A British tabloid newspaper said Tuesday it had hired veteran reporter Peter Arnett, who was fired by American TV network NBC after he said the U.S.-led war effort in Iraq had failed."Fired by America for telling the truth," said the Daily Mirror in a front page headline, adding it had hired the "legendary war reporter" to carry on telling the truth.
"I am still in shock and awe at being fired," Arnett wrote for the newspaper, which is vehemently opposed to the war. "I report the truth of what is happening here in Baghdad and will not apologize for it."
A U.S.-led assault on a compound controlled by an Iraqi-based extremist Islamic group has turned up a list of names of suspected militants living in the United States and what may be the strongest evidence yet linking Ansar al-Islam to al-Qaida, coalition commanders said Monday.The cache of documents, including computer discs and foreign passports belonging to Arab fighters from around the Middle East, could bolster the Bush administration's claims that the two groups are connected, although there was no indication any of the evidence tied Ansar to Saddam Hussein as Washington has maintained.
There were indications, however, that the group has been getting help from inside neighboring Iran.
Kurdish and Turkish intelligence officials, some speaking on condition of anonymity, said many of Ansar's 700 members have slipped out of Iraq and into Iran -- putting them out of reach of coalition forces.
The officials also said a U.S. missile strike on Ansar's territory on the second day of the war missed most of its leadership -- which crossed into Iran days earlier.
U.S. officials said the government had reports some Ansar fighters could have made it into Iran and have been shuttling back and forth with fresh supplies.
According to a high-level Kurdish intelligence official, three Ansar leaders -- identified as Ayoub Afghani, Abdullah Shafeye and Abu Wahel -- were among those who had fled into Iran. The official said the three were seen being detained by Iranian authorities Sunday.
"We asked the Iranian authorities to hand over to us any of the Afghan Arabs or Islamic militants hiding themselves inside the villages of Iran," said Boorhan Saeed, a member of the pro-U.S. Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. "We asked them about it Sunday, and still don't have a response."
"The army knows I ran away. They could come and take revenge," he said in the central police barracks in Kalak, about 20 miles northwest of the Kurdish administrative center Irbil. "My only hope is that I'm not alone. There are so many deserters and those who want to run. They cannot attack all these families with a war going on."War for this foot soldier was one of desperation. "We only prayed we'd stay alive long enough to get a chance to escape," Ali said through an interpreter....
"The spirit of the soldiers is very low," he said. "We were not really mad at the Americans. We just want to save our lives."
He and four other soldiers decided to run. But they had to pick their moment. Their unit and most others include Baathist agents given orders to execute any deserters, he said....
"The people know that any uprising against Saddam now would mean terrible things to them and their family. They force them to chant `Down with America,' but not everyone means it. Saddam's people are afraid for the future."
That's when he started to cry.
Totalitarian dictatorships survive because of 'divide-and-rule' tactics, coupled with the cowardice and lack of cooperative spirit among their populace. If a few soldiers could only band together, they could easily kill their Baathist minders. But they fear betrayal, and don't dare suggest even to their friends an attack on their captors. Courage and cooperativeness are the cultural prerequisites of freedom. Only the home of the brave, and the community of the associative, can hope to become a land of the free.
Russian intelligence agents are holding daily meetings with Iraqi officials in Baghdad, Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported Friday and suggested they are interested in gaining control of Iraqi secret service archives if Saddam Hussein's regime falls.The report, which said that the meetings include agents of the SVR, the foreign intelligence service, did not specify its sources. But the newspaper is believed to have well-placed contacts in military and intelligence spheres.
Telephone calls to the SVR press office were not answered Friday evening.
The newspaper said the archives could be highly valuable to Russia in three major areas: in protecting Russian interests that remain in a post-war Iraq; in determining to what extent the Hussein regime may have financed Russian political parties and movements; and in providing Russia access to intelligence that Iraqi agents conducted in other countries.
FOR her high school class in persuasive speech, Afton Dahl, 16, chose to present an argument that abortion should be illegal. She graphically described the details of various abortion techniques, including facts about fetal heart development."The baby's heartbeat starts at around 12 to 18 days, so it's murder to kill someone with a heartbeat," Miss Dahl said recently, recalling the argument she used in class in January. "I don't believe in abortion under any circumstances, including rape. I think it would be better to overturn Roe v. Wade."
Miss Dahl, a sophomore, attends Red Wing High School in Red Wing, Minn., a small city that is the home of Red Wing shoes and a town where a majority voted for Al Gore for president. Miss Dahl's abortion views are not something she learned from her parents: her mother, Fran Dahl, 47, maintains that abortion should be a woman's choice.
"Nowadays kids don't grow up knowing or being aware of what was going on when abortion was illegal," said Ms. Dahl, a former nurse. "It's not a choice that I would have taken personally, but for the future of women I want to see the right to an abortion maintained."
This contrast between mother and teenage daughter illustrates a trend noted in polls: that teenagers and college-age Americans are more conservative about abortion rights than their counterparts were a generation ago. Many people old enough to have teenage children and who equate youth with liberal social opinions on topics like gay rights and the use of marijuana for medical purposes have been surprised at this discovery. Miss Dahl was one of numerous students in her class who chose to make speeches about abortion, and most took the anti-abortion side.
"I was shocked that there were that many students who felt strong enough and confident enough to speak about being pro-life," said Nina Verin, a parent of another student in the class (whose oral argument was about war in Iraq). "The people I associate with in town are pro-choice, so I'm troubled--where do these kids come from?"
A study of American college freshmen shows that support for abortion rights has been dropping since the early 1990's: 54 percent of 282,549 students polled at 437 schools last fall by the University of California at Los Angeles agreed that abortion should be legal. The figure was down from 67 percent a decade earlier. A New York Times/CBS News poll in January found that among people 18 to 29, the share who agree that abortion should be generally available to those who want it was 39 percent, down from 48 percent in 1993. [...]
Some parents trace their teenagers' anti-abortion views to sexuality education programs that stress abstinence as the only way to prevent pregnancy and disease, and in the process sometimes demonize abortion. Since 1996 the federal government has budgeted $50 million annually to "abstinence only till marriage" programs, which are taught in 35 percent of public schools in the country, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit group affiliated with Planned Parenthood. [...]
If today's teenagers and young adults maintain their views on abortion into older adulthood, and if succeeding waves of students are also conservative, the balance could tip somewhat in the America's long-running abortion war, some experts speculate.
It's unclear whether the shift will ever be substantial enough to change the centrist position of the majority of Americans of all ages: that abortion should be legal, but with restrictions. In Red Wing, the certainty of the youthful opinions of the students reminded their speech-class teacher, Jillynne Raymond, of an earlier generation's certainty--her own.
"Teenagers have strong opinions," Ms. Raymond, 41, said. "It's no different than the 70's when I was a teenager, but the difference is that the majority of speeches then were pro-choice. I wanted the right to an abortion as a woman. The focus then was not having the government tell me what to do with my body.
"Today," she said of her students, "the majority is pro-life."
But now we find ourselves about a century into the process of women's liberation and the coming generations of young women have never known the "oppression" of which their mothers and grandmothers complained and feel themselves, with good cause, equal or superior to men. The idea that they need to be able to kill someone to prove themselves powerful must inevitably sound bizarre and so they look at abortion as simply a moral issue rather than an exercise in political claim-staking. Given that abortion had been the only realm in human affairs where women came down on the side of freedom over security, favored the powerful over the helpless, it was a certainty that once the artificial reason for advocating "freedom of choice" had passed, they'd tend back towards a position that the state should intervene to protect those who can't protect themselves. This trend will be greatly accelerated when it becomes more common knowledge that abortion is being used throughout the world to gender-select for male babies. The prospect that what began as an assertion of power is going to turn women into a genuine minority in the political sphere, presumably for the first time in human history, seems likely to kick out the last prop supporting the case for abortion among women.
In strong and accusatory language, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called on Syria and Iran last night to stop supporting terrorists. He warned that Syria's leadership "faces a critical choice" and will be held responsible for help it gives to the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.Powell became the second Cabinet secretary in three days to warn the two countries, which the United States considers state sponsors of terrorism. On Friday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld charged that Syria is shipping military supplies across its border to Iraq, calling the move a hostile act.
"Syria can continue direct support for terrorist groups and the dying regime of Saddam Hussein, or it can embark on a different and more hopeful course," Powell said in an address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "Either way, Syria bears responsibility for its choices and for the consequences."
While President Bush named Iran to his "axis of evil" last year, Powell called on other countries that have closer relations with the country to pressure Tehran to withdraw its sponsorship of such groups as Hezbollah, a principal foe of Israel.
"It is now time that the entire community step up and insist that Iran end its support for terrorists," Powell told AIPAC, the country's most influential pro-Israel lobby.
Drawing a distinction favored by Bush between the Iranian leadership and activist citizens, he said the administration would "continue to support the aspirations of the Iranian people to improve their lives and live in peace and security with their neighbors."
The more aggressive language Powell and Rumsfeld used suggests a greater determination by the administration to play a role in the Middle East beyond Iraq, whose government Bush has pledged to remove by force. Powell's comments drew a standing ovation from his audience, but are likely to worry Arabs in the region already nervous about U.S.
On Sunday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld quickly invoked international law in condemning Iraq's treatment of American prisoners of war and its use of civilians as human shields. As soon as the Americans were shown on television, Rumsfeld denounced Iraq for violating the Geneva accords, which govern the treatment of prisoners of war.But Rumsfeld's hypocrisy here is enormous. For two years, the Bush administration has ignored and violated international law and thus has undermined the very legitimacy of the treaties and principles that constitute the law of nations. Though we all hope, of course, for the quick and safe return of the American prisoners of war, the fact is that -- unfortunately -- Iraq and other nations may feel much freer today to violate international law in the way they treat war captives and the way they wage war.
One clear violation by the United States is taking place in Guantanamo Bay, where for the last 15 months the U.S. has held more than 600 captives in clear violation of international law.
Under the third Geneva Convention, those who were caught in Afghanistan are deemed prisoners of war if they were fighting for the Taliban. International law prescribes the way they can be questioned, how they are to be treated and when they are to be repatriated. The U.S. government has ignored all of these requirements.
Rumsfeld has asserted that those held in Guantanamo are "enemy combatants" and thus the rules for prisoners of war do not apply. International law draws a distinction between "prisoners of war," who were soldiers fighting for a nation, and "enemy combatants," who were not acting on behalf of a country; enemy combatants are accorded fewer protections than prisoners of war. Under well-established principles of international law, only those who fought for Al Qaeda and not the Taliban government are enemy combatants. The Geneva accords are clear that there must be a "competent tribunal" to determine whether a person is a prisoner of war or an enemy combatant.
Americans share two misperceptions of Iraqi politics and society. One is that ethnic conflict is endemic to Iraqi society. Another is that Iraqis lack a tradition of civil society, cultural tolerance, and political participation. Both perceptions are contradicted by the historical record. These faulty premises lay behind Washington's unwillingness to support the Iraqi uprising of 1991, which came close to ousting the Ba'athist regime. It would be a great tragedy if the United States were to make the same mistake in 2003. [...]An Arabic proverb states that, "The Egyptians write, the Lebanese publish, and the Iraqis read." Iraq has the capability to become one of the most advanced countries of the Middle East. It has a large and highly educated middle class, a tradition of a flourishing civil society (which can be documented in school history textbooks after Saddam and the Ba'ath are ousted), an agricultural sector whose potential is greatly underutilized, one of the world's great civilizational heritages (after all, history as we understand it began in ancient Mesopotamia), and a rich base of oil wealth, which can provide the resources for ambitious development projects. Once no longer at odds with its neighbors in the Gulf region, it will be able to cooperate with them to produce serious economic development. The demonstration effect of a functioning Iraqi democracy can have a salutary impact on neighboring authoritarian regimes.
What would an Iraqi democracy look like? Because Iraq is a multi-ethnic society, it would undoubtedly have a "rough and tumble" quality. However, countries like Italy also have such democracies and have remained relatively stable over time. To the riposte that Italian governments are constantly changing, Italians often respond that this only means that many people have access to governing the country. After all, they point out, Italy has one of the world's most prosperous economies and a strong civil society. Numerous Iraqi political parties will also vie for power in a post- Saddam Iraq. However, a federated country in which Iraq's main ethnic groups, the Sunni and Shi'i Arabs and the Kurds, as well as other minorities, can feel that their traditions are respected and not subject to state repression, and in which economic development assures every citizen a decent standard of living
will work to offset the strife that facilitated the rise of the Ba'ath Party. Taking democracy seriously in Iraq will go a long way toward winning the hearts of minds of Iraqis.
A tank battle fought by the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards last Thursday was described as the "biggest since El Alamein". It involved 14 British tanks taking out an equivalent number of Iraqi tanks, without losing any of their own.
The incident sums up much of what has been happening in this war. Iraqi sorties are often being crushed by superior force, but such episodes, including many more bothersome to the coalition, are being reported without much sense of proportion.Alamein is an instructive comparison. Against the 8th Army of 195,000 men, the Afrika Corps had about 105,000. The ratio of tanks was two to one in Britain's favour (1,000 to 500). This single battle took as long as this war has so far lasted. [...]
Now that things are moving more slowly than originally hoped, comparisons are being made with Vietnam, as if the Americans face becoming bogged down for years in guerrilla warfare. The comparison is invalid. The problem for the Americans in Vietnam was not only that they were trying to defend a deeply unpopular regime against a wily enemy, but also that they never found an answer to the Communists' ability to stay supplied. North Vietnam itself was never invaded, but sustained by support from Russia and China. It used the famous Ho Chi Minh trail to get provisions through to the fighters in the south.
The Iraqis, by comparison, have no sanctuaries and no demoralised enemy from whom they can obtain weapons and ammunition. Eventually key units will be effectively cut off and unable to sustain themselves.
The issue with the Iraqi resistance is not its evident ability to cause frustration, but whether it can prevent reinforcements and the continuous resupply of coalition forces. That appears to be beyond its capabilities. Furthermore, many of its divisions defending Baghdad are pointing to the north, and will be difficult to redeploy safely.
Politically, this will remain a difficult war for the coalition to fight. The early traumas of street fighting in Baghdad could be severe, especially as the Iraqis will have stocked up for the defence. The key to success there, as in the wider campaign, will lie in the ability to isolate the defending forces, politically as well as physically, and to deny them fresh men and arms.
The drama of war lies in combat but the source of victory lies in logistics.
As Mr. Freedman's article suggests, the war is unlosable on the ground, but we could do ourselves some damage by waffling around and bickering back in Washington. Gotta suck it up and go fight.
ALL triplets in North Korea are being forcibly removed from parents after their birth and dumped in bleak orphanages.The policy is carried out on the orders of Stalinist dictator Kim Jong-il, who has an irrational belief that a triplet could one day topple his regime.
Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, "Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East, and have come to worship him." When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem was with him; and assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him, "In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it is written by the prophet."...Then Herod ... was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under.
“It’s a stalemate now,” the former intelligence official told me. “It’s going to remain one only if we can maintain our supply lines.... The Marines are worried as hell,” the former intelligence official went on. “They’re all committed, with no reserves, and they’ve never run the lavs”—light armored vehicles—“as long and as hard” as they have in Iraq. There are serious maintenance problems as well. “The only hope is that they can hold out until reinforcements come.”...The planner agreed, saying, “The only way out now is back, and to hope for some kind of a miracle"... “Hope,” a retired four-star general subsequently told me, “is not a course of action.”...
Scott Ritter ... noted that much of the bombing has had little effect or has been counterproductive. For example, the bombing of Saddam’s palaces has freed up a brigade of special guards who had been assigned to protect them ...
My own view is that the war plan has been brilliant. Things have gone better than I dared hope. As we develop the airfields (Tallil, H2, H3, and others), re-open the Umm Qasr port, and open additional highways, we'll be able to step up the flow of supplies and press the battle more aggressively. It's not clear that more troops would help us, because right now we appear to be supply-limited, not force-limited, and water and food for additional troops would take the place of fuel and ammunition for the existing forces. Existing forces are steadily destroying the struts that keep the regime standing, and sooner or later the whole regime is going to crash, probably with as little warning as the Taliban fell. Working with half the forces may lengthen the war, but it's unlikely to increase our casualty count -- in fact, by easing logistical problems and avoiding heavy concentrations of forces, it probably reduces the risk of large casualties from ammunition-short forces or lucky WMD hits. We have no time constraints, and can afford to patiently weaken the regime until it falls.
With Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard dug in on the outskirts of Baghdad and thousands of his most loyal defenders no doubt armed and waiting in the city's neighborhoods, he might be on the verge of delivering the "mother of all battles" he promised 12 years ago.He has ceded the majority of his country to the rapidly moving American and British forces, but has left pockets of determined loyalists in cities large and small. These troops, many dressed in civilian clothing, will shoot at coalition forces from densely populated areas, daring return fire that might kill the very Iraqis whom President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain hope to liberate.
It is a strategy both cunning and cruel, and it may work. The outcome will depend in large part on the people of Baghdad, each of whom has a decision to make. What they decide could mean either a quick defeat of the regime or a protracted mess that would amount at best to a Pyrrhic victory for allied troops.
Saddam Hussein is betting that his people will rally around his crack troops. The allies are betting they will betray the dictator and flush out his enforcers. I'm afraid the odds at this point favor Saddam Hussein. Even those Iraqis eager to turn against the regime are still caught between the guns, and won't dare make a move until they are sure one side has the upper hand. Neighborhood by neighborhood, they will have to decide when it is safe to make their move.
If Saddam Hussein wins his bet, then coalition forces could face fighting reminiscent of the 1993 battle of Mogadishu.
If Saddam has a religion, it is a belief in the superiority of Arab history and culture, a tradition that he is convinced will rise up again and rattle the world. His imperial view of the grandeur that was Arabia is romantic, replete with fanciful visions of great palaces and wise and powerful sultans and caliphs. His notion of history has nothing to do with progress, with the advance of knowledge, with the evolution of individual rights and liberties, with any of the things that matter most to Western civilization. It has to do simply with power. To Saddam, the present global domination by the West, particularly the United States, is just a phase. America is infidel and inferior. It lacks the rich ancient heritage of Iraq and other Arab states. Its place at the summit of the world powers is just a historical quirk, an aberration, a consequence of its having acquired technological advantages. It cannot endure.In a speech this past January 17, the eleventh anniversary of the start of the Gulf War, Saddam explained, "The Americans have not yet established a civilization, in the deep and comprehensive sense we give to civilization. What they have established is a metropolis of force ... Some people, perhaps including Arabs and plenty of Muslims and more than these in the wide world ... considered the ascent of the U.S. to the summit as the last scene in the world picture, after which there will be no more summits and no one will try to ascend and sit comfortably there. They considered it the end of the world as they hoped for, or as their scared souls suggested it to them."
Arabia, which Saddam sees as the wellspring of civilization, will one day own that summit again. When that day comes, whether in his lifetime or a century or even five centuries hence, his name will rank with those of the great men in history. Saddam sees himself as an established member of the pantheon of great men—conquerors, prophets, kings and presidents, scholars, poets, scientists. It doesn't matter if he understands their contributions and ideas. It matters only that they are the ones history has remembered and honored for their accomplishments.
The disarmament of Iraq is our aim, we say. And surely even if there's some slippage between our public statements and true motives, reducing the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) seems like a good idea.Previous inspections for WMD in Saddam Hussein's Iraq failed because the Iraqis refused to cooperate and the inspectors were too few and too weakly supported to overcome Iraqi resistance. But even if the inspections had succeeded in the short term, a high-cost, intrusive inspection program could not have continued indefinitely.
So now we're going to try something else: regime change through conquest. Forcing out Hussein and his loyalists should allow the United States and its coalition partners to eliminate Iraq's present WMD capacity. But disarmament is difficult to sustain, even with total victory. What's necessary is the creation of a social and political aversion to weapons of mass destruction in New Iraq like that which developed in Japan after World War II.
Japan today could easily produce chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in large quantities in short order, but it has not done so. The Japanese population is deeply opposed to such weapons, owing to its unique experience as the targets of the only nuclear weapons ever used in war and to its suffering from conventional bombing. As a result, Japanese politicians have found alternative methods of defense through alliance and diplomacy.
There are two principal components to creating a WMD-averse environment, both essentially psychological: a sense of the humanity of opposing forces or neighboring populations, and confidence that one's defensive situation is not desperate. The United States fostered this attitude in Japan after 1945 by demonstrating the inhumanity of WMD, by creating a popular democratic and antiwar constitution for Japan, by committing itself to defend Japan, by supporting economic growth and by working to promote regional stabilization and democratization.
The vast majority of the Japanese public still believes that WMD -- and aggressive wars -- are unacceptable, and Japanese political leaders work hard to maintain strong diplomatic relationships with the United States and with the other Asian nations.
Both of those elements are fundamentally lacking in Iraq and have been since before the first Gulf War. This leaves us the question of whether we can replicate the dramatic turnaround of Japan in Iraq.
Depite having noted the unique use of WMD on Japan, Mr. Dresner then argues that: "There are two principal components to creating a WMD-averse environment, both essentially psychological: a sense of the humanity of opposing forces or neighboring populations, and confidence that one's defensive situation is not desperate." Might he not better have considered the possibility that the singular factor that made the Japanese so averse to WMD was having two nuclear weapons dropped on them, several cities quite intentionally incinerated in systematic fire bombings, and the certain knowledge that the United States would be only to happy to keep up the process idefinitely against a Japanese people who most Americans had genuinely come to think of as sub-human. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, the prospect that one's homeland will be reduced to a charnel house concentrates the mind wonderfully.
We're not suggesting this lesson need be applied to Iraq, but it's a tad disingenuous to minimize it, is it not?
A new international poll suggests the majority of people from Britain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand believe the United Nations should have supported military action against Iraq. [...]Of those surveryed, 61 per cent of Australians said the UN should have sanctioned the action, as did 81 per cent of Americans, 66 per cent of Britons and 50 per cent of New Zealanders.
Veteran television correspondent Peter Arnett, who has been covering the war with Iraq for NBC News through an arrangement with National Geographic Explorer, went on Iraq's state television network and praised Iraq's treatment of journalists.In a transcript of Arnett's comments during the interview, he seemed to praise Iraq's Ministry of Information, saying it has "allowed me and many other reporters to cover 12 whole years since the Gulf War with a degree which we appreciate and that is continuing today." [...]
Arnett's comments are sure to stir controversy since some media outlets, including CNN, Arnett's former employer, have been booted out of Baghdad. Also, two reporters from the Tribune Co.-owned (TRB) newspaper Newsday are missing after being expelled from Baghdad and the paper has said it believes its journalists are being held by the Iraqi government.
MORE:
Iraq May be Holding Newsday Journalists (1010 WINS, Mar 30,
2003)
Two Newsday journalists who disappeared from Baghdad may have been detained by Iraq's government, the newspaper's editor said Saturday.Reporter Matthew McAllester and photographer Moises Saman were last heard from Monday, and the newspaper has been unable to obtain information about their whereabouts from Iraqi officials, said editor Anthony Marro in a statement.
Journalists expelled from Iraq have told Newsday that security officials on Monday came to the Baghdad hotel where they were staying and questioned reporters. Some were taken from the hotel.
In southern Iraq, British Royal Marine commandos captured five high-ranking Iraqi paramilitary leaders and a senior officer Sunday in a village southeast of Basra, said Capt. Al Lockwood, a British military spokesman.Hmm, we just happen to capture two generals we expect to help us with defeating their own army. Isn't it more likely that our negotiations, rumored since before the war began, are starting to bear fruit? If this wasn't a capture, then note how the press' scepticism plays into the administration's hand. Unwilling to suggest that the administration has done something right, they spread disinformation."One of them is an Iraqi general," Lockwood said. "We are hoping very much that he will be able to assist us, now that he is no longer a member of the regime, to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime."
U.S. forces in western Iraq have captured another Iraqi general, who led them to a cache of weapons that included 26 surface-to-air, anti-aircraft missiles and six anti-aircraft guns, according to Central Command.
More: Militants call Israel suicide bomb 'gift to Iraq', At least 49 injured in Netanya attack (CNN).
A suicide bomb that injured dozens in northern Israel Sunday was "a gift to the Iraqi people," according to a Palestinian militant group that claimed responsibility for the attack.If our enemies see this as one seamless war, can we really afford to disagree with them?The bombing, which took place at a busy cafe in the coastal town of Netanya, injured at least 49, five of them seriously, Israeli police and ambulance services said. Ten Israeli soldiers were among the injured.
The United States is failing to make use of what should be its most valuable asset in this war: the many Iraqis who are willing to fight and die for their country's liberation.Those who imply that a rising surge of "nationalism" is preventing Iraqis from greeting American and British troops with open arms are wrong. What is preventing Iraqis from taking over the streets of their cities is confusion about American intentions -- confusion created by the way this war has been conducted and by fear of the murderous brown-shirt thugs, otherwise known as Saddam's Fedayeen, a militia loyal to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who control the streets of Iraqi cities and who are conducting the harassing attacks on American and British soldiers.
The coalition forces have not yet sent clear and unmistakable signals to the people of Iraq that, unlike in 1991, there will be no turning back before Hussein's
regime has been overturned. In order to do this effectively they must count on the Iraqi opposition, which has so far been marginalized. [...]Hanging over the head of every Iraqi like a sword of Damocles is the memory of March 1991, when the uprising of the people of southern Iraq was
mercilessly suppressed -- with particular brutality in Basra. If Hussein came back from the grave after 1991, Iraqis are thinking to themselves, what
guarantees do they have that he will not do so this time? Phone calls that the Iraqi opposition has received over the past two days from sources in southern Iraq confirm this sense of ambiguity and hesitation. A group of rebels in Nasiriyah called the leadership of the Iraqi opposition in the north. They wanted to know what to do with a number of abandoned military vehicles they had found, including a tank and some armored personnel carriers. Should they sequester
them and turn them against the regime? The answer was no, they would be shot by coalition forces because they had not been given the special device necessary to be identified as friend, not foe. Such is the state of coordination between the opposition and the coalition forces.No American or coalition soldier can quell the perfectly legitimate fears of ordinary Iraqis living in places such as Basra and Baghdad. Only other Iraqis,
attentive to the nuances of their own society and culture, can do this. Communication with Iraqis about such things cannot be reduced to an index card listing
rules of engagement. Only Iraqis can get messages distributed through the local social networks, and only Iraqis can reassure other Iraqis that they are truly
to be liberated this time.Hussein's image and the images of his henchmen have been visible throughout the fighting. Hussein rules through his face, through his ubiquitous presence in
daily life. That is what his millions of larger-than-life wall posters are about. Every day that aired image reinforces an aura of invincibility. That is why Iraqi state TV must be put out of commission, permanently.But eliminating his image is not enough. An alternative image must be projected -- and by Iraqis, not Americans. Give them the equipment inside Iraq to do
it immediately. The INC has been trying to get TV and radio belonging to free Iraqis on the air in Iraq since 2000. Members of Congress and other powerful
friends of the INC have proved helpless against the remarkable machinations of those who have fashioned entire careers around hobbling the INC as an
organization and fighting force in Iraq.The coalition needs the Iraqi opposition -- Iraqis who can sneak into cities and help organize other Iraqis, who know how to communicate with their entrapped compatriots, who can tell them why Hussein really is finished, and who are able to root out his cronies when they try to melt away into the civilian population.
One cannot liberate a people -- much less facilitate the emergence of a democracy -- without empowering the people being liberated.
The argument that [it] s right to prefer a quiet and comfortable life has been well made by Adair Turner, the former director general of the CBI, in a lecture at the LSE earlier this month. His argument is that if you allow for shorter hours worked, European productivity is not much below that of the US. GDP per head in the EU is lower, but that is largely because we choose to take more leisure. And our take-home pay is further reduced relative to the US because we pay for more of our services through the tax system rather than paying for them directly. (The UK, as usual, is somewhere in between the continental and the US models.)"Europe" argues Adair Turner, "is making social choices which are rational and natural for human beings in mature, already rich, and peaceful societies." His main doubt is whether the world can be peaceful enough to sustain these choices - he hopes and believes it can be, but he acknowledges that this is debatable. His is a powerful argument which cuts to the very core of the clash between Europe and America, at the moment over the Middle East. But the division is not just about what should be done about Iraq. It is about what sort of society we want to live in.
Many of us would find it pretty tough to have to work in the US. Having only two weeks holiday a year would not go down too well. It would not be much fun to have to worry about the adequacy of one's medical insurance. And while it might be harder to find a job in much of continental Europe than in the States, at least when people lose their jobs in Europe (and for that matter the UK) there is usually a better cushion to tide them over than there would be in most US states.
But is the European model sustainable? Adair Turner has two caveats. One follows from Europe's ageing society: the implications for pensions and so on, the other is that point about global power.
It seems to me that the power game is already lost. It is very hard to see any set of circumstances where Europe collectively will be able to exert much military or even political power in the world over the next generation. In another quarter century, when the US population is expected to pass the EU one, the imbalance of power will become even wider. For the time being, the larger European nations can individually have some modest influence - Tony Blair really does have more influence over the US than most Britons would give him credit for - but the EU as a body is and will remain impotent. If we have not yet learnt that harsh lesson we soon will.
My greater concern is that Europe will lose the economic game too - its model is simply not sustainable. There are two broad reasons for believing that. One is the ageing point made by Adair Turner; the other, the implications of labour mobility - particularly of the highly-skilled - for high-tax, high-benefit societies.
The implications of ageing on the European social welfare model, where the current generation of working people pay the benefits of the current generation of retirees, have been so widely recognised that there is a danger of "pension fatigue" overtaking electorates. The core problem is that welfare systems that were developed at a time when there were more than four workers for every pensioner cannot function when there are fewer than two. (In the case of Spain and Italy, there will actually be fewer workers than pensioners when the present 20-somethings retire.)
But that is a known problem. Europe has not done much about it, but at least people are aware of the problem. Europe is much less aware of the problem created by the increased mobility of the highly-skilled - and the increased demand for such skills.
So many times in the run-up to the second Gulf War President Bush's diplomatic skills were contrasted detrimentally to those of his father. The broad coalition and unequivocal U.N. backing for the first war was an example, according to this theory, of the right way to do things.The unilateralist cowboy approach of George W., failing to gain the military aid of the French Foreign Legion and the blessing of that final U.N. resolution, critics claim, doom the current war to -- well, exactly what it isn't clear, but obviously something not nice. Not military defeat, certainly. But victory without the blessings of certain European intellectual quarters, which they assume to be an equally traumatic outcome.
It's worth considering, however, that exactly these features of the first Gulf War contributed to the need for its successor. In particular, the fatal pause before Baghdad and the survival of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein were to some degree the result of the broadness of the coalition, some of whose members preferred a strong leader in Iraq because of fear of its fragmentation.
In a larger sense, the first Gulf War, coming in the middle of the Cold War endgame, marked the opening of a period, which we are coming to understand was a transitory interlude, in which a certain vision of transnational order was thought to be possible and desirable. Sept. 11, 2001, began the closing of this period. The second Gulf War may come to be seen as the final act of that closure, the two wars thus serving as bookends for the period. [...]
The core of the coalition of the willing assembled to pursue the liberation of Iraq demonstrates the difference between broadly inclusive organizations and more limited ones that, because they share certain understandings of the world, are able to move more quickly and effectively. The task for the coming period is to construct a set of more permanent structures along similar lines to pursue important security, economic trade and development, and political goals.
American Jacksonians can learn from the second Gulf War that, unlike the universalist organizations they have come to despise, a more select group of nations can work together effectively increase their mutual security. American Wilsonians and their cousins, the British Gladstonians, can learn that the international order they crave will more likely grow from successful collaboration of more limited partners with strong civil societies and like assumptions than the morally compromised international bodies, which have tended to lower themselves to the lowest common denominator of morality, rather than raising, as they had hoped, the lower to a higher standard.
Britain, America, Australia and their allies have accomplished what is needed in Iraq, where a decade ago the broader coalition failed, with painful consequences for the Iraqi people and others. Now is the time to explore how to apply these lessons to the broader issues of international order.
MORE:
Operation Anglosphere: Today's most ardent American imperialists weren't born in the USA. (Jeet Heer, 3/23/2003, Boston Globe)
EMPIRE IS A DIRTY word in the American political lexicon. Just last summer, President Bush told West Point graduates that ''America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish.'' In this view, the power of the United States is not exercised for imperial purposes, but for the benefit of mankind.Since the Sept. 11 attacks, however, many foreign policy pundits, mostly from the Republican right but also including some liberal internationalists, have revisited the idea of empire. ''America is the most magnanimous imperial power ever,'' declared Dinesh D'Souza in the Christian Science Monitor in 2002. ''Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets,'' argued Max Boot in a 2001 article for the Weekly Standard titled ''The Case for American Empire.'' In the Wall Street Journal, historian Paul Johnson asserted that the ''answer to terrorism'' is ''colonialism.'' Columnist Mark Steyn, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, has contended that ''imperialism is the answer.''
''People are now coming out of the closet on the word `empire','' noted Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. ''The fact is no country has been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically and militarily in the history of world since the Roman Empire.'' Krauthammer's awe is shared by Harvard human rights scholar Michael Ignatieff, who asked earlier this year in The New York Times Magazine, ''What word but `empire' describes the awesome thing America is becoming?'' While acknowledging that empire may be a ''burden,'' Ignatieff maintained that it has become, ''in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike.''
Today's advocates of American empire share one surprising trait: Very few of them were born in the United States. D'Souza was born in India, and Johnson in Britain - where he still lives. Steyn, Krauthammer, and Ignatieff all hail from Canada. (Krauthammer was born in Uruguay, but grew up in Montreal before moving to the United States.) More than anything, the backgrounds of today's most outspoken imperialists suggest the lingering appeal and impact of the British empire.
''I think there's more openness among children of the British Empire to the benefits of imperialism, whereas some Americans have never gotten over the fact that our country was born in a revolt against empire,'' notes Max Boot, currently afellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. ''But lots of people who are advocating pro-imperial arguments - such as Bill Kristol and me - are not Brits or Canadians.'' (Boot, who was born in Russia, moved to the United States as a baby.)
Imperialism is often seen as an expanding circle, with power radiating outward from a capital city like London or Paris to hinterlands. But a quick review of history shows that imperial enthusiasm doesn't emanate only from the center. Often, the dream of empire is nursed by those born on the periphery of power, precisely because empire would give them a place in a larger framework. Alexander the Great, for example, was born in Macedonia and went on to create an Hellenic empire. And France's greatest empire-builder was the Corsican Napoleon. [...]
The promotion of ''Anglo-Saxon unity'' was particularly attractive to transnational business leaders like the Canadian-born newspaper tycoon William Maxwell Aitken (later known as Lord Beaverbrook). In 1910 Aitken moved to Britain, where he used his newspapers, Daily Express and the Evening Standard, to argue for free trade and the strengthening of imperial ties. In recent years, Beaverbrook's ideas have been given new currency by another newly ennobled Canadian-born newspaper magnate, Conrad Black, also known as Lord Black of Crossharbour.
While he has recanted his belief that the English-speaking provinces of Canada should join the United States, Black has been campaigning for the inclusion of the United Kingdom into the NAFTA trade accord. For Black, Britain's destiny is to be primarily an Atlantic power, not a European one.
Among conservative intellectuals, Black's dream of an Anglo-American concert of nations is part of a larger desire to strengthen ''the Anglosphere.'' Apparently coined by science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his 1995 novel ''The Diamond Age,'' the term has been popularized lately by journalists like James C. Bennett, who writes a weekly column covering ''The Anglosphere Beat'' for United Press International, and Andrew Sullivan, as well as by the English historian Robert Conquest. The proponents of an anglosphere want a loose and informal alliance of English-speaking peoples, modelled on the ''soft'' imperialism that governed Britain's relationship with dominions like Canada and Australia, not the ''hard'' imperialism of the Raj.
The enthusiasm for the old Pax Britannia has been bolstered by the revisionist scholarship of Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, whose new book ''Empire'' argues that the British Empire was a progressive force in world history that lay the foundations of our current global economy.
But the idea of a new American empire remains controversial on the American right, and not just among isolationists. Take the case of David Frum, the Canadian-born former Bush speechwriter who famously helped coin the term ''axis of evil.'' Though his writing shows touches of imperial nostalgia (among other thing, he has argued that Canada should jettison the nationalist Maple Leaf flag and return to the Union Jack), he rejects the imperial analogies drawn by writers like Max Boot. ''If `empire' means anything, it certainly does not describe what the US is proposing to do in Iraq,'' notes Frum. ''The big story, it seems to me, is the ascendancy of neo-Wilsonianism on the political right, not neo-imperialism.''
For Boot, that's just a language game. ''I don't think David and I disagree on any substantive point of foreign policy,'' Boot says. Another name for ''`hard' Wilsonianism,'' he points out, is liberal imperialism. After all, Wilson, who took over Veracruz, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, was one of our most imperial presidents. Boot adds: ''I prefer the more forthright if also more controversial term American Empire - sort of like the way some gays embrace the `queer' label.''
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has unleashed a wave of terror on his political opponents in Harare's poverty-ridden townships while world attention is diverted by the war in Iraq.Mugabe appears to be taking revenge on the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) for organising a successful two-day general strike last week - and also trying to intimidate MDC supporters planning further mass action.
Mugabe is also trying to prevent MDC voters from voting against him in two parliamentary by-elections in the Harare townships this weekend, the MDC believes.
The wave of violence appears to be derailing a tentative new peace initiative by President Thabo Mbeki.
A report by the independent Human Rights Forum tells of devastating violence against residents of the Harare townships, which are largely MDC strongholds.
"People taken by police for questioning were handed over to Zanu-PF youths and taken behind police stations where they were assaulted severely, using weapons such as baton sticks, chains, hosepipes and rifles.
"In most cases [the assaults involved] groups of between 20 and 50 individuals," reads the report.
The Human Rights Forum believes the new wave of violence is worse than that which preceded the June 2000 parliamentary general elections and the presidential elections in March last year. Its report details a horrific list of tortures, which include beatings, blindfolding, rape and electric shocks.
And according to the Human Rights Forum, the terror campaign is not aimed only at MDC supporters. Allegations of elderly parents and young children being blindfolded, taken to torture camps and then dumped in the bush have also surfaced.
One case study tells of a woman who was raped with the barrel of an AK47 while the rest of her family stood by helplessly.
The attack, carried out by 16 men in army uniform and four civilians loyal to Mugabe's Zanu-PF party, continued with a savage assault on the woman's son, who was beaten and burnt with cigarettes before being dumped in the bush.
Others told of electric wires attached to their noses, ears and genitals and current switched on whenever they were asked a question.
There was a dramatic rise in reported racist and anti-Semitic acts in France last year, according to the French Government's human rights watchdog.The National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CNCDH) said there had been more than 300 registered instances of violence, and almost 1,000 cases of abuse or threats.
Two-thirds of them were anti-Semitic - six times as many as in 2001.
The CNCDH said the incidents, often blamed on young men of Arab descent, were largely connected with the escalation in the Middle East conflict.
The attacks on America of 11 September 2001 are also thought to have fuelled tensions.
One spring day last year I was at Yankee Stadium, sitting in the loge section, when suddenly during the third inning a chant erupted from the upper deck: "Boston sucks, Boston sucks!" This is normal when the Red Sox play in the Bronx, but on this occasion the Yanks were slamming the hapless Tampa Bay Devil Rays.My two young sons, decked out in Bosox uniforms (we're diehard Boston fans but as Manhattan residents attend about 25 games at the stadium each season) were confused. My nine-year-old said: "Dad, are those guys too drunk to know what teams are on the field?" They'd endured the jibes of Yankee partisans before, but this commotion was just too taxing on their developing minds. It didn't help that it was soon followed by the inevitable "1918!, 1918!"--for some, the year that ended World War I, for others, the year the Boston Red Sox last won the World Series.
My baseball "facts of life" speech to the boys included the "Curse of the Bambino," Boston's astonishing choke against the Mets in the '86 World Series and, most painfully, Bucky Dent's cheap homer in the '78 one-game playoff for the American League East title that again left the Yanks victorious over the Sox.
The durable New York-Boston baseball feud is an anomaly today. Decades ago, before league expansion, before owners spent huge sums on free agents, before theme parks became more important than the game itself, there were legendary rivalries--famously, the Yanks and Dodgers of the 1950s, when they faced off in several World Series. The Giants and Dodgers created a riveting clash of fans, too, which survived even the move of both teams to California. But these rivalries died away, along with others, and attempts to gin up lesser pairings into an admirable viciousness--St. Louis and Kansas City? the Cubs and White Sox?--have always failed.
There is obviously something different about Boston and New York, making the competition bitter from the day Babe Ruth was sold to New York after the 1919 season. Both cities are unusually sports-centric, for one thing, with a rabid collection of journalists eager to stoke the emotions of lifelong fans. Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium were built before the Depression, in urban settings, and many spectators still use mass transit, often reading the tabloids, to reach the games. And the Sox and Yanks were part of the original eight-team American League, back when players traveled by train and fans listened to games on the radio.
All this tradition matters.
The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Oh people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.
There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream.
-Archibald MacLeish
In Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got it Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, Mona Charen holds liberals accountable and reveals the horrifying crimes that these liberals helped defend and cover up for the Communists. Meet the useful idiots:Jane Fonda, Dan Rather, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Jesse Jackson, and all the other liberals who were and are always willing to blame America first and defend its enemies as simply misunderstood. These are the liberals who flocked to Castro?s Cuba and called it paradise, just as a previous generation of liberals visited the Soviet Union and proclaimed its glorious future. They are the liberals who saw Communist Vietnam and Cambodia in fact, Communism everywhere as generally a beneficial force, and blamed America as a gross, blind, and blundering giant.
Now that the Cold War has been won, these liberals, amazingly, are proud to claim credit for the victory conveniently forgetting their apologies for the Communists and their spluttering attacks on Cold Warriors like Ronald Reagan.
But nationally syndicated columnist Mona Charen isn?t about to let them rewrite history.
In her shocking new book, Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, she exposes:
-Prominent Clinton administration officials such as Madeleine Albright, Sidney Blumenthal, and Strobe Talbott who turned a blind eye to the Soviet Evil Empire, but who now want to be counted as Cold Warriors
-Media figures who clucked with praise for Communists and smirked with snide disdain for America including Bill Moyers, Phil Donahue, Bryant Gumble, and Katie Couric
-Professors who poisoned the academy with anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism at top universities such as Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and Georgetown
-Entertainerssuch as Harry Belafonte, Pete Seeger, Meryl Streep, Martin Sheen, and Ed Asnerwho used the megaphones of their fame to blame America first
MORE:
-The Conservative Chronicle - Biography of Mona Charen
-ARCHIVES: Mona Charen (Jewish World Review)
"We want Saddam overthrown by any means,'' said Sam Dibato, 66, a retired geologist who fled Iraq two years ago when he learned he was going to be arrested on false charges. "We are not supporting war. We are supporting a free Iraq.''The mostly older men are part of Chicago's Assyrian-American community, which numbers nearly 100,000. Members of the community are holding a rally today at Warren Park in support of the U.S. troops. Organizers said they canceled the annual Assyrian New Year's parade scheduled for next week because of the war.
Like Dibato, thousands of Assyrians--who boast of being some of the oldest Christians in the world--have been persecuted and killed by Saddam Hussein's Baath party. Despite their religious beliefs, the men said using force to oust Saddam is the only option to save their country. They say that even knowing that innocent civilians have died and more will die because of the war. But they believe more people would perish if Saddam remained in power.
"He is cutting the ears off the people, cutting the tongues, killing people to stay in power,'' Dibato said.
That includes 10 members of Dibato's extended family, who disappeared from a village in northern Iraq in 1988 and are thought to have been burned alive when Saddam accused them of opposing his regime. Dibato was forced to leave when he was accused of the same. His mother, two daughters and two brothers remain in Iraq.
The men believe most in Iraq shares their feelings about Saddam but are too afraid to speak out. But they also think many Iraqis aren't convinced the United States will back them if they rebel, considering they were abandoned following the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
"They don't trust anybody, not Saddam Hussein, not the American government,'' said Khoshiaba Jaba, 50.
Kurdish guerrillas working with U.S. special forces attacked well-trained Islamic militants allegedly linked to al-Qaida-- an operation that one Kurdish
leader said left at least 120 militants dead and dealt "a very serious blow" to terrorism.Heavy machine gun fire and bombardment were reported Saturday around the northeastern city of Halabja near positions of the Ansar al-Islam extremists, who have been under
sporadic attack by U.S. forces for a week.Barham Salih, prime minister of the Sulaymaniyah-based Kurdish government that is a U.S. ally, told The Associated Press the attack on the militants was important in the war against terror. He added that many of those killed were Afghan Arabs who had fought and trained in Afghanistan.
"It was a very tough battle," said Salih. "You're talking about a bunch of terrorists who are very well-trained and well-equipped."
On Friday, thousands of Kurdish rebels swept through Ansar's stronghold, dislodging many of the militants from mountain villages they controlled.
Seventeen Kurds and between 120 and 150 Ansar militants were killed, Salih said.
Two suspected al-Qaida militants were also killed in a separate shootout earlier this week near Halabja, about 50 miles southeast of Sulaymaniyah, Kurdish officials said.
"[US President George W.] Bush insists that the regime change in the Arab world should start in Ramallah," says a senior PA official. "He wants to get rid of all Arab leaders who refuse to dance to American and Israeli music."Indeed, the US, with the help of the European Union, United Nations and Russia, has already forced Arafat into accepting the idea of sharing his "bedroom" with another Palestinian leader. Palestinians who have worked with Arafat for the past four decades say the move is tantamount to forcing the Palestinian leader to dig his grave with his own hands.
"Bush is trying to bury Arafat alive, and that's not fair," complains one official. "Now, he is trying to bury Saddam Hussein in a more brutal manner. What's going on here? Has the man gone mad?"
Saddam is the only Arab leader whose posters are raised together with those of Arafat during demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. By all accounts, he is the second most popular Arab leader among the Palestinians after Arafat.
He is admired in the refugee camps and villages mainly because he is the only Arab leader who defied Israel and made good on his promise to launch Scud missiles at Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War. The rest of the Arab leaders are usually condemned for only paying lip service to the Palestinian issue instead of sending their armies to fight Israel.
The Iraqi dictator's popularity skyrocketed during the current intifada when he started paying thousands of dollars to the families of Palestinian victims, including suicide bombers [see box]. Once a week, Saddam's representatives in the tiny Arab Liberation Front hold a ceremony in the Gaza Strip or West Bank to hand out checks to Palestinian families. Hence by losing Saddam, the Palestinians would not only lose a major political and military ally, but a significant financier.
"The downfall of Saddam's regime is going to be a major loss for the Palestinians," says a university lecturer from an-Najah University in Nablus. "It will send home the message that unless Uncle Sam is happy with you, you have no room in this world. This is a very serious matter because it gives Bush the power to decide who's good and who's bad. This applies also to the Palestinians, who will have to choose leaders favored by Bush and [US National Security Adviser] Condoleezza Rice.
"I believe that the defeat of Saddam will only complicate the situation because it will increase bitterness and frustration not only in the Palestinian street, but also throughout the Arab world. The Arabs will go around with the feeling that their dignity has been badly hurt. This creates a strong desire for revenge."
PALESTINIANS HAVE different opinions as to the post-Saddam era. While some believe that Washington is expected to focus its efforts on finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, others say that the US would need several more years to rid itself of the quagmire in Baghdad and therefore won't have time for the problems here.
In any case, the Palestinians are fully aware that they would have to play the American card after the war is over. Senior Palestinian officials in Arafat's entourage are openly talking about the possibility that a triumphant Bush, who in their eyes represents an administration that is 100 percent biased toward Israel, would try to impose a solution that only a few Palestinians would accept.
"We have red lines that no Palestinian leader, not even Arafat, can cross," explains a senior official. "These include, first and foremost, the right of return for the refugees and a full withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including Arab Jerusalem. Any attempt to impose a solution that does not include these factors will be doomed to failure. Even the most moderate Palestinian leader wouldn't dare cross the red lines. An enforced solution would only lead to more anger and violence in the Palestinian street."
MORE:
-Facing reality: There Will Never be a Palestinian Democracy (Barbara Lerner, 3/27/03, National Review)
srael's Natan Sharansky is one of the intellectual godfathers of President Bush's new "democracy first" approach to the Palestinian question. Sharansky's influence is hard to miss. His influence on the views of his countrymen is another matter. Twenty-nine months of suicide bombings, shellings, and machine-gun attacks aimed at civilians have decimated the ranks of Israelis who still believe a Palestinian state could ever be anything other than the same old terror-warriors, with new and more lethal powers. When I interviewed Sharansky in Jerusalem on February 12, his political party had just lost two of its four seats in Israel's 120-member parliament, but his faith that democracy was the answer remained unshaken.Natan Sharansky has a big Russian soul, but he carries it on a small frame, and slumps in his seat. When I sat at his soon-to-be-vacated desk in Israel's Ministry of Housing and Construction, I had to scrunch down to be at eye-level with him. When I forgot, I would find myself looking instead into the eyes of his mentor, Andrei Sakharov, in a large photo above Sharansky's head. The man once known as Anatoly wants it that way. He believes the principles he and his fellow Soviet freedom fighters went to prison for are universal principles - as real and right in the Middle East as they were and are in what was once the Soviet Union. He also believes that in the terror war, as in the Cold War, appeasing tyrants can never bring lasting peace - only the spread of democracy can. And he believes, too, that democracy is for everyone, that neither Arabs nor Palestinians are exceptions to the rule.
I offer up the Israeli everyman's objection at the outset: Polls show that 80 percent of Palestinians approve of suicide bombings. Anyone they elect will be a murdering thug. "Of course," Sharansky explodes. "It's primitive to think democracy is about elections. It's not. It's about freedom. Freedom is the key." First, he explains, you have to free people from the all-pervasive fear that is the sine qua non of all tyrannies. Give people the freedom to express themselves, to say what they really think, over time - without the fear that government goons will come and get them. That's the start of the democratization process. Elections are at the other end. They come last, after people have experienced what it's like to live free, because that - not elections - is what democracy is about. Once people know freedom, Sharansky argues, they vote to keep it. And because rulers in a democracy can't ignore what majorities vote for if they want to stay in office, they have powerful incentives to respect freedom at home and to pursue peace abroad. For tyrants, the situation is quite different. Freedom is their nemesis, and to negate it they need to demonize enemies, both at home and abroad - justifications for their brutal, suffocating control. [...]
But it's unrealistic, I think, to expect anything like democracy in the southern half of the Middle East any time soon - and a dangerous illusion to expect a Palestinian democracy ever.
Mahmoud Abbas, known by his nom de guerre Abu Mazen, has been tapped by PLO leader Yasser Arafat to be the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. Merely the fact that he has been selected by arch-terrorist Arafat to take on the mantle of authority should already give pause to those committed to fighting terrorism. In fact, anyone involved with the corrupt, duplicitous terrorist organization called the PLO - Abu Mazen is the head of its executive committee - should by now be considered unfit to lead anything but a prison-work detail. Beyond his senior position in the PLO, however, Abu Mazen is also a Holocaust revisionist, a conspiracy theorist, and a promoter of terrorism.
Supporters of the war in Iraq grabbed their opportunity yesterday to voice their approval of the U.S.-led coalition forces' efforts to remove Saddam Hussein from office and liberate the Iraqi people, while a smaller crowd rallied for peace outside the U.S. Embassy.Nearly 4,000 supporters of the U.S. and coalition forces weathered the rain to relay their opposition to Prime Minister Jean Chretien's decision to exclude Canada from the 45 nations listed as allies.
Signs piercing the sea of red, white, and blue read "God Bless America" and "Shame to Chretien."
The ralliers, many of them more senior than their "peace" opponents, stood before the Peace Tower to hear words that validate their convictions.
"We have to stand by the people of operation Iraqi Freedom," Debbie Jodoin told the crowd.
Ms. Jodoin, a member of an anti-Liberal group "Free Dominion," organized the rally. Strong backers of Free Dominion and the pro-war rally included members of the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties, as well as personalities such as CFRA talk show host Lowell Green.
Mr. Green stood with his hand on a boy's shoulder in front of the soaked crowd.
"I want to introduce to you to Ahmed," he said, as the crowd cheered.
"Ahmed is an Iraqi who had to flee his own country. And with God's will and the allies of the coalition, Ahmed may soon be able to go back to his own land and live in freedom."
The ralliers responded by yelling "free Ahmed."
Ontario Conservative Ottawa-West Nepean MPP Gary Guzzo said speakers and citizens alike were standing on the parliamentary lawn to differentiate "what is right and what is wrong in this world."
"Our thoughts and prayers are with the coalition forces who are today in danger, protecting our freedom, and our thoughts and prayers are more importantly with the captured soldiers and we hope and pray for their safe return," Mr. Guzzo said, emphasizing his approval of Ontario Premier Ernie Eves' and Alberta Premier Ralph Klein's support of the war.
Saddam Hussein has fired his commander of air defenses as U.S.-led forces claimed control of 95% of Iraq's sky, the British government said Saturday.Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman said Saddam had sacked his cousin, Musahim Saab al-Tikriti, and replaced him with Gen. Shahin Yasin Muhammad al-Tikriti.
The spokesman also said new, unspecified intelligence indicated that U.S. and British bombing may not have been to blame for explosions in two marketplaces in Baghdad this week.
MORE WAR NEWS:
British officers say Iraqi general captured (The Associated Press, 3/30/03)
A general from Saddam Hussein's army has been captured in southern Iraq and is being pressed to provide strategic information, British officers said Sunday. An Iraqi official said 4,000 Arab volunteers have arrived, eager to carry out more suicide attacks against U.S. and British forces. [...]Group Capt. Al Lockwood, a British spokesman, said an Iraqi general was captured in the besieged city of Basra - the highest-ranking Iraqi prisoner of war thus far.
"We'll be asking him quite politely if he's willing to assist us to continue our operations against the paramilitary forces in Basra," Lockwood said.
Lockwood also said Royal Marine Commandos killed a Republican Guard colonel who apparently was sent to Basra to strengthen the resolve of the defense forces, who are encircled by British troops.
For most of the 1980s, those who saw Islamic fundamentalism for what it is saw groups as violent and dogmatic as any in the world. These were people who mixed nostalgia with grievance to produce a millenarian vision of an Islamic state - a vision so powerful that its pursuit justified any means. Angry believers invoked this Islam when they executed enemies of the revolution in Iran, assassinated a president in Egypt, and detonated themselves and abducted others in Lebanon. Their furious words complemented their deeds. They marched to chants of "Death to America" and intimidated all opponents with charges of espionage and treason. They did not expect to be understood, but they did want to be feared, and feared they were, by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.Yet their violence failed to overturn the region. While fundamentalists did seize the state in Iran, in most Arab countries they lurked about the edges of politics. They were often dangerous, and always fascinating, but they posed no mortal threat to the established order.
By the decade's end, however, many of these same groups had managed to transform themselves into populist movements, and even win mass followings. They did so by riding a huge tide of discontent, fed by exploding populations, falling oil prices, and economic mismanagement by the state. While governments fumbled for solutions, the fundamentalists persuaded the growing numbers of the poor, the young, and the credulous that if they only returned to belief and implemented God's law, the fog of misery surrounding them would lift.
"Islam is the solution," ran the fundamentalist slogan. What that meant, no one would say. The treatises of those billed as first-rate theoreticians seemed vague, by design. Here and there, fundamentalists organized model communities. Although billed as successful experiments in self-reliance, they were actually Potemkin mosques, built and supported with money from oil-rich donors. Fundamentalists also organized Islamic investment banks, which were supposed to prove that market economics could flourish even under the Islamic prohibition of interest. The most extensive experiment in Islamic banking, in Egypt, produced Islamic financial scandal in fairly short order.
But most of new followers read no theory and lost no money. They stood mesmerized by the rhetorical brilliance of men like the Sudan's Hasan al-Turabi, Tunisia's Rashid al-Ghannushi, and Lebanon's Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah. These preachers did not intone musty Islamic polemics against the unbelievers. Often they sounded more like the tenured Left, venting professorial condemnations of the West's sins.
Indeed, many of them issued from the academy. Turabi, schooled at the University of London and the Sorbonne, had been a professor of law and a dean; Ghannushi, a teacher of philosophy. They had overheard the West's self-incrimination, uttered in Left Bank cafés and British and American faculty lounges. This they reworked into a double-edged argument for the superiority and inevitability of Islam, buttressed not only by familiar Islamic scripture but by the West's own doomsday prophets, from Toynbee onward. These wise men of the West had confessed to capital crimes: imperialism, racism, Zionism. If they felt the tremors of the coming quake, could Muslims not feel them? Those who listened long enough to words pumped from pulpit amplifiers did begin to feel a slight tremor, and the mosques filled to overflowing.
A great deal of solid scholarship on these movements appeared during the 1980s, making it difficult to view them benignly. Their theories of jihad and conspiracy, embedded in wordy tracts, received critical scrutiny. True, Edward Said, Columbia's part-time professor of Palestine, presented a contrary view in Covering Islam, a book which bemoaned the Western media's treatment of Islam. The book was much admired by the Islamic Jihad in Beirut, prolific deconstructionists (of U.S. embassies) who circulated it among Western hostages for their edification. But the violence of the fundamentalists made them a difficult sell, and when in 1989 they filled the streets to demand the death of Salman Rushdie, they bit the hands even of those few Western intellectuals who had tried to feed them. As the decade closed, Islamic fundamentalism could count on few foreign friends.
While Islam's fundamentalists demanded the death of Rushdie, a longing for democracy (and capitalism) swept across Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, rulers took fright at the scenes of revolution from Romania and East Germany, and proceeded to initiate tightly controlled experiments in political pluralism. At the time, the architects of these experiments had no sense of the fundamentalists' appeal; they thought that the openings would work to the benefit of parties advocating liberal reform.
It was the fundamentalists, though, who led the dash through the newly opened door. The first of a succession of surprises had occurred in Egypt's parliamentary elections in 1987, when a coalition dominated by the fundamentalist Muslim Brethren emerged as the biggest opposition party in a contest gerrymandered to assure victory for the ruling party. The fundamentalists also outdistanced all other opposition parties in the 1989 elections for Tunisia's parliament, although a winner-take-all system gave every seat to the ruling party. That same year, the fundamentalists nearly captured the lower house of Jordan's parliament, in that country's first general election since 1967. Then, in 1990, the fundamentalists swept the country-wide local elections in Algeria.
Given these successes, almost overnight fundamentalist movements became the most avid and insistent supporters of free elections - an unpatrolled route to the power that had hitherto eluded them. Liberal Arab intellectuals, who had lobbied for democratic reforms and human rights for much of the 1980s, now retreated in disarray, fearful that freer press and elections might play straight into the hands of fundamentalists.
For Western theorists of democracy, it was as if the Arabs had defied the laws of gravity. Few admitted the bind as frankly as Jeane Kirkpatrick, who said:
"The Arab world is the only part of the world where I've been shaken in my conviction that if you let the people decide, they will make fundamentally rational decisions. But there, they don't make rational decisions, they make fundamentalist ones."
Most theorists, however, refused to be shaken. In order to synchronize the Arab predicament with the march of democracy, they developed a convenient theory - the theory of initial advantage.
The fundamentalists, according to this theory, enjoyed an advantage in the first stage of democratization: they knew how to organize, to stir emotions, to get out the vote. But "as civil society is enlivened," announced one political scientist, "it is only natural that the influence of the Islamist groups will be challenged." Then their appeal would fade, once the people enjoyed a full range of options. In the privacy of the voting booth, the voters would become rational actors, and elect liberals and technocrats who proposed serious answers to the crisis of Arab society.
Then, though, questions arise as to whether a revolutionary period is inevitable in the rest of the Middle East--is this a necessary phase that the states will all or almost all pass through, just to get it out of their systems?--and, more importantly, will countries that did not have long experience of a pro-Western liberalizing dictator like the Shah (or like Attaturk in Turkey) be able to shuck off the revolution as quickly as Iran has? Support for freedom, constitutionalism, liberation of women, etc., predates the Revolution in Iran and has apparently remained strong. Is there any reason to believe that a nation like Egypt--after it descends into its fundamentalist epoch, as surely it will--which seems to have few of these foundations upon which liberal democratic society is built, can develop them during a period when Islamic fundamentalism reigns? It seems at least somewhat dubious.
And it is here that Iraq comes in. For the new Iraq to succeed it will require a constitution that diffuses political power, a secular government, a free market economy, an independent judiciary, vibrant mosques and churches, a depoliticized military, and myriad social and community organiztions. Can all of these things be developed before it submerges into chaos or fundamentalist enthusiasms? Can it serve as an example of how democratic institutions might be built and revolution avoided? Here too it's necessary to be skeptical. But we have to help both Iran and Iraq make the efforts, don't we?
The suicide bombing that killed four U.S. soldiers Saturday happened just outside a dusty town that saw hundreds of Iraqis literally drive themselves into U.S. positions during a four-day battle that started with a swirling sandstorm and ended with nightmarish scenes.WHEN U.S. tanks from the 3rd Mechanized Infantry first rumbled into this town on the Euphrates river on Wednesday, irregular Iraqi forces set up sniper nests up and down the main street, opening fire from doors, windows, market stalls and patches of open ground.
A crimson sunset painted the street red and visibility fell to less than 15 feet as a swirling sand and dust storm kicked up when the guerrilla units attacked.
U.S. officers said fighters in minivans, pick-up trucks and cars drove straight at the oncoming tanks. Others took to canoes, rowing down the river and trying to fix explosives to the main bridge in this town about 80 miles south of Baghdad.
But the guerrilla-style forces were vastly outgunned by the tanks of the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division, and hundreds of Iraqis have died in this town over the last four days. [...]
"It was mad chaos like you cannot imagine," said the tank unit's commander, who identified himself as "Cobra 6" as he did not want friends and neighbors back home to know what he had been through.
U.S. warplanes firing laser-guided missiles destroyed a two-story building in the Iraqi city of Basra Friday, killing some 200 Iraqi paramilitary fighters, the U.S. military said.The attack targeted the Saddam Hussein loyalists who British officials say have clamped down on a restive population in Basra.
Earlier Friday, the paramilitaries -- known as "Saddam's Fedayeen" -- had fired mortars and machine guns on about 1,000 Iraqi civilians trying to leave the southern city, British military officials and witnesses said.
British forces surround the city -- Iraq's second-largest, with a population of 1.3 million -- and want to open the way for badly needed humanitarian aid. But they have yet to move in, facing what would likely by tough street-by-street resistance from the militiamen.
Friday night's airstrike went after what Central Command called "an emerging target." The pair of F-15E Strike Eagles fired laser-guided munitions fitted with delayed fuses -- meaning they penetrated the building before detonating to minimize the external blast effect. The Central Command statement said a church 300 yards from the two-story building was undamaged.
The statement did not say how it was known that 200 paramilitaries were holding a meeting.
U.S. helicopters attacked units of Iraq's elite Republican Guard on Saturday, killing at least 50 Iraqi soldiers and destroying some 25 vehicles, a senior officer said."We fired 40 missiles and we had 40 hits. We had a confirmed kill of at least 25 vehicles including tanks, armored personnel carriers and trucks, and at least 50 dead," Major Hugh Cate told Reuters.
Hundreds of Palestinians living in Lebanon have been sent to Iraq to carry out suicide attacks against American and British soldiers.Col. Munir Maqdah, one of the top commanders of the Fatah movement in Lebanon, said his men were already in Baghdad, prepared to launch suicide attacks. Another group of Fatah suicide bombers are due in Iraq shortly, he added.
Fatah, the largest faction of the PLO, has several thousand militiamen in Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps. Most of the Fatah gunmen continue to receive their salaries from the PLO.
Maqdah, a former senior officer in Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's elite Force 17, is based in the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon. Although he belongs to Fatah, Maqdah has openly challenged Arafat by criticizing him for signing the Oslo accords with Israel.
This is the first time that a senior Fatah official has announced that his men have decided to join the fighting in Iraq. Palestinian sources said the Fatah volunteers entered Iraq through Syria.
Maqdah told the Nazareth-based A-Sennarah weekly that Fatah has decided to "strike at American interests all over the world."
"Resisting the American aggression on Iraq supports the Palestinian people and the intifada," he added. "What is happening in Iraq is the battle of the Palestinian people first and the Arab and Muslim nation second."
Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word "quagmire" has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad.Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world? Premature the questions may be, three weeks after the fighting began. Unreasonable they are not, given the scars scoured into the national psyche by defeat in Southeast Asia. For all the differences between the two conflicts, and there are many, echoes of Vietnam are unavoidable. Today, for example, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld disclosed for the first time that American military forces are operating in northern Afghanistan, providing liaison to "a limited number of the various opposition elements."
Their role sounds suspiciously like that of the advisers sent to Vietnam in the early 1960's, although Mr. Rumsfeld took pains to say of the anti-Taliban forces that "you're not going to send a few people in and tell them they should turn right, turn left, go slower, go fast." The Vietnam advisers, of course, were initially described in much the same terms, and the government of the day vigorously denied that they were a prelude to American combat troops.
In the most famous such denial, Lyndon B. Johnson vowed that he would not send American boys in to fight the war for Vietnamese boys.
Despite the insistence of President Bush and members of his cabinet that all is well, the war in Afghanistan has gone less smoothly than many had hoped. Not that anyone expected a lightning campaign without setbacks; indeed, both Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld have often said the effort would be long and hard. [...]
At least at first, American public opinion would present no problem. The latest New York Times/CBS News poll shows that a majority of Americans are prepared to accept the deaths of several thousand American troops there, although there were the first suggestions that many Americans think that the war is not going too well.
Though the scion of a family steeped in politics and public service, George W. Bush remains a young president who came to the White House with relatively limited knowledge of the world and its ills. Yet for two years he has ridden high in public esteem, thanks to confident leadership after Sept. 11 and a surer political touch than his detractors give him credit for.Is his luck about to turn in the winds and sands of Iraq? [...]
For the moment, Mr. Bush seems secure. People like him. None of his possible Democratic opponents loom as a major threat, not so far.
Still, for presidents, especially for wartime leaders, political capital can drain quickly from the White House account. After the guns fall silent, voters' eyes turn elsewhere, often to social and economic needs. It happened to Winston Churchill late in World War II, and as this president remembers better than most, it happened to his father, too.
MORE QUAGMIRISM:
Back Off, Syria and Iran! (MAUREEN DOWD, March 30, 2003, NY Times)
We're shocked that the enemy forces don't observe the rules of war. We're shocked that it's hard to tell civilians from combatants, and friends from foes. Adversaries use guerrilla tactics; they are irregulars; they take advantage of the hostile local weather and terrain; they refuse to stay in uniform. Golly, as our secretary of war likes to say, it's unfair.Some of their soldiers are mere children. We know we have overwhelming, superior power, yet we can't use it all. We're stunned to discover that the local population treats our well-armed high-tech troops like invaders.
Why is all this a surprise again? I know our hawks avoided serving in Vietnam, but didn't they, like, read about it?
"The U.S. was planning on walking in here like it was easy and all," a young marine named Jimmy Paiz told ABC News this weekend with a rueful smile. "It's not that easy to conquer a country, is it?"
We will conquer the country, and it will be gratifying to see the satanic Saddam running like a rat through the rubble of his palaces. But it was hard not to have a few acid flashbacks to Vietnam at warp speed.
Syria is granting free passage across its border with Iraq to volunteers who wish to join the fight against the U.S. and British forces. Thus far, dozens of volunteers, primarily Palestinians from the refugee camps in Lebanon, have crossed over into Iraq through Syrian-controlled border posts.The passage of volunteers with Damascus's consent has given rise to the theory that the U.S.-fired missile that struck a Syrian bus traveling in Iraq was an intentional attack on a busload of such volunteers. The bus left Damascus on Sunday and was hit by the missile some 50 kilometers inside Iraqi territory. The missile strike left five people dead and dozens injured.
Speaking on the subject, the Syrian military analyst, Hitham al-Kilani, said in an interview on Al Jazeera, on 24 March, that "the Syrian border was opened to Syrian, Arab and Muslim volunteers wishing to reach Iraq and participate in the fighting against the American invasion." [...]
Syria's active support for Saddam Hussein has been particularly evident in recent months, with Damascus even purchasing military equipment on behalf of the Iraqi army. The equipment was reportedly delivered from its country of origin to the Syrian port of Latakia and then carried on trucks to Iraq. The purchases were made from a number of East European countries, and the equipment included engines for Russian-made tanks and aircraft. Also purchased were tank carriers, probably from Germany.
A pair of helpful defendants lent District Attorney Bruce Roberson an unexpected hand, or actually a show of hands, last month during their trial for aggravated assault and robbery at district court in Perryton.The female victim was tearfully testifying that she had been beaten and robbed by two men.
The district attorney listened intently.
"And are the two perpetrators of this terrible crime present in the courtroom today?" Roberson asked.
Both defendants immediately raised their hands.
"Here, your honor."
Protesters took to the streets by the thousands across the Middle East today after Friday Prayers, with calls for a holy war against the American and British forces in Iraq ringing out from minarets throughout the region.One of the most remarkable demonstrations was in the Iranian capital, Tehran, where tens of thousands of marchers turned out in a government-organized rally to denounce the war against Iraq even though President Saddam Hussein is still reviled in Iran for starting the 1980-88 war between the two countries.
Demonstrators in Tehran chanted both "Death to Saddam" and "Death to America." They also shattered windows in the British Embassy, pelting the building with stones while shouting for its closing.
"Will bombs and the use of force bring democracy and freedom?" asked Ayatollah Muhammad Yazdi, delivering the Friday sermon broadcast on Iranian television. "It will definitely not." [...]
Even Kuwait, which Iraq invaded in 1990 and which the allies have used as a jumping-off point for the war, heard harsh criticism of the Americans in some mosques.
"America does not want freedom for the Iraqi people," said Saleh Jawhar, a Shiite cleric who also called Americans evil. "It wants to install its puppets and subdue Muslims until we become a voice for America." He conceded, though, that Iraq would obliterate Kuwait if American forces withdrew.
WITH THE THIRD INFANTRY DIVISION, in central Iraq, March 28 - It troubles him, now that the battle is over. Sgt. Mark N. Redmond remembers shouting "qiff," Arabic for halt, but they did not halt. The Iraqi fighters just kept coming.Sergeant Redmond's unit spent three days and nights fighting for the bridge at Kifl, a village on the Euphrates River about 75 miles south of Baghdad. By any military definition - the territory seized, the number of enemy killed, the mission accomplished - the unit's fight ended in victory. After victory, though, comes rest. And with rest comes reflection.
"I mean, I have my wife and kids to go back home to," he said, sitting atop a box of rations back at his base camp, whiling away a lull as unexpected as it was appreciated. "I don't want them to think I'm a killer."
The fighting around Kifl subsided today, officers here said, as it did around much of Najaf, the holy city on the Euphrates that the Third Infantry Division struggled to encircle in an unexpectedly fierce battle that began late Monday night when Sergeant Redmond's unit - Troop C, attached to the First Brigade of the Third Infantry - first crossed the river.
The division's commanders said today that the withering effects of an expanding armored ring around the city, coupled with airstrikes and artillery barrages, had at last halted Iraq's efforts to reinforce Najaf, though the situation in the city itself remains unclear.
By tonight, there was still no complete count of the enemy who died there, though soldiers and officers said there were scores, at least. And for some, like Sergeant Redmond, the memory remained haunting.
"They just came up to us," he said, describing irregular Iraqi militiamen who began fighting as soon as Troop C crossed the two-lane bridge over the Euphrates. "It seemed to me they were trying to test us, but it was suicide." [...]
The brigade's Graves Registration Team began to fan out across the village and its surroundings to collect the remains of Iraqi fighters, which they packed in black bags along with any personal items that might help identify them.
"Basically we did the same thing with the Iraqi dead that we would have done with American dead," said Capt. Andrew J. Valles, the brigade's civil affairs officer.
Shoeless enemy: Marine Lance Cpl. Marcco Ware carries an Iraqi soldier who was shot three times while trying to ambush a convoy of the 3rd Battalion, Fifth Regiment, in central Iraq. The attack left one Marine and about 40 Iraqis dead.
[T]he fix we are in is the fruit of a long pattern of appeasement and of North Korea?s canny manipulation of our illusions and fears. Once we discovered that Pyongyang was indeed building a nuclear reactor, we spent five or six years getting it to sign the NPT, then another seven years securing its signature to a "safeguards" agreement, then three more vainly trying to induce it to abide by that agreement. We finally abandoned the effort in favor of a "framework," which eight years later it admitted it had been disregarding all along. At the core of this pathetic tale was our reluctance to consider that the goal of the North Koreans' nuclear-weapons program was to possess nuclear weapons-an that diplomatic and economic incentives to avert this goal might be of no avail. In place of a frank recognition of this reality, we substituted our vain hopes that North Korea?s rulers could be softened by concessions, and that what they really wanted was economic aid, political legitimacy, and "respect."How, then, do we get out of the fix? [...]
Ultimately, the world is likely to be safe with North Korea, as with Iraq, only through the demise of its current government. In 1994, we believed that the Kim dynasty was likely to fall of its own dead weight, just as we thought that Saddam Hussein would fall in 1991 after his humiliating defeat in the "mother of all battles." Predicting the fall of dictators is clearly a chancy business. In the hope of opening fissures in the closed polity of North Korea, a group of neoconservative intellectuals, including Max Kampelman, R. James Woolsey, and Penn Kemble, have suggested adding human-rights issues to the diplomatic agenda. A fine idea; but the only way to assure regime change in North Korea is through military action.
But war, we have been told by numerous analysts as well as implicitly by the Bush administration, is "unthinkable." The North Koreans have hundreds of thousands of soldiers and thousands of artillery pieces arrayed in and around the DMZ. Their shells can reach Seoul. Any war would mean the deaths of many thousands of South Korean soldiers and civilians, and many of the 37,000 American troops stationed on the front lines. This is not even to mention whatever harm the North might manage to inflict with its nuclear devices.
Horrible, war would be. But to say that it is unthinkable is once again to hide our head in the sand. Pyongyang itself suffers under no such illusions and no such inhibitions. For its part, it insists that economic sanctions will be taken as an act of war, implying that it would respond with military strikes. Indeed, far from having viewed war with us as unthinkable, the North has calculated its demands on us over the years-that we remove our tactical nuclear weapons, that we persuade the South Koreans to forswear nuclear weapons of their own, that we cancel joint military exercises with Seoul-precisely in order to weaken our ability to resist its own military power. These demands we have systematically granted.
Not only does the North's belligerence leave us no choice but to "think" about war, we cannot exclude the possibility of initiating military action ourselves. Part of the cause of our present predicament is that we ruled out the use of force at earlier points in this saga-when, however painful, it would have been less costly than today. And today it may be less costly than a few years from now, when North Korea will have dozens of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles (it has tested one that could reach Alaska) or when it will have shared them with al Qaeda and others.
IS THERE anything to be learned from the appalling choices we find ourselves facing? The New York Times editorialized in January that Pyongyang's confession had "blown apart the Bush administration's months-long effort to portray Saddam Hussein as uniquely dangerous." The implication was that the North Korean menace spoke against the policy of disarming Iraq by force. What it really did was the opposite. It illustrated how such threats grow ever worse if they are not dealt with resolutely. Contrary to those who airily put their trust in "containment," it gave us a glimpse into how much more dangerous the world would be if we allowed Iraq to join North Korea in the nuclear club. Since appeasement has only emboldened the North Koreans, perhaps making an example of Saddam Hussein may take some of the wind out of their nuclear sails.
In short, our experience with North Korea confirms anew the folly of appeasement and the frailty of "parchment barriers"-not to mention the wisdom of missile defense. Above all, it points up the error of lowering our guard. Since the cold war ended, we were living in something of a fool?s paradise. All of the conflicts in which we were embroiled after the fall of Communism-Kuwait, Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo-were minor in comparison to our decades-long tussle with the Soviet empire. Although the issues were real, the dangers were always contingent, and we enjoyed a wide margin for error. Accordingly, we progressively reduced the size of our military and our spending on weapons until we abandoned, first in practice and then in doctrine, the capacity to wage wars simultaneously on two fronts. The result was, and is, that our ability to confront North Korea is constrained by our mobilization around Iraq-a fact that by itself helps to explain the brazenness of the North Koreans.
With the fall of the Soviet empire, as Francis Fukuyama eloquently explained more than a dozen years ago, no ideology remained to rival our own. Neither was there any foe on the horizon that could hope to vanquish us. Modern weapons, however, endow even a minor power with the capability of wreaking terrible damage, and of killing Americans in larger numbers than Hitler or Tojo. That such weapons can be fielded by North Korea, a country so miserable that infinitely more of its people are eating grass than are shopping at "Wal-Marts," underscores how far removed we are from the old calculus in which military potency derived from industrial might.
The ideological competitors with democracy and capitalism have indeed faded. But these were mostly phenomena of the 20th century. What has remained is something older and deeper: the atavistic impulses of self-aggrandizement and nihilism. How else to classify the motor force behind the dynasty-Communism of the Kims, the Baathism-cum-Islamism of Saddam, the twisted preachings of bin Laden? When there are no longer powerful men like these, then we may truly begin to speak of the end of history. Until then, the preservation of all we hold dear will require unillusioned clarity, vigilance, courage-and, it is to be feared, sacrifice.
At a news conference, Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan threatened more suicide attacks and identified the bomber as Ali Jaafar al-Noamani, a father of several children. A detailed statement would be issued later, he added."This is just the beginning. You'll hear more pleasant news later," Mr. Ramadan said.
Asked whether suicide bombings will now be used regularly by the Iraqi military, Mr. Ramadan said, "It will be routine military policy. We will use any means to kill our enemy in our land and we will follow the enemy into its land."
Seven American prisoners of war have been taken from southern Iraq to Baghdad and are under the direct control of people close to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Bush administration officials said yesterday.One Pentagon official said the expectation is that Saddam's regime will use the captives to score propaganda points by putting them on Iraqi television or forcing them to do an interview with the Arab-language Al Jazeera television network, based in Qatar.
Reports earlier today of Marines finding the bodies of four of their comrades in shallow graves near An Nasiriyah may confirm [Iraqi brutality] yet again. It is unlikely that the Iraqis would bury enemy dead unless they have something to hide. These may be more murdered POWs. We must never forgive, or forget, Iraqi war crimes.
The bodies of four American soldiers were found by Marines on Friday in a shallow grave in the battle-worn town of Nasiriyah, near the Euphrates River.U.S. Military officials said they believe the four were executed by Iraqi paramilitary forces after being seized in an ambush on Sunday....
On Friday, a Marine unit found the four bodies in a freshly dug grave near a house in the northeast corner of the town of al-Jazeera. An Army official said the four bodies were clothed in U.S. military uniforms.
Damaged Canada-U.S. relations can not be repaired until Prime Minister Jean Chretien is replaced, says the Liberal chairman of the Commons defence committee.Nepean-Carleton MP David Pratt said relations have now fallen to a level not seen since Richard Nixon referred to Pierre Trudeau as that "a--hole" in the early 1970s and John F. Kennedy and John Diefenbaker sparred over Cold War missiles in the early 1960s.
"I don't think things will change until our leadership changes," Mr. Pratt said bluntly. [...]
[M]r. Pratt said it is important that Canada "patch this up just as quickly as we can."
He said one way to do that is for Canada to join the coalition of the willing if the Iraqis use chemical or biological weapons in the war.
The German architect of one of Saddam Hussein's main bunkers in Baghdad said on Friday the Iraqi leader can survive anything short of a direct hit with a nuclear bomb if he stays within its four-feet-thick walls."It could withstand the shock wave of a nuclear bomb the size of the Hiroshima one detonating 250 meters away," said Karl Esser, a security consultant who designed the bunker underneath Saddam's main presidential palace in Baghdad.
U.S.-led troops will also find it hard to fight their way in through its three-ton Swiss-made doors, Esser told Reuters in an interview....
Esser said he had no qualms about having helped to protect a dictator likened to Hitler.
"It's not just one person getting protection, it's several people, it's the palace staff as well. I just see it as an achievement of bunker technology," said Esser.
Europe's gathering crisis is moral at its roots. They are drowning in selfishness. They pursue only their own profit, whether it be measured in money or leisure or comfort. Any profitable deed can be justified, no matter how vicious the consequences. Any burden is too great to bear, be it children or armed conflict or the duties of religion. Action is warranted only to postpone the costs of narcissism. But the bill is growing, and it will sooner or later come due. On that day, Europeans will find they have few friends. The evildoers they have aided will turn on them in contempt; the erstwhile friends they have betrayed will mourn their decay but not, ultimately, their passing.
By looking for patterns in email traffic, a new technique can quickly identify online communities and the key people in them. The approach could mean terrorists or criminal gangs give themselves away, even if they are communicating in code or only discussing the weather."If the CIA or another intelligence agency has a lot of intercepted email from people suspected of being part of a criminal network, they could use the technique to figure out who the leaders of the network might be," says Joshua Tyler of Hewlett-Packard's labs in Palo Alto, California. At the very least, it would help them prioritise investigations, he says.
"It has become a world action," said Tama Gallo, executive director of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of
America, a New York-based group that began the effort to have the prestigious prize awarded to Walter Duranty in 1932
withdrawn.Mr. Duranty, who was the Times' Moscow correspondent from 1921 to 1934, won the Pulitzer for a 1931 series of reports
about Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's five-year plans to reform the economy.His stories appeared in the Times before the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, which left 5 million to 10 million dead.
Western historians now generally agree that the famine was the result of Stalin's industrialization effort and an
attempt to break the will of the independence-minded Ukrainian people.In his 1932-1933 dispatches, Mr. Duranty denied that a famine was occurring in Soviet Ukraine, although he has been
quoted in several books as privately telling friends he had never seen such misery.
U.S. covert teams have been operating in urban areas in Iraq trying to kill members of President Saddam Hussein's inner circle, including Baath Party officials and Special Republican Guard commanders, according to U.S. and other knowledgeable officials.The covert teams, from the CIA's paramilitary division and the military's special operations group, include snipers and demolition experts schooled in setting house and car bombs. They have reportedly killed more than a handful of individuals, according to one knowledgeable source. They have been in operation for at least one week. [...]
As conventional U.S. and British forces have encountered fiercer than expected Iraqi resistance, the CIA and the Pentagon's covert units are under increasing pressure to fire the "silver bullet" that will kill Hussein and bring down his government, thereby bringing the ground war to a quick conclusion. The agencies have stepped up a fierce psychological operations campaign to rattle key members of Hussein's government in an effort to get them to turn on the Iraqi leader.
The covert teams are just one feature of the largely invisible war being waged in Iraq by the CIA's and Pentagon's growing covert paramilitary and special operations divisions.
CIA units and special operations teams are also involved in organizing tribal groups to fight the Iraqi government from the north. They are secretly hunting for weapons of mass destruction and missiles sites, and are looking to interrogate Iraqi defectors and prisoners of war. The CIA, the National Security Agency and foreign intelligence services cooperating with the agency are helping to identify "leadership" targets; the homes, offices and other sites inhabited by the officials who make up the government's infrastructure.
Anyone who knows the Catholic world must realize that the present anti-war chorus from church leaders is a better index of the force of John Paul II’s personality than of any genuine consensus on the Iraq conflict. Under the papal banner are grouped Catholics with very diverse ideas about the causes of this war, its rights and wrongs, and what its implications are for global geo-politics.Example: Italy’s left-leaning Catholic Action movement is marching under the slogan “no to the war, yes to peace”; the right-wing Communion and Liberation movement says “no to the war, yes to America.”...
These divisions were transparent in two public events in Rome on Monday evening, March 24. All one had to do was to move across town, from the Basilica of the Holy Apostles to the Cathedral of St. John Lateran, to move in two different Catholic worlds.
Holy Apostles was the site of a Mass commemorating the 23rd anniversary of the murder of El Salvador’s fabled Archbishop Oscar Romero, long a hero to progressive Catholics....
The rainbow peace banner, along with a sky-blue United Nations flag, was carried at the head of the offertory precession during the Mass to bring up the gifts.... The first prayer at the Mass was a meditation which, among other points, stated that the Church “repudiates” the war....
[The Lateran hosted] a lecture on “Work, Solidarity, Liberty: A Global Society in a Humanistic Key?” by Cardinal Diogini Tettamanzi of Milan. The event was part of a series called “Dialogues in the Cathedral” sponsored by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the pope’s vicar for the Rome diocese and John Paul’s personal choice as president of the Italian bishops’ conference....
I bumped into Bishop Rino Fisichella, rector of the Lateran University and a trusted Vatican advisor. Fisichella was one of the primary contributors to the 1998 papal encyclical Fides et Ratio. Fisichella, an auxiliary bishop of the Rome diocese, is also considered the “chaplain” of the Italian parliament.
Fisichella, whose English is exceptionally good, is a long-time friend of the United States. He was the main celebrant at last December’s Immaculate Conception Mass at the North American College, the feast that also marks the foundation of the American seminary in Rome during the pontificate of Pius IX.
Fisichella told me that “this direction we are moving in, of isolating the United States, is terrible.” He said that in Italy there are forces “manipulating” the anti-war humor of the moment to grind ancient ideological axes against the United States and against the West....
Ruini struck a similar note in an address earlier in the day to the Italian bishops’ conference. He called for “constant discernment … in order that the commitment to peace not be confused with markedly different objectives and interests, or polluted by arguments that are really based upon conflict.”
To those with ears to hear, it’s clear what kind of “pollution” Ruini had in mind — a secular leftist peace movement that shades off into opposition to the Atlantic alliance.
Ruini later made an explicit plea for solidarity with the United States....
There are signs that the Vatican, especially in the Secretariat of State where the diplomatic heavy lifting is done, is becoming sensitive to the risk that its peace message could be construed as an ideological choice against the U.S.-led coalition.
As I pointed out earlier, the Vatican's anti-war stance has few roots in the Christian tradition, and is arguably contrary to tradition. It is no surprise, therefore, that the Vatican stance is dividing the Church. Moreover, the divide is clearly along ideological lines. The Church's left is not only turning away from tradition, but sacralizing the United Nations. The "peace" they seek is not genuine peace, as the Church has always understood it, but passivity on the part of the West in the face of continued violence from Saddam and his terrorist allies. Their beloved "peace" is merely perpetual warfare.
In light of this ideological divide within the Church, it is hard to understand why the Vatican took such an aggressive stand on an issue about which, tradition says, duly constituted public authorities are the appropriate and best-informed decision-makers. Church officials are creating a deep muddle in the moral theology of war and public governance, and they are going to be increasingly embarrassed by it.
A final shock scene in the video of AOLTIMEWARNER recording artist Madonna's upcoming release -- is that of the singer throwing a grenade in the lap of President Bush!"It is not me being anti-Bush, it's me being ironic and tongue in cheek," Madonna explains to NBC's ACCESS HOLLYWOOD this weekend.
"My kind of wish for peace and my desire to sort of turn a weapon of destruction, which is a grenade, into something that is completely innocuous."
Madonna uses a Bush look-alike in the final scene of AMERICAN LIFE. The "president" picks up the lit grenade that Madonna throws --and lights his cigar with it!
The image is "my wish to find an alternative to violence to war and destruction," the singer says.
Some students at Madison Area Memorial High School are objecting to studying the Arab and Muslim culture and religion while the United States is at war with Iraq.About three dozen students have signed a petition that calls for seniors to be given the option to take alternative assignments in the senior English class project, according to 18-year-old senior Richard Poulin, who circulated the petition. [...]
"I'm a Christian," Poulin said. "How come we can't sit down and study why we worship what we do, but we can sit down and study what another country does?" [...]
School Administrative District 59 Superintendent Anthony Krapf said the school board and teachers must follow educational guidelines.
"It's up to us to follow the adopted curriculum," Krapf said. "As a public school we must prepare students to go out into different types of culture - because our job is to help the students, these young adults, to fit in and understand other cultures."
All arguments against the war--including mine--are moot now. The decision has been made, and our job is not to nurse misgivings but to win in Iraq.Compared to what occurred 62 years ago, the anti-war movement in the United States is scanty and timorous. In 1941, it was of enormous influence. The ''America First'' movement was based in this city, and its rallies featured the hero Charles Lindbergh and Sears Roebuck tycoon retired Gen. Robert Wood, among others. The movement extended throughout the nation and included young John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. But Dec. 7 brought an end to all that. The issue became a ''time for unity.'' As indeed it should be today, as our troops are engaged in the struggle in Iraq. [...]
One job remains uncompleted now that we are resolved to win this war. It involves the senior senator from South Dakota, Tom Daschle, who has said that the death of a single soldier would be the fault of President George W. Bush.
Daschle should resign as Senate minority leader. No one should lead a party who is so insensitive to the demands of national unity. Whether or not Daschle steps down or his party removes him, any additional words from him should be regarded as irrelevant. What is important now is that we triumph and show the world that Iraq's chamber of horrors will not stand.
An Iraqi terror team armed with millions of dollars tried to get smuggled into the U.S. through Mexico to Crawford, Tex. - the site of President Bush's ranch, a law enforcement source said yesterday.The alarming attempt to infiltrate the country occurred this month, the source said.
It is not known what the Iraqis planned to do in Crawford, but Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein tried to assassinate Bush's father, the former President George Bush, in 1993.
A Columbia University professor told an anti-war gathering that he would like to see "a million Mogadishus" -- referring to the 1993 ambush in Somalia that killed 18 American servicemen.At Wednesday night's "teach-in" on the Columbia campus, Nicholas De Genova also called for the defeat of U.S. forces in Iraq and said, "The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military." And he asserted that Americans who call themselves "patriots" are white supremacists.
De Genova's comments about defeating the United States in Iraq were cheered by the crowd of 3,000, Newsday reported. But his mention of the Somali ambush -- "I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus" -- was largely met with silence.
The last American troops left South Vietnam today, leaving behind an unfinished war that has deeply scarred this country and the United States.
If the Shi'a of Iraq are slow to rise and the Ba'athist believe they can win just by making the war bloody enough, much of the blame lies with ourselves, because the lessons of Vietnam (and of the Battle of the Black Sea, which Saddam seems to have gone to school on) are that we're an uncertain ally and a squeamish foe. Such is the price we continue to pay for the victory of the anti-war forces as regards Vietnam.
U.S. authorities have gathered detailed evidence in southeast Asia that links accused terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui with the Sept. 11 hijackers and planners as well as a broader al-Qaida plan for a second wave of attacks, according to foreign and American officials and intelligence documents.The evidence, according to those familiar with it, reinforces U.S. authorities assessment that al-Qaida began shifting some operational planning and fund-raising to southeast Asia well before the 2001 attacks and that Moussaoui was part of a terrorist plot that was broader than the suicide hijackings in New York and Washington.
A key link, the officials say, is a captured Malaysian chemist named Yazid Sufaat who authorities believe hosted both the hijackers and Moussaoui in Malaysia at different times in 2000 and provided Moussaoui with fake papers to make his way to the United States.
The evidence and timelines have led authorities overseas and here to explore whether Moussaoui and Sufaat "were tasked to set up a network to prepare for the second wave of attacks after Sept. 11," one senior foreign intelligence official in southeast Asia said, speaking only on condition of anonymity.
The alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, has also told U.S interrogators since his capture a month ago in Pakistan that Moussaoui was supposed to prepare for a second wave of attacks that were to follow Sept. 11.
A suicide bomber has killed five Americans soldiers in an attack near the city of Najaf in central Iraq, US military officials say.
Q: "Might it support the Administration's case in that regard?"
A: "No, only Americans will believe this is terrorism, because they wish to. But this is nothing unusual--suicide bombings have been used in Sri Lanka and by the Kamikazes in WWII."
Civilians who greet US and British troops are being executed on President Saddam Hussein's orders, according to a former chief scientist of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, Dr Hussein Shahristani.The most recent outrage was carried out in the small town of Khidr, between Nasiriyah and Samawa, where some families were accused of cheering the US soldiers who drove through their locality, Dr Shahristani who is now chairman of the Iraq Refugee Aid Council, told rediff.com
Their executions started as soon as the US soldiers left, the scientist, who is now based in Kuwait, said.
"These [coalition] troops pass through local towns and villages and do not stop for long enough to clean up Saddam's terror apparatus.
"When they depart, the civilian families are left to the mercy of Ba'ath party officials and the thugs in charge of Saddam's fidayeen militia.
"Those Iraqis who refuse to serve on the frontline are also being shot," he said.
Dr Shahristani said he had been informed of the killing of a tribal leader, Rahim Karim, who was late by five minutes for a meeting with Saddam's cousin and local governor, Aly Hasan Al Majeed.
Karim had come to discuss how members of his tribe could be mobilised for frontline duty, but Majeed lost his temper and had him shot.
There are apparently two versions of the tape shown by Al Jazeera. The second, shown over and over on Egyptian TV, shows both the murder of American POWs and the desecration of their bodies. Though the tape has been shown over and over in the Middle East, congressional requests for access to it have so far been denied. One source told me that some of what he saw reminded him of the murder of Danny Pearl. The public doesn't need to see all these tapes. But more people in government do, and they need to tell the press. The lack of public reaction to these horrors troubles me greatly. Maybe it's because there's so little knowledge of any of the details.
THE Marines at this chopper base near the Iraqi border are seething with rage and talking revenge over the treatment of American POWs - paraded on TV and some possibly executed."OK, they want to play that way. We can play that way," vowed one enraged pilot.
Marine after Marine had the same message - many of them warning that there would be "no second chances for those Iraqis now."...
"We want to help these people and look what they're doing to us," said more than one shocked Marine....
During an air raid yesterday ... one Marine's muffled swearing was heard above the din.
Repeating the sneering nickname used for Saddam Hussein, he kept saying, " 'So damn' insane, 'so damn' insane. I'm going to come up there myself and kill you."
One caveat: our guys have to know who their enemy is. They have to know that most Iraqis are terror victims just as we are.
Go get 'em, guys. Keep the pressure on.
Iraq's information minister said at least 58 people were killed Friday in a crowded market in northwest Baghdad by what local officials called a coalition bombing.The market was strewn with wreckage and there were bloodstains on a sidewalk. Crowds of mourners wailed and blood-soaked children's slippers sat on the street not far from a crater blasted into the ground.
The U.S. Central Command in Qatar said it was looking into the report. Iraqi officials have blamed U.S. forces for explosions at another market that killed 14 people on Wednesday. The Pentagon had denied targeting the neighborhood.
There is nothing conservative about war. For at least the last century war has been the herald and handmaid of socialism and state control. It is the excuse for censorship, organised lying, regulation and taxation. It is paradise for the busybody and the nark. It damages family life and wounds the Church. It is, in short, the ally of everything summed up by the ugly word "progress".
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THE BRUTES OF BAGHDAD: IF SADDAM RAISED HIS TWO SONS TO BE AS VICIOUS HE IS, THEY'RE DOING HIM PROUD (BARBARA LAKER, 3/28/03, Philadelphia Daily News)
ONE IS a sadistic playboy who rapes 12-year-old girls and tortures friends for amusement.The other is a methodical, ruthless enforcer who kills for political power, then has his victims buried in mass graves.
They are Saddam Hussein's infamous sons - two evil brothers with blood on their hands.
The Brutes of Baghdad.
United States troops say they are dealing with a new tactic from Iraqi soldiers - a willingness to use civilians in suicide attacks to halt the American advance.As coalition soldiers drove through a dust storm on Wednesday afternoon, fighters believed to be from Saddam Hussein's Baath Party drove a bus, the passengers still aboard, into a Bradley fighting vehicle.
The brief and vicious firefight left the road littered with bodies, all Iraqis, and wrecked vehicles. Small-arms fire cracked and popped overhead even as medical personnel attended the Iraqi wounded.
US commanders said they expect suicide attacks to become more commonplace as coalition forces move toward Baghdad.
"They have decided on suicide missions to get at us," said Charlie Company commander Captain Jason Conroy, 30. "We need to be really careful about any civilian vehicles approaching us."
He said the 7th Cavalry had lost two Abrams tanks to attacks by civilian fuel tankers. "They are just running the trucks into the tanks and exploding them. They could do the same with cars loaded with [munitions]."
Among the Iraqis captured in Wednesday's battle was one who appeared to be wearing an American-style desert camouflage uniform.
Has Canada indirectly condemned an Iranian woman to be persecuted, tortured or even killed because of her conversion from Islam to Christianity?The Canadian authorities ordering her deportation back to her homeland on April 24 do not believe this will happen in Iran, even though the U.S. State Department declared last year: "The (Iranian) government does not ensure the right of citizens to change or renounce their religious faith. Apostasy, specifically conversion from Islam, can be punishable by death."
Sylvie Duval, examiner for the Canadian Government's Pre-Removal Risk Assessment, denied that a nurse from Tehran seeking asylum in Montreal would face much peril if sent home.
"There is no serious reason to believe that her life would be endangered or that she might fall victim to torture or other cruel punishments," Duval concluded in a 15-page summary. This differed significantly from the view on which U.S. immigration appeals boards base their decisions in similar cases.
