Guten Morgen Mr. Bush - 500 Beiträge pro Seite (Seite 19)

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Summary
Military Fatalities:
________US__UK__ Other__ Total
Total___390_53____6_______ 449

http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx

Latest Military Fatality Date: 11/7/2003

11/07/03 Centcom: Black Hawk Down Confirmed: 6 Dead
A U.S. Army UH-60 (Black Hawk) helicopter from the 101st Airborne Air Assault Division, which was ferrying passengers, went down on the East side of the Tigris river near Tikrit, Iraq on Nov. 7 at 9:40 a.m
11/07/03 Wapo: 6 Dead as Army Helicopter Crashes
An Army helicopter crashed Friday into a riverbank near Tikrit, killing six U.S. soldiers, the military said.
11/06/03 DoD: Soldier dies of injuries
Spc. James R. Wolf ... was killed on Nov. 6 in Mosul, Iraq. Wolf was in a convoy when an improvised explosive device was detonated. Wolf died of his injuries.
11/06/03 DoD: 16th Death from Chinook attack
Sgt. Paul F. Fisher, 39, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, died on Nov. 6 at the Homburg University Klinikum, Homberg, Germany.
11/06/03 BBC: British soldier dies in Iraq crash
A British soldier has been killed in a road crash in southern Iraq, according to the Ministry of Defence.
11/06/03 DJ: US Soldiers Injured In Iraq Attack
Two U.S. soldiers were slightly injured Thursday afternoon when several mortars were fired at an American command post in Mosul, the military said.
11/06/03 BBC: Polish Soldier Killed
The Pole was the first fatality for the European state, which leads a 9,000-strong force in south-central Iraq.
11/06/03 Centcom: 1 Killed, 2 Wounded
1 soldier from 3rd Battaliont, 82nd Airborne Division was killed and 2 were wounded when their patrol was ambushed by rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire near the city of Mahmudiyah at approximately 8:00 p.m. Nov 5.
11/06/03 Centcom: Soldier Killed in Lindmine
One U.S. soldier from 1st Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, attached to the 82nd Airborne Division, was killed when a military truck struck a land mine while traveling along a border road near the Husaybah border crossing point at 6 a.m. Nov. 6.
11/06/03 AP: Two American soldiers killed
Two American soldiers were killed in separate attacks near Baghdad and along the Syrian border, the U.S. military said Thursday, and a Polish major was seriously wounded in an ambush south of the capital.
11/06/03 AFX: Polish officer injured in Iraq
A Polish officer has been seriously injured in Iraq during an attack on a military convoy 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of Karbala, the defence ministry said.
11/05/03 Reuters: Update on Mosul attacks
Guerrillas mounted two grenade attacks on U.S. convoys in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Wednesday, killing three Iraqis and wounding at least nine people including two American soldiers.
11/05/03 Centcom: Soldier dies - non-hostile gunshot wound
One 1st Armored Division soldier died from a non-hostile gunshot wound at a checkpoint in Baghdad at approximately 7 p.m. Nov. 4.
11/05/03 AP: 2 Iraqis Killed, 1 American Wounded near Mosul
Attacks kill two Iraqis, wound one American; U.S. military captures two Iraqi generals
11/05/03 ADN(AP): Mosul bases hit
Insurgents using rocket-propelled grenades struck a U.S. compound Wednesday in the northern city of Mosul...

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as i said:
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Das Interview mit ABC

Former Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch tells Diane Sawyer of her harrowing experiences in Iraq, and clears up conflicting reports about what really happened during the March ambush.


Real Player Video:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/videofiles/Video/031105ly…


Too Painful’
Jessica Lynch Says She Can`t Remember Sexual Assault
ABCNEWS.com
Nov. 6— Former POW Jessica Lynch, whose dramatic rescue offered Americans a glimmer of hope at one of the low points of the Iraq war, discloses in her upcoming biography that she suffered a brutal sexual assault during her captivity in Iraq.


While a medical report indicates that Lynch had been sexually assaulted, Lynch says she has no recollection of the attack. " Even just the thinking about that, that`s too painful," she tells Diane Sawyer in her first interview since her nine-day captivity in Iraq.

I`m No Hero

In the interview, Lynch also clears up conflicting stories about her actions during the March 23 ambush in which Lynch was taken prisoner. Initial reports portrayed the Army supply clerk, then 19, as a hero who was wounded by Iraqi gunfire but kept firing until her ammunition ran out, shooting several Iraqis.

But Lynch confirms that was not the case. She tells Sawyer she was just a soldier in the wrong place at the wrong time, whose gun jammed during the chaos. " I`m not about to take credit for something I didn`t do," she tells Sawyer in the interview, airing Tuesday, Nov. 11.

" I did not shoot, not a round, nothing," she tells Sawyer. " When we were told to lock and load, that`s when my weapon jammed … I did not shoot a single round … I went down praying to my knees. And that`s the last I remember."

Lynch, now 20, says she feels hurt to have received praise she says her colleagues deserved. " It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about. They did not know whether I did that or not. Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren`t here to tell that story. So I would have been the only one able to say, `Yeah, I went down shooting.` But I didn`t. I did not."

" I don`t look at myself as a hero," she adds. " My heroes are Lori [Pfc. Lori Piestewa], the soldiers that are over there, the soldiers that were in that car beside me, the ones that came and rescued me." Piestewa was one of the 11 members of Lynch`s unit, the 507th Maintenance, who were killed in the ambush near the southern Iraqi town of Nasiriyah.

Lynch, who spent nearly four months in a military hospital in Washington, D.C., after her ordeal, says she still feels like a soldier — and something else. " I`m a survivor, for all the things that I`ve been through," she tells Sawyer.


Lynch described the moments of the ambush as terror and confusion. " Once it started, it was just chaos," she said, adding, " You could hear them [bullets] bouncing off our vehicle. You could hear people screaming. It was scary, so scary."

She said her convoy was surrounded by Iraqi attackers: " They were coming from everywhere. We had vehicles getting stuck, vehicles running out of gas … our weapons were jamming."

Her unit was ambushed after missing a turn and becoming separated from the convoy they were traveling in. " We weren`t thinking quickly. We were so tired, we were hungry … it was just a mistake," Lynch said.

In the chaos of the ambush, Lynch says, she discovered that her gun was jammed and she was unable to defend herself. She was never able to fire her weapon.

She says it may have been Piestewa who fought fiercely and went down firing. " That may have been her. But that wasn`t me, and I`m not taking credit for it," Lynch said.

Lynch says she remembers Piestewa protecting her: " She was there for me … She had my back the whole time."


Fearing the Worst

Lynch was held in an Iraqi hospital for nine days after the ambush, and she describes the fear she felt during her captivity as well as the excruciating pain from her injuries. " I couldn`t move … It was so horrible, like I`ve never felt that much pain in my whole entire life."

She said she was never mistreated at the hospital, but she still feared for her life. " I kept repeating, `Please don`t hurt me, please don`t hurt me,`" she said.

Lynch said the Iraqi medical staff tried to reassure her, but she was skeptical. She said she refused the food they offered her, fearing that it could be poisoned or unsanitary. Lynch said no one among the staff at the Iraqi hospital was abusive to her, " no one beat me, no one slapped me, no one, nothing … I mean, I actually had one nurse, that she would sing to me."

At one point, Lynch said, she overheard Iraqi doctors planning to amputate her leg. " I started just crying and screaming and just doing everything that I could … And they just backed off. They took me back up to my room and left me there."


The Rescue

Lynch says that when U.S. special forces burst into the hospital in search of her, her first reaction was panic. " I heard the Americans coming in, `Get down, get down,` you know. And that`s when I started to really panic … that`s when I really, I felt like getting down on the ground and crawling under that bed because I didn`t know what was about to happen," she said.

She says she heard the U.S. soldiers ask about her, speaking in English, but she was still terrified. " I thought, `Here it comes.They`re about to kill me … It`s about to happen.`"

It wasn`t until the soldiers spoke to her that she began to feel hope. Lynch said the soldiers told her, " We`re American soldiers. We`re here to take you home."

She went on: " And I was like, `Yeah, I`m an American soldier too` … It was obviously a dumb thing to say — `I`m an American soldier, too` — but it was the first thing that came out of my mind."

One soldier, Lynch said, ripped an American flag off his suit and handed it to her. " I would not let go of his hand. I clenched to his hand because I was not going to let him leave me here. He was going to take me out."

It wasn`t until she was being evacuated in a U.S. helicopter, Lynch says, that she felt, " My God, this is real. I`m going home."

The U.S. military filmed the rescue, and U.S. television networks aired the dramatic green night-vision footage repeatedly as they reported how the special forces team, acting on a tip from a brave Iraqi lawyer, engaged in firefights on their way into and out of the hospital.

" I don`t think it happened quite like that," Lynch said, " though … anyone, you know, in that kind of situation would obviously go in with force, not knowing who was on the other side of the door."

It later emerged that there were no firefights at the hospital. The hospital staff said there were no Iraqi soldiers there, and questioned the need for the Americans to use force. Lynch told Sawyer she does not remember seeing the lawyer, Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, who is the focus of a TV movie that is being made without her participation. But if he did help her, she said, she is grateful.

Asked whether the military`s portrayal of the rescue bothers her, Lynch said, " Yeah, it does. It does that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. I mean, yeah, it`s wrong … I don`t know what they had … or why they filmed it."

But Lynch was unequivocal in her gratitude to the soldiers who rescued her. " All I know was that I was in that hospital hurting … I wanted out of there. It didn`t matter to me if they would have came in shirts and blank guns. It wouldn`t have mattered to me. I wanted out of there."

" They`re the ones that came in to rescue me. Those are my heroes … I`m so thankful that they did what they did. They risked their lives. They didn`t know, you know, who was in there."

Lynch told Sawyer she wrote her upcoming biography with journalist Rick Bragg, not for money, but " to let everyone know my side of the stor

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RIVALS ACCUSE DEAN OF PANDERING TO NAKED-LADY MUD-FLAP VOTE

Remark Taken Out of Context, Vermont Gov Says

At a candidates’ forum last night in Davenport, Iowa, Democratic frontrunner Howard Dean came under attack for saying that the Democratic Party should reach out to voters who have naked ladies on their trucks’ mud-flaps.

The former Vermont Governor said that his remark about the naked-lady mud-flaps was taken out of context, adding, “I meant all mud-flaps, not just naked-lady mud-flaps.”

But Congressman Richard Gephardt (D-MO) was unmoved, charging that the former Vermont Governor had also said that Democrats should cater to voters who sport smutty bumper stickers on their cars.

“Howard, you are on record as saying that the Democratic Party should be the party of voters who have bumper stickers reading, ‘Golfers Do It In Eighteen Holes,’” Gephardt said.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) joined in the attack, saying that Governor Dean had once favored pandering to voters who wore T-shirts reading, “I don’t have a drinking problem – I drink, I get drunk, I pass out – NO PROBLEM!”

Mr. Dean, who had been biting his tongue as the charges were being hurled his way, finally showed a flash of his legendary anger by forming an “L” with his thumb and index finger and shouting “Losers!” at Messrs. Gephardt and Kerry.

Attempting to regain the high road after Mr. Dean’s outburst, Senator Kerry told the audience, “Unlike Howard Dean, I believe the Democratic Party should be the party of people who have those little green pine-tree air-freshener thingies dangling from their rear-view mirrors.”

Most observers agreed that the debate’s big winner was Carol Moseley Braun, who did not attend.

**** BOROWITZ ON CNN FRIDAY MORNING ****

Andy Borowitz wraps up the week’s biggest stories this Friday on CNN’s “American Morning,” 8:30 (Eastern).

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Friday, November 07, 2003
War News for November 7. 2003

Zu jeder Meldung ein Link:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/


Bring `em on: Insurgents shoot down US Amry helicpoter near Tikrit. Six US soldiers killed.

Bring `em on: One US soldier killed, six wounded in convoy ambush near Mosul.

Bring `em on: Three US soldiers wounded in roadside bomb ambush in central Mosul.

Bring `em on: Mortar attack on Baghdad police station kills Iraqi woman.

Soldiers in Iraq mourn comrades at memorial services.

Baghdad Airport reported "under siege." "Insurgents in Iraq appear to have intensified efforts to shoot down an aircraft flying in or out of Baghdad airport. At least 30 attempts have been made since July. Three of those were last week alone, including one against an airplane owned by air-freight company DHL and another against a Russian charter plane, coalition officials say."

Bush now spinning his quagmire as the lastest front in the "global democratic revolution."

Arabs to Bush: Mind your own business.

General Clark chews Lieutenant AWOL`s ass. "`I think before you go to war, you`ve got to have exhausted all the diplomatic possibilities. He didn`t,` Clark told a Georgia Tech audience. `... I think you have to have a realistic plan for what happens after you turn loose the bombers and send the armored columns in. He didn`t.`"

CPA may arrest Karbala mayor for visiting Bulgaria without permission.

Strike shuts down Najaf.

Profiteers brave war to land juicy contracts. "The explosion shook his chair, but he kept preparing a bid for $18 million in construction work in the war-torn Iraq city...His father, Winton Blount III, is a Montgomery businessman, former gubernatorial candidate and former chairman of the Alabama Republican Party."

Other contracts go to Chalabi`s buddies.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Illinois soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Iowa soldier dies of wounds.

Local story: Kansas soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Washington State soldier dies in Iraq from "non-hostile gunshot wound."

Local story: Mississippi Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Home Front

Bush raises big bucks in North Carolina.





# posted by yankeedoodle : 12:18 PM

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Employment Situation Summary
Technical information:
Household data: [phone] USDL 03-675
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, November 7, 2003.


THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION: OCTOBER 2003


Employment rose in October, and the unemployment rate, at 6.0 percent, was
essentially unchanged, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of
Labor reported today. Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 126,000 in October,
following a similar increase (as revised) in September. Job gains occurred in
several service industries in October. Manufacturing employment continued to
decline, but the rate of job loss has moderated in recent months.

Unemployment (Household Survey Data)

The unemployment rate, 6.0 percent, and the number of unemployed persons,
8.8 million, were essentially unchanged in October. Unemployment rates for
the major worker groups--adult men (5.6 percent), adult women (5.2 percent),
teenagers (17.1 percent), whites (5.1 percent), blacks (11.5 percent), and
Hispanics or Latinos (7.2 percent)--also were little changed. The unemploy-
ment rate for Asians was 6.1 percent, not seasonally adjusted. (See tables
A-1, A-2, and A-3.)

In October, 2.0 million unemployed persons had been looking for work for 27
weeks or longer, about the same level as in September. They represented 23.0
percent of the total unemployed. (See table A-9.)

Total Employment and the Labor Force (Household Survey Data)

Total employment increased by 441,000 in October to 138.0 million, season-
ally adjusted. The employment-population ratio edged up to 62.2 percent.
The civilian labor force was little changed at 146.8 million, while the labor
force participation rate remained at 66.1 percent. (See table A-1.)

Persons Not in the Labor Force (Household Survey Data)

In October, 1.6 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force,
170,000 more than 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, however, because
they did not actively search for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. Of
the 1.6 million, 462,000 were discouraged workers--persons who were not current-
ly looking for work specifically because they believed no jobs were available
for them. The number of discouraged workers was up by 103,000 from October
2002. (See table A-13.)

- 2 -

Table A. Major indicators of labor market activity, seasonally adjusted
(Numbers in thousands)

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

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`Iraqification` key to return of US troops
Pentagon shrugs off Vietnam-era connotations of term to churn out hastily trained local forces

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Saturday November 8, 2003
The Guardian

The Bush administration, unnerved by the bloodiest week since April for US forces in Iraq, has launched a public relations offensive to convince Americans it can achieve two seemingly conflicting goals: bring stability to Iraq, while bringing the troops back home.

Behind the strategy is "Iraqification", an unfortunate term for the administration because of echoes of Richard Nixon`s "Vietnamisation" in the early 1970s.

But those connotations were cast aside this week when the administration pressed ahead with speeding up the timetable for handing over security to the recruits from the Iraqi police to allow the Pentagon to reduce the number of US troops in country.

The strategy has raised concerns that it gives the appearance of Washington preparing to "cut and run" from Iraq.

On Wednesday the vice-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Peter Pace, said US forces would be reduced to 100,000 by next May from the current levels of 130,000. They could be down to 50,000 by 2005.

Meanwhile, the administration has sped up the transfer of power, bringing forward the deadline for drafting the new constitution, and pencilling in a date for elections in 18 months` time.

Increasingly, it seems, this is an administration in a hurry.

But President George Bush has little choice. The congressional budget office warned it will be impossible to sustain present force levels beyond next spring without imposing longer tours of duty on the troops.

That is politically dangerous for Mr Bush in an election year, so officials have been promoting the idea that Iraqis are poised to shoulder the burden of America`s guerrilla war, even to the extent of manufacturing data about the numbers of locally trained police.

The strategy has caused widespread alarm, not least because it suggests to the world that Washington is ready to "cut and run", and to the Iraqi resistance that US forces can be driven out by stepping up attacks.

"When the United States announces a schedule for training and deploying Iraqi security officers, then announces the acceleration of that schedule, then accelerates it again, it sends a signal of desperation, not certitude," the Republican senator and Vietnam veteran John McCain told a Washington thinktank this week.

Goal


Within political circles, there is little dispute with the notion of Iraqification as the eventual goal of the occupation. Instead, there is concern about whether Iraqi forces - poorly trained and poorly equipped - are adequately prepared to take over security.

There are also fears that the occupation authority`s obsession with churning out new Iraqi recruits has led to a lowering of standards. In some districts of Baghdad, local militias graduate after five days of training.

Of equal concern for the Pentagon are suspicions that some of its recruits are in fact agents of Saddam Hussein, and that the occupation authority was so focused on increasing the numbers in its new police forces that it forgot about vetting procedures.

Those lapses could cripple efforts to build credible Iraqi security forces, some analysts say. "It would be wrong if, in trying to avoid conflict, we put Iraqis out there to draw fire like a bunch of canaries in the mine," said Daniel Gouré, a military expert at Virginia`s Lexington Institute. "The question is not to put the Iraqis out there so that we can get shot at less, but what is the right combination of Iraqi and American forces?"

It is also far from clear just who these Iraqi forces are. Somehow, during the past fortnight, the numbers of trained Iraqi police personnel appear to have more than doubled.

On Thursday the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, claimed more than 118,000 Iraqis had been trained for police work. Pentagon officials now casually describe the poorly trained and ill-equipped force as the second largest contributor to the coalition forces in Iraq, far exceeding the number of British troops.

But military analysts say the figure is wishful thinking given that it takes at least 12 weeks to train a police officer to an international standard. The Pentagon has also conceded it has not been entirely open about the numbers when discussing levels of Iraqi forces.

"I think people are a little bit surprised that it has gone up fairly significantly here in a fairly short period of time," General Richard Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday.

He said only 60,000 Iraqis had been fully trained and equipped to serve as security personnel. The remainder of the much-cited figure of 180,000 included unarmed guards at oil pipelines.

"Let`s say you`ve just armed them with a radio where they can report intrusion, where somebody else, a competent force, can come in and deal with the situation. That is a very valuable thing, we think," Gen Myers said.

But Mr McCain and others remain unconvinced. "When in the course of days we increase by thousands our estimates of the numbers of Iraqis trained, it sounds like somebody is cooking the books," he said.

"When we do this as our forces are coming under increasing attack, we suggest to our friends and allies that our ultimate goal in Iraq is leaving as soon as possible - not meeting our strategic objective."


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Soldier charged over panic attack caused by seeing Iraqi body
Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday November 8, 2003
The Guardian

A military interrogator who suffered a panic attack after seeing the mangled body of an Iraqi man has been sent back to the US to face charges of dereliction of duty in a case which has raised questions about how the American military is dealing with flagging morale.

Staff Sergeant Georg-Andreas Pogany was initially charged with cowardice, a rare military crime punishable by death.

Army lawyers reduced the charge on Thursday to dereliction of duty, a catch-all offence which carries a maximum six-month sentence.

But military lawyers questioned the appropriateness of the charge, adding it was probably the first time it had been used against a soldier who had suffered a panic attack.

Staff Sgt Pogany was attached to a Green Beret special forces unit in Samarra, north of Baghdad. On September 29, three days after arriving in Iraq, he saw the disintegrated remains of an Iraqi man who had been shot by US troops. The American soldiers said the man had tried to ambush them.

After seeing the body, he said he had recurring dizzy spells and vomited several times. He asked his unit for help but his senior officer just gave him sleeping pills and told him to go away.

Staff Sgt Pogany eventually saw a military psychologist, who advised him to rest, but instead his unit sent him back to his home base at Fort Carson, Colorado.

He is a military intelligence specialist with five years` service and a degree in criminology, but has been given menial tasks, stripped of his security clearance and barred from carrying a gun. He believes he is being put under pressure to resign.

"I am getting the vibe that my military career is over," he told the Associated Press. "The sentiment I get is that they have branded me as a coward."

Staff Sgt Pogany said he had no intention of abandoning his post and wanted to stay in Iraq after treatment for his panic attack.

Dereliction of duty is a vague charge in military law which has been used in a variety of ways: against a serviceman who blew his nose on an American flag, and against an officer who failed to post guards during a night exercise in the desert.

Military lawyers questioned its application to a soldier who became unwell as a consequence of his wartime experiences.

"If this case is pursued I would expect a serious effort on the part of the defence to argue that the facts do not support a dereliction charge," said Eugene Fidell, the head of the National Institute of Military Justice.

Another expert in military law, Scott Silliman, said it appeared there had been a "cultural rift" between the 32-year-old military intelligence sergeant and the Green Berets he was serving alongside, who had little time for panic attacks.

"I think the army finally realised that, and brought him back... recognising that this young man probably was sick and so just couldn`t perform," Mr Silliman said.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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America gets back to work
Bush camp rejoices at boost to re-election hopes

Charlotte Denny
Saturday November 8, 2003
The Guardian

America`s labour market has roared back to life, creating twice as many jobs as expected last month, government figures showed yesterday, prompting speculation that the US federal reserve could call a halt to its policy of rock bottom interest rates.

Firms hired more workers than they sacked for the third month in a row in September, adding 126,000 employees to their payrolls, according to labour department figures.

Investors on both sides of the Atlantic cheered the news. In the City, the FTSE 100 index of leading shares closed up 52.7 points or 1.2% higher, while on Wall Street a surge at the opening bell was later trimmed by profit taking. In mid day trading, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 5.34, or 0.1%.

Workers were taken on by firms across a broad swath of the business landscape, including technical services, temporary employment firms, health care, social work, education and retail. Only the manufacturing sector continued to shed jobs, cutting 24,000 workers off its payrolls.

"We can finally put the nail in the coffin of the jobless recovery," said Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics. "We are back on a rising job track."

Unemployment fell to 6%, from 6.1% in September, the lowest level since April.

The failure of the jobs market to respond to pickup in US growth over the summer had been a concern for the Bush administration, which is pinning its re-election strategy on a strong economy. The jobs market has been the weak link in the robust recovery, which saw the economy expand at its fastest pace for two decades in the last quarter.

With the campaign in Iraq floundering, Democrats had hoped the increased costs of the occupation and the lack of new jobs would be powerful arguments in next year`s presidential elections.

"The most likely scenario is, we`ll get enough jobs so it won`t be the issue Democrats need to oust the president," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com.

White House advisers said yesterday the turnaround was the result of the administration`s hefty tax cuts. "The labour market has turned the corner," Gregory Mankiw, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

But the strong data could prompt the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates sooner than analysts had been expecting.

"If employment growth continues to accelerate in the coming months, then the first rise in rates is likely to come sooner than our current forecast of early 2005 suggests," said Paul Ashworth, international economist at Capital Economics.

Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan struck an optimistic tone about the employment outlook in a speech to the Securities Industry Association, earlier this week, saying hiring was expected to rebound.

"The odds... do increasingly favour a revival in job creation," Greenspan said.

The service sector added 143,000 new jobs last month, the largest increase in nine months. That included a 33,000 gain in temporary employment services, which have added jobs for the last five months.

Economists say that shows companies still remain a bit hesitant about the strength of the recovery and are waiting to take on the increased costs of hiring new workers.

"In the short run, they are hiring temporary workers," Mr Mayland said.

"It is creating a pent-up demand for hiring. I think the rebound is sustainable and as we build up a track record, more hiring will follow."


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Look away, Dixieland
US Democrats won`t win in the South while they keep quiet on race

Sidney Blumenthal
Saturday November 8, 2003
The Guardian

Everything seemed to be going so well for Howard Dean, the frontrunner in America`s contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Then he made a throwaway remark that changed everything: he wanted, he said, "to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks". Dean`s error was to evoke the divisive Confederate symbol, hated by black Americans as standing for slavery and still upheld by many Southern conservatives as representing their "heritage". Because he was the frontrunner, other Democratic candidates seized on the opportunity to create a controversy, implying that Dean is racist. The immediate effect was to slow his momentum.

But, as with many so-called gaffes, his comment alluded to a fundamental political truth: the Democratic and Republican parties have traded places after decades of struggle over civil rights. The solid South of the old Confederacy, which once voted uniformly for the Democrats, is now the bastion of the Republicans.

From the beginning of the Democratic party, through the civil war and the New Deal, the South was the foundation stone of the party`s national strength. With the coming of the civil-rights revolution, Democratic presidents Kennedy and Johnson deployed the federal government to support social equality. In reaction, Republicans - from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan - developed a Southern strategy to win over white voters in the region who felt betrayed. That strategy involved using widely understood code going back to the civil war - phrases like "states` rights", used to justify slavery - in an updating of the well-worn strategy of invoking race to keep poor white and black Americans divided on issues of common interest. Thus the party of Lincoln became the party of Reagan.

Dean, the former Vermont governor, raised in New York City, is the most distinctly old-line Yankee to emerge to prominence within the Democratic party in living memory. Despite his New England pedigree, George Bush is a man of the Republican South. If selected, Dean will challenge the first conservative Southern president in modern US history. The possible confrontation reflects the deeper polarisations of race, class and society that are driving the country apart.

In March, Dean described the thinking behind his controversial remark more fully: "I think the Republicans, ever since 1968, with Richard Nixon`s Southern strategy, have divided us on race issues. Look, when I go to the South, I talk about race deliberately... If we`re going to have elections about race, we might as well talk about it openly. I want white males, particularly in the South, to come back to the Democratic party. And the case that FDR made was, look, when was the last time you all got a raise? When was the last time your kids got decent health insurance? What kind of schools do your kids go to if you can`t afford a private academy?"

His problem is that, this time, he left off the filigree of Nixon and Roosevelt. And so, for days after his gaffe, Dean engaged in the etiquette of fulsome apologies. He began by condemning the Confederate flag as "a painful symbol", then asked for forgiveness from "any people in the South who thought they were being stereotyped". A day later he called his language "clumsy", and added: "I deeply regret the pain that I may have caused." An overdue discussion of the Republicans` Southern strategy was replaced by bowing and scraping.

Dean`s Confederate flag problem coincided with another, seemingly unrelated, difficulty - over a mini-series, The Reagans, commissioned by the television network CBS. The intersection was less odd than it appears; Reagan and the Confederate flag, after all, have long been for the Southern Republican party the equivalent of apple pie and motherhood.

The Reagans mini-series is the latest in a long line of cheesy TV productions mangling the lives of the presidents, though no one has chosen to politicise these tabloid productions until now. This time, a Republican mole filched a copy of the script, and the Republican party chairman, Ed Gillespie, assumed the pose of historian. The script put words into the mouth of Reagan - like these about Aids sufferers: "They that live in sin shall die in sin" (what he actually said was: "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague", because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments"). Gillespie called on CBS to pull the series or flash a warning on screen every 10 minutes that it was make-believe. CBS promptly crumpled, pulling the show from the network schedule. Leslie Moonves, the CBS president, abased himself with abject apologies.

The Reagans, judging from leaked excerpts of the script, features a distracted Ronnie and harridan Nancy, a melding of 1950s situation comedy and Mommy Dearest. Policy and politics are not its centrepieces. Certain crucial events in the rise of Reagan are noticeably missing. The actual words on race and civil rights, essential to his political success, are absent, though the Republicans haven`t complained.

Some true-life scenes: Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it "humiliating to the South"), and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books. "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house," he said, "he has a right to do so." After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan travelled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: "I believe in states` rights".

As president, Reagan aligned his justice department on the side of segregation, supporting the fundamentalist Bob Jones University in its case seeking federal funds for institutions that discriminate on the basis of race. In 1983, when the supreme court decided against Bob Jones, Reagan, under fire from his right in the aftermath, gutted the Civil Rights Commission.

Reagan consolidated the Southern strategy that Nixon formulated in response to the civil rights movement. It is this Republican party that has created the radically conservative Southern presidency of Bush. When Bush`s candidacy was threatened in the Republican primaries of 2000, he rescued himself by appearing at Bob Jones University and wrapping himself in support of the preservation of the Confederate emblem on the South Carolina state flag.

Dean`s remarks were awkward, but his challenge to the Republican party`s basic character and the need for a strategy for defeating it will inevitably be revisited by whoever becomes the Democratic nominee, if that nominee cares about winning.

On the day before Dean`s last apology, Haley Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and the third-biggest lobbyist in Washington, was elected governor of Mississippi. He had campaigned at an event sponsored by the Council of Concerned Conservatives, an overtly racist group and successor organisation to the White Citizens` Council, which led opposition to civil rights in the 1960s. In his lapel, Barbour wore a pin of the Mississippi state flag, a matter of controversy because of its incorporation of the Confederate flag. On election night, even before he was announced as the winner, Barbour received a congratulatory telephone call from Bush. Look away, Dixieland.

As the great novelist William Faulkner, of Mississippi, wrote: "The past is not dead. In fact, it`s not even past."

· Sidney Blumenthal is a former assistant and senior adviser to President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars. Starting next week he will be writing a fortnightly column on US politics from Washington

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How to win the religious wars
Oliver McTernan
Saturday November 8, 2003
The Guardian

In his speech to the Labour party conference, Tony Blair responded to concerns about his domestic policies, declaring: "I know that the old top-down approach won`t work any more."

The expression suggests that he recognises the distinction leadership gurus make between adaptive challenges and technical problems. Technical problems can be solved by the know-how and procedures already to hand. Adaptive challenges require a process of adjustment at every level; leaders do not need to know all the answers, but they do need to ask the right questions.

Looking at the American/British-led war on terrorism, one may wonder whether or not the right questions have been asked. George Bush and Tony Blair seem convinced that this is a problem they can fix. The eradication of real or potential enemies, and the establishment of democracy, are their dual objectives.

This strategy stems from the prevailing political and academic mindset that refuses to acknowledge that religion can be, by itself, a cause of terrorism. Since Marx and Freud relegated religion to the backwaters of mainstream life, grievance or greed have been favoured as the most plausible causes for communal conflict and political violence. Where religion surfaces as a factor, it is dismissed as a surrogate for other causes.

Social conditions, political oppression, injustice and ethnic grievances may provide the trigger that leads religious activists to resort to violence, but these factors are not in themselves the sole cause. The letters of Kamil Daoudi, the Algerian-born, French-educated computer specialist accused of plotting to blow up the American embassy in Paris, provide a valuable insight into how religion can trump grievance as the inspiration for violence.

Daoudi claims that a combination of his anger at French government support for the regime in Algeria, and the alienation he felt as a sub-citizen in Paris, drove him to embrace Islam. His new-found faith gave him a purpose, and the strength to achieve it. He describes his life task as "to fight any form of injustice and those who support it".

This incongruous mix of religious piety and homicidal behaviour is not exclusive to Islam. Yitzhak Rabin`s assassin, Yigal Amir, claimed he was acting on God`s orders; Paul Hill, the Christian minister executed in the US for the murder of an abortion doctor and his driver, said something similar. The Hindu mobs that periodically attack their Muslim neighbours in India claim to be motivated by a desire for national religious purity, as do the Sri Lankan Buddhists who support a military solution to the conflict with the Tamils.

My research shows that terrorism that is religiously motivated essentially questions the legitimacy of the society it confronts. The perpetrators voice a common complaint about the absence of spiritual values in a world that excludes god. Their goal is to make religion - and, in particular, the moral code of their own sacred texts - the foundation of a new political-social order. The belief that these texts were dictated verbatim by a divine power allows no room for compromise.

They use the ambivalence towards violence reflected in these texts to legitimise their own use of it; the fact that all the world`s major religions have at sometime sanctioned violence to protect or promote their sectarian interests gives them additional authority to justify their actions.

The reality is that neither the bullet nor the ballot box will remove the religious terrorist threat. To deal with it as a technical problem alone is likely to increase the dangers and make religious militants feel more alienated. The problem is an adaptive challenge that requires political and religious leaders to engage more actively with the communities that often act as breeding grounds for discontent.

Until each faith group recognises the need to promote respect for human life above all else, religion will have the potential to be a divisive and destructive force.

· Oliver McTernan is a former Roman Catholic priest


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Die Neocons haben die größte Angst vor dem Verlust der Angst.
Und die Angst der US-Bevölkerung aufrechtzuerhalten wird auch die größte Anstrengung der Neocons vor der Wahl sein.

Anthrax alert after spores found in US sorting office
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
08 November 2003


Washington is on anthrax alert after the possible presence of deadly spores was detected during routine tests at a US navy mail-sorting office yesterday.

The sorting office and 11 public post offices were shut and five employees at the navy facility were offered the antibiotic ciprofloxacin, while authorities conducted follow-up tests to confirm whether anthrax was indeed involved.

Officials warned that even affirmative tests could prove to be false positives. In any case, the low level of spores indicated by the field tests meant that that the risk was far less than in October 2001, when a series of anthrax attacks killed five people, including two Washington postal workers, and left 17 others seriously ill.

There was no evidence that any of the 1,500 other postal staff at the closed offices had been exposed, officials said, and none has been offered antibiotics.

A navy spokesman said the closures had been decided "out of an abundance of caution" while tests for contamination were carried out.

After field tests, eight samples were sent to the US army`s biological warfare defence centre at Fort Detrick, Maryland, for examination. One sample tested positive for anthrax, but seven were negative.

In October 2001, letters containing anthrax spores were sent to news media offices in New York and Florida, and to the Washington offices of two senators, including Tom Daschle, who was the Democratic majority leader. Those responsible have not been caught.
8 November 2003 11:10



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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November 8, 2003
Job Figures Buoy Bush, but Democratic Hopefuls See Room to Attack
By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM and ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 — The Democratic presidential candidates persisted in pounding President Bush about the economy on Friday, even in the face of new data showing strong growth in jobs last month that the president said was a vindication of his policies.

"Good luck in using statistics to convince working Americans that the Bush administration has their economic interests at heart," Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts said in Salem, N.H., in remarks typical of all the potential challengers. "The deep unfairness of the Bush economy is real to Americans."

Economic matters have long been the Democrats` strong suit. Now, although the jobs numbers suggest that the economic recovery may be genuine and that the issue may not be the sure winner it seemed a few months ago, the party`s strategists said the candidates had no choice but to continue to play this hand.

"I still think the race will be run on the economy," said Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization of moderate Democrats. "But it won`t be so much on the recent past as on the outlook for the future."

Another tactician who is not affiliated with any candidate, Howard Wolfson, said the improving jobs picture made "the argument on the economy tougher to make but still not impossible."

Mr. Wolfson added, "What we have to argue is that he bought a short-term uptick in jobs at the expense of structural deficits as far as the eye can see."

Gene Sperling, a top economic adviser in the Clinton White House, encouraged Democratic candidates to use his calculations showing that even if the number of jobs increased every month between now and the election at last month`s pace of 126,000 new jobs, it would still be the slowest recovery in terms of job creation since World War II.

In Winston-Salem, N.C., Mr. Bush said the employment figures released Friday were evidence that his policies were working. But with the state having lost more than 150,000 manufacturing jobs since July 2000 and struggling with one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, he stopped short of triumphant claims of victory.

At a fund-raiser that brought in $1.1 million for his re-election campaign, the president said, "This administration has laid the foundation for greater prosperity and more jobs across America."

"We`ve had some good news recently about our economy," Mr. Bush added, "but we won`t rest until everybody who wants to work can find a job."

Later, on a stage with students and administrators at Forsyth Technical Community College in Winston-Salem, he praised the college`s retraining programs and said: "This is the beginning of good news for job seekers. Over the last three months, the economy, the entrepreneurs, the private sector and others have driven the job base up by 285,000 jobs, new jobs, which is good."

White House officials indicated that Mr. Bush`s rather cautious tone was driven by the rough economic terrain in North Carolina. Mr. Bush is aware that his father was criticized in 1992 for paying too little respect to people in economic distress.

The Democratic presidential candidates insisted that they welcomed the good news on employment, but they said Mr. Bush`s record was unimpressive.

"I hope that the economy will turn around," Gen. Wesley K. Clark said at a forum in Atlanta. But he said the employment increase was meager compared with the three million jobs lost during the Bush presidency.

"The mission`s not accomplished on the economy," General Clark said.

Like several other Democrats, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, campaigning in New Hampshire, focused on the line in the employment report on Friday showing that manufacturing jobs were still being lost. "I don`t believe there is a sustained economic recovery happening," Mr. Edwards said.

Another Democratic theme was that Mr. Bush`s economic policies were not only ineffective but also unfair. Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri had no public events on Friday, but campaigning in Iowa earlier in the week, he said of the president: "He doesn`t have a clue what to do. He has only one thing in his head: tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, that he follows by tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, that he follows by tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans."

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut also had no public events, but he issued a statement questioning whether the good news would be long-lived. "We have graduated from sinking to treading water," Mr. Lieberman said.

Howard Dean had only one public appearance on Friday. It was early, before the economic news had registered, and the former Vermont governor discussed only his policies for helping military veterans.

In response to a reporter`s question, a Dean spokesman, Jay Carson, said: "This administration has compiled the worst economic record of any administration since the Great Depression. It`s going to take more than this to take this country out of the mess it has caused."

Not surprisingly, this early in the election campaign, the Democratic candidates do not have fully formed economic platforms.

All of them criticize the three years of Bush tax cuts and say the resulting budget deficit is irresponsible. Mr. Gephardt and Dr. Dean would repeal the tax cuts entirely. Mr. Gephardt would use all the revenue to pay for health insurance for nearly all Americans. Dr. Dean would use some of the money to make health coverage more available and allocate the rest for job creation and domestic security.

The other leading Democratic candidates would repeal the tax cuts for the wealthiest people — in most cases, those with incomes of more than $200,000 a year — but would retain the cuts for everyone else.

All the candidates offer programs they say would create new jobs, but in most cases, their proposals are not developed to the point where the cost has been established and the legislative language written.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 8, 2003
With a U.S. Nod, Turkey Says It Won`t Send Force to Iraq
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 — With the quiet blessings of the White House, Turkey said Friday that it was withdrawing its offer to deploy troops to help stabilize Iraq. The decision ended a lengthy and almost entirely futile effort by the Bush administration to solicit large numbers of foreign troops to bolster the American presence.

With the announcement, the administration`s effort, presented by the president in early September, appears to be close to a complete failure. India and Pakistan both have declined, at least for the time being. South Korea has said it may be willing, but is concerned about reducing its own troop levels at a moment of heightened tension with North Korea. Japan has approved sending some troops for noncombat missions, but has yet to deploy them.

There are 24,000 non-American troops in Iraq, but almost half of them are British, and few countries have agreed in recent months to join the effort.

/>Turkey`s decision was conveyed to the administration in a telephone call Thursday evening between Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the Turkish foreign minister, Abdullah Gul. It appears that in the conversation, Mr. Powell gave Mr. Gul an easy way out, perhaps reflecting second thoughts within the administration about the advisability of asking for Turkey`s help. "The secretary said that given the situation, given the sensitivities involved, maybe it`s not the time," Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said on Friday.

In recent weeks, the administration`s early enthusiasm for troops from Turkey, the only NATO member with a Muslim majority, waned as it became clear that Iraq`s American-appointed Governing Council was deeply opposed to the deployment.

Iraq was once part of the Ottoman Empire and suffered under the heavy hand of its Turkish rulers. In recent months, Iraqi Kurds in the north have objected strongly to the presence of Turkish forces, some of which have been operating just on the Iraqi side of the border.

Turkey`s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has said repeatedly that he would not send troops to Iraq except at the invitation of the Iraqi Governing Council. In recent weeks, however, L. Paul Bremer III, the director of the occupation in Iraq, told the White House that the council would not approve.

Mr. Bush and his national security team have been sharply criticized for seeking Turkey`s help. Iraqis, Democratic presidential candidates and even some within the administration have faulted the strategy. By the middle of last month, as the depth of feelings became clear, Mr. Bush`s top aides said they were inclined to let the whole matter fade away.

Among the critics was Richard Haass, who was the head of policy planning at the State Department until he left this summer.

"We`ve now done damage to the relationship with Turkey twice," said Mr. Haass, who is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. "First, we asked them to help during the war, and they weren`t ready. And now we asked them again, and the Iraqis weren`t prepared.

"The bigger fault or flaw is why anyone in the U.S. asked Turkey in the first place. We never should have invited in one of the neighbors. The opportunity for mischief is too great."

Mr. Boucher portrayed the conversation on Thursday night as cordial, saying Mr. Powell thanked Mr. Gul "for the positive response that they had given" to the American request. "And they agreed they would work together on the reconstruction of Iraq," he said. "But for the moment, this deployment is not going forward."

By the time the final decision came today, administration officials had backed away from their prediction in September that Mr. Bush`s appeal would draw 10,000 to 15,000 foreign troops to Iraq. Instead, they have focused on financial contributions for reconstruction and on retraining former Iraqi military forces and police officers to handle security problems.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 6, 2003
Q&A: Bush`s AIDS Program

From the Council on Foreign Relations, November 6, 2003


What`s the status of President Bush`s anti-AIDS program?

It is expected to be funded by Thanksgiving, after which it will get under way. The unprecedented $15 billion, 5-year plan to dramatically reduce HIV/AIDS infections worldwide was passed by Congress in May and signed into law by President Bush. Congress is now deciding the funding level for the plan`s first year. The White House requested $2 billion, and the Senate is pushing to raise that to $2.4 billion.

Why is there a dispute over the funding?

The legislation passed by Congress--the United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2003--authorizes $3 billion to be spent in each of the next five years. The White House asked for only $2 billion for 2004 because it says ramping up the program over time will be more efficient. AIDS activists have criticized this decision, arguing that more money is needed urgently to treat the 42 million HIV-infected people worldwide. Because Congress must fund the program on an annual basis, activists are also worried that the full $15 billion will not materialize if the political will in Washington weakens. These arguments have found a more sympathetic hearing in Congress than they have in the White House.

What will the extra $400 million fund?

In part, it is expected to increase the U.S. contribution to the two-year-old Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, a U.N.-affiliated, international agency that is charged with attracting and managing funds from private organizations and governments to battle the disease. President Bush`s plan calls for $200 million annually for the agency, which some critics charge is insufficient. The Senate`s proposal will likely bring that total to between $400 million and $600 million, according to Erin Chapman, policy director for DATA--Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa--the nonprofit organization founded by Bono, the singer for the Irish rock band U2, to raise awareness of Africa`s debt and health crises.

How does the president`s plan divide the money for AIDS?

Of the $15 billion:

$5 billion is devoted to existing activities to prevent, treat, and research HIV/AIDS in some 50 countries around the world. These programs are run by USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development).
$9 billion in new funds will target 14 countries deeply affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. According to the White House, these nations are home to 50 percent of all of the HIV-infected people in the world and 70 percent of all HIV-infected individuals in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, the regions most devastated by the virus.
$1 billion will go to the U.N.-affiliated Global Fund, which finances AIDS treatment and prevention programs worldwide. Total pledges to the fund through 2008 are now $4.7 billion. The United States is barred from contributing more than one-third of the total resources of the Global Fund, according to recently passed U.S. legislation. The fund`s chairman in 2003 is U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy G. Thompson.

How does the U.S. program compare with other countries` anti-AIDS programs?

Experts agree that the program dwarfs other global efforts to fight the disease. The 2002 USAID HIV/AIDS budget was $790 million, which already made the U.S. government the world`s largest bilateral donor of HIV/AIDS assistance. The new plan will, over five years, nearly triple this amount--making it "certainly, the largest single increase in funding for global health in memory," says Dr. Nils Daulaire, president of the Global Health Council.

How much money is needed to control AIDS/HIV?

Worldwide, the investment needed to stem the epidemic is great--the World Bank estimates that by 2005, $10.6 billion will be required annually. But while much remains to be done--and while the effectiveness of the new plan is still untested--the president`s AIDS plan is "a very strong indication that health has moved to center stage in U.S. foreign policy," Daulaire says.

What does the United States spend on domestic AIDS programs?

Almost $15 billion annually, including $2.6 billion for vaccine and cure research, according to the White House.

Who are the other major funders of international anti-AIDS programs?

In 2002, some $1.8 billion was spent on international HIV/AIDS programs, according to UNAIDS, the U.N. agency that coordinates anti-AIDS efforts. Major donors included the European Community, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands. World Bank loans accounted for $95 million in aid, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contributed more than $100 million.

Which 14 countries are covered by the U.S. plan?

There are 12 countries in Africa and two in the Caribbean.

In Africa: Botswana, Cote d`Ivoire, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.
In the Caribbean: Guyana and Haiti.

Adult HIV-infection rates (the percentage of people aged 15-49 with the disease) in these countries range from 38.8 percent in Botswana--the world`s worst-afflicted country--to 3.1 percent in Guyana, according to statistics compiled by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNAIDS.

Do these countries have the highest AIDS rates worldwide?

Some do, but there are some countries with extremely high infection rates missing from the list. Among them: Zimbabwe, with 33.7 percent of adults infected; Swaziland, with 33.4 percent of adults infected; Lesotho, with 31 percent of adults infected; and Malawi, with 15 percent of adults infected.

Why were those countries excluded?

White House officials say they have chosen countries with "among the highest prevalence of HIV-infection" but have not given specific explanations for why some countries were included and others not. AIDS experts say the decisions appear to be based on a variety of factors. In some highly populated countries, such as Nigeria and Kenya, the total number of cases is very high, even if the rate of infection is lower than in other nations. Cote d`Ivoire has fewer HIV sufferers than some non-targeted nations, but the highest rate in West Africa. Another factor: the White House appears to have selected countries with which it already has a good working relationship on which to build, DATA`s Chapman says.

Do experts agree that the right countries were selected?

No. "If you put a bunch of AIDS experts in a room, you`d get a room full of different opinions," Daulaire says. There is also a discussion among experts about whether more funding should go toward regional or multilateral programs. On the other hand, there is broad agreement that all the countries included are in desperate need of help.

Could the U.S. list of countries change?

Yes, AIDS activists say. Some experts hope that in the future, the program will also target nations outside Africa and the Caribbean in which the epidemic is just starting to explode. India--which already has 4 million infected--is a key nation that needs more assistance, says Dr. Helene D. Gayle, the director of HIV, TB, & Reproductive Health at the Gates Foundation. "Should there be more consideration given to where we know the disease will spread over the next decade? That question needs to be asked," she says.

How will the funding be split between prevention and treatment for AIDS sufferers?

Congressional legislation mandates set percentages of funding for different aspects of the fight against HIV/AIDS:

55 percent of funds are for AIDS treatment, with a focus on providing antiretroviral (ATV) drugs that suppress the virus and extend the life of an AIDS sufferer. This is a major innovation in U.S. AIDS policy--which up until now has provided ATV drugs only in limited pilot programs overseas--and will be the first global effort to provide advanced antiretroviral treatment on a large scale in the poorest, most afflicted countries. In late September, the WHO announced a plan to provide ATVs to 3 million additional sufferers.
15 percent of funds will be used for care of AIDS patients who cannot be treated with ATVs. This so-called palliative care includes home-health care visits, hospital stays, and other treatment to make sufferers more comfortable.
20 percent of the funds will go toward prevention. In a special stipulation lobbied for by U.S. fundamentalist Christian groups, at least one-third of this funding should be used to promote sexual-abstinence-until-marriage programs. Many AIDS activists are skeptical that abstinence-promotion programs--compared with, for example, distribution of free condoms--will significantly reduce HIV infections.
10 percent of the funds will be used to help AIDS orphans and vulnerable children. Half of this money, according to the law, should be channeled through nonprofit organizations, including so-called "faith-based" organizations run by religious groups that run orphanages in local communities.

What are the program`s goals?

If the plan is funded at its full amount, the White House projects it will:

Prevent 7 million new infections (60 percent of the projected new infections in the target countries). While abstinence programs will be funded, other prevention efforts will include voluntary testing and counseling and help for organizations that provide condoms and distribute information about other ways to prevent the spread of AIDS.
Treat 2 million HIV-infected people with ATV drugs.
Care for 10 million HIV-infected sufferers and AIDS orphans.

How will the requirement regarding abstinence programs affect the initiative?

It`s not yet clear, AIDS experts say. In large part, this is because many details about how the program will be implemented have not been worked out. If the statute is interpreted strictly, $1 billion over five years in funding would be reserved for abstinence-only education, with $2 billion for other prevention efforts. A looser interpretation would allow abstinence funds to be spent on programs that encourage abstinence along with other behaviors, such as the approach used to help control the epidemic in Uganda. That country`s ABC program--Abstain, Be Faithful, Use a Condom--has had impressive success in curbing Uganda`s AIDS epidemic. But experts warn that local conditions differ from country to country--and that what worked in Uganda may not work elsewhere. "There is no one-size-fits all approach," says Todd Summers, the deputy director of the White House Office of National AIDS policy under President Bill Clinton and now president of Progressive Health Partners.

Does the program emphasize faith-based organizations and care?

Yes. While churches and other religious networks have partnered with USAID in the past to some degree, there is specific language in the new legislation encouraging that money be channeled through faith-based organizations. In large part, this reflects the reality on the ground in Africa, where religious organizations are often the primary provider of health and social care, and "harnessing these organizations is a good idea," Summers says. However, some activists have expressed concern that church groups may incorrectly withhold services based on a sufferer`s religion or proselytize, directly or indirectly, with the funds.

Will the program use generic drugs?

It`s still being decided. President Bush has emphasized that the highest quality drugs will be used, whether name-brand or generic. The cheapest name-brand drugs available in developing countries cost approximately $675 per person per year; that figure can drop to less than $300 for generic drugs. Further cutting costs, the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative, run by former President Bill Clinton, recently negotiated an agreement with four generic drugmakers in India and South Africa to provide ATV drug prices for $132 a year. Many AIDS experts say that given the number of sufferers the initiative plans to treat, low-cost generic drugs are the only option in the program`s price range, though experts also warn these drugs can vary in quality. Because of patent protections and other costs, ATV prices in the United States and other developing countries remain high, often topping $12,000 per year.

Who will run the program?

Randall Tobias, the chairman of major U.S. pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Company from 1993 to 1999, was confirmed as President Bush`s Global AIDS coordinator in early October. He has the rank of ambassador and will be responsible for overseeing all U.S. international HIV/AIDS assistance and coordinating the efforts of the various agencies and departments that deliver it.

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TODAY`S EDITORIALS
November 8, 2003
The Fruits of Secrecy

One of President Bush`s first acts was to convene a task force to produce a national energy strategy. Led by Vice President Dick Cheney, the group met secretly with hundreds of witnesses. It heard from few environmentalists, but many lobbyists and executives from industries whose fortunes would be affected by any new policies. Despite lawsuits, the White House has refused to divulge the names of those privileged to get Mr. Cheney`s ear. The results, however, have been plain as day: policies that broadly favor industry — including big campaign contributors — at the expense of the environment and public health.

That unfortunate bias was demonstrated anew this week when the Environmental Protection Agency decided to drop investigations into more than 140 power plants, refineries and other industrial sites suspected of violating the Clean Air Act. The winner is industry; the loser, the public.

The administration had already weakened the cases` legal foundation: a provision in the act that required companies to install up-to-date pollution controls whenever they increased harmful emissions by making major upgrades to their plants. The utilities had complained that the rule kept them from producing more power and discouraged investments in energy efficiency. Though the companies produced no convincing evidence, Mr. Cheney`s task force swallowed the argument whole, and in due course it forced Christie Whitman, then head of the E.P.A., to jettison the rule in favor of a more permissive regime allowing companies to increase pollution without paying for new controls.

The administration insists lamely that a handful of cases in litigation will be pursued. It seems clear, however, that the many investigations that have not reached litigation will be dropped altogether or at best restarted under the new rules — rules so full of loopholes that it is highly unlikely that anybody will ever be found to have violated them.

The administration swore to Congress months ago that this would not happen, that all the old investigations would be aggressively pursued under the old rules. So in addition to another rollback of environmental law, we have here another depressing example of official mendacity. Abandoning these cases is also deeply unfair to the companies that have already installed pollution controls in a good-faith effort to comply with the law.

As is so often the case these days, the burden of defending the environment now falls to the states. Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general who has aggressively used the old rules to reduce pollution from power plants, has joined other states in suing the E.P.A. for weakening the law. He has also asked the E.P.A. to turn its files over to the states so they can pursue violators on their own. Finally, some in Congress are calling for an investigation into the administration`s behavior. And why not? Congress has a right to be unhappy with a regulatory and judicial retreat that undermines much of what the Clean Air Act stands for.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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TODAY`S EDITORIALS

November 8, 2003
A Global Democracy Policy

ddressing the National Endowment for Democracy on Thursday, President Bush sought to look beyond the current bloody chaos in Iraq. Successfully implanting a democratic government in Iraq, he predicted, would energize a democratic revolution that would sweep away tyrannies from Cuba to North Korea. Specifically, Mr. Bush proclaimed a new "forward strategy" for advancing freedom in the Middle East, rightly declaring that 60 years of excusing and accommodating dictatorships there "did nothing to make us safe" because stability cannot be purchased at liberty`s expense.

Mr. Bush spoke well. He is right that Washington has failed to support abroad the values Americans live by at home. Too often, putting realpolitik ahead of freedom has backfired, causing anti-American rage. Mr. Bush is not the first president to promise to put democracy at the forefront of American policy. We hope he does a better job delivering on his promises than some of his predecessors.

Unfortunately, his biggest experiment in democracy promotion has been in Iraq, and he has not been going about it in the most promising ways. As Iraqis are showing, even a terrorized population does not much enjoy foreign invasion and occupation. Nor does it help that Washington is running the show itself, keeping the United Nations and Iraqis mainly on the sidelines.

The president`s warning of the futility of excusing dictatorship in the name of security seems custom-made for Saudi Arabia, the original home of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. Promoting democracy there must become an urgent American priority. Washington should give itself more leverage for doing so by drastically decreasing American dependence on imported oil. The United States should also encourage the work of democracy campaigners in Egypt, Syria and Iran, providing them with educational and legal resources where appropriate and documenting and denouncing the crimes of dictatorial governments.

Another country where America relies too much on a dictator for security is Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country that harbors Kashmiri terrorists and lets Taliban military recruiters operate near its border with Afghanistan. President Pervez Musharraf`s timely support for Washington in Afghanistan two years ago should not permanently immunize his dictatorship from needed criticism.

It is not surprising that Mr. Bush`s speech paid homage to Ronald Reagan and his 1980`s invocations of freedom`s unstoppable momentum against a failed Soviet communism. Mr. Bush should remember what Mr. Reagan well understood: America`s most effective cold war weapon was the power of its democratic ideas. The Reagan administration`s support for democratic opposition movements across Central and Eastern Europe played a crucial role in hastening the Soviet empire`s collapse. Washington`s willingness to outspend Moscow on arms and maintain strong NATO defenses also helped. But there is a big difference between defending existing democracies and trying to create new ones through invasion and occupation.

America, with its reverence for law and freedom and its awesome economic power and cultural influence, is well equipped to help democrats around the world. To succeed in this vitally important endeavor, the Bush administration will have to learn to put the same kind of energy and resources into the diplomatic and educational sides of foreign policy as it has devoted to unilateral military action.



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U.S. Grip Loosens in the Sunni Triangle
Tactical Shift In Iraq Leaves Power Vacuum

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 8, 2003; Page A16


THULUIYA, Iraq, Nov. 7 -- American troops patrol less frequently, townspeople openly threaten Iraqi security personnel who cooperate with U.S. forces, and the night belongs to the guerrillas.

That is the reality in this little town 60 miles north of Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi officials say, and it reflects a shifting balance of power in U.S.-occupied central Iraq. Resistance forces move with impunity in Thuluiya and throughout the so-called Sunni Triangle, despite repeated raids on suspected hide-outs and arms caches.

Since June, when attacks on U.S. forces began in earnest, the average number of ambushes has more than doubled, soaring from about 12 a day to 37 in late October before falling to 29 last week, according to Col. William Darley, an Army spokesman.

Today in Tikrit, 45 miles west of here, for the second time in a week, guerrillas shot down a U.S. helicopter. Despite the immediate appearance of airborne reinforcements, the perpetrators escaped.

There is a growing power vacuum in central Iraq, where support for Saddam Hussein was strongest and where much of the population depended on jobs in his government and vast security apparatus and on the favored political status he accorded to the country`s Sunni Muslims. The danger of permitting this wide-open state of affairs to persist, Iraqi officials say, is that it will spread and increase the confidence of enemies of the occupation.

"The weaker the grip of the U.S., the bigger the gap in power, and the increasing perception that the Americans are vulnerable boosts the morale of those who want to destabilize and expand a reign of terror," said a senior Iraqi cabinet official in Baghdad. "This perception creates unease among those who cooperate with the United States."

"I wouldn`t say we are winning," said Lt. Brian Caplin, a U.S. officer in charge of Thuluiya`s branch of the Civil Defense Force, an Iraqi unit set up to buttress security throughout central Iraq.

One reason the U.S. military presence is at a particularly low ebb is that commanders are trying not to provoke incidents during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. On the eve of the beginning of Ramadan, Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of the U.S. division operating in most of the Sunni Triangle, said during a telephone briefing with Pentagon reporters that his troops would respect Ramadan by lifting curfews, reducing their presence in cities and generally showing "increased sensitivity to local traditions."

This tactical retreat has caused some grumbling among troops who say they fear it will be misinterpreted by their adversaries as a sign of weakness. But commanders tend to dismiss those worries.

"We have not stopped offensive operations," said a senior officer based near here. "We are still conducting raids on known targets, we are still conducting combat patrols and [bomb-detection] sweeps, and we are still doing engagements with the locals."

Since the end of the Iraq war, U.S. forces have tried a variety of tactics to bring order to the Sunni Triangle -- a section of Iraq running west and north of Baghdad. In Fallujah, one of the most hostile towns in central Iraq, units have alternately tried large-scale raids, search-and-seizure operations, handouts of soccer balls, monetary compensation for killings and, most recently, major crackdowns. Troops have ringed Auja, Hussein`s native village, with barbed wire and are forcing all males over the age of 15 to obtain identity cards. In Baghdad, American forces have tried to carry out joint patrols with police but have largely abandoned them because of attacks.

None of the U.S. tactics in Thuluiya has worked. In June, the town was the target of a massive helicopter and tank sweep as troops raided houses in a search for Hussein sympathizers. Of more than 400 detainees netted in the raid, called Operation Peninsula Strike, two remain in custody, according to Iraqi police.

When U.S. commanders took a softer approach, funding repairs to schools and the police station and recruiting local policemen to provide security, attacks continued. A father killed a son who had informed on behalf of the Americans. Attacks on U.S. soldiers at a bridge prompted the Americans to bulldoze a swath of date palms and fruit trees along a major roadway. U.S. troops carried out sporadic raids; eight Thuluiya residents have been detained in the past two weeks, residents say.

Efforts to get Iraqis to handle security in town foundered under a wave of mistrust. The police have been all but sidelined. "The Americans don`t have confidence in us," said one officer, who declined to give his name for fear of getting fired. "They think we know who is doing the attacks but are not telling them."

The officer and his comrades said U.S. commanders no longer meet with local leaders in town but invite them to their base at a large airfield north of the town. Since a wave of car bombings last month in Baghdad, no U.S. official has visited the police station, they said. "The Americans are afraid," the officer said.

Enlistees in the Civil Defense Corps have supplanted the Iraqi police. The 94-man unit -- scheduled to expand to 200 members by next month -- is supposed to aggressively pursue attackers. Unlike the police, who are armed with pistols, the corps members carry AK-47 rifles. But they received only a week of training, Caplin, the U.S. commander, said. Many members are in their teens and have little experience with weapons.

They have been employed mainly to guard a hospital and a fuel depot. When they accompany U.S. forces on raids, they serve primarily as interpreters. "We explain to the people why the Americans have come to their house," said Capt. Khalaf Jassem, the Iraqi corps commander and a veteran of the Iraqi army.

He said Thuluiya residents are hostile to the corps, and the unit is unwilling to patrol the town on its own. "They call us the American brothers," Jassem said.

One former corps member, who identified himself only as Abu Hamis, said he had joined the corps for money and left because he had been shot at twice while guarding the fuel depot. He had also become a pariah in his neighborhood. "They say I am a traitor, that I inform for the Americans. Everyone knows everyone here, and it is hard to go against your neighbors," he said.

He was standing at a pharmacy on Thuluiya`s main street, where customers gathered to pick up medicines and to dispense complaints about the Americans and their allies. "No one should spy on us. If they do, they are worse than the Americans," said Muthana, a pharmacist. "It is against Islam, it is against everything. We tell the civil defense agents so."

He said that once night falls, Thuluiya`s streets are bare and "anyone can come in and out." The town, which lies at a sharp bend in the Tigris River, is heavily cultivated with date palms. "The trees are no friend of the Americans either," he said.

Everyone at the drug store insisted that attackers came from outside Thuluiya. But no one seemed to suggest that whoever was assaulting U.S. forces was unwelcome.

"We hate the Americans," said Hawan Mohammed Khalaf, a car dealer who said his date and orange grove had been bulldozed by U.S. troops. He said that guerrillas travel around Thuluiya by car and motorcycle. "Even if I wanted to stop them, I couldn`t," he said.

Does he want to?

"I am a farmer, not a fighter," he said.

Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks in Washington contributed to this report.



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An Iraqi man passes burning garbage as soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division patrol a market in Fallujah.

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$401 Billion Voted to Boost Defense
House Provides for Pay Raises, Benefits, More Sophisticated Arms

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 8, 2003; Page A03


The House approved a $401 billion military spending bill yesterday, providing a pay raise for troops, new benefits for veterans and money for more sophisticated weapons.

Before the 362 to 40 vote, Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) said the authorization bill would prepare the country for a new "era of terrorism and high technology," in which the Cold War dragon may be dead but "there are a lot of poisonous snakes out there."

The measure, expected to clear the Senate next week, outlines Pentagon spending for the coming year and sets policies on a variety of matters, including research on nuclear weapons and treatment of the environment. Supporting the bill were 144 Democrats and 218 Republicans; 39 Democrats and one independent opposed it. Two Democrats voted present.

Lawmakers said it was essential to include a 4.15 percent pay raise for military personnel. The bill also would reduce the amount that service members must pay for housing and would phase out the payments by 2005.

"We need the pay raise" to attract recruits and help alleviate "the strain on our troops," said Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) .

There were sharp divisions, however, on nonmonetary elements in the bill. Republicans and Democrats sparred over how to treat veterans` disability benefits. Under current law, about half a million retirees must give up a dollar in retirement benefits for every dollar they receive in disability compensation. Under the authorization bill, any veteran who is 50 percent disabled would not have retirement benefits deducted, a change that would cost the government $22 billion over the next decade.

Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), chairman of the Veterans` Affairs Committee, called the change "historic" and said, "This is not an insignificant cost."

But many Democrats said the change did not go far enough, leaving hundreds of thousands of veterans still facing a tax on retirement benefits. "The vast majority of disabled veterans are left out," said Rep. Lane Evans (D-Ill.). "This is an attempt to divide and conquer veterans."

The bill would exempt the military from aspects of the Marine Mammal Protection and Endangered Species acts. The armed forces would be allowed to conduct tests near critical habitats with less oversight from other departments such as Interior. The military would operate under a looser definition of "harassment" of whales, dolphins and porpoises. The new law also would allow the military to manage and define what a critical habitat is, rather than conform to detailed guidelines from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"There`s no land to work around anymore," Hunter said of military training needs.

But even some Republicans said the exemption went too far, and environmental groups criticized the measure. Gerald Leape, vice president of the National Environmental Trust, called the provision "a gaping new loophole that is sure to be abused."

"Does anybody trust Donald Rumsfeld to save the whales?" Leape asked, referring to the secretary of defense.

The bill also seeks to settle a two-year dispute over the Pentagon`s acquisition of 100 Boeing Co. refueling tankers. Boeing supporters, including Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), had pushed to lease all 100 planes, which would make the government`s contract less expensive in the short term but more costly over time. They encountered resistance from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.), who prevailed in forging a deal in which 20 tankers will be leased and 80 purchased.

Under the plan the Pentagon would have to spend $2.4 billion more than had been set aside for fiscal years 2008 to 2010, as well as $1.4 billion later, but taxpayers would save $4 billion over the long term.



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9/11 White House Subpoena Omits Classified Briefings
Bush Administration Has Resisted Granting The Sensitive Documents

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 8, 2003; Page A02


An independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks announced yesterday that it will issue a second subpoena for documents from the Bush administration, but the legal demand does not include classified intelligence briefings that have been the focus of an ongoing dispute with the White House.

The new subpoena, for Pentagon records about U.S. air defenses on the day of the attacks, follows a demand last month for similar material from the Federal Aviation Administration. The commission said in a statement that it "has encountered some serious delays in obtaining needed documents from the Department of Defense" and that "records of importance to our investigation had not been produced."

The Pentagon said in a statement that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has pledged cooperation and "has directed that the department be responsive to help ensure the commission can meet its deadlines."

But the commission acted more cautiously in its more visible fight with the White House, which has focused on access to President`s Daily Brief documents prepared for President Bush. The documents include a briefing from Aug. 6, 2001, containing information about possible attacks by Osama bin Laden`s al Qaeda network. The administration has steadfastly resisted granting access to the documents, citing national security concerns.

During a closed meeting Thursday night, the commission rejected a proposal by former representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.) to immediately subpoena the CIA for access to the briefings, several members said. But sources said the panel also rejected an offer from the White House that would have restricted access to the briefings to a small group including the panel`s chairman, former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean (R).

The result was a continuation of the stalemate between the commission and the White House. Kean and other commission members have said repeatedly in recent weeks that further delays would threaten the panel`s ability to finish its work by the May 27 statutory deadline. Kean pointedly warned in news interviews two weeks ago that the commission would consider subpoenas targeting the White House if its demands were not met.

Kean said in an interview yesterday that he remains optimistic.

"I think the White House has an interest in resolving these final issues just as we do," he said. "Hopefully by next week we can have an agreement. . . . We just have to work through the details."

Bush has promised to work with the commission on its request but has stopped short of saying whether the White House would hand over any documents. A White House spokeswoman did not return a telephone call yesterday.

Roemer and several other members declined to reveal details of the votes by the commission, which has largely deliberated in secret and has consistently sought to appear unified in public. But Roemer said the failed vote to subpoena the CIA was "very strong" and would "hopefully serve to send a message that we need a better offer from the White House."

The commission`s continued disputes with the administration over access to information have become a distraction for the panel, which was created by Congress late last year and has been hobbled by delays since then. Some relatives of Sept. 11 victims have sharply criticized the commission for not acting more aggressively in its quest for information.

Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband, Ronald Breitweiser, was killed in the World Trade Center attacks, said: "It`s really sad that 11 months into this, they are still doing negotiations.

"They need to be able to say they did everything in their power to get every document and every piece of information they needed, and so far they can`t say that. If my husband had been killed in a car accident, I would know more about what happened than I do about this."

In its statement about the Pentagon subpoena, the commission said the missing information is related to "certain Air Force commands" and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which dispatched fighter jets in response to the hijacking of four commercial airliners used in the attacks. The commission`s dispute with the FAA also involved documents from NORAD and other materials related to whether air defenses were activated quickly enough.

The Pentagon said that it has provided more than 38,000 pages of documents to the commission so far and that about 130 people have been involved in honoring the requests. The commission has received about 2 million records total from the Bush administration.

Some administration officials have complained privately that many of the commission`s requests have been unfocused and overly broad, but panel members have said they intend to be exhaustive to ensure that nothing is missed.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a commission member appointed by Democrats, said the delay in obtaining documents from NORAD will force the commission to postpone one of its hearings scheduled for January.

"Our ability to conclude the work within the deadline given would require complete cooperation by the relevant agencies of goverment," he said. "To the extent that we have setbacks and delays, it makes our job much more difficult and makes the looming deadline more difficult to meet."



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A Democracy Policy




Sunday, November 9, 2003; Page B06


SOME CRITICS CAST President Bush`s speech on democracy in the Middle East Thursday as merely another effort to repackage his troubled and costly mission in Iraq. But the president deserves more credit than that: Not only has he been talking about a political transformation of Arab countries since before the war, but he`s right to conclude that such a project is vital to victory in the war on terrorism. "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty," Mr. Bush told supporters of the National Endowment for Democracy on its 20th anniversary. His speech was notable for such forthrightness; the president went on to say that "the United States has adopted a new policy" for the Middle East and singled out, as countries that must change, not just traditional U.S. adversaries such as Syria but allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The lingering question, as it is so often with Mr. Bush, is how quickly and fully the rhetoric will translate into action. The president`s "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan never materialized; his ambitious "road map" for an Israeli-Palestinian peace didn`t get past the first stop sign. A policy to promote democracy in the Middle East, even if defined as the work of decades, will require not just soaring speeches but far-reaching changes in U.S. practices and substantial costs. Though the administration has already been talking about the new strategy for many months, there has been no substantial follow-up so far -- other than a start on a new democratic political system for Iraq.

Iraq, of course, is now the key to the region`s political future, as Mr. Bush again pointed out. If the United States can succeed in nourishing democracy there, it will galvanize and empower the nascent democratic movements around the region. Failure would doom the larger project and encourage an explosion of anti-Western extremism. For Mr. Bush to say that this "massive and difficult undertaking . . . is worth our sacrifice" is not only a way to justify the losses in Iraq. It is a truth that opponents as well as supporters of the war should be able to accept. The goal of liberalizing Iraq and the Middle East can and should be a bipartisan cause. It should also be an international cause. Mr. Bush should reach out to Democrats in Congress as well as European allies and urge them to join in the project.

He should also begin to demonstrate to people in the Middle East that he means what he says. So far U.S. democracy programs in the region have been squeezed into the margin alongside the traditional relationships with corrupt and autocratic governments. Independent civic movements, tiny political parties, human rights activists and dissidents -- the sort of people the United States backed during the Reagan-era campaign for democracy lauded by Mr. Bush -- are mostly ignored. Even Palestinian reformers don`t get much help when such help threatens to irritate the current, hawkish government of Israel. Arab spokesmen who say that the United States cannot impose democracy from the outside are right, but U.S. aid, encouragement and protection can do much to nourish Arab democrats. Openly backing those freedom fighters will mean confronting old "friends" such as Egypt`s Hosni Mubarak, Saudi Arabia`s Crown Prince Abdullah or Israel`s Ariel Sharon, rulers on whom the United States has considerable leverage. The leverage should be used carefully, of course; change cannot happen immediately. Yet one measure of U.S. policy in the Middle East will be whether, in addition to threatening its longstanding enemies, the Bush administration begins to talk differently to some of its allies.




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THE WORLD



Deadly Copter Crash Caps One of the Bloodiest Weeks in Iraq
By Patrick J. McDonnell
Times Staff Writer

November 8, 2003

TIKRIT, Iraq — The U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter crash that killed six soldiers here Friday marked the first week of November as the most lethal for U.S. troops since the fall of Baghdad.

The crash along a bank of the Tigris River came just five days after a Chinook helicopter went down near the restive town of Fallouja, killing 16 and injuring more than 20. Officials said that craft was hit by a type of shoulder-fired missile believed to be in wide circulation in this nation awash in weaponry, much of it abandoned in the final days of Saddam Hussein`s regime.

The two crashes, plus a steady stream of lethal attacks on American-led coalition forces, have left 32 U.S. soldiers dead in the first week of November, according to Associated Press.

Military authorities could not say whether enemy fire or mechanical failure brought down the Black Hawk, although speculation was rampant that the elusive armed opposition had scored another direct hit.

"There have been some reports that it was shot down," said Capt. Jefferson Wolfe, a military spokesman here. "That`s not something we have been able to determine yet."

Commanders say the mounting death toll and the enemy`s seeming relentlessness — one soldier was killed and six were wounded Friday morning when their convoy was ambushed east of Mosul — have not sapped soldiers` spirits.

"No matter how many attacks there may be on a given day, the morale has not slipped at all," said Col. David A. Teeples, commander of the Army`s 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which patrols much of western Iraq and suffered losses in Sunday`s crash.

Helicopters are viewed as critical in Iraq for ferrying supplies and soldiers in a large country where roads are unreliable or prone to ambush.

The craft that crashed Friday went down at 9:40 a.m. under fair skies in a riverside area about a mile north of downtown Tikrit. It was one of two Black Hawks from the 101st Airborne Division, based in the northern city of Mosul, making a routine run to the main U.S. base here.

Military helicopters crisscross Iraq daily, with their pilots frequently using landmarks such as the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as guides to their destinations.

The crew of the second Black Hawk, which arrived safely, did not notice any hostile fire directed at the ill-fated chopper.

"They did not report seeing anything strike the other helicopter," Wolfe said, nor were there any known reports of mechanical problems before the crash.

Several witnesses said they saw a flaming chunk of debris become separated from the craft just before it hit the ground.

"It looked like a fuel tank that crashed to the ground and caused a fire," said Natiq Hassani, directing a visitor`s gaze to a charred stretch on the riverbank where, he said, the debris had fallen and ignited a blaze.

The Black Hawk hit the ground seconds later, witnesses said. It came to rest amid thick river reeds covering the east bank of a bend in the Tigris.

The helicopter was about a mile or so short of its destination — a former palace compound that is the headquarters of the Army`s 4th Infantry Division, which patrols this zone north of Baghdad. The aircraft was a minute or two from landing when it went down.

The crash area is within a few miles of the site where grenade fire forced a Black Hawk into an emergency landing Oct. 25, injuring one soldier.

If the latest crash is determined to be the result of hostile action, it will mean insurgents have forced down three helicopters in two weeks — a discouraging accomplishment for Pentagon planners seeking to find ways to quash the opposition.

A military quick-reaction team responded shortly after the crash and secured the area. First reports indicated that two of the six soldiers aboard survived the impact, but the military later said all six had died.

Later in the day, cranes hoisted pieces of the chopper onto a flatbed truck for investigation. Streaks of black marked the place where fire had consumed the thick vegetation.

Overhead, Cobra and other U.S. helicopters circled almost continuously, buzzing this provincial city that is considered one of Iraq`s most hostile to U.S. forces.

Tikrit, which is close to Hussein`s ancestral village, was long a Baath Party stronghold and a place of privilege for Hussein family members, who occupied several palaces. The deposed president`s supporters have lost their standing, and many are furious at Washington and its allies.

U.S. officials say Tikrit and Fallouja — site of the Chinook downing — are bastions of the armed opposition. Both are in the midst of the so-called Sunni Triangle, the largely Sunni Muslim homeland that has been at the forefront of the anti-U.S. campaign. Several residents interviewed said the Americans had gotten what they deserved — and could expect more.

"To tell you the truth, I do support this kind of thing," said Jasim Mohammed, a 33-year-old former government worker. "Why didn`t the Americans keep their promises to help us?"

However, his friend Shalan Hasan, 30, condemned the act.

"I think it is awful that so many people were killed," said Hasan, who works at City Hall. "No one has a right to do such a thing."


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THE WORLD





Poles Question Troop Deployment in Iraq
From Reuters

November 8, 2003

WARSAW — Poland`s leaders faced tough questions on their nation`s troop deployment in Iraq on Friday from a nation preparing to bid a hero`s farewell to the first Polish soldier killed there.

"Poland pays homage to a hero," read tabloid Fakt`s front page, alongside a picture of Maj. Hieronim Kupczyk, a civil defense instructor killed in an ambush Thursday.

Kupczyk`s funeral will be Monday.

Despite the fatality, Prime Minister Leszek Miller defended Poland`s leadership of a 9,000-strong multinational force that took control of central-southern Iraq in September.

"The threat of international terrorism, of regimes which have deadly weapons at their disposal and are prepared to use them … is a real one," Miller said in a radio interview. "There is no country or place … which is immune to this threat."

But the public is skeptical, with a recent survey showing 57% of Poles opposing the mission and 37% supporting it.

One opposition leader said Miller and President Aleksander Kwasniewski — commander in chief of the armed forces — should be held personally responsible for the soldier`s death.

Miller embarks this weekend on a Middle East tour and will visit troops in Iraq on Tuesday — Poland`s independence day and a symbolic date in a country subjected to foreign domination for much of its modern history.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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

lookout by Naomi Klein

Bring Halliburton Home
[from the November 24, 2003 issue]

Cancel the contracts. Ditch the deals. Rip up the rules.

Those are a few suggestions for slogans that could help unify the growing movement against the occupation of Iraq. So far, activist debates have focused on whether the demand should be for a complete withdrawal of troops, or for the United States to cede power to the United Nations.

But the "Troops Out" debate overlooks an important fact. If every last soldier pulled out of the Gulf tomorrow and a sovereign government came to power, Iraq would still be occupied: by laws written in the interest of another country, by foreign corporations controlling its essential services, by 70 percent unemployment sparked by public sector layoffs.

Any movement serious about Iraqi self-determination must call not only for an end to Iraq`s military occupation, but to its economic colonization as well. That means reversing the shock therapy reforms that US occupation chief Paul Bremer has fraudulently passed off as "reconstruction" and canceling all privatization contracts flowing from these reforms.

How can such an ambitious goal be achieved? Easy: by showing that Bremer`s reforms were illegal to begin with. They clearly violate the international convention governing the behavior of occupying forces, the Hague Regulations of 1907 (the companion to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, both ratified by the United States), as well as the US Army`s own code of war.

The Hague Regulations state that an occupying power must respect "unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country." The Coalition Provisional Authority has shredded that simple rule with gleeful defiance. Iraq`s Constitution outlaws the privatization of key state assets, and it bars foreigners from owning Iraqi firms. No plausible argument can be made that the CPA was "absolutely prevented" from respecting those laws, and yet two months ago, the CPA overturned them unilaterally.

On September 19, Bremer enacted the now-infamous Order 39. It announced that 200 Iraqi state companies would be privatized; decreed that foreign firms can retain 100 percent ownership of Iraqi banks, mines and factories; and allowed these firms to move 100 percent of their profits out of Iraq. The Economist declared the new rules a "capitalist dream."

Order 39 violated the Hague Regulations in other ways as well. The convention states that occupying powers "shall be regarded only as administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests, and agricultural estates belonging to the hostile State, and situated in the occupied country. It must safeguard the capital of these properties, and administer them in accordance with the rules of usufruct."

Bouvier`s Law Dictionary defines "usufruct" (possibly the ugliest word in the English language) as an arrangement that grants one party the right to use and derive benefit from another`s property "without altering the substance of the thing." Put more simply, if you are a housesitter, you can eat the food in the fridge, but you can`t sell the house and turn it into condos. And yet that is just what Bremer is doing: What could more substantially alter "the substance" of a public asset than to turn it into a private one?

In case the CPA was still unclear on this detail, the US Army`s Law of Land Warfare states that "the occupant does not have the right of sale or unqualified use of [nonmilitary] property." This is pretty straightforward: Bombing something does not give you the right to sell it. There is every indication that the CPA is well aware of the lawlessness of its privatization scheme. In a leaked memo written on March 26, British Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith warned Prime Minister Tony Blair that "the imposition of major structural economic reforms would not be authorized by international law."

So far, most of the controversy surrounding Iraq`s reconstruction has focused on the waste and corruption in the awarding of contracts. This badly misses the scope of the violation: Even if the selloff of Iraq were conducted with full transparency and open bidding, it would still be illegal for the simple reason that Iraq is not America`s to sell.

The Security Council`s recognition of the United States and Britain`s occupation authority provides no legal cover. The UN resolution passed in May specifically required the occupying powers to "comply fully with their obligations under international law including in particular the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907."

According to a growing number of international legal experts, this means that if the next Iraqi government decides it doesn`t want to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Bechtel or Halliburton, it will have powerful legal grounds to renationalize assets that were privatized under CPA edicts. Juliet Blanch, global head of energy and international arbitration for the huge international law firm Norton Rose, says that because Bremer`s reforms directly contradict Iraq`s Constitution, they are "in breach of international law and are likely not enforceable." Blanch argues that the CPA "has no authority or ability to sign those [privatization] contracts" and that a sovereign Iraqi government would have "quite a serious argument for renationalization without paying compensation." Firms facing this type of expropriation would, according to Blanch, have "no legal remedy."

The only way out for the Administration is to make sure that Iraq`s next government is anything but sovereign. It must be pliant enough to ratify the CPA`s illegal laws, which will then be celebrated as the happy marriage of free markets and free people. Once that happens, it will be too late: The contracts will be locked in, the deals done and the occupation of Iraq permanent.

Which is why antiwar forces must use this fast-closing window to demand that the next Iraqi government be free from the shackles of these reforms. It`s too late to stop the war, but it`s not too late to deny Iraq`s invaders the myriad economic prizes they went to war to collect in the first place.

It`s not too late to cancel the contracts and ditch the deals.

[Joerver]

If Bush is Serious About Arab Democracy...
...he`ll have to accept a region run by mostly less-than-friendly governments
http://www.time.com/time/columnist/karon/article/0,9565,5384…


Friday, Nov. 07, 2003
Democracy requires that the results of a properly certified vote be accepted, no matter how unpalatable the outcome. So, if President Bush`s promise to make democracy the guiding principle in U.S. dealings with the Middle East signals an intention to press regimes to subject themselves to the popular will, and also a readiness in Washington to respect the resulting political choices of Arab citizens, that would indeed mark a revolutionary break with the past. But the skepticism with which the President`s comments were greeted among the freedom-starved peoples of the Arab world is not without foundation.

The reason every U.S. administration since FDR`s has excused Arab autocracy and authoritarianism is not simply a product of what the President described as "cultural condescension" — a notion that Arab societies are unable to support democracy. No. The reason the U.S. has found itself propping up royal autocrats in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Gulf emirates and pre-revolutionary Iran, and military autocrats in Egypt, Algeria and (looking further east) Pakistan is that it prefers governments that will do Washington`s bidding over the bidding of their own citizens. During the Cold War, these governments served as a bastion against leftist and nationalist currents hostile to Washington and also as guarantors of a smooth flow of oil to the West. Today, it is the war on terrorism that functions to excuse the authoritarianism of many of Washington`s allies in Arab and Muslim lands.

Democracy in the Middle East and nearby Muslim lands would almost certainly restrain cooperation with the U.S. war on terror. Just look at what happened in Turkey on the eve of the Iraq war: Washington had simply assumed that Ankara would jump into line once the U.S. was on the march to war — after all, the country had been effectively ruled since World War II by generals closely aligned with Washington. But Turkey is far more democratic today, and when it was left up to the elected parliament to choose, the U.S. request to invade Iraq from Turkish territory was declined. And it`s a safe bet that if Jordan and Saudi Arabia had put the matter of their own cooperation with the Iraq invasion to a freely elected legislature, the response would have been the same as Turkey`s.

President Bush`s handling of the Palestinians tends to feed Arab skepticism of his pronouncements on democracy. "For the Palestinian people, the only path to independence and dignity and progress is the path of democracy," said the president. "And the Palestinian leaders who block and undermine democratic reform, and feed hatred and encourage violence are not leaders at all. They`re the main obstacles to peace, and to the success of the Palestinian people." In the Arab world, however, the U.S.-Israeli effort to sideline Yasser Arafat looks decidedly hypocritical — for all his warts, Arafat remains the democratically elected president of the Palestinian Authority (and as such, the only democratically elected leader in the Arab world). One reason the U.S. has steered conspicuously clear of demanding that Israel take the necessary steps to allow the Palestinians to hold new presidential elections is precisely because the smart money says Arafat would be easily reelected, despite considerable hostility among his own constituents to the corruption and ineptitude of his regime. Moreover, the suggestion that the only thing standing between the Palestinians and their freedom is Yasser Arafat is taken, in the Arab world, as an Orwellian attempt to distract attention from the reluctance of the Bush administration to restrain Ariel Sharon`s creeping annexation of an ever-growing portion of the West Bank.

Washington`s war against al-Qaeda has given new luster to such poster-children of democracy as Pakistan`s General Pervez Musharraf, the army chief who anointed himself President after taking power in a coup. Musharraf talks the language of Western modernity and eloquently denounces extremism, but democracy in Pakistan is rationed by his hand. President Bush may rail against Syria`s ruthless dictatorship, but his own security agencies happily cooperate with Syria`s unlovely secret police in fighting al-Qaeda — Canada is up in arms, right now, over the case of a Syrian-born Canadian arrested in transit in New York on suspicion of al-Qaeda links and "deported" to Syria, where he was repeatedly tortured over more than a year in custody. And it`s hard to avoid the conclusion that it is precisely because the secret police in countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are not restrained by the democratic rule of law that the U.S. prefers that al-Qaeda suspects be interrogated on their turf.

The biggest test of the seriousness of President Bush`s commitment to promote democracy will come in Egypt, which is due to hold parliamentary elections in 2005. Egypt is especially vulnerable to U.S. pressure as the recipient of around $2 billion annually in U.S. aid, as its reward for making peace with Israel in 1979. "The great and proud nation of Egypt has shown the way toward peace in the Middle East, and now should show the way toward democracy in the Middle East," Bush intoned. But if Egypt were a democracy, it`s far from certain that it would still a peace treaty with Israel.

Egypt is a good illustration of President Bush`s point that the absence of channels for democratic political participation in Arab states has helped foster terrorism, which has eventually been exported. Osama Bin Laden may be Saudi, but most of the top-tier al-Qaeda leadership at the time of 9/11 were veterans of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a militant offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that turned to terrorism in response to the Sadat regime`s peace treaty with Israel, and found hundreds of willing recruits in Egypt`s middle class and in its officer corps. The Brotherhood, of course, is a far more moderate Islamist entity than Jihad, originating in early 20th agitation against British colonial rule. It enjoys a strong, some say dominant, presence among Cairo`s professional classes, and has eschewed violence. Although its activities are formally banned and it is precluded from contesting parliamentary elections, Egypt analysts suggest it may nonetheless be the dominant opposition force in Egyptian society. The impact of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on Egyptian public opinion has also seen a growing alignment in the views of the Brotherhood and more traditionally liberal democratic opposition groups, around the questions of democracy and sovereignty. Today, the overarching criticism of the Mubarak regime is that it is more responsive to Washington than to its own citizenry, and the internal demand for democratic reform is linked with opposition to, rather than support for U.S. policies.

Democracy can only take root in societies such as Egypt if, at the same time as political violence is suppressed, parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood are allowed to participate in elections, and be respected as winners if they`re chosen by the voters. When Algeria`s military rulers summarily nixed the result of elections won by that country`s Islamists in 1991, they triggered a vicious war on terror that has raged for more than a decade and contributed extensively to the al-Qaeda cause.

Creating a non-violent, democratic channel for the expression of Islamist political sentiment may be the key to the long-term transformation of the region away from a political dynamic of authoritarian autocracy vs. extremism and terror. Democracy, however, requires a leap of faith not only on the part of Arab autocrats, but also by the powers that be in Washington. Because as much as a wave of democracy would sweep away the mullahs in Tehran and the neo-Stalinists in Damascus and the deranged dictator in Tripoli who swears he holds no power and is simply a guy in a tent, it would also almost certainly sweep away America`s allies in Cairo, Amman and Riyadh. And in both sets of cases, their replacements may not be the kind of folks with whom President Bush feels comfortable.

Even in Iraq, hailed by President Bush as the "watershed event" in his global "democratic revolution," democracy may not produce the sort of result imagined by the ideological hawks who most actively promoted "regime-change." Just last week, the constitutional consultant sent by the U.S. to work with the Iraqi Governing Council on a new constitution warned that an Iraqi democracy would likely be some form of Islamic state, unlikely to recognize Israel and not particularly pro-U.S. And there`s little reason to believe a genuinely democratic Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and even Iran would be much different. Which leaves one wondering just how serious a Bush administration in the heat of its war on terrorism is about grasping the nettle of Arab democracy.

[rightnow]

joerver,
habe ich gerade gesehen von dir:

-----

#8961 von Joerver 07.11.03 00:16:46 Beitrag Nr.: 11.261.428 11261428
Dieses Posting: versenden | melden | drucken | Antwort schreiben

De mortuis nil nisi bene!

------

heisst das:
von dem tod (den toten) kommt nichts gutes ?

------
rightnow,
den das als halblateiner einfach mal so interessiert

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

@rightnow

De mortuis nil nisi bene!

Man soll über Tote nur Gutes sagen.

Stammt wohl ursprünglich aus dem Griechischen.

Es war gemünzt auf die Bemerkung über die toten US-Soldaten.

nil nisi: nichts wenn nicht.

[rightnow]

joerver,
merci -jetzt bin ich wieder auf dem laufenden.

der satz ist eindeutig lateinisch -soviel kann ich mit sicherheit sagen.
aber:
logisch -ist ja eine doppelverneinung, u. damit:
...nur gutes sagen.

right.

cu
rightnow

[Joerver]

Wenn Mr.Moore in Deutschland für sein neues Buch wirbt, darf ich nicht versäumen das Vorwort aus der deutschen Ausgabe dieses Buch eizustellen.

Das neue Buch heisst:`Volle Deckung Mr.Bush`.
Warum nicht `Guten Morgen, Mr.Bush`?

Es wird am 14.11. erscheinen.

Es wird wohl die deutsche Übersetzung con `dude, where`s my country`sein.

Dieser Artikel erschien in der Zeit.

Amerika

"Nicht ganz Amerika ist verrückt"

Die Koalition der Unwilligen formiert sich. Auch in den USA wendet sich die öffentliche Meinung gegen Präsident Bush

Von Michael Moore

Seid gegrüßt, meine deutschen Freunde, stolze Überreste des alten Europa und Anführer der Koalition der Unwilligen! Was zum Teufel ist los mit euch? Habt ihr nicht mehr gewusst, dass ihr gehorchen müsst, wenn die einzige Supermacht der Welt einen Befehl bellt? Wir bellen, ihr springt – das ist die Regel. Hat Mr Bush euch nicht hoch genug bestochen, damit ihr mitmacht und die Bevölkerung des Iraks bombardiert? Habt ihr nicht gewusst, dass Saddam der Übeltäter Massenvernichtungswaffen besaß? Große Waffen! Oh ja! Grausige Waffen! Er … er … er konnte sich unsichtbar machen, und er besaß geheime magische Kräfte, wie dass er, äh, dass er sich in eine Motte verwandeln konnte! Und, und … fliegen konnte er auch! Ich habe gesehen, wie er auf dem Empire State Building landete, und er sah so grimmig drein, als wollte er uns alle töten! Echt!Michael Moore Foto: Target/Fotex

Millionen von uns versuchen hier in den USA mit aller Macht zu verhindern, dass das Bush-Regime rund um den Erdball noch mehr Unheil anrichtet. Für uns ist es dringend notwendig, dass ihr Deutschen Bush Widerstand leistet, und ihr sollt wissen, dass wir diesen Widerstand geradezu verzweifelt begrüßen. Es schadet uns sehr, dass Leute wie Tony Blair unsere Anstrengungen sabotieren. Aber zum Glück haben in Frankreich und Deutschland und zahlreichen anderen Ländern einige der größten Antikriegsdemonstrationen aller Zeiten stattgefunden. Ich kann dazu nur sagen: Danke, Danke und nochmals Danke.

Ein Volk, das den Irak nicht einmal auf der Landkarte findet

Als ich kürzlich nach Übersee reiste, kamen viele Leute auf mich zu und dankten mir, weil ich „der einzige vernünftige Amerikaner“ sei. Dieses Kompliment entspricht schlichtweg nicht der Realität. Ich kann euch versichern, dass nicht das ganze Amerika verrückt geworden ist. Bitte vergesst niemals die folgende Wahrheit: Die Mehrheit der Amerikaner stimmte nicht für George W. Bush. Es ist nicht der Wille des amerikanischen Volkes, dass er im Weißen Haus sein Amt ausübt. Im Gegensatz zu einem weit verbreiteten Irrglauben ist eine Mehrheit der Amerikaner ziemlich fortschrittlich – ihr würdet es „linksliberal“ nennen –, aber sie hat keine engagierten liberalen Führer. Wenn sich das (hoffentlich bald) ändert, bessert sich die Lage.

Ich schreibe euch, damit ihr wisst, dass ich keineswegs allein bin, sondern mitten in einer neuen amerikanischen Mehrheit stehe. Viele Millionen amerikanischer Bürger denken wie ich, oder ich denke wie sie. Ihr erfahrt bloß nichts von ihnen, jedenfalls bestimmt nicht aus der Presse. Aber sie sind da draußen – und ihre Wut brodelt dicht unter der Oberfläche. Deshalb mache ich weiter meinen Job und versuche, das eine oder andere Loch zu bohren, damit die Wut sich in einem Geysir demokratischen Handelns entladen kann.

Ich kann gut verstehen, dass Deutschland und der Rest der Welt über das Verhalten der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika ausgeflippt sind. Recht hatten sie! Der Haufen, der bei uns regiert, fühlt sich an kein Gesetz gebunden. Ihr braucht euch nur zu fragen, wozu diese Gauner noch fähig sind, wenn sie schon die Wahl gefälscht haben. So viel kann ich euch sagen: Sie haben keine Hemmungen, alles zu zerstören, was sich ihnen in den Weg stellt, besonders wenn sie unterwegs sind, um noch mehr Geld zu machen. Und sie bestrafen euch, auch als alte Verbündete, wenn ihr nicht mit gebeugtem Knie und gesenktem Kopf am Wegrand steht und ruhig zuseht, wie sie zum nächsten Regimewechsel marschieren (vorzugsweise in einem Land, das ein paar profitversprechende Ölfelder hat).

All dies wird natürlich zu ihrem – und unserem – Untergang führen. Ich glaube, eine knappe Mehrheit der Amerikaner spürt das tief unten in ihren Bäuchen. Sie sind nur völlig verwirrt, und zwar nicht zuletzt, weil sie unter einer aufgezwungenen Unwissenheit leiden. Die Grundlage für diese Unwissenheit wird schon in der Schule gelegt, denn in unseren Schulen lernen sie fast nichts über den Rest der Welt. Und sie werden auch ihr ganzes Erwachsenenleben lang unwissend gehalten, weil die Medien kaum noch über das Ausland berichten, es sei denn, die Nachrichten haben etwas mit den USA zu tun. Dass wir nichts über euch wissen, solltet ihr an uns am meisten fürchten. Die meisten von uns finden euch nicht einmal auf der Landkarte. Laut einer kürzlich erschienenen Studie finden 85 Prozent der Amerikaner zwischen 18 und 25 den Irak nicht auf der Weltkarte. Ich meine, die erste Vorschrift des Völkerrechts sollte lauten: Ein Volk, das seinen Feind nicht einmal auf dem Globus findet, darf ihn auch nicht bombardieren.

Sollte ein derart unwissendes Volk die Welt führen? Wie ist es überhaupt dazu gekommen? 82 Prozent von uns haben nicht einmal einen Pass! Nur eine Hand voll kann eine andere Sprache als Englisch (und auch das sprechen wir nicht besonders gut). George W. sieht den Rest der Welt jetzt zum ersten Mal – weil er muss, weil das Reisen bei einem Präsidenten, verdammt noch mal, zum Job gehört. Vermutlich bekamen wir die Verantwortung für die Welt, weil wir die größten Kanonen haben. Komisch, das funktioniert anscheinend immer. Wir haben den Kalten Krieg gewonnen, weil unser Gegner die Flagge gestrichen hat. Die Sowjetunion beschloss dank Mr Gorbatschow, den Kampf aufzugeben, weil sie sich mit einem System stranguliert hatte, das einfach nicht funktionierte. Das Regime in Ostdeutschland ging zu Ende, weil die Leute auf die Straße gingen und gegen eine Mauer hämmerten. Wow, das muss man sich mal vorstellen, ein Regimewechsel, ohne dass ein einziger Schuss abgefeuert wird!

Dasselbe passierte in Südafrika – niemand musste das Land bombardieren, um es zu befreien. Tatsächlich gibt es etwa zwei Dutzend Länder, die – grob gerechnet – im letzten Jahrzehnt befreit wurden, einerseits durch den Druck der Weltöffentlichkeit, vor allem jedoch, weil ihre Bevölkerung durch einen gewaltlosen Aufstand die Macht ergriffen hat.

Aber wir Amerikaner kriegen ja keine Nachrichten aus Gebieten, die jenseits von Brooklyn oder Malibu liegen. Vermutlich haben wir gar nicht erfahren, wie ein richtiger Regimewechsel vor sich geht. Deshalb war es vor dem Irak-Krieg auch so einfach, uns schaufelweise Sand in die Augen zu streuen (meine Lieblingsschaufel war, dass der 11. September mit Saddam Hussein in Verbindung gebracht wurde), und die meisten von uns ließen sich blenden.

Ein Volk, das George W. Bush nicht noch einmal wählen würde

Okay, das ist verständlich. Wir wussten es nicht besser, und ich bin sicher, den meisten von euch ist klar, dass wir ein wirklich leichtgläubiger Haufen sind. Wir gehen das Leben ziemlich offen und großzügig und unkompliziert an. Wenn ihr uns um Hilfe bittet, kommen wir euch zu Hilfe. Und wenn ihr uns sagt, dass Esel fliegen können, glauben wir es (wenn ihr es im Fernsehen sagt). So sind wir nun mal, und ihr habt bestimmt schon festgestellt, dass das eine bezaubernde Eigenschaft von uns ist. Na los, gebt’s schon zu, das ist doch der Grund, warum ihr uns so gern habt. Und unseren Unternehmungsgeist nicht zu vergessen! Wir haben die nächste große Erfindung schon gemacht, bevor es 12 Uhr mittags schlägt. Wir haben Drive! Und Ehrgeiz! Und Selbstvertrauen! Klar, wir haben seit sechs Jahren keinen Tag mehr freigehabt, aber was soll’s! Wer braucht schon Schlaf! Wir müssen eine Welt regieren!

Das erklärt vermutlich, warum wir uns so verhalten haben, wie wir uns verhalten haben. Aber jetzt kommt meine Frage an euch: Welche Entschuldigung habt ihr? Warum habt ihr euren Regierungen im Lauf der Jahre gestattet, immer mehr von dem sozialen Netz wegzuschnippeln, das ihr uns vorausgehabt habt? Ihr Deutschen habt doch immer gesagt: „Wir sind füreinander verantwortlich.“ Deshalb gab es bei euch die Krankenversorgung, die Ausbildung und überhaupt alles, was Alle brauchen, umsonst. Aber jetzt wird das alles immer weniger. Es ist, als ob ihr euch in uns verwandelt, in ein Volk, das glaubt, dass die Reichen immer reicher werden müssten und alle anderen ihnen den Arsch küssen sollten. Ach, kommt schon, ihr Deutschen, ihr wisst es doch besser! Ihr seid belesen. Eure Medien berichten auch, was südlich der Alpen geschieht. Ihr macht Reisen. Ihr wisst Bildung zu schätzen. Und ihr habt im vergangenen Jahr die moralische Führung in der Frage Krieg oder Frieden übernommen. Ich bitte euch inständig, zeigt dieselbe moralische Urteilsfähigkeit, wenn es darum geht, das soziale Netz für jene Deutschen zu erhalten, die in eurem Land die Schwächsten sind. Beschreitet nicht den amerikanischen Weg, wenn es um die Wirtschaft, um Arbeitsplätze und um Dienstleistungen für Arme und Einwanderer geht. Es ist der falsche Weg.

Okay, jetzt kommt eine gute Nachricht: Während ich dies schreibe, wird über eine neue Meinungsumfrage in den USA berichtet. Ihr zufolge sind die Amerikaner zum ersten Mal mehrheitlich der Ansicht, dass Bush keine zweite Amtszeit mehr regieren sollte. Das ist eine großartige Nachricht, wenn man bedenkt, wie viel Unterstützung er zunächst für seinen kleinen Krieg bekam, der inzwischen zu einem endlosen Krieg geworden ist. Es hat also auch etwas Positives, dass wir Amerikaner uns nicht lange auf eine Sache konzentrieren mögen und immer nach sofortiger Befriedigung streben! Der Irak war kein Grenada, und jetzt ist uns die Sache langweilig geworden! Wir wollen Fernsehshows mit Happy End! Hey, warum schießen die immer noch auf uns? Ich will nach Hause! Hilfäääääääääää!

Noch eine letzte Bemerkung: Ich bin ganz überwältigt, wie die Menschen auf der ganzen Welt, seit Stupid White Men und Bowling for Columbine erschienen sind, auf meine Arbeit reagiert haben. Besonders aber bin ich von der Reaktion der Deutschen überwältigt. Die deutschsprachige Ausgabe von Stupid White Men wurde über eine Million Mal verkauft, und das Buch stand über sechs Monate auf Platz eins der Bestsellerliste. Zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt war es gleichzeitig Nummer eins und sechs – in der deutschen und in der englischen Version! Während ich dies schreibe, stehen Bücher von mir in Deutschland auf Platz eins und zwei (mein erstes Buch, Querschüsse von 1997, belegt den zweiten Platz). Über vier Millionen Exemplare von Stupid White Men sind inzwischen weltweit gedruckt (anscheinend hat sich nur Harry Potter besser verkauft), und Bowling for Columbine war für einen Dokumentarfilm der größte Kassenschlager aller Zeiten. Ich bin dafür sehr dankbar, weil es bedeutet, dass ich ohne Einmischung anderer die Bücher und Filme machen und veröffentlichen kann, die ich will. Dies ist ein Geschenk, das ich keineswegs als selbstverständlich betrachte. Ich nehme es als Zeichen, dass sich die Öffentlichkeit von der Rechten abgewandt hat und dass die Zeit reif ist für eine Bewegung, die sich für ein paar von den guten Dingen einsetzt, die endlich realisiert werden sollten. Ich hoffe, es ist euch ein Trost, dass die Amerikaner letztes Jahr, als Bush (wie die Medien fälschlich berichteten) so populär war, kein Buch öfter kauften und lasen als Stupid White Men, in dem George W. Bush die Hauptrolle spielt. Wie ihr seht, ist nicht alles verloren! Habt Vertrauen! Habt Hoffnung! Und schickt uns eine Zeitung mit interessanten Artikeln!

September 2003


© Piper Verlag GmbH, München 2003. Übersetzt von Helmut Dierlamm. Das Buch erscheint am 14.11.; Michael Moore tritt u. a. in Berlin (16.11. ) Hamburg (17.11. ), Köln (18.11) und München (20.11.) auf


Michael Moore ist nicht nur Dokumentarfilmer ("Bowling for Columbine"), sondern auch Bestsellerautor. Den deutschen Lesern seines neues Buches "Volle Deckung, Mr. Bush" hat er ein eigenes Vorwort gewidmet. Wir drucken den Gruß an seine hiesigen Fans vorab

[Joerver]

[Erika007]

na, joever,

gut, daß du dich zu deinen freunden von der "zeit" und "washington post" gesellst, die den nächsten präsidenten lieberman herbeischreiben, jedenfalls schon mal das feld bestellen.

dann, erst dann, wenn liebermann präsident ist, wird die welt nicht nur rund, sondern auch eine wirklich schöne ,neue welt sein.

[Joerver]

Erika
Lieberman habe ich nie favorisiert. Genau so ist mir die Zeit oder die WaPo ans Herz gewachsen.(Das war heute der dritte oder vierte Zeit-Artikel, den ich eingestellt hatte.)

Die für mich wahrscheinlichsten Kandidaten sind Clark und Dean, habe ich auch schon vor längerem geschrieben.

Politisch würde ich mir Dean wünschen, aber der einzige, der ein Chance hat ist wohl Clark.

Im Endeffekt gibt es keine großen Unterschiede zwischen den Dems und den GOPs, wenn man die Spinner von den NeoClowns herauslässt.

Seit Reagan ist die USA am Ende, will es aber nicht wissen.

Auf normalem Weg wird da auch nichts zu ändern sein.

Nur bei einem Zusammenbruch werden wir alle mit heruntergrissen werden.

Ein kluger Kopf hat mal geschrieben der Sozialismus ist verschieden und der Kapitalismus hat überlebt.

Augenblicklich bereiten wir uns auf einen weiteren Todesfall vor.

Die Frage ist, was dann weiterleben wird, oder ob es dann in der Steinzeit neu beginnt.

[Joerver]

DIM BULBS, BIG CITY

GOP Convention Lurches Towards Disaster
NEW YORK--Next year, for the first time ever, the Republicans will hold their national convention in New York City, the high temple of American liberalism. At a time when Americans are politically polarized over Iraq and other divisive issues, Republicans plan to nominate an extreme right-winger in a city where 81 percent of the locals voted for Al Gore. To top it off, they`re scheduling their Roy-in-the-lion`s-mouth act in September--the GOP usually holds its confabs in July--to coincide with ceremonies commemorating the 9/11 attacks.

At the risk of coming off like those who warned that President Clinton risked his life every time he appeared before audiences of well-armed soldiers on Southern military bases, let me say, as a New Yorker: this is a very bad idea.

"Next year in New York" is already the rallying cry of more than 150 groups planning to protest Bush`s coronation. United for Peace and Justice, which organized some of the biggest demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq, has applied for a 250,000-person permit to march past Madison Square Garden, where the convention is being held, on the event`s first full day.

Everyone from radical anarchists to moderate environmentalists expects the NYC/GOP ideological collision to spark the biggest American protest march since the end of the Vietnam War. Families of 9/11 victims, predominantly Democratic like the oasis of ideological sanity they live in, are so incensed at reports that the convention was timed to allow Bush to lay the Freedom Tower cornerstone at the World Trade Center site that many plan to join the protest. "Keep your hands off Ground Zero," Rita Lasar, head of a 9/11 victims group, warns Republicans. "Do not make a political football out of this."

Too late. New York`s Republican mayor and governor have denied the cornerstone-laying story, but they`ve confirmed that Bush will shuttle back and forth between the convention in midtown and speeches at Ground Zero. And Rudy Giuliani is encouraging convention organizers to use 9/11 as a prop.

Activists are talking, some with barely hidden glee, about the possibility of violence. "It`ll be Chicago 1968," a well-connected progressive leader predicts, referring to the "Days of Rage" riots during that year`s Democratic National Convention. "Things are gonna burn, people are gonna die." Harsh new NYPD tactics, like using horses to trample protesters, could throw gas on an already combustible situation. "Angry protesters have claimed police are meeting [antiwar] demonstrations with new heights of repressiveness, amounting to a pattern of unfounded arrests and abuses," reports The Village Voice.

Both sides are itching for a fight. "If they think New York City will welcome them with open arms, or even tolerate them dancing on the graves of the WTC victims, they are in for a very rude awakening," "Seraphiel" posted to the TalkLeft.com website. "I hope it is a remake of the `68 convention in Chicago and the fabulous NYPD, this time, get to break some left-wing heads like grapes," a Bush supporter named "David" retorted.

As much as I relish the idea of a million angry Americans turning the tawdry Necropublican National Convention into a Seattle WTO-style fiasco, the potential for mayhem is terrifying. As a Manhattanite, I hope that the Republicans will seriously consider moving their convention somewhere else. New York, wounded by the dot-com crash and 9/11 (the latter injury exacerbated when Bush welched on the money he promised to help the city rebuild), continues to suffer from widespread unemployment. The risk of convention-related terrorist attacks should be reason enough to not hold it in a city that paid the highest price on 9/11. A revival of 1968, with cops fouling their batons with the blood of young people, wouldn`t do anyone--left or right--any good.

Riots would make everyone look bad--New York, the GOP and the demonstrators. The resulting property damage could exceed the cost that would be involved in moving the convention to another city--a price that the well-funded Bush campaign can easily afford. The Bushies would be better off today if they had taken my advice on Afghanistan, Iraq, and the economy. They`ve haven`t listened yet--but that`s no reason not to start now.

(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. It is now available in a revised and updated paperback edition containing new material. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2003 TED RALL

[Joerver]

[Erika007]

#..37

nee, du nicht, aber jene postillen, achte mal drauf.

nur wird dort der name ja nicht genannt. aber eisenstadt hat es mal auf den punkt gebracht: "wir sind von den rändern ins zentrum der macht gerückt." und das dürfte (muß) auch personelle konsequenzen haben.

[Joerver]

President Bush Visits California -- Talks to Victims of Fires
Remarks by the President to the Travel Pool
Harbison Canyon, California

Analysis of Excerpts of Bush Remarks by Politex

Q Mr. President, clearly the residents here appreciate your coming and your seeing the devastation here. Do you bring additional help, beyond what has been announced, sir?

THE PRESIDENT: No, what I do is I answer questions, Ed, as to whether or not the help that is available is being delivered. Hopefully, I get the truth. I mean, if there is a frustration at the federal level, I need to know about it. I haven`t heard that yet. I`ve been -- frankly, Mike Brown and FEMA have been getting high marks. But I want to see, as best as the President can possibly see, the truth....The best thing I can do is to listen and hug and empathize as best as I can empathize.

(Analysis: Bush is saying he`s created enough of a national deficit through his tax cuts to the wealthy and his wrong-heading throwing around of tax-payer money in Iraq, and he`s not going to give money to Californians who voted for Gore, so they`ll have to make do with what they got, but he`s prepared to hug women and children, as long as there`s a photo-op camera around.)

Q You said that Saddam Hussein is no longer a menace, but there`s reports that he may be behind these attacks. So how can we be sure that he is, in fact, no longer a menace?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, he`s no longer running a country. He`s no longer got rape rooms; no longer raping young girls, having young girls raped because their families don`t agree with them; he`s no longer torturing people; he`s no longer developing mass graves -- remember, we discovered thousands and thousands and thousands of men, women and children in mass graves in Iraq. He`s no longer running the -- no longer threatening people, and he is no longer in power. We`ll get him, we`ll find him.

(Analysis: Aside from additional evidence that sex is going to be a major theme in the Bush 2004 campaign and the Dems better wake up about it, Bush is saying there`s now a need to start talking about Saddam again, now that his Iraq occupation is going down the tubes. It`s a good way to misdirect the American people away from the present problems in Iraq, caused by his policy failures. He`s also saying he should have tried to get the American people to agree to invade Iraq on the basis of Saddam "raping young girls," rather than lying about non-existent WMDs and Iraq`s non-existent terrorist connections. But then, of course, he`d have to prove what he`s saying now, somehow limit his allegations to Iraq, and establish a U.S. policy of rape as a reason to invade a country.)

Q He`s not behind these attacks, though?

THE PRESIDENT: Oh, I`m sure he`s trying to stir up trouble. As I`ve said, Saddam loyalists, those are the people, the torturers and murders and thugs that used to benefit from Saddam Hussein`s regime are the ones -- some of the ones creating the havoc, trying to create the conditions so that we leave, testing our will. And I`m sure that -- I don`t know, look, I can`t tell you what he`s doing. All I can tell you is, he`s not running Iraq. And all I can tell you, as well, there`s a lot of -- some people who are upset by the fact that he`s no longer in power.

(Analysis: As with Bush`s State of the Union speech and supposed Saddam connections to 9/11, believed at the time by nearly half of the American people, Bush knows if you keep repeating a circumstance, like the present chaos in Iraq, and a name, like "Saddam," people will start to believe that there is a connection, even though no assertion of one is being made.)

Q Mr. President, as you know, Sunday was the deadliest day in Iraq since the end of major combat. What was your reaction to the downing of the Chinook and the 16 soldiers who were killed on board? And, also, should Americans be prepared for more such deadly days ahead?

THE PRESIDENT: I am saddened any time that there`s a loss of life. I`m saddened, because I know a family hurts. And there`s a deep pain in somebody`s heart. But I do want to remind the loved ones that their sons and daughters -- or the sons, in this case -- died for a cause greater than themselves, and a noble -- and a noble cause, which is the security of the United States. A free and secure Iraq is in our national security interests. We are at war.

(Analysis: This is Bush`s timid response to the largest murder of American troops since last March, and he buried his comments in a second-string press availability that further buried his remarks in a story focused on California wildfires. Bush used pretty much the same line about the hate crime murder of a black man in Texas, not wanting to address the specific death, but asserting a saddness for any death. Bush, of course, doesn`t want to remind Americans that Americans are dying in Iraq under his occupation on a daily basis. That`s why, unlike Clinton but like his father, he forbids cameras when the dead American soldiers land on American soil, he refuses to attend funerals of dead American soldiers, and he doesn`t make public statements of mourning each time there is news of more American deaths, as presidents, as leaders, are supposed to do. His mean-spirited, politically-motivated (see today`s NYT, 11.05.03) attempt to hide his connection to the deaths of Americans in Iraq is disgraceful. --Politex, 11.05.03

http://www.bushwatch.com/#editorial

[Joerver]

Saturday, November 08, 2003
War News for November 8, 2003

Zu jeder Meldung ein Link
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/


Bring ‘em on: Police station mortared in Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Two US soldiers killed, one wounded in bomb ambush between Ramadi and Fallujah.

Bring ‘em on: CENTCOM reports one US soldier killed, two wounded in bomb ambush near Mosul on November 6th.

Bring ‘em on: Oil pipeline bombed near Kirkuk.

Kurdish – Turkmen hostility escalates in Kirkuk.

Red Cross closes Baghdad and Basra offices due to deteriorating security.

Rummy’s poor planning and Feith-based post-war force structure at root of current problems.

Study concludes that Iraqi Army excelled at tactical intelligence, a skill carried into current conflict.

US Marine reservists return to Iraq five months after re-deployment.

Here’s how thin Rummy has stretched the Army: A company of the Old Guard, the soldiers who guard the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington, will deploy to Djibouti. “It is the first time that a unit from the Old Guard will be deployed abroad since the Vietnam War, and it underscores the lengths that the Pentagon has had to go to find fresh troops.”

Bosnia offers troops for Iraq. I wonder what Lieutenant AWOL promised in exchange for troop support. Actually, the whole notion is actually pretty stupid since there are currently 12,000 NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia.

Lieutenant AWOL ducks mentioning casualties, brags about “economy.” You know the war is going badly when it can make Bush`s shitty economic policy look good.

Coalition of the Willing: Despite the positive spin, it remains a miserable failure. “An administration official described the effort to bring in the troops as "a very sophisticated diplomatic campaign," matching American needs in Iraq with the capabilities of large and small nations…This official insisted that the rising death toll in Iraq was not discouraging potential contributors. But at the United Nations, an official said the impression of rising danger to foreign forces in Iraq can`t be dismissed: ‘You can`t underestimate the impact of these bombings.’”

Bush bones Polish and Bulgarian allies on Iraq contracts. “In an editorial in the Washington Post, Radek Sikorski, former deputy minister for defense and foreign affairs, said dissatisfaction is welling in Central European nations over a variety of issues, including obtaining U.S. visas, modernizing their militaries and getting a fairer share of reconstruction work in Iraq.” Time to call up some more US reservists!

US again asks for South Korean combat troops. “The Pentagon is running into serious problems persuading countries to deploy forces to Iraq to relieve war-weary American troops. U.S. officials said the Pentagon has requested up to 10,000 troops from South Korea.” Fat chance.

Blessing in disguise: Turks won’t send troops to Iraq. “Iraqis in general, and the Kurds in particular, have made it very clear that Turkish soldiers would not be welcome…If anybody should be embarrassed at the plan`s failure, it is the Bush administration. It failed to win Iraqi agreement for the deployment in advance - a failure that contains a larger message about the need to heed Iraqi views. It has angered a key Muslim ally ahead of next May`s Nato summit, to be held in Turkey. And it is still looking, largely in vain, for reinforcements for hard-pressed American (and British) forces. Meanwhile, Ankara is still to receive a supposedly unconnected $8.5bn US loan for its trouble.”

Helicopter pilots told to “fly smarter.” Right. With about 1,000 SA-7 missing from unsecured weapons sites, I can hear Army pilots laughing their asses off at this piece of advice all the way over here.

Kinda off-topic, but this really frosts my ass: “The Bush White House, irritated by pesky questions from congressional Democrats about how the administration is using taxpayer money, has developed an efficient solution: It will not entertain any more questions from opposition lawmakers.”

This pisses me off, too. Sen. Frist helps Bush obstruct Congressional intelligence investigation. But that`s what happens when you have a Republican one-party state - Party loyalty trumps constitutional safeguards.

War on Terror

British embassy in Bahrain warns of “high threat of terrorist attacks against Western targets.”

US closes all diplomatic missions in Saudi Arabia due to high terrorist threat.

Homeland Security says AQ plans to use cargo planes in attack against “US facilities.”

Commentary

Editorial: Throw the bum out. “November, 2004, is the U.S. electorate`s best chance to put a wiser, more far-sighted, less ideologically driven into the White House.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Tennessee soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Texas soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: South Dakota soldier wounded in Iraq.

Home Front

Cheney rakes in the cash from Texas fat cats at $1,000 per plate lunch.





# posted by yankeedoodle : 2:34 AM

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Eine sehr sorgfältige Untersuchung über das Wahlverhalten der US-Bürger. Im Endeffekt brauchten sie nächstes Jahr nicht mehr zu wählen, alles unentschieden und die Gerichte müssen wieder entscheiden, und die hat alle Bush besetzt.



The 2004 Political Landscape
Evenly Divided and Increasingly Polarized

http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=196

Released: November 5, 2003

Navigate this report
Overview
Part 1: Party Affiliation
Part 2: Early Voting Intentions
Part 3: Foreign Policy, International Threats and Patriotism
Part 4: Success, Poverty and Government Responsibility
Part 5: Social and Political Attitudes about Race
Part 6: Cynicism, Trust and Participation
Part 7: Business, Government, Regulation and Labor
Part 8: Religion in American Life
Part 9: Other Issues (Civil Liberties, Immigration, Technology, Environment)
Methodology
Questionnaire Part 1
Questionnaire Part 2
Questionnaire Part 3

Overview

Over the past four years, the American electorate has been dealt a series of body blows, each capable of altering the political landscape. The voting system broke down in a presidential election. A booming economy faltered, punctuated by revelations of one of the worst business scandals in U.S. history. And the country endured a devastating attack on its own soil, followed by two major wars.

National unity was the initial response to the calamitous events of Sept. 11, 2001, but that spirit has dissolved amid rising political polarization and anger. In fact, a year before the presidential election, American voters are once again seeing things largely through a partisan prism. The GOP has made significant gains in party affiliation over the past four years, but this remains a country that is almost evenly divided politically ­ yet further apart than ever in its political values.

The Pew Research Center`s longitudinal measures of basic political, economic and social values, which date back to 1987, show that political polarization is now as great as it was prior to the 1994 midterm elections that ended four decades of Democratic control in Congress.

But now, unlike then, Republicans and Democrats have become more intense in their political beliefs.

This is seen clearly in the growing partisan gap over national security, which is now greater than in the late 1980s. In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, members of both parties, but especially Republicans, became more supportive of an assertive national security policy ­ as seen in attitudes on the use of force and other issues. Yet in the past year many Democrats have shifted away from that approach as they have become embittered by the war in Iraq. By comparison, the change among Republicans has been far more modest. (More on foreign policy, p. 7; for information about values scales, see methodology, p. 79).

Over the past four years, Democrats also have become more critical of business and much stronger advocates of the social safety net ­ and their differences with Republicans have increased as a result. Ironically, one of the few areas in which the partisan gap has narrowed in recent years is in perceptions of the scope and efficiency of government. The widespread hostility Republicans felt toward the federal government has dissipated now that their party controls all of the levers of power in Washington.

Perhaps the most striking evidence of a growing partisan disparity is the extent to which Republicans, Democrats and independents now judge their personal financial situation differently. Republicans are at least as satisfied financially as they were four years ago, but Democratic personal contentment has declined significantly since 1999. Independents also have become more negative about their personal financial situation over the past four years, to the point where their economic views now mirror those of Democrats.

The Pew Research Center`s political values survey, conducted among 2,528 adults July 14-Aug. 5, examines the core beliefs that form the basis of public opinion on a broad range of topics ­ foreign policy and civil liberties, religion and social values, government and voting, and other issues. These values, which we have analyzed at the start of recent presidential election campaigns, ultimately will shape the decisions voters will make a year from now. A second nationwide survey was conducted Oct. 15-19, among 1,515 adults, to update recent trends on opinion toward the president`s reelection and the situation in Iraq.

As part of this project, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press also has produced a detailed analysis of recent trends in party affiliation, based on about 80,000 interviews conducted over the past three years. This analysis shows that the GOP, which lagged well behind the Democrats in party affiliation for most of the past century, achieved significant nationwide gains after Sept. 11 and has drawn even with the Democrats. As it now stands, more voters identify with the GOP both in so-called "Red" states ­ those that consistently have voted Republican in recent presidential elections ­ but also in a number of swing states like Michigan and Florida. At the same time, Democrats have lost ground in swing states and have not picked up adherents in "Blue" states ­ those that have gone Democratic in recent elections.

But these favorable trends for the GOP are imperiled by several factors, including rising discontent with national conditions and concern over the war with Iraq. Moreover, independents continue to share a common point of view with Democrats, not just in their financial attitudes but in their beliefs about national security. In the post-Enron environment, business and regulation is another area of strong agreement between Democrats and independents; only Republican opinions seem largely unaffected by the scandals.

The overtime election of 2000 is the sole calamitous event of the past four years to have not left a mark on public thinking. Americans do not feel more disenfranchised or unheeded by their political leaders than they did four years ago. If anything, there is somewhat less overall cynicism and distrust of government, mostly because Republican discontent with government has fallen off sharply. African Americans, who at the time expressed the most outrage over the way the 2000 presidential election was resolved, are no more likely to say that their vote does not count than they were four years ago. However, African Americans, who are overwhelmingly critical of the Bush administration, feel much more estranged from government than they did four years ago.

Ironically, one of the significant changes in the political landscape appears to have little direct connection to the events of recent years. This year`s Pew survey finds a wider gap in strong religious commitment between Republicans and Democrats than at any time over the 16-year period that the Pew Research Center has measured basic political, social and economic attitudes. This pattern reflects the growing number of white evangelical Protestants in the U.S. who affiliate with the Republican party.

But the partisan gap over most social values, while substantial, has not increased in recent years. Over the past decade there has been a decided shift across the political spectrum in favor of tolerance on issues relating to homosexuality and race. On abortion, by comparison, there has been very little change in attitudes over the course of the 1990s, though the partisan gap on this issue also remains large.


GOP Gains, Parties Now at Parity

As the electorate has become more polarized in its political values, it has become more evenly divided in partisan affiliation. Throughout President Clinton`s second term the Democrats held about a six-point advantage over the GOP among the general public. That held steady through the first nine months of Bush`s first year in office. But since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Democratic advantage has vanished.

In Pew Center surveys conducted since the Iraq war earlier this year, 30% of Americans identify themselves as Republicans, 31% as Democrats and 39% as independents or other. When that combined sample is winnowed to registered voters, the partisan breakdown is just as narrow ­ 33% Republican, 34% Democrat, 33% independent or other.

Republican gains have come across the board, both geographically and demographically. The GOP has made significant increases in party allegiance in 13 of 50 states since 2000, and six of these 13 have been crucial swing states in recent elections such as Florida and Michigan. The Democrats have even lost some ground in states that have gone consistently to the Democratic candidate in recent presidential elections, such as California and Washington. In fact, the Democratic advantage in Blue states is now about what it was nationwide during Clinton`s second term.

Demographically, there have been increases in Republican party affiliation in nearly every major voting bloc, except among African Americans. Republicans have made some of their greatest gains among Hispanics in the West and Texas, white Catholics and white evangelical Protestants. The changes among religious groups have been dramatic, particularly when current party affiliation is compared to 1987-1988, the first two years of the Pew values surveys. Republicans now hold nearly a two-to-one advantage over Democrats among white evangelical Protestants (44%-23%) and the GOP has drawn even among white Catholics. Moreover, many of the Republican gains among these groups have occurred since the 2000 election. (See Part 1: Party Affiliation; p. 13).

Yet the net effect of all these changes is merely to reinforce the sense of a nation whose political alignment is nearly symmetrical. In interviews with nearly 9,000 registered voters conducted since the Iraq war began, Democrats hold a ten-point advantage in the Blue states; Republicans are ahead by five points in the Red states (37%-32%). And the two parties are dead even in the swing states (33%-33

[Joerver]

How we denied democracy to the Middle East

By Robert Fisk

8 November 2003: (The Independent) We created this place, weaned the grotesque dictators. And we expect the Arabs to trust Bush`s promise?

It gets weirder and weirder. As his helicopters are falling out of the sky over Iraq, President Bush tells us things are getting even better. The more we succeed, he says, the deadlier the attacks will become. Thank God the Americans now have a few - a very few - brave journalists, like Maureen Dowd, to explain what is happening.

The worse things are, the better they get. Iraq`s wartime information minister, "Comical Ali", had nothing on this; he claimed the Americans weren`t in Baghdad when we could see their tanks. Bush claims he`s going to introduce democracy in the Middle East when his soldiers are facing more than resistance in Iraq. They are facing an insurrection. So let`s take a look at the latest lies. "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe," he told us on Thursday. "Because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty." Well said, Sir. George Bush Jr sounds almost as convincing as, well, Tony Blair. It`s all a lie. "We" - the West, Europe, America - never "excused and accommodated" lack of freedom. We endorsed lack of freedom. We created it in the Middle East and supported it.

When Colonel Ghaddafi took over Libya, the Foreign Office thought him a much sprightlier figure than King Idriss. We supported the Egyptian generals (aka Gamal Abdul Nasser) when they originally kicked out King Farouk. We - the Brits - created the Hashemite Kingdom in Jordan. We - the Brits - put a Hashemite King on the throne of Iraq. And when the Baath party took over from the monarchy in Baghdad, the CIA obligingly handed Saddam`s mates the names of all senior communist party members so they could be liquidated.

The Brits created all those worthy sheikhdoms in the Gulf. Kuwait was our doing; Saudi Arabia was ultimately a joint Anglo-US project, the United Arab Emirates (formerly the Trucial State) etc. But when Iran decided in the 1950s that it preferred Mohammed Mossadeq`s democratic rule to the Shah`s, the CIA`s Kim Roosevelt, with Colonel "Monty" Woodhouse of MI6, overthrew democracy in Iran. Now President Bush demands the same "democracy" in present-day Iran and says we merely "excused and accommodated" the loathsome US-supported Shah`s regime.

Now let`s have another linguistic analysis of Mr Bush`s words. "The failure of Iraqi democracy," he told us two days ago, "would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region." Here`s another take: the failure of the Bush administration to control Israel`s settlement-building on Arab land would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region. Now that would be more like it. But no. President Bush thinks Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is "a man of peace".

And then there`s that intriguing Bush demand for a revolution in undemocratic Iran. Sure, Iran is a theocratic state (a necrocracy, I suspect), but the morally impressive President Mohamed Khatami, repeatedly thwarted by the dictatorial old divines, was democratically elected - and by a far more convincing majority than President George Bush Jr in the last US presidential elections.

Yes, "democracy can be the future of every nation", Bush tells us. So why did his country support Saddam`s viciousness and war crimes for so many years? Why did Washington give its blessing, at various stages, to Colonel Ghaddafi, Hafez Assad of Syria, the Turkish generals, Hassan of Morocco, the Shah, the sleek Ben Ali of Tunisia, the creepy generals of Algeria, the plucky little King of Jordan and even - breathe in because the UNOCAL boys wanted a gas pipeline through Afghanistan - the Taliban?

A break here. Fouad Siniora is the finance minister of Lebanon. He is a believer in the American way of life, a graduate of the American University of Beirut and a former lecturer there, an ex-executive of Citibank. He has a valid American visa in his passport. Yet he has been telephoned by the American embassy in Beirut to be told he will not be permitted entry to the US.

Why? Because last year he gave $ 660 at a Ramadan fast-breaking iftah to a charity that runs educational projects and orphanages in Lebanon. The organisation is run by Sayed Mohamed Fadlallah - once described by the Western press as the "spiritual adviser" to Hizbollah. CIA sources long ago revealed that they tried to kill Fadlallah - they failed, but their Saudi-prepared car bomb killed 75 civilians - so Siniora, an Americanophile to his fingertips, is persona non grata in the US. Fadlallah is not Hizbollah`s "spiritual adviser" - so he could hardly withdraw his support for its victory over the Israeli army in Lebanon three years ago - but the loony- tune "security" legislation in the US has deprived Siniora of any further contact with a country he admires.

Yes, roll on democracy. Bring `em on. The new "Rummyworld" war on terror is in Iraq. Ban the press from filming the return of dead American soldiers to the US. Liberty is what it`s about, democracy. "Accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East", indeed. We created this place, drew its borders, weaned their grotesque dictators. And we expect the Arabs to trust Mr Bush`s promise?

Copyright: The Independent.

[Joerver]

Lass die Morgensonne wieder untergehen. Amerikas schreckliches Erwachen. Achtung nicht jugendfrei!
http://www.bartcop.com/092603_morning.jpg

[Joerver]

Summary Military Fatalities:

US__UK__ Other___Total

392_53_____6_____ 451

The Wounded: US Military
Reported by Centcom As of 11/6/2003 Total Avg
US troops wounded in action: 1889 8.18
US troops wounded in non-hostile incidents 341 1.48
TOTAL US wounded in Iraq since March 20th: 2230 9.65

http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx

11/08/03 ABC: Explosions heard across Baghdad
Loud explosions, probably caused by mortars or rockets, have echoed across the Iraqi capital Baghdad in the third apparent attack on the city by insurgents this week.
11/08/03 Reuters:US Pounds Saddam Hometown
U.S. warplanes and armored vehicles battered suspected guerrilla hideouts in Saddam Hussein`s hometown of Tikrit on Saturday after six soldiers were killed in the shooting down of a Black Hawk helicopter
11/08/03 Yahoo: 2 Killed, 2 Wounded
Insurgents killed two U.S. paratroopers and wounded another west of Baghdad on Saturday as the U.S. military cracked down on residents of Saddam Hussein`s hometown
11/07/03 Centcom: 1 Killed, 2 Wounded
A 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) soldier was killed and six others were wounded in east Mosul when their convoy was ambushed with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire at approximately 7 a.m. Nov. 7.
11/07/03 Centcom: Black Hawk Down Confirmed: 6 Dead
A U.S. Army UH-60 (Black Hawk) helicopter from the 101st Airborne Air Assault Division, which was ferrying passengers, went down on the East side of the Tigris river near Tikrit, Iraq on Nov. 7 at 9:40 a.m
11/07/03 Wapo: 6 Dead as Army Helicopter Crashes
An Army helicopter crashed Friday into a riverbank near Tikrit, killing six U.S. soldiers, the military said.

[Joerver]

Jamal Muhammad looked over a house that U.S. troops destroyed in a raid in Tikrit on Friday and Saturday.

Will die USA nun die gleiche Taktik wie Israel anwenden.

November 9, 2003
U.S. Troops Raid Tikrit In Hunt for Guerrillas
By ALEX BERENSON

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 8 — American forces used tanks, howitzers, and fighter planes in an overnight raid on a volatile area around Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein, the Fourth Infantry Division said on Saturday.

The raid began a few hours after a Black Hawk helicopter crashed near Tikrit on Friday, killing six American soldiers, and was intended as a show of force in an area where guerrillas attack American soldiers every day, said Maj. Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the division, which controls north-central Iraq. The Army has not yet officially determined the cause of the Black Hawk crash.

Meanwhile, two soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division were killed in Falluja on Saturday when a roadside bomb hit their vehicle, the military reported. A third soldier was wounded.

The deaths brought to at least 392 the number of soldiers who have died in Iraq or Kuwait since the United States invaded Iraq on March 19. At least 254 soldiers have died since May 1, when President Bush declared major combat operations over.

The raid in Tikrit began about 10 p.m. on Friday and lasted about five hours, Major Aberle said. She said that it was part of an aggressive new effort to root out guerrillas in and around the city, which is about 100 miles north of Baghdad and has been a center of resistance to the American occupation.

In an effort to be culturally sensitive, the division had scaled back its patrols and raids in late October to accommodate Muslims during Ramadan, the holiest month of the Muslim year, Major Aberle said.

"Our hopes were that we would give the local population the opportunity to police themselves," Major Aberle said.

But guerrilla activity increased, leading to the new crackdown, called Operation Ivy Cyclone, she said. "The intent is to let the individuals who are involved in anticoalition activities know that it`s not going to be tolerated."

At least three houses were destroyed in the raid, Major Aberle said. The houses were empty and had been used by guerrillas for meetings and to store weapons, she said.

Also on Saturday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it would close its offices in Baghdad and in Basra, the second largest city in Iraq.

The announcement came almost two weeks after a car bomb at its Baghdad office killed 12 people.

In a news conference in Baghdad, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said the United States had been "sobered" by the guerrilla attacks in the Sunni Triangle, the region north and west of Baghdad where resistance to the occupation is strongest.

"It`s not a secret to anyone that in the Baghdad-Tikrit-Falluja-Ramadi area, we`ve got a problem, and we`re sobered by the problem," Mr. Armitage said. But he said he believed that United States troops were on the offensive, even though two helicopters had crashed and 31 soldiers had died since Sunday.

"We have a very solid plan to go out and get these people who are killing us and killing Iraqis."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

Der Sunday Herald ist ein schottisches Sonntagblatt, das sehr viel über den Irak und über Blair und Bush berichtet hat. Immer eie seriöse Zeitung. Deshalb stelle ich diesen Bericht über den 11.9. ein, auch auf die Gefahr hin, dass er von manchen in die falsche Schublade gelegt wird.


Sunday Herald - 02 November 2003
Five Israelis were seen filming as jet liners ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 ...
Were they part of a massive spy ring which shadowed the 9/11 hijackers and knew that al-Qaeda planned a devastating terrorist attack on the USA? Neil Mackay investigates

http://www.sundayherald.com/37707
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


THERE was ruin and terror in Manhattan, but, over the Hudson River in New Jersey, a handful of men were dancing. As the World Trade Centre burned and crumpled, the five men celebrated and filmed the worst atrocity ever committed on American soil as it played out before their eyes.

Who do you think they were? Palestinians? Saudis? Iraqis, even? Al-Qaeda, surely? Wrong on all counts. They were Israelis – and at least two of them were Israeli intelligence agents, working for Mossad, the equivalent of MI6 or the CIA.

Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of indisputable fact. To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they moved from the Middle East through Europe and into America where they trained as pilots and prepared to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States. And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause.

After the attacks on New York and Washington, the former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was asked what the terrorist strikes would mean for US-Israeli relations. He said: “It’s very good.” Then he corrected himself, adding: “Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans].”

If Israel’s closest ally felt the collective pain of mass civilian deaths at the hands of terrorists, then Israel would have an unbreakable bond with the world’s only hyperpower and an effective free hand in dealing with the Palestinian terrorists who had been murdering its innocent civilians as the second intifada dragged on throughout 2001.

It’s not surprising that the New Jersey housewife who first spotted the five Israelis and their white van wants to preserve her anonymity. She’s insisted that she only be identified as Maria. A neighbour in her apartment building had called her just after the first strike on the Twin Towers. Maria grabbed a pair of binoculars and, like millions across the world, she watched the horror of the day unfold.

As she gazed at the burning towers, she noticed a group of men kneeling on the roof of a white van in her parking lot. Here’s her recollection: “They seemed to be taking a movie. They were like happy, you know ... they didn’t look shocked to me. I thought it was strange.”

Maria jotted down the van’s registration and called the police. The FBI was alerted and soon there was a statewide all points bulletin put out for the apprehension of the van and its occupants. The cops traced the number, establishing that it belonged to a company called Urban Moving.

Police Chief John Schmidig said: “We got an alert to be on the lookout for a white Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration and writing on the side. Three individuals were seen celebrating in Liberty State Park after the impact. They said three people were jumping up and down.”

By 4pm on the afternoon of September 11, the van was spotted near New Jersey’s Giants stadium. A squad car pulled it over and inside were five men in their 20s. They were hustled out of the car with guns levelled at their heads and handcuffed.

In the car was $4700 in cash, a couple of foreign passports and a pair of box cutters – the concealed Stanley Knife-type blades used by the 19 hijackers who’d flown jetliners into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon just hours before. There were also fresh pictures of the men standing with the smouldering wreckage of the Twin Towers in the background. One image showed a hand flicking a lighter in front of the devastated buildings, like a fan at a pop concert. The driver of the van then told the arresting officers: “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”



His name was Sivan Kurzberg. The other four passengers were Kurzberg’s brother Paul, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari. The men were dragged off to prison and transferred out of the custody of the FBI’s Criminal Division and into the hands of their Foreign Counterintelligence Section – the bureau’s anti-espionage squad.

A warrant was issued for a search of the Urban Moving premises in Weehawken in New Jersey. Boxes of papers and computers were removed. The FBI questioned the firm’s Israeli owner, Dominik Otto Suter, but when agents returned to re-interview him a few days later, he was gone. An employee of Urban Moving said his co-workers had laughed about the Manhattan attacks the day they happened. “I was in tears,” the man said. “These guys were joking and that bothered me. These guys were like, ‘Now America knows what we go through.’”

Vince Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counter-terrorism with the CIA, says the red flag went up among investigators when it was discovered that some of the Israelis’ names were found in a search of the national intelligence database. Cannistraro says many in the US intelligence community believed that some of the Israelis were working for Mossad and there was speculation over whether Urban Moving had been “set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists”.

This makes it clear that there was no suggestion whatsoever from within American intelligence that the Israelis were colluding with the 9/11 hijackers – simply that the possibility remains that they knew the attacks were going to happen, but effectively did nothing to help stop them.

After the owner vanished, the offices of Urban Moving looked as if they’d been closed down in a big hurry. Mobile phones were littered about, the office phones were still connected and the property of at least a dozen clients were stacked up in the warehouse. The owner had cleared out his family home in New Jersey and returned to Israel.

Two weeks after their arrest, the Israelis were still in detention, held on immigration charges. Then a judge ruled that they should be deported. But the CIA scuppered the deal and the five remained in custody for another two months. Some went into solitary confinement, all underwent two polygraph tests and at least one underwent up to seven lie detector sessions before they were eventually deported at the end of November 2001. Paul Kurzberg refused to take a lie detector test for 10 weeks, but then failed it. His lawyer said he was reluctant to take the test as he had once worked for Israeli intelligence in another country.

Nevertheless, their lawyer, Ram Horvitz, dismissed the allegations as “stupid and ridiculous”. Yet US government sources still maintained that the Israelis were collecting information on the fundraising activities of groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Mark Regev, of the Israeli embassy in Washington, would have none of that and he said the allegations were “simply false”. The men themselves claimed they’d read about the World Trade Centre attacks on the internet, couldn’t see it from their office and went to the parking lot for a better view. Their lawyers and the embassy say their ghoulish and sinister celebrations as the Twin Towers blazed and thousands died were due to youthful foolishness.

The respected New York Jewish newspaper, The Forward, reported in March 2002, however, that it had received a briefing on the case of the five Israelis from a US official who was regularly updated by law enforcement agencies. This is what he told The Forward: “The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it.” He added that “the conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs”, but the men were released because they “did not know anything about 9/11”.



Back in Israel, several of the men discussed what happened on an Israeli talk show. One of them made this remarkable comment: “The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event.” But how can you document an event unless you know it is going to happen?

We are now deep in conspiracy theory territory. But there is more than a little circumstantial evidence to show that Mossad – whose motto is “By way of deception, thou shalt do war” – was spying on Arab extremists in the USA and may have known that September 11 was in the offing, yet decided to withhold vital information from their American counterparts which could have prevented the terror attacks.

Following September 11, 2001, more than 60 Israelis were taken into custody under the Patriot Act and immigration laws. One highly placed investigator told Carl Cameron of Fox News that there were “tie-ins” between the Israelis and September 11; the hint was clearly that they’d gathered intelligence on the planned attacks but kept it to themselves.

The Fox News source refused to give details, saying: “Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.” Fox News is not noted for its condemnation of Israel; it’s a ruggedly patriotic news channel owned by Rupert Murdoch and was President Bush’s main cheerleader in the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq.

Another group of around 140 Israelis were detained prior to September 11, 2001, in the USA as part of a widespread investigation into a suspected espionage ring run by Israel inside the USA. Government documents refer to the spy ring as an “organised intelligence-gathering operation” designed to “penetrate government facilities”. Most of those arrested had served in the Israeli armed forces – but military service is compulsory in Israel. Nevertheless, a number had an intelligence background.

The first glimmerings of an Israeli spying exercise in the USA came to light in spring 2001, when the FBI sent a warning to other federal agencies alerting them to be wary of visitors calling themselves “Israeli art students” and attempting to bypass security at federal buildings in order to sell paintings. A Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) report suggested the Israeli calls “may well be an organised intelligence-gathering activity”. Law enforcement documents say that the Israelis “targeted and penetrated military bases” as well as the DEA, FBI and dozens of government facilities, including secret offices and the unlisted private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel.



A number of Israelis questioned by the authorities said they were students from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, but Pnina Calpen, a spokeswoman for the Israeli school, did not recognise the names of any Israelis mentioned as studying there in the past 10 years. A federal report into the so-called art students said many had served in intelligence and electronic signal intercept units during their military service.

According to a 61-page report, drafted after an investigation by the DEA and the US immigration service, the Israelis were organised into cells of four to six people. The significance of what the Israelis were doing didn’t emerge until after September 11, 2001, when a report by a French intelligence agency noted “according to the FBI, Arab terrorists and suspected terror cells lived in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as in Miami and Hollywood, Florida, from December 2000 to April 2001 in direct proximity to the Israeli spy cells”.

The report contended that Mossad agents were spying on Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehi, two of leaders of the 9/11 hijack teams. The pair had settled in Hollywood, Florida, along with three other hijackers, after leaving Hamburg – where another Mossad team was operating close by.

Hollywood in Florida is a town of just 25,000 souls. The French intelligence report says the leader of the Mossad cell in Florida rented apartments “right near the apartment of Atta and al-Shehi”. More than a third of the Israeli “art students” claimed residence in Florida. Two other Israelis connected to the art ring showed up in Fort Lauderdale. At one time, eight of the hijackers lived just north of the town.

Put together, the facts do appear to indicate that Israel knew that 9/11, or at least a large-scale terror attack, was about to take place on American soil, but did nothing to warn the USA. But that’s not quite true. In August 2001, the Israelis handed over a list of terrorist suspects – on it were the names of four of the September 11 hijackers. Significantly, however, the warning said the terrorists were planning an attack “outside the United States”.

The Israeli embassy in Washington has dismissed claims about the spying ring as “simply untrue”. The same denials have been issued repeatedly by the five Israelis seen high-fiving each other as the World Trade Centre burned in front of them.

Their lawyer, Ram Horwitz, insisted his clients were not intelligence officers. Irit Stoffer, the Israeli foreign minister, said the allegations were “completely untrue”. She said the men were arrested because of “visa violations”, adding: “The FBI investigated those cases because of 9/11.”

Jim Margolin, an FBI spokesman in New York, implied that the public would never know the truth, saying: “If we found evidence of unauthorised intelligence operations that would be classified material.” Yet, Israel has long been known, according to US administration sources, for “conducting the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any US ally”. Seventeen years ago, Jonathan Pollard, a civilian working for the American Navy, was jailed for life for passing secrets to Israel. At first, Israel claimed Pollard was part of a rogue operation, but the government later took responsibility for his work.

It has always been a long-accepted agreement among allies – such as Britain and America or America and Israel – that neither country will jail a “friendly spy” nor shame the allied country for espionage. Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Boston’s Political Research Associates and an expert in intelligence, says: “It’s a backdoor agreement between allies that says that if one of your spies gets caught and didn’t do too much harm, he goes home. It goes on all the time. The official reason is always visa violation.”

What we are left with, then, is fact sullied by innuendo. Certainly, it seems, Israel was spying within the borders of the United States and it is equally certain that the targets were Islamic extremists probably linked to September 11. But did Israel know in advance that the Twin Towers would be hit and the world plunged into a war without end; a war which would give Israel the power to strike its enemies almost without limit? That’s a conspiracy theory too far, perhaps. But the unpleasant feeling that, in this age of spin and secrets, we do not know the full and unadulterated truth won’t go away. Maybe we can guess, but it’s for the history books to discover and decide.


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Copyright © 2003 smg sunday newspapers ltd. no.176088

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Americans sow seeds of hatred
Patrick Graham in Falluja meets angry Iraqi tribes who say they, not Saddam`s forces, are shooting down US helicopters

Patrick Graham in Falluja
Sunday November 9, 2003
The Observer

Sarab rolls up her sleeve and looks at the thick scar across her upper arm. The eight-year-old says she was playing in the bathroom of her house when the shots were fired but cannot remember anything else.

`It is their routine,` said her grandfather, Turk Jassim. `After the Americans are attacked, they shoot everywhere. This is inhuman - a stupid act by a country always talking about human rights.`

Last September, US forces shot dead Sarab`s two-year old sister, Dunya, and wounded two other girls in her family, 13-year-old Menal and 16-year old Bassad. The family belongs to the Albueisi tribe who farm the rich land along the Euphrates river south of Falluja. The Albueisi fought against the British and even Saddam Hussein found them difficult to control. Since April, at least 10 members of the tribe have been killed by US forces, including five policemen.

While the US authorities maintain that resistance attacks are carried out by former Baathists and supporters of Saddam, they continue to ignore the tribal nature of the insurgency which has grown steadily over recent months. Deeply conservative clans like the 50,000-strong Albueisi have codes of honour which they complain the American army ignores at checkpoints and during raids on houses.

They also believe that the Koran demands jihad against foreign invaders. Asked how many American lives should be taken if one of their own is killed, the answer is: `As many as possible.`

Last week an American Chinook helicopter was shot down by a heat-seeking missile a few kilometres from Sarab`s house, killing 16 soldiers. It could have been worse, the neighbours say. Resistance fighters were ready to fire another missile at a second Chinook when they were stopped by worried locals.

After the crash, others in the area came out with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and Kalashnikovs, but they, too, were dissuaded for fear of retaliation. And with good reason. After Friday`s downing of a Black Hawk helicopter near Tikrit,US troops dropped two 500lb bombs and fired tank rounds at the area of the crash in a show of force.

According to Albueisi resistance supporters, the attack on the Chinook was carried out by members of the tribe, as was a second attack later in the week on a military train. One of the freight containers from the train lies behind Sarab`s house, its lettering partially effaced by handfuls of mud.

`If the Americans came as normal citizens, we`d welcome them,` said Khalid, an Albueisi with ties to the resistance. `When they came for liberation, I sent them food. Now I just want to kill them. If I didn`t have children, I`d join tomorrow.`

As a teenager, Khalid won local fame for revenging his brother`s death. A notoriously good shot, he says he is now thinking of dusting off his Kalashnikov.

`What are we supposed to say? "Oh, the poor American soldiers died" when they kill people here every day? I expected more than just a Chinook to be shot down.`

Like everybody in the area, he believes far more soldiers died in the crash than the authorities admit. According to Khalid, the tactics and aims of the resistance in the Falluja area are different from those in Baghdad. In the countryside, foreign fighters and Saddam`s supporters play a far smaller role than tribal relationships and traditional codes.

`The Albueisi have hot blood and will do anything without caring about the results. If something happens to one of them, they will get together and take revenge. More helicopters will go down, definitely.`

According to Khalid, last month a Russian made Sam-7 Strela anti-aircraft missile like the one used against the Chinook could be purchased for $325, mostly from tribes in southern Iraq who collected thousands following the fall of Saddam. He had heard that a new, more compact missile was on the market but did not know the name or the price.

The US troops pulled out of the Chinook crash site at the end of last week, leaving behind piles of Tootsie Roll wrappers and plastic containers for Menu 19, Beef With Mushroom. Near by, women in bright dresses and scarves wrapped round their faces weeded potato and wheat fields. Yassim Hachim smiled broadly as he wheeled by on his bike past bulldozed farmland where US troops had scooped up even the soil next to an irrigation ditch. `It was like Eid, because it was the best celebration,` he said, referring to the festival that ends this month`s fasting of Ramadan.

`I saw the missile come from the west and hit the helicopter. After the crash, people got their weapons to shoot the US soldiers, but they were stopped. Everybody here hates the US.`

Since April, at least 40 civilians and police have been killed in and around Falluja, as well as 22 US soldiers, two of them yesterday in a bomb attack west of the city. It is a cycle that does not look like it will end soon.

`They do not understand psychology,` said Dr Adnan Chechan, a surgeon at Falluja`s main hospital. `When you are violent, you get a violent reaction.`

Last week, he pointed out, six people were killed 500 yards from the hospital as they drove past a US convoy shortly after a roadside bomb exploded. Television footage from inside one of the mini-vans carrying employees of the Oil Ministry was too gruesome to be broadcast.

Adnan was sitting under posters that read: `Free Dr Omar Abdul Sattar.` He said that the former head of the provincial healthcare system had been arrested for operating on members of the resistance six weeks ago and was still in jail.

People in Falluja have been particularly critical of the 82nd Airborne - which has been given responsibility for occupying the area and ordered to crack down on insurgents.

`Previously, I had a good view of American people,` said Adnan. `But we have changed our mind after seeing the aggression - the soldiers in Falluja and Khaldiya are very aggressive.

`The people here do not do these attacks for no reason. If someone in their clan has been killed, they will take revenge.`

In the area around Falluja, the US army appears to be winning hearts and minds - for their enemy.

`The American army is our best friend,` a resistance fighter told us. `We should be giving them medals.`


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Private Jessica says President is misusing her `heroism`
Edward Helmore, New York
Sunday November 9, 2003
The Observer

When American Private Jessica Lynch was rescued from an Iraqi hospital last April, President George Bush`s administration and much of the US media was gripped by a dramatic tale of blonde, all-American heroism.

The story reaches fever pitch this week with the publication of Lynch`s autobiography, a dramatised TV documentary, interviews and a Vanity Fair cover story.

Beneath the gloss of the US media and the machinations of an administration eager to show a `good news` angle of the Iraq conflict against the reality of a rising body count, Lynch has become a metaphor not for the heroism of pretty young Americans captured by a devilish foreign enemy, but for the confusion that has marked Bush`s Operation Iraqi Freedom from the start.

Misgivings characterising Lynch`s story are coming to a head: last week she accused the administration of manipulating her story for propaganda, saying she was not a heroine at all; accusations that she`d been raped were disputed by appalled Iraqi doctors who first treated her, and the army was accused of insensitivity and racism for awarding Lynch a full disability pension while others from her ambushed maintenance company, including Shoshana Johnson, the black cook wounded and captured by Iraqis, will receive barely a third of Lynch`s discharge package.

While Johnson is living on $500 a month, Lynch stands to make millions from her book, I Am a Soldier, Too. She has been romanced as the media target of the moment, photographed by Annie Liebowitz for Vanity Fair, and stands to make millions more from a movie deal.

`There is a double standard,` said Johnson`s father, Claude. `I don`t know for sure that it was the Pentagon. All I know for sure is the media paid a lot of attention to Jessica.`

And America is deter mined that Lynch will be a heroine, despite the fact that she never fired a shot, and instead got down on her knees to pray as her unit was surrounded by enemy forces. As she pointed out herself, it was her dead colleague Lori Piestewa, a Native American mother of two, who went down fighting.

Lynch says the circumstances of her rescue was dramatised and manipulated by the Pentagon. She was not rescued in a `blaze of gunfire` as reported by Defence Department officials last April, but picked up from compliant Iraq doctors who had saved her life.

She was not raped, as the department said, and the Iraqi, Mohammed Odeh Al-Rehaief, who was given US citizenship for his efforts, has written a book about how he risked his own life to win her freedom. Now he is described by his wife as overly influenced by John Wayne movies.

`Lynch is basically saying the whole thing was made up, a fraud,` said media critic Michael Wolff. `At the same time, the media is going on with this elaborate production effort to make her into a hero. It`s as if the size of the attention itself makes her a hero. Everyone is committed to making her the face of the war whereas the other story that this all a kind of scandal.`

But the story may be too far along to reverse. `She can`t take back being a star. The fact that she says it`s all made up doesn`t make a difference. It`s been decided she`s a star, and that`s the only indisputable fact,` said Wolff.

The New York Times has pointed out how Lynch has become the Mona Lisa of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Americans have been able to read into her unrevealing snapshot whatever story they chose. Her story becoming `a Rorschach test for homefront mood swings`.

Now, with the US forces having lost 32 soldiers in the last week alone, the mood may be turning and she stands to be come symbolic of US confusion and press credulity. The inconsistencies have not been missed by veterans` groups who don`t wish to besmirch her individual valour but are uneasy over the administration`s efforts to present `good news` while ignoring the reality.

`The White House sent a message that they were going to tell the good news stories so now we have a situation where we are not allowed to witness the coffins coming home and there are no images of young soldiers coming home missing arms and legs,` said Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Centre.

`We`re just seeing one side of the story, and you`ve got to tell the other side, the one about the wounded, maimed and the dead.` There is growing doubt Lynch`s uplifting story will help to sweeten the nation`s mood about the dim prospect that the US will be able extricate itself from Iraq before hundreds, and possibly thousands, more servicemen died.

Lynch, who joined the army hoping to see the world after failing to land a job at a supermarket, is preparing to go on a media tour that will include appearances with TV anchors such as David Letterman. Yet she is unable to fulfil the role of the patriot.

The administration`s game plan, enabled by a supplicant media, is showing signs of distress. The singer Cher recently visited the hospital where Lynch recovered from her ordeal and talked on TV of meeting a teenage soldier who had lost both his arms.

She wanted to know why Bush and his team weren`t there having their photographs taken with the injured troops. `I don`t understand why these guys [the wounded] are so hidden and there aren`t pictures of them,` Cher said.

Lynch now questions why her rescue was filmed: `They used me to symbolise all this stuff. It`s wrong. I don`t know why they filmed it, or why they say these things.`


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Non-US firms frozen out of Iraq
Oliver Morgan
Sunday November 9, 2003
The Observer

The US is to reaffirm that non-American companies cannot win government contracts in the multi-billion dollar effort to rebuild Iraq.

Only companies with US joint ventures can expect to take prime contractor roles in a fresh wave of reconstruction programmes to be funded by the $18.6 billion budget cleared by the US Congress last month.

Few UK companies have such agreements, although engineer Amec has a venture with California counterpart Fluor, through which it is bidding for oil and capital construction projects. The UK government is encouraging other interested companies to follow suit.

The contracting strategy will be spelt out at roadshows in Washington and London later this month by David Nash, the retired US admiral who heads the Iraq Infrastructure Reconstruction Office, part of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

The US-first rules have been a source of grievance to UK companies seeking to win work in Iraq. Some companies, and industry bodies such as the British Consultants and Contractors Bureau hoped the regulations would be relaxed.

But a briefing to British contractors from UK Trade and Investment, the government agency that promotes British commercial interests overseas, makes clear this will not happen: `It is reasonable to expect that strong US connections will enhance the potential for businesses to secure contracts either by creating joint ventures with American majority partners or presenting themselves through their US operations.`

The key items in the reconstruction include $5.5bn on the electricity sector, $4.3bn on water systems and $1.9bn on oil infrastructure.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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A fast handover by US will fail
Fareed Zakaria says the idea of handing power to Iraqis is doomed

Fareed Zakaria
Sunday November 9, 2003
The Observer

Iraq is not Vietnam: the US lost dozens of troops there for every one it is losing in Iraq. The Vietcong had popular support and were supplied by great powers.

But in one sense, the analogy might hold. Frustrated by the lack of progress on the ground and fading political support at home, Washington is latching on to the idea that a quick transfer of power to local troops and politicians would make things better. Or at least reduce American casualties. It was called Vietnamisation; today, it is Iraqification. Now, as then, it is less a winning strategy than an exit strategy.

Everyone seems in favour of Iraqification. The President has urged an accelerated training schedule for the Iraqi army. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says more Iraqi troops, not Americans, would be the best answer to his problems. Where once the administration spoke of a three-year process of constitution-writing and institution-building, now it wants to turn things over in 18 months. Even the French love the new, improved schedule.

This new impulse has less to do with Iraqi democracy than American democracy. The President wants to show, in time for re-election, that Iraqis are governing their affairs and Americans are coming home. It might not work out that way.

Putting more Iraqi soldiers and police on the ground makes sense. By taking care of routine policing and security, they will free the US army to conduct raids and fight the guerrillas. But the desperation to move faster will have bad results. Accelerating training will produce an ineffective Iraqi army and police force.

When we speak of sending `Iraqis` on raids into the Sunni Triangle, who would these soldiers be? Sunnis? They might not want to hunt down Baathists. Shia and Kurds? That would galvanise the Sunni population in support of the guerrillas. If the goal is to stabilise Iraq, fomenting inter-group violence is not the best path.

A quick transfer of power is even more dangerous. Iraq has gone from decades of Stalinism to total collapse. A quick transfer of authority to a weak central government would encourage the Shia, the Sunnis and the Kurds to retain de facto autonomy in their regions.

For the neo-conservatives in the Pentagon, a quick transfer fulfils a pet obsession - installing in power the exiles led by Ahmad Chalabi. But every indication is that the exiles do not have popular support.

There are no short cuts. The first task of winning the peace is winning the war, which might take more troops, or different kinds of troops. It might take a mixture of military force and bribes. Whatever it takes, the US must do it. Talk about a drawdown of troops sends the wrong message to the guerrillas.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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US bungling in Baghdad
Oliver Morgan on the frustrations growing as Iraqis are locked out of their own reconstruction work

Oliver Morgan
Sunday November 9, 2003
The Observer

Anwar Diab is a frustrated man. As an Iraqi who has recently returned to his homeland from America to participate in its reconstruction, his description of winning a contract from the American authorities in Baghdad is reminiscent of K`s struggles with the powers-that-be in Kafka`s The Castle.

Speaking on a satellite phone from the Iraqi capital, he outlines the problems in getting any work out of the Americans - and as an English-speaker who lived in the US for 23 years, he will have had it relatively easy.

`There is no system or procedure on how to reach the Americans,` he says. `Every ministry has an American co-ordinator, but it is very difficult for ordinary Iraqis to reach them. The system is not transparent to Iraqis.`

Diab, who started a technology company in Baghdad three months ago, says increasing numbers of small contracts are being handled by Iraqi authorities, where there is openness. But dealing with the US Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) or any of the other government agencies is truly Kafkaesque.

`They have two offices, but the one where the real work is done is in the old palace of Saddam. You cannot go there unless you are invited and you have to be met at the door.`

The contacts needed for such an invitation elude most Iraqi would-be businessmen. Diab, who secured a small contract to supply IT equipment for an internet cafe, says: `I had to use all my personal contacts and knock on the door like a hard-nosed salesman.`

A CPA website now lists contracts for everything from installing valves and switches on power stations to providing policing equipment. But it is criticised for having very short tender periods - sometimes less than a week - which effectively rule out those Iraqis who are aware of it in the first place.

`Those who get the contracts are lucky,` says Diab, `and it is large American companies that get the big ones. The awarding of contracts to [Halliburton subsidiary] Kellogg Brown and Root and Bechtel [two companies with controversial links to the Bush administration] is above and beyond what is happening in Iraq. But Iraqis are very suspicious of this. And the problem is increased because these companies are not open either, just like the CPA.`

It is not just Iraqis who are suspicious of America in general and Halliburton - where vice-president Dick Cheney used to be chief executive - in particular. President Bush`s opponents have lambasted the administration for its award of con tracts to the Texas company. California Democratic congressman Henry Waxman has recently accused Halliburton of profiteering from importing petrol from Kuwait. Waxman is also concerned about the contract, awarded without competitive bidding and before the war started, to KBR for emergency services work on oil infrastructure.

That contract was to be replaced in the summer with two new ones, split into north and south, worth a total of $1bn. On 29 October, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the agency `letting` the work, delayed the award for a second time, until December, citing increased sabotage and the poor state of infrastructure, and doubling its total value to $2bn.

KBR will eventually bid for this against UK company Amec and its US partner Fluor, and a third company, California-based Parsons. Meanwhile, Halliburton - whose third-quarter revenues rose 39 per cent thanks to Iraq-related work - continues to benefit from the original deal.

Waxman says: `The administration took only nine days to enter into a sole-source contract worth up to $7bn with Halliburton. Yet it now says that rebidding the contracts is so complex that it can`t be done in less than nine months.`

Waxman`s staff confirm that he is concerned that the administration is not being as expeditious as it might be because Halliburton is involved and gains by any delay.

It is not simply political opponents who make the point. One competitor of Halliburton says: `The longer the contract takes to re-let, the more by definition KBR benefit because they are paid by the man-hour.`

British companies have complained that, unlike UK reconstruction funding, of which the Department for International Development has set aside £550m, US money is accessible only to US prime contractors, although they can sub-contract work.

But while conspiracies abound, it is probable that there is also a considerable cock-up element to both the KBR contract and the reconstruction process in general. Iain Brown of oil consultancy Wood Mackenzie acknowledges that KBR will continue to benefit, but believes the delay is because real problems have emerged. `It is two things: they underestimated the extent of the work that needed to be done, as well as there being sabotage. But also they may be trying to push a bit further beyond the emergency repairs and refurbishment to pre-war levels.`

Brown believes the administration wants to get production up to 2.5 million barrels per day by the end of 2004. Notwithstanding the $18.6bn for reconstruction passed by Congress last month, the US wants Iraqi oil to start paying the rebuilding bills. And it is the desire to get on quickly that is the prime defence against lack of openness.

Even Halliburton`s competitor doesn`t believe that the prime purpose of the delay is to benefit Halliburton. `They are delaying because they want to get this right. The benefit to Halliburton is coincidental.`

Back in Baghdad, Anwar Diab concurs. `There are big problems. But this is because of the bureaucratic system, not the people. Many of the people in the CPA are very committed and are doing their very best to get things done,` he says.

Administration of contracts is being overhauled, with the CPA`s Iraq Infrastructure Reconstruction Office centralising the process, which has hitherto been fragmented between the CPA, the US Agency for International Development, and the departments of State, Defence and others.

CPA budgeting has become more transparent after criticisms from non-governmental organisations such as Christian Aid. An international monitoring agency will also have special auditing powers to examine the award and execution of contracts.

Greater openness is coming, according to the CPA. On 17 November the US government is set to explain the contracting strategy by which it will spend the $18.6bn. However, one person who has seen the strategy says the sources of many grievances will not be removed just by greater openness. `It will not be happy reading to the British and other companies who think they should get a bigger share of the work. It will still go through the American companies because that is what their laws say it must do.`

In Washington, continued lack of openness would provide useful fodder for Democrats in the run-up to next November`s presidential election. In London it would remain a source of irritation to contractors seeking to cash in on Blair`s support for Bush. In Baghdad, however, the stakes are rather higher.

Christian Aid estimates unemployment in Iraq at between 65 and 70 per cent. Katherine Nightingale of Christian Aid says: `The issue of economic insecurity is a big problem. Contracts have not necessarily led to Iraqis being employed, and we have reports that in some cases they are squeezed out by `cheaper` South East Asian labour.`

Diab concurs. If major contracts are to stay with major US companies, he says, there may be continued frustration. `KBR and Bechtel and others, along with the CPA, must open their doors to Iraqis. Iraqis will remain very suspicious until they can see some improvement. The most important thing is that the wheels of the domestic economy should start turning. Only when they can start seeing some economic benefits themselves, will they feel they are being treated fairly.`


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Love-hate affair or kissing cousins?
On the eve of President Bush`s state visit to Britain, Peter Beaumont talks to Americans living here about the relationship - special or not?

Peter Beaumont
Sunday November 9, 2003
The Observer

`You know the thing that shocks me repeatedly?` asks writer Isabel Fonseca of the difficulties of speaking to the English. `It`s how you think you are communicating with them and at the end of a conversation you discover you have not communicated at all.`

`There is an illusion of a common culture,` adds Fonseca, who has lived in Britain for 20 years, not least with husband Martin Amis. `But there is a cultural difference that`s masked by appearing to have the language in common.`

It is the understanding thing between Britons and Americans - closest of allies, friends and sometimes baffled collaborators. Next week, however, the understanding, and the frequent lack of it, that comprises the `Special Relationship` will be put to its sternest test when an unpopular President from the country Britons love best is welcomed here on the first state visit in decades.

What is certain is that George Bush will be greeted with a public upsurge of anti-Americanism not seen since the Vietnam War. And what is also certain is that, for all the anger that will be piled on Bush over the war in Iraq, it will not affect the enthusiasm the vast majority of Britons retain for most things American - if not its foreign policy. The relationship between Britain and the US - or rather Britons and Americans - has not been this complicated in a long time.

Yet while the special relationship is easy to define in its specifics - the close connection between the two countries` intelligence and military infrastructures and the exchanges of political ideas, although that has been largely from Washington to London in recent years - the wider connection between the two societies is more challenging and sometimes uncomfortable.

Britons - as Matt Wolf, the London theatre critic of Variety, observes - now shop enthusiastically in malls populated by Starbucks, The Gap and McDonald`s, while younger British urban residents dream of living in lofts modelled on the Manhattan lifestyle. If they go to see a film this weekend, it will almost certainly be American, whether it`s Tarantino`s Kill Bill or Finding Nemo. Our television is crowded with American shows.

There is a mutual fascination that drives Hollywood stars to flock to the West End stage and British musicians to America`s urban landscapes and vast open places. It is the same fascination that fuels a steady flow of Rhodes scholars to our universities and a reverse flow of Britons to Yale, Stanford and Harvard.

For one group, in particular - Americans resident in the UK - it is not where the cultures meet but where they differ that stands out. David Schwartz, a stock market historian who has lived in Britain for 20 years, believes it is a mistake to focus on high-street phenomena and Hollywood`s ascendancy, arguing that they represent not a merging of cultures but simply the assertion of the brands of the world`s most powerful economic power. He sees the differences in the way the two nations go about their business.

Bob Worcester, founder of the polling company Mori and an American resident in Britain for 34 years, has been one of the most forensic analysts of relations between the two countries, collating not only his own polls but also those of other organisations, on how the two peoples view each other. And what surprises him is how `brittle` that relationship is at present.

For while Britons by and large are enthusiastic admirers of most things American, from its technology, films, music and get-up-and-go, and while a quarter of Britons would like to live and work in the US, Worcester has been surprised by how fragile British approval of America on the whole has been during the period of the Iraq war, which saw a trebling of those who are `somewhat or very unfavourable` toward the US as sampled by a series of polls.

For all that increase of those unfavourable, the polls show a confusing picture, with an approval of America in summer 2002 of 75 per cent that dropped to just 48 per cent immediately before the Iraq war and picked up again by May this year to 70 per cent. But it is the rise in the `don`t approves` since 2002 that surprises Worcester, with many coming to the anti-camp from the `don`t knows`.

`I was shocked,` he said. `I had thought that the strength of good fellowship was stronger than it is. It seems to be a battle between an established good feeling towards America and a reservation about the US as a country at the moment and about its direction over Iraq.`

But the evidence Worcester has collected also reflects the fundamental contradiction in UK attitudes to the US, not least a sharp increase in the past 10 years in those who believe the relationship with the US is more important than with Europe, from around 16 to 34 per cent.

It is a contradiction summed up in a single line: 80 per cent of Britons, says Worcester, like Americans but also have reservations about America as a country. Like all those interviewed by The Observer, he singles out crucial differences that underscore the tensions between ordinary Americans and Britons, not least in their political cultures, for all the efforts by successive leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to join them up.

Most critical is how Americans and Europeans, including Britons, face up as communities to problems. A trait first noted by Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America of 1835, Worcester believes it still has a currency.

`De Tocqueville put his finger on it. If there is a problem, Americans will get together and say what should we do about it. Europeans will say someone should do something about it.`

Worcester believes it is a function of the two countries` contrasting histories. America was a place where people fled to for adventure and a new future, while Britain exported its adventurers.

`It did leave something rather chinless behind for a long time, though I should say I mean that in the most loving way.`

Fonseca was struck by the difference between how Americans do business, even within her own relationship.

`Martin [Amis] has said himself that when his father was ill it was his wife who wanted a second opinion, when he did not even want a first one. In America you would throw your life`s savings at a problem like that. I think, too, that Americans are more prepared to thrash things out. They are less embarrassed about emotion. It is just not a British thing.`

But if there is a greater tension between American and British values - outside the political elites - it resides, believe most of those interviewed by The Observer, in a suspicion that the way Americans and Britons `believe` in issues is fundamentally different.

`Americans do not have time for scepticism,` says Wolf, `they want to be believers. The British could do with a little more fervour, but Americans do not brook dissent.` While some suggest that America`s continued habit of widespread religious observance is crucial to this difference, others are sceptical. For his part, Schwartz thinks the experience of history plays a crucial part in separating Europeans - for that, read Britons too - from the American mindset.

`The difference is that America has never really been attacked and conquered. You only have to look around the European towns to see the statues in every square marking massacres and slaughter to understand why it is that there is reticence about going to war, a willingness to turn the other cheek and to accept pragmatic solutions.

`America has the heritage of the victorious battlefield and, whether the image is correct or not, it is connected to a power that is omnipresent, all powerful and morally right.`

It is in this area of belief and moral certainty that Fonseca believes Tony Blair connects most powerfully with the rituals of US political life, in which religious observance is a necessity.

`He talks all the time about how he believes deeply in this and how he believes deeply in that. It is a way American politicians talk, a kind of political piety that is in the American tradition.`

And as George Bush prepares to visit, Fonseca, too, has noted a recent rise in anti-Americanism in Britain: `For a lot of Americans, it is a shock. They don`t get it. They are quite innocent and can`t credit that people don`t like them.`

It is a contradiction that has been noted by Jamie Rubin, a former spokesman for Bill Clinton, who moved to London in 2000. Rubin remembers how struck he was at the huge outpouring of sympathy towards America after 11 September while he was in Britain.

The change that has happened following the war against Iraq, he believes, has not been towards a general hatred of Americans but towards a frustration at a nation that Britons feel closer to than any other.

`I would not have wanted to be in any other city outside of the US when 11 September happened. Because I had been on television a lot, I guess, and people recognised me, they would come up in the street and tell me how sorry they were. British people wanted to show solidarity.

`That has changed. That warmth and trust has been replaced by a feeling that a country they love so much is pursuing policies they do not agree with. It is a frustration.`


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Let Google belong to the world - not to Microsoft
John Naughton
Sunday November 9, 2003
The Observer

All good things come to an end, as my mother used to say. The question now is whether this applies to Google, the search engine to end all search engines.

How come? Well, Google is a private company, based in Silicon Valley. It was founded by two Stanford students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who invented a clever set of algorithms for ranking web pages. It was a classic case of disruptive innovation - a smart idea, embodied in computer code, which comes from nowhere and conquers the world.

For most of us, internet chronology divides into two periods - BG (before Google) and AG. Nobody who used Google ever went back to anything else. At a click, all the other search engines were dumped on the rubbish heap of history.

Unlike most Internet start-ups, Google made money virtually from the outset. The revenue came from various sources. One was licensing its search technology to other Internet portals such as Yahoo! and AOL. About 75 per cent of all referrals to websites now originate from Google`s algorithms.

A second source of income is discreet, paid-for advertisements on the right-hand side of the Google search page. And finally, the company makes money from `contextual advertising`. This is where web publishers allow Google to trawl through their pages and place relevant text advertisements in the right margin. Once visitors click on the links, the webmasters share the revenues with Google.

All told, Google brings in something like $200 million a year, which you`d think would be enough to keep anyone happy. Not so.

Among the early (and most influential) investors in Google were two of Silicon Valley`s leading venture capitalists - John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital. These gents are interested primarily in capital growth, and they have come to the conclusion that payback time on their Google investment is nigh.

Consequently, Google is moving inexorably towards flotation. Investment bankers (including, no doubt, some of the genuises who brought us the last internet bubble) have been whispering figures like $15 billion as a possible valuation for the company. Google is, after all, overwhelmingly the market leader and a truly dominant global brand, like Amazon, eBay and, er, Microsoft.

Which is what ought to set alarm bells ringing. For there was a time when a company called Netscape was overwhelmingly the market leader in the web browser business - and we know what happened to Netscape. And, surprise, surprise, it emerged last week that Microsoft approached Google a few months ago to inquire whether it would like to be bought by the Gates empire. We are told that Google declined. But Microsoft has been working on search technology - which it naturally plans to build into Windows in due course. Just as it once began work on a browser which was eventually folded into Windows...

History repeats itself, said Marx - the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Netscape went public without a strategy for dealing with Microsoft`s ruthlessness. The original investors made fortunes, but the company perished, and the world is a less diverse - and therefore a poorer - place.

As Messrs Doerr and Moritz prepare to cash in their Google chips, I wonder if they have a game plan for their amazing company beyond the IPO. If they have, then they will sell its shares on eBay rather than via Wall Street. Google should belong to the world and not to the banks and pension funds who will cave in to Microsoft.

[e-mail] www.briefhistory.com/footnotes/


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Iraqi doctors dismiss claims that Jessica Lynch was raped in hospital
By Scheherezade Faramarzi Nasiriyah
09 November 2003


Iraqi doctors who treated the American former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch dismissed on Friday claims made in her biography that she was raped by her Iraqi captors.

Although Ms Lynch said she has no memory of the sexual assault, medical records cited in I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story allege she was raped and sodomised by her Iraqi captors. But Dr Mahdi Khafazji, an orthopaedic surgeon at Nasiriyah`s main hospital, performed surgery on Ms Lynch to repair a fractured femur and said he found no signs that she was raped or sodomised.

Dr Khafazji, speaking at his private clinic in Nasiriyah, said he examined her extensively and would have detected signs of sexual assault. He said the examination turned up no trace of semen.

The doctor said Lynch suffered broken bones to her right arm, right leg and thighs and ankle and received a head injury when her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle. Eleven soldiers were killed in the attack. She was taken first to the military hospital, a few hundred yards from the ambush site, at around 8am, about an hour after the attack. A few hours later, she was brought to his hospital.

"She was injured at about seven in the morning," he said. "What kind of animal would do it to a person suffering from multiple injuries?" Dr Jamal al-Saeidi, a brigadier general and head of the orthopaedic department at the now disbanded hospital, remembers seeing Ms Lynch`s motionless body on a bed in the hospital. He said a police van parked outside appeared to have brought her to the hospital.

"When she was brought there she was fighting for her life," said Dr al-Saeidi. "She was in shock because of the severity of her injury." He said Ms Lynch was fully clothed with her field jacket buttoned up. "Her clothes were not torn; buttons had not come off; her pants were zipped up," Dr al-Saeidi said, adding that he found no signs of rape during an examination, although he acknowledged he was not looking for such signs.

Ms Lynch had lost more than half her blood because of a wound on the left side of her head, as well as broken limbs that caused internal bleeding, Dr al-Saeidi said. "We had a few minutes, golden minutes to save her," he said. He rushed her to the operating room and gave her intravenous fluid and blood and stitched her head wound.

Half an hour after surgery on Ms Lynch, Dr al-Saeidi assured her that she was in good hands. Soon after, military intelligence officers came to the hospital to take her away. Dr al-Saeidi told them if she did not get medical attention she would die. They took her to the Saddam Hospital, where she stayed nine days until Iraqi soldiers left the hospital. Several hours later American commandos raided the hospital and evacuated her.

"Why are they saying such things?" Dr Khodheir al-Hazbar, the hospital`s deputy director, said. "We were good to her."

In an interview with the US television network ABC, Ms Lynch said she has no recollection of a rape. "Even just the thinking about that, that`s too painful," she said. Ms Lynch told ABC she doesn`t remember being slapped or mistreated at the hospital, and she recalled one nurse sang to her.

She also accused the military of using her capture and dramatic night-time rescue to boost public support for the war in Iraq. "They used me as a way to symbolise all this stuff," she said in an interview to be aired on US television on Tuesday. "It`s wrong."
9 November 2003 09:56



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Case for war confected, say top US officials
Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
09 November 2003


An unprecedented array of US intelligence professionals, diplomats and former Pentagon officials have gone on record to lambast the Bush administration for its distortion of the case for war against Iraq. In their view, the very foundations of intelligence-gathering have been damaged in ways that could take years, even decades, to repair.

A new documentary film beginning to circulate in the United States features one powerful condemnation after another, from the sort of people who usually stay discreetly in the shadows - a former director of the CIA, two former assistant secretaries of defence, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and even the man who served as President Bush`s Secretary of the Army until just a few months ago.

Between them, the two dozen interviewees reveal how the pre-war intelligence record on Iraq showed virtually the opposite of the picture the administration painted to Congress, to US voters and to the world. They also reconstruct the way senior White House officials - notably Vice-President Dick Cheney - leaned on the CIA to find evidence that would fit a preordained set of conclusions.

"There was never a clear and present danger. There was never an imminent threat. Iraq - and we have very good intelligence on this - was never part of the picture of terrorism," says Mel Goodman, a veteran CIA analyst who now teaches at the National War College.

The case for accusing Saddam Hussein of concealing weapons of mass destruction was, in the words of the veteran CIA operative Robert Baer, largely achieved through "data mining" - going back over old information and trying to wrest new conclusions from it. The agenda, according to George Bush Senior`s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman, was both highly political and profoundly misguided.

"The theory that you can bludgeon political grievances out of existence doesn`t have much of a track record," he says, "so essentially we have been neo-conned into applying a school of thought about foreign affairs that has failed everywhere it has been tried."

The hour-long film - entitled Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War - was put together by Robert Greenwald, a veteran TV producer in the forefront of Hollywood`s anti-war movement who never suspected, when he started out, that so many establishment figures would stand up and be counted.

"My attitude was, wow, CIA people, I thought these were the bad guys," Mr Greenwald said. "Not everyone agreed on everything. Not everyone was against the war itself. But there was a universally shared opinion that we had been misled about the reasons for the war."

Although many elements in the film are not necessarily new - the forged document on uranium sales from Niger to Iraq, the aluminium tubes falsely assumed to be parts for nuclear weapons, the satellite images of "mobile biolabs" that turned out to be hydrogen compression facilities, the "decontamination vehicles" that were in fact fire engines - what emerges is a striking sense of professional betrayal in the intelligence community.

As the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern argues with particular force, the traditional role of the CIA has been to act as a scrupulously accurate source of information and analysis for presidents pondering grave international decisions. That role, he said, had now been "prostituted" and the CIA may never be the same. "Where is Bush going to turn to now? Where is his reliable source of information now Iraq is spinning out of control? He`s frittered that away," Mr McGovern said. "And the profound indignity is that he probably doesn`t even realise it."

The starting point for the tarnishing of the CIA was a speech by Vice-President Cheney on 26 August 2002, in which he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear weapons programme and was thus threatening to inflict "death on a massive scale - in his own region or beyond".

According to numerous sources, Mr Cheney followed up his speech with a series of highly unorthodox visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in which he badgered low-level analysts to come up with information to substantiate the extremely alarming - but entirely bogus - contents of his speech.

By early September, intelligence experts in Congress were clamouring for a so-called National Intelligence Estimate, a full rundown of everything known about Iraq`s weapons programmes. Usually NIEs take months to produce, but George Tenet, the CIA director, came up with a 100-page document in just three weeks.

The man he picked to write it, the weapons expert Robert Walpole, had a track record of going back over old intelligence assessments and reworking them in accordance with the wishes of a specific political interest group. In 1998, he had come up with an estimate of the missile capabilities of various rogue states that managed to sound considerably more alarming than a previous CIA estimate issued three years earlier. On that occasion, he was acting at the behest of a congressional commission anxious to make the case for a missile defence system; the commission chairman was none other than Donald Rumsfeld, now Secretary of Defence and a key architect of the Iraq war.

Mr Walpole`s NIE on Iraq threw together all the elements that have now been discredited - Niger, the alumin- ium tubes, and so on. It also gave the misleading impression that intelligence analysts were in broad agreement about the Iraqi threat, relegating most of the doubts and misgivings to footnotes and appendices.

By the time parts of the NIE were made public, even those few qualifications were excised. When President Bush`s speechwriters got to work - starting with the address to Congress on 7 October that led to a resolution authorising the use of force against Iraq - the language became even stronger.

Mr Tenet fact-checked the 7 October speech, and seems to have played a major role in every subsequent policy address, including Colin Powell`s powerful presentation to the United Nations Security Council on 5 February. Of that pivotal speech, Mr McGovern says in the film: "It was a masterful performance, but none of it was true."
9 November 2003 09:58



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Rescue workers canvassed destroyed buildings in Riyadh this morning after an explosion in a residential compound in the Saudi capital
November 9, 2003
Blast Shatters Housing Enclave in Saudi Capital
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

CAIRO, Sunday, Nov. 9 — Saudi Arabia`s capital, Riyadh, was rocked by a huge explosion just before midnight Saturday in what the country`s Interior Ministry described as a terrorist attack against a residential compound.

There were reports of dozens of casualties, but the exact number could not be confirmed in the hours after the explosion, which occurred on a day that the American Embassy and other United States diplomatic facilities were closed because of warnings about just such an attack, Saudi officials and Western diplomats said.

Preliminary figures indicated that 4 people had been killed and at least 40 had been wounded, Al Arabiya satellite television reported, quoting the Saudi health minister and other officials.

Residents of the compound put the numbers far higher.

The blast, probably a car bomb, was set off at the B2 residential compound in the Nakheel neighborhood in the western part of the city, diplomats said.

The Saudi Interior Ministry issued a one-paragraph statement, carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, saying the explosion was a terrorist attack on Muhaya compound.

The force of the blast could be heard across the sprawling capital, and Riyadh residents who lived miles away said they had felt their buildings shake. The explosion shattered windows throughout the walled compound, which housed mostly Arab residents as well as some Westerners, according to officials and witnesses.

One American was hospitalized after the blast and a second remained unaccounted for, said Carol Kalin, a spokeswoman for the United States Embassy. She said "a handful" of Americans lived in the compound.

Ms. Kalin said that the embassy would remain closed until further notice and that American diplomats were staying within the diplomatic quarter.

Three suicide attacks against similar residential compounds in May, which Saudi Arabia said were carried out by Al Qaeda, killed 25 residents, including 8 Americans, as well as 9 suicide bombers.

In their desire to drive all Western influence out of the Arabian peninsula, the militants are believed to include as targets any Arabs and Muslims who maintain the same kind of relaxed ways of life as their Western counterparts behind the high walls of such compounds.

Pictures broadcast from the scene showed smoke and flames still erupting from several shattered residences two hours after the attack, the flames outlining palm trees in the otherwise dark night.

Witnesses who live in the compound told Al Arabiya by telephone that there were scores of wounded and an unknown number of dead. The station broadcast live pictures from inside an unidentified hospital of a number of bloodied men, women and children being treated for wounds.

The American Embassy, situated three miles away from the attack site in the heavily protected diplomatic quarter, issued a warning on Friday about an imminent terrorist attack and was closed to the public on Saturday. The United States Consulates on opposite coasts in Dhahran and Jidda were also closed.

The United States and the British and Australian governments had issued travel advisories at the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan, two weeks ago, warning of a possible terrorist attack. The American Embassy`s warning told American citizens to be on alert during a month when some might try to exploit the period of heightened religious awareness to strike.

Ms. Kalin, the embassy spokeswoman, said all embassy personnel were accounted for immediately after the attack.

"I heard a blast and saw a light; others were woken up by the blast," said Ms. Kalin, who was in the diplomatic quarter, a walled enclave where virtually all embassies are situated.

The spokeswoman said the embassy and consulates had been closed Saturday because "there were threats that had gone beyond planning to an operational stage."

"They were threatening enough that we decided to close our facilities to the public," she said. "We also warned that Americans should use extreme vigilance at any location perceived to be Western or American."

Hanadi al-Ghandaki, described by Al Arabiya as the manager of the compound, said it had some 200 residential villas, virtually all occupied by Saudis, Lebanese or other Arabs. She said residents included a family from France, two from Germany and one from England.

Several helicopters with powerful searchlight beams hovered over the stricken area on Sunday morning, aiding the search for survivors.

"We heard a very strong explosion, and we saw the fire," Bassem al-Hourani, another man identified as a resident by Al Arabiya, said by telephone.

"I heard screams of the children and women," he said. "I don`t know what happened to my friends, if anybody was injured. All the glass in my house were shattered."

Initial reports also suggested that the explosion had been preceded by two smaller ones and gunfire. That would fit the same pattern as the attacks in the spring, when the suicide bombers first tried to fight their way past the gates and then blew up booby-trapped cars. They were foiled at one compound when guards managed to put up the security barrier, but they breached the other two.

Until the May attacks, the Saudi royal family had largely brushed aside the possibility of Al Qaeda cells existing in the kingdom. The May incidents prompted a crackdown, with raids that led to the arrests of some 600 terrorists and huge caches of weapons.

There were a number of incidents this month, including one on Thursday in which two suspects fleeing from the police in Mecca blew themselves up.

The country`s clergy have rolled out repeated statements condemning such attacks as outside Islam. At the same time, the ruling Saud family has responded to numerous petitions about the lack of democratic freedom in the country, promising municipal elections at a future unspecified date.

The attacks in May followed a botched attempt by the Saudi security services to seize a cell that the Interior Ministry accused of being linked to Al Qaeda.

A senior Saudi official said 19 suspected militants, 17 of whom are Saudis, had been sought in the raid but had escaped. The suspects, the official said, had served in Afghanistan or Chechnya and had links to radical clerics.

Saudi agents seized a huge arms cache — 800 pounds of advanced explosives along with hand grenades, assault rifles and ammunition — as well as disguises and tens of thousands of dollars in cash. Saudi and American officials have said since then that they are still seeking to track down members of that cell as important ringleaders and have refused to specify how many remain at large.

Most foreigners in Saudi Arabia live in walled, gated communities that allow them to escape the strict legal codes of the Wahhabi sect of Islam prevalent in the kingdom.

Liquor is readily available, and men and women can mix freely at the swimming pools on most compounds, liberties unthinkable elsewhere in Saudi Arabia. Many of the Westernized, educated Arab technocrats who work there choose to live in the compounds because they were educated in the West or were accustomed to a less religious environment.

A brief notice was posted on an Internet site favored by Al Qaeda in February, warning Saudis that they should not live side by side with possible targets, specifically Americans.

The kingdom is dependent on Western technical expertise for its oil industry and has long imported foreign specialists for its hospitals and other services. But the presence of such enclaves grates on the fundamentalists.

At least a half-dozen bombs planted under cars in recent years killed three foreigners and maimed several others. Americans were the main victims of both the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in eastern Saudi Arabia and a 1995 attack on a Saudi National Guard center.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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November 9, 2003
Rich Colleges Receiving Richest Share of U.S. Aid
By GREG WINTER

f there is any grand, elegant logic behind the federal government`s dispersal of more than a billion dollars in college aid, then Maria Hernandez is humble enough to confess that it has escaped her.

Consider her point. Poverty is hardly a rarity among the students of California State University at Fresno, where she is the director of financial aid. Many come from families working in the fields nearby, on farms where students spend their summer and winter vacations harvesting peaches and sugar beets to stay in school.

About three hours and a world away sits Stanford. Far fewer of its students are poor, yet the federal government gives it about 7 times as much money to help each one of them through college under one program, 28 times as much in another and almost 100 times as much in a third, government data show.

"Pretty sad," if you ask Ms. Hernandez.

Similar discrepancies emerge across the nation, adhering to a somewhat counterintuitive underlying theme: The federal government typically gives the wealthiest private universities, which often serve the smallest percentage of low-income students, significantly more financial aid money than their struggling counterparts with much greater shares of poor students.

Brown, for example, got $169.23 for every student who merely applied for financial aid in order to run its low-interest Perkins loan program in the 2000-1 academic year. Dartmouth got $174.88; Stanford, $211.80. But most universities did not get nearly that much: the median for the nation`s colleges was $14.38, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data on the more than 4,000 colleges and universities that receive some form of federal aid.

Nearly 200 colleges received less than $3 per applicant for financial aid. The University of Wisconsin at Madison got 21 cents.

Harvard, Princeton, Yale — and all the other members of the Ivy League, for that matter — were also given 5 to 8 times the median to pay their students in work-study jobs. That is money the institutions got directly, to be spent on behalf of needy students.

And they got 5 to 20 times the median amount of grant money to look after the everyday needs of their poor students, despite having some of the largest endowments in the nation, if not the world. (Harvard and Yale both have endowments of more than $10 billion. Princeton`s is $8.7 billion.)

Such disparities have been a sore point among universities for years, leftovers from an era when federal money was given to colleges on an individual, almost negotiable basis. Now, for the first time in more than two decades, the nation`s financial aid officers are calling for the imbalances to be wiped away, replaced by a system that steers financial aid toward the universities that poor students actually attend, rather than those with the biggest reputations.

"We`re saying, `Hey, is this really fair?` " said Dallas Martin, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. "The money ought to follow where the neediest students are. That`s the equity piece and that`s what`s missing."

At first glance, it may seem that some universities receive more money simply because they cost more to attend. But try telling that to Heather McDonnell, director of financial aid at Sarah Lawrence College, which costs just as much as its Ivy League competitors, yet in one category received only a sixth as much money as any of them.

"It`s not even touching reality," Ms. McDonnell said. "It`s not even acknowledging any changes in the economy and how my families are doing."

Even some of the beneficiaries of the imbalance concede that it is not entirely rational, and say they would consent to shedding a few dollars for the sake of parity.

"How could we complain, really?" said Sally C. Donahue, director of financial aid at Harvard College. "We have been very fortunate to receive the money that we have. And the barriers facing low-income students are considerable, so anything increasing their access to college nationally is something we would support wholeheartedly."

As for the origins of the disparities, most veterans of university finance agree that they date back at least to the 1970`s, when regional panels of educational experts, not formulas, decided how much colleges would receive. Because each university had to make its own case for the money, those with long histories and a certain financial savoir-faire tended to do particularly well. In fact, the panels were sometimes composed of their peers.

"If a school was politically savvy and well connected enough, they would end up with the lion`s share of the funds," said Ken Redd, research director of the financial aid officers association.

Congress tried to correct the imbalance in 1980, voting to divide the aid according to a "fair share" formula. But that applied only to whatever new money flowed into these programs, guaranteeing that no college would receive less than it was already getting. It is a guarantee that still exists.

The compromise averted a political melee over redistribution, but because spending in these programs has grown relatively slowly in the last 20 years, it did little to eliminate the disparities. Today, about 60 percent of the money is still spent honoring old pledges.

"I wish I had been at the table when the decisions were being made," said JoAnne Boyle, president of Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania. "It just drives me nuts."

It is the magnitude of the disparities that irks many college officials. At most universities, for example, whenever low-income students get money from the federal government under the Pell grant program, the college receives some, too — to help the student with tuition, books, housing, meals and so forth.

For every Pell dollar one of its students received in the 2000-1 academic year (and they could each get up to $4,000), the median college got an extra 7 cents. Harvard got 98 cents. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology got $1.09. Princeton got $1.42.

At the other end of the scale sit institutions like the City University of New York, which had the most financial aid applicants in the nation that year. It got 4 cents on the dollar. More than 50 colleges got a penny.

So what does this mean for students? For Princeton in 2000-1, a poor student meant up to $5,680 in extra grant money from the government, money that could have gone toward the student`s tuition, room, board or other educational expenses.

The same student would have brought in only $2,000 at Sarah Lawrence, even though its tuition is higher than Princeton`s. Sarah Lawrence could have spent its own money making up the difference (although its endowment is less than 1 percent of Princeton`s). Or the student could have taken out bigger loans.

Then there is the money that campuses receive to place students in work-study jobs. For each of its aid applicants, the median college got $87.67 to help pay wages. Yale got $592.75. Duke got $600.28. Columbia got $677.93. But nearly 100 other colleges got less then $20.

Even under the fairest of systems, college officials say, some protections need to be built in so that low-income students continue to attend elite universities. And given that private colleges typically cost more than twice what public universities do, even after accounting for living expenses, they should usually receive more money, the officials say. But 10 times more than the median? Or 20?

"The problem is, once people start to see resources start to shift away from them, they do what`s necessary to protect their interests," said George Chin, director of financial aid for the City University of New York.

Indeed, the call for redistribution has put many universities on the defensive, particularly those that worry about doing worse under new rules.

"Any time you talk about reallocating money when there isn`t new money, you`re going to pit institutions against one another," said Kate Jeffery, director of student financial support for the University of California. In some areas, her campuses do worse than most universities. In others, they do better. "It just doesn`t seem appropriate to take it from one school and give it to another," she added.

In fact, few universities seem to know exactly how they would fare under a new system, though the financial aid officers association has a pretty good idea of who would be the big beneficiaries: community colleges and, perhaps most surprisingly, for-profit universities.

A generation ago, neither kind of institution had the same national presence it does now, and both enroll high percentages of low-income students. These two factors would probably win them a greater share of federal dollars.

The geography of higher education has also changed. Enrollments in Arizona, Texas, Georgia and other states have more than doubled in the last 30 years, while the cluster of Northeastern states that once seemed to anchor higher education have not grown nearly so fast. That, too, could affect where the money goes.

But, some wonder, at what cost?

"The idea of fairness is certainly a valid one, but there are so many schools below their fair share that any redistribution may have a very negligible impact on their schools," said William Schilling, director of financial aid at the University of Pennsylvania. "But the schools that would lose money would face a major problem."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 9, 2003
PERSPECTIVE | INSIDE THE C.I.A.
Iraqi Insurgents Take a Page From the Afghan `Freedom Fighters`
By MILT BEARDEN

As the daily attacks against American forces in Iraq increase in number and sophistication, the Bush administration continues to portray its adversaries as an assortment of die-hard Baathists, criminals, thugs and foreign terrorists, all acting out of desperation.

Certainly, there are Baathists and foreign terrorists operating against the American-led coalition, and their ranks probably include criminals. But the overarching reality is that the American and British forces are facing a resourceful adversary whose game plan may be more fully developed than originally thought.

My own experience in war has largely been on the side of insurgents. I served as the Central Intelligence Agency`s quartermaster and political agent to the Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupation from 1986 until the Soviets left in 1989.

From my perspective, the Iraqi resistance has taken a page from a sophisticated insurgency playbook in their confrontations with the American-led coalition.

The insurgents` strategy could have been crafted by Sun Tzu, the Chinese military tactician, who more than 2,500 years ago wrote, in "The Art of War," that the highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemy`s strategy.

So it was probably no accident that as American forces approached Baghdad, expecting tough street fighting, the bulk of the Iraqi forces melted away. The American troops, forced to shift strategy on the run, have been bedeviled by the consequences of those early chaotic days ever since.

Next, according to Sun Tzu, you attack his alliances.

This, again, is what the Iraqi insurgents did. Presumably acting on the assumption that the Jordanians were being too helpful to the United States, insurgents detonated a car bomb outside the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad on Aug. 7, killing 11 and wounding scores. Less than three weeks later, as an increased role for the United Nations was debated, suicide bombers attacked the organization`s headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 people, including the United Nations special representative to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

Then, in mid-October, as proposals for an expanded peacekeeping role for Turkey were argued, a suicide bomb detonated outside the Turkish chancery in Baghdad, killing one bystander and wounding a dozen others.

When Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, began in late October, Baghdad was rocked by a series of suicide bombings that killed dozens and wounded hundreds, including an attack on the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

In addition, there have been countless attacks against individual Iraqis viewed as allied with the United States, whether police recruits, members of the Iraqi Governing Council or figures in the judiciary. A pattern of attack against American allies seems clear.

Consider the following: Since the focused attacks began, most Arab League missions in Baghdad have distanced themselves from the coalition; the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, has withdrawn his international staff from Baghdad; the Red Cross followed suit, prompting other international aid organizations to pare down in Baghdad as well. The Turkish government, for a number of complex political reasons, has now reconsidered sending troops.

Even Spain, part of the original coalition, has decided to withdraw the bulk of its diplomatic staff from Baghdad. It appears that after disrupting the American strategy, the insurgents have made progress in undermining its alliances.

Next, Sun Tzu prescribed, attack their army.

This is occurring with increasing lethality. To misread these attacks as desperation is dangerous. In the last two weeks, there have been multiple attacks on the coalition headquarters in Baghdad, with mortars and rockets landing inside the secure green zone. Shoulder-fired missiles have brought down a Chinook helicopter, killing 16 soldiers. The crash of a Blackhawk helicopter, killing an additional six, is still under investigation, but according to some reports a rocket-propelled grenade may have brought it down. One or two casualties are logged almost daily.

Ordinary criminals and thugs could not deliver this kind of punch. Mortar tubes, base plates and ammunition have to be smuggled to within a few thousand yards of the green zone, carefully set up and then launched either in a shoot-and-scoot attack or with timed delay.

Similarly, a rocket attack on the Rashid Hotel while the deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, was there required imagination, ability and training. Die-hards, maybe, but focused ones with a strategy and the skills to carry it out.

These growing attacks against American forces have two clear goals: inflict casualties and force a reaction that alienates the local population. Both are being achieved, as the quick-response raids by coalition troops to seize those behind the attacks fuel Iraqi alienation.

That suspicion is reflected in an incident described in a New York Times article about a group of American soldiers who tossed handfuls of candy to Iraqi children along a road in Falluja, inside the volatile Sunni triangle. " `Don`t touch it, don`t touch it!` Iraqi children squealed. `It`s poison from the Americans. It will kill you.` "

This is reminiscent of Afghan children being terrified that Soviet soldiers were seeding the countryside with booby-trapped toys, or that wells had been poisoned, or food aid adulterated. All those stories were false, many of them propagated by the C.I.A. But the important thing was that the locals believed them.

Similarly, American troops are not offering poisoned candy, but the point is that the Iraqis families believe it.

For every mujahedeen killed or hauled off in raids by Soviet troops in Afghanistan, a revenge group of perhaps a half-dozen members of his family took up arms. Sadly, this same rule probably applies in Iraq.

The Soviet Union tried to denigrate the Afghan mujahedeen by calling them bandits. This did not help the Russian cause. Americans are confronting a foe that is playing down and dirty — but remarkably effectively — on his own turf. Yes, there are criminals and foreign terrorists among them, but the Pentagon seems to understand little about the identity of its enemy beyond that.

Sun Tzu also said "know yourself and know your enemy, and of a hundred battles you will have a hundred victories."

There were two stark lessons in the history of the 20th century: no nation that launched a war against another sovereign nation ever won. And every nationalist-based insurgency against a foreign occupation ultimately succeeded. This is not to say anything about whether or not the United States should have gone into Iraq or whether the insurgency there is a lasting one. But it indicates how difficult the situation may become.


Milt Bearden, a 30-year veteran in the C.I.A.`s Directorate of Operations, served as senior manager for clandestine operations. He is the co-author with James Risen of "The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the C.I.A.`s Final Showdown with the K.G.B."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 9, 2003
The Fed`s Election Year Problem

Alan Greenspan may be in for a rough election. Indeed, if you ran the Federal Reserve, you`d probably just want to take off every fourth year. A presidential campaign can be an awkward time for the nation`s independent central banker, who has more power to influence the economy quickly than any single branch of government, even though it is the president who gets the lion`s share of credit or blame for how things are going.

President Bush`s father unfairly blamed Mr. Greenspan for his defeat by Bill Clinton in 1992, claiming that Mr. Greenspan was too slow to cut interest rates, thereby delaying a recovery. This history only makes Mr. Greenspan`s present challenge more delicate.

The quandary facing the Federal Reserve will not be how much or how fast to cut, but how much and how fast to raise, its crucial overnight interest rate, now at a 45-year low of 1 percent. Just two weeks ago, the Federal Reserve opted to leave that rate unchanged, and it issued a statement suggesting it would not act for a "considerable period."

But the ongoing flurry of positive economic data should force Mr. Greenspan to shorten his time horizon. Since the Fed spoke, we have learned that the economy grew at a blistering 7.2 percent annual rate in the third quarter. Manufacturing, construction, corporate profit, consumer spending and productivity numbers have all been impressive.

Most significant, the economy is finally adding jobs after being battered by the overhang of the popped Internet bubble, terrorism, corporate scandals and the war with Iraq. More than a quarter-million jobs were created in the last two months, according to figures released Friday, and plummeting new claims for unemployment benefits suggest the labor market will only get stronger. The unemployment rate now stands at 6 percent, down from 6.4 percent in June. A new Gallup poll shows that most Americans feel the economy is improving.

Nobody is yet suggesting that these are the best of times. The country will be hard pressed to regain anytime soon the 2.5 million jobs lost during the Bush presidency. Still, it`s clear that these record-low interest rates, which sustained consumer spending during the slowdown as people rushed to refinance their mortgages and otherwise take advantage of easy money, are no longer prudent.

The Bank of England last week became the first major central bank in three years to raise interest rates, and Mr. Greenspan will have to do the same soon, unless he wants to begin flirting with inflation. You can expect the Fed to prepare markets for the turnabout when it next considers rates in December, and then to take action in the spring. Mr. Greenspan cannot allow the political calendar to make him trigger-shy.

There is always a concern that a rise in interest rates will derail a recovery, or spook the stock market. But in this case, if a modest increase from such extraordinarily low rates is done carefully and deftly explained, Americans will understand that it is a vote of confidence in this recovery.

Democratic presidential candidates may have to adjust their pitch in reaction to an improving economy, but they need not worry about running out of compelling economic policy arguments. They can remind voters that their party pushed hard for tax cuts aimed at working families that did provide a stimulus, and wanted more of them, while they resisted the larger, regressive cuts that have wrecked the nation`s long-term fiscal outlook by pumping up the deficit.

This brings us to a second, even more critical election-year quandary facing Mr. Greenspan, who famously lectured President-elect Clinton in late 1992 about the economic dangers posed by large federal deficits. He should speak forthrightly about this danger now that it has been resurrected by President Bush`s recklessness.

To his credit, the Fed chief did just that in a speech last Thursday. Continuing to do so, however, will not be easy in an election year, particularly given his complicated history with the Bush family. But then, if Mr. Greenspan had been more adamant about warning about the dangers of huge deficits when Congress first sought his views on the tax cuts, he might be facing a smoother election year.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 9, 2003
FRANK RICH
Pfc. Jessica Lynch Isn`t Rambo Anymore

Ah, the dazzling pyrotechnics of "shock and awe." The finality of the toppling of Saddam Hussein`s statue. The thrill of that re-enactment of "Top Gun." The sense of closure provided by the banner reading "Mission Accomplished." Like all wars of the TV age, the war in Iraq is not just a clash of armies, but a succession of iconic images. Those who control the images, and the narratives they encapsulate, control history. At least until a new reality crashes in.

Few of this war`s images have had such longevity or proven more pliable than that of the smiling face of Pfc. Jessica Lynch. In the seven months of virtual silence since her rescue from a Nasiriya hospital, she has become the Mona Lisa of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Americans have been able to read into her pleasant but unrevealing snapshot whatever story they choose. Those stories, usually imposed on her by others, have become a Rorschach test for homefront mood swings.

When American forces were bogged down in the war`s early days, she was the happy harbinger of an imminent military turnaround: a 19-year-old female Rambo who tried to blast her way out of the enemy`s clutches, taking out any man who got in her way. When those accounts turned out to be largely fiction, she became a symbol of Bush administration propaganda and the press`s war-time credulity in buying it. Then came her months of muffled recuperation: a metaphor for the low-grade fever of inertia and unease that has set in at home in the months since that Saddam statue fell.

But Private Lynch is not a passive player in her narrative any more. At a crucial moment in Iraq, as American casualties pile up and the poll numbers of support for our "post-victory" engagement there go down, she`s getting ready for her close-up. Tonight NBC broadcasts its unofficial dramatization of her rescue, the movie "Saving Jessica Lynch," timed to jump the gun on the Tuesday publication of Private Lynch`s own book, "I Am a Soldier, Too." The days ahead bring her whirlwind tour of the promotional stations of the cross, starting with appearances with Diane and Katie, punctuated by a visit to the Letterman couch for spice.

Few authors deserve book sales and attention more than this brave young woman from Palestine, W.Va., who joined the Army to see the world after failing to land a job at Wal-Mart. But now, as in every other step of her time in the spotlight, the way her story plays out may tell us more about a country at war than it does about our hero.

Take, for instance, tonight`s surprising "Saving Jessica Lynch," as written by John Fasano and drawn in part from the account of Mohammed Odeh Al-Rehaief, the Iraqi lawyer who has written his own book about how he risked his life to lead American forces to Private Lynch. The movie begins with the inevitable disclaimer that "some characters, scenes and events in whole or in part have been created for dramatic purposes." Even so, given the facts as we know them to date, it is startling in its relative accuracy — more than earlier reportage by The Washington Post (which attributed its initial Rambo version to "U.S. officials") and The New York Times (whose reporter Jayson Blair fictionalized some of the paper`s Lynch coverage).

The Lynch of this film has not been pumped up with steroids. She`s a supply clerk gravely injured in a Humvee collision, not G.I. Jessica spraying bullets in a shootout. (She has only a sprinkling of lines in the entire movie, many of them in flashbacks to prewar West Virginia.) The American forces that rescue her encounter no "blaze of gunfire," as was described in an early Los Angeles Times account attributed to "defense officials and reports from the battlefield," but instead confront only compliant doctors and nurses. The White House is portrayed as being disproportionately focused on the urgency of this single mission, for no apparent purpose other than p.r. As for Iraq itself, it is presented as a shooting gallery whose citizens despise Saddam but can also be skeptical of their American liberators. Al-Rehaief`s own wife tells him that he has been "poisoned" by all "those John Wayne movies."

What does it say that "Saving Jessica Lynch" is more candid than much of the reportage on the war? It wasn`t that long ago when correspondents on NBC`s sibling network, MSNBC, were enthusing about President Bush`s aircraft-carrier landing as "the president`s excellent adventure." The movie even pays a dramatic price for its integrity; a reasonable approximation of the truth is less exciting than the bogus reports of Lynch-as-John Wayne. While its title character is still a hero, as she must be, the movie portrays Private Lynch as a lowly pawn of larger, mysterious forces operating in the shadows, whether in Baghdad or Washington.

"Saving Jessica Lynch" is not to be confused with "The Deer Hunter," but its existence as prime-time entertainment during the commercially calculating ratings wars of a sweeps week reflects another change in the country`s mood, toward harder-nosed realism and away from unrestrained triumphalism. The so-called "Fox effect" on the other networks may finally be relinquishing some of its hold — except at CBS. This week it replayed its craven Vietnam-era cancellation of the Smothers Brothers by yanking its "Reagans" mini-series after fire from right-wing bloviators and the Republican National Committee.

To counter "Saving Jessica Lynch" tonight, CBS is making the patriotic gesture of fielding "The Elizabeth Smart Story," a cheesy movie about another blond teenager, whose captivity ended a few weeks before Private Lynch`s last spring. But the biggest threat to Private Lynch`s media rollout this week is not the Smarts, whose tireless and tasteless exploitation of their daughter`s trials have made them the most unwelcome parents to invade American living rooms since JonBenet Ramsey`s. The real competition to Private Lynch is competing war imagery — that of the continuing bloodshed in Iraq.

The Chinook helicopter brought down last Sunday — accounting for 16 out of the day`s 19 American casualties — was the most grueling replay imaginable of the most catastrophic war image of recent years, the downing of a helicopter that led to 18 American casualties in Mogadishu in 1993. Though the military turned away reporters who tried to visit the site of the new crash, the available long-shot views of the broken chopper were enough to rekindle those nightmarish 1993 images as well as Hollywood`s still-fresh re-creation of the incident, "Black Hawk Down." That movie was supposed to be a favorite of Saddam`s, and not without reason. As Time reported back in April, American officials believe it was distributed by the Iraqi command to its officers before the war as an instructional video guide to American defeat.

Private Lynch, a woman who risked her life for her country for entirely altruistic reasons and survived, should by all rights make us feel better at this low point in the Iraq story. The timing of her new emergence parallels that of her initial capture, in the aftermath of another helicopter crash in which the first four American casualties of the war occurred. Her book has been kept under wraps before release by its publisher, Knopf, but you can sense the upbeat flavor from any of the few sample sentences that have seeped out in advance, such as: "Back home, boys with tears in their eyes had offered to marry her, to build her a brand-new house, anything, to get her to stay forever in the high, green lonesome." The writer on the project is Rick Bragg, a former Times reporter famous for this brand of inspirational poetry.

But through no fault of Private Lynch`s, she may not be the antidote to bad news in November that she was in April. The steady drumbeat of casualties is making it harder for those who pushed her into the limelight at the time of the rescue to control the stories butting against her happy ending. In broadcasting the first reports of "Chinook Down" last Sunday morning, the normally unflappable Bob Schieffer of CBS News raised his voice as he said, "If this is winning, you have to ask the question: How much more of this winning can we stand?" Later that day, on ABC`s "World News Tonight," the correspondent John Berman captured a "M*A*S*H" moment when a military medic attending the American wounded looked directly at the camera and said, " `All major combat operations have ceased` " — after which he winked and, with a roll of his eyes, added a sarcastic, "Right!"

The Bush administration tries to shut down pictures as effectively as it has stonewalled Congressional committees and the bipartisan commissions looking into intelligence failures surrounding 9/11. On the day of the Chinook`s fall, the president stayed off-camera on his ranch in Crawford, resting up for his next round of fund-raisers, and sent out only a written statement of grief. Reuters reported on Monday that journalists seeking access to Ramstein, the American air base in Germany to which Private Lynch was first taken, had been told that the defense department would not lift its policy prohibiting photographs of flag-draped coffins, even for the Chinook casualties. The president did not go to the funerals of the nine fellow soldiers who died in the same ambush that led to Private Lynch`s capture; he hasn`t gone to any funerals for soldiers killed in action, The Washington Post reports.

Two weeks ago, after spending the day visiting the wounded at Walter Reed, the same hospital where Private Lynch recuperated upon returning to the United States, Cher, of all people, crystallized the game plan. She called into C-Span to tell of her experience talking with "a boy about 19 or 20 who had lost both his arms" and then asked: "Why are none of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bremer, the president — why aren`t they taking pictures with all these guys? Because I don`t understand why these guys are so hidden and why there aren`t pictures of them."

The answer is clear enough: the fewer of these images we see, someone hopes, the less likely we`ll realize the story that goes with them. Certainly the new plot they tell is simple enough: what began as a war at a time of our choosing has become a war at the time of the enemy`s choosing. It may be asking too much of even a patriot like Private Lynch to pretty up this picture as she takes her show on the road.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 9, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Humiliation Factor
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

If President Bush wants to get a better handle on the problems he`s facing in Iraq and the West Bank, I suggest he study the speech made Oct. 16 by Malaysia`s departing prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, to a conclave of Muslim leaders. Most of that speech was a brutally frank look into the causes of the Muslim world`s decline. Though it was also laced with shameful anti-Jewish slurs, it was still revealing. Five times he referred to Muslims as humiliated. If I`ve learned one thing covering world affairs, it`s this: The single most underappreciated force in international relations is humiliation.

"I will not enumerate the instances of our humiliation," Mr. Mahathir said. "We are all Muslims. We are all oppressed. We are all being humiliated. . . . Today we, the whole Muslim [community], are treated with contempt and dishonor. . . . There is a feeling of hopelessness among the Muslim countries and their people. They feel that they can do nothing right." He added: "Our only reaction is to become more and more angry. Angry people cannot think properly."

One reason Yasir Arafat rejected the Clinton plan for a Palestinian state was that he and many followers didn`t want a state handed to them by the U.S. or Israel. That would be "humiliating." They wanted to win it in blood and fire. Hezbollah TV had bombarded Palestinians with stories of how the Lebanese drove the Israelis out. Palestinian militants wanted the "dignity" of doing the same.

Always remember, the Arab-Israeli conflict is about both borders and Nobel Prizes. It`s about where the dividing line should be and it`s about the humiliation that comes from one side succeeding at modernity and the other not. As Mr. Mahathir says in his speech, "We sacrifice lives unnecessarily, achieving nothing other than to attract more massive retaliation and humiliation. [But] we are up against a people who think. [The Jews] survived 2,000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. . . . We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also."

Which is why the Palestinians need both their own state and a new leadership able to build their dignity on achievements, not resistance.

Ditto Iraq. Why have the U.S. forces never gotten the ovation they expected for liberating Iraq from Saddam`s tyranny? In part, it is because many Iraqis feel humiliated that they didn`t liberate themselves, and America`s presence, even its aid, reminds them of that. Add the daily slights and miscommunications that come with any occupation, and even the best-intended liberators will wear out their welcome over time. I was with my Iraqi translator one day in Baghdad, trying to enter the office of the Governing Council. The American private security guard at the door ordered me to shut my mouth until I was told to speak. Then he told my translator to sit in the 130-degree heat while he escorted me — the American — inside to see if the Iraqi leader we were seeing was available. Both of us felt like punching that guard in the face.

"Iraq is full of angry men," Mustafa Alrawi, managing editor of Iraq Today, wrote in Beirut`s Daily Star. "For example, in the area unfairly labeled as the `Sunni triangle,` the population was badly hurt by the decision to disband the army and the policy of de-Baathification. . . . Thousands of men, many of whom took pride in their rank and status, were left bewildered and confused. It must be remembered that the army . . . did not fight the U.S. invasion, effectively giving their stamp of approval to the plan to topple Saddam Hussein. They have wounded pride to restore. Entire tribes feel embarrassed that they supported the invasion, only to be left out in the cold by the coalition`s myopic vision of how Iraq should be run."

Never, ever underestimate a people`s pride, no matter how broken they might be. It is very easy for Iraqis to hate Saddam and resent America for overstaying. Tap into people`s dignity and they will do anything for you. Ignore it, and they won`t lift a finger. Which is why a Pakistani friend tells me that what the U.S. needs most in Iraq is a strategy of "dehumiliation and re-dignification."

The only way we`ll foster a decent government in Iraq is if every day we turn a little more power over to Iraqis and create the economic conditions where Iraqis can be successful. The more we empower Iraqis, the less humiliated they will feel, the more time we will have to help them and the less they will need our help.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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November 9, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Chicago Way
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

In the movie "The Untouchables," Sean Connery, a cop named Malone, instructs a naïve Eliot Ness on going up against gangsters.

"If you open the can on these worms you must be prepared to go all the way, because they`re not gonna give up the fight until one of you is dead," he says. "You wanna know how you do it? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That`s the Chicago way, and that`s how you get Capone. Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?"

As the president offered his lofty "vision thing" for spawning democracy in the Middle East, America was at a rough juncture. The administration opened the can on these worms in Iraq. Are Americans now prepared to do what it takes?

The Bush crowd hurtled into Baghdad on the law of Disney: Wishing can make it so. Now they`re ensnared in the law of the jungle: the rules of engagement don`t apply with this scary cocktail of Saddam loyalists, foreign fighters and terrorists, who hold nothing sacrosanct, not human rights organizations, humanitarian groups or Iraqi civilians.

The gangsters are getting ever bolder about picking off our soldiers on land and out of the sky. With three Army helicopters hit in the last two weeks, killing 22 Americans, soldiers are reduced to flying low and fast, as they scan for the glint of sunlight coming off the rockets of the invisible guerrillas. It`s an eerie flashback to the 10-year war of attrition Afghans waged against the mighty Soviets, when worn-down Soviet soldiers complained that the Afghan fighters were "ghosts" who would shoot down their helicopters with American Stinger surface-to-air missiles and fade back into the mountains.

On Wednesday, Senator John McCain offered a vinegary critique of the Bush team, urging the president to be more engaged on Iraq, and not leave decisions to subordinates. He also swatted Donald Rumsfeld`s assertion that troop levels are fine, saying 15,000 more troops should be dispatched to avoid risking "the most serious American defeat on the global stage since Vietnam."

Senator McCain, nervous about both Army morale and Iraq shattering, believes we must get in deeper to make progress.

Administration officials, nervous about President Bush`s election chances shattering, believe we must show progress by starting to pull out.

That is why the Pentagon announced last week it would reduce the number of troops by next summer, replacing them with Iraqis.

But some fret that the Pentagon — growing desperate as the Turks, the Indians, the Pakistanis and other allies refuse to send reinforcements — has been turning out new Iraqi police officers and guards as swiftly and sloppily as Lucy and Ethel turned out chocolates on the assembly line.

The Washington Post reported that tens of thousands of Iraqis were being shoved into action "with little or no formal training in democratic standards and relevant job skills."

Many diplomats were shocked to read the Times report that the back-channel attempt of Iraqis to avert war, with Richard Perle as go-between, was blown off with the C.I.A. message, "Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad."

But the Bush brigade had many dovetailing reasons not to be dovish.

Mr. Rumsfeld thought the war could showcase his transformation of the military to be leaner and more agile. Paul Wolfowitz thought the war could showcase his transformation of Iraq into a democracy. Dick Cheney thought the war could showcase his transformation of America into a dominatrix superpower. Karl Rove thought the war could showcase his transformation of W. into conquering hero. And Mr. Bush thought the war could showcase his transformation from family black sheep into historic white hat.

But now Wolfie`s messianic vision of growing democracy in the Middle East is at odds with Rummy`s stubborn desire to shrink the Army.

Our military around the globe is tapped out, so strained by Iraq and Afghanistan, as the Times military correspondent Michael Gordon discovered, that a unit from the Army`s Old Guard is even being dispatched overseas. The guard is best known for ceremonial duties such as standing vigil at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery and serving in color guards for visiting dignitaries.

The Old Guard has not been deployed abroad since Vietnam.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Alternatives to Iraqi Council Eyed
Inaction of Hand-Picked Baghdad Officials Frustrates Washington

By Robin Wright and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 9, 2003; Page A01


Increasingly alarmed by the failure of Iraq`s Governing Council to take decisive action, the Bush administration is developing possible alternatives to the council to ensure that the United States can turn over political power at the same time and pace that troops are withdrawn, according to senior U.S. officials here and in Baghdad.

The United States is deeply frustrated with its hand-picked council members because they have spent more time on their own political or economic interests than in planning for Iraq`s political future, especially selecting a committee to write a new constitution, the officials added. "We`re unhappy with all of them. They`re not acting as a legislative or governing body, and we need to get moving," said a well-placed U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "They just don`t make decisions when they need to."

Ambassador Robert Blackwill, the new National Security Council official overseeing Iraq`s political transition, begins an unannounced trip this weekend to Iraq to meet with Iraqi politicians to drive home that point. He is also discussing U.S. options with L. Paul Bremer, civilian administrator of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, U.S. officials said.

The United States is even considering a French proposal, earlier rejected, to create an interim Iraqi leadership that would emulate the Afghanistan model, according to U.S. and French officials. During the debate before the new United Nations resolution on postwar Iraq was passed Oct. 17, France and other Security Council members had proposed holding a national conference -- like the Afghan loya jirga -- to select a provisional government that would have the rights of sovereignty.

Among several options, the administration is also considering changing the order of the transition if it looks as though it could drag on much longer than the United States had planned. The United States has long insisted that a new constitution was the essential first step and elections the final phase in handing over power.

But now U.S. officials are exploring the possibility, again backed by other Security Council members, of creating a provisional government with effective sovereignty to govern until a new constitution is written and elections held. This is again similar to Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai has governed while a new national charter is written. Elections are scheduled there next June, two years after the fall of the Taliban.

"If our exit is going to take longer, if it looks like it could go more than two years to get it all done, then there`s an incentive to look into a transitional phase and some other governing mechanism," a State Department official said.