Attorney Patti Lyman, who handles asylum cases for Just Law International, a Virginia-based firm, told United Press International Monday of Board of Immigration Appeals decisions stating that a convert to Christianity "is more likely than not to be persecuted in Iran."
"By definition, a Muslim convert (to Christianity) meets the standard convention against torture and will more likely than not be subjected to torture," she added.
The House passed a resolution Thursday calling for a national day of humility, prayer and fasting in a time of war and terrorism.The resolution, passed 346-49, says Americans should use the day of prayer "to seek guidance from God to achieve a greater understanding of our own failings and to learn how we can do better in our everyday activities, and to gain resolve in meeting the challenges that confront our nation."
Under the resolution, President Bush would issue a proclamation designating a specific day as a day of "humility, prayer and fasting." [...]
A similar resolution approved on March 17 said it was the sense of the Senate that that day should be a national day of prayer and fasting.
Nearly every prediction about this war has proved wrong. Americans were led to believe it would be over in a weekend, that U.S. air power would "shock and awe" the enemy, that Iraqi troops would lay down their arms and civilians would welcome us as conquering heroes. Instead we're embroiled in a conflict that looks like a bad remake of Vietnam with an enemy that fights in civilian dress. The bravado of a week ago is gone. "It's out of our hands," sighs a White House aide. In an echo of Vietnam, military leaders say they are hamstrung by the rules of engagement. [...]Congress will vote every penny for the war, but Democrats dealt the White House a blow when they teamed up with a handful of moderate Republicans to cut Bush's proposed tax cut from $727 billion to $350 billion. It's a pyrrhic victory because when the Senate bill is reconciled with the more generous House version, most of the money will almost certainly be restored. Democrats are clueless about how to challenge Bush. Voting for half a massive tax break instead of the whole thing isn't a winning message. "WE'RE SLIGHTLY MODERATING THE ADMINISTRATION'S EXCESSES doesn't fit on a bumper sticker," says a Democratic aide. GOP moderates aren't faring much better. If past history is any guide, they will capitulate and Bush will get what he wants.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned Syria on Friday to stop sending military equipment to Iraqi forces, a charge that Mideast nation called "absolutely unfounded."Rumsfeld said he had "information that shipments of military supplies have been crossing the border from Syria into Iraq, including night vision goggles."
"We consider such trafficking as hostile acts and will hold the Syrian government accountable for such shipments," he told a Pentagon press conference. He didn't say what the other equipment was, and several senior Defense Department officials said they didn't know.
Syrian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Bouthaine Shaban rejected Rumsfeld's statement as "unfounded and irresponsible."
"He only brings problems for his country and humanity at large," she told Britain's Channel 4 television in a telephone interview from Damascus. "It is an absolutely unfounded, irresponsible statement, just like his statements that brought his country and the allied countries into a terrible war, unnecessary war on Iraq."
Syrian President Bashar Assad has described the military action against Iraq as "clear occupation and a flagrant aggression against a United Nations member state."
N.B.--Hey, Mr. Murtaugh, note how we're already doing the spadework for a future Tonkin-like episode with Syria?
Presidential candidate John F. Kerry has been passing notes on the Senate floor, assuring his Southern Democratic colleagues that he plans to compete in their home states.The Massachusetts senator distributed verbatim text of remarks he gave earlier this month at a fund-raiser in California when he was asked about his chances in the conservative-leaning South.
Kerry slipped the note, a copy of which was obtained by the Associated Press, to a few colleagues Wednesday while the Senate deliberated the budget. He was prompted by a story Monday in The State newspaper of Columbia, S.C., titled, ''Kerry might have written off the South,'' that referred to his speech.
''Al Gore proved that you can get elected president of the United States without winning one Southern state - if he had simply won New Hampshire or West Virginia or Ohio or Colorado or a number of other states,'' Kerry said at the fund-raiser. ''We are the leaders. Democrats have to stop looking at the small solution that the country is compartmentalized in that way.''
Last week's euphoria over a quick start to the invasion of Iraq has now been almost entirely overtaken by gloom. Pentagon officials are on the defensive when discussing their war plan; images of sandstorms and black-masked Iraqi irregulars and American prisoners of war fill TV screens here and abroad; the looming battle for Baghdad has made many feel a deep sense of foreboding.Perhaps the Bush administration deserves it. It did not begin to emphasize the potential for a difficult war until hostilities began. Pentagon advisers like Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman have been promising a cakewalk to Baghdad for 18 months; in the late 1990's, Paul Wolfowitz, now the deputy defense secretary, argued that a small American force fighting in conjunction with the Iraqi opposition could quickly overthrow Saddam Hussein.
But despite this week's proof that war is not always easy, the invasion is not going badly.
Americans should be able to find common ground, for all sides dream of an Iraq that is democratic and an America that is again admired around the world.
North Korea fears it could be the next target of US military action after Iraq but a diplomatic solution to the communist country's dispute with Washington is within reach, according to the United Nations envoy who held talks in Pyongyang earlier this week.
We'll look at the military's war plan on the battlefield in Iraq: what's working, what's not, and what we learned from the first Gulf War. Laura's guests are Daryl Press, assistant professor of Government at Dartmouth College [http://www.dartmouth.edu], and William Martel, professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College [http://www.nwc.navy.mil]
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on Thursday told the media how George Bush thrice sought his help in the war on Iraq, and how he refused the American President."The US President George Bush has spoken to me three times saying that India must help the USA as Sadaam Hussein had left him with no option but to go for the attack," he told journalists after a dedication programme of the Chakara Nala Patni Watershed Management Plan prepared by the Deendayal Research Institute run by Nanaji Deshmukh here.
Vajpayee told Bush that India believed war was not a solution to any problem and so could not help. India is also trying to consolidate the support of many countries to prevent escalation of the battle between US and Iraq, Vajpayee said.
Just as India's socialist ideology is in retreat, its Hindu nationalism is rising and may deepen the ideological gap that divides us.
I hope that the U.S. and India can grow closer, but this may prove to be one of those friendships that just never develops.
The war in Iraq is only a week old and one photograph has already become an icon: A young, grimy soldier in full battle gear, a look a deep concern on his face, carrying a wounded Iraqi child to safety.
The photograph has been on newspaper front pages around the world and broadcast on most American television networks. The military brass has mentioned it when briefing the press.
The soldier in the picture, Pfc. Joseph P. Dwyer, 26, is still in the field, about 80 miles outside Baghdad with his outfit in the 3rd Infantry Division. [He was misidentified by a superior in the field and in the original caption.] Until today, he hadn’t a clue that he was famous. His reaction when he found out?
He laughed.
And couldn’t stop laughing. He was both amused by this and embarrassed.
“Really, I was just one of a group of guys. I wasn’t standing out more than anyone else,” he said in a telephone conversation during some rare down time.
Dwyer has lived the past six years in Wagram, N.C., where his parents moved after his father retired as a New York transit policeman. Dwyer grew up in Mt. Sinai on New York’s Long Island. His three older brothers are New York City policeman. One brother lost a partner when the Trade Center towers collapsed.
“I mean everyone lost someone, a lot of good people,” he said. Dwyer was sure that he had lost someone, too; he believed that his brother had been killed. “I thought he was gone.”
But when he talked to him the night of Sept. 11 and learned his brother was safe, “I knew I had to do something.”
Two days later, Dwyer enlisted in the Army to become a medic.
“It was just what I could do at the time,” he said.
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British troops attempt to rescue civilians under fire (NICOLE WINFIELD, March 28, 2003, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
And, at our sides, thanks to Tony Blair and Ian Duncan Smith, the nation that birthed us and, thanks to John Howard, our Australian brothers.
While getting dressed for work, I noticed that the man on TV standing at the podium taking tough questions from cranky journalists was a black man.I almost poked myself in the eye with a makeup brush.
This is huge. As huge as Secretary of State Colin Powell taking questions from members of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the State Department budget on Wednesday.
As huge as National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's role was in shaping America's policy toward Saddam Hussein.
Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, deputy director of operations at the U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar, is the man whose words must reflect the truth about this war. [...]
He is the kind of leader that is critical to the military today.
African-American soldiers account for more than 35 percent of the Army's troops. Half the Army's enlisted women are black. In fact, African-American soldiers represent 21 percent of all military branches, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Many of these men and women did not expect to go to war. For most of them, the military was a refuge or a second chance.
At a time like this, blacks should not be tearing these people down, they should be holding them up for people like Jacqueline Atkins.
Although Atkins has exchanged e-mails with her son, Dequan Atkins, 25, she hasn't seen him since he enlisted in the Navy four years ago.
As far as she knows, her son could be in Iraq because he is stationed on a U.S. Naval ship. What she does know is that she really doesn't want him "over there."
"He got himself in the Navy. He was running with the wrong crowd. He made the decision. But he had to do something or he had to get out of the house," she said.
Now she is confused about why young men like him are involved in a war.
"I don't think they should be over there. There are people here who are homeless and people here who are suffering," Atkins said.
There won't be any peace for these mothers until their sons and daughters come home.
But leadership from honorable people such as Powell, Rice and Brooks should give them hope.
I don’t know how the antiwar Europeans will react to Anglo-American-Australian victory, but one thing is sure: they won’t identify with it and from this to a feeling of also having been defeated is just a small step. Their sense of impotence after so many protests might be overwhelming. I wouldn’t be too surprised at seeing the Western European psyche beginning resemble, in many significant ways, the Arab one....Actually, it is the two psyches, the European and the Arab, that are on the move, a convergent move.... I also think (though this would need factual research) that the pro-Palestinian European left's influence on the Arab masses, giving legitimacy to anti-Semitism under the guise of anti-Zionism, has been at least as decisive as the rather cruder propaganda one finds in the Arab press and the mosques. It is easy to note that, when speaking in Western languages, the Arabs use the left's anti-Zionist vocabulary and are conscious of politically correct conventions. Thus, it is not a simple matter of Europeans influencing Arabs or vice-versa, but rather a case of two convergent mentalities discovering through anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism lots of common ground as well as what Goethe would have called their "elective affinities".
The observation of Muslim-European convergence, particularly in France, is appearing elsewhere:
Hating "l'Oncle Sam" (Christopher Caldwell, Weekly Standard, 3/31/2003)
Chirac ... has long been something of a hero in the Arab world.... Palestinian families have begun to name their newborn boys "Chirac." When he visited Algeria early this month, crowds estimated at over a million turned out to acclaim him. And a new book that arrived in Paris bookstores last week--"L'Orient de Jacques Chirac," written by the Egyptian journalist and literary critic Ahmed Youssef--compares Chirac to Alexander the Great and Aladdin. Indeed, Youssef meekly expresses his hope that he might serve as Cicero to Chirac's Caesar, or Stendhal to his Napoleon....French public opinion has come into sync with the opinion of its Arab immigrants and their children. On such matters as American militarism and the Middle East, its poll numbers resemble those of an Arab country. When the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP) asked citizens whether they approved of the American attacks on Iraq, the answer was Non, by 87 percent to 12 percent. Voters do approve of Chirac's position by 92 percent to 8 percent. Under such circumstances, Muslims feel themselves much more part of the country.
France abandoned Christianity long ago. Will it embrace aspects of modern Islam? It is possible that France will soon be the world's most powerful Arab nation.
Captured Iraqi soldiers have told British military interrogators that members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network are fighting alongside Saddam Hussein's forces against U.S. and British troops near Basra.Specifically, the Iraqi POWs claim that about a dozen al-Qaida members are in the town of Az Zubayr, coordinating grenade and other attacks on coalition positions, according to a Scotsman report carried in several papers, including London's Financial Times.
"The information we have received from POWs today is that an al-Qaida cell may be operating in Az Zubayr," a senior British military source inside Iraq said in the report. "There are possibly around a dozen of them and that is obviously a matter of concern to us."
I was wrong. I had opposed the war on Iraq in my radio program, on television and in my regular columns -- and I participated in demonstrations against it in Japan. But a visit to relatives in Baghdad radically changed my mind.I am an Assyrian Christian, born and raised in Japan, where my father had moved after World War II to help rebuild the country. He was a Protestant minister, and so am I.
As an Assyrian I was told the story of our people from a young age -- how my grandparents had escaped the great Assyrian Holocaust in 1917, settling finally in Chicago.
There are some 6 million Assyrians now, about 2.5 million in Iraq and the rest scattered across the world. Without a country and rights even in our native land, it has been the prayer of generations that the Assyrian Nation will one day be restored.
A few weeks ago, I traveled to Iraq with supplies for our Church and family. This was my first visit ever to the land of my forefathers. The first order of business was to attend Church. During a simple meal for peace activists after the service, an older man sounded me out carefully.
Finally he felt free to talk: "There is something you should know -- we didn't want to be here tonight. When the priest asked us to gather for a Peace Service, we said we didn't want to come because we don't want peace. We want the war to come."
"What in the world are you talking about?" I blurted.
Thus began a strange odyssey that shattered my convictions. At the same time, it gave me hope for my people and, in fact, hope for the world.
Hacker attacks continued to plague the Web site of Arab satellite TV network al-Jazeera on Thursday, as cyber-vandals replaced the news site with a stars-and-stripes logo saying "Let Freedom Ring".Both the Arabic site, at (http://www.aljazeera.net), and the English-language version at (http://english.aljazeera.net) could not be accessed Thursday. Users who tried to log onto the site found a message that read, "Hacked by Patriot, Freedom Cyber Force Militia" beneath a logo containing the U.S. flag.
"This broadcast was brought to you by: Freedom Cyber Force Militia," the site said. "God bless our troops!!!"
But the press too is an institution and can become a threat to our freedom and when it does so it is appropriate to deal with it accordingly. To do otherwise it to elevate the means above the ends. And where, as in the case of al-Jazeera, you have a press that--whether directly or indirectly--serves the purposes of terrorists and terror states with whom we are at war, the suggestion that they are entitled to full freedom is simply absurd. It is comparable to complaining that patriots were shredding Der Angriff during WWII. We should, in fact, make al-Jazeera a military target, just as would any other enemy propaganda operation in time of war.
The willingness to accept risks to the very existence of the Union in order to fetishize subsidiary rights that it protects, but which it need protect only where they perfect the Union, is an almost suicidal instance of putting the cart before the ass. If folks succeed in protecting al-Jazeera from interference at the cost of letting it spread the lies of Osama and Saddam until the Arab world is whipped into a homicidal frenzy and we end up in an ever widening war, who will thank them for their actions?
"There was a machine designed for shredding plastic. Men were dropped into it and we were again made to watch. Sometimes they went in head first and died quickly. Sometimes they went in feet first and died screaming. It was horrible. I saw 30 people die like this. Their remains would be placed in plastic bags and we were told they would be used as fish food . . . on one occasion, I saw Qusay [President Saddam Hussein's youngest son] personally supervise these murders."This is one of the many witness statements that were taken by researchers from Indict (the organization I chair) to provide evidence for legal cases against specific Iraqi individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. This account was taken in the past two weeks.
Another witness told us about practices of the security services towards women: "Women were suspended by their hair as their families watched; men were forced to watch as their wives were raped . . . women were suspended by their legs while they were menstruating until their periods were over, a procedure designed to cause humiliation."
The accounts Indict has heard over the past six years are disgusting and horrifying. Our task is not merely passively to record what we are told but to challenge it as well, so that the evidence we produce is of the highest quality. All witnesses swear that their statements are true and sign them.
For these humanitarian reasons alone, it is essential to liberate the people of Iraq from the regime of Saddam. The 17 UN resolutions passed since 1991 on Iraq include Resolution 688, which calls for an end to repression of Iraqi civilians. It has been ignored. Torture, execution and ethnic-cleansing are everyday life in Saddam's Iraq.
At Roy Jenkins’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey yesterday, shafts of sunlight streamed over the heads of a congregation containing pretty well every surviving political figure from the second half of the 20th century. Three former prime ministers shared the front pew of the quire. The only notable absentee, the man who was supposed to give the address, was Tony Blair, the adopted political son of Lord Jenkins of Hillhead.In normal circumstances, the current Prime Minister would not have dreamt of missing such an event. He was fond of Jenkins, and saw him as his mentor, his father figure. It was therefore particularly poignant that a council of war — that most adult of tasks — had drawn Mr Blair to Washington.
For the Prime Minister, in the past few months, has grown up immeasurably. He seems to have undergone the transformation that many men, particularly oldest sons, experience when their father dies. John Mortimer describes the process in Clinging to the Wreckage: “Sudden freedom, growing up, the end of dependence, the step into the sunlight where no one’s taller than you and you’re in no one’s shadow.”
When Mr Blair won power, he seemed like a boy pretending to be a man. He had no experience of even the lowest rung of ministerial office. It didn’t help that the youngest premier for more than a century looked even younger than he was.
As experience has taken the place of innocence, a new Blair has emerged.
EUROPE’S population will continue to decline for decades even if birthrates improve significantly, researchers have calculated.Trends towards smaller families and later motherhood mean that there are too few women of childbearing age to reverse the decline in the near future, according to an Austrian study. The year 2000 marked a turning point, with the population’s “momentum” becoming negative; there will be fewer parents in the next generation than in this one. [...]
They show that Europe’s population could decline by as much as 88 million people if present trends continue for another 15 years. The population of the European Union was about 375 million in 2000.
The decline made Europe the scene of a significant social experiment, Dr Lutz said. “Negative momentum has not been experienced on a large scale in world history so far,” he added.
(1) At a time of rising animus towards Muslim immigrants, Europe will be increasingly dependent on ever greater immigration just to fund the retirement and health systems of the aging "European" population. Yet, over time, as the immigrants become the majority and the tensions keep torquing up, who seriously thinks will they pay the extortioniate tax rates that the elderly require of them? (I don't know the similar numbers for Europe, but: in 1935, there were 37 workers for every retiree. Today, the number of workers per retiree is 3.4 and falling. What is a system that requires recent immigrants to support elderly natives but a form of modern slavery?) And as these societies reach that tipping point, where "Europeans" perceive that their nation is about to become predominantly Islamic, imagine the potential for even genocidal violence that will exist. The argument that Germany and France are too advanced to exterminiate a hated minority refutes itself.
(2) Given the adaptability of humans it is, of course, possible that Europe will surprise us all, but consider that we have no, or few, examples of societies being able to maintain a healthy and growing economy while their populations declined. Folks have come up with all kinds of explanations for the fact that the American economy has so outperformed those of other Western countries in recent decades. But perhaps the easiest explanation is that their growth has slowed--in the case of Japan it's reversed--as their populations have first stabilized and then headed into real decline. Meanwhile, the U.S. which experienced unimagined economic growth during the '90s--sufficient even to pull Europe along somewhat in our wake--also experienced an unexpected population surge and is now predicted to be in for a doubling of its population over the coming century. Suffice it to say, it seems at least imprudent for Europe to count on an ability to defy human history.
(3) It has been possible in recent decades for Europeans to imagine that they were done with war forever. America protected them after WWII and asked nothing in return--in fact transferring money to them--both directly (in things like the Marshall Plan) and indirectly, by covering defense costs--which helped them restart and artificially prop up their welfare states. The fall of the Soviet Union brought dreams of an href=http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/742>End of History, which might see all the nations of the world tend toward pacific liberal democracy. Here was a future which would require neither the young men nor the expenditures of public money that make national defense and war possible. And so, there are no young men and those monies are spent on social programs for the aging.
But, 9-11 at least deferred the dream that History was at an end. The Islamic world may well end up reforming toward liberal democracy, but it looks like we're in for some number of years of bloodshed first. Worse, the reluctance of Europe to shed blood--its own or that of others--and the seeming eagerness of America to do so in their stead, has led to a quite acrimonious break between the parties who were already drifting away from each other as Europe declined and America continued to rise in economic affluence and military power. So now the Europeans talk of developing their own defense apparatus and some kind of standing military, but at a time when they are utterly incapable of either funding or manning such a force.
In the cold gray light of dawn, for all the Franco-German chest-beating, they face a choice between accepting--openly or with a grudging wink and a nod--the status of American client-states or of shredding the social contract that has defined their welfare states and thereby causing massive disruptions (imagine telling a 58 year old Frenchman, one year away from retirement and working a 35 hour week, that you're adding five hours to his workweek and six years to his retirement age?). Or, they could just roll over and play dead, hoping the danger passes but unable to control their circumstances at all. It's a menu of unpleasant choices.
(4) European Civilization, like Islamic Civilization, was once great but now finds itself eclipsed and in decline. As with Islam, it's easy enough to see how to rectify the situation, but much harder to do. Where Islam must relax the death grip that religion has on governance and the economy, Europe must abandon the statism that has atomized society and must restore religion, civil society, community and family so that they can provide the social network to replace transfer payments from the government. In effect, both must become more like us--though we too face problems similar to Europe's if we aren't vigilant. But, understandably, both abhor the idea. Still, look at the psychic damage that the Muslim world's inferiority complex has caused it and imagine what lies ahead for Europe as it sinks into similar despondency and rages against the dying of the light (though, luckily for us, unless old ladies take up the hobby, there'll be no suicide bombings--they can't spare the young men).
I hope none of this sounds triumphalist, for I regret the passing of Europe, as well as the continuing self-inflicted agony of Islam, and would like nothing better than a revival, a reawakening, a renaissance, a reformation, what have you. But I fear that Kipling long ago wrote the epitaph:
Recessional (Rudyard Kipling)GOD of our fathers, known of old--
Lord of our far-flung battle-line--
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine--
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!The tumult and the shouting dies--
The captains and the kings depart--
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!Far-call'd our navies melt away--
On dune and headland sinks the fire--
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe--
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law--
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard--
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard--
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
The Iraqi war has convinced the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership that some form of confrontation with the U.S. could come earlier than expected.Beijing has also begun to fine-tune its domestic and security policies to counter the perceived threat of U.S. "neo-imperialism."
As more emphasis is being put on boosting national strength and cohesiveness, a big blow could be dealt to both economic and political reform.
That the new leadership has concluded China is coming up against formidable challenges in the short to medium term is evident from recent statements by President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao.
Hu indicated earlier this year Beijing must pay more attention to global developments so that "China make good preparations before the rainstorm ... and be in a position to seize the initiative."
Wen also pointed out in the first meeting of the State Council, or cabinet, last Saturday the leadership "must keep a cool head."
"We must boost our consciousness about disasters and downturns -- and think about dangers in the midst of [apparent] safety," he said. [...]
Chinese strategists think particularly if the U.S. can score a relatively quick victory over Baghdad, it will soon turn to Asia -- and begin efforts to "tame" China.
It is understood the LGNS believes the U.S. will take on North Korea -- still deemed a "lips-and-teeth" ally of China's -- as early as this summer.
These developments have prompted China to change its long-standing geopolitical strategy, which still held true as late as the 16th CCP Congress last November.
Until late last year, Beijing believed a confrontation with the U.S. could be delayed -- and China could through hewing to the late Deng Xiaoping's "keep a low profile" theory afford to concentrate almost exclusively on economic development.
"Now, many cadres and think-tank members think Beijing should adopt a more pro-active if not aggressive policy to thwart U.S. aggression," said a Chinese source close to the diplomatic establishment.
He added hard-line elements in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had advocated providing weapons to North Korea to help Pyongyang defend itself against a possible U.S. missile strike at its nuclear facilities. [...]
What is China doing to forestall the perceived U.S. challenge?
Firstly, the CCP leadership is fostering nationalistic sentiments, a sure-fire way to promote much-needed cohesiveness.
While not encouraging anti-U.S. demonstrations, Beijing has informed the people of what the media calls "increasingly treacherous international developments."
This explains what analysts including Beijing scholars considered the unexpectedly virulent official reaction to the start of the Iraq war. [...]
The corollary of boosting national cohesiveness could be the suppression of dissent, particularly politically incorrect views expressed by "pro-West" intellectuals.
The warning and punishment that party authorities recently meted out to several Beijing and provincial publications may augur a relatively prolonged period of ideological control in the interest of promoting "unity of thinking."
On the economic front, the authorities may play up the imperative of concentrating resources to boost China's "economic security" and "energy security." [...]
It is instructive that in his 90-minute long interview with the international media last week, Wen was quite reticent about boosting economic reform such as the liberalization of state-owned enterprises.
In accordance with the theory of "the synthesis of [the needs of] war and peace," civilian economic projects in areas including infrastructure may be planned will the requirements of the defense forces in mind.
Richard N. Perle, a key figure inside the Bush national security team who has been dogged by conflict of interest allegations, resigned today as the unpaid chairman of an influential Pentagon advisory board but intends to stay on as a member.Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who announced the move in a written statement late this afternoon, praised the 61-year-old Perle as a "man of integrity and honor" who has a "deep understanding of our national security process."
"I am grateful for his willingness to continue to serve on the board," Rumsfeld wrote.
Perle, a former assistant defense secretary under Ronald Reagan, has been the subject of several published reports describing his ties to companies that have business before the Defense Department.
He drew fire, in particular, for agreeing to represent Global Crossing, a telecommunications business that sought his help in overcoming the Pentagon's national security objections to the firm's proposed sale to a foreign firm controlled by investors from China and Singapore. Under the arrangement, Perle was to be paid a $125,000 retainer and would earn another $600,000 if the deal was approved by a government review panel that includes Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the New York Times reported last Friday. [...]
Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a government watchdog group, agreed. And he said the advisory board's ethical failings reach beyond Perle.
At least 10 of the panel's 31 members are executives or lobbyists with private companies that have tens of billions of dollars' worth of contracts with the Defense Department and other government agencies, according to a report to be released by the center Friday.
"The problems of the Defense Policy Board run much deeper than Richard Perle," Lewis said. "To the public it looks like you have folks feathering their nest. . . . I'm shocked and awed by audacity of who has been selected and who is serving on this board. There really is a tin ear when it comes to ethical appearance considerations."
The panel, which meets at least quarterly, brings together academics and former government and military officials to advise Pentagon officials on a wide range of strategic issues and defense policy matters. Agendas from recent meetings list discussions on Iran, North Korea and the Pentagon's controversial Total Information Awareness initiative.
Members of the board are appointed to one-year terms, are unpaid and serve as special government employees. They are covered both by federal ethics laws and regulations known as the Standards of Ethical Conduct, which, among other things, prohibit financial conflicts of interest and using one's public position for private gain.
US and British forces may be disappointed with their welcome in the rest of Iraq, but the US paratroopers who have dropped into Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq are surrounded by a population happy to see them.The 1,000 members of the US 173rd Airborne Brigade who arrived at an airstrip here Wednesday night are part of a widening "northern front" that may soon complement the US-led advance in southern and central Iraq.
Until now, the US presence in the Kurdish zone has consisted primarily of scores of Special Forces and intelligence operatives who have kept their activities secret and shirked media attention. The more-or-less open presence of the paratroopers seems to indicate that the US will assemble at least a limited invasion force to enter the parts of Iraq controlled by President Saddam Hussein. [...]
In the town of Harir, set in the hills above the airstrip where the paratroopers landed, residents are delighted to welcome the US troops. "From the [1991 Kurdish] uprising until now we have waited for them to come," says Taha Hussein Hamadameen, who owns a teashop in Harir. "They come to free us from this oppression," he says, referring to Hussein's regime.
A former Kurdish militia member, or pesh merga, Mr. Hamadameen is ready to come out of retirement. "If they distribute rifles, we are ready to go to the front ... we will go in front of them."
French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin gave a talk at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies in his first visit to Britain since the outbreak of war.During a question and answer session at the end of his speech he refused to answer the question: "Who do you want to win the war?"
The way Phil Vischer sees it, the key to making children's entertainment positive without being unbearably dull comes down to making an apple taste like a Twinkie."You assume that everything that is good for you is boring. Which one do the kids want? They need the apples, but they want the Twinkies," says 36-year-old co-founder and president of Illinois-based Big Idea Inc., from which sprang the Veggie Tales series.
There's no sure recipe for making biblically based entertainment, well, entertaining. Vischer and co-founder Mike Nawrocki's list of ingredients include Old Testament stories, a dash of Monty Python, a little bit of Meatloaf, equal parts silliness and sweetness and limbless vegetables that sing and dance.
It seems an incongruous mix at best, but the combination has made Veggie Tales wildly popular with preschoolers and adults, conservative Christians and people of other faiths or no faith.
Narrator: "Joining Larry are Pa Grape and Mr. Lunt, who together make up the infamous gang of scalliwags, the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything!"Larry, Pa, Mr. Lunt: "We are the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything! We just stay home and lie around. And if you ask us to do anything, we'll just tell you ..."
Larry: "We don't do anything!"
Pa: "Well, I've never been Greenland and I've never been to Denver, and I've never buried treasure in St. Louis or St. Paul, and I've never been to Moscow and I've never been to Tampa, and I've never been to Boston in the fall."
All: "'Cuz we're the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything! We just stay home and lie around. And if you ask us to do anything, we'll just tell you .."
Mr. Lunt: "We don't do anything. And I never hoist the mainstay and I never swab the poop deck, and I never veer to starboard 'cuz I never sail at all, and I've never walked the gang plank and I've never owned a parrot, and I've never been to Boston in the fall."
All: "'Cuz we're the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything! We just stay at home and lie around. And if you ask us to do anything, we'll just tell you .. We don't do anything!"
Larry: "Well, I've never plucked a rooster and I'm not too good at ping-pong, and I've never thrown my mashed potatoes up against the wall, and I've never kissed a chipmunk and I've never gotten head lice, and I've never been to Boston in the fall!"
Pa: "Huh? What are you talking about? What's a rooster and mashed potatoes have to do with being a pirate??"
Mr. Lunt: "Hey, that's right! We're supposed to sing about pirate-y things!"
Larry: "Oh ..."
Pa: "And who ever kissed a chipmunk? That's just nonsense! Why even bring it up? Am I right? What do you think?"
Mr. Lunt: "I think you look like Cap'n Crunch!"
Pa: "Huh? No I don't!"
Mr. Lunt: "Do too."
Pa: "Do not!"
Mr. Lunt: "You're making me hungry."
Pa: "That's it, you're walkin' the plank!"
Mr. Lunt: "Says who?"
Pa: "Says the captain, that's who!"
Mr. Lunt: "Oh, yeah? Aye aye, Cap'n Crunch!"
Larry: "And I've never licked a spark plug and I've never sniffed a stink bug, and I've never painted daisies on a big red rubber ball, and I've never bathed in yogurt and I don't look good in leggings ..."
Pa: "You just don't get it!"
All: "And we've never been to Boston in the fall!"
The world's media continues to focus on the controversial explosions which, according to the Iraqi authorities, caused the deaths of at least 14 civilians and injured 30 more in northern Baghdad on Wednesday.But it is still not clear exactly what caused the blasts in a shopping street in the Shaab district.
The Iraqis say the coalition forces have been targeting civilians in their bombing.
The US - which says it is doing everything possible to avoid civilian casualties - has not admitted responsibility for the deaths.
Our correspondents in Baghdad who visited the scenes of devastation and spoke to eyewitnesses were unable to find an obvious military target in the area.
The man accused of assassinating Dutch anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn has told judges he acted on behalf of the country's Muslims.Volkert Van der Graaf, 33, said during his first court appearance in Amsterdam on Thursday that Fortuyn was using "the weakest parts of society to score points" and gain political power.
Van der Graaf, who is charged with premeditated murder, pleaded guilty to illegally possessing firearms and sending Fortuyn threats before carrying out the attack, the Associated Press reports.
Although he allegedly confessed to the killing, under Dutch law prosecutors must present their case to a panel of judges. There are no jury trials in the Netherlands.
"(The idea) was never concrete until the last moment, the day before the attack," the news agency reported Van der Graaf as saying.
"I saw it as a danger, but what should you do about it?" he said. "I hoped that I could solve it myself."
Syrian mufti Sheikh Ahmad Kaftaro, the country's top Muslim religious authority, called on Thursday for suicide bombings against the US and British troops in Iraq."I call on Muslims everywhere to use all means possible to thwart the aggression, including martyr operations against the belligerent American, British and Zionist invaders," he said in a statement, a copy of which was faxed to AFP.
"Resistance to the belligerent invaders is an obligation for all Muslims, starting with (those in) Iraq," the mufti said. [...]
Separately, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad predicted the United States and Britain would never be able to bring Iraq under their full control and would face "popular Arab resistance", in an interview published on Thursday in Lebanese daily As-Safir.
THE FOCUS for the past six months on obtaining United Nations approval for the invasion of Iraq has obscured a simple, logical American strategy based on a clear premise. The premise is that the mass civilian killings of 9/11 triggered a world war between the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism, sometimes called Islamism.This world war would not be happening on the scale it is were it not the case that the rise of Islamism is part and parcel of a convulsive upheaval destabilizing the billion-member world of Islam as well as neighboring countries and--at least potentially--countries with Islamic minorities. In a war of such reach and magnitude, the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders, should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well into the future.
If this premise is true, then just about everything the Bush administration is doing makes sense. So do the actions and announcements of our various adversaries and non-well-wishers in this far-flung war.
The most shocking thing about 9/11 was the willingness of Islamists to carry out indiscriminate mass killing of noncombatant Americans. The attacks that day laid bare the desire of our enemies to obtain weapons of mass destruction to inflict vastly greater destruction on our country and people.
The day after 9/11, there existed four deeply anti-American rogue states, clearly open to helping Islamists achieve the mass murder of Americans. They were Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. The invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 removed one of these four regimes. The coming invasion of Iraq will remove a second.
Is it any wonder that the two remaining anti-American rogue states are doing everything in their power to race toward clear-cut possession of nuclear weapons?
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations walked out of a debate on the Iraqi war Thursday after Iraq's ambassador accused the United States of trying to exterminate the Iraqi people. "I did sit through quite a long part of what he had to say but I'd heard enough," U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte said.First of all, good for Negroponte. Second of all, from where does the UN's vaunted moral authority come?
More than anything else we need to recognise that the military achievement to date has been breathtaking. The fact that within six or seven days virtually all of southern Iraq is now under allied control (control, not occupation); that the western desert is also under the control of British, US and Australian special forces; that an armoured thrust is within 20 to 30 miles of the capital; and that there are sufficient forces in northern Iraq to protect the Kurdish population, is a feat of arms that will be recorded in military history as a classic example of offensive armoured warfare, on a par with Guderian’s blitzkrieg armoured thrust through the Ardennes into northern France in 1940.Remember, too, that there has never been a war when a coalition has so willingly and thoroughly hedged itself about with self-inflicted constraints: the imperative to cause the minimum number of civilian casualties; to target only military or regime assets; and, perhaps most importantly, to achieve the military aim with the least amount of allied casualties. There have been remarkably few casualties: some hundreds of civilians and mercifully few coalition troops. It is astonishing that the first British fatality in combat was announced only last Monday when some 45,000 British servicemen had been engaged in battle on land, sea and air for five days.
Of course the capture of Baghdad is not going to be easy. Only three US divisions will be attacking six Republican Guard divisions in prepared positions. Such odds go against all the rules of war. There are going to be more casualties and we will need to learn to accept the unexpected . One thing, however, is certain: the coalition is going to win.
There needs to be a little more faith. Servicemen expect accurate and intelligent reporting. Yet if one watches the television, listens to the radio or reads either the broadsheet or tabloid press, one might be forgiven for forming the impression that things are going badly astray. Is this the result of media prejudice, political correctness, or just plain ignorance? I don’t know. But, if the media are not going to get egg on their faces, they need to change their tune.
Well, this is a day late and a dollar short, but seeing as the peace activists in San Francisco have expressed their desire to follow the teachings of Ghandi and King by rioting and destroying private property, (here's betting they're not Libertarians) I figured I'd send this anyway.In 1991, the US promised Iraqi rebels and resistance fighters that if they revolted against Saddam, we would support them. They revolted and we let them dangle and as many as 50,000 Iraqi civilians died in the first year after the war as Saddam put down the revolts. We didn't get involved in Iraq back then because there wasn't a UN blessing for it, the French weren't behind it, there wasn't a coalition for it, the "Arab Street" was against it - does this sound familiar? We broke a promise to the Iraqi people and they have suffered for twelve years. Now we have the opportunity to make things right. The US has given a lot of people the shaft in its history and it's incredibly difficult to atone for these things. We can't go back in time and prevent FDR and California Governor Earl Warren from interning Japanese-Americans and we can't go back to the 1860's and prevent the Supreme Court from allowing the Jim Crow laws to be inacted. But in this one case in our history, we have the opportunity to atone for a national sin and to make things right for a people that we've grievously wronged. No other country can take responsibility for this.
Is this war really all about oil? I don't know, but I would suggest that the burden of proof rests on the accusers, rather than the accused. To echo the cry of the anti-war protesters, "Where's the smoking gun?" If you really, really want to believe that George Bush is the nefarious head of a super-secret cabal of oil magnates who have manipulated world events to their own evil purposes then you will find evidence that fits your purpose and be damned with common sense and contradictory evidence. Common sense such as: If the Bush Administration was really so hot to get Iraq's oil, why wage a war that is going to cost more money than will be gained from oil production? Contradictory evidence like: If the Bush Administration wants the oil so bad and doesn't care who has to die to get it, why not just press the UN to drop the sanctions and cut a deal with Saddam? We could leave him in power, he can kill as many Iraqi civilians as he pleases, and the Bush Administration gets the oil and the bonus of the blessings of the anti-war left (who want the sanctions lifted) and the French (who want Saddam left in power). Of course all of this proves nothing; I can't prove a negative. It's up to the "No Blood for Oil!" folks to come up with some hard evidence to support their case. Not a nebulous connection of dots; any five-year old can easily demonstrate that dots can be connected to form any pattern one chooses. I keep asking myself, "If the No Blood for Oil types are correct, then Bush is committing treason. Do I really believe that a sitting president is fomenting war and putting American troops in harm's way merely to line his pockets? Or is it more likely that he is merely trying, as all other presidents have before him, to do the right thing for his country as he perceives it?" Occam's Razor favors the latter and not the former.
Some folks are saying that this military action is unconstitutional. Evidence to support this lies in much-wrangled over interpretations of the Constitution and goes way back to the old arguments on whether or not the South should have been allowed to secede from the Union. They say that only Congress can declare war, but I have three little words for them: "War Powers Act." Passed in 1973 during the closing days of the Vietnam War, the War Powers Act gives the President 90 days to send troops anywhere he damned well pleases before he asks Congress for authorization. President Bush wisely asked Congress for authorization back in November before any troops were sent. Congress gave its authorization and so this is a done deal. The President is not required to declare war before he sends troops anywhere. Ask Truman, Kennedy, Carter and Clinton; they all sent troops
overseas without a formal declaration of war. Now, the Constitutionality of the War Powers Act is something that can certainly be debated; the Constitution is one of those funny documents that, like the Bible, can be interpreted to mean whatever the reader wants it to mean. But that doesn't change the fact that the War Powers Act has been in force for 30 years and is, right now, the law of the land. Don't like it? OK, that's fine that's your right. Call your Congressman and start the ball rolling to get it repealed. Just don't forget that the War Powers Act was enacted to prevent decade-long quagmires like the Vietnam War, and without it, the Constitution is silent on the President's authority to use the military without Congressional authority. One more point on the Constitutionality of the current conflict: I think it's pretty funny that most of the same people who encourage an extremely liberal interpretation of the Constitution are the same people who are up in arms over this conflict being "unconstitutional." Well, gang, that sword cuts both ways. If you're going to encourage a strict, by-the-book interpretation of the Constitution, that also means a strict, by-the-book interpretation of the Second Amendment, the Electoral College and other lefty boogeymen. Also a strict, almost Libertarian interpretation means no Civil Rights Act of 1964, no EPA, no Social Security, no National Endowment for the Arts and none of the other feel-good federal programs of the last 75 years. This would be, of course, a Libertarian utopia, but I'm betting that the anti-war Libertarians and Buchannanites would have an ideological clash with the anti-war Leftists and Naderites on this topic.I'm continually amazed at the peace activists who claim they want to save Iraqi civilians. A historical analogy would be if the isolationist America Firsters of the 1930's had claimed that they wanted to keep the US out of European affairs because of concern for the fate of German Jews. If the modern incarnation of the America Firsters really had the welfare of the Iraqi people at heart, they would want them to be free. Instead, what seems to be happening is that the peace activists subscribe to the idea that "war should be avoided at all costs" except that they do not think about what the phrase "at all costs" actually means. If more people die under the peace than would die under the war, does that still mean that war should be avoided? What the peace activists really want is to be able to say that their hands are clean. Iraqi civilians dying by the millions under the boot of a brutal tyrant thousands of miles away don't make the news and are very easy to forget. Iraqi civilians dying by the hundreds on our nightly news and caused by our own weapons cause uncomfortable feelings of guilt. Well, friends and neighbors, sometimes doing the right thing feels bad. Yes, we have all seen enough episodes of MASH to know that war is bad. But there are worse things than war, and screwing these people over again right when they need our help most is one of them.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has condemned the arrival of the first aid shipments into southern Iraq — and a possible future route for Canadian aid — as a propaganda exercise.Three trucks of aid arrived in the southern Iraqi town of Safwan yesterday afternoon, which led to chaos as hungry crowds mobbed the trucks chanting "Food! Food!" while unidentified workers tossed relief packages into the crowd. The whole episode unfolded in front of rolling television cameras, while armed American soldiers stood watch.
Mui'n Kassis, the head of communications for the ICRC in Jordan, said he was appalled as he watched the scene on television. "That was disgusting; that was propaganda," he said, shaking his head angrily.
He said he didn't know who co-ordinated the aid shipment, which came overland via Kuwait, although news reports said it was the Kuwait Red Crescent Society, an affiliate of the ICRC. Mr. Kassis said whoever organized it seemed more interested in appearances than in those they were supposed to be helping.
"We have to think about the dignity of the recipients in these situations," he said.
I'm here tonight because men and women of the United States military have given their lives for my freedom. I am not here tonight because Sheryl Crowe, Rosie O'Donnell, Martin Sheen, George Clooney, Jane Fonda or Phil Donahue, sacrificed their lives for me.If my memory serves me correctly, it was not movie stars or musicians, but the United States Military who fought on the shores of Iwo Jima, the jungles of Vietnam, and the beaches of Normandy.
Tonight, I say we should support the President of the United States and the U.S. Military and tell the liberal, tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, hippy, tie-dyed liberals to go make their movies and music and whine somewhere else.
After all, if they lived in Iraq, they wouldn't be allowed the freedom of speech they're being given here today. Ironically, they would be put to death at the hands of Sadam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden.
I want to know how the very people who are against war because of the loss of life, can possibly be the same people who are for abortion? They are the same people who are for animal rights but against the rights of the unborn.
The movie stars say they want to go to Iraq and serve as "human shields" for the Iraqis. I say let them buy a one-way ticket and go.
No one likes war. I hate war! But the one thing I hate more is the fact that this country has been forced into war-innocent people have lost their lives - - and there but for the grace of God, it could have been my brother, my husband, or even worse my own son.
On December 7, 1941, there are no records of movie stars treading the blazing waters of Pearl Harbor.
On September 11, 2001; there are no photos of movie stars standing as "human shields" against the debris and falling bodies ascending from the World Trade Center. There were only policemen and firemen - -underpaid civil servants who gave their all with nothing expected in return.
When the USS Cole was bombed, there were no movie stars guarding the ship - - where were the human shields then?
If America's movie stars want to be human shields, let them shield the gang-ridden streets of Los Angeles, or New York City, let them shield the lives of the children of North Birmingham whose mothers lay them down to sleep on the floor each night to shelter them from stray bullets.
If they want to be human shields, I say let them shield the men and women of honesty and integrity that epitomizes courage and embody the spirit of freedom by wearing the proud uniforms of the United! States Military. Those are the people who have earned and deserve shielding!
Throughout the course of history, this country has remained free, not because of movie stars and liberal activists, but because of brave men and women who hated war too. However, they lay down their lives so that we all may live in freedom. After all -- "What greater love hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friend," or in this case a country.
We should give our military honor and acknowledgment and not let their lives be in vain. If you want to see true human shields, walk through Arlington Cemetery. There lie human shields, heroes, and the BRAVE Americans who didn't get on television and talk about being a human shield -- they were human shields.
I thank God tonight for freedom - - those who bought and paid for it with their lives in the past - - those who will protect it in the present and defend it in the future. America has remained silent too long! God-fearing people have remained silent too long!
We must lift our voices united in a humble prayer to God for guidance and the strength and courage to sustain us throughout whatever the future may hold.
After the tragic events of Sept. 11th, my then eleven-year-old son said terrorism is a war against them and us and if you're not one of us, then you're one of them.
So in closing tonight, let us be of one accord, let us stand proud, and let us be the human shields of prayer, encouragement and support for the President, our troops and their families and our country.
May God bless America, the land of the free, the home of the brave and the greatest country on the face of this earth!
The U.S. government has been unable to find any Muslim American organization to issue a Fatwa, a religious ruling, ascribing legality to the war against Iraq....The Muslim American anger continues to simmer, although it has not boiled over into the streets because of the intimidating laws [such as the USA Patriot Act]....
CAIR warned against an indefinite occupation of Iraq because it will fuel anti-American sentiment.... “Such an occupation could quickly turn into a political and military quagmire.”
The North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has not appeared in public for 43 days, observers said, triggering speculation that he putting his country in a war posture. Mr. Kim was absent from the Supreme People's Assembly meeting on Wednesday; his last public appearance was Feb. 12 at the Russian Embassy in Pyongyang. Experts on North Korea say Kim's withdrawal is deliberate and that North Korea has gone into a semibelligerent state since the outbreak of the Iraqi war. Sixty-one other top-level officials were absent from the assembly meeting.One expert, Cho Myung-chul at the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy, who was a professor at Kim Il Sung University before defecting to the South, said that the 61 absentees would be commanding officers and that it seemed North Korea was in a state of war. Another North Korea expert said that North Koreans would take Kim's absence from the assembly meeting to mean that they are under an emergency situation.
Experts pointed to other signs that Pyongyang is getting unsteady: that excluded from the meeting were the cabinet minister's report and mention of this year's budget, and that the government is selling loans to the public for the first time in its existence. Also, Pyongyang hiked its military spending as a ratio of the budget by 0.5 percentage points this year, to 15.4 percent, and has told the public to increase its preparedness.
A senior diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Mongolia has resigned in protest over Washington's decision to wage war in Iraq and U.S. policy toward the Middle East and North Korea.Ann Wright, who as deputy chief of mission was the embassy's second-in-command, also criticized the "unnecessary curtailment of civil rights" in the United States since Sept. 11.
"I believe the administration's policies are making the world a more dangerous, not a safer, place," she said in a resignation letter addressed to Secretary of State Colin Powell.
[A key front of the war is the] almost invisible airborne and special forces campaigns, in which British, Australians, Poles and others, including local forces, not yet acknowledged, have been playing very important roles, seizing and destroying or disabling the Iraqi regime's most lethal military and terror assets, and hunting for the "leadership targets"....The Pentagon planners have, thus, enlisted the media without their full knowledge in exhaustively covering what I suspect may be a series of feints. And Saddam's remaining loyalists, cut off from most of their own sources of information in the field, are obliged to focus their attention only on what they can see -- more and more exclusively through the eyes of the media....
[The coalition] is using tactics much like those which were so successful in Afghanistan. Indeed, the overall strategy in Iraq is beginning to resemble the Afghan one ...
They take out the struts upon which the regime is supported, and seem to make no dramatic progress until the moment when suddenly the whole thing comes down, almost simultaneously in many different cities.
[Iraqi leaders] don't want to go out [of their bunkers], because they--and the Saddam Fedayeen--are being outfought inside Baghdad. A small--how small I didn't even ask--bunch of special-ops guys are doing their job exceedingly well. Which is to say that for their small number, they are having a disproportionate effect on the enemy. That's a polite term to describe the work of the scout-sniper. Reconnaissance is always the prime mission, and locating targets for immediate and later strikes is very important. But if we can kill a few Fedayeen every time they stick their noses above ground, pretty soon they won't want to. A suppressed sniper's rifle can drill you from several hundred yards away or across the street, and the guys near you won't know where it came from.
Every day coalition forces are bombarding Iraqi cities and towns with leaflets, nearly 30 million of them since October and counting. The latest message: Stay Home!THEY WANT CIVILIANS off the roads and bridges. With Iraqi paramilitary troops dressing as civilians and, in some cases, using them as human shields, it is even more imperative that the United States get that message out.
All in all, the war seems to be going fabulously well.
MORE: Help Iraqis Arise (William Safire, New York Times, 3/27/2003)
Our entire coalition has a job to do, and it will not end with the liberation of Iraq. We will help the Iraqi people to find the benefits and assume the duties of self-government. The form of those institutions will arise from Iraq's own culture and its own choices. Yet, this much is certain: The 24 million people of Iraq have lived too long under a violent criminal gang calling itself a government.Iraqis are a good and gifted people. They deserve better than a life spent bowing before a dictator. The people of Iraq deserve to stand on their feet as free men and women -- the citizens of a free country.
This goal of a free and peaceful Iraq unites our coalition. And this goal comes from the deepest convictions of America. The freedom you defend is the right of every person and the future of every nature. The liberty we prize is not American's gift to the world; it is God's gift to humanity.
The Army Special Forces define their mission in a motto, "To liberate the oppressed." Generations of men and women in uniform have served and sacrificed in this cause. Now the call of history has come once again to all in our military and to all in our coalition. We are answering that call. We have no ambition in Iraq except the liberation of its people. We ask no reward except a durable peace. And we will accept no outcome short of complete and final success.
The path we are taking is not easy, and it may be long. Yet we know our destination. We will stay on the path -- mile by mile -- all the way to Baghdad, and all the way to victory.
Thank you, all. And may God bless America.
[Q:] So you think the way he's presenting this war to the world is really where he's gone wrong.[A:] Yes, it has been wretched. He's presented his arguments for going to war partly mendaciously, which has been a disaster. He's certainly presented them in a confused way, so that people can't understand his reasoning. He's aroused a lot of suspicion. Even when he's made good arguments, he's made them in ways that are very difficult to understand and have completely failed to get through to the general public. All in all, his inarticulateness has become something of a national security threat for the United States.
In my interpretation, the basic thing that the United States wants to do -- overthrow Saddam and get rid of his weapons -- is sharply in the interest of almost everybody all over the world. And although the U.S. is proposing to act in the interest of the world, Bush has managed to terrify the entire world and to turn the world against him and us and to make our situation infinitely more dangerous than it otherwise would have been. It's a display of diplomatic and political incompetence on a colossal scale. We're going to pay for this.
[Q:] Then what is it that the public doesn't understand? What hasn't he been able to get across?
[A:] One thing he hasn't gotten across is that there is a positive liberal democratic goal and a humanitarian goal here. Iraq is suffering under one of the most grotesque fascist tyrannies there's ever been. Hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people, have been killed by this horrible regime. The weapons programs are not a fiction. There's every reason to think that Saddam, who's used these weapons in the past, would be happy to use them in the future. The suffering of the Iraqi people is intense. The United States is in the position to bring that suffering to an end. Their liberation, the creating of at least the rudiments of a liberal democratic society there, are in the interests of the Iraqi people and are deeply in the interests of liberal society everywhere. There are reasons to go in which are those of not just self-interest or self-defense, but of solidarity of humanitarianism, of a belief in liberal ideals. And Bush has gotten this across not at all.
A Liberal senator has been thrown into the firestorm of shaky U.S.-Canada relations after the Senate's Debates quoted him shouting "Screw the Americans" during a Senate sitting this week.The quote was attributed to outspoken Senator Laurier LaPierre, who has expressed anti-American sentiments in the past, in the official transcript of Tuesday's Senate sitting. Opposition MPs and senators were quick to jump on the quote as another example of the Liberal government's strong anti-Americanism.
Mr. LaPierre told the Senate yesterday that he had been misquoted in the transcript and that he had in fact shouted: "So did the Americans." But his attempt to correct the Debates, which requires unanimous consent, was blocked by opposition members who said they wanted to listen to a tape of the sitting first.
A shaken Mr. LaPierre said he would offer his resignation to Prime Minister Jean Chretien since "his honour" was being challenged by the opposition members.
MORE:
Some Liberals want Cellucci censured:Chretien insists Canada is not anti-American (Joan Bryden, March 27, 2003, The Ottawa Citizen)
Prime Minister Jean Chretien insisted Wednesday that his government is not anti-American even as some Liberal backbenchers called on him to censure or expel U.S. Ambassador Paul Cellucci for publicly denouncing Canada's refusal to participate in the war on Iraq.Mr. Chretien's assurances that Canada-U.S relations have not been damaged by the Iraq crisis were further undermined by American officials, who disclosed that the White House authorized Mr. Cellucci's unusually blunt remarks.
Mr. Cellucci's expression of "disappointment" in Canada and his hints of economic retaliation were deemed warranted after Mr. Chretien last week failed to rebuke Natural Resources Minister Herb Dhaliwal for levelling personal criticisms at President George W. Bush.
Mr. Dhaliwal told reporters that Mr. Bush let down the world by failing to act like a statesman, an affront that American officials said should have been immediately repudiated by Mr. Chretien.
The ambassador's remarks continued to reverberate on Parliament Hill yesterday. While Mr. Chretien and most of his Liberal caucus tried to downplay the significance of Mr. Cellucci's intervention and the extent of the rift between the Canadian and American administrations, several government backbenchers said the ambassador stepped over the line of diplomatic protocol.
Leader of the opposition Iraqi National Congress Ahmad Chalabi has emphatically rejected British assertions that hostility toward the coalition forces is an expression of anger over the West's supposed "double standards" in its approach to Iraq and Israel."This is science fiction," said US-backed Chalabi, who is Washington's choice to head a future administration in Baghdad. "The Iraqis are stuck between the allied bombs and Saddam's repressive apparatus.
"The issue of Palestine is not the reason why they have not demonstrated. It is fear of Saddam and that the coalition has told them to do nothing."
In an interview from the northern Iraq town of Dokan, published in London's Daily Telegraph on Thursday, Chalabi was also critical of the proposal by British Prime Minister Tony Blair that the UN should play a major role in post-war Iraq.
"The UN is too weak to deal with de-Ba'athification, the destruction of weapons of mass destruction and the dismantling of Saddam's security services," he said.
"The UN would be hamstrung. Iraq is far too big and important."
He noted that "the UN's record on Iraq has been abysmal and the Iraqi people has little confidence in the UN."
Instead, Mr Chalabi wants allied troops to remain until a referendum, followed by elections, to establish democracy and independence.
(1) Have we occupied Baghdad--without leveling the whole city? [...](2) Have we killed, captured or expelled Saddam? [...]
(3) Have we been able to explain why some Iraqi forces are putting up such a fierce fight? [...]
(4) Have we won this war and preserved the territorial integrity of Iraq? [...]
(5) Has an authentic Iraqi liberal nationalist emerged from the U.S. occupation to lead the country? [...]
(6) Is the Iraqi state that emerges from this war accepted as legitimate by Iraq's Arab and Muslim neighbors? [...]
(2) Duh?!?
(3) Who cares as long as they're dead?
(4) Yes and no. There's no such thing as Iraq and there's going to be a Kurdistan, whether independent or federated within Iraq is merely a matter of aesthetics.
(5) We can't guarantee a post-Saddam Iraq will be a liberal nation, only that it will be more liberal than it is now.
(6) If we were by some chance to achieve #5, isn't the real question whether that Iraq and we accept the anti-liberal regimes in the rest of the Arab world? Why would we let Syria determine the legitimacy of Iraq instead of vice versa?
A friend living in England sent me this article and asked what I think.
Suddenly, the government of the United States has discovered the virtues of international law. It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world, but when five of its captured soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, immediately complained that "it is against the Geneva convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them". . . .Here is my response:This being so, Rumsfeld had better watch his back. For this enthusiastic convert to the cause of legal warfare is, as head of the defence department, responsible for a series of crimes sufficient, were he ever to be tried, to put him away for the rest of his natural life.
His prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, where 641 men (nine of whom are British citizens) are held, breaches no fewer than 15 articles of the third convention. The US government broke the first of these (article 13) as soon as the prisoners arrived, by displaying them, just as the Iraqis have done, on television. In this case, however, they were not encouraged to address the cameras. They were kneeling on the ground, hands tied behind their backs, wearing blacked-out goggles and earphones. In breach of article 18, they had been stripped of their own clothes and deprived of their possessions. They were then interned in a penitentiary (against article 22), where they were denied proper mess facilities (26), canteens (28), religious premises (34), opportunities for physical exercise (38), access to the text of the convention (41), freedom to write to their families (70 and 71) and parcels of food and books (72). . . .
It is not hard, therefore, to see why the US government fought first to prevent the establishment of the international criminal court, and then to ensure that its own citizens are not subject to its jurisdiction. The five soldiers dragged in front of the cameras yesterday should thank their lucky stars that they are prisoners not of the American forces fighting for civilisation, but of the "barbaric and inhuman" Iraqis.
First, this is not "an illegal war against a sovereign state." Security Council resolution 687 explicitly authorizes action by member states to enforce all current and future resolutions concerning Iraq. As no one seriously claims that Iraq is not in breach of these resolutions, the action is justified under the UN charter. As far as picking and choosing is concerned, every permanent member of the Security Council has waged an external war without UN approval. Most recently, the US did so in Kosovo, along with France and others, to protect the Muslim population against the Serbs.
Nor is the United States "seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world." What bugs the left is three particular treaties, two of which the US never ratified. Kyoto, in its current form, was rejected while being negotiated by the Senate during the Clinton Administration without a dissenting vote. Nonetheless, the other nations refused to amend it to make it acceptable. The ABM treaty specifically allowed the signatories to cancel it on six months' notice. The Russians seem to care about this a lot less than the Europeans. The ICC is plainly unconstitutional as applied to US nationals and the other signatories refused to address this concern. Interestingly, France sought -- and was granted -- some of the same concessions the US was not given.
As for the Geneva Conventions, he's just smoking dope. He starts off by ignoring the possibility, raised by the tv pictures, that some of the captured US soldiers were executed after they surrendered. Next, the distinction between legal and illegal combatants is not as ambiguous as he implies and, sensibly, it does not turn on whether the war is "legal" under international law. There is a specific test. Among other things, illegal combatants don't wear uniforms and don't answer to a command structure. There is no question but that the captured al Queda fighters are not legal combatants. Nor is there any requirement that the "competent authority" be either judicial or civilian. Military tribunals, answerable to the President, are perfectly appropriate under both international law and the Constitution. More to the point, photographs of unidentified AQ fighters were released to show how they were being treated. They were not humiliated. The other rights he mentions are not applicable, though some are being respected. The food they are given is kosher, you should excuse the expression. They have access to US Army Imams. They are given some exercise, though not a lot. Finally, I have no idea why he thinks hostilities have ended. We're still actively engaged fighting AQ in Afghanistan and throughout the world.
As for Doran's documentary [alleging American complicity in Afghan atrocities], it has been vastly oversold. Here is a snippet from an interview with Doran by the World Socialist Web Site (found via Travelling Shoes):
WSWS: Is there any other evidence, apart from the testimony of these witnesses, on the involvement of the American military in the deaths of these 3,000 prisoners?Dostum is an evil guy, but the evidence that he acted with the help of Americans is almost nonexistent. I am, however, perfectly willing to offer Monbiot a deal. He can choose whether to spend some time as a prisoner of the US Army, or he can go wandering through Iraq ahead of the US Army.JD: Absolutely not. The reason the story has been released early is that I received a warning from Mazar-i-Sharif that the graves in the desert were being tampered with. All the evidence is in the graves, and it is essential that those graves are not touched! [....]
WSWS: Is there any evidence to point to the participation of American soldiers in shooting victims in the desert?
JD: I have absolutely no evidence that American troops were involved in the shooting that took place in the desert. . . .
MORE: The article, found via Instapundit, gives what seems like a pretty good overview of conditions at Guantanamo, even if the headline does oversell the evidence of beatings.
The Iraqis threw the allies a curve ball by deploying thousands of fedayeen and paramilitary forces in southern Iraq to engage in guerrilla-style hit-and-run attacks. Indeed, the Iraqis are not shrinking from the fight: columns of vehicles carrying more paramilitary forces were heading south tonight from Baghdad to join the fray, according to American officials. Later, much fighting, including a fierce clash at Nasiriya that resulted in casualties on both sides, was reported.The allies, however, are now countering by putting off the battle of Baghdad for at least some days and focusing their efforts on attacking the paramilitary groups in and around Najaf, Nasiriya, Samawa, Basra and other southern and central Iraqi cities.
With the limited ground forces the Bush administration has allocated for the initial phase of the campaign and the need to take care of threats in their rear, the United States military can hardly do anything else.
The planning and preparations for the drive to Baghdad, however, are very advanced. The next phase of the campaign is to take the fight to the Republican Guard divisions that are on or approaching the outskirts of the Iraqi capital and then begin ground attacks against key strongholds in Baghdad itself.
There seems to be no doubt among American commanders that this battle will take place relatively soon and that their forces will ultimately prevail.
"We have achieved several of our strategic objectives, the first of which was to seize the oil fields before destruction for the Iraqi people," said Maj. Gen. William Webster, the deputy commanding general of the allied ground command. "The enemy adjusted. The conditions changed. And we are staying on the balls of our feet."
The ultimate goal of the allied invasion is the overthrow of Mr. Hussein and his government. But there are also several important secondary objectives.
One was to seize Iraq's oil fields to ensure that they were not set aflame, either as a means of obscuring the battlefield or as an act of vengeance, by retreating Iraqi forces.
Indeed, intelligence reports that just seven of the oil wells in the Rumaila oil fields were on fire triggered last Thursday's land attack, a ground assault that in contrast to the 1991 Persian Gulf war, began before the air strikes began in earnest.
Besides ensuring that very few of the oil wells were set alight, allied warplanes and special forces also have been successful so far in preventing Iraq from launching Scud missiles at Israel, also a considerable undertaking and one that is a high priority given the United States desire to keep Israel out of the war.
The allies have not been able to stop the Iraqis from firing surface-to-surface missiles at American forces in Kuwait, including some aimed at the land war command center here. But the Patriot antimissile batteries deployed by the allies have shot down the vast majority of the missiles, while the remainder have fallen harmlessly in the desert or the Persian Gulf.
In terms of the invasion itself, allied forces have penetrated deep into Iraq and have managed to get across the Euphrates River. The key port of Umm Qasr has been taken.
The main focus now is eliminating the fedayeen and other paramilitary groups in southern Iraq or at least reducing them to the point where they become a mere nuisance, not a major threat.
Recent history suggests that well-equipped armies, especially if their soldiers are taught to exercise initiative, can seize urban areas at surprisingly low cost. In 1967, Israeli soldiers defeated the approximately 6,000 Jordanian troops who held East Jerusalem; 200 Israelis were killed. The following year, American marines fought roughly 4,000 North Vietnamese soldiers south of the Perfume River as part of the battle to retake the city of Hue; 38 marines died in the fighting. And in 1989 the United States Army fought against approximately 5,000 Panamanian Defense Forces for control of Panama City; 23 Americans were killed in action.The fatality ratios are especially revealing. In Jerusalem the Israelis lost three men for every 100 Jordanians deployed to defend the city; in Hue the ratio was one marine for every 100 enemy soldiers killed, wounded, captured or driven away. In Panama the fatality ratio was half that suffered by the marines at Hue.
What do these numbers suggest for a battle in Baghdad? To estimate coalition losses one must first estimate how many Iraqis might fight. The Iraqi fedayeen militia has at most 40,000 men. The paramilitary Special Republican Guard has another 20,000. Add several thousand more from the palace guard and the intelligence services, and the combined forces in Baghdad would total about 65,000 men.
In addition, Mr. Hussein might pull one or two Republican Guard divisions into Baghdad, adding 10,000 to 20,000 troops to his defenses.
With their technological advantages, coalition forces in Baghdad should perform at least as well as the Marines in Hue; the poorly trained Iraqis can be expected to fight less effectively than the North Vietnamese did. Depending on how many Iraqis resist, total coalition deaths might be in the 400 to 800 range. However, if the Iraqis perform as poorly as the Panamanians, coalition fatalities would be only half as high. But if the Iraqis are as skillful as the Jordanians were in 1967--which seems unlikely because the Jordanians at the time were the best soldiers in the Arab world--then coalition losses could rise to between 1,000 and 2,000 dead.
Even if a battle for Baghdad "only" claims several hundred coalition lives, it would be terrifying for the combatants and horrifying to watch on television. Coalition infantry companies that are ordered to clear well-defended buildings, or that are caught in ambushes, will pay dearly. And the number of injuries will be several times higher than fatalities. Soldiers will be taken prisoner.
While images from the battle are likely to shock us, they are also likely to inflame much of the world. Civilians will be caught in the crossfire. Images of the dead will be broadcast around the world. The Israeli assault on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank last spring, portrayed by the world's press as a massacre, claimed the lives of fewer than 30 noncombatants. An assault on Baghdad will be far worse.
MORE:
Allied blockade of Baghdad is best (John Keegan, March 26, 2003, Chicago Sun Times)
The Americans shrink from street fighting precisely because tanks and armored vehicles are of limited use in cities. What is true for them is, however, is also true for the Iraqis. If they decide to withdraw their tanks from the countryside to shelter them in the city, they are effectively taking them out of the battle altogether.If that analysis is correct, then it may be to the allies' advantage for the Iraqis to avoid battle outside Baghdad and to withdraw the Republican Guard armor into the city, both of which would effectively be self-neutralizing moves.
The moves would absolve Franks of the need to send American troops into the streets, at least in the immediate term.
They could wait outside, imposing a blockade and watching to see how long resistance would continue. Frustration at the allied refusal to engage in street fighting might provoke Saddam into launching forays, which would prove costly to him.
On the other hand, the allies cannot allow this war to drag on. Protraction will have a depressing effect on the markets and on economies in general, while fueling the anti-war movement.
Franks needs an outcome without serious delay and that increasingly seems to mean that he needs more troops, quickly.
Whatever the truth of differences of opinion in the Pentagon last year between supporters of a "light" and "heavy" war, and whether there is indeed a "Rumsfeld doctrine" vs. a "Powell doctrine," the truth has to be faced that the allies are trying to capture a country the size of California with one heavy division, one airborne division, and a U.S. Marine force or roughly two light divisions.
A central point of contention in the Camp David discussions is expected to be Mr. Blair's proposal that the United Nations take a prominent role in the oversight of Iraq after the downfall of Saddam Hussein's regime.U.S. officials have been vague about the constitution of a postwar administration in Iraq. But there is deep skepticism in the administration about including the United Nations after the failure of the Security Council to approve a second resolution sought by Washington and London explicitly authorizing the war.
At a London press conference yesterday before leaving for Washington, Mr. Blair said, "I can assure you that it is our desire to make sure the United Nations [is] centrally involved" in the Iraq reconstruction project.
Nile Gardiner, a visiting fellow in Anglo-American security policy at the Heritage Foundation, said Mr. Blair runs a risk if he presses the point too hard.
"I think Blair might be underestimating the tremendous opposition to going down the U.N. route again inside the Bush administration," Mr. Gardiner said.
Mr. Blair also has been far more outspoken than Mr. Bush in urging a renewed international effort to revive peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, in large part to mend fences with Arab states.
Mr. Bush's Rose Garden pledge two weeks ago to release the Middle East "road map" — a phased peace plan drafted by the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia — was widely seen as a gesture to Mr. Blair.
The British prime minister, answering questions in Parliament yesterday, insisted, "There is no difference between us at all on the basic principles" in the Middle East peace process.
MORE:
PATRIOT ACT:
George & Tony – friends forever? (Pat Buchanan, March 24, 2003, Creators Syndicate)
Even conservatives who prefer that the cousins across the pond choose Tory leaders find much to admire in Tony Blair. He is arguably America's best friend.
As a college professor, I regularly conduct a class exercise to illustrate that the "national character" of peoples isn't genetically fixed.I pick out an inoffensive coed with a Scandinavian name and ask her if, when she passes by a prosperous-looking town, she feels compelled to burn it down, kill the inhabitants and steal their cattle. Usually, the reply is a chuckled "No!" I comment that her predatory Viking ancestors would be displeased with her lack of bloodlust.
Now, many commentators tell us that the Iraqi people (and, by implication, all Muslims and Arabs) are intrinsically unable to sustain a participatory democracy and a civil society. The postwar aims of the United States and the world – even those who oppose the second Persian Gulf War – must be to prove them wrong.
The prescription for a transformation from a nation governed by genocidal tyranny must be drastic and immediate. In a world of proliferating madmen and weapons of mass destruction, we can't wait a millennium or even a generation. [...]
It is fair to say the pre-Gulf War II Saddam Hussein was a minor military threat to his neighbors. Ironically, a democratic, civil-minded Iraq would be a moral threat to the ruling castes of many Middle East and Near East theocracies, kingdoms and tyrannies. The temptation for those players to try to sabotage the rule of law in Iraq will be great. The United States must make the costs of such adventurism unacceptable.
In such strategies, almost everyone has a role to play, not just the Marines, Iraqi-Americans and the White House. For example, the many millions in the West who have taken to the streets opposing the war have assured us that they are doing so for humanitarian reasons – such as saving the children of Iraq from the fallout of battle. After the war is over, they can prove the sincerity of their concerns by directing time, energy and money to helping rebuild the country for those children.
An Iraq that is saved by its own people and by the good will of foreign soldiers and citizens isn't a fantasy but a necessity. If a postwar Iraq fails, and if we fail a postwar Iraq, we will condemn the region and the world to many more wars with no hope of a positive outcome.
I know Principal Flutie would have said, 'Kids need understanding, kids are human beings.' That's the kind of woolly-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten.
--Principal Snyder ('The Puppet Show' - Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
[T]he Iraqi private with a bullet wound in the back of his head suggested something unusually grim. Up and down the 200-mile stretch of desert where the American and British forces have advanced, one Iraqi prisoner after another has told captors a similar tale: that many Iraqi soldiers were fighting at gunpoint, threatened with death by tough loyalists of President Saddam Hussein.Here, according to American doctors and Iraqi prisoners, appeared to be one confirmation. The wounded Iraqi, whose life was ebbing away outside an American field hospital, had been shot during the firefight Tuesday night with American troops. It was a small-caliber bullet, most likely from a pistol, fired at close range. Iraqi prisoners taken after the battle said their officers had been firing at them, pushing them into battle.
"The officers threatened to shoot us unless we fought," said a wounded Iraqi from his bed in the American field hospital here. "They took out their guns and pointed them and told us to fight."
A resolution presented Wednesday to the top U.N. human rights body does not include a condemnation of Cuba's record, a rare move that immediately drew protests from rights campaigners.The activist groups charged that just last week Cuba arrested scores of dissidents, accusing them of conspiring with American diplomats in Cuba to encourage opposition to the communist government.
The annual meeting of the 53-nation U.N. Human Rights Commission has censured the communist island for its lack of democracy and free speech every year over the past decade except 1998.
But in wording that will likely draw U.S. protest as well, the draft measure produced by Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Peru and Uruguay simply asks Cuba to accept a visit by a U.N. monitor appointed earlier this year by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. [...]
A spokesman for the U.S. mission to U.N. European offices in Geneva said only that the United States supported the efforts of the sponsoring nations to address the human rights situation in Cuba.
"The United States needs a resolution against Cuba like a fish needs water," Perez Roque, the foreign minister, told reporters in Geneva last week.
Washington is running out of ways to justify its 40-year-old embargo against Cuba, which most other nations oppose, he said.
Kurdish strategist Noshirwan Mustafa, standing at a conference table in his book-lined study, points out Iraqi troop deployments marked in red on a glassed-over map of the country.He traces with his finger the arc of the US-led advance toward Baghdad, admiring how American forces have largely bypassed Iraqi troops around Basra. "I think the war is going very well," he says.
But a week into the fighting, Mr. Mustafa is critical of other aspects of the US battle plan, asserting that the US has allowed the Iraqi leadership to maintain internal communications, has only belatedly targeted the country's mass media, and so far has neglected the "political dimension."
"Until now, the Iraqi population has no [reason for] confidence that this is a permanent change of the political system," Mustafa says.
Mustafa, a gray-haired eminence in the Kurdish movement, was the architect of the Kurds' 1991 uprising against the regime of President Saddam Hussein, which culminated in their seizure of the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.
The Kurds only held Kirkuk for eight days, in part because the US declined to prevent Mr. Hussein's forces from crushing their rebellion, but their experience seems to offer lessons that might be useful today.
Mustafa recounts how the Kurds determined that the regime's power was centered in four key institutions in every collective camp, town, and city in northern Iraq: the branch of the ruling Baath Party, the local offices of the Iraqi intelligence, military intelligence, and security services.
As they did in other towns and cities in 1991, the Kurds targeted these four institutions in Kirkuk. "If you can crush them," Mustafa says, "you can control the cities."
[T]roops had established a strong but not yet secure foothold in the town - a known Iraqi militia base - and were to begin distributing aid to its people.The troops were greeted by cheering crowds of several hundred people as they arrived western edge of the town, he said.
But before any food or water could be handed out, snipers opened fire and two mortars shells fell into the crowd.
The civilians scattered to escape a hail of bullets and mortar rounds which followed in quick succession and the relief effort was abandoned.
I hope we have enough Arabic speakers to get help from the local populace in rooting out these thugs.
MORE: Marines discover Iraqi 9/11 Mural (CNN, 3/26/2003)
MORE: Iraqi paramilitaries using human shields (SkyNews, 3/26/2003)
Despite the rapid advance of Army and Marine forces across Iraq over the past week, some senior U.S. military officers are now convinced that the war is likely to
last months and will require considerably more combat power than is now on hand there and in Kuwait, senior defense officials said today.The combination of wretched weather, long and insecure supply lines, and an enemy that has refused to be supine in the face of American combat power has led to a broad reassessment by some top generals of U.S. military expectations and timelines. Some of them see even the potential threat of a drawn-out fight that sucks in more and more U.S. forces. Both on the battlefield in Iraq and in Pentagon conference rooms, military commanders were talking today about a longer, harder war than had been expected just a week ago, the officials said.
"Tell me how this ends," one senior officer said today.
Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word "quagmire" has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad.Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world? Premature the questions may be, three weeks after the fighting began. Unreasonable they are not, given the scars scoured into the national psyche by defeat in Southeast Asia. For all the differences between the two conflicts, and there are many, echoes of Vietnam are unavoidable. Today, for example, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld disclosed for the first time that American military forces are operating in northern Afghanistan, providing liaison to "a limited number of the various opposition elements."
Their role sounds suspiciously like that of the advisers sent to Vietnam in the early 1960's, although Mr. Rumsfeld took pains to say of the anti-Taliban forces that "you're not going to send a few people in and tell them they should turn right, turn left, go slower, go fast." The Vietnam advisers, of course, were initially described in much the same terms, and the government of the day vigorously denied that they were a prelude to American combat troops.
In the most famous such denial, Lyndon B. Johnson vowed that he would not send American boys in to fight the war for Vietnamese boys.
Despite the insistence of President Bush and members of his cabinet that all is well, the war in Afghanistan has gone less smoothly than many had hoped. Not that anyone expected a lightning campaign without setbacks; indeed, both Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld have often said the effort would be long and hard.
Hopefully it won't take two weeks to make Mr. Fallows and Mr. Ricks seem as silly, but if it does or if it takes months, so be it. Let it last: "Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."
MORE:
-The making of a hawk: From Kuwait to Kosovo to Kabul, American firepower has been on the right side of history. The odyssey of a former dove. (David Talbot, Jan. 3, 2002, Salon)
-Blundering Into Afghanistan: The Great Game has repeatedly foiled the great powers. (David Greenberg, September 20, 2001, Slate)
Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874. Here's his poem, The Trial by Existence:
Even the bravest that are slain
Shall not dissemble their surprise
On waking to find valor reign,
Even as on earth, in paradise;
And where they sought without the sword
Wide fields of asphodel fore'er,
To find that the utmost reward
Of daring should be still to dare.The light of heaven falls whole and white
And is not shattered into dyes,
The light forever is morning light;
The hills are verdured pasture-wise;
The angle hosts with freshness go,
And seek with laughter what to brave;--
And binding all is the hushed snow
Of the far-distant breaking wave.And from a cliff-top is proclaimed
The gathering of the souls for birth,
The trial by existence named,
The obscuration upon earth.
And the slant spirits trooping by
In streams and cross- and counter-streams
Can but give ear to that sweet cry
For its suggestion of what dreams!And the more loitering are turned
To view once more the sacrifice
Of those who for some good discerned
Will gladly give up paradise.
And a white shimmering concourse rolls
Toward the throne to witness there
The speeding of devoted souls
Which God makes his especial care.And none are taken but who will,
Having first heard the life read out
That opens earthward, good and ill,
Beyond the shadow of a doubt;
And very beautifully God limns,
And tenderly, life's little dream,
But naught extenuates or dims,
Setting the thing that is supreme.Nor is there wanting in the press
Some spirit to stand simply forth,
Heroic in it nakedness,
Against the uttermost of earth.
The tale of earth's unhonored things
Sounds nobler there than 'neath the sun;
And the mind whirls and the heart sings,
And a shout greets the daring one.But always God speaks at the end:
'One thought in agony of strife
The bravest would have by for friend,
The memory that he chose the life;
But the pure fate to which you go
Admits no memory of choice,
Or the woe were not earthly woe
To which you give the assenting voice.'And so the choice must be again,
But the last choice is still the same;
And the awe passes wonder then,
And a hush falls for all acclaim.
And God has taken a flower of gold
And broken it, and used therefrom
The mystic link to bind and hold
Spirit to matter till death come.'Tis of the essence of life here,
Though we choose greatly, still to lack
The lasting memory at all clear,
That life has for us on the wrack
Nothing but what we somehow chose;
Thus are we wholly stipped of pride
In the pain that has but one close,
Bearing it crushed and mystified.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the scholar and senator, the orator and author, whose intellectual and political leadership did much to shape national policy on the major issues of his time, died today, his successor, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton announced on the Senate floor.The cause of death was not immediately announced but Sen. Moynihan, 76, had been ill for several months. This month he had been hospitalized at the Washington Hospital Center after an emergency appendectomy.
A Democrat, Sen. Moynihan represented New York in the Senate for four terms. He decided not to seek reelection in 2000.
Throughout his 24 years on Capitol Hill, he was one of the most trenchant and memorable voices in the ongoing national debate on such issues as national security and Social Security, as well as on welfare reform and family matters.
Beyond that, he gained honor, recognition-and often ignited controversy-in many roles: Harvard teacher and lecturer, ambassador to India and to the United Nations, adviser to presidents.
He was an advocate of renewing and preserving cities and their downtown buildings, winning renown in Washington as a champion of restoring Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the U.S. Capitol. His use of the phrase "benign neglect" to characterize an approach to racial policy that he was advocating set off a firestorm that smoldered for years
A blend of the ivory tower and the big city streets, he combined gifts and qualities that were in many ways unique in American public life: a propensity to lecture fellow senators on sometimes abstruse topics and a proven ability to win the votes of an often fractious and fragmented constituency on election day.
An orator with an easy mastery of statistical fact and telling anecdote, he was a pungent phrasemaker, formidable in debate. In diagnosing the nation's social ills, he warned in an oft-repeated phrase, that America was "defining deviancy down." [...]
Throughout his career he maintained a vigorous interest in protecting the long-term vitality of American society by shoring up Social Security and reforming welfare.
But he was also notable for his opposition to aspects of the welfare reform measures passed during the Clinton administration.
He expressed the fear that it penalized helpless children, and when it was signed he said: "Shame on the president." [...]
Speaking in August, 1980, at the Democratic National Convention that renominated Jimmy Carter, he warned that the "Soviet empire" had begun again to expand, extending influence into Central America while bolstering its nuclear forces in a manner that was "mad and relentless."
The next year, the first year of the Reagan administration, he expressed his opposition to cuts passed by the Senate Budget Committee. "We have undone 30 years of social legislation in three days," he complained.
The degree of fame that Moynihan has attained recently stems mainly from the fact that he is the author of a much-discussed Government paper entitled "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action," now commonly referred to as the Moynihan Report, in which he urged that the Federal Government adopt a national policy for the reconstruction of the Negro family, arguing that the real cause of the American Negro's troubles is not so much segregation, or a lack of voting power, but the circumstance that the structure of the Negro family is highly "unstable and in many urban centers. . .approaching complete breakdown." This is so, stated Moynihan, because of the increasingly matriarchal character of American Negro society, a society in which a husband is absent from nearly 2 million of the nation's 5 million Negro families and in which, too, some 25 per cent of all births are illegitimate. Moreover, Moynihan pointed out, children, especially boys, who grow up in fatherless homes tend not to adjust to this country's essentially patriarchal society, particularly when their problems are complicated by poverty and racial prejudice."From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles," wrote Moynihan a few months ago, enlarging on his report for the Jesuit magazine, America, "there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future--that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder. ..are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable. And they are richly deserved."
Mr. Moynihan was by all accounts a genial man and he did raise some issues in provocative ways. But, unfortunately, he left the heavy lifting on those issues to others and thereby squandered much of his four terms in the Senate, falling back often on the most purely partisan position. No Senator ever did less with more.
MORE:
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Retrospective: With News and Reviews From the Archives of The New York Times
-Pat Moynihan, RIP (Steven Hayward, No Left Turns)
-Clinton's Democratic Support Slips Further (CNN All Politics, 9/06/98)
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) said on ABC's "This Week" program that he thinks if Clinton perjured himself in the Paula Jones' sexual harassment suit about an affair with Monica Lewinsky, it would constitute an impeachable offense, even without additional evidence of obstruction of justice.
Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat from New York who enjoyed a reputation as an intellectual giant among his peers, died Wednesday after battling an infection stemming from a ruptured appendix. He was 76.
Moynihan did influential work in sociology and public policy, and his research prepared the way for welfare reform. But as so often happens, the more powerful Moynihan became, the less he led. In the 1980s, Moynihan's ideas on welfare reform found a receptive audience in the Reagan administration and the Republican side of Congress, and Moynihan often mused in the press whether he should follow his conscience and vote with Republicans, or stick with his fellow liberals out of party loyalty. Party loyalty always won.
I suspect that Peggy Noonan will have a fine obituary online at OpinionJournal.com tomorrow, and I look forward to reading it. May God bind up all Senator Moynihan's wounds; may he rest in peace.
Once more, we, the West, were going to protect the Middle East from tyranny. Anthony Eden took the same view of Egypt, anxious to topple the "dictator" Gamal Abdul Nasser, just as Napoleon had been desperate to rescue the Egyptians from the tyranny of the Beys, just as General Maude wanted to rescue Iraq from the tyranny of the Turks, just as George Bush Junior now wants to rescue the Iraqis from the tyranny of President Saddam.And always, these Western invasions were accompanied by declarations that the Americans or the French or just the West in general had nothing against the Arabs, only against the beast-figure who was chosen as the target of our military action. "Our quarrel is not with Egypt, still less with the Arab world," Anthony Eden announced in August of 1956. "It is with Colonel Nasser."
So what happened to all these fine words? The Crusades were a catastrophe in the history of Christian-Muslim relations. Napoleon left Egypt in humiliation. Britain dropped gas on the recalcitrant Kurds of Iraq before discovering that Iraq was ungovernable. Arabs, then Jews drove the British army from Palestine and Lloyd George's beloved Jerusalem. The French fought years of insurrection in Syria. In Lebanon, the Americans scuttled away in humiliation in 1984, along with the French.
And in Iraq in the coming months? What will be the price of our folly this time, of our failure to learn the lessons of history? Only after the United States has completed its occupation we shall find out. It is when the Iraqis demand an end to that occupation, when popular resistance to the American presence by the Shias and the Kurds and even the Sunnis begins to destroy the military "success" which President Bush will no doubt proclaim when the first US troops enter Baghdad. It is then our real "story" as journalists will begin.
It is then that all the empty words of colonial history, the need to topple tyrants and dictators, to assuage the suffering of the people of the Middle East, to claim that we and we only are the best friends of the Arabs, that we and we only must help them, will unravel. Here I will make a guess: that in the months and years that follow America's invasion of Iraq, the United States, in its arrogant assumption that it can create "democracy" in the ashes of a Middle East dictatorship as well as take its oil, will suffer the same as the British in Palestine. Of this tragedy, Winston Churchill wrote, and his words are likely to apply to the US in Iraq: "At first, the steps were wide and shallow, covered with a carpet, but in the end the very stones crumbled under their feet."
The French Canadian writer Yann Martel has acknowledged that he rearranged chapters in the Canadian edition of his new novel, "Life of Pi," because he feared that Canadians would be offended by its religious content."America is a very religious, almost puritanical country," he told Publishers Weekly last year. "In Canada, secularism is triumphant, and to talk noncynically, nonironically about religion is strange."
Mr. Martel's comments have been much quoted of late as a sign that in at least one vital respect, Canadian and American societies are moving in opposite directions despite their common language and geographical proximity.
In a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in Washington, only 30 percent of Canadians said religion was very important to them, compared with 59 percent of Americans. Twenty-one percent of Canadians said they attended religious services regularly in another survey taken in 2000 - about half the rate for Americans (although still a bit higher than the rate for most of Western Europe).
The statistics would be far more skewed if it were not for the growing number of devout Muslim, Sikh and Hindu immigrants to Canada. In Mr. Martel's city of Montreal, which is crowned by a giant illuminated cross atop Mount Royal, to commemorate the piety of its founder, Paul de Chomedy de Maisonneuve, church attendance is plummeting so fast that at least 18 churches in the last three years have been boarded up and abandoned or converted into condominiums and, in one case, even a pizza parlor. Meanwhile, rural churches are closing across the western prairies.
"This is a society where religion no longer wields cultural authority," Marguerite Van Die, a theology professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, wrote recently.
Tim Collins, a 42-year-old lieutenant colonel in the British army, has become a media hero, famous not for deeds performed in battle in Iraq but for words delivered to his men before they moved against the forces of Saddam Hussein.Collins, commander of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment, addressed his troops at their camp in Kuwait. His words, which reportedly had many of his men close to tears, left admirers calling to mind President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the "band of brothers" speech by William Shakespeare's Henry V character before the 1415 Battle of Agincourt.
According to a pool report, Collins told his men:
"The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction. There are many regional commanders who have stains on their souls and they are stoking the fires of hell for Saddam. He and his forces will be destroyed by this coalition for what they have done. As they die they will know that their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity.
"There are some who are alive at this moment who will not be alive shortly. It is my foremost intention to bring every single one of you out alive, but there may be some among us who will not see the end of this campaign. We will put them in their sleeping bags and send them back. There will be no time for sorrow.
"Those who do not wish to go on that journey, we will not send. As for the others, I expect you to rock their world. Wipe them out if that is what they choose. But if you are ferocious in battle, remember to be magnanimous in victory. It is a big step to take another human life. It is not to be done lightly.
"I know of men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts. I can assure you they live with the mark of Cain upon them. If someone surrenders to you, then remember they have that right in international law and ensure that one day they can go home to their family. The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please.
"If you harm the regiment or its history by over-enthusiasm in killing or in cowardice, know it is your family who will suffer . . . .
"We go to liberate, not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. ... Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there."
Reportedly, Collins said the conflict was vital if the West was to curb the threat of Muslim fundamentalists, but he made clear that his men were to respect Iraqi culture and religion.
"You will see things that no man could pay to see and you will have to go a long way to find a more decent, generous and upright people than the Iraqis," he told his troops. "You will be embarrassed by their hospitality even though they have nothing."
[B]loggers are now going to war. Not all of them like it, although many are cheering.In choosing the best of the best, we excluded "meta-blogs" like Warblogs.cc and Warblogging, which are essentially compilations of other blogs, many of them opposed to the war.
We were careful that the five we've selected represent a diversity of opinions.
He's currently working hours the rest of us have nightmares about, but there is consoling news for Ari Fleischer. The balding White House spokesman, Spy hears, has females the length and breadth of the States a-swoonin' with his no-nonsense specs and straight bat denials.You don't believe me? OK, well here goes with some comments on the new Ari Fleischer internet fan site: "Some people don't understand how a hot blonde 24-year-old NYC girl could have such a major crush on Ari Fleischer - but I DO!!" writes one groupie. "I think it is so cool the way he can walk into a room full of press sharks and completely control the room and never ever flinch."
The United States does not have the military means to take over Baghdad and will lose the war against Iraq, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter said."The United States is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated. It is a war we can not win," he told private radio TSF [in Lisbon Tuesday evening]....
"Every time we confront Iraqi troops we may win some tactical battles, as we did for ten years in Vietnam, but we will not be able to win this war, which in my opinion is already lost," Ritter added.
Since, as Rod Dreher recently noted, for the left, "every war is Vietnam", let's look at how Vietnam has led directly to our current state of affairs. Reading this recent post by The Volokh Conspiracy, and watching the protestors last night, I figured I'd discuss a geopolitical theory that I'm surprised I didn't post yet (and because this a blog, this is going to be grossly simplified--I'm just trying to connect the dots, not paint a detailed landscape): how Vietnam is related to our current war on terrorism.On TV last night, I saw a guy in his late 40s or 50s (he looked trim, clean shaven, with a nicely cut shock of graying hair) asked by an interviewer, "why are you here"? He replied, "Well, we made a difference during Vietnam, and I think we're making a difference now."
As for the latter, it's hard to say how--except, as Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds have recently noted, making your cause look distinctly bad to the rest of the country. As to the former, yes, you may have made a difference, but it wasn't the one that you think.
Its possible to tie 9/11 all the way back to Vietnam if you wanted to...
A bombing raid in Baghdad may have caused civilian casualties, the United States central command has acknowledged.It said the US-British coalition used precision-guided weapons to target Iraqi missiles and launchers on Wednesday.
However the missiles were placed in a residential area less than 100 metres (300 feet) from homes, the US central command said in a statement.
Iraqi officials say at least 14 people were killed in a busy residential area of northern Baghdad during an air raid on the city.
Capitalizing on concerns about the costs of war in Iraq, Senate Democrats won a vote today to reduce President Bush's proposed tax cut by half, a rare political defeat for a wartime president.The vote, 51 to 48 with three Republicans breaking ranks and voting against the president, complicates the prospects for enactment of the main element of his economic program, a $726 billion tax cut over 10 years.
The Senate's action showed the willingness of Democrats, even during a war, to challenge the president head-on over domestic priorities. And it was evidence of unease within the president's own party about cutting taxes in the face of rising budget deficits and the unknown cost of disarming, occupying and rebuilding Iraq.
Senator George V. Voinovich of Ohio, one of the Republicans who voted to limit the tax cuts, said: "I happen to believe that we'll have to have troops in there for one year or two years. You're going to at least probably have to spend $2 billion a month next year or next budget just to provide security there."
Five years after voters approved English-only classrooms across California, the popular ballot measure seems to be working.The number of students who speak English well despite having learned a different language at home tripled last year.
Thirty-two percent of California students learning English -- more than 862, 000 -- were able to speak it "proficiently" as measured by the California English Language Development test in the fall of 2002.
The rate was just 11 percent in fall 2001. About 1.8 million students took the test for the first time that year.
State schools chief Jack O'Connell announced the test results Tuesday, offering the first measurable evidence of whether students were making progress in English.
"These results are very exciting for our state," O'Connell said, noting that California had more students learning English than any other state -- about one in four. "Public education is on the right track."
A large contingent of Iraq's elite Republican Guard, including 1,000 vehicles, headed Wednesday toward U.S. marines in central Iraq - an area that already has seen the heaviest fighting of the war.Intelligence officers with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force said the Iraqi forces were headed south from Baghdad on a route that avoids advancing U.S. army forces and leads them directly to the marines who have been fighting in recent days around Nasiriyah. The intelligence officers said about 3,000 Republican Guard troops were spotted in one town along Highway 7 and 2,000 more at another.
The American personality might be characterized as an easygoing, sentimental, fair-minded ruthlessness.We tie yellow ribbons 'round the old oak tree at the same moment we dispatch a wing of B-52s to carpet-bomb the enemy. No murderer in the world gets as many appeals from his conviction as an American murderer. But when we have finished being fair (about the same length of time that a French murderer has to spend in prison before being released), we fry him.
More recently, to show our gentle side, we have taken to killing our murderers with a painless lethal injection. Even amongst our law-abiding citizens, we shock the Europeans with both our generosity and ferocity. We provide for every kid with a pulse to go to college, and then let them sink or swim in the workplace. American workers are lucky to get two weeks of vacation a year, and if an American is out of work, he is, after a few months, out of luck.
In 1996, we repealed the right to welfare payments. Poor people in America have the choice of going to work or going to hell. A few nitwit school boards have outlawed dodgeball: but for most Americans dodgeball is a way of life -- and we aim at the head. Europeans, on the other hand, only permit a fraction of their students to go to college, but then coddle their lazy population with lifetime-guaranteed maintenance and a month and a half of vacation for those who choose to work. Americans consider it a compliment to be called a cowboy. The French take it as an insult.
The current war with Iraq will bring out all these aspects of our national personality. We started by spending six months asking nicely for Saddam to obey the law. When he refused, we asked nicely for our friends to help us enforce the law. When many of them refused, we appealed to their sentiment -- after all, we had helped them out for most of the last century. But when we found out they had a lump of coal where a heart ought to be, we still politely told them we would do it ourselves.
[A]s fighting in Iraq intensifies, all of Britain seems to be falling in behind the prime minister....The "Stop the War Coalition" and other anti-war groups in Britain were always more enthusiastic about opposing U.S. imperialism and less concerned with the welfare of the Iraqi people. At the demonstrations and on the talk-show circuit, U.S. hegemony took center stage and denunciations of Washington always received the most rousing applause. The climax of the Feb. 15 demonstration was a speech delivered by U.S. civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson, who gave an impassioned critique of a U.S. government trying to "divert attentions from problems at home to a war no one wants."...
We preferred to demonize U.S. President George W. Bush rather than appeal for sympathy for the children of Baghdad and Basra.
Mr. Blair understood that the British opposition to the war was more about sticking it to the Yanks and less about the perils of war. Over the past month, he has repeatedly attempted to downplay the American-ness of this war, declaring that he was "truly committed" to disarming Iraq and that "if the Americans were not doing this, I would be pressing for them to be doing so." Mr. Blair knew that by staking his credibility and career on the rightness of this war, he was turning the war into a British domestic issue. No longer was the war only a U.S. war; it was also Mr. Blair's war. By imbuing the war with a distinctly British flavor, the prime minister deflated an anti-war movement that was ostensibly built around the mantra of anti-Americanism.
Mr. Blair did not stop there. In light of the opposition's inability to articulate the plight of the Iraqi people, he cunningly turned the tables and seized the humanitarian argument for the pro-war camp. Borrowing from Mr. Bush's rhetoric, he told us (with solemn conviction) that this war was about "liberating" the people of Iraq. Sure, a few hundred civilians would die from wayward bombs, but in the end, Iraq would be free from a barbarous dictator. Mr. Blair had no qualms about claiming to care about a people whose misery he had neglected during his tenure as prime minister....
If the anti-war movement had wanted to remain relevant, it should have re-examined its stance and shown that lifting sanctions, not making war, was the way to liberate Iraq. It didn't and it is too late now, as war has begun. The movement showed it could make noise, but Mr. Blair's quieter, reasoned delivery won the argument.
Mr. Hasan, a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge, is a former member of the Stop the War Coalition.
There has never been a war with such a high level of disinformation about what exactly is happening on the battlefield as the present conflict in Iraq, according to Israeli researchers and senior military officers. . . .The embedded correspondents give us the impression that we know each little thing that happens. But this is misleading. From NPR this morning, for example, I know about a Marine who, though a trumpeter in a Marine band when stateside, is providing perimeter security in Iraq. I know that between the sand and rain last night, the lack of visibility, and the resulting sense of being alone in enemy territory, he was miserable. This is good reporting and gives me a sense of what it's like to be a Marine in Iraq, but it tells me nothing about the war. If I know little about this particular Marine detachment, I know nothing about the many Special Forces teams in Iraq (including, reportedly, in Baghdad) and, by the way, what ever happened to the rumored division attacking from the west?
According to Shahak, Israelis are "frustrated that the Iraqi regime has still not collapsed, which would suit us. You don't hear such frustration expressed in the U.S. over the pace of the campaign. [Ha - dgc] I didn't think that it was possible to win a war like this and bring about the collapse of a regime within three days. I would counsel patience. The Americans are very determined to go all the way." . . .
Most of those interviewed agree that, paradoxically, despite the unprecedented media coverage of the war, including the many correspondents who are embedded in fighting units, nobody knows what is really happening in Iraq. Yossi Peled, former GOC Northern Command, thinks the U.S. has shown great skill in its control of the media. "You have lots of television crews in the field, yet as someone watching TV you have no overall picture."
Military historian Prof. Martin van Creveld goes further: "Everyone is lying about everything all the time, and it is difficult to say what is happening. I've stopped listening. All the pictures shown on TV are color pieces which have no significance."
"There is a lot of disinformation," he concludes. "Every word that is spoken is suspect."
Shahak says that until now the American's have managed to conceal their true battle plan. "Do you know what the Americans have planned? I don't. They also never said (what they were planning to do). How do you topple a regime in 48 hours? In a week? Seventeen days? If we don't want to make fools of ourselves, we should wait patiently. It would just be arrogant to judge from what we see on TV."
Metalworkers in Sao Paulo are to begin an indefinite strike--on Wednesday--to demand wage increases amid growing indications that President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's honeymoon is coming to an end.With 20,000 workers of a 750,000-strong union picketing on Wednesday, it is the first large-scale industrial action since Mr Lula da Silva, himself a former Sao Paulo metalworker and union leader, took office on January 1.
Although the strike is primarily directed at employers, it reflects growing dissatisfaction with the new government over high unemployment and inflation. The Sao Paulo metalworkers' union, which belongs to the opposition Forca Sindical union federation, usually renegotiates wages in November but is claiming that consumer price increases have already eroded the last increase. "With that kind of inflation, we couldn't wait," said Eleno Jose Bezerra, the union president.
The strike comes after growing criticism in recent days that the Lula da Silva administration, despite good intentions, is moving too slowly to tackle key social and economic problems.
While the government has earned plaudits for its fiscal and monetary austerity, critics say too many meetings and discussions are holding up tax and social security reforms and hampering its flagship anti-famine project.
"The government has the right analysis of what this country needs . . . but administratively it is still stumbling on many issues," Horacio Lafer, the head of Fiesp, the influential Sa~o Paulo industry federation, said this week.
A good place for the U.S. to start rebuffing ... European conceit would be to throw over the side the U.N.'s corrupt oil-for-food program.U.N. Security Council members have been haggling this week over the fate of that program and the $40 billion said to be sitting in its escrow accounts....
But while Secretary-General Kofi Annan has proposed a resolution that would give him interim authority over the program and allow him to start the flow of humanitarian supplies, France and Russia have declared they will block anything acknowledging that the status quo has changed. Jacques Chirac says he will "not accept" any resolution that "would legitimize the military intervention" and "give the belligerents the powers to administer Iraq."
As usual, the French and Russian position has more to do with commercial interests than any principled opposition to "legitimizing" the use of force. Oil-for-food has been a giant racket whereby Saddam has rewarded the firms of friendly countries with U.N.-approved contracts and kept most of the food for his Baathist allies.
Now, the French are apparently trying to use their U.N. powers of veto over the disposition of the $40 billion in escrow to obtain a continuation of Saddam-era contracts. (See here for signs of French confidence.) Meanwhile, Kofi Annan apparently wants authority to spend the whole $40 billion himself, not just $1 billion or so in "expenses."
During the run-up to the Iraq war, the U.N. failed to show it could play a positive role in international events. If it withholds the $40 billion escrow accounts from the Iraqi people, the U.N. will show that it plays a negative and obstructionist role. I think the Bush administration can reasonably take a hard line in these negotiations.
I assume they have good intelligence on Kofi Annan's Swiss bank accounts, and will soon have proof of French and Russian collaboration with Saddam. I expect they will negotiate by publicly making nice while privately threatening to expose malfeasance and to suspend U.S. contributions to the U.N. I expect they'll succeed in getting the $40 billion to its rightful owners, the Iraqi people.
Friend Paul Cella noted a fact about one of our casualties that somehow seems especially poignant. Where else but America have so many successive generations fought, and died for the same ideal: "You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments: rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the universe."
President Roh Moo-hyun said Wednesday that the government's decision to send troops to Iraq is in line with its plan to deal wisely with the nuclear crisis on the peninsula and secure peace. "The decision was made based on strategic and practical reasons," he said. "Logic or justice was not the top consideration."Speaking at the commencement ceremony for the 3rd Military Academy, President Roh said, "When Korea-U.S. relations are steadier, it will be possible to solve the nuclear problem and improve relations between the North and the United States."
Roh promised that no war here disapproved by South Korea would occur, and said that Korea-U.S.-Japan relations must be strengthened. "Because of practical reasons like these, the government decided to send troops to the Iraq war," he said.
Roh asked for the public's understanding, saying, "Peace on the peninsula was given top priority in making the decision."
Roh doesn't sound very gung ho, but as Harry points out, we'll need infantry in the months ahead to keep the country secure, and all help is appreciated. Thanks, Korea.
After a series of setbacks, and with the advance on Baghdad delayed by sandstorms, the invasion forces were badly in need of some positive developments yesterday.
The first success of the day - which came just at the right moment for prime-time television news in the UK - was a claim by the British military that a "popular uprising" against Saddam Hussein's regime had broken out in Basra....Until now, Shia organisations in southern Iraq have been very wary of getting involved in the war. In 1991, the US encouraged them to rebel but then abandoned them to their fate at the hands of Saddam's merciless men.
In Nassiriya yesterday, US officers said they had found 3,000 chemical protection suits and large quantities of nerve gas antidote at a hospital which had been used as a base by Iraqi soldiers fighting the invasion. This is being interpreted as evidence that Iraq may be prepared to use chemical weapons.However, the "antidote" - atropine - also has routine medical uses for treating heart patients and some respiratory conditions.
Allied forces have shifted the focus of their land campaign in Iraq to concentrate on defeating the fedayeen and other militias serving Saddam Hussein in the south before beginning the battle for Baghdad, senior officers said tonight...."We will go to where the enemy is," a senior American military official said tonight....
The British moves came amid reports of rebellion in the Shiite-dominated city and harsh reprisals by security forces loyal to Mr. Hussein's government.
A woman who waved to British forces on the outskirts of the city was later found hanged, an American officer said, and the Iraqis moved D-30 artillery in place to shell rebellious residents....
The turn of events in Iraq is likely to raise questions about the influence of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on military planning. Mr. Rumsfeld had rejected the doctrine of overwhelming force promulgated by Colin L. Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the current secretary of state.
THE BBC was last night sensationally condemned for “one-sided” war coverage — by its own front line defence correspondent.Paul Adams attacks the Beeb for misreporting the Allied advance in a blistering memo leaked to The Sun.
And he warned the BBC’s credibility is at risk for suggesting British troops are paying a “high price for small victories”.
On Monday, he wrote from US Central Command in Qatar: “I was gobsmacked to hear, in a set of headlines today, that the coalition was suffering ‘significant casualties’.
“This is simply NOT TRUE. Nor is it true to say — as the same intro stated — that coalition forces are fighting ‘guerrillas’.
“It may be guerrilla warfare, but they are not guerrillas.”
Adams’ memo was fired off to TV news head Roger Mosey, Radio news boss Stephen Mitchell and other Beeb chiefs.
It adds stunning weight to allegations that BBC coverage on all its networks is biased against the war.
In one blast, he storms: “Who dreamed up the line that the coalition are achieving ‘small victories at a very high price?’
“The truth is exactly the opposite.
“The gains are huge and the costs still relatively low. This is real warfare, however one-sided, and losses are to be expected.”
Even Iraqi loyalists, at least at the level of common men and women, say privately that, this time, the long years may be up. But they, and other Iraqis who do not support Mr. Hussein, have found themselves in something like an accord in recent days over the nightmare than could lie ahead.In one family today, among professional, middle-class people who have long yearned for a freer Iraq unburdened by sanctions and repression, there was one obsessive concern. It was similar to the one that mesmerized this and similar families after President Bush gave Mr. Hussein and his two sons an ultimatum last week to quit Iraq within 48 hours, or face war.
Then, it was how long Iraqis had to wait for the first American airstrikes and the ground assault from Kuwait. Today, with the invaders more than 300 miles closer to Baghdad, the question was the same: How long would America take to close its account with Mr. Hussein?
The family members, fearful of being described in any way that could make them identifiable, said that they were scared to death by the success that Iraqi irregular troops, among them the most fanatical of his zealots, have had in delaying and harassing the American troops on their drive up the Euphrates River valley.
If similar groups make a fight for Baghdad, as most Iraqis believe they will, the family said, the new freedoms they had hoped to celebrate could come at too high a price in shattered Iraqi lives. [...]
But much more than that, they said, they feared what might befall Iraqis like themselves if, faced with continued stiff resistance by Mr. Hussein's troops, Mr. Bush did what his father did at the end of the Persian Gulf war in 1991, and decided that a settlement was preferable to a long and grisly campaign to topple Mr. Hussein.
"That is our nightmare," one of the men said, "and we ask, `What will Mr. Bush do to help us then?' "
Even before the war, Iraqis had begun to borrow from an imagined future, speaking out, here and there, as though new freedoms had already arrived. After the conflict started, this continued for a few days, encouraged by the fact that Mr. Hussein had disappeared from view after the American attempt to kill him with the cruise missile attack that began the war before dawn on Thursday. But then, on Monday, he reappeared with a lengthy television speech calling for Iraqi militiamen to "cut the throats" of the Americans, and the old anxieties were back in full measure, all over town. [...]
If it is a conundrum how Mr. Hussein has maintained his power in a capital where the government appears to have just about shut down, the answer lies in the pattern that American troops ran into on their drive north from Kuwait.
Although the Iraqi leader has always had iron control of the government and the army, the heart of his power has lain outside the formal institutions of the state, and especially in the shadowy network of irregular militia units and security agencies that report to members of his family. It is those elements that have now become crucial to sustaining his power.
In the neighborhoods of Baghdad, Iraqis have been observing for weeks the dispersal of those militias with strong personal loyalties to Mr. Hussein. Heavily armed, and often traveling in white pickup trucks, those men — from the militia formations of the ruling Baath Party, from fanatical groups of fedayeen, or martyrs for God, who wear black coveralls and black face masks, and from the private armies of tribal leaders who have sworn fealty to Mr. Hussein — are likely to be among the last groups to desert him, Iraqis say. For similar reasons, they have been the shock troops of the Iraqi leader's resistance, so far, to the American troops advancing from the south.
Coalition aircraft hit the Iraqi TV station in Baghdad, knocking the state-run TV off the air, U.S. officials told Fox News.The state-run TV signal was lost after 4 a.m. after large explosions were heard in and around Baghdad. The pre-dawn raid came after a several-hours-long lull in allied bombing.
U.S. military officials told Fox News they were optimistic Iraq's state TV was down for the count. The channel could not be seen in Baghdad after the raid, but satellite transmissions continued with periodic breakups.
U.S. officials also told Fox News that the station's proximity to the Ministry of Information, which also houses foreign media and is located a block away, raised concerns about collateral damage. But the TV station was a necessary target, they said, because it was believed the facility was being used as a meeting place by regime leadership and may have played a dual military/civilian role.
The fighting began at 8:30 p.m. Monday local time (12:30 p.m. ET Monday) when about 200 Iraqi troops ambushed the 500-vehicle convoy at night along the western bank of the Euphrates.Red tracers arched back and forth as the Iraqis, dug in a hundred yards back on each side of the road, traded fire with the U.S. troops. The U.S. forces poured high-explosive shells into the Iraqi positions, and the Iraqis responded with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, hitting two U.S. trucks and a Humvee.
The encounter ended soon after squadron commander Lt. Col. Terry Ferrell ordered his soldiers to fire howitzers at the Iraqis. The radio crackled with taut voices barking grid references, then six orange fireballs blossomed over the Iraqi positions. A pair of A-10 Warthog jets delivered the final blow, dropping bombs, then strafing the enemy position.
That was just the start.
Just before midnight local time (about 4 p.m. ET) in the streets on the edge of Al Faysaliyah, just west of the Euphrates, the Iraqis attacked again.
Dozens of Iraqi militiamen hit the convoy with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns. The convoy dispersed up side streets, but the leading elements headed for a bridge that seemed to offer an avenue of escape.
The bridge held up under the first five vehicles but buckled under the 70-ton weight of an Abrams tank, plunging the tank into a gulch. The crew escaped uninjured, but Ferrell had no choice but to turn all 500 vehicles in the convoy around to find another route.
In the darkness and confusion, with Iraqis continuing to fire on the convoy, two more tanks and a fuel truck rolled into ditches. Of the three tanks that had fallen into ditches, Ferrell managed to put two back on the road, but he had to abandon the other tank and the fuel truck. The squadron then retraced its way through the town, knocking out Iraqis, some firing rocket-propelled grenades.
Once out of town, the convoy continued pushing north toward Baghdad. A few hours later, as dawn approached, U.S. soldiers spotted Iraqis armed with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades about 1,000 yards from the road on each side.
The fight was on again.
With his convoy strung out for many miles behind him and his troops weary from almost 10 continuous hours of combat, Ferrell called in airstrikes. Within minutes, two more A-10s dropped eight 500-pound bombs and raked the Iraqi positions with cannon fire, setting two tree lines ablaze.
"It looks like 'Apocalypse Now,'" Air Force Tech. Sgt. Michael Keehan, Ferrell's senior enlisted tactical air controller, said with a look of pride.
The troops watching the burning tree lines could now see buildings among the trees. A man came running from one house, waving a white cloth and screaming that his family had been hurt.
He was told to bring his family to the road, where a medical team patched up a 4-year-old boy, a pregnant woman and two men, one in his late teens, the other in his 30s. All had shrapnel in their legs.
Maj. Todd Albright, a doctor, predicted a full recovery for all the victims except one man who would probably lose a foot. The family was driven away in an Iraqi ambulance.
Ferrell gave his troops two hours to catch their breath. He estimated his squadron had killed 150 Iraqi militia troops — not including those killed by the A-10s — with no casualties among his own soldiers.
Iraqi troops fired artillery pieces horizontally into crowds of their own people last night after a civilian uprising in Basra, the second city.Watching British troops encircling the city of 1.3 million inhabitants said there were "horrific" scenes. One officer said: "We have seen a large crowd on the streets. The Iraqis are firing artillery at their own people. There will be carnage."
Last night Maj Gen Robin Brims, commander of the British forces surrounding Basra, was making plans to move tanks of the 7th Armoured Brigade into the city centre today to help the rebels and try to prevent slaughter.
British commanders were cautiously optimistic about a sudden collapse of the Iraqi regime in Basra. Maj Gen Peter Wall, deputy British commander in the Gulf, said that although the uprising seemed to be in its "infancy" the allies were planning to exploit the situation. [...]
Western intelligence officials said the trouble started when Ali Hassan al-Majid, one of Saddam Hussein's closest aides, who is in charge of the south, ordered the execution of a Shi'ite Ba'ath Party leader.
The rebels were later observed by British troops. The Army said its artillery spotting equipment also picked up Iraqi weaponry being fired at short range at targets within Basra.
British artillery targeted the Iraqi emplacements, and the Ba'ath Party headquarters, home of pro-Saddam forces within the city, was destroyed by laser-guided bombs from US aircraft.
Later British forces took "significant action" against mortars and artillery pieces in Basra. An official said: "They have all been destroyed."
Tank commanders from the Black Watch battle group, part of the 7th Armoured Brigade, the Desert Rats, had been urgently seeking permission to intervene. But British commanders decided to wait for daylight.
One officer said: "If we were to go in darkness that is not a good time to be able to identify civilians and distinguish them from people fighting for Saddam. That is not an easy task in daylight but it will be much easier than when it is dark and difficult to see clearly."
The decision to delay intervention disappointed the troops, with several expressing frustration that they were unable to go to the immediate assistance of the protesters.
MORE:
Shiites Rise Up Against Saddam (AP, March 25, 2003)
In a telephone interview with Al-Jazeera television, Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed al-Sahhaf denied any uprising in Basra."The situation is stable," he said. "Resistance is continuing and we are teaching them more lessons."
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he had not seen reports of an uprising in Basra, but was aware that fedayeen guerrillas loyal to Saddam were infiltrating the city.
Rumsfeld said he was "reluctant" to encourage uprisings explicitly. "I guess those of us my age remember uprisings in Eastern Europe back in the 1950s when they rose up and they were slaughtered," he said. "I am very careful about encouraging people to rise up. We know there are people in those cities ready to shoot them if they try to rise up."
But he added: "Anyone who's engaged in an uprising has a whole lot of courage and I sure hope they're successful." [...]
"The humanitarian situation in Basra is difficult, and very, very tense," said Muin Kassis of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in neighboring Jordan.
Attempts by The Associated Press to reach Basra residents by telephone were unsuccessful, but international relief agencies had satellite-phone contact with aid workers in the city and expressed deep concern about the fate of trapped civilians.
"It's very alarming, very critical," said Veronique Taveau of the U.N. humanitarian office for Iraq.
The decision to embark on military operations in Iraq last week produced something unfamiliar in our politics: the sense of the genuinely tragic — by which I mean not the sad or the catastrophic, but the awareness of desperately constrained choices, profound moral risk, the knowledge of the cost of what we do, even when we do it from conviction.
The vast antiwar movement in the world shows that a "large part of humanity" has repudiated the idea of war as a means of resolving conflicts between nations, Pope John Paul II said in a message released Tuesday.
Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly, but not alone: in a parting irony, he will take the UN down with him. Well, not the whole UN. The "good works" part will survive, the low-risk peacekeeping bureaucracies will remain, the chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat. What will die is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions.As free Iraqis document the quarter-century nightmare of Saddam's rule, let us not forget who held that the moral authority of the international community was enshrined in a plea for more time for inspectors, and who marched against "regime change". In the spirit of postwar reconciliation that diplomats are always eager to engender, we must not reconcile the timid, blighted notion that world order requires us to recoil before rogue states that terrorise their own citizens and menace ours. [...]
In the heady aftermath of the allied victory, the hope that security could be made collective was embodied in the UN security council - with abject results. During the cold war the security council was hopelessly paralysed. The Soviet empire was wrestled to the ground, and eastern Europe liberated, not by the UN, but by the mother of all coalitions, Nato. Apart from minor skirmishes and sporadic peacekeeping missions, the only case of the security council acting during the cold war was its use of force to halt the invasion of South Korea - and that was only possible because the Soviets were not in the chamber to veto it. It was a mistake they did not make again.
Facing Milosevic's multiple aggressions, the UN could not stop the Balkan wars or even protect its victims. It took a coalition of the willing to save Bosnia from extinction. And when the war was over, peace was made in Dayton, Ohio, not in the UN. The rescue of Muslims in Kosovo was not a UN action: their cause never gained security council approval. The United Kingdom, not the United Nations, saved the Falklands.
This new century now challenges the hopes for a new world order in new ways. We will not defeat or even contain fanatical terror unless we can carry the war to the territories from which it is launched. This will sometimes require that we use force against states that harbour terrorists, as we did in destroying the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The most dangerous of these states are those that also possess weapons of mass destruction. Iraq is one, but there are others. Whatever hope there is that they can be persuaded to withdraw support or sanctuary from terrorists rests on the certainty and effectiveness with which they are confronted. The chronic failure of the security council to enforce its own resolutions is unmistakable: it is simply not up to the task. We are left with coalitions of the willing. Far from disparaging them as a threat to a new world order, we should recognise that they are, by default, the best hope for that order, and the true alternative to the anarchy of the abject failure of the UN.
Dr Ahmed Chalabi addressed the Iraqi people from Northern Iraq on the arabic language of Radio Sawa, which is widely listened to throughout Iraq. He spoke shortly after the announcement of the Coalition action to liberate Iraq saying:“The hour of liberation has come. Your dark night is coming to an end.”
A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."
Information's free flow is a great treasure of true liberty. Merely forming and voicing an opinion is NOT what makes free speech so valuable. The protected right itself is surely sacred, but it is powerless or even harmful without truth (e.g. yelling "fire" in the crowded theater or words from the Iraqi "Information" minister). Like all rights, free speech exists in a tenuous vacuum unless counterbalanced by a correlative responsibility.Mindless slogan chanting, while clearly free speech, is indicative of exercising a right in the absence of its responsibility. One could argue that it is freedom - but only for personal freedom's sake. It surely is not freedom for truth's sake. It's like running an engine on dirty or improper fuel.
Freedom to form and voice an opinion based on access to unimpeded information or that which would lead to deciphering the truth -- now THAT's liberty's treasure at its fullest.
In Iraq's case, there are surely 100's of thousands if not millions who would trade their oil for truth. They know the only way to operate their burgeoning engine of free speech is on truth's cleanest fuel. After all, they've lived under the antithesis for generations. They embrace anybody who will listen with the truth about the evil oppression in their country rather than stories of untold oil riches that could be plundered.
In the end, as from the beginning, fully embracing the Truth is the only way to real freedom - physically and spiritually.
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (John 8:32, KJV)
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We pray without ceasing for Victory: Swift, Clean, Decisive and LiberatingJohn Resnick
And this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their deeds were evil.
-John 3:19-21
But, for the nonce, it is a great honor to be a citizen of one of the few countries that are taking our responsibilities as seriously as our rights, fighting against the darkness, and hopefully helping the Iraqi people to find their voices, speak the truth, and see the light after a long, long night.
France is drawing up plans to win French companies access to lucrative oil and reconstruction contracts [in postwar Iraq], officials said Tuesday....Officials in Paris say French firms' experience in working in Iraq would be an advantage....
Munier said he believes American companies will have difficulties in Iraq because of widespread anger against the U.S.-led bombing campaign.
"I don't see how American executives can work when their lives will be at risk," he said. "There will be such hatred toward Americans."
Munier criticized French companies for negotiating with American companies for a piece of their businesses in Iraq, saying that such "collaboration" would damage the image of French business among Iraqis.
"Food, water, sleeping bags -- we don't really ask for a whole lot more than that," says Lt. Antonelli. In less than an hour, only a few white landing pads remained.But Cpl. Justin Palmer, of Tracy, Calif., points out one more essential: baby wipes. The moist, disposable cloths are the only means of bathing for troops without access to showers, and are especially welcome at this sandy outpost where the labor is strenuous and the constant exposure to fuel adds to the mess. Asked what he'd like to say to the people back home, Cpl. Palmer immediately replies: "Please send more baby wipes."
Friend Kevin Whited comments on an essay by former assistant Secratary of State Martin Indyk which, I kid you not, contains the following sentence:
It's too late to salvage the Security Council consensus that would have legitimized this war against Iraq.
Franks counteracted by throwing into the arena a secret weapon, a 3,000-man opposition Shiite militia organized by Majid al-Khoei, the 34-year old son of Ayatollah Khoei, the legendary spiritual leader of Iraq’s Shiites. The militia, trained and funded by the US war command, waited in Qatar for the signal to go into action.Monday night, March 25, the Shiite militiamen reached the southern outskirts of Basra ...
Major General Peter Wall, the second in command of British troops, confirmed the reports but said the situation was not yet fully understood."I'm confirming that there are events in Basra," Wall said. "We don't know what has spurred them, we don't know the scale, we don't know the scope of it. We don't know where it will take us."
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene yesterday in an ongoing argument over the proper boundaries for federal surveillance of suspected terrorists, rebuffing an attempt by civil liberties advocates to challenge the Bush administration on the issue.The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and Arab American groups had asked the high court to consider whether the government had gone too far in permitting information gathered with secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to be used in criminal prosecutions.
The justices declined to allow the groups to intervene in the case, but they did not issue a decision on the merits of either side.
The ACLU had taken the novel step of filing an appeal on behalf of people who did not know they were being monitored in an attempt to bring the case before the high court. The organization said it was disappointed but not surprised by the justices' decision to reject that effort.
"It was an unusual case because there was no one able to appeal the government's power to spy on ordinary Americans," said Ann Beeson, the ACLU's associate legal director. "We are not going to give up on our many different attempts to challenge these new spying powers."
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft praised the decision and defended "the government's lawful actions to detect and prevent international terrorism and espionage within our borders.
OPPRESSED by decades of brutal dictatorship, Iraq's Shia Muslim city of Basra was supposed to rise against Saddam Hussein and greet US and British soldiers as liberators.But nearly a week into the campaign, there is little evidence so far that the coalition forces are welcome in the southern Iraqi capital, and even fears that they are regarded as invaders by locals.
Although no major population centre has yet been captured and secured by American and British forces, anecdotal evidence suggests that ordinary Iraqis have decidedly mixed views about the war, and regard the new arrivals with deep suspicion.
The view was confirmed at Safwan, scene of one of Saddam's most brutal purges in 1991, and the first settlement reached by British and American forces. Although some villagers clapped and cheered at the sight of the first coalition armour, others demanded to know why the troops had come. One asked: "Are you going to steal our oil?" [...]
The Americans and British are blamed for failing to overthrow Saddam after the Gulf War in 1991 and allowing him brutally to suppress uprisings by Shias and Kurds.
[T]he US-Kurdish relationship is strained by differences regarding Kirkuk. The Kurds see the oil-rich city, Iraq's fourth-largest, as a traditional Kurdish settlement and thus a primary war objective. Turkey fears that Kurdish control of such a vital economic asset would provoke separatist unrest among its own Kurdish population. The Americans want to assuage both parties for the short-term war effort.Mullah Sheikh, a senior commander of the peshmerga guerrillas in Chamchamal, said: "We are being told that Kirkuk may not be an objective until after Baghdad is encircled. This is an American idea, not a Kurdish one."
Others were even more derogatory, despite yesterday's airstrikes. "The Americans are being slowed in the south for the same reasons they are delayed in the north," Saddiq Ahmad, 34, of the communist opposition in Chamchamal, said. "They have embraced no Iraqi opposition into their war, so the people of al-Nasiriyah see them only as a foreign army and will not rise up to help them, just as the people of Kirkuk see the Americans.
"We are hearing reports from the media that our peshmerga are to operate under US command, but so far few commanders on the ground are being told to co-operate."
The Moral Idiocy of James Carroll (H.D. Miller, March 25, 2003, Travelling Shoes)
He Who is Sensibly Shod chastises the insufferable James Carroll for essentially declaring Saddam Hussein's Iraq morally equivalent to George W. Bush's Washington.
Blair was just as focused as Bush on disarming Iraq but showed more genuine interest than Bush in building international cooperation to combat the threats of terrorism and weapons proliferation.Bush, in his address, was dismissive of nations that resisted the war. "These governments share our assessment of the danger," he said, "but not our resolve to meet it."
Blair recognized that the conflict between the United States and Europe over Iraq draws on deeper currents: Europe's failure to understand how dramatically the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have "changed the psychology of America," and America's failure to recognize the fear in Europe and elsewhere that the U.S. now intends to flex its muscle without much regard for the views of others.
To heal the breach, Blair offered Bush good advice. The best way to reduce resentment of America's preponderant power, he suggested, is to channel that power into an international system of shared responsibilities and common priorities.
Confronting Iraq, Blair argued, should be part of "a larger global agenda," with new initiatives "on poverty and sustainable development, democracy and human rights" and an international effort to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace. In words that seemed to be aimed at Bush and French President Jacques Chirac, Blair offered the U.S. and Europe a guidepost for reconciliation: "Partners are not servants, but neither are they rivals."
McCain had some equally wise counsel for Bush on the home front. In a statement on the Senate floor, McCain made a point that should be obvious. With the federal budget already groaning under massive deficits and the nation facing unknown costs from the war-- plus the costs of helping rebuild Iraq while strengthening our defenses against terrorist attacks at home -- this is no time for the huge additional tax cuts Bush has proposed.
"No one," McCain said, "can be expected to make an informed decision on fiscal policy at this time ... with the near, mid- and long-term costs of defending this country unknown."
All evidence suggests Bush isn't listening much to Blair or McCain. The White House is still pressing Congress for a tax cut of at least $725 billion. And the administration is drawing plans to maximize American, rather than international, control over a post-Hussein Iraq.
Such obstinacy, amid persuasive criticism, is the flip side of Bush's commitment to defanging Iraq. The rapid progress of U.S. forces through the Iraqi desert seems almost a physical manifestation of Bush's determination to impose his will. But so do the suspicion of America abroad and the mounting deficits at home.
Meanwhile, even after the tax cut the budget defecits are negligible in historic terms and should be considered separately from the question of the war. Mr. McCain pushes things like scrapping the tax cuts because journalists like Mr. Brownstein lap it up, not because it would be good for the economy, which could use a stimulative shot in the arm.
The president of Somalia's transitional government has condemned the United States-led attack on Iraq as naked aggression.Abdulkassim Salat Hassan said he was praying for an Iraqi victory.
Somalia has denied repeated accusations that it is harbouring members of the al-Qaeda network.
Six days into the war against Iraq, the United States has yet to knock Iraqi TV off the air.Defense officials and military experts say the Pentagon made a calculated decision to keep Iraq's state-run network running so it could monitor broadcasts and follow the activities of Saddam Hussein and Iraq's political leadership.
U.S. officials also feared civilian casualties if they destroyed transmitting equipment, defense officials say.
On Monday, a Pentagon official said the United States would eventually take over Iraq's TV network once Saddam is removed from power to keep the Iraqi people informed of developments.
Another possible factor in the decision: The Bush administration wants as little damage to the country's infrastructure as possible because the United States will have to foot the bill for rebuilding Iraq.
A U.S. missile hit a passenger bus on the Iraqi side of the border as it carried Syrian civilians fleeing the war, killing five people and wounding 10, Syria's official news agency reported Monday.The bus was transporting 37 passengers when it was struck by the air-to-surface missile Sunday near the border of the two countries, the agency reported. Syrian officials refused a request by The Associated Press to go to an area near the site Monday.
A U.S. Central Command spokeswoman had no information on the report. She said, however, that U.S. forces do not target civilians and that they fire very carefully, using precision-guided missiles against military targets.
The Syrian agency said the wounded were taken to a Syrian hospital near the border and the dead were sent to a hospital outside the Syrian capital, Damascus. Officials reported relatives had retrieved the bodies.
"F___ Saddam. We're taking him out." Those were the words of President George W. Bush, who had poked his head into the office of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. It was March 2002, and Rice was meeting with three U.S. Senators, discussing how to deal with Iraq through the United Nations, or perhaps in a coalition with America's Middle East allies. Bush wasn't interested. He waved his hand dismissively, recalls a participant, and neatly summed up his Iraq policy in that short phrase. The Senators laughed uncomfortably; Rice flashed a knowing smile. The President left the room.A year later, Bush's outburst has been translated into action, as cruise missiles and smart bombs slam into Baghdad. But the apparent simplicity of his message belies the gravity at hand. Sure, the outcome is certain: America will win the war, and Saddam will be taken out. But what is unfolding in Iraq is far bigger than regime change or even the elimination of dangerous weapons. The U.S. has launched a war unlike any it has fought in the past. This one is being waged not to defend against an enemy that has attacked the U.S. or its interests but to pre-empt the possibility that one day it might do so. The war has turned much of the world against America. Even in countries that have joined the "coalition of the willing," big majorities view it as the impetuous action of a superpower led by a bully. This divide threatens to emasculate a United Nations that failed to channel a diplomatic
settlement or brand the war as legitimate. The endgame will see the U.S. front and center, attempting to remake not merely Iraq but the entire region. The hope is that the Middle East, a cockpit of instability for decades, will eventually settle into habits of democracy, prosperity and peace. The risks are that Washington's rupture with some of its closest allies will deepen and that the war will become a cause for which a new generation of terrorists can be recruited.
Has there ever been a president who worked harder than Bush to conciliate and befriend his opponents? He appointed a Democrat, Norman Mineta, to his Cabinet, and put another Democrat, John DiIulio, in charge of his signature faith-based initiative. He signed a bill that affixed Robert Kennedy's name to the Justice Department building; renominated Clinton judges whose nominations had lapsed when President Clinton's term ended; compromised his education bill to accommodate Democratic ideas; and rarely, if ever, criticized any Democratic officeholder.Yet all this symbolic and substantive bipartisanship has done Bush no good. Joe Lieberman, the would-be Mr. Nice Guy of American politics, said in December that Bush had made Washington "more partisan" than ever before. Bush, the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne reported in January, "has become a deeply polarizing figure, winning near-universal support within his own party while sowing deep resentment in the opposition."
"Resentment" isn't the half of it. In a Feb. 12 speech on the Senate floor, West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd damned Bush as "reckless and arrogant." In December, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry accused Bush of "making a conscious decision to ... dominate the discussion with Iraq" in order to divert attention from the nation's economic difficulties. Ted Kennedy -- whom Bush courted and lavishly praised in 2001 -- on March 4 accused Bush of rushing into an "unnecessary war."
As Kennedy's words suggest, leading Democrats are now stepping beyond criticism to lend aid and comfort to the antiwar movement in the United
States and Europe. By adopting the movement's rhetoric, they blur the distinction between the mainstream Democratic Party and the far left. It's important to understand that today's antiwar movement is a very different beast -- more ambitious and more sinister -- than the antiwar movement of the 1960s.I attended the first of the big antiwar marches in London in October 2002 and was struck by the prevalence of radical Muslim groups and chants. All that was missing were the facsimile suicide-bomber belts.
Now, the antiwar movement is turning to more direct action. In Europe, Italian antiwar protesters have blocked train stations in an effort to halt the transport of military equipment; here in the United States, the protesters are tying up traffic and trying to shut down cities.
The Democratic Party nearly destroyed itself in the 1970s and '80s by inviting in the anti-Vietnam radicals of the '60s. In the '90s, moderate Democrats vowed never to repeat the previous generation's mistake: Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate in 1992 very largely because Gore was one of the few Democratic senators to have cast a vote in favor of the Gulf War resolution. Gore, in turn, selected Lieberman as his running mate on the strength of Lieberman's reputation as a foreign-policy hawk.
The Democrats' hatred of Bush, though, is leading them to forget this painfully earned wisdom and revert to the bad habits of the recent past.
Once our forces are ringing Baghdad ... the world is going to witness the first post-modern siege....Once the last die-hard Saddamites are corralled in Baghdad (and, perhaps, in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, a city that just brings out the nuclear side of my character), we're going to work 'em like history's biggest cat batting around a blind, three-legged mouse.
Allied special operations forces - already in Baghdad - will be prowling the hallways and alleys, taking direct action against the regime's remaining supporters, collecting information for precision strikes and working with the growing Iraqi resistance.
There is a popular uprising in the city of Basra.People are rising up against the ruling Ba'ath regime, we are being told by military intelligence officers there that they have had enough.
Iraqi soldiers in the city are actually firing mortar rounds on their own people.
[W]e've taken casualties and American soldiers have been captured - doesn't that mean we're in trouble? No. I wish it were otherwise, but, in any war - especially one of this magnitude - soldiers die, suffer wounds, or fall into enemy hands. We cherish every servicemember and mourn every loss. But, to be frank, our losses thus far are remarkably low, given the scale of our enterprise.We may lose considerably higher numbers of casualties before this war is over. But I can promise you that our military commanders are relieved by the low level of our losses to date.
Are the Iraqis really trying to lure us deep into their country so they can spring a trap on our forces? The Iraqis have no choice in the matter. Our troops go where they want to go.
Yes, the Iraqis are probably planning a large military confrontation, an operational-level ambush, close to Baghdad - while forces remaining in our rear area attack our supply lines. They may even have left some of the bridges across the Euphrates standing on purpose.
If so, it was a grave error. If those Republican Guards divisions confront our forces, they simply will not survive. Even if their plan includes the use of chemical weapons.
Thus far, our troops have performed magnificently, seizing an ever-growing list of airfields, bridges, roads, oil fields and other critical infrastructure, enabling us to maneuver swiftly and freely, while preserving the backbone of Iraq's economy for its people. And we prevented an ecological catastrophe, although those on the left will never credit us for doing so.
Even if the Iraqis have some ambitious master plan they still believe they can spring on us, they never expected to lose so much of their country so quickly. They are reeling; any plan could only be executed piecemeal, at this point.
After less than four days of ground operations, the Iraqis have lost control over half their country, they have lost control over most of their military, and allied forces are closing in on Baghdad.
But what about the "Battle of Baghdad"? Will it be a bloodbath? Haven't the Iraqis already lured us into urban warfare in the south? No. The Iraqis haven't lured us into anything. We have consistently imposed our plan and our will upon the enemy. While there have been some incidences of urban combat to date, with friendly casualties, our forces are far better prepared for such encounters than are the Iraqis. The Marine Corps, especially, has been training intensively in urban environments.
We are not going to be lured into a "Stalingrad" in Baghdad. Ignore the prophets of doom, who have been wrong consistently. As this column has steadily maintained, we have time, but Saddam doesn't. If we have to sit in a ring around Baghdad for several weeks while the last resistance is dismantled in innovative ways, then that's what we'll do.
Grave dangers lie ahead. Only a fool would underestimate them. But this war is not being run against a clock. The counsel that we must all be patient and let our troops do their jobs remains the best a former soldier can offer.
As long as the American people keep their perspective - which they will - it really doesn't matter how many journalists lose theirs.
The weekly al-Usbu' al-Siyassi reported that Morocco offered the U.S. forces a large number of monkeys, some from Morocco's Atlas Mountains and others imported, to use for detonating land mines planted by the Iraqis.
With a camera strapped to his fin, the bottle-nose dolphin is one of about 100 dolphins and sea lions helping to clear shipping lanes in the Gulf to ensure a safe passage for vessels.
Meanwhile in Bradenton, the Pirates also have played a couple of exhibitions against college teams this spring. In one of them, they were held to four hits and one run in a four-inning stint by Duquesne walk-on freshman Bob Hartle -- a guy who had actually been cut from the team last fall.Hartle, whose fastball peaked at 75 mph, told the Beaver County Times' John Perrotto: "I'd like to tell you I fooled them, but I don't think they were really used to my speed."
Well, after that spectacle, pitcher Salomon Torres was determined that he wasn't going to get embarrassed in a charity game against Manatee Community College. So he used his whole repertoire in two shutout innings.
"Guys were getting on me for throwing those college kids too many curveballs," Torres said. "Hey, I'm trying to make the club. I'd throw curveballs for my little 18-month-old daughter if she stepped into the batter's box:"
The larger question of human shields is still under debate. My own view is the one I think will prevail: that allied armies should more-or-less ignore such people, in the selection of targets. For the use of such cover is itself among the illicit weapons of the terror regimes, who will abandon the weapon only when it ceases to work. Those who agree to be used as shields, can hold themselves to account for their fates; those who had no choice are tragically unlucky.
[A]s we shall soon learn, many of the most accomplished of Saddam's defenders behind the lines are, indeed, members of Al Qaeda, Hamas, and other terrorist groups who have received training in Iraq. We are unlikely to hear much about this, or about the capture of biological and chemical weapons sites, until the war is over (despite several interesting independent reports). This is because the allies are still benefiting from Saddam's hesitation to use weapons that may immediately cost him the support of his few remaining foreign friends.
[T]he general population ... has greeted invading forces with wary enthusiasm wherever they have appeared, and open enthusiasm wherever they have clearly prevailed. I have now seen several accounts of Iraqi civilians, voluntarily risking their lives to help allied soldiers locate Saddamite gunmen in concealed positions. The Iraqis themselves are, alas thanks to media attitudes in the West, America's most unsung allies.
Best moment from today's Centcomm briefing: someone asked if the GPS jammers were causing us problems. The briefer could barely contain his amusemt as he responded that we'd actually used a GPS weapon to destroy one of the jammers, than ended with" Ironic, eh?"
Pentagon planners once dreamed Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard might lay down arms rather than fight superior U.S. forces. But now two divisions of his army's elite -- roughly 20,000 Iraqi troops -- await the Americans on the approaches to Baghdad from the south.To make the confrontation more complicated, those troops are dispersing. The U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq pledging to spare its citizenry of hardship and death as much as possible -- a pledge the Republican Guard is taking to heart.
"They're not in their final fighting position," one senior U.S. military official in the region says. "They're either mixed into civilian areas or they're dispersed to areas where there's religious shrines or antiquities or things like that."...
Amatzia Baram, a professor and former Israeli army battalion commander who has studied Iraq's military for years, says the Guard will take advantage of U.S. pledges to limit civilian deaths and is prepared to fight a war in populated areas. "Their tanks are not as good as American tanks but they'll hide their tanks behind houses," he predicts. "The soldiers will be inside houses. They know this is America's weak point." He added U.S. forces should expect them to use chemical weapons....
The Special Republican Guards and the Special Security Service are based in the capital of Baghdad itself.... Analysts say Special Republican Guard troops have the closest ties to Saddam Hussein, and the best pay and perks. Gen. Kamal Mustafa, believed to be the head of the Special Republican Guard, is related by marriage to Mr. Hussein. These troops are living with their families in Baghdad, which may give them more of an incentive to defend it.
Saddam is working hard to assure that we cannot win the war without taking many civilian lives. He hopes we will decide that victory is not worth it. His hope is vain.
Don Cherry's pro-American rant on the war in Iraq wasn't a hit with Hockey Night In Canada viewers nor apparently with the CBC itself."The CBC does not feel Hockey Night In Canada is the appropriate place for discussion on the war in Iraq," CBC spokeswoman Ruth-Ellen Soles said Monday. [...]
It started with Cherry commenting on Montreal Canadiens fans booing the American national anthem last Thursday before a game against the New York Islanders.
Cherry, wearing a tie emblazoned with U.S. colors, apologized on behalf of Canadians, saying that "years of pride went down the drain" with Habs fans' behavior.
Cherry also went at it with MacLean over the war in Iraq, chiding the Canadian government for its "lack of support to our American friends."
"I hate to see them go it alone. We have a country that comes to our rescue, and we're just riding their coattails," Cherry said.
MacLean stood firm that it was Canada's right not to go.
"Why attack Iraq if they haven't attacked you?" MacLean said.
"You are one of us. We expect from Israel more than we expect from Cambodia or Colombia."So said Giancarlo Chevellard, the European Union's ambassador to Israel, in answer to a question I asked him last May with respect to the EU's failure to insist on the end of Syria's occupation of Lebanon. It was a telling remark, an honest one, and one that gets to the heart of much of what currently informs "world opinion" - meaning that segment of the public who think, with greater or lesser sophistication, that the world has more to fear from George Bush than it does from Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il.
"This crowd has the fear part down cold," writes New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd of the Bush administration's effect on the world. In a "news analysis," her colleague David Sanger observed that "Mr. Bush's speech [on Monday] almost certainly confirmed some of the world's worst fears about George Bush's America: that when the United Nations will not bend to its will, when the allies will not go along, Mr. Bush will simply break away and pull the trigger." And then there was syndicated cartoonist and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Ted Rall: "By launching an illegal, unsanctioned invasion of a sovereign nation," he wrote, "the US has abandoned its moral standing. We are, by definition, a rogue state."
SO HERE'S the US, about to end a regime that puts dissidents feet-first through plastic shredders and uses their corpses for fish food, and it stands accused of abandoning its moral standing. A while back, when the US was air-dropping food and medical supplies into Afghanistan, Britain's Guardian saw fit to ponder the questions: "Who asked Mr. Bush to 'save civilization'? Which bits of the planet does Mr. Bush term uncivilized? Some would say Afghanistan; others might nominate west Texas."
No doubt, if the US succeeds in installing a progressive regime in Baghdad, Bush will be accused in some quarters of installing an American puppet.
"Pardon the sardonic giggle," writes Nicholas von Hoffman in the New York Observer, "it arises from the thought that George W. Bush, the unelected president, is going to teach democracy to the Iraqis." Presumably, if Bush were to go to Baghdad personally to hand out Oreo cookies to Iraqi orphans, he'd be seen as a shill for Nabisco.
I'd done it a dozen times before, rushing at the last minute to catch the high-speed train from Paris to Brussels, then paying on board. I knew the routine: I bowed before the French conductor, mumbled something about bad traffic, and appealed to his ultimate authority.This time, however, the conductor wouldn't let me pass. An American woman behind me showed even more agitation that I did at being turned away. She wanted the man's name so that she could lodge a complaint with his superiors.
"George Bush," he spat. He turned his back on her and climbed aboard the departing train.
A few days earlier, I had a similarly unsettling experience on a German TV talk show. The Social Democratic president of the German parliament, Wolfgang Thierse, refused to let me interrupt his practiced rhetoric against U.S. policy in Iraq with a question. He called me a "fanatic" for trying to do so. The studio audience egged him on, applauding each successive attack on Washington more enthusiastically....
I sense among many Europeans a desire to see America fail and even smug self-satisfaction at some of the weekend's bloody setbacks. It's telling that perhaps the most popular American in Germany is Michael Moore, the Oscar-winning filmmaker whose Bush-bashing is always a runaway best seller. My German schoolteacher-friend Gerhard Stockheim now greets me with the title of Mr. Moore's latest book: "Hello, you stupid white man."...
A senior German diplomat says only Americans dare talk and think about such far-fetched Utopian notions as remaking the Middle East. Perhaps that is the smartest of America's smart bombs -- the continuing American belief in their country's ability to create a better world. Yet he also worries about a mean streak in this administration that will make it look for ways to punish those that have opposed it rather than new ways to win them over.
On Sept. 11, Paul Berman, political and cultural critic and author of "A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968" watched from his roof as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. That day, Berman says, he "woke up" to the threat of what he calls Islamic totalitarianism. Berman lives in Brooklyn, just around the corner from the Al Farooq mosque on Atlantic Avenue where a Yemeni cleric was recently convicted of funneling $20 million to Osama bin Laden.During the last year and a half he has picked his way through the Islamic bookstores in his neighborhood, hunting down volumes by Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian intellectual whose "In the Shade of the Qur'an" is the groundwork for Islamic fundamentalism. Berman finds Qutb's analysis of the "hideous schizophrenia" of modern society "rich, nuanced, deep, soulful, and heartfelt." Qutb's work also convinced Berman that in Islamism we face a threat
not unlike such 20th century totalitarian movements as fascism and communism. Berman feels similarly about Baathism, the nationalist ideology of Iraq's ruling party.In fact, Berman believes that Islamism and Baathism emerged from the same great rift in liberal society, the First World War. "Terror and Liberalism," Berman's bracing new book, suggests that just as liberal-minded Europeans and Americans doubted the threats of Hitler and Stalin, enlightened Westerners today are in danger of missing the urgency of the violent ideologies coming out of the Muslim world.
The argument put forward by Berman, who is one of the most elegant and provocative thinkers to emerge from America's New Left, will both infuriate and engage those on all sides of the political spectrum. In a recent interview with Salon, Berman insisted that while he does not support the Bush administration -- actually, he detests how President Bush has handled the case for war and warns "we will pay for it" -- he thinks it was also
dangerous for the antiwar movement to ignore the threat that was posed by a ruthless Iraqi regime that killed a million people and threatened the stability of the world. [...][Q:] It seems that you are more critical of what Bush says -- how he presents the war on Iraq -- than what he's actually doing.
[A:] Well, I thought I was criticizing what he's doing.
[Q:] You do think there are reasons for going to war, though.
[A:] Yes.
[Q:] So you think the way he's presenting this war to the world is really where he's gone wrong.
[A:] Yes, it has been wretched. He's presented his arguments for going to war partly mendaciously, which has been a disaster. He's certainly presented them in a confused way, so that people can't understand his reasoning. He's aroused a lot of suspicion. Even when he's made good arguments, he's made them in ways that are very difficult to understand and have completely failed to get through to the general public. All in all, his inarticulateness
has become something of a national security threat for the United States.In my interpretation, the basic thing that the United States wants to do -- overthrow Saddam and get rid of his weapons -- is sharply in the interest of almost everybody all over the world. And although the U.S. is proposing to act in the interest of the world, Bush has managed to terrify the entire world and to turn the world against him and us and to make our situation infinitely more dangerous than it otherwise would have been. It's a display of diplomatic and political incompetence on a colossal scale. We're going to pay for this.
[Q:] Then what is it that the public doesn't understand? What hasn't he been able to get across?
[A:] One thing he hasn't gotten across is that there is a positive liberal democratic goal and a humanitarian goal here. Iraq is suffering under one of the most grotesque fascist tyrannies there's ever been. Hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people, have been killed by this horrible regime. The weapons programs are not a fiction. There's every reason to think that Saddam, who's used these weapons in the past, would be happy to use them in the future. The suffering of the Iraqi people is intense. The United States is in the position to bring that suffering to an end. Their liberation, the creating of at least the rudiments of a liberal democratic society there, are in the interests of the Iraqi people and are deeply in the interests of liberal society everywhere. There are reasons to go in which are those of not just self-interest or self-defense, but of solidarity of humanitarianism, of a belief in liberal ideals. And Bush has gotten this across not at all.
[Q:] Do you believe Bush has such motives?
[A:] It's not right to utterly dismiss these motives. A lot of people look at Bush and sneer a little too easily and think that these motives cannot possibly have anything to do with him or his policies. This is a mistake too.
In Afghanistan, everybody sneers at the achievements of the United States and its allies because we see the warlords in the provinces, we see the extreme suffering, we see all the things that haven't been done. But what has been done has really been quite magnificent. A hideous tyranny was overthrown, a new government was established in more or less the way that any liberal democrat would advise: Afghans were consulted from around
the country, more or less democratic councils led to the forming of a new government with a new leader for Afghanistan who is not a warlord or a corrupt figure or a friendly religious fanatic but who is in fact a man of modern liberal democratic ideals.Bush announced that the war in Afghanistan was going to be fought on behalf of women's rights. Everybody deeply laughed at that and for reasons I can understand because in the United States Bush has not been a promoter of women's rights. Still, the result of the war was in fact that women's rights in Afghanistan have made a forward leap larger than anywhere in the world in history. From a certain point of view this has been the first feminist war in all of history.
He's unable to do that partly because the man is fatally inarticulate and he's also unable to do that, I'm sure, because he's confused ideologically about whether he's really in favor of the do-good aspect of his program or indifferent to it. [...]
[Q:] I want to be clear on something. Do you support this military invasion?
[A:] I can certainly imagine how the whole thing can be done better. Bush is probably the most inept president we've ever had in regard to maintaining foreign alliances and presenting the American case and convincing the world. He's failed in every possible way. The defeat and overthrow of Saddam Hussein is in the interest of nearly the entire world and although it is in the interest of nearly the entire world, nearly the entire world is against Bush. That situation is the consequence of Bush's ineptness.
At the same time, I think that getting rid of Saddam is in our interest and in the interest of Iraq and in the interest of the Arab world. Saddam is a mad tyrant.
So I wish Bush had gone about it differently. But now that the thing is getting under way, I fervently hope it goes well. And I think that the attitude of everyone with the best of motives who have opposed the war, should now shift dramatically. The people who have demanded that Bush refrain from action should now demand that the action be more thorough. The danger now is that we will go in and go out too quickly and leave the job half-done. The position of the antiwar movement and of liberals should be that the United States fulfill entirely its obligations to replace Saddam with a decent or even admirable system. We've done this in Afghanistan but only in most halfhearted way. We should now do more in Afghanistan and do a lot in Iraq. The people who've opposed the war should now demand that Bush do more.
The first to benefit from a free Iraq would be the Iraqi people, themselves. Today they live in scarcity and fear, under a dictator who has brought them nothing but war, and misery, and torture. Their lives and their freedom matter little to Saddam Hussein — but Iraqi lives and freedom matter greatly to us.Bringing stability and unity to a free Iraq will not be easy. Yet that is no excuse to leave the Iraqi regime's torture chambers and poison labs in operation. Any future the Iraqi people choose for themselves will be better than the nightmare world that Saddam Hussein has chosen for them.
If we must use force, the United States and our coalition stand ready to help the citizens of a liberated Iraq. We will deliver medicine to the sick, and we are now moving into place nearly 3 million emergency rations to feed the hungry.
We'll make sure that Iraq's 55,000 food distribution sites, operating under the Oil For Food program, are stocked and open as soon as possible. The United States and Great Britain are providing tens of millions of dollars to the U.N. High Commission on Refugees, and to such groups as the World Food Program and UNICEF, to provide emergency aid to the Iraqi people.
We will also lead in carrying out the urgent and dangerous work of destroying chemical and biological weapons. We will provide security against those who try to spread chaos, or settle scores, or threaten the territorial integrity of Iraq. We will seek to protect Iraq's natural resources from sabotage by a dying regime, and ensure those resources are used for the benefit of the owners — the Iraqi people.
The United States has no intention of determining the precise form of Iraq's new government. That choice belongs to the Iraqi people. Yet, we will ensure that one brutal dictator is not replaced by another. All Iraqis must have a voice in the new government, and all citizens must have their rights protected.
Rebuilding Iraq will require a sustained commitment from many nations, including our own: we will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more. America has made and kept this kind of commitment before — in the peace that followed a world war. After defeating enemies, we did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and parliaments. We established an atmosphere of safety, in which responsible, reform-minded local leaders could build lasting institutions of freedom. In societies that once bred fascism and militarism, liberty found a permanent home.
There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken. The nation of Iraq — with its proud heritage, abundant resources and skilled and educated people — is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom.
The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life. And there are hopeful signs of a desire for freedom in the Middle East. Arab intellectuals have called on Arab governments to address the "freedom gap" so their peoples can fully share in the progress of our times. Leaders in the region speak of a new
Arab charter that champions internal reform, greater politics participation, economic openness, and free trade. And from Morocco to Bahrain and beyond, nations are taking genuine steps toward politics reform. A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.It is presumptuous and insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world — or the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim — is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life. Human cultures can be vastly different. Yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on Earth. In our desire to be safe from brutal and bullying oppression, human beings are the same. In our desire to care for our children and give them a better life, we are the same. For these fundamental reasons, freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror. [...]
I've listened carefully, as people and leaders around the world have made known their desire for peace. All of us want peace. The threat to peace does not come from those who seek to enforce the just demands of the civilized world; the threat to peace comes from those who flout those demands. If we have to act, we will act to restrain the violent, and defend the cause of peace. And by acting, we will signal to outlaw regimes that in this new century, the boundaries of civilized behavior will be respected.
Protecting those boundaries carries a cost. If war is forced upon us by Iraq's refusal to disarm, we will meet an enemy who hides his military forces behind civilians, who has terrible weapons, who is capable of any crime. The dangers are real, as our soldiers, and sailors, airmen, and Marines fully understand. Yet, no military has ever been better prepared to meet these challenges.
Members of our Armed Forces also understand why they may be called to fight. They know that retreat before a dictator guarantees even greater sacrifices in the future. They know that America's cause is right and just: liberty for an oppressed people, and security for the American people. And I know something about these men and women who wear our uniform: they will complete every mission they are given with skill, and honor, and courage.
Much is asked of America in this year 2003. The work ahead is demanding. It will be difficult to help freedom take hold in a country that has known three decades of dictatorship, secret police, internal divisions, and war. It will be difficult to cultivate liberty and peace in the Middle East, after so many generations of strife. Yet, the security of our nation and the hope of millions depend on us, and Americans do not turn away from duties because they are hard. We have met great tests in other times, and we will meet the tests of our time.
We go forward with confidence, because we trust in the power of human freedom to change lives and nations. By the resolve and purpose of America, and of our friends and allies, we will make this an age of progress and liberty. Free people will set the course of history, and free people will keep the peace of the world.
UPDATE:
David Horwitz seems to have issues with Mr. Berman.
U.S officials tell CBS News Correspondent David Martin that the Iraqis have drawn a red line on the map around Baghdad, and once American troops cross it, the Republican Guards are authorized to use chemical weapons.
Forces entered battle expecting to face chemical or biological weapons but so far have seen none. But, as American troops approach Baghdad, there's speculation that Saddam Hussein may be preparing to finally use chemical weapons.CBS News Correspondent Phil Ittner reports that Army doctors who treated some Iraqi prisoners of war, believed to be some high-ranking Iraqi officials, found Cipro pills among the Iraqis’ personal possessions.
Cipro is meant to ward off the effects of a biological attack from several toxic agents, foremost among them, anthrax.
Today, we are living through not just a military crisis but something of a political crisis within the larger liberal democratic world, trans-Atlantically. Robert Kagan has written a subtle and brilliant book on this theme called Of Paradise and Power, and I don't want to try to characterize his whole complicated argument here. I wish only to point to Kagan's view that, in the United States, people tend to suppose that we inhabit a "Hobbesian" world filled with nasty and brutish types who need to be stoutly clubbed from time to time, whereas, in Western Europe, people tend to picture themselves inhabiting a "Kantian" world, in which lions and lambs lay down in perpetual peace according to international law or can be lured into doing so.This idea seems to me almost entirely wrong. The modern European idea does not seem to me Kantian. It seems to me Tocquevillean. It is a liberal democratic idea of a sort that cannot conceive of wielding power. It assumes that liberal democracy can only follow the path of a Sweden or a Switzerland or a Florentine Republic--the liberal democracy of virtuous and admirable countries that cannot possibly defend themselves, except by being inoffensive. In the European idea, power is imperial or nothing--the power of brutal empires, such as the Europeans themselves used to administer. Kagan writes that Europe has chosen to emphasize a nonviolent approach to world events today because the Europeans do not enjoy an option of doing otherwise. But the opposite is true. The Europeans (as Kagan acknowledges in a somewhat contradictory remark), with their 400 million people and their $9 trillion economy, could make themselves extremely powerful. They do not choose to do so. It is because they wish to be liberal democrats. And liberal democracy, in their concept, is a compromise, a mediocrity. It is, by definition, a negotiation--a good thing, but, as Tocqueville took pains to show, not entirely a good thing. And, because the Europeans cannot conceive or accept the notion of liberal democracy as a revolutionary project for universal liberation, they cannot imagine how to be liberal democrats and wield power at the same time. They simply cannot imagine how an exercise of force might bring about political revolutions in remote corners of the world--cannot imagine this, even though the experience of their largest country, Germany, offers a superb and vivid example.
In the United States, on the other hand, a great many people--not everyone, but many--naturally assume that every country, all over the world, will eventually embrace liberal democracy. In American eyes, the revolutions of 1989 were, at bottom, not at all surprising--they were the kind of revolutions that Americans have spent 200 years impatiently expecting to see. And, if the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 have not yet spread to still further regions of the world--if liberal democracy has not yet swept the Arab world and sundry zones within the larger Muslim world--why, that is only a matter of time, and we Americans ought meanwhile to show a little solidarity and do what we can to help, as we have done so effectively on behalf of the benighted Europe of yore. This view of world affairs is not Hobbesian. But neither is it Tocquevillean. It is Lincolnian.
In one respect Kagan seems to me on the mark. His idea about Hobbesian Americans and Kantian Europeans does express the way in which two specific groups of people see the Atlantic divide. The first of those groups includes a great many Europeans who picture the United States as Hobbesian precisely because, like Tocqueville, they cannot imagine how a liberal democracy could wield power; and, since the United States does wield power, its behavior must owe to a nasty brutishness that is not at all liberal and democratic. (And, to be sure, sometimes they are right.) The second group of people who share Kagan's perspective are the American partisans of foreign policy "realism," whose own doctrinal principles insist on a variation of the old Symbolist slogan about "art for art's sake," except this time in a political version: power for power's sake. These people know perfectly well that liberal democratic motives have driven U.S. foreign policies in moments of the past and that liberal democratic motives still drive portions of U.S. policy; but they cannot really integrate these two insights--their belief in power for power's sake with their observation about the idealist impulses of some of their fellow citizens. And so, the realists bow piously toward the liberal democratic idea; and then, once the services have concluded, they go on prattling about power for power's sake.
And here we stumble on a peculiar tragedy of our present moment. The United States has come under military attack, requiring military responses. But, as in the Civil War, the revolutionary responses of liberal democratic ideals are likewise required, and not in a small degree. For the ultimate goal of our present war--the only possible goal--must be to persuade tens of millions of people around the world to give up their paranoid and apocalyptic doctrines about American conspiracies and crimes, to give up those ideas in favor of a lucid and tolerant willingness to accept the modern world with its complexities and advantages. The only war aim that will actually bring us safety is, in short, the spread of liberal outlooks to places that refuse any such views today. That is not a small goal, nor a goal to be achieved in two weeks, nor something to be won through mere military feats, though military feats cannot be avoided.
In each of the greatest crises of its past, the United States has known how to summon its most radical ideals and to express them in ever deeper versions to ourselves and to our enemies--as Lincoln did; as Woodrow Wilson did; as Franklin Roosevelt did two times over, first against the fascists and then, at the end of his life, in sketching a few preliminary notions for the impending cold war. But, on these themes, our present White House has turned out to be incoherent.
Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity.We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not know -- we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history.
Sam Maloof made a world. In a citrus grove now surrounded by malls and houses, in a wood shop where he hand-built furniture that is now revered as art, in the home he crafted one room at a time as he could afford the lumber and where he has lived the last half century, almost every minute of every day, with the wonder of his life - his wife, Alfreda - Sam Maloof made a world. He nurtured his lemons and oranges and figs, planted walnut and sycamore trees that started as cuttings the size of his thumb and eventually grew to engulf the grounds. He tore down a chicken coop and built a shop that always smells of sweet, fresh wood. He tore down a shack and built a house that, like a piece of modern sculpture, has no front or back. In the kitchen, he laid bricks without mortar so that each step makes the music of wind chimes. Then he moved on to the living room, Freda's study, the skylit tower, the guest room with a loft, the balcony overlooking the grove. The house ultimately came to 7,000 square feet - 26 rooms that unfold like a pyramid's secret chambers adorned with handmade redwood doors, windows and jalousies, two dozen wooden door latches that resemble flying fish or bones or tusks, jagged-edged walnut dogboards nailed to the wall like abstract art, Douglas fir rafters with mortise-and-tenon joints at their peaks, window frames joined with dovetails, even toilet seats handmade from English oak and black walnut. Outside the grove, cars and trucks groan and spew and honk in stagnant air while, inside the grove, birds are always singing and a breeze is always rustling the trees. The question everyone wants answered is: Would Sam Maloof's craftsman genius have blossomed if he had not first created this world in which to live and work? In other words, did his genius create this place, or did this place create his genius?"Oh, I don't know," Sam says. "What do you think, Freda?" Sam and Freda are puttering around their house in Alta Loma, California, at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. She is tidying the kitchen. He is giving a tour of the house and the 100 handmade chairs and tables, desks and settees, coffee tables, beds and dressers that decorate it, of the woodshop, of the 6 acres of lemons, peaches, pears, apricots, figs and avocados that sit like an island in a sprawling suburban sea. But this island, like Atlantis, is about to disappear forever, to be buried not underwater but under concrete, a new section of the nearby Foothill Freeway. Because Sam's house and workshop are on the National Register of Historic Places, they will be moved to a scraggly citrus grove a few miles away and turned into a working museum. Sam will design and help build a new house on the new grounds for himself and Freda.
"It's sort of scary sometimes," Sam says of his success and fame, which have seemed almost to overtake him in recent years. His furniture is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution's Renwick Gallery, the White House and the homes of former presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. A dining room set he sold for $3,000 about 25 years ago resold recently for $150,000. One of his new high-backed rockers today sells for $18,000. "Sam's furniture embodies intangible qualities that transcend the sensory delights of sight and touch," Jonathan Fairbanks, curator of American decorative arts and sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, has written. Sam is hailed today not as a furniture maker but as an artist. Yet for all his success, Sam, at 82, is too militantly modest to take credit. And Freda, at 86, is too down-to-earth to think Sam - or anyone, for that matter - can deserve the world-renowned stature he has achieved.
"God's been very good to us," Freda says. "I'd say I was lucky," Sam says, "but I worked doggone hard." [...]
People have described him as an artist, but he prefers to be known simply as a woodworker. "It's an honest word," he says. "And that's what I am: a woodworker."
Doing what Sam loved - creating about 50 pieces of furniture a year for 50 years - has made him one of the most respected craftsmen in the country. His chairs have the curving grace of a parabola, the embracing comfort of loving arms and the tactile sensuality of supple skin. They look and feel like living creatures, not pieces of wood connected by dowel and glue and joint, but single, seamless waves of wood. Sam once watched as the blind bluesman Ray Charles caressed a piece of his furniture and announced that it had "soul." Sam likes that story because soul is a place beyond words, where hand, head and humanity blur. "You can't have soul without sincerity," he says.
"Man is a seeker of the Agent." This notion, cribbed from John Fowle's superb book, The Aristos, is a succinct summary of the reason for the emergence of religion in the human mind.We are seekers of the reason for why we are here, on this ball of dirt in a vast, seemingly empty universe. We are seekers of meaning - "what does it all mean?"
The latter question, as one philosopher notes, is most likely to be asked by children, the mad, the anguished, the ironic, and the damned. It is a question we all routinely push to one side as we occupy ourselves with the family, the business, the bills, the lawn, the local.
The local - no, not the pub, but our local 'area of operation' - is the primary locus of our sense of meaning. It's where we build our most treasured meanings, since meaning is not something received 'from out there' but something we make, something we construct.
If you - as cognitive scientists do - build a 'neural network', a primitive set of connected, artificial neurons, it will take in what data you choose to give it and seek to categorise that data in some way; it will try to make understandable patterns from the data. "Which is what you would expect," I hear you cry, "seeing that's why you built the thing in the first place."
Well, yes, but neural networks are simply an impoverished imitation of a brain, with all its billions of interconnected neurons. The brain is a pattern-seeker, a pattern-builder par excellence, and it evolved that way - we didn't build it.
Human brains run on meaning. All those neurons need nutrients, in the form of information, data to work on, patterns to find. We desperately need to put a meaning to things, to things that happen, things that we see, things that we experience. Most of the time, we put meaning to things by telling stories. We weave our stories in order to make sense of where we are, what we are, who we are.
So, we work our way outwards. We build our local meaning - in family, close relationships, home. We make wider meaning and stories about our place in a community - our relationships with others who work and live nearby - and we make our richest stories about 'ultimate meaning', first causes, prime movers, in order to put some pattern we can handle into the strangeness of our human condition, marooned here on our blue planet between the lost garden of Eden and some mythical promised land.
The richest of these stories have a compelling sense of 'rightness' - they match our pattern sense, they fire the 'God' neuron in our brains. They are, however, stories. They are worked on by generations, refined, passed on, passed down, handed over. But they are stories, built by humans, people seeking meaning.
The Bush administration's embrace of a democratization strategy for the postwar Middle East has triggered a torrent of scorn from the region's traditional political and intellectual elites, not to mention regional experts at the State Department and CIA. Less noticed is the fact that it has also produced a flurry of political reforms, quasi-reforms and grass-roots initiatives in countries across the region.Two days before the war began last week, the Palestinian legislative council dealt a major blow to the autocracy of Yasser Arafat, rejecting his attempt to limit the powers of a new prime minister. This happened by a democratic vote after a noisy democratic debate -- which in turn came a few days after President Bush called for a strong prime minister in a Palestinian democracy.
The next day an Egyptian court finally ended the prosecution of the country's leading pro-democracy activist, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who had twice been sentenced to prison on trumped-up charges -- and whose last conviction prompted the Bush administration to freeze aid to Egypt. Two weeks earlier, Gamal Mubarak, would-be heir to his father, Hosni, as president, announced a plan to end trials of civilians in the security courts in which Ibrahim was sentenced, and proposed an independent national council to monitor human rights.
A week before Mubarak spoke, King Abdullah of Jordan, who has not allowed an election since taking office four years ago and who dissolved parliament in 2001, set a date for parliamentary elections. He chose June 17, thereby ensuring that as the postwar political discussion gets underway, Jordan will be able to point to its own democratic exercise.
Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has been urging Western journalists to take note of an "Arab Charter" floated by ruling Crown Prince Abdullah, which calls for "internal reform and enhanced political participation in the Arab states," and a related petition by 104 intellectuals calling for the direct election in Saudi Arabia of a consultative council, an independent judiciary and freedom of speech and assembly. In January, on Abdullah's order, a host of senior Saudi officials met with a visiting delegation from Human Rights Watch -- the first time a Western human rights group had been allowed to visit the country.
So what does this all amount to? Not, to be sure, a sudden outbreak of democracy or radical reform. It may all be cosmetic. But it does show that Arab governments, and to some extent their peoples, have absorbed the idea that political change is coming after the war, and are trying to anticipate it. This means, in turn, that the postwar era is likely to offer the United States an opportunity to promote real change, provided it acts effectively.
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Power to the New Prime Minister (Dennis Ross, March 24, 2003, Washington Post)
The volume of commentary on the Bush administration's policy to lead the effort to disarm Iraq has overshadowed the other global fight President Bush has decided to lead, the war against HIV.President Bush's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief is a humanitarian relief effort of a scale never before attempted by any leader, of any nation, to benefit people of other nations. Given the magnitude of the devastation this epidemic has caused, and the continued threat it poses, a commensurate response is required.
But no matter how desperate the need is for a relief program of the scale Bush has proposed, there is no inexorable law that guarantees the existence of a nation with the resources and political leadership to provide it. This is a time when some people are anxious about the worldwide dominance of US power and wealth, particularly as exercised by the Bush Administration. But for those of us who understand the importance of waging a real war against HIV, and the risk associated with continued delay, we are grateful for America's wealth, generosity and political leadership.
AIDS is a monumental human tragedy. More than 60 million people have been infected with the deadly AIDS virus - 20 million are already dead. More than half of the 40 million people infected with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa. If effective action is not taken soon in India and China, we could see a repeat of the African tragedy. Worldwide, if current rates of infection continue, 45 million more people will become infected by 2010. In the hardest hit regions of the world, decades of economic progress have been reversed, 14 million children have been orphaned and food production has plummeted causing famine. In addition to the human suffering involved, destabilization of this magnitude is a threat to the national security of nations around the world.
The AIDS epidemic is an international crisis that demands an effective response. President Bush's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief is such a response. Bush proposes to spend $15 billion over five years to fight the epidemic in 14 countries in Africa and the Caribbean. Fifty percent of people infected worldwide live in these countries. The major focus of the plan is to provide life saving anti-retroviral treatment to people who need it. The Plan aims to provide this treatment to 2 million HIV infected people, prevent 7 million new infections and to care for 10 million infected people and AIDS orphans. In addition, $1 billion would go to the recently created Global Fund for AIDS, Malaria, and Tuberculosis. Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services has recently accepted the Chairmanship of the Fund - signaling renewed U.S. commitment to its success.
US President George W Bush has complained directly to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, that Russian companies have been selling military equipment to Iraq in breach of UN sanctions.The White House says it has "credible evidence" that Russian companies had sold military equipment such as satellite-jamming devices, anti-tank missiles and night-vision goggles to Iraq, despite Russian denials.
In a phone conversation with Mr Bush, the Russian president said he would look into the allegations immediately, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said
The ethics and values we try to live by are an extension of the way we understand the world and our place in it. The humanist recognition that humans have evolved naturally, are all of the same species, and will live only once, gives rise to the ethics and values of equality, fairness and justice. Instead of trying to lead a good life to appease an imagined God, or get to heaven, a growing number of people try to lead a good life by recognising our responsibility for the wellbeing of all humanity and of other life forms. These people draw on human wisdom which shows that acting with compassion, empathy and tolerance, settling disputes by talk rather than violence, and being prudent and restrained will lead to the most peaceful, just and socially productive outcomes.It is those who cling to the certainties of established religion that cause the most havoc in today's troubled world: the Catholic and Islamic resistance to family-planning programs, the Palestinian/Israel conflict, terrorism inspired by fundamentalist beliefs, religion-based conflict, and the US belief that god is on their side. In contrast, modern humanism rests on the open-mindedness of science and the desire to use human capabilities to develop a more just and equitable world.
None of these questions can be answered except by a blind assertion of faith in the ethos she's plucked from thin air--and so we see, once again, the delightful irony that none are so constricted by a close-minded faith as those who deny it.
At the beginning of the Second World War, George Orwell gave the young Christopher Hill a stinking review of the sort that no author forgives or forgets. Writing in the New Statesman, Orwell tore into the historian who was to become a great and generous interpreter of seventeenth-century English radicalism - and Master of Balliol to boot. Hill's best work was to come. In 1940 Orwell's fury was provoked by his juvenilia, The English Revolution: 1640, a book with a fair claim to be the most simplistic Marxist version of history published in Britain in the twentieth century.Orwell identified a persistent fault of the far Left. Like those who give a knowing wink and insist that the war against Iraq is 'all about oil,' Hill and his comrades were too 'cocksure'. They wrote off 'religion, morality, patriotism [as] a sort of hypocritical cover-up for the pursuit of economic interest' when they insisted that the Parliamentarians' war against Charles I could be reduced to a battle between the rising class of capitalists and the dead weight of the feudal monarchy.
'A "Marxist" analysis of any historical event tends to be a hurried snap judgment based on the principle of cui bono?, something rather like the "realism" of the saloon-bar cynic who always assumes the bishop is keeping a mistress and the trade union leader is in the pay of the boss,' Orwell continued.
Such reasoning was a hopeless guide. 'Long after Hitler came to power official Marxism was declaring that Hitler was of no importance and could achieve nothing. On the other hand, people who had hardly heard of Marx but who knew the power of faith had seen Hitler coming years earlier.' [...]
Hill never gave up his Marxism, but left the Communist party in 1957. He went on to rescue the histories of the Levellers, Diggers, Ranters and Fifth
Monarchists from obscurity. More than any other historian in the twentieth century, he showed how ordinary people developed ideas of democracy, socialism, secularism and women's emancipation as soon as civil war destroyed censorship and political control and allowed them the space to think and argue.The most moderate of the radical groups were the Levellers. All they wanted was democracy.
[W]ill this bold action inaugurate a new epoch? Is it "the first war of the 21st century," the harbinger of things to come?Well yes, it's bound to be, but the harbinger of what things? We simply can't know. It all depends on the costs and ripples of the enterprise, long term as well as short term, economic and political as well as human. It depends on whether America succeeds or fails, as well, of course, as on the reactions of others to those successes and failures. America will win the war, but no one can deny that it could lose the peace. To go to war is to roll the dice not least because the unintended consequences of victory can be as unpleasant as the anticipated ones of defeat or inaction. The American tendency to withdraw from the world always lurks besides its tendency to assert itself in it, and no one can say at this point which of these the outcome of this war will strengthen.
The implications for Canada are clearer, simply because we have abdicated all responsibility in the matter. Never has our role in the world been less significant than it is today. When even pacifist Japan supports an American military action, our failure to do so is egregious. Perhaps we should replace the beaver as our national symbol with the horsefly. Having dismantled our military, we combine complete parasitism on the United States with a nasty tendency to sting it. We'll burrow in its hide, as smug as ever and as well-defended. Jean Chretien is betting that this is what Canadians want.
There is no doubt that the Iraqi armed forces are playing a weak hand with some skill.
U.S. helicopters have begun attacking Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard forces arrayed around Baghdad, a Pentagon official said Monday.Asked about ground forces, Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal said, "We have not gotten into direct firefights with Republican Guard forces." The Army's Third Infantry division moved to within 50 miles of the Iraqi capital.
He said that thus far in the war, 2,000 precision-guided weapons have been used against the Iraqis.
"All of the pieces are falling into place," McChrystal told a Pentagon briefing.
"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."
--U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, U.S. representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, Aug. 12, 1945.Will Bush be impeached? Will he be called a war criminal? These are not hyperbolic questions. Mr. Bush has permitted a small cadre of neoconservatives to isolate him from world opinion, putting him at odds with the United Nations and America's allies.
What better illustrates Mr. Bush's isolation than the fact that he delivered his March 16 ultimatum to the U.N. concerning Iraq from an air base in the Azores, where there was no prospect for massive demonstrations against his policy. Standing with Mr. Bush against the world were Britain and Spain.
The U.S., once a guarantor of peace, is now perceived in the rest of the world as an aggressor.[...]
Mr. Bush and his advisers have forgotten that the power of an American president is temporary and relative. The U.S. is supposed to be the world's leader. For the Bush administration to pursue a policy that sets the U.S. government at odds with the world is to invite comparisons with recklessness that we have not seen in international politics since Nikita Khrushchev tried to install nuclear missiles in Cuba. Is Saddam Hussein worth this much grief?
N.B.--We, on the other hand, would have supported his impeachment for leaving the Castro regime in place when given a perfect pretext to remove it.
A total of 580 randomly selected Americans were interviewed Sunday. A separate subsample of 69 African Americans also were interviewed, which brought the total of blacks who participated in this survey to 103. Margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus 4 percentage points.The survey found that the protests at home and abroad have done little to affect public opinion on the war-if anything, they have deepened support among those who already favored using military force against Iraq.
Seven in 10 said the anti-war rallies have not changed their opinion on the conflict. One in five-20 percent-said the protests have made them more likely to back the war, while 7 percent said it has increased their opposition to the conflict.
Six in 10 agreed that the demonstrations were a sign of a healthy democracy, while fewer than four in 10 said opponents should not demonstrate against the war because it was better for the country to appear united. Only one in six said such protests should not be permitted.
In "It's a Wonderful Life," a suicidal George Bailey (James Stewart) is given a chance by his guardian angel to see what his hometown would have been like if he had never lived there....What would the world be like if there were no United States to lead?
In this latest case of Iraq, you could rest assured that Israel would be no more. And all of Europe and Japan would be oil-starved, their economies in shambles, their citizens hunkered down against constant terrorist threats.
But hey, we wouldn't have any war.
Polish commandos have seen their first action of the Iraq war ...A Defence Ministry spokesman said "GROM" (Thunder) special forces had joined operations in the Gulf port of Umm Qasr, where resistance by Iraqi forces was continuing. Prime Minister Leszek Miller said no Polish casualties had been taken so far.
"These operations are regarded as highly professional and highly effective. Our soldiers are earning very high marks," Miller told public radio.
DEEP INSIDE SOUTHERN IRAQ - The triumphant road to Baghdad is littered with discarded combat boots and army uniforms, even hand grenades, as men from the Iraqi military throw away anything that could identify them as combatants....For many kilometres, civilians and soldiers were lined up, waving and blowing kisses at the passing vehicles holding U.S. Marines. Many begged for food. Each U.S. vehicle had been given two boxes of ready-to-eat rations suitable for Muslims. Some people came back for seconds, hiding the food they had already collected.
For their part, the U.S. troops were amazed at the Iraqi soldiers' behaviour.
"Canteens, grenades, abandoned positions -- they even left the Iraqi flag in place before they retreated," said 1st Sergeant Miguel Pares, a New Yorker from Spanish Harlem and the top enlisted man in Bravo company, 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division.
"I wanted that flag so bad but we had to continue moving along.
"All the peasants were cheering us, even the soldiers. They gave us the thumbs-up, they blew us kisses. I couldn't believe all the boots that were lying on the road. The soldiers just left them there."...
We have seen no resistance to speak of and no hostility -- simply, ordinary people standing by the road and, as we drove, increasing numbers of Iraqi soldiers.
"Praise be to Allah," many of them shouted, relieved at being finally delivered from more than two decades of Saddam Hussein's tyranny.
"I wasn't surprised at the reception we got," Sgt. Pares said.
"It is what I expected here. Whatever the world thinks of what we are doing, the Iraqi people view us as a force that is freeing them.
"I saw a lot of kids and I started to think of my own kids back at home. God Bless America for giving our children a chance. These kids were so thin. They sure didn't get their share of Iraq's oil money."
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LIBERATION (Jonathan Foreman, New York Post, 3/24/2003)
[N]othing could bring home the rightness of this campaign in Iraq - and the deluded wrongness of the peace movement - like the sight that greeted the 54th Engineer Battalion (and this writer) yesterday morning in a string of small towns on Route 8 near the city of Nasiriyah in southern Iraq.In village after dusty village, the people - most presumably Shiites - rushed out to greet the troops. They lined the highway: portly older men, teenage boys, little girls in brightly colored pajamas, waving, giving the thumbs-up sign and smiling.
Bravo Company's Sgt. Roy Lee Brown III (32) of Hackensack, N.J., said, "This gives me a real good feeling. It's the first time I've ever been deployed that I've seen people so happy that we're here."
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Best of the Web Today has good liberation stories.
Specially trained paramilitary guerrillas and Saddam Hussein's security forces are leading the stiffest resistance to the U.S.-led invasion, trying to keep Iraqi soldiers from surrendering and organizing battlefield tricks that have inflicted casualties, U.S. and British officials said Sunday.Members of the Fedayeen Saddam are suspected of having organized battlefield ruses using civilian clothes and cars and fake surrenders of Iraqi soldiers that drew in U.S. forces to be attacked in places like An Nasiriyah and Umm Qasr, the officials said.
The Fedayeen are elite inner-circle soldiers totaling about 15,000 that report directly to one of Saddam's sons....
Officials said the Fedayeen and Saddam's personal security force, known as the Special Security Organization, have been behind the stiffest resistance coalition troops have encountered as they raced from Kuwait through the south toward Baghdad.
"The majority of the resistance we have faced so far comes from Saddam's Special Security Organization and the Saddam Fedayeen," said Peter Wall, chief of staff to the British military contingent in the the U.S.-led coalition. "These are men who know that they will have no role in the building of a new Iraq and they have no future."
An American Jew in traditional Orthodox dress was assaulted by four men late Sunday afternoon on the capital's main shopping boulevard, police said Monday.One of the assailants swung at the 21-year-old rabbinical student, striking him in the face, and another threw an object at him, police said. The men, described as Middle Eastern in appearance, have not been identified or detained.
The student was not hurt, but was shaken up by both the incident and the fact that no one at a crowded outdoor caf where the attack took place intervened, said Rabbi Yedudah Teichtal, who runs a rabbinical school in Berlin where the young man has been studying for about six months.
"You always have wild people, you always have people who are uncontrollable. What was really shocking was that no one responded when he wanted to call the police," Teichtal said.
When the student, who was wearing a traditional Fedora hat and black suit, asked to use one man's mobile phone, he responded, "I didn't see anything," according to Teichtal.
The Ugandan government has publicly declared its support for the US-led war in Iraq and said it will provide any support needed.The "Cabinet, sitting under the chairmanship of (President) Yoweri Museveni, decided to support the US-led coalition war against Iraq," Foreign Minister James Waphakabulo said in a statement released late pn Saturday.
"Cabinet also decided that if the need arises Uganda will be ready to assist in any way possible."
It was not clear what support Uganda, a poor East African nation, could offer the US-led coalition.
The government supports the war because the "potential link between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction poses a very serious threat to international peace and security," the statement said.
Museveni, who seized power in 1986 after leading a five-year bush war, is regarded as a US ally and the United States is the second largest bilateral donor to Uganda.
Uganda is the third African country to publicly support US military action against Iraq, following Horn of Africa countries Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Ethiopia has granted US aircraft over-flight rights and access to its air bases.
A predominantly Christian nation in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia has two main air bases, one outside the capital Addis Ababa and the other 320km to the east in Dire Dawa.
Eritrea, which gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993 after a 30-year guerrilla war, has offered the United States the use of Assab and Massawa ports - both of which are on the Red Sea - but it is not known whether this has been accepted.
A senior Iraqi official tipped off the CIA, telling Washington where Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would be sleeping on the eve of the war, Newsweek magazine reports.After months of US intelligence groundwork, the magazine quoted an unnamed "knowledgeable intelligence source" as saying Delta Force, the secret commando group, "managed to tap Saddam's underground phone lines in Baghdad.
"The real break came when the CIA managed to recruit an asset, a senior Iraqi official in a position to know Saddam's greatest vulnerability: where he sleeps each night," the news weekly added in its report due on news stands on Monday.
"Saddam, who had stayed alive and in power for more than three decades by never sleeping in one place for long, had to trust at least a few bodyguards. He made the rare mistake of relying on one henchman who was more afraid of the United States than he was of Saddam Hussein," the report says.
"The Iraqi official 'weighed the balance of fear,' a senior administration official told Newsweek. "The Iraqi turncoat told his intelligence handlers that on the night of March 19, Saddam, probably accompanied by his sons Uday and Qusay, was sleeping in a bunker beneath a nondescript house in a residential area of Baghdad."
"At the CIA, Director George Tenet got the tip shortly before 23:00 Baghdad time ... Tenet raced to the Pentagon, bursting in on Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as he met with his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. The air war - the astonishing first wave of "shock and awe," hundreds of warheads raining down on Baghdad - was scheduled to begin the next night. But here was a chance to end the war before it even began. If Saddam and his henchmen could be killed in a "decapitating strike," hundreds and maybe thousands of lives could be saved.
Tenet, Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff chair General Richard Myers went to meet President George W Bush, who "considered but rejected the argument that Saddam be given until 03:00 (SA time) to respond to the ultimatum that he leave Iraq or face the consequences."
'Let's go'
Millions of people will soon be freed from a yoke of cruelty and dictatorship. One might have expected liberals to use this moment to cheer the prospect that the war's aftermath could lead to a better life for Iraqis, as well as for those Arabs, Israelis, Turks and Kurds who have for more than two decades lived under the threat of attack by Saddam Hussein. One might have expected liberals to begin making the case for a lengthy and serious rebuilding of Iraq -- a process that is hugely complicated and that no one knows whether the Bush administration will commit to wholeheartedly. But neither of these things has happened. Instead, on the brink of the ouster of a dictator who is the very embodiment of illiberal values, too many liberals are on the sidelines throwing beer cans at the proceedings.It's time for progressives to make an eleventh-hour effort to correct this mistake. Some may continue to criticize this administration's treatment of its allies, but such criticism is no substitute for pushing a set of progressive ideas for a new Iraq. Chiding the president for allocating funds to rebuild Iraqi schools while allowing American public schools to languish -- as we have heard some liberals do -- is not a foreign policy; it is the absence of a foreign policy. Any fair-minded liberal should admit that Iraqi rebuilding and American domestic priorities are not mutually exclusive; both carry a strong moral imperative and both are clearly in our country's national interest.
In order to carve out for themselves a constructive position on Iraq, liberals will have to reclaim the optimism that once animated the progressive spirit but seems now to be a casualty of the build-up to war. Since September 11, progressives have become infected with a reflexive dread on questions of foreign policy -- first, dread of an imaginary quagmire in Afghanistan, now dread of instability in Iraq, dread of Hussein's demise leading to increased terrorism and dread of what other Arab leaders might think if, God forbid, our actions put pressure on their regimes to liberalize or reform.
Well, we have news for our progressive friends: Dread isn't going to fly with the majority of American voters -- and it isn't progressive. In two months, U.S. forces will have liberated Iraq from Hussein's rule. How will a temperament of permanent dread look then? Imagine the line George W. Bush will land over and over again on the campaign trail: "For those who said we couldn't plant the seed of democracy in the Middle East, I say, 'Never doubt the resolve of the American people.'"
Optimism is an invaluable political commodity in America, and it is nearly impossible to win elections without it. Right now Bush has it, and liberals don't. Consider the recent history of presidential elections. In 1976, Jimmy Carter offered a moral vision of American life that stood in stark contrast to the perceived dirtiness of Nixonian politics; in its own way, Carter's implicit promise to American voters was a powerful sort of optimism. Four years later, his moralism came to be seen by voters as a kind of self-righteous negativism, and one that America could never be worthy of. So Ronald Reagan -- despite an agenda that was anything but moderate or mainstream -- won over those voters by sunnily conveying that the United States was meant for great things in the world. In 1992, Bill Clinton triumphed by using a similar optimism to speak to the economic aspirations of the middle-class. (Remember "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow"?) And since 9-11, Bush has won over many moderates with his confident message that Americans are a resilient people who will not just survive terrorist strikes but exhibit bravery in preventing future ones.
American progressives need to reclaim their sense of optimism on foreign policy. And if they are looking for some inspiration to escape the temperamental and political corner they have painted themselves into, then they need look no farther than their own history. From the American Revolution to the New Deal to the civil-rights movement, the crusading spirit of liberalism is decorated with victories won on behalf of democracy and the common good.
Take a look at what President Bush has proposed for our war on terror and it's easy to see why the Left can not support it. It's one thing to go after actual terrorist organizations, but the cost in dollars that could be spent on domestic social programs and the risk to Americans lives here and broad make it absurd to believe that the Left would ever come to grips with a campaign that eventually contemplates removing Yassar Arafat, Saddam Hussein, the mullahs in Iran, Kim Jong-il, and Bashar Assad from power and that will carry American troops from the Philippines to Colombia to combat indigenous guerilla/terrorist movements. A diversion of funds to such a vast, almost boundless, military campaign would threaten things like Universal Health Care and is, thus, anathema.
and
THE REMINDER OF FAILURE:
The anti-American century (Amotz Asa-El, March 23, 2003, Jerusalem Post)
AMERICA became what it is thanks to its prudent handling of three challenges: tolerance, development, and power. In each of these categories America looms ominously as a stark reminder of another European power's grand historic failure.The first case in point is Germany. No country in human history has welcomed penniless immigrants, tolerated diverse faiths and accommodated political refugees as America has. Originally, Germany had the potential to be just as prosperous, inviting and inspiring, but it chose a course that led elsewhere. When a surrendered Germany finally embraced American-style pluralism, it was far too late in the day to come coupled with American-style greatness. That hurts.
Then comes Russia. There, the tragedy lay in the mishandling of the frontier. As de Tocqueville noted prophetically more than a century before the Cold War began, the US and Russia were both blessed with vast landmasses that begged pioneering, but while America would be developed by initiative from below, Russia's would be by decree from above.
And indeed, when America had entrepreneurs build new towns, highways, and factories from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Russia killed its peasantry and littered its hinterland with gulags.
In recent years, when a bankrupt Russia's vast frontier finally met private enterprise, America's frontier had long been established as the world's breadbasket and tool shop. That too hurts.
Finally there is France. Here, the great shame lies in the failure to lead the world. Having sought so much and accomplished so little in numerous misadventures from Gen. Kotuzov's Moscow to the FLN's Algeria, France's imperial experience has been a disastrous continuum of ill-fated conquests; the US, though fought a lot, did less conquering and more inspiring.
In 1940, Time magazine founder Henry Luce's essay "The American century" saw the New World coming to dominate the old. Subsequent decades have vindicated Luce, as history became rife with airplanes, satellites, spaceships, movies, jeans, automobiles, sneakers, PCs, fast food, pop, jazz, rock, and spectator sports that had "Made in USA" written all over them.
And that, apparently, hurts America's detractors most; so much, in fact, that if it were up to them ours would be declared the anti-American century.
It's tough to see through the dust clouds that swirl about the allied tank columns on the road to Baghdad - but tougher still to see our way out of old habits of mind. The critics of the war against Saddam have been right about one thing: this war will overthrow and transform the status quo in the Middle East.But there is another status quo that is also being overthrown and transformed - the status quo of the transatlantic relationship between America and Europe. And no country on Earth will have to make bigger and more difficult choices in the aftermath of this transformation than Britain. [...]
[T]he existing structures of multilateralism now stand condemned in American eyes. Jacques Chirac's opposition to American policy went beyond dissent, which Americans will always accept, to outright sabotage - pressuring former French colonies, for example, to follow France's orders against America.
After this stunt, it would be a careless American president indeed who ever took an important security decision to any body in which the government of France wielded a veto.
If Britain tries to revive such multilateral bodies, it will fail. And even if it somehow succeeded, what would Britain gain? When did it become a British interest to seek to increase French political influence?
Instead, Britain should work to develop and renovate institutions that offer the Anglo-American alliance multilateral legitimation - without a veto for governments that fundamentally oppose that alliance's purposes and values.
What would such institutions look like? They might look like Nato: a council of like-minded allies to face common security threats across the globe.
As the Iraq war demonstrates, this council already exists: it includes America and Britain, Australia and Japan, and other countries as well who recognised the threat from Iraq and were prepared to take action - and who also already recognise the even greater threats taking shape in east Asia.
The council lacks a name and a building and a chairman, but it exists and takes decisions. And Britain matters much, much more inside this council than it ever has or could at the UN or even within the EU.
Russia and other countries will ask the United Nations (news - web sites) to rule whether the US-led war on Iraq is legal, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov revealed."With other states, we will put this question before the UN's legal department. It is very important that these arguments (about the legality of US actions) are confirmed," he told the State Duma lower house of parliament.
"This is the only way that we can use them as a strong weapon," Ivanov added.
MORE (PJ): RUSSIA SOLD IRAQ KEY MUNITIONS LAST WEEK:
3 Russian Firms' Deals Anger U.S. (Washington Post, 3/23/2003)
The United States delivered a protest to the government of President Vladimir Putin yesterday for refusing to stop Russian arms dealers from providing illegal weapons and assistance to the Iraqi military.Bush administration sources said one Russian company is helping the Iraqi military deploy electronic jamming equipment against U.S. planes and bombs, and two others have sold antitank missiles and thousands of night-vision goggles in violation of U.N. sanctions....
"The stuff's there, it's on the ground and they're trying to use it against us," said a well-placed U.S. official who requested anonymity. Of the Russians, the official said, "This is a disregard for human life. It sickens my stomach."...
The Bush administration reserved its highest-level efforts for halting the delivery of the jamming devices, which officials said sell for thousands of dollars apiece and can interfere with global positioning equipment important to aircraft navigation and ground forces. Guided bombs also use the technology ...
Administration officials became infuriated last week when they learned that Aviaconversiya personnel are now in Iraq "showing Iraqis how to use them and how to fix them," said the official. The Russians "sure as hell should have been able to stop these guys."
MORE (PJ): Moscow Denies Supplying Iraq With Weapons (FoxNews, 3/24/2003)
United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan has appeared on children's TV show Sesame Street, and said diplomats could learn a thing or two from its characters.Annan guest-starred on the long-running show to help teach children how to resolve conflict.
He is only the third politician on the show in recent years - first ladies Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton have also appeared.
Annan stepped in when puppet character Elmo and his friends argued over who would get to sing the alphabet song.
In the end he persuaded them all to join in.
Afterwards he said it was "wonderful to reach out to young people" and hoped that he showed children "the spirit of the UN, a spirit of understanding, sharing and working together".
He said some politicians needed to be more like the characters in the show: "Elmo and his friends will tell us, it's the way they are, they tell it straight.
"Keep it simple and it brings you back to earth. I think that is very important, we all need that."
For war news I find Rantburg indispensable. Founded by former CIA analyst Fred Pruitt, it now has numerous posters from multiple countries, most with military or intelligence backgrounds, who often find stories I would never otherwise reach.
Instapundit has just recommended The Command Post, which looks good.
Any other recommendations?
SADDAM Hussein’s henchmen last night pleaded with Russia to find them a top surgeon to save the tyrant’s life.They sent an SOS to Moscow as their leader lay badly wounded at a secret hideaway in Baghdad.
Saddam is believed to have suffered abdominal injuries when cruise missiles scored a direct hit on his bunker on Day One of the war last Thursday.
British intelligence chiefs say that he was hauled from the rubble and whisked away in an ambulance hours after the sudden strike that launched Operation Iraqi Freedom.
They are convinced he underwent a major operation and a blood transfusion. And at one stage thought he may be dead.
But last night experts at GCHQ listening station in Cheltenham intercepted a message which suggests he is still alive — but in need of treatment the Iraqis cannot provide.
In a moment nearly surreal, the BBC just had a report from the Academy Awards where Michael Moore asked what lesson we taught the children of Columbine this week: "That violence is a legitimate way to solve problems". Then they announced that child rapist Roman Polanski had just won the Best Director award. What lesson did Mr. Moore and his friends teach the children of Columbine tonight?
- Donate a calling card to help keep service members in touch with their families at Operation Uplink at http://www.operationuplink.org/
- Send a greeting via e-mail through http://anyservicemember.org/ or http://www.OperationDearAbby.net
- Sign a virtual thank you card at the Defense America web site at http://www.defendamerica.mil/nmam.html
- Make a donation to one of the military relief societies:
- Army Emergency Relief at http://www.aerhq.org/
- Navy/Marine Relief Society at http://www.nmcrs.org/
- Air Force Aid Society at http://www.afas.org/
- Coast Guard Mutual Assistance at http://www.cgmahq.org/
With these character sketches of key figures of the American Revolution and illuminating probes of its circumstances, Bernard Bailyn reveals the ambiguities, complexities, and uncertainties of the founding generation as well as their achievements.Using visual documentation portraits, architecture, allegorical engravings as well as written sources, Bailyn, one of our most esteemed historians, paints a complex picture of that distant but still remarkably relevant world. He explores the powerfully creative effects of the Founders’ provincialism and lays out in fine detail the mingling of gleaming utopianism and tough political pragmatism in Thomas Jefferson’s public career, and the effect that ambiguity had on his politics, political thought, and present reputation. And Benjamin Franklin emerges as a figure as cunning in his management of foreign affairs and of his visual image as he was amiable, relaxed, and amusing in his social life.
Bailyn shows, too, why it is that the Federalist papers polemical documents thrown together frantically, helter-skelter, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in a fierce political battle two hundred years ago have attained canonical status, not only as a penetrating analysis of the American Constitution but as a timeless commentary on the nature of politics and constitutionalism.
Professor Bailyn concludes, in a wider perspective, with an effort to locate the effect of the Founders’ imaginative thought on political reformers throughout the Atlantic world. Precisely how their principles were received abroad, Bailyn writes, is as ambiguous as the personalities of the remarkably creative pro- vincials who founded the American nation
MORE:
BOOK SITE: To Begin the World Anew (Borzoi Reader)
-REVIEW & LINKS: The Peopling of North America by Bernard Bailyn (Brothers Judd)
On Sunday afternoon, the Qatar-based television al Jazeera broadcast Iraqi TV, showing a videotape of at least 10 US POWs, including one female soldier, and a room with some 15 bodies of US troops. The live broadcast included also a footage of a battle field area in the southern Iraqi city of Nassiriya with additional corpses of US soldiers as well as struck military equipment.The videotape has also shown how the Iraqis investigate the American POWs. The prisoners were questioned on air and gave their names, military identification numbers and home towns.