The move comes after repeated warnings to the Iraqi body. Two weeks ago, Bremer met with the council and bluntly told members that they "can`t go on like this," a senior U.S. official in Baghdad said. Bremer noted that at least half the council is out of the country at any given time and that at some meetings, only four or five members showed up.

Since the council appointed 25 cabinet ministers in late August, the body has done "nothing of substance," the U.S. official in Baghdad added. The council has been seriously remiss in oversight of its own ministers, holding public hearings, setting policy for cabinet departments and even communicating with cabinet members, he said.

The United States, which financially and politically backed several of the council members when they were in exile, has also been disillusioned by the council`s inability to communicate with the Iraqi public or gain greater legitimacy. The senior official in Baghdad called the council "inept" at outreach to its own people.

As a result, the council has less credibility today than it did when it was appointed, which has further undermined Iraq`s stability, U.S. officials here and in Baghdad said.

The administration is not yet at the point of abandoning the council. "Ambassador Bremer is working with the Governing Council. Our priority focus now in working with the council is to formulate a plan to meet the December 15 deadline outlined in U.N. Resolution 1511, which calls for the council to formulate a timetable and program for the drafting of a new constitution and for the holding of democratic elections under that constitution," a White House official said yesterday.

U.S. officials are still hoping that they can "stay the course, only faster," the well-placed U.S. official said. If the council exercised its responsibilities, Bremer would even be prepared to hand over greater authority "by the truckload," the senior official in Baghdad added.

But with time rapidly slipping away, the administration is preparing options in the event that the Iraqi body does not come up with a constitutional convention or meet the Dec. 15 deadline. The CPA "hasn`t totally given up yet on the Governing Council. There`s no sword yet over their heads," an administration official said. "But we`re certainly looking for change next year and if they can`t do it, then we have to be realistic."

Ironically, Iraqi council members counter that they should be given the powers of a provisional government -- with rights of sovereignty -- because they have no real powers to act as long as the CPA occupies and rules Iraq.

In an interview, a council member also charged that the United States has an "unrealistic idea" that difficult issues can be sorted out in a day or two. "It`s not possible," the Iraqi added. A senior Iraqi National Congress official added that just because the principals are not at meetings does not mean they are not working.

Adel Abdel-Mehdi, a council member with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said the Iraqi mission should not be rushed. "Figuring out how to write the constitution is the most important thing we will do. We have to make sure we take the time to do this right," he said. Council members, he added, were busy talking to Iraqis about the issue informally.

Coming out of decades of either a dictatorship or a monarchy, Iraqis also need time to learn how to use and share power.

"The council is trying its best. You have to remember we are 24 personalities," said Mowaffak Rubaie, a moderate Shiite Muslim physician who returned from exile in Britain. "We have never worked together. There is no precedent for what we are doing."

Chandrasekaran reported from Baghdad.



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Adnan Zadan works at a shop on the road from Iraq to Iran. "Now you can see all kinds of traffic coming," he says.



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Riding Into Tehran On Winds of Change
Road From Baghdad Is Paved With Upheaval and Uncertainty

By Steve Coll
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 9, 2003; Page A01


BISTOUN, Iran -- Among the least of its many problems, Iran`s isolated and bloated bureaucracy struggles with English spelling. "Historical Remainds of Bistoun," a battered tourist sign declares, and sure enough, around the side of a cliff looms an ancient bas-relief, a chiseled king whose hand stretches to the divine while his foot grinds the neck of a prostrate rebel. Several well-dressed Iranian travelers stare up at this tableau.

Their talk turns easily to politics and war.

"Iranians -- especially young people -- have a strong feeling. They think maybe America will help them change the system," offers Ayoub Adeli, an engineering manager visiting from Tehran. But he doubts this will occur; perhaps there has been enough upheaval already. "I think everything will happen from within Iran, inside the system."

Overweight trucks honk and belch below on the highway from Baghdad to Tehran. A hundred miles to the west lies Iraq, a country in ferment because the state has been overthrown. To the northeast lies the seat of an Iranian government also in ferment over how to retain its grip.

An 18-hour drive from Baghdad to Tehran is a ride among people in flux, some lifted by hope and faith, some cowed by threats.

Nahid is the youngest traveler among us. Thirty-one and unemployed, she says she seethes at the Iranian mullahs who shadow her ambitions, dictating about lipstick, jobs and television channels. Once she visited a relative in Turkey -- as much of the world as she has seen outside of Iran -- where she watched the pious young fashion Islam for themselves. "I think God smiles on them more than us," she says, asking to be identified only by her nickname, lest she invite trouble from the police. "Because there it is by choice, and here it is by force."

Her words echo on this road: Whose choices, and by what force? To one side of the highway`s gated border, American military commanders seek amid rising violence to recreate Iraq as a democracy from the top down. Across a sparse frontier, a season of debate grips Iran: How should the country manage its estrangement from the United States? How should it reply to encroaching U.S. power and ideas?

Along the highway between, thousands of people have been set newly in motion. Devout Iranian pilgrims and clerics trek to Iraqi Shiite shrines previously beyond reach. Displaced Kurds flood into the borderlands to reclaim lost property. Traders, smugglers, political agents and tribal chieftains slide back and forth in search of money and influence.

Detritus of History


Out of Baghdad, the road unfurls at dawn across a half-lit sandy plain dotted with date palms. Dented Datsun and Toyota mini-pickup trucks zip and weave in a high-speed ballet of near-miss. Some haul single cows strapped precariously in their tiny beds. Others carry chador-clad female field hands collected at roadside day labor markets. A turbaned driver stretches his arm across his empty passenger seat, while a woman sits alone behind him in his truck bed, gripping the sides, her black cover flapping in the wind.

Behind lies the sprawling Iraqi capital, its occupied center sprouting with razor wire and crossed by protective blast walls. Ahead lies fertile Diyala province, a Sunni Arab flatland long favored by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein`s patronage machine. The highway is wide and smooth here. Electric lines crisscross walled villages.

Eighty miles from Baghdad, beyond the last U.S. checkpoint, beyond the last convoys of gun-swinging Bradley armored personnel carriers, the road rises toward Iran across an arid dunescape.

The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority has recently deployed an Iraqi border force here to check for possible terrorist infiltrators from Iran. The force includes scores of Kurds recruited from friendly U.S.-allied militias to the north. They wear fresh brown jumpsuits and plastic-encased identification cards. Their new Nissan double-cab trucks are stenciled "Border Patrol" in freshly painted English. In hastily erected shacks of wood and corrugated metal along the road they control sit the beneficiaries of their nascent regime: Kurdish farmers who have left impoverished villages for new lives as highway shopkeepers, hoping to sell candy bars and cans of warm Pepsi to busloads of Shiite pilgrims rolling from Iran.

"I`m making a living out of this," says Adnan Zadan, 49, who hammered his stall together in July. "Now you can see all kinds of traffic coming -- trucks, cars, buses. This used to be strictly a military area, and many military were camped out in the hills."

The bare hills are strewn with detritus from the long, decimating stalemate of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. Berms and mounds from abandoned Iraqi gun emplacements stretch to the horizon, as if this were a vast suburb of prairie dogs. For two decades it was nearly impossible for ordinary Iraqis to travel to Iran, or even to approach the border. It was equally difficult for Iranians to reach Iraq.

From the late 1990s, Hussein authorized a few controlled bus tours for Iranian pilgrims to visit the holy Shiite cities of Najaf and Karbala, but mainly he managed the area as a vast security zone, enforced by interlocking networks of Iraqi militia and local informers. Now Kurdish return, Shiite revival and the retreat of Hussein`s forces define the region.

Besides the 2,000 approved Iranian pilgrims who pour through the area`s sole official border checkpoint each week, thousands more are crossing to Iraq illegally on foot. At least 200 have been killed by land mines or died of exposure along these pathways since the summer, the Tehran Times reported last week.

A black steel gate divides Iraq from the Iranian border village of Khosravi. At 10:30 a.m., a long line of anxious Iranian pilgrims snakes behind it -- young families toting Nike duffles, old women shuffling in pairs, turbaned religious scholars in dry-cleaned robes barking on cell phones. They press toward the narrow door into Iraq. Kurdish border guards call names from a clipboard and wave the chosen toward a row of Hyundai buses bound for Najaf.

I hand over my Iranian visa and wait two hours on a plastic chair while the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps lieutenants call in my case to headquarters. Across the way, two trucks have parked back-to-back against the border fence. Workers in orange reflector vests lift cases of soda over the wire to the Iraqi trucks. There is no talking, only shouting -- a roiling patois of Arabic, Kurdish dialect and Persian, the language of Iran.

"Amer-I-kee good," the Iranian gatekeeper finally announces, and through the gate we squeeze, across to a cavernous airport-style terminal where polite policemen dip each of my 10 fingers into thick black ink and rub the fingerprints -- twice -- onto colonial-style registries.

A Preference for Silence


Iranian security forces run checkpoints and drive in mobile patrols to enforce a 12-mile exclusion zone running east, off-limits to the general public. A Kurdish taxi driver with the right papers drops me at the final security line. For miles around, nomadic Kurdish shepherds kick up trails of dust in cragged hills.

Memorials to the 1980s war with Iraq festoon Iran`s border provinces. Billboards on the outskirts of every small town depict the painted faces of young war dead. Whitewashed graves and battered tanks hoisted onto concrete pedestals are still freshly dabbed in revolutionary slogans: "Death to the Traitors," or "Martyrs Are the Heart of History."

Yet the vernacular of Islamic revolutionary nationalism holds little appeal to many younger Iranians. Along the highway -- and hundreds of miles from the elite, international neighborhoods of Tehran -- they talk instead of jobs, fashion, romantic relationships and the attractions of a more tolerant Islam.

Iran`s clerics now run the country mainly to take care of their own, complains Reza, a cleanshaven security guard with a soft and direct manner who works in the southwest mountains, and who asks to be identified only by his first name. "Those mullahs have sunk some roots with the majority of the people," he says. "They give them jobs, privileges, houses." He and his friends support the urban university students who have tried off and on since 1999 to demonstrate for political change in Iran, but who more recently have been subdued by mass arrests.

Reza doubts the students can succeed. The rural poor in his area who depend on government handouts "think that if the mullahs go away, they will lose everything. And the rest of the country is so poor they can`t think about this kind of thing. It`s hard just to take care of a family."

Later on the road, Nahid, the unemployed young woman inspired by her visit to Turkey, traces the arc of her frustrations. She earned a college degree in Persian literature, then was rejected for a high school teaching job because the mullahs in her provincial city said she was on a list of girls who wore too much makeup on campus. She remembers the exact words the Islamic official spoke when he rejected her: "We don`t need people like you." She had gone to the job interview with her mother, who scolded her afterward for bringing this on herself.

"You feel sinful," Nahid says. "I think they want to give you this feeling." In early afternoon, she invites me to her family`s small apartment to break my drive. It is clean but modest, three or four rooms lit with a fluorescent bulb. Government TV news plays on a small set in the corner.

Nahid`s family wants their landlord to get a satellite dish that can pick up international channels. The dishes are in bloom across Iran, illegal on paper but lately tolerated by the government, part of a modest loosening of social rules in response to the student protests.

The government anchors talk over footage from CNN depicting violence in Iraq, then air sound bites from Democratic candidates in the United States, who criticize the Bush administration`s policies.

"I think the majority of the young are like me," Nahid says, meaning they are fed up with their government. "Yet we have no good opinion about this situation in Iraq. Maybe before, we thought it would be good to have the United States come in. But now, we look at these pictures from Iraq, and it looks terrible. So we think, maybe it is just better to be patient and hope for change from within -- or tolerate the system we have.

"All of our lives have been spent in wars, revolution, changes. When you think about this, you prefer silence."

Get in Line


Sixty miles short of Tehran, sputtering in the darkness, my boxy Iranian rental car runs low on gas. The first station my driver tries is closed. Then the second. In a panic he pulls down the highway to a third. We are on a six-lane superhighway in the heart of urban Iran, northwest of Karaj, and still there is no gas. Truckers and tourists have clustered at the shuttered station, desperate. A policeman turns up and is set upon by the drivers. There is no gas between here and Tehran, he announces.

Maybe, just maybe, he confides, if you drive back three miles in the opposite direction, off the highway in a small town, you might find one station with some gas left. An angry convoy sets forth across dusty lanes, down through a culvert, twisting and turning off-road, trying to find the village. There it is: a huge pileup of vehicles, more than a hundred idling in line before the pump islands and jockeying for position like demolition derby drivers.

Oil-exporting Iran is a gasoline importer. Its price subsidies (25 cents a gallon at the pump) are designed to quell popular discontent, but they encourage over-consumption and mass smuggling. Its refining capacity is inadequate to meet demand, battered by war and crimped by closed-market policies.

The great majority of Iran`s economy is state-run, unable to create jobs for its swelling population. There is no consensus within the government about what to do.

It is nearly midnight when the lights of the capital at last appear, sparkling across a vast valley.

A Vision of Reform


The next morning Tehran celebrates the 24th anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy by militant students on Nov. 4, 1979. "Death to America," echo the familiar megaphone chants. Amid the modest crowd of bused-in demonstrators outside the former embassy -- mainly young students joyous to be free from a day of classes -- it all feels a bit phoned-in. The chanting is dim and desultory. A press badge identifies me in Persian as an American. Protesters read the badge and laugh, then pose for snapshots.

A few blocks away the real student radicals live behind university campus gates guarded by crisply dressed plain-clothes police. The press badge does not impress the cops: No entry.

A passing student carries a message to the local chapter of the Office for Fostering Unity, one of the most radical of the splintered movements. Ten minutes later Sadjad Ghoroghi, 23, a marine engineering major with a thick mop of black hair, saunters through the gates, glances at the police, and leads the way to a private office nearby.

He and a colleague lay out their platform: "completely confronting the system in certain areas," as Ghoroghi puts it. They seek by nonviolent means a full electoral democracy in Iran, separation of religion and politics, respect for human rights, and a liberal, free-market economy. Many of their members have been charged with political crimes or jailed, some beaten or tortured, Ghoroghi says.

One of his colleagues, Mehdi Habibi, is appearing in court across town today. He and 10 colleagues at universities across Iran wrote a letter to the United Nations outlining their government`s systematic human rights violations and demanding international help. After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, they issued a statement declaring that outside force was sometimes necessary to overthrow dictatorship. Habibi is charged with, among other things, "writing a letter to the Secretary General of the U.N. regarding provocative activities [and] disturbing the reputation of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the world," in the words of his attorney.

Last June, thousands of students took to the streets in protest against government policies. But the numbers did not shake the system, and many were arrested in the following months. The demonstrations have waned. Some Iranians say that by loosening social rules and cracking down on student leaders, the clerics are gaining the upper hand.

Ghoroghi sees the religious establishment he opposes as increasingly pragmatic. "They will bow to changes and developments -- they`re not like the Taliban," he says. "These people are political. They want to stay in power." Yet there are hard-core militants in the security services and Islamic societies who gird the establishment, he says, "people with whom you can never hold a dialogue."

As for the Americans and their program of regional change, "The value of international pressure should not be ignored here," he says. At the same time, "students have paid a heavy price in the confrontation." There is a new axis between Baghdad and Tehran, Ghoroghi says, in which the future of the Iranian student movement may be dependent on the course of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Many Iranian students remain inspired by U.S. and European ideas. Yet the impact of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq "very much depends on how well the United States will be able to establish a democratic system in Iraq and be responsive to the demands of the Iraqi people," he says. "If the U.S. fails in Iraq, it may change the attitudes of the Iranian populace."

Researcher Robert E. Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.



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Soldier Killed In Iraq, Buried With Mother



Associated Press
Sunday, November 9, 2003; Page A10


BEAVER FALLS, Pa., Nov. 8 -- An Army sergeant killed in a missile attack as he was returning home for his mother`s funeral was buried along with her on Saturday.

More than 200 family members and friends gathered at a school auditorium about 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh for a double funeral for Sgt. Ernest Bucklew and his mother.

Mary Ellen Bucklew, 57, of Darlington Township died Oct. 31 of an aneurysm as she drove home from work. Her son, 33, was on emergency leave two days later when the CH-47 Chinook helicopter he was in was shot down near Fallujah, Iraq.

The attack killed sixteen soldiers. The funerals for some were held over the weekend.

The Rev. Jay Hurley said mourners might not understand how such a tragedy could befall the Bucklews, but he assured them that God has a plan for mother and son.

Family members declined to speak to reporters, but William Braslawsce, a friend who served as the family`s spokesman, said the Bucklews wished to express their thanks for the outpouring of support they have received.

Ernest Bucklew, promoted posthumously to staff sergeant, was buried with full military honors, including a 21-gun salute.

Military officials presented his wife, Barbara, and his father, Donald, with American flags. Barbara Bucklew also received her husband`s Purple Heart and Bronze Star.

Ernest Bucklew, the son of a coal miner, grew up in Geneva, Pa., and Morgantown, W.Va., where he attended high school and college and joined the National Guard. He joined the Army in 1999.



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A Foreign Policy Choice




Sunday, November 9, 2003; Page B06


WILL THE Democratic Party offer a reasonable alternative to President Bush`s foreign policy in next year`s presidential election? Despite Mr. Bush`s growing vulnerability on this front, the answer is not obvious. Since President Clinton left office, the events of 9/11 and U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have dramatically altered the "post-Cold War" world that the Democrats last confronted while in power, and the consensus Mr. Clinton forged seems to have fallen apart.

Recently a group of 15 foreign policy specialists, including a number who served in the Clinton administration, offered one set of answers. Their platform for "progressive internationalism," issued with the endorsement of Sens. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), includes support for free trade, the promotion of liberal democracy, rebuilding alliances and action to prevent terrorists and rogue states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. It rejects Mr. Bush`s coddling of dictators who offer tactical support in the war on terrorism and says his policy of "transforming" the Middle East must be extended from Iraq and Iran to supposed allies such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In all, the doctrine strikes us as a logical continuation of Mr. Clinton`s centrist policies, one that advocates the defense of vital U.S. interests but differs dramatically with Mr. Bush`s Pentagon-centered unilateralism. What`s remarkable is how much it also departs from what is now being heard from most of the Democratic presidential candidates.

President Bill Clinton himself identified the danger of dictators, terrorists and weapons of mass destruction well before 9/11, though he failed to follow through with sufficient energy on his conclusions. The authors of "progressive internationalism" start from that position, rejecting both "the neo-imperialist right and the non-interventionist left." They support the Bush administration`s interventions in both Iraq and Afghanistan, while condemning Mr. Bush`s failure to do more to win international backing or prepare for postwar reconstruction. Despite those failings, they say they are "convinced that the Iraqi people, the region and the world are better off now that this barbaric dictator is gone." That is not a conclusion heard recently from the Democrats chasing votes in Iowa and New Hampshire, where there has been a rush to match pack leader Howard Dean`s outspoken condemnation of the war.

Nor do those Democratic candidates, with the notable exception of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, echo the Clintonist belief in free trade and U.S. support for globalization. The "progressive internationalism" authors offer an alternative to Mr. Bush`s fiscal recklessness, which, they contend, endangers global American economic leadership, and they call for a revitalization of World Trade Organization negotiations for free trade as well as for the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Yet most of the Democratic candidates have followed the lead of Rep. Richard Gephardt in catering to union demands for increased protectionism and economic nationalism.

Polls show that the presidential pack is tacking toward the views of early primary voters, a majority of whom opposed the war in Iraq. The question is whether the eventual Democratic platform will be one that a majority of the country can support. "Too many on the left seem incapable of taking America`s side in international disputes," warn the party policymakers. "Viewing multilateralism as an end in itself, they lose sight of goals, such as fighting terrorism or ending gross human rights abuses, which sometimes require us to act -- if need be outside a sometimes ineffectual United Nations. And too many adopt an anti-globalization posture that would not only erode our own prosperity but also consign billions of the world`s neediest people to grinding poverty." That`s a powerful critique. If it describes the next Democratic nominee for president, both party and candidate will be diminished.



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The Dangers of Aiming Too High


By Jim Hoagland

Sunday, November 9, 2003; Page B07


Iraq`s killers have learned to exploit the zone of confusion that now lies between the Bush administration`s urgent goals in Iraq and its lofty ideals in the Middle East. The assassins seek to turn President Bush`s declarations of goodwill for the region against him and the still-strangely unfocused U.S. campaign to break the costly insurgency in Iraq`s Sunni heartland.

The administration risks making the perfect the enemy of the good. Taking their cue from the president`s vows to make Iraq a catalyst for a democratic, peaceful Middle East, U.S. civilians and commanders are hesitating to adjust well-intentioned policies that inadvertently help the killers operate with little fear of being caught and punished.

Six months after the end of "major combat operations," U.S. policy in Iraq is a medley of counterinsurgency, nation-building and regional political modeling. This fluctuating mix of priorities has led to a dispersal of American resources and attention in an environment where there is neither peace nor a conventional war in which U.S. strength can be brought to bear with full force.

From May 1 through yesterday, 149 American soldiers died from hostile fire in Iraq. Juxtapose against that grim statistic this number: 0. That is the total of legally sanctioned executions or lengthy prison sentences announced for anyone aiding, planning or carrying out these attacks.

Those arrested in American roundups disappear from public view. While there may be rough battlefield justice in U.S. operations, there is no visible retribution against Saddam Hussein`s dead-enders or foreign jihadists for Iraqi civilians to see and to take into account. There is instead the appearance of a cat-and-mouse game in which American troops, who know little of local conditions, personalities and languages, stumble endlessly down blind alleys or into ambushes.

To change this, the occupation authorities should immediately empower Iraqi militias and other local security forces to help hunt down and deal with the ex-Baathists who form the core of the insurgency. This is the quickest and most effective way to cut the American casualty toll. It comes with risks, but those risks are less than the ones Americans already run.

Iraqis are likely to be more capable of finding and dealing with local terror networks quickly than are American troops, at least as they are currently configured. Unfortunately, the militias are also likely to be more ruthless. It will require a strong U.S. hand to prevent revenge from overtaking justice as the driving force in militia action.

What no longer makes any sense is to allow the security response to be inhibited by textbook notions about democracy or by illusions about the nature of the enemy in Iraq. Part of the justification for not empowering the militias has been that this will give them or the factions they represent "unfair" advantages for future elections and governments. To insist on such purity is to fiddle while Baghdad burns.

Paul Bremer, Bush`s special representative in Iraq, is concerned that the current Governing Council -- which he constructed to reflect in detail the country`s ethnic and tribal balances -- still does not give adequate political weight to the Sunni minority that controls the region around Baghdad. He is reluctant to cede significant political authority until that problem is fixed, presumably through free and fair elections. Military commanders such as Gen. John Abizaid, head of Central Command, also worry that the struggle cannot be won without "winning the Sunnis."

But for the Sunni areas that seem to have willingly become the sea in which the insurgent fish swim, democracy is a code word for domination by the country`s Shiite majority. The Sunnis fear that democratic elections would enable the Shiites to do unto them as they did unto the Shiites under their co-religionist, the dictator Saddam Hussein.

The United States has failed thus far to develop a strategy that convinces them otherwise and splits the Sunni population from the killers based among them. The Sunnis still respond to the efforts to construct a fair and free political system in Iraq with the age-old question: What`s in it for us?

Emphasizing the wonders of democracy will have much less immediate effect on them than will emphasizing the price they will have to pay for continuing to let the killer fish swim in their midst. The Baathists have not yet accepted that they have lost power forever. Forcefully convincing them that they are wrong is the first urgent step toward democracy in the Middle East.

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One Last Chance to Get Help


By Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Sunday, November 9, 2003; Page B07


There is a crisis of confidence in the president`s leadership in Iraq. The American people have grave doubts about whether we have a strategy for success, and so do many members of Congress.

I voted for the $87 billion President Bush sought because I believe we cannot afford to fail in Iraq and because I believe we can succeed if we act wisely. What do we have to do to succeed? The first step is to understand the situation on the ground in Iraq.

There are two realities in Iraq right now. The administration is right in pointing out that we`ve made real progress by opening schools and hospitals, starting reconstruction projects and setting up local governing councils. But all that progress is being undermined by the other reality: our failure so far to establish security, especially in the Sunni Triangle and Baghdad.

Job No. 1 is getting security right -- controlling the streets, defeating the rejectionists, securing weapons depots. We also need better intelligence on the ground. Lack of adequate training means we`re having a difficult time telling good guys from bad. Iraqis need to be part of the solution, but we`ve got to help them rebuild their own intelligence networks.

Security always is the first priority, and it`s always been the administration`s responsibility, not Congress`s, to figure out how to do it right. But the administration is not getting it done. We`re stuck in neutral and running out of time. Over the long term, the best way to get security right is to have the Iraqis provide it with a viable Iraqi police force and army. But it takes time to build effective forces. When I was in Iraq in June, I was told it would take five years to recruit and train 75,000 cops and three years to recruit and train a 40,000-man army.

Today we are putting that effort into overdrive. But let`s understand the risk: The faster we go, the more poorly trained and less legitimate the police and army will be. Putting them in charge prematurely is a recipe for failure. We are going to need at least a year before we can hand over the keys.

So what do we do to buy time? Option one is flood the zone with more U.S. troops. Putting them in now would allow us to get them all out faster later. We especially need MPs, Special Forces, civil affairs experts. But this is hard stuff. Our forces are stretched thin in Iraq already, and in Afghanistan. We`d have to bring people back to Iraq for second and third tours. That`s a decision no one wants to make, but we have to at least consider it.

Another way to buy time until the Iraqis can fend for themselves is to make Iraq the world`s responsibility, not just our own. We`ve had many opportunities to do that -- before the war, in its immediate aftermath and at the end of the summer, when it became clear the security situation was not getting better. This administration has squandered each one.

I am convinced we have one last chance to bring the world into Iraq. It would require a genuine U-turn away from the unilateral model we`ve been following for securing and rebuilding Iraq. But participating should be in Europe`s own interest and in the interest of Iraq`s neighbors, because a failed state in the heart of the Middle East threatens their security as much or more than ours. President Bush should call a summit, go to Europe, and ask for more help. We`d have to give up some authority to get it, but Iraq is no prize, and we ought to be happy to share the burden of building peace. The president should propose three initiatives to bring more countries on board.

First, we should make Iraq a NATO mission, and "double hat" Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, by putting him in charge of a new NATO command for the region. More countries would take part, because they would be reporting to the North Atlantic Council, not the Pentagon. But the United States would retain operational control on the ground with Gen. Abizaid as head of the new NATO command.

Second, we should create a high commissioner for Iraq who reports to an international board of directors of which the United States would be chairman. The high commissioner could be a leading international figure or the head of the Iraqi reconstruction effort, Paul Bremer, wearing dual hats like Abizaid.

The recent donors conference in Madrid is a painful example of the price we pay for doing everything ourselves. Typically, as in the Balkans, the United States covers about 25 percent of reconstruction costs after a major conflict. By that ratio, the $18.7 billion Congress just approved for Iraq`s reconstruction should have generated about $60 billion from the rest of the world. Instead we got $13 billion, of which $9 billion was loans. As long as the Coalition Provisional Authority is the primary body making decisions for how Iraq will be rebuilt, other countries will be reluctant to fork over real money. They want a true say in how it will be spent.

Third, we should transform the Iraqi Governing Council into a provisional government, with greater sovereign powers, and make it an institution that better represents Iraq`s constituencies. This transfer of authority should not be held hostage to the complicated and time-consuming process of writing a new constitution. Nothing would send a clearer message to the Iraqi people that the future is theirs to build and to inherit. And nothing would make it clearer to them that the Saddam Hussein loyalists and international terrorists killing our troops and Iraqi citizens are also trying to destroy their future.

The writer is a senator from Delaware and ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
How to Win in Iraq


By John McCain

Sunday, November 9, 2003; Page B07


Iraq is not Vietnam. There is no popular, anti-colonial insurgency in Iraq. Our opponents, who number only in the thousands in a country of 23 million, are despised by the vast majority of Iraqis. The Iraqi insurgents do not enjoy the kind of sanctuary North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos provided. They do not have a superpower patron. These murderers cannot carry the banner of Iraqi nationalism, as Ho Chi Minh did in Vietnam for decades.

But if we are to avoid a debate over who "lost" Iraq, as we debated who lost Vietnam a generation ago, we must act urgently to transform our early military success into lasting political victory.

We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting and because we limited the tools at our disposal.

The United States will fail in Iraq if our adversaries believe they can outlast us. If our troop deployment schedules are more important than our staying power, we embolden our enemies and make it harder for our friends to take risks on our behalf. When the United States announces a schedule for training and deploying Iraqi security officers, then announces the acceleration of that schedule, then accelerates it again, it sends a signal of desperation, not certitude.

Politics at home has handicapped our progress. Today some Democrats who supported the war in Iraq oppose spending the money required to win the peace. Others blindly criticize the administration without proposing an alternative policy that preserves U.S. interests.

With the exception of Joe Lieberman and Dick Gephardt, who are committed to victory in Iraq, it is unclear what the other Democratic presidential candidates would do differently to ensure an American victory -- or how they would handle the consequences of the early American withdrawal some advocate. Howard Dean has expressed ambiguity about the justness of our cause in Iraq. I hope he will learn that partisan anger is no substitute for moral clarity.

Administration officials must be careful not to adjust our military posture in Iraq for political reasons. The only legitimate reason to adjust our posture is to improve our ability to accomplish our mission or respond to our successes in stabilizing and rebuilding Iraq.

Prematurely placing the burden of security on Iraqis is not the answer. It is irresponsible to suggest that it is up to Iraqis to win this war. In doing so, we shirk the responsibility that we willingly incurred when we assumed the burden of liberating and transforming their country, for their sake and our own. If the U.S. military, the world`s best fighting force, cannot defeat the Iraqi insurgents, how do we expect Iraqi militiamen with only weeks of training to do any better?

President Bush speaks frequently of the need to take the offensive in the war on terror, but in Iraq we too often appear to be playing defense. The truth is that we do not have sufficient forces in Iraq to meet our military objectives. In early September, the U.S. commanding officer in Iraq, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, admitted that his forces could not handle any new eruption of conflict in Iraq. "If a militia or an internal conflict of some nature were to erupt," he said, ". . . that would be a challenge out there that I do not have sufficient forces for."

Since then, attacks on American forces have doubled, to more than 30 a day, and their increasing sophistication has made them more lethal.

Yet the number of American forces in Iraq has not increased. Our overall troop level in Iraq does not reflect a careful assessment of what it takes to achieve victory. It reflects the number of American forces who were in Iraq when the war ended -- minus the Marines who were sent home. Simply put, there does not appear to be a strategy behind our current force levels in Iraq other than to preserve the illusion that we have sufficient forces in place to meet our objectives.

I believe we must deploy at least another full division, giving us the necessary manpower to conduct a focused counterinsurgency campaign across the Sunni Triangle that seals off enemy operating areas, conducts search-and-destroy missions and holds territory.

While Iraqification will not solve our immediate security problems, we must move more quickly to transfer meaningful political authority to Iraqi leaders. The Coalition Provisional Authority continues to make a fundamental mistake in the way it interacts with the Iraqi people. The authority seems to think that all wisdom is made in America and that the Iraqi people were defeated, not liberated. For all the comparisons of postwar Iraq to Germany and Japan in 1945, the examples of Italy and France, liberated countries whose people were largely on our side, may be more instructive. The United States is treated as an occupying force in Iraq partly because we are not treating Iraqis as a liberated people.

It is our responsibility to help create the security in which Iraqi politics can flourish. We can leave it to the Iraqis to decide what kind of tax code they should have.

Iraq`s transformation into a progressive Arab state could set the region that produced Saddam Hussein, the Taliban and al Qaeda on a new course in which democratic expression and economic prosperity, rather than a radicalizing mix of humiliation, poverty and repression, create a new modernity in the Muslim world that does not define itself in ways that threaten its people or other nations.

Failure to make the necessary political commitment to secure and build the new Iraq could endanger American leadership in the world, put American security at risk, empower our enemies and condemn Iraqis to renewed tyranny. It would be the most serious American defeat on the global stage since Vietnam.

The writer is a Republican senator from Arizona. This column was adapted from a speech he delivered to the Council on Foreign Relations.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Newsweek Poll: Economic Gains Bolster Bush
Newsweek Web Exclusive
But worries about Iraq have narrowed the gap between the president and Democratic candidates

http://www.msnbc.com/news/990895.asp?0cv=KA01

With news that the economy grew at a surprisingly robust 7.2 percent annual rate and that some 300,000 new jobs were added during the third quarter, an increasing number of voters say they approve of the way the President George W. Bush is handling the economy, according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll. While more registered voters say they disapprove rather than approve of the way Bush is handling the economy (48 percent vs. 44 percent), the margin has narrowed considerably since October`s 37 percent vs. 56 percent.

YET BUSH`S LEAD against the five leading Democratic contenders-Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Richard Gephardt-has shrunk to a low of 4 points, vs. 6 points a month ago. Dean continues to poll best against Bush, with 45 percent of respondents saying they would vote for him, compared to 49 percent for Bush. Last month, 43 percent would have voted for Dean and 49 percent Bush. In a race against Clark, Bush would win 48 percent of the vote vs. 45 percent for Clark. Last month, those numbers were 49 percent and 43 percent.
Among contenders for the Democratic nomination, Dean and Clark remain in a statistical dead heat, with 16 percent and 15 percent respectively selecting them as first choice for Democratic nominee. Nine percent would select Gephardt, followed by Lieberman (8 percent), Mosely-Braun and Kerry (7 percent each), Al Sharpton (4 percent) and Dennis Kucinich (2 percent).

The narrowing of Bush`s lead may be due to an increasing pessimism about U.S. efforts in Iraq. In the NEWSWEEK poll, 53 percent said they don`t believe the administration has a well thought out plan for post-war Iraq; that represents a 5 percent increase since October. Sixty percent feel the United States is investing too much money in operations in Iraq, a statistic that has remained constant since September. The number of respondents who feel going to war with Iraq was the right decision has also slipped considerably in the past few months, from more than two-thirds in July to just 55 percent this week. This week`s poll was taken at the end of a particularly violent period in Iraq; 32 Americans were killed during the week and two U.S. helicopters were downed.

Still, Bush may end up benefiting from the fact that a third (34 percent) of voters say the economy will be a more important issue than terrorism and homeland security in choosing a candidate to vote for in the 2004 election. Far fewer (16 percent) say terrorism will matter more. Still, nearly half (47 percent) of voters now say these two issues will be equally important.

Three-quarters of those polled say they are either somewhat (30 percent) or very concerned (45 percent) that the United States will be bogged down in Iraq for many years without making much progress in achieving its goals there. Half of Americans say they are somewhat (36 percent) or very confident (14 percent) that U.S. efforts to establish a stable democratic government will succeed, though almost as many are either not too confident (26 percent) or not at all confident (21 percent) that U.S. efforts will succeed. Americans are similarly split in their opinion of efforts to establish security and rebuild Iraq since major conflict ended May 1. Thirty-five percent feel that U.S. efforts in Iraq since the May 1 end of combat have gone somewhat well but 30 percent say they have not gone too well. Only 10 percent believe the operations have been going very well whereas more than twice that number (21 percent) believe U.S. efforts have not gone well at all.

Bush`s overall approval rating is holding steady at about 52 percent, though that`s down considerably from its peak of 88 percent in the weeks following the September 11 attacks. Half approve of his approach to education. However, approval ratings of the president policies on the following are still stuck below the halfway mark, as they have been for the past few months: taxes (45 percent), the environment (44 percent) and foreign policy in general (46 percent). Just 36 percent approve of his health care policies.

A comfortable majority, 64 percent of the respondents, approve of the Bush administration`s policies to prevent and minimize terrorism domestically, however. And that may bode well for the Bush campaign down the road, with nearly half (47 percent) of those polled saying they believe Bush`s handling of the war on terrorism and homeland security efforts is as important as the economy and job creation in in determining their vote next year.

For the NEWSWEEK Poll, Princeton Survey Research Associates interviewed by telephone 1,002 adults aged 18 and older on Nov. 6 and Nov. 7. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.





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Iraq Seen as Al Qaeda`s Top Battlefield
Terrorist network and its affiliates are aiding Hussein loyalists, coalition officials say.
By Richard C. Paddock, Alissa J. Rubin and Greg Miller
Times Staff Writers

November 9, 2003

BAGHDAD — Answering Osama bin Laden`s call for holy war in Iraq, hundreds of followers from at least eight nations have entered the country and are playing a major role in attacking Western targets and Iraqi civilians, U.S. and Iraqi officials say.

Operatives of the Al Qaeda terrorist network and affiliated extremist groups are collaborating with Saddam Hussein loyalists, officials say, forming an array of shadowy alliances that are emerging as one of the biggest challenges to U.S.-led efforts to bring stability to the war-torn country.

Some officials believe that Iraq is replacing Afghanistan as the global center of Islamic jihad and becoming the prime locale for extremist Muslim fighters who are eager to confront Americans on Arab soil.

As many as 2,000 Muslim fighters from as far as Sudan, Algeria and Afghanistan are operating in Iraq, officials say. Ansar al Islam, an Iraqi group that was previously active in northern Iraq, also has made a comeback, officials say. The Bush administration says Ansar has ties to Al Qaeda.

Although many of the foreign militants likely operate in small cells independent of any central command, others appear to have hooked up with Hussein loyalists who provide money, materiel and logistical support. In exchange, the foreigners provide suicide bombers and experience in guerrilla tactics.

While authorities have acknowledged the presence of some of the fighters, the role they are playing in the anti-American insurgency appears to be increasing — and their unconventional tactics make them a formidable force. Foreign fighters are suspected of taking part in as many as a dozen suicide bombings that have killed more than 200 people in the last three months, including four nearly simultaneous attacks in Baghdad on Oct. 27.

"Since mid-July we have seen the reconstitution of Ansar al Islam and Al Qaeda," L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the U.S.-led civilian administration, said at a briefing of visiting Americans last week. "They are coming back into Iraq."

Jalal Talabani, the current president of Iraq`s Governing Council, estimates that 500 to 2,000 Islamic militants from foreign countries are operating in Iraq, including some who may have arrived before the war started. Some officials of the U.S.-led coalition cite the same figure.

The largest group of militants is from neighboring Syria, officials say, while others have come from Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Palestinian territories.

"The big majority of those criminals who are committing terror actions are from Al Qaeda" and associated militant Muslim organizations, Talabani said. "Those who are making suicide attacks are from Islamic fundamentalist groups."

Before the war, President Bush contended that Al Qaeda was active in Iraq. But it was not until several months after the U.S.-led occupation began that Islamic extremists apparently took advantage of the postwar chaos and started launching terrorist attacks.

U.S. officials acknowledge that they are hobbled in their efforts to stem the apparent surge in Islamic extremism because they have little information about the attackers or their activities.

Authorities believe that some of the fighters are Al Qaeda operatives and others are members of extremist groups affiliated with the network. Officials suspect that the groups operate as independent cells but are cooperating to some degree with one another and with Hussein loyalists seeking to regain power.

In September, Bremer told reporters in Washington that 248 foreign fighters had been arrested in Iraq, including 19 suspected Al Qaeda members. It is unclear when the arrests took place.

Bin Laden, who was critical of Hussein while he was in power, has repeatedly called on Muslims to go to Iraq and avenge the U.S. invasion.

"God knows if I could find a way to your field, I wouldn`t stall," a voice identified as Bin Laden`s said in an audiotape released in mid-October. "You my brother fighters in Iraq ... I tell you: You are God`s soldiers and the arrows of Islam, and the first line of defense for this [Muslim] nation today."

It is difficult to gauge the extent of ties between Hussein loyalists and the foreign fighters. Some officials believe that a new alliance between Al Qaeda-trained foreigners and former agents of the Mukhabarat, Hussein`s intelligence service, is behind some of the terrorist attacks.

"They are now fully operational and clandestine and working with terrorist groups to start hitting targets," said Iyad Allawi, a member of the Governing Council and its security committee. "They are getting more clever, and we will see more attacks in the weeks ahead."

In the battle against the U.S. presence in Iraq, the foreign fighters bring with them experience as guerrilla warriors who are skilled in reconnaissance and mounting surprise attacks while keeping a low profile.

The Hussein loyalists can offer their knowledge of local targets and the location of caches of weapons that could be used to make bombs. Top Iraqi operatives can contribute cash, much of it stolen shortly before or during the war.

The Iraqi insurgents may also be in contact with sympathizers who work near American or international targets. It appears, for instance, that some of the Iraqis working at the United Nations at the time of the August bombing of its headquarters in Baghdad had worked there during Hussein`s regime.

Allawi said recent intelligence indicated that former Mukhabarat agents and Al Qaeda or its affiliates were forming a "field command" that would be responsible for operations against Americans and their supporters.

According to these reports, attacks would increasingly target the Americans and British, the leading members of the coalition that ousted Hussein, he said.

U.S. officials say there are an average of 29 attacks a day on coalition forces, most of them low-level incidents apparently staged by Hussein supporters. Some major attacks also appear to be the work of Hussein loyalists, including the downing of a Chinook helicopter near the town of Fallouja on Nov. 2 that killed 16 people and the shelling of Baghdad`s Rashid Hotel on Oct. 26, which killed one and injured seven.

But other attacks bear the stamp of Al Qaeda: in particular, suicide car bombings of targets that are carefully selected for maximum psychological effect and to inflict a large number of casualties.

"The goal in hitting these targets is to create chaos, especially in Baghdad," Allawi said.

Authorities were able to establish the role of foreign extremists in the Oct. 27 bombings when police foiled a planned attack on a fourth Baghdad police station.

The would-be suicide bomber rammed a police barricade with his SUV, which was packed with explosives. The vehicle did not explode. When the man jumped out and threw a hand grenade at police, an officer shot and wounded him.

"Iraqis are traitors!" the attacker shouted at police, authorities say. "I am an Arab, you cowards! Allahu akbar [God is great]!"

Initially thought to be a Syrian, the would-be bomber was a Yemeni who entered the country through Syria, authorities say. He is believed to be in U.S. custody. There was no indication what he might have told investigators.

Ahmad Shyaa Barak, a member of the Governing Council who sits on its security committee, said authorities recently arrested another foreign militant who apparently was casing a building in Baghdad.

The man`s passport showed that he had been to Afghanistan four times, including a six-month stay during which authorities suspect he attended an Al Qaeda training camp. He was turned over to coalition investigators.

"They captured him on the street," Barak said. "People were suspicious of him. He had a camera, and he was trying to take photos of a building that was a possible target."

In the last three months, Iraq has seen 13 vehicle bomb attacks. Most of them were suicide bombings, authorities say. The targets have included one of Iraq`s holiest Shiite Muslim shrines, police stations, U.N. offices, U.S. facilities and the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Most of the victims have been Iraqis.

Iraqi officials say the willingness to commit suicide and to target civilians are uncharacteristic of attacks by Hussein loyalists but are a common tactic for Islamic terrorists.

U.S. and Iraqi authorities as well as former agents of the Mukhabarat suspect that Islamic terrorists were involved in the deadliest attacks: the Aug. 19 car bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad that killed 22 people; the Aug. 29 bombing of the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf that killed 120 people; the Oct. 12 bombing of the Baghdad Hotel that killed seven people; and the Oct. 27 attacks on the police stations and Red Cross that killed at least 35 people.

Two of the attacks may have been intended as assassinations of widely respected leaders who could have played a key role in stabilizing and reconstructing Iraq: the esteemed Shiite cleric Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim, who was killed in the Najaf bombing; and U.N. Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello, a strong advocate of handing over power to a new Iraqi government, who was killed in the U.N. headquarters blast.

Some officials fear that a growing Islamist movement in Iraq could give a boost to the extremist cause and train a new core of Muslim fighters, just as the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union did in the 1980s.

A senior U.S. intelligence official in Washington said Iraq has emerged as the focal point for Islamic jihad, becoming the most active front in the movement and the top priority for Muslim fighters who want to confront the United States.

The assessment, shared by analysts at the CIA and other agencies, underscores how in a matter of months Iraq has supplanted Afghanistan, Chechnya and other international trouble spots as the focus of the jihad cause.

"The fact that the U.S. military is there in force, that this is a core Arab state, that [the U.S. occupation] has been the biggest issue in world affairs in the last few months all add up to it being a highly important, highly active place" for jihadis, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Iraq is a top priority for jihadis in the Arab world, who have chafed at the presence of American troops in places such as Saudi Arabia for years but now confront the U.S. occupation of a nation in the heart of their region.

Asked whether Iraq was now the primary destination for Islamic fighters, the official said: "Far and away, no question about it." He added that Iraq had earned that distinction because of its "size, prominence, importance and number of Americans to shoot at."

Although many in the West have been skeptical of Bush`s contention that there was an alliance between Hussein and Islamic extremists, members of the Governing Council say the dictator began reaching out to the militants more than two years ago.

Before the war, hundreds of Ansar al Islam militants were trained at camps in northern Iraq and hundreds of foreign fighters were trained at camps outside Baghdad, said Talabani, the Governing Council president.

The Mukhabarat began forging ties with Arab extremists in 2001, Allawi said.

During the war, at least 5,000 foreign fighters came from abroad to aid the regime, Iraqi officials estimate. Many entered through Syria, where buses would fill up in Damascus with Syrians, Palestinians, Jordanians and occasionally Moroccans and Tunisians, according to injured fighters interviewed in Damascus, the Syrian capital, after their return. There is no estimate of how many fighters stayed behind after the war ended.

With the U.S. occupation, Iraq no longer had border guards, creating opportunities for militants to enter. The crossings opened up, and people streamed freely into Iraq.

"I`m afraid to say, it is going to get worse before it gets better," Allawi said. "They are an evil group. They are looking at Iraq as their haven and as the staging post to hit at every decent and civilized target."

Paddock and Rubin reported from Baghdad, and Miller from Washington.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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IRAQ


Place the Fate of Iraq Above U.S. Politics
The truth is a mixed bag: Most people are better off, but crime and chaos have risen.
By Nicholas Goldberg
Nicholas Goldberg is op-ed editor of The Times.

November 9, 2003

BAGHDAD — The last time I was here, during the final years of Saddam Hussein`s nearly 25-year-long reign, no one was happy and everyone was scared.

In the hospitals, babies died of malnutrition, and a perpetual shortage of antibiotics meant many deaths that could have been prevented. International sanctions had devastated the economy — jobs were disappearing, infant mortality was rising, ragged street children were everywhere. I met former doctors and lawyers hawking cigarettes on corners or driving cabs. Auction houses sold the furniture of middle-class families that had declined into poverty.

On the streets of Baghdad, I was dogged by a government "minder," and people ducked into doorways rather than talk to me. Innocent questions provoked looks of terror but little information. Criticizing the president was punishable by death. Hussein`s secret police and army were dreaded. And for good reason.

In northern Iraq on a previous trip, I had visited a village where 33 men and boys, virtually all the males in the village, had been lined up, shot and killed by Hussein`s soldiers as part of the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds. I spoke with one of a handful of survivors, who had been shot but was able to hide behind a tree as his brother and nephew bled to death nearby.

Last week, I arrived back in Iraq for the first time in six years, and the transformation was extraordinary. On the streets of Baghdad and Al-Hilla, people were eager to speak, often gathering in small groups to hear my questions and offer answers. A furniture salesman told me that now, people were buying back furniture rather than selling it. Political parties — banned during my last visit — have offices visible throughout the city. It is now easy to set up interviews, and many of those I`ve interviewed have been harsh in their recollections of Hussein, whom they described as a tyrant and a criminal.

Iraq is a difficult country to understand, a difficult place for a foreigner to come to know, particularly if one`s visits are short and one`s Arabic limited. On my earlier visit, I was also hampered by the powerful government propaganda machine. My taciturn minder, an employee of Hussein`s government, served as my translator, tour guide and shadow, reporting to his superiors on my movements and my questions. Virtually everything I saw that was interesting or real I saw by sneaking away from him.

My most recent trip was a propaganda mission as well, but this time led by the new rulers of Iraq, the United States government. I was invited by the office of the secretary of Defense as part of a government effort to get its side of the story out. President Bush and his advisors say the truth in Iraq is being distorted by a liberal media "filtering" out all the good stories in order to present only the bad. They`ve decided to go over the heads of the reporters in Baghdad and talk directly to more sympathetic journalists and opinion makers in the U.S.

The original invitation I received went, overwhelmingly, to people perceived as friendly to the administration`s position. Among the 20 or so people invited for a three-day visit to Baghdad, Kirkuk and Mosul (to be paid for by the invitees or their employers) were conservative columnists George Will, Fred Barnes and William Safire, as well as several generals and representatives of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, Americans for Tax Reform and the American Conservative Union. Among the dozen or so who ultimately attended were an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, a speechwriter for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and a former press secretary for Nancy Reagan and the first President Bush (whose résumé said, mysteriously, that she had also done "international crisis work" for Crayola Co.). Only a handful of Democrats were on the trip.

The administration`s message was pounded into us relentlessly: The war has been a success, and any postwar obstacles were no more than speed bumps. Do not allow the news accounts of suicide bombings, mortar attacks, insurgents and downed helicopters to distract you from the main story: the freedom of an oppressed people and the rebirth of their country as a modern democracy. On our first day, we met L. Paul Bremer III, who directs the American occupation of Iraq from one of Hussein`s old palaces. He held out his hand, smiled and said, "Welcome to free Iraq."

In free Iraq, Bremer explained, U.S. troops were working overtime to rebuild the country from the ground up. The U.S. accomplishments cited by Bremer were impressive: 1,260 schools renovated and reopened in time for the beginning of the term in October, 90% of the health clinics reopened, 12,000 tons of pharmaceuticals brought into the country, $300 million worth of jobs created. Oil production is up to a rate of 1.9 billion barrels per year.

Yes, there`s an insurgency, and yes, every death must be mourned, we were told, but America`s mission is not being threatened. Resistance to U.S. occupation is restricted to a small group of malcontents in the narrow Sunni Triangle formed by Baghdad, Tikrit and Ramadi. "It`s like Richard Wagner`s music," said Brig. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, who commands the 30,000 soldiers of the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad. "It isn`t as bad as it sounds."

Above all, we were told, the defeatist television images beamed into American living rooms must not force America to back down, as it did in Vietnam and Somalia. "Saddam had his guys read `Black Hawk Down,` " said Col. Steve Hicks. "They believe that if they hit us hard enough, we`ll leave."

At the end of a couple of days on the tour — and after several days on my own in Baghdad and Tikrit — I was persuaded that the administration`s case has a good deal of merit. There`s no question that people in Baghdad are freer. There`s no denying that most people are happy to see the end of a terrifying, violent, criminal dictatorship. And it is probably true that the deaths of a couple of hundred soldiers out of a fighting force of 139,000 coalition troops is not enough to cripple our effort.

But the administration`s view lacks nuance. To dismiss the insecurity in Iraq today as "tactically insignificant," as one official did, is to miss the point. On the streets, disorder, lawlessness and insurrection claim lives daily — and many more Iraqis die than Americans. Coalition forces operate from heavily fortified palaces and bases that make much of Baghdad off limits. Checkpoints and barriers abound, and armored vehicles patrol by night.

Altercations between soldiers and Iraqis are a daily occurrence, and relations are fraying. "They raid our homes in a barbaric, animalistic way, blasting down the doors with explosives and kicking in the gates," said Mohammed Hashem, a 35-year-old Sunni Muslim who works at a mosque in the Baghdad neighborhood of Adamiya. "Now, the American soldiers are hated by all parts of the community." Iraqis are frustrated at the pace of reconstruction, and few trust U.S. intentions. I found no one with anything kind to say about the U.S.-installed Governing Council, which is seen as a puppet organization.

Perhaps even more disturbing to Iraqis are the general lawlessness and chaos that have been epidemic since the end of the war. Although some data suggest it is beginning to decline, a postwar crime wave has left Iraqis disappointed and angry at the Americans who are supposed to be in charge. Carjackings, kidnappings, murder and robbery are common in the city. Electricity shortages continue. Much garbage that lined the streets after the war has been removed, finally, but much remains. "Any government would be better than this," said Khaled el-Adani, a 46-year-old Baghdad shop owner. "Now, we`re living in a vacuum."

One of the worrisome things about the U.S. government`s efforts to oversell its case is that in the months ahead, the public relations battle will become more and more intertwined with the upcoming presidential election. If the insurgency continues, if Iraq is not made measurably better and happier and freer and safer and more self-sufficient as the election draws closer, there will be growing pressure on the Bush administration to make decisions about Iraq`s future based on political considerations.

Presidential politics are already palpable here. In the village of Al-Hilla, a young political appointee who worked on the last Bush campaign is spokeswoman for the Coalition Provisional Authority. In Baghdad, presidential politics are a common subject of discussion at the authority`s offices. In a meeting in Al-Hilla, a Shiite Muslim cleric, Farqad al-Qizawini, who has worked closely with the Americans, ended his presentation to those of us on the government tour by saying: "I am asking you all for one more thing, and this is very important — to reelect President George Bush."

The administration has the right to make sure that Americans understand before next November why the president initiated this war and why he thinks he was right to do so. But decisions about the war itself should rise above politics. Calculations about whether to stay or leave, about troop deployment, about when Iraq is ready to govern itself, are decisions that must not be made based on how they would affect the U.S. election.

Whether or not one supported the U.S. decision to go to war, there is no question that Iraq now has the opportunity to become a much better place than it was. Even the minder who watched me for the government during my last trip has a new life: He is a translator for the Times bureau, no longer beholden to his government, no longer withholding the news and no longer quite so taciturn.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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UNIONS


An Anti-Labor Line in the Sand
By David Bacon
David Bacon is a labor journalist and photographer. His forthcoming book is "NAFTA`s Children."

November 9, 2003

BAGHDAD — For most Iraqis, oil used to seem like a blessing. It raised their standard of living during the 1960s to near-First World levels. Then it began to seem more like a curse, financing war and a brutal dictatorship. It was oil, many believe, that drew the covetous attention of foreign powers, most recently the United States. Now, for some Iraqis, oil is simply a commodity their children sell by the roadside to passing cars, the way poor farmers in the San Joaquin Valley once sold peaches and strawberries at highway fruit stands.

At the Al Daura refinery on the outskirts of Baghdad — one of three such huge installations in Iraq — the plant manager knows workers can`t live on their salaries, which average $60 per month, so to keep them working he gives them oil, which their children hawk daily outside the plant.

Before the war, workers received bonuses, profit-sharing and food and housing allowances to supplement their small incomes. Now, although salaries remain the same, that additional income has been eliminated by U.S. occupation authorities.

In plants and factories all over Iraq, workers are quickly organizing unions. They want better wages. They want shorter hours (workers at the refinery and elsewhere often work 11- and 13-hour shifts without additional pay). They want safety shoes, goggles, masks and other protective gear. Most of all, they want a voice in the future of their jobs.

But in their quest for what they see as simple fairness in the workplace, they are encountering a determined foe: the Coalition Provisional Authority. Whenever the new unions try to talk with the managers or ministries that operate the plants, they`re told that a law passed by Saddam Hussein in 1987 is still being enforced by the CPA. This law says that workers in state-owned enterprises (where the majority of Iraqis work) have no right to form unions or to bargain for contracts.

The law violates at least two conventions of the United Nations` International Labor Organization. But on June 5, CPA chief L. Paul Bremer III backed up this decree with another that Iraqi union activists say bans strikes and demonstrations that would disrupt economic activity.

U.S. funding in Iraq seems primarily focused on two things — an overwhelming military presence and the transformation of the Iraqi economy from one in which the bulk of industry is state-owned to one in which it is in private hands. Both are key parts of a plan to make the country attractive to foreign investors, who, Bremer seems to feel, might find the presence of unions a disincentive to investment. And nothing can stand in the way of privatization.

In an Oct. 8 phone press conference, Thomas Foley, director for private-sector development for the CPA, announced a list of the first Iraqi state enterprises to be sold off, including cement and fertilizer plants, phosphate and sulfur mines, pharmaceutical factories and the country`s airline. On Sept. 19, the authority published Order No. 39, which permits 100% foreign ownership of businesses except for the oil industry, and allows businesses to send their profits outside the country.

Iraqi workers view the prospect of privatizing their workplaces with dread, fearing the sell-off will bring massive layoffs in order to maximize profits. Al Daura`s manager, Dathar Al-Kashab, predicted that with privatization, "I`ll have to fire 1,500 [of the refinery`s 3,000] workers. In America, when a company lays people off, there`s unemployment insurance, and they won`t die from hunger. If I dismiss employees now, I`m killing them and their families."

Outside the gates, the unemployed go hungry and even homeless. Some 70% of Iraqi workers have no jobs. Though Congress may have appropriated billions for "reconstruction," Nuri Jafer, the deputy minister of labor and social affairs, says he can find "no country willing to fund our plans" for a minimal system of unemployment benefits. Reconstruction itself is invisible on the streets. Work may be proceeding on the pipelines and ports necessary to get oil exports restarted, but huge piles of the war`s rubble lie untouched.

Fledgling unions, although in a precarious position, are moving forward energetically. One, the Workers Democratic Trade Union Federation, is being organized by labor activists driven underground or into exile in 1977 when Saddam Hussein banned real unions and executed many leaders. Now the federation has set up unions in the country`s main industries, including oil refineries like Al Daura. Basra already has a central labor council, and workers there have mounted protests.

Another group, the Workers Unions and Councils, helped workers elect committees in factories like the State Leather Industry plant, a huge shoe factory, and the Mamoun Vegetable Oil enterprise. Both factories are candidates for privatization. This union also backed Baghdad`s Union of the Unemployed when it organized demonstrations in front of the CPA offices, demanding jobs and unemployment benefits — hardly things the U.S. should stand against.

But U.S. zeal to privatize Iraq — in the process bringing in a host of American companies — seems to trump labor rights, jobs and the welfare of working families. At one recent international conference, ExxonMobil, Delta Airlines and the American Hospital Group all expressed interest in purchasing Iraqi concerns, while Bechtel, Halliburton and Fluor Corp. are among many already operating in Iraq under no-bid contracts.

Meanwhile, the CPA is holding down the wages of Iraqi workers. One woman sewing shoes at the state leather factory said she struggled to support six family members on her CPA-set emergency payment. "The prices of food and clothing are going up rapidly, and the salary is very low. We work hard, and I`ve been here 10 years. I have to have a raise," she said. But that requires the CPA`s permission. "When we talked to the manager, he told us he had to talk to the Oil Ministry, which had to talk to the Finance Ministry, which had to get permission from the coalition forces," said Detrala Beshab, president of Al Daura refinery`s new union.

Iraq`s new labor movement is determined to stop the work site sell-off, the loss of jobs and the prohibition of unions and strikes, which may increase conflict with the CPA. Instead of trying to ban labor activity, the U.S. must respect the labor rights guaranteed under international law. Unions, after all, are an important part of America`s democratic tradition. As Majeed Sahib Kreem, general secretary of the union at the vegetable oil plant, said recently, "a major reason for our existence is to eliminate the laws issued by the Baath regime."

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California connection
Edwin Black
Sunday, November 9, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/11/09/IN…


Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a so-called Master Race.

But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn`t originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little-known, role in the American eugenics movement`s campaign for ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at "improving" the human race. In its extreme, racist form, this meant wiping away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in 27 states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the 20th century`s first decades, California`s eugenicists included potent but little-known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, as well as members of the California state Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.

Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America`s most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics` racist aims.

Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.

In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation`s social service agencies and associations.

The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, confinement or forced sterilization.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California`s quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as Pasadena`s Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations -- which functioned as part of a closely-knit network -- published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics,

and propagandized for the Nazis.

Eugenics was born as a scientific curiosity in the Victorian age. In 1863,

Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, theorized that if talented people married only other talented people, the result would be measurably better offspring. At the turn of the last century, Galton`s ideas were imported to the United States just as Gregor Mendel`s principles of heredity were rediscovered. American eugenics advocates believed with religious fervor that the same Mendelian concepts determining the color and size of peas, corn and cattle also governed the social and intellectual character of man.

In a United States demographically reeling from immigration upheaval and torn by post-Reconstruction chaos, race conflict was everywhere in the early 20th century. Elitists, utopians and so-called progressives fused their smoldering race fears and class bias with their desire to make a better world. They reinvented Galton`s eugenics into a repressive and racist ideology. The intent: Populate the Earth with vastly more of their own socioeconomic and biological kind -- and less or none of everyone else.

The superior species the eugenics movement sought was populated not merely by tall, strong, talented people. Eugenicists craved blond, blue-eyed Nordic types. This group alone, they believed, was fit to inherit the Earth. In the process, the movement intended to subtract emancipated Negroes, immigrant Asian laborers, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews, dark- haired hill folk, poor people, the infirm and anyone classified outside the gentrified genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists.

How? By identifying so-called defective family trees and subjecting them to lifelong segregation and sterilization programs to kill their bloodlines. The grand plan was to literally wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior -- the so-called unfit. The eugenicists hoped to neutralize the viability of 10 percent of the population at a sweep, until none were left except themselves.

Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 "Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder`s Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population." Point No. 8 was euthanasia.

The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States was a "lethal chamber" or public, locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, "Applied Eugenics," which argued, "From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution . . . Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated." "Applied Eugenics" also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."

Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement an organized lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their own. One institution in Lincoln, Ill., fed its incoming patients milk from tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to 40 percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln. Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.

Nonetheless, with eugenicide marginalized, the main solution for eugenicists was the rapid expansion of forced segregation and sterilization, as well as more marriage restrictions. California led the nation, performing nearly all sterilization procedures with little or no due process. In its first 25 years of eugenics legislation, California sterilized 9,782 individuals, mostly women. Many were classified as "bad girls," diagnosed as "passionate," "oversexed" or "sexually wayward." At the Sonoma State Home, some women were sterilized because of what was deemed an abnormally large clitoris or labia.

In 1933 alone, at least 1,278 coercive sterilizations were performed, 700 on women. The state`s two leading sterilization mills in 1933 were Sonoma State Home with 388 operations and Patton State Hospital with 363 operations. Other sterilization centers included Agnews, Mendocino, Napa, Norwalk, Stockton and Pacific Colony state hospitals.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough." This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes` words in their own defense.

Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.

Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti- Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. Hitler`s race hatred sprung from his own mind, but the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.

During the `20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany`s fascist eugenicists. In "Mein Kampf," published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is today one state," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception (of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."

Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. "I have studied with great interest," he told a fellow Nazi, "the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."

Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenics leader Madison Grant, calling his race-based eugenics book, "The Passing of the Great Race," his "bible."

Now, the American term "Nordic" was freely exchanged with "Germanic" or "Aryan." Race science, racial purity and racial dominance became the driving force behind Hitler`s Nazism. Nazi eugenics would ultimately dictate who would be persecuted in a Reich-dominated Europe, how people would live, and how they would die. Nazi doctors would become the unseen generals in Hitler`s war against the Jews and other Europeans deemed inferior. Doctors would create the science, devise the eugenic formulas, and hand-select the victims for sterilization, euthanasia and mass extermination.

During the Reich`s early years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler`s plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.

In 1934, as Germany`s sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe, upon returning from Germany, ebulliently bragged to a colleague, "You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought . . . I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."

That same year, 10 years after Virginia passed its sterilization act, Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia`s Western State Hospital, observed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, "The Germans are beating us at our own game."

More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany`s eugenic institutions.

By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 -- almost $4 million in today`s money -- to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 toward creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler`s systematic medical repression.

Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute`s complex of eugenics institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had operated out of a single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years. Leading the institute, once again, was Hitler`s medical henchman Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin`s organization became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others.

Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed.

Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, declared of Nazism, "While we were pussy-footing around ... the Germans were calling a spade a spade."

A special recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. For decades,

American eugenicists had craved twins to advance their research into heredity.

The Institute was now prepared to undertake such research on an unprecedented level. On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York dispatched a radiogram to its Paris office: JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE NINE THOUSAND

DOLLARS OVER THREE YEAR PERIOD TO KWG INSTITUTE ANTHROPOLOGY FOR RESEARCH ON
TWINS AND EFFECTS ON LATER GENERATIONS OF SUBSTANCES TOXIC FOR GERM PLASM.
At the time of Rockefeller`s endowment, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a hero in American eugenics circles, functioned as a head of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Rockefeller funding of that institute continued both directly and through other research conduits during Verschuer`s early tenure. In 1935, Verschuer left the institute to form a rival eugenics facility in Frankfurt that was much heralded in the American eugenics press. Research on twins in the Third Reich exploded, backed by government decrees. Verschuer wrote in Der Erbarzt, a eugenics doctor`s journal he edited, that Germany`s war would yield a "total solution to the Jewish problem."

Verschuer had a longtime assistant. His name was Josef Mengele.

On May 30, 1943, Mengele arrived at Auschwitz. Verschuer notified the German Research Society, "My assistant, Dr. Josef Mengele (M.D., Ph.D.) joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmführer (captain) and camp physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anthropological testing of the most diverse racial groups in this concentration camp is being carried out with permission of the SS Reichsführer (Himmler)."

Mengele began searching the boxcar arrivals for twins. When he found them,

he performed beastly experiments, scrupulously wrote up the reports and sent the paperwork back to Verschuer`s institute for evaluation. Often, cadavers, eyes and other body parts were also dispatched to Berlin`s eugenic institutes.

Rockefeller executives never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the foundation had ceased all eugenics studies in Nazi-occupied Europe before the war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the great institutions they helped found, and the science they helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.

After the war, eugenics was declared a crime against humanity -- an act of genocide. Germans were tried and they cited the California statutes in their defense -- to no avail. They were found guilty.

However, Mengele`s boss Verschuer escaped prosecution. Verschuer re- established his connections with California eugenicists who had gone underground and renamed their crusade "human genetics." Typical was an exchange July 25, 1946, when Popenoe wrote Verschuer, "It was indeed a pleasure to hear from you again. I have been very anxious about my colleagues in Germany . . . I suppose sterilization has been discontinued in Germany?" Popenoe offered tidbits about various American eugenics luminaries and then sent various eugenics publications. In a separate package, Popenoe sent some cocoa, coffee and other goodies.

Verschuer wrote back, "Your very friendly letter of 7/25 gave me a great deal of pleasure and you have my heartfelt thanks for it. The letter builds another bridge between your and my scientific work; I hope that this bridge will never again collapse but rather make possible valuable mutual enrichment and stimulation."

Soon, Verschuer again became a respected scientist in Germany and around the world. In 1949, he became a corresponding member of the newly formed American Society of Human Genetics, organized by American eugenicists and geneticists.

In the fall of 1950, the University of Münster offered Verschuer a position at its new Institute of Human Genetics, where he later became a dean. In the early and mid-1950s, Verschuer became an honorary member of numerous prestigious societies, including the Italian Society of Genetics, the Anthropological Society of Vienna, and the Japanese Society for Human Genetics.


Human genetics` genocidal roots in eugenics were ignored by a victorious generation that refused to link itself to the crimes of Nazism and by succeeding generations that never knew the truth of the years leading up to war. Now governors of five states, including California, have issued public apologies to their citizens, past and present, for sterilization and other abuses spawned by the eugenics movement.

Human genetics became an enlightened endeavor in the late 20th century. Hard-working, devoted scientists finally cracked the human code through the Human Genome Project. Now, every individual can be biologically identified and classified by trait and ancestry. Yet even now, some leading voices in the genetic world are calling for a cleansing of the unwanted among us, and even a master human species.

There is understandable wariness about more ordinary forms of abuse, for example, in denying insurance or employment based on genetic tests. On Oct. 14,

the United States` first genetic anti-discrimination legislation passed the Senate by unanimous vote. Yet because genetics research is global, no single nation`s law can stop the threats.

Edwin Black is author of the award-winning "IBM and the Holocaust" and the recently released "War Against the Weak" (published by Four Walls Eight Windows), from which this article is adapted.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

[Joerver]

Seramgul, tribal landowner.


Forbidden frontier
Pakistan`s tribal lands a haven for al Qaeda, hurdle for U.S. forces
Juliette Terzieff, Chronicle Foreign Service
Sunday, November 9, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/09/MNGO92TRV91.DTL



Dera Ismael Khan, Pakistan -- Since the U.S. military and its Northern Alliance allies routed Afghanistan`s Taliban regime and drove Osama bin Laden from his Tora Bora redoubt at the end of 2001, the hunt for fugitive al Qaeda and Taliban fighters has centered largely on an unusual area - theautonomous tribal zones of Pakistan that line the Afghan border. The region is inhabited by fiercely independent peoples who are devoutly religious, ready to fight and hostile to foreigners. Chronicle Foreign Service correspondent Juliette Terzieff recently visited this wild and remote region and filed these two of four reports..

Responding to increased attacks on American and Afghan forces, the Pakistani military has launched a major offensive against al Qaeda and Taliban fighters hiding in this country`s remote tribal regions.

While the campaign has had some success, it has been slowed by stiffening resistance from local tribesmen who are sheltering the fighters. According to eyewitnesses, the 300-mile-long stretch of forbidding frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan has become a haven for al Qaeda and operatives loyal to the deposed Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

"Almost every tribe in the area is currently supporting al Qaeda, actively or passively, as guests, and the situation is incredibly tense," said Seramgul, a malik, or landowner, from Wana, the capital of mountainous South Waziristan, the tribal region believed to harbor the largest number of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Dozens of tribesmen interviewed during a 10-day trip in late October through this mountainous, largely inaccessible land echoed his remarks. Their responses point to one of the most urgent problems facing the U.S. military here: Unless the fiercely independent tribesmen can be persuaded to cooperate, rooting out resurgent al Qaeda and Taliban forces and capturing or killing their leaders will become even more difficult and dangerous.

"Our people are angry at the troops - Pakistani, Afghan, American, it doesn`t matter. It is our land, our tradition to give shelter, and there should be no interference in our affairs," added Seramgul, who was interviewed in Dera Ismael Khan, a city close to the border with South Waziristan.

Two years after the fall of the Taliban, guerrilla-style assaults -- which Afghan and Western officials believe Taliban and al Qaeda forces stage from the tribal areas -- are increasing against U.S. and allied Afghan troops, aid workers and civilians. Nearly 300 people - including civilians, Afghan soldiers, American military personnel, local aid workers and guerrillas

-- have died since early August.

Periodically, Afghan and American troops chase militants back across the Pakistani border, and there have been numerous arrests of Taliban and al Qaeda members. Most of the 420 terrorist suspects Pakistan has turned over to U.S. authorities have been caught either inside the tribal lands or in areas just around them.

But many experts believe that top al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, are hiding in the tribal areas or moving back and forth over the border. As long as they remain at large, experts say, the backbone of the terrorist network that mounted the Sept. 11 attacks will remain intact.

According to South Waziri tribesmen, al Qaeda members used their area, dominated by the Pashtun ethnic group, as a staging base to fight across the border against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan but gave no hint of any plans to attack New York City and Washington, D.C.

Many tribesmen, whose tradition is to protect, even unto death, strangers requesting shelter, honored the request, coming as it did from fellow Muslims who at that time were seen as true mujahedeen, or holy warriors, battling to free Afghanistan.

Unless tribesmen like these can be persuaded to help capture al Qaeda forces, they will continue to take refuge in the remote region


Tribal sources said that while al Qaeda operatives have been in and out of the region since Sept. 11, 2001, trying to avoid detection by U.S. and Pakistani soldiers, groups of up to 25 began appearing in South Waziristan about six months ago offering to rent houses from tribesmen for the large sum of 7,000 rupees, or about $120, a month.

Unsuccessful forays by Pakistani government agents into the area over the past year to persuade tribesmen to turn over fugitive al Qaeda and Taliban fighters prompted President Pervez Musharraf in the early autumn to opt for more direct measures.

Pakistani forces launched operations in the area with an Oct. 2 raid involving hundreds of commandos that set off a bloody four-hour battle costing two Pakistani soldiers their lives and resulting in the arrest of 18 suspected Taliban and al Qaeda operatives.

Since then, government forces have cajoled, bargained with, battled and detained more than 100 Waziri tribesmen.

But betraying people the Waziris consider guests remains a tough sell, said retired Pakistani army Lt. Gen. Talaat Massood.

"(To the tribesmen), a loss of autonomy is a loss of freedom, equals occupation,`` he said. "And it is immensely difficult to convince them otherwise."

Some U.S. officials and analysts have been skeptical about Pakistan`s commitment to fighting terrorism in the tribal lands. But Massood insists Musharraf is well aware of the threat al Qaeda still poses.

"As far as the government is concerned, al Qaeda is a menace and they want to get rid of them," he said. "Even without U.S. support, they hunt them down. Everybody understands the damage al Qaeda has done and could do."

Unfortunately, for Islamabad and Washington, the locals don`t appear to see it that way. Ash-hab Khan, a Wana resident, summed up the feelings of many South Waziris about the accusations leveled at al Qaeda and bin Laden.

"It`s all Western propaganda. Al Qaeda are good people and would not kill like that,`` Khan said angrily, referring to the Sept. 11 events.

The Pakistan army, which has fought numerous skirmishes since the beginning of last month, has netted 230 Taliban and al Qaeda suspects so far, according to Lt. Gen. Muhammed Ali Jan Aurakzai. Ten Pakistani military personnel have died in the last month, and dozens have been injured, he said.

The campaign has forced the fugitives and their sympathizers to adapt.

"The Arabs (al Qaeda) have now changed their tactics," said Seramgul, the tribal elder. "People are housing them for one or two nights and then they move on using their own vehicles. They dress like Waziris and have made good progress learning the local language."

Khan, a man in his mid-30s with a full beard who wears a white skullcap around which a black-and-white headscarf is wrapped, claims that almost three months ago American and Pakistani forces operating together attacked his cousin`s house, where about 60 fighters - some Afghans, some Arabs -- were hiding.

But informers alerted the tribal network, Khan said. Tribesmen took positions around the house, lured the Pakistani soldiers away and opened fire on the Americans. He claimed several Americans were killed before they withdrew.

Khan`s account could not be verified, as American and Pakistani officials refused comment. But in South Waziristan`s combustible atmosphere, such stories take on a life of their own.

Seramgul offered his own chilling anecdote, saying that a resident had turned into an informer after the local elders decided at a jirga, or council, to extend hospitality to the fugitives.

A few days later, Seramgul said, Taliban fighters arrived in a pickup truck and killed the informer and his two sons.

Khan said the recent crackdown is not working. "The Pakistani troops are being very careful," he said. "But we know now that we can fight them and beat them, and that makes us stronger."

For Musharraf, who is thought to be firmly committed to ferreting out the foreign fugitives, the continuing battle in the tribal areas represents a tightrope walk above a ripped net.

The autonomy deal worked out at the time of Pakistan`s creation allows the federal government to make arrests and even demolish entire villages if a tribe is harboring, and has steadfastly refused to turn over, a known fugitive.

But an outright assault on, or full army occupation of, the entire area inhabited by the tribes -- well over 8 million people -- could trigger a major war in the borderlands, experts say. It could also provoke a violent backlash among Pashtuns as a whole - a people 27 million strong comprising dozens of tribes on both sides of the frontier. For decades, many Pashtuns have argued that they should have their own homeland - "Pashtunistan" -- free forever from the interference of Islamabad and Kabul.

Mohammad Bokhari, an Islamabad-based defense analyst, said: "Thus far, the government has succeeded in using just enough carrot to balance its stick .

. . but the larger the stick gets, as we are seeing in South Waziristan, the larger the risk. Nobody can say for sure where the cutoff line is for the tribesmen. An outright fight with a whole tribe or all the tribes is a fight no one wants."

Massood, the retired general, agreed. "Allowing al Qaeda to use our territory to conduct terrorist activities is out of the question," he said. "But Musharraf has his limitations . . . you can`t violently impose policies that run contrary to the feelings of the masses and expect no response."

Those limitations were summed up by Khan. "The army has been on the border for over a year, and they never bothered us before,`` he said. "The government asked us if they could come and look for al Qaeda and we granted it.


"We have done nothing wrong, so why is the government killing us now?" he asked, turning palms up, as if to say: "We tried to help."

Then he answered his own question. "That`s easy. Bush told Musharraf to. We have been betrayed by our own leaders."



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About the series
The Forbidden Frontier

Day 1: Trouble on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan

Day 2: The army of Mohammed

Day 3: Inside a Taliban village

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle





Pakistani paramilitary troops check vehicles for rebels in Pakistan`s South Waziristan tribal area.

[Joerver]

Forbidden frontier
The Pashtun revere tribal honor -- and back it up with rifles
Juliette Terzieff, Chronicle Foreign Service
Sunday, November 9, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/09/MNGO92TRVH1.DTL


Mirali, Pakistan
Chronicle Foreign Service correspondent Juliette Terzieff recently visited this wild and remote region and filed these two of four reports..

Hier der 2.Teil. 1.Teil #9083

Dawn breaks on a Sunday and the streets of this small city are filled with the calls of peddlers. Pashtun tribesmen descend on the market to stock up on the essentials - flat bread, sticky, fist-sized balls of hard brown sugar, ammunition belts, pistols and Kalashnikov rifles.

Seraj Khan, a handlebar moustache framing his full beard, strides down the main road dressed in long, flowing black robes and towering turban, carefully eyeing everyone he passes.

"This is my home,`` says Khan, cradling his double-barreled rifle, "and only those who come in peace are welcome. Anyone else will be met with force."

Thousands of tribesmen, the different tones of their turbans creating a kaleidoscope of color, swarm through the streets, setting down their weapons only for the time needed to say mid-morning prayers. Many wear the black turbans favored by the Taliban.

Of the thousands on the street, not a single woman is in sight. In this highly conservative area, they rarely venture outside their homes, and when they do, they cover themselves in the all-encompassing burqa to safeguard the family`s honor. In this part of North Waziristan, as in the other six Pakistani-administered areas that form a loose belt of tribal lands along the Afghan border, residents live outside established Pakistani law. An autonomy deal brokered when Pakistan was created in 1947 gave tribal law supremacy here.


The frontier lands have emerged from obscurity since the Sept. 11 terror attacks because Pashtun tribesmen have sheltered al Qaeda and Taliban fighters wanted by the United States.

"They are honorable men, fighters for the ummah (global Muslim community) and welcome friends here," said Saifullah, 23, an uneducated tribesman with peach fuzz, rather than the customary beard.

In addition to a sense of tribal honor and Islamic solidarity -- and, reportedly, a fee of $300 per individual safe passage -- the hosts also share with their fugitive guests a deep antipathy for the United States and the American troops who occasionally mount raids in search of militants.

"America is the enemy. Just look at how they destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq," said Saifullah. "For me, anyone who is an enemy of George Bush is my friend."

Khan, who is 43 and a father of five, knows what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, but does not feel it outweighs the importance of generations of cultural tradition.

"When a Pashtun offers a person shelter, that person becomes family," he said. "Unless there is proof of severe crimes or wrongdoing, a Pashtun will not turn that person out."

This value goes to the core of a belief system thousands of years old. When growing up, Pashtun tribal children learn the axiom: "Me against my brothers; my brothers and I against our cousins; me, my brothers and our cousins against everybody else." It forms a moral bedrock for life decisions and seeks to perpetuate the honor of family, tribe and nation.

Raj Wali Shah, a Pashtun scholar in Peshawar, said, "Understand that in the eyes of the Pashtun, standing by the weak reinforces one`s honor."

With regard to the sheltered militants, he said, it is al Qaeda and the Taliban -- run out of Afghanistan in favor of the non-Pashtun Northern Alliance -- that are perceived as injured parties.

Facing intense pressure from Washington to closely monitor the border with Afghanistan, the government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf reached an agreement with tribal leaders 10 months ago to allow army checkpoints and patrols in their territory -- the first time in centuries that outside police or soldiers have been permitted to operate here. More than 40,000 Pakistani troops are now deployed along the border.

In the early fall, however, frustrated by the lack of progress in flushing the "guests" from the tribal areas and feeling increased heat from the U.S. and Afghan governments, Musharraf sharply stepped up military operations.

That has inflamed passions among the tribesmen, who were largely content to let the army attempt a semblance of control along the rugged border. Military operations in the area -- which locals claim often involve American troops -- against suspected al Qaeda members have sometimes met with ferocious resistance from tribesmen, according to eyewitness accounts.

"The Americans will never succeed in invading us," said Saifullah, who like many here believes the U.S. goal is to conquer all Muslim lands. "Our entire nation is ready to fight them."

Maj. Paul Willie, a spokesman for the U.S. Army`s 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment in southern Afghanistan, acknowledged that the tribal lands are "almost like an independent country," and bluntly called them a "sanctuary" for al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Shah, the Pashtun scholar, said outside forces will never win over the tribesmen until the outsiders realize that they are dealing with a long- established culture, not a band of terrorist sympathizers.

"It is not the law of the jungle out there," he said.

"Pashtuns will never give in to force," Shah said. "If you want their help, you must negotiate and convince, allow them to call a council and decide of their own free will. That is the only way."

Back in the Mirali bazaar, the tribesmen ignore a pickup truck full of Malaysian soldiers, invited in by Pakistani authorities, as their vehicle slows in the swirl of foot, animal, and motor vehicle traffic -- beat-up Suzuki FX`s, giant Jeep Pajeros with tinted windows, donkey carts.

The bazaar is a symphony of smells -- hot bread, pungently spiced chicken barbecuing on skewers, spice stands whose mixed aromas tickle the back of the throat -- and sights. An old man sells gooey lumps of beehive and bottles of honey from a cardboard box; small groups of vendors squat by the road to eat lunch, chatting and sipping the popular tan-colored sweet tea from cracked cups.

Many of men in the marketplace say they do not know how old they are; some use a thumbprint to sign their names. One remembers "the Britishers" leaving when he was a small boy, which would put him in his 60s. He says his only knowledge of the outside world comes from information passed on by his son, who got as far as the 10th grade. Neither of his daughters was allowed to attend school.

Dust floats everywhere, blown in by the wind from the sandy landscape beyond the coconut palms at the city`s edge.

Twenty miles away in Miran Shah, the capital of North Waziristan, Malaysian and Pakistani checkpoints guard the main road toward the Afghan border, only about 15 minutes away by car. As tribesmen pass through, they shield their weapons from view, tucking them under car seats, shawls or among the blankets, food and rugs they have bought at the market.


©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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Filling a suit isn`t enough any more
By ROBYN E. BLUMNER, Times Perspective Columnist
Published November 9, 2003
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/11/09/Columns/Filling_a_suit_isn…
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is an old Brady Bunch episode in which Greg is plucked out of obscurity by a talent scout who says she is going to make him a rock star. It turns out his singing ability didn`t attract her - a production studio would make Greg`s voice sound however she wanted - but he had the right physique for the glittering costume.

This is how George Bush got to be president. He was the perfect front man for the corporate interests and right-wing ideologues who were looking for a guy who was both electable and malleable.

Like Greg, he fit the suit.

While it is true that candidate Bush with his "gentleman`s C`s" suffered from a lack of depth - the man had a startling lack of interest in geopolitics - the oligarchs knew that in the age of sound bites you don`t need the ability to explicate at length. The mileage one could get from the meaningless phrase "compassionate conservative" would be worth a wall full of well-digested books by Benjamin Barber, Thomas Friedman and Francis Fukuyama.

Moreover, what Bush had was far more valuable: a gold-card pedigree, giving him nationwide credibility, an outside-the-Beltway Marshal Matt Dillon affectation and, it seemed initially at least, the ability to hide his fierce conservatism within a common touch.

But as the war in Iraq continues to go badly, sending back news of a daily casualty count, Bush`s common-touch artifice is beginning to wear thinner than the backside of his Crawford jeans. Showing through is the real Bush, his swaggering arrogance, unidimensional understanding of issues, congenital lack of sympathy and intense pique at challenging questions.

When Bush was asked at a recent news conference whether he could promise that there will be fewer American troops in Iraq in a year, he refused to answer, calling it a "trick question." Bush has no oratorical powers to justify his policies and treats anyone who asks him to do so as his enemy.

Last Sunday, when a missile downed a Chinook helicopter in the deadliest assault on American troops since the Iraqi invasion began in March, Bush declined to comment. He made no public appearance that day, nor did he issue a statement expressing his shared grief with the families. It was explained that the president was taking a "down" day at his ranch in Texas, between campaign appearances. Only the next day, did he refer to the incident obliquely, saying, "We mourn every loss."

The White House has adopted a determined strategy of keeping Bush from being connected to the messy parts of the war. This is a Vietnam lesson misunderstood. The Bush people apparently believe it was the pictures of body bags - not the fact of them - that caused public opinion to shift on the war. But the out-of-sight tactic is showing the commander in chief as callous and indifferent to our deployed soldiers and their stateside families.

Unlike Presidents Reagan, Bush I and Clinton, who all attended memorial ceremonies for troops killed in overseas terrorist attacks, Bush II declines to be present at services for soldiers who have died in Iraq. The pictures wouldn`t be helpful.

This tight control over news includes renewed enforcement of a policy closing the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and the air base at Ramstein, Germany, to reporters and cameras when the caskets arrive; and a refusal to give daily accounts of soldiers wounded in clashes where there are no fatalities.

Haven`t you noticed how sanitized this war has been? We have seen no pictures of our men and women returning with limbs gone and other disfigurements. The wounded are kept cloistered at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and at Fort Stewart, Ga.

What has been available to the press are identical letters sent to hometown newspapers under the signatures of soldiers speaking in glowing terms about how the war effort is going. Some of the troops apparently had no idea that a letter to the editor had been sent out in their name.

Despite this manipulation, the polls show that the public is growing restive. Bush`s distance is looking less presidential and more bumbling; and the oligarchs are getting nervous. They desperately want Bush around another term for more tax breaks, environmental giveaways, federal judges who will ignore the Constitution, and privatization of government. But they might have chosen the wrong titular head. Bush doesn`t have the capacity to speak persuasively to the public about anything, never mind the war he and the neocons around him started - a failing that might prove his downfall. When the best Bush can come up with in response to the guerrilla tactics killing American troops by the dozens is "Bring `em on!" it is clear he lacks any deftness.

As we enter the election year, that suit is starting to hang.

© Copyright 2003 St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved

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MotherJones.com / News / Feature
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/11/ma_559_01.ht…
The Uncompassionate Conservative
It`s not that he`s mean. It`s just that when it comes to seeing how his policies affect people, George W. Bush doesn`t have a clue.

Molly Ivins
November/December 2003 Issue

In order to understand why George W. Bush doesn`t get it, you have to take several strands of common Texas attitude, then add an impressive degree of class-based obliviousness. What you end up with is a guy who sees himself as a perfectly nice fellow -- and who is genuinely disconnected from the impact of his decisions on people.

On the few occasions when Bush does directly encounter the down-and-out, he seems to empathize. But then, in what is becoming a recurring, almost nightmare-type scenario, the minute he visits some constructive program and praises it (AmeriCorps, the Boys and Girls Club, job training), he turns around and cuts the budget for it. It`s the kiss of death if the president comes to praise your program. During the presidential debate in Boston in 2000, Bush said, "First and foremost, we`ve got to make sure we fully fund LIHEAP [the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program], which is a way to help low-income folks, particularly here in the East, pay their high fuel bills." He then sliced $300 million out of that sucker, even as people were dying of hypothermia, or, to put it bluntly, freezing to death.

Sometimes he even cuts your program before he comes to praise it. In August 2002, Bush held a photo op with the Quecreek coal miners, the nine men whose rescue had thrilled the country. By then he had already cut the coal-safety budget at the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which engineered the rescue, by 6 percent, and had named a coal-industry executive to run the agency.

The Reverend Jim Wallis, leader of Call to Renewal, a network of churches that fight poverty, told the New York Times that shortly after his election, Bush had said to him, "I don`t understand how poor people think," and had described himself as a "white Republican guy who doesn`t get it, but I`d like to." What`s annoying about Bush is when this obtuseness, the blinkeredness of his life, weighs so heavily on others, as it has increasingly as he has acquired more power.

There was a telling episode in 1999 when the Department of Agriculture came out with its annual statistics on hunger, showing that once again Texas was near the top. Texas is a perennial leader in hunger because we have 43 counties in South Texas (and some in East Texas) that are like Third World countries. If our border region were a state, it would be first in poverty, first in the percentage of schoolchildren living in poverty, first in the percentage of adults without a high school diploma, 51st in income per capita, and so on.

When the 1999 hunger stats were announced, Bush threw a tantrum. He thought it was some malign Clinton plot to make his state look bad because he was running for president. "I saw the report that children in Texas are going hungry. Where?" he demanded. "No children are going to go hungry in this state. You`d think the governor would have heard if there are pockets of hunger in Texas." You would, wouldn`t you? That is the point at which ignorance becomes inexcusable. In five years, Bush had never spent time with people in the colonias, South Texas` shantytowns; he had never been to a session with Valley Interfaith, a consortium of border churches and schools and the best community organization in the state. There is no excuse for a governor to be unaware of this huge reality of Texas.

Take any area -- environment, labor, education, taxes, health -- and go to the websites of public-interest groups in that field. You will find page after page of minor adjustments, quiet repeals, no-big-deal new policies, all of them cruel, destructive, and harmful. A silent change in regulations, an executive order, a funding cutoff. No headlines. Below the radar. Again and again and again. Head Start, everybody`s favorite government program, is being targeted for "improvement" by leaving it to the tender mercies of Mississippi and Alabama. An AIDS program that helps refugees in Africa and Asia gets its funding cut because one of the seven groups involved once worked with the United Nations, which once worked with the Chinese government, which once supported forced abortions.

So what manner of monster is behind these outrages? I have known George W. Bush slightly since we were both in high school, and I studied him closely as governor. He is neither mean nor stupid. What we have here is a man shaped by three intertwining strands of Texas culture, combined with huge blinkers of class. The three Texas themes are religiosity, anti-intellectualism, and machismo. They all play well politically with certain constituencies.

Let`s assume the religiosity is genuine; no one is in a position to know otherwise. I leave it to more learned commentators to address what "Christian" might actually mean in terms of public policy.

The anti-intellectualism is also authentic. This is a grudge Bush has carried at least since his college days when he felt looked down on as a frat rat by more cerebral types. Despite his pedigree and prep schools, he ran into Eastern stereotypes of Texans at Yale, a common experience at Ivy schools in that time. John F. Kennedy, the consummate, effortlessly graceful, classy Harvard man, had just been assassinated in ugly old Dallas, and Lyndon Johnson`s public piety gave many people the creeps. Texans were more or less thought of as yahoo barbarians somewhere between the Beverly Hillbillies and Deliverance. I do not exaggerate by much. To have a Texas accent in the East in those days was to have 20 points automatically deducted from your estimated IQ. And Texans have this habit of playing to the stereotype -- it`s irresistible. One proud Texan I know had never owned a pair of cowboy boots in his life until he got a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard. Just didn`t want to let anyone down.

For most of us who grow up in the "boonies" and go to school in the East, it`s like speaking two languages -- Bill Clinton, for example, is perfectly bilingual. But it`s not unusual for a spell in the East to reinforce one`s Texanness rather than erode it, and that`s what happened to Bush. Bush had always had trouble reading -- we assume it is dyslexia (although Slate`s Jacob Weisberg attributes it to aphasia); his mom was still doing flash cards with him when he was in junior high. Feeling intellectually inferior apparently fed into his resentment of Easterners and other known forms of snob.

Bush once said, "There`s a West Texas populist streak in me, and it irritates me when these people come out to Midland and look at my friends with just the utmost disdain." In his mind, Midland is the true-blue heartland of the old vox pop. The irony is that Midland along with its twin city, Odessa, is one of the most stratified and narrow places in the country. Both are oil towns with amazingly strict class segregation. Midland is the white-collar, Republican town; Odessa is the blue-collar, Democratic town. The class conflict plays out in an annual football rivalry so intense that H.G. Bissinger featured it in his best-selling book, Friday Night Lights. To mistake Midland for the volk heartland is the West Texas equivalent of assuming that Greenwich, Connecticut, is Levittown.

In fact, people in Midland are real nice folks: I can`t prove that with statistics, but I know West Texas and it`s just a fact. Open, friendly, no side to `em. The problem is, they`re way isolated out there and way limited too. You can have dinner at the Petroleum Club anytime with a bunch of them and you`ll come away saying, "Damn, those are nice people. Sure glad they don`t run the world." It is still such a closed, narrow place, where everybody is white, Protestant, and agrees with everybody else. It`s not unusual to find people who think, as George W. did when he lived there, that Jimmy Carter was leading the country toward "European-style socialism." A board member of the ACLU of Texas was asked recently if there had been any trouble with gay bashing in Midland. "Oh, hell, honey," she drawled, "there`s not a gay in Midland who will come out of the closet for fear people will think they`re Democrats."

The machismo is what I suspect is fake. Bush is just another upper-class white boy trying to prove he`s tough. The minute he is questioned, he becomes testy and defensive. That`s one reason they won`t let him hold many press conferences. When he tells stories about his dealings with two of the toughest men who ever worked in politics -- the late Lee Atwater and the late Bob Bullock -- Bush, improbably, comes off as the toughest mother in the face-down. I wouldn`t put money on it being true. Bullock, the late lieutenant governor and W`s political mentor in Texas, could be and often was meaner than a skilletful of rattlesnakes. Bush`s story is that one time, Bullock cordially informed him that he was about to fuck him. Bush stood up and kissed Bullock, saying, "If I`m gonna get fucked, at least I should be kissed." It probably happened, but I guarantee you Bullock won the fight. Bush never got what made Bullock more than just a supermacho pol -- the old son of a bitch was on the side of the people. Mostly.

The perfect absurdity of all this, of course, is that Bush`s identification with the sturdy yeomen of Midland (actually, oil-company executives almost to a man) is so wildly at variance with his real background. Bush likes to claim the difference between him and his father is that, "He went to Greenwich Country Day and I went to San Jacinto Junior High." He did. For one year. Then his family moved to a posh neighborhood in Houston, and he went to the second-best prep school in town (couldn`t get into the best one) before going off to Andover as a legacy.

Jim Hightower`s great line about Bush, "Born on third and thinks he hit a triple," is still painfully true. Bush has simply never acknowledged that not only was he born with a silver spoon in his mouth -- he`s been eating off it ever since. The reason there is no noblesse oblige about Dubya is because he doesn`t admit to himself or anyone else that he owes his entire life to being named George W. Bush. He didn`t just get a head start by being his father`s son -- it remained the single most salient fact about him for most of his life. He got into Andover as a legacy. He got into Yale as a legacy. He got into Harvard Business School as a courtesy (he was turned down by the University of Texas Law School). He got into the Texas Air National Guard -- and sat out Vietnam -- through Daddy`s influence. (I would like to point out that that particular unit of FANGers, as regular Air Force referred to the "Fucking Air National Guard," included not only the sons of Governor John Connally and Senator Lloyd Bentsen, but some actual black members as well -- they just happened to play football for the Dallas Cowboys.) Bush was set up in the oil business by friends of his father. He went broke and was bailed out by friends of his father. He went broke again and was bailed out again by friends of his father; he went broke yet again and was bailed out by some fellow Yalies.

That Bush`s administration is salted with the sons of somebody-or-other should come as no surprise. I doubt it has ever even occurred to Bush that there is anything wrong with a class-driven good-ol`-boy system. That would explain why he surrounds himself with people like Eugene Scalia (son of Justice Antonin Scalia), whom he named solicitor of the Department of Labor -- apparently as a cruel joke. Before taking that job, the younger Scalia was a handsomely paid lobbyist working against ergonomic regulations designed to prevent repetitive stress injuries. His favorite technique was sarcastic invective against workers who supposedly faked injuries when the biggest hazard they faced was "dissatisfaction with co-workers and supervisors." More than 5 million Americans are injured on the job every year, and more die annually from work-related causes than were killed on September 11. Neither Scalia nor Bush has ever held a job requiring physical labor.

What is the disconnect? One can see it from the other side -- people`s lives are being horribly affected by the Bush administration`s policies, but they make no connection between what happens to them and the decisions made in Washington. I think I understand why so many people who are getting screwed do not know who is screwing them. What I don`t get is the disconnect at the top. Is it that Bush doesn`t want to see? No one brought it to his attention? He doesn`t care?

Okay, we cut taxes for the rich and so we have to cut services for the poor. Presumably there is some right-wing justification along the lines that helping poor people just makes them more dependent or something. If there were a rationale Bush could express, it would be one thing, but to watch him not see, not make the connection, is another thing entirely. Welfare, Medicare, Social Security, food stamps -- horrors, they breed dependency. Whereas inheriting millions of dollars and having your whole life handed to you on a platter is good for the grit in your immortal soul? What we`re dealing with here is a man in such serious denial it would be pathetic if it weren`t damaging so many lives.

Bush`s lies now fill volumes. He lied us into two hideously unfair tax cuts; he lied us into an unnecessary war with disastrous consequences; he lied us into the Patriot Act, eviscerating our freedoms. But when it comes to dealing with those less privileged, Bush`s real problem is not deception, but self-deception.

Ever since their paths crossed in high school, Mother Jones contributing writer Molly Ivins has been an observer of our president. Her books about Bush include Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush`s America and Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush

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OPENLY EPISCOPAL MAN JOINS VILLAGE PEOPLE

Controversy Threatens to Tear Disco Band Asunder

For the first time in their three decades of existence, the disco band The Village People have inducted an openly Episcopal man, igniting a controversy that threatens to tear the fabled group asunder.

Holding a press conference in New York City today, The Construction Worker, a prominent member of The Village People since its inception in the 1970’s, urged “tolerance and understanding” for its latest member, The Episcopal Guy, who joined the group over the weekend.

“From the start, The Village People have been all about inclusiveness,” The Construction Worker said. “And introducing The Episcopal Guy as our latest member is part of that tradition.”

While The Indian Chief and The Fireman were reportedly in agreement with The Construction Worker about including The Episcopal Guy in the band, The Policeman, The Cowboy, and the Leather-clad Guy were reportedly opposed, creating speculation that The Village People might split up into two smaller, somewhat less influential disco bands.

Meanwhile, one full day after rap impresario Sean “P. Diddy” Combs ran the New York City Marathon, Mr. Combs’ posse finally crossed the finish line with a time of 30:16:27.

While the posse’s finish was unimpressive compared to that of the winner, Kenyan Martin Lel, it does set a new record for best finish by a bloated entourage of leeches and parasites.

Rounding out the day’s entertainment news, the CBS network, under fire for its controversial new miniseries about President Ronald Reagan starring James Brolin, today “indefinitely postponed” plans for a miniseries about former Vice President Dan Quayle starring Carrot Top.

http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=729


“New York’s hottest and hippest literary ticket.” – The Wall Street Journal

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http://www.takebackthemedia.com/index.shtml


Dieses Teil ist 9 Monate alt, aber aktueller als damals. Ein Flash Video:

http://www.takebackthemedia.com/pentagoon2.html


NEW! Dick Cheney and Friends Appear in Santa Barbara to throw money to teeming crowds! Click here for the newest Flash Animation!

http://www.takebackthemedia.com/noprotest.html

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Sunday, November 09, 2003
War News for November 9, 2003

Zu jeder Meldung ein Link:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/


Bring ‘em on: US soldier killed, one wounded by roadside bomb in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: US contractor missing since October 9.

Bring ‘em on: British convoy ambushed in Basra by roadside bomb.

Bring ‘em on: US soldiers ambushed in Mosul; several US soldiers reported wounded, residents burn US vehicle.

Bring ‘em on: US compound in Baghdad mortared again.

Demonstrations of force provoke resentment and resistance.

Rummy’s Iraqi police: another neo-con fiasco in the making.

Bremer unhappy with hand-picked IRC. “The United States is deeply frustrated with its hand-picked council members because they have spent more time on their own political or economic interests than in planning for Iraq`s political future, especially selecting a committee to write a new constitution, the officials added.” Sounds more like Bremer caught them poaching on the CPA’s turf.

Attacks on oil pipelines increasing. “Not only are the acts of sabotage targeting Iraq`s main export pipeline to Turkey and preventing the resumption of exports through it, but they are also interrupting the supply of crude to the Dora and Baiji refineries.”

CPA confirms Bush Crony Doctrine: “The US is to reaffirm that non-American companies cannot win government contracts in the multi-billion dollar effort to rebuild Iraq.”

Iraqi resistance more than the band of thugs that the Bushies want you to believe they are.

Case for Bush`s War “confected.”

More military families sound off against Bush’s War.

New York soldier returns from Iraq. “On June 19, Leary was in the turret of a Humvee with a machine gun and an automatic grenade launcher, doing convoy support through the desert. In a single blast, a rocket-propelled grenade struck the vehicle and threw Leary about 60 feet. The driver and assistant driver were both killed when the Humvee exploded into a fireball. President Bush had declared the fighting over in Iraq seven weeks earlier.”



Commentary

Opinion: Thoughts from a Winter Soldier. “The policy of blindly striking out to gain revenge has became the play of the day. On Sept. 12, 2001, the goodwill of the world was with the United States. The United Nations supported to the hilt U.S. and allied actions to weed out and bring to justice the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attack. But the last two years of unilateralism and arrogance by the Bush administration have diminished our support around the world. We are neck-deep in the big muddy, folks, and no one out there is going to throw us a rope until we show the world we are willing to cooperate on the issue of rebuilding Iraq and turning over power to the people of that country.”

Editorial: “The more American President George W. Bush gets involved in Middle East issues, the more obvious it becomes how deficient is his knowledge of the region.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Tennessee soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Massachusetts soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: South Carolina soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Massachusetts soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Missouri soldier killed in Iraq.



# posted by yankeedoodle : 2:42 AM
Comment (1)

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Mossad chief: invasion has created a holy war
By Kim Sengupta and Kendah El-Ali
09 November 2003


A former chief of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, has accused the United States and Britain of lack of foresight over the Iraq invasion and warned of even greater violence unless the civic infrastructure is established quickly.

Major General Danny Yatom said the presence of Western forces in Iraq has presented the opportunity for a holy war, or jihad, by Islamists in a country surrounded by Muslim neighbours.

Speaking during a visit to London, Gen Yatom said: "Colin Powell has always said that if the coalition went into Iraq, they had to get out. But it seems America did not have such a plan in place. They are lacking such a plan, and that is what is urgently needed now."

The failure to restore basic amenities such as water and power has been one of the biggest obstacles to winning over the Iraqi people to "show that the democratic system works," said Gen Yatom, whose visit was organised by the group Friends of Hebrew University.

"This must be a priority. It should not be too difficult; after all you don`t have to go to the moon to get that kind of thing. Establishing these basic things must give the people the confidence to start on the political process."

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Cheney`s Long Path to War
By Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas, Newsweek

http://www.msnbc.com/news/991209.asp
Every Thursday, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have lunch together in a small dining room off the Oval Office. They eat alone; no aides are present. They have no fixed agenda, but it`s a safe assumption that they often talk about intelligence--about what the United States knows, or doesn`t know, about the terrorist threat.

THE PRESIDENT RESPECTS Cheney`s judgment, say White House aides, and values the veep`s long experience in the intelligence community (as President Gerald Ford`s chief of staff, as a member of the House Intelligence Committee in the 1980s and as secretary of Defense in the George H.W. Bush administration). As vice president, Cheney is free to roam about the various agencies, quizzing analysts and top spooks about terrorists and their global connections. "This is a very important area. It`s the one the president asked me to work on ... I ask a lot of hard questions," Cheney told NBC`s Tim Russert last September. "That`s my job."
Of all the president`s advisers, Cheney has consistently taken the most dire view of the terrorist threat. On Iraq, Bush was the decision maker. But more than any adviser, Cheney was the one to make the case to the president that war against Iraq was an urgent necessity. Beginning in the late summer of 2002, he persistently warned that Saddam was stocking up on chemical and biological weapons, and last March, on the eve of the invasion, he declared that "we believe that he [Saddam Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons." (Cheney later said that he meant "program," not "weapons." He also said, a bit optimistically, "I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.") After seven months, investigators are still looking for that arsenal of WMD.

Cheney has repeatedly suggested that Baghdad has ties to Al Qaeda. He has pointedly refused to rule out suggestions that Iraq was somehow to blame for the 9/11 attacks and may even have played a role in the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The CIA and FBI, as well as a congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks, have dismissed this conspiracy theory. Still, as recently as Sept. 14, Cheney continued to leave the door open to Iraqi complicity. He brought up a report--widely discredited by U.S. intelligence officials--that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001. And he described Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11." A few days later, a somewhat sheepish President Bush publicly corrected the vice president. There was no evidence, Bush admitted, to suggest that the Iraqis were behind 9/11.

Cheney has long been regarded as a Washington wise man. He has a dry, deliberate manner; a penetrating, if somewhat wintry, wit, and a historian`s long-view sensibility. He is far to the right politically, but in no way wild-eyed; in private conversation he seems moderate, thoughtful, cautious. Yet when it comes to terrorist plots, he seems to have given credence to the views of some fairly flaky ideologues and charlatans. Writing recently in The New Yorker, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh alleged that Cheney had, in effect, become the dupe of a cabal of neoconservative full-mooners, the Pentagon`s mysteriously named Office of Special Plans and the patsy of an alleged bank swindler and would-be ruler of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi.

A Cheney aide took strong exception to the notion that the vice president was at the receiving end of some kind of private pipeline for half-baked or fraudulent intelligence, or that he was somehow carrying water for the neocons or anyone else`s self-serving agendas. "That`s an urban myth," said this aide, who declined to be identified. Cheney has cited as his "gold standard" the National Intelligence Estimate, a consensus report put out by the entire intelligence community. And, indeed, an examination of the declassified version of the NIE reveals some pretty alarming warnings. "Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," the October 2002 NIE states.

Nonetheless, it appears that Cheney has been susceptible to "cherry-picking," embracing those snippets of intelligence that support his dark prognosis while discarding others that don`t. He is widely regarded in the intelligence community as an outlier, as a man who always goes for the worst-case --scenario and sometimes overlooks less alarming or at least ambiguous signs. Top intelligence officials reject the suggestion that Cheney has somehow bullied lower-level CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency analysts into telling him what he wants to hear. But they do describe the Office of the Vice President, with its large and assertive staff, as a kind of free-floating power base that at times brushes aside the normal policymaking machinery under national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice. On the road to war, Cheney in effect created a parallel government that became the real power center.

Cheney, say those who know him, is in no way cynically manipulative. By all accounts, he is genuinely convinced that the threat is imminent and menacing. Professional intelligence analysts can offer measured, nuanced opinions, but policymakers, Cheney likes to say, have to decide. As he put it last July in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, "How could any responsible leader have ignored the Iraqi threat?" And yet Cheney seems to have rung the warning bell a little too loudly and urgently. If nothing else, his apparently exaggerated alarms over Iraq, WMD and the terror connection may make Americans slow to respond the next time he sees a wolf at the door.
What is it about Cheney’s character and background that makes him such a Cassandra? And did his powerful dirge drown out more-modulated voices in the councils of power in Washington and in effect launch America on the path to war? Cheney declined an interview request from NEWSWEEK, but interviews with his aides and a wide variety of sources in the intelligence and national-security community paint the portrait of a vice president who may be too powerful for his own good.
Cheney, say those who know him, has always had a Hobbesian view of life. The world is a dangerous place; war is the natural state of mankind; enemies lurk. The national-security state must be strong, vigilant and wary. Cheney believes that America’s military and intelligence establishments were weakened by defeat in Vietnam and the wave of scandals that followed in Watergate in the ’70s and Iran-contra in the ’80s. He did not regard as progress the rise of congressional investigating committees, special prosecutors and an increasingly adversarial, aggressive press. Cheney is a strong believer in the necessity of government secrecy as well as more broadly the need to preserve and protect the power of the executive branch.
He never delivers these views in a rant. Rather, Cheney talks in a low, arid voice, if at all. He usually waits until the end of a meeting to speak up, and then speaks so softly and cryptically, out of one side of his mouth, so that people have to lean forward to hear. (In a babble of attention-seekers, this can be a powerful way of getting heard.) Cheney rarely shows anger or alarm, but on occasion his exasperation emerges.
One such moment came at the end of the first gulf war in 1991. Cheney was secretary of Defense, and arms inspectors visiting defeated Iraq had discovered that Saddam Hussein was much closer to building a nuclear weapon than anyone had realized. Why, Cheney wondered aloud to his aides, had a steady stream of U.S. intelligence experts beaten a path to his door before the war to say that the Iraqis were at least five to 10 years away from building a bomb? Years later, in meetings of the second President Bush’s war cabinet, Cheney would return again and again to the question of how Saddam could create an entire hidden nuclear program without the CIA’s knowing much, if anything, about it.
Cheney’s suspicions—about both the strength of Iraq and the weakness of U.S. intelligence agencies—were fed after he left government. Cheney spent a considerable amount of time with the scholars and backers of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank that has served as a conservative government-in-waiting. Cheney was on the board of directors and his wife, Lynne, a conservative activist on social issues, still keeps an office there as a resident “fellow.” At various lunches and dinners around Washington, sponsored by AEI and other conservative organizations, Cheney came in contact with other foreign-policy hard-liners or “neoconservatives” like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. It was an article of faith in the AEI crowd that the United States had missed a chance to knock off Saddam in 1991; that Saddam was rebuilding his stockpile of WMD, and that sooner or later the Iraqi strongman would have to go. When some dissidents in northern Iraq tried to mount an insurrection with CIA backing in the mid-’90s and failed, the conservatives blamed the Clinton administration for showing weakness. Clinton’s national-security adviser, Tony Lake, had, it was alleged, “pulled the plug.”
In the late ’90s, Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of one of the resistance groups, the Iraqi National Congress, began cultivating and lobbying intellectuals, journalists and political leaders in Washington. Chalabi —had a shadowy past; his family, exiled from Iraq in the late ’50s, had set up a banking empire through the Middle East that collapsed in charges of fraud in 1989. (Chalabi, who has always denied wrongdoing, has been convicted and sentenced, in absentia, by a Jordanian military court to 22 years of hard labor.) But operating out of London, the smoothly persuasive Chalabi presented himself as a democratic answer to Saddam Hussein. With a little American backing, he promised, he could rally the Iraqi people to overthrow the Butcher of Baghdad.
Chalabi was hailed in some circles, especially among the neocons at AEI, as the “George Washington of Iraq.” But the professionals at the State Department and at the CIA took a more skeptical view. In 1999, after Congress had passed and President Bill Clinton had signed the Iraqi Liberation Act, providing funds to support Iraqi exile groups, the U.S. government convened a conference with the INC and other opposition groups in London to discuss “regime change.” The American officials proposed bringing INC activists to America for training. Chalabi’s aides objected. Most of the likely candidates were Iraqi refugees living in various European countries. By coming to the United States, they could lose their refugee status. Some Pentagon officials shook their heads in disbelief. “You had to wonder,” said one who attended the conference, “how serious were these people. They kept telling us they wanted to risk their lives for their country. But they were afraid to risk their refugee status in Sweden?”
After the Republicans regained the White House in 2001, many of the neocons took top national-security jobs. Perle, the man closest to Chalabi, chose to stay on the outside (where he kept a lucrative lobbying practice). But Wolfowitz and Feith became, respectively, the No. 2 and No. 3 man at the Defense Department, and a former Wolfowitz aide, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became the vice president’s chief of staff. Once the newcomers took over, the word went out that any disparaging observations about Chalabi or the INC were no longer appreciated. “The view was, ‘If you weren’t a total INC guy, then you’re on the wrong side’,” said a Pentagon official. “It was, ‘We’re not going to trash the INC anymore and Ahmad Chalabi is an Iraqi patriot who risked his life for his country’. ”
Some neocons began agitating inside the Bush administration to support some kind of insurrection, led by Chalabi, that would overthrow Saddam. In the summer of 2001, the neocons circulated a plan to support an INC-backed invasion. A senior Pentagon analyst questioned whether Iraqis would rise up to back it. “You’re thinking like the Clinton people,” a Feith aide shot back. “They planned for failure. We plan for success.” It is important to note that at this early stage, the neocons did not have the enthusiastic backing of Vice President Cheney. Just because Cheney had spent a lot of time around the Get Saddam neocons does not mean that he had become one, says an administration aide. “It’s a mistake to add up two and two and get 18,” he says. Cheney’s cautious side kept him from leaping into any potential Bay of Pigs covert actions.
What changed Cheney was not Chalabi or his friends from AEI, but the 9/11 attacks. For years Cheney had feared—and warned against—a terrorist attack on an American city. The hijacked planes that plowed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon confirmed his suspicions of American vulnerability—though by no means his worst fears—that the terrorists would use a biological or nuclear weapon. “9/11 changed everything,” Cheney began saying to anyone who would listen. It was no longer enough to treat terrorism as a law-enforcement matter, Cheney believed. The United States had to find ways to act against the terrorists before they struck.
Cheney began collecting intelligence on the threat anywhere he could find it. Along with Libby, his chief of staff, the vice president began showing up at the CIA and DIA for briefings. Cheney would ask probing questions from different analysts in various agencies and then, later with his staff, connect the dots. Such an aggressive national-security role by a vice president was unusual. So was the sheer size of Cheney’s staff—about 60 people, much larger than the size of Al Gore’s. The threat from germ warfare was a particular concern of Cheney’s. After 9/11, Libby kept calling over to the Defense Department, asking what the military was doing to guard against a bio attack from crop-dusters. In July 2002, Cheney made a surprise, unpublicized visit to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. He wanted to question directly the public-health experts about their efforts to combat bioterrorism. If not for the traffic snarls caused by his motorcade, his visit might have remained a secret.
There was, within the administration, another office parsing through intelligence on the Iraqi and terror threat. The Office of Special Plans was so secretive at first that the director, William Luti, did not even want to mention its existence. “Don’t ever talk about this,” Luti told his staff, according to a source who attended early meetings. “If anybody asks, just say no comment.” (Luti does not recall this, but he does regret choosing such a spooky name for the office.) The Office of Special Plans has sometimes been described as an intelligence cell, along the lines of “Team B,” set up by the Ford administration in the 1970s to second-guess the CIA when conservatives believed that the intelligence community was underestimating the Soviet threat. But OSP is more properly described as a planning group—planning for war in Iraq. Some of the OSP staffers were true believers. Abe Shulsky, a defense intellectual who ran the office under Luti, was a Straussian, a student of a philosopher named Leo Strauss, who believed that ancient texts had hidden meanings that only an elite could divine. Strauss taught that philosophers needed to tell —”noble lies” to the politicians and the people.
The OSP gathered up bits and pieces of intelligence that pointed to Saddam’s WMD programs and his ties to terror groups. The OSP would prepare briefing papers for administration officials to use. The OSP also drew on reports of defectors who alleged that Saddam was hiding bio and chem weapons under hospitals and schools. Some of these defectors were provided to the intelligence community by Chalabi, who also fed them to large news organizations, like The New York Times. Vanity Fair published a few of the more lurid reports, deemed to be bogus by U.S. intelligence agencies (like one alleging that Saddam was running a terrorist-training camp, complete with a plane fuselage in which to practice hijackings). The CIA was skeptical about the motivation and credibility of these defectors, but their stories gained wide circulation.
Cheney’s staffers were in more than occasional contact with the OSP. Luti, an intense and brilliant former naval aviator who flew combat missions in the gulf war, worked in Cheney’s office before he took over OSP, and was well liked by Cheney’s staff. Luti’s office had absorbed a small, secretive intelligence-analysis shop in the Pentagon known as Team B (after the original Team B) whose research linked 9/11 to both Al Qaeda and the Iranian terror group Hizbullah. The team was particularly fascinated by the allegation that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent. One of Team B’s creators—David Wurmser—now works on Cheney’s staff. Libby went to at least one briefing with Team B staffers at which they discussed Saddam’s terror connections. It would be a mistake, however, to overstate the influence of OSP on Cheney or his staff. Cheney collected information from many sources, but principally from the main intelligence agencies, the CIA and DIA. Likewise, Cheney’s aides say that they talked to Chalabi and his people about “opposition politics”—not about WMD or terrorism. (“The whole idea that we were mainlining dubious INC reports into the intelligence community is simply nonsense,” Paul Wolfowitz told NEWSWEEK.)
There has been much speculation in the press and in the intelligence community about the impact of the conspiracy theories of Laurie Mylroie on the Bush administration. A somewhat eccentric Harvard-trained political scientist, Mylroie argued (from guesswork and sketchy evidence) that the 1993 World Trade Center attack was an Iraqi intelligence operation. When AEI published an updated version of her book “Study of Revenge” two years ago, her acknowledgments cited the help of, among others, Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of State John Bolton and Libby. But Cheney aides say that the vice president has never even discussed Mylroie’s book. (“I take satisfaction in the fact that we went to war with Iraq and got rid of Saddam Hussein,” said Mylroie. “The rest is details.”)
Cheney is hardly the only intelligence adviser to the president. CIA Director George Tenet briefs the president every morning. But Tenet was often caught up defending his agency. Cheney feels free to criticize, and he does. “Cheney was very distrustful and remains very distrustful of the traditional intelligence establishment,” says a former White House official. “He thinks they are too cautious or too invested in their own policy concerns.” Cheney is not as “passionate” in his dissents as Wolfowitz, the leading intellectual neocon in the administration. But he carries more clout.
Cheney often teams up with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to roll over national-security adviser Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell. “OVP [Cheney’s office] and OSD [Rumsfeld’s office] turned into their own axis of evil,” grouses a former White House official, who added that Cheney and Rumsfeld shared the same strategic vision: pessimistic and dark. Some observers see a basic breakdown in the government. Rice has chosen to play more of an advisory role to the president and failed to coordinate the often warring agencies like State and Defense. “Cheney was acting as national-security adviser because of Rice’s failure to do so,” says Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
State Department staffers say that Cheney’s office pushed hard to include dubious evidence of Iraq’s terror ties in Powell’s speech to the United Nations last February. Libby fought for an inclusion of the alleged meeting between Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague. Powell resisted, but Powell’s aides were impressed with Libby’s persistence. In the end, the reference to Atta was dropped, but Powell did include other examples linking Baghdad to Al Qaeda. When the State Department wanted to cut off funds to Chalabi for alleged accounting failures, Cheney backed shifting the money from the State Department to the Defense Department. It is significant, however, that Cheney ultimately did not support setting up Chalabi as a government in exile, a ploy that the State Department and CIA strongly opposed. They feared that Chalabi would proclaim himself ruler-by-fiat after an American invasion. Though Chalabi’s people often talked to Cheney’s staff, the vice president has no particular brief for the INC chief over any other democratically elected leader, says an administration official.
Accused of overstating the Iraqi threat by politicians and pundits, Cheney is publicly and privately unrepentant. He believes that Al Qaeda is determined to obtain weapons of mass destruction and use them against American civilians in their cities and homes. To ignore those warnings would be “irresponsible in the extreme,” he says in his speeches. His staffers are not unmindful of the risk of crying wolf, however, and acknowledge that if weapons of mass destruction are never found in Iraq, the public will be much less likely to back pre-emptive wars in the future. Cheney still believes the WMD will turn up somewhere in Iraq—if they aren’t first used against us by terrorists.


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With Tamara Lipper, Richard Wolffe and Roy Gutman

Casualties of War
The death toll among soldiers is mounting, even as political pressure builds and we head into a bitter election battle
http://www.msnbc.com/news/991206.asp?0sl=-21

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November 8, 2003

The Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
The Bride Wore Black
By SAUL LANDAU

"This is a first," a colleague moaned, claiming that the country has fallen into the hands of a religious cult. "Look," he directed me, "at the crusade-like rhetoric emanating from high circles about the Iraq effort, while we get dosed with supposedly Christian doctrines of enforcement from Attorney General John Ashcroft." He meant the 2001 order from the AG to cover a bare breast on a statue in the Department of Justice as well as his Puritanical diktats that decry abortion and exalt the death penalty.

"Look at history," I reminded my colleague. "Until the late 17th Century, a theocracy ruled Massachusetts Bay Colony. Those Puritans believed in witches and the Devil. They also fostered aggressive conversion of the heathen, so that all might hear the `revealed word.` God had instructed them to build a `Zion in the Wilderness,` so He could issue in the Kingdom of the Apocalypse, or what the current holy rollers call The Rapture. The Puritan mission to create a virtuous society worthy of God`s redemption placed an urgent burden on their pious shoulders. Since God had chosen these Puritans to do His mission, the stoic New Englanders could not afford to indulge in sentimentality or other forms of weakness. They tried to eliminate the Devil`s presence by killing his witches after fair trials of course.

"Today," I argued, "the religious or ideological descendents of the Puritan elite, the modern crusaders, repeat similar messages from the pulpit and even from the Pentagon." I offered as an illustration Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence General William G. Boykin, who called a dark spot on a photograph in Mogadishu, Somalia `a manifestation of evil.`

In speeches Boykin refers to the "Christian army," waging holy war against the "idol" of Islam`s false God, and the "spiritual battle" against "a guy named Satan" who "wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army." This does not sound like the emissions coming from the mouth of rational Jewish neo conservatives like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. With completely secular logic, Wolfy explained to Vanity Fair (May 2003) that "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."

Now, imagine an intellectual marriage between these two men! Does it seem bizarre that ultra zany Christian theologians wearing military uniforms marry Jewish neo-con ideologues? In the 21st Century, this union has not replaced the family, but it has invaded the space traditionally occupied by foreign policy strategists.

One could see the invasion of Iraq as the nuptial ceremony for this bizarre matrimony. The war itself, over in weeks, symbolized the honeymoon period when both sides of this crusading union talked about "liberating Iraq" and bringing democracy to the Middle East." This act of "liberation" destroyed with missiles and bombs Iraq`s infrastructure. The neo-con/Christian fundamentalist merger received the blessings of President George W. Bush when he declared victory who could forget his jet landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln? In his May 1 self-congratulatory speech he also indirectly applauded those who had brought him to lead the country into a pre-emptive attack against Iraq.

Then, even as US troops began to rebuild Iraq, the consequences of an unjust war began to intrude. The very neo-cons and Christians who had predicted that Iraqis would welcome our soldiers as liberators, had to face the harsh truth that many Iraqis deeply resented the invasion and the occupation of their country. By the end of October more than 200 US soldiers have died, more than a thousand wounded, more than a dozen suicides; thousands more have fallen seriously ill and been evacuated. Bush`s declaration of victory might even have echoed harshly in the ears of Wolfowitz himself as mortars struck the hotel that lodged him in Baghdad where he had been busy issuing optimistic statements. As Ramadan commenced at the very end of October, suicide bombers struck four targets in Baghdad and hit other Iraqi targets as well. Wolfowitz looked shaken. The fanatics on the enemy side seemed even more committed than Wolfy and his new theological partner.

The peace and order promised by the president as his newly married advisers assured him did not materialize. Instead, the numbers of attacks on US occupation forces, including those by suicide bombers, has grown. The army`s morale has declined. A Member of Congress told me that National Guardsmen from his district call him regularly to complain about as many as twenty attacks a day on US patrols. Guardsmen`s wives also complain, he said, that their husbands did not join the National Guard to become an occupation force in a country whose people didn`t want them.

The Member went on to describe the condition of some of the wounded he had visited in a Washington DC military hospital. "They have lost legs, arms and eyes," he said. "Some of these poor young men told me that their humvees didn`t have proper protection against explosives or rocket propelled grenades, but had only canvas flaps. The Administration spends our money freely on contracts to Halliburton and Bechtel, but they don`t seem to be able to give our guys proper protection." The Congressman said that only recently had the occupying troops received Kevlar vests.

Bush has sworn to use them to bring order to Iraq, despite the Administration`s stinginess on providing soldiers protective material. So, ironically, the very agency and methods that destroyed Iraq, will now rebuild it: killing and intimidating to install order and democracy very different from Saddam Hussein`s methods!

But the Administration continues to boast of its progress in Iraq and label critics as party poopers. For upbeat news, watch Fox or CNN. The bad news, the human and material price of occupying a country whose people resent the occupiers, seeps out in daily reports of casualties: dead, wounded, sick (physically and mentally) and suicides.

The Bushies count on their New Crusaders as a counterweight. One example of the new imperialists, Reverend Bobby Welch, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Daytona Beach, Florida, invites his colleagues on an April 22-23 visit to The John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg "to share an experience with the Green Berets."

If your mind flashes back to the original crusades, you`ve had an insight. "It is believed by you, me and others," Welch extols, "that we must find a group of men who are warriors of FAITH, pastors who have the guts to lead this nation to Christ and revival."

The Special Forces will demonstrate for the visiting clergy "today`s war fighting weapons," ("live fire/real bullets"). They`ll watch, hand-to-hand combat and discover how "Special Forces attack the enemy inside buildings. The trip includes a visit with Major General William Boykin, who had collaborated previously with Reverend Welch. At the time Boykin commanded the special warfare center (<www.thenation.com> 4-9-03).

Try and picture New Crusaders like Reverend Welch at the wedding when the brainy Wolfowitz mated with the muscular Boykin. The neo cons who fed ideologically at the trough of the Heritage Foundation and founded The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) wanted "to promote American global leadership." Among those who founded this 1997 Project one finds VP Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

While Boykin rants about Muslim devils Wolfowitz seeks to convert the United States into the world`s permanent and only superpower. No nation, backward and hostile or advanced and friendly could challenge US supremacy. To achieve this, Wolfowitz advocated preemptive military actions "when collective action cannot be orchestrated." Since 1998, Wolfowitz has called for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power by force as a major goal of policy.

Wolfowitz foresaw that such a transformation of policy from alliances to uni-literalism would encounter resistance from Congress, save for "a catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." The events of 9/11 served the purpose. But he and his fellow neo cons needed a man to realize their crusade on the one hand and a wider pulpit from which the new word would issue forth.

And Boykin offered the Christian soldiers the reason to support Emperor Bush. "Why is this man in the White House?" Boykin asked rhetorically. "The majority of Americans did not vote for him," he accurately stated. "He`s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this."

Fellow fundamentalist Jerry Falwell backed Boykin. He told an October 22, 2003 CNN "Crossfire" audience that "God rules in the affairs of men. And history would support that." Not only did God choose Bush (43) but "we needed Bill Clinton, because we turned our backs on the lord and we needed a bad president to get our attention again."

Falwell evokes images of Cotton Mather`s Church in the 17th Century. The Puritan salvation mission might have contained more sophisticated theology than that provided by the Boykins and Falwells, but it`s the same hunt for witches and Devils. As the sage once said, "the first time around tragedy, then again, farce." Unfortunately, we`re living in the second go around. So, get off your butts unless you want the Boykin-Wolfowitz marriage to generate real offspring.

Saul Landau is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. He teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University. For Landau`s writing in Spanish visit: www.rprogreso.com. His new book, PRE-EMPTIVE EMPIRE: A GUIDE TO BUSH S KINGDOM, has just been published by Pluto Press. He can be reached at: [e-mail]

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Summary Military Fatalities:

US___UK_Other__Total

393__53__6_______452

11/09/03 Stars&Stripes: 7000 injured and ill from Iraq war
Congressional delegation stops to visit patients at Landstuhl
11/09/03 femail: Brits caught in Basra blast
British Army vehicle was damaged by homemade explosive in an attack in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed.
11/09/03 WaPo:British soldier wounded in Basra
A British soldier was injured in a land mine explosion in Basra, Iraq`s second-largest city after the capital, witnesses said.
11/09/03 Reuters: Loud Explosions Heard in Baghdad
Several loud explosions echoed across central Baghdad on Sunday night, but there were no immediate details on what caused the blasts, witnesses said
11/08/03 BBC: US soldier killed in Baghdad
An American soldier was killed in an attack in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, on Saturday evening, the US military has said.
11/08/03 ABC: Explosions heard across Baghdad
Loud explosions, probably caused by mortars or rockets, have echoed across the Iraqi capital Baghdad in the third apparent attack on the city by insurgents this week.
11/08/03 Reuters:US Pounds Saddam Hometown
U.S. warplanes and armored vehicles battered suspected guerrilla hideouts in Saddam Hussein`s hometown of Tikrit on Saturday after six soldiers were killed in the shooting down of a Black Hawk helicopter
11/08/03 Yahoo: 2 Killed, 2 Wounded
Insurgents killed two U.S. paratroopers and wounded another west of Baghdad on Saturday as the U.S. military cracked down on residents of Saddam Hussein`s hometown
11/07/03 Centcom: 1 Killed, 2 Wounded
A 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) soldier was killed and six others were wounded in east Mosul when their convoy was ambushed with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire at approximately 7 a.m. Nov. 7.
11/07/03 Wapo: 6 Dead as Army Helicopter Crashes
An Army helicopter crashed Friday into a riverbank near Tikrit, killing six U.S. soldiers, the military said.

[Joerver]

Uncovered: The Whole Truth About The Iraq War" DVD
Produced and Directed by Robert Greenwald



http://www.truthuncovered.com/

Truth Uncovered

"Interrupting a meeting on UN sanctions against Iraq one day in March 2002, Bush popped in on national security adviser Condi Rice. Getting a whiff of the subject matter, W peremptorily waved his hand and told her "Fuck Saddam. We`re taking him out."

This controversial and arresting film takes you behind the walls of government, as CIA, Pentagon and foreign service experts speak out, many for the first time, detailing the lies, misstatements and exaggerations that served as the reasons to fight a "preemptive" war that wasn`t necessary. The war with Iraq brought about unparalleled resistance, both in the streets and in the chambers of government. This documentary offers an in-depth look at the unsettling distortion of intelligence and the "spin and hype" presented to the American people, the Congress and the press. Fighting wars to bring about regime change is in breach of international law. Yet, throughout the fall of 2002, and into the weeks preceding the war in Iraq, the Bush administration systematically distorted intelligence evidence and misled the public in order to turn opinion favor of "regime change" in Iraq.

The film will present interviews with more than 20 experts, all of whom have informed opinions about the reasons we were given for war and the evidence presented to support those reasons. Some supported the war itself but are deeply concerned about the way information was misused. All believe it is their duty to speak up.

Among those interviewed are former Ambassador Joe Wilson, weapons inspectors Scott Ritter and David Albright, anti-terrorism expert Rand Beers, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, former CIA operative Robert Baer and Washington editor of The Nation, David Corn.

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http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,273298,00.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,273298,00.html

Al Gore kritisiert Bush

"Auf dem Weg in den Orwellschen Überwachungsstaat"

Die Amerikaner sind empfindlich, wenn es um ihre individuellen Freiheiten geht. Nach Ansicht des früheren US-Vizepräsidenten Al Gore höhlt George W. Bush jedoch konsequent die Bürgerrechte aus. Der Präsident setze blind auf Überwachung und Kontrolle, die an George Orwells Schlüsselroman "1984" erinnerten.

Washington - Bush habe es versäumt, das Land nach den Anschlägen vom 11. September sicherer zu machen. Stattdessen seien die USA in einem Ausmaß auf dem Weg in einen Orwellschen Überwachungsstaat, wie keiner das je für möglich gehalten habe, sagte Gore.

Er forderte die Rücknahme des Patriot Acts, eines Gesetzes, das der Regierung mehr Vollmachten bei der Überwachung gibt. Das nach dem 11. September noch mit großer Mehrheit verabschiedete Gesetz ermöglicht es den Sicherheitskräften unter anderem, die Lesegewohnheiten von Bürgern zu überwachen und verdeckte Durchsuchungen durchzuführen. Die Kritik von Gore am Patriot Act wird inzwischen von etlichen demokratischen und auch republikanischen Senatoren geteilt. Im Senat laufen Bemühungen, besonders strittige Befugnisse wieder zu streichen.

Die Regierung scheine davon auszugehen, dass die Bürger auf einige ihrer Freiheiten verzichten müssten, wenn sie vor Terroristen sicher sein wollte, erklärte Gore. Er halte aber die Einschränkung von Bürgerrechten zum Schutz vor Terrorismus genauso wenig für sinnvoll wie den Angriff auf den Irak, um Osama bin Laden zu fassen. In beiden Fällen habe die Regierung das Land unnötigen Gefahren ausgesetzt, sagte Gore, der Bush bei der Präsidentenwahl 2000 nur durch das umstrittene Ergebnis in Florida unterlegen war.

[rv_2011]

Todesverachtung

New Orleans · 9. November · ap · Gertrude Jones hatte für den Fall ihres Todes klare Anweisungen gegeben: Die 81-Jährige wollte keine Blumen für ihr Grab, sondern zum Abgang von US-Präsident George W. Bush beitragen. In ihrer Todesanzeige ließ sie daher um Zuwendungen "an jegliche Organisation, die die Entfernung von Präsident Bush aus dem Amt anstrebt", bitten.

Seit dem Erscheinen der Todesanzeige in der Zeitung The Times-Picayune in New Orleans hat nun allein Wesley Clark, einer der Präsidentschaftsbewerber der Demokraten, mindestens 15 Spenden in Jones` Namen erhalten. Auf einer Gedenkseite für Jones im Internet kündigten Dutzende Menschen Spenden an. "Das ist ziemlich cool", erklärte eine Frau: "Sie ist nicht mehr unter uns, aber sie lebt weiter in einer Sache, die ihr am Herzen lag."

[Joerver]

The new face of rightwing deep south politics
In this week`s Louisiana elections, an Indian is breaking the mould

Gary Younge in New Orleans
Monday November 10, 2003
The Guardian

In the small town of Opelousas, Louisiana, two Catholic churches sit side by side. There is the Holy Ghost, for African Americans, and St Landry, for whites. In between is the cemetery where, by law and then by custom, people of the same faith have been buried separately according to their race.

In death as in worship the binary tradition of the south`s racial history have persisted in deep southern states such as Louisiana. There is black and there is white and those basic differences will follow you to the grave and on to eternity.

But in the race for governor, which will be decided by elections on Saturday, the racial certainties inherited from slavery and perpetuated through segregation have become literally and metaphorically shaded by ethnicity.

In what is a tense and tightly fought campaign, the Republican candidate, Bobby Jindal, is neither black nor white but brown - the 32-year-old son of Indian immigrants. This in a state where 12 years ago a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, won a majority of the white vote.

Yet Mr Jindal is close to breaking the mould with a victory that would strengthen the Republicans` grip in the deep south, following their governorship successes in Mississippi and Kentucky.

There is certainly nothing wrong with Mr Jindal`s CV. With an ivy league education, the former Rhodes scholar was running Louisiana`s medical system with a $4bn (£2.34bn) budget at the age of 24. At 27 he was president of the University of Louisiana system. By 30 he was the senior administration health policy official to the White House.

Look at his support base, however, and the fact that he is a contender in this state is little short of astounding. Standing outside the Charity hospital in New Orleans, his gangly, sloping frame is surrounded by the rosy cheeks and expansive girths of the southern good ole boys who make up the state`s Republican leadership.

"He has amazed us in getting as far as he has," says Wayne Parent, the chairman of political science at Louisiana State University. "He`s captured the biggest bloc of southern and Louisiana voters, rural social conservatives, and he seemed like the most unlikely to do that."

Ironically, Mr Jindal has leaned on the same core constituency as Mr Duke - white men, among whom, according to recent polls, he leads 61% to 35% over his Democratic opponent, Kathleen Blanco, the state`s current lieutenant governor.

His campaign has even produced bumper stickers announcing "Bubbas for Bobby" (Bubba is an affectionate term for a southern white man).

Initially it was thought his ethnicity would be a significant obstacle. One black politician said of Mr Jindal`s chances: "He`s too dark for the white folks and not dark enough for the blacks." Warren Triche, a white Democrat, predicted Mr Jindal "wouldn`t get as many votes in Acadiana [south Louisiana] as a mamou hoot owl".

The Indian community is right behind him. His victory would be of huge symbolic significance for one of the country`s fastest-growing communities, even if most of them usually vote Democrat. "I disagree with him on many issues but it would be good for all of us if he won," said one Indian supporter, who did not wish to be named. "We are very proud of him."

But their support will make little difference at the polls in a state where they make up less than a fifth of 1% of the electorate.

Being Indian-American may set Mr Jindal apart from the traditional racial divide, but culturally he has long been well assimilated into Louisiana`s particular brand of southern conservatism.

At the age of four he decided to swap his given name of Priyush for Bobby after a character in the Brady Bunch television show. At 18 he converted from Hinduism to Catholicism - unlike other heavily Protestant states this is a boon in Louisiana. At every opportunity Mr Jindal plays down his ethnicity as a factor and wraps himself in the flag.

"The voters of Louisiana are going to vote for the best candidate," he says. "It doesn`t matter whether they are black, white, red or blue. We are all red, white and blue. We are all Americans."

Not even his own supporters believe this.

Harvey Thompson, an African-American Republican who is backing Mr Jindal, believes no black American candidate could have got the nomination for either party. "A black candidate would never have got the endorsement of the present governor, he would never have got the resources to launch a campaign, and then white people would never have voted for him."

Mr Jindal joined the race late and took to the airwaves of rightwing talk radio, breathing fire with a slight southern drawl against abortion, divorce, big government, taxes and Jacques Chirac, over the war.

To hear him on the radio you would not know he was Indian unless the presenter brought it up. That might explain why he was the last major candidate to appeal for support on television.

The strategy of appealing to the Republicans` most conservative base worked. In the primary Mr Jindal topped the poll.

Louisiana holds an open primary where all candidates from all parties stand and if no one gets more than 50% the top two go through to a runoff. Of the 18 candidates standing, Mr Jindal won 33%. Ms Blanco, his nearest rival, won 18%.

Whoever wins will break Louisiana`s mould. For all but 35 days of its 191-year history the governor`s mansion has been occupied by a white man (PBS Pinchback, the son of a slave, was governor for little over a month in 1872).

Polls show both candidates have to take on prejudice within their core support base. While 23% of black men said they would be less likely to vote for Ms Blanco because she is a woman, 26% of blue-collar workers said they would be less likely to vote for him because of his ethnicity, according to the Marketing Research Institute. "If his ethnicity damages his vote at all then it will probably be balanced out by the discrimination against her gender," Mr Parent says.

A lot is at stake. As the only state in the south recording a net outflow of people, the primary issue is the brain drain and the economy. Louisiana ranks in the bottom five states in the country for poverty, unemployment and infant mortality.

But despite his initial victory, Mr Jindal remains a slight outsider. He may have come first in the primary but the combined vote of all the Democratic candidates was 57%. In the last week Mr Jindal has been catching up and they are now neck and neck.

In the crude racial arithmetic of southern politics Mr Jindal will have to secure 80% of the white vote and more than 15% of the black vote to win. The only question then is turnout and which candidate can best motivate their core base. So even though Mr Jindal`s ethnicity has not become a huge issue, in a race as close as this any difference could be decisive.

Mr Jindal has received the endorsements of two black organisations that usually back Democrats. "He may make some incremental gains in the black community but I don`t know whether it will be enough," Mr Parent says.

But Mr Thompson believes the underlying test will be whether his fellow white Republicans can overcome their traditional reluctance to vote for anyone other than a white candidate. "Some of them would rather have a white Democrat than a brown anything," he said.



Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

Tales of the unexpected
Monday November 10, 2003
The Guardian

McDonald`s has a beef with the latest edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate dictionary issued in the US. Among the 10,000 new words was McJob, defined as "low paying and dead-end work", a usage coined by Douglas Coupland in his 1991 novel, Generation X.

The chief executive of McDonald`s sent Merriam-Webster an open letter saying the term is "a slap in the face to the 12 million men and women" who work in the restaurant industry. Another spokesman pointed out that McJOBS is the trademarked name for McDonald`s training programme for mentally and physically disabled people, "and we`ve notified them that legally that`s an issue".

From the Associated Press, November 7


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

`Shambolic` Iraqi council forcing US to think again
Julian Borger in Washington
Monday November 10, 2003
The Guardian

The Iraqi governing council, set up by the US as a step towards self-rule, has proved be so ineffective and shambolic that Washington is beginning to consider alternatives, it was reported yesterday.

Frustration with the council has been building for some time within the Bush administration, which selected the panel of Iraqi politicians in July and gave it until December 15 to come up with a plan for drawing up a constitution and holding elections.

But progress has been minimal as only a handful of council members have been turning up regularly for meetings, and there has been little oversight of the new Iraqi cabinet ministers, who are supposed to be the council`s responsibility.

"It has not been a coherent council. Members are not aware of legislation passed in their names," said Laith Kubba, the president of the Iraqi National Group, a liberal democratic organisation that is not part of the council. "They are not aware of what ministers are doing. Although the council is made up of 25 members, there are only five main players and the rest are there in a very ineffective way."

The Washington Post yesterday quoted US and French officials as saying that the administration was even considering the idea put forward by Paris and other UN security council members for an interim Iraqi leadership chosen by national conference - along the lines of the loya jirga held in Afghanistan.

If such a system were chosen, the US would reverse the order of the transition, handing sovereignty to the provisional government before a constitution was written and an election held.

This suggestion had been rejected by Washington, but it is beginning to look more inviting as the US death toll rises amid the clashes in Iraq, and there is now a greater urgency to withdraw US forces in time for next November`s presidential elections.

"If our exit is going to take longer, if it looks like it could go more than two years to get it all done, then there`s an incentive to look into a transitional phase and some other governing mechanism," a state department official said.

Mr Kubba suggested that the leaks to the Washington Post were more likely meant to focus the minds of the council than to be a concrete plan of action.

"The frustration has been there for some time so I am not surprised by it," Mr Kubba said in a telephone interview yesterday. "I would be surprised if they tried to complicate their difficult situation at the moment by upsetting the governing council."

Robert Blackwill, an official from the national security council, who was given the job of coordinating the political transition, is reported to have begun an unannounced visit to Iraq at the weekend, reportedly to try to put pressure on the council members and discuss alternatives with the head of the occupation authority, Paul Bremer.

The Iraqi governing council was intended to represent Iraq`s ethnic diversity, and includes Shias, Sunnis, Kurds and a representative of the Turkoman community. It included three women, but one, Aqila al-Hashimi, was assassinated in September.

Most of the prominent Sunnis on the council are former exiles, and Mr Kubba said the council should be expanded to include more representatives from the provinces and the main Sunni tribes, which he said had been marginalised by the occupation authorities.

Those groups would have to be convinced that they would wield real - rather than symbolic - power.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

Riyadh: a new front against US
By John R Bradley in Jeddah
10 November 2003


America`s fortunes in the Gulf were in free-fall yesterday after a suicide bombing in Riyadh late on Saturday that appeared to be aimed at undermining the Saudi monarchy, the United States` key ally in the region.

No one had claimed responsibility by last night, but the shadow of the fugitive Saudi national Osama bin Laden hangs over the outrage. At least 17 people, many of them Arab expatriates, were killed and 120 others, 36 of them children, were injured in a massive car bomb attack on a residential compound in Riyadh.

Those killed included Saudis, Sudanese and Egyptians. No Westerners were believed to have died. Among the wounded were Americans and Canadians, as well as people from Africa, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, Turkey, Pakistan, Romania and Sri Lanka. Two Britons who lived in the compound were found unhurt.

The bombing came a day after American, British and other Western diplomatic missions were closed because of warnings of an attack. Western diplomats believe that as many as 30 people may have been killed in the bombing.

"We pulled out eight bodies from the rubble," a Filipino rescue worker at the scene of the blast told The Independent. "Most of them were children."

The attack, the second spectacular suicide bombing in the Saudi capital in six months, was made by a person driving a stolen police car. It caused utter devastation, razing eight villas and blowing out the windows of buildings over an area covering a square mile.

A day before the previous bombings on 12 May, a Saudi Islamist group believed to be close to Bin Laden`s al-Qa`ida network called for revenge attacks on US interests after a huge arms seizure from Islamic militants in Riyadh. Hours before the latest bombing, the same organisation ­ the Mujahedin of the Arabian Peninsula ­ urged its followers to strike and destroy Western and Saudi regime interests .

It was partly because of that statement, issued on an Islamist website, that the US embassy in Riyadh and diplomatic missions in Jeddah and Dhahran had been closed on the day of the attack. Intelligence reports also indicated that the terrorists had moved from the planning to the operational phase of an attack.

Bin Laden had issued a fatwa in the 1990s urging his followers to refrain from attacks in the kingdom because revenues from its oil industry would be needed to consolidate an Islamic revolution. But the Saudi decision to assist the US-led war on Iraq changed all that, with Bin Laden for the first time explicitly calling for attacks inside the kingdom.

The attack is a clear sign to the Saudi rulers and military that al-Qa`ida is willing and able to attack in the heart of the kingdom, despite asecurity clampdown and co-operation between the CIA and Saudi intelligence services.

The bombing provoked near-universal outrage among Saudis, who awoke yesterday to find gruesome images of those injured by flying glass on the front pages of newspapers. No one could understand why fellow Arabs had been the target. Many initially refused to believe it could have been the work of al-Qa`ida, especially as the bomber struck in the middle of the fasting month of Ramadan. Inevitably, conspiracy theories about CIA and Mossad involvement started to circulate.

If it was al-Qa`ida, it may be seen ultimately as an own goal. The attack will damage the support the organisation has in Saudi Arabia, where anti-US sentiment has been fed by America`s support for Israel`s continuing crackdown on the intifada and the occupation of neighbouring Iraq.

The ruling Saud family is now al-Qa`ida`s number one target, and the kingdom has become the front line in the so-called war on terror. Since 12 May, more than 600 suspected Islamists have been arrested and more than 2,000 suspects have been interrogated. Saudi Arabia`s security forces have lost a dozen men in their almost weekly battles with al-Qa`ida fighters and killed more than 15 suspects.

The bombing could have been launched on the basis of outdated information that the compound was home to mostly Americans and Britons. Until the late 1990s, it was occupied and sponsored by the American aircraft and defence manufacturer Boeing.
10 November 2003 10:01


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Mark Mazower: Democracy in the Middle East won`t favour the US
Preaching democracy is no substitute for a sustained effort to bring about a just settlement in Palestine
10 November 2003



The first half of the 20th century saw a great struggle between fascism and liberal democracy. While Mussolini and Hitler viewed the world as a Darwinian zero-sum game between states and peoples locked in a conflict of mutual hostility, liberals believed in the possibility of the common good and an international harmony of interests.

Fascists idealised hierarchy; liberals co-existence: in economics, the invisible hand of the free market would make everyone better off; political freedom would allow for individual expression and self-development. The pursuit of democracy and liberty was the best guarantee of peace - for were not ordinary people peace-loving? - while war was the result of the self-interested manoeuvrings of repressive elites.

When this view of the world was blended with the missionary fervour of evangelical Protestantism, it yielded a recipe for Great Powers who wished to govern the world in everyone`s best interest. President George Bush has brought this vision into the 21st century, with the idea of a "forward strategy for freedom". His speech last week to the National Endowment for Democracy identified the bringing of democracy to the Middle East as a long-range goal of American policy.

The theme may be new for the Bush presidency but it goes back almost a century in US foreign policy. During the First World War, Woodrow Wilson declared that America`s role was to make the world "safe for democracy". Offering himself as an honest broker, his idealism shaped the peace settlement of Europe accordingly.

The old autocratic Habsburg, Ottoman and Hohenzollern emperors were replaced by shiny new constitutional democracies. Yet when American liberal idealism hit the realities of interwar politics, the dream soon began to come apart and the world was not safe for long. In the years that followed the liberal strategy failed on almost every count. Free markets collapsed during the great depression. More importantly, in the ethnically divided societies of central and eastern Europe, democracy quickly turned into a new tyranny - that of the majority over the minority - or led to constitutional stalemates whose solution was found in new and nastier forms of authoritarianism.

Today, Washington`s advocates of democratisation never mention this failure. Yet the experience of interwar Europe raises some key issues that the new strategy will need to address. Scholars argue over what kinds of social mix and tradition produce stable democracies; but all agree that adjustment is hard where societies have little or no prior experience of multiparty politics, where the middle classes are weak and where the army has dominated the state.

Then there is the minorities issue. Interwar Poland was only two-thirds ethnically Polish, and there were huge minorities everywhere else in eastern Europe. How does President Bush see Middle Eastern democracy coping with similar problems - the Shia in Saudi Arabia, the Copts in Egypt, the Palestinian majority in Jordan, the Kurds almost everywhere? Guarantees of minority and human rights will be needed; but these may be seen as one further Western intervention in a long history of its meddling in the internal affairs of these countries.

The historical experience of democratisation that Washington prefers to remember is the collapse of Communism in 1989. Skating over the shameful decades of containment, Mr Bush`s speech homed in on the heroic moment of rollback, which showed just what determined American leadership could do.

Condoleezza Rice, in her past life as an academic, co-authored a study of how the US brought down the Soviet Union, and many others in the administration see the Soviet policy of the Reagan (and George Bush senior) years in this way. For them, it was the combination of American pressure and popular desire for freedom that toppled the Communists. Now, with Bush junior in Reaganite mode, the same combination can work its magic in the Middle East: with a little pushing from the US, those under-performing economies with their huge armies of youthful unemployed will give way to free markets and modern ways.

But before we get too excited, some reasons for doubt. During the Cold War, east Europeans identified the US with the cause of freedom. Donald Rumsfeld`s "new Europe" had always known the choice was between Communist repression and American liberties, and only wondered if the latter would ever arrive. But where the US is seen as having supported dictatorship, historical memory works very differently.

Southern Europe in the 1970s was stuck under authoritarian rule, and there the US itself had done little, to put it mildly, by way of rollback: it supported these dictators until they got old and died, or made a mess of things, as the Colonels did over Cyprus. Greece is a case of a country today that combines a healthy democracy with high levels of suspicion towards American policy, precisely because the public associates the US with support for the dictatorship.

This administration appears to believe that bringing liberty to the Arab world will expand intellectual horizons and drain the swamp of religious extremism, thereby creating a popular mood much more favourable to the US. In fact, the outcome is likely to resemble Greece rather than Lithuania.

What makes Arab opinion anti-American is not some sweeping rejection of modernity, or the American way of life, but simply opposition to American foreign policy. People in the Middle East see the US, not as some disinterested Wilsonian force descending from on high to improve their lives, but rather as the Great Power which more than any other over the past half century has intervened to defend its own strategic interests by supporting the very dictatorships it now claims it wants to see vanish.

In such circumstances, how credible can Washington be as a force for democratic reform? Will Mr Bush put pressure on the Egyptian government to open up its political system? Or will he worry that this might pave the way for the rise of political parties far less supportive of his regional goals than President Hosni Mubarak?

Democracy may seem the prerequisite for long-term success in the "war on terror"; in the short term, however, dictatorial regimes and their intelligence services have a convenient handle to assure themselves of backing in Washington. Anti-Communism served the interests of nasty police states around the world for many decades, despite the US`s public commitments to defending the "Free World". What is to stop the fight against al-Qa`ida working the same way in years to come, allowing Washington to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses or to clampdowns on popular but anti-American parties?

The truth is that, as long as US foreign policy is unwilling to push Israeli governments towards a proper peace deal, future Arab democracies are likely to be at least as anti-American as the existing despotisms. Is Washington too naive to realise this, or too ideologically driven by neo-conservative theories of how it won the Cold War?

Preaching democracy is no substitute for a sustained effort to bring about a just settlement over Palestine. Until there is some sign of that, Mr Bush`s grand vision is unlikely to last any longer than Wilson`s: who would wager on its supporters winning the day once they come up against the hard realities of US interests, at least as they are currently defined? Visions of international harmony sound a little premature right now.

Mark Mazower is professor of history at Birkbeck College London
10 November 2003 10:05



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

[Joerver]

November 10, 2003
U.S. Opposes Money for Troops Jailed in Iraq
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 — The Bush administration is seeking to block a group of American troops who were tortured in Iraqi prisons during the Persian Gulf war in 1991 from collecting any of the hundreds of millions of dollars in frozen Iraqi assets they won last summer in a federal court ruling against the government of Saddam Hussein.

In a court challenge that the administration is winning so far but is not eager to publicize, administration lawyers have argued that Iraqi assets frozen in bank accounts in the United States are needed for Iraqi reconstruction and that the judgment won by the 17 former American prisoners should be overturned.

If the administration succeeds, the former prisoners would be deprived of the money they won and, they say, of the validation of a judge`s ruling that documented their accounts of torture by the Iraqis — including beatings, burnings, starvation, mock executions and repeated threats of castration and dismemberment.

"I don`t want to say that I feel betrayed, because I still believe in my country," said Lt. Col. Dale Storr, whose Air Force A-10 fighter jet was shot down by Iraqi fire in February 1991.

"I`ve always tried to keep in the back of my mind that we were never going to see any of the money," said Colonel Storr, who was held by the Iraqis for 33 days — a period in which he says his captors beat him with clubs, broke his nose, urinated on him and threatened to cut off his fingers if he did not disclose military secrets. "But it goes beyond frustration when I see our government trying to pretend that this whole case never happened."

Another former prisoner, David Eberly, a retired Air Force colonel whose F-15 fighter was shot down over northwest Iraq and who said his interrogators repeatedly pointed a gun at his head and pulled the trigger on an empty chamber, said he was surprised by the administration`s eagerness to overturn the judgment.

"The administration wants $87 billion for Iraq," he said. "The money in our case is just a drop of blood in the bucket."

Officials at the Justice and State Departments, which are overseeing the administration`s response to the case, say they are sensitive to the claims of the former prisoners, who brought suit against Iraq under a 1996 law that allows foreign governments designated as terrorist sponsors to be sued for injuries.

But they say the case cannot be allowed to hinder American foreign policy and get in the way of the administration`s multibillion-dollar reconstruction efforts in Iraq — an argument that federal appeals courts seem likely to accept.

"No amount of money can truly compensate these brave men and women for the suffering that they went through at the hands of a truly brutal regime," said Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman. "It was determined earlier this year by Congress and the administration that those assets were no longer assets of Iraq, but they were resources required for the urgent national security needs of rebuilding Iraq."

In a related case, a federal judge in New York ruled in September that the families of people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks could not claim any part of about $1.7 billion in frozen Iraqi assets in the United States.

The judge noted that President Bush had signed an executive order in March, on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, that confiscated Iraqi assets and converted them into assets of the United States government. In May, after Mr. Hussein was ousted, Mr. Bush issued a declaration that effectively removed Iraq from a list of countries liable for some court judgments involving past rights abuses and links to terrorism.

In a sworn court filing in the case for the former prisoners, L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, said the money won by the former prisoners had already been "completely obligated or expended" in reconstruction efforts.

"These funds are critical to maintaining peace and stability in Iraq," he said. "Restricting these funds as a result of this litigation would affect adversely the ability of the United States to achieve security and stability in the region."

The case dates from April of last year, when the 17 former prisoners and their families filed suit in the Federal District Court here against Mr. Hussein and his government, seeking damages for the physical and emotional injuries suffered as a result of torture during the prisoners` captivity. The prisoners represented all branches of the military.

The Iraqi government made no effort to respond to the lawsuit. In July, three months after the fall of Mr. Hussein, Judge Richard W. Roberts ordered the former Iraqi government to pay damages totaling nearly $1 billion — $653 million in compensatory damages, $306 million in punitive damages.

"No one would subject himself for any price to the terror, torment and pain experienced by these American P.O.W.`s," the judge wrote. But he said that "only a very sizable award would be likely to deter the torture of American P.O.W.`s by agencies or instrumentalities of Iraq or other terrorist states in the future."

The lawyers who brought the case on behalf of the former prisoners said such a huge penalty against Iraq would discourage other governments from torturing American troops.

"This was a major human rights decision," said John Norton Moore, one of the lawyers and a professor of national security law at the University of Virginia. "It never occurred to me in my wildest dreams that I would then see our government coming in on the side of Saddam Hussein and his regime to absolve them of responsibility for the brutal torture of Americans."

The administration moved within days of Judge Roberts`s decision to block the former prisoners from collecting any money. On July 30, the judge reluctantly sided with the government, saying Mr. Bush`s actions after the overthrow of Mr. Hussein had barred the transfer of the frozen assets to the former prisoners.

He said he had no other choice even though the administration`s position "that the P.O.W.`s are unable to recover any portion of their judgment as requested, despite their sacrifice in the service of their country, seems extreme." The former prisoners are appealing the case through the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Stephen A. Fennell, a Washington lawyer who is also representing the former prisoners, said the Bush administration had rejected a proposal that would have allowed the United States to delay the payments to his clients for months or years — until after the reconstruction of Iraq was well under way. "My guys are obviously real patriots, and they authorized us to tell the government that we were willing to wait," he said. "But that was turned down."

Cynthia Acree, whose husband, Clifford, is a Marine colonel who was held by the Iraqis for 47 days, said that "the money is not the issue and it never has been."

She said Judge Roberts`s ruling that detailed her husband`s torture — including beatings that resulted in a skull fracture and broken nose, as well as mock executions and threats of castration — had been "a tremendous gift" to her husband.

"I remember it so well, the look on my husband`s face when he heard the decision, because finally there was a public record," she said. "But now, our government wants to act like none of this happened, to throw out the entire case. My husband is an active-duty Marine colonel, and President Bush is his commander in chief. But I`m not. And I can say that I feel betrayed."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

November 10, 2003
NEWS ANALYSIS
A Campaign to Rattle a Long-Ruling Dynasty
By PATRICK E. TYLER

WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 — For years, Osama bin Laden called for the violent overthrow of the Saudi royal family for allowing American bases in the holiest land of Islam.

But with American forces gone, the bombs continue to explode — signaling that the withdrawal did not address the deeper grievances among the hardened Saudi militants who were behind the car bomb attack in Riyadh late on Saturday. Those militants are now seeking to exploit the opposition that is growing within Saudi Arabia to a dynasty long immune to political challenge.

What seems ever more apparent in the attack in Riyadh that left at least 17 people dead and 122 wounded is that it is no longer Americans or even Westerners who are the targets of terrorism in Saudi Arabia, but rather stability itself in the oil-producing kingdom, as well as the writ of the House of Saud.

With targets like government ministries and diplomatic quarters heavily guarded, the bombers may have opted for blowing up a relatively unprotected housing compound associated with Western lifestyles and foreign influence to make their point.

"I think they are after the royal family," said Wyche Fowler Jr., a former senator who was ambassador to Saudi Arabia from October 1997 to February 2001. "There is a determined fight to rattle the government if not bring it down."

A prominent Saudi who advises the royal household agreed. "This is an effort to destabilize the regime," he said. "It`s against the monarchy and it is against the government."

As such, the terror campaign is merging with the domestic struggle over political reform in the conservative kingdom, where demonstrations against the royal family in Mecca last month showed a new boldness among opposition forces.

Though Saudi officials were quick to blame Al Qaeda for the bombing, it was difficult even for Saudis to distinguish where domestic political opposition ends and the goals of the current terrorist campaign begin. But the danger for the Saudi royal family, analysts said, was that the growing ranks of domestic opponents to the monarchy would adopt the violent tactics of Al Qaeda, or look to its members for leadership.

"I think that is the ultimate concern of the Saudis," Mr. Fowler said. "I think that is why they are being so thorough to uncover these cells and eliminate them."

The threat to the royal family has mobilized security forces who have used increasingly aggressive tactics and firepower during the summer to break up terrorist plots and to seize large caches of explosives and ammunition. The tactics have shocked the public in their scale and volume.

To counter both domestic political opposition and the terrorist instinct that courses through dissident mosques, Crown Prince Abdullah, the day-to-day ruler of the royal family, has tried to accelerate some political reforms. But he is offering far less than even the most centrist opponents demand.

Last month, the government announced that elections for municipal offices would be organized next year and, more recently, the crown prince opened for television coverage the deliberations of the consultative assembly, whose members he appoints. While the steps he has taken or talked about draw derisive comments — as in: too little, too late — from Saudi dissidents, the crown prince is regarded as the most reform-minded among the sons of King Abdul Aziz bin Saud, who unified the warring tribes of the Arabia Peninsula and created the Saudi state.

The bombing in Riyadh was the second major strike in the new campaign and the largest attack since those of the mid-1990`s directed at Western and American military targets. It destroyed homes in a compound inhabited mostly by expatriates from other Muslim countries, though some Westerners were among the wounded.

On May 12, a larger and more coordinated assault force set off a series of car bombs in three Riyadh housing complexes whose residents were mostly Saudi, but included American and other foreign workers. The explosions killed 34 people, including 8 Americans and 9 attackers.

"May 12 was the inevitable wake up call," said Judith Kipper, director of Middle East programs at the Council on Foreign Relations. Since then, as Ms. Kipper pointed out, Saudi security authorities have mobilized a significant campaign under the interior ministry to arrest religious figures who have preached violence and to disrupt the flow of illicit arms to people who would use them for terrorist attacks.

"It`s going to take some time to dig them all out," she said.

The role of the United States in this struggle may prove to be crucial, analysts said, but the kingdom has come under assault at a time when the Bush administration`s relations with Saudi Arabia have been troubled by two years of recriminations over the prominent role that some Saudis played in the Sept. 11 attacks and the Saudi money that has flowed, wittingly and unwittingly, to organizations and charities connected to terrorist groups.

Last week, President Bush admonished Saudi Arabia and Egypt to take concrete steps toward democracy in a speech widely viewed in the Arab world more as hectoring for domestic effect in the United States than constructive statesmanship abroad.

But it is also true that Mr. Bush was articulating a deeply held view among conservatives in his administration: that American power and influence, recently exercised in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, should be used to advance the horizons of democracy, not just to protect American national interest by securing strategic commodities, like the oil resources of the Persian Gulf.

While Crown Prince Abdullah continues to welcome American intelligence in the campaign against terrorism, it is unlikely that the Saudi ruler will want publicly stated advice or assistance on how to conduct political reform from Mr. Bush, whose bluntness lacks the subtleties to which Saudis are accustomed in foreign relations.

In Riyadh on Sunday, Richard L. Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, struck a supportive tone, one that seemed to emphasize American hope than certainty.

"We have the utmost faith," he said, "that the direction chosen for this nation by Crown Prince Abdullah, the political and economic reforms, will not be swayed by these horrible terrorists."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Celebrating West Germany`s 1954 World Cup victory over Hungary.
November 10, 2003
BERLIN JOURNAL
Germany`s Grief and Glory, Wrapped Up in a Soccer Ball
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

ERLIN, Nov. 9 — The tears have been flowing in Germany lately, including the tears of the chancellor himself, Gerhard Schröder, who not only announced that he cried but also urged his fellow German males to loosen their macho inhibitions and join him.

Mr. Schröder`s tears came when he watched a new movie, "Das Wunder von Bern," or "The Miracle of Bern," the story of West Germany`s come-from-behind victory in the soccer World Cup of 1954, and now the conspicuous cinematic hit of the season in this country.

The 1954 match, played in Bern, the Swiss capital, unleashed a tremendous wave of emotion in a West Germany that was still recovering from the defeat and devastation of World War II, and now the movie has unleashed something more than nostalgia. It has led Germany almost collectively to re-experience the mixture of relief and jubilation it experienced five decades ago, when the somewhat ragtag West German team squeaked past Hungary, the global soccer powerhouse of those days, by a score of 3 to 2.

"After 1945, the German identity was broken and there were two things that rebuilt it," Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the former student radical who is now a member of the European Parliament, said in a recent conversation. "One was economic growth and the other was the 1954 football championship. It was the first time the Germans were recognized in the world for a nonaggressive achievement."
A scene from the movie "The Miracle of Bern."

The historian Joachim Fest, author of many books on wartime Germany, told the French News Agency that the World Cup triumph "was in a certain way the birth of the federal republic."

And that suggests something very German about the film, the chancellor`s tears and the general enthusiasm of an audience that, after less than one month, exceeds two million people. In most countries, a feel-good movie about a sports triumph would be just that, a sleekly inspirational but nonpolitical movie the way "Chariots of Fire," the story of two unlikely British Olympic champions, was some years ago.

But in Germany, "The Miracle of Bern" has carried with it a special meaning, and a special sort of conversation, owing, of course, to the tormented past, which has always made Germans wonder if they had a right to celebrate themselves as a national entity. "The Miracle of Bern" says that yes, Germany does have that right, not only to feel proud of Germany itself but also to sympathize with the millions who suffered as a consequence of the war and its aftermath, and that is clearly one reason for the film`s success.

"The film is courageous," the German weekly Der Spiegel said, "full of humor and full of sadness." Why courageous? Simply because few German films before have dealt with the history of the war in Germany or the immediate postwar years, and "The Miracle of Bern," which was directed by Sönke Wortmann, does so not only directly but also naturally and unapologetically, as if it were as normal a thing to do as it would be in any other country.

The movie tells two stories, one that of the soccer team, led by the coach, Sepp Herberger, a legendary figure, which lost to Hungary 8 to 5 in an initial World Cup match, and then won in the final, helped by a heavy rain that slowed the normally lethal Hungarian players.

But soccer action is only about a quarter of an hour of the movie, most of which is taken up with the story of an 11-year-old boy named Matthias living in the industrial Ruhr Valley, whose father comes home after 11 years as a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union. There were thousands of such ex-soldiers coming home to their families many years after the war, bruised and silent about what they experienced, finding aging wives and children they did not know, and — like the father of "Miracle" — clumsily striving to establish authority by insisting on discipline and obedience.

In one emblematic moment, the father slaps Matthias for some misdeed, and then tells him not to cry.

"German boys don`t cry," he says.

Well, as German moviegoers have seen, German fathers themselves cry as Matthias`s father does, when he sees what a mess he is making of things at home, when he allows himself to feel the anguish of his years of imprisonment, the constant hunger, the terror, the scent of death in the Siberian coal mines where he was a forced laborer. In the end, the soccer game in Bern brings Matthias and his wounded father together. Then, as the film draws to an end, and the father understands that Matthias loves him and needs him as most boys love and need their fathers, he weeps, and so did Chancellor Schröder and everybody in the theater. It is almost impossible not to.

Still, not everybody agrees that the film is a harmless recollection of a pivotal moment in recent history. One writer in the newspaper Die Zeit, the intellectuals` paper in Germany, complained that the overall message of "Miracle" will be to lead Germans into a sort of moral equivalency — into thinking that everybody was terrible in the total war that was World War II, and that German suffering therefore merits the same commemoration as anybody else`s.

"Wortmann`s film is less about football than about this German feeling of having suffered rather than caused the Second World War," Diedrich Diedrichsen, a columnist for the paper wrote. "After a terrible defeat on the battlefield, at last they get their just rewards on the footfall field. The film tells the Germans they are right to feel this way."

The response of the director, Mr. Wortmann, seems to sum up the feelings of Chancellor Schröder: "I`d rather see patriotism expressed in this harmless way than something that was secret and far-right."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 10, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Living on Borrowed Money
By BOB HERBERT

It`s interesting that so much attention is being paid to the modest job creation numbers for October, and so little is being given to a much more significant issue that Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is homing in on.

Over the past couple of decades, Mr. Edwards said last week, "the American dream of building something better" has been replaced by the reality of "just getting by."

It has become increasingly difficult to get into — or stay in — the middle class. In speeches, reports and interviews, Senator Edwards has been pointing out that despite income gains, most families have been unable to save money and are dangerously vulnerable to setbacks like job losses and illnesses.

Citing statistics from an influential recent book, "The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke," by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, he noted that over the past 30 years home mortgage costs have risen 70 times faster than the average father`s income. So you end up with two parents working like crazy just to keep the family economically afloat.

A generation ago the average American family was able to save about 11 percent of its income. Today the average family saves nothing. How can a family possibly save when it`s piling up debt like mad?

The consumer debt load for the average family has tripled in just one generation. More and more Americans are using credit cards and other forms of borrowing to bridge the difficult gap between household income and the cost of essential goods and services. And those families, already in trouble, are ruthlessly exploited by a wide range of lenders.

As Senator Edwards pointed out in a report issued by his campaign: "Credit card companies target people least able to pay and then raise interest rates when people miss a single payment after losing their job. Almost half of all Americans pay the minimum balance or less each month, running up large interest debts."

Struggling families that fall behind in their payments are like a gold mine to the credit card companies.

"Late fees," according to a study by the public policy group Demos, "have become the fastest growing source of revenue for the industry, jumping from $1.7 billion in 1996 to $7.3 billion in 2002. Late fees now average $29, and most cards have reduced the late payment grace period from 14 days to zero days. In addition to charging late fees, the major credit card companies use the first late payment as an excuse to cancel low, introductory rates — often making a zero percent card jump to between 22 and 29 percent."

With so many families living on the edge of a financial cliff, it`s inevitable that a lot of them will fall off. Personal bankruptcies reached an all-time high of 1.6 million last year.

If I were a cartoonist, I`d draw a picture of a family running for their lives down the center of a highway with an enormous truck labeled "financial insolvency" speeding behind them.

The American Dream has morphed into a treacherous survival regimen in which the good life — a life that includes a home, family vacations, adequate health coverage, money to provide the kids with a solid education, and a comfortable retirement — is increasingly elusive.

Senator Edwards said he is frequently confronted on the campaign trail by middle-class voters who will say, for example: "I`ve got a mother who needs to go into a nursing home and I can`t pay for it. And I think I`m going to have to go into bankruptcy to do it, in order to qualify for Medicaid."

Or, "I was doing fine until my husband got sick and now he needs medication that costs $300 a week. How in the world do I pay for that?"

Borrowing, whether by the federal government or individual consumers, has become the preferred (perhaps only) way to make ends meet. What`s been driving this so-called red-hot economy is not the solid growth in jobs and wages that is essential for a flourishing middle class, but an orgy of refinancing and an irresponsible mixture of tax cuts and federal spending that is creating monster deficits. In short, we`re mortgaging the nation`s future.

On Friday the Federal Reserve reported that consumers had jacked up their borrowing in September by the largest amount since the beginning of the year. The $15.1 billion increase in consumer borrowing was 9.7 percent higher than in August, and pushed total consumer debt to $1.97 trillion.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Soldiers with the U.S. 1st Armored Division patrol in central Baghdad after several blasts from mortar fire echoed across the Iraqi capital.

washingtonpost.com
Iraqi Warns of Delay on Constitution, Vote
Security Issues Cited as Appointed Council Presses for Provisional Government Status

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 10, 2003; Page A20


BAGHDAD, Nov. 9 -- Iraq`s interim foreign minister, Hoshyar Zubari, said Sunday that a further deterioration in the security situation in Iraq might prevent the U.S.-appointed Governing Council from meeting timetables it will set for writing a constitution and holding elections, despite American pressure for action toward both goals.

Under a U.N. resolution, the Governing Council has a month to set its schedules. But Zubari told reporters that "those timetables depend on the security situation, and if the security deteriorates, we will not adhere to such commitments."

The comments form part of a delicate joust between the council and the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. administrators of Iraq. U.S. officials here have complained that the Governing Council has been laggard in moving the political process forward, and officials in Washington have said they were considering creating an alternative Iraqi assembly. Council members complain that failure to give them greater authority in running Iraq`s affairs, particularly in security, makes it difficult to put down a rebellion in the central part of the country.

The council is pressing the occupation authority to grant it the status of a provisional government. That, they argue, would encourage Iraqis to take the fight to anti-occupation guerrillas. The council has proposed recruitment of militia members under the control of Iraqi parties as a means of building up a force capable of fighting the shadowy, violent resistance in central Iraq. "Iraqis are willing to die for an Iraqi government, not for foreigners," a senior Iraqi cabinet official said.

Such talk raises concern at the occupation authority that the council considers the constitution and elections secondary priorities. At some point, council members may conclude that the United States will create a provisional government out of desperation to pacify Iraq, one official suggested.

"After all, elections put the council out of a job. So, in their view, what`s the hurry?" a senior occupation official said. "Anyway, it is unlikely that we will want to make a provisional government out of a council that has been feckless." He dismissed the notion that a council-led provisional government would make Iraqis aggressively pursue the guerrillas. "Who really thinks that Iraqis will want to die for the Governing Council?"

For the moment, there is no letup in attacks on U.S. and allied forces. Two Iraqis died Sunday when their taxi, filled with explosives, blew up near a U.S. base in Tikrit, a town that was once home to deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. In the southern city of Basra, a British soldier was wounded by a land mine. November has been the deadliest month for U.S. forces since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in May.

Also Sunday, U.S. soldiers arrested 18 people in last month`s deadly missile attack at the al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, officials told the Associated Press. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was staying at the hotel at the time of the attack. No details on the detainees were made public.

U.S. warplanes bombed centers of resistance near Tikrit, north of Baghdad, and Fallujah, to the west, and the military said it was intensifying the battle against attackers, the AP reported.

Zubari said the council would fulfill its tasks. "The ball is now in our court and we must deliver," he said. The council is facing a Dec. 15 deadline for laying out the constitutional and electoral schedules.

He spoke Sunday at a news conference with Spain`s foreign minister, Ana Palacio. Palacio appeared to side with the Governing Council in its tug of war with Washington and intervened when a reporter queried Zubari about how he could reconcile the U.S. criticisms of the Governing Council with the council`s drive to form a provisional government. "We will stand by the Iraqi institutions, especially the Governing Council," she said.

The conflict over creation of a provisional government predates the war in Iraq. A year ago some delegates at a conference of exiled Iraqi political figures in London pressed for immediate establishment of an exile government. U.S. officials squashed the proposal. During the war, opposition leaders contended that Iraqis were unwilling to revolt against Hussein during the American march on Baghdad because the opposition and their militias had been sidelined.

The council, dominated by Shiite Muslims and Kurds, is proposing expanding its membership beyond 25 to give Sunni Muslims a greater voice. Sunnis formed the bulk of support for Hussein during his three-decade rule. Sunnis largely populate the unruly central region of the country.

The council has been hobbled by infighting, particularly over the role of Islam in a new Iraq, and the means of holding elections. Shiites, the country`s majority, want a one-person, one-vote system put in place immediately, while minority Sunnis and Kurds are seeking to forge a system that would protect minority rights.

Occupation authority officials complain that council members are frequently absent from meetings or send delegates to sit in while leaders travel or stay at home. In Washington, U.S. officials voiced complaints last week that council members are overly concerned about their own political and economic interests at the expense of acting decisively. The Bush administration is considering replacing the U.S.-appointed body with a large, representative assembly specifically tasked to move the constitutional and elections process forward.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Gore Criticizes Bush Approach to Security
Freedoms Shouldn`t Be Compromised To Fight Terror, Ex-Vice President Says

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 10, 2003; Page A02


In his second major policy speech in three months, former vice president Al Gore took aim yesterday at what he said was the Bush administration`s exploitation of the terrorist attacks of 2001 to justify an undemocratic suspension of domestic freedoms and to create a government built on "secrecy and deception."

Looking energized and fit, Gore told 3,000 cheering supporters in Washington`s DAR Constitution Hall -- and innumerable others who watched on C-Span and on a live Internet webcast -- that President Bush was taking the wrong approach to protecting the nation from terrorist threats.

"I want to challenge the Bush administration`s implicit assumption that we have to give up many of our traditional freedoms in order to be safe from terrorists," Gore said during the one-hour speech sponsored by MoveOn.org and the American Constitution Society (ACS).

"Rather than defending our freedoms, this administration has sought to abandon them. Rather than accepting our traditions of openness and accountability, this administration has opted to rule by secrecy and unquestioned authority. Its assaults on our core democratic principles have only left us less free and less secure," he said.

Gore, who described himself as "a recovering politician," urged Congress to repeal the Patriot Act, with its broad enhancements of government powers that allow federal agents to "sneak and peek" at citizens` private records; enter citizens` homes in secret; and hold citizens indefinitely without access to legal counsel or a hearing before a judge.

"I believe strongly that the few good features of this law should be passed again in a new, smaller law, but that the Patriot Act must be repealed," he said.

Gore made no reference to the 2000 election in which a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on contested votes in Florida left him losing to Bush even as he won the popular vote. But Lisa Brown, ACS acting executive director, found a way to remind everyone of that decision, introducing Gore as "President, oh, nope, vice president Al Gore."

Gore harked back to eras in which Americans had been denied civil liberties at home through government actions that in retrospect were judged to be of questionable wisdom -- among them the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the aggressive investigations of citizens by the FBI and CIA during the Vietnam War era.

In all those cases, he said, the nation managed to recover its equilibrium and "absorbed the lessons" of fear-inspired suspensions of freedoms.

But there is reason to worry, Gore said, that the Bush administration`s actions may represent not just a new cycle but also the beginning of a new and lasting era of repression. For one thing, he said, "the new technologies of surveillance, long anticipated by novelists like Orwell and other prophets of the `Police State,` are now more widespread than they have ever been."

For another, he added, the threat of terrorism is so open-ended that it offers Republicans a grand opportunity "to use fear as a political tool to consolidate its power and to escape any accountability for its use."

In addition to calling for a repeal and rewrite of the Patriot Act, Gore called upon the Bush administration to "immediately stop its policy of indefinitely detaining American citizens without charges," a reference to the administration`s use of "enemy combatant" status to justify holding U.S. citizens.

He also demanded that foreign citizens held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be given hearings as provided for under Article 5 of the Geneva Convention, which the United States has given captured combatants in every war, including Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War, until now.

"If we don`t provide this, how can we expect American soldiers captured overseas to be treated with equal respect?" Gore asked. "We owe this to our sons and daughters who fight to defend freedom in Iraq, in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Bankrolling a New Path to the Primary


By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 10, 2003; Page A04


BARRE, Vt., Nov. 9 -- The decisions of President Bush and former Vermont governor Howard Dean to forgo public financing will reshape future presidential contests, encouraging ideological candidates and weakening prospects of moderates, according to strategists and observers.

There is a consensus that a growing number of candidates will reject public financing of primaries and the accompanying spending limits without major changes in the law, an unlikely prospect if Republicans maintain control of Congress.

Without a revised law, candidates will seek to raise very large sums -- Bush and Dean are each aiming for $170 million to $200 million.

Fundraising is widely viewed as "the first primary," in which candidates gain or lose credibility well before any votes are taken. With Bush and Dean now establishing a clear precedent for a system without spending limits, fundraising will become all the more important in future nomination contests.

Candidates facing the toughest struggles are Republican moderates without an inside track to business support, and Democratic centrists without strong appeal to such groups as Hollywood liberals or trial lawyers.

"These are the guys without strong followings on the Democratic left or Republican right, and that`s what you need," said a Republican consultant, who requested anonymity.

Conversely, Dean is demonstrating his access to a large donor base by tapping into well-educated, computer-literate enthusiasts. Dean is capitalizing on the ease of contributing via the Internet by asking donors to "borrow" $100 to give him, a step that online credit card use has made simple.

"It`s not automatic that it [the shift away from public financing] pushes the party to the left," said Al From, head of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. "But there are going to be times that it is, and this is one of them," he said, referring to Dean`s success.

Jim Jordan, manager of the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), said Democratic small donors are "disproportionately liberal," which empowers candidates who appeal to those "from the left side of the spectrum."

The GOP counterpart to Dean, in the view of strategists, would be a conservative with strong appeal to the party`s core voters in the mold of former president Ronald Reagan.

The Bush campaign has demonstrated an even more effective Republican model by unifying much of the pro-Republican corporate community through a network of fundraisers known as "pioneers" (raising $100,000 or more) and "rangers" ($200,000 or more).

In 2000, Bush set a fundraising record of $101 million. He has raised just over $83 million and appears well on his way toward reaching his goal of $170 million to $200 million, despite facing no serious challenge for the nomination.

"There is no question that the corporate world has a strong Republican bias," said Gary Jacobson, a campaign finance expert at the University of California at San Diego. "As public finance fades, access to raw dollars rises in importance, and Republicans are always going to have an advantage there."

The Bush and Dean candidacies reflect two very different fundraising strategies. Eighty-four percent of Bush`s contributions have been $1,000 or more, and 11 percent have been less than $200; 22 percent of Dean`s contributions have been $1,000 or more, and 55 percent have been less than $200, according to the Campaign Finance Institute.

Although no Democrat in the current field has been able to compete effectively with Bush for $1,000 to $2,000 donors, campaign finance experts suggest that a Democrat with strong "star" power could. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is mentioned most often for 2008.

Bush and Dean have found the rejection of public financing is an effective tool to raise money. Dean was wildly applauded Saturday by 300 or more Democratic activists in Barre when he repeated his decision to reject public financing.

Dean told the gathering that "you have the power to take back this country so that the American flag doesn`t belong any longer to [Attorney General] John Ashcroft and [religious right leader] Jerry Falwell."

Dean, aides said, raised a record $5 million in the two days after announcing that he wanted to reject public financing.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Fair and Balanced™ Cartoons
Richtig schottisch am Montag, nur 50 frische Cartoons.

http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20031110__050toons.htm

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1.Teil s.gestern

FORBIDDEN FRONTIER
Alliances, loyalties rule in Pakistan border area
Border fighter: Elderly leader from tribal lands is kind of ally Musharraf needs
Juliette Terzieff, Chronicle Foreign Service
Monday, November 10, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/10/MNGLM2U4HR1.DTL


Shawal District, North Waziristan, Pakistan -- Second of three parts.

Pashtun tribesman Malik Khandan is the kind of man President Pervez Musharraf could use more of as his government seeks out Pakistanis willing to hop aboard the U.S.-led war on terror.

The grizzled, elderly tribal leader may be uneducated, highly conservative and quick with his trigger finger, but he is also savvy enough to foresee possible benefits from Musharraf`s plea of more than a year ago: "Pakistan First."

The slogan -- which failed to impress an impoverished populace grown cynical after decades of spotty national leadership -- was intended to inspire Pakistanis to work against social ills such as poverty and illiteracy. But most of all, it was encouraging them to stand up against the militancy and terrorism that has flourished here over the last two tumultuous decades.

Nowhere has the battle for hearts and minds been more challenging for Musharraf`s government than in the harsh, unforgiving tribal lands from which Khandan hails and where Western and regional intelligence officials believe members of the Taliban and al Qaeda have forged a base of operations for attacks against U.S.-allied forces, aid workers and civilians in neighboring Afghanistan.

The largely autonomous tribal areas historically tolerate little interference from the federal government. All seven areas have granted government access to the actual border area, but none of the tribes has agreed to even a limited deployment of Pakistani troops in their actual towns and villages.

While most tribes have also refused any significant cooperation with the government in the war on terror, the tribesmen of the Shawal district, located high in the mountains just on the Pakistani side of the border, have thrown in their lot with the pro-American camp.

"Some other tribes have complained about this, but our jirga (council) decided to cooperate, and we`ve got three new roads, 300 new jobs for tribal policemen, and are awaiting water pumps and schools," said Khandan, a 66-year old landowner from the Bakkakhel tribe. "All we have to do is keep our eyes open for al Qaeda and throw them out if they come."

Although the Shawal tribesmen are receiving an impressive reward from the government, Khandan says they have not nabbed anyone from al Qaeda yet.

"They know our area won`t welcome them, so they avoid us," he offered.

There is no inclination to help, however, when it comes to Taliban fighters. Reflecting the opinion held by most in the tribal areas, Khandan said of the Taliban: "They are good guys. If Musharraf wants them, he`ll have to provide evidence of their guilt."

The residents of the Shawal area -- about 100,000 people in all, members of the Bakkakhel, Janikhel and Kobalkhel tribes -- knew their lives were going to change when the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan began. A few months later, Pakistani and American forces showed up requesting to build a border fence in their area, and the tribes quickly saw an opportunity to improve their lives and increase their clout.

But the mistrustful locals were uncomfortable negotiating with the Americans, so the Pakistanis eventually brokered a deal. The border fence idea was scrapped since it would cut off the local tribesmen from their kinsmen on the other side of the poorly demarcated frontier. But the tribes pledged to help hunt down al Qaeda members.

"Our people are very happy," Khandan said. "We didn`t want bloodshed when we would have had to agree in the end anyway. For us, it was a good deal."

Like tribes in other areas, the people of Shawal are largely supportive of their Afghan brethren and remain staunchly opposed to the Bush administration`s assessment of the Taliban. They say they know little about al Qaeda.

Tribes in the Mohmand agency, just next to North Waziristan where Khandan lives, have also shown a willingness to help in the hunt for al Qaeda. But they too resist taking any action against any Taliban members in their midst.

"We don`t like terrorism or extremism here and so there are no al Qaeda allowed in our area," said Shahidullah, a member of the Halimzai tribe who lives in Dagkilli, a small village only 15 miles from the Afghan border.

"Taliban are not terrorists," he said. "They are following the true path of Islam, trying to protect their Pashtun nation. I would not try to capture them. It is up to the government to decide if that is necessary."

Mohmand`s 50-mile frontier with Afghanistan -- made up of sharp shale mountains and a cornucopia of dusty mule trails -- had never been patrolled before last June, when Pakistani soldiers arrived to setup checkpoints. While the army controls the border area, the tribesmen keep an open eye for strangers among them.

"If there is a face we don`t recognize, that person -- or those hosting him -- is immediately questioned," said Shahidullah.

On the question of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who is believed to be hiding somewhere in the border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan with his deputy, Egyptian-born Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Pakistani government`s desire to see them arrested is enough for Khandan.

"It`s better to capture or kill one bin Laden, who has killed others, and save an entire village of people," he said. "But we would not turn him over to George Bush. We would give him to the families of people he has killed for proper justice."

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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s.#9116 und gestern.

FORBIDDEN FRONTIER
Alliances, loyalties rule in Pakistan border area
Jaish-e-Mohammed: Journalist gets rare glimpse of feared, elusive militant group
Juliette Terzieff, Chronicle Foreign Service
Monday, November 10, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/10/MNG5A2U1VA1.DTL


Northwest Frontier Province, Pakistan -- Second of three parts.

Under the cover of impending darkness, the fighters from one of the world`s most infamous guerrilla armies arrived at a desolate farmhouse, wrapping their heads in dense white turbans to hide their faces.

"We are well prepared," said their spokesman, Salamat Gul, as the other five armed members of Jaish-e-Mohammed (Army of Mohammed) fanned out in their vehicles to create a loose safety cordon.

Meetings with Western journalists are exceedingly rare for this secretive and feared organization, and this one took place under extensive security. Aside from the present contingent, all other group members in a 15-mile radius scattered from their hideouts just in case the encounter turned out to be a trap.

Jaish-e-Mohammed was formed in March 2000 as a merger of militant Islamic groups dedicated mostly to freeing Muslims from Indian rule in Kashmir, the disputed Himalayan province over which India and Pakistan have fought two wars.

That remains the organization`s declared goal.

But U.S., Pakistani and Indian investigators believe the group -- which Gul boasts now has more than 5,000 members -- is aiming to play a larger terrorist role in the region and may now be linked to al Qaeda and the Taliban.


"Jaish-e-Mohammed and (most other Pakistani) extremist groups are together with al Qaeda, working together," said Anwar Sher, a retired Pakistani major general who worked with militant groups fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

It`s a claim Gul does not dispute.

"We fight for the cause of Islam, and we will only stop the day that Kashmiris and all Muslims around the world are assured their rights," he said in a deep voice. "Our group has its own operations, but when another group like the Taliban asks us for assistance, we will join forces with them on that. "

The interview took place in a sparsely furnished room lit by a single lightbulb, the door locked from the inside. Gul spent the entire encounter fingering the trigger of the Kalashnikov assault rifle in his lap, tapping his right foot nonstop and avoiding eye contact.

Gul -- like the vast majority of veteran militants in this part of the world -- began his mujahedeen (holy warrior) path as a young man fighting on Afghanistan`s fertile Shomali Plain against invaders from the Soviet Union. He carries a nasty scar that starts just below his right ankle bone and disappears up the leg of his white shalwars, the baggy pants favored by most men in this area.

The mission that called Gul to Afghanistan eventually became a career, and he moved on to join Harkat ul Ansar -- one of dozens of Kashmiri separatist groups -- until his commanders opted to join the newly formed Jaish-e-Mohammed.

"We were fighting, but we didn`t have the best supplies," recalled Gul, who is just under 6 feet tall but massive in presence -- with an enormous barrel chest and huge hands. "Jaish-e-Mohammed has the latest technology and equipment, money, and houses sharing the same goals we originally started out with."

Now 45, he is a seasoned field commander for a group implicated in such notorious operations as the December 2001 attack on the New Delhi Parliament that killed 14 people and brought India and Pakistan to the brink of another war, and the gruesome kidnap-murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl last year.

One of the group`s purported leaders, English-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, received the death penalty in July 2002 for his role in the Pearl murder.

"Pearl was against us, so that is why it had to be done," Gul said nonchalantly of the brutal killing, which prompted Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to launch a nationwide crackdown on extremist groups.

Both Sheikh and Maulana Massoud Azhar, Jaish-e-Mohammed`s founder, were also members of Harkat ul Ansar before breaking away to form their current association, specifically named by President Bush as part of the global "terrorist underworld" in his 2002 State of the Union address.

The two were freed from an Indian jail as part of a prisoner exchange during a 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane, delivered to Kandahar, Afghanistan, and then fled to Pakistan. U.S., Afghan and Pakistani investigators believe Azhar subsequently met with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and secured financing for Jaish-e-Mohammed from the al Qaeda leader.

"Their hate for America bonds them," said Sher. "This hate naturally is also directed at Musharraf for joining with the U.S."

Gul refuses to elaborate on the sources of his group`s funding, saying only that it has no trouble raising money. Being listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist group, facing increased global scrutiny of its financial structure after Sept. 11, and being banned by Musharraf in January 2002 have done little more than to push Jaish-e-Mohammed further underground, he said.

While Afghan and Western officials routinely praise Musharraf`s commitment to combating the terrorism that plagues this South Asian nation, Gul dismisses the Pakistani leader`s efforts: "Musharraf can do what he likes. He is unimportant and cannot stop us. Just look, he banned us, closed down offices, and detained people, but we are still here, still fighting."

That fighting, according to Gul, who prefers to carry only his Kalashnikov and a mortar into battle, includes hit-and-run actions against American forces in Afghanistan.

Gul said that Jaish fighters had been inside Afghanistan at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks on America but had been called back to Pakistan by their leaders when it became clear that a U.S. invasion was imminent.

"We were told that it was not the right time to fight the Americans, that we would get our chance later," he said.

Gul boasted that on a foray across the border in September, Jaish-e- Mohammed fighters had attacked U.S. troops stationed in the village of Shkin in eastern Paktika province. Two CIA agents were killed in an ambush in the area on Oct. 25.

Al Qaeda members are believed to be using Paktika as a hiding place, and there has long been speculation that bin Laden is in the area. Paktika has been the site of several battles between U.S.-allied forces and Taliban remnants since the fall of the fundamentalist regime in Afghanistan.

Pakistani and American investigators believe al Qaeda is infiltrating Pakistani militant groups -- nearly all of which are motivated by the Kashmiri issue or involved in Sunni-Shiite feuds -- in order to extend al Qaeda`s network in South Asia.

Rising to his feet to end the interview, Gul utters a final defiant message: "We were here before the Americans came, and we`ll still be here when they leave."



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ABOUT THE SERIES
The Forbidden Frontier

Sunday: Trouble on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan

Today: The army of Mohammed

Tuesday: Inside a Taliban village



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The tribal zones along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border are inhabited by fiercely independent peoples who are devoutly religious, hostile to foreigners and ready to fight. Chronicle Foreign Service correspondent Juliette Terzieff recently visited this remote region, where Osama bin Laden`s al Qaeda terror network is believed to be regrouping. Today`s stories are the second installment in her series of reports. For the complete coverage, go to: SFGATE. com
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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Shooting myself in the foot
VIEW FROM THE LEFT
Harley Sorensen, Special to SF Gate
Monday, November 10, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2003/11/10/hsorens…



When you stick your neck out as often as I do, every once in a while you`ll get your head chopped off.

I wouldn`t say this week`s "clarification" of last week`s column rises to the level of a head-in-the-basket case, but I`d be happier if I didn`t have to write it.

Last week`s column did something I would have thought impossible: It falsely maligned the Bush administration.

An administration starring a serial liar and a supporting cast of persistent prevaricators, obdurate obfuscators and downright double-talkers is hard to bum rap, but somehow I managed to do it.

I suggested something that apparently isn`t true: that our government is misleading us about the number of deaths of our troops in Iraq.

The rationale for my argument was that we rarely hear of a wounded soldier dying. When the severely injured never -- or rarely -- die, one might become suspicious.

I suggested sarcastically that our military doctors must be miracle workers because they seem to save every wounded soldier`s life.

I could have done without the sarcasm. The apparent truth is that the lives of nearly all the wounded in Iraq are indeed saved.

If I were a consistent reader of The New York Times, and could remember as far back as March 30, I might have known that.

Or if I were a reader of the U.S. Army`s Web site, I might have stumbled across this story.

Both articles were e-mailed to me by readers.

In essence, both say that the died-of-wounds rate in Iraq has dropped to a fraction of 1 percent. In other words, of all wounded GIs who live long enough to get to a surgeon (and that`s most of them), fewer than one in 100 die of their wounds.

That`s absolutely amazing, and is the best news I`ve heard yet coming out of that war.

What accounts for that amazing success? A variety of factors, such as better medicines -- in particular, quick blood-clotting drugs. In the past, too many GIs bled to death, either because the medics couldn`t reach them or, if they could, they couldn`t stop the bleeding. Now they can.

And now there are mobile surgical teams scattered throughout the battle areas, so the wounded get to well-equipped operating rooms in a hurry.

For far much greater detail, I recommend the article in The New York Times.

So, I apparently was wrong last week. Our government appears not to be covering up combat deaths.

However, in my own defense, and in the defense of all the e-mailers who agreed with me last week, the Bush administrations` secretiveness, and its history of deliberate misrepresentations, certainly tempts one to suspect the worst of those fellows.

Banning the press from Dover (Del.) Air Force Base, where GI bodies are returned from overseas, is the kind of unnecessary secrecy that`s bound to make one wonder what they`re hiding from us.

IN OTHER NEWS, "Our Man in Iraq," Sgt. Mike, wrote a couple of weeks ago that the one place in Iraq where a soldier might be safe was inside a tank. Too much armor to pierce.

But now that has changed. "The Hajji wanted a tank," he wrote last week. "For months now, the resistance has been targeting them. Tanks are [or were] the only thing we had that they just couldn`t mess with. Now it seems they`ve got it right."

Harley Sorensen is a longtime journalist. His column appears Mondays. E-mail him at [e-mail].

©2003 SF Gate

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http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-newhamp10nov10,1,…

With New Hampshire Voters, It`s More the War Than the Economy
By Faye Fiore
Times Staff Writer

November 10, 2003

FRANKLIN, N.H. — Business is brisk at Cafe Louie on Central Street. The Wednesday franks-and-beans special is moving nicely at $4.95, and every one of the orange booths is taken.

Louis Matney, 22 and fresh out of college, opened the place in the spring, a risky venture while the nation is struggling through the worst job loss in terms of numbers since the Great Depression.

But the success he has seen is not unique in this tiny state, where the first presidential primary is about 11 weeks away; the sluggish economy that has battered places like Iowa, Michigan and Ohio has left New Hampshire only slightly bruised.

"I`ve never seen such loyalty from customers. The same people come back every day," Matney said, running out to deliver a salad.

Times are relatively good in New Hampshire. The unemployment rate is more than a point below the nation`s — even in Franklin, a blue-collar town that has struggled since the textile mills shut down 30 years ago.

Now it`s the war that is making some New Hampshire voters nervous, so much so that the division could be seen at the table nearest the kitchen at Cafe Louie.

Brad Hinds, 36, owner of a plumbing and heating business, believes that the Iraq invasion was necessary and that Bush is on the right track. He`ll vote for him again.

Not so the guy across the table. Jarrod Deyarmond, 30, who works for Hinds, believes he is financially better off than he was a year ago. But he is looking hard at the field of Democratic presidential candidates traipsing through the state.

Deyarmond is disturbed by the failure so far to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the billions being spent there and the steady stream of bodies coming home. "I think we need a change, a different point of view," he said.

A president`s approval rating is typically linked to the economy`s performance. But despite the positive economic signs in New Hampshire, Bush`s numbers in the state continue to slide. In a recent University of New Hampshire poll, 53% approved of his handling of foreign affairs, a 10-percentage-point decline since summer and the lowest since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Ambivalence about the situation in Iraq helps explain why former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who questioned the war from the start, has staked out a strong lead among the Democratic candidates in state polls. In just one sign of his popularity, he is drawing such large crowds to house parties that some people have had to park three blocks away.

"The war has become a wedge issue here because it symbolizes for Democrats everything they can`t stand about American politics right now, and Howard Dean appeals to them because he can`t stand it either," said Dante Scala, a political scientist at St. Anselm College in Manchester.

Bush has many supporters in New Hampshire, which he carried by one percentage point in 2000. Even though more than a third of the state`s registered voters declare themselves independents, New Hampshire tilts Republican. All of its top elected officials are Republican, and the party holds sizable majorities in both houses of the Legislature.

But the postwar victory glow that pushed Bush`s approval rating sky-high a few months ago is now a chin-to-chest resolve among backers who promise to stick by the president through the long haul.

"He told us it would be hard," said Karen Faris, 40, sitting with her husband over a Chinese dinner at the Mall of New Hampshire in Manchester. "We feel things are going much better in Iraq, but that isn`t always what is reported."

On one recent afternoon, the streets of downtown Manchester were soaked with rain and, over at the new sports center, the circus was in town. As if New Hampshire needed another one.

Although Bush is unchallenged for the GOP nomination, the Democratic field is a whopping nine — and seven of them have been campaigning actively, their number swamping the state at times. (The state Democratic Party`s recent annual bash drew record crowds, forcing a hotel manager to roll up his sleeves and help serve food.)

It is not unusual to bump into a would-be president at the local pizzeria or the supermarket. The airwaves are flooded nightly with ads, all of them implicitly or explicitly anti-Bush. That is one reason his faithful believe his overall approval rating has slid 15 percentage points here since the spring.

"Bush has taken close to$1 million of unanswered, negative, paid media," said Tom Rath, a longtime New Hampshire Republican strategist who has been close to the Bush family for years.

New Hampshire`s 1.2 million population is roughly the size of San Diego`s, but its political sway in the early part of every presidential campaign is huge. This year, whoever wins the Democratic primary on Jan. 27 will get a boost heading into a rapid series of primaries that follow.

Despite Dean`s lead, the race is considered fluid. New Hampshire voters are famous for making up their minds on the way to the voting booth. And that`s what the other Democratic contenders, including Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, are counting on.

"How are you doing? How are things going?" Kerry recently asked a small woman in a headscarf waiting to cross Elm Street, Manchester`s main drag.

The answer to this often-repeated question is usually positive. Still, there is a sense that New Hampshire is ill at ease.

If anything, the economic signals here have been mixed. On the bright side, housing prices have shot up. Unemployment is 4.5%, and the state boasts the sixth-highest income per capita in the nation. Manchester, the largest city, picked up 2,000 jobs in the last couple of years.

"This time around, I`m not exactly sure we actually had a recession here," said Andy Smith, director of University of New Hampshire Survey Center. "We had a slowdown ... but it never really got that bad."

At the same time, though, New Hampshire lost one-fifth of its manufacturing jobs, a pattern repeated in other states across the country. The northern part of New Hampshire, sparsely populated and dominated by timber and paper mills, felt it the worst, with some counties recording unemployment figures as high as 9%.

The result is a mix of optimism and uncertainty. No one has forgotten the early 1990s, when recession slammed the state so hard that five banks closed in a single day, and voters vented a collective rage that precipitated the political downfall of President George H.W. Bush.

This time, New Hampshire`s economy was more diversified when the slowdown began. The high-tech sector suffered, but the state`s population was so highly educated that people tended to find other jobs, experts agreed.

Yet every person doing well in New Hampshire seems to know at least one who isn`t.

Doug Young, 42, of Rochester, who owns a chain of discount gift card shops, is having one of his best years ever. He bought a new car because the deals were irresistible — one-third off the sticker price. But some of his 30 employees can`t afford health insurance even though he pays half the cost.

"This is the first time a Bush tax cut has actually helped me, but not one penny of that is going into creating jobs," said Young, who is considering voting Democratic this time. "I am willing to give up certain things financially to have a president with more integrity."

Art and Joyce Gagne, 61 and 60, sold their flower shop in Derry and took a six-week trip out West.

But it`s hard to enjoy their good fortune when Art`s sister can`t afford her blood pressure pills, and one of their friends who had retired now has to work as an airport shuttle driver to keep his house.

"Why should people we know not be having their blood pressure pills and yet we are giving Iraq all this money?" Joyce Gagne asked, bringing the conversation back to the war.

Which, around here, is where it often seems to end up.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-turk…
THE WORLD




Turkey Warns of Preemptive Action Against Rebel Kurds
An official urges U.S. to take promised steps against insurgents based in northern Iraq, saying otherwise Ankara may intervene itself.
By Amberin Zaman
Special to The Times

November 10, 2003

ANKARA, Turkey — Reiterating demands that American forces take action against Turkish Kurd rebels in Iraq, Turkey warned that it might intervene to disarm and evict the guerrillas from their mountain strongholds in northern Iraq if the U.S. fails to do so.

"The U.S. has promised to remove the terrorists. We are still waiting for America to fulfill its promise. We believe that it will," Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told The Times in an interview Saturday. "But Turkey has the right to take preemptive action to defend its own security interests, just as Israel and the United States do. The U.S. government must take this issue seriously."

Gul spoke a day after the U.S. and Turkey formally abandoned plans to deploy as many as 10,000 Turkish troops to Iraq to help U.S. forces restore peace.

Washington withdrew its request for the Turkish contingent because of resistance from the Iraqi Governing Council, particularly its Kurdish members. Turkey and the Kurds of northern Iraq have long been adversaries; other Iraqis also were suspicious of bringing in Turks, who ruled Iraq for nearly 400 years under the Ottoman Empire.

Although the Turkish forces would not have been deployed in Iraq`s north, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, leaders of the two Iraqi Kurdish factions that have run northern Iraq as an autonomous area since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, accuse Turkey of seeking to undermine gains made by their regional administration.

Turkey, for its part, fears that Iraq`s Kurds are seeking to establish an independent state — a move that would probably refuel separatist sentiment among Turkey`s own 12 million Kurds.

Kurds and their role in postwar Iraq have become a source of friction between the U.S. and Turkey, who are NATO allies.

In a bid to improve ties with the U.S., Turkey`s parliament approved a bill last month giving the government a yearlong mandate to send troops to Iraq. In exchange, Turkey said it expected the U.S. to disarm and deport about 5,000 Turkish Kurd rebels from northern Iraq.

The rebels` Kurdistan Workers Party, known as the PKK, waged a 15-year war for Kurdish independence that claimed nearly 40,000 lives. They announced a unilateral truce after the capture of their leader in 1999, but have threatened to resume their battle if attacked.

The U.S. has pledged to move against the PKK, which is on the State Department`s list of terrorist organizations, even though the deal for sending Turkish forces to Iraq has fallen through. "The United States is committed to eliminating all terrorist threats in Iraq, including from the PKK," a U.S. Embassy spokesman here said Sunday.

But sources said Pentagon officials and the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, are blocking action against the PKK on the grounds that it would require thousands of troops that the U.S. can ill afford to spare while attacks on American forces are escalating.

A senior Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity, complained that even Iraqi Kurdish groups that until recently helped Turkish forces battle the Turkish Kurd rebels in Iraq "are now protecting them."

Gul noted that Turkey had helped shield Iraq`s Kurds from Saddam Hussein by allowing U.S. planes patrolling a "no-fly" zone over Kurdish areas to be based in Turkey. But now, he said, "the Kurds are behaving irresponsibly in their relations with Turkey, and the United States would be committing an historic error if it sides with these marginal groups."

The warnings from Turkey come as congressional leaders in Washington continued to urge the Bush administration to overhaul its strategy in Iraq.

Sen. Charles Hagel (R-Neb.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees, called Sunday for revamping the 24-member Iraqi Governing Council appointed by the United States.

Instead, he said on CNN`s "Late Edition," control should be given to "a provisional government like we have in Afghanistan … because the military of Iraq, the military police, the allies, all are anchored through government."

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the Governing Council needed to be "reorganized" and urged the Bush administration to give greater control of military operations in Iraq to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and to turn over civilian affairs to the United Nations.

Biden, speaking on ABC`s "This Week" said President Bush should call a summit with European leaders to discuss NATO involvement and the Governing Council. He also said leaders should consider establishing a "high commissioner" who would run the civilian side of the government, reporting to NATO and the U.N. Security Council.

*


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Times staff writer Leslie Hoffecker in Washington contributed to this report.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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MISPLACED PRISONERS
11/10/2003

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorial…

Several hundred thousand inmates in America`s prisons -- as many as one in six -- are mentally ill, according to a report by Human Rights Watch. Most dwell in a netherworld of grossly inadequate care. Here is one story from the report, about R.P., a mentally ill inmate in a New York State prison:

In 1998, R.P. was convicted of assault and attempted sale of a controlled substance. He has taken multiple prescription drugs to manage psychosis. In prison he has had violent outbursts and been cited for creating disturbances and "unhygienic acts." A scar on his stomach shows where he tried to cut himself open.

Since May 1999 R.P. has been in a secure unit with no access to intensive therapy. He is occasionally released for involuntary medication: shots of Haldol. He is due to be released in September 2004.

There are effective treatments for psychiatric illness, but the American Psychiatric Association says that "access to that care is fragmented, discontinuous, sporadic, and often totally unavailable," noting that serious persistent mental illness among the homeless and incarcerated has reached "epidemic proportions."

It will take a huge effort to overhaul the nation`s mental health system so it can serve and protect anyone with a mental illness in or out of prison.

Until that revolution comes, it is vital to celebrate small victories and try to duplicate them. Recently, Governor Romney commended the work of the Framingham Jail Diversion Program, a new initiative that unites police and mental health crisis workers. Their goal is prevention: steering mentally ill offenders away from jail and toward supportive services.

The Framingham cop/clinician teams have been involved in 237 incidents and avoided 47 arrests in the past six months. Instead of jail, the majority of these offenders go to a locked inpatient hospital unit. Others are referred to community treatment programs or to their own homes, or to foster care in the case of minors.

The program`s benefits: People get fitting care, and the police get much-needed help.

The program is an affordable $150,000 a year. Romney and the legislature should expand the effort. This will take hard work. Framingham`s program is supported entirely by foundation funding. It should have public support, and it should be duplicated in other police departments, with local tailoring to fit each community`s needs.

Diversion programs also need alternative placements where people can be sent. Unfortunately, the budget crisis has forced cuts in mental health services.

Government action is essential. It is inhumane and impractical for jails to be the mental health safety net of last resort. Government action is essential. It is inhumane and impractical for jails to be the mental health safety net of last resort.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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A regional solution to climate change
By James T. Brett, 11/10/2003

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/arti…

WHILE FEDERAL legislation to regulate greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming has yet to pass, several New England states are at the forefront of efforts to develop a regional solution. What`s needed now is a coordinated effort to get agreement among government policy makers and private sector interests on general principles to guide development of an effective regional strategy, one that could serve as a model for the rest of the country. The New England Council is taking such a step by convening a forum on climate change today in Boston. It will be attended by policy makers and business leaders from throughout the Northeast. The outcome is anticipated to be a declaration and set of principles encouraging such a regional approach.

At the core of the debate are programs and regulations that would regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists have concluded that certain gases, including carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, contribute to climate change, which will have an impact on our quality of life for generations to come. While that premise may still be debatable, there appears to be growing consensus among policy makers and business leaders that effective measures should be developed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Ten states recently announced their intentions to sue the Administration to force the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases. An amendment offered by Senators Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and John McCain of Arizona to legislation currently pending in Congress sought to establish a mandatory carbon dioxide reduction program along with an emission trading system.

Although the proposal was defeated, most observers agree federal action is only a matter of time. Meanwhile, Massachusetts and other Northeastern states have initiated efforts to develop state policies to address the issue.

The Conference of New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers has identified ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction goals for the region that necessitate action. Some New England states, including Massachusetts, have already developed climate change policies, while others are evaluating their options. Some states in this region have started to collaborate on climate change policies with neighboring states. Companies in New England are making business decisions today that will have an impact on current and future efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

Although important, effective actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions cannot be limited to state specific initiatives. Instead we must act as a region. Collectively, we can leverage our ingenuity to take meaningful steps towards cost-effective reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

We must also recognize the challenges and opportunities that our actions present for regional businesses, organizations and governments. The New England states must thoughtfully consider all climate change policies and actions and recognize that in order to be effective over the long-term, greenhouse gas emission reductions must encompass as large a geographic area as possible. Legislation and regulation, while vitally important, should not be the only response. The market must be encouraged to respond.

With these considerations in mind -- climate change policy should recognize certain key factors:

Scientific evidence points towards the conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions should be avoided, reduced, or sequestered.

Greenhouse gases, unlike other pollutants, have a global impact, and as a result avoiding or reducing greenhouse gases anywhere on Earth benefits our region just as if they occurred here.

Tapping into market forces, a robust greenhouse gas emission trading program that includes all technologies and activities that avoid, reduce, or sequester greenhouse gases is essential to a cost-effective climate change solution.

The criteria to evaluate the marketability of greenhouse gas emission reduction activities should require (at a minimum) a demonstration that the emission reductions are real, permanent, surplus, enforceable, and verifiable.

Regional greenhouse gas emission and emission reduction trading policies and programs are preferable to state programs and should be compatible with national and international trading systems as we look toward supporting future market linkages.

Reliable, diverse energy supplies and environmental quality are vital to New England`s economic growth and quality of life. The actions we take now as a region will have an impact on the future of global climate change policy -- both nationally and internationally.

James T. Brett is president and CEO of the New England Council.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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NEWS ANALYSIS
Bush stays firm on Iraq policy
Americans` death toll, home-front criticism mount
Marc Sandalow, Washington Bureau Chief
Monday, November 10, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/10/MNGLM2U4HV1.DTL


Washington - -- November in Iraq has been the cruelest of months, by the numbers, for President Bush.

Already 37 dead Americans. Two downed helicopters. And for the first time since the war began almost eight months ago, polls show a majority of Americans disapprove of Bush`s handling of the situation.

The human toll of the deadliest stretch since major combat ended served as a gut check for policy-makers who must make cold calculations about how to proceed. It also held serious political consequences for a president whose popularity sprouted from his handling of national security and who is up for re-election in less than a year.

There have been no signs of wavering from the White House. Bush told reporters during a brief inspection of California`s wildfires last week that he would "stay the course.`` A few days later he offered a sweeping vision of democracy for the Middle East that he said would require the same sort of patience it took to prevail in the Cold War, and the two world wars that preceded it.

Yet the tragic developments, surely intended to weaken American resolve, have not gone unnoticed. Bush`s critics escalated their attacks. Some prominent allies -- including GOP Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska -- openly questioned his tactics. And many neutral observers wondered how long such bad news can continue before the president changes his tack.

"This kind of loss of life, it`s water dripping on a stone. And if it keeps up over the next six, eight, 10 months, it will defeat Bush and cost him his presidency,`` said presidential historian Bob Dallek, author of "An Unfinished Life: John Fitzgerald Kennedy 1917-1963.``

The Democratic attack is growing increasingly loud. On Sunday, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called on Bush to call a summit with European nations and turn to NATO to take command in Iraq.

"The U.S. is a country right now basically in search of a strategy, and I think it`s time to make a fundamental shift in the way in which we`re going about trying to win the peace here,`` Biden said on ABC`s "This Week.``

Meanwhile, Republicans like McCain and Hagel have called on Bush to answer the latest violence by increasing the U.S. military presence.

Bush has responded by accentuating the positive in a series of public appearances. And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced plans to reduce the number of troops from 130,000 to 105,000 by early next year.

The broader message from the White House is that this is the inescapable price of war.

"Freedom is worth fighting for, dying for, and standing for -- and the advance of freedom leads to peace,`` Bush said at an event marking the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy. "We`ve reached another great turning point -- and the resolve we show will shape the next stage of the world democratic movement.``

Bush was warned repeatedly last spring that waging a pre-emptive attack on Iraq would be the greatest political gamble made by a modern American president. Now, barring a dramatic change in policy -- such as a steep increase or decrease in the number of U.S. troops -- Bush is at the mercy of the U.S. military and a group of violent insurgents, who hate America, its policies and, particularly, its president.

"Our enemies, whether they are Somalis, Hezbollah, or the Iraqis, understand that our vulnerable center of gravity is dead Americans,`` said Ret.

Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, a military historian whose most recent book is titled "The Iraq War: A Military History.``

"They`re not stupid. They figured it out. You can`t beat Americans in face-to-face combat. The surest way to avoid losing is to kill enough Americans that we tire first,`` Scales said. "Their view is that the rate at which Americans die is in direct proportion to the rate at which American will decreases.``

The initial evidence shows that American resolve has strengthened, not weakened, in the midst of the recent violence. A series of polls conducted by the Gallup Organization found support for the deployment of American troops actually increased during the last two weeks. However, during the same period, assessments of how well the effort is going, as well as Bush`s handling of the situation, have deteriorated.

"The decline in Bush`s rating has paralleled almost exactly the decline in the public`s assessment of how well the war is going, suggesting the public blames the president for the problems,`` concluded poll director David Moore.

It is a predicament that confronted other modern presidents with politically devastating consequences: Harry Truman`s second term was destroyed by the Korean War, Lyndon Johnson decided to abandon his quest for re-election because of Vietnam; and Jimmy Carter never recovered from his failure to free American hostages in Iran.

"Historically, risky foreign policy ventures have been more likely to undermine than bolster a president`s re-election campaign,`` said Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University in Washington.

"Will that defeat Bush for re-election? Probably not. Will it make it much more risky than it might have been? Absolutely,`` Lichtman said.

Bush`s political prospects have been bolstered by good signs on the economy, which happened to coincide with the tragic news from Iraq. A 7.2 percent growth rate during the third quarter and an upturn in the job market have led many to believe that Bush is a much safer bet for re-election than previous presidents who faced foreign policy crises.

"The great irony for this president is that throughout his administration,

his strength has been in his foreign military policy,`` Lichtman said. "Just when his foreign policy efforts turn sour, we`ve seen signs of the economic recovery speeding up.``

The Democratic field challenging Bush, which until recently has focused on the weak economy, has turned its attention to Iraq. Although the entire field now criticizes Bush, the candidates have been divided in their approach, with several initially supporting the president`s push toward war.

As the presidential election year approaches, Bush`s Iraq effort is being judged increasingly through partisan lenses. Democrats are becoming more and more hostile toward Bush, while Republicans, by and large, remain solidly behind his approach.

In a survey conducted over the summer by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 46 percent of Democrats said it was the right decision to attack Iraq, and 46 percent said it was the wrong decision. An updated survey conducted last month found that 54 percent of Democrats said it was wrong to go to war, with just 35 percent who thought it was the right decision.

By comparison, roughly 85 percent of Republicans said it was the right decision in both surveys.

"The national unity that we saw in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks has given way to intense political polarization and even anger,`` said center Director Andrew Kohut.

The conflict was evident last week as 115 Democrats, including all Bay Area Democrats except Reps. Tom Lantos of San Mateo and Ellen Tauscher of Walnut Creek, voted against Bush`s request for an additional $87 billion to sustain the effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Senate approved the appropriation by voice vote with only six members on the floor in order to spare some members political awkwardness.

"The debate we had here in Congress reflects more than understandable sticker shock at the $87 billion. It reflects the fact that there is a crisis in confidence in the president`s leadership in Iraq,`` Biden charged during the Senate debate. "The American people have grave doubts about whether we have a strategy for success -- and so do many members of Congress.``

Bush offered a different assessment as he signed the bill in an East Room ceremony.

"With this act of Congress, no enemy or friend can doubt that America has the resources and the will to see this war through to victory,`` he said to sustained applause.

The coming months will be a test of that resolve.

E-mail Marc Sandalow at [e-mail].

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

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Monday, November 10, 2003
Happy 228th Birthday to the United States Marine Corps!

[B}Jede Meldung ein Link:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/[/B]

War News for November 10, 2003

Bring ‘em on: US soldier killed in RPG ambush near Iskandariya.

Bring ‘em on: US troops under small arms fire in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Mortar attack in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: US troops mortared in Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Three US soldiers wounded in patrol ambush near Fallujah.

Bring ‘em on: US headquarters in central Mosul again attacked with small arms fire.

Bring `em on: US troops fighting Kurdish PKK guerrillas in northern Iraq.

Bring `em on: US soldier shoots and kills head of the district`s U.S.-appointed municipal council during "altercations" in Sadr City.

Iraqis demonstrate against US in Sadr City.

Unemployment in Iraq increases instability and insecurity.

Bremer’s decision to disband Iraqi Army was sheer folly with permanent damages.

Fashion maven L. Paul Bremer warns of rising militancy in Iraq. “Mr. Bremer also warned the problem will continue to grow worse, unless intelligence in Iraq improves.� Replacing Bremer with a competent administrator would be a good start.

Local newspapers in military towns are paying attention to the war.

US 1st Cavalry Division prepares for deployment to Iraq. “Every Friday, Capt. Timothy Tyson lines his soldiers on the pavement in the Army motor pool and tells them straight up what to expect when they eventually deploy to Iraq. His most effective method: reading aloud the details surrounding new deaths of U.S. troops.�

Casualty Reports

Local story: Michigan soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Colorado soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Iowa soldier killed in Iraq.





# posted by yankeedoodle : 2:43 AM

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CHENEY EXPANDING EVEN FASTER THAN ECONOMY

Creates 20,000 Jobs for Halliburton in Last Quarter


The White House had yet another piece of good economic news to trumpet over the weekend, announcing that Vice President Dick Cheney expanded even faster than the U.S. economy in the quarter just ended.

"Our economic policy, including our program of tax cuts for the highest income brackets, have resulted in the most dramatic expansion of a Vice President in U.S. history," President Bush said in his weekly radio address on Saturday.

While President Bush acknowledged that many Americans had yet to reap positive benefits from Mr. Cheney`s explosive growth, he said that it was only a matter of time before the Vice President`s surging wealth trickled down to the rest of the country.

According to figures released by the White House, Vice President Cheney expanded at a torrid 11.2% rate in the last quarter, creating over 20,000 new jobs, most of them for the Halliburton Company.

While economists expressed amazement at Mr. Cheney`s unprecedented growth rate, however, some doubted that his dramatic expansion could be sustained.

But Charles Donner, chief economist for Credit Suisse First Boston, predicted that the next quarter will also be strong for the Vice President, with the completion of an oil and gas pipeline leading directly from the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan directly into Mr. Cheney`s super-secret underground lair.

"With the completion of that pipeline, Dick Cheney will become the second-largest economy in the world," Mr. Donner said.

In other economic news, jobless claims were down overall in October, but way up in one key sector, the coaching staff of the New York Yankees.

**** BOROWITZ ON CNN MONDAY MORNING ****

Andy Borowitz gives his take on pop culture Monday morning at 7:40 on CNN`s "American Morning."

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

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Frightening winds swirl around the House of Saud

Robert Fisk

11/10/03: (The Independent) Osama bin Laden has an awful lot of friends in Saudi Arabia. In the mosque, among the disenchanted youth, among the security forces, even - and this is what the West declines to discuss - within the royal family.

Saudi ambassadors routinely dismiss these facts as "unfounded", but Sunday`s attack in the capital, Riyadh, is part of a growing insurrection against Bin Laden`s enemies in the House of Saud.

Whether or not the bombers were Saudi security force members - they were certainly wearing Saudi military uniforms - the Riyadh Government`s own "war on terror" is now provoking bombings, gun battles and killings almost every day in the kingdom.

The enemies of the House of Saud want to make the kingdom ungovernable - just as America`s enemies in Iraq want to make its occupation ineffective. Iraqis are still the principal victims of the bombings in Baghdad, just as Saudis were the principal victims on Sunday.

Clearly, after years of procrastination, the Saudi authorities are passing on some of their own intelligence to the US. For once, the latest warning from Washington - that al Qaeda`s next attack was moving from the "theoretical" to the "operational" stage was spot on the mark.