Asked why he came to Iraq, one captive replied "I come to fix broke stuff." He was asked by the interviewer if he came to shoot Iraqis. "No I come to shoot only if I am shot at," he said. "They (Iraqis) don't bother me, I don't bother them."
Another prisoner, who said he was from Texas, said only: "I follow orders." A voice off-camera asked "how many officers" were in his unit. "I don't know sir," the man replied.
The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff U.S. Air Force conceded that there were American soldiers missing, but said that there were fewer than 10 troops unaccounted for in southern Iraq.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned Sunday it was possible that Iraqi forces had taken U.S. prisoners, saying there were unaccounted soldiers and journalists in the combat zone.
He noted that under the Geneva Conventions governing prisoners of war, "It's illegal to do things to POWs that are humiliating to those prisoners."
Earlier, it was reported that U.S. Marines battled for control of Nassiriya, taking "significant" casualties in a fight to open a route north to Baghdad, military officials said.
Reuters quoted military officials as saying the Marine battalion spearheading the fight had suffered significant casualties in the battle.
A total of 11 U.S. soldiers were captured after taking a wrong turn, and 50 military personnel have been wounded in the massive firefight in Nassiriya, ABCNEWS reported Sunday.
British troops outside Basra have discovered cruise missiles and warheads hidden inside fortified bunkers as part of a massive arsenal abandoned by Saddam Hussein's disintegrating southern army.Cases of rockets, giant anti-shipping mines and other ammunition are piled from floor to ceiling in dozens of bunkers at what is marked on maps as the Az Zubaya Heliport.
The most disturbing find was two Russian-made Al-Harith anti-shipping cruise missiles, each 6m long and 1m in diameter, and nine warheads, hidden in two enormous reinforced concrete bunkers.
Another missile, as yet unidentified, was found still crated up at the rear of one of the bunkers.
Some of the boxes are clearly marked with the names of British manufacturers.
The scale and possible implications of the weapons find took British forces by surprise and raised fresh questions about the extent of the Iraqi war machine and the ability of weapons inspectors to cope with the task of scouring such a vast country for prohibited ordinance.
The discovery of the missiles - date-marked 2002 - came as British troops from the Black Watch Regiment fought to secure the area around Iraqi's second city, Basra, in preparation for the capture of the city.
The vast complex, surrounded by chainlink fence and barbed wire, stands to the southwest of the town, defended by a network of earth works and with tanks and other armoured vehicles dug in to the surrounding area.
But the defenders have fled after coming under attack from coalition forces.
Outside the perimeter fence are about 40 bunkers packed with a mixture of RPGs and other ammunition. Inside, 22 larger fortified bunkers contain larger weaponry including the Al-Harith missiles.
The missiles, with Al-Harith 2002 stencilled in red paint on the side, and covered with cyrillic writing, were housed in 20-m-long concrete bunkers, 8m high, buried under earth and protected by sliding steel double doors 30cm thick.
Painted grey, the missiles have two wings, each about 60cm in span and three tail fins of a similar size. There was no indication of the nature of the warheads fitted and experts have been called in to examine the find.
Also housed inside the reinforced bunkers were what appeared to be large anti-shipping mines, 1m in diameter, and a host of other munitions.
On one box, written in English, were the words: "Contract AS Navy. 5/1980 Iran."
Corporal Steven Airzee said: "The initial sight was a shock. We were trying to figure out what they were. You have to wonder whether the weapons inspectors have been there because they looked pretty big."
...TWO STEPS AHEAD...:
US TROOPS CAPTURE CHEMICAL PLANT (Caroline Glick Mar. 23, 2003, Jerusalem Post)
About 30 Iraqi troops, including a general, surrendered today to US forces of the 3rd Infantry Division as they overtook huge installation apparently used to produce chemical weapons in An Najaf, some 250 kilometers south of Baghdad.One soldier was lightly wounded when a booby-trapped explosive went off as he was clearing the sheet metal-lined facility, which resembles the eery images of scientific facilities in World War II concentration camps.
The huge 100-acre complex, which is surrounded by a electrical fence, is perhaps the first illegal chemical plant to be uncovered by US troops in their current mission in Iraq. The surrounding barracks resemble an abandoned slum.
It wasn't immediately clear exactly which chemicals were being produced here, but clearly the Iraqis tried to camouflage the facility so it could not be photographed aerially, by swathing it in sand-cast walls to make it look like the surrounding desert.
In the West, it is hard to grasp why events that happened nearly a millennium ago still dominate Arab perceptions of Europeans -- and, by extension, Americans. There were five principal Crusades in medieval times, stretching over 200 years, and all aimed at "liberating" Christianity's holiest sites from Muslim control. And though each was unique, they had one thing in common: In one way or another, they were all failures.This is a primary reason Arabs are drawn to this ancient lore. Memory is long in that part of the world, and resentment runs deep. Many Arabs put great faith in a mysterious process they call "the forces of history." Western armies may commit aggression in the sands of the Middle East. They may kill many Arabs, and they may stay for years, even decades. But ultimately they will leave or become absorbed. [...]
In crusades, the war can never be separated from its long and tedious aftermath. In their view of history, Arabs know the Americans will want to go home as quickly as they can. They will not want to bankrupt the American treasury, nor will they want to stay for decades. They will tire of their American crusader kingdom.
Of all the crusades, the third Crusade of Richard the Lionhearted, from 1187 to 1192, most passionately captures the imagination of the Arab world. It is a story not of oppression but of Arab triumph. It had a great Arab hero, Saladin, the defender of the faith and the lance of jihad. Memorials to him dot the Middle East today, from the heroic equestrian statue in Damascus to his colossal palace in Cairo. It was Saladin who crushed the Crusader army in 1187 at the Battle of Hattin. Until his death a few years ago, Syrian President Hafez Assad displayed an epic painting of the Battle of Hattin in his presidential office. Proudly, he would take Western visitors over to it. One day, he would say, a new Saladin will arrive on the scene.
It is doubtful that an American occupation of Iraq, no matter how long it lasts, will erase from the Arab mind the heroics of Saladin or the obligation of jihad or the carnage of the first Crusade and replace it with the democratic principles of Jefferson.
TIME's Jim Lacey has been traveling with the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division. Over two weeks ago, they had set up camp in northern Kuwait just 20 miles south of the Iraqi border. Then the drama began:It was 1:45 Sunday morning when I was awakened by the first blast—a boom 10 times louder than a car backfiring. Ten seconds later there was a second blast, and then soldiers started screaming, "Get out! Get out!" Someone had slipped two hand grenades into the tent housing more than a dozen of the brigade's officers. One woman in my tent, which was 10 yards away from the explosion, yelled, "I'm hit." A piece of shrapnel from the grenade had lodged in her leg.
I ran out of my tent into total chaos.
There is now sufficient evidence to believe that ITV News Correspondent Terry Lloyd was killed in an incident on the Southern Iraq war front yesterday.It is believed his body is in a Basra hospital, which is still under Iraqi control.
Two members of his team, Fred Nerac and Hussein Osman, are still missing and currently there is no information on their whereabouts or condition.
The ITN team came under fire, apparently from Coalition forces, outside Basra. Iraqi ambulances took a number of dead and injured from the area into Basra and it is believed that Terry Lloyd's body was among the dead.
The fourth member of the team, cameraman Daniel Demoustier, was injured in the incident but was able to get back to US and British lines. He reported afterwards seeing Iraqi ambulances retrieve dead and injured.
Demoustier said that the legacy he believes Terry would want to leave from this tragic incident is that the spirit of free reporting in war zones should continue.
Nakia Waters and two of her sisters stood on the concrete porch of their parents' brick rowhouse in Baltimore yesterday, laughing about their memories of knock-down pillow fights and all-out water-gun duels with their brother, Kendall D. Waters-Bey, a Marine who was one of the first U.S. casualties of the Iraq war.But tears started streaming down Waters' cheeks when they began to talk about whether their brother died for a good cause. All three said they are angry at President Bush for sending their brother to die in what they regard as an unjust and pointless war.
"This war is all about oil and money," said Waters, 26, wiping the tears away. "But he [Bush] has already got oil and money. It's about greed. ... He ought to send his daughters over there to fight. See how long they'd last over there."
Their brother, a 29-year-old staff sergeant who supervised the maintenance of combat helicopters, was one of four U.S. Marines and eight British commandos who died Thursday when their CH-46E Sea Knight helicopter crashed and burned south of the Iraqi town of Umm Qasr.
Another of Waters-Bey's sisters, Sharita Waters-Bey, 23, said she was unmoved when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld expressed his condolences during a televised press conference.
"That was just a show. They don't care. If they really cared, they [Bush or Rumsfeld] would call or send something. They wouldn't go on national television to express that to us," she said. "They don't know what we're going through as a family."
While several politicians praised Waters-Bey's sacrifice in fighting for freedom, those words rang false among neighbors up and down the block of Northeast Baltimore rowhouses where Waters-Bey grew up.
Many in this stable, hardworking community north of Morgan State University agree with Waters-Bey's sisters, who believe their brother died for oil prices.
Marines driving deep into southern Iraq were greeted by Iraqi civilians yesterday who waved and gave the advancing force a "thumbs-up.""That was awesome," Gunnery Sgt. Gregory Keeler said. "They were waving at us, honking their horns . . . I really felt like a liberator."
Three days into the war, Marines passed by small villages set around cultivated fields and encountered increasing numbers of civilians and surrendering Iraqi soldiers as they moved closer to the fertile Euphrates River valley. [...]
"They seemed happy we're here, or they were just hungry," said Cpl. Adam Brown, a light armored vehicle driver with the recon battalion. "I think I saw definite joy in their faces."
Many of the Iraqis carried yellow plastic bags containing humanitarian daily rations that U.S. troops were given to hand out to refugees and surrendering soldiers.
"They all know what the yellow bag is," said Ramage, who with the other crewmen on his vehicle tossed the rations to women and children along the highway.
Anti-war activists marched again Saturday in dozens of cities, marshaling well over 100,000 in Manhattan and sometimes trading insults with backers of the U.S.-led war on Iraq. War backers rallied too, often by the thousands, with American flags and chants of ``USA!''In Chicago, some of about 800 troop supporters came within 20 feet of a small group of anti-war activists outside a federal building. As the protesters shouted ``killers, killers, killers,'' a military backer yelled back ``idiots, idiots, idiots.'' Later, about 500 anti-war protesters marched around the same building.
Carrying peace signs and wearing costumes, demonstrators in New York spanned 30 blocks as they marched down Broadway toward Washington Square Park. Unofficial police estimates put the crowd at more than 125,000; United for Peace and Justice, the march organizers, estimated the crowd at more than 250,000.
"I believe if you really want to show `shock and awe,' you should show love and justice,'' said marcher Bob Edgar, an officer at the National Council of Churches.
[Sayyid Qutb -- the intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went into Al Qaeda, their Karl Marx] wrote a book called
''Milestones,'' and that book was cited at his trial, which gave it immense publicity, especially after its author was hanged. ''Milestones'' became a classic manifesto of the terrorist wing of Islamic fundamentalism. A number of journalists have dutifully turned the pages of ''Milestones,'' trying to decipher the otherwise inscrutable terrorist point of view.I have been reading some of Qutb's other books, and I think that ''Milestones'' may have misled the journalists. ''Milestones'' is a fairly shallow book, judged in isolation. But ''Milestones'' was drawn from his vast commentary on the Koran called ''In the Shade of the Qur'an.'' One of the many volumes of this giant work was translated into English in the 1970's and published by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, an organization later widely suspected of participation in terrorist attacks -- and an organization whose Washington office was run by a brother of bin Laden's. In the last four years a big effort has been mounted by another organization, the Islamic Foundation in England, to bring out the rest, in what will eventually be an edition of 15 fat English-language volumes, handsomely ornamented with Arabic script from the Koran. Just in these past few weeks a number of new volumes in this edition have made their way into the Arab bookshops of Brooklyn, and I have gobbled them up. By now I have made my way through a little less than half of ''In the Shade of the Qur'an,'' which I think is all that exists so far in English, together with three other books by Qutb. And I have something to report.
Qutb is not shallow. Qutb is deep. ''In the Shade of the Qur'an'' is, in its fashion, a masterwork. Al Qaeda and its sister organizations are not merely popular,
wealthy, global, well connected and institutionally sophisticated. These groups stand on a set of ideas too, and some of those ideas may be pathological, which is an old story in modern politics; yet even so, the ideas are powerful. We should have known that, of course. But we should have known many things.[A]s the Pan-Arabists went about promoting their revolution, Sayyid Qutb went about promoting his own, somewhat different revolution. His idea was ''Islamist.'' He wanted to turn Islam into a political movement to create a new society, to be based on ancient Koranic principles. Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood, became the editor of its journal and established himself right away as Islamism's principal theoretician in the Arab world. [...]
Readers without a Muslim education who try to make their way unaided through the Koran tend to find it, as I have, a little dry and forbidding. But Qutb's
commentaries are not at all like that. He quotes passages from the chapters, or suras, of the Koran, and he pores over the quoted passages, observing the prosodic qualities of the text, the rhythm, tone and musicality of the words, sometimes the images. The suras lead him to discuss dietary regulations, the proper direction to pray, the rules of divorce, the question of when a man may propose marriage to a widow (four months and 10 days after the death of her husband, unless she is pregnant, in which case after delivery), the rules concerning a Muslim man who wishes to marry a Christian or a Jew (very complicated), the obligations of charity, the punishment for crimes and for breaking your word, the prohibition on liquor and intoxicants, the proper clothing to wear, the rules on usury, moneylending and a thousand other themes.The Koran tells stories, and Qutb recounts some of these and remarks on their wisdom and significance. His tone is always lucid and plain. Yet the total effect of his writing is almost sensual in its measured pace. The very title ''In the Shade of the Qur'an'' conveys a vivid desert image, as if the Koran were a leafy palm tree, and we have only to open Qutb's pages to escape the hot sun and refresh ourselves in the shade. As he makes his way through the suras and proposes his other
commentaries, he slowly constructs an enormous theological criticism of modern life, and not just in Egypt.Qutb wrote that, all over the world, humans had reached a moment of unbearable crisis. The human race had lost touch with human nature. Man's inspiration, intelligence and morality were degenerating. Sexual relations were deteriorating ''to a level lower than the beasts.'' Man was miserable, anxious and skeptical,
sinking into idiocy, insanity and crime. People were turning, in their unhappiness, to drugs, alcohol and existentialism. Qutb admired economic productivity and
scientific knowledge. But he did not think that wealth and science were rescuing the human race. He figured that, on the contrary, the richest countries were the
unhappiest of all. And what was the cause of this unhappiness -- this wretched split between man's truest nature and modern life?A great many cultural critics in Europe and America asked this question in the middle years of the 20th century, and a great many of them, following Nietzsche and other philosophers, pointed to the origins of Western civilization in ancient Greece, where man was said to have made his fatal error. This error was philosophical. It consisted of placing an arrogant and deluded faith in the power of human reason -- an arrogant faith that, after many centuries, had created in modern times a tyranny of technology over life.
Qutb shared that analysis, somewhat. Only instead of locating the error in ancient Greece, he located it in ancient Jerusalem. In the Muslim fashion, Qutb looked on the teachings of Judaism as being divinely revealed by God to Moses and the other prophets. Judaism instructed man to worship one God and to forswear all others. Judaism instructed man on how to behave in every sphere of life -- how to live a worldly existence that was also a life at one with God. This could be done by obeying a system of divinely mandated laws, the code of Moses. In Qutb's view, however, Judaism withered into what he called ''a system of rigid and lifeless ritual.''
God sent another prophet, though. That prophet, in Qutb's Muslim way of thinking, was Jesus, who proposed a few useful reforms -- lifting some no-longer necessary restrictions in the Jewish dietary code, for example -- and also an admirable new spirituality. But something terrible occurred. The relation between
Jesus' followers and the Jews took, in Qutb's view, ''a deplorable course.'' Jesus' followers squabbled with the old-line Jews, and amid the mutual recriminations,
Jesus' message ended up being diluted and even perverted. Jesus' disciples and followers were persecuted, which meant that, in their sufferings, the disciples were never able to provide an adequate or systematic exposition of Jesus' message.Who but Sayyid Qutb, from his miserable prison in Nasser's Egypt, could have zeroed in so plausibly on the difficulties encountered by Jesus' disciples in getting out the word? Qutb figured that, as a result, the Christian Gospels were badly garbled, and should not be regarded as accurate or reliable. The Gospels declared Jesus to be divine, but in Qutb's Muslim account, Jesus was a mere human -- a prophet of God, not a messiah. The larger catastrophe, however, was this: Jesus' disciples, owing to what Qutb called ''this unpleasant separation of the two parties,'' went too far in rejecting the Jewish teachings.
Jesus' disciples and followers, the Christians, emphasized Jesus' divine message of spirituality and love. But they rejected Judaism's legal system, the code of Moses, which regulated every jot and tittle of daily life. Instead, the early Christians imported into Christianity the philosophy of the Greeks -- the belief in a spiritual existence completely separate from physical life, a zone of pure spirit. [...]
Qutb's story now shifts to Arabia. In the seventh century, God delivered a new revelation to his prophet Muhammad, who established the correct, nondistorted
relation to human nature that had always eluded the Christians. Muhammad dictated a strict new legal code, which put religion once more at ease in the physical
world, except in a better way than ever before. Muhammad's prophecies, in the Koran, instructed man to be God's ''vice regent'' on earth -- to take charge of
the physical world, and not simply to see it as something alien to spirituality or as a way station on the road to a Christian afterlife. Muslim scientists in the Middle Ages took this instruction seriously and went about inquiring into the nature of physical reality. And, in the Islamic universities of Andalusia and the East, the Muslim scientists, deepening their inquiry, hit upon the inductive or scientific method -- which opened the door to all further scientific and technological progress. In this and many other ways, Islam seized the leadership of mankind. Unfortunately, the Muslims came under attack from Crusaders, Mongols and other enemies. And, because the Muslims proved not faithful enough to Muhammad's revelations, they were unable to fend off these attacks. They were unable to capitalize on their brilliant discovery of the scientific method.The Muslim discoveries were exported instead into Christian Europe. And there, in Europe in the 16th century, Islam's scientific method began to generate results, and modern science emerged. But Christianity, with its insistence on putting the physical world and the spiritual world in different corners, could not cope with scientific progress. And so Christianity's inability to acknowledge or respect the physical quality of daily life spread into the realm of culture and shaped society's attitude toward science.
As Qutb saw it, Europeans, under Christianity's influence, began to picture God on one side and science on the other. Religion over here; intellectual inquiry over there. On one side, the natural human yearning for God and for a divinely ordered life; on the other side, the natural human desire for knowledge of the physical
universe. The church against science; the scientists against the church. Everything that Islam knew to be one, the Christian Church divided into two. And, under
these terrible pressures, the European mind split finally asunder. The break became total. Christianity, over here; atheism, over there. It was the fateful divorce between the sacred and the secular.Europe's scientific and technical achievements allowed the Europeans to dominate the world. And the Europeans inflicted their ''hideous schizophrenia'' on peoples and cultures in every corner of the globe. That was the origin of modern misery -- the anxiety in contemporary society, the sense of drift, the purposelessness, the craving for false pleasures. The crisis of modern life was felt by every thinking person in the Christian West. But then again, Europe's leadership of mankind inflicted that crisis on every thinking person in the Muslim world as well. Here Qutb was on to something original. The Christians of the West underwent the crisis of modern life as a consequence, he thought, of their own theological tradition -- a result of nearly 2,000 years of ecclesiastical error. But in Qutb's account, the Muslims had to undergo that same experience because it had been imposed on them by Christians from abroad, which could only make the
experience doubly painful -- an alienation that was also a humiliation.That was Qutb's analysis. In writing about modern life, he put his finger on something that every thinking person can recognize, if only vaguely -- the feeling that human nature and modern life are somehow at odds. But Qutb evoked this feeling in a specifically Muslim fashion. [...]
His deepest quarrel was not with America's failure to uphold its principles. His quarrel was with the principles. He opposed the United States because it was a liberal society, not because the United States failed to be a liberal society.
The truly dangerous element in American life, in his estimation, was not capitalism or foreign policy or racism or the unfortunate cult of women's independence.
The truly dangerous element lay in America's separation of church and state -- the modern political legacy of Christianity's ancient division between the sacred
and the secular. This was not a political criticism. This was theological -- though Qutb, or perhaps his translators, preferred the word ''ideological.''The conflict between the Western liberal countries and the world of Islam, he explained, ''remains in essence one of ideology, although over the years it has appeared in various guises and has grown more sophisticated and, at times, more insidious.'' The sophisticated and insidious disguises tended to be worldly -- a camouflage that was intended to make the conflict appear to be economic, political or military, and that was intended to make Muslims like himself who insisted on speaking about religion appear to be, in his words, ''fanatics'' and ''backward people.''
''But in reality,'' he explained, ''the confrontation is not over control of territory or economic resources, or for military domination. If we believed that, we would play into our enemies' hands and would have no one but ourselves to blame for the consequences.''
The true confrontation, the deepest confrontation of all, was over Islam and nothing but Islam. Religion was the issue. Qutb could hardly be clearer on this topic.
The confrontation arose from the effort by Crusaders and world Zionism to annihilate Islam. The Crusaders and Zionists knew that Christianity and Judaism were
inferior to Islam and had led to lives of misery. They needed to annihilate Islam in order to rescue their own doctrines from extinction. And so the Crusaders and
Zionists went on the attack. [...]Qutb's vanguard was going to reinstate shariah, the Muslim code, as the legal code for all of society. Shariah implied some fairly severe rules. Qutb cited the Koran on the punishments for killing or wounding: ''a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear.'' Fornication, too, was a serious crime because, in his words, ''it involves an attack on honor and a contempt for sanctity and an encouragement of profligacy in society.'' Shariah specified the punishments here as well. ''The penalty for this must be severe; for married men and women it is stoning to death; for unmarried men and women it is flogging, a hundred lashes, which in cases is fatal.'' False accusations were likewise serious. ''A punishment of 80 lashes is fixed for those who falsely accuse chaste women.'' As for those who threaten the general security of society, their punishment is to be put to death, to be crucified, to have their hands and feet cut off, or to be banished from the country.''
But Qutb refused to regard these punishments as barbarous or primitive. Shariah, in his view, meant liberation. Other societies, drawing on non-Koranic principles, forced people to obey haughty masters and man-made law. Those other societies forced people to worship their own rulers and to do as the rulers said -- even if the rulers were democratically chosen. Under shariah, no one was going to be forced to obey mere humans. Shariah, in Qutb's view, meant ''the abolition of man-made laws.'' In the resurrected caliphate, every person was going to be ''free from servitude to others.'' The true Islamic system meant ''the complete and true freedom of every person and the full dignity of every individual of the society. On the other hand, in a society in which some people are lords who legislate and some others are slaves who obey, then there is no freedom in the real sense, nor dignity for each and every individual.''
He insisted that shariah meant freedom of conscience -- though freedom of conscience, in his interpretation, meant freedom from false doctrines that failed to
recognize God, freedom from the modern schizophrenia. Shariah, in a word, was utopia for Sayyid Qutb. It was perfection. It was the natural order in the universal.
It was freedom, justice, humanity and divinity in a single system. It was a vision as grand or grander than Communism or any of the other totalitarian doctrines of
the 20th century. It was, in his words, ''the total liberation of man from enslavement by others.'' It was an impossible vision -- a vision that was plainly going to require a total dictatorship in order to enforce: a vision that, by claiming not to rely on man-made laws, was going to have to rely, instead, on theocrats, who would interpret God's laws to the masses. The most extreme despotism was all too visible in Qutb's revolutionary program. That much should have been obvious to anyone who knew the history of the other grand totalitarian revolutionary projects of the 20th century, the projects of the Nazis, the Fascists and the Communists. [...]It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks of deep philosophical ideas -- it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political leaders speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and noncoercion. This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse.
But who will speak of the sacred and the secular, of the physical world and the spiritual world? Who will defend liberal ideas against the enemies of liberal ideas? Who will defend liberal principles in spite of liberal society's every failure? President George W. Bush, in his speech to Congress a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, announced that he was going to wage a war of ideas. He has done no such thing. He is not the man for that.
Philosophers and religious leaders will have to do this on their own. Are they doing so? Armies are in motion, but are the philosophers and religious leaders, the
liberal thinkers, likewise in motion? There is something to worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have trouble understanding -- one more worry, on top of all the others, and possibly the greatest worry of all.
Many challenges, abroad and at home, have arrived in a single season. In two years, America has gone from a sense of invulnerability to an awareness
of peril; from bitter division in small matters to calm unity in great causes. And we go forward with confidence, because this call of history has come to the right country.Americans are a resolute people who have risen to every test of our time. Adversity has revealed the character of our country, to the world and to ourselves. America is a strong nation, and honorable in the use of our strength. We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers.
Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity.
We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not know -- we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history.
The fundamental difference between Islamic government, on the one hand, and constitutional monarchies and republics, on the other, is this: whereas the representatives of the people or the monarch in such regimes engage in legislation, in Islam the legislative power and competence to establish laws belongs exclusively to God Almighty. The Sacred Legislator of Islam is the sole legislative power. No one has the right to legislate and no law may be executed except the law of the Divine Legislator. It is for this reason that in an Islamic government, a simple planning body takes the place of the legislative assembly that is one of the three branches of government. This body draws up programs for the different ministries in the light of the ordinances of Islam and thereby determines how public services are to be provided across the country.
Here, on the other hand, is the summons that Mr. Bush offered us in his Inaugural Address:
We have a place, all of us, in a long story--a story we continue, but whose end we will not see. It is the story of a new world that became a friend and liberator of the old, a story of a slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom, the story of a power that went into the world to protect but not possess, to defend but not to conquer.It is the American story--a story of flawed and fallible people, united across the generations by grand and enduring ideals.
The grandest of these ideals is an unfolding American promise that everyone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance, that no insignificant person was ever born.
Americans are called to enact this promise in our lives and in our laws. And though our nation has sometimes halted, and sometimes delayed, we must follow no other course.
Through much of the last century, America's faith in freedom and democracy was a rock in a raging sea. Now it is a seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations.
Our democratic faith is more than the creed of our country, it is the inborn hope of our humanity, an ideal we carry but do not own, a trust we bear and pass along. And even after nearly 225 years, we have a long way yet to travel.
While many of our citizens prosper, others doubt the promise, even the justice, of our own country. The ambitions of some Americans are limited by failing schools and hidden prejudice and the circumstances of their birth. And sometimes our differences run so deep, it seems we share a continent, but not a country.
We do not accept this, and we will not allow it. Our unity, our union, is the serious work of leaders and citizens in every generation. And this is my solemn pledge: I will work to build a single nation of justice and opportunity.
I know this is in our reach because we are guided by a power larger than ourselves who creates us equal in His image.
And we are confident in principles that unite and lead us onward.
America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens. Every child must be taught these principles. Every citizen must uphold them. And every immigrant, by embracing these ideals, makes our country more, not less, American.
Today, we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation's promise through civility, courage, compassion and character.
America, at its best, matches a commitment to principle with a concern for civility. A civil society demands from each of us good will and respect, fair dealing and forgiveness.
Some seem to believe that our politics can afford to be petty because, in a time of peace, the stakes of our debates appear small.
But the stakes for America are never small. If our country does not lead the cause of freedom, it will not be led. If we do not turn the hearts of children toward knowledge and character, we will lose their gifts and undermine their idealism. If we permit our economy to drift and decline, the vulnerable will suffer most.
We must live up to the calling we share. Civility is not a tactic or a sentiment. It is the determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos. And this commitment, if we keep it, is a way to shared accomplishment.
America, at its best, is also courageous.
Our national courage has been clear in times of depression and war, when defending common dangers defined our common good. Now we must choose if the example of our fathers and mothers will inspire us or condemn us. We must show courage in a time of blessing by confronting problems instead of passing them on to future generations.
Together, we will reclaim America's schools, before ignorance and apathy claim more young lives.
We will reform Social Security and Medicare, sparing our children from struggles we have the power to prevent. And we will reduce taxes, to recover the momentum of our economy and reward the effort and enterprise of working Americans.
We will build our defenses beyond challenge, lest weakness invite challenge.
We will confront weapons of mass destruction, so that a new century is spared new horrors.
The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake: America remains engaged in the world by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favors freedom. We will defend our allies and our interests. We will show purpose without arrogance. We will meet aggression and bad faith with resolve and strength. And to all nations, we will speak for the values that gave our nation birth.
America, at its best, is compassionate. In the quiet of American conscience, we know that deep, persistent poverty is unworthy of our nation's promise.
And whatever our views of its cause, we can agree that children at risk are not at fault. Abandonment and abuse are not acts of God, they are failures of love.
And the proliferation of prisons, however necessary, is no substitute for hope and order in our souls.
Where there is suffering, there is duty. Americans in need are not strangers, they are citizens, not problems, but priorities. And all of us are diminished when any are hopeless.
Government has great responsibilities for public safety and public health, for civil rights and common schools. Yet compassion is the work of a nation, not just a government.
And some needs and hurts are so deep they will only respond to a mentor's touch or a pastor's prayer. Church and charity, synagogue and mosque lend our communities their humanity, and they will have an honored place in our plans and in our laws.
Many in our country do not know the pain of poverty, but we can listen to those who do.
And I can pledge our nation to a goal: When we see that wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not pass to the other side.
America, at its best, is a place where personal responsibility is valued and expected.
Encouraging responsibility is not a search for scapegoats, it is a call to conscience. And though it requires sacrifice, it brings a deeper fulfillment. We find the fullness of life not only in options, but in commitments. And we find that children and community are the commitments that set us free.
Our public interest depends on private character, on civic duty and family bonds and basic fairness, on uncounted, unhonored acts of decency which give direction to our freedom.
Sometimes in life we are called to do great things. But as a saint of our times has said, every day we are called to do small things with great love. The most important tasks of a democracy are done by everyone.
I will live and lead by these principles: to advance my convictions with civility, to pursue the public interest with courage, to speak for greater justice and compassion, to call for responsibility and try to live it as well.
In all these ways, I will bring the values of our history to the care of our times.
What you do is as important as anything government does. I ask you to seek a common good beyond your comfort; to defend needed reforms against easy attacks; to serve your nation, beginning with your neighbor. I ask you to be citizens: citizens, not spectators; citizens, not subjects; responsible citizens, building communities of service and a nation of character.
Americans are generous and strong and decent, not because we believe in ourselves, but because we hold beliefs beyond ourselves. When this spirit of citizenship is missing, no government program can replace it. When this spirit is present, no wrong can stand against it.
After the Declaration of Independence was signed, Virginia statesman John Page wrote to Thomas Jefferson: ``We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?''
Much time has passed since Jefferson arrived for his inauguration. The years and changes accumulate. But the themes of this day he would know: our nation's grand story of courage and its simple dream of dignity.
We are not this story's author, who fills time and eternity with his purpose. Yet his purpose is achieved in our duty, and our duty is fulfilled in service to one another.
Never tiring, never yielding, never finishing, we renew that purpose today, to make our country more just and generous, to affirm the dignity of our lives and every life.
This work continues. This story goes on. And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.
God bless you all, and God bless America.
Recently, 14,000 ''writers, academics and other intellectuals'' -- many of them my friends -- published a petition against the war, at the same time condemning the Iraqi regime for its human rights violations and supporting ''efforts by the Iraqi opposition to create a democratic, multiethnic and multireligious Iraq.'' But since they say that ''the decision to wage war at this time is morally unacceptable,'' I wonder what their support for the Iraqi opposition amounts to. One colleague refused to sign the petition because he said it was guilty of confusion. The problem is not that overthrowing Saddam by force is ''morally unjustified.'' Who seriously believes 25 million Iraqis would not be better off if Saddam were overthrown? The issue is whether it is prudent to do so, whether the risks are worth running.Evaluating risks is not the same thing as making moral choices. It is impossible to be certain that improving the human rights of 25 million people is worth the cost because no one knows what the cost will be. Besides, even if the cost could be known, what the philosophers call ''consequential'' justifications -- that 25 million people will live better -- run smack against ''deontological'' objections, namely that good consequences cannot justify killing people. I think the consequential justifications can override the deontological ones, but only if the gains in human freedom are large and the human costs are low. But let's admit it, the risks are large: the war may be bloody, the peace may be chaotic and what might be good in the long run for Iraqis might not be so good for Americans. Success in Iraq might win America friends or it might increase the anger much of the Muslim world feels toward this country.
It would be great if moral certainty made risk assessment easier, but it doesn't actually do so. What may be desirable from a moral point of view may be so risky that we would be foolish to try. So what do we do? Isaiah Berlin used to say that we just have to ''plump'' for one option or the other in the absence of moral certainty or perfect knowledge of the future. We should also try to decide for ourselves, regardless of the company we keep, and that may include our friends, our family and our loved ones.
During Vietnam, I marched with people who thought America was the incarnation of imperial wickedness, and I marched against people who thought America was the last best hope of mankind. Just as in Vietnam, the debate over Iraq has become a referendum on American power, and what you think about Saddam seems to matter much less than what you think about America. Such positions, now as then, seem hopelessly ideological and, at the same time, narcissistic. The fact is that America is neither the redeemer nation nor the evil empire. Ideology cannot help us here.
In the weeks and years ahead, the choices are not going to be about who we are or whose company we keep, or even about what we think America is or should be. The choices are about what risks are worth running when our safety depends on the answer. The real choices are going to be tougher than most of us could have ever imagined.
Twenty-two years ago President John F. Kennedy went to the Berlin Wall and proclaimed that he, too, was a Berliner. Well, today freedom-loving people around the world must say, I am a Berliner, I am a Jew in a world still threatened by anti-Semitism, I am an Afghan, and I am a prisoner of the Gulag, I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam, I am a Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism.
The pre-emption doctrine prefers ad hoc coalitions, allowing an unfettered America to strike at threats and potential threats. At A.E.I., Mr. Perle boasted that far from going it alone, the Bush administration had a coalition of "more than 40 countries and . . . growing." (Including Micronesia, Mongolia and the Marshall Islands,
all of them.)
French officials insist that their dispute with the U.S. was about means, not ends, but that is not true. It was about the huge disparity in power that has emerged between the U.S. and Europe since the end of the cold war, thanks to the vast infusion of technology and money into the U.S. military. That disparity was disguised for a decade by the softer touch of the Clinton team and by the cooperation over second-order issues, such as Kosovo and Bosnia.But 9/11 posed a first-order threat to America. That, combined with the unilateralist instincts of the Bush team, eventually led to America deploying its expanded power in Iraq, with full force, without asking anyone. Hence the current shock and awe in Europe. As Robert Kagan, whose book "Of Paradise and Power" details this power gap, noted: "We and the Europeans today are like a couple who woke up one day, looked at each other and said, `You're not the person I married!' "
Yes, we have changed. "What Chirac failed to understand was that between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the twin towers, a new world was created," said Dominique Moisi, a French foreign policy expert. "In the past, the Americans needed us against the Soviets and would never go so far as to punish France for straying. But that changed after 9/11. You have been at war since then, and we have not, and we have not integrated that reality into our thinking [and what that means] in terms of America's willingness to go it alone. We have fewer common interests now and more divided emotions."
WE ARE fighting in Iraq, apparently, because the soldiers are bored. We could have waited a little longer, perhaps, but they've been hanging around long enough, and frankly they want to get back home, have some real chow, and watch Friends.Those soldiers are not the only ones. Sometimes you get the feeling the whole of America just wants to cut to the chase, watch the fireworks and move on to the next showdown. At Fox and CNN, where news isn't news unless it's 'breaking', the stress of sustaining the coverage has been killing them. Hans Blix and Colin Powell just didn't cut the mustard, and all those endless Security Council meetings!. If only everything in life could be as perfectly scripted as last October's sniper attacks in Washington: one death every two or three days, just enough to hold the public's fickle attention, and then a gripping finale. All over within three weeks. Next.
Not really over, of course, just the fun part. John Lee Malvo, the 17-year-old co-defendant in the case is having his constitutional rights trampled so that attorney general John Ashcroft can have him executed, but that's not news. That's tedium. Like anthrax. Remember that? It closed down the Capitol in October 2001, and terrified America, but it was only interesting when it was scary. The perpetrator was never caught, despite the biggest operation in FBI history. For all we know, the attacks were a government plot to justify attacking Iraq. Probably not, but you can see how conspiracies begin. If the FBI with all its resources couldn't find the culprit, perhaps it was because it didn't want to.
IN QUIETER times, Saddam Hussein starts the day with a digest of the foreign press. Right now, he may be too busy to read international speculation about his possible demise in the raid on Wednesday night, but he would certainly regard any suggestion that he is finished with derision.The former hitman from Tikrit has never shown any sign of caving under pressure, still less turning tail, and there is no reason to believe that he will change now.
"He's keeping his nerve," one Iraqi opposition activist said disappointedly after watching Saddam's post-raid television broadcast. "He did not ask for this fight, in fact he made every concession he could to avoid it. But now it has been forced on him, he will fight to the end."
Police in south-western China have discovered 28 baby girls packed into nylon suitcases and stacked on the luggage rack of a long-distance bus.The police, acting on a tip-off, found them at a highway toll gate in Binyang, Guangxi province.
One of the babies - some of whose cheeks were mottled with cold - had died by the time the discovery was made on Tuesday evening.
The Beijing Morning News newspaper published the story on Saturday and it has since been confirmed by police.
Police said the youngest of the babies were only a few days old and the eldest were no more than three months. Most were "fine", they said.
They had been taken to a nearby school where nurses were taking care of them.
The newspaper suggested the infants may have been drugged to stop them crying.
"They had been on the bus for four or five hours before they were found," a police man told news agency AFP.
The babies, some packed two or three to a suitcase, were stacked on the luggage rack, on the back seat and along the sides of the bus, which was bound for an eastern province.
[S]ome conservatives imagine the role of America today as imperial, with a reformulated noblesse oblige, to democratize rather than civilize, animating it. I think this wild idea dangerous, impractical and largely divorced from reality; but even if it were advisable, do we really think that the country could undertake to implement it, with ruthlessness and perseverance? We have not that strength; it is imprudence to think so; the British imperialists, who failed as much as they succeeded, were made of sterner stuff than us. We cannot even get control of our own immigration policy where it concerns immigrants from countries full of our enemies. We can hardly educate our own children. For us, it is controversial to demand that school children be taught English; or to question the wisdom of that tedious old refrain about a certain religion of peace, which nevertheless inspires and countenances bloody mayhem on the occasion of a beauty contest. These are the symptoms of a profound spiritual loss of nerve; one of the more brazen symptoms of which is that hubris which gives rise to the notion that a nation ashamed of its own institutions and traditions, its own founts of inspiration, its own ideals as they developed organically out of a matrix of reason and faith, its own school of experience and inherited wisdom--that a nation ashamed of all these things, can nonetheless successfully export them to those resentful masses who long for our demise.
However, it is here that 9-11, the first WTC bombing, Khobar Towers, the African embassy bombings, the Cole, etc. enter the picture. For the brutal reality is that either Nazism or Communism could have taken over every each of European soil and never represented much of a threat to our liberties here in America. Either form of anti-human despotism might have slaughtered hundreds of millions of Europeans without ever directly implicating our own self-interest in their defeat. And, so long as we built and maintained a strong defensive force, we might have remained isolated until these evil empires crumbled under their own weight. But we live in a far different world today, one where suicide bombers put us all at risk and create a clear self-interest in taking on this ism, Islamicism, in a way that it was never "necessary" to combat Nazism and Communism. And, unfortunately, there seems little doubt that whenever our enthusiasm for the current war flags a new incident will come along to restore our will to fight. There may be lulls in the war, especially after a major action like the Iraq War, but they'll surely be followed by new terrorist attacks that begin the cycle all over again. The Osamas of the world are not done with us and so we can not be done with them.
Doctrine, it is said, never survives the battlefield unscathed. The strikes aimed at killing Saddam Hussein probably cannot be counted as a true example of that proposition, since the theory of precision weapons does lay down that they are only as good as the intelligence which provides the target, coupled with the speed with which fire is brought to bear.But they certainly represent the first of the tests of the American and British armed forces, their governments and their doctrines of war at every level, which this conflict will bring. Such doctrines go all the way from the smallest unit in the desert to the command staffs, and beyond them to governments pondering, as they will as soon as the violence ends, what will be the best course, whether military or non-military, in conflicts to come.
President Bush's ultimatum on Monday cited the new national security strategy, first outlined in January 2002, to the effect that, in an age when weapons of mass destruction are increasingly available, waiting to act after the enemy has "struck first is not self-defence, it's suicide". Critics have pointed out that the new doctrine blurs the distinction between pre-emption, which implies an imminent threat, and prevention, which implies more distant dangers.
The doctrine, as so far advanced, also tends to stress military rather than non-military solutions, and unilateral rather than multilateral decisions about the seriousness of threats. Although it does not neglect containment and deterrence, it pushes them down the list. Taken to the extreme, it would seem to allow one country, the US, to attack others at will if it deems them to represent a future rather than a present threat - and it might also encourage other countries to take pre-emptive action of the same kind in their neighbourhoods.
The administration repudiates such sweeping interpretations and seems genuinely convinced that this is a big idea which justifies the Iraq war and will be a key to action for years to come. Much of the rest of the world disagrees, either on the general principle, or on its application to Iraq, deeming the doctrine cover for other motives. In the most immediate sense that doctrine will be tested as it becomes clear what Iraq does possess in the way of weapons of mass destruction.
For the doctrine to be justified to any extent, there must be evidence that Iraq does have substantial stocks, and, equally important, that evidence must not take the form either of the effective use of such weapons against our troops or their transfer to terrorists who could use them in our home countries. The stocks, and any information on serious continuing weapons programmes, would show a degree of real threat, which would go some way to justifying the doctrine in principle. Even if the stocks are very substantial, that would not prove, of course, that the Iraqi regime planned to use them or could not have been deterred by means short of war. But it might nevertheless change the minds of many people across the world.
The completion of the military campaign without such weapons - assuming they exist in some quantity - being effectively used or transferred, would justify the doctrine at the level of execution. It would in other words show that the US had developed the military means to deal with an enemy, or at least this particular enemy, without its action leading to disaster rather than disarmament. To develop the capacity to paralyse an enemy and the speed and flexibility to get in sufficiently close to inhibit the use of weapons of mass destruction has been a preoccupation of reformers inside and outside the American services throughout the 90s. Major-General Robert Scales (author of Yellow Smoke, a new book on such requirements) stresses the weight of firepower, and the speed and especially the cunning of manoeuvre. The British military theorist of the 30s, Basil Liddell Hart, who advocated the "indirect approach", slicing through the enemy to cut up his nervous system, is an inspiration for such officers. What Scales calls the "new American style of war" has to be both fast and indirect, for the consequences otherwise could be horrendous.
Such wars now demand not just victory but the right kind of victory.
A soldier with the US Army's elite 101st Airborne Division has admitted carrying out a grenade attack that killed a member of his unit and wounded a dozen others."I'm told he admitted doing it," Time Magazine reporter Jim Lacey, who is embedded with troops from the unit in the northern Kuwait desert, told CNN television early Sunday.
Military officials said the unidentified soldier hurled an undetermined number of grenades Saturday into a heavily guarded US military camp in the northern Kuwait desert.
Lacey said family members of the injured soldiers were being notified early Sunday.
The suspect is a sergeant attached to an engineering unit and has "an Arabic-sounding last name," Lacey said.
The famous hardheaded definition of war is "the continuation of politics by other means." In the real world, though, war is the failure of politics. This war - undertaken at such cost to America's own interests - is specifically a failure of Colin Powell's politics.Even if you believe that this war is justified, the route to it has been an ugly display of American opportunism and bullying, dissembling and dissonance. The administration has neglected other lethal crises around the world, alienated the allies we need for almost everything else on our agenda and abandoned friends working for the kind of values we profess to be exporting.
When the last insincere whimper of diplomacy failed this week, I happened to be in Pakistan, where those who speak up for the values we espouse live with death threats from Islamic zealots. As America moved on Iraq, it was heartbreaking to hear the despair of these beleaguered liberals. They are convinced that their cause - our cause - will now be suffocated by anti-Americanism, not because we are going to war but because of the way we are going to war.
Let's hope they are wrong, and let's hope the war is a quick success, and let's hope President Bush can regain the good will that accrued to America after Sept. 11. But on the battleground of ideas - on the issue of how America uses its power - Mr. Powell seems to me to have been defeated already. When the war is over, when his departure will not undermine the president during a high crisis, he should concede that defeat, and go.
Iraq's exiled democratic politicians know what needs to be done to avoid a repeat of the old endless cycle of violence. Ahmed Chalabi, the President of the Iraqi National Congress, has built a coalition of religious and ethnic leaders. He has even got Hakim al-Bakr on board. Chalabi is going to host the constitutional conference in which Iraqis will decide what political constitution they will adopt: a parliamentary democracy, a presidential democracy, or even a constitutional monarchy, are all possibilities. Whatever constitution the conference decides upon will be put to a popular vote before it is ratified.Once that has happened, a new, democratic Iraq should be safely on its way. But it will take about two years to get to that point - and it is in those two years that Iraq is liable to split itself apart, as the totalitarian apparatus of the Ba'ath Party is destroyed, and perhaps 40 of Saddam's top henchmen are tried for their crimes (including men such as Ali Majid, or "Chemical Ali", who gassed Halabja).
There is only one force that has the power to guarantee that disputes in Iraq are resolved without violence. That force is the American army. American military power can prevent Iraq from sliding into anarchy, as it has prevented civil war from breaking out in Afghanistan since the removal of the Taliban regime, protecting Mohammed Karzai - who is committed to peaceful politics - from the warlords, who are not.
The Americans can ensure that only peaceful procedures are used in Iraq. But to do so, they will have to use their power subtly, indeed almost invisibly. It would be a terrible blunder if the Americans try to act as an adjudicator in Iraq's religious and political disputes, deciding who will get which of the spoils of war. If the Americans start to be perceived as meddling in Iraq's internal politics, the result will undo any possible good that might have come from removing Saddam.
A benign America, one that acts only to prevent the fanatics or the bloodthirsty in Iraq from wresting control from the politicans committed to non-violent procedures, would be profoundly appreciated. An imperial America would be the fastest way to turn Iraq into a fanatically anti-American country generating terrorists faster than the West Bank.
My old teacher, Professor Elie Kedourie, who was born in Baghdad, insisted that "You must always keep your eye on the corpses." The Americans have done so during the war. They must continue to do so once the war is over. For if they do not, the number of bodybags could be higher than anyone has imagined.
It has taken a major war to alert many non-American observers to how little they know about George W Bush. Ignorance, of course, has never been a problem for leftist commentators. They take pride in keeping their prejudices unsullied by embarrassing, politically incorrect facts. It is an axiom on the left that Dubya is a moron, a Texan cowboy who is driven by an extreme right-wing ideology, with a penchant for nuclear war. Does that fashionable description ring any bells? The same was said of Ronald Reagan, whose modest legacy includes the global collapse of communism, after he precipitated the implosion of the Soviet economy by forcing the evil empire to match his Star Wars programme.People who buy into the Bush/cretin thesis would do best to paint their faces and join the 10-year-olds on the picket lines. We are at too critical a moment in history to abandon intelligent geopolitical analysis in favour of grudge-driven sloganising. The objective fact is that George W Bush is surrounded by some of the most brilliant people to have served in any American administration. Indeed, the real danger may be the reverse of the liberal/leftist canard: the presidential team may be too cerebral for its own - and the world’s - good.
Politics, ideally, should be conducted by intelligent people. That is not a luxury we have enjoyed recently in this country, as witness l’affaire Clare Short - that surreal moment of farce, when Armageddon briefly wore motley. Yet there is an important distinction between government by the intelligent and by intellectuals. Arguably, the most formidable armoured column that is spearheading the present conflict is the invasion of the Oval Office by think-tanks. Dubya is a traditional American cultural conservative who likes to cut taxes, limit big government, encourage citizens’ personal responsibility, reinforce family values and prioritise the defence of the United States against aggression.
Yet even that last principle does not quite explain why he has a quarter of a million troops toiling through the Iraqi desert. This American intervention can only represent that phenomenon beloved of university examiners: a watershed in history. It is not so long since commentators were babbling about "the end of history", the successor buzz words to "glasnost", "perestroika" and the rest of Gorbachev’s turgid nonsense. The message blowing out of the sandstorms between Basra and Mosul is: kiss goodbye to the New World Order - here comes the New American Century. [...]
After the unsatisfactory outcome of the First Gulf War, the US Defense Department drew up a revanchist document which proposed a hyperpower role for America, as universal arbiter of human affairs. Dubya Pere, deeply embarrassed by this charter for imperial expansion, quietly binned it. Its philosophy resurfaced, however, in a report published by a powerful think-tank called Project for the New American Century, in September 2000.
Its authors included Paul Wolfowitz, now deputy defence secretary in the Dubya administration; John Bolton, now undersecretary of state for arms control and international security; and Dov Zakheim, undersecretary of defence and Pentagon chief financial officer.
Conspiracy theorists will get no joy from this coterie: there is no secrecy and their programme is aggressively in the public domain. Saddam is history. Kim Jung-il - by all means read short stories, but don’t get hooked on any serials. Iran? Well, one of their locker-room on dits is that nerds can take Baghdad, real men want to go to Tehran. Beyond those modest ambitions, the orchards of Syria beckon seductively... By an irresistible logic, the ultimate target must be China - probably not as a military objective, but to be absorbed into the global imperium of motherhood and apple pie by a process of economic and cultural osmosis.
Now hold on just one moment, fellas! Some of this Napoleonic stuff is getting kinda scary. Especially since Dick Cheney and Donald (Dr Strangelove) Rumsfeld are country members of the club. There is a danger that the ambitions of certain neo-conservative elements within the present administration may play into the hands of propagandists, by conforming to the leftist caricature of Republicans. Dubya is one of the sanest men this side of Alpha Centauri, but his Special Republican Guard is starting to frighten the children.
According to the Jewish Agency, Anti-American demonstrators attacked and wounded two young boys Saturday. The boys were participating in an educational activity of the Hashomer Hatsa'ir youth movement, taking place nearby.The Jewish Agency called on the French government "to assume its responsibility for the security of its Jewish citizens, and to prevent violence against Jews or anti-Semitic acts under the guise of pacifist protest".
American special forces were reported to be in Baghdad as thousands of elite troops still loyal to Saddam Hussein prepared for a final bloody showdown in the Iraqi capital.The prospect of coalition forces fighting street by street for control of the city emerged after thousands of Saddam's troops withdrew to the city following a day of sweeping advances by US and British soldiers pushing north from Kuwait. [...]
Earlier American Brigadier-General Vincent Brooks said the US military had entered the capital, and Pentagon sources told The Observer that intelligence paramilitary forces were also inside the city.
The sources said the role of the special forces was to 'help locate targets and monitor defence preparations'. However, they refused to comment on whether the infiltrators planned assassinations or direct engagement with the Iraqi forces.
The infiltration dovetails with US concerns that Saddam is preparing what they call the 'Stalingrad Factor' to defend the capital, seeking to establish an iron ring of defences, possibly involving the deployment of chemical and biological weapons.
The sources said the paramilitary forces were from the CIA, and 'may be' involved in talks between the US, represented by Iraqi dissidents and Kurdish leaders, and Saddam's Republican Guard.
US State Department sources said contacts had 'intensified' in the past 24 hours 'with regard to mass surrenders and surrenders higher up the chain of command'. [...]
In an attempt to put a quick end to the war, the US has been negotiating with Iraqi military commanders using third-country intelligence connections, Iraqi defectors and even straightforward telephone appeals from American officers, according to US and Iraqi opposition officials.
The aim is to persuade the Iraqi military to stage a coup against Saddam or surrender en masse. 'We're trying to get the message across that it's time to give up,' said a State Department official. Across the southern portion of the country, Iraqi army regulars were surrendering to anyone they could find in a military uniform; some even tried to surrender to reporters.
US intelligence officials said there was now a high volume of back-channel communications with officials inside Iraq. American military officers were trying, often by telephone, to coax their Iraqi counterparts into surrendering.
MORE:
Aerial Pounding Intended to Push Iraq's Government TowardBrink: The airstrikes the U.S. military carried out were intended to destroy Saddam Hussein's ability to control his forces. (MICHAEL R. GORDON, 3/22/03, NY Times)
An American Muslim soldier is understood to have carried out a grenade attack on a US military camp, injuring16 soldiers.A second man, who is not a soldier, is thought to be held....
[Sky correspondent Stuart] Ramsay watched as the suspects were held....
"Two men are being held, one of which is a Muslim soldier who is an engineer," Ramsay said.
"It appears he was hiding in a barrack where the attacks happened. A second man, who we believe is not an American soldier, is being held by the military."...
He said fears about the Muslim soldier's behaviour had been raised in recent days by colleagues.
"In recent days they were concerned about his behaviour and were not going to send him up to the front when the soldiers were going to be deployed."
FOR EXAMPLE:
U.S. Soldier Held for Another's Death in Grenade AttackRick Atkinson, , March 23, 2003, Washington Post)
One soldier from the 101st Airborne Division was killed and 13 were wounded this morning when two hand grenades were thrown into the 1st Brigade technical operations center at Camp Pennsylvania in central Kuwait, U.S. Army officials said.A U.S. soldier assigned to the brigade was in custody, the officials said. The soldier who was killed was not idenfitied.
Army sources said that soldiers from the 1st Brigade had loaded their vehicles and were preparing to move from Camp Pennsylvania when the grenades exploded at about 1:21 a.m. local time in the operations center, which is in a closely confined tent and usually manned by a couple dozen staff officers.
A soldier guarding a convoy of engineer vehicles was found to be missing, as were four grenades from the convoy's ammunition supply.
Roughly an hour after the grenade attack, a missile alert sounded and the missing soldier was discovered in a protective bunker. The soldier was arrested and was in the custody of the military police at Camp Pennsylvania.
if it is the case that we can rid peoples of such [evil] regimes and manifestly improve their lives, even save their lives, with such minimal impact, has the moral obligation now clearly shifted . . . to one where we must embrace war because of the suffering and death it so clearly relieves? . . . Isn't the hard question that confronts us all today, but the peace party in particular, whether we behaved decently and responsibly towards fellow human beings when we left the Iraqis to Saddam's mercies in 1991? . . . May we not be in the midst of an unusual and as yet unrecognized epoch in our affairs where war is not the worst but the best option available to us and to captive peoples? Which do we place a higher value on, as a society, our peace or human freedom? And can we love our society if we choose the former?OJ is making three implicit claims:
Why is this pro-war demonstrator dressed up like General Custer? I suppose it could be said that Americans won that battle, but General Custer surely lost. Next thing you know, people will dress as Benedict Arnold.
I recall many times during the 20 years that I knew Yasser Arafat well, trying to explain to him that [America] was a complex society with all sorts of currents, interests, pressures, and histories in conflict within it and that far from being ruled the way Syria was, for instance, a different model of power and authority ought to be studied. I enlisted my late friend, the scholar and political activist, Eqbal Ahmed ... but all to no avail.
Most people throw up their hands in despair like disappointed lovers: America is hopeless, and I don't ever want to go back there, they often say, though one also notices that green, permanent residence cards are much in demand, as are university admissions for the children.
The difference between America and the classic empires of the past is that ... this one [operates] with an astonishing affirmation of its nearly sancrosanct altruism and well-meaning innocence....America is the world's most avowedly religious country. References to God permeate the national life, from coins to buildings to common forms of speech: in God we trust, God's country, God bless America, and on and on. George Bush's power base is made up of the 60-70 million fundamentalist Christians who, like him, believe they have seen Jesus and are here to do God's work in God's country....
All of those things converge around an idea of American rightness, goodness, freedom, economic promise, social advancement that is so ideologically woven into the fabric of daily life that it doesn't even appear to be ideological, but rather a fact of nature. America=good=total loyalty and love. Similarly there is an unconditional reverence for the Founding Fathers, and for the Constitution, an amazing document, it is true, but a human one nevertheless. Early America is the anchor of American authenticity. In no country that I know does a waving flag play so central an iconographical role.
[T]he consensus operates in a sort of timeless present. History is anathema to it, and in accepted public discourse even the word 'history' is a synonym for nothingness or non-entity, as in the scornful, typically dismissive American phrase, 'you're history.' Otherwise history is what as Americans we are supposed to believe about America (not about the rest of the world, which is 'old' and generally left behind, hence irrelevant) uncritically, loyally, unhistorically.
America, by contrast, has an essentially Christian spirit which emphasizes forgiveness. "Forgive us our trespasses, Lord, as we forgive those who trespass against us" -- this is our daily prayer. In the Christian vision, relationships are continually renewed in the present, constantly rededicated to love and affection. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord" -- we are to renounce all grudges. We let old offenses slip into history, and we are rightfully scornful of those who do not. It is, to us, weakness in the Arabs that they clutch their history tightly, and never let it go.
America [is] embroiled in a serious clash of identities whose counterparts are visible as similar contests throughout the rest of the world. America may have won the Cold War, as the popular phrase has it, but the actual results of that victory within America are very far from clear, the struggle not yet over.
Cultures, specially America's, which is in effect an immigrant culture, overlap with others, and one of the perhaps unintended consequences of globalisation is the appearance of transnational communities of global interests, as in the human rights movement, the women's movement, the anti-war movement and so on. America is not at all insulated from any of this.... There is hope and encouragement to be gained from that view.
Over those 20 years, active duty deaths from all causes plummeted, from 2391 (116.6 per 100,000) in 1980 to 761 (54.9 per 100,000) in 1999. Accidents (411, down from 1577) and illness (126 v. 401) fell particularly sharply. At this point, there are almost as many self-inflicted deaths (110 in 1999) as deaths from illness. I was also surprised to see that, during those 20 years, there were only four years without any deaths from hostile action. The Marine Corp is the most dangerous service (70.1 deaths per 100,000 in 1999), the Air Force the least dangerous (32.4 per 100,000). There is a lot of fascinating information here (the Air Force is also the least suicidal service) and if you're at all interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend it.
From Napoleon's drive into Egypt through Britain's rule of Iraq in the 1920s to Israel's march into Lebanon in 1982, Middle East nations have tempted conquerors only to send them reeling.Little wonder that even many Arabs who revile Saddam Hussein view the prospect of a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq with trepidation. "Unless the Americans are far more subtle than they've ever had the capacity to be, and more subtle than the [colonial] British, it's going to end in tears," predicts Faisal Istrabadi, an Iraqi-born lawyer in Michigan who has worked with the State Department on plans to rebuild Iraq's judiciary. "The honeymoon will be very brief."
Again and again, Westerners have moved into the Mideast with confidence that they can impose freedom and modernity through military force. Along the way they have miscalculated support for their invasions, both internationally and in the lands they occupy. They have anointed cooperative minorities to help rule resentful majorities. They have been mired in occupations that last long after local support has vanished. They have met with bloody uprisings and put them down with brute force.
"We tend to overlook a basic rule: that people prefer bad rule by their own kind to good rule by somebody else," says Boston University historian David Fromkin, author of a 1989 classic on colonialism's failures in the Mideast called "A Peace to End All Peace."...
With the passion of a convert to nation-building, he spoke movingly of confronting totalitarianism, of spreading "God's gift" of liberty "to each and every person," and of how "Iraqi lives and freedom matter greatly to us."
Napoleon proclaimed a similar new era of equality and respect for "true Muslims" as he marched into Cairo in 1798, killing a thousand members of Egypt's ruling caste. He was accompanied by 100 French scientists, researching an encyclopedia and spreading European "enlightenment" to bemused Egyptian intellectuals.
"Peoples of Egypt, you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion," said Napoleon as he entered Cairo. "Do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights!"...
Resentment grew as hundreds of unveiled women paraded around town with the French interlopers, flouting Islamic ideals of modesty. "One saw low-class women mixing with the French because of their liberality and their liking for the female sex," wrote Egyptian historian Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti.
Months after the French arrival, Islamic clerics stirred a mob to rebellion, killing 300 Frenchmen. In revenge, the French bombarded Cairo. French troops stormed the city, killing 3,000 Cairenes and ransacking the chief mosque of al-Azhar on horseback. "The people of Cairo were overwhelmed with disdain, abasement at the despoiling and looting of wealth by the French," Mr. al-Jabarti observed.
The French left within three years.
Much has changed since the early 1800s: notably, the rewards to freedom. Even the most advanced nations in 1800 grew at 0.5% per year, meaning that for the average adult, living in a static society would cost the average 40-year-old 5% of his lifetime earnings -- hardly a factor that would weigh against cultural preferences. Now, advanced nations grow at 3% per year, and developing nations like Iraq can easily grow at 10% per year. This means that being in a dictatorship like Iraq or Iran, rather than a free society, will cost the average 40-year-old 65% of his future earnings, and the average 20-year-old 90% of his future earnings. Today, the cost of living in a socially and politically backward country is immense, especially for the young.
Non-economic factors have changed too: the value of freedom is much more clear after two centuries of experience; and modern business, more than commerce of a hundred years ago, provides a cultural training that supports freedom.
I believe that, if we are tenacious, Arab freedom will flourish. I hope President Bush works hard to prove the skeptics wrong.
He is group editor at Energy Intelligence, a company that publishes news and provides data and analysis about international energy issues. Ibrahim is also a senior fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, Ibrahim was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, and Tehran Bureau Chief. He also covered energy for The Wall Street Journal.
The liberation of the Iraqi people has begun, after the slaughter of 2 Million Iraqis, countless wars and aggression against his neighbors, decades of abject oppression of the most fundamental human rights, untold violations of the Geneva Convention and UN Resolutions, the end of Saddam and his regime of terror is at hand. US and British forces once again bring liberty to the oppressed.One would think after the untold death and oppression of the late 19th and early 20th century the lessons of appeasement would be learned. One would also think the complete and total failure of communism would also be widely universally accepted. Fortunately in America largely these lessons have been learned, our troops have had to mop up the messes, including the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF CORPSES, created by these failed ideologies. Europe doesn’t care about the clean up their failed policies, because its been a long time since they have had to clean them up, that’s a job they leave for us Yanks.
Sadly much of the world has not learned this lesson and it appears that the nations that have learned the least about dealing with despots are the same nations that created the 3 antichrists of Europe. The nations that unleashed Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin upon the world have been the most vociferous advocates of leaving Saddam and his regime in power.
I guess in a way I can see their side, I mean, why worry about Saddam slaughtering 2 million, after all, their past leaders butchered nearly 200 Million, É. I guess in the face of that, what is a paltry 2 million souls? What is cutting out the tongue of those who speak against the dictator in the face of the Gulags and Concentration camps? What is raping a 4 year old girl, or gouging out her eyes, in front of her parents in comparison to this? What is rounding up those who oppose you and making them disappear in the face of French collaboration with Hitler’s Holocaust? At least the Iraqis rounding up those souls who will die, are doing so at the orders of another Iraqi, not a German. What’s to care about Saddam’s desire to control a few desert countries in the middle east? When your actions have destroyed CONTINENTS. I guess to the nations who unleashed these horrors upon the world, Saddam is just a want to be.
PHOTOGRAPHER Terry Richards, 52, has been with The Sun since 1980 and has previously covered the Afghan war.This time Terry, of Essendon, Herts, joined 40 Commando Royal Marines on HMS Ocean and followed their attack on Al Faw in Southern Iraq. Here is his amazing report and pictures.
IRAQI troops shot their own commanders with Kalashnikov rifles — so they could surrender.
I overheard a Marine reporting to an officer what the captives had admitted to him. And I don’t blame them for it.
Not when you have just witnessed the awesome sight of 40 Commando Royal Marines capturing a key oil refinery — and seen doomed Iraqi fighters crumble at their gunposts.
Faced with the astonishing firepower and determination of these elite Marines, even hardened soldiers would crack.
As for this poorly-equipped Iraqi force, it takes just two hours for Our Boys to blast a devastating hole through their shattered morale.
Scores of demoralised men with fear in their eyes and white flags waving above their heads capitulate under a barrage of bullets at the Al Faw refinery.
MORE (PAJ): Conscripts shoot their own officers rather than fight (Times of London, 3/22/2003)
IRAQI conscripts shot their own officers in the chest yesterday to avoid a fruitless fight over the oil terminals at al-Faw. British soldiers from 40 Commando’s Charlie Company found a bunker full of the dead officers, with spent shells from an AK47 rifle around them.Stuck between the US Seals and the Royal Marines, whom they did not want to fight, and a regime that would kill them if they refused, it was the conscripts’ only way out....
Two [prisoners] were a general in the regular Iraqi Army and a brigadier. They came out from the command bunker where they had been hiding after 40 Commando’s Bravo Company fired two anti-tank missiles into it. With them was a large sports holdall stuffed with money. They insisted that they had been about to pay their troops, to the disbelief of their captors.
These were the men who had left their soldiers hungry, poorly armed and almost destitute for weeks, judging by the state we had seen them in, while appearing to keep the money for themselves....
Every time you turned around, a new trickle of silhouettes emerged from the horizon walking slowly towards us. One Marine joked: “Oh no. They’re surrendering at us from all sides.”
[S]ince the end of World War II, the United States has at least formally agreed to international constraints on the right of any nation, including itself, to start a war. These constraints were often evaded, but rarely just ignored. And evasion has its limits, enforced by the sanction of embarrassment. This gave these international rules at least some real bite.But George W. Bush defied embarrassment and slew it with a series of Orwellian flourishes. If the United Nations wants to be "relevant," he said, it must do exactly as I say. In other words, in order to be relevant, it must become irrelevant. When that didn't work, he said: I am ignoring the wishes of the Security Council and violating the U.N. Charter in order to enforce a U.N. Security Council resolution. No, no, don't thank me! My pleasure!!
By Monday night, though, in his 48-hour-warning speech, the references to international law and the United Nations had become vestigial. Bush's defense of his decision to make war on Iraq was basic: "The United States of America has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security." He did not claim that Iraq is a present threat to America's own national security but suggested that "in one year or five years" it could be such a threat. In the 20th century, threats from murderous dictators were foolishly ignored until it was too late. In this century, "terrorists and terrorist states" do not play the game of war by the traditional rules. They "do not reveal these threats with fair notice in formal declarations." Therefore, "Responding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not self-defense. It is suicide."
What is wrong with Bush's case? Sovereign nations do have the right to act in their own self defense, and they will use that right no matter what the U.N. Charter says or how the Security Council votes. Waiting for an enemy to strike first can indeed be suicidal. So? [...]
[B]ush is asserting the right of the United States to attack any country that may be a threat to it in five years. And the right of the United States to evaluate that risk and respond in its sole discretion. And the right of the president to make that decision on behalf of the United States in his sole discretion. In short, the president can start a war against anyone at any time, and no one has the right to stop him. And presumably other nations and future presidents have that same right. All formal constraints on war-making are officially defunct.
Well, so what? Isn't this the way the world works anyway? Isn't it naive and ultimately dangerous to deny that might makes right? Actually, no. Might is important, probably most important, but there are good, practical reasons for even might and right together to defer sometimes to procedure, law, and the judgment of others. Uncertainty is one. If we knew which babies would turn out to be murderous dictators, we could smother them in their cribs. If we knew which babies would turn out to be wise and judicious leaders, we could crown them dictator. In terms of the power he now claims, without significant challenge, George W. Bush is now the closest thing in a long time to dictator of the world. He claims to see the future as clearly as the past. Let's hope he's right.
MORE:
Saddam's son beats 12-year-olds who say no to sex: defectors (Sydney Morning Herald, March 22 2003)
Saddam Hussein's eldest son mercilessly beats girls as young as 12 on the soles of their feet if they refuse to sleep with him, Iraqi defectors said today.Uday Hussein forces head teachers of schools in Baghdad's poorest districts to send pupils to his palace where he arranges dates with those he likes.
If the chosen girls annoy him in anyway they are dangled over a wooden beam held by his bodyguards and repeatedly hit with a wooden club, according to two former members of his inner circle who recently fled Iraq.
"He does it to a girl if she says she doesn't want to go out with him, or if she finds another boyfriend, or is late or reluctant," one defector told Vanity Fair magazine.
The 38-year-old warns victims not to flinch while the beating is administered or they will have their legs broken. He often hits them up to 50 times, the report claimed.
Afterwards, when they can barely walk, he orders them to dance. [...]
Intelligence officials believe Uday may have been in the bunker hit by a cruise missile in the "decapitation strike" on Baghdad in the first hours of the war.
His younger brother, Qusay, is Saddam's heir after Uday fell out of favour when he murdered a close friend of his father in 1988.
In escalating the aerial bombardment of Iraq on Friday, U.S. commanders crossed a threshold in a psychological campaign meant to unravel the Iraqi government.They hoped that the promise of hundreds more airstrikes throughout the country, plus the advance of thousands of American ground troops toward the gates of Baghdad, would compel key people in President Saddam Hussein's inner circle to turn on him, U.S. officials said.
"They're beginning to realize, I suspect, that the regime is history," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference. "And as that realization sets in, their behavior is likely to begin to tip and to change. Those close to Saddam Hussein will likely begin searching for a way to save themselves."
But the time for capitulation was rapidly expiring. Pentagon officials speaking on condition of anonymity said as many as 1,500 Air Force and Navy bombs and missiles would hammer targets throughout Iraq in the 24 hours after the accelerated air campaign began Friday.
One senior official said Gen. Tommy Franks, who is running the war from a command post in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar, would calibrate the intensity of the air war to build maximum pressure on Saddam's lieutenants.
By early next week, however, U.S. ground forces led by the Army's 3rd Infantry Division are likely to be at the outskirts of Baghdad.
"The intention is to convince the regime that it is time to leave, and if they don't we will try to take them out by force," Rear Adm. Matthew G. Moffit, commander of
A substantial majority of Americans support the war with Iraq, but the public is divided over whether Iraqi President Saddam Hussein must be killed, captured or merely removed from power for the United States and its allies to be successful, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.More than seven in 10 endorsed the decision of President Bush to wage war on Iraq. A similar proportion expressed confidence that the United States and its allies are right to use military force to topple Hussein and rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. And two out of three said they believe Bush had worked hard enough to try to find a diplomatic solution before ordering the attack.
"I didn't vote for George Bush, but I strongly support him, and if anything I think he should have acted sooner," said Rick Jackson, 31, a manager at an engineering company in Bradenton, Fla. "I think he exhausted all channels to appease those who don't agree with us."
In interviews with 804 registered voters conducted March 18-20, 2003, the Ipsos Public Affairs/Cook Political Report Poll registers a dramatic swing in favor of President George W. Bush and the whole Republican Party.* A majority (53%) of all adults say the country is on the right track, 40% wrong track; that represents a reversal from 37% right track-54% wrong track in interviews conducted February 18-March 6, 2003.
* In the most recent poll, 46% of registered voters would definitely vote to re-elect Bush, the highest re-elect number he has seen since the second quarter (April-May-June) 2002.
* In the most recent poll, 44% of registered voters would like to see Republicans win control of Congress and 41% would like Democrats to win control.
The Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed Al-Douri, reacted strongly Friday to a new draft resolution at the UN Security Council that would transfer authority for a UN humanitarian program from the Iraqi government to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, accusing the chief of international body of doing the bidding of the U.S. and Britain.The new plan will also re-assign funds raised through the sale of Iraqi oil to sponsor rehabilitation for Iraqis who fled their homes because of the war.
"Our government is there, controlling the country, and this move is a very unfortunate move," he said.
The envoy said Annan was doing the bidding of the United States and Britain in violation of the UN Charter by withdrawing international staff and suggesting alternative ways to get humanitarian relief to Iraqis through the use of oil revenues.
The council spent more than three hours discussing Annan's draft resolution that would adjust the UN oil-for-food program to allow the UN to run the program not just in Iraq's north but throughout the country and for refugees fleeing the U.S.-led war.
The "Oil-for-Food" program was initiaited in as "a temporary measure to provide for the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people."
The first oil under the program was exported in December 1996 and the first shipments of food arrived in March 1997. So far, almost $26 billion worth of supplies and equipment have arrived in Iraq through the scheme.
U.S. air power ... kept a potential flood of Iraqi refugees away from the Jordanian border Friday....U.S. fighter bombers took out the only gas station between Baghdad and the border, a distance of 600 kilometers. The one-camel village of Ramadi was also the only phone booth on the desert road and a Jordanian was killed by the explosion of the gas station while making a call to his parents in Amman to let them know he was on his way home.
A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."
Jordanians see a good omen in the daily arrival of almost 1,000 white storks. They alight near the Safeway on one of Amman's seven hills, a pit stop on their way from Africa to their east European breeding grounds. About 100,000 storks are expected at the Safeway for the next month, numbers not seen in 10 years, and a sign of ample rain and a good harvest.
A British Member of Parliament has asked military leaders in Iraq to think about some of the forgotten casualties of war -- animals.Tony Banks, a former minister in Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites)'s Labour government, welcomed promises from London and Washington that troops would do their best to avoid hitting ordinary Iraqis in bombing raids, but said they also needed to think about the creatures in Baghdad's El-Zawra Zoo.
"In war, countless numbers of animals are killed and injured," the former sports minister, who voted against war on Iraq, said in an statement put before parliament on Friday.
He appealed to military leaders "to ensure that Baghdad's El-Zawra zoo is safeguarded and that when hostilities are over military vets will provide urgent assistance to the zoo and other organizations involved with animal welfare in Iraq."
The zoo, which is reported to be shut and under renovation, escaped bomb damage during the 1991 allied blitz on Baghdad but keepers said the animals had been disturbed by the noise of bombs hitting nearby targets....
In 2001, [Banks] championed the cause of Marjan, a lame one-eyed lion in Kabul Zoo when the U.S. carried out bombing raids in Afghanistan ...
Within weeks of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the president and his most influential advisers set a goal of toppling Saddam -- if possible by coup or exile, more likely by force. Bush began to make the case to the world with his speech to the United Nations a year and a day after the attacks.With Wednesday's decision, Bush finally pulled the trigger. But the gun was cocked for a long time, since the Sept. 12, 2002, speech. The six months since then have been a time of diplomatic maneuvers, military deployments, rhetorical shifts and single-minded determination.
Bush refused to let anything deter him:
* He minimized a nuclear showdown with North Korea that even some administration officials believed posed a more immediate threat. The divisions within the president's inner circle over North Korea were severe. When New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson told Secretary of State Colin Powell that he had gotten a call from North Korean diplomats, Powell said Richardson should go ahead and meet with them -- but told him to avoid talking about it to Powell's rivals in the administration.
* He dismissed the complaints of then-Senate Intelligence Chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla., and others that in targeting Iraq as the second front in the war on terrorism, the administration was shortchanging the first battleground, in Afghanistan and against al-Qaeda. A senior Defense Department official worried that combat operations in Afghanistan last spring were poorly planned because the Central Command was preoccupied with the next war.
* He was defiant when the U.N. Security Council refused to endorse the resolution he and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had sought to pave the way for the attack. The president had fought hard behind the scenes for the U.N. imprimatur. After a private White House dinner with Secretary-General Kofi Annan, he included an initiative to fight AIDS in Africa in the State of the Union address. Annan had mentioned the issue as a personal priority.
Administration officials even found themselves addressing other worldly matters as they lobbied the president of Guinea, one of the Security Council's 15 members. He was desperately ill with kidney disease. His concern: Which vote was more likely to get him into heaven?
In the end, it was Bush's unyielding determination that undermined the diplomatic campaign. Skeptical foreign leaders complained that the administration's earlier willingness to go to the United Nations and agree to renewed weapons inspections in Iraq was only for show. The president had his mind made up, they said, no matter what.
Some top administration officials agree.
''He was not going to be easily deterred or distracted,'' a senior adviser says. ''It would have taken nothing less than an Iraqi capitulation. Either Saddam and his inner circle would have had to leave or they would have had to really, truly, completely, verifiably disarm. Bottom line: Bush was not looking for a way out.''
Aides and outsiders interviewed for this article cite a mix of motives behind the president's focus -- some call it an obsession -- on Iraq: His view of Saddam as a brutal despot who threatened Israel and unsettled the Middle East. An almost Shakespearean impulse to finish the job his father had started. The prospect of more-stable oil supplies.
Bush himself says he is thinking about the verdict of history.
H. D. Miller predicts Baghdad will fall by Monday and says why. Persoonally, I think that whoever's "in charge" will surrender by some time tomorrow but I don't know if we can get the level of troops there to take control that one assumes we'd require. So Baghdad may fall without being taken.
Indeed. it seems likely that in retrospect we'll come to see that the war was effectively won by the time we announced it had begun. Also--and I don't mean this cynically, because I think it was strategically necessary--we'll realize that the Pentagon has known that the decapitation worked (whether Saddam is actually dead or not) but has pursued the war in order to genuinely disarm Iraq, lest weapons end up in the hands of Shi'a, Sunni, and Kurds who might turn them on each other.
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Baghdad by Monday (Patrick Sawer, 3/21/03, Evening Standard)
Senior British and US commanders today predicted that allied forces could be in Baghdad by Monday. The claim came after US marines captured a key section of the southern Iraqi port of Umm Qasr. [...]There was growing speculation this afternoon that Saddam and one of his sons were killed or injured in the first bombing raids on Baghdad, despite Iraqi denials. One US official said: "The preponderance of the evidence is he [Saddam] was there when the building blew up."
After being pinned down in a two-hour firefight US troops this afternoon moved into the new port area of Umm Qasr. They had to call in British artillery fire to clear their path, and a dozen helicopters brought reinforcements.
Marines raised the US flag over the new port but later removed it. No reason was given but Washington has consistently stressed invading US forces want to liberate Iraq, not occupy it. [...]
In a further sign of French anger at the US-led attack, its foreign ministry rejected US demands to expel Iraqi diplomats from Paris.
REMEMBER when Mayor Martin O'Malley used all those colorful cuss words a few years back in speaking about Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia Jessamy?Remember the uproar? Remember how all those black folks gathered out in front of City Hall with signs and accused O'Malley of insulting all black women? How dare the mayor use such language about a black female government official, they fumed.
On Saturday, at one of the state's public colleges, another man said something even worse about another black female government official.
In front of an overwhelmingly black audience of about 100 at Coppin State College, Amiri Baraka, New Jersey's Lunatic Laureate, called national security adviser Condoleezza Rice a "skeeza."
For those of you not in the know, a "skeeza" is a derogatory street term used in reference to a woman and as offensive as calling her a prostitute. It's a noxious, bilious, disgustingly sexist term and one of the worst things you could call a woman.
It is something Rice certainly is not. Baraka knows she's not. Those blacks who laughed, giggled, tittered and applauded when Baraka said it know she's not. But what was the reaction of these black folks when Baraka finished his invective masquerading as poetry that he called "Somebody Blew Up America"?
They gave him thunderous applause and a standing ovation.
Gregory Kane is a fine columnist who is not afraid to speak truth to power in the black community. In challenging the intimidators, he is helping to heal America's racial divide.
To climb into today's M-1 tank with Marine Staff Sgt. Mark Miller, 36, a decorated tanker from the first Persian Gulf War, is to understand why Saddam Hussein will be hopelessly outgunned."Look through this sight," Miller said to his visitor. The sight magnifies the armored vehicles in the distance to 10 times their size, making them seem close enough to swat. At the same time, a laser beam shoots out to tell the tank commander the target's exact distance. Miller had no such instrument on his M-60 tank in the first Gulf War, when he nevertheless won the Bronze Star for destroying three Iraqi tanks and two armored personnel carriers.
Although 2,500 meters (about a mile and a half) is considered a "comfortable" range for the M-1's main 120-mm gun, Miller said that his upgraded tank could destroy an Iraqi armored vehicle more than two miles away. A computerized system in the tank calculates the effects of the wind and the air temperature for the gunner, helping him to hit the very heart of the enemy vehicle from long distances.
And the big gun is only part of the hell that the M-1 can make. A chain gun can fire 11,000 7.62-mm bullets per minute while that old reliable, the .50-caliber machine gun, can spit out 1,000 rounds of lethal fire. And if Iraq should dare to fly a helicopter over his M-1, Miller can use the big gun to explode a round right in the aircraft's path, thanks to another new high-tech aiming system.
"We're a big armored pillbox," said Miller. "And we have had 12 years of studying the lessons of the last Gulf War." He feels sure that none of the Iraqis who faced U.S. tanks back then will have any stomach for a rematch.
Miller said he felt no pleasure in 1991 destroying Iraqi tanks with men like him inside. "I just felt numb as I was going through it. I just lined up the sights and pressed the trigger," he recalled. Later, when he drove through the Iraqi wreckage and saw the death and destruction he had caused in pressing that trigger, it bothered him, he said. "I did keep seeing some of the faces. I had a difficult time sleeping afterward." And he said that after the war, when he was back home, "I was hypervigilant. My senses were extremely sharp. I was difficult to be around, especially if I saw lots of light, like Fourth of July fireworks."
Miller said he could have left the tank corps after Gulf War I in hopes of relieving some of the postwar stress. "But I thought I should come back and teach young marines what I learned." Miller was to be in one of the first tanks to bump over the big sand berm that marks the dividing line between Kuwait and Iraq. "I'll go without hesitation, because that's the choice I've made in my life. I'm sure if the president says this is important, he knows more than I do. So I'll say, 'Aye, aye,' and go."
Jacques Chirac said Friday that France would not go along with a new United Nations resolution allowing the United States and Britain to administer postwar Iraq.The French president said at a European Union summit he would "not accept" a resolution that "would legitimize the military intervention (and) would give the belligerents the powers to administer Iraq."
European Union (EU) divisions over Iraq have widened after Britain stood by charges that France prevented a peaceful solution to the crisis, while three anti-war states called a separate summit on defence integration.As EU leaders held a second day of tense talks, Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt announced plans for France, Germany and Belgium to meet next month to discuss integrating their armed forces.
The moves plunged the EU back into crisis hours after the 15 leaders had papered over their splits with a statement pledging support for UN humanitarian relief efforts and urging Iraq's neighbours not to make mischief. [...]
The defence initiative apparently is designed to isolate Britain, Europe's biggest military power. [...]
Mr Verhofstadt told the Belgian news agency, Belga: "In April Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, President Jacques Chirac and I will meet in Brussels to discuss a stronger integration of our respective forces."
His Foreign Minister, Louis Michel, said closer defence integration is the only way for Europe to be taken seriously as an entity by the US.
Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker applauded the initiative, telling reporters: "This is not a closed shop. I expect others would join. It's the logical consequence of the differences of recent weeks."
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Drudge is reporting that S & A may be scaled back anyway because whoever's running Iraq at this point is negotiating its surrender.
[T]hunderous silence does not mean that all's quiet on the Iraqi western front. "The surprise is not the attack on Baghdad or the advance from Kuwait. The surprise will come from Jordan," a top Jordanian source who requested anonymity told Asia Times Online. The source says that well over 400 American tanks and more than 7,000 American troops may well be on their way to Baghdad from a remote launching pad in eastern Jordan.So far, the tanks and heavy military equipment have arrived by ship at the southern Jordanian port of Aqaba and have been deployed to the east shrouded in utmost secrecy. Secrecy is paramount, according to the source.
Exiled Iraqis may be praying for the end of Saddam's brutal secular regime, but at the same time they are now caught in a very serious religious conflict. The most eminent scholars at al-Azhar University in Cairo - which is the highest religious authority in Sunni Islam - have declared that a jihad against the "new crusade" targeting Islam is absolutely legitimate. According to al-Azhar's academy for Islamic research, "If an enemy descends upon Muslim land, then it is the duty of all Muslim men and women to perform jihad." The scholars are unanimous that 1.3 billion Muslims all over the world "must be ready to defend themselves, their faith and their honor".Egyptian and Saudi scholars have agreed these past few days that even if this war does not explicitly pit Christians against Muslims, the only possible reaction to the Anglo-American invasion is jihad: "Hitting American interests is an act of martyrdom."
I am an eager consumer of war news. I'm spending my time listening to the news, watching the news and downloading the news, sometimes all at the same time. As a result, I know that 8 B-52 bombers took off from Fairford Airforce Base, England, this morning. I know the approximate flight time to Iraq, although I also know that, with refueling, a B-52 can stay in the air over a target for hours. I know that each B-52 can carry up to 30 metric tons of ordinance. So I suspect that, sometime in the next two to six hours, a couple of hundred thousand pounds of high explosive are going to rain down upon Iraq.
Now, I like knowing this. My eagerness to know it, along with your eagerness and our neighbor's eagerness, is responsible for it being available. I even can understand that letting the Iraqis know this is part of our shock and awe campaign. Still, I can't help but be a little nervous that all this information is so easily available.
Although the parliament approved motion on sending Turkish troops to northern Iraq and opening Turkish airspace to U.S. planes, the Turkish and the U.S. sides failed to reach an agreement on text deal. The United States could not use Turkish airspace last night while Turkish troops were prevented from entering northern Iraq.... While agreement was reached on rules of implementation of opening air corridors, the U.S. overflights which were foreseen to start at midnight were delayed upon Turkey's request....The United States had informed Turkey of the first bombardment of the Gulf War in 1991, but this time, it did not do it. The United States informed Israel before the attack while Ankara learnt it on CNN International. Replying questions of reporters who asked whether the United States had informed Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, "no"....
Former Foreign Minister Yasar Yakis referred to the financial aid shock and said, "we thought that the United States needed our assistance and made a serious mistake. It was revealed that the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government made a strategic mistake during the negotiations with the United States." Yakis, who played an active role at negotiations with the United States, noted, "we did not believe that the United States had had the Plan B. We thought that the United States needed Turkey to open the northern front."
The Turkish troops in northern Iraq has begun spreading its military units to the region. Zakhu-Begowa-Batufa Highway was taken under control by Turkish soldiers. Earlier, Iraqi Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) peshmerga fighters raised their objection to Turkish soldiers' control over the highway.
Now there's a new deal on the table: overfly rights during the war, in exchange for influence upon post-war Iraq. The overfly rights are rapidly losing value, because Iraq is surrendering and the war will be over in three or four days. If Turkey continues dithering and being too greedy, the second deal will leave the table also, and Turkey will have obtained nothing at all.
There's obviously still much that could go wrong in the Second Iraq War and we'll surely lose more men, even if just through mechanical malfunctions or friendly fire, so I don't wish to minimize the task ahead or the risks these brave souls continue to face, but we're rapidly approaching a rather profound moment in American history. The great--and I believe mistaken--lesson of the the first two world wars was that war was too terrible an enterprise--too lethal with modern weaponry, particularly for "non-combatants"--to be contemplated anymore. Thus we got the Cold War for fifty years, with only a very few low grade conflicts between the main parties, as we decided that we'd rather tolerate the most anti-human ideology man's ever come up with, and mass murders from Nicaragua to China to Russia to Ethiopia and beyond, than fight briefly, though brutally, to put a stop to it. The argument--though ultimately specious--that we could not risk killing millions, including our own, in the late 40s to depose the Marxist regime in Russia at least had the advantage that it was likely that many would die. The war would in fact have been terrible and we must therefore have some regard for the moral case against it.
However, at least since the early 80s--and arguably since 1945--it has been obvious that the West's technological, cultural, political, and military superiority over the various "isms" that it finds itself arrayed against from time to time is so great that when we choose to do so we can replace the most brutal and tyrannous regimes with a rather minimal loss of human life. Moreover, where it was initially the case that such warfare merely imposed less suffering on non-combatants than did the dictatorships themselves, it is increasingly the case that our methods of combat inflict almost no direct suffering on civilians. The list continues to grow--Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, soon Iraq--of countries where we deposed despicable rulers at minimal human cost.
So here's the profound question: if it is the case that we can rid peoples of such regimes and manifestly improve their lives, even save their lives, with such minimal impact, has the moral obligation now clearly shifted (assuming the case the anti-war folks made had prevailed) from one where we must try to avoid war because of the suffering it might cause to one where we must embrace war because of the suffering and death it so clearly relieves? In what sense is the moral position that demanded we contain Saddam from 1991 until Wednesday, at the expense of 1.5 million dead Iraqis, superior to that which requires us to liberate Iraq, at a cost of several hundred or several thousand lives? Isn't the hard question that confronts us all today, but the peace party in particular, whether we behaved decently and responsibly towards fellow human beings when we left the Iraqis to Saddam's mercies in 1991? And, going forward, mustn't we reckon with a far different moral calculus than that which has been commonly accepted as we begin to consider what course of action is right and just with regard to N. Korea, Cuba, Syria, Libya, Zimbabwe, etc.? May we not be in the midst of an unusual and as yet unrecognized epoch in our affairs where war is not the worst but the best option available to us and to captive peoples? Which do we place a higher value on, as a society, our peace or human freedom? And can we love our society if we choose the former?
The late Herb Denton, the Washington Post's reporter here, had a different take: "The day Canada finally stands up to the U.S. is the day the U.S. will finally respect it." He was talking about the free-trade deal, but this war would serve as well. I'd add, from my observations, that it may not happen instantly, but if you stick to it till they know you're serious, then eventually, grudgingly, respect will come.And if not now, when? All previous postwar U.S. military eruptions, however you judged them, were one-offs: Vietnam, the 1991 gulf war, Kosovo etc. This one is avowedly the first in a limitless chain of assertions of U.S. power. It means destruction of the frail system of global order that the UN represents. Even scarier: In earlier conflicts, only Westerners in the military were at direct risk; now we all are, and our families, not from Iraq, but from small, crazed, outlaw groups that learned on Sept. 11 how much damage they can do, with little or no state support -- and that are being consciously provoked by U.S. policies.
So I'd call this Jean Chrétien's finest hour.
The reality is that Canada's persistent unwillingness to help us has led to U.S. indifference toward Canada. Were Canada to become militantly and stubbornly hostile, that indifference would turn to contempt.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the former United Nations secretary-general, yesterday condemned the U.S.-led war on Iraq as a violation of the UN charter and said George W. Bush's policy of pre-emptive strikes is in "basic contradiction" with international law.Mr. Boutros-Ghali, the secretary-general of La Francophonie, an organization of francophone states, also said he fears the war will provoke civil conflict among competing ethnic factions in Iraq and destabilize the entire Middle East.
"I believe that this intervention is a violation of the charter of the United Nations," Mr. Boutros-Ghali told reporters in Ottawa after meeting with Jean Chretien, the Prime Minister, to commemorate International Francophonie Day.
Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix yesterday said Iraq violated its agreement with the United Nations if the missiles it fired at American troops were Scuds."I'm very interested to know whether they used Scuds," Blix said in an interview with the Fox News Channel. "If they're firing [Scuds], of course that shows that there's a violation," he said.
Blix told the U.N. Security Council this month that it was "questionable" whether the Iraqis had destroyed all of their Scuds and that about 50 Scud warheads were still unaccounted for.
Even though he wanted more time for inspections, Blix said yesterday that he didn't know if he could ever be sure that Iraq wasn't hiding the illegal missiles.
"I could not guarantee that we would come to clear conclusions even after some months more," he said.
Tom Jelton, on NPR's Morning Edition, just said that as far as the Pentagon can tell there is no one in charge of Iraq at this point.
The Democratic National Committee is asking party members to defend Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle's criticism of the way President Bush has handled the Iraq crisis even as U.S.-led forces invade the country....[T]he DNC sent e-mails to its grass-roots activists that said "Democratic leaders are standing up to Bush; Make sure you stand up for them!"...
Mr. Daschle and his Democratic counterpart in the House, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, have vowed to continue to speak out on the war...
"I am saddened, saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war. Saddened that we have to give up one life because this president couldn't create the kind of diplomatic effort that was so critical for our country." [Daschle comments to AFSCME, 3/17/03]
European leaders today expressed personal condolences to Tony Blair over last night's helicopter crash in Kuwait - but the French president, Jaques Chirac, was not among them.
A U.S. Marine has been killed in Iraq, becoming the first reported combat death of the war, defense officials said Friday.The slain soldier, of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, was moving in the ground assault in southern Iraq, said Lt. Col. Neal Peckham, a British military spokesman in Kuwait.
Peckham said he had no further details. MSNBC cable network reported that the soldier was felled by Iraqi gunfire during the advance on the Rumeila oil field.
MONTREAL (AP) Fans booed during the playing of the U.S. national anthem before the New York Islanders' 6-3 victory over the Montreal Canadiens on Thursday night.The sellout crowd of 21,273 at Bell Centre was asked to "show your support and respect for two great nations" before the singing of the American and Canadian national anthems.
But a significant portion of the crowd booed throughout "The Star-Spangled Banner" in an apparent display of their displeasure with the U.S.-led war against Iraq.
"On Tuesday night I gave the order for British forces to take part in military action in Iraq."Tonight, British servicemen and women are engaged from air, land and sea. Their mission: to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.
"I know this course of action has produced deep divisions of opinion in our country. But I know also the British people will now be united in sending our armed forces our thoughts and prayers. They are the finest in the world and their families and all of Britain can have great pride in them.
"The threat to Britain today is not that of my father's generation. War between the big powers is unlikely. Europe is at peace. The cold war already a memory.
"But this new world faces a new threat: of disorder and chaos born either of brutal states like Iraq, armed with weapons of mass destruction; or of extreme terrorist groups. Both hate our way of life, our freedom, our democracy.
"My fear, deeply held, based in part on the intelligence that I see, is that these threats come together and deliver catastrophe to our country and world. These tyrannical states do not care for the sanctity of human life. The terrorists delight in destroying it.
"Some say if we act, we become a target. The truth is, all nations are targets. Bali was never in the frontline of action against terrorism. America didn't attack al Qaida. They attacked America.
"Britain has never been a nation to hide at the back. But even if we were, it wouldn't avail us.
"Should terrorists obtain these weapons now being manufactured and traded round the world, the carnage they could inflict to our economies, our security, to world peace, would be beyond our most vivid imagination.
"My judgment, as prime minister, is that this threat is real, growing and of an entirely different nature to any conventional threat to our security that Britain has faced before.
"For 12 years, the world tried to disarm Saddam; after his wars in which hundreds of thousands died. UN weapons inspectors say vast amounts of chemical and biological poisons, such as anthrax, VX nerve agent, and mustard gas remain unaccounted for in Iraq.
"So our choice is clear: back down and leave Saddam hugely strengthened; or proceed to disarm him by force. Retreat might give us a moment of respite but years of repentance at our weakness would, I believe, follow.
"It is true Saddam is not the only threat. But it is true also - as we British know - that the best way to deal with future threats peacefully, is to deal with present threats with results.
"Removing Saddam will be a blessing to the Iraqi people. Four million Iraqis are in exile. Sixty per cent of the population are dependent on food aid. Thousands of children die every year through malnutrition and disease. Hundreds of thousands have been driven from their homes or murdered.
"I hope the Iraqi people hear this message. We are with you. Our enemy is not you, but your barbarous rulers.
"Our commitment to the post-Saddam humanitarian effort will be total. We shall help Iraq move towards democracy. And put the money from Iraqi oil in a UN trust fund so that it benefits Iraq and no one else.
"Neither should Iraq be our only concern. President Bush and I have committed ourselves to peace in the Middle East based on a secure state of Israel and a viable Palestinian state. We will strive to see it done.
"But these challenges and others that confront us - poverty, the environment, the ravages of disease - require a world of order and stability. Dictators like Saddam, terrorist groups like al-Qaida, threaten the very existence of such a world.
"That is why I have asked our troops to go into action tonight. As so often before, on the courage and determination of British men and women, serving our country, the fate of many nations rests.
"Thank you."
About 1,000 American troops backed by attack helicopters mounted a dawn assault on a string of mountain villages and caves in southeastern Afghanistan today, sending a forceful message to militants here that coalition forces would not be slackening their pace as the war in Iraq gets under way.Special Forces and a battalion from the 504th Parachute Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division, were dropped into the region at 6 a.m. from Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters, a military spokesman said today. Apache attack helicopters provided security, he said.
The operation, named Valiant Strike, was aimed at several villages and caves in the Sami Ghar mountain range, in the Maruf district of Kandahar province, some 20 miles from the Pakistani border. "There are suspected people in the area," said Master Sgt. Richard Breach, a spokesman at the coalition headquarters here at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul.
Intelligence had led American forces to watch the area and they then caught radio intercepts of people in the caves communicating with each other, the senior spokesman, Col. Roger King, said at a morning briefing. [...]
Military officials insisted the timing of today's raid, on the first day of airstrikes against Iraq, was purely coincidental. But Sergeant Breach agreed that American forces were also sending a message to any terrorists or militants opposed to the American presence in Afghanistan. "We are showing them we are still out to win this war on terror," he said.
The commander of American forces in southern Afghanistan, Lt. Col. John Campbell, said in a recent interview that he was acting aggressively against any opposition forces to show that the United States would not lose focus in Afghanistan while it wages war in Iraq.
U.S. intelligence officials believe Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, possibly accompanied by one or both of his powerful sons, was still inside a compound in southern Baghdad early yesterday when it was struck by a barrage of U.S. bombs and cruise missiles.But intelligence analysts in Washington and operatives working in the region were not certain whether the Iraqi leader was killed or injured or escaped the attack, according to senior Bush administration officials, who worked yesterday to analyze a videotape of an appearance by Hussein broadcast on Iraqi television within hours of the pre-dawn bombardment.