But the Saudi royal family - that part still desperate for US assistance - provided plenty of reasons during the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq for their Arab enemies to attack them.

For although they publicly said the US would not use Saudi military facilities during the war, they allowed the Americans to direct 2700 air sorties a day from the Prince Sultan Air Base - far more damagingly, they gave secret permission for 200 US aircraft at the base to fly 700 combat missions over Iraq daily.

The Jordanians suspect the bombing of their embassy in Baghdad was retaliation for a secret military operation in which 26 US F/A-18 fighter bombers flew missions from a Jordanian air base to bomb Iraqi air force facilities possibly able to fire missiles at Israel.

So, Crown Prince Abdullah, the effective ruler of Saudi Arabia, must be feeling some frightening winds blowing across the Saudi desert. For Bin Laden`s aim to destroy the royal family is shared by the American right wing.

When Laurent Murawiec, friend of the then US defence policy board chairman Richard Perle, gave his odd but damning assessment of Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the US and the "Kernel of Evil", he might have been Bin Laden spokesman.

Murawiec, who works with the Rand corporation and has been an executive editor of Executive Intelligence Revue presented a slide show to the Pentagon last year with titles that included "taking `Saudi` out of Arabia".

He claimed that since 1745, 58 per cent of all Saudi rulers had met a violent demise, that other Arabs consider Saudis "lazy, overbearing, dishonest, corrupt" and that they are "active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheer leader."

A suspicion persists in Washington that the Saudi royal family is still trying to compromise with the country`s religious hierarchy and its al Qaeda enemies. And Bin Laden`s messages are still laced with venom for the House of Saud. Indeed, his original aim is to do what Murawiec demanded: to take the "Saudi" out of Arabia.

Could the Americans sit back and watch al Qaeda take over the nation`s oil wells? There are those in the House of Saud who fear that now the US is in Iraq, it can - in the event of a revolution - just seize the oil fields in northern Saudi Arabia, leaving Riyadh and other cities to whichever Arabian ruler takes control.

Copyright: THE INDEPENDENT

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High court to hear Guantanamo challenges


By Michael Kirkland
UPI Legal Affairs Correspondent


WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 (UPI) -- The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether the Constitution extends to the cells of terror suspects at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Despite opposition from the Bush administration, the justices indicated they would review two lower-court decisions that said federal judges do not have jurisdiction to hear challenges to the detention of those foreign suspects being held outside the sovereign territory of the United States.

Though not yet scheduled, argument in the combined cases should be heard sometime next spring.

In an order accepting the cases, the justices said argument would be "limited to the following question: Whether (U.S.) courts lack jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba."

However, though the argument is limited, any eventual decision in this case is expected to affect a broad number of terrorism detentions elsewhere in the world, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, where suspects are in U.S. hands.

In a brief asking the Supreme Court to reject two challenges brought by prisoners at Guantanamo, U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson argued that aliens captured and detained abroad do not have the "capacity and standing to invoke the process of the federal courts," citing a 1950 high court decision, Johnson vs. Eisentrager.

"The Eisentrager court emphasized that aliens are accorded rights under the Constitution and the laws of the United States only as a consequence of their presence within the United States," the brief said.

Moreover, the 1950 decision "also stressed that judicial review of the claims of aliens seized overseas by the military in a time of war would interfere with the president`s authority as commander in chief, which `has been deemed, throughout our history, as essential to war-time security,`" it added.

About 660 prisoners of 42 nationalities are believed to be housed in the prison. The U.S. government acknowledges 32 attempted suicides.

One of the challenges to the detention was filed by relatives of two British and two Australian prisoners at Guantanamo.

Most of those being held as enemy combatants at the Naval Base are there because they attempted to prop up the Taliban theocracy in Afghanistan, while that regime was protecting those who had allegedly attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

The two British and two Australian citizens, however, may be in a different category. They maintain that they never took up arms against the United States -- though there appears to be reason to doubt at least one of those denials.

After the Sept. 11 terror attacks, which the United States has blamed on al-Qaida, Shafiq Rasul left his home in Britain to visit relatives in Pakistan, according to his lawyers. "While overseas, he wanted to explore his culture and continue his computer studies," they told the Supreme Court in their petition. "He was seized in Pakistan after visiting his aunt."

Asif Iqbal, also a British citizen, traveled from his home in Britain to Pakistan after Sept. 11, "intending to marry a woman from his father`s small village. He was seized in Pakistan shortly before the marriage."

Both men were turned over to the Afghan insurgency, the Northern Alliance, which eventually toppled the Taliban regime in concert with U.S. forces. The two British citizens have been held prisoner at Guantanamo, where the U.S. military transported Afghan enemy combatants, since January 2002.

Australian Mamdouh Habib traveled to Pakistan in August 2001 "to look for work and a school for his teenage children." He was seized by Pakistani authorities in October 2001 and turned over to Egyptian authorities, who transferred him to U.S. custody early in 2002. He has been at Guantanamo since May last year.

A fellow Australian, David Hicks, was in Afghanistan when he was captured by the Northern Alliance and turned over to U.S. custody in December 2001. His lawyers concede that "Hicks`s father believes his son may have joined the army of the then-incumbent government of Afghanistan." Like the two British citizens, he has been at Guantanamo since January 2002.

Despite the doubts in Hicks`s case, lawyers for the four men maintain they "are not, nor have they even been, enemy aliens or unlawful combatants." Their petition points out that the Taliban had caused no American casualties before the four were captured, and says they never received any training from al-Qaida or any other terror organization, nor did they participate, directly or indirectly, in the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The United States has never presented any evidence to the contrary," the petition says.

The four men have not been charged with any crime, but despite repeated requests, the four have never been allowed to contact their lawyers or family members. Because they were not captured in uniform, the U.S. government contends they do not have the protection of the Geneva Convention, which guarantees certain rights to prisoners of war.

The majority of prisoners at Guantanamo`s "Camp Delta" are kept in solitary confinement in cells measuring 6 feet 8 inches by 8 feet, except for 30 minutes of shackled exercise on a small concrete slab, according to their lawyers. Lights are kept on 24 hours a day.

The second challenge was filed by relatives of 12 Kuwaiti nationals "who were captured abroad in connection with the hostilities in Afghanistan," according to the Justice Department.

The Kuwaiti nationals are also being held at Guantanamo, their lawyers say for more than a year and a half.

Their petition to the Supreme Court identifies them as "charitable volunteers" who were in Pakistan or Afghanistan "to provide humanitarian aid to the people of those countries. None of the Kuwaiti detainees is or ever has been a member or supporter of al-Qaida or the Taliban, or of any terrorist organization, or has ever engaged in or supported any terrorist or hostile act against the United States."

The petition says the 12 were seized by local villagers after Sept. 11, 2001, then "turned over to the (U.S.) authorities in exchange for financial bounties."

In both cases, a federal judge ruled for the government and against the detainees, saying "Eisentrager and its progeny are controlling and bars the court`s consideration of the merits of these two cases."

When a federal appeals court upheld the judge -- saying "the privilege of litigation has been extended to aliens, whether friendly or enemy, only because permitting their presence in the country implied protection" -- the detainees` relatives filed two separate petitions at the Supreme Court asking for review.

That review was granted Monday in a one-paragraph order.

--

(Nos. 03-334, Rasul et al vs. Bush et al; and 03-343, Al-Odah et al vs. United

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`course the problem is if he ever ascends to the throne, we won`t know if we`ve got a king or a queen.
God save `em both.

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Irak ist kein Ausverkaufsobjekt der USA
Das internationale Recht sagt einhellig, Paul Bremers Wirtschaftsreformen sind illegal
von Naomi Klein
Guardian / ZNet 07.11.2003


Schickt Halliburton nach Hause. Hebt die Verträge auf. Weg mit den Deals. Zerreißt die Regeln. Dies sind nur ein paar Vorschläge für Slogans, die vielleicht helfen, die wachsende Bewegung gegen die Irak-Besatzung unter einen Hut zu bringen. Bislang konzentriert sich die Debatte unter Aktivisten auf die Frage: Sollen wir einen kompletten Truppenabzug fordern, oder sollen die USA die Macht an die Vereinten Nationen abtreten? Die ‘Truppen-raus’-Debatte übersieht aber eine wichtige Tatsache. Selbst wenn morgen der letzte Soldat aus dem Golf verschwindet und eine souveräne Regierung an die Macht kommt, der Irak bleibt besetzt: durch Gesetze, die im Interesse eines anderen Landes gemacht wurden, durch ausländische Konzerne, die entscheidende Dienstleistungen des Landes kontrollieren, durch eine Arbeitslosigkeit von 70%, deren Auslöser Entlassungen im öffentlichen Sektor waren. Jede Bewegung, die es ernst meint mit der Selbstbestimmung des Irak, sollte nicht nur das Ende der Militärokkupation des Irak fordern sondern auch das der Wirtschaftskolonialisierung, soll heißen, Rücknahme der Schocktherapie-Reformen - die von US-Besatzungschef Paul Bremer irreführenderweise als “Wiederaufbau” verkauft wurden -, und Aufhebung sämtlicher Privatisierungsverträge, die aus diesen Reformen hervorgegangen sind.

Wie ist so ein ehrgeiziges Ziel zu erreichen? Ganz einfach: Man weist nach, dass Bremers Reformen zumindest illegal sind. Sie stellen einen klaren Verstoß gegen jene internationale Konvention dar, die das Verhalten von Besatzungstruppen regelt: das Haager Abkommen von 1907 (ein Pendant zu den Genfer Konventionen von 1949, beides von den USA ratifiziert), und sie sind auch ein Verstoß gegen den Kriegskodex der US-Army. Das Haager Abkommen legt fest: “außer wo dies absolut unmöglich ist”, hat eine Besatzungsmacht “die Gesetze, die im Land in Kraft sind” zu respektieren. In hämischem Trotz hat die Provisorische Behörde der Koalition (CPA) diese simple Regel geshreddert. Laut Iraks Verfassung ist die Privatisierung maßgeblicher staatlicher Aktiva gesetzeswidrig, Ausländern ist es verboten, irakische Firmen zu besitzen. Ich komme auf kein plausibles Argument, warum es der CPA “absolut unmöglich” sein sollte, diese Gesetze zu befolgen. Und dennoch hat die CPA genau das vor zwei Monaten getan - sie unilateral über Bord geworfen. Am 19. September setzte Bremer die inzwischen schon berüchtigte ‘Order 39` inkraft, mit der die Privatisierung von 200 irakischen Staatsunternehmen verkündet wurde. Die Order verfügt, dass ausländische Firmen bis zu 100% an irakischen Banken, Minen und Fabriken halten können, und diesen Firmen ist auch erlaubt, 100% der Profite außer Landes zu schaffen. Der ‘Economist’ erklärt die neuen Regeln zum “kapitalistischen Traum”.

Aber auch in anderer Hinsicht verstößt ‘Order 39` gegen das Haager Abkommen. Denn in dieser Konvention ist festgelegt, Besatzungsmächte “sind ausschließlich als Verwalter und Nießbraucher von öffentlichen Gebäuden, Immobilien, Wäldern and agrikulturellen Liegenschaften, die dem feindlichen Staat gehören und im besetzten Land liegen zu betrachten. (Die Besatzungsmacht) hat das Kapital dieser Besitztümer zu sichern sowie diese in Übereinstimmung mit den Regeln des Nießbrauchs zu verwalten.” ‘Bouvier’s Law Dictionary’ (Lexikon des Rechts) definiert “Nießbrauch” (‘usufruct’ - das vielleicht hässlichste englische Wort) als Vereinbarung, mit der einer Partei das Recht eingeräumt wird, den Besitz einer andern zu nutzen und daraus Gewinn zu erzielen, allerdings “ohne die Substanz der Sache” zu verändern. Simpler ausgedrückt: Ein Haus-Sitter darf zwar den Kühlschrank leeressen aber nicht das ganze Haus in Ferienwohnungen umwandeln und verhökern. Aber genau das tut Bremer. Wie könnte man “die Substanz” öffentlichen Besitzes wohl tiefgreifender verändern als durch Umwandlung in Privatbesitz? Falls der CPA dieses kleine Detail entgangen sein sollte - im Landkriegsrecht der US-Army (‘Law of Land Warfare’) steht: “der Besatzer hat nicht das Recht, (nicht-militärischen) Besitz zu veräußern oder unqualifiziert zu nutzen”. Eine klare Sache: Wenn man etwas bombardiert, heißt das noch lange nicht, man hat das Recht, es zu verkaufen.

Sehr vieles spricht dafür, dass der CPA die Ungesetzlichkeit ihres Privatisierungsschemas wohl bewusst war. In einem durchgesickerten Memo vom 26. März warnt der britische Generalbundesanwalt Lord Goldsmith Tony Blair, dass “eine Auferlegung weitreichender struktureller Wirtschaftsreformen nicht durch das internationale Recht autorisiert wäre”. Bislang dreht sich die Kontroverse bezüglich Wiederaufbau des Irak meist um Verschwendung und Korruption bei der Vergabe von Verträgen - am wahren Ausmaß des Missbrauchs geht das aber extrem vorbei. Selbst wenn sich der Ausverkauf des Irak in völliger Transparenz und im offenen Wettbewerb vollzöge, er wäre illegal - aus dem einfachen Grund, der Irak ist kein Verkaufsobjekt der USA. Auch dass der UN-Sicherheitsrat die amerikanische bzw. britische Besatzungsbehörde anerkannt hat, kann hier keine rechtliche Deckung bieten. In der UN-Resolution vom Mai wird von den Besatzungsmächten ausdrücklich verlangt, “ihren Verpflichtungen gemäß internationalem Recht vollständig nachzukommen, einschließlich und vor allem den Genfer Konventionen von 1949 und dem Haager Abkommen von 1907". Eine wachsende Zahl internationaler Rechtsexperten vertritt mittlerweile die Auffassung, sollte sich die nächste irakische Regierung entscheiden, keine reine Filiale von Bechtel und Halliburton sein zu wollen, könnte sie starke rechtliche Argumente haben, eine Renationalisierung der Aktiva durchzuführen - Aktiva, die unter dem Edikt der CPA privatisiert wurden. Juliet Blanch - globaler Kopf einer großen internationalen Anwaltskanzlei (Norton Rose) und im Bereich ‘Energie’ und ‘internationale Schiedsgerichtsbarkeit’ tätig -, sagt, da Bremers Reformen in direktem Widerspruch zur irakischen Verfassung stehen, “verstoßen” sie auch “gegen internationales Recht und sind daher mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit nicht durchsetzbar”. Blanchs Argument, die CPA “ist nicht in der Lage noch besitzt sie die Autorität, jene (Privatisierungs-)Kontrakte zu unterzeichnen”. Somit hätte eine souveräne irakische Regierung “ein ziemlich schlagkräftiges Argument zur Renationalierung ohne Kompensationszahlungen”. Unternehmen, die sich mit einer solchen Enteignung konfrontiert sähen, hätten, so Blanch “keine rechtlichen Mittel”. Einzige Lösung für unsere Administration: dafür Sorge zu tragen, dass die nächste Regierung des Irak alles andere ist als souverän. Sie müsste vielmehr geschmeidig genug sein, die illegale Gesetzgebung der CPA zu unterschreiben. Und das Ganze wird man dann als glückliche Hochzeit des freien Markts mit einem freien Volk feiern. Ist es erst soweit, ist alles zu spät: die Verträge unter Dach und Fach, die Deals durchgezogen, und die Besatzung des Irak permanent. Die Kräfte des Friedens sollten also das sich rasch schließende Fenster noch nutzen und eine künftige irakische Regierung fordern, die frei ist von den Fesseln der Reformen. Es ist zu spät, den Krieg zu verhindern. Aber es ist noch nicht zu spät zu verhindern, dass die Invasoren - myriadenfachen - wirtschaftlichen Lohn einheimsen - Lohn, für den sie diesen Krieg in erster Linie geführt haben. Es ist nicht zu spät, die Verträge zu canceln und die Deals zu stoppen.

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Published on Monday, November 10, 2003 by ZDNet UK
Michael Moore Attacks E-Voting
by Andrew Donoghue

Controversial US documentary maker and author Michael Moore has lambasted electronic voting machines being used in some US states, claiming the technology is inherently open to misuse.

Speaking at an event to publicize his latest book, Dude, Where`s My Country?, in London`s Palladium theatre on Sunday, Moore attacked one of the main US voting-machine manufacturers, Diebold, for its links to the Bush administration. It has been revealed that the company`s chief executive Walden O`Dell is a major fundraiser for the Republican Party

O`Dell came in for criticism recently when he claimed in a letter to be "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year".

Moore ridiculed the variety of voting technologies used in the US, claiming the pencil-and-paper systems used in countries such as the UK and Canada were the still the best method of avoiding vote-rigging.

"In Canada they mark an X in a box, and then people sit and count the votes by hand with representatives of the various parties watching everything. There are hardly any roads north of Toronto but the Canadians manage to get all their votes in four hours after the ballots close," he said.

Jokingly, he asked for someone in the UK audience to explain to him in detail how exactly to put a cross in a box so that he could report the intricacies of the system to US authorities.

Moore also took mobile giant Orange to task, after finding the stage for the book-reading event festooned with banners advertising the UK company. The film maker, who is vocally anti-big business, seemed unaware the mobile operator was sponsoring the event until he came on stage and noticed the banners.

Moore twisted one of the 20 ft canvas signs around so that the Orange logo was no longer visible, amid cheers from the packed auditorium. He then denied any knowledge of a sponsorship deals with the company.

"Who the hell are Orange -- are they some kind of phone company? " he said. "No one sponsors me."

The author, who has seen his personal fortune rocket amid huge sales of his books worldwide, later apologized to the audience for the prominent onstage advertising.

Later in the hour-long event, Moore revealed he is currently filming another documentary following on from the Oscar-winning "Bowling for Columbine" called "Fahrenheit 9/11," which is due for release next summer.

Copyright © 2003 CNET Networks, Inc.

###

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Published on Sunday, November 9, 2003 by the Hearst Newspapers
Rumsfeld Retreats, Disclaims Earlier Rhetoric
by Eric Rosenberg

WASHINGTON - In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said U.S. forces would be welcomed by the Iraqi citizenry and that Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

Now, after both statements have been shown to be either incorrect or vastly exaggerated, Rumsfeld - with the same trademark confidence that he exuded before the war - is denying that he ever made such assertions.

In recent testy exchanges with reporters, Rumsfeld interrupted the questioners and attacked the premise of the questions if they dealt with his pre-war comments about weapons of mass destruction and Americans-as-liberators.

For example, on Feb. 20, a month before the invasion, Rumsfeld fielded a question about whether Americans would be greeted as liberators if they invaded Iraq.

"Do you expect the invasion, if it comes, to be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq?" Jim Lehrer asked the defense secretary on PBS` "The News Hour."

"There is no question but that they would be welcomed," Rumsfeld replied, referring to American forces. "Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and the al-Qaeda would not let them do."

The Americans-as-liberators theme was repeated by other senior administration officials in the weeks preceding the war, including Rumsfeld`s No. 2 - Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz - and Vice President Cheney.

But on Sept. 25, - a particularly bloody day in which one U.S. soldier was killed in an ambush, eight Iraqi civilians died in a mortar strike and a member of the U.S-appointed governing council died after an assassination attempt five days earlier - Rumsfeld was asked about the surging resistance.

"Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently and you said . . . they would welcome us with open arms," Sinclair Broadcasting anchor Morris Jones said to Rumsfeld as the prelude to a question.

The defense chief quickly cut him off.

"Never said that," he said. "Never did. You may remember it well, but you`re thinking of somebody else. You can`t find, anywhere, me saying anything like either of those two things you just said I said."

When testifying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the House Armed Services Committee Sept. 18, 2002, Rumsfeld said Saddam "has amassed large clandestine stocks of biological weapons." including anthrax and botulism toxin and possibly smallpox. His regime has amassed large clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX and sarin and mustard gas."

Saddam "has at this moment stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons," he later added, repeating the charges the next day before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

He repeated that theme in the weeks preceding the war.

Last month, after U.S. weapons hunters reported to the administration and Congress that they have yet to find a single weapon of mass destruction in Iraq, Rumsfeld was asked about his earlier statements.

A reporter at a Pentagon news conference asked: "In retrospect, were you a little too far-leaning in your statement that Iraq categorically had caches of weapons, of chemical and biological weapons, given what`s been found to date? You painted a picture of extensive stocks" of Iraqi mass-killing weapons.

"Wait," Rumsfeld interjected. "You go back and give me something that talks about extensive stocks. The U.N. reported extensive stocks. That is where that came from. I said what I believed to be the case, and I don`t - I`d be surprised if you found the word `extensive."`

With the weapons hunt in its eighth month, Rumsfeld also has backtracked on his earlier assertions that American troops knew where the forbidden weapons were hidden.

On March 30, 11 days into the war, Rumsfeld said in an ABC News interview when asked about WMDs: "We know where they are. They`re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

In comments Sept. 10 before the National Press Club, Rumsfeld conceded that he may have overreached. "I said, `We know they`re in that area," Rumsfeld said. "I should have said, `I believe we`re in that area. Our intelligence tells us they`re in that area,` and that was our best judgment."

"We know where they are. They`re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

Donald Rumsfeld on March 30, on alleged weapons of mass distruction in Iraq.

"I should have said, `I believe they`re in that area.` "

© 2003 Hearst Newspapers

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Row over Bush security as Blair defends visit
Ewen MacAskill, Hugh Muir and Julian Borger in Washington
Tuesday November 11, 2003
The Guardian

Tony Blair last night launched an impassioned defence of George Bush`s visit to London next week and pleaded with anti-war protesters to put the arguments about war behind them and focus on Iraq`s future.

With a week to go before the US president arrives, the promise of the three-day visit is already acting as a magnet for protesters and anarchists from all over Europe.

The Guardian learned last night of tension between US security agents, who want an exclusion zone round the president, and the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, who wants the demonstrators to be guaranteed as much freedom as possible. The Metropolitan police are caught in the middle.

Mr Blair devoted the bulk of his annual foreign policy speech at the Guildhall in London to Mr Bush`s state visit. Confronting critics who say political embarrassment lies ahead and that he must regret having issued the invitation, Mr Blair insisted he was not nervous: "I believe this is exactly the right time for him to come."

He adopted an apocalyptic tone to justify Mr Bush`s visit, saying the battle for Iraq was more important than most people realised. "It is a battle of seminal importance for the early 21st century. It will define relations between the Muslim world and the west. It will influence profoundly the development of Arab states and the Middle East," he said.

The Stop the War Coalition and the Muslim Association of Britain hope that 100,000 protesters will take to the streets. Scotland Yard has cancelled all leave for the three days Mr Bush will be in London. About 3,800 British police will be involved in the £4m security operation, in addition to up to 250 armed US secret service agents.

Sir John Stevens, commissioner of the Metropolitan police, is in a position of acute sensitivity. While the White House is insisting on maximum security, Mr Livingstone`s office has made clear to Scotland Yard its insistence that those who want to are left free to demonstrate. One source said: "The view was expressed that a legitimate protest must be facilitated."

He said comparisons were being drawn to the visit of President Jiang Zemin of China in 1999. When he rode up The Mall, police stopped protesters from holding up banners and Tibetan flags. "There must be no repeat of that fiasco," said the source.

Members of London`s Police Authority have also expressed concern, insisting that the bill for the police operation not be paid by local ratepayers. Eric Ollerenshaw, who is also leader of the Conservative group on the London assembly, said: "We must be sure that the government pays and we must look at where all these police officers are going to be coming from."

Mr Bush will arrive on Tuesday and is scheduled to make a speech the following day. Much of his time will be spent with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, a useful photo opportunity for next year`s presidential election and one he will not want marred by huge demonstrations.

Mr Blair, in his speech at the lord mayor`s banquet, said: "For many, the script of the visit has already been written. There will be demonstrations. His friends wonder at the timing. His enemies rub their hands at the potential embar rassment." Mr Blair said they were all wrong.

The visit comes at a bad time for the prime minister, with his advisers anxious to get the agenda back to domestic issues after almost a year consumed by Iraq. Mr Bush`s presence in London will reignite the arguments over the war.

According to a Populus/ Times poll released today, more than half of British voters (60%) believe the close personal relationship between Mr Bush and Mr Blair is bad for Britain.

Mr Blair said: "I say to those who will protest when President Bush comes: protest if you will. That is your democratic right. Attack the decision to go to war, though have the integrity to realise that without it, those Iraqis now tasting freedom would still be under the lash of Saddam, his sons and their henchmen.

"But accept that the task now is not to argue about what has been, but to make what is happening now work, and work for the very Iraqis we all say we want to help."

Mr Blair acknowledged the confrontation with France over Iraq and the continuing fall-out from it. "It is true also that there is an antipathy in parts of the French political es tablishment to America. But don`t exaggerate it."

The Blair-Bush relationship is likely to come under particular scrutiny in the light of the surprise decision by the US supreme court yesterday to hear appeals from Guantanamo Bay inmates for access to the US legal system. Two of the inmates whose cases will be heard are Britons, Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal. This will put pressure on the government to clarify its position on the detention without trial of its citizens in arguments before the supreme court.


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Fear of trade war after US steel tariffs ruled illegal
Andrew Osborn in Brussels and David Gow
Tuesday November 11, 2003
The Guardian

A trade war between Europe and America threatened to reignite last night after the US rejected a final ruling from the World Trade Organisation that its protectionist tariffs on foreign steel are illegal and industry accused it of planning fresh measures.

US officials said they rejected the findings of the WTO appeal body as the EU urged Washington to lift tariffs of up to 30% on some foreign steel imports or face EU sanctions worth €2.2bn (£1.5bn) a year, from as early as next month.

The UK steel industry warned that Washington was planning to get round the WTO ruling by changing the way anti-dumping duties are calculated, thus extending the tariffs for up to three more years.

Welcoming the WTO decision, Ian Rodgers, director of trade body UK Steel, said: "It looks to us as if the US is preparing to cheat on its obligations. We are urging the [European] commission and British government that if this proposal is enacted, the EU must still proceed with its retaliation even if the tariffs are apparently withdrawn."

The WTO said the tariffs, imposed by President Bush in January 2002, were "inconsistent" with free trade and quashed a last-ditch US appeal. Washington had claimed the "safeguard measures" were necessary to protect the US steel industry from an unexpected surge in cheap imports but the WTO concluded that America had comprehensively failed to prove its case. The decision is a victory for the EU as well as Japan, Brazil, South Korea, Norway, New Zealand and Switzerland, which had all contested the US measures.

EU sanctions will come in the form of higher import tariffs on a range of US goods such as Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Ray-Ban sunglasses. They will see many US goods priced out of the European market and have been calculated to inflict maximum pain upon US manufacturers based in "swing states" whose support will be crucial for Mr Bush`s re-election campaign next year.

"The measures are not there to punish the US but to focus the minds of the US administration," said a commission spokeswoman. "The sooner they terminate the measures the better, and we won`t need to use these sanctions."

The EU and the other victorious parties said, however, that the US now had "no choice" but to scrap the tariffs and demanded Washington act "as quickly as possible".

In Britain the CBI said America should abandon the "mutually damaging" tariffs. "These illegal tariffs are not only damaging to industry outside the US," said CBI leader Digby Jones. "They are actually harming America`s reputation and American industry, which is paying above the odds for steel both from home and abroad."

Anglo-Dutch group Corus, which negotiated exemptions, also welcomed the ruling and urged President Bush to remove the tariffs swiftly. It said its sales to the US in the first half of this year were down 10% because of the tariffs and currency movements, with exports from Holland down 30%.


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Dreamers and idiots
Britain and the US did everything to avoid a peaceful solution in Iraq and Afghanistan

George Monbiot
Tuesday November 11, 2003
The Guardian

Those who would take us to war must first shut down the public imagination. They must convince us that there is no other means of preventing invasion, or conquering terrorism, or even defending human rights. When information is scarce, imagination is easy to control. As intelligence gathering and diplomacy are conducted in secret, we seldom discover - until it is too late - how plausible the alternatives may be.

So those of us who called for peace before the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan were mocked as effeminate dreamers. The intelligence our governments released suggested that Saddam Hussein and the Taliban were immune to diplomacy or negotiation. Faced with such enemies, what would we do, the hawks asked? And our responses felt timid beside the clanking rigours of war. To the columnist David Aaronovitch, we were "indulging... in a cosmic whinge". To the Daily Telegraph, we had become "Osama bin Laden`s useful idiots".

Had the options been as limited as the western warlords and their bards suggested, this might have been true. But, as many of us suspected at the time, we were lied to. Most of the lies are now familiar: there appear to have been no weapons of mass destruction and no evidence to suggest that, as President Bush claimed in March, Saddam had "trained and financed... al-Qaida". Bush and Blair, as their courtship of the president of Uzbekistan reveals, appear to possess no genuine concern for the human rights of foreigners.

But a further, and even graver, set of lies is only now beginning to come to light. Even if all the claims Bush and Blair made about their enemies and their motives had been true, and all their objectives had been legal and just, there may still have been no need to go to war. For, as we discovered last week, Saddam proposed to give Bush and Blair almost everything they wanted before a shot had been fired. Our governments appear both to have withheld this information from the public and to have lied to us about the possibilities for diplomacy.

Over the four months before the coalition forces invaded Iraq, Saddam`s government made a series of increasingly desperate offers to the United States. In December, the Iraqi intelligence services approached Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA`s former head of counter-terrorism, with an offer to prove that Iraq was not linked to the September 11 attacks, and to permit several thousand US troops to enter the country to look for weapons of mass destruction. If the object was regime change, then Saddam, the agents claimed, was prepared to submit himself to internationally monitored elections within two years. According to Mr Cannistraro, these proposals reached the White House, but were "turned down by the president and vice-president".

By February, Saddam`s negotiators were offering almost everything the US government could wish for: free access to the FBI to look for weapons of mass destruction wherever it wanted, support for the US position on Israel and Palestine, even rights over Iraq`s oil. Among the people they contacted was Richard Perle, the security adviser who for years had been urging a war with Iraq. He passed their offers to the CIA. Last week he told the New York Times that the CIA had replied: "Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad".

Saddam Hussein, in other words, appears to have done everything possible to find a diplomatic alternative to the impending war, and the US government appears to have done everything necessary to prevent one. This is the opposite to what we were told by George Bush and Tony Blair. On March 6, 13 days before the war began, Bush said to journalists: "I want to remind you that it`s his choice to make as to whether or not we go to war. It`s Saddam`s choice. He`s the person that can make the choice of war and peace. Thus far, he`s made the wrong choice."

Ten days later, Blair told a press conference: "We have provided the right diplomatic way through this, which is to lay down a clear ultimatum to Saddam: cooperate or face disarmament by force... all the way through we have tried to provide a diplomatic solution." On March 17, Bush claimed that "should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war". All these statements are false.

The same thing happened before the war with Afghanistan. On September 20 2001, the Taliban offered to hand Osama bin Laden to a neutral Islamic country for trial if the US presented them with evidence that he was responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington. The US rejected the offer. On October 1, six days before the bombing began, they repeated it, and their representative in Pakistan told reporters: "We are ready for negotiations. It is up to the other side to agree or not. Only negotiation will solve our problems." Bush was asked about this offer at a press conference the following day. He replied: "There`s no negotiations. There`s no calendar. We`ll act on [sic] our time."

On the same day, Tony Blair, in his speech to the Labour party conference, ridiculed the idea that we could "look for a diplomatic solution". "There is no diplomacy with Bin Laden or the Taliban regime... I say to the Taliban: surrender the terrorists; or surrender power. It`s your choice." Well, they had just tried to exercise that choice, but George Bush had rejected it.

Of course, neither Bush nor Blair had any reason to trust the Taliban or Saddam - these people were, after all, negotiating under duress. But neither did they have any need to trust them. In both cases they could have presented their opponents with a deadline for meeting the concessions they had offered. Nor could the allies argue that the offers were not worth considering because they were inadequate: both the Taliban and Saddam were attempting to open negotiations, not to close them - there appeared to be plenty of scope for bargaining. In other words, peaceful resolutions were rejected before they were attempted. What this means is that even if all the other legal tests for these wars had been met (they had not), both would still have been waged in defiance of international law. The charter of the United Nations specifies that "the parties to any dispute...shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation".

None of this matters to the enthusiasts for war. That these conflicts were unjust and illegal, that they killed or maimed tens of thousands of civilians, is irrelevant, as long as their aims were met. So the hawks should ponder this. Had a peaceful resolution of these disputes been attempted, Bin Laden might now be in custody, Iraq might be a pliant and largely peaceful nation finding its own way to democracy, and the prevailing sentiment within the Muslim world might be sympathy for the United States, rather than anger and resentment.

Now who are the dreamers and the useful idiots, and who the pragmatists?

· www.monbiot.com


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A cry of: waiter! And the fighting stopped
A new German book reveals fresh details about the day peace broke out

Luke Harding in Berlin
Tuesday November 11, 2003
The Guardian

A new book by a German historian last night cast fresh light on one of the most extraordinary episodes of the first world war and revealed that the celebrated 1914 Christmas truce took place only because many of the Germans stationed on the front had worked in England.

The book, Der Kleine Frieden im Grossen Krieg, or The Small Peace in the Big War, shows that the German and British soldiers who famously played football with each other in no man`s land on Christmas Day 1914 didn`t always have a ball. Instead, they improvised. On certain sections of the front, soldiers kicked around a lump of straw tied together with string, or even an empty jam box.

According to previously unseen letters and diaries sent home by Germans from the trenches, many of the passes went wildly astray and shot off the icy pitch. The soldiers used sticks of wood, their caps and steel helmets as goalposts. The games lasted about an hour. The sleep-deprived players then collapsed, exhausted.

The book, by the German author Michael Jürgs, is the first to be written from a German perspective about the impromptu Christmas ceasefire that spread across the western front - in defiance of official orders and to the horror of the British high command - some five months after the outbreak of war.

It includes extracts from an extraordinary diary by a German lieutenant, Kurt Zehmisch, discovered four years ago in an attic near Leipzig. Zehmisch was a schoolteacher who spoke English and French. He describes how, on Christmas Eve, the shooting suddenly stopped. His Saxon regiment then blew a whistle on two fingers. The English immediately whistled back.

"Soldier Möckel from my company, who had lived in England for many years, called to the British in English, and soon a lively conversation developed between us."

A couple of soldiers from each side then climbed out of their trenches, shook hands in no man`s land, and wished each other a merry Christmas. They agreed not to shoot the following day.

"Afterwards, we placed even more candles than before on our kilometre-long trench, as well as Christmas trees," Zehmisch wrote. "It was the purest illumination - the British expressed their joy through whistles and clapping. Like most people, I spent the whole night awake. It was a wonderful, if somewhat cold, night."

According to Jürgs, the fraternisation involving mostly Catholic Saxon and Bavarian regiments was only possible because many of the German soldiers spoke good English as they had previously been employed in Britain. "They had worked as cab drivers and barbers in places like Brighton, Blackpool and London," he said. "When war broke out in August 1914 they were forced to go home. Some even left families behind in England."

One German soldier had worked in the Savoy; when the war started British soldiers would apparently shout "Waiter!" across their newly dug positions. Another German infantryman described how on Christmas Day, when both sides climbed out of their trenches and over the barbed wire, a British Tommy had set up a makeshift barber`s shop in no man`s land. The barber was "completely indifferent" to whether his customers were German or British, and charged a couple of cigarettes per haircut, Bavarian Josef Sebald observed. "This was war... but there was no trace of enmity between us," he added.

The informal ceasefire stretched all across the 500-mile western front where more than a million men were encamped, from the Belgian coast as far as the Swiss border. The truce was especially warm along a 30-mile line around the Belgian town of Ypres, Jürgs notes. Not everybody, though, approved. One Austrian soldier billeted near Ypres complained that in wartime such an understanding "should not be allowed". His name was Adolf Hitler.

Last night Zehmisch`s son Rudolf, who discovered the diaries in 1999 while clearing out the family loft, told the Guardian he was proud that his father had helped initiate the unprecedented ceasefire. "My father had studied in France. He also visited England. He went on a day trip to Folkestone in 1913," Mr Zehmisch, 76, said.

At first he was unable to read his father`s 15 diaries sent back from the front in envelopes because they were written in an archaic form of German shorthand. He managed to track down an elderly professor who could decipher the text - who then died. Mr Zehmisch then taught himself Gabelsberger shorthand and began the translation. "My father was in charge of three or four companies. At one point he wrote: `We will not shoot against the British today`."

Miraculously, Kurt Zehmisch survived the first world war and returned to his old teaching job. He did not survive the second, however. After Hitler`s rise to power he rejoined the army, became a major, and was sent to fight on the eastern front. The Russians captured him and took him to a prison camp. In November 1946 he disappeared.

Last night Jürgs, a biographer of the German novelist Günter Grass and a former magazine editor, said he had found numerous unseen letters in German newspapers and regimental archives. He said his book was the first about the 1914 truce "to be written from the German point of view", adding: "It`s important for British people too because it tells what happened from the other side."

In some parts of the front, meanwhile, the ceasefire lasted for several weeks after Christmas Day 1914. Inevitably, though, the slaughter resumed. "The English are extraordinarily grateful for the ceasefire, so they can play football again," Gustav Riebensahm, of the 2nd Westphalian regiment, wrote in his diary. "But the whole thing has become slowly ridiculous and must be stopped. I will tell the men that from this evening it`s all over."

· Der Kleine Frieden im Grossen Krieg by Michael Jürgs, published by Bertelsmann


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Iran accepts extra inspections of nuclear sites
By Jim Heintz in Moscow
11 November 2003


A senior Iranian official said yesterday that his country had accepted an increase in inspections of its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency and was temporarily suspending uranium enrichment.

Hasan Rowhani, the head of Iran`s Supreme National Security Council, made the announcement before meeting President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. He said Iran wanted to earn "greater trust from the international community". Iran has been subjected to intense international pressure over fears that it intended to use a Russian-built nuclear reactor to help it to develop atomic weapons.

Mr Rowhani said Iran had sent a letter to the IAEA agreeing to stepped-up inspections. The agency in Vienna could not immediately be reached for confirmation.

But Mr Putin and Igor Ivanov, the Russian Foreign Minister, indicated satisfaction with his statement and suggested it cleared the way for further lucrative Russian-Iranian nuclear co-operation. Iran`s concessions had been widely expected, although the timeframe had been vague. By making the announcement in Moscow, Mr Rowhani bolstered the diplomatic prestige of the Kremlin, which had taken a position between Washington and Tehran in the dispute.

Russia had joined the United States in urging Iran to accept tighter controls. But the Kremlin resisted all calls from Washington to freeze its $800m (£480m) deal to help to build Iran`s first nuclear power plant, at Bushehr. Russia dismissed as nonsense American concerns that Iran would use the project as a cover to develop nuclear weapons.

"Atomic weapons are not important to our defence doctrine," Mr Rowhani said yesterday.

The additional protocol would allow IAEA inspectors to make snap inspections and extend their examination of Iranian nuclear activities that had previously been off-limits. Tehran says it has enriched uranium only to non-weapons levels, as part of peaceful nuclear programmes intended to produce power as its oil stocks decline. (AP)
11 November 2003 10:29

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Was ist für die NYTimes heute wichtig. Die Printausgabe Headlines.

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November 11, 2003
LAW AND ORDER
Iraqi Tribes, Asked to Help G.I.`s, Say They Can`t
By SUSAN SACHS

FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 8 — As a tribal chieftain in Iraq`s most rebellious city, Sheik Khamis el-Essawi has met more American commanders in the last seven months than he can remember.

They all make the same polite yet firm demand. He must, they say, exert his legendary tribal authority to stop guerrilla attacks on their troops.

Sheik Khamis, a dapper man whose Buessa tribe still controls a fine swath of fertile land along the Euphrates, says he keeps responding that, alas, his influence is just not what it used to be.

"Every time a new general comes, they call us to a meeting and say the same things," he said after conferring Saturday with the latest high-ranking visitor, Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of American forces in the Middle East. "But they don`t understand that the sheiks have no control over those people doing the attacks. Believe me, those people are not going to listen to me."

In Iraq`s Shiite-dominated south, a cohesive group of Shiite Muslim clergymen, quickly established themselves as the new authority figures when official hostilities ended and they urged their followers to tolerate the occupation.

There has also been virtually no violence in the north, where the majority Kurds had long built up their own institutions.

But in restive Falluja, and places like it across the Sunni Muslim heartland of central Iraq, Saddam Hussein had so decimated the natural social hierarchy, Iraqis say, that no group could fill the political vacuum left by his ouster.

"We miss the support that the government used to give," said Sheik Khamis, lighting up a Pleasure brand cigarette and recalling the days when no one in power expected him to actually lead his tribesmen. "Now it`s the state that`s coming to us for support."

In their day, imperial powers like the Ottoman Turks and the British used to manage this unruly region by co-opting the tribes, keeping them occupied with internal rivalries or buying their loyalty with land.

Iraq`s newest foreign occupiers are trying the same formula, but the ingredients are different, producing inconclusive results. Under Mr. Hussein, tribal leaders became an extension of the all-powerful Baath Party, rendering them irrelevant in the eyes of many of their followers.

In the 1990`s, Mr. Hussein further undercut tribal authority with his "faith campaign," which placed a new class of militant Sunni clerics above the tribes in the social and political mix, residents here say.

Since Baghdad fell in April, five different American commanders have tried to tame Falluja, a rough and tumble city of 450,000 people that lived almost exclusively off the patronage of Mr. Hussein`s government.

Nearly every day, bombs explode near American convoys, rocket-propelled grenades are fired at American patrols or soldiers raid the houses of suspected insurgents. On Nov. 2, a rocket fired from the outskirts of Falluja brought down a Chinook helicopter, killing 16 soldiers on board.

To judge by the look of Falluja, the violent opposition still has the upper hand.

The main streets display neatly written banners urging people to kill "traitors" and Americans. The police station, where officers are paid and supervised by American soldiers, is reinforced against attack with sandbags and barbed wire. City Hall, where the American-appointed mayor sits, has been hit repeatedly with rocket-propelled grenades.

Yet the newest American commander is confident he has found the right combination of military force, persuasion and promise of a brighter future to pacify Falluja.

"What we offer is this," said Lt. Col. Brian M. Drinkwine, of the 82nd Airborne Division, who took charge two months ago. "If Falluja and the surrounding area are safe, then the coalition and the international community would invest here."

The colonel and his men operate from trailers on the southern outskirts of the city, among the bleak remnants of an old holiday camp. They frequently invite clerics and tribal leaders over for chats about the disadvantages of allowing attacks to continue. Sometimes they also make the point more forcefully.

After American convoys encountered homemade explosives on roads running through Sheik Khamis`s land, soldiers turned up on his doorstep and demanded to search his home for weapons.

The sheik was delighted.

"When they came to my house, honestly I was happy," he recalled. "It`s kind of a cover for me because some people were calling me a traitor for supporting the Americans. It actually helped me."

Colonel Drinkwine has also dangled financial incentives, spending thousands of dollars to fix some schools and a hospital. Not everyone was impressed.

"He was telling us one day how he spent $3,000 on this and $5,000 on that," said Sheik Ibrahim el-Buessa, a cousin of Sheik Khamis. "So what? When Sheik Khamis`s father died two years ago, we paid $35,000 just for the funeral."

The American commander`s adviser on tribal and religious affairs is a young Arab-American medic in his unit, Pfc. Khaled Dudin, a Californian who spent part of his childhood among the Bedouin tribes of Saudi Arabia.

Private Dudin has taken to warning local Sunni clerics that they will have "blood responsibility" under Islamic law if they incite their followers to attack American forces.

"I am a paratrooper and an American Muslim," the soldier declared, "and I can quote Koran as well as anybody."

But there is nothing simple about Falluja and its murky stew of tribal leaders, Saddam-era pretenders to tribal power, clerics of varying militancy and a population primed for hostility to the United States.

The city and occupiers got off to a bad start. A pro-Saddam Hussein demonstration in late April led to a shootout with soldiers that left at least 15 Iraqis dead. Other lethal confrontations followed, fueled in part by mosque preachers who spread stories about American soldiers spying on women from their posts in residential neighborhoods.

The rumor, denied by the military, was poison in a conservative city where women rarely leave their homes and then only when they are completely covered. Iraqis said it also enhanced the standing of young Sunni clerics who preached that the United States was waging war on Islam, a theme that had been encouraged by Saddam Hussein.

"This used to make a lot of young men eager to go fight the infidels and become a martyr," said Abdelhamid al-Jumaili, one of the more moderate of Falluja`s clerics. "So now it`s practically impossible for clerics to preach moderation and patience."

Sheik Jumaili, whose title is religious rather than tribal, would prefer to see Falluja at peace.

Most of the city`s clerics share these views, he said, but are too divided and frightened to exert influence.

"What can a majority do against 100 people with guns who can go into the street and terrorize us?" he said. "These people don`t listen to clerics or anyone else who disagrees with them. They only listen to the hardliners, those who will march with them."

The same questions were asked one night last week in Saadi Muhammad`s home in Falluja. The men sat cross-legged on the floor for the sunset meal to break the daylong Ramadan fast. The women stayed in the kitchen, away from visitors, letting the children deliver the flat bread they had baked in an outdoor oven.

The talk around the dishes of soups and rice was of rising prices for gasoline, meat and vegetables, and the many neighbors who lost their jobs in the disbanded military and security services. Mr. Muhammad, a schoolteacher, could not work up much indignation. Under the Americans, his monthly salary has skyrocketed from about $30 to $300.

"We used to sit and dream about people with satellite television," he said. "Now I have it so the kids can watch sports. Before I had a wreck of a car. Now I bought a nice used one. We fixed up the house, too. I guess I`m rich."

Mr. Muhammad was reluctant to criticize openly those who attack American forces here, insisting that no one was fighting for Saddam Hussein — "all he brought us was wars" — but noting, "It`s a kind of religious belief that they should not accept occupation."

After several hours of conversation over tea and plates of fruit, he let his own frustration show, just for an instant.

"We were just discussing this at school, that with no security, companies will not come to help us rebuild and the Americans will stay longer because all Iraq will be in chaos," he said. "But I can`t stand up and say anything."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Two federal courts have agreed that the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay is not legally part of the U.S.
November 11, 2003
Justices to Hear Case of Detainees at Guantánamo
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 — Setting the stage for a historic clash between presidential and judicial authority in a time of military conflict, the Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether prisoners at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are entitled to access to civilian courts to challenge their open-ended detention.

The court said it would resolve only the jurisdictional question of whether the federal courts can hear such a challenge and not, at this stage, whether these detentions are in fact unconstitutional. Even so, the action was an unmistakable rebuff of the Bush administration`s insistence that the detainees` status was a question "constitutionally committed to the executive branch" and not the business of the federal courts, as Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson argued in opposition to Supreme Court review.

In accepting the cases, the court moved from the sidelines to the center of the debate over whether the administration`s response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, reflects an appropriate balance between national security and individual liberty.

While the court does not indicate why it grants review in a particular case, the justices might well have been persuaded that no matter what the ultimate answer to the question of whether judicial review is even available, they are the ones who have to provide it.

"It is for the courts and not the executive to determine whether executive action is subject to judicial review," the appeal filed on behalf of 12 Kuwaitis told the court.

The two appeals the court accepted were filed on behalf of 16 detainees, the Kuwaitis in one group and two Britons and two Australians in the other, all seized in Afghanistan and Pakistan during United States-led operations against the Taliban in late 2001 and early 2002. They have all been held for more than 18 months without formal charges or access to any forum in which they can contest the validity of their detention.

The men assert that they were not fighters either for the Taliban or for Al Qaeda; most say they were humanitarian volunteers who were captured by bounty hunters.

The two separate lawsuits, seeking a federal court hearing on the validity of the open-ended detention, were combined by the Federal District Court here. That court then ruled, in a decision affirmed in March by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, that on the basis of a World War II-era Supreme Court precedent, the federal courts lack jurisdiction over the military detention of foreigners outside United States territory.

The applicability of that 1950 decision, Johnson v. Eisentrager, is at the heart of the dispute before the Supreme Court. The justices also combined the two cases, Rasul v. Bush, No. 03-334 (the Britons` and Australians` case), and Al Odah v. United States, No. 03-343 (the Kuwaitis` case), and will hear them in late March, with a decision expected by early summer.

One central issue is the status of the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, which while indisputably a part of Cuban territory has been administered by the United States under a 1903 lease that grants it many of the attributes of sovereignty and uses the phrase "complete jurisdiction and control."

By contrast, the Eisentrager decision denied judicial review to German intelligence agents who were captured in wartime China and were being held in Germany after conviction as war criminals by military tribunals.

How to characterize Guantánamo Bay is of such importance because it is clear that noncitizens do have certain constitutional rights if they are within United States territory. On the other hand, the court has frequently invoked the Eisentrager precedent, even out of its wartime military context, to stand for the proposition that outside the territorial reach of the United States, aliens have no such rights.

The brief filed for the Britons and Australians by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a liberal public interest law firm in New York, told the court that "we alone exercise power at Guantánamo Bay" and that the base should therefore be treated for jurisdictional purposes as part of the United States. In the administration`s view, not only is that conclusion incorrect but it is not one that the court is free to make. The determination of sovereignty over a particular territory is "not a question on which a court may second-guess the political branches," Solicitor General Olson said in his brief.

It was evident on Monday that this, too, was a question on which the justices want to have the final word. That conclusion emerged from a comparison of how the administration phrased the question presented by the two cases with how the justices phrased it in their order granting review. Solicitor General Olson said the question was whether the federal courts had jurisdiction to decide the legality of detaining "aliens captured abroad in connection with ongoing hostilities and held outside the sovereign territory of the United States at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba."

The Supreme Court, by contrast, said it intended to decide the jurisdiction of the courts to hear challenges to "the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba." The court`s question incorporated no assumption about whether the base was or was not "outside the sovereign territory of the United States."

Pamela S. Falk, a professor of international law at the City University of New York, recalled on Monday that when she first visited the Guantánamo base 10 years ago, she did not have to clear United States customs on her return flight to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., an indication that she was not considered to have left the United States at any time during her journey.

But when she visited again in July and returned by way of Puerto Rico, she had to clear customs there, reflecting a policy change that she said should not deprive the Supreme Court of the opportunity to decide "the fundamental question of the rights of anyone being held in U.S. custody."

If the justices decide that the federal courts do have jurisdiction, the cases will go back to district court in the first instance for a decision on the merits of the detainees` claims. Lawyers for the Kuwaiti group, from the law firm of Shearman & Sterling, describe what the detainees are asking for as modest relief: to be informed of any charges against them, to be allowed to meet with lawyers and family members and to obtain "access to an impartial tribunal to review whether any basis exists for their continued detentions."

Without those rights, their brief says, their detention violates the Constitution as well as domestic and international law.

Lawyers for the Britons and Australians make similar arguments. Both cases were originally filed as petitions for a writ of habeas corpus, the procedure deeply rooted in English law for challenging confinement.

Several of the detainees in these cases have been placed by the government in the first group of the 660 Guantánamo detainees to go before military commissions, when those operations begin in the coming months. But even if some do get a hearing before a commission, their Supreme Court cases would not become moot because the issue of access to a civilian federal court would remain.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

November 11, 2003
U.S. Tariffs on Steel Are Illegal, World Trade Organization Says
By ELIZABETH BECKER

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 — The World Trade Organization ruled on Monday that steel tariffs imposed by President Bush last year were illegal, clearing the way for the European Union to impose more than $2 billion of sanctions on imports from the United States unless Washington quickly drops the duties.

The final decision by a W.T.O. panel, which was widely anticipated and has been discussed for weeks at the White House, puts Mr. Bush in a difficult spot. As an election looms, he must choose between continuing to help the steel industry — which could bolster his electoral prospects in crucial industrial states — or respecting international trade laws and increasing his chances of winning new regional and global trade agreements.

Lifting the tariffs would also please American automakers and other steel-consuming industries, which have complained that the tariffs have increased their costs.

The European Union has made the president`s decision more difficult by aiming its proposed sanctions at products in states considered pivotal in the 2004 election — threatening, for example, to impose tariffs on citrus fruit imported from Florida.

Administration officials said President Bush had not decided whether to lift the temporary tariffs, which increase the cost of imported steel by as much as 30 percent and were meant to give the ailing steel industry a three-year respite from international competition.

But the W.T.O. panel ruled that the American tariffs went beyond the rules allowing countries to protect themselves against sudden surges of imports. Monday`s decision upheld an original W.T.O. ruling in March on complaints brought by the European Union.

Europe issued a joint statement with Japan, South Korea, Norway, Switzerland, China, New Zealand and Brazil, saying they all welcomed the decision. Those other countries could also now seek to impose sanctions on American imports if the steel tariffs are not removed.

News of the W.T.O`s decision came as Mr. Bush headed to Spartanburg, S.C., on a trip aimed at highlighting signs of job growth after nearly two years of recession and to raise campaign cash in a state critical to his re-election.

Mr. Bush spent much of the afternoon at BMW`s Spartanburg auto assembly plant, which is a major consumer of steel, most of it domestically manufactured. Steve Thies, the president of Spartanburg Steel, which stamps car bodies for BMW, said in an interview that his company was able to obtain an exemption from the tariffs for the small amount of imported specialty steel used in the vehicles.

In fact, the administration has handed out hundreds of such exemptions to manufacturers, to minimize harm to companies and workers in the United States. Mr. Bush`s aides have conceded that those exemptions are part of a complex balancing act, a process described recently by one senior administration official as an effort to "make sure we`re not saving a steel worker in West Virginia while losing an auto worker in Michigan."

Mr. Bush made no public reference Monday to the steel decision, and his aides defended the president`s tariffs as perfectly legal, no matter what the highest court in international trade law ruled.

"They are fully consistent with W.T.O. rules," said Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, talking to reporters aboard Air Force One. "We will carefully review this decision," he said, but he made no statement that the administration would abide by it.

Some members of Congress quickly urged Mr. Bush to ignore the W.T.O. ruling. Rep. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat of Ohio, referred to the W.T.O. as a "secret" court and said the president should let the tariffs run their three-year course, now only half complete.

But Senator Charles E. Grassley, who heads the Senate Finance Committee, urged Mr. Bush not to undercut the organization`s authority, even if he does not like its decisions.

"Complying with our W.T.O. obligations is an important sign of American leadership," said Senator Grassley, an Iowa Republican. "The U.S. economy has benefited greatly from our being in the W.T.O."

Since the imposition of tariffs in March 2002, the steel industry has invested more than $3 billion into a streamlining effort, with smaller companies either going into bankruptcy or being bought by bigger companies. American steel industry officials said their multibillion-dollar consolidation efforts would be jeopardized if the president lifted the tariffs before the full three years of the program. The officials accused the European Union and its chief trade commissioner, Pascal Lamy, of trying to "blackmail" the United States.

"It would be a big mistake to buckle under E.U. retaliation," said Thomas J. Usher, chairman and chief executive of U.S. Steel, the biggest American steel maker. "The public is beginning to realize this is a very basic manufacturing issue and they are all very concerned about losing jobs."

With the loss of manufacturing jobs shaping up as an important election issue, especially in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, both sides of the debate say the tariffs are becoming a political problem for the president.

American manufacturing companies that use steel have urged the president to lift the tariffs. They say the tariffs have raised their costs, cut their profits and forced them to delay expansion and lay off employees. If those consequences were not reason enough to lift the tariffs, the threatened retaliation completes the argument, said William E. Gaskin, the head of the Consuming Industries Trade Action Coalition Steel Task Force, a lobbying group.

"The U.S. now faces billions of dollars in retaliatory tariffs by our trading partners," Mr. Gaskin said. "For the sake of the U.S. manufacturing sector, it`s time to end the tariffs now."

In late September, two reports on the tariffs by a United States government agency, the International Trade Commission, said that the case was muddy and that it was difficult to distinguish whether the tariffs or changing market conditions were responsible for the problems of steel consumers.

Calculations about the political fallout from the tariffs could be upended by the European Union`s proposed list of sanctions. It has said that it plans to aim at agriculture with tariffs on vegetables, fruits and nuts from Florida and California.

Various kinds of clothing — including coats, underwear, shirts and blouses — are also on the list, a potential blow to Southern states with ailing textile industries. Steel and metal products, including Harley-Davidson motorcycles, along with paper products, furniture and games also made the list.

Trade experts point out that the United States used similar tactics after the W.T.O. ruled in 1997 against a European Union quota system favoring the import of bananas from its members` former colonies and its ban on American beef raised with hormones.

"The U.S. made its trade sanctions even more onerous on Europe by pinpointing certain countries and having a constantly changing set of retaliation, spreading the pain more broadly," said Richard Cunningham, a trade lawyer at Steptoe & Johnson.

Even without the tariffs, some experts said, global shortages of steel as soon as early next year could raise prices, benefiting the American steel industry.

Trade experts said Monday that a growing demand for steel in China could lead to shortages in the first three months of next year.

"It is my judgment we are going to have a price spike, perhaps a severe one, as steel buyers worry about the availability of raw materials for the steel industry," said Peter Marcus, a managing partner of World Steel Dynamics, an information service based in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.

Unions have joined in the debate. Leo W. Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers of America, said that lifting the tariffs could lead to more bankruptcies in the steel industry, and the loss of his members` medical and retirement benefits.

But Gary C. Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, said that if Mr. Bush believed that the steel industry needed further relief, he should persuade Congress to provide relief for steel workers and not continue the tariffs.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

Das ist der einzige Auftrag, der vernünftigerweise nicht an eine US-Firma gegangen ist(nicht mit den Nachbarn compatibles System) und der soll als einziger nicht regulär zu Stande gekommen sein.

November 11, 2003
US authorities in Iraq probe phone contracts
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington



US authorities in Iraq have put on hold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of mobile telephone contracts, while they investigate allegations that the bidding process was hijacked by associates of the new Iraqi governing council.

When the Iraqi Ministry of Communications last month awarded three Middle Eastern consortia two-year licences to build and operate wireless phone networks, the deals were heralded as a breakthrough for regional operators willing to invest in the new Iraq.

But the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq has been advised to postpone signing the contracts, according to a US administration official speaking on condition of anonymity. CPA lawyers in Iraq made the recommendation to delay signing the contracts for 10 days to allow time to investigate claims of cronyism by the Iraqi authorities in awarding the licences, the official said.

At the Pentagon, the Department of Defense`s Inspector General has separately been asked to investigate how the telecom licences were awarded.

The request is understood to focus on the role of Nadhmi Auchi, the Iraqi-born billionaire businessman, in the Orascom group, one of the successful consortia.

The CPA has become concerned that evidence of corruption would reflect badly on the US authority, which played a central role in evaluating the bids.

The delay to the signing of the mobile phone licences comes amid broader US concern about the workings of the Iraqi governing council. Senior US officials have voiced frustration that the interim body of 25 hand-picked Iraqis is putting their own political and economic interests first.

Another senior CPA official said the US occupying authorities have been struck by the resilience of corrupt business practices in Baghdad, where members of the new Iraqi regime have used power for personal gain.

Commenting on the Iraqi ministry`s award of the licences, a US official said on Monday: "The question is who did what due diligence, and when?" Amid increasing suggestions of cronyism in handing out contracts, the CPA is preparing to establish a new Iraq Infrastructure Reconstruction Office to oversee how contracts are awarded.

Haider al-Abadi, Iraq`s communication`s minister, dismayed the CPA last month when he announced that he would hold discussions with the three winners about awarding a fourth license before their contracts had expired, the official said.

A Pentagon spokesman confirmed on Monday that there had been a delay, but denied it was because of problems with how the licenses were awarded.

The CPA said it was working with the Ministry of Communications and the winners to finalise the details of the licences. "We expect the licences to be signed in due course within weeks and not months," said a CPA spokesman.



© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2003.
"FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of The Financial Times

[Joerver]

November 11, 2003
The White House Steel Trap

o no one`s surprise, the World Trade Organization issued a final ruling yesterday that the Bush administration violated trade laws when it slapped onerous tariffs on an array of steel imports last year. The tariffs, as harmful to the American economy as they were to foreign exporters, were a political gambit, aimed at scoring points in such key electoral battlegrounds as Pennsylvania.

The W.T.O. ruled against the tariffs last July, rightly finding that Washington had failed to make its case for the "safeguard" action. The Bush administration could not prove that an unexpected surge of imports had hurt the American steel industry. It did not help that the industry had been suffering from self-inflicted woes for years and that imports were actually declining in the immediate two years before the tariffs. Yesterday`s ruling was against the appeal of that judgment. The Bush economic team reportedly opposed the tariffs from the start — as had the Clinton administration — but was overruled by White House political operatives.

The European Union, Japan, Brazil and others will now be free to retaliate against American imports if the administration does not lift the tariffs. The European Union is compiling a list of tariff-worthy goods — from Harley-Davidson motorcycles to farm equipment and Florida citrus juices — that would maximize the punitive bang, politically speaking, for the buck.

President Bush should cut his losses, abide by the W.T.O. decision and lift the tariffs, even if it means angering the very steel workers he set out to woo. Continued defiance would be disastrously timed. Frayed trade relations have already jeopardized important efforts to liberalize global trade.

Despite being a Republican ostensibly committed to free markets, Mr. Bush has abdicated America`s leadership role in championing them. The same set of muddled calculations that led to the steel tariffs last year prompted Mr. Bush to sign an outrageously protectionist farm bill.

Congressional Democrats` complaints about the W.T.O. decision will only make matters worse. What the world will read into Washington`s bipartisan protectionist rant is the unwillingness of a bully to abide by the rules it expects others to follow.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

Brooks ist der neoconscheste Schreiber der NYT.

November 11, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Cynics Without a Cause
By DAVID BROOKS

Over the past few months, the Democratic presidential candidates have been peddling a story. The story is that the Bush administration is circumventing the competitive bidding process to funnel sweetheart Iraq reconstruction contracts to major campaign contributors, especially Dick Cheney`s old firm, Halliburton.

The riff was laid down by Dennis Kucinich, but now all the candidates are playing along. Howard Dean says the Halliburton contracts show that the Bush administration "has sold this country down the river." John Kerry says the administration has broken faith with the American people with its no-bid contracts with Halliburton. In the parade of Democratic bogeymen, the word "Halliburton" elicits almost as many hisses as the chart-topping "Ashcroft."

The problem with the story is that it`s almost entirely untrue. As Daniel Drezner recently established in Slate, there is no statistically significant correlation between the companies that made big campaign contributions and the companies that have won reconstruction contracts.

The most persuasive rebuttals have come from people who actually know something about the government procurement process. For example, Steven Kelman was an administrator in the Office of Federal Procurement Policy under Bill Clinton and now is a professor of public management at Harvard.

Last week, Kelman wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post on the alleged links between contributions and reconstruction contracts. "One would be hard-pressed to discover anyone with a working knowledge of how federal contracts are awarded — whether a career civil servant working on procurement or an independent academic expert — who doesn`t regard these allegations as being somewhere between highly improbable and utterly absurd," he observed.

The fact is that unlike the Congressional pork barrel machine, the federal procurement system is a highly structured process, which is largely insulated from crass political pressures. The idea that a Bush political appointee can parachute down and persuade a large group of civil servants to risk their careers by steering business to a big donor is the stuff of fantasy novels, not reality.

The real story is that the Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root, won an open competition to provide the service support for overseas troops. This contract is called the Logcap, and is awarded every few years. KBR won the competition in 1992. It lost to DynCorp in 1997, and won it again in 2001.

Under the deal, KBR builds bases, supplies water, operates laundries and performs thousands of other tasks. Though the G.A.O. has found that KBR sometimes overcharges, in general the company has an outstanding reputation among the panoply of auditing agencies that monitor these contracts.

But some circumstances are not covered under Logcap. During the Clinton administration, the Pentagon issued a temporary no-bid contract to KBR to continue its work in the Balkans. In the months leading up to the Iraq war, Defense officials realized they needed plans in case Saddam Hussein once again set his oil wells ablaze. KBR did the study under Logcap. Then in February, with the war looming, Pentagon planners issued an additional bridge contract to KBR to put out any fires that were set. KBR had the experience. Its personnel were in place. It would have been crazy to open up a three-to-five-month bidding process at that time.

There are a number of legitimate questions Democratic candidates could be asking about our procurement system. Are we so overreliant on private contractors that the line between combat personnel and support personnel is getting blurred? Should we beef up the Pentagon procurement staff, to give us the ability to manage contracts from a wider cast of companies? What do we do if the private contractors decide to pack up and leave Iraq?

But answering these questions would mean coming up with a positive vision of how to better proceed with our reconstruction efforts. Instead the Democratic presidential candidates are content simply to repeat demagogic and misleading applause lines.

The lesson of this Halliburton business is that some parts of our government really do make their decisions on the merits. And just because a story makes you popular doesn`t make it true.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

November 11, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Support the Troops
By PAUL KRUGMAN

esterday`s absurd conspiracy theory about the Bush administration has a way of turning into today`s conventional wisdom. Remember when people were ridiculed for claiming that Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, eager to fight a war, were hyping the threat from Iraq?

Anyway, many analysts now acknowledge that the administration never had any intention of pursuing a conventionally responsible fiscal policy. Rather, its tax cuts were always intended as a way of implementing the radical strategy known as "starve the beast," which views budget deficits as a good thing, a way to squeeze government spending. Did I mention that the administration is planning another long-run tax cut next year?

Advocates of the starve-the-beast strategy tend to talk abstractly about "big government." But in fact, squeezing government spending almost always means cutting back or eliminating services people actually want (though not necessarily programs worth their cost). And since it`s Veterans Day, let`s talk about how the big squeeze on spending may be alienating a surprising group: the nation`s soldiers.

One of George W. Bush`s major campaign themes in 2000 was his promise to improve the lives of America`s soldiers — and military votes were crucial to his success. But these days some of the harshest criticisms of the Bush administration come from publications aimed at a military audience.

For example, last week the magazine Army Times ran a story with the headline "An Act of `Betrayal,` " and the subtitle "In the midst of war, key family benefits face cuts." The article went on to assert that there has been "a string of actions by the Bush administration to cut or hold down growth in pay and benefits, including basic pay, combat pay, health-care benefits and the death gratuity paid to survivors of troops who die on active duty."

At one level, this pattern of cuts is standard operating procedure. Just about every apparent promise of financial generosity this administration has made (other than those involving tax cuts for top brackets and corporate contracts) has turned out to be nonoperational. No Child Left Behind got left behind — or at least left without funds. AmeriCorps got praised in the State of the Union address, then left high and dry in the budget that followed. New York`s firefighters and policemen got a photo-op with the president, but very little money. For that matter, it`s clear that New York will never see the full $20 billion it was promised for rebuilding. Why shouldn`t soldiers find themselves subject to the same kind of bait and switch?

Yet one might have expected the administration to treat the military differently, if only as a matter of sheer political calculation. After all, the military needs some mollifying: the Iraq war has turned increasingly nightmarish, and deference toward the administration is visibly eroding. Even Pfc. Jessica Lynch has, to her credit, balked at playing her scripted role.

So what`s going on? One answer is that once you`ve instilled a Scrooge mentality throughout the government, it`s hard to be selective. But I also suspect that a government of, by and for the economic elite is having trouble overcoming its basic lack of empathy with the working-class men and women who make up our armed forces.

Some say that Representative George Nethercutt`s remark that progress in Iraq is a more important story than deaths of American soldiers was redeemed by his postscript, "which, heaven forbid, is awful." Your call. But it`s hard to deny the stunning insensitivity of President Bush`s remarks back on July 2: "There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring `em on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation." Those are the words of a man who can`t imagine himself or anyone close to him actually being in the line of fire.

The question is whether the military will start to feel taken for granted. Publications like Army Times are obviously going off the reservation. Retired military officers, like Gen. Anthony Zinni — formerly President Bush`s envoy to the Middle East — have started to offer harsh, indeed unprintable, assessments of administration policies. If this disillusionment spreads to the rank and file, the politics of 2004 may be very different from what anyone expects.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

K. hat auch die Greenspan Politik als Voodoo-Ökonomie bezeichnet.

Columnist Biography: Paul Krugman
aul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed Page and continues as professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Mr. Krugman received his B.A. from Yale University in 1974 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. He has taught at Yale, MIT and Stanford. At MIT he became the Ford International Professor of Economics.

Mr. Krugman is the author or editor of 20 books and more than 200 papers in professional journals and edited volumes. His professional reputation rests largely on work in international trade and finance; he is one of the founders of the "new trade theory," a major rethinking of the theory of international trade. In recognition of that work, in 1991 the American Economic Association awarded him its John Bates Clark medal, a prize given every two years to "that economist under forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic knowledge." Mr. Krugman`s current academic research is focused on economic and currency crises.

At the same time, Mr. Krugman has written extensively for a broader public audience. Some of his recent articles on economic issues, originally published in Foreign Affairs, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American and other journals, are reprinted in Pop Internationalism and The Accidental Theorist.

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

washingtonpost.com
Post-9/11 Visa Rules Keep Thousands From Coming to U.S.


By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page A01


AUSTIN -- More than two years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a thicket of new rules governing the granting of visas to foreigners is dissuading thousands of people from coming to the United States and generating protests from research universities, medical institutions, multinational corporations and the travel industry.

Because of the new regulations, American universities have lost students and scholars; corporations have suffered production delays, friction with customers and personnel problems; and foreign tourists and conventioneers have decided by the thousands to take their business elsewhere.

Increasingly, U.S. leaders in education, business and science are warning that the procedural obstacles thrown up to screen security threats have fostered a bureaucratic "culture of no" that discounts the benefits that foreigners bring to the United States.

Bush administration officials defend the new rules, saying they are keeping terrorists from entering the country. "In the post-9/11 environment, we do not believe that the issues at stake allow us the luxury of erring on the side of expeditious processing," Janice L. Jacobs, deputy assistant secretary of state for visa services, told a congressional committee earlier this year.

But many critics caution that by requiring foreigners to wait weeks or months for visas, Washington is damaging its efforts at public diplomacy. They say the United States is sending a hostile message to the world at a time that the Iraq war and other U.S. policies have blackened perceptions of the United States.

"Our commercial, research and academic institutions have always benefited from the open exchange of people, knowledge and ideas," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.). "We need to protect ourselves. But we don`t want to go too far and lose the rewards of an open society."

All 19 of the Sept. 11 hijackers entered the United States on valid visas, most of them without being interviewed by an American consular officer. Mindful of that, the Bush administration adopted extensive new policies governing visas, the latest of which took effect on Aug. 1.

The most significant include a requirement for face-to-face interviews for hundreds of thousands of visa-seekers who previously were excused from such interviews, and the withholding of visas for certain categories of people until the FBI runs name checks to determine that they do not appear to be a threat. That process can take months.

The administration also granted the Department of Homeland Security control of most visa rule-making decisions, as well as vetoes over visas issued overseas, previously the exclusive province of the State Department.

Starting Jan. 5, the government intends to fingerprint all visa-bearing travelers who arrive at airports and seaports. Next October, visitors who do not require visas -- mostly people from Western Europe and Canada -- will have to have machine-readable passports. In addition, people issued non-immigrant visas abroad will be fingerprinted when obtaining the visa.

The new regulations have created special hindrances and holdups for people from Islamic countries that are the subject of concerns about terrorism. Visitors from South Korea and Brazil, which rank among the top 10 countries sending people to the United States, have also faced weeks-long delays in applying for visas. Chinese and Russians, particularly in scientific and technological fields, have also met extensive difficulties in securing visas.

Even British citizens working for American companies overseas are facing waits of a month or two to obtain longer-term work visas for transfers to the United States, a process that once took less than two weeks.

Some recent examples:

• The Amway Corp., one of the world`s largest direct-sale firms, ruled out Los Angeles and Hawaii as possible convention sites for about 8,000 South Korean distributors next year, in the face of a requirement that they all complete face-to-face interviews with U.S. consular officials. The convention is to be held in Japan. Amway estimates that the distributors would have spent an average of $1,250 per person on U.S. airlines, hotels and shops, meaning a loss of more than $10 million for the would-be host city.

• The UCLA Medical Center, one of California`s elite teaching hospitals, scrambled to fill a staffing gap when one of its three pediatric heart surgeons, a Pakistani, was waylaid in Karachi for seven months awaiting a new visa. The doctor, Faiz Bhora, had just completed 10 years of medical training in the United States.

• Ingersoll-Rand Co., a multinational corporation with $9.6 billion in annual sales and 50,000 employees worldwide, has been waiting for nearly two months to ship a $2.5 million compressor to an energy concern in Sichuan province in China. The hang-up: getting visas for five Chinese engineers and an interpreter for a one-week inspection visit.

"They think they can put in all these security processes and still keep business flowing, but it`s not happening," said Elizabeth Dickson, who handles immigration and visa matters for Ingersoll-Rand. "I see a culture of no because no consular officer wants to be the next one to issue a visa to a terrorist. But that means they`re treating everyone as a terrorist."

The Government`s Role


State Department officials and the FBI, which handles background checks for visa applicants, acknowledge it has been a struggle to implement new programs, procedures and technologies put in place after the attacks of 2001. Months-long delays and backlogs for visa applicants nearly paralyzed the system in 2002, many government officials have said.

But officials insist that most of the worst kinks have been worked out this year, and for the most part they are unapologetic about the new rules and procedures. In the effort to safeguard borders as well as open doors, the Bush administration has struck the right balance, they say. Much of the falloff in the number of foreign visitors is due to the global economic downturn, they say.

The government has broadened the fields that trigger FBI name checks for applicants -- a list of 200 scientific and technical specialties that now includes not only expertise in arms and munitions and nuclear technology, but also landscape architecture, geography, community development, housing and urban design.

Critics say the list is overbroad, and may actually make it more difficult to spot the terrorist needle in an ever-expanding haystack.

Because of the broader criteria, the bureau is now processing about 1,000 name checks per business day, twice the number it handled two years ago, despite a sharp dip in the number of travelers.

Jacobs, the deputy assistant secretary of state, and other officials argue that FBI name checks are not a significant drag on travel to the United States.

To help expedite these checks, the FBI has created a special team of 40 agents. And in any case, the bureau reports that only a small percentage of the millions of visa applicants are subjected to the checks -- scarcely over 2 percent -- and that most of those are completed in days.

Of 8,503 requests for the most common security checks for non-immigrant visa applicants received by the FBI in August, for instance, all but 373 had been resolved by Oct. 1, according to the bureau. Most were resolved in a few days, it said. Officials also report that the portion of applicants who are refused a visa, about 25 percent, has remained virtually stable over the past three years.

FBI officials say the intensified screenings, which also include name checks for most male applicants from a list of 26 predominantly Muslim nations, have turned up an unspecified number of "persons of interest."

"It`s not a foolproof system, but at the same time it does identify people," said David M. Hardy, chief of the FBI`s Record-Information Dissemination Section.

Officials do acknowledge, however, that the requirement for in-person interviews has created long delays for hundreds of thousands of visa-seekers. In some countries where securing a visa once took a few days, people now routinely wait weeks for an interview.

The State Department is adding 79 consular officers to the 843 positions it already has, but the delays persist.

"The problem is that the administration has made all these new requirements for face-to-face interviews and adding background checks but has not provided adequate resources to fund them," said Waxman.

Students and Scholars


Educators have expressed anxiety that the new visa rules are discouraging international students from studying in the United States, depriving American universities of a vital source of diversity, intellectual energy and tuition. The universities are being put at a competitive disadvantage against institutions in Canada, Britain and Australia in the contest for top-flight international students and scholars, they say.

In recent decades, the influx of foreign students has been crucial to the strength of U.S. universities and technology companies. Nearly 40 percent of engineering faculty members in the United States are foreign-born, as are a third of American Nobel Prize winners.

In addition, "Foreign students are important because many go home and bring back an understanding and appreciation of the United States and often become leaders and help establish business relationships," said Peter Spear, provost of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Spear said that at his school, where more than 10 percent of the 41,000 undergraduate and 8,800 graduate students are foreigners, undergraduate applications from overseas dropped by 14 percent this year, partly because of new visa rules. "There`s some evidence that people who are worried about the climate here or getting their visas on time are starting to avoid the U.S.," he said.

In interviews with more than a half-dozen officials from major research universities, none said they knew of any case in which drawn-out security checks of foreign students and scholars yielded information tying them to terrorism. And the officials expressed frustration that in the minority of cases that get stuck for months, they are unable to learn the status of the security check or do anything to hasten it.

In a case this year, Dennis Eremin, a 28-year-old Russian physicist, had to wait 10 months to reenter the United States to complete his work for a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. He had already spent five years in Texas before leaving in 2001 to get married.

"I had two theories," said Eremin. "The first was the reluctance of [U.S.] consular representatives to attend to my case, or the sheer ineffectiveness of their work. The second one was paranoia."

University officials acknowledge that visas are granted relatively quickly for most of the 1 million foreign students and scholars in the United States. Nonetheless, they say cases like Eremin`s are too common. "If you`re stopped by a policeman, they check the database in their laptop in the car in maybe 30 seconds," said Larry Bell, director of international education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "These are maybe larger and more sophisticated [FBI] databases, but it`s a large leap from a 30-second check to a six-month check."

Business and Medicine


The Bush administration`s new visa policies have also exasperated one of its traditional constituencies: big business.

In blunt language, corporate leaders have stressed that the smooth conduct of business is threatened by visa delays, and they chafe at what they regard as the government`s reluctance to deploy adequate manpower to handle the additional requirements.

Some top business associations have publicly questioned the State Department`s insistence that the large majority of travelers are not badly inconvenienced by the new policies. "State controls the numbers, so who knows?" said Randel K. Johnson, vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "But companies that aren`t ordinarily critical of the government are having lots of problems, and they`re willing to say so publicly. I don`t think things are getting any better."

The institutions affected range from huge industrial concerns to some of the nation`s most renowned hospitals.

The nonprofit Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has been plagued by delays in visas for foreign doctors and researchers, which has made a mess of day-to-day appointment schedules, according to Bruce Larson, director of the clinic`s International Personnel Office. Foreign physicians and scientists at the clinic have also been prevented from traveling abroad for professional conferences.

In the past two years, visa problems have contributed to the Mayo Clinic`s loss of hundreds of foreign patients, particularly from the Middle East, many of whom have chosen to seek treatment in Britain instead, officials said.

"We`ve had cases where children were granted visas for medical treatment, but their parents were denied," said Misty Hathaway of the clinic`s Office of International Relations. "Previously patients were able to get visas for medical treatment in a matter of days. Now it`s weeks and sometimes months, and some of the patients are quite ill."

Major corporations and the tourism industry have cited South Korea, the United States` sixth-largest export market and the fifth-largest source of foreign visitors, as especially hard hit; South Korean travelers spent $21 billion in this country last year.

With the introduction of the new policy Aug. 1 requiring consular interviews for most visa applicants, people have waited up to two months for those meetings in the South Korean capital, Seoul; even in the current autumn lull, it is taking about a month. Calling the new regulations ill-coordinated and poorly communicated, American business leaders said they are certain to do damage to U.S. interests there.

Researcher Karin Brulliard contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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In giving $15.5 million to the effort to defeat President Bush, George Soros has filled a gap in Democratic Party finances.
washingtonpost.com
Soros`s Deep Pockets vs. Bush
Financier Contributes $5 Million More in Effort to Oust President

By Laura Blumenfeld
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page A03


NEW YORK -- George Soros, one of the world`s richest men, has given away nearly $5 billion to promote democracy in the former Soviet bloc, Africa and Asia. Now he has a new project: defeating President Bush.

"It is the central focus of my life," Soros said, his blue eyes settled on an unseen target. The 2004 presidential race, he said in an interview, is "a matter of life and death."

Soros, who has financed efforts to promote open societies in more than 50 countries around the world, is bringing the fight home, he said. On Monday, he and a partner committed up to $5 million to MoveOn.org, a liberal activist group, bringing to $15.5 million the total of his personal contributions to oust Bush.

Overnight, Soros, 74, has become the major financial player of the left. He has elicited cries of foul play from the right. And with a tight nod, he pledged: "If necessary, I would give more money."

"America, under Bush, is a danger to the world," Soros said. Then he smiled: "And I`m willing to put my money where my mouth is."

Soros believes that a "supremacist ideology" guides this White House. He hears echoes in its rhetoric of his childhood in occupied Hungary. "When I hear Bush say, `You`re either with us or against us,` it reminds me of the Germans." It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit ("The enemy is listening"). "My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me," he said in a soft Hungarian accent.

Soros`s contributions are filling a gap in Democratic Party finances that opened after the restrictions in the 2002 McCain-Feingold law took effect. In the past, political parties paid a large share of television and get-out-the-vote costs with unregulated "soft money" contributions from corporations, unions and rich individuals. The parties are now barred from accepting such money. But non-party groups in both camps are stepping in, accepting soft money and taking over voter mobilization.

"It`s incredibly ironic that George Soros is trying to create a more open society by using an unregulated, under-the-radar-screen, shadowy, soft-money group to do it," Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson said. "George Soros has purchased the Democratic Party."

In past election cycles, Soros contributed relatively modest sums. In 2000, his aide said, he gave $122,000, mostly to Democratic causes and candidates. But recently, Soros has grown alarmed at the influence of neoconservatives, whom he calls "a bunch of extremists guided by a crude form of social Darwinism."

Neoconservatives, Soros said, are exploiting the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a preexisting agenda of preemptive war and world dominion. "Bush feels that on September 11th he was anointed by God," Soros said. "He`s leading the U.S. and the world toward a vicious circle of escalating violence."

Soros said he had been waking at 3 a.m., his thoughts shaking him "like an alarm clock." Sitting in his robe, he wrote his ideas down, longhand, on a stack of pads. In January, PublicAffairs will publish them as a book, "The Bubble of American Supremacy" (an excerpt appears in December`s Atlantic Monthly). In it, he argues for a collective approach to security, increased foreign aid and "preventive action."

"It would be too immodest for a private person to set himself up against the president," he said. "But it is, in fact" -- he chuckled -- "the Soros Doctorine."

His campaign began last summer with the help of Morton H. Halperin, a liberal think tank veteran. Soros invited Democratic strategists to his house in Southampton, Long Island, including Clinton chief of staff John D. Podesta, Jeremy Rosner, Robert Boorstin and Carl Pope.

They discussed the coming election. Standing on the back deck, the evening sun angling into their eyes, Soros took aside Steve Rosenthal, CEO of the liberal activist group America Coming Together (ACT), and Ellen Malcolm, its president. They were proposing to mobilize voters in 17 battleground states. Soros told them he would give ACT $10 million.

Asked about his moment in the sun, Rosenthal deadpanned: "We were disappointed. We thought a guy like George Soros could do more." Then he laughed. "No, kidding! It was thrilling."

Malcolm: "It was like getting his Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval."

"They were ready to kiss me," Soros quipped.

Before coffee the next morning, his friend Peter Lewis, chairman of the Progressive Corp., had pledged $10 million to ACT. Rob Glaser, founder and CEO of RealNetworks, promised $2 million. Rob McKay, president of the McKay Family Foundation, gave $1 million and benefactors Lewis and Dorothy Cullman committed $500,000.

Soros also promised up to $3 million to Podesta`s new think tank, the Center for American Progress.

Soros will continue to recruit wealthy donors for his campaign. Having put a lot of money into the war of ideas around the world, he has learned that "money buys talent; you can advocate more effectively."

At his home in Westchester, N.Y., he raised $115,000 for Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean. He also supports Democratic presidential contenders Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.).

In an effort to limit Soros`s influence, the RNC sent a letter to Dean Monday, asking him to request that ACT and similar organizations follow the McCain-Feingold restrictions limiting individual contributions to $2,000.

The RNC is not the only group irked by Soros. Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, which promotes changes in campaign finance , has benefited from Soros`s grants over the years. Soros has backed altering campaign finance, an aide said, donating close to $18 million over the past seven years.

"There`s some irony, given the supporting role he played in helping to end the soft money system," Wertheimer said. "I`m sorry that Mr. Soros has decided to put so much money into a political effort to defeat a candidate. We will be watchdogging him closely."

An aide said Soros welcomes the scrutiny. Soros has become as rich as he has, the aide said, because he has a preternatural instinct for a good deal.

Asked whether he would trade his $7 billion fortune to unseat Bush, Soros opened his mouth. Then he closed it. The proposal hung in the air: Would he become poor to beat Bush?

He said, "If someone guaranteed it."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Iraqis carry the coffin of Muhannad Kaabi, head of the U.S.-supervised council that runs Sadr City, the largest Shiite Muslim enclave in Baghdad. The U.S. Army and Iraqi guards disputed what preceded his shooting by a soldier.
washingtonpost.com
GI Kills Head of Council in Baghdad Slum
Army and Iraqis Disagree on Circumstances

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page A12


BAGHDAD, Nov. 10 -- The U.S. military and residents of Baghdad`s largest neighborhood differ on the circumstances of Muhannad Kaabi`s death. Did he reach for a gun? Did he try to wrestle a U.S. soldier to the ground? Was he killed in cold blood?

They do, however, agree on the aftermath, another potential setback in U.S. efforts to court support among the crucial constituency of Sadr City. After a shouting match and fight that lasted a few minutes Sunday, a soldier shot Kaabi, the man leading the U.S.-supervised council that runs the slum, which is home to as many as 2 million people. His death left supporters of U.S. efforts grasping for explanations and handed detractors new evidence that tranquility under the occupation is impossible.

"Why would they use force against him?" asked Thamer Hamad, 30, a neighbor who joined the funeral procession Monday that escorted Kaabi`s flag-draped coffin from his home. "He was the representative of this city and people trusted him."

The fight erupted around noon at the council headquarters as Kaabi, a 28-year-old mechanical engineer who had led the council for more than three months, arrived in his car at council headquarters.

The U.S. military, without referring to Kaabi by name, said in a statement that soldiers blocked the vehicle from entering the gate, which is protected by concrete barriers and barbed wire. Kaabi got out and argued with the soldiers, it said. He then got back in the car and attempted to drive through the barricade. The statement said a soldier fired a warning shot, and Kaabi got out again, and fought with the soldier and grabbed at his weapon. At that point, the statement said, another soldier fired two more warning shots.

"The driver continued to fight and wrestled the soldier to the ground while attempting to pull the weapon away from the soldier," the statement said. "The other soldier shot the driver in the upper leg."

Iraqi guards who patrol the entrance with U.S. forces denied that Kaabi reached for the soldier`s gun or tackled him. Several guards who said they witnessed the incident said Kaabi -- known even to them for his temper -- yelled in English at the soldiers as they tried to search his car. One of the soldiers bumped him with his chest, then pushed him and a shoving match ensued.

The fight lasted a couple of minutes, the guards said, and another soldier fired a warning shot into the air. Seconds later, they said, the same soldier fired another shot that struck the slightly built Kaabi, who died a few hours later at a military hospital.

"They fired the second bullet deliberately, 100 percent," said Jassem Kadhim Abboud, 40, a city hall employee, who said he witnessed the incident. "It was killing for the sake of killing. It was not self-defense."

Since the Oct. 27 bombings of the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross and three police stations in Baghdad, U.S. soldiers and their Iraqi colleagues have heightened precautions at city council buildings, government offices and other potential targets across the uneasy capital. Since then, U.S. forces have suffered their highest casualties of the seven-month occupation: 35 killed in the first 10 days of November. Another U.S. soldier was killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack on a convoy Sunday night in Iskandariyah, a town about 40 miles south of Baghdad, the military said.

[Early Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that an explosion in the southern city of Basra destroyed two cars on a road used by British troops. Iraqi police officers said at least three civilians were killed.]

For U.S. troops, Sadr City has proved to be a particularly difficult neighborhood to navigate. Home to about a third of Baghdad`s residents, Sadr City is overwhelmingly populated by Shiite Muslims. The vast majority welcomed the fall of Saddam Hussein`s government, whose repression of their community was relentless. But the neighborhood also serves as the stronghold of Muqtada Sadr, a junior cleric who until recently has tried to rally opposition to the U.S. occupation among the legions of poor and disenchanted.

In August, the U.S. military acknowledged that soldiers in a helicopter in Sadr City had intentionally knocked down a banner inscribed with the name of one of Shiite Islam`s most revered figures. The incident ignited a protest of about 3,000 people.

Last month, two U.S. soldiers and two Iraqis were killed in a firefight that erupted near Sadr`s headquarters. Since then, some residents have complained about the greater U.S. military presence in the streets, a share of them calling it provocative. While U.S. officials insisted the shooting of Kaabi remained under investigation, they clearly worried Monday about the fallout.

"We`re concerned about how the good people of Iraq view this. We`re concerned about how people might turn this in ways that should not be done," said Col. William Bishop, a civil affairs officer who works with the 41-member council in Sadr City and eight others in Baghdad. "It`s a sad event and a good man died, and I`m still not sure exactly what happened."

Despite his position, Kaabi was not a well-known figure in Sadr City, although many said Monday that they had heard of the shooting. The council is caught in a tug-of-war that breaks along the fault lines that define the occupation in much of Iraq. On one side are residents who support the body in the hope that it can bring relief to a neighborhood whose streets are strewn with trash and sewage. On the other are supporters of Sadr and others who view the council as a puppet of U.S. officials and question its motives.

About 200 people poured into the street outside Kaabi`s house, within walking distance of the U.S. military base in the area. Women beat their chests in traditional mourning. Men carried the coffin, draped in an Iraqi flag, and shouted, "There is no god but God." Along the procession, residents held up banners denouncing "the criminal act which the infidel Americans committed."

Other banners declared Kaabi a martyr and labeled his killing an assassination.

"It`s so strange. Why would they do something like this?" asked Salim Jabbar, a relative of Kaabi`s. "This is the policy of occupation. They don`t respect people. They respect only those who serve their interests."

Outside Kaabi`s house, some relatives traded conspiracy theories, wild speculation that is familiar in Baghdad. He was honest and incorruptible, they said. Perhaps he was not heeding the wishes of the U.S. administration, so he was killed. "This is what we think," said Sawali Kaabi, another relative. "It was deliberate."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Unfair Tilt Toward Israel


By Michael Lerner and Cornel West

Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page A25


In mid-September, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) joined Democratic Rep. Howard Berman of Los Angeles and several dozen other congressional Democrats in an extraordinary attempt to stop debate in the presidential primaries about America`s approach to Middle East conflict. In a letter to candidate Howard Dean, the liberal Democrats criticized Dean`s statement that if the United States wanted to play a positive role in bringing Israel and Palestine to peace, it would have to take a more neutral stance.

Pelosi and others insisted that these words were a violation of America`s traditional tilt toward Israel, and that they could be interpreted as abandoning the U.S. commitment to Israel`s survival. Of course Dean had neither intended nor implied any such thing. In fact, Dean has not been particularly courageous on Middle East peace issues, so the public hand-slap sent a powerful message: Democrats can be against the war in Iraq, but they dare not question America`s almost blind support for Ariel Sharon`s government.

Privately, some Democrats say they are doing this to ensure that their party does not lose the support of Jewish campaign contributors, who play a disproportionate role in the finances of the party. Pelosi, they say, was trying to reassure these contributors that the party would stay loyal to Israel.

Yet in precluding a serious public discussion of our Israel-Palestine policy, the liberal Democrats who are normally the champions of free speech are actually hurting the best interests of the United States, Israel and the Jewish people.

The United States has repeatedly been the object of anger and terrorism from people who refer to the oppression of Palestinians by a U.S.-funded Israeli government as a major reason for their antagonism. President Bush promised that the war in Iraq would give him new leverage with Israel to push for a peace settlement. But the road map proposed for this purpose has proved seriously flawed, in part because it allows acts of terrorism to derail the process, and in part because it fails to state from the outset whether the Palestinian state it envisions is in all of the West Bank and Gaza or just in the little sliver that Ariel Sharon would give.

The Bush administration has passively acquiesced in Israel`s refusal to free political prisoners (most of them never charged or given a trial), and has made only token protests against Israel`s construction of a wall through the West Bank, demolitions of Palestinian homes and the targeted assassinations of Palestinian militants (usually carried out in ways that kill more innocent civilians than targets). Last month the United States vetoed a U.N. resolution that challenged Israel`s right to expel or murder Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. The State Department offered vague warnings when Israel announced an expansion of existing West Bank settlements. These policies put all Americans at risk and do nothing to move peace forward.

Israel`s best interests lie with a United States that would support U.N. intervention to stop the killings, protect each side from the other and provide a U.N. protectorate for Palestine while it became organized as an economically and politically viable state, and while it set in motion steps to repress all those criminals whose ideological commitments might lead them to terrorist acts even after a state had been created. The United States should be promoting an agenda that is explicitly even-handed, balanced and both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. It would call for an end to the occupation, return of Israel to the pre-1967 borders and compensation for Palestinian refugees, who should be resettled in the new Palestinian state. There should also be a guarantee (perhaps through a mutual defense pact with the United States) of Israeli security. Such an agreement was signed last month between former Israeli justice minister Yossi Beilin and leading figures in the Palestinian Fatah organization; it remains only for Ariel Sharon and the Palestinian Authority to sign on.

Many Israelis see that Sharon`s policies have led to an increase, not a decrease, in violence. They are dismayed when their government rejects out of hand Palestinian proposals for a cease-fire. They are appealing to their friends around the world to put pressure on the Israeli government. Doing so is an act of friendship, not hostility toward the Jewish people. We who are rightly outraged at Palestinian acts of violence need to be equally outraged when Sharon creates daily obstacles to a settlement of the conflict.

Instead of validating misleading stereotypes about Jewish money and power, the Democrats should be giving a place to the many friends of Israel, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who believe that it is not domination over others but cooperation and reconciliation that will provide the best path to peace and security for the United States and Israel.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine and author of "Healing Israel/Palestine." Cornel West is university professor of religion at Princeton University and author of "Race Matters." Lerner will answer questions about this column during a Live Online discussion at 1 p.m. today at www.washingtonpost.com.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Fair and Balanced™ Cartoons
Cartoon Archive
133 New Cartoons Today, weil heute Dienstag ist.

http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20031111__133toons.htm

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The evangelicals who like to giftwrap Islamophobia

The world`s largest children`s Christmas project has a toxic agenda

Giles Fraser

Monday November 10, 2003: (The Guardian) It all sounds innocent enough. Operation Christmas Child "is a unique ministry that brings Christmas joy, packed in gift-filled shoeboxes, to children around the world". Over the past 10 years, 24 million shoeboxes have been delivered, making it the world`s largest children`s Christmas project. Every US president since Ronald Reagan has packed a shoebox for Operation Christmas Child. In the UK, thousands of schools, churches and youth clubs are doing the same. Some will fill their boxes with dried-out felt tip pens and discarded Barbie amputees. Others spend serious money on the latest GameBoy or Sony Walkman.

But what many parents and teachers don`t know is that behind Operation Christmas Child is the evangelical charity Samaritan`s Purse. Their aim is "the advancement of the Christian faith through educational projects and the relief of poverty". And a particularly toxic version of Christianity it is. This is the same outfit that targeted eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and was widely condemned for following US troops into Iraq to claim Muslims for Christ.

It`s run by the Rev Franklin Graham - chosen by George Bush to deliver the prayers at his presidential inauguration - who has called Islam "a very wicked and evil religion". Graham, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham, is from the same school of thought as General William Boykin, US deputy undersecretary of defence for intelligence, who described America as waging a holy war against "the idol" of Islam`s false god and "a guy called Satan" who "wants to destroy us as a Christian army".

Across the UK, children in multicultural schools are being encouraged to support a scheme that is, quite understandably, deeply offensive to Muslims. Under pressure from those who have complained that Operation Christmas Child is a way of promoting Christian fundamentalism through toys, evangelical literature will now be distributed alongside shoebox parcels from the UK rather than inside them - as if this makes any real difference. Little wonder that such organisations as the fire service in south Wales, which had allowed its depots to be used as collection points for shoeboxes, has decided to suspend its involvement. Other organisations are reconsidering their participation.

What is most resented about Samaritan`s Purse is the way it links aid and evangelism. "We have no problem with people going into a country to do evangelical work," said Hodan Hassan, a spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "But when you mix humanitarian work in a war-torn country with evangelisation you create a problem. You have desperate people and you have someone who has food in one hand and a Bible in another."

Christian missionaries in 19th-century India used to describe those who came to the mission stations simply for food as "rice Christians". This became a derogatory term for those driven to accept Christianity out of hunger rather than genuine conviction. The accusation is that groups such as Samaritan`s Purse are creating a new generation of rice Christians in the Middle East. How might they be stopped? The answer is not quite as simple as erecting a firewall between Christian evangelism and social action. For Christianity is not neatly divisible into theory and practice; it is a form of praxis. Belief and action are ultimately inseparable.

Ironically, it is the story of the good Samaritan that provides one of the most effective put-downs to precisely the sort of Islamophobia displayed by Christian fundamentalists such as Graham. Jesus is asked: "Who is my neighbour?" The moral of the story he tells in response - at least the one most people remember from Sunday school - is that it is the man who is beaten up and left for dead that Jesus points to as our neighbour. Conclusion: we must help those in need.

But that`s not the story at all. A man is mugged in the Wadi Qelt between Jerusalem and Jericho. Whereas the religious pass by and do nothing, it is the Samaritan who offers care. Those listening to the story would have despised Samaritans. The words "good" and "Samaritan" just didn`t go together. Indeed, theirs would have been the General Boykin reaction: that Samaritans worshipped the idol of a false god. Therefore, in casting the Samaritan as the only passer-by with compassion, Jesus is making an all-out assault on the prejudices of his listeners.

If the story was just about helping the needy, whoever they are, it would have been sufficient to cast the Samaritan as the victim and a Jewish layperson as the person who helped. Crucially, however, the hated Samaritan is held up as the moral exemplar. Conclusion: we must overcome religious bigotry.

The story of the good Samaritan, in the hands of Franklin Graham, is conscripted as propaganda for the superiority of Christian compassion to the brutal indifference of other religions - almost the opposite of the purpose of the story.

What is astonishing is that Christian fundamentalists have managed to persuade millions that their warped version of Christianity is the real thing and that mainstream churches have sold out to the secular spirit of the age. The truth is quite the reverse.

US evangelicals employ a selective biblical literalism to support a theology that systematically confuses the kingdom of God with the US`s burgeoning empire. It is no coincidence that the mission fields most favoured by US evangelicals are also the targets of neo-conservative military ambition. To use Jesus as the rallying cry for a new imperialism is the most shameful reversal of all, for he was murdered by the forces of empire. The cross spoke of Roman power in just the way Black Hawk helicopters speak today of US power.

Schools and churches that are getting their children involved in Operation Christmas Child need to be aware of the agenda their participation is helping to promote. There is, of course, a huge emotional hit in wrapping up a shoebox for a Christmas child. But if we are to teach our children properly about giving, we must wean them off the feel-good factor.

Instead, why not support Christian Aid, which works wherever the need and regardless of religion. Its current campaigns include working with HIV/Aids orphans in Kenya, recycling guns in Mozambique, and highlighting the impact of world trade rules on farmers in Ghana. Sure, we will need to have some rather grown-up conversations with our children if we are to explain some of these things. But that would be time better spent than wrapping up a shoebox. We must get over our fondness for charity and develop a thirst for justice.

· The Rev Dr Giles Fraser is vicar of Putney and lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford

[e-mail]

Copyright: The Guardian.

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Multistate Anti-TeRrorism Information EXchange (MATRIX)
http://www.iir.com/matrix/
MATRIX Project -- a pilot effort to increase and enhance the exchange of sensitive terrorism and other criminal activity information between local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies

Use factual data analysis and data integration technology to improve the usefulness of information contained in multiple types of document storage systems



The MATRIX project is implementing factual data analysis from existing data sources to integrate disparate data from many types of Web-enabled storage systems to identify, develop, and analyze terrorist activity and other crimes for investigative leads. This capability will facilitate integration and exchange of information within the participating states, including criminal history, driver license data, vehicle registration records, and incarceration/corrections records including digitized photographs, with significant amounts of public data record entries. Provision has been made for the inclusion of data sources from additional states, should expansion be authorized. The use of factual data analysis from existing data sources will save countless investigative hours and significantly improve the opportunity for successful conclusion of investigations.

Data Security

Information submitted by a state may only be disseminated in accordance with restrictions and conditions placed on it by the submitting state, pursuant to the submitting state`s laws and regulations. Information will be made available only to law enforcement agencies, and on a need-to-know and right-to-know basis. Data access permissions will be conditioned on the privileges of the user making the inquiry.

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http://www.bendib.com/newones/
Khalil Bendib is a Berkeley, CA-based award-winning cartoonist published in numerous small and mid-sized newspapers across the USA, as well as in
The Black Commentatorhttp://www.blackcommentator.com/ and various other online publications.

Born in North Africa under a colonialist French regime, Khalil brings a fresh, non-Eurocentric perspective and a unique voice not usually found in our large, corporate media, which have studiously censored, avoided and blacked it out.

His hard-hitting, myth-shattering, platitude-mocking cartoons rarely shy away from the truth, as they seek to expose the crude racial stereotypes, "diss-information" and info-tainment pabulum offered as gospel by our mass media.

In the proud tradition of genuine watchdog journalism, Khalil Bendib`s work aims to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable - and to give a voice to the voiceless.

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Impoverished villagers smuggle for survival
Illicit trade with al Qaeda and Taliban fugitives has become way of life for tribesmen on frontier
Juliette Terzieff, Chronicle Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback
Der 3. Teil Die beiden ersten Teile gestern und vor gestern

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/11/SMUGGLE.TMP


Bannu, Pakistan -- With a bulbous nose and thick brown mustache, two ammunition belts slung across his chest and pistols in holsters strapped to his bulging sides, Karamat-ullah could be mistaken for a character out of an old Hollywood B-Western.

The smuggler even stuffs his pockmarked cheeks with naswar -- a local specialty that marries tobacco leaf with partially cooked tree bark -- occasionally ending up with bits of the brown, gooey mass on his mustache when he spits it out. His smile seems permanently etched into his countenance, and he loves a good joke.

But the Pashtun tribesman`s forte -- sneaking past government patrols on both sides of the Pakistani-Afghan border with soap, carpets, weapons and other commodities -- is no laughing matter.

It`s a particular thorn in the side of U.S.-led attempts to choke off the movement and resupply of fugitive al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the primitive, mountainous regions on both sides of the frontier.

Karamat-ullah shrugs off the American concerns.

"Legal, illegal, what difference does that make?" the 40-year-old said. "I have food for my family, money for clothes and shoes, and I can buy what I want. You find me another job that can promise that, and I`ll think about it."

Smuggling is big business in Bannu, a dusty, decrepit city bordering Pakistan`s lawless tribal lands where grinding poverty is the norm. According to a local khan, or influential leader, more than 50 percent of the city`s population is engaged in smuggling -- a dog-eat-dog occupation in which competing interests often collide violently. "Bannu is paradise, but the people are devils," a popular saying goes.

But many of Karamat-ullah`s fellow traders view their business in wider terms than dollars and cents. They see themselves as contributing to the jihad against the foreigners -- either by arming fighters, ferrying militants across the border or supplying goods necessary for the survival of their Pashtun brethren.

"Taliban are viewed with affection by many here, as true Muslims fighting to promote the true path, and are treated accordingly,`` said the khan, who did not wish his name to be used. "When they ask for help, they find it.``

The roots of the thriving smuggling trade began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, when sympathetic Pakistani tribesmen throughout Northwest Frontier province (NWFP) began supplying Afghan mujahedeen fighters with supplies. American and British intelligence operatives used the smuggling routes as they became involved in semi-clandestine military training and infiltration operations designed to assist the Afghan resistance forces.

During the Taliban years, when Afghanistan was all but cut off from the world, the smuggling routes served as a lifeline for supplies between the Pashtun-dominated Taliban government and their kinsmen on the Pakistani side of the border.

Today, the trade still supplies weapons, medicines and household and personal hygiene products to those on the Afghan side, despite the combined efforts of Afghan, American, allied and Pakistani troops to stem the flow of men and goods.

In the NWFP -- where one third of the workforce is unemployed and hardy crops like potatoes grow from the barren earth only through farmers` heroic efforts -- the $12 to $15 a day smugglers will pay for gunmen, extra hands and rentals of animals constitutes a fortune.

Vast quantities of drugs -- largely heroin and opium -- also pass through the territory each year despite an aggressive government interdiction campaign, which nets a yearly average of seven metric tons of opium destined for Europe and the Persian Gulf states.

The smugglers of Bannu appear to favor weapons, autos and toiletry supplies, leaving the bulk of the narcotics trade to the Afridi clan located farther north around the Khyber Pass, according to the United Nations` Office on Drug Control and Crime Prevention.

Afghan and Western officials are convinced that the smuggling routes are funneling supplies and manpower used to carry out deadly attacks on U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan.Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman Omar Samad said there were indications that an underground railroad for Taliban and al Qaeda fighters operated across the border.

"They have equipment, and they seem to have money, and they seem to be encouraging their followers to continue their violent campaigns,`` he said. "Having a safe haven (in Pakistan) has emboldened them.``

Islamabad has sent about 40,000 army and elite forces to patrol the border, but it has been unable to put a dent in the smuggling.

"Controlling the border is a near impossible mission,`` said Maj. Abdul Razik, 22, who has run the Afghan army border brigade in the Spin Boldak district since his uncle was killed fighting the Taliban. "Thousands of people -- civilians, shepherds, smugglers, but also Taliban fighters -- cross each day.``

"The Americans aren`t interested in anything except al Qaeda and the Taliban,`` the khan said. "And the Pakistanis don`t know what the hell is going on."

When pressed, tribesmen admit that men are being ferried across the border areas.

"There is a system of links, contacts, and this is a very religious area where people were encouraged by the efforts of the Taliban and have sympathy for them," the khan said. "Obviously, people can sneak across. It`s a big border. You can`t put a checkpoint everywhere."

Smugglers cross by a number of routes, depending in the terrain and the size of the delivery, using a labyrinth of pathways and a network of sympathetic households known only to the traders.

"In general terms, if you`ve got five or six rifles, men will carry them across," said Karamat-ullah. "If it`s a couple dozen pieces, camels or donkeys are used. If it`s more, then they go in vehicles. Although smugglers are now a bit more careful, taking smaller loads, to avoid the Americans on the other side."But for Karamat-ullah, the nationality, political affiliation or religious motivation of his customers matters little. To him, the bottom line dictates the day`s work.

"If the client is paying money, I will sell to them," he says. "If the FBI wants to give me $25 million, I would even sell them bin Laden if I can catch him."

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

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Pakistani tribesmen stay fundamentally faithful to Taliban
Farmers put down plows to take up arms against U.S.
Juliette Terzieff, Chronicle Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback
Der 3. und letzte Teil siehe #9161 und gestern und vorgestern.

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/11/TALIBAN.TMP


Northwest Frontier province, Pakistan -- Rahimullah`s fingers adeptly clean and reassemble the Kalashnikov rifle on the dusty mud floor of the small village store. A single bulb swinging from a wire bounces shadows back and forth across him as he works.

"I am a Taliban. I believe in the movement and in the supreme leader Mullah Omar," the 25-year-old says to the approving nods of the 20-odd men gathered round to hear his discourse with the foreign female reporter.

Like four of the others present -- and thousands of other sympathetic Pakistanis in the past several years -- Rahimullah has traveled repeatedly to wage part-time jihad on behalf of the fundamentalist Taliban: in 1996, when they overthrew an earlier Afghan government; in 2001, as the U.S. military was set to invade; and earlier this year, to help in the guerrilla warfare against the American occupation.

All three times he crossed the border near the Afghan town of Khost, where al Qaeda ran its most infamous training camps, and support for the former government is still very strong.

Approximately 185 men from a small farming village of 3,800 located just outside Pakistan`s unruly tribal lands have volunteered each time, many of them performing repeat duty. Those remaining behind chip in for the forays with supplies and money, and promise to tend the fields of the farmers-turned-jihadis.

Given the jihadis` illegal activities, the reporter was brusquely told not to ask the name of the village, which is about one hour`s drive west of Peshawar, the capital of Northwest Frontier province.

The fighters travel by vehicle up through the nearby tribal area of North Waziristan and cross the frontier as near as they can get to Khost.

They used to go straight through the official border crossing, but the presence of American, Afghan and Pakistani troops hunting al Qaeda and Taliban men has forced them to detour on foot along ancient mountain trails.

Their most recent foray last spring, however, left them pining for the re-emergence of a centralized Taliban leadership and the most famous Afghan guerrilla of all, Mullah Mohammed Omar, the one-eyed spiritual head of the former government, who has reportedly been in hiding somewhere in central Afghanistan since late 2001.

"We went to kill Americans," Rahimullah said bluntly. "When we got there, there was nobody to fight because all the fighting was happening between Pashtun rivals. It`s all politics and infighting."

The Afghan border provinces that have seen the most fighting -- Paktia, Paktika and Khost -- have been roiled for nearly two years by bloody rivalries centering around Pashtun warlord Bacha Khan Zadran.

A renegade who initially supported Hamid Karzai`s central government in Kabul, Bacha Khan and his militia have been battling Afghan and U.S. soldiers -- and extorting money from travelers from Pakistan.

The pilgrimages of Pakistani Pashtun tribesmen to join the seemingly endless fights in Afghanistan began with the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. The last big cross-border exodus came at the start of the U.S.-led invasion that followed the events of Sept. 11, 2001. It ended in disaster, with the deaths and imprisonment of thousands of Pakistanis.

But that has not deterred true believers, said Sohail Anwar, a Pakistani regional analyst based in Peshawar.

"Yes, there are plenty of tribesmen and even some non-Pashtun Pakistanis who strongly identify with the Taliban," Anwar said. "For some, it is a reaffirmation of who they are and what they believe they should be. For others, it is a (way to act out) their deep mistrust of Western influence and control in the region."

While the number of active Taliban supporters or sympathizers in Pakistan makes up a small percentage of the country`s 140 million people, the issue poses a quandary for the U.S.-allied government.

President Pervez Musharraf has vowed to battle terrorism, but many Pakistanis don`t apply that label to the Taliban, even though its leaders gave support and shelter to Osama bin Laden and played host to al Qaeda`s terrorist training camps.

"Though the government has a clear standard -- no tolerance -- for al Qaeda, the Taliban is a different matter," said Anwar. "They received support from this side of the border and are (sheltering) on this side of the border, but they never attacked anyone outside Afghanistan."

The villagers say they do not harbor foreign militants, sometimes referred to as Arab Afghans. But they add that if Taliban fighters came looking for their help, they would respond on a case-by-case basis.

When their stints in Afghanistan -- usually no more than a couple of months -- are over, the jihadis simply return home to their farms and await the next call from Taliban operatives inside Afghanistan.

"If Mullah Omar gives the word, I would cross the border the very same day," Rahimullah said, prompting hoots and hollers of support from the men around him.

As word spreads about the presence of a foreigner, more villagers come to join the discussion. Only the very elderly and children are without guns, and all profess the highest admiration for the ousted Taliban regime and the reclusive Omar, whom they view as both an Islamic and Pashtun role model.

"Mullah Omar was 100 percent right in every aspect, and we all follow him along the path," said Sadiq Khan, 37.

"He brought peace and security of life, and that is all that matters," added Rahimullah, cradling his now-freshly oiled rifle in his lap.

But the men became flustered when asked about the Taliban`s banning women from working, closing down girls` schools and forcing all men to grow beards on pain of detention.

"Omar wasn`t against teaching girls, you are wrong," screamed Jamshid, a red-faced middle-aged villager whose face seems permanently frozen in a grimace. "It was even on the BBC that there were girls` schools operating in homes."

When the reporter points out that the schools referred to in the BBC radio reports were run clandestinely by teachers who were risking their lives, there was a brief uproar.

"How would you know anything but Western propaganda? You have never even set foot on Afghan soil! We know better," Jamshid shouted.

He jumped to his feet and swung his rifle menacingly in the foreigner`s direction. Learning that the reporter had indeed been to Afghanistan, he stomped off, grumbling. "There is no point talking to her," he said. "She will never understand. None of the foreigners will ever understand, and that makes them our enemy."

After his outburst, the remaining men adopted an apologetic posture, serving tea and semistale biscuits to the shaken visitors.

Rashid, a 32-year-old jihadi and father of four, said: "Omar might have been a little too harsh in some respects, but look what he was dealing with. After 20 years of fighting, they had to be harsh to impose law and order."

The loose alliance of mujahedeen groups that drove out the Soviet Union in 1989 quickly splintered, plunging Afghanistan into a half-decade of ruinous internecine warfare. Public anger over the anarchic conditions led to the formation of the Taliban and their eventual takeover in 1996.

Sadiq allowed that the Taliban might have gone too far in their social strictures. "There should be the ability to educate your daughters if a father wants that, and access to female doctors or policewomen," he said. "But there have to be limits."

Those present said they forgave Omar for any excesses that occurred during his rule.

"He is a good man, a real fighter, who rose from nothing to stand against the Soviets and defend his people," said Sadiq. "If he has made mistakes, they are excused by all of us."

Now there is a new enemy, and it`s not al Qaeda.

Hajji Ghulab Khan, 55, an Afghan from the Khost area who regularly hitches rides or walks into Pakistan, said he was certain that fellow Pashtuns there were being abused by the latest foreign invader.

"I tell the truth," he said emphatically. "The Americans are taking our weapons, arresting our tribe members and killing our people. What else matters?"



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The tribal zones along the Pakistani-Afghan border are inhabited by fiercely independent peoples who are devoutly religious, hostile to foreigners and ready to fight. Chronicle Foreign Service correspondent Juliette Terzieff visited this remote region, where Osama bin Laden`s al Qaeda terror network is believed to be regrouping. For the complete series, go to www.sfgate.com/
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wire/ats-ap_top10nov…

U.S. Holds 20 Suspected al-Qaida in Iraq
By BASSEM MROUE
Associated Press Writer

3:38 AM PST, November 11, 2003

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- An explosion Tuesday on a road frequently used by British troops killed six civilians in the southern city of Basra, hospital officials said, and the top U.S. commander in Iraq said the military had detained about 20 people suspected of links to al-Qaida.

Meanwhile, a Kurdish guerrilla group that had battled the Turkish army for 15 years said it would it would dissolve itself.

In the southern city of Basra, a blast during the morning rush hour destroyed two cars on a road frequently used by British troops, witnesses said. Soldiers immediately blocked off access to the site, and Iraqi police and hospital officials said a total of six civilians died in the blast.

In Baghdad, the coalition military commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, told reporters that the U.S. military had arrested about 20 people who may have been linked to al-Qaida but none had been confirmed as part of Osama bin Laden`s terror network.

"At one point, we had up to about 20 suspected al-Qaida members, but as we have continued to refine and interrogate, we have not been able to establish definitively that they were al-Qaida members," Sanchez said.

Sanchez did not say where they were held, when they were detained or whether any of them have been released.

U.S. officials have said they suspect foreign volunteers, including some from al-Qaida, have slipped across the borders into Iraq to take part in a "holy war" against the U.S.-led occupation.

However, a number of U.S. commanders have said they were uncertain about the numbers of foreign fighters and their role in the insurgency.

Asked about foreign fighters, Sanchez said "hundreds" of foreigners cross the border area to carry out attacks here. Sanchez was asked how close U.S. forces had been to capturing Saddam Hussein, Sanchez replied only: "Not close enough."

American commanders have speculated that they are facing attacks from Saddam supporters, religious extremists and foreign fighters. U.S. officials have said at least some of the attacks may have been orchestrated by Saddam`s former deputy Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who may have forged an alliance with the Kurdish religious extremist group Ansar al-Islam.

Ansar al-Islam is believed to have ties to al-Qaida. It was unclear whether Sanchez was referring to Ansar fighters when he said the Americans were holding about 20 al-Qaida suspects.

Sanchez also said that although attacks against his troops have increased, the insurgents know "that from a military point of view, they can`t defeat us."

He defended the use of aerial bombing in Tikrit and Fallujah over the past five days, saying it was necessary to defeat those who attack coalition forces.

Also in Baghdad, the Kurdish rebel group known as the Congress for Freedom and Democracy in Kurdistan, or KADEK, said it was planning to form a new group that would likely be pan-Kurdish and would pursue Kurdish rights through negotiations.

"KADEK is being dissolved in order to make way for a new, more democratic organizational structure that allows for broader participation," the group said in a statement.

The group was originally called the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, but changed its name last year and announced a shift in strategy saying it would peacefully campaign for Kurdish rights.

The turmoil in the Kurdish organization comes as the guerrillas face increasing pressure from Turkey and the United States, which both consider the guerrillas as terrorists. The group`s main fighting force of some 5,000 is based in the mountains of northern Iraq and is expected to face serious pressure from U.S. and Turkish forces as Washington struggles to bring stability to Iraq.

Some 37,000 people, mostly Kurds, died in nearly two decades of fighting between the autonomy-seeking PKK and Turkish troops.

The PKK declared a cease-fire after Turkish forces captured the group`s leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1999.

In Japan, media reports said that gnawing concerns about the deteriorating security situation and worries about the political fallout may force Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to push back or water down his plans to send a small number of troops to Iraq.

Koizumi had reportedly been hoping to get his Cabinet to sign orders by the end of this week to send an advance party of ground forces to southern Iraq next month to help with reconstruction and other non-combat duties.

Koizumi has stood behind the U.S.-led "coalition of the willing" since the outbreak of fighting in Iraq, but so far his support has been limited to justifying the war to an increasingly skeptical Japanese public and earmarking billions of dollars for humanitarian aid.

The Japanese plan to send a 150-member advance contingent to southern Iraq by the end of the year and 550 soldiers early next year to provide water, medical care and other services.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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AN HONOR ROLL OF SACRIFICE IN IRAQ
The Department of Defense and family members have identified 383 U.S. troops who have died in Iraq since the war began March 20, through Nov. 7. Of these, 245 died on or after May 1, when President Bu
Associated Press

November 11, 2003

March 20* Marine Maj. Jay Thomas Aubin, 36, Waterville, Maine, helicopter crashMarine Capt. Ryan Anthony Beaupre, 30, St. Anne, Ill., helicopter crashMarine Cpl. Brian Matthew Kennedy, 25, Houston, helicopter crashMarine Staff Sgt. Kendall Damon Waters-Bey, 29, Baltimore, helicopter crashMarch 21Marine 2nd Lt. Therrel S. Childers, 30, Harrison County, Miss., combat Marine Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez, 28, Los Angeles, combat March 22Navy Lt. Thomas Mullen Adams, 27, La Mesa, Calif., helicopter collisionMarine Sgt. Nicolas M. Hodson, 22, Smithville, Mo., vehicle accidentMarine Lance Cpl. Eric J. Orlowski, 26, Buffalo, N.Y., machine gun accidentArmy Capt. Christopher Scott Seifert, 27, Easton, Pa., grenade attackArmy Reserve Spc. Brandon S. Tobler, 19, Portland, Ore., vehicle accidentMarch 23 Army Spc. Jamaal R. Addison, 22, Roswell, Ga., combatArmy Sgt. Edward John Anguiano, 24, Brownsville, Texas, combatMarine Sgt. Michael E. Bitz, 31, Ventura, Calif., combatMarine Lance Cpl. Brian Rory Buesing, 20, Cedar Key, Fla., combatArmy Sgt. George Edward Buggs, 31, Barnwell, S.C., combatMarine Pfc. Tamario D. Burkett, 21, Buffalo, N.Y., combatMarine Cpl. Kemaphoom A. Chanawongse, 22, Waterford, Conn., combatMarine Lance Cpl. Donald John Cline Jr., 21, Sparks, Nev., combatArmy 1st Sgt. Robert J. Dowdy, 38, Cleveland, combatArmy Pvt. Ruben Estrella-Soto, 18, El Paso, Texas, combatMarine Lance Cpl. David K. Fribley, 26, Fort Myers, Fla., combatMarine Cpl. Jose A. Garibay, 21, Costa Mesa, Calif., combatMarine Pvt. Jonathan L. Gifford, 30, Decatur, Ill., combatMarine Cpl. Jorge A. Gonzalez, 20, Los Angeles, combatMarine Pvt. Nolen R. Hutchings, 19, Boiling Springs, S.C., friendly fireArmy Pfc. Howard Johnson Jr., 21, Mobile, Ala., combatMarine Staff Sgt. Phillip A. Jordan, 42, Enfield, Conn., combatArmy Spc. James Kiehl, 22, Comfort, Texas, combatArmy Chief Warrant Officer Johnny Villareal Mata, 35, El Paso, Texas, combatMarine Cpl. Patrick R. Nixon, 21, Gallatin, Tenn., combat Army Pfc. Lori A. Piestewa, 23, Tuba City, Ariz., combat Marine 2nd Lt. Frederick E. Pokorney Jr., 31, Tonopah, Nev., combat Marine Sgt. Brendon Reiss, 23, Hanna, Wyo., combatMarine Cpl. Robert M. Rodriguez, 21, New York, combatMarine Cpl. Randal Kent Rosacker, 21, San Diego, combat Army Pvt. Brandon Sloan, 19, Bedford Heights, Ohio, combat Marine Lance Cpl. Thomas J. Slocum, 22, Thornton, Colo., combat Army Sgt. Donald R. Walters, 33, Kansas City, Mo., combat Marine Lance Cpl. Michael J. Williams, 31, Phoenix, combat March 24 Marine Lance Cpl. Thomas A. Blair, 24, Broken Arrow, Okla., combat Marine Cpl. Evan T. James, 20, La Harpe, Ill., drowned in canalMarine Sgt. Bradley S. Korthaus, 28, Davenport, Iowa, drowned in canal Army Spc. Gregory P. Sanders, 19, Hobart, Ind., combat March 25 Marine Pfc. Francisco A. Martinez Flores, 21, Los Angeles, combatNavy Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Michael Vann Johnson Jr., 25, Little Rock, Ark., combat Marine Staff Sgt. Donald C. May, Jr., 31, Richmond, Va., combat Marine Lance Cpl. Patrick T. O`Day, 20, Santa Rosa, Calif., combatAir Force Maj. Gregory Stone, 40, Boise, Idaho, grenade attackMarch 26 Marine Maj. Kevin G. Nave, 36, White Lake Township, Mich., vehicle accident March 27 Marine Gunnery Sgt. Joseph Menusa, 33, Tracy, Calif., combatMarch 28 Marine Sgt. Fernando Padilla-Ramirez, 26, San Luis, Ariz., combat Army Sgt. Roderic A. Solomon, 32, Fayetteville, N.C., vehicle accidentMarch 29Marine Staff Sgt. James Cawley, 41, Roy, Utah, combat Army Pfc. Michael Russell Creighton-Weldon, 20, Conyers, Ga., suicide attackArmy Spc. Michael Edward Curtin, 23, Howell, N.J., suicide attack Army Pfc. Diego Fernando Rincon, 19, Conyers, Ga., suicide attackMarine Lance Cpl. Jesus A. Suarez Del Solar, 20, Escondido, Calif., combatMarine Lance Cpl. William W. White, 24, New York, vehicle accidentArmy Sgt. Eugene Williams, 24, Highland, N.Y, suicide attackMarch 30 Marine Capt. Aaron J. Contreras, 31, Sherwood, Ore., helicopter crash Marine Sgt. Michael V. Lalush, 23, Troutville, Va., helicopter crash Marine Sgt. Brian D. McGinnis, 23, St. George, Del., helicopter crash March 31 Army Spc. William A. Jeffries, 39, Evansville, Ind., illness Army Spc. Brandon J. Rowe, 20, Roscoe, Ill., combat April 1 Army Sgt. Jacob L. Butler, 24, Wellsville, Kan., combat Marine Lance Cpl. Joseph B. Maglione, 22, Lansdale, Pa., noncombat weapon dischargeApril 2 Army Capt. James F. Adamouski, 29, Springfield, Va., helicopter crash Marine Lance Cpl. Brian E. Anderson, 26, Durham, N.C., accident Army Spc. Mathew G. Boule, 22, Dracut, Mass., helicopter crash Army Master Sgt. George A. Fernandez, 36, El Paso, Texas, gunshot wound Marine Pfc. Christian D. Gurtner, 19, Ohio City, Ohio, noncombat weapons discharge Army Chief Warrant Officer Erik A. Halvorsen, 40, Bennington, Vt., helicopter crash Army Chief Warrant Officer Scott Jamar, 32, Granbury, Texas, helicopter crash Army Sgt. Michael F. Pedersen, 26, Flint, Mich., helicopter crash Army Chief Warrant Officer Eric A. Smith, 42, Rochester, N.Y., helicopter crash Navy Lt. Nathan D. White, 30, Mesa, Ariz., friendly fire April 3 Marine Pfc. Chad E. Bales, 20, Coahoma, Texas, nonhostile accident Army Staff Sgt. Wilbert Davis, 40, Hinesville, Ga., vehicle accident Marine Cpl. Mark A. Evnin, 21, Burlington, Vt., combat Army Capt. Edward J. Korn, 31, Savannah, Ga., combat Army Staff Sgt. Nino D. Livaudais, 23, Ogden, Utah, combat Army Spc. Ryan P. Long, 21, Seaford, Del., combat Army Spc. Donald S. Oaks Jr., 20, Harborcreek, Pa., combat Army Sgt. 1st Class Randall S. Rehn, 36, Longmont, Colo., combat Army Capt. Russell B. Rippetoe, 27, Arvada, Colo., combat Army Sgt. Todd J. Robbins, 33, Hart, Mich., combat Marine Cpl. Erik H. Silva, 23, Holtville, Calif., combat April 4 Army Capt. Tristan N. Aitken, 31, State College, Pa., combat Army Pfc. Wilfred D. Bellard, 20, Lake Charles, La., vehicle fell into ravine Army Spc. Daniel Francis J. Cunningham, 33, Lewiston, Maine, vehicle fell into ravine Marine Capt. Travis A. Ford, 30, Ogallala, Neb., helicopter crash Marine Cpl. Bernard G. Gooden, 22, Mount Vernon, N.Y., combat Army Pvt. Devon D. Jones, 19, San Diego, vehicle fell into ravine Marine 1st Lt. Brian M. McPhillips, 25, Pembroke, Mass., combat Marine Sgt. Duane R. Rios, 25, Griffith, Ind., combat Marine Capt. Benjamin W. Sammis, 29, Rehoboth, Mass., helicopter crash Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, 33, Tampa, Fla., combatApril 5 Army Staff Sgt. Stevon A. Booker, 34, Apollo, Pa., combat Army Spc. Larry K. Brown, 22, Jackson, Miss., combat Marine 1st Sgt. Edward Smith, 38, Chicago, combat April 6 Army Pfc. Gregory P. Huxley Jr., 19, Forestport, N.Y., combat Army Pvt. Kelley S. Prewitt, 24, Birmingham, Ala., combat April 7 Marine Lance Cpl. Andrew Julian Aviles, 18, Tampa, Fla., combat Air Force Capt. Eric B. Das, 30, Amarillo, Texas, combat Army Staff Sgt. Lincoln D. Hollinsaid, 27, Malden, Ill., combat Army 2nd Lt. Jeffrey J. Kaylor, 24, Clifton, Va., combat Marine Cpl. Jesus Martin Antonio Medellin, 21, Fort Worth, Texas, combat Army Pfc. Anthony S. Miller, 19, San Antonio, combat Army Spc. George A. Mitchell, 35, Rawlings, Md., combat Air Force Maj. William R. Watkins III, 37, Danville, Va., combat April 8 Army Cpl. Henry L. Brown, 22, Natchez, Miss. combat Marine Pfc. Juan Guadalupe Garza Jr., 20, Temperance, Mich., combat Army Sgt. 1st Class John W. Marshall, 50, Sacramento, combat Army Pfc. Jason M. Meyer, 23, Howell, Mich., combat Air Force Staff Sgt. Scott D. Sather, 29, Clio, Mich., combat Army Staff Sgt. Robert A. Stever, 36, Pendleton, Ore., combatApril 10 Marine Gunnery Sgt. Jeffrey E. Bohr Jr., 39, San Clemente, Calif., combat Army Staff Sgt. Terry W. Hemingway, 39, Willingboro, N.J., combatApril 11 Marine Staff Sgt. Riayan A. Tejeda, 26, New York, combat April 12 Marine Cpl. Jesus A. Gonzalez, 22, Indio, Calif., combat Marine Lance Cpl. David Edward Owens Jr., 20, Winchester, Va., combatApril 13 Army Spc. Gil Mercado, 25, Paterson, N.J., noncombat weapon dischargeApril 14 Army Pfc. John E. Brown, 21, Troy, Ala., accidental grenade explosion Army Spc. Thomas A. Foley III, 23, Dresden, Tenn., accidental grenade explosion Marine Cpl. Armando Ariel Gonzalez, 25, Hialeah, Fla., vehicle accident Army Spc. Richard A. Goward, 32, Midland, Mich., vehicle accident Army Pfc. Joseph P. Mayek, 20, Rock Springs, Wyo., friendly fire Marine Cpl. Jason David Mileo, 20, Centreville, Md., friendly fireApril 17 Army Cpl. John T. Rivero, 23, Gainesville, Fla., vehicle accidentApril 22 Marine Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Todd Arnold, 30, Spring, Texas, grenade launcher accident Army Spc. Roy R. Buckley, 24, Portage, Ind., fall from a military truck Marine Chief Warrant Officer Robert W. Channell Jr., 36, Tuscaloosa, Ala., grenade-launcher accident Marine Lance Cpl. Alan D. Lam, 19, Snow Camp, N.C., grenade-launcher accidentApril 24 Army Sgt. Troy D. Jenkins, 25, Ridgecrest, Calif., cluster-bomb explosionApril 25 Army 1st Lt. Osbaldo Orozco, 26, Delano, Calif., vehicle accident Army Spc. Narson B. Sullivan, 21, North Brunswick, N.J., noncombat weapon dischargeApril 28 Army 1st Sgt. Joe J. Garza, 43, Robstown, Texas, vehicle accidentMay 1 Army Pfc. Jesse A. Givens, 34, Springfield, Mo., tank accidentMay 3 Army Sgt. Sean C. Reynolds, 25, East Lansing, Mich., weapon accident May 4Army Pvt. Jason L. Deibler, 20, Coeburn, Va., noncombat weapon dischargeMay 8 Army Pfc. Marlin T. Rockhold, 23, Hamilton, Ohio, killed by sniperMay 9 Marine Lance Cpl. Cedric E. Bruns, 22, Vancouver, Wash., vehicle accident in Kuwait Army Cpl. Richard P. Carl, 26, King Hill, Idaho, helicopter crash Army Chief Warrant Officer Hans N. Gukeisen, 31, Lead, S.D., helicopter accident Army Chief Warrant Officer Brian K. Van Dusen, 39, Columbus, Ohio, helicopter accidentMay 10 Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew R. Smith, 20, Anderson, Ind., vehicle accident in KuwaitMay 12 Marine Lance Cpl. Jakub Henryk Kowalik, 21, Schaumburg, Ill., killed when unexploded ordnance detonated Marine Pfc. Jose Francisco Gonzalez Rodriguez, 19, Norwalk, Calif., killed when unexploded ordnance detonatedMay 13 Air Force Staff Sgt. Patrick Lee Griffin Jr., 31, Elgin, S.C., convoy ambush Marine Lance Cpl. Nicholas Brian Kleiboeker, 19, Irvington, Ill., accidental explosionMay 14Army Spc. David T. Nutt, 32, Blackshear, Ga., vehicle accidentMay 16 Army Master Sgt. William L. Payne, 46, Otsego, Mich., accidental explosionMay 18 Marine Cpl. Douglas Jose Marencoreyes, 28, Chino, Calif., vehicle accident Army Spc. Rasheed Sahib, 22, New York, accidental weapon discharge May 19 Army Lt. Col. Dominic R. Baragona, 42, Niles, Ohio, vehicle accident Marine Capt. Andrew David La Mont, 31, Eureka, Calif., helicopter crash Marine Lance Cpl. Jason William Moore, 21, San Marcos, Calif., helicopter crash Marine 1st Lt. Timothy Louis Ryan, 30, Aurora, Ill., helicopter crash Marine Sgt. Kirk Allen Straseskie, 23, Beaver Dam, Wis., drowning Marine Staff Sgt. Aaron Dean White, 27, Shawnee, Okla., helicopter crashMay 21 Army Spc. Nathaniel A. Caldwell, 27, Omaha, Neb., vehicle accidentMay 25 Army Pvt. David Evans Jr., 18, Buffalo, N.Y., accidental munitions dump explosionMay 26 Army Sgt. Keman L. Mitchell, 24, Hilliard, Fla., drowning Army Pvt. Kenneth A. Nalley, 19, Hamburg, Iowa, vehicle accident Army Military Police Staff Sgt. Brett J. Petriken, 30, Flint, Mich., vehicle accident Army Maj. Mathew E. Schram, 36, Brookfield, Wis., hostile fire Army Pfc. Jeremiah D. Smith, 25, Odessa, Mo., accidental ordnance explosionMay 27 Army Sgt. Thomas F. Broomhead, 34, Canon City, Colo., checkpoint shooting Army Staff Sgt. Michael B. Quinn, 37, Tampa, Fla., checkpoint shootingMay 28 Army Staff Sgt. Kenneth R. Bradley, 39, Utica, Miss., heart attack Army Spc. Jose A. Perez III, 22, San Diego, Texas, convoy ambush May 30 Army Spc. Michael T. Gleason, 25, Warren, Pa., accident Army Spc. Kyle A. Griffin, 20, Emerson, N.J., accident Army Spc. Zachariah W. Long, 20, Milton, Pa., accidentJune 1 Marine Sgt. Jonathan W. Lambert, 28, New Site, Miss., accidentJune 3 Army Sgt. Atanacio Haro Marin Jr. , 27, Baldwin Park, Calif., combatJune 5 Army Pfc. Branden F. Oberleitner, 20, Worthington, Ohio, combatJune 6 Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Doyle W. Bollinger Jr., 21, Poteau, Okla., accident Army Sgt. Travis Lee Burkhardt, 26, Edina, Mo., accidentJune 7 Army Pvt. Jesse M. Halling, 19, Indianapolis, combatJune 8 Army Sgt. Michael E. Dooley, 23, Pulaski, Va., combatJune 10 Army Pfc. Gavin L. Neighbor, 20, Somerset, Ohio, combatJune 12 Army Spc. John K. Klinesmith Jr., 25, Stockbridge, Ga., accidentJune 13 Army Staff Sgt. Andrew R. Pokorny, 30, Naperville, Ill., accidentJune 15 Marine Pfc. Ryan R. Cox, 19, Derby, Kan., accidentJune 16 Army Pvt. Shawn D. Pahnke, 25, Shelbyville, Ind., combat Army Spc. Joseph D. Suell, 24, Lufkin, Texas, noncombat June 17 Army Sgt. Michael L. Tosto, 24, Apex, N.C., pneumonia Army Pvt. Robert L. Frantz, 19, San Antonio, combat June 18 Army Spc. Michael R. Deuel, 21, Nemo, S.D., combat Army Staff Sgt. William T. Latham, 29, Kingman, Ariz., combatJune 19 Army Spc. Paul T. Nakamura, 21, Santa Fe Springs, Calif., combatJune 22 Spc. Orenthial J. Smith, 21, Allendale, S.C., combatJune 24 Army Spc. Cedric L. Lennon, 32, West Blocton, Ala., noncombatJune 25 Army Spc. Andrew F. Chris, 25, San Diego, explosion Army Spc. Cory A. Hubbell, 20, Urbana, Ill., breathing difficulties Marine Lance Cpl. Gregory E. MacDonald, 29, Washington, D.C., vehicle accident Army Pfc. Kevin C. Ott, 27, Orient, Ohio, killed in action Army Sgt. 1st Class Gladimir Philippe, 37, Roselle, N.J., killed in actionJune 26 Navy Seaman Joshua McIntosh, 22, Kingman, Ariz., nonhostile gunshot wound Army Spc. Richard P. Orengo, 32, Toa Alta, Puerto Rico, hostile fireJune 27 Army Cpl. Tomas Sotelo Jr., 22, Houston, hostile fireJune 28 Army Sgt. Timothy M. Conneway, 22, Enterprise, Ala., explosionJuly 1 Army 1st Sgt. Christopher D. Coffin, 51, Bethlehem, Pa., vehicle accidentJuly 2 Marine Cpl. Travis J. Bradach-Nall, 24, Portland, Ore., explosion during a mine-clearing operationJuly 3 Army Pfc. Edward James Herrgott, 20, Shakopee, Minn., hostile fire Army Pfc. Corey L. Small, 20, East Berlin, Pa., noncombatJuly 6 Army Sgt. David B. Parson, 30, Kannapolis, N.C., hostile fire Army Pfc. Jeffrey M. Wershow, 22, Gainesville, Fla., hostile fireJuly 7 Army Sgt. Chad L. Keith, 21, Batesville, Ind., explosion Army Staff Sgt. Barry Sanford Sr., 46, Aurora, Colo., noncombatJuly 8 Army Sgt. 1st Class Craig A. Boling, 38, Elkhart, Ind., collapsed while eating dinner Army Pvt. Robert L. McKinley, 23, Peru, Ind., heat strokeJuly 9 Army Sgt. 1st Class Dan Henry Gabrielson, 39, Frederic, Wis., hostile fire Army Sgt. Roger D. Rowe, 54, Bon Aqua, Tenn., hostile fire Marine Lance Cpl. Jason Andrew Tetrault, 20, Moreno Valley, Calif., vehicle accident Army Sgt. Melissa Valles, 26, Eagle Pass, Texas, noncombat injuriesJuly 11 Army Spc. Christian C. Schulz, 20, Colleyville, Texas, noncombat relatedJuly 12Army Spc. Joshua M. Neusche, 20, Montreal, Mo., pneumoniaJuly 13 Army Cpt. Paul J. Cassidy, 36, Laingsburg, Mich., noncombat related Army Sgt. Jaror C. Puello-Coronado, 36, Pocono Summit, Pa., vehicle accidentJuly 14 Army Sgt. Michael T. Crockett, 27, Soperton, Ga., hostile fireJuly 15 Marine Lance Cpl. Cory Ryan Geurin, 18, Santee, Calif., fall from a roofJuly 16 Army Spc. Ramon Reyes Torres, 29, Caguas, Puerto Rico, hostile attackJuly 17 Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class David J. Moreno, 26, Gering, Neb., nonhostile gunshot wound Army Sgt. Mason Douglas Whetstone, 30, Ogden, Utah, noncombat relatedJuly 18 Army Sgt. Joel L. Bertoldie, 20, Independence, Mo., roadside explosionJuly 19 Army Second Lt. Jonathan D. Rozier, 25, Katy, Texas, hostile fireJuly 20 Army Sgt. Justin W. Garvey, 23, Townsend, Mass., hostile fire Army Sgt. Jason D. Jordan, 24, Elba, Ala., hostile fire Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher R. Willoughby, 29, Phenix City, Ala., vehicle accidentJuly 21 Army Cpl. Mark A. Bibby, 25, Watha, N.C., explosionJuly 22 Army Spc. Jon P. Fettig, 30, Dickinson, N.D., hostile fireJuly 23 Army Capt. Joshua T. Byers, 29, Sparks, Nev., explosion Army Spc. Brett T. Christian, 27, North Royalton, Ohio, hostile fire July 24 Army Sgt. Evan Asa Ashcraft, 24, West Hills, Calif., hostile fire Army Pfc. Raheen Tyson Heighter, 22, Bay Shore, N.Y., hostile fire Army Staff Sgt. Hector R. Perez, 40, Corpus Christi, Texas, hostile fire Army Sgt. Juan M. Serrano, 31, Manati, Puerto Rico, changing a tire when vehicle fell on himJuly 26 Army Spc. Jonathan P. Barnes, 21, Anderson, Mo., grenade attack Army Spc. Jonathan Marshall Cheatham, 19, Camden, Ark., hostile fire Army Sgt. Daniel K. Methvin, 22, Belton, Texas, grenade attack Army Spc. Wilfredo Perez Jr., 24, Norwalk, Conn., grenade attackJuly 27 Army Sgt. Heath A. McMillin, 29, Canandaigua, N.Y., hostile fireJuly 28 Army Sgt. Nathaniel Hart Jr., 29, Valdosta, Ga., vehicle accident Army Spc. William J. Maher III, 35, Yardley, Pa., explosionJuly 30 Army Capt. Leif E. Nott, 24, Cheyenne, Wyo., hostile fireJuly 31 Army Pvt. Michael J. Deutsch, 21, Dubuque, Iowa, explosion Army Spc. James I. Lambert II, 22, Raleigh, N.C., struck by a stray bulletAug. 1 Army Spc. Justin W. Hebert, 20, Arlington, Wash., hostile fireAug. 5 Army Spc. Farao K. Letufuga, 20, Pago Pago, American Samoa, fall from the top of a building Army Staff Sgt. David L. Loyd, 44, Jackson, Tenn., noncombat relatedAug. 6 Army Spc. Zeferino E. Colunga, 20, Bellville, Texas, illness Army Pvt. Kyle C. Gilbert, 20, Brattleboro, Vt., hostile fire Army Staff Sgt. Brian R. Hellermann, 35, Freeport, Minn., hostile fire Army Sgt. Leonard D. Simmons, 33, New Bern, N.C., heart attackAug. 7 Army Spc. Duane E. Longstreth, 19, Tacoma, Wash., noncombat relatedAug. 8 Army Pvt. Matthew D. Bush, 20, East Alton, Ill., died in his sleep Army Pfc. Brandon Ramsey, 21, Calumet City, Ill., vehicle accident while chasing a suspicious vehicleAug. 9 Army Spc. Levi B. Kinchen, 21, Tickfaw, La., died in his sleep Army Sgt. Floyd G. Knighten, Jr., 55, Olla, La., noncombat relatedAug. 10 Army Staff Sgt. David S. Perry, 36, Bakersfield, package explosionAug. 12 Army Pfc. Timothy R. Brown, Jr., 21, Conway, Pa., explosion Army Staff Sgt. Richard S. Eaton Jr., 37, Guilford, Conn., illness Army Pfc. Daniel R. Parker, 18, Lake Elsinore, Calif., vehicle accident Army Staff Sgt. Taft V. Williams, 29, New Orleans, explosionAug. 13 Army Sgt. Steven W. White, 29, Lawton, Okla., antitank mineAug. 14 Army Pfc. David M. Kirchhoff, 31, Anamosa, Iowa, heat strokeAug. 17 Army Spc. Craig S. Ivory, 26, Port Matilda, Pa., noncombat Aug. 18 Army Sgt. Eric R. Hull, 23, Upper Middletown, Pa., explosionAug. 20Army Staff Sgt. Bobby C. Franklin, 38, Mineral Bluff, Ga., explosion Army Spc. Kenneth W. Harris, Jr., 23, Charlotte, Tenn., vehicle accidentAug. 21 Army Pfc. Michael Scott Adams, 20, Spartanburg, S.C., smoke inhalation during training exercises Navy Lt. Kylan A. Jones-Huffman, 31, College Park, Md., hostile fireAug. 23Army Pfc. Vorn J. Mack, 19, Orangeburg, S.C., drowning Army Spc. Stephen M. Scott, 21, Lawton, Okla., noncombat gunshot wound Aug. 25 Army Spc. Ronald D. Allen Jr., 22, Mitchell, Ind., vehicle accident Army Pfc. Pablo Manzano, 19, Heber, Calif., noncombat weapons dischargeAug. 26 Army Spc. Darryl T. Dent, 21, Washington, D.C., explosionAug. 27 Army Sgt. Gregory A. Belanger, 24, Narragansett, R.I., explosion Army Spc. Rafael L. Navea, 34, Pittsburgh, explosion Army Lt. Col. Anthony L. Sherman, 43, Pottstown, Pa., noncombat Aug. 29 Army Staff Sgt. Mark A. Lawton, 41, Hayden, Colo., rocket-propelled grenadeAug. 30Army Sgt. Sean K. Cataudella, 28, Tucson, Ariz., vehicle rolled into a canalSept. 1 Army Sgt. Charles T. Caldwell, 38, North Providence, R.I., explosion Army Staff Sgt. Joseph Camara, 40, New Bedford, Mass., explosion Army Staff Sgt. Cameron B. Sarno, 43, Las Vegas, vehicle accidentSept. 2 Army Pfc. Christopher A. Sisson, 20, Oak Park, Ill., helicopter accidentSept. 4 Air Force Tech. Sgt. Bruce E. Brown, 32, Coatopa, Ala., vehicle accidentSept. 7 Army Spc. Jarrett B. Thompson, 27, Dover, Del., vehicle accidentSept. 9 Army Spc. Ryan G. Carlock, 25, Colchester, Ill., hostile fireSept. 10 Army Staff Sgt. Joseph E. Robsky Jr., 31, Elizaville, N.Y., explosion while disabling a bombSept. 11 Army Sgt. Henry Ybarra III, 32, Austin, Texas, tire explosionSept. 12 Army Sgt. 1st Class William M. Bennett, 35, Seymour, Tenn., killed in a raid Army Master Sgt. Kevin N. Morehead, 33, Adams, Tenn., killed in a raidSept. 14 Army Sgt. Trevor A. Blumberg, 22, Canton, Mich., explosionSept. 15 Army Staff Sgt. Kevin C. Kimmerly, 31, North Creek, N.Y., hostile fire Army Spc. Alyssa R. Peterson, 27, Flagstaff, Ariz., noncombat weapons dischargeSept. 18 Army Spc. Richard Arriaga, 20, Ganado, Texas, hostile fire Army Capt. Brian R. Faunce, 28, Philadelphia, electrocuted by power lines Army Staff Sgt. Anthony O. Thompson, 26, Orangeburg, S.C., hostile fire Army Spc. James C. Wright, 27, Delhi Township, Ohio, hostile fireSept. 20 Army Spc. Lunsford B. Brown II, 27, Creedmoor, N.C., mortar attack Army Staff Sgt. Frederick L. Miller Jr., 27, Hagerstown, Ind., explosion Army Sgt. David T. Friedrich, 26, Hammond, N.Y., mortar attackSept. 22 Army Spc. Paul J. Sturino, 21, Rice Lake, Wis., noncombat weapons dischargeSept. 24 Army Spc. Michael Andrade, 28, Bristol, R.I., vehicle accident Sept. 25 Army Capt. Robert L. Lucero, 34, Casper, Wyo., explosion Army Sgt. 1st Class Robert E. Rooney, 43, Nashua, N.H., struck by a forklift Army Spc. Kyle G. Thomas, 23, Topeka, Kan., explosion Sept. 29 Army Sgt. Andrew Joseph Baddick, 26, Jim Thorpe, Pa., drowned Army Staff Sgt. Christopher E. Cutchall, 30, McConnellsburg, Pa., explosion Army Pfc. Kristian E. Parker, 23, Slidell, La., noncombat related Army Sgt. Darrin K. Potter, 24, Louisville, Ky., drownedSept. 30 Army Spc. Dustin K. McGaugh, 20, Derby, Kan., nonhostile gunshot wound Oct. 1 Army Command Sgt. Maj. James D. Blankenbecler, 40, Alexandria, Va., hostile attack Army Pfc. Analaura Esparza-Gutierrez, 21, Houston, hostile attack Army Spc. Simeon Hunte, 23, Essex, N.J., hostile fire Oct. 3Army Pfc. Charles M. Sims, 18, Miami, drowned Oct. 4 Army Spc. James H. Pirtle, 27, La Mesa, N.M., hostile fire Oct. 6 Army Spc. Spencer T. Karol, 20, Woodruff, Ariz., explosion Army Pfc. Kerry D. Scott, 21, Mount Vernon, Wash., explosion Army 2nd Lt. Richard Torres, 25, Clarksville, Tenn., explosion Oct. 9 Army Spc. Joseph C. Norquist, 26, San Antonio, hostile fire Army Pvt. Sean A. Silva, 23, Roseville, Calif., hostile fire Army Staff Sgt. Christopher W. Swisher, 26, Lincoln, Neb., hostile fireOct. 12 Army Spc. James Powell, 26, Mark Center, Ohio, antitank mine explosion Oct. 13 Army Pfc. Jose Casanova, 23, El Monte, Calif., vehicle accident Army Pvt. Benjamin L. Freeman, 19, Valdosta, Ga., drowned Army Spc. Douglas J. Weismantle, 28, Pittsburgh, vehicle accident Army Spc. Donald L. Wheeler, 22, Concord, Mich., hostile fire Army Pfc. Stephen E. Wyatt, 19, Kilgore, Texas, hostile fire Oct. 16 Army Staff Sgt. Joseph P. Bellavia, 28, Wakefield, Mass., hostile fire Army Cpl. Sean R. Grilley, 24, San Bernardino, hostile fire Army Lt. Col. Kim S. Orlando, 43, Nashville, hostile fire Oct. 17 Army Spc. Michael L. Williams, 46, Buffalo, N.Y., explosion Oct. 18 Army 1st Lt. David R. Bernstein, 24, Phoenixville, Pa., hostile fire Army Pfc. John D. Hart, 20, Bedford, Mass., hostile fireOct. 20Army Staff Sgt. Paul J. Johnson, 29, Calumet, Mich., hostile fire Oct. 21 Army Spc. Paul J. Bueche, 19, Daphne, Ala., changing helicopter tire when it exploded Oct. 22 Army Spc. John P. Johnson, 24, Houston, noncombat related Army Pvt. Jason M. Ward, 25, Tulsa, Okla., noncombat related Oct. 23 Army Capt. John R. Teal, 31, Mechanicsville, Va., explosion Oct. 24 Army Spc. Artimus D. Brassfield, 22, Flint, Mich., mortar attack Army Sgt. Michael S. Hancock, 29, Yreka, Calif., hostile fire Army Spc. Jose L. Mora, 26, Bell Gardens, Calif.,mortar attack Oct. 26 Army Pfc. Steven Acosta, 19, Calexico, Calif., nonhostile fire Army Pfc. Rachel Bosveld, 19, Waupin, Wis., mortar attack Army Lt. Col. Charles H. Buehring, 40, Winter Springs, Fla., hostile fire Army Pvt. Joseph R. Guerrera, 20, Dunn, N.C., explosion Army Staff Sgt. Jamie L. Huggins, 26, Hume, Mo., explosionOct. 27 Army Sgt. Aubrey D. Bell, 33, Tuskegee, Ala., hostile fire Army Pvt. Jonathan I. Falaniko, 20, Pago Pago, American Samoa, explosion Oct. 28 Army Pvt. Algernon Adams, 36, Aiken, S.C., noncombat related Army Sgt. Michael Paul Barrera, 26, Von Ormy, Texas, land mine Army Spc. Isaac Campoy, 21, Douglas, Ariz., land mine Oct. 31 Army 2nd Lt. Todd J. Bryant, 23, Riverside, explosion Nov. 1Army 2nd Lt. Benjamin J. Colgan, 30, Kent, Wash., explosion Army 1st Lt. Joshua C. Hurley, 24, Clifton Forge, Va., explosion Army Spc. Maurice J. Johnson, 21, Levittown, Pa., explosion Nov. 2 Army Staff Sgt. Daniel A. Bader, 28, Colorado Springs, Colo., helicopter crash Army Sgt. Ernest G. Bucklew, 33, Enon Valley, Pa., helicopter crash Army Sgt. Steven D. Conover, 21, Wilmington, Ohio, helicopter crash Army Pfc. Anthony D. D`Agostino, 20, Waterbury, Conn., helicopter crash Army Spc. Darius T. Jennings, 22, Cordova, S.C., helicopter crash Army Pfc. Karina S. Lau, 20, Livingston, Calif., helicopter crash Army Sgt. Keelan L. Moss, 23, Houston, helicopter crash Army Spc. Brian H. Penisten, 28, Fort Wayne, Ind., helicopter crash Army Sgt. Ross A. Pennanen, 36, Shawnee, Okla., helicopter crash Army Sgt. Joel Perez, 25, Newark, N.J., helicopter crash Army 1st Lt. Brian D. Slavenas, 30, Genoa, Ill., helicopter crash Army Chief Warrant Officer Bruce A. Smith, 41, West Liberty, Iowa, helicopter crash Army Staff Sgt. Paul A. Velazquez, 29, San Diego, helicopter crash Army Spc. Frances M. Vega, 20, Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico, helicopter crash Army Staff Sgt. Joe N. Wilson, 30, Crystal Springs, Miss., helicopter crash Nov. 4 Army Spc. Robert T. Benson, 20, Spokane, Wash., nonhostile gunshot wound Army Sgt. Francisco Martinez, 28, Humacao, Puerto Rico, explosion Nov. 5 Army Sgt. 1st Class Jose A. Rivera, 34, Bayamon, Puerto Rico, hostile fire Nov. 6 Army Spc. James A. Chance III, 25, Kokomo, Miss., land mine Army Sgt. Paul F. Fisher, 39, Marion, Iowa, died of injuries received in Nov. 2 helicopter crash Army Spc. James R. Wolf, 21, Scottsbluff, Neb., explosion Nov. 7 Staff Sgt. Morgan D. Kennon, 23, Memphis, Tenn., rocket-propelled grenade attack Chief Warrant Officer Sharon T. Swartworth, 43, Alexandria, Va., Black Hawk was shot down by unknown enemy ordnance Chief Warrant Officer Kyran E. Kennedy, 43, of Boston, Black Hawk was shot down by unknown enemy ordnance Army Command Sgt. Maj. Cornell W. Gilmore I, 45, Baltimore, Black Hawk was shot down by unknown enemy ordnance Army Capt. Benedict J. Smith, 29, Monroe City, Mo., Black Hawk was shot down by unknown enemy ordnance Staff Sgt. Paul M. Neff II, 30, Fort Mill, S.C., Black Hawk was shot down by unknown enemy ordnance Sgt. Scott C. Rose, 30, Fayetteville, N.C., Black Hawk was shot down by unknown enemy ordnance | Associated Press



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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COMMENTARY


Conspiracy Theories Have Run Their Course
By Richard M. Mosk
Richard M. Mosk, an associate justice of the California Court of Appeal, was a member of the staff of the Warren Commission.

November 11, 2003

Each fall for 40 years we have remembered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. This year`s decennial anniversary, however, may well be remarkable for what will be missing: myriad articles and discussions debunking the Warren Commission`s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

With time, the conspiracy theories that have been offered to explain Kennedy`s death have unraveled, and widespread public doubts about the commission`s findings have subsided.

There are reasons for this. Most of the plots spun to explain Kennedy`s death involved vast government agencies, organizations and groups and suggested that many people were in on the schemes. Yet not one credible witness has ever surfaced. The release of previously classified documents has revealed nothing that reasonably could be used to support a conspiracy theory. And reputable scholars, such as Gerald Posner, and subsequent scientific findings have supported the conclusions of the Warren Commission.

Finally, it seems the conspiracy theories just became too outlandish even for a gullible public. Oliver Stone`s 1991 motion picture, "JFK," is an example. The Kennedy assassination conspiracy it portrayed involved the interplay of a gay underground, the FBI, the CIA, the military, President Johnson, state officials and local police. Other conspiracy theorists even pointed to all of us on the Warren Commission, including Chief Justice Earl Warren.

For many years, it was hard to accept the possibility that a man who commanded one of the most powerful nations in the world could be struck down by a single individual who commanded nothing. But lately, we have come to grips with that idea too. The Oklahoma City bombing is one tragedy that taught the American public that a vast conspiracy is not necessary to inflict great pain on an entire nation — all it takes is one or a few deranged individuals.

That the Kennedy conspiracy theories flourished at all represents a disturbing and unhealthy aspect of our society. Historians someday may find the reaction to the assassination as interesting as the actual events of November 1963. It`s a phenomenon that one historian has referred to as part of "the paranoid style of American politics." Thus, over the years, various theories attempted to explain the assassinations and assassination attempts on our leaders.

For example, the sole assassin of President McKinley was falsely assumed to have been an agent of anarchists. And President Lincoln`s assassination was blamed on his successor, a Cabinet member, and even the Jesuits. Notwithstanding overwhelming evidence of a lone gunman, rumors continue about wider plots in the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The commercial marketplace can take some blame for the propagation of these theories. For years, publishers clamored for conspiracy theory books. Television programs featured just about anyone who purported to have information on a conspiracy.

There were hundreds of publications, assassination study bureaus and a ready supply of conspiracy evangelists on the lecture circuit. These profiteers saw a chance to tap into a public that was ready, even eager, to consume such ideas.

But although unfounded conspiracy theories may offer tantalizing, entertaining and satisfying explanations, they can also do great harm. They place innocent people in the path of cruel accusations. They threaten to distort history. They lead to the belief that we are all powerless in the face of some secret government or operation capable of killing our leaders. And, in providing easy explanations, they subvert rational and productive analysis.

That publishers and movie moguls can convince people to accept far-fetched and bizarre explanations for the John Kennedy assassination means you have to wonder: What will they get the people to believe next?



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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COMMENTARY


In a Democracy, Liars Can Never Be Liberators
Robert Scheer

November 11, 2003

It takes stunning arrogance for a president to invade an oil-rich, politically strategic country on the basis of demonstrable lies, put his favorite companies in control of its economic future, create a puppet regime to do his bidding and then claim, as George Bush did last week in a speech, that this is all a bold exercise in spreading democracy. "Iraqi democracy will succeed, and that success will send forth the news from Damascus to Tehran that freedom can be the future of every nation," the president said. "The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution."

Bush even invoked the blessing of a divine power, the "author of freedom," suggesting that he is not merely an overambitious imperial president but rather a modern Moses armed with smart bombs and Black Hawk helicopters come to liberate an enslaved people.

Bush presents his vision as bold and new when it is nothing of the sort.

His predecessors in the White House similarly claimed the mantle of democracy as justification for establishing American dominance in the Mideast over the last half a century. They used lies and secrecy and the lives of young Americans to create, nurture and protect dictatorships that served narrow U.S. interests above the needs and rights of their own people.

His buddies at Bechtel, Halliburton and the giant oil companies have been ripping off the profits of Mideast oil for decades while seeking and gaining protection from the CIA and whatever other parts of the U.S. military-industrial complex were needed to prop up "our guy" — the dictator of the moment. Despotism in the Mideast flowered on our watch, often succeeded by fundamentalist or nationalist regimes of great violence, or both. Every Mideast despot exists only because his power has proved tolerable to the economic interests that former Halliburton Chief Executive Dick Cheney and his defense-industry friendly counterparts in previous Republican and Democratic administrations have placed at the top of the American agenda.

Democracy is the most wonderful notion ever conceived, but Washington considers it a dangerous threat when the people in fledging democracies vote against U.S. interests. That`s when the CIA steps in, as it did in Iran in 1953, overthrowing democratic secularist Mohammad Mossadegh and launching Iran into decades of madness.

Or how about the cynical support under presidents Carter and Reagan of the fundamentalist moujahedeen in Afghanistan, which morphed into the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The CIA gave these "freedom fighters" shoulder-fired rockets, perfect for terrorism, and Ronald Reagan declared a day of national support for them in the U.S. Unfortunately, as the quarter of a century since has proved, we have neither the means nor the will to bring democracy to Afghanistan.

People make their own history, and though the U.S. can help, it cannot impose.

Bush is not really interested in meaningful democracy in Iraq — just as the U.S. wasn`t in Afghanistan or earlier in Iran. In Iraq, the U.S. will not tolerate any opposition to the U.S. occupation. But that excludes democracy, which will not cater to the whims of U.S. foreign policy.

Meanwhile, the chaos and bitterness of postwar Iraq continues without break, all the more tragic for its predictability. In fact, we would not be in such a mess today if the president had listened to his own father.

"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq … would have incurred incalculable human and political costs," co-wrote the senior George Bush in the 1998 book "A World Transformed."

"Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world," he continued. "Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations` mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."

Unfortunately, because of George W. Bush, it is just that.

Democracy cannot exist without truth and genuine self-determination. A liar cannot be a liberator if the flowering of democracy is truly the endgame.




Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Published on Monday, November 10, 2003 by the Christian Science Monitor
Defining the Resistance in Iraq - It`s not Foreign and It`s Well Prepared

by Scott Ritter

DELMAR, N.Y. - In the Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib is a compound on an abandoned airstrip that once belonged to a state organization known as M-21, or the Special Operations Directorate of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. As a UN weapons inspector, I inspected this facility in June of 1996. We were looking for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). While I found no evidence of WMD, I did find an organization that specialized in the construction and employment of "improvised explosive devices" - the same IEDs that are now killing Americans daily in Iraq.

When we entered the compound, three Iraqis tried to escape over a wall with documents, but they were caught and surrendered the papers. Like reams of other documents stacked inside the buildings, these papers dealt with IEDs. I held in my hands a photocopied primer on how to conduct a roadside ambush using IEDs, and others on how to construct IEDs from conventional high explosives and military munitions. The sophisticated plans - albeit with crude drawings - showed how to take out a convoy by disguising an IED and when and where to detonate it for maximum damage.

Because WMD was what we were charged with looking for, we weren`t allowed to take notes on this kind of activity. But, when we returned to our cars, we carefully reconstructed everything we saw.

What I saw - and passed on to US intelligence agencies - were what might be called the blueprints of the postwar insurgency that the US now faces in Iraq. And they implied two important facts that US authorities must understand:

• The tools and tactics killing Americans today in Iraq are those of the former regime, not imported from abroad.

• The anti-US resistance in Iraq today is Iraqi in nature, and more broadly based and deeply rooted than acknowledged.

* * *

IEDs are a terrifying phenomenon to the American soldiers patrolling Iraq. The IED has transformed combat into an anonymous ambush, a nerve-racking game of highway roulette that has every American who enters a vehicle in Iraq today (whether it be the venerable, and increasingly vulnerable, Humvee, or an armored behemoth like the M-1 Abrams tank) wondering if this ride will be their last.

Far from representing the tactics of desperate foreign terrorists, IED attacks in Iraq can be traced to the very organizations most loyal to Saddam Hussein. M-21 wasn`t the only unit trained in IEDs. During an inspection of the Iraqi Intelligence Service`s training academy in Baghdad in April 1997, I saw classrooms for training all Iraqi covert agents in the black art of making and using IEDs. My notes recall tables piled with mockups of mines and grenades disguised in dolls, stuffed animals, and food containers - and classrooms for training in making car bombs and recruiting proxy agents for using explosives.

That same month, I inspected another facility, located near the wealthy Al Mansur district of Baghdad, that housed a combined unit of Hussein`s personal security force and the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The mission of this unit was to track the movement and activities of every Iraqi residing in that neighborhood straddling the highway that links the presidential palace with Saddam International Airport.

A chilling realization overcame us when we entered a gymnasium-sized room and saw that the floors were painted in a giant map of the neighborhood. The streets were lined with stacked metallic "in-box" trays - each stack represented a house or apartment building. A three-story building, for example, contained three levels of trays; each tray contained dossiers on each citizen living on that floor. Similar units existed in other neighborhoods, including those deemed "anti-regime."

Hussein`s government was - and its remnants are - intimately familiar with every square inch of Baghdad: who was loyal, where they live, and who they associated with. (The same can be said about all of Iraq, for that matter, even the Kurdish and Shiite regions.) This information allows officials from the remnants of Hussein`s intelligence and security services to hide undetected among a sympathetic population. Indeed, a standard quotient among counterinsurgency experts is that for every 100 active insurgents fielded, there must be 1,000 to 10,000 active supporters in the local population.

Though the Bush administration consistently characterizes the nature of the enemy in Iraq as "terrorist," and identifies the leading culprits as "foreign fighters," the notion of Al Qaeda or Al Ansar al Islam using Baghdad (or any urban area in Iraq) as an independent base of operations is far-fetched. To the extent that foreigners appear at all in Baghdad, it is likely only under the careful control of the pro-Hussein resistance, and even then, only to be used as an expendable weapon in the same way one would use a rocket-propelled grenade or IED.

The growing number, sophistication, and diversity of attacks on US forces suggests that the resistance is growing and becoming more organized - clear evidence that the US may be losing the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

To properly assess the nature of the anti-American resistance in Iraq today, one must remember that the majority of pro-regime forces, especially those military units most loyal to Hussein, as well as the entirety of the Iraqi intelligence and security forces, never surrendered. They simply melted away.

Despite upbeat statements from the Bush administration to the contrary, the reality is that the Hussein regime was not defeated in the traditional sense, and today shows signs of reforming to continue the struggle against the US-led occupiers in a way that plays to its own strengths, and exploits US weakness.

For political reasons, the Bush administration and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) haven`t honestly confronted this reality for fear of admitting that they totally bungled their prewar assessments about what conditions they would face in postwar occupied Iraq.

The failure to realistically assess the anti-American resistance in Iraq means that "solutions" the US and CPA develop have minimal chance of success because they`re derived from an inaccurate identification of the problem.

The firestorm of anti-US resistance in Iraq continues to expand - and risks growing out of control - because of the void of viable solutions. Unless measures are taken that recognize that the tattered Hussein regime remains a viable force, and unless actions are formulated accordingly, the conflict in Iraq risks consuming the US in a struggle in which there may be no prospect of a clear-cut victory and an increasing possibility of defeat.

• Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq (1991-1998), is author of `Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America.`

Copyright © 2003 The Christian Science Monitor

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The Policies of War
Veterans battle on the home front
Maile Melkonian
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/11/EDGL92UHNT1.DTL


EVEN AS President Bush sends American soldiers into Iraq, he is cutting their benefits.

Two Californians -- Pfc. Karina Lau, 20, of Livingston, and Staff Sgt. Paul A. Velazquez, 29, from San Diego -- died last week when their Chinook helicopter was shot down over Fallujah, Iraq. Fourteen others perished with them. I wonder if the 20 injured soldiers who survived the crash know their veteran`s benefits are being torpedoed by the same folks who put them in harm`s way.

A system that once provided health care for those who served their country is now reneging on that promise. The president has refused a congressional request for $275 million in emergency funds to cover the Veterans Administration health-care shortfall last year. Remember, that was the year Bush got an extra $50 billion for his so-called war on terrorism.

Now he wants to slash $2 billion more from the VA`s strained budget for 2004, and continue the assault on benefits over the next decade. House Republicans voted to take a whopping $28 billion from vets over 10 years -- on the same March day they passed a resolution supporting our troops in Iraq.

Department of Veterans Affairs head, Anthony Principi, is the Bush appointee in charge of implementing this strategy. "We have reformed our department," he touts. Indeed, Principi`s tenure has seen a steady decline in the number of nurses at VA facilities, and those remaining are routinely subjected to mandatory overtime. Bobby L. Harnage, of the American Federation of Government Employees, states, "The veterans` health-care system is in a state of shock from the combined traumas of flat-line budgets, staffing cuts, bed closures, restructuring and contracting out."

As you read this, more than 200,000 veterans have been waiting six months or more (two years for some!) for their first VA appointment.

And the system is getting more expensive to use. Bush more than tripled the cost of medications to veterans in February 2002, while he sent tens of thousands of Americans to fight in Afghanistan.

My father happened to survived 20 sorties over Nazi Germany during World War II. Now he suffers from Alzheimer`s disease, and has taken to refusing doctors outside the VA system. "Thank goodness for the Veterans Administration, " I thought.

This summer, he received an odd letter from the VA. "Your priority for enrollment in the VA health-care system has been changed to Priority Group 8," it informed him. This brand-new category comes with new rules. Thus, he is eligible for less coverage, at a higher co-pay than before. As it turns out, at least 164,000 veterans have been similarly "reclassified."

More sinister yet is the stipulation that any Group 8 vet who was not enrolled in the system as of Jan. 16, 2003, will no longer be eligible for VA health care at all, with or without copayment. That means that a veteran must either be impoverished or service-related disabled, or both, to qualify. Are our soldiers in Iraq aware of this?

The Veterans for Foreign Wars organization sums it up thus: "The shortage in funding has forced VA to ration health care by increasing waiting times, raising copayment amounts and removing veterans from the system altogether."

In other words, the VA will no longer be a way for a grateful country to treat its veterans with dignity and respect. Instead, it is being turned into a welfare repository for the growing number of former servicemen in poverty.

Squeezing health care isn`t the whole story. Pensions, education and other military benefits are also under attack.

Shortchanging veterans started with President Ronald Reagan, who -- like Bush -- avoided combat duty. But the current administration seems bent on gutting benefits to our servicemen and women more than any president since the Veterans Administration was established in 1930.

My condolences go out to the Lau and Velazquez families, and to their surviving comrades.

Maile Melkonian is a former radio commentator for Public Radio International and reporter for Japan`s NHK.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

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Veterans Day

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

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Bush Angry At Dean`s `McJobs President` Charge
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WASHINGTON, DC (IWR Satire) - President Bush last night, at a $10,000 per plate fundraiser in Miami, expressed his outrage at presidential challenger Howard Dean`s charge that Mr. Bush is the `McJobs President`.

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Rockefeller memo

Here is the full text of the memo from the office of Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WVa.) on setting a strategy for pursuing an independent investigation of pre-war White House intelligence dealings on Iraq.

We have carefully reviewed our options under the rules and believe we have identified the best approach. Our plan is as follows:

1) Pull the majority along as far as we can on issues that may lead to major new disclosures regarding improper or questionable conduct by administration officials. We are having some success in that regard.

For example, in addition to the President`s State of the Union speech, the chairman [Sen. Pat Roberts] has agreed to look at the activities of the office of the Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, as well as Secretary Bolton`s office at the State Department.

The fact that the chairman supports our investigations into these offices and cosigns our requests for information is helpful and potentially crucial. We don`t know what we will find but our prospects for getting the access we seek is far greater when we have the backing of the majority. [We can verbally mention some of the intriguing leads we are pursuing.]

2) Assiduously prepare Democratic `additional views` to attach to any interim or final reports the committee may release. Committee rules provide this opportunity and we intend to take full advantage of it.

In that regard we may have already compiled all the public statements on Iraq made by senior administration officials. We will identify the most exaggerated claims. We will contrast them with the intelligence estimates that have since been declassified. Our additional views will also, among other things, castigate the majority for seeking to limit the scope of the inquiry.

The Democrats will then be in a strong position to reopen the question of establishing an Independent Commission [i.e., the Corzine Amendment.]

3) Prepare to launch an independent investigation when it becomes clear we have exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the majority. We can pull the trigger on an independent investigation of the administration`s use of intelligence at any time. But we can only do so once.

The best time to do so will probably be next year, either:

A) After we have already released our additional views on an interim report, thereby providing as many as three opportunities to make our case to the public. Additional views on the interim report (1). The announcement of our independent investigation (2). And (3) additional views on the final investigation. Or:

B) Once we identify solid leads the majority does not want to pursue, we would attract more coverage and have greater credibility in that context than one in which we simply launch an independent investigation based on principled but vague notions regarding the use of intelligence.

In the meantime, even without a specifically authorized independent investigation, we continue to act independently when we encounter footdragging on the part of the majority. For example, the FBI Niger investigation was done solely at the request of the vice chairman. We have independently submitted written requests to the DOD and we are preparing further independent requests for information.

SUMMARY: Intelligence issues are clearly secondary to the public`s concern regarding the insurgency in Iraq. Yet we have an important role to play in revealing the misleading, if not flagrantly dishonest, methods and motives of senior administration officials who made the case for unilateral preemptive war.

The approach outlined above seems to offer the best prospect for exposing the administration`s dubious motives.

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Handicapping the 2004 Race:
Wazzup, Democrats?
http://www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/handicapping.htm

By Bernard Weiner
Co-Editor, "The Crisis Papers."
November 11, 2003

Twelve months from now, the most important American presidential election since the Depression will take place. It will determine whether the country continues its imperial warring abroad -- the next potential targets appear to be Syria and Iran -- and whether domestically we will continue our quick slide away from Constitutional protections into an even more militarist, police-state society. The stakes are that high.

It might prove useful one full year before that vote, therefore, to take a step back and see where we are in a variety of areas that might influence American voters.

We already know who the Republican nominees will be Bush & Cheney. Of course, the GOP powers-that-be might decide that Cheney is more a liability than asset, and he would resign due to "health concerns." Then it could be some GOP senator (Hatch?) or Condoleeza Rice -- trying to take the African-American vote out of the Dems` base -- or, crazy as it may sound, even Joe Lieberman on a "unity" ticket, bringing over conservative (and Jewish-American) Dem voters.

We will have a better idea who the Democratic nominee will be -- or rather, who will NOT be the standard-bearer -- after the first initial primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire in February, and then the large-state primaries in early-March. Some hopefuls will drop out at that stage. (Senator Bob Graham already has withdrawn, though he`s let it be known that if the eventual Dem candidate wants to choose him as a running-mate, he`d be available.)

THE CONTENDERS

I would guess that Lieberman and Edwards would bow out fairly early, maybe also Kucinich (who, probably no surprise, is my candidate). Gephardt, with heavy manufacturing-union support, probably will stay in the race. Sharpton and Moseley-Braun, who have been most impressive, may stay in the hunt, not because they can win but to ensure that they have major leverage at the convention.

Dean has the momentum, money and organizational structure at the moment, and even is picking up some key service-union and other major endorsements. But if Dean continues to stub many more of his toes, Kerry or Clark might well be the beneficiary. (The Southern-strategy issue Dean raised is a courageous and vital one, but he sure was clumsy in explaining it and dealing with the fall-out.)

Clark still has a lot of learning to do as a campaigner, but he`s well-positioned as the middle-range candidate between the Dean/Kucinich more liberal wing of the party and the Gephardt/Lieberman more conservative wing. Plus, he`s got the heroic warrior credentials, something that would play well against Bush`s AWOL history. Kerry, also a war hero -- but one who voted to give Bush a blank check to invade Iraq, thus angering the Democratic base -- in this analysis could squeeze by only if Clark and Dean falter.

As of mid-November 2003, I`d say the tickets could well look this way Bush/Cheney vs. Dean/Clark or maybe Dean/Graham. (But the Democrats, jockeying for voter blocs, need to cool their rhetoric towards each other and aim their verbal guns mainly in the direction of the resident in the White House.)

THE ISSUES

I`m guessing that the central issues for the Democratic primary will be the war in Iraq (the lies and manipulations that got us in there and that wrong-headedly keep our troops quagmired there, with the U.s. isolated and hated in much of the Muslim world, Europe and elsewhere); the shaky employment situation; and the lack of funds to maintain popular social programs because Bush&Co. are spending away the treasury on war and security issues, thus saddling our kids and grandkids with humungous debt and bankrupting popular social programs in the process. This, all the while giving generous tax breaks to the already-wealthy while providing little or nothing to the strapped middle-class, and leaving plenty of children behind with their education scam.

It`s also possible that several major Bush scandals will come to a ripe head prior to the election: 9/11 pre-knowledge (still being stonewalled by the Administration), the felonious outing by "senior Administration officials" of a covert CIA agent as a form of revenge politics, the gross lying by the Administration about the toxicity of the air in New York for months after the 9/11 attacks, Cheney`s secret energy report still kept hidden away from public view, and the appalling treatment of soldiers and veterans by an administration that pretends to be a dear friend of the military.

THE REPUBLICANS

Bush, as in the 2000 election, has about a solid 40% base to start with -- die-hard conservatives, Christian fundamentalists, angry Southern white men, etc. -- who might normally be counted on to stick with him no matter whom the Democrats select as their nominee. So he cannot afford to alienate this base, and will continue to throw them red-meat playing to the religious right (thus no overt sanctions for the anti-Muslim ravings of Christian zealot Gen. Boykin), nominating extremist judges that won`t and can`t be confirmed by the Senate, ratcheting up the patriotic themes, harping on gun-control and abortion and gay marriages.

Bush will count on the war situation not deteriorating much further in Iraq, and an economy that gives preliminary evidence of bouncing back. Somehow, he`s got to neutralize the jobs issue, the fact that 3,000,000 Americans have lost their jobs since his inauguration. How he does this will be most interesting, since so many jobs have been "outsourced" abroad, especially in the high -paying tech fields, and will not be returning to the United States. The "economy" may indeed be improving for some, but the lack of well-paying jobs -- and the general insecurity about keeping one`s employment -- could be the economic albatross around his neck. It`s the jobs, stupid.

The neo-con philosophy undergirding Bush foreign/military policy -- as was emphasized openly by Bush in his recent major address on the need for Arab democratization -- requires more arrogant bullying, especially in the Islamic Middle East, perhaps even more wars. But, unless Bush and his advisors are absolutely nuts, there will be no invasions before the election.

On the other hand, you never know with these guys; they may figure that the American citizenry wouldn`t want to change electoral horses in the middle of a full-fledged war -- and some incident always could be found to justify an attack on Syria or Somalia or elsewhere "aiding and abetting the opposition in Iraq," "hiding al-Qaida cells," maybe even "caches of WMD." Those worked once, thanks to a quiescent press and lots of lying, so maybe they figure they can get away with it again. (A risky strategy, as the approval of Bush war policy in Iraq is way down these days, as the populace seems to have cottoned to how they were manipulated into a war that threatens to have no end other than a Vietnam-like tragedy.)

THE DEMOCRATS

It would appear that, even with the mass-media being cheerleaders for the Republican Party and attack-dogs against leading Democratic contenders, the Democrats can count on a solid 40% of the voters, who are appalled at what Bush&Co. have done to American national-interests abroad -- making us less, not more, secure -- and to the economy and civil liberties at home.

All over this country, Dem voters have indicated that they will, if necessary, hold their noses and vote for whatever reasonable candidate the party puts forward, even if they might disagree with aspects of that candidate`s program. And large segments of Greens likewise have expressed a desire not to repeat the political disaster of 2000 by running a name-candidate for president, and will go along, for the public good, by voting for the Democrat.

(But many would-be Democratic voters are turned off by the cowardly enabling of the Dems in Congress, who have a tendency to roll over whenever push comes to shove on key issues, such as giving Bush a blank check to launch his Iraq war, and then, just recently, approving everything he wanted in his $87 billion package for that war. Not a good sign.)

If the Republicans and Democrats already have 80% of the vote locked up, that means, as usual, that the election will be decided by the 20% of voters in the middle. Many in that group are independents, libertarians, disaffected moderate-conservatives and small-government rightwingers/isolationists who are outraged at having their party hijacked by let`s-have-a-war types and Big Brother neo-fascists. Also in that tappable middle are mad-as-hell veterans, and disgruntled soldiers and their families -- angered by the incompetency and militarist arrogance that are getting them and their loved ones killed and wounded for what appear to be questionable ends.

If the Democrats run an elitist-type campaign without taking those voters` concerns into consideration, they will lose. If they can make the citizenry understand that Bush-led Republicans are out-of-the-mainstream extremists who are endangering America`s security and the U.S. economy -- including such popular programs as Medicare, Social Security, Head Start, and giving short shrift to the educational system and America`s decaying infrastructure -- they have a good chance to win.

A WINNING CAMPAIGN

The focus now should be on getting a Democrat of principle nominated as a result of the primaries, one who can win the general election next November. That`s why the current debates are so helpful, in laying out the policies and personalities of the various contenders -- as long as those debates don`t degenerate into political bloodletting instead of focusing on the opposition to Bush and his reckless policies.

There are, I believe, three keys to a winning campaign

1. All abstractions must be tied to the real lives of American citizens. You can`t just say the U.S. is less secure as a result of Bush policy, you have to show how our lives are less secure, with examples. You can`t just talk in generalizations about job-losses and fears of job-losses, you have to demonstrate how and why those jobs disappeared, and which new ones are likely to disappear unless we have a shift in economic policy. You can`t just say the wealthy got huge tax breaks and the middle-class got next to nothing, you have to provide the figures and explain what those figures mean. You can`t just bash Bush for turning pollution-control over to the polluting corporations, you have to show how that capitulation will raise disease and death rates in various communities. Etc.

2. Democrats can`t let the Republicans seem to have a patent on security issues in this campaign. Americans, with good reason, are fearful and want to feel more secure for themselves and their children. The Democrats have to have specific plans for enhancing the security of the U.S. -- including full funding for states and localities to put into place their emergency haz-mat systems, with all the supplies they need -- without having to resort to shredding the Constitutional due-process guarantees that make our governmental system so admired around the world.

3. The Democrats need to have a plan to defuse the two most dangerous military hot spots on the globe: Iraq and Israel/Palestine. If the U.S., under a new administration, can go back to the U.N. and assert its willingness to share power in the Iraq reconstruction phase, it might actually be able to repair the damage done by the Bush Administration`s unilateralist tendency to insult and humiliate others. Many nations might be more willing to donate peacekeeping troops and money to the cause, and, under an international banner, many Iraqis might be more willing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the world effort rather than to see the U.S. for the arrogant Occupation force that it is.

And if the U.S. can move forcefully to help implement a fair peace settlement in the Middle East -- security for the Israelis, a viable contiguous state for the Palestinians, end of the Occupation and abandoning the Israeli settlements on Arab land, an internationalized Jerusalem, etc. -- much of the tension would recede in that incendiary area of the world, and better relations would ensue with Islamic countries.

DIRTY TRICKS AND COMPUTER-VOTING

All signs point at this stage to yet another extremely close election in 2004. Which means that, once again, we can anticipate dirty tricks being employed in numerous large electoral-vote states -- last time in Florida, more than 90,000 voters were illegally purged from the roles in advance of the balloting, and similar ploys may be tried this time in several key states. In addition, the potential computer-voting scandal could well become actual.

If several thousand votes could determine elections in those key states, it is not outside the realm of possibility that the vote-counting computer software could be fiddled with to determine the winner.

As mainstream press outlets finally are starting to report, those computer-voting software codes are mainly controlled by three major Republician-supporting corporations -- the CEO of one of those companies, Diebold, promised to "deliver" Ohio to Bush in 2004 -- and they refuse to permit examination of those codes by outside inspectors. Reason enough to push for paper ballots for the 2004 election, counted by hand; computer-voting technology is simply too new and too open to manipulation. A journalist recently demonstrated how easy it is to enter into the machines, manipulate the tally numbers, and exit without leaving any trace of having even been inside the system. There is some evidence to suggest that such vote-tampering may have taken place in the 2002 elections in key states.

Given how close the 2004 vote might be, and the built-in problems with the vote-counting software, it is incumbent on all of us interested in the democratic process to lean on our state and county election officials not to certify those touch-screen computer-balloting machines until the software codes can be certified and until a paper-trail of votes cast can be built into the process. For more information on all this, see the Electoral Integrity file on The Crisis Papers, and Congressman Rush Holt`s bill on computer-voting.

SUMMARY

It IS possible to defeat Bush in 2004, but, from this moment on, it will take lots of time, money, energy and determination. Once the Dems choose the nominee, it`s full speed ahead in terms of mobilization, signing up new voters, working for the candidate, insisting on demonstrably fair vote-tallying, etc. Without this kind of massive activism and determination, we could lose.

If Bush gets elected in 2004, the world and our country are in for policies too awful to contemplate. There would be more "preventive" wars, more imperialist aggression, more terrorist responses. Domestically, there is no telling what would happen to our fragile, time-honored Constitution, to our civil liberties, to our economy, to our air & water, to our schools and kids, to all sorts of helpful social programs. And to our sense of ourselves as a moral, democratic society.

Let`s get to work. Now.




Copyright 2003, by Bernard Weiner

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Tuesday, November 11, 2003

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

A Veteran’s story for Veteran’s Day: Georgia soldier wounded in Iraq. “Martinez became a one-man pep squad several months ago, when nurses in BAMC`s world-renowned burn ward asked him to speak to some depressed patients who were refusing to do their physical therapy. His words helped, and he`s been volunteering ever since.”

And some last letters home.

War News for November 11, 2003

Bring `em on: Baghdad civil court bombed. Six wounded, including two Iraqi policemen.

Bring `em on: Three US soldiers wounded in roadside bomb attack near Mosul.

Bring `em on: More explosions reported in central Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Four Iraqi civilians killed by roadside bomb in Basra.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi oil executive ambushed in Mosul.

Bring `em on: British security consultant wounded in ambush.

A war in search of a strategy.

L. Paul Bremer returns to Washington for "consultations."

Gen. Myers says US is "revising" strategy in Iraq. "Gen. Richard Myers said warplanes, bombs, and aerial assaults are now a part of that plan."

Iraq faces severe health crisis.

Oil facility sabotage expected in Iraq and now Saudi Arabia.

Veterans compare Iraq to Vietnam.

Press wants to interview wounded soldiers, but it takes several weeks to process the requests.

A story you won’t see in the US media, but you can bet the rest of the world will see it.

Troop morale in Iraq.

Commentary

Opinion: The Names Bush Won’t Mention.

Opinion: Support the Troops. “But it`s hard to deny the stunning insensitivity of President Bush`s remarks back on July 2: ‘There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring `em on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.’ Those are the words of a man who can`t imagine himself or anyone close to him actually being in the line of fire.”

Opinion: “For all its fine words, this CEO White House has little empathy for workers or soldiers, the ``grunts`` who make this country go. Enlisted men and women in Iraq have been treated badly. Many go into occupation with useless flak jackets that date from the Vietnam era.”

Opinion: Remember the wounded. "...an even deeper anger is for those who start such conflicts without thinking about what will happen to young Americans, carelessly saying: `We must accept casualties for the national good.` Such statements are made by men who never were in combat and never were in harm`s way. At the top of that list is a president who did not serve in Vietnam though he had the chance; who said "bring `em on!" when he was not the one to fight; a president who dared to pretend that he had been in combat by landing on the flight deck of a carrier, claiming falsely that the war was over; a president who flew over Baghdad, safe in an airplane, when earlier presidents - Lincoln in Richmond in 1865 and Kennedy in Berlin in 1963 - risked their lives to show an American presence in places of great tension and danger."

Opinion: Soldiers die when leaders lie. "I was a lieutenant in 1969 and 1970 with the First Brigade Fifth Infantry Division in the Quang Tri province of South Vietnam."

Casualty Reports

Local story: Maine soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Pennsylvania soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Texas soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: North Dakota soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Arizona soldier wounded in Iraq.

Home Front

Lieutenant AWOL celebrates veterans` day by laying wreath at Arlington, signing Fallen Patriots Tax Relief Act, (a cleverly-named piece of legisaltion that doubles the tax-free death gratuity payment given to the families of soldiers KIA and which the AWOL rat bastard fought tooth and nail) and the National Cemetery Expansion Act, and then running off to a nice, friendly Heritage Foundation fundraiser.





# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:00 AM

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America`s Virtual Empire
U.S. soldiers are great warriors, but unwilling imperial guards. If we want to secure our interests, we must draw on other sources of power.

By Gen. Wesley Clark
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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0311.clark.ht…



Last March, somewhere in Kuwait, the troops of the 101st Airborne Division gathered the last of their gear onto trucks that would carry them into war. They were a magnificent sight. All in uniform, taut and fit, talking quietly; their weapons slung over their shoulders; their rucksacks hung neatly along the trucks` rails. The scene reeked of training and discipline, the quiet professionalism of soldiers who have prepped for months and years, who know their moment is at hand. No scene showed more clearly the achievements of the all-volunteer force or the distance our Army had come since the trying days of Vietnam.
In the days that followed, performance lived up to appearance and reputation. Driving through the dust and grit, fighting to clear the built-up areas of Najaf, Karbala, and Hilla, and later surging into the far north of Iraq to work with the Kurds, the 101st burnished the reputation of the American man-of-arms. Fighting, as did those who fought alongside them, with skill, courage, and compassion, controlling their firepower to minimize civilian casualties and limit the destruction of local roads and buildings, this compelling image of force sprang on its nation`s citizens, and the world`s, like the genie emerging from Aladdin`s lamp--unexpected, almost magically powerful.



But they were not only the world`s most overwhelming military force. Their presence embodied a powerful political message. As the 101st`s troops carved their way through the desert landscape and overcame scattered resistance, they signaled a new American assertiveness, a willingness to risk lives and treasure for our beliefs. The U.S. military was so superior as to be virtually unchallengeable on the field of battle. Perhaps not since the Roman Empire had a single state`s power under arms so dominated every possible opponent. In Iraq, the destruction and dismemberment of the enemy`s army had been accomplished with vast U.S. capabilities left over. This was a military that could rewrite the boundaries of what force could achieve. This was an armed force that made a new kind of empire appear inevitable. And many foreign policy theorists in and around the White House and the office of the secretary of defense were putting forward the idea that America should embrace its destiny as a new imperial power, using military force as the chief tool to create a more democratic and pro-American world order.

On the eve of conflict with Iraq, President Bush appeared to agree. "A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region," he argued in a televised address to the nation last February. "Success in Iraq could also begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace." The president`s vision brought pride to America, reflecting self-confidence in our worth and the superiority of our values. But it all came down to success on the ground: success not just in the military sense, after all, but in a broader sense, one articulated by the president during the last two years. This was to be a new America, reborn from adversity and threat, reaching out constructively to the world, liberating peoples, reforming a "vital region," enabling the emergence of a new, universal morality, and taking advantage of this unique window of American military dominance to secure into the foreseeable future our security and safety. A Pax Americana--and maybe even more--was to fall into place around the globe: a dizzying journey from the "more humble" foreign policy to which Bush had aspired during the 2000 campaign.

But today, such a mission appears to be hanging in the balance. Certainly the United States retains a preponderance of resources--if it can bring them to bear. There is no opposing superpower to stoke the opposition in Iraq, as we did a generation earlier to the Soviets in Afghanistan. But the occupation has thus far failed to meet popular Iraqi expectations in restoring security and minimal economic standards; Saddam Hussein has evaded capture for months; Baathist elements remain hostile; al Qaeda and other Islamic fighters continue to infiltrate the country; and daily sniping attacks, bombings, and ambushes are inflicting more casualties each week upon our people. This resistance is, of course, far from sufficient to defeat the U.S. military on the ground. But it nevertheless casts a deepening shadow.

Our difficulties in Iraq are not just evidence of careless planning for the postwar--though they are that. More fundamentally, they call into question the whole theory that America is capable of--or that it is in our interest to create--an empire founded on force of arms. The American military has never been and probably cannot be made into an imperial force along neo-Roman lines. This is not to say that America lacks sufficient power to defend its interests in the world, including spreading values such as democracy and free-market economics. We`ve had that power for decades, and wielded it successfully. But while a powerful military has been vital, the chief means of our influence has been an interlocking web of international institutions and arrangements, from NATO to the World Bank to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. This network of mutual interdependence, though marginalized by the Bush administration, was largely devised by America, which has also been its chief beneficiary. It is, for all practical purposes, a kind of empire--but to use a contemporary term, a virtual one. Properly used and expanded, it can be the secret to a secure and prosperous future.

Return keyAs events in Iraq have demonstrated, the main obstacle to an American imperium is that our armed forces, despite their vast strength, have not been built for empire, but for war-fighting. Despite a heritage of frontier service in the American West, they conceived of themselves in Clausewitzian terms, of big battles and maximum violence. During World War I, General John J. Pershing created, with help from the French and British, the modern, European-style U.S. Army, built to occupy terrain and absorb casualties. During World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and afterward, the U.S. armed forces sought an enemy, focused on him, and trained to beat him. These were the forces of 20th-century warfare, of mass armies and the battles of state against state. They targeted enemy forces--and, victory achieved, they wanted to go home. They were citizens first, soldiers second.

The Army has also historically lacked staying power abroad. By the summer of 1919, a few months after the Armistice had ended World War I, Pershing`s army was for the most part at home, being demobilized. After World War II, the Army pulled quickly out of Germany and Japan, leaving behind smaller, constabulary-type forces, even in the face of a continuing military challenge from the Soviet Union. Throughout much of the Cold War, U.S. forces abroad were under constant fiscal and political pressures to recall them. Casualties have always added pressure to withdraw, as they did during Vietnam. The better the communications, and the deeper the media coverage, the greater the sensitivity. U.S. operations in Somalia were ultimately undone by the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers in a single incident. Successful peacekeeping in Bosnia and Kosovo was believed to be contingent on avoiding U.S. casualties altogether.

Moreover, the Army itself has changed since the glory days of the "Greatest Generation." As a consequence of Vietnam, it is now all-volunteer. New technology, which has transferred some of the fighting and destruction to airpower, made the Army smaller overall. Its units lacked the infantry strength, the "boots on the ground" that characterized the draftee armies of the two world wars and even Vietnam. As of 2003, the active-duty Army stands at an authorization of less than 500,000--a little more than half the Cold War force and a paltry 5 percent of the World War II mobilization. Many troops are married. Despite their patriotism, these are men and women who must weigh the call of country against responsibilities to family. Simply recruiting and retaining sufficient soldiers has been problematic. And supplementing the force with more than 100,000 volunteer reservists called to active duty has added to the pressure to finish up overseas and return home as rapidly as possible.

In the summer of 2003, the troops committed to Iraq, around 140,000 plus another 15,000 or so in allied troops, were thin on the ground measured against the recent standards of peacekeeping. In Bosnia in 1996, more than 60,000 NATO and associated soldiers had enforced the cease-fire and peace agreement between the warring factions. The civilian population there was less than 4 million. In Kosovo, there were almost 40,000 peacekeepers in a province of slightly less than 2 million people, in an area roughly 65 miles square. Yet in Iraq, with a population more than ten times more numerous and an area some 80 times greater than that of Kosovo, our troop strength is only about 155,000. Outgoing Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki`s concerns, expressed in February 2003, about the size of the force required-"several hundred thousand"--now seem prophetic. Worse, the American force cannot be rotated for refitting, retraining, and recuperation in a "steady-state" fashion. The Army is committed in Iraq--at its peak, more than half the deployable strength of the Army was there. But in Afghanistan, South Korea, Kosovo, and Bosnia are other competing requirements. Any serious rotation would require mobilizing National Guard formations. No matter how great its courage and competence, this is a force whose size, focus,and all-volunteer nature argue against the likelihood that the president`s grand vision would succeed.

Nor is our army large enough to follow through on the most expansive visions of the early days in the war on terror, when there was a vision of "taking down states," sweeping across the Middle East, greeted by cheering throngs. Could our military now handle a drive into Syria, and the subsequent duty there, or onward into Lebanon? Certainly, the airpower is adequate, and the ships could pivot offshore-for the airmen and the sailors, any further actions would be yet another extended deployment. But for the Army it is different-they are doing the dirty work in Iraq, day after day, amid dangers and uncertainties. Casualties and lengthy, strenuous deployments have struck at the heart of this force. Most of those serving there had believed in the compatibility of their conflicting duties to family and to country. During the fighting, feeling the national sense of engagement, the patriotism, and sense of community involvement, such burdens had seemed bearable. But occupation is another matter altogether. Even if the extended tour of duty is completed successfully, despite the heat and austerity, another call to arms may be awaiting immediately thereafter. There are already stories of helicopter pilots transferred directly from Afghanistan to Iraq. For those that do return home, there will be another rotation to a combat training center, more family separation, births and birthdays missed, wailing children and unhappy spouses. And every casualty strikes a note of fear among the families waiting at home.

The U.S. Army that defeated Iraq is a great force, unique really--but our soldiers aren`t the Roman legions who marched into Brittany, across the Rhine, and conquered England, or the hardy Brits who sought fortune and fame along the Northwest Frontier in 19th-century India. No, these are Americans, unchallengeable in combat, fighting for their country`s self-defense, committed to strike back at those who might be responsible for the attacks of 9/11--even though no link between Iraq and the terrorists has ever been established. But they are utterly void of any interest in the gains and glory of occupation duty far from home. Indeed, unless there is a speedy reduction of such requirements there, or a wholesale call-up of the reserves, we might lose the essence of the Army that fought its way so valiantly into Iraq, a casualty not of enemy fire but of over-commitment and under-resourcing, as its soldiers and officers opt out. We simply do not have an Army of empire.

Are we there yet?

The public at home was also ill-prepared to shoulder imperial challenges. 9/11, it`s true, sparked the effort to dispatch a mighty force for an unprecedented American action. But soon after Saddam`s statues came down, the triumphalism in the media was replaced by more routine dribs and drabs: unusual murder cases, sexual assault charges against a sports icon, mounting concern about the continuing spate of losses falling upon us in the early postwar period. The American people, it seemed, would rally for war. (As a British lord reflected in an earlier century, "War not only supplied the news, it created the demand for it.") But when the uncertainty and excitement of the maneuvers and offensive actions came to an end, public opinion turned away. Americans wanted their troops home--and soon.

And despite all the evidence pointing to the unsuitability of the Army to a long overseas deployment, no extra resources were provided to prepare for a drawn-out campaign. Instead, U.S. foreign policy has become dangerously dependent on its military. The armed forces are now practically the only effective play in the U.S. repertoire. Only they have the personnel, funding, and transportation to deliver relief supplies; organize training for armies and police; install communications and power; advise ministries of justice, health, and finance; build bridges; support election efforts; and inoculate and treat host populaces. Yet such problems are not among their primary missions. The troops often resent being asked to tackle these issues, to which they bring, often very understandably, a narrow, almost mechanical approach. For all their versatility, they lack the knowledge, skills, staying power, and scale to manage seriously a large nation on a continuing basis. They are unable to foment deep-rooted political development. They lack the skills and experience to revise constitutions, rework property laws and criminal statutes, and methodically bore into the deepest aspects of the societies. Troops are not police officers; the kind of investigations and anticorruption efforts essential in nation-building are largely beyond them.

The reliance on the U.S. military feeds another unfortunate trait: the tendency toward unilateralism. In the conduct of military operations, the United States has no peer. No other nation can muster the intelligence capabilities, logistics, firepower, and deployable forces that we possess. But by neglecting diplomatic levers and exhausting other international alternatives, the Bush administration has left itself without the numbers to effectively secure our gains. When, after capturing Baghdad, the military tried to impose security, it lacked sufficient forces to do the job-it simply couldn`t occupy the breadth of the country, search for weapons of mass destruction, and simultaneously guard the immense spread of civil facilities and infrastructure needed for the successful transition to an authentically Iraqi government. And when they went "onto the offensive" by conducting sweeps and searching homes, they often lacked the interpreters to explain to families what they were doing and why--a classic mistake in a counter-guerrilla effort. They offended local leaders, and swept up the innocent and uninvolved. Even straightforward self-defense, like returning fire if fired upon, cannot but over time inflict even more casualties upon innocent civilians, as well as arouse popular anger that will be very hard to assuage.

As of today, the best hope seems to lie in turning over political authority to a selected Iraqi council as rapidly as possible, and securing a new U.N. mandate which would provide the legitimacy needed for other nations to send in troops and provide financial assistance. At the same time, we ought to create sufficient Iraqi security forces to relieve U.S. troops-an approach which, in early September 2003, the president finally announced that he was prepared to follow. But even if we are able to significantly draw down the U.S. military commitment in Iraq over the next year or so, our ground forces will have been stretched tight and will likely need several years and unanticipated additional resources to recover fully. So soon after the defeat of Iraq, the vision of U.S. armed forces as the heart of a new empire--as a liberating force sweeping through the Middle East, brushing aside terrorist-sponsoring regimes to create a new American empire of Western-style democracies--seems to be fading fast. The transformation of the region seems a generation away.

Sharing the wealth

But forgoing an empire of arms need not mean forsaking our leadership role in the world. Indeed, much of the debate and some degree of the enthusiasm about American empire seemed to misunderstand America`s enormous power and its unique place in the world.

The United States had come of age as a world power by the end of the 19th century. Surging in population and wealth, gorged on foreign, primarily British, capital in the decades after the Civil War, the United States by the turn of the century was the world`s premier manufacturing power. Simultaneously, we set out to compete as an imperial power, seizing Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific, dismembering Colombia to create an independent Panama in order to build a canal across the isthmus, fighting a difficult counter-guerrilla campaign in the Philippines to secure control of the archipelago, and mounting a "punitive expedition" across the U.S. border into Mexico in pursuit of the populist Mexican bandit leader Pancho Villa.

But here the American pursuit of classical empire ends, for deep within the American psyche has been the principle of national self-determination, which has asserted itself again and again as the country has charted its international course. Cuban independence was granted in 1902. Repeated U.S. military interventions in Central America and the Caribbean during the first third of the century never resulted in formal U.S. annexation or permanent legal control. Philippine independence was formally granted in 1946. Americans tended, on the whole, to be "leavers," not colonizers. Interests in foreign adventures soon faded, military expeditions were scaled back and withdrawn, and local forces, sometimes with U.S. assistance and advice, took over. The United States had power and influence, yes, and its businesses sought to compete globally for gain, but it was not interested in legal control or classic empire.

Indeed, after World War II, the United States strongly resisted the re-imposition of colonialism in Asia and encouraged decolonization elsewhere. We denied substantial assistance to the French as they sought to regain full control of Indochina and were pressured the Dutch out of Indonesia. We weighed in against the British and French when they invaded Gamal Abdul Nasser`s Egypt in 1956 and encouraged the end of colonial regimes and white dominance in Africa, eventually mounting a strong economic campaign that by the mid-1990s had helped end South African apartheid. Unlike most classical colonial powers, we were large and rich in resources. We were much less dependent on foreign trade for our economic development. Rather than finding outlets abroad for surplus labor and capital, we benefited from enormous inflows of foreign direct investment during the railroad boom of the late 19th century. And by the turn of last century, our geography and economic development contributed to form a strong predisposition toward isolationism in U.S. foreign policy.

But in the aftermath of World War II, we fought off a return to the historic tradition of withdrawal, first under the leadership of President Harry Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall, then continuing through General Dwight Eisenhower`s presidency. Meanwhile, the value of the extractive industries-gold, diamonds, timber-that motivated earlier colonial efforts by other nations was declining in relative terms. While these industries, and the multinational companies which dominated them, continued to hang on in their market sectors, the terms of trade were shifting. New areas of wealth had emerged in travel, entertainment, medicine, communications, and modern manufacturing. Value in these areas for the most part was not achieved by dominating sources of supply but by access to markets and attracting foreign capital and talent.

The United States has continued to draw waves of immigrants hungry for freedom and economic opportunity--from the 19th-century Germans, Irish, and Italians onto the early-20th-century East Europeans, to a steady flow from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Cuba, and then Central America, as well as from the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia. During the 1990s, the United States experienced the highest population growth rates of any developed country, largely because it received more than a million immigrants per year, becoming, by 2001, home to more than 3 million Muslims of Middle Eastern and Asian origin.At the beginning of the 21st century the United States is the world`s leading economy, accounting for about 20 percent of global output and, during the period 1995-2002, for about 40 percent of the world`s economic growth. Over time the world economy has become disproportionately dependent on the U.S. growth engine, which has led to the strange result that the United States must consume more than it produces--while much of the rest of the world must produce more than it consumes. This is a benefit to other countries, which must find markets for their products, but it is most of all a benefit to ordinary Americans. No previous preeminent power has done so well, either in creating wealth for itself, or in sharing the benefits with others.

Waging peace

This was sustained not by a classic empire but rather by that interlocking web of international institutions and arrangements that protected and promoted American interests and shared the benefits, costs, and risks with others.

First came the security arrangements which emerged after World War II. Committed to deterring and containing the Soviet threat, America stationed hundreds of thousands of troops abroad--but much of the expense was borne by the recipient countries themselves, especially in Asia. The majority of these troops were not scattered across the underdeveloped world, but rather concentrated in the once-devastated, but now highly developed, lands of America`s former enemies. Although Congress grumbled continually about costs, the truth was that such deployments provided important contributions to states that had become some of America`s principal economic and commercial partners. Joined to them by formal alliances, the United States relieved these nations of some defense burdens, creating supranational interests in security, but also providing a crucial U.S. voice in financial, political, and, ultimately, cultural matters.

Second, the United States exercised leverage through international institutions and arrangements, initially through a frame of security treaties: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for European allies, bilateral agreements with Japan and South Korea. Acting with allies, the United States was able to redistribute the financial, military, and political burdens of its global security interests. In Europe, NATO member states provided most of the ground manpower in the event of war. Independent French nuclear programs provided a backstop for Cold War NATO nuclear decision-making. Britain assisted in the Persian Gulf until the late 1960s. France and Belgium were active in Africa. And Japan not only came to develop surprisingly modern and effective self-defense capabilities; it paid a significant portion of the operating expenses of U.S. forces stationed there.

Finally, there were such arrangements facilitating American economic leadership as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and later the regular meetings of leading economic powers which eventually became known as the Group of Eight (G8). Central bankers frequently met, at least to share perspectives. The United States also used the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to open new markets for U.S. goods, products, and services and was the leader in organizing the World Trade Organization to further regulate and expand international commerce. General agreements were led or accompanied by regional arrangements such as NAFTA--the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada. The dollar became the principal world reserve currency.

When the United States developed balance-of-payments problems in the early 1970s, it was able to shift the international financial system from fixed to floating exchange rates, enabling continued growth of U.S. consumer demand while other nations concentrated on export-led growth to feed the U.S. market. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 were absorbed, and then digested, yielding, more than 20 years later, a lower real price of oil, as well as a strong financial bond between the oil-producing and oil-consuming countries marked by reciprocal investments and exchanges of debt. The allure of an integrated U.S. market was so strong that during the 1980s and into the 1990s the United States was able to run enormous federal budget deficits financed by foreign investors and foreign governments` purchases of U.S. bonds. Foreign investments and financing allowed the United States to expand its economy--and strengthen its military--without paying for all of it through taxes. It was partly a matter of economics: The United States was a safe place to invest, and the returns were good.

Soft sell

For decades, the United States has been at the hub of this network of mutual interdependence, sometimes called "globalization." Heavily influenced--some might say dominated--by us, globalization reflected the American values of free-market economics and popular democracy. Enabled by modern communications and transportation, this network facilitated access to markets and investment opportunities abroad, assisted the flow of talent and intellectual property, and fostered the spread of market forces and democratic processes around the world. The major beneficiary of all of this was the United States itself. In short, this "globalization" was the new American empire.

But it ran not only on the "hard power" of military security and economics but also on confidence and shared values. This confidence reflected collective judgments about broader U.S. policies at home and abroad, expressed through the multinational institutions the United States helped create after World War II. And it was through and within these institutions, as well as by concrete actions, that values could be demonstrated and confidence sustained.

The United Nations served as a forum for communications and for addressing international issues less directly related to superpower competition. Its founding and overall design was driven by the United States, attempting to rectify the failures of the post-World War I international system that had led to World War II. Almost immediately, the emergence of the Cold War undercut hopes that the United Nations could serve as a means of collective security. But it did. Support organizations such as the U.N. Development Programme, the Food and Agricultural Organization, and UNESCO assumed extraordinary significance for the peoples of less developed countries. But even more important, the United Nations became the source of international law-for that was the status of U.N. Security Council resolutions. True, it was law without a real sovereign to enforce it-but the legitimacy it carried moved domestic politics in many countries.

The United States ardently used this international system. There were treaties to regulate nuclear and chemical weapons, as well as agreements to regulate exploitation of the oceans and govern all manner of commercial activities. And many of these agreements were underwritten by the creation of monitoring and enforcement mechanisms and organizations, such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The United States had representatives everywhere, ambassadors and delegates and officers detailed for periods of service. And, issue by issue, they worked to pursue and secure U.S. interests.

But the American way was not to rely on coercion and hard pressure, but on persuasion and shared vision. To an unprecedented extent, the United States had been benign and magnanimous as a victor of World War II. Sharing international power through the United Nations system, deeply involved in assisting the reconstruction of the German, Japanese, and Korean economies, hosting foreign students and encouraging exchange programs, speaking out against the old colonial empires, receiving immigrants, the United States became a model for nations around the world. American principles expressed in the Bill of Rights inspired others around the world. We were palpably uninterested in classical empire-our motives were consistent with those of dozens of struggling freedom movements around the world. For our potential competitors in the developed world, the combination of U.S. economic strength and American ideals was difficult to oppose. For two-thirds of a century the United States was generally viewed as the most admired nation in the world. To an important degree, American power in the 20th century was what Joseph Nye, dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, calls "soft power," the power to persuade, based on American values. It gave us an influence far beyond the hard edge of traditional balance-of-power politics, based less on physically occupying countries and imposing laws and institutions, or even on wielding our enormous economic and military strength, as old colonialists might have done, and more on leading by example, on transparency, and outreach.

To be sure, throughout the Cold War, the United States sometimes found it challenging to maintain its high principles abroad in the face of the Soviet threat. We gradually lost some of our moral edge, creating adversaries and doubters. Worried about potential Soviet encroachments upon the Middle East, we deposed an Iranian leader and replaced him with an unpopular shah; in Central America, the United States fought for almost a decade against Marxist-inspired governments and guerrillas using C.I.A. and special forces personnel, as well as local movements--a struggle that succeeded, but at enormous human cost, with additional human rights violations and illegal government activities. We often distinguished between totalitarian regimes, which we opposed, and regimes that were merely authoritarian, which could serve U.S. interests--but it was an uncomfortable distinction, never fully accepted across the American political spectrum.

The end of the Cold War removed the source of these contradictions in U.S. policy, leaving the United States free not only to expound principles but also to encourage more directly those that aligned with our values. Conversely, the United States was less constrained in condemning states that habitually violated human rights. This new strain of idealism in U.S. foreign policy was reinforced during the 1990s by U.S. actions to depose a Haitian junta blocking a democratic government there, and by the U.S. military peace operations in the Balkans, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Risky business

But in 2001, recently come to power in a disputed election, the Bush administration acted unambiguously to impose a more unilateralist stamp on U.S. foreign policy. The United States withdrew from international efforts to address global warming, the Kyoto Treaty. The administration made clear that it would proceed with national missile defense regardless of the U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; the South Korea-North Korea dialogue was essentially rejected; and a new proposal to focus the United Nations on tightening sanctions against Iraq was dropped.

Even before 9/11, it was clear that U.S. foreign policy had changed tack, but responding to those grim events, the Bush administration definitively abandoned its "more humble foreign policy." Overnight the U.S. stance in the world became not only unilateralist but moralistic, intensely patriotic, and assertive, planning military action against Iraq and perhaps other states in the Middle East, and intimating a new American empire. With an American public reeling from the shock of 9/11, the message played powerfully at home, dampening concerns about rising unemployment and the soaring budget deficit. And the risks were discounted. No matter that aggressive unilateralism would hamper counter-terror efforts, turn upside down five decades of work to establish an international system to help reduce conflict, undercut the alliance that had maintained security for half a century in Europe, and shake relations critical to maintaining the web of interdependence central to American prosperity. By September 2003, U.S. forces were in Iraq--deeply committed, without as yet a clear strategy either to salvage success or to exit, continuing discussion about possibly expanding the area of military action to include Syria and perhaps other states in the region.

But this shift--rather than promoting the emergence of the new American empire--put all that we gained with "soft power" and the virtual American empire at risk, producing an outburst of worldwide anti-American sentiment. Opinion polls in many nations show substantial numbers who think that "bin Laden was more likely to do the right thing than Bush." These are concerns not about American values or how we live but about how America acts abroad. Because such concerns reflect judgments about American actions, they will not be countered easily by advertising and public relations techniques. And they have already affected the support the United States receives abroad.

Individually, some governments, especially democratic ones which must listen to the opinions of voters, have found it more difficult to comply with American wishes. Turkey, for example, refused to support the passage of U.S. troops in the war on Iraq and as of early September had yet to take up U.S. requests to assist with a peacekeeping force. India declined the request to participate because the mission was not under U.N. control, as did Germany and France. These are only the latest signs of nations beginning to define their own interests in refusing unilateralist U.S. "leadership."

What is emerging is more subtle, a more or less informal constellation of interests among several states, including both allies and former adversaries, to frustrate and complicate U.S. policies and objectives that are increasingly seen at odds with their own interests. Fundamentally, this risks unraveling the political and economic structures of interdependence which have proved so favorable to the United States. In the narrowest sense, if foreigners lose confidence in U.S. leadership and reject the implicit understandings and economic alignments that have led them-especially the central banks of China, Taiwan, and Japan-to accumulate dollar holdings, they could quickly diversify out of dollar assets, triggering a sharp decline in the dollar`s value and significantly impairing our recovery.

Somewhere in the rising U.S. budget deficits, the balance-of-payments current accounts deficits, and the growing resentment of the United States abroad, there may be a "tipping point," as yet undetermined, which could be triggered by geopolitical failure on the Korean Peninsula or in South Asia, a severe oil shock derived from simultaneous domestic failures in several producer countries, or a rapid enlargement of more attractive investment opportunities in China and India, and greater confidence in the Euro, sufficient to choke down the continuing influx of foreign financing. Or we could simply suffer a continuing gradual erosion of our influence.

But if leadership is defined as "persuading the other fellow to want to do what you want him to do," as Eisenhower put it, then American leadership is failing. We simply aren`t persuading others to align with our interests--we are coercing and pressuring. If we do not alter our approach, we are headed toward a less powerful and relevant America, regardless of the numbers of stealth bombers we deploy or countries we "access." If this path leads to American empire in the sense of more countries occupied by U.S. troops, it will mean a poorer, more isolated, and less secure America.

Desperately seeking sovereignty

We need to see ourselves and the world around us in sharp relief--and use that vision to inform better our policies. Simply put, the United States needs a new strategy for the 21st century--a broader, more comprehensive, and less unilateralist approach abroad, coupled with greater attention to a sound economy at home, and sensible long-range policies. The Bush administration`s strategy of preemption, published in the 2002 National Security Strategy, was focused against Iraq. At home, the formula of the supply-siders--tax cuts for the wealthy to feed trickle-down economics--has about run its course. It is time for America to return to the basic concepts that ensured its unprecedented prosperity and security and to adapt from these a new strategy that can better serve our needs today.

The first of these basic principles should be inclusiveness. The United States represents evolutionary values of human dignity and the worth of the individual-ideals that have steadily swept across Europe and into much of the rest of the world. We have been proselytizers, advocating our values, assisting states abroad, encouraging emerging young leaders to study and visit the United States. During the Cold War we were careful to reach across the Iron Curtain. And when the Cold War ended, we worked hard to encourage the enlargement of democracy around the world. We should be seeking allies and friends around the world.

Second, we should be working to strengthen and use international institutions, beginning with the United Nations and NATO. Such institutions can provide vital support to American diplomacy, bringing in others to share the burdens and risks that we would otherwise have to carry alone. The United Nations especially can contribute legitimacy to U.S. purposes and actions. International law is of little significance to most Americans, but it carries heavy weight abroad. Both the United Nations and NATO need refinement, particularly the United Nations--but these refinements can be made only through American constructive leadership, for we are the lone superpower, with the resources and incentives to do so.

And finally, we must place in proper perspective the role of the armed forces in our overall strategy. We should ensure that they retain the edge over any potential adversary and continue to modernize them to deal with foreseeable contingencies, including the possible need to preempt any threat to the United States. We always have the right of self-defense, including inherently the right to strike preemptively. But force must be used only as a last resort--and then multilaterally if possible.

Operating on these three principles, we should repair our trans-Atlantic relationships. When the United States and Europe stand together, they represent roughly half the world`s gross domestic product and three of the five permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council. These are the countries that are most politically and culturally aligned with the United States. We are the major investors in each other`s economies. We should turn upside down nineteenth-century Britain`s view that Britain had no permanent friends, only permanent interests. In the West, we must have permanent friends and allies and then work to ensure that our interests converge.

Using this trans-Atlantic alliance as our base, we should then work to resolve our security challenges--the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, the continuing threat from al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. We should be working with allies to help settle disputes between India and Pakistan and within the Middle East that could explode into deadly conflict. And we should be pressing through the United Nations and offering assistance to ease the ongoing conflicts in Africa.

Fight smart

Surprisingly, most of the discussions about American empire--as about terrorist threats abroad and our actions to address them--have little to say about America itself. Yet in the wake of 9/11, Americans are seeing themselves in a new way. For the first time in more than a decade, we are aware of the importance of the world beyond our borders, as well as the power of political forces and ideas other than our own. And we are looking at each other differently, too, seeking a community with greater trust and security. And we shouldn`t believe that we can meet this challenge without changing in the process. In the immediate outpouring of international sympathy after 9/11, Americans felt a warmth of support that has seldom been so openly expressed abroad. But much of that sympathy has evaporated. Many felt that we were "fixating" on terrorist threats, claiming that their societies had faced this for a generation. But they failed to understand that we are of a different tradition: independent, and determined to restore our sense of security.

The shock, the fear, and the anger will rightly remain embedded in our memories, but now is the time to "fight smart." It is true that we are engaged in "a campaign unlike any other," which may well extend for a long time. This is modern war, and no state or society is better able to wage it than us. We must, however, develop the appropriate strategy and use both the military forces and the full array of means at our disposal. We don`t need a new American empire. Indeed, the very idea of classic empire is obsolete. An interdependent world will no longer accept discriminatory dominance by one nation over others. Instead, a more collaborative, collegiate American strategy will prevail, a strategy based on the great American virtues of tolerance, freedom, and fairness that made this country a beacon of hope in the world.

America`s primacy in the world--our great power, our vast range of opportunities, the virtual empire we have helped create--has given us a responsibility for leadership and to lead by example. Our actions matter. But we certainly cannot lead by example unless we are sustained by leadership.



Gen. Wesley Clark, U.S.A. (Ret.), was Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, from 1997-2000. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, Winning Modern Wars. Copyright 2003. Reprinted by arrangement with Public Affairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved.

[Joerver]

QUESTIONS FOR PRESIDENT BUSH’S NEXT PRESS CONFERENCE
by CALVIN TRILLIN
Issue of 2003-11-17
Posted 2003-11-10
Friendly question: “Sir, although your supporters’ predictions that Iraqis would greet our troops with flowers haven’t been borne out, isn’t it possible that, given the problems with the water supply and the infrastructure in general, there is a serious shortage of flowers over there and that Iraqis might be greeting our troops with flowers if Iraqis had any flowers?”

Follow-up question to friendly question: “Mr. President, in your budget for the reconstruction of Iraq, is there any money specifically earmarked for rebuilding the Iraqi cut-flower industry, and, if so, would any American company be able to bid on that contract, or would they have to go through your friend Joe Allbaugh’s consulting firm?”

Zen question: “Sir, if the ability of the Star Wars ABMs to hit a nuclear missile is imaginary and the nuclear missiles in Iraq are imaginary, does that mean a Star Wars ABM could hit an Iraqi nuclear missile?”

Follow-up question to Zen question if answer is yes:“How could that be verified?”

Follow-up question to Zen question if answer is no:“Would you consider that justification for having gone to war against Iraq?”

Strategic-planning question: “Sir, now that you’ve acknowledged that there was never any evidence of Iraqi involvement in the September 11th attacks by Al Qaeda, does it remain your policy that in the event of any future Al Qaeda attack against this country we would still retaliate against Iraq, and, if so, how would you avoid hitting our own troops?”

Follow-up question to strategic-planning question:“If not, then did you have some other country in mind to retaliate against?”

Coalition question: “Is Bulgaria still part of the coalition, and, if so, what have they done for us lately?”

Follow-up question depending on answer to coalition question: “Would you encourage the American people to drink more Bulgarian wine?”

Follow-up question depending on answer to coalition question: “Would you encourage the American people to boycott Bulgarian wines, and, if so, do you know of any French wines that might make a good substitute?”

Second Zen question: “If, as you’ve said, Mr. President, the interim report stating that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq justifies our having gone to war to remove weapons of mass destruction, what would a report stating that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq justify, if you know?”

Alternative to friendly question: “Sir, do you think that the flowers with which your Administration said Iraqis would greet our troops will ever be found?”

Follow-up to alternative to friendly question if answer is yes: “Then would that justify having gone to war with Iraq?”

Follow-up to alternative to friendly question if answer is no:“Then would that justify having gone to war with Iraq?”

Somewhat off-the-wall question: “Speaking of Iraq and Al Qaeda, sir, do you think it’s fair that Arabs don’t have to use a ‘u’ after a ‘q’?”

Follow-up to somewhat off-the-wall question if answer is no:“Then would that justify having gone to war with Iraq?”

http://newyorker.com/shouts/content/

[Joerver]

Ein guter Satz über den Sinn des Sterbens.

He was guarding God. The money that is the true religion of Bush and Cheney and the others who hide in offices while young men in the Army die.



The Names They Still Won`t Mention
Jimmy Breslin

http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-nybres113536792nov…



November 11, 2003

The baby had gone into a deep sleep in the warm funeral home and she was flat on her back in the mother`s arms as the mother brought her out into the chill night. The baby did not move. Warm air, cold air, it made no difference.

The mother was carrying her out from the wake of . Sgt. Joel Perez, dead at 25 when he went down in a Chinook helicopter near Fallujah, Iraq, Nov. 2. The wake was in a funeral home with a neon sign saying, "Funerarias Las Americas."

"I`m the cousin," the woman said.

"His mother called my mother and then my mother told me," she said. "That is how you find out."

She shook her head and said she didn`t want to talk anymore and she left.

On the funeral parlor steps were Omar Valentine, 22, and a friend.

"Did you know the guy well?" Omar was asked.

"The wife."

"From school," the friend said.

"We graduated high school together. Essex County Vocational."

"He was coming home to surprise them," the friend said.

That is all they had to say. Nobody else wanted to talk, either. What was there to say?

The other Sunday, in high excitement, Sgt. Perez got on a helicopter that was going to start him home to his wife, Milagros, and 15-month-old daughter in time for the wedding anniversary, which was yesterday, the day they put him into the ground in Newark.

He had not told his wife that he was coming home and the others in the family kept it secret. He got on that helicopter because he had a Bronze Star and Purple Heart from the fighting.

Now, yesterday, he was a name on a list of the dead. If I had not been typing out this list, I wouldn`t have known that Perez was the short ride away at Newark.

There is no public display over the death and all these others on the list accompanying this column. Bush and his people sent them out to get killed and now you can`t get one of them in Washington to mention these dead.

Your government would prefer that night falls and the dead are buried in darkness. We must keep them remote, names on a list, and concentrate on things like patriotism, exporting democracy and shipping freedom - all those big words that Joyce said make us so unhappy.

On this list of our dead is a name that shakes the insides. It is Staff Sgt. Morgan D. Kennon, age 23. He is from Memphis, Tenn. "Kennon was guarding a bank in Mosul, Iraq, when his position came under rocket-propelled grenade attack."

He was from the 101st Airborne in Fort Campbell, Ky. He never had a job. He went from Central High in Memphis to the Airborne. He picked a spot as rough as he could find. Then they sent him to war, proud and strong, and put him in front of a bank like a retired broken-down cop.

This is called nation building in Iraq. Repairing the infrastructure. Putting freedom into the country. Fighting terrorism.

Stand in front of a bank and get shot like he`s guarding an ATM in Brooklyn.

Kennon`s mother talks to nobody. She is separated from her husband, who is an over-the-road truck driver. His brother, Isaac, was killed when a burglar broke into his home in 1975. Kennon`s oldest son, Marcus Kennon, was murdered and his body thrown onto the street in Birmingham in 2000. His girlfriend Sharron White disappeared in 1986 and hasn`t been found.

And the other Friday he arrived home from work at 4 p.m. and he was taking off his shoes when there was a knock on the door. Two Army officers were at his front door. Right away, they told him that his son had died but he had not suffered.

They did not tell him that the best thing in his life was put out in front of a bank with all that bravery. And he was shot as if in a common robbery.

He was guarding God. The money that is the true religion of Bush and Cheney and the others who hide in offices while young men in the Army die.

Here is your war so far this week:

Staff Sgt. Paul J. Johnson, 29, of Calumet, Mich. Killed Oct. 20 in Fallujah, Iraq.

Spc. Paul J. Bueche, 19, 131st Aviation Regiment, Army National Guard, killed Oct. 21 when the tire he was changing on Black Hawk helicopter exploded. Home, Daphne, Ala.

Pvt. Jason M. Ward, 25, 2nd Battalion, 70th Armored Regiment, lst Armored Division, Fort Riley, Kansas. Died in Baghdad on Oct. 22 of non-combat related injuries. Home, Tulsa, Okla.

Spc. John P. Johnson, 24, 2nd Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment, lst Armored Division, Fort Riley, Kansas. Died in Baghdad of non-combat related injuries on Oct. 22. Home, Houston.

Capt. John R. Teal, 31, 2nd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Hood, Texas. Killed on Oct. 24 when an improvised explosive device struck his convoy in Baghdad. Home, Mechanicsville, Va.

Spc. Jose L. Mora, 26, C Company, lst Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colo. Died of wounds received from an enemy mortar attack Oct. 24 in Samaria, Iraq. Home, Bell Gardens, Calif.

Sgt. Michael S. Hancock, 29, lst Battalion, 320 Field Artillery Regiment, Fort Campbell, Ky. Killed on Oct. 24 when shot while on guard duty in Mosul, Iraq. Home, Yreka, Calif.

Spc. Artimus D. Brassfield, 22, B Company, lst Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Hood, Texas. Died of wounds received from an enemy mortar attack on Oct. 24 in Samaria, Iraq. Home, Home, Flint, Mich.

Staff Sgt. Jamie L. Huggins, 26, C Company, 2nd Battalion, 325th Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C. Killed on Oct. 26 on patrol when his vehicle was hit by improvised explosive device. Home, Hume, Mo.

Pvt. Joseph R. Guerrera, 20, C Company, 2nd Battalion, 325th Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C. Killed when his vehicle was hit with an improvised explosive device while he was on Patrol on Oct. 26 in Baghdad. Home, Dunn, N.C.

Lt. Col. Charles H. Buehring, 40, Army Central Command Headquarters (Forward) Fort McPherson, Ga. Fatally injured during a rocket-propelled grenade attack on the El Rashid Hotel in Baghdad on Oct. 26. Home, Fayetteville, N.C.

Pfc. Rachel K. Bosveld, 19, 537th Military Police Company, V Corps, Giesen, Germany. Killed Oct. 26 during mortar attack on the Abu Ghraib Police Station. Home, Waupun, Wis.

Pfc. Steve Acosta, 19, C Company, 3rd Battalion, 67th Armored Regiment, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Hood, Texas. Died on Oct. 26 from a non-combat gunshot wound. Home, Calexico, Calif.

Pvt. Jonathon L. Falaniko, 20, A Company, 70th Engineer Battalion, lst Armored Division, Fort Hood, Texas. Killed on Oct. 27 while on duty near the police station in downtown Baghdad when a vehicle containing an improvised explosive device detonated. Home, Pago-Pago, American Samoa.

Sgt. Aubrey D. Bell, 33, 214th Military Police Company, Alabama National Guard. Killed in Baghdad on Oct. 27, when an improvised explosive device detonated at his location at the Al Barra Police Station. Home, Tuskegee, Ala.

Spc. Isaac Campoy, 21, 3rd Battalion, 67th Armor Regiment, Fort Hood, Texas. Killed on Oct. 28 in Baghdad, Iraq, when his tank was hit with an improvised explosive device. Home, Douglas, Ariz.

Sgt. Algernon Adams, 36, 122nd Engineer Battalion, Army National Guard. Died on Oct. 28 of non-combat related injuries at Foreward Operating Base, St. Mere, Iraq. Home, Aiken, S.C.

2nd Lt. Todd J. Bryant, 23, lst Battalion, 34th Armored Regiment, lst Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kansas. Died on Oct. 31 when an improvised explosive device blew up while he was on patrol at Fallujah. Home, Riverside, Calif.

Spc. Maurice Johnson, 21, 326th Engineer Battalion, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) Fort Captvell, Ky. Killed in Mosul, Iraq, on Nov. 1 when when the high mobility multi-purpose wheeled vehicle he was riding in was hit by an improvised explosive device. Home, Levittown, Pa.

1st Lt. Joshua Hurley, 24, 326th Engineer Battalion, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky. Killed when vehicle he was riding in was hit by an improvised explosive device. Home, Virgina.

2nd Lt. Benjamin J. Colgan, 30, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, lst Armored Division, Giessen, Germany. Killed when he was struck with an improvised explosive device while responding to a rocket-propelled grenade attack. Home, Kent, Wash.

The following were killed in the crash of the Chinook helicopter at Al Fallujah, Iraq, Nov. 2:

Sgt. Daniel M. Bader, 28, Air Defense Artillery Battery, 1st Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Carson, Colo. Home, Colorado Springs, Colo.

Sgt. Ernest G. Bucklew, 33, Support Squadron, 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment, Fort Carson, Colo. Home, Enon Valley, Pa.

Spc. Steven D. Conover, 21, 2nd Battalion, 5th Field Artillery Regiment, Fort Sill, Okla. Home, Wilmington, Ohio.

Sgt. Anthony Dagostino, 20, 16th Signal Battalion, Fort Hood, Texas. Home, Waterbury, Conn.

Spc. Darius T. Jennings, 22, of 16th Signal Battalion, Fort Hood, Texas. Home, Cordova, S.C.

Pfc. Karina S. Lau, 20, of 16th Signal Battalion, Fort Hood, Texas. Home, Livingston, Calif.

Sgt. Keelan L. Moss, 23, of 2nd Battalion, 5th Field Artillery Regiment, Fort Sill, Okla. Home, Houston, Texas.

Spc. Brian H. Penisten, 28, Air Defense Artillery Battery, lst Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Carson, Colo. Home, Fort Wayne, Ind.

Sgt. Ross A. Pennanon, 36, assigned to 2nd Battalion, 5th Field Artillery Regiment, Fort Sill, Okla. Home, Oklahoma.

Sgt. Joel Perez, 25, 2nd Battalion, 5th Field Artillery Regiment, Fort Sill, Okla. Home, Rio Grande, Puerto Rico.

lst Lt. Brian D. Slavenas, 30, F Company, 106th Aviation Battalion, Army National Guard, Peoria, Ill. Home, Genoa, Ill.

Chief Warrant Officer Bruce A. Smith, 41, Detachment I, Company F, 106th Aviation Battalion, Army National Guard, Davenport, Iowa. Home, West Liberty, Iowa.

Spc. Francis M. Vega, 20, 151st Adjustant General Postal Detachment, Fort Hood, Texas. Home, Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico.

Staff Sgt. Paul A. Velazquez, 29, 2nd Battalion, 5th Field Artillery Regiment, III Corps Artillery, Fort Sill, Okla.

Staff Sgt. Joe N. Wilson, 30, of 2nd Battalion, 5th Field Artillery Regiment, Fort Sill, Okla. Home, Mississippi.

Sgt. Paul F. Fisher, 39, Detachment I, Company F, 106th Aviation Battalion, Army National Guard, Davenport, Iowa. Home, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Sgt. Francisco Martinez, 28, of B Detachment, 82nd Soldier Support Battalion (Airborne) Fort Bragg, N.C. Killed on Nov. 4 in convoy when improvised explosive device exploded. Home, Humacao, Puerto Rico.

Sgt. lst Class Jose A. Rivera, 34, Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 3rd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Fort Bragg, N.C. Killed on Nov. 5 while part of a patrol at Mumulktdyah, Iraq, that came under rocket-propelled grenade and small arms fire. Home, Bayamon, Puerto Rico.

Spc. Robert T. Bensonm, 20, of Company A, lst Battalion, 35th Armored Regiment, lst Armored Division, Smith Barracks, Germany. Died from a non-hostile gunshot wound. Home, Spokane, Wash.

The following were killed when a Black Hawk helicopter was shot down by unknown enemy ordinance Nov. 7 in Tikrit, Iraq:

Chief Chief Warrant Officer (CW5) Sharon T. Swartworth, 43, (identified by Pentagon as "female"), regimental warrant officer for the Judge Advocate General Office, Headquarters Department of the Army, Pentagon. Home, Virginia.

Chief Warrant Officer (CW3) Kyran E. Kennedy, 43, of Boston, Mass.

Staff Sgt. Paul M. Neil II, 30, of S.C.

Sgt. Scott C. Rose, 30, Fayettville, N.C.

Kennedy, Neil and Rose were assigned to 5th Battalion, 101st Aviation Regiment, 10th Airborne Division, (Air Assault) Fort Campbell, Ky.

Spc. James A. Chance III, 25, of C Company, 890th Engineer Battalion, Army National Guard, Columbia, Miss. Killed Nov. 6 when his vehicle struck a landmine in Husaybah, Iraq. Home, Kokomo, Miss.

Staff Sgt. Morgan D. Kennon, 23, of 3rd Batallion, 327th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, (Air Assault) Fort Campbell, Ky. Killed on Nov. 7 in Mosul, Iraq, while guarding a bank in downtown when he came under rocket propelled grenade attack. Home, Memphis, Tenn.

Staff Sgt. Mark D. Vasquez, 35, of lst Battalion, 10th Infantry Regiment, lst Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kansas. Killed on Nov. 8 in Fallujah, Iraq, when a Bradley Fighting Vehicle was struck by an improvised explosive device. Home, Port Huron, Mich.

Spc. James R. Wolfe, 21, Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 52nd Engineer Battalion, Fort Carson, Colo. Killed on Nov. 6 in Mosul, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device was detonated in his convoy. Home, Scottsbluff, Neb.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.

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Tuesday, November 11th, 2003
Another Former Intelligence Official Blows the Whistle on 9/11
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/11/157236

Watch 256k stream: Real Player Videohttp://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow/demnow/demand/2003/nov/256/d…


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Veteran Pentagon Middle East analyst Peter Molan speaks out on the invasion of Iraq, his work on the 9/11 investigation and why he is protesting in front of Walter Reed Medical Center today.

Peter Molan, Department of Defense Middle East analyst for 25 years. He began his military career with the US Army in the Middle East during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Went on to work at the Department of Defense until August 2001, when he retired. After the 9-11 attacks, he was recalled to duty because he speaks fluent Arabic. He was one of the people working on the bin Laden dossier for the Pentagon.

‘Nothing but Poison Plants Can Grow from Poison Seeds’: Another Former Intelligence Official Blows the Whistle on Iraq/9-11 Connection
BY THE STAFF OF DEMOCRACY NOW!

November 11, 2003 — Veterans from several U.S. wars are protesting across the country today. But at the vigil outside Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland, there is an unusual presence in their ranks.

Peter Molan spent years listening to Arab radio broadcasts, watching Al Jazeera and visiting Arabic Internet chat-rooms. As one of the many intelligence bureaucrats in the chambers of Washington’s war-planning center, the Pentagon, he had his ear to what was happening on the “Arab street.” In August, 2001, the 25 year veteran Middle East analyst retired to spend more time with his family, continue his scholarship and pursue his hobbies: photography, carving duck decoys and dry-fly fishing.

But then came September 11th.

Not long after the planes hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Molan received a call from the Pentagon saying his services were once again needed. Fluent in Arabic, he was pulled out of retirement to work on the bin Laden case for the Defense Department. After four months of work, Molan went back to retirement. Then he began hearing the Bush administration amplifying the rhetoric against Iraq, implying that Saddam Hussein was tied to the 9-11 attacks.

“The justifications for that war were completely counter to everything that I had learned in that 20-odd years of government service working on the Middle East,” Molan told Democracy Now!. “I was simply outraged by the twisting and turning of intelligence information that I had helped develop to what was clearly, to my mind, a preordained policy decision that I felt to be profoundly wrong. Nothing about this suggests that Saddam Hussein was anything but a brutal dictator. He was. But that`s not why we went to war.”

Molan said that due to restrictions on revealing classified information, he cannot discuss details of his work on the bin Laden/9-11 investigation. “But what I can tell you,” he said. “Is that my involvement, my direct, immediate involvement, day-to-day involvement with Veterans for Peace arises precisely out of the subsequent decision by the Bush administration to go to war with Iraq.”

Molan said that had the White House worked with the United Nations in dealing with Iraq, he may have supported the administration. “But nothing but poison plants can grow from poison seeds,” he said. “This administration`s goals and intentions and policies, which are quite clearly articulated in the Security Strategy Document and in the work of the Project for the New American Century, are completely at odds, radically at odds, with America`s now more than a century-old tradition of trying to build international institutions.”

Molan began his military career in 1963, studying Arabic and Near Eastern Studies at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. After graduating with honors, he was deployed to Ethiopia during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, for which he received the US Army Commendation Medal.

After 12 years in academia, where he taught at a number of universities and colleges, Molan went to work at the Pentagon as a Middle East analyst. He was frequently sent on foreign assignments in addition to his job of teaching in federal government training programs. Today, he was one of dozens of veterans commemorating Veterans Day by protesting outside of Walter Reed Medical Center, the main facility treating wounded soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We believe that the Bush Administration is dishonoring both the commitment that is required by today`s holiday—to the veterans and to concurrently serving GIs, as well as to that notion of international peace and justice,” he said. “All the talk about support for the troops that we hear from the White House is belied by the fact that facilities are being closed, charges are being placed on the veterans. This administration is not in support of these troops.”



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TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: Veterans` groups are holding a vigil today outside Walter Reed Medical Center. Among them, vets of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and other wars and conflicts. Their protest comes as reports are emerging that several thousand U.S. soldiers have been wounded and are being treated at a single military hospital in Germany.

Peter Molan is on the line with us now. He was a Department of Defense Middle East analyst for 25 years. He began his military career with the U.S. Army in the Middle East during the 1967 Arab/Israeli war. He then left the military, but came back to work at the Pentagon until August, 2001, when he retired. After the 9-11 attacks, he was recalled to duty because he speaks fluent Arabic. He was one of the people working on the Bin Laden case for the Pentagon. But today he stands in front of Walter Reed Medical Center. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Peter Molan.

PETER MOLAN: Thank you very much, Amy. We`re very pleased to be here, and I would like to just mention that the fine ladies that you just spoke to -- they are, I believe, all members of military families speak out, and we are in coalition with them, and they will be represented at our rally today. There will also be rallies- similar rallies throughout the country at other veterans` hospitals and facilities, so while we`re here in Washington, we are celebrating Veterans Day across the country in protest for two reasons.

We would like to point out that while we do honor and support our troops and that was one of the initial functions of Armistice Day in 1918, but there`s another bylaw aspect to Veterans Day. As it was established in 1918, as it became an official U.S. government holiday in 1938, and as its name was changed in 1954 from Armistice Day to Veterans Day to honor veterans of all of our wars, not just the first World War- but in addition to honoring the veterans, there is also in each of the legislation acts that brought about this holiday, a requirement that we rededicate ourself to world peace and justice, and we believe that the Bush Administration is dishonoring both the commitment that is required by today`s holiday- legal holiday- to the veterans and to concurrently serving G.I.s, as well as to that notion of international peace and justice.

AMY GOODMAN: Why to protest in front of Walter Reed Medical Center? Why, for example, not in front of the White House?

PETER MOLAN: We have chosen Walter Reed precisely because it is the medical center, the Army medical center through which all U.S. Army G.I.`s pass on their way to other places here in the United States. You mentioned the 7,000 wounded G.I.`s in Germany, but they will coming through Dover and through Andrews Air Force Base. They`ll be coming through Walter Reed, and then going on to their homes and their -- the veterans` facilities that will take care of them there. It will be passing through Walter Reed, and we felt that was a particularly appropriate place to express the views that we`re having.

You may know that we did have the opportunity yesterday, Veterans for Peace had a delegation go in and visit with a number of the G.I.`s who are currently recuperating from their wounds there, and we do want to recognize the splendid care they`re getting there from the medical staff and the nursing staff in a state-of-the-art facility. But that, too, is part of the thing that we are concerned with and protesting. As you mentioned, the overcrowded conditions in Germany -- the situation at Ft. Stewart as the G.I.`s are coming back is -- the medical facilities here are being overwhelmed. And of course, that is at a time when tremendous cutbacks are being made.

So, all the talk about `support for the troops` that we hear from the White House is belied by the fact that facilities are being closed, charges are being placed on the veterans. We were hearing about them being charged $8 a day for their food while in the hospitals. This administration is not in support of these troops.

AMY GOODMAN: We`re talking to Peter Molon, Pentagon Middle East analyst for 25 years. We`ll be outside Walter Reed Medical Center today with other veterans` groups protesting the invasion. You are in a unique position, Peter Molon, working for the Pentagon for more than 25 years. You retired in August, 2001, are recalled after the 9-11 attacks to work on the attacks. You`re one of the people working on the Bin Laden case, who worked on the Bin Laden case for the Pentagon. Can you talk about what you know?

PETER MOLAN: Well, not in technical detail, of course. I`m still bound by commitments to classified information. But what I can tell you is that my involvement, my direct, immediate involvement, day-to-day involvement with Veterans for Peace arises precisely out of the subsequent decision by the Bush administration to go to war with Iraq.

The justifications for that war were completely counter to everything that I had learned in that 20-odd years of government service working on the Middle East, as you say. I was simply outraged by the twisting and turning of intelligence information that I had helped develop to what was clearly, to my mind, a preordained policy decision that I felt to be profoundly wrong.

Not -- nothing about this suggests that Saddam Hussein was anything but a brutal dictator. He was. But that`s not why we went to war. Had we gone to the United Nations as Kofi Annan has - the Secretary General, has suggested that the United Nations must reorient its goals from preventing war between states to preventing the sort of things that we see in international terrorism, and the suppression of populations by their own government. The United Nations does have to be reordered towards that goal. Had we done that, I might have been supportive of what the administration is doing. But nothing but poison plants can grow from poison seeds, Amy, and this administration`s goals and intentions and policies, which are quite clearly articulated in the Security Strategy Document and in the work of the Project for the New American Century, are completely at odds, radically at odds with America`s now more than a century-old tradition of trying to build international institutions.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Molon, your thoughts about the polls that say that most Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9-11.

PETER MOLAN: I am -- they take my breath away. They stun me. Even this administration, although it speaks out of both sides of its mouth, the -- just, what, several weeks ago, the President admitted publicly that there was no connection between 9-11 and Saddam Hussein, although he did then turn around the next -- the very next day and suggest that there was. So, there are conflicting stories coming out of the administration, but still, even the administration admits that there was no such connection, and yet more than half of us believe that there is. I can only suggest that Chris Hedges` new book, "War Gives Us Meaning," speaks to the kind of psychological advantages that war gives to us. And that we are able to overcome all information to the contrary, all rational thought, in order to follow a war -- a lust for war.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Molon.

PETER MOLAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Department of Defense Middle East analyst for 25 years. Let me ask you a little bit about Osama Bin Laden, and what the administration knew before 9-11 and what they understood afterwards. You have been there for a quarter of a century in the Pentagon.

PETER MOLAN: Well, of course, we did know that we had supported him in his involvement in the war - the Afghan War against the Soviet Union, that he was hostile to the United States after the first Gulf War in 1991. We had had contact when he was in the Sudan with the Sudanese government. We didn`t bother to take up their offer to hand him over to us, for some reason, it`s not entirely clear. We knew that he was involved with the embassy bombings in East Africa. We were working, certainly, to -- by 9-11 -- to find out all that we could about him, but he had gone to ground by that time, and was protected by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

We knew that he was quite hostile, but intelligence is a limited tool. We don`t have many persons on the ground, as we know. There have been any number of reasons for that, not least of which are cutbacks in intelligence gathering capabilities. We knew he was hostile to us, and that he would try to harm us in any way that he could.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the story of John O`neill, the man who worked in -- on the F.B.I. Counter Terrorism Unit, tried to investigate the "USS Cole," was stopped by the ambassador to -- the U.S. ambassador to Yemen. He tried to investigate links to Saudi Arabia, felt he was prevented from doing so by the Bush administration, and finally gave up, left the F.B.I., and ended up being head of security at the World Trade Center and died on September 11.

PETER MOLAN: Yeah. Well, of course, those things do happen. There are internal turf battles. In the case of Mr. O`Neill in Yemen, the ambassador was trying to maintain her relationships with the Yemeni government, and there`s a great deal of conflict within the Middle East states. Again, the United States is not well thought of in the Arab world, because of its general policies towards the Middle East, and consequently, it`s very hard to operate there.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Molon, you were brought back after 9-11 to continue investigating because you speak fluent Arabic.

PETER MOLAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: You have been monitoring all the Arab press, Al-Jazeera -- what do you look for specifically when you are inside the Pentagon listening to all of that, watching all of that, and what do you think of the difference between what we see here in the United States and what the rest of the world is seeing?

PETER MOLAN: Well, what do we think of the Arab view of us? It is hostile for a variety of reasons. Reasons that we are not able to address, I suppose, for political - current domestic political reasons such that we are brought into direct conflict with both governments and popular wills. Now, that`s, I suppose, the thing that we have to understand. Both the Arab governments and the Arab streets as it`s called, that is popular opinion, is very hostile to us. And we do a very bad job of trying to address those questions.

Charlotte Beers has been hired by the Bush administration, was hired shortly after 9-11 to carry out an increased program of public democracy - public diplomacy, sorry, public diplomacy, trying to get our story out. But our story has been very hard sell in the Middle East. She has been as far as I can tell, absolutely unable to do much of anything.

AMY GOODMAN: Charlotte Beers, the P.R. specialist.

PETER MOLAN: I take it because she hasn`t got the funding to do much. We have seen very little of American spokespersons getting out and getting their story into the Arab press.

AMY GOODMAN: You also went into internet chat rooms.

PETER MOLAN: Yes, I do that, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you do?

PETER MOLAN: I talk to people. I listen to them. I listen more than I talk. But I do attempt, by that means, since I`m not in the Middle East at the moment, to make contact with people who are not government officials, but - but to get the kind of the view of the common person. I do not -- I do not do that and we are not able to do that, of course, in the Defense Department, per se. But that`s something that I do now, and it`s one of the sources that I try to use to get the views of the populous.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you do? Do you actually pose as someone?

PETER MOLAN: No, no. I just -- I say who I am, an American who has been interested professionally for now 40 years. I -- you say 25 years in the military, and that`s quite true. I was also an academic for a long time. But no, I don`t try to hide my identity. I don`t make it -- I don`t publicize the fact that I was a -- an intelligence officer, but I say who I am.

AMY GOODMAN: Do intelligence officers who are active now -- are they going into these internet chat rooms?

PETER MOLAN: Well, that is something that I would have to let you ask them. There`s the situation that you are talking about with your earlier guests. The military, of course, is ordered not to speak to the press, to allow only public relations officers to speak to the press, and if you -- if you do anything else, you are in breach of orders.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Peter Molan, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Peter Molan will be outside of Walter Reed Medical Center with a number of veterans` groups today protesting the invasion of Iraq. The number again that has startled many, at least 7,000 U.S. soldiers wounded in Iraq. That does it for today`s program. Peter Molan with the Department of Defense for more than a quarter of a century.


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Private Lynch`s media war continues as Iraqi doctors deny rape claim
Sexual assault would have killed injured soldier, says medical team

Gary Younge in New York
Wednesday November 12, 2003
The Guardian

The Iraqi doctors who treated the American soldier Jessica Lynch said yesterday that they were "pained" by accusations that she was raped sometime after being captured.

The doctors insisted that the claims, detailed in her biography, I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story, which was published yesterday, were untrue, and that examinations of her showed that she had not been sexually assaulted.

Ms Lynch was unconscious for three hours after her convoy was ambushed and she says that she has no recollection of what happened to her.

But medical records which form part of her official biography indicate she was raped, according to the author, Rick Bragg. "The records also show that she was a victim of anal sexual assault," the book contends.

"The records do not tell whether her captors assaulted her almost lifeless, broken body after she was lifted from the wreckage, or if they assaulted her and then broke her bones into splinters until she was almost dead."

Ms Lynch`s primary doctor during the three months she spent at the Walter Reed medical centre, which treats casualties from the war, backed up the claim.

"The exam in Landstuhl," Greg Argyros told Time magazine, referring to the place in Germany where she was treated, "indicated that the injuries were consistent with possible anal sexual assault."

Ms Lynch, a supply clerk for the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, has never claimed that she was raped. "Even just the thinking about that, that`s too painful," she said.

But Bragg, a former Pulitzer prize winner, said it was the soldier`s parents who felt that the details of her condition and of the alleged sexual assault should be included in the biography. "Because if we didn`t put it in, the story wouldn`t be complete. It would be a lie," he said.

The author, who left the New York Times this year after he was suspended for failing to credit a freelance reporter for doing the bulk of his reporting, did not visit Iraq while researching the book.

The claims have infuriated and shocked doctors in Nassiriya, where Ms Lynch was taken after a rocket-propelled grenade attack hit her Humvee vehicle on March 23. "She was a woman, young and alone in a strange country," said Jamal Kadhim Shwail, the first doctor to examine Ms Lynch when she was taken to the town`s military hospital by Iraqi special police. When he saw Ms Lynch, Dr Shwail said, she was lying in the hospital reception, unconscious and in shock from blood loss. She was wearing her uniform including a flak jacket, military trousers and boots; none of her clothes had been unbuttoned or removed, as the book claims, he said.

"We only had a few minutes to save her life, we found a vein in her neck to give her fluids and blood," Dr Shwail told Reuters at his home in Nassiriya. "It was our duty to look after her and we did. Now people are saying she was raped, it pains us. The thought did not cross my mind.

"Her injuries were consistent with severe trauma, a car crash, nothing else."

Mahdi Khafazi, who operated on Ms Lynch`s fractured right femur, said he had cleaned her body before surgery: "I examined her very carefully. I cleaned her body including her genitalia. She had no sign of raping or sodomising."

A sexual assault of that nature, he said, would have killed her: "If she had been raped there is no way she could have survived it. She was fighting for her life, her body was broken. What sort of an animal would even think of that?"

Khudair al-Hazbar, then deputy director of the hospital, said: "It was war, but we cared about her and we did everything we could for her. I spoke to her every day. She was frightened, but polite to us. I know she is grateful."

On April 1, after Iraqi forces deserted the hospital, it was raided by US forces. The event was filmed by the military through a night-vision lens and Ms Lynch was taken away on a stretcher.

"They attacked the hospital at night. There were explosions outside which broke the windows. The patients were terrified," Dr Hazbar said. "The Americans knew the Iraqi military had gone, so why they didn`t come for her quietly, I don`t know."

The dispute over the sexual assault is just the latest salvo in the media war over the portrayal of Ms Lynch`s injuries, capture, treatment and rescue, which has intensified in the run-up to the publication of her biography.

Shortly after she was rescued by US soldiers anonymous American officials told journalists that the private had heroically resisted capture, emptying her weapon at her attackers until the last minute.

Subsequent investigations revealed that her vehicle had crashed after her unit lost its way, her M16 rifle, clogged with sand, had jammed from the outset and the Iraqi doctors had not only treated her well but tried to give her back when they were fired upon by US troops. Asked in an interview to be screened last night whether the military`s depiction of events troubled her, Ms Lynch said: "Yeah, it does. It does that they used me as a way to symbolise all this stuff. Yeah, it`s wrong. It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about.

"Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren`t here to tell the story. So I would have been the only one able to say, `Yeah, I went down shooting.` But I didn`t.

"I`m not about to take credit for something I didn`t do. I did not shoot, not a round, nothing. I went down praying to my knees. And that`s the last I remember."

Ms Lynch has also contested claims by an Iraqi lawyer, Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, who reported her whereabouts to the US military and who now lives in America. He claimed in a book that her captors had slapped her.

"From the time I woke up in that hospital, no one beat me, no one slapped me, no one, nothing," she said. "I`m so thankful for those people because that`s why I`m alive today."

Jeff Coplon, who helped Mr Rehaief write the book, said last week that both he and Ms Lynch could be right: "One of the questions that could arise in the wake of this kind of trauma is that someone could believe they remember everything and their memory could still be incomplete."


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`Health will suffer for generations`
James Meikle, health correspondent
Wednesday November 12, 2003
The Guardian

Iraqis will suffer the health consequences of the second Gulf war "for years, maybe generations", says a report warning of an "information black hole" on what is truly happening in the country.

The international health charity Medact said yesterday that up to 9,565 civilians might have been killed between the start of the war in March and October 20, and more were at risk as already weakened public services collapse.

A breakdown in law and order, lack of security and damage to infrastructure threatened further casualties.

Even in 2001, Unicef, the UN`s children`s organisation, reported that one in eight children under five died and one in four was chronically undernourished.

The Medact report, Continuing Collateral Damage, estimates that 22,000 to 55,000 people on all sides, including in the military, had died in the war and its aftermath. The figure is far lower than the 49,000 to 261,000 the UK-based charity forecast before the war, largely because military resistance collapsed quickly.

But disruption to the country`s health was still considerable, says the report`s author, Dr Sabya Farooq, pointing to dangers such as leftover explosives and ammunition - Unicef has said this has hurt more than 1,000 children - landmines, andrisks of cancers from toxic dust from weapons with depleted uranium.

"The mental and physical health of already weakened and unhealthy people is being damaged further," the report says. "Shortages of clean water, adequate food and power leads to an increase in diseases that is likely to result in more deaths than those directly caused by the conflict."

It adds: "The absence of reliable data, the failure of occupying forces to provide full information, and the deteriorated security situation which caused most UN staff and many non-government organisations to leave have led to an information black hole of unique proportions."

The report calls for independent academic institutions or the UN to be funded to monitor the war`s effects, while an assessment of chemical risks and a rapid clear-up of unexploded ordnance should be organised. A strong health sector, eventually paid for by progressive taxation, must be established quickly, it says.

Iraq`s £260bn debt must be cancelled or substantially cut and not left hanging like a millstone around the new democratic government`s neck.

Iraqi doctors working in Britain who attended a London seminar to launch the report warned that health professionals still in Iraq were in increasing danger of kidnap, violence and murder.

Salih Ibrahim, a histopathologist at St Peter`s hospital in Chertsey, Surrey, said: "It is a living hell. Doctors are regarded as soft targets. Nurses on their way to work have to have a male relative to accompany them and wait to take them home."


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So who did invite him?
George Bush`s visit is a nightmare for Tony Blair - but not for the White House, which badly wanted it

Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday November 12, 2003
The Guardian

We all know the feeling. You glance at the diary and realise you have guests coming to stay next week, when nothing could be less convenient. They`re coming from abroad, expecting to be entertained for several days and it`s far too late to cancel. This is the last thing you need.

So spare a thought for Tony Blair, as he scans the calendar and sighs. There are the dates, circled and unyielding: November 18 to 21 - Bush in Britain. He knows what it will mean. His guest is the most unpopular US president in living memory. The anti-war movement will be back on the march, gearing up for its biggest outing since it brought up to 2 million Britons onto the streets in February. Blair will have to make yet more speeches like the one at Guildhall on Monday, once again defending the war on Iraq. And for a fortnight, starting now, all eyes will focus not on the domestic agenda by which his government will eventually be judged, but on the matter which has brought him greatest grief since taking office.

A Times poll yesterday found half the public regard Blair`s closeness to George Bush as bad for Britain; next week will show the two of them standing shoulder-to-shoulder, in coverage that will be wall-to-wall. Blair must want to shout up the stairs to Cherie: "I never wanted him to come here in the first place. Whose bloody idea was this?"

As well he might ask. For no one seems ready to own up to this particular invitation. "It came up as a matter of routine," says a Foreign Office spokesman, "all American presidents get them in their first term." Except Bush`s trip can hardly be described as routine. He will be the first US president to come here on a state visit - with all the extra lashings of ceremony and royal red carpet that that term implies. (There was big hoopla for Woodrow Wilson in 1918 but even that, the protocol experts say, did not quite count.) Working visits are common enough, but a royal welcome is not given easily: Bill Clinton had to wait till his final month in office before he had an invitation to take tea at Buckingham Palace. Bush will be staying there as a house guest.

So how did it happen? The Foreign Office suggests a call to the palace, who promptly insist this was not their doing. "This whole visit is being done with advice - with a capital A," says a palace spokeswoman firmly. The royal family did not do this on their own; government was involved. The two sides cannot even agree on when this wizard idea first surfaced. The Foreign Office says it was settled in June 2002; the palace and US embassy say the first they heard of it was early this year.

All of which makes you wonder if even the hosts are getting cold feet. You can hardly blame them. For who does this trip really benefit? Not Blair, who`s getting a headache he could do without. Not the Queen, who has an allergy to political controversy and, given recent events, can hardly be eager to see her already beleaguered institution tarred by association with the "toxic Texan".

No, there is only one beneficiary of this visit and it is the Bush White House. With an election campaign looming, they are anxious to deflect the accusation that Bush is isolated. They want to show he has allies and friends around the world and few play better in the US than Tony Blair, whose American ratings put his home numbers in the shade.

That explains why Bush is keen to be seen with the PM, but not why he might want the full flummery of a state visit. A clue can be found in the text studied more closely than any other by the political operatives in the Bush White House: the campaign to re-elect Ronald Reagan in 1984. That made heavy use of TV footage which cast Reagan as a statesman, at home across the globe. A favourite sequence showed the president and the Queen on horseback in Windsor Great Park during his 1982 visit. The Bush team want some royal shots like that of their own. Apparently they were particularly keen on an open-carriage procession down the Mall, and are said to be disheartened by London`s suggestion that that might not be possible due to "security".

One Republican source, close to the White House, has a theory as to why the Queen is such an important catch for the image makers. "Look, Americans don`t know shit. They`re not going to recognise the prime minister of the Philippines. The only foreign leaders they could pick out are the Queen of England and the Pope - and we`ve already got those pictures." With the Pontiff in the can, the Queen is the co-star the president needs.

Getting the first ever state visit for a US president was a big request, but Team Bush had just the man to make it. William Farish, the US ambassador to London, has been the invisible man of the diplomatic circuit since he arrived here. But he has one asset: he is a genuinely close friend of the Windsors. A racing fanatic, he even trains and keeps the Queen`s horses at his Kentucky estate.

According to this version, it is Washington, not London, which is driving next week`s visit. Even the timing is designed to suit them: late November is the run-up to Thanksgiving, with Congress due to be in recess and a convenient drought of rival news. They could not wait till next year, when the election campaign will be at full throttle, and when foreign jaunts risk Bush Snr Syndrome - spending too much time abroad when Americans want their president to fix things at home. Next week is the time that best suits the Republican re-election effort, so that is the week he is coming. My Republican source detects the hand of Karl Rove, Bush`s chief political counsellor: "Rove is driving the timing and image-making of all this."

If this is the White House`s thinking, some UK government officials wonder if they might have blundered. The best pictures from next week may be of a giant Bush statue being toppled, Saddam style, in Trafalgar Square. If rioters on heat, rather than a president on horseback, is the defining image of the visit, won`t that be a failure? Not necessarily. So long as the protesters look like the usual suspects - multiply pierced, Genoa-style activists in torn clothes and mohican haircuts - then, I`m told, the White House will not worry. They will be able to say Bush enjoys the global support of all but a few anarchist weirdos. If the demonstrators look like the UK equivalent of America`s "soccer moms", regular people of all ages, including plenty of women - tricky to bring out on a weekday - then Washington may have to rethink.

It seems incredible that the White House could breezily decide to use Britain as a backdrop for a glorified ad campaign - and be granted its wish. The government insists it really wants this visit, that a relationship with the sole superpower cannot be taken for granted, but has to be, in Jack Straw`s words, "maintained and nurtured".

But this seems a stretch. If Britain, which continues to lose soldiers in Iraq, and Blair, who has put his entire prime ministership in jeopardy, have not already done enough to maintain and nurture this relationship, then what kind of relationship is this?

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Migrant workers sue Wal-Mart
Conditions of cleaners `a step from slavery` lawyer alleges

Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday November 12, 2003
The Guardian

Wal-Mart, the world`s biggest company, has been taken to court by a group of former immigrant employees who have accused the US supermarket chain of conspiring with cleaning contractors to employ them in conditions that were "one step away from slavery", the workers` lawyers said yesterday.

The case comes less than three weeks after 60 Wal-Mart supermarkets in 21 US states were raided simultaneously by federal agents and 250 cleaners were detained on suspicion of being illegal immigrants. Since then, foreign workers have told of working seven-night, 56-hour weeks at the budget stores for as little $325, well below the national minimum hourly wage.

James Linsey, one of the lawyers involved in the class action in New Jersey, said the case had been filed in the name of nine plaintiffs, all Mexicans, but that thousands more from Latin America and Eastern Europe were expected to join it.

"This is really the big fish eating the little fish," Mr Linsey said. "It`s the most powerful and richest company in the world taking obscene advantage of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world."

He said Wal-Mart had violated a law that is normally applied to organised crime. The Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organisations Act (Rico) was applied because it is alleged that the company entered into a conspiracy with subcontractors who hired the workers from around the world and transported them to Wal-Mart stores in the US.

"Wal-Mart was systematically defrauding people of the minimum wage, social security protection, and workers` compensation," the New York lawyer said. "If they were injured on the job, they were told to go to the hospital on their own. It`s obscene, and one step away from slavery."

Wal-Mart and its contractors are also accused of failing to make required workers` compensation and social security payments, failing to withhold federal payroll taxes, mail fraud, wire fraud, bringing in and harbouring illegal immigrants and allegedly engaging in a "pattern of racketeering activity" to prevent officials from enforcing wage and immigration laws.

Sharon Weber, a company spokeswoman at Wal-Mart`s headquarters in Arkansas, said: "We do not feel there is merit to the plaintiffs` case and we will quickly move for dismissal of the class action suit."

She refused to discuss the action further, but company officials have denied knowing that illegal immigrants were working in their branches. They said the cleaning contractors had assured them they used only legal labour.

The court documents in the class action case reject the claim that Wal-Mart was unaware of the workers` conditions as "an effort to disguise Wal-Mart`s role as a joint employer of its janitors".

The documents allege: "Wal-Mart purposefully contracts maintenance and janitorial services through the contractor defendants, who are ostensibly independent entities, in an effort to shield itself from the systematic labour law and immigration violations.

"Wal-Mart is, and was, fully aware of and acted to aid and abet the rampant violation of federal and state law by the contractor defendants."

Wal-Mart is the country`s biggest employer, accounting for 2.3% of America`s gross national product. It sells $1.25bn (£750m) worth of goods on an average day through nearly 4,500 stores. It has become the cut-price, low-wage keystone of the economy.

In the UK, it owns the Asda chain of supermarkets.

Wal-Mart is now the subject of a federal grand jury inquiry into its hiring practices. It is also the target of another class action on behalf of 100,000 workers in California, whose lawyers claim were not given full rest and meal breaks or proper overtime payments.


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US wants ban on protests during Bush visit
By Kim Sengupta
12 November 2003


Anti-war protesters claim that US authorities have demanded a rolling "exclusion zone" around President George Bush during his visit, as well as a ban on marches in parts of central London.

The Stop The War Coalition said yesterday that it had been told by the police that it would not be allowed to demonstrate in Parliament Square and Whitehall next Thursday - a ban it said it was determined to resist. The coalition says that it has also been told by British officials that American officials want a distance kept between Mr Bush and protesters, for security reasons and to prevent their appearance in the same television shots.

The Metropolitan Police banned the Parliament Square and Whitehall route by the use of Sessional Orders - which can be enforced for such a purpose when Parliament is in session.

MPs supporting the protests saydemonstrations have been allowed while Parliament was sitting, and, in any case, it was unlikely it will be doing so on the day of the proposed march.

The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said yesterday that Mr Bush should not be shielded from public anger about the Iraq war, and Londoners should not have to pick up the £4m policing bill. He said: "To create a situation in which perhaps 60,000 people remain unseen would require a shutdown of central London which is just not acceptable."

It is reported that Mr Bush`s entourage will number around 500 with up to 200 members of the security service. The Americans are also said to be bringing a US Marine Corps Sea King helicopter, a Black Hawk helicopter and 15 sniffer dogs.

Organisers say they expect between 50,000 and 70,000 people for the biggest protest against a visiting head of state. Andrew Burgin, of the Anti-War Coalition, said: "We have refused to sign off the agreement over Parliament Square and Whitehall, and we shall certainly also refuse to do so on this whole idea of an exclusion zone." He said: "If there is no agreement by next week, we have a potentially highly risky situation with so many protesters in the centre of London."

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour MP, said: "[The police] are under pressure from the Americans, and the losers appear to be people of Britain who want to show their opposition to the Iraq war."

George Galloway, the MP expelled from New Labour over his opposition to the Iraq war, said "What makes the whole matter ludicrous is that on Thursday next week, when the main march takes place, we don`t think Bush is even going to be in London. We think he will be in Sedgefield with Tony Blair.

"We are not blaming the police. We have had no problem with them in previous marches. In our biggest march we had up to two million people, and the number of arrests was lower than on an average Saturday. But the Metropolitan Police are having to cope with a hidden hand which stretches from Washington via Downing Street. "A Scotland Yard spokeswoman said: "The security surrounding the Presidential visit is a matter being discussed between the American authorities, the Foreign office and the Home office."

A police source added: "It is perfectly normal to use Sessional Orders to stop demonstrations in certain areas when Parliament is sitting.

"We don`t want to stop the public from exercising their legitimate right to protest. We are trying to find a reasonable agreement on this."
12 November 2003 10:12



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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November 12, 2003
NEWS ANALYSIS
It`s a Question of Federal Turf
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Nov. 11 — In its decision to accept the Guantánamo Bay prisoners` appeals despite the Bush administration`s objections, the Supreme Court brushed past the "judges keep out" fence the administration had tried to erect around its open-ended detention policy.

No matter how the court eventually rules, that action alone may well come to define a singular moment in the relationship between the White House and the Supreme Court, two inherently powerful institutions that for the last several years have been in alpha mode, each intent on exercising its power to the maximum extent possible.

Though it may not have been clear that the court was ready to join the post-Sept. 11 debate, it now appears that the administration laid down a challenge the justices were unwilling to ignore. This was a moment long in coming: the imperial presidency meets the imperial judiciary.

There were less confrontational ways for the administration to defend its view that the Guantánamo policy does not violate any constitutional or statutory rights. It could have defended the policy on its merits, taking the position that the detainees are receiving all the due process to which they are entitled under the circumstances and summoning the deference that the Supreme Court and other courts have traditionally given to executive branch claims of military necessity.

Or it could have defended the position it took successfully before the lower courts — that the federal courts have no jurisdiction over the detention of foreigners held in military custody outside the country`s borders — while conceding that this jurisdictional question was itself sufficiently important to merit the Supreme Court`s attention. Parties to Supreme Court cases, who have won in the lower courts, do occasionally acquiesce to the court`s review while continuing to defend their victory.

Instead, the administration drew an uncompromising line at the threshold of the entire debate, insisting in the brief filed by Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson that these were not cases that the Supreme Court should even hear. The implication was that there was nothing to discuss.

Yet the question of jurisdiction — whether the courthouse doors are open to various categories of cases and claimants — goes to the heart of the Supreme Court`s role, as the court`s critics as well as its friends have always understood.

There have been periodic efforts in Congress to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over questions — abortion, school busing for integration, prayer in the classroom — to which lawmakers think the courts are giving the wrong answers. Senator Wayne Allard, Republican of Colorado, recently introduced a bill to strip the lower federal courts of oversight on cases involving the Pledge of Allegiance, display of the Ten Commandments on public property and other touchy church-state questions.

Jurisdictional questions, in other words, lie not at the margins but at the core of the judicial function. The question the justices framed on Monday for their review of the Guantánamo cases — "Whether United States courts lack jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba" — may have appeared at first glance to reflect only a technical or preliminary slice of the larger debate.

But to the justices, that is the question from which all else flows. If indeed there is no jurisdiction — if a 1950 precedent, issued in a quite different but unmistakably related context, really means that the federal courts may not review the Guantánamo detentions — then it will be the Supreme Court and not the White House that says so.

The administration`s argument that the Supreme Court should not even hear the cases was thus a direct challenge to the court`s sense of itself, a battle joined on the court`s own most sacred ground.

"I`m surprised the administration chose to defend such a hard-line position," David A. Strauss, a former assistant solicitor general who now teaches at the University of Chicago Law School, said on Tuesday. "It`s almost as if they are interested in vindicating an abstract point." Mr. Strauss signed one of the "friend of the court" briefs urging the justices to accept the cases.

The administration`s stance was consistent with its uncompromising position in disputes with other branches of government. It refused a Congressional request for information about the energy policy task force Vice President Dick Cheney ran early in the administration, and recently appealed to the Supreme Court to block a federal district judge`s ruling that two outside groups, Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club, were entitled to some information about the task force. The administration characterizes the lower court`s ruling as threatening to "violate fundamental principles of the separation of powers."

As for the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, it has been extremely jealous of its prerogative to "say what the law is," in the words of the chief justice`s judicial hero and predecessor 12 times removed, Chief Justice John Marshall in the landmark case of Marbury v. Madison.

In a series of recent decisions, the court has made it clear that it regards constitutional interpretation as an exercise for itself alone, not to be shared with the other branches. In a recent article, two Yale law professors, Robert C. Post and Reva B. Siegel, wrote that the court`s current "juricentric" view of its role departs substantially from recent tradition.

The battle over who gets the last word in this round may have little bearing on the fate of the Guantánamo detainees. Even if the court finds jurisdiction, it is highly unlikely that any federal judge would order a detainee`s release over military objections. But that does not diminish the importance of what happened on Monday, when the Supreme Court could have turned away but decided, instead, to decide.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 12, 2003
For Bush, a Janus-Like View of Trade
By ELIZABETH BECKER

WASHINGTON, Nov. 11 - In the next few weeks, President Bush will decide what kind of a trade president he wants to be.

After coming into office vowing to surpass the record of President Bill Clinton and aggressively press for new free trade agreements, Mr. Bush`s administration finds itself facing growing complaints that some of its policies look like those of a protectionist rather than a free trader.

The administration faces the prospect of a trade war with Europe if the president fails to lift his temporary steel tariffs, which were ruled illegal on Monday by a World Trade Organization panel. A week from now, talks are to resume to extend the North American Free Trade Agreement throughout the Western Hemisphere, a proposal that has been protested by labor unions, small farmers and environmental advocates.

Even the staunchest allies, like Australia, have complained that the farm bill President Bush signed into law last year is an impediment to new global trade agreements.

All countries will be watching to see if Mr. Bush, the leader of a nation that has profited substantially from global trade, defies the W.T.O. and accepts $2 billion of European sanctions rather than lift the 30 percent tariffs that are meant to protect the American steel industry as it consolidates.

Politics will naturally play an important role in that decision, just as it did when the administration decided to impose the steel tariffs and accept new American farm subsidies as the necessary price to pay for the authority to negotiate free trade agreements with little interference from Congress.

The steel tariffs went a long way to winning votes from lawmakers representing manufacturing states. The farm states, led by Representative Larry Combest, Republican of Texas, made it clear that their votes depended on support for the 2002 farm bill. At one stage, Mr. Combest removed his name from the legislation for trade authority until the president assured him of his support for the increased farm subsidies.

Now the bargain struck for trade promotion authority is threatening to backfire.

Sebastian Mallaby, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Mr. Bush and his trade representative, Robert B. Zoellick, had committed the classic mistake of free traders who thought they could "buy the allegiance of protectionists, whether they are big farmers or the steel industry, to make some advance in their long-term trade policy and not become captives of the protectionists."

"It was naïve of them to think there wouldn`t be a price for all of this," Mr. Mallaby said. "Now, they`ve disillusioned people in their own free trade camp."

The immediate issue is the steel tariffs, and the White House remains divided over them.

President Bush`s economic team at the White House - led by Stephen Friedman, director of the National Economic Council, and N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers - is in favor of ending the special steel tariffs. The tariffs have never been popular among economists, who generally oppose trade barriers of most types.

President Bush`s political advisers, however, are looking at next year`s election and the role steel producers in Pennsylvania and Ohio will play in helping win these important battlegrounds. But those and other big industrial states are also home to big steel consumers, like car manufacturers and their suppliers, which have been paying higher prices.

White House officials say they do not need to make a decision on the steel tariffs right away. The European Union must wait for the W.T.O. to officially approve the panel`s ruling sometime from Nov. 21 to Dec. 10. And they say there are potential compromises that might placate the Europeans without abandoning all the tariffs.

But to some lawmakers who are worried that the mood in the country is moving against free trade, this seems like unnecessary delaying tactics.

Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, said on Tuesday that the time had come to end the steel tariffs. Taking the side of industries that use steel and complain that the tariffs raise their cost of doing business, Mr. Alexander said the tariffs had already destroyed jobs in the American automobile industry. Now, he said, foreign sanctions would do more damage.

"Because of the W.T.O. ruling,`` he said, "continuing the tariff will destroy thousands more of our textile and agricultural jobs. President Bush`s honest effort to save steel jobs is now backfiring and hurting American workers."

The obvious question is whether the trade promotion authority was worth the bargain on steel and subsidies.

So far, Mr. Zoellick has completed free trade agreements with Chile and Singapore that were begun during the Clinton administration. He succeeded in starting a new global trade round at Doha, Qatar, not long after the attacks of September 2001. But nearly two months ago, the talks broke up spectacularly at Cancún, Mexico, in large part over American and European farm subsidies.

Other direct, nation-to-nation trade talks are under way, and Mr. Zoellick hopes to wrap up a free trade agreement with five Central American countries by the end of the year.

Next week, Mr. Zoellick will have a chance to improve that record at a Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting in Miami - hoping to push ahead with another Clinton initiative to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement to the entire hemisphere.

That got back on track last weekend when Mr. Zoellick agreed to focus on lowering tariffs for the moment rather than to continue battling for new rules he wants covering intellectual property rights, government procurement and foreign investment. In return, Brazil agreed to put aside, for the moment, its demand for a reduction in United States farm subsidies.

Those subsidies are also on the political radar screen. The "red states" territory in the Midwest and South that voted for Mr. Bush in the 2000 election are some of the biggest recipients of those subsidies, and it is unlikely that he will upset those voters with a new free trade agreement soon before the presidential election.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 12, 2003
In Search of Nuclear Control

After years of claiming to seek only peaceful nuclear reactors, Iran now acknowledges having tested uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing, both of which can be used to make weapons material. Fortunately, to make a bomb, the uranium needed further enrichment and the amount of plutonium was insufficient. In other words, Iran seems to have been caught at an early stage of a secret program. But nobody can be sure whether this is the whole truth or whether Iran simply admitted what it thinks international inspectors already know. It is especially troubling that the inspectors — who revealed Iran`s admission in a new report from the International Atomic Energy Agency — found traces of highly enriched uranium that have yet to be satisfactorily explained.

Under intense international pressure, Iran has now agreed to open itself to more intrusive inspections and suspend its uranium enrichment program, at least temporarily. That is not good enough. Iran has no legitimate need to pursue either enrichment or reprocessing technologies and should forswear both approaches entirely.

Mohamad ElBaradei, director general of the I.A.E.A., has a good proposal for international control of such weapons-grade material and the facilities to produce it. He says all enrichment and reprocessing facilities should be under multinational control, along with a guarantee to provide nuclear fuel to any nation that wants it for legitimate power purposes. Meanwhile, experts are assessing a variety of other ways to rein in nuclear proliferation, ranging from a total ban on commerce in weapons-grade materials to using market forces to discourage such commerce.

Dr. ElBaradei has rightly warned repeatedly in recent weeks that current measures to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons are far too weak to remain effective. Unless dangerous nuclear materials and facilities can be brought under international control, rogue nations or terrorist groups will find ways to make weapons-grade uranium or plutonium and fabricate a bomb. Iran is only the latest case in point. North Korea is another one.

Control efforts are hampered by the almost impossible dual mission given the I.A.E.A. under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The agency is supposed to help signatories develop civilian nuclear programs while ensuring that the programs are not used to produce weapons material. The agency relies on inspectors and monitoring equipment. The problem is that nations are free to drop out of the treaty on short notice, as North Korea did after possibly amassing enough material for several bombs. Countries can also hide their programs from the inspectors, as Iran has been doing for almost two decades. This is why Dr. ElBaradei`s proposals are so urgently worthy of consideration.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 12, 2003
Hold the Vitriol
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Considering the savagery with which the Snarling Right excoriated President Clinton as a "sociopath," blocked judicial appointments, undermined U.S. military operations from Kosovo to Iraq, hounded Vincent Foster and then accused the Clintons of murdering him, it is utterly hypocritical for conservatives to complain about liberal incivility.

But they`re right.

Liberals have now become as intemperate as conservatives, and the result — everybody shouting at everybody else — corrodes the body politic and is counterproductive for Democrats themselves. My guess is that if the Democrats stay angry, then they`ll offend Southern white guys, with or without pickups and flags, and lose again.

A new report from the Pew Research Center says that America is more polarized now than at any time since its polling series began in 1987. Partly that`s because it used to be just the Republicans who were intense in their beliefs, while now both sides are frothing.

The latest Progressive magazine features the article "Call Me a Bush-Hater," and The New Republic earlier published "The Case for Bush Hatred."

I see the fury in my e-mail messages. In a fairly typical comment, one reader suggested that President Bush and his aides are "lying, cynical greedy pirates who deserve no better than a firing squad." At this rate, soon we`ll all be so rabid that Ann Coulter will seem normal.

I worry about the polarization partly because I`m afraid that America is now transforming into something like Old Europe, the political moonscape that I remember when I was a student in England in the 1980`s.

Two friends, both named Chris, epitomized Britain to me back then. Right-wing Chris was an an ardent Conservative from the south, a graduate of an exclusive private school; left-wing Chris was a working-class bloke from the north, a Labor Party supporter from a state school. Right-wing Chris read The Telegraph; left-wing Chris read The Guardian.

That was pretty typical of the tribalism of Old Europe. Left and right came from different social classes, lived in different areas, attended different schools and despised each other.

Since then, Europe has matured and become much less polarized — becoming more like (Old) America. And unfortunately the U.S. is transforming itself into the classic European pattern of reinforcing cleavages. A red state/blue state divide overlaps an evangelical/secular divide and a Fox News/Al Franken divide.

The most striking cleavage is the God Gulf, and it should terrify the Democrats. Put simply, liberals are becoming more secular at a time when America is becoming increasingly religious, the consequence of a new Great Awakening. Americans, for example, are significantly more likely now than in 1987 to say they "completely agree" that "prayer is an important part of my daily life" and that "we all will be called before God on Judgment Day to answer for our sins."

The Pew survey found that white evangelicals are leaving the Democratic Party in droves. Fifteen years ago, white evangelicals were split equally between the two parties; now they`re twice as likely to be Republicans. Likewise, white Catholics who attend Mass regularly used to be strongly Democratic; now they are more likely to be Republican.

Since Americans are three times as likely to believe in the virgin birth of Jesus as in evolution, liberal derision for President Bush`s religious beliefs risks marginalizing the left.

Anyone who isn`t concerned by the growing political incivility in this country doesn`t remember how the antagonisms in Europe became so caustic that they often blocked governance (not to mention triggered civil wars in Spain and Greece). Already, in this country the public vitriol discourages public service.

The left should have learned from Newt Gingrich that rage impedes understanding — and turns off voters. That`s why President Bush was careful in 2000, unlike many in his party, to project amiability and optimism.

Core Democratic voters are becoming so angry that some are hoping for bad economic figures and bad Iraq news just to hurt President Bush. At this rate, Democrats risk turning themselves into an American version of the old British Labor Party under Michael Foot, which reliably blasted the Tory government and reliably lost elections.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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[Punk24]

jetzt will ich auch mal was beim Joerver schreiben

Dienstag, 11. November 2003
Anti-Bush-Kampagne
Soros gibt Millionen

George W. Bush nicht mehr an der Spitze seines Landes zu sehen, ist dem US-Milliardär George Soros offenbar einiges wert. Der Finanzmogul hat nun fünf Mio. Dollar für eine Kampagne zur Abwahl von Bush bei der Präsidentschaftswahl 2004 gespendet.

Wie die "Washington Post" berichtete, floss das Geld in die Kasse der liberalen Aktivisten-Organisation MoveOn.org, die sich für die Demokratische Partei einsetzt.

Bereits vor wenigen Monaten hatte der 74-Jährige einer anderen den Demokraten nahestehenden Gruppe zehn Mio. Dollar gespendet. Die "Washington Post" zitierte Soros mit den Worten, es sei das "zentrale Ziel" seines Lebens, dass Bush abgewählt werde.

Quelle: http://www.n-tv.de/5193909.html

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Mariam Jassam, 3, prays alongside her aunt, Suham Mohammed, at her aunt`s home in Baghdad, where her family was living temporarily after their home was destroyed in March
`I`m Waiting for My Destiny`
Baghdad Family Made Homeless by U.S. Missile Still Can`t Rebuild
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; Page A01


BAGHDAD -- Down the street from the trickle of sewage, past a shabby market where three U.S. Army Humvees patrolled through crowds, Madhlum Jassam clambered hesitantly over rubble left by a U.S. bombing in March. To no one in particular, he whispered a phrase. "God forbid," he said over and over. "God forbid."



"This is the refrigerator," he muttered, pointing to a crumpled carcass tossed in the debris that he called home. "These are my daughters` clothes," he said, gesturing toward a dusty brown sweater that was no longer familiar. He stopped, taking a deep breath, and surveyed the life he once had. "What can I do?" he asked, shaking his head. "Yell? Beat my chest?"

Jassam`s new life began on March 31, when his home was destroyed by a U.S. missile strike nine days before Iraqi President Saddam Hussein fell. In the seven months since, like the country still shadowed by that collapse, he has tried to rebuild.

In vain, he sought compensation from U.S. officials administering the occupation -- seeking $5,000, recognizing he would settle for less. In desperation, he considered asking for charity from neighborhood mosques. And in resignation, he -- like his country, perched as it is between war and peace -- waits with frayed patience for answers to uncertainties.

"How`s it going to end? I`m still waiting for my fate. I`m waiting for my destiny," he said. "Only God knows."

There`s a saying in Iraq, often quoted by the elderly to describe misfortune. It tells of a married woman courted by a man named Ali. She divorces her husband, only to have Ali die. "She didn`t keep her husband," it goes, "nor did she get Mr. Ali."

Like many in his country, Jassam is haunted by the proverb, and his story is a tale of today`s Iraq. The country has endured a revolution whose reward is often lost on its people. Despite promises of prosperity and security, the U.S. occupation and reconstruction have yet to restore even the certainties of the past, shattered by the brief but violent war. In the shards left behind is a sense of helplessness. Jassam lost his home, then, in the void that has lingered, he surrendered hope.

He gazed at his house, the wreckage taking on the air of permanence.

"I`m like a farmer at the harvest," he said, "and my sickle is broken."

Fleeing to the Country

In the war that began March 20, the odds were stacked against Jassam`s house, a four-room building of gray concrete and yellow brick. The neighborhood of Radwaniya was a redoubt of Baath Party repression, home to a palace of Hussein`s, housing for his officers and barracks of his military elite. Even to those who lived there, its name had become a synonym for a killing field.

A few days after the war began, as Iraqi television aired patriotic songs, footage of goose-stepping soldiers and stock images of Hussein firing a rifle into the air, Jassam, his wife and his three children fled with two pillows, a blue-and-brown blanket and what they had left from government rations -- tea, rice, sugar, cooking oil and lentils. They piled into a battered orange-and-white taxi and, like hundreds, perhaps thousands of others, headed down the highway west for the safety of the countryside.

"We were escaping death," said his wife, Jamila Abed.

The driver was a friend. Rather than charge the going rate of 30,000 Iraqi dinars -- 10 times the prewar price -- he took them for free. It was, Jassam said, another instance of a community that pulled together, creating bonds that didn`t exist before or afterward.

Within an hour, they were in fields irrigated by the Euphrates River, staying with a cousin who had opened his home to the families of three other relatives and six strangers. As tradition dictates, he provided his guests -- 35 in all -- with mattresses, blankets, food and drink. Jassam`s family took up residence on the cold concrete floor of a guardhouse, next to a chicken coop.

For the weeks they were there, it provided the families` sustenance.

"We finished the whole coop," he said. "We ate chicken for lunch, we ate chicken for dinner. For breakfast, we had eggs."

The bombing was distant, but the threat of death lingered. The family recalled U.S. military helicopters flying low, suspicious of the crowds that had gathered at the farmhouse. They recalled the days of waiting, and they remembered the fear.

"Most of the time, I sat with my children in my lap," said Abed, a veiled woman whose bearing befits her university degree. "I`m a mother, and I love my children. If a missile landed, I`d want us to die together. I`d want them to die close to my heart."

Hussein was toppled on April 9, but they stayed for another 10 days or so, fearful of the chaos that followed in Baghdad. Over that time, they spoke little about the dictator, less about the future. Abed remembered one sentiment that overwhelmed them.

"There was no more death," she said.

In Baghdad, Jassam`s house and two others were already destroyed -- flattened in a missile strike that came, as neighbors recalled, at 3:30 a.m. Scavengers had already picked the rubble clean of belongings. His neighbor, who stayed in Baghdad, lost his mother, sister, wife, two sons and a daughter. Weeks later, Jassam said, the man was seen wandering the streets, having lost his mind.

Life at the Hospital

Wearing a nurse`s coat and the haggard look of the overwhelmed, Jassam tried to negotiate the demands of families streaming last week into Yarmouk Hospital, where he works a 24-hour shift three days a week managing a wing that treats broken bones. Gone was the civility and solidarity Jassam recalled from the war. In their place were confusion and chaos.

Some families were frustrated, some were angry. Their unmet demands were not unlike Jassam`s, played out on a smaller stage. Most of them wanted a response, perhaps just an assurance that someone was in charge.

"What do you want from me?" the gaunt, 42-year-old Jassam carped as a young man entered his office, its yellow paint peeling.

To another, who threatened to complain, he said sternly, "If you want to complain, you can complain, a thousand times."

In came a father whose son was shot in the right leg during a carjacking. He asked for a stretcher. "Do I have stretcher? Does it look like I have a stretcher? Go ask one of the assistants." Another asked where Dr. Mohammed was, seeking help for a neighbor wounded in the left arm as he tried to stop a robbery. "God knows," Jassam answered, lingering on each word. "I don`t know."

Arabic is infused with formalities. In most instances, the responses are reflexive, removing any awkwardness from an encounter. For Jassam, they could carry the edge of sarcasm. "God bless you for visiting us," he told a woman whom he turned away.

"Some people say, `Please, can you give me an injection? Can you take my blood pressure? Can you give me a Band-Aid?` " he said, his desk stacked with tattered pink patients` folders. "Until now, I haven`t done my prayers. I haven`t done them. I have no time. I have no time to think. Since the fall of the government, after the destruction of my house, I`ve felt tense all the time, always.

"You should excuse me," he said.

For more than three months -- or, as Jassam puts it, 100 days -- his family lived down the hall in Room 14, unused at the time. To secure the deal, he agreed to work as an always-available nurse. Abed and the three children -- Mustafa, Rasul and Mariam -- lived on three hospital beds pulled together. Their clothing hung from curtain rods that once separated patients. The hospital administrator asked them not to wander the halls and, to fill their time, the children made dolls out of bandages and other supplies.

Since the summer, they have moved from house to house -- a week here, three days there, a few weeks at another home, sleeping -- as Abed said -- "like sausages." They now live at his mother`s house, sharing the floor of his brother`s room. Tape from the war still covers the windows to stop glass from shattering in a bombing. They cook on a white stove next to the bathroom.

"Any person who doesn`t complain, who keeps smiling at me, I end up staying," Jassam said.

On this day, he sat in his office after the crowds dispersed. His son Mustafa, 9, who attends school nearby, sat on a cot with a soiled green blanket. He opened his notebook, adorned with pink flowers, and read a poem from his Arabic class.

"My house, my house, my house."

"How beautiful is the house."

"How beautiful is the person sitting inside with nightingales and flowers."

"My father and my mother are two suns lighting the house."

Jassam said nothing.

Compensation Denied

On a cool, sunny day last week, Jassam returned to the house, in a swath of impoverished Baghdad where rural and urban still collide. A feral dog picked at the rubble. Across the street, in a lot awash in sewage, two horses stood tethered to a wall. This time, he came alone. When he brought Mustafa this summer to see what it had become, the child cried so violently he vomited.

As he stood on the street, his neighbor, 36-year-old Shadha Hashim, approached him. Her house, too, was damaged.

"No one has given us any compensation," she shouted. "Whom do I file a complaint with? Why won`t anyone help us?"

"God help you," Jassam said. After she left, he spoke from his own experience. "They`ll ask anybody to help them," he said. "Everybody wants compensation. Everybody expects they should receive compensation, but no one is providing it."

Jassam first ventured back to his house 10 days after the war. They had lived there for 10 years, building it room by room and saving money for appliances by selling cans of government-rationed baby`s milk for about $2. When he arrived, nothing was left.

"I imagined where my son was sitting, where my wife was sleeping. I knew that if I hadn`t fled, I would be in the other world. Only God knows," he recalled. "I sat down on the ground. I put my head on my hands, and the neighbors came toward me."

They thanked God that he was alive, that his wife and children were safe.

"All the neighbors said, `Come live in our house, our house is your house. Whatever you need is here,` " he remembered. "If they weren`t crying for me with their eyes, they were crying in their hearts.

"It`s difficult," he said. Then he repeated the words.

For two months, Jassam went repeatedly to a nearby U.S. military base. He prepared a claim form, photocopied his property deed and identity papers and tucked pictures of the damage in a manila folder. He shaved his beard, wore a white dress shirt striped with purple and put on a blue tie with red polka dots, the only one he owned. But after six visits to the base and a barely functioning courthouse, he was told bluntly if politely: The military was not responsible for damage inflicted during combat.

He said the interpreter working with U.S. forces told him he would have to wait until a government was established.

For a time, he considered going to two mosques in his neighborhood. The prayer leaders there offered to take a collection, even recruit worshipers to rebuild a room or at least a wall. But he said he was too proud to get their help. Dignity was all he had left.

"Until now I`ve refused," Jassam said. "You can imagine, it`s difficult." Then he repeated the words.

It`s in God`s hands now, he said. "I`ve delivered my case to God."

In Arabic, Jassam`s first name, Madhlum, means oppressed or wrongly treated. The irony prompted a rare smile.

"My name is Madhlum and I really am madhlum," he said, now laughing. "I`m madhlum, I`m madhlum, I`m madhlum. Until I die, I swear to God, I`ll be madhlum, either under Saddam or under the Americans."

Uncertainty and Fear

Two phrases are heard often in Baghdad -- one a description, the other a proverb. The situation is taaban, people say -- it`s tired or worn out. The other is more portentous: The ground is getting wetter. It means things are getting worse.

Jassam and his wife mentioned both.

Amid the cacophony of often-contradictory sentiments that define Baghdad, neither expressed anger at the U.S. forces, but both chafed at the idea of an occupation. They said they wanted the Americans to set up a government and help write a constitution -- in Jassam`s words, "today rather than tomorrow."

But they feared the chaos that might follow the departure of U.S. forces in a country they said viewed freedom as anarchy, with its specter of sectarian and ethnic strife and threat of crime.

Sitting at the elementary school, where they picked up Mustafa, they talked of a city that was unfamiliar and uncertain.

"There`s no government, there`s no law. Who will listen to us?" asked Jassam, his eyes bleary after finishing a 48-hour shift. "Until now we don`t know what the law is. Only God knows what will come in the following months."

The lack of authority dictated their lives, they said. Who would pay Jassam`s salary next month? Who would bring down prices that have doubled for tomatoes, jumped 50 percent for meat and chicken? How would they save money for a house?

"What is democracy?" Abed asked, her daughter sitting in her lap. "What is democracy?"

"There are so many pressures on the people," she added. "If people feel happy, if they feel prosperous, then they can search for other things. But now the main worry is to get from day to day. Look at us, we`re poor, what do we think about? We think about a house. We think about buying cooking gas and an oven. All of this was gone in a second."

She sat back in the couch in the headmaster`s office, again a guest in a room not her own. She repeated a mantra heard countless times in Baghdad these days -- istiqrar and aman, stability and safety.

"A house is stability and safety," she said. "We have nothing in our hands. What can we do? With Saddam, we couldn`t do anything. Now with the Americans, we can`t do anything either. I hope, I wish the future will be good. But it`s not in my hands."

As he often did, Jassam quoted a saying infused with faith. "God guides those who wish to be guided," he said.

Then, wounded by his wife`s tears, he spoke in less lofty terms.

"I feel lost," he said. "If there is no home, you`re completely lost. I feel like a stranger."


© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Explosion Rocks Italian Police in Iraq

The Associated Press
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; 4:54 AM


ROME - An explosion on Wednesday rocked the headquarters of the Italian Carabinieri police in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, and Carabinieri in Rome said some Italians may have died and others may be trapped in the debris.

An explosive device went off at about 10:40 a.m. Iraqi time at the multinational specialist unit in the southern city, the Italian paramilitary police said in a statement. The statement said that the explosion occurred in front of the base, near the Iraqi chamber of commerce.

Maj. Roberto Riccardi, an official with the Carabinieri in Rome, said the building was in flames, and that some Italians may have died. "It`s possible," he said, adding that details were difficult to come by because communication had been severed.

"We cannot exclude the possibility that there are soldiers under the rubble," he said by telephone.

Carabinieri also said there may be injuries among Iraqis.

Italy has sent about 2,500 troops to help the reconstruction in Iraq. About 300 Carabinieri are based in the Nasiriyah camp, along with 110 Romanians. Everyone was believed to have been inside the building at the time of the blast, because it occurred early in the morning, Riccardi said.

Since August, vehicle bombs have targeted several international buildings, including the United Nations headquarters, the offices of the international Red Cross, the Baghdad Hotel and the Turkish and Jordanian embassies in Baghdad.

Nasiriyah, a Shiite city, had been relatively quite in recent months, although it was the scene of heavy fighting during the war. It was where the 507th Maintenance Company was ambushed in March and where a number of Americans were captured, including Jessica Lynch.

There have been no combat-related fatalities among Italian troops serving in the multinational force.

The Italian official heading up U.S. efforts to recover Iraq`s looted antiquities, Pietro Cordone, was in a car that came under mistaken U.S. fire in September in northern Iraq. Cordone`s Iraqi interpreter was killed in the shooting.


© 2003 The Associated Press

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Blair Defends Bush Partnership
President`s Visit Seen as Chance to Explain Policies
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; Page A19


LONDON, Nov. 11 -- Prime Minister Tony Blair, facing a wave of protest over President Bush`s planned state visit here next week, pleaded Tuesday with the British public to give Bush -- and himself -- a chance to explain anew their policies on Iraq and terrorism.

"What I say to them is, just listen to the argument," Blair said in an interview with six American news organizations. "Try not to believe that myself or President Bush are sort of badly motivated people who want to do the worst, just try and look at it from the perspective that we are talking on."

Blair acknowledged a new Times of London poll in which 60 percent of Britons surveyed said they disapproved of the way Bush was handling the situation in Iraq and half said they believed the strong personal relationship between Bush and Blair was bad for Britain. "For us as leaders, we would not be doing these things, particularly in circumstances where frankly there isn`t much popularity to be gained , unless we deeply believed it was the right thing to do," Blair said.

"Look, it is not that you have got a president of the United States sitting there just looking for the next place to invade," he added. "There is a real, serious, fundamental type of security threat that we face, it is of a different nature than before, [and] it has to be tackled in a different way."

The timing of the Bush visit, billed as the first state visit by a U.S. president in British history, seemingly could not be worse from Blair`s point of view. His personal approval ratings are down, public support for the military effort in Iraq has reached record lows, and the Bush administration is viewed by many on both ends of the political spectrum here as alarmingly unilateralist.

British military officials have reportedly expressed frustration over the way the occupation of Iraq has been conducted and their lack of clout with the American overseers of that process. There are enduring tensions with Washington because of Britain`s efforts to reconnect with its main European partners, France and Germany, over a European Union defense capability and over a joint diplomatic effort to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. In addition, many Britons remain critical of the continued detention without charge or trial of nine British terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But Blair, who appeared relaxed and voluble during the 45-minute question-and-answer session at his Downing Street office, insisted that his relationship with Bush remained as strong as ever and that their disagreements were minor. He rejected the argument of some of his critics that Britain would be in a stronger position in the world -- and he would be better off politically -- if he was more critical of his American ally.

"I don`t believe it is very sensible when you are in a coalition and you are fighting a war, and then fighting the peace in very difficult circumstances, to be mouthing off every so often," he said. "And actually I don`t believe that the essential strategy of the Americans is wrong, I believe it is right."

He said he welcomed Bush`s visit because it would give the two leaders an opportunity to make a joint case for the war on terrorism.

"There is a genuine debate about this, and it is a debate I welcome, because I think in the end the more people hear the argument, at least they can see that we have a point," Blair said. "Now whether we are right or wrong about it, people can make their judgments."

Some critics charged that Bush would not be able to hear their protests during his three-day visit, saying police had acceded to a White House request to establish what they called "an exclusionary zone" in central London in which demonstrations would not be allowed. A spokesman for Scotland Yard, the metropolitan police force, said officials were considering invoking a law banning protests in the area around Parliament when the institution is in session.

But the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who has been bitterly critical of Bush, said at a news conference Tuesday that he was certain a "reasonable balance" could be struck between security needs and peaceful protest.

"The ideas of some American security advisers that perhaps we should shut the whole of central London for three days, ignoring the economic consequences of that, I don`t think that`s got a chance at all," Livingstone said. "I would point out we haven`t had a prime minister assassinated in this country for 190 years."

Blair, the leader of the left-of-center Labor Party, acknowledged that his partnership with Bush seemed anomalous, at least on the surface. "The oddest thing about the past couple of years since September 11th is I find as a politician it is completely muddled up, left and right, in the political spectrum," he said. "There is a Republican president who probably did not think a great deal about nation building but here we are in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, and to an extent in the Middle East also trying to do precisely that, and liberating Afghanistan from the Taliban, and Iraq from Saddam, with quite a lot of people on the left saying what on earth did you do that for? I find it a curious time because it has changed perceptions."

Europeans still do not grasp the impact of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Blair said. "People have a view that [Bush] was determined on this action in Iraq way before September 11th, it was something he had just come into office determined to do," Blair said.

"But September 11th was a fundamental change and I think that American policy is evolving, this is why I think it is important that he comes and it is important that he is given the opportunity to speak and people listen to the case that he is making."


© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Skepticism About U.S. Deep, Iraq Poll Shows
Motive for Invasion Is Focus of Doubts

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; Page A18


More than half of Baghdad`s residents said they did not believe the United States would allow the Iraqi people to fashion their political future without the direct influence of Washington, according to a Gallup poll.

With the Bush administration holding consultations on the future of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, recent analyses of the poll data, which were gathered three months ago, highlight the roots within that city`s populace of many of the concerns the U.S.-led coalition now faces there.

Only 5 percent of those polled said they believed the United States invaded Iraq "to assist the Iraqi people," and only 1 percent believed it was to establish democracy there.

Three-quarters of those polled said they believed the policies and decisions of the Iraqi Governing Council -- whose members were appointed in July by Coalition Provisional Authority Administrator L. Paul Bremer -- were "mostly determined by the coalition`s own authorities," and only 16 percent thought the council members were "fairly independent."

The poll, funded by Gallup, was conducted through face-to-face interviews with 1,178 Baghdad residents between Aug. 28 and Sept. 4. The initial results were announced in late September, but additional analyses were released to the polling firm`s clients in succeeding weeks. Some Gallup analyses have been published on the Coalition Provisional Authority`s Web site in the past two days.

Although 52 percent of those polled said they thought the United States was serious about establishing a democratic system of government in Iraq, 51 percent said Washington would not allow Iraqis to do that without U.S. pressure and influence. The margin of error in the poll was plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.

In an Oct. 28 analysis, Richard Burkholder, Gallup`s director of international polling, noted that most Baghdad residents thought getting rid of Saddam Hussein was worth the hardships they are enduring. But "most are deeply skeptical of the initial rationale the coalition has given for its actions," Burkholder added.

The poll showed that doubts about the U.S. motives for invading had led to doubts about Washington`s commitment to creating an independent democratic government in Baghdad.

Forty-three percent of the respondents said they believed that U.S. and British forces invaded in March primarily "to rob Iraq`s oil." While 37 percent believed the United States acted to get rid of the Hussein regime, only 5 percent thought it did so "to assist the Iraq people," the poll found.

An additional 6 percent believed the motive was to "change the Middle East `map` as the U.S. and Israel want." Four percent believed the purpose was to destroy weapons of mass destruction, the primary reason given by the Bush administration.

At a time when the United States faces a growing security threat, the poll pointed to other possible reasons why coalition forces are being looked upon as occupiers instead of as liberators.

Almost everyone interviewed -- 94 percent -- said Baghdad "now is a more dangerous place than before the invasion," and 86 percent said that for the previous four weeks "they or a member of their household had been afraid to go outside their home at night for safety reasons," Burkholder said in his analysis. He noted that in the two months before the U.S. invasion, only 8 percent said they had experienced a similar fear.

Asked about attacks against U.S. troops, 64 percent said they were not justified; 36 percent said they sometimes were. Burkholder noted that those who believed such attacks were somewhat or completely justified -- 11 percent and 8 percent, respectively -- would translate to 440,000 adults 18 or older among Baghdad`s adult population of 2.3 million.

Forty-eight percent of those polled said they did not believe that the United States will "remain in Iraq as long as necessary, but not a day more," as President Bush has said. Thirty-six percent said they believed that the Americans would leave as Bush had promised.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Trials and Error


By Philip Allen Lacovara

Wednesday, November 12, 2003; Page A23


Two years ago this week, President Bush authorized trials by military commission for people accused of membership in al Qaeda or attacks on the United States. Six men have been identified thus far to appear before these commissions.

Shortly before the president issued his executive order, and just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, I raised my voice in strong support of military commissions. As deputy solicitor general in the Nixon administration, I had been in charge of the government`s criminal and internal security cases before the Supreme Court. I understood how the Bush administration could invoke the laws of war sanctioned by the Supreme Court to deal with international terrorists -- as distinct from "mere felons" (including mass murderers) and legitimate combatants entitled to protection under the 1949 Geneva Convention as prisoners of war. I urged the administration to do so.

When I proposed using military commissions to try terrorists, I conceived of trials with fair and reliable procedures designed to ascertain guilt -- or, equally important, innocence. I knew there would be critics of this approach but was confident that both legal and policy factors justified such trials.

Now, two years later, I reluctantly conclude that the administration`s approach to military commissions confirms many of the critics` worst fears.

The rules governing military commissions depart substantially from standards of fair procedure. Most problematic, they undermine the basic right to effective counsel by imposing significant legal constraints on civilian defense attorneys. The rules negate normal attorney-client confidentiality and authorize the withholding of key evidence from defendants and their civilian counsel. In addition, the military commission rules permit the Defense Department to restrict defense lawyers` ability to speak publicly about a case -- while Pentagon officials face no such constraint.

While the government reserves the right to listen in on attorney-client communications, defendants and their civilian counsel may be denied access to relevant and even exculpatory information if the military concludes that concealment is "necessary to protect the interests of the United States." The rules also purport to bar the civil courts from any review of the eventual judgments of the tribunals.

Not surprisingly, few eligible defense lawyers have decided to participate in these cases, and the criminal defense bar has called for lawyers to boycott the proceedings. In defending these military commissions, representatives of the Bush administration constantly refer to the well-known Quirin case -- in which the Roosevelt administration established a military commission during World War II to try eight Nazi saboteurs who had sneaked into the United States and thereby forfeited their status as soldiers entitled to be treated as POWs.

What they fail to note is that the Supreme Court decision in that case accorded much more in the way of legal rights to those eight Nazis than the administration is proposing today. The accused saboteurs retained the right to confidential communications with their counsel, access to all relevant evidence and Supreme Court review of the lawfulness of the proceedings against them. In a subsequent case involving the notorious Japanese Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Supreme Court reaffirmed this important principle, granting even enemy leaders the right to have civil courts review the lawfulness of their prosecution and conviction by military commissions.

Surely if such procedural guarantees could be extended to acknowledged enemies prosecuted under the Articles of War applicable during World War II, they also can be accorded to the suspects the administration wants to put on trial before specially constituted military commissions today. But they are not. Further undermining the legitimacy of the process is the fact that the Defense Department`s instructions for the military commissions grant broad discretion to the president and secretary of defense to close the entire proceeding, acting on undefined "national security interests." Armed with this license to close the trials, the Defense Department has also failed to respond to repeated inquiries from human rights groups and others seeking authorization to attend military commission trials as observers.

As a lawyer who has served as an international observer at "state security" trials in Yugoslavia and Turkey, I know how important it is to ensure that the antiseptic glare of sunlight be allowed to shine on politically sensitive trials. Earlier assurances by senior administration officials that proceedings before military commissions generally would be open, with some type of public access provided, have given way more recently to vague statements that the issue of access for impartial legal observers will be addressed once trials are officially scheduled.

The administration`s refusal to make a definitive commitment now suggests that public access may become another casualty in the war on terrorism.

All of this needs to be scrutinized and sorted out quickly -- especially now that the administration has identified six potential defendants for these military trials. Given the stakes for both security and liberty interests, a more precise and balanced -- and therefore more credible -- approach to military justice certainly is in order.

The writer, a former deputy solicitor general of the United States and former counsel to the Watergate special prosecutor, is a board member of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. He will answer questions about this column during a Live Online discussion at 2:30 p.m. today at www.washingtonpost.com.



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Harvesting Voters


By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, November 12, 2003; Page A23


If you read the headlines about last week`s elections, you`d think the Republicans were on a roll. GOP gubernatorial candidates won the statehouses in Kentucky and Mississippi as the South continued to morph into one vast Republican plantation.

But the implications of these races for the 2004 presidential contest were nonexistent. Mississippi and Kentucky are no more in play in next year`s election than Austria and Hungary are. These states are George W. Bush`s, come what may.

The real action last week was in Pennsylvania, a battleground state if ever there was one. Bush has visited the Keystone State 23 times since becoming president, more than any other state; its 21 electoral votes loom large in the electoral calculations of both parties.

And it was the Democrats who had themselves one fine Election Day in Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, incumbent Democratic Mayor John Street scored an impressive victory over Republican businessman and perennial candidate Sam Katz, winning 59 percent of the vote.

The cause for Democratic celebration is not Street himself, who seems unlikely to make it into the pantheon of great American mayors. Rather, it is the astonishing voter registration and mobilization campaign waged on Street`s behalf by several organizations, chiefly the political operation of local congressman Chaka Fattah. When the voting rolls closed last month, it had registered 86,000 new voters over the preceding three months, virtually all of them from Philadelphia`s African American and Latino communities. In a city of 1.49 million residents (according to the 2001 Census Bureau estimate) that`s a mind-boggling achievement. I know of no voter registration campaign anywhere in the United States over the past several decades that can claim results this impressive.

The voter registration drive wasn`t the only thing that Street had going for him, of course. The discovery of FBI-planted bugs in his City Hall office just as the campaign was entering the home stretch galvanized the city`s African American community. In a twinkling, Street was transformed into a persecuted black leader whom John Ashcroft`s Justice Department was trying to bring down.

In fact, the revelation of the FBI`s surveillance brought Street up. Four years ago, he eked out a 51 percent to 49 percent victory over Katz, winning by 9,000 votes out of 430,000 cast. Last week his victory margin was 85,000 votes out of 490,000 cast.

But it`s the registration campaign that`s of national significance, for it was the pilot project of the Partnership for America`s Families. The partnership is one of the several voter outreach organizations (called 527s in the argot of election law) that have arisen on the Democratic side since the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law prohibited the official national party committees from raising megabucks to fund such efforts. The mastermind behind the partnership -- as he is behind several of the 527s -- is Steve Rosenthal, the former AFL-CIO political director, who is well on his way to creating the most formidable Democratic field operation in decades.

The Partnership for America`s Families is funded by a number of unions to the tune of $12 million over the next year. Another Rosenthal-led 527, America Coming Together, has a budget of just under $100 million and has already received several tidy $10 million donations from Democrats with discretionary income, such as George Soros. That level of resources allows Rosenthal to go into 17 battleground states and establish field operations in black and Latino communities earlier than the Democrats have ever done.

Though heartened by some recent reforms at the Democratic National Committee, Rosenthal is a longtime critic of many of the official party`s voter outreach campaigns. "The Democratic program aimed at minority voters has often been to ignore them for one year and 50 weeks out of a two-year election cycle, then send in recorded phone messages from Bill Clinton and last-minute mail," he says. "Our goal is to try to keep communicating with people over a two-year process."

In that regard, the Philadelphia project was a model of its kind. Tom Lindenfeld, a veteran political operative and Rosenthal associate who helped shape the project, says that the program had a far more intensive canvasser training program than is the norm, and that canvassers returned to the same households, in some of the city`s most desolate neighborhoods, four times over the course of the summer and fall. At that level of frequency, a canvasser becomes almost an old-style ward heeler, though minus the plums of patronage.

The Philadelphia project is not going away; indeed, Lindenfeld thinks it can add 85,000 minority voters to the rolls before next November. Other operations funded by the Partnership for America`s Families are already registering voters in St. Louis and Cleveland, and Rosenthal marvels that he has the resources to hire as his state directors experienced operatives "who`ve won these states for Democratic governors or senators" -- not the 25-year-olds who have often run such operations in the underfunded past.

"We plan to bring millions of voters back to the political process" over the next year, Rosenthal says. If Philadelphia is any indication of what`s to come, that is no idle boast.

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continuing collateral damage
the health and environmental costs of war on Iraq 2003

PDF Datei mit Daten und Tabellen
http://www.medact.org/tbx/docs/Coll%20Dam%202.pdf
siehe auch heute Bericht im Guardian.

This evidence based report analyses from a public health
perspective the health and environmental costs of the war on Iraq 2003. It builds on Medact’s report of a year ago, Collateral damage: the health and environmental costs of war on Iraq. This report shows that the war had and will continue to have a major impact on the physical and mental health of civilians and combatants, and on the environment and physical infrastructure of Iraq.
The report is by Medact, an organisation of health professionals that exists to highlight and take action on the health consequences of war, poverty and environmental degradation and other major threats to global health. For many years the organisation has highlighted the impacts of violent conflict and weapons of mass destruction and worked to improve the health of survivors of conflict such as refugees.
This report, and annexes to individual sections, can also be found on the Medact website www.medact.org and on the
website of ippnw www.ippnw.org.
This report assesses the impact of the 2003 war on the environment and on the physical and mental health of civilians and combatants. It describes the war and some of the weapons used; its impact on health and the environment; and health-related issues in postwar reconstruction. The health of civilians and combatants has suffered greatly and continues to suffer. Its conclusions may help to determine whether waging war on Iraq was
more or less damaging than alternative courses of action; how best to conduct postwar affairs to minimise further loss of life and maximise health gain; and how to approach such issues in debates about other conflicts. The report ends with recommendations relating both to Iraq and prevention of war.
Keywords: conflict, environment, health, international development, Iraq This report and an executive summary are available in English, Arabic and Italian, from Medact
and on the website – www.medact.org. Annexes to sections are also available on the website

The war and the weapons
Iraq was attacked on 20 March 2003 by a coalition comprising the US, the UK, Australia and Poland (ground forces), and Denmark and Spain (naval forces). The ‘fall of Baghdad’ came less than three weeks later and the US announced the end of the war on 1 May 2003. Combat operations had mostly been ‘conventional’ (air strikes and missile attacks) and all weapons used were conventional – that is, not chemical, biological or nuclear. Armed forces
consisted mainly of aircraft, heavy artillery and light
weaponry.
However, some of the weapons used during the conflict have indiscriminate effects, i.e. they impact on combatants and civilians alike: not only are cluster weapons, landmines and depleted uranium weapons likely to create civilian casualties during combat operations, but they also remain a potential health hazard for local populations years after the conflict.
Considering that Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions prohibits indiscriminate attacks (Art.51.4) and prescribes the protection of civilians (Art.51.1), the use of such indiscriminate weapons, especially in built-up areas (see table 1) can be regarded as controversial, or of dubious legality.
This section looks at these contentious weapons, their destructive potential and subsequent health effects.
Table 1 gives quantities and descriptions for each weapon as well as a small representative selection of incidents. It is based on publicly available information and is by no means exhaustive, owing to governmental secrecy and unreliable data. When available, official quantities are figures presented as total quantities by governments or military personnel they may not represent the entire truth.
Cluster weapons contain submunitions called ‘bomblets’ - explosive projectiles designed to separate and spread when released. When they explode, fragments of munitions penetrate the body, maiming or provoking lethal internal bleeding. This ‘fragmentation effect’ is an intended design objective.
About 30% of victims die even with good life support (Husum et al 2000). Bomblets are designed to explode on impact, but many fail to explode and become de facto landmines. The new L20 used by British forces is designed to self-destruct when it fails to explode, but its failure rate is 2%. However, the old BL-755 has no self-destructing device and a high failure rate (~10%). The US used its new precisionguided CBU-105 bomb but did not acknowledge use of older types of cluster bombs, which are probably responsible for the Basra and al-Hillah atrocities
among others. It also refused to provide figures for ground-launched cluster munitions, used in far greater quantities, but Human Rights Watch has identified the use of the Multiple Launch Rocket System (which fires cluster munitions), with a failure rate of 16% (1.4.03).
Depleted uranium (DU) is used in anti-tank ammunition because it is dense and heavy, and penetrates heavy armour. After explosion, it leaves a chemically toxic dust, but only people inhaling significant amounts of dust are susceptible to DU poisoning. DU is also weakly radioactive but serious risks of cancer could only arise from internal radiation, i.e. from inhaled dust embedded in the lungs (Royal Society 2001). No comprehensive scientific study has ever been carried out to prove whether DU played a part in reported increases in Iraqi cancers and birth defects or in Gulf War Syndrome after the
1990-91 war. However, a 2003 UN Environmental Programme study found proof of groundwater contamination seven years after the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and recommended the use of alternative water sources (Unep 2003b). Despite this,the US said it had no intention of cleaning up residues from DU weapons (BBC News Online
14.4.03), and it has not given any figures for DU munitions fired from battle tanks. Experts estimate that between 1,100 and 2,200 tonnes of DU were used during the conflict, compared with 350 tonnes in 1991 (The Guardian 25.4.03).
Landmines used by Iraq included anti-personnel (AP)fragmentation mines and blast mines.These cause leg and groin injuries and secondary infections which often lead to amputations, extensive hospital stays and rehabilitation (ICBL 1999). Stockpiles of Iraqi landmines were found around the country including in civilian buildings and a mosque, and hundreds were laid in water tanks, in and around towns, on roads and bridges and in oilfields (Landmine Action 2003). The 1997 Ottawa Treaty bans landmines, but Iraq has not signed it and used many different types of landmines which continue to pose a major threat to life and health in Iraq.
Explosive remnants of war (ERWs) are live munitions left after conflict. From figures published in Hansard (table 1), it is possible to calculate that British cluster weapons alone left between 2,000 and 3,000 ERWs – US ERWs are impossible to estimate owing to incomplete data. Fleeing Iraqi soldiers abandoned large quantities of ammunition, often in easily accessible locations, including 100 Iraqi surface-to-air

Table 1 PDF

missiles around Baghdad (Unicef 2003). By May, the Humanitarian Operations Centre in Baghdad identified 317 minefields and 1,102 Coalition cluster munitions strike sites (Landmine Action 2003). A Unicef briefing points out that, since the end of the war, over 1,000 children have been injured by ERWs, especially cluster bomblets which are colourful or shiny, and ‘come in interesting shapes that are attractive to children’ (2003). Clearance is slow, painstaking and dangerous so the problem will persist for years. Before and during the war, UK and US leaders made much of the ability of precision bombing to
minimise civilian casualties. However, the war showed that deployment of laser/satellite-guided does not necessarily reduce ‘collateral damage’, because Coalition troops also used older types of weapons or used precision weapons in built-up areas.
Civilian facilities hit by the Coalition include numerous homes, markets and farms (Herold 2003), three hospitals, several communications facilities, and the Palestine hotel where foreign journalists were staying. In addition, some of the weapons used in or near built-up areas were indiscriminate; for example, US officials admitted that 26 of the 1,500 US cluster bombs were dropped within 500m of civilian areas (US Department of Defence 25.4.03). Landmines and DU weapons were also used in and around towns
(see table 1).
All these weapons are likely to pose significant long-term health risks for civilian populations, strain health services, and slow down the reconstruction process.
Health and environment – impact assessment
The direct effects of war.
The impact of war on combatants and civilians arises both from the direct effects of combat, namely battle deaths and injuries, and from the indirect consequences of war that continue to be felt years after conflict ends (Ghobarah et al 2002). It includes both physical and mental trauma, though the latter is less often acknowledged or quantified in war statistics.
Making an accurate body count in wartime is an act of responsibility and a historical record. The difficulties of making a count are obvious - death certification ceases, and bodies are blown to pieces, buried under rubble, burned beyond recognition or buried quickly, in accordance with Islamic custom. This is compounded by the US government’s reluctance to collect statistics of Iraqi casualties. Victors in modern wars may underestimate the
number of dead and the vanquished overestimate them, so truth also becomes a casualty. Civilian deaths and injuries
The number of civilians killed since the beginning of the war and October 20, 2003 is independently estimated to be in the range of 7,757-9,565 (Iraq Body Count) (see Table 2). These figures are currently being corroborated by researchers in house-to-house surveys checking each death against different sources and visiting hospitals, mortuaries and cemeteries (CIVIC). Reliable numbers of civilians injured during conflict are difficult to obtain. Health professionals have no time to keep records and under-reporting is likely due to rapid removal of the injured from the scene of the incident. One assessment using reports from the media and non-governmental organisations estimates at least 20,000 civilian injuries by July - three times the number of deaths (Iraq Body Count). Of these 8,000 were in the Baghdad area alone; there is no full countrywide picture. Deaths and injuries from unexploded ordnance continue and are likely to be
under-reported, according to the Mines Advisory Group.
Combatant deaths and injuries The number of Iraqi military deaths is unknown, the estimates ranging between 13,500- 45,000. This is based on extrapolating from death rates of between 3-10% found in the units around Baghdad, although
it is believed the overall casualty rate may lie closer to
the lower figure (The Guardian 28.05.03).The US military estimates 2,320 Iraqi military deaths from fighting in and around Baghdad alone (Reuters).The Iraqi Red Crescent is exhuming mass graves to identify Iraqi war dead, including at the airport where the most intensive fighting took place (The Guardian 19.08.03).
The official number of American and British combatants killed during the war was 172. The postwar phase saw more US casualties in the next five months than during the war. By October 20 a further 200 American, 18 British and 4 other service personnel had died, many to hostile action (Iraq Coalition Casualty Count) but the total number of
deaths due to all causes is much higher due to accidents, illness and suicide (The Guardian 4.8.03).
The number of Americans wounded in Iraq between March 20 and October 19 is officially reported as 1,927, half of them postwar, though unofficial figures are much higher (Coalition Casualty Count, The Guardian 4.8.03). Over 6,000 US personnel are

Table 2 PDF

mental illness (Washington Post 2.9.03). Little is known about them but there is public concern about long-term and potentially fatal health problems resulting from exposure to DU or obligatory anthrax vaccinations, both believed to be among the triggers of Gulf War Syndrome.
Unlike US and UK combatants, very few Iraqi combatants have access to adequate health or social care or long-term rehabilitation services. There are no reliable figures but the number of wounded is generally calculated as three times the number of deaths, which gives a range of 40,500 – 135,000 injured Iraqi combatants.During the looting of Tuwaitha nuclear power plant, people tipped uranium on the ground so they could use its containers to store food and water. Some 150 of the 500 containers are still naccounted for and aid workers uncovered a mixing canister containing several kg of uranium. Radioactivity levels in houses including one source are 10,000 times above normal. Local reports describe people suffering from nose-bleeds, vomiting, breathing difficulties and skin problems.
Occupying forces have refused unlimited access to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). However, a limited inventory of one location estimates that 10 kg of uranium compound could have been dispersed and demands a concerted effort to recover it. It is essential the IAEA be given a full mandate to search survey and decontaminate towns and villages around Tuwaitha and carry out a
full assessment of the situation at all nuclear sites in Iraq.
Radioactive hazards
A country in ruins
The condition of a country’s environment and physical infrastructure has a significant direct and indirect impact on its people’s health. Already seriously damaged by earlier wars and sanctions, the physical infrastructure suffered further degradation in the 2003 war. Less tangible but equally important is the social infrastructure, battered by oppression and war. Violence, poverty, unemployment and family/community relationships all influence health and the prospects for individual and community development.
The environment and physical infrastructure
Environment
The conflict added to the chronic environmental stresses that have accumulated in Iraq over the past 20 years (Unep 2003a). Major threats include environmental degradation and the destruction of water and sanitation systems. Power cuts and shortages stop the pumps that remove sewage and circulate fresh water, leading to contamination and health risks, and also affect the pumps that remove saline water from irrigated lands, leading to further waterlogging and
salinisation.
Smoke from oil well fires and burning trenches caused air pollution and soil contamination. Heavy bombing and the movement of large numbers of vehicles and troops further degraded natural and agricultural ecosystems. Large quantities of military debris, including unexploded ordnance, litter the environment. Depleted uranium used in weapons and armour is known to be an environmental
contaminant.The looting of nuclear power plant sites caused dispersal of radioactive materials and contamination of the environment, in addition to the possibility of radioactive materials falling into the wrong hands (see box).
Water and sanitation
Clean water and good sanitation are prerequisites to health; in their absence, infectious diseases flourish and kill vulnerable people, especially babies. Iraq’s water and sanitation systems were severely disrupted in the 1990-91 Gulf War and not repaired to former standards.The water system was further affected by the recent conflict: in Baghdad, around 40% of the network was damaged, leading to loss or contamination of piped water. Shortly after the war
began 40% of the people of Basra had little or no water and drank directly from the polluted river. Sabotage, and breaking pipes open to use the supply even when contaminated,was common. UN tankers are supplying many areas while 80% of prewar capacity has now been restored in Baghdad (The Guardian 16.8.03).
In 2000, more than 4.8 million people did not have access to any type of sanitation (WHO and Unicef) and the system is now even worse (Care International 22.5.03). Sewage treatment plants were stripped bare during the looting and sewage is flowing back into the rivers; it may take up to a year to rectify. Meanwhile people are unaware of basic preventive measures and there are few health workers to teach them.
Nutrition and food security
Malnutrition,which results from low food intake or an unbalanced diet or both, is a major determinant of poor health in Iraq. Before the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the imposition of UN sanctions, Iraq was one of the best-fed countries in the Middle East and imported two-thirds of its needs. From 1997 until the 2003 war, the nutritional status of three in five Iraqi people depended on food rations distributed under the Oil-for-Food programme (OfF), but these did not provide a nutritionally adequate and varied diet (FAO 2000). The food basket rarely lasted the month and lacked important nutrients such as vitamins A and C, riboflavin, folate and iron. Some families supplemented the rations with food from local
markets, but many families could not afford to buy extra and were particularly vulnerable to malnutrition.
In preparation for war, the Iraqi government supplied double and triple rations and people stored what they could. In the event food shortages were avoided due to stockpiling and the relatively short interruption to OfF, which has been extended until February 2004.
Viable plans are needed to meet future nutrition needs, widespread unemployment and poverty have eroded domestic purchasing power, and few families will be self-sufficient. Some households sell part of During the looting of Tuwaitha nuclear power plant, people tipped
uranium on the ground so they could use its containers to store food and water. Some 150 of the 500 containers are still unaccounted for and aid workers uncovered a mixing canister containing several kg of uranium. Radioactivity levels in houses including one source are 10,000 times above normal. Local reports describe people suffering
from nose-bleeds, vomiting, breathing difficulties and skin problems.
Occupying forces have refused unlimited access to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). However, a limited inventory of one location estimates that 10 kg of uranium compound could have been dispersed and demands a concerted effort to recover it. It is essential the IAEA be given a full mandate to search survey and decontaminate towns and villages around Tuwaitha and carry out a full assessment of the situation at all nuclear sites in Iraq.
Radioactive hazards
A country in ruins
The condition of a country’s environment and physical infrastructure has a significant direct and indirect impact on its people’s health. Already seriously damaged by earlier wars and sanctions, the physical infrastructure suffered further degradation in the 2003 war. Less tangible but equally important is the social infrastructure, battered by oppression and war. Violence, poverty, unemployment and family/community relationships all influence health and the prospects for individual and community development.
The environment and physical infrastructure
Environment
The conflict added to the chronic environmental stresses that have accumulated in Iraq over the past 20 years (Unep 2003a). Major threats include environmental degradation and the destruction of water and sanitation systems. Power cuts and shortages stop the pumps that remove sewage and circulate fresh water, leading to contamination and health risks, and also affect the pumps that remove saline water from irrigated lands, leading to further waterlogging and
salinisation. Smoke from oil well fires and burning trenches caused air pollution and soil contamination. Heavy bombing and the movement of large numbers of vehicles and troops further degraded natural and agricultural ecosystems. Large quantities of military debris, including unexploded ordnance, litter the environment. Depleted uranium used in weapons and armour is known to be an environmental contaminant.The looting of nuclear power plant sites caused dispersal of radioactive materials and contamination of the environment, in addition to the possibility of radioactive materials falling into the wrong hands (see box).
Water and sanitation
Clean water and good sanitation are prerequisites to health; in their absence, infectious diseases flourish and
kill vulnerable people, especially babies. Iraq’s water and sanitation systems were severely disrupted in the 1990-91 Gulf War and not repaired to former standards.The water system was further affected by the recent conflict: in Baghdad, around 40% of the network was damaged, leading to loss or contamination of piped water. Shortly after the war
began 40% of the people of Basra had little or no water and drank directly from the polluted river. Sabotage, and breaking pipes open to use the supply even when contaminated,was common. UN tankers are supplying many areas while 80% of prewar capacity has now been restored in Baghdad (The Guardian 16.8.03). In 2000, more than 4.8 million people did not have access to any type of sanitation (WHO and Unicef) and the system is now even worse (Care International 22.5.03). Sewage treatment plants were stripped bare during the looting and sewage is flowing back into the rivers; it may take up to a year to rectify. Meanwhile people are unaware of basic preventive measures and there are few health workers to teach them.
Nutrition and food security Malnutrition,which results from low food intake or an unbalanced diet or both, is a major determinant of poor health in Iraq. Before the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the imposition of UN sanctions, Iraq was one of the best-fed countries in the Middle East and imported two-thirds of its needs. From 1997 until the 2003 war, the nutritional status of three in five Iraqi people depended on food rations distributed under the Oil-for-Food programme (OfF), but these did not
provide a nutritionally adequate and varied diet (FAO 2000). The food basket rarely lasted the month and lacked important nutrients such as vitamins A and C, riboflavin, folate and iron. Some families supplemented the rations with food from local markets, but many families could not afford to buy extra and were particularly vulnerable to malnutrition. In preparation for war, the Iraqi government supplied double and triple rations and people stored what they could. In the event food shortages were avoided due to
stockpiling and the relatively short interruption to OfF, which has been extended until February 2004. Viable plans are needed to meet future nutritionneeds, widespread unemployment and poverty have eroded domestic purchasing power, and few families will be self-sufficient. Some households sell part of their rations to buy essential clothing and medicine, while a quarter of families interviewed in the poor district of Shu’la in Baghdad had no income at all (Save the Children 2003).
These heavily subsidised rations should be replaced by supplies targeted at vulnerable people as defined by nutritional needs assessment. Domestic food production must be re-established to reduce the reliance on external aid and food imports. However, conflict, sanctions and drought, and the regime’s despoliation of fertile lands in the Kurdish north and Shia south, have wrecked agriculture and the rural economy (FAO), while US troops have destroyed
orchards of oranges, lemons and date palms (The Independent, 11.10.03). Farmers lack seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, fuel, spare parts and other tools, animal feed, and vaccines and medicine for livestock. The lack of veterinary services and quarantine controls could result in the spread of animal disease, with serious implications for the entire region (FAO). Power
Iraq’s prewar electricity supply was erratic and weak, with homes, public services and industries often forced to rely on their own generators for long periods. The war caused temporary deterioration of power supplies in many areas. Restricted electricity means ineffective water pumping, no cold storage for essential vaccines and drugs, more accidents and lack of air conditioning, thus making it difficult for hospitals and health centres to function.
The picture varies nationally. Baghdad slums lack electricity most of the time, while in the north supplies are near normal for the first time in years. Around 500 pylons in the Basra region were toppled by saboteurs, including utility workers anxious to keep power supplies for themselves rather than Baghdad (The Guardian 4.10.03). Elsewhere copper was stolen from power lines. Restoration will require $10 billion and may take as long as three years (The Guardian 17.9.03).
Despite abundant oil production, problems with the electricity grid and the dilapidated refineries are causing shortages in the supply of fuel for cars and domestic or commercial use, with long queues and higher prices. Fuel riots broke out in Basra in August, while UN officials predict winter shortages of kerosene, used for heating homes in the north (New York Times 11.08.03).

Housing
Aerial bombardment and ground combat in urban areas destroyed or damaged many buildings including schools and factories, but no information is available on the number, or on people rendered homeless and now living in overcrowded conditions with relatives or neighbours.These upheavals and living conditions are hazardous to mental and physical health. Population movements and crowding in temporary shelters increase the risk of waterborne and airborne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. The war caused no mass movement of refugees, but thousands were temporarily displaced. Some minority groups once protected by the Iraqi government left for fear of persecution (UNHCR).

Health services
Prior to 1990, the Iraqi health system was considered to be one of the best in the Middle East and the health status of the Iraqi people was comparable to that of other middle-income countries. The health system was financed by central government and provided free healthcare to all Iraqis irrespective of income. The 1991 Gulf war and over a decade of sanctions caused a drastic decline in the public health system and preventative programmes suffered a significant deterioration. Problems with maintaining essential medical equipment affected the functioning of health facilities. In 1997 the Iraqi government was able to
meet 10-15% of the country’s medicine needs and only a quarter of medical equipment was considered operational. Laboratory services were seriously impaired and an intellectual embargo had serious consequences for medical training with no textbooks or medical journals being allowed into the country during the 1990’s.
The already dilapidated health system was further damaged by ground combat, aerial bombardment and looting during the recent war. Around 7% of hospitals were damaged during combat with at least three hospitals being directly hit (Associated Press 31.3.03; 11.4.03) and about 12% being looted.

Security remains the country’s main health issue:
both as an underlying reason for seeking medical care and in limiting access to services (The Lancet 18.10.03).
The conflict caused a breakdown of the cold chain system used for storing vaccines, which meant some 210,000 newborns had no immunisations and risk preventable diseases such as measles (Unicef).Political and/or religious groups, many with armed guards, now run half the public health clinics in Baghdad and in the absence of a government there are concerns for a health system heading towards deregulation and privatisation (Colombo 2003). There are continuing shortages of staff, specialised drugs
(for cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancer) and equipment and staff are severely stretched as wards overflow with victims of lawlessness. Psychological and social impact Studies of the health impact of war tend to overlook less visible effects such as disruption of individual and societal development (Ugalde et al 2000).

The psychological impact on civilians
The initial ‘shock and awe’ bombing campaign undoubtedly generated acute anxiety among Iraqi civilians and combatants that will trigger a significant increase in common mental disorders of anxiety and mood disturbance (Dyer 2003). The prevalence of common mental disorders is likely to be similar to destabilised conflict areas and much greater than in stable countries (de Jong, Comproe and Ommeren 2003). Long-term morbidity will include more
suicides, greater disability, increased drug and alcohol abuse and more social and domestic violence - major obstacles to the restoration of a stable society. Iraq’s only long-stay mental hospital, Al-Rashid in Baghdad, was looted and its 1,200 inpatients allowed to leave.Around 600 have not returned and their fate is unknown. The incidence of behavioural and emotional disorders is likely to be high among children and adolescents, interacting with broader social issues of moral breakdown, violence and educational failures.
Cognitive developmental disorders are likely to be increased through association with malnutrition and poor general health. Combatants’ mental health Recognition is growing of the psychological distress experienced by combatants and its long-term consequences (Stuart and Halverson 1997), but there is no hard data on combatants in this war. Mental wellbeing in conflict is generally protected by a sense of attachment to the purpose of the conflict, but many Iraqis were conscripts with little loyalty to the regime. Coalition forces have far more psychological support available although there is controversy over the adequacy of such support. The postwar situation where service personnel remain targets for violence is highly stressful, judging by evidence from the
former Yugoslavia (Hotopf et al 2003).

Social impact
Since the war robbery, burglary, kidnapping and violence have been widespread and the authorities are struggling to establish law and order. The US army has too few soldiers to keep the peace effectively and only 150 of the 400 law courts are believed to be in operation (The Independent 9.8.03). The removal of the regime and dismissal of the top
four layers of management created a power vacuum. Newly promoted officials lack experience in top-level leadership, policy and management posts. The decision to disband the military and purge most Ba’ath Party members from government posts with no reintegration or job creation has driven unemployment up from 50% before the war to more than 60% (BBC News Online 7.7.03). Mass
unemployment reinforces the deprivation cycle of joblessness, poverty and ill health. Iraqis who do have jobs suffer from dangerous levels of occupational ill health, including accidents and illness. Most now work in the informal economy with few safeguards. Dangerous occupations such as sex work and smuggling have expanded, while social welfare has diminished.
The crisis of law and order threatens vulnerable people,with reports of rape and abduction of women and children, and organised networks in human trafficking (CARE Intl 22.5.03). More children live on the streets; many family and community networks that protect them are not functioning and exploitation for sex or slavery is likely (Unicef). For every Ali Abbas, the severely injured boy who lost 16 relatives and is now being cared for in the UK, there are thousands of children receiving no expert help. School attendance rates after the war fell to an average of 65% and even lower for girls (Unicef).
Although new textbooks and renovated premises have been provided, many parents are keeping their children at home because of security fears. Poor literacy, especially among females, has a negative impact on health, while a good primary education system provides protection against exploitation and injury, and allows children to regain a sense of normality as well as develop skills for the future. The security situation, and the emergence of brands
of religious conservatism that restrict women’s choices, has a particularly negative impact on women. Before 1990 Iraq was in the forefront of Arab countries promoting education and employment for women, but this has reversed.
Widowhood through war, deprofessionalisation, rising unemployment and widening education differentials all damage their status and prospects.The decline is particularly acute in rural areas. All these factors may contribute to a worse state of health for women and a rise in infant mortality and morbidity.

Iraq’s state of health
The state of people’s health in Iraq was already poor when the war started, as illustrated by the most recent reliable figures from 2001 (WHO, Unicef):
• Life expectancy at birth: 59 for men and 63 for women.
• Deaths of children under five: 133 per 1,000, or one in 8.
• Maternal mortality: 294 deaths for every 100,000 births.
• One in four children under five chronically malnourished.
• A quarter of all children born underweight.
This is the cumulative result of the effects of war in 1990-91;
living under Saddam Hussein’s regime;
economic under-development, accentuated by the period of sanctions; increasing levels of poverty and malnutrition; and a steady deterioration in the quality and availability of health services.The impact of the 2003 war compounded this already poor state of health, afflicting people who were already weakened and whose ability to withstand further trauma, let alone create a new society, was thus
severely compromised.
The impact of war on health is usually assessed only in terms of its most direct and visible effects - death and injuries through conflict. Even then much goes unrecorded.Yet as indicated throughout this report, the full effects of war on health are felt through many other less direct but potentially equally or more deadly pathways. Lack of access to clean water and the undermining of household food security, for example, are both known to increase child mortality.
The diagram below illustrates the multiple direct and indirect pathways through which war affects health at the individual and societal level in Iraq. By their very nature it can be inferred that precise measurement of the true impact of war is methodologically complicated. Counting injuries and deaths is difficult enough in wartime, but estimating the impact on other indicators such as child mortality, access to clean water and mental health is extremely problematic.
In spite of the need to acknowledge and attempt to measure these complex and multiple pathways, there is a lack of accurate and reliable data in many postwar situations, including Iraq. Poor mortality and morbidity data are a consequence of the Coalition authority’s failure so far to collect and record data, as well as the collapse of routine health information systems. So little reliable data on the health of the population is available (Colombo 2003) that it isimpossible to present any population-based health indicators that allow a comparison of health status
before and after the 2003 war.
The information in this report nevertheless suggests that in addition to the direct effects of war on injuries and death, there has been deterioration in all the intermediate determinants of health affected by war shown in the table. It can therefore be concluded that the rates of the prewar indicators above have deteriorated, in other words that people’s health is generally even worse.
This conclusion is reinforced by the state of collapse of many basic services as well as prevailing violence and insecurity, and further substantiated by recent small-scale surveys. For example, there has been a dramatic increase in waterborne diseases such as gastrointestinal diseases, typhoid and cholera. A postwar nutritional assessment in Baghdad found that acute malnutrition or wasting had nearly doubled from 4% in 2002 to almost 8%, and that 7 out of 10 children had suffered from diarrhoea (Unicef). The main health hazards continue to be communicable diseases,nutritional deficiencies, unattended childbirth (48% home deliveries), and noncommunicable and
chronic mental and physical conditions.
The full impact of the war on health will not be known for years, if ever. Good health and social information systems will be necessary to monitor disease incidence and new disease patterns, including conditions that have been previously controlled, and mental as well as physical health. If insufficient progress is made on the multiple determinants identified here, which will be affected by the state of security and stability, there could be tens of thousands of additional deaths in the next few years.
Insecurity, lawlessness and conflict beset postwar Iraq, while the state of collapse of many public services prolongs hardship and suffering. The nature of the political, economic and social reconstruction will be
crucial – and not only in the short term; decisions being taken at this moment will have profound and long-lasting effects on Iraq’s social, cultural and economic prosperity.
Postwar administration has been directed by the occupying powers through the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Progress towards Iraqi self-governance and representative democracy has been slow and unsatisfactory.The role of the UN and neutral and independent humanitarian agencies is marginal. The attacks on UN headquarters in Baghdad and the state of insecurity have led many agencies to withdraw or reduce their activities. All this compounds the habitual difficulty of interagency co-ordination and reduces their effectiveness.
Private and for-profit companies, many from the US, have been awarded contracts to provide services and technical assistance in many sectors. For example, in the health sector, the large for-profit US company Abt Associates has been awarded a US $40m contract to strengthen the Iraqi health system. Iraq’s relative wealth and the large amounts of public money being invested in reconstruction provide profitable opportunities, but the unashamed commercialisation of postwar relief, humanitarian and development efforts raises questions about the ethics of
profiteering from war.
Lessons should be learned from the successful postwar reconstruction of Europe and Japan, including the importance of a strong central government directing resource allocation towards meeting the needs of the country as a whole. Both examples highlight the importance of public investment. It will also be important to find ways to cancel or substantially reduce Iraq’s sovereign debt of about $260 billion (Oxfam 2003) by recovering
assets frozen overseas. High levels of debt have a negative impact on private and public investment and therefore future growth prospects.
There has been very little talk of the need to pursue similar processes of ‘social healing’ to those that occurred in South Africa and Chile.The Iraqi people currently lack any meaningful path to ‘social reconstruction’, essential to repair the deep wounds and widespread trauma inflicted by the war and by the old regime, and to find ways of resolving conflict and living with diversity in peaceful, respectful ways.

The health system
The postwar reconstruction of Iraq’s health services exemplifies the difficulties outlined above. Some commendable efforts are being made by the Coalition administration and other agencies to deliver humanitarian aid and provide essential health services, but this is proceeding in an uncoordinated and fragmented way. Some interventions are attempting to develop participative processes that put Iraqis themselves in control of reform, but there is no overall agreement on the values and principles that should drive the reconstruction process, and no strategic planning.
Postwar health sector rehabilitation interventions elsewhere have tended to concentrate on rebuilding the infrastructure and supplying free medicine, while issues like human resources are neglected. There is also a reported policy intention (The Guardian 15.10.03) to model the future health system on the American model of commercialised and marketoriented health care, and little commitment to exploring the various options of rebuilding and restructuring the health system through an Iraqi-led
process. The postwar situation provides a unique opportunity to review the functions and distribution of health facilities and to rationalise and make more equitable the distribution of resources. On the basis of international evidence commercialisation of health care should be avoided.
Reconstruction of the health system should be carried out on the basis of a transparent and participatory debate about the desired configuration, governance and financing of the health system, and should be guided by an explicit set of strategic aims and principles. While immediate and short-term interventions are vital to meet emergency and
humanitarian needs, they should not deflect from longer-term planning. A clear vision of the future health system should be established now so that all policy decisions work towards its achievement. For example, building or re-equipping hospitals is seen as a priority in postwar situations, but may not be the best way to achieve better health for people whose needs are better met by good primary health care.
Health service development also needs to move in step with the redevelopment of other sectors such as finance, education, housing, transport and the environment that have a profound impact on health.
Finally, the reconstruction of the health system and the promotion of good health for all should be viewed as an important nation-building exercise.
Health care has an important symbolic role in promoting healthy inter-community relationships and health is a potential ‘bridge to peace’.

Conclusions and recommendations
At this stage it is impossible to assess the precise impact of this latest war on the health of the Iraqi people.The absence of reliable data, the failure of the occupying forces to provide full information, and the deteriorated security situation which caused most UN staff and many non-government organisations to leave the country, have led to an information black hole of unique proportions.
What is certain is that the war has led to the death and injury of thousands of Iraqi civilians and of combatants on all sides. It has caused a further deterioration in the health of the Iraqi people and contributed to the chronic stress on the environment.
Iraq is an increasingly violent and unstable place with particular risks for vulnerable groups such as women and children, the sick, disabled and the elderly. In addition to the direct casualties of war, problems in the essential infrastructure such as water/sanitation,power, housing and food availability have contributed to further suffering in the short to medium term. There are also concerns about high unemployment and its implications for poverty and
social unrest.
What happens to health in the long term is dependent on restoration of security and public services, and regeneration of the health care system.

Recommendations relating to Iraq
1. Health
• Establish an Iraqi health sector based on the principle that health and health care are basic social rights. In a country as diverse as Iraq equity should also be a central concern. The health sector goal must be to ensure a strong, coherent and integrated public health system providing primary, secondary and tertiary care with financing based on progressive taxation.
• Establish health information systems to monitor disease incidence and examine disease patterns in order to plan effective public health interventions.
• Carry out an assessment of the country’s chemical risks and levels of contamination in addition to surveillance of health effects of environmental risk factors including depleted uranium.
• Fund and rapidly implement the clear-up of all unexploded ordnance.
• Study long-term effects of the war on mental health and trends in domestic and criminal violence, and develop effective health care and social policy interventions.
• Fund independent academic institutions or UN agencies to continue monitoring the health effects of war.
2. Social reform • Give social and political reconstruction the same prominence as economic reconstruction.
• Explore processes of ‘social healing’ similar to those which occurred in South Africa and Chile in order to secure long term peace and avoid revenge attacks or internal conflict.
3. Political reform•
The democratisation process must be speeded up with a clear timetable for handing over authority to a legitimate interim Iraqi administration under the auspices of and accountable to the UN.
• The occupying powers must allow the UN to play the central role in peacekeeping and in the humanitarian and reconstruction process.
4. Reconstruction and economic reform • Economic reconstruction should not be tied to the economic and commercial interests of the occupying powers. The pace at which sectors are liberalised and public assets privatised also needs careful consideration by the Iraqis.
• Proposed economic, social and political reforms should be debated widely. Care should be taken that economic liberalisation does not result in the creation of monopolies and vested interest.
• Cancel or substantially reduce Iraq’s sovereign debt of $260 billion. Successful reconstruction will not be possible if this is left to hang like a millstone around the neck of a new democratic government. Recommendations relating to prevention of war
• Support steps to reduce the global arms trade (in the UK, for example, the arms trade is the second biggest export earner – BMA 2001) and the development and stockpiling of weapons by all countries.
• Work through the UN to tackle the roots of Middle Eastern problems, including a just and fully enforced Israeli-Palestinian settlement.
• Increase funding for effective interventions for physical, political and psychological security that break the cycle of violence (these currently receive less than 1% of the funds available for military intervention (Elworthy and Rogers 2002).
• Maximise ability of health professionals to be involved in building ‘health bridges for peace’.

http://www.medact.org/tbx/pages/sub.cfm?id=775

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-bombing12…

U.S. Military Responding More Fiercely to Iraqi Guerrilla Strikes
By John Daniszewski and Patrick McDonnell
Times Staff Writers

November 12, 2003

MAMUDIYAH, Iraq — U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police arrived at the sprawling three-family farmhouse just after 4 p.m. with orders for the 15 or so people still living there: Grab what you can in the next 30 minutes, and then leave. Your house is about to be bombed.

Two hours later on Monday, a pair of F-16 warplanes screamed overhead and dropped 1,000-pound laser-guided armaments on the boxy, concrete structure. The bombs left a deep crater strewn with smashed furniture, broken concrete and other debris. The lawn, shed and date trees around it remained intact.

U.S. military authorities said the bombing of the Najim family house was a prime example of a firm new response to those who plant roadside bombs, hide weapons or carry out ambushes that kill or harm American soldiers, and they want the people in these parts to know about it. It was the third fixed-wing bombing in a week across Iraq, pointing up a re-escalation of the war by the U.S. in response to heightened insurgency.

"The message is this: If you shoot at an American or a coalition force member, you are going to be killed or you are going to be captured, and if we trace somebody back to a specific safe house, we are going to destroy that facility," said Maj. Lou Zeisman, a paratroop officer of the Army`s 82nd Airborne Division deployed here from Fayetteville, N.C. "We are not going to take these continuous attacks."

For some members of Zeisman`s 3-505 task force based in this town half an hour south of Baghdad, the bombing was a particularly satisfying act of strategic retribution and deterrence. That is because, they said, they had first managed to obtain confessions and physical evidence implicating male residents of the house in a recent night ambush by eight Iraqi insurgents that took the life of one of their best-loved sergeants.

The ambush and the U.S. military`s crushing response offer a detailed glimpse into the give-and-take of battle now occurring in Iraq`s "Sunni Triangle" west and north of Baghdad, parts of which seem to be sliding inexorably back toward all-out war.

Bands of Iraqi fighters, often affiliated with the former Iraqi army and bearing more sophisticated equipment, are acting with increased audacity and frequency against U.S.-led coalition forces. In response, the U.S. is using escalating force, including some of the most concentrated fixed-wing bombing attacks since President Bush declared the major combat phase of the war over May 1.

U.S. forces are sometimes able to turn the tables on their assailants and use human intelligence and overwhelming military force to defeat them, as the military said was the case with the house bombed Monday.

The evidence against the members of the Najim household included homemade bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and launchers, and night-vision goggles found before the strike in and around the premises, some even hidden in the false bed of a pickup truck, said Zeisman, speaking the day after the bombing that destroyed the house situated along a major supply route used by coalition forces.

`We Lost a Good Soldier`

Referring to Sgt. 1st Class Jose A. Rivera, 34, of Bayamon, Puerto Rico, who was killed in a firefight last Wednesday by attackers believed to have carried out their ambush from the house, Zeisman said, "We lost a soldier that evening, a very good soldier, who was loved by a lot of people."

But he insisted it wasn`t entirely revenge. "We didn`t destroy a house just because we were angry that someone was killed," he said. "We did it because the people there were linked to the attack and we are not going to tolerate it anymore."

For people who harbor attackers or allow their houses to be used for planning attacks, he said, "we are going to destroy their property — period."

The sentiment was echoed by Col. Jefforey Smith, commander of the 3rd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, in Fallouja, which also has responsibility for the Mamudiyah area.

"There is no sanctuary," Smith said. "This is serious business here. The enemy needs to know we`re not playing around."

It is a message that was pushed on leaders of towns in western and central Iraq who met last weekend with Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command. The general`s unmistakable demand: Get with the program, or lose out on the benefits of the new Iraq.

In the Arab world, the tactic is likely to be compared to that used by Israel, which frequently bulldozes the family homes of Palestinian suicide bombers and other buildings from which Palestinian attacks are believed to emanate.

The Najim house is southeast of Mamudiyah, on the southern fringe of the Sunni Triangle, which has been the center of armed resistance to the U.S.-led occupation. Smith said the area had been calm for months but that the last few weeks had seen a surge in guerrilla actions. In addition, he had noticed a lot of mistrust of U.S. forces, to the extent that Mamudiyah police a month ago refused to go on joint patrols with the Army.

The attack that left Rivera dead occurred while the senior sergeant, who was a father figure to his platoon, was riding in a convoy patrolling a section of highway looking for improvised explosives routinely buried on the side of the road or taped to guardrails.

The convoy was hit by rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire, and the U.S. soldiers responded, hitting at least one insurgent, and driving the attackers into the surrounding farmland. The Americans then sped back to base, taking the critically wounded Rivera and two other injured soldiers to medical treatment.

Rivera, suffering a head wound, could not be saved. Grown men cried that night, Zeisman said.

The next morning, another patrol went back to the site and found debris and footprints where the insurgents had lain in wait. They also discovered abandoned weapons, shell casings and a night-vision scope, an ominous sign that the American edge in being able to see at night may be ebbing as insurgents obtain better equipment.

The link to the Najim house, three miles away, came Thursday, when a unit seeking to ask residents about anti-coalition fliers being distributed in the area approached a group of six men standing outside the house, about 200 yards off the main highway. At first, said Capt. Rick Schute, commander of the battalion`s Delta Company, the men seemed cooperative. But then one of Schute`s soldiers noted something amiss with a white pickup truck parked in front of the Najim house.

It had a custom-made liner in the bed, and when the soldiers investigated, they found rocket-propelled grenades hidden inside a hollowed-out section. They found more illegal weapons behind the seat of the vehicle.

That prompted a thorough search of the house and shed. Inside, Zeisman said, the troops found several improvised remote-detonation bombs, equipment for making more bombs, and the other weapons, including a belt-fed machine gun.

Most damning was a night-vision scope that was an exact match with the one left at the scene where the convoy was attacked. The six men were taken into custody.

Smith said the leader of the group is believed to have been a lieutenant colonel in the former Iraqi army.

"He was proud to admit he was a former officer in the Iraqi army," Smith said. "He was still carrying all of his identification. And he expressed his personal belief during our interrogation of him that the Iraqi army was going to come back to power, and he was going to be part of it again.... He was basically a former regime loyalist. And he was proud of it."

During questioning, Zeisman said, at least one of the men admitted participating in the ambush, and they had been stopped just as they were gathering to go to the funeral for one of their comrades wounded in last Wednesday`s engagement.

As a result, the Americans said, preparations were made to call in F-16s to destroy the house. Soldiers and Iraqi police blocked off the highway, assisted women and children in gathering their belongings, and transported their cattle away. The planes dropped the bombs at 6:20 p.m.

Within a day, another firefight took place just outside Zeisman`s base. It left what appeared to be at least two Iraqis dead on the street.

Zeisman said he was not cleared to talk about the early-afternoon incident.

At the ruins of the bombed-out house Tuesday, the 65-year-old mother of former Iraqi air force Lt. Col. Shaalan Najim stared dejectedly, tears running down her tattooed face. Shaalan, 40, and a second son, Suhail, 45, the owner of the house, were in American custody. The home they had lived in for about 15 years was squashed as if by a giant foot. Belongings pulled from the ruins were piled up on the grass: bedding, carpets, a child`s bicycle.

A younger brother of the arrested men, Emad, 30, loudly proclaimed their innocence, while a bevy of wives, cousins and grandchildren also complained and protested angrily that they had done nothing and had been given only half an hour to leave.

"My husband had nothing to do with politics," said stricken-looking Suaad Haadi, the wife of Suhail Najim. "He was a farmer, and he used his pickup truck to deliver milk from our cows."

`Terrorist House`

Emad proclaimed loudly to the small group that had gathered: "This is the freedom of America? Terrorizing and intimidating children in their garden? Women left without their husbands? Innocent men taken in? ... Where will they all stay now?"

"I did not even have time to collect my gold," said one cousin`s wife.

They roundly denied that they had even been given a reason for the house`s destruction until a teenage neighbor, Ghassan Ali, admitted that the Americans` interpreter, through a loudspeaker, had announced to the whole neighborhood that it was a "terrorist house."

Although they would not budge from their story that their husbands were innocent, the wife of one of the incarcerated men said otherwise when pressed by an Iraqi driver.

"If it wasn`t for that damned truck ... ," she told him.

Times staff writer McDonnell reported from Fallouja.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-afghan1…
EDITORIAL



A Warning in Afghanistan

November 12, 2003

Afghanistan foreshadowed Iraq with a quick military victory, foreign aid to rebuild and emphasis on getting in place a constitution, elections and a hoped-for democracy. But the Afghans` persistent struggles should send a warning to the world that a lack of security, heavily armed militias and a flourishing drug trade could turn the nation back into a lawless sanctuary for terrorists.

An independent commission last week unveiled a draft constitution that could be a milestone in Afghanistan`s recovery from decades of invasion, wars and Taliban misrule. If an Afghan grand council adopts the blueprint next month, it will set the stage for elections next year and a strong presidential form of government. The constitution proclaims Afghanistan an Islamic state but promises religious freedom to all. It specifies free education for boys and girls up to secondary school.

But the constitution could be an empty promise. Nearly two years after the U.S. drove the Taliban from power, remnants of the Islamic extremist group are regrouping and attacking U.S. troops. International peacekeepers, whom Washington foolishly limited to Kabul, only now are expanding their mandate. It`s happening in the relatively calm northern city of Kunduz, not where troops are needed more — in southern areas like Kandahar. Foreign aid groups, which last year were attacked monthly, say their workers are attacked every other day. As in Iraq, this has led aid groups to withdraw many foreign workers.

Washington has committed other errors. U.S. troops have been too tied for too long to warlords. In a southeastern province, Afghans said militias — paid to guide U.S. forces hunting for Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters — last month robbed, assaulted and tortured villagers after the Americans left. Warlords` cruelty first led many Afghans to welcome the Taliban a decade ago. If the U.S. is seen as an ally of the tens of thousands of militia fighters — forces who prey on civilians and again grow opium — it will turn Afghans against the soldiers, depriving them of intelligence they need to hunt the Taliban.

France, Germany and other nations that opposed the Iraq invasion have helped the U.S. with Afghanistan, understanding the 9/11 attacks require a unified assault against terrorism. If international support has not been enough to make Afghanistan a success yet, how much tougher will it be in Iraq? Washington needs to help Afghan President Hamid Karzai disarm the militias and work with France and Germany to train a national army. Will Afghanistan provide a global example as a peaceful, democratic nation or a land of chaos and brutality?


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/147831_guaned.html

Prisoners` review a move for justice
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

It`s good news for America that the U.S. Supreme Court will take a look at the Bush administration`s conduct in the war on terrorism.

On Monday, the high court said it would decide whether foreign prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should have access to federal courts to question their captivity. The administration plans to bring some of the 600 plus prisoners before military tribunals, but officials assert they can be held indefinitely without charges, access to attorneys or family visits.

The court could well rule in favor of the administration`s position that the detainees have no right to court reviews. It`s right that justices traditionally have given presidents broad authority during times of war.

It is healthy, however, for the justices to review sweeping claims of power in a new, amorphous kind of combat. Even if the court rules against the prisoners, the review could focus more attention on the detainments. In that sense, the attorneys who have brought these cases may have already won a victory for justice.

The court`s consideration of the prisoners` status can only help the United States in its larger battle for world support. Yesterday, Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio, one of the firmest international supporters of the war on terrorism, called the indefinite detentions at Guantanamo Bay a "capital error." The United States must conduct itself in a way that brings honor, not international doubt, to the causes of democracy, freedom and the rule of law.

© 1998-2003 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Terror Is A Triple Meat Pizza
Who needs war and evildoers and a big nuclear holocaust? We`ve got a national obesity epidemic
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2003/11/…



To hell with Osama. Enough with al Qaeda. Screw global warming or killer locusts or the Second Coming. Evildoer terrorists and anthrax and SARS, AIDS and nuclear holocausts and cute cataclysmic asteroid collisions? Whatever.

Ain`t got nothing on America`s proud obesity epidemic, baby. Rampant, uncontrolled, pandemic weight issues are upon us, huge, unstoppable, nationwide, like a runaway train of ignorance and misinformation and disease and imminent heart failure bearing down on everything we think we are, right now.

What, too dramatic? Hardly. Obesity is no longer just a curiosity. It is no longer just an "alarming trend." It is no longer just a statistic, a whiny hot-button debate, a PC lightning rod wherein fat advocates and skinny finger-pointers bitch about who is to blame and who is a victim and who can just shut up and get over it and start eating better and exercising.

We are inventing scales that go to 1,000 pounds. We are inventing sponges on a stick so fat people can scrub hard-to-reach subdivisions of their bodies. We are inventing devices to help the obese put on their socks.

We are supersizing bath towels and we are redesigning car seats and pushing the steering wheel further forward to accommodate massive girth and enormous guts. And we are, most tellingly, cranking out extra-large caskets as fast as we can build them, because we know what`s coming, soon.

The bottom line is, we are killing ourselves with fat. And chemicals. And hormones. And gluttony. The cultural complexion is shifting, radically. The statistics are overwhelming and irrefutable and sad -- over 50 percent of adults overweight, over 30 percent obese, huge increases in fat children, cancer rates escalating, diabetes skyrocketing, ligament problems and organ failure and tumors and heart disease and impotence and infertility and bad hair and a thousand other related ailments, all coupled with a massive wave of Prozac-slammed anxiety and depression like a never-ending sitcom in hell.

It is without refute: We are, as a culture, as a country, enormously addicted, worse than heroin, worse than coffee, worse than porn, worse than BushCo`s bogus war or Fox News` bogus news or Jessica Simpson`s ditzy self or any happy narcotic you can name, to an enormous array of garbage foods and known legal poisons and industrial additives. A great many of the foods we are fed as children contain so many chemicals and toxins, they actually cause debilitating weight-gain illness in healthy adults who exercise like crazy and eat like birds, such as PCOS and hypothyroidism.

It is incredibly messy, this issue. It is complicated. There is no single cause and no single solution and there is no single attack plan, no way to list all the facets of the problem.

But then there`s you. We can finger-point all we want, but until there`s a huge cultural shift and a massive change in the educational system coupled with an enormous global class-action lawsuit against the impotent FDA and McDonald`s and KFC and Monsanto and ConAgra and Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) and all the rest who cram BGH and animal feces and deadly bacteria into your frozen liquefied microwavable wax-coated prebrowned beef/chicken/cheese-nugget dinner, you have only you to account for.

It is utter BS to believe ourselves powerless. It is total disaster to buy into the whole "pathetic victim" scenario, that it`s just so hard to change our food awareness because Whole Foods is too expensive and we are just too busy and, besides, we are just too deeply addicted to the chemicals and the toxins and everyone knows addicts have to go through enormous trauma and physical discomfort and rehab in order to have colons that actually function properly.

What a crock. This is what they love you to think. To be sure, it can be a challenge to get healthy and change your body, or to become more food conscious, but it`s far from impossible.

These are the things we must learn. For many, maybe it`s simply a matter of starting slowly, weaning yourself off toxic foodstuffs. Start with heavily processed foods, refined sugar, all that neon-lit nuclear-colored Safeway and Albertson`s and Foodland processed crap with unpronounceable chemicals and fillers and binding agents and hormones and shards of thumb.

Maybe we need to start reading ingredient lists. Compare. Contrast. Ask basic and commonsense questions, like, which is better, the natural chips with four organic ingredients, or the preliquefied heat-molded salt-crusted Pringles Xtreme Ranch, with 142 unpronounceable ones made by Dow Chemical? Feign ignorance, and ignore the obvious difference at your, and your body`s, peril.

And, to start, you simply replace as many of those toxic processed foodstuffs we so love with the same exact foods from a healthier food store, Whole Foods or Real Foods or farmer`s markets or even inner-city neighborhood garden programs, anything remotely close -- and, hell, even Safeway put in a natural-foods aisle. There are choices. There are options. It is absolutely worth a try.

And we must educate ourselves. The Net is a freakin` library. Half an hour reading up on organics and seasonal eating and natural ingredients and what to look out for, and you may never look back. You do not have to become a dogmatic extreme food Nazi. You do not need to be severe and pious and lopsided and never eat a steak or pizza again. You just need to be more aware. Much more.

Begin to shun fast food. Wean yourself off milk and refined sugar and excess floury gunk, and seek out organics, start moving in that direction, tune your awareness little by little. Buy a few books. Or just one. Fast Food Nation or Mad Cowboy or The Food Revolution or even Eating Well For Optimum Health. Grab the free newsletter at your local farmer`s market or health-food store. Talk to an organic farmer. Pay attention.

We gotta give a damn where our food comes from. Far too few in this nation seem to give a damn about what they pump into their mouths. Make the connection that what you put into your body translates directly to how you feel, sleep, breath, function, orgasm, smile, think, move, smell and taste to others who may desire a lick of your divine chemical-free self.

What are you up against? Plenty. Poisonous crap like this breaded, deep fried, chemically treated disgusting french-fry thing, injected with "a beef-and-cheese compound" that is designed to taste like a cheeseburger and packs 4-6 grams of fat into each fry and is aimed straight at your child, via toxic school lunches, courtesy of the largely contemptible National Cattlemen`s Beef Association.

This is their agenda. This is their cause. They have zero shame. And they could give a rat`s chemotherapy needle for your, or your child`s, overall health. "We want beef in dessert if we can get it there," says the association. They are serious. And they should be ashamed. And then strung up by their Rocky Mountain oysters and slapped with rancid slabs of diseased beef earmarked to become Taco Bell filling. Just an opinion.

The astounding truth remains: Wean yourself away from the lethal chemical/sugar food vortex, and your body changes. Your cravings change. Your skin and breath and energy shift. You desire greens. You desire fresh ingredients. Your body craves whole, real, unprocessed foods and you become more sensitive, can taste the difference in an organic avocado versus a conventionally grown one. Organic eggs from grain-fed free-range chickens have more energy.

You learn that seasonal eating actually synchs up with your body`s natural tendencies. You realize you are not a whimpering pathetic victim, a slave to Coke and Doritos and that obnoxious football dink from Round Table pizza. It`s kind of, you know, a nice realization.


There is no other way. You cannot count on the media. You cannot trust major pharmaceutical or fast-food or government-supported industries to have your best interests at heart. You cannot look to the church. Or schools. Or major chain supermarkets. Or television. Or sitcoms. Only you.

After all, who doesn`t want to be around, all healthy and radiant and aglow, for the impending nuclear holocaust?


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

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Mark Morford`s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters

[Joerver]

[Delerium]

Hohmann läßt grüßen!

[Joerver]

Posted on Tue, Nov. 11, 2003



More Iraqis supporting resistance, CIA report says

By Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder Newspapers


WASHINGTON - A new, top-secret CIA report from Iraq warns that growing numbers of Iraqis are concluding that the U.S.-led coalition can be defeated and are supporting the resistance.


The report paints a bleak picture of the political and security situation in Iraq and cautions that the U.S.-led drive to rebuild the country as a democracy could collapse unless corrective actions are taken immediately.


L. Paul Bremer, head of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, who arrived unexpectedly in Washington for strategy sessions on Tuesday, essentially endorsed the CIA`s findings, said a senior administration official.


The report`s bleak tone and Bremer`s private endorsement differ sharply with the upbeat public assessments that President Bush, his chief aides and Bremer are giving as part of an aggressive publicity campaign aimed at countering rising anxieties at home over increasing U.S. casualties in Iraq.


Two senior administration officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the document is classified, described the report`s findings in broad terms, but didn`t give excerpts or details of any recommendations.


The report landed on the desks of senior U.S. officials on Monday. The speed of the leak suggested that senior policymakers want to make sure the assessment reaches Bush.


Some senior policymakers have complained of being frustrated in their efforts to provide Bush with analyses of the situation in Iraq that are more somber than the optimistic views of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and other hardliners.


The CIA analysis suggests U.S. policy in Iraq has reached a turning point, as the Bush administration moves to escalate the war against the guerrillas and accelerate the transfer of political power to Iraqis.


Both options are potentially risky.


In Baghdad, the U.S. military announced Tuesday that it will wage a more aggressive offensive against the loose confederation of former Saddam Hussein loyalists, foreign and Iraqi Islamic extremists and Iraqi nationalists.


"The most important message is that we are all going to get pretty tough, and that`s what is needed to defeat the enemy, and we are definitely not shy of doing that when it is required," Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. general in Iraq, told journalists.


Such a campaign, however, could cause more civilian casualties and drive more Iraqis to the side of the insurgents.


At the same time, the CIA assessment warns that none of the postwar Iraqi political institutions and leaders have shown an ability to govern the country or even preside over drafting a constitution or holding an election.


Bill Harlow, a CIA spokesman, declined to confirm or deny the existence of the new report, saying the agency does not discuss such matters.


The growing toll of dead and wounded has cost Bush a significant loss of popularity as he begins campaigning in earnest for re-election next November.


Bremer and top Bush officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rumsfeld, met at the White House on Tuesday to examine ways to speed up the restoration of Iraqi self-government. Bush did not attend.


U.S. officials have become deeply frustrated by infighting, nepotism and inaction within the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council, the U.S.-appointed body of Iraqi politicians that has been given limited powers to govern Iraq. The council also is in charge of overseeing the drafting of a constitution.


Bremer, Powell, Rumsfeld and other officials also discussed moves to speed up the recruiting of U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces, including a new army.


More than 118,000 Iraqis are serving in the new Iraqi army, police and other forces, and U.S. officials aim to bring the total up to more than 220,000 sometime in 2004.


Accelerating a restoration of Iraqi self-rule, speeding up the recruiting of Iraqi security forces and intensifying a U.S. counter-insurgency campaign form the crux of a new U.S. strategy to crush the resistance, consolidate the support of ordinary Iraqis for U.S.-led democracy-building efforts and reduce the U.S. military presence.


"The long-term security of Iraq will be assured by the Iraqis themselves," Bush asserted in a Veterans Day speech on Tuesday to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank.




The CIA assessment, said the senior administration officials, was composed by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, a veteran operations officer who oversees more than 275 officers in Iraq.


The report is a type known in intelligence parlance as an AARDWOLF, a special field assessment that is usually requested by senior policymakers in Washington at important junctures in overseas crises.


The report, one official said, warned that the more aggressive U.S. counter-insurgency tactics could induce more Iraqis to join the guerrilla campaign that has killed at least 153 U.S. soldiers - 35 of them so far this month - since Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq on May 1.


It also raised concerns about the governing council. The group, which is dominated by former Iraqi exiles with little popular support, has failed to persuade ordinary Iraqis that the occupation is temporary and will lead to a unified, sovereign Iraq, the report said


Bremer has been formulating ways "in which the Governing Council can evolve into a decision-making body to move the constitutional process along," said a third senior U.S. official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.


He denied recent news reports that the Bush administration is considering replacing the council with some other group of Iraqis.


According to the second senior administration official, the report warned that the inability of the U.S.-led coalition to crush the resistance is convincing growing numbers of Iraqis that the occupation can be defeated, bolstering support for the insurgents.


It also raised the concern that majority Shiite Muslims could begin joining minority Sunnis in turning against the occupation.


Such a development would almost certainly doom the Bush administration`s chances of succeeding in Iraq.


The Shiites comprise 60 percent of Iraq`s 25 million people. They suffered massive repression under Saddam, whose regime favored the Sunnis. Most Shiite leaders have been willing to give the U.S.-led occupation time to restore Iraqi sovereignty, as that would give them power for the first time since the country was created by Britain under a mandate of the League of Nations in 1920.


But frictions between the U.S.-led occupation and the Shiites have been intensifying, fueled by incidents such as the killing this week by a U.S. soldier of the mayor of Sadr City, a massive Shiite slum in Baghdad.


In another finding, the CIA report said there is no way to completely seal Iraq`s borders with Syria, Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to infiltration by foreign Islamic extremists bent on killing Americans.


U.S. officials and military commanders blame the foreigners, Iraqi Islamic extremists and Saddam loyalists for the bombings and guerrilla-style ambushes of U.S. forces that have been increasing in frequency and sophistication.


Most attacks have been concentrated in Baghdad and a 200-square-mile Sunni-dominated region north of the capital that includes Saddam`s hometown of Tikrit.


In an effort to discourage support for the United States, the insurgents also have targeted peacekeepers from other countries, international organizations like the United Nations, and Iraqis who have cooperated with the U.S.-led occupation.


Bush on Tuesday reiterated his resolve to stay the course and crush the insurgency, and his belief that the United States will prevail in helping to build "democracy and peace and justice" in Iraq that will be a model for the Middle East.


---


(Knight Ridder correspondents Warren P. Strobel and Maureen Fan contributed to this report.)

[Joerver]

Rich Procter: `A personal message from G.W. Bush to grieving military families`
Contributed by drprocter on Wednesday, November 12 @ 09:56:12 EST
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Rich Procter

Dear (Amigo, Ma`am),

Hey, y`all! Sorry to hear that your (circle one - son/daughter) lost (his/her) life in the glorious liberation of Iraq. You`ll be glad to know that your President - a certain yours truly - does NOT take it personally, that your offspring`s death added to fake liberal-media idea that things are goin` to hell in golf cart over there. No Siree Bobcat. I happen to know things are goin` super spiffy-keen peachy, because my advisers who watch them fine folks at Fox News tell me so. Your (son/daughter) may be takin` a permanent dirt nap, but them school kids in Iraq have something even kids in Texas don`t have - new school books! I`m bustin` my buttons over that, and you should be too.

Now about your (son`s/daughter`s) funeral - As my Official Press Guy said, if I went to that dang funeral, I`d have to go to EVERY dang funeral! And what makes this cadaver more special than any other? No way I figured them terrorists would start mowin` our guys down just because I said, "Bring `em on." Who could know that? Not me. Just because I won`t let the defeatist "Hate America First" press corps shoot news pictures of your (son/daughter) bein` off-loaded in his official U.S. government issue "transfer tube" doesn`t mean I`m not broken-hearted.



Even if I wanted to go your (son`s/daughter`s) funeral, my hellacious schedule of fund-raising won`t allow it. Man`s gotta have his priorities in order. After all, I`ve got to raise at least 200 million dollars to fight off all the opponents I`ve got in the primaries...which so far amount to none, but you never know. When I`m stuffing those five and six figure checks from oil companies, pharmaceutical giants and our other corporate buddies into my inside suit coat pocket, I`ll sure as hell be thinking of your (son/daughter). Just because they weren`t smart enough to have a daddy who could make a phone call to get `em outta military service doesn`t mean their sacrifice was in vain for nothin`.

What do I mean by that? Just this, my fellow Corpro-American. This Administration is in Iraq for the long haul. These colors don`t run, got it? Even if my poll numbers are in the toilet next year...like if they`re around 30% approval for the war by next Spring, and we`re still losing two or three soldiers a day...well hell, in that case, what we`ll probably do is "Iraq-ify" the bejeezus out of the place, declare "victory," throw up some barbed wire around them oil fields, and blame the whole magilla on "defeatist" Democrats. So even if we lose, we win.

The most important thing for you to do (besides sending me your OWN $2,000 campaign contribution - see enclosed self-sealing envelope) is to join with me in this glorious crusade to bring Democracy to the Middle East. See, that`s the reason your (son/daughter) had to die - to bring Democracy to the Middle East. Bet you thought it was because ol` Saddam was gonna use some of them Weapons of Mass Destruction I talked about in my State of the Union Address! Well, it turns out (boy, is my leathery Texas face beet red!) that that ol` sumbitch didn`t even HAVE any WMD! And you can forget about what I said about Saddam and Osama bein` best buds. Turns out that was another of Dick Cheney`s nocturnal emissions. (DANG!) But this Democracy thing - that`s the McCoy. We`re gonna run their Democracy just like we run OUR Democracy - find a candidate we like, and get that sumbitch elected. Anyone`s okey-dokey with us - as long as he`s pro-America, pro-West, pro-Christian, pro-Republican, pro-ExxonMobil. We`re not gonna put up with some muttering, towel-headed religious fanatic. I mean, you can carry this Democracy thing too dang far.

Where was I? Oh yeah, I was comforting you about your (son/daughter). Once again, let me tell you that I feel so bad about your loss, I had a brief discussion with Karl Rove about actually missing a fund-raiser to attend the funeral, but he (thank God) talked me out of it. And be glad that your (son/daughter) didn`t live long enough to watch my Administration do the fiscally responsible thing by cutting (his/her) Veterans benefits, cutting back on (his/her) medical care, slashing (his/her) pension, and closing down the VA Hospital nearest to (him/her). Your child never lived to be an embittered, forgotten Veteran cursing me as I play endless rounds of golf at the private course near my beloved Crawford Ranch. What a blessing. Your Beloved President

Please make your 2,000 dollar check out to "Re-Elect Bush/Cheney 2004." You`ll receive your, "My kid died in Iraq War II, and All I Got Was This Crummy Sweatshirt" sweatshirt in the return mail

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=13740&mode=nest…

[Joerver]

The Professor Takes the Gloves Off
Terrence McNally, AlterNet
November 11, 2003
Viewed on November 12, 2003

Accustomed in economic circles to calling a stupid argument a stupid argument, and isolated (in Princeton, New Jersey) from the Washington dinner-party circuit, Paul Krugman has become the most prominent voice in the mainstream U.S. media to openly and repeatedly accuse George Bush of lying to the American people to sell budget-busting tax cuts and a pre-emptive and nearly unilateral war.


Krugman cannot be dismissed by opponents as some dyed-in-the-wool lefty. He`s a moderate academic economist who`s been radicalized by the Bush White House and the right wing it represents. Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the op-ed Page and continues as professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University. His new book, "The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way In The New Century" (#9 on the New York Times best-seller list and a top seller on Amazon) is a collection of his op-ed pieces from January 2000-January 2003.


McNally: How did your role in the op-ed pages of The New York Times happen and how has it evolved?


Krugman: I was brought on to write about "my real home," economics and business, specifically international economics. There were a lot of international crises in the `90s and The Times thought I`d be writing about policies and disasters overseas, as well as about stuff at home, typically the follies of the new economy. But it was election season, and it pretty quickly became clear to me -- and more and more so as we went along -- that the really scary follies, the potential disasters that were the greatest risks of concern were at home.


I came on thinking it would be a largely non-political column. I think The Times thought that, too. And then during the campaign, because I knew my stuff -- basically, because I could do my own arithmetic -- I found myself saying: "You know, these guys are lying...This is a fundamentally irresponsible and dishonest economic program." Then after the election it increasingly became clear to me that it wasn`t just economics.


So it`s a very strange thing. I`m no wild-eyed radical. Actually, The American Prospect, a very liberal magazine, ran a story in the mid-90s attacking me for my support of Free Trade.


McNally: I remember that.


Krugman: So I was kind of a bad guy from the point of view of more consistently reliable commentators on the left. But of course now all of that seems insignificant compared with the awesomeness of the fraud that they [the Bush Administration] are trying to perpetrate on all of us.


McNally: Exactly. Could talk a little bit about the introduction to your book and the context it sets? I assume you would never have written that at the time you wrote the first op-eds that appear in the book.


Krugman: You`re right. I put a date on the introduction: April 10, just to make it clear that this is what I thought at that date. If we`d found a nuclear program in Iraq or the budget picture had improved, then I would`ve looked like I didn`t know what I was talking about. But of course everything has turned out even worse than I expected. What I realized looking back over my own writings is that it`s pretty easy to identify some very radical intents on the part of the coalition that now runs the country. It`s not just a single group. It`s the religious right, it`s the hard-line conservatives, it`s the anti-environmental industry groups and so on.


Put it all together and what you see is the outlines of an extremely radical program. Maybe reactionary would be the word because a lot of it would be rolling us back to where we were before the 1930s, before Franklin Roosevelt. In any case, a very radical program that would un-do the America that we`ve all grown up in.


I end up quoting Henry Kissinger because his writings gave me the key to why it`s so hard for people -- even liberals -- to accept what`s going on. He wrote about how when faced with a revolutionary power -- who really doesn`t accept the rules of the game, the legitimacy of the system -- people who have been accustomed to the stability make excuses. They say: "Oh, well, they may talk that way but they don`t really mean it. If we give them some partial concessions we can appease them, they`ll be satisfied and all of this stuff would stop." That`s exactly what`s been happening now.


The true radicalism of the Bush Administration -- cutting taxes to a level that will not support social programs and dangerous adventurism in foreign policy -- has been right in front of our eyes, but most pundits and much of the public are saying: "Oh, let`s not get too extreme here. I`m sure we can work this out. We can find a middle ground." And there isn`t one.


McNally: Do you think that appeasement approach, that inability to believe that these people are as far out as they say they are, has been exacerbated by September 11? It`s my take that had the economy continued as it was, had the lies continued as they were without Bush in the Commander-in-Chief role, people would`ve picked up on this sooner...


Krugman: Probably, although it`s hard to say. We can`t re-run the tape.


If you say what is actually obvious: that these people took September 11 as a great political opportunity and used it to push both a domestic economic and social agenda and a foreign policy agenda that had nothing to do with September 11 -- that`s an extraordinary charge. And the very fact that it`s such a harsh thing to say makes people unwilling to see it. It was obvious in the fall of last year that they were hyping the case for a war with Iraq. But it just seemed too harsh, too extreme to say that the President of the United States would do that. So there was a tremendous soft pedaling in the reporting.


McNally: I`ve talked about this with [UC Berkeley journalism professor] Mark Danner and others... Is it because the press is afraid of Bush`s popularity and basically the media don`t want to be caught ahead of the people? Is it corporate profits? Is it just a loss of true journalism? What do you attribute it to? You must talk with your colleagues about this.


Krugman: Well, actually, less than you might think, in terms of talking with colleagues. I`m based in Central New Jersey...


I`m not even sure I believe that the corporate influence thing is important yet. It may be at some future date, but I think that -- outside of Fox News, which is of course simply part of a machine -- it`s not that crucial. By the way, I insult Fox News whenever I can, hoping that they`ll sue me.


McNally: Best if they can do it while the book is fresh in the stores, right?


Krugman: That`s right. But meanwhile, I think a better story is two things. One is that the media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that`s partly because there`s a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the right doesn`t like.


So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column -- in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally -- was that if Bush said the earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: "Shape of the Earth -- Views Differ." Then they`d quote some Democrats saying that it was round.


Journalistic organizations are afraid of being accused of bias. There`s also a fair bit of low rate intimidation of journalists themselves. I have received a couple of elliptical death threats but they weren`t serious. The real stuff is the hate mail that comes in enormous quantities. Organizations try their best to find some scandal in your personal life and disseminate it. I don`t think a lot of journalists are sitting around saying: "I better not cross these guys, they`ll ruin me." But they do know that every time they say anything the right doesn`t like to hear, they get the equivalent of a nasty electric shock. They sort of get conditioned not to go there.


McNally: Your initial op-eds dealt with Bush`s campaign economics, but now you`ve grown to believe that the lying and the other things are basic approaches across the board, haven`t you?


Krugman: Sure. Whatever you think about the Iraq war, the way it was sold was exactly the template they use for selling the tax cuts. The hyped evidence, the misleading statements, the bait-and-switch, the constantly shifting rationale. And the same things can be seen in less politically hot issues...the "Healthy Forests" plan, for instance.


In terms of naming things, Orwell had nothing on these guys. So the "Healthy Forest" plan turns out to be a plan to allow more logging of the forests. The "Clear Skies Initiative" turns out to first, get rid of new source review, which is an integral part of the Clean Air Act, and so on down the line.


So it`s definitely a pattern. And if you step back a moment and look at it, you start to realize that, although looking at selling of the 2003 tax cut and what it does to our physical future is a bad thing, looking at the whole picture makes you feel a whole lot worse.


McNally: You point back to Reagan who had ideas you didn`t agree with but at least sold them on what he believed to be their merits. Whether it was true or not, it was the actual case.


Krugman: That`s right. Reagan, I think sincerely believed in trickle-down economics. Look, it`s funny. Not only do I miss Reagan who I thought had bad policies but didn`t approach the skullduggery of these people, I actually miss Nixon. Although God knows he did skullduggery, as John Dean says, even Nixon didn`t go after the wives.


McNally: The CIA leak of Ambassador Joe Wilson`s wife...


Krugman: Yeah. Also Nixon seemed to be at least sincerely interested in governing. He was actually trying to run the country. He didn`t think anybody else should have a chance to run it, but he actually tried to solve problems. The old hands of the Environmental Protection Administration will tell you that the Nixon years were a golden age. These people now... they`re ruthless, they`re dishonest, and they haven`t actually tried to deal with any of our real problems.


McNally: I read one quote where you said: "Tell me one real problem that they took on and offered an actual solution." Can we narrow our focus to economics? What is most alarming about the deficit? We know in Keynesian economics deficits are okay... What`s the real problem here? Why is it as bad as you think it is?


Krugman: I`m sorry, there`s one-and-a-half problems. It`s still a jobless recovery. That`s a very nasty prospect and we have seen no real sign of turn-around there. But beyond that... Look, deficits are okay, but Keynes never said it was okay to run deficits forever. He said that deficits are good for stimulating the economy temporarily during downturns.


What we have is the prospect of deficits that are not temporary. The last estimate is, of the $500 billion-plus deficit, only about $60 or $70 billion would go away even if the economy does recover. And it`s much worse once the baby boomers retire, which happens in about 10 years. We have the finances of a banana republic right now. If current tax rates and current programs continue, at some point the U.S. government will simply be unable to pay its debts -- and long before that point happens, industries will pull the plug.


And we have the same thing internationally as well. We have a huge trade deficit. It roughly matches the domestic deficit, and foreigners are lending the country money to cover that. At some point they will pull the plug. Some people say we now have a faith-based currency. I think we have a faith-based government. People believe that we`re going to get our act together, but there`s no sign that we will.


McNally: So perhaps a lulling effect -- similar to the one we were talking about earlier -- may be working right now to cover our butt for a while, but it could turn quickly.


Krugman: That`s right. At the moment, the actual fiscal state of the federal government is substantially worse than that of the state of California. The laws are different: the state of California is obliged by law to balance its books each year. It`ll fudge a bit but eventually it has to clear the books. The federal government does not.


Also, you might say that Bush has some un-earned credits from the responsibility of his predecessors. In the past, U.S. presidents have always in the end done enough of the right thing so that the solvency of the government was never at stake. And it comes back to this denial that I talk about. People can`t believe that we`re dealing with something completely different now, but we are.


McNally: Let me get this straight. You`re not saying that we will actually go bankrupt, but that we are too dependent on foreign investors and at some point, they`ll say: "You know what, I`m putting my money elsewhere."


Krugman: Well, in fact, that does produce something that looks like bankruptcy. When you have a huge debt, not only do you have to pay interest on it, but you have to keep rolling it over. The point comes when investors say: "I don`t trust these Americans. They don`t seem to be responsible." Then all of a sudden you cannot raise the money to service the debt when it comes due.


McNally: We`ve watched this happen in other countries and the thought is -- that`s Thailand, that`s not the U.S.


Krugman: That`s Argentina. This is my specialty. I watched it happen in other countries and you look at the numbers and you say: "Geez, we have a budget deficit that`s bigger compared with the size of our economy than Argentina before their 2001 crack-up. We have a trade deficit that`s bigger compared with the size of our economy, than Indonesia before its 1997 crack-up." You say: "Well, yeah, but this is America and it can`t happen here." But there`s a lot of things we didn`t think could happen here. Something very seriously wrong is going on now.


McNally: What I haven`t heard quite yet is the point which you make very strongly in the book, that the purpose behind the tax cuts is to bankrupt the government, to undermine social programs, so that no one who comes into office after them will have an easy time restoring them.


Krugman: I`m not making that up. That`s exactly what the lobbyists and the others behind these people say. The program that the Administration is following looks as if it was designed to implement their ideas. I think it is.


McNally: What would you do? And let me ask it two ways. What would Paul Krugman`s solution be? And then, if Paul Krugman were Howard Dean or Wesley Clark or John Kerry -- if he were running for office, what would his solution be?


Krugman: Okay. First off, you have to have a plan to get the budget back into balance. It`s not possible to have a plan that doesn`t include phasing out the bulk, if not all, of the Bush tax cuts. Not all in the first year, we`re still in a recession. But a gradual plan to eliminate those tax cuts, bring the tax system back to about where it was in 2000. This would get us most, though not all, of the way to a balanced budget. You could talk about other things on the side, but that would have to be the core of it.


Meanwhile, we need to get the economy moving. To do that, you have to do the things that governments always do during recessions, but this government hasn`t. Aid to state and local governments so they aren`t laying off schoolteachers and firemen just when the economy is slumping. Public works programs. As it happens, we have a whole backlog of homeland security spending: ports and so on that we should be doing that the government is nickel-and-diming away.


McNally: And a huge amount of federal infrastructure that we just ignore completely.


Krugman: That`s right. Just go and do these things which we need done anyway and particularly now. They would also help create jobs. Maybe on top of that we need another round of rebates, but rebates that are fully refundable and go to the people most likely to spend the money.


Is that guaranteed to work? I don`t know. But it`s certainly has a good chance of working and we haven`t tried any of these obvious things.


McNally: How much of that do you think a candidate could say and get away with?


Krugman: I think a candidate has to be fairly forthright. We can argue about whether the whole Bush tax cut or just the upper brackets need to go. But at least they have to say that the upper brackets must go.


And look, I don`t know that we`ll win. I don`t know what tricks the Administration will come up with to divert people`s attention, but I think that unless a candidate is really prepared to come out swinging, to say these people are doing the wrong thing by the country, there`s no chance. Saying "I`m like Bush only less so" is not going to win this election.


Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7fm, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org), where he interviews people he believes can help create "a world that just might work."


http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17169

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

© 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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[Joerver]

Wednesday, November 12, 2003
War News for November 12, 2003

Zu jeder Meldung ein Link:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Twenty Italian soldiers and civilians killed in truck bombing in Nasiriyah.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed, two wounded by roadside bomb on patrol near Tajii.

Bring `em on: One US soldier killed, two wounded by roadside bomb ambush in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Explosions again reported in Baghdad. US military operation reported in progress.

21,000 reported killed in Iraq since begnning of Bush`s War.

US troops accidently kill five Iraqi civilians near Fallujah.

CIA says Iraq security posture will deteriorate across the entire country.

The future Bush and the neo-cons have created in Iraq.

US troops mistakenly fire on car carrying a member of the IGC.

IGC President wants immediate provisional government in Iraq. Gee, I wonder why?

You can’t tell the players without a scorecard. Some brief biographies of members of the IGC.

"Groundhog Day" for US troops in Iraq. I really want to thank the Aussies for covering this war while the US media is flat on its ass.

Some Vietnam veterans think Bush is a liar. “’I don`t think we should be there,’ said Richard Wright, who served in the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam. “’At the beginning, I was behind the president 100 percent. But the truth wasn`t told.’” Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice…

Concerns increase that commercial troop carriers might get shot down at Baghdad airport.

Eric Schmidt calls bullshit on Cheney`s lies about Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Sen. McCain says situation in Iraq is worsening and time is running out.

Another Army colonel thinks he`s Rush Limbaugh; diversifies into the propaganda business. "`In spite of what you hear from the hyped-up, election-year media, we are winning this fight,` Fuller wrote in an August newsletter. He says he was tired of seeing television reporters portray the situation in Baghdad as out of control, when in his opinion, conditions actually were improving." Proving once again that the most lasting effect of airborne training is the part where they drill a hole in your head and suck out half of your brain.

Commentary
Opinion: What Americans didn’t see on Veterans’ Day. “And what of those who come back on stretchers and in wheelchairs, to Andrews Air Force Base, not in aluminum cases, to Dover? ‘The wounded,’ Vermont`s Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy told his Senate colleagues last month, ‘are brought back after midnight, making sure the press does not see the planes coming in with the wounded.’”

Opinion: The Bush-Blair Iraq is a catastrophe in progress.

Casualty Report

Local story: Virginia soldier killed in Iraq.





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PRINCE CHARLES ADMITS TAPING MAKEOVER SHOW

`Royal Eye for the Commoner Guy` To Air in November Sweeps


In a nationally televised address last night, Prince Charles acknowledged the existence of a scandalous video of him but said that the tape was merely a pilot for a new makeover series to air later this month on the Bravo network.

The program, "Royal Eye for the Commoner Guy," was taped in September in the utmost secrecy, but the steady drumbeat of tabloid rumors forced the Prince of Wales to out himself as a reality-TV show host last night.

"Does the video exist? Yes. Is it fabulous? Yes," Charles told a stunned nation.

Prince Charles then showed a clip from the "Royal Eye" program, in which he helps a self-styled "slob" from Chicago weed out the hideous clothes from his wardrobe and redo his slovenly apartment.

On the nightly BBC program "Windsor Watch," historian Lord Andrew Lyndon-Hogg expressed doubt that the monarchy could survive this latest controversy.

"There has been suspicion for some time that there was something a little odd about Charles, but no one ever dreamt he engaged in reality TV," Lord Lyndon-Hogg said. "I dare say this may be too much for the British people to bear."

Even more damaging was a new poll showing only 23% of Britons wanting Charles to be the next King, with 84% choosing football star David Beckham and a surprising 42% favoring Camilla Parker Bowles.

In an alternate succession plan reportedly being hammered out by the royal family, Prince William would eventually become King, with Charles assuming the somewhat lesser title of The Aristocrat Formerly Known As Prince.

**** BOROWITZ ON CNN THURSDAY MORNING ****

Andy Borowitz gives his take on pop culture Thursday morning on CNN`s "American Morning" at 7:40 (Eastern).

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Iraqi Teenagers Cheer as American Blood Flows

By Michael Georgy

Wed November 12, 2003: BAGHDAD (Reuters) - If Washington doubts there is Iraqi public support for guerrillas killing its troops, it should consider the teenagers who happily watched American blood spill on Wednesday.

After a roadside bomb ripped through a military vehicle and wounded two soldiers, Iraqi boys rushed out of their homes to survey the damage.

"This is good. If they ask me, I will join the resistance. The Americans have to die," said Ali Qais, 15. "They are just here to steal our oil."

The U.S. administration has long dismissed the guerrillas as isolated "terrorists" who are Saddam Hussein loyalists or foreign Islamic militants.

But the scene in the Sarafiya district of Baghdad suggests they are winning the sympathy of Iraqis, whose joy at Saddam`s fall has been overshadowed by anti-American rage.

Teenage boys were irritated to hear that two American soldiers were just wounded, not killed.

"I saw them pushing their hands onto one of the Americans` chest. They must have died. One soldier`s friend was crying," said Abdullah Oman, 18.

His fury has been fueled by what he says is an American desire to humiliate all Iraqis.

He even believes that U.S. troops plant the bombs themselves, risking American lives to terrify and kill Iraqis.

"They are watching us die and laughing. They humiliate us. They handcuffed me and arrested me in front of my parents late one night because I stood on my house porch after curfew," he said.

A new CIA report on Iraq warns of growing popular support for insurgents combating U.S. occupation forces and says efforts to rebuild the country could collapse without immediate corrective action, the Philadelphia Inquirer said on Wednesday.

The newspaper, quoting unnamed administration officials, also said in an article that the classified document`s bleak view of the situation in Iraq has been privately endorsed by Iraq`s U.S. governor, Paul Bremer.

Guerrillas have killed 155 American soldiers since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1.

In the months after the war, Iraqis voiced frustration with the American failure to crack down on looters and restore basic services.

Now talk has turned increasingly violent, especially among teenagers. They have watched American soldiers arrest their fathers and body-search their mothers during intrusive raids.

Iraqis are angrier and guerrillas are carrying out more spectacular attacks such as suicide bombings and mortar strikes on the main U.S. compound in Saddam`s former palace.

Shortly after Wednesday`s bombing teenagers in Sarafiya picked up leaflets from a group calling itself the Army of Mohammad.

"Patience, patience Baghdad. The occupation army will be destroyed," the leaflets said.

Residents of the working-class area watched as a U.S. soldier poured water and sand over the pools of blood from his comrades.

"I want to join these Iraqi fighters. I want to hit the Americans, the infidels," said Ali Ahmed, 10.© Copyright Reuters 2003

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Reasons Not to Invade Iraq, by George Bush Sr.

04/19/03

On 21 September 2002, The Memory Hole posted an extract from an essay by George Bush Sr. and Brent Scowcroft, in which they explain why they didn`t have the military push into Iraq and topple Saddam during Gulf War 1. Although there are differences between the Iraq situations in 1991 and 2002-3, Bush`s key points apply to both.

But a funny thing happened. Fairly recently, Time pulled the essay off of their site. It used to be at this link, which now gives a 404 error. If you go to the table of contents for the issue in which the essay appeared (2 March 1998), "Why We Didn`t Remove Saddam" is conspicuously absent.

Because of this erasure, we`re posting the entire essay below the portion we originally excerpted. Below that, you`ll find a copy of the actual page from the magazine, courtesy of Bruce Koball and Boing Boing.

Excerpt from "Why We Didn`t Remove Saddam" by George Bush [Sr.] and Brent Scowcroft, Time (2 March 1998):

While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.`s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.

I`ve been told that the same passage appears on page 489 of Bush and Scowcroft`s book, A World Transformed (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).

"Why We Didn`t Remove Saddam"

George Bush [Sr.] and Brent Scowcroft
Time (2 March 1998)

The end of effective Iraqi resistance came with a rapidity which surprised us all, and we were perhaps psychologically unprepared for the sudden transition from fighting to peacemaking. True to the guidelines we had established, when we had achieved our strategic objectives (ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait and eroding Saddam`s threat to the region) we stopped the fighting. But the necessary limitations placed on our objectives, the fog of war, and the lack of "battleship Missouri" surrender unfortunately left unresolved problems, and new ones arose.

We were disappointed that Saddam`s defeat did not break his hold on power, as many of our Arab allies had predicted and we had come to expect. President Bush repeatedly declared that the fate of Saddam Hussein was up to the Iraqi people. Occasionally, he indicated that removal of Saddam would be welcome, but for very practical reasons there was never a promise to aid an uprising. While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.`s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.

We discussed at length forcing Saddam himself to accept the terms of Iraqi defeat at Safwan--just north of the Kuwait-Iraq border--and thus the responsibility and political consequences for the humiliation of such a devastating defeat. In the end, we asked ourselves what we would do if he refused. We concluded that we would be left with two options: continue the conflict until he backed down, or retreat from our demands. The latter would have sent a disastrous signal. The former would have split our Arab colleagues from the coalition and, de facto, forced us to change our objectives. Given those unpalatable choices, we allowed Saddam to avoid personal surrender and permitted him to send one of his generals. Perhaps we could have devised a system of selected punishment, such as air strikes on different military units, which would have proved a viable third option, but we had fulfilled our well-defined mission; Safwan was waiting.

As the conflict wound down, we felt a sense of urgency on the part of the coalition Arabs to get it over with and return to normal. This meant quickly withdrawing U.S. forces to an absolute minimum. Earlier there had been some concern in Arab ranks that once they allowed U.S. forces into the Middle East, we would be there to stay. Saddam`s propaganda machine fanned these worries. Our prompt withdrawal helped cement our position with our Arab allies, who now trusted us far more than they ever had. We had come to their assistance in their time of need, asked nothing for ourselves, and left again when the job was done. Despite some criticism of our conduct of the war, the Israelis too had their faith in us solidified. We had shown our ability--and willingness--to intervene in the Middle East in a decisive way when our interests were challenged. We had also crippled the military capability of one of their most bitter enemies in the region. Our new credibility (coupled with Yasser Arafat`s need to redeem his image after backing the wrong side in the war) had a quick and substantial payoff in the form of a Middle East peace conference in Madrid.

The Gulf War had far greater significance to the emerging post-cold war world than simply reversing Iraqi aggression and restoring Kuwait. Its magnitude and significance impelled us from the outset to extend our strategic vision beyond the crisis to the kind of precedent we should lay down for the future. From an American foreign-policymaking perspective, we sought to respond in a manner which would win broad domestic support and which could be applied universally to other crises. In international terms, we tried to establish a model for the use of force. First and foremost was the principle that aggression cannot pay. If we dealt properly with Iraq, that should go a long way toward dissuading future would-be aggressors. We also believed that the U.S. should not go it alone, that a multilateral approach was better. This was, in part, a practical matter. Mounting an effective military counter to Iraq`s invasion required the backing and bases of Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.

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November 12, 2003
Bush Looking to Transfer Power to Iraqis, U.S. Aide Says
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 — L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, asserted today that the pacification of Iraq was going well despite inevitable problems. But Secretary of State Colin L. Powell later acknowledged that there had been discussions at the White House about the state of security in Iraq.

Speaking outside the White House after high-level talks on ways to speed up the transfer of power to the Iraqis, Mr. Bremer sought to play down any suggestion that the situation in Iraq had reached a crisis point. He said he would return to Iraq with iron-clad assurances from the White House that the United States was firm in its commitment to turn Iraq over to its own people.

"I`ll be taking them a message from the president that he remains steadfast in his determination to defeat terrorism in Iraq and steadfast in his determination to give the Iraqis authority over their country, authority they`re already beginning to assume very quickly in the area of security and in the area of running the Iraqi ministries," Mr. Bremer said.

Mr. Bremer repeatedly declined to discuss the substance of his talks at the White House, saying only that he had had "some very good discussions in the last couple of days with the president and his advisers." But the urgency of those discussions, on a hastily arranged visit to Washington that began even before today`s deadly attack on an Italian police post, was self-evident.

And Secretary of State Powell, in a brief exchange with reporters after a meeting with Mexico`s foreign minister, Luis Ernesto Derbez, acknowledged that overall security in Iraq had been on the agenda in the talks with Mr. Bremer at the White House.

"We candidly took a look at the security situation," Mr. Powell said. "It`s a difficult situation, but we are confident that our commanders will get on top of it and our intelligence experts will be able to penetrate these remnants of the old regime who are trying to destroy the hopes and aspirations of the Iraqi people."

But Mr. Powell emphasized, as did Mr. Bremer, that the United States remained committed to reconstruction in Iraq and to transferring power to the Iraqis themselves.

Mr. Bremer asserted that the Iraqi Governing Council was made up of "an extremely capable group of ministers" who were assuming more and more authority over their country, and he rejected the suggestion that he was frustrated with the pace of its progress.

The White House meetings reflected dissatisfaction with the pace of progress in Iraq and a growing conviction that Mr. Bremer must abandon his methodical plan to move gradually toward the election of an Iraqi government over a year or two, officials said.

But Mr. Bremer deflected questions on whether the Bush administration had changed its position and might now be leaning toward having an interim government before a constitution was written.

"Well, there are lots of discussions being held in Baghdad among members of the Governing Council, a lot of discussions here and there," the administrator said. "Let`s wait and see what the decisions are that the Governing Council makes. Those will be their decisions."

Mr. Bremer also played down the importance of a new report from the Central Intelligence Agency that ordinary Iraqis might be growing disillusioned with the American-led occupation.

"I am completely confident and optimistic about the outcome in Iraq, but we will face some difficult days, like the day when we had the attack on the Italian soldiers in the South," he said. "We`re going to have difficult days ahead because the terrorists are determined to deny the Iraqis the right to run their own country. We`re not going to let them get away with that."

The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said later that the administration`s goal in Iraq remained unchanged: "How best to move forward on transferring sovereignty as quickly as possible to the Iraqi people, making sure that it is done the right way."

Pressed on whether Mr. Bremer was taking "a new idea" back to Iraq, Mr. McClellan said: "We`re staying the course to realize our same goal. I think we`re having some serious discussions about the best way to move forward, and those discussions include discussions with the Governing Council."

Besides President Bush, the officials who met with Mr. Bremer included Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Mr. Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser.

Several administration officials said there was no evidence that Mr. Bush had lost confidence in Mr. Bremer, although the president wants him to move more quickly.

But Mr. Bremer`s visit had an unusually urgent air. To be here, he had to break an appointment in Baghdad with Leszek Miller, the prime minister of Poland, the only country other than Britain to contribute substantial numbers of troops to the occupying force.

The first round of White House discussions took place on Tuesday as the top American military commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, spoke of a "turning point" in the conflict.

General Sanchez outlined a new get-tough approach to combat operations in areas north and west of Baghdad, strongholds for loyalists of Saddam Hussein. Dispensing with euphemisms favored by many officials in the Bush administration in recent months, he described what 130,000 American troops were facing as a "war."

Among the options being reviewed in Washington, officials said, is the selection of an interim Iraqi leader who would serve until elections could be held. Some American officials have said they see a model in Afghanistan, where Hamid Karzai has served as his country`s leader ahead of elections scheduled for next year. The administration is also considering a temporary constitution for Iraq, and officials said they spent considerable time on Tuesday debating how to speed the process of drafting a permanent constitution that would provide the basis for elections.

The officials added that now was a natural time for the United States to push Iraq to move to the next stage of its political rebirth, given that Congress had approved nearly $20 billion to rebuild the country.

One Defense Department official said Mr. Bremer had returned to defend his approach as the White House re-examined some of his biggest decisions, including disbanding the Iraqi Army.

Other administration officials described the meetings as driven primarily by a need to settle on a procedure for drafting an Iraqi constitution. The latest United Nations Security Council resolution on Iraq calls on the Governing Council to provide the Security Council by Dec. 15 with a timetable and a plan for drafting a constitution for Iraq and holding elections.

But American officials have grown increasingly impatient with the Governing Council, which is made up of 24 Iraqis appointed by the United States.

Mr. Bremer has been pushing the council, with little success so far, to adopt a plan for drafting and ratifying a constitution as a precursor to elections and the establishment of a government. Several council members have complained in turn of having little real power because it is concentrated in Mr. Bremer`s office.

The council`s performance was a main theme of the discussions at the White House, several officials said.

Among the options considered in the White House meetings, officials said, was whether to hold national elections to select delegates to a constitutional convention, a step favored by the Shiite majority in Iraq but viewed with misgivings by other religious and ethnic groups.

There has been no consensus within the administration on how to move ahead on the creation of a constitution, and administration officials said no decisions were made on Tuesday.

"U.N. Resolution 1511 calls for the Governing Council to accelerate the process of setting up a constitutional track," said Dan Senor, the spokesman for Mr. Bremer, who accompanied him to Washington. "As that deadline approaches we are intensifying consultations with the Governing Council and within our own government about the best path forward."

The United States has already taken steps to accelerate the training and deployment of Iraqi security forces in an effort to move American and allied troops off the streets and into support roles. Close to 40 American soldiers have been killed in the past 10 days.

That shift was driven by the increasingly sophisticated attacks on American troops, Iraqis who are cooperating with the occupation, and international aid groups.

But the administration has also been under pressure from other nations, including France and Germany, to do more to accelerate Iraq`s political development.

Mr. Bush is scheduled to travel to London next week for a visit with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who has faced intensifying domestic political criticism for backing the United States in the war and who has made clear that he would like to see quick progress in Iraq.

Heading into an election year, Mr. Bush also has his own domestic political considerations, especially with the steady killing and wounding of American troops in Iraq.

Reflecting the impatience even within the president`s own party at the pace of progress in creating a viable Iraqi government, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, told reporters on Tuesday that the members of the Iraqi Governing Council "aren`t doing their job."

At a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on Tuesday morning, Mr. Bush said the United States was "a nation at war" and cast the loss of life in Iraq and in the struggle against terrorism as painfully necessary to protect the country and what it stands for.

"Young Americans have died in liberating Iraq and Afghanistan," Mr. Bush said. "The loss is terrible. It is borne especially by the families left behind. But in their hurt and in their loneliness, I want these families to know your loved one served in a good and just cause."

Later, at a speech to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, Mr. Bush said, "We`re offering aid and self-rule and hope for the future" in Iraq while Iraqis and foreigners in Iraq who are attacking American troops "offer nothing but oppression and death."

Speaking to reporters outside a Veterans Affairs hospital in Manchester, N.H., Wesley K. Clark, the retired general who is one of the nine candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, said the administration did not have an appropriate plan for how to get Iraq back on its feet after the end of major combat operations. "It`s the obligation of any commander to have a success plan and know how to make it work," he said.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for this article.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Man muß sich den Wahnsinn auf der Zunge zergehen lassen. 401,3 Milliarden Dollar für die Verteidigung in einem Jahr.

washingtonpost.com
Senate Approves $401.3B Defense Bill


By KEN GUGGENHEIM
The Associated Press
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; 4:24 PM


WASHINGTON - The Senate gave final approval Wednesday to a $401.3 billion defense bill that gives the Pentagon greater control over its civilian work force and eases environmental restrictions on the military.

The bill authorizing 2004 defense programs now goes to President Bush for his signature.

Democrats joined Republicans in the 95-3 vote, despite their objections to the broader Pentagon authority. They stressed the measure would provide new benefits to both active duty soldiers and veterans.

But the bill was opposed by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., who said it "transfers vast, unchecked powers to the Defense Department while avoiding any break with the business-as-usual approach to increasing defense spending."

The bill is $1.5 billion more than the amount request by Bush and about 2.2 percent more than Congress approved last year. It was approved by the House on Friday in a 362-40 vote.

It raises salaries for soldiers by an average of 4.15 percent and extends increases in combat and family separation pay.

It would also partially reverse a policy set in the 1890s of reducing disabled veterans` retirement benefits by $1 for every dollar received in disability pay. The change would be phased in over 10 years and mainly help the more seriously disabled - about a quarter-million veterans. It will cost $22 billion.

In a compromise, the bill allows the Air Force to lease 20 Boeing 767 planes as midair refueling tankers and buy 80 more. The Air Force says it urgently needs to replace its aging fleet, but some senators said its original proposal to lease all 100 planes was too expensive.

The measure would also authorize some of the Pentagon`s most costly programs, including $9.1 billion for ballistic missile defense, $6.6 billion for the construction of seven new ships, $4.4 billion for developing the Joint Strike Fighter and $3.5 billion for 22 F/A-22 Raptor jet fighters.

But the Pentagon lobbied most intensively over changes affecting civil service and environmental regulations - and generally prevailed.

The Pentagon will have greater flexibility in hiring, firing and promoting civilian employees. It says current rules force it to use military personnel for jobs better suited for civilians. Democrats and unions say the bill hurts workers by weakening job protections, overtime rules and other rights.

Democrats also said the bill goes too far in providing the military with exemptions to the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The Pentagon and congressional Republicans have said those laws have hampered training exercises.

"We are spending such (an inordinate) amount of money protecting the suspected habitat of the red-cockaded woodpecker that it`s having a very deteriorating effect on our ability to train," said Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla.

The bill also lifts a decade-old ban on research into low-yield nuclear weapons and authorizes $15 million for continued research into the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, capable of destroying deep underground bunkers. Republicans say the United States needs to adapt its nuclear arsenal to defend against terrorism and other modern threats. Democrats say the change could trigger a new arms race and increase the risk of nuclear war.

The bill adds 2,400 soldiers to the Army. The Pentagon has not sought additional troops, but lawmakers are concerned that the military is being stretched thin by demands in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world.

In addition to Byrd, Sens. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, and James Jeffords, I-Vt., voted against the bill. Two Democrats, both presidential candidates, were absent: John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina.

The bill does not provide the money for military programs. Most of the funding will come from a $368 billion defense appropriations bill signed by Bush on Sept. 30.

Additional funds for military construction projects would be provided under a separate $9.3 billion measure approved by the Senate in a 98-0 vote Wednesday. The House approved the measure last week.

The military construction bill is $1.4 billion below last year`s level, but $200 million over Bush`s request. Lawmakers added more than 100 projects for military facilities in their home districts that Bush had not requested.

The measure would be the fifth of the 13 spending bills for the new budget year that Congress will have completed.

--

The defense authorization bill is H.R. 1588.

--

On the Net:

Congress: http://thomas.loc.gov


© 2003 The Associated Press

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Dieser Beitrag wurde vom System automatisch gesperrt. Bei Fragen wenden Sie sich bitte an [e-mail]

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#9221

Für die Verteidigung? Wirklich?

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WHY WE FIGHT

Iraq From the Other Side
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:

Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.

You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein`s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.

Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans` own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.

It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.

It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America`s vast underclass. Many don`t want to be here; joining America`s mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney`s cynical oil war.

Unfortunately, we can`t help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn`t always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.

In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.

In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.

Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.

To victory!

(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. It is now available in a revised and updated paperback edition containing new material. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2003 TED RALL

RALL 11/11/03

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`We could lose this situation`
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power

Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian

The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.

The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.

One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents` strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.

An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".

"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.

"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba`athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."

Although, the report was an internal CIA document it was widely circulated within the administration. Even more unusually, it carried an endorsement by Paul Bremer, the civilian head of the US-run occupation of Iraq - a possible sign that he was seeking to bypass his superiors in the Pentagon and send a message directly to President George Bush on how bad the situation has become.

Proof of the strength of the insurgents and their ability to strike anywhere in Iraq was provided in another devastating suicide bombing yesterday.

This time the target was the Italian military police barracks in the south-eastern city of Nasariya.

At least 17 Italians and eight Iraqis were killed, striking a blow at one of the few nations prepared to send troops to help the US and Britain contain the rising violence.

Following crisis talks in Washington yesterday, Mr Bremer flew back to Baghdad armed with proposals to bolster the US-backed Iraqi governing council with more powers and more resources in an attempt to speed up elections.

Under one of the proposals, the council could be expanded or transformed into a full provisional government backed by an interim constitution.

That would represent a radical reversal of earlier US policy which was to put off the transfer of real power to an Iraqi government until after elections, which in turn would have to await a comprehensive new constitution.

The new blueprint, which reverses that methodological progression and which is closer to what was done in post-war Afghanistan, emerged from an urgently arranged series of meetings between the president, his top national security advisers, and Mr Bremer, as the security situation in Iraq continued to deteriorate rapidly.

In scenes last night reminiscent of the height of the war, US forces went back on the offensive with air strikes and armoured assaults on a suspected guerrilla stronghold near Baghdad. Guerrilla attacks, meanwhile, have become more frequent, bolder and bloodier.

In public at least, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has insisted that the attacks are the work of a few remnants of Saddam Hussein`s Ba`athist party and a handful of Islamic jihadists from other Arab countries.

It is understood that Mr Bremer`s administration is concerned about the impact of the decision by US forces to escalate their offensive against the insurgents, anxious that bombing and heavy-handed raids will increase popular support for the insurgency.

Mr Bremer refused to provide details of the new US plan, but US and British officials said he was carrying proposals from Mr Bush aimed at bolstering the interim Iraqi leadership in the hope of winning the confidence of Iraqis and paving the way for elections pencilled in for the end of next year. But, according to some US officials, elections could be held in four to six months.

The UN security council has given the Iraqi governing council until December 15 to come up with a constitutional blueprint and organising elections.

The council, deeply divided by internal disputes, has shown little sign of meeting that deadline, but the new US proposals would put it under pressure to accelerate its work and the transfer of power.

One of the options discussed in the White House yesterday was replacing the governing council with a new body.

The council was hand-picked by Washington after the war, largely from returning exiles, but it has since disappointed US officials by its slow progress. Many of its 24 members fail to turn up to its meetings, and the CIA report said the council had little support among the Iraqi population.

However, the secretary of state, Colin Powell insisted: "We are committed to the governing council and are prepared to help them in any way we can."

"We`re looking at all sorts of ideas, and we do want to accelerate the work of reform," Mr Powell said.

"We want to accelerate the work of putting a legal basis under the new Iraqi government and we are doing everything we can to get the governing council equipped with everything they need."


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Analysis
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Governing council put in frame as US makes no bones about how situation is unravelling
Rory McCarthy
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian

The unscheduled summit in Washington over the future of Iraq reflected intense White House unease about the way the situation is unravelling in the country.

Paul Bremer, who was flying back to Baghdad last night, has been leading a Coalition Provisional Authority that has become frustrated with the work of the Iraqi Governing Council.

In private, American and British officials in the CPA can barely disguise their disappointment at a body which has been criticised for tardiness and inefficiency.

The council, now 24 people, was intended to be an advisory group, but under pressure from Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN special representative killed in a bombing in August, it was handed more responsibility. US officials hoped its members would quickly chose a leader, then appoint ministers. But it took several weeks even to decide who should be president and in the end settled on a compromise: nine of them would lead the council in a rotating presidency.

Weeks later, ministers were named, but the council has yet to make a decision on its most important task: the creation of a committee to draft Iraq`s new constitution - the Americans had hoped the drafting would begin as early as last August. Last month a committee reported to the council on forming a group to write the constitution. Yet no decision has been taken on its proposals.

Officials complain that several council members are routinely absent from the three days of meetings each week, often leaving only four or five of the original members at the table.

For their part, the Iraqis on the council are aware that as American appointees they lack the legitimacy of an elected body. They say they lack authority and that key decisions are taken without reference to the council.

"The governing council should not alone bear the responsibility of any inefficiency," Mahmoud Othman, a Sunni Kurd member of the council, told the Associated Press. "This is supposed to be a partnership based on equality, but when the Americans want to find solution for their problems, they do it in any way that suits them."

Mouwafak al-Rabii, a Shi`ite Muslim member of the governing council and a human rights activist, also rejected criticism of the council`s performance, saying it is facing complex issues. "We need to negotiate and have a dialogue to reach a decision," he told AP. "And when we do that, then we shall have to talk with our (coalition) partners, differ, negotiate and compromise with them."

Entifadh Qanbar, a spokesman for the Pentagon-backed council member Ahmed Chalabi, yesterday said: "The only solution is that the council [gets] full powers and sovereignty."

Several council members were furious last month when they found the Americans had agreed to send Iraqi police officers to Jordan for training. Many in Iraq still remember Jordan as an ally of Saddam Hussein. The council was angry again when it learned that the US had invited Turkish troops into Iraq. Weeks of complaints from the council appear to have shelved that plan.

Council members have also pressed to take more control over security in Iraq, and until now their plans have largely met with resistance from the Americans.

Each of the 24 is a likely target for the guerrilla movement because of their perceived support for the Americans. Aqila al-Hashimi, one of only three women on the council, was shot dead outside her home in September.

Yesterday an American soldier opened fire on a car carrying another council member, Mohammad Bahr al-Uloom, near the American military zone in Baghdad. Although Mr Uloom was unhurt, his driver was injured.


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Red Kabul revisited
Are the US rulers of Afghanistan at last adopting the agenda of their Soviet predecessors?

Jonathan Steele
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian

Two years after Kabul was freed from the Taliban there`s a sense of deja vu about Afghanistan. The striking comparison is not primarily with Iraq, although reminders of the trouble the Americans are having in Mesopotamia pop up constantly. Indeed, in some ways things are worse. Fighting is on a heavier scale, with US helicopters and aircraft conducting almost daily raids on Taliban groups. Swathes of the south have become no-go areas for UN aid workers and NGOs. More than 350 people have been killed by Taliban attackers or US air raids since August, a death toll greater than in Iraq.

No, Kabul today bears a strong resemblance to the Kabul of 1981. This time the men setting the model are American rather than Russian, but the project for secular modernisation which Washington has embarked on is eerily reminiscent of what the Soviet Union tried to do. Schools, hospitals, electrification, rights for women, an expansion of education - it`s the same mix as the Russians were encouraging. Moscow`s aid came within the framework of a one-party state and national control of fledgling industry as opposed to today`s liberal democracy and an open door for private investors; but for most Afghans, then as now, the ideological trappings matter less than the practical results and the amount of money put to work.

In 1981, Kabul`s two campuses thronged with women students, as well as men. Most went around without even a headscarf. Hundreds went off to Soviet universities to study engineering, agronomy and medicine. The banqueting hall of the Kabul hotel pulsated most nights to the excitement of wedding parties. The markets thrived. Caravans of painted lorries rolled up from Pakistan, bringing Japanese TV sets, video recorders, cameras and music centres. The Russians did nothing to stop this vibrant private enterprise.

Of course, Kabul was an invaded city, but most residents did not seem worried. Baghdad-style bomb attacks on Soviet troops were rare and the mujahedin who fought the Russians in the countryside never approached the capital. Unlike the Americans in Iraq, the Russians had enough intelligence from locals to forestall sabotage attempts.

I was no supporter of the Soviet invasion. Although nominally a response to an invitation from Afghan leaders, the despatch of Soviet troops in December 1979 was foolish and illegal, as I vigorously argued against an official from the Soviet embassy at a protest meeting at the LSE a few days later. But what I saw in 1981, and on three other visits to several cities over the 14 years that the People`s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) was in charge, convinced me that it was a much less bad option than the regime on offer from the western-supported mujahedin.

It`s a view that surfaces continually. "Those were the best times," said Latif Anwari, a translator with an NGO in Mazar. Now in his late 30s, he studied engineering in Odessa from 1985 to 1991. "There was no fighting, everything was calm, the factories were working," he said. I asked him about Mohammed Najibullah, the PDPA leader who ruled for more than three years after Soviet troops withdrew. He`s universally known as "Dr Najib". "He`s still popular. If Dr Najib were a candidate in the presidential elections, he would easily win. No one likes the mujahedin," Latif said.

Or take Margaret Knill, a doughty Christian missionary from Britain who has worked at Kabul`s Vocational School for the Blind since 1983. She has seen every regime for the past 20 years and has no hesitation in saying the 1980s was the high point. "The Russians re-opened the school in 1979. We had up to 130 pupils when I came. In 1993 the building was destroyed by shelling between the mujahedin factions. We moved closer to the centre but, under the Taliban, girls and the six women teachers were excluded." Now the school is reviving, but with 98 pupils it`s still behind its PDPA heyday.

The paradox of the Soviet invasion was that it was both liberation and occupation. The Russians removed a PDPA autocrat, Hafizullah Amin, and installed a more benign ruler from a different wing of the party. But by then the damage had been done. The PDPA`s modernising agenda was easy for local tribal leaders and rural landlords to portray as anti-Islamic. Internationally, the Soviet move was denounced as a push for global expansion. The west, which had already been covertly supporting anti-communist rebels, now massively stepped up its efforts to arm the fundamentalist resistance.

The Russians did not run a pretty war. They showed no mercy in bombing villages suspected of harbouring guerrillas, as they sought to "cleanse" the border regions. But this was no Chechnya. For one thing, Soviet forces were more disciplined than their Russian successors, and they did not use kontraktniki or mercenaries who give Russian behaviour in Chechnya a bad name.

Secondly, Kabul was not Grozny. The Russians captured it without a fight, and most Kabulis supported their agenda. This was not a war of Russia v Afghanistan, but a civil war in which the Russians supported secular, urban Afghans against Islamic traditionalists and their Arab and western backers.

For a foreign journalist to make that case at the time was a lonely, unpopular business. Had the PDPA given more visas, they might have done better. Instead, they got a diet of romantic stuff about treks with the mujahedin. The west`s greatest mistake was not that it armed the mujahedin but that after Soviet troops pulled out, it failed to back UN efforts to broker a coalition between the PDPA and the mujahedin. Washington wanted revenge for defeat in Vietnam, and George Bush senior was not ready to accept a communist role in government, however much educated Afghans preferred that to victory for the fundamentalists.

Fourteen years later, after mujahedin mayhem and the even worse tyranny of the Taliban, the Americans are picking up where the Russians and the PDPA left off. In one way, Washington is worse off than Moscow was. For the Russians, the jihadi warlords were an external enemy, propped up from outside. Now they are in the country, and even in government, resisting modernisation. But in two other ways, the prospects for the Americans are better. The fiercest armed opponents - the Taliban - are not getting as much foreign backing as the anti-Soviet mujahedin did. Most Afghans have learned from their parents` mistakes. The mullahs` ability to manipulate people into mistrust of the world has faded.

Why did Afghans fight the Russians 20 years ago, but not the Americans now, I asked Nasir Rahman, a doctor. "Because they were ignorant," he said. "They didn`t know the Russians were bringing schools and hospitals or that neighbouring countries would use Afghanistan to put pressure on Russia for their own reasons. Now people wish they hadn`t caused all this suffering. People are tired of war."

I don`t expect western leaders will revise their ideological image of Afghan history or accept that arming the mujahedin was a blunder. I just hope they will nurture secular democracy this time by fighting, rather than supporting, the fundamentalists and by helping Afghans to rebuild their shattered state. Let the development money keep on flowing in. Governments will call it aid. I prefer to see it as reparations.

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France and Germany discuss union
Jon Henley in Paris
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian

France and Germany are publicly discussing the possibility of a "Franco-German union" that would allow them to cooperate more closely in such areas as education, social affairs and the economy and even merge their defence and foreign policies, the French daily Le Monde said yesterday.

The paper said that at this stage Europe`s two most powerful nations, whose historic enmity has been transformed into the main driving force towards European integration, saw the project primarily as a tactic to ensure that countries such as Spain and Poland do not block the planned European constitution, paralysing the EU as it expands to 25 members next year.

But beyond short-term tactical considerations, some form of Franco-German union is seen by leaders particularly in Paris as a vital future step. The French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, said the project was "essential" and "the only historic gamble that we cannot lose".

The prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who earlier this month hoisted a joint meeting of French and German regional authorities, also believes the two countries` relations have never been closer and that the time is ripe to go "pretty far", Le Monde said. After a shaky period during and immediately after the stormy Nice EU summit in December 2000, Paris and Berlin have worked conspicuously hard to get the so-called Franco-German motor firing again.

Their efforts culminated earlier this year when the French president, Jacques Chirac, and the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, signed a declaration promising more cooperation in areas ranging from crime to foreign policy.

They also said France and Germany would seek to "adopt common positions" in international bodies, including the UN security council, hold joint cabinet meetings, harmonise national laws wherever possible, and each appoint a senior official to oversee Franco-German cooperation.

Since then the two countries` relationship has been further cemented by the role they played in opposing the US-led invasion of Iraq, and more recently Mr Chirac represented Mr Schröder at an European council meeting in October.

But it is the realisation in both capitals that without the closest possible cooperation, France and Germany could well lose much of their influence in a larger EU that seems to be driving the project for a Franco-German union.

Le Monde quoted Mr Raffarin as saying: "If Europe with 25 members is a failure, what is left for France? The initiative of Franco-German rapprochement."

The prime minister reportedly continued, during a recent informal debate, to praise the "efficiency" of Paris`s relations with Berlin and to say he could "well imagine that one day a German commissioner could represent France in Brussels."


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By George!
You couldn`t make him up, and you don`t have to. Like him or loathe him, George Bush is for real - and heading soon for a capital city near you. Rupert Cornwell introduces our celebration of the remarkable career of Britain`s favourite US President
13 November 2003


Monarchs and their Prime Ministers enjoy many privileges not granted to their subjects. Clairvoyance, however, is not among them. For how were the Queen and Tony Blair to know in 2001, when they extended the invitation for President Bush to make his state visit next week, that two years later it would be shaping up as the most fraught and ill-timed exercise of its kind in living memory?

Simply put, the leader of the country that Blair insists is our closest ally is about to receive the most torrid reception ever to greet a foreign dignitary on British shores. It`s predicted that up to 100,000 people will be out on London`s streets to protest at Bush`s presence. All police leave has been cancelled, and Scotland Yard and the US secret services charged with protecting the President are trying to agree how much of London should be sealed off to prevent demonstrators - and possible terrorists - from getting a sight of him.

But even if Bush, whose contact with the news is so assiduously filtered by his courtiers, gains little idea of the turmoil around him, his countrymen back home assuredly will. The treacherous French and spineless Germans are one thing. But in Iraq - as in most other things, the average American assumes - the British are our friends. Imagine the shock, then, when they see surging crowds, burning flags and (unless police step into ban it) a giant effigy of the Great Leader being toppled, à la Saddam, in Trafalgar Square.

It is not only Bush the Chicken-hawk warmonger and promoter-in-chief of the great illusion about Saddam`s weapons of mass destruction who they will be denouncing. It is also Bush the ignorant, self-righteous Christian warrior, Bush the smirking executioner and Bush the believer in one law for America and another for everyone else. And, of course, Bush the "Toxic Texan", an image made flesh by the "ghost ships" bearing down on Hartlepool, whose US-produced contaminants will find a last resting place on Britain`s unpolluted isle.

No man is ever quite as extreme as his caricature. But Bush comes closer than most, and not only Britons cannot abide him. In his own country, too, he is perhaps an even more polarising Presi- dent than Bill Clinton. Conservatives abhorred Clinton; but for the liberal half of an equally divided country Bush embodies everything to hate about the right. And the President`s great betrayal only makes them angrier.

This, after all, was a President elected after the closest election in history - a President, indeed, who, but for the archaism of the electoral college, would have lost to Al Gore, who clearly defeated him in the popular vote. At first Bush made conciliatory noises, but his "compassionate conservatism" soon became a hollow joke. His administration is the most radical of modern times. It has rammed through huge tax cuts, and run up the biggest deficits in US history in the name of supply-side ideology. By tilting those cuts towards the very rich, he has widened the disparities of US society.

Rarely is there any serious attempt to engage with critics, just the fait accompli, and the implication that, in time of war, opposition is akin to giving succour to the enemy. Bush wants to pack the courts with doctrinal right-wing judges; if he could, he would roll back a woman`s right to choose even further than the ban on partial birth abortion he signed into law last week.

And all this done with a certainty ill-befitting a man with scant knowledge of the world`s complexities, and a quite scary lack of curiosity about what makes other people and other cultures tick. As the political writer Joe Klein put it in a Time magazine column just before the second Iraq war: "George W Bush lives at the intersection of faith and inexperience. This is not a reassuring address, especially in a time of trouble." No more reassuring is the secrecy with which he and his high command operate. Add that to Bush`s aversion to press conferences and Republican control of both houses of Congress, and the Bush White House often appears beyond accountability.

Indeed, today`s Washington has a whiff of Soviet ways; suffocating internal discipline, resentment of even reasoned, moderate opposition, and a refusal to admit even the tiniest error. For imperialists, read "evildoers". With their condescending "we know best" attitude, Messrs Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest offer as close an impersonation of the Politburo as you will find. As was said of the pre-glasnost Kremlin then, so with the White House now: you know nothing, but understand everything.

Finally, there is Bush the buffoon. There is another reason for his aversion to press conferences: in anything but the most tightly scripted circumstances he is capable of saying anything. Sometimes it works fine, as at his father`s state banquet for the Queen in 1991, when he boasted to her that he had embroidered his new cowboy boots with the phrase "God Save the Queen", before confessing he had been his family`s black sheep. "Who`s yours?" he then asked the sovereign, to the horror of his mother.

But he`s President now. And if there`s anything that jars with liberals more than his gilded, semi-accidental glide to the White House, it`s his capacity to mangle the English language. In the US and Britain alike, the chattering classes don`t know whether to laugh at Bush or loathe him. The antipathy is assuredly mutual. Is he dumb, Barbara Bush was once asked of her son. Yes, came the acid reply, "dumb as a fox".

With its kernel of truth, her remark only makes Bush`s critics more furious. Far more than real but less familiar tyrants from foreign lands such as Nicolae Ceausescu and Jiang Zemin, who also have supped at Her Majesty`s table, we think we know George Bush. We know he doesn`t deserve to be where he is. And what could be more maddening than that?

Bush telegraph: selected presidential facts

In May 2001, Bush`s government gave $43m to the Taliban.

Bush has never attended a funeral or memorial service for a soldier killed in Iraq.

In August this year, Bush took the second-longest holiday ever by a US president: 28 days.

Bush`s 16-member cabinet is the wealthiest in US history, with an average fortune of $10.9m each.

As governor of Texas, Bush executed 152 prisoners.

Sixty-one people who raised $100,000 for Bush`s 2000 election campaign have since been given government posts.

Nine members of Bush`s Defense Policy Board sit on the board of defence contractors or are advisers.

Bush owns more than 250 autographed baseballs.

Bush has been arrested three times: for stealing a Christmas wreath from a hotel; for ripping down the Princeton goal posts after a Princeton-Yale game; and for drunk driving.

Bush infuriated the Russian media by spitting a wad of chewing gum into his hand before signing 2002`s historic Treaty of Moscow with Vladimir Putin.

While appearing on the David Letterman show in 2000, Bush was caught surreptitiously cleaning his glasses on the jacket of the programme`s executive producer, Maria Pope.
13 November 2003 10:45



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Charles Glass: There are so many echoes of Vietnam in Iraq
It took two years for US deaths to reach 324 in Vietnam. It passed that figure in seven months in Iraq
13 November 2003


The US armed forces launched their first air raid against post-war Iraq last week, when F-16 fighter-bombers dropped 500-pound bombs on Tikrit. The new campaign against Iraq`s resistance fighters, dubbed Operation Ivy Cyclone, recalls President Lyndon Johnson`s Operation Rolling Thunder over Vietnam in 1965. That campaign of bombing Vietnam would eventually see Indochina devastated by 7 million tons of aerial explosives.

These are early days in Iraq, where the conflict between a growing percentage of the native population and the occupying forces is escalating far more rapidly than it did in Vietnam. It took two years, from 1963 to the end of 1964, for American combat deaths to reach 324. The US has surpassed that figure in only seven months in Iraq, where 398 American soldiers have died already. In the last 12 days, 38 have been killed. As for the Iraqi dead, the US does not count them with similar precision. Vietnam offers examples to the US, but it is learning the wrong lessons.

Parallels with Vietnam are asserting themselves again and again in Iraq. They start with the justification for committing American troops to battle. In both cases, politicians lied to persuade Congress and the public to go along. In 1964, the year Lyndon Johnson officially upgraded the US military role from advisory to combat, the secretaries of state and defence accused North Vietnam of attacking the USS Maddox.

Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, in a bravura performance emulated by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN last February, announced: "While on routine patrol in international waters, the US destroyer Maddox underwent an unprovoked attack." The only phrase corresponding to reality was that the Maddox was a destroyer. Otherwise, the routine patrol was in fact an attack on North Vietnam`s shore installations. The international waters were really North Vietnam`s. And the unprovoked attack was not only provoked, it did not take place at all.

The Johnson administration`s deception, like George Bush`s over Saddam`s weapons of mass destruction, worked. Johnson won passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, allowing him to take "all necessary measures". Bush passed his war resolution after telling Congress that Saddam was threatening the US. The Bush administration`s dance around facts to achieve the invasion of Iraq made Johnson`s chicanery look amateur.

Tonkin was shown to be a lie when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The lies over Iraq were exposed almost as soon as the US erected barriers in Baghdad to protect itself from the people it had liberated. No one found the nuclear programme, the Niger uranium or the elusive connection to al-Qa`ida. From the beginning in Iraq, as in Vietnam, the credibility gap lay wide open.

At a recent dinner in Washington, US Marine officers told me of their opposition to the occupation of Iraq. Two reasons they gave were: occupation cannot work; and young Marines risking their lives know that the sons of the war`s architects, like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, will not face combat or risk death in Iraq. These officers were born about the time US troops left Vietnam. Their voices echo those of generals Matthew Ridgway and Douglas MacArthur, who warned Kennedy that the US could not win a land war in Asia. Many commanders were outspoken critics of the Vietnam war. The most consistent was the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David M Shoup.

In 1966, Shoup, who had already warned both Kennedy and Johnson that the military had no business in Vietnam, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that most of the South Vietnamese people were fighting against "those crooks in Saigon", leaders whom the US had imposed upon them. In one of his many speeches throughout the country, Shoup said, "If we had and would keep our dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. [A solution] that they design and want. That they fight and work for. [Not one] crammed down their throats by Americans."

Robert Buzzanco, in Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era, observed that the reward for Shoup`s candour was to be placed, alongside other military and civilian opponents of the war, under FBI surveillance.

Robert Buzzanco wrote that, while the American officer corps was sceptical, "they nonetheless ignored their own bleak analysis with the full complicity of the civilian policy-making establishment." Many officers saw what happened to Shoup and protected their careers. Most of all, they did not want the military to take the blame for a war directed by Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Avoiding blame for disaster was preferable to telling presidents what they did not want to hear.

As in Iraq, getting into Vietnam was easier than getting out. The US attempted to impose a viable South Vietnamese government and army capable of defeating the popular resistance of the National Liberation Front. It never succeeded. The Bush administration tried a similar manoeuvre with its appointment last July of the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council (IGC). Now Paul Bremer, head of the occupyin g administration, has been recalled amid reports that they are seeking alternatives to the IGC.

In South Vietnam, a state the US more or less created after the Geneva Accords of 1954, Washington installed Ngo Dinh Diem as leader. When it became dissatisfied with Diem`s inability to control the insurgency against his rule, Kennedy allowed some of South Vietnam`s generals to assassinate him and take over. The US presided over one military coup after another in the elusive search for a government acceptable to South Vietnam`s people.

When American soldiers died in Vietnam, the US reacted with various programmes to protect them: saturation bombing, camps called strategic hamlets in which it confined hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese peasants, and the Phoenix Programme, under which the CIA and Special Forces assassinated 30,000 suspected Viet Cong cadres. The CIA chief William Colby called Phoenix the only successful operation of the war. How far is the US willing to go to preserve the notion that it can impose a government acceptable to both itself and the Iraqi people? Will it employ the old techniques, the only ones in its counter-insurgency arsenal, as it suffers more casualties? Old words come howling out of the past: body count, kill ratio, search and destroy, destroying the village to save it and the light at the end of the tunnel.

America lost 58,000 dead in Vietnam. It killed two million Vietnamese. It was warned against that war, as it was warned against this one - and often by the military men who did not want their soldiers to risk their lives except in defence of their own country.

The last exit strategy in Vietnam was Vietnamisation, training South Vietnamese soldiers to fight South Vietnamese guerrillas. Now the word is Iraqisation and amounts to the same thing. In Vietnam, the US created a state apparatus that was corrupt and a local army that did not want to fight. Both collapsed when America pulled out. In Iraq, the Bush administration promises a different outcome - despite pursuing the same goals with the same methods.

The author was ABC News Chief Mideast correspondent, 1983-1993
13 November 2003 10:50


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November 13, 2003
Panel Reaches Deal on Access to 9/11 Papers
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 — The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said on Wednesday that it had reached agreement with the White House to give the panel access to copies of the daily intelligence briefings sent to President Bush`s desk shortly before the attacks.

The accord was reached after months of talks over the reports, known as the President`s Daily Brief, which the Central Intelligence Agency presents to Mr. Bush and his senior aides every morning. The bipartisan commission had threatened to subpoena the reports.

"We believe this agreement will prove satisfactory and enable us to get our job done," the panel said in a statement that lacked details on the agreement.

Although panel officials said the pact imposed substantial limits on access, it still appeared to establish a precedent for outside access to some of the most highly classified intelligence reports in the executive branch, a precedent that the White House had not been eager to set.

Administration officials acknowledge that they fear that information in the reports might be construed to suggest that the White House had clues before Sept. 11, 2001, that Al Qaeda was planning a catastrophic attack. The White House acknowledged last year, in response to news reports, that an intelligence briefing in August 2001 suggested that Al Qaeda might be planning hijackings.

Commission officials said that under the accord two members of the 10-member commission would have access to the full library of daily briefings prepared in the Bush and Clinton administrations and that two other members would be allowed to read just the copies of the briefings that the White House deemed relevant to the inquiry.

The panel, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, created by Congress last year over the initial objections of the White House, is led by former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey.

Although the agreement appeared to have the support of most of the commissioners, it was denounced by a Democrat on the panel, former Representative Timothy J. Roemer of Indiana. Mr. Roemer said in an interview that the White House was continuing to place unacceptable limits on access to the briefings.

"In paraphrasing Churchill, never have so few commissioners reviewed such important documents with so many restrictions," said Mr. Roemer, who was a member of the joint Congressional committee that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. "I am not happy with this agreement, and I will not support it."

The accord was also criticized by family members of victims of the attacks. The relatives have said all 10 commissioners should have access to the intelligence reports.

"Our understanding is that this is an unacceptable agreement," said Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband was killed in the attacks and who is now a spokeswoman for the Family Steering Committee, which represents many of the victims` families. "The details haven`t been shared with us. But we understand that this access will be highly limited."

But another prominent Democrat on the panel, Richard Ben-Veniste, a lawyer in Washington who was a special prosecutor in the Watergate scandals in the 1970`s, said the accord would give the commission adequate access to the reports.

"I think," Mr. Ben-Veniste said, "this is a compromise that respects the integrity of the commission inasmuch as it will be the commission — and not anyone else — that will designate the subcommittee that will initially review the materials."

The White House, he noted, had originally wanted to determine which commissioners would conduct the review.

"It also provides for immediate access to important material that we have been long delayed in receiving," Mr. Ben-Veniste said.

The President`s Daily Brief, known in the White House as the P.D.B., is a 10- to 12-page report prepared nightly by the C.I.A. for the president and his senior staff. It outlines what the agency considers the most important intelligence information reaching the United States in the previous 24 hours.

Citing executive privilege and concerns over the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government, the White House refused last year to make the reports available to the joint Congressional committee. Senior administration officials said the White House felt pressure to reach some deal, given Mr. Bush`s repeated promise to help the commission in every way possible and the threat of a politically damaging court fight if the panel issued a subpoena. The commission has already sent subpoenas to the Defense Department and the Federal Aviation Administration.

A spokeswoman for the White House, Ashley Snee, said on Wednesday, "We are pleased we are able to reach agreement with the commission and we look forward to their recommendations to make Americans safer."

Commission officials said they were barred from discussing many details of the agreement at the request of the White House. But they added that there was still potential for the agreement to break down, especially if the two members with full access to the reports believed that the White House was too restrictive in determining which reports the two commissioners with more limited access could see.

"We remain committed to obtaining the access we need to fulfill our mandate," the commission said.

Powder Sent to News Organizations

Envelopes received and opened yesterday at The Washington Post and a cable television news station on Long Island had a white powder, the authorities said. Preliminary tests in the two cases, they said, showed no evidence of anthrax or other dangerous substances. Additional tests were pending on the envelopes, which seem to have originated in Pakistan.

After the cable station, News 12 in Woodbury, N.Y., reported its incident, the police in New York City alerted news organizations to be cautious when opening mail. A police official in New York said the letter received on Long Island had the phrases "Death to Yankees" and "Praise Jihad Mujahadeen."

Letters with white powder were also delivered to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and a Denver location believed to be a radio station, the F.B.I. said. All tested negative for anthrax or other pathogens, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said. A spokeswoman for its Washington field office said the letters appeared to be identical.

"The content of each letter," she said, "is anti-American and pro-Muslim."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 13, 2003
Iraq Policy in Crisis

The abrupt recall of America`s top administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer III, for two days of urgent White House consultations signals a new level of alarm among American policy makers. Anxieties in Washington surely deepened yesterday after the bombing of an Italian military police compound killed at least 17 Italians and 9 Iraqis.

Administration officials, from President Bush on down, have been pressing Mr. Bremer to speed the transfer of sovereignty to appointed Iraqi officials and to compress, radically, the one- to two-year timetable he drew up for holding elections. There is some merit in these suggestions. We have long called for a quicker transfer of real power to Iraqis, as have most of America`s allies. What is troubling, however, is the notion of short-circuiting the time necessary to draw up a workable constitution and conduct fair elections in a country as torn and troubled as Iraq. Such thinking suggests that the Bush administration is in such a rush to bring American troops home that it has lost interest in laying the foundations for a stable democracy.

The White House recently began shifting its case for the Iraq war from the embarrassing unconventional weapons issue to the lofty vision of creating an exemplary democracy in Iraq. Mr. Bush would look breathtakingly cynical if he seemed to be rushing the preparation for real elections with an eye toward improving his own re-election chances.

A much better way to manage the process would be to transfer political authority to a newly created United Nations administration. Constitutional development and election supervision are areas where the U.N. has built-in legitimacy and experience. Creating a U.N. administration for Iraq could also help attract more international peacekeeping troops to relieve America`s overstrained forces — a need made even more urgent by yesterday`s attack on the Italians. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has never had much support at home for keeping troops in Iraq and may now face calls for withdrawing the more than 2,000 Italians in Iraq.