"The preponderance of the evidence is he was there when the building blew up," said one senior U.S. official with access to sensitive intelligence. The official added that Hussein's sons, Qusay and Uday, may also have been at the compound. "He didn't get out" beforehand, another senior official said of the Iraqi president.
A third administration official said "there is evidence that he [Hussein] was at least injured" because of indications that medical attention was urgently summoned on his behalf. The condition of Hussein's sons, and any others who may have been at the compound, was also unknown, officials said.
While U.S. intelligence monitored Iraqi government communications and movements yesterday to pick up signs of Hussein's fate, the administration's attention was focused on the television appearance by Hussein in which he stated yesterday's date and made reference to "dawn" and an attack by the United States.
Officials said they were not surprised by the broadcast because they had information that the Iraqi leader had recorded several statements earlier in the week in anticipation of a military strike shortly after the expiration of a U.S. deadline for Hussein and his sons to leave the country.
THE Sun hit Paris yesterday to show the world our disgust at the cowardice of President Jacques "The Worm" Chirac for wriggling out of his responsibilities to the West.We took copies of a French edition of our newspaper labelling Chirac as Saddam Hussein's whore.
Describing his actions as those of a "Paris harlot", The Sun argued he was as big a threat to the civilised world as Iraq's tyrant.
Sadly but predictably, the poor, misled French people backed their spineless president to the hilt. [...]
[A]ngelique Bienassis, 19, said: "You cannot call Chirac a harlot. That is so offensive to the French people. Whatever his faults he is our protector."
US defence sources say 12 Americans and four Britons are killed when a US helicopter comes down, apparently over Kuwait, in what is believed to be an accident.
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Marine Chopper Crash Kills 16 in Kuwait Yahoo! News)
A U.S. Marine helicopter crashed in Kuwait Thursday, killing all 16 American and British soldiers aboard, military officials said.The crash of the CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter killed 12 U.S. and 4 British soldiers, officials said.
The seizure of Basra would be a stunning psychological blow to Saddam Hussein's regime, depriving him of his third largest city and giving the Allies a huge
strategic advantage.Basra opens up the route to Baghdad, 350 miles to the north-west. Once the Iraqi 3rd Corps defending the area is routed, there are no other forces before the capital. The approaches to Baghdad up the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates are wide open.
Basra is the largest city in southern Iraq. Situated on the west bank of Shatt Al-Arab, 35 miles from the Gulf it is the main gate to the outside world. The main port of Iraq, it is the terminal point for oil pipelines, and petroleum refining is a major industry.
The seizure of Basra and the ports to its south opens up a new and much shorter supply route for troops occupying the south of Iraq.
By grabbing Iraq's only access to the Gulf it will allow the coalition forces to bring in reinforcements directly rather than through the overcrowded and more distant ports in Kuwait.
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Marines drive to Basra is key to decisive victory (JACK FAIRWEATHER AND JIM MCBETH, 3/21/03, The Scotsman)
Saddam Hussein's eldest son Uday suffered a cerebral hemorrhage this morning. According to Iranian news agency IRNA, Uday was involved in a fight with his father's body guard last night.There is no information about Uday's current condition. Saddam Hussein's aides are refusing to confirm this information although they admit that a fight did indeed take place in Saddam's palace.
WAR is a last resort, and always should be. So no-one can take any pleasure in the events now unfolding in Iraq. Those who reject war on any grounds whatsoever will not be assuaged. But those who see armed force as sometimes - regrettably - required to maintain security, or defend human rights, will find that the situation unfolding in Iraq justifies their position. Yesterday, as the liberation of Iraq began, the crumbling Saddam Hussein regime fired salvoes of missiles at Allied troop concentrations in Kuwait. It was the most eloquent admission by the Iraqi dictatorship that it had been taking the UN weapons inspectors for a ride for the last three and a half months.Under UN Security Council Resolution 687, passed in 1992, Saddam should have destroyed his Scud and long-range missiles. Clearly, he did not. Under Resolution 1441, he was to declare where the remaining missiles were. Clearly, he did not. Some of yesterday?s attacks may have been made using the new al-Samoud rockets which the UN inspectors also wanted destroyed. Saddam prevaricated and only let 70 be sawn up. He went slow on destroying the rest, though they could all have been dispatched in a day. Now they are being used to try to kill British service men and women.
The moral of this sordid tale, as the fighting escalates in Iraq, is that Saddam Hussein is a proven liar. He will not disarm peaceably. He will not obey UN resolutions. He never has done. He never will. His regime can only be disarmed by force.
Over the last few weeks, the geopolitical west of the cold war has collapsed before our eyes.... But we can already see three broad ideas competing for the succession to the cold war west. I'll call them the Rumsfeldian; the Chiraco-Putinesque; and the Blairite.The Rumsfeldian idea - if idea is not too dignified a word - is that American might is right. It's right because it's American.... If some allies want to come along to help, that's fine. If they don't, then you find "work-arounds".... Meanwhile, you carry on offending all your potential allies with clumsy remarks.
The Rumsfeldian vision is half right and therefore all wrong....
The Chiraco-Putinesque idea - if idea is not too dignified a word - is that American might is, by definition, dangerous.... The diplomatic battle over the last few weeks, with the Franco-German-Russian (-Chinese) continental alliance pitted against the American-British-Spanish (-Australian) maritime one, made me think again of the war of super blocs in George Orwell's 1984. He called them Eurasia and Oceania.
The Chiraco-Putinesque vision is half right and therefore all wrong....
That leaves Blairism. Blair's idea is that we should re-create a larger version of the cold war, transatlantic west, in response to the new threats we face.... Yes, Europeans should worry about US unilateralism, but, he told the Commons, "the way to deal with it is not rivalry but partnership. Partners are not servants but neither are they rivals"....
Blair's idea is completely right.... Blair himself made two major mistakes over the last year. The first was not to do more last September to try to bring Europe to speak "with one voice".... The second was to forget that partnership also involves sometimes saying "no"....
I am totally convinced that the Blairite vision of a new postwar order of world politics is the best one available on the somewhat depressed market of world leadership.
Ash also fails to recognize the tension in his insistence that Blair should be willing to "say no" to one partner but "speak with one voice" with other partners. According to Ash's own principles, if European nations aren't free to say "no" to one another, then they are not "partners." Thus a European partnership should not be expected to "speak with one voice."
The idea of a new transatlantic alliance to fight terrorism is attractive if it is a real alliance of committed nations. But it appears that such an alliance must exclude France, and will therefore divide the Europe that the Ash thinks should "speak with one voice." Blair has recognized this conflict. I wonder how long it will take the British intelligentsia to do so?
Why are the lights on in Baghdad? Check your CNN images--the city is now being bombarded from the air, and yet street lights and building lights glisten. Traditionally, cities being bombed turn off all their lights. In World War II, air-raid wardens walked the streets of London, pounding on the doors of anyone with a light visible or whose windows were not covered by black-out curtains. Yet Baghdad tonight is alight.Maybe nobody's running the show; early indicators are that Iraqi leadership is already collapsing. Or maybe this is devilishly clever.
Torn by a deep and bitter split over Iraq, the leaders of Europe came together today to struggle with how to restore unity among themselves and with the United States, even to the point of offering to participate in Iraq's post-war reconstruction.While no one would have planned it this way, the 15 leaders of the European Union gathered in Brussels for a long-scheduled quarterly summit on the very day that the war against Saddam Hussein was launched, and the Europeans were distracted by television reports on the United States-led attack on Iraq.
Never before in the history of the European Union have its members had to grapple with two more different impulses on foreign policy. There is deep resentment among most of them that the United States waged war without the legality of international cover, despite their individual and collective appeals; at the same time, there is the sense that if the United States is the victor - as anticipated - the Europeans will have been on the wrong side of the war and as a group had better reposition themselves to be part of a post-war reconstruction. [...]
The European Commission chief, Romano Prodi, meanwhile, called on the member countries to pull together, saying, "We cannot rely on others to defend our richness, wealth and security."
The vision-challenged opponents of the war against the terror masters, those who have been saying that you can't fight Saddam and terrorism at the same time, got bad news today from Baghdad. It turns out that our surgical strike on Wednesday night - the one aimed at the "top leadership" of Saddam's little hell-between-two-rivers - got an unexpected bonus: a terrorist from the Palestine Liberation Front. And the good news comes not from the Pentagon but from the PLF itself.According to UPI, the Palestine Liberation Front said Thursday one of its guerrillas was killed during the U.S. missile strikes on Iraq. A PLF statement released in the southern city of Sidon (Syrian-occupied Lebanon) identified the slain guerrilla as 1st Lieutenant Ahmed Walid Raguib al-Baz who was killed early Thursday "while confronting the treacherous U.S. air bombardment on Iraq."
I don't know anything about the late Mr. Al-Baz, but I know all too much about the PLF and its evil leader, Abu Abbas. This was the group that organized the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro back in the mid-1980s. They segregated the American passengers from the rest, and then courageously pushed an American Jewish paraplegic in his wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer, into the Mediterranean. We tried to have Abu Abbas arrested in Italy, but he escaped through Yugoslavia to Yemen.
The PLF has long been one of the most lethal Palestinian terrorist groups, and achieved notoriety for its high-tech killings. Recently, Abu Abbas had come to live in the Palestinian Authority, but when Israel moved against the terrorists there he ran away - to Baghdad. The PLF has been one of the main conduits for Iraqi money to Palestinian suicide bombers.
The FBI was hunting Thursday for a suspected al-Qaida operative with pilot training who may be in the United States and planning a “major attack,” senior counterterrorism officials told NBC News. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said authorities fear the man could be “another Mohammed Atta.”THE OFFICIALS sent out a nationwide bulletin to police urging them to be on the lookout for Adnan G. el-Shukrijumah, who recently was using the alias Jaafaral al-Tayyar. The bulletin said word of his plans was based on information obtained from recently captured al-Qaida operatives.
“The United States has information indicating he may be involved in al-Qaida and may pose an imminent threat to U.S. interests at home or overseas,” the bulletin said.
The officials who spoke with NBC News said el-Shukrijumah was known to have been in the United States since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, living for a time in Miami. His whereabouts now are not known.
The officials said they had no specific information about what el-Shukrijuman, nicknamed “Jaafaral the Pilot,” may be planning, but they said his pilot training raises the possibility that he might be planning an airborne attack similar to that carried out by Atta, the ringleader of the 19 hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.
Saturday's show at the Warfield in San Francisco a Pretenders concert, but it was really the in-your-face Chrissie Hynde show in every way, shape and form.Lead singer Hynde was in a razor-tongued mood, whether the topic was war, sports, dancing, her own sex appeal, meat, or what the crowd looks like. She nearly picked a fight and openly coveted love from a biker.
And what the heck -- since she was there with three guys toting instruments, there was even some music.
That part of the show was occasionally inspired, hot, passionate, flawless and sexy. After nearly a quarter-century, Hynde's voice is still a sneer wrapped in cool velvet. Seeing her front and center wearing a black T-shirt, jeans, her trademark black bangs and a Telecaster is like witnessing a rock 'n' roll monument. For lovers of real rock, it's the equivalent of a political junkie standing on the steps of the Capitol.
And speaking of politics ... Hynde is a tad anti-war. She's anti lots of stuff, and isn't afraid to growl about them all every time the music stops.
"Have we gone to war yet?" she asked sarcastically, early on. "We (expletive) deserve to get bombed. Bring it on." Later she yelled, "Let's get rid of all the economic (expletive) this country represents! Bring it on, I hope the Muslims win!"
When a crowd member responded to that inflammatory statement, Hynde stormed the mic, roaring, "Shut your face!" Glaring, she held out the mic toward the fan as longtime drummer Martin Chambers stood up behind her, ready to rumble. "You come up to the mic and say something, smart guy," she snarled. "What do you want to talk about?"
As we begin the war, this metaphor seems to have stood up fairly well, though Saddam ain't no Frank Miller.
Are the Dixie Chicks victims of a right-wing conspiracy?That's what their manager, Simon Renshaw, has told country music stations being pressured to drop the Chicks' music after lead singer Natalie Maines criticized President Bush last week.
In an e-mail to stations distributed by Sony Music, their label, Renshaw says the protest has been orchestrated by the Free Republic (www.freerepublic.com) , a Web site "for independent, grassroots conservative, " according to founder Jim Robinson of Fresno, Calif. The Web site also alleges that recent anti-war protests are "communist-organized demonstrations."
"Your company is being targeted by a radical right-wing online forum," Renshaw says in the e-mail. "You are being `Freeped,' which is the code word for an organized e-mail/telephone effort attempting to solicit a desired response."
On March 10, Maines told a London audience: "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."
Yemen[...] Ma'rib's ratty streets smell of urine and petrol. The city swarms with young men, often in their early teens and with bad teeth and skin discolorations, riding around in pickup trucks, armed with knives and AK-47s. The knives are jambiyahs. Blunt and difficult to remove from their sheaths, they are rather impractical as ready weapons, and instead symbolize the stabilizing influence of tribal custom in Yemen-the social glue that keeps the rate of random crime low. The AK-47 is another matter. "Once you have a gun, why bother to learn to read and write?" a Yemeni soldier said to me, after I had asked a particularly hostile knot of young men if they attended school. They did not.
Estimates of the number of fire-arms within Yemen's borders go as high as 80 million-four for every Yemeni. Their availability, along with perhaps the largest al Qaeda presence anywhere outside the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, threatens to transform the small-scale tribal fighting that has plagued Yemen for centuries into a debilitating anarchy. Indeed, the high walls, the concertina wire, and the proliferation of armed guards in Sana'a indicate the level of apprehension felt by both the Yemeni government and the foreign community here.
Keep in mind that terrorism is an entrepreneurial activity, dominated by enterprising self-starters. An American military expert told me, "In Yemen you've got nearly twenty million aggressive, commercial-minded, and well-armed people, all extremely hard-working compared with the Saudis next door. It's the future, and it terrifies the hell out of the government in Riyadh." [...]
President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a former army lieutenant colonel, has ruled first North Yemen and then unified Yemen since 1978. By most accounts, his government controls the main roads, oil fields, and pipelines; but significant patches of the countryside, especially the desert regions near the Saudi border, such as Ma'rib, al-Jawf, and Sa'da, stand largely ungovernable. Traveling around Yemen, one can see why this situation obtains. I sat at many crowded local road stalls where every man or boy not only had an AK-47 but didn't put it down even while eating. Nevertheless, President Saleh may be doing better than the Turks or the British before him in extending control over this country. [...]
Al Qaeda's attacks on the USS Cole, in Aden Harbor in 2000, and on the French tanker Limburg, off the Yemeni coast in 2002, may have perplexed some Western observers. After all, the bombings should have served to bring the United States and France, two bickering allies in the anti-terror coalition, closer together. But al Qaeda knew exactly what it was doing. Without Saleh, Yemen would be a conveniently chaotic, culturally sympathetic base for al Qaeda, much more useful than non-Arab, geographically peripheral Afghanistan. Saleh's regime is not necessarily weak: its security and party apparatus provide an institutional basis for power rare in twentieth-century Yemen. But a substantial reduction in government revenues, which are Saleh's main tool to placate hostile sheikhs, could still destabilize his regime. Some informal estimates suggest that the attacks have reduced the amount of cargo arriving in Aden by 75 percent, and that $25 million a month is being lost in the container trade. And war-risk-insurance premiums for ships calling at Yemeni ports are already six times the worldwide average. [...]
Eritria
Whereas Yemen's streets and shops are plastered with photos of President Saleh (whose cult of personality is mild compared with those of other Arab and African leaders), one never sees such photos of the Eritrean President, Isaias Afewerki, the veritable founder of this country. For decades Afewerki led a low-intensity guerrilla movement that finally wrested independence from Ethiopia in 1991. "Photos of me would create an air of mystery and distance from the people," he told me in December. "It's the lack of photos that liberates you. I hate high walls and armed guards." While other leaders in the region live inside forbidding military compounds, Afewerki lives in a modest suburban-style house and greets people in his secretary's office, which sits at the end of an undistinguished corridor. He moves around the capital in the passenger seat of a four-wheel-drive vehicle, with only one escort car, stopping at red lights. Western diplomats here say they have seen him disappear into large crowds of Eritreans without any security detail at all. "It's easy to put a bullet in him, and he knows it," one foreign diplomat said to me.
Security, which consumes the Western diplomatic and aid communities in Sana'a (and everywhere else in the Middle East), is barely an issue in Asmara, Eritrea's capital. Despite its tattered storefronts, Asmara not only is one of the cleanest capital cities in Africa but also may be the only capital south of the Sahara where one can leave the car doors unlocked or prowl the back streets at all hours without fear of being robbed, even though the police are barely in evidence. American, Israeli, and other resident diplomats and aid administrators in Eritrea move freely around the country without guards or other escorts, as if they were at home.
Desperately poor and drought-stricken, with almost three quarters of its 3.5 million inhabitants illiterate, Eritrea nonetheless has a surprisingly functional social order. Women run shops, restaurants, and hotels; handicapped people have shiny new crutches and wheelchairs; people drive slowly and even attend driving school; scrap-metal junkyards are restricted to the urban outskirts; receipts are given for every transaction; there are few electricity blackouts from sloppy maintenance or badly managed energy resources. Foreign diplomats in Asmara praise the country's lack of corruption and its effective implementation of aid projects. Whereas rural health clinics in much of Africa have empty shelves and unexplained shortages of supplies, clinic managers in Eritrea keep ledgers documenting where all the medicine is going.
An immense fish farm near the port of Massawa testifies to Eritrea's ability to utilize foreign aid and know-how. The 1,500-acre complex channels salt water from the Red Sea, purifies it, and then uses it to raise shrimp in scores of circular cement tanks. The nutrient-rich excess of that process is used for breeding tilapia, a freshwater fish. The remaining waste water is pumped into asparagus and mangrove fields and artificially created wetlands. Though the operation was initially overseen by a firm from Phoenix, Arizona, and for a time employed an Israeli consultant, the consultant is now only rarely used. The Eritreans themselves run the operation in every respect.
Such initiative and communal discipline are the result of an almost Maoist degree of mobilization and an almost Albanian degree of xenophobia-but without the epic scale of repression and ideological indoctrination that once characterized China and Albania. The Eritrean xenophobia and aptitude for organization are, as Eritreans never cease to explain, products of culture and historical experience more than they are of policy choices. Eritrea never had feudal structures, sheikhs, or warlords. Villages were commonly owned and were governed by councils, or baitos, of elders. "It was not a society deferential to individual authority," I was told by Yemane Ghebre Meskel, the director of President Afewerki's office, "so we didn't need Marxist ideology to achieve a high stage of communalism." Wolde-Ab Yisak, the president of the University of Asmara, observed, "Communal self-reliance is our dogma, which in turn comes from the knowledge that we Eritreans are different from our neighbors."
A number of commentators and politicians have been hand wringing over the cost of the war and subsequent infrastructure repair in Iraq. They point to cost estimates in the $200 to $300 billion range as being possibly dangerous to the U.S. economy and to the Federal budget. Of course, they generally neglect to point out that these cost estimates are the undiscounted sums of multi-year outlays. Also, they neglect to mention that these are gross, not net, estimates (for example, the military gets paid whether it is fighting in Iraq or stationed in Germany).But these systematic cost overestimates are reduced to mere quibbles amongst the green eyeshade accounting crowd compared to the true cost / benefit calculation that should, and is, being made by the marketplace. That marketplace is, of course, the U.S. stock and other markets.
Over the last five days as it became apparent that President Bush had reached the conclusion that the U.N. peace process was not going to work and that the U.S. was going to have to disarm Saddam by force, markets have rallied. Over the last five days, the U.S. stock market has risen by more than 8%. The market capitalization of the stock market five days ago was approximately $11 trillion. Now it is about $900 billion higher.
Hypothetically speaking, suppose investors cashed that gain in at the long-term capital gains tax rate. Then the Federal government gets an immediate cap gains tax payment of $180 billion. That would surely pay for most, if not all, of the discounted present value of Iraq war and reconstruction expenditures.
But, as they say on TV, that is not all you get! Oil prices have also come down over the last five days from $38 to about $30 per barrel. The U.S. imported 3.4 billion barrels of crude oil last year. An $8 drop in oil prices translates into $27 billion per annum in reduced costs for imported oil. That saving alone would pay for most, if not all, of Iraq’s annual reconstruction expenses.
But that is not all! The reduction in uncertainty over the last five days has caused a rally in the corporate bond market. Ford Motor Co. bond yield spreads, for example have tightened by 20 basis points. This eases the financing burden on U.S. companies as well as handing bondholders a substantial (taxable) capital gain. Based on the market cap of the fixed income market and the average spread tightening over the last five days,
investors have gotten a capital gain of about $160 billion.But that is not all! Whether they liked it or not, our European "allies" have also benefited from the U.S. decision to disarm Iraq and from lower oil prices. Over the last five days, the French CAC and the German DAX stock price indices have rebounded sharply. This provides a clear example of the "free rider" problem. At least we cannot claim that these government’s anti-war positions were motivated by a desire to increase investor wealth.
The bottom line is that, setting aside all the non-monetary national security benefits associated with disarming Iraq, it is clear to me that this action is being priced in securities markets around the world as hugely beneficial. Those who worry about the direct dollar cost of war and reconstruction are missing that point.
Now let us pray for the men, women and children in harm’s way in Iraq.
"I am being told by several senior officials not to take that taped speech Saddam gave last night as proof that he survived the attack," CBS NEWS reporter David Martin said on air."They say the evidence that put him in the bunker last night was very reliable, and they are confident that the cruise missiles and bunker-busting bombs that were fired at that bunker last night hit the target. So now, intelligence experts are studying the tape to determine if it is really Saddam, or a body double which he is known to use from time to time. And they are running a computerized voice analysis, comparing that speech with known recordings of Saddam's voice. But that's a process that takes awhile. So we may not have a quick answer."
"There is considerable belief in this government that they may, in fact, have gotten Saddam."
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Bush Administration Questions Hussein Video: White House Says Tape Offers No 'Immediate Conclusions' (Mike Allen, March 20, 2003, Washington Post)
The White House today questioned the authenticity of a videotape showing Saddam Hussein speaking a few hours after the cruise missile strikes that opened the war in Iraq."We have reached no conclusions about that tape or about who's on the tape or when it was taped," press secretary Ari Fleischer said.
Former White House aide Karen P. Hughes, now a $15,000-a-month consultant to the Republican National Committee, has been playing a key role in advising President Bush and the administration on a communications strategy for the Iraq war.Hughes flew with Bush on Air Force One to the Azores on Sunday and helped to draft his speech to the nation delivered Monday night. Hughes briefed reporters in the White House on Monday in advance of Bush's speech, saying he would offer exile as the only option to avoid an attack. And Hughes, who officials say has worked from the White House for the past week, has played a key role in developing the administration's plan for a coordinated communications strategy during the Iraq war.
The arrangement has prompted accusations from Democrats and government watchdog groups that the role of Hughes improperly blends politics and government business. Democrats complain that the presence of Hughes gives an inherently political tinge to the war effort. "George Bush should be focused on winning this war and making sure our troops are safe, not on how his partisan campaign hacks are going to score political points in the aftermath," said David Sirota, [partisan campaign hack] for Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee.
Although it was overshadowed by the beginning of war, on Capitol Hill Wednesday there was a major escalation in the conflict between Senate Democrats and the White House over the president's judicial nominees.The escalation had nothing to do with the ongoing Democratic filibuster over appeals-court candidate Miguel Estrada. Instead, it involved a Democratic decision to block, and, at least for the moment, kill a total of four Bush nominees to the federal courts of appeals.
Acting in concert, Michigan Democratic Sens. Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow told the Judiciary Committee they will block the nominations of Richard Griffin, David McKeague, Susan Bieke Neilson, and Henry Saad to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. In addition, Levin and Stabenow said they will block the nomination of Thomas Ludington to a seat on the U.S. District Court. That means the two senators are attempting to kill every Bush nominee from the state of Michigan.
Levin and Stabenow stopped the nominations by returning negative blue slips, which are the documents in which senators indicate approval or disapproval of judicial nominees from their home states.
Blue slips are a Senate custom with a long and controversial history, but both parties concede it is nearly impossible for a nominee of either party to win confirmation over the objections of both of his or her home-state senators. That means the nominations of Griffin, McKeague, Neilson, Saad, and Ludington are effectively dead.
It was an extraordinary move on the part of Levin and Stabenow, a kind of Wednesday-night massacre that sent Republicans scrambling to research whether such wholesale obstruction had any precedent in Senate history, and what a GOP response might be.
The move is all the more remarkable because much of the Sixth Circuit is in what the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts calls a "judicial emergency." The court normally has 16 members, but half of those seats are now empty.
Maybe the Iraqis and other Arab people are just folks - regular people who want to live in harmony with their neighbors near and far. And maybe not.Maybe Iraq and the broader Arab world have ancient values and beliefs that are hostile to America's. Maybe Arab men - who still practice honor killings against their wives and daughters, even in "moderate" countries like Jordan - do not want to release the creative gifts of women. Maybe the venerated spiritual leaders of the Arab world regard Western democracy as an offense against the laws of the Koran and "human liberty" as infidel code words for ungodly license.
Maybe the men made rich by their associations with Saddam and other dictators are not interested in creating a free-market economy. Maybe the secular political class of Baghdad - and Damascus and Cairo - regards domestic repression as preferable to American intervention for any reason whatever.
Maybe the mass of uneducated Arabs are profoundly loyal to tribal traditions and uninterested in attaining newfangled liberties. In short, perhaps the Arabs in Iraq and elsewhere have the governments they deserve. The next few months will clarify the issue.
Bringing liberty to the people of Iraq would be a fine thing. Still, it is not the main thing. The goal of this war is to establish and enforce the new Golden Rule of the post-post-Colonial world order inaugurated in September 2002: Sovereignty is not an inalienable right.
From now on, self-determination will belong to those people whose basic ethos and instincts do not pose a mortal threat to the United States, its interests and allies. The Iraqis and the other Arab nations may pass that test, or they may fail it. Once Saddam is gone, we will begin to find out.
Our standard must be that sovereignty and self-determination are dependent on leaders and peoples exercising those rights responsibly. They are not absolute and they diminish rapidly if you become a threat not merely to your own citizens but to the citizens of other nations.
In his first news conference on Tuesday, China's new Premier Wen Jiabao insisted on a political solution for the crisis in Iraq, and the same afternoon Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan underscored that China was working and hoping for a solution within the framework of the United Nations. In fact China's position since the beginning has been consistent: it wanted to achieve a solution, no matter which one, by going through the Security Council, where it holds the important and prestigious veto power.But US President George W Bush's war ultimatum to Saddam bypassed a vote at the UN and the UN was de facto defeated. It was a major setback for China, which had been betting heavily on the United Nations. Bush's ultimatum underscored a major turning point in the diplomacy of the United States, which had declared war without UN approval for the second time. The first time it was in Kosovo under president Bill Clinton, and so the trend is definitely bipartisan: the United States is willing to work within the framework of the United Nations only if doing so fits US interests, and it refuses to be constrained by the UN straitjacket.
China still argues that the majority of countries in the world favor working within the United Nations, where they have representation, and even the US has no interest in doing without the UN altogether, as it is a useful arena to exercise its global diplomacy. But the truth is that the interest of a weak majority doesn't count as much as that of a strong minority.
Throughout the nineteenth century, China's emperors had watched as foreigners encroached further and further upon their land. Time and again, foreigners forced China to make humiliating concessions. Foreign regiments, armed with modern weapons, consistently defeated entire imperial armies. Now, as a new century was about to begin, Tsu Hsi, empress dowager of the Ch'ing Dynasty, searched for a way to rid her empire of foreign parasites. . . .Down below, Orrin posts an article quoting various representatives of the Arab Street as confidently predicting victory for Iraq. In effect, they are saying that Allah will bring victory by defeating any American who sets foot on Iraqi soil. It struck me that this is a strain of defeatism. Even the Arab Street knows that Arab bravery and feats of arms stand no chance against the US military. Their only hope is a miracle. This put me in mind of the Boxer Rebellion, briefly described above.
While the outside powers bickered over who would control China, Tsu Hsi issued an imperial message to all the Chinese provinces.The present situation is becoming daily more difficult. The various Powers cast upon us looks of tiger-like voracity, hustling each other to be first to seize our innermost territories. . . . Should the strong enemies become aggressive and press us to consent to things we can never accept, we have no alternative but to rely upon the justice of our cause. . . . If our . . . hundreds of millions of inhabitants . . . would prove their loyalty to their emperor and love of their country, what is there to fear from any invader? Let us not think about making peace.In northern Shandong province, a devastating drought was pushing people to the edge of starvation. Few people there were thinking about making peace. A secret society, known as the Fists of Righteous Harmony, attracted thousands of followers. Foreigners called members of this society "Boxers" because they practiced martial arts. The Boxers also believed that they had a magical power, and that foreign bullets could not harm them. Millions of "spirit soldiers," they said, would soon rise from the dead and join their cause.
Their cause, at first, was to overthrow the imperial Ch'ing government and expel all "foreign devils" from China. The crafty empress, however, saw a way to use the Boxers. Through her ministers, she began to encourage the Boxers. Soon a new slogan -- "Support the Ch'ing; destroy the foreigner!" -- appeared upon the Boxers' banner.
In the early months of 1900, thousands of Boxers roamed the countryside. They attacked Christian missions, slaughtering foreign missionaries and Chinese converts. Then they moved toward the cities, attracting more and more followers as they came. Nervous foreign ministers insisted that the Chinese government stop the Boxers. From inside the Forbidden City, the empress told the diplomats that her troops would soon crush the "rebellion." Meanwhile, she did nothing as the Boxers entered the capital.
Although there are important differences between the Boxer Rebellion and Al Queda, the similarities are obvious. A species of fundamentalism born out of grinding poverty and despair. Hatred of the foreigner seen not only as the cause of this misery but also because he sets an unbearable example. Hatred of the non-fundamentalist government seen as contributing, or at least not opposing, the humiliation of a people that should, by rights, control the world. The cynical use of this movement by that government, until it gets out of hand. Finally, the triumph of a modern military over the deluded masses.
If this is a legitimate precedent, the news is not entirely good. The West put down the Boxer Rebellion and, in so doing, destroyed the power of the Imperial government. As the Imperial government was corrupt, tradition bound and incapable, this was a good thing. The Chinese Republic, which eventually came into being, was better, but not much and the lot of the average Chinese did not change. Eventually, the resentment, the humiliation, the poverty (and a good dollop of Communist treachery) led to the establishment of the People's Republic, which was a tragedy for China from which it has yet to recover.
Can a people vote away their democratic rights?...But while the legitimacy of Napoleon's overwhelming results in 1802 and 1804 [plebiscites making him "First Consul-for-Life"] may justifiably be doubted, Prince Hans-Adam II of Liechtenstein seemed to win plenary powers fair and square on Sunday.... [Was] it, as the Vienna-based Council of Europe warned rather darkly this week, "a serious step backwards"?...
While Sunday's referendum gave the prince an absolute veto over legislation, the right to dismiss the parliament, and immunity from Liechtenstein's courts, voters did not give up the democratic ghost altogether. A petition of 1,500 signatures (admittedly, nearly 5% of the population and over 7% of the voters) is sufficient to force a further referendum on the prince's role.
It's ... not clear that statelets like Liechteinstein have all that much to gain from ... parliamentary rule. In the 1990s, constitutional reform in Andorra imbued the local assembly with all the powers of a full-fledged government, which promptly went about putting up taxes and expanding the state. Given the alternatives, beneficent constitutional monarchy doesn't seem entirely bad.
Charles I of England once said that liberty consists of having government under those laws by which one's lives and one's goods may be most one's own. By those standards, Liechtenstein is doing pretty well, especially compared to some of the more traditionally democratic, but more socialist, countries around it. If its citizens think Prince Hans-Adam II is best-equipped to continue that trend of thriving, who are we to argue?
Earlier this week, in a letter to the Herald, I offered one long-shot possibility of getting directly through to the White House: a viewer boycott of the Oscars.Perhaps the idea wasn't as far-fetched as some critics tried to make out.
The US, for all its military might, has a political system that makes it very vulnerable to protest campaigns which target any of its major industries. The entertainment industry is certainly among the most influential of those.
The Academy Awards broadcast is traditionally the most widely watched of all American television shows. If there was clear evidence of a drop in ratings attributable to anti-war sentiment, it would send a symbolic message to the bosses of the big studios, networks and pop music companies.
They would begin to realise that an unpopular war has the potential to threaten billions of dollars in overseas profits, and they would make sure that message was passed on quickly to the politicians who represent them. [...]
Only within the US entertainment industry do Australians really count. The amount of money earned here from American-made television programs, movies and CDs happens to be very significant on a per capita basis, placing us among the top overseas consumers.
A symbolic switch-off of such product surely seems an easy enough gesture to make for any motivated anti-war protester, and the economic impact locally would be minimal.
Could such a campaign work? The major US TV networks and studios are prone to panic over any issue that looks like impacting on profits.
A celebrity who makes some impromptu pro-abortion comment risks being fired on the spot for offending advertisers. So, too, the industry is vulnerable to a president who enrages millions of foreign consumers by declaring a war with no clear explanation.
The Hollywood moguls would soon enough let their displeasure be known to the West Wing.
Have we really reached the stage where Australians, as much as they admire Americans, need to contemplate a symbolic boycott to express their grave concerns about US foreign policy?
Sadly, there appear to be few other options in a situation where Washington claims to act as the ultimate guardian of free nations everywhere, yet leaves millions of free-world citizens virtually disenfranchised because they have no voice in US politics.
Sources suggested the attack on Saddam might have been a set-up by US "black operations" units.It was claimed the Americans had faked a story yesterday that Iraqi deputy premier Tariq Aziz had defected.
Saddam was forced to scotch the rumour by ordering Aziz to appear at a news conference.
Observers said US intelligence could have tracked Aziz after his TV appearance, using him to lead them to Saddam.
"God, you are almighty, you are capable of turning this (war) against" the Americans, said Bashir el-Afesh as he finished his prayers in Cairo.Kamal Abou Ayta, an Egyptian political activist who has organized anti-war protests in Cairo, called the attack "illegitimate."
"I believe that American soldiers whenever they step on Iraqi soil, they will be defeated," Abou Ayta said in an interview. "I am sure of that."
Egyptian newspapers planned extra editions Thursday. In the Lebanese capital, papers pushed back deadlines to include war news and appeared on newsstands.
Early morning anti-war protests where reported at Cairo University and Al-Azhar University — at the latter, a venerable Islamic institution in Cairo, students chanted: "Patience, patience, oh Bush, tomorrow the Muslims will dig your grave."
While many European leaders remain deeply fearful of the fallout from a war with Iraq, many Arab leaders in the Middle East began several weeks ago to adjust to what they perceive to be a new reality. They stopped trying to prevent the war and instead began signaling that they wanted neither to be on the wrong side of the conflict nor on the wrong side of the U.S.--or our broader agenda in the region.Consider Egypt's press, which has been emphasizing that Saddam Hussein is bringing the conflict on himself. In his trip to Berlin, Hosni Mubarak emphasized to his hosts that it was time to get the conflict over and remove Saddam. In Washington, a high-level Egyptian delegation made it clear recently that they would not oppose us and, in anticipation of our emphasis after the war, also suggested that Egypt did have a serious, if measured, approach to internal reform.
The Saudis, though more circumspect on the war, have also indicated a greater willingness to permit U.S. operations out of the kingdom during the conflict. Crown Prince Abdullah is now openly calling for a new charter on reform to be adopted by the Arab League. Both the Egyptians and Saudis seem to have anticipated President Bush's speech in which he proclaimed that the liberation of Iraq might be a springboard to broader transformations in the region. And both seem to see the way the wind is blowing in the area--and they intend, at least tactically, to be on the right side of those winds.
They are not the only ones. Jordan publicly announced that an American contingent would come to the country to man Patriot missile batteries. Can anyone doubt that the Jordanian government was making a statement about where it was lining up in the event of war with Iraq? Contrast this posture with Jordan's posture during the Gulf War 12 years ago.
Syria's behavior is even more surprising. Not only has it been restraining Hezbollah of late, but as if to convey that it will not be a problem, Syria has withdrawn 4,000 troops from Lebanon.
The International Monetary Fund, the Washington-based bank set up to police the financial globe and assist the Third World, yesterday made the startling admission that the policies it has been pursuing for the last 60 years do not often work.In a paper that will be seized on by IMF critics across the political spectrum, leading officials reveal they can find little evidence of their own success.
Countries that follow IMF suggestions often suffer a "collapse in growth rates and significant financial crises", with open currency markets merely serving to "amplify the effects of various shocks".
Kenneth Rogoff, the IMF chief economist who is one of the report's authors, called the findings "sobering".
A recent study by the United Nations reported that the 47 poorest countries in the world - the biggest recipients of loans from the IMF and the World Bank - are poorer now than they were when the IMF was founded in 1944.
Iraq retaliated Thursday against the opening stages of the U.S.-led war to topple Saddam Hussein's regime, launching missiles at U.S. troop positions in Kuwait.CBS News Correspondent David Martin reports three missiles were launched. Patriot anti-missile batteries intercepted one missile, and the others were believed to have crashed. No injuries were reported and there was no indication that chemical or biological material was involved.
There were conflicting reports on what type of missiles were launched. One appeared to be a surface-to-air missile that had been converted to hit ground targets, perhaps an Al Samoud 2 missile — one of the type that Iraq had started to destroy.
In another possible attack, a small airplane crashed while attempting to fly from Iraq to Kuwait.
American troops went on alert two separate times, donning gas masks and protective suits twice and then receiving the "all clear." Air raid sirens wailed repeatedly in Kuwait City as officials warned that some Iraqi missiles might be aimed there.
The United States is offering Colombians $300,000, a U.S. visa and a new life in America for information leading to the rescue of three U.S. military contractors captured by rebels last month.Authorities Tuesday began distributing color fliers outlining the offer, complete with pictures of a jetliner, a visa application and a clean, modern metropolis lying along azure waters -- presumably an American city.
The Americans were captured by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- known as the FARC -- Feb. 13 after their U.S. government plane went down in rebel territory during an intelligence mission. A fourth American and a Colombian on the plane were killed near the scene.
The U.S. State Department years ago classified the FARC as a terrorist group, but the U.S. Embassy denied that the offer of the money -- equal to more than a lifetime's pay for many Colombians -- and the hard-to-get U.S. visa is tantamount to negotiating with terrorists.
Shortly before 4 p.m. yesterday, Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet offered President Bush the prospect -- improbable to the point of fantasy, yet suddenly at hand -- that the war against Iraq might be transformed with its opening shots. The CIA, Tenet said, believed it had a fix on President Saddam Hussein.Hussein and others in "the most senior levels of the Iraqi leadership," ordinarily among the most elusive of men, had fallen under U.S. surveillance. The intelligence was unforeseen and perishable, presenting what one administration official called "a target of opportunity" that might not come again. Not only did the agency know where Hussein was, Tenet said, but it also believed with "a high probability" that it knew where he would be for hours to come -- cloistered with advisers in a known private residence in southern Baghdad.
Bush listened calmly -- as his aides portrayed the scene -- as Tenet described the sources and limits of his information, the likelihood that it was true and the length of time Hussein could be expected to spend at the site before moving to his next refuge. The Iraqi president, a man of many palaces, avoids them at moments of maximum risk. There was no guarantee at all, Tenet said, that his whereabouts would be pinpointed again.
For the next three hours, Bush and his senior national security advisers tore up the carefully orchestrated schedule of violence that the U.S. Central Command had honed for months. Those present in the Oval Office, officials said, included Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
When Bush signed the launch order at 6:30 p.m., it had a hastily prepared insert. The first shots would strike through the roof and walls of an anonymous Baghdad home and deep beneath it in hopes of decapitating the Iraqi government in a single blow.
"If you're going to take a shot like this, you're going to take a shot at the top guy," said a government official with knowledge of the sequence of events. "It was a fairly singular strike."
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Bid to assassinate Saddam : Missile attack on Iraqi leader á Bush: 'early stages' of invasion á 170,000 troops on border (Julian Borger and James Meek, March 20, 2003, The Guardian)
The United States attempted to kill Saddam Hussein with a cruise missile attack in the early hours of this morning, in what President George Bush said were the "early stages" of a US-British invasion of Iraq.A sombre President Bush told the American people in a TV broadcast minutes after the blast: "This will not be a campaign of half measures and we will accept no outcome but victory."
A blast was reported in the Baghdad outskirts a little less than two hours after a US-imposed deadline for President Saddam to leave the country expired. It was followed by anti-aircraft fire rising into the pre-dawn sky over Baghdad just before 6am local time (3am GMT)
Pentagon officials said up to two dozen cruise missiles had been launched from ships in the Gulf and the Red Sea in a "decapitation attempt" - an assassination attempt against the Iraqi leader himself and his sons and lieutenants.
It was unclear whether the attack had been successful. A few minutes after the attack, Iraqi radio issued a statement attributed to his son, Uday Hussein, saying : "God protect us from foreign aggressors."
U.S. air attacks against Iraq on Thursday were aimed at control and command centres and, if successful, might "radically" change the nature of the war, a U.S. spokesman said."These strikes are being characterised as a decapitation targeted at command and control nodes. If successful, it will radically change the way we do things," U.S. spokesman Marine Colonel Chris Hughes told Reuters.
U.S. bombs and cruise missiles hit Baghdad at dawn as the United States launched a war to topple President Saddam Hussein.
U.S. officials in Washington said earlier that the Thursday morning air raids were aimed at senior Iraqi leadership targets near Baghdad. They did not name the targets.
Hughes indicated that targets in the south of Iraq had also been hit. He added that he now expected a lull in the attacks.
The U.S. government has obtained potentially valuable new information on Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs in recent days from scientists and intelligence agents confronted outside Iraq with threats that failure to cooperate could mean unpleasant consequences when Baghdad falls, according to two U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the effort.In a top-secret adjunct to an openly reported diplomatic initiative, U.S. and allied intelligence services summoned scores of Iraqi operatives in foreign capitals to present a stark choice. They were told "they could either 'turn,' " said one official, using an expression for switching sides, or be expelled back to Iraq "to enjoy your very short stay in Baghdad."
Another official with access to written accounts of the conversations said the Iraqis were told that when the United States sorts friends and enemies after toppling President Saddam Hussein, "they'll be putting themselves and their families at the mercy of the new Iraqi government."
The State Department announced on March 6 that it had asked 60 friendly governments to expel alleged Iraqi intelligence operatives who lived abroad under diplomatic or commercial cover. Spokesman Philip Reeker portrayed the request as routine. But behind the announcement was Operation Imminent Horizon, in which Iraqis were pressured to provide information about the weapons programs and Iraqi operational plans. Among the nations that helped with the expulsions and recruiting efforts were Romania, Hungary, Australia and Sweden, officials said.
The Defense Department is racing to integrate the new leads into an extremely risky and ambitious disarmament mission. The quality of intelligence on Iraqi chemical, biological or nuclear weapons could not only determine the threats facing U.S. troops on the battlefield in the days ahead, but also could become a factor in conclusions around the world about whether the war was necessary.
U.S. planners are urgently focused on the speedy capture of Iraqi scientists and identification of suspected weapons sites, to prevent attacks on U.S. forces and preserve evidence of proscribed programs. But they are also wary of booby traps and the possibility that small U.S. disarmament teams could be overwhelmed if they outrun friendly ground forces.
AFTER a protracted two-day debate on the Iraq war, the Senate has voted to bring Australian troops back home immediately. Labor, Australian Democrats, Australian Greens and independents Brian Harradine and Meg Lees joined forces to support the motion Iraq was being invaded without UN Security Council authorisation.Australian troops should be withdrawn and returned home immediately, the senators said.
On Aug. 25, 2002, e-mail went from the director general of CIS Paris to Qilu Chemicals in China regarding a preliminary order: "We are about to have one of our affiliates open a L/C [Letter of Credit] for an initial order of 20,000 kg. of sealant type HTBP-III. . . . The drums should have a label mentioning the nature of the goods, same as your sample: `modified polybatadiene [sic] sealant type III,' it is not necessary that the label shows the name of your company."Ten days later, on Sept. 4, this response came from Qilu: "Thank you for your order to our HTPB-III! We just have sent a 40-foot container to Tartous (Syria) last month. I am not sure whether the container is in your warehouse now." A month later, Qilu sought a "formal order."
A Times colleague in Paris visited CIS early last week. The director, Jean-Pierre Pertriaux, acknowledged the documents but said someone else had filled the order. I duly reported his denial.
Mr. Pertriaux has since written to me to denounce my column as "mostly imagination and slander." He argues, in a rambling fashion, "About HTPB, one of the uses of this chemical is as a binder for rocket propellant, one of the possible rocket style is long-range missile, which I personally know for sure the Iraqis do not have (the CIA know it still better): so the supply of HTPB is legal, it is not forbidden by the UN except for a use which does not exist, though it is unpleasant if you plan to invade Iraq and do not want to face field rockets or anti-tank weapons."
But what about those e-mail notes? "My company never supplied HTPB to Iraq (but it considered this eventuality) we know the Chinese QiLu company, they boasted to have shipped HTPB to promote their business but never actually did."
Then, "leaving you a chance to show that you distorted the truth, but did not organize a lie," the French broker pointed elsewhere: "Three shipments (totaling 115.8 tons) have actually been made from USA via Jordanian traders."
He didn't name the supposed suppliers, but I was able to check his assertion that "the supply of HTPB is legal" with an assistant secretary of state, John Wolf. "All military-related sales to Iraq are banned by several U.N. resolutions," countered Mr. Wolf, the man in charge of our nonproliferation bureau. "This is rocket fuel you're talking about. The fact that Iraq was permitted to have missiles in the sub-150-kilometer range does not therefore allow the import of such fuel. Any sale to Iraq, except for humanitarian goods, requires the approval of the U.N. sanctions committee." The U.S. is on that committee and never approved such a sale.
About 1,000 U.S. troops launched a raid on villages in southeastern Afghanistan Thursday, hunting for members of the al-Qaida terrorist network in the biggest U.S. operation in just over a year, military officials said.Helicopters ferried troops from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division to the remote, mountainous area as the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his terror network intensified, according to U.S. military officials in Washington. [...]
It was the largest U.S. military operation in Afghanistan since Operation Anaconda just over a year ago.
President Bush told the nation Wednesday night that the ?opening stages? of Operation Iraqi Freedom were under way. U.S. forces stepped up what had been intended as an initial softening of the battlefield by launching an aerial bombardment of Baghdad in an attempt to kill Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. [...]A senior U.S. official said the raids in and around Baghdad had been intended as "extensive prepping of the battlefield" in the no-fly zone in the south of the country. But the attack was ramped up after U.S. intelligence spotted what was termed a "target of opportunity," described as a "senior or very senior member of the Iraqi regime."
U.S. officials told Miklaszewski that the target was Saddam himself. They would not say whether the attack, in which F-117s dropped mammoth GBU-27 "bunker buster" bombs, was successful.
'CONSCRIPTS TO SURRENDER (Sky News, 3/20/03)
'Two-thirds of Iraq's conscript army are ready to surrender without a fight, according to US military sources in Kuwait.Two army divisions totalling 20,000 troops based in the south of Iraq are set to give themselves up to Allied forces in nearby Kuwait, the sources told Sky News reporter Colin Brazier.
The sources said Iraq's 11th infantry and 51st mechanised divisions were "ready to capitulate".
They said troops from the 6th armoured division were also believed to be considering giving themselves up.
Brazier, with US troops in Kuwait, said recent intelligence briefings had reported the troops were badly motivated.
Asked why the conscripts would surrender, Sky's Foreign Affairs Editor Tim Marshall said: "They are underfed, underpaid and extremely scared."
SADDAM WAS ATTACK TARGET (Sky News, 3/20/03)
The cruise missile attack on Baghdad was aimed at wiping out Saddam Hussein, US sources said.Pentagon sources said the Iraqi leader, his two sons and senior military officials were the targets of the strike.
The sources said they had intelligence information pinpointing where Saddam and the others may have been.
My fellow citizens, at this hour American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein?s ability to wage war.
These are opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign. More than 35 countries are giving crucial support, from the use of naval and air bases to help with intelligence and logistics to the deployment of combat units. Every nation in this coalition has chosen to bear the duty and share the honor of serving in our common defense.
To all the men and women of the United States armed forces now in the Middle East, the peace of a troubled world and the hopes of an oppressed people now depend on you. That trust is well placed. The enemies you confront will come to know your skill and bravery. The people you liberate will witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military.
In this conflict, America faces an enemy who has no regard for conventions of war or rules of morality. Saddam Hussein has placed Iraqi troops and equipment in civilian areas, attempting to use innocent men, women and children as shields for his own military, a final atrocity against his people.
I want Americans and all the world to know that coalition forces will make every effort to spare innocent civilians from harm. A campaign on the harsh terrain of a nation as large as California could be longer and more difficult than some predict. And helping Iraqis achieve a united, stable and free country will require our sustained commitment.
We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq except to remove a threat and and restore control of that country to its own people.
I know that the families of our military are praying that all those who serve will return safely and soon. Millions of Americans are praying with you for the safety of your loved ones and for the protection of the innocent. For your sacrifice, you have the gratitude and respect of the American people. And you can know that our forces will be coming home as soon as their work is done.
Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of firefighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.
Now that conflict has come, the only way to limit its duration is to apply decisive force. And I assure you, this will not be a campaign of half measures. And we will accept no outcome but victory.
My fellow citizens, the dangers to our country and the world will be overcome. We will pass through this time of peril and carry on the work of peace. We will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others. And we will prevail.
May God bless our country and all who defend her.
U.S. forces launched a military strike near Baghdad targeting Iraqi leaders, a senior government official said.The official, speaking Wednesday night, said U.S. intelligence had detected the possibility Iraqi leaders were in the area, which he described as a "target of opportunity."
The official declined to identify the leaders who were targeted or to say whether the attack was successful.
UPDATE:
It's now being referred to as a decapitation strike. It's at least conceivable that Saddam is dead already.
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TARGET--SADDAM:
Crack troops pursue Saddam (Tim Reid, March 20, 2003, Times of London)
ELITE teams of US Delta Force commandos who have been inside Iraq for weeks are preparing to descend on Baghdad with the objective of capturing or killing President Saddam Hussein, US defence officials said yesterday.Small, highly mobile units picked from the US Army's most revered and secretive fighting force have been assigned a key mission of the war: to hunt down Saddam, his two sons and at least a "dirty dozen" of Iraq's top military and civilian leaders.
The Delta Force, the US equivalent of the British SAS, has 306 men. It has been training for several years with the CIA for the specific mission of hunting down the Iraqi leader, officials said.
Last night they were being mobilised to infiltrate Baghdad and Saddam's home city of Tikrit to begin the hunt.
As plans were revealed to drop the commandos from Black Hawk helicopters to sites outside Baghdad, it became clear that, if US forces locate Saddam, the likelihood is that they will kill him and his closest henchmen rather than capture them.
"The expectation is to kill him within days (of the start of the war)," a Pentagon official said."It's what Delta has been training 24/7 to do."
Assassinating a foreign leader runs counter to a 1976 order signed by President Ford. But White House officials cite international law, which states that, once a war begins, there are no limits on military actions against enemy leaders. Saddam, as Commander-in-Chief of Iraq's Armed Forces, is a legitimate target, they say.
CIA operatives have been photographing and spying on Saddam's numerous presidential compounds, while US spy satellites take daily pictures of the Iraqi leader's suspected hideouts. Some of the most detailed information on his possible whereabouts, Pentagon officials said, has come from Jordanian intelligence.
Explosions have been heard in Baghdad, an hour and a half after the US deadline for Saddam Hussein to go into exile or face war expired.The skies above Baghdad lit up with tracer fire and a large pall of smoke was seen in the south of the city.
President Bush gave the Iraqi leader until 0100 GMT on Thursday to quit, but there was no word out of Baghdad as the cut-off point lapsed.
With the passing of the deadline, Mr Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters: "The disarmament of the Iraqi regime will begin at a time of the president's choosing."
White House says, "The opening stages of the disarmament of the Iraqi regime have begun." President Bush to address nation at 10:15 p.m. (CNN)
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Many Iraqi Loyalists Leave Posts (HAMZA HENDAWI, 3/20/03, Associated Press)
Hundreds of armed members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party and security forces deployed Wednesday throughout Baghdad, taking positions behind sandbags and in foxholes ahead of the U.S. ultimatum for the Iraqi leader to leave or face war.There was no sign during the day of regular army troops, however, and as the deadline approached, nearly half of the Baath loyalists were gone from the almost deserted streets. [...]
The Baath loyalists and security forces, meanwhile, stood behind hundreds of sandbagged positions built throughout the city over the past two weeks. Some were inside foxholes. Most were armed with Kalashnikovs, but some had rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine-guns. On the city's southern fringes, several anti-aircraft guns could be seen.
Even Baghdad's traffic policemen wore helmets and carried assault rifles.
The Baathists, who wore olive-green uniforms and deployed in clusters of fours and fives, are widely expected to take charge of keeping law and order in Baghdad and other main Iraqi cities in the event of war.
Saddam, Iraq's president of 23 years, also was expected to look to them and other loyal militiamen and troops to deal with any anti-government stirrings by groups tempted to capitalize on the chaos caused by war to try to seize power.
Curiously, there was no sign Wednesday of Iraq's army troops or armor in or outside Baghdad, where Saddam is widely expected to make his final stand against any invaders.
With war imminent, the most outspoken opponents of military action against Iraq - France, Russia and Germany - insisted Wednesday the United States will be acting illegally if it attacks Iraq and overthrows Saddam Hussein.
I have been living here in the guise of a businessman. Not being registered as a journalist means I don't need a KDP minder "for my protection." In the age-old fashion, such minders have a distinct influence on what foreign journalists see and think. In this case, journalists have not noted the nefarious activities of the Kurdish authorities in charge of the northern "no-fly" zone....[T]he Kurds could ... integrate into their northern zone a population of Turkmens and Assyrians that would almost match their own -- and for a while, perhaps for a long while, they would rule over them. Their treatment of those minorities to date in their own preponderantly Kurdish zone suggests it won't work ...
I witnessed a "spontaneous" stone-throwing riot against [Turkmen] party headquarters by a Kurdish mob in Irbil, which the KDP offered to dispel by occupying the premises. The Turkmens refused, as the KDP have a passion for invading and looting their offices. Some nights later, KDP commandos occupied the high-points around Turkmen office buildings and pointed Kalashnikovs at the guards. Turkmen officials are detained without charge, their homes looted anonymously....
Saddam used [the Turkmen] as cannon fodder in the Iran-Iraq war. Many were taken prisoner by the Iranians. Others escaped to [Kurdish-controlled] Irbil, leaving behind relatives at Saddam's mercy. Saddam in turn has tortured and killed those unfortunates for having "foreign" connections. Now the Irbil exiles are stuck with Barzani -- dubbed "Mini Saddam" -- who also treats them as spies for the Turks. Barzani's rival-cum-uneasy confederate, who rules the other official Kurdish zone as strongman of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), is a mite more civilized, though insidious. He refused minority-language TV channels, for example, on grounds that he couldn't protect them adequately....
Barzani's new-found pan-Kurdish nationalism is pragmatic. Any change in the status quo brought on by Turkish or American forces breaks his monopoly on trade and smuggling revenues and threatens his financial hold over the mercurial Kurdish tribes. Until the trade in oil with Iraq stopped a few days ago -- after Turkey closed the border -- Barzani made nearly a billion dollars a month on transit "taxes." His family takes a cut from all trade in tobacco, textiles, tea, alcohol and medicines. None of this bodes well for his future governance in a wider Kurdish area. It is an open secret here that he has allowed Iraqi intelligence to operate under cover, and that Saddam's family and friends have regularly visited here -- after all, Barzani and Saddam's son, Qusay, co-own the local firm that traded in U.N.-sanctioned oil....
In the weeks I've been here, I've learned the last thing local leaders want, or intend to employ, is democracy and the rule of law.
Laura's guest is Michael Kirk, senior producer of the PBS Frontline program, "The Long Road to War"
Although millions have marched worldwide, Bush's war is now beginning.But even despite the launch of mass bombing, we must continue to work to lay the groundwork to prevent it from leading to wars on Iran, North Korea, Colombia, and so on. This means we'll need those now surging into the movement to stick around for the long haul, and not melt away when times get hard.
During the first Gulf War, one arguably more justified, the U.S. peace movement got kicked in the gut. Then as well, major protests surged through American and European cities, hoping to stop the war before it started. But once the war began, mainstream American debate over the wisdom of war quickly became supplanted by the insistence that anything other than relentless cheerleading was disloyal to the troops -- and to the country. Americans overwhelmingly supported the first Gulf War, because it worked militarily, and because the hundred thousand Iraqis who died were faceless and anonymous.
Those who continued speaking out for peace quickly felt marginalized, isolated, and silenced. Most quickly retreated into private life, many entering a political cocoon they would stay in for years.
Yet for some who've been active working for justice and peace ever since, that war was their entry point to involvement. What made the difference between the people who retreated and those who stayed engaged? What will make the difference now that many more ordinary citizens are outraged enough to speak out -- opposing both the war and Bush's broader assault on democracy?
Those who persisted back then promptly learned that their actions could matter whether or not they produced immediate results. Connecting with fellow activists, they saw themselves as part of a long-term movement for change -- fighting for basic principles. They retained hope and courage even when the political tides seemed to run against them.
History never fully repeats itself. But if Bush does go to war despite massive global opposition, the peace movement needs to be prepared for some unsettling possibilities.
Anti-war sentiment and disapproval of President Bush's international policies continue to erode America's image among the publics of its allies. U.S. favorability ratings have plummeted in the past six months in countries actively opposing war--France, Germany and Russia--as well as in countries that are part of the "coalition of the willing." In Great Britain, favorable views of the U.S. have declined from 75% to 48% since mid-2002.In Poland, positive views of the U.S. have fallen to 50% from nearly 80% six months ago; in Italy, the proportion of respondents holding favorable views of the United States has declined by half over the same period (from 70% to 34%). In Spain, fewer than one-in-five (14%) have a favorable opinion of the United States. Views of the U.S. in Russia, which had taken a dramatically positive turn after Sept. 11, 2001, are now more negative than they were prior to the terrorist attacks.
Among possible coalition countries, majorities oppose joining the U.S. to take action against Iraq to end Saddam Hussein's rule. Even in Great Britain, a 51% majority opposes war. Among the unwilling allies, there is also virtually no potential support for a U.S.- led military effort.
But ironically, most publics surveyed think that in the long run the Iraqi people will be better off and the Middle East will be more stable if Iraq is disarmed and Hussein is removed from power. More than seven-in-ten of the French (73%) and Germans (71% ) see the Iraqi public benefiting.
Washington has angrily demanded the immediate release of dozens of Cuban dissidents arrested for their contacts with the US representative in Havana.State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Washington was "outraged" by the detentions.
"This is an appalling act of intimidation against those who seek freedom and democratic change in Cuba," Mr Boucher said.
He also strongly defended the US envoy, James Cason, against Cuban accusations of carrying out subversive activities.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has expressed concern for the millions of civilians who could be caught in the looming war in Iraq."It is the plight of the Iraqi people which is now my most immediate concern," he told a meeting of the UN Security Council in New York - just hours before a US deadline for war was due to expire.
Mr Annan said Iraqis had suffered a lot over the years and were faced now with a disaster "which could easily lead to epidemics and starvation". [...]
The Secretary General said nearly a million Iraqi children were suffering from malnutrition, and the coming conflict would make things much worse.
It is quiet here in the rubble at the presumed site of ancient Troy. No tourists gawk at the spot where Achilles pierced Hector's throat, at the high stone walls on which King Priam tore his gray hair, at the gate that shows signs of having been widened as if to admit an unusually big object, like an oversized wooden horse.Then there's a roar, and two fighter jets streak across the sky, creating a collage of one of the world's first battlegrounds and the next one, just southeast of here in Iraq. The instruments of war have changed mightily in 3,200 years, but people have not; that is why Homer's "Iliad," even when it may not be historically true, exudes a profound moral truth as the greatest war story ever told.
So on the eve of a new war, the remarkably preserved citadel of Troy is an intriguing spot to seek lessons. The Trojan War was the very first world war, between Europe and Asia, and the legends suggest that it was marked not just by heroism but also by catastrophic mistakes, poor leadership and what the Greeks called ato: the intoxicating pride and overweening arrogance that sometimes clouds the minds of the strong.
Troy offers us three lessons about war, each as enduring as the spring that still trickles here - described by Homer as the place where Trojan women washed clothes.
Not so long ago, Saddam was admired as a thoughtful, articulate, intelligent politician who was an asset to Iraq's reform-minded socialist-revolutionary party. Some of those who knew him in the sixties and seventies recall enjoying idealistic bull-sessions with him about Iraq's future. And as he gained power within the party, he began to implement a number of reforms to Iraq's health-care and educational systems that ... earned him praise in the West.A pathological sense of vanity, Bowden explains, has also played an important role in Saddam's quest for absolute power. He seems to want more than anything to go down in history as a great man ...
In 1994 genocide occurred in Rwanda. Within the space of 100 days, 1 million people perished. At the time, the United Nations had a sizable presence in the country, but it did not stop the genocide. The world still debates whether the international community could have stopped the horror. It is a debate Rwandans do not understand and cannot relate to.Maybe the risk of failure in Rwanda in 1994 was high; maybe substantial numbers of the members of an intervening force would have come home in body bags. That is no justification for the inaction that cost Rwanda its best and brightest. [...]
Rwandans believe that the international community needs to learn from its mistakes. Sadly, that seems not to be happening. We are not members of the Security Council, and we do not know whether Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction and is therefore a danger to international peace and security, as Resolution 1441 says. What we do know is that the international community cannot shirk its responsibility. Either Hussein is and he should be disarmed, or he is not.
International politics is, in many ways, about dealing with shades of gray. Where genocide, international terrorism and the survival of the human race are concerned, however, hard choices need to be made. Simply waiting is not a choice, it is an abdication of responsibility.
In Berlin, a reporter talking to a German official heard that the Schroeder government initially believed Iraq was a one-issue crisis, narrowly confinable to disagreement on the military undertaking and the painful although surmountable problem (in the middle term) of Germany's nonparticipation.But reacting in fear of isolation, the official suggested, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's willingness to subordinate Germany to a French view of confrontation with the United States on many wider fronts has brought the government to a position it now finds an awkward fit with Germany's long-term interests, and to a place outside the realm of the two men's anticipation when they ran for re-election on a pacifist platform last September.
In very less specific terms, this notion of things having gone too far appeared to suffuse remarks on Monday by Fischer that American policy was absolutely nonimperial in nature, that the United States was the irreplacable element of global and regional security, that there was no alternative to good trans-Atlantic relationships and that he well understood how the new East European membership of the European Union could have a "very different view" of their security than this or that EU founding member.
British and American troops were involved in fierce fighting near Iraq's main port today as the war to topple Saddam Hussein began.The firefight broke out near Basra as men of the Special Boat Service targeted the strategically vital city and the oilfields in southern Iraq. [...]
The fighting reported at Basra was believed to involve British special forces and US marines in an operation to prepare landing sites for amphibious craft during an invasion.
Other special units were deep inside Iraq on secret operations to prepare landing strips in the desert for airborne troops.
Basra, Iraq's only seaport, lies on the Shatt al Arab waterway where the Tigris and the Euphrates open into the northern Gulf.
Surrounded by treacherous sandbanks and marshes it is difficult to approach from the sea.
Artillery, infantry and the tanks of the 7th Armoured Brigade had already moved into Forming Up Positions, and some were already on the start line.
An attack could target Basra and proceed up alongside the Euphrates towards the strategic cities of Nasariya, Najaf and Karbala.
Citizen after citizen told the Senate Taxes Committee on Tuesday evening at Northeast Middle School in Minneapolis that taxes ought to be raised on high-income families or corporations in order to balance Minnesota's $4.23 billion projected budget shortfall.J Robert Burger, an organizer for a clerical workers union at the University of Minnesota and one of about 40 citizens who testified Tuesday, cited statistics from the Minnesota Revenue Department showing that those at the very top of the income scale pay a lower percentage of their income in state and local taxes than do middle-and low-income families. [...]
Burger's direct challenge to the Senate, which is controlled by the DFL, will be answered by the end of the month. Senate Majority Leader John Hottinger of St. Peter has set that deadline for presenting an alternative DFL budget proposal. But he says he still doesn't know whether the proposal will include a tax hike, despite increasing demands from some interest groups and citizens, such as Burger. [...]
It's no secret that DFLers at the State Capitol, already reduced to their fewest numbers and weakest position in 30 years, have been in a terrible bind over how to respond to [Governor] Pawlenty's adamant opposition to higher tax rates.
Republicans control the House by a yawning margin. Pawlenty, with his no-tax-increase campaign, beat DFLer Roger Moe and the Independence Party's Tim Penny, both of whom said that increases were "on the table."
Some DFLers note that the combined vote of three major-party candidates who had taxes on the table was larger than Pawlenty's, about 55 percent to 45 percent, but opinion polls continue to show little support for tax increases.
After the blowing up of the Maine in Havana harbor in 1898, McKinley issued a call for 25,000 volunteers to liberate Cuba from Spain. A million responded. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the lines at recruiting stations went around the block.This war is different. It is a war the president and Secretary Powell said they did not want to fight, but must, if Iraq refused to disarm. Thus, on the eve of war, the mood here seemed less one of war enthusiasm than of resignation, and a grim resolve to get it over with.
The war debate has been protracted and bitter. Now it is over, and patriotism commands that when American soldiers face death in battle, the America people unite behind them.
With rising intensity and emotion, the Democratic Party finds itself divided over war in Iraq. The turmoil in the party--and the rising voices of the antiwar wing--are shaping the nation's view of the Democrats as they approach a national election that could turn on the question of the country's security, party leaders said.Officials in both parties say the image of high-profile Democrats challenging President Bush's war policy right up through his address to the nation on
Monday--and, in fact, beyond the speech, as was clear here today--could reinforce a perception that Republicans are better suited to deal with threats from abroad.Should that happen, Democrats say, it could pose a serious obstacle for the party if the White House and Congressional contests in 2004--unlike the contests of 1992, 1996 and 2000--are fought out on issues of national security and foreign policy. [...]
Though worried, some Democratic leaders predicted that the potential war with Iraq would ultimately have little effect on the outcome of Mr. Bush's re-election campaign.
"Let's remember that this war--if there is a war--is likely to be a distant memory by November of 2004," Gov. Gray Davis of California said.
In recent months, everyone from Slate's Michael Kinsley to former U.S. presidential candidate Gary Hart to Hardball host Chris Matthews has commented about the problem of "dual loyalty" in this conflict — the question of whether some Americans — especially certain Jewish members of the Bush administration — are supporting war with Iraq because they believe war is in Israel's interests.The debate surfaced in public March 3 when Rep. James Moran, D-Va., told a church forum that, "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this."
The White House condemned Moran's comments and the congressman has since apologized for his comments.
American Jewish groups have not endorsed the war, and many Jews have been active in the anti-war movement. But, as evidenced by Moran's recent comments, the debate continues over Israel's role, American Jewish support of the Iraq war, and a perceived dual loyalty.
Kinsley wrote in October that there has been a "lack of public discussion about the role of Israel in the thinking of President Bush." The Moran flap was the first time the White House has gotten involved. Before, the discussion has stayed in the realm of political magazines and op-ed pages. Below we break down the debate.
Carbon dioxide certainly warms our planet, but it might not turn on the heat, reveals a new analysis of ancient Antarctic ice."Our data suggest that the warming came first, then carbon dioxide increased," says Jean Jouzel of the Pierre-Simon Laplace Institute in Gif-sur-Yvette, France1. Something else — probably extraterrestrial — got the warming going, his team concludes.
Aside from water vapour, carbon dioxide is the major warming influence on our planet. But it's hard to work out which comes first: a rise in carbon dioxide levels or a slight warming. Why? Because even a slight temperature hike increases atmospheric carbon dioxide, through its effects on forests and oceans.
Pioneering a new technique, Jouzel's team has probed air bubbles trapped in 240,000- year-old ice laid down as snow when the Earth was warming up at the end of a massive ice age.
They compared the ratio of two forms of the atmospheric gas argon in the bubbles, and looked at their carbon dioxide content. The argon ratio changes relative to the temperature of the air at the time it was trapped, the team argues.
They saw a temperature rise, followed by greater warming caused by rising carbon dioxide levels, that tallied well with evidence from the surrounding ice and other climate records. "We were surprised to find that these indicators agreed," says Jouzel.
In the hours following President Bush's ultimatum Monday to Saddam Hussein, local antiwar groups moved to shift their strategy from protest to resistance.E-mails went out to supporters. Phone calls, too. In Oakland, groups affiliated with Direct Action to Stop the War met to complete plans for the day bombs start hitting Iraq.
In San Francisco, the organization stepped up nonviolent "role-playing scenarios" to prepare for acts of civil disobedience.
As the groups begin to mobilize, communities throughout the East Bay began bracing for war and the mass protests that promise to follow. If the local response to 1991's Operation Desert Storm is any indication, the Bay Area could face days of unrest in the event of war.
This time, however, the protests are expected to be larger, organizers said, because of intensified antiwar sentiment in the Bay Area and across the world.
"We're getting ready to see something we've never really seen before," said Leda Dederich, an organizer with the San Francisco-based Direct Action to Stop the War.
"We're planning to really stop the financial district, to really put our bodies on the line to stop the war machine," Dederich said.
The problem for these protestors is that there's no objective sense in which they're morally correct and subjectively the great majority of Americans disagree with them. The idea of sending them to prison for trying to disrupt the functioning of society is far more attractive than that of leaving Saddam in place. Let's hope that, like serious practitioners of civil disobedience in the past, they're willing to stay in prison until society changes its policy...in other words, forever.
Elshtain clearly thinks a war now against terrorism and Iraq meets just-war criteria.Her guiding ethos is an "Augustinian realism that resists sentimentalism and insists on ethical restraint." The great Church father appreciated, in her words, that "power is a basic reality of political life" and "justice and force are not mutually incompatible." Indeed, President Bush's much-mocked view that he might go to war partly to create a just peace for now-oppressed Iraqis is vintage Augustine, who advocated force to protect innocents from harm, and even saw it as a form of obligatory Christian love for neighbors.
Elshtain's trench-level arguments about such matters include reflections on the thoughts of such theologians as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich about force and evil. Some of her citations sound eerily contemporary, such as Niebuhr's 1940 observation that history "refutes the idea that nations are drawn into war too precipitously. It proves... that it is the general inclination, of democratic nations at least, to hesitate so long before taking this fateful plunge that the dictator nations gain a fateful advantage..."
Elshtain's least persuasive moments concern America's role in the world. "The role of preventing or interdicting violence in other countries is not new to the United States," she writes, "it was thrust upon the United States in 1989 when it became the world's only superpower."
That's the kind of disingenuous malarkey currently infuriating America's allies. No one thrust the role of world cop on the United States - we took it. Even if one believes we should take it, we owe the world some arguments beyond "might makes right." Since agreed-upon "just take" criteria don't exist, working out the principles is a challenge.
In the end, one values Elshtain's judgments while regretting her often inadequate brief for them. She says "we have no choice but to fight." Better to say, "It's our choice to fight," and explain why.
Paul Jaminet has already offered a long post on just war theory today and we finally posted our long-promised review of Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars. But quite the best thing you're ever likely to read on just war is the essay Just Cause
Revisited by James Turner Johnson. It is exceptional.
[H]ere we are, going to war, basically alone, in the face of opposition, not so much from "the Arab Street," but from "the World Street." Everyone wishes it were different, but it's too late — which is why this column will henceforth focus on how to turn these lemons into lemonade. Our children's future hinges on doing this right, even if we got here wrong.The president's view is that in the absence of a U.N. endorsement, this war will become "self-legitimating" when the world sees most Iraqis greet U.S. troops as liberators. I think there is a good chance that will play out.
But wars are fought for political ends. Defeating Saddam is necessary but not sufficient to achieve those ends, which are a more progressive Iraq and a world with fewer terrorists and terrorist suppliers dedicated to destroying the U.S., so Americans will feel safer at home and abroad. We cannot achieve the latter without the former. Which means we must bear any burden and pay any price to make Iraq into the sort of state that fair-minded people across the world will see and say: "You did good. You lived up to America's promise."
To maximize our chances of doing that, we need to patch things up with the world. Because having more allied support in rebuilding Iraq will increase the odds that we do it right, and because if the breach that has been opened between us and our traditional friends hardens into hostility, we will find it much tougher to manage both Iraq and all the other threats down the road. That means the Bush team needs an "attitude lobotomy" — it needs to get off its high horse and start engaging people on the World Street, listening to what's bothering them, and also telling them what's bothering us.
Some 35 years ago Israel won a war in Six Days. It saw its victory as self-legitimating. Its neighbors saw it otherwise, and Israel has been trapped in the Seventh Day ever since — never quite able to transform its dramatic victory into a peace that would make Israelis feel more secure.
More than 50 years ago America won a war against European fascism, which it followed up with a Marshall Plan and nation-building, both a handout and a hand up — in a way that made Americans welcome across the world. Today is a D-Day for our generation. May our leaders have the wisdom of their predecessors from the Greatest Generation.
Pope John Paul II is a man of intellectual courage and a leading philosopher of the school known as Christian personalism. He has often integrated his personalist views into traditional Catholic teachings to good effect: his strong support for capitalism and democracy helped bring the Catholic nations of Latin America, Iberia, and Africa from dictatorship to democracy during his papacy; and his teachings on sex, love, and marriage have helped make "the new familiar, and the familiar new." But in one area -- questions of the use of force, especially in matters of life or death -- his innovations seem to me a step backward.
Traditional Catholic teaching integrates hundreds of Bible passages which in some cases endorse the use of force, even deadly force, and in other cases reject it. For instance:
If a thief is caught in the act of housebreaking and beaten to death, there is no bloodguilt involved. [Exodus 22:1]
I say unto you, resist not evil; if one strike you on the right cheek, offer him the other. [Matthew 5:39]
Exodus tells us that killing a housebreaker is a legitimate act, so that no one may rightly punish a householder who kills a housebreaker. But though such a killing would be legitimate, so too not killing the housebreaker would also be legitimate. Which should the householder choose? That is a moral question. Jesus's "resist not evil" is traditionally taken as a spiritual, not a moral, injunction, for, as St. Thomas Aquinas noted, Jesus's cheek really was slapped and far from turning the other one, Jesus protested (John 18:23). Aquinas comments:
Holy Scripture must be understood in the light of what Christ and the saints have actually practiced. Christ did not offer His other cheek, nor Paul either. Thus to interpret the injunction of the Sermon on the Mount literally is to misunderstand it. This injunction signifies rather the readiness of the soul to bear, if it be necessary, such things and worse, without bitterness against the attacker. This readiness our Lord showed, when He gave up His body to be crucified. [Commentary on Saint John, 4, 2]
Indeed, traditional Christianity holds that to use force against evildoers is an act of love: love for the evildoers, because it limits their descent into sin and encourages them to repent; and love for those who would otherwise fall victim to the evildoers. As an act of love, the use of force can be morally obligatory, particularly for those authorities to whom society has entrusted the use of force.
One further point regarding traditional Christian teaching is worth making. The Bible makes no ethical distinction between rulers and ruled: the same ethical law applies to all. Distinctions in the right to use force will come about because of the voluntary agreements of persons, but such agreements are always limited by the original grants of authority under divine law. Thus the principles governing a ruler's decisions about force in war are derived from the same principles as those governing a householder's decision to kill a housebreaker. As Scripture has it:
[S]hould you then decide to have a king over you like all the surrounding nations, . . . [w]hen he is enthroned in his kingdom, he shall have a copy of this law made from the scroll that is in the custody of the levitical priests. He shall keep it with him and read it all the days of his life that he may learn to fear the LORD, his God, and to heed and fulfill all the words of this law and these statutes. Let him not become estranged from his countrymen through pride, nor turn aside to the right or to the left from these commandments. [Deuteronomy 17: 14,18-20]
The Christian tradition on the use of force was thoroughly worked out by such eminent philosophers as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Given the difficulty of finding alternative interpretations that are consistent with the many relevant Biblical injunctions, there would seem to be little scope for innovation in Catholic teaching on these issues.
Yet Pope John Paul II has brought about a change in rhetoric and emphasis. Horrified by the rise of mass abortion -- 40 million babies killed in the United States since 1973, and hundreds of millions around the world -- the Pope sought a new way to teach respect for life. He juxtaposed "the culture of death" with "the culture of life," and argued for life. This rhetoric avoids the subtleties of traditional Christian teaching on the use of force, but rhetorical power comes at some cost. How, for instance, can the Church's traditional support for capital punishment be reconciled with its denunciation of "the culture of death"?
Theologically the reconciliation is possible, but only by emphasizing the prudential judgment. The Bible makes clear that the death penalty is a legitimate response to murder ("Whoever takes the life of any human being shall be put to death," Leviticus 24:17). But life imprisonment, or some lesser sentence, are also legitimate. Which is morally best? At this point a prudential judgment must be made. Here the Pope argues that, of the various legitimate courses, abjuring the death penalty is best because doing so will help promote "the culture of life." In effect, the Pope seems to be arguing that many people who on issues like abortion would not be persuaded by the sophisticated but subtle Bible-driven traditional Catholic principles, are open to persuasion by the simpler life-is-better-than-death argument, and that, as it is crucial to win over these people, it would be imprudent to make the "culture of life" rhetoric appear hypocritical by supporting the death penalty.
The result has been a kind of moral pacifism: yes, killing is sometimes just, but so rarely is it morally good, when all its consequences are considered, that in practice we should almost never do it. The prudential judgment almost completely swallows the rest of the theory. Prudence decides. What is more, the factors that prudence should consider are particular to the contemporary world -- the abortion plague, for instance. The Church does not reject St. Thomas Aquinas's judgment that the death penalty is morally superior to life imprisonment as a punishment for murder; rather it holds that times have changed, and in current circumstances it is best to oppose death.
One consequence is a de-Christianization of Church rhetoric about the use of deadly force. Biblical principles are irrelevant to the decision; only consequences in today's world affect the prudential decision. This is why Catholic bishops, speaking today on questions of deadly force, rarely quote the Bible or the saints, and make arguments indistinguishable from those of atheists.
Let's look now at recent Vatican statements regarding the war on Iraq.
Vatican Strongly Opposes War (Fox News, 3/12/2003)
Pope John Paul II and top Vatican officials are unleashing a barrage of condemnations of a possible U.S. military strike on Iraq, calling it immoral, risky and a "crime against peace."...The stance reflects what experts say is the Vatican's evolving position on just war, already seen by its opposition to the Gulf War, as well as concern about the impact of war on relations between Christians and Muslims.
"He is looking ahead for the rest of this century where Christian-Muslim relations are key to peace and religious freedom in Africa and many parts of Asia," said the Rev. Thomas Reese, editor of the Jesuit magazine America....
"We want to say to America: Is it worth it to you? Won't you have have, afterward, decades of hostility in the Islamic world," asked the Vatican's No. 2 official, Cardinal Angelo Sodano.
John Paul II's "global diplomacy" in the Iraqi crisis is motivated in part by an attempt to avoid any kind of clash of civilizations, says the founder of the Community of Sant'Egidio.Andrea Riccardi, whose Catholic movement arose in Rome in 1968, said that "it is clear that the Vatican has the Christians of Iraq and the Muslim world in mind, who might remain as hostages of a Muslim reaction against the West. However, this is not the only reason for so much effort."
"As at the time of the Gulf War, the Pope does not want the confrontation to become a war between the West and Islam," Riccardi explained an article published in the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.
Now, I believe that the Vatican is mistaken about the consequences of war. Muslims will not despise Christians for liberating them from a vicious dictator, as this New York Times report from Baghdad shows:
The striking thing was that for many Iraqis the first American strike could not come too soon....Iraqis were astonishingly frank in suggesting they were ready to endure war for liberty.
One retired chemical engineer working as a taxi driver told a fare that he had listened to Mr. Bush. "People are waiting for America," he said, taking both hands off the wheel to simulate applause.
Conversely, if Christians were so weak that we were not only unwilling to bear any burden for love of Iraqis, but unwilling to defend ourselves from the attacks of murderers like Saddam and al Qaeda, we might obtain the contempt of many Muslims. Statements by Osama bin Laden and others suggest that our refusal to respond to terrorist attacks throughout the 1990s led extremist Muslims to believe that we know our society and culture and religion to be unworthy of defense, and encouraged their attacks.
Moreover, the emphasis which the Vatican now gives to prudential judgment is contrary to the Biblical mindset. The Bible warns us against trying to calculate speculative consequences too finely: indeed, calculation is the pre-eminent activity of evildoers:
They have calculated and gone astray, they have not appreciated the honour of a blameless life. (Wisdom 2:21-22)
God made mankind straight, but men have had recourse to many calculations. (Ecclesiastes 7:29)
For the reasoning of mortals is worthless, and our designs are likely to fail. (Wisdom 9:14)
The LORD brings to nought the plans of nations; he foils the designs of peoples. (Psalm 33:10)
He frustrates the plans of the cunning,
so that their hands achieve no success;
He catches the wise in their own ruses,
and the designs of the crafty are routed.
They meet with darkness in the daytime,
and at noonday they grope as though it were night. (Job 5:12-14)
Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are we not of more value than they?... Therefore do not be anxious, saying, 'How shall we defease Muslim hostility? How shall we appease the Arab street?' For the Gentiles seek all these things; and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be yours as well. Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow.
I believe, further, that the Vatican's recent "evolution" in just war doctrine, apparently from tradition toward modern European progressive opinion, is mistaken. I stand with John Locke:
And he that shall collect all the moral rules of the philosophers, and compare them with those contained in the new testament, will find them to come short of the morality delivered by Our Saviour, and taught by his apostles; a college made up, for the most part, of ignorant, but inspired fishermen. (The Reasonableness of Christianity, 241)
May the war end swiftly, with few lives lost; and may God continue to bless America.
MORE: An opposing view from The Spectator (via Amy Welborn).
-REVIEW: of Just and Unjust War by Michael Walzer
(Brothers Judd)
Sometimes I feel as if I've spent half my adult life covering a President Bush as he squares off against Saddam Hussein, an evil dictator who invades his neighbors and gasses his own people.But while on the surface this seems like Groundhog War, the father-and-son duels in the sun with Saddam are breathtakingly different. The philosophical gulf between 41's gulf war and 43's gulf war is profound and cataclysmic--it has sent the whole world into a frenzy--yet it can be summed up in a single pronoun.
"The big I," as Bush senior calls it.
The first President Bush was often teased about his loopy syntax. But it was a way of speaking that signified the modesty and self-effacement his mother had insisted upon. He was so afraid to sound arrogant if he used the first person singular that he often just dropped the subject of a sentence and went straight to the verb.
"Mother always lectured us--in a kinder, gentler way--against using the big I," Poppy Bush said. He is so shy of "I" that he has never written a personal memoir.
Intellectually, Saad Eddin Ibrahim has always been one of Egypt's freest men. Now, after three years, three trials and 14 months of health-shattering imprisonment, Dr. Ibrahim, the country's most prominent democracy and human rights advocate, is legally free as well. Egypt's highest and most independent court, the Court of Cassation, affirmed yesterday what every honest observer of the Ibrahim case had known all along, that the charges against him were without foundation. The court's verdict is final; the Egyptian government cannot appeal.Dr. Ibrahim, who holds American as well as Egyptian citizenship, was charged with damaging Egypt's reputation by reporting past instances of electoral fraud, as well as illegally accepting European Union research funds. The real damage to Egypt's reputation came from the politically motivated prosecution of Mr. Ibrahim, a 64-year-old sociologist who worked to encourage cleaner elections, wider political participation by women and better understanding between Egypt's Muslim majority and Coptic Christian minority, earning him an international reputation. Yesterday's verdict will restore some of Egypt's good name. [...]
To its considerable credit, last year the Bush administration froze additional aid to President Hosni Mubarak's government over Dr. Ibrahim's treatment. This pressure, and the efforts of human rights groups worldwide, helped persuade the government to back off and prosecute the case less aggressively. Lesser known activists continue to face legal persecution in Egypt and even greater dangers in other Arab countries, like Libya and Syria.
Prime Minister Jean Chretien says Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would have peacefully disarmed within weeks if the U.S. hadn't jumped the gun with a 48-hour deadline.Chretien said he's convinced the Canadian compromise brought to the UN Security Council Feb. 18 that would have set four weekly disarmament deadlines for Hussein would have succeeded.
"If we had accepted the ideas presented by Canada ... I think Saddam Hussein would have met the requirements," the PM said yesterday after meeting with Mozambique President Joaquim Chissano. "And I think we might have been able to avoid a war."
Chretien said U.S. President George W. Bush caused the failure of diplomacy by pulling out of the UN Security Council and ordering Hussein and his son's out of Iraq by tonight.
"I am still of the view, given some more weeks, disarmament would have been achieved," Chretien said. "I think the process of diplomacy was not over."
Clare Short's version of events goes like this: she was writing her resignation statement when suddenly she decided to stay in her job.Having nearly completed the draft valediction, she thought: "We've got to look after the people in Iraq; we've got to drive forward the peace process to get the Palestinian state; we've got to make sure there's not a humanitarian disaster." Resignation, the Secretary of State for International Development decided, would be "cheap" and "cowardly".
This account by Ms Short of why she was so spectacularly reneging on her public promise to quit the Cabinet over the Iraq crisis left her an isolated and humiliated figure yesterday.
The first shots of the war have been fired, killing at least one Iraqi during a suspected operation to mine the waters off Kuwait. But that opening skirmish is about to be dwarfed by the most formidable military assault in modern warfare: 250,000 British and American troops — backed by more than 1,000 aircraft, 400 tanks and a 110-strong armada — are poised to unleash their awesome power on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq the moment the order is given.Unnamed sources are suggesting that the Iraqi rejection of the President's 48 hour ultimatum may mean that the US will not wait until tomorrow night. Some operations, including Special Forces teams probing the front lines, have been going on for the last few days. Alliance troops have moved out of their bases to forward positions on the Kuwaiti/Iraqi border. There are some odd reports of a considerable number of military vehicles moving south through Turkey. Apparently, we have cell phone numbers for Iraqi soldiers of widely disparate ranks, and are calling many of them directly. I still say that the bombing will start tomorrow night, but for all intents and purposes we're prosecuting the war now, and probably have been for the last few weeks.The first clash occurred in the mouth of the Khawr al-Zubayr river, a few miles south of the port of Umm Qasr, when a Kuwaiti gunboat challenged a flotilla of about 25 Iraqi dhows. The boats failed to respond and the Kuwaitis opened fire. It was unclear whether the dhows had laid any mines.
Serves 4 as a main dish8 1/2-inch thick slices chewy, crusty country bread
2 cloves garlic, split
About 1/2 cup robust extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1/2 pound fresh goat cheese or fresh Italian mozzarella packed in waterHerb Blend:
1 large clove garlic
1 large thin slice prosciutto (about 1 ounce)
4 whole scallions
3 tightly packed tablespoons fresh basil leaves
2 tightly packed tablespoons Italian (flat leaf) parsley
1/2 medium red onion
1/3 cup (2 to 3 ounces) toasted pine nuts, or toasted almonds, coarsely chopped
Salt and freshly ground black pepper1. Toast the bread under the broiler, over a wood fire, or on top of the stove. Rub with the 2 cloves of garlic (for milder garlic flavor, rub it on the bread before toasting) and moisten lightly with some of the olive oil. Sprinkle with a little salt and freshly ground black pepper. Spread each bread slice with a generous layer of the cheese.
2. On a large cutting board, smash the garlic clove with the flat side of a large knife then mince the garlic. Pile on the board the prosciutto, scallions, basil leaves, parsley, and onion. Add the minced garlic and chop all together into 3/4- to 1-inch pieces.
3. Film the bottom of a 10-inch skillet with about 2 tablespoons of the olive oil. Set over medium-high heat until hot. Drop the herb mix into the skillet and stir for 10 seconds or until fragrant. Remove from heat and taste, adding salt and pepper if needed. Stir in pine nuts.
4. Pile the herb mixture onto the slices of bruschetta, lightly pressing into the cheese. Drizzle with a bit of the olive oil. Serve immediately.
The Man Without Qualities speculates that a substantial invasion may be mounted from Turkey.
To call him a horse's ass would do a disservice to equine anuses.
Following is a list of 30 countries the State Department says are members of a "Coalition for the Immediate Disarmament of Iraq":Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Italy, Japan (post conflict), S. Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan.
FRANCE has come back to earth with a bump, one day after President Chirac played a lead role in blocking Britain and America's efforts to gain United Nations backing for war.The country's pride was tinged with worry yesterday about the fallout from the President's heady spell at the centre of the world stage.
As the spotlight moved away from France, antigovernment strikes by teachers and railway workers began. The national stoppages were a signal that the glory won by international statesmanship could soon be diminished by economic trouble at home.
The United States is basing its Iraq policy on a set of mistaken assumptions, says James Zogby, head of the Arab American Institute in Washington.UPI Chief News Analyst Martin Sieff interviewed Zogby, a prominent and respected leader of the Arab-American community, about his criticisms of the administration's war policy
toward Iraq, the possible negative consequences of war and the intellectual assumptions on which the policy is based.UPI: Why do you believe that President Bush has failed to make an effective case for going to war with Iraq?
Zogby: I have argued from the outset that President Bush has not made a case for this war. He and Secretary of State Colin Powell have made the case that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is evil but not why this would make a case for a unilateral and pre-emptive American war.
BTW: here's a fun exercise to try with this interview: substitute "Jews" every time Mr. Zogby says "neoconservatives" and things become much clearer.
[T]he war to come is likely to resemble the resolution of the largest hostage crisis in history. The task of the allies is to remove Saddam, and his fellow monsters, while sparing every possible innocent human life that he is holding for his protection. Saddam's strategy, for the battle ahead ... is to maximize the carnage and suffering, in the earnest expectation that the world's America-haters will blame it all on Washington, not Baghdad....Saddam's complete distrust of his own generals, and non-interest in their professional advice, was broadcast with his decision Saturday to place the country under four "warlords", with his son, the psychopathic Qusay, in charge of the key, central sector, which encompasses Tikrit and Baghdad....
Perhaps his most subtle tactic is to array his IV Army Corps (the so-called "Saladin"), not in the obvious path of the allies, but with seeming irrelevance against the Iranian frontier. Their job is to seal it, so that refugees and deserters are unable to flee towards Iran, and a tide of some hundreds of thousands of them can be driven into the path of the advancing columns of U.S. and British armour, slowing these down....
It appears that most significant defences in the south are concentrated in Nasiriyah, not the large port city of Basra. A second such line is drawn through Karbala, another third of the way to Baghdad. In both of these Shia holy cities, as in Baghdad, obvious air targets have been deployed in mosques, and the courtyards of hospices, schools, and hospitals.
But not, apparently, in Basra, which is being offered as a baited trap, the target possibly of chemical or biological weaponry, once it has been occupied by allied troops....
By concentrating the whole national artillery in Baghdad, Saddam has improved the odds of chance hits against allied aircraft. Most of this flak will miss, however, causing random carnage as it comes back down to earth, and giving the appearance that it is part of the allied bombing.
Why so crazed a self-defence? Because Saddam's real strategy can not be to prevail over the invading forces, only to enmire them in a human catastrophe.
May God bless our troops, and America.
France awoke on Tuesday torn between two emotions.A proud sense of righteous indignation, on the one hand.
But on the other, a fearful recognition that - in the world of human reality as opposed to the sphere of moral abstractions - control of events has slipped entirely from its grasp.
Being typecast as the whipping-boy of the pro-US camp has deepened the feeling of outrage at the imminent invasion of Iraq. [...]
President Chirac's ratings have shot through the roof in the last days, after he made clear he meant to carry his opposition to the US to its conclusion.
According to a poll in the Catholic magazine, Le Pelerin, a whopping 86% of the public support the president in his showdown with the US.
Astonishingly his popularity is even higher among left-wing voters - 94% of Communists for example - than among voters for his own conservative Union for a Popular Majority (UMP) party.
After nightfall Monday, Palestinian legislators from Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction gathered in his ruined compound here to face the full wrath of the leader who has dominated their movement for decades.The Palestinian Parliament had just voted twice to reject an amendment sought by Arafat to restrict the powers of a new Palestinian prime minister, and to Arafat - already alarmed by Israeli and American demands for the post - this looked like betrayal.
The stormy, four-hour meeting that followed reflected the mounting tensions between generations of Palestinian leaders, and between the institutions of the nascent Palestinian democracy. In the end, it was Arafat who relented, paving the way for the legislature to vote Tuesday to create a post of prime minister with the authority to form a government.
Arafat signed the law Tuesday night, Palestinian officials said.
It obliges our moralistic streak to try to replace Mr. Arafat, and it would be great if the Palestinians did get a better leader. But Mr. Bush's harrumphing does nothing to achieve better leadership in Palestine; if anything, it strengthens Mr. Arafat and boosts Hamas as well. One poll of Palestinians has already found that a solid plurality expects Mr. Arafat to be elected in a democratic vote. Another poll found that nearly three times as many Palestinians trust Mr. Arafat as they do the next highest contender.So by calling off our plans for a Middle East conference and simply insisting that Mr. Arafat leave the scene before we come out to deal, Mr. Bush is signaling that we are disengaging from the Middle East, returning to his earlier failed policy of looking the other way. That was a catastrophic mistake that helped create today's mess.
MORE:
Wobbly Vision
Forcing the Contradictions (Brothers Judd, 4/04/02)
Since January, European opposition to war has been led by France and Germany, with Belgium, Austria, Greece, Luxembourg and Sweden following more sheepishly behind. Ireland, Finland, Cyprus and Malta remain neutral or have not nailed their colors to the mast.So with only half a dozen or so European Union, or future EU member states, categorically opposed to war, why has the old continent managed to convey an image of pacifism,
appeasement and anti-Americanism over the past months?Firstly, polls show that European public opinion is overwhelmingly against war and last month's mass demonstrations rammed home this message in Technicolor detail.
Secondly, France, Germany and Belgium have waged an unrelenting rear-guard campaign against armed action, culminating in the three countries' decision to temporarily block military support for fellow NATO member Turkey.
Thirdly, although the EU's 15 members are split down the middle over how to disarm the Iraqi regime, the Brussels-based bloc is not representative of Europe as a whole. Almost all the 12 countries queuing up to join the Union over the next four years are standing shoulder to shoulder with London and Washington.
Finally, both the American and European media have been happy to repeat the old canard about the United States acting 'unilaterally' against Baghdad, despite military backing from Britain and Australia and the more passive support of dozens of other countries.
Of course, the current U.S. president is far from assembling the type of broad coalition Bush Sr. stitched together in 1991. But to talk about the United States being isolated and EU states being isolationist merely panders to the views of those who see Americans as from Mars and Europeans from Venus.
The most powerful state in history has proclaimed that it intends to control the world by force, the dimension in which it reigns supreme.President Bush and his cohorts evidently believe that the means of violence in their hands are so extraordinary that they can dismiss anyone who stands in their way.
The consequences could be catastrophic in Iraq and around the world. The United States may reap a whirlwind of terrorist retaliation and step up the possibility of nuclear Armageddon.
Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and company are committed to an ?imperial ambition,? as G. John Ikenberry wrote in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs ?a unipolar world in which the United States has no peer competitor? and in which ?no state or coalition could ever challenge it as global leader, protector and enforcer.?
That ambition surely includes much expanded control over Persian Gulf resources and military bases to impose a preferred form of order in the region.
Even before the administration began beating the war drums against Iraq, there were plenty of warnings that US adventurism would lead to proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, as well as terror, for deterrence or revenge.
Right now, Washington is teaching the world a dangerous lesson: If you want to defend yourself from us, you had better mimic North Korea and pose a credible threat. Otherwise we will demolish you.
On the other hand, his point about N. Korea is valid and is the main reason that we have to dispatch Kim Jong-il even if it leads to a limited nuclear exchange. Our nukes must be a deterrent to other people acquiring nukes, otherwise their nukes will serve as a deterrent to our policing of their behavior.
Tony Blair has won Commons backing to send UK forces into battle with Saddam Hussein - but also suffered another major backbench rebellion.Amid dramatic scenes in the Commons on Tuesday night, 217 MPs - as many as 140 of them Labour backbenchers - backed a rebel amendment opposing the government's stance on Iraq, with 396 opposing the motion.
A motion backing the government's position was passed by 412 votes to 149. [...]
Meanwhile, the Tory leadership suffered three more resignations over Iraq after the departure as a whip of John Randall last week.
Shadow environment minister Jonathan Sayeed, shadow home affairs minister Humfrey Malins and shadow health minister John Baron all left their posts on Tuesday.