The grim truth is that there are no very attractive options in Iraq. The administration would clearly love to be able to remove American troops from the line of fire. So would we. Yet a rushed American withdrawal without an orderly handoff to the U.N. would leave Iraq open to just the kind of mixture of misgovernment and terrorism that the White House waged this war to prevent.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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November 13, 2003
A New Democracy, Enshrined in Faith
By NOAH FELDMAN

In his admirable if overdue speech last week, President Bush acknowledged 60 years of American error and announced a new policy of encouraging democracy rather than dictatorship in the Muslim world. What Mr. Bush neglected to mention was that many Muslims, if freed to make their own democratic choices, will choose Islam over secularism. A case in point is the newly released draft of the Afghan constitution, which enshrines Islamic values even as it guarantees basic liberties.

The document raises a crucial question that goes well beyond Afghanistan to the Muslim world as a whole: Can a nation be founded on both Islam and democracy without compromising on human rights and equality?

If the answer is no, then democratization in places like Iraq and Afghanistan will be a pyrrhic victory — we will have gotten rid of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein without their former victims actually achieving real freedom. If, however, a synthesis of Islam and democracy can satisfy devout Muslims, while at the same time protecting individual liberties and the rights of women and non-Muslims, then Islamic democracy may be the best hope for improvement in the Muslim world.

Make no mistake: the Afghan constitution is pervasively Islamic. Its first three articles declare Afghanistan an Islamic Republic, make Islam the official religion, and announce that "no law can be contrary to the sacred religion of Islam and the values of this constitution." The new Supreme Court, which is given the power to interpret the constitution, is to be composed of a mix of judges trained either in secular law or in Islamic jurisprudence.

The new flag features a prayer niche and pulpit, and is emblazoned with two Islamic credos: "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet" and "Allah Akbar" ("God is Great"). The government is charged with developing a unified school curriculum "based on the provisions of the sacred religion of Islam, national culture, and in accordance with academic principles." The provision requiring the state to ensure the physical and psychological well-being of the family calls, in the same breath, for "elimination of traditions contrary to the principles of the sacred religion of Islam."

And yet, the draft constitution is also thoroughly democratic, promising government "based on the people`s will and democracy" and guaranteeing citizens fundamental rights. One essential provision mandates that the state shall abide by the United Nations Charter, international treaties, all international conventions that Afghanistan has signed and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Because Afghanistan acceded in March to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women — a treaty the United States Senate has never ratified — the draft constitution guarantees women far-ranging rights against discrimination. It also ensures that women will make up at least 16.5 percent of the membership of the upper legislative house (only 14 of 100 United States senators are women.)

In addition, the provision that makes Islam the nation`s official religion also recognizes the right of non-Muslims "to perform their religious ceremonies within the limits of the provisions of law." This carefully chosen language might arguably leave room to restrict proselytizing — as, for example, do similar laws in India and Israel — but it nonetheless guarantees individual expression as an inviolable right. (It`s worth noting that the right to change one`s religion is enshrined in the human rights declaration.)

Yes, if the draft is ratified by the grand assembly, or loya jirga, tensions in the constitutional structure will have to be resolved later by the Supreme Court. According to the draft, for instance, political parties must not be organized around a program contrary to Islam or the constitution. That would exclude an antidemocratic Taliban party; but would it also exclude a party of secularists who wanted to remove Islam from the constitution? What about laws requiring women to dress modestly: unconstitutional as a violation of women`s rights, or constitutional as in accord with the teachings of Islam?

The draft constitution gives guidance on all these questions, but the answers might well come down to the makeup of the Supreme Court: one dominated by illiberal religious scholars might interpret the text one way, while one with a majority of judges trained in the secular tradition might see it very differently.

In its ambitions, attractions and dangers, the Afghan draft constitution can be seen as a metaphor for the wider prospects of Islamic democracy. Like the Afghan constitution, Islamic democracy has no chance if the West does not help create the economic prosperity and social stability for its success. After driving out the Taliban, the American-led coalition has done too little to bring Afghanistan under the control of a centralized government, nor has the United Nations presence in Kabul lessened the de facto control of the country by regional warlords.

Unless America and the United Nations do more to buttress the sovereignty of an elected Afghan government, the constitution will inevitably become more of a symbol than an actual charter of governance. Similarly, unless America keeps steady pressure on Muslim countries to democratize — rewarding meaningful elections and punishing human rights violations — little progress will be made.

The paradox, of course, is that if the people of Muslim countries do get a greater say in their own government, Islamic politics will likely prevail. Islamic parties speak the language of justice, the paramount political value to most Muslims. In some places — Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia — secular forces in the society counterbalance the rising Islamic politics. But in the Arab dictatorships, where secularist politics are associated with autocracy and graft, increased freedom will undoubtedly lead, at least in the short run, to new gains for political Islam.

This leads some to say that we should not promote democracy in the Middle East lest we open the door to elections that might be, in the memorable words of a former assistant secretary of state, Edward Djerejian, "one man, one vote, one time." But calls to preserve the undemocratic status quo fail to acknowledge that the alternative to trying Islamic democracy may be much worse.

It would be equally futile for the United States to unilaterally impose secularization in Afghanistan and Iraq. For a constitution to function, it must represent the will of its citizens. Nothing could delegitimize a constitution more quickly than America setting down secularist red lines in a well-meaning show of neo-imperialism. Rather, our goal must be to persuade a majority of the world`s 1.2 billion Muslims that Islam and democracy are perfectly compatible.

This will be especially true in Iraq, where the constitutional process must demonstrate to the Iraqi people and the rest of the world that the coalition intends to let Iraqis govern themselves. What`s more, denying the possibility of democracy within Islam may bolster the case of Islamist radicals who, for very different reasons, claim that their religion and political freedom cannot mix.

The draft Afghan constitution is just one possible picture of how Islam and democracy can live side-by-side in the same political vision. There are no guarantees in constitution writing or in nation building, and it is too soon to predict that the idea of Islamic democracy will take hold in practice — in Afghanistan or elsewhere. All we can do is continue to press for democracy in the Muslim world: not because we naïvely expect a victory for secularism, but because freedom only makes sense as a value extended equally to all, to make of it what they will.


Noah Feldman, author of "After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy," is a law professor at New York University. He was a senior adviser for constitutional law to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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November 13, 2003
Their Master`s Voice
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON — It must be the voice.

It is the basso pretendo profundo voice of the dean of boys in a strict private school. At the tables of power, he speaks so sparsely and softly in that low hypnotic monotone, with that lower jaw tilting to the side in a self-assured "I only talk out of one side of my mouth" kind of way, that others at the table have no choice but to listen up. He is the one who must be obeyed.

Dick Cheney`s dry Wyoming voice has the same effect on some male Republicans, starting at the very top, and even some journalists, that a high-pitched whistle has on a dog. How else to explain the vice president`s success in creating a parallel universe inside the White House that is shaping the real universe?

Congressman Charles Rangel of New York introduced a resolution this week urging President Bush to fire Donald Rumsfeld for misleading the American public about how well the war and the occupation are going, and for sending American forces into battle "without adequate planning" and showing "a lack of sensitivity" about U.S. casualties.

Certainly, Rummy is a worthy target. But maybe Mr. Rangel should aim higher. If the Pentagon is responsible for mismanaging the occupation in Iraq, it is the vice president`s office that is responsible for the paranoid vision — the "with us or against us" biceps flex against the world — that got us into this long, hard slog.

This week`s Newsweek cover story on the vice president characterized a recent article by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker as raising the question of whether "Cheney had, in effect, become the dupe of a cabal of neoconservative full-mooners, the Pentagon`s mysteriously named Office of Special Plans, and the patsy of an alleged bank swindler and would-be ruler of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi."

Mr. Cheney`s parallel universe is a Bizarro world where no doubts exist. He indulges in extremes of judgment, overpessimistic about our ability to contain Saddam and overoptimistic about the gratitude we would encounter as "liberators" in Iraq.

In Cheneyworld, the invasion of Iraq has made the world a safer place (tell it to the Italians), W.M.D. are still concealed in all those Iraqi basements, every Iraqi insurgent is a card-carrying member of Al Qaeda, and the increase in attacks on Americans reflects the guerrillas` desperation, not their strengths. Guerrilla attacks on American soldiers are labeled acts of terrorism rather than acts of war, even though the official U.S. definition describes terrorism as attacks on civilians.

As Eric Schmitt reported in The Times this week, Mr. Cheney has implied in recent speeches that Al Qaeda is responsible for the major attacks in Iraq this past summer, even though senior military and intelligence officials say there is no conclusive evidence for that. Clearly, Mr. Cheney remains oblivious to the fact that the president has already had to correct the vice president`s previous assertion that the government did not know whether Saddam Hussein had a connection to the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Bush conceded that "no, we`ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th."

But while some have suggested that the president feels let down by Mr. Rumsfeld, he still seems seduced by the siren call of that deep Cheney voice and lugubrious Cheney world view. As Newsweek suggested, quoting those who know him: "Cheney has always had a Hobbesian view of life. The world is a dangerous place; war is the natural state of mankind; enemies lurk."

Mr. Cheney`s darkness ends up dominating Mr. Bush`s lightness.

As Newsweek noted, the vice president cherry-picks the intelligence, then feeds his version of reality to Mr. Bush. The president leaves himself open to manipulation because, by his own admission, he doesn`t read the papers and relies on his inner circle to filter information to him.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported yesterday that the C.I.A. had issued a top-secret report from Iraq, endorsed by Paul Bremer, warning that growing numbers of Iraqis are concluding that the U.S. can be defeated and are supporting the insurgents.

The question is whether other voices can ever break through that sonorous ominous murmuring in the president`s ear.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Is This Hussein`s Counterattack?
Commander Says Insurgence Has Earmarks of Planning

By Vernon Loeb and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 13, 2003; Page A01


BAGHDAD, Nov. 12 -- The recent string of high-profile attacks on U.S. and allied forces in Iraq has appeared to be so methodical and well crafted that some top U.S. commanders now fear this may be the war Saddam Hussein and his generals planned all along.

Knowing from the 1991 Persian Gulf War that they could not take on the U.S. military with conventional forces, these officers believe, the Baath Party government cached weapons before the Americans invaded this spring and planned to employ guerrilla tactics.

"I believe Saddam Hussein always intended to fight an insurgency should Iraq fall," said Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division and the man responsible for combat operations in the lower Sunni Triangle, the most unstable part of Iraq. "That`s why you see so many of these arms caches out there in significant numbers all over the country. They were planning to go ahead and fight an insurgency, should Iraq fall."

In an interview Wednesday at his headquarters northwest of the capital, Swannack said the speed of the fall of Baghdad in April probably caught Hussein and his followers by surprise and prevented them from launching the insurgence for a few months. That would explain why anti-U.S. violence dropped off noticeably in July and early August but then began to trend upward.

Not everyone in Iraq agrees with that theory. An alternative view is that the current resistance was not planned in advance; rather, Hussein loyalists were in disarray after the invasion and took several months to develop a response. In either case, the insurgents clearly gathered intelligence during that time on the vulnerabilities of the U.S. occupation force.

Swannack said there is no evidence that Hussein is orchestrating the attacks. "He has to move so much that he can`t do the day-to-day operational planning or direction and resourcing of the effort," he said.

Lt. Col. Oscar Mirabile, a brigade commander credited with running a sophisticated and largely successful security operation in the Sunni Triangle town of Ramadi, agreed that the Baathist attacks were long planned.

"He released criminals out onto the streets," said Mirabile, a Miami police official and former homicide detective who commands the 1st Brigade, 124th Infantry Regiment of the Florida National Guard, which has been operating in Ramadi since May. "Why would anybody do that? Saddam knew he couldn`t win a war head to head against coalition forces. He was setting the stage for what you`re looking at right now."

A CIA report from Iraq received over the weekend supported the commanders` views, saying that agency officers in the field believe that most of the insurgents are "former regime types" who were disorganized by the speed of the U.S. invasion but are now regrouping.

The CIA report also warned that if coalition forces cannot get the situation under control, Iraqi citizens may stop cooperating in the fight against the insurgents. "There was a time when the public was relieved the Saddam Hussein regime was gone, and we were the most significant force on the ground," a senior administration official in Washington familiar with the new report said Wednesday. "But now they are getting worried about retribution from them [the insurgents] more than us." He added: "When that becomes a critical mass, it all could go south."

If these observations are borne out, it would be a significant departure from previous U.S. government assessments. Before the war, the Bush administration never gave any indication that it expected to face a large-scale, planned guerrilla campaign. Just recently, U.S. officials who interrogated former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz and other former Iraqi officials said they found no evidence of such a strategy.

Whether or not the Iraqi opposition is waging a long-planned war, there is no question that enemy attacks on U.S. troops and their foreign and Iraqi allies are increasing in scope, intensity, sophistication and frequency.

As one top U.S. officer here noted, Wednesday`s suicide bombing of the Italian military police headquarters in an area that had been largely quiet appears to be part of a continuing effort "to spread violence to all parts of the country."

Reflecting the U.S. military`s inability to get much solid intelligence on the numbers, identity or organization of the opposition, this senior Army officer said he had almost no idea of who was behind Wednesday`s attack -- Baathists or Islamic extremists, Iraqis or foreigners, centrally controlled or operating haphazardly.

While there has been talk in Washington of the impact of "foreign fighters" in Iraq, intelligence officers here have repeatedly said they believe their enemies inside Iraq are overwhelmingly Iraqi. Earlier this week, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said that only "probably a couple of hundred" fighters have come from Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Sudan and other countries in the region.

The quality of U.S. intelligence in Iraq has proven to be a major problem in recent months and was criticized in a recent internal Army study. While commanders generally say the volume of information coming in has increased, there are still widespread complaints about the lack of coordination and integration of the data. Trustworthy interpreters and intelligence analysts fluent in Arabic remain in short supply.

"We`re not just getting the human intelligence we need to figure out some of those linkages, across regions, within regions and the national level," Swannack agreed.

The bombing Wednesday fits a pattern of attacks on anyone who publicly sides with the U.S. occupation, whether Iraqi officials, foreign troops or international organizations.

Over the past three months, Iraqi fighters have shot and killed a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, rocketed the Baghdad hotel where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was staying, and bombed Iraqi police stations and the embassies of Jordan and Turkey, as well as offices of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

As L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. occupation official for Iraq, put it after a meeting at the White House on Wednesday, "they`ve tried to target people who cooperate with us: Iraqis, they`ve killed judges, they try to kill policemen." He added: "I don`t think that that`s going to work."

Overall numbers of enemy attacks also are escalating. In May and June, as the U.S. occupation force settled in, there was an average of five or six attacks a day. By late summer it was averaging about 15. Earlier this week Sanchez, the top U.S. commander inside Iraq, said that during the autumn that number has more than doubled. "It is now about 30 to 35 engagements in a day," he said.

One senior commander in Baghdad said he believes there are three levels within the insurgence, all with Baathist loyalists at the core. The smallest attacks, such as sniping on Army patrols, he said, are being carried out by perhaps eight to 10 neighborhood-based cells in Baghdad, each with about 25 members.

At the next level -- conducting attacks using improvised roadside bombs against U.S. troops -- he said he suspects there is a citywide organization of Baathists with links to criminal gangs. Finally, for the major, mass casualty suicide bomb attacks, such as the one on the Italian military police headquarters, he said he thinks that Baathists are working with foreign fighters "intent on jihad," or holy struggle.

The Iraqi fighters also show increasing sophistication. For example, this summer roadside bombs generally were controlled by wires, one Army officer said; more recently, some have been detonated by signals from cellular telephones. Likewise, some of the mortars fired on U.S. installations in Baghdad have been buried in gardens or kept under garbage cans. Attackers drop two or three shells into the buried mortar tube and then speed away on motorcycles while the shells are airborne.

Over the past two weeks, enemy fighters have killed 37 U.S. soldiers, most of them in two downings of U.S. helicopters.

"The enemy is waging a campaign against the occupation," said retired Army Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, who teaches strategy and security issues at Boston University. "In some respects, their campaign manifests greater coherence and logic than does our own."

Ricks reported from Washington. Staff writer Walter Pincus in Washington contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
U.S. to Back Re-Formed Iraq Body


By Robin Wright and Daniel Williams
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 13, 2003; Page A01


The Bush administration plans to support the creation of a reconstituted governing body in Iraq that will assume a large degree of sovereignty by next summer -- and possibly end control by the U.S.-led occupation before the 2004 presidential election.

The decision was reached after two days of hastily organized talks at the White House with L. Paul Bremer, top U.S. administrator in Iraq, in an attempt to accelerate the political transition, one of two prerequisites, along with security, for the eventual U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

The decision represents a major shift in U.S. political strategy. Mirroring the U.S. military strategy of "Iraqification," Washington now wants to hand over as much responsibility for the political process as is feasible, as fast as it is feasible.

"The focus is how to get to an interim government that can bear the weight of sovereignty and authority -- and to whom we can turn the keys over," said a well-placed U.S. official who requested anonymity.

The two primary U.S. goals are to foster an executive body and a constitutional committee that are accepted as legitimate by the majority of Iraqis, while not totally abandoning the current council -- at least for now. The flurry of meetings reflects the growing frustration with the 24 handpicked members of the Iraqi Governing Council, which is widely viewed as a surrogate of the United States and has failed so far to come up with a formula for the transition.

"We are looking at all sorts of ideas, and we do want to accelerate the pace of reform. We want to accelerate our work with respect to putting a legal basis under the new Iraqi government," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told reporters.

After talks with President Bush yesterday, Bremer acknowledged that the United States and the council face "a very intense period" with the looming U.N.-imposed deadline of Dec. 15 for the Iraqis to establish a timetable for the transition.

After additional talks at the Pentagon, Bremer left yesterday for Baghdad with two broad options to discuss over the weekend with the council, senior U.S. officials said.

The details were being closely held, in large part because the United States wants the council to participate in the decision. "It doesn`t matter what my options are; what matters is what does the Governing Council think," Bremer told reporters after meeting Bush yesterday.

Added a senior administration official: "It has to be a process made in Baghdad, not in Washington."

One option broadly calls for a national election to choose a new council to write Iraq`s first democratic constitution and possibly select a new leadership. The other proposes the creation first of a reconstituted provisional government that would rule while a constitution is drafted and then conduct elections for a permanent government.

The prime difference is the sequence of events; both options seek to create a formula for transition that will be accepted as a product of Iraqi preferences, not U.S. dictates.

The Bush administration expects a speedy decision by the Iraqi council. "We hope and intend to move very fast," said a senior U.S. official.

The administration said the decision is not a dramatic policy shift but instead reflects its flexibility and willingness to let policy evolve as circumstances change.

"Just like you have to adapt and adjust on the security front to meet the enemy, you need to be willing to adjust and adapt to circumstances on the ground, in terms of reconstruction and in terms of the political front," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

Bremer and others stressed that the United States does not want to abandon the council, despite a consensus within the administration that its members have failed to live up to expectations or move expeditiously to launch the constitutional process, the first big step in a political transition.

"I have every confidence that we will be able to work with the Governing Council and with the cabinet ministers, going forward," Bremer said.

But other U.S. officials acknowledged that the current effort will eventually replace the council. "No one is talking about abandoning the council, but the idea is that it will eventually be replaced or absorbed by the new body or bodies. It will take a while to get to a constitutional body and legislature or an executive body, and the council will play a role until then," said the well-placed official.

In Baghdad, key members of the Iraqi council said they had offered Bremer three options for selecting the group that will write a new constitution. One option, which they said originally had Bremer`s backing, called for local U.S.-appointed councils to select members of a constituent assembly, senior council members said. The other two options were for the council to elect the body or for a one-person, one-vote national election.

Until now, however, the council has been deadlocked, partly because of demands by leaders of the majority Shiite Muslim community for national elections. If they vote in a bloc, they could dominate the constitutional process and, some Iraqis and U.S. officials fear, establish rule by Islamic law. The election option is backed by the Ayatollah Hussein Sistani, the most powerful Shiite cleric, who issued a call for all Shiite Muslims to support the vote.

While the local council option is appealing to many council members, "many Shiite members are afraid to stand up to Sistani," said a senior council official.

Several secular liberals on the Governing Council would prefer that the council pick the constituent assembly. Elections, they believe, are premature because of the lack of national political parties and other civic organizations. Shiite religious groups are the best-organized force in Iraq, they believe, enhancing the chances that Iraq will be declared an Islamic state.

"The irony is that the Shiite mullahs back the most democratic option and the liberals back the least," another senior council official said.

Council members were meeting into the evening Tuesday to forge a possible compromise. One possibility involved an election to supplement or expand the council, which would then choose the constituent assembly. "It`s sort of a halfway house between the Shiite clerics` demands and the fears of the liberals," said the senior official.

Williams reported from Baghdad. Staff writer Glenn Kessler contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Fair and Balanced™ Cartoons
Cartoon Archive
161 New Cartoons Today, ist denn heut schon Weihnachten 161 frische Cartoons:

http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20031113__161toons.htm

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Lightning lights up downtown L.A. as a strong storm blows in. The downpour was heavy enough to make the evening commute miserable. Limited visibility and erratic winds halted traffic at Los Angeles International Airport
Storms` Combination Punch Staggers Parts of Southland
`Extremely Rare` 5-Inch Deluge Floods Streets, Cuts Power


By Eric Malnic and Michael Krikorian, Times Staff Writers


Thunderstorms rumbled across Southern California on Wednesday evening, hammering central Los Angeles and surrounding communities with torrential downpours that flooded roads and buildings while lightning strikes blacked out vast areas.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran13no…
THE WORLD



U.S. Questions U.N. Findings on Iran`s Bid for Nuclear Arms
A Bush official says Tehran`s covert efforts to acquire sensitive technology make sense only as part of a weapons program.
By Paul Richter
Times Staff Writer

November 13, 2003

WASHINGTON — A U.N. inspectors` report that said no evidence had turned up that Iran has tried to develop nuclear weapons is "simply impossible to believe," the Bush administration`s top arms control official said Wednesday.

In the administration`s first official response to the harshly worded report, which was circulated this week among members of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton noted that the inspectors had found evidence that Iran had conducted a secret nuclear program for 18 years, and that it had committed numerous breaches of its nuclear treaty obligations.

In a speech prepared for a dinner of the American Spectator, a conservative magazine, he disputed the IAEA`s conclusion that "no evidence" has yet been found that the concealed activities were linked to a nuclear weapons program.

The administration believes that "the massive and covert Iranian effort to acquire sensitive nuclear capabilities makes sense only as part of a nuclear weapons program," Bolton said.

"In what can only be an attempt to build a capacity to develop nuclear materials for nuclear weapons, Iran has enriched uranium with both centrifuges and lasers, and produced and reprocessed plutonium," he said. "It attempted to cover its tracks by repeatedly and over many years neglecting to report its activities, and in many instances providing false declarations to the International Atomic Energy Agency."

The IAEA, the U.N.`s nuclear watchdog, is issuing its report as the international community considers whether to take action to prevent any Iranian effort to build arms. Next week, the IAEA board of governors is meeting to consider whether Tehran, which has continued to deny any intent to build nuclear weapons, should be held in violation of its nuclear treaty obligations.

The 30-page IAEA report harshly criticized Iran, saying that, over 18 years, the regime concealed from the United Nations both a centrifuge uranium-enrichment program and a laser enrichment program. It said Iran manufactured small amounts of enriched uranium and plutonium, a substance with virtually no civilian uses.

The report noted that the IAEA had so far found no evidence that Iran had sought to build nuclear weapons, as the Bush administration has asserted. But the IAEA intends to keep looking for such evidence, the report said, adding that it would be some time before the agency could conclude whether Iran`s nuclear program was exclusively for peaceful purposes.

Bolton, however, said "the report`s assertion [on nuclear arms] is simply impossible to believe." Despite Tehran`s denial that it has any nuclear arms program, "the IAEA has amassed an enormous amount of evidence to the contrary that makes this assertion increasingly implausible," he said.

He accused Tehran of trying to falsely legitimize its pursuit of nuclear fuel cycle capabilities that would give it the ability to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons.

According to Bolton, Iran wants to develop the capability for uranium mining and extraction, uranium conversion and enrichment, reactor fuel fabrication and heavy-water production, as well as acquire a heavy-water reactor well suited for reprocessing spent fuel to recover plutonium. It is also pursuing " `management of spent fuel` — a euphemism for reprocessing spent fuel to recover plutonium," Bolton said.

He said that if Iran took all the steps sought by the IAEA, including full disclosure of nuclear activities and an agreement to allow unannounced inspections, such actions would "mark a major advance toward its integration into civilized society."

But if Iran continues to conceal its program and "lie to the IAEA, the international community must be prepared to declare Iran in noncompliance with its IAEA safeguards obligations," he said.

Such a declaration would put the issue before the U.N. Security Council and could lead to sanctions against Iran. Bolton did not disclose what course the United States would recommend when the 35 members of the IAEA board meet in Vienna on Nov. 20.

He noted that Iran, which President Bush last year grouped with North Korea and Saddam Hussein`s Iraq as part of an "axis of evil," also has "robust" biological and chemical weapons programs, as well as a missile development effort.

Iranian officials acknowledged this week that the country had failed to comply with all their treaty obligations, but they described the violations as minor and insisted that the IAEA report was proof that it was not developing nuclear weapons. Tehran is hoping that its new candor will persuade the international community not to take tough steps.

Jack Straw, Britain`s foreign secretary, took a milder tone this week in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., saying that the world "should be reacting calmly to the latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency."

Although Iran had concealed its nuclear activities in the past, it was now cooperating with the agency, he noted.

Straw is scheduled to meet today in Washington with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. The two are expected to discuss Iran`s nuclear interests.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fi-jobs13n…
THE NATION



For Many Firms, Jobless Recovery Is a Good Thing
U.S. employers are in no hurry to resume hiring as increased productivity cuts their need for workers.
By David Streitfeld
Times Staff Writer

November 13, 2003

The economy roared last quarter, and so did Falcon Plastics Inc.

A family-owned firm in the eastern South Dakota city of Brookings, Falcon posted record sales in September. Yet there`s no impulse to celebrate, no rush to hire. The bad times are still too vivid.

"We want to make sure that when we add someone, we won`t have to turn around in three months and let them go," Falcon President Jay Bender said.

Multiply Falcon`s situation by tens of thousands of other companies, and a picture begins to develop of an economy climbing a wall of worry.

On Friday, the Labor Department announced that employers added a net 126,000 payroll jobs in October. In all, the economy has added 286,000 positions over the last three months — the best showing since early 2001.

But 2.4 million more jobs would be needed to regain all the ground lost since March 2001, when the last recession began. When, or even if, those positions will come back is far from clear.

Here`s the problem: Many companies like the notion of a jobless recovery. The leaner they can keep their U.S. payrolls — by using overtime, automating the production process and outsourcing jobs overseas — the higher their profits.

The murky hiring picture affects not only the 8.8 million unemployed but the 1.6 million who want a job but aren`t actively looking for work. It affects millions more who want a full-time job but must get by with part-time work. And it weighs on the more than 130 million employed.

"The greatest single concern people appear to have about the economy is jobs," investment house Fred Alger Management Inc. said in its November market review. "We have companies and an economy that can shift gears quickly, but not the kind of job creation and job security that people understandably seek."

For Falcon, as for many companies, the 2001 downturn was swift and harsh. Annual sales tumbled from $20 million to $14 million. The 305 employees shrank to 175. "Sometimes," Bender said, "you have to cut off your arm to save your life."

The emergency surgery was a success. For the fiscal year that ends in April, Falcon expects again to hit sales of $20 million. But the payroll is back to only 200 workers. Any further growth, Bender said, "will be incremental. We`re still very cautious."

So, too, are consumers. Although the economy expanded during the third quarter at its fastest rate in 19 years, people`s confidence in the future remains "middling," noted Richard Curtin, who directs the University of Michigan`s monthly consumer survey. The tenuous job situation is a big reason.

"It used to be understood that when business weakened, layoffs went up. When it improved, people were called back to do the same jobs at the same employers," Curtin said. "Now, if people lose their jobs, they have to find new skills and a new job at a new employer. It`s a more daunting challenge."

It`s one that many stand to face, even as the economy picks up steam. The job placement firm of Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that planned layoffs at U.S. firms were 171,874 in October, more than double September`s total and the highest in a year.

Duke Energy Co. said it would eliminate 8% of its global workforce, or 2,000 jobs. Sony Corp. will cut several thousand U.S. jobs as part of a major restructuring. Tyco International Ltd. said it would do away with 7,200 jobs, or 3% of its labor force.

In some cases, the cuts were accompanied by solid earnings reports. Boise Cascade Corp. said sales increased 9% in the third quarter and profit nearly quadrupled. But the wood products firm is continuing layoffs, which have reduced the number of employees by 460 this year and will lop off an additional 90 during the fourth quarter.

Electronic Data Systems Corp. fulfilled Wall Street`s expectations for the third quarter, but the computer services company nonetheless announced it would cut an additional 2,500 jobs in its third layoff in a year.

One major company going against the trend is IBM Corp., whose chairman, Samuel J. Palmisano, says he foresees the need in 2004 "for approximately 10,000 new positions in key skill areas." IBM has 315,000 employees, roughly the same number it had when the boom peaked in 2000.

However, fewer than half its workers are in the U.S., and Palmisano didn`t specify where the hiring would take place. Alliance@IBM, a union representing workers at the technology company, said the announcement was a "smokescreen" for the fact that many IBM jobs were being transferred overseas, where they would be filled by Indian or Chinese software engineers.

For its part, the Bush administration suggests that the employment picture is bound to improve next year as the economy continues to strengthen. And there are some promising signs. First-time unemployment claims unexpectedly dropped last week to their lowest level since early 2001. Although initial claims often are revised upward, economists were heartened by the report, saying it could be further evidence that the drought in jobs was coming to an end.

Analysts say 150,000 jobs must be created every month just to keep pace with population growth. Only if more than that number are created would the unemployment rate, currently 6%, continue to fall.

"There can`t be a jobless recovery," Treasury Secretary John W. Snow recently told the Economic Club of Washington. "The nature of a recovery is to recover. You don`t recover if lots of people are looking for work and can`t find work."

Yet that`s just what`s happening in some places. A survey of 74 companies by Pacific Staffing, which supplies temporary workers to hundreds of local businesses in the Sacramento area, found that most weren`t planning to add employees. "We haven`t seen a big spike the way you would have in previous recoveries," said Pacific Staffing President Jay Jurschak.

If investments aren`t being made in new people, money definitely is being put down for new equipment. Business spending on equipment and software rose 15.4% in the third quarter, the biggest jump since the first quarter of 2000.

Pine Hall Brick Co. in Winston-Salem, N.C., just built its fourth factory and retooled part of an older plant. Both are now heavily automated. As a result, Pine Hall`s brick-making capacity is up about 25% — but its employee count has risen only 10%.

"It`s better for us now, and for our employees," said Pine Hall President Fletcher Steele. "We took the guys who used to move bricks by hand and trained them to operate machines. The employees who remain are more highly skilled."

Falcon Plastics, which makes custom injection moldings, restructured during the recession out of necessity. It also gambled on a better future, increasing the size of one plant from 30,000 square feet to 50,000.

By this point, the Falcon factories are fairly humming. Employees are working 48 hours a week — "some voluntary, some mandatory," Bender, the president, said. Despite the fact that they`re getting time-and-a-half for those extra hours, Bender said it`s no more expensive than giving benefits to new workers.

All of this helps explain why the unemployment rate in Falcon`s home state, where two of its three factories are located, isn`t dropping faster.

South Dakota`s jobless rate nearly doubled from 1.9% in March 2000 to a recessionary peak of 3.7% in December 2001. The most recent rate, in September, was only marginally improved at 3.4%.

Doing more with fewer workers cuts across the economy. Intel Corp., the Silicon Valley chip maker, reported third-quarter sales rose 20% and net income more than doubled compared with the same period last year. The reason: increased productivity. Over the last four years, Intel has been building wafer fabrication plants in New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon and Ireland.

"They`re a huge capital investment, but the payoff is tremendous," spokesman Chuck Mulloy said. "We can make more than twice the number of units with the same staff."

For the fourth quarter, Intel projects sales as high as $8.7 billion. That would equal its record achieved in the fourth quarter of 2000, when the company had 86,000 employees. Current employment is 79,000. There are no plans to add more in the U.S. until the economy "improves significantly," Mulloy said.

Productivity is up just about everywhere. In the third quarter, nonfarm productivity rose 8.1%, a rate exceeded only twice in the last decade.

"If you survived the last few years, you`ve done it by being really mean and lean," said Scott Montrey, a spokesman for the National Assn. of Manufacturers. "And once you get lean and mean, you don`t go back to being fat and lazy."

The trouble, economist Nick Perna said, is that "if every company was lean and mean, the economy would be in serious recession."

Perna — who is credited with coining the term "jobless recovery" more than a decade ago — is hopeful that, as confidence builds and the economy expands, hiring will follow. After all, the jobless recovery of the early `90s eventually gave way to a lengthy, job-packed expansion.

"In the best of all worlds, we`ll get rapid productivity growth and, when people are displaced, they`re able to find work in other sectors," Perna said.

John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the placement firm, is more bleak.

"My sense is that hiring and job creation will be meager," he said. "There are huge transformative forces at work, with technology and globalization forcing us in different directions. I think we`re in uncharted territory."


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-iraq13n…
EDITORIAL



Pace of Iraq Change Is Key

November 13, 2003

Suicide attacks. The destruction of homes of the families of suspected terrorists. A frustrated military leadership, filling the void left by a stalled political process. This portrait of the Israeli army`s escalating conflict with Palestinians also comes too close to describing the United States` growing predicament in Iraq.

The White House summoned civilian Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer III for high-level meetings Tuesday and Wednesday. Almost on cue, two vehicles crashed into Italian military police headquarters in Nasiriya on Wednesday, killing at least 26 people and further illustrating the vulnerability of the coalition forces. The new dose of bad news certainly kept Bremer`s meeting focused.

White House officials hoping to speed up the transfer of political power to Iraqis worry that Iraqis are falling behind on writing their interim constitution that would lead to local and national elections. The Iraqi Governing Council of Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni representatives is moving at a glacial pace. Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, complains that a monthly rotation of the Governing Council`s presidency has prompted Iraqi leaders to go abroad and enjoy being treated as celebrities while neglecting the tough task of getting their country on its feet.

Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, correctly observed Tuesday, "What also needs to come along is … to give Iraqis a sense that, hey, they`re in charge of their country."

Bremer said Wednesday that he has "made proposals to transfer more power" to the Governing Council. The return of sovereignty, while necessary, should not serve as a smokescreen for pulling out U.S. troops before an internally divided Iraqi leadership can stand on its own.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) noted in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations last week that quicker training of Iraqis may fall short of what`s needed: "When the United States announces a schedule for training and deploying Iraqi security officers, then announces the acceleration of that schedule, then accelerates it again, it sends a signal of desperation, not certitude," McCain said. In mid-October, the number of Iraqis listed as being in security jobs was 85,000. As of Monday, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice put the number at 118,000, and Myers said it was 131,000 on Tuesday.

No matter what the real number, putting guns in the hands of teenagers after a few weeks of training is a poor substitute for seasoned soldiers. More effort needs to go into luring back former Iraqi troops who were not key parts of Saddam Hussein`s brutal repression. Having brought war to Iraq, Bush has no alternative but to leave U.S. soldiers in harm`s way until it can be honestly ended, or at least until more nations can be persuaded to help bring peace. Bremer`s meeting in Washington suggests the administration recognizes the gravity of the choices to be made. Better to grapple with reality than to bluster that there`s no cause for alarm.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Bush besucht GB

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Bush wird auch die Queen treffen

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PRESIDENT BUSH EXPLAINS THE ECONOMIC MIRACLES OF JOBLESS RECOVERY AND ENDLESS DEFICIT SPENDING TO ASSEMBLED PHOTO-FRIENDLY BLUE COLLAR WORKING FOLK
Campaign Appearance by the President
THE PRESIDENT: Thanks for the warm welcome, it’s wonderful to be back in the great state of INSERT SOUTHERN STATE HERE. I got a couple of things rattling around in my noggin that I’d like to jaw about with you fine folks here at PREDOMINANTLY CAUCASIAN-STAFFED FACTORY.

I’d like to thank LOCAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTING ROBBER BARON for having us here, and I promise to use this time to explain to you, COMPANY NAME AUTOMATONS, how I’m going to TELL THEM WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR while continuing to BACKSLAP OUR GRACIOUS SPECIAL INTERESTS.

Well hot damn. I wasn’t supposed to talk those words. Guess that’s what happens when you watch the new special edition Scarface DVD with your speech writers in the back of Air Force One and shotgun a Silver Bullet every time some Guinea-Rican says "fooock!" Am I right or am I right? Hey boys – next time, fill in the blanks for me, OK? Har, har, har.

Let me just get off my chest what needs saying, without all the fancy words the Democrats love to throw at y’all. Words like "unemployment" and "fiscal responsib-funnydoodle."

You may have recently seen the media reporting at length on our press releases indicating that the economy is shooting heavenward like a geyser of pure Texas crude. And because most of you blew your paltry tax cut moolah on things like diapers, Menthols, and Lotto, my administration can take credit for a fluke third quarter economic surge that we haven’t seen in twenty years – and probably won’t for another twenty.

But believe me when I say, we didn’t see this coming even though we swore it would, and we will milk this quarter gain for all it’s worth. Because we’re Republicans, and we can turn this one quarter into four just by bringing it up over and over, until we almost win again in 2004. I call that Bushonomics – where two bucks on a press release is worth more than zilch in your hand.

This isn’t a lot of smoke and mirrors, though. The economy is strong. Why is it strong? Well, I don’t want to bore you with a bunch of bean counter mumbo jumbo, but basically: I cut taxes for the rich, and as if by magic, it helps y’all. The way you proud Americans spent your Federal bribe was like pouring gasoline on a fire, and as any good, heterosexual Boy Scout will tell you, nothing creates a warm, steady, dependable fire than tossing car juice on a pile of smoldering California Oak twigs.

Now, I`m no fan of "irony" – prefering stark, non-negotiable absolutes like black and white, good and evil, poor and rich, cowboys and injuns. But I`ll admit, it`s a bit ironical that you working stiffs and a big time world dictator like yours truly have something real in common – we both run our houses on credit. We spend and spend and spend and if we run out of cash, we`ll, there`s always a way to get more, by either printing it, or in your case, selling your birthright at 11% interest.

VISA stuffs their cards in your greedy little mailboxes like they`re giving away free money. Same thing with government. Where are we getting the 87 billion dollars to turn Iraq into a proper, hobbled, helpless veal nation? Hell if I know! I do know this: one main difference between you and me – when VISA calls you, they actually want back more than just the money they gave you. When my debt collector calls, it`s Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, and we make plans to play golf.

I never met a tax cut I didn`t like. I`m not gonna tax my corporate dominatrixes to pay for a war that will create a new exclusive market for their products and services. And I`m not gonna tax you – at least, not obviously. It`s like that pagan British whore sang in that classic psychedelic movie musical about child abuse of yore, "Just a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down."

Always remember that economics is magic. Just like geopolitics. And war. I guess that makes me a bit of a magic man, don`t it? Of course, in my day, a "magic man" was that colored fella in the rabbit fur trenchcoat who’d roll up in his Lincoln Continental with a briefcase full of "energy dandruff."

Although I’m not technically campaigning yet, which I’ve been saying during every campaign speech I’ve ever given starting with my inauguration, it is still important for me to stoop to meet with you glassy-eyed, patriotic Americans who care enough about their country to vote for me again without question, look you in straight in the peepers – Privileged Yankee blueblood to common unwashed rabble – and say "You might not be better off now than you were three years ago, but an economy that hovers even a micro-fraction above full-blown recession means we’re going to win the war in Iraq. And the Democrats still want to rape your paychecks."

I gotta git to another one of these hootenannys. I’ve enjoyed my time with you, whoever you are, wherever I am. So y’all take care of yourselves. I know I am.

(Applause.)

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Arming outer space
Ruth Rosen
Thursday, November 13, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/13/EDG11308KV1.DTL


LOOK UP at the sky. Imagine space-based weapons orbiting the globe, ready to zap or nuke any country declared an imminent threat to the United States.

No, this is not science fiction. It is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s vision of global domination.

Before he headed the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was chairman of the Commission to Assess U.S. National Security Space Management Organization. In its final report, submitted to Congress on Jan. 11, 2001, it warned, "If the United States is to avoid a `Space Pearl Harbor,` it needs to take seriously the possibility of an attack on U.S. space systems." The commission recommended the creation of a U.S. Space Corps that would defend our space-based "military capability."

Rumsfeld`s report was actually a tamer version of an earlier Department of Defense Space Command document -- "Vision for 2020" -- that, on its Web site, showed laser weapons shooting deadly beams from space, zapping targets on Earth. Beneath this sci-fi image crawled the words "U.S. Space Command dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investments."

"Vision for 2020" rightly predicted that the global economy would widen the gap between "the haves" and "the have-nots." By deploying space surveillance and weaponry, the United States would have the ability "to control space," and, from this higher ground, "to dominate" the Earth below.

By appointing Rumsfeld as his defense secretary, President Bush chose a man whom the Washington Post described as "the leading proponent not only of national missile defenses, but also of U.S. efforts to take control of outer space."

Since then, the Air Force Space Command has issued a progress report, "Strategic Master Plan FY04 and Beyond (SMP)," which puts forth the U.S. intention to dominate the world by turning space into a crucial battlefield.

In the introduction, Gen. Lance W. Lord proudly writes, "As guardian of the High Frontier, Air Force Space Command has the vision and people to ensure the United States achieves space superiority today and in the future. A new space corps will fight from and in space."

"Space," according to the SMP, "is the ultimate high ground of military operations . . . . Our vision calls for prompt global-strike systems with the capability to directly apply force from or through space against terrestrial targets. Space superiority is essential to our vision of controlling and fully exploiting space to provide our military with an asymmetric advantage over our adversaries."

The immediate goal, according to the SMP, is to prevent anyone else from launching space-based weaponry. To dominate the globe, the United States must dominate outer space.

Clearly, this space-based vision is useless against terrorist attacks in Iraq or Afghanistan. China, however, believes it is the unnamed enemy who might be the target of this country`s newly articulated policies of pre- emptive war and global supremacy.

Last September, China fought hard at the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in Geneva for an agreement that would prevent an arms race in outer space. The Bush administration, as usual, insisted that an international treaty was unnecessary.

Rumsfeld`s dream is dangerous. It not only violates the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which wisely prohibited the militarization of space, but also threatens to reignite the arms race, this time in space. It is also hugely expensive, costing hundreds of billions of dollars that could be used to care for people who live right here on Earth.

Look up at the heavens. Do we really want to leave future generations with a legacy of space-based warfare? If not, let`s pressure every presidential candidate, as well as President Bush, to keep the heavens free of weapons of mass destruction.

E-mail Ruth Rosen at [e-mail]. For documentation, go to www.wslfweb.org/space/spacedocs.htm

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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UK police say they will not stifle Iraq protests
By Mark Huband, Jean Eaglesham and Rohit Jaggi
Published: November 12 2003 21:28 | Last Updated: November 12 2003 21:28
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com%2FS…

President George W. Bush will not be hidden from the mass protests expected during his state visit next week, a senior police officer said on Wednesday.


The Metropolitan Police would be in full charge of security during the three-day visit despite the presence of up to 200 US secret service officers in London, said Andy Trotter, deputy assistant commissioner.

Roads would not be closed to pedestrians and protesters would not be kept away, he said. "There is no intention to spare anyone`s embarrassment. It is not part of our policing plan. We will do what`s necessary to balance security," he said.

Mr Trotter denied that US security officials had devised the policing operation, which will involve 5,000 London police officers. "It is the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police who decides what happens in London. No one else. We lead," he said.

Mr Bush will stay at Buckingham Palace for the November 18-21 visit - the first of its kind by a US president since 1918 - and The Mall will remain open at least to pedestrians. The closure of roads to traffic would be kept to a minimum, he said, denying there had been pressure on the police to declare exclusion zones.

Mr Bush`s secret service team would not be immune from prosecution if their use of firearms caused injury or death, said Mr Trotter.

Jack Straw, foreign secretary, dismissed criticism of the visit as "fashionable anti-Americanism". He said "many more" people would be demonstrating against the US involvement in Iraq than had taken to the streets to protest against the "brutal, vicious" regime of Saddam Hussein.

The Stop the War Coalition, which is organising a march next Thursday, is at odds with the police over the route. Police want it to go from Holborn to Trafalgar Square, but the coalition wants it to pass along Whitehall, Parliament Square and Westminster Bridge.

The government came under fire for the heavy-handed policing of demonstrations during the 1999 state visit by Jiang Zemin, the Chinese president. It later emerged the Foreign Office had told the police about the Chinese government`s "concerns about the possible impact of demonstrations on the visit" of the Chinese leader.

Mr Trotter said the Met now regretted the policing of that visit. "The things that went wrong then, like the seizing of [protest] placards, was not part of the plan. Some officers were over-zealous, and it gave the wrong impression," he said.

The Foreign Office said there had been discussions on Mr Bush`s visit between the government, the police, Buckingham Palace and US officials. Ministers had been told about the discussions but not involved.

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Nov. 13, 2003. 01:00 AM

American hypocrisy on democracy
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thes…

HAROON SIDDIQUI

With bombs going off in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and skirmishes raging in Afghanistan, George W. Bush is championing democracy for Muslims as an antidote to terrorism. But, as usual, he tells only half the truth.

His promise of an "age of liberty" for Arabs has been welcomed by Americans. But Arabs are not impressed. He has little credibility with them.

But first, what he got right.

The president shot down two favourite post-9/11 themes: that Arabs (many of them Christians) and Muslims are not ready for democracy, and that Islam is incompatible with it.

"Cultural condescension," he called it, quoting Ronald Reagan.

"Time after time," said Bush, "observers have questioned whether this country, or that people, are `ready` for democracy ... It should be clear to all that Islam is consistent with democratic rule. Democratic progress is found in many predominantly Muslim countries — in Turkey and Indonesia, and Senegal and Albania, Niger and Sierra Leone. Muslim men and women are good citizens of India and South Africa, of the nations of Western Europe, and of the United States.

"More than half of all the Muslims in the world live in freedom under democratically constituted governments. They succeed, not in spite of their faith, but because of it. A religion that demands individual moral accountability, and encourages the encounter of the individual with God, is fully compatible with the rights and responsibilities of self-government."

That`s what Iranian president Mohammed Khatami says, too. But let`s continue with Bush.

"Modernization is not the same as Westernization. Representative governments in the Middle East will reflect their own cultures. They will not, and should not, look like us...Working democracies always need time to develop, as did our own. We`ve taken a 200-year journey toward inclusion and justice. Other nations are at different stages of this journey."

Sounds like Khatami again. But back to Bush.

He also told the biggest home truth of the American foreign policy: "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe — because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty."

Are we to assume that Bush will no longer support authoritative Arab regimes?

Or, that he thinks it was wrong of the CIA to have toppled democratic governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954) and Chile (1973)? Or that Washington made a grave error by going along with the Algerian military junta`s overturning of the 1993 elections?

Leaving a trail of such questions, Bush continued: "As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. With the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo."

It suits Bush to connect weapons of mass destruction to his war on terror. But 9/11 and other terrorist acts have been carried out with box cutters, crude bombs and human sacrifices.

Second, the anti-American sentiment of Arabs, some of it channelled into terrorism, is only partially driven by the American support for their repressive regimes. It springs mainly from the American support for Israeli policies towards the Palestinians.

Israel is not the sole cause of Arab problems. Far from it, as the recent Arab Development Report showed. But just because Bush chooses to be silent about Ariel Sharon does not mean that Arabs, or the rest of the world, would oblige.

Bush showed similar selectivity when referring to Palestinians and Egyptians.

"The Palestinian leaders who block and undermine democratic reform, and feed hatred and encourage violence are not leaders at all. They are the main obstacles to peace."

True, as far as it goes. Ending Yasser Arafat`s corruption and tolerance of terrorism will not, by itself, solve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Invoking Egypt`s pioneering role in forging peace with Israel, Bush urged Cairo to "show the way toward democracy in the Middle East." What he did not say is that the warmth generated by Anwar Sadat turned long ago to cold peace and that Hosni Mubarak is keeping the lid on current anti-Israeli fury with oppression and torture — with Washington`s approval.

Bush praised the reformist baby steps taken by Kuwait, Bahrain, Morocco, Jordan, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Good. But he invited mockery by holding them up as "the stirrings of democracy," while bearing down hard on Iran.

Iran has held more elections than any Arab nation. Imperfect elections, yes, leading to an ineffective parliament and a toothless president, both overruled by unelected centres of power. But Iran is the most advanced in the debate on Islam and democracy. Iranian women are the most empowered in the region.

Yet Bush, as Bill Clinton before him, has taken a pass on a historic chance to help democracy by helping Iranian moderates.

On Iraq and Afghanistan, too, Bush presents a distorted picture. "The failure of democracy in those two countries would convince terrorists that America breaks down under attack, and more attacks on America would surely follow."

Yet, the use of American force in Iraq has attracted terrorism where it did not exist.

War on terrorism, yes. But not the Bush way.

A drive for democracy, yes. But not couched in dishonesty.


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Haroon Siddiqui writes Thursdays and Sundays. [e-mail]

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http://www.sunspot.net/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.page13nov13,…
Using Patriot Act to hunt down `terrorists` at Vegas strip clubs

Sponsored by



By Clarence Page

November 13, 2003

WASHINGTON - In our latest episode of continuing adventures with the USA Patriot Act, FBI agents say they`ve used the new anti-terrorism law to prosecute a political bribery case centered on the owner of some Las Vegas strip clubs.
What do topless dancers in Vegas have to do with terrorism, you may ask? Nothing, everyone agrees, unless perhaps you count the violence that some of the ladies inflict on the wallets of their clientele.

Nevertheless, the FBI now confirms local Las Vegas newspaper reports that the agency used the Patriot Act`s provisions to subpoena financial information about four local politicians and one local businessman, Michael D. Galardi, the owner of the Jaguars strip club in Las Vegas and Cheetahs clubs in Las Vegas and San Diego.

The Patriot Act, passed in the panicky weeks after 9/11, allows the government to peek into the personal affairs of many people, not just suspected terrorists. The law`s powers only begin with suspected terrorists. We have yet to learn how far it extends.

That`s the part that Attorney General John Ashcroft does not talk about much as he tours the country touting the powers the Patriot Act has given the federal government to fight terrorism.

"We have used these tools to save innocent American lives," Mr. Ashcroft told a convention of law officers at the federal courthouse in Las Vegas in August. "We have used these tools to provide the security that ensures liberty."

He neglected to mention how, even as he spoke, Las Vegas FBI agents were using those "tools" to go after a strip club owner and the politicians he allegedly paid off.

It turns out that Section 314 of the Patriot Act allows federal investigators wider leeway in obtaining financial information from stockbrokers, banks and other financial institutions on people "suspected, based on credible evidence, of engaging in terrorist acts or money laundering." Pay close attention to that last phrase: "or money laundering." Ah, what legal power that little word "or" contains. Thanks to that teeny but mighty conjunction, the Patriot Act is not limited to money laundering that is linked to suspected terrorist acts but to any suspected money laundering.

"The Patriot Act was not meant to be just for terrorism," Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo told a reporter.

Now they tell us.

Before the Patriot Act became law, FBI agents needed a subpoena from a grand jury to demand financial records. Under Section 314, agents no longer need trouble themselves with facing a grand jury, which is, after all, made up of only ordinary citizens. Instead, agents need only certify in a secret documentation a reasonable suspicion that money laundering is taking place.

Only after the case comes to trial can a judge rule on whether the agents` certification was adequate. If not, the judge can throw out all the evidence gathered as a result of the bogus certification, according to the Justice Department spokesmen.

Why, one wonders, is the normal subpoena process such a bother all of a sudden? Since when it is so hard to prosecute public corruption in Las Vegas, a possibility that rivals gambling in Casablanca on most people`s shock-o-meters?

The Justice Department spokesman said the American people expect law enforcement officers to use any and all constitutional and legal tools to fight all crime, whether it is terror-related or not.

Maybe that`s so. After all, it is just allegedly corrupt politicians and strip club owners we`re talking about here and not the sort of people for whom, say, the Moral Majority would go to bat.

Most anti-abortion groups probably felt that way about the federal RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) law until pro-choice groups persuaded the federal government to use it against aggressive protests at abortion clinics. Anti-abortion groups cheered when the Supreme Court overturned that use of anti-crime law last spring in Scheidler vs. NOW. Now we shall wait to see how many of them join hands with civil libertarians as the government overreaches with the Patriot Act.

Some members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are expressing reservations about the potential for wretched governmental excesses under the Patriot Act. Fortunately, the law must be renewed in 2005. That gives Congress time to reconsider its 342 pages in a calmer atmosphere than that which followed the 2001 terrorist attacks.

I hope they debate wisely. Concern for civil liberties should be equally important to both political parties. After all, the privacy you save may be your own.


Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune Publishing newspaper, and appears Thursdays in The Sun.



Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun

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Thursday, November 13, 2003
War News for November 13, 2003

Zu jeder Meldung ein Link:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: One US soldier killed, one wounded in bomb ambush in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: US troops attacked in Fallujah. Six Iraqi attackers killed, four wounded.

Bring `em on: Ukranian troops wounded in convoy ambush near al-Aziziyah.

Bring `em on: US troops seize explosive-packed ambulances at checkpopint in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Iraqi police fire on demonstrators in Samawah.

Bring `em on: US troops under RPG fire in Mosul; Iraqi guard killed. (Second-to-last paragraph of this story.)

Bring `em on: US troops conduct counter-insurgency operations in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: US troops conduct counter-insurgency raids near Mosul.

Bring `em on: More explosions reported in Baghdad.

US losing "hearts and minds" campaign in Iraq. "`We had one of our workers out here the other day who said, `We take your money today, and we will shoot you tomorrow,`" said Capt. Tammy Galloway, a public affairs officer with the 82nd Airborne Division, stationed in Ramadi, 60 miles west of Baghdad."

Relations sour between US troops and journalists in Iraq.

Soldier`s mother says Bush "personally responsible" for son`s death. I guess she didn`t get a hug.

Bush begins Operation Cut and Run.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Tennessee Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Local story: Florida Guardsman killed in Iraq.

Local story: Texas soldier killed in Iraq.

Home Front

Anti-Bush War veterans removed from VFW-sponsored Florida parade. "A group of 30 military veterans critical of the war in Iraq hoped to use Tuesday`s Veterans Day parade to call attention to the increasingly deadly conflict but instead found themselves fighting for something much more fundamental. Members of Veterans For Peace and Vietnam Veterans Against the War were yanked off a downtown Tallahassee street, directly in front of the Old Capitol, while marching in the holiday parade they had legitimately registered in." This is why I hate the VFW.





# posted by yankeedoodle : 12:53 PM

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ZNet | Economy

"Bush`s Best Speech"

by Paul Street; November 13, 2003

Shunning the Mirror
According to the Buddhist writer Pema Chodron, "not harming ourselves or others is the basis of enlightened society. It is how there could be a sane world." In Chodron`s view, "the first and most fundamental harm" is done by and to our selves. It is "to remain ignorant by not having the courage to look at ourselves honestly." When we do exhibit that courage, she argues, "it comes as quite a shock to realize how much we`ve blinded ourselves to the ways in which we cause harm. Our style is so ingrained that we can`t hear when people try to tell us, either kindly or rudely, that we`re causing harm by the way we are or the way we relate to others. We`ve become so used to the way we do things that somehow we think that others are used to it too."

George W. Bush`s recent speech before the National Endowment for Democracy ("President Bush Discusses Freedom in Iraq and the Middle East," available online at www.whitehouse.gov) is an excellent case in point. It epitomizes the cowardly, moral self-blindness that Chodron sees at the heart of global insanity. According to the arch-conservative New York Times columnist William Safire, it is "Bush`s best speech," and it "is worth reading." (Safire, "The Age of Liberty," New York Times,November 10, 2003). Bush` address certainly merits a careful reading, though not for the reasons Safire thinks.

It is an eloquent, well-crafted monument to self-delusion and the deep resistance powerful people and nations have to taking an honest look in the mirror of past and current history. Focused largely on the Middle East, it is a gold mine for students of elite ideology, one of whose core projects is precisely to prevent the powerful from feeling the "shock" to which Pema Chodron refers - to keep, in other words, the mirrors turned away from the main architects of harm and shining back at the victims and others with the blinding light of mass confusion. Again and again, Bush reveals his utter inability to grasp why the majority of the world`s people view him and his government as the greatest threat to world peace, a rogue state of greater danger than any of the states he once absurdly lumped together in an "Axis of Evil." He is equally oblivious to the intimately related harm and alienation that is experienced by masses of people in his own country, thanks to his own actions and to the broader domestic power structures he works to represent.

"Respecting The People?"

Take, for example, Bush`s opening approval of Ronald Reagan`s statement that (in Bush`s words) "Soviet communism...failed...because it did not respect its own people." This statement contains no small measure of truth. We are entitled, however, to follow up by asking what sort of "respect" the White House under Bush has shown for "its own people." Beneath the cover of the "war on terrorism" since the terrible jetliner attacks of September 2001, the president and his "posse" (as he likes to call his inner circle) have launched a deeply contemptuous two-pronged assault on the American population. The first prong is a radical and elaborate campaign to redistribute American wealth and hence power yet further upward through massive tax cuts consciously calculated to overwhelmingly benefit the richest Americans and to devastate the nation`s ability to meet basic social and civic needs, including even basic homeland security against terrorist attack. The second prong is an attack on American civil liberties, democracy and public space, the worst such assault in fifty years, designed to marginalize dissent, restrict the spectrum of acceptable debate and constrict democratic imagination.

The two prongs are inseparably linked. Policymakers and corporate interests seeking to increase the already extreme concentration and centralization of American wealth and power have found it useful and all-too-easy to smear their critics as "anti-Americans" in the post-9/11 environment. A time of (apparently endless) public emergency is not an appropriate moment, we are told, to question the Leaders` noble schemes to stuff Fat Cat pockets yet fuller with cash originally marked for the most vulnerable among an increasingly insecure populace. To criticize such vile plutocracy "while we are fighting our war on terrorism" - to quote the not-yet-disgraced close Bush ally Trent Lott rebuking that subversive radical Tom Daschle last year - is to flirt, we have been told, with treason.

"Respect" for the people? When George W. Bush spoke on behalf of "free trade" (corporate globalization) and his regressive tax cut in a St. Louis trucking company warehouse last January, he huffed and sneered about the superiority of the American System in front of "a printed canvas backdrop of faux cardboard boxes, which featured `Made in America` in large black letters" (New York Times, January 23, 2003). The canvass read "STRENGTHENING THE AMERICAN ECONOMY." A handful of warehouse officials applauded in the background, framed by two American flags. But the only real warehouse boxes that White House "volunteers" could find to arrange in front of Bush had large pieces of dark brown duct tape placed on their lower left corner. When reporters peeled the tape off, they found three magic words the White House wished to hide: "Made in China."

When many millions across the world, including masses of angry Americans took to the streets against the "war" even before it was technically launched, consistent with US public opinion numbers showing majority opposition to unilateral war, Bush and his "posse" dismissed this remarkable outpouring of pre-war antiwar sentiment as irrelevant. Telling reporters that he also remembered many Americans and others wrongly (in his view) protesting "trade" (his Orwellian description for the top down corporate globalization that global-activists actually oppose) and refused to directly answer reporters` questions about the reasons for mass opposition to his Iraq policy at home and abroad. Following standard White House doctrine, Bush, Rice and Rumsfeld lectured us on how fortunate we are to possess the very right to protest, unlike the people of Iraq, as if this was granted to us conditionally by benevolent masters and not a longstanding freedom won through deadly struggle and asserted as our birthright. As if this birthright was more seriously endangered by Saddam Hussein than by the Christian Fundamentalist Confederacy enthusiast John Ashcroft and other sponsors of the Patriot Act and Total Information Awareness.

Last July, Bush expressed his respect for American working people by taunting Iraqi guerillas to attack their many children deployed inIraq. "There are some who feel like the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring `em on." Like many of fighting age from his privileged, super-wealthy circle, of course, "bring `em on Bush" avoided real military service during the Vietnam War. He dodged the central military engagement of his time by "making occasional appearances at the Texas National Guard." Given the opportunity to express his rugged, West-Texas sentiments against the "Communist" enemies of American "freedom" in the jungles ofSoutheast Asia, he was content to leave the bloody and dirty work to the sons of the American working-class, who are joined now by blue-collar daughters to comprise to the core basis ofAmerica`s armed forces today. He recoiled in horror at the supposedly "elitist" anti-war movement but was pleased to eggAmerica`s predominantly poor and working-class soldiers on to murder and death from the sheltered sidelines of aristocratic advantage.

The list of plutocratic and authoritarian outrages inflicted on theUSpopulace under the guise of the "war on terrorism" and the "leadership" of the Bush administration - by far the wealthiest White House in history - goes on and on. Perhaps nothing, however, epitomizes the sheer contempt in which that administration and its allies hold the American people and democracy more perfectly than the propaganda campaign it conducted since last September to convince Americans to accept the utterly false notion that Saddam posed a serious threat to Americans and world peace, linking him to 9/11 and Islamic terrorism. This idea cannot withstand scrutiny, which is why it was quickly replaced byAmerica`s supposed mission to spread "freedom" and "democracy" - the main theme of Bush`s recent speech - as the reason we illegally and immorally invadedIraq. But, of course, Bush`s deceptions are so monumentally profuse that authors are already filling entire books with lists and diagnoses of the president`s many lies.

Love for Democracy: Plutocracy At Home, Polyarchy (and Worse) Abroad

Later in "Bush`s Best Speech," the president claims that the world has undergone the "swiftest advance of freedom in the 2500-year story of democracy" during the last 30 years, which have seen the number of democracies in the world rise (according to the calculations of the right-wing think-tank "Freedom House") from 40 to 120. It is "no accident," Bush argues, that "the rise of so many democracies took place in a time when the world`s most influential nation was a democracy."

But is America truly "a democracy" in the true (dictionary) sense of one-person vote, one vote, with an equal policymaking influence for all, regardless of wealth and other factors of socially constructed inequality?. Not exactly: the top 1 percent owns more than 40 percent of the nation`s wealth and possesses vastly greater capacity to fund campaigns and win policies tailored to its interests than the non-affluent majority. That top hundredth makes more than 80 percent of campaign contributions above $200 in theUS, helping contribute toAmerica`s reputation as the "best democracy that money can buy"and generating truly remarkable levels of voter disengagement and political apathy in theUS. Reflecting the massive media-driven costs of American campaigns, the candidates who win the race for private dollars tend to win elections in the great preponderance of cases. Candidates serious about winning are beholden to wealthy corporate donors, who possess massive stashes of political cash they use as a profitable investment in the policy process. American elections are generally "wealth primaries," with incumbents routinely out-raising challengers because officeholder`s position in policymaking power means they can most effectively act on the political investments of the wealthy.

Thanks to this and a host of related factors including highly concentrated media ownership, it is absurdly difficult for people who might dare to speak against concentrated wealth within (Kucinich) our outside (Nader) the two-party system to win elections or even get a meaningful public hearing. Such candidates are censored by the nature of the nation`s political system, as American elections are becoming little more than a recurrent celebration of big capital`s permanent dictatorship. The democratic ideal is widely understood by Americans to have been negated by the harsh realities of "dollar democracy" and the "golden rule" ("those who have the gold rule"). "As theUnited Statesapproaches the 2000 presidential race," columnist William Pfaff wrote three years ago, "the fact must be faced thatAmericahas become a plutocracy, rather than a democracy."

In 2000, of course, even record-breaking private financial investments inAmerica`s electoral process were not enough to guarantee Bush`s ascendancy over the expressed popular will. He also required some help from the vote scrubbers ofFloridaand some scandalous support from high-placed allies in the most explicitly aristocratic branch of the federal government - the Supreme Court.

The policy and related socioeconomic consequences of American plutocracy are all too evident. American governmentlacks the resources to provide universal health coverage (leaving more than 42 million American without basic medical insurance), to properly match unemployment benefits to millions out of work, and to meet the needs of veterans. It can afford, however, to spend trillions on Fat Cat Tax Cuts that reward those least in need and to spend more on the military than all of its possible enemy ("evildoer") states combined many times over, providing massive subsidy to the high-tech corporate sector, including billions on weapons and "defense" systems that bear no meaningful relations to any real threat faced by the American people.

Turning abroad, many if not most of Bush`s 120 "democracies"(a count generated by the right-wing think-tank "Freedom House"),supposedly brought to life under the benevolent influence of the freedom-lovingUnited Statesare democracies in name only. The real term for the prevailing political system in many of them (as in the homeland) is "polyarchy," a US-favored "system in which a small group actually rules and mass participation in decision making is confined to leadership choice carefully managed by competing elites. The polyarchic concept of democracy," notes sociologist William I. Robinson, "is an effective arrangement for legitimating and sustaining inequalities within and between nations (deepening in a global economy) far more effectively than authoritarian solutions." Under this watered down system of "democracy" promoted by the NED and theUS, Noam Chomsky has noted, the big decisions belong to "leading sectors of the business community and related elites." The "public are to be only `spectators of action,` not `participants` ...They are permitted to ratify the decisions of their betters and to lend their support to one or another of them, but not to interfere with matters - like public policy - that are none of their business. If segments of the public depart from their apathy and begin to organize and enter the public arena [as in Venezuala today] that`s not democracy. Rather it`s a crisis of democracy in proper technical usage, a threat that has to be overcome in one or another way: in El Salvador, by death squads - at home by more subtle and indirect means."

When democracy and elections are perceived as incompatible with perceived USeconomic and military interests, as in Vietnam during the 1950s, Chilein the 1970s, or in Iraq today, to give just three of many possible examples, US policymakers have always preferred dictatorship and authoritarianism. From the 1950s through the 1970s, this preference cost millions of Vietnamese lives, snuffed out in the interest of freedom`s salvation. It claimed hundreds of thousands inIndonesia during the 1960s and in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s. Other examples are abundant.

The Bush administration recently displayed its love for democracy in Venezeula, a leading oil exporter to the US. In April 2002, it actively fostered a short-lived coup against that nation`s popularly elected leader Hugo Chavez, whose commitment to national self-determination, social justice, and popular political engagement and related critic of US imposed neo-liberal globalization made him a target for US efforts at regime change. The NED, interestingly enough, provided nearly $900,000 to dissident anti-Chavez forces from within Venezuela`s socioeconomic elite and military in the year leading up to the coup, which the White House immediately welcomed - only to be embarrassed when a mass popular rebellion of the nation`s newly empowered non-affluent majority put that country`s supposed "hated" dictator back in office (see the amazing documentary, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," screenings available at www.chavezthefilm.com ).

Nearly one year later, American leaders` commitment to the democratic ideal was displayed in the Bush administration`s biting rhetorical division between an archaic "Old [because officially anti-war]Europe" and a progressive, forward-looking "New [because officially pro-war]Europe" - a distinction that neglected to note that the very preponderant majority of all (including "New") Europeans opposed Bush`s attack onIraq. The White House criticized Turkey`s refusal to serve as an imperial staging ground as anti-democratic when it knew full well that refusal was demanded by a huge majority of the Turkish population.

Meanwhile, authoritarian US-sponsored war- and drug-lords have replaced the Taliban as the American-approved rulers ofAfghanistan. The US enrages the people of South Korean by reversing previous policies of engagement with North Korea and turns a wary eye at a heroic but (for US policymakers) disturbing outburst of mass protest in defense of national resources in Bolivia. Americacontinues to supportIsrael`s bloody, illegal occupation ofPalestineand deepens its alliance with authoritarian and state-terrorist forces inRussia,Indonesia, andColumbia. It does so in the name of supposed "wars" "on" "terrorism" and "drugs" that have emerged from and displaced the war on Communism as official new pretexts for a permanent imperial campaign in the not-so post-Cold War era.

Sacrificing for "Rescue and Liberation"

Beyond the inspiring influence exercised by America`s brilliant model, Bush`s speech claims that part of the explanation for the planet`s supposed spectacular "advance of freedom" is found in the willingness of America`s "free people" to "sacrifice for liberty" with their blood. This "sacrifice" has occurred through battlefield activities he made sure to avoid "in the trenches of World War I, through a two-front war in the 1940s, the difficult battles of Korea and Vietnam, and in [unspecified] missions of rescue and liberation on nearly every continent," including the recent operations in Iraq. "Because we and our allies were steadfast," Bush noted, "Germany and Japan are democratic nations that no longer threaten the world" and `every nation has learned" that "freedom is worth fighting for, dying for, and standing for"...unless you happen to be a child of privilege who counts on connections to keep you out of the booby-trapped jungles where freedom`s march is measured in brown-skinned body counts.

Too bad America`s supposed historical and ongoing supposed mission of "rescue and liberation" couldn`t have been put into practice in Rwandaor, more recently, Liberia, where Bush was shamed into making small gestures towards humanitarian intervention by the population`s resort to the practice of literally piling up corpses outside the US Embassy in Monrovia. This mission does not extend to the whole of Africa, where the Bush administration resists trade, health care and other reforms that might stem the ravages of AIDS and poverty.

Too bad, for that matter,America`s passion for "rescue" and "liberation" did not extend to European Jewry during the 1930s and the Second World War. Truth is, beneath all of Republican`s recent talk about saving Europefrom Hitler, the US was relatively pleased with German`s fascist, racist, and pillaging ways well into the late 1930s. It saw Italian and even German fascism as understandable and even useful development in America`s efforts to keep theSoviet Union and the left at bay. It was only when history`s real "evil Axis" moved to seriously attack US global interests that US policymakers undertook to battle it in the name of "liberty," making sure along the way to expand the global "open door" for US corporate power and working afterward to keep both West Germany and Japan firmly under strict US control. During the war, American rejected repeated Jewish pleas to make special efforts to halt Hitler`s genocide.

In Vietnam during the 1960s, young Bush watched from the sidelines of privilege while 56,000 Americans were "sacrificed" to the cause of preventing national self-determination and social revolution. A good portion died simply to save presidential and establishment face after the White House and Pentagon had given up on full military victory. Ever since Vietnam, US policymakers have been terrified by the volatile political affect of civilian casualties on a US population that repeatedly learns all-too well who does and doesn`t [get] sacrifice[d] for empire.

During the first Gulf War, the US actually called Iraqis out to rebel for "liberty" and then stood by while the US-designated monster butchered his opposition. The rebels were sacrificed to America`s drive to control Iraqi affairs, as were the 500,000 or more Iraqi children who died as a result of US-imposed economic sanctions that killed without a single American sacrifice. Consistent with this ruthless insensitivity, our "rescue" instincts have not led us to acknowledge the large number of innocent civilians we have killed and injured during our recent liberation ofIraq, whose numbers US policymakers don`t even bother to count

Speaking of sacrifice, liberty, and Iraq, we can safely predict that Bush`s speech writers will never have him reference one of John Stuart Mill`s famous arguments in his classic text On Liberty [1857]) - the one where Mill noted that people need to fight and sacrifice for their own rights to truly cherish them. "Freedom" imposed by foreigners, Mill argued, inevitably reverts to slavery, an argument that calls into question the very possibility ofAmericaliberating anyone other than itself. You cannot export democracy through the barrel of a gun.

"Inclusion and Justice"

And speaking of theMiddle East, where the US has long worked to subsidize, equip and otherwise sustain widespread dictatorship and authoritarianism, Bush`s speech claims that "working democracies always need time to develop - as did our own. We`ve taken a 200-year journey toward inclusion and justice - and this makes us patient and understanding as other nations are at different stages of this journey."

Well, that`s nice to know, but if America is so advanced on the long and winding road to "inclusion and justice," why doesthe average white person in metropolitan America live in a neighborhood that is 80% white and only 7% black while a typical black American individual lives in a neighborhood that is only 33% white and as much as 51% black (see the work John Logan and colleagues at the Lewis Mumford Center, online at www.albany.edu/mumford/ census)?. Why are African-Americans twice as likely to be unemployed as whites and why is the poverty rate for blacks in the US is more than twice the poverty rate for whites? Why is black families` median household net worth less than 10 percent that of whites? Why are blacks still disproportionately concentrated in the country`s worst urban ghettoes, in neighborhoods that host the worst public school systems in the country and are home to a tragic tangled web of pathologies that emerge wherever disadvantaged people are concentrated and cordoned off from "respectable society"? Their predominantly African-American populations live, writes African-America writer and activist Elaine Brown, "in conditions of deterioration and disrepair, lacking needed services, with few community-based businesses." A shocking number and percentage of their younger residents now provide crucial raw material for the nation`s massive prison-industrial complex, one of the great growth industries to emerge in the wake of the loss of industrial jobs that used to employ millions of urban African-Americans. Such are just a tiny share of the many disturbing facts of life in the savagely unequal nation that Madeline Albright said "stands taller and sees farther" than the rest of the world - the country that Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson calls "the beacon to the world of the way life should be."

The Making of "Successful Societies"

"Bush`s best speech" reaches new depths of narcissistic self-delusion when he sermonizes on the "essential principles common to every successful society, in every culture." Among these principles he includes the requirement that "governments respond to the will of the people and not the will of an elite," "invest in the health and education of their people," and recognize the "impartial rule of law." Successful societies, Bush notes, "allow room" for "healthy civic institutions," including "labor unions and independent newspapers and broadcast media" and they "prohibit and punish official corruption."

All true but the problem is that America`s economic "elite" routinely dominates US policy to cut investment in health and education for the populace, rollback the power of organized labor (targeted for major diminishment under the design of Bush`s Department of Homeland Security), stack the decks of justice and prevent serious punishment of powerful corporate criminals (who go free after demolishing droves of jobs and savings accounts while hundreds of thousands of impoverished African-Americans rot in Hellish jails and prisons for minor narcotics offenses), deepen the ever-increasing corporate concentration of print and electronic media ownership, and relentlessly manipulate public opinion ("taking the risk out of democracy" in the late Alex Carey`s wonderfully suggestive words) from inside and outside that dominant media. This is a structural, bipartisan reality, graphically evident under a Bill Clinton as well as a Bush, though the latter is an especially dedicated, energetic, shameless, and resolute agent of the American "elite`s" agenda of starving the left (social and democratic) hand and feeding the right (regressive and repressive) hand of the state. The corporate-plutocratic "welfare reformer" Clinton, who worked to distance the "new" Democratic Party from its social-democratic New Deal (and related Great Society) legacy, is appalled by the depth and degree of his successor`s commitment to socioeconomic and policy regression.

Shameless

Speaking of shamelessness, consider Bush`s last line on what makes a good society. "Instead of directing hatred and resentment against others," Bush says, "successful societies appeal to the hopes of their own people." This from the president who told the world it is "either with us or against us" in an apparently permanent and borderless war against "the enemies of freedom." This from a sneering violator of the most basic edicts on the books of post-Nuremberg international law who pushes fear and loathing of shifting and falsely merged Evil Others to marshal mass support and divert attention from the consequences of his aristocratic domestic policies.

Perhaps a psychoanalyst should be sent to the White House to examine the remarkable inversion that occurs in Bush`s depiction of the rest of the world`s problems: he and his team are masters of almost everything he reproaches in others - the fiendish foes of "freedom." In the meantime, fellow Americans, let us reflect on the harm we are doing ourselves and others by permitting "leaders" like Bush to remain so dreadfully oblivious to the painful reality of how America relates to itself and the world.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=10&Ite…

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PaulStreet([e-mail]) writes on race, class, imperialism, and thought control. His book Empire Abroad, Inequality at Home: Writings onAmericaand The World(Paradigm Publishers) will be published next year.

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Criticizing the U.S. empire is not enough

Amitai Etzioni

Thursday, November 13, 2003 (IHT)

Searching for alternatives

WASHINGTON Now that the American empire is collapsing around our ears, it is the turn of those who favored a multipolar world - and one in which the United Nations plays a key role - to show that they can do better.

Although no one in Washington has noticed it yet, the days of the American empire are numbered. The notion that one can govern the world by military might has found its limit. It is now widely understood that the United States cannot take out the North Korean regime because some of its weapons of mass destruction are in caves, beyond the reach of bombs. Trying to use force against North Korea might cause the deaths of millions of South Koreans, which forces the United States to pursue negotiations, despite noises to the contrary. The macho declaration of pre-emption is already passé.

Moreover, the U.S. armed forces are stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan and the American public willingness to accept more casualties and costs is rapidly fading. Far from going it alone, the United States is courting allies and friends, hat in hand, to share the burden of nation-building in these two countries. Washington felt forced to go pleading with the United Nations to grant its blessing for what needs to be done. Although it has obtained a UN resolution, it will not provide much relief in terms of funds or military forces.

All this is a long way from the posture of unilateralism, yesterday`s neoconservative battle cry. Indeed, the negotiations with North Korea are taking place in close collaboration with several other key nations - Japan, Russia, China and South Korea. It is less clear how Iran`s nuclear program is going to be dealt with, but this situation, too, seems to be moving in a multilateral direction.

Finally, nation-building is not working. When the United States was unable to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and when the preinvasion claims of Al Qaeda connections proved to be hard to sustain, the Bush administration chose to rely more and more on what had previously been a sort of an afterthought: that the United States was out to liberate Iraq and turn it into the first shining prosperous and democratic Arab republic, a model that would change the whole Middle East. In reality, the United States has had a hard time pacifying central Iraq, and the rest of the country is run by mullahs (in the south) and Kurdish warlords (in the north), mirroring the state of Afghanistan outside of Kabul. This last rationale for the American empire is not holding either.

Those who opposed the invasion of Iraq should not gloat. Rubbing the nose of a superpower in the mess it created could push the empire to one last hurrah, to show what it can do, with results that all would regret. Indeed, now is their turn to show how a less unipolar and a more UN-driven world might work.

Here are the key missions for the "post-empire" world:

Continue collaboration with the United States in the war against terrorism, which was from the beginning multilateral and UN-endorsed;

Actively encourage Iran and North Korea, by use of incentives and, if need be, economic sanctions, to agree to a stronger UN role in their countries, to counter proliferation;

Participate, under UN auspices, in limited nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, focusing on pacification, while insisting on the early withdrawal of all foreign powers, especially from Iraq;

Form stronger "standby" regional forces, beginning in Africa, able to expeditiously stop genocides and civil wars before they unfold, backed up by big powers. Above all, these regional forces must be professionalized so that they themselves will cease to engage in large-scale criminal activities, such as drug dealing and rape. These humanitarian interventions are essential for the credibility of the new global order. Those who believe that everything can be fixed by negotiations should acknowledge that in situations such as we have recently seen in Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ivory Coast, and before that in Rwanda and East Timor, force must be applied;

Honor commitments to increase contributions to the fight against AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, and enhance economic development in the have-not countries, especially by lowering trade barriers;

Take advantage of the opportunity to gradually restructure the United Nations, beginning by adjusting the composition of the Security Council to reflect the power realities of the emerging multipolar world. The UN Commission on Human Rights, which undermines the UN`s credibility by including many nations that do not know of human rights, ought to be reconstituted.

There is a season for everything. There was a time to criticize the American empire. For those who argue that they know better, the time has come to prove it.

The writer is a professor at George Washington University. His book "From Empire to Community" will be published next year.

Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune

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Es ist vorbei mit der Demokratie, erst mal schnell eine Regierung und dann nichts wie weg.
Keine Wahlen, keine Verfassung nur irgendeine Regierung und weg.
Noch vor einer Woche hat sich Bush noch mit dieser verlogenen Rede über "Demokratie" lächerlich gemacht.
Nun ist schon alles Makulatur.
Wer glaubt denn, dass eim einmal eingesetzter Präsident nach einer Zeit die Macht wieder abgeben wird.
Also wieder die alte Leier.

November 13, 2003
General Says Hussein Loyalists Pose Growing Threat in Iraq
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — The senior American commander in the Middle East said today that the American-led occupation in Iraq faced no more than 5,000 guerrilla fighters, but that they were increasingly well organized, well financed and gradually expanding their attacks to the country`s relatively calm north and south.

The officer, Gen. John P. Abizaid of the Army, said that loyalists to Saddam Hussein — not foreign terrorists, as some Bush administration officials have asserted — posed the greatest threat to stability in Iraq. He said these Baathist groups, and other extremists, were hiring criminals and young, unemployed Iraqi men to do the bulk of their "dirty work."

As General Abizaid described the security challenge, President Bush`s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, acknowledged that the United States was changing course on how to form a government.

She said the White House had been persuaded by the Iraqi Governing Council that writing a constitution for the country would be a lengthy, complex process that needed time — and that they could not wait that long for the transfer of civilian authority from the coalition.

Ms. Rice declined to go into detail, though other administration officials say Mr. Bush has now approved in broad strokes the creation of a temporary Iraqi government, to be formed by the middle of next year.

"It is still important that the Iraqi people have a permanent constitution and elections for a permanent government," Ms. Rice said. "Nothing has changed. But what is also important is that we find ways to accelerate the transfer of power to the Iraqis — they are clamoring for it, they are, we believe, ready for it."

General Abizaid, who heads the United States Central Command, offered a sobering assessment of a guerrilla force that, while numerically dwarfed by 155,000 American and coalition troops and more than 100,000 Iraqi security forces, is fighting an increasingly bloody low-intensity war that is expected to claim more American lives before it is over.

"In all, I would say that the force of people actively armed and operating against us does not exceed 5,000," General Abizaid said at a news conference at his headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla. "People will say, well, that`s a very small number. But when you understand that they`re organized in cellular structure, that they have a brutal and determined cadre, that they know how to operate covertly, they have access to a lot of money and a lot of ammunition, you`ll understand how dangerous they are."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Bush to meet bereaved British relatives
Julian Borger in Washington
Friday November 14, 2003
The Guardian

President Bush said yesterday that he would meet the families of British soldiers who have been killed in Iraq during next week`s state visit. He also made it clear that he would do his best to bolster the prime minister`s political standing at the same time.

In an interview with British journalists, the president shrugged off the threat of huge demonstrations against his visit, insisting the trip, the first full state visit by a president since 1918, would be "a really interesting and fun experience".

Asked about the families of the 54 British dead in Iraq, he said that they had died in a "noble cause" and that he would have two messages for them.

"There`s two messages. One, the prayers of the American people and the prayers of the president are with them, as they suffer," the president said, according to the Press Association.

"Secondly, that I will tell them that their loved ones did not die vain. The actions we have taken will make the world more secure and the world more peaceful in the long run."

Many of his remarks in the 40-minute interview were devoted to praise for Mr Blair and stressed his close relationship with the prime minister, with whom he said he consults weekly. "I`m really looking forward to spending time with my friend - and I emphasise `my friend` - Tony Blair," Mr Bush said. "He`s a smart, capable, trustworthy friend, and we`ve got a lot to talk about."

He went out of his way to deny the suggestion that Mr Blair had sacrificed Britain`s independence by maintaining such a close relationship with Washington.

"He`s plenty independent. If he thought the policy that we have both worked on was wrong, he`d tell me," he said.

"Never once has he said to me, ever, `gosh, I`m feeling terrible pressure`," Mr Bush said. "I have never heard him complain about the polls, or wring his hands. The relationship is a very good relationship because I admire him, and I admire somebody who stands tough."

In his state visit, President Bush will visit Mr Blair`s constituency in Sedgefield, and make a policy speech on the transatlantic relationship.

But he said the part of the trip he was looking forward to most was staying as a guest of the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

"Obviously, staying at Buckingham Palace is going to be an historic moment. I never dreamt when I was living in Midland, Texas, that I would be staying in Buckingham Palace," he said, joking that he would have to rent a morning suit for the occasion.

In fact, Mr Bush is no stranger to royalty. He met the Queen in Washington when his father was president.

According to an account of that 1992 encounter, the Queen asked him whether he was "the black sheep in the family".

"I guess that might be true," Mr Bush said. The Queen reportedly responded by saying every family had one.

In the course of his interview, the president sought to defuse issues likely to heighten tension in the Anglo-American relationship.

He insisted there could be a diplomatic solution to weapons proliferation in Iran and North Korea, the other two nations in the group he dubbed "the axis of evil" last year.

He also said he was open to persuasion on the issue of US tariffs on steel, which the World Trade Organisation has ruled illegal, and which Mr Blair has asked the US to lift.

"I am listening, looking and we`ll decide at an appropriate time. I haven`t made up my mind yet," the president said.

But the opposition to Mr Bush`s visit will focus on Iraq. He said he was ready for the protests, and looking forward to the opportunity to make his case for the war. He said he had ordered the invasion on two principles: to "secure America" and to promote a free society in Iraq. He said that US policy was to "encourage more Iraqis to assume more responsibility" quickly in governing the country, a reference to new US proposals to accelerate elections in Iraq.

The Bush administration and its generals sought yesterday to play down the bleak warnings sounded over the weekend in a CIA briefing on the situation in Iraq.

That report suggested that the insurgency was gathering strength and was becoming more deeply rooted in Iraqi towns and cities. A military intelligence estimate put the total strength of the guerrillas and their supporters at 50,000.

But the head of US Central Command, General John Abizaid, insisted there were no more than 5,000 people actively fighting the coalition.

He also rejected the views of two of his field commanders, who told US journalists that they thought the guerrilla war had been planned in advance by Saddam Hussein as a long-term strategy to defeat the invasion.

"I know one of my subordinate commanders said that today," Gen Abizaid said. "But I think Saddam Hussein is one of the most incompetent military leaders in the history of the world, and to give him any credit to think that somehow or other he planned this is absolutely beyond my comprehension."


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Security crisis prompts radical rethink in Iraq
Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Friday November 14, 2003
The Guardian

Iraq`s governing council is to meet Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Baghdad, tomorrow to craft a radical change to political plans that would see the rapid creation of a transitional government.

It is increasingly clear from both Iraqis and American officials that a new, larger Iraqi authority will be created in Baghdad that will have a greater say in the running of the country. The change is an attempt to speed the handover of power from the American-led administration to locals.

Mr Bremer and the governing council will spend the coming days debating the details of the policy shift and the process of finding candidates for the new authority.

Many of the 24 US-appointed Iraqis on the governing council support the idea of a larger authority. Most want new candidates to be selected through a series of nationwide consultations, although some officials still favour holding elections in the coming months.

The format is expected to allow an Iraqi to take over as president. Many candidates will be vying for the job - including the Pentagon`s favourite, exile Ahmad Chalabi - but it is still unclear who will emerge as a widely supported candidate.

The governing council has agreed that it would take too long to draft a constitution in the short term, as was first envisaged by America. "The entire constitution issue would be deferred later until after general elections," said Samir Shakir Mahmoud al-Sumaidy, one of the council members. "Let`s make progress towards a representative government which enables us to regain sovereignty and power for the Iraqi people."

He said the council proposed to create an "electoral law" under the new government, after which elections could be held. Only then would a constitution be drafted.

Many are also keen to respect a fatwa issued by Aya-tollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered Shia cleric in Iraq, calling for the body drafting the constitution to be elected. "The difficulty is that if we don`t have full elections then the constitution will be challenged on the basis that it is not generated by an elected body," Mr al-Sumaidy said.

Officials at the US-led administration have been reluctant to disclose the plans Mr Bremer brought back from a series of meetings in Washington, including a session with George Bush. "We are very keen that more and more Iraqis are consulted and participate in this process," said a senior official in Baghdad. "It needs to be done soon."

Adil Abdul Mahdi, a senior political figure in Iraq`s largest Shia party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which holds a council seat, said his party had been pressing for the changes.

He said the new government would number several hundred people, and should be chosen from community leaders. "It could be ten times the size of the governing council," he said. "It is important that we have an authority first, then a constitution."

Under the latest UN security council resolution on Iraq, the council has until December 15 to announce a timetable for the writing of a constitution and holding elections.

"The important thing is that we can work and have the support of the Iraqi people," said Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish politician who sits on the council.

Dr Othman said the council had decided that holding elections, a position favoured by some officials, would be too difficult given the security crisis. He said the governing council would remain at the heart of the new government. "It is a matter of agreeing on a formula of how to add more members."

Council members will be pressing Mr Bremer to concede significant powers to the new authority. "If the government is not given authority security-wise and money-wise then the government won`t work," he said. "If they don`t give it authority on the ground then in the end it might not be able to deliver."

Once chosen, it is understood the new transitional government would select its own cabinet and leader, and effectively take over the political process in Iraq from the US civilian administration, the Coalition Provisional Authority. However, troops would be likely to remain in Iraq for some time to come.

The new approach is a significant reversal of America`s plans for Iraq. For months diplomats in Baghdad have been saying elections cannot be held now because of the fragile security situation. Yet general elections now appear to be one of the options under consideration. They hope a rapid transfer of power will undercut the growing guerrilla resistance movement that claims more lives every day.

Accelerating plans to hand back power

Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, first proposed a seven-step plan:

· Appointing a governing council
· Rebuilding Iraqi ministries
· Naming a committee to write the constitution
· Drafting the constitution
· Endorsing it with a referendum
· Electing a new government
· Transferring power

Plans now being considered include:

· Letting an enlarged governing council immediately take over the responsibilities of a transitional government
· Enlarging the governing council by choosing several hundred Iraqis from trade unions, tribes and professions, as well as other community leaders
· Closing down the governing council and holding general elections to find candidates for a new transitional government
· Choosing one Iraqi to emerge as president of the new transitional authority
· Drawing up an electoral law under a new transitional government to prepare for general elections
· Delaying the drafting of a constitution until after an election


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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The power of a car, a bomb and a man willing to die
Ordinary Iraqis want to see the back of the Americans - but not yet

Martin Woollacott
Friday November 14, 2003
The Guardian

It is ironic that the United States and Britain, who would never have invaded Iraq had it not been for the superior technology which they trusted would limit their casualties to a tolerable level, now face a military and political crisis in that country precisely because of the primitive technology which those resisting them are employing. What the US army snootily calls "improvised explosive devices" have wrecked convoy after convoy. A few cheap shoulder-fired missiles have been enough to hamper helicopter use, the main means of rapid mobility possessed by the coalition forces. And the combination of an automobile, a bomb, and a man willing to die has proved devastating in attacks on the coalition`s camps and outposts, military and civilian, and on the offices of international organisations.

For the attackers, it has been as "target-rich" an environment in its different way as any in which an American fighter-bomber was able to pick and choose during the few weeks of the war proper. Supply, movement, fixed positions and the commitment of allies and helpers - both Iraqi and international - have all been affected. Hence the urgency of the re-thinking that has been going on in Baghdad and Washington, and the evident search for new policies.

With all the lessons that have been learned about the power of the weapons of the weak, from Vietnam to the West Bank, all this might have been expected. Yet almost always in the past such weapons have been employed in the context of substantial support for resistance among the general population. The paradox of Iraq is that the occupiers face a militarily successful resistance which is not at all popular except in limited areas and among limited groups.

A further paradox is that this is a resistance without an identity and without a programme, without an announced plan for the nation and without objectives - except for the withdrawal of foreign forces. That, it may be said, is the cry of the occupier through the ages, always claiming the allegiance of the majority and always classifying those resisting as bandits or fanatics. But, while the evidence is admittedly largely anecdotal, the picture in Iraq does seem to be one in which a majority, while by no means pro-American, very definitely do not want those resisting them to prevail.

Typically, in a posting on the Open Democracy website, a returning Iraqi exile wrote after a trip to Baghdad and Amara, a town near Basra, that he had not met a single person ready to endorse any of "the violence as legitimate resistance to occupation... the vast majority in Iraq, especially women - who represent 60% of the adult population - do not want the Americans to leave anytime soon".

Such views may be too rosy. But even if the estimate, reported yesterday in this paper, of 50,000 "insurgents", both fighters and supporters, is correct, that still repre sents a very small proportion of the Iraqi population.

During the recent Arab media summit in Dubai there was a clash between those who saw the conflict in Iraq as a fight between invaders and resisters and those who saw it as a continuation of the justified effort to get rid of Saddam`s regime. At one point a speaker extolling the resistance was interrupted by cries of protest from Kuwaiti and Iraqi delegates. One of them said afterwards that those who romanticised the violence in Iraq did not see that they were "turning it into a movie in which real people are dying, and most of those who are dying are Iraqis".

It might be said that there are two rival movie crews filming Iraq. One wants to film Arab resistance, and the other an Arab democracy rising from the ashes of dictatorship, thanks to US help. If the first movie is almost entirely fictional, the second is not the whole truth. Part of the problem in Iraq, and arguably the main reason why violence is growing rather than diminishing, is that Iraqis have been conditioned by their modern history to move with extreme caution. Commitment has historically been dangerous, particularly beyond the boundaries of sect or tribe.

A combination of passivity and as much a defence of group interests as can be managed without too much risk made the population vulnerable in the past to the manipulations and predations of a minority ready to ruthlessly reach out for power. Now, in addition, there may be a tendency to wait out the conflict between occupiers and resisters largely as onlookers, albeit onlookers who have their preferences about which side they want to win. How to unlock Iraqi knowledge about who is doing the violence, and how to release Iraqi energies and courage so that the conflict becomes one between the Iraqi majority and the minority of wreckers is thus the main preoccupation of the coalition authorities.

Speeding up the handover of power may or not be the solution. The difficulty is that there is a clear conflict between bringing an Iraqi government and a new army, police, and intelligence service into being quickly - so that they can take the lead in the campaign against the bombers - and doing what was originally envisaged, which was to lay the groundwork for such changes surely and to ensure they were made to stick through properly prepared elections.

The overly rapid creation of Iraqi institutions, already under way as far as security forces are concerned and clearly now being contemplated for the political side, must compromise both their efficiency and their legiti macy. The Americans and the Iraqi governing council have not helped each other, the US by failing to hand over any real powers and the council by its dilatoriness in forming a cabinet and in coming up with a programme for choosing a constitution. This latter is a critical dimension because true politics in Iraq cannot start until a framework for them is in being and in particular until the way in which the country will vote - whether for a constituent assembly or for parliaments - is decided. The hard choice is between arrangements which give different ethnic and religious groups automatic representation, thus diluting the advantage of the Shi`ite majority, and those that do not. But it has to be made and, in this case, the sooner the better.

Sometimes panicky changes in US policy have made the situation worse. The Iraqis may wish to see the back of the Americans, but not before the threats to their security have been reduced and basic political decisions have been taken. Iraqis must know that the changes in policy, whether good or bad in themselves, are driven by the need to reduce the bad news reaching the US during an election campaign. If American seriousness becomes widely questioned that will reinforce the wait-and-see attitude, which is part of the problem. The final paradox may be that the more determined the US is to stay, the sooner it may be able to leave.

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Iraq: the crumbling coalition
As Italy mourns and Japan abandons plans to send troops, Bush desperately scrambles for new approach
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington and Phil Reeves in Baghdad
14 November 2003


The American-led coalition`s failure to secure additional outside help in policing Iraq during a worsening security crisis was exposed yesterday when Japan backed away from sending troops.

The death toll in Wednesday`s suicide bombing at an Italian base in Nasiriyah rose to 31, adding impetus to the efforts of George Bush and his administration to extract the United States from the worsening conflict.

Washington is more anxious than ever to hand power to Iraqis - without Iraq collapsing into chaos in the process. President Bush said last night that America wanted to speed up the transfer of power: "We want Iraqis to be more involved in the governance of their country."

Japan reacted to Wednesday`s carnage by indicating that it would postpone plans to send 1,000 troops by the end of the year because of the instability. The announcement made it the latest important potential contributor of troops to refuse to send forces. India, Pakistan, and, most importantly Turkey - which would have been the first main involvement of a Muslim nation - have also declined.

Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan are the only Muslim countries in the 34-nation coalition, providing 175 troops between them. The United Nations and the Red Cross have also withdrawn from Iraq in recent weeks.

In another setback for the White House, South Korea - another usually close US ally - scaled its contribution back to 3,000 troops, from the 5,000 originally requested by the Pentagon. And no date has been set for their deployment.

France, vocal opponents of the invasion, piled the pressure on Washington, calling for an urgent change in its approach to Iraq. "Every day, it is spiralling in Iraq with American, British, Polish, Spanish, Italian deaths," France`s Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, told French radio. "How many deaths does it take to understand that it is essential to change the approach?"

The coalition has not yet disintegrated but it is in danger of crumbling in the face of attacks in Iraq and growing worldwide opposition. Of those that have sent troops to Iraq, no country has said it will pull out but in Italy - the third-largest contributor of troops - parts of the opposition now want to withdraw. Many more countries may be reviewing their presence in the light of continuing attacks on occupation forces.

Despite claiming in February that it had assembled a coalition of at least 30 "willing" nations, America has been unable to assemble a credible group prepared to provide troops in the numbers required. It has been forced to rely on smaller nations, including Azerbaijan, Estonia, and Honduras. Even Poland, which controls one of the Iraqi sectors and leads a 9,000-strong force, has little or no experience of such an operation. France has ruled out sending troops before a handover of sovereignty to the Iraqi people.

The real failure of the US has been its inability to expand the coalition, and attract a second international division to join the one already in Iraq.

General John Abizaid, head of US Central Command, said: "The goal of the enemy is not to defeat us militarily. The goal is to break the will of the United States, to make us leave." And, he might have added, to deter other countries from sending troops.

The attack on the Italians was a clever tactic, hitting representatives of a country that has 2,400 men in Iraq - a number exceeded only by the US and Britain - and has a distinguished peace-keeping record in the Middle East, but where public opinion has been strongly against the war.

The bomb - 650lbs of high explosive - blew the front off a building used by Italian paramilitaries. Hospital officials estimated the number of injured at 80.

Italy`s Defence Minister, Antonio Martino, toured the scene yesterday. He said: "Slightly over a month ago, I was in New York City at ground zero, and I was struck by the similarity of the impression of my feelings. And then I realised why, because they are the same people, they are the people we are fighting against."

US officials said yesterday that another American soldier had been killed, pushing the overall number of American deaths to close to 400.

The attacks are corroding domestic support in the US for the occupation of Iraq, and are deepening disquiet within the international community.

Role Troops/Casualties Current status
United States Control of north and central Iraq, HQ in Baghdad 130,000/397 57% back war, down from 68% in May. Senate investigates US intelligence behind invasion. War is election issue
United Kingdom Control of southern Iraq with HQ in Basra the second biggest city 9,900/52 Massive anti-Bush demonstrations planned next week. Blair government in trouble over `dodgy` intelligence
Italy Engineers, logistics, marines and military police based in Dhiqar 2,400/17 36% believe war justified. Fifty more carabinieri sent despite heavy losses in suicide bombing
Poland Controls south-central zone, and commands 9,200 multinational force 2,350/1 Huge outcry after soldier`s death last week. More than half the country is opposed to the war
Ukraine Serve under Polish-led force policing border with Iran 1,650/0 Sent troops to appease US criticism it had busted sanctions to aid Saddam. Sent in 20 additional helicopters
Spain Concentrated in Shia Muslim areas south of Basra 1,250/3 Only 15 per cent think war is justified. Prime Minister Aznar ignored huge anti-war feeling in the country
Netherlands Engineers and military police based around Masayna 1,100/0 Troops on heightened alert because they are operating in dangerous area. Almost half of public in favour of war
Australia Operating around Baghdad airport and helping in weaponshunt 800/0 Parliamentary inquiry into intelligence justifying war. Critics say Prime Minister Howard is in Bush`s pocket
Romania Based in Nasiriyah, troops are training Iraqi police 700/0 Extra 56 troops to be sent
Bulgaria Based in the Shia holy city of Karbala, under Polish command 500/0 Moved diplomats from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan, last month
Denmark Stationed in north Basra, under British command 420/0 Highest support in the EU for war, with 57% in favour. But Defence Minister refuses to send more troops
Czech Republic Runs field hospitals and has police in Basra and Masour 400/0 Public support for war has fallen from about half to 10 per cent. Troops are due to be withdrawn next month
Norway Engineers based with British troops in Basra in southern Iraq 179/0 Prime Minister Bondevik said country was against war, but willing to help in the mission to rebuild Iraq
Azerbaijan Under US command, mainly guarding the Shia holy sites 150/0 Troops are due to pull out in January
Hungary Logistics experts based in Hillah under Polish command 140/0 Set to keep troops in Iraq until end of next year. More than 80 per cent of public are against the war
Portugal Based in Basra. Troops under British command 128/0 Avoided sending soldiers to Nasiriyah because of danger. About one third of public think war justified
New Zealand Engineering, humanitarian aid and reconnaissance 61/0 47% backed war, but Prime Minister Helen Clark said it would never have happened had Al Gore been president
South Korea Staunch ally of the US, said it was willing to send up to 5,000 troops 0/0 Has reduced the number of troops it plans to send from 5,000 to 3,000, but has set no date for their deployment
Turkey Was to be first Muslim nation to participate, offering 10,000 troops 0/0 Plans to send 10,000 troops cancelled after opposition from Turkish public and Iraqi Governing Council
Japan Had proposed guarding reconstruction in southern Iraq 0/0 Reversed decision to send 1,000 soldiers. One third of public infavour of war
14 November 2003 08:30


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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The hidden cost of Bush`s war
Concern about fatalities among Western forces in Iraq tends to overlook another ghastly statistic: the spectacularly mounting toll of the severely wounded. Andrew Buncombe reports on America`s invisible army of maimed and crippled servicemen
14 November 2003


It has been three months since Sergeant Mike Meinen lost his right leg in Iraq and just two weeks since he received a new one. He is still getting used to the prosthetic, still adjusting to its feel, the way it looks, the way in which his injury has changed his life for ever. Remarkably, he refuses to be bitter ­ either about the Iraqi guerrillas who maimed him or about the people in Washington who sent him to war.

"I can`t be upset for what has happened. We went to Iraq for a reason, there were obviously going to be casualties," said 24-year-old Sgt Meinen, father of a five-month-old daughter, Abigail, who was born when he was in Iraq. "I can`t be upset that I was among them... I am proud of what I have done."

Sgt Meinen, of the 43rd Combat Engineer Company, 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, is among thousands of wounded soldiers who have returned from Iraq to uncertain futures, months of difficult and often painful treatment and an American public largely unaware that so many troops are being injured every day. The reality is that, just as Iraqi hospitals struggled to deal with the number of wounded civilians during the invasion of the country, so military hospitals in the US are now overflowing with wounded Americans.

Advances in body armour and battlefield medicine mean that an increasing number of soldiers such as Sgt Meinen are surviving injuries that even just a decade ago would have killed them. As a result, while the Bush administration is able to point to a relatively modest number of US fatalities in Iraq ­ yesterday the total stood at 396 ­ there is a huge number of severely wounded soldiers whose injuries and fate go largely unreported. Mr Bush has ordered that the media should not be allowed to photograph coffins containing the bodies of those killed in Iraq, and the return of injured US troops also goes largely unpublicised. This is no coincidence. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont told the Senate last month: "The wounded are brought back after midnight, making sure the press does not see the planes coming in with the wounded."

But for visitors to the Walter Reed Medical Centre in Washington ­ where Sgt Meinen and two comrades who were injured in the same rocket-propelled grenade attack were treated ­ the wounded are very much on display. Indeed, at this hospital, which deals with injured soldiers (as opposed to sailors or marines), there is barely room for non-war casualty patients.

Last week all but 20 of the hospital`s 250 beds were reportedly taken up with soldiers injured in Iraq, where there are now some 35 attacks on US forces every day. Fifty soldiers had lost limbs ­ often more than one ­ while dozens of others were being treated for burns or shrapnel wounds. Others require psychiatric help. Officials say that 20 per cent of the wounded have suffered "severe brain injuries" while 70 per cent had wounds with the "potential for resulting in brain injury". About 600 have been dispatched to a specialist burns unit in San Antonio, Texas.

On the fifth floor of Walter Reed, where soldiers such as Sgt Meinen and his comrades Pte Trystan Wyatt and Sgt Erick Castro receive physical therapy, staff have reportedly put up a bulletin board with their patients` photographs. It is crammed full of pictures of young men. "We didn`t start the board when the war began," Mary Hannah, a therapist, told the Los Angeles Times. "Even the most experienced people here ­ it`s beyond their imagining. These are our babies and they just keep coming, coming, coming."

The facilities at Walter Reed, the army`s main hospital in the US, are so crowded that the 600 or so rooms set aside for families of the injured are apparently insufficient and people are doubling up. The Pentagon is paying to put up hundreds more at local hotels.

"I don`t think this is going to go away," said the hospital`s director, Major-General Kevin Kiley. "Our people are pedalling as hard and fast as they can. We can do this for a long time but at some point ­ if there is no let-up ­ the casualty demand will have to start affecting what Walter Reed is. The whole hospital is on a war footing and emotionally involved. The broader challenge is how do you keep up the battle tempo for a long period of time?"

The first stopping-off point for almost all injured soldiers evacuated from Iraq is the US Regional Medical Centre in Landstuhl, Germany, about 100 miles south-west of Frankfurt. To date they have treated a total of 7,714 ill and injured troops. Of these, the Pentagon says 937 had suffered so-called combat injuries, as opposed to non-hostile injuries, though these numbers are disputed by independent experts. "One is going to get you a Purple Heart [a medal for troops injured in battle] and one is not," said a Pentagon spokesman, explaining the difference. "One`s for wounds inflicted by the enemy. It could be any type of injury inflicted by someone who wishes to cause you harm."

There are no comparable figures for British combatants. We know that 52 British servicemen have died in Iraq, 19 of them since "major operations" officially ended on 1 May. But the Ministry of Defence says that it cannot give any figure for the number of wounded, and none of the defence think-tanks feels able to venture an estimate. One reason is believed to be the extensive involvement in the war of British special forces ­ the MoD is extremely secretive about the SAS and SBS.

The sick and wounded from Iraq arrive at Ramstein Air Base near Landstuhl on huge transport planes. Around 30 new patients arrive every day, straining the resources of the hospital, which has had to request additional doctors to boost the medical staff of 1,800. Apparently the hospital had not been expecting the number of less seriously wounded soldiers it has had to treat ­ for road traffic injuries and ailments such as kidney stones (which were commonplace during a summer in which many troops became dehydrated).

In a recent interview with The New York Times, the hospital`s senior officer, Colonel Rhonda Cornum, said the situation in Iraq meant that the demands being placed on the staff and resources at Landstuhl would not go away any time soon. "You can`t work people 60 hours a week for ever," she said. "People have to take leaves. They`ve got to go to school. You can`t run it as a contingency when it has obviously become a steady state."

She added: "This is never going to be a quiet medical centre again. Our people are proud and privileged to be doing it. But we don`t have any illusion that it`s going away."

In addition to the advances in medical treatment, more soldiers are surviving as a result of better equipment. Most troops in Iraq are equipped with $1,600 (£950) Kevlar vests and $325 helmets. The vests, the thickly woven material of which is designed to "catch" projectiles, are fitted with ceramic plates that cover the most vulnerable areas. As a result, most injuries ­ two out of three ­ involve the arms or legs. Around 100 troops have lost arms, legs, hands or feet in the operation to oust Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq.

While the body armour cannot stop all injuries, the result is that many more troops are surviving than in previous conflicts. Estimates suggest that during the current war in Iraq the ratio of wounded to dead stands at eight to one. In the Second World War the ratio was three to one, while even in the 1991 Gulf War the ratio was four to one. Most deaths occur within half an hour of a soldier being injured, usually as a result of massive blood loss. Survival rates soar if he or she can be airlifted to a medical centre within an hour of being wounded.

Most of those seriously hurt receive excellent treatment. Sgt Meinen and his comrades have been fitted with titanium and graphite prosthetics. Speaking by telephone from his home in Colorado, close to his base at Fort Carson, Sgt Meinen was upbeat. "It`s really nice," he said of the false limb. "It`s better than I thought. I am doing physical therapy now ­ I say I am on vacation."

Mr Wyatt, who also lost a leg in the same incident in the city of Fallujah on 25 August, has been fitted with a $100,000 prosthetic that attaches to the stump of what was his upper thigh. The so-called C-leg "understands" when to bend as a result of built-in microprocessors that detect stresses 50 times per second.

"When we first got here I felt I was screwed and thought I would never walk again," said the 21-year-old. "The rocket went through my leg like a knife through butter. It was a terrible scene with the three of us... there was just blood and muscle everywhere. It`s hard to see your comrades hurt, but there are a lot of people here farther down the line with the same injuries. It definitely gives you hope."

Many of the wounded appear optimistic, hopeful that with retraining and treatment they may be able to return to the armed forces and continue their careers in some sort of capacity. They hope their sacrifice has not been entirely in vain. But there are increasing numbers of veterans from former wars and relatives of soldiers who fought in Iraq speaking out against the ongoing operation and demanding that the troops be brought home. They say it suits the Bush administration not to draw attention to the number of wounded and to ignore the effect on the recruitment and retention of troops as well as public opinion.

"The general sense is that it`s politically damaging to the Bush administration. It makes it more difficult for them to continue their policies in Iraq,"said Wilson Powell, director of Veterans for Peace. "It may be that those policies are changing. There is a sense that they are trying to accelerate their withdrawal of troops."

Mr Wilson, 71, a veteran of the Korean War, said that for a family, the effect of a relative being wounded could be worse than that of them being killed. "Post-traumatic stress disorder goes on for decades. It can affect marriages, relationships with children," he said. "With a death people can move on, people get on with things. If they are wounded, you might have someone who is 50 per cent disabled, who has a sense of shame, who is angry or bitter."

Sgt Meinen is not in that position, at least not yet. For the time being he is focusing on getting better, on learning to use his new limb and enjoying his daughter. "I love being a father. She learns so much every day," he said.

Of what happened in Iraq he says he is glad that he and his comrades came home alive. "I always told them I would take them to the worst places in the world, but that I would always bring them out," he said. "They believed in me. All three of us wanted to be there."
14 November 2003 08:31


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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November 14, 2003
In U.S., Fears Are Voiced of a Too-Rapid Iraq Exit
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN and CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — The Bush administration`s decision to speed the transfer of sovereignty to Iraq and replace American troops with Iraqis is bringing fresh warnings from Congress and policy experts against pulling out of Iraq too early and letting election-year considerations dictate Iraq policy.

Much of the anxiety about Iraq is being expressed by Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and those raising questions include both supporters and critics of the war.

Even as Gen. John P. Abizaid, the American military commander in the Middle East, was saying that the schedule "won`t be driven by political concerns," a debate over the pace of a turnover expanded to foreign officials, military policy experts, political operatives and many others, with criticism being heard in places normally friendly to the administration.

"The Pentagon strategy of reducing troops doesn`t make sense to me," said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, adding that the security situation demanded a continuing American presence.

The administration is not suggesting that a speedier transfer of power to an Iraqi governing authority would mean an end to America`s military presence in the country. Indeed, the reduction in troop levels envisioned by the Pentagon would still leave 105,000 American soldiers in Iraq next year, compared to the 130,000 there now.

And in an interview with British journalists in Washington on Thursday, President Bush said it was inconceivable that the United States would leave either Iraq or Afghanistan before it had helped establish democratic societies.

Still, one critic, Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who ran for president against George W. Bush three years ago, said that, if anything, more American troops — perhaps a division — might be needed to "stay the course," as he put it.

"To announce withdrawals when the number of attacks and deaths of American military are going up is not reasonable or logical," Mr. McCain said in an interview. "If the American military can`t do it, then certainly half-trained Iraqis cannot."

In general, American lawmakers support the administration`s strategy of transferring power to Iraqis more quickly. Indeed, the theme of many critics of the war has been that such a transfer would stabilize Iraq and allow Americans to go home. But in recent weeks, a chorus of voices, in many cases from supporters of the war, have warned of the dangers of premature departure driven by political reasons as the campaign season heats up.

Administration officials deny that politics have been a factor in any decision to reduce American forces and accelerate Iraqi self-government, asserting that these steps are being taken to reduce Iraqi support for the attacks on American and other occupation forces.

"We intend to do our best, to turn over security in a prudent manner, in a time schedule that won`t be driven by political concerns, but with Iraqi capacity to be able to handle the security situation," General Abizaid, commander of American forces in the Middle East, said Thursday.

In brief remarks to reporters Thursday, Mr. Bush said that a rushed exit from Iraq would carry a high cost, and called attention to a survey in Baghdad, saying that it found "the vast majority of people understand that if America were to leave and the terrorists were to prevail in their desire to drive us out, the country would fall into chaos."

Nevertheless, many experts say they are concerned that the administration is carrying out a schedule that, coincidentally or not, fits into the desire of many Republican politicians to reduce the vulnerability of American troops by cutting them back by next year.

"My greatest fear is that this administration, having made all the wrong choices, is going to conclude they have to bring Johnny and Jane home by the next election in order to survive," said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in an interview.

Representative Rahm Emanuel, in a separate interview, said, "If you look at everything they`re doing, it looks like they`re laying the groundwork for a premature departure."

Martin Indyk, the White House`s Middle East policy director under Mr. Clinton, said that the stepped-up attacks on rebel forces in Iraq this week were reminiscent of the naval strikes President Reagan unleashed on anti-American forces in Lebanon just before American troops were withdrawn in 1983.

"The problem is that, as the C.I.A. has already concluded, the Iraqi public has already reached its conclusion that the United States is leaving," said Mr. Indyk, director of the Saban Center of Middle East policy at the Brookings Institution. "Other nations in the region will be quick to reach the same conclusion."

For the most part, Republicans in Congress and among administration supporters in Washington have not parted company politically with the administration on Iraq, at least publicly. But that is beginning to change.

"We are in trouble in Iraq and I think there is no other way to say it," said Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, adding that he hoped that L. Paul Bremer III, the administrator in Baghdad summoned to Washington this week, told Mr. Bush "that we are going to have to do some things differently."

Essays urging Mr. Bush to press on in Iraq, and to accelerate the transition to self-rule, are increasingly prominent in The Weekly Standard, a conservative journal with a wide readership in the administration. This week, a lead editorial urged a "victory strategy" rather than an "exit strategy."

William Kristol, editor of The Standard and author of that editorial, said it was unclear which direction the administration was taking.

"Too many people for my comfort are looking for an exit strategy, and this administration is making too many noises that sound like an exit strategy," Mr. Kristol said in an interview. "But I believe that, at the end of the day, Bush is not pursuing and will not pursue an exit strategy."

Kenneth Adelman, a former official in the Reagan administration who now serves on the Defense Policy Board, said he did not have any worries in this regard. "Transferring more authority to the Iraqis isn`t being driven by politics," he said. "It`s the right thing to do. Sovereignty should have been transferred to the Iraqis a long time ago."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Hail was a foot deep in some parts of Los Angeles on Thursday after an unusual storm. Matthew Johnson, 14, shoveled out a car in Watts, part of the South-Central section that was particularly hard hit.

Es regnet niemals im südlichen Kalifornien, es hagelt.

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November 14, 2003
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Op-Chart
By ADRIANA LINS de ALBUQUERQUE, MICHAEL O`HANLON and JELLY ASSOCIATES

ow are things really going in Iraq? That`s a tricky question. First, it is inherently difficult to measure progress in counterinsurgency warfare and nation-building efforts. Second, reports of the latest violence — including the deaths of more than 50 American and other coalition troops in the first two weeks of November — and the highly partisan debate in Washington dominate the news coverage, overshadowing more in-depth analysis.

This chart, compiled largely using United States government information, tracks a number of trends in Iraq that can help shed light on how the situation is evolving. Of course, this being war, the data is inevitably fluid, subject to constant updating by the government. Nevertheless, what we have is still better than the filtered information usually heard from the true believers of the left and right.

A few main messages emerge. For starters, violence against coalition troops has increased as the occupation has lengthened and, in regard to the all-important objective of winning Iraqi hearts and minds, unemployment rates are still too high. However, most other trends are encouraging — declining crime rates in Baghdad, increasing numbers of Iraqi police officers being trained, and telephone and water services at about 80 percent of pre-war levels. Once one accepts the premise that the United States and its partners are still at war in Iraq, and that the mission there is clearly the most challenging American military operation since the Vietnam War, the most accurate long-term outlook is one of guarded optimism.


Adriana Lins de Albuquerque and Michael O`Hanlon are, respectively, senior research assistant and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Jelly Associates is a graphic design firm in South Norwalk, Conn.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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American enterprise institute ist ein "stink tank" von liberaler Seite.

November 14, 2003
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Sabotage of Democracy
By REUEL MARC GERECHT

WASHINGTON

The hastily called conference at the White House involving America`s top man in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, clearly revealed that the Bush administration knows its program in Iraq is failing. The "Iraqification" of the security forces has not dimmed the rate or deadliness of attacks against coalition troops; the Iraqi Governing Council has willfully stalled the process of drafting a new constitution; a new American intelligence report leaked to the press indicates that Iraqis are increasingly angry with the American presence.

The administration is now going to grant the Governing Council`s wish: it will become more or less an autonomous provisional government. In return, the council has promised to set a timetable for drafting a constitution and holding democratic national elections (although, oddly, the question of which will come first remains up in the air). This new approach, the White House hopes, will make Iraqis feel more responsible for their own fate, and thus more willing to take over security from coalition forces. In sum, the administration that waged a war for democracy now wants an exit strategy that is not at all dependent upon Iraq`s democratic progress.

In fact, the administration`s efforts to improve internal security and midwife democracy are now seriously at odds. Where once American officials were sensitive to the need to have political reconstruction precede the re-establishment of a small Iraqi army, they are now rushing Iraqis into uniform, showing no concern about the long history of overgrown security and military forces running roughshod over the country`s parliaments and civil traditions.

Worse, the administration remains convinced that the democratic participation of the Iraqi people in a constitutional assembly would be counterproductive. Senior officials in Washington and in the Coalition Provisional Authority have warned that a new constitution should be the product of a small unelected committee. Introducing democracy now, they feel, would undermine the focus of the Coalition Authority and the Governing Council, whose members would naturally be consumed by elections and constitutional deliberations. Quick democracy might also empower illiberal, anti-American forces among the Shiites — who, given their majority status in the population, could possibly dominate a constitutional convention.

Such fears may seem logical, but they are totally misguided. America`s failure to embrace a democratically elected assembly is far more likely to derail a transition to responsible self-government than would the predictable messiness that comes with an elected body. And if Washington doesn`t soon endorse the idea of an elected constitutional assembly, its counterterrorist and counterinsurgency efforts have little chance of improving.

It shouldn`t be hard to see why. With an increasing number of ordinary Iraqis dying at the hands of terrorists and American troops, the United States cannot argue successfully that the Iraqi people don`t have the right to select their representatives to write their most fundamental laws. Radicals, who will surely point out this moral discrepancy, will start looking like moderates to many people.

Most important, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, far and away the most respected person in Iraq, has issued a legal judgment that unequivocally rejects an unelected constitutional assembly. "The occupying forces do not have in any way the legal competence to select members of a constitutional assembly," he wrote, insisting it should happen only "through the means of an open election."

Some in the administration are now advising that the coalition sidestep the grand ayatollah by creating a "hybrid" assembly that would include both elected and non-elected members. And they would want even the "elected" participants to receive their mandates from local and regional associations of city and tribal elders, not from a general election. These American officials feel this this would guarantee a more liberal and expeditious outcome to constitutional deliberations. To some extent this is reasonable: the proponents are sympathetic to Iraq`s many minority groups and the exile political organizations, which would lose influence in a Shiite-dominated, popularly elected convention.

Still, a hybrid assembly is likely to get the Bush administration, and the provisional Iraqi government, into even greater trouble. No matter how it is put together, a convention is bound to be a raucous affair, as Iraqis of all religions and backgrounds hammer out a new national identity. Elected members would undoubtedly clash with unelected ones, but those chosen by a vote — even a restricted one — would have far greater legitimacy than those hand-picked by the authority and governing council. An assembly so divided could easily be overcome with paralysis. And many good ideas — for example, constitutional protections for minority rights — could get shunted aside if they were closely associated with the unelected representatives.

In addition, this plan seems to be based on the idea that Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who is known for his strong aversion to mixing politics and faith, will not rally the faithful if his wishes are ignored. However, his past actions may not be a guide to the future. It is worth noting that his juridical opinion on the constitutional assembly made no allusion whatsoever to Holy Law. Rather, it was explicitly secular — he considers the question to be of paramount importance to the nation rather than simply another textual analysis of divine law and tradition. Iraqis familiar with Grand Ayatollah Sistani`s temperament and pronouncements are already referring to the statement as a hukm, which is a peremptory ruling not to be trifled with.

Until now, the Coalition Authority has been very wise to avoid a collision with senior Iraqi clerics. In fact, the success it has had in corralling radical Shiite forces loyal to the young cleric Moktada al-Sadr have come in large part because Grand Ayatollah Sistani and the traditional clergy have calmed the Shiite masses and, behind the scenes, encouraged them to provide intelligence and aid to the Americans. Angering the grand ayatollah over the makeup of the constitutional assembly doesn`t seem worth the risk; if only a small number of Shiites become violently hostile to coalition forces, the United States` presence in the country will quickly become untenable.

The Iraqi Governing Council, as an unelected body, does not have the popular appeal or cohesion to propel self-government where it needs to go. Neither it nor its successor — if the Bush administration is so unwise to replace one unelected body with another — is going to rally the citizenry to take on the Sunni insurgents. There may well be no short-term political solution to the guerrilla and terrorist strikes within the Arab Sunni triangle. But the hurried "Iraqification" of the country`s security services makes no sense unless Iraqi democracy is pushed forward at least as quickly.

Grand Ayatollah Sistani has warned the United States that the democratic process must begin in earnest in Iraq or else American troops will be viewed as occupiers. Unfortunately, its new plans indicate that the White House does not seem to be listening.


Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
New Urgency, New Risks in `Iraqification`


By Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, November 14, 2003; Page A01


At least four factors forced the administration to overhaul its military and political strategy in Iraq, despite the danger that a new approach might actually diminish U.S. control over the country`s future.

The foremost factor is security -- from an Iraqi opposition that has become more intense, more effective, more sophisticated and more extensive. The other three are the failure of the Iraqi Governing Council to act, the looming U.N. deadline of Dec. 15 for an Iraqi plan of action and the U.S. elections just a year away, according to administration and congressional officials and U.S. analysts.

All four factors produced a new sense of urgency in Washington. "In an atmosphere of heightened violence and instability, Iraq urgently requires a new political formula. The U.S. administration, increasingly alarmed at the turn of events, is considering a range of options. This will be its second chance to get it right; there may not be a third," the International Crisis Group, a nonpartisan watchdog, warned in a report issued yesterday.

The new approach amounts to Iraqification, or the handing over of responsibility for both a deteriorating security situation and a stalled political process to Iraqis. The goal, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told reporters yesterday, "is that we find ways to accelerate the transfer of authority to the Iraqi people."

"They are clamoring for it; they are, we believe, ready for it. And they have very strong ideas about how that might be done," she said.

But Iraqification also poses significant hazards -- risks that emerge from the same security and political considerations that drove the administration`s decision to change strategies.

As the administration sorts out a plan in talks with the Governing Council over the weekend, the first test may be in averting the appearance that the United States intends to cut and run. U.S. officials already sound defensive.

"We are not in a rush to leave. We will stay as long as we need to to ensure that Iraq is secure, that the hand-over makes sense and that a moderate Iraqi government emerges. And we`re very capable of doing that," Army Gen. John Abizaid, the U.S. commander for Iraq and the Middle East, said at a news conference in Tampa yesterday.

Abizaid used the word "prudent" four times to describe his plans for Iraq.

President Bush said yesterday that the revamping of his policy was a "positive development" because it will get Iraqis "more involved" in the governance of their country.

But others were more skeptical. "If the policy is to more rapidly Iraqify the situation -- as in Vietnamization during the Vietnam War -- then that is another version of cutting and running. One way to cut and run is to simply say we`re pulling out. Another is to prematurely turn over security to Iraqi forces and draw down American forces. That`s a near-term prescription for disaster," said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee.

"All the political body language coming out of Washington these days seems to show that we are going to cut and run," said Thomas Mahnken, the acting director of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University. "That is precisely the wrong signal to be sending."

For an administration loath to concede it has made mistakes, redirecting U.S. policy is an open admission that the situation has reached a crisis point. Under mounting pressures, the White House had little choice but to effectively jettison the seven-point plan outlined by its own governor in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, just two months ago.

"We so underestimated and underplanned and underthought about a post-Saddam Iraq that we`ve been woefully unprepared," said Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), a Vietnam War veteran and member of the Foreign Relations Committee who has frequently visited Iraq. "Now we have a security problem. We have a reality problem. And we have a governance problem. . . . And time is not on our side."

Iraqification includes its own challenges. On the security front, experts worry that it will overburden the new and fragile Iraqi military and police units with limited training as they confront other Iraqis, particularly better-trained loyalists from Saddam Hussein`s army.

"I`m not optimistic," said Gordon W. Rudd, a peacekeeping expert who earlier this year served on the staff of the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad. "On the one hand, it`s the right thing to do. On the other hand, you simply can`t rush it." Rudd said he is especially concerned that the faster the training, the more Iraqi police and other officials will simply be inclined to resume their old corrupt, authoritarian ways.

Some experts say, however, that Iraqification could create a more effective anti-guerrilla force because indigenous units understand their own society and can identify opposition forces. "I think it is logical," said Frances West, who participated in an initiative in Vietnam similar to the creation of Iraqi civil defense forces now. "If our soldiers have six months with such small units, they will turn out Iraqi forces superior to the threat as it now appears."

Accelerating the political transition is also risky -- and it could even jeopardize the goal of creating a democratic government. As part of the new strategy, the United States is prepared to endorse some form of elections before a new constitution is written -- reversing the order outlined in Bremer`s seven-point plan -- to ensure that a new governing body would have the legitimacy that the current 24-member council, handpicked by the United States, lacks.

"Elections are always chancy. You don`t know the outcome, and some of the wrong people may win out. But if we`re advocating democracy, we`ll have to take that risk," Hagel said.

There are no guarantees, for example, that either the constitutional committee or a reconstituted provisional government would back democratic ideas for a constitution. The most organized political forces in Iraq are the Islamist parties, particularly among the majority Shiite population, and the former Baathists among Sunni Muslims.

The two greatest U.S. fears are that Iraq will end up with a new autocrat or will become a theocracy rather than a democracy. Some U.S. officials fear that a transfer of authority before Iraq gets a new constitution could pose the danger that an interim leader becomes president for life.

Other dangers include handing over power to people who are not fully prepared to take political office or ending up after elections with a fractious constitutional committee or a provisional government unable to agree on the major political challenges ahead. If the United States draws down forces before political stability has been ensured, the differences among Iraqis could deteriorate into conflict.

"If [a new body] lacks strong grass-roots support, then it will be vulnerable to a violent takeover and Iraq could revert to its violent past," said Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst now at the National Defense University.

As Abizaid described the U.S. dilemma, however, the key question is not whether Iraqis can take over their own security and governance, but whether the U.S. public has sufficient patience to let that happen.

"The goal of the enemy is to break the will of the United States of America," he said. "It`s clear, it`s simple, it`s straightforward. Break our will, make us leave before Iraq is ready to come out and be a member of the responsible community of nations."

Staff writer Mike Allen contributed to this report.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Rethinking Iraq




Friday, November 14, 2003; Page A28


THE SILVER LINING to another stormy week in Iraq has been the evident recognition by the Bush administration that its strategy for stabilizing the country isn`t working. Two days of high-profile consultations at the White House appear to have produced a mandate to speed the transfer of authority to a sovereign Iraqi government, even if that means scrapping the administration`s previous requirement that Iraqis first draft and approve a new constitution. The current, appointed Iraqi governing council may not be the beneficiary: U.S. officials say it has failed to act effectively or gain popular support and must somehow be reformed or reconfigured.

In parallel with the political overhaul, U.S. commanders have been escalating combat operations to root out insurgents, while rushing to enlist tens of thousands of Iraqi police and militiamen. These are pragmatic responses to a changing situation, and it`s hard to disagree with the goal of involving more Iraqis sooner in their own government and defense.

Yet the administration`s improvisations also convey unsteadiness; they again raise the question of whether the United States is prepared to stick with its mission in Iraq and with President Bush`s goal of establishing a democratic government.

The most prominent feature of the new strategy is haste: Timetables are being accelerated to the point that it`s fair to ask whether underlying goals are being compromised. On the military side, commanders have doubled and redoubled the number of Iraqis under arms in recent weeks and now say 100,000 are in service. But this has been done by eliminating meaningful screening of recruits and drastically curtailing training. These raw militias cannot defeat the insurgents and foreign terrorists, but it appears likely that U.S. commanders will become increasingly reliant on them as the Pentagon proceeds with its plan to draw down U.S. troops in the coming election year -- and as international institutions and supporting allies melt away. Iraqis -- both those who fight the occupation and those who watch from the sidelines -- may be encouraged to believe that with time, U.S. and allied forces will disappear entirely.

An accelerated political transition might improve the situation if it leads to a functional national government that most Iraqis can support.

But that can`t be achieved without a credible political process. If the administration simply gives in to those former Iraqi exiles on the governing council who demand that they be handed power, the internal warfare may get still worse. In the absence of a constitution, a quick transfer of power also could leave Iraqis without the means to handle explosive questions such as how power will be divided among ethnic groups and how minorities will be protected. Elections, or at least a series of regional assemblies, are the only way to produce a leadership that would command popular respect. An elected body could write a constitution and choose a leader or small council to run an interim government.

Both the political transition and the security situation would be easier to manage if the United States forged a full partnership with allies and the United Nations, which could help organize, oversee and validate a transfer of sovereignty. With such a process in place, it might be possible to recruit the fresh foreign troops that the administration has been unable to find. In theory, a multilateral consensus should be easier to forge now than it was several months ago, because the administration`s new openness to an early handover of power brings it closer to the position of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan as well as estranged allies such as France and Germany.

Yet the administration appears uninterested in breaking the miserable U.S. monopoly in Baghdad; officials insist they are focused on handing jobs to Iraqis rather than foreigners. That sounds good. The question is whether the Iraqis who are to be so speedily recruited and empowered will have the skills and popular support to handle the daunting jobs they will be handed.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Check That Oil


By David Ignatius

Friday, November 14, 2003; Page A29


LONDON -- Even when the bombs are going off in Saudi Arabia, people tend to take it for granted that the kingdom has a bottomless reservoir of cheap oil. But that perception of low-cost abundance may change if a U.S. investment banker`s revisionist critique of Saudi oil reserves proves accurate.

"The prevailing view has been that the Saudi oil fields are great big caverns of oil, and that recovery is so easy they will basically last forever," says Matthew Simmons, the chief executive of a Houston-based investment banking firm called Simmons & Co. International.

Simmons believes that this traditional image of Saudi Arabia as a perpetual gusher of cheap oil is wrong. He is finishing a book documenting his argument that in the future Saudi oil will be scarcer and more expensive than many people expect.

Simmons`s analysis has been generating a buzz in oil circles, and he presented some of his findings last week to experts attending a conference here sponsored by the Energy Intelligence publishing group. Essentially, Simmons was revisiting a question that has vexed the CIA since the late 1970s: How much oil can Saudi Arabia produce, and at what cost?

Top industry experts caution that Simmons`s analysis doesn`t change some basic facts: Saudi Arabia still has the world`s largest oil reserves, with an estimated 266 billion barrels; and it still has extra capacity to "surge" from its current production of about 8.5 million barrels a day to about 10 million barrels a day. The Saudis used that surplus capacity last spring to make up for lost production from Venezuela, Nigeria and Iraq -- and it`s a big reason why the oil market stayed relatively calm.

But high Saudi production "is not something one can just count on passively," says a U.S. government energy official who closely monitors the market. He predicts that the Saudis will need to spend more to maintain current production levels -- which could roughly double Saudi production costs from their current $2 a barrel to as much as $4. That would put the Saudis closer to the global industry average cost of about $4 to $6 a barrel.

"They will need to invest to keep production up," says a geologist who has worked in the kingdom for Saudi Aramco and is now a top executive with one of the major oil companies. "That means it will become more expensive."

Simmons bases his analysis on a review of about 150 technical papers that have been written since 1962 by geologists and engineers at Saudi Aramco and its predecessor, Aramco. The papers, published by the Society of Petroleum Engineers, examine sensitive production issues that are rarely discussed outside the kingdom.

It turns out that Saudi oil structures aren`t the cavernous reservoirs the world imagines. Rather than having the smooth underground topography that geologists call "homogeneity," which provides strong wellhead pressure and easy recovery, some of the biggest Saudi fields, such as Ghawar and Abqaiq, are instead "heterogeneous," with complex underground fractures that can impede recovery.

To maintain its high production level, Saudi Arabia since the 1970s has used a recovery technique known as "water injection" -- in which heavy, salty water is pumped into the reservoirs to push oil toward the surface. According to Simmons, the Saudis are now injecting about 7 million barrels a day of seawater through three big pipelines.

"Water injection gives the appearance of eternal youth," Simmons says. "That`s why the Saudi fields look so robust." But he argues that injection can damage wells and create unpredictable flows underground, sometimes known as "rogue water," that prevent full recovery of reserves.

The decision to pump water into the Saudi reservoirs worried the CIA enough that it commissioned a special study in the late 1970s. But the practice was urged by Exxon Corp., the leading Aramco partner at the time, which argued that it was essential for prudent management of reserves. The CIA eventually agreed.

CIA worries about Saudi production capacity returned in the early 1990s, when the Persian Gulf War halted Iraqi and Kuwaiti production. Again, the agency concluded that the Saudis had the necessary extra margin. Saudi surge capability was tested once more this year. Saudi production briefly spiked above 10 million barrels, but some industry experts believed it was not sustainable at that level without more investment.

The world has taken for granted that cheap Saudi oil will always be there to buffer the market. That abundance made the kingdom a tempting target. But if Simmons is right, there may not be quite so much Saudi oil, at quite so cheap a cost, as the world imagined.

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A Hero for Telling the Truth


By Richard Cohen

Friday, November 14, 2003; Page A29


Against all expectations -- but not against my better judgment -- I`ve taken a liking to Jessica Lynch. Initially she brought such a rush of cynicism to my head I thought I would swoon from vertigo. But to the undoubted horror of the White House, the Pentagon and everyone at Fox News, she has refused to play the propaganda puppet and has, shockingly, told the truth. She is a hero -- not for what she did in Iraq but for what she did on the "Today" show.

There, as in other places, she denied that she emptied her rifle into the enemy, as initial reports had it, and instead conceded that she did not fire her rifle at all. She rued that her rescue has been videotaped and used to suggest that the operation matched the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima. She thanked the troops who had snatched her back to safety -- her heroes, she said -- but lamented the use to which the video was put.

I confess that I was totally unprepared for such refreshing candor -- and I bet the entire Military-Industrial-Television-Publishing Complex was too. Lynch became instantly famous when she was rescued from an Iraqi hospital. She was the perfect propaganda tool -- young, female, white and blonde.

In a way, Lynch reminds me of Farragut Jones, a fictional character in the book and the movie "Don`t Go Near the Water." The story concerned World War II Navy PR men in the Pacific and how they discovered who they thought was the perfectly named seaman, a combination of David Farragut and John Paul Jones. He turned out, however, to be something of a mistake -- a sailor who could barely complete a sentence without uttering an expletive. In the movie, played by Mickey Shaughnessy, he was a stitch.

Lynch is no stitch. She is merely beguilingly honest, the totally unexpected creation of fast-typing journalists, the confusion of war -- or the fictional concoction of some Pentagon fibber somewhere. Either way, the story from the word go was false or embellished. She was ambushed once in Iraq and yet again in the fertile minds of marketing geniuses.

To her credit and to almost everyone`s surprise, Lynch has emerged as a generational prototype -- post-racial, post-feminist and post-falsehood. In the first place, she`s a soldier, a woman in what was once almost exclusively a man`s world. Her closest Army buddy was Lori Piestewa, a Native American (Hopi) from Arizona, a divorced mother of two and the first woman to die in the Iraq war. It`s likely that Lynch has few if any racial or ethnic hang-ups, and like many young people, she has friends of all races -- and doesn`t even give the matter any thought.

This blindness to race is a generational thing -- and a marvelous thing it is. The reason it is not yet fully reflected in popular culture, particularly network television, is that older TV executives and their real bosses, ad buyers, either have not yet caught on or fear a backlash from their over-50 viewers. This may explain why on "Average Joe," an NBC piece of effluent in which a former NFL cheerleader is supposed to pick her dream lover from a collection of average- to repulsive-looking guys, none of the men are African American.

That same sort of generational disconnect explains why it was so shocking to some and so unsurprising to others that semi-nude pictures of Jessica Lynch exist. Those pictures are now in the grubby hands of Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, who has retracted his solemn vow to publish them, as usual, in a public service. He seemed to think that the pictures truly exposed Lynch: She is not what she pretends to be -- not "Joan of Arc," says he. No, she is not who Flynt and other aging gutter-heads think she is. She is, though, precisely who a lot of younger people assumed she is -- a rambunctious young woman who does not have either pre-feminist or feminist hang-ups. She could -- and she apparently did -- pose for some fun pictures, not thinking that she was surrendering either her dignity or her power. She may be wrong about one or the other, but so what? Being wrong is what youth is for.

I concede that in some ways Jessica Lynch is not exactly my type. But in her honesty, her refusal to pose as an older generation`s military mannequin, her choice of the Army over some menial job, her friends and her calm throughout the entire publicity storm, I am impressed. Maybe it`s a generational thing.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-iraqpol…
NEWS ANALYSIS



U.S. Favors a Quick Transition in Iraq as Means to Stem Insurgency
By Richard C. Paddock and Doyle McManus
Times Staff Writers

November 14, 2003

BAGHDAD — New efforts to create a provisional government in Iraq may be fraught with problems, but for President Bush and Iraqi leaders, they provide an alternative to the prospect of further deterioration of security and to the eroding legitimacy of the U.S. occupation government.

Plans to put power quickly into the hands of Iraqis could lessen opposition to the continued presence of U.S. troops, but come with the risk that the new government would be too weak to hold the country together.

Civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III, fresh from meeting with Bush in Washington this week, is expected to sit down with the 24 members of the Iraqi Governing Council in coming days to hammer out a plan that would give Iraqi leaders more control of the government while allowing additional time to draft a constitution.

Bremer, who heads the Coalition Provisional Authority, previously opposed turning over power to an interim body until the adoption of a constitution that would give a new government legitimacy in the eyes of Iraqis and the world.

But the White House, frustrated by the slow progress in establishing a functioning government and stung by escalating attacks on U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians, is now leaning toward arrangements that echo proposals advanced months ago by France, Germany and Russia.

"We want the Iraqis to be more involved in the governance of their country," Bush told reporters at the White House on Thursday. "And so, Ambassador Bremer, with my instructions, is going back to talk to the Governing Council to develop a strategy."

Administration officials acknowledged that it was a significant change in course, but as one official put it: "The important thing is that the principles and goals have not changed. The endgame is still a constitution, a free election and the restoration of sovereignty."

Council members who advocate the creation of a provisional government say it will cut back the U.S. military role in Iraq, give Iraqis responsibility for providing security and reduce the number of American casualties.

Iraqi officials say they believe that the Bush administration`s newfound willingness to hand over power appears to be driven in part by the approaching U.S. presidential election.

"That`s a very important factor," Governing Council member Mahmoud Othman said. "They don`t talk about it directly, but it is very well understood. This will be a formula they can sell to the American people."

U.S. officials say they expect substantial numbers of U.S. troops to be in Iraq a year from now when Americans go to the polls, but they hope that Bush will be able to show that the number of American troops in the country is dropping.

Bremer`s abrupt visit to Washington and the change in White House strategy were prompted by a looming Dec. 15 deadline for the Governing Council to inform the United Nations of its timetable for adopting a constitution. U.S. officials said Bremer was returning to Iraq with several options.

National security advisor Condoleezza Rice, who also met with Bremer during his brief trip, said it was important to find ways to accelerate the transfer of authority to the Iraqi people.

"They are clamoring for it, they are, we believe, ready for it, and they have very strong ideas about how that might be done," Rice said.

A plan under consideration by the Iraqi Governing Council calls for dividing the panel into legislative and executive branches.

"All these things have to be agreed upon," council member Adnan Pachachi said. "But I think we are all agreed on the necessity of doing this in two stages — have a provisional interim government with extensive powers and at the same time prepare properly for the constitutional process."

According to one proposal, elections would be held to expand the council to 100 members, broadening its base and including constituencies that are not now represented. This new assembly would then elect either a prime minister or an executive board to run the country until a constitution could be adopted and elections held.

By turning over powers to the Iraqis, the U.S. would hope to diminish resentment of the occupation and in turn face fewer attacks on coalition forces. If attacks diminished, fewer foreign troops would be needed to patrol.

Insurgents are staging about 30 attacks a day on American forces, up from about five a day in May, just after Bush declared an end to the major-combat phase of the war.

This month, Iraqis have shot down two U.S. military helicopters, killing 22 American troops. Suicide bombings have also become a fact of life in Baghdad and beyond. The latest, in heretofore peaceful Nasiriyah, killed more than 30 people, many of them Italian military police and soldiers.

At the same time, increased power for the Iraqi council carries its own risks.

"It`s not an easy process of putting together institutions and trying to govern a place that has been under totalitarian rule for as long as Iraq has," Rice said Thursday.

Whether Iraq is ready for a provisional government remains to be seen. Divisions among Iraq`s three main groups — Shiite Muslims, Sunni Muslims and ethnic Kurds — prevented the council from electing a president earlier this year.

Nor could the panel agree on whether an executive board should consist of three or five members. In the end, the council elected nine rotating presidents who each hold the job for a month, thus limiting their effectiveness. Othman said the council would have to be more effective in the future.

"We have to choose one," he said. "A government should have one prime minister if you want people to take you seriously."

Under the proposal, the new assembly would adopt a basic law that would give it the authority to operate until a constitution was approved, including conducting a census, registering voters and holding an election to select a committee to write the constitution. Some council members also favor an election to ratify the constitution. The entire process could take up to two years, they say.

"A constitution is not something that can be done quickly and haphazardly," Pachachi said. "You have to be very careful. This is going to affect the fate of the country for generations. It`s a new experiment."

The council has been asking Washington to hand over power for three months. Members argue that a provisional government will be better able than U.S. troops to stem Iraq`s escalating violence. They say the perceived lack of legitimacy of the American occupation is spawning opposition to the U.S. forces — a trend that they say can be reversed if Iraqis are given power.

Some council members say a provisional government can modify Bremer`s controversial decision to disband the Iraqi army and mobilize thousands of former soldiers to restore order and guard the borders.

"We want the American troops in their garrisons and off the street," said Qubad Talabani, an aide to his father, Jalal, who is this month`s council president. "We don`t want them targeted the way they are being targeted. They did their job in liberating the country, for which we are eternally grateful. But now the responsibility should be on our shoulders to rebuild the country."

*

Paddock reported from Baghdad and McManus from Washington.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Iraq: Quicksand & Blood
By Robert Parry
November 13, 2003

George W. Bush and his top advisers learned little from the Vietnam debacle of the 1960s, since most avoided service in the war. But many top Bush aides played key roles in the repression of leftist peasant uprisings in Central America in the 1980s, a set of lessons the Bush administration is now trying to apply to the violent resistance in Iraq.

The key counterinsurgency lesson from Central America was that the U.S. government can defeat guerrilla movements if it is willing to back a local power structure, no matter how repulsive, and if Washington is ready to tolerate gross human rights abuses. In Central America in the 1980s, those tactics included genocide against hundreds of Mayan villages in Guatemala’s highlands and the torture, rape and murder of thousands of young political activists throughout the region. [More on this below]

The body dumps that have been unearthed across Central America are thus little different from the mass graves blamed on Saddam Hussein in Iraq, except in Central America they represented the dark side of U.S. foreign policy and received far less U.S. press scrutiny. Another lesson learned from the 1980s was the importance of shielding the American people from the ugly realities of a U.S.-backed "dirty war" by using P.R. techniques, which became known inside the Reagan administration as "perception management."

The temptation to recycle these counterinsurgency strategies from Central America to Iraq is explained by the number of Reagan-era officials now back in prominent roles in George W. Bush`s administration.

They include Elliot Abrams, who served as assistant secretary of state for Latin America in the 1980s and is a National Security Council adviser to Bush on the Middle East; John Negroponte, U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s and now Bush’s U.N. Ambassador; Paul Bremer a counter-terrorism specialist in the 1980s and Iraq’s civilian administrator today; Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was the senior military adviser to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in the 1980s; and Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a Republican foreign-policy stalwart in Congress two decades ago.

Proxy Army

One important difference between Iraq and Central America, however, is that to date, the Bush administration has had trouble finding, arming and unleashing an Iraqi proxy force that compares to the paramilitary killers who butchered suspected leftists in Central America. In El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, well-established “security forces” already existed. Plus, in Nicaragua, Ronald Reagan could turn to the remnants of ousted dictator Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard to fashion a contra rebel force.

In Iraq, however, U.S. policymakers chose to disband – rather than redirect – Saddam Hussein’s army and intelligence services, leaving the burden of counterinsurgency heavily on U.S. occupying troops who are unfamiliar with Iraq’s language, history and terrain.

Now, with U.S. casualties mounting, the Bush administration is scrambling to build an Iraqi paramilitary force to serve under the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council’s interior minister. The core of this force would be drawn from the security and intelligence wings of five political organizations, including Ahmad Chalabi’s formerly exile-based Iraqi National Congress.

Bush’s national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Nov. 10 that the administration’s No. 1 strategy in Iraq is to build an Iraqi security force, which she claims already numbers about 118,000 people, roughly the size of the U.S. military contingent in Iraq. Many of these Iraqis have received speeded-up training with the goal of using them to pacify the so-called Sunni Triangle north of Baghdad.

Earlier, some U.S. officials, including civilian administrator Bremer, balked at a paramilitary force out of fear it would become a tool of repression. “The unit that the Governing Council wants to create would be the most powerful domestic security force in Iraq, fueling concern among some U.S. officials that it could be used for undemocratic purposes, such as stifling political dissent, as such forces do in other Arab nations,” the Washington Post wrote.

But faced with the rising U.S. death toll, Bremer no longer has “any objection in principle” to this concept, a senior U.S. official told the Post. [Washington Post, Nov. 5, 2003] With all the missteps that have plagued the U.S. occupation, Bremer appears to understand that the Iraqi security situation needs to be bolstered – and quickly.

In much of the Sunni Triangle, U.S. control now is intermittent at best, existing only during heavily armed U.S. forays into resistance strongholds. “American troops patrol less frequently, townspeople openly threaten Iraqi security personnel who cooperate with U.S. forces, and the night belongs to the guerrillas,” the Washington Post reported from Thuluiya about 60 miles north of Baghdad. [Nov. 8, 2003]

One U.S. senator who has visited the region told me that the struggle for Iraq may take 30 years before a new generation accepts the American presence. But even taking the long view does not guarantee success. Israel has been battling to break the back of Palestinian resistance for more than three decades with no sign that younger Palestinians are less hostile to the Israeli occupation. The Iraqi insurgency already has spread too far and penetrated too deeply to be easily uprooted, military experts say.

Central American Lessons

Having lurched into this Iraqi quicksand, the Bush administration is now searching for lessons that can be gleaned from the most recent U.S. counterinsurgency experience, the region-wide wars in Central America that began as uprisings against ruling oligarchies and their military henchmen but came to be viewed by the Reagan administration as an all-too-close front in the Cold War.

Though U.S.-backed armies and paramilitary forces eventually quelled the leftist peasant rebellions, the cost in blood was staggering. The death toll in El Salvador was estimated at about 70,000 people. In Guatemala, the number of dead reached about 200,000, including what a truth commission concluded was a genocide against the Mayan populations in Guatemala’s highlands.

The muted press coverage that the U.S. news media has given these atrocities as they have come to light over the years also showed the residual strength of the “perception management” employed by the Reagan administration. For instance, even when the atrocities of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt are mentioned, as they were in the context of his defeat in Guatemala’s Nov. 9 presidential elections, the history of Reagan’s warm support for Rios Montt is rarely, if ever, noted by the U.S. press.

While the slaughter of the Mayans was underway in the 1980s, Reagan portrayed Gen. Rios Montt and the Guatemalan army as victims of disinformation spread by human rights groups and journalists. Reagan huffily discounted reports that Rios Montt’s army was eradicating hundreds of Mayan villages.

On Dec. 4, 1982, after meeting with Rios Montt, Reagan hailed the general as "totally dedicated to democracy" and declared that Rios Montt`s government had been "getting a bum rap." Reagan also reversed President Jimmy Carter’s policy of embargoing military equipment to Guatemala over its human rights abuses. Carter’s human rights embargoes represented one of the few times during the Cold War when Washington objected to the repression that pervaded Central American society.

Death Squad Origins

Though many U.S.-backed regimes in Latin America practiced the dark arts of “disappearances” and “death squads,” the history of Guatemala’s security operations is perhaps the best documented because the Clinton administration declassified scores of the secret U.S. documents in the late 1990s to assist a Guatemalan truth commission. The Guatemala experience also may be the most instructive today in illuminating a possible course of the counterinsurgency in Iraq.

The original Guatemalan death squads took shape in the mid-1960s under anti-terrorist training provided by a U.S. public safety adviser named John Longon, the declassified documents show. In January 1966, Longon reported to his superiors about both overt and covert components of his anti-terrorist strategies.

On the covert side, Longon pressed for “a safe house [to] be immediately set up” for coordination of security intelligence. “A room was immediately prepared in the [Presidential] Palace for this purpose and … Guatemalans were immediately designated to put this operation into effect,” according to Longon’s report. Longon’s operation within the presidential compound became the starting point for the infamous “Archivos” intelligence unit that evolved into a clearinghouse for Guatemala’s most notorious political assassinations.

Just two months after Longon`s report, a secret CIA cable noted the clandestine execution of several Guatemalan "communists and terrorists" on the night of March 6, 1966. By the end of the year, the Guatemalan government was bold enough to request U.S. help in establishing special kidnapping squads, according to a cable from the U.S. Southern Command that was forwarded to Washington on Dec. 3, 1966.

By 1967, the Guatemalan counterinsurgency terror had gained a fierce momentum. On Oct. 23, 1967, the State Department`s Bureau of Intelligence and Research noted the "accumulating evidence that the [Guatemalan] counterinsurgency machine is out of control." The report noted that Guatemalan "counter-terror" units were carrying out abductions, bombings, torture and summary executions "of real and alleged communists."

The mounting death toll in Guatemala disturbed some American officials assigned to the country. The embassy`s deputy chief of mission, Viron Vaky, expressed his concerns in a remarkably candid report that he submitted on March 29, 1968, after returning to Washington. Vaky framed his arguments in pragmatic terms, but his moral anguish broke through.



“The official squads are guilty of atrocities. Interrogations are brutal, torture is used and bodies are mutilated,” Vaky wrote. “In the minds of many in Latin America, and, tragically, especially in the sensitive, articulate youth, we are believed to have condoned these tactics, if not actually encouraged them. Therefore our image is being tarnished and the credibility of our claims to want a better and more just world are increasingly placed in doubt.”



Vaky also noted the deceptions within the U.S. government that resulted from its complicity in state-sponsored terror. “This leads to an aspect I personally find the most disturbing of all -- that we have not been honest with ourselves,” Vaky said. “We have condoned counter-terror; we may even in effect have encouraged or blessed it. We have been so obsessed with the fear of insurgency that we have rationalized away our qualms and uneasiness.



“This is not only because we have concluded we cannot do anything about it, for we never really tried. Rather we suspected that maybe it is a good tactic, and that as long as Communists are being killed it is alright. Murder, torture and mutilation are alright if our side is doing it and the victims are Communists. After all hasn`t man been a savage from the beginning of time so let us not be too queasy about terror. I have literally heard these arguments from our people.”



Though kept secret from the American public for three decades, the Vaky memo obliterated any claim that Washington simply didn`t know the reality in Guatemala. Still, with Vaky`s memo squirreled away in State Department files, the killing went on. The repression was noted almost routinely in reports from the field.



On Jan. 12, 1971, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that Guatemalan forces had "quietly eliminated" hundreds of "terrorists and bandits" in the countryside. On Feb. 4, 1974, a State Department cable reported resumption of "death squad" activities.



On Dec. 17, 1974, a DIA biography of one U.S.-trained Guatemalan officer gave an insight into how U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine had imbued the Guatemalan strategies. According to the biography, Lt. Col. Elias Osmundo Ramirez Cervantes, chief of security section for Guatemala`s president, had trained at the U.S. Army School of Intelligence at Fort Holabird in Maryland. Back in Guatemala, Ramirez Cervantes was put in charge of plotting raids on suspected subversives as well as their interrogations.



The Reagan Bloodbath



As brutal as the Guatemalan security forces were in the 1960s and 1970s, the worst was yet to come. In the 1980s, the Guatemalan army escalated its slaughter of political dissidents and their suspected supporters to unprecedented levels.



Ronald Reagan`s election in November 1980 set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America. After four years of Jimmy Carter`s human rights nagging, the region`s hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems.



The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes that engaged in bloody counterinsurgency against leftist enemies. In the late 1970s, when Carter`s human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -- then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should “walk a mile in the moccasins” of the Argentine generals before criticizing them. [For details, see Martin Edwin Andersen`s Dossier Secreto.]



After his election in 1980, Reagan pushed to overturn an arms embargo imposed on Guatemala by Carter. Yet as Reagan was moving to loosen up the military aid ban, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies were confirming new Guatemalan government massacres.



In April 1981, a secret CIA cable described a massacre at Cocob, near Nebaj in the Ixil Indian territory. On April 17, 1981, government troops attacked the area believed to support leftist guerrillas, the cable said. According to a CIA source, "the social population appeared to fully support the guerrillas" and "the soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved." The CIA cable added that "the Guatemalan authorities admitted that `many civilians` were killed in Cocob, many of whom undoubtedly were non-combatants."



Despite the CIA account and other similar reports, Reagan permitted Guatemala`s army to buy $3.2 million in military trucks and jeeps in June 1981. To permit the sale, Reagan removed the vehicles from a list of military equipment that was covered by the human rights embargo.

No Regrets

Apparently confident of Reagan’s sympathies, the Guatemalan government continued its political repression without apology.

According to a State Department cable on Oct. 5, 1981, Guatemalan leaders met with Reagan`s roving ambassador, retired Gen. Vernon Walters, and left no doubt about their plans. Guatemala`s military leader, Gen. Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia, "made clear that his government will continue as before -- that the repression will continue."

Human rights groups saw the same picture. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission released a report on Oct. 15, 1981, blaming the Guatemalan government for "thousands of illegal executions." [Washington Post, Oct. 16, 1981]

But the Reagan administration was set on whitewashing the ugly scene. A State Department "white paper," released in December 1981, blamed the violence on leftist "extremist groups" and their "terrorist methods," inspired and supported by Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Yet, even as these rationalizations were pitched to the American people, U.S. ntelligence agencies in Guatemala continued to learn of government-sponsored massacres.

One CIA report in February 1982 described an army sweep through the so-called Ixil Triangle in central El Quiche province. "The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor [known as the EGP] and eliminate all sources of resistance," the report stated. "Since the operation began, several villages have been burned to the ground, and a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been killed."

The CIA report explained the army`s modus operandi: "When an army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village, it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed." When the army encountered an empty village, it was "assumed to have been supporting the EGP, and it is destroyed. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of refugees in the hills with no homes to return to. … The well-documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike."

Rios Montt

In March 1982, Gen. Rios Montt seized power in a coup d’etat. An avowed fundamentalist Christian, he immediately impressed official Washington, where Reagan hailed Rios Montt as "a man of great personal integrity."

By July 1982, however, Rios Montt had begun a new scorched-earth campaign called his "rifles and beans" policy. The slogan meant that pacified Indians would get "beans," while all others could expect to be the target of army "rifles." In October, he secretly gave carte blanche to the feared “Archivos” intelligence unit to expand “death squad” operations.

The U.S. embassy was soon hearing more accounts of the army conducting Indian massacres. On Oct, 21, 1982, one cable described how three embassy officers tried to check out some of these reports but ran into bad weather and canceled the inspection. Still, the cable put a positive spin on the situation. Though unable to check out the massacre reports, the embassy officials did "reach the conclusion that the army is completely up front about allowing us to check alleged massacre sites and to speak with whomever we wish."

The next day, the embassy fired off an analysis that the Guatemalan government was the victim of a communist-inspired "disinformation campaign," a claim embraced by Reagan with his "bum rap" comment after he met with Rios Montt in December 1982.

On Jan. 7, 1983, Reagan lifted the ban on military aid to Guatemala and authorized the sale of $6 million in military hardware. Approval covered spare parts for UH-1H helicopters and A-37 aircraft used in counterinsurgency operations. State Department spokesman John Hughes said political violence in the cities had "declined dramatically" and that rural conditions had improved too.

In February 1983, however, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in "suspect right-wing violence" with kidnappings of students and teachers. Bodies of victims were appearing in ditches and gullies. CIA sources traced these political murders to Rios Montt`s order to the "Archivos" in October to "apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit."

Sugarcoating

Despite these grisly facts on the ground, the annual State Department human rights survey sugarcoated the facts for the American public and praised the supposedly improved human rights situation in Guatemala. "The overall conduct of the armed forces had improved by late in the year" 1982, the report stated.

A different picture -- far closer to the secret information held by the U.S. government -- was coming from independent human rights investigators. On March 17, 1983, Americas Watch representatives condemned the Guatemalan army for human rights atrocities against the Indian population.

New York attorney Stephen L. Kass said these findings included proof that the government carried out "virtually indiscriminate murder of men, women and children of any farm regarded by the army as possibly supportive of guerrilla insurgents."

Rural women suspected of guerrilla sympathies were raped before execution, Kass said. Children were "thrown into burning homes. They are thrown in the air and speared with bayonets. We heard many, many stories of children being picked up by the ankles and swung against poles so their heads are destroyed." [AP, March 17, 1983]

Publicly, however, senior Reagan officials continued to put on a happy face. On June 12, 1983, special envoy Richard B. Stone praised "positive changes" in Rios Montt`s government. But Rios Montt’s vengeful Christian fundamentalism was hurtling out of control, even by Guatemalan standards. In August 1983, Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores seized power in another coup.

Despite the power shift, Guatemalan security forces continued to kill those who were deemed subversives or terrorists. When three Guatemalans working for the U.S. Agency for International Development were slain in November 1983, U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin suspected that “Archivos” hit squads were sending a message to the United States to back off even the mild pressure for human rights improvements.

In late November, in a brief show of displeasure, the administration postponed the sale of $2 million in helicopter spare parts. The next month, however, Reagan sent the spare parts. In 1984, Reagan succeeded, too, in pressuring Congress to approve $300,000 in military training for the Guatemalan army.

By mid-1984, Chapin, who had grown bitter about the army’s stubborn brutality, was gone, replaced by a far-right political appointee named Alberto Piedra, who was all for increased military assistance to Guatemala.

In January 1985, Americas Watch issued a report observing that Reagan`s State Department "is apparently more concerned with improving Guatemala`s image than in improving its human rights."

Death Camp

Other examples of Guatemala’s “death squad” strategy came to light later. For example, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency cable in 1994 reported that the Guatemalan military had used an air base in Retalhuleu during the mid-1980s as a center for coordinating the counterinsurgency campaign in southwest Guatemala – and for torturing and burying prisoners.

At the base, pits were filled with water to hold captured suspects. "Reportedly there were cages over the pits and the water level was such that the individuals held within them were forced to hold on to the bars in order to keep their heads above water and avoid drowning," the DIA report stated.

The Guatemalan military used the Pacific Ocean as another dumping spot for political victims, according to the DIA report. Bodies of insurgents tortured to death and live prisoners marked for “disappearance” were loaded onto planes that flew out over the ocean where the soldiers would shove the victims into the water to drown, a tactic that had been a favorite disposal technique of the Argentine military in the 1970s.

The history of the Retalhuleu death camp was uncovered by accident in the early 1990s when a Guatemalan officer wanted to let soldiers cultivate their own vegetables on a corner of the base. But the officer was taken aside and told to drop the request "because the locations he had wanted to cultivate were burial sites that had been used by the D-2 [military intelligence] during the mid-eighties," the DIA report said. [To see the Guatemalan documents, go to the National Security Archive`s Web site.]

Guatemala, of course, was not the only Central American country where Reagan and his administration supported brutal counterinsurgency operations -- and then sought to cover up the bloody facts. Deception of the American public – a strategy that the administration internally called “perception management” – was as much a part of the Central American story as the Bush administration’s lies and distortions about weapons of mass destruction were to the lead-up to the war in Iraq.

Reagan`s falsification of the historical record became a hallmark of the conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua as well as Guatemala. In one case, Reagan personally lashed out at a human rights investigator named Reed Brody, a New York lawyer who had collected affidavits from more than 100 witnesses to atrocities carried out by the U.S.-supported contras in Nicaragua.

Angered by the revelations about his contra "freedom-fighters," Reagan denounced Brody in a speech on April 15, 1985, calling him "one of dictator [Daniel] Ortega`s supporters, a sympathizer who has openly embraced Sandinismo."

Privately, Reagan had a far more accurate understanding of the true nature of the contras. At one point in the contra war, Reagan turned to CIA official Duane Clarridge and demanded that the contras be used to destroy some Soviet-supplied helicopters that had arrived in Nicaragua. In his memoirs, Clarridge recalled that "President Reagan pulled me aside and asked, `Dewey, can`t you get those vandals of yours to do this job.`" [See Clarridge`s A Spy for All Seasons.]

`Perception Management`

To manage U.S. perceptions of the wars in Central America, Reagan also authorized a systematic program of distorting information and intimidating American journalists. Called "public diplomacy," the project was run by a CIA propaganda veteran, Walter Raymond Jr., who was assigned to the National Security Council staff. The project`s key operatives developed propaganda “themes,” selected “hot buttons” to excite the American people, cultivated pliable journalists who would cooperate and bullied reporters who wouldn`t go along.

The best-known attacks were directed against New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner for disclosing Salvadoran army massacres of civilians, including the slaughter of some 800 men, women and children in El Mozote in December 1981. But Bonner was not alone. Reagan`s operatives pressured scores of reporters and their editors in an ultimately successful campaign to minimize information about these human rights crimes reaching the American people. [For details, see Robert Parry`s Lost History.]

The tamed reporters, in turn, gave the administration a far freer hand to pursue counterinsurgency operations in Central America. Despite the tens of thousands of civilian deaths and now-corroborated accounts of massacres and genocide, not a single senior military officer in Central America was held accountable for the bloodshed.

The U.S. officials who sponsored and encouraged these war crimes not only escaped legal judgment, but remain highly respected figures in Washington. Some have returned to senior government posts under George W. Bush. Meanwhile, Reagan has been honored as few recent presidents have with major public facilities named after him, including National Airport in Washington.

On Feb. 25, 1999, a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that Reagan and his administration had aided, abetted and concealed.



The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the Guatemalan conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s. Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.



The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages. "The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages … are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala`s history," the commission concluded.



The army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops," the report said. In the northern highlands, the report termed the slaughter a "genocide." Besides carrying out murder and "disappearances," the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. "The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice" by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found.



The report added that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some [of these] state operations." The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed "acts of genocide" against the Mayans.



"Believing that the ends justified everything, the military and the state security forces blindly pursued the anticommunist struggle, without respect for any legal principles or the most elemental ethical and religious values, and in this way, completely lost any semblance of human morals," said the commission chairman, Christian Tomuschat, a German jurist.



"Within the framework of the counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, in certain regions of the country agents of the Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against groups of the Mayan people,” Tomuschat said. [For more details on the commission`s report, see the Washington Post or New York Times, Feb. 26, 1999]

During a visit to Central America, on March 10, 1999, President Clinton apologized for the past U.S. support of right-wing regimes in Guatemala. "For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake," Clinton said.

Iraqi War

Less than five years later, however, the U.S. government is teetering on the edge of another brutal counterinsurgency war in Iraq.

Some supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq in March are now advocating an iron fist to quell the growing Iraqi resistance. In a debate in Berkeley, Calif., for instance, ardent Bush supporter Christopher Hitchens declared that the U.S. intervention in Iraq needed to be “more thoroughgoing, more thought-out and more, if necessary, ruthless.” [See Salon.com, Nov. 11, 2003]

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. commander in Iraq, told a news conference in Baghdad on Nov. 11 that U.S. forces would follow a new get-tough strategy against the Iraqi resistance. "We are taking the fight into the safe havens of the enemy, in the heartland of the country," Sanchez said.

But U.S. military commanders in Iraq and Bush enthusiasts at home are not alone in encouraging a fierce counterinsurgency campaign to throttle the Iraqi resistance. Though many war critics say the likelihood of a difficult occupation should have been anticipated before the invasion, some now agree that the U.S. government must fight and win in Iraq or the United States will suffer a crippling loss of credibility in the Middle East and throughout the world.

Wishing for a result, however, can be far different from achieving a result. Wanting the U.S. forces to prevail and asserting that they must prevail does not mean that they will prevail. American troops could find themselves trapped in a long painful conflict against a determined enemy fighting on its home terrain.

As the United States wades deeper into this Iraqi quicksand, the lessons of the bloody counterinsurgency wars in Central America will be tempting to the veterans of the Reagan administration. Those lessons certainly are the most immediate antecedents to many of the architects of the Iraq counterinsurgency.

But the Central American lessons may have limited applicability to Iraq. For one, the Bush administration can`t turn to well-entrenched power centers with ideologically committed security forces as the Reagan administration could in Guatemala and other Central American countries. Also, the cultural divide and the physical distance between Iraq and the United States are far greater than those between Central America and the United States.

So even if the Bush administration can hastily set up an Iraqi security apparatus, it may not be as committed to a joint cause with the Americans as the Central American paramilitary forces were with the Reagan administration. Without a reliable proxy force, the responsibility for conducting a scorched-earth campaign in Iraq likely would fall to American soldiers who themselves might question the wisdom and the morality of such an undertaking.

Perhaps one of the lessons of the current dilemma is that George W. Bush may have dug such a deep hole for U.S. policy in Iraq that even Guatemalan-style brutality applied to the Sunni Triangle would only deepen the well of anti-Americanism that already exists in many parts of Iraq and across much of the Islamic world.

In the 1980s, as a correspondent for the Associated Press and Newsweek, Robert Parry broke many of the stories now known as the Iran-Contra Affair. His latest book is Lost History.

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US war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years

14.11.2003 - 3.00pm
PHILADELPHIA - The American death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over United States affairs for more than a generation.

A Reuters analysis of US Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.

By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where US forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.

The casualty count for Iraq apparently surpassed the Vietnam figure last Sunday, when a US soldier killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack south of Baghdad became the conflict`s 393rd American casualty since Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 20.

Larger still is the number of American casualties from the broader US war on terrorism, which has produced 488 military deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Southwest Asia and other locations.

Statistics from battle zones outside Iraq show that 91 soldiers have died since October 7, 2001, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, which US President George W. Bush launched against Afghanistan`s former Taleban regime after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington killed 3000 people.

The Bush administration has rejected comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, which traumatised Americans a generation ago with a sad procession of military body bags and television footage of grim wartime cruelty.

Recent opinion polls show public support for the president eroding as he heads toward the 2004 election, partly because of public concern over the deadly cycle of guerrilla attacks and suicide bombings in Iraq.

Because US involvement in Vietnam increased gradually after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, there is little consensus on when the war in Southeast Asia began.

Some date the war to the late 1950s. Others say it began on August 5, 1964, when Lyndon Johnson announced air strikes against North Vietnam in retaliation for a reported torpedo attack on a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin.

However, the Army`s start date for the Vietnam War has been set by its Centre of Military History as December 11, 1961, when two helicopter companies consisting of 32 aircraft and 400 soldiers arrived in the country, an Army public affairs specialist said.

"It was the first major assemblage of US combat power in Vietnam," Army historian Joe Webb said.

Vietnam casualties, which amounted to 25 deaths from 1956 through 1961, climbed to 53 in 1962, 123 in 1963 and 216 in 1964, Pentagon statistics show.

At the time, the US presence in Vietnam consisted mainly of military advisers. President John F. Kennedy increased their number from about 960 in 1961 to show Washington`s commitment to containing communism.

But not until September 1965, after Congress had approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, did Washington begin its massive escalation of the war effort. With a huge influx of soldiers, casualties in Vietnam soared to 1926 in 1965 and peaked at 16,869 in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive, data show.

In a major revision of US military history in 1995, former Defence Secretary Robert McNamara said he believed the Gulf of Tonkin torpedo attack never occurred.

More than 58,000 US military personnel died in Vietnam before the war ended in the mid-1970s.

In another comparison, British forces that created Iraq in the aftermath of World War 1 suffered 2000 casualties from tribal reprisals, guerrilla attacks and a jihad proclaimed from the Shi`ite holy city of Kerbala, before conditions stabilised in 1921, according to US military scholars.

Reuters included military deaths both on and off the battlefield for Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, for comparison with Vietnam War statistics that made no distinction between hostile and non-hostile casualties.

On Thursday, US combat deaths totalled 270 for Iraq and 28 for other battle zones, including Afghanistan.

- REUTERS

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3534214&t…


©Copyright 2003, NZ Herald

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The Limits of Eloquence
Did Bush mean a word of his speech about democracy?
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Thursday, Nov. 13, 2003, at 12:00 PM PT



America`s proper role in promoting democracy and freedom in the world was a big issue in the 2000 presidential election. One of the candidates was a Wilsonian idealist, arguing that the prestige and even the military strength of the United States should be used to remake other governments in our image. The other candidate was contemptuous of this woolly-minded notion, saying American blood and treasure should be spent only in humanitarian emergencies or to protect our own narrowly defined self-interest.

The idealist won the election, in the opinion of many. But the skeptic took office. And then, guess what! The skeptic became a woolly-minded idealist! Democracy`s a funny thing.

President Bush`s recent speech committing the United States to a "forward strategy of freedom," declaring that "the advance of freedom is … the calling of our country," and that "freedom is worth fighting for, dying for, and standing for" (an odd anticlimax, by the way) is being heralded as eloquent. Which it is. Some of the finest eloquence that money can buy. A beautiful endorsement of an activist foreign policy that goes beyond protecting our interests to advancing our values.

The eloquence would be more impressive if there were any reason to suppose that Bush thinks words have meaning. One test of meaning is the future: what the words lead to. As even some admirers of the speech point out, the details of this "forward strategy of freedom" are missing, except for pursuing our current military adventure in Iraq—which was sold to the country on totally non-Wilsonian grounds. But meaning can also be tested by looking at the past. Eloquence is just a hooker if it will serve as a short-term no-commitments release for any idea that comes along.

In 2000, Bush said that the Clinton-Gore administration had been reckless in overcommitting the United States, and the military in particular, to exercises in "nation-building." By that he meant trying to establish institutions of democratic government and civil society. The intervention in Somalia, for example, begun by Bush`s father, "started off as a humanitarian mission and it changed into a nation-building mission and that`s where the mission went wrong." Just as with his current nearly opposite philosophy, Bush stated the principle in the categorical terms of someone who has adopted it and checked it off his list without diving for subtleties. Preventing starvation: good. Overthrowing the occasional dictator: well, OK. Nation-building: bad. "Maybe I`m missing something here. I mean, we`re going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not. It needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the exit strategy obvious. I`m not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say this is the way it`s got to be. I think the United States must be humble … in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course."

One way to show your respect for democracy is to state your beliefs when running for office and then apply those same beliefs when you`re elected. Democracy becomes pointless if there is no connection between the policies that citizens think they are voting for and the policies they get. In this case we actually do seem to have the policies that a majority of voters thought they were supporting. But we cannot count on election theft and broken promises to cancel each other out every time.

Nevertheless, it can be quite noble for a politician to change his or her mind. It can demonstrate courage, integrity, open-mindedness. Has Bush changed his mind on America`s role in the world? Or is it all just words—was there no mind to change?

One simple test of a change of mind is whether it is acknowledged and explained. In his eloquent speech this month, Bush made a gutsy reference to "sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East." This was taken as a near-explicit criticism of his own father, among others. But there is every reason to suppose that our current Bush also supported this approach for most of those 60 years, including his entire adult life until a few months ago when Iraq started going bad. What caused the scales to fall from his eyes?

A man who sincerely has changed his mind about something important ought to hold his new views with less certainty and express them with a bit of rhetorical humility. There should be room for doubt. How can your current beliefs be so transcendentally correct if you yourself recently believed something very different? How can critics of what you say now be so obviously wrong if you yourself used to be one of them? But Bush is cocksure that active, sometimes military, promotion of American values in the world is a good idea, just as he was, or appeared to be, cocksure of the opposite not long ago.

If you`ve really been thinking about a Big Question recently, you ought to be taking recent evidence into account. But Bush`s eloquent speech is stuck in 1989. In Europe and Asia and "every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace," he declared. We used to think like that, before Bosnia and Kosovo. These episodes taught us that free people will sometimes vote for bloodshed that the previous government was able to suppress. This doesn`t undo the case for democracy and freedom, but it complicates that case. Acknowledging and addressing such complications is another way to demonstrate that your change of mind is sincere.

And what should you do if you are a supporter of a politician who changes his mind on one of the fundamental questions of democratic government? George W. Bush`s powers of persuasion are apparently so spectacular, at least to some, that almost all the pro-Bush voices in Washington and the media have remained pro-Bush even when "pro-Bush" means the opposite of what it did five minutes ago. The Comintern at the height of its powers, in the 1930s, couldn`t have engineered a more impressive U-turn. If places like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page had been as enthusiastic about nation-building back in 2000 as they are now, Al Gore might be president today.

Wait a minute. Maybe he is.

Michael Kinsley is Slate`s founding editor.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2091185/

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Friday, November 14, 2003
War News for November 14, 2003 Draft

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

Bring `em on: US contractor killed in convoy ambush near Balad.

Bring `em on: Portugese journalists attacked near Basra. One wounded, one kidnapped.

Bring `em on: Three US troops wounded in bomb ambush near Mosul.

Bring `em on: Two US soldiers wounded in Baghdad bomb ambush.

Bring `em on: Four US soldiers and Iraqi policeman wounded in three seperate ambushes near Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: Three US soldiers wounded by bomb ambush in Fallujah.

Coalition of the Wobbly: Japan delays troop deployment to Iraq.

Coalition of the Wobbly: South Korea limits future deployments to 3000 troops, orders troops already in Iraq to remain in barracks.

US in Iraq casualties exceed total US Vietnam casualties from 1962 - 1964.

Returning Guardsmen find themselves unemployed.

Casualty Reports

Local story: New York soldier killed in Iraq.





# posted by yankeedoodle : 8:10 AM

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Insurgents gain a deadly edge in intelligence

Guerrillas have better sources than the coalition

By John Diamond,

Steven Komarow and Kevin Johnson

11/13/03: (USA Today) U.S. forces are losing the intelligence battle in Iraq to an increasingly organized guerrilla force that uses stealth, spies and surprise to inflict punishing casualties.

U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement officials say that after six months of intensifying guerrilla warfare, Iraqi insurgents know more about the U.S. and allied forces -- their style of operations, convoy routes and vulnerable targets -- than the coalition forces know about them. Indeed, U.S. intelligence has had trouble simply identifying the enemy and figuring out how many are Iraqis and how many are foreign fighters.

With local knowledge and the element of surprise on their side, the guerrillas are exploiting their intelligence edge to overcome the coalition`s overwhelming military superiority. Insurgents routinely use inexpensive explosives to destroy multimillion-dollar assets, including tanks and helicopters. Using surveillance and inside information, the guerrillas have assassinated many Iraqis helping the coalition, gunned down a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, killed the top United Nations official in Iraq and blasted the heavily guarded hotel in Baghdad where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying.

Sophisticated U.S. intelligence tools such as spy satellites and electronic eavesdropping intercepts have been of little practical use, according to intelligence officials in Washington and military officers in Iraq. And despite an intense search and exhaustive intelligence efforts, deposed leader Saddam Hussein remains at large.

The key problem is that Iraqi guerrillas simply have more and better sources than the coalition. U.S. military officers worry that the Iraqis who work for them, such as translators, cooks and drivers, include moles who routinely pass inside information back to insurgents. In at least two cases, Iraqis have been fired on the suspicion that they were spies.

A former senior director in the Iraqi intelligence service says the Americans are right to be anxious.``The intelligence on the Americans is comprehensive and detailed,`` says the Iraqi, who insisted on not being identified and spoke to a reporter in a private home rather than at a restaurant or hotel to avoid being observed. He says guerrillas get detailed reports on what is going on inside the palace grounds occupied by Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. civilian administrator, Bremer`s staff and the Governing Council. Again on Tuesday, guerrillas fired mortar rounds into the ``Green Zone,`` a heavily secured area of central Baghdad that includes Bremer`s headquarters.

Attacks on troops, Iraqis

Guerrilla forces have mounted repeated attacks on U.S. convoys despite frequent changes of route and routine. One frustrated U.S. commander points out that there are only so many ways to drive between downtown Baghdad and Baghdad International Airport, a trip U.S. forces must make and during which they have frequently been ambushed.

Insurgents have also mounted devastating attacks after conducting patient surveillance of major targets such as the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, the elaborately secured Al Rasheed Hotel and a military supply train.

And they have identified and in several cases killed Iraqis helping the coalition. An Iraqi scientist who had provided confidential assistance to U.S. teams hunting for banned weapons last summer was gunned down outside his Baghdad apartment, chief U.S. weapons searcher David Kay told members of Congress last month. A week ago, an Iraqi security guard working with the Army on the secure transport of surplus Iraqi munitions answered a knock on his door and was asked whether he was still helping the Americans. He answered yes and was fatally shot three times in the chest, according to Dan Coberly, spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers.

U.S. intelligence cable traffic between Baghdad and Washington is rife with warnings about Iraqi employees of the coalition secretly supplying information to guerrillas, according to a U.S. intelligence official and a high-ranking defense official. Coalition authorities suspect that some insider information may have aided guerrillas in the Aug. 19 bombing of the U.N. headquarters that killed Sergio Viera de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq. The former Iraqi intelligence official says guerrillas knew that Wolfowitz was at the Al Rasheed Hotel last week, a closely guarded secret.

``Absolutely they did. In fact, the sixth and 12th floors were targeted,`` the Iraqi says. Pentagon officials say they have no evidence the guerrillas knew Wolfowitz was in the hotel when they launched their rocket barrage Oct. 26.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says the coalition will rapidly increase the number of Iraqis serving as police and joining U.S. forces on military patrols. But he acknowledges that hurrying Iraqis into security roles increases the risk that some will be moles working for the other side.

The guerrillas are as skillful at keeping their secrets out of U.S. hands as they are at collecting sensitive information about coalition operations. By using rudimentary security precautions such as avoiding the careless use of cellphones, guerrillas have kept their attack plans a secret. A series of bombings last week in Baghdad caught U.S. commanders completely by surprise, according to two U.S. military sources in Iraq.

A defense intelligence official says Iraqi guerrillas are sophisticated in covert tradecraft. They ``compartmentalize`` information, so no one operative knows enough to compromise an operation if caught. They use ``cut-outs,`` intermediaries who protect the identity of operatives and pass messages. And they plant false information in coalition hands.

Just such a false lead may have led to the ambush death of a National Guard military policeman, Spc. Richard Orengo, in Najaf in June. Called to investigate a car theft, Orengo instead walked into a firefight and was killed.

Coalition struggles

Army Lt. Col. Jim Danna, a unit commander in Baghdad, says soldiers in Iraq know they can`t rely on complex intelligence devices to fight the Iraqi insurgency.

``The U.S. intelligence community in general is a technology-based force, designed to fight against a peer foe,`` such as the Soviet Union, Danna says. But what is going on in Iraq today ``is a human-based war.`` For troops trying to protect themselves and the new Iraqi government, the useful information is ``98% human intelligence`` from local sources.

Military intelligence field units have had some success developing reliable sources, arresting former regime officials and increasing the volume of viable tips, commanders say. But they face an Iraqi populace reluctant to help them, whether because the Iraqis oppose the occupation or fear they`ll be killed by guerrillas if they cooperate.

Intelligence officials say they have had little success in getting information that would allow them to thwart attacks. Some tips have turned out to be traps meant to lure soldiers into ambushes.

``No, we`re not satisfied with the quality or quantity of our intelligence,`` Wolfowitz told National Public Radio last week. Field commanders now get so many reports from Iraqi sources that ``sifting out the good from the bad is a real challenge,`` Wolfowitz said.

At the field headquarters of the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division in downtown Baghdad, intelligence gathering resembles old-fashioned detective work.

Told that an informant says a Saddam loyalist wanted for questioning has turned up at a local hotel, Army Col. Ralph Baker replies, ``Let`s pick him up.``

Baker says traditional Army methods are light on human intelligence. The focus is the battlefield, not the community. But now, Baker and others say, the only way to win is to get tips from the same people the Army is working with on sewage projects, school renovations and the like.

``We call them the silent majority,`` Baker says. ``We were slow getting started,`` he concedes, but today ``we have a tremendous information network.``

`Mission impossible`

While the military wants information about the location of guerrilla hideouts and coming attacks, the FBI has a large team in Baghdad trying to find the culprits in recent rocket and car-bomb attacks.

One official with knowledge of the investigations says the difficulty of getting reliable intelligence has made tracking down attackers ``almost mission impossible.`` For example, Iraq`s unreliable telephone system has confounded U.S. efforts to consistently gain information from the sort of electronic surveillance that works in U.S. investigations, the official says.

An example of the frustration experienced by U.S. authorities has been the ongoing FBI investigation into the U.N. bombing.

Within hours of the blast, investigators had recovered the vehicle identification number, manufacturer number and Iraqi license plate attached to the Russian-made truck used in the bombing. In most countries, the recovery of just one of those items would have been a coup, tantamount to a quick and sure resolution.

In the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the rear axle of the truck that held the bomb led agents to the Kansas rental agency where bomber Timothy McVeigh had leased the vehicle. Parts of the truck used in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing also linked terror suspects to a rental agency. In Iraq, the gold mine of vehicle evidence yielded little immediate payoff because Iraqi vehicle records are in disarray.

Furthermore, continuing combat in Baghdad means that even on routine forays through the city, FBI agents must travel with the bureau`s hostage rescue team just to ensure the agents` safety. The heavily armed and visually conspicuous teams get in the way of conducting clandestine meetings with Iraqi sources.

``It`s pretty difficult to get people to feel comfortable with you when you pull up with a SWAT team,`` the official says.

Copyright: USA Today.

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A U.S. Army combat engineer inspects the damage November 14, 2003 to a building in a former Republican Guard compound in Baghdad, which was shelled by a U.S. Air Forces. U.S. forces destroyed a building in the compound that they said resistance fighters used to launch attacks, and struck more suspected mortar and rocket-launch sites in an operation called "Iron Hammer"

US Aircraft Strike Iraq Targets; 2 Soldiers Killed
Fri November 14, 2003 12:43 PM ET


By Dean Yates
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. forces struck at targets near Baghdad airport on Friday evening and attack helicopters and F-16 fighter jets carried out raids elsewhere in Iraq in operations to root out guerrillas and destroy their hideouts.

Despite the growing U.S. toll -- two more soldiers were killed north of Baghdad in a bomb attack on Thursday -- American officials vowed troops would stay until they had defeated insurgents fighting on seven months after Saddam Hussein`s fall.

But Iraqis could expect a faster transfer of power, U.S. officials said.

A spokesman for the 1st Armored Division said U.S. forces hit five targets around Baghdad with mortar fire on Friday evening in the third successive night of "Operation Iron Hammer," an American drive to attack guerrilla positions.

"These are locations the enemy has used to fire on us. Today we are firing first," he said.

Reuters witnesses reported several explosions around the airport, in the southwest of the city, as U.S. planes and helicopters flew overhead.

The tougher U.S. tactics follow guerrilla mortar and rocket attacks on the headquarters of the U.S.-led administration in Baghdad and a bloody few weeks in Iraq in which 18 Italians and dozens of American soldiers have been killed.

NO TURNING BACK

U.S Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denied Washington and its allies were in trouble.

"There is no decision to pull out early. Indeed quite the contrary. We will stay there as long as necessary," Rumsfeld told U.S. troops at the Pacific base of Guam.

Arriving later in Japan, which has cold feet about sending troops in the wake of Wednesday`s bomb attack on an Italian base, Rumsfeld met Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. He is also due in South Korea, which is reviewing its offer of troops.

Opinion polls show declining support among U.S. voters for the occupation as President Bush seeks re-election a year from now.

Rumsfeld said the initial plan had been for a transfer of sovereignty after a new Iraqi constitution was ratified and elections held but the administration was considering ways to transfer some responsibility sooner. Bush said on Thursday he wanted to "encourage the Iraqis to assume more responsibility."

U.S. officials have not spelled out how this will be done, saying Iraq administrator Paul Bremer, now back in Baghdad after urgent consultations this week in Washington, will discuss details with the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.

The council is scheduled to meet on Saturday, but a council source said it was not clear if Bremer would attend.

In the latest deadly attack on occupation troops, a bomb detonated as a U.S. convoy passed on Thursday killed two American soldiers and wounded three, the U.S. Army said.

Guerrillas have killed at least 158 U.S. soldiers since Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.

ATTACK HELICOPTER, FIGHTER JETS

Near Saddam`s hometown Tikrit, a U.S. Apache helicopter spotted and killed seven Iraqi insurgents late on Thursday as they prepared to fire rockets at a U.S. military camp, a U.S. army spokeswoman said.

And near the Syrian border, the 82nd Airborne said F-16 fighter jets on Thursday night destroyed an isolated three-story building used by "terrorists" as a staging area for attacks and storage of ammunition.

In the southern town of Nassiriya, Italian divers were scouring the Euphrates river for evidence after the blast that devastated the Italian base nearby, killing 27 people. A plane carrying wounded Italians arrived in Rome on Friday.

Fearing a similar attack, the U.S.-led administration has shut its headquarters in the southern city of Basra for 36 hours for a security review, spokesman Dominic D`Angelo said.

Underscoring Iraq`s fragile security, gunmen shot and wounded a Portuguese reporter and kidnapped a second in southern Iraq on Friday after attacking a convoy of vehicles, the British military and Portuguese media said.

The kidnapped reporter, Carlos Raleiras of private radio station TSF, made a plea for help on his mobile phone.

With voices speaking in Arabic behind him, Raleiras said, "Would anyone who speaks Arabic please contact me? I have to stop talking now, OK?"

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Summary Military Fatalities:

US++UK+++Other+++Total

399+53++++24++++++476

Latest Military Fatality Date: 11/13/2003

11/14/03 Centcom: US Soldier Dies In Afghanistan
MACDILL AFB, Tampa - A special operations force soldier died of wounds received when the vehicle he was in struck an improvised explosive device (IED) in the vicinity of Asadabad, Afghanistan today.
11/14/03 CENTCOM: 2 Killed, 3 Wounded 11/13
Two Task Force Ironhorse soldiers were killed and three were wounded when the convoy they were traveling in was attacked with an improvised explosive device at approximately 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 13, north of Samarra
11/14/03 Koulikov: Ukrainian Soldier Dies
In Iraq, as a result of improper weapon handling, Junior Sergeant Sergiy
11/14/03 Yahoo: Roadside Bomb Wounds Two U.S. Soldiers
A roadside bomb exploded in southern Baghdad Friday morning, wounding two American soldiers, a U.S. officer said.
11/14/03 AP: Gunmen Hit Portuguese Reporters in Iraq
Gunmen opened fire on jeeps carrying Portuguese journalists in southern Iraq on Friday, wounding one reporter and kidnapping another
11/14/03 DJ: 3 Soldiers Slightly Hurt By Bomb In Mosul
Three U.S. soldiers were slightly injured when an improvised explosive device went off near their convoy at about 6:30 p.m. Thursday in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the military said Friday
11/14/03 Reuters: Apache Strike Kills Iraqi Attackers
A U.S. Apache helicopter spotted and killed seven Iraqi insurgents late on Thursday as they prepared to fire rockets at a U.S. military camp near Tikrit
11/14/03 BayArea: THE WOUNDS OF WAR
U.S. soldiers who survive attacks in Iraq often face lasting injuries
11/14/03 USA Today: Contractor Killed In Iraq
Suspected insurgents raked a convoy with automatic gunfire, killing a U.S. civilian contractor and wounding another American, a U.S. military official said Friday.
11/13/03 DJ: Suspects In Iraq Helicopter Attack Arrested
U.S. troops have arrested six Iraqis suspected in attacks against U.S. helicopters, including at least two allegedly involved in last week`s downing of a Black Hawk that killed all six Americans on board, officials said Friday.
11/13/03 MSNBC: Roadside Bomb in Fallujah
In a separate attack, a bomb planted on a road in the flashpoint Iraqi town of Fallujah hit a U.S. military vehicle on Thursday and residents spoke of three American casualties.
11/13/03 Centcom: 1 Killed, 1 Wounded In Baghdad IED Attack
A 1st Armored Division soldier died Nov. 12 at approximately 1:35 p.m. from wounds sustained from an improvised explosive device explosion and one other soldier was wounded.
11/12/03 AJC: U.S. Troops Kill Five Civilians in Iraq
U.S. troops opened fire on a truck carrying live chickens near the tense town of Fallujah, killing five
11/12/03 AP: US kills 6 in defense of hospital
U.S. paratroopers killed six attackers and wounded four others in a shootout outside the hospital run by the Jordanian government near the city of Fallujah, the Army`s 82nd Airborne Division said Wednesday.
11/12/03 ample(AFX): US Army kills 2 in Baghdad operations
Two suspected insurgents were killed, three more wounded and five detained when the US army staged two operations late Wednesday in Baghdad, the US military said.
11/12/03 Reuters: Baghdad blasts part of U.S. operation
The U.S. military says a succession of blasts heard in the Iraqi capital Baghdad night were part of an operation against guerrillas responsible for attacks on U.S. forces.
11/12/03 ABC: Col. Scalas - 17 Italians were killed
11 Carabinieri paramilitary police, four army soldiers, an Italian civilian working at the base and an Italian documentary filmmaker.
11/12/03 WaPo: Bomb at Italian Base in Iraq Kills 24
A suicide bomber drove a tanker truck into the headquarters of Italys paramilitary police in this southern city on Wednesday, exploding the vehicle in a ball of flame and killing at least 24 people, most of them Italians.
11/12/03 Centcom: 1 Killed, 2 Wounded
One Task Force Ironhorse soldier was killed and two were wounded when their military vehicle struck an improvised explosive device northwest of Baghdad at approximately 11 p.m. Nov. 11.
11/12/03 Centcom: 1 US soldier killed, 2 Wounded
One 1st Armored Division soldier died of wounds received and two were wounded in an improvised explosive device attack in Baghdad at approximately 4 p.m. Nov. 11.

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Fair and Balanced™ Cartoons
Cartoon Archive
102 New Cartoons Today, heute mit großer Verspätung 102 frische Cartoons:

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Published on Friday, November 14, 2003 by Tomdispatch.com
The Scalping Party
by Mike Davis

TomDispatch.com Editors Note: "Operation Iron Hammer" just went into its second night in Baghdad with the limited use of helicopters and an AC-130 gunship over the capital and the destruction of at least one building. Part of a new "get tough" policy announced by Centcom head Gen. John Abizaid, it represents an escalation in the "urban warfare" that everyone, by late last April, assumed would never happen. Meanwhile, in the Sunni triangle our military has started dropping 500-pound bombs around the flashpoints of Falluja and Tikrit. In a guerrilla war, this is the equivalent of conceding defeat in the struggle for popular support in an area. A 500-pound bomb is a completely indiscriminate weapon.

So helicopters and gunships firing over urban areas, 500-pound bombs as a response to pinprick guerrilla attacks, lurching tactics and "mid-course" corrections, escalating daily attacks on American and allied forces, escalating casualties (already at something like 2-4 American dead a day and cumulatively higher than our casualties in the first three years of the Vietnam war), escalating frustration at being unable to sort the enemy from the civilian population, lowering morale among administration and occupation officials and at the level of the troops. Believe me, we`ve been down this path before and it leads nowhere good.

Here are typical comments made this week by American commanders:

```Although the coalition can be benevolent, this is still the same lethal formation that removed the former oppressive regime [of Saddam Hussein],`` Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez told a regular news briefing... ‘`We will not hesitate to employ the appropriate levels of combat power,`` he said as a slide of a fighter jet dropping bombs was displayed behind him... `Not a single tool that we have available would be spared if necessary to defeat that enemy,`` Sanchez said." (Andrew Grey, U.S. military chief vows to `get tough` in Iraq, Reuters)

And that`s the polite version. Move a little farther down the line of command and here`s what you get:

"`This is to remind the town that we have teeth and claws and we will use them,` said Lt. Col. Steven Russell, commander of the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment" -- a statement made after U.S. units moved through Tikrit "firing at houses suspected to be harboring hostile forces in the wake of an apparent attack on a Black Hawk helicopter that killed six U.S. soldiers." (U.S. Retaliates After Black Hawk Crash)

Now, along comes Mike Davis, who sends a flare into the dark night sky and illuminates a landscape many would rather leave unlit. (When you`re done with his piece, you might also check out Nick Turse, The Tip of the Iceberg at the ZNET website, which puts the Toledo Blade reports Davis considers below into a larger Vietnam context.) Tom

The Scalping Party

By Mike Davis

In his dark masterpiece, Blood Meridian (1985), novelist Cormac McCarthy tells the terrifying tale of a gang of Yanqui scalp-hunters who left an apocalyptic trail of carnage from Chihuahua to Southern California in the early 1850s.

Commissioned by Mexican authorities to hunt marauding Apaches, the company of ex-filibusters and convicts under the command of the psychopath John Glanton quickly became intoxicated with gore. They began to exterminate local farmers as well as Indians, and when there were no innocents left to rape and slaughter, they turned upon themselves with shark-like fury.

Many readers have recoiled from the gruesome extremism of McCarthy`s imagery: the roasted skulls of tortured captives, necklaces of human ears, an unspeakable tree of dead infants. Others have balked at his unpatriotic emphasis on the genocidal origins of the American West and the book`s obvious allusion to "search and destroy" missions à la Vietnam.

But Blood Meridian, like all of McCarthy`s novels, is based on meticulous research. Glanton - - the white savage, the satanic face of Manifest Destiny -- really existed. He`s simply the ancestor most Americans would prefer to forget. He`s also the ghost we can`t avoid.

Six weeks ago, a courageous hometown paper in rustbelt Ohio -- the Toledo Blade - tore the wraps off an officially suppressed story of Vietnam-era exterminism that recapitulates Blood Meridian in the most ghastly and unbearable detail. The reincarnation of Glanton`s scalping party was an elite 45-man unit of the 101 Airborne Division known as "Tiger Force." The Blade`s intricate reconstruction of its murderous march through the Central Highlands of Vietnam in summer and fall 1967 needs to be read in full, horrifying detail. Blade reporters interviewed more than 100 American veterans and Vietnamese survivors.

Tiger Force atrocities began with the torture and execution of prisoners in the field, then escalated to the routine slaughter of unarmed farmers, elderly people, even small children. As one former sergeant told the Blade, "It didn`t matter if they were civilians. If they weren`t supposed to be in an area, we shot them. If they didn`t understand fear, I taught it to them."

Early on, Tiger Force began scalping its victims (the scalps were dangled from the ends of M-16s) and cutting off their ears as souvenirs. One member -- who would later behead an infant -- wore the ears as a ghoulish necklace (just like the character Toadvine in Blood Meridian, while another mailed them home to his wife. Others kicked out the teeth of dead villagers for their gold fillings.

A former Tiger Force sergeant told reporters that "he killed so many civilians he lost count." The Blade estimates that innocent casualties were in "the hundreds." Another veteran, a medic with the unit, recalled 150 unarmed civilians murdered in a single month.

Superior officers, especially the Glanton-like battalion commander Gerald Morse (or "Ghost Rider" as he fancied himself), sponsored the carnage. Orders were given to "shoot everything that moves" and Morse established a body-count quota of 327 (the numerical designation of the battalion) that Tiger Force enthusiastically filled with dead peasants and teenage girls.

Soldiers in other units who complained about these exterminations were ignored or warned to keep silent, while Tiger Force slackers were quickly transferred out. As with Glanton`s gang, or, for that matter, Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi mobile extermination squads, in the western Ukraine in 1941, atrocity created its own insatiable momentum. Eventually, nothing was unthinkable in the Song Ve Valley.

"A 13-year-old girl`s throat was slashed after she was sexually assaulted, and a young mother was shot to death after soldiers torched her hut. An unarmed teenager was shot in the back after a platoon sergeant ordered the youth to leave a village, and a baby was decapitated so that a soldier could remove a necklace."

Stories about the beheading of the baby spread so widely that the Army was finally forced to launch a secret inquiry in 1971. The investigation lasted for almost five years and probed 30 alleged Tiger Force war crimes. Evidence was found to support the prosecution of at least 18 members of the platoon. In the end, however, a half dozen of the most compromised veterans were allowed to resign from the Army, avoiding military indictment, and in 1975 the Pentagon quietly buried the entire investigation.

According to the Blade, "It is not known how far up in the Ford administration the decision [to bury the cases] went," but it is worth recalling whom the leading actors were at the time: the Secretary of Defense, then as now, was Donald Rumsfeld, and the White House chief of staff was Dick Cheney.

Recently in the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh, who was instrumental in exposing the My Lai massacre, decried the failure of the corporate media, especially the four major television networks, to report the Blade`s findings or launch their own investigations into the official cover-up. (Since then, ABC news and Ted Koppel`s Nightline have both covered the subject.) He also reminds us that the Army concealed the details of another large massacre of civilians at the village of My Khe 4, near My Lai on the very day in 1968 when the more infamous massacre took place.

Moreover, the Tiger Force story is the third major war crimes` revelation in the last few years to encounter apathy in the media and/or indifference and contempt in Washington.

In 1999, a team of investigative reporters from the Associated Press broke the story of a horrific massacre of hundreds of unarmed Korean civilians by U.S. troops in July 1950. It occurred at a stone bridge near the village of No Gun Ri and the unit involved was Custer`s old outfit, the 7th Calvary regiment.

As one veteran told the AP, "There was lieutenant screaming like a madman, fire on everything, kill ‘em all. .... Kids, there was kids out there, it didn`t matter what it was, eight to eighty, blind, crippled or crazy, they shot them all." Another ex-soldier was haunted by the memory of a terrified child: "She came running toward us. You should have seen guys trying to kill that little girl. With machine guns."

A reluctant Pentagon Inquiry into this Korean version of the Wounded Knee Massacre acknowledged that there was a civilian toll but cited very low figures for the dead and then dismissed it as "an unfortunate tragedy inherent in war," despite overwhelming evidence of a deliberate U.S. policy of bombing and strafing refugee columns. The Bridge at No Gun Ri (2001), by the three Pulitzer Prize-winning AP journalists, currently languishes at near 600,000 on the Amazon sales index.

Likewise there has been little enduring outrage that a confessed war criminal, Bob Kerrey, reigns as president of New York City`s once liberal New School University. In 2001, the former Navy SEAL and ex-Senator from Nebraska was forced to concede, after years of lies, that the heroic engagement for which he received a Bronze Star in 1969 involved the massacre of a score of unarmed civilians, mainly women and children. "To describe it as an atrocity," he admitted, "is pretty close to being right."

The blue-collar ex-SEAL team member who revealed the truth about the killings at Than Phong under Kerrey`s command was publicly excoriated as a drunk and traitor, while powerful Democrats -- led by Senators Max Cleland and John Kerry, both Vietnam veterans -- circled the wagons to protect Kerrey from further investigation or possible prosecution. They argued that it was wrong to "blame the warrior instead of the war" and called for a "healing process."

Indeed covering up American atrocities has proved a thoroughly bipartisan business. The Democrats, after all, are currently considering the bomber of Belgrade, General Wesley Clark, as their potential knight on a white horse. The Bush administration, meanwhile, blackmails governments everywhere with threats of aid cuts and trade sanctions unless they exempt U.S. troops from the jurisdiction of the new International Criminal Court.

The United States, of course, has good reason to claim immunity from the very Nuremburg principles it helped establish in 1946-47. American Special Forces troops, for example, were most probably complicit in the massacres of hundreds of Taliban prisoners by Northern Alliance warlords several years ago. Moreover, "collateral damage" to civilians is part and parcel of the new white man`s burden of "democratizing" the Middle East and making the world safe for Bechtel and Halliburton.

The Glantons thus still have their place in the scheme of Manifest Destiny, and the scalping parties that once howled in the wilderness of the Gila now threaten to range far and wide along the banks of the Euphrates and in the shadow of the Hindu Kush.

Mike Davis is the author of City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, and most recently, Dead Cities: and Other Tales

Copyright C2003 Mike Davis

Tomdispatch.com is researched, written and edited by Tom Engelhardt, a fellow at the Nation Institute, for anyone in despair over post-September 11th US mainstream media coverage of our world and ourselves.

© 2003 TomDispatch.com

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EINE NÜTZLICHE LEKTION IN SACHEN RESERVEWÄHRUNG
Was dem Euro fehlt
DER schwache Dollar und der starke Euro stehen gegenwärtig unter der Dauerbeobachtung von Wirtschaftsexperten und Analysten. Aber warum ist die Stabilität einer internationalen Leit- und Reservewährung eigentlich so wichtig? Wie kommt es, dass diese Rolle dem Dollar zugefallen ist? Und was hieße es, wenn der Euro den Dollar tatsächlich ablösen würde? Denn obwohl die Leitwährung über wirtschaftliche Macht und Einflussmöglichkeiten entscheidet, ist mit ihr doch auch eine immense Verantwortung verbunden.
Von HOWARD M. WACHTEL *
* Wirtschaftswissenschaftler an der American University (Washington, DC) und Mitarbeiter des Transnational Institute (Amsterdam). Autor u. a. von: "Street of Dreams - Boulevard of Broken Hearts: Wall Streets First Century", London (Pluto Press) 2003.

Seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg ist überall auf der Welt der Dollar die Leitwährung. Er hat die finanzielle Hegemonie der Vereinigten Staaten begründet. Wird ein starker Euro - als Speerspitze einer erweiterten Europäischen Union - diese Dominanz gefährden können? Diese Frage hat seit dem Irakkrieg und der Aufwertung des Euro gegenüber dem Dollar eine neue Dringlichkeit gewonnen.


Es ist nichts Neues, dass Europa auf verschiedene Weise die Dominanz des US-Dollars in Frage zu stellen versucht. Bereits 1967, während des Vietnamkriegs, wollte Charles de Gaulle die Flucht aus dem Dollar und die daraus resultierende Dollarschwäche für seine Absicht nutzen, die Weltwirtschaft wieder strikt an den Goldstandard zu binden. Auch dem Euro-Projekt hat man immer wieder nachgesagt, es ziele letztlich auf eine Schwächung des Dollars. Im Gefolge der wieder erwachten Ängste vor einer aggressiven, ausgreifenden imperialen Strategie der USA im Zusammenhang mit dem Irakkrieg wird diese Diskussion jetzt in Europa wieder belebt. Die Ambitionen für einen starken Euro haben erneut Spekulationen genährt, der Euro könnte sich als Alternative zum Dollar zur Reservewährung entwickeln, im globalen Finanzsystem zum Brückenkopf gegen die Dominanz der USA ausgebaut werden und auf diese Weise der US-amerikanischen Finanzmacht ein europäisches Potenzial entgegensetzen.


Dieser Problemkreis lässt sich nur analysieren, wenn man zunächst das Wesen einer Reservewährung verstanden hat und dann nach den Bedingungen fragt, unter denen der Euro als Reservewährung gegen den Dollar konkurrieren könnte.


Damit der Welthandel und das globale Finanzsystem sich so stetig und stabil entwickeln können, dass ein weltweites Wachstum möglich wird, bedarf es einer Währung, die allgemein verfügbar ist und in aller Welt akzeptiert wird. Ihre Hauptfunktion besteht darin, Liquidität sicherzustellen. Im 19. Jahrhundert hatte das britische Pfund Sterling diese Aufgabe inne.


Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg wurde das Pfund dann schrittweise vom US-Dollar abgelöst, der seither die globale Reservewährung darstellt. Um zu erfassen, wie unabdingbar eine solche Reservewährung für eine prosperierende Weltwirtschaft ist, brauchen wir uns nur die Zwischenkriegszeit zu vergegenwärtigen. Damals war das britische Pfund nicht mehr imstande, Liquidität im globalen Maßstab zu gewährleisten, während der Finanzsektor der USA noch zögerte, eine Rolle zu übernehmen, die ihm von den Märkten eigentlich bereits zugeteilt war. Dieser zeitweilige Umstand - dass es keine internationale Reservewährung gab - war einer der Gründe für den Zusammenbruch des internationalen Handels in den 1930er-Jahren.


Eine nationale Währung wird für andere Länder dann zur Reservewährung, wenn sie sich dank ihrer überwältigenden ökonomischen und finanziellen Stärke innerhalb des globalen Finanz- und Handelssystems als bevorzugtes internationales Zahlungsmittel durchsetzt. Dann wird jedes Land bestrebt sein, diese Währung als Reserve zu halten, weil sie ein Zahlungsmittel darstellt, das in allen Ländern, mit denen man Handel treibt, gleichermaßen willkommen ist. Denn diese Länder sind ihrerseits auf eine Währung angewiesen, die ihnen als universale Zahlungsreserve dient.


Das Land, dessen Währung sich zu dieser universalen Zahlungsreserve entwickelt, gewinnt dadurch große Macht und Einflussmöglichkeiten. Aber es bürdet sich damit zugleich eine Riesenverantwortung auf. Nehmen wir als Beispiel die Zeit unmittelbar nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, um zu illustrieren, welch subtile und vielfältige Einflussmöglichkeiten mit der Rolle der internationalen Reservewährung verbunden sind.


Versetzen wir uns zu diesem Zweck in die Lage eines Finanzministers, dessen Staat auf die Reservewährung Dollar angewiesen ist. Dieser Minister hat in erster Linie die Aufgabe, Dollars anzuziehen und zu akkumulieren, denn nur mit Hilfe dieser Devisenreserve kann er überall auf der Welt die benötigten Produkte einkaufen. Wie kann er nun an diese Dollars herankommen? Er kann - erstens - eigene Produkte an die USA verkaufen und dafür Dollars einnehmen, ein Weg, der den europäischen Ländern bis Mitte der 1950er-Jahre versperrt war. Eine zweite Möglichkeit besteht und bestand darin, dass US-Unternehmen ihre Dollars ins Land bringen und investieren: Hier liegt der Ursprung der modernen multinationalen Konzerne. Zum Dritten konnte der besagte Finanzminister US-Militärbasen und das dazugehörige Personal ins Land holen.(1)

Das waren die drei wichtigsten Methoden für Europäer, damals an Dollars heranzukommen. Über den Einfluss, der mit diesen Dollarzuflüssen verbunden war, brauchen wir uns nicht lange auszulassen. Es ist immer dieselbe Geschichte, die wir auch heute wieder vor allem in den Ländern der Dritten Welt beobachten, aber auch in den Transformationsländern, also in Mittelosteuropa, in Russland und in den Staaten der ehemaligen Sowjetunion.


Liquidität und letzte Kredite
DIE Verpflichtungen, die sich für das Land der Reservewährung ergeben, sind zweifacher Art. Zum einen muss es bereit sein, für weltweite Liquidität zu sorgen: Die eigene Währung muss in ausreichender Menge zirkulieren, um die globalen Handels- und Finanzströme in Gang zu halten. Voraussetzung dafür ist ein stetiges und zuverlässiges Wachstum der eigenen Volkswirtschaft. Zum anderen muss es darauf vorbereitet sein, die Rolle des so genannten lender of last resort auszufüllen, das heißt als "letzter" Kreditgeber für Länder einzuspringen, die zu Marktbedingungen keine Kredite mehr bekommen. Diese beiden Funktionen kann das Reservewährungsland nur erfüllen, wenn es - bei robustem eigenem Wirtschaftswachstum - seine Währung nach innen wie nach außen einigermaßen stabil halten kann. Wobei sich die innere Stabilität in einer akzeptablen Inflationsrate, die externe Stabilität dagegen in berechenbaren Wechselkursschwankungen gegenüber den Währungen anderer Länder ausdrückt. Wenn diese Stabilitätsbedingungen fehlen, werden andere Länder die betreffende Währung nicht mehr ohne weiteres als Devisenreserve halten, weil sie zu starken - inneren wie äußeren - Wertschwankungen ausgesetzt wäre.


Wenn der Euro dem Dollar als internationale Reservewährung Konkurrenz machen will, muss er also zunächst zwei Voraussetzungen erfüllen: Erstens muss der Wert des Euro nach innen und nach außen über einen längeren Zeitraum hinweg stabil bleiben, und zweitens müssen die Länder der Eurozone ein angemessenes ökonomisches Wachstum zustande bringen. An diesen Kriterien gemessen sind die Aussichten für den Euro, eine alternative Reservewährung zu werden, eher durchwachsen. Zwar steht die Eurozone, was die Inflationsgefahr betrifft, ganz gut da. Doch gerade die innere Geldwertstabilität ist zugleich ein wichtiger wachstumshemmender Faktor.


Der europäische Stabilitäts- und Wachstumspakt hat die Mitgliedsländer auf die so genannten Maastricht-Kriterien festgelegt, die den Spielraum für die staatliche Haushaltspolitik der einzelnen Länder unangemessen stark einschränken. Die Europäische Zentralbank (EZB) legt den Stabilitätspakt dermaßen streng aus, dass sie insbesondere den beiden wichtigsten Volkswirtschaften der Eurozone, Frankreich und Deutschland, nicht die geringste fiskalische Flexibilität gestattet. Soll der Euro auf lange Sicht zur alternativen Reservewährung werden, brauchen die Länder der Eurozone ein kräftiges Wirtschaftswachstum, und das setzt voraus, dass die Maastricht-Kriterien grundlegend geändert werden.


Hier zeigt sich einmal mehr, dass die Einführung des Euro mit einer wirtschaftspolitischen Strategie einherging, die nicht auf ihre inneren Widersprüche hin durchdacht war. Die nationalen Regierungen mussten zwei der drei maßgeblichen Instrumente, mit denen sie das Wirtschaftswachstum beeinflussen konnten, ganz aus der Hand geben, nämlich die Geldpolitik und die Wechselkurspolitik. Und auch das dritte Instrument, die staatliche Haushaltspolitik, wurde durch die Begrenzung des jährlichen Haushaltsdefizits auf maximal 3 Prozent des Bruttoinlandsprodukts in seiner Wirksamkeit eingeschränkt. Nach neueren Erkenntnissen über die Bedingungen ökonomischen Wachstums - sowohl von der monetaristischen wie von der keynesianischen Schule - sind derartige makroökonomische Beschränkungen aber nicht nur inkonsistent, sondern auch falsch. Hinzu kommt, dass es eine gewisse Zeit der "Bewährung" braucht, bis die Finanzmärkte in der Lage sind, die Stabilität des Euro-Wechselkurses verlässlich einzuschätzen. Dies wird mit zunehmendem Alter des Euro korrigiert werden.


Jenseits dieser wirtschaftspolitischen Probleme gibt es zwei strukturelle Faktoren, die der Entwicklung des Euro zu einer alternativen Reservewährung im Wege stehen. Der erste hat mit dem Lender-of-last-resort-Standard zu tun: Die EZB ist nach ihrer gegenwärtigen Konstruktion nicht in der Lage, die Rolle des "letzten" Kreditgebers wahrzunehmen. Die Kompetenz für die Kreditvergabe liegt nach wie vor bei den einzelnen Zentralbanken der Eurozone und ist entsprechend auf das jeweils eigene Land begrenzt. Solange es keine Instanz gibt, die als lender of last resort für die gesamte Eurozone auftreten könnte, hat der Euro nur begrenzte Aussichten, sich als Alternative zum Dollar zu profilieren.


Der zweite strukturelle Hemmfaktor ist die Tatsache, dass innerhalb der Eurozone die Reformen im grenzüberschreitenden Bankverkehr nur langsam vorankommen. Solche Transaktionen sind, zumal im Vergleich mit den US-Banken, nach wie vor umständlich, und die Banken verlangen für solche Geldbewegungen immer noch viel zu hohe Gebühren. Das liegt vor allem an veralteten Prozeduren und am erheblichen technologischen Vorsprung der US-Banken vor denen der Eurozone, den man durchaus mit dem Rückstand der Europäischen Union gegenüber den USA auf dem Gebiet der Militärtechnologie vergleichen kann.


Es mag paradox erscheinen, aber diese Lücke könnte geschlossen werden, wenn sich Großbritannien der Eurozone anschließen würde, denn in praktischer und technologischer Hinsicht sind die britischen Banken die Einzigen, die es mit den US-amerikanischen aufnehmen können. Doch die Briten haben sich nun einmal mit guten Gründen entschieden, außerhalb der Eurozone zu bleiben. Und selbst wenn sie beitreten würden, müssten zwei weitere Bedingungen erfüllt sein, damit der Euro konkurrenzfähig wird. Erstens müssten sich die Bankstrategien der übrigen Eurozonenländer an den Gepflogenheiten ihres britischen Partners orientieren, zweitens würde sich das Zentrum des europäischen Finanzsystems von Frankfurt nach London verlagern - und beides wäre für die gegenwärtigen Mitgliedsländer der Eurozone nicht akzeptabel. Zudem bliebe auch in diesem Fall noch das Lender-of-last-resort-Problem zu lösen.


Es gibt also noch viele Hindernisse, die der Entwicklung des Euro zu einer ernsthaften Alternative im Wege stehen. Aber es gibt andererseits auch gewichtige Faktoren, die den Euro in die Rolle der Reservewährung drängen. Da wäre zuallererst das andauernde Zahlungsbilanzdefizit der USA zu nennen, das sich inzwischen auf rund 500 Milliarden Dollar pro Jahr(2) beläuft. Eine Trendwende ist einstweilen nicht absehbar. Diese Zahlungsbilanzlücke wäre nur durch weitere, vor allem aus der Europäischen Union und aus Asien stammende Kapitalzuflüsse in die USA zu schließen. Sollten sich diese Zuflüsse - wie in den letzten beiden Jahren geschehen(3) - weiter vermindern, werden die Preise für US-Staatsanleihen fallen und die Zinssätze entsprechend steigen. Die US-amerikanische Volkswirtschaft würde damit in ernsthafte Turbulenzen geraten.


Das Szenario eines Preisverfalls der US-Staatspapiere und eines steigenden Zinsniveaus ist umso plausibler, als noch ein zweiter Grund hinzukommt, der die Kapitalanleger zur Flucht aus dem Dollar in den Euro bewegen könnte: Das Vertrauen in die politischen Entscheidungen, die in Washington getroffen werden, hat weltweit merklich nachgelassen. Das gilt nicht nur für die amerikanische Außenpolitik, die ein grundsätzliches Misstrauen gegenüber den Absichten der US-Regierung nährt, sondern auch für die Haushaltspolitik Washingtons, mit dem sich rasant vermehrenden Defizit von 450 Milliarden Dollar in diesem Jahr (was 4 Prozent des Bruttoinlandsprodukts entspricht) und künftig wahrscheinlich noch größeren Defiziten. Diese Zahlen lassen die Manager der großen ausländischen Anlagefonds befürchten, dass die Risiken auf den US-Märkten zunehmen und diese also bald nicht mehr das stabile Umfeld für Kapitalanlagen bieten werden wie noch vor wenigen Jahren.


Handelsbilanz und unechte Importe
NACH diesem Szenario wird der Zufluss von Auslandskapital in die USA zwar anhalten, aber nicht mehr mit demselben Schwung wie in den 1990er-Jahren. Und schon gar nicht in einem Umfang, der die Folgen der niedrigen Sparquote der US-Bürger für den einheimischen Kapitalbedarf kompensieren könnte. Wenn dieses Szenario eintrifft, ist mit steigenden Marktzinsen zu rechnen, und dann wird die US-Zentralbank (die Federal Reserve) mit ihrem geldpolitischen Arsenal nicht mehr viel gegen diesen Trend ausrichten können. Schließlich hat sie ihre Munition bereits verschossen, indem sie das von ihr kontrollierte Zinsniveau so weit herabgesetzt hat, dass eine weitere Senkung zur Deflation führen könnte.


Das bringt uns schließlich zu der Frage, ob die Verbilligung des Dollars gegenüber dem Euro das Defizit in der Handelsbilanz zwischen der Eurozone und den USA verringern wird, wodurch ja die US-Volkswirtschaft nicht mehr so stark von Kapitalzuflüssen aus dem Ausland abhängig wäre. Die Wahrscheinlichkeit einer solchen Entwicklung wird meines Erachtens überschätzt. Es ist zwar richtig, dass ein gegenüber dem Euro sinkender Dollarpreis eine Zunahme der US-amerikanischen Exporte und einen Rückgang der Importe aus der Eurozone bewirkt. In begrenztem Maße wird dies auch geschehen, aber die Wirkung wird kaum spürbar sein und auf keinen Fall ausreichen, um den stark defizitären Trend in der US-Zahlungsbilanz umzukehren. Jenseits bestimmter Branchen - wie Landwirtschaft, Automobilproduktion, Tourismus - werden sich die Export-Import-Bilanzen kaum verändern.


Dafür gibt es mehrere Gründe. Erstens ist es allenfalls langfristig möglich, die Fertiggüterindustrie der USA neu zu orientieren, die ja schon seit Jahrzehnten nicht mehr auf den Export ausgerichtet ist. Die US-Unternehmen haben sich vor langer Zeit für eine Investitionsstrategie entschieden, die in aller Welt Produktionsstätten errichtet und von da aus die internationalen Märkte beliefert. Diese Unternehmen produzieren also nicht in den USA, um Produkte im Ausland zu verkaufen. Das Defizit in der Handelsbilanz der USA erklärt sich in Wahrheit sogar zu einem erheblichen Teil daraus, dass US-Unternehmen die in anderen Ländern gefertigten Produkte auf dem US-Markt verkaufen, was diese dann in der Handelsbilanz als Importe zu Buche schlagen lässt. Verlässliche Schätzungen beziffern den Anteil dieses Handels innerhalb von US-Unternehmen, die im Ausland produzieren und zu Hause verkaufen, auf 45 Prozent aller US-Importe. Die Konzerne sind auf diese Strategie festgelegt und werden sie auf keinen Fall ändern.


Ein zweiter Grund, der gegen eine Trendwende in der US-Handelsbilanz spricht, ist das Wirtschaftswachstum der Vereinigten Staaten, das auch künftig höher liegen wird als das der Eurozone. Das wird den Kauf von Produkten aus der Eurozone durch die USA begünstigen und umgekehrt den Kauf von US-Produkten durch die Länder der Europäischen Union hemmen.


Das heißt aber, dass die Bush-Administration ihre Strategie des schwachen Dollars auf eine falsche Prämisse gründet: Sie geht davon aus, dass sich das Handelsbilanzdefizit verringert, was wohl kaum in nennenswertem Umfang geschehen wird. Im Gegensatz dazu hatte Clintons Finanzminister Robert Rubin eine Politik des starken Dollars betrieben, weil ihm klar war, dass ein starker Dollar ausländisches Kapital anziehen würde.


Das beleuchtet ein weiteres Dilemma, das die Rolle des Reservewährungslandes mit sich bringt. Mit dieser Rolle sind nicht nur große Vorteile, sondern auch schwer zu erfüllende Verpflichtungen verbunden. Denn das betreffende Land nimmt auf den internationalen Märkten - auf dem globalen Basar - auch die Funktion eines buyer of last resort wahr. In dieser Rolle des Abnehmers von Exportprodukten der anderen Länder akkumuliert es gewaltige Zahlungsbilanzdefizite, die es nur ausgleichen kann, wenn es zugleich in der Lage ist, ausländisches Kapital zu importieren.


Fassen wir zusammen: Zwar ergibt sich durch die Verwundbarkeit der US-Währung für den Euro die historische Chance, den Dollar als Reservewährung herauszufordern. Voraussetzung ist aber, dass der Stabilitäts- und Wachstumspakt modifiziert wird, dass die Banken der Eurozone die Modalitäten des grenzüberschreitenden Zahlungsverkehrs reformieren und dass der technologische Abstand zum Bankensektor der USA und Großbritanniens verringert wird. Die jüngste Dollarschwäche, die Abkehr Washingtons vom "Multilateralismus" sowohl in militär- als auch in finanzpolitischer Hinsicht und die unvernünftig hohen Haushaltsdefizite der USA haben das Interesse am Euro als einer potenziellen Reservewährung verstärkt.


Die von anderen Ländern gehaltenen Dollarreserven sind wertmäßig leicht zurückgegangen, auf den Finanzmärkten haben einige der großen Fonds ihre Portfolios leicht zugunsten von Euro-Anlagen umgewichtet, und auf dem Rohölmarkt wurden einige Verkäufe in Euro statt in Dollar fakturiert. Für die EU ergibt sich damit ein neues strategisches Ziel. Wenn sie die Öl exportierenden Länder dazu bewegen kann, sich in Euro statt in Dollar bezahlen zu lassen, wäre in der Konkurrenz um die Rolle der internationalen Reservewährung eine neue Front eröffnet. Entscheidend wird dabei sein, ob Russland seine Ölverkäufe künftig in Euro abrechnet. Die EU könnte diese Entscheidung dadurch beeinflussen, dass sie Moskau als Gegenleistung die langfristige Perspektive einer EU-Mitgliedschaft in Aussicht stellt.




deutsch von Niels Kadritzke

Fußnoten:
(1) Siehe dazu auch Howard M. Wachtel, "The Money Mandarins: The Making of a Supranational Economic Order", New York (Pantheon Books) 1986, S. 40-45. In diesem Buch wird auch der Versuch de Gaulles im Jahre 1967 analysiert, den Dollar zu destabilisieren.
(2) Diese Zahl gilt für das Rechnungsjahr Juli 2002 bis Juni 2003. The Economist, 26. Juli 2003.
(3) Dazu der demnächst erscheinende Beitrag "Tax Distortion in the Global Economy", in: Lourdes Beneria (Hrsg.), "Global Tensions", London (Routledge) 2003.


Le Monde diplomatique Nr. 7178 vom 10.10.2003, 477 Zeilen, HOWARD M. WACHTEL

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November 14, 2003
Q&A: Kenneth Katzman on Iraq

From the Council on Foreign Relations, November 13, 2003


Kenneth Katzman is the senior Middle East analyst for the Congressional Research Service, the federal legislature`s nonpartisan think tank. On November 11, 2003, Katzman participated in a Council-sponsored conference call to brief reporters and editorial-page editors at U.S. and foreign newspapers. Following is an edited transcript of the briefing:

What is your view of the current situation in Iraq?

My view, as I`ve outlined in several talks around Washington in the last couple of months, has always been on the pessimistic side of the spectrum. My view is that the resistance is not confined to a few ex-Baathists or criminals let out of jails or foreign fighters, perhaps even linked to al Qaeda--this is a broad movement. It`s gaining a lot of strength. It is against the U.S. occupation. My view is that the U.S. decision to go with an occupation strategy for the postwar period created this degree of resistance. I don`t believe that it will be calmed easily. The only thing, I think, that would calm the resistance would be a real restructuring of how the postwar operation is conducted. Turning it over to the United Nations is one way to do it; there are other ways. Perhaps even a formulation based on the current Iraqi Governing Council, led perhaps by somebody like Ibrahim Jafari or Mowaffak al-Rubaie. These are the moderate Shiites on the council. My view all along has been that eventually the Shiites are going to be the dominant group in Iraq. And even if a moderate Shiite like Jafari is put up as leader, the Shiite clerics will have very strong influence, particularly Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who is based in Najaf.

So, as long as Iraq appears to be under U.S. occupation, the resistance will continue?

That`s my view, because the administration says this is about creating a democracy. Well, that`s one way of looking at it. But successful democracies are usually created through foreign aid programs, engagement, and national institutions. Since World War II, I can`t think of another attempt to put a democracy in place through force. In Iraq, we had what many editorialists have called a war of choice. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, but he wasn`t on the march in 2003. We are now learning he did not have any weapons of mass destruction and was not necessarily even working on active weapons programs. The U.S. decision to go into Iraq was clearly a choice, and now we`re attempting to impose democracy on a country that was not being aggressive, at least not this year.

Do you see any potential downside for the United States if it turned over this operation to the United Nations?

If control of postwar Iraq is turned over to the United Nations, it`s not going to be viewed any more as a U.S. occupation, and presumably the United Nations would be, as [U.N. Secretary General] Kofi Annan himself has said, looking to quickly restore sovereignty to an Iraqi entity. That entity could be the Iraqi Governing Council, it could be a revised governing council, it could be something new. The issue is not the United Nations per se, the issue is doing away with the occupation. That would go a long way toward calming the resistance. I do believe it is a resistance to occupation.

How do you account for the opposition within the administration to turning control over to the United Nations?

My analysis is, the administration feels that if the United Nations restored sovereignty fairly quickly, as it has said it wants to, a Shiite Islamist would very quickly become dominant. You`d end up with an Iraq that in the minds of many Americans would look like an Islamic Republic of Iraq, a nation that would approximate Iran. And perhaps there is a sense that this outcome would generate some opinion here in the United States that the decision to invade was a failure or didn`t work out as planned. But my view is that the ascendancy of Shiites, and particularly Shiite Islamists, is virtually inevitable. The Shiites are 60 percent of Iraq. However, of the Arab population of Iraq, if you subtract the Kurds, who are only interested in northern Iraq, the Shiites are 80 percent of Iraqi Arabs. Their numbers are overwhelmingly dominant and their political structure is very well organized by the clerics. The Sunni Arabs have no political structure right now. Their political structure was the Baath Party, which is now back underground and leading the resistance.

Is it possible that Shiite Islamists could be in charge of a multiethnic democratic Iraq?

That`s been my view. There are a lot of interlocking relationships. Iraqi Shiites like Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, who was killed in a Najaf bombing in late August, had worked very well with Sunnis and others who were anti-Saddam. Not Islamists necessarily, they also worked very well with the Kurds. [Massoud] Barzani [the head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party] had visited Baqir al-Hakim before his death. I believe Barzani has visited Ayatollah Sistani. So, yes, there could be a political structure in which the Shiite clerics are dominant but there would be room for the Sunnis and the Kurds to participate in a multiethnic Iraq.

Your view of a growing and broad resistance movement is almost diametrically opposed to what we`re being told by most people in the administration. What do your base you conclusion on?

The evidence is out there every day. The sophistication of attacks is clearly growing. [Insurgents have] downed three helicopters within three or four weeks. I`m looking at geographic spread. We had a bombing in Basra today. We`ve had one Polish soldier killed [near Mussayibin]. Brits have been killed in or around Basra. We`ve had attacks up in Mosul. The Sunni triangle has obviously been very widely talked about. The resistance started out in May and June with RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] attacks--one shot, hit-and-run attacks. Now, [insurgents are using] much more well-developed explosives. The device that hit [U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz` hotel [in Baghdad on October 26] was indigenously designed by the resistance. We have these roadside explosions. We`re seeing more mortar attacks now. We`re seeing anti-aircraft attacks.

So I think the facts clearly show that the resistance is growing. Whether it`s reached critical mass, who knows? Or whether it`s going to peter out, or where it goes from here? I personally think it keeps growing. Obviously, the administration would say differently. But look at the sophistication [of the attacks] and the [Iraqi] reaction to resistance attacks. When I see Iraqis dancing with pictures of Saddam around burning U.S. vehicles, that tells me that the resistance is not just a bunch of guys running around by themselves. There is some sympathy out there for these guys, and that is what is most troubling.

We also are having increasing trouble with [anti-U.S. Shiite cleric] Muqtada al-Sadr and the Shiite regions. He has come out even more strongly against the occupation. There have been some soldiers killed by forces or various clerics loyal to him. So I don`t see this as confined to Fallujah. I don`t see this as confined to Tikrit. This is a fairly broad movement.

Will the anti-U.S. sentiment end in a full-fledged resistance?

My personal view is, it virtually is a full-fledged resistance at this point. Some of the Iraqis we are recruiting into the police, the army, and the facilities protection service are feeding information to the resistance and may actually be active members of the resistance. I say that because it appears to me that the resistance has recently had very good information on the movements of U.S. officials around the country, the movements of certain U.S. units, helicopters, vehicles. To my mind, [recent] attacks would not have been so successful without substantial help from informants. So I`m very skeptical of the Iraqification strategy--recruiting Iraqis to maintain security. The British did the very same thing when they occupied Iraq in the `20`s and `30s. They set up tribal militias, local governing councils. Attempts to localize security and governance and institutions generally fall apart when the occupying power either leaves or gets distracted.

Is the situation comparable to Vietnam?

I compare it to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. They wanted to have a pro-Soviet government there. Similarly, we are trying to install a pro-western moderate government in Iraq. A lot of similar patterns are emerging. In Afghanistan, there were at least seven major mujahedeen parties. In Iraq, the resistance is segregated into many different factions, many different groupings. Among the Sunnis are at least two different groups: the ex-Baathists and the Islamists. The latter are Sunnis who are somewhat sympathetic to a Saudi version of Sunni Islam Wahhabism, somewhat sympathetic to al Qaeda, probably working with some of the foreign Arab fighters who have come into Iraq. Within the Shiites, you have several different camps. I`ve talked already about Muqtada al-Sadr. But I think other Shiite factions are going to become more anti-occupation as time goes on and they become impatient for a major role in governing Iraq.

I don`t see why you feel that the resistance would stop if the United Nations took over political authority. Who would be the military authority? If it remains the United States, why would the resistance stop?

If the United Nations were in control, presumably sovereignty would be quickly turned over to the Iraqis. Then the Iraqi insurgents` quibble would be with the new sovereign body. Their quibble would no longer necessarily be with the United States, because the United States would have transferred sovereignty to an Iraqi body. The whole dynamic changes at that point. Obviously, we can debate it, it`s all hypothetical. But I really think the dynamic changes dramatically if Iraq gets sovereignty.

If the United States let the United Nations take over and it then transferred sovereignty to an Iraqi body, what would happen to the almost $20 billion Congress approved for reconstruction? Do we not spend the money?

My understanding is that it is the U.S. donation made at the World Bank donor`s conference held in Madrid in late October. The $20 billion would be the U.S. pledge.



Copyright 2003

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Hardcore protesters plot to halt traffic
Jamie Wilson
Saturday November 15, 2003
The Guardian

The centrepiece of next week`s Stop the War march to coincide with George Bush`s state visit will be the symbolic toppling of a six metre high statue of the 43rd president. But long before the papier-mache figure is pulled from one of the plinths in Trafalgar Square a group of direct action protesters will hope to have put their own indelible mark on the visit.

While the Stop the War Coalition, the Muslim Council of Britain, and CND are urging more than 100,000 people to take to the streets on Thursday for what they hope will be the biggest anti-war demonstration since the start of the invasion of Iraq, those involved in direct action are unlikely to number more than a few hundred.

But despite the relatively small numbers involved, much of the £4m security operation put in place by Scotland Yard will be taken up with trying to counter the actions of these hardcore protesters in a giant game of cat and mouse across central London.

Set up under the umbrella name "Resist Bush", the action is being spearheaded by several groups including Justice Not Vengeance (JNV), Grass Roots Opposition to War (Grow) and Voices in the Wilderness.

Many of those involved have become tired of the Stop the War demonstrations, which they say have become little more than talking shops.

"The marches have been great at mobilising large numbers of people, but at some point we need to go further to really get our point across," one 23-year-old activist told the Guardian. "I don`t think Bush realises just how angry people in this country are and how offensive his coming here is. Well, we`re going to let him know."

Those with their ears to the ground - including the police - are not expecting any largescale assaults in the style of the G8 conference in Genoa in 2002, which resulted in clashes with Italian police when a protester was killed.

Instead the direct action is likely to take the form of what one seasoned watcher termed "freelance" operations, involving small groups breaking off from the main body and performing random acts.

"In my experience the most effective direct action is usually spontaneous," said another protester, a veteran of direct action at US airbases during the Iraq war. "You need to see what the police are doing, where the cordons are and then react to the situation. At the moment we don`t even know what Bush`s itinerary is or where he is going to be."

Most of the actions are likely to involve attempting to block roads in an effort to gridlock the centre of the capital. There has even been rumours that protesters have been making their own "Road Closed" signs in an attempt to add to the chaos.

Another popular tactic is for groups to perform symbolic "die-ins" which involve groups of protesters lying down in the middle of the road. The protests are also likely to involve large amounts of red dye sprinkled around central London to symbolise the blood spilt in Iraq.

Resist Bush has set up workshops for those who want to be involved in direct action. Protesters are taught how to work in small groups to take on particular targets. But much of the emphasis has been on making sure those who plan to get involved understand their legal rights and the possible consequences of being arrested.

"There are worse things in the world than being nicked, but it is really important that people like teachers, who could face serious disciplinary action, understand what they might be letting themselves in for," one of the activists said. "But compared to the suffering of the people of Iraq it is a small price to pay."

· More than 100,000 people will take to the streets next week for three days of protests, according to Stop the War

· Protests kick off on Tuesday night with a Burning Planet march organised by Campaign Against Climate Change, but the first big flashpoint is likely on Wednesday with mass protest and civil disobedience at a Resist Bush "tea party" planned outside Buckingham Palace

· Between 60,000 and 100,000 are expected to join the Stop the War Coalition demonstration and rally on Thursday afternoon. There could be trouble if it is not allowed to march past parliament and up Whitehall


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Gunships ram home might of US firepower
Rory McCarthy
Saturday November 15, 2003
The Guardian

The US military has begun fresh "offensive operations" in Baghdad in an attempt to take on Iraq`s growing guerrilla movement.

Evidence on the ground suggests the attacks are as much a message of superior firepower as about apprehending resistance fighters.

"What you are seeing from the coalition forces are offensive operations that are intended to go out and find the terrorists in their lairs," said Lieutenant Colonel George Krivo, a US military spokesman.

Codenamed "Iron Hammer," the sweep began on Wednesday night when an AC-130 Spectre gunship, equipped with heavy and light-calibre cannon delivering devastating firepower, shot up an empty textile warehouse in south Baghdad apparently used as a resistance gathering point.

On Thursday night, tanks and another AC-130 fired at a base once used by Saddam Hussein`s eldest son, Qusay, as well as Special Security and Special Republican Guard forces.

The assault, together with similar operations elsewhere in Baghdad, amounted to one of the heaviest nights of explosions since the war.

Iraqis living near the base in Farat, west Baghdad, said that it had been heavily bombed during the war, but even yesterday looters were still stripping iron wires from inside the concrete walls.

Thursday night`s attack damaged a roof and adjoining walls but left the complex of buildings standing.

Residents yesterday admitted that three days earlier, rocket-propelled grenades had been fired from the site at a US base.

But the residents appeared confused by the message the new tactic was delivering. They said American soldiers had knocked on their doors early on Thursday evening to warn them an attack was coming.

"The Americans told us to take care of the children and to stop them running outside in the streets.

"They told us they wanted to flatten those buildings. I don`t know why they did it," said Ashraf Ahmed, 19.

Several Iraqi guards from the Facility Protection Service, helping to guard the nearby US base, questioned the attack`s effectiveness.

"I don`t see how this is going to work. People who really want to attack the Americans are not going to stop because a building has been destroyed," said one, who declined to give his name.

"The bombing just made people afraid and it didn`t achieve much. They want to make people afraid, both the resistance and civilians, and to show they are here and they are strong. It felt like the first day of the war again."

Mortars had fired back at the Americans` hilltop position during the operation, he added.

Lt Col Krivo defended the use of heavy weaponry. "It is not unusual for coalition commanders on the ground to call for overwhelming firepower," he said.

The AC-130, a version of the Hercules transport plane, was first used in Vietnam to lay down a carpet of fire. Upgraded and fitted with more weaponry and electronics, it was deployed in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, and more recently against the Taliban in Afghanistan. It has a side-firing 105mm howitzer, 40mm cannon, and a 25mm Gatling gun firing 1,800 rounds a minute.

Lt Col Krivo said there had been a "migration of tactics" whereby resistance fighters were relying more and more on mortars and rockets to hit at US bases and convoys, and the US was in part trying to hit "terrorist mortar teams".

In the past fortnight several mortar rounds and rockets have have landed inside Baghdad`s "green zone" protecting the US military and civilian headquarters. One attack this week destroyed several parked cars, although no one was injured.

US military officials admitted that their missions would no doubt provoke an increase in attacks on US forces.

"It is not surprising that we are seeing a reaction from the enemy as we go out and attack them," Lt Col Krivo said.

Near Saddam Hussein`s hometown of Tikrit, a US Apache helicopter on Thursday night killed seven Iraqis who the military said were preparing to fire rockets at a US base. A store of 600 missiles and rockets was found.

Carlos Raleiras, a reporter for the Portuguese radio station TSF, was kidnapped in south Iraq yesterday after a convoy of three cars driving from Kuwait to Basra was shot at. Maria Joao Ruela, of the Portuguese TV network SIC, was wounded in the leg.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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American expatriates to lead the protests against Bush
By Marie Woolf, Chief Political Correspondent
15 November 2003


Americans marching beneath a banner proclaiming "Proud of My Country, Shamed by My President" will lead a demonstration against George Bush during his state visit next week. The Stop the War Coalition, which is organising the rally, expects up to 100,000 people to take to the streets of London and express their hostility to the American President.

Trade union members, Muslim groups, environmentalists and peace activists will join forces for the march, with about a hundred US expats, who are adamant the event should be perceived as an indictment of their President, not a snub to their country.

Luke Robinson, 29, a website developer from the United States who has lived in Britain for four years, is among those who will attend the protest. He will be joined by American academics and City workers."Most of us love our country and won`t take any anti-American sentiment but we feel this guy is leading us down a bad path," he said. "Allowing a fully fledged state visit is [sending] a bad message that Britain is really backing Bush. The pictures from this visit will definitely be used in his election campaign."

Demonstrators carrying placards reading "Bush - Blair Dumb and Dumber", "Bush Eco-terrorist" and "George W.ar Criminal", as well as blood-splattered anti-Bush banners, will gather in Trafalgar Square where a mock statue of the US President will be symbolically toppled.

Coachloads of demonstrators who oppose the war in Iraq and Mr Bush`s environmental and economic policies are to be bused in from Wales, Scotland and the West Country among other points. Michael Moore, the American film maker and comedian who is known for his outspoken views on the US leader, is donating $1,000 to transport demonstrators in from Manchester. Pupils missing school, worshippers from mosques around Britain and a busload of pensioners from an old people`s home in Hounslow, west London, will also join the march to express their anger at the visit. Alongside them will be members of the far-left Socialist Workers` Party, the Labour Party and Liberal Democrats, and peace demonstrators from CND and other anti-war groups. A large contingent of Greens will make their feelings known on President Bush`s environmental policies. They plan to express their opposition with a week of events including a street party and an anti-Bush home-made T-shirt competition outside Buckingham Palace on Wednesday evening.

"Bush would be better off staying at home to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming than coming to Britain," said Spencer Fitzgibbon, a former army officer and member of the Green Party executive.

The exact route of the march is still being negotiated with the Metropolitan Police, who will have 5,000 officers on duty. The protesters want to parade past the Houses of Parliament and Downing Street but police have suggested a shorter route, which would keep them away from Whitehall.

There will be 500 stewards to try to ensure the march does not deteriorate into the sort of violent attacks on American businesses, such as McDonald`s restaurants, that have marred anti-capitalism demonstrations in recent years.

The march organisers insist they have not had any trouble during seven previous events and insist Thursday`s protest will not be hijacked by anarchist groups. Meetings with the police yesterday were said to have been constructive. They will meet again on Monday to discuss the route.

A spokesman for the Stop the War Coalition said: "We are not anti the American people - in fact many share our reservations about President Bush. This is about the President. There are 500 local Stop the War groups who are bringing people from around the country and the phones are ringing non-stop. We are making 6,000 placards."

The march represents the main event in four days of anti-Bush events, for which the President has drafted in an entourage of more than 500 people, including up to 200 secret service and security personnel. On Tuesday activists are organising a public rally in London with high-profile speakers including the acclaimed playwright and actor Harold Pinter, and the Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, whose story inspired the Tom Cruise film Born on the Fourth of July. The former Labour cabinet minister Tony Benn and George Galloway MP, who was recently thrown out of the Labour Party for his public comments about the war, will also speak.

There will be a march to the American consulate in Edinburgh on Wednesday and a petition from people throughout Britain will be presented to Downing Street on Monday.
15 November 2003 11:11


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Corin Redgrave: Britain`s detainees must be returned from Guantanamo
As the lawyers have pointed out, a Cuban iguana has protection on Guantanamo but not the detainees
15 November 2003


Moazzam Begg, a teacher, had one ambition. He wanted to teach poor children in an underdeveloped country. He chose Afghanistan. Born in Britain, with a UK passport, he left this country with his wife and three small children in the spring of 2001. While waiting for permission to begin teaching from the Taliban authorities he joined a programme sinking tube wells for local villagers. Then came 9/11.

On the night of 2 February 2002 Moazzam was dragged from his bed by two Pakistani security service agents and two CIA officers and bundled into the boot of their car. He was abducted to the vast sprawling prison at Bagram near Kabul where he spent the next year in detention, half starved, with all his fingernails extracted, hardly seeing the light of day. In the spring of this year he was transferred by plane, blindfolded and shackled, to Guantanamo.

Moazzam is one of the 650 detainees whom their captors call "illegal combatants", a definition unknown in international law. By law, of course, their status ought to be determined, and Geneva Convention III.5 lays down such a procedure. The US has incorporated the procedure in its army regulations: "All persons taken into custody by US forces will be provided with the protections of the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War until some legal status is determined by a competent authority."

These provisions were drafted so as to prevent what has happened to Moazzam and hundreds of others, innocent civilians caught up in the chaos of war and dragged into captivity. In an investigation by Newsweek the reporters say that of the Kuwaiti detainees whose cases they were able to follow, most were "little more than volunteers for their society`s version of faith-based charities, who wanted to help Afghans suffering from drought and famine and then from the war, but discovered, once the conflict began, that they could not get out".

For the first time in history the US court has ruled that people jailed by the US government with no rights whatsoever cannot even petition the court to consider their claims. To arrive at this ruling the District of Columbia circuit court twisted a precedent, Johnson vs Eisentrager, to make it mean that aliens could be held indefinitely without charge, without right to counsel, and without access to any judicial oversight or review.

The dangers of this ruling can hardly be exaggerated. For more than 200 years American courts have been the guardians of the country`s legal principles, empowered to test the legality of the government`s actions. The DC circuit court decision relieves Bush`s administration of any obligation to explain its actions or justify them.

Donald Rumsfeld saidthe prisoners would stay in Guantanamo "until the war on terrorism is over". Some prisoners may be tried by military tribunals, he said, "but our interest is not in trying them and letting them out. During this global war on terror, our interest is in keeping them off the streets, and that is what we`re doing".

The DC district court`s decision rests on a technicality. The 45 square miles of Guantanamo Bay were leased by Cuba to the US for perpetuity in 1903, revocable only by agreement of both parties. The US has jurisdiction and control but not sovereignty over the territory.

It is the flimsiest of pretexts. American laws apply on Guantanamo to every other man, woman and child. US citizens and non-citizens alike are governed there by US civil and criminal laws. Even an animal on Guantanamo is protected by US law from wanton cruelty, and anyone who violates such law is subject to the penalties prescribed by law. And thus, as the US attorneys who petitioned the court on behalf of Kuwaiti detainees observed, a Cuban iguana has protection against cruelty on Guantanamo, but not the detainees.

Belatedly the US Supreme Court has aroused itself to the extraordinary dangers of the lower courts` decision, and has voted for a judicial review. For the prisoners this offers a thin ray of light. For the British Government it offers acute embarrassment, because they will have to make a submission on behalf of the nine British detainees, and will have to rest that submission on the application of human rights law to their citizens, and on the unlawfulness of their coalition partner`s conduct.

Why have they not done so before? The British Government is reluctant to accuse the American government of breaking the law in its detention of aliens because it is doing the same thing itself. Britain also holds aliens, without charge, indefinitely, in prisons such as Belmarsh, on British soil. The only difference is that George Bush`s regulations were drafted after 9/11, whereas ours are contained in the Terrorism 2000 Act.

In the discussions preceding George Bush`s state visit there will likely be some further concessions for the British detainees. If real enough they will be welcomed by the detainees and their families. But they will also serve only to emphasise the extent to which both governments have sacrificed human rights and civil liberties in pursuit of their terrible war on terrorism. Only the freedom and return to Britain of its citizens can satisfy anyone who believes in justice and law.

The author is organising a symposium on Guantanamo and human rights, chaired by Helena Kennedy, in London on Sunday 23 November. (www.peaceandprogress.org)
15 November 2003 11:15


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Army Specialist Robert Brown, left, of Waco, Tex., guards a checkpoint south of Tikrit with Nativ Kazaum, of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.
November 15, 2003
U.S. Is Set to Return Power to Iraqis as Early as June
By SUSAN SACHS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 14 — The Bush administration has agreed to restore independence to Iraq as early as next June, apparently hoping the move will change the perception of the United States as an occupying power and curb the mounting attacks on American forces in the country, Iraqi and American officials said Friday.

The plan to accelerate the transfer of power was put forward by Iraqi leaders this week, and taken to Washington by L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq. Late on Friday, officials said, a newly returned Mr. Bremer hastened to tell members of the Iraqi Governing Council`s inner leadership circle that the White House had broadly accepted the plan.

Mr. Bremer is to meet with the full 24-member council on Saturday.

The agreement envisions giving Iraqis control over their own wealth and political affairs in advance of writing a constitution or holding national elections, while maintaining the presence of American and other foreign troops to assure stability, officials said.

"This is good for everyone," said Ahmad Chalabi, a council member who saw Mr. Bremer on Friday night. "We will have the U.S. forces here, but they will change from occupiers to a force that is here at the invitation of the Iraqi government."

The plan to give power to an Iraqi provisional government represents a sharp change in American policy, which had been focused on retaining control until a new constitution was adopted and elections held.

The switch occurred as American deaths have mounted rapidly, with 22 soldiers killed just this month when two helicopters were shot down. Three soldiers were killed and five were wounded in two roadside bombings Thursday and Friday. The increasing danger has prompted more questioning in Washington of the Bush administration`s policy and planning for Iraq after Saddam Hussein was ousted in April.

Over the past month, it also became clear that the Iraqis in the Governing Council — the only native political authority, albeit unelected — were not willing to risk a public split over the process of drafting a constitution, which would inevitably open up a divisive debate over the future role of the Muslim clergy.

The deadlock demonstrated the new muscle of Iraq`s majority Shiite Muslims, long oppressed by Saddam Hussein and his predecessors. They now hold a majority of seats on the Governing Council and insisted that it adhere to a ruling by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading Shiite authority in Iraq, saying that only an elected body should write a new constitution.

The Iraqis also faced a United Nations Security Council deadline of Dec. 15 to establish a timetable for a constitution and national elections to gain international recognition.

Their solution, as proposed to Mr. Bremer this week, was to demand sovereignty first and schedule elections later. Bush administration officials, who have said they wanted to turn over authority to Iraqis as soon as practicable, largely accepted the Iraqi plan, said an American official who traveled with Mr. Bremer.

Ayatollah Sistani, according to clerics close to him, supports the plan. Leaders of Iraq`s Kurds, who dominate in the north, and of the minority Sunni Muslims predominant in the center said they also viewed it as a way to avoid a showdown that could alienate large sections of the Iraqi public and destabilize the country further.

"Of course we want a constitution, but it is not as much a priority as sovereignty," said Sheik Jalal Uldin al-Saghir, a Shiite cleric who defended the ayatollah`s edict on the council`s constitutional committee.

"I think we can have elections by the end of 2004," added Sheik Saghir, who announced Mr. Bremer`s acceptance of the sovereignty plan in his sermon at Friday Prayers. "But, before that, we must go through a process of transferring authority and a transitional period."

Iraqi leaders have pressed for more control over security, demanding that American troops pull out of Iraqi cities and turn over policing and intelligence-gathering to Iraqis.

While there is no certainty that attacks on American forces will diminish after this happens, Iraqi leaders believe that they will. "The occupation itself is a source of insecurity," said Adel Abdel Mahdi, the Governing Council representative of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the main Shiite political party.

Whatever the final shape of the agreement reached between Mr. Bremer and the Governing Council, President Bush made it clear this week that he had no plans to withdraw the American military presence for some time — perhaps until Mr. Hussein is caught.

Mr. Bush told British reporters it was "inconceivable" that he would consider pulling all American troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan anytime soon. "We`re not pulling out until the job is done. Period," he told the reporters, who saw him in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

"And that includes finding those two?" the reporters asked, referring to Mr. Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

"Yes, that`s part of it," he said. "But an even bigger is a free and democratic society. That is the mission."

By defining the mission that way, Mr. Bush appeared to set a relatively high standard — that American troops, at some level, would be in Iraq and Afghanistan until there was an assurance of a stable democracy. But after sovereignty is returned to Iraq, one senior American official said, the United States forces would be in the country at the "invitation of the new government."

The Iraqi political leaders said they also planned to adopt a basic law setting out fundamental principles for the new Iraq, like equality for all sects and respect for human rights. The law, they said, would serve as the guide for their transitional government.

They said they would also expand the council`s political base by forming a new legislative assembly of about 200 people, to be elected or designated in provincial meetings.

That assembly would appoint the provisional government, which would call for elections once a census is completed. Mr. Chalabi said he expected the process to take about 14 months, to be followed by a constitutional convention and then elections, possibly in 2006.

Iraqi political parties had proposed essentially the same plan for a legislative assembly and a transitional government in the weeks immediately following the fall of Baghdad and the ouster of the government of Mr. Hussein.

But Mr. Bremer and his British counterpart in the occupation administration rejected the proposal then, saying the Iraqis were not ready to assume political power. Instead, the Governing Council was created with limited powers to oversee government ministers and propose legislation to the occupation authority.

They have chafed under the restrictions ever since. The council meets only three days a week, and many of the political leaders who are members rarely attend.

Officials in the occupation authority have also expressed frustration with the present political setup, particularly the Governing Council`s monthly rotating presidency. Mr. Bremer, administration officials said, will insist that the council provide him with a single Iraqi interlocutor to provide more consistency in his dealings with the Iraqi political body. It is not clear who, if anybody, on the council possesses the standing to assume such a role.


David E. Sanger, in Washington, contributed reporting for this article.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 15, 2003
Q&A: Iraq`s Tribes

From the Council on Foreign Relations, November 15, 2003


What part can tribes play in Iraqi politics?

Experts disagree. U.S. military officials have sought the cooperation of many local tribal leaders, but it is difficult to determine how much political authority tribes and sheiks still exercise. There is, however, a consensus among experts that tribal traditions remain culturally important to many Iraqis.

Why are occupation authorities reaching out to them?

Tribes are regional power-holders. Each has a geographical area associated with it. Building relationships with tribes, especially in the Sunni triangle--the center of the anti-U.S. insurgency--could help stem the ongoing resistance to U.S. forces, some experts say. More broadly, there are few social organizations for U.S. forces to work through as they try to win over the hearts and minds of Iraqis. Other national groups that, for better or worse, unified the people--Saddam Hussein`s Baath Party, the nation`s large army--no longer exist, and most political parties are just beginning to gather strength.

What is the relationship between tribal leaders and religious leaders?

Among Iraq`s Shiite majority, religious leaders appear to be a more potent political force, some experts say. Fatwas, or rulings, by Iraq`s top Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, are broadly respected and followed. That said, religious leaders, including Sistani, appear to derive some of their strength from tribal connections. One example: when militiamen tied to an increasingly influential cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, beseiged Sistani`s home in April, armed men loyal to local tribal leaders came to his aid, according to press accounts. In Iraq`s Sunni population, religious leaders have had a lower public profile.

What role are the tribes playing in Iraq now?

Tribes appear to have limited influence in Baghdad. In smaller cities and rural areas, however--especially in the Shiite-dominated south--press reports indicate that many tribal sheiks have emerged as intermediaries between occupying authorities and the Iraqi people. The U.S. occupation government in Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional Authority, has been meeting regularly with tribal sheiks to discuss reconstruction and security, according to press reports. U.S. military forces are seeking greater cooperation with tribes, especially in the Sunni triangle: in early November, General John P. Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, held a meeting with mayors and sheiks in the region`s al-Anbar province to discuss security.

What is a sheik?

In Arabic, sheik means leader, or simply a venerable male elder, and each level of tribal organization--tribe, clan, and house--generally has a sheik at its head, says Iraqi tribal expert Amatzia Baram, a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington and a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Haifa in Israel. Because there are so many sheiks, finding one with a significant degree of authority can be a challenge for U.S. occupiers. Another problem: Saddam subverted the traditional tribal hierarchy and elevated many sheiks in return for their cooperation.

What is a sheik`s traditional role?

Sheiks are traditionally responsible for protecting their people from harm and guaranteeing them a basic level of economic well-being. They also act as mediators and judges, settle disputes, resolve property claims, and suggest marriages, among other roles. In exchange, they have their people`s allegiance, Baram says. For centuries, sheiks were appointed by a council of elders within a tribe, and a sheik`s authority was not unlimited. The British--who ruled Iraq between 1920 and 1932--eliminated some of these checks and balances to exercise stricter control over Iraq`s tribesmen. In essence, this turned tribal sheiks into the sole source of law and authority in wide stretches of Iraq`s countryside.

What do the sheiks working with U.S. forces do?

They are serving as conduits for reconstruction aid and, to some extent, they provide security by organizing guards to protect pipelines and other infrastructure. In exchange, U.S. forces have asked sheiks to contain anti-U.S. violence in their areas. However, U.S.-tribal cooperation in some cases has failed to take hold or is mishandled by coalition forces, some experts say. The web of tribal allegiances is complex, and the U.S.-led authority lacks sufficient local knowledge to operate within it, Baram says.

Are tribes playing a national political role?

At least two tribal coalitions led by Sunnis in Baghdad are trying to represent the wants and needs of tribal leaders to the new authorities. The Iraqi National League for Chiefs of Tribes, headed by Thameer al-Dulemi, and the Iraqi Tribal National Council, led by Hussein Ali Shaalan, both claim hundreds of sheiks as members, press reports say.

What are these organizations trying to accomplish?

They are trying to influence domestic and international politics. In September, Shaalan`s group met in Damascus with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to discuss Syrian-Iraqi relations. Al-Dulemi`s group issued a statement condemning the coalition`s plan, which was later shelved, to deploy Turkish peacekeepers to Iraq. Some reports indicate there are Shiite tribal leaders within the ranks of these organizations. The level of popular support for these groups is unknown.

Should the United States engage more with Sunni tribal leaders?

Experts disagree. In the short-term, securing cooperation from the Iraqi tribes in the Sunni triangle could help stem the growing resistance to U.S. forces and bring more areas under control. The handpicked Iraqi Governing Council does not include any Sunni tribal representatives, and the religious group--in accordance with their population in Iraq--are a minority on the council. Sunnis dominated Iraq under Saddam`s rule, and the Baath Party was largely Sunni. Some scholars believe this population is now dangerously alienated.

What are the arguments against working with tribes?

Engaging closely with tribal sheiks across Iraq shores up their power. Some scholars argue this could hurt a longer-term effort to create a unified national identity and a political party system in which Iraqis do not vote along strictly sectarian lines.

What are the origins of Iraq`s tribes?

Most of them formed in the Arabian Peninsula and migrated north, and some are from the lands that constitute modern-day Iraq. Some tribes pre-date Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, who lived in Arabia in the sixth and seventh centuries and was himself a member of the Quraysh tribe. For centuries, the tribes were the primary form of social organization through much of the region. While their influence has diminished through the years, the Ottoman Turks, the British, the British-backed monarchy, and the Baathists all sought their cooperation.

What binds a tribe together?

A mixture of shared ancestry, geography, and a strict social code that demands allegiance between members. Ethnic background and religion are less important factors--in fact, some tribes in Iraq have Sunni, Shiite, and even Kurdish branches. In some cases, tribal affiliation is a much older bond than religious affiliation. For example, a number of tribes in southern Iraq adopted Shiite Islam only in the 19th century.

What are the main Iraqi tribes?

Many Iraqi Arabs can trace their ancestry back to one of nine tribal confederations, or qabila, that arose in Iraq before the 17th century, says Yitzhak Nakash, author of the "Shi`is of Iraq" and a professor of Middle East studies at Brandeis University. Each of the confederations--the Muntafiq, the Zubayd, the Dulaym, the `Ubayd, the Khaz`al, the Bani Lam, the Al Bu Muhammed, the Rabi`a, and the Ka`b--encompasses many individual tribes. By the 19th century, the tribal map of Iraq was filled out by other powerful confederations and tribes, including the Shammar, the `Anaza, the Bani Tamim, and the Zafir.

How many tribes are there in Iraq today?

It`s not known exactly, in part because comprehensive anthropological research has not been conducted in Iraq for decades. That said, tribes have grown and divided over the centuries, and there are certainly hundreds--and likely more than 1,000--tribal organizations now in Iraq, Baram estimates. Of these, Baram says there are likely 20-30 large tribes or federations that have 100,000 or more descendents. A caveat: Arab tribal society is traditionally ordered on multiple levels--by confederation, tribe, clan, house, and extended family. Deciphering which unit is being referred to by the word "tribe" from one situation to the next can be difficult.

What tribes are the most powerful in Iraq today?

In general, Sunni tribes that were favored by Saddam, although members of some of these tribes have occasionally attempted to rebel against him. This includes the Dulaym confederation, which occupies a wide stretch of territory in central Iraq, and the Shammar, which lives north of Baghdad between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. Other important Sunni tribes include the al-Jaburi, the Ubaydis, and the `Azza. Saddam particularly favored members of his own tribe, the al-Bu Nasir--though he also made enemies within the tribe by murdering members he considered disloyal.

How have tribes been weakened over the centuries?

In Iraq, significant blows to tribal authority came in the 1960s. Socialist Baathists split up large estates of the tribal sheiks and enforced land reform. Millions of Iraqis moved into cities, taking jobs in industry as Iraq began to build a modern economy. Tribalism was originally condemned by the Baathists. Their push for a unified Arab nationalism and the widespread migration from traditional tribal areas eroded tribal ties.

Why didn`t tribes disappear under the Baathists?

In part because, in the late 1980s and 1990s, Saddam shifted his political program and openly supported the tribal sheiks. Experts say this was at least partially a reaction to the erosion of Saddam`s power after the disastrous eight-year Iran-Iraq war and Iraq`s defeat in Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War. Giving tribal leaders money and significant autonomy over their areas in exchange for their allegiance helped control the countryside and force recruitment for the Iraqi army. Overall, tribes have proved to be resilient social structures, enduring through the advent of Islam--which encourages all Muslims to think of themselves as part of a single community and opposes some traditional tribal practices--as well as concepts of modern nationalism.

What percent of the population associates itself politically with a tribe?

It`s unknown. But because Iraq`s population of 24 million is quite urbanized-- in 1988, just 27 percent of Iraqis lived in the countryside--some experts say the number is likely around 25 percent of the population or less. On the other hand, cultural tribal values--such as allegiance to members of one`s clan or tribe, avenging the blood of a relative (al-tha`r), and demonstrating one`s manly courage in battle (al-muruwwah), are still thought to be important to many Iraqis, even, to some extent, in cities. One example: according to statistics cited in The New York Times, nearly half of all marriages recorded in Baghdad over the past two decades were between first or second cousins, a common tribal custom. "Iraqi culture builds to a very large extent on tribal traditions. From a cultural point of view, you cannot understand Iraq without understanding the importance of tribalism," Nakash says.

What is the most basic unit of tribal organization in Iraq?

The extended family, or khams. According to Baram, a khams consists of all male-born children who share the same great-great grandfather-- in other words, five generations of men in a single family. Of all the levels of tribal organization, Baram believes the khams remains the most vital. "Once the khams structure is broken, there`s no longer a tribal society in place," he says.

How does the khams function?

Within each khams, every man owes allegiance to the other. The most dramatic display of this loyalty is found in the tradition of blood feuds, or al-tha`r. According to Baram, if one member of a khams is killed, other members are obligated to avenge the death. This could take the form of killing someone from the khams that murdered the family member or, more commonly, working out a blood price--a financial repayment--from one khams to another.

How common is this practice today?

It`s difficult to know for sure. Some experts feared that revenge killings would skyrocket in southern Iraq in the chaotic period immediately after Saddam fell. They didn`t, some experts say, because Shiite clerics in the city of Najaf-- especially Ayatollah al-Sistani--issued fatwas that ordered Iraqi Shiites to refrain from such attacks. Even so, the practice continues to some extent: in Basra, an ongoing feud between two tribes--the Bukhatra and the Bukeheet--has resulted in the deaths of seven tribal members since June, according to The New York Times. Particularly in the Sunni triangle, some scholars see echoes of the blood feud tradition in some killings of U.S. soldiers, especially after Iraqis have been killed in the same area.

How do women fit into the picture?

They are members of their father`s tribe. But when they are married, they become members of their husband`s tribe. This explains why marriages between first cousins in traditional tribal society are not uncommon, Baram says. If a man`s daughters marry out of the clan or tribe, he no longer has benefit of her or her sons, who could one day increase the clan`s strength.

What are the other levels of tribal organization?

A biet, or "house," is similar to a khams. It can resemble a single, vast extended family with hundreds of members.
A number of "houses" form a clan, or fakhdh.
A group of clans forms an `ashira, or tribal organization. For example, in Falluja, the tribe named for the town--al-Fallujiyyin--has 16 clans, according to Iraqi genealogical charts from the 1980s. Tribes can vary widely in size--they can have a few thousand or 100,000 members.
A group of tribes forms a confederation, or qabila, which consists of a number of tribes. In Saddam`s case, his Al-bu Nasir tribe was part of a federation named after the town, al-Tikriti.

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

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November 15, 2003
The Wal-Martization of America

The 70,000 grocery workers on strike in Southern California are the front line in a battle to prevent middle-class service jobs from turning into poverty-level ones. The supermarkets say they are forced to lower their labor costs to compete with Wal-Mart, a nonunion, low-wage employer aggressively moving into the grocery business. Everyone should be concerned about this fight. It is, at bottom, about the ability of retail workers to earn wages that keep their families out of poverty.

Grocery stores in Southern California are bracing for the arrival, in February, of the first of 40 Wal-Mart grocery supercenters. Wal-Mart`s prices are about 14 percent lower than other groceries` because the company is aggressive about squeezing costs, including labor costs. Its workers earn a third less than unionized grocery workers, and pay for much of their health insurance. Wal-Mart uses hardball tactics to ward off unions. Since 1995, the government has issued at least 60 complaints alleging illegal anti-union activities.

Southern California`s supermarket chains have reacted by demanding a two-year freeze on current workers` salaries and lower pay for newly hired workers, and they want employees to pay more for health insurance. The union counters that if the supermarkets match Wal-Mart, their workers will be pushed out of the middle class. Those workers are already only a step — or a second family income — from poverty, with wages of roughly $18,000 a year. Wal-Mart sales clerks make about $14,000 a year, below the $15,060 poverty line for a family of three.

Wal-Mart may also be driving down costs by using undocumented immigrants. Last month, federal agents raided Wal-Marts in 21 states. Wal-Mart is facing a grand jury investigation, and a civil racketeering class-action filed by cleaners who say they were underpaid when working for contractors hired by Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart insists that it was unaware of its contractors` practices. But aware or not, it may have helped to deprive legally employable janitors of jobs and adequate pay.

This Wal-Martization of the work force, to which other low-cost, low-pay stores also contribute, threatens to push many Americans into poverty. The first step in countering it is to enforce the law. The government must act more vigorously, and more quickly, when Wal-Mart uses illegal tactics to block union organizing. And Wal-Mart must be made to pay if it exploits undocumented workers.

Unions understand that the quickest way to win this war is to organize Wal-Mart workers. And Wal-Mart`s competitors have to strive for Wal-Mart`s efficiency without making workers bear the brunt. Consumers can also play a part. Wal-Mart likes to wrap itself in American values. It should be reminded that one of those is paying workers enough to give their families a decent life.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 15, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Swords Into Plowshares
By DAVID BROOKS

I`ve been waiting for one of the trailing Democratic presidential candidates to give the following speech. Since none have, I`m offering it to them, free of charge:

My fellow Democrats, it`s good to be back in New Hampshire today. But I`d like to throw away my stump speech and talk honestly about the state of this campaign.

I am losing. Howard Dean is crushing me. He has money. He has a movement. And he`s had one other big advantage: no opposition.

From the moment his campaign took off, the rest of us contenders tried to mimic his success. We ratcheted up our attacks on the Bush administration. We became more combative. We attacked the war in Iraq. In short, we`ve tried to be better Howard Deans than Howard Dean. The results have been pathetic.

Oh sure, we sniped at him at times. We pointed out his flip-flops and his gaffes. But Dean`s core strength is that he is tough enough to stand up to the Republicans. His supporters don`t care if he`s flip-flopped on issues or if he makes a gaffe or two. They just want to know he can take on Karl Rove.

Howard Dean is liberal aggression, and none of us have ever taken that on until today. But now I am relaunching my campaign around one simple slogan: Stop the War.

I don`t mean the war in Iraq. I mean the war at home. I mean the partisan war between Republicans and Democrats that rages every day in Washington and produces behavior that would be unacceptable in any other arena of life. I mean the war that poisons our airwaves, clogs up our best-seller lists and stagnates our politics.

I`ve lived at the front: it`s in Washington, D.C. This is World War I. Each party has its trench works. Each party has its heavy artillery. Anybody who dares wander from the predictable party lines and do something unorthodox gets his head blown off.

Nothing ever changes.

If Dean is our nominee, he may fight the Beltway wars more aggressively than other Democrats, but we will still be a nation at war. I have seen Dean up close. The man hates his opponents. His kind thrives only during times of domestic war.

If we nominate Dean, it will be bad for our party and bad for our country. It will be bad for our party because 40 percent of the voters in this nation call themselves moderates.

If we nominate Dean, George Bush will have a good shot at winning a large chunk of those votes. That`s disgraceful after the partisan way George Bush has led this country. But it will be our fault because we nominated someone just as partisan on the other side.

But suppose Dean does win the White House. He`ll propose some good legislation. I`ll support it, but it will never get passed. Because each party will still be down in its trenches, and nothing will move except the bouncing of the rubble and the writhing of the wounded.

We`ve all seen the Dean style. If he is elected, we will be a nation at war every second of his term. I don`t even want to think about what our country would be like after four years of that.

Remember when George Bush used to say he was going to change the tone in Washington? He lied about that. He couldn`t even reach out to Jim Jeffords, a moderate in his own party. He was never going to reach out to Democrats. He is too intellectually insecure. He can`t handle people who disagree with him, so he retreats into the cocoon of the like-minded.

I`m opting out of the game of tit for tat. I`m going to get us out of the trenches.

If I do nothing else in the Oval Office, I will free people to build new coalitions, explore new ideas and talk to one another for the first time in a decade.

This is an evenly divided country. That is the political fact of our time. It is about time we had a president who understands that, who has a strategy for governing in such circumstances. Howard Dean and George Bush do not. They just want to pound away and pound away and ram things through. More artillery, more troops, more screaming and more hatred.

As for me, I say no more war. I`m for movement. I`m for progress, and if you are, too, come along with me.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 15, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Scary Afghan Road
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Here`s a foreign affairs quiz:

1. In the two years since the war in Afghanistan, opium production has:

(A) virtually been eliminated by Hamid Karzai`s government and American forces.

(B) declined 30 percent, but eradication is not expected until 2008.

(C) soared 19-fold and become the major source of the world`s heroin.

2. In Paktika and Zabul, two religiously conservative parts of Afghanistan, the number of children going to school:

(A) has quintupled, with most girls at least finishing third grade.

(B) has risen 40 percent, although few girls go to school.

(C) has plummeted as poor security has closed nearly all schools there.

The correct answer to both questions, alas, is (C).

With the White House finally acknowledging that the challenge in Iraq runs deeper than gloomy journalism, the talk of what to do next is sounding rather like Afghanistan. And that`s alarming, because we have flubbed the peace in Afghanistan even more egregiously than in Iraq.

"There is a palpable risk that Afghanistan will again turn into a failed state, this time in the hands of drug cartels and narco-terrorists," Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, writes in a grim new report on Afghanistan.

I strongly supported President Bush`s war in Afghanistan, and I was there in Kabul and saw firsthand the excitement and relief of ordinary Afghans, who were immensely grateful to the U.S. for freeing them (a crucial distinction between Iraq and Afghanistan, to anyone who covered both wars, is that you never saw the same adulation among Iraqis). Mr. Bush oversaw a smart war in Afghanistan, and two years ago the crisp mountain air there pullulated with hope — along with pleas for more security.

One day back then when I was thinking of driving to the southeast, six Afghans arrived from there — minus their noses. Taliban guerrillas had stopped their vehicle at gunpoint and chopped off their noses because they had trimmed their beards.

I stroked my chin, admired my own proboscis, and decided not to drive on that road.

Every foreign and local official said then that Afghanistan desperately needed security on roads like that one. But the Pentagon made the same misjudgment about Afghanistan that it did about Iraq: it fatally underestimated the importance of ensuring security. The big winner was the Taliban, which is now mounting a resurgence.

"Things are definitely deteriorating on the security front," notes Paul Barker, the Afghan country director for CARE International. Twelve aid workers have been killed in the last year and dozens injured. A year ago, there was, on average, one attack on aid workers per month; now such attacks average one per day.

In at least three districts in the southeast, there is no central government representation, and the Taliban has de facto control. In Paktika and Zabul, not only have most schools closed, but the conservative madrasas are regaining strength.

"We`ve operated in Afghanistan for about 15 years," said Nancy Lindborg of Mercy Corps, the American aid group, "and we`ve never had the insecurity that we have now." She noted that the Taliban used to accept aid agencies (grudgingly), but that the Taliban had turned decisively against all foreigners.

"Separate yourself from Jews and the Christian community," a recent open letter from the Taliban warned. It ordered Afghans to avoid music, funerals for aid workers and "un-Islamic education" — or face a "bad result."

The opium boom is one indication of the downward spiral. The Taliban banned opium production in 2000, so the 2001 crop was only 185 metric tons. The U.N. estimates that this year`s crop was 3,600 tons, the second-largest in Afghan history. The crop is worth twice the Afghan government`s annual budget, and much of the profit will support warlords and the Taliban.

An analyst in the U.S. intelligence community, who seeks to direct more attention to the way narco-trafficking is destabilizing the region, says that Afghanistan now accounts for 75 percent of the poppies grown for narcotics worldwide.

"The issue is not a high priority for the Bush administration," he said.

If Afghanistan is a White House model for Iraq, heaven help us.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Iraqis Say U.S. to Cede Power by Summer
Town Meetings to Set Process in Motion

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 15, 2003; Page A01


BAGHDAD, Nov. 14 -- The Bush administration told leaders of Iraq`s Governing Council on Friday that it intends to transfer sovereignty of Iraq by next summer to a provisional government selected by delegates chosen in town meetings across the country, officials of the U.S.-appointed council said.

Driven to revise its blueprint for Iraq`s political transition because of intensifying attacks by insurgents, the administration`s new plan abandons a process that would have required Iraqis to write and approve a constitution and hold national elections for a permanent government before the handover of power. Under the new strategy, sovereignty would first be given to a provisional government, which would oversee the writing of a constitution and the convening of elections for a permanent government.

But some council officials said the plan, which does not envisage any sort of national election until late 2004 or early 2005, could prove controversial among Iraqis. While there appears to be broad public support for a fast handover of sovereignty, there also is a strong desire among many Iraqis to choose their new leaders -- even interim ones -- through an election. It remains unclear whether town meetings, where participation likely would be restricted to people deemed to be community leaders, would be regarded as legitimate.

The plan would enable President Bush to end the formal occupation of Iraq before the 2004 election in the United States -- a key goal of the White House -- but would not end the American presence in Iraq. U.S. officials expect the provisional government to permit tens of thousands of American soldiers to remain in the country, along with hundreds of civilian reconstruction specialists.

The administration`s plan was outlined by the U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, to the nine presidents of the Governing Council in a meeting Friday night in Baghdad, the council officials said. The officials said the plan received a positive response from the presidents, who have been calling on the administration to hand over power more quickly.

"There was strong support for it," said a senior official of the Iraqi National Congress, the political organization headed by Ahmed Chalabi, one of the nine presidents. "Everyone was happy with it."

U.S. officials in Baghdad would not comment publicly on the plan. Daniel Senor, a spokesman for the U.S.-led occupation authority, said Bremer returned to Baghdad from Washington Friday morning "with some ideas that he began discussing with members of the Governing Council." Bremer had left Baghdad on short notice for two days of discussions at the White House and the Pentagon about the situation in Iraq.

Senor said the occupation authority "looks forward to hearing the proposal the full Governing Council agrees upon once they have the opportunity to meet and discuss it."

The administration wants the new political blueprint to appear as if it were generated by the council and not by Bremer and the White House. Council officials said the presidents intend to discuss the new approach with the full 24-member council on Saturday at a meeting that Bremer might also attend. Assuming there is general agreement among the council members, the officials said the presidents would announce details of the plan in the following days.

"It will be pitched as probably some kind of joint agreement, but it will be what Bremer proposed," the Iraqi National Congress official said. The presidents, the official said, will "accept it with very few modifications."

Administration officials had expressed a preference for having the Governing Council agree on a way to quickly write a constitution, enabling a permanent government to be seated before the transfer of sovereignty. But the council has been unable to overcome differences on how the document should be written. Shiite Muslim members want the drafters of the constitution to be chosen in a national election, while Sunni Muslims and ethnic Kurds say town meetings would suffice. Shiites make up about 60 percent of Iraq`s population.

The disagreement has led to paralysis on the council, fueling fears on Bremer`s staff and in the White House that the transition would be prolonged. With attacks on U.S. forces averaging more than 30 a day, the administration has been keen to find a way to shorten the handover without appearing to cut and run.

Under the administration`s plan, town meetings would be held early next year across Iraq to select delegates to a national convention. Participants in the meetings likely would be restricted to political, religious, tribal, academic and labor union leaders, as well as other influential figures. "The town hall meetings would be a selected group," one council official said.

That restriction prompted concern among some council members. "It will be difficult, in some places, to determine who will be the best people to attend such meetings," said one council member, Samir Shakir Mahmoud Sumaidy. "Selection is a process that is open to challenge."

Some council officials said the method of selection would be a focus of discussions over the coming days. But they said Bremer indicated that he would not support national elections to choose the delegates. Occupation officials are concerned that holding hasty national elections, to select either a provisional government or drafters of a constitution, could result in sabotage by forces loyal to former president Saddam Hussein and domination by religious extremists.

The delegates selected through the town meetings would convene by late spring to select the form and membership of a provisional government, which would assume sovereignty from the occupation authority and disband the Governing Council, council officials said. Before the provisional government was seated, the council would craft a basic legal framework that would remain in effect until a new constitution was written.

The provisional government would organize national elections in 12 to 18 months for delegates to a constitutional convention, the officials said. The resulting document would be put to a national referendum. If approved, elections for a permanent government outlined by the constitution would follow.

Adel Abdel-Mehdi, the director of the political bureau of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the country`s largest Shiite political party, said the proposal represents a reversal of the process originally outlined to grant sovereignty to Iraq. "Instead of starting with the constitutional process, it will come at the end of the road," he said. "We are reversing the whole process to meet the demands of all the parties."

One of those key demands was from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq`s most influential religious leader, who insisted in an edict this summer that any delegates to a constitutional convention be elected. Sistani has since shown almost no flexibility on the issue, and Shiite parties such as Abdel-Mehdi`s were loath to oppose him.

Abdel-Mehdi said he met with Sistani on Thursday and the ayatollah broadly approved the compromise. "He blessed the whole process," Abdel-Mehdi said.

Abdel-Mehdi said sovereignty within six months would be much sooner than many parties expected. "This is a very good achievement, taking into the account the real situation in the country," he said. "This is a real achievement."

Correspondent Anthony Shadid in Baghdad and staff writer Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.



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Attacks in Afghanistan Are on the Rise
Gen. Abizaid Calls Combat Situation `Every Bit as Difficult` as in Iraq

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 15, 2003; Page A16


Two years after the Taliban regime fled Kabul in the face of U.S.-led coalition forces, Gen. John Abizaid, the head of the U.S. Central Command, has described daily combat operations in Afghanistan as "every bit as much and every bit as difficult as those that go on in Iraq."

As if to punctuate Abizaid`s Thursday statement, a U.S. Special Forces soldier was killed yesterday when his vehicle hit a homemade bomb in eastern Afghanistan, while a Romanian soldier, part of the 11,500-person U.S.-led coalition force, died this week from wounds received in fighting in the south. In a northeastern province, a remote-controlled bomb exploded Thursday near a U.S. vehicle, killing four Afghans.

With most public attention focused on the growing insurgence in Iraq, Afghanistan is also heating up. In contrast to President Bush`s Veterans Day declaration that "in Afghanistan we`re helping to build a free and stable democracy as we continue to track down and destroy Taliban and al Qaeda forces," the U.S. intelligence community recently reported stepped-up activities by those forces.

In response, the Americans have mounted a six-day operation aimed at al Qaeda in the mountains along the Pakistani border. "We`ve taken casualties there," Abizaid said, adding: "We will continue to take casualties there, yet we take the fight to the enemy day after day." Since the United States first began operations in Afghanistan in October 2001, 35 Americans have died from hostile fire, 11 since August, according to the Associated Press.

NATO assumed control of a 5,000-person international stabilization force centered in the capital city of Kabul in August. NATO Secretary General George Robertson has said the Afghan stabilization has prevented NATO from getting involved in Iraq. Speaking Thursday on Fox News, he said: "We`re trying to get it right to make sure that it works in the long term. . . . And before we take on any new obligation, like Iraq, I think we`ve got to get Afghanistan right."

Abizaid vowed that coalition forces "will continue to close with and destroy the enemy while reconstruction takes place [and] while the Afghan national government gradually expands its influence in a territory that is very, very difficult to control."

On Tuesday, the leader of a U.N. Security Council mission to Afghanistan reported that "terrorist activities, factional fighting and drug-related crime remained the major concern of Afghans today." Gunter Pleuger, the German envoy to the United Nations, said the mission found that in the southern provinces of Afghanistan "insecurity was greatly exacerbated by terrorist attacks from suspected Taliban, al Qaeda and supporters of renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar." Hekmatyar returned to Afghanistan from Iran after the U.S.-led coalition, in conjunction with the United Nations, placed Hamid Karzai in charge of the transitional government.

Warlords continue to fight for control of major sections of the country outside Kabul, the U.N. group found. Pleuger reported that Karzai and other officials said that "drug production and trafficking fed terrorism, criminality and corruption." Unchecked, he said, the situation "could lead to Afghanistan becoming a `narco-state.` "

There has been progress, Pleuger noted. After two years of negotiations, an Afghan team has drafted a constitution that would establish an Islamic state with protections for other religions and a complicated legal system with religious and secular judges. It is to be voted on later this year.

But conditions for a credible political process are not yet in place, he said. Pleuger said national reconciliation "requires greater focus, political parties need time to develop, national institutions must undergo reform and the power of factional leaders must be diminished."

Like Iraq`s Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda`s Osama bin Laden, Taliban leader Mohammad Omar remains at large. And like them, the head of Afghanistan`s ousted government apparently continues to try to rally support.

Reuters reported yesterday that one of its employees was given an audio cassette in the southern town of Spin Boldak. In the recording, a man claiming to be Omar calls on his former commanders to take up jihad again.



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Pentagon Plans Iraq Channel
Satellite Link Allows White House to Bypass TV Networks

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 15, 2003; Page A17


In an escalation of White House efforts to circumvent what President Bush calls the news media "filter," the Pentagon plans to launch a 24-hour satellite channel from Baghdad to make it easier for U.S. television stations to air government-authorized news about Iraq.

The satellite link, dubbed "C-SPAN Baghdad" within the administration, is to go on the air in a week or two. It begins at a time when guerrilla violence in Iraq is increasing and the White House is revising and accelerating plans to transfer governing authority to Iraqis.

Administration officials assert that U.S. news organizations have emphasized violence and setbacks in occupied Iraq while playing down progress. The officials say the satellite capability is designed to help local stations interview U.S. authorities in Iraq and offer live coverage of military ceremonies and briefings relevant to their geographic areas.

The channel is the most aggressive yet of several administration efforts to bypass national news organizations, including a succession of interviews for local television stations with Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others.

One Republican strategist expressed skepticism about the project, saying it appeared to be an effort "to improve public opinion back home" before Bush`s reelection campaign gets fully underway.

The officials said the channel will offer uncut coverage of government briefings and other events, and they plan to notify U.S. stations when an enlisted person, general, official or business from their area is participating. The project, they said, would have the effect of cutting the broadcast networks out of news transactions between the administration and affiliate stations.

"We want the stations to show not just the shocking picture but the whole picture," said a senior administration official who refused to be named. "Car bombs are news, but there`s a journalistic responsibility to paint a more comprehensive picture."

White House communications director Dan Bartlett said a shortage of reliable satellite conduits from Iraq "often makes it difficult for people to follow briefings and the progress that`s being made."

"The better technology will make it easier for reporters from news organizations, big or small, to cover the story as it unfolds," Bartlett said. "News organizations will still make the decision whether to use it or not. That`s not control. It`s access many reporters currently don`t get because they are back in the United States."

The project is being headed by J. Dorrance Smith, who was assistant to the president for media affairs in George H.W. Bush`s administration and advised the younger Bush on his Florida recount strategy in 2000. Smith was a longtime executive for ABC News, producing Olympics and political convention coverage and serving as executive producer of "This Week With David Brinkley" and "Nightline."

Smith has been working in Iraq since September as an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by L. Paul Bremer. Officials said Smith`s mission is to promote what the administration considers to be a more realistic picture of events.

The new channel was first reported by the New York Observer, which quoted Smith as saying that removing the network intermediaries would help prevent news conferences and other events from "getting chopped up in New York."

The administration officials said they will make the satellite coordinates of the transmissions widely available so that stations, government offices and conservative interest groups can pick up the coverage at will. The events also could be picked up by cable and broadcast networks.

Dave Busiek, news director of KCCI, the CBS affiliate in Des Moines, said local TV journalists will be "cautious about this new approach, particularly if there`s a widespread feeling that the government is trying to go around the networks."

"Part of the argument is that those of us in local TV ask softball questions and aren`t skilled enough to separate the real news from the pure spin," he said. "It`s pretty insulting. That being said, if I could have a live interview with Ambassador Bremer, for instance, in my 6 o`clock newscast, that`s a tempting possibility and I have no doubt it would be valuable for our viewers."

Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, said several local stations have aired stories about the bleak conditions being endured by military families, and she said administration officials might find themselves answering tough questions.

But many stations with large military bases in their areas cannot afford to send a reporter to Baghdad, she said, and would have "tremendous interest" in interviews with local people in the armed services.

The channel is starting amid changes in the administration`s communications team. Tucker A. Eskew, director of the White House Office of Global Communications, told officials yesterday he will leave on Dec. 7. He plans to open a consulting firm and serve as a senior adviser to Bush`s campaign.

Margaret Tutwiler, who was Bush`s ambassador to Morocco, is awaiting Senate confirmation as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs; she is expected to start work this month. Sources said she plans to focus on the Middle East, beginning with an assessment of the audience the United States will try to reach and ways to measure the impact of programs.



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9/11 Panel: Free to Probe


By Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton

Saturday, November 15, 2003; Page A23


The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States has reached an agreement with the White House that will allow commissioners unprecedented access to materials from the president`s daily intelligence briefs, the most sensitive documents the government produces.

For the first time ever, the president will allow individuals other than the most senior officials in the executive branch to see these documents. Access to the briefs will enable the commission to put speculation to rest.

The commission will be able to state authoritatively what information and threat warnings were provided to presidents Clinton and Bush. Access to these daily intelligence briefs will enable the commission to fulfill its mandate to prepare an authoritative report on the events of Sept. 11, 2001, for the American people. Two representatives from the commission will check the items responsive to our document request. Four representatives from the commission will constitute our review team to examine all items of critical interest in the Sept. 11 probe. Our review team will provide a complete report on the critical documents to all commissioners. The commission, in turn, will be able to use this highly classified information to inform the writing of its public report. So an assertion that all commissioners will not read every single document, while true, is misleading.

Even more misleading is an assertion that the White House is editing the material being made available to the commission. The commission requested a broad range of relevant intelligence. Hundreds of responsive articles have been produced. None of these relevant articles is being edited in any way. The commission will have access to everything -- we repeat, everything -- it asked to see.

The law that created the commission mandated an investigation of the facts and circumstances surrounding the terrorist attacks on the United States and the immediate response to those attacks. The commission therefore never asked to see other intelligence presented to the president on subjects that have nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks -- for example, items dealing with China, Kosovo, Colombia or hundreds of other topics.

The agreement before us gives the commission access to materials on which the executive`s claim of executive privilege and state secrets is strong. If the commission had subpoenaed these documents, the White House would no doubt have fought the subpoena to avoid setting a damaging constitutional precedent.

In that case, the commission might have seen no documents and could have been tied up in the courts past its date of expiration. The choice before us is not unrestricted access versus conditional access; the choice is between access to fulfill our mandate and no access at all. Under this agreement, the commission has gained a degree of access to sensitive information unequaled in the history of the United States.

The agreement before us gives us the ability to fulfill our mandate, and it respects the integrity and independence of the commission. Some charge that this agreement "compromises" the commission`s work. We obviously disagree.

Some have suggested that we have impinged too far on the prerogatives of the presidency; others say we have not gone far enough. The bottom line is that this agreement allows us to see everything we have requested.

The Sept. 11 attacks were an episode of surpassing public importance. The commission`s statutory mandate is explicit. The president has said he supports the commission`s work. With this unprecedented and constitutionally delicate agreement, he has followed through on that commitment. And amid the clamor, we can now do our job.

Thomas H. Kean is chairman and Lee H. Hamilton vice chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.




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4 Former Security Chiefs Criticize Israel`s Policy
From Associated Press

November 15, 2003

JERUSALEM — Four former Israeli security chiefs sharply criticized Prime Minister Ariel Sharon`s policies toward the Palestinians on Friday, warning in unusually bold terms that Israel is headed for catastrophe if it does not reach a peace deal soon.

The former security chiefs, respected for their combined 18 years of experience as leaders of the Shin Bet intelligence agency, called on the government to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the only way to avoid more violence after more than three years of fighting.

"It is clear to me that we are heading toward a crash," said Carmi Gilon, one of the former security chiefs.

Their comments came two weeks after army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon said the government needed to ease restrictions that have increasingly angered Palestinians. Another of the four, Yaakov Perry, said it was no coincidence that those closest to the conflict came to the same conclusion.

"Why is it that everyone, Shin Bet directors, chiefs of staff, former security personnel … become the advocates of reconciliation with the Palestinians?" Perry asked. "We know the material, the people in the field and, surprisingly enough, both sides."

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Korei is trying to secure an agreement from Palestinian extremists to halt attacks on Israelis in anticipation of a broader truce with Israel.

Israel`s security services are reportedly divided on whether to accept a truce. The military believes that a cease-fire is a step in the right direction and is ready to halt assassinations of Palestinian militants, the Maariv newspaper reported Friday. The current Shin Bet chief is concerned that armed groups will use the lull to plan more attacks.

The four former security leaders — Ami Ayalon, Avraham Shalom, Perry and Gilon — spoke in an interview with the Yediot Aharonot daily published Friday.

Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian Cabinet minister, praised the four. "It reflects the realistic policy required from the Israeli side," he said.

Former Israeli President Ezer Weizman accused the former Shin Bet leaders of undermining the government, calling them the "four musketeers."

"This really makes me furious," Weizman told Israel Television. "We have a country that is in a very delicate situation."


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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November 14, 2003
Q&A: Richard Haass on Mideast Democracy

From the Council on Foreign Relations, November 14, 2003
http://www.cfr.org/

Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former senior State Department official, welcomes President Bush`s call for bringing democracy to the Middle East, but warns that the United States does not have the luxury of waiting for elections or a constitutional referendum in Iraq.

"This might mean the lowering of some of our ambitions there," says the former director of policy planning in Colin Powell`s State Department. "The idea that some seem to have that we are going to create a model city on the hill in Iraq is simply too ambitious. It would be better to content ourselves with the goal of making Iraq significantly better than it was, and making it good enough."

Haass was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on November 13, 2003.

President Bush spoke last week on the importance of bringing democracy to the countries of the Middle East. What were your impressions of the speech, since you also spoke in depth on the same subject last year?

I was heartened by the speech. It`s a welcome development. This president, or any president, is essential to furthering democratic reform in this part of the world. I don`t think we`ve done these nations any favors, or done ourselves any favors, by essentially creating a democratic exception for the Arab world. What we learned on 9/11 is that failures in their society harm not only them but also can harm us, that when young men continue to grow up without any marketable skills, with terrible educations, and witness corruption and a lack of opportunity all around them, they are often drawn to radicalism, and it is a small step from radicalism to terrorism.

So the lesson I draw from is that what goes on inside of other people`s societies is not simply a domestic matter for them but ultimately becomes a domestic matter for us. To put it another way, U.S. foreign policy has to increasingly concern itself with what goes on inside these societies.

There is a general feeling that democracy would be a plus unless the wrong people came to power via an election. And of course in Iraq now, there is considerable discussion about how to bring about a suitable political solution. Are you concerned that perhaps the Bush administration is rushing too quickly on Iraq, or do you think the pace is about right?

In Iraq, we don`t have the luxury of going slowly. We don`t have the luxury of doing a textbook nation-building exercise. To put it bluntly, the welcome mat won`t be out there long enough to do that.

So we have no alternative but to telescope the process, and that means not simply accelerating the development of Iraqi police and military capabilities but it also means accelerating the transfer of political authority to Iraqis. This might mean the lowering of some of our ambitions there. The idea that some seem to have that we are going to create a model city on the hill in Iraq is simply too ambitious.

It would be better to content ourselves with the goal of making Iraq significantly better than it was, and making it good enough. Ultimately, the Iraqis are going to determine the character of their political system. What we need to do is simply try to create conditions of stability at this point.

Some people want some kind of early elections in Iraq. You yourself said in the speech last December, however, that "elections a democracy does not make."

First, we should never confuse elections and democracy, and second of all, having elections early on in a political process is often simply a mistake. Let me take a step back. What distinguishes democracy is two things. First, that within government you have a distribution of power. You don`t have all the power concentrated on a king, or an emir, or a president.

Second, within a society, you have some kind of a distribution of power and a balance of power between the government and the rest of society. That means you need independent institutions, from trade unions to newspapers, television stations, and businesses, so that, again, you don`t have any over-concentration of power. Until this is set up, I don`t see the value of elections. You want to make sure you don`t have a winner-take-all situation. Or to use the old saw: "You don`t want to have one man, one vote, one time." You want to have something that forces people to work with you and one another. Premature or early elections, in the name of accelerating democracy, actually run the risk of undermining it.

Staying with Iraq, how do we go from where we are today--with an Iraqi Governing Council, which has come under criticism for not being very effective--to a constitution? If the administration asked you, what would you recommend?

I will tell you first what I would not do. I would not focus on early elections. I would not focus on getting a constitution drawn up and then subjected to some sort of vote or referendum. That creates too many gates you have to go through. One could argue that that`s the ideal approach if you weren`t constrained. But the fact is, we are constrained. We are constrained by the pressures coming from Iraqis who don`t want us there, and we are pressured by the constraints coming from ourselves, that we don`t want to continue to be there in the numbers we are paying the price for. The alternative, it seems to me, is to get some sort of an interim political arrangement. We won`t try to settle the long-term question of the constitution. In a funny kind of way, you almost want to reinvent the governing council and make an improved governing council.

You mean make it a more respected body?

And give it greater authority. It means taking some risks. It means handing over more authority to the Iraqis. But I don`t see that there is much choice. It might mean going to a few key power brokers in Iraq and disappointing many of the people who are in the current governing council. I would actually be open to the idea, for example, of having someone, who might actually be quite aged, so that he is not in a position to enjoy long-term office, be made an interim leader, an interim president over some sort of small committee that would run Iraq for the most part. During this period you could think about constitutions and elections and the like. You don`t want to delay having Iraqis run the country, and it is unrealistic to get everything arranged quickly. There is no political history or culture in Iraq that leads you to believe that you will be able to come to consensus quickly. So I would rather have what you might call a non-democratic but representative Iraqi leadership as an interim arrangement than try to create a democratic leadership at this point.

Is a strengthened governing council politically acceptable to President Bush, given his recent stress on democracy?

I don`t think you have to give up any of your goals. It`s an acknowledgement of constraints and costs, but also it is important to see this not as a single event, but as a process. It is a meaningful step in the direction of Iraqification of political authority. You should think of this happening in parallel tracks, politically, in the security sphere, and in the economics sphere. One wants to move on all tracks and try to keep them, to some extent, in parallel. And I think we were beginning to get into a problem where--not that we were doing too much on the military track; we can`t do too much in terms of Iraqizing or turning security over to the Iraqis--but, by having all these milestones or preconditions on the political track, we were running the risk that the political track was inevitably going to fall too far behind the security track.

This won`t be a problem for the president if this new approach seems to enjoy some acceptance on the Iraqi side and casualties and Iraqi resistance to the American presence goes down. The key market test for what the United States does in Iraq, to put it bluntly, is at the moment the degree of effective Iraqi resistance to our presence. The rate of democratization is a distant second to that.

Do you think your suggestions are included in the package of ideas that L. Paul [Jerry] Bremer took back to Baghdad after his White House meetings this week?

I think the essence of Jerry Bremer`s package is to do something like this. I think the consensus in the administration is that there has to be some telescoping and that the best solution is the enemy of good enough.

The British, when they took over Iraq from the Ottomans after World War I, eventually installed a king. Is this a good approach?

That is why it is important that whatever is done is interim and you actually look for an individual or individuals who probably are only in a position to rule for a certain amount of time. We should have some representative group that would be smaller than 25 [the size of the governing council] that would help oversee things. I can`t tell you this will work. But I think going down this path at least seems to take into account the reality that we simply don`t have the kind of time we would want to do this in a textbook way.

I think the headlines in the press about almost daily casualties have been hurting the president.

The real issue here is whether, by accelerating the transfer of meaningful political authority to the Iraqis, this helps create a context in which you can accomplish more of what you want to accomplish in the security sphere. I think it probably does. It helps make it easier for the Iraqis to be seen to be cooperating with the authorities, if the authorities are seen as more Iraqi.

Let`s get back to Bush`s Middle East democracy speech. After all, Bush is known as someone who did not particularly like nation-building. What got him to be such an advocate of democracy-building? Does he really believe strongly in what he is saying?

The short answer is yes. I think there are two reasons. One is the president reflects a tradition in American foreign policy which is to give speeches that cannot now be immediately realized and do have a large ideological component.

Like President [Woodrow] Wilson`s 14 points [his goal for post-World War I], which the president cited in his speech?

You could describe it as a muscular Wilsonian doctrine. This is not a Wilsonianism in which you go to Paris and hope for the best [a reference to the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference]. You do more than hope for the best. Second of all, if you read the Bush administration`s National Security Strategy, if you read the president`s democracy speech, there is a growing recognition in the administration--and beyond, for that matter--that this dichotomy in the debate between realists and idealists breaks down. The quality of these societies, the quality of the economies, the openness of the political systems ultimately have consequences, not simply for values and principles and humanity, but also for security. There has often been a gap in government between those people who work on so-called soft issues like development and aid and education, and people who work on the hard issues, the political-military, bullets and bombs sort of stuff.

What I think you are seeing after 9/11 is a realization that they really are to some extent two sides of one coin. What we used to think of as just soft sorts of considerations actually turn out to have real consequences for the hard stuff of security. I think this president and this administration have internalized this. It is one of the reasons you see this kind of speech; it is the reason you see the Millennium Challenge Account, the reason you see funding for disease eradication.

It is interesting that you and Paul Wolfowitz [deputy secretary of defense] are on the same page on democracy in the Middle East.

This approach crosses ideological lines. It is something that Democrats and Republicans can agree on, and neoconservatives and more traditional conservatives come together on, and people who work on economic and political issues can also agree on.

Should an effort be made to enlist other countries in this effort?

I think it would be counter-productive if democratization was simply seen as another form of Americanization. I actually think it would be much more successful if democratization is seen as a dimension of globalization rather than Americanization.



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After his wife was exposed as a CIA agent, embattled former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson "leaked" an explosive document to the US media. The report by Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner (Ret) identifies 50 "stories of strategic influence" that were allegedly manufactured by the White House to "market" the war on Iraq.

The-Edge has obtained a copy of the 56-page Gardiner Report. We hope that the publication of this overview of Gardiner`s findings will help to break through the "Paper Curtain" and prompt extensive media coverage, public debate and a congressional investigation.


Around the Bend: Exposed: America`s Ministry of Propaganda Part One: "A Strategy of Lies: How the White House Fed the Public a Steady Diet of Falsehoods," by Gar Smith / The-Edge. (11/7/03)

http://www.earthisland.org/project/newsPage2.cfm?newsID=491&…

Around the Bend: America`s Ministry of Propaganda Part Two: "Transforming Language to Market the Big Lie," by Gar Smith / The-Edge (11/7/03)

http://www.earthisland.org/project/newsPage2.cfm?newsID=492&…

Around the Bend: America`s Ministry of Propaganda Part Three: "Targeting Critics, Spreading Lies, and PSYOPS," by Gar Smith / The-Edge (11/7/03)

http://www.earthisland.org/project/newsPage2.cfm?newsID=493&…

Around the Bend: America`s Ministry of Propaganda Part Four: "Black Programs and the Future of Propaganda," by Gar Smith / The-Edge (11/7/03)

http://www.earthisland.org/project/newsPage2.cfm?newsID=494&…

Here`s the latest from The Edge: Earth Island`s Weekly Compendium of News-from-the-Brink. (Friday, 11/7/03)
Edge Exclusive!
Weitere Links über:
http://www.earthisland.org/project/viewProject.cfm?pageID=17…

[Joerver]

The Real Jobs Numbers





Many in the media have underestimated the severity of the current labor slump by focusing on the unemployment rate and the gains in real hourly wages. If you look at the numbers, the current slump is setting records in terms of sustained job loss, and the decline in wage and salary income, among other areas. Why should you be skeptical of those who report a rosy future in the job market? Read on.

A number of factors must be considered in order to understand the severity of the current labor slump:

The record length of time that jobs have failed to recover—Prior to the current slump, jobs had never fallen over a two and a half year period since monthly job numbers began in 1939. As of October 2003, payroll jobs had fallen by 2.4 million below the level of March 2001.

The growth in the working age population since the recession began in March 2001—Even as jobs were shrinking by 1.8 percent, the working age population (i.e., the number of people of working age) was growing by 3.4 percent. Had job growth kept up with working age population growth over that period, 6.9 million more payroll jobs would have been filled in October 2003.

The effect of the "missing" labor market on the unemployment rate—The unusually prolonged loss of jobs has caused an unprecedented number of people to refrain from actively looking for work, and therefore to be excluded from the unemployment measurement. Had the labor force grown more in line with the population—as it has in past labor slumps—another 2.3 million people would have been in the labor force in October 2003. This "missing" labor force is significant because the unemployment rate would have been 7.4 percent had the 2.3 million "missing" workers been considered as unemployed.2 The 7.4 percent unemployment figure provides a better measure of current slack in the labor market than the actual unemployment rate of 6.0 percent. The 1.4 percentage-point difference reflects the people pushed to the sidelines of the labor market who can be expected to seek work again once job prospects improve. As a result, the official unemployment rate should not be expected to fall very much when the employment picture actually begins to improve.

The loss of wage and salary income—Although real hourly wages have grown since the start of the recession, those gains have been more than offset by declines in the number of jobs and the amount of hours paid per job.
The U.S. labor market has remained mired in a slump since the recession began in March 2001. This Briefing Paper compares the severity of the current labor slump with that of earlier slumps in terms of both depth and duration, and in terms of both absolute decline and the decline relative to a target based on keeping pace with population growth. Because of the extended period of job loss, the current labor slump is the most severe on record by several important measures:


This slump saw the longest duration of job loss—28 months.
This slump is the first time in which there was not a full recovery of jobs 31 months after the recession began.
This slump is the worst in terms of the rise of the unemployment rate (after adjustment for the "missing" labor force) 31 months after the recession began—up 3.2 percentage points.
The current slump has also been the most severe in terms of the loss of aggregate real wage and salary income 30 months after the recession began—down 1.2 percent.
For more information on jobs and the economy, and to read the full briefing paper, "Understanding The Severity Of The Current Labor Slump" by Lee Price with Yulia Fungard, please click here.
http://www.epinet.org/briefingpapers/146/epi_bp146.pdf


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Published: Nov 07 2003

[Joerver]

Dear American Worker:

Norma Sherry

11/14/03: (ICH) I apologize for my ignorance and that of many of my fellow Americans. I apologize, too, for my shortsighted eagerness to get the best buy I could, and for my silly desire to save a few extra pennies, or a few more dollars. In my ignorance and naiveté, I thought I was buying wisely, saving money. When indeed, what I was doing was hurting my friends and my neighbors, and citizens I don’t know; because what I didn’t know, or what I refused to acknowledge, was that by doing so I was robbing someone of their job.

I apologize for buying my JVC VHS/DVD Recorder that was made in China.

I apologize for buying my SONY flat screen television that was made in Japan.

I apologize, dear American worker, for buying my PANASONIC telephone that was actually made in Japan.

I apologize for buying our FORD vehicle that was actually built, part by part in ports unknown.

I apologize for buying a GATEWAY desktop computer that was made somewhere else and is supported by technicians in Guam and India and who knows where else.

I apologize for buying NORTON Anti-Virus to protect my GATEWAY computer that is written and packaged and supported in lands far from American shores.

I apologize, dear American out-of-work worker, for buying my DELL laptop that was built and is supported primarily by workers in India.

I apologize for buying the MCAFEE Anti-virus support that came with my DELL laptop that was written, packaged, and serviced by technicians in India.

I apologize, dear worker for banking at CHASE MANHATTAN, CITICORP, BANK OF AMERICA, SUNTRUST or nearly any other American bank because they, too are outsourcing at least one aspect of their banking—and if they are not yet, they will be very soon.

I apologize for flying on DELTA AIRLINES, wearing my NIKE, or were they my ADIDAS sneakers, paying for both with my VISA card, eating my airline prepared food from SKY CHEFS, sipping on a COCA COLA from COKE, reading the current best-seller by SIMON & SCHUSTER, as I intermittently, fired up my DELL laptop to search EBAY for a good buy on the newest PLAY STATION wearing my RADIO SHACK headphones, dreaming of my comfy bed at the MARRIOTT and munching on something gooey from SARA LEE.

Dear American worker, it is with the deepest, most profound regret that I apologize for all these transgressions. I actually thought Nike and Adidas and Delta and Sara Lee, not to mention the others, were American companies run by American employees. I admit I was mixed-up and confused. I actually thought American products were American products. In my foolishness, I thought when I boarded an American airline or purchased an American labeled product I was helping to keep my fellow-Americans working.

But, nay. In fact, today and for well over ten years if it needed to be manufactured, built, assembled, sewn, appliquéd, wired, electrified, glued, bound, boxed, or hung, you can bet your bottom dollar that it was done so by hands other than American.

Little by little, tiny step by tiny step, quietly at first, businesses moved their labor to shores far beyond our borders. It was hardly noticed when inexpensive clothing manufacturers moved. It became a little more obvious when the designers went abroad. Not to artisans, not because the fabrics were finer, or the threads more silky, no, they went, almost tripping over one another in their glee. A garment that may have cost them tens of dollars to create would now only be pennies. The incentive, greed, was almost too much to contain. But not just for the designer or the clothing manufacturer, but also to us, the customer. The savings, not nearly as gargantuan were stunning enough to make us jump for joy, as well.

We gave little thought to the consequences. That is until our neighbors lost their jobs, needed food stamps, and began losing their homes.

It wasn’t long after that the telephone companies lost their monopolies and free trade became the free-willy to the American consumer. Phone calls became cheaper and in some cases, downright affordable. By the tens of thousands, we left the phone companies of our youth and sought the best buys we could find. To compete and pile more multi-millions in the till, AT&T, BellSouth and all the little MaBell’s learned a new concept: Outsourcing.

New businesses opened that made the deals, taught the concepts, and low and behold, businesses dismantled their American structures, fired their employees, and moved without a modicum of regret or allegiance to shores beyond our borders leaving behind the wrecked lives of 2.7 million workers.

And more and more of our working middle-class were becoming poorer and poorer with each new day. Jobs? There weren’t any. Not even flipping hamburgers was a choice anymore-- their kids had those jobs. Data processing? Gone. Internet Technicians? Asta Levista, baby.

Outsourcing was the new magic pill for all the woes of big business, little business, all businesses. There’s not a business that isn’t a candidate to outsource. DOW does it, so does DUPONT and Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Bristol-Meyers, even the US Department of Defense. In fact, according to Dow’s outsourcing partner, ACCENTURE, they saved $70 million since 1992 and their employee output surged over 50%, they just weren’t American workers. Accenture, however, is closed mouth about their other partners. Accenture’s Stacey Jones told me, “We do not divulge our client list,” which made me ponder, why the secrecy?

However, among the companies that are public knowledge are Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Virgin Wines, Sony Computer and Entertainment, Chrysler, Visa USA, SunTrust Bank, British Airlines, Barclays Stock Brokers, Chubb Insurance, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, Sharp Electronics, Bank One, World Rally Championship, Time Warner Trade Publishers, BP, Citgo, Halliburton, Boise Cascade, Sonoco, Ryder, Arizona Department of Revenue, US Air Force, US Department of Defense, and Federal Voting Assistance Program, to name just a few.

In their sales brochure, Accenture pitches that they offer “a cool savings of up to 30% or more” for “dramatically improving the efficiency and effectiveness of back offices operations.” Also known as, BPO. They also promise to reduce “credit card processing with a $10 - $20 per card per annum savings.” That’s nothing to sneeze at.

Additionally, Accenture proclaims, “two-thirds of US retail and commercial banks with assets of at least $3 billion outsource one or more of its business functions.”

As significant as Accenture is, number one in the outsourcing industry is, Cognizant Technology Solutions. Based in New Jersey, Cognizant claims that they “deliver the best of both worlds: the transparency of an American company, backed by an offshore organization that is rated one of India`s top employers.”

Some of their outsourcing clients are: Blue Cross of NE Pennsylvania, John Deere Health Plan, Philadelphia Stock Exchange, Pacific Stock Exchange, MetLife, Liberty Insurance, Dun and Bradstreet, AC Nielsen, Coors, Schwans, Ace Hardware, Radio Shack, Marks and Spencer, Fortunoff, and The Maritime Life Assurance Company.

Every time one of us buys a product, orders a service, signs a contract, becomes a client, from a company that outsources jobs that were once the American workers stronghold we are giving our permission to them to continue firing, dismissing, and replacing the American worker for cheaper labor abroad.

Do we have a right to be upset? Damn right we do!

Don’t misunderstand me, I wish every one, in every land a job worthy of supporting themselves and their families. I just don’t want it to be at the expense of the American worker and the American worker’s families. It’s simply not fair and if it’s bad for the American worker, it should be bad for American businesses.

But it’s not. It’s not because most of us are unaware of this travesty and, let’s face it, we have a very narrow focus. If it’s cheaper, it’s sold. How many times do we check first to see where it’s made before we buy it? Even that however, isn’t reliable anymore. It doesn’t tell the whole story. Companies could outsource their payroll department, or their mortgage department, or their inventory department and we would never know it. Furthermore, if you did know, would it make a difference? Would it still make a difference if you could save $10?

In my book, the corporations that were formed in America, built in America by the sweat and ingenuity of the American worker, that are now fleeing for greener pastures where there are no regulations, no workman’s comp, no insurance, no promises of a future, owe the American worker a huge debt and at the very least, Corporate America owes their American workforce their promised security.

With the signing of NAFTA, American workers working for these same American corporations were dismissed as so much excess trash. Dismissed for the almighty dollar.

© Norma Sherry 2003

Bio: Norma Sherry is co-founder of TogetherForeverChanging.org, an organization devoted to educating, stimulating, and igniting personal responsibility particularly with regards to our diminishing civil liberties. She is also an award-winning writer/producer. Norma welcomes Email: [e-mail]

[Joerver]

Invasion as Marketing Problem: The Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy

By NOAM CHOMSKY

11/14/03: Establishment critics of the war on Iraq restricted their comments regarding the attack to the administration arguments they took to be seriously intended: disarmament, deterrence, and links to terrorism.

They scarcely made reference to liberation, democratization of the Middle East, and other matters that would render irrelevant the weapons inspections and indeed everything that took place at the Security Council or within governmental domains.

The reason, perhaps, is that they recognized that lofty rhetoric is the obligatory accompaniment of virtually any resort to force and therefore carries no information. The rhetoric is doubly hard to take seriously in the light of the display of contempt for democracy that accompanied it, not to speak of the past record and current practices.

Critics are also aware that nothing has been heard from the present incumbents -- with their alleged concern for Iraqi democracy -- to indicate that they have any regrets for their previous support for Saddam Hussein (or others like him, still continuing) nor have they shown any signs of contrition for having helped him develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when he really was a serious danger.

Nor has the current leadership explained when, or why, they abandoned their 1991 view that "the best of all worlds" would be "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein" that would rule as Saddam did but not make the error of judgment in August 1990 that ruined Saddam`s record.

At the time, the incumbents` British allies were in the opposition and therefore more free than the Thatcherites to speak out against Saddam`s British-backed crimes. Their names are noteworthy by their absence from the parliamentary record of protests against these crimes, including Tony Blair, Jack Straw, Geoff Hoon, and other leading figures of New Labour.

In December 2002, Jack Straw, then foreign minister, released a dossier of Saddam`s crimes. It was drawn almost entirely from the period of firm US-UK support, a fact overlooked with the usual display of moral integrity. The timing and quality of the dossier raised many questions, but those aside, Straw failed to provide an explanation for his very recent conversion to skepticism about Saddam Hussein`s good character and behavior.

When Straw was home secretary in 2001, an Iraqi who fled to England after detention and torture requested asylum. Straw denied his request. The Home Office explained that Straw "is aware that Iraq, and in particular the Iraqi security forces, would only convict and sentence a person in the courts with the provision of proper jurisdiction," so that "you could expect to receive a fair trial under an independent and properly constituted judiciary."

Straw`s conversion must, then, have been rather similar to President Clinton`s discovery, sometime between September 8 and 11, 1999, that Indonesia had done some unpleasant things in East Timor in the past twenty-five years when it enjoyed decisive support from the US and Britain.

Attitudes toward democracy were revealed with unusual clarity during the mobilization for war in the fall of 2002, as it became necessary to deal somehow with the overwhelming popular opposition.

Within the "coalition of the willing," the US public was at least partially controlled by the propaganda campaign unleashed in September. In Britain, the population was split roughly fifty-fifty on the war, but the government maintained the stance of "junior partner" it had accepted reluctantly after World War II and had kept to even in the face of the contemptuous dismissal of British concerns by US leaders at moments when the country`s very survival was at stake.

Outside the two full members of the coalition, problems were more serious. In the two major European countries, Germany and France, the official government stands corresponded to the views of the large majority of their populations, which unequivocally opposed the war. That led to bitter condemnation by Washington and many commentators.

Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the offending nations as just the "Old Europe," of no concern because of their reluctance to toe Washington`s line. The "New Europe" is symbolized by Italy, whose prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was visiting the White House. It was, evidently, unproblematic that public opinion in Italy was overwhelmingly opposed to the war.

The governments of Old and New Europe were distinguished by a simple criterion: a government joined Old Europe in its iniquity if and only if it took the same position as the vast majority of its population and refused to follow orders from Washington.

Recall that the self-appointed rulers of the world -- Bush, Powell, and the rest -- had declared forthrightly that they intended to carry out their war whether or not the United Nations (UN) or anyone else "catches up" and "becomes relevant." Old Europe, mired in irrelevance, did not catch up. Neither did New Europe, at least if people are part of their countries.

Poll results available from Gallup International, as well as local sources for most of Europe, West and East, showed that support for a war carried out "unilaterally by America and its allies" did not rise above 11 percent in any country. Support for a war if mandated by the UN ranged from 13 percent (Spain) to 51 percent (Netherlands).

Particularly interesting are the eight countries whose leaders declared themselves to be the New Europe, to much acclaim for their courage and integrity. Their declaration took the form of a statement calling on the Security Council to ensure "full compliance with its resolutions," without specifying the means.

Their announcement threatened "to isolate the Germans and French," the press reported triumphantly, though the positions of New and Old Europe were in fact scarcely different. To ensure that Germany and France would be "isolated," they were not invited to sign the bold pronouncement of New Europe -- apparently for fear that they would do so, it was later quietly indicated.

The standard interpretation is that the exciting and promising New Europe stood behind Washington, thus demonstrating that "many Europeans supported the United States` view, even if France and Germany did not."

Who were these "many Europeans"? Checking polls, we find that in New Europe, opposition to "the United States` view" was for the most part even higher than in France and Germany, particularly in Italy and Spain, which were singled out for praise for their leadership of New Europe.

Happily for Washington, former communist countries too joined New Europe. Within them, support for the "United States` view," as defined by Powell -- namely, war by the "coalition of the willing" without UN authorization -- ranged from 4 percent (Macedonia) to 11 percent (Romania).

Support for a war even with a UN mandate was also very low. Latvia`s former foreign minister explained that we have to "salute and shout, `Yes sir.` . . . We have to please America no matter what the cost."

In brief, in journals that regard democracy as a significant value, headlines would have read that Old Europe in fact included the vast majority of Europeans, East and West, while New Europe consisted of a few leaders who chose to line up (ambiguously) with Washington, disregarding the overwhelming opinion of their own populations.

But actual reporting was mostly scattered and oblique, depicting opposition to the war as a marketing problem for Washington.

Toward the liberal end of the spectrum, Richard Holbrooke stressed the "very important point [that] if you add up the population of [the eight countries of the original New Europe], it was larger than the population of those countries not signing the letter." True enough, though something is omitted: the populations were overwhelmingly opposed to the war, mostly even more so than in those countries dismissed as Old Europe.

At the other extreme of the spectrum, the editors of the Wall Street Journal applauded the statement of the eight original signers for "exposing as fraudulent the conventional wisdom that France and Germany speak for all of Europe, and that all of Europe is now anti-American."

The eight honorable New European leaders showed that "the views of the Continent`s pro-American majority weren`t being heard," apart from the editorial pages of the Journal, now vindicated. The editors blasted the media to their "left" -- a rather substantial segment -- which "peddled as true" the ridiculous idea that France and Germany spoke for Europe, when they were clearly a pitiful minority, and peddled these lies "because they served the political purposes of those, both in Europe and America, who oppose President Bush on Iraq."

This conclusion does hold if we exclude Europeans from Europe, rejecting the radical left doctrine that people have some kind of role in democratic societies.

Noam Chomsky is the author, of Hegemony or Survival: America`s Quest for Global Dominance

[Joerver]

POLL ANALYSES
November 14, 2003


Howard Dean Still an Unknown Quantity to Many Americans
No front-runner among Democrats for their party`s nomination


by Frank Newport
GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- Questions and answers about Election 2004, now less than one year away:

1. Are the Democratic candidates becoming better known after months of intensive campaigning?

No, except for retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark. Despite a great deal of media focus on the Democratic race, including a number of nationally televised debates, most of the candidates are not better known today among members of their own party than they were back in August, just before the campaigning began in earnest.

Weiter:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr031114.asp

These results are based on telephone interviews with a randomly selected national sample of 1,004 adults, 18 years and older, conducted Nov. 10-12, 2003. For results based on this sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum error attributable to sampling and other random effects is ±3 percentage points. For results based on the sample of 404 Democrats and Democratic leaners who are registered to vote, the maximum margin of sampling error is ±5 percentage points. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

[Joerver]

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031201&s=alterman


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

Stop the Presses by Eric Alterman

Why Chickenhawks Matter
[from the December 1, 2003 issue]

During the run-up to the Iraq war, it was impossible not to notice that those most gung-ho for the adventure were, by and large, virgins when it came to the actual battlefield. George W. ("I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes") Bush; Dick ("I had other priorities") Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Tom DeLay, Elliott Abrams--to a man, all found better things to do than join the armed forces during Vietnam, a war most of them supported.

During the war debate, this issue was confused by the casual tossing of the epithet "chickenhawk." This discussion was actually promoted by the war party itself--together with its punditocracy cheerleaders--as it allowed its members to wrap themselves in the flag of free speech. It also appealed to the media, few of whose denizens had seen the inside of a military uniform either. But the point was not--or should not have been--to question the right of those who never served in the military to make military policy, which, after all, is intelligently enshrined in the Constitution. Rather it was a matter of judgment: Knowing nothing of war from firsthand experience, these men (and women) were more likely to have a romantic view of what war could accomplish.

The results of this foolish faith are all around us. While Bush prefers to avoid the many unpleasant aspects of the war--allowing no photographing of returning coffins and attending no funerals of fallen soldiers--he waxes rhapsodic about the alleged democratic benefits the Arab world will one day reap from this botched operation. Meanwhile, as Don Van Natta Jr. and Desmond Butler reported in the New York Times, "Across Europe and the Middle East, young militant Muslim men are answering a call issued by Osama bin Laden and other extremists, and leaving home to join the fight against the American-led occupation in Iraq." The net result, according to Uri Dromi, director of International Outreach at the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem, is that Iraq appears to be turning into America`s "Lebanon." In that conflict, in which Israel attempted to address a political problem with blunt force, it succeeded only in bleeding itself dry, creating more hatred and hence more terrorism, and ultimately decreasing the security of its citizens before leaving in ignominy and humiliation.

What makes this catastrophe all the more infuriating is how predictable it was--except, of course, by those blinded by ideology and unwilling to listen to more experienced voices. If only the Administration had not turned a deaf ear when those former military men not under "color" contract to the networks spoke candidly about the proposed war. None did so with greater force or credibility than Maj. Gen. Anthony Zinni, who headed the US Central Command from 1997 to 2000 and was later George W. Bush`s special envoy to the Israeli/Palestinian negotiations.

Just over a year ago, Zinni gave talks, one to the Middle East Institute in Washington, in which he predicted many problems now facing US occupation authorities. Among Zinni`s warnings:

The war party itself: "It`s pretty interesting that all the generals see it the same way, and all the others, who have never fired a shot and are hot to go to war, see it another.... We are about to...ignite a fuse in this region...we will rue the day we ever started."

Is this a liberation? What comes next? "If it`s short with minimal destruction, there will be the initial euphoria of change. It`s always what comes next that is tough. I went in with the first troops that went into Somalia. We were greeted as heroes on the street.... [After] about a month...a group of prominent Somalis...wanted to talk to me. I met with them. The first question out of their mouths was that we`d been there a month, hadn`t started a jobs program, and when were we going to fix the economy? Well, I didn`t know it was my Marine unit`s responsibility to do that. Expectations grow rapidly.... It`s not whether you`re greeted in the streets as a hero; it`s whether you`re still greeted as a hero when you come back a year from now."

Is Iraq likely to become a democracy? "If we think there is a fast solution to changing the governance of Iraq, then we don`t understand history, the nature of the country, the divisions, or the underneath suppressed passions that could rise up.... If you think it`s going to be easy to impose a government or install one from the outside, I think that you`re further sadly mistaken."

What are (were) the alternatives? "If I were to give you my priority of things that can change for the better in this region, it is first and foremost the Middle East peace process and getting it back on track. Second, it is insuring that Iran`s reformation or moderation continues on track and trying to help and support the people who are trying to make that change in the best way we can.... The third is to make sure those countries to which we have now committed ourselves to change, like Afghanistan and those in Central Asia, we invest what we need to in the way of resources there to make that change happen. Fourth is to patch up these relationships that have become strained, and fifth is to reconnect to the people. We are talking past each other.... We have based this in things that are tough to compromise on, like religion and politics, and we need to reconnect in a different way.

"I would take those priorities before this one [deposing Saddam]. My personal view, and this is just personal, is that I think this isn`t number one. It`s maybe six or seven, and the affordability line may be drawn around five."

General Zinni is a brave and patriotic soldier. After he made those remarks, he was informed by Bush Administration officials that he "will never be used by the White House again." Compare that with the kid-glove treatment given General ("My God is bigger than your God") Boykin. Like his fellow former soldier, John McCain, Zinni hears echoes in the rhetoric of the Bush team that must give him nightmares. "It reminds me of Vietnam. Here we have some strategic thinkers who have long wanted to invade Iraq. They saw an opportunity, and they used the imminence of the threat and the association with terrorism and the 9/11 emotions as a catalyst and justification. It`s another Gulf of Tonkin."

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

You won`t believe what happens next
Letters @ 3AM
BY MICHAEL VENTURA

http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2003-11-14/co…




James Baldwin said that Nazism thrived not because most Germans were evil but because most were spineless. One cowardly compromise after another, succumbing to the bluster of bullies, quickly created a climate in which the rare act of courage, however splendid, became futile. Cowardice proved infectious, contagious. Taking a stand against the dark storm, individuals might have redeemed themselves, but their nobility disappeared with barely a trace; the Nazi anti-culture created a kind of collective immunity to anything redemptive. Only rampant destruction and total collapse would finally cleanse that corrosive atmosphere, so that new beginnings could be made and genuine values could again take root.

Is that what is happening to us? Perhaps.

Or let`s just say my fillings itch when a television network takes orders from a political party: a TV miniseries, probably as second-rate as most, canceled out of fear. Fear of what? Of nothing specific. Yet of something pervasive. That`s the nature of the disease.

CBS canceled The Reagans because of an unspecific fear of a pervasive meanness, a nastiness, a mercilessness toward anything that contradicts one faction`s image of itself. It is not enough anymore for the far-right Republican Party to be in power; now they demand the right to control how others see them. The CBS answer could have been: Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Truman, Ike, the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and even George W. Bush have been depicted, flatteringly and unflatteringly, in many TV and feature films; what makes Ronald Reagan so special? But the far right has sanctified Reagan, and will not have his sainthood questioned. Intolerance is the right`s mode of operation, rage is its engine, fear is its weapon -- a weapon that only works on cowards. What fundamental insecurity, what virulent anxiety, what holy terror, makes rightists such braying bullies? Cowards don`t ask such questions.

Especially cowards in high places. CBS Chairman Les Moonves made the decision to pull The Reagans. Moonves is in charge not only of the network`s entertainment division, but of CBS News, CBS Sports, UPN, King World syndications (which distributes Oprah), and the 39 TV stations owned by Viacom (CBS`s parent company). That seems a lot of power. Yet Moonves couldn`t say No to the Republican Party. That is an enormous political and cultural fact.

Political: Off-the-record comments indicate Viacom didn`t want to jeopardize relations with state and federal lawmakers, from whom Viacom constantly seeks favors; so, contrary to the notion of corporate-run politics, the Republicans now have a major corporation running scared.

Cultural: We may be entering an era in which mass culture is directly the servant of politics -- a first for the United States.

Put the two together: What happens if corporations, in order to achieve their agenda of profit and dominance, take on the cultural agenda of the far right in order to please Republicans? Until now only Rupert Murdoch`s Fox empire has openly taken sides in our culture wars. If this becomes standard corporate practice ("the price of doing business," as they say) our atmosphere could resemble Germany`s in the early 1930s, when, one by one, the major cultural venues gradually kowtowed to the Nazi Party, allowing no other visions to reach mass circulation. Then think of the far right`s cultural agenda: a fundamentalist Christian state; the rights of women, gays, and nonwhites severely curtailed and controlled; creationism taught as fact in public schools; history, science, and art subject to ideological whims. What if that also becomes the corporate agenda? Most people in America, after all, work directly or indirectly for corporations that demand economic obedience; what happens if they begin also to demand right-wing ideological purity, in order to curry favor with the dominant party?

Nothing less is at stake when, for the first time, a political party is allowed to dictate what may be broadcast on the public airwaves.

The Reagans was first commissioned by ABC. ABC let it go because, they said, "It was very soft, not controversial in the least." CBS picked it up. Anybody who`s worked in television knows that not a single script gets the green light until it`s been pawed over by a coven of executives, network censors, and sponsors` reps. CBS Chairman Les Moonves is a micromanager famous for reading every script for show under his command, though he now claims to have known nothing of the production that was to have been his sweeps-month centerpiece. No one in the industry believes him. Thus The Reagans went through the usual exhaustive TV vetting process, and was deemed ready and fit for public consumption. Then The New York Times ran a piece that focused on the show`s portrayal of Nancy as a control freak and Ronald as an aging president showing the first symptoms of Alzheimer`s. Republican flacks on talk radio and Rupert Murdoch`s Fox News banshees took to the warpath -- though not a single one of them has, as of this writing, seen the film or read a complete script. Their uproar made its way to the desk of Les Moonves. Calling the film "unbalanced" -- as opposed to all the "balanced" material on CBS -- he canceled the broadcast. Yet in his official statement of cancellation Moonves admitted that "the producers have sources to verify each scene in the script."

Pause at that. History is, in essence, an evaluation of sources. As any shelf of history books easily proves, the same sources can lead to different conclusions from different historians. There is never "the" truth; there is always "a" truth, a conclusion drawn from sources. It is precisely this eternal condition that the far right abhors. They insist that their conclusions are "the" truth, and there is room for no other. (The far left is guilty of the same syndrome, but, not being in power, they`re not worth an argument. Anyway, they`re so happy to argue with one another, it would be bad manners to interrupt.) Be that as it may, according to Moonves, his decision to cancel "was based solely on our reaction to seeing the final film, not the controversy that erupted around a draft of the script." But no network has ever canceled a sweeps-month centerpiece two weeks before airtime for any reason, so no one in the industry takes Moonves at his word. He chickened.

Good news: The right has proved that these so-called Chairmen of Everything soil their drawers when faced with human beings who are willing to go the distance for their beliefs. Progressives need to remember that.

Bad news: You can`t improve on William Butler Yeats` "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity." Passionate intensity is wonderful in love and art, and disastrous in politics. Politics at its best is the cool art of compromise -- "the art of the possible." The right`s passionate political intensity is matched on the left by Ralph Nader and his Greens, who have endangered the welfare of millions of powerless people by an abhorrence of compromise that is a mirror image of the far right`s (as Nader`s petulant inflexibility mirrors that of Bush). Going the distance for your beliefs doesn`t have to mean intolerance for the beliefs of others. If it does, democracy is doomed.

Those who pay for Showtime (another Viacom subsidiary) can see a version of The Reagans early in 2004. Robert Greenblatt, Showtime honcho, promises the version he broadcasts "will contain the essence of [the filmmakers`] vision." Anyone who`s worked in film and TV knows those are fighting words. In movie-talk, Greenblatt is promising that he will define "the essence" and edit accordingly.

Put plainly: The Reagans has effectively been banned by the far right -- a victory that has rightists salivating for their next fight, to see just how much mass culture the Republican Party can directly control. That is very different from conservative artists making conservative art, as they have every right to do, be it pop or highbrow. We`re seeing with The Reagans the first round of the fight for and against politically controlled culture. It`s going to be quite a fight, and, if intolerance wins, then, as Clint Eastwood gets to say in Don Siegel`s Coogan`s Bluff, "You won`t believe what happens next, even while it`s happening."
For more on The Reagans, see TV Eye

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Saturday, November 15, 2003
War News for November 15, 2003 Draft

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

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed, two wounded in Baghdad bomb ambush.

Bring ‘em on: Total casualties from Bush’s War exceed 9,200.

Bring ‘em on: US forces Iraqi translator killed in Mosul ambush.

Bring ‘em on: Witnesses report US casualties in second Baghdad bombing.

Bring ‘em on: Large explosion, smoke plumes reported near Bremer’s compound in central Baghdad.

Cleric warns US military operations will “make things worse.”

Walter Reed Hospital: The wounded “just keep coming.”

German defense minister visits wounded US troops at Landstuhl Army Hospital.

Soldier sounds off on talk radio. “Macek`s strident criticism of President Bush may have opened her up to disciplinary action according to US Central Command Spokesmen Major Pete Mitchell based at McDill Air Force Base in Tampa Florida. ‘If she has said these things about the Commander-in-Chief she has opened herself up to disciplinary action,’ said Mitchell.” What about those two dingbat colonels in the 82d Airborne who are busy organizing phony astroturf campaigns from a combat zone?

European views of Bush’s Quagmire. Which is about to become their quagmire.

Analysis: Lots of potential for corruption when the Bushies cut and run.

L. Paul Bremer tosses some scraps to the poodle. “Paul Bremer, the US civil administrator in Baghdad, has been pushing for British firms to be included in the new round of bidding. He told The Times last weekend that he was "entirely sympathetic" to the argument that Britain`s military contribution had earned that right.

Commentary

Editorial: Japan must look closely at Iraq. “Conditions on the ground in Iraq are too far removed from those envisioned by the special measures law passed by the Diet for sending SDF troops.”

Editorial: Bush can’t hide the human toll from Iraq. “It may seem parochial, but the death of one American soldier at the hands of enemy forces will matter more to American citizens than the issuance of new currency for 20 million Iraqis. On any given day, that is the story from Iraq, the story of the ultimate price of this war. It cannot, should not, be minimized.”

Editorial: “‘You not only have a former Guardsman in the White House, you have a friend,’ President Bush declared during a 2001 visit to an Air National Guard base.” Read this to see how Bush screwed Guardsmen.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Pennsylvania soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Florida soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Texas Guardsman wounded in Iraq.

Rant of the Day

The Bushies are getting ready to cut and run. How do I know? When was the last time you heard them chanting their “stay the course” slogan?

This war was always about domestic politics and keeping Bush’s poll numbers propped up. There were never any WMDs in Iraq and they knew it. There was never any connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda and they knew it. Professionals in our own government warned them that all hell would break loose if they invaded Iraq, but they chose to believe the neo-cons and Chalabi’s exiles. They went in half-assed, without a plan, without support and now they find themselves in a political trouble at home.

The problem is that the Bushies never think about long-term consequences. From the minute they launched the first Tomahawk strikes on Baghdad in March, the Bushies painted the United States into a very small corner. There are no good options for America, thanks to the ineptitude and incompetence of George W. Bush and his handlers. Some options are better than others. But you can bet that the Bushies will choose the course of action that limits their short-term political pain at the expense of long-term cost to America.

So we’re back to domestic politics and propping up Bush. Cut and run, blame somebody else, and to hell with the consequences.

I`m starting a new section on this blog just to track Operation Cut and Run. Like everything else on this blog, it`ll evolve with time as the Bushies make their "plans" (for want of a better word) clear.

Oh, by the way, there`s one other way I know they`re going to cut and run: that`s Dubya`s style. The pattern of his entire wasted life has been to leave an enormous pile of shit everywhere he goes and expect others to clean it up for him.

Operation Cut and Run: Watch what they do, and listen carefully to what they say.

What they’re doing:

US works to expedite handover.

Reports say US will hand over power by June.

CENTCOM reinforces forward command post in Qatar. Sure looks like a precursor for a retrograde operation.

What they’re saying:

Bush says US will remin until Iraq is “free and peaceful.” The goalposts are moving.

Rummy says no troop reductions in Iraq.

Lieutenant AWOL begs international aid groups to remain in Iraq. “’It is very important for the leaders of the NGOs (non-governmental organizations) to recognize that if they don`t go into Baghdad, they`re doing exactly what the terrorists want them to do,’ Bush told reporters.” Translation: Clean up this pile of shit while I cut and run.






# posted by yankeedoodle : 2:45 AM

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Published on Friday, November 14, 2003 by the UPI
US Casualties from Iraq War Top 9,000
by Mark Benjamin

WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 (UPI) -- The number of U.S. casualties from Operation Iraqi Freedom -- troops killed, wounded or evacuated due to injury or illness -- has passed 9,000, according to new Pentagon data.

In addition to the 397 service members who have died and the 1,967 wounded, 6,861 troops were medically evacuated for non-combat conditions between March 19 and Oct. 30, the Army Surgeon General`s office said.

That brings total casualties among all services to more than 9,200, and represents an increase of nearly 3,000 non-combat medical evacuations reported since the first week of October. The Army offered no immediate explanation for the increase.

A leading veterans` advocate expressed concern.

"We are shocked at the dramatic increase in casualties," said Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center.

Of the non-combat medical evacuations:

-- 2,464 were for injuries, such as those sustained in vehicle accidents.

-- 4,397 were due to illness; 504 of those were classified as psychiatric, 378 as neurological, and another 150 as neurosurgery.

"We are especially concerned about the psychological and neurological evacuations from this war," Robinson said. "We request a clarification of the types of illnesses people are suffering from so we do not have a repeat of the first Gulf War. We need to understand the nature and types of illnesses so scientists can determine if significant trends are occurring."

Army Surgeon General`s Office spokeswoman Virginia Stephanakis told United Press International Thursday that it is misleading to combine psychiatric and neurological problems. Some of the neurosurgery might be operations on the spinal cord, for example.

"Those are apples and oranges," she said.

She also said that some troops evacuated for psychiatric reasons later returned after getting a rest.

In early October, the Army Surgeon General`s office said 3,915 soldiers had been evacuated from Operation Iraqi Freedom for non-combat injuries and illnesses, including 478 with psychological problems and 387 for neurological reasons.

The new total of 6,861 reported non-combat evacuations is a rise of 57 percent since then.

The latest data on non-combat evacuations includes 1,628 orthopedic (bone) injuries. Other leading causes for evacuations include:

-- 831 surgeries for injuries;

-- 289 cardiology cases;

-- 249, gastrointestinal;

-- 242, pulmonary (lung);

-- 634, general surgery;

-- 319, gynecological;

-- 290, urological;

-- 37, dental.

Stephanakis said the pulmonary problems included soldiers who suffered from pneumonia as part of a cluster investigated by the Army in August.

The numbers don`t include service members treated in theater or those whose illnesses -- such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder -- were not apparent until after they returned to the United States.

Copyright © 2001-2003 United Press International

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Summary Military Fatalities:

US++UK++Other*++Total

402+53++++25++++480

Latest Military Fatality Date: 11/15/2003

* Other - Polish: 1

* Other - Danish: 1

* Other - Spanish: 3

* Other - Ukrainian: 2

* Other - Italian: 18

11/15/03 Reuters: RPG Brought Down 1 Copter
One of the helicopters was hit in the tail by a rocket propelled grenade (RPG), a U.S. officer at the scene said on Saturday.
11/15/03 CNN: 12 Dead In Black Hawk Crashes
Twelve U.S. soldiers were killed and nine were wounded Saturday evening when two U.S. military helicopters crashed in a residential area of the northern city of Mosul, a coalition military spokesman said
11/15/03 CENTCOM: Two Black Hawks Confirmed Down
Two UH – 60 Blackhawk helicopters assigned to the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) crashed in West Mosul at approximately 6:30 p.m. today.
11/15/03 Yahoo News: Update on Black Hawk Crashes
Two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters crashed on Saturday in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, coming down in a residential area after some witnesses said they had a mid-air collision.
11/15/03 MSNBC: US Black Hawk crashes in Mosul
A U.S. helicopter crashed in a civilian area in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Saturday and American soldiers sealed off the area, witnesses said
11/15/03 Yahoo: Wounded Italian Soldier Dies
An Italian soldier badly wounded in a recent suicide bombing in southern Iraq died Saturday in a Kuwait hospital after his parents gave approval for his life-support system to be turned off, the Italian embassy said.
11/15/03 Reuters: Blast Heard in Baghdad
An explosion was heard in central Baghdad on Saturday and smoke could be seen rising from an area close to the headquarters of Iraq`s U.S.-led administration, Reuters witnesses reported.
11/15/03 Centcom: 1 killed and two others wounded
A 1st Armored Division soldier was killed and two others wounded when an improvised explosive device was detonated on their two-vehicle convoy Nov. 15.
11/14/03 Centcom: The 400th U.S. Death
A 1st Armored Division soldier died of wounds received when the convoy in which the soldier was riding struck an improvised explosive device (IED) approximately 8:20 a.m., Nov. 14, near central Baghdad.
11/14/03 Centcom: US Soldier Dies In Afghanistan
MACDILL AFB, Tampa - A special operations force soldier died of wounds received when the vehicle he was in struck an improvised explosive device (IED) in the vicinity of Asadabad, Afghanistan today.
11/14/03 CENTCOM: 2 Killed, 3 Wounded 11/13
Two Task Force Ironhorse soldiers were killed and three were wounded when the convoy they were traveling in was attacked with an improvised explosive device at approximately 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 13, north of Samarra
11/14/03 Koulikov: Ukrainian Soldier Dies
In Iraq, as a result of improper weapon handling, Junior Sergeant Sergiy
11/14/03 Yahoo: Roadside Bomb Wounds Two U.S. Soldiers
A roadside bomb exploded in southern Baghdad Friday morning, wounding two American soldiers, a U.S. officer said.
11/14/03 AP: Gunmen Hit Portuguese Reporters in Iraq
Gunmen opened fire on jeeps carrying Portuguese journalists in southern Iraq on Friday, wounding one reporter and kidnapping another
11/14/03 DJ: 3 Soldiers Slightly Hurt By Bomb In Mosul
Three U.S. soldiers were slightly injured when an improvised explosive device went off near their convoy at about 6:30 p.m. Thursday in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the military said Friday
11/14/03 Reuters: Apache Strike Kills Iraqi Attackers
A U.S. Apache helicopter spotted and killed seven Iraqi insurgents late on Thursday as they prepared to fire rockets at a U.S. military camp near Tikrit
11/14/03 BayArea: THE WOUNDS OF WAR
U.S. soldiers who survive attacks in Iraq often face lasting injuries
11/14/03 USA Today: Contractor Killed In Iraq
Suspected insurgents raked a convoy with automatic gunfire, killing a U.S. civilian contractor and wounding another American, a U.S. military official said Friday.
11/13/03 DJ: Suspects In Iraq Helicopter Attack Arrested
U.S. troops have arrested six Iraqis suspected in attacks against U.S. helicopters, including at least two allegedly involved in last week`s downing of a Black Hawk that killed all six Americans on board, officials said Friday.
11/13/03 MSNBC: Roadside Bomb in Fallujah
In a separate attack, a bomb planted on a road in the flashpoint Iraqi town of Fallujah hit a U.S. military vehicle on Thursday and residents spoke of three American casualties.
11/13/03 Centcom: 1 Killed, 1 Wounded In Baghdad IED Attack
A 1st Armored Division soldier died Nov. 12 at approximately 1:35 p.m. from wounds sustained from an improvised explosive device explosion and one other soldier was wounded.

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November 15, 2003
U.S. Helicopters Crash in North Iraq, Killing at Least 12
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MOSUL, Iraq, Nov 15 (Reuters) - Twelve personnel from the U.S.-led occupation forces were killed and nine wounded when two American Black Hawk helicopters crashed in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Saturday, a U.S. Army spokesman said.

One of the helicopters was hit in the tail by a rocket propelled grenade (RPG), a U.S. officer at the scene said.

The helicopters came down in a residential area, although one ambulance driver said there were no civilian casualties.

Witnesses said the helicopters collided mid-air.

"Initial reports say there were 12 killed coalition personnel in action and nine wounded," said the military spokesman, speaking in Baghdad.

He had no details on nationalities of the victims. The two Black Hawks were attached to the U.S. Army`s 101st Airborne Division and crashed just after dark.

"I know one of the helicopters was hit by an RPG on the tail wing," said a U.S. officer in Mosul, who declined to be identified.

Sirens wailed and U.S. soldiers kept reporters away from the scene. A rapid reaction force secured the area and was investigating, military officials said.

Local resident Mohammad Badran said the two helicopters collided after an explosion.

"I was watching TV when I heard a large explosion," he said. "I looked outside the window and saw two helicopters. One was flying low and was on fire. The other was higher up. The first one climbed and hit the higher one. They crashed in separate areas."

FRONTLINE CHOPPER

The Black Hawk is the U.S. Army`s frontline utility helicopter, designed to carry 11 combat-ready assault troops, and is also used for medical evacuations.

The U.S. military said the helicopters crashed in the west of the city at approximately 6:30 p.m. (1530 GMT).

Three U.S. helicopters have been shot down in Iraq in the past three weeks for an overall loss of 22 lives.

In the deadliest single strike on American troops since the start of the war to oust Saddam Hussein, a U.S. Chinook helicopter was shot down west of Baghdad on November 2, killing 16 soldiers.

Five days later a U.S. Black Hawk was shot down near Saddam`s hometown of Tikrit, killing all six people aboard.

On October 25, guerrillas brought down a Black Hawk in Tikrit, hitting one of its engines with an RPG. The helicopter made an emergency landing and all five crew members escaped before it was engulfed in flames.

Insurgents now mounting some 30 attacks a day have killed 160 U.S. soldiers in Iraq since U.S. President George W. Bush declared major combat over on May 1. U.S. forces in Baghdad have hit back with "Operation Iron Hammer" for the past three days, using air strikes to destroy buildings they say were used by insurgents.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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New Poll Shows Green Candidate Out in Front in San Francisco Mayor`s Race...

New poll shows Gonzalez out in front
He leads Newsom 49% to 47% in S.F. mayor`s race
John Wildermuth, Chronicle Political Writer
Saturday, November 15, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/15/MNGKO32V3A1.DTL



San Francisco`s race for mayor is too close to call, but Supervisor Matt Gonzalez has a small lead among those most likely to vote Dec. 9, according to a poll released Friday by CBS 5-TV.

The poll, taken earlier this week by SurveyUSA of New Jersey, gave Gonzalez a surprising 49 to 47 percent lead over Supervisor Gavin Newsom among those certain to vote in the runoff. Among probable voters, Newsom had a 46 percent to 43 percent advantage. Both results are within the poll`s margin of error.

"This is welcome news," said Ross Mirkarimi, a spokesman for Gonzalez. "This is fuel that adds to our fire.``

Gonzalez needed the boost. Although Newsom didn`t get the 50 percent plus one vote he needed to win outright in the nine-way Nov. 4 general election, his 42-to-20-percent lead left progressive candidate Gonzalez with a steep mountain to climb.

The new survey shows that Gonzalez is doing just that. Voters who backed such losing candidates as Angela Alioto, Tom Ammiano and Susan Leal are moving to Gonzalez 2 to 1, according to the poll. And it indicates the board president is grabbing most of the voters who didn`t show up at the polls in November.

Although Newsom and Gonzalez are running to replace Mayor Willie Brown, who`s being forced out of office by term limits, the mayor`s race is shaping up almost as a re-election effort with Newsom perceived as the incumbent.

"Newsom is the traditional candidate, and all the opposition (to Brown) is lining up behind the second-place finisher," said Joseph Shipman, director of election polling for SurveyUSA. "It`s very impressive for Gonzalez to be doing so well since he`s running a very nontraditional campaign.``

Aside from Gonzalez`s overall showing, the poll provides few surprises. It shows that Gonzalez is running strong with the younger, 18- to 34-year-old voters, among whom he leads Newsom 61 to 34 percent, and with voters who identify themselves as liberal, where he has an overwhelming 73-to-23-percent lead.

Not surprisingly, Gonzalez has a huge, 89-to-9-percent lead in the poll among his fellow Green Party members.

"Gonzalez is trying to appeal via the Internet to people who haven`t voted much before and to political activists," Shipman said. "Newsom has support from the Republicans, the Democrats are split almost evenly, and the Greens are providing Gonzalez with his margin.``

The SurveyUSA poll is unusual in that it is a strictly automated survey. Voters are dialed and questioned by a computer, listing their choices by pushing buttons on the telephone keypad. Much of the company`s work is with television stations across the nation.

"These type of phone surveys are notoriously unreliable,`` said Eric Jaye,

Newsom`s chief campaign consultant. "But we`ve always said that this race would be close.``

According to the poll, Newsom has strong support among voters 55 and older, who back him 60 to 31 percent. It also shows him beating Gonzalez 68 to 22 percent among conservative voters and 59 to 34 percent among those who identify themselves as moderates.

While white voters are almost evenly split in the mayor`s race, the poll shows the Spanish-speaking Gonzalez has a strong, 62-to-33-percent lead among Latino voters. Newsom outpolls Gonzalez 49 to 36 percent among black voters and 53 to 36 percent among other ethnic groups, which includes Asian voters.

According to the poll, nearly 52 percent of the 1,012 registered voters surveyed say they are certain to vote in the Dec. 9 runoff election, while 42 percent will probably vote. About 46 percent of San Francisco`s registered voters cast ballots in the Nov. 4 election, and the turnout typically drops in the runoff vote.

The poll also had a surprisingly small number of undecided voters, ranging from 4 percent among certain voters to 10 percent among probable voters.

Shipman, SurveyUSA`s polling expert, said that while it`s improbable that anything like the poll`s 94 percent of likely voters would show up in December,

there is intense interest in the mayor`s race.

"Many of the people who say they`ll probably vote won`t show up in the end,`` he said. "But typically, about two-thirds to three-quarters of those surveyed say they expect to vote and in this poll, it was over 90 percent. Very, very few of the people we surveyed said they were unlikely to vote.``

In a tight race, turnout is what counts, and that gives an advantage to a traditional candidate like Newsom, Shipman said.

"Gonzalez is exciting a lot of people,`` Shipman said. "But a traditional candidate like Newsom typically has the advantage in getting out the vote, because of his base of voters and his campaign machine, which can bring out the voters.``

Both Gonzalez and Newsom will have their volunteers out on the streets this weekend, trying to nail down the votes they need.

"The winner is going to be the one who can get their voters to the polls on election day,`` Jaye said.

But for Gonzalez, the new poll numbers can energize his volunteers.

"This underscores that Matt`s vision is connecting with a large number of voters,`` said Mirkarimi. "It will certainly provide some pep for those early Saturday morning volunteers who need something with their coffee.``

The poll was based on a telephone survey of 1,012 registered San Francisco voters, including 955 likely voters and 524 certain voters. It was taken between Tuesdayand Thursday. The margin of error for the certain voters is plus or minus 4.4 percent.

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Uncensored Gore
The take-no-prisoners social critic skewers Bush, Ashcroft and the whole damn lot of us for letting despots rule.
by Marc Cooper
(Photo by Debra DiPaolo)

It`s lucky for George W. Bush that he wasn’t born in an earlier time and somehow stumbled into America’s Constitutional Convention. A man with his views, so depreciative of democratic rule, would have certainly been quickly exiled from the freshly liberated United States by the gaggle of incensed Founders. So muses one of our most controversial social critics and prolific writers, Gore Vidal.

Gore Vidal

When we last interviewed Vidal just over a year ago, he set off a mighty chain reaction as he positioned himself as one of the last standing defenders of the ideal of the American Republic. His acerbic comments to L.A. Weekly about the Bushies were widely reprinted in publications around the world and flashed repeatedly over the World Wide Web. Now Vidal is at it again, giving the Weekly another dose of his dissent, and, with the constant trickle of casualties mounting in Iraq, his comments are no less explosive than they were last year.

This time, however, Vidal is speaking to us as a full-time American. After splitting his time between Los Angeles and Italy for the past several decades, Vidal has decided to roost in his colonial home in the Hollywood Hills. Now 77 years old, suffering from a bad knee and still recovering from the loss earlier this year of his longtime companion, Howard Austen, Vidal is feistier and more productive than ever.

Vidal undoubtedly had current pols like Bush and Ashcroft in mind when he wrote his latest book, his third in two years. Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson takes us deep into the psyches of the patriotic trio. And even with all of their human foibles on display — vanity, ambition, hubris, envy and insecurity — their shared and profoundly rooted commitment to building the first democratic nation on Earth comes straight to the fore.

The contrast between then and now is hardly implicit. No more than a few pages into the book, Vidal unveils his dripping disdain for the crew that now dominates the capital named for our first president.

As we began our dialogue, I asked him to draw out the links between our revolutionary past and our imperial present.



MARC COOPER: Your new book focuses on Washington, Adams and Jefferson, but it seems from reading closely that it was actually Ben Franklin who turned out to be the most prescient regarding the future of the republic.

GORE VIDAL: Franklin understood the American people better than the other three. Washington and Jefferson were nobles — slaveholders and plantation owners. Alexander Hamilton married into a rich and powerful family and joined the upper classes. Benjamin Franklin was pure middle class. In fact, he may have invented it for Americans. Franklin saw danger everywhere. They all did. Not one of them liked the Constitution. James Madison, known as the father of it, was full of complaints about the power of the presidency. But they were in a hurry to get the country going. Hence the great speech, which I quote at length in the book, that Franklin, old and dying, had someone read for him. He said, I am in favor of this Constitution, as flawed as it is, because we need good government and we need it fast. And this, properly enacted, will give us, for a space of years, such government.

But then, Franklin said, it will fail, as all such constitutions have in the past, because of the essential corruption of the people. He pointed his finger at all the American people. And when the people become so corrupt, he said, we will find it is not a republic that they want but rather despotism — the only form of government suitable for such a people.



But Jefferson had the most radical view, didn’t he? He argued that the Constitution should be seen only as a transitional document.

Oh yeah. Jefferson said that once a generation we must have another Constitutional Convention and revise all that isn’t working. Like taking a car in to get the carburetor checked. He said you cannot expect a man to wear a boy’s jacket. It must be revised, because the Earth belongs to the living. He was the first that I know who ever said that. And to each generation is the right to change every law they wish. Or even the form of government. You know, bring in the Dalai Lama if you want! Jefferson didn’t care.

Jefferson was the only pure democrat among the founders, and he thought the only way his idea of democracy could be achieved would be to give the people a chance to change the laws. Madison was very eloquent in his answer to Jefferson. He said you cannot [have] any government of any weight if you think it is only going to last a year.

This was the quarrel between Madison and Jefferson. And it would probably still be going on if there were at least one statesman around who said we have to start changing this damn thing.



Your book revisits the debate between the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Hamiltonian Federalists, which at the time were effectively young America’s two parties. More than 200 years later, do we still see any strands, any threads of continuity in our current body politic?

Just traces. But mostly we find the sort of corruption Franklin predicted. Ours is a totally corrupt society. The presidency is for sale. Whoever raises the most money to buy TV time will probably be the next president. This is corruption on a major scale.

Enron was an eye-opener to naive lovers of modern capitalism. Our accounting brotherhood, in its entirety, turned out to be corrupt, on the take. With the government absolutely colluding with them and not giving a damn.

Bush’s friend, old Kenny Lay, is still at large and could just as well start some new company tomorrow. If he hasn’t already. No one is punished for squandering the people’s money and their pension funds and for wrecking the economy.

So the corruption predicted by Franklin bears its terrible fruit. No one wants to do anything about it. It’s not even a campaign issue. Once you have a business community that is so corrupt in a society whose business is business, then what you have is, indeed, despotism. It is the sort of authoritarian rule that the Bush people have given us. The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with — even using much of the same language. In one of my earlier books, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, I show how the language used by the Clinton people to frighten Americans into going after terrorists like Timothy McVeigh — how their rights were going to be suspended only for a brief time — was precisely the language used by Hitler after the Reichstag fire.



In this context, would any of the Founding Fathers find themselves comfortable in the current political system of the United States? Certainly Jefferson wouldn’t. But what about the radical centralizers, or those like John Adams, who had a sneaking sympathy for the monarchy?

Adams thought monarchy, as tamed and balanced by the parliament, could offer democracy. But he was no totalitarian, not by any means. Hamilton, on the other hand, might have very well gone along with the Bush people, because he believed there was an elite who should govern. He nevertheless was a bastard born in the West Indies, and he was always a little nervous about his own social station. He, of course, married into wealth and became an aristo. And it is he who argues that we must have a government made up of the very best people, meaning the rich.

So you’d find Hamilton pretty much on the Bush side. But I can’t think of any other Founders who would. Adams would surely disapprove of Bush. He was highly moral, and I don’t think he could endure the current dishonesty. Already they were pretty bugged by a bunch of journalists who came over from Ireland and such places and were telling Americans how to do things. You know, like Andrew Sullivan today telling us how to be. I think you would find a sort of union of discontent with Bush among the Founders. The sort of despotism that overcomes us now is precisely what Franklin predicted.



But Gore, you have lived through a number of inglorious administrations in your lifetime, from Truman’s founding of the national-security state, to LBJ’s debacle in Vietnam, to Nixon and Watergate, and yet here you are to tell the tale. So when it comes to this Bush administration, are you really talking about despots per se? Or is this really just one more rather corrupt and foolish Republican administration?

No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country — like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged.



So if George W. Bush or John Ashcroft had been around in the early days of the republic, they would have been indicted and then hanged by the Founders?

No. It would have been better and worse. [Laughs.] Bush and Ashcroft would have been considered so disreputable as to not belong in this country at all. They might be invited to go down to Bolivia or Paraguay and take part in the military administration of some Spanish colony, where they would feel so much more at home. They would not be called Americans — most Americans would not think of them as citizens.



Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans?

I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to take over everything, and quite in the open. We have a deranged president. We have despotism. We have no due process.



Yet you saw in the ’60s how the Johnson administration collapsed under the weight of its own hubris. Likewise with Nixon. And now with the discontent over how the war in Iraq is playing out, don’t you get the impression that Bush is headed for the same fate?

I actually see something smaller tripping him up: this business over outing the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA agent. It’s often these small things that get you. Something small enough for a court to get its teeth into. Putting this woman at risk because of anger over what her husband has done is bitchy, dangerous to the nation, dangerous to other CIA agents. This resonates more than Iraq. I’m afraid that 90 percent of Americans don’t know where Iraq is and never will know, and they don’t care.

But that number of $87 billion is seared into their brains, because there isn’t enough money to go around. The states are broke. Meanwhile, the right wing has been successful in convincing 99 percent of the people that we ‰ are generously financing every country on Earth, that we are bankrolling welfare mothers, all those black ladies that the Republicans are always running against, the ladies they tell us are guzzling down Kristal champagne at the Ambassador East in Chicago — which of course is ridiculous.

And now the people see another $87 billion going out the window. So long! People are going to rebel against that one. Congress has gone along with that, but a lot of congressmen could lose their seats for that.



Speaking of elections, is George W. Bush going to be re-elected next year?

No. At least if there is a fair election, an election that is not electronic. That would be dangerous. We don’t want an election without a paper trail. The makers of the voting machines say no one can look inside of them, because they would reveal trade secrets. What secrets? Isn’t their job to count votes? Or do they get secret messages from Mars? Is the cure for cancer inside the machines? I mean, come on. And all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption?

So Bush will probably win if the country is covered with these balloting machines. He can’t lose.



But Gore, aren’t you still enough of a believer in the democratic instincts of ordinary people to think that, in the end, those sorts of conspiracies eventually fall apart?

Oh no! I find they only get stronger, more entrenched. Who would have thought that Harry Truman’s plans to militarize America would have come as far as we are today? All the money we have wasted on the military, while our schools are nowhere. There is no health care; we know the litany. We get nothing back for our taxes. I wouldn’t have thought that would have lasted the last 50 years, which I lived through. But it did last.

But getting back to Bush. If we use old-fashioned paper ballots and have them counted in the precinct where they are cast, he will be swept from office. He’s made every error you can. He’s wrecked the economy. Unemployment is up. People can’t find jobs. Poverty is up. It’s a total mess. How does he make such a mess? Well, he is plainly very stupid. But the people around him are not. They want to stay in power.



You paint a very dark picture of the current administration and of the American political system in general. But at a deeper, more societal level, isn’t there still a democratic underpinning?

No. There are some memories of what we once were. There are still a few old people around who remember the New Deal, which was the last time we had a government that showed some interest in the welfare of the American people. Now we have governments, in the last 20 to 30 years, that care only about the welfare of the rich.



Is Bush the worst president we’ve ever had?

Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed.



How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out?

I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And it won’t be pretty.

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Jetzt ist alles umgeworfen. Erstmal eine irakische Regierung, dann sollen diese sich auf Wahlen einigen. Die ausländischen Truppen sollen bleiben auf Einladung der neuen Regierung. Was soll das ändern? Außer es wird sich eine Regierung bilden gestützt auf US-Waffen, und dann vielleicht Saddam II eingesetzt?
Träumer bleiben Träumer. Nur die Realität wird wieder grausam sein.

November 16, 2003
Iraqis in Accord on Fast Schedule to Regain Power
By JOEL BRINKLEY and SUSAN SACHS

BAGHDAD, Nov. 15 — Buoyed by an American promise of independence by June, Iraqi political leaders on Saturday pledged to quickly organize elections and build a democratic government on the ruins of Saddam Hussein`s dictatorship.

Their announcement, broadcast by satellite television stations across the Arab world, signaled the revival of Iraqi political life after 35 years of one-party rule and the start of a potentially divisive national debate over the shape of the new Iraq.

Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader who is this month`s president of Iraq`s interim governing council, said the council would soon broaden its membership and create a provisional government to replace the Iraqi Governing Council by the end of June 2004.

While American and other foreign troops are likely to remain for some time, he added, "the occupation shall end."

His declaration put a public stamp of approval on a deal worked out between the council members and L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator for Iraq, who had assured the Iraqis on Friday that the Bush administration would accelerate its transfer of power to meet Iraqi demands for sovereignty.

Mr. Talabani said the council would immediately begin work on establishing the basic parameters of an Iraqi government that would provide for the separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers, and would guarantee equality for Iraq`s diverse religious and ethnic groups.

He said the principles would be incorporated in a "basic law" to be formulated by the end of February. That will start a process that returns control of the country to an Iraqi government in just over six months. After that, Mr. Talabani said, allied military forces would remain in Iraq only as "invited guests."

A transitional assembly will be selected in the coming months. Members are to include representatives of every geographical, religious and social group in the nation — meaning it could be quite large. That assembly is to elect the new provisional government in June.

The transition would end with a national election of a new government chosen by the general public at the end of 2005, based on rules set out in a constitution to be drafted between now and then.

The plan agreed to by Mr. Bremer and the Iraqis would transform the political process initially imposed by the countries that invaded Iraq and overthrew the Hussein government more than seven months ago.

They had been insisting that the Iraqi council first organize a constitutional convention, hold elections and only then assume control of the country, but changed tactics as American troops in Iraq this month suffered their worst casualties since major combat operations ended.

With elections on the horizon and a timetable established for creating a provisional government, Iraq`s budding political parties should finally come into their own, said Kanan Makiya, an adviser to the council.

"The way the council was structured, it was just window dressing," he said. "Now, Iraqis will have a sense that they have a real and visible leadership here."

Appointed by Mr. Bremer in July, the council has largely been invisible to most Iraqis, who can see regular televised messages from Mr. Bremer but have seen little of the 24 members individually or as a group.

The American-led occupation, and the corresponding paralysis in the Governing Council, also weighed on the vast Iraqi public sector. Interim ministers have been named and many bureaucrats have returned to their offices. But the government has been rudderless, officials said, and unable to settle on a direction.

"We`re in a rough patch until the constitution," said Ali Allawi, the interim trade minister and a former World Bank official who returned recently to Iraq after 30 years abroad. "The constitution has taken on a life of its own. It is the document that is supposed to resolve all these issues. But I think you`d have to have the wisdom of Solomon to come up with a solution."

The constitution is likely to become a battleground where the relative weight of the country`s Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish populations is determined.

Already some Sunni political leaders have expressed misgivings about calling elections. Although a minority of the population, Sunnis have long dominated the political elite of the country and were particularly favored over the Kurds and the brutally oppressed Shiite majority during the reign of Mr. Hussein.

"Elections, semielections, constitutional committees — all will work to their benefit," said Nasir Kamil al-Chadirchi, a Sunni council member.

"It`s bad when someone tries to impose his opinion on others," he added, speaking earlier this week before the formal announcement of the sovereignty agreement. "Let`s not have the majority impose its opinion on the minority."

Leading Shiite parties, have sought to allay any fears among their council colleagues and American officials that they want to create an Iranian-style Islamic state or a rigid theocracy like Saudi Arabia`s.

"Iraq is moving toward a free market economy, so no laws can limit what anyone can do in the economic field," said Sheik Jalal Uldin al-Saghir, the representative of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. "But our program for the constitution is for it to respect the Islamic identity of the Iraqi people," he added. "No law should be passed that contradicts Islamic law in its broad principles."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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An embrace to the end
Even if he wanted to, Tony Blair cannot loosen his bond with George W. Bush. Iraq and its afterburn leave them dependent on each other

Andrew Rawnsley, political journalist of the year
Sunday November 16, 2003
The Observer

The last time I rode through London on board the Prime Minister`s motorcade, it was a fairly low-key affair: a limousine for him, a people-carrier for his staff, a police support vehicle and a couple of cops on motorbikes to hold back lesser mortals.

Modest though this cavalcade was by the standards of many leaders, as we hurtled through the stopped traffic, one of Mr Blair`s senior aides groaned about its negative impact on members of the public watching as the Prime Minister swept them aside. The aide sighed: `I can`t help thinking that every time we do this we lose a thousand votes.`

If that worries them, consider how apprehensive they are inside Number 10 as they prepare to roll out the red carpet for George W. Bush. Downing Street people wonder how many votes will be flushed away each time the American President`s armoured column, complete with mobile arsenal, blood bank and resuscitation unit, brings London`s traffic to a halt. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? A million?

It`s impossible to be sure exactly how damaging George W. Bush`s state visit will be to Tony Blair. The answer may be that it will not be such a massive vote-loser as the critics anticipate if only because the harm done to the Prime Minister by this relationship is damage already inflicted.

It is easy to see the political advantages that Mr Bush hopes to extract from his three days in Britain. The feasting and flummery of a state visit is an honour that has strangely not been accorded to the 10 previous Presidents of the Queen`s reign. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied armies that liberated Europe from the Nazis, did not get this distinction. Margaret Thatcher did not wrap this ribbon around Ronald Reagan, her soulmate and fellow warrior of the Cold War.

We know why George W. Bush was so keen on a state visit because his election strategists have been completely unembarrassed about it. They freely chatter about the advantages of adding pictures of President Bush banqueting at Buck House to the international showreel they are preparing for next year`s contest for the White House.

They want to present their candidate as well travelled abroad and well liked there, not the blundering gunslinger who has isolated America that is portrayed by his domestic opponents.

Their template is the re-election campaign of Reagan in 1984 and they mention how well it played for him to be filmed riding with the Queen. For the people of a proud republic, many Americans have a curious awe of Britain`s monarchy. At any rate, they are thought to do so by the people who run American election campaigns.

Added to that are the benefits to Mr Bush of being seen clasped close to Mr Blair, who is much more popular in the United States than he is here, and held in greater regard by a lot of centrist Americans than their own leader.

What possible upside the Prime Minister might derive from this visit is less immediately clear than its potential for embarrassment. Easy ammunition is provided to his anti-war critics such as Robin Cook, who speaks for a large segment of the Labour Party when he despairs that the Prime Minister should be `offering up Buckingham Palace as the mother of all photo-ops for President Bush`.

Many people in government have been wincing how much better it would be if there had been a way of calling the whole thing off. But among them is not Tony Blair. `I believe this is exactly the right time for him to come,` the Prime Minister said last week, a statement of defiance which met widespread bemusement.

Even if he were minded to, he cannot wriggle free of the ties that bind him to George Bush. The war in Iraq and the afterburn on the two men who made that war has left them dependent on each other.

For both Prime Minister and President, this transcends every other item straining at the relationship. It might do Mr Blair a power of good with those who accuse him of poodleism if he articulated some of the transatlantic differences during the Bush visit. I very much doubt he will. Blair does not like to `do rude` to other leaders, and Bush takes rude exceptionally badly.

Their shared enterprise into Iraq is now a shared predicament which has strengthened rather than weakened the affinity between the two. Each says he admires in the other a straightness that he does not find elsewhere. When Bush says of Blair that `he is the least political person I`ve dealt with`, he means it as a compliment. For his part, Blair has regularly told confidants that he finds it much easier to deal with this American rather than the cleverer but more slippery Bill Clinton.

The judgments of history about their Iraq project, if not their electoral fortunes, are now bound together. Whether people around them much like it or not - and many on both sides of the Atlantic don`t - their fates have become entwined.

More than six months after President Bush announced the war to be over, a declaration the more prudent Mr Blair never made, both men have domestic audiences deeply suspicious of the causes they gave for war and increasingly troubled by its consequences.

America`s embroilment becomes daily less popular in the United States. As the bodybags keep coming home, the shadow of Vietnam darkens over the campaign. Now, more than ever, George Bush needs to demonstrate to the United States that they are not alone in this enterprise. No one performs the role of stalwart friend better than Tony Blair. When American faith in their President`s judgment is fraying, more than ever he needs to show he still enjoys the maximalist support of the Prime Minister.

Bush needs Blair; Blair needs Bush. He is in too deep to extricate himself from this clasp, even if he wanted to. The Prime Minister`s second term is defined by the war in Iraq. That decision relegates anything else he has done since the last election and will do before the next one. Public-service reform is so fragile that his flagship foundation hospitals, already stripped down to near-irrelevancy though they are, are in high peril of being torpedoed in the House of Commons this week. His devotion to his European project remains as undimmed as ever, and as stalled as ever.

For good or ill, Iraq is the big item by which Blair`s second term will be judged. At the moment, the definition is nothing like as flattering as he assumed it would be in the immediate afterglow of victory. The fabled weapons of mass destruction have proved as elusive as Saddam Hussein himself. The verdict of Hutton - to be expected, I`m told, on 15 January next year - hangs over the Government.

The war can only become a Blair plus in the ledger of history if Iraq emerges from the present traumas as the civilised, cohesive, pluralistic democracy he has promised. That will demand sacrifice, patience and subtlety from the occupying forces. All three commodities seem to be running dangerously low on the American side as its electoral timetable kicks in.

The abrupt changes to the American exit strategy announced last week contained some adjustments welcome to the British, but it is much more alarming to Mr Blair if this presages an American scuttle from Iraq to get the boys and girls home before the next presidential election.

George W. Bush and those who will demonstrate against his visit have, in this crucial sense, more in common with each other than they have with Tony Blair. Both the protesters and the President want to see US troops out of Iraq.

In the words of Mr Blair, at the moment there is only the introduction of `some semblance of broad-based government`. Cutting and running from Iraq before his democratic vision for the country is fulfilled would be personal humiliation and political disaster in the eyes of both electorate and history. Much, much worse than the passing discomforts of having George W. Bush in town.

[e-mail]


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Cheney ignored war chaos alert
Kamal Ahmed, political editor
Sunday November 16, 2003
The Observer

British warnings that America was failing before the war to prepare properly for a crumbling security situation in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was ousted were ignored by Vice President Dick Cheney and the Pentagon.

In some of the first direct evidence of serious divisions between the key allies in the run-up to the conflict, the former British Ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, said the US had failed to focus on what might happen after Saddam had been overthrown.

His admission raises serious questions that a lack of planning by US forces is at least partly to blame for Iraq`s present security problems.

Last week 17 Italians and eight Iraqis were killed by a suicide bomber in the southern Iraqi town of Nasiriyah. It was the worst atrocity in the country for three months.

In an interview with The Observer, Meyer, who was ambassador just before the war began, said there were a series of meetings between British and American officials between the signing of the United Nations Resolution 1441 last November and the start of the war in March.

The British regularly raised their concerns about how much planning was going on to secure the country after Saddam, but the issue was largely ignored.

`One of the things that did not work out between us was a properly agreed strategy,` Meyer said.

`I suspect that a lot of things that we were saying to the Americans when we had a number of meetings towards the end of last year on post-Saddam strategy, a lot of those things have now been shown to be right.`

Meyer was referring to the security situation in Iraq, which critics say has been blighted by a lack of co-ordination between American forces and a lack of understanding about what the response of sections of the Iraqi population would be to the occupation.

Asked if the Government had warned the US about the need for planning the post-Saddam era, he said: `Absolutely, absolutely.

He added: `The problem was that bureaucratically there is a tendency in Washington to be able to focus on only one big issue at a time.

`I think they were consumed in the contingency planning for war.

`We were saying that`s fine but we must be clear in our own mind what is happening afterwards. That was absolutely indispensable.

`The message was well taken in the State Depart ment but it could not agree an approach with the Defence Department and the Vice President.`

Meyer revealed that Tony Blair had made a personal appeal to Bush in the new year to delay the war.

At their Washington summit in January, Bush had made it clear that America was ready to attack the following month, well before all the diplomatic avenues had been exhausted and before Britain felt that its military capability was ready.

`Two issues had to be thrashed out,` Meyer said. `Would the Americans support us going for a second resolution. The other was [that] we needed some delay - less to work through the diplomacy, more to get the British deployment there.

`I remember sending something to London on the eve of that meeting saying: "Neither argument had been won in Washington. Tony Blair is going to have to come to Washington and argue for support of the second resolution and argue for some delay which is desirable".`


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Mounting death toll forces US to speed Iraq handover
Strengthening resistance has convinced the coalition that a transfer of security is needed, reports Peter Beaumont in Baghdad

Peter Beaumont
Sunday November 16, 2003
The Observer

Iraqi guerrillas claimed their 400th US military victim yesterday morning in a roadside blast in a Baghdad suburb, even as the US unveiled its plans for transfer of sovereignty and security to an Iraqi transitional government.

By the early evening, at least 12 soldiers died after two Black Hawk helicopters crashed after apparently colliding in mid-air over the northern city of Mosul. Witnesses said they collided after one was already ablaze from an explosion.

The bombs were coming like punctuation marks to the coalition`s best intentions. Even as the Iraqi Governing Council met within the city`s heavily fortified convention centre to announce the accelerated transfer of sovereignty to a transitional government, another blast reverberated across the city.

These explosions hang like question marks over the latest US political and military initiatives in Iraq, designed to bring the escalating insurgency to an end, but whose very trajectory - so many fear - could simply bring more violence.

The question they pose to ordinary Iraqis is whether the plan is the answer to their prayers, or simply an excuse for America to cut and run, despite President George W. Bush`s denials that it is his `exit strategy`.

What they want to know most of all is whether the declaration that the `occupation` will end next summer is a real, or a matter of semantics? Most pressingly they want to know what precisely was announced yesterday by the rotating president of Governing Council, the veteran Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, with the support of his council colleagues.

The proposal, on paper at least, seems simple. Town and city leaders will be asked next spring to `elect` a transitional government in which sovereignty over all issues, from finances to security, will be invested. Under its auspices, a written constitution and bill of rights would be drawn up and national elections organised.

Most significantly of all for Washington, the new sovereign government would be in a position to renegotiate the terms of the foreign troops on its soil, turning the coalition forces from the legally-defined `occupation forces` into a `military presence`. It is this last formulation that is supposed to be the magic in the plan.

Washington`s rationale is that if the largely US presence can be presented not as an occupation but a partnership, then the swamp of support for the resistance can be drained. The reality, as it emerged yesterday, is that the new plan of accelerated sovereignty is a trade-off and a gamble.

What is being traded off is the earlier US insistence that the Governing Council should settle its differences - in particular over the role of clerics in the new Iraq - and agree on a constitution that could be democratically in favour of a process that is only partially democratic at the very best.

The gamble is that the Iraqis will accept a process that is so flawed and deliver the feel-good factor that would - with the assistance of the government`s new security forces - help to stem the attacks on coalition forces in a US election year.

But risk is written right across the plan. It requires all parties in Iraq in Talabani`s formulation to agree to a new administration which, given the divisions among Shi`ites alone, would appear to be a tall order.

It also requires Iraqi troops and security forces not only to reach a level of training to be put into the battle against the rebels, but to be engaged without the risk of major human rights abuses, which is also open to question. And it requires ordinary Iraqis to invest in a process which, at its outset at least, excludes them from the decision-making process.

How high the stakes that are being played for are was reinforced last week amid more bad news from the military front, not least the devastating suicide attack on the Italian carabinieri post in Nasariyeh. For if Washington has been forced to rethink the governance of Iraq, it has been forced too to rethink its strategy for its war against an insurgency that is leaching dangerously out of the Sunni Triangle into the north and south.

In almost a week of operations in Tikrit and western Baghdad, the US military has brought into play some of its most sophisticated equipment, including jets, attack helicopters and AC-130 Spectre gunships, converted cargo planes with cannon mounted in their bellies.

All it has served to do is emphasise how the coalition and the Iraqi guerrillas are fighting different wars by different rules. The difference has been defined by language just as sharply as on the political front between `occupation` and a `military presence`.

Coalition press officers talk of attacking `guerrilla hideouts` and buildings being used as `meeting places` for the rebels, suggesting a guerrilla army living in the field, separate from the population. In reality, the hideouts are people`s homes, their headquarters apartments and living rooms.

What is clear is that the change in US tactics has been driven by the rapid improvement in the tactics of the Iraqi resistance.

`What we have been seeing is an increasing trend in sophistication in the devices being used against us that we have not seen before the past few weeks,` said one coalition officer. `These are remotely-initiated bombs, both electrical and mechanical.`

And the biggest risk of all is how the resistance is now playing with the most vulnerable Iraqi group: its youth.

`We have started noticing a new trend, the appearance of young guys attracted by a kind of glamour of being a fighter,` said Dr Iyad Alawi of the Iraqi National Accord, one of the rotating presidents on the Governing Council. `When we interrogate them, they come up with some half-baked reason for being involved, like nationalism or religion, when it is a kind of youthful rebellion thing.

`There has been a breakdown of communication between the coalition and this group and we need to get to them quickly and explain exactly what concepts like liberation and democracy should mean to them.`


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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United States: Escalating guerrilla attacks feed fears of new Vietnam
Six months ago a hugely popular George Bush declared `Mission Accomplished`. But now Rupert Cornwell finds the President`s political life in danger as even former hawks see history repeating itself
16 November 2003


On a crystal-clear November afternoon in Washington DC, tourists trickle slowly past the Vietnam War memorial, as usual. Some take photos. Others make a stone rubbing of the name of a lost loved one, carved in the plain black granite.

Katrina Arnwine, 35, has travelled from the West Coast to visit Washington and scans a stone panel for a name. "He`s the son of a friend of mine. He was just 19 when he was killed, back in 1970." And as the toll of deaths continues to rise steadily in Iraq, she wonders whether a similar tragedy may be starting to unfold.

"The war was supposed to have been won. But our troops are still in Iraq and they`re still dying. Every day you hear of more of them, more now since the so-called end of active engagements than during the war. Many of them are so young, and they`ve no idea why they`re there and why they were sent there in the first place."

Ms Arnwine is not alone. To be sure, a majority of Americans still believe that the conflict was worthwhile, that the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein, however dubious the rationale that he was a real and imminent threat to their country. As Condoleezza Rice, George Bush`s National Security Adviser, told The Independent on Sunday ahead of the President`s visit to London: "This is a regime in which we have already found mass graves ... the world is far better off and freedom has been advanced by the destruction of that regime. So when people are protesting in the streets, I hope they`ll remember that finally Iraqis ... may have a chance to have the same privilege."

But six and a half months after President Bush, dressed in a Top Gun pilot`s suit, declared an end to major combat operations beneath that now infamous banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished", a quiet fear is spreading among many ordinary Americans - that their country is slipping ineluctably into another overseas morass of its own making.

Mr Bush, his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and the neo-conservatives who dominate the administration, are congenitally unable to admit that anything has gone wrong. The present difficulties were expected, they maintain; ultimate victory is certain. But today even they cannot deny that this wasn`t how it was supposed to be.

Despite every White House effort to minimise the domestic impact of the casualties, including a ban on media coverage of the returning coffins, Ms Arnwine and everyone else are well aware that day after day two or three (or even, once, 16) Americans are killed by an elusive and ever more organised resistance.

Cover the positive, the White House urges, but in vain. The pictures and news stories from Iraq dwell on coalition losses, suicide bombings and the declining morale of 130,000 troops, some of whose tours of duty have been extended to a year or more.

Last week the crisis could be hidden no longer, as Paul Bremer, the chief US civilian administrator in Baghdad, was summoned back to Washington and told by Mr Bush to accelerate the political handover to Iraqis. But how? Elections first and then a new government, or the other way round? What sort of new constitution should be agreed and when?

A "variety of options" are under consideration, says Ms Rice, slipping into diplo-speak. "Clearly, though, the course decided will have to be an Iraqi course," she notes. "Iraqification", the process is called, reminiscent of the Vietnamisation of yore. The difference is that even after "Iraqification", American troops will stay in the country to provide security.

Now finally it has dawned even on the cheeriest Pentagon neo-cons, such as Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defence for policy and the department`s number-three ranking civilian official, that Washington`s goals risk sliding into insoluble conflict. As Americans become increasingly unwelcome, the US troop presence will reduce the credibility of a supposedly Iraqi government, and fuel suspicions that the real aim of the US is control of Iraq`s oil.

Yet to pull the soldiers out would invite charges of abandonment, and a complete collapse of security. There was, Mr Feith owned, "a tension" between the two objectives.

Less than a year before he faces the voters in the 2004 election, Mr Bush knows that if this guerrilla war continues to exact casualties at the present rate and if Iraq`s political future is unresolved next November, then his political future too might be in grave doubt.

Maybe, of course, it will all come right: Saddam Hussein will be captured, rivalries between Iraq`s various ethnic and religious groups will vanish, and everyone will live happily ever after.

Close to the Vietnam memorial, vendors still tout that Pentagon "deck of cards", depicting Iraq`s most wanted, and triumphalist posters with "Gotcha" scrawled in black over the faces of Saddam`s killed and captured henchmen. Today, however, they are ancient icons, reminders that an age of innocence vanished only six months ago.
16 November 2003 12:25


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Lance Price: Rupert Murdoch - the man who would be kingmaker
Can the world`s most powerful media baron make or break politicians?
16 November 2003


It was a bravura performance, even by Rupert Murdoch`s own standards. Not content with having faced down a shareholders` revolt to see his 30-year-old son, James, confirmed at the top of BSkyB, the media tycoon went on to cap a good day`s work on Friday by sending shivers down the collective spines of the Prime Minister and his government. And, for good measure, in the process he brought a smile to the already smirking face of the new leader of the Conservative Party with the suggestion that his newspapers, including The Sun, could switch allegiance at the next election.

So far Labour has had little choice but to put a brave face on it all. The election is still 18 months away at least, and Mr Murdoch`s comments fell a long way short of announcing that he was returning to the Tory fold. Indeed, for him, they were surprisingly muted.

But before the Tories start to think that Christmas has come early, they should take a good long pause for thought. The gift that Mr Murdoch is dangling so temptingly before them, just out of reach, may not be as appealing as the paper it`s wrapped in suggests.

Of course, to an aspiring Prime Minister, Mr Murdoch`s support comes wrapped in some very attractive papers indeed. The Sun may not have won it, as it claimed back in 1992, but the backing of the News International stable, including the News of the World and The Times, has been of huge benefit to the Labour Party. Which is why the party, and Tony Blair personally, have invested so much time and effort in keeping on the right side of News International and its powerful boss for the best part of a decade.

When I worked inside No 10, relations with Mr Murdoch were considered such a sensitive matter that they were dealt with by just a handful of Mr Blair`s closest advisers. Two of them, Alastair Campbell and Anji Hunter, his former special assistant, have now left. But those who remain know that to lose Mr Murdoch`s support would be seen by the Prime Minister as a big blow.

The Prime Minister tells us he`s developed a thicker skin over the years. The man who at the beginning enjoyed something approaching adulation from the media has had to get used to life with a daily diet of fierce media criticism. But he won`t be ready to give up Mr Murdoch`s support without a fight. Not for nothing did he make a 22-hour journey to address Mr Murdoch`s executives at their private resort off Australia in 1995, or to keep in regular personal contact ever since.

There was never any discussion that I can remember about whether it was right or wrong to court him so energetically. That his support was a huge bonus was a given. There was certainly never any doubt that that`s how Mr Blair saw it.

The trip down under was before my time in Downing Street and I was never privy to the contents of the discussions. There are those, of course, who believe the then Leader of the Opposition was in a mood to do a deal. That the law passed in his first term as Prime Minister to allow foreign ownership in British broadcasting was part of that deal. And Mr Murdoch wouldn`t have been in London for the BSkyB board meeting without it.

I don`t believe the Prime Minister I got to see at close quarters for several years did such an explicit deal with Mr Murdoch any more than he did one with Gordon Brown over the leadership itself. But I`m happy to accept that Mr Murdoch`s much-valued support doesn`t come cost free. For that reason alone, Michael Howard should be on his guard.

Yet none of Labour`s careful cultivation - the dinners at Downing Street, not all of which were made public at the time - has altered the fact that Mr Murdoch has a problem with the Prime Minister, rooted in the former`s own political contradictions. They show that, even now, he hasn`t come to terms with what Mr Blair really stands for. And, for what it`s worth, it also says a huge amount about where power lies in Britain today.

If the News Corporation boss wants to know what makes Mr Blair tick, he need only read the Labour leader`s own rewriting of Clause Four of the party`s constitution. The bit that talks about "power, wealth and opportunity ... in the hands of the many not the few".

How does that square with a 74-year-old man, who doesn`t even have a vote in Britain, going into a BBC studio and pointing out that he might have the opportunity to use his considerable wealth and power to oppose a government elected with an enormous popular mandate? As ever, the issue Mr Murdoch raised was Europe. In this case, the proposed European constitution. "I don`t like the idea of any more abdication of our [sic] sovereignty," he growled.

Fortunately for Mr Blair, Parliament`s sovereignty comes from the will of the people, the many not the few. Labour would have won in 1997 and again in 2001 without the support of Mr Murdoch or any of his illustrious titles. And Labour can win again in 2005 or 2006, too, whatever Mr Murdoch decides.

As for Mr Howard, the real reason he should look at what Mr Murdoch says with foreboding rather than glee is because the politics the media mogul stands for are exactly the politics the Tories must reject if they are to regain public support. At the heart of that politics is the kind of strident anti-Europeanism that finally did for Margaret Thatcher. The adulation of Mr Murdoch and The Sun couldn`t save her in the end, and they offer no salvation to Mr Howard now.

The truth is that Mr Blair would be delighted if the Tories decided to fashion their policies to suit Mr Murdoch. As it happens, Mr Howard shares Mr Murdoch`s anti-European instincts, so he may be happy to pay the price. But if he does, he`ll pay a heavy price for some good headlines. If the Conservative high command still thinks New Labour robbed them of their innate right to rule through good media relations, then they`ve learnt nothing at all.

The success of New Labour depended on building and maintaining a much broader coalition of support than any party, let alone the Labour Party, had managed in recent political history. Some of that support has fallen away, as it was bound to do, but an awful lot remains.

Mr Murdoch knows that, which is why his words this week were so uncharacteristically hesitant and conditional. "Let`s see how Mr Howard performs, let`s see how the Government performs," he said. In other words, if the public don`t warm to a Howard-led Tory party then neither will he, no matter what policies they pursue.

The Sun never won it, they just backed a winner. So, if the News International titles do abandon Labour, it will be because they see that the British people have shown themselves ready to do so. The Sun that has shone with such warmth on Mr Blair may yet go in, but until then we are entitled to ask if Mr Murdoch is a weather vane - or just plain vain.

Lance Price is a former director of communications for the Labour Party
16 November 2003 12:28


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Tom Tennant and Husniye Akpinar prepared "Stop Bush" signs for a rally on Thursday in London to protest American policy in Iraq.
November 16, 2003
Bush Visit Spurs Protests Against U.S. in Europe
By ALAN COWELL

LONDON, Nov. 15 — It is the perception in many parts of the world that the Bush administration was redefined on Sept. 11, 2001, by its response to global terrorism, even as a wave of global sympathy engulfed the United States after the attacks.

But a more recent moment — in March 2003 — has become the real benchmark for many European critics, who contend that the first American airstrikes on Baghdad consumed any residual benevolence toward President Bush after he overrode European objections to the war in Iraq.

Mr. Bush is preparing to fly to London for a three-day visit, starting Tuesday night, that has stirred deep and hostile passions here and plans for anti-Bush street protests. Some of that anger has turned to schadenfreude as American forces seem ever more bogged down in a morass that is compared, if only by association, with Vietnam.

"In a way I even like it that he is now in such big trouble in Iraq," said Torsten Lüdge, a 21-year-old physics freshman at Berlin`s Technical University, referring to President Bush. "It`s a lesson he had to learn. Everybody told him before that he wouldn`t succeed in Iraq and he wouldn`t listen. Now Bush has to learn it the hard way."

Indeed, some European analysts believe, European misgivings about the Iraq campaign are being vindicated by the continued bloodshed in Iraq and that may produce a different approach from the United States — if only because a chastened Washington, in the view of some Europeans, has been proved wrong.

"Even the most ideological of figures in the Bush administration are beginning to realize that no power is unlimited," Thierry de Montbrial, director of the French Institute of International Relations, a private policy group, wrote in an article in Le Monde. "Better late than never."

Other French analysts agreed with Phillipe Gélie, who wrote in Le Figaro, "French ideas are coming back into favor in the United States."

For all that, President Bush remains a lightning rod for scorn and caricature as a bumbling provincial, an insensitive cowboy and worse: in Britain, Steve Bell, a cartoonist for The Guardian, routinely depicts President Bush with simian hands and feet, half man and half ape. "Bush Off," a play on the phrase "push off," a British expression for "shove off," proclaimed a front-page headline in The Mirror.

"As we would say in Rome," said an Italian jeweler, Sandro Mosciatti, 54, "Bush junior is a `bullo di periferia,` " a thug from out in the sticks.

It is a matter of debate here whether Europeans have become more anti-American or are venting deep frustrations with President Bush himself.

Timothy Garton-Ash, a scholar of European affairs at Oxford University, said it was clear that anti-Washington sentiment spreads right across the divide between what Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld once characterized as an anti-American, antiwar "old Europe," led by France and Germany, and a new Europe, led by Britain and other nations that supported the war, including Spain and Italy.

"What scares people is Bush`s unilateralism," said Javier Noya, a political analyst in Madrid.

Indeed, one recent opinion survey of 7,500 Europeans, conducted on behalf of the European Commission in Brussels, ranked the American leader No. 2, along with Kim Jong Il of North Korea, as a threat to world peace. (Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel ranked No. 1.)

Even in Britain — by far Washington`s staunchest ally in the Iraq war — thousands of people say they will take to the streets to protest President Bush`s state visit here. Mr. Bush and his wife, Laura, will stay at Buckingham Palace as guests of Queen Elizabeth II.

Partly, hostility by Britons — unlike that of some other Europeans — is colored with a profound resentment that, having sent troops to fight and die in Iraq and having provided unfailing political cover and support, Prime Minister Tony Blair seems to reap so few American rewards for tying his political fortunes to an unpopular alliance with Mr. Bush.

"It is all too clear what Britain has done to advance U.S. foreign policy," said Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who resigned in protest over the Iraq war. "It is hard to spot what President Bush has done in return to assist British interests."

In an effort to soften the harsh and simplistic contours of his image here, Mr. Bush embarked on an unusual publicity campaign, giving interviews in Washington to two British newspapers and a news agency. He also plans to appear on Sir David Frost`s television talk show.

"The president is entitled to a fairer hearing than he has received and to be treated as a politician on his merits rather than be caricatured as a cartoon figure," said an editorial in The Times of London, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch`s News Corporation.

The editorial appeared, though, opposite a cartoon showing a confused-looking Mr. Bush in camouflage military gear pondering how the letter X in the phrase "Exit Strategy from Iraq" would look as the X on a ballot for the presidential elections in 2004.

Mr. Bush will find it hard to shake the perception among European critics that he is anything more than a tool of oil interests and a coterie of close, neoconservative advisers and an implacable opponent of many cherished European ideas on the environment, the Middle East and other issues. His frequent allusions to his own Christian faith may not have won friends, either.

"He thinks the same way as Philip II did in the 16th century: as long as we believe in God we`re going to win," said Mayte Embuena, a 43-year-old tour guide in Madrid. "He doesn`t know anything about history, economics or sociology; he`s governing thanks to his faith, his mother`s advice and the help of four friends."

Mr. Bush`s visit was planned long before the war in Iraq at a time when British sentiments toward Washington were molded by sympathy after the Sept. 11 attacks. Since then, attitudes have changed. In particular, the arguments offered by both Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair to justify the war — that Iraq had chemical, biological and potential nuclear weapons, that there were links between Iraq and Al Qaeda and that a smooth victory was likely — have not been borne out for many Europeans.

"If we had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, if the transition was going well, what would be the atmosphere around this visit?" Mr. Garton-Ash said. "If things had gone well, if Blair and Bush had been proved right, you wouldn`t have had anything like the kind of resistance that you have now."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 16, 2003
U.N. Diplomats Are Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop
By KIRK SEMPLE

UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 15 - When United Nations officials speak of Iraq these days, any impulse to gloat is quickly supplanted by frustration over the harsh realities of the situation in Iraq and sadness over the loss of 19 colleagues who died in a bombing in August.

``There may be a temptation to rub one`s hands together and say, `Ha, ha! It`s not working out the way Bush thought - we told you so!``` a senior United Nations administrator said this week. ``But, frankly, it`s not good for anyone if the U.S. is defeated in Iraq.``

The Bush administration`s decision this week to speed up the transfer of power to the Iraqis won evenhanded, public praise from Secretary General Kofi Annan, who had long championed a quicker restoration of Iraqi sovereignty.

But officials and diplomats here, while welcoming the policy change, warned privately against a rapid reduction of American military forces and said they feared that the United States would dump Iraq into the hands of the United Nations.

``We in the international community are waiting for the tablets to come down from Washington,`` a foreign diplomat said nervously. ``Who knows what sort of face-saving formula they`re going to come up with.``

Mr. Annan has never been a proponent of a United Nations administration for Iraq, like in East Timor or Kosovo. Instead, he has said that the United Nations should help shepherd the transition under the authority of a sovereign, broad-based interim government and alongside a multinational security force led by the United States and endorsed by the Security Council.

But as the violence in Iraq has continued under the American occupation, the future participation of the United Nations in Iraq remains highly uncertain, even doubtful, officials say.

Mr. Annan, citing security threats, has pulled the last of his non-Iraqi workers from Baghdad and left only about 40 others in the northern part of the country, most of whom are affiliated with the oil-for-food program, under which Saddam Hussein`s government was allowed to sell oil for civilian needs despite sanctions imposed at the time of the first Persian Gulf war.

The remaining foreign staff members are due to leave the country when the program is transferred to the control of occupation forces on Nov. 21.

``Everything is on hold at the moment,`` Edward Mortimer, the United Nations director of communications, said in an interview. ``Now it`s gotten to the point where it really requires a make-or-break mission for us to send people in.``

A team from the United Nations headquarters in New York and staff members from Baghdad met this week in Nicosia, Cyprus, to discuss the future involvement of the world body in Iraq in a worsening security situation in which they and other aid workers have become targets.

The group reviewed how the United Nations can continue to contribute to the rebuilding of Iraq and ensure the safety of its workers at the same time, officials said. The results of the talks, which will be conveyed to Mr. Annan in a list of recommendations, are expected to have implications for United Nations missions in other conflict zones like Afghanistan, where a car bomb was detonated outside the organization`s offices in the southern city of Kandahar on Tuesday.

While the United Nations has insisted that the withdrawal from Baghdad is only temporary, officials say there is no clear timetable for a return. The review of future activities in Iraq is ``literally on a day-to-day basis,`` Shashi Tharoor, the under secretary general for communications and public information, said in an interview.

Fred Eckhard, a United Nations spokesman, said late this week that the policy discussions in Baghdad and Washington would not have an immediate effect on Mr. Annan`s decision to revive United Nations operations in Iraq.

``Should there be an improvement in security as a result of a change of approach, I think he would be more willing to consider sending his people back in,`` Mr. Eckhard said.

What frames the analysis and perhaps even complicates it, officials said, is an Oct. 16 Security Council resolution that was intended to define the role of the United Nations in Iraq but left many here perplexed as to its full meaning.

The resolution acknowledged that the United Nations had a ``vital role`` in Iraq, and endorsed a list, provided by Mr. Annan, of political and social services that the United Nations would provide. It also allowed Mr. Annan to provide those services as the security situation permitted.

But in the view of officials here, the document did not clarify the political relationship between the United Nations, the Iraqi people and the American-led occupation forces.

Mr. Annan has said that given the risk of working in Iraq, he would prefer to have United Nations employees work under a sovereign transitional government and not in a subordinate role to the occupying power, which, he believes, increases the danger for his staff.

``The Security Council has spoken on several occasions about the U.N. playing a central role, but it has never been clear what is meant by that,`` said Danilo Turk, assistant secretary general for political affairs. United Nations officials hope that now, with the changes in the timetable for restoring Iraqi rule, their ambiguous mandate will become clearer.

Meanwhile, because the Oct. 16 resolution allows the United Nations to calibrate its involvement depending on the security threats, Mr. Annan has time to contemplate how much risk he is prepared to take under the mandate - but only as long as the security situation remains severe, Security Council and United Nations officials agree.

``The Council is mindful that security is a problem,`` a State Department official said. ``Which is not to say there won`t be pressure put on the secretary general as the situation improves.``

``Everyone wants this enterprise to succeed,`` one senior United Nations official said. ``The challenge is to find the most sustainable basis for it.``



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November 16, 2003
Iraq Goes Sour

The American involvement with Iraq appears to have turned a corner. The Bush administration`s old game plan — drafting a constitution, followed by elections, followed by American withdrawal — has been replaced by a new timetable. It`s a bit cynical to say that the plan is to toss the whole hot potato to whatever Iraqis are willing to grab it. But the White House thinking is veering close.

President Bush gambled vast amounts of American money, influence and American and Iraqi lives on the theory that toppling Saddam Hussein would make the world safer and make the Mideast a more stable and democratic region. Obviously, the Iraqi people are better off without a vicious tyrant in power. But if the American forces leave prematurely, the country will wind up vulnerable to another dictator and possibly more of a threat to the world than it was before. Yet the administration is giving the impression of having one foot out the door, while doggedly refusing to take the only realistic next step — asking the United Nations to take over the nation-building.

Blind Intelligence

It`s useful, at this point, to look back and see how we got here. Most Americans, polls told us, were eager to see Saddam Hussein deposed because they believed he was somehow connected to Sept. 11. The president knew that was not the case, as he acknowledged long after the invasion. But the White House, along with many officials of the Clinton administration, did believe that Saddam Hussein had massive supplies of biological and chemical weapons, and that he was attempting to make Iraq a nuclear power. That was what created a sense of urgency about the invasion.

How did they wind up at what now appears to be a totally incorrect conclusion about Iraq`s weapons programs? The Central Intelligence Agency, we now realize, had no idea of what was going on inside Iraq. The country had been virtually shut off since 1998, when President Clinton ordered renewed bombing and weapons inspectors withdrew. The C.I.A.`s estimates were basically worst-case scenarios of what the Hussein regime might have been up to in the interim. That was apparently a mistake, if an understandable one.

But the assumptions Mr. Bush shared with the American people seem to have been hyped further. That was at least in part because of pressure from the Pentagon, where influential aides to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had their own sources of information, most notably Iraqi exiles. The best known was Ahmad Chalabi, now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council. After the American forces were in Iraq, Mr. Chalabi claimed for a while that their failure to find the weapons was due to the refusal of American officials to heed his tips about where they were.

The Will to Invade

The people who believed that Iraq was armed to the teeth with illegal weapons also based that opinion on simple logic. If Saddam Hussein did not have them, surely he would have cooperated fully with weapons inspectors rather than allow his country to be invaded. The very fact that he never backed down seemed to be proof he had something terrible to hide. But the Bush administration knew that as the countdown to invasion ticked away, Iraq had reached out through middlemen with an offer to allow not just full inspections, but inspections by American troops. It was an offer that might, in the end, have turned out to be meaningless. But the fact that the administration chose not to pursue it is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the White House regarded the run-up to the war not as a time for trying to avoid conflict, but as a time for public relations moves meant to give the American people the impression that there was no way out.

The Failure to Plan

Most experts, in and out of government, believed that the American military could quickly defeat the Iraqis. But there were far fewer who thought that once the Hussein government had been toppled it would be easy to make Iraq secure, get the country back on its feet and establish a democratic successor. The Bush administration had even less reason to make that conclusion, since the State Department`s own internal studies, done in preparation for the attack, outlined the obvious pitfalls. Vice President Dick Cheney had listed some of the same perils in 1991 when he defended the decision not to march on to Baghdad during the first gulf war. (American troops, he opined, would find themselves in a "quagmire.")

What, then, caused the administration to invade with so little preparation for what would happen after the fighting, and so much confidence that the Iraqis could quickly take the reins of power? Once again, it seems most likely that the Defense Department and the president`s security advisers believed the reassurances of Mr. Chalabi and the other Iraqi exiles. The administration seems to have placed its bets on information given by the very people who had the most to gain from the invasion.

The Governing Council

Mr. Chalabi, who has lived outside Iraq for much of his life, is now a member of the Governing Council, a group of leaders handpicked by the American government. So far, the council has done little but squabble internally and complain about American slights. It has made virtually no progress in preparing a new Iraqi constitution. In a nation where the overriding danger for the future is conflict among the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, it has failed to show any aptitude for bridging those gaps even within its own ranks.

If the administration winds up turning Iraq over to the council in anything like its current form, it seems wildly unlikely that the next government will be able to survive for any period of time without civil war, or the same kind of brutality that caused the world to recoil from Saddam Hussein. The Middle East would wind up an even less stable place than it is now. The war on terror would be far more difficult to fight. Iraq, which was probably not a major haven for international terrorists before the invasion, could easily turn into one.

The Last, Best Hope

The only real chance for a peaceful future for Iraq lies in a government made up of representatives of all the critical factions, working together to resolve problems fairly and peacefully. The only way to get leaders with the skills to accomplish that supremely difficult task is to train them. The best training is the very process of writing the constitution that the Bush administration now rejects as too time-consuming.

Iraqis are growing weary of American occupation and the White House argues that they will not tolerate the current situation long enough for a constitution to be prepared. That is the precise reason that the job should be turned over to the United Nations. The United Nations has far more international experience, credibility and reputation for neutrality in these matters than the United States does. There is certainly no guarantee it can succeed. There is only the certainty that the Bush administration, which has made all the wrong bets so far, does not have any better options.



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November 16, 2003
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Better Army for Iraq
By DILIP HIRO

LONDON — As President Bush and his aides met frantically this week to discuss speeding up Iraq`s transition to democracy, a paradox in the administration`s foreign policy became evident. It is the conflict between the occupation`s overarching goal — to build a stable, democratic Iraq — and the desire to get American troops out of harm`s way well before the presidential election next November.

However, the solution lies not in the administration`s new plan to turn a half-baked mess over to an unelected Governing Council. Rather, the White House should find a way to de-link the events in Iraq from Mr. Bush`s electoral strategy. One idea might be to turn day-to-day security operations over to forces that would have popular support of Iraqis, which the American-led coalition troops do not.

Some have suggested that the United Nations take over peacekeeping duties, but that is unacceptable to Iraqis. Most of them associate the United Nations with 12 years of economic sanctions that hurt them financially far more than Saddam Hussein. A better idea comes from a poll Zogby International conducted in Iraq in August, which found that 57 percent of respondents would support "Arab forces" providing security in their country. The logical conclusion: leave security up to soldiers from the Arab League.

The 22-member league has a history of peacekeeping missions in Arab countries. In 1961 it dispatched troops — from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Sudan — to Kuwait when that newly independent country was threatened by Iraq. And the league`s Arab Deterrent Force, consisting of troops from six countries, served as peacekeepers in Lebanon from 1976 to 1982 (it was only after Israel invaded Lebanon and the league failed to renew its six-month mandate that Syria got deeply embroiled in the Lebanese civil war). Now, with a United Nations mandate, Arab troops would be truly legitimate peacekeepers in Iraq.

The alternative to bringing in new peacekeepers is the Bush administration`s plan to accelerate training and arming of Iraqi security personnel. "Iraqification" has the disturbing resonance of "Vietnamization." The perils of haste are evident in the blatant massaging of numbers. In early November, while Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was saying that 118,000 Iraqis had been trained for police work, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, told reporters that actually only 60,000 Iraqis had been fully trained and equipped, and that the remainder included many guards posted along oil pipelines equipped with nothing more lethal than radios.

Speeding up the process has already led to a further relaxing of recruitment standards and vetting procedures and increased the chances that remnants of the ousted regime will find themselves in uniform. It has also led to a reduction in training below the current (and insufficient) 12 weeks. Ill-trained recruits have proved trigger-happy, frequently firing on unarmed demonstrators. Such incidents set the scene for bloody feuds along tribal lines which, in the eye-for-an-eye culture of Iraq, could escalate into civil war in the coming months and years.

The Bush administration may not like the idea of turning over part of its "war on terrorism" to Muslim nations. But it must face a fact: America has nothing in common with Iraq or Iraqis. The alienation between the occupier and the occupied extends not only to race, religion, language, and social and tribal mores but also to such basic political values as commitment to democracy. According to the Zogby poll, when asked if "Democracy can work in Iraq," 51 percent responded that "it is a Western way of doing things and will not work here."

One hopes that this attitude will change. But given the current level of distrust, it is all the more important to reassure Iraqis that they will be able to determine their future completely on their own. That means allowing them the time to draft a constitution through a popularly elected assembly — as the senior Shiite religious leaders keep insisting.

Bringing in Arab League troops to keep the peace may not be what Washington wants to hear. But it may be the most viable way to ease Mr. Bush`s campaign worries while ensuring Iraq`s long-term stability.


Dilip Hiro is author of ``Secrets and Lies: Operation `Iraqi Freedom` and After.``



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November 16, 2003
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Lessons of a Quagmire
By MAX BOOT

This month`s setbacks in Iraq — the downing of American helicopters, the suicide bombing of an Italian headquarters — have made President Bush`s mantra of "progress" ring increasingly hollow. It`s true that 80 percent of Iraq remains peaceful and stable, but we seem to be losing in the other 20 percent, mostly among Sunni Muslims who benefited from Saddam Hussein`s rule. The escalating violence lends credence to critics who see parallels with Vietnam.

In truth, there is no comparison: In Vietnam, we faced more than 1 million enemy combatants backed to the hilt by North Vietnam and its superpower patrons, China and Russia. In Iraq we confront a few thousand Baathists and jihadis with, at most, limited support from Iran and Syria. But even if this isn`t "another Vietnam," we can still learn important lessons from that earlier war about how to deal with the insurgency.

The biggest error the armed forces made in Vietnam was trying to fight a guerrilla foe the same way they had fought the Wehrmacht. The military staged big-unit sweeps with fancy code names like Cedar Falls and Junction City, and dropped more bombs than during World War II. Neither had much effect on the enemy, who would hide in the jungles and then emerge to ambush American soldiers. Seeing that his strategy wasn`t working, Gen. William Westmoreland, the American commander, responded by asking for more and more troops, until we had 500,000 soldiers in Vietnam. And still it was not enough.

President Bush seems so intent on avoiding this mistake that the Defense Department has unveiled plans to cut the total number of troops in Iraq next year from 132,000 to 105,000. It is hard to see what, in the current dismal strategic picture, convinces the Pentagon that this makes sense. Such a slow-motion withdrawal will only embolden our enemies in Iraq and discourage our friends.

Senator John McCain has suggested that, far from reducing our forces, it`s time to send another division. There are certainly tasks where we could use more troops, such as securing Iraq`s porous borders and guarding arms depots that have become virtual Wal-Marts for terrorists. But as the experience of Vietnam suggests, more troops will not necessarily solve our central challenge: defeating guerrillas.

Sending more soldiers could even be counterproductive if it results in more civilian casualties, as it did in Vietnam, complicating our effort to win over the population. American forces in Iraq have tried hard to avoid "collateral damage," but they have nevertheless made some costly mistakes. A week ago, an army sentry shot dead the American-appointed mayor of Sadr City in Baghdad.

What proved most effective in Vietnam were not large conventional operations but targeted counterinsurgency programs. Four — known as CAP, Cords, Kit Carson Scouts and Phoenix — were particularly effective.

CAP stood for Combined Action Platoon. Under it, a Marine rifle squad would live and fight alongside a South Vietnamese militia platoon to secure a village from the Vietcong. The combination of the Marines` military skills and the militias` local knowledge proved highly effective. No village protected under CAP was ever retaken by the Vietcong.

Cords, or Civil Operations and Rural Development Support, was the civilian side of the counterinsurgency, run by two C.I.A. legends: Robert Komer and William Colby. It oversaw aid programs designed to win hearts and minds of South Vietnamese villagers, and its effectiveness lay in closely coordinating its efforts with the military.

The Kit Carson Scouts were former Communists who were enlisted to help United States forces. They primarily served as scouts and interpreters, but they also fought. Most proved fiercely loyal. They had to be: they knew that capture by their former Vietcong comrades meant death.

Phoenix was a joint C.I.A.-South Vietnam effort to identify and eradicate Vietcong cadres in villages. Critics later charged the program with carrying out assassinations, and even William Colby acknowledged there were "excesses." Nevertheless, far more cadres were captured (33,000) or induced to defect under Phoenix (22,000) than were killed (26,000).

There is little doubt that if the United States had placed more emphasis on such programs, instead of the army`s conventional strategy, it would have fared better in Vietnam. This is worth keeping in mind today as Sunni towns like Fallujah and Ramadi increasingly turn into an Arab version of Vietcong "villes." The Army is running some valuable counterinsurgency programs in Iraq, but too often it responds to major setbacks with big-unit sweeps (the ongoing one is called Iron Hammer). In a move reminiscent of some of the excesses of Vietnam, the military has taken to dropping 500-pound bombs and sending out M-1 tanks in a largely futile attempt to wipe out elusive foes.

To secure the Sunni Triangle, the army would do better to focus on classic counterinsurgency strategies. We need closer cooperation between Iraqi and coalition forces, as in CAP. We need better coordination between the military and L. Paul Bremer`s Coalition Provisional Authority, as in Cords. We need better intelligence to identify and neutralize Iraqi insurgents, as in Phoenix. We might even want to recruit Baathists and induce them to turn against their erstwhile comrades, as in the Kit Carson Scouts.

The common factor in all these initiatives is solid help from Iraqis. Only locals can pick out the good guys from the bad. Also — and this is a more delicate matter — Iraqis would be able to try some of the strong-arm tactics that our own scrupulously legalistic armed forces shy away from.

Excessive brutality can be counterproductive in fighting an insurgency (as the French discovered in Algeria), but there is also a danger of playing by Marquess of Queensbury rules against ruthless opponents. Our military — which is court-martialing an Army lieutenant colonel who fired his pistol into the air to scare an Iraqi suspect into divulging details of an imminent attack — may simply be too Boy Scoutish for the rougher side of a dirty war. Iraqis who suffered under Saddam Hussein`s tyranny likely feel no such compunctions. More should be done to recruit relatives of those killed by the Baathists who would be eager to pursue a "blood feud" against Saddam Hussein`s men.

While Mr. Bush`s plans to accelerate the turnover of political authority to Iraqis and the deployment of Iraqi security forces make sense, for now the brunt of the military campaign will still have to be borne by Americans. If American forces fear to spend time on the streets of Fallujah and other Sunni towns, what hope is there for undertrained Iraqi security officers who will be branded collaborators by their own people?

Even if the American forces do everything right, there is no quick or easy end in sight. No halfway competent guerrilla force has ever been defeated as easily as the Iraqi army was in 1991 and 2003.

The Iraqi guerrillas, like the Vietcong, realize that a conventional military victory is beyond their grasp. Their only hope is to continue ratcheting up the cost of the conflict until the desire of the American public to continue the struggle is shattered. This worked in Vietnam. It might — sobering thought — work today. Is the American will to sustain casualties greater than our enemies` ability to inflict them? Upon that question will turn the future of Iraq.


Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of ``The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power.``



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Agreement on Formation of Iraq`s New Government



The Associated Press
Saturday, November 15, 2003; 5:37 PM


The agreement between the U.S.-led coalition and the Iraqi Governing Council on the formation of Iraq`s new government.

1. The "Fundamental Law." To be drafted by the Governing Council in close consultation with the Coalition Provisional Authority. Will be approved by both the GC and CPA, and will formally set forth the scope and structure of the sovereign Iraqi transitional administration.

Elements of the "Fundamental Law":

— Bill of rights, to include freedom of speech, legislature, religion; statement of equal rights of all Iraqis, regardless of gender, sect, and ethnicity; and guarantees of due process.

— Federal arrangement for Iraq, to include governorates and the separation and specification of powers to be exercised by central and local entities.

— Statement of the independence of the judiciary, and a mechanism for judicial review.

— Statement of civilian political control over Iraqi armed and security forces.

— Statement that Fundamental Law cannot be amended.

— An expiration date for Fundamental Law.

— Timetable for drafting of Iraq`s permanent constitution by a body directly elected by the Iraqi people; for ratifying the permanent constitution; and for holding elections under the new constitution.

Drafting and approval of "Fundamental Law" to be complete by Feb. 28, 2004.


2. Agreements with Coalition on Security. To be agreed between the CPA and the GC. Security agreements to cover status of Coalition forces in Iraq, giving wide latitude to provide for the safety and security of the Iraqi people.

Approval of bilateral agreements complete by the end of March 2004.


3. Selection of Transitional National Assembly. Fundamental Law will specify the bodies of the national structure, and will ultimately spell out the process by which individuals will be selected for these bodies. However, certain guidelines must be agreed in advance.

— The transitional assembly will not be an expansion of the GC. The GC will have no formal role in selecting members of the assembly, and will dissolve upon the establishment and recognition of the transitional administration. Individual members of the GC will, however, be eligible to serve in the transitional assembly, if elected according to the process below.

— Election of members of the Transitional National Assembly will be conducted through a transparent, participatory, democratic process of caucuses in each of Iraq`s 18 governorates.

— In each governorate, the CPA will supervise a process by which an "Organizing Committee" of Iraqis will be formed. This Organizing Committee will include five individuals appointed by the Governing Council, five appointed by the Provincial Council, and one appointed by the local council of the five largest cities within the governorate.

— The purpose of the Organizing Committee will be to convene a "Governorate Selection Caucus" of notables from around the governorate. To do so, it will solicit nominations from political parties, provincial-local councils, professional and civic associations, university faculties, tribal and religious groups. Nominees must meet the criteria set out for candidates in the Fundamental Law. To be selected as a member of the Governorate Selection Caucus, any nominee will need to be approved by an 11/15 majority of the Organizing Committee.

— Each Governorate Selection Caucus will elect representatives to represent the governorate in the new transitional assembly based on the governorates percentage of Iraq`s population.

The Transitional National Assembly will be elected no later than May 31, 2004.


4. Restoration of Iraq`s Sovereignty. Following the selection of members of the transitional assembly, it will meet to elect an executive branch, and to appoint ministers.

By June 30, 2004 the new transitional administration will be recognized by the Coalition, and will assume full sovereign powers for governing Iraq. The CPA will dissolve.


5. Process for Adoption of Permanent Constitution. The constitutional process and timeline will ultimately be included in the Fundamental Law, but need to be agreed in advance, as detailed below.

— A permanent constitution for Iraq will be prepared by a constitutional convention directly elected by the Iraqi people.

— Elections for the convention will be held no later than March 15, 2005.

— A draft of the constitution will be circulated for public comment and debate.

— A final draft of the constitution will be presented to the public, and a popular referendum will be held to ratify the constitution.

— Elections for a new Iraqi government will be held by Dec. 31, 2005, at which point the Fundamental Law will expire and a new government will take power.


© 2003 The Associated Press

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Mary Lau, with son Anthony, 1, follows the casket of her sister-in-law, Army Pfc. Karina Lau, who died in Iraq.

Wenn die Regierung beweisen kann, dass der Sieg im Irak noch möglich ist, werden auch die Menschen die Kriegsopfer mittragen.
Durch die Aufgabe hat BushCo wohl auch die Zustimmung der Gutwilligen verloren, weil daraus zu erkennen ist, der Krieg ist nicht zu gewinnen.

washingtonpost.com
U.S. Tolerance of Deaths Tested
Key Factor Is Whether Public Believes Victory Is Likely

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 16, 2003; Page A20


The key variable in public tolerance of U.S. military deaths in combat is whether people believe that victory is likely, according to a new poll and study of U.S. public opinion on casualties in Iraq and in other military actions.

If the Bush administration "can persuade the public that `victory` is likely in Iraq, then public support will endure," says the study, which was conducted by three Duke University political scientists.

Their report concludes that President Bush has already lost most of the "soft supporters" of his handling of Iraq -- essentially those who supported an invasion and an occupation only if they were nearly cost-free -- and it predicts that a small but steady trickle of combat fatalities would not cause a collapse in support. The report estimates that, aside from confirmed hawks and doves on Iraq, about 20 percent of the public is "casualty-phobic," in that it supported the president`s actions in Iraq until casualties started to rise. It is the backing of that group that the president lost in recent months, said Peter Feaver, one of the three researchers who conducted the study.

The study notes that a precipitous drop in support could occur if the public comes to believe that victory is unlikely.

Feaver briefed White House and other administration officials on the findings Friday. The study points to three recommendations for Bush, he said. "First, worry less about persuading the American people he really did the right thing, and more about ensuring that the mission is going to be successful -- and persuading the American people of that," he said.

Also, he said, the administration needs to develop valid and convincing measures of success in Iraq, "so he himself knows whether he is winning."

Finally, Feaver said, the administration should worry less about communicating the strength of its resolve and more about "how their behind-the-scenes actions undercut their rhetoric."

In a similar survey, CBS News found that half of Americans believe the U.S. effort in Iraq is going badly, the highest proportion since Bush declared more than six months ago that major combat had ended.

But Feaver said asking about whether things are going well or badly tends to produce "very volatile" results. The question that better illuminates long-term trends, he said, is: "Do you think we`re likely to succeed?"

The Duke study is based on a survey of 1,203 American adults in late September and early October, before the latest upsurge in violence in Iraq. It was funded by the Carnegie Corp. It comes as the nation is experiencing the first sustained ground combat in four decades, since the Vietnam War. Its results challenge some of the prevailing academic wisdom about public opinion and casualties, such as the long-held view that public reaction to casualties turns on whether the public understands and supports the mission in which they occur.

The Duke study also suggests that a major reason for Bush or any president to woo foreign support is that it can shore up domestic public opinion. For example, it says that support for any military action is heavily affected by whether the president`s policies are endorsed by other major institutional players, such as Congress, NATO or the United Nations. If all those entities support the president, it says, then 68 percent of the public probably would support his policy. But if Congress opposes it, or NATO and the United Nations line up against it, support would fall to about 40 percent. And if all three go against the president, then support would drop to 22 percent.

The study arrived at some new conclusions about the relationship between the volume of media coverage and public support for the president`s handling of a situation. As casualties increased during the conventional war this spring, both support and coverage increased. "Those casualties had no significant impact" on the public`s approval of the president, the study notes.

But as casualties and coverage increased in the guerrilla fighting in late summer, support for the president declined. In that case, it says: "As coverage goes up, approval goes down."

The reason for the diverging effects of intense media coverage, Feaver said, is the nature of what is being covered. While the public has confidence in the U.S. military`s ability to wage conventional war, he noted, it is less sure of the military`s ability to prevail against an insurgency. "When the public hears `insurgency,` I think they hear `something we`re not good at,` and so that raises doubts about whether we can win, which our study finds is key," he said.

The other two political scientists who participated in the study were Christopher Gelpi and Jason Reifler.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
CIA Finds No Evidence Hussein Sought to Arm Terrorists


By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 16, 2003; Page A20


The CIA`s search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found no evidence that former president Saddam Hussein tried to transfer chemical or biological technology or weapons to terrorists, according to a military and intelligence expert.

Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, provided new details about the weapons search and Iraqi insurgency in a report released Friday. It was based on briefings over the past two weeks in Iraq from David Kay, the CIA representative who is directing the search for unconventional weapons in Iraq; L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civil administrator there; and military officials.

"No evidence of any Iraqi effort to transfer weapons of mass destruction or weapons to terrorists," Cordesman wrote of Kay`s briefing. "Only possibility was Saddam`s Fedayeen [his son`s irregular terrorist force] and talk only."

One of the concerns the Bush administration cited early last year to justify the need to invade Iraq was that Hussein would provide chemical or biological agents or weapons to al Qaeda or other terrorists. Despite the disclosure that U.S. and British intelligence officials assessed that Hussein would use or distribute such weapons only if he were attacked and faced defeat, administration spokesmen have continued to defend that position.

Last Thursday, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith defended the administration`s prewar position at the Council on Foreign Relations. "The idea that we didn`t have specific proof that he was planning to give a biological agent to a terrorist group," he said, "doesn`t really lead you to anything, because you wouldn`t expect to have that information even if it were true. And our intelligence is just not at the point where if Saddam had that intention that we would necessarily know it."

Yesterday, allegations of new evidence of connections between Iraq and al Qaeda contained in a classified annex attached to Feith`s Oct. 27 letter to leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were published in the Weekly Standard. Feith had been asked to support his July 10 closed-door testimony about such connections. The classified annex summarized raw intelligence reports but did not analyze them or address their accuracy, according to a senior administration official familiar with the matter.

During the recent Baghdad briefing, Cordesman noted that Kay said Iraq "did order nuclear equipment from 1999 on, but no evidence [has turned up] of [a] new major facility to use it."

Although there was no evidence of chemical weapons production, Kay said he had located biological work "under cover of new agricultural facility" that showed "advances in developing dry storable powder forms of botulinum toxin," Cordesman wrote.

During his Nov. 1-12 trip, Cordesman visited Baghdad, Babel, Tikrit and Kirkuk, where he met combat commanders and staff in high-threat areas. Reporting on his briefing by Bremer, Cordesman said 95 percent of the threat came from former Hussein loyalists while most foreign terrorists, who entered Iraq before the war, arrived from Syria, with some from Saudi Arabia and only "a few from Iran." Bremer "felt Syrian intelligence knows [of the volunteers] but is not proactive in encouraging [them]." He also said there was "no way to seal borders with Syria, Saudi [Arabia] and Iran. Too manpower intensive."

Bremer said Hussein loyalists "still have lots of money to buy attacks [because] at least $1 billion still unaccounted for." He also said the Syrians had admitted "some $3 billion more of Iraqi money [is] in Syria."

The Coalition Joint Task Force briefers noted that the Iraq Governing Council felt "the U.S. is too soft in attacking hostile targets, arrests and use of force," while the U.S. side "feels restraint is the key to winning hearts and minds."

Hussein, according to the briefers, "is cut off, isolated, moving constantly, [and has] no real role in control." They told Cordesman that the "problem is ex-generals and colonels with no other future -- not former top officials." They also said Hussein "made officers read `Black Hawk Down` [Mark Bowden`s book about the fatal downing of U.S. helicopters in Somalia a decade ago] to try to convince them U.S. would have to leave if major casualties."

They said there will be attacks "until the day U.S. leaves" and "cannot ever get intelligence up to point where [they can] stop all attacks."

During his visit to the Polish-led international division, south of Baghdad where the Shiites predominate, Cordesman said there were 34 attacks before a Pole was killed Nov. 6.

The force there considers the holy cities "stable" but notes that Shiite leaders such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Hussein al-Sistani, Iraq`s top Shiite cleric, "protect themselves with their own militias with CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] approval. This has its advantages, but it means they cannot be given effective coalition protection," he wrote.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Fair and Balanced™ Cartoons

Cartoon Archive
44 New Cartoons Today, für einen Sonntag langen auch 44 frische Cartoons:

http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20031116__044toons.htm

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Published on Saturday, November 15, 2003 by the Boulder Daily Camera
Economy `Robust,` Never Mind Hungry, Jobless
by Christopher Brauchli

It is a reproach to religion and government to suffer so much poverty and excess.
— William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude

It was a great speech. It was delivered in San Antonio, Texas, at a Bush-Cheney reception on the day before Halloween.

President Bush said: "And to get the economy going again, I have twice led the United States Congress to pass historic tax relief for the American people. When Americans have more take-home pay to spend, to save or invest, the whole economy grows and people are more likely to find a job. So we`re returning more money to the people to help them raise their families. ... With all these actions, this administration has laid the foundation for greater prosperity and more jobs across America so that every single one of our citizens can realize the American Dream."

He wasn`t talking about the American Dream of being free from hunger. He wasn`t talking about the American Dream of being employed. He was talking about rich people`s dream of being free from taxes. Had he been talking about hunger or jobs he would have said it was too bad that so many Americans were still going hungry and unemployed at the same time we were spending $86 billion for people who live in Iraq. He probably didn`t know his subjects were going hungry because the Department of Agriculture had not yet released its report. He didn`t know lots of people were unemployed because no one had told him.

On Halloween the DOA reported that 12 million Americans were worried that they would be unable to buy food, and in 32 percent of those families some members of the family had had to go without food. This report marked the third consecutive year in which those numbers had increased. And the increase — here comes the surprise — came about even though the administration was able to reduce the tax on capital gains and on dividends. In other words, even though hungry people were only required to pay 15 percent tax on their dividends and, in some cases, only 10 percent on profits they made when they sold their stocks and bonds, they were still going hungry.

The U.S. Census Bureau said 7.5 percent of the population of the United States was concerned that it would not have enough money to buy food and 3.5 percent felt insecure and experienced hunger. The number of people suffering the pangs of hunger went up by 5 percent over 2001 and 8 percent over 2000. According to the Census Bureau, 34.6 million Americans lived in poverty in 2002. That was an increase of 1.7 million over the previous year.

Those statistics were released the day after Mr. Bush gave his speech. Had the results been released one day earlier, it would very likely not have affected the speech. That`s because he wasn`t talking about human beings. He was talking about economic growth. He was bragging about the fact that there had been a surge in economic growth during the third quarter of 2003. The economy expanded at a 7.2-percent annual rate at the same time the hungry were also expanding in numbers.

Talking to workers in Columbus, Ohio, on Oct. 30, Mr. Bush said: "The tax relief we passed is working." Commenting on the call by some Democrats for the tax cuts to be rolled back, Mr. Bush said: "Just as the economy is coming around, some over in Washington say now is the time to raise taxes. I strongly disagree. Tax relief put this nation on the right path, and I intend to keep America on the path to prosperity."

The hungry aren`t the only ones unable to stay on the path. The jobless are another. Since Mr. Bush has been in office somewhere between 2.6 million and 3 million Americans have lost their jobs. Although that is tough on those who are jobless, it doesn`t detract from the fact that the economy is robust. During the third quarter the country enjoyed 7.2-percent growth. As the White House explained when the figures on the growth came out, without the tax cuts "as many as 1.5 million additional Americans could have lost their jobs." Had that occurred there would have been 4.1 to 5 million new jobless in America.

The announcement on Nov. 7 of the creation of 126,000 new jobs in October was welcome, even though it was accompanied by news that there was a 27-percent increase from last year in the number of workers who could only find part-time work and that the jobless rate for blacks climbed three-tenths of a percentage point in October.