The dreadful events of September 11th, when Muslims acting in the name of Islam attacked the first country in the world to separate Church from State, forced the issue of political Islam into the world's face. We did not then understand why devout adherents of a religion whose name means "peace" should have undertaken this assault, knowing as they did that it would involve taking the lives of those who had done them no harm.These are the findings of some study I have done on my own into Islam, why it is used as a political force in ways that Christianity is not, and why its differences from Christianity are more profound that we might realise.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, is a Pakistani Baluch. So is Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1995, together with a third Baluch, Abdul Hakam Murad, the two collaborated in an unsuccessful plot to bomb 12 U.S. airplanes. Years later, as head of al Qaeda's military committee, Mohammed reportedly planned the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings, as well as the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.Why should the Baluch seek to kill Americans? Sunni Muslims, they live in the desert regions of eastern Iran and western Pakistan. The U.S. has little to do with them; there is no evident motive for this murderous obsession. The Baluch do, however, have longstanding ties to Iraqi intelligence, reflecting their militant opposition to the Shiite regime in Tehran. Wafiq Samarrai, former chief of Iraqi military intelligence, explains that Iraqi intelligence worked with the Baluch during the Iran-Iraq war. According to Mr. Samarrai, Iraqi intelligence has well-established contacts with the Baluch in both Iran and Pakistan....
U.S. authorities have identified as major al Qaeda figures three other Baluch: two brothers of Yousef and a cousin. The official position is thus that a single family is at the center of almost all the major terrorist attacks against U.S. targets since 1993....
Notably, this Baluch "family" is from Kuwait. Their identities are based on documents from Kuwaiti files that predate Kuwait's liberation from Iraqi occupation, and which are therefore unreliable. While in Kuwait, Iraqi intelligence could have tampered with files to create false identities (or "legends") for its agents. So, rather than one family, these terrorists are, quite plausibly, elements of Iraq's Baluch network, given legends by Iraqi intelligence.
The outbreak of a war with Iraq now seems to be a matter of days -- or even hours. Talk of war and diplomatic maneuvering has dominated the political and policy landscape for months. Win, lose or draw, the conclusion of a war with Iraq means President Bush will face many formidable policy challenges that are no less daunting than Iraq and easily could significantly complicate his re-election efforts.Bush will likely find himself playing defense on a wide range of very difficult issues. [...]
The year before a presidential election is usually a time for fine-tuning the president's positioning on policy matters and for teeing up issues that will maximize his chances of getting re-elected. Instead, Bush will likely find himself playing defense on a wide range of very difficult issues, with little maneuverability to select and promote other issues that would maximize his attractiveness to various elements of the electorate.
Whether one agrees with Bush's handling of Iraq, it is hard to argue with the premise that America's relations with major Western and Asian nations are in a shambles. At no point since the end of World War II have relations between the United States and the governments of historic allies and adversaries alike been so strained. And relations are even worse with the general populations of those respective countries. Whether these governments and their peoples were "right" or "wrong" in their opposition or hesitancy to war, the United States will find dealing with them in the post-war era significantly more difficult than at any time in memory. Putting together coalitions for the foreseeable future will be particularly problematic given the ill will that has been created over the last year.
In terms of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims, relations with the vast majority of peaceful adherents to the Islamic faith are awful, while we have further antagonized the distinct minority of radicals to the point that future terrorism is even more likely than it was prior to Sept. 11, 2001. [...]
The real political consequences of policy miscalculations have been masked to a certain extent by the halo effect of the terrorist attacks and the focus on foreign policy. Very real symptoms regarding the president's political health, the condition of his agenda and his ability to advance his agenda have gone unrecognized or with little note. Once the war is over, the problems that remain will be just as serious but more evident. Even a boost in Bush's approval numbers after an exceedingly short and successful war could be short-lived given the nation's poor economy and the other serious problems that seem to have the president surrounded.
Instead, the administration is likely to turn to North Korea--a regime that the President, for excellent cause, finds just as morally repugnant as Saddam's--and to narcoterrorists in Colombia and to Syria's Ba'athists and to Palestine's Hamas and Iran's Hezbollah, etc., etc., etc.... The war on terror is against both terrorists who use violence on us and our allies and against the regimes that use terror to subjugate their own populations--plenty of both remain. Defeating al Qaeda and Saddam is a start to that war, not its end. And since the conduct of foreign policy is left entirely to the president's discretion, he'll largely determine what we're talking about for the next year and a half (or five and a half), not Tom Daschle, Nancy Pelosi, and the lilliputian presidential contenders.
If the economy doesn't begin to improve, Mr. Bush is certainly in for tough times, but the toughest times ahead may well be for Democrats, who will likely oppose the administration at each step in the war on terrorand who, having essentially sought to protect Saddam will now find themselves propping up Kim Jong-il and Muamar Qaddafi and Bashar Assad and a host of other tyrants, a position they'll share with the governments of France, Russia, and China. When the topic is national security the Democrats nearly always look bad and that'll be the topic for some time to come.
The Prime Minister told a hushed Commons this afternoon that his Government now faced a "stark choice" - to stand down the thousands of troops now hours away from war, or to hold firm to the course they have set. And he declared "I believe we must hold firm."He went on to paint a graphic picture of the consequences of retreat, the United Nations reduced to "a talking shop"; Saddam Hussein triumphant; other tyrants encouraged - and the Iraqi people condemned to continued oppression. And he demanded bluntly: "Who will celebrate and who will weep if we take our troops back from the Gulf now?"...
And he said that to retreat now, he believed, "would put at hazard all that we hold dearest ... tell our allies that at the very moment of action, at the very moment they need our determination, that Britain faltered. I will not be party to such a cause."
“There was a machine designed for shredding plastic. Men were dropped into it and we were again made to watch. Sometimes they went in head first and died quickly. Sometimes they went in feet first and died screaming. It was horrible. I saw 30 people die like this. Their remains would be placed in plastic bags and we were told they would be used as fish food . . . on one occasion, I saw Qusay [President Saddam Hussein’s youngest son] personally supervise these murders.”
May God bless our servicemen and women.
It has been a long road to this moment of decision on Iraq, but the inevitability of the destination has been clear. When historians have access to the memos and the diaries of the Bush administration's insiders, it's likely they will find that President Bush set his sights on removing Saddam Hussein from power soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks -- if not before.Everything the president has said publicly -- everything that Vice President Cheney reiterated in his Sunday television interviews -- confirms that the impact of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks was to steel Bush's determination to disarm any ruler who plausibly might collaborate in a similar or worse assault. And to him, disarming clearly meant dislodging that potential assailant from power.
Skeptics may argue that the United States has yet to produce convincing evidence of a link between the Baghdad regime and the al Qaeda terrorists. But the link exists in the mind of the commander in chief, and he is prepared to act on that conviction.
It should have been clear from how he governed Texas what his modus operandi was, but there's no excuse, especially after the way the No Child Left Behind Act played out, for any serious observer--like Mr. Broder--to still not get it. If you''ll recall, the Democrats crowed and the far Right cringed as Ted Kennedy added money and gewgaws to the bill, but Mr. Bush continually said that so long as the bill included testing, accountability, and consequences he'd sign it. And so the final bill, regardless of the rest of the clutter, imposes a testing regime that will declare as many as 80% of America's public schools to be providing an inadequate education and will allow students in those schools to transfer. Without even comprehending what they were doing, the Left helped George W. Bush begin the process of voucherizing education.
Similarly, when it came to the removal of Saddam, Mr. Bush allowed himself to be coaxed into going to Congress for authorization (which he'd planned to do all along, as the Constitution requires) and to the UN, while the troops in the region were built up, made all the calls anyone could ask for to try and pass a final resolution, offered allies money and other emoluments to join the coalition, etc., etc., etc.... But he never took his eyes off the prize: regime change. This weekend, Daniel Schor was on NPR expressing bewilderment at how the President could demand a vote on an 18th resolution on Monday and by Friday be telling Tony Blair it was fine by him if it was just withdrawn. Mr. Schor said he'd never seen an administration that could reverse course so easily and make so little of it. It seemed as though it had never occurred to Mr. Schor that the President could do so because he genuinely didn't care one way or another about the UN--having them along, at least rhetorically, would have silenced some peoples' concerns, but the UN has no role to play in the actual waging of the war and is too debased an institution to offer a meaningful moral imprimatur. The important thing, from Mr. Bush's perspective, is and has been to remove Saddam. No amount of background noise was ever going to deflect him from that aim.
And, at the end of the day, once again, he's achieving his goals. Mr. Broder, though he may be alone, appears to have figured this out. Whether he's correct that Mr. Bush did not anticipate all the side effects--like the delegitimization of the EU and the UN--we'll only know for sure in a few years. But, considering that the President stocked his administration with advisors who are hostile to such transnational institutions and considering that they now done them significant damage, it seems like Mr. Broder might want to consider that this too was a goal that was within the President's sights.
St. Patrick, born and raised in Britain, was captured by Irish marauders and sold into slavery in Ireland at the age of 16. Like so many slaves, he was drawn to the Christian message. In his "Confessio" he tells how he prayed in captivity:
[T]he faith grew in me, and the spirit was roused, so that, in a single day, I have said as many as a hundred prayers, and in the night nearly the same, so that whilst in the woods and on the mountain, even before the dawn, I was roused to prayer and felt no hurt from it, whether there was snow or ice or rain; nor was there any slothfulness in me, such as I see now, because the spirit was then fervent within me.
Patrick became a priest and a disciple of the missionary bishop St. Germain. On St. Germain's recommendation, Patrick was made bishop and missionary to Ireland. His intended first act was to visit his former master, pay ransom for his freedom, and implore the man to convert. However, he was opposed on his way by a Druidic chieftain, Dichu, who sought to strike Patrick with a sword. Legend has it that his arm became rigid as a statue until he declared himself obedient to Patrick. Impressed by Patrick's gentleness, Dichu presented Patrick with a barn, which Patrick consecrated as the first church in Ireland. Alas, word that Patrick had returned and was working miracles of great power preceded him to his former slavemaster Milchu, who, expecting to be destroyed and too proud to be vanquished by a former slave, set his house and barn ablaze and killed himself in the conflagration.
Legend has it that a series of miracles helped Patrick persuade the Irish from Druidism. It could not have been easy, for the pagan and Christian minds were quite foreign, and misunderstandings were easy:
While engaged in the baptism of the royal prince Aengus, son of the King of Munster, the saint, leaning on his crosier, peirced with its sharp point the prince's foot. Aengus bore the pain unmoved. When St. Patrick, at the close of the ceremony, saw the blood flow, and asked him why he had been silent, he replied that he thought it might be part of the ceremony.
Its sound was heard all over the valleys and hills of Erin, everywhere bringing peace and joy. The flocks of demons began to scatter, He flung his bell among them; they took to precipitate flight, and cast themselves into the ocean. So complete was the saint's victory over them that, as the ancient narrative adds, "for seven years no evil thing was to be found in Ireland."
Patrick tells in his "Confessio" that twelve times he and his companions were seized and carried off as captives, and once he was loaded with chains, and his death was decreed. But it was not to be; Patrick lived to the age of 105.
On the verge of death, Patrick had a vision:
He saw the whole of Ireland lit up with the brightest rays of Divine Faith. This continued for centuries, and then clouds gathered around the devoted island, and, little by little, the religious glory faded away, until, in the course of centuries, it was only in the remotest valleys that some glimmer of its light remained. St. Patrick prayed that the light would never be extinguished, and, as he prayed, the angel came to him and said: "Fear not: your apostolate shall never cease." As he thus prayed, the glimmering light grew in brightness, and ceased not until once more all the hills and valleys of Ireland were lit up ...
Let us, as we battle the darkness of Saddam Hussein, bear difficulties with the courage of Aengus and the tenacity of Patrick. And may God continue to bless America.
As Blair has said, in war there will be civilian was well as military casualties. There is, too, as both Britain and America agree, some risk of Saddam using or transferring his weapons to terrorists. There is as well the possibility that more angry young Muslims can be recruited to terrorism. But if we leave Iraq with chemical and biological weapons, after 12 years of defiance, there is a considerable risk that one day these weapons will fall into the wrong hands and put many more lives at risk than will be lost in overthrowing Saddam.During the 90's, I was not a Clinton hater. He was about as good a President as I would never vote for. He should have been impeached and he should have responded to the bombing of the Cole the way we responded to 9/11, but at least he wasn't Jimmy Carter. Having said that, isn't it perfectly clear that he is deeply disturbed? It's not that he's a liar, but that he can believe five contradictory things before breakfast. And it is, of course, in his image that the Democratic party has remade itself.I wish that Russia and France had supported Blair's resolution. Then, Hans Blix and his inspectors would have been given more time and supprt for their work. But that's not where we are. Blair is in a position not of his own making, because Iraq and other nations were unwilling to follow the logic of 1441.
"I'm saddened, saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war," Daschle said in a speech to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. "Saddened that we have to give up one life because this president couldn't create the kind of diplomatic effort that was so critical for our country."Before we get to the purely political question, what in the world is Daschle talking about? What diplomacy would have avoided war? To believe that, you'd have to believe either that there was a diplomatic strategy that would have caused Iraq to disarm voluntarily, or that our goal of disarming Iraq should, in the name of diplomacy, have been abandoned. Otherwise, our choice was to go to war with the UN's blessing or without it. Even with the UN's blessing, it's safe to say that not one fewer American would be going into harm's way.
Dearest readers:Today is the Jewish holiday of Purim. Though unlike the Jewish Sabbath (Shabbes) and the holy days, work is permitted. Still, Jews have a number of extra religious obligations today, including special and extended prayer services and other functions.
Though I've been up for most of the night getting today's issue out, I'm already running behind schedule. If it's not too much trouble, PLEASE access today's issue via our Front Page:
And, yes, despite the fact that I will be spending most of the day away from the office, I have every intention of publishing tomorrow. Purim, after all, is about miracles and the fact JWR continues to publish is basically a miracle. Yes, I know, we're not supposed to rely on them, but... :)
Thanks so much for continuing to read JWR and spreading the word about us. It makes it all worth it.
Warmest regards --- and in friendship,
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky,
Editor in Chief
We wish all our Hebraic homeys a good Purim and hope everyone will observe the day by praying for the allied troops who are now in harm's way in the Gulf. God Bless you all and God bless those who fight for freedom everywhere.
A third minister has quit the government over the Iraq crisis as Clare Short announced she would stay in her cabinet job despite earlier threats to resign.Home Office Minister John Denham has now followed Health Minister Lord Hunt of Kings Heath in resigning on Tuesday morning.
Their resignations come in the wake of Robin Cook's departure from the cabinet after he objected to war without a fresh United Nations mandate.
Ms Short's decision to stay - despite saying she was still "very critical" of the way the crisis has been handled - is a boost for Tony Blair as he prepares to get House of Commons backing for war on Tuesday afternoon.
Blair can lose 165 Labour votes befoire it will be the Tories who make the war resolution possible and 245 before the resolution would go down to defeat.
UP TO 15 per cent of Iraqi conscripts holding Saddam Hussein’s northern front line have already deserted, according to US special forces in the region.Elite US troops based in the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq are regularly probing Iraqi lines, to draw up target lists for airstrikes.
They are looking for pockets of ‘hard core’ pro-Saddam troops who can be attacked first to break the back of resistance.
It is hoped the attacks will turn the trickle of desertions into a torrent, allowing Kurdish resistance fighters to drive southward to seize the Kirkuk and Mosul oil fields.
Liaison teams have been building up links with Kurdish Peshmerga fighters from the KDP and PUK resistance groups. As in Afghanistan, these teams have been operating largely in plain clothes to avoid attracting the attention of western journalists based in the Kurdish safe haven.
Up to five thousand US, British and Australian special forces troops are now deployed around Iraq’s borders and are already playing a key role in General Tommy Franks’ war plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime.
But their main role will come in the first few hours of the attack. Oil facilities at the top of the Arabian Gulf are to be the target of lightning US and British special forces raids to thwart the Iraqis opening their taps and releasing millions of barrels of oil in a campaign of ‘environmental terrorism’.
With one short stab on Monday, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's United Nations ambassador ... inflicted a wound that may take far longer to heal...."One country in particular has underlined its intention to veto any ultimatum 'no matter what the circumstances'. That country rejected our compromise before even the Iraqi government itself, and has put forward suggestions that would row back on the unanimous agreement of the council in 1441."...
French officials were stung. "So it is our fault? This is just untrue," one said. "They did not get the majority in the council. That is just a matter of fact."
While Paris was unlikely to renege on its humanitarian responsibilities to Iraq, the official said Sir Jeremy's words could have implications for future attempts by the allies to return to the UN. "In three days we'll need each other. This makes things more difficult."
Amazingly, some people think that France's diplomacy is more sophisticated than ours.
UPDATE--DOGPILE ON THE LAPIN (from OJ):
This is from the President's address tonight:
Today, no nation can possibly claim that Iraq has disarmed. And it will not disarm so long as Saddam Hussein holds power. For the last four-and-a-half months, the United States and our allies have worked within the Security Council to enforce that Council's long-standing demands. Yet, some permanent members of the Security Council have publicly announced they will veto any resolution that compels the disarmament of Iraq. These governments share our assessment of the danger, but not our resolve to meet it. Many nations, however, do have the resolve and fortitude to act against this threat to peace, and a broad coalition is now gathering to enforce the just demands of the world. The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities, so we will rise to ours.
For the past 20 years, the regime in Khartoum has bombed, starved, and enslaved black Southern Sudanese with impunity in an effort to subject them to Islamic rule. As a result, over two million black non-Muslims have perished. A further five million have been driven off their land.Sudanese slaves -- mainly women and children -- are routinely beaten, raped, genitally mutilated, forced to convert to Islam and racially abused.... Credible estimates of the number of Sudan's slaves range from tens of thousands to over 200,000....
France provided Khartoum with military intelligence for the prosecution of the jihad, while French and German helicopters have been used for ethnic cleansing in southern Sudan's oil fields. Driving black, non-Muslims out of their homes creates greater security for the investments of oil firms like Total Fina (France/Belgium) and the German engineering giant Mannesmann....
France and Germany ... persuaded the UN Commission on Human Rights to censor any use of the word "slavery" from official documents on Sudan and replace it with the euphemism "abduction" -- a lesser offense.
The Cold War ended in the defeat of the Soviet Union, but the conflict between Western and anti-Western values continues. It appears that France can be counted upon to champion tyranny, murder, and slavery, in opposition to U.S.-championed values such as freedom, nonviolence, and cooperation.
I understand that for advice on how to prosecute this conflict, President Bush has turned to Dave Barry.
MORE (via Porphyrogenitus):
EU economic outlook 'grim without reform' (Financial Times, 3/17/2003)
European business leaders will on Monday warn that the economic outlook will continue to be "unremittingly grim" unless EU leaders finally live up to their rhetoric on reform.
Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them. If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you. As our coalition takes away their power, we will deliver the food and medicine you need. We will tear down the apparatus of terror and we will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free. In a free Iraq, there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near.It is too late for Saddam Hussein to remain in power. It is not too late for the Iraqi military to act with honor and protect your country by permitting the peaceful entry of coalition forces to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. Our forces will give Iraqi military units clear instructions on actions they can take to avoid being attacked and destroyed. I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services, if war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life.
And all Iraqi military and civilian personnel should listen carefully to this warning. In any conflict, your fate will depend on your action. Do not destroy oil wells, a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people. Do not obey any command to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, including the Iraqi people. War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say, "I was just following orders."
Robin Cook is a brilliant parliamentary debater, but comes across dreadfully on television. He believes in an "ethical dimension" for foreign policy, but cheated repeatedly on his wife. His soft-left views are in tune with many Labour MPs, but he has few real friends on the back benches.For the former leader of the Commons, the personal always seems to get in the way of the political. Last night, amid a fevered atmosphere at Westminster, many MPs were wondering what was going on in Mr Cook's brain. Was he plotting to lead a rebellion solely against the war on Iraq, or was it a wider campaign against New Labour itself?
His supporters claim that, in the short term at least, his clear intelligence and passion could make him one of the most formidable opponents of a Blair government. Some more excitable colleagues even suggest that if the war on Iraq went disastrously wrong, he would be ideally placed to defeat Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership.
His critics wondered if his resignation was a desperate attempt to restore the reputation of a man who had thrown his dignity away while in office.
Brian Naylor, NPR, is reporting that in his speech tonight Mr. Bush will give Saddam and company 48 hours to get out of Iraq.
A generation ago, Paul Ehrlich warned in "The Population Bomb" that with demands on resources soaring, overpopulation would kill our planet. As demands on water and air soared, many thought he was right. Now it turns out that population growth rates are plummeting--for good and tragic reasons. The implications are profound.According to a United Nations report issued recently, most advanced countries could, in effect, slowly turn into old-age homes. For example, by 2050, the median age in Japan and Italy will be over 50. Fertility rates in nearly all well-off countries have already fallen below 2.1 babies per woman, the rate at which a population remains stable.
In the developing world, fertility rates average three children, down from six a half-century ago, and the U.N. projects that the rate will dip below the
replacement level in most poor countries later this century. Slower growth rates are both the cause and consequence of a higher standard of living, and of the emancipation of women.There are also alarming reasons for the drop in the population growth rate--notably the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic. It is one of the factors the United Nations cited in revising its 2050 world population projections, from 9.3 billion people down to 8.9 billion (we're at 6.3 billion today). The U.N. estimates that there will be a half-billion fewer people in the 53 nations most afflicted by AIDS than there would have been. [...]
Aging populations will pose an economic challenge for most wealthy nations as smaller working-age populations will have to pay for the health and pension benefits of a growing number of longer-living retirees.
Even a cursory understanding of these demographic trends makes two things clear. Helping poor countries improve their economies is not a matter of charity but of intelligent foreign policy. And no matter how much progress is made, there will be large population shifts into better-off nations. The immigrants will need the jobs and the richer countries will need the workers. So increasing the orderly, legal migration of labor from poorer to richer countries in the next few decades is a global imperative. Those who oppose this trend will be embracing long-term economic suicide.
Certainly the developed world will require massive immigration if it is not to collapse, but combine that outflow with already falling birthrates in the underdeveloped world and you've a recipe for permanent poverty there. Is Africa to be just a mammoth cemetery/safari park?
Meanwhile, mightn't we expect that a story like this would at least mention abortion? "Fertility rates" has such a polite sound to it, but the reality is that there are entire nations and even several American counties that have more abortions than live births every year. We're not just having fewer children, we're killing off the babies who would help solve this crisis. We are, in the Timesmen's own phrase "embracing long-term economic suicide", but it's a murder/suicide pact.
Federal prosecutors said a Hollywood private detective may be indicted on charges of widespread wiretapping and witness intimidation following his arrest on unrelated weapons charges.FBI agents have secured the names of various people who allegedly hired Anthony Pellicano to conduct illicit wiretaps or secure the silence of potential witnesses.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Saunders said the FBI identified the computer software Pellicano allegedly used to tap into telephones, his contact at the telephone company and a corrupt law enforcement officer who assisted him.
Pellicano, 58, was arrested and released in November after he posted $400,000 bond, following a probe into allegations that he hired a man to threaten a Los Angeles Times reporter researching a story about an alleged Mafia extortion plot targeting actor Steven Seagal.
Alexander Proctor was charged with threatening a Times reporter, who was investigating a relationship between actor Steven Seagal and a reputed Mafia associate. Proctor was accused of planting a dead fish, a rose and a sign reading "Stop," on her car.
French officials on Monday dismissed suggestions that Paris had knowingly helped Iraq obtain biological weapons, but conceded Baghdad may have had ulterior motives for scientific cooperation dating back two decades.The New York Times reported that Iraq had identified a Virginia-based biofirm and France's prestigious Pasteur Institute as suppliers of 17 types of biological agents that were used in weapons programs.
The Pasteur Institute told Reuters it had helped Iraq work on anthrax and other dangerous bacteria in the 1980s -- in purely scientific and educational research -- but said the last shipment of material had been transferred around 1985.
For Jennifer Hoes, a Dutch student, May 28 will be a doubly exciting day. She'll turn 30, and she'll be a blushing bride - plus her own groom. In the Trouwzaal, or wedding room, of the City Hall of Haarlem in the Netherlands, Jennifer will marry herself.Bedecked in a wedding gown studded with 200 perfect latex copies of her own nipples, Jennifer will appear before Ruud Grondel, Haarlem's registrar, and promise to "love, respect and honor" herself in good times and in bad, according to Dutch and German newspaper reports.
Then Jennifer, her mother, her uncle, aunts, cousins and some other 80 relatives will indulge in a $22,000 wedding feast. That done, Jennifer's wedding garment, studs included, will wind up in the show window of the shop that manufactured it free of charges.
Jennifer pretty much acknowledges that hers will be the quintessential postmodern union. "We live in a 'Me' society. Hence it is logical that one promises to be faithful to oneself," she told a reporter of Der Spiegel, the leading German newsmagazine.
This leaves of course a number of unanswered questions: Will she fall for the postmodern rage and adopt a double-barreled name - Jennifer Hoes-Hoes, for example? And what if she ceases to like herself - will divorce be an option, and which Hoes will get the car?
Indeed, what if she should fall in love with somebody else deeply enough to wed him - must she first send herself packing? In case she doesn't but still says, "I do," to the guy, would this be considered an act of bigamy? Could she go to jail for that? "There's room for two rings of my finger," she said.
In more ways than one, Jennifer ought to be congratulated. Intentionally or unintentionally, she is taking the Mickey out of a nutty society determined to deconstruct matrimony, a state most religions and cultures have since time immemorial held up as holy and essential for the health of communities and nations.
Top Turkish leaders say government will urgently take action toward allowing in U.S. troops, according to a statement.
In an e-mail to her family on Feb. 7, two weeks after her arrival in the Gaza Strip, Rachel Corrie wrote that "no amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing . . . could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here."Corrie, a 23-year-old Washington state college student described by her friends as a committed peace activist, was killed Sunday by a bulldozer while in Gaza protesting the demolition of Palestinian houses by the Israelis. [...]
Corrie's friends remembered her Sunday as an inspired, courageous and responsible peace activist.
"She actually told me she was inspired to become a peace activist by the World Trade Center bombing on Sept. 11," said Will Hewitt, who watched in horror Sunday as a bulldozer crushed his friend. The two friends were part of a group of human shields protecting homes from demolition. "If you can understand people who are different than you, you can help resolve the conflict."
Corrie strived to build a bridge of understanding between the Palestinians and her hometown of Olympia, Wash., by establishing a "sister city" relationship with pen pals and other connections, said her friend Phan Nguyen.
Corrie had arrived in Gaza on Jan. 24 and planned to stay three months, participating in projects from guarding the remaining water pump in the town of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip to standing in front of bulldozers.
Before leaving the United States, "she was afraid and nervous at the same time as being excited," said Nguyen, 28, a fellow Olympia peace activist who has made similar trips to the West Bank. "She felt it was something she had to do."
Nguyen described Corrie as a dedicated peace activist and organizer with the Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace.
But "she wasn't a radical extremist," he said. "She wasn't someone who would participate in protests for the thrill of it. She wasn't reckless."
We've put together a page with numerous links to background information and links to Orrin's relevant reviews as we prepare to liberate Iraq. Take a look at Liberate Iraq and let us know what's missing. We'll be adding links and content in the ensuing days.
A federal Appeals Court ruled yesterday that hundreds of individuals captured during the war on terrorism and now held by the US military in Cuba have no right to challenge their detention in American courts.As foreign citizens in military custody outside the United States, the detainees have no rights under the Constitution, even if they were determined not to be enemies of the United States, the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled.
Since January 2002, the government has sent as many as 650 people to Camp X-Ray at the American military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Only five are known to have been released since then. They have had no access to their families or lawyers.
The ruling solidifies their legal isolation. A foreigner ''without property or presence in this country has no constitutional rights, under the due process clause or otherwise,'' the court said.
''If the Constitution does not entitle the detainees to due process, and it does not,'' the three-judge panel added, ''they cannot invoke the jurisdiction of our courts to test the constitutionality or the legality of restraints on their liberty.''
The families of 16 detainees -- 12 Kuwaitis, two Australians, and two Britons -- said that none of them had taken up arms against the United States, even though they were captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan during US military operations after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Although the Justice Department insisted that all were enemy combatants, to strengthen its case that they have no rights, that argument was unnecessary. The Appeals Court made clear that, even if they were innocent of committing hostile acts against the United States, they still would have no right to be in US courts.
The circumstances that put the detainees beyond the reach of any American court, the judges said, are that they are overseas and in the custody of the US military, have never been in this country, and were captured during military operations outside the United States.
Thomas Willner, a Washington lawyer for 12 of the detainees, said the ruling ''gives a green light to US officials to imprison foreigners outside the rule of law. It allows the executive branch to capture any foreigner, at any time, for any reason, and to jail him or her outside the law and with no rights whatsoever, simply by choosing to imprison him or her outside our sovereign territory.''
Recalling, and reaffirming its [previous] resolutions . . . .
Noting that, despite all efforts by the United Nations, Iraq refuses to comply with its obligation to implement resolution 660 (1990) and the above-mentioned subsequent relevant resolutions, in flagrant contempt of the Security Council,
Mindful of its duties and responsibilities under the Charter of the United Nations for the maintenance and preservation of internationalnd peace and security,
Determined to secure full compliance with its decisions,
Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter,
1. Demands that Iraq comply fully with resolution 660 (1990) and all subsequent relevant resolutions, and decides, while maintaining all its decisions, to allow Iraq one final opportunity, as a pause of goodwil, to do so;
2. Authorizes Member States co-operating with the Government of Kuwait, unless Iraq on or before 15 January 1991 fully implements, as set forth in paragraph 1 above, the foregoing resolutions, to use all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660 (1990) and all subsequent relevant resolutions and to restore international peace and security in the area; . . . .
Even as President Bush struggles against robust international opposition to launch a regime-toppling invasion of Iraq, some of the strongest and earliest supporters of military action against Saddam Hussein are already looking ahead to the next target.Some hawks outside the government are beginning to turn up the rhetorical heat against Iran and Syria, both of whom are Iraq's neighbors, and both known to be funneling aid to Middle East terrorist groups. Others are focusing on North Korea and its rapidly mobilized nuclear weapons program, or the North African country of Libya.
"Even after Mr. Hussein is gone, other tyrannies, such as North Korea and Iran, will continue to threaten world peace," said Max Boot, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Such tough talk reflects the fact that, despite Bush's rocky road toward his goal of regime change in Iraq, and despite the many questions about how it will proceed, some in Washington believe the Iraq conflict will mark only the beginning of U.S. resolve to exercise its military muscle.
"It takes little imagination to dream up other scenarios that might call for pre-emptive military action," said Thomas Donnelly, a military analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank that has led the charge for war against Iraq.
Donnelly said one such example might be the imminent overthrow of the Musharraf government in Pakistan, given that country's possession of nuclear weapons.
One European defence minister said: "If war breaks out without a second UN resolution, it could affect the stability of the global political system. Many governments could fall."He painted a scenario in which turmoil in the EU and the demise of Nato gives France and Germany the chance to forge ahead with plans for unity among a "core group" of about six European countries with a common foreign policy and a Euro-army.
"By provoking a rift with America, Chirac will force other European countries to take sides and try to create a union in which he would be the leader," said the minister.
UPDATE (from OJ):
...which reminds us of the classic conservative comic strip, The Wizard of Id, and the panel where it is announced to the King that: "The peasants are revolting!" To which he responds: "Of course they are."
instauration (in-sto-RAY-shuhn) noun1. Renewal; renovation; restoration.
2. An act of founding or establishing something.
[From Latin instauration-, from instauratio, from instaurare (to renew).
Other words derived from the same root are: store, restore, and stow.]
The United States, backed by Britain and Spain, on Monday ended diplomatic efforts to disarm Iraq and this led to a stock market rally as the uncertainty that has plagued Wall Street for months seemed to finally lift.American Public Opinion About Iraq (Gallup Poll).
Americans increasingly support the concept of U.S. involvement in war against Iraq, and the public has generally become more critical of the United Nations and countries like France, Germany, and Russia that have attempted to slow down the move toward military action.I find these two stories just astonishing. The market hates uncertainty, it hates turmoil, it hates anything that threatens to destabilize the middle east. It is rallying this morning. In the last few weeks, "millions" have marched for peace, the tv news and newspapers hve been full of criticism of the administration, which has "blown" the diplomacy and ruined our standing in the world. Even some supporters of the war have complained that all the dithering was sapping our resolve. More Americans now support the war than did before the Left started to make such fools of themselves. Maybe we're just going to have to live with the idea that the President knows what he's doing.Gallup's latest poll shows 64% support for U.S. involvement in a war against Iraq -- an increase of five points over the last two weeks.
Robin Cook has become the first minister to resign over IraqRobin Cook has resigned from Tony Blair's cabinet as the build-up to apparent war with Iraq gathers pace.
The decision by the Leader of the House of Commons, one of the highest profile figures in the Labour Party, came as the cabinet held an emergency meeting in Downing Street.
Announcing the news, Downing Street said Mr Cook would make a personal statement in the House of Commons on Monday evening.
An alleged terrorist accused of helping the 11 September conspirators was invited to a party by the Iraqi ambassador to Spain under his al-Qaeda nom de guerre, according to documents seized by Spanish investigators.Yusuf Galan, who was photographed being trained at a camp run by Osama bin Laden, is now in jail, awaiting trial in Madrid....
George Tenet, the Director of the CIA, has made increasingly strong statements alleging [an al Qaeda - Iraq] connection. In Congressional testimony last month, he said that Iraq had co-operated with al-Qaeda for 10 years, and that it had trained al-Qaeda members in bombmaking and the use of chemical and biological weapons. In an apparent attempt to refute the sceptics, he said this information 'comes from reliable sources'.
President Bush planned to address the nation Monday night to give Saddam Hussein a final ultimatum. "He will say that to avoid military conflict Saddam Hussein must leave the country," spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
We are not initiating this war. The truth is that Saddam is a whirlwind of war. Wherever he is, there is war. Consider:
Saddam, in short, has been waging a perpetual war against civilization. There can be no peace in the world until Saddam is removed from power, because Saddam will not live in peace with others.
It only takes one to make a war. Our choice is to submit and be victimized by Saddam's ongoing aggression, or to fight back. It is time -- past time -- for civilization to fight back.
May God bless the coalition troops. May the war be swiftly ended with few lives lost. May liberty come to the people of Iraq and security to America. Lord, hear our prayer.
Recrimination at the failure of US diplomacy has begun in Washington, one source close to the administration admitting yesterday: "This has been the worst American diplomatic debacle of our lifetime."Administration sources suggest that this is the prelude to a postwar bloodletting in which the secretary of state, Colin Powell, will be the fall guy.
The result merchant's business counterpart is the executive who punishes failure and rewards success, without considering the reasons for failure or success. This practice, it has been found, destroys all incentive to innovate. Innovation is always risky, and it can fail for many reasons not the fault of the innovator. Punishing failure punishes all risk-taking, and soon enough eliminates it.
We have seen what an administration that fears action looks like: the Clinton administration. Problems are swept under the rug and infections allowed to fester until life-threatening. The Bush administration cannot afford to become risk-averse while the war on terror remains half won.
Moreover, politically Bush cannot allow infighting and recriminations. If the administration is convinced this was a failure, the public surely will be. Currently, the public views administration diplomacy as well handled:
By a ratio of more than 2-to-1, most Americans say the Bush administration has done a good job handling diplomatic efforts with other nations.
I agree with the American public: this diplomatic interlude has been quite successful. It has exposed countries (e.g. France) and institutions (e.g. the U.N.), and the truth is a great cleanser. It has done no harm except to muddle people's minds. Forthright action will soon enough clear those minds, reminding everyone of the fundamental issues.
Nothing is more despicable than a result merchant, except a back-stabber. George Bush should put the word out: There was no failure, and there will be no recriminations.
UPDATE (from OJ):
HOW FRENCH DIPLOMACY FAILED:
The Men Behind the French 'Non': Chirac and his aide, De Villepin, were expected to improve Franco-U.S. ties. Instead, they are fundamentally at odds with a centuries-old ally. (Sebastian Rotella, 3/17/03, LA Times)
With close supervision from Chirac, De Villepin played a lead role last fall in drafting the U.N. resolution mandating that Iraq disarm. Subsequently, however, analysts and diplomats say his high-voltage style angered Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, whom Europeans saw as the U.S. leader most sympathetic to their antiwar views.De Villepin and Powell got along well and spoke frequently throughout the fall. But Powell, according to numerous accounts, felt ambushed by his French counterpart at a Jan. 20 meeting of the Security Council. The meeting, nominally about terrorism, took place on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Powell was in great demand at events around the U.S. and attended the U.N. session reluctantly at De Villepin's urging, according to Parmentier and others.
Powell grew tense as France and Germany turned the forum into a discussion of Iraq. He was furious when De Villepin used a news conference afterward to declare France's determination to oppose war plans, according to sources.
The French view disputes the idea that De Villepin somehow "lost" Powell at a vital moment. Parmentier said Powell had already indicated at a meeting with the French foreign minister that he had converted to the camp of the hawks.
Despite the gulf of misunderstanding and resentment that now separates Paris and Washington, Chirac and De Villepin's goal has been to reassert France's influence and strengthen its bonds to such countries as Russia and such regions as the Middle East. In the long run, they think the Bush administration is an unusually radical government that may be weakened by war in Iraq, especially if the aftermath is messy, according to Marchal.
"It may be a wrong assessment, but Chirac and Villepin are looking beyond this group of neoconservatives," Marchal said. "They think that the Americans, at the end of the day, will need France for anti-terrorism cooperation, trade and so on. To what extent could the U.S. government really carry off an economic boycott of France?
"They think maybe Bush will not do so well in terms of economic policy and a new administration could come in with more traditional thinking."
By some time this weekend the Iraqi regime will likely have been changed; the UN, Old Europe, and "world opinion" will have been shown to be utterly ineffectual; and Colin Powell will have made common cause with the hawks and ended up leading the charge to war. Every goal which George W. Bush might have set himself for the Iraq conflict a year ago will have been realized. The press is doing post-mortems on a patient who lived--time to carve up the one that died, French-led multilateralism.
The Azores Summit will go down in history as the time when the talking stopped. "Tomorrow is a moment of truth for the world," said George W Bush, before reiterating his support for an interim authority in a liberated Iraq. Mr Bush added that today would be the last day when diplomacy could work."Without a credible ultimatum," said Tony Blair, "more discussion just means more delay." Appealing for the world to unite behind such an ultimatum, he added that "we are in the final stages. Now is the time when we have to decide."
This was an ultimatum in all but name. Saddam Hussein has been given only a day's grace. Assuming that France, Russia and the other opponents of war do not climb down by agreeing to a new resolution, there is every likelihood that the war will begin within hours. It could even begin tonight.
Despite Mr Blair's readiness to press on with a final round of talks, it was clear from the news conference that time has run out for Saddam. Mr Bush was only prepared to talk about new UN resolutions "if military force is required É to encourage broad participation in the process of helping the Iraqi people to build a free Iraq". That means the American demand for regime change has prevailed, and Mr Bush emphasised this by insisting that Saddam could still avert war by leaving Iraq.
Saddam's reaction to the warning was instant and characteristic: "Who appointed America the unjust judge of the world?" The fact that Jacques Chirac might well echo Saddam's sentiment is an indication of how the French president's intransigence has divided the West.
President Bush compared the diplomacy to poker, adding that France had "shown its cards" by threatening to veto any new resolution. In this game of nerves, the stakes are vertiginously high. It is not only the future of Iraq that is in question; the viability of the Western alliance, the UN, and the entire world order is also at stake.
While Mr Bush was emphatic on the importance of the UN, he made it clear that the nature of war in the 21st century, and specifically the war against terrorism, would require a more effective system to secure international cooperation. His scepticism about whether the UN would, or could, "do its job" was obvious to all. [...]
Yesterday's summit finally dispelled the illusion that the UN is or can be the sole arbiter of war and peace. It is not a question of unilateralism versus multilateralism, but of action versus words.
Patrick Ruffini asked last week what people thought were the "best" arguments for waging this war. His are posted at his website. For myself, I have only two:
(1) Saddam Hussein and his gang of thugs are responsible for the deaths of millions of people, including his own citizens, through war, civil war, purges, torture, intentional starvation, and various other forms of repression. He long ago turned Iraq into a state whose predominant feature is terror. Here's just one story from a profile by Mark Bowden (Tales of the Tyrant, Atlantic Monthly):
In 1987 Entifadh Qanbar was assigned to work on the restoration of the Baghdad Palace, which had once been called al-Zuhoor, or the Flowers Palace. Built in the 1930s for King Ghazi, it is relatively small and very pretty; English in style, it once featured an elaborate evergreen maze. Qanbar is an engineer by training, a short, fit, dark-haired man with olive skin. After earning his degree he served a compulsory term in the army, which turned out to be a five-year stint, and survived the mandatory one-month tour on the front lines in the war with Iran.Work on the palace had stalled some years earlier, when the British consultant for the project refused to come to Baghdad because of the war. One of Qanbar's first jobs was to supervise construction of a high and ornate brick wall around the palace grounds. Qanbar is a perfectionist, and because the wall was to be decorative as well as functional, he took care with the placement of each brick. An elaborate gate had already been built facing the main road, but Qanbar had not yet built the portions of the wall on either side of it, because the renovation of the palace itself was unfinished, and that way large construction equipment could roll on and off the property without danger of damaging the gate.
One afternoon at about five, as he was preparing to close down work for the day, Qanbar saw a black Mercedes with curtained windows and custom-built running boards pull up to the site. He knew immediately who was in it. Ordinary Iraqis were not allowed to drive such fancy cars. Cars like this one were driven exclusively by al Himaya, Saddam's bodyguards.
The doors opened and several guards stepped out. All of them wore dark-green uniforms, black berets, and zippered boots of reddish-brown leather. They had big moustaches like Saddam's, and carried Kalashnikovs. To the frightened Qanbar, they seemed robotic, without human feelings.
The bodyguards often visited the work site to watch and make trouble. Once, after new concrete had been poured and smoothed, some of them jumped into it, stomping through the patch in their red boots to make sure that no bomb or listening device was hidden there. Another time a workman opened a pack of cigarettes and a bit of foil wrapping fluttered down into the newly poured concrete. One of the guards caught a glimpse of something metallic and reacted as if someone had thrown a hand grenade. Several of them leaped into the concrete and retrieved the scrap. Angered to discover what it was, and to have been made to look foolish, they dragged the offending worker aside and beat him with their weapons. "I have worked all my life!" he cried. They took him away, and he did not return. So the sudden arrival of a black Mercedes was a frightening thing.
"Who is the engineer here?" the chief guard asked. He spoke with the gruff Tikriti accent of his boss. Qanbar stepped up and identified himself. One of the guards wrote down his name. It is a terrible thing to have al Himaya write down your name. In a country ruled by fear, the best way to survive is to draw as little attention to yourself as possible. To be invisible. Even success can be dangerous, because it makes you stand out. It makes other people jealous and suspicious. It makes you enemies who might, if the opportunity presents itself, bring your name to the attention of the police. For the state to have your name for any reason other than the most conventional ones—school, driver's license, military service—is always dangerous. The actions of the state are entirely unpredictable, and they can take away your career, your freedom, your life. Qanbar's heart sank and his mouth went dry.
"Our Great Uncle just passed by," the chief guard began. "And he said, 'Why is this gate installed when the two walls around it are not built?'"
Qanbar nervously explained that the walls were special, ornamental, and that his crew was saving them for last because of the heavy equipment coming and going. "We want to keep it a clean construction," he said.
"Our Great Uncle is going to pass by again tonight," said the guard. "When he does, it must be finished."
Qanbar was dumbfounded. "How can I do it?" he protested.
"I don't know," said the guard. "But if you don't do it, you will be in trouble." Then he said something that revealed exactly how serious the danger was: "And if you don't do it, we will be in trouble. How can we help?"
There was nothing to do but try. Qanbar dispatched Saddam's men to help round up every member of his crew as fast as they could—those who were not scheduled to work as well as those who had already gone home. Two hundred workers were quickly assembled. They set up floodlights. Some of the guards came back with trucks that had machine guns mounted on top. They parked alongside the work site and set up chairs, watching and urging more speed as the workers mixed mortar and threw down line after line of bricks.
The crew finished at nine-thirty. They had completed in four hours a job that would ordinarily have taken a week. Terror had driven them to work faster and harder than they believed possible. Qanbar and his men were exhausted. An hour later they were still cleaning up the site when the black Mercedes drove up again. The chief guard stepped out. "Our Uncle just passed by, and he thanks you," he said.
No human being should have to live this way. No American, believing the words upon which our nation was founded, can read of such a place--where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the birthrights given us by our Creator, mean nothing--and not be appalled. Yet the times are all too few when we as a nation can be summoned to put an end to this kind of state terror. This happens to be one of those rare times and Iraq happens to be the place. There are others equally bad--N. Korea for one--and other peoples equally deserving of freedom, but it is Iraq and the Iraqi people who are our focus at the moment. It will be an unqualified good to free them from Saddam's tyranny, from the terror that has defined their lives for decades. This alone would suffice to justify the coming war.
but, (2) We are not so selfless as to fight a war only to free others; there are purposes here that will benefit us too. Chief among them, I think, is that we will win, again, and another domino in the Middle East will have been toppled by the United States and those who deal in terror will have cause to fear us and thus we will be safer. First, Afghanistan. Second, Saddam. Third, Arafat. And hopefully Qaddafi and Assad will follow and all the while we'll keep rolling up al Qaeda. After twenty or thirty years in which terror prevailed in the Middle East and the West looked feckless, it is long past time to demonstrate that this war can only have one conclusion and that it ends with us winning.
For too long Osama bin Laden was able to recruit and motivate followers by listing a largely uninterrupted string of successes for the radicals against America--the Beirut Marine barracks bombing, the first World Trade Center Bombing, the Battle of the Black Sea, Khobar Towers, the Cole, etc., etc., etc., all the way until 9-11. And until 9-11 he was absolutely correct when he told them that we were too somnolent even to rouse ourselves to our own defense, let alone to strike back. Ronald Reagan withdrew the Marines. Ramzi Youssef was arrested, but no other action followed. We pulled out of Somalia. We let the Saudis dither around with the Khobar bombing. The Cole limped home. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton fired a few cruise missiles into Afghanistan and the Sudan, but did more damage to himself and our credibility that to al Qaeda. If you were an angry young man, filled with hatred and resentment towards the West, why not join bin Laden--he was winning; terror was winning.
But now the worm has turned. Suddenly there's a price to pay for attacking the West, for using terror against us or, in Saddam's case, against your own people. If we are wise and if we are serious about this war, we will not stop with Saddam. We will use Iraq as the template for ridding the Arab world of a series of regimes that maintain power by terrorizing their own people--from Iran to Syria to Palestine to S. Lebanon to Libya. Folks complain that friendlier nations like Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Kuwait and Jordan are not as free as they could be, and this is true. But there is a qualitative difference between a life that is insufficiently free and one that is lived in terror. We should recognize the difference and relieve the terrified, even as we work to liberalize the merely unnecessarily repressive.
It is said that attacking Saddam will build resentment in the Arab world and make future terrorism more likely--perhaps it will. But we know for sure and certain that our docility was emboldening the practitioners of terror, to the point where they had so little respect for or fear of the U.S. that they thought crashing four jumbo jets into American landmarks would serve to terrorize us, rather than, at long last, rouse us to action. If the price of responding to terror is that the lines in the Middle East become etched more sharply with the terrorists and maybe even entire societies choosing terror, which they think can be harnessed and directed only against the West, as against the freedom we seek to bring them, so be it. We've fought terror before. At their core Nazi terror and Communist terror were really no different than the forms we now face--all seek to impose the mad totalitarian visions of the few upon the many and require the apparatti of terror to do so. That's why it's so easy for a Saddam to model himself after Stalin or for a Hitler to be revered in the region or for state television networks to broadcast series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The hatreds don't change, only the haters. The terror doesn't change, only the terrorizers.
And, to the great dismay of many, but to the great pride of most of us, the liberators don't change either. Once again it is left to the United States, with Britain, to put an end to terror. Right now that may seem too massive a task, but it's no more massive than that of freeing Western Europe from the Nazis and Asia from the Japanese or that of stopping Soviet expansion. Instead, the question now is, which model will we choose. Do we go in and crush terror at its source, as we did to Germany and Japan or do we try to contain it as we did in the case of the Soviets?
Unfortunately, a myth has grown up around the Cold War, about how relatively cost free it was and about how lucky we are to have avoided all out war. It is, in fact, compared favorably to WWII and containment is offered as an alternative to war. This has something of the nature of a mass delusion. WWII was terrible and was marked by murder on a scale man had never dreamt of before, but it was over in six years and is, even today, recalled as "The Good War". The entire society banded together, fought as one, and won--quickly and decisively. The Cold War claimed far fewer victims in direct warfare, but dragged on for fifty soul-killing years, saw the extermination of tens of millions, the ruination of economies, and, worst of all, led the West to loathe itself. Stability came to seem a value, one we were willing to pay any price for, coddle any horrific regime to maintain, idly watch any genocide rather than disrupt. It is not too much to say that by the late 70s, we in the West saw ourselves as no better than our enemies and it was only by the grace of God, the Pope, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan that we were snapped out of that kind of moral relativism and retrieved that last shred of determination to see the fight through to the end, which, having rededicated ourselves, came far faster than most believed it could. But because we for so long fought a war of attrition, which attrited us as surely as them, it was a damn close run thing. By the time the West prevailed there was so little of the West left that it was nearly a Pyrrhic victory.
These are the two choices before us now, assuming damned few want to simply surrender, we can fight or contain. Either will work. Realistically, radical Islam, the terror regimes and the terrorists, are not a long term strategic threat. Like Nazism and Communism, Islamicism could be contained and would eventually fall of its own weight, unable to satisfy the material desires of its people, unable to compete economically, politically, or technologically with the liberal democracies of the West. But if it takes ten or twenty or thirty or even fifty years to run its course, if we have to make all the same moral compromises with ourselves all over again, have to disfigure our economy to pay for a massive military-industrial complex, have to curtail civil liberties for decades, have to actively prop up regimes we find repellent, have to smack down and sacrifice friends who threaten to upset the apple cart, have to maintain our own society with a deep divide between those who wish to continue all this rather than lose and those who would rather lose than dirty their hands, then what will have been the point at the end of that long day? If the 2030s are to be like the 1970s, who would willingly choose such a fate for America?
No, let us fight now and fight as hard as final victory requires. Let terror find no safe haven. Make people choose their sides and fight for them. If that means a wider war and more bloodshed and more killing in the short term, let it come, because the short term fight that we know to be just, no matter how savage it ends up being, will do us less damage than the long term containment we know to be, ultimately, a function of cravenness. Let those who choose terror see that the terror is coming for them, unrelentingly, unremorsefully, unapologetically, until terror is too costly a weapon for them to wield. Then let us help them build societies based on hope and freedom, without bitterness at what they forced us to do to them.
Let us fight for their liberty and our security, that both they and we can be safe and free. Let us one day think of this as a "Good War", but, please God, let us not learn to love it.
Ministers said Mr Blair was left with no option but to support military action without a fresh UN mandate, blaming Jacques Chirac, the French president, for sabotaging attempts last week to win the Security Council votes of six wavering countries.I know there are sceptics among us, but as far as I can see this has played out pretty much the way the administration expected. 1441 gives us a "legal" basis for acting. There's not much the UN can do about it (which might be the legendary statement that's never false). Public support in the US has only grown, Blair had the opportunity to try to work through the UN and our build up is just coming up to full strength. M. Chirac has done us a signal service in helping bolster US and British support. I wish Turkey had cooperated, but it is not entirely to the bad that it hasn't and I'm still not convinced that the northern front is lost. It could have gone better, of course, but it could have gone much worse."Chirac has handed the case for military action to us with his intransigence," said a Cabinet minister. "He has been inflexible and unreasonable."
Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, will tell the Lords tomorrow that he advised Mr Blair that existing UN resolutions, including last year's resolution 1441, give him the legal authority to declare war. He felt that the legal case might be weakened if a further resolution was voted down by a majority of the 15-member Security Council.
DEBKAfile’s Military Sources: Full-scale US-British offensive against Iraq is scheduled to begin Monday, 24 hours after Azores summit....Preparations wind up Sunday night to fly and parachute ground troops into Iraq from launching bases in and outside Middle East. US 82nd Airborne Division will be flown in from Afghanistan.
As hopes for a peaceful solution dimmed, U.N. arms inspectors were even forced to pull out five of their eight helicopters from Iraq on Sunday after insurers cancelled cover because of war risks.
Musil also predicts that Jacques Chirac will soon be unpopular in France. This seems about as safe a prediction as can be found.
If Christy Smith, the first disabled competitor on Survivor, thinks she's facing adversity in the Brazilian jungle, wait till she gets back home and faces some of her deaf fans.As the newest and most visible deaf celebrity on TV, Smith, 24, has become a magnet not only for praise, but also scathing criticism.
On one hand, the deaf community is proud of the Colorado native who is a graduate of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the world's only liberal-arts college for the deaf.
But on the other, many deaf people are angry that she is not openly displaying more pride in deaf culture. They want her to use sign language when she speaks, and to teach other members of her all-female tribe how to sign.
They are particularly critical of her choosing to read lips and speak instead of insisting on a sign-language interpreter during the Darwinian game show. Those choices are particularly insulting to strong proponents of deaf culture.
"I was so excited when I learned she was going to be on the show," said Kristy Griffin, a youth specialist at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf in Germantown. Speaking through a sign-language interpreter, the classroom aide said she had looked forward to the first episode.
"Then, whoa! She's not signing, she's speaking. I told my husband that I was sure she'd have a sign interpreter at Tribal Council, so I waited and waited and she didn't. It's so not deaf-friendly."
Target Saddam: Countdown Clock (GlobalSecurity.org)
They're showing 2 days 5.5 hours, which seems about right.
Belgium will refuse transit rights to US forces if Washington decides to wage war against Iraq without the authorization of the United Nations, Foreign Minister Louis Michel says.
In an apparent attempt to come up with a guise other than warmonger, George W. Bush is being hastily repackaged as "deeply religious."Bush has always been officially described as "born again" - a useful device to explain the transformation from his early days (up to the age of 40) of heavy drinking and carousing.
But the notion that Bush is motivated by deep religious convictions is being pushed with such vigour these days by his supporters that one senses an orchestrated campaign - perhaps to prevent worldwide skepticism about the motives for the Iraq invasion from spreading to the U.S.
Some Americans may worry about an evangelical crusader controlling the world's biggest nuclear arsenal, but religion - even the fundamentalist variety - is generally considered a good thing in the U.S. Certainly, focusing on religion helps keep attention away from other more contentious motives for invading Iraq, such as oil or world domination.
So the media have been hyping Bush's alleged spirituality (including a Newsweek cover story on "Bush and God"), even as the president snubbed pleas for peace from world religious leaders and last week tested a 21,000-pound bomb in preparation for unloading it on people in Iraq. (Blessed are the bombed children.)
Of course, it's possible that Bush is deeply religious, whatever than means.
More likely, Bush is simply an empty vessel, a hollow shell, a person of weak character and limited life experience who is therefore highly susceptible to the control of a small, determined group of ideological hard-liners bent on asserting U.S. power more forcefully in the world.
In a series of eloquent and increasingly strong books, McQuaig has made a case for preserving the Canadian welfare state in something like the form it has achieved since 1960. She has attacked, with increasing power, the arguments made against social democracy.
THE trendiest religion in Hollywood was founded on the teachings of a Satanist, a new essay by Camille Paglia claims.The Church of Scientology - which boasts Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Lisa Marie Presley, Hilary Swank, Juliette Lewis and Kirstie Alley among its members - was founded by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. According to an article by Paglia in Boston University's Arion journal, Hubbard got many of his ideas from infamous devil worshipper Alistair Crowley.
"Hubbard had met Crowley in the latter's Los Angeles temple in 1945," Paglia writes. "Hubbard's son reveals that Hubbard claimed to be Crowley's successor: Hubbard told him that Scientology was born on the day that Crowley died."
According to the article, Scientologists perform some of the same rites that Crowley invented, all designed to free practitioners from human guilt.
"Drills used by Scientologists to cleanse and clarify the mind are evidently a reinterpretation of Crowley's singular fusion of Asian meditation and Satanic ritualism, which sharpens the all-conquering will . . . Guilt and remorse, in the Crowley way, are mere baggage to be jettisoned," Paglia says.
She writes that Crowley, a Nazi sympathizer who used opiates and hallucinogens and called himself "The Great Beast," advocated total sexual freedom, including orgies and bestiality.
Despite French denials, U.S. intelligence and defense officials have confirmed that Iraq purchased from China a chemical used in making fuel for long-range missiles, with help from brokers in France and Syria.Bush administration officials said the sale took place in August and was described in classified intelligence reports as a "dual-use" chemical used in making missile fuel.
Officials discussed details of the chemical sale after it was first reported by columnist William Safire in Thursday's editions of the New York Times. [...]
The chemical transferred to Iraq was a transparent liquid rubber called hydroxy terminated polybutadiene, or HTPB, that is used in making solid fuel for long-range missiles, said U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The sale of the chemical was known since last summer, when it was traced from China's Qilu Chemicals company in Shandong province, the officials said. [...]
Disclosure of the Chinese chemical sale comes amid other recent intelligence reports revealing that an unidentified French company sold military-aircraft spare parts to Iraq in January.
The spare parts for Iraq's French-made Mirage jets and Gazelle helicopters were sold to a company in the United Arab Emirates and sent to Iraq over land from a third country, intelligence officials said.
The chemical sale to Iraq, according to the officials, involved a French company known as CIS Paris, that helped broker the chemical sale in August of 20 tons of HTPB, which was shipped from China to the Syrian port of Tartus.
The chemicals were then sent by truck from Syria into Iraq to a missile-manufacturing plant.
WAR with Iraq could now be as close as 60 hours away. Military sources believe that the first wave of attack aircraft and cruise missiles will be launched against Saddam overnight on Tuesday.The stakes were raised dramatically when the mighty American B-1 bomber was used for the first time in the southern Iraq no-fly zone, pounding mobile radar installations with unheard-of firepower. The attack was only 230 miles west of Baghdad.
On the front line in Northern Kuwait, the urgency quickened noticeably yesterday. In an around the clock operation, troops in Camp Coyote, the British camp closest to the Iraq border, are being supplied with everything they need to fight the first hours and days of war - the priorities being ammunition and water.
A foot fetisher running rampant in southern New Hampshire has struck again, lavishing compliments on a school administrator about her ``beautiful legs'' and then trying to run his lips along her size 5 feet."He asked what size feet I had and then he said, `Can I touch them?' '' said the archvillain's latest victim, 38-year-old Catherine, who didn't want her last name used.
But the 50-something foot licker couldn't resist the wife and mother's gait.
As she put down a just-purchased case of Pepsi from Shaw's next to the passenger door of her Oldsmobile in the parking lot about 8:45 a.m. Wednesday, the heel whom police suspect of similar offenses struck again.
"He grabbed my leg down by my ankle and pulled my foot out of my shoe,'' Catherine said yesterday. "The way he was caressing my foot was absolutely stomach-turning. He was just very gentle, very nice, a very calm-looking person. He had a very soft, delicate and gentle touch. Oh creepy!''
Catherine, wearing a dress, said she had on 2- to 3-year-old no-name black flats and was trying to make sense of the sole attraction when she raced around to her driver's side door - only to find he had beat her to it and was holding it open.
"Here, allow me the pleasure of opening the door for you as you give me the pleasure of your legs this morning,'' she remembered him saying in a slight Australian accent. [...]
Catherine is one of several women in the Dover area who have reported similar bizarre assaults by a man who stands about 5 feet, 5 inches tall, weighs between 160 and 170 pounds and has a crop of curly, reddish hair, said Dover police Sgt. Linda Anderson.
MORE:
-REVIEW: of The Pity of War : Explaining World War I (1998) (Niall Ferguson)
-REVIEW: of The First World War (1998) (John Keegan)
As patriots, we want our country to win the wars that we fight. As Americans, we want our soldiers--young men and women who risk too much for too little pay--to come home in one piece. But supporting our troops while they're fighting an immoral and illegal war is misguided and wrong.Iraq has never attacked, nor threatened to attack, the United States. As his 1990 invasion of Kuwait proved, Saddam is a menace to his neighbors--Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel--but he's their problem, not ours. Saddam's longest-range missiles only travel 400 miles.
Numerous countries are ruled by unstable megalomaniacs possessing scary weaponry. North Korea has an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the western United States and, unlike Iraq, the nuke to put inside it. Pakistan, another nuclear power run by a dangerous anti-American dictator, just unveiled its new HATF-4 ballistic missile. If disarmament were Bush's goal, shouldn't those countries--both of which have threatened to use nukes--be higher-priority targets than non-nuclear Iraq?
Iraq isn't part of the war on terrorism. The only link between Iraq and Al Qaeda is the fact that they hate each other's guts. And no matter how often Bush says "9/11" and "Iraq" in the same breath, Saddam had nothing to do with the terror attacks.
That leaves freeing Iraqis from Saddam's repressive rule as the sole rationale for war. Is the U.S. in the liberation business? Will Bush spread democracy to Myamnar, Congo, Turkmenistan, Cambodia, Nigeria, Cuba, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan or Laos, just to name a few places where people can't vote, speak freely or eat much? You be the judge. I wouldn't bet on it.
Of course, it would be great if Iraqis were to overthrow Saddam (assuming that his successor would be an improvement). But regime change is up to the locals, not us. George W. Bush is leading us to commit an ignominious crime, an internationally-unsanctioned invasion of a nation that has done us no harm and presents no imminent threat.
We find ourselves facing the paradox of the "good German" of the '30s. We're ruled by an evil, non-elected warlord who ignores both domestic opposition and international condemnation. We don't want the soldiers fighting his unjustified wars of expansion to win--but we don't want them to lose either.
Zalmen Rosen, from the Skver sect of Hasidic Jews, says co-worker Luis Nivelo, a Christian, was about to kill a carp to be made into gelfilte fish in the city's New Square Fish Market in January when it began shouting in Hebrew."It said 'Tzaruch shemirah' and 'Hasof bah'," Mr Rosen later told the New York Times newspaper.
"[It] essentially means [in Hebrew] that everyone needs to account for themselves because the end is nigh."
Mr Nivelo told the paper he was so shocked he fell into a stack of slimy packing crates, before running in panic to the shop entrance and grabbing Mr Rosen, shouting: "The fish is talking!"
However his co-worker reacted with disbelief.
"I screamed 'It's the devil The devil is here!', but Zalman said to me 'You crazy, you a meshugeneh [mad man]!" Mr Nivelo said.
A disbelieving Mr Rosen then rushed to the back of the store, only to hear the fish identifying itself as the soul of a local Hasidic man who had died the previous year.
It instructed him to pray and study the Torah, but Mr Rosen admitted that in a state of panic he attempted to kill the fish, injuring himself in the process and ending up in hospital.
The fish was eventually killed by Mr Nivelo and sold.
MORE:
Fishy Story Tests Chasidic Town's Beliefs (MAX GROSS, MARCH 14, 2003, FORWARD)
The owner of the market says that he has received thousands of letters and phone calls asking about the tale. Of course, many people are skeptical. When Nivelo repeated the story to his family, they told him he had gone crazy.But for others the loquacious carp is believed in as fervently as the law of gravity. Even local rival fish markets such as A&B Famous Fish and Monsey Glatt refuse to say the talking fish is a hoax. Rosen, one of the three men who claims to have heard the fish speak, is highly regarded in New Square. "This man is not a liar," declared one New Square resident, who - like most residents here - insisted that his name not appear in a newspaper.
"Opinion varies within the community," said Rabbi Mayer Schiller, who teaches on Sundays at New Square's girls' school, a few blocks from where the fish uttered his words. "Some people believe - others don't."
New Square is in many ways the most cut-off of any of the chasidic communities. An incorporated village founded in the 1950s by followers of the Skver chasidic sect, it basked in obscurity for years. It was briefly the focus of national attention after President Clinton pardoned several town officials who had been convicted of embezzling millions of dollars in federal funds, but once the scandal died down the town gracefully slipped back into anonymity. Today it looks like a suburban version of a medieval Jewish shtetl: SUVs are parked in driveways and toys are scattered across front lawns, but geese still walk casually down its streets. Strangers are eyed with caution.
But the fish tale has put New Square back on the map, as the story has become a source of fascination for Skver chasidim scattered throughout the world. And why not? The Skver chasidim believed in the parting of the seas and the sun standing still... why not a talking fish? "Certainly in Jewish mysticism there is the notion of [transmigration of] souls [into] other life forms," Schiller said, "particularly fish."
These are days of war talk, and the same sort of talk is coming out of Israel and the United States.From Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon: "Israel will not surrender to blackmail. He who rises up to kill us, we will pre-empt it and kill him first. As we have proven there is no and there will never be any shelter for evil."
From US President George W Bush: "We will not wait to see what terrorists or terrorist states could do with weapons of mass destruction. We are determined to confront threats wherever they arise and as a last resort we must be willing to use military force."
It is the language of war against terrorism, used for both Iraq and for the Palestinians.
But are the two conflicts the same?
"The Americans and the Iraqis don't have a dispute about land, they don't have a political dispute about sharing the same area," says Israeli defence correspondent Alex Fishman.
"In Israel, we've got an historical, cultural dispute, it's a completely different story, you can't compare it."
So if the conflicts are different, why is the language the same?
Suicide bombings have certainly contributed.
They have reinforced Ariel Sharon's view that Palestinian violence is terrorism rather than a national struggle against occupation.
And, says analyst Akiva Eldar, they have also suited his political agenda.
"The suicide bombings is something that made it even easier for Sharon to sell this equation that we and you the Americans are in the same boat," he says.
"Because 11 September was a suicide bombing. Both in the US and in Israel it helped people to paint the conflict in black and white."
Some 27 years ago, we celebrated the Bicentennial, whooping up the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The festivities were considerably more muted 11 years later, when we observed the 200th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention.The 200th anniversary of Marbury vs. Madison causes no similar devotion, although it should. What happened in 1776 didn't define us as a nation. What happened during the 1787 constitutional debates in Philadelphia defined us only somewhat.
It's what happened on Feb. 24, 1803 -- when the Supreme Court handed down the decision in Marbury vs. Madison -- that established judicial review as a fundamental principle in American government.
For 200 years, the Supreme Court has examined laws and lower court decisions to see if they pass constitutional muster. (One quote from Chief Justice John Marshall sums it up more succinctly: "A law repugnant to the Constitution is void.") While Marbury vs. Madison might not ring a bell, its effect may be discerned from other Supreme Court decisions more famous -- or infamous, depending on where you camp out on the political spectrum.
There's Roe vs. Wade, 30 years old as of January, when the court ruled that state laws restricting abortions during the first trimester of pregnancy violated privacy rights. The debate on whether the high court's ruling was sound law or "judicial activism" -- i.e., judges legislating from the bench -- rages on.
"You have the right to remain silent" -- watch any cop show, and you're almost guaranteed to hear that line. Credit goes to the Supreme Court's 1966 ruling in Miranda vs. Arizona.
Mashed jackrabbits make irresistible snacks for hungry vultures. And hardly anything mashes a jackrabbit quite as efficiently as a speeding 747.The vultures that hang around at Miami International Airport have known this for a long time.
They've acquired a real taste for the blacktail jackrabbit, an oversized species that has an unfortunate habit of sprinting across runways at the wrong times. [...]
At least two dozen vultures have collided with jets in the past two years alone. None have caused accidents, but planes have crashed elsewhere because vultures were swept into jet engines. [...]
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants the rabbits trapped and resettled. But Ron Magill of Miami's Metrozoo said the traps would not catch enough of them to make a difference. He is pushing to exterminate the blacktails by shooting them.
"God forbid a tragedy happens at the airport because we let emotion take over," he said.
WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT from an ally who disagrees with us? The question arises because of France's strong objection to President Bush's call for disarmament by Iraq--by war if necessary. The French reaction has infuriated many Americans, stirred talk of a boycott of French goods, and generated a spate of biting anti-French jokes. Angry Americans see France as breathtakingly ungrateful.But this is unfair. Gratitude is not what's required of an ally. A French retreat on Iraq would no doubt soothe American indignation. And if the French mentioned their gratitude for America's role in saving France in both world wars, bailing out the French economy with the Marshall Plan, and giving France a seat on the United Nations Security Council with veto power, so much the better. But a grateful heart is a character trait, not a principle governing foreign affairs.
Acting in good faith, however, is required of an ally, especially a fellow democracy. France is a member of NATO (not on the military side) and a partner of the United States in the war on terrorism. And it was France and the United States who last fall jointly drafted U.N. Resolution 1441, which ordered new weapons inspections in Iraq.
Since then, France has acted in bad faith. [...]
As an ally, France could have been expected to voice its doubts about American policy, then graciously step back and abstain in a Security Council vote. But France has chosen to undermine the United States. Rather than increase pressure on Saddam to disarm, French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin focused last Friday on refuting every American claim about the threat posed by Iraq. Then he hop-scotched across west Africa to seek the votes of Angola, Cameroon, and Guinea against the American-British deadline for Iraqi disarmament. Ambassador Levitte says Iraq simply isn't an "imminent threat."
French President Jacques Chirac has committed his country to a final hostile act. Last Monday he said that a majority vote in favor of the British-American plan to set a deadline for Saddam to complete the disarmament of Iraq will not stand. France will veto it, using the gift given the beleaguered French at the U.N.'s founding to make them feel like an important nation.
Lastly, it's the obligation of an ally not to blow up its relationship with a long-time friend if at all possible. On Iraq, maintaining the French-American tie is quite possible. The problem is France doesn't seem interested, though Levitte says the French-American tie is critical to France. If so, France might have outlined its opposition to U.S. policy in a closed-door session of the Security Council. On the contrary, France brushed aside an American request and insisted last Friday's session be held in public, thus on worldwide television.
The French answer to American criticism is that their opposition is not based on anti-Americanism but on sincere differences. They are wary of using military force, fearful a war with Iraq and regime change will create instability in the Middle East, and dubious of American plans to install democracy in Iraq. So the differences between the United States and France turn out to be philosophical and deep. With the gulf this wide, it may simply be a mistake to think of the French as the ally they once were.
The United States is within reach of dismantling the leadership of the al Qaeda terrorist network responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Bush administration officials and U.S. intelligence experts said.CIA and FBI officials are cautious in public not to overstate their optimism about breaking up al Qaeda and capturing Osama bin Laden, the organization's leader. But people who receive regular briefings on U.S. counterterrorism operations said the arrest and subsequent cooperation under interrogation of al Qaeda lieutenant Khalid Sheik Mohammed this month have given them concrete reasons to come to this conclusion.
"I believe the tide has turned in terms of al Qaeda," said Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House intelligence committee and a former CIA case officer. "We're at the top of the hill."
Goss's sentiment was echoed by a dozen other intelligence experts and law enforcement officials with regular access to information about U.S. counterterrorism operations. "For the first time," Goss said, "they have more to fear from us than we have to fear from them."
Officials cautioned that there was no certainty they could disrupt attacks already set in motion by al Qaeda or other affiliated groups, and said they were still concerned about possible bombings and attacks on a smaller scale than those mounted against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said last week that he believes suicide attacks in this country may be inevitable.
But officials said the reasons for their optimism about al Qaeda are threefold.
Mohammed's capture in the Pakistan city of Rawalpindi on March 1, they said, cut off the organization's key operational leader from followers poised to execute attacks. The cache of computer and paper files found in the house where Mohammed was living has turned out to be "a mother lode" of information, said one intelligence official. It has provided "hundreds of leads" about the organization's financial pipelines, funders, followers, movement of operatives and targets, another official said.
In addition, Mohammed began providing information to his CIA captors soon after his arrest, officials said. Some of the information is unverifiable, said one U.S. government official, but other information is "things we didn't know and are very glad we know now." Mohammed is also providing translations of coded letters found among his belongings, U.S. sources said.
Although the precise nature of the information, including any planned attacks, could not be learned, one official said the information has already allowed U.S. law enforcement officials to improve security at certain targets Mohammed identified. It has yet to lead to any further detentions of suspected terrorists, the official said.
Because the CIA and FBI are much more familiar than they were a year ago with the organization and individuals involved in al Qaeda, they are more able to put the new leads to use. Also, with a handful of other high-ranking al Qaeda members imprisoned and undergoing CIA interrogation, the information "can be bounced off five other senior guys now anxious to tell us what they know," said one knowledgeable intelligence expert.
Because of these factors, the information "will lead to geometric progress," Goss said. New leads "are a trickle that has turned into a torrent."
Ever since bows and arrows came on the scene 15,000 years ago, the spread of military technology has shaped the nature of conflicts. Some new technologies rapidly became commonplace; others failed to spread or were successfully banned. The historical lessons to be learned from weapons proliferation are useful to reflect on as we figure out how to deal with North Korea.Let's start by considering an episode in New Zealand history known as the Musket Wars. New Zealand's original inhabitants, a Polynesian people known as the Maori, possessed stone and wooden weapons but lacked guns. Maori tribes were chronically embroiled in fierce warfare with one another. But that warfare did not produce mass slaughters because all tribes were equally matched in their weapons, which were useful only for fighting at close quarters.
Those limitations began to change as European traders started arriving in New Zealand in the early 19th century. Until 1815, the Napoleonic Wars meant that Europeans needed all the weapons they produced. But after Napoleon's surrender, a surplus of guns became available for other purposes, such as selling to Maoris.
By 1818, the Nga Puhi tribe at the north end of New Zealand, where the first European trading stations had been set up, had acquired enough muskets to start using them in battle. This began a period of carnage that lasted until 1835. Intertribal musket wars killed about one-quarter of the Maori population -- more people than New Zealand would lose to trench warfare and poison gas in World War I.
At first, tribes with guns used them to settle accounts with neighboring traditional enemies who had the misfortune still to be gunless. Then, as the Maoris realized the power of their new weapons, gun-possessing tribes began traveling up to 1,000 miles to attack tribes with which they had no quarrel, just to show off power and capture slaves. Tribes without guns desperately tried to acquire them, because their survival was now dependent on firepower. Some tribes got the weapons, mounted successful defenses and went on to become attackers themselves. Other tribes were either wiped out or enslaved.
Then something strange happened. As guns spread, casualties declined. Eventually, when all surviving tribes were armed, there were no more easy victories, and Maori warfare, though still chronic, settled back down to something like its previous level.
The Musket Wars illustrate the potential instability of a situation in which a potent new technology is unevenly distributed. The wars began when only a few tribes had guns, and they ended when all had them. If nukes follow a similar course, North Korea's going nuclear could trigger a desperate scramble by other countries to acquire the weapons in self-defense.
Presidential hopeful Howard Dean electrified the state Democratic convention here Saturday when he leveled a verbal barrage against the Bush policies in support of the war in Iraq -- fists raised, roaring, "We want our country back!"But North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, also a candidate for president, got a different reception entirely from the 1,800 delegates here when he raised the issue of Iraq. A resounding chorus of boos and chants of "No war!" erupted with his statement: "I believe Saddam Hussein is a serious threat and must be disarmed (with) military force if necessary."
Indeed, the level of anti-war fervor was evident in the reception for Dean, the former Vermont governor and a physician, who fired up partisans chanting "We want Dean, We want Dean" almost as soon as he took the stage.
From his opening shots, his ammunition was aimed not only at Bush -- but also at other Democrats whom he suggested had waffled on the war.
"What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing, supporting the president's unilateral intervention in Iraq," he said, as delegates got to their feet. "I'm Howard Dean, and I'm here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."
Although he is only in single digits in some national polls and is an unknown to most voters, delegates jammed Dean's information booth, snapping up souvenir prescription bottles and "The Doctor is In" signs.
"He's the only one who is a straight shooter, and called the Bush administration on the war," said Corey Johnson, one enthusiastic Dean delegate. [...]
Kerry, who raised $900,000 in a San Francisco fund-raiser this week, also joked that, "I'm running for president of the United States because I believe we need a regime change at home."
Yoshindo Yoshihara is not looking forward to his trip to the United States this month. Ever since Sept. 11, Yoshihara, a master swordsmith, has had difficulty checking his baggage through U.S. airports. For security reasons, United Airlines has insisted that his chest of four swords, each one worth about 3.5 million yen, remain unlocked."I am afraid they will be stolen in transit," says Yoshihara, "but I obviously cannot take them on board." Sixty-year-old Yoshihara is reluctant to switch airlines because he has accumulated too many rewards with his frequent-flier program.
Such are the concerns of a modern-day swordsmith. While Yoshihara's techniques date back to 12th-century Japan, his workshop in Katsushika Ward, northern Tokyo, is hardly in a feudal rut. Yoshihara's fleece-clad son, age 36, like to have the radio blaring as he works, while one of Yoshihara's three disciples enlivens his corner of the studio with a Takanohana poster. Then there's the wall of Yoshihara's living room filled with his grandchildren's crayon drawings.
Yoshihara is a 10th-generation swordsmith. His grandfather produced katana (long swords) for the Showa emperor, and his brother, Shoji, plays a swordsmith in Tom Cruise's upcoming movie "The Last Samurai."
By law, Yoshihara is only allowed to forge two katana, or three shorter swords, per month. The shorter swords include the tanto, which is shorter than 30 cm, and the wakizashi, which spans from 30 to 60 cm. In the Momoyama and Edo periods, samurai wore both a wakizashi and katana at their waist. The longer katana is defined as a blade over 60 cm in length. [...]
Yoshihara says the most difficult part of making a sword is reworking and tempering the special steel he buys that is made in a tatara (Japanese-style smelter). Steel, an alloy, is formed in the smelter by heating iron-oxide sand, or iron ore, so that it naturally combines with the carbon released from burning charcoal.
About 2 to 3 kg of steel at a time are heated at 1,300 degrees and hammered into flat sheets 0.5 cm thick. The sheets are then laid on top of each other and hammered together over the fire. Once the steel is malleable enough, the metal is folded over onto itself several dozen times.
After the hard steel form of the sword has been made in this way, a soft inner layer of steel is sandwiched in between and the blade is then shaped into the length of the final sword. Japanese blades are so outstanding because they combine two types of steel, a soft but flexible low-carbon inner layer, and a hard, high-carbon outer layer that forms the cutting edge.
Crafting a strong and flexible blade from naturally nonhomogeneous iron ore is an art that is slowly learned over time. "I wish I could take a pill and automatically have that sense," says Yoshihara's disciple, Hiroshi Yamashita.
"You have to know what a good sword is," explains Yoshihara. "But then you have to be able to produce that with your hands."
After the inner and outer layers are hammered into a sword, two types of insulating clay are painted on. A thick clay is added to the cutting edge, while a thinner clay is spread along the smooth edge.
The blade is then heated and quenched in water. The layers of clay affect the cooling rate of the metal, thus adding another dimension of hard and soft metal to the sword. The pattern left by the clay is called the hamon (temper pattern), whose beauty is one measure of the swordsmith's art.
At this point the sword is passed onto a polisher. Depending on the sword, the polisher usually spends about eight days on one blade. With a new one, the time is evenly split between relatively rough polishing, using stones slightly larger than a video cassette, and the final polishing, which includes the use of paper-thin stones glued onto a special kind of washi paper.
Yoshihiko Usuki, a Japanese sword polisher who works with Yoshihara out of his shitamachi studio in Tokyo, compares sword polishing to fixing someone's makeup. "Every sword is different; you have to figure out how to polish each individual sword."
Usuki tries to remove the least amount of metal possible. "You can only take away from a sword," he explains, "you cannot add to it."
Usuki likens sword blades to manju (stuffed dumplings), with the soft inner layer being the anko red-bean paste and the outer layer the steamed bread. "You cannot polish away so much of the outer surface, otherwise the anko starts to show."
Sword polishing does not run in Usuki's family: He was a disciple for 10 years before opening his workshop in 1985. As a parting gift, his teacher gave him a lifetime supply of the washi paper used in the last steps of the polishing process. "The craftsman that made the paper is no longer around," says Usuki, now aged 46.
The highlight of Usuki's career was a Kamakura Period blade he encountered last year. A collector who has known Usuki for many years asked him to repolish the sword. Even though steel naturally tarnishes over time, this blade was in perfect condition. Usuki was amazed by the thought of how many people had to be involved in preserving the blade for the past 800 years.
The split in senior Labour ranks over war in Iraq was blown wide open yesterday with an astonishing U-turn by health minister Malcolm Chisholm, who now 'bitterly regrets' his previous support for the party leadership's policy.The Edinburgh North and Leith MSP chose to announce his change in dramatic form, borrowing a megaphone from anti-war protesters outside his constituency surgery to announce that his decision to back Tony Blair had been 'immoral' when he voted for the party line in the Scottish parliament last week.
Citing his concerns over the death toll for Iraqis and the threat to his personal assistant, Annette Lamont, who is in Iraq as a human shield, he said only the Labour Party can now exert sufficient pressure on Tony Blair to step back from British involvement in war, and that those against conflict should focus their attentions for the next two or three final days when that could be possible. Only two other MSPs shifting sides would have won a motion in the parliament last Thursday warning the Prime Minister that the case for war has not been made.
MORE SCOTS HOPELESSNESS:
Beauty With Balls: Edd McCracken joins the male grooming revolution by waxing his shoulders, but finds that there is no gain without pain (Sunday Herald, 16 March 2003)
I HAVE hairy shoulders. Not just wisps of hair but great big wads of fur that sit on my shoulders like a matted parrot. They appeared a few years ago and quickly made their nest. Abject disgust soon gave way to acceptance of my hairy lot and, finally, to a weird sense of affection. And now they are about to be ripped from my body. It's like losing a friend. Still, my 'waxer' today at Edinburgh's One Spa is a beautiful Russian woman so, if they have to go, I suppose this is as good a way as any.Perhaps that goes some way to explaining why a growing number of Scottish men are submitting themselves to such masochistic behaviour. Narcissus was a man, after all.
'There has been a huge shift now between guys and girls,' says Brian Hunter, general manager of One Spa, located behind Edinburgh's Sheraton Grand Hotel. 'A lot more men are getting in touch with their feminine side. It's not such a big barrier anymore.'
Recent figures show that more and more men are spending vast amounts of time and money on their appearance.
On three continents, Al Qaeda and other terror organizations have intensified their efforts to recruit young Muslim men, tapping into rising anger about the American campaign for war in Iraq, according to intelligence and law enforcement officials.In recent weeks, officials in the United States, Europe and Africa say they had seen evidence that militants within Muslim communities are seeking to identify and groom a new generation of terrorist operatives. An invasion of Iraq, the officials worry, is almost certain to produce a groundswell of recruitment for groups committed to attacks in the United States, Europe and Israel.
"An American invasion of Iraq is already being used as a recruitment tool by Al Qaeda and other groups," a senior American counterintelligence official said. "And it is a very effective tool."
Another American official, based in Europe, said Iraq had become "a battle cry, in a way," for Qaeda recruiters.
Some of the information about Qaeda recruiting comes from interrogations of captured operatives and from materials found at the house in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, where Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the third-ranking Qaeda leader, was arrested this month, officials say.
The surge in Qaeda recruitment efforts has been most visible in Germany, Britain, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands, the officials said. Investigators have significantly increased their use of informants and, in some cases, bugging devices, to monitor mosques and other gathering places, where they have observed a sharp spike in anti-American oratory. [...]
Despite an apparent increase in potential recruits, many analysts say that the American-led campaign in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 had shut down Al Qaeda's primary training camps and dealt an enormous blow to the network's ability to recruit and train new members. But officials believe that terrorist groups have established new bases of operation, especially in the Caucasus. "I fear that Chechnya could become the new Afghanistan," Judge Brugui“re said. "The threat is moving to the Caucasus, because the jihad system needs a battleground."
In response to concerns that European cell members and new recruits are traveling to the Caucasus, France has opened up an inquiry focusing on Chechnya and Pankisi Gorge in Georgia.
Other officials and experts believe that video images of an American-led invasion of Iraq may ultimately hand Mr. bin Laden his most useful recruitment tool.
"Bin Laden's strategy has always been to demonstrate to the Islamic community that the West, and especially the U.S., is starting a global war against Muslims," Judge Bruguiere said. "An attack on Iraq might confirm this vision for many Muslims. I am very worried about the next wave of recruits."
[T]here is something unappealing and even morally dubious about this concentrated haggling at the United Nations, as though upholding the amour- propre of the UN was more important than Saddam's secret weapons or the welfare of his people. And here again I have a sneaking suspicion that Blair has been too punctilious for his own good.Although he has consistently maintained that a second UN resolution was desirable but not essential, the frantic pace of British diplomacy has told a different story. Never has Talleyrand's advice to young diplomats - "above all, gentlemen, no zeal" - been so disregarded.
We are constantly told that Blair is working "flat out" for a second resolution. In New York Sir Jeremy Greenstock pops up every five minutes with a fresh set of conditions. At one moment we are told that Saddam absolutely has to go on television and say: "I have been a very nasty person and told a lot of lies about the horrible weapons I have been hiding." At the next, we are told: "Oh well, he needn't really, that was just a negotiating ploy."
Saddam himself shows little sign of wanting to join Blair and the other victims of reality TV in any such humiliating rituals. In total contrast, there was a touching ceremony earlier this week in front of the television cameras in the Gaza YMCA, at which Saddam's envoys handed out cheques of up to E18,000 to the families of suicide bombers and other Palestinian terrorists - making suicide bombing just about the best-paid occupation in that miserable region, though not a career with much future, at least not this side of paradise.
The lucky recipients were also handed a certificate inscribed: "Reward of the President- Mujahed Saddam Hussein whom God preserve to honour those who irrigated the holy land with their blood." If you still want evidence of Saddam's links with terror, these much prized certificates seem to me just as good as any smoking gun.
Thus the realities of life in Iraq and the Palestinian territories remain as dismal as ever. Yet polite opinion among the ABC1s in Britain has become obsessed with arcane questions of legality. Does resolution 1441 provide sufficient cover for military action? Some international lawyers say yes, others say no. You can find both answers given from within a single set of chambers, Cherie Blair's as it happens.
Then is it legitimate to disregard an unreasonable veto if there is otherwise a majority for the resolution? No, say the lawyers, a veto is a veto. But what else did we do in Kosovo in defiance of the Russian veto? Was that illegal, or did success somehow make it legal? I am not arguing that the UN should be bypassed or ignored. But it is absurd to pretend that we have always regarded it as the sole arbiter of justice. Anyway, there is surely something repellent about the idea of "cover" for our actions, as though we were contemplating a dodgy business deal rather than setting out to disarm and depose a mass murderer.
And is this obsessive quest for a second UN resolution even the right way to hold the Labour party together? Surely it suggests a lack of confidence in the existing justification for military action and allows the Labour rebels to puff up their moral pretensions? For the first time since Blair came to power, the awkward squad are muttering about a change of leadership. And even those who do not go quite so far are beginning to fear that Blair has already suffered irrecoverable damage. They detect "the glimmer of twilight, never glad, confident morning again", as that acerbic old Tory Nigel Birch said of Macmillan in the Profumo debate, quoting from Browning's poem The Lost Leader.
Well, I am not so sure. Yes, even if the war goes well, the Labour party will continue to haemorrhage members, perhaps even more than it did after the Gulf war. But it may be that ultimately new Labour does not really need the old constituency Labour stalwarts.
It is noticeable that skilled workers - who are crucial to any new coalition of the centre-left - seem much more comfortable with the idea of bringing Saddam down by force than the intelligentsia and the professions. Outside Labour circles, who will really care if Clare Short and Robin Cook do resign? In retrospect, resigning ministers dwindle to dots in the landscape. What we remember is whether the leadership had the will to stick to its commitments - not so much a second resolution as resolution.
And that is a commodity Blair shows no signs of running low on.
FRANCE'S opposition to war with Iraq under any circumstances appears to have contributed to a shift in public opinion in Britain in favour of military action.A YouGov poll of 2,260 people, conducted for Showdown in Iraq: a Jonathan Dimbleby Special on ITV1 today, shows that people in Britain have little time for the tactics of Jacques Chirac. Only 22% think the French president was right to say he would block any UN Security Council resolution that threatened military action; 70% believe he was wrong.
The result is that voters in Britain continue to oppose a war with Iraq that does not have UN backing ‹ but opposition is softening. The poll shows that 60% of Britons are opposed to war without a second security council resolution, while 32% are in favour.
Although a significant majority is still against war, the position has shifted. In late January only 20% favoured war without a second resolution, while 73% were opposed.
A similar shift has occurred when it comes to war with a second resolution, even though that is now seen as unlikely: 76% now support military action with UN backing, the highest since the question was first asked in September.
The poll appears to suggest that people are increasingly resigned to war. Fewer than a third, 29%, think UN inspectors should be given a few more months to uncover Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Nearly two-thirds, 65%, say inspections are not working and Saddam should be given a shorter deadline, backed by the threat of force.
On Thursday I shook the hand of the world¹s most reviled man. No, not Saddam Hussein but George Bush. The occasion was the St Patrick's Day reception in the White House. It was a very small affair compared with the days of Bill Clinton. Only about 60-80 people were present and of that number probably less than a quarter were Irish.The fact that Bush turned up at all was a minor miracle. The previous day he had cancelled all engagements to muster support for a further United Nations resolution and it was entirely possible that he might have done so again on Thursday. But he met Bertie, accepted the bowl of shamrock, discussed the north and Iraq and then addressed the reception--again talking about the north--after which he met anyone who wanted to meet him.
That he showed up at all reveals how patient the Americans are with the Irish. It also highlights how successfully the government has walked the tightrope between pacifying domestic opinion, which is mostly anti-war and anti-American, and maintaining good relations with America--still our best friend in the world.
It's as well for the friendship that Bush wasn¹t at the bash in the Irish ambassador's residence that night because it would have been put severely to the test. Almost every Irish person at the reception who offered an opinion was against the impending war against Iraq ‹ and loathed Bush. All the usual fabricated nonsense was being spouted. It¹s about oil; the Americans armed Iraq in the first place; Bush is the real threat to world peace.
Dealing with this level of ignorance is like draining an ocean with a thimble, but let's try anyway.
A headline in Friday's Washington Post captures perfectly the Rumsfeld Effect: "Anti-US Sentiment Abates in South Korea; Change Follows Rumsfeld Suggestion of Troop Cut". Change Follows Rumsfeld Suggestion: there's a slogan for the age, and it's fast becoming the First Law of Post-9/11 Geopolitics."The anti-American demonstrations here have suddenly gone poof," began the Post reporter in Seoul. "The official line from the South Korean government is: Yankees stay here." What brought about this remarkable transformation? Why, a passing remark, an extemporaneous musing; in other words, "a suggestion from Defense Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld that US troops may be cut and repositioned."
Other politicians sweat for weeks over a major 90-minute policy speech, hire the best writers, craft memorable phrases, and nobody notices. If you want to "re-shape the debate", as the cliche has it, all you need is a casual aside from Rummy. The concept of "old Europe" barely existed until Rumsfeld used it as a throwaway line a month and a half ago. Within a week, it became the dominant regional paradigm. Belgium - Old Europe. Bulgaria - New Europe. The entire map of the continent suddenly fell into place for the first time since the Cold War. Even those who indignantly huffed about this unacceptable insult seemed unable to resist confirming the truth of it.
Alas, last week Rummy's ruminations on rummy nations finally alighted, as they were bound to eventually, on the United Kingdom. The Defence Secretary made some mild remarks to the effect that, if Britain were not able to participate in the war on Iraq, it wouldn't make much difference. Even some of his cheerleaders on the right thought this was a tad inconsiderate to Tony Blair. And at the BBC they fell upon it deliriously as evidence that
heartless old Rumsfeld would be happy to have Bush's poodle put down and served up at the South Korean farewell banquet with nary a thought: Secretary Rumsfeld, said the BBC's correspondent, Nick Assinder, had managed to "blow a series of holes in the Prime Minister's armour", he had "pulled the rug out" from beneath Blair's armoured feet, etc, etc.But the thing is: he's not wrong, is he? Britain is helpful, but not necessary. And it would not be unreasonable if Rumsfeld, with a couple of hundred thousand guys kicking their heels in the sand for six months, felt that America was being perhaps too deferential to the Prime Minister's domestic difficulties. After all, at what point does Britain's helpfulness cease to be helpful? There are no hard and fast rules, but when Baroness Amos is chasing Dominique de Villepin around West Africa because Guinea's presidential witchdoctor is advising against war it is hard not to feel that, even by diplomatic standards, the whole thing has become unmoored from reality.
That is Rumsfeld's function - to take the polite fictions and drag them back to the real world. During the Afghan campaign, CNN's Larry King asked him, "Is it very important that the coalition hold?" The correct answer - the Powell-Blair-Gore-Annan answer - is, of course, "Yes". But Rummy decided to give the truthful answer: "No". He went on to explain why: "The worst thing you can do is allow a coalition to determine what your mission is." Such a man cannot be happy at the sight of the Guinean tail wagging the French rectum of the British hindquarters of the American dog.
Mainstream Muslim clerics in the Middle East who had denounced Osama bin Laden are now urging followers to rise up against the United States if it attacks Iraq, in a sign that some Islamic moderates are finding common cause with extremists.At the Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, the 1,000-year-old temple and theological guide for hundreds of millions of Sunni Muslims, a group of sheikhs called last week for Muslims around the world to declare a holy war against the United States.
''According to Islamic law, if the enemy steps on Muslims' land, jihad becomes a duty on every male and female Muslim,'' according to a statement issued by Al-Azhar Islamic Research Academy.
In Jordan, the leader of the Islamic Action Front, the country's largest and most powerful mainstream Muslim party, said last week that Muslim movements should take up arms to defend Iraq against American aggression.
''Under US occupation, no one will restrict their actions to peaceful means,'' said Sheikh Hamza Mansour, leader of the Front. ''Everyone will call for resistance by all the means they can muster.''
Islamic scholars say such statements may signal a shift toward a radical stance by clerics who traditionally have stressed moderation and nonviolence, and a Muslim public that has grown increasingly anti-American and that has participated in massive antiwar demonstrations in recent weeks from Cairo to Karachi, Pakistan, and to Jakarta, Indonesia. [...]
US officials and some world leaders have warned that a war against Iraq could increase terrorism. President Jacques Chirac of France has said that, in a war with Iraq, ''the first victors will be those who want a clash of civilizations, cultures, and religions.'' [...]
Islamic scholars in the United States who oppose calls for a religious struggle against America say the United States has succeeded where even bin Laden has failed: US policies in the Middle East have united a myriad of factions across the Muslim world to create the kind of umma, or community of believers, bin Laden has evoked.
Some days, you pick up the newspaper and you don't know whether to laugh or cry. Let's see, the prime minister of Serbia just got shot, and if that doesn't seem like a bad omen then you missed the class on World War I. Our strongest ally for war in Iraq is Bulgaria - a country I've always had a soft spot for, because it protected its Jews during World War II, but a country that's been on the losing side of every war in the last 100 years. Congress is renaming French fries "freedom fries." George Bush has managed to lose a global popularity contest to Saddam Hussein, and he's looking to build diplomatic support in Europe by flying to the Azores, a remote archipelago in the Atlantic, to persuade the persuaded leaders of Britain and Spain to stand firm with him. I guess the North Pole wasn't available. I've been to the Azores. It was with Secretary of State James Baker on, as I recall, one of his seven trips around the world to build support for Gulf War I. Mr. Baker used the Azores to refuel.Having said all that, I am glad Mr. Bush is meeting with Tony Blair. In fact, I wish he would turn over leadership on the whole Iraq crisis to him. Mr. Blair has an international vision that Mr. Bush sorely needs. "President Bush should be in charge of marshaling the power for this war," says the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen, "and Tony Blair should be in charge of the vision for which that power should be applied."
HUNDREDS of Kurds were fleeing to northern Iraq yesterday as President Saddam Hussein’s special forces began a crackdown in the key city of Kirkuk to prevent an uprising in the event of war....“They were looking for anyone that they suspected might be planning an uprising,” Haval Ravel, Mr Rafiq’s cousin, said. “When they found he had a friend staying from Kurdistan, they arrested both of them and took them away.”
At least ten young Kurdish men from the immediate neighbourhood were arrested that night. By morning the entire Kurdish quarter had been sealed off with roadblocks and the special guards were continuing their searches from house to house, arresting scores more men as they went.
Mr Ravel decided not to stick around to see what would happen when the guards reached his neighbourhood. Taking only the clothes he stood in, he left his house and found a taxi heading out of the city towards the relative safety of the Kurdish-controlled enclave in the north, out of reach of the Iraqi authorities....
All yesterday morning, battered taxis and buses streamed steadily through the Qushatapa checkpoint separating “Saddam Iraq” from the Kurdish north ...
Those fleeing have good reason to be afraid. They said the man leading the crackdown was Ali Hassan Majid, Saddam’s cousin.
To Kurds he is known simply as “Chemical Ali” for his part in the deaths of more than 100,000 Kurds between 1987 and 1989, including the gassing of 5,000 villagers in Halabja.