In addition to bragging about the economy while in Ohio, Mr. Bush raised $1.4 million for his re-election campaign. His aides said in San Antonio he expected to raise $1.2 million. It`s nothing more than a coincidence that in that one day he raised as many new dollars for his re-election as there have been new jobless during his time in office.

When the president is upbeat, people feel better. The hungry poor are glad to learn that tax relief is working even though they remain hungry. The jobless are glad that tax relief is working even though they remain jobless. And the rest of us are glad to get our tax refunds thanks to the tax cuts.

Christopher Brauchli is a Boulder lawyer and and writes a weekly column for the Knight Ridder news service. He can be reached at [e-mail]

Copyright 2003, The Daily Camera

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Published on Saturday, November 15, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
20 Questions for George W. Bush:
Americans Must Demand Straight Answers from Their President
by Glenn Scherer

George W. Bush`s poll numbers are tumbling, his credibility crumbling, his domestic and foreign policies faltering, and our national debt soaring. Worse, many Americans fear that our nation is at far greater risk of terrorist attack today than before 9/11.

While Mr. Bush has cynically spun lies, and claims to care about America and its people, he has undermined the United States Constitution, stomped upon freedoms granted under the US Bill of Rights, attacked the bulwark of environmental laws that protects our natural resources, threatened our national security through reckless military adventures, and has savaged our economy by serving not the electorate but his campaign donors. Mr. Bush has proven repeatedly by his actions that he represents not the people, but a handful of the nation`s wealthiest families, a small group of corporate special interests and right wing religious Christian zealots.

Meanwhile, the real American people, not the super rich, but those millions who form the backbone of this country -- America`s middle class, the working poor, the elderly, our children, honest businesspeople, our soldiers, firefighters, police, scientists, bureaucrats and other public servants, have been callously battered by a Republican administration that is more abusive and ruthless in its wielding of power than any president, any Congress, any ruling political party in American history.

The president has, often behind our backs, made deals to sell out our public lands to multinational corporate oil drillers; sell off our national forests to corporate loggers; poison our air to benefit coal, energy and auto company CEOs; and threatened our drinking water by not prosecuting corporate polluters. His administration has rewarded corporate swindlers at Enron and other companies by failing to adequately punish those individuals responsible for massive criminal harm done to the people and the country. This administration, in league with these corporate pirates, has tarnished the image of America worldwide, and harmed the good name of those honest corporations who have steered clear of Republican cronyism and Neoconservative global profiteering schemes.

Still, the corporate-owned mainstream media, in attendance at the President`s rarely held press conferences, meekly reports the administration`s false promises and lame excuses, and fails to ask the tough questions that are critical to the survival of our nation in this dark time.

In truth, this is a time made even darker not by Al Qaeda, that shadowy terrorist enemy who attacks us from without, but by a Republican President and Congress that are shattering the bedrock of democratic institutions upon which our founding fathers built our country. They are destroying America by a terror attack from within.

Americans deserve straight answers from George Bush, and they deserve them now:


1. Mr. President, as you ask us to spend $87 billion in Iraq -- the second richest oil nation in the world -- in order to supposedly defend our national security, what do you say to the 1.7 million Americans who you have allowed to slip below the poverty line in the last 12 months, without any promise of help? What do you say to the 34.6 million Americans -- 1 in 8 of our people, including 13 million children -- who live in poverty and upon whom you, the Congress, and your party have turned your backs? We, the richest nation in all of history, have the worst child poverty rate and worst life expectancy of all the world`s industrialized countries. These facts, being true, why should we believe you care about our working poor, or the "national security" of hungry American children?
2. Since January 2001, nearly 2 million US jobs have been lost, and 8.6 million Americans now are actively seeking work. Since you won election three years ago, in Ohio alone, one in six manufacturing jobs have disappeared. Hunger is epidemic there, with 2 million of that state`s 11 million people forced to rely on food charities last year. This being so, why should we believe that you care about America`s labor, its moderate income or working poor, those who are the driving force buoying up our battered consumer economy, but whom you ignore?

3. Will you please defend for us, Mr. President, the massive tax cuts you have engineered for the super rich, and the massive subsidies and tax breaks you have authorized to the corporations that have provided you with the biggest campaign donations ever given a president? All this at a time when our nation is at war, when all Americans, especially the wealthy, should be willing to make sacrifices to offset a staggering $1.9 trillion national deficit over the next six years? How do you justify tax cuts to the rich when 43 million Americans cannot afford basic health insurance. That`s 43 million Americans to whom you, Congress, and your party have offered no help or hope? How can we believe you care about "national security" when none of these citizens know what will become of their families if parents or children are struck by catastrophic illness?

4. You have just approved a new rule, Mr. President, that bypasses and subverts the Clean Air Act, one of our greatest environmental achievements as a nation. Your new rule, in direct violation of that law, will allow coal burning power plants to significantly increase their rate of air pollution. Coal-fired plants already kill at least 10,000 Americans each year; that`s 3 times the number of Americans who died on 9/11. The increased air pollution you have now approved will sicken and kill many more. Coal and energy companies are among the biggest campaign contributors to you and Republican members of Congress. Isn`t your new air pollution rule an open act of corporate cronyism, or even worse, an act of corporate terrorism committed against America`s senior citizens with respiratory illnesses and American children with asthma?

5. On your watch, Mr. Bush, you presided over the most private bankruptcies filed in a 12 month period (up by 23 percent since 2000), the biggest drop in the stock market in US history ( a crash of 38 percent or $6.65 trillion in a little over 18 months), the most foreclosures in a 12 month period, history`s biggest deficit, and the greatest stock market fraud in history. A US budget surplus of $236 billion bequeathed to you by Bill Clinton was squandered, and turned into a projected $350 billion loss for 2004. Why should taxpayers rehire you Mr. Bush as America`s CEO, or reelect anyone of the Congressional advocates of corporate deregulation and privatization that have allowed select Bush-favored multinationals to commit high piracy against the American nation and its people?

6. Why did you cut health care benefits for war veterans and support cuts in duty benefits for active duty troops and their families during wartime? Is how you reward the GI heroes who won your War in Iraq, especially when you have rewarded more than 70 American companies and individuals (some of your biggest campaign contributors), with $8 billion in profiteering war contracts within Iraq and Afghanistan? Meanwhile, morale in the Iraqi war theatre is plummeting as worn out soldiers doubt the purposefulness or direction of their mission. No end is in sight in Iraq, as more American troops die every day; as under-trained reservists see their tours of duty extended, while their families wait at home with no word of relief; as more than 1,800 wounded, some with lost limbs and other horrible disfigurements go unreported, unlauded and even unvisited by their President; as the regular military is given the best equipment, while reservists are expected to make-do with outdated night goggles, flak jackets, and other ineffectual equipment. How can our soldiers respect a Commander and Chief who is a draft dodger, a man who dares to don a Navy flight suit and declare: "The war is won!" when of course it isn`t, and may never be?

7. Why has your Vice President Dick Cheney been allowed to keep his financial ties with the Halliburton Corporation? He received $162,392 in deferred salary in 2002, and owns 433,333 stock options in the company today. He promised to end those financial ties when he took office. And why are the largest multibillion dollar post-war reconstruction contracts being awarded to Halliburton by the Pentagon with no bidding process? Why aren`t Iraqi companies or other American companies being given a chance to bid? Why aren`t reports of horrific price gouging by Halliburton in Iraq being investigated by you? Considering that Mr. Cheney`s corporate investments are worth far more than his vice presidential salary, and considering his very suspicious actions, why should we believe he is not more loyal to Halliburton than to the American people? Under your administration, it appears that select multinational corporations have taken over the rule of our country, in utter disregard of America`s long standing free enterprise system, democratic principles, and in utter disregard of our national security.

8. Mr. Bush, where are Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction? Why did both you and Dick Cheney before the war repeatedly assert or imply a connection between Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and the terrorist horrors of 9/11, when in fact your intelligence told you then that there was absolutely no such evidence of any such connection? Did you, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Connie Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and others in your administration exaggerate or fabricate reports of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the invasion of Iraq, a sovereign nation that had not attacked the United States? Are you Mr. President, a liar?

9. Mr. Bush, you told the American people that you would get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive." You made the same promise concerning the ruthless despot Saddam Hussein. Both remain free and at large, and both could be plotting devastating new attacks against America and the world right now. Should a US President who fails so dismally to deliver on such huge and important promises, promises that impact the national security and well being of every American, run for a second term? Or should he instead stand aside humbly, withdraw from the office and the race, and allow another more capable citizen to take over the job?

10. What do you have to say about disturbing reports that federal public servants have been fired by you because they have demonstrated that the US nuclear industry, one of your big campaign supporters, has failed to adequately protect against mock-terrorist attacks? Nuclear plants were penetrated in 50 percent of the mock-attacks, even though the facilities knew months in advance on exactly what day those attacks would occur. And what do you say about your failure to support a Congressional bill to force America`s chemical industry to better defend its factories against terror assaults? (This legislation was chiefly blocked by the chemical industry itself, another one of your big campaign donors). Isn`t it true that as we spend billions to secure Iraqi oil fields, you have failed to fund key homeland security initiatives, leaving every American vulnerable to assaults on undefended industries, attacks that could be equivalent in the suffering brought by the bombing of Hiroshima or Russia`s Chernobyl disaster?

11. Why, Mr. President, did you give $43 million in foreign aid to the Taliban in Afghanistan less than six months before 9/11, when you knew they were the most virulent anti-American violators of human rights in the world, and also knew that they harbored the training camps of terrorist Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda? The record shows that your administration was in negotiations with the Taliban until August 2001, less than a month before the attacks on Washington and the World Trade Center. Those negotiations were for a multibillion dollar pipeline to benefit US oil giant Unocal and Halliburton (a major pipeline construction firm and a company which made huge donations to your campaign, and from which the Vice President still receives huge financial benefits). These negotiations, and the gift of $43 million, make it appear that these companies, your administration, and your Vice President, were in bed with the very terrorists who attacked America. If this allegation is true, why should we believe that you have our best national security interests at heart, rather than the corporate interests of multinational companies? Why isn`t the US Justice Department investigating Halliburton, Unocal, Dick Cheney, and other officials who may have worked closely with the Taliban within weeks of the 9/11 attacks?

12. Why did your White House Council on Environmental Quality order the Environmental Protection Agency to conceal the magnitude of the air quality health hazards of the World Trade Center Ground Zero site from the heroes of 9/11 -- the firemen, police and rescue workers -- as well as from the people of New York City? What are Americans to make of reports that this concealment was a deliberate attempt by the White House to get Wall Street up and running again as soon as possible? If this allegation is true, why should we believe you have the health and safety of average Americans as a first priority over profit?

13. Why did your administration repeatedly resist the release of intelligence data to those in Congress investigating the FBI and CIA failings of your administration prior to the attacks of 9/11? And why have Americans been denied access to the portion of the Congressional document relating your personal and political connections with the corrupt Saudi government? Please remember, Mr. President, that most of the 20 hijackers were Saudis, and that Al Qaeda was and continues to be heavily bankrolled by Saudi princes. Such facts are owed to the American people so they can vote in the next election based on the complete story. Considering your apparent attempts to hide evidence, why should we believe that your administration is not responsible for the failure to stop 9/11, and for concealment of the Saudis continued links to terrorists?

14. Why is it that the biggest corporate swindler in US history, Kenneth Lay, the CEO of Enron who robbed his own employees of millions in retirement savings, has not been charged with any crime, remains untried, unfined, and unjailed? Does this failure on the part of John Ashcroft and your Justice Department have anything to do with the simple fact that Kenneth Lay was your biggest political campaign supporter in the year 2000 election, and that he also happens to be a close personal friend who you affectionately have nicknamed "Kenny Boy"? While your close association with Ken Lay does not on the surface make you guilty of any crime, your failure to press for his prosecution makes you appear to be complicit with corporate piracy committed against the American people. Your failure to prosecute other corporate pirates, who have committed crimes against our economy, forces many of us to assume that you can no longer govern fairly, with the best interests and the will of the American people in mind. Please tell us why we should believe otherwise.

15. Mr. Bush, you have declared yourself to be a born again fundamentalist Christian, but have never outlined your religious beliefs in public. Most Americans would agree this is your personal business. However, if you are a fundamentalist Christian in the style of many of your biggest right wing supporters such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, do you also then believe, as they do, that we are now living in the End Time described in the Bible? To be more clear, do you believe we are living in the time when Jesus Christ will return to the Earth, rescue true Christian believers, and leave the rest of the sinful world behind to suffer through ecological disaster and nuclear Armageddon? Your cavalier decisions as President concerning the destruction of the environment (approving arsenic in our water and pushing for increases in the production of chemicals that could destroy the ozone layer), along with your decisions regarding nuclear weapons (authorizing atomic bunker busters, approving weapons delivery systems for outer space, and preemptive strikes), could lead Americans to think that your judgment is clouded by extreme religious beliefs. Do you, Mr. Bush, believe the Apocalypse, the end of the world is at hand, and the return of Jesus Christ imminent? Americans need to know your answer.

16. Why does the White House find it necessary to repeatedly censor EPA scientific reports that verify the nation`s horrific danger in the face of global warming? Isn`t this censorship a direct attack on freedom of speech, and the free exchange of vital scientific information? In Europe, 35,000 people -- in what some call a genocide of the elderly -- are dead as a result of one of the worst heat waves in history (a fact mostly unreported in the US press). Arctic ice has thinned by almost 50 percent in the last 50 years. Antarctic icebergs the size of Rhode Island are falling into the sea. Oceans are rising, ecosystems collapsing, plants and animals going extinct, and weather disasters worsening. All of this is happening, reputable scientists say, as the result of global climate change. And yet, secret documents leaked to the alternative press reveal that among your key advisors shaping your climate policy is ExxonMobil Corporation. Do you, like Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee Chair James Inhofe (a stalwart fundamentalist Christian), believe that global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? Dick Cheney continues to stonewall against the release of documents revealing with whom he met to create the administration`s energy plan. That plan would grossly benefit oil and coal companies, pump millions of tons of additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and potentially put our country and the world on a collision course with irreversible runaway climate change and a global environmental meltdown. When will you stop pretending global warming is a non-threat to America and the world, but rather the greatest looming disaster in human history?

17. You say your are the education President, Mr. Bush, and the mainstream corporate media records and applauds your every pronouncement on the issue. Only they fail to report that you yourself sliced $90 million from your "No Child Left Behind" Act after it was passed. Also, your primary program targeting aid to disadvantaged children is expected to fall $6 billion short in 2004 of what was promised by your new education law. You also wish to abandon any federal role in the highly successful Head Start early childhood program for the underprivileged. However, your $87 billion Iraq military and reconstruction expenditure will be 87 times what the federal government annually spends on after-school programs; 7 times what you proposed to spend on education for low-income schools in 2004; nine times what the federal government spends on special education each year; and 8 times what the federal government spends to help middle- and low-income students go to college. Should Americans be sending their children to Iraq for schooling?

18. Please outline for us, Mr. President, your family`s connection with the bin Laden family. Why were rich members of the Saudi bin Laden family flown out of the United States without questioning within days after 9/11, as meanwhile, poor Islamic people, who had committed no crime other than minor violations of US immigration laws, were held in cruel and illegal solitary confinement without charges made against them for many months? Why do you and Attorney General John Ashcroft continue to press for the extension of Patriot Act I and the passage of Patriot Act II, which both contain numerous flagrant violations of the US Bill of Rights? Considering this evidence, should Americans not wonder whether you value the freedom of your corporate friends in Saudi Arabia more than your country or its freedoms?

19. During your run for President in 2000, what part did your brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, play in assuring that 94,000 blacks, many of them legally registered to vote, were expunged from the voter roles? Why did the US Justice Department not investigate these serious election irregularities once they came to light after the US Supreme Court dubbed you President? If these allegations are true concerning your brother, why should we accept you as the legitimate leader of our nation? Should we demand an unbiased investigation?

20. Mr. Bush, as president, just before 9/11, you took a month vacation for rest and relaxation, setting the all-time record for most vacation days taken by any president in any one year period in office. You did so despite intelligence briefings that Osama bin Laden might be planning massive attacks within the borders of the United States. Mr. President, why not go on a permanent vacation so that hard working Americans can begin recovering from the most politically corrupt, the most economically, environmentally, and socially destructive, and most militarily inept presidency in our country`s history?

Mr. President, the answers to these 20 questions and countless others concerning your wrong doing, and potentially illegal actions, should not come from your handlers or spokespeople, not from Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, or anyone else. Harry Truman said about the presidency, "the buck stops here." So sir, it stops with you.

As our President, you must come clean and answer for your actions. You need to stand before the American people at a town meeting and tell them why, for example, you haven`t asked for an investigation of the White House leak that recently exposed a CIA agent to exposure in the press and put her life at risk. That act (probably committed or aided by your 2000 campaign mastermind Karl Rove) is a federal offense and felony. Why haven`t you asked every White House staffer to sign sworn affidavits that they did not commit this crime? Why haven`t you launched an investigation? More than 70 percent of Americans say a special counsel should be appointed; why are you and John Ashcroft doing nothing? Isn`t this considerably more important than covering up the bare breasts of statues in the Justice Department? Mr. Ashcroft needs to act now.

Mr. President, an activist from India recently spoke eloquently and simply about the painful reality of George W. Bush`s America. He asked:

"Why is it that a candidate in your country is allowed to accept vast sums of money from corporations and multimillionaires as gifts, then once elected president can offer those same companies and individuals generous government contracts, freedom from regulation, and freedom from prosecution for illegal activities? We in India have a name for such dealings. We don`t call such influence pedaling "campaign contributions," we call it "bribery" and "political corruption." And in our country leaders who do such things go to jail. In America, such misdeeds go largely unreported, and officials are rewarded with reelection. It is madness and will ruin your country."

Mr. President, you must stop dodging questions about your actions, and you must stop wrapping your administration in the flag of patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel. You must stop spinning lies. You must stop defending graft, influence peddling, war profiteering and the other high crimes of your Vice President, Attorney General, and Secretary of Defense.

Americans must have the truth from you, Mr., President. We deserve it. It is time for you to speak to us directly and with total honesty.

And should you, Mr. President, refuse to tell us the truth, then we must demand your resignation. Failing that, we must ask Congress to go forward with the impeachment of George W. Bush for selling out our nation to multinational corporations, and for committing treason against the Constitution of the United States.

Glenn Scherer ([e-mail]) is a freelance journalist whose articles and commentary have been published by Salon.com, E the Environmental Magazine, Gotham Gazette, and other publications. He is former editor of Blue Ridge Press, a syndicated environmental op ed service that reached up to 2 million Southeastern newspaper readers monthly.

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Many Britons believe Washington would act more responsibly if America had a different president

‘Foolish and Insincere’
As George W. Bush prepares for his transatlantic visit, a new poll finds that the majority of Britons have nothing good to say about the U.S. president

By Stryker McGuire
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
http://www.msnbc.com/news/993833.asp?0cv=KB20

Nov. 14 — President George W. Bush’s visit to Britain next week is not going to be all banquets, pomp and circumstance. He’s going to do some reaching out to ordinary Britons.

HE WILL, FOR EXAMPLE, meet with families of some of the 53 British soldiers who have died in Iraq since the start of the war. In an interview on Thursday with the Press Association, Bush said he would “share with them a deep grief, my sorrow for the sacrifice.” It will take all the charm Bush can muster to get the wider British public to warm to him, judging from new polling that reveals scathing anti-Bush sentiment in Britain.
On Friday the British polling firm YouGov provided NEWSWEEK with survey data gathered in recent days. It doesn’t make pretty reading for Bush fans. By big majorities, Britons believe Bush is “not very intelligent” (62 percent), “insincere” (53 percent) and “not very well informed about the world” (62 percent). He also “does not care much about the views of people in other countries” (82 percent), is “a bad advertisement for America” (65 percent) and is “foolish” (63 percent).
The attitudes uncovered by YouGov seem to have more to do with anti-Bush sentiment than with anti-Americanism. Asked how much confidence they had in the ability of the United States to act responsibly in its role as the world’s sole superpower, 57 percent of the Britons surveyed said “not much” or “none at all.” However, asked if the United States would behave more responsibly under a different president, a plurality of 42 percent said they thought that would be the case.
In his interview with the Press Association, Bush praised British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s tolerant acceptance of the political price he’s paid for standing shoulder to shoulder with Bush in Iraq. Said Bush: “I have never heard him complain about the polls, or wring his hands. Never once has he said to me, ever, ‘Gosh, I’m feeling terrible pressure’.” Perhaps Bush can be equally stoic about his own bad-news polls in Britain.

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About-Face in Iraq
By Michael Hirsh, Rod Nordland and Mark Hosenball, Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.com/news/994237.asp

Paul Bremer`s job sounds straightforward, at least. It is to transform Iraq from a dangerous muddle into a democratic model. But last week the dapper career diplomat got a faceful of Iraqi democracy, laced with a lot of smoke and cordite, from the very Governing Council he created and once all but ignored. And now the future looks anything but straightforward. While an anti-American insurgency raged out of control, the 24 council members were telling him they were utterly stalemated on how to write a constitution, which the Bush administration insisted would be the first step in doing democracy "right" (as one U.S. official put it). Majority Shiites, knowing they represent 60 percent of the country, insisted on direct election of delegates, citing a fatwa to that effect from their senior religious figure, Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Minority Sunnis, the elite group that produced Saddam Hussein, didn`t want a direct vote that might cost them power. So no constitution for the moment. And there would be more delays--and more bloodshed--if Bremer didn`t give.

BREMER HAS GROWN increasingly frustrated during his six-month tenure--not least because his bosses back in the White House and Defense Department haven`t appreciated how bad the guerrilla attacks have gotten. So he promptly got Condoleezza Rice on the phone. The national-security adviser, taking a rare Sunday afternoon off, was at the Redskins game at FedEx Field. Rice has been given more oversight of the Iraq problem as Bremer has chafed under Pentagon control and the White House has fretted that Donald Rumsfeld`s unforeseen "postwar" war could cost President George W. Bush the 2004 election. Now, talking to Bremer on her cell phone at the stadium, Rice realized America needed a whole new game plan. Bremer was rushed back to Washington--so abruptly, in fact, that he had to cancel an important meeting with one of America`s few allies in this fight, Poland`s prime minister (who was mildly miffed at not being alerted beforehand).
After a day and a half of intense talks with the president and other senior officials, the administration reversed itself. The Iraqis would have their way. A week after Bush`s much-noted speech calling for democracy in the Arab world, the president decided to compromise on a principle his administration had, just weeks ago, stoutly maintained (against the advice of the United Nations and Europeans). Bush and Bremer had insisted that before the Iraqis could run their own country, they`d have to create a proper constitution first, and only then hold national elections. Instead, as the United Nations and various influential former exiles like Ahmad Chalabi and Sunni power elites have long wanted, the Americans agreed to a kind of quasi democracy on the "Afghan model." This involves selection of delegates for a National Assembly by tribal leaders and "notables" in Iraq`s 18 provinces. That body in turn would form a provisional government of elites by next June that will "assume full sovereign powers for governing Iraq," according to an agreement released Saturday. This is to be followed by a constitutional convention, a referendum and then national elections--but not until 2005-06, when the Americans will have less control. The upshot is that Bush`s grand designs for Arab transformation now depend far more on Iraqis who may not share all his goals.

The minority Sunni elite in the Governing Council had, in effect, successfully filibustered the Shiite majority, stalling a direct vote. Democracy, too, works that way sometimes, as the majority Republicans in the U.S. Senate learn all the time. But the larger point is that together, the council members had put "Jerry" Bremer--who for months had insisted the Iraqis weren`t ready for governance--in his place. His Coalition Provisional Authority, which gave him MacArthur-like powers, is now destined to morph into a mere ambassadorial presence by June 30, 2004, when it is to dissolve (though U.S. troops will remain). Where not long ago the administration was thinking of ditching the Governing Council altogether, it is saying now the body represents "the blossoming of the Iraqi political process," as one official put it last Friday. Sunni council member Adnan Pachachi was plainer: Bush is "responding to our desire" for political power and to end the occupation.

There`s no mystery behind the Bushies` new eagerness to hand things over to the Iraqis--however it gets done. More Americans are dying, Iraqi support for the occupation is plummeting and the administration knew something dramatic had to change. Attacks have jumped from fewer than 10 a day in May to about 30 to 35 a day. Worse, they have gotten more deadly and sophisticated, with some 40 Americans and 19 Italians killed in the past few weeks. Last Saturday, two more U.S. helicopters crashed under fire, killing at least 17 Americans. The insurgents, believed to be mostly members of the old Baathist regime, are using vast quantities of Semtex, the plastic explosive; surface-to-air missiles, and other high-tech weapons. Even the bridge across the Tigris that Bremer proudly reopened in October has been closed again for security, reviving massive traffic jams that irritate Baghdadis no end.

Most Iraqis still do not endorse the insurgents, even in the Sunni Triangle in the center of the country, where many attacks occur. But Iraqis do seem to be hedging their bets. While Bush insisted again last week that "we`re not pulling out until the job is done, period," many Iraqis believe Bush is looking for an exit strategy. In June, both Bremer and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, frequently boasted that more and more Iraqis were coming forward to give the Coalition tips on the bad guys. That`s not something reporters in Baghdad hear any longer. Today, when someone starts setting up a mortar tube in their neighborhood, Iraqi witnesses are less likely to run to the CPA. Sanchez has acknowledged as much, saying last week that Saddam`s capture "would relieve the people of... the blanket fear that exists that keeps some Iraqis from cooperating with the Coalition."
Ultimately America’s success or failure may depend less on Saddam’s fate than on Bremer’s diplomatic skills. The administration believes the best way to defeat the insurgency is to undercut it politically. And that means getting most Iraqis to accept the forthcoming provisional government as legitimate, thereby taking the edge off Iraqi anger over the occupation. With 23 years in the Foreign Service, Bremer is widely praised for his tough-mindedness, coolness under fire and ability to “multitask” as a negotiator. His job now is to convince Iraqis who hope to vote soon that democracy lite can work for the moment.
Most worrisome of all, the insurgency is costing the occupation support among Iraqis, according to a CIA report leaked last week to The Philadelphia Inquirer and endorsed by Bremer. And the U.S. intelligence community increasingly believes the insurgency is not only organized, it may also be benefiting from detailed prewar planning by Saddam and his henchmen. It seems strategically designed to sap U.S. will and undermine the U.S. occupation.



So the administration finds itself needing to win over more Iraqis while it harshly crushes an insurgency in their midst, with tactics that don’t always make friends (most recently AC-130 and Apache strafing runs under Operation Iron Hammer). But even as they step up airstrikes, U.S. forces still seem to have very little idea of who they are battling for Iraqi hearts and minds, U.S. intelligence officials say. There are no hard suspects for most of the major terror attacks in Iraq that have occurred over the past several months. “Saddam Hussein’s strategy is working,” says Adel Abdul Mehti, the representative of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq on the Governing Council. “If he can stop the process through bombs and assassinations, he will succeed, not in returning to power—he’s finished forever—but in bringing the country to the point of civil war and chaos.” Rumsfeld, in some of his frankest remarks on the insurgency, said the guerrillas he once dismissed as “dead-enders” were “going to school on us.” He added that the ultimate test is, “Who’s going to outlast the other? And the answer is, we’re going to outlast them.”
Bremer will retain some control well into 2004 as he supervises the formation of “organizing committees” for each province. In doing so, he must navigate between Sunni demands for power and Shiite demands for direct democracy—and both groups now realize they have far more leverage than before. The key will be to prevent the Sunnis and other minorities from seizing a disproportionate amount of power through town and village “caucuses” in coming months, while stalling any Shiite move to create an Islamic state. In other words, the Bush administration is grappling with exactly the kind of problems—Iraq’s piecemeal ethnic and religious makeup—that led some war skeptics to warn that democracy there might be impossible. “This is going to be hard work,” a senior White House official said Saturday. And Bremer has no “blueprint” from Washington, the official said; he’ll be making things up as he goes along.

Hazardous occupations

U.S. military forays since 1898

Introduction


Post-war American occupations transformed Germany and Japan from despotisms into democracies.
But not all U.S. occupations left a better world behind them.

Explore by choosing a number above.

1898-1902: Cuba
Victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898 left the U.S. in possession of Spain’s last major Caribbean colony. After independence in 1902, Washington sent troops back well into the 1930s, when Fulgencio Batista seized power. The U.S. helped keep him there until Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959.
1898-1946: Philippines
Washington governed the Philippines as a province from the end of the Spanish-American war until 1946. A hefty garrison force fought a bloody conflict with pro-independence Filipino rebels. By the time Japan conquered the Philippines in 1942, however, a path toward independence already had been agreed. After independence in 1946, U.S. troops remained on two large bases leased from Manila until 1999 and Washington routinely intervened in domestic politics.
1904-1999: Panama
Washington won rights “in perpetuity” to the territory around the Panama Canal after helping locals secede from Colombia. Washington did little to promote democracy for decades. In 1999, the canal and adjacent territory were turned over to local sovereignty and the county currently is a functioning democracy.
1905-1924: Dominican Republic
U.S. Marines intervened and occupied this nation on the eastern side of Hispanola after European states hinted they would intervene to stave off the nation’s bankruptcy. American troops left in 1924, but the U.S. Treasury controlled the country’s finances until 1941. In 1965, Marines imposed a new pro-American government. True democratization failed to take root until the mid-1970s. Today, the country is a functioning democracy.
1912-1925: Nicaragua
American Marines ruled Nicaragua for 13 years beginning in 1912, fighting nationalist rebels before leaving in 1925. They returned in 1928 to fight a new rebel leader, Augusto César Sandino. The U.S. withdrew in 1934 after killing Sandino, leaving Anastasio Somoza in charge. Somoza ruled as U.S.-based dictator until his overthrow by Soviet-inspired Sandinista guerrillas in 1979. A CIA-based war against them ended in 1989, when free elections forced the Sandinista regime out of power.
1915-1934: Haiti
U.S. Marines entered Haiti in 1915 after a mob killed the Haitian ruler. Some 20,000 American troops stayed there, running the country via military administration, until 1934. The Marines left power in the hands of Haiti’s national guard, which, in turn, installed the brutal Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier into power. He and his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier ruled until 1986, when Baby Doc fled to Paris.
1945-1952: Japan
Gen. Douglas MacArthur sat as military governor of Japan between 1945-1949. By absolving Emperor Hirohito of his wartime guilt, MacArthur successfully blunted opposition to the democratization of Japan, most notably the drafting of a new constitution that foreswore war and established electoral laws. In April, 1952, a peace treaty took effect and the Allied occupation ended.
1945-54: Germany
The four victorious Allied powers occupied sectors of German territory and quadrants of its capital city, Berlin. The occupation quickly broke down into rival Western vs. Soviet zones. “De-Nazification” and Marshal Plan aid began to transform Western Germany by the early 1950s, and in 1954 it emerged as the independent West German state.
1945-1948: South Korea
The defeat of Japan left Korea, a Japanese colony, split between U.S. and Soviet control. The U.S. military governed the southern part of the peninsula until 1948, when elections established the Republic of Korea. U.S. forces remained, however, when the Soviet-backed north refused to hold elections. In 1950, North Korea attacked and war raged until 1953. U.S. forces – some 38,000 – have stayed ever since.
1945-1955: Austria
As in Germany, Austria – which had been annexed by the Germans in 1938 – was split between victorious powers. Austria`s status remained unclear for a decade until a treaty ended the occupation, recognized independence and forbade unification with Germany.
1965-73: South Vietnam
When communist guerillas defeated French efforts to reestablish its Indochina colony in 1953, the U.S. stepped in to back the anti-communist Vietnamese government. Drawn progressively into the maelstrom, Washington formally landed combat troops in 1965, their numbers topping out at 500,000 in 1969. Throughout, the South’s government remained undemocratic and corrupt. The U.S. pulled out in 1973, and the South was overrun by communist North Vietnamese troops in 1975.
1983-84: Grenada
U.S. troops landed on this tiny Caribbean island, citing the arrival of Cuban military advisers and the threat they allegedly posed to American medical students studying there. After a short battle, U.S. troops took control of the island, deposed its left-leaning “military council” and organized free elections before leaving in 1984. The country is now a functioning democracy.
1994-99: Haiti
When the Duvalier dictatorships ended in 1986, the Haitian military took direct control of the country. An election in 1993 quickly led to a coup, which in turn caused the U.S. to threaten invasion. The threat forced the generals into exile, restoring the ousted president, Jean-Bertrande Aristide. U.S. and other international forces patrolled the country until 1999.
1995-present: Bosnia-Hercegovina
The collapse of Yugoslavia beginning in 1990 led to civil war in its most ethnically diverse republic, Bosnia-Hercegovina. European-led U.N. force tried to restore order but failed. In 1995, after years of steering clear, the U.S. intervened and imposed a peace treaty that included a NATO-led occupation of the fractured state. Some 6,000 U.S. troops are still there, along with 40,000 other forces, in 2003. A democratic state is struggling to emerge,
1999-present: Kosovo
Repression by Serbia in ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo spiraled into civil war in 1999, and the U.S. led a NATO invasion of the country to force an end to Serb efforts to deport the Albanian population. Some 60,000 U.S., British, French and German troops occupied Kosovo after the war, and a force about half that size remained in place in 2003. Prospects for democracy in Kosovo and in Serbia remain uncertain.
2002-present: Afghanistan
A U.S.-led campaign to find al-Qaida leaders harbored by the Taliban government swept elements of both from the central Asian nation. Prospects for democracy remain extremely fragile. In early 2003, some 9,000 U.S. forces remained in and around Afghanistan, many engaged in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Source: MSNBC research

Within the administration, a debate still rages over whether to insist on some kind of vote for the provisional government. Some officials are advocating elections only in untroubled areas. But since most of the —violence is in the Sunni middle, that could leave Sunnis feeling disenfranchised and incite more support for the insurgency. Sheik Mahir Hussein Al Hamra, a Shiite Governing Council member, suggests that while the Shiites support the new plan now, they, too, could revolt if the Sunnis don’t turn against the insurgents. “The Shia community also contains a category of people who are not as moderate as the main part of the Shia community,” he says. The CIA report raises the scary possibility that Shiite radicals could end up in bed with Saddam-inspired Sunni insurgents.
Other Governing Council members are cynical about Bush’s real reason for a change in course. “They’re in a hurry, you know,” says Mahmoud Othman, who represents the Popular Union of Kurdistan on the council. “In America, this is an election year and they have to try to prepare something in Iraq to sell it to the American people and to the world. That’s obvious.”
How much politics actually plays in Bush’s about-face is unknown (the White House denies such considerations had any role). But no one can doubt any longer that the president is deeply engaged in the details of the Iraq problem. Bush himself, in fact, may have had a direct hand in one of the most disastrous decisions of the postwar period: the move to “de-Baathify” Iraq to the point of dismantling the entire Iraqi Army. U.S. officials now believe that former Iraqi Army officers are among the leaders of the insurgency. When Bremer arrived in Baghdad in mid-May, the insurgency was just getting started, and clots of former Iraqi troops were reappearing, asking to be remobilized. Bremer, who has been widely blamed for reversing the decision of his predecessor, Jay Garner, to hire such men and pay them, was warned he would cause chaos by demobilizing the Army instead. The CIA station chief told him, “That’s another 350,000 Iraqis you’re pissing off, and they’ve got guns.” According to one official who attended the meeting, Bremer replied: “I don’t have any choice... Those are my instructions.” Then Bremer added: “The president told me that de-Baathification is more important.”
Now Bush has begun to give on that point, too. As the administration rushes to create an Iraqi security force, it is no longer de-Baathifying or vetting backgrounds as it once did. Still, CENTCOM’s commander, Gen. John Abizaid, last week ridiculed the idea that the insurgency was preplanned by Saddam’s regime. “I think Saddam Hussein is one of the most incompetent military leaders in the history of the world,” he said. “To think that somehow or other he planned this is absolutely beyond —my comprehension.” White House officials were less certain, suggesting that Saddam may have been involved in promoting the insurgency.
General Abizaid insists the insurgency is small, no more than 5,000 strong, but the CIA report suggests it could number as many as 50,000. “I’m not sure I’d say there’s a national-level resistance leadership. Not yet,” Abizaid said. (General Sanchez was a little more vague, saying there are “a few indicators that at least intent is operating at the national level.”) Intel officials who weeks ago dismissed reports and purported Iraqi secret documents that suggested Saddam had made elaborate plans for guerrilla war are now taking them very seriously. NEWSWEEK has obtained one such document, dated Jan. 23, 2003, and marked top secret. It lists 11 instructions—including sabotage, looting and the assassination of religious leaders (all of which have happened)—for pro-Saddam operatives to follow in the event of an invasion by “American British Zionist coalition forces.”

The document is marked with the seal of the Mukhabarat, Saddam’s intelligence service. Intelligence reports indicate that a secret “compartmented” unit within the Mukhabarat known as M-14, whose duties included monitoring terrorist groups and linking up with Baath militias when Saddam was in power, may have been instrumental in crafting some kind of master plan for a guerrilla campaign in the event of a U.S. invasion. Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, Saddam’s intelligence chief, is still at large (he’s the “jack of diamonds”). Whether coordinated or not, recent major strikes seem to have followed a pattern. Coming against the United Nations, the Red Cross and the Italian carabinieri, they have had the effect of strategically isolating the United States and Britain. Even the loyal Japanese have reversed a decision to send troops.
So for the moment, Bush’s hopes rest on Bremer’s determined shoulders. At a recent press conference, the Iraqi administrator was asked by a questioner, “Admit it: you weren’t ready for the complexities and you didn’t understand the problems of Iraq.” To which Bremer replied, “It’s going to be a very long time before I admit either of these things.” What is clear is that he is learning more about the Iraqis every day.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With Tamara Lipper, Christian Caryl, Richard Wolffe and Scott Johnson

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


Iraqi Security Forces Far From Ready
Some recruits say that they joined out of hardship and that they sympathize with the insurgents.
By John Daniszewski
Times Staff Writer

November 16, 2003

BAGHDAD — Police Gen. Ahmed Ibrahim gathered hundreds of his men during a ceremony at the Police Academy here last week to tell them a few truths about the enemy they face. The regime of Saddam Hussein let Iraqis suffer, he reminded them, while its leaders lived in unimaginable luxury.

At that, a Rolls-Royce was driven onto the pavement where Ibrahim was speaking.

"Look at that car," he said. "It used to belong to Uday!"

The sight of the gleaming bronze vehicle owned by the late, reviled son of the former Iraqi dictator drew cheers. But the subtext of the pep talk was disturbing: Seven months after Hussein`s fall, the national police chief still believes that his men need to be convinced that they are on the right side.

That`s part of the quandary facing the United States as it seeks to launch a program of rapid "Iraqification" — turning over increasing security responsibility to Iraqis amid a wave of anti-American attacks.

The project to "Iraqify" the conflict received fresh impetus Saturday with an announcement that the United States would relinquish power by June to a provisional Iraqi government. If the plan works as envisioned by political leaders here, Iraqi forces gradually would take over day-to-day security in the country while U.S. troops would step into the background, concentrated in a few bases. And some Americans would start going home.

But there is no indication that the Iraqis are up to the challenge, especially when it comes to facing an alliance of Hussein loyalists who seem to be only getting stronger.

Last week, administration officials noted that the number of Iraqis in uniform tops the 130,000 troops the U.S. has here. But the comparison did not take into account the poor state of these Iraqi security forces, which comprise police, border guards, civil defense troops and fledgling units of a new army.

For the most part, the Iraqi police and guards who make up most of the nation`s forces have little to no training, only light weapons, virtually no communications or heavy military equipment, and no demonstrated expertise or will to take on the insurgents. In fact, many of the recruits say they have joined up primarily out of economic need and acknowledge that many among their comrades sympathize with the insurgents fighting to rid Iraq of U.S. troops.

Until the Iraqi forces reach full strength, Ibrahim argued, Americans should not consider pulling out or they would dishonor those who have already died fighting in Iraq.

"What will we say to the American families and the British families who have lost loved ones?" said Ibrahim, who is also deputy interior minister. "That they fought for nothing?"

The guerrillas have been ruthless, sowing enough death and terror to stall, or at least slow down, hopes for national reconstruction and development of democracy. And they seem to be in no shortage of weapons and ammunition left over from the old regime`s conventional arms stockpiles.

The insurgents, who Gen. John Abizaid, the head of the U.S. Central Command, said might number as many as 5,000, have killed an average of six American military personnel a week since President Bush declared the major-combat phase of the war over on May 1. The number of U.S. military fatalities has reached 417, including 17 soldiers killed Saturday when two Black Hawk helicopters crashed. Most of the 417 deaths have been from hostile fire.

U.S. troops face insurgents using increasingly sophisticated ambush techniques and explosive devices, and military commanders see more signs that the attacks are coordinated at least at the regional level.

Unlike a few months ago, there are no longer assertions that the insurgency is waning. So far in November, nearly 80 troops have been killed. Serious assaults on U.S. forces have risen to about 30 a day.

The number of Iraqis joining the country`s various security forces are growing sharply, U.S. officials say. Five weeks ago, civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III estimated that about 60,000 Iraqis were enrolled in the police and other security forces. This month, various Bush administration officials continually raised their estimate of recruits until it reached the 130,000 figure, a surprisingly rapid intake.

But that total suggests a far more formidable force than the one that exists. In fact, only about 1,500 men have been inducted into the new Iraqi army and are receiving a full boot-camp training — eight weeks under the tutelage of coalition troops and private contractors.

The rest are police officers — who get three weeks of training that emphasizes courtesy and respect of human rights. The other services — the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, the Fixed-Site Protection Service and the Border Guards — receive training that ranges from a day to a week.

Ibrahim said his police forces were understaffed and ill-equipped even to handle the crime that was their chief focus. "We have about 7,000 police," he said, "and we need 12,000."

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week that the Pentagon`s plans to lower the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to 105,000 by mid-2004. To make up for the pullbacks, an accelerated training program is to create a new Iraqi army of 40,000 by late 2004. There also has been discussion — so far not endorsed by Pentagon planners — of reconstituting parts of the former, 400,000-strong Iraqi army, which Bremer declared dissolved in May.

"Iraqification" or "Iraqization" — the precise term is still being coined — is popular in many quarters, with policymakers in Washington and some political leaders in Iraq believing that reducing the exposure of U.S. forces will lessen overall hostilities.

But others liken it to the "Vietnamization" in the later stages of the Vietnam War, a policy that seemed to embolden Viet Cong guerrillas, who believed that the United States was pulling out.

"If the policy is to more rapidly Iraqify the situation — as in Vietnamization during the Vietnam War — then that is another version of cutting and running," said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. Turning over security to Iraqis too soon, he said, is "a near-term prescription for disaster."

President Bush, facing reelection a year from now, has promised that would not happen. On Friday, he pledged not to bring home U.S. forces "until the job is done."

"We think the better part of wisdom is to get the Iraqis to bear arms in their own defense and to take up the battle for their own people," Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage told reporters in Baghdad this month. "Obviously, this is not something that happens overnight…. It seems to be something that is very necessary here and that we do very much support."

Mustapha Alani, an associate fellow and Iraq specialist at Britain`s Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies, agreed that Iraqis were needed by the Americans but said he did not think that the Iraqi forces being recruited will be sufficient or ready in time.

"The only solution is to recall the Iraqi army and not try to remake it from the ground up — that will take years," Alani said. And he urged the U.S.-led coalition to move quickly: "In two months, it will be too late."

Iraqi officials are divided on whether it was a mistake to disband the army, but they agree that Iraqi security forces have to play a much greater role in protecting the country.

Jalal Talabani, president of the Iraqi Governing Council, agreed with Bremer`s decision to disband the army because it was a tool of Hussein and over time could have posed a threat to the coalition. "The mistake was, and still is, not giving the responsibility for the security of the country to Iraqis," Talabani said.

"From the beginning, we told our American friends it is easy to topple Saddam Hussein because he is totally hated by the people and the army will not fight," he said. "But controlling Iraq`s towns and streets is very difficult without the active participation of the Iraqi people."

He and other political leaders have argued that the mainly Sunni Muslim insurgents could be defeated if the coalition would enlist the help of militias affiliated with various political and religious factions — such as the Kurdish peshmerga and the Badr Brigade, a Shiite Muslim former opposition group funded by Iran that has been officially disarmed.

Bremer has refused, fearing that incorporating militias into the nascent Civil Defense Corps would lead to violent factionalism or even warlordism. Members of such militias are free to join the country`s defense forces, but only as individuals pledged to defend Iraq as a whole, he says.

Nevertheless, Talabani is adamant that a relatively small number of Iraqis, if properly armed, led and freed from the constraints imposed by the Americans, will be able to distinguish friend from foe and defeat the insurgency.

"If the Iraqi police were given armor, ammunitions, cars and other necessary things," he said, "I am sure we can secure the area and Americans will not suffer daily attacks and casualties."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times staff writers James Gerstenzang in Washington and Alissa J. Rubin and Richard C. Paddock in Baghdad contributed to this report.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-asse…
NEWS ANALYSIS



Many Obstacles Lie Ahead on Iraqi Road to Democracy
The transition plan has the advantage of speed, but holds great risks for the U.S.-led coalition.
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer

November 16, 2003

BAGHDAD — Since the U.S.-led coalition took control of this country, one of its biggest enemies has been time. The agreement reached Saturday to hasten the hand-over of sovereignty to Iraqis, if it works, has the advantage of speed. But whether democratic efforts will prevail remains in doubt.

The new approach holds huge risks for the coalition because democracy has shallow roots in Iraq and there will be numerous obstacles at each step of the process, not least of all the destabilizing violence that now seems to be touching nearly every corner of the country.

If it fails, the Bush administration`s experiment of exporting democracy to the Middle East could look like a benighted policy on the eve of the 2004 presidential election and could leave the Iraqi people demoralized.

But if Iraqis, who have been clamoring for an end to the occupation, embrace the moment and take charge of their future, the plan could be the advent of a new era and a new paradigm for transforming despotic governments into democratic ones.

For the Bush administration, there were few other choices to get the stalled reconstruction effort going, especially in light of the deteriorating security situation. The administration has been faced with the growing skepticism of Iraqis over the coalition`s intentions. At the very least, the developments Saturday looked likely to give Iraqis faith that the U.S. presence has a real end date.

Several members of the Iraqi Governing Council said they also believed that the imminent prospect of an Iraqi state would give ordinary citizens a sense of ownership and a stake in the future — and that, in turn, would give them the wherewithal to stand up to the anti-American guerrillas.

"I hope that these steps will improve the security situation," said Adnan Pachachi, a member of the Governing Council. "I hope it will persuade people we are on the right track, and I think the majority will see it that way because I don`t see any alternative."

A senior Bush administration official said that one goal of the agreement was to increase Iraqis` sense of empowerment.

"The more participation in the government that we can get at the grass-roots level, the more legitimacy it will be perceived as having in the short term and the long term," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

But the critical factor in the administration`s change in course perhaps had more to do with timing than with concerns about democratic participation.

With Saddam Hussein`s ouster, the coalition faced unrealistic expectations about how quickly Iraqis` daily life would be changed with the dictator`s departure. When instead many aspects of their lives worsened or became more chaotic, people felt cheated and angry, and some regions quickly became fertile ground for the armed insurgency.

Since August, when the attacks dramatically increased and the suicide car bombings began, the administration has been desperately searching for a way to stem its losses both in troops killed and in public credibility.

The urgency of reversing course became clear about 10 days ago when the Governing Council went to civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III and told him there was no way to write a constitution without first holding a direct election for the drafters — a demand particularly pushed by Shiite religious leaders. Bremer had wanted an appointed constitutional assembly to draft the document.

The demand for the election focused everyone on the reality that writing the constitution before forming a government "was not in line with the desire to get authority back to the Iraqis … as quickly as possible," the administration official said.

The new plan has many vulnerabilities, not least of all its system for creating a legislature — which relies on the appointment of committees in each province, which in turn will appoint a large caucus for the province, which then will choose the lawmakers.

The risk with such a multitiered process is that there would be many opportunities for Hussein loyalists to intimidate caucus members or even assassinate them to frighten people away from participating.

There is also the possibility that mosques and tribes, both of which have considerable influence at the local level, will be unable to agree on the representatives to send to a new National Assembly.

The administration official said that Washington did not develop the blueprint for the series of town council meetings and caucuses called for in the plan, adding, "This is going to be now the hard work … for the Governing Council."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times staff writer Maura Reynolds in Washington contributed to this report.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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

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Whopper: Donald Rumsfeld
By Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, Nov. 14, 2003, at 12:45 PM PT


"Q: Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently and you said, I remember this it was done very well, you said they would welcome us with open arms.

"A: Never said that.

"Q: Never said that?

"A: Never did. You may remember it well, but you`re thinking of somebody else. You can`t find anywhere me saying anything like either one of those two things you just said I said. I may look like somebody else."

—Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in a Sept. 25, 2003 interview with Sinclair Broadcasting.

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Sunday, November 16, 2003
War News for November 16, 2003 draft

Auch heute jede Meldung ein Link:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi policemen wounded in Katyusha attack on police post in Kirkuk.

Bring ‘em on: Seventeen soldiers killed, five wounded, one missing in yesterday’s battle in Mosul.

South Carolina town has lost three soldiers in Bush’s War.

Kidnapped Portugese journalist freed.

NYT reports on wounded soldiers.

Florida Guardsmen return from Iraq.

“Great deal of hostility” toward US troops in Mosul. This place was friendly towards the United States back in April.

On patrol in Baghdad.

No chickenhawk here. This soldier should be an inspiration to all those conservative laptop commandos who expect somebody else to do their fighting for them.

Lies come home to roost. I never planned to post a PFC Jessica Lynch story on this blog, because I think that soldier has had enough manipulation and victimization. But the serial lying and fabrications that characterize this administration are so well documented in this particular story, as well as the consequences of their lying. Those are lessons most children learn early, but the Bushies are slow learners. In one way, the story is wrong. Unless you completely fuck up all over yourself while in captivity, most POWs receive a Bronze Star Medal, as did PFC Lynch.

Update: I was cruising around the ‘net tonight and I found that USNDEMVET did a follow-up to a story about the courageous Alabama bidnessman Winton Blount IV, who is braving shot and shell in Iraq to land those yummy CPA contracts. Turns out plucky young Winton is the grandson of Winton Blount, whose Senate campaign employed George W. Bush while he was AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard back in 1972. What a coinky-dink!

Pure fucking intimidation. Marine’s Girl is closing her blog.

Commentary

Opinion: The beginning of the end. “With the US election only a year away the White House must find a way out of the Iraq nightmare. That is why George Bush’s man in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, returned to Iraq last week after emergency talks in Washington carrying a brand new strategy in his briefcase.”

Opinion: What Iraq won’t get is self-rule. “The Prime Minister can`t say it, but more than unilateralism, it was dishonesty that doomed George W. Bush`s war on Iraq and soured much of the world on America. Incompetence — exacerbated by imperial arrogance and cultural ignorance — turned the occupation into a nightmare. Now, all those traits are in play in the American plan to ostensibly turn Iraq over to the Iraqis.”

Editorial: From “stay the course” to “cut and run.” “Running away is not an option for the United States. President Bush, who promised again Friday that our troops ‘will stay . . . until the job is done,’ can`t allow domestic political considerations to alter the timetable for finishing the job.” Oh, but you can bet your bottom dollar that Lieutenant AWOL will put his precious political ass above national interest. You don’t realize that Bush is nothing more than a big-talking pussy of the first order.

Opinion: “In Vietnam, we faced more than 1 million enemy combatants backed to the hilt by North Vietnam and its superpower… In Iraq we confront a few thousand Baathists and jihadis with, at most, limited support from Iran and Syria.” I love the way these chickenhawks use the word “we.” This conservative armchair field marshal wasn’t in Vietnam, nor is he anywhere near the shooting in Iraq.

Editorial: Time to make a decision on Iraq. “It`s time to stop this nonsense and either beef up the military presence in Iraq or fold up our tent and skulk home.”

Editorial: Extricating America from Bush’s Quagmire.

Opinion: A truly foolish adventure. “As things stand, the coalition must now choose in Iraq between two different kinds of disaster. If their troops stay the course, they seem certain to face increasing popular hostility and military threat. If they depart relatively soon, Iraq will almost certainly descend into chaos of a fearful kind. To remain will be terrible; to leave probably worse. In my years of observing Western foreign policy, I have never witnessed a more foolish adventure than the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.”

Operation Cut and Run

Bush wants out. “Bush said the United States will not spend ‘years and years’ in Iraq as a new government takes shape.”

L. Paul Bremer will “help” write new Iraqi constitution.





# posted by yankeedoodle : 2:29 AM

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Irak

Blutiger Ramadan

Erneuter Kurswechsel in Bagdad: Unter dem Druck neuer Anschläge will Amerika so schnell wie möglich die Verantwortung an eine vorläufige Regierung abtreten. Doch die Iraker streiten darüber, wer sie übernehmen soll.

Drei dumpfe Explosionen erschüttern den ehemaligen Präsidentenpalast in der Stadtmitte von Bagdad. In den Häusern ringsum wackeln die Fensterscheiben, augenblicklich verstummen am Tigris-Ufer die Zikaden. Doch kaum jemand bleibt stehen oder geht gar in Deckung.

"Mörser", sagt Muhanneth Dschuburi, der in seinem Pavillon auf der gegenüberliegenden Seite des Flusses auf Gäste wartet, und lässt kurz seine Zeitung auf die Knie sinken. "Drei Stück. Keine 1000 Meter von hier. Die Terroristen schießen jetzt oft vom Süden der Stadt auf die Amerikaner."

Im Laternenlicht der Abu-Nuwas-Straße, der von Stacheldraht- und Betonbarrieren abgesperrten ehemaligen Flaniermeile der Stadt, versammeln sich junge Männer zum Fußballspielen. Der Iftar ist vorbei, das Festmahl nach zwölf Stunden des Fastens, und das Privatleben der Bagdader beginnt.

Zwei Hubschrauber tauchen auf und knattern über der Stelle, wo die Granaten eingeschlagen haben, aber das hält hier keinen von seinem bescheidenen Ramadan-Vergnügen ab. Man hat Schlimmeres erlebt, und selbst das Wummern von Artilleriefeuer im Zentrum der Stadt ist inzwischen fast zum Alltag geworden. Aus Sicherheitsgründen, so bedauert das Amt für Strategische Kommunikation der US-Zivilverwaltung, könne nicht bei jedem Raketen- und Mörserangriff auf das Hauptquartier der Amerikaner der genaue Ort der Einschläge bekannt gegeben werden.

Verunsicherte Besatzer

Paul Bremer, Chef der Zivilverwaltung und mutmaßliches Hauptziel der Attentäter, war kurz vor dem Angriff am vorigen Dienstag zu einem Krisengipfel nach Washington abgereist, wo ihn am Morgen danach die Botschaft von einem noch viel dramatischeren Anschlag erreichte.

Vor ihrem Hauptquartier in der Stadt Nassirija riss eine Autobombe 19 Italiener und 9 Iraker in den Tod - und Washington wie seine Verbündeten aus einer trügerischen Gewissheit: Der Guerilla-Krieg ist keineswegs auf das berüchtigte "Sunniten-Dreieck" nordwestlich von Bagdad beschränkt. Auch im schiitischen Süden Iraks, der wie der kurdische Norden des Landes als weitgehend befriedet galt, sind militante Gegner der Besatzung aktiv und in der Lage, verheerende Anschläge zu verüben.

Italien trauert - und die ersten von Amerikas Verbündeten zeigen Nerven. Zwar gelobte Ministerpräsident Silvio Berlusconi, trotz des Rückschlags die "hohe Mission" im Irak fortzusetzen. Auch Großbritanniens Premier Tony Blair, der George W. Bush an diesem Dienstag zu einem Staatsbesuch in London erwartet, hält unverändert zum US-Präsidenten.

Doch andere sind verunsichert. Spaniens Ministerpräsident José María Aznar hat ungeachtet wiederholter Lobeshymnen aus Washington bereits einen Großteil seines Botschaftspersonals aus Bagdad abgezogen. Die Türken, die noch Ende Oktober planten, das drittgrößte Kontingent ausländischer Truppen in den Irak zu entsenden, sind inzwischen heilfroh, ihr Angebot rechtzeitig zurückgezogen zu haben.

"Amerika befindet sich im Krieg"

Japan, das zum ersten Mal in seiner Nachkriegsgeschichte Soldaten in einen Auslandseinsatz schicken wollte, sagte nach dem Anschlag von Nassirija ab: Die Sicherheitslage im Irak mache es der Truppe unmöglich, ihren humanitären Auftrag am Tigris zu erfüllen. Auch Südkorea, Washingtons anderer asiatischer Alliierter, will nun allenfalls 3000 Soldaten bereitstellen.

Die Besatzer sind, wie Generalleutnant Ricardo Sanchez, Kommandeur der 130 000 US-Soldaten im Irak, vergangene Woche zugab, an einem "Wendepunkt" angelangt. Mehr als 40 amerikanische Todesopfer wurden im Monat Ramadan, der in diesem Jahr mit dem November zusammenfällt, bereits gezählt. Zwei Helikopter der US-Armee wurden abgeschossen, täglich kommen Soldaten bei Angriffen mit Granaten und der Detonation improvisierter Straßenbomben ums Leben. Viele Verbündete haben inzwischen Todesopfer zu beklagen.

Amerika befinde sich im "Krieg", hob General Sanchez hervor und bestand auf der dramatischen Wortwahl - gut sechs Monate, nachdem US-Präsident George W. Bush das offizielle Ende der Kampfhandlungen verkündet hatte.

Die Zahl der täglich bereits 35 Anschläge werde sogar noch weiter ansteigen. Der Gegner ziele darauf ab, "die Koalitionskräfte vom irakischen Volk zu isolieren und den Willen der internationalen Gemeinschaft zu brechen".

Noch düsterer beschrieb der CIA-Stationschef in Bagdad die Lage im Land. Sein Bericht, unter dem Datum des 10. November, widerspricht allen Beschönigungen, die Donald Rumsfeld oder Paul Wolfowitz nach ihren Besuchen zum Besten gaben.

Ernüchternder CIA-Bericht

Der CIA-Rapport stellt fest, dass der Aufstand an Stärke gewinnt. Die Zahl der aktiven Widerständler wird auf "Zehntausende" geschätzt. Die Iraker hegten Zweifel daran, dass eine wirkliche Alternative zum Saddam-Regime entstehe - am Horizont sei ja niemand zu sehen, der auf Dauer für Ruhe und Ordnung sorgen könne. Deshalb nehme auch unter den einfachen Leuten das anti-amerikanische Ressentiment zu. Außerdem genieße der von den USA handverlesene "Irakische Regierungsrat" keine Autorität.

Groß sei die Gefahr, schließt der CIA-Mann seinen Bericht sinister, dass noch ein weiterer Unruheherd hinzukomme: Die Schiiten, die religiöse Mehrheit im Irak, die sich noch im Abwarten üben, können bald schon neben den Sunniten den Kampf gegen die amerikanischen Streitkräfte aufnehmen.

So schätzt auch der amerikanische Prokonsul im Land, Paul Bremer, den Gang der Dinge ein. Der Zivilverwalter bekräftigte die Erkenntnisse über die gärende Stimmung in Bagdad. Das CIA-Resümee fand deshalb seinen Weg in die höchsten Ränge der Bush-Regierung, stieß diesmal sogar auf ungeteilte Aufmerksamkeit und löste Großalarm aus. Das Weiße Haus bestellte Bremer überstürzt nach Washington ein, um Konsequenzen aus dem Rapport zu ziehen.

Daraus entstanden dramatische Entscheidungen, die sich seit Mitte voriger Woche im Sunniten-Dreieck zwischen Bagdad, Falludscha und Tikrit auswirken: Wiederaufnahme des Bombenkriegs plus Beschleunigung der Irakisierung.

Eine Herbstoffensive soll den Willen der Aufständischen brechen. Grimmig kündigte General Sanchez an: "Worauf wir uns hier einlassen, ist die absolute Notwendigkeit, den Feind zu besiegen - mit allen zur Verfügung stehenden Kampfmitteln."

Die "Operation Eisenhammer" begann mit dem Luftangriff auf ein Warenlager im Süden Bagdads, das den Aufständischen angeblich als Stütz- und Treffpunkt gedient hat. Zwei Einheiten der 82. Luftlandedivision und der 1. Panzerdivision riegelten die Umgebung im Stadtteil Saidija ab. Ein Kampfflugzeug vom Typ AC-130 legte das Ziel mit seiner 105-Millimeter-Haubitze in Schutt und Asche. Gewaltige Detonationen hallten durch Bagdad.

"Wir haben eine gute Strategie gegen diese Killer."

Die US-Militärführung quittiert die neue Strategie mit grimmiger Zufriedenheit. Den Krieg mit größerer Intensität zu führen, anstatt blutigen Anschlägen und Hinterhalten hilflos ausgeliefert zu sein, sieht Kommandeur Sanchez als Vorteil an. Länger schon tobt ein Konflikt zwischen Militärführung und Pentagon, was gegen die Guerilla zu tun sei. Jetzt haben sich CIA und Militärs gegen die Zivilisten im Verteidigungsministerium durchgesetzt.

Dabei ist allerdings der psychologische Nutzen größer als der militärische. Amerika demonstriert den Willen zum Krieg gegen die Guerilla. Die Tage der Hilflosigkeit, die Präsident Bush in schlechtes Licht rückten, sind erst einmal vorbei. "Wir werden uns durchsetzen", sagte der Präsident wie zur Selbstmotivation. "Wir haben eine gute Strategie gegen diese Killer."

Der militärische Wert solcher Aktionen hingegen ist eher gering. "Die Zerstörung dieser Infrastruktur", lautete eine offizielle Erklärung nach dem Warenlager-Bombardement, "trägt dazu bei, dass der Feind keinen Nutzen mehr davon haben wird." General John Abizaid, Oberbefehlshaber der US-Truppen in der Region, fügte realistisch hinzu: "Es ist sehr wichtig, dass unsere militärischen Erfolge von politischen und wirtschaftlichen Fortschritten begleitet werden, damit wir diese zornigen jungen Männer von den Straßen wegbekommen."

Spätestens seit Vietnam weiß das US-Militär, dass sich eine Guerilla militärisch nicht besiegen lässt. Es geht immer vor allem darum, wer moralisch die Oberhand gewinnt. Doch solange Krieg im Irak herrscht, ist an einen umsichtigen Aufbau des Landes kaum zu denken. Solange Kollaborateure der Amerikaner Zielscheibe für Attentäter sind, bleibt auch der politische Aufbau nur Stückwerk.

Streit im Regierungsrat

Dennoch hat sich die amerikanische Regierung dazu durchgerungen, die Irakisierung zu beschleunigen. Bremer flog zurück nach Bagdad mit der Maßgabe, bis Mitte 2004 demokratische Wahlen zu organisieren und die zivile Gewalt danach an eine Übergangsregierung abzutreten. Erst dann soll die neue Verfassung für den neuen Irak geschrieben werden.

Ähnliche Vorschläge hatte der "Irakische Regierungsrat" unterbreitet, jenes ethnisch und religiös proportional zusammengesetzte Gremium, das nach und nach Vollmachten von Bremer übertragen bekommen soll. Doch der US-Administrator und die 24 Ratsmitglieder haben sich zuletzt gegenseitig mit Vorwürfen überzogen: Bremer warf ihnen Beschlussunfähigkeit und ständige Abwesenheit vor. Viele seien mehr mit der Regelung ihrer persönlichen und finanziellen Angelegenheiten befasst als mit der Zukunft des Landes. In besonderem Maße hat Ahmed Tschalabi, Sprecher der Exil-Iraker und Günstling des Pentagon, mit seiner Hoffart und Dauerkritik an den Amerikanern Anstoß erregt. Der monierte im Gegenzug, dass die Amerikaner mit Ideen nur so um sich würfen, aber keinen plausiblen Plan verfolgten.

"Die Frage ist", so ein hoher amerikanischer Regierungsbeamter in Bagdad, "wie wir eine Übergangsregierung hinkriegen, die das Gewicht der Souveränität und Autorität tragen kann - und der wir die Schlüssel übergeben können."

Sollten die Amerikaner sich ernsthaft auf die Vorstellungen des Regierungsrats einlassen, dann sind die Probleme haufenweise programmiert: Die Kurden und die arabischen Sunniten im Rat, beides Minderheiten, bevorzugen ein Übergangsmodell, das ihnen zumindest bis auf weiteres einen größeren Anteil an der Macht garantieren könnte, als er ihnen bevölkerungsmäßig zusteht.

Paris zeigt Hilfsbereitschaft

Der mächtige Schiiten-Block, der etwa 60 Prozent der irakischen Bevölkerung repräsentiert und zweifellos jede Wahl gewinnen würde, bevorzugt hingegen einen baldigen Urnengang. Dies fordert seit Monaten in einer religiösen Fatwa der politisch einflussreichste Mann des Irak, Großajatollah Ali al-Sistani. Vorschläge, den bestehenden Regierungsrat auszubauen oder durch Mitglieder lokaler Räte nach afghanischem Vorbild eine Art Loya Jirga wählen zu lassen, lehnt er strikt ab.

Als die Guerilla noch weniger Schlagkraft bewies und niemand an neuerliche Luftschläge auf Bagdad dachte, stellten die Vereinten Nationen den USA ein Ultimatum: Bis zum 15. Dezember müsse ein Zeitplan für die Irakisierung vorliegen. Den gibt es jetzt, zumindest in Umrissen.

Heute ist Amerika sehr viel mehr als noch vor ein paar Monaten bereit, sein Machtmonopol im Irak zu teilen. Und wenn denn die neue Doppelstrategie - Bombardement plus Irakisierung - nicht die erhoffte Wirkung erzielt, bleibt eigentlich nur noch ein Ausweg: der Bittgang nach New York, damit die Uno retten hilft, was zu retten ist.

Und dort ist bei den Mitgliedern des Sicherheitsrats einiges in Bewegung geraten. Selbst Paris, einst Vorhut der Kriegsgegner, ändert den Ton. Nicht trotzige Rechthaberei ist angesagt, sondern Hilfsbereitschaft. Die Sackgasse, in der die USA stecken, veranlasst die französische Regierung, den Amerikanern "die offene Hand zu reichen", so Außenminister Dominique de Villepin, weil es um die Sicherheit der Welt gehe: "Wir sind zu allen Begegnungen und Abstimmungen bereit. Setzen wir uns zusammen, vereinigen wir unsere Erfahrungen. Es ist nicht möglich, länger abzuwarten."

Angst vor den gleichen Fehlern wie in Vietnam.

Die USA hätten jetzt eingesehen, dass ihr Besatzungsregime nicht Sicherheit schafft, sondern die Hydra des Terrorismus nährt. Im Irak müsse unverzüglich eine beratende Versammlung einberufen werden und diese eine provisorische Regierung wählen, in deren Dienst sich die multinationale Streitmacht stellen würde. Damit wäre die irakische Souveränität unter Uno-Hoheit anerkannt, das Besatzungsregime de jure beendet.

Offensichtlich fürchten aber die Franzosen, die USA könnten bei der Irakisierung des Konflikts den gleichen Fehler machen wie seinerzeit in Vietnam: die Verantwortung einfach an überforderte irakische Behörden mit neu aufgebauter Polizei und Armee abschieben und diese dann allein lassen, um die US-Truppen schnell nach Hause bringen zu können. Ein überhasteter Rückzug der USA wäre verhängnisvoll, glaubt Villepin: "Die Amerikaner haben eine Aktion begonnen, jetzt muss sie zum guten Ende geführt werden, mit einem veränderten Konzept."

Schwere Explosionen sind seit vergangenem Mittwoch jeden Abend in Falludscha, Tikrit und an den Stadtgrenzen von Bagdad zu hören - Helikopter und Kampfflugzeuge bombardieren mutmaßliche Treffpunkte und Waffenlager der Aufständischen.

Einen durchschlagenden Erfolg hatte die Operation Eisenhammer bis zum Wochenende noch nicht gebracht. Schon gar nicht traf sie Saddam Hussein, den flüchtigen Despoten, um den sich der Widerstand schart.

Wie nahe er Saddam inzwischen gekommen sei, wurde Sanchez gefragt. "Nicht nahe genug", antwortete der General. "Bei Gott, wir müssen ihm näher kommen."

ROMAIN LEICK, GERHARD SPÖRL, BERNHARD ZAND


© DER SPIEGEL 47/2003

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#9366
Der Spiegel Artikel ist bei dem Ablauf der Übergabe nicht mehr auf dem letzten Stand, deshalb dazu noch eine Reuters Meldung von heute:

Der von den USA eingesetzte Regierungsrat im Irak hatte am Samstag erklärt, bis Ende Juni 2004 würden die USA die Regierungsmacht an eine irakische Übergangsregierung abgeben. Bis Ende 2005 würden zudem eine Verfassung ausgearbeitet und demokratische Wahlen abgehalten. Ratspräsident Talabani hatte ferner gesagt: "Die Anwesenheit der Truppen der USA und anderer Staaten wird in der Übergangsregierung besprochen werden. Falls wir sie noch hier benötigen, werden wir sie bitten zu bleiben. Falls nicht, werden wir sie respektvoll darum bitten abzuziehen."(......)
US-Präsident George W. Bush sagte in einem BBC-Interview: "Wir werden uns nicht einfach aus dem Staub machen." Ein US-Armeesprecher bezeichnete Berichte als Spekulation, wonach der Absturz zweier US-Hubschrauber im Nordirak auf Raketenbeschuss zurückzuführen sei.

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Ist das Pentagon schon wieder beim Falschmelden erwischt worden?

DOD Statement on News Reports of al-Qaida and Iraq Connections

United States Department of Defense

No. 851-03
IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 15, 2003

News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate.

A letter was sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee on October 27, 2003 from Douglas J. Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, in response to follow-up questions from his July 10 testimony. One of the questions posed by the committee asked the Department to provide the reports from the Intelligence Community to which he referred in his testimony before the Committee. These reports dealt with the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida.

The letter to the committee included a classified annex containing a list and description of the requested reports, so that the Committee could obtain the reports from the relevant members of the Intelligence Community.

The items listed in the classified annex were either raw reports or products of the CIA, the NSA, or, in one case, the DIA. The provision of the classified annex to the Intelligence Committee was cleared by other agencies and done with the permission of the Intelligence Community. The selection of the documents was made by DOD to respond to the Committee’s question. The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida, and it drew no conclusions.

Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal.

http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/2003/nr20031115-0642.htm…

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Published on Sunday, November 16, 2003 by the Long Island, NY Newsday
American Gulag
Editorial

No American president should have the absolute power to imprison people at will, even when the nation is at war.

That`s the unfettered power President George W. Bush has claimed for himself in the war on terrorism. On his authority alone -- unchecked by courts or international convention -- 660 people from 42 nations captured in the Afghanistan war have been locked in a U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for two years. Two others -- American citizens -- have been held in military brigs almost as long, without criminal charges or access to family, lawyers or court.

Bush has labeled them "enemy combatants." With those two words, the president says he can lawfully move anyone he chooses beyond the reach of any legal authority other than his own.

After two years on the sidelines, the Supreme Court announced last week that it will decide what role, if any, the courts should play in sorting through the claims of people held at Guantanamo. Another case the court has not yet accepted, raises the same issue when the person in the dock is a U.S. citizen. The court should take that case as well, and reaffirm the constitutional protections due all U.S. citizens.

The question isn`t only whether these detentions, imposed after Sept. 11, 2001, can withstand judicial scrutiny. Those at Guantanamo probably can. The issue is whether the detentions should be subject to any scrutiny at all.

They must be: Kings and dictators wield unlimited power over the liberty of others. Not American presidents. They are constrained by the Constitution, the rule of law and, in the case of foreigners captured during hostilities, the Geneva Convention, endorsed by 191 nations including the United States.

The Supreme Court should rein in the presidential power-grab. But if the detainees are unlikely to win their freedom, why the fuss?

At stake is the bedrock Western legal principal of habeas corpus, a fundamental guarantor of individual liberty. It gives anyone imprisoned by the government the right to challenge the lawfulness of their incarceration. By getting word to a judge who can order the jailer to "bring me the body," (as habeas corpus means in Latin) officials are made to prove that the detention is legal. That check on presidential power is a critical bulwark against government tyranny.

Courts vs. Commander-in-Chief

But the administration insists that habeas corpus, while applying to the U.S. citizens, does not apply to the Guantanamo detainees. And with the nation at war, the courts cannot second-guess the commander-in-chief. All they can require is the most cursory justification of the enemy combatant label.

Any other arrangement is thought to compromise the nation`s ability to wage war: "It would be difficult to devise more effective fettering of a field commander than to allow the very enemies he is ordered to reduce to submission to call him to account in his own civil courts and divert his efforts and attention from the military offensive abroad to the legal defensive at home," the U.S. Solicitor General said in the government`s brief.

Opposing that view, civil libertarians, retired military officers, former U.S. diplomats and former federal judges have filed friend-of- the-court briefs. Among their comments:

U.S. troops will be put at risk if Bush prevails. Three former top military legal officers said the Geneva Convention requires that a "competent tribunal" review any decision to deny prisoner-of-war status to a wartime captive. Since no such reviews have been done at Guantanamo, the likelihood is increasing that foreign authorities holding American captives will decide to ignore the Geneva Convention entirely -- thereby putting the lives of American prisoners at risk.

A competent tribunal can be as rudimentary as a panel of military officers that reviews individual cases, said Christophe Vogirod, U.S. director of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is the guardian of the Geneva Convention. "Some legal process should be put in place to end the uncertainty," he said.

The Bush view may undermine U.S. influence abroad. Nineteen former U.S. diplomats noted that "Our most important diplomatic asset has been this nation`s values," an asset lost when the U.S. ignores the rule of law.

The status and circumstances of the detainees are not all the same. Yaser Hamdi was captured, gun in hand, in Afghanistan. But he`s a U.S. citizen, now held in a military brig in Virginia. The Supreme Court is considering whether to take his case. José Padillo, the so-called dirty bomber, is a Brooklyn native and U.S. citizen taken into custody in Chicago. He`s in a brig in South Carolina. Whether he has the right to see an attorney and to challenge the enemy combatant label will be argued Monday in the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan. The Guantanamo prisoners are all foreign nationals captured overseas.

In the cases of 12 Kuwaitis, one Australian and two Britons among those at Guantanamo, the court will decide a narrow question: Do U.S. courts have the jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad during hostilities and imprisoned outside the United States?

The 1950 Precedent

The Bush administration says no, based on the 1950 precedent of 21 Germans captured in China and convicted by a U.S. military commission of spying for the Japanese. The 21 were imprisoned in Germany and filed a writ of habeas corpus for review by a U.S. court. The high court ruled that the federal courts had no jurisdiction.

Bush`s lawyers say it`s the same at Guantanamo: Foreign detainees were captured abroad and have never set foot in the United States. It`s a strong argument.

But to lawyers representing relatives of detainees they have never met, it`s a convenient sham. The United States, not Cuba, has sovereign control of the naval base at Guantanamo and unquestioned control of the prisoners, they say, which means federal courts do have jurisdiction. Besides, the Germans in 1950 were charged with crimes and had lawyers and trials.

The President`s Discretion

It has been two years and the Guantanamo detainees have been afforded no similar process.

What is the same in the Guantanamo cases, and those of Hamdi and Padilla, is the president`s insistence that he alone has the authority to decide who should be locked up and when, if ever, they will be released.

It`s not supposed to work that way in the land of the free.

Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.

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Published on Sunday, November 16, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
How We Know Bush Will "Cut and Run" from Iraq
by Robert Freeman

It looks like it`s official. We`re going to "cut and run" from Iraq.

Oh, to be sure, that`s not what the standard press reports say. They say the president insists, "We will NOT cut and run from Iraq." But the media has proven singularly credulous (that`s the most charitable way we can put it) regarding the administration`s pronouncements on Iraq.

So herewith, a simple, foolproof system for understanding what is really going on: believe exactly the opposite of whatever the administration says. That`s right. Whatever they say with regards to policy, you may be drop-dead certain the exact opposite is actually the truth.

This system`s virtues are two-fold. First, it is absurdly simple. Any fool not aspiring to be a "professional" journalist can make it work from the comfort of his own home. Its second virtue is that it is unerringly accurate. It just never fails. Whatever they say, believe the opposite.

Let`s see how it performs in service and then test it on the "cut and run" declaration.

In August of last year the administration said we had to invade Iraq because Iraq would not allow U.N. weapons inspectors inside. In fact, they allowed inspectors inside.

They said the inspectors were not being allowed to do their job. The inspectors announced that they had not been denied access to a single site.

The administration told us the Iraqis had been trying to buy processed uranium from Africa. Their own man on the scene, Joseph Wilson, had told them-and later the public-that this was not true.

They told us that "most experts believe" the aluminum tubes had no other use than in centrifuges for enriching uranium. In fact, their own experts had told them that the tubes were not suited for such purposes.

They said the Iraqis possessed "thousands of tons" of chemical and biological weapons. As it turns out, of course, they possessed none. None.

We were told the Iraqis had an advanced program in place to develop nuclear weapons. They simply had nothing of the kind. Nothing.

We were told the Iraqis had connections to Al Qaeda. The CIA`s own report a year before the invasion denied any such connection. Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladin are blood enemies.

We were bludgeoned with the intimation Iraq was behind the tragedy of 9/11. The truth, of course, is that they had nothing whatsoever to do with it. The president was forced to concede this recently, even against the continuing and embarrassing public insistence to the contrary by his own Vice President.

We were told Iraq posed an imminent threat to the security of the region. But not a single one of Iraq`s neighbors claimed to feel threatened by Iraq.

We were told the invasion was approved by United Nations resolution but the U.N.`s Secretary General denied any such imprimatur and insisted the U.S. was in violation of both the U.N. charter and international law.

We were told before it started that there was simply no way to know what the war would cost. But Lawrence Lindsey`s $200 billion estimate has proven eerily prescient if not conservative. Lindsey was hustled out of Washington faster than anyone since David Stockman let slip that supply side economics was a "Trojan Horse" for shifting more national wealth to the already fabulously wealthy.

The administration told us they had exhausted every single possibility of avoiding war. Now we learn that even in the final days before the war they were rebuffing urgent offers of settlement from senior Iraqi officials.

We were told the invasion would make us more safe, that it would begin dismembering a global terrorist network. Now the CIA tells us the invasion has sparked a holy war against the United States, revitalizing global recruitment of young Muslims willing to die in order to bloody the US`s nose. We are less safe.

We were told there was a "coalition of the willing" that supported our aims and would provide help in the project. Only England, ever ready to return the insult to its failed imperial rule, has proven willing while former allies Turkey, India, Pakistan, and now even Japan have snubbed us.

We were told that France, Germany, Russia and China, reluctant to miss out on a feeding frenzy, would sheepishly come aboard once the war was underway. They are nowhere to be found and we stand naked and increasingly isolated.

We were told that the war would prove a "cakewalk," that it would be "over in months, if not weeks." There`s cake involved, it`s true, but it`s on Bush`s and Cheney`s and Rumsfeld`s and Wolfowitz` faces.

We were told, "we know where the weapons are." Iraq is now the most inspected country in the history of the planet and not a single shred of weapons of mass destruction has been found.

We were told "we`ve found the weapons of mass destruction." They turned out to be two trucks for inflating weather balloons.

We were told our mission was to bring "democracy" to Iraq. But we also insisted we would never allow the Iraqis to elect a Shi`ite government. Shi`ites represent 60% of Iraq`s population.

We were told we would be treated as liberators, that the Iraqis would be throwing flowers in our paths for rescuing them from an evil dictator. We were welcomed, all right, but with rocket propelled grenades, AK-47s, anti-tank mines and ambushes. Most Iraqis insist they were better off under Saddam Hussein.

We were told the invasion would be "self-funding," that Iraq`s vast oil wealth would pay for the invasion, the occupation, and the rebuilding. Turns out it will not begin to come close and that the American citizens are picking up the tab to the tune of multiple billions of dollars a week.

We were told the international community would support us financially. The stated target of the Madrid Donor`s Conference was $56 billion in pledges. Only $33 billion was actually raised with $29 billion of that put up by the U.S. and its front organizations.

Most recently, we were told things were going swimmingly and that it was only the negative media that was distorting the situation. In fact, there is chaos on the ground, demoralization among the troops, complete collapse of essential civic services and swelling rage massing throughout vast portions of the Iraqi population.

This is only a short list, hastily thrown together. Its purpose was to test the simplicity and the accuracy of the Do-It-Yourself-Bush-Iraq-Policy-Pronouncement-Divination-System. Whatever they say, know that the truth is the exact opposite.

The system`s efficacy speaks for itself. And the only requirements for using it are that your IQ be larger than your belt size and that you not be a "professional" journalist.

Now for the final test. Here`s the situation. The CIA`s internal report (not the happy story offered for public consumption) says the situation is close to spiraling out of control. The locals smell blood. Bush`s poll numbers are sinking like a hot rock through fresh snow. Elections are 12 months away. Karl Rove still sets policy in the White House.

Bush says the U.S. "will not cut and run from Iraq."

What else could it possibly mean?

Robert Freeman writes on technology and economics. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Salon, CounterPunch, Democratic Underground, ComputerWorld, and other publications. He can be reached at [e-mail].

do ga
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Summary Military Fatalities:

US++UK++Other+++Total

419+53+++24+++++496

Latest Military Fatality Date: 11/15/2003

http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx

11/16/03 BBC: US turns heat on insurgents
The US has launched a new operation against insurgents in Iraq, backed by hi-tech missiles, fighter jets and attack helicopters.
11/16/03 telus(AP): U.S. investigating elicopter crash
The U.S. military on Sunday was investigating whether insurgent ground fire caused the crash of two helicopters that killed 17 American soldiers
11/16/03 Reuters: Loud Blasts in Central Baghdad
At least two loud explosions echoed across central Baghdad after dark on Sunday, Reuters witnesses reported.
11/15/03 Centcom: 17 Killed, 5 Wounded, 1 Unaccounted For
Two UH – 60 Black hawk helicopters assigned to the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) crashed in West Mosul at approximately 6:30 p.m. Nov. 15. 17 soldiers died in the crash, 5 were wounded, and 1 is unaccounted for.
11/15/03 Yahoo: AP Reporting 17 Dead in Crash
The U.S. military said 17 soldiers were killed in the crash of two Black Hawk helicopters in the northern city of Mosul, five were injured and one remained unaccounted for.
11/15/03 Reuters: RPG Brought Down 1 Copter
One of the helicopters was hit in the tail by a rocket propelled grenade (RPG), a U.S. officer at the scene said on Saturday.
11/15/03 CNN: 12 Dead In Black Hawk Crashes
Twelve U.S. soldiers were killed and nine were wounded Saturday evening when two U.S. military helicopters crashed in a residential area of the northern city of Mosul, a coalition military spokesman said
11/15/03 CENTCOM: Two Black Hawks Confirmed Down
Two UH – 60 Blackhawk helicopters assigned to the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) crashed in West Mosul at approximately 6:30 p.m. today.
11/15/03 Yahoo News: Update on Black Hawk Crashes
Two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters crashed on Saturday in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, coming down in a residential area after some witnesses said they had a mid-air collision.
11/15/03 MSNBC: US Black Hawk crashes in Mosul
A U.S. helicopter crashed in a civilian area in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Saturday and American soldiers sealed off the area, witnesses said
11/15/03 Yahoo: Wounded Italian Soldier Dies
An Italian soldier badly wounded in a recent suicide bombing in southern Iraq died Saturday in a Kuwait hospital after his parents gave approval for his life-support system to be turned off, the Italian embassy said.
11/15/03 Reuters: Blast Heard in Baghdad
An explosion was heard in central Baghdad on Saturday and smoke could be seen rising from an area close to the headquarters of Iraq`s U.S.-led administration, Reuters witnesses reported.
11/15/03 Centcom: 1 killed and two others wounded
A 1st Armored Division soldier was killed and two others wounded when an improvised explosive device was detonated on their two-vehicle convoy Nov. 15.
11/14/03 Centcom: The 400th U.S. Death
A 1st Armored Division soldier died of wounds received when the convoy in which the soldier was riding struck an improvised explosive device (IED) approximately 8:20 a.m., Nov. 14, near central Baghdad.
11/14/03 Centcom: US Soldier Dies In Afghanistan
MACDILL AFB, Tampa - A special operations force soldier died of wounds received when the vehicle he was in struck an improvised explosive device (IED) in the vicinity of Asadabad, Afghanistan today.
11/14/03 CENTCOM: 2 Killed, 3 Wounded 11/13
Two Task Force Ironhorse soldiers were killed and three were wounded when the convoy they were traveling in was attacked with an improvised explosive device at approximately 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 13, north of Samarra
11/14/03 Koulikov: Ukrainian Soldier Dies
In Iraq, as a result of improper weapon handling, Junior Sergeant Sergiy
11/14/03 Yahoo: Roadside Bomb Wounds Two U.S. Soldiers
A roadside bomb exploded in southern Baghdad Friday morning, wounding two American soldiers, a U.S. officer said.
11/14/03 AP: Gunmen Hit Portuguese Reporters in Iraq
Gunmen opened fire on jeeps carrying Portuguese journalists in southern Iraq on Friday, wounding one reporter and kidnapping another
11/14/03 DJ: 3 Soldiers Slightly Hurt By Bomb In Mosul
Three U.S. soldiers were slightly injured when an improvised explosive device went off near their convoy at about 6:30 p.m. Thursday in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the military said Friday
11/14/03 Reuters: Apache Strike Kills Iraqi Attackers
A U.S. Apache helicopter spotted and killed seven Iraqi insurgents late on Thursday as they prepared to fire rockets at a U.S. military camp near Tikrit
11/14/03 BayArea: THE WOUNDS OF WAR
U.S. soldiers who survive attacks in Iraq often face lasting injuries
11/14/03 USA Today: Contractor Killed In Iraq
Suspected insurgents raked a convoy with automatic gunfire, killing a U.S. civilian contractor and wounding another American, a U.S. military official said Friday.

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Blair ally in poll threat to Bush
Nicholas Watt and Duncan Campbell
Monday November 17, 2003
The Guardian

George Bush will be served notice today that the deep hostility towards him in Britain has reached the Blair inner circle, when the former minister Stephen Byers launches a bid to destabilise the president`s re-election campaign next year.

On the eve of Mr Bush`s state visit to Britain, Mr Byers, an arch-Blairite, will set out proposals to help Democrats in key swing states if the White House refuses to abandon punitive trade sanctions against the UK.

Acting with the tacit approval of Blair supporters, who were enraged when Mr Bush imposed tariffs on imports of British steel to shore up his vote, the former trade and industry secretary will call for sanctions to be imposed on four key marginal states which the president will need to win.

The states - and the exports to be targeted - are:

· Florida and its citrus products. The state was the scene of the "hanging chad" saga in the 2000 presidential election, after Mr Bush and Al Gore virtually tied there;
· Wisconsin and its apples and paper. Mr Gore won this state by a tiny margin;
· Tennessee and its chemicals. Mr Bush scored a narrow victory in Mr Gore`s home state;
· Iowa and its agricultural equipment. This state will play a key role when the nominations battle starts in January.

Mr Byers also calls for tariffs to be imposed on exports of textiles, which would hit states across the American south.

In a letter to Pascal Lamy, Europe`s top trade negotiator, Mr Byers calls for the EU to im pose the tariffs if Mr Bush fails to lift his sanctions by a December deadline imposed by the World Trade Organisation.

"It is clear that steel tariffs were introduced for short-term political advantage to deliver on a promise made by George Bush during the last presidential election campaign in order to gain votes in key swing states like West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan where the steel industry is a major employer.

"The EU should now indicate that if President Bush fails to comply with the WTO ruling, then it will impose tariffs targeted at the major sectors of employment in politically sensitive swing states."

Mr Byers` intervention will help Mr Blair, who plays host to Mr Bush as Britain and the US are struggling to assert their authority in Iraq, following incidents such as the Black Hawk helicopter attack at the weekend. The US military yesterday fired a satellite-guided missile for the first time since major combat was declared over on May 1, targeting a site where it said insurgents had set up a training camp.

Police and US secret service agents will mount a heavy security operation in London to protect the president, who is likely to face huge protests after he arrives at Heathrow tomorrow evening.

Mr Bush stepped up his charm offensive when, in an interview with Sir David Frost recorded several days ago, he said that he was delighted to be visiting a country where people were free to protest. But his emollient tone cut no ice with Clare Short, who resigned from the cabinet after the war. She told ITV the visit was "very embarrassing".

Mr Blair is standing by the decision to invite Mr Bush on the first state visit by a US president since 1918 because he is convinced history will judge them to have been right on Iraq.

But Mr Blair has never made any secret of his irritation with Mr Bush for imposing the trade tariffs in 2002.

Patricia Hewitt, the trade and industry secretary, underlined government anger over the tariffs when she told the BBC yesterday: "It is time for them to go because if they don`t go by the first week in December we will be into a trade war with European retaliations against American imports."

There are hopes that the president, who will discuss the issue with Mr Blair, will signal a change of heart this week. At the weekend Mr Bush said: "I am listening, looking and we`ll decide at an appropriate time."

His advisers may be shaken by Mr Byers` proposals. The tariffs would not technically be imposed on the four states, but would instead be directed against named exports which would adversely affect those sensitive states.

Florida is regarded as essential by both the main US parties. If the EU hit the citrus business there, with consequent job losses and economic fall-out, Mr Bush could pay a heavy electoral penalty.

All of the main Democrat contenders were in Iowa at the weekend. Any threat to Iowa`s agricultural equipment industry would certainly be heavily exploited by the Democrats.

An Iowa Republican, Senator Charles Grassley, the chairman of the Senate finance committee, has already urged President Bush to end the tariffs on steel because of "changed economic circumstances".

Everett Ehrlich, an undersecretary of commerce under Bill Clinton, gave a taste of the battle ahead when he told the LA Times: "If the US sticks with the tariffs, the EU will surely retaliate now that it has the authority to do so."


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Get mad - and get even
Bush deserves our rage, but Blair should take the brunt of it. We elected him, now we must get rid of him

Gary Younge
Monday November 17, 2003
The Guardian

The US president, George Bush, looks pretty baffled at the best of times. But after an hour-long meeting with "moderates" in Bali during his whistle-stop tour of Asia last month he cut a particularly confused figure. For reasons he could not quite grasp, his self-professed vision of America as a benign superpower spreading democracy through the Middle East was received with polite scepticism, even among those nations and leaders he considered allies. "Do they really believe that we think all Muslims are terrorists?" he asked. "I`ve been saying all along that not every policy issue needs to be dealt with by force."

The difference between how Bush and his administration perceive the world and almost everybody else experiences it would be comic if the consequences were not so tragic. It is not the product of a misunderstanding but carefully crafted, wilful ignorance. Once, when asked how he gets his information, Bush said: "The best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff."

Nonetheless, the fact that both he and his staff have finally realised that the difference between their perception and reality actually does exist is a small breakthrough. "On a trip like this he can get a glimpse of it, but only a glimpse," said one senior official who attended several of the meetings in Asia. "Of course, when you are moving at warp speed, there isn`t a lot of time to think about what you are hearing."

Given that Bush`s state visit to Britain, which starts tomorrow, will be conducted at a more leisurely pace, we can only hope that the huge demonstrations that greet him will give him more than a glimpse of where this "perception gap" might have come from.

Travel, if you let it, can broaden the mind. So from the time Bush lands, it is important that he is aware that while the British prime minister may be his ally in the war against Iraq the British people are not and, barring a short spell at the outset of the fighting, never have been. That is why the upcoming demonstrations around Bush`s visit are not only necessary but demand our full support. The threat of them alone has shifted the focus of the visit from the two leaders` proposed declaration of a quick exit from Iraq to the question of why they ever entered in the first place.

Meanwhile, America`s preparation for them shows just how much they value our special relationship and what kind of democracy they like to export on their travels. Among other things, US armed special agents have asked for diplomatic immunity in case they kill a protester; to patrol the skies with Black Hawk helicopters; and include a tank, equipped with a gun that can kill a dozen people in one go, in their presidential cavalcade. While these requests have been turned down much of central London will still be closed down to create a "sterile zone" so that Bush`s belief that he has the support of the British people will not be contaminated. If ever there was an example of a guest taking liberties this is it.

But if Bush`s visit provides the motivation for the demonstrations it would be a mistake if it also monopolised their message. For to be effective the protests should not mark a reflexive response to the arrival of an unpopular foreign dignitary, but reflect an expression of the popular will that has been forced on to the streets because our own parliament`s inability to adequately represent us.

If the leader who is coming is a problem, the leader who invited him is no less so. As the man who led the charge to war Bush is a worthy target of our ire. As the man who followed him and in so doing lent the war what little legitimacy it ever had, Blair is even more so.

We did not elect Bush (it is a moot point whether anybody did) and can do little about him but hope that the Democrats get it together to beat him next year. We did elect Blair, and if these demonstrations are going to be about anything more than ire, then it is our responsibility to get rid of him.

For if the demonstrations show our strength in numbers they also reveal a weakness in application. We have shown that we can get mad; we have yet to show that we can get even. This is a global problem, not a local one. The vast majority of humanity did not want this war to happen, and it happened anyway. Even in those countries that are prosecuting it, including America, opinion polls showed that most were opposed to military action without UN approval.

If that were not bad enough we now know that in order to gain even minority support they had to lie about weapons that do not exist, using intelligence that could not be trusted. So we have a war we did not want, led by people we can no longer believe. And yet it remains to be seen whether anyone will be held accountable or forced to pay an electoral price. So, while the problem may manifest itself on a global scale, the solution is essentially local. Leaders like Blair, who use their association with Bush to strut the world stage with hubris, must be shown the meaning of humility at home. Having found a way to demonstrate our frustration, we must now find a way to make it count.

In fact, it is a challenge more pertinent to Britain than anywhere else. For unlike Bush, Silvio Berlusconi, Jose Maria Aznar or John Howard, Blair - ostensibly - comes from the left. So, unlike the anti-war demonstrators in the US, Italy, Spain or Australia, most of those who oppose the war also supported the man who is prosecuting it. And unless they come up with an alternative they may well end up doing so again.

It is in this one crucial respect that America remains a far more hopeful place than Britain. For there is little confusion in the American anti-war movement about whom the enemy is and what needs to be done about him. Their protests are having real consequences in the Democratic race for the presidential nomination, where anti-war candidates are making all the running and lifted the level of debate to a far higher level than we are currently seeing in the Labour party.

This is what makes the charges that the demonstrations are anti-American as ridiculous as they are predictable. Americans are not the problem: Bush is. The majority of Americans disapprove of his handling of the war. As the bodybags and the bill for occupation mount, so the opposition keeps rising. If anyone is bucking the tide of US public opinion it is Blair and Bush, not the protesters.

Meanwhile, Bush comes to the same country that turned out in droves to welcome Bill Clinton, when he walked through the centre of London with a smile and a wave and not a combat vehicle in sight. Bush is not synonymous with America any more than Blair is synonymous with Britain. We can make Bush uncomfortable; it is only Blair we can make unemployed.

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No proof Saddam armed al-Qaida, says CIA
Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
Monday November 17, 2003
The Guardian

The CIA has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein tried to transfer chemical or biological weapons or technology to al-Qaida or any other groups, according to a new American report.

The details of the CIA`s findings were published as the domestic political debate over how long US troops will remain in Iraq intensified.

The report by Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, was compiled from briefings in the past two weeks by David Kay, the CIA representative leading the search for unconventional weapons in Iraq, Paul Bremer, the US civil administrator, and military personnel. "No evidence of any Iraqi effort to transfer weapons of mass destruction or weapons to terrorists," Mr Cordesman wrote of Mr Kay`s briefing.

According to the report, details of which were published in the Washington Post yesterday, Mr Kay said that Iraq "did order nuclear equipment from 1999 on, but no evidence [has turned up] of [a] new major facility to use it."

Mr Kay added that he had located Iraqi biological work "under cover of new agricultural facility" that indicated "advances in developing dry storable powder forms of botulinum toxin".

The report concluded that 95% of current attacks on coalition forces came from former Saddam loyalists, with some assistance from fighters from Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Money looted from the central bank in Iraq in the regime`s dying days may be financing the attackers` activities, the report suggested. "At least $1bn [was] still unaccounted for," it said.

The briefings indicate that Saddam is "cut off, isolated, moving constantly [and has] no real role in control."

Mr Bremer also told CNN that there was no evidence that Saddam was coordinating the attacks.


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US agrees to international control of its troops in Iraq
By Leonard Doyle and Stephen Castle in Brussels
17 November 2003


The United States accepts that to avoid humiliating failure in Iraq it needs to bring its forces quickly under international control and speed the handover of power, Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, has said. Decisions along these lines will be made in the "coming days", Mr Solana told The Independent.

The comments, signalling a major policy shift by the US, precede President George Bush`s state visit this week to London, during which he and Tony Blair will discuss an exit strategy for forces in Iraq.

Mr Solana underlined the change of mood in Washington, saying: "Everybody has moved, including the United States, because the United States has a real problem and when you have a real problem you need help." There is a "growing consensus" that the transfer of power has to be accelerated, he said. "How fast can it be done? I would say the faster the better."

He added: "The more the international community is incorporated under the international organisations [the better]. That is the lesson I think everyone is learning. Our American friends are learning that. We will see in the coming days decisions along these lines."

The Bush administration spelt out over the weekend its new plans for the faster transfer of power from Americans to the Iraqis, with a transitional government now scheduled to take over from the end of June. Before, US officials had said that Iraqi leaders should write a constitution first, then hold elections.

As the EU`s foreign policy representative, Mr Solana has been playing a significant, behind-the-scenes role. Until now, the US had resisted putting the allied forces under international auspices, although there is growing support in Washington for a Nato role.

Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, arrives in Brussels tonight for talks with EU ministers, which he will combine with a meeting with the retiring Nato secretary general, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. Diplomats say that Mr Powell is expected to "test the water" about the involvement of the transatlantic alliance in Iraq. The litany of setbacks, growing US casualties and the recent killing of 18 Italian servicemen has brought intense domestic and international pressure on the Bush administration to give the occupying force more legitimacy.

Eager to counter this domestic unease, the American military sought to advertise their latest crack-down. They declared that they had fired a satellite-guided missile at what they said was an insurgents` training camp west of Kirkuk.

But there was more grim news on Saturday with the collision of two Black Hawk helicopters after one was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Seventeen American soldiers died, the worst single loss of life in one incident since President Bush ordered the US-led invasion.

He insisted yesterday that the US would not "cut and run". In an interview with Breakfast with Frost on BBC1, the President said the United States would not spend "years and years" in Iraq. But he rejected as "not a fair comment" claims that the US was unprepared for winning peace. Mounting violence in Iraq was "nothing more than a power grab". He added: "There are some foreign fighters, mujahedin types or al-Qa`ida, or al-Qa`ida affiliates involved, as well."

America`s chief post-war administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, also suggested that US-led forces would remain on a different basis. "Our presence here will change from an occupation to an invited presence," he said. "I`m sure the Iraqi government is going to want to have coalition forces here for its own security for some time.

There have been no specifics yet about how the international community would control the mainly American and British forces in Iraq. Nato remains the only strong possibility because it would provide international credibility while leaving control with a military organisation which Washington dominates.

Nato has already proved its willingness to act outside its traditional sphere of operations by taking a role in Afghanistan. But to allow it to deploy in Iraq would mean getting the approval of all 19 Nato allies including France, Germany and Belgium, all staunch opponents of the war.

They would need to be satisfiedthat the UN had been given a sufficient role in the political control of Iraq. Diplomats say that the US and Britain will need to be certain that no one will block an Iraq mission before they make a request.

With the US-led occupation likely to be declared over the next year, Mr Bremer said that work would start on a constitutional settlement. "We`ll have a bill of rights. We`ll recognise equality for all citizens. We`ll recognise an independent judiciary. We`ll talk about a federal government," he said.

Mr Bremer explained that the Americans would work with the Iraqi Governing Council in writing the interim constitution. There would also be a side agreement dealing with security and the presence of American and coalition forces in Iraq, he said.

Al-Qa`ida claimed responsibility for the bombings of two Istanbul synagogues which killed at least 23 people and vowed further attacks, the London-based Arab newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi said yesterday.
17 November 2003 09:33



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Michael Moore: `You need to show that the people of Britain don`t support Bush`
The Monday Interview with the author and film-maker
By Ian Burrell, Media and Culture Correspondent
17 November 2003


You would have thought it would take something more extraordinary to trigger an outburst of unabashed US patriotism in the maverick film-maker Michael Moore than a traffic jam on the M6 outside Walsall. But after more than half-an-hour of the quintessentially British pastime of going nowhere on the motorway, Moore`s gaze fixes on the free-flowing opposite carriageway.

"If you guys only drove on the other side of the road, that`s the problem here," he says. "The American side over there is going by us at 70 miles an hour and we are stuck here." Moore is laughing but his good humour barely conceals a concern that the British public will be gripped by a similar inertia this week during the state visit of his President, George Bush.

The baseball-capped popular icon of Western opposition to the Iraq war is touring British cities, hoping to be the "advance guard" for mass protests against Mr Bush, who arrives in Britain tomorrow. "It`s up to the British people to do their job in letting the American people know the British people don`t support this war," Moore says.

The author of the best-selling critique of corporate America, Stupid White Men, says one of the "many lies" told by the US Government about the Iraq war (alongside claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and helped plan 9/11) was the suggestion that "the British are with us on this, the British are our allies and our friends".

This claim, Moore believes, will be reinforced if the President`s state visit is allowed to proceed as the meticulously stage-managed event he believes is being planned as part of Mr Bush`s strategy for winning next year`s election.

"It is a photo-opportunity. With the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jacks flying in Pall Mall and the whole royal thing he is going to be treated to, this is all about trying to shore him up for next year," he says.

The President`s London photo-opportunities, he hopes, will be tarnished. "That can happen only in one way, and that`s a very large physical presence in the streets of London, letting the American people know the people of Great Britain do not support this war and do not support George Bush," he says. "It has to be done in a graphic way, in a physical way; it can`t just be said. It has to be done with the images that will be sent back to America because the American media will be there with Bush."

Mr Moore, and his sister Anne, are heading for Cambridge where he is to address the Cambridge Union Society. The night before he was in Manchester. After Cambridge, he will drive back across the Midlands to an event in Warwick that evening, and the day after he is in Bristol at lunch-time, and Brixton in London at night.

It is an extraordinary schedule, not arranged by the Stop the War Coalition but by Blackwell`s, the bookseller, and Penguin, the publisher. Moore may be trying to rally the anti-war protesters but he also hoping to shift a few copies of his book Dude, Where`s My Country?, which sold a million copies in America in three weeks and went straight to the top of the British best-sellers` list.

He has been astonished by the response of the British public to what is essentially a book promotional tour. "We have been jokingly referring to this as the first stadium tour for a book," he says, after 3,000 people turned up at the Manchester Apollo the night before.

It is perhaps no surprise his "readings" have been reviewed (mostly favourably) as if they were stand-up performances, particularly when he has chosen to use venues such as the London Palladium. "Penguin told me that, with the exception of Edinburgh, every venue was sold out before they were able to take out a single advert," Moore says. "They said, `Word got around that you were coming and the phones started ringing off the hook`."

But the author`s popularity has brought with it cynicism. One commentator referred to Moore`s audience as "fawning"; another suggested those who liked his work held a "black-and-white view of the world in which lefties like them are goodies and everyone else (especially Americans) stupid".

Certainly the sheer numbers who turn out for his shows, buy his books and cinema tickets for his Oscar-winning film Bowling for Columbine suggest that he has mainstream appeal. During his visit to Europe, he is filming part of his next movie project Fahrenheit 911, The Temperature At Which Truth Burns which, like Dude, Where`s My Country?, explores the relationship between Mr Bush and Osama bin Laden.

He says: "It`s essentially about Bush and 9/11 and things that are not being discussed, in terms of what was going on with the Taliban and the Bush administration, what was going in with the Saudi royal family and the Bush administration, the potential connections between the Bushes and the Bin Ladens for the past 25 years, then, after 9/11, how this event and the deaths of these 3,000 people have been used as a smokescreen for Bush to get his right-wing agenda passed." The President`s policies, Moore believes, are feeding an anger towards all things American that is discernible at his live events in Britain.

And he describes Tony Blair as the "rug" that needs to be pulled away from under the feet of the American President. His audiences, he thinks, are "afraid of saying the words `Tony Blair must go` because they are afraid of what that means in terms of what he might be replaced with".

The media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, may believe the new Conservative leader Michael Howard is a potential prime minister but Moore does not. "People seem to be very afraid the Tories could come back into power. I have tried my best to ridicule that notion. They need to trust that the people in this country don`t want to go back to those old days."

The fears, Moore believes, are an indication of the lack of depth in the ruling party. "It`s a comment on how ineffective people feel the Labour Party is. It seems filled with a lot of wimpy, spineless people afraid to criticise their leader or stand up to him."

The paralysis in criticising Mr Blair, he says, must not be extended to the US President and allow the London visit to be portrayed as the coming of "the conquering hero". He said British people must abandon their workplaces and schools to come to London and show their opposition to the war.

"It will require a sacrifice because it`s 2pm on a Thursday and you`ve got to travel across the UK and you may have to take off work and you may have to take off school and it will be inconvenient," he says.

"But I assure the crowds that their inconvenience will be far less than the sacrifice made by the 53 British soldiers who have died in this criminal undertaking."

He suggests every effort will be made to ensure protesters are kept out of sight of Mr Bush. "You are going to have to do a fake and a dodge to get around these barriers set up to deny you your right to freedom of expression. That still is a British right, isn`t it?"

LIFE STORY

Born: 23 April, 1954, to Irish-American parents in Davison, suburb of Flint, Michigan.

Education: Davison High School from 1968.

Ran for Flint school board in 1972, among youngest in the US to win election to public office. University of Michigan, Flint.

Career: Journalist for weekly newspaper Flint Voice. Editor of Michigan Voice; editor of Mother Jones magazine (1986); Roger & Me, (1989, producer); Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint (1992, producer); TV Nation (NBC, 1994); Canadian Bacon (1995, producer); Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American (1996, writer); The Big One (1997, producer); The Awful Truth (1999); Stupid White Men (2001); produced Bowling for Columbine (2002).

Family: Married to Kathleen Glynn. Has a daughter, Natalie
17 November 2003 09:35



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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November 17, 2003
Business of Governing Starts This Monday for Schwarzenegger
By JOHN M. BRODER

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 16 — Arnold Schwarzenegger will be sworn in as California`s governor on Monday after a whirlwind campaign followed by a six-week transition period in which he was largely invisible.

Rarely has a person assumed so high an office with so little known about his political philosophy and so few clues to his governing style. In the recall campaign, Mr. Schwarzenegger largely stuck to generalities, promising to resist raising taxes while advocating moderate-to-liberal positions on the environment and other social issues.

In his first post-election visit to Sacramento in late October, a reporter asked Mr. Schwarzenegger what to expect from his first days in office.

"Action, action, action, action," Mr. Schwarzenegger said, repeating a word he must have heard often during his movie career. "That`s what people have voted me into the office for."

But action toward what end? Mr. Schwarzenegger has said his first act in office will be to repeal a 300 percent increase in the vehicle license fee imposed by Gov. Gray Davis this year as part of a budget-balancing plan.

Rolling back the car tax will increase the state`s projected budget deficit, now an estimated $10.2 billion, by $4 billion. Mr. Schwarzenegger has not said how he intends to replace the lost revenue, most of which goes to local government to pay for police, fire and other essential services.

Mr. Schwarzenegger has also said he intends to overturn a law signed by Governor Davis allowing illegal immigrants to obtain driver`s licenses and to revamp the state`s workers` compensation system.

Beyond that, the new governor`s agenda is rather vague. The clearest indication of the direction in which he intends to lead the state is the 20 appointees to senior posts in his administration he announced over the last three weeks. The nominees range across the political spectrum.

For example, Mr. Schwarzenegger has nominated Terry Tamminen, a Democrat and a staunch environmentalist, as head of the California Environmental Protection Agency. But on the same day, he named James Branham, a Republican timber company executive, as Mr. Tamminen`s deputy.

"The obvious lesson is that he will govern the way he has appointed, the way he campaigned and the way he came into politics: from left, right and center," said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former speechwriter for Pete Wilson, a former Republican governor.

Mr. Whelan noted that Mr. Schwarzenegger had named Bonnie Reiss, a liberal Democrat with strong Hollywood ties, to be a senior adviser, and Patricia Clarey, who has worked for Republicans in Sacramento and Washington, to be chief of staff. Mr. Schwarzenegger`s chief education adviser will be Richard J. Riordan, a moderate Republican and former mayor of Los Angeles.

"You will see a blend of ideologies; that`s Arnold in a nutshell," said Mr. Whalen, who is close to many of the former Wilson aides who have been advising Mr. Schwarzenegger.

So far, the public appears to approve of the way Mr. Schwarzenegger has conducted his transition. The anger that fed the recall of Mr. Davis seems to have abated, at least for the time being, said Mark Baldassare, director of research at the Public Policy Institute of California.

A survey of 2,000 Californians conducted from Oct. 24 to Nov. 2 found that 47 percent approved of Mr. Schwarzenegger`s stated plans and policies, while 25 percent disapproved and 28 percent said they did not know enough to judge.

Republicans overwhelmingly approved of Mr. Schwarzenegger, while even a third of Democrats and self-described liberals had a positive view of the new governor.

State residents remain pessimistic about the state`s budget and economy. But the proportion of those who said they believed the state was headed down the wrong track has dropped from three out of four on Election Day in early October to roughly half.

Mr. Baldassare credits Mr. Schwarzenegger, in part, for the improvement in the state`s mood.

"He has given the impression that he`s going to be a very active governor and he`s going to listen to a lot of different voices," Mr. Baldassare said. "From that standpoint, he has moved in a political direction which, according to our survey, has been impressive to a lot of Californians. That is what they are looking for."

Many in the capital are waiting to see how Mr. Schwarzenegger approaches the Legislature. The Democrats who control both houses by large margins regularly tormented Mr. Davis with liberal legislation that pulled him far to the left of the centrist path he tried to follow. That will not be an option under Mr. Schwarzenegger, who has vowed to reduce regulation and make the state friendlier to business.

Democrats appear somewhat cowed by their new celebrity governor and have agreed to convene for a special session on Tuesday to consider his first proposals.

Bruce Cain, director of the Institute for Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, said Mr. Schwarzenegger could adopt one of two models in dealing with the Legislature.

He could follow the path of Ronald Reagan or Jesse Ventura, the former governor of Minnesota, treating lawmakers as adversaries and going directly to the public to approve his proposals through ballot initiatives. Alternately, he could roll up his sleeves, negotiate with legislative leaders and try to win votes through cooperation.

Mr. Cain said he suspected that the new governor would try the course of conciliation at first but would ultimately use the pulpit of his office to get in front of the cameras and speak directly to the people.

"Working with the Legislature involves a personal investment on Schwarzenegger`s side," Mr. Cain said. "He has to show up regularly in Sacramento, try not to get frustrated and deal with people who are far less famous than he is. The question is whether he has the temperament and inclination to do that when the temptation is to go the other route."

Mr. Whalen said the new governor arrived in Sacramento vastly more popular than the Legislature or the permanent bureaucracy. They defy him at their peril, he said.

"The public voted for change and they will risk public wrath if they get in his way," Mr. Whalen said. "Getting in a public relations fight with Arnold Schwarzenegger is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. He`ll set it up as good versus evil, just like in his movies, he`ll take the fight out of Sacramento and he`ll beat them time and again."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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On patrol over Baghdad, Specialist Richard Harvey, a gunner on a Black Hawk helicopter, watches out below.
November 17, 2003
Over Baghdad: Wary Targets, Yet Confident
By DEXTER FILKINS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 16 — As the rooftops of the Iraqi capital passed beneath him, the crewman of a Black Hawk helicopter looked down, shook his head and stated what had once again, only the night before, become so tragically clear.

"It`s like shooting ducks for them," said Specialist Nik Kayler, 22, over the roar of the rotor. "They could be hiding anywhere down there."

It is not a good time to be a helicopter pilot in the skies over Iraq. In two weeks, the Black Hawks and Chinooks and Apaches that once zoomed overhead with such grace and panache have suddenly become vulnerable. Four American helicopters have been lost over Iraq since Nov. 2, sending 39 soldiers to their deaths.

One copter, a Chinook, was destroyed by a missile fired from a palm grove, and a crowd of Iraqis cheered. Another, a Black Hawk, was brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade.

On Saturday night, in circumstances still unclear, two Black Hawks collided over the northern city of Mosul and plummeted to the ground. Seventeen American soldiers died. American officials said the collision apparently occurred when one of the Black Hawks came under fire and the pilot veered upward, pushing his rotor into the helicopter above.

The collision sent a tremor through the barracks of the Black Hawk pilots and crew at Baghdad`s international airport. On Saturday night and Sunday morning, the men gathered to talk about what they might learn from the incident. They brainstormed, as they have done after each downing, for ways to confound an ever more tenacious enemy.

But as the Black Hawks lifted off and landed at their base, the most poignant reckonings were personal. Some of the men here knew those who had died in the collision, and every one of them, whether a friend had perished or not, had only to think of his next mission in the air.

"Deep in my gut, I know the same thing could happen to me," said Lt. Sean Kenney, a Black Hawk pilot, as he prepared to board his craft. "Every night, I see the tracer rounds go up, and I know that one of them one day might hit me."

The pilots who fly the Black Hawks exude steely confidence in themselves, their training and their machines. On any given flight, the odds are in their favor. It is the "lucky shot," as they all call it, that binds their thoughts.

A quick glance at a Black Hawk does indeed inspire a sense of security, or as much of one as is likely in a war zone. At $7 million apiece, the machines are quick and nimble, able to duck and weave with each tilt of the rotor. The pilots sit encased in frames of bulletproof Kevlar. Each Black Hawk has a spare hydraulic system, an extra fuel network and an additional electrical system. The fuel tank, if pierced with a bullet, seals the puncture by itself.

With all of that, the Black Hawk has become the all-purpose aircraft, a kind of flying mule: tough, versatile, able to carry men and matériel almost anywhere, in all kinds of weather, in total darkness. The Black Hawks, with no lights, dart through the night sky invisible; only their sound betrays them.

"It`s the best doggone helicopter in the world," said Lt. Col. James Schrote, who commands a fleet of 16 Black Hawks here.

But the vulnerabilities of the Black Hawk, as with any helicopter, are obvious enough. It is far slower than an airplane, so makes for a much easier target. It skims the rooftops, exposing itself to dangers a fighter pilot would never dream of. The Black Hawk helicopter shot down over Tikrit eight days ago was flying just 300 feet off the ground when it was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade. Over Baghdad, Black Hawk pilots coming under fire have sometimes had difficulty turning to get away; they have to watch out for the telephone wires.

The Black Hawk`s strengths and vulnerabilities showed themselves in a patrol late Sunday afternoon over the streets of Baghdad. Seen from above, the Iraqi capital is an astonishing sight, its squat buildings stretching for miles in each direction, an ocean of mud bricks broken by the pale green of date palms and the garbage in the streets. It hardly seems the conflicted city it has become.

All of Baghdad is visible this way: the giant green Martyrs Monument to the fallen of the Iran-Iraq war, the buildings destroyed in the current war, laundry flapping on clotheslines, children waving from a football field. The Black Hawk flies so low that it almost seems possible to reach out and touch the people below.

"Strangest thing I`ve seen is a goat on a rooftop," Chief Warrant Officer Steve Patch said as the Black Hawk raced over the city.

Since arriving in May, the Black Hawk crews working with the First Armored Division have watched the city emerge from the chaos that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein`s government. At night, they flew over a city shrouded in darkness; now, with the electricity mostly restored here, it bristles with light.

Colonel Schrote, a veteran of the ill-fated American venture in Somalia 10 years ago, said the city he flies over today has much to recommend it over the Somali capital, Mogadishu, then without a government and broken up by feuding warlords.

"Baghdad is much more civilized than that," he said.

At any point in the hourlong journey on Sunday, one well-placed shot from a rocket-propelled grenade, or a lucky hit from a Kalashnikov rifle, could have sent the Black Hawk and its crew into serious trouble. The shot could come from anywhere: a rooftop, a window, a stairwell.

In some ways, the low altitude preferred by the Black Hawk works in its favor; at treetop level, the helicopter cannot usually be seen until it is directly overhead. Then, in a flash, it has disappeared over the next building. There is very little time to take aim.

On this day, as on most days, the sky above the city stayed calm.

"There used to be parts of the city where we couldn`t even fly over," Mr. Patch said.

The evenings are a different matter. Every night, the Black Hawk crews say, the tracer bullets come up to meet them. Flying without lights, racing across the rooftops, the Black Hawks make a difficult target.

"They are shooting at what they hear," Colonel Schrote said.

He figured that more bullets and rocket-propelled grenades had passed by his helicopters than he knew about; in the chaos and darkness, they had gone unseen.

So durable are the Black Hawks that Colonel Schrote said his greatest fear was that his men would be tempted into complacency. Each time they take off in Iraq, he reminds them, they are on a combat mission.

The recent calamities seem a permanent guarantee against anyone here getting too comfortable.

"With the right equipment, with a better aim, they could take down helicopter after helicopter," Specialist Kayler said. "I`m just trying to stay focused."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

A monument in Baghdad to those killed in the Iran-Iraq war is seen through the door of a Black Hawk helicopter.

[Joerver]

November 16, 2003
FRANK RICH
Angels, Reagan and AIDS in America

Tonight is the night when Americans might have tuned into Part 1 of "The Reagans" on CBS. But the joke is on the whiners who forced the mini-series off the air. Just three weeks from tonight, HBO will present the first three-hour installment of Mike Nichols`s film version of Tony Kushner`s "Angels in America," starring Al Pacino and Meryl Streep. (Part 2 is a week later.) This epic is, among other things, a searing indictment of how the Reagan administration`s long silence stoked the plague of AIDS in the 1980`s. If "Angels" reaches an audience typical for HBO hits, it could detonate a debate bloody enough to make the fight over "The Reagans" look like an exhibition bout.

Al Pacino as Roy Cohn.
That`s not such a big if. "Angels" is the most powerful screen adaptation of a major American play since Elia Kazan`s "Streetcar Named Desire" more than a half-century ago. It`s been produced not only with stars but at four times the budget of "The Reagans." People are going to talk about it, and, as they do, HBO will replay it relentlessly to rake in more and more of the country. Threats of a boycott against a channel soon to unveil a new season of "The Sopranos" will go nowhere.

"Angels" is only minutes old when Mr. Pacino appears as a real-life crony of the Reagans — Roy Cohn, in his post-McCarthy-era incarnation as a still-powerful Republican fixer, closely tied to the Ed Meese justice department. A photo on his office wall shows him arm in arm with both the president and his vice president. Cohn is also a closeted gay man dying of AIDS. When he takes a sexual partner to the White House, he gloats, "President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand." Eventually Cohn will threaten to reveal "adorable Ollie North and his secret contra slush fund" unless the White House secures him a private stash of AZT, then the most promising AIDS drug and still unavailable to all but a few. Cohn gets his pills while thousands of other dying Americans are placed on hold.

How much of this really happened and how much is fantasy? Mr. Kushner is not making a historical documentary, or practicing journalism, any more than those behind "The Reagans" were. Whatever his script`s fictions, it accurately conveys the rancid hypocrisy among powerful closeted gay Republicans in Washington as AIDS spiraled. And though "Angels" takes note of the falling of the Berlin Wall, it doesn`t feel that it owes a president any sanctuary from free speech. "If he didn`t have people like me to demonize," says one angry non-Republican gay character, Reagan would have ended up the "upper-right-hand square on `The Hollywood Squares.` " The Reagans are "not really a family," goes another riff. "There aren`t any connections there, no love."

There is much, much more to "Angels" than politics, which is why it is so gripping. Were it a didactic ideological piece, it would be deadly. But Mr. Kushner`s story is built on characters, gay and straight alike, who fight timeless battles over love and betrayal even as they struggle with the meaning of faith, family and America itself at an apocalyptic moment in the life of their nation. In the nearly dozen years since the play`s premiere, its captivating interweaving of fever dreams with domestic drama, of humor with death, has become a calling card for adventurous TV, including HBO`s "Six Feet Under" and "Carnivàle" as well as "The Sopranos." And if anything, Mr. Kushner`s writing has gained in pathos with age. What he has to say about coping with unfathomable loss and the terror inflicted by covert, death-dealing cells at the end of the last millennium speaks to us more urgently than ever in the new one ushered in by 9/11. If you blink, you may miss the World Trade Center when it peeks out of the clouds in the background of a shot, but its shadow is always there, hovering in the film`s vivid downtown New York, roiling the viewer`s heart.

Because "Angels" will reach a far larger audience through TV than any play does in the theater, it will instantly cast the curious argument over CBS`s "Reagans" in another light. If there was one consistent theme to 90 percent of the outrage over a mini-series that no one outside CBS (including me) has seen, it was focused on a single line about AIDS attributed to Ronald Reagan: "They that live in sin shall die in sin." The screenwriter of "The Reagans" admitted to The New York Times that she had no source for the line and it was cut. Yet even after it was cut, those on the attack kept harping on it more than any other element in the unseen film. Why?

It was the syndrome of protesting too much, methinks. There`s no evidence to suggest that Reagan was a bigot, but even so, he did say things similar to that jettisoned sentence. Edmund Morris, who wrote "Dutch," the Reagan biography both solicited and authorized by the former president`s inner circle, quoted him as saying, "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague" because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments." But what`s more important in any event is what Reagan didn`t say — and didn`t do — when AIDS happened on his watch.

As Lou Cannon, the most respected of Reagan biographers, wrote in his authoritative "President Reagan," "Reagan`s response to this epidemic was halting and ineffective." The president mentioned to his own doctor that he thought AIDS was as transitory as measles. Mr. Cannon`s bald accounting of the net results of this inactivity speaks for itself: "There were only 199 reported cases of AIDS in 1981. Eight years later more than 55,000 persons had died from this new scourge, exceeding the total of U.S. combat deaths in either the Vietnam War or the Korean War."

Dr. Everett Koop, the frustrated surgeon general who tried to enlist Reagan in the AIDS battle late in his second term, gave a speech to a Kaiser Family Foundation symposium in 2001 explaining what went on in the White House during the 80`s. In Dr. Koop`s account, he was kept out of all AIDS discussions for the administration`s first five years, while "the advisers to the president took the stand" that homosexuals and intravenous drug users were "only getting what they justly deserve." In Mr. Cannon`s biography, anti-Koop forces within the administration are identified as William Bennett, Gary Bauer and Patrick Buchanan — all of whom, uncoincidentally enough, were vociferous in the assault on "The Reagans."

In his attempt to use the debate over a TV movie to rewrite that history, Mr. Bauer went so far as to suggest that Reagan galvanized the bureaucracy to take on AIDS — a statement so ludicrous you have to wonder if Reagan himself would find it a reach. In truth, Reagan`s actual record on AIDS may be worse than "The Reagans" purported it to be. Jon Stewart, as always, could be counted on to crystallize that point when discussing the fictional "live in sin" line last week on "The Daily Show." "As critics point out, Reagan never said anything like that," Mr. Stewart said. "In fact he didn`t even mention the word AIDS in public until seven years into his presidency. So you can see why people are upset: CBS made someone totally indifferent look callous."

The farcical hypocrisies of the debate over "The Reagans" don`t end there. In trying to explain why he caved on the show at the last minute — there was a full-page ad for it in People as recently as last week — Les Moonves of CBS has taken to referring to his network as a "public trust." If you want to see the reverence with which that trust is honored, don`t miss CBS on Wednesday, when it broadcasts the latest installment of "The Victoria`s Secret Fashion Show." No less ridiculous were two of Mr. Moonves`s loudest critics, Patti Davis and Michael Reagan, both of whom got big paydays for tell-all books trashing Ronald and Nancy Reagan far more ferociously than anything reported to be in the CBS mini-series. In "The Way I See It," published in 1992, Ms. Davis presented her mother as a pill-popping tyrant who slapped her around for years for such sins as refusing to urinate on demand.

Some rationalizers of the do-little Reagan record on AIDS have gone so far as to mount a "some of his best friends were closeted homosexuals" defense. One right-wing Web site, NewsMax.com, trumpeted a letter from Rock Hudson`s lover, Marc Christian, describing a phone call Reagan placed to the star when he was dying of AIDS in 1985. But in Reagan`s public statement saluting his Hollywood friend after he had died, he never mentioned AIDS. As Lou Cannon writes, the president actually cut AIDS funds a few months after Hudson`s death and didn`t pay more than lip service to the topic until a speech in May 1987; even then, a mention of Ryan White, the heroic young hemophiliac AIDS victim, was stripped from the speech in the White House drafting process. It`s true that the Reagans had gay friends — Roy Cohn prominently among them — but, as "Angels in America" reminds us, those friends were more terrified of being forced out of the closet than of AIDS. In one of Mr. Kushner`s most harrowing scenes, we see Mr. Pacino`s Cohn rip himself off his hospital-room IV, spouting geysers of blood, to try to browbeat a gay Republican lawyer (Patrick Wilson, in a career-making performance) into going back to his wife.

The zeal with which the likes of Gary Bauer and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, among others, have suddenly taken to championing the Reagan record on AIDS may have less to do with Ronald Reagan than with trying to bury their own records back then. Not that they`ve changed much since. It`s because of their continued efforts — and those of other political operatives like them — that even the current administration`s admirable AIDS initiative in Africa is hindered by restrictions that give a higher priority to abstinence than safe sex as a form of HIV prevention. Science is politicized in the Bush White House, as it was in Reagan`s, to the point where AIDS researchers have complained that terms like "gay" and "anal sex" must be omitted from their grant applications to the National Institutes of Health, lest they prompt the administration to shut them down. The same family-values pressure groups have also lobbied the White House to throw up roadblocks for embryonic stem-cell research, a possible cure for other diseases.

"A lot of time is being wasted," said Nancy Reagan when she signaled her opposition to the Bush administration`s stand on stem cells to The Times last fall. "A lot of people who could be helped are not being helped." One of those people, of course, is her husband; Alzheimer`s is thought likely to be alleviated by stem-cell therapy.

When Gary Bauer and his peers expressed horror that CBS would broadcast "The Reagans" while Ronald Reagan is dying of Alzheimer`s, they seemed oblivious to the reality that they had helped scuttle some of the scientific research that might have helped their idol. When they complained that it is unfair to revisit the Reagan story when Reagan can no longer speak in his own defense, they ignored the tens of thousands of casualties from that time who also have no voice. On screen, "Angels in America" speaks for those silenced thousands far more eloquently than any of those defending the Reagan record on AIDS has yet spoken for the former president. Mr. Kushner and Mr. Pacino even make you feel a certain human sympathy for Roy Cohn.

I can`t say I expected to find "Angels in America" this affecting in 2003. Plays you love don`t always hold up years later, particularly those tied in any way to headlines. Great plays almost never make good films. But even when Mr. Nichols`s version lags — as it does at times in the second half, in part because the female characters are not as deeply acted as the men — any failings pale next to the grandeur of the larger achievement. This is a work big enough to walk around in again and again, and ravishing to watch even when its heavenly interludes threaten to go over the top. It hasn`t dated a whit. When Mr. Kushner, in anticipation of the millennium, wrote the line, "History is about to crack wide open," he saw around a corner the rest of us could not. And what he found there is more important than ever: not just terror, but a possibility of hope in which love, God and a bedrock belief in the American ideal of justice all come into play. At one point Belize (Jeffrey Wright), Cohn`s black gay nurse, complains that the "white cracker who wrote the national anthem" set the word "free" to "a note so high nobody could reach it." But Mr. Kushner does reach it here, and it is piercing.

As onstage, "Angels" ends on a bright winter`s day in 1990, as old friends gather by the fountain in Central Park harboring a statue of the Bethesda Angel. "This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all," says Prior Walter (Justin Kirk), a young man who discovers his first lesion of Kaposi`s sarcoma at the start of the drama but is still alive at the end. "We are not going away," he says. "We won`t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward."

And so it has. Neither CBS nor those who intimidated it can suppress the story of just what happened in America in the 1980`s, a time when too many died in secret and too many of those who might have helped looked away.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 17, 2003
The Court and Guantánamo

he Supreme Court took a welcome step when it agreed last week to decide whether the Guantánamo detainees could challenge their status in civilian courts. Over the objections of the Bush administration, the justices will review a lower court`s refusal to hear their claims. The Supreme Court should hold that the detainees have a right to a legal proceeding to challenge their confinement.

Hundreds of detainees have been held at a naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since their capture in the Afghanistan war, with no idea of when they will be released. Those who may have been captured in error have had no chance to make that case. After more than a year and a half, 16 of the detainees are suing. They are not asking for full-blown civilian trials, but they argue that they should be given a chance to contest their detainment before an impartial tribunal.

The administration had urged the Supreme Court not to hear the case, arguing that the detainees` status is "constitutionally committed to the executive branch." The administration contends that the Guantánamo base is not part of the United States, and it invokes a 1950 Supreme Court decision holding that federal courts lack jurisdiction over the military detention of foreigners outside the United States.

When the Supreme Court rules next year, it should vindicate two important legal principles. First of all, it must send a forceful message that the detainees have a right to challenge their confinement before a tribunal. Given the absolute control the United States exerts over the Guantánamo naval base, and the terms of the 1903 lease giving it that control, it is disingenuous for the government to argue that the detainees are outside its jurisdiction.

It is no less important that the court make clear to the administration that it is not above the law when it wages its war on terrorism. Rather than arguing that its detainee policies are lawful, the administration boldly asserted that the courts had no right to review them. The Supreme Court will undoubtedly be hearing similar arguments in the days ahead. Now is the time to say clearly that the court, not the president, has the final word on what the Constitution permits.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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washingtonpost.com
Shiites Impatient For Vote in Iraq
Mistrust Greets New U.S. Plan

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 17, 2003; Page A01


BASRA, Iraq, Nov. 16 -- With a wispy beard and a gait weakened by age, Mohammed Baqir Nasseri, an influential cleric in Shiite-dominated southern Iraq, has lived the life of an enemy of Saddam Hussein. With other Shiite Muslim clerics, he was driven into exile in 1979 and wandered in Iraq`s diaspora. Soon after, the turquoise-tiled Ahl Beit mosque he built was seized. His death sentence was commuted only by Hussein`s fall as president.

But Nasseri`s message today looks forward, rather than back.

"I believe absolutely in democracy," he said, sitting next to bookcases filled with volumes on jurisprudence, law and history. "Why are [U.S. officials] running away from elections? The people have a hunger for democracy, for the person who will represent them."

Nasseri`s displeasure results from a decision announced this weekend by the United States and its allies to grant independence to a provisional but unelected government by next summer. Under the plan, elections for a constitutional convention will follow in March 2005 and a permanent government will follow by the end of that year.

Nasseri has given voice to the formidable challenge that will confront a two-year political transition in a region that is growing impatient and frustrated. His words mark the division among Shiites -- between former exiles and those who have remained in Iraq, between supporters of U.S. efforts and those suspicious of American intentions -- over how and when change will come.

Questions about the provisional government are already being raised. Some critics, like Nasseri, are skeptical whether it will relieve hardship in the long-neglected south. Activist clerics and the growing number of small but militant Shiite parties are increasingly demanding earlier elections that will in all likelihood deliver authority to Shiites, a community relentlessly repressed under Hussein and now anticipating the political power that, as the majority, it considers its destiny.

This struggle in southern Iraq is a window on change across the Middle East: How quickly can a country long repressed democratize? What is the relationship between Islam and power? What happens when religious activists are the biggest proponents of rapid democratic change? And how will the Bush administration respond to the ascent of Islamic forces that are hostile to U.S. policy?

"People are now suspicious about every action that delays an election," Nasseri said from his home in Nasiriyah, a city about 185 miles southeast of Baghdad. "The people`s frustrations are going to grow. They`re going to say they promised us elections. If they postponed it once, they can postpone it again. If they postponed it today, they can postpone it tomorrow."

Outside Nasseri`s office, along a street where sewage ran in trash-strewn ditches, a gaggle of men in tribal dress and women in flowing black abayas stood at an iron gate waiting for him. They appeared agitated and desperate. "We were suffering in the days of Saddam and we`re suffering now," one man muttered. They waited for help for hours, clutching small pieces of paper pleading for money from the cleric.

"The people are ready," Nasseri said.

Waiting for a Sign


Along the walls across from Sayyid Ali Abdel-Hakim Musawi`s office in Basra are the graffiti of militant Islam. "Long live the Islamic Republic of Iran," one slogan read. "Iraq and Iran are one people, one nation, destroying colonialism and fighting the tyrant," another said. But inside his office was a message of tranquillity. Musawi preached patience.

"We don`t care about the time period," he said. "We only want a constitution that serves us."

Musawi is a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most influential cleric in Iraq, whose opinions could determine the success or failure of the U.S.-charted transition. For clerics such as Musawi, Sistani`s opinion on the new process will be critically important. "We will accept only Sistani`s opinion, whatever the circumstances," Musawi said. "We are waiting to hear."

Since the fall of Baghdad on April 9, Sistani has advocated separation between government and Iraq`s Shiite clergy, one of the few organized groups to weather Hussein`s three decades of repression. But despite his reluctance to interfere in politics, the cleric has not been averse to delivering judgments with far-reaching political implications. In a religious ruling issued this summer and repeated several times since, he called for the election of a constitutional convention.

Sitting in his office, where tribal leaders had kissed his hand when he entered, Musawi, a cheerful, energetic man, rifled through stacks of petitions. Some were piled in manila folders, others in clear plastic sheaths. They listed thousands of signatures -- of doctors, lawyers, engineers, tribal sheiks and clergy -- insisting that Sistani`s edict be obeyed. They were delivered to the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, whose Shiite members were loath to oppose Sistani`s order and instead searched for an alternative.

The decision by the United States to endorse an elected constitutional convention marked a stunning victory for Sistani, perhaps the clearest sign yet of his power in postwar Iraq.

Adel Abdel-Mehdi, the director of the political bureau of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the main Shiite parties, said that he met Sistani last Thursday and that the ayatollah "blessed" the new plan. But Sistani has yet to publicly declare his position. Some believe he may never formally endorse the process permitting it to go forward.

"Sometimes his silence is enough," said Amr Khuzai, a formerly exiled doctor and the representative in Basra of the Dawa party, an influential Islamic party whose leader sits on the Governing Council.

Sistani`s tacit support for a transition that delays the election of a government would provide a windfall to those -- particularly among parties of former exiles -- who argue that Iraqis are not yet ready to take part in a democratic process, degraded as they were by decades of dictatorship that virtually obliterated all the institutions of civil society. Education is needed, they contend, as well as a familiarity with nascent democratic institutions. Only after a prolonged transition, the argument goes, will voters have the ability to make careful choices.

"They have to understand what the democratic process is," Khuzai said. "If you want to create the basis of a nation, you need time to prepare human beings who were destroyed by Saddam. You have to build step by step."

Others argue against elections on the grounds of logistics. It would take time for parties to build the capacity for campaigns. A national census -- a delicate topic in a country with myriad ethnic and sectarian divisions -- would be required for voting lists. Some contend other issues -- economic rehabilitation and restoring security -- are more pressing than elections.

"All of us wish we could hold elections now but, practically speaking, how can we hold elections that soon? It`s not practical," Abdel-Mehdi said. "Everybody wants to be rich, but it`s not easy to be rich."

In Search of Stability


Saad Jamal Karim stood in his grocery store in Amarah, a town along the Tigris River. Like others, he worried about borders that he said were open, permitting foreign fighters to enter Iraq. He worried that Hussein`s loyalists were behind last week`s bombing in Nasiriyah and that attacks could follow in Amarah. And he worried about an economy that he said was worse than it was before the war.

Patience, the 34-year-old Karim said, was not what he wanted.

"A government is the mother of stability," he said, closing his shop before sunset, when Muslims break their day-long fast during the month of Ramadan. "The Iraqi people should rule themselves by themselves. Even if he`s Iraqi and he`s not elected, it`s not good."

As in much of Iraq, demands for a better economy and greater security resonate through the relentlessly flat landscape of the south, where the Tigris and Euphrates join in the Shatt al Arab. The bombing in Nasiriyah, which devastated the headquarters of the Italian military police, has reinforced that anxiety. In Basra, barriers of rocks, lumber and even bed frames have fallen like curtains across streets and government buildings. British and Italian soldiers in Amarah and Nasiriyah are busy filling barricades with sand along their installations, hoping to prevent the car bombings that have become a hallmark of anti-American fighters.

In Basra last week, witnesses said, a mob, on edge about shootings and bombings in the city over the past month, captured a man trying to plant explosives under a bridge. They almost beat him to death before British forces and Iraqi police intervened.

The Shiite south remains far more quiet than the north and west of Iraq, where a campaign against U.S. troops has escalated. People remain grateful to U.S. forces for toppling Hussein, and few call for a departure of U.S.-led troops, fearing chaos would ensue. But for many, living a lifetime of experience in less than a year, a permanent government is a code word for stability.

"It`s getting worse, there`s no protection," said Kadhim Abdel-Amir, whose soda kiosk was down the road from the site of the Nasiriyah bombing. "There`s no government. Everybody barricades himself and takes care of himself."

Around the corner, Taher Feisal Jabr, a 49-year-old businessman, surveyed the damage to his house from the bombing -- shattered windows and broken doors. He complained that Iraq already had a provisional government. It doesn`t need another, he said. He wanted elections under U.N. supervision, and a government that represented Iraq`s interests -- not, he said, American interests.

"The Governing Council, where is the Governing Council? The Governing Council is in Baghdad. Can they do something the Americans refuse? They cannot. It belongs to the Americans. It needs to find a way to work for Iraqis," he said.

The question of credibility may haunt the political transition, a process that will require patience. Some advocates of elections, like Nasseri, have insisted that only an elected government can win confidence, overcoming suspicions it is serving interests other than Iraq`s. Others see it as a way to bring finality -- even if symbolically -- to the tumult that has followed Hussein`s fall.

"The people are looking for elections to secure their lives," said Mehdi Kadhem, who stood in Karim`s store in Amarah. "If the constitution is the way to create stability, then we should have it tomorrow. We already have a provisional government."

Heavy Suspicions


Khaled Hassan Chiyad claims a following of dozens in his branch of a radical Shiite movement known as the Revenge of God. It is one of dozens that have sprung up in cities like Basra, Amarah and Nasiriyah. Their funding remains murky. They often take the law into their own hands. But they claim to speak for the street, giving voice to the frustrations of the poor and disenchanted.

"There must be elections," Chiyad said, sitting at his desk with a picture of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran`s spiritual leader.

It is an irony of the U.S. occupation that the Shiite groups most opposed to it are the biggest advocates of democratic elections. Their support is dismissed by the more mainstream Shiite groups, and their infrastructure pales before the organization of groups such as the Dawa party and the Supreme Council, whose leaders sit on the Governing Council. But the groups claim a popular voice.

Their ascent is one of the arguments made by U.S. officials and their allies against a hasty transition to an elected government.

"This maneuvering is an old practice of the Americans," said Aws Khafaji, the leader of a group in Nasiriyah loyal to Moqtada Sadr, a young cleric who enjoys support among poor Shiites in Baghdad, Basra, Amarah and Nasiriyah. "We should decide by the choice of the people. We should not decide by the choice of the Americans."

"America is the devil, and Islam has told us not to trust the devil," he added.

The divide over elections sometimes coincides with the line separating formerly exiled groups and activists who remained in Iraq under Hussein. Activists like Khafaji dismiss the credentials of the exiles, contending that their time abroad has divorced them from the needs and demands of Iraqis who remained. They suggest groups such as the Supreme Council are beholden to foreign powers and that a long transition is designed to give the exile parties time to build popular support that has so far been lacking.

"The people who were in exile don`t understand Iraq," said Jabr Musawi, the 40-year-old leader of the Revenge of God movement in Amarah.

Jabr, dressed in black with a green scarf, said the Shiites represented the majority, and elections would guarantee the authority that derives from their status.

"Any delay is not in the interests of the Iraqi people. It is an attempt to delay them taking their rights," he said, sitting under portraits of Shiite leaders and the branch`s most revered saints. "It is better for the Iraqi people to hurry toward elections."




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Bush Sees Progress Despite `Sad Day`
President Hails Plan to Transfer Power to Iraqis

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 17, 2003; Page A17


President Bush departed yesterday from his practice of not commenting on particular setbacks in Iraq and acknowledged it had been "a tough week." It ended with the death of the 400th U.S. soldier in Iraq since the war began and the deadly collision of two U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopters.

"We`re going to stay tough and deal with the terrorists," Bush said, amid rising questions from Democrats about whether his approaching reelection race will drive a reduction of U.S. forces in Iraq.

Bush typically ignores the roped-off cluster of journalists who watch Marine One drop him off on the White House South Lawn after weekends at Camp David. But yesterday, he approached the microphones somberly, and with no coaxing.

"Today, I spent some time in prayer for our servicemen and women who are in harm`s way," he said before answering questions. "I prayed for their families, I prayed for those who are still in harm`s way, whether it be American troops or coalition troops."

Asked about Saturday`s chopper crash, which killed 17 soldiers and was the worst single loss of U.S. life since the invasion of Iraq, Bush said: "It`s sad. It`s a sad day when we lose life." Then, using military jargon for homemade bombs, he added: "It doesn`t matter whether it`s in a chopper crash or an IED [improvised explosive device], the loss of life is sad."

His seven-minute remarks reflected the view of some aides that as casualties mount, he takes a risk by remaining silent, as he did after the Nov. 2 downing of a Chinook helicopter that killed 16 soldiers.

Bush said the plan, formalized Saturday, to turn the U.S. occupation over to a provisional national assembly by July 1 "makes sense."

"In Iraq, it was a tough week, but we made progress toward a sovereign and free Iraq," he said.

The president did not commit to any specific troop deployment. "We`re not leaving until the job is done, pure and simple," he said. He added that the United States will not be run out by developments such as the broadcast yesterday of a purported audiotape of Saddam Hussein, which he called "the same old stuff -- you know, it`s propaganda."

"I`m sure he would like to see us leave," Bush said. "In fact, it`s his voice. And I know that elements of the Baathist Party -- those who used to torture, maim and kill in order to stay in power -- would like to see us leave. We will do our job."

Sir David Frost asked Bush in an interview, taped Thursday and aired yesterday on the BBC and PBS ahead of a four-day presidential visit to Britain, whether producing a successful Iraqi democracy will take years and years.

"We don`t think it will be years and years because, first of all, we think the Iraqi people are plenty capable of running their own country, and we think they want to run their own country," Bush said.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement that the new timetable "sounds like another rosy scenario."

"We cannot be seen as cutting and running or we will only invite further instability and set the stage for years of turmoil that will threaten our national security," he said.

On Saturday, hours after the Iraqi Governing Council and the occupation authority announced their agreement, a senior White House official said the United States is not bailing out.

"This process will provide time and space to the Iraqis to have a deliberative and inclusive constitutional process," the official said.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Fair and Balanced™ Cartoons

Cartoon Archive
52 New Cartoons Today, auch heute gibt es frische Cartoons 52 Stück:
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Wichtig!!!
1 year 2 months 6 days 2 hours 17 minutes (10.43 Uhr)(29.44%) remaining in the Bush Occupation

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The world must stop this madman
By Maureen Dowd
September 19 2002


No, not Saddam. That other gun-toting, tough-talking cowboy in the Oval Office.

The trap is sprung. The name of the game is containment. Contain the wild man, the leader with the messianic and relentless glint who is scaring the world. Surround him, throw Lilliputian nets on him, tie him up with a lot of United Nations inspection demands, humour him long enough to stop him from using his weapons and blowing up the Middle East.

But this time, the object of the containment strategy is not Saddam Hussein, but George Bush, the president with real bombs, not the predator with plans to make them.

America`s European and Arab allies now act more nervously about the cowboy in the Oval Office who likes to brag of America as "the greatest nation on the face of the Earth" than the thug in the Baghdad bunker.

"We don`t want another war in this region," says an adviser to the Saudi royal family. "When Afghanistan is bombed, they just hit rocks. When there`s bombing in our neighbourhood, they hit oil fields."


Gerhard Schroeder`s campaign prospects soared when he started running against Bush. "Many Germans," wrote The Times` Steven Erlanger, "seem to fear American military action in Iraq more than they fear Mr Hussein."

With assistance from the rump cabinet of internationalists, including the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, America`s allies have been engaged in a benevolent conspiracy to ensnare the President in the web of UN rules for war and diplomacy.

The Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, insists that the Iraqi threat must be taken care of without "the firing of a single shot or the loss of a single soldier". He added a big sweetener, promising that American bombers could use Saudi bases if Bush would work through the UN.

Privately, Saudi officials say they are alarmed by the Bush team`s military strutting, and think it would have been much better to get rid of Saddam with a covert operation. They agree with the President that Saddam is a monster who not only eliminates his enemies, real and perceived, but also their wives, children and friends. But if he has nothing to lose, they worry, he might fire his chemical and biological weapons at the Saudis or the Israelis or give them to terrorists to use on the United States.

By wrapping Bush in a warm embrace, the Persian Gulf allies hope to waltz him closer to where they want him to be. Meanwhile, the Egyptians and the Jordanians pinned Saddam to the mat and told him that if he had any chance of avoiding Armageddon, he should open up his country to inspectors.

Thus, in just a few days, the Iraq crisis went from Saddam having a noose around his neck to W. being bound by multilateral macrame.

"All the reasons for an attack have been eliminated," crowed Tariq Aziz, Iraq`s Deputy Prime Minister.

But the allies - and especially Aziz - should not underestimate the zeal of the Bush warriors. Saddam can admit a legion of inspectors, but that may not stop Bush from wriggling out of the UN restraints and declaring the despot`s compliance a sham.

The Arabs tut-tut that America should focus on rebuilding Afghanistan, getting a state for the Palestinians and pursuing the war on terrorism.

But the Bushies have got a taste of empire building in Afghanistan and they like it. The White House adviser, Karl Rove, is building a Republican empire. The Defence secretary adviser, Richard Perle, the Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, and Vice-President Dick Cheney`s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, are building an ideological empire. Cheney is building a unilateral empire. And the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is building a military empire.

As Henry Kissinger told Newsweek, Rummy wants "to beat back the attitudes of the Vietnam generation that was focused on American imperfection and limitations".

Besides, why should former CEOs Cheney and Rummy settle for mere Jack Welch-style perks when they can have the perks of empire?

They can restore civilisation to the cradle of civilisation. Lemon fizzes, cribbage and cricket by the Tower of Babel. A 36-hole golf course on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. ArabDisney in the hanging gardens of Babylon. Oil on tap at the Baghdad Hilton. Huge contracts for buddies in the defence and oil industries. Halliburton`s Brown & Root construction company building a six-lane highway from Baghdad to Tel Aviv.

How long can it be before the empire strikes back?

The New York Times


This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/09/18/1032054864975.html

[Joerver]

washingtonpost.com
Prez in Topless Tabloid
London Paper Nabs Rare Bush Exclusive

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 15, 2003; Page C01


President Bush has gone down-market.

After coming to office with a vow to restore dignity to the White House, the president yesterday took a brief sabbatical from that effort: He granted an exclusive interview to a British tabloid that features daily photographs of nude women and articles akin to those found in our own National Enquirer.

Press secretary Scott McClellan broke the news yesterday with nonchalance. "Good morning," he told reporters. "The president had his usual briefings this morning and just recently completed an interview with the Sun, for a discussion of his upcoming visit to the United Kingdom."

A British journalist for a more highbrow outlet was not about to let that slip by unnoticed. "Just to clarify," he asked, "why has the president chosen to do an interview with the Sun? It`s a newspaper which publishes daily pictures of topless women."

Such comments are grossly unfair to the Sun. True, its Page 3 is devoted daily to photographs of women and their breasts. True, it this week named "classy Krystle, the beautiful brunette babe" as this year`s "Page 3 Idol" and amply displayed evidence of what it called her "vital statistics of 32C-24-33."

But the Sun is so much more than breasts. It is also reporting this week on a woman who is "made of two women" and "is NOT the biological mother of two of the children she conceived and had naturally." Other news items highlighted on the Sun`s Web site: "Man begins 12-day sausage, bean and chip bath to promote Brit food," "German saboteurs plotted to bomb Palace with peas in WW2, files reveal," and "Sobbing islanders say sorry to the ancestor of minister eaten by natives."

Bush, meanwhile, has given no solo interviews this year to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time or Newsweek. And he hasn`t given an exclusive interview in his entire presidency to the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and dozens of other major publications.

So why did Bush choose the tabloid that last raised international attention by publishing topless pictures of Prince Edward`s fiancee? It`s because the Sun has huge, uh, circulation. "It has a large readership," McClellan said. Indeed, about 3.5 million Britons are said to buy it each day -- all of them, of course, for the articles.

And the Sun is far from the raunchiest of tabloids on fetid Fleet Street. "You should`ve seen the ones we declined," McClellan said.

Word on Fleet Street is it`s an obvious payoff to the Sun`s owner, Rupert Murdoch, the conservative publisher behind many Bush-friendly news outlets such as Fox News. Officials at the White House acknowledge that it was a reward to the Sun for its unstinting support of the United States regarding the war in Iraq. (The Sun`s pro-Bush stance also got it an interview with Vice President Cheney in late 2001.) But Bush aides also said it was done on the recommendation of Tony Blair, Britain`s Labor Party prime minister, who has worked hard to bring the Sun away from its Tory Party roots.

The White House said the interview will appear Monday -- on the eve of Bush`s arrival in London -- and far away from Page 3. The interview was conducted in Washington by the Sun`s political editor, Trevor Kavanagh, who on Monday penned an article titled "Bush Shows Tax Cuts Can Boost Economy."

Bush often gives foreign media outlets interviews before heading on a trip; this time, he also had a BBC interview and a roundtable with three more sober British outlets, the Financial Times, the Telegraph and the wire service Press Association. But an exclusive interview for a newspaper is a high honor, and the Sun`s tabloid rivals are smarting. The Daily Mirror`s front page yesterday included the headline "BUSH OFF" and stated: "Mirror poll reveals Britain thinks President is threat to world peace and not welcome here." The Mirror opposed the Iraq war.

Even in the colonies, Bush`s Sun interview is bound to create jealousies. His only other one-on-one interviews with print publications this year have been with USA Today, Leaders magazine and Sports Illustrated.

After McClellan`s bombshell at yesterday`s briefing, this correspondent asked whether the other publications present would get Bush interviews if they ran nude photos. "I hope you`re not talking about yourself," McClellan replied.

Correspondent Glenn Frankel in London contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[Joerver]

How Bush Economic Forecasts Are Made

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
WASHINGTON (IWR Satire) - Investigative reporter Bob Woodward last night on Larry King Live provided a rare glimpse into how economic forecasts are made inside the Bush Administration.
Woodward gained access to a secret Treasury Department meeting by posing as an oil industry oligarch.

Here is the Larry King interview:

Larry King: "So Bob do I understand you right? You`re not here to talk about the Scott Peterson trial?"

Bob Woodward: "Bingo Larry. I was booked to talk about how economic forecasts are made in the Bush Administration, remember?"

Larry King: "Oh. That`s why Nancy Grace isn`t here yet."

Bob Woodward: "Anyway. I was quite surprised when Alan Greenspan unveiled a crystal ball, which he referred to as the `Oracle of St. Louis`.

The crystal ball looked more like a snow globe with a resin bust of John Ashcroft to me, but what do I know?"

Larry King: "Was Gloria Allred there?"

Bob Woodward: "No, but then Greenspan asked the globe if the Fed should lower interests rates again, and the globe replied: `The Limbo stick can go no lower!`.

Greenspan then questioned the crystal ball what the long-term economic outlook will be considering the effects of the Iraq war, the record tax cuts and the budget deficits.

The Oracle then replied: `The liberal soothsayer Krugman is Right. Bankruptcy! Snake eyes! Tilt!`.

Mr. Greenspan then said that he was glad that nothing had changed since the last quarter.

John Snow chimed in that it should be a piece of cake to run out the clock until at least after the 2004 election is over.

`When all the peasants find out how screwed they really are when their Social Security and Medicare benefits are cut, it will be too late,` said Snow with a sinister smirk.

The room then broke out into a hideous diabolical laughter, and then, SEC Chairman Bill Donaldson handed out Cuban cigars and brandy snifters filled with Napoleon cognac to everybody."

Larry King: "So Bill do you think Scott Peterson is guilty?"

Bob Woodward: "Guilty as sin, Larry, and his ex-girlfriend seems to be an airhead."

Larry King: "Thanks for you insights Bob. Don`t let the door hit you in the ass. And we`ll be right back with Gloria Allred, Nancy Grace and Ken Starr to talk about what kind of clothes everybody is wearing at Scott Peterson Trial."

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

Gilt auch für Leute ohne Glatze.

Racial prejudice makes you stupider, new research finds
Encounters with another race made whites perform worse on cognitive test
Gareth Cook, Boston Globe
Monday, November 17, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/17/MNGB633LED1.DTL


To the litany of arguments against prejudice, scientists are now adding a new one: Racism can make you stupid.

That is the message of an unusual and striking new series of experiments conducted at Dartmouth College, with the help of brain-imaging equipment and a crew of undergraduate volunteers.

According to the findings, the more biased people are, the more their brain power is taxed by contact with someone of another race, as they struggle not to say or do anything offensive. The effect is so strong, the team found, that even a five-minute conversation with a black person left some of the white subjects unable to perform well on a test of cognitive ability.

"Just having a prejudice makes you stupider," said John Gabrieli, a professor of psychology at Stanford University who was not involved in the research. "It is really interesting."

Researchers cannot yet predict how racial bias as measured in the lab will translate into overt racist attitudes or actions. But the new brain- imaging work, reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience, represents the most detailed look yet at the way racial biases function in the brain.

The work also paints a dispiriting portrait of the state of the nation`s race relations, the lead researcher said, even among the well-educated, well- meaning Dartmouth undergraduates whom the scientists studied.

"I think people are getting caught in this trap where they are trying not to do the wrong thing, rather than trying to act natural," said Jennifer Richeson, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College. "Somehow, we have to get past this awkward phase."

Richeson and her colleagues began by recruiting a group of white Dartmouth undergraduates and asked them to perform an "Implicit Association Test," a test that is widely used to measure unconscious racial bias. The subject is given a screen and two buttons. First, the subject is asked to push the button on the left if the word that appears on the screen is a positive word, like beauty, or a common first name for a white person, such as Nancy. Otherwise, they are instructed to push the button on the right.

After a session, the test is changed slightly, and the names given are those more common for a black person, such as Tyrone. The greater the difference between the reaction times in the two sessions, the more the person has trouble associating black names with positive concepts.

Next, the team had each of the students speak briefly with a black experimenter and then perform a test of cognitive ability called the Stroop test. They showed that the higher a bias score the student had in the IAT test,

the worse they did on the Stroop test after speaking with the black experimenter.

To uncover what was behind this effect, the team used a functional magnetic resonance imager, which is able to peer inside the brain and measure the level of activity in different areas.

Each student was then shown a series of photographs, some of white males and some of black males. The more biased a student was, the more the team saw a certain area of their brain activate, an area associated with "executive control," conscious efforts to direct thinking. This, Richeson said, is a sign the brain is struggling not to think inappropriate thoughts.

Based on the findings, the team suggested that when a biased person interacts with someone of another race, even briefly, it exhausts the part of the brain in charge of executive control, leaving it temporarily unable to perform as well on the Stroop test and, presumably, other tasks.

The report is the first time that researchers have shown a connection between racial bias and the parts of the brain responsible for higher functions, according to several neuroscientists who were not involved in the research.

It is part of a nascent movement to study the neurological basis of social phenomena, in particular racism. One study, by Elizabeth Phelps at New York University, found that biased people were more likely to have greater activity in their amygdala, a portion of the brain associated with negative emotions like fear, when shown the picture of a black person they don`t know.

Another, conducted by Stanford`s Gabrieli and other scientists, showed that the brains of white people process white and black faces differently from the moment they see them.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

[Joerver]

U.S. one of a few nations with juvenile death laws
Public hesitant, however, to impose sentence

(CNN) --Of the 21 U.S. states that carry the death penalty for juvenile murderers, only Texas has used it with frequency -- executing 13 since capital punishment was reinstated.

Texas is ahead of other states by a large margin -- Virginia is second in line with three and Oklahoma, having executed two juvenile killers, comes next.

According to the American Bar Association, 14 states that have juvenile death laws have never carried out such executions. Additionally, 86 percent of the death sentences imposed on juvenile offenders are reversed, the bar association reports.

Of the 21 states that carry a death penalty for juvenile offenders -- defined as someone who committed the crime under the age of 18 -- 16 put the minimum age at 16, the other five at 17.

Historically, Americans are hesitant about sending a juvenile offender to death row.

A 2001 University of Chicago study found 62 percent of those polled supported the death penalty, but only 34 percent supported it for juvenile offenders. A May 2002 Gallup poll showed 72 percent of Americans backed the death penalty, but only 26 percent supported it for juvenile offenders.

The United States continues to come under fire from abroad for state laws allowing execution of juvenile offenders.

International human rights treaties prohibit anyone under 18 years old at the time of the crime being sentenced to death. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the American Convention on Human Rights and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child all have provisions to this effect.

More than 110 countries whose laws still provide for the death penalty for at least some offenses have laws specifically excluding the execution of child offenders or may be presumed to exclude such executions by being parties to one or another of the above treaties.

The United States remains the only country that has failed to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

It joins the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen as the seven countries known to have executed prisoners who committed a crime under the age of 18 since 1990, according to Amnesty International, a human rights group that opposes the death penalty.

The country that has executed the greatest number of juvenile offenders since 1990 is the United States, with 17, Amnesty International reported.

The number of juvenile killers receiving death sentences in the United States is decreasing, according to Northwestern University`s Bluhm Legal Clinic. In 1999, 14 juvenile offenders were sentenced to death, seven in 2001, four in 2002 and so far, one in 2003.







Find this article at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/LAW/11/16/sprj.dcsp.juvenile.dea…

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[Erika007]

joe,

veröffentlicht wird doch nie die wahrheit, allenfalls die halbe, die man früher ganze lügen nannte.

[Joerver]

BUSH PULLS OUT OF SPEECH TO PARLIAMENT

Nov 17 2003




By Bob Roberts, Political Correspondent


GEORGE Bush was last night branded chicken for scrapping his speech to Parliament because he feared being heckled by anti-war MPs.

The US president planned to give a joint address to the Commons and Lords during his state visit to Britain.

But senior White House adviser Dr Harlan Ullman said: "They would have loved to do it because it would have been a great photo-opportunity.

"But they were fearful it would to turn into a spectacle with Labour backbenchers walking out."
The decision to abandon the speech came as extraordinary security measures costing £19million placed London under a state of virtual siege ahead of Mr Bush`s arrival tomorrow.

Roads in Whitehall were closed with concrete blockades. Overhead, a no-fly zone has been established with the RAF on standby to shoot down unidentified planes. All police leave is cancelled.

The only speech Mr Bush, who will stay with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, is now due to give will be to an "invited audience" at the Banqueting House in Whitehall.

Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn said: "This is yet another slight on this country by the president of the USA.

"The least he could do is subject himself to questions from MPs."

And colleague John McDonnell said: "Bush might be able to run from the protesters, he might be able not to see the banners.

"But he must not be able to hide from the anger felt across the country at this unjustified war."

Previous world leaders, including Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela and Francois Mitterand, have all given speeches to the Lords and the Commons while visiting Britain.

Tony Blair gave a joint address to the American Senate and Congress in July.

But earlier this year, Bush was embarrassed when he was heckled by MPs in Australia.

Downing Street last night refused to comment on the president`s itinerary.

A spokesman said: "We have said consistently the programme details will be announced at the appropriate moment. There is nothing to add to this."

The row about the speech came after President Bush set up a showdown with demonstrators by refusing to be apologetic on the Gulf war.

In an interview with the BBC`s Breakfast with Frost show, he said they would not "cut and run" from Iraq. He added: "We will not be defeated by the terrorists."

Mr Bush also refused to grant British pleas for mercy for the six Britons held in Guantanamo Bay.

He said: "They will go through a military tribunal at some point, a military tribunal in international accord, or in line with international accords."


BUSH`S VISIT IS COSTLY AND CONTROVERSIAL. WHAT ARE YOUR VIEWS?
Do you agree with the President`s State visit to Britain?



Post a message
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/content_objectid%3D1363…

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NED`s feel-good name belies its corrupt intent
VIEW FROM THE LEFT
Harley Sorensen, Special to SF Gate
Monday, November 17, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2003/11/17/hsorensen.DTL



William Safire was hyperventilating so robustly last week that he caught the attention of a Chronicle reader, who brought Safire`s overwrought condition to my attention.

Safire, for those of you who don`t know, is what passes for a "moderate" conservative. These days he writes a twice-weekly op-ed column for The New York Times. Back in the olden days, when Safire first came to public attention, he was a speechwriter for Spiro T. Agnew, or, more accurately, a hatchet man`s hatchet man.

It was Safire who gave Agnew (to give us), "nattering nabobs of negativism," a put-down of the press. Safire himself is no such nabob, tending more to be a platitudinous purveyor of positivism.

Safire was at his heavy-breathing cheerleading best last week as he polished up the whole bushel of apples for our fearless leader, George Walker Bush. (Fearless because he is not the one being shot at in Iraq or Afghanistan.)

The topic of the column was a Bush speech given a week earlier in Washington. Safire found the speech, addressed to the 20th anniversary gathering of the National Endowment for Democracy, to be "a moving exposition of the noble goal of American foreign policy." He urged us all to read it.

Well, I took Safire`s advice. But I did not find anything moving or noble about it. I found it a slick con job. It was vintage Bush, consistent with his practice of saying one thing while doing another.

Did I say "con job"? What else can you say about a speech that mentions "Reagan" seven times, "liberty" 18 times, "freedom" 36 times and "democracy" (singular or plural) a whopping 49 times? Is the speaker imparting information or blowing smoke?

"Liberty," "freedom," and "democracy" are feel-good words to an American audience, and, when used in that abundance, a sales pitch for the speaker. "Reagan," to a conservative crowd, is akin to "god," "creator," "higher power," or "savior."

But I`m used to Alfred E. Bush`s blarney and to political operatives like Safire sucking up to the boss of bosses, so that`s not what struck me about this particular song and dance. What struck me was the existence of an outfit like the National Endowment for Democracy.

Have you ever heard of it? If you`re hardcore political junkie, you probably have, but if you`re a normal person, you most likely have not.

The NED was founded in 1983 because President Reagan, the real-life incarnation of Chance the Gardener, had suggested it`d be nice to have a private organization promoting "democracy" in a way the CIA couldn`t.

[Note: For those who don`t know about Chance the Gardener, he is the lead character in the 1979 movie "Being There." Here`s how Roger Ebert described him in his Chicago Sun-Times review:

["His mind has been supplied with a fund of simplistic generalizations about the world, phrased in terms of the garden where he has worked all his adult life. But because he presents himself as a man of good breeding (he walks and talks like the wealthy older man whose house he lived in, and wears the man`s tailored suits) his simplicity is mistaken for profundity, and soon he is advising presidents and befriending millionaires."]

Reagan spoke simply, his minions nodded wisely and responded, and the NED was born.

What is the NED? According to its Web site, it is "premised on the idea that American assistance on behalf of democracy efforts abroad would be good both for the U.S. and for those struggling around the world for freedom and self-government."

In other words, it`s the champion of freedom-loving people everywhere. [APPLAUSE]

But one`s suspicions of the NED become aroused almost immediately when one learns its chairman happens to be Vin Weber, former Republican congressman from Minnesota`s 2nd District and ubiquitous man-about-town in Washington, D.C.

If I were an intemperate soul, I might describe Weber as one of those smarmy conservative types, like Randall Terry or Gary Bauer or the once-disgraced, now born-again, Robert Livington, who show up whenever there are true believers to be courted and a buck to be made.

But, being a cautious man, I`ll restrain myself and say only that twerps like Weber make me believe there might be a God after all, the yin suggesting the existence of the yang.

Anyway, the NED is better described by its detractors than by its supporters. One detractor is the amazing Republican congressman from the Texas Gulf Coast, Dr. Ron Paul. Paul, who is more Libertarian than Republican, writes thus:

"The misnamed National Endowment for Democracy is nothing more than a costly program that takes US taxpayer funds to promote favored politicians and political parties abroad. What the NED does in foreign countries ... would be rightly illegal in the United States. The NED injects Œsoft money` into the domestic elections of foreign countries in favor of one party or the other.

"Imagine what a couple of hundred thousand dollars will do to assist a politician or political party in a relatively poor country abroad. It is particularly Orwellian to call US manipulation of foreign elections Œpromoting democracy.` How would Americans feel if the Chinese arrived with millions of dollars to support certain candidates deemed friendly to China? Would this be viewed as a democratic development?"

Rep. Paul continues by quoting Barbara Conry, a foreign policy analyist for the Cato Institute, a mostly libertarian think tank:

"NED, which also has a history of corruption and financial mismanagement, is superfluous at best and often destructive. Through the endowment, the American taxpayer has paid for special-interest groups to harass the duly elected governments of friendly countries, interfere in foreign elections, and foster the corruption of democratic movements ..."

Why should you and I care? Mainly because NED is a part of America`s shadow government, yet another underground agency responsible to no one. It masquerades as a non-governmental organization, but in fact nearly all of its $35 million annual budget comes from Uncle Sam.

It`s just another symptom of the cancer destroying American democracy. I thank William Safire and the man he worships for bringing it to our attention.

Finally, it should be noted that NED is bipartisan. Although it seems heavily loaded with scoundrels from the right, it also includes scoundrels from the left among its leadership. Hanky-panky is not limited to one political party or belief.

Harley Sorensen is a longtime journalist. His column appears Mondays. E-mail him at [e-mail].

[Joerver]

Monday, November 17, 2003
War News for November 17, 2003

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

Bring ‘em on: Bomb in Kirkuk wounds Iraqi civilian.

Bring ‘em on: Insurgents mortar central Baghdad.

Bring `em on: US troops conduct counter-insurgency raids in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: US troops conduct counter-insurgency operations near Tikrit.

Bring `em on: US troops conduct counter-insurgency operations near Kirkuk.

Bring ‘em on: Oil pipeline bombed near Baiji.

US raids antagonize Iraqi civilians.

Power failures reported again in Baghdad.

Time to take spaghetti off the White House menu! Italian official bolts Bremer`s Mesopotamian satrapy. "The provisional authority simply doesn`t work," the Italian daily Corriere della Sera quoted Calamai as saying. "It`s neither fish nor fowl. Reconstruction projects that were promised and financed have had practically no results."

Update: At Marine`s Girl real Marines have landed and the situation is well in hand.

Commentary

Opinion: Insurgency is more than “dead-enders” and “hold-outs.”

Opinion: This quagmire was predictable. “Had a peaceful resolution of these disputes been attempted, Bin Laden might now be in custody, Iraq might be a pliant and largely peaceful nation finding its own way to democracy, and the prevailing sentiment within the Muslim world might be sympathy for the United States, rather than anger and resentment.”

Opinion: The empty suit. “Unlike Presidents Reagan, Bush I and Clinton, who all attended memorial ceremonies for troops killed in overseas terrorist attacks, Bush II declines to be present at services for soldiers who have died in Iraq. The pictures wouldn`t be helpful.”

Opinion: “I don`t think the Bush administration lied to us about Iraq. It`s worse than that. I think they fooled themselves. I think they were conned by Ahmad Chalabi. I think they indulged in wishful thinking to a point of near criminality. I think they decided anyone who didn`t agree with them was an enemy, anti-American, disloyal. In other words, I think they are criminally stupid.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Washington State soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: North Carolina soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: New Jersey soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Illinois soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Three Wisconsin soldiers killed in Iraq. More here.

Local story: New Jersey soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: North Dakota soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: New York soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Oregon soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Ohio soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Texas soldier wounded in Iraq.

Operation Cut and Run

Bush wants the chocolate makers to get him out of his quagmire. “There have been no specifics yet about how the international community would control the mainly American and British forces in Iraq. Nato remains the only strong possibility because it would provide international credibility while leaving control with a military organisation which Washington dominates.”




# posted by yankeedoodle : 2:20 AM

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Hold the Neocons Accountable
by Paul Craig Roberts


Will neoconservatives be held responsible for orchestrating a war in order to pursue their Middle Eastern agenda? Will they get away with inflicting death and injury on thousands of Iraqis and Americans?

Powerful people have good reasons to hold the neocons accountable. Secretary of State Colin Powell is one. Deceived into lying to the United Nations when he presented the case for a preemptive US attack on Iraq, Secretary Powell was ruthlessly used by neocon administration officials.Colin Powell put his reputation on the line when he gave the UN assurances that “every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

There was not a word of truth or intelligence in what Powell told the UN. Iraq most certainly was NOT developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was NOT involved with al Qaida and the September 11 attacks on the US. Saddam Hussein had NO weapons of mass destruction to give to terrorists.

President Bush also has good reason to hold the neocons responsible. Deceived and trapped in a war of attrition that can have no successful outcome, Bush’s credibility is burdened with speeches even more egregious than Powell’s UN speech.

Fed disinformation, Bush dutifully regurgitated neocon fabrications that Iraq possessed 500 tons of chemical weapons, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 30,000 prohibited warheads, and uranium from Niger. America had to attack Iraq, Bush said, before these fearsome weapons could be used against us.

Vice President Cheney’s fear mongering was more extreme than Bush’s. Cheney claimed that Iraq had “reconstituted nuclear weapons.” References to “mushroom clouds” over American cities made ears deaf to voices of reason.

Congress has an incentive to hold the neocons accountable. Fear created by neocon lies caused Congress to emasculate itself, to give up its war powers and to agree to massive sums of money being wasted on a pointless war.

The US media has good cause to hold the neocons accountable. Neocons manipulated the media and turned reporters, news networks and publications into war propagandists. Uncritical acceptance of neocon propaganda has made laughingstocks out of “conservative” media, such as Fox News, the Weekly Standard, National Review and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

For example, the current issue (Nov. 24) of the Weekly Standard confidently reports that a “top secret U.S. government memorandum” leaked to the magazine proves beyond any doubt that “Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda – perhaps even for Mohammed Atta.”

These improbable revelations raised no suspicions at the Weekly Standard or Fox News, which fed the story to the public without checking it out.

The US Department of Defense repudiated the story in a November 15, 2003 press release: “News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al Qaida and Iraq in a letter [from Undersecretary Douglas Feith] to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate.”

All the Weekly Standard has is a “classified annex” containing “raw reports” or unsupported claims such as those made by self-serving Iraqi exiles. The Defense Department news release says that “the classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida, and it drew no conclusions.”

But the propagandists at the Weekly Standard were not deterred by facts.

Neoconservatives have made as big a fool of the American public as they have of President Bush. The US has been tricked into waging a war that already has cost us $200 billion and the sympathy of the world, a war that disrupts the lives of tens of thousands of reserve and national guard families, kills and maims our troops and Iraqi civilians, destroys our alliances and foreign policy, and recruits terrorists for bin Laden.

We went to war for false reasons. The costs are enormous. Will the perpetrators be held accountable?

November 17, 2003

Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

Copyright © 2003 Creators Syndicate

Paul Craig Roberts Archives

Find this article at:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts17.html

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from the November 17, 2003 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1117/p01s01-woeu.html

The war on terror may open a Turkish front
Two bombings in Istanbul Saturday killed at least 23 people and wounded hundreds more.
By Yigal Schleifer | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

ISTANBUL, TURKEY - As investigators continue to sift for clues through the rubble at the sites of Saturday`s truck-bomb attacks on two Istanbul synagogues, Turkey is being forced to confront what may be a harsh new reality.

With Turkish officials strongly suggesting that the sophisticated attacks were organized by an international terrorist organization, possibly Al Qaeda, the country could find itself becoming another front in the war on terrorism. That could push Turkey into even closer cooperation with the US and Israel, analysts say - as well as widen Turkey`s Islamic-secular divide.

"Turkey has faced terrorist acts in the past, but they were either ethnic, like the [Kurdish separatist group] PKK, or extreme ideological groups from the left or right. This appears to be part of the international terror campaign, and it is something different," says Sami Kohen, a political analyst and columnist with the Turkish daily Milliyet.

Saturday`s attacks at the temples, which are about three miles apart, killed at least 23 people, most of them Muslim passersby, and wounded more than 300.

It was the second attack on Neve Shalom, Istanbul`s largest synagogue, where gunmen suspected of being associated with Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal killed 22 people in 1986. The Turkish daily Radikal reported that the Israeli intelligence service Mossad had warned Turkish intelligence units twice, most recently in September, about attack plans.

. If this latest strike is connected to Islamic extremists trying to destabilize the region and punish Turkey for its relationship with the US, it could change the public`s attitude, says Ali Carkoglu, of Sabanci University in Istanbul.

"People on the street would be pushed toward a tougher Turkish policy in Iraq," he says. "They would not use this as an excuse to shy away from any active involvement in Iraq. So I don`t think this would work towards pushing Turkey towards the margin of the conflict. It will work the other way."

US officials in Turkey are quick to say that the country has been an important ally in the US fight against terrorism, providing peacekeeping troops for Afghanistan, for example. But Ankara has been less supportive of the US war in Iraq.

Last March, the Turkish parliament failed to approve a US request to move its troops through Turkey into northern Iraq. Although the parliament recently approved sending Turkish troops to aid the US in Iraq - an offer quickly shelved because of Iraqi opposition - Turkish public opinion remains strongly opposed to the war.

Mr. Carkoglu and other analysts say the domestic implications from the two synagogue bombings could be more significant. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), a new political party that traces its roots to Turkey`s political Islamic movement, currently rules Turkey. While the party`s leaders have distanced themselves from their Islamist past, the country`s secular establishment has remained suspicious.

Any involvement of Turkish Islamist groups in the attacks could intensify the simmering conflict between the AKP government the secularists, Carkoglu says. "If the secularists can show that there has been a linkage with a domestic pro-Islamist group that hasn`t been properly followed or acted against, then the domestic implications could be very severe," he says.

If Turkey finds out that foreign terrorist organizations have been able to make inroads in the country and find local recruits, the reaction would most likely be swift. "The Turks are quite determined on one thing, and that is the fight against terrorism," says Milliyet`s Mr. Kohen. "The Turkish government, any Turkish government, is not going to yield to pressure when it comes to terrorism. If anything, it would strengthen its resolve."

Turkey`s unyielding approach to terrorism was shaped by its 15-year war against the separatist PKK, which cost the lives of some 35,000 people and ended just four years ago. The harsh tactics used by Turkey and the restrictive laws it passed during the fight were often seen as coming at the expense of human rights. But Turkey has eased up in recent years, as part of its bid to join the European Union.

But some worry that a new terrorist threat could sabotage Turkey`s reform process. "This new alarm on security matters on terrorism might have a negative impact on human rights, democracy, and pluralism in Turkey, things we have been working on for years," says Ihsan Dagi, of Ankara`s Middle East Technical University.

Some of the fiercest international condemnations of the bombings came from Israel. Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom arrived in Turkey Sunday to lay wreaths at the synagogues and meet with his Turkish counterpart, Abdullah Gul.

Mr. Shalom tied the attacks to "anti-Israel and anti-Semitic" sentiment in the Arab world and in Europe, calling them "another link in the chain of global terrorism that has struck against Mombasa, Bali, Saudi Arabia, and other targets."

Turkey`s support for the US-led war in Iraq makes it a potential target for militant Islamic groups, but its extremely close relationship with Israel may also be a factor.

"I think our relations with Turkey are second only to our relations with the US in importance," says Alon Liel, a former director general at Israel`s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. "There are countries in Europe that are extremely important to us, but Turkey is the only Muslim country with whom we have excellent relations, and that is a source of hope."

Ties between the two countries range from tourism to projects involving the precious Middle East commodities of oil and water. The two share intelligence, according to Mr. Liel, and cooperate closely on military matters. Israeli aircraft use Turkish skies for their exercises, Israel is upgrading Turkey`s tanks and aircraft, and the countries perform naval and air force exercises together. "The whole security aspect of our relations is in the open," says Liel. "It`s of great symbolic importance."

Turkey recognized Israel just after its founding in 1949, when Israel signed an armistice with neighboring Arab countries. With the advent of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the early 1990s, Turkey initiated closer cooperation.

• Staff writer Nicole Gaouette contributed to this report from Jerusalem, and material from the wires was used.

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http://www.atimes.com

Middle East

New US fury misses the mark
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - While the United States`s new military aggressiveness against opposition targets in Iraq provides good video to lead television news broadcasts, its effectiveness, as well as the latest political strategy to win Iraqi "hearts and minds", remain very much in question.

While the military put on a display of firepower in Baghdad and in the notorious Sunni triangle - no doubt to "shock and awe" an increasingly effective and sophisticated resistance - all that sound and fury failed to drown out the growing impression that the administration is at a loss as to how to reverse negative trends on the ground.

Those trends were detailed in a partially-leaked Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report that Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief L Paul Bremer carried with him from Baghdad for intensive talks at the White House last week. The document warned that the resistance was growing in strength and that rising numbers of Iraqis believe that the occupation might be defeated.

The fact that Bremer returned under these circumstances suggested to at least one prominent neo-conservative analyst, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer and Mideast specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, that the administration "knows its program in Iraq is failing", a remarkable assertion given Gerecht`s strong support for the administration, both before and after the US-led war.

But the meetings` outcome, Bush`s decision to sharply accelerate the process of "Iraqification", represents a serious gamble for the administration. The word itself - reminiscent of the Richard Nixon administration`s ill-fated "Vietnamization" strategy of the early 1970s - is politically problematic in that it suggests that Bush is seeking a way to withdraw "with honor" but without necessarily achieving his more high-minded goals, such as ensuring the viability of a new Iraqi state, let alone creating a democratic one that would act as a model for the Arab world.

"If the policy is to more rapidly Iraqify the situation - as in Vietnamization during the Vietnam War - then that is another version of cutting and running," Senator Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the Washington Post.

The military side of Iraqification means the greatly accelerated recruitment and training of tens of thousands of Iraqi men into the army, police and other security forces. That process will enable Washington to gradually withdraw its own forces from the approximately 135,000 there today to around 100,000 by next spring and as few as half that number by the November 2004 US presidential elections.

But the draw down will be accompanied by a more aggressive US counter-insurgency campaign, based on better intelligence provided by indigenous Iraqi forces. The opening stages of that effort were on display last week, although, as noted by the New York Times, it was not clear whether the latest fireworks were particularly effective.

On the political side, the Bush administration has now given up on a seven-stage process originally promoted by Bremer that would have begun with the drafting of a new constitution by early next year and the installation of an elected government next summer or early fall at the latest.

That scenario was frustrated by both the deteriorating security situation and protracted delays by the US-selected Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), largely dominated by Kurdish leaders and former exiles, in addressing key issues like how the constitution-drafting committee will be selected.

The administration has now agreed to put off the constitution until after the creation by next spring of a provisional government. That body will presumably assume formal sovereignty, be given greater executive powers (subject to Bremer`s veto) than the IGC now enjoys, and organize the drafting of a constitution. "They are clamoring for it; they are, we believe, ready for it," US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said after the latest round of meetings.

Both the military and political sides of this "Iraqization" strategy are designed to work in tandem to defeat the resistance by, on the one hand, mounting a more effective counter-insurgency, and on the other, by persuading Iraqis that Washington has no interest in running their country.

But the strategy carries huge risks. On the military side, the main worry is over the speed with which recruitment is taking place. In just the last two weeks, the number of men under arms has doubled to about 118,000. Under these circumstances, as the Washington Post noted, training is virtually non-existent, while screening of recruits for Ba`athist sympathies has necessarily also been reduced.

"How will we know whether the Iraqi recruits can be trusted not to carry out sabotage?" asked another prominent neo-conservative, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, in a major attack on Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, called "Exit Strategy or Victory Strategy?"

Moreover, the CIA itself warned that more aggressive US military operations could very easily undermine the war for hearts and minds, as the US has learned in many previous wars, not least Vietnam.

But similar and even greater risks attend the political process, where the central issue is how a provisional government will be appointed. The IGC reportedly favors the creation of an interim assembly, which will include its members along with others appointed by the IGC and the CPA and/or selected in local elections or by tribal or religious chiefs around the country.

But this process poses serious political problems, beginning with the fact that recent polling shows that the current membership of the IGC, particularly the exiles who have been closest to Washington, lacks any grassroots support. "If they form the core of any new governing authority, we`re going to have a credibility problem from the get-go," one Congressional aide told IPS.

Moreover, such a selection process would effectively defy an edict issued last summer by the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who is believed to have the greatest influence of any leader in Iraq`s majority Shi`ite community, which so far has generally cooperated with the occupation. He has demanded that those who will draft the constitution must be democratically elected.

Because of Sistani`s stature and influence, Gerecht writes, the IGC`s constitutional plans, if implemented, could be disastrous. "If only a small number of Shi`ites become violently hostile to coalition forces, the United States`s presence in the country will quickly become untenable."

At this point, the administration does not have good answers to any of the questions raised by the growing number of critics, even those who until now were solidly in the Bush camp.

(Inter Press Service)

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French to Bush: `We were right` on Iraq
Nation feels vindicated over war, but may not be ready to help
Elizabeth Bryant, Chronicle Foreign Service
Monday, November 17, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/17/MNGB633LFM1.DTL


Paris -- Anti-war weasel no more.

As President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell head off to Europe this week, French commentators are savoring the headline in Washington`s prestigious policy magazine, the National Journal, that "the French were right" all along in opposing the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Even before Americans counted their latest casualties -- 17 dead in Saturday`s dual helicopter crash -- France`s leading newspaper, Le Monde, was reporting with satisfaction that french fries and French bread are back in favor in Washington, and "the Congressional French Caucus has become one of the capital`s choicest clubs."

"Of course, there`s a feeling we were right and they were wrong," said Etienne Schweisguth, a researcher for the Center for the Study of French Political Life in Paris.

Whether such feelings of vindication will translate into magnanimous offers of French help to its beleaguered Atlantic ally is far more doubtful.

While some analysts here believe France and other European countries have to step up with tangible assistance -- if only to prevent Iraq from exporting terrorism and instability to their own shores -- others suggest there is little appetite to help an American administration that dismissed war doubters like France as out-of-touch "old Europe."

"This very basic change in American strategy can be summed up in two words: Too late," said Francois Heisbourg, director of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research, of Washington`s accelerated deadline for transferring power to Iraqi authorities by next June.

Not only do U.S. and European views on Iraq remain radically different, say French experts on international affairs, but European diplomats are assessing the latest American move as being driven by election-year calculations.

"Had this happened in July, you would have had 50,000 to 60,000 European troops in Iraq," Heisbourg said. "But there`s no way a French, or a German, or a Russian politician can explain to his people why they would risk being associated with the mess created by the Americans -- just so the Americans can be home before the next presidential elections."

To be sure, there is no indication that Washington, having been repeatedly rebuffed, will again ask "old Europe" to send troops or to pledge money when Powell meets his diplomatic counterparts from the European Union in Brussels today and Tuesday. Nor are other Europeans -- who watched television images of Italian troops returning home from Baghdad in coffins --

lining up to help.

"The French and the Europeans could play a diplomatic role when it comes to Iraq," Schweisguth said. "But I think the attitude will be one of minimum service."

Such predictions were underscored by a series of remarks in the past few days by French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin.

France, he said, is holding out an "extended hand" to our American friends and is "ready today for any meeting, all discussions."

But in an interview published today in the French daily Le Croix, de Villepin scorned as "too late" the Bush administration`s plan to cede sovereignty to an Iraqi provisional government by June. Calling for a transfer of power within the next six weeks, de Villepin said: "We are in an extremely urgent situation."

But for all the urgency, de Villepin has deftly ducked questions about sending French troops and other aid to Baghdad.

"If there is a provisional government, then it will be time to ask Iraqis how they want to maintain security in their own country," Villepin said, insisting Iraq`s main problem was its American-led occupying force.

In France`s rainy, chilly capital on Sunday, ordinary Parisians offered a more mixed view.

"Bush wants to be re-elected next year, and politicians change ideas like shirts," said Algerian Hocine Aid, offering his own primer on American politics as he hawked shoes at a packed outdoor market in northern Paris. "But the Europeans are also hypocritical. They should be giving Iraqis assistance to help them out of their misery."

Nearby, Marie-Claude Herdzina packed oranges and red peppers into her bulging shopping cart. "France should give America some diplomatic help, but that`s it," said the 48-year-old housewife. "Bush is a manipulator, and we don`t have the troops."

Those hopeful of a solution point to Afghanistan as a model of postwar trans-Atlantic cooperation, which could be restyled to Iraqi needs. French aid to Iraq may not come in the form of troops, but other kinds of security assistance could be offered.

The more skeptical believe such Franco-American cooperation is unlikely because neither Paris nor Washington has shown much interest in resolving their differences over the Iraq war.

"The Germans have backtracked a bit, but the French moved the line all the time when it came to Iraq," said Paul Godt, a French politics professor at the American University in Paris. "So I can`t imagine anybody in the Bush administration tipping their hat in any way to the French."

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Das passt aber gut!

Protests begin but majority backs Bush visit as support for war surges
See the ICM poll in full (pdf)
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Politics/documents/200…
Alan Travis and David Gow
Tuesday November 18, 2003
The Guardian

A majority of Labour voters welcome President George Bush`s state visit to Britain which starts today, according to November`s Guardian/ICM opinion poll.

The survey shows that public opinion in Britain is overwhelmingly pro-American with 62% of voters believing that the US is "generally speaking a force for good, not evil, in the world". It explodes the conventional political wisdom at Westminster that Mr Bush`s visit will prove damaging to Tony Blair. Only 15% of British voters agree with the idea that America is the "evil empire" in the world.

Mr Blair insisted last night that he had made the right decision in inviting Mr Bush to Britain as an unprecedented security operation got under way to prepare for his arrival today. More than 14,000 police officers at a cost of £5m will be on duty during the four-day visit, with tens of thousands of anti-war protesters are expected to take to the streets.

The ICM poll also uncovers a surge in pro-war sentiment in the past two months as suicide bombers have stepped up their attacks on western targets and troops in Iraq. Opposition to the war has slumped by 12 points since September to only 41% of all voters. At the same time those who believe the war was justified has jumped 9 points to 47% of voters.

This swing in the mood of British voters is echoed in the poll`s finding that two-thirds of voters believe British and American troops should not pull out of Iraq now but instead stay until the situation is "more stable".

It also may explain the beginnings of a recovery in Tony Blair`s personal ratings in this month`s Guardian poll. He still remains an unpopular prime minister with 52% unhappy with the job he is doing, compared with 40% who say they are satisfied with his performance. But the prime minister`s net popularity rating of minus 12 points is a significant improvement over last month`s net rating of minus 18 points.

The detailed results of the poll show that more people - 43% - say they welcome George Bush`s arrival in Britain than the 36% who say they would prefer he did not come.

Labour voters are more enthusiastic about the visit than Tory voters. But it is only Liberal Democrats who are marginally more unhappy about his arrival, with 43% against and 39% willing to welcome him. A majority of "twentysomethings" welcome Mr Bush. Hostility is strongest amongst the over-65s. There is a clear gender gap in attitudes with a majority of men - 51% - welcoming the president`s arrival, compared with only 35% of women.

Pro-Americanism, as might be expected, is strongest among Tory voters with 71% saying the US is a force for good. But it is nearly matched by the 66% of Labour voters who say the US is a force for good. Anti-Americanism is strongest among Liberal Democrat voters but is still only shared by 24% of them and the majority see the US as the "good guys".

Mr Blair told the CBI national conference in Birmingham yesterday of his support for the war on terrorism, saying: "Now is not the time to waver but see it through."

In unscripted remarks, he said the weekend terrorist bombings in Turkey, the recent attacks in Saudi Arabia and continuing bombings in Iraq, meant Britain should "stand firm with the United States of America in defeating terrorism wherever it is and delivering us safely from what I genuinely believe is the security threat of the 21st century".

But Mr Blair made plain he completely backed the EU`s stance against the US over illegal tariffs on steel imports, insisting that Washington must now respond to the World Trade Organisation ruling: "There will be from time to time these disagreements on issues to do with trade and we must stick very firmly to our position."

The prime minister also reaffirmed his vision of Britain as a bridge between the US and Europe.

"I firmly believe we have two big foreign policy pillars, the US alliance and our position in the EU. There`s absolutely no reason to yield up either and we will not," he said to loud applause.

· ICM interviewed a random sample of 1,002 adults aged 18 and over by telephone between November 14-16, 2003. Interviews were conducted across the country and the results have been weighted to the profile of all adults.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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While we have your attention, Mr President...
It`s not often that we get the chance to speak directly to the most powerful man in the world. So as George Bush lands in Britain for his first state visit, we asked 60 Brits and Americans to make the most of it

Tuesday November 18, 2003
The Guardian

Dear George,

Thank you for the leadership that you have given to the free world. Your father`s decision not to topple Saddam in 1991 started a decade in which America looked weak, and unwilling to defend itself and its values. Escalating terrorism from al-Qaida went unpunished, encouraging further outrages. It was not American arrogance that led up to 9/11, but American feebleness. In parallel, Saddam came to represent the most successful defiance of the US and of the UN by a rogue state.

It is regrettable that Tony Blair misled you into thinking that he could deliver Mr Schröder, Mr Chirac and Mr Putin to vote for a UN resolution. The PM does, I am afraid, have delusions of grandeur. Unfortunately, the doomed strategy of making weapons of mass destruction the cause of war has discredited the war in the UK. You did better to say frankly that you wanted to remove the Saddam regime which so brutalised its people and destabilised the region.

Through you I would like to thank the American people for the sacrifice of lives that they have made, and for the billions of dollars of their money that has been voted to rebuild Iraq. We appreciated your words recognising the sacrifice made by British families.

Please do renew your efforts on the Middle East roadmap. The terrorists there can now be in no doubt that they will not win using violence. That is the necessary pre-condition for achieving peace, which with your commitment is within grasp.

Congratulations on organising your own security while in Britain. You may have noticed that our policemen could not protect the Royal family from a joker dressed as Osama bin Laden who walked into Windsor Castle. I don`t think you could have relied on them to protect you against the real thing.
Yours sincerely
Michael Portillo
Conservative MP

Dear President Bush,

I`m sure you`ll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood, with my compliments.
Harold Pinter
Playwright



Dear Mr Bush,

Two years ago, shortly after the 9/11 atrocity I was arrested in the early hours of the morning at the home I shared with my wife in Colnbrook. At the time we were happy and looking forward to the future. I was studying to convert my US commercial pilot`s licence to a European one and Sonia, my beautiful wife, had recently had a promotion at work. As the anti-terrorist branch officers stormed into our home, our life died and the nightmare began.

The front page headlines around the world reported the US and their representatives as saying that I was the "lead instructor" of four of the pilots responsible for the hijackings and that I would in time be charged for "conspiracy to murder". I faced extradition and the death penalty.

The proceedings against me lasted seven long months. Millions of pounds and dollars were spent on what the crown prosecution service described as the biggest investigation ever in the UK. The result was that the US case against me was thrown out of court by a UK judge who said that there had been "no evidence whatsoever" to support the allegation that I was involved in terrorism.

I spent five months of hell in Belmarsh prison where threats were made on my life. My dream of a career as a pilot is over. The money spent on my training is wasted. My wife and I are unemployed. Many people will now always think of me as a terrorist. Because the US won`t admit they were wrong and withdraw the warrant I can`t travel out of the UK except to visit Algeria. I can`t even visit my in-laws in France. The "war on terror" has moved on but my life and family are still in pieces.
Lotfi Raissi
The pilot falsely accused of aiding the September 11 terrorists



Dear Jorge,

Look out! Behind you!!

Hahahahahahahaha, only kidding.

Love,
DBC Pierre
Novelist

Dear Mr Bush,

Novelists are famous for not knowing much about public affairs, but for what it is worth, I have always liked America. I have only been a tourist, but my family goes back a long way: my grandfather died as a reporter with American troops on the Rhine in 1945, and my father was wounded twice at Anzio fighting alongside the US Third Infantry Division.

After that, we had our Suez; you had your Vietnam, Korea, Guatemala, Chile... I could go on, but we will pass over these things because in the 20th century we won the first, second and cold wars. It wasn`t just the winning, it was the fact that we were on the democratic side, and that we behaved with propriety. We were not the aggressors. We negotiated. You waited. Good heavens, did you ever wait!

Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers were attacks to which you responded with appropriate force. Saddam Hussein, however, had neither the means nor the motive to attack you. Nor did he supply others. None of the reasons you offered for invading Iraq - taken singly or jointly - stood up to moral or strategic scrutiny. This was clear to even those of us well disposed towards America. We were at first puzzled ("I`m sure they know something we don`t, they`re just not allowed to tell us"); then, as it became apparent that you knew nothing, we became unhappy.

What we hated was the way you failed to understand the inheritance of the west. It was not a birthright of absolute superiority, but it was the best thing we had; it was something that went, as Mr Blair put it, to the "heart of our credibility as a nation". And this credibility, for which so many millions died - you have let it run through your hands. And in doing so, you allowed a British prime minister to be morally finessed by Jacques Chirac... Dear God, that it should come to that.

You can laugh at the old Stalinists who lead the protest march against you and ignore the anti-western ranting of a few journalists here whose pathology is one of guilt and self-hatred. But please do be aware of the distaste felt towards what you have done by reasonable, pro-American Britons. I hate to think what the allied dead of two world wars would have made of it, and of your presidency.
Sebastian Faulks
Novelist

Dear Mr President,

Today you arrive in my country for the first state visit by an American president for many decades, and I bid you welcome.

You will find yourself assailed on every hand by some pretty pretentious characters collectively known as the British left. They traditionally believe they have a monopoly on morality and that your recent actions preclude you from the club. You opposed and destroyed the world`s most blood-encrusted dictator. This is quite unforgivable.

I beg you to take no notice. The British left intermittently erupts like a pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. Seventy years ago it opposed mobilisation against Adolf Hitler and worshipped the other genocide, Josef Stalin.

It has marched for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov. It has slobbered over Ceausescu and Mugabe. It has demonstrated against everything and everyone American for a century. Broadly speaking, it hates your country first, mine second.

Eleven years ago something dreadful happened. Maggie was ousted, Ronald retired, the Berlin wall fell and Gorby abolished communism. All the left`s idols fell and its demons retired. For a decade there was nothing really to hate. But thank the Lord for his limitless mercy. Now they can applaud Saddam, Bin Laden, Kim Jong-Il... and hate a God-fearing Texan. So hallelujah and have a good time.
Frederick Forsyth
Novelist



Dear George,

I hate to wake you up from that dream you are having, the one in which you are a superhero bringing democracy and freedom to underdeveloped, oppressed countries. But you really need to check things out in one of the countries you have recently bombed to freedom. Georgie, I am kind of worried that things are going a bit bad in Iraq and you don`t seem to care that much. You might want it to appear as if things are going well and sign Iraq off as a job well done, but I am afraid this is not the case.

Listen, habibi, it is not over yet. Let me explain this in simple terms. You have spilled a glass full of tomato juice on an already dirty carpet and now you have to clean up the whole room. Not all of the mess is your fault but you volunteered to clean it up. I bet if someone had explained it to you like that you would have been less hasty going on our Rambo-in-Baghdad trip.

To tell you the truth, I am glad that someone is doing the cleaning up, and thank you for getting rid of that scary guy with the hideous moustache that we had for president. But I have to say that the advertisements you were dropping from your B52s before the bombs fell promised a much more efficient and speedy service. We are a bit disappointed. So would you please, pretty please, with sugar on top, get your act together and stop telling people you have Iraq all figured out when you are giving us the trial-and-error approach?

Anyway, I hope this doesn`t disturb you too much. Have a nice stay in London, wave hello to the demonstrators, and give my regards to your spin doctors. I bet they are having a hell of a job making you look good.
Regards,
Salam Pax
The Baghdad Blogger


Dear President Bush,

The child who has lost his arms

thought he was catching a ball

when the bomb his enemies dropped

bounced through his dapper hall.

Look at him here in his bed

washed by the camera glare:

the world must know what happened,

and show how truly it cares.


Was it in fact his foes

who threw this thing in his house?

Or was it perhaps his friends -

hence their exceptional fuss?


Guilt is the great disguiser,

blacking the white of the sun.

One thing we know for sure:

the ball goes bouncing on.
Andrew Motion
Poet laureate



George,

Great job, keep it up!
Julie Burchill
Writer

Dear George,

First, do no harm. Your state visit to the UK is risky, unpopular and awkward enough. Many Americans will be nervously peeking at the TV news from between our tightly crossed fingers and praying that you don`t utterly disgrace us. Don`t go all folksy and Texan, thanking Tony Blair for his friendship. He has enough to deal with already in the Labour party without receiving any more public kisses of political death from you. Don`t interrupt when someone is asking you a question. Try not to puke on the Queen.

Second, despite all the security arrangements, physical barriers and traditions that make a state visit - as you have said yourself - like travelling in a bubble, you can make an effort to learn from this trip. You`ve said that you admire the longstanding British tradition of free speech. This week, free speech will be blasting in Trafalgar Square and in the streets. Pay attention. To British ears, your claim not to read polls sounds like stolid indifference to public opinion, not moral strength and political courage. Even if you are sheltered from the demonstrations, read the British newspapers - the whole raucous range of them. Watch television; listen to the radio. Competition as well as tradition makes the British media the feistiest in the world. If you argue your position from awareness of what they are saying, rather than ignorance, you may win some respect.

Ride in a London taxi. Why don`t we have those superb vehicles here in Washington? Please get us some. And meditate upon the traits of intelligence, humour and dignity that will always make Britain great, whatever her status as a military power.
Best wishes for a safe journey,
Elaine Showalter
Writer and professor of literature, Princeton University



Dear George,

First off, as an expat, let me welcome you to England. The good news is that both of your daughters can drink here legally. You see, here in England they believe that if you are 18 and old enough to fight and die for your country you should at least be able to have a drink or two legally.

Now the bad news. I don`t know if you know this but the majority of people outside the US don`t hold you in high regard. As a matter of fact, you`re kind of scaring a few folks and angering a few more. It might be all right to slowly take away one`s individual freedoms in the States, but over in Europe and in the rest of the world they don`t take it too kindly. They have enough things to worry about, like trying to figure out how to make an honest wage while living in the shadow of the ill-fitting World Trade Organisation.

Finally, while you`re over here in London, try and get out and see a few things on your own. As a matter of fact, if you want to make some real friends, stand on the lefthand side of the escalators that lead down to the tube stations.
Mind that gap,
Dave Fulton
Comedian

Dear Mr President,

You will certainly have been briefed that various quaint rituals have their place in a state visit to Britain. One of them is a noisy and possibly violent demonstration. This is reserved only for the heads of state of Britain`s closest allies. If you are merely President Mugabe or erstwhile President Ceausescu, you don`t qualify for a demonstration, and poor old Saddam would never be paid the compliment were he to make it to Britain - certainly not by the people who will be demonstrating against you.

There are many of us in Britain who admire the way in which you have declared war on terrorism in what our own prime minister has described as "the battle of seminal importance for the first part of the 21st century". We respect you for ejecting the Taliban from Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein from Iraq, even though the situation in the latter country still presents serious challenges. We share, too, your belief that the proliferation of nuclear weapons into the hands of plainly evil and dangerous regimes is something which cannot be tolerated and must be stopped.

Sadly, there are so-called allies who do not have the stomach to face up to these threats but prefer to duck them or procrastinate. We in Britain don`t hesitate to challenge your decisions when we think you are wrong. Such as your overambitious initial plans for postwar Iraq, your steel tariffs or your rejection of the Kyoto accord. We shall continue to push you in directions in which you are reluctant to move, like the road map for peace in the Middle East. But when the chips are really down, Britain is as always a firm ally, standing alongside the United States in the cause of making the world a safer place. That is what we have done for well over half a century and what we shall continue to do, whatever the chants of the demonstrators. It`s called the special relationship.

So welcome to Britain, Mr President. The state visit is a compliment to your great country, to your high office and to you.
Yours sincerely,
Charles Powell
Member of the House of Lords; foreign affairs adviser to Margaret Thatcher and John Major

Dear George,

I would like to welcome you to our country. Both as a person and a president, you are a nice guy, and it is a good idea for both yourself and the people of England that you have taken the time to come over to visit our country. I am a self-employed person, and have been getting quite a lot of free advertising from your being in the public light for many years now. I would like to thank you for that. Only the other day I heard someone say on the radio: "George Bush, he`s doing a guvvy [Newcastle slang, meaning a little job for oneself] job. I`ve just seen him parked outside the house!" I would have voted for you, George. I think your father was nice as well, when he was president about 10 years ago. Although my family and friends vary a little in their opinion, I think you are the right man for the job.
George Bush
Builder



Dear "President" Bush,

I don`t know if you know Janet Street Porter, but she`s one helluva sassy lady. Her motto? Tell it like it is. So let me tell you what it`s like being me, right?

I`ve been away on sabbatical to research and write my new book, Wotchoo Lookin` At: The Authorised Biography of Sir Nicholas Serota (Faber, £35) and I arrive back in Blairland to find that for these past three years my son Marley has been lying on the green sofa in the basement in his Reeboks watching Eminem on MTV eating Big Macs, drinking Coke and surfing the internet for anything with Britney Spears on it.

What do all these have in common? Right first time, Georgie, baby. Country of origin: US of A.

What do you plan to do about it, then? Frankly, we in this country have been living under the American jackboot for far too long. As Harold Pinter so memorably put it in his recent poem:

There`s a bomb/Up your arsehole/Chum/And if you want to shit it out/You can`t/Chum/Because the president won`t bloody let you/Chum.

The single human being I most admire in the world right now is Michael Moore. The guy`s a genius. Talk about brave. If it wasn`t for Moore, we`d never have discovered the link between Lee Harvey Oswald, the Osmonds, the tobacco multinationals, Pee-Wee Herman, Mark Chapman and Spiro Agnew. Nor would we now know that for four years in the 1980s Osama bin Laden was a fully paid-up member of the Disney Corporation, working first as a stoker on the Casey Jones Railroad Experience in Disneyland Florida, and finally as a key member of the Three Bears in the Goldilocks House in Disneyland Paris.

How to solve the whole Middle East thing? It would even be hard to solve just the Iraq problem in 200 words. But at least we can try. So first, George, let`s for God`s sake let bygones be bygones. I don`t agree with your foreign policy, and - who knows? - maybe on reflection you don`t agree with certain aspects of my forthcoming series of media studies seminars (Jade Goody and the Meaning of Big Brother) at the University of Oxbridge (formerly Thameside Polytechnic). But here`s my advice - and it`s advice I literally beg you, George, to take.

Take a few hours off. Light yourself a scented candle, dim the lights down low, and pick up Anita Roddick`s wise and beautiful book, Lessons I`ve Learnt from the Peppermint Shower Gel Tribe of East Africa. Then read it, George - read it, and, believe me, you`ll never want to go to war again.

And Janet agrees with me.
Bel Littlejohn
Columnist



Dear Mr President,

I was eight in 1945 and remember as yesterday the vivid yearning that the old history - which was really European history in the age of the nation state, empire-building, nationalistic, autarkic, aggressive and war-torn - was over and that a new and different history, based on the overriding imperative of "never again", was beginning.

The reconstruction of the postwar world, during a period of barely five years between the second world war and when we began seriously believing that the third world war could start any day, still ranks for me as the most amazingly creative and enlightened era in modern history - the UN, Bretton Woods, the Gatt, Marshall aid, the Berlin airlift and Nato. This made it possible to believe that the US really was different and not just another European-style nation bent on might-is-right self-aggrandisement in the manner of the French and British empires and the German Reich.

Principles - the rule of law, the outlawing of aggression, the legitimacy of UN decisions, the cooperative management of an open world economy and the need for collective security - were embraced under American leadership and have held some, though imperfect, sway ever since. The third world war was avoided, the global economy prospered, though not everyone in it, and the Stalinist threat was seen off. But the same principles of law, legitimacy, cooperation and collective strength are needed if the peace-making and peace-keeping challenges of today`s world and the economic, social and environmental preconditions of sustaining human and other life on this planet are to be met.

Europe is bent on constructing in the EU a new nation on the old European pattern: flag-waving, glory-seeking, protectionist, exclusive of other races and creeds and full of touchy amour-propre, to say nothing of naked resentment of the US. This is a world that needs, just as much as it did in 1945, the unique American ability to be at once strong and principled in its global leadership.

Please pledge, Mr President, that under your leadership that proud tradition will be maintained and that the US will never, whatever the provocations from Europe or elsewhere, slip back into the bad old pre-1945 vices of nationalism, unilateralism, autarky and the laws of the jungle.
Yours sincerely,
Peter Jay
Former ambassador to Washington

Dear George,

I would just like to say how much I hate you. You have done nothing positive in your whole time as president. You are the reason for the poverty in the Middle East. You have no idea what you are doing. You`re killing loads of people, and that is not excluding your own nation too. There are still lots of very poor people in America, and they are getting poorer.

You keep making excuses about Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, but all you were in Iraq for was the oil. Saddam had been there for 30 years, so why is it only now you decided to act? You keep talking about September 11 when all you do is bomb other countries and give Israel lots of money. It is a very bad idea that you have come over here.

I don`t want to grow up in a country which is so influenced by you and your policies.
Mickey (12)



Dear Mr President,

Please understand the complexity of the hostility that will be greeting you during your visit to Britain. Some of it springs from sincere opposition to the war in Iraq. Some of it is knee-jerk anti-Americanism from the left. Some is an often near-hysterical response to your pro-life words and deeds. Be assured that there are countless thousands of "ordinary" people in this country who, even if they disagree with you about the morality of the war and cannot understand how you reconcile it with your pro-life stance, are deeply grateful that you have committed yourself to upholding the right to life of every innocent human being from fertilisation to his or her natural end.

They thank you for the example you have set and wish that other leaders would follow it. They thank you for promoting pro-life legislation in the US - against partial-birth abortion and human cloning - and withholding federal funds from agencies which promote coercive abortion and sterilisation in China and Latin America. They thank you for constantly proclaiming that "all human life is sacred and deserves protection in all its stages".

Like you, they believe that destruction and trivialisation of preborn human life are incompatible with justice and democracy. Like you, they look to the day when our society comes to see that abortionism, human embryo abuse, and cloning - all forms of discrimination against human beings at their most vulnerable - are as unworthy of a civilised society as we already recognise slavery, anti-semitism and apartheid to be. Like you, they know that, one day, they will overcome, because justice and truth are on their side.
Yours sincerely,
Professor Jack Scarisbrick
National chairman, Life



Dear George,

There is no way to write this but in anger. For the dead and mutilated you have left in the wake of your shocking tread, from Afghanistan to Iraq. For the prisoners you have caged, manacled and tortured, from Bagram to Guantanamo. For your worship of the warrior. For the smart bombs you dropped from 30,000ft and the missiles you fired from 1,000 miles. For the flesh this hateful technology has charred and for the limbs it has severed. For your threats to the sovereign nations and international bodies who oppose your ambitions. For the crass lies you told the world. For your cynical corruption of law. For your naked plundering of a conquered people`s wealth. For your blank cheque to Ariel Sharon. For every signature with which you consigned a human being to the death chamber in Texas. For the super-rich friends you have so handsomely rewarded and for the poor, unemployed and marginal in your own country whose lives you continue to blight. For making the world an infinitely more dangerous place.

For all these reasons, do not be fooled by the flags you will see fluttering on the Mall. Do not be fooled by the red carpets the toadies will guide you to step upon.

Look about you, if your hosts will let you look, if your flunkeys dare let you peek from beneath the official shield. Look about you when you land. You will see people in their tens of thousands protesting against your visit. Do not say we are "lucky" to live in a country that permits free speech and free assembly. Do not insult us like that. Those rights were hard won.

I doubt that what you see will chasten you, still less change your mind - you are a man of conviction, of ideological certainty, you have truly global ambitions and power to match - but at least it should be clear to you, Mr Bush, that you are not welcome here.
Ronan Bennett
Writer

Dear Mr President,

Are you getting out enough? The world is divided into two groups of people and here I draw no political or social distinctions. I am, of course, referring to those that run and those that do not. When you kindly granted me an interview last year, your first question to me was "Are you still getting out?" I remember the look of puzzlement that settled upon the faces of your inner circle. "Yes, Mr President," I replied, "and I hope you are too." More puzzlement. In fact, I am sure they felt that they were being deliberately excluded from the conversation in some Masonic-type code.

Maintaining your daily running diet will keep your head clear and your mind focused, and will remind you constantly that, as a runner, you have the advantage over others, knowing that the road is often undulating and the gradient and surface uncertain. You will also know, as any runner does, that the session has to be completed and, unlike the bluffers who make up the ranks of the political intelligentsia, you do something on a daily basis that is objectively measured. Good luck and, as they would say in the north of England, "Get the miles in."
Sebastian Coe
Former athlete and Conservative MP

Dear George,

Sorry about that delay at the airport - no one had been warned that you had never owned a passport. And thanks for warning us that your secret service requires a motorcade of more than 35 cars. You might want to look out for a letter that turns up in the next few weeks marked "Congestion charge".

You are, of course, an enormously popular figure over here and thousands of well-wishers will be turning out to greet you. They are so desperate for a handshake and a chat that they may have even made special placards asking you to "Stop Bush!" Even if your security officers advise against it, why not pull over and mingle with the crowd? You might ask them if they can guess what the initial stands for in George W Bush. It might be fun to see which W first springs to mind!
John O`Farrell
Writer


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US and them
Criticising the Bush administration`s belligerent foreign policy does not add up to visceral anti-Americanism

Peter Kilfoyle
Tuesday November 18, 2003
The Guardian

During the build-up to the war on Iraq, an American friend - a proud Republican - charged me with "visceral anti-Americanism". I indignantly responded that there was not one iota of anti-Americanism within my ample viscera, but I was totally opposed to the belligerence of the current American administration.

That charge still rankles with many of us who are constantly accused of a negative knee-jerk response to all things American. Such misunderstanding is hardly surprising when the spin doctors continue to distort the truth. Theirs was the deliberate confusion of the so-called "war on terror" with the war on Iraq. There was no linkage between Iraq and al-Qaida, yet the two antagonistic entities were misrepresented as the same thing. The process was extended to embrace Israel, whereby criticism of the aggressively rightwing government of Ariel Sharon was portrayed as anti-Israeli, or, shamefully, as anti-semitic.

Such propaganda tactics are, of course, not new, but have reached new depths in the repeated transposition of America for George Bush. By this means, reasoned, responsible and targeted criticism of the president`s policies is misrepresented, for political ends, as an emotional reaction to America itself.

There is undeniably a strand of cultural anti-Americanism which is as old as the United States itself - from Dr Johnson`s view that "I am willing to love all mankind, except an American", to Evelyn Waugh`s arrogant dismissal of "that impersonal, insensitive friendliness that takes the place of ceremony in that land of waifs and strays". Even Charlie Chaplin declared that he had "no further use for America. I would not go back there if Jesus Christ was president."

Such long-standing and, at times, vitriolic views of America find some resonance among American writers, from William Burroughs to Gore Vidal. No group has been more critical of the American way than the indigenous intellectuals of that vast land; and no group has been more vilified for its pains.

However, even they are generally cautious today about the image of the United States overseas, particularly when politicians wrap themselves in the flag and the constitution. Memories of McCarthyism are alive and well, despite the honesty of the Noam Chomskys and the Michael Moores of modern America.

What gives even marginal criticism such potency at the present time is the extreme sensitivity of the two governments concerned to opposition to an unpopular and increasingly costly war. Essentially, two men - Bush and Blair - wholly miscalculated the course of events, both politically and militarily, and their errors have left them reaching out in desperation for cover.

For George Bush, it is perhaps more straightforward. American presidents, even disgraced ones, tend to hide behind the stars and stripes. Great swaths of middle America revere that flag in a way that Britons cannot fathom. Even so, Bush finds himself in worsening straits as his poll ratings fall and George Soros pledges his millions to his removal. Thus, approaching election year, he needs good news and good television footage - hence his visit to the UK.

Tony Blair, on the other hand, found it impossible to don the Union Jack for a transparently American war - and a failed one at that. Instead, he clings to the myth of the "special relationship" as justification for his dogged loyalty to Bush and his extremely rightwing administration. It suits him to claim "the national interest" in support of his stance. At the same time, critics of his position are painted as disloyal, unpatriotic and anti-American. At every opportunity opponents of Bush are labelled, explicitly or implicitly, as unthinking bigots.

What is striking is just how erroneous a claim it is to caricature opponents of the Bush way in this manner. Many of the critics of the president and his idiosyncratic views are fiercely pro-American in many respects. Many of us have American friends and relatives who are equally horrified by what is being done in the name of the United States. We admire many of the qualities of American public life denied to us within our own polity. Just compare freedom of information within the American system to our own diluted and restrictive Freedom of Information Act.

No, Mr Blair, it is not knee-jerk anti-Americanism which holds sway in the UK. It is the reaction of one old friend to another when the latter is acting wholly unreasonably and unacceptably. In such circumstances, that old friend needs to be reminded of his responsibilities to himself and to others.

In such a context, if we do not speak out to President Bush, who on earth can? It is through those entirely justifiable criticisms that we might inform our real friends - the American people - of the damage done to America`s standing and interests by the Bush approach to international affairs.

· Peter Kilfoyle is Labour MP for Liverpool Walton and a former defence minister.


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Will she, won`t she? It`s decision time for Hillary
Despite denials, Mrs Clinton could still run for president

Gary Younge in New York
Tuesday November 18, 2003
The Guardian

In an episode of The Sopranos, Carmela Soprano and two friends are lamenting their men`s unfaithful ways over lunch when the conversation leads to Hillary Clinton.

"I can`t stand that woman," says one.

"I don`t know. Maybe we could all take a page from her book," responds another.

"What, to be humiliated in public, and then walk around smiling all the time? That is so false."

"All I know is she stuck by him and put up with the shit and in the end, what did she do? She set up her own little thing."

"She took all that negative shit he gave her, and spun it into gold. You got to give her credit."

"She is a role model for all of us," the third concludes.

The former first lady and current New York senator, Hillary Clinton, 56, is as popular as she is divisive. Asked to pick out words that best describe her, members of the public chose "intelligent" and "smart". The third word, pollsters at the Pew Research Centre said, is a pejorative term that "rhymes with rich".

With nine candidates standing for the Democratic presidential nomination, polls continue to show Ms Clinton as the favourite. The trouble is she is not one of the nine. But despite her insistence that she is not running, many people believe she could yet throw her hat in the ring. Friday marks the deadline for entering the Democratic primaries; this week is her last chance to change her mind.

The political logic behind her refusal is sound. While President George Bush`s approval ratings are falling fast, he remains the favourite for 2004. He is the incumbent, he has raised an unprecedented amount of money and has wrapped his presidency in the flag. No clear frontrunner has emerged from the current field of Democratic contenders.

Moreover, for Ms Clinton to abandon her six-year Senate term would make her look like a dilettante carpetbagger.

But she has not ruled out ever running for the White House. Keeping her powder dry until 2008, when Mr Bush would have to stand down, would give her a better shot and her entry into elected politics would look less like a smash-and-grab raid on the presidency. Although five of the 11 post-second world war presidents were over 60 when they took the oath, the common view remains that she would be too old at 65 in 2012.

There is little doubt that if Ms Clinton were to stand (this year or any year) she would act as a polarising figure. A Quinnipiac University Institute poll, released last month, showed that even though she is not running, 43% of Democratic voters support her - her closest adversary was General Wesley Clark with 10%. Meanwhile, an ABC news poll last summer found that 71% of conservative Republicans "felt strongly" about their "unfavourable" feelings towards her.

"Just as Hillary-haters say she is the archetype of the kind of woman they don`t like, so for those who love her she represents the archetype of the kind of woman they find inspiring and exemplary," says Michael Tomasky, executive editor of American Prospect and author of Hillary`s Turn: Inside her Improbable Victorious Senate Campaign.

Even her professed decision not to stand is polarising - prompting elaborate conspiracy theories among Republicans. Asked why the polling institute keeps putting her name to the public when it would not appear on the ballot, Maurice Carroll, director of Quinnipiac, says: "You have to keep asking it, because she is still a big factor."

When, not if


Her decision to accept the role of MC at last Saturday`s Democratic party`s Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa - a key event in a state where the candidates rally the faithful - is a case in point. "She would not come to MC this dinner if there was a ghost of a chance that she was going to run," the state party chairman, Gordon Fischer, told the Washington Post before the event.

To others her appearance in the state at this time is evidence that there is still a chance. "It is now unlikely that she will enter the primaries but we are not going to give up trying to persuade her until the convention is over," says Adam Parkhomenko, head of votehillary.org, which was collecting signatures to draft Ms Clinton outside the dinner on Saturday.

While her views do not differ from the more moderate candidates in the race (she backed the war in Iraq) she has other attributes in her favour. "She has name recognition. She`s better than all the other candidates and most importantly she can beat Bush," says Mr Parkhomenko.

Republicans, however, are convinced that the entire Democratic race thus far is little more than a dramatic ruse to get another Clinton in the Oval Office. Such theories start at the fringes, with the rightwing polemicist Carl Limbacher, whose book Hillary`s Scheme: Inside the Next Clinton`s Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House details Ms Clinton`s plans for a "grand political coup" to take the White House in 2004.

But they end up in the mainstream. William Safire, a New York Times columnist, believes Mr Clark`s decision to stand was part of a plot to hold a slot open for Ms Clinton. "If Bush stumbles and the Democratic nomination becomes highly valuable the Clintons probably think they would be able to get Clark to step aside without splintering the party, rewarding his loyalty with second place on the ticket," he wrote.

"That`s an absurd feat of imagination," said Ms Clinton in response.

While Democrats may love her and Republicans loathe her, both, it seems, need her to energise their base support. And while they may disagree on what she stands for, few doubt the issue is when, rather than whether, she puts her name forward for America`s top job.

"She can try and win in 2004 or she can hope that the Democrats nominate a respectable loser this time around and stand in 2008," says Maurice Carroll. "By 2012 she`s on social security and its over."


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Americans turn Tikrit into Iraq`s own West Bank
By Phil Reeves in Awja
18 November 2003


It is the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but transported to Iraq. A town is imprisoned by razor wire. The entrance is guarded by soldiers, protected by sand bags, concrete barricades and a machine-gun nest.

Only those people with an identification card issued by the occupation authorities are allowed in or, more importantly, out.

"Hey, this is just like Gaza, isn`t it?" a fiery-eyed young Iraqi policeman shouted at us from behind the chest-high, three-layer wire coils which separate his home from the rest of the surrounding dead-flat Iraqi landscape, Sunni Triangle heartland. "We`re not happy. Not happy!"

This is Awja, the wealthy enclave outside Tikrit where Saddam Hussein grew up. It has long been a centre of pro-Saddam, anti-American sentiments, home to the ousted dictator`s closest tribesmen, his cronies and his relatives. The United States military says it is also the source of persistent violent insurgency.

The Americans, accompanied by selected journalists and cameramen, have been conducting dozens of operations in the past few days, mounting house-to-house raids, and firing off several 500lb satellite-guided missiles in an effort to show the world and the guerrillas that they are now getting tough.

Early yesterday in Tikrit, American forces attacked what they said were "enemy" positions with tank and mortar fire, saying they killed six insurgents. Some 2,000 troops also took part in a raid on a 20-block residential area in Baghdad, emerging with only with a few dozen guns. In Awja, the crackdown is less photogenic, but as significant. On 30 October, two rifle companies from the US army`s 4th Infantry Division turned up at night and sealed off the town.

"We were asleep," recalled Mohammed Shakr al-Nassiri, 33, a shopkeeper. "We did hear some work going on during the night. When we got up, we found all this barbed wire around us. We don`t understand the point of it. Why us? There`s been resistance all over Iraq." In the case of Awja, the Americans appear to have resorted to this strategy after concluding they have no hope of winning over the people.

Similar tactics against the Palestinian intifada by Israel, which has sealed off towns and villages in the occupied territories for many months, have been widely criticised within the international community and human rights organisations as counter-productive.

The Americans have decided they have little to lose by sealing the town off in the hope that it will stifle guerrilla activity. Residents seem to think the approach is doomed to fail. A young policeman said over the wire barricade: "It will make the resistance stronger. Even those who did not fight when the Americans came to Iraq are being pushed to join the resistance."

The American military yesterday proved unable to provide The Independent with any comment on the enclosing of Awja. But Lieutenant-Colonel Steve Russell of the 4th Infantry Division, who came up with the scheme, told The Washington Post in an interview last week: "The insurgents should not be allowed to swim among the population as a whole. What we elected to do was make Awja a fish bowl so we could see who was swimming inside."

• An American patrol opened fire yesterday on people in Baghdad`s gun market, killing three, including an 11-year-old boy, after the soldiers mistook the gunfire of customers testing weapons for an attack, a witness and an Iraqi police officer said.
18 November 2003 10:03


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Livingstone says Bush is `greatest threat to life on planet`
By Nigel Morris, Home Affairs Correspondent
18 November 2003


Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, launched a stinging attack on President George Bush last night, denouncing him as the "greatest threat to life on this planet that we`ve most probably ever seen".

His provocatively timed comments, on the eve of Mr Bush`s arrival in London tonight, threaten to create severe embarrassment for the Prime Minister. They also come with talks under way on whether to re-admit Mr Livingstone to the Labour Party before his five-year exile ends.

Although he made his many differences with the Government on a range of issues clear, he reserved his strongest comments for the American President in an interview with The Ecologist magazine.

The President`s three-night trip, which will culminate on Friday with a visit to the Prime Minister`s Sedgefield constituency, has sparked a flood of protests from those opposed to his foreign policy. But Mr Livingstone`s outburst makes him one of the most high-profile and explicit of his critics.

Mr Livingstone recalled a visit at Easter to California, where he was denounced for an attack he had made on what he called "the most corrupt and racist American administration in over 80 years". He said: "Some US journalist came up to me and said: `How can you say this about President Bush?` Well, I think what I said then was quite mild. I actually think that Bush is the greatest threat to life on this planet that we`ve most probably ever seen. The policies he is initiating will doom us to extinction."

Mr Livingstone, who is holding a "peace party" for anti-war groups in City Hall tomorrow, added: "I don`t formally recognise George Bush because he was not officially elected. So we are organising an alternative reception for everybody who is not George Bush."

He said he supported stronger links between European Union countries only because he wanted to see a powerful bloc emerge to rival the United States. "The American agenda is sweeping everything before it, and although it`s not perfect, the EU is better on environmental issues. It`s a less rapacious form of capitalism."

The Mayor said he had viewed Labour`s 1997 election manifesto as a "load of old guff they`d come out with because they didn`t want to upset the Daily Mail" that would rapidly be ditched. "I was amazed when it transpired that Blair had been serious," he said.

Accusing Mr Blair of suffering from a "background problem", he said: "There is nothing in his past that was radicalising. He wasn`t interested in all the great student activities, the radical campaigns.

"He did not get involved in politics until the 1970s, when the high point was passed. So you have someone of the summer of `68 generation who actually wasn`t part of it."

On GM foods, he said: "If the Government ignores public opinion, then civil disobedience on this issue is legitimate, as long as it`s not violent.

"But the most important thing that affects a government is not peaceful protest, but fear of the ballot box.

The Mayor`s comments will infuriate Downing Street at a time when No 10 is examining ways of bringing Mr Livingstone, who was expelled from the Labour Party for standing as an independent in the London mayoral elections of 2000, back into the fold.

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Iraqi military police trainees at target practice on Monday in Baghdad. The training has been speeded up, partly in reponse to Iraqi demands.
November 18, 2003
TROOPS
A U.S. General Speeds the Shift in an Iraqi City
By DEXTER FILKINS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 17 — An American commander is preparing to pull troops back from Ramadi, a city at the center of guerrilla activity, and turn it over to Iraqi officers, an experiment that could change the course of the occupation of Iraq.

The commander, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., of the 82nd Airborne Division, said in an interview last week that troops stationed in Ramadi might be ready to withdraw as early as January. About 18,000 Americans are stationed in Anbar Province, with several thousand of those in Ramadi, military officials said.

The plan, if it works, would represent a significant shift in American efforts to pacify areas dominated by Sunni Arabs, who benefited the most from the reign of Saddam Hussein. The plan seems to dovetail with Washington`s recent push to accelerate the transfer of political responsibilities to the Iraqis.

General Swannack said his troops would "stand back" outside the town, ready to help the Iraqi police when needed, but otherwise leaving policing duties to them. To help prepare the Iraqis, he said, the G.I.`s have begun joint patrols with them.

Ramadi, the provincial capital, with about 250,000 residents, has been a center of armed resistance against the American occupation. About 80 miles west of Baghdad, it is in the heart of the area north and west of the capital known as the Sunni Triangle, which is generating most of the attacks against Americans.

"By January or February, we will start backing away and letting them do it," General Swannack said of the Iraqi police. "We will become the backup and the checkers if they aren`t doing something right," he added in the interview, at his headquarters in Ramadi.

Many Iraqi leaders have been urging American commanders to take a lower profile, saying their presence alone is prompting resentment and violence against the Americans.

The question in Ramadi is how well the Iraqi security forces, assembled and trained by the Americans, sometimes with great haste, will perform on their own. Some security forces in Anbar are not fully equipped with guns and radios. Many of the province`s 4,000 Iraqi police officers have not gone through the training courses taught by the Americans, officials said.

American and British commanders have executed similar pull-backs, but in cities dominated by Kurds, Shiite Muslims and Christians, groups that have been largely receptive to the occupation.

The plan outlined by General Swannack appears to be the broadest effort so far to pull American troops back from a city dominated by Sunni Arabs. A more limited transfer was tried in Falluja in July.

The 18,000 soldiers under General Swannack`s command are spread across a wide desert expanse. Anbar Province, particularly the areas around Ramadi and Falluja, has been the center of resistance against the occupation since 15 Iraqis were killed by American soldiers during a riot in Falluja in April.

The violence has risen sharply. In September, American soldiers were attacked 340 times in Anbar; in October, there were 450 attacks.

But General Swannack said he had made steady progress in Ramadi, not just in training security forces but also in winning over allegiance from residents. Ramadi currently has about 1,600 Iraqi police officers.

"The perception that Iraqis are unwilling to take charge of their destiny is totally wrong," General Swannack said. "The Sunnis in this area want to take charge of their destiny. We just have to provide the tools."

In Ramadi on Monday, military officials announced what they described as a significant success by apprehending Kazim Muhammad Faris, whom American officials described as an organizer of anti-American attacks.

In separate attacks on Monday near Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, an American soldier died and two others were wounded when guerrillas ambushed their patrol, and another soldier died when the convoy he was in hit a homemade bomb.

Four Iraqis and a suspected foreign fighter were killed in three incidents on Sunday night and Monday, American officers said.

Three Iraqis died in a firefight in Tikrit that the officers said began when an American patrol found a group of Iraqis who appeared to be planting a homemade bomb. The suspected foreign fighter was killed when he attacked an American soldier after he was captured Sunday night trying to cross from Syria, the officers said.

In the interview, General Swannack drew a distinction between Ramadi, where, he said, the residents were largely cooperative, and Falluja, where, he said, they are not.

General Swannack said Falluja was nowhere near ready to be handed over to the Iraqi police. In discussing the guerrillas in Falluja, he said: "They can make it easy on themselves and tell us who the bums are, and we`ll go search them out, or they will be subjected to some pain.

"But we are not going to tolerate attacks on coalition forces and people jumping for joy in the streets."

French Urge Faster Transfer

PARIS, Nov. 17 — In a new sign of French resistance, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said Monday that the American plan to speed the transfer of power in Iraq was too slow.

In an interview in the daily La Croix, Mr. Villepin proposed instead to supplement the present Iraqi Governing Council of 24 leaders with "additional forces" to form a representative assembly that could elect a cabinet of 15 ministers before the end of the year. "This provisional government would embody Iraqi sovereignty and would see itself progressively endowed with the reality of executive power," he said.

Mr. Villepin`s remarks appeared at odds with the approval of the American plan by the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer. Speaking with reporters on Monday after a meeting with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Mr. Fischer said the American timetable was "a very important step forward," news agencies reported.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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November 18, 2003
Funds and Games
By PAUL KRUGMAN

ou`re selling your house, and your real estate agent claims that he`s representing your interests. But he sells the property at less than fair value to a friend, who resells it at a substantial profit, on which the agent receives a kickback. You complain to the county attorney. But he gets big campaign contributions from the agent, so he pays no attention.

That, in essence, is the story of the growing mutual fund scandal. On any given day, the losses to each individual investor were small — which is why the scandal took so long to become visible. But if you steal a little bit of money every day from 95 million investors, the sums add up. Arthur Levitt, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, calls the mutual fund story "the worst scandal we`ve seen in 50 years" — and no, he`s not excluding Enron and WorldCom. Meanwhile, federal regulators, having allowed the scandal to fester, are doing their best to let the villains get off lightly.

Unlike the cheating real estate agent, mutual funds can`t set prices arbitrarily. Once a day, just after U.S. markets close, they must set the prices of their shares based on the market prices of the stocks they own. But this, it turns out, still leaves plenty of room for cheating.

One method is the illegal practice of late trading: managers let favored clients buy shares after hours. The trick is that on some days, late-breaking news clearly points to higher share prices tomorrow. Someone who is allowed to buy on that news, at prices set earlier in the day, is pretty much assured of a profit. This profit comes at the expense of ordinary investors, who have in effect had part of their assets sold off at bargain prices.

Another practice takes advantage of "stale prices" on foreign stocks. Suppose that a mutual fund owns Japanese stocks. When it values its own shares at 4 p.m., it uses the closing prices from Tokyo, 14 hours earlier. Yet a lot may have happened since then. If the news is favorable for Japanese stocks, a mutual fund that holds a lot of those stocks will be underpriced, offering a quick profit opportunity for someone who buys shares in the fund today and unloads those shares tomorrow. This isn`t illegal, but a mutual fund that cared about protecting its investors would have rules against such rapid-fire deals. Indeed, many funds do have such rules — but they have been enforced only for the little people.

In some cases fund managers traded for their own personal gain. In other cases hedge funds, which represent small numbers of wealthy investors, were allowed to enrich themselves. In return, it seems, they found ways to reward the managers. You make us rich, we`ll make you rich, and the middle-class investors who trusted us with their money will never know what happened.

And there`s probably more. During last year`s corporate scandals, each major company that came under the spotlight turned out to have engaged in some original scams. By analogy, it`s a good guess that the mutual fund industry was cheating its clients in other ways that haven`t yet come to light. Stay tuned.

Oh, and about that corrupt county attorney: last year it seemed, for a while, that corporate scandals — and the obvious efforts by the administration and some members of Congress to head off any close scrutiny of executive evildoers — would become a major political issue. But the threat was deftly parried: a few perp walks created the appearance of reform, a new S.E.C. chairman replaced the lamentable Harvey Pitt, and then we were in effect told to stop worrying about corporate malfeasance and focus on the imminent threat from Saddam`s W.M.D.