Sure, the Bushies might be feeling a bit rattled right now, with the old international system and the North Atlantic alliance crashing down around their ears.But you can't transfigure the world without ticking off the world.
It's not a simple task, carving new divisions in Europe, just as Europe is moving past the divisions that led to the greatest tragedies of the 20th century.
The Bush hawks never intended to give peace a chance. They intended to give pre-emption a chance.
They never wanted to merely disarm the slimy Saddam. They wanted to dislodge and dispose of him. [...]
The hawks despise the U.N. and if they'd gotten its support, they never would have been able to establish the principle that the U.S. can act wherever and whenever it wants to--a Lone Ranger, no Tontos.
Cheney, Rummy, Wolfy, etc. never wanted Colin Powell to find a diplomatic solution. They hate diplomatic solutions. That's why they gleefully junked so many international treaties, multilateral exercises and trans-Atlantic engagements.
They blame the popular Mr. Powell for persuading Bush 41 to end Desert Storm with Saddam still in power, so that the Army would not look as if it was slaughtering the retreating Iraqi Republican Guard.
Once the war stopped, American troops could not intervene to help Shiite Muslims rising up in the south, a rebellion encouraged by Bush 41. Saddam massacred the rebels.
And does she really think that Europe's problem was "divisions" rather than the totalitarian ideology adopted on one half of the divide?
Neat photos from the Gulf.
Jacques Chirac has finally landed himself the starring part as France’s heart-throb, after a lifetime during which the glamorous role in history he had always imagined for himself never quite materialised. M Chirac’s stance over Iraq has provoked fury in Britain and the US, but almost hysterical plaudits in France. “Whatever the immediate future holds, Jacques Chirac has already, by crystallising the feeling of national pride, written the page that was missing from the book of his life,” panted Le Figaro....M Chirac’s supporters ... say he is acting out of pure, lofty principle. If so, this may be a first ...
Ruthless, smooth and energetic, M Chirac was never accused of believing in anything much; as a consequence, he never achieved anything very substantial. Even his nickname, “Le Bulldozer”, suggested dogged determination rather than talent....
Perhaps these are the actions of a man who, having spent a lifetime believing very little, has belatedly discovered a cause; but more likely they are those of a politician hearing sustained, unfeigned applause for almost the first time in his life.
“The President is in ecstasy,” one aide remarked as M Chirac began collecting the bouquets and billets-doux from an adoring French media. “He’s like a man smoking a cigarette after making love.”
France, Russia and Germany issued a joint declaration Saturday saying there was no justification for a war on Iraq and calling for a meeting of foreign ministers at the U.N. Security Council to set a "realistic" timetable for Saddam Hussein to disarm.France's foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, said his country would accept a "tight timetable" for Iraqi disarmament - but not an ultimatum that would automatically lead to war if missed. But he said war appears increasingly inevitable.
"It is difficult to imagine what could stop this machine," he told France 2 television, before adding "one does not have the right to be discouraged."
Former President Clinton lost the codes to nuclear war the day the Monica Lewinsky affair broke, was MIA in the fall of 1998 when a decision was needed on the killing of Osama bin Laden, and was "too busy watching a golf match" to OK a 1996 bombing mission in Iraq, says a blockbuster new book by Clinton's former military aide. Lt. Col. Robert Patterson, who carried the nuclear "football" from May 1996 to May 1998, crosses a line no other "mil aide" has before in condemning his commander in chief in Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America's National Security. "This story had to be told." But a Clinton national security aide, William Danvers, tells us Clinton was never "unavailable for key" decisions and didn't jeopardize U.S. security. One story: The day the Lewinsky scandal broke, Clinton was to trade in his "biscuit" with the nuclear launch codes. But they were missing. "We never did get them back," says Patterson. Then there's bin Laden: Clinton ducked calls from the Situation Room to ok a Tomahawk attack in 1998, then waffled until it was too late.
"Alpha Annie" didn't survive her deployment to the Kuwaiti desert with the U.S. Marines. But at least it wasn't NBC that killed her.Alpha Annie was a chicken, one of the now famous Kuwaiti chickens that were purchased by some Marine ground combat units here to help provide a backup for the high-tech nuclear-biological-chemical (NBC) detectors each Marine company is equipped with. It was sort of a modern-day canary-in-the-mine-shaft concept.
Unfortunately, the chicken experiment didn't work. The wind and sand and dust in the barren Kuwaiti desert apparently is even harder on chickens than it is on Marines, because all of the sentinel chickens quickly died of natural causes. Sadly, Alpha Co.'s chicken was among them.
"Alpha Annie lasted the longest of any of them," reports Lt. Nathan Shull, the XO (executive officer) of Alpha Company, part of the 1st Marine Division based at Camp Pendleton. "I got to pick out our chicken and I picked the best one, and we kept her in the (sleeping) tent most of the time. But after five or six days she croaked in her sleep. I guess all the dust clogs up their sinuses or something."
The rapid disappearance of the NBC chickens gave rise to a persistent rumor.
"That's what they've been feeding us in the chow tent," says Sgt. James Hepburn, 25, who lives in Orange when he's not eating sand in Kuwait. In fact, Alpha Annie was buried in the desert with appropriate military honors.
Pakistani authorities arrested suspected al Qaida operative, Yassir Al-Jazeeri, in Pakistan's eastern Punjab capital of Lahore on Saturday, Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said.
Last fall I spent a day with church-going Christians in Sweden, a distinct minority these days.I mentioned that although many Swedes had abandoned the church, their society continued to live off the moral capital accumulated during centuries of faith. Honesty, peacefulness, generosity, prudence, justice-the Vikings were not noted for such qualities before their conversion.
"What would Sweden look like if we used up our moral capital?" one woman asked. I recommended she visit Russia, the next stop on my trip, for an answer.
There, brilliant leaders with a thoroughly materialistic outlook on life set into motion an experiment on a huge scale. They shuttered 98 of every 100 churches and killed 42,000 priests. Some cathedrals they turned into museums of atheism; village churches they converted into apartments or barns.
An irony played itself out, though, as a society committed to social and economic justice accomplished just the opposite. "With the best of intentions, we ended up creating the greatest monstrosity the world has ever seen," a shaken editor of Pravda told me. Official archives detail the deaths of at least 25 million people at the hands of their own government. A massive economy collapsed of its own incompetence.
By many standards, Russia today finds itself among the world's developing nations. Russian men have a life expectancy of 59. The birth rate has fallen so precipitously that the U.N. is forecasting Russia's population may sink to only 55 million by 2055. Seventy percent of Russian marriages end in divorce, and, according to conservative estimates, the average woman has had four abortions.
Visitors today comment on the scarcity of smiles, rudeness on the subways, the fear of crime, the quantity of alcohol consumed. Russian politicians complain about the lack of honesty and charity, and even commission foreign organizations to teach the Ten Commandments in the schools.
In St. Petersburg I attended a Christian booksellers' convention, a tiny gathering held in an abandoned factory district. The day before, I had visited the Hermitage Museum, where one stunning room displays 25 Rembrandts, including The Return of the Prodigal Son. I watched schoolchildren being ushered through the museum. They would stop at paintings of biblical scenes, which their teachers would attempt to explain.
Talking with the booksellers, I recalled the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch from Acts 8, in which Philip climbed in the chariot and asked, "Do you understand what you are reading?" That's the task of Christians in Russia, I concluded. The vocabulary already exists: in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, in the great art at the Hermitage, and in the icons prominent in every church. Someone simply needs to climb in the chariot and explain.
The photograph, a precious possession, shows gracious, dignified Holbein Street in Dresden before World War II, where the childhood friends Nora Lang, now 72, and Vanila John, 71, lived in apartments across from each other."It's nice that Dresden is being restored," Ms. John said, speaking of the many monuments in this once ruined city that are still being rebuilt, stone by stone. "But the old Dresden is gone forever — the houses, the homes and also the people whom I knew, who are gone, too."
Ms. John, who witnessed the nighttime firebombing of Dresden by the Royal Air Force on Feb. 13, 1945--an attack that killed about 35,000 people and destroyed one of the most beautiful cities in Europe — was doing what many Germans have been doing lately: talking about their own suffering in World War II.
For the last few months in fact, television has been showing endless documentaries and discussions of the air war waged by Britain and the United States against Germany in World War II. While this is not exactly a new subject in Germany, there are at least two ways in which the discussion is different from the past.
First, the emphasis in today's articles and discussions is on what Jorg Friedrich, author of a best-selling book on the Allied bombing campaign, calls "Leideform," the form of suffering inflicted on the German civilian population.
In other words, a taboo, by which Germans have remained guiltily silent, at least in public, about their experience of the horrors of war, has been suddenly and rather mysteriously broken.
Second, the new awareness of the Allied bombings and the devastation they wrought has become an important element in German opposition to the expected American war on Iraq. What people like Ms. Lang and Ms. John, both antiwar activists in Dresden, have been saying is something like this: We have direct knowledge of the gruesome effects of war and we don't want anybody else to experience what we have experienced. [...]
Moreover, in what has stirred perhaps the greatest amount of criticism, here and there in his book Mr. Friedrich uses language that until now has been reserved to describing the Holocaust. He refers to the deaths in bomb cellars caused by the carbon monoxide produced by the fires raging above as "death by gassing."
He also uses the word "crematoria" to describe the fires' incinerating effect.
Where he describes attacks on cities that had, in his view, no military significance, he calls the havoc and deaths that resulted "massacres."
Judge Advocate General Maj. Gen. Menachem Finkelstein predicted yesterday ... that the methods that might come under the [International Criminal] Court's purview include what Israel refers to as "pinpoint prevention," a euphemism for assassinating terrorists and terrorist commanders....The leading candidate for the job [of general prosecutor] is South African Justice Richard Goldstone....
Goldstone, a Jew, had recently appeared on Belgian TV and spoke in favor of putting Premier Ariel Sharon on trial for his alleged involvement in the Sabra and Chatila massacres of Beirut during Israel's occupation of the city in 1982....
Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein said Israel refuses to join the international criminal court treaty "because we have a responsibility toward the IDF, security officials and the political echelon to protect them against fabricated enforcement."
The UK will ask Greece, which currently holds the presidency of the EU, to convene a special emergency summit to discuss anti-Americanism and its impact on the Union’s projects....If it goes ahead the meeting may be crucial point in the fight for control over the future of the EU.
Supreme Court vacancies? Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., says he's been told there will soon be two, and is rearranging his staff for what is expected to be the mother of all fights on Capitol Hill to stop any Bush nomination.
Well, if fight there must be -- bring it on, baby.
Although the nation's life expectancy reached an all-time high in 2001, the Sept. 11 attacks caused a sharp rise in the homicide rate, countering a decade-long trend, federal officials reported yesterday.The lifespan for Americans rose from 77 years in 2000 to 77.2 in 2001, continuing a long-term trend of Americans living longer, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.
The increase was for both men and women and for both whites and blacks. For men, life expectancy increased from 74.3 years in 2000 to 74.4 years in 2001. For women, it increased from 79.7 years to 79.8. For whites overall, the increase was one-tenth of a year, to 77.7 years in 2001; for blacks, it was three-tenths of a year, to 72.2.
At the same time, the age-adjusted death rate hit an all-time low, dropping from 869 deaths per 100,000 people in 2000 to 855 in 2001, according to an annual report from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics.
The number of homicides, however, which had been decreasing steadily, jumped 17 percent between 2000 and 2001 -- up from 16,765 to 19,727, according to Robert N. Anderson, a statistician.
But the increase was almost entirely the result of the 2,953 homicides that the CDC officially attributed to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. If those deaths are subtracted, the age-adjusted homicide rate dropped from 5.9 per 100,000 in 2000 to 5.8 per 100,000 in 2002, officials said.
As a result, the CDC created a new subcategory for homicide -- deaths from terrorism -- so officials could monitor the homicide rate separately, Anderson said.
Freshman Kyle Wilson tipped a wide shot from P.J. Yedon into the left corner of the net 1:05 into the fourth overtime last night at Thompson Arena to give Colgate a 4-3 win over Dartmouth and a 1-0 lead in the ECAC Division I men's hockey tournament quarterfinals after the longest game in the history of either school.Senior goalie Nick Boucher broke a 36-year-old Dartmouth record for saves with 65 before Wilson's goal ended a game that lasted 121:05, easily surpassing the previous Big Green record of 94:15 set in last year's 5-4 double-overtime win against the Raiders in the first round of the ECACs.
The same two teams were involved in the only other double OT game in Dartmouth history, a 4-3 Colgate win in the 1993 playoffs.
The Big Green (17-12-1) and the Raiders (17-17-4) return to action tonight at 7. A Dartmouth victory would force a third and deciding game tomorrow night, also at 7.
Remarks by National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice at the National Prayer Breakfast (Washington Hilton Hotel, Washington, D.C., February 6, 2003)
I am greatly honored by the invitation to speak here this morning. It is a day when official Washington gathers not as Republicans or Democrats; not as conservatives or liberals; nor as Christians, Jews, or Muslims. Rather, we are gathered as a fellowship of the faithful who share a love of God and who embrace God?s will and ways - even in moments of pain and loss, like right now, when those ways seem so mysterious to us. Today, our Nation?s thoughts are with the seven brave souls taken from us five mornings ago. We pray that in losing their mortal lives they have found life eternal in His care.I approach the honor of addressing you with a deep sense of humility. I am not a member of any clergy. I am, however, the daughter, the granddaughter and, indeed, the niece, of ordained Presbyterian ministers. So in some ways this occasion feels very familiar to me.
Sundays in my family meant church. It was the center of our lives. In segregated black Birmingham of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the church was not just a place of worship; it was the social and civic center of our community.
Throughout my life I have never doubted the existence of God, but, like most people, I have had some ups and downs in practicing my faith. After I moved to California in 1981 to join the faculty at Stanford, there were a lot of years when I was not attending church regularly. I was traveling a great deal, always in a different time zone, and going to church too often fell by the wayside.
Then something happened that I will always remember. One Sunday morning I was approached at the supermarket by a man buying some things for his church picnic. He asked me, "Do you play the piano by any chance?" I said, "Yes." And he said his congregation was looking for someone to play the piano at their church. It was a small African-American church in the center of Palo Alto and I started playing there every Sunday. And I thought to myself, "My goodness, God has a long reach - all the way to a Lucky?s Supermarket in the spice section on a Sunday morning."
The only problem was, it was a Baptist church and I don?t play gospel very well, unlike our great Attorney General John Ashcroft. I play Brahms. At this church the minister would start with a song and the musicians had to pick it up. I had no idea what I was doing. So I called my mother, who had played for Baptist churches, to ask her for advice. She said, "Honey, just play in C and they?ll come back to you." And that?s true. If you play in C, the foundational key in music, people will come back. Perhaps God plays in C, and that?s why we always seem to find our way back to Him, sometimes in spite of ourselves.
Looking back on the years since I found my way back, it is hard for me to imagine my life without a strong and active faith. Faith is what gives me comfort, and humility, and hope . even through the darkest hours. Like many people - here and abroad - I have turned to God and prayer more and more this past year and a half, including this past Saturday morning. Terror and tragedy have made us more aware of our vulnerability and our own mortality. We are living through a time of testing and consequence - and praying that our wisdom and will are equal to the work before us. And it is at times like these that we are reminded of a paradox, that it is a privilege to struggle. A privilege to struggle for what is right and true. A privilege to struggle for freedom over tyranny. A privilege, even, to struggle with the most difficult and profound moral choices.
American slaves used to sing, "Nobody knows the trouble I?ve seen - Glory Hallelujah!" Growing up, I would often wonder at the seeming contradiction contained in this line. But as I grew older, I came to learn that there is no contradiction at all.
I believe this same message is found in the Bible in Romans 5, where we are told to "rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,and hope does not disappoint us, because God?s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us."
For me, this message has two lessons.
First, there is the lesson that only through struggle do we realize the depths of our resilience and understand that the hardest of blows can be survived and overcome. Too often when all is well, we slip into the false joy and satisfaction of the material and a complacent pride and faith in ourselves. Yet it is through struggle that we find redemption and self-knowledge. In this sense it is a privilege to struggle because it frees one from the idea that the human spirit is fragile, like a house of cards, or that human strength is fleeting.
We see this theme in illustrated in sacred texts the world over. In the Book of Job, God tests Job?s faith by taking from him everything that he cherishes-his wealth, his health, and his family. Early in his trials, one of Job?s friends counsels him to be patient, saying, "Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth; therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole ... In famine he shall redeem thee from death; and in war from the power of the sword ... And thou shalt know that thy tabernacle shall be in peace ..." In the end, Job?s sufferings strengthen his faith and, we are told, he is rewarded with "twice as much as he had before" and he lived "a hundred and forty years" until he was "old and full of days." We learn in times of personal struggle - the loss of a loved one, illness, or turmoil - that there is a peace that passeth understanding. When our intellect is unequal to the task - the spirit takes over, finding peace in
the midst of pain is the true fulfillment of one?s humanity.Struggle doesn?t just strengthen us to survive hard times - it is also the key foundation for true optimism and accomplishment. Indeed, personal achievement without struggle somehow feels incomplete and hollow. It is true too for human kind - because nothing of lasting value has ever been achieved without sacrifice.
There is a second, more important, lesson to be learned from struggle and suffering is that we can use the strength it gives us for the good of others. Nothing good is born of personal struggle if it is used to fuel one ?s sense of entitlement, or superiority to those who we perceive to have struggled less than we. Everyone in this room has been blessed, and I am sure we all know that it is dangerous to think about the hand that one has been dealt relative to others if it ends in questioning why someone else has more. It is, on the other hand, sobering and humbling to think about one?s blessings and to ask why you have been given so much when others have so little.
Our goal must not be to get through a struggle so that others can congratulate us on our resilience, nor is it to dwell on struggle as a badge of honor.
Perhaps this is why in describing his personal struggle, the Apostle Paul felt it necessary to say to the Philippians, "Forgetting those things that are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead . I press toward the goal for the price of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus." We find a similar idea in the Talmud, which says "one should only pray in a house that has windows" - in order that we may remember the outside world. And in the Hadith, we find Muhammad saying: "No one of you is a believer
until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself."But to direct the energies from our struggles toward the good of others, we must first let go of the pain, and the bad memories, and the sense of unfairness-of "Why me?" - that inevitably accompany deep personal turmoil.
I believe this lesson applies not only to individuals, but to nations. America emerged from the losses of September 11th as a nation that is not only stronger, but hopefully better and more generous. Tragedy made us appreciate our freedom more - and more conscious of the fact that God gives all people, everywhere, the right to be free. It made us more thankful for our own prosperity, for life, and health - and more aware that all people, everywhere deserve the opportunity to build a better future.
It prompted us to cultivate what the President has called "the habit of service" to others so that the "gathering momentum of millions of acts of kindness" may bring hope to people in desperate need. And perhaps most importantly, September 11th reminded us of our heritage as a tolerant nation; one that welcomes people of all faiths, or no faith at all.
Now, as our Nation once again deals with great loss, with fears and uncertainties, let us once again recommit ourselves to those values which define us. Let us renew our quest for understanding the natural world and all the heavens which God has made. Let us renew our commitment to standing for life, and liberty, and peace for all people. Let us renew our commitment to working with all nations to conquer want, and hunger, and disease in every corner of the globe. Let us accept our responsibility to defend the freedom which we are so privileged to enjoy.
If terror and tragedy spur us to rediscover and strengthen these commitments, then we can truly say that some good has come from great loss. And in all the trials that may lie ahead, we will carry these commitments close to our heart so we may leave a better world for those who follow. This is our prayer for our Nation and our people. This is our prayer for all Nations and all peoples. Lord, hear our prayer.
MORE:
Condoleezza Rice's Secret Weapon: How our National Security Adviser finds the strength to defend the free world. (B. Denise Hawkins, September/October 2002, Christian Reader)
It's not the large size of boas that interests Auburn University herpetology graduate student Scott Boback. It's the smaller size of the boas found on certain Central American islands. In the Snake Cayes, a group of small islands just off the coast of Belize, boas grow to only a fraction of the size of their mainland relatives."You have snakes on the islands that are completely different in size," Boback told the National Geographic Channel. "The mainland snakes are at least twice as long and four or five times as heavy [as those on the islands]." The island snakes are no small fry, averaging some six feet (1.8 meters) in length, but their mainland relatives can grow up to 12 feet (3.6 meters) long or more. Why the discrepancy? No one knows, but Scott Boback hopes to find out. If he can, he might just shed some light on the evolution not only of reptiles-but many other island-dwelling animals as well.
Boback's plan requires research subjects, willing or otherwise. That means the arduous collection of a lot of boa constrictors-specifically females. With his professor, Craig Guyer, and several research assistants, Boback has already gathered 16 female boas from both the islands and the mainland and brought them back to his research lab in Auburn, Alabama, to carefully watch them give birth.
It's the lab-reared generation of snakes that may help Boback to solve this "nature versus nurture" dilemma. He plans to study the offspring carefully to determine whether varying diets or genetics lie behind the differences in island and mainland boa constrictors. By feeding snakes from both locations identical food, raising them in the same environment, and carefully charting their growth, Boback hopes to learn more about the factors determining their differing sizes.
"The questions that I'm asking are critically important to understanding snake biology and evolution in general," he explained.
A thousand years ago, Turkish warriors were the last of the nomad horsemen who streamed from Asia to conquer Europe. The riders were a mixed lot. Each band had a leader and a common language. Legend had it that one leader, Osman, led Turkish-speaking warriors, who eventually became the Ottomans.The Ottomans went to Anatolia, essentially today's Turkey, on the frontier of the Byzantine Empire. Often they would cross the water to Europe, paid to fight for Christian rulers. Later, acting for themselves, they occupied the Balkans. In 1453, they captured Constantinople, now Istanbul, and with it the remains of the Byzantine Empire. At their zenith, the Ottoman armies fought their way to the gates of Vienna.
The Turks prospered on their captured wealth, so in the 19th century, when they stopped expanding, they started to retreat. The decline opened up enticing prospects for Europe's great powers, which expected to annex strategically important territories. The Ottoman Empire had settled the Balkans and the Middle East; these were the land bridges that joined Europe, Asia and Africa. But the European powers were surprised when the indigenous European subjects of the empire - including Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria - won independence for themselves.
After World War I, Britain and France, by defeating the Ottoman Empire, won control of the Arab lands, and with it, a tantalizing bauble: the likelihood that vast deposits of oil might be found there.
The Europeans and their American business partners hoped to establish stable and friendly regimes. After they redrew the borders in the early 1920's, Britain and France introduced a state system, and sought to supply political guidance too. But the system did not endure. Instead, the area grew more turbulent and unsettled.
Looking back, it is clear that many characteristics of the Middle East, some of which President Bush would like to change, were shaped by the five centuries of Ottoman rule. The United States may preach and practice secular politics, but it would have difficulty imposing secularism on the Middle East. It was taught to put religion first by its Turkish rulers, which defined the empire as a Muslim country, not a national one. The importance of religion in the Middle East is a legacy of the sultans who were also caliphs.
The empire also encouraged its perhaps two dozen ethnic and national groups to maintain their separate identities. It is no wonder that they are constantly feuding today - the Ottoman ghosts never far away.
Al-Sayyed Mortada, leader of the Pakistani Al-Insaf Movement, said Wednesday, March 12, that bin Laden has been arrested by U.S and Pakistani joint forces and that Washington would announce his capture on March 17 or 18 after unleashing war on Iraq....Pakistani political sources expected Washington to make public bin Laden’s arrest on the eve of its looming war on Iraq with claims he was getting biological weapons from Iraq in a bid to justify the war....
On Thursday, March 6, the White House refused to confirm reports that bin Laden might be arrested soon by U.S. and Pakistani intelligence authorities.
"I'm not in the position to confirm anything about that," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
Pakistani officials also dismissed reports of the arrest of Bin Laden as groundless.
But a senior Pakistani official said that there are some very "important pieces of information with us. If the information is accurate, then he (Bin Laden) cannot hide for long," the official said, referring to Sheikh Mohammed's revelations.
My wife and I do not believe in God.In our last posting, in Brussels among the nominally catholic Belgians, unbelief was not a problem.
The Bush administration hums to the sound of prayer. Prayer meetings take place day and night.
Before that in London it was not remotely an issue. With the sole exception of one friend who is an evangelical Christian, I don't recall a single conversation with anyone about religious matters in the years I lived and worked in the capital.
Our house in London was right next to a church. We talked to the tiny congregation about the weather, about the need to prune the rose bushes and mend the fence. But we never talked about God.
How different it is on this side of the Atlantic. The early settlers came here in part to practise their faiths as they saw fit.
Since then the right to trumpet your religious affiliations - loud and clear - has been part of the warp and weft of American life.
And I am not talking about the Bible Belt - or about the loopy folk who live in log cabins in Idaho and Oregon and worry that the government is poisoning their water.
I am talking about Mr and Mrs Average in Normaltown, USA.
Mr and Mrs Average share an uncomplicated faith with its roots in the puritanism of their forebears.
According to that faith there is such a thing as heaven - 86% of Americans, we are told by the pollsters, believe in heaven.
But much more striking to me, and much more pertinent to current world events, is the fact that 76% or three out of four people you meet on any American street believe in hell and the existence of Satan.
They believe that the devil is out to get you. That evil is a force in the world - a force to be engaged in battle. [...]
Having made the decision to fight the good fight - and have no doubt about it President Bush has made that decision - the nagging doubts, the rational fears, the worldly misgivings - all those things felt so strongly by post-religious Europeans - can be set aside.
President Bush looks as tired as Prime Minister Blair sometimes, but never as worried.
Both are religious men but the simple American faith - with heaven and hell, good and evil and right and wrong - appears rather better suited to wartime conditions.
DARK-LANDWherein Wesley stood
up from his father's grave,
summoned familiar dust
for strange salvation:
whereto England rous'd,
ignorant, her inane
Midas-like hunger: smoke
engrossed, cloud-encumbered,
a spectral people
raking among the ash;
its freedom a lost haul
of entailed riches.
Evil is not good's absence but gravity's
everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains
inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.
The Times titled its news report "Bombing Kills An American And 20 Others In Philippines." The first seven paragraphs concerned Hyde, who had lived and worked in the Philippines since 1978, and another American, Barbara Stevens, who had been "slightly wounded" in the attack....On the next day (March 5), another American Baptist, 14-year-old Abigail Litle, was among 16 people killed by a suicide bomber on a bus in Haifa, Israel. The story and photo caption in the March 6 Times, tucked at the bottom corner of page 1, made no mention of Abigail's name....
Less than 5 percent of Palestinian casualties have been female, and even fewer have been pregnant mothers. Yet when one is killed — as happened on March 2 — the Times takes care to let its readers know: in news reports on March 3 (page 6), March 4 (page 1), March 5 (page 3), and March 9. Readers would be forgiven for assuming that Israel killed pregnant mothers every day, but these stories all refer to the same unnamed woman....
This was an accidental death in the course of a legitimate counterterrorist action. But a number of pregnant Israeli mothers were killed deliberately. If their deaths were reported at all, the Times and other media have referred to them merely as "Israelis" or as "settlers." For example, when a pregnant Israeli, her infant child, and other family members were attacked at their family Passover meal at Elon Moreh on March 28, 2002, the only coverage the Times provided was the following sentence buried in an article about Yasser Arafat: "Even as Mr. Arafat made his pledge, a Palestinian gunmen shot and killed four Israelis in a Jewish settlement near the West Bank city of Nablus." No mention of the seven children left orphaned in that attack.
When the Times has sympathetically profiled women who have died in this conflict, it has more often been the suicide bombers than their Israeli victims. Wada Idris — who killed or wounded 150 innocent civilians on Jerusalem's Jaffa Road on January 27, 2002 — had "chestnut hair curling past her shoulders"; she "raised doves and adored children," James Bennet reported in a front-page article for the Times....
The Times has consistently underplayed Arafat's role in orchestrating the ongoing terror against Israel. It has failed to report how the al-Aqsa Brigades, the militia Arafat set up after launching the Intifada, has been responsible for as many Israeli civilian deaths as Hamas. Even when the al-Aqsa Brigades proudly claims responsibility for killing a mother, her 5- and 4-year-old sons, and two other Israelis at a Kibbutz (as it did on November 10 of last year, posting a photo of the perpetrator on it website), a front-page Times report on December 17, 2002, described the gunman merely as "mysterious" ...
For ten years now, ever since Arafat returned to Gaza, moderate Palestinians — outside the earshot of the dozen different security forces Arafat has set up to safeguard his rule — have long whispered to those Western reporters who would listen that they should help to expose the corrupt, dictatorial, and duplicitous ways of Arafat and his clique. Few reporters have done so....
The distortions of the media ... set back the day when there might be peace and coexistence between Israeli and Palestinian.
There are those who are rebels against the light;
they know not its ways;
they abide not in its paths.
When there is no light the murderer rises,
to kill the poor and needy.
The eye of the adulterer watches for the twilight;
he says, "No eye will see me."
In the night the thief roams about,
and he puts a mask over his face;
in the dark he breaks into houses.
By day they shut themselves in;
none of them know the light. (Job 24:14-16)
The symbolic message rock resting near the flagpoles at West Potomac High School has assumed what the students who recently painted it called a ``pro-war" stance. On Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, 10 upperclassmen at the school used paint brushes, rollers and the illumination of car headlights to paint a U.S. flag and pro-war messages on the large oval rock.
The pathway to post-Saddam Iraq becomes daily less misty. Before the fighting starts, we should examine how Iraq links to a series of other, more structurally momentous changes, in Britain, in Europe especially and within the global political order. Large as the military action looms, Iraq may not be the most important game afoot.It wasn't during the scratchy Commons debate but at the prime minister's February 18 press conference when we saw that the die was cast. The body language was eloquent. Broadcast snippets showed a prime minister pushing forward, boats burning behind him, choices made. Assisted by President Chirac's swansong Gaullism, Blair has made the decision that every prime minister since the second world war has sought to avoid; and his decision to stand with America is for positive reasons. Since then, he has hit his stride for the first time since the Iraq crisis burst, moving to the human rights argument, which matters to him most. Can he now seize - does he yet see - the greatest opportunities of his prime ministership opening before him? [...]
If one interpretation of the French stand on the unprecedented Turkish article IV request for help was that it was intended to kill off Nato so that military functions transfer to the EU - the consistent aim, openly at and since Nice in 2000 - it was unnecessary and too late. This was death by many knives: a murder on the Orient Express.
But the biggest miscalculations of the past few weeks have been about the EU. The EU constitutional convention, as now drafted, is straightforwardly federal. Not a word of what the British and other sceptics said was entertained. When Giscard d'Estaing presented the clauses, he did so with a brutal frankness: this is the future and those who do not like it are free to leave. The assumption is that this is a deadly threat - to be cast out into the cold. But is it? For decades there have been two visions of Europe, but only one to the fore.
The publication of the "letter of eight" in support of US action in Iraq and the statement of the eastern European "Vilnius 10" have together suddenly precipitated the colours of that other European vision. It is inclined to free-market philosophy, is English-speaking and not hostile to America. At the sour EU special summit, Chirac's apparently imprudent castigation of the eastern European applicants, with the thinly veiled threat of punishment for their support of the US, served only to precipitate "new Europe" further. Or was it imprudent? There are those who think that Chirac had a devious purpose: to sink enlargement, the British foil to the federal imperative.
Put now to Giscard's choice, for the first time in decades it becomes realistic to think that the British, the Dutch, Iberians, Scandinavians, current applicants - and who else? - may decline the federal invitation and prefer to become Europeans marching to a different drum. This other Europe contains the more dynamic European economies, would go with the grain of expressed public desires, and it is Blair's to lead.
Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said yesterday he's more worried about global warming than war."The environment - that is a creeping danger. I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict," the 74-year-old Swede told MTV. [...]
"To me, the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war," Blix added.
MORE: Between Iraq and a Hard Place (MTV, 3/14/2003)
The Iraqis ... tell me that these are not weapons of mass destruction, they are weapons of self-destruction. I agree.
To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war. We will have regional conflicts and use of force, but world conflicts I do not believe will happen any longer. But the environment, that is a creeping danger. I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict....I don't think there's any reason for a rant of hysteria [about weapons of mass destruction], no.
We continue to work in an optimistic mood, but it may also be that the work finishes a week from now.
Tony Blair has asked the Queen not to travel out of the country in the middle of the coming week. The British "constitution" requires him to get her permission before taking the nation to war. Looks like the liberation begins on or about Wednesday.
A spokesman for Cleveland Democrat Dennis Kucinich, who recently announced his support for a woman's right to choose abortion, said he could not vote for the Senate version if it comes before the House."The bill fails to protect the constitutional right of women and does not provide protections for the health of the mother," said his aide, Doug Gordon.
Germany, one of the strongest opponents of a war in Iraq, is willing to provide financial aid and up to 1,000 soldiers for peace missions and reconstruction work after a possible conflict, a magazine said on Saturday.Germany has so far avoided making clear statements about humanitarian support after a war, saying it believes in a peaceful solution and such discussion would encourage the belief that war had already been decided on.
Der Spiegel news weekly said the government was discussing options for an aid programme by a publicly-owned reconstruction bank and for sending up to 1,000 troops to the region as part of a peace mission.
The Foreign Ministry said it would not comment on the report, but referred to an interview given by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to ARD television on Friday.
Asked what Germany was prepared to do after a war, Schroeder said: "Within the framework of the United Nations, it will always be possible talk with Germany. The United Nations will always be able to count on Germany." He did not elaborate.
In an advance of its report, Spiegel quoted a cabinet member as saying that, if the U.N. sought support from Berlin after a war, Germany could hardly refuse it.
Father Neuhaus: [...] As St. Thomas Aquinas and other teachers of the just war tradition make clear, war may sometimes be a moral duty in order to overturn injustice and protect the innocent. The just cause in this case is the disarmament of Iraq, a cause consistently affirmed by the Holy Father and reinforced by 17 resolutions of the Security Council.Whether that cause can be vindicated without resort to military force, and whether it would be wiser to wait and see what Iraq might do over a period of months or years, are matters of prudential judgment beyond the competence of religious authority.
In just war doctrine, the Church sets forth the principles which it is the responsibility of government leaders to apply to specific cases -- see Catechism No. 2309.
Saddam Hussein has for 11 years successfully defied international authority. He has used and, it appears, presently possesses and is set upon further developing weapons of mass destruction, and he has publicly stated his support for the Sept. 11 attack and other terrorist actions.
In the judgment of the U.S. and many other countries, he poses a grave and imminent threat to America, world peace and the lives of innumerable innocents. If that judgment is correct, the use of military force to remove that threat, in the absence of plausible alternatives, is both justified and necessary.
Heads of government who are convinced of the correctness of that judgment would be criminally negligent and in violation of their solemn oath to protect their people if they did not act to remove such a threat.
As a theologian and moralist, I have no special competence to assess the threat posed by Iraq. On the basis of available evidence and my considered confidence in those responsible for making the pertinent decisions, I am inclined to believe and I earnestly pray that they will do the right thing.
Q: Strong objections have been raised to the concept of preventive or pre-emptive uses of military force to overthrow threatening regimes or to deal with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Is the use of pre-emptive force justified according to just war principles?
Father Neuhaus: Frequent reference to preventive or pre-emptive use of military force, and even to "wars of choice," have only confused the present discussion.
War, if it is just, is not an option chosen but a duty imposed. In the present circumstance, military action against Iraq by a coalition of the willing is in response to Iraq's aggression; first against Kuwait, then in defiance of the terms of surrender demanding its disarmament, then in support of, if not direct participation in, acts of terrorism.
This is joined to its brutal aggression against its own citizens, and its possession of weapons of mass destruction which it can use or permit others to use for further aggression.
To wait until the worst happens is to wait too long, and leaders guilty of such negligence would rightly be held morally accountable.
In the Catholic tradition there is, in fact, a considerable literature relevant to these questions. Augustine, Aquinas, Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suarez, for example, all wrote on prudential action in the face of aggressive threats. The absence of reference to such recognized authorities in the current discussion among Catholics is striking.
Art That Transfigures Science (ALAN LIGHTMAN, March 15, 2003, NY Times)
In Joseph Wright of Derby's painting "An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump," dated 1768, we see a stunning demonstration that air is vital for life. A white cockatoo has been taken from its cage and placed in a covered glass jar, and the air has just been pumped out by levers and pistons. Deprived of oxygen, the beautiful bird languishes at the bottom of its new cage, listlessly stretching one wing, dead within seconds if air is not let back into its container.In the dimly lighted room, several people stare at the airless container in hypnotized fascination. But there are other reactions as well. A small girl looks up at the bird with pity and dread; another young woman is so overwhelmed that she covers her eyes. A man in a beige jacket points his finger at the bird as if explaining the principles of science involved. Another observer has taken out his watch to time the experiment. The largest figure of all, the lecturer, holds his left hand poised on the cap of the jar, able at any moment to let the precious air back in and thus restore life to the bird. Taken together, the spectators' faces reveal the full range of attitudes about science.
Wright's painting, to my mind, is a magnificent synthesis of science and art. Moreover, it emerged from a long tradition of fusing the two. Lucretius's ancient poem "De Rerum Natura" is a beautiful and sensuous exposition of the theory of atoms. Fontenelle's 17th-century book "Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds" imagines a series of romantic meetings between a lady and gentleman, during which he explains the new science of Copernicus and Descartes. Wright himself kept well abreast of new developments in science. He was a member of the Lunar Society, a group of English scientists, artists and philosophers who met monthly on the Monday nearest the full moon. Later artists inspired by science included Goethe, Mary Shelley, Thomas Eakins, H. G. Wells, Karel Capek, Bertolt Brecht.
The longstanding love affair between scientists and artists continues, as exemplified by the recent films "A Beautiful Mind" and "Pi," the plays "Arcadia" by Tom Stoppard and "Copenhagen" by Michael Frayn, the novels "The Gold Bug Variations" by Richard Powers and "The Mind-Body Problem" by Rebecca Goldstein, and the various exhibitions based on the double helix now in New York. Art has always wrestled with emerging ideas. Science has always been a rich source for those ideas. As Salman Rushdie said to an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in late 1993, "Many of us writers of my generation have felt that in many ways the cutting edge of the new is to be found in the sciences."
So what exactly does science have to offer the arts? What are the particular ways in which science provokes us, inspires us and examines who we are?
In the bureaucratic reshuffling over domestic security, Attorney General John Ashcroft came out a winner. Mr. Ashcroft grabbed control of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and with it an issue dear to his conservative agenda, guns. And he shucked responsibility for two areas of law enforcement that had brought ridicule to the Justice Department, the color-coded threat alert system and immigration.In recent months, Mr. Ashcroft, once regarded as a peripheral, even clumsy, player in the Bush administration, has not only honed his skills as a bureaucratic infighter, he has also patched his tenuous relations with President Bush, who told Mr. Ashcroft last month that he was doing "a fabulous job."
With the addition of nearly 5,000 law enforcement officials from the firearms bureau, Mr. Ashcroft has again expanded the policing authority of the Justice Department, a hallmark of his tenure as attorney general. And with the fight against terrorism as his soapbox, he has pushed the powers of federal law enforcement in directions few thought possible before the Sept. 11 attacks. His reach extends not only to
counterterrorism, but also to issues like the death penalty and gun policy, which he attacks with equal aggressiveness. Despite a years-long effort as a senator from Missouri to shrink government, Mr. Ashcroft has significantly broadened the reach of the attorney general, legal scholars and law enforcement officials agree.All of which has left his many critics increasingly worried.
Even some of his conservative peers complain that Mr. Ashcroft may have grown too powerful. To his critics, Mr. Ashcroft is a Big Brother figure: an attorney general whose expanding scope has allowed the Justice Department to use wiretaps, backroom decisions, and an expanded street presence to spy on ordinary Americans, read their e-mail messages, or monitor their library checkouts, all in the name of fighting terrorism. And the department's consideration of proposals that could give it still greater, secret counterterrorism authority has provoked a fresh round of concerns. [...]
Mr. Ashcroft has managed to blunt Congressional criticism through the carefully timed announcements of one major terrorist arrest after another. And he has also emerged as a useful political foil for President Bush.
While the president has visited mosques to deliver a message of respect for Muslims, for instance, it was left to Mr. Ashcroft to orchestrate an unpopular program to register Middle Eastern immigrants. And after Mr. Bush last year announced that he wanted to enlist workers for a terrorist "tips" program, Mr. Ashcroft was dispatched to Capitol Hill to defend the unpopular idea.
"I think Ashcroft understands that he's a lightning rod for this administration," said a Justice Department official close to the attorney general who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "He's at the center of so many different policies - terrorism, affirmative action, the death penalty - and he's no stranger to controversy. He's been living it all his life." [...]
Mr. Ashcroft is an unlikely figure to lead the Justice Department's expansion: a politician who sharply attacked big government and privacy intrusions and fought for states' rights is now orchestrating one of the most sweeping federal expansions in law enforcement history.
Two years after he was confirmed by the slimmest margin for an attorney general in 75 years, Mr. Ashcroft has not only survived that bruising fight and a malaise that seemed to follow it, but is drawing comparisons to Robert F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt's attorney general, Francis Biddle, in the muscle and ambition he has brought to the job - for better or worse.
"For Ashcroft, the evils are pervasive," said Nancy Baker, a professor at New Mexico State University who wrote a history of the attorney general's office. "The current attorney general sees himself and the Justice Department as engaged in a systemwide struggle between good and evil, and that therefore requires very aggressive and comprehensive countermeasures." [...]
"John Ashcroft has clearly abused his power," said Laura W. Murphy, director of the A.C.L.U.'s Washington office. "He is supposed to be the chief enforcer of the Constitution for the executive branch, but he has given lip service to constitutional rights and has systematically eroded free speech rights, privacy rights and due process rights, in the context of fighting the war on terrorism."
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder wrenched his government to the right yesterday by unveiling of his long-awaited plan to revive the sluggish Germany economy.His televised speech to parliament had been keenly awaited, and was built up as a turning point in the history of post-war Germany.
Last night he seemed to have succeeded in making his political lurch without provoking a revolt in his Social Democratic party or an open declaration of war by the trade unions.
But it was less clear whether the plan will succeed in its main economic aim.
Economists reacted cautiously, some saying the measures he announced were insufficiently bold. [...]
The main points
The package set out by the chancellor will include:
* A system of subsidised loans for local authorities and homeowners worth EUR15bn · A relaxation of the rules protecting workers from being laid off* A shortening of the 32-month period during which the jobless are entitled to full unemployment benefits - down to a maximum of 18 months for the over-55s, and 12 months for others
* A cut in the unemployment support that replaces unemployment benefit and currently amounts to 57% of a worker's previous salary
* Measures to encourage competition in the health service by allowing health insurers to make contracts with doctors directly
Concern that the arts - and by association the world at large - are being overrun with graphic sexuality is as old as communication itself. Now, at last, it's finally happened. Sex is everywhere. Everyone's at it. The bad news is it looks awful and it's as erotic as old roadkill in the rain (if you're lucky). Suddenly art is making pornography look good. Television, as is customary, must take the brunt of the blame. Nine in the evening is now less of a watershed than a last-chance saloon in which one may swill down a final glass of decency before the nightly carousel of reality-styled lust begins again. Even prior to that, no one's safety can be guaranteed. Lest we forget, Mark Fowler's naked and post-coital torso - like some ghastly celestial event - was clearly visible much earlier in the evening at one point last year. But more of Mark later (so to speak).The grim sex trend has permeated the visual arts to a greater degree than ever before - if you think TV sex is bad then you should keep well clear of the cinema - and now even those on the front line are struggling to keep pace. The Actors Centre in London is running a course this month called Getting Intimate, devoted to "helping young actors negotiate the tricky subject of sex scenes and 'gratuitous exposure'". Stranger still, the course is co-hosted by Helen Baxendale.
Quite why an actress that one associates with acerbic condescension more than overt sexuality should be involved in such a venture merits some investigation. A call to the Actors Centre established that she is an old theatre colleague of the new director, Matthew Lloyd, which kind of explains things. Mr Lloyd wasn't available but they were kind enough to say "we try and keep up with new trends" and described the course in the following terms: "The explicit sex scene is now a staple of film, TV drama and contemporary theatre but, if it goes wrong, the scope for awkwardness and embarrassment is huge and the results can be weak drama and truthless acting. Keeping most of our clothes on, we will look at a range of practical examples that raise questions about nudity, naturalism, dramatic justification and gratuitous exposure."
All very handy for the thesps, but what about those of us who must bear witness? The idea that bad sex is better than no sex at all is as bogus in art as it is in life: as a viewer, it can be even worse.
The writer Howard Fast, who has died aged 88, was the last surviving American recipient of the Stalin peace prize. His first novel appeared at the height of the depression, and he was still publishing bestsellers in the 1980s.Fast was a literary phenomenon of a recognisable American kind. Untouched by the ugly racism of Jack London, and certainly more skilled at the delineation of character and the crafting of a readable plot than Upton Sinclair, he was the champion of the progressive novel in the United States.
For a decade after the second world war, he moved in the upper strata of inter- national anti-fascism and communist propaganda. His historical novels, which ranged from portraits of slave revolts in antiquity, as with Spartacus (1953), to the American revolution, won him a broad readership across the world. In the Soviet Union, his print runs were substantial.
Having refused to cooperate with the House un-American activities committee and provide records of the joint anti-fascist refugee committee, he was convicted of contempt of Congress in 1950, and served three months in jail - it was in effect a congressional imprimatur of his leftwing credentials and integrity. It also meant that, overnight, his books became unpublishable. He was blacklisted. Angus Cameron (obituary, November 30 2002), the editor-in-chief at his publishers, Little Brown, came under fire in 1951 for publishing avowed or secret communist authors, and was forced to resign.
Fast was driven to publishing his own books - including the bestselling Spartacus - until he broke with the American Communist party, which he had joined in 1943. Despite his misgivings about the party, he regarded the rising tide of McCarthyism as a more immediate threat to American liberties. He ran for Congress on the American Labour party ticket in 1952, after it had come under the CP's covert control. He wrote a eulogy of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, who had been executed during the 1920s red scare. The party had played a key role in the worldwide campaign against the American legal system.
For this and other services, Fast was awarded the Stalin peace prize in 1954. He was the one truly popular American writer to remain loyal to the Communist party until 1956, when Khrushchev's so-called "secret speech" on Stalin's crimes, and the Red army's crushing of the Hungarian revolution, led three-quarters of the membership of the American Communist party to quit. [...]
He seldom wrote autobiographically; the nearest he came to a self-portrait was in Citizen Tom Paine. For Paine, the greatest revolutionary propagandist of the 18th century, the likely fate of the American revolution of 1776, as well as of the French of 1789, was betrayal and defeat. Paine knew the vicious attacks of enemies in America and abandonment by his friends, as well as persecution and imprisonment in France under the Jacobins.
And, indeed, Fast's novel is a portrait of the writer as revolutionary. It is also a singularly harsh portrayal of the nature of revolution itself, and of the terrible fate awaiting its creators; it belongs on the same shelf as Arthur Koestler's novel of the fate of an old Bolshevik, Darkness At Noon (1940). [...]
It was when Fast learned that the Soviet writer Boris Polovoy had lied to him about the whereabouts of an admired Jewish writer (who had, in fact, been shot), and when he learned that Alexander Fadeyev had lied to Mary McCarthy in 1949 about other "silent" Soviet writers, that Fast saw the moral bankruptcy that was international communism's final legacy. Others, like Dos Passos, had seen it earlier; some never saw it at all. For Fast, Khrushchev's 1956 speech was a final cherry on the cake, when he finally felt able to say much of what he had felt.
A classified State Department report expresses doubt that installing a new regime in Iraq will foster the spread of democracy in the Middle East, a claim President Bush has made in trying to build support for a war, according to intelligence officials familiar with the document.The report exposes significant divisions within the Bush administration over the so-called democratic domino theory, one of the arguments that underpins the case for invading Iraq.
The report, which has been distributed to a small group of top government officials but not publicly disclosed, says that daunting economic and social problems are likely to undermine basic stability in the region for years, let alone prospects for democratic reform.
Even if some version of democracy took root - an event the report casts as unlikely - anti-American sentiment is so pervasive that elections in the short term could lead to the rise of Islamic-controlled governments hostile to the United States.
"Liberal democracy would be difficult to achieve," says one passage of the report, according to an intelligence official who agreed to read portions of it to The Times.
"Electoral democracy, were it to emerge, could well be subject to exploitation by anti-American elements."
The thrust of the document, the source said, "is that this idea that you're going to transform the Middle East and fundamentally alter its trajectory is not credible."
Even the document's title appears to dismiss the administration argument. The report is labeled "Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes."
The report was produced by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the in-house analytical arm. [...]
The report concludes that "political changes conducive to broader and enduring stability throughout the region will be difficult to achieve for a very long time."
Middle East experts said there are other factors working against democratic reform, including a culture that values community and to some extent conformity over individual rights.
"I don't accept the view that the fall of Saddam Hussein is going to prompt quick or even discernible movement toward democratization of the Arab states," said Philip C. Wilcox, director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and a former top State Department official. "Those countries are held back not by the presence of vicious authoritarian regimes in Baghdad but by a lot of other reasons."
Bush has responded to such assessments by assailing the "soft bigotry of low expectations."
MORE:
-ESSAY: Tales from the Bazaar: As individuals, few American diplomats have been as anonymous as the members of the group known as Arabists. And yet as a group, no cadre of diplomats has aroused more suspicion than the Arab experts have. Arabists are frequently accused of romanticism, of having "gone native"--charges brought with a special vehemence as a result of the recent Gulf War and the events leading up to it. Who are the Arabists? Where did they come from? Do they deserve our confidence? (Robert D. Kaplan, August 1992, Atlantic Monthly)
-ESSAY: Democracy by America (Daniel Drezner, 3/12/02, New Republic)
-It's Democracy, Like It or Not (TODD S. PURDUM, March 9, 2003, NY Times)
For more than two centuries, no nation on earth has preached the healing powers of democracy more consistently than the United States. H. L. Mencken summed up the native faith as "the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."Now President Bush pledges that by ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein, "free people will set the course of history, and free people will keep the peace of the world." [...]
Yet for most of the 19th century, the United States bought or won territory from foreign powers in war, avoided alliances and stood alone. And even though the United States helped found the United Nations and the post-World War II international security framework, it has faced varying degrees of anti-Americanism and charges of hypocrisy.
"It's something much deeper now," said James Chace, a professor of government and public law at Bard College. "What's happening is that the manner in which this administration has largely talked about the world, the kind of general arrogance and bullying tone, just reinforces the sense that we are now seen, and I think rightly, as an imperial power."
"The question," he added, "is whether it will be seen as relatively benevolent, or not."
Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland, said: "It is not about not wanting democracy. I think that we underestimate the extent to which other priorities overtake democracy in our foreign policy."
In a famous speech in 1982 outlining his foreign policy to the British Parliament, Ronald Reagan declared, "The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructures of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means."
But President Reagan often settled for less. The first President Bush protested when a military coup overthrew the democratically elected leader of Haiti, the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but was far less exercised around the same time when the Algerian Army canceled the second round of elections that seemed certain to put an Islamic fundamentalist regime in power.
"The romance of democracy is that somehow the results will come out the way you want, but everything we know about democracy is that the result comes out the way the people want," said John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University. "It's a very creaky instrument."
Robert D. Kaplan, a foreign policy expert and author who has twice briefed President Bush, contends that there is no double standard to American ambitions abroad. He argues that the United States should promote democratic change where it can, but not do so irresponsibly in places unready to handle it, where the result could unleash anti-democratic forces.
"Anyone can hold an election," he said, "but building real democratic institutions - police, judges, a constitution - is much harder." He added: "There will always be places where the alternatives are bad, and without hypocrisy you will improve human rights dramatically by going for a more liberal-minded dictator over a Stalinist one. If Saddam were to be replaced tomorrow by an Iraqi general along the lines of Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, real changes would occur."
President Bush's two bold steps Friday -- announcing a last-ditch summit with Britain and Spain and pledging to soon release the "road map" for a final Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement -- in effect signal the breakdown of diplomacy on Iraq, U.S. officials and analysts say.The summit, in the remote Azores islands, is expected to pave the way for war, because the three leaders have now concluded that they almost certainly will not be able to win sufficient backing for a U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq, according to U.N. and U.S. officials. [...]
[T]he bigger clue to the status of U.S. diplomatic efforts, six months after Bush's speech appealing for U.N. action to disarm Iraq, was his Rose Garden pledge Friday to jump-start peace efforts on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The administration insisted that its abrupt action was not connected to Iraq but was instead produced by the confluence of three factors: Israel has formed a new government after January elections. The Palestinian Authority is soon to put in place a new prime minister, weakening the autocratic control of Yasser Arafat. And the so-called quartet -- the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia -- has in place a road map for peace.
Yet both Republicans and Democrats, Israelis and Arabs greeted the move with cynicism. It is widely seen as a kind of diplomatic quid pro quo that will make it easier for Britain and Spain to stay on board for war by addressing a key concern of both governments and their publics. [...]
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar have badly needed a U.S. commitment to act on the other, older Middle East conflict before they take the last step on Iraq. But so do Arab allies and others among the two dozen nations that administration sources claim are willing to play some role in supporting a U.S.-led war to oust Hussein. [...]
But some experts were skeptical about the administration's sincerity.
"I'm not convinced the president does believe this is the right moment to increase momentum behind a new Palestinian state. Behind closed doors, there are also some in this administration who would like to take the road map and the commitment to a Palestinian state off the table," [Ellen Laipson, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council and now president of the Henry L. Stimson Center] said.
"I'd like to announce that tonight I'm off to buy a case of French wine."-- Nebraska senator and oenophile Chuck Hagel at the Marriott yesterday, during a speech critical of fellow Republican President Bush's "unilateralism." Hagel's cheering audience was a State Department-sponsored gathering of the National Council of International Visitors.
Alaska was sold. This piece of news arrived in St.Petersburg 136 years ago....When the news about selling Alaska became known in Russia, people refused to believe it. Newspapers would write that it was nothing but a mean, disgusting joke upon the Russian society.... As a matter of fact, the dispute is not over even today. So many tragic things have happened in the Russian history, although Alaska is still an issue for professors, students, taxi drivers, and the like. A lot of Russian people often say the following sentence: “What if Alaska remained a part of Russia?” ... as if Alaska was a chance that was taken away from Russian people.
Bertie Ahern has given his strongest indication yet that the US will be able to use Shannon Airport regardless of UN backing for war in Iraq.
The US and UK could use Jordanian and Israeli airspace to launch air strikes on Iraq if Turkey continues to refuse permission for allied bombers to operate out of its airbases to support an invasion.... Amman has tacitly agreed to overflight rights for allied aircraft.
I write to express my displeasure at your attempts to protect Saddam Hussein from the agreed upon consequences for his continued defiance of the will of those who defeated him in the 1991 war and of his own people. There can be no justification for the French defense of this murderous tyrant.
Whatever remained of the former French/American alliance--after French collaboration with the Nazis; withdrawal from the NATO military structure; Le Balon Rouge; refusal to grant overflight rights at the time of the Libya bombing; etc.--is surely now gone and the blame is wholly France's.
In future, I will urge my representatives in Congress to thwart any measure designed to aid French interests and to treat your country as what it is become: an objective enemy of the United States.
Regretfully,
Orrin C. Judd
Hanover, NH
Margaret Thatcher stiffened her legendary resolve with all-night drinking sessions, her personal assistant reveals in a new television documentary. [...]The favourite "tincture" of her avuncular husband Denis was gin and tonic. That was not enough for Maggie, once described by Ronald Reagan as the best man in England.
When Thatcher went to war against Argentina to reclaim the Falkland Islands, her personal assistant Cynthia Crawford recalled: "She'd say 'You can't drink gin and tonic in the middle of the night dear, you must have a whisky and soda because it will give you energy.'" [...]
Jane Bonham Carter, producer of the four-part documentary being aired from Thursday in Britain on ITV1, called Thatcher "arguably the most significant English woman since Queen Elizabeth I."
President George W Bush is to hold emergency talks with British and Spanish leaders on Sunday amid diplomatic deadlock at the UN Security Council over their plans for disarming Iraq.The three countries co-sponsored a draft resolution that would have given Baghdad until next Monday to disarm or face a US-led war.
But despite frantic diplomatic efforts, they have so far failed to win backing for their position, while France and Russia have threatened to veto any resolution that authorises war.
Mr Bush, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spain's Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar will meet in the Azores on Sunday, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
The points of conflict between France and America are multiple, but what truly sets the two nations at odds is not their differences but what unites them: only the US and France still have a genuinely global view of themselves, a national self-image founded on the belief that they are the repositories of universal values. Both consider themselves, with equal conceit, to be "universal nations", in a way that Britain ceased to do with the end of empire.For all France's feigned insouciance about the torrent of American abuse it is now receiving, the French remain obsessed with America in a way that America is not obsessed with France. Indeed, except when France is behaving badly, America does not much care or think about France. This, of course, makes France even more obsessive.
In a new book entitled L'ennemi americain, Philippe Roger argues that French anti-Americanism is not so much a reaction to identifiable policies as a coherent world view perceiving America as a threat to France, a rival that has consistently belittled and frustrated French ambitions.
In this, modern French anti-Americanism is the direct descendant of French Anglophobia of the 18th and 19th centuries, the belief that a barbaric Anglo-Saxon capitalism was undermining French glory and excluding France from superpower status. Both Anglophobia and modernanti-Americanism contrast humane virtues with unbridled and uncaring capitalism, the kinder, gentler France holding back the geopolitical bully that was the British empire, and is now America. In practical terms, this has meant refusing the US access to French airspace on bombing missions to Libya in 1986, widespread French opposition to military action in Afghanistan, and the current stance over Iraq.
What really has the insiders panicked, however, is the irresponsibility of Mr. Bush and his team, their almost childish unwillingness to face up to problems that they don't feel like dealing with right now.I've talked in this column about the administration's eerie passivity in the face of a stalling economy and an exploding budget deficit: reality isn't allowed to intrude on the obsession with long-run tax cuts. That same "don't bother me, I'm busy" attitude is driving foreign policy experts, inside and outside the government, to despair.
Need I point out that North Korea, not Iraq, is the clear and present danger? Kim Jong Il's nuclear program isn't a rumor or a forgery; it's an incipient bomb assembly line. Yet the administration insists that it's a mere "regional" crisis, and refuses even to talk to Mr. Kim.
The Nelson Report, an influential foreign policy newsletter, says: "It would be difficult to exaggerate the growing mixture of anger, despair, disgust and fear actuating the foreign policy community in Washington as the attack on Iraq moves closer, and the North Korea crisis festers with no coherent U.S. policy. . . . We are at the point now where foreign policy generally, and Korea policy specifically, may become George Bush's `Waco.' . . . This time, it's Kim Jong Il (and Saddam) playing David Koresh. . . . Sober minds wrestle with how to break into the mind of George Bush."
We all hope that the war with Iraq is a swift victory, with a minimum of civilian casualties. But more and more people now realize that even if all goes well at first, it will have been the wrong war, fought for the wrong reasons--and there will be a heavy price to pay.
Reports of anti-gay harassment within the U.S. armed forces have increased sharply as American forces are mobilized for a loomingconflict in Iraq, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network reported this week.Between January 1st and March 1st, the organization reports a 30 percent spike in harassment complaints from men and women in uniform over the same period last year. The SLDN's C. Dixon Osburn said the group has already received a record 1,100 calls for assistance in 2003. [...]
"I think any form of discrimination has to be looked at," said [Secretary of State Colin] Powell. "As you know, the military has the policy, 'don't ask, don't tell,' so that somebody who is openly homosexual does not serve. I'm an advocate of that policy, I helped put that policy in place, and I'm accused, therefore, of supporting homophobia.
"But I think it's a different matter with respect to the military," Powell continued, "because you're essentially told who you're going to live with, who you're going to sleep next to, and it's a different set of circumstances in a military environment."
IT'S NOT CLEAR whether the constitutional definition of "advice and consent" will become a casualty of Miguel Estrada's fightfor a seat on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, but the possibility is serious and sobering. In a 55-44 vote, Democrats last week defeated a Republican attempt to break their unprecedented partisan filibuster of Estrada's nomination, opening the way for the simple-majority standard for Senate confirmation of judicial nominees to be replaced with a super-majority requirement. The Republic isn't there yet. But it's close."If we go very much further there will be obvious consequences," said Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican. "This standard will have to be applied to both parties and by both parties. This is very close to the point where you can't pull it back."
The strain on the Constitution and Senate precedent is now obvious. Less obvious is the toll the Estrada fight has taken on the relationship between the new Senate GOP leadership team and the Bush White House. While GOP senators are loath to admit it, the Estrada debate has drifted on this long because the White House and the GOP leadership could not fashion a cohesive strategy.
Plaintiffs are active-duty members of the military, parents of military personnel, and members of the U.S. House of Representatives. They filed a complaint in district court seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent the defendants, President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, from initiating a war against Iraq. They assert that such an action would violate the Constitution. The district court dismissed the suit, and plaintiffs appeal. We affirm the dismissal.On the one hand, good for the First Circuit. On the other hand, why aren't the plaintiffs busy figuring out how they're going to pay the Rule 11 sanctions imposed against them for bringing a frivolous action?
The plaintiffs appropriately disavow the formalistic notion that Congress only authorizes military deployments if it states, "We declare war." This has never been the practice and it was not the understanding of the founders. See J.H. Ely, War and Responsibility 25-26 (1993). Congressional authorization for military action has often been found in the passage of resolutions that lacked these "magic words," or in continued enactments of appropriations or extensions of the draft which were aimed at waging a particular war. See, e.g., Laird, 451 F.2d at 34 ("[I]n a situation of prolonged but undeclared hostilities, where the executive continues to act . . . with steady Congressional support, the Constitution has not been breached."); Orlando, 443 F.2d at 1042-43 ("[T]he test is whether there is any action by the Congress sufficient to authorize or ratify the military activity in question."); see also Ely, supra, at 12-46 (arguing that Congress gave constitutionally sufficient authorization for ground war in Vietnam and Cambodia).Maybe now we'll hear less of this particular argument.
Finally, the history of our dealings with Iraq for the last twelve years is well worth reading:
Tensions between the United States and Iraq have been high at least since Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait in 1990. In 1991, the United States led an international coalition in the Persian Gulf War, which drove Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Before that conflict, Congress passed a resolution quite similar to the October Resolution. See Pub. L. No. 102-1, 105 Stat. 3 (1991). As part of the ceasefire ending the Gulf War, Iraq agreed to United Nations Security Council Resolution 687, which required that Iraq end the development of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, destroy all existing weapons of this sort and their delivery systems, and allow United Nations weapons inspections to confirm its compliance with these terms. See S.C. Res. 687, U.N. SCOR, 46th Sess., 2981st mtg., U.N. Doc. S/RES/687 (1991). Since that time, Iraq has repeatedly been in breach of this agreement by, among other things, blocking inspections and hiding banned weapons. Iraq ended cooperation with the weapons inspection program in 1998. Since 1991, the United States and other nations have enforced a no-fly zone near the Kuwaiti border and on several occasions have launched missile strikes against Iraq. Congress has been engaged in the American response to Iraqi noncompliance throughout this period. It was well-informed about ongoing American military activities, enforcement of the no-fly zone, and the missile strikes. In 1998, Congress passed a joint resolution which chronicled Iraqi noncompliance and declared that "the Government of Iraq is in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations, and therefore the President is urged to take appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws of the United States, to bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligations." Pub. L. No. 105-235, 112 Stat. 1538, 1541 (1998). Later that year, Congress also passed the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, Pub. L. No. 105-338, 112 Stat. 3178. This statute authorized assistance, including military equipment and training, for "Iraqi democratic opposition organizations," and declared that it should be United States policy to remove Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power. Id. §§ 3, 4, 112 Stat. at 3179.A rush to war, indeed.
The United Nations has also remained engaged in the dispute ever since the Persian Gulf War. It supervised weapons inspections, supported economic sanctions against Iraq, and, through the Security Council, repeatedly passed resolutions declaring that Iraq was not fulfilling the conditions of Resolution 687. On September 12, 2002, President Bush addressed the United Nations General Assembly. There he called for a renewed effort to demand Iraqi disarmament and indicated that he thought military force would be necessary if diplomacy continued to fail. In response, Iraq agreed to allow inspectors back into the country, but it has failed to comply fully with the earlier Security Council resolutions.
The week after his September 12 speech at the United Nations, President Bush proposed language for a congressional resolution supporting the use of force against Iraq. Detailed and lengthy negotiations between and among congressional leaders and the Administration hammered out a revised and much narrower version of the resolution. The House of Representatives passed this measure by a vote of 296 to 133 on October 10, 2002; the Senate followed suit on October 11 by a vote of 77 to 23. The full text of the October Resolution is attached as an appendix to this opinion.
On November 8, 2002, the Security Council passed Resolution 1441, which declared that Iraq remained in material breach of its obligations and offered "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations." S.C. Res. 1441, U.N. SCOR, 57th Sess., 4644th mtg., U.N. Doc. S/RES/687 (2002). It also noted that "the Council has repeatedly warned Iraq that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations." Id. In diplomatic parlance, the phrase "serious consequences" generally refers to military action. More than 200,000 United States troops are now deployed around Iraq, preparing for the possibility of an invasion.
THE next seven days will decide the trajectory of British politics for the next seven years. The vote expected in the House of Commons next week will not just be about Iraq, but the entire Blair
project. The Prime Minister is taking on the Labour Party.If Tony Blair fights and wins, he will be unassailable. If he loses next week's vote, he will have little choice but to resign. If he falls, then his lieutenants - Alan Milburn, Charles Clarke, John Reid - will topple like dominoes.
Most staggeringly, it is Mr Blair who wants to bring this to a head. The Prime Minister is being advised not to hold a vote - but wants to take his case to Parliament and actively seek the decision which could end his career. [...]
For the scores of back-benchers who have long resented the Blair project, there has never been a better chance to vote down both him and his entire apparatus. War is the one issue where a Labour MP can defy the party leader without the charge of treason. There are several constituencies in the UK where rebelling MPs would be praised for fidelity to the "Labour movement". [...]
Finally, there is a coherent ideology uniting such rebels with the historic roots of their party. They believe in the state: public services run from the centre under common ownership.
Mr Blair believes in the market. Tuition fees, foundation hospitals, private finance initiative - a trio of policies designed to empower the producer. It is state socialism versus social democracy. [...]
The Prime Minister is choosing conflict over consensus - knowing that, if public service reforms do not go through now, the results will not be available at the next election. [...]
Mr Blair has not stopped at Iraq. He is fighting on all fronts - flying to Northern Ireland last week to hammer down the peace process, urging David Blunkett to deliver an antisocial behaviour bill and imploring
Gerhard Schroeder to reform Germany's economy.To take on so many battles looks like rage. But Mr Blair's strategy runs deeper. Painfully aware of the lack of progress his first term in office represented, this is how he wants it to be from now on.
Margaret Thatcher is the model, in methodology if not in policy. Blairites look back and admire the scope and audaciousness of her reforms - if only Labour's agenda could be implemented with such speed. [...]
To hell with the majority - let's do the right thing, and let those who like it join us. It's the message from the White House over Iraq and the message from Downing Street over public services. [...]
Mr Blair has won so much Tory support because he is showing courage and risking everything. This admiration will outlast the Iraq invasion because risk is Mr Blair's new policy for both international and
domestic issues.It is quite possible such voters will replace those in the Labour Left who tear up their membership cards as he sends troops to war. As Thatcher found out, strength of leadership can be a political party in itself.
Europe has thrown up its hands. Americans abroad say they give "Canadian" as their nationality to avert ugly scenes, and two classy career U.S. diplomats have resigned from the Foreign Service in protest of a policy they say generates hatred and fear. John Brady Kiesling, whose most recent posting was in Athens, wrote an eloquent letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell. A classics scholar, he quoted his reason in Latin, further infuriating the know-nothings who have gone to war against french fries.The letter was seen by a brother officer, John H. Brown, a diplomat's son with a doctorate from Princeton on assignment at Georgetown's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. He had just about made up his mind to send in his resignation. "I was inspired by it," says Brown.
The Senate voted by a wide margin Thursday to ban a late-term abortion procedure, referred to by critics as partial-birth abortion.The 64-33 vote sent the legislation to the Republican-controlled House, which is expected to pass it this spring. President Bush said he will sign it once it clears Congress.
"Partial-birth abortion is an abhorrent procedure that offends human dignity, and I commend the Senate for passing legislation to ban it," Bush said in a statement. "Today's action is an important step toward building a culture of life in America."
Almost nine-tenths of Vietnam's most important sites for bird conservation are at risk from hunting and trapping, experts say.The warning comes from BirdLife International, a global alliance of ornithologists working in more than 100 countries.
It says the danger comes mainly from a huge rise in the trade in wildlife, and from agricultural pressure.
But BirdLife praises the Vietnamese Government's work to establish protected areas for wildlife.
With the Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources, Hanoi, BirdLife has published a guide, Key Sites for Conservation in Vietnam.
It says 56 of 63 of the most critically important places for bird and biodiversity conservation (88%) are affected by illegal hunting and trapping.
A couple from Derbyshire have escaped from an Australian service station where they were marooned for 17 days.The pair from Buxton were trapped after a river burst its banks, leaving them surrounded by crocodile infested flood waters.
The car park where Alex Mackenzie and Elizabeth Holland had stopped for a break became an island with the man-eating reptiles all around them.
They were eventually airlifted to Darwin by helicopter as it was the only way to escape the area. [...]
Ms Holland said the authorities were reluctant to help them out.
"The main government in Canberra refused to help, and the British government couldn't help and our insurance company refused to help," she said.
"The police didn't get involved and no one seemed to want to help us out."
Prime Minister John Howard today launched a blistering attack on France as he hit the airwaves to sell his case for war against Iraq, a day after his nationally televised address.The Bush administration backed down overnight from its demands that the latest UN resolution on Iraqi disarmament be voted on by tomorrow but Mr Howard supported the move and denied the US was treading water.
Instead, he blamed France for destroying any hope of peacefully disarming Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, echoing the sentiments of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
"We won't achieve that peaceful disarmament if we continue to have spoiling tactics from say the French, who appear intent on saying no to everything irrespective of its merit," Mr Howard told the Nine Network.
"I think it's regrettable that the spoiling role some countries have played have made that kind of outcome quite unlikely, next to impossible."
He said France has always regretted the rise of the United States as the pre-eminent world power and the fact that Europe was no longer as powerful in relation to the United States as it used to be.
MORE:
Analysis: Australia's military role in Iraq (Jonathan Marcus, 3/14/03, BBC)
Fiendish Iraqi terrorists are lurking beneath Lake Michigan in one or more mini-submarines, poised to launch a deadly attack on America, a military insider warns."We know they're down there but we don't know exactly where," claims the U.S. Navy source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. [...]
Authorities have intercepted transmissions that seem to be coming from the mini-subs, with voices speaking in Arabic. Translators have interpreted the voices saying, "The Iron Fish are ready to bite."
The Bush administration is keeping the crisis under wraps to avoid nationwide panic, the source claims.
"The White House is weighing its options because, at this point, they're not sure how many subs might be down there. There could be dozens of these things," notes the Navy man. "If we start carpet-bombing the Great Lakes with depth charges -- which is what it may take to get these SOBs -- people may feel the war has come to their own back yards."
The spokesman stressed that these subs are too small to carry nuclear weapons, but added, "They could still be smuggling in nuclear materials to manufacture weapons of mass destruction right here in the U.S."
Navy SEALS have been searching Lake Michigan, but they've found no sign of any mini-subs so far. But civilian sightings of the subs have continued at an alarming rate.
"I was fishing off my boat early one morning," one local fisherman says, "and I hooked something so big,
I thought maybe I had caught the Lake Michigan monster. I tried to reel it in, but then I saw a periscope come up. You can't even begin to imagine my surprise when I found out I'd hooked a mini-sub."
The fisherman dropped his rod in the water and raced back to shore as fast as his boat would carry him.
"I'm lucky I got out of there alive," he says. "That thing could've blown my boat to smithereens."
AMERICAN hostility to France reached new heights yesterday when the remains of US servicemen buried in Normandy were dragged into the heat of battle over Iraq.A Florida congresswoman introduced a Bill on Capitol Hill that would allow the families of Second World War dead to dig up their bones and take them home.
Ginny Brown-Waite said that her American Heroes Repatriation Act 2003 was a response to constituents' concerns that their fathers and grandfathers were lying in "unpatriotic soil".
Five volunteers who went to Iraq to serve as "human shields," including two Americans, were forced out of the country because they were critical of the government's choice of sites to protect, the head of the group said Wednesday.They had chosen locations "essential to the civilian population," such as food storage warehouses and water and electricity facilities, said Ken O'Keefe, of Haleiwa, Hawaii.
But the Iraqi government wanted the shields in more sensitive locations, he said. He did not elaborate, but some earlier activists have also left Iraq, reportedly after being told they would be posted at potentially strategic targets, such as oil refineries and power plants.
British military commanders in the Gulf warned today that a decision to send their troops into action must be taken within the next few days or not at all.Army planners have told Tony Blair they cannot maintain forces on the ground in a high state of readiness indefinitely.
The warning came as Pentagon sources made it clear that action is now only a few days away and that the British are a vital part of the opening phase of the attack on Iraq.
The US commander, General Tommy Franks, has said that once the Americans start moving out of Kuwait to begin the big push from the south, the British forces will go with them.
British military chiefs have also informed Mr Blair that once he has ordered the Desert Rats, Royal Marines and air assault troops into battle, it will be almost impossible to call them back.
U.S.-European differences on matters of policy and global strategy or governance are certainly nothing new. What is striking today, however, is that some serious observers are starting to conclude that the fundamental cultural and structural basis for a transatlantic alliance is eroding. Author Francis Fukuyama, who 13 years ago was declaring the triumph of common Euro-American values and institutions to be the "end of history," now speaks of the "deep differences" within the Euro-Atlantic community and asserts that the current U.S.-European rift is "not just a transitory problem." Jeffrey Gedmin, director of the Aspen Institute Berlin -- once a bastion of Atlanticism -- talks about Europe's "pathology" regarding the use of force and argues that U.S. and European views of security are now so different that "the old Alliance holds little promise of figuring prominently in U.S. global strategic thinking." Columnist Charles Krauthammer has not been alone in asserting that NATO -- once the centerpiece of the transatlantic alliance -- is "dead."No one, however, has done more to advance the notion that Americans and Europeans are growing apart than analyst Robert Kagan, who began a summer 2002 article in Policy Review with a bold thesis: "It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world." In the long and perceptive analysis that followed, Kagan argued that the disparity in power between the United States and Europe has grown so great that when it comes to "setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies the United States and Europe have parted ways." Kagan's suggestion that "the day could come ... when Americans will no more heed the pronouncements of the EU than they do the pronouncements of asean [the Association of Southeast Asian Nations] or the Andean Pact" certainly grabbed the Europeans' attention. The article had hardly been printed when it began to be circulated on e-mail lists and cited in dozens or even hundreds of newspaper articles around the world. It was reprinted or excerpted in Le Monde, Die Zeit, the International Herald Tribune, and Commentaire and was even distributed to European Union officials by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana. It should perhaps come as no suprise that the article struck a chord, especially in a Europe already led by Bush administration policies to believe that the United States no longer saw Europe as a valued ally. [...]
For all the talk of a transatlantic rift in the post-September 11 world, the fact is that basic American and European values and interests have not diverged -- and the European democracies are certainly closer allies of the United States than the inhabitants of any other region are or are likely to become anytime soon. Although their tactics sometimes differ, Americans and Europeans broadly share the same democratic, liberal aspirations for their societies and for the rest of the world. They have common interests in an open international trading and communications system, ready access to world energy supplies, halting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, preventing humanitarian tragedies, and containing a small group of dangerous states that do not respect human rights and are hostile to these common Western values and interests.
Certainly, the Texan George W. Bush and the deeply conservative cabinet members who surround him, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, have little in common with most of their European counterparts. To use Kagan's terms, the Bush team represents a particularly "American" perspective; on issues such as religion, abortion, gun control, missile defense, the use of force, multilateralism, and the environment, they are about as far from "European" positions as Americans get. It thus stands to reason that their ascent to power was read as a step toward an increasingly "American" America, and that their subsequent policies -- given a further boost by the challenge of global terrorism -- have crystallized the apparent differences across the Atlantic.
It is less clear, however, that Bush's election really represented a fundamental shift in American values, or that these values have grown more "American" over time as Europe's have become more "European." After all, Bush's opponent in the last election, Al Gore, won some 540,000 more votes than Bush did, and Gore did so on a platform that was much closer on most issues to the European norm. The 2000 and 2002 congressional elections were also divided right down the middle between Democrats and Republicans, suggesting very little change in America's political and ideological balance, notwithstanding the dramatic change in the national leaders' approach. The point here is not to suggest that the Bush approach to domestic and world affairs is not widely supported in the United States or that most Democrats are not more "American" in their outlook than most Europeans. It is, rather, to underline that the alleged U.S.-European divide today would look very different had Gore polled a few more votes in Florida two years ago or had the Supreme Court taken a different view of the Florida recount. There would still be real differences over the Middle East, the environment, and Iraq, as there were during the Clinton years, but it is hard to believe they would be anywhere nearly as brutal as they are today.
The important thing to recognize though is that there's no reason to be confident that America will resist this brave new world. Mr. Gordon imagines a future where Europe and England might converge once again at a point where Europe would be a significant factor in world affairs. But what's far more likely is that they will converge at a point where America joins Europe in complacent suicide. It is our great good fortuine that George W. Bush is president at this time and that he's forcefully pushing a stunningly retrograde vision of Americanism--lower taxes; privatized entitlement programs; faith-based social programs; military confrontation with anti-Western nations and movements; etc. As Mr. Gordon suggests, things would be much different if Al Gore had prevailed in December 2000. In fact, we'd have significantly higher taxes, almost certainly be permanently locked in to large scale government-run entitlements, and we might well be drifting into the same kind of regime of socialized medicine that the European nations have. There would be no movement to restore a moral dimension to the delivery of social services. And, while Mr. Gore is certainly enough of a patriot that he'd be pursuing al Qaeda, we may never have attacked Afghanistan and would definitely not be extending the war to Iraq, N. Korea, Iran, the Phillipines, Colombia, etc.. And as government spending on ourselves took an ever greater portion of our wealth, it would be less and less feasible to mount a serious military campaign or even to maintain our current defenses.
So the question is: in the years to come will we follow a Bush-like vision of an "American America" or a Gore-like vision of a European America? We know what we'd like to see, but which seems more likely?
Cohen is right that sensible societies shouldn't trust generals to navigate the myriad curvatures of war without civilian oversight. But since he provides no absolute canon to guide ordinary leaders (nor can such a canon really exist), his argument in favor of civilian dominance can easily backfire when politicians fail to grasp their limitations. Cohen effectively leaves his readers with one of two approaches when assessing the wartime legacy of civilian leaders. Readers can either assume that the outcome of a war justified the means used or argue, as Tolstoy did in War and Peace, that since war is a game of infinite variables, leaders are mere cogs in an unfathomable machine. The utilitarian argument is hopelessly biased in favor of the victors; the Tolstoyan outlook explains why strict guidelines of behavior are impossible.Nor does one get much illumination in a chapter titled "Leadership Without Genius." Cohen uses the sorry outcome in Vietnam to conclude that the Johnson administration's management of that war was an example of how civilian leadership shouldn't have acted. He concludes that the problem in Vietnam was not that the civilians tied the military down -- a spurious indictment resurrected by conservatives to rationalize America's defeat -- but that they didn't tie the military down enough to provide the bewildered armed forces with a clear sense of direction and priorities.
This assessment raises a question: If leaders err when failing adequately to counterbalance their military establishments, might not an uninspired leader's excessive prying also bring a military venture to disaster? It is not just the manner of overseeing war that a leader must consider but also the tactical excellence of his oversight. Despite brief involvement in the Blackhawk War, Lincoln wasn't a military man. But he intuitively grasped that the Union’s priority was the destruction of the Confederate army, not the capture of Richmond. In contrast, Hitler's rerouting of two Panzer groups around Moscow in July 1941 delayed a German attack against the Soviet capital, allowing the Red Army to regroup. Cohen provides no overarching rule allowing us to say why Lincoln was right and Hitler wrong, except that one won and the other lost his war. [...]
To be fair, Cohen never assumes infallibility in his subjects. But once one evokes the potential for fallibility, an obvious question arises: How will the book's lessons be applied in the martial age of George W. Bush? In a jacket blurb, William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, recommends the president read Cohen's book. What the neocons want Bush to learn is that it’s up to him and his civilian aides, not the brass hats, to set the pace in the Middle East, particularly Iraq.
Fair enough. But the successful civilian wartime leader is the one who has a clear sense of his political objectives. With Bush, the only certainty is his yearning to fight. It's hard to tell what the administration's long-term aims in Iraq might be. Indeed, it is apparent that a possible Iraq war is different things to different officials. Some see it solely as a means of getting rid of Saddam, while others ponder reshaping the entire Middle East. Bush has united his advisers through his vagueness, while also allowing them diverse readings of what should come next in the Gulf, ignoring his own role as the paramount unifier of purpose.
Cohen probably would not accept this abdication as an example of suitable leadership. Bush, in his inability to define persuasive and coherent aims in Iraq for the American public and, perhaps more important, for his own armed forces (who are preparing to elect Tommy Franks as a successor to Saddam), has failed to do what even leaders without genius must.
One is reminded of Ravi Shankar's retort at the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh when the public applauded what they thought was a sitar improvisation: "Thank you. If you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you'll enjoy the playing more." Many are applauding Bush's tuning, confusing it with the performance. Yet nothing indicates he really knows the tune in Iraq.
So we turn to Iraq and what is Mr. Bush's goal: regime change. What uncertainty and confusion is Mr. Young talking about?
Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., is back in the Senate. He voted against the ban on so-called partial birth abortions this morning and went to the Senate floor to say he'll vote against cloture on the Democratic filibuster on the Estrada nomination.
This has already been a desperate week for Tony Blair. First, his handling of the Iraq crisis was openly denounced as "reckless" by a member of his own cabinet, Clare Short. He then advertised his growing political weakness by failing to sack her, emboldening parliamentary defiance and triggering the first calls by Labour MPs for his replacement. The following day, as Blair was slow handclapped by a television audience, the French president, Jacques Chirac, appeared to close off Blair's last hope of any new UN security council resolution that could be presented as authorising war by declaring: "Whatever the circumstances, France will vote no."Now, most gallingly of all, the prime minister has been stabbed in the back by the very US administration for whom he has put his own leadership on the line. By publicly calling into question Blair's ability to join a US attack on Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld was clearly signalling the Pentagon's impatience with the chaotic diplomatic quadrille in New York and letting it be known that Blair's usefulness to his US patrons may be close to being exhausted. Some have suggested the US defence secretary was merely trying to be helpful, but given Downing Street's frenzied reaction and Rumsfeld's unilateralist convictions, that seems deeply implausible.
The two sides were busy talking down the transatlantic rift yesterday, but the worst of the week may not yet be behind Blair. President Bush has insisted there will be a vote on a new security council resolution by the weekend. The terms of the ultimatums being cooked up for it - including a requirement that Saddam Hussein gives a televised confession of his mendacity - make clear it is designed to be rejected by the Iraqi regime and pave the way for an immediate US invasion. And unless Chirac decides to perform a self-defeating volte-face, the expectation must be that the resolution - now mainly being fought for to save Tony Blair's political skin - will be vetoed.
If he sticks with the US none the less, Blair will then find himself at the heart of the political nightmare he has so long hoped to avoid: facing a likely wave of resignations from government, a parliamentary rebellion that might leave him dependent on Tory support, an explosion of mass opposition in the country and the likelihood of a challenge to his position as prime minister. He would also be party to an act of aggression that the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, warned on Monday would be a violation of the UN charter and therefore illegal.Without an explicit UN resolution backing war, Blair will face a choice. He could try to ride out the tide of opposition in the hope that the war would be short, the known casualties relatively few and the military occupation at least initially welcomed on the streets of Iraqi cities. Alternatively, but improbably, he could perform a historic u-turn and refuse to take part in an unlawful at tack opposed by a clear majority of the British people. A third option would be to go for a low profile backup role in a US invasion of the kind floated by Rumsfeld and certainly discussed in Downing Street as a possible fallback position over the past few weeks - though that might seem the worst of both worlds, neither pacifying opponents nor offering full entitlement to the political and commercial spoils.
As the deadline for war inexorably approaches and the national economy hovers on the brink of collapse, we turn -- like so many generations before us -- to sport for escape.We turn to the uplifting, heartwarming story of Harvey the Hound.
Unlike the contrived tension of "reality television," this is a fascinating parable of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong -- a tongue-twister, if you will. It is the tale of man's best friend triumphing over man himself.
Back on Jan. 20, when the world was a more innocent place, the Edmonton Oilers visited the Calgary Flames in a hockey contest that has come to be known as the "Battle of Alberta." Who could have imagined that the greatest mayhem would be waged not on the ice, but behind the Edmonton bench?
It was late in the third period, with the Flames leading 4-0, and Harvey the Hound, Calgary's colorful mascot, was dancing, giddy in the anticipation of victory.
"He comes to the rink, and he cheers our team on," explained Flames' right wing Jarome Iginla. "He does everything by the book. He doesn't try to get on anybody's nerves. He's just out there enjoying himself.
"He was leaning over the glass, trying to see what was going on with the Oilers' bench. And then ..."
"...all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a quick hand grabbed his tongue and just ripped it out," remembered Calgary center Craig Conroy. "It was almost ... it was unspeakable."
Edmonton coach Craig MacTavish, already seething over the Oilers' inept performance, reached up and yanked the tongue right out of Harvey's mouth. After holding it briefly aloft, MacTavish -- wearing a grin that seemed to blur somewhere between triumph and embarrassment -- tossed the tongue into the crowd behind him.
"Certainly, it shocked everyone," said Flames goalie Jamie McLennan. "It was very emotional for everyone. The image was played over and over again. I'm sure it was burned into people's minds. I think it's the responsibility of parents to sit their children down and tell them how these things happen and how they unfold." [...]
Predictably, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals were outraged.
"There is never any excuse for cruelty to animals," said Dan Shannon of PETA. "Harvey the Hound was just acting on his instincts as a dog."
Former president Bill Clinton, who has generally supported the Bush administration's Iraq policy in recent remarks, called on his successor yesterday to accept a more relaxed timeline in exchange for support from a majority of U.N. Security Council members. . . .[Emphasis added]Clinton warmly praised British Prime Minister Tony Blair and endorsed his proposal to set five specific benchmarks that Hussein must meet to prove that he is disarming. The former president also said chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix should set the timetable for compliance. "Then I would hope the United States would agree to that amount of time, whatever it is," he said.
They are known as the swinging six and it has nothing to do with wife-swapping. These are the member states holding America to ransom over war on Iraq. You can spot a swinger by the swagger in his gait and the crowd of hysterical journalists surrounding him. The Pakistanis, Chileans, Mexicans, Cameroonians, Angolans and Guineans are visibly basking in the attention, and the gossip is intense. "Am I enjoying being at the UN at this time? Of course. It's fantastic," the Pakistani ambassador, Munir Akram grins.
[S]omeone "upstairs" called them "the bidders" - some cynics think they are out for as much money as they can get in return for support.
[T]he German ambassador, Gunter Pleuger, (strongly anti-war) is smilingly convinced that America will never get the nine votes it needs to make any military action it takes look so much as mildly justified. "I don't see the six as swingers," he smirks. "They are all anti."As he moves across to the enormous bank of television cameras, he stops for a brief chat with a journalist who suggests that their opposition might leave Germany and France isolated in Europe. The notoriously placid Pleuger explodes. "Isolated! Isolated! Who can try and isolate France and Germany in Europe! We'll show them who's isolated!"
Charm, it is widely agreed, is not Washington's forte. The Pakistani ambassador smiles. "Do they actually threaten us? They don't have to. Pressure? We get a lot of, shall we say, delicate phone calls."
There are, apparently, "wimpy fear-ridden intellectuals" who believe Mexico should just get in line behind Big Brother, but the government refuses to play its cards too early. They don't want to "pay the cost of any decision in advance"...
Word at the UN is that Musharaf's position is near-impossible. He faces total opposition to war against another Islamic country at home, but he relies for his own personal and political survival on American support. "America is very helpful to Pakistan," says Ambassador Akram. "It could also be very unhelpful."..."We know exactly what we're doing," [Guinean ambassador Mamady Traore] grins.
"They have no idea what they're doing," says a senior UN official....
"We are not undecided," says Traore, looking undecided. "As president of the Security Council we should not choose any camp. We are trying to create consensus."
Anyone who still believes the U.S. and its allies are "rushing to war" in Iraq should spend a few days here watching the fabled "international community" at work.The word "rush" simply doesn't exist here, in any of the UN's six official languages.
Indeed, apart from the convoy of television news trucks outside this dazzling, Le Corbusier-designed world headquarters on the Hudson, there are few signs this is an institution on the brink of crisis and collapse.
Signs that it's an institution on the brink of irrelevance, however, are everywhere.
But then, the UN has always been other-worldly by design.
Established as an 18-acre chunk of "international territory" smack in the middle of the greatest city in the world, it prides itself on its detachment from the very country and city that allow it to flourish.
I first noticed this on my visit last Sept. 12, when U.S. President George Bush made his landmark speech calling for UN action on Iraq.
When I inquired when and where the president was speaking, UN staff repeatedly gave me blank looks - What president? Of what country? - despite the crush of world media and the fact NYPD and Secret Service types had the place surrounded for a five-block radius.
That same near-perverse detachment is very much in evidence this week, despite the high-tension, last-ditch, world-peace-at-stake issues before the the Security Council. [...]
As the world lurches toward war, the UN has set up a new "peace" display alongside its main-floor exhibitions celebrating its fights against illiteracy, land mines and polio. It is festooned with slogans from schoolkids, ranging from "Dump Bush, not bombs" to "Give peace a chance" to "Someone please kill Saddam Hussein!"
In an institution that too often celebrates moral equivalency, they're fitting - and about as significant as the rantings of many of the diplomats.
Dinesh D'Souza recently wrote an amusing but not terribly helpful book of Letters to a Young Conservative, part of the Basic Books mentoring series. I've mentored more than a few folks over the years as they faced their forbidden conservative urges and eventually came out of the closet to join the VRWC. One of the hardest parts of acknowledging that they feel the tug of the love that dare not speak its name (love of our ancestors and the wisdom and traditions they bequeathed us) seems to be the degree of deviance it requires from social norms. So, in the 60s, if you wanted the US out of the UN and Earl Warren impeached, you were considered wackier than a Hare Krishna. But here's the thing about conservatism, if you just stubbornly cling to the ancient teachings--like no entangling alliances or that the judiciary is the most dangerous branch of government if not restrained--sooner or later other people realize these things to be true.
Now, they'll never acknowledge that conservatives were right all along and that, if only they'd been listened to, much needless damage might have been avoided. However, it does save you from the dizziness that others experience as they follow every trend and fad that comes down the pike, usually driven by some hare-brained pack of intellectuals. And while the pain of watching the society you love perform lethal experiments on itself is sometimes hard to bear, the rewards of knowing you manned one of the few redoubts of resistance compensates in some tiny way. Plus, the spectacle that the experimenters make of themselves confirms you're justifiably low opinion of mankind and, once you accept the inevitability of their having their way, provides endless hours of amusement. This in fact is why comedy is so overwhelmingly (we'd argue exclusively) conservative--for it is conservatives who look at life as a comedy and it is precisely because so many of life's disasters are avoidable that they are so funny.
So, if you're a youngster and you're confused because you've begun to notice: that older people are smarter than you and your peers; that dead white European men seem to understand the world better than your teachers; that Margaret Thatcher has it goin' on; that no matter what they're talking about, Jesse Jackson and Ted Kennedy make you laugh; that you have this haunting suspicion that whatever it's doing, America is at least trying to do the right thing; that you have the opposite reaction of Gomez Adams when you hear French; that many of the same people who are apoplectic over gay priests think there should be gay Boy Scout leaders; that the only televised news you can tolerate is Fox News; that you're embarrassed that Bill Clinton was ever president of the United States; that you'd rather wake up next to Donna Reed than J-Lo; that it bothers you that nothing has "evolved" in recorded history; that Bob Hope is funnier than Tom Green; that it seems like guys who hunt and fish like Nature better than people who hate SUVs; that it made sense when Peter Parker gave up MJ at the end of Spider-Man; that you wouldn't actually trust anyone who wouldn't say the Pledge of Allegiance; that George W. Bush seems smart enough to be President; that rather than being embarrassed by younger players, Michael Jordan is embarrassing them because he works harder and cares more; that baseball on the radio is better than football on a giant-screen TV; that, whatever PETA says, meat tastes good and that appears to be why God gave us cows, pigs & fowl; that you hear some kid listening to rap and think he's too young for it; that you think young girls ought to cover their navels; etc.; etc.; etc.. Have no fear. Oranges are not the only fruit. Your friends and family may not understand you at first, but God loves you and we do too. You're not mentally ill, you're just a conservative. And the US should get out of the UN, like we've been saying for four decades...
The British government declared open season on France yesterday in retaliation for its threat to veto the proposed UN resolution on Iraq.Tony Blair, after weeks of restraint, openly criticised France in the Commons, as did other ministers. Officials have been told they have been freed by "the highest authority" to lay into the French.
Relations have not been so bad since De Gaulle vetoed Britain's entry to the common market in 1963.
A French foreign ministry spokesman said its position was "perfectly clear and consistent, and has been since the very start of all this.
As for the instant question of Iraq, what would be so wrong if, instead of the all-out smash-and-destroy war the president and his people have planned, the U.S. and Britain simply began to ratchet up the small, quiet war that has been going on for quite a while. The air patrols in the northern and southern no-fly zones could be gradually enlarged until all of Iraq was blanketed with overhead surveillance that could spot and, when necessary, knock out clearly identified weapons installations. Economic sanctions could be tightened as well, with stiffer penalties against those selling contraband to Saddam Hussein.True, this would not bring about a change of regime as swiftly as a blitzkrieg, but over time it would loosen Hussein's grip on power and make change possible.
Several factors recommend this path. For one, some if not most of the nations opposed to the present Bush war plan would have a difficult time rejecting a more modulated, commonsense approach, using techniques already in place. And the damage to Washington's relationship with old allies would be softened.
There would also be significantly less destruction of Iraq's extensive road system, bridges, and other infrastructure, making much easier any nation-building effort to follow.
Finally—and not least—a lot fewer human beings would be killed, including Americans.
Something to think about.
Meanwhile, the plan Mr. Schanberg proposes, while it may involve less actual killing of Iraqis by Americans (though that's not clear, given his willingness to bomb "weapons installations), would surely result in tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of deaths as we essentially tried starving Saddam out of power. What kind of moral derangement is it that leads the Left to countenance millions of deaths so long as they can claim not to have been the killers themselves, rather than accept the responsibility for the few thousand killings that would free a nation and allow us to save hundreds of thousands? How can someone be so shallowly selfish that they'd trade the deaths of others for a "clean conscience" for themself?
Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Deniz Baykal asserted on Tuesday that the government made a secret agreement with the U.S....Baykal said that setting up new bases in Mardin and Gaziantep ... "is not an issue which will be decided by the government on its own because base means accepting a regulation that foresees deployment of 'soldiers.' Our Constitution is very clear. The parliament gives decision about deployment of foreign soldiers in Turkey and sending of Turkish soldiers abroad. Thus, we can't accept the government's giving a decision about formation of a base in Mardin."...
Baykal said that the parliament didn't approve deployment of foreign soldiers in Turkey and their launching an operation to another country from these territories....
Despite that, the activities ... were speeded up, Baykal commented, adding "Turkey is not a 'Banana Republic.'"
MORE: Yakis: No Official Request (Turkish Press, 3/12/2003)
Foreign Minister Yasar Yakis said on Wednesday that ... "we have not received an official request of the United States to use our air space yet."...Responding another question, Yakis said, "when we receive such an official request, we will assess whether or not it requires decision of the parliament."
The Saudi Arabian opposition in London says there has been a major influx of US warplanes into Saudi airbases close to the Iraqi border.It says that large numbers of US planes have been arriving at the airbases of Tabuk and 'Arar, and that Saudi troops there had moved out to make room for them....
But a spokesman for the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia said the US shows every appearance of mounting a new front in its expected conflict with Iraq....
He said sources inside the Saudi military had revealed that Saudi forces were being moved out of the airbases to make room for the US air force and American ground troops.
The discomfort of Labour MPs was plain on their faces in the Commons yesterday, but after wobbly Tuesday in Downing Street moral certitude has returned to the frontbenches.At prime minister's questions, Tony Blair gave the impression that his great decision has been made. There will be war, with or without the support of the UN security council. Even if a majority of security council members fail to endorse a second resolution, British troops will go into military action alongside the US. Moreover, Mr Blair declared - after weeks of speculation about the legality of conflict - that "we would not do anything that would not have a proper legal basis to it". He presumably would not risk such a view unless he felt sure he was supported by the attorney general, his good friend Lord Goldsmith.
This certainty contrasted markedly from Tuesday, when it appears the lines of communication between the White House and Downing Street became extremely fragile.
Rightly or wrongly, the White House was becoming increasingly anxious that Mr Blair's diplomats at the UN were going an extra mile too far in search of support from the swing six states. Calls between the Foreign Office and the state department, and to a lesser extent, between British and US diplomats at the UN, became difficult.
Mr Bush has always been aware of the political shelter a second UN resolution would provide Mr Blair in his battle with Labour and British opinion. But Washington feared Mr Blair was starting to stray over some of America's diplomatic red lines.
It has been an article of political faith for Mr Blair and Mr Bush to keep their tactical differences to a minimum in public. But the swing six states, struggling to make a choice between the US and France, started to discern Britain was willing to go much further than the US in search of a compromise and their support. [...]
Mr Rumsfeld spoke after one of his regular phone conversations with his British counterpart, Geoff Hoon. The American, under the impression that Britain might have to hold its troops back, must have been reflecting the despondent tone emerging from London.
The effect was confusion in political, diplomatic and military circles, and a midnight call between Mr Bush and Mr Blair to clarify their position.
It was the culmination of a bad few days for Downing Street. But by this morning the wobble was over. Overnight Mr Blair faced down the difficulties mounting on many sides and emerged more resolute than ever.
The rebels at yesterday's Labour's parliamentary party meeting were seen off after overplaying their hand. Mr Blair told MPs at question time that British troops would fight alongside the US.
The United States appeared to be moving closer on Wednesday to a U.N. Security Council majority for a resolution authorizing war against Iraq, as Britain proposed confronting President Saddam Hussein with a set of tough new demands to avoid a military onslaught.A senior U.S. official said the United States had positive responses from three African members of the Security Council -- Angola, Cameroon and Guinea -- which had previously been uncommitted. "We're assured by what we heard from them," said the official, who asked not to be named.
If confirmed, that would bring support for the war resolution in the 15-member Security Council up to seven, two short of the nine votes needed for passage. A veto from France, Russia or China, all of which are on record as opposing the resolution, would still kill it. [...]
Apart from the African trio, the other uncommitted Security Council nations were Mexico, Pakistan and Chile. Definitely in favor of the resolution were the United States, Britain, Spain and Bulgaria. Against were Russia, China, France, Germany and Syria.
In another sign of the intense diplomatic pressure Washington was bringing to bear, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow, warned Moscow to think twice and "carefully weigh all the consequences," before using its U.N. veto.
U.S. officials said there was still a chance Russia and China would abstain, but France was seen as a definite 'no' vote. However, that outcome would allow Washington to argue that it had international legitimacy and that France was the country defying the world community.
France, China and Syria all have a common reason for keeping American and British troops out of Iraq: the three nations may not want the world to discover that their nationals have been illicitly supplying Saddam Hussein with materials used in building long-range surface-to-surface missiles.We are not talking about the short-range Al Samoud 2, which Saddam is ostentatiously destroying to help his protectors avert an invasion, nor his old mobile Scuds. The delivery system for mass destruction warheads requires a much more sophisticated propulsion system and fuels.
If you were running the Iraqi ballistic missiles project, where in the world would you go to buy the chemical that is among the best binders for solid propellant?
Answer: to 116 DaWu Road in Zibo, a city in the Shandong Province of China, where a company named Qilu Chemicals is a leading producer of a transparent liquid rubber named hydroxy terminated polybutadiene, familiarly known in the advanced-rocket trade as HTPB.
But you wouldn't want the word "chemicals" to appear anywhere on the purchase because that might alert inspectors enforcing sanctions, so you employ a couple of cutouts. One is an import-export company with which Qilu Chemicals often does business.
To be twice removed from the source, you would turn to CIS Paris, a Parisian broker that is active in dealings of many kinds with Baghdad. Its director is familiar with the order but denies being the agent.
A shipment of 20 tons of HTPB, whose sale to Iraq is forbidden by U.N. resolutions and the oil-for-food agreement, left China in August 2002 in a 40-foot container. It arrived in the Syrian port of Tartus (fortified by the Knights Templar in 1183, and the Mediterranean terminus for an Iraqi oil pipeline today) and was received there by a trading company that was an intermediary for the Iraqi missile industry, the end user. The HTPB was then trucked across Syria to Iraq. [...]
The French connection - brokering the deal among the Chinese producer, the Syrian land transporter and the Iraqi buyer - is no great secret to the world's arms merchants. French intelligence has long been aware of it. The requirement for a French export license as well as U.N. sanctions approval may have been averted by disguising it as a direct offshore sale from China to Syria.
MORE:
Report: U.S. one vote away from Security Council majority on Iraq (Ha'aretz, 3/13/03)
The Bush administration believes that it is one vote shy of having nine of 15 votes needed on a UN Security Council resolution giving Iraq an ultimatum to disarm, CNN quoted two senior U.S. State Department officials as saying Wednesday.These officials said the administration will focus its diplomatic energies on Mexico and Chile to secure their backing, and that the U.S. is confident it has the support of the three African members of the Security Council - Cameroon, Guinea and Angola - despite a visit this week by French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin to lobby for support opposing the resolution.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said, "I wouldn't deny that we are making progress but I don't want to mislead you into thinking that we've got it in the bag."
"We stay fixated on the rule that you don't count your chickens until the cows come home," he told a briefing. Boucher was referring to Angola, Cameroon and Guinea, as well as the other undecided members -- Chile, Mexico and Pakistan.
It's been a good if busy season for the Weekly Standard and its aggressive version of American greatness. A change of administrations and 9/11 have made the tiny journal, the prime voice of Republican neoconservatives, one of the most influential publications in Washington.The circulation of The Weekly Standard, which was founded by the News Corporation in 1995, is only 55,000. The Nation, a liberal beacon, has 127,000, The New Republic has 85,000, and National Review, long a maypole for conservatives, counts 154,000 readers. But the numbers are misleading in a digital age in which thought and opinion are frequently untethered from print and reiterated thousands of times on Web sites, list servers and e-mail in-boxes.
"Reader for reader, it may be the most influential publication in America," said Eric Alterman, a columnist for The Nation and author of "What Liberal Media?" (Basic Books). The circulation may be small, but "they are not interested in speaking to the great unwashed," Mr. Alterman said. "The magazine speaks directly to and for power. Anybody who wants to know what this administration is thinking and what they plan to do has to read this magazine."
A few weeks ago President Bush attended the annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute to compliment Irving Kristol. Now 83, he is the forebear of the neoconservative movement that his son, William, The Weekly Standard's editor, now champions.
The younger Mr. Kristol, 50, was happy that President Bush graciously acknowledged his father, but he was even more pleased by the text of his speech, which seemed lifted from The Weekly Standard's hymnal. [...]
Mr. Kristol has spent 18 years in Washington. He served as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and has done occasional stints as a pariah of both the right and left. He acknowledged that the staff he helped assemble seven years ago has made a quick trip from rock-throwing revolutionaries to an amen corner for the administration.
The outburst by the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the US might go to war without the UK reflects the tension between Washington and London about whether further diplomacy is a waste of time.It helps to explain why there is such a rush at the United Nations to try to get a follow-up and final resolution which will say that Iraq has a certain time in which to comply.
Britain is trying to head off both American impatience and domestic dissent. [...]
As for Mr Rumsfeld, he is famous for speaking his mind and he has done so again.
US and UK interests have diverged because Mr Blair needs to go to the UN Security Council and Mr Bush does not
He and others like him in the administration, who never wanted to go the United Nations at all, are now impatient at the complicated efforts to get another resolution.
They basically want to clear the decks and start the action.
Mr Rumsfeld managed in passing to dismiss the whole British military effort with his remark that there would be "workarounds", a statement of fact given that the US does not need the British there militarily.
But such candour is not helpful to Mr Blair who has invested so much in sending a third of his armed forces to the Gulf.
The world's first brain prosthesis - an artificial hippocampus - is about to be tested in California. Unlike devices like cochlear implants, which merely stimulate brain activity, this silicon chip implant will perform the same processes as the damaged part of the brain it is replacing.First, this is cool. Second, it is somewhat comforting to those of us who believe that there is more to man than flesh and blood that the best that could be done is mimic the brain, without understanding it.The prosthesis will first be tested on tissue from rats' brains, and then on live animals. If all goes well, it will then be tested as a way to help people who have suffered brain damage due to stroke, epilepsy or Alzheimer's disease.
MILLIONS of women and children need urgent help to survive in North Korea despite signs of an improving humanitarian situation, UNICEF's Asia-Pacific Regional Director Mher Khan warned yesterday.UNICEF's plea comes despite a substantial improvement in conditions following a famine in the late 1990s that aid specialists estimate killed about two million people.
"We are in a critical situation in terms of essential support," Mr Khan said. "Medicines, vaccines, food are desperately needed.
"Without these basic supplies we could see malnutrition rates go up in the next few months.
"We believe there are millions of vulnerable women and children who continue to need external assistance in order to survive."
I've had a chance over the last couple of days to talk to some foreign investors and let me tell you something: They're not big fans of ours, or me, for that matter.Perhaps it was that wine that I ordered with the twist-off cap. I don't know. But this much I do know: These guys over there don't think much of us guys over here.
They think we're arrogant, pushy and even reckless.
First of all, someone French calling me arrogant is pretty gutsy. But that's another issue.
No, my issue is why we put up with this crap in the first place. I'll tell you why: Because we're decent people. I'm a nice guy and all, but here's what I say: Stop being decent.
[T]he next time the South Koreans throw rocks and eggs at our U.S. guys there, I say, we bring them back home here and tell these ungrateful asses: You deal with the kook in pajamas north of you, collecting nuclear weapons.
N.B.--Joe informs us Mr. Murdoch was naturalized several years ago.
Families of Palestinians killed by Israel received $245,000 in checks from Saddam Hussein on Wednesday, underscoring the Iraqi leader's continued support for a Palestinian revolt as he faces the prospect of a U.S.-led war.Leaders of a pro-Iraq Palestinian group handed out the checks after delivering fiery speeches extolling the Iraqi president's virtues to hundreds of relatives of "martyrs" packed into a dingy YMCA hall in Gaza City.
Officials of the Palestinian Arab Liberation Front staging the ceremony said Saddam had now paid $35 million to support the kin of Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip and West Bank since militants rose up against Israel there 29 months ago.
"Saddam Hussein considers those who die in martyrdom attacks as people who have won the highest degree of martyrdom," an official of the Arab Liberation Front said.
"It's the woman professor who haunts me most. A prisoner under Saddam, she gave birth to a girl, but couldn't feed her because the thin soup wasn't enough to provide breast milk," Ann Clwyd tells me. "When she begged the guards for milk, they beat her. She held that dead baby for three days, refusing to give it up. The temperature in the cell was stifling, the smell was horrendous, but none of the other prisoners complained. In the end, they took her away and killed her."When Mrs Clwyd stood up in the House of Commons last week to talk about the plight of the Iraqis and Kurds, MPs fell silent....
Former prisoners showed her around [the new Kurdish genocide museum]. On the walls were hundreds of photographs of piles of clothing, mass graves and skulls. "Saddam's regime is like the Khmer Rouge and the Nazis; they are obsessed by documenting everything they've done. There are lots of photographs of prisoners just before they were executed, grinning at the cameras. The guards tickled them before they died to make them laugh."
The day she opened the museum it was snowing, grey and icy. "Hundreds of relatives of the dead and the victims queued up to watch and to tell me their stories. An old Kurdish woman shoved a piece of plastic at me; inside were two photographs of her husband and two missing sons. She wanted to know how they died. One old man showed me a photograph of 15 of his family. He was the only survivor. 'Why was I meant to survive?' he said....
"I burst into tears. As I stood in that museum, I just thought: 'Why didn't we carry on to Baghdad? Why did we let this keep happening for another 12 years?'"
My view is that the op-ed column length is the work of the Devil. It is too long to make one simple important point--so an op-ed column has to at least pretend to take a comprehensive view. But it is too short to really take a comprehensive view of anything....Memo to Howell Raines: Give Paul Krugman 2000 words once a week (or once every week and a half) rather than 700 words twice a week.
I must say, however, I do like the Krugman-once-a-week suggestion.
War in Iraq would disrupt food supplies to the millions of Iraqis who depend on government-provided rations to survive, and an extended conflict could displace hundreds of thousands of people - or more. Diane talks with representatives from some of the many relief organizations preparing to cope with a possible refugee crisis in and around Iraq. With: Kenneth Bacon, president, Refugees International, and Bob Laprade, director of Emergencies and Crisis, Save The Children
Having done their best to block America's plans to wage war on Iraq, French leaders are assessing the cost of angering their mighty ally, and are coming up with a surprising figure: virtually nothing....That may prove a costly error.... "Even though France has been a friend of ours for many years, will be a friend in the future, I think [a French veto] will have a serious effect on bilateral relations, at least in the short term," said U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in a television interview Sunday....
Far from expecting a bill for the veto, some in Paris think the stance may pay dividends on the diplomatic front, by enhancing France's influence in the Middle East and Africa. Mr. Chirac made a triumphal visit to Algeria last week, where he was cheered by crowds, and the Algerian president urged the French leader be put forward for a Nobel Peace Prize....
France could find its veto hits on the diplomatic front. "It is hard to speculate what form it will take, and it will probably not be economic, but there is sure to be some serious scar tissue after all of this," a U.S. official said.
Wesley Clark needs you to know something and it can't wait."I want to make this very clear," he says. "Some of the information that's out on me says I come from a long line of rabbis." But now he says he's not certain about his lineage. He acknowledges, "I may be incorrect."
As a general rule, interviews don't start this way.... You haven't asked Clark anything, barely said a word beyond small talk, and suddenly the telegenic retired general with an Arkansas drawl is setting the record straight about his peeps back in Minsk....
Could this man become a candidate for president?
"I haven't speculated on the future."...
Why does his name keep coming up?
"Because people are looking for leadership. A lot of people are talking to me."...
In January, Clark ate lunch with Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe. But this was just a coincidence, Clark says. He had planned to have lunch with someone else, a mutual friend who Clark says invited McAuliffe along.
The Democratic chairman is amused by this characterization. In fact, a DNC spokesman says, the lunch was Clark's idea.
It is true that there is more than one "truth" to be discerned in any historical account, and there are always shades of grey. But there should be no misunderstanding of what Keith Windschuttle in his recent writings has been saying. He is not just contesting interpretations of what happened to Aborigines in the past, but is pointing to something much more serious, the deliberate falsification of our history.His latest book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Macleay Press), is about just that. It is in fact only the first volume of a projected three volume work, and deals with early Tasmanian history only. The volumes to come will deal with Eastern Australia, the Northern Territory and West Australia. Why did he choose such an apparently narrow initial approach? In fact in articles published in Quadrant and elsewhere he has covered a wider canvas. But Tasmania is the place where some historians have made the reputations which back up the work they have done subsequently, and it is of Tasmania that genocide, complete or perhaps only nearly complete, is most frequently alleged. (The original allegations of genocide, the disappearance of the Aboriginal Tasmanians, were revised when the need to find some basis for land rights claims emerged. It remains doubtful whether the tenuous connections of present day claimants with the original Tasmanians are sufficient basis. The shakiness of these claims is only underlined by the bitter opposition to DNA testing of those claiming to be of Aboriginal descent.)
There is no disagreement that Aborigines suffered sorely as a result of white settlement especially from diseases to which they had no immunity, and from the disruption of their traditional lives and customs. All Australians owe them a debt which can never be fully repaid. But Windschuttle's thesis is not that nothing bad happened, but that so much historians have claimed to have happened, by way of massacres and murders of Aborigines, simply did not happen. There were indeed some massacres. But why fabricate the evidence?
And this is what Windschuttle proves has happened, over and over again. Typically one of the historians whom he criticises will write a passage describing the horrors of a particular occasion at a particular place and time, and as a good academic will provide footnotes pointing to the places where evidence of this can be found. But what if the footnotes lead nowhere, and the sources cited do not even mention an alleged incident, and no other evidence of any kind is available? In these cases it is pretty clear that the historians are not writing history but fiction.
They pretend it is history, and many honest people believe them, so they have had enormous influence on our attitudes to our own history. But are they really, deliberately faking it, or are they making honest mistakes? [...]
There is of course point in moral engagement in the past so long as it is not simply a matter of proving how morally superior in every way the present day historian is to the people of the past. No one now would defend slavery in any circumstances. but it is an historical fact and it is both pointless and absurd to spend one's time denouncing the slave holders of the past as if they could have acted very differently, or as if the present can somehow compensate the descendants of the slaves for the wrongs done to their ancestors, especially if it is claimed that the slave trade had nothing to do with the wars and injustices of the countries whence the slaves came. The history of the world up to the 20th century was one of invasions, conquests, settlement by force, population movements and population absorptions. Human history is not a pretty story. If anything, under the influence of movements which wished to reform humanity, the history of the 20th century was even worse. It is difficult to see what the point of moral engagement which does not take account of the sins of the engagŽs might be. Equally, it is pointless to pretend that history could have been anything other than it has been although it is worth speculating about how much worse off the Aborigines would have been if their colonisers had been any of the rivals of Britain, the gentlest of all colonial powers. The possibility of not being exposed to European settlers was simply not on the menu. The Aborigines suffered, as every other people has suffered from time to time in the course of world history.
That we owe a duty to Aborigines and their descendants today is not at issue. It has nothing to do with Left or Right, with conservatism or progressivism. But to those who would make it an issue and pretend that one side is good, the other bad, is really a shabby confession of determination to retain control of the writing of history for their own political purposes. The tone of the attacks on Windschuttle make this all too clear. They are not concerned about the welfare of present-day Aborigines, but about preserving the position which has been built up over the last thirty years or so. They are the keepers of the progressive flame, and to it they have subordinated the Aborigines in history and in person.
MORE:
-REVIEW: of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) (Jared Diamond 1937-)
-REVIEW: of The Other Side of Eden : Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World (2001) (Hugh Brody 1943-)
The speedy cancellation of fresh and intellectually challenging, or at least non-lobotomizing, television fare and its replacement with safe retreads of past winners has occurred since television's inception. Season after season, risk-averse network executives fall back on old and proven themes: sex, celebrities, teen sex — and lately, public humiliation — while viewers mutely follow along. The current television season has been particularly, soul-crushingly uncreative, but MTV's new animated series "Clone High USA" is proof that all hope is not lost.The world of "Clone High," in which teenaged clones of famous historical figures attend high school together, is a fascinating cross-pollination of the History Channel and "Saved By The Bell." Abe Lincoln roams the hallways pining for Cleopatra, a horny JFK can't keep his hands off all the hotties, Genghis Khan sports a "Screw Tibet" T-shirt and Gandhi and George Washington Carver partner up to make a student film called "Black and Tan." (Carver's animate peanut sidekick assists.) Watching teen versions of historical figures grapple with love, lust, alcohol, disease and other "after school special" issues is a comforting and surprisingly hilarious approach to teen angst. If Abe Lincoln was a hopeless sack in high school and Joan of Arc was a clueless romantic, you can't feel too badly about never getting past second base until your senior year. And by "you," I mean me.
The angst factor is boosted by each character's knowledge of their former selves. Every high school student suffers from feelings of inadequacy; knowing you are an exact genetic replica of JFK or Abe Lincoln as you wage an unsuccessful campaign for student council president significantly ups the ante. Expectations weigh heavily on most teens, but when your DNA is presidential, the weight can be crushing.
FOUR decades of feminism have turned middle-class French men into miserable creatures who are intimidated by women and losing their way in an increasingly matriarchal society, a study says.Men aged 20 to 45 believe that they have paid a heavy price for the social, legal and professional empowerment of women since the onset of the Pill and women’s liberation in the 1960s, according to the analysis for Elle, an upmarket women’s magazine.
“Men of all generations are suffering,” it said. “They feel diminished, devalued in a society where things feminine are perceived as positive and all-powerful values.”
Men under 35 in particular felt that they were being treated as sexual objects by predatory young women.
Elle was surprised by the sense of victimisation and the anger of men towards women — especially among the younger generation — revealed by the Centre de Communication AvancŽe study. “They think women have gone too far, too quickly, without setting any limit to their demands or ever questioning themselves,” Elle said.
Modern men see women as “castrating, vengeful, power-hungry and obsessed by men’s sexual performance”.
European shares have tumbled again, with London shares closing at their lowest level since May 1995.Paris stocks plummeted to levels a little over one third what they were at their September 2000 peak.
And Germany is now in the grips of a market downturn worse than it suffered in the Great Depression, calculations at investment bank Merrill Lynch have revealed.
Traders blamed the falls on poor corporate news, high oil prices, and the ever-present fears of war against Iraq.
Political moves on Wednesday were seen as heightening the risk of a lone US campaign against Iraq.
"It increasingly seems that the US is going to go it alone, which is the least desirable outcome," said Rupert Thompson, global strategist at independent brokerage E*trade.
To [Chen Wen, a 38-year-old laborer ], a job in Israel sounded like a great opportunity. In China, his family was sinking under nearly $20,000 in debt -- more than most Chinese earn in a lifetime -- partly because Mr. Chen had borrowed heavily as he tried to start his own tile business. When that failed, he borrowed even more to secure a visa to work abroad. While prices vary around China, he paid about $10,000 to a "middleman company" that arranged his visa.Mr. Chen was the only breadwinner in the family. He supported seven people, including a 14-year-old son who is mentally ill, two younger children, Mr. Chen's mother, and his 67-year-old father, who is blind....
In January, Mr. Chen was standing on a street in Tel Aviv when a Palestinian man ignited a suicide bomb. The blast, which killed 23 people, severed Mr. Chen's spinal cord and left him paralyzed from the waist down. He has been hospitalized in Israel ever since....
Clutching a small leather bag, Chen Weizhi shuffled past customs officers at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport. Tears welled in her dark eyes.
"I simply don't now how we'll manage," she said, moments after her arrival in Israel. "I don't know how our family will survive."
"I know the Americans too well to imagine they could use such methods," Chirac said, brushing off a French journalist's question about whether there would be a price to pay for France's stance....Chirac's effort at turning a Western institutional confrontation of proportions unknown since de Gaulle's decision to pull France out of NATO in the 1960s into a disagreement among friends went as far as insisting that after Saddam's defeat "France, very obviously, will have its place" as an invited participant in Iraq's reconstruction....
"But they've already won!" [Chirac] said. "I told that to President Bush not very long ago. It's highly probable if the Americans and the British hadn't deployed these large forces, Iraq would not have produced this more active cooperation that the inspectors demanded and are now getting. So, in reality, you can say that in so far as their strategy for disarming Iraq goes, the Americans have already reached their objective. They've won."
Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, the former Danish foreign minister, ... likened Chirac to King Lear, saying that the loss of its European primacy left France, "in the face of diminishing influence, alone with its impotent rage."
President Truman outlined a new foreign policy for the United States today. In a historic message to Congress, he proposed that this country intervene wherever necessary throughout the world to prevent the subjection of free peoples to Communist-inspired totalitarian regimes at the expense of their national integrity and importance.In a request for $400,000,000 to bolster the hard-pressed Greek and Turkish governments against Communist pressure, the President said the constant coercion and intimidation of free peoples by political infiltration amid poverty and strife undermined the foundations of world peace and threatened the security of the United States.
Although the President refrained from mentioning the Soviet Union by name, there could be no mistaking his identification of the Communist state as the source of much of the unrest throughout the world. He said that, in violation of the Yalta Agreement, the people of Poland, Rumania and Bulgaria had been subjected to totalitarian regimes against their will and that there had been similar developments in other countries.
As the Senate and House of Representatives sat grim-faced but apparently determined on the course recommended by the Chief Executive, Mr. Truman made these cardinal points of departure from traditional American foreign policy:
"I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
"I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes."
The Bush administration believes that it is one vote shy of having nine of 15 votes needed on a U.N. Security Council resolution that sets a Monday deadline for Iraqi compliance, a senior U.S. State Department official said, and officials are focusing diplomatic energies on Mexico and Chile to secure their backing.I have no idea if this is true. I'm pretty sure that I think that leaking it is a bad idea, regardless of whether its true. But, wow. As I've said before, I think that a majority of the council is more important than avoiding a veto. Now, how do we get Mexico and Chile on board?
The European Union vowed yesterday to press ahead with the admission of a divided Cyprus in 2004 despite a breakdown in peace talks that has virtually doomed Turkey's hopes of joining the EU in the foreseeable future.The situation on Cyprus is complex and I am by no means an expert. But I am willing to bet that our relationship with Turkey just got a little bit closer.
His White House ambitions and a lack of Irish heritage make him the perfect target at Sunday's St. Patrick's Day political roast, but U.S. Sen. John F. Kerry apparently won't be there to take the heat. [...]Kerry's staff says that he had to cancel the South Boston roast after his surgery last month.
But the surgery hasn't stopped Kerry from making a number of other campaign events. He is slated to appear at a major Boston fund-raiser tonight, and travels to California this weekend for political events and fund-raisers.
Kerry is also planning to appear at another St. Patrick's Day roast - in New Hampshire - the following weekend.
The St. Patrick's Day event in South Boston, where the state's political titans exchange insults and jokes, could be particularly uncomfortable for Kerry this year.
The senator is in the midst of a presidential campaign and has taken some criticism for failing to refute several inaccurate reports in the Boston Globe that cited his Irish ancestry.
Japan's Nikkei average closed below 8,000 on Tuesday for the first time in 20 years as government promises of co-ordinated action failed to stem a wave of selling driven by fear of war and economic misery.
The revelations of the last few days -- including the discovery by U.N. inspectors in Iraq of such "smoking guns" as a gas-spewing air drone, and delivery devices for chemical and biological bombs; the revelation on Al-Jazeera TV of one of Saddam's suicide-terrorist camps; the public threat by a member of Iraq's cabinet to gas the Kurds again; multiple reports of the placing of explosives in Iraqi oil wells both north and south; the allegation that France has been shipping spare parts for the repair of Saddam's air fleet through third parties in the Gulf -- such overwhelming evidence of the true state of affairs is ignored alike by media and diplomats. They have reached their decision, to isolate and damage the United States as much as possible, and grant Saddam a pass....The French et al. smell blood, they are not going to back off now when they see the prospect of doing real damage. Their strategy was from the beginning to split the British from the Americans by humbling Mr. Blair, to delay the inevitable full-scale attack into the Iraqi hot season, when the fighting would be more difficult and thus the casualties higher; to isolate the U.S. diplomatically; to galvanize the international peace movement against the Bush administration; and to improve Saddam's prospects for creating a catastrophe when war comes.
The French betrayal is as total as it was surprising, after earnest promises from President Chirac to support the U.S. in return for elaborate concessions on U.N. Resolution 1441. They think they now have President Bush in a fox-trap: from which he cannot escape without chewing off a leg. They may be right: he may now have no choice but to chew off the British leg.
I have a confession to make. Right after 9/11, I was given a CD by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which included their rendition of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." I put it in my car's CD player and played that song over and over, often singing along as I drove. It wasn't only the patriotism it evoked that stirred me, but the sense of national unity. That song was what the choir sang at the close of the memorial service at the National Cathedral right after 9/11. And although that was such a wrenching moment for our nation, I look back on it now with a certain longing and nostalgia. For it was such a moment of American solidarity, with people rallying to people and everyone rallying to the president.And that is what makes me so sad about this moment. It appears we are on the verge of going to war in a way that will burst all the national solidarity and good will that followed 9/11, within our own country and the world.
This war is so unprecedented that it has always been a gut call--and my gut has told me four things.
The point is that in the immediate wake of 9-11 even people of the Left, like him, were filled with a martial and patriotic fervor, prepared, though only momentarily, to wage a war on terrorism. Here, after all, are the words he was singing along to, penned during another, rather more divisive, American religious war:
Battle Hymn of the Republic (Julia Ward Howe, February 1862,
Atlantic Monthly)Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,Since God is marching on."
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,While God is marching on.
In the next few days, George W. Bush will make critical decisions likely to determine the fate of his presidency. Whether or not he goes to war with Iraq, and whether he is successful in breaking the tyrannical grip of Saddam Hussein, will decide whether the American people praise him or reject him, and what his place in history will be.It became painfully clear to me watching the State of the Union address this year that I've drunk the Koolaid: I'm W's man. He is my leader and I am his follower (unless there's been no regime change in Iraq by the next election, in which case I'm moving to France). So I like a good "hasn't W grown in office?" column as much as the next guy.
But by assuming that Bush's focus is on his popularity and the history books, Hughes, like so many observers both pro and anti-Bush, betrays his Clinton-era thinking. These observers are thinking too small. What George Bush intends is nothing less than ending the post-war security system and setting up a new system for the new century. This is a huge gamble with a commensurate potential payoff, but is as risky as anything the United States has attempted since World War II. Despite my own trust in the President, I find it odd that this is going on without much discussion, mostly because so many observers refuse to take W seriously when he says, in the State of the Union, to the UN or at press conferences dismissed as soporific, that he intends to remake the world.
The bouts of faux nostalgia for the cold war that pop up every now and then are impossible to take seriously. When this nostalgia takes the form, as it has recently, of wishing that the US could be defeated in war it is, at best, puerile. But it is another thing entirely to abandon the structure that, at least in Europe, kept the peace for 50 years and reconciled nations whose wars, over the past three centuries, had threatened more and more of the world. Anything that lasts so long becomes part of the landscape. It is almost impossible to imagine life without it.
And so people forget that the UN was formed to perpetuate the alliance that won World War II. NATO was formed to deter and contain the Soviet Union. With Germany and Japan tamed, with eastern Europe freed, with the Soviet Union gone to the dust-bin of history, the UN and NATO and the rest of the post-war order kept going more out of habit than purpose. Having lost their purpose, they needed a second. What were these powerful institutions to do now?
The first President Bush had an answer: he would use these post-war instruments to shape a new world order. Russia and the US, east and west, rich and poor, white and non-white, north and south, he would gather them all together to provide the stability previously imposed by the cold war. Even better, because we would no longer have to fear that some random hotspot could unleash global thermonuclear Armageddon, we would no longer have to suffer tyrants to live. This worked well once in Iraq. It half worked, without the UN and with a stiff-arm to Russia, in the Balkans. It will never work again and President Bush, contrary to the pop-psych theories that he lives to finish his father's work, has decided to undo that work.
To return to Hughes,
The defining moment in this coming of age was Sept. 11, 2001. Bush's life changed when Osama bin Laden sent his misguided minions on a surprise suicide attack with hijacked airliners against New York and Washington. As Bush said in his press conference last week, he will not take the chance of that happening again.Will the UN or NATO or any collective security arrangement help us prevent another 9/11? Or, given that we can't guarantee our safety, is the old system the best we can do, or can we establish a better system? George Bush believes that the best interests of the United States require a new system, and it is that system that he is now working to establish.
The administration has decided to make the world safer in order to reduce our presence in the world substantially. Remake the middle east, so that it is not a powder keg. Leave Europe to the Europeans. Tame North Korea and reduce our presence in Asia. Through a free trade agreement for the Americas, plus military assistance when needed, build up the economies and the governments of Latin America.
This is, in some ways, a return to an older idea of America's place in the world -- Teddy Roosevelt's vision rather than Franklin's. But it will also depend on 21st century weaponry, technological superiority and the ability to put fires out while they are still smoldering. We will work with others. We will help when needed. We will accept help when offered. But at the end of the day, it will be America relying on itself. As the President said shortly after 9/11, we can do it alone if we have to, we're the United States.
The mavens of collective security deride the President as a cowboy but they have not watched enough westerns. The best follow a simple story: the stranger rides into town, sees a wrong that needs righting, he does what must be done, but he must do so alone. He discovers that the townsfolk, as afraid of him as of those he has fought, will never accept him. At the end, he rides out of town the same way he rode in, alone but tall in the saddle. George Bush hears the theme music playing; its time for the final shoot-out and then we'll saddle up and ride out of town.
A university professor said she was asked to resign for introducing elite students to flaws in Darwinian thought, and she now says academic freedom at her school is just a charade.During a recent honors forum at Mississippi University for Women (MUW), Dr. Nancy Bryson gave a presentation titled "Critical Thinking on Evolution" -- which covered alternate views to evolution such as intelligent design. Bryson said that following the presentation, a senior professor of biology told her she was unqualified and not a professional biologist, and said her presentation was "religion masquerading as science."
The next day, Vice President of Academic Affairs, Dr. Vagn Hansen asked Bryson to resign from her position as head of the school's Division of Science and Mathematics.
MORE:
Arrogance and ignorance: Darwinian Texas Tech professor is going against basic professorial ethics (Marvin Olasky , World)
JACQUES CHIRAC was basking in ecstatic praise from virtually all of France yesterday after his Monday night pledge to defy America and veto a war against Iraq. [...]“In the eyes of the world he has attained the kind of stature that Mandela won in Africa,” La Croix, the Roman Catholic daily, declared.
Le Figaro called M Chirac a “white knight of peace, champion of all the oppressed of the Earth” and suggested that he might win the Nobel Peace Prize.
The talk from Paris dinner tables to works canteens was about pride in France leading the field in a moral cause. The mood, spurred in part by old Gallic reflexes against the “Anglo-Saxons”, reflected the belief that M Chirac had put France back on the map.
“Maybe Chirac stumbled into this, but the old dodger has finally done something great,” was a common refrain among intellectuals who had long regarded him as an unprincipled opportunist.
Le Monde, which until elections last year had led the campaign to expose M Chirac as corrupt, hailed the “nobility” of his cause in defending the international order against “the neo-imperialist Americans”. Liberation, another perennial opponent, the left-wing daily, marvelled at the way in which he was leading the world towards his vision of a multipolar, international order in the face of superpower hegemony. Serge July, Editor of Liberation, said that M Chirac’s intransigence was aimed at saving America from its own “fatal unilateralism”.
With the wind in his sails as never before in 35 years of high politics, M Chirac is in no mood to compromise over a new UN resolution, his aides said. Nor is he likely to rush to help Tony Blair, whom he views as an irritating rival and an adversary of the old EU core, which France dominates with Germany.
A few doubters did air qualms about a US backlash and the damage to Europe. La Tribune, a business daily, said that France’s veto was not justified by any national interests and it would look impotent when Washington launched its war. “France’s influence in the Security Council would be annihilated . . . It would inflict a terrible blow to the (UN) organisation whose role it wants to consecrate,” it said.
While the Socialist and Communist Opposition showered praise on M Chirac, Olivier Dassault, an MP in his UMP party and a boss in the family aerospace and media firm, said that thousands of businesses could be ruined by an anti-French reaction from the US.
MORE:
Chirac basks in warm glow of adulation: President takes plaudits for veto promise (Jon Henley, March 12, 2003, The Guardian)
Tacky Jacques (Daily Sun, 3/11/03)
Democrat Gov. Ed Rendell made it clear Monday he has little choice but to veto his own budget to regain political leverage over a Republican Legislature and complete his ambitious agenda for Pennsylvania.''I'd be fighting this budget battle with one hand tied behind my back ,'' Rendell said. ''I don't see any point in doing that.'' [...]
Rendell took a political black eye last week when the Republican-controlled House voted 113-84 along party lines to send the governor's spending plan to the GOP-dominated Senate. It did so despite Rendell's pleas that lawmakers wait until March 25, when he will detail the second half of his budget proposal. The Senate is scheduled to vote Wednesday.
''We expect to consider the budget in the full Senate on Wednesday,'' said Erik Arneson, an aide to Senate Majority Leader David J. Brightbill,
R-Lebanon. ''At this point, we have no plans to change the budget — pass it as is.''Legislative Republicans have claimed they were simply following Rendell's wishes by moving on the budget — even if the vote came just 48 hours after it was unveiled without public hearings.
But a Rendell veto would reflect badly on the administration's credibility, especially because Rendell had said he'd sign the document if it wasn't changed, said Steve Miskin, spokesman for House Majority Leader John M. Perzel, R-Philadelphia.
''In the future, when he sends us legislation, how do we take it serious that it's serious?'' Miskin asked. ''This is his budget. These are his ideas. These are his numbers. This isn't our budget. We just can't imagine he would veto the first bill that comes to his desk — a bill he sent to us.''
His story in the April edition of the magazine is "A Tale of Two Colonies." Kaplan traveled to Yemen and Eritrea to investigate how the war on terrorism is forcing the United States to be involved with each. Yemen is believed to have the largest al Qaeda presence outside of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Kaplan is best known for his book Balkan Ghosts, which former President Clinton turned to before the U.S. involvement in the Bosnian crisis. Kaplan's 1990 book Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has just been republished, updating the story.
MORE:
A Post-Saddam Scenario: Iraq could become America's primary staging ground in the Middle East. And the greatest beneficial effect could come next door, in Iran (Robert D. Kaplan, November 2002, Atlantic Monthly)
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that the United States was in secret contact with elements of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's military who it hopes will step aside or surrender in the event of an American-led attack.Rumsfeld's comments, at a Pentagon news conference broadcast into Iraq, marked the first official indication from the U.S. military that some Iraqi soldiers are cooperating in undermining Saddam.
"They are being communicated with privately at the present time," Rumsfeld said.
"They are being - will be - communicated with, in a more public way. And they will receive instructions so that they can behave in a way that will be seen and understood as being nonthreatening. And they will not be considered combatants, and they will be handled in a way that they are no longer part of the problem."
The disclosure, together with the testing of a terrifying new American bomb Tuesday at an Air Force installation in Florida, seemed aimed at fomenting fear - front and rear - in the Iraqi military.
Three of North America's Great Lakes -- Lake Huron, Lake Superior and Lake Erie -- have frozen over for the first time in nearly a decade after icy weather lasting more than a month, experts at Environment Canada said on Tuesday.This will, of course, get every bit as much attention as the supposed thawing of the north pole. I look forward to reading the New York Times editorial arguing that, given the risks posed by a new ice age, we can't wait for proof but must start mandated air pollution schemes at once.A month of temperatures below minus 4 Fahrenheit has caused an ice blanket averaging as much as 24 inches on the lakes . . . .
Sources tell CBS News that Great Britain – America's closest ally – may find it politically impossible to commit its military to a U.S.-led attack on Saddam Hussein. And that could force the United States to go it alone in Iraq.Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld hinted as much Tuesday.
"To the extent that they are able to participate that would obviously be welcomed. To the extent they are not, well, there are workarounds," Rumsfeld said.
War in Iraq is now supported by fewer than 20 percent of Britons, and Prime Minister Tony Blair has told Washington he needs U.N. authorization, reports CBS News Correspondent Bill Plante.
So Britain is now talking about a new amendment to the draft resolution in the Security Council that would extend the March 17 deadline by as much as another ten days and would include strictly defined disarmament benchmarks – something the U.S. has opposed in the past.
"The United Kingdom is in a negotiation and it's prepared to look at timelines and tests together," Britain's U.N. Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock said. "But I'm pretty sure we're talking about action in March, don't look beyond March."
On the other side was our delegation, sent by Fidel Castro in an attempt to convince his Baghdad ally that a war in the Persian Gulf would be disastrous for Iraq....The idea of a direct appeal to the Iraqi dictator had come from Castro.... Rodrigo Alvarez Cambras, an orthopedic surgeon who years before had removed a tumor from Saddam Hussein's spinal cord, was included. His presence would underscore the friendly, almost intimate, nature of the mission....
The Soviet military, which was kept fully informed on the mission's activities, provided us with detailed descriptions of the allied forces and equipment en route to the region, including information on new weaponry. At the Soviet base in Torrens, on the outskirts of Havana (known as Lourdes to Americans), electronic intelligence had been culled from command centers throughout the United States ...
The electronic surveillance network Echelon played a key role in the capture of the alleged September 11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it was reported yesterday - as did a $27m payment to an "al-Qaida foot soldier", who may be planning to relocate to Britain. [...]In Washington, the national security agency used Echelon, an intelligence system coordinated by the United States but involving several of its allies, including the UK, to monitor more than 10 mobile phones used by Mohammed.
"They were tracking him for some time," an unnamed intelligence official told the American news magazine US News and World Report. "He would shift; they would follow."
Echelon reportedly monitors phone numbers and voices, then uses satellite triangulation to locate the user. The Swiss justice ministry has confirmed reports that the September 11 hijackers used pre-paid Swiss cellular phones, not registered in any name and thus hard to trace, in preparing the attack.
"Let's say that thing that drug traffickers and terrorists thought they could do to avoid detection are really not effective strategies anymore," said Larry Johnson, a former deputy director for counter-terrorism at the US state department. "The technology being used now [by the authorities] is really pretty effective."
The rival magazine Newsweek quoted a Middle Eastern intelligence source as saying that an unidentified al-Qaida member "turned over and made a deal with the United States", taking the $25m reward offered and extracting a supplementary $2m in order to relocate with his family to the United Kingdom. A US law enforcement source confirmed that the payment had been made, the magazine said.
Other Pakistani intelligence sources said the real breakthrough had come when the FBI had managed to "persuade" an al-Qaida operative arrested earlier to reveal the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden or his close associates. The man was arrested in Quetta, capital of Baluchistan province, but his identity was never made public.
These sources say the Pakistani officials were kept in the dark about the real identity of this man, or the deal that the American had cut with him. The sources said it was only a few hours before the raid on Mohammed's hideout in Rawalpindi that the FBI had informed Pakistani intelligence, and had asked it to carry out the raid without the help of the local police or the civilian intelligence services.
The poet who sees things differently these days is Wolf Biermann, lyricist, baladeer, an incontravertible figure of respect in Germany. Hard to classify, this lank-haired man with washed-out blue eyes who writes poems, sings songs, and offers up an occasional, enormously readable political essay. "Great poet": So says, very judiciously, a man from the chancellery, having just heard, a couple of days later, what Biermann thinks of his boss.Biermann, 66, is sitting at a little table, near the window of his house in Altona, a nice suburb, close to downtown, a good place for his small children.Schroeder is not his main preoccupation. It is his country, its "harte deutsche Vaterlands-Mus," or, roughly and inadequately, "the hard must of the German Fatherland." But with his name slipping into the conversation, Biermann contrasts the current chancellor's soft position on Saddam Hussein with a Churchill battling appeasement, or Tony Blair's treading against the flow.
"Schroeder's opportunism is the worst," Biermann says. "He's a victim of a democratic pratfall. All this guy wanted to do was get elected, and he turns out morally to be under Chamberlain and Daladier. Their appeasement policy was wrong, but at least they were serious. There was no historical experience to go on then." [...]
The son of a Communist murdered by the Nazis, he left West Germany at age 17 for East Berlin, where he became a writer whose renown and eventual role as a dissident grew together. In 1976, he was expelled from East Germany to instant elevation as a cultural hero in the West. His poetry remained a source of vast admiration, but his politics gradually changed. From someone, after coming West, who joined demonstrators blocking U.S. Army bases (and remembers, he says, "how good it feels to be part of the Oh So Very Good"), he returned to the dissident's role as a German who sees "vulgar hatred" and paranoia in the "the propaganda bogeyman" that has been projected here onto the White House.
In fact, with a German press, like Britain's, that has much more a pro and con division on Iraq than the single, missionary position of French newspapers, Biermann hardly speaks from persecuted isolation.
But what he says is tougher, more direct, and comes with the whip-stroke of his rage. He calls the meld of Germans now challenging the use of force against Saddam "National Pacifists" - no small damnation in a language where the word national, as in National Socialists, shakes with the sound of abjectness, a curse. [...]
But the bombs, the deaths to come? Biermann tells a story of he and his mother surviving the storms of fire that devastated Hamburg after British air raids in 1943. Down the street from the flames, his mother told him then that these "terrible, terrible bombers are going to free us from evil, evil people who took Papa away."
Madonna added: “My real responsibility is to bring light to the world and make the world a better place.”...She claims following the Jewish mystic cult Kabbalah has taught her not to gossip or criticise others.
Madonna said: “If we truly believed that every act of denigrating somebody is a small form of murder — the negative energy you create by talking badly — we’d never do it again."
In a remark that could be directed against precipitous U.S. military action in Iraq, Annan said the creators of the tribunal had considered "the implications such a court might have for the delicate process of dismantling tyrannies and replacing them with more democratic regimes committed to uphold human rights."..."International law can be extremely effective in destabilizing tyrannical leaders who have a history of atrocities," [said the man who signed the treaty on behalf of the United States, former war crimes ambassador David Scheffer]...
The new court is modeled on the temporary tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Its rules and procedures will be set out in coming months by the judges and, once elected, the prosecutor.
The member states have been unable to find a consensus candidate for prosecutor.
The fascinating thing about this "international law" is that there appears nothing lawful about it. There is no agreement on rules and procedures, so some chosen prosecutor will dictate rules and procedures, and then judges will create their own variations. The law will apply to persons and jurisdictions that never consented to be governed by it. It creates a multiplicity of law-making authorities in any jurisdiction, so that if the ICC is respected, no one will be able to know what the "law" is. And these people believe that this retreat from negotiation and the rule of law will somehow reduce conflict, instead of just giving us new things to fight over - like who the prosecutor should be.
The White House has asked Mel Mart’nez, a Cuban-American member of President Bush's Cabinet and the former elected chairman of Orange County, to run for U.S. Senate in Florida next year, sources told The Herald Monday.Mart’nez, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development since 2001, has been approached in recent days by a leading Republican senator and other White House emissaries, and is said to be weighing his options, said the sources familiar with the discussions. [...]
[M]art’nez, 56, would drive up voter turnout among Cuban Americans and in his politically critical home region of Central Florida in a year that the president needs Florida's 27 electoral votes to secure reelection.
''How many more Cubans, who are almost always Republican, does it draw out in an election if the Senate candidate's name is Mart’nez?'' said one leading Republican operative.
''It's not a slap in the face at McCollum or Foley,'' the operative said, ``it's just a fact that [Mart’nez] would influence turnout in a way that would be favorable for Republicans.''
The United Nations fight for freedom
Antiwar protesters burned and ripped up flags, flowers and patriotic signs at a Sept. 11 memorial that residents erected on a fence along Whittier Boulevard days after the terrorist attacks in 2001 and have maintained ever since.However, although officers witnessed the vandalism Saturday afternoon, police did not arrest three people seen damaging the display because they were "exercising the same freedom of speech that the people who put up the flags were,' La Habra Police Capt. John Rees said Monday. [...]
Tracey Chandler, a Whittier mother of four who has maintained the spontaneous memorial since it was created by other area residents soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, said she was shocked by the destruction.
"They trashed 87 flags, ripped 11 memorial tiles made by myself and my children out of the ground and glued the Bob Dylan song to a sign that said, 'America, land of the brave, home of the free,' ' she said.
The Bob Dylan song she referred to is "With God on Our Side,' an antiwar anthem of the 1960s.
I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Yea, though ye offer me burnt-offerings and your meal-offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace-offerings of your fat beasts.
Take thou away from Me the noise of thy songs; and let Me not hear the melody of thy psalteries.
But let justice well up as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.
President Bush called Afghan President Hamid Karzai last week to apologize for the way he was treated in a meeting with members of a Senate committee on Capitol Hill late last month ...Karzai was placed at a witness table looking up at the senators, the usual layout for people summoned to testify at a hearing. There were several skeptical and hostile questions that Karzai did not expect and had not prepared for ...
"We thought these people were our friends, but now we really don't know," a senior Afghan government official said. "This was a protocol blunder, and there was real insensitivity on the part of some senators. They were talking about nitty-gritty problems in Afghanistan and missing the big picture that there is a war on terrorism going on while we try to make a country again from scratch."...
In addition to being seated at a table below the committee members, Karzai was scolded by some of them.
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) warned that if Karzai told the committee everything was going well, "the next time you come back, then your credibility will be in question." Hagel said later that he felt the administration had "coached" Karzai.
Holding a recent report released by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) told Karzai that "police in Herat are detaining women and girls caught alone with unrelated men, are being forced to submit to medical exams to see if they have recently had sexual relations."
The Karzai government is trying to expand its authority across the country, but it still has only limited control in many areas, including the western city of Herat.
Civil liberties and privacy may be priceless, but they may soon have a price tag.In an unusual twist on cost-benefit analysis, an economic tool that conservatives have often used to attack environmental regulation, top advisers to President Bush want to weigh the benefits of tighter domestic security against the "costs" of lost privacy and freedom.
"People are willing to accept some burdens, some intrusion on their privacy and some inconvenience," said John Graham, director of regulatory affairs at the White House Office of Management and Budget. "But I want to make sure that people can see these intangible burdens."
In a notice published last month, the budget office asked experts from around the country for ideas on how to measure "indirect costs" like lost time, lost privacy and even lost liberty that might stem from tougher security regulations.
The budget office has not challenged any domestic security rules, and officials say they are only beginning to look at how they might measure costs of things like reduced privacy. But officials said they hoped to give federal agencies guidance by the end of the year. And even if many costs cannot be quantified in dollar terms, they say, the mere effort to identify them systematically could prompt agencies to look for less burdensome alternatives. [...]
Jarring as it may seem to assign a price on privacy or liberty, the idea has attracted an unusual array of supporters, including Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and former presidential candidate, who said the approach might expose wrong-headed security regulations.
"My position is that whatever the circumstances, France will vote no."
- JACQUES CHIRAC, announcing that France would veto a United Nations resolution threatening war against Iraq.
On my way to synagogue, I see my brother outside with a friend. Here, serious faces always mean bad news.I'm informed that "there was a pigua (terrorist attack) last night, in Kiryat Arba ... An older couple was murdered in their home --- apartment 35" just as they finished their Friday night Sabbath meal.
That's all that is known.
Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, is where I went to high school. A quick search through my memory: Older couples, older couples. No one immediately comes to mind. I tell myself that there is no point in getting all worried now, anyway --- there's no way of finding out until after the Sabbath.
It's now after synagogue. I'm back at home, playing a game -- relaxing, laughing, having fun -- before Sabbath lunch. My mom enters the room.
"Do you know a Horowitz, from Kiryat Arba?"
The name sparks in my brain. The game is put on the floor. I already understand, but I want to ignore, ignore.
"Yes, Dina Horowitz --- my teacher."
"Dina? Is her husband a rabbi?"
"Yes."
We look at each other, already knowing, but denying. [...]
I don't know how many of you have been taught by an amazing person before. How many of you had the privilege of knowing a real, passionate, gentle, loving teacher? In Hebrew, the word "Morah" means teacher and guide --- someone who shows you the way, who gives you love and encouragement, helps you make your own way in this complicated world.
A Morah is someone who gives you the tools to deal with whatever should happen along your path. Such a person was Dina. She was my "Morah."
Some of Dennis Kucinich's politics are a long way from polka, bowling and kielbasa.Kucinich, now in his fourth term in the U.S. House, has added a constituency--one likely to appreciate crystals and incense more than the ethnic icons he frequently cites to highlight the character of his hometown.
Known for crusades to keep open local steel mills and hospitals and to improve safety near railroad crossings, Kucinich remains rooted in a pro-labor populist social agenda.
But he also can claim the support of a network of peace activists and New Age gurus, from those who practice meditation to those who embrace alternative religions.
They are attracted to his message of spirituality and peace.
He is relying on this cultivated network - even at risk of being tagged the "Moonbeam Congressman" - to help him win the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination.
Kucinich, a strict vegetarian whose friends include a New Mexico spiritual adviser, has won converts specifically with his legislation to ban the use of weapons in space and to create a U.S. Department of Peace.
Two weeks ago, when Tahir Anwar, the imam of San Jose's downtown mosque on Third Street, just about a two-minute stroll north from St. James Park, returned home after almost three weeks on the Arabian peninsula, it was a bit difficult for him to swing right back into his daily routine, and jet lag wasn't the only factor. The imam had just performed the hajj, for most Muslims not only a cleansing but also the ultimate confirmation of religion before death itself.The word hajj, in fact, is linguistically related to the word hujah, which is translated as "proof," teaches a Bay area scholar. And so, visiting the Kaaba--the empty black cube (once full of idols, now cleansed) in the center of Mecca that Muslims believe Abraham built--confirms, by its very emptiness, the impossibility of conceptualizing the divine, the incapability of the finite to capture the infinite.
Meanwhile, many of Imam Tahir's own confirmations came, like so many pilgrims before him, through the swarming masses of humanity surrounding him. "The greatest sight is the people." The imam shakes his head in disbelief of the memory. "What's more amazing is the different countries that people come from--Indonesia, Thailand, Bosnia. ... When you're walking between groups of people, it's like you're walking from one country to another in a matter of minutes."
It's this social egalitarianism, this unity, that Muslims pride themselves on. It was, of course, an awed Malcolm X who wrote home about sitting sincerely with "fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond and whose skin was the whitest of white."
But while unity overwhelms in the sanctuary of Mecca, back in the United States, the second and final holiday season of the Islamic calendar has, again, brought with it a jurisprudential tiff that Muslims still can't seem to resolve. The celebration of Eid al-Adha, the holiday that honors Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son and then being restrained by God, falls during the hajj season, but Muslims are (still) having a nasty time figuring out exactly when it should be. [...]
Ask ordinary Muslims what this disagreement is all about, and they'll likely shrug it off not as a disagreement but as a "difference of opinion." Ask conspiracy theorists, and they might spout off something about Sheik George W. and the United States exerting political pressure to evacuate the pilgrims from the Middle East early to gain time in their plans for invading Iraq.
From the Christian perspective, it's rather like not being able to come to a consensus on when Christmas should be (although, because of the accepted ambiguity of the Islamic lunar calendar, not exactly). But, perhaps more interesting than the problem itself are the spiritual implications inherent to the disagreement.
The crux of the difficulty lies in the sighting of the new moon, which marks the beginning of the 12th Islamic lunar month, Dhul-Hijjah.
[S]ceptics have a myopic view of power that focuses too heavily on the military dimension, where the US excels. But power in the 21st century is distributed differently on different issues and resembles a three-dimensional chess game. On the top board of military issues, where US military expenditure is equal to the next two dozen countries combined, the world is unipolar. There is only one superpower. It is likely to remain that way unless Europeans want to double the proportion of gross national product spent on defence to equal US levels. But even more modest European capabilities should not be discounted. European participation in a coalition against Iraq helps the legitimacy of the US cause and European nations could play a crucial role in the aftermath. There are more European than US troops helping to keep the peace today in the Balkans and in Afghanistan.The middle board of economic issues is a sharp contrast from the military board. Here the world has a multipolar balance of power. The US cannot achieve a global trade agreement without the agreement of Europe and others. In the area of antitrust, General Electric was unable to merge with Honeywell because the European Commission opposed the move. And recently, Microsoft had to make significant changes to its new passport system in order to meet European privacy regulations. This is hardly the "American hegemony" that some proclaim. Moreover, despite the political popularity of the US in Donald Rumsfeld's "new Europe", the US is becoming less prominent in business and investment there. EU countries account for three-quarters of the "new Europe's" trade.
The bottom board of the three- dimensional chess game consists of transnational issues that cross borders outside the control of governments. Examples include illegal migration, drugs, crime, the spread of infectious diseases, global climate change and, of course, transnational terrorist networks. On this board, power is chaotically organised and it makes no sense to speak of unipolarity, hegemony or American empire. While these
issues are having an increasing effect on the lives of ordinary Americans, they cannot be solved by military power or by the US acting alone. Co-operation with other countries, particularly the capable Europeans, is essential to Americans' ability to get the outcomes they want.Europe is not likely soon to become the military equal of the US but it has enough sticks and carrots to produce significant hard power, the ability to get others to do what they would not otherwise do. In addition, despite internal divisions, Europe's culture, values and the success of the EU have produced a good deal of soft power, the ability to attract rather than merely coerce others.
Despite policy differences over Iraq, no two parts of the world share more of the basic values of democracy, liberty, tolerance and human rights than do Europe and the US. Mr Bush and President Jacques Chirac should cool the exaggerated rhetoric that obscures these similarities and the importance of working together. France should think again before producing a train-wreck by using its veto in the United Nations. And US unilateralists should remember that those who focus on only one board in a three-dimensional game are likely to lose in the long run.
Meanwhile, he underestimates the degree to which unilateralism and even geopolitical isolation can remain an effective option in a globalized world. On the middle rung of his chess board we need only lower our own trade barriers to reap most of the benefits we're likely to gain from Free Trade. Why should we care if European taxpayers subsidize our purchases of their goods? While, on the other hand, it is going to become more and more difficult for Amnerican exports to compete abroad, regardless of what trade rules exist, because our currency is going to be so much stronger than anyone elses. Certain goods that only we make--like cultural/intellectual goods: computer programs, movies, music, biotechnologies, pharmaceuticals, stock in US companies, etc.--will continue to thrive, but no one will have enough euros to buy an American made machine of any kind. As Europe declines our goods will be priced out of its markets regardless of any structural barriers.
The bottom rung argument is the most bizarre, though you hear it often from Atlanticists trying to scare folks. What Mr. Nye and others are proposing is that a France which is terrified of its burgeoning Muslim population will allow radical Islamic terrorists to operate with impunity inside her borders in order to teach us a lesson. This fantasy, of an al Qaeda that would not choose to attack its anti-Muslim hosts and of a French people who would tolerate a globalist Islamic movement in their midsts, would be amusing if so many transnationalists weren't using it to try and keep us bound to Old Europe.
Just as the generals always prepare for the last war and the Fed always fights the problems of the youth, so does the foreign policy establishment try to prop up the system that they were taught in grad school "worked" fifty years ago, no matter how much the world has changed.
MORE:
A Theory: What if there's method to the Franco-German madness? (Michael Ledeen, March 11, 2003, Jewish World Review)
They dreaded the establishment of an American empire, and they sought for a way to bring it down.If you were the French president or the German chancellor, you might well have done the same.
How could it be done? No military operation could possibly defeat the United States, and no direct economic challenge could hope to succeed. That left politics and culture. And here there was a chance to turn America's vaunted openness at home and toleration abroad against the United States. So the French and the Germans struck a deal with radical Islam and with radical Arabs: You go after the United States, and we'll do everything we can to protect you, and we will do everything we can to weaken the Americans.
The Franco-German strategy was based on using Arab and Islamic extremism and terrorism as the weapon of choice, and the United Nations as the straitjacket for blocking a decisive response from the United States.
This required considerable skill, and total cynicism, both of which were in abundant supply in Paris and Berlin. Chancellor Shroeder gained reelection by warning of American warmongering, even though, as usual, America had been attacked first. And both Shroeder and Chirac went to great lengths to support Islamic institutions in their countries, even when - as in the French case - it was in open violation of the national constitution. French law stipulates a total separation of church and state, yet the French Government openly funds Islamic "study" centers, mosques, and welfare organizations. A couple of months ago, Chirac approved the creation of an Islamic political body, a mini-parliament, that would provide Muslims living in France with official stature and enhanced political clout. And both countries have permitted the Saudis to build thousands of radical Wahhabi mosques and
schools, where the hatred of the infidels is instilled in generation after generation of young Sunnis. It is perhaps no accident that Chirac went to Algeria last week and promised a cheering crowd that he would not rest until America's grand design had been defeated.
France is playing the peace card because it is the only one it holds. But for fragile entities like Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, France, which recently failed to impose its military will on a small West African state (the Ivory Coast), has nothing to offer. In the end, as Hobbes pointed out, covenants are useless without swords to enforce them....The EU, far from being an embodiment of the rule of law, as Mr. Kagan argues, is fundamentally corrupt and in a sense lawless. French governments invariably break or ignore its rules when they conflict with national interests. Jacques Chirac is an opportunist with a long record of malfeasance. If he did not enjoy ex officio immunity, he would be under indictment. His current anti-Americanism is in part an effort to win over his accusers on the left....
I trust that American policy makers will not accept the view that basic differences exist between America and Europe. What they should try to avoid are entangling alliances in which a single rogue power, like France, has the right to inhibit America's pursuit of her vital national interests.
And lo, which nation has emerged as the world's leading "rogue power"? If Jacques Chirac had intentionally sought to undermine the world's respect for France, he could not have been more effective.
The U.S. foreign-born population has reached a record high, though the rate at which people came to America has slowed considerably, the government reports. . . .A tenth of the population is foreign born and many have arrived since 1990. The AP article goes on to note that the census numbers don't include illegal aliens (another 7 million) or people in jail or nursing homes or other group living situations. Two thoughts jump out at me. First, the economy is absolutely dependent upon immigration. Second, wars come and go, but the great American project remains making one nation from the people of all nations.Census Bureau estimates being released Monday show there were about 32.5 million foreign-born residents in the United States in March 2002, 2 percent more than the 31.8 million in the previous March.
In a population of 282.1 million, the foreign born amounted to 11.5 percent. . . .
-Nearly 17 million people, or just over half of the foreign-born population in 2002, came from Latin America. Over half of the 17 million arrived after 1990.
-Slightly more than one-quarter of the foreign-born population had a bachelor's degree or more, about the same as the native-born population. More than 20 percent of the foreign-born population had less than a ninth-grade education, compared with about 5 percent of the native population.
The census report did not count immigrants in jails, nursing homes or other group quarters, and did not cover illegal immigration.
Portugal is siding with the United States on Iraq because Washington was "Portugal's best way to ensure national security," a Portuguese Cabinet minister said Monday.Foreign Minister Antonio Martins da Cruz told state radio that if Portugal were attacked, "it would be unlikely France and Germany would come to our rescue."
He said: "Let us suppose Portugal, proper or its archipelagos, faced a threat, who would come to our rescue? The European Commission, France, Germany?
"I think it would be NATO who would come to our rescue, in other words, it would be the U.S., no one else would defend us....
"How curious is this: in Bosnia, when we were called to send soldiers urgently to that region, the U.S. had C-17 and C-130 planes, and France leased ferry boats, which during the summer are employed in tourist services to Corsica.
"Is this how we are supposed to project our forces in Europe? Are they planning to defend us with ferry boats?"
Interesting that the word of the day on My Yahoo yesterday was propitiate and today is abstain. We know the former applies to France, perhaps the latter will also.
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, an active supporter of the United States on Iraq, on Monday linked the ''material interests'' of France, Russia and China in Iraq to their opposition to the use of force there.Spain, currently on the U.N. Security Council, has joined the United States and Britain in backing a tough new resolution giving Iraq little time to disarm or face military strikes.
''We don't have any material interests in Iraq...France has material interests in Iraq. Russia has material interests in Iraq. China has material interests in Iraq. We don't have any,'' Aznar told Telecinco television in drawing a distinction between governments on opposing sides within the U.N. Security Council.
Secretary General Kofi Annan warned today that if the United States fails to win approval from the Security Council for an attack on Iraq, Washington's decision to act alone or outside the Council would violate the United Nations charter."The members of the Security Council now face a great choice," Mr. Annan said in The Hague, where he was trying to broker a United Nations deal on Cyprus. "If they fail to agree on a common position and action is taken without the authority of the Security Council, the legitimacy and support for any such action will be seriously impaired."
Mr. Annan's remarks drew a sharp response from Washington, where the Bush administration, like its allies overseas, was engaged in a strong lobbying effort to win the necessary nine votes to pass a resolution this week authorizing war.
The White House spokesman Ari Fleischer in a strongly worded retort said that "from a moral point of view," if the United Nations fails to support the Bush administration's war aims, it will have "failed to act once again," as it did in Kosovo in the face of persecution of the ethnic Albanians by Serbia and earlier in Rwanda in the face of genocidal massacres by Hutus against Tutsis. [...]
Responding to a question on the United Nations Charter, Mr. Annan said the charter is "very clear on circumstances under which force can be used. If the U.S. and others were to go outside the Council and take military action, it would not be in conformity with the charter."
"Nobody can predict in advance the results of a war. They are seldom positive." So said President Jacques Chirac on TV this evening, when being questioned by journalists from the two main national TV networks here.
Within a month, we should know whether Tony Blair stands comparison with Winston Churchill, or with Ramsay MacDonald. Will his resolution ensure that Britain can successfully take part in a war, renew the most important alliance in its history and rise above the carping short-sightedness of our two main EU partners?Or will an unpopular war break his hold over his party, offer an opening to the Conservatives and leave Britain friendless in a Europe that has decisively thrown off the American yoke?
In 1931, the first Labour prime minister was thought to have capitulated to the needs of capitalism in the slump. Will the latest, and hitherto most successful, of Labour prime ministers be dismissed for having slavishly prosecuted capitalism's war?
There seem to be many in the Labour Party who regard their leader as a traitor in MacDonald's mould. There is nothing about the coming war that they like. It is to be started by America and, worse, by a Republican president who, they believe, stole the election.
It is against a dictator who, though nasty, has the inestimable merit, in their eyes, of being Left-wing and anti-Israel. It is likely to take place without the support of that elusive "international community" of which they are such keen members.
It is opposed by UN panjandrums and Europhiles and bishops and Muslims and feminists and the BBC. And yet a Labour government is supporting it.
It is almost as if a Tory government were advocating the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party - it doesn't come naturally.
Once in a Lifetime (1984) (Talking Heads)And You May Find Yourself Living In A Shotgun Shack
And You May Find Yourself In Another Part Of The World
And You May Find Yourself Behind The Wheel Of A Large Automobile
And You May Find Yourself In A Beautiful House, With A Beautiful Wife
And You May Ask Yourself-Well...How Did I Get Here?Letting The Days Go By/let The Water Hold Me Down
Letting The Days Go By/water Flowing Underground
Into The Blue Again/after The Money's Gone
Once In A Lifetime/water Flowing Underground.And You May Ask Yourself
How Do I Work This?
And You May Ask Yourself
Where Is That Large Automobile?
And You May Tell Yourself
This Is Not My Beautiful House!
And You May Tell Yourself
This Is Not My Beautiful Wife!Letting The Days Go By/let The Water Hold Me Down
Letting The Days Go By/water Flowing Underground
Into The Blue Again/after The Money's Gone
Once In A Lifetime/water Flowing Underground.Same As It Ever Was...Same As It Ever Was...Same As It Ever Was...
Same As It Ever Was...Same As It Ever Was...Same As It Ever Was...
Same As It Ever Was...Same As It Ever Was...Water Dissolving...and Water Removing
There Is Water At The Bottom Of The Ocean
Carry The Water At The Bottom Of The Ocean
Remove The Water At The Bottom Of The Ocean!Letting The Days Go By/let The Water Hold Me Down
Letting The Days Go By/water Flowing Underground
Into The Blue Again/in The Silent Water
Under The Rocks And Stones/there Is Water Underground.Letting The Days Go By/let The Water Hold Me Down
Letting The Days Go By/water Flowing Underground
Into The Blue Again/after The Money's Gone
Once In A Lifetime/water Flowing Underground.And You May Ask Yourself
What Is That Beautiful House?
And You May Ask Yourself
Where Does That Highway Go?
And You May Ask Yourself
Am I Right?...Am I Wrong?
And You May Tell Yourself
MY GOD!...WHAT HAVE I DONE?Letting The Days Go By/let The Water Hold Me Down
Letting The Days Go By/water Flowing Underground
Into The Blue Again/in The Silent Water
Under The Rocks And Stones/there Is Water Underground.Letting The Days Go By/let The Water Hold Me Down
Letting The Days Go By/water Flowing Underground
Into The Blue Again/after The Money's Gone
Once In A Lifetime/water Flowing Underground.Same As It Ever Was...Same As It Ever Was...Same As It Ever Was...
Same As It Ever Was...Same As It Ever Was...Same As It Ever Was...
Same As It Ever Was...Same As It Ever Was...
The United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil a day. Eleven million of those barrels are imported, but 9 million are from domestic oil production. Oil is oil, and when events -- a war in the Middle East or an OPEC ministers' meeting in Vienna -- affect the price of oil we import from Saudi Arabia and Iraq, they have the same effect on the oil produced in the United States.In recent months, as America has threatened and prepared for war against Iraq, the price of oil has gone from the low $20s to the high $30s a barrel. American consumers, therefore, are paying an extra $15 a barrel, or $300 million a day, or more than $100 billion a year as a "war premium" on the oil they consume. It's like a tax -- imposed as a result of government policy -- except that the government doesn't get the money. That's before the war even starts, and it is in addition to the $300 billion or so they're saying that prosecuting the war is going to cost directly. Of that $100 billion, $55 billion pays for the oil we import. But $135 million a day -- a day -- or more than $45 billion a year (minus some taxes) goes into the pockets of domestic oil producers.
"Producer" is a misleading term for people who pull oil out of the ground and sell it. "Oil extractors" would be more accurate. The oil is there, produced from leftover dinosaurs that God or nature has tossed into the recycle bin. This oil costs something to extract, but that something is less than $25 a barrel, or no one would have been extracting it before the war buildup started. So the extra $15 is a gift from Hussein and Bush.
I don't believe that Bush is prosecuting a war against Iraq in order to enrich -- or, more accurately, further enrich -- his oil-patch cronies. But we all are happier when we can make our friends happy. All this happiness among his buddies must at least make a man like Bush, who is not plagued by self-doubt or second thoughts in any event, even more confident as he marches forward.
MORE:
The Incoherent Embryophile: Bush's position on cloning makes no sense. (Michael Kinsley November 29, 2001, Slate)
Reason, Faith, and Stem Cells (Michael Kinsley, August 29, 2000, Slate)
A do-it-yourself quiz to test a marriage's chances of surviving is being published today by Relate, the marriage guidance service.The quiz, the first undertaken by Relate, is aimed at couples contemplating marriage, but the group emphasises that it is only a guide to the chances of finding marital bliss, not a guarantee.
"Our counsellors find predictive tests can be very useful in helping couples work out how to get their relationship to work long-term," says Angela Sibson, the group's chief executive. "Taking time to identify possible problems can go a long way to help couples thrive." [...]
Elizabeth Martyn, 50, a relationship adviser who wrote the book, said: "Often people don't talk enough about how well their relationship is working. By working through simple questionnaires together, couples could "get a new perspective on their relationship".
"This is invaluable in revealing how a couple may be avoiding talking about problem areas and give them a good idea of areas they might need to focus on to maintain a good relationship."
4. The marriage vows have real meaning for me
12. I'm happy with the frequency and variety in our sex life
20. We're good at sorting out our differences fairly
23. We recognise the importance of talking about our feelings, and can do so openly
Consider this experiment in temporal ingenuity. You are holding your mother's left hand. At the same time, she clutches her own mother, your grandmother, with her right. Your grandmother then holds her mother's hand, and so on into the past.With each individual allocated a yard of private space, your ancestral queue snakes off into the Industrial Revolution, through the Middle Ages and on into prehistory, until, 300 miles down the line, it eventually reaches the missing link, the common ancestor that humans shared with chimpanzees six million years ago.
Now imagine a similar, parallel queue emerging from that common ancestor, this time following the chimpanzee side of her family - until it reaches the present day. 'You are now face to face with your chimpanzee cousin, and you are joined to her by an unbroken chain of mothers holding hands,' Dawkins observes.
The crucial word in this sentence is, of course, 'unbroken', for at no point on Dawkins's seamless chain of primates does one link differ in any substantive way from the next. There is only imperceptible change, one species eliding effortlessly into the next. There are no jumps in which one animal abruptly turns into a totally different kind of creature, no sudden hurdling of species barriers, an idea that so bothers opponents of natural selection. There are only tiny, unnoticeable transformations.
It is a typically deft piece of Dawkins imagery that not only illustrates the relentless power of evolutionary process, but reveals the dangers of the 'discontinuous mind', the thinking of the priest, lawyer or politician who seeks to compartmentalise our minds and inflict arbitrary concepts - soul, race, even species - on mankind. These are all villains in Dawkins's world, particularly the priests, individuals who have inflicted the 'the most inflammatory, enemy-labelling device in history' -religious affiliation - and who have been responsible for civilisation's worst horrors.
It is an old myth about Plato that he was the proponent of a mad scheme to institute the rule of "philosopher-kings" in Greek cities, and that his "Sicilian adventure" was a first step toward realizing his ambition. When Martin Heidegger returned to teaching in 1934 after his shameful tenure as Nazi rector of Freiburg University, a now forgotten colleague, meaning to heap shame on his head, quipped, "Back from Syracuse?" As a bon mot this can hardly be bettered. But Plato's aims could not have been more different from Heidegger's. As Plato recounts in his Seventh Letter, he once dreamed of entering political life but was disheartened by the tyrannical rule of the Thirty in Athens (404 - 403 B.C.). He then renounced politics altogether when the democratic regime that succeeded the Thirty put to death his friend and teacher Socrates. He concluded, much as the character Socrates concludes in Plato's Republic, that once a political regime is corrupt there is little one can do to restore it to health "without friends and associates" -that is, without those who are both philosophical friends of justice and loyal friends of the city. Short of a miracle, in which philosophers would become kings or kings would turn to philosophy, the most that can be hoped for in politics is the establishment of a moderate government under the stable rule of law.. . . Dionysius is our contemporary. Over the last century he has assumed many names: Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, Mao and Ho, Castro and Trujillo, Amin and Bokassa, Saddam and Khomeini, Ceausescu and Milosevic-one's pen runs dry. In the nineteenth century optimistic souls could believe that tyranny was a thing of the past. After all, Europe had entered the modern age and everyone knew that complex modern societies, attached to secular, democratic values, simply could not be ruled by old-style despotic means. Modern societies might still be authoritarian, their bureaucracies cold and their workplaces cruel, but they could not be tyrannies in the sense that Syracuse was. Modernization would render the classical concept of tyranny obsolete, and as nations outside Europe modernized they, too, would enter the post-tyrannical future. We now know how wrong this was. The harems and food tasters of ancient times are indeed gone but their places have been taken by propaganda ministers and revolutionary guards, drug barons and Swiss bankers. The tyrant has survived.
The problem of Dionysius is as old as creation. That of his intellectual partisans is new. As continental Europe gave birth to two great tyrannical systems in the twentieth century, communism and fascism, it also gave birth to a new social type, for which we need a new name: the philotyrannical intellectual. A few major thinkers of that period whose work is still meaningful for us today dared to serve the modern Dionysius openly in word and deed, and their cases are infamous: Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt in Nazi Germany, Georg Lukacs in Hungary, perhaps a few others. A great many joined Fascist and Communist parties on both sides of the Iron Curtain, whether out of elective affinities or professional ambition, without taking great risks; a few played soldier for a time in the jungles and deserts of the third world. A surprising number were pilgrims to the new Syracuses being built in Moscow, Berlin, Hanoi, and Havana. These were the political voyeurs who made carefully choreographed tours of the tyrant's domains with return tickets in hand, admiring the collective farms, the tractor factories, the sugarcane groves, the schools, but somehow never visiting the prisons.
Mainly, though, European intellectuals stayed at their desks, visiting Syracuse only in their imaginations, developing interesting, sometimes brilliant ideas to explain away the sufferings of peoples, whose eyes they would never meet. Distinguished professors, gifted poets, and influential journalists summoned their talents to convince all who would listen that modern tyrants were liberators and that their unconscionable crimes were noble, when seen in the proper perspective. Whoever takes it upon himself to write an honest intellectual history of twentieth-century Europe will need a strong stomach.
The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.
More than 3000 children are dying every week in Iraq as a result of the decade long embargo that was enforced on the country after its invasion of Kuwait, a new report says.It puts the total increase in the number of children who have died as a result of the embargo at around 1.6 million since 1990, with year on year increases. [...]
The report, written by a paediatrician at the Saddam College of Medicine in Baghdad, adds, "In Iraq, social and economic circumstances have deteriorated, and in particular the health services; thus child mortality followed by infant mortality have increased." The report shows that in the first three months of last year the increase in the total number of child deaths put down to the embargo was in excess of 44, 000. [...]
Rosemary Hollis, director of the Middle East programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, one of the world?s leading centres for the analysis of international issues, criticised the balance of the article.
She said, "I don't think it washes to put all the blame on the Iraq government or to put it all on the sanctions themselves. It is miserable combination which is the result of disastrous policy failure.
"Unwittingly by setting up a sanction regime that was run through the Iraqi regime in terms of the food distribution, the UN Security Council cemented in power what had been a rather shaky government system."
The war has already started: Anglo-American commandos and airplanes are now operating inside Iraq, laying the groundwork for the conventional forces that will follow soon. As President Bush made clear in his press conference last Thursday, coalition forces will act against Saddam Hussein, with or without the UN's approval.
The Security Council does not seem to have got the message. On Friday, it reconvened for another endless round of palaver over the pace of weapons inspections, presided over by the resplendently-robed foreign minister of Guinea. No doubt his countrymen would have been mighty proud of François Fall's star turn on the world stage. If only they had seen it.Unfortunately, The New York Times reports from Guinea's capital, Conakry, that "electricity is available only every fourth day, and then only between
midnight and 6am". Not that CNN would be on even if there were power for TV sets. General-turned-president Lansana Conte, who has ruled with an iron fist since 1984, strictly regulates the flow of information to his subjects.This is what the UN "process" comes down to: a country that keeps its own people in the dark, literally and figuratively, is asked to shed light on what America and Britain should do with regard to Iraq. Gaining the imprimatur of Guinea - and of such other global giants as Angola, Chile and Syria - is supposed to confer "international legitimacy" on the actions of two of the oldest and most successful democracies in the world.
That, at least, is the logic of those, such as France, Russia and China, who demand another UN resolution before Saddam Hussein is finally punished for failing to comply with the previous 17. Their sincerity in suggesting that the world body must be the final arbiter of all military actions is pretty suspect, however. France did not seek UN approval when it sent 3,000 soldiers into Ivory Coast. Russia did not seek sanction for its bulldozing of Chechnya, nor China for its brutalisation of Tibet. In private, the leaders of these nations would chortle at the notion of giving Guinea a veto over where they can send their own forces - yet they expect America to do just that.
From the standpoint of the rest of the world, there is a realpolitik logic to this: they think that the UN and other international institutions can be instruments of containing US power. "I like very much the metaphor of Gulliver, of ensnarling the giant," Jorge Castenada, Mexico's former foreign minister, explained in November. "Tying it up, with nails, with thread, with 20,000 nets that bog it down: these nets being norms, principles, resolutions, agreements, and bilateral, regional and international covenants."
The Supreme Court is revisiting its landmark 1966 ruling that led to the familiar refrain, "You have the right to remain silent." Justices said Monday they would consider an appeal by a man who claims he was duped into talking to officers.John J. Fellers' case gives the high court a chance to clarify when officers must recite "Miranda rights" to suspects they've come to arrest. [...]
Fellers was barefoot and sipping a mug of what appeared to be tea when he sat on his couch talking to officers who came to his door in Lincoln, Neb. One officer was familiar to Fellers because they both worked as hospital volunteers. Fellers talked freely about getting into drugs after the breakup of his marriage and business problems.
He had been indicted on drug charges before officers went to his house, but they did not specifically tell him they were there to arrest him. Fellers was sentenced to more than 12 years in federal prison after being convicted of conspiring to distribute methamphetamine.
University of Texas law professor Susan Klein said the scene in Fellers' den is played out around the country as officers try to elicit a confession from an off-guard suspect.
If Fellers wins, Klein said, "police officers can no longer intentionally circumvent Miranda by questioning first, getting a statement, then saying 'Oh by the way, now that you've spilled the beans, here's your rights.'"
If Fellers loses, officers will have more freedom to question suspects without bringing up Miranda, she said.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon praised the determination of US President Bush and his administration in its drive to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. "If, in the 1930's," Sharon said at a Likud Knesset faction meeting today, "there had been a leadership so determined to fight dictatorial regimes, it is likely that we, the Jewish Nation, would not have had to pay [the price of the Holocaust]. At times like these, it is important to realize that."
Norwegian black metal band Mayhem is known for hurling animal parts into its concert audiences, but things went wrong at a performance last week. A 25-year-old fan in Bergen landed in the hospital after getting hit by a sheep's head.Per Kristian Hagen is recovering from emergency surgery and taking the incident in good humour, but he's filed a police report against Mayhem even though he otherwise enjoyed their show.
"If it turns out I've got permanent injuries after this, it's important to have some sort of record to refer to," Hagen told local newspaper Bergensavisen. "I'll have to file a claim for lost income, since I can't work for awhile."
Hagen concedes he must be one of the unluckiest Mayhem fans in the country. He'd heard rumors that the band dismembered dead animals on stage and threw their body parts into the audience. He found out the rumors were true.
The band usually is said to dismember pigs, but last week it opted for a sheep. "I was standing near the mixing board and talking with a friend," Hagen recalls. "Suddenly I was hit in the head and knocked out. I don't remember seeing the sheep's head flying at me. I just remember I woke up on the floor."
Harriet Klausner . . . can plow through a book in just an hour or two - and she typically reads two or three a day - so when she worked at a Pennsylvania library in the '70s, she started writing brief reviews of all the new books for the library's newsletter. The habit stuck, and she's been writing brief book reviews ever since. A few years ago, Amazon.com started allowing people to submit reviews to the site, and suddenly Klausner found herself labeled the No. 1 reviewer. . . .Klausner just wants to introduce people to lesser-known authors. She confesses her own favorite is Patricia Cornwell ...
In related news, Brothers Judd blog has been rated a Slimy Mollusc in the blog ecosystem. Say, do these two creatures have orange beards?
American interrogators are barred by international convention from torturing prisoners. That means no "extreme pain or suffering, whether physical or mental." Extreme irritation is a different matter."The idea is to make the prisoner talk, not to hurt him," says X. "Harsh physical pain produces bad results. Hurt someone enough, and he'll tell you his mother shot JFK if that's what it takes to stop the torture. But if his mother didn't really shoot JFK, what's the point? You want to break a suspect psychologically. That's how you get real information."
Orrin raised the issue of the use of Mohammed's children.
In the case of Mohammed, interrogators have another means of coercion - his two small children. The U.S. reportedly has been holding them for more then six months."Nobody will hurt them," says X. "But he doesn't know that. You bring the kids in, show them to him through a window. That's all you really need."
Mohammed went to college in North Carolina. Will he really believe that American interrogators are prepared to torture his children?
"Right now he doesn't even know what country he's in, or who's in charge," says X. "He may think he's dealing with a Third World intelligence service that does torture kids. He's in the red room, exhausted and confused. And he's got his own imagination to contend with. He's thinking what he would do if the situation was reversed and he was holding the children of his enemies. And that's going to be a terrifying thought."
One of the dark and bloody oaths OJ made me swear when he offered to loose me upon you was that I would not do the blogdance: hey, look at Instapundit's riff on Vodkapundit's fisking of Calpundit's post about Andrew Sullivan. Nevertheless, I am linking to a Mark Steyn column about a Mark Kingwell column, rather than directly to Kingwell, because, first, I'd much rather read Steyn and, second, he highlights exactly what I want to talk about. Steyn quotes Kingwell as follows:
"For generations, we [Canada] have been busy creating, in your shadow, a model of citizenship that is inclusive, diverse, open-ended and transnational. It is dedicated to far-reaching social justice and the rule of international law. And we're successfully exporting it around the world not by bucking the UN, but by seeing it for the flawed but necessary agency it is."Now, Steyn does a splendid job making fun of this, but I did want to focus on the idea of "a model of citizenship that is . . . transnational." I'd like to top it off with a model of ice cream that is hot and a model of black that is pink. How, exactly, do you run a country if your citizens think of themselves as transnational? What is transnational citizenship? I've never been much of a Marxist, but I wouldn't be that surprised if Canada's state was the first to actually wither away or, at least, convert itself into an HMO.
The Democrats are talking themselves to death in their filibuster against the nomination of Miguel Estrada to the federal bench. The more they talk, the more it is clear that they have nothing to say and no reason to block the nomination of one of the few Hispanics to be nominated to the senior levels of our judiciary.There is no ethical problem here. No rash statements. No imputed bias. Not even any clear indication of a strong right wing or left wing political philosophy. The burden of the Democratic argument seems to be that Estrada has not ruled, in advance, on all the cases that will come before him. What many would take as a refreshing lack of prejudice and the indication of an open mind, the Democrats assume is evidence of a great conspiracy of silence.
Liberals see the Estrada filibuster as providing a precedent for a new level of disclosure for all nominees to the federal bench. Rather than nominate and confirm good people and let them decide cases, the Democrats are now asking for clear commitments on each area of judicial decision-making that a new judge is likely to confront. The independence of the judiciary is at stake in this new assertion of legislative prerogative.
But the Democrats should realize that they have chosen a terrible target for their new level of scrutiny. By filibustering an Hispanic nominee and going to such lengths to block his confirmation, even when there is no clear reason to do so, they are asking the Hispanic voters to turn against them in droves.
When you're a writer for CBS' "Everybody Loves Raymond," a hard night at home usually means an easy day at the office."A lot of times, we'll be arguing with our spouses and you're sad that you're in the argument, but then you think, 'This could be 18 grand,' " said Steve Skrovan, one of the executive producers.
"That's not entirely true," supervising producer Mike Royce interrupted. "You also get 10 [grand] for the repeat."
"My wife will accuse me of getting this look in my eye," Skrovan said, "and she's going, 'This is not for the show!' "
Ah, but it almost always is, and the hit sitcom's creator and executive producer Phil Rosenthal (not to be confused with your favorite TV critic, though we also share a middle name) told moderator David Wild and an audience at the recent U.S. Comedy Arts Festival that he and his staff have the black and blue marks to prove it.
That's why even the most absurd of plots on the series have the ring of truth to them. More often than not, they have actually happened.
"I read that Carl Reiner ran ['The Dick Van Dyke Show' writers] room by saying, 'What happened at your house this week?' " Rosenthal said. "I thought that's the perfect model for how to do a show about real life, about a real family, so that's what we do."
The US paid an al-Qa'eda foot soldier a £17 million reward for the capture of third-in-command Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - including a £1.2 million bonus to relocate to Britain, it has been reported.The Egyptian radical, who has not been named, agreed to tell his captors the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant after he was arrested in Pakistan last month, according to Newsweek.
France's position is, therefore, quite clear.
- Opposition to inspections
- Opposition to ending inspections
- Opposition to continuing inspections
- Categorical opposition to military option
- Clear support for military option
- Opposition to sanctions
- Need for a timetable
- Refusal of any deadline
- Opposition to any Iraqi noncompliance
- Permission of various types of Iraqi noncompliance
Ours is a corporate age. Yet, amid the fertile arguments on how to tame and transform today's corporations, there is a curious absence, a sense that the current era of business dominance is somehow unique. For there was a time when corporations really ruled the world, and among the commercial dinosaurs that once straddled the globe, Britain's East India Company looms large. At its height, the Company ruled over a fifth of the world's people, generated a revenue greater than the whole of Britain and commanded a private army a quarter of a million strong.Although it started out as a speculative vehicle to import precious spices from the East Indies--modern-day Indonesia--the Company grew to fame and fortune by trading with and then conquering India. And for many Indians, it was the Company's plunder that first de-industrialised their country and then provided the finance that fuelled Britain's own industrial revolution. In essence, the Honourable East India Company found India rich and left it poor.
But visit London today, where the Company was headquartered for over 250 years, and nothing is there to mark its rise and fall, its power and its crimes. Like a snake, the City seems embarrassed of an earlier skin. All that remains is a pub--the East India Arms on Fenchurch Street. Cramped, but popular with office workers, the pub stands at the centre of the Company's former commercial universe.
The absence of any memorial to the East India Company is peculiar. For this was not just any corporation. Not only was it the first major shareholder owned company, but it was also a pivot that changed the course of economic history. During its lifetime, the Company first reversed the ancient flow of wealth from West to East, and then put in place new systems of exchange and exploitation. [...]
The war, known simply as the 'Indian Mutiny', lasted for almost two years, and was characterised by extreme savagery on both sides. When the Company retook Cawnpore, where rebel troops had slaughtered European women and children, captured sepoys were made to lick the blood from the floors before being hanged. The reconquest of Delhi by the Company's troops was followed by systematic sacking, and the surviving inhabitants were turned out of its gates to starve. Bahadur's two sons and grandson were killed in cold blood, and the old Mughal was stripped of his powers and sent into exile in Rangoon.
Yet the Company that had grown in a symbiotic relationship with the Mughal Empire could not long survive its passing. The uprising itself and the massacres of Europeans had generated a ferocious bloodlust in British society. Even the mild-mannered Charles Dickens declared that 'I wish I were commander-in-chief in India [for] I would do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested.' On 1 November 1858, a proclamation was read from every military cantonment in India: the East India Company was abolished and direct rule by Queen and Parliament was introduced. Firework displays followed the proclamation
The Company's legacy was quickly erased. East India House was demolished in 1861. India was no longer ruled from a City boardroom, but from the imperial elegance of Whitehall.
Many would argue that the Company was no worse and in some respects somewhat better than other conquerors and rulers of India. What sets the Company apart, however, was the remorseless logic of its eternal search for profit, whether through trade, through taxation or through war. The Company was not just any other ruler. As a commercial venture, it could not and did not show pity during the Bengal famine of 1769-1770. Shareholder interests came first when it dispossessed Bengal's peasantry with its 'permanent settlement' of 1794. And the principles of laissez-faire ensured that its Governor-General would note the devastation of India's weavers in the face of British imports, and then do absolutely nothing.
Many institutions have justifiably disappeared into the anonymity of history. But in a country like Britain that is so drenched in the culture of heritage, the public invisibility of the East India Company is suspicious. Perhaps a single Hindi word can now help to explain this selective memory, this very British reticence: loot.
[Khalid Shaikh ] Muhammad is not talking. Yet, if he can be forced to talk, the information could save thousands. It was said to be two weeks of torture that broke the Al Qaeda conspirator who betrayed the plot to blow up those airliners. And if ever there was a case for torture, this excuse for a human being, Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, is it.Thus, the question: Would it be moral to inflict pain on this beast to force him to reveal what he knows? Positive law prohibits it. However, the higher law, the moral law, the Natural Law permits it in extraordinary circumstances such as these.
Here is the reasoning. The morality of any act depends not only on its character, but on the circumstances and motive. Stealing is wrong and illegal, but stealing food for one's starving family is a moral act. Even killing is not always wrong. If a U.S. soldier had shot Muhammad to save 50 hostages, he would be an American hero.
But if it is permissible to take Muhammad's life to save lives, why is it impermissible to inflict pain on him to save lives?
Is the deliberate infliction of pain always immoral? Of course not. Twisting another kid's arm to make him tell where he hid your stolen bicycle is not wrong. Parents spank children to punish them and drive home the lessons of living good lives. Even the caning of that American kid in Singapore that caused a firestorm was not immoral. [...]
In short, while the instant recoiling that decent people exhibit to the idea of torturing Muhammad may mark them as progressive, it may also be a sign of fuzzy liberal thinking.
Many of these same folks are all for war on Iraq. Why? To rid the Middle East of a tyrant and his weapons of mass destruction. When John Paul II argues that, with inspections underway, such a war does not seem necessary, or thus moral, Ari Fleischer instructed the Holy Father that this war has to be fought to keep Saddam from giving horrible weapons to terrorists.
But if it is moral to go to war and kill thousands to prevent potential acts of terror on U.S. soil, why cannot we inflict pain on one man, if that would stop imminent acts of terror on U.S. soil? There is no evidence Saddam has murdered Americans, but there is a computer full that Muhammad has and has hatched plots to slaughter more.
What will history say about people who hold Harry Truman to be a moral hero for dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but recoil in horror from painfully extracting the truth out of one mass murderer to stop the almost certain slaughter of their own people?
Neither side wants to admit the obvious: that American and European interests and perspectives are diverging on an array of issues. With the demise of the Soviet Union, there is no longer a focal point of unity in the Western alliance. It has taken more than a decade, but transatlantic relations are beginning to return to their normal pattern - the pattern that existed during the century or so before the second world war and the cold war. US and European interests may still overlap on some issues, but we are likely to find more and more instances where they do not coincide.Both the US and the leading European powers need to adopt a more realistic and mature attitude about these developments. Too often, Europeans want an activist US that will be responsible for global security and take a leading role in resolving Europe's specific security problems, such as the Balkan crises of the 1990s. At the same time, many of those same Europeans want the US to follow the wishes of its allies passively on key policy issues. They seek a US that is powerful enough to be a hegemon, but humble enough not to exercise that awesome power unilaterally.
In essence, the European allies want the US to be a tethered hegemon. But that is an inherently contradictory and unrealistic concept. If the European countries want to be taken seriously by Washington, they must forge a cohesive foreign and security policy and back it up with serious military resources. And, if necessary, they must be willing to challenge US policy and not back down. Beyond those steps, they must ask the US to do less in the security arena while demonstrating their willingness to do more.
US policymakers and opinion leaders harbour their own illusions about the country's allies. They expect the prosperous and proud European countries to act as obedient clients of the US whenever Washington pursues an initiative. They apparently expect such deference even when the Europeans disagree with the substance of US policy and when European interests may not be served by that policy. Such expectations may have been plausible at the dawn of Nato, when a war-ravaged western Europe faced a powerful threat to its security and desperately needed the US as a protector. They are, however, woefully out of touch with reality in the 21st century.
The engines rumbled and the red sand swirled as the cargo plane roared onto the dirt airstrip. One by one, the dazed and impoverished refugees climbed from the belly of the plane into this desolate wind-swept camp.They are members of Africa's lost tribe, the Somali Bantu, who were stolen from the shores of Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania and carried on Arab slave ships to Somalia two centuries ago. They were enslaved and persecuted until Somalia's civil war scattered them to refugee camps in the 1990's.
Yet on this recent day, the Bantu people were rejoicing as they stepped from the plane into the blinding sun. They were the last members of the tribe to be transferred from a violent camp near the Somali border to this dusty place just south of Sudan. They knew their first trip in a flying machine was a harbinger of miracles to come.
Over the next two years, nearly all of the Somali Bantu refugees in Kenya--about 12,000 people--are to be flown to the United States. This is one of the largest refugee groups to receive blanket permission for resettlement since the mid-1990's, State Department officials say. [...]
Back in the classroom, the students spent the next few hours learning about the refrigerator, ice cubes and strawberry jam. They watched eagerly as Mr. Adan washed dishes in a sink and admired the bathtub and shower. One woman demurred, however, when he invited her to step into the tub.
"It is so clean," she said shyly. "Can I really step in it?"
Some students grumbled that the American appliances seemed more complicated than their ordinary ways of living. Why worry about cleaning a toilet, some refugees said aloud, when the bushes never need to be cleaned?
But Mr. Saidali said he was thrilled to learn about modern toilets after years of relying on smelly pit latrines.
"This latrine is inside the house," marveled Mr. Saidali, a lean man in tattered sneakers. "It's better than what we are now using. It has a seat for sitting and the water goes down.
"Even this sink--it's my first time," he said. "This sink is for washing. It cleans things very nicely."
Even with the lessons, some Bantu are worried about how they will cope in America. They know that blacks and Muslims are minorities there. Will Americans be welcoming? Will they learn English quickly enough? Will they find jobs and housing and friends? Some officials here worry, too.
"These people are from rural areas," Mr. Adan said. "They don't know much about modern life."
But the refugees who arrived on the plane here said they were eager for the challenge.
Uncertain of what might be needed in the United States, they carried most of their precious possessions--broken brooms, chipped mugs, metal plates--as they boarded a rattling bus that roared deep into the camp as the sun sank beyond the horizon.
The refugees knew they would be sleeping on the ground again and going hungry as they have often done. But they also knew that this was only the first phase of an incredible journey.
First stop, Kakuma. Next stop, America.
IS there a future for the Republican Party in New York City? Jay Golub and Robert Hornak think so.At a recent fund-raiser, Golub and Hornak officially unveiled the Urban Republican platform - five principles and reform ideas that they hope will
inspire forward-thinking GOPers to run for City Council seats. [...]Thus, the Urban Republican Platform and its five "Statutes of Liberty":
* Place Parents Before Bureaucrats: Empower individual schools, parents and students, with particular emphasis on giving parents the ability to choose the school best suited to their child's needs.
* Place People Before Government: Implement both tax and spending cuts to "fundamentally change how government views the taxpayers."
* Remain Vigilant in the Fight Against Crime: Continue the downward crime trend of the last few years.
* Abolish Barriers to the Creation of New, Affordable Housing: Streamline the process of, and eliminate the barriers to, building new housing, and encourage new construction with a guarantee that rents on these buildings will not be regulated by government bureaucrats.
* Fight for Good, Responsible and Responsive Government: Reform how the city is run.
[A] very senior member of the government of the United Kingdom told me last summer that there would be no problem on the Labour back-benches or in the EU if Russia or China were leading the coalition against Iraq. . . .I had occasion to say in the Iraq debate in the House of Lords two months ago that this notion of the relationship of the United States and the UN Security Council was an attempt to treat the United States as a great St. Bernard dog which would take the risks and do the work, while others, and not necessarily allies, would hold the leash and give the instructions. One of my noble friends leapt excitedly at the metaphor and asked if I had ever tried to restrain a St. Bernard bitch in heat. Another said the United States was not a St. Bernard but a rotweiler. . . .
The French, Russians, and Chinese are at the poker table; the Germans are on the psychoanalyst's coach. . . .
France has had the policy . . . of purporting to be America's . . . foul-weather friend, while spending