Now history is repeating itself. The S.E.C. ignored warnings about mutual fund abuses, and had to be forced into action by Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general. Having finally brought a fraud suit against Putnam Investments, the S.E.C. was in a position to set a standard for future prosecutions; sure enough, it quickly settled on terms that amount to a gentle slap on the wrist. William Galvin, secretary of the commonwealth of Massachusetts — who is investigating Putnam, which is based in Boston — summed it up: "They`re not interested in exposing wrongdoing; they`re interested in giving comfort to the industry."

I wonder what they`ll use to distract us this time?



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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CIA Seeks Probe of Iraq-Al Qaeda Memo Leak


By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A18


The CIA will ask the Justice Department to investigate the leak of a 16-page classified Pentagon memo that listed and briefly described raw agency intelligence on any relationship between Saddam Hussein`s Iraqi government and Osama bin Laden`s al Qaeda terrorist network, according to congressional and administration sources.

In addition, the leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and Vice Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), are considering making their own request for a Justice investigation. The top-secret memo was attached to an Oct. 27 letter to them from Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith. Feith was answering a request that he support his assertion during a closed-door hearing in July that there was intelligence to support a longtime relationship between the Iraqi leader and the terrorist group.

Excerpts from the memo were first published Saturday in the issue of the Weekly Standard dated Nov. 24. Under the headline "Case Closed," the article described the memo as documenting "an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003" between bin Laden and Hussein. It describes the memo as containing "50 numbered points" that are "best viewed as sort of a `Cliff`s Notes` version of the relationship. It contains the highlights, but it is far from exhaustive."

In making their case for invading Iraq, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other senior administration officials stressed both Hussein`s possession of weapons of mass destruction and his connection to bin Laden. To date, the administration has been unable to come up with unconventional weapons in Iraq or evidence that there was a close connection between the Iraqis and al Qaeda.

A Washington Post poll in August found that 69 percent of the American public believed Saddam Hussein was connected to the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

A CIA request to Justice is automatic when classified information purported to come from the CIA is involved in an unauthorized disclosure, according to a senior intelligence official, who declined to comment specifically on the Feith memo. Under the normal referral system, a request would be made to Feith to determine who had access to the memo and what other distribution it may have had beyond the Senate committee, the official said.

In a news release, the Defense Department late Saturday described the Feith memo as containing "either raw reports or products of the CIA, the NSA [the National Security Agency, which performs electronic intelligence intercepts] or in one case, the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency]." The release said that leaking such a document "is deplorable and may be illegal."

One item reported in the Weekly Standard began, "According to CIA reporting, bin Laden and [top bin Laden deputy Ayman] Zawahiri met with two Iraqi intelligence officers in Afghanistan in Dec. 1998." Another item refers to "sensitive CIA reporting" about the Saudi National Guard going on alert in December 2000 "after learning Saddam agreed to assist al Qaeda in attacking U.S./U.K. interests in Saudi Arabia."

In its Saturday release, the Pentagon took the unusual step of saying, "News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq . . . are inaccurate." The release also said the memo "was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda and drew no conclusions."

A senior intelligence official said yesterday that the NSA and the DIA may make their own referrals to Justice, based on their analysis of the information disclosed from the Feith memo.

While Stephen F. Hayes, author of the Weekly Standard article, concluded that "there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein`s Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans," some critics of the administration policy came to a different conclusion.

W. Patrick Lang, former head of the Middle East section of the DIA, said yesterday that the Standard article "is a listing of a mass of unconfirmed reports, many of which themselves indicate that the two groups continued to try to establish some sort of relationship. If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying?"

Another former senior intelligence official said the memo is not an intelligence product but rather "data points . . . among the millions of holdings of the intelligence agencies, many of which are simply not thought likely to be true."




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History`s Tea Leaves Point to Bush`s Reelection


By Dana Milbank

Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A23


More than 2,500 casualties in Iraq. Some 2.5 million jobs lost. Nearly half a trillion dollars in federal budget deficits.

And George W. Bush could still be a solid bet to win reelection next year.

The day-to-day news about violence in Iraq and lingering economic worries at home obscure a fundamental reality about next year`s election: Historically speaking, it should belong to President Bush. Since the presidential primary system became influential in 1952, an incumbent president has never lost a reelection bid if he did not face significant opposition in the primaries.

This is no nugget of political trivia. Political strategists and historians say an incumbent president`s lack of primary opposition is a measure of how much support he has from his base of core supporters -- and therefore how much leeway he has in appealing to the political center, the key to general election victory. Of course, historical patterns do not always repeat themselves, but Bush`s strength among his base means the Democrats will have extraordinary difficulty dislodging him from office.

The pattern has repeated itself perfectly. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton all ran for reelection without major challenges from within their own parties -- and all easily won second terms. Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush faced primary challenges while seeking reelection -- and all were ousted in the general election.

Bush appears to be comfortably in the former category. "The biggest thing he`s got going for him is near-unanimous support from his base," said Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego. Jacobson said that is a main reason the election "is his to lose."

"He`s not unbeatable, but he`s in pretty solid shape," Jacobson said.

Princeton University presidential scholar Fred I. Greenstein concurred that the lack of primary opposition is an important determinant. "It`s a pretty good indicator of whether the president has his own shop in order," Greenstein said. "One of the geniuses of this administration and of Bush`s whole career is he manages to have general appeal without seeming to antagonize the base."

Bush`s campaign strategists, while predicting a close outcome next year, agree that the lack of a primary opponent is a significant source of strength for the president, allowing him unchallenged access to GOP donors and unrivaled freedom to embrace swing voters. "The president`s views and swing voters` views are much more aligned" than the Democrats are with such voters, said Matthew Dowd, a campaign strategist.

Democrats, by contrast, are vying with one another to appeal to their party`s core supporters, far from the voters who usually decide election victories. "They`re basically making a choice today that is going to cause them significant trouble in achieving a majority of the electorate," Dowd said.

A review of opinion polls shows that the absence of primary opposition is closely correlated to an incumbent president`s standing among partisans. At the moment, Bush enjoys the support of 87 percent of those who identify themselves as Republicans. That puts him in the company of two-termers such as Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Clinton, and safely away from failures such as Ford, Carter and the first Bush.

William Mayer, a professor at Northeastern University, calculated from Gallup polling data that incumbent presidents with more than 80 percent support in their party a month before the first primary (Reagan had 91 percent, Clinton 83 percent and Nixon 81 percent) were essentially uncontested whereas those below 80 (Bush at 72 percent, Carter at 67 percent and Ford at 63 percent) had a more difficult time.

Although it is difficult to tell whether a president`s popularity discourages primary challenges or a lack of challengers increases his popularity, Mayer said, this much is clear: "The odds would certainly favor Bush`s reelection." With neither the economy nor Iraq registering as a major problem, "if it continues this way, it will be extraordinarily difficult for Democrats to beat him -- and I`m not sure they realize that yet."

History, of course, never repeats itself precisely, and unknown factors -- new terrorist attacks, a shock to the economy or continued deterioration of security in Iraq -- could yet overpower historical trends. And even Bush`s boosters hasten to point out that the country remains evenly divided politically. "We think this election`s going to be decided within four or five points," Dowd said. "Getting 50 percent of the vote, to be honest, would be significant because it hasn`t happened since 1988 for either side."

That said, Bush advisers believe his strength with his core supporters gives him a huge advantage over his Democratic opponents. "Democrats running for president appear to have made the decision that they can`t appeal to their base and ticket-splitting swing voters," said Ken Mehlman, Bush`s campaign manager.

This, in turn, has strengthened the Republican electoral hold from the evenly split 2000 race. Mehlman points out that Republicans have made gains both in their own "red" southern and border states, with gubernatorial wins this year in Mississippi and Kentucky, and in Democratic "blue" states of the coasts, with a GOP win in the California governor`s race and continued control of New York`s governorship and mayoralty. "You have red states that are getting redder and blue states that are becoming purple," he said.

Mehlman and Dowd point to a range of favorable indicators: Democratic weakness in Florida, an approval rating for Bush that is consistently above 50 percent, Bush`s popularity among young voters and a much-improved Republican get-out-the-vote operation.

Democrats, naturally, dispute these indicators. But neither side can deny that history has been kind to presidents who have unified parties -- a point Bush`s main political thinker, Karl Rove, observed long ago. "That was one of Karl`s primary things: Avoid a primary challenge at all cost," said Charlie Cook, a political handicapper. "Not being forced to do things to curry favor with your base before an election is very important. It means they`re not distracted, and they can single-mindedly focus on the other team."

Assistant director of polling Claudia Deane contributed to this report.



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Avoiding A Critical Inquiry


By John D. Rockefeller IV

Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A25



No decision can be more sobering and important for our president and the country than the decision to send America`s sons and daughters to war. Since Sept. 11, 2001, that decision has become even more difficult. Now the United States may have no choice but to be ready to strike preemptively if a threat from terrorists or rogue nations rises to a clear and present danger. But initiating war by preemptive attack unquestionably requires that an enemy have not only the desire but also the capability to carry out an attack against our citizens.

In the case of Iraq the president unequivocally told the country that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction of such force and readiness that our nation was at risk. The president`s case was based in part on U.S. and foreign intelligence and in part on the judgments of his administration. I and many others supported the Iraq war resolution largely because of those presentations. And while today there is no question that Saddam Hussein was a brutal and dangerous dictator, we must face the fact that both the intelligence agencies and the administration increasingly appear to have been wrong in their assessment of the threat Hussein posed to the United States.

Now we must find out why. Today, and in the future, the resolve of the American people is fundamental to our success in the war on terrorism. If we are less than fully honest about how and why we went to war in Iraq, the risk is great that people will not support preemptive action when a more clear and present danger emerges in the future.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was created in 1976 in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate expressly as a check on potential abuse of intelligence by the executive branch. When no weapons of mass destruction were found after the fall of Saddam Hussein`s regime, the committee correctly began an inquiry into the accuracy and quality of prewar intelligence. But the committee`s Republican chairman has refused to look at the whole picture, excluding from the inquiry the subject of how intelligence was used, or potentially misused, and whether policymakers in any way shaped the intelligence they received.

In what is beginning to look like a coordinated effort to shield the administration from scrutiny, Republicans claim that reviewing the ways intelligence was used is not part of the committee`s responsibilities. In this they plainly misread the committee`s history and organizing resolution, which explicitly calls for oversight of "the collection, analysis, production, dissemination, or use of information which relates to a foreign country . . . and which relates to the defense, foreign policy, national security or related policies of the United States."

The chairman recently went so far as to say that "there is no doubt how the intelligence was used" prior to the war, and so there is "nothing to review" [Pat Roberts, op-ed, Nov. 13]. In fact, there is disconcerting evidence that in this administration, the policymaking is driving the intelligence rather than the other way around. This has added to a growing doubt among the American people about why we went to war, and it is our job to conduct for them a thorough review of the underlying facts.

Many of our unanswered concerns remain classified, but even those that have been widely reported clearly merit the committee`s oversight. Consider, for example:

• The highly unusual role of Defense Department officials in preparing and collecting information outside the normal intelligence channels.

• The unexplained and possibly unsupported shift in the 2000 and 2002 intelligence assessments regarding Iraq`s nuclear programs.

• The presentation of fraudulent information regarding Iraq`s nuclear program in the president`s State of the Union address -- and assertions by intelligence analysts that their judgments were discounted when they did not support the administration`s pro-war policies.

Faced with Republicans` continuing refusal to conduct a complete investigation into these matters, my staff recently drafted an options memo on the use or potential misuse of intelligence. The memo, intended only for me, was pilfered from the usually secure Senate intelligence committee and distributed to the media. It has become a convenient excuse for Republicans to shut down the committee and curtail the investigation.

The Senate intelligence committee must, in a fair and objective manner, pursue the inquiry into prewar intelligence to the end -- not to score political points on either side but because it`s our job to identify mistakes or abuses. Failure to get to the truth about why we went to war jeopardizes the trust and resolve of the American people.

The writer is a Democratic senator from West Virginia and vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.



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Building Arab Democracy


By Hala Mustafa and David Makovsky

Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A25


President Bush`s speech about nourishing democracy in the Middle East was received with predictable derision by state-run Arab media. More disturbing is the fact that the speech has failed to attract much attention in this country. It is dismissed by some as mere political rhetoric and seen by others as part of an effort to justify America`s military losses in Iraq.

Not enough Americans see the link between the internal dynamics of Arab societies and Arab foreign policy -- and the way authoritarian Arab regimes seek legitimacy by blaming their troubles on "sinister" forces abroad. Indeed, for adherents of the so-called "realist" school of politics, who always thought talk about Arab democracy was delusional, dropping the entire project makes sense. But in the post-Sept. 11 world, these realists are not realistic: Arab democratization is not a fantasy, it is a necessity -- for both Americans and Arabs alike.

Today, as before, America earns enmity from Arab public opinion for its seeming indifference to issues unrelated to Israel and oil, and the language of protest more often than not is Islamic. Because Arab governments feel weaker than ever, many have sought refuge in distancing themselves from the United States. Throughout the Oslo-to-Camp David era of peacemaking, for example, Arab governments were not nearly as publicly supportive of U.S. efforts as Washington wanted (or needed).

Ironically, as Washington and Arab capitals grew farther apart on key policy issues, Islamist fanatics such as al Qaeda gained ground by painting America as the main pillar of support for what they would call bloated, corrupt and oppressive Arab regimes. Arab leaders responded by using their impressive internal security apparatuses to clamp down on (and sometimes export) terrorists, while seeking popular legitimacy by currying favor with the softer side of Islamism. Instead of confronting the ideology of the Islamists, they tried to ride the Islamist wave, just as they rode anti-colonial, pan-Arabist and anti-Israel waves in previous decades. But because these regimes could never truly out-Islam the Islamists, they were fighting a losing battle. The result has been the growing isolation felt by both the United States and Arab leaders.

A strategy of promoting Arab democratization would demolish the cynical "Islam is the solution" myth propagated by the Islamists and would give ordinary citizens a stake in the development of their own countries.

But promoting democracy in the Arab world is a tricky process. On the one hand, demanding "instant democracy" -- that is, immediate elections -- would be unwise, perhaps even catastrophic. Most Arab regimes would view open, transparent elections as a threat and would call on the vast array of tools at their disposal to manipulate, marginalize, defeat or even neutralize their opponents. (Indeed, hope for democratization in Iraq rests, to a great extent, on the fact that there isn`t an Arab regime in place to prevent it.) And if the United States arm-twisted Arab regimes enough to compel free and fair elections, the most likely victors would be Islamists, the only popular force with a ready-made organizational infrastructure, the mosque. Islamists would be delighted to use liberal means (elections) to promote illiberal ends (the creation of theocratic states) -- hardly the preferred outcome.

On the other hand, pursuing "business as usual" in the Arab world -- that is, talking about political reform but doing virtually nothing to advance it -- only hands victory to the Islamists.

In a Faustian bargain, Arab leaders cynically but shortsightedly support such Islamization because they believe it keeps them one step ahead of the real Islamists. Unable to play the game of "performance politics" -- winning legitimacy by providing real services to their people -- they opt instead for "identity politics," in which leaders are never actually held accountable for their actions. This makes it easier to blame foreign enemies -- i.e., the United States and Israel -- for their troubles, both at home and abroad.

Between the realist`s option of "do nothing" and the romantic`s option of "elections now" lies a third path -- gradual yet persistent liberalization. By helping Arab countries lay the building blocks for democracy, Washington can ensure that real elections, when they come, will eventually rest on a firm foundation of law and institutions.

Liberalization is a messy, difficult, time-consuming process. It means sometimes working with -- and sometimes working against -- Arab leaders to advance a strategy of opening political space; encouraging freer, more responsible media; increasing participation for women in public life; modernizing educational systems; improving justice systems and instituting incremental political reforms.

This requires a master politician`s sense of when to cajole, when to praise and when to twist arms. But unlike many initiatives, it does not require a lot of money. Rather, it will need a constant supply of an even more precious commodity: consistent attention at the highest levels of government. This process will never succeed if it is the last item on President Bush`s talking points for conversations with Arab rulers. It is also sure to fail if it is the only item. That the journey will be long and difficult is understood, so long as the direction is clear.

Hala Mustafa lives in Cairo and is editor of the Al-Ahram Foundation`s quarterly journal, Al-Dimuqratiya (Democracy). David Makovsky is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.




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Toward a Smoother Transition


By David Ignatius

Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A25


On its face, the Bush administration`s new plan to speed the transition to Iraqi sovereignty makes sense. It puts primary responsibility for building a new Iraq where it has always belonged -- with the Iraqi people.

But I worry that this new strategy, like the last one, has too much wishful thinking and too little hard analysis about what could go wrong.

So under the banner of "no more surprises," here`s a skeptical look at some problems the new U.S. plan could encounter -- along with a few suggestions about how to avoid trouble.

First, the United States needs a new military deployment in Iraq to fit its political strategy. The Americans need fewer heavy armored units patrolling Iraqi cities; they need more mobile units that can intervene quickly to assist Iraqi security forces.

The solution isn`t more U.S. troops but wiser use of the numbers that are deployed. Too often the current U.S. force is providing targets to the insurgents without offering security to Iraqis. That has it backward. A differently configured force could get the balance right.

Second, the Bush administration is being too optimistic about the readiness of the Iraqi security forces that, in theory, will begin to take over from coalition troops next year.

On paper, there will soon be about 150,000 Iraqis in the new police, army and civil defense forces. But I`ve seen these units training at bases around Iraq, and I agree with the American officers and NCOs doing the training that it will be many, many months before they are really ready. Jordan has offered to retrain Iraqi army officers, starting in January, and about 30,000 Iraqi police. That will help, but it`s not enough.

"There is no way the Iraqis will be ready by next summer," says one top Arab official. To bolster the still-fragile Iraqi units, the Pentagon will need to embed Special Forces and other advisers that can provide instant liaison with mobile U.S. backup troops.

Third, the political transition process is unwieldy, and it has some of the same weaknesses as the existing Governing Council.

The official text released over the weekend describes a complex, Rube Goldberg device to select the Transitional National Assembly that will assume sovereignty by June 30, 2004. Organizing Committees will be formed in each of Iraq`s 18 governorates; each of these committees will have five members appointed by the Governing Council in Baghdad, five members appointed by local Provincial Councils and one each from local councils of the five largest cities. Each Organizing Committee will then select a Governorate Selection Caucus of local notables, which in turn will select the new assembly.

To me, this sounds like a formula for confusion and deadlock. And I haven`t even mentioned all the political feuds that are buried in the numbingly complex selection process. The best hope for making it work are the personal relationships U.S. commanders have built with local tribal, civic and religious leaders.

Fourth, the new plan ducks the divisive political question that has bedeviled the Bush administration since Baghdad fell in April -- namely, what role will be played by exile leader Ahmed Chalabi. Both Chalabi and his enemies claim to like the plan -- which makes me nervous.

Chalabi is a brave and dedicated man who, for all his abrasiveness, has probably done more than anyone to create a free Iraq. The problem is that he has much more influence in Washington than in Baghdad. It`s unrealistic to expect him to become the unifying figure his supporters would like; but until his role is clarified, the new plan will be afflicted by the same infighting and paralysis as the old.

Fifth, the beleaguered occupation chief, L. Paul Bremer, needs to sustain his principal political success to date, which has been to maintain the support of Ayatollah Ali Sistani and other Shiite religious leaders. Sistani`s reported agreement to give up his demand for elections and a new constitution before the handover of sovereignty will make the new plan viable, if it`s for real. But in maneuvers with the Shiites, the administration is risking its crucial base of support.

Finally, the United States should recognize that many Iraqis will prepare for the transition by arming militias to protect their religious and tribal groups. Last weekend`s announcement confirms what they have wanted and feared: a rapid end to American occupation. If there is a power vacuum, it will be filled by the militias, not by budding Iraqi democrats.

Iraqis know that a quick American military pullout is a recipe for civil war. It`s right to give the Iraqis more political power; it would be tragically wrong to abandon them militarily.

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Fair and Balanced™ Cartoons


Cartoon Archive
93 New Cartoons Today, Humor kennt keine Grenzen, heute 93 frische Cartoons:

http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20031118__093toons.htm

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POLL ANALYSES
November 18, 2003


Bush Approval at 50%, Tied for Lowest of Presidency
Public likes Bush but ambivalent about his policies


by David W. Moore
GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- The latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey finds the American public expressing positive views about President George W. Bush personally, but having ambivalent views about his performance in office. The president`s approval rating is down to 50%, tying the lowest level of his presidency, at the same time that 68% of Americans approve of Bush "as a person." Several ratings of his personal characteristics have slipped over the past several months, though the biggest declines are found on policy rather than personal issues.

The poll, conducted Nov. 14-16, finds Bush`s approval rating identical to that measured two months ago, Sept. 19-21, 50% approve to 47% disapprove, which was the worst rating recorded during his presidency. Prior to that Bush`s term-low rating was a 51% score in a poll conducted immediately before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
George W. Bush’s Job Approval Rating


Trotzdem mögen die Amis BushErstaunliche Zahlen)
http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr031118.asp

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EDITORIAL



9/11 Probe Moves Forward

November 18, 2003

The Bush White House has never hidden its preference for secrecy. "For 35 years that I`ve been in town, there`s been a constant, steady erosion of the prerogatives and powers of the president of the United States," Vice President Dick Cheney declared in January 2002. "And I don`t want to be part of that." From Cheney`s energy task force to presidential records, the White House has tried to restrict the information given Congress and the public.

A good compromise reached last week with the bipartisan, 10-member federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks provided a welcome break in that pattern.

Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, who heads the commission, had threatened to subpoena the White House for access to the president`s top-secret daily briefings prepared exclusively for him by the CIA. Victims` families and two Democrats on the commission, former Rep. Tim Roemer and former Sen. Max Cleland, complained that the conditions of the deal with the White House were too restrictive. Kean, however, said the agreement "gives the commission full access to all the documents we`re asking for."

The deal marks the first time that any White House has handed over top-secret intelligence documents to outside investigators.

The commission has agreed that only two members will be allowed to look at the most sensitive materials and that the White House will determine whether they may takes notes and share them with other panel members. Up to four members will be allowed to look at other documents.

Such access might not be perfect, but it will permit the commission to help answer the key question of whether presidents Clinton and Bush were warned by intelligence agencies that an Al Qaeda attack was in the works.

Both Clinton and Bush say the allegation is unfounded. If that is the case, allowing the commission to look at key documents would dispel doubts. Even if all commission members receive only summaries, they will have a firm grasp of what was, and was not, in the daily briefings.

The commission thus avoids a protracted battle over White House documents, but other roadblocks remain. It has already subpoenaed the Department of Defense and the Federal Aviation Administration for documents on the national air defense network. Bush`s concession on intelligence should prompt other agencies to cooperate. If they don`t, the White House ought to intervene. To ensure that the commission has sufficient time, Congress should extend by a few months its deadline for submitting a report, currently May 2004.

The White House agreement removes a potential cloud of doubt over the commission report. The secret material should settle cover-up charges once and for all, denying fodder to Sept. 11 conspiracists.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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



There`s Something Happening Here
The echoes of Vietnam emanating from Iraq are all too clear
Robert Scheer

November 18, 2003

Here we go again. Only now it`s the "Iraqification" rather than the "Vietnamization" of a quagmire war in another distant and increasingly hostile land.

Washington`s puppets are once again said to be on the verge of getting their act together, and the American people are daily assured that we are about to turn the corner. Soon we will be able to give Iraq back to the Iraqis, and some distant day the United States will get out. In the meantime, U.S. troops must continue in a "support role" while being maimed and killed with increasing frequency.

Sorry to appear so jaded, but it has been nearly 40 years since I was briefed in Saigon by U.S. officials about the great progress being made in turning the affairs of South Vietnam over to Washington`s handpicked leaders of that country. I was also told with great emotional forcefulness that it would be irresponsible to just leave, given the dire consequences for world freedom.

Iraq is not Vietnam, and this is not 1964. But there are enough pillars for this analogy that we should remember some of the lessons of our last attempt to remake a nation in our image.

First, we never managed to build "our" stable Vietnam government; one gang of incompetents and thieves simply replaced another, until — 10 years and millions of deaths later — we finally left, under the most ignominious circumstances.

Second, after Saigon fell, the anticipated security disaster for the United States and the region didn`t happen. To the contrary, communist Vietnam and communist China soon went to war with each other, leaving the U.S. in a far stronger position to exert its influence on both of those nations and the rest of Asia.

Third, and perhaps most important, in Vietnam then and Iraq now, guerrilla tactics by "the locals" and overwhelming American firepower killed or maimed a large number of innocent people on all sides. All in a war without a clear purpose and sold to the American people by U.S. political leaders willing to lie to them.

For me, there are two particularly symbolic victims, one from each war. They stand out for their parallel experiences, marked by tragedy and bravery before and after their experiences in battle. Ron Kovic and Jessica Lynch were both working-class kids vulnerable to the siren song of jingoism, and both suffered serious injuries that will keep them in considerable pain throughout their lives — long after the movies made about them and the reasons for the wars they fought in have been mostly forgotten.

Kovic and Lynch are true heroes, not because they were severely wounded in battle but because they refused to give in to despair and emerged as decent people with clear, honest voices. Both refused the easy positions — either retreating into private silence or touting the government`s line that their sacrifice was worth it. Each went public to talk about the nonsensical realities of war in general, their wars in particular and how they were individually treated by their government.

"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," Lynch told ABC`s Diane Sawyer of the way the military packaged her story for the media. "It hurt in a way, that people would make up stories that they had no truth about."

Kovic served two tours with the Marines in Vietnam and has been a peace activist for three decades now. I first met him in the early 1970s while he sat in his wheelchair contemplating the vast rows of graves in a West Los Angeles military cemetery. Recently, he met with families of some of those killed in Iraq and with wounded soldiers. Compare this to President Bush, who has been unwilling to attend funerals of those killed in Iraq.

Lynch is still grappling with just how she was used as a propaganda tool by a Pentagon that sought to turn her into a female action figure. But the stance she has taken against further manipulation of her suffering reveals a sterling character far stronger than the macho movie image placed on her when she was a prisoner of war. As Lynch told her biographer, Rick Bragg:

"We went and we did our job, and that was to go to war, but I wish I hadn`t done it — I wish it had never happened. I wish we hadn`t been there, none of us…. I don`t care about the political stuff. But if it had never happened, Lori [Piestewa, a fellow soldier and her best friend] would be alive and all the rest of the soldiers would be alive. And none of this would have happened."

Amen.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Scheer writes a weekly column for The Times and is co-author of "The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq" (2003, Alternet.org).



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Scene of the crime 11/22/63
From Dealey Plaza and the grassy knoll to the tale of Nick Beef`s grave, conspiracy is still a big draw in Dallas


An X in the street is supposed to mark the spot where JFK was when the fatal bullet hit as he rode with Jacqueline Kennedy. The shot was fired from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. Photo by John Flinn


Dallas historian Ken Holmes, standing at Lee Harvey Oswald`s grave, explains that reporters at the burial had to act as pallbearers
Visitors view a display of evidence at The Sixth Floor Museum, the former School Book Depository, in Dallas.

Jimmy Longoria sells conspiracy pamphlets and points out sites in Dealey Plaza to visitors.

Dallas, Texas -- You peer out the sixth-floor window of the former Texas School Book Depository and you think: It wouldn`t have been that tough of a shot.

Maybe, you tell yourself, Lee Harvey Oswald really did do it all by himself.

But then you walk out into Dealey Plaza and talk to the sidewalk conspiracy buffs, and you buy one of their pamphlets and go over to the grassy knoll and sit down and read it, and before long you begin to wonder if Oswald was even in Dallas that day.

People the world over make the pilgrimage to Dealey Plaza in search of answers, or some sense of closure, and most go home with neither. As the nation marks the 40th anniversary this week, the assassination of John F. Kennedy remains for many of us a disturbing mystery, a still-purple bruise on the national psyche.

But still we are drawn to Dallas. We come to gaze at the sniper`s perch, hidden behind a wall of children`s schoolbooks; to stand on the very spot where Abraham Zapruder shot history`s most notorious home movie; to poke through the shrubs for clues that somehow eluded the thousands of searchers before us.

Driven by a morbid obsession, some are compelled to visit every site associated with the assassination, no matter how trivial: the former location of Jack Ruby`s strip club, the Texas Theater, the street where Officer J. D. Tippit was gunned down, Oswald`s quasi-secret gravesite.

Not long ago, one of those obsessives was me.

I quickly got the impression that this is not Dallas` favorite topic of conversation. In Dealey Plaza, I had to search hard to find any official acknowledgement of what happened 40 years ago. Next to the grassy knoll there`s a plaque -- to John Neely Byron, who founded a trading post on the site in 1839. On the former Texas School Book Depository, a big, wordy sign from the Texas Historical Commission covers in detail the site`s various owners and uses through the years -- noting, among other things, that it once housed the offices of a plow-making company -- until finally, in the last sentence, it gets around to mentioning the assassination.

"Dallas hoped it had put all this behind it in the 1980s," said Jeff West, executive director of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. "We had America`s Team, and a wonderfully trashy TV show about us." In short, Dallas hoped the rest of the country would obsess about who shot JR, rather than who shot JFK.

Not much chance of that. In Dealey Plaza, someone for years has been painting a big X in the center lane on Elm Street as it slopes down toward the Triple Underpass: It purports to mark the exact spot where Kennedy was struck by the fatal bullet. This is just about the only fact in the case with which the majority of conspiracy buffs and lone-gunman advocates agree. And it`s slightly wrong.

The X is, according to the Dallas Morning News, the work of 57-year-old Robert Groden, one of several men who regularly hawk conspiracy pamphlets in Dealey Plaza. The problem is that the lanes have been re-striped since 1963, and the X is actually about 6 inches too far to the west.

"If it is off," Groden conceded, "it`s not off by much."

Nearly every day of the year, Groden and other conspiracy buffs man card tables around the plaza, pointing out suspicious (and bogus) bullet marks in the pavement and expounding on theories ranging from plausible to laughable. A few appear to be true believers; many are merely pitchmen for $5 brochures. When I pointed out to one hawker, 35-year-old Jimmy Longoria, that he hadn`t even been born when Kennedy was shot, he drawled, "I wasn`t around when Jesus was alive, either. But I still go to church."

In Dealey Plaza, I met people from all over the globe: a woman from Bangalore, India, in a sari, a group of visiting Israeli schoolteachers, a youth soccer team from Portugal. Richard Kangethe, a 57-year-old coffee farmer from Kenya, told me: "I`ll never forget hearing about it over the radio in my village. I just had to come here." Ed Donahue and Brid Sharkey, both 26, from Dublin, said: "Being Irish, we grew up with JFK. He was one of us, the symbol of the Irish immigrant dream."

Behind the grassy knoll is a 4-foot-high picket fence separating the plaza from a railroad yard, and it was from behind this fence that most conspiracy theorists believe a second gunman fired. The back side of the fence has become a little shrine, covered with notes and plastic flowers and graffiti. "The shot was from here," scrawled someone named Jean, age 62. "I didn`t know you, but I hope you`re in heaven," wrote Kimberly Davis, a third- grader from Memphis Tennessee.

View from the window

It took Dallas until 1989 to open a museum dedicated to the assassination, but the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza is exceedingly well done. You ride an elevator up to the sixth floor of the old book depository and are instantly transported back to 1963. The walls are hung with posters for the Broadway play Camelot; Chubby Checker`s "The Twist" plays over your headphones; a television monitor shows clips from the Dick Van Dyke Show.

Soon the focus shifts to Kennedy. There`s the menu for a White House dinner at which Pablo Casals played (and at which Inglenook Pinot Chardonnay and Almaden Cabernet Sauvignon were poured). Exhibits cover his economic and social programs, and the increasing turmoil of his presidency: Mafia prosecutions, civil rights marches, the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam. Video screens show snippets of speeches, and I was struck anew by how witty and charismatic he was.

All the while, as I wound around the panels and displays, I could feel a palpable sense of dread growing. I was being led inexorably to the window at the southeast corner of the building. There, behind glass, the museum has re- created the sniper`s nest, just as investigators discovered it. Cartons of school books are stacked to create a concealing wall, and others form the brace where Oswald steadied his mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.

You can`t peer out that window (although you can get a real-time peek over the Internet by visiting www.jfk.org; click on EarthCam`s Dealey Plaza Cam), but you get a very similar view from the adjoining window.

I spent more than half an hour there, tracing the route of the presidential motorcade as it came slowly down Houston Street, directly toward the sniper`s perch - I`m not the only one who wondered why Oswald didn`t take his shot then - and then slowed even further to make the hard left onto Elm. Just as Nellie Connally, wife of the Texas governor, finished saying to Kennedy, "You can`t say Dallas doesn`t love you, Mr. President," Oswald would have pulled the trigger.

The branches of the big oak tree that are thought to have deflected that bullet still hang over the street. I could see the spot where the second bullet struck Kennedy in the throat, and I could clearly make out the X that (almost) marks the location of the third and fatal shot. It was easy to picture Oswald standing up in his sniper`s nest, a satisfied look on his face.

"That smirky little twerp," said the man next to me, shaking his head. "That goddamn smirky little twerp."

The following day, after touring nearly every Oswald-related site in Dallas with local historian Ken Holmes, I found myself standing over the assassin`s grave in the Rose Hill Memorial Burial Park outside Fort Worth.

"The reporters who covered his burial had to act as pallbearers," Holmes said. "There was no one else around to do it."

There`s a flat plaque on the ground engraved with "Oswald" and nothing else. For years, cemetery officials have refused to direct visitors to the site. (Directions are not hard to find, though, on the Internet.) But in a macabre bit of weirdness, there`s a matching plaque on the adjacent grave engraved with "Nick Beef," the stage name of a local comic (who, apparently, is still alive). In his act, he told his audience that if they wanted to find Oswald`s grave, all they had to do was ask cemetery workers to steer them to Nick Beef`s site. That`s not the only ghoulish aspect to the site. In 1981, Oswald`s remains were exhumed after a British author made an apparently convincing case that the body in the grave was actually that of a Russian KGB agent who had impersonated Oswald. A team of pathologists at Baylor University examined dental records and concluded that the corpse was indeed Oswald`s. It was reburied.

Whopper of a conspiracy

Nevertheless, I needed to give the conspiracy crowd its due. To do so, I knew, would send me down a rabbit hole into the shadowy world of poison darts, empty caskets, KGB impostors, forged autopsies, Corsican hit men and gunmen hiding in storm drains. And a whole cast of near-mythic characters: Umbrella Man, Babushka Lady, Badge Man, Frenchy, Black Dog Man, the Three Tramps and others.

Which is not to say this thinking is entirely outside the mainstream. Polls have consistently found that a majority of Americans believe a conspiracy was behind JFK`s assassination. According to an exhibit at the Sixth Floor Museum, even Lyndon Johnson, who appointed the Warren Commission and officially accepted its findings, never believed Oswald was the lone gunman.

The problem with the conspiracy crowd is that there`s no solid line between those who investigate clear and troubling lapses in the Warren Commission report and those who regularly share a Whopper with Elvis at Burger King.

Case in point: The Conspiracy Museum, located a block from Dealey Plaza. It`s not merely about the JFK assassination; it sets forth what might be called the Grand Unifying Theory of conspiracy, linking Kennedy`s death to those of his brother Robert and the Rev. Martin Luther King, plus Chappaquiddick (Ted Kennedy was supposedly the intended target) and -- I`m still scratching my head over this one -- the downing of Korean Airlines flight 007. Down in the basement, a sprawling, Asian-style mural somehow tries to tie it all together with imagery of cherry blossoms, birds and other symbols ... well, I didn`t hang around long enough to sort it out. It was too weird and creepy.

On my way out, I paused to read a bulletin board full of newspaper clippings about the crash of the space shuttle Columbia, with various sentences double-underlined. The young man from the front counter hurried over. He had been watching me on the security monitors.

"We`re not saying that this had anything to do with the other conspiracy, " he told me.

"Then why put it up?"

"We just found it ... " he raised an eyebrow "... interesting."

`It was absolute chaos`

Key figures in the case are regularly dying off, succumbing to old age, but it`s still possible to speak with people who were there that day, who saw it with their own eyes.

Ann Atterberry was a 26-year-old reporter for the "women`s page" at the Dallas Morning News. She wasn`t assigned to cover the presidential visit, so she bought a sandwich in the paper`s cafeteria and joined three friends to watch the lunchtime motorcade.

"It was really Jackie we wanted to see," she told me. "We wanted to get past the big crowds, so we went down to Dealey Plaza and sat on the curb and ate our lunches."

Atterberry walked me over to the spot, just east of the grassy knoll. She recalled how the motorcade turned sharply onto Elm and crept down the hill, passing within 10 feet of her. "I thought (Jackie) looked great in her pink pillbox hat. The sun was out, and her pink suit radiated. She was not terribly older than we were."

This was the end of the parade. In just a few seconds the motorcade would pass under the Triple Underpass and speed off to a luncheon at the Dallas Trade Mart.

"Jack and Jackie both looked pleased, and relieved," Atterberry said. "As they passed by us they waved, and they both made eye contact with us."

Tears moistened her eyes, and her voice cracked.

"I`ve often wondered if the four of us were the last thing he ever saw."

At almost the same instant, she heard the first crack of gunfire. "My first reaction was that it was a firecracker," she said. "I thought that was awfully rude. I was just turning to see where the sound came from when I heard the second shot. Just as I realized what it was, I heard the third shot, and then there was no doubt in my mind. We all burst into tears.

"It was absolute chaos. People on the knoll threw themselves on the ground. A motorcycle fell over and was left in the middle of the street. People were running everywhere."

Atterberry had been standing about 100 feet from Zapruder, and I asked her if she was in the famous home movie. She said she could never bring herself to look at it. (Later I watched the film in slow motion; there are four young women just where she said she and her friends were.)

"It`s haunted me ever since," she said. "My roommate, one of the girls I was with that day, joined Kennedy`s Peace Corps not long after that. Her psychologist told her she was doing this to atone, and she said no, but of course she was."

And maybe a similar instinct is what brings the rest of us to Dealey Plaza.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/16/T…

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Published on Monday, November 17, 2003 by the BBC
Italian Quits US-Led Iraq Authority in Protest

Marco Calamai
An Italian member of Iraq`s US-led Coalition Provisional Authority has resigned in protest at its policies.

Marco Calamai said few reconstruction projects had been implemented and warned that Iraqis were becoming angry.

Mr Calamai also told Italian newspapers the United Nations had to intervene in the country to improve a situation he described as "seriously compromised".

The criticism comes as Italy prepares to bury the 19 Italians killed in last week`s bomb attack in Iraq.

State funeral

Mr Calamai told Italian newspaper La Stampa the attack, in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriya, was the consequence of "a mistaken policy and an under-evaluation of the complexity of the social structure of Iraq".

He also warned that the US needed to make radical changes to the policies it had adopted so far in the country.

An official state funeral is due to be held on Tuesday - which has been declared a national day of mourning - for those killed in the bombing.

The bodies are lying in state in Rome`s Victor Emmanuel monument, dedicated to the Unknown Soldier.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and the Italian cabinet were among those who have paid their respects.

Worst single loss

On Monday crowds gathered in Rome to file past the coffins of the dead, all draped in the Italian flag.

"I am a mother who has a son in the carabinieri. I felt a really strong desire to be here. They are all my sons," said one woman, Antonella Regnon.

The last body - that of Corporal Pietro Petrucci - was returned to Italy after his parents gave permission for his life support machine to be switched off on Saturday.

His coffin was being brought to the monument to join the others.

The attack was the worst single bomb attack on international peacekeepers in Iraq, and the worst Italian military loss since World War II.

The Italian losses included 12 carabinieri, five army soldiers and two civilians. Nine Iraqis also died in the attack.

Copyright 2003 BBC

[Joerver]

The Tabloid President!


$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Inspiration:
Prez in Topless Tabloid
London Paper Nabs Rare Bush Exclusive
By Dana Milbank

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43228-2003Nov…

[Joerver]

Bush likely to find Britons quite chilly; Huge protests to assail war await prez
Posted on Tuesday, November 18 @ 10:26:05 EST
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Tom Hundley, Chicago Tribune

LONDON -- Soon after his arrival Tuesday for a four-day state visit, President Bush will receive a royal welcome from Queen Elizabeth II. Later, he will be treated to a rude one from an expected 100,000 protesters of the Iraq war.

Bush will have the distinction of being the first U.S. president to sleep in Buckingham Palace since Woodrow Wilson stayed there as King George V`s guest after World War I. But while the British public hailed Wilson as an ally and peacemaker, Bush has become a lightning rod for the storm of anti-Americanism that has swept Europe.

The visit of the "Toxic Texan," to use the title the British media have bestowed on Bush, is now viewed as a monument to bad timing for the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair.



Trip finalized last spring

But the White House bets that the right mix of Bush`s down-home charm and blunt talk will help sell a skeptical British public on Bush`s vision for a democratic Middle East built around a pacified Iraq.

In interviews before his trip, Bush played down suggestions that his visit would add to Blair`s political burdens.

"Freedom is a beautiful thing," Bush told interviewer David Frost in an exchange to be broadcast in Britain. "I would first say [to protesters], `Aren`t you lucky to be in a country that encourages people to speak their mind.`"

The idea for the state visit was broached in July 2002. The queen agreed, and plans were finalized last spring, just after U.S. and British troops had swept through Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein.

But rather than basking in the afterglow of their military victory, Blair and Bush appear headed into what many predict will be a firestorm of public disapproval.

The war in Iraq, which never had the support of the British public, has turned into a bloody and uncertain occupation. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the inability of the U.S. to bring stability to the region has severely damaged America`s standing.

A recent poll of 7,500 Europeans, done by EOS Gallup Europe for the European Commission, showed that they ranked Bush second--in a tie with North Korea`s Kim Jong Il--among leaders who pose the greatest threat to world peace. Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ranked first.

Iraq will dominate the Bush-Blair meetings. But Blair also is expected to ask about the detention of British citizens at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; the stalled peace process in the Middle East, a new defense force for Europe and difficulties with Iran.

Although Bush is scheduled to arrive in London on Tuesday night to meet with the queen, the formal welcoming ceremony at Buckingham Palace will wait until Wednesday morning.

Elizabeth has supped with every U.S. president since Harry Truman, but Bush`s visit is the first by an American president that has been formally designated a "state" visit by the palace.

A state visit usually means a bit more royal pomp, such as ride down the Mall in an open-top carriage. But because of security concerns and because of the large number of protesters who will be trying to get close to Bush, the carriage ride has been scrapped.

Instead British police and military will cocoon Bush in the largest security operation in London`s history. More than 5,000 officers will be on the streets throughout the president`s visit. Special operations soldiers will be barracked nearby, and RAF jets will be ready to scramble in the event of an airborne threat.

Al Qaeda threats

For several days, Britain`s security services have been on "severe general" alert--the second-highest alert level--in response to unspecified threats from Al Qaeda supporters.

A more immediate problem will be posed by demonstrators who are expected to dog every step of the Bush visit. Police anticipate a crowd of about 100,000 at Thursday`s anti-war rally in Trafalgar Square. That rally is scheduled to take place while Bush and Blair have lunch nearby at 10 Downing Street.

The U.S. Secret Service asked British police to establish an exclusion zone in central London for the duration of the president`s visit, effectively shutting down the capital for three days and eliminating any possibility of the protesters getting close to Bush. The police declined, citing the need to keep the zone of 7 million functioning and the right of demonstrators to be heard.

"It is our intent to facilitate lawful protest," said Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Andy Trotter.

Some of the security demands made by the White House advance team have provoked outrage and ridicule in the British media.

According to the Sunday Telegraph, the president`s men wanted to install blast-proof and bulletproof windows and curtains in the Buckingham Palace suite where the president and first lady will sleep. They also wanted to strengthen the walls against a possible rocket or missile attack.

The palace rejected the idea.

"Her Majesty takes the view that no amount of strengthening of windows and walls could protect the president in such an eventuality and that the work would cause disruption and involve discarding original fittings and fixtures," the palace said.

Black Hawk denied

The paper also reported a White House request for a Black Hawk helicopter to hover above the palace while Bush was present. The queen dismissed this as "too noisy."

The streets around Blair`s office and Parliament were initially declared off-limits to protesters, but on Monday the police reversed themselves and said they would allow demonstrations in this area. Still, Bush is unlikely to have any close encounters with an angry public.

The president and First Lady Laura Bush will be received privately by the queen when they arrive at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday evening. The following day, Bush meets with new Tory leader Michael Howard and Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy, an outspoken critic of the Iraq war, before delivering a speech on the trans-Atlantic alliance. That evening he will be honored at a Buckingham Palace white-tie banquet.

On Thursday, he tours Westminster Abbey, lunches with Blair and hosts a reciprocal dinner for the queen at the U.S. ambassador`s residence. On Friday, he and Blair have lunch with constituents in Blair`s home district of Sedgefield, about 250 miles north of London.

Tribune national correspondent Bob Kemper contributed from Washington

Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune

Reprinted from The Chicago Tribune:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/
nationworld/chi-0311180110nov18,1,3887278.story

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Niagara Falls Reporter Archive>>

IS BUSH REALLY AN `INCOHERENT` `MORON` AS SO MANY BRITS AND CANADIANS THINK?
By Bill Gallagher
DETROIT -- George W. Bush has managed to alienate and antagonize so much of the world, you have to conclude it`s intentional. And it goes well beyond our nation`s real and perceived enemies. Bush treats our friends and allies with such disdain it will take decades to undo the damage his horrific policies and arrogant personality have caused.

We`ve managed to enrage the Arab world, unleash more violent Islamic extremism and effectively create an entire new generation of terrorists. That not only puts U.S. forces in deadly peril, but American civilians face hostility traveling nearly everywhere.

Then there is Europe. Bush doesn`t care about the French and Germans and what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dismissed as "old Europe." Just toss out the heritage and ancestral lands of so many of our people and much of the richness of our culture. All done in a moment of presidential petulance because they refused to buy his war in Iraq and the phony rationales for the invasion.

An aside. A new poll shows a majority of the American people, at long last, now believes President Bush`s stated reasons for going after Iraq were false. Praise the Lord! After the most deceptive, yet effective, government propaganda campaign in our nation`s history, people are finally waking up and understanding the truth that so many, especially in Europe, understood long ago.

Our big European ally in the Iraq adventure is Great Britain, and that`s where George W. Bush will be this week for a state visit. He`ll do a lot of chumming up with his favorite lapdog, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and they`ll both try to put a chipper face on the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

Bush will spend most of his time at Buckingham Palace, hanging out with the cretins from the genetically challenged Battenberg family, aka the House of Windsor.

They`ll chat about things dear to them -- dynasty, the burdens of empire, the ups and downs of British gin, fretting about the rabble and other sobering thoughts.

The president will not address Parliament, because his handlers are afraid he`d get heckled. He probably would. After a few Aussie politicians hooted at him in their parliament, the Bush crowd forever crossed out visits to such democratic forums.

While Blair, Rupert Murdoch`s newspapers and the British elite liked the Iraq war, the people, just plain folks in the U.K., have different ideas and they won`t be shy about expressing them.

Massive demonstrations are planned and, unlike in the United States, where the Secret Service and local police departments keep protesters at a distance in Orwellian "free speech zones," the president may actually be forced to see and hear the protesters.

The British public has some harsh judgments on the American president. On the eve of his visit, a poll shows more than one in three Brits -- 37 percent -- say George W. is stupid, and 33 percent say he`s incoherent. They can be harsh.

Back on our side of the Atlantic, Bush has managed to thoroughly antagonize our closest neighbor nations, Mexico and Canada.

Much was made of Bush`s initial friendship with Mexican President Vincente Fox. When he made the first state visit of his presidency to Mexico, breaking the long tradition of going to Canada first, much was made of the strong bonds and friendship between Bush and the Mexican leader.

But in rapid succession, Bush found ways to alienate Fox. First the execution of a Mexican national in Texas caused a furor. When he was arrested in 1988, he was not told he had the right to contact the Mexican consulate for help. That was a clear violation of the 1963 Vienna Convention on consular relations. The pope, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Fox pleaded with Bush to spare the man`s life.

Showing his disdain for international law and his passion for the death penalty, and knowing its popularity in Texas politics, Bush refused to intervene and the execution proceeded. Fox was infuriated that Bush ignored his pleas and chose to pursue his political benefit.

The president has also ignored Mexico`s position that immigration reform is needed and visiting workers deserve better status.

Finally, Fox refused to yield to enormous pressure from Bush and would not support the war in Iraq. Bush refused a one-on-one meeting with Fox at the United Nations in September, and the relationship, once so promising, is now sore at best.

Oh, Canada! Now that`s where U.S. relations are really cool. The president doesn`t like retiring Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien. Bush has trouble dealing with people who object to his world view and Chretien certainly does.

The Canadian government, which sent forces to fight and die in Afghanistan, just would not buy the lies about Iraq and refused to support the war.

It was sickening to hear right-wing commentators bash Canadians, suggesting they were cowardly. Let me remind them that Canadian soldiers were dying fighting Hitler in 1939, three years before any American troops tangled with the Wehrmacht.

For decades, Canadian peace-keeping forces, under UN aegis, have performed valiantly around the world.

The Bush wrath toward Canada really got going when one of Chretien`s top aides mumbled to reporters that the U.S. president was "a moron." The aide was fired, and the blunt-speaking prime minister tried to smooth things over, saying, "He is a friend of mine, he`s not a moron at all."

The Bush crowd didn`t appreciate the defense, especially since it was delivered in French.

The Canadians are still terribly upset over the accidental bombing in Afghanistan that left four of their soldiers dead. The U.S. F-16 pilots who dropped the bomb violated rules of engagement, standing orders and common sense, but a military tribunal let them off with a gentle slap on the wrist.

Another incident involved a Canadian citizen who was detained at New York`s J.F.K. Airport as a suspected terrorist. Maher Arar was then deported to his native Syria and U.S. authorities didn`t even bother telling the Canadian government what had happened and why. Arar was held in Syria for a year and says he was tortured.

The U.S. government never produced a shred of evidence that he was a terrorist, and refuses to offer any explanation about the case, in spite of demands from the Canadian government to know why one of their citizens was treated that way.

The president from Texas finds much about Canada alien and offensive. For starters, they have universal health care. What a radical notion.

Canadian prescription drug prices are government-controlled, making them affordable for most people. Americans are buying drugs from Canada, infuriating the pharmaceutical industry barons who pump millions of dollars into George W.`s campaign coffers.

The medical use of marijuana is legal in Canada. Imagine that. Gay unions have legal status, and there are strict gun laws. The Canadians have this strange idea that weapons for hunting and sport are fine, but arsenals for killing people and committing crimes don`t make any sense.

The Canadians don`t have the death penalty. Political debate in Canada is open and robust. The media is tough and hard-hitting. The CBC program "The Fifth Estate" recently did an extraordinary report on the Bush family connections with the bin Ladens and how the administration protects Saudi interests, even at the expense of U.S. security.

No. George W. does not like Canada. It`s plain to see why.



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Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News. His e-mail address is [e-mail].
Niagara Falls Reporter www.niagarafallsreporter.com November 18 2003

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Tuesday, November 18, 2003
War News for November 18, 2003

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

Bring ‘em on: Two US soldiers wounded in bomb ambush in Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed, two wounded in RPG ambush near Balad.

Bring ‘em on: US soldier killed in bomb ambush near Balad.

Bring ‘em on: RPG attacks reported on two oil pipelines near Kirkuk.

Bring ‘em on: Surface-to-air missiles fired at US C-130 transport aircraft at Baghdad International Airport.

Bring ‘em on: Gunfire reported near Japanese embassy in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: US contractor killed by land mine near Tikrit.

CENTCOM reports one US soldier died from a non-hostile gunshot wound.

Major power disruptions continue in Baghdad.

New Iraqi police force receives minimal training and screening.

US troops begin joint patrols with new Iraqi police in Ramadi.

US Army will provide more pipeline security by November 15.

US troops accidentally kill three Iraqi civilians at Baghdad gun market.

Oil for food program ends on Thursday.

Another GI’s mom who didn’t get a hug sounds off.

Some American politicians find time to visit wounded US troops.

US troops begin to destroy homes of suspected insurgents. Whose brilliant idea was this? Who approved this policy? This is exactly what the Israelis have been doing for the last 20 years, and you can see how much success they have had.

Lieutenant AWOL continues to milk the sympathy vote. “’I understand particularly when I go and hug the mums and dads and brothers and sisters and sons and daughters of those who died,’ today`s edition of The Sun newspaper in London quoted him as saying.” The reality is that the lying poltroon doesn’t even want the casualties to receive military honors because he’s afraid the pictures might make him look bad.

Analysis: Deteriorating situation in Iraq. “Unfortunately, like so much else associated with the US-led war against Iraq and its aftermath, events appear to be driven primarily by America’s political agenda rather than one that is in the best interests of the Iraqi people.” Which, of course, is exactly why the situation is deteriorating so rapidly.

Attacks on oil facilities increasing.

Chicago father visits soldier son in Iraq. The banner on the family home says it all: Proud of our soldier - Ashamed of our President.

Wounded US soldiers are overloading the Army’s medical system. “Because of the overloaded system, the Army`s treatment and evaluation process is taking far too long, according to Robinson and other critics. ‘It doesn`t make sense. I know of people who are giving up their benefits to simply be allowed to go home, and others are leaving to go back to their homes without filing proper claims and not receiving proper medical care,’ said the veterans advocate.”

Coalition of the Wobbly: Philippine President says she will withdraw troops from Iraq if security continues to deteriorate.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Mississippi soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Texas soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: South Dakota soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: West Virginia soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: More about a young North Carolina soldier killed in Iraq and already mentioned in yesterday`s Casualty Report.

Local story: Missouri soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Pennsylvania soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Illinois soldier wounded in Iraq.

Operation Cut and Run

Bushies want UN to save Lieutenant AWOL. “Nevertheless, Powell said in Washington, ‘I think it`s time now with this new plan for the United Nations to determine whether or not circumstances will permit it to play a more active role inside the country.’”

Bush’s “strategy” may lead to civil war in Iraq. “Clearly Bush wants the imagery of thousands of troops coming home as a backdrop for his election campaign. But that would be a dangerous collision of his foreign and domestic agendas because in truth, the US is likely to be stuck in its Iraq quagmire - we can now call it that - for years to come.”






# posted by yankeedoodle : 2:11 AM

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Skull And Bones

CBS. 60 Minutes. Broadcast Oct. 5, 2003

There are secrets that George W. Bush guards at least as carefully as any entrusted to a president.

He`s forbidden to share these secrets even with the vice president -- secrets he has held ever since his days as an undergraduate at Yale.

Video zum Zwischenspeichern oder Download: (7,42MB)
http://informationclearinghouse.info/video1/cbs60minskulland…
oder direkt anschauen über Link:
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article5244.htm


SOURCE FILE

In his senior year, Mr. Bush - like his father and his grandfather - belonged to Skull and Bones, an elite secret society that includes some of the most powerful men of the 20th century.

All Bonesmen, as they`re called, are forbidden to reveal what goes on in their inner sanctum, the windowless building on the Yale campus that is called "The Tomb."

There are conspiracy theorists who see Skull and Bones behind everything that goes wrong, and occasionally even right in the world.

Apart from presidents, Bones has included cabinet officers, spies, Supreme Court justices, statesmen and captains of industry - and often their sons, and lately their daughters, too.

It’s a social and political network like no other. And they`ve responded to outsiders with utter silence – until an enterprising Yale graduate, Alexandra Robbins, managed to penetrate the wall of silence in her book, “Secrets of the Tomb.” Correspondent Morley Safer reports.
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”I spoke with about 100 members of Skull and Bones and they were members who were tired of the secrecy, and that`s why they were willing to talk to me,” says Robbins. “But probably twice that number hung up on me, harassed me, or threatened me.”

Secret or not, Skull and Bones is as essential to Yale as the Whiffenpoofs, the tables down at a pub called Mory`s, and the Yale mascot - that ever-slobbering bulldog.

Skull and Bones, with all its ritual and macabre relics, was founded in 1832 as a new world version of secret student societies that were common in Germany at the time. Since then, it has chosen or "tapped" only 15 senior students a year who become patriarchs when they graduate -- lifetime members of the ultimate old boys` club.

“Skull and Bones is so tiny. That`s what makes this staggering,” says Robbins. “There are only 15 people a year, which means there are about 800 living members at any one time.”

But a lot of Bonesmen have gone on to positions of great power, which Robbins says is the main purpose of this secret society: to get as many members as possible into positions of power.

“They do have many individuals in influential positions,” says Robbins. “And that`s why this is something that we need to know about.”

President Bush has tapped five fellow Bonesmen to join his administration. Most recently, he selected William Donaldson, Skull and Bones 1953, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Like the President, he`s taken the Bones oath of silence.
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Ron Rosenbaum, author and columnist for the New York Observer, has become obsessed with cracking that code of secrecy.

“I think there is a deep and legitimate distrust in America for power and privilege that are cloaked in secrecy. It`s not supposed to be the way we do things,” says Rosenbaum. “We`re supposed to do things out in the open in America. And so that any society or institution that hints that there is something hidden is, I think, a legitimate subject for investigation.”

His investigation is a 30-year obsession dating back to his days as a Yale classmate of George W. Bush. Rosenbaum, a self-described undergraduate nerd, was certainly not a contender for Bones. But he was fascinated by its weirdness.

“It`s this sepulchral, tomblike, windowless, granite, sandstone bulk that you can`t miss. And I lived next to it,” says Rosenbaum. “I had passed it all the time. And during the initiation rites, you could hear strange cries and whispers coming from the Skull and Bones tomb.”

Despite a lifetime of attempts to get inside, the best Rosenbaum could do was hide out on the ledge of a nearby building a few years ago to videotape a nocturnal initiation ceremony in the Tomb`s courtyard.

“A woman holds a knife and pretends to slash the throat of another person lying down before them, and there`s screaming and yelling at the neophytes,” he says.

Robbins says the cast of the initiation ritual is right out of Harry Potter meets Dracula: “There is a devil, a Don Quixote and a Pope who has one foot sheathed in a white monogrammed slipper resting on a stone skull. The initiates are led into the room one at a time. And once an initiate is inside, the Bonesmen shriek at him. Finally, the Bonesman is shoved to his knees in front of Don Quixote as the shrieking crowd falls silent. And Don Quixote lifts his sword and taps the Bonesman on his left shoulder and says, ‘By order of our order, I dub thee knight of Euloga.’"

It’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo, says Robbins, but it means a lot to the people who are in it.

“Prescott Bush, George W`s grandfather, and a band of Bonesmen, robbed the grave of Geronimo, took the skull and some personal relics of the Apache Chief and brought them back to the tomb,” says Robbins. “There is still a glass case, Bonesmen tell me, within the tomb that displays a skull that they all refer to as Geronimo.”

“The preoccupation with bones, mortality, with coffins, lying in coffins, standing around coffins, all this sort of thing I think is designed to give them the sense that, and it`s very true, life is short,” says Rosenbaum. “You can spend it, if you have a privileged background, enjoying yourself, contributing nothing, or you can spend it making a contribution.”

And plenty of Bonesmen have made a contribution, from William Howard Taft, the 27th President; Henry Luce, the founder of Time Magazine; and W. Averell Harriman, the diplomat and confidant of U.S. presidents.

“What`s important about the undergraduate years of Skull and Bones, as opposed to fraternities, is that it imbues them with a kind of mission for moral leadership,” says Rosenbaum. “And it`s something that they may ignore for 30 years of their life, as George W. Bush seemed to successfully ignore it for quite a long time. But he came back to it.”

Mr. Bush, like his father and grandfather before him, has refused to talk openly about Skull and Bones. But as a Bonesman, he was required to reveal his innermost secrets to his fellow Bones initiates.

“They`re supposed to recount their entire sexual histories in sort of a dim, a dimly-lit cozy room. The other 14 members are sitting on plush couches, and the lights are dimmed,” says Robbins. “And there`s a fire roaring. And the, this activity is supposed to last anywhere from between one to three hours.”
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What’s the point of this?

”I believe the point of the year in the tomb is to forge such a strong bond between these 15 new members that after they graduate, for them to betray Skull and Bones would mean they`d have to betray their fourteen closest friends,” says Robbins.

One can`t help but make certain comparisons with the mafia, for example. Secret society, bonding, stakes may be a little higher in one than the other. But everybody knows everything about everybody, which is a form of protection.

“I think Skull and Bones has had slightly more success than the mafia in the sense that the leaders of the five families are all doing 100 years in jail, and the leaders of the Skull and Bones families are doing four and eight years in the White House,” says Rosenbaum.

Bones is not restricted to the Republican Party. Yet another Bonesman has his eye on the Oval Office: Senator John Kerry, Democrat, Skull & Bones 1966.

“It is fascinating isn`t it? I mean, again, all the people say, ‘Oh, these societies don`t matter. The Eastern Establishment is in decline.’ And you could not find two more quintessential Eastern establishment, privileged guys,” says Rosenbaum. “I remember when I was a nerdy scholarship student in the reserve book room at, at the Yale Library, and John Kerry, who at that point styled himself ‘John F. Kerry’ would walk in.”

“There was always a little buzz,” adds Rosenbaum. “Because even then he was seen to be destined for higher things. He was head of the Yale Political Union, and a tap for Skull and Bones was seen as the natural sequel to that.”
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David Brooks, a conservative commentator who has published a book on the social dynamics of the upwardly mobile, says that while Skull & Bones may be elite and secret, it`s anything but exciting.

“My view of secret societies is they`re like the first class cabin in airplanes. They`re really impressive until you get into them, and then once you`re there they`re a little dull. So you hear all these conspiracy theories about Skull and Bones,” says Brooks.

“And to me, to be in one of these organizations, you have to have an incredibly high tolerance for tedium `cause you`re sittin` around talking, talking, and talking. You`re not running the world, you`re just gassing.”

Gassing or not, the best-connected white man`s club in America has moved reluctantly into the 21st Century.

“Skull and Bones narrowly endorsed admitting women,” says Robbins. “The day before these women were supposed to be initiated, a group of Bonesmen, including William F. Buckley, obtained a court order to block the initiation claiming that letting women into the tomb would lead to date rape. Again more legal wrangling; finally it came down to another vote and women were admitted and initiated.”

But Skull & Bones now has women, and it’s become more multicultural.

“It has gays who got the SAT scores, it`s got the gays who got the straight A`s,” says Brooks. “It`s got the blacks who are the president of the right associations. It`s different criteria. More multicultural, but it`s still an elite, selective institution.”

On balance, it may be bizarre, but on a certain perspective, does it provide something of value?

“You take these young strivers, you put them in this weird castle. They spill their guts with each other, fine. But they learn something beyond themselves. They learn a commitment to each other, they learn a commitment to the community,” says Brooks. “And maybe they inherit some of those old ideals of public service that are missing in a lot of other parts of the country.”

And is that relationship, in some cases, stronger that family or faith?

“Absolutely,” says Robbins. “You know, they say, they say the motto at Yale is, ‘For God, for country, and for Yale.’ At Bones, I would think it`s ‘For Bones.`”

© MMIII, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Published on Tuesday, November 18, 2003 by the Knight-Ridder Newspapers
In Tikrit, US Destroys Homes of Suspected Guerrillas
by Jeff Wilkinson

TIKRIT, Iraq - In a tactic reminiscent of Israeli crackdowns in the West Bank and Gaza, the U.S. military has begun destroying the homes of suspected guerrilla fighters in Iraq`s Sunni Triangle, evacuating women and children, then leveling their houses with heavy weaponry.

At least 15 homes have been destroyed in Tikrit as part of what has been dubbed Operation Ivy Cyclone II, including four leveled on Sunday by tanks and Apache helicopters that allegedly belonged to suspects in the Nov. 7 downing of a Black Hawk helicopter that killed six Americans.

Family members at one of the houses, in the village of al Haweda, said they were given five minutes to evacuate before soldiers opened fire.

The destruction of the homes is part of a sharp crackdown on insurgents in the so-called Sunni Triangle where guerrillas have downed at least two U.S. helicopters, one a Chinook in Fallujah on Nov. 2, killing 16 U.S. soldiers, and the other the Nov. 7 downing of the Black Hawk. On Saturday, two more helicopters crashed, after one of them may have been fired upon, killing 17.

U.S. forces struck dozens of targets on Monday, killing six guerrillas and arresting 21 others, the military said. The operation is expected to continue through Wednesday, said Col. James Hickey, commander of the 1st Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division.

Hickey said the four homes were destroyed on Sunday because enemy fighters lived and met there. Leveling the homes will force the fighters to find other meeting places, he said.

"Those four people used those houses as sanctuary, and we`re not allowing them to have sanctuary," Hickey said.



On Monday, angry residents of al Haweda, where three of the destroyed homes were, said the tactic will spawn more guerrilla fighters and perhaps spark an Iraqi uprising similar to the Palestinian intifada in the West Bank and Gaza.

"This is something Sharon would do," said 41-year-old farmer Jamel Shahab, referring to the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon. "What`s happening in Iraq is just like Palestine."



"We`re going to turn the heat up and complicate their battlefield," driving them into the desert, he said. "There they will be exposed and we will have them."

It was unclear whether the decision to destroy the houses was part of an overall strategy approved in Washington. White House spokesman Scott McClellan declined to comment specifically, referring questions about the razings to the Defense Department, but he praised the military`s efforts to get tough with Iraqi insurgents.

``There are terrorists who are seeking to spread fear and chaos in Iraq, and we are on the offensive and taking the fight to the enemy,`` McClellan said. ``Our coalition forces are doing an outstanding job working with Iraqis to bring these terrorists to justice.``

Officials at the Department of Defense referred questions to Central Command in Tampa, which oversees all military operations in Iraq. Spokesmen there declined to comment.

On Monday, angry residents of al Haweda, where three of the destroyed homes were, said the tactic will spawn more guerrilla fighters and perhaps spark an Iraqi uprising similar to the Palestinian intifada in the West Bank and Gaza.

"This is something Sharon would do," said 41-year-old farmer Jamel Shahab, referring to the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon. "What`s happening in Iraq is just like Palestine."

Shahab stood amidst the rubble of the former home of 55-year-old farmer Omar Khalil, who was arrested shortly before the home was destroyed. The military said Khalil`s son, who escaped, is one of the suspects in the downing of the Black Hawk.

Khalil`s wife, Kafey, sat wailing near her wrecked house. "I have no son. I have no husband. I have no home. I will be a beggar."

Kafey Khalil said military officials first visited the house two days ago, demanding that her husband turn in her son. He refused.

Then at about 10 p.m. Sunday, the military returned, she said.

"They started shouting at us, `Get up! Get out!``` she said. "They brought a big truck for us. It was so cold we felt like we were dying. After five minutes they started shooting. We didn`t have time to get anything but blankets. They brought in the tanks and the helicopters and started bombing."

After the shooting stopped, the women and children were released and were left at the scene, they said. They were sifting through the wreckage on Monday, attempting to salvage what few items remained.

Two other homes nearby were also in shambles. What walls remained were pierced by tank rounds. A small boy held up what was left of the family`s TV set.

In the backyard of one home, a cow lay dead, its stomach split open by a large caliber round, its unborn calf half-exposed. A dog limped nearby, a piece of shrapnel protruding from its body.

Tank tracks had churned up the sandy earth. Spent 5-inch-long shell casings littered the ground. Boys collected them and displayed handfuls to journalists.

The Israeli military`s practice of demolishing the homes of families of convicted or suspected terrorists has brought widespread condemnation from human rights and other governments - including the United States.

The State Department`s 2002 human rights report, released in March, said such policies "left hundreds of Palestinians not involved in terror attacks homeless." In September, department spokesman Richard Boucher criticized Israel for destroying a seven-story apartment building in Gaza during a raid on a suspected Hamas militant.

There was no official reaction in Washington.

A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, suggested Monday that the tactic was not sanctioned in Washington. "I can`t wait to see al-Jazeera`s presentation of it," the official said, referring to a satellite TV network viewed widely throughout the Middle East.

The military had promised a tough crackdown in response to the recent surge in American military deaths and has launched two operations, Operation Iron Hammer around Baghdad and Ivy Cyclone in the heart of the Sunni Triangle.

Hickey said counterstrikes against fighters around Tikrit have been continuous, but that Ivy Cyclone Two represents a higher level of coordination using more advanced weapons.

For example, Sunday night`s action included the launching of a missile from Baghdad, 55 miles away, at the abandoned home of former Saddam henchman Izzat Ibrahim al Duri, who is No. 6 on the coalition`s most-wanted list. A reporter and photographer from Knight Ridder were allowed to witness the destruction, which was completed by laser-guided artillery fire.

Hickey said al Duri`s house was destroyed to deny guerrillas a meeting place, though it was unclear that such high-tech weaponry was needed to destroy the structure, which appeared completely looted.

Hickey said soldiers had been instructed to make sure to evacuate innocent civilians nearby. Near al Duri`s house, two men, four children and two babies were shivering in near-freezing temperatures in the back of a truck, given just a few minutes to flee their neighboring farm.

"We know exactly what we`re shooting at and why we`re shooting it," Hickey said. "Collateral damage won`t be a problem."

Military officials said the targets around Tikrit and Kirkuk also have included enemy mortar sites and a suspected insurgent training camp. The camp, on an island in the Little Zab River west of Kirkuk, was hit Sunday morning by a satellite-guided missile with a 500-pound warhead fired 130 miles from a Baghdad launch site.

Hickey promised no letup in the campaign. He also promised to deal harshly with weapons violations. "If we see someone with a weapon," he said, "he becomes a ballistics test," meaning the man is shot.

"You won`t see guns in Tikrit," he said.

Warren Strobel in Washington contributed to this report.

© 2003 Knight-Ridder

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Military Fatalities:

+US++UK++Other++Total

422++53++++25++++500

Latest Military Fatality Date: 11/18/2003

http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx

11/18/03 BBC: US forces pound Iraqi insurgents
American warplanes and ground forces have bombarded targets in central Iraq in the latest series of operations against suspected insurgents
11/18/03 interfax:Ukrainian peacekeeper commits suicide
Kyiv, November 18 (Interfax-Ukraine) - On Tuesday Captain Olexiy Bondarenko, translator from the Arabic language in the peacekeeping contingent of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Iraq, committed a suicide having shot himself in the head.
11/17/03 CENTCOM: Soldier died from a non-hostile gunshot
A 1st Armored Division soldier died from a non-hostile gunshot wound at approximately 10:20 a.m. Nov. 17.
11/17/03 CENTCOM confirms fatailty
One 4th Infantry Division soldier was killed when a convoy struck an improvised explosive device south of Balad at about 7:50 a.m. on November 17.
11/17/03 CENTCOM: Confirms fatality
One 4th Infantry Division soldier was killed and two were wounded when attackers using automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenades fired upon their patrol at about 7:30 a.m. on November 17 in Albu Shukur.
11/17/03 Reuters: Two U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq Attacks
Two U.S. soldiers were killed and two wounded in attacks north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad on Monday, the U.S. military said.
11/17/03 MSNBC:U.S. cracks down on Baghdad badlands
The U.S. Army`s get-tough Operation Iron Hammer cracked down on Monday on one of Baghdad`s roughest neighbourhoods, with helicopters and warplanes swooping overhead as troops hunted for illegal weapons.
11/17/03 Reuters: Iraq Pipeline Bombed
Saboteurs have set an oil pipeline in northern Iraq on fire as a new U.S.-led force was deployed to protect the area`s infrastructure, witnesses said Monday

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November 18, 2003
Dollar Falls to All - Time Low Against Euro
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:40 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- The dollar fell to an all-time low against the euro Tuesday in a broad-based selloff of the U.S. currency.

Traders said the reasons behind the euro`s surge of nearly 2 cents on the day ranged from concerns about trade and geopolitics to investment outflows.

``It`s difficult to put a finger on the precise news behind`` the sharp move lower in the dollar, said Kenneth Agostino, senior dealer at Gain Capital in New Jersey. ``There`s an overall nervousness about holding U.S. assets.``

After a lazy, rangebound session overnight, the selling began in earnest following news that the Bush administration has granted U.S. industry requests to impose temporary quotas on some imports of Chinese textiles.

That fed into growing concerns that the U.S. is edging closer to low-intensity trade wars with its major trading partners, over not just textiles but also steel tariffs and currency manipulation.

``In general, intervention in trade flows is a backdoor devaluation,`` said Ram Bhagavatula, chief economist for North America at Royal Bank of Scotland in New York. ``It`s an implicit admission that the currency should be weaker.``

Perhaps more importantly, the Treasury Department released data showing a big pullback in foreign investment in Treasurys, agency debt and equities in September. The slowdown in net inflows to $4.2 billion has major implications for the dollar, because it comes at a time when the ballooning U.S. trade deficit requires an increasing amount of financing from abroad to keep the dollar from falling.

The morning news helped propel the euro through key resistance at $1.1860, tripping several stop-loss buy orders. Momentum picked up again in afternoon trading enough to send the euro soaring to around $1.1960, its strongest level since being introduced in January 1999.

In late New York trading, the euro was quoted at $1.1945, up from $1.1766 late Monday. The dollar was quoted at 108.04 yen, down from 108.95 yen late Monday. The dollar was quoted at 1.2941 Swiss francs, down sharply from 1.3219, and 1.2987 Canadian dollars, down from 1.3121. The British pound rose to $1.7004 from $1.6932.



Copyright 2003 The Associated Pres

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Howard Dean: a candidate, or a movement?
E.J. Dionne, Jr. - Washington Post Writers Group

11.17.03 - WASHINGTON -- An influential supporter of Sen. John Kerry`s presidential campaign offered this fantasy when asked what the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination would look like if his candidate had voted against the Iraq War resolution in 2002.

"If John had voted the other way," he said of his Vietnam War hero candidate, "the biography that people say doesn`t resonate would have resonated perfectly."

The supporter even imagined a television ad that might be running right now: "He stood up to Richard Nixon`s war in Vietnam. He stood up to Ronald Reagan`s illegal war in Central America. And he stood up to George Bush`s war."

As for the front-running Howard Dean, "he`d be Bruce Babbitt." It was a reference to the former Arizona governor who ran a widely admired but unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988.

But in the real world, Dean is not Babbitt. His campaign is now a movement and his promise is to reorganize American politics. On Wednesday, Dean augmented his base of well-educated professionals and young activists with the endorsements of two of the country`s most politically powerful unions -- the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. These unions don`t take flyers on appealing underdogs like Babbitt. They like to certify winners.

It is still a long time to the first voting in the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 19 -- plenty of time for buyer`s remorse. Rival campaigns are doing all they can to gin it up. One top aide to a Dean rival noted that House and Senate Democrats in the South are alarmed at the damage having Dean at the top of the ticket could do the party in their region. Both Kerry and Rep. Richard Gephardt, who narrowly leads Dean in Iowa, are bringing up Dean`s past stands on Medicare and Social Security to ask voters if they really know who Howard Dean is.

But all this may be beside the point. Joe Trippi, Dean`s campaign manager, freely concedes that Kerry`s Iraq vote is "one of the big ifs of the campaign." What matters now is that Dean took the opening Kerry gave him and changed the tenor of the year. Dean not only captured Democratic anger at Bush, he insisted that he could shape the opposition into a victorious fighting force.

This is the key to the Democratic race: Will Democrats decide that this year is about issues and electability, or will they choose instead to build a movement?

One Democrat captured a central reason for Dean`s surge: "Many of Dean`s people are more in love with the campaign than they are with the candidate." Trippi rejects this, noting that voters flocked to Dean before the effort became the high-tech wonder it is now. But Dean`s visionary campaign manager himself lays heavy stress on the imperative of inspiring the same level of commitment on the Democratic side that is so obvious among conservative Republicans.

Trippi waxes eloquent on Dean`s capacity to create a mass fund-raising base that could challenge the Republican Party`s vast treasury. He speaks of the "energy" Dean inspires at the grass roots. He talks of the campaign`s appeal to younger voters who could lead a political realignment.

Dean`s signature exclamation to his supporters is: "You have the power!" It is a revivalist`s promise. While the other candidates build themselves up, Trippi says, Dean builds up his supporters by saying: "Look at you. Aren`t you cool? Aren`t you amazing?"

Battered Democrats are hungry to hear that. So were the conservatives, then isolated from power, who flocked to Barry Goldwater in 1964.

It is the Goldwater campaign, not George McGovern`s 1972 antiwar crusade, that Dean`s movement most resembles. Goldwater was not about "new ideas." He was about preaching the full conservative Gospel and giving his followers a vehicle through which they could organize and put it into practice. Goldwater had his share of verbal gaffes. His supporters found them endearing. "Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue," Goldwater said. You could imagine a Dean supporter saying that.

Goldwater and his legions built a mighty movement that changed the country and affects politics to this day. But in 1964, Goldwater was clobbered by Lyndon B. Johnson in a landslide felt all the way down the ballot.

Dean`s challenge is to prove he can inspire a movement and still win the election. Dean`s opponents are desperate to show that the price of the energy Dean unleashes is four more years of George W. Bush. Right now, the betting is on Dean. Like Goldwater, Dean has the energy on his side.

(c) 2003, Washington Post Writers Group


URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=15995L

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A destiny linked to Iraq is the only thing they share
Bush and Blair could not be further apart on all aspects of social reform

Polly Toynbee
Wednesday November 19, 2003
The Guardian

The spectacle over the next few days of Tony Blair and George Bush beaming and backslapping remains as puzzling as ever. Is this just realpolitik business-as-usual, putting out more flags in the Mall for another necessary but unsavoury foreign leader? If so, Blair plays his part well, his energetically sincere smile never faltering.

Even in private he hotly protests that the Bush he knows is nothing like the one of caricature. No, no, the president is intelligent, thoughtful, well-informed, a good listener and a lot of other entirely incredible adjectives. Look into Blair`s face and you see not one flicker: he`s a good bluffer. He knows no one believes a word of it, but he will pretend it is so until the last. He has made his fateful bed of nails and now he has to lie on it - and lie through his teeth about it, too. If he has regrets, if ever in the still of night he doubts whether he took the right path, he will never let on. You can bet there will be nothing to suggest doubt about his tragic error in his autobiography. We have yet to see if he is eventually broken by it, as Lyndon Johnson was by Vietnam: it is not impossible.

But it is intellectually impossible to believe Blair and Bush share more than the same brand of toothpaste - as Bush once joked. Only Colgate explains the artificial grin between this most ultra rightwing president and Britain`s social democrat prime minister.

This era in British politics has been not unlike Johnson`s construction of the Great Society, with huge new social programmes rolled out in the biggest public-spending programme of our political lifetime. With much of the same optimism and endeavour of early 1960s America, Labour came to power in 1997 determined to tackle poverty, social exclusion and unemployment. Health and education spending are leaping up to meet the EU average for the first time. Poverty abolition is on target to meet its quarter-way mark by 2005 - 1.1 million fewer poor children. Most of Labour`s ideas, energy and funding has gone to programmes concerned with social justice. We can argue round the edges about whether choice is the wrong way, more tax could be raised or more could be done faster, but the spending facts speak for themselves: this is a successful social democracy.

Now compare that to the devastation George Bush and his neo-conservative ideologues are wreaking upon America. The last vestiges of the Great Society programmes are in the process of being dismantled, if the White House gets its way. Programmes that survived the depredations of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr are falling under the Bush Jnr axe. The axe is the natural result of the phenomenal tax cuts of the past three years - $1.3 trillion in 2001, $96bn in 2002 and $330bn this year.

Nearly half of the main tax cut went straight into the pockets of the richest 1% of Americans. The Bush plutocracy is led by a cabinet whose wealth is 10 times that of Bill Clinton`s. Now they plan to abolish inheritance tax - which only the top 2% pay - and capital gains taxes. Cuts in federal social programmes are an ideological as well as a financial twin to tax cuts. The neo-conservatives are on an ideological crusade to slash and burn big government in Washington, whatever it takes, shredding taxes and social programmes as they go: the wild right mindset of the militias has seized the citadel.

Johnson`s greatest success was his Head Start programme for under-fives. Founded 38 years ago, every study shows how intensive support for poor children with education, health and nutrition has delivered children ready to learn when they enter primary school. One famous study followed for 30 years the destiny of a group of children from the programme and compared them with a control group of poor children who were among the many who never got a Head Start place. It found that every $1 Head Start spent saved $7 later on social security, mental health and crime. Many more Head Start children went on to university, owned their own homes and never drew welfare. Another study just out has revised the sum to $8.74 for every dollar spent. It was the well-monitored results of the US Head Start programme that inspired Britain`s similar Sure Start children`s centres. A third of people working for Head Start are mothers who were themselves helped by it.

The strength of this evidence saved it from previous Republican presidents: Nixon increased funding for Head Start. But now George Bush plans, in effect, to dismantle it. The House of Representatives has pushed through his wish to devolve funding and control from federal level down to individual states. But as the states are heavily in debt and already cutting their existing social programmes, they are likely to use this block grant for other things. Head Start risks fading away, covering ever fewer children with an ever thinner programme. Already 40% of poor children are not covered. An official government General Accounting Office report finds that federal funds are eight times more likely to reach poor families than funds devolved to the states to target the poor.

It is a Bush hallmark that this dismantling goes with a guileful promise to "improve" Head Start by demanding more graduate teachers are employed. That doubles the cost, yet with cuts and no extra money for teachers the programme will shrink drastically. There has been a great groundswell of protest, with a recent full-page ad in the New York Times taken out by leading business CEOs, such as the head of Hasbro toys, makers of Action Man. Head Start rates as the most popular government programme of all time.

But this is only the most high-profile of Bush plans to dismantle federal social programmes by devolving them down to the states with inadequate funds, scant ring fencing and no monitoring of the effect. Unemployment insurance, Medicaid (healthcare for poor families), child welfare, food stamps and housing are all in line. Congress may manage to modify and delay some of it - Head Start devolution may now start with just eight pilot states - but this heralds a further erosion of what was anyway the thinnest, meanest, weakest social system in the western world.

So what do Bush and Blair talk about over their fireside bottle of mineral water? Where is this fabled meeting of minds? Once they have done whatever is to be done - or not done - on Iraq, Guantanamo and trade tariffs, once they have small-talked wives and children, what then? Here is the leader with the greatest wealth and power on Earth at his command, squandering it, abusing it, misusing it with every step he takes. The two men can hardly compare notes on pet projects and policies. It is astonishingly difficult to talk for long or with any closeness to someone whose politics are obnoxious.

In truth, whatever appearances suggest over the next two days, there is precious little shared between them beyond political destinies so fatefully linked in Iraq.

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Improved security prompts pullback
Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Wednesday November 19, 2003
The Guardian

The US military is to pull its troops from a key town in the heartland of Iraq`s resistance campaign because of an improvement in security, a senior general said yesterday.

By January the 82nd Airborne Division, which controls the west of Iraq, will withdraw from Ramadi, 68 miles west of Baghdad, and leave security to Iraqi police.

Major General Chuck Swannack, commander of the 82nd Airborne, said: "I believe our joint patrols with the police between now and January 1 will allow us to move to a second stage in regards to security in Ramadi where American forces step back."

He said US troops would still operate some joint patrols with the Iraqi police and be ready to bring in bigger forces if called upon.

Gen Swannack said a similar withdrawal may be made in the nearby town of Hit, also once troubled by frequent attacks on the US military. But his troops would stay in Falluja, which is in the same area north-west of Baghdad but has seen much stiffer resistance to the US occupation.

Ten days ago Gen Swannack and General John Abizaid, the chief of US central command, met community leaders in Ramadi to warn them about the growing insurgency. "What we said was: `Our patience is wearing thin and we are not going to tolerate it`," Gen Swannack said. "I believe that message was clear to them."

He said attacks in Falluja had since dropped off. At the same time as agreeing to withdraw from Ramadi the US military has also intensified its operations in the more troubled towns nearby.

F16 jets have dropped bombs in Falluja for the first time since the war and there have been heavy artillery and mortar attacks by the US in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein`s birthplace, north of Baghdad.

Yesterday, in the heaviest bombing operation since the war, jets and Apache attack helicopters bombed targets in Baquba, 30 miles north-east of Baghdad, and the nearby town of Samarra.

Gen Swannack defended the heavy use of force, which has seen the destruction of several houses owned by suspected fighters. "I think it demonstrates our resolve," he said.

"It is a war and we are going to prosecute this war not holding one hand behind our back. As commanders we might have been a little bit reluctant before to use aircraft. Now there are no holds barred to what we use. Take the fight to the enemy."

Commanders in Baghdad have been less successful in trying to quell resistance. The nightly curfew for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan was dropped and troops opened the July 14 suspension bridge, a thoroughfare in the centre of the city, for the first time since the war. But since then there have been frequent mortar attacks on the US headquarters and the bridge has had to be closed because of security concerns.

· Iranian officials discussed reconstruction projects and border security yesterday with representatives from Iraq`s governing council in a sign of a more pragmatic approach towards their US-occupied neighbour. Although Iran has condemned the American presence in Iraq it has decided to recognise the governing council and has pledged $300m (£175m) in aid.
Dan De Luce


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`Mock killing` by US colonel
Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday November 19, 2003
The Guardian

A US lieutenant colonel went before a military hearing in Iraq yesterday charged with beating an Iraqi detainee and staging a mock execution to scare information out of him.

The case of Lt Col Allen West has become a cause célèbre in the US as conservatives have flooded radio talk shows in support of his self-defence claim, arguing that the information helped his unit avoid an ambush.

Lt Col West is the most senior US officer since the war began to be charged with ill-treating an Iraqi civilian.

He is facing a preliminary military hearing in Tikrit which will decide whether he should go before a full court martial.

According to the charges against him, he struck the detained Iraqi, Yahya Jhodri Hamoody, on the head and body and threatened to kill him during an interrogation in the town of Taji, north of Baghdad, on August 20.

One of yesterday`s witnesses, Col West`s driver, Private Michael Johnson, said Mr Hamoody was an Iraqi policeman who was believed to have information about a plot to kill Lt Col West.

Pte Johnson said that after an hour`s interrogation Mr Hamoody was taken outside and forced to lean over a sandbox used by soldiers to clear their weapons after a patrol.

Lt Col West then fired his pistol past Mr Hamoody`s ear, he said.

Lt Col West`s lawyer, Neal Puckett, said that the interrogation saved lives because it prevented an attack on the officer and his unit.

"He doesn`t deny doing what is alleged in the charges but we as a defence team deny the criminality of the charges," he said.

Iraq`s interim human rights minister, Abdel Basset Turki, said yesterday the occupation forces had committed violations and must hold its soldiers accountable.


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A mechanized mortar unit with the Fourth Infantry Division, operating early today near Tikrit, 110 miles north of Baghdad, helped keep pressure on districts suspected of harboring guerrillas. Tikrit, the ancestral home of Saddam Hussein, has been the scene of recent attacks on allied forces.
November 19, 2003
Few Signs of Infiltration by Foreign Fighters in Iraq
By JOEL BRINKLEY

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 18 — The commanding general of the United States Army division that patrols much of Iraq`s western borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia said Tuesday that his men had encountered only a handful of foreign fighters trying to sneak into the country to attack American and allied forces.

"I want to underscore that most of the attacks on our forces are by former regime loyalists and other Iraqis, not foreign forces," said the officer, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division.

His view was echoed by Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, which controls northern Iraq and parts of its borders with Syria, Turkey and Iran.

During a briefing on Monday for a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, he said that since May, his men had captured perhaps 20 foreign fighters trying to slip into the country from those three countries.

During a period in which border patrols have been intensified and new technology is being used, that number suggests only modest foreign incursions into Iraq, in contrast to estimates by the Bush administration.

In Washington late last month, officials estimated the number of foreign fighters in Iraq at 1,000 to 3,000, and the White House has been suggesting that foreign fighters are continuing to enter the country and are behind many of the attacks, linking the war in Iraq to the global campaign against terror.

In a news conference on Oct. 28, President Bush said: "We are mindful of the fact that some might want to come into Iraq to attack and to create conditions of fear and chaos. The foreign terrorists are trying to create conditions of fear and retreat because they fear a free and peaceful state in the midst of a part of the world where terror has found recruits."

During a news briefing on Tuesday evening, General Swannack, who took over the region two months ago, said his men had captured 13 foreign guerrillas and killed 7 others. Ten days ago, Col. David A. Teeples, who is part of General Swannack`s command, said only a small number of the foreigners were among the 500 to 600 people his forces had captured in attacks on coalition forces.

American efforts to prevent attacks continued Tuesday, when American fighter jets bombed suspected guerrilla positions near Tikrit, in central Iraq. Commanders called in AC-130 gunships, A-10 attack planes and Apache helicopter gunships, as well as Air Force F-16 and F-15E fighter-bombers with 500-pound bombs, the military said, in the largest bombardment in the area since President Bush declared the end of major combat on May 1.

In Baghdad on Tuesday night, the military said it had fired heavy artillery at a suspected insurgent position.

In Washington, a military official disclosed that the Army`s Fourth Infantry Division had destroyed a house that belonged to Gen. Izzat Ibrahim, one of Saddam Hussein`s closest aides, who American officials believe is playing a significant role in the insurgency. It is not yet known whether General Ibrahim was inside when a satellite-guided missile destroyed his home, about 10 miles southwest of Tikrit, Mr. Hussein`s ancestral home, the official said.

But the strike illustrated what military officials said was a new twist to their counterinsurgency campaign: attack bomb-making factories, weapons warehouses, guerrilla meeting places and insurgents` homes with no warning, using high-altitude bombing or long-range missile strikes. Officials indicated that it was clear the general`s house was being used as a meeting place.

"This approach gives us more tactical surprise," a military official said. "They`re still using houses and neighborhoods, but we`ve been removing sanctuaries and keeping them off balance."

Without speaking of those operations specifically, General Swannack said the stepped-up offensive "demonstrates our resolve, and we are not going to fight this one with one hand tied behind our backs." Echoing a historical quote from the British military, the general said the Army was going to "use a sledgehammer to smash a walnut."

Military officials in Iraq also reported the arrest of eight Iraqis during searches in Mosul. Soldiers seized a five-gallon container of gunpowder, three grenades, five fuses, two cases of rifle ammunition and two rifles, the United States Army said.

The military has made a rather public effort in recent days to tamp down speculation that they are fighting a guerrilla war against foreign terrorists. Late last week, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the senior American military commander in the Middle East, said loyalists to Saddam Hussein — not foreign terrorists — posed the greatest danger to American troops and to stability in Iraq.

General Swannack said Iraq`s borders had been "porous" in the months before he took command of the region. The number of soldiers patrolling the borders has almost tripled, to 20,000, he said.

General Petraeus, in the north, said his men had deployed new technology along the border that can locate anyone or anything trying to cross it. With that, he said, "if you don`t see anything moving, then you know you have got control."

A few days ago, General Swannack said, his men came across their largest group of foreigners trying to sneak across from Syria. "We identified six of them at the border," he said. "One pulled a knife, and he was killed. We secured the other five."


Eric Schmitt in Washington contributed reporting for this article.



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November 18, 2003
Q&A: Brzezinski on American Foreign Policy

From the Council on Foreign Relations, November 18, 2003
http://www.cfr.org/

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as President Jimmy Carter`s national security adviser, sharply attacks the Bush administration`s handling of foreign policy, asserting that despite its worldwide power, the United States lacks "international credibility" and U.S. standing in the world is at "an unprecedented low point." Counselor and trustee for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., Brzezinski says what`s needed is "a return to a foreign policy based on moderation and derived from bipartisan consensus." He also is scornful of the administration`s peace-making efforts in the Middle East, saying that, "in the name of fighting terrorism," Washington has lent "totally one-sided support for the most repressive Israeli government."

Brzezinski, the author of a forthcoming book, "The Choice," was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on November 17, 2003.

In a speech you gave in October, you said that "American power worldwide is at its historic zenith," but that "American global political standing is at its nadir." Why that contradiction?

It is self-evident. After the U.S. military success both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the United States is the only power today with a military capability that is literally worldwide. There is no other country with such a credible capability. But at the same time, from every indication that we have--from public opinion polls, foreign government reactions, and from the reports of American journalists--today America lacks international credibility and the United States` standing in the world, in the political sense, is at an unprecedented low point. The categorical assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction destroyed the trust that others had in our word. That is a serious development which detracts from America`s world role.

You have made the point that the United States is very isolated. If you were asked by the Bush administration, what would you suggest to repair this problem?

There are several steps that would help to ameliorate what is clearly a very unfortunate development. The first and broadest would be a return to a foreign policy based on moderation and derived from bipartisan consensus. Moderation and bipartisan consensus go hand in hand. American foreign policy lately has been formed largely by a rather extremist orientation within the Republican Party itself, dominated by the outlook of Christian fundamentalists and the strategic views of the so-called neoconservatives. That does not provide the basis for serious bipartisanship.

Beyond that, we have to do a great deal to consult much more with foreign governments and not operate on the premise that if someone is not with us, he is automatically against us. That is a self-destructive approach which eliminates the possibility of consensus. Thirdly, I think we have to do a great deal to reactivate an intelligence service that can give us reliable information that would provide the basis for intelligent decision-making, not decision-making based on worst case scenarios. That in turn would mean that other governments, in particular friendly governments, will again rely on our judgments and assessments as the basis also for their own policies.

On the intelligence problem, you have had a lot of experience in your years in and out of government working with intelligence agencies. Why do you think the intelligence community is in such poor shape right now?

I can`t give you a detailed answer because I`m not a student, so to speak, of their internal bureaucratic dynamics, but I would hazard judgments. First, the nature of the threat has become quite different from what it used to be. It used to be highly focused, based on a totalitarian regime and expressed largely through science and technology-based acquisitions of military power.

You`re talking about Soviet missile threats and the like?

Yes. The CIA, as a consequence, over the years became increasingly effective in deciphering the nature and the dimensions of that threat. I think today we have a far more diversified, vague threat in which reliance on human intelligence is far more important than ever before. We simply have failed to develop the necessary clandestine service with the necessary clandestine culture of operations. And the second reason is political pressure, which I think clearly took place in the course of the last two years to provide support for the kind of highly alarmist assessments policy makers were making on their own regarding the nature and scale of the Iraqi threat.

Talking about Iraq, in your speech, you made the point that the United States should transfer sovereignty to Iraq as soon as possible. You said that "sovereignty is a word that is used often but it has really no specific meaning." Now the Bush administration has said that essentially sovereignty will be given to the Iraqis by June of next year. Is that a step forward?

Yes, it certainly is a step forward. My concern is that it may be a little late in the sense that we will be less likely to get the credit that we would have gotten had we taken this step somewhat earlier. I remember participating in some very top level meetings in which the argument for that kind of initiative was being made by some outside advisers, including myself, and it was summarily dismissed.

What was the argument against it?

That it would dilute our control.

Now the administration looks like it is in a rush to exit Iraq as quickly as it can.

Well, there is a risk in that as well. It increases the incentive for the insurgency to persist until and beyond that deadline.

The administration says U.S. troops will remain in Iraq until the mission is over. Do you suspect this timing is related to the 2004 presidential elections?

I think perhaps the readers of this interview can make their own judgment on that.

You are a long-time Democrat, but you`ve also been a proponent of bipartisanship in foreign affairs. Are you planning to get involved with any Democratic candidate in particular?

First of all, let me say that I am a long-time Democrat who consistently supports the Democratic position on domestic affairs, but I am also of the view that in foreign affairs the president makes a lot of difference, and there have been occasions when I have actually voted for Republican candidates for the presidency. In other words, I do discriminate in the area of foreign policy, though I favor, as a general proposition, a bipartisan foreign policy. I do have a candidate toward whom I strongly lean, but I don`t want to give my public views the imprint of political opportunism by relating my views and my position to some candidate.

I speak out now because of very genuine concern for America`s role in the world. I think that role is being undermined by some recent policies and the way those policies are projected, the kind of language that is being used to explain it, the kind of narrow focus on one issue alone, namely terrorism as the central obsession of the United States in the world. These are dangerous tendencies.

Can you talk about that a bit? Are you concerned by what you call an obsession with the "war on terrorism?"

That`s correct. Terrorism cannot be isolated from its political, historical, and even social context. A lot of countries have dealt with terrorism over the last 150 years. In some cases, it has beset countries for years. What makes it more urgent now, of course, is the potential risk of terrorists becoming armed with increasingly destructive weapons. But that makes it all the more urgent that [terrorism] should be addressed intelligently and in a larger context. It should not be theologized about, dogmatized, and also certainly [not made] a focus of periodic waves of domestic panic.

Since Iraq is so intertwined with the politics of the Middle East, what is your view on the progress made or not made by the Bush administration on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian question?

First of all, you are absolutely right in emphasizing that the problems of the Middle East are conflated, and certainly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iraq are interactive. That`s absolutely a fundamental truth. I think the administration has essentially abandoned the notion of any serious effort on behalf of peace. In the name of fighting terrorism, it has provided totally one-sided support for the most repressive Israeli government, which is pursuing policies that are in direct head-on conflict with the policies, for instance, of what Yitzhak Rabin [the Israeli prime minister assassinated in 1993] pursued. I think if he were alive today, Israel wouldn`t be as isolated and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict wouldn`t be as mutually destructive as it has become in the last two or so years.

I think the vagueness of U.S. pronouncements unfortunately provides an umbrella for a very negative turn of events. My only silver lining is my sense that both the Israeli and Palestinian publics are getting to realize that they have to turn away from extremism. I hope the Geneva accords, worked out by unofficial Israeli and Palestinian public figures, which will be made public on December 1, will win so much international support that this will give some momentum to peace. I happen to think that the vast majority of the American Jewish community is liberal and broad-minded and once there is a meaningful alternative, I think it would begin to support a more sustained effort to make peace.

If that doesn`t happen, then I think the option of an eventual two-state solution is going to be lost within a year. The combination of the colonial settlements and the new wall will make a two-state solution increasingly unavailable.

The idea of a one-state solution seems to be gaining some traction among some Palestinians.

I don`t think it is a solution frankly. It`s a dire prospect in the sense that there may be no alternative. Pretty soon, the condition of the West Bank and Gaza under Sharon`s rule is going to be an absolute imitation of the apartheid of South Africa: [so-called] Bantustans for the Palestinians, colonial fortified settlements for the Israeli settlers, a wall cutting up the West Bank into little islands of poverty and resentment. It is a tragic prospect and that is why it deserves serious attention.

Of course, you must look back at the original Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel in 1978 when you were national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. There was so much enthusiasm at that point, with everyone thinking the Middle East was on the road to a permanent solution. It is kind of sad, isn`t it?

It is sad, and I think the United States, starting with us, the Carter administration, which was then in office, just didn`t pursue hard enough the issue of settlements. I`ve always felt that settlements would make the attainment of peace increasingly difficult, and of course, in the subsequent 25 years, the number of settlements has dramatically increased, and so has, therefore, the difficulty of finding some kind of peaceful solution.



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November 19, 2003
`Mistakes Were Made`
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

What if, by some miracle, everyone `fessed up to mistakes made about the surprisingly easy overthrow of Saddam and its unexpectedly bloody aftermath, and mistakes now being made in building democracy?

(1) In London, the amalgam of isolationists, pacifists and anti-Blair leftists — once certain they would spoil a state visit by branding the U.S. president a monster militarist — would generously admit that they had been a noisy minority, and that their discourtesy triggered a reaffirmation by most Britons of the ties between two freedom-speaking nations that lead the world in defeating tyrants.

(2) Gen. Wesley Clark would have to admit that his early reading of the Pentagon war plan on CNN was unduly panicky. Other analysts who feared heavy civilian casualties, masses of refugees, environmental disaster in the torching of oil fields and the mother of all battles in the narrow streets of Baghdad were in egregious error.

(3) Hawkish idealists like me who believed that Iraqi scientists, including "Dr. Germs," would come forward promptly to reveal where supplies of biological weapons were hidden were mistaken, at least for now.

(4) SecDef Donald Rumsfeld would freely admit that he did not anticipate the disappearance of Saddam`s intact Republican Guard and the formation of a Baathist terrorist insurgency that would kill coalition soldiers and drive out U.N. and other relief agencies. On the same day, SecState Colin Powell and spymaster George Tenet would admit that their bureaucracies` resistance to the pre-invasion training in Europe of Iraqi expatriate volunteers to perform police and anti-guerrilla duties was unfortunate.

(5) Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who became Jacques Chirac`s toy spitz in opposing America as well as neighbors in Europe, would confess that his positioning of Germany as an unreliable Atlantic ally and a Central European bully was a diplomatic and economic blunder that his current attempt to sweet-talk U.S. investors is not about to rectify.

(6) Former spooks who convinced reporters that there was never any connection between Saddam`s Iraqi regime and Osama bin Laden`s terror network would forthrightly assert they were uninformed about the decade-long links that were revealed in the classified memo the Senate Intelligence Committee requested from Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith. (The secret memo detailing 50 instances has gone relatively uncovered by major media because it surfaced in the current Weekly Standard, but is the subject of an automatic leak investigation — yet another time-wasting mistake.)

(7) Kurdish leaders on Iraq`s Governing Council who indulged past grievances by spurning Turkey`s offer of 10,000 troops to help suppress the terror campaign would realize, too late, that they not only dismayed Americans who supported the Kurdish cause through thick and thin, but also missed their historic opportunity to reverse the tide of ill will that hurts the Kurds more than the Turks.

(8) Paul Bremer has already as much as admitted that his disbanding of Saddam`s army, especially officers, was a mistake. But if this military group, made up almost completely of Saddam`s ruling Sunni minority, is to be reconstituted and re-armed, who is to say that — after elections are held giving most power to the majority Shiites and coalition troops leave — it won`t stage a coup? Those now so certain that disbanding Saddam`s army was a mistake would have to own up to their greater error.

(9) In the same way, the U.S. has now admitted being mistaken for months in following the wishes of the Shiite leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, that the Governing Council draft a constitution before holding elections and transferring sovereignty. Sunnis on the council balked; they fear the Shiite majority. Under White House pressure, Bremer prevailed on the ayatollah to go along with sovereignty first, elections later.

(10) On that Great Mea Culpa Day, what would be the biggest mistake admitted? It would come from Western experts who for years have been saying, in pessimistic condescension, that Arabs in their culture and religion are unsuited to democracy.

Mistakes have been made in overcoming that notion. Mistakes will be made in winning this war. But advancing freedom is never a mistake.



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November 19, 2003
Safety First
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

It`s easy to criticize the Bush administration for its foolishness in invading Iraq, at a cost so far of 400 American lives and (one study suggests) at least 11,000 Iraqi lives. But it`s much harder to figure out what to do next.

And while the administration`s new approach is risky, weakens our control and may result in less democracy than the U.S. had hoped, it is probably the best of a bunch of bad options.

Democrats are having a field day pointing out the problems, but their suggestions for what to do next are pretty unhelpful. Most Democrats want to hand over more power to the United Nations and bring in NATO troops, and while those steps would help, they certainly don`t amount to a solution to the mess.

The reality is that the U.N. and NATO have even less stomach for suicide bombs than Americans do. The U.N., after all, has been frantically cutting staff in Baghdad. And if we can`t get NATO countries to secure Afghanistan, why would it be easier in Iraq — particularly now that guerrillas have displayed their multiculturalism by blowing up 19 Italians?

"How do we get out of this hell to see the stars again?" an editorial in the Italian newspaper Repubblica said on Sunday, alluding to the last lines of Dante`s "Inferno." It added that the Bush administration was "going through a period of insanity that is worsening every day."

And Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, welcomed Mr. Bush to London with this reflection: "I actually think that Bush is the greatest threat to life on this planet that we`ve most probably ever seen."

Ah, yes, the cheery warmth of our staunch pro-American friends, the Italians and the British.

I`ve asked two Democratic presidential candidates, Richard Gephardt and another who spoke off the record, if it`s really credible to offer the U.N. and NATO as a solution to Iraq. They harrumph a bit in a way that I interpret to mean: "Maybe not, but it works in front of television cameras."

Meanwhile, the administration is overselling the benefits of the Iraqification of security. Sure, it will help to have more Iraqi policemen and troops: Iraqi guerrillas who lay down roadside mines have been known to scrawl a warning on the street in Arabic. Thus American troops hurtle blindly into danger.

The problem is that while the administration boasts that 130,000 Iraqis have been incorporated into the security forces, most have trained for a few weeks or less (in some cases, for just one day). Relying too quickly on these Iraqis for security as we draw down our own troops will simply be a replay of Afghanistan: a slide into chaos.

Security is paramount. Iraq`s economy can`t revive until there`s security. And the half of the population that is female is arguably worse off now than under Saddam, until security improves. As one U.N. official told me, Iraqi women were once raped by Qusay and Uday, Saddam`s sons; now they are raped by everybody else. Fewer women are in the labor force than under Saddam because now they don`t dare leave their homes.

A new report by the U.N. Population Fund offers a devastating portrait of the plight of Iraqi women since the war. Contraceptive use has fallen because of supply breakdowns, unsafe abortions are increasing, sexual abductions are on the rise, and a combination of poor security and hospital looting has left many women without access to medical care.

"Treatment of problems, such as sexually transmitted infections, breast and cervical cancer, is now impossible," the report declares.

Let me suggest three steps that are worth taking. First, bring back regular Iraqi Army units to bolster security. Second, be more attentive to nationalism — that means we should avoid privatization (even though it`s a good idea) because Iraqis will suspect us of stealing their assets. Third, resist the temptation to anoint Ahmad Chalabi, who is resented by ordinary Iraqis as our puppet.

The bottom line, though, is that neither Republicans nor Democrats are being straight with the public: now that Mr. Bush has gotten us into this mess, there`s no simple way out.

We need a name for this war. "Operation Iraqi Freedom" never rolled off the tongue, and "Iraq war" creates confusion with the 1991 war. So send in your entries by mail or e-mail. I`ll report the top five suggestions and give those writers Iraqi 250-dinar notes with Saddam`s portrait.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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washingtonpost.com
U.S. Plans New Iraq Proposal For U.N.
Resolution Will Seek More Troops and Aid

By Robin Wright and Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 19, 2003; Page A01


The United States is preparing to seek another U.N. resolution to back its new plan for Iraq and ensure that the first postwar Iraqi government does not fail for lack of international recognition, according to U.S. officials and European and U.N. diplomats.

A new resolution could also help win commitments for additional troops and reconstruction aid from other countries, which Washington has been unable to secure with three previous resolutions, U.S. officials said. In addition, it might lead to a renewed U.N. role in Iraq in helping oversee the selection of a new provisional government.

"We want to pave the way for international acceptance for a new government and get a blessing for its legitimacy. We can`t afford to set up a government for failure and let the international community later say it doesn`t recognize it," a senior U.S. official said yesterday.

An administration official added: "In the end, we will need a new resolution to bless our exit strategy. We could go into Iraq without the United Nations, but it`ll be much harder to get out and leave behind a viable government if it doesn`t have some form of U.N. approval."

In a choreographed sequence, the United States will wait until after the Iraqi Governing Council has presented its timetable for the transition to a provisional government. Under the most recent U.N. resolution, passed in October, the council must present its plan by Dec. 15, although the Iraqis may do it sooner because of the momentum behind a transfer of power, diplomats at the United Nations said yesterday.

In Europe, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told reporters that any resolution now would be "premature." And a senior administration official traveling with President Bush in Britain said that the U.S.-led occupation does not need an additional U.N. resolution.

But Powell discussed the need for a new U.N. resolution yesterday with L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. governor of Iraq, U.S. officials said. And the language from U.S. officials and key U.N. members strongly signaled a return to the world body.

"I think we will want to discuss what more is needed, in terms of the United Nations, in terms of its functions, in terms of its ability to support the political transition that will now be underway, and then you can work back from that to say, is a Security Council resolution a good thing," the senior administration official traveling with Bush told reporters. "I believe if there`s something welcoming this political transition, that that would always be useful."

Even though U.S. officials have not decided exactly what a new resolution would stipulate, the United States and Britain have already begun putting out feelers. Deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley traveled Monday to New York to brief U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and Security Council members on U.S. plans. U.N. envoys said that they were receptive to a resolution endorsing the new U.S. strategy, although countries were cautious about the prospect of committing troops or resources.

Chinese Ambassador Wang Guangya said Hadley conveyed Washington`s desire to enlist U.N. support during the transition to a provisional Iraqi government next summer. Council members responded positively, he added.

"We asked what sort of assistance or help they might need during this period," Wang said. "The Americans have a change of their approaches to the Iraq issue. Certainly for China and for many others we welcome it. Because now you have the intention of giving back sovereignty to the Iraqi people earlier."

Germany and France, which opposed the U.S. war on Iraq, are also willing to consider a new resolution, which the administration is seeking to expedite an exit from Iraq, partly to diminish the occupation as an issue in the 2004 elections.

"Losing the peace is not an option," German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer told reporters in Washington yesterday. "We don`t exclude another U.N. resolution."

Some countries opposed to U.S. policy in Iraq noted that the new plan to transfer authority by June mirrors earlier proposals from Germany, France, Russia and the U.N. secretary general.

The United Nations also appears to be receptive to renewing its role in Iraq, cut short by two bomb attacks that led to the withdrawal of its staff. In New York, Annan told reporters this week that he is close to appointing a new special representative to oversee the U.N. activities there, after appeals from Powell to reengage in Iraq.

But Gunter Pleuger, Germany`s ambassador to the United Nations, Annan and other envoys warned that any agreement on a political handover may not be enough to get the United Nations to return or to prompt governments to commit troops if the violence does not diminish.

In turn, Washington and London have also made clear that they are not prepared to engage in a prolonged rehash of earlier Security Council clashes over Iraq policy in exchange for a new resolution.

Staff writer Peter Slevin contributed to this report from London.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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A woman in Tikrit walks through the rubble that was her home, destroyed by U.S. forces.
washingtonpost.com
`Sending a Message` With a Show of Force
Rural Iraqi Homes Destroyed in U.S. Offensive

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 19, 2003; Page A21


TIKRIT, Iraq, Nov. 18 -- The house of Omar Khalil Ibrahim is a flattened jumble of broken bricks and roofing. Three of his neighbors` homes, still standing, are riddled with big holes made by tank shells that blasted through two or three walls. A dead cow lies rotting beside a broken shed.

The scene in central Iraq was the result of a U.S. military offensive aimed at taking the initiative away from anti-occupation guerrillas. It is using helicopter gunships, tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, as well as an occasional jet strike, unleashing 500-pound bombs and satellite-guided rockets.

One high-ranking commander described it as a "no-holds barred" operation. The targets are suspected hideaways, command centers and safe houses of the elusive guerrillas, U.S. officials said.

"We have to use these capabilities to take that fight to the enemy, and why not?" said Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, which patrols western Iraq. "That`s why we use them. They are the right systems."

For all the heavy and sophisticated armaments, the targets in Hawijat al-Ali, a rural hamlet near Tikrit, are small-scale. The houses are single-story structures set within walled rose gardens.

"We were surprised by all the big shooting," said Kafi Khalaf, Ibrahim`s wife. "They spent a lot to get rid of our houses."

U.S. military officials say the show of force is a necessary response to escalating attacks in central Iraq. Maj. Gordon Tate, a spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division in Tikrit, said the offensive, which began Oct. 1, picked up steam after Nov. 2, when guerrillas shot down a U.S. CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter near the western town of Fallujah, killing 16 soldiers. Rocket and artillery operations replaced search-and-seizure raids that characterized U.S. military activity in the summer and early fall.

"We are sending a message. We are showing we are here," Tate said. Among the weapons now in use are rockets that each disperse 960 little anti-personnel bombs. Five Iraqis were killed Monday night in a 4th Infantry Division attack, Tate said.

Tate said that sympathizers of deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein pay mercenaries to harass U.S. troops. "We want them to think twice," he said. "They should leave out of fear or face death."

To curb the use of roadside bombs that are among the deadliest weapons employed by Iraqi resistance fighters, soldiers have orders to shoot and kill anyone seen digging a hole alongside thoroughfares, Tate said. The same goes for anyone seen carrying a weapon, he said.

Emphasizing the new get-tough approach, U.S. troops in dozens of armored vehicles patrolled in convoys throughout Tikrit Monday. "They are saying, `I dare you,` " said Ashraf Skarki, a farmer. "The noise and dust, it is all part of their letter to Tikrit."

The activity is not limited to this town, which is notoriously hostile to the U.S. occupation. In Baqubah, several miles east of Tikrit, a pair of F-15 fighter jets, launched from Qatar on the Persian Gulf, dropped four 500-pound bombs Tuesday on some abandoned farmhouses, military officials said. Apache helicopter gunships and artillery poured fire on targets on Baqubah`s outskirts and then ground troops pounded the area with 155mm howitzers and 120mm mortars.

"We have taken action on these targets before, but this is to demonstrate one more time that we have significant firepower and we can use it at our discretion," said Lt. Col. Mark Young, commander of the 67th Armor Regiment`s 3rd Battalion, part of the 4th Infantry Division. "This is the biggest operation we`ve had in the Baqubah area in terms of tonnage and volume" of munitions, he said.

On Monday, two U.S. soldiers were killed near Balad, about 35 miles from Baqubah, one in a rocket-propelled grenade attack, the other by a roadside bomb.

"We will not let these insurgents dance on our territory. We need to maintain an offensive stance and let the enemy know that we will come down with a heavy hand," said Lt. Col. Steve Russell, a battalion commander with the 4th Infantry Division.

In Baghdad at mid-evening, U.S. forces fired heavy weapons at suspected guerrilla positions in the far western part of the city. A series of blasts reverberated across the capital. For a second consecutive night, the city was largely blacked out. U.S. officials blamed the electrical outage on a storm that they said toppled high-tension wires, although the weather has been calm for several days all across Iraq.

Exactly who the guerrillas are remains a mystery, even to commanders on the ground. At a briefing in Baghdad on Tuesday, Swannack said that 90 percent of the fighters that U.S. forces have captured or killed were loyalists of Hussein or Iraqi religious militants. While the Bush administration has described foreign fighters as posing a mounting threat, Swannack estimated that only 10 percent of the guerrillas had come from abroad.

"We are not finding foreign fighters coming across the borders in significant numbers to do the fighting," said Swannack, whose soldiers patrol a vast swath of Iraq that borders Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Residents of Hawijat al-Ali doubted the offensive in the Tikrit area would be successful. "Do they really think making this kind of ruin will stop the resistance?" said Jamal Shahib, who described himself as a shepherd.

Shahib and other residents said U.S. soldiers arrived Monday night searching for Ali Ahmed Hamid and Hussein Ali, two teenagers suspected of being members of Saddam`s Fedayeen, a militia created in the 1990s as an irregular adjunct to Iraq`s army and secret police. They did not find the young men. The soldiers arrested Omar Khalil Ibrahim, 55, and told the residents to leave their houses. They then unleashed the barrages of firepower to destroy the structures.

Everyone denied that anyone had a connection to Saddam`s Fedayeen. One woman, in a fit of emotion, began to chant, "With our blood and our souls, we will defend you, O Saddam."

Correspondent Anthony Shadid in Baghdad contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
If We Cut and Run


By Eliot A. Cohen

Wednesday, November 19, 2003; Page A27


Suppose President Bush -- or for that matter a Democratic successor -- were to decide that the project of reconstructing Iraq was impossible or too costly. What would cut-and-run look like, and what consequences would it have?

Of course, an administration would do something that would look more like "cut and shuffle" than skedaddle. Somalia after the "Blackhawk Down" incident would provide the model -- a pulling back from engagement in heavily populated areas, a hunkering down of American forces in their compounds, a declaration that the main mission (overthrowing Saddam Hussein or neutering Iraq as a menace to its neighbors) had been accomplished, and a disengagement over a year or two. During that period, authorized but anonymous senior officials would complain about the impossibility of getting Iraqis to take charge of their own destiny, while U.S. troops on the ground would do what they could to obtain a decent interval of stability before the whole mess disintegrated into obvious failure.

The cardinal fact is that no one would be fooled. Everyone -- in Iraq, here and abroad -- would understand what was going on, as was the case in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia. Adnan Pachachi, the oldest member of the Iraqi Governing Council, put it this way a few days ago: "In the current security crisis, any talk of a withdrawal would swell the ranks of the insurgents." Of course it would -- knowing that the hard men were winning, would you want to be on our side or theirs? The locals have to live there, and people want to side with the winners, particularly brutal winners. The insurgents would have no incentive to make it easy for us -- the more humiliating the American exit, the better the chance that the United States would stay out of that part of the world for good and the more satisfying the revenge.

Let us say, though, that American forces nonetheless got out, accompanied (one would hope) by tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who had put their faith in their American liberators and at least had received asylum in return. What would then happen in Iraq? A return of Hussein to complete power? Not likely: His army is in ruins, and neither Kurds nor Shiites would be as easy victims as in the past. But internecine mayhem? Surely -- both within the various confessional communities and certainly between them, there would be ample opportunities for preemptive or retaliatory slaughter, particularly in towns with mixed populations (including Baghdad). It might settle down after a while, with a Kurdish republic in the north boxed in by Turkey, Syria, Iran and the Sunnis (all hostile), a turbulent Shiite south (with a lot of oil but little governance) and a Sunni center including, in all likelihood, control of a divided Baghdad. This would be the playground for all kinds of foreign parties -- Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Islamist fanatics of all stripes. If the United States did not like Afghanistan as a home for jihadists, it can expect to like such a base in the heart of the Arab world even less.

Regionally, of course, the losers would be numerous: Jordan, a lonely island of economic and social progress; Israel; and the gulf states, whose alliance with the United States would have reaped a large dividend of instability. Turkey, however, might welcome the opportunity to isolate and subordinate the Kurds; Iran would see opportunities in the south and a salutary warning to its budding domestic reformers, and Saudi Arabia would be mixed -- its leadership more fearful of chaos to the north than it was of Hussein`s dictatorship, its Islamist opposition encouraged.

The United States would bury its dead and get back to business. But the lessons for its political leaders, and indeed for everyone else in the world, would be simple: The United States cannot and will not, under any conditions, conduct a counterinsurgency. When it tries, drips and spurts of casualties will cause it to lose its nerve. For all potential opponents of the United States, the ultimate deterrent is not a nuclear weapon but a few dozen suicide bombers and trucks to carry them, augmented by a couple of hundred grenade-launcher-toting irregulars. Not much, all things considered. Hussein made clear in 1990 that he had learned (he thought) the lesson of Beirut 1983 -- Americans cannot take casualties. In this war he seems to have learned the "Blackhawk Down" lesson -- Americans may be able to fight a three-week conventional war, but not a multiyear guerrilla struggle. If the United States leaves Iraq under these conditions, he will be proven right. And if he pops up in person to affirm such after we leave, the evidence will be irrefutable.

Cut-and-run cannot be disguised, and the price to be paid for it would be appalling. No one else would take on the burdens of Iraq; talk of handing it over to the United Nations or NATO is wishfulness, not strategy. Whatever one`s view of the war`s rationale, conception, planning or conduct, our war it remains, and we had best figure out how to win it.

The writer is professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University`s School of Advanced International Studies.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Not Too Late for the U.N.


By Salim Lone

Wednesday, November 19, 2003; Page A27


F-16s are bombing civilian neighborhoods in pro-resistance cities. U.S. military commanders in Iraq are threatening mayors, tribal chiefs and farmers with stern measures unless they curb the militants attacking coalition troops. And from across the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Tony Blair labels all those fighting occupation forces as "fanatics." Even as the new and potentially laudable strategy of giving primacy to quick Iraqi sovereignty is being embraced, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer reassures the world that the interim Iraqi constitution will embody "American values."

All those who have goodwill toward the United States and Iraq must be in utter despair at the coalition`s refusal to countenance the far-reaching changes in policy that are needed to contain this internationally destabilizing crisis. So a temporary occupation, which was the most that even pro-U.S. Iraqis were prepared to tolerate, has been turned to war again, as if widespread use of force is the only way to better protect coalition troops. Little seems to have been learned from the blunders this summer that prevented a quick, successful U.S. exit from Iraq.

The Coalition Provisional Authority also seems unaware that the planned transfer of power to its own choice of Iraqis -- who, we are already told, will want to continue the coalition`s military presence -- will do little to stop the attacks on troops or the terrorist outrages against innocent civilians. The hasty nature of this transfer to another unelected body could also unravel the prospects for sustainable peace and democracy in Iraq.

The new get-tough measures have already inflamed anti-occupation passions well beyond the reassuringly labeled "Sunni Triangle," including among senior Shiite clerics who have restrained their huge, increasingly restive followings by criticizing the occupation but counseling patience as the best tactic for achieving their goals.

What will bring peace to Iraq is a true end of occupation, which would mean more inclusive political arrangements than those represented by the Governing Council (which has failed to establish leadership legitimacy), managed not by the United States but by an international force and mission led by the United Nations. Given the widespread Arab perception of the United Nations as essentially doing U.S. bidding, this mission would have to be free of U.S. control and have an unquestionable pro-Iraqi mandate, which would include guaranteeing all democratic factions equal access to full political opportunity.

Even then it would provide no assurance of success and would need the kinds of security protection articulated by Secretary General Kofi Annan, because it would continue to be targeted by the resistance. But such a U.N. effort would undercut the insurgents by winning strong national support.

The late Sergio Vieira de Mello, head of the first Iraq U.N. mission, was an experienced negotiator of bitterly divided post-conflict societies who enjoyed the strong backing of the U.S. administration. He concluded three months ago, when the insurgency was basically in its infancy, that only a short-lived occupation would work in Iraq, because even then many Iraqis who had initially supported the Americans were bristling under an intolerable level of lawlessness and insecurity and expressing strong opposition to the occupation.

The critical issue in Iraq from the beginning was not only war but occupation. Occupation is always an explosive matter, and that of an Arab nation by the United States particularly so, given its support for Israel. Most ordinary Arabs and Muslims are convinced that the United States is on a crusade to crush them and control or occupy their lands. Yes, this is how embattled even mainstream Muslims feel, although they gravitated toward the United States for decades, until the 1980s, and would do so again if the United States extended them friendship.

And so this occupation faces severe difficulties. Indeed, the significant improvements in security and essential services, which were considered key anti-insurgency tools, have been accompanied by a parallel escalation of destructive attacks and a decreased Iraqi confidence in the ability of the United States to stay the course.

It is not too late for the United Nations to apply its experience in reconciling deeply torn post-conflict societies in Iraq. The Bush administration, having radically advanced its timetable for Iraqi sovereignty, should let a neutral United Nations bring it about.

The United States should not have launched this preemptive war, but it did, and it achieved its goal of deposing Saddam Hussein`s regime. It does not need to advance its interests through a continuing occupation, given the extraordinarily high political, moral and human costs of such an approach.

The writer, who recently retired from the United Nations, held a number of senior communication positions there and was director of communications and spokesman for the U.N. mission in Baghdad.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Fair and Balanced™ Cartoons
Cartoon Archive
125 New Cartoons Today, alles zur Ankunfts Bushs in London, 125 frische Cartoons:

http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20031119__125toons.htm

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AFGHAN ROAD TO RUIN

We`re Spending Too Much, Getting Too Little
NEW YORK--It only takes an hour to develop a profound understanding of why one of Afghanistan`s top priorities is road-building. My November 2001 trip from the border with Tajikistan to the capital of Takhar province, a little over a hundred miles long, would take about an hour and a half in the United States. But most of this back-breaking, bone-crushing ordeal is spent pounding tire ruts and rocks across a liberally-mined desert that shows no sign of ever having been paved. The bridges have been blown up by Soviet, mujahedeen, Taliban, Northern Alliance or American armies. Motorists are forced to ford a full-fledged, five-feet deep river, two large creeks and an uncountable number of axle-shattering gaps in the road. For a few hundred thousand crisp afghanis, local entrepreneurs improvise bridges out of dead tree limbs to support each vehicle for the few seconds needed to cross these abysses.

Some 15 hours after we set out from the Pyanj River border outpost, my convoy rolled into Taloqan. We`d ducked bandits, U.S. warplanes and rampaging militiamen to get there, but the road itself had been the worst obstacle. It took four days to shake the ringing in my ears, the result of syncopated whiplash and hundreds of serial concussions as my skull smacked into the roof of my rented truck. No wonder you hardly ever saw other people moving between isolated villages.

With an average per capita annual income of $200, Afghanistan`s economy is in ruins. Even if exports of products like hand-woven carpets, jewelry, rubies, pomegranates and modest oil reserves were to return to prewar levels of the 1960s, it would be impossible to generate the $45 billion Karzai estimates will be needed to build modern-quality infrastructure. Afghanistan`s future was sealed by two factors: its paucity of natural resources and its role as a mountainous buffer state between czarist Russian and British India. People, goods and services traveling overland between Central and South Asia have always had to pass through Afghanistan--and they`ve paid for the privilege. If Afghanistan is to become economically viable without exporting heroin or remaining in a state of permanent war, it must reprise its role as Asia`s most ferocious collectors of tolls and tariffs.

The Asian Development Bank`s $3 billion Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAP) project, which would carry Caspian Sea natural gas from fields in Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to a Pakistani port on the Indian Ocean, is one attempt to revive the fabled Silk Road. According to Turkmen officials, Afghans would receive eight percent of revenues in the form of transit fees. But pipelines need service roads. TAP would run alongside the Herat-to-Kandahar highway, so the American and Saudi governments have committed $180 million of the estimated $250 million needed to pave it.

Afghans will tell you that, along with the need for security, running water and electricity, roads are on top of their wish list. Well-maintained roads would allow Afghans to make money the old-fashioned way--by taking a cut on the stuff they move around. Roads would also mitigate the security problem, reducing the power of regional warlords by making outlying provinces more accessible to the central government forces currently trapped in Kabul. Divided by religious, political and tribal fissures, Afghanistan doesn`t stand a chance of becoming a unified or centralized nation-state without a high-quality lattice of asphalt linking and pulling together its disparate nether regions.

At present, Afghanistan, a Texas-sized nation of 17 million people, has only five marginally paved highways totaling 1,675 miles. (Texas has 79,185.) The Wakhan Corridor, the finger-shaped province that connects northeastern Afghanistan to China, doesn`t even have a single dirt road to its name. In most areas, a road like the one I took to Taloqan is as good as it gets. But only one road in Afghanistan will host a multi-billion energy pipeline--and it looks like that`s the only one we`re going to pave.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage recently asked Congress for $1.14 billion for Afghan aid--just 10 to 20 percent of the $5 to $10 billion most conservative experts believe is be needed. But, according to CARE Afghanistan, only 40 percent of the money is slated for long-term development. $420 million would "bolster efforts at training national Afghan police and armed forces while demobilizing local militias"--in other words, bribing warlords to swear fealty to the central government in Kabul. $104 million would finance elections, $140 million would pay for border patrols, $60 million would rehab the U.S. embassy, and $35 million would go to "the presidential protective detail"--Karzai`s equivalent of the Secret Service.

It`s a lot of money. But, reports the BBC, "The only real reconstruction has involved the refurbishment of the best buildings in [Kabul] for the usual international acronym soup which follows a peace deal, WFP, FAO, UNICEF, UNAMA, and so on. Afghanistan is getting too little of the right kind of aid."

Meanwhile, ordinary Afghans have seen no meaningful improvement in their lives. Reshad, a 19-year-old whose father works for the Afghan Finance Ministry, told The Washington Post that his family hadn`t gotten a paycheck in months. "We sold the carpets and the refrigerator," he said. "Now we`ll borrow money to live. Finally, we`ll have to start stealing something to eat. We`ll join the Taliban just to support our family. If they give us money, we`ll join them."

He may want to rethink that plan. Taliban-held provinces, after all, are at least a hundred miles away from Kabul. Who wants to deal with those atrocious roads?

(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. It is now available in a revised and updated paperback edition containing new material. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2003 TED RALL

RALL 11/18/03

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The `truth` of war reporting

By Nick Higham
BBC media correspondent

Death is a commonplace on television, but real death is rare.

There are plenty of killings in films and drama, but in Britain, at least, the convention is to spare viewers sight of the moment of death and the bloody aftermath of violence.


This coming Sunday on Discovery the taboo is broken, in the first of a three-part series called Reporters at War by the award-winning documentary maker (and one-time war correspondent) Jon Blair.
It`s a move that will be welcomed by those, like the former BBC correspondent Martin Bell and the Independent`s Robert Fisk, who believe that television sanitises the vicious reality of war.

In Fisk`s view, governments and television authorities stop people from seeing images of violence "because if they saw them, they would never again support war".

He adds: "And we want a population that will, when we want, support wars."

Tough viewing

There is no sanitising in Reporters at War.

The first programme, in particular, makes for tough viewing: we see beatings, shootings, ghastly machete wounds, dying infants, bloody body parts in the wake of explosions.


Iraq war reporting


Blair has gone as far as he and Discovery dared to show us the reality of war - knowing that is easier to do in the context of a documentary than in a peak time news bulletin where the viewer may be ambushed by deeply disturbing images.

But the programmes do more than shock and unsettle.

They look at the way battlefield coverage has changed with changing technology.

They tell us about military censorship and news management - culminating in the decision to embed hundreds of reporters with military units during the recent Gulf War.

They ask why war reporters do it.

One honest answer - from Michael Nicholson of ITN and Alan Pizzey of CBS News - is that wars are big stories and covering them is fun.

And they look at the risks reporters run - physical but also psychological.

Most of Blair`s interviewees seem remarkably robust and undisturbed - perhaps because reporters are, first and foremost, story-tellers and telling stories about disturbing events helps to exorcise them.

But a few were clearly damaged.

The ITN cameraman Jon Steele speaks movingly of his breakdown after filming the death of a young girl in Sarajevo.

And Gloria Steinem, who covered Vietnam for the New York Times, talks bleakly of what she sees as the futility of her trade.

"I don`t think as a journalist you can go on pretending your stories make a difference," she said.

"They were like ice cubes, they melted. Who we saved, who rose from the grave, what was prevented, all that writing, all that typing.

"What happened because of those stories? Very little."

Reporters at War is on the Discovery Channel. on Sunday 23 November, Wednesday 26 November and Wednesday 3 December, all at 2100 GMT.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/3276575.…

Published: 2003/11/18 13:16:45 GMT

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Dollar Drops to Record Low Versus Euro as Asset Purchases Fall
Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar tumbled to a record low against the euro in New York trading after net foreign purchases of U.S. securities in September fell to the lowest in five years, a government report showed.

A drop in the amount of stocks and bonds bought by international investors makes it harder for the U.S. to finance the deficit in its current account, the broadest measure of trade and investment. The Treasury Department said foreigners bought a net $4.19 billion in September, down from $49.9 billion in August and the smallest since $1.17 billion in September 1998.

``The big question remains whether foreign investors will be attracted to U.S. assets and keep flows coming in at a pace enough to offset the current account deficit,`` said Rebecca Patterson, global currency strategist at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. in New York. ``The dollar is weakening further from here.``

As of 3:34 p.m. in New York, the dollar traded at $1.1953 per euro, compared with $1.1749 yesterday, its biggest decline since June 5. It fell as low as $1.1960. The previous low was $1.1933 per euro on May 27. The dollar has declined against 15 of the 16 major currencies this year, with the exception being the Mexican peso. It fell to 108.08 yen from 108.92. Patterson forecast the dollar would decline to $1.20 per euro by year-end.

The euro, a currency shared by a dozen European Union nations, debuted on Jan. 1, 1999, and reached $1.1804 its first day of trading. Its low was 82.3 U.S. cents in October 2000. The dollar is down about 5 percent against the euro since some investors interpreted a statement on Sept. 20 from the Group of Seven finance ministers calling for flexible exchange rates as an endorsement of a weaker dollar.

Declines in the dollar accelerated as it past previously set orders to sell the currency at specific levels, or so-called stops, such as $1.1810 per euro, $1.1845 and $1.1933, according to Chris Melendez, president of Tempest Asset Management, a hedge fund in Irvine, California.

China Trade

The dollar also fell after the Bush administration said it intends to limit imports of some textiles and apparel from China to stem a record flow of goods from that nation and protect mills in states such as North Carolina. U.S. textile and apparel companies such as Milliken & Co. had said rising imports from China threaten to put U.S. and Caribbean manufacturers.

``Every time the U.S. imposes more trade sanctions, it`s a sign the dollar is going to weaken,`` said Kenneth Landon, senior currency strategist, at Deutsche Bank AG in New York. ``At the same time, it`s a sign of lower inflows to the country.``

Some U.S. companies and lawmakers blame China`s currency policy -- which pegs the yuan at about 8.3 to the dollar -- for the increasing U.S. trade deficit and some of the 2.5 million job losses in the manufacturing sector during President George W. Bush`s tenure.

Boosting Exports

For some U.S. companies, the dollar`s drop is a welcomed event. United Parcel Service Inc., the world`s largest package- delivery company, said that currency-related gains boosted its revenue by $79 million in the third-quarter and its profit by $18 million compared with the year-ago period.

``Clearly, the currency has helped us because we have a big presence in Europe,`` Scott Davis, chief financial officer at United Parcel Service Inc. said in an interview last week.

McDonald`s Corp., the world`s largest restaurant chain, said the slide accounted for 4 percentage points of the 11 percent sales gain in the third quarter.

Another factor forcing the dollar down is interest rates, with some investors buying debt of nations with higher yields. The benchmark Australian 10-year note, yields 1.66 percentage points more than Treasuries with comparable maturity, up from 1.30 percentage points on Oct. 1. Australia`s dollar is up 6.43 percent versus the dollar this quarter, second only to the 7 percent gain for the New Zealand dollar among 60 currencies tracked by Bloomberg.

Terrorist Threats

``There`s no doubt the U.S. economy is rebounding, but the underlying factor impacting the dollar is the record current account deficit and insufficient inflows to finance it,`` said Margaret Browne, a currency analyst at HSBC Bank USA Inc. ``The difference in interest rates is still playing an important part and favoring the euro.``

In the second quarter, the deficit held at a record $138.7 billion. The U.S. has had to borrow more money overseas to satisfy demand for imported goods and services to finance investment not covered by U.S. savings.

The dollar`s decline also comes amid speculation fighting in Iraq may intensify, spurring terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its coalition allies. Two U.S. soldiers were killed yesterday in Iraq, a day after a report that al-Qaeda may strike Britain, Italy and Japan. The dollar is down 5.7 percent against the euro since Bush`s May 1 announcement that major military operations in Iraq were over.

``The broader issue is how the U.S. is doing in Iraq,`` said Mary Davis, a currency strategist in London at Credit Suisse First Boston. ``If there is further deterioration, the situation will impact on the dollar.``

`Real Muscle`

An audiotape broadcast yesterday on Dubai`s Al-Arabiya television containing a message purportedly from Saddam Hussein said U.S.-led forces in Iraq had reached a ``dead end,`` and called for a holy war against the occupation. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency said it is unable to confirm whether the tape was of the ousted Iraqi leader.

In other trading, the dollar fell against the Swiss franc and the Australian dollar. The U.S. Dollar Index, a measure against a basket of six currencies, fell to 90.35 from 91.61. It`s now at the lowest since January 1997. The index has lost more than 11 percent this year. Gold rose and oil reached its highest since the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March.

``Risk aversion is by no means dead, and the support for gold prices reflects that,`` said Naomi Fink, a currency strategist in Tokyo at BNP Paribas SA.

Potential Underestimated

The dollar fell even after U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said the U.S. economic expansion has ``real muscle`` and will continue to create jobs in the months ahead. He spoke at a Confederation of British Industry gathering in Birmingham, central-England.

``We still think the market is underestimating the potential for the U.S. economy to rebound in the fourth quarter and next year,`` Steven Saywell, a currency strategist at Citigroup Inc. in London, said in a televised debate between the two strategists on Bloomberg News. ``The growth differential relative to Europe will grow.`` He says the dollar will strengthen to $1.11 per euro in the ``near-term.``

The economy is forecast to slow in the fourth quarter after surging at the fast pace in 19 years in the prior quarter, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. The economy may grow 4 percent this quarter, compared with 7.2 percent in the third quarter.

Peugot Sales

PSA Peugeot Citroen, Nokia Oyj and Royal Philips Electronics NV are among companies that have said the euro`s appreciation is hurting business.

Peugeot, Europe`s second-largest automaker, cut its full- year profit forecast last month, partly because of a stronger currency. Nokia said earlier this month that quarterly sales may decline for the same reason. Philips blamed the euro`s rise for operating losses in most of its businesses last quarter.

``If this situation drags on it could wipe out any traces of a recovery,`` said Giancarlo Losma, chief executive officer of Losma SpA, an Italian maker of air filters for car makers such as Fiat SpA and Renault SA. ``We can only sit and watch and hope it goes away.`` He spoke in a telephone interview from Rome.

Japanese Response

Japan has responded to the yen`s advance by selling its currency and buying dollars. The European Central Bank hasn`t sold euros since 2000. In September that year, the G-7 bought euros, in addition to the ECB`s own purchases.

Jean-Claude Trichet, who became president of the European Central Bank this month, suggested he`s not concerned with the euro`s level. ``When we have a policy of a strong and stable euro, which we are pursuing, we are paving the way in the medium and long run for medium- and long-term rates that are at a lower level,`` Trichet said on Nov. 6.

Exports, equivalent to about a third of Germany`s economy, last year saved the euro region`s biggest economy from recession. The country`s recovery may be slow as orders from its biggest trading partners barely grow, said Anton Boerner, president of the BGA association of exporters and wholesalers said last month.

``Above $1.25, it gets critical,`` Hans-Werner Sinn, head of the Munich-based Ifo economic institute, said this month. Ifo polls about 7,000 German executives each month when compiling its survey of German business confidence, Europe`s most widely- watched economic indicator.

Last Updated: November 18, 2003 15:37 EST

[Joerver]

How the Orwellian White House Continues to Keep the Saddam-9/11 Connection Alive, Even After Bush Debunked the Lie. They Are the Masters of "1984" Double Speak.
http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/03/11/ana03305.html
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

First, a letter to Buzz...

Dear Buzz:

I was a bit bored this past Saturday and thought I would turn on FOX News for a few laughs.

What I heard shocked me.

At the top of the list of stories they were covering was one about new "Top Secret documents" that had been leaked that provided "unimpeachable, unassailable" evidence that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin-Laden were tied together in the training, planning and executing of terrorist attacks throughout the world as well as the WTC bombing on 9/11.

Flabbergasted I picked up the phone and called Pacifica radio to report what I had just heard. FOX was claiming to be breaking the story live even as I listened and I thought that Pacifica would want the information right away. Well, as it turns out there was nobody there except a fellow who had something to do with Spanish programming. Turns out they don`t have a news department on weekends. Typical Pacifica.

I e-mailed Buzzflash & Take back the Media.

Later that very day the Defense Department comes out with a story claiming that there is and never was a tie in between the two.

Today I turned to FOX again to see how they were going to weasel out of their story of the year.

It turns out they use the same method as the bush mob.

They just treat it like it never happened.

I didn`t hear them say one word.

This is strange since they were giddy with the news two days before even having former military officers including a couple of retired Generals there to nod knowingly in agreement.

Also regarding a recent letter from one Elaine from Petaluma. Yes, there should be an outcry of voices demanding that bush turn over all information regarding 9/11. Not just the parts he wants too.

I wish I were more computer savvy so I could start a petition demanding that bush take the right action.

Perhaps someone can

Thank you,

Mitch from Woodland Hills
Peace

* * *

BuzzFlash Responds...

Dear Mitch:

This dirty work and continual lying was probably the work of Arch-Neo-con, Douglas Feith, in collaboration with the Rupert Murdoch empire of media evil and lies. (BuzzFlash can`t prove Feith actually handed the Weekly Standard the virtually meaningless memo, but the Weekly Standard interpretation reflects Feith`s recent statements. It could have been Perle, Abrams, Rove, Wolfowitz -- well, they are all untrustworthy in the Bush administration.)

The fallacious charge that Saddam Hussein was connected to Osama bin Laden, which was recently denied by Bush HIMSELF, was resurrected last week in the Weekly Standard [LINK].The Standard, owned by Rupert Murdoch, is the "intellectual" Neo-con bed of radical ideas, subversive to American Democracy. It is kind of like a Pravda for Neo-cons with advanced degrees. It can`t make enough money to survive, so Murdoch subsidizes it.

This was the lead paragraph of the misleading Weekly Standard article last week:

"OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD."

FOX News, also owned by Murdoch, of course, received this baton of mistruth and prevarication about the Saddam/Al-Qaeda/9-11 connection (because that is the goal of this lie) and aired it across the nation and world. Meanwhile right wing NewsMax also picked it up [LINK]. You can rest assured that other Bush Cartel media outlets provided an echo chamber for the lie perpetrated in the Weekly Standard article. Rush Limbaugh was still being "rehabbed," otherwise he would have force read it to the Ditto Heads.

Meanwhile, the Department of Defense actually went to the trouble of issuing a denial of the lie resurrected by Murdoch`s evil media empire [LINK], and went so far as to say:

"News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate.... Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal." [Bolded by BuzzFlash]

While not AS illegal and compromising to national security as the Plame CIA operative leak, once again the Bush administration is the one making public classified information. In this case, leaking and lying simultaneously.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post ran a November 14th article, in response to the latest Feith-Murdoch spreading of horse manure. The Post article was entitled: "CIA Finds No Evidence Hussein Sought to Arm Terrorists." [LINK]

In the article, Feith "defends" his claim, refuted by none other than "the man hotwired to God in the White House, George W. Bush," with a chilling Orwellian explanation, the likes of which is all too common from the Bush administration:

Last Thursday, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith defended the administration`s prewar position at the Council on Foreign Relations. "The idea that we didn`t have specific proof that he was planning to give a biological agent to a terrorist group," he said, "doesn`t really lead you to anything, because you wouldn`t expect to have that information even if it were true. And our intelligence is just not at the point where if Saddam had that intention that we would necessarily know it."

In short, Feith is saying no proof is necessary because the Bush Cartel knows what the truth is even if it is a lie.

According to recent polls, 50% of the American people still support Bush. This is very scary, indeed. This deluded half of America has proven that we have reached Orwell`s vision of "1984" in 2003.

Remember that a key reason Bush was able to invade Iraq was that he had used a combination of the Murdoch empire, right wing think tanks, pro-Bush corporate media, coerced and trumped-up intelligence reports, the evangelical fundamentalists, and a phalanx of administration misleaders to scare America half to death. Key to this Soviet style call to defend the "motherland" against Saddam`s "imminent threat" was the conscious effort to persuade Americans that Saddam was directly linked to Al-Qaeda and 9/11.

That is why the vast majority of Americans, more than 70% in one poll, thought that Saddam was responsible for or deeply involved in the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attack. Americans believed this before the war on Iraq -- and AFTER the infamous Bush "Mission Accomplished" stunt on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.

Lately, the horrifying violation of national security committed by the White House and condoned by Bush (we are talking about the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame) has been forgotten. As we predicted [LINK], John "KGB" Ashcroft is in the process of covering-up the true damage done by the Plame leak and ensuring that they will not prosecute Rove or any other Bush official. The Justice Department`s excuse will be that they cannot prove that the disclosure was "intentional," which is a prerequisite for prosecution. Bush will declare, in essence, no harm, no foul -- and the Democrats will let it all drop.

Meanwhile, the Murdoch evil media empire continues to be a conduit for Neo-con mistruths and lies. FOX News even went so far as to coordinate the timing of last week`s failed GOP attempt to force a vote on three radical Bush judicial nominations (even though the phony "talkathon" succeeded in throwing some red meat to the radical right).

Democrats, Independents and Greens all too easily dismiss the impact that FOX (and other less biased, but still VERY biased, mainstream media outlets) have on the thinking of Americans who don`t rely on the Internet for alternative news. Remember that more than 70% of Americans, at one point, believed that Saddam Hussein was connected to Al-Qaeda and had a role in 9/11.

You cannot counter this kind of Orwellian media manipulation with good intentions. You have to battle for control of the media.

Otherwise, the slow creep into the Soviet-style Gulag that the Bush Cartel is imposing on America will continue.

They control the Congress, the White House, the courts and the media.

Most Americans are like frogs being boiled. It will be over for them long before they even know that democracy is being served up on a platter prepared for a Bush Politburo state dinner.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

* * *

BuzzFlash Afternote to Mitch: On November 18th, the Washington Post reported [LINK]:

The CIA will ask the Justice Department to investigate the leak of a 16-page classified Pentagon memo that listed and briefly described raw agency intelligence on any relationship between Saddam Hussein`s Iraqi government and Osama bin Laden`s al Qaeda terrorist network, according to congressional and administration sources.... Excerpts from the memo were first published Saturday in the issue of the Weekly Standard dated Nov. 24. Under the headline "Case Closed," the article described the memo as documenting "an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003" between bin Laden and Hussein.

Of course, this will go into the same "case closed" file on John Ashcroft`s desk as the outing of a CIA operative by the White House. How can the administration investigate its own damaging leaks? It can`t, but the Democrats aren`t keeping up the drumbeat, so another potential Bush felon will be left off the hook.

* * *

Final Note to Mitch: The November 18th Washington Post Article also notes: "A Washington Post poll in August found that 69 percent of the American public believed Saddam Hussein was connected to the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon."

Enough said.

Now, get out there and bang the drum loudly, Mitch.

Sincerely,

Buzz

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

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

[Joerver]

Ich glaube man nennt das Franchising. Familie Bin Laden hat viel von ihren US-Geschäftspartnern gelernt.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-terror19…
Experts See Major Shift in Al Qaeda`s Strategy
By Sebastian Rotella and Richard C. Paddock
Times Staff Writers

November 19, 2003

PARIS — A spate of suicide bombings in several countries illustrates that Al Qaeda has survived by mutating into a more decentralized network relying on local allies to launch more frequent attacks on varied targets, experts say.

In bombings from Turkey to Morocco, experts say, evidence suggests that Al Qaeda provided support through training, financing or ideological inspiration to local extremists. Through an evolving and loose alliance of semiautonomous terrorist cells, the network has been able to export its violence and "brand name" with only limited involvement in the attacks themselves.

"Al Qaeda as an ideology is now stronger than Al Qaeda as an organization," said Mustafa Alani of the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies in London. "What we are witnessing now is a major shift in Al Qaeda`s strategy. I believe it is successful. Now they are not on the defensive. They are on the offensive."

A U.S.-led assault on Al Qaeda has left many of the network`s leaders dead, in jail or on the run. Still, counter-terrorism officials have linked Al Qaeda or its followers to a drumbeat of attacks in Russia, Indonesia, India, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and the Philippines, dating back to spring. Intent on maximizing the propaganda impact of its actions, the network has shifted from a single-minded focus on American interests to a broader mix including Jewish and Muslim targets.

Al Qaeda allegedly gave the direct order for some of the attacks, investigators say, including one in Indonesia and the May bombing of a residential compound in Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital. But in others, its local affiliates appeared to have operated more independently. The May suicide bombings in Casablanca, Morocco, are seen as a model of the network`s emerging strategy.

U.S. and Iraqi authorities say several suicide car bombings — at an Italian military police base last week and at the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross and three Baghdad police stations in late October — were the work of foreign Islamic extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda.

There is growing debate about who is responsible for attacks in Iraq. An array of insurgents, including forces loyal to former President Saddam Hussein, seek to end the U.S.-led occupation. Insurgents have hit a variety of targets — from the United Nations headquarters to the Jordanian Embassy.

U.S. authorities say about 2,000 Islamic fighters from as far away as Sudan, Algeria and Afghanistan are playing a more prominent role in the insurgency and probably are teaming up with Hussein loyalists.

The U.S. presence in Iraq is being used by extremist leaders to rally their followers to jihad, or holy war, around the world.

Authorities in Turkey say twin car bombings that killed 25 people Saturday at two synagogues in Istanbul had Al Qaeda`s trademark methodology and were carried out by Turks who sympathized with the network and may have received training from it.

The global threat persists because of the years Al Qaeda spent "training the trainers" — tens of thousands of operatives molded in the movement`s camps in Afghanistan. Many have returned to their homelands and are trying to whip local extremists into killing shape, U.S. and European counter-terrorism officials say.

This diaspora of holy warriors drives a new approach that contrasts with the Sept. 11 hijackings in the United States or the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Those attacks took years of planning, with videos of potential targets brought to the group`s leaders in Afghanistan for study. Such plots were executed by terrorists groomed in the camps and directed to their targets — via phone, e-mail and messenger — by network masterminds.

Al Qaeda has always been relatively decentralized and unstructured. But today it moves faster, inciting attacks that require less time, expertise or high-level supervision, said Matthew Levitt, a former FBI analyst and terrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

"It was always a network of networks whose inner core would wait patiently for three to five years to carry out spectacular attacks," Levitt said. "What`s different today is that it`s not clear they can conduct attacks with that kind of command and control. So to maintain relevancy, they gave the go-ahead: Do what you can, where you can, when you can. And they are targeting softer targets more frequently."

The very name Al Qaeda, some experts say, has become shorthand for a larger jihad fed by the Sept. 11 attacks, the Iraq war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A top French counter-terrorism official cautioned against blaming Al Qaeda for every act of Islamic terrorism.

"We have to be prudent," said Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the dean of France`s anti-terrorism magistrates. "These attacks are part of a climate, a planetary offensive. Al Qaeda is important. But there is too much of a tendency, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, to personalize the threat. It is not all [Osama] bin Laden, it is not all Al Qaeda."

Although the planners of the Istanbul bombings have not been identified, a thread linking Islamic extremism in Turkey and Morocco are the associates of Abu Musab Zarqawi, an Al Qaeda chief of Palestinian-Jordanian descent. Zarqawi`s crew has been known to plot against Jewish targets and is high on the list of potential suspects in the Istanbul case, Levitt said.

This fall, Turkish police arrested a reputed Zarqawi associate: Abdelatif Mourafik, a Moroccan wanted in the suicide bombings that killed 45 people in Casablanca in May, according to Spanish investigators.

In Casablanca, as in a number of recent cases, the exact role of top Al Qaeda figures remains murky. But Western investigators regard the case as a model of the way Al Qaeda cobbles together global and local terrorism infrastructures.

The FBI and Spanish, Italian and French police have worked closely with Moroccan investigators on the Casablanca case. The bombings, which claimed Spanish, French and Italian victims along with Moroccans, were Morocco`s worst terrorist attack.

The strategy teamed a handful of holy warriors trained in the Afghan camps with raw local recruits. One expert calls them "Kleenex kamikazes," young men who are rapidly radicalized, used and then discarded.

The 12 suicide bombers came from a primitive extremist group based in a Casablanca slum. Most of them were in their early 20s, uneducated and unknown to Morocco`s tough security forces.

The bombers were told their targets only the night before, investigators say. Two attack teams found few victims at a Jewish cemetery and a Jewish community center that had closed for Friday night Sabbath. Yet the bombers set off their charges anyway, killing themselves and the few others present.

The other targets were a luxury hotel, a Jewish-owned Italian restaurant and a Spanish restaurant popular with upscale Moroccans. The selection of targets reflected the puritanical mentality of local extremists: symbols of Judaism and Spain (a prominent U.S. ally) and places where the elite went to cavort, in the terrorists` minds, with Westerners.

Police discovered that one slain bomber had carried a detonator in each hand, the Spanish investigator said. One detonator triggered the explosives he carried in his backpack, while the other was wired to the backpack-bomb of a second attacker.

The ringleaders were unsure that the second bomber had the nerve to set off the blast, so they entrusted the task of detonating both bombs to the more motivated terrorist, the investigator said.

The youthful Moroccans had unusual foreign contacts. Their ideologue was an imam who divided his time between Morocco and a mosque in Hamburg, Germany, that had been frequented by suspects involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. One of the bombers, Abderahim Belkaid, called an associate in Syria the night before he died, the Italian official said.

"Casablanca was 99% local," the Spanish investigator said. "But there was, it appears, external inspiration. Either it was direct — that is, someone connected to Al Qaeda gave an order — or it was indirect: People trained in the camps did it following a general line of instructions from Al Qaeda."

A similar pattern can be found halfway around the world in Indonesia, a high-risk zone where a suicide car bombing killed 12 people at the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in August. Police blame the attack on Jemaah Islamiah, a Southeast Asian terrorist group cultivated by Al Qaeda.

The group was responsible for the double suicide bombing of Bali nightclubs that killed 202 people last year.

Al Qaeda contributed at least $45,000 to finance the Marriott bombing through a man known as Hambali, a top operative of the network who also was Jemaah Islamiah`s operations chief. He was arrested in Thailand in August after the Marriott bombing.

The resurgent global menace leads critics to assert that the U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have boomeranged by scattering Al Qaeda`s forces, making them harder to detect, and inspiring like-minded extremists.

"I think it [U.S. strategy] has backfired," said Alani, of the London defense studies institute. "There is no evidence they can cope effectively with these groups."

On the other hand, some U.S. and European officials see signs of weakness as inexperienced, improvised terrorists turn to soft targets. Even in a diminished condition, Al Qaeda has shown how effectively it can harvest the seeds of hate, said Olivier Roy of the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris.

"It`s a movement that functions by franchise," Roy said. "You find a local group like the Casablanca group who exist all over, who are radicalized and controlled by intermediaries. Al Qaeda gives a general attack order, and then it`s not really important if the attack is rational. Casablanca was not rational in many aspects.... The real message was in the suicide, not in the targets. It was necessary to strike fear."

Rotella reported from Paris and Paddock from Baghdad.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

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





Tired, Terrified, Trigger-Happy
By Andrew M. Cockburn
Andrew M. Cockburn is the co-author of "Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein" (Perennial Press, 2000).

November 19, 2003

Among the less publicized incentives propelling Iraq overseer Paul Bremer`s urgent dash to Washington last week was the concern in various quarters of the administration that the U.S. expeditionary force in Iraq was in a dangerously unstable state. "We are one stressed-out reservist away from a massacre," remarked one senior official closely involved in the search for an exit strategy.

He was expressing the fear that a soldier, possibly a reservist, pressed beyond endurance by the rigors and uncertainties of his or her condition in a hostile land far from home, might open up with a machine gun on an Iraqi crowd, with obviously disastrous consequences for the future of the occupation.

In case anyone considers this contingency unthinkably remote, examples already abound of overstressed U.S. soldiers behaving in a lethally trigger-happy fashion. As U.S. soldiers get more and more stressed, their tempers fray and you see more altercations on the streets, more browbeating of ordinary Iraqis by soldiers and, as a result, a general deterioration in the already tense relationship that helps convince Iraqis that the U.S. is nothing but an ugly, arrogant occupying army.

In traveling around Iraq, I always stay well away from American convoys, for reasons well known to all Iraqi drivers and best illustrated by an incident (by no means unique) outside Fallouja last month. Gunners in an armored column responded to a roadside bomb blast by opening up, apparently indiscriminately, with heavy automatic weapons on traffic moving in the opposite direction on the other side of the highway median. Six civilians died, including four in a single minivan, some of whom were decapitated. An 82nd Airborne spokesman was later quoted as insisting that "the use of force was justified."

Indiscriminate fire and other atrocities can be understood, if not explained, by the degree of stress endured by hot and exhausted soldiers terrified of an unseen enemy. U.S. Army Field Manual 22-51 addresses what it calls "misconduct combat stress behavior," which it deems most likely in guerrilla warfare. The manual notes that, "even though we may pity the overstressed soldier as well as the victims," such cases must be punished.

The manual also identifies other stress behaviors, including looting and pillaging, practices that many people in Iraq — including non-Iraqis — report is widespread among the occupation force.

"I keep hearing rumors about our attached infantry company. Apparently they are under investigation for a few `incidents,` " a young officer based in the Sunni Triangle wrote home to his family in August. "It seems that whenever they get the chance, they steal money from the locals. I`m not talking about small amounts of cash, I`m talking about a nice, fat bankroll. They take the money during raids, while searching cars, while detaining locals."

Questioned about various examples of misconduct, the official military response in Iraq tends to range from professed ignorance about the incidents to excuses like "these things happen in the heat of the action" to vague promises of future investigation. Yet surely the anonymous author of the U.S. Army Field Manual was correct in writing that "only a strong chain of command and a unit identity which says `We don`t do that, and those who do aren`t one of us and will be punished` can prevent such behavior from happening."

Despite this commendable official doctrine, professional military personnel specialists are seeing a worrying trend in the profusion of stress-related cases in Iraq.

"It`s not surprising," says Maj. Don Vandergriff, who teaches military science at Georgetown University. "After six months in an intense environment, units start to degrade, especially when they are in combat and are likely getting very little sleep."

Vandergriff is also fiercely critical of the Army`s practice of constantly rotating individuals, especially commanders, in and out of units. Morale and cohesion of the Army in Iraq "is deteriorating at four times the rate it did in Vietnam," he states.

The high command should be seeking remedial measures, but perhaps the best we can hope for are the coldly realistic sentiments of the officer who wrote about the looting.

"I really don`t care for the Iraqi people, I don`t care about helping them get back on their feet," he wrote in his letter. "However, I don`t condone stealing from them, hurting them unnecessarily or threatening them with violence if it is not needed. We will never win hearts and minds here, but what these guys are doing is wrong. I am positive that this isn`t happening in my company, and that`s all I can really affect."

With any luck, his superiors are developing the same sense of responsibility. There is always that stressed-out reservist to worry about.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

Cold War Comeback?
The nuclear threat from within
Ellen Tauscher
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/11/18/EDGTL338EP1.DTL


With mounting casualties in Iraq and other news of the war dominating headlines, it`s no wonder that President Bush`s drive for a revolutionary breed of new nuclear weapons has gone largely unnoticed. Since Bush first came to office and presented the so-called Nuclear Posture Review, it has been clear that this White House has a dramatically different view of nuclear weapons compared with previous administrations.

The Nuclear Posture Review actively sought to find new uses for nuclear weapons, emphasized pre-emptive military action and shortened the timeline to restart nuclear tests in Nevada. The Bush administration has been actively pursuing new nuclear weapons that are explicitly for use on the battlefield. These tactical weapons -- the powerful "bunker buster" Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator and "mini-nukes" less than 5 kilotons -- turn the notion of strategic deterrence on its head and create a world in which nuclear weapons are seen as legitimate offensive alternatives.

Neither of these weapons was asked for by the Pentagon. They were not driven by a real threat. They will not make the United States any safer. Instead, the administration`s actions are having the opposite effect by erasing the taboo on the use of nuclear weapons. Russia has already indicated that it will develop new "tactical" weapons in response, and no one doubts our enemies will follow suit.

This is a major departure from where we were as a country only a few years ago and deserves serious debate. Do we want a world in which the United States is spurring a new global arms race with our own development of a new generation of nuclear weapons? Or do we want a world in which the United States, confident in the proven deterrence of our existing nuclear stockpile and the success of our conventional forces in every conflict since the Cold War, is able to lead the world in preventing the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons?

At the same time the administration is hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it is paving the way to test nuclear weapons in Nevada and reigniting America`s nuclear weapons industry. This is like throwing gasoline on a fire.

What is perhaps most troubling is that the intense desire for these new weapons is fueled by ideology rather than a national security need. A recently leaked classified report by the Pentagon`s Defense Science Board recommended pursuing new nuclear weapons, writing that the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator "has been requested, but much more needs to be done," in spite of the fact that the Department of Defense has "neither clear requirements nor persuasive rationale for changing the nuclear stockpile."

In fact, the administration`s two main arguments -- that new nuclear weapons are needed so American scientists can think and excel and that the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator is needed to defeat terrorists -- don`t stand up to scrutiny. The utility of bunker-busting nuclear weapons is highly questionable. Even the most powerful nuclear weapons cannot destroy every bunker, as there is virtually no limit to how deep enemies can tunnel. They will never surgically destroy targets, offer no guarantee of destroying chemical and biological agents without releasing them into the atmosphere and hinder our ability to gain valuable reconnaissance in the bunkers by making them radioactive. Moreover, even a 1-kiloton nuclear bomb -- many times smaller than the warheads under consideration for a bunker-buster -- would kill tens of thousands of civilians if detonated in an urban area.

These are not theories in a vacuum. Congress recently repealed the decades-old law forbidding research and development of nuclear weapons smaller than 5 kilotons and soon will provide millions of dollars for researching nuclear bunker-busters. Simply put, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, America is back in the business of developing new nuclear weapons.

A handful of my congressional colleagues and I tried to counteract the push for new nuclear weapons, but we were defeated by near-unanimous Republican support for the administration. I am gravely concerned that our minor successes in requiring the administration to provide a long-term plan for our nuclear weapons stockpile pales in comparison to what is to come on this perilous path.

We should learn from history. Nearly half a century ago, President Eisenhower rejected the counsel of advisers who wanted a new variety of nuclear weapons they said would allow the United States to fight a winnable nuclear war. Eisenhower responded, "You can`t have this kind of war. There just aren`t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets." As we have seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, our conventional weapons can do the job. There is no military, scientific or strategic reason to go nuclear at this time -- and every reason not to.

Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, sits on the House Armed Services Committee and is a leader on nonproliferation.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

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The Love That Killed America
As gay marriage wins even more legal support, Bible-clutching homophobes recoil, violently
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2003/11/19/notes111903.DTL



The gays are marching in. The end is near. Sheer unadulterated evil and scary anal sex and superlative hair products and new blasts of fresh happy love are to be unleashed anew upon the country. Horror is nigh. Everyone into the bunker.

This is, apparently, the prevailing sentiment. This is, according to a new poll, the majority response in America to the increasingly successful gay-marriage movement, even as states and the law move more and more aggressively toward proving that banning gay marriage is unconstitutional and immoral and just plain stupid.

People are terrified. Religious people, in particular. Hyperzealous, evangelical, white, borderline fanatical religious people who apparently don`t see a lot of sunlight and never read books and believe everything their homophobic intolerant Bible-spouting evangelical pastor and maybe Ann Coulter say, even more particularly.

The nation is not ready for gay marriage. This is the sad news. Even as homosexual people in love celebrate the latest huge victory in Massachusetts` state Supreme Court in support of gay-marriage rights, an enormous and quivering chunk of the BushCo-voting nation cowers in inexplicable horror.

And almost every one of them is vowing, right this minute, to vote for Bush in the next election, if for no other reason than because he`s a none-too-bright born-again Christian who will protect them from those icky homos and will invoke God`s name as it`s supposed to be invoked -- you know, as justification for launching ultraviolent bloody hate-filled unwinnable wars over petroleum and corporate power.

The nation is not ready. Even gay rights advocates are worried, as the issue is simply moving and evolving too quickly for the dread-filled, God-fearing, war-drunk nation to absorb.

And, verily, the fear among the gay community is that the issue`s amazing momentum could backfire, could divide the nation even more violently and drive more confused citizens straight into the fearmongering tentacles of the hate-filled Right.

It does not matter that gay marriage is so obviously no threat whatsoever to "traditional" marriage or the sanctity of uptight pseudo-Christian missionary-position Budweiser-fueled sex and the spawning of more Republican babies.

It does not matter that gay marriage could, in fact, be the savior of the institution of marriage in this nation in how it gives new life, new breath to our beleaguered notions of love and commitment and family, considering the relentless 50 percent divorce rate among happy heterosexuals.

This is a nation that still, despite its incredibly diverse range of religious belief, despite its array of progressive cities and universities, despite how every nuanced soul anywhere on the planet understands that love is not to be contained by rigid legislation and sanctimonious bile and pious narrow mindedness (hey, just ask the Taliban), this is a nation that still wraps itself in the blind and dangerous cloak of a few misinterpreted, regurgitated lines of the Bible as justification for bashing gays and remaining completely ignorant as to uncontainable energies of love and commitment. It`s true.

Of course, at this point it seems completely useless to point out to the America`s misguided homophobes that if you really want to follow the Bible that closely, why, we can easily justify, say, incarcerating unmarried single mothers. Or exterminating homeless people. Or burning pagans. Or imprisoning Buddhists or Rosicrucians and members of that weird cult Tom Cruise and John Travolta are into.

After all, the Bible has been used to justify slavery. And misogyny. And oppression. And racism. And genocide. And Pat Robertson. For centuries. And it still is.

Half the nation still actually believes gays can change their sexual orientation if they really want to. Most still feel homosexuality is a serious sin. And, perhaps most depressingly, the poll found that the higher the level of one`s religious commitment, the more bitterly, violently opposed one is to gay marriage and new definitions of love.

Ironic, isn`t it? It`s a global truism: The more passionately religious you are, the more hateful and small minded you become, and the more desperate you are to convince everyone else that Satan himself is at the door, carrying nothing but a whip and a sinister grin and a big bottle of Astroglide.

But here is the good news: In the long term, this bilious national recoil does not matter. The writing is on the wall. The cracks are appearing all over the homophobic armor. The national whining, the fear, the hate, the resistance, are only a necessary and entirely predictable pothole, a typical reflex, a painful wart on the big toe of progress.

After all, huge and violent were the protests from angry, terrified citizens when blacks were first allowed into white schools. Enraged and horrified were many powerful white men when women were finally given the right to vote. Shocked and outraged were the orangutans when humans first began to walk upright.

There is no significant change, no progress, without much impassioned puling from those who refuse to open their hearts, and minds, and thighs.

And the good news is, the sadly misguided citizens of America who are right now raging against homosexual love, well, they are indeed in for a number of big surprises in the coming decades, as their world of intolerance and fear crumbles, and as a new, more open minded generation emerges. To be sure, in the near term the controversy and the backfirings and the right-wing spew will be painful and obnoxious and sad. But, hey, you gotta start somewhere.

And, verily, to believe that the energy of love and devotion can occur only between a man and a woman, that the only acceptable definition of this most universal and timeless and unfathomably powerful of emotions can only exist between a penis and a vagina, well, perhaps this is the ultimate insult, the nastiest sin against true divinity.


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

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Mark Morford`s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.

©2003 SF Gate

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http://www.pollingreport.com/

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WHEN BRIAN MET DUBYA

Brian Reade
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/content_objectid%3D1363…

IT WAS an offer even the White House couldn`t refuse. Because the Daily Mirror gave it to the President straight.

"You have spoonfed hand-picked toadies from right-wing British newspapers," we told him, "but nobody over here has swallowed a line of it.

"So, if you want to win British hearts and minds this week do so by being frank and honest with The People`s Paper."

He thought long and hard (half a second, which is very long for him) then agreed.

So we laced his soda pop with sincerity pills, wired him up to a lie detector and threatened to blow him up to daddy if he dropped any porkies. And it worked right from the off.

As he ushered me into the Oval Office, he put away the Winston Churchill bust and replaced it with the Homer Simpson doll which usually sits there, switched off the Rugrats episode he was watching on TV and told me he was giving this rare interview for the sake of world peace.

Read his words and you will agree that one thing comes over loud and clear.

His enduring love of power, oil and wealth and the freedom that can bring to himself and his Texan mafia.

The first question I asked was the one that scores of our decent, hard-working readers asked me at the Beachcomber bar in Torbay Sands caravan site last summer: Is the world a safer place after the Iraq War?

GEORGE W BUSH: You joking buddy? Twenty-three dead in Istanbul, five Black Hawks down in four weeks, 30 attacks a day on coalition forces in Iraq, Israel mired deeper in bloodshed, London brought to a standstill for fear of an al-Qaeda attack, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden still at large. A safer place? You kidding. Why do you think ah`m asking the Queen to gimme iron curtains in my bedroom?

BRIAN READE: Iraq is turning into your new Vietnam, just as we predicted, isn`t it?

GWB: You betcha. You were bang on the money. Listen up, more US troops have been killed during this war than in the first three years of Nam.

And that`s from our own Defence Department. So far we`ve had 417 killed in the past seven months, which is more than died in Nam between 1962 and 1964. Ah`m in deep doo-doo.

BR: If, as expected, you pull out of Iraq to win re-election, does that mean that the 52 Britons killed over there died in vain?

GWB: That`s one way of looking at it, ah s`pose. They died to give Iraq a secure future but a far more important future is at stake. Mine. And Donnie Rumsfeld`s and Condoleezza`s.

Us Republicans can`t have body bags flying home in the run-up to next year`s election. So we`re outta there. But they didn`t die totally in vain. They made a lot of Party donors very rich.

BR: Are you referring to the fact that you have made Iraq a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America, causing massive unemployment as you sold off the public sector?

GWB: Sure. On September 19, we enacted the now infamous Order 39. It announced that 200 Iraqi state companies would be privatised; decreed that foreign firms (mainly ours) can retain 100 per cent ownership of Iraqi banks, mines and factories; and allowed these firms to move 100 per cent of profits out of Iraq.

BR: Is it true the beneficiaries of the $8billion rebuilding contracts so far awarded are virtually all American firms and overwhelmingly donors to your re-election campaign?

GWB: You`ve got it buddy. Washington`s Center for Public Integrity said 70 firms who were handed contracts gave more than half a million dollars to my 2000 campaign. Most of the 10 largest contracts went to companies that employed former high-ranking government officials, or executives with close ties to members of Congress.

A $2billion contract went to oil firm Halliburton, which used to be run by my big pal and Vice President Dick Cheney.

BR: Amazingly, the contracts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan were awarded by the White House without any competitive bids. Is that usual?

GWB: Since 9/11 we live in unusual times mah friend. I will never forget the smell at Ground Zero in the days that followed...

BR: Meaning?

GWB: Hell, I dunno but it`s what I always say when I get a tricky question. What was it again? Oh yeah, giving all the contracts to my backers? It`s called rewarding friendship.

That`s why I`m coming to Britain, because Tony Blair has been a great friend to me over this war thing.

BR: When exactly did Blair commit himself to your war? After all diplomatic channels had been exhausted?

GWB: Diplo-what? I don`t understand. I won Tony over by making Congress give him a standing ovation after 9/11. I could see in his eyes he got drunk on the same power as me.

Then in April 2002, when he stayed in my Texan ranch, he told me the Brits would follow us to war whatever happened. All that UN resolution stuff was just bulls**t.

BR: Do you and Tony pray together?

GWB: Yep. Whenever we see our opinion poll ratings.

BR: Did you know there was no hard evidence of weapons of mass destruction?

GWB: Like I give a s***.

BR: Or that Saddam Hussein had no link to Osama bin Laden?

GWB: Whatever.

BR: Your family has links though, hasn`t it? You`ve done business with them for 25 years, haven`t you?

GWB: As my good friend Michael Moore says, the bin Ladens have extensive dealings with our friends. Friends such as Citigroup, General Electric, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and the Fremont Group.

The bin Ladens have donated $2million to my alma mater, Harvard. They own property in Texas, Florida and Massachusetts. In short, they have their hands deep in our pants.

BR: You knew Iraq would descend into chaos but went ahead regardless, didn`t you?

GWB: Sure. Yonks ago, the US State Department issued a report called The Future Of Iraq after consulting with 200 experts which forecast everything from the looting to the overt hostility against us. But we ignored it `cos, hey, whadda they know?

BR: You famously said when you gave the order to go to war: "I feel good." Do you still today?

GWB: Six months after the war the country is still without a regular power supply. Sabotage has destroyed about 700 transmission centres. The whole reconstruction effort is foundering under allegations of favouritism and corruption.

Congress has gone ape over my demand for another $87billion and more than half of Americans say they can`t rely on me in a crisis.

Now I have to come to Britain to send back pictures of me looking like a world statesman when most of you Limeys hate mah guts and thousands are gonna tell me so. Would you feel good?

BR: What will you be giving Britain as a reward for our help in the war? Will you drop steel tariffs, release our citizens in Guantanamo Bay, adhere to the Kyoto Treaty?

GWB: Erm, kinda nope.

BR: You don`t really give a monkeys about the rest of the world, do you?

GWB: The rest of the world just outside Texas, yep. Because I need it to vote for me. The world outside America? Uh-un.

BR: Do you have plans to liberate any other country run by a despotic regime?

GWB: Let me tell you this. If people are getting slaughtered and tortured by fanatics running nations where only cabbages or rice grow, they`ve got nothing to worry about.

But if there`s oil there, we will unleash all of our awesome might to liberate it. And that`s a promise folks.

Clearly, whatever those who protest about the protesters say in editorials tomorrow, Bush is a force for evil, not good.

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Wednesday, November 19, 2003
War News for November 19, 2003 Draft

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

Bring ‘em on: Major counter-insurgency operations continue across Iraq.

Bring ‘em on: US conducts tactical air strikes in central Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi official assassinated in Diwaniyah.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi policemen and Iraqi translator wounded in attack on police station in Mosul.

Australians working for CPA evacuated from Iraq after threats.

Report from Fallujah. “This city is a case study in how U.S. war planners appear to have underestimated the complexity of Iraqi society, including the role of tribes and different ethnic and religious groups. As casualties grow, the Americans are discovering how hard it will be to create a government of these disparate interests.”

Back to the future in Baghdad.

Insurgents are locals, according to US general. “’I want to underscore that most of the attacks on our forces are by former regime loyalists and other Iraqis, not foreign forces,’ said the officer, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division.” So why does Lieutenant AWOL keep yapping about “foreign fighters?”

Iraqis complain about targets. “But residents are wondering why some of the targets were picked, saying they are on land that`s fully controlled by coalition forces.”

Media Analysis: The collapse of American values. “Three things America cherishes and prides itself more than anything else are its democratic values — absolute freedom of the media to report anything it wants, as it wants according to its best judgment; and indiscriminate and fair dispensation of justice. The US government could not imagine to advise media about the coverage or otherwise of a story or the mode of the coverage.”

Commentary

Opinion: Take a close look at Bush’s “exit strategy.” “But I worry that this new strategy, like the last one, has too much wishful thinking and too little hard analysis about what could go wrong.” Keep worrying. All of this administration’s military and diplomatic policy is coming exclusively from the political office. Lieutenant AWOL and his buddies really don’t give a rat’s ass about either the Iraqi or the American people.

Opinion: Former US Marine sounds off.

Opinion: Bush’s taxpayer-supported propaganda network is a bad idea.



Casualty Reports

Local story: California soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Minnesota soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: California soldier dies in Iraq.

Local story: Mississippi soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Tennessee soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: New York soldier killed in Iraq.

Operation Cut and Run

Report from Samarra. “Mowafaq Hameed, a police captain in Samara, speculated the Americans pulled back after pressure from the city`s religious leaders and tribal chiefs. He said the police had no prior knowledge of the move. The soldiers had barely left Saturday when an army of looters arrived in pickup trucks to strip the bases of whatever they could lay their hands on, including bricks from walls and glass from windows.” Emphasis added.

Name That War!

In an otherwise incoherent piece in today’s New York Times, Nicholas Kristoff announced that he is sponsoring a contest to name the current war in Iraq. “We need a name for this war. `Operation Iraqi Freedom` never rolled off the tongue, and `Iraq war` creates confusion with the 1991 war. So send in your entries by mail or e-mail. I`ll report the top five suggestions and give those writers Iraqi 250-dinar notes with Saddam`s portrait.”

As Kristoff himself acknowledges, “Mr. Bush has gotten us into this mess” so I suggest Bush’s War is an appropriate title both for history to remember this folly and for Americans to remind Lieutenant AWOL (and future Presidents who might contemplate their own vanity wars) about where the buck stops.

Send in your own suggestions. Mr. Kristoff’s email is at the link above.





# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:05 AM

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Will Bush Exit – or Escalate?

by Pat Buchanan

November 19, 2003: Watch what we do, not what we say," was the retort of Attorney General John Mitchell to reporters questioning Nixon`s commitment to desegregation.

Though mocked for cynicism, Mitchell was right. Even as Nixon`s men were railing at the radical idiocy of forced busing for racial balance, they were desegregating six times as many schools as LBJ.

Bush`s tough talk, too, about staying the course – "We`re not leaving until the job is done, pure and simple" – may not be a smokescreen to cover a strategic retreat from Iraq. Bush may be in earnest.

Ten days ago, Sen. John McCain warned of a possible defeat in Iraq more disastrous than the fall of Vietnam. He called for 15,000 more U.S. troops. Pentagon response? It leaked plans to cut U.S. forces by 30,000 by May.

Another sign Bush appears to want to toss this hot potato to Iraqis is the enlistment of Iraqi police and military at an almost reckless pace. Have these scores of thousands of soldiers and cops been vetted for loyalty? Also, our man in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, was called back to Washington urgently, then sent back to speed up the transfer of power. By June, the Iraqis are to have their own provisional government.

Thus, the emergent wisdom is this: Jolted by U.S. casualties, the coordination and lethality of the latest attacks, now running at 30 a day, and faltering home-front support, the White House has begun to advance its timetable for withdrawal.

Yet, it is impossible to believe Bush is about to "cut-and-run," as his enemies contend. It goes against his natural instincts, and his interests. A rapid pullout would risk a bloodbath against all who cast their lot with America, civil war in Iraq and a humiliation more devastating to U.S. credibility than the fall of Saigon. Should Iraq collapse, Bush would risk defeat in 2004 and enter the history books as a failed president who had blundered into the most ill-conceived war in U.S. history.

Surely he knows this. Which is why I believe Bush and his War Cabinet may have another strategy in mind, which is this. The president intends to draw down U.S. forces to a hard core of fighters, perhaps 90,000, backed by U.S. air power, a force 15 times as large as the mobile U.S. force in Afghanistan. This force will carry the brunt of battle in a new war against the guerrillas and terrorists, and be less concerned with winning hearts and minds in the Sunni Triangle than killing enemy fighters. Operation Iron Hammer is the dress rehearsal for the new war.

An Iraqi assembly will be elected and a leader chosen upon whom the United States can rely to fight a "long, hard slog." This leader will, with U.S. training, rapidly expand the Iraq army and police forces. Unlike Vietnam`s President Thieu, who was abandoned in 1973, this leader, like Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, will be able to call on U.S. firepower to win any battle against attacking guerrillas.

Goal: Convince undecided Iraqis, who cannot wish to be ruled by Saddam and the Ba`athists, or Islamic radicals, that America and her allies are going to win the war, so it is wiser and safer to cast their lot with us.

Do not rule out the possibility that Bush escalates rather than retreats, that he puts his faith in winning the war rather than consigning Iraq to the Iraqi electorate and hoping for the best. Use of bombers near Tikrit and gunships around Baghdad may be harbingers of the war to come.

The enemy strategy also seems clear. Roadside bombs, firings on helicopters, the sniping at U.S. troops, the mortar and rocket shelling of our installations are designed to ratchet up casualties and break America`s will.

Attacks on U.N. and Red Cross headquarters, the Italian military base and the Jordanian embassy are designed to terrify aid workers into fleeing and peel off U.S. allies, to make reconstruction fail.

But in their attacks on Iraqi police, the enemy may, as the Viet Cong did with the massacre of Vietnamese civilians during the Tet Offensive in Hue, convince Iraqis they have to take sides, even if they would prefer to wait and see who is going to win.

Bush is being pushed to hand Iraq over to a United Nations he distrusts, to NATO allies who failed to help, to Arabs who opposed his war. With his presidency and place in history on the line, my guess is Bush puts his chips on what he believes has never failed him – the firepower of the Armed Forces of the United States.

Just a hunch, but we may not be headed out of Iraq. We may be headed into the third and longest Arab-American war in a dozen years.

Copyright: Creators Syndicate, Inc.

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Report Suppressed: Iran Gassed Kurds, Not Iraq

US Army War College (USAWC) undertook a study of the use of chemical weapons by Iran and Iraq in order to better understand battlefield chemical warfare. They concluded that it was Iran and not Iraq that killed the Kurds.

by Raju Thomas

Times of India, 16 September 2002: The repeated American propaganda weapon to rationalise the deaths of more than one million innocent Iraqis since 1991 through economic sanctions is that Saddam Hussein used poison gas against Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war and against Iraq’s own Kurdish citizens. The accusation is now being invoked to launch a full-scale American assault on Iraq. This claim of Iraq gassing its own citizens at Halabjah is suspect. First, both Iran and Iraq used chemical weapons against each other during their war. Second, at the termination of the Iran-Iraq war, professors Stephen Pelletiere and Leif Rosenberger, and Lt Colonel Douglas Johnson of the US Army War College (USAWC) undertook a study of the use of chemical weapons by Iran and Iraq in order to better understand battlefield chemical warfare. They concluded that it was Iran and not Iraq that killed the Kurds.
In the first report they wrote: “In September 1988 — a month after the war had ended...the state department abruptly, and in what many viewed as sensational manner, condemned Iraq for allegedly using chemical weapons against its Kurdish population...with the result that numerous Kurdish civilians were killed. The Iraqi government denied that any such gassing had occurred...Having looked at all the evidence that was available to us, we find it impossible to confirm the state department’s claim that gas was used in this instance. To begin with there were never any victims produced. International relief organisations who examined the Kurds — in Turkey where they had gone for asylum — failed to discover any. Nor were there any found inside Iraq. The claim rests solely on testimony of the Kurds who had crossed the border into Turkey, where they were interviewed by staffers of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

Regarding the Halabjah incident where Iraqi soldiers were reported to have gassed their own Kurdish citizens, the USAWC investigators observed: “It appears that in seeking to punish Iraq, Congress was influenced by another incident that occurred five months earlier in another Iraq-Kurdish city, Halabjah. In March 1988, the Kurds at Halabjah were bombarded with chemical weapons, producing many deaths. Photographs of the Kurdish victims were widely disseminated in the international media. Iraq was blamed for the Halabjah attack even though it was subsequently brought out that Iran too had used chemical weapons in this operation, and it seemed likely that it was the Iranian bombardment that had actually killed the Kurds.” [The Iranians thought the Kurds had fled Halabjah and that they were attacking occupying Iraqi forces. But the Iraqis had already vacated Halabjah and the Kurds had returned. Iran gassed the Kurds by accident]

In March 1991 as the massive US-led attack on Iraq ended, I was visiting the USAWC to give a lecture on South Asian security and discussed this problem with professor Pelletiere at lunch. I recall Pelletiere telling me that the USAWC investigation showed that in the Iranian mass human wave battlefield strategy, Teheran used non-persistent poison gas against Iraqi soldiers so as to be able to attack and advance into the areas vacated by Iraqis. On the other hand, Baghdad used persistent gas to halt the Iranian human wave attacks. There was a certain consistency to this pattern. However, in the Halabjah incident, the USAWC investigators discovered that the gas used that killed hundreds of Kurds was the non-persistent gas, the chemical weapon of choice of the Iranians. Note it was the Iranians who arrived at the scene first, who reported the incident to UN observers, and who took pictures of the gassed Kurdish civilians. However, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait in August and the truth of the Halabjah incident became inconvenient.

I asked professor Pelletiere in March 1991, when he thought their findings would come out. I recall him telling me that it would probably take about five years after emotions over the Gulf war crisis died down. However, the USAWC report of 1990 has been dispatched into oblivion. The propaganda that Iraq gassed its own Kurdish civilians is cons-tantly invoked by the media. It was reactivated by president Clinton in December 1998 to justify the further bombing and destruction of Iraq.

Meanwhile, estimates of the number of innocents who have died in Iraq from relentless American-dictated UN sanctions range between 1-1.7 million, including more than half-a-million children. An article in The New England Journal of Medicine, assessed through a study of monthly and annual infant mortality rates in Iraq that “more than 46,900 children died between January and August 1991. UNICEF official Thomas Ekfal estimates that about 500,000 children have died in Iraq since the United Nations Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Baghdad.

If the US bombs Iraq, it is not the direct loss of Iraqi lives from “collateral damage” alone that will be the only tragedy, but the unseen and accelerated loss of lives of tens of thousands of more infants, the sick and the elderly from lack of medicine and other healthcare. Before the US bullies all countries into supporting its bombing of Iraq, major countries such as France, Germany, Russia, China, India and Indonesia should stand up in unison and say “no more [bombs]” to the sole superpower.

The author is the Allis Chalmers distinguished professor of International Affairs at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Copyright Raju Thomas, Times of India 2002, For fair use only

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1.Teil
CIA Analysis: The Predicament Mr. Bush And The Pentagon Have Gotten US Into

"It`s important you understand who is pushing this war"

2.Teil

Q & A With CIA Analyst Stephen Pelletiere


Zwei Videos zu jedem Thema:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2097.htm
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2098.htm

A War Crime or an Act of War?
By Stephen C. Pelletiere The New York Times, Jan. 31, 2003

MECHANICSBURG, Pa. - It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq`s weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The dictator who is assembling the world`s most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."

The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq`s "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.

But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.

I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency`s senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.

This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq`s main target.

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds` bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent - that is, a cyanide-based gas - which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.

These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.

I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.


In fact, those who really feel that the disaster at Halabja has bearing on today might want to consider a different question: Why was Iran so keen on taking the town? A closer look may shed light on America`s impetus to invade Iraq.

We are constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the world`s largest reserves of oil. But in a regional and perhaps even geopolitical sense, it may be more important that Iraq has the most extensive river system in the Middle East. In addition to the Tigris and Euphrates, there are the Greater Zab and Lesser Zab rivers in the north of the country. Iraq was covered with irrigation works by the sixth century A.D., and was a granary for the region.

Before the Persian Gulf war, Iraq had built an impressive system of dams and river control projects, the largest being the Darbandikhan dam in the Kurdish area. And it was this dam the Iranians were aiming to take control of when they seized Halabja. In the 1990`s there was much discussion over the construction of a so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the parched Gulf states and, by extension, Israel. No progress has been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change.

Thus America could alter the destiny of the Middle East in a way that probably could not be challenged for decades - not solely by controlling Iraq`s oil, but by controlling its water. Even if America didn`t occupy the country, once Mr. Hussein`s Baath Party is driven from power, many lucrative opportunities would open up for American companies.

All that is needed to get us into war is one clear reason for acting, one that would be generally persuasive. But efforts to link the Iraqis directly to Osama bin Laden have proved inconclusive. Assertions that Iraq threatens its neighbors have also failed to create much resolve; in its present debilitated condition - thanks to United Nations sanctions - Iraq`s conventional forces threaten no one.

Perhaps the strongest argument left for taking us to war quickly is that Saddam Hussein has committed human rights atrocities against his people. And the most dramatic case are the accusations about Halabja.

Before we go to war over Halabja, the administration owes the American people the full facts. And if it has other examples of Saddam Hussein gassing Kurds, it must show that they were not pro-Iranian Kurdish guerrillas who died fighting alongside Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Until Washington gives us proof of Saddam Hussein`s supposed atrocities, why are we picking on Iraq on human rights grounds, particularly when there are so many other repressive regimes Washington supports?

Stephen C. Pelletiere is author of "Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Persian Gulf."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/opinion/31PELL.html

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Published on Wednesday, November 19, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
“Turning Point” in the War in Iraq: But Which Way Is It Turning?
by Ivan Eland

As Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. general in Iraq, unleashed a more aggressive plan to pulverize the intensifying insurgency, he declared that the war was at a turning point and was breaking America’s way. The divergence of that statement from reality is much like a blind man with an assault rifle insisting that he has killed all the gophers under his lawn.

Sanchez and the administration he serves are blind both literally and figuratively. American intelligence is so limited in Iraq that U.S. forces aren’t even sure who they are fighting and how organized they are. Sun Tzu, one of history’s most respected authorities on war, going back to the 5th Century B.C., believed that accurate intelligence on the enemy was the key to victory in any war. By ratcheting up the level of violence without having good intelligence, the Bush administration is making a horrendous mistake and is playing into the hands of the insurgents. Frequently, in guerrilla war, the insurgents attempt to provoke the stronger party into an excessively violent overreaction, thus shifting all-important popular opinion in the conflict zone from the occupiers to the guerrillas. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong successfully pursued that strategy in the Vietnam War and the warlord Muhammad Aidid did so during the U.S. intervention in Somalia in the early 1990s. In the latter case, after an instance in which the U.S. military used excessive force, Somali public opinion rapidly turned from supporting the United States to supporting Aidid. Similarly, in Iraq, more aggressive U.S. tactics without good intelligence will likely lead to a surge in Iraqi civilian deaths and thus could rapidly exacerbate hostility in an Iraqi population already disgruntled with the American occupation.

Recent polls in Iraq, including a secret poll done by the U.S. State Department, ominously show that most Iraqis regard U.S. forces as occupiers rather than liberators. That unsettling fact contributed to a gloomy CIA assessment of the situation in Iraq that was endorsed by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, the administration’s top civilian in Iraq. According to press reports, the top-secret CIA analysis suggests that the war in Iraq is at a turning point, but reaches the opposite conclusion from the one reached publicly by Lt. Gen. Sanchez. The dismal CIA estimate reportedly notes that Iraqis are losing faith in the U.S. occupation forces and the U.S. hand picked Iraqi Governing Council.

Thus, the blindness of the administration is figurative, as well as literal. Lt. Gen. Sanchez and other administration officials, including Ambassador Bremer, have been excessively upbeat in public statements about the situation in Iraq, while the reality seems to be heading in the opposite direction. Senator John McCain, a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War and normally supportive of the administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, recently compared the divergence between the reality on the ground and the administration’s public pronouncements with the credibility gap in Vietnam. The administration is blind to the potentially catastrophic effects of lying to the American people about the conduct of a war. U.S. public opinion turned against the Vietnam War after a major offensive by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in 1968 destroyed the credibility of the Johnson administration’s rosy assessments that the tide had turned and the United States was winning the war.

The situation in Iraq is so bad that one U.S. government official was quoted in the press as saying, “The trend lines are in the wrong direction. I haven’t seen anything in any of the intelligence reports that offers a hard and fast recipe for how to turn things around.” The administration has had no success in recruiting foreign forces to help in Iraq, cannot throw more U.S. forces into the fray without committing political suicide, and has no hope of creating competent and loyal Iraqi security forces anytime soon. So it has resorted to brute force. Already, the CIA notes the danger of the majority Shiite Muslim population joining with the minority Sunni Muslims in attacking U.S. forces. A U.S. escalation of violence and concomitant civilian casualties can only increase the probability that this catastrophic development could occur.

The Bush administration has painted itself into a corner and now has no good options. Believe it or not, the least odious alternative, both for America and for President Bush politically, is to withdraw U.S. forces, turn over Iraq to the Iraqis, take the criticism and move on. Ultimately, U.S. “credibility” will be greater under that scenario than if the administration lets the body bags pile up and waits until an election year before drawing down U.S. forces. Experts in investing say that investors often cannot admit to themselves psychologically that they made a mistake by investing in a poorly performing stock. They hold onto it too long, hoping that the price will go back up. Instead, they should sell the stock, cut their losses and invest their resources in something more profitable. In Iraq, President Bush would be wise to follow similar advice--cut his losses, bring the troops home before things get worse and let the Iraqis run their own country.

Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute in Oakland, CA.

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Actions Speak Louder Than Words: A Response to the President`s Speech
http://www.centerforamericanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?cid={E9…
November 19, 2003

In London this morning, President George W. Bush defended the administration’s policies on Iraq and the war on terrorism. While his speech deftly combined gravity and humor, a close examination shows that his actions fail to match his rhetoric:

International Institutions and Alliances

“First, international organizations must be equal to the challenges facing our world, from lifting up failing states to opposing proliferation. Like 11 presidents before me, I believe in the international institutions and alliances that America helped to form and helps to lead.”

• President Bush says he believes in international institutions and alliances and yet he has gone out of his way to avoid using them to protect and advance our national interests. He launched his attack on Iraq without U.N. approval, despite the fact that a majority of Americans felt we should go to war only with U.N. sanction.

• The administration has also gutted the impact of international organizations aimed at “opposing proliferation” – backing off the Convention on Biological Weapons and not allowing International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors into Iraq to continue their search for nuclear weapons and materials. The administration should use alliances and international institutions because they ultimately benefit us and help ensure fewer American casualties and that the U.S. bears less of the economic burden of the reconstruction in Iraq.

Use of Force

“The second pillar of peace and security in our world is the willingness of free nations, when the last resort arrives, to retain aggression and evil by force…. The victims of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans… had few qualms when NATO applied force to help end those crimes. The women of Afghanistan… did not reproach us for routing the Taliban. Inhabitants of Iraq`s Baathist hell… do not miss their fugitive dictator; they rejoiced at his fall. In all these cases, military action was preceded by diplomatic initiatives and negotiations and ultimatums and final chances until the final moment.”

• The use of force as a last resort is necessary and justifiable in the protection of American security. The administration, however, did not exhaust all diplomatic avenues before resorting to the use of force against Iraq, and by doing so, alienated our European allies, costing us critically needed support and resources in the current period.

• While there are similarities in the “evil” encountered in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the U.S. responses to the three have been markedly different. In the Balkans, the Administration worked closely with its allies under a clear NATO mandate and in Afghanistan, the Administration allowed the United Nations to play a central role in establishing the Afghan interim authority. The International Security Assistance Force is largely multilateral, with German troops in the lead, authorized under a United Nations Security Council resolution. The go-it-alone approach has made Iraq susceptible to terrorists.

Expansion of Democracy

“The third pillar of security is our commitment to the global expansion of democracy and the hope and progress it brings as the alternative to instability and hatred and terror. We cannot rely exclusively on military power to assure our long-term security. Lasting peace is gained as justice and democracy advance.”

• The administration relied exclusively on military power to effect regime change while doing little to ensure that democracy takes root. Our long-term security can only be assured by using all of the weapons in our arsenal, including intelligence, strong diplomacy, public diplomacy, economic instruments, and military force.

• In consultation with countries throughout the region, the U.S. should articulate a strategy for promoting democracy which should include clear benchmarks and accountability mechanisms. According to Fareed Zakaria, “[The] Bush administration seems to like the idea of democracy if it can achieve it by killing a tyrant. The long hard slog of democracy, which is foreign aid, which is cultural exchange, which is legal reform, education reform, the whole process of modernizing societies, building institutions… that is much more boring, unsexy, and the kind of thing they usually criticize liberals for doing.”

Iraq

“The failure of democracy in Iraq would throw its people back into misery and turn that country over to terrorists who wish to destroy us. Yet democracy will succeed in Iraq, because our will is firm, our word is good and the Iraqi people will not surrender their freedom… Since the liberation of Iraq, we have seen changes that could hardly have been imagined a year ago. A new Iraqi police force protects the people, instead of bullying them. Schools are open, with textbooks free of propaganda.”

• Department of Defense officials have admitted that the majority of the Iraqi police force has received little or no training. With the rapid acceleration of plans to field Iraqis, the vetting process has largely been circumvented, possibly allowing former Baathists and insurgents to infiltrate their ranks.

• Schools and markets may be open, but recent Gallup polls indicate that ninety-four percent of Baghdad residents say that their city is “a more dangerous place than it was before the invasion.” Eighty-eight percent are afraid to go outside of their home at night for safety reasons. As a result, news reports indicate that many parents in Baghdad are keeping their kids at home due to fear for their safety.

“This is substantial progress. And much of it has proceeded faster than similar efforts in Germany and Japan after World War II.”

• Throughout his speech, President Bush continued to compare the postwar reconstruction of Iraq with that of Germany and Japan after World War II. Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) has pointed out differences between the two efforts: “For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare… (and fourth), the reconstruction of Europe was undertaken in the context of spirit of internationalism, multilateralism, and collective security.”

“We did not charge hundreds of miles into the heart of Iraq and pay a bitter cost of casualties and liberate 25 million people only to retreat before a band of thugs and assassins.”

• The administration had no qualms about charging hundreds of miles into the heart of Iraq without a plan for the occupation of Baghdad or a strategy to deal with the growing insurgency. It repeatedly ignored reports by the State Department and the intelligence community and instead clung to rosy scenarios of being greeted as liberators instead of occupiers. A recently released after-action report by the Third Infantry Division describes the complete absence of high-level military and political planning to manage the aftermath of the war.

I`ve been here only a short time, but I`ve noticed the tradition of free speech exercised with enthusiasm is alive and well here in London. We have that at home too.”

• President Bush’s planned speech to Parliament was cancelled due to fears that members might boycott or heckle in protest to his policies. All of the usual public appearances associated with a state visit have been scrapped, and media on both sides of the Atlantic have complained that neither the White House nor Downing Street have provided substantive details of the visit.

• Both at home and abroad, Administration officials have dismissed critics of their policies as “unpatriotic” and “anti-American.” The Administration banned news coverage and photography of killed soldiers on all military bases. It also forbids photos of dead soldiers’ coffins at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

• A report by Reporters Without Borders ranked the United States 31st in a global study of 164 countries in freedom of the press at home and “135th for its behavior beyond its borders.” The low ranking specifically reflected the treatment of foreign and Iraqi reporters by U.S. troops.

Encouraging Stability

“By promoting development and fighting famine and AIDS and other diseases, we`re fulfilling our moral duties as well as encouraging stability and building a firmer basis for democratic institutions.”

• The only way to achieve long-term stability is to get at the root causes of terrorism, including socioeconomic conditions and religious fanaticism. The Bush Administration has advanced worthy ideas on this front but has failed to deliver its promises on development aid and public diplomacy.

• The President’s Millennium Challenge Account – originally announced as a $5 billion dollar increase over the coming three years but likely to be funded at only $650 million next year – may increase foreign aid funding but will do nothing to lift up the failing states referenced by the President, as these new monies are targeted exclusively for the developing world’s “good performers.”

• Although he has increased substantially U.S. assistance to the global fight against HIV/AIDS, only a small percentage of these funds will go through the international Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria. Furthermore, the President’s announcement of his plan to increase international AIDS funding during his State of the Union was not preceded by a sustained effort to leverage similar increases from other like-minded donor nations, but was instead followed by his berating of European donors at the G8 summit for being stingy.

• Even with the President’s new initiatives, the U.S. still fails to rank in the world’s top ten in terms of percentage of GDP going to foreign aid and development. According to an index released by the Center for Global Development and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the U.S. ranked 20th out of the world’s 21 wealthiest countries for its policies aimed at reducing poverty in poor countries.

• A report released in October by a State Department Advisory Commission led by former Ambassador Edward Djerjerian called for “an immediate end to the absurd and dangerous underfunding of public diplomacy in a time of peril.” The report also found that the U.S. public diplomacy infrastructure faced significant problems in organization, staffing, and training. As a result, the State Department has fewer than 60 employees fluent in Arabic and only five have the skills to go toe-to-toe with commentators on Middle Eastern television program.

Democracy In the Middle East

“If the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation and anger and violence for export... We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East. Your nation and mine in the past have been willing to make a bargain to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability... Tyranny is never benign to its victims and our great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found.”

• Allowing some countries -- allies in the war on terrorism or important oil producing partners -- leeway to behave repressively will discredit the Administration’s commitment to democracy. Just last week, the President praised the democratic advances of Saudi Arabia and Egypt -- two strategically-important allies often criticized for their repressive ways.

• The U.S. should promote democracy through the example of openness, transparency, and fair treatment. In Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority has refused to disclose how it spends both Iraqi and American funds, and secrecy and misperception continue to surround the process of awarding contracts.

Arab-Israeli Conflict

“A forward strategy of freedom must also apply to the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is a difficult period in a part of the world that has known many. Yet our commitment remains firm.”

• The Administration’s initiatives in the Arab-Israeli conflict have stalled. As a result of ineffective U.S. pressure, neither the Israelis nor Palestinians ever took more than token steps to fulfill the obligations set out in the ambitious U.S-backed “road map.” Despite being heavily promoted by President Bush, Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas resigned in September saying in part that he had been thwarted by American inaction. As a result, the “road map” is dead, Special Envoy John Wolf remains in Washington, and there is still no clear strategy for achieving the vision the President has laid out.

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The High-Tech Job Bust
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61296-2003Nov…

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War and peace - inside the two worlds of George Bush
Jonathan Freedland
Thursday November 20, 2003
The Guardian

All is calm, inside the bubble. Outside there may be baying demonstrators, clashing with dense lines of fluorescent-yellow police. Outside, a few streets away, there may sit a House of Commons bristling with anger at a war so many millions did not want. And outside, several thousand miles away, there may be the unfinished business of that decision: an occupation which sees the loss of a British or American life almost every day.

But inside the Bush bubble, all that clamour is far away. The combination of ceremony and security required for this, the first state visit ever granted to an American president, ensured that George Bush spent yesterday sealed off from any potential intrusions of nastiness. He moved in a bubble that enveloped him wherever he went, allowing him and his hosts to think only pleasant thoughts.

He began his day taking breakfast with the Windsors. A vicious rumour said he had kept the Queen waiting for five minutes, but that did not sound like a man known to regard unpunctuality as a sign of sackable indiscipline. He was certainly on time for his first engagement of the day, the formal welcome at Buckingham Palace.

For this, and lest he even breathe the same air as the protesters outside, he was ferried by limousine from the back door of the palace round to the front. It was the shortest political car ride since Pauline Prescott saved her hairdo on the seafront at Bournemouth. The presidential motorcade was so long, stretching from point of departure to destination without even moving, that the bullet-proofed Cadillac barely needed to inch out of first gear.

As the 41-gun salute sounded just over the wall in Green Park, a footman (mysteriously not carrying a reporter`s notebook) opened the presidential car door. The first couple emerged, looking pleased as punch. Up the red-carpeted stairs, to a receiving line in which the Lord Lieutenant was first and a Mr Tony Blair was second. (One of the quirks of royal occasions is their knack for putting mere elected politicians in their place: Blair, so used to being the star, was yesterday demoted to a place in the chorus line.)

Even this was not exposed to the outside world. Instead the Bushes were welcomed into a specially constructed pavilion at the front of Buck House. Decked out in red, white and blue it looked like a Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlour, sealed with an oversized royal warrant.

The ceremony that followed was one of those moments of performance art that somehow reflect an aspect of Britain that`s easy to forget.

The president was introduced to the chief of the defence staff, along with the heads of the army, navy and air force; then he shook hands with the lord mayors of London and Westminster - but no Mayor Livingstone - and later watched the Household Cavalry mounted regiment file past.

And all you could think of was how these folk were kitted out. The military top brass were in full dress uniform, complete with sashes and gold brocade: they looked like extras from Oh! What a Lovely War. The lord mayor in ermine and chain, the cavalry with their red-plumed helmets - the whole spectacle was Ruritanian, to be sure, but also a reminder of how Americans see Britain.

We look the way they imagine their past to be. They are brought up on fairy tales of King George and his wicked redcoats, and there they were yesterday - for all the world, as if nothing had changed in 230 years.

We looked like an old country yesterday, with George Bush, in his plain lounge suit, the brash young upstart. When the president was asked to inspect the guard of honour he did it at breakneck speed - briskly walking past the rows of polished soldiers like a man hurrying to catch a train. Poor Prince Philip was all but running behind him, like an aged father desperate to keep up with his son. Soon it was over and Bush was back indoors, for a private peek at the royal collection. The Queen tried to appeal to her guest, showing off items of Americana - like Queen Victoria`s snap of Buffalo Bill -but it was a strain. At one point the Prez seemed to be staring at the ceiling.

But the centrepiece of the day was a speech at the Banqueting House in Whitehall, scene of the execution of Charles I. There was to be no such act of defiance yesterday, not with a handpicked audience of foreign policy wonks and mandarins. There might have been heckling from anti-war MPs had Bush addressed parliament, but this was a suitably sterile environment. The president could stay in his bubble. And with the outside din of protest drowned out, we could let a different idea take root.

For Bush delivered a very good speech yesterday, well-constructed, well-written and, yes, well-delivered - even without the help of autocue. He said what many Britons want to hear from an American president, invoking the internationalist idealism of the last of his predecessors to sleep at Buckingham Palace, Woodrow Wilson.

For a lunchtime hour, we could imagine a different kind of President Bush. He made a powerful case for multilateralism, against the go-it-alone muscularity that has characterised so much of his rhetoric and record. "In this century, as in the last, nations can accomplish more together than apart," he said, promising that he had not given up on the United Nations, the European Union or a clutch of other international groupings.

Of course, he restated his insistence that sometimes force was the only way to do what was right.

But he blended that with some sound remarks on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and also a Wilsonian call for democracy and liberty to extend their reach to all those places as yet untouched by their blessings.

If the Middle East was denied democracy much longer, he warned, it would "remain a place of stagnation and anger and violence for export". To say that these nations were somehow culturally unsuited for self-rule was "pessimism and condescension and we should have none of it".

These were noble and wise sentiments and, since he was in the bubble, he could make them with no fear of contradiction.

No one was going to spoil the mood by mentioning America`s ongoing support for non-democracies like Saudi Arabia, or its desire in Iraq to do exactly what he said could not be done - to impose freedom by force. Best of all, Bush reminded his audience of the depth of the British-American relationship, with some warm lines about the wartime GIs who were "over here", and a reminder of how the United States was founded on the dreams of British radicals.

He lavished praise on us as a "kind and steadfast and generous and brave" people and said we were his nation`s "closest friend in the world".

In that room, and for one day, we could imagine the special relationship as it might be. Sheltered away, whether at an indoor wreath-laying ceremony for the victims of 9/11 or at last night`s state banquet, the spell could hold. But only until the bubble bursts - which may come as soon as today.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Only a true end to occupation will bring peace
The new US tactics won`t work - bombing civilians and handing over power to an unelected body will strengthen Iraqi resistance

Salim Lone
Thursday November 20, 2003
The Guardian

As part of the get-rough strategy just introduced in Iraq, US forces are striking with missiles, dropping 500lb bombs and using heavy bombardment on suspected insurgent hideouts in the civilian neighbourhoods of pro-resistance cities. US military commanders are openly talking of intimidating the "opposition" in such neighbourhoods, and also threatening mayors, tribal chiefs and farmers with "stern" measures unless they curb the militants who are attacking coalition troops.

Across the Atlantic, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, tries to intimidate his own critics, made resurgent again by President Bush`s visit, by lumping all those fighting occupation forces as "fanatics". Their defeat, he went on, "will mean the death of poisonous propaganda... about America".

The irony of this new coalition blitz is that it is being launched simultaneously with a new, and, in principle, laudable, strategy of giving primacy to Iraqi sovereignty. And to win support for this new pro-sovereignty policy, which he had earlier rejected, the US administrator for Iraq, Paul Bremer, reassured America that the interim Iraqi constitution will embody "American values". So much for convincing Iraqis that they are about to be free again.

All those who have goodwill towards the US, the UK and Iraq must be in utter despair at the coalition`s refusal to countenance the far-reaching changes in policy needed to reverse the bloody chaos in Iraq which could spiral out of control and further destabilise the region and the world, as the first Gulf war did. So a temporary occupation, which was the most that even pro-US Iraqis were prepared to tolerate, has been turned to war again, and the choice of widespread use of force seen as the only way to better protect coalition troops.

Little seems to have been learned from the blunders which this summer enraged central Iraq and Baghdad, and prevented a quick, successful US exit from the country. The coalition provisional authority, lurching haplessly to find fixes to a crisis that daily confounds its many new strategies, seems unaware that the planned transfer of power to its own choice of Iraqis will not stop the attacks on troops or the terrorist outrages against innocent civilians. The hasty nature of this transfer to another unelected body could also unravel for good the prospects for sustainable peace and democracy in Iraq.

The new war and aspects of the sovereignty plan have already further inflamed anti-occupation passions well beyond the reassuringly labelled "Sunni triangle", including senior Shia clerics who have restrained their huge, increasingly restive followings by criticising the occupation but counselling patience as the best tactic for achieving their goals.

What will bring peace to Iraq is a true end of occupation. This would require that the introduction of urgently needed new, and infinitely more inclusive, political arrangements than those represented by the governing council - which failed entirely in establishing its leadership legitimacy - be managed not by the US, whose motives are intensely distrusted in the Arab world, but by an international force and mission led by the United Nations.

Given the widespread Arab perception of the UN as essentially doing US bidding, this mission would have to be free of US control and have an unquestionable pro-Iraqi mandate. This would include guaranteeing all democratic factions equal access to political opportunity.

Even then, mobilising the UN would provide no assurance of success, and its political presence would obviously need the kinds of security protection articulated by Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, who would of course have to vet closely the nature of the mission`s mandate. Even such a UN effort would be attacked by the resistance, but its comprehensively pro-Iraqi mandate would undercut the insurgents by winning strong national support, including that of the Sunnis, and by negotiations with resistance groups. UN leadership of the political process would also eliminate the powerful electoral pressures which would otherwise dictate every US move. Such a UN mission would be worth the obvious risks because it could potentially bring peace to Iraq. The first UN mission was given an inconsequential and highly contradictory mandate by the security council, for which risking UN lives was a needless tragedy.

The head of that first Iraq UN mission - the vastly experienced negotiator of bitterly divided, post-conflict societies that enjoyed the strong backing of the US administration, the late Sergio Vieira de Mello - had himself concluded three months ago, when the insurgency was basically in its infancy, that only short-lived coalition rule would have worked in Iraq. Even many of the Iraqis who had initially supported the invasion were bristling under an intolerable level of lawlessness and insecurity and expressing strong opposition to the occupation. The critical issue in Iraq from the very beginning was not only war but occupation. Occupation is always an explosive matter, and that of an Arab nation by the US particularly so, given its total support for Israel, which itself occupies Palestine and Syria`s Golan Heights.

The majority of ordinary Arabs, and Muslims, are in fact convinced that the US is bent on a crusade to crush them and control or occupy their lands, and now the UK has opened itself to the same pernicious perception. Yes, this is how embattled, even mainstream, Muslims feel, even though they gravitated towards the US for decades until the 1980s, and would do so again if the US extended them friendship. But, at the moment, any claim that the US is in Iraq to help Iraqis is met with derision. Not a single pro-invasion Iraqi I met in Baghdad thought that altruism was the principal motivation for the war.

And so this occupation faces severe difficulties. Indeed, the significant improvements in security and essential services, which were considered key anti-insurgency tools, have been accompanied by a parallel escalation of destructive attacks and a decreased Iraqi confidence in the US ability to stay the course.

Clearly, the major coalition policy failures and misreadings of the Iraqi situation have given us a crisis to which there are no easy answers any more. But it is not too late to mobilise in Iraq the UN`s expertise in reconciling deeply torn post-conflict societies. Mr Blair is reported to be planning to use this visit to convince President Bush of the need for a major policy shift in favour of a softer approach.

His bellicose language at the lord mayor`s banquet seems not to have followed that script. Be that as it may, he must persuade the president, and himself, that having radically advanced the timetable for Iraqi sovereignty, it is only a genuinely neutral UN - with no vested interests of its own - that can bring that about, since it would potentially have Iraqis` and the region`s support.

As the prime minister himself pointed out at the banquet, Iraq is too central an issue to peace in the Middle East and the world for the two allies not to consider a dramatic rethinking of its occupation policies. If Iraq can be peaceful again, the US, as the overwhelming and unchallenged political, military and economic power in the world, and through alliances it has established in the country, will exercise immense influence.

It should never have launched this pre-emptive war, which was bound to inflame Arab and Muslim passions and which in fact the whole world had clamorously opposed. But with the active support of Mr Blair, President Bush pushed ahead. The two have now achieved their goal of deposing Saddam Hussein`s regime. They do not need to advance their interests through a continuing occupation, given its extraordinarily high political, moral and human costs.

· Salim Lone was director of communications for the UN mission in Baghdad. He retired on September 30.

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War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal
Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday November 20, 2003
The Guardian

International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.

In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."

President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq - also the British government`s publicly stated view - or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.

But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.

French intransigence, he added, meant there had been "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein".

Mr Perle, who was speaking at an event organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, had argued loudly for the toppling of the Iraqi dictator since the end of the 1991 Gulf war.

"They`re just not interested in international law, are they?" said Linda Hugl, a spokeswoman for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which launched a high court challenge to the war`s legality last year. "It`s only when the law suits them that they want to use it."

Mr Perle`s remarks bear little resemblance to official justifications for war, according to Rabinder Singh QC, who represented CND and also participated in Tuesday`s event.

Certainly the British government, he said, "has never advanced the suggestion that it is entitled to act, or right to act, contrary to international law in relation to Iraq".

The Pentagon adviser`s views, he added, underlined "a divergence of view between the British govern ment and some senior voices in American public life [who] have expressed the view that, well, if it`s the case that international law doesn`t permit unilateral pre-emptive action without the authority of the UN, then the defect is in international law".

Mr Perle`s view is not the official one put forward by the White House. Its main argument has been that the invasion was justified under the UN charter, which guarantees the right of each state to self-defence, including pre-emptive self-defence. On the night bombing began, in March, Mr Bush reiterated America`s "sovereign authority to use force" to defeat the threat from Baghdad.

The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has questioned that justification, arguing that the security council would have to rule on whether the US and its allies were under imminent threat.

Coalition officials countered that the security council had already approved the use of force in resolution 1441, passed a year ago, warning of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to give a complete ac counting of its weapons programmes.

Other council members disagreed, but American and British lawyers argued that the threat of force had been implicit since the first Gulf war, which was ended only by a ceasefire.

"I think Perle`s statement has the virtue of honesty," said Michael Dorf, a law professor at Columbia University who opposed the war, arguing that it was illegal.

"And, interestingly, I suspect a majority of the American public would have supported the invasion almost exactly to the same degree that they in fact did, had the administration said that all along."

The controversy-prone Mr Perle resigned his chairmanship of the defence policy board earlier this year but remained a member of the advisory board.

Meanwhile, there was a hint that the US was trying to find a way to release the Britons held at Guantanamo Bay.

The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said Mr Bush was "very sensitive" to British sentiment. "We also expect to be resolving this in the near future," he told the BBC.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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November 20, 2003
BAGHDAD
Sensing Shiites Will Rule Iraq, U.S. Starts to See Friends, Not Foes
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 — The Bush administration, which was wary earlier this year of installing a government dominated by Shiites in Iraq, has concluded that such a development is virtually inevitable and not necessarily harmful to American interests, administration officials said Wednesday.

The officials said that fears of an Iranian-style — and Iranian-influenced — theocracy in Baghdad have faded because it has become clear that Iraq`s Shiite population is not a monolithic bloc and not necessarily dominated by Tehran.

"Our basic position is that as we get to know more of Iraqi society, we`re more comfortable with a democratic process, and if that emerges with a predominant Shiite role, so be it," said an administration official. "There`s been a steady education process here."

Still, American officials are taking steps to ensure that when a Shiite-dominated government is installed next year, as most expect, religious freedom and minority rights are respected and Iraq`s neighbors are reassured that the first Shiite-governed Arab country does not pose a threat to them.

The shift in the administration`s thinking laid the groundwork for the decision announced last week to accelerate the timetable for self-government in Iraq, administration officials say.

Administration officials acknowledge that elections or local meetings held to choose an interim government next year are likely to be dominated by Shiites, who represent a majority of Iraq`s population and who are better organized to win.

And while administration officials believe such a government will seek to be independent of Iran`s religious influence, some experts on Iran and the Middle East caution that even the more secular of Shiites will also come under at least some influence of religious leaders in Iraq, and perhaps even in Iran.

"It is true that the Shiites are not monolithic," said Flynt Leverett, a former director of Middle East affairs at the National Security Council under President Bush. "It`s also true that most Iraqi Shias do not want to see an Iranian style rule brought into post-Saddam Iraq."

But Mr. Leverett cautioned that most Iraqi Shiites also "want to see a system in which Islam has an official standing, and in which Islamic law is recognized as an important foundation for society."

This fact, he said, could create problems for the Bush administration as it plans for a government that respects religious diversity and the rights of minority groups and separates religion and state. Mr. Leverett is now a visiting fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

Half the Iraqi Governing Council`s 24 members are Shiites. The number was 13 out of 25, a bare majority, until the assassination of one member earlier this year. But Bush administration officials note that the Shiite members range widely in ideology: some are clerics, some are not, and there is also at least one Communist.

The Bush administration first prepared for the likelihood of a Shiite government by insisting that the Iraqis write a constitution enshrining certain minority rights before an Iraqi government was installed. But that process looked like it was going to take a year or two.

Because of the worsening security situation, the administration speeded up that timetable last week. Now the administration wants the establishment of what it calls a "fundamental law" — in effect, an interim constitution — before an interim government is chosen next year.

That law is to be developed in "close consultation" with the American-led occupation authority`s in Baghdad, according to a document on its Web site.

American officials say that the main fear concerning a Shiite government in Iraq is more external than internal. Some of Iraq`s neighbors — Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf states — are said to be worried that a new Shiite-ruled nation in their midst might inflame their own restive Shiite populations.

If that came to pass, some Arab diplomats say, neighboring countries might end up encouraging the Sunni minority in Iraq to rebel against the government in Baghdad — as some Sunnis are already doing.

Another possibility, some in the administration say, is that Iraq could evolve toward a political compromise forged by the exile Ahmad Chalabi — a secular Shiite. Mr. Chalabi might manage to stitch together pro-Iranian groups, Kurds and others into a government.

A top administration official predicted recently that in that event, Mr. Chalabi — who set up an office for his opposition group in Tehran before the American invasion of Iraq — could become the first Iraqi prime minister.

The fear among American policy makers has long been that Iran would exercise too much influence over Shiites in Iraq. The best-known Shiite groups opposing Mr. Hussein, officials note, had links to Iranian intelligence services.

Now, however, American officials say that Iran might see a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad more as a rival than an ally. Iraq has many centers of Shiite study, like Najaf, that could easily pose a threat to Iran`s centers, including the city of Qum.

"We see the religious rivalry playing itself out," said an administration official. "Some of us call this the coming Najaf-Qum rivalry."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 20, 2003
You Gotta Have Friends
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

ONDON — So I step off the plane in London and the British customs guy sees on my form that I`m a journalist and asks, "Is it true there are more police to protect your president in London than there are in Baghdad?" Then I pick up The Independent to read in the taxi and I see that London`s left-wing mayor, Ken Livingstone, has denounced President Bush as "the greatest threat to life on this planet that we`ve most probably ever seen." Then I check out The Guardian, which carried open letters to the president, one of which is from the famous playwright Harold Pinter, who says: "Dear President Bush, I`m sure you`ll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood."

No, Dorothy, we`re definitely not in Kansas anymore.

We`re in the U.K., our closest ally in the Iraq war — a country where Mr. Bush still has many supporters, but also a legion of detractors. But if this is how some of our best friends are talking, imagine how difficult it is going to be to win over America`s more ambivalent allies — to widen support for the rebuilding of Iraq. To be sure, some people simply will never be winnable because they hate America above all else. (That may explain why you don`t see any protesters here carrying signs saying, "Death to bin Laden," "Saddam: How many Iraqis did you kill today?" or "Mr. Bush: Thanks for believing in Arab democracy.")

But there is also a whole constituency in Europe and the Middle East who are upset with Mr. Bush because of what he does, not who he is. They can be won over, or at least neutralized, so their governments can be more supportive on Iraq. But it will require a policy lobotomy by the Bush team.

Tom Malinowski, from Human Rights Watch, perfectly described Mr. Bush`s core problem: When you look at the muted reaction to the president`s important speech on the need for democracy in the Arab world, you see that "President Bush has moral clarity, but no moral authority." He has a vision — without influence among the partners needed to get it moving. His is a beautifully carved table — with only one leg.

The Bush team`s decision to change course in Iraq, and to transfer authority by July 1 to an interim government indirectly elected by community leaders from each of Iraq`s 18 governates, is a good new start for generating legitimacy for the U.S. presence in Iraq. I do not know if this plan will work, but those who dismiss it as a cut-and-run strategy have it wrong. This plan is actually the only way America can stay. Only a legitimate Iraqi authority can give cover for a long-term U.S. presence and do what it takes to finish the war.

But this policy shift is not enough. It needs shifts toward Europe and the Middle East, too. It is amazing, British officials say, how little the Bush team has done to shore up Mr. Blair for taking his hugely important (and unpopular) pro-war stance. Mr. Blair needs the U.S. to drop its outrageous steel tariffs, to provide a workable alternative to Kyoto, to hand over the nine U.K. citizens held in Guantánamo Bay (which is a big story here) and to let London play around with the E.U. on a European defense force, which is not a threat to NATO. But so far, he appears to be getting nothing.

Tony Blair was too principled for his own good. He was so convinced that the war was right, he never played hardball with the Bush team to get it to adopt the other policies needed to sustain British support, and which would also have increased Mr. Bush`s authority throughout Europe.

In the Mideast, now is the time for a fresh Bush diplomatic initiative to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — the persistence of which is toxic for America`s influence — and to revive the Syrian-Israeli negotiations. Bringing in the Syrians is important, because they know the guys who know the guys who know the guys who are hurting us in Iraq.

Friends, Iraq is the most audacious nation-building project America has ever engaged in. But to succeed, we need partners — not only to help, but to provide legitimacy so we can sustain it. Right now, though, we are operating in a context of enormous global animosity. We are dancing alone. We can`t let this stop us. We can`t cater to every whim — but we can`t just ignore it all, especially when it comes from our friends. Because there is no country in the world that we can`t smash alone, and there is no country in the world we can rebuild alone — certainly not one as big and complex as Iraq.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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November 20, 2003
The Buck House Stops Here
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON — President Bush thought he had at last found someplace even more sequestered from the real world than the Republican fund-raisers and conservative think tanks where he makes his carefully controlled "public" appearances.

Swaddled in the $8.5 million security blanket of reinforced concrete, wire mesh and 14,000 bobbies designed to protect him from the ungrateful citizens of our one — I mean, our closest — ally, Mr. Bush was a blithe spirit in his rented tails with his English cousins behind the high gates of Buckingham Palace.

Even sheltered in the bosom of the British royal family, however, Mr. Bush wasn`t entirely safe.

Wearing a blue sash and a tiara with enough diamonds to pay for a year of the Iraqi occupation, the British queen gave the American president a bit of a poke, a light sideswipe with her handbag, as it were.

In her remarks honoring Mr. Bush at the state dinner last night, Queen Elizabeth unleashed a barrage of favorable references to the most dreaded words in the Bush-Cheney lexicon: "multilateral order," "trans-Atlantic partnership," "other allies" and "effective international institutions."

"At the very core of the new international and multilateral order, which emerged after the shared sacrifices of that last terrible world war, was a vital dynamic trans-Atlantic partnership working with other allies to create effective international institutions," she said. This, to a president who has never met an international institution he did not try to wreck and who`s darting around like a fugitive in the land of the "special relationship," using Buck House as a safe house.

Her Majesty barely mentioned the pesky colonial mess in Iraq — where U.S. occupiers are also surrounded by razor wire, concrete barricades and armed guards — and spent more time praising the first President Bush`s leadership than the second`s.

Everything Mr. Bush did in London reinforced the idea that this was a trip made not so much to thank the British people for their friendship, but to send a message to the voters back home that he was at ease as a world leader.

The White House spared Mr. Bush from having to endure a session with the rowdy Parliament and flew him by helicopter over the protesting rabble, who think a bullying Bush administration dragged Britain into the war under false pretenses. (Scotland Yard even wanted to keep the president in a "mobile-free bubble" that would block cellphone calls in his vicinity, but the phone companies refused, calling it "Bush hysteria.")

The White House packaged the visit for the viewers at home.

How else to explain the same Bush advance geniuses who brought us the "Mission Accomplished" banner putting up a blue PowerPoint-ish backdrop for the president`s speech at Whitehall Palace that stuttered, "United Kingdom," "United Kingdom," "United Kingdom."

The people in the United Kingdom already knew he was in the United Kingdom. And the kingdom isn`t very united at the moment.

Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, captured the spirit of the moment when he told NPR that the Republican National Committee should foot the bill for Mr. Bush`s extraordinary security, the largest police operation ever in Great Britain. All this, he harrumphed, "just so George Bush can use a few clips of him and the queen in his campaign advertisements for re-election next year."

There was a dispiriting contrast between G.W.B. shutting out the world and avoiding the British public, and the black-and-white clips this week of J.F.K. reaching out to the world and being adored by Berliners.

There was also a dispiriting contrast between the Bush administration, hiding the returning coffins of U.S. soldiers and avoiding their funerals, and the moving pictures of the Italian politicians and people, honoring their dead with public ceremonies and a week of mourning.

The bubble in London is just an extension of the bubble the Bush team lives in at home. It superimposes its reality on the evidence for war, the ease of the occupation, the strength of the insurgency and the continuing threat from Saddam and Osama.

Isolationism has been a foreign policy before. But for this administration, it seems to be a way of life.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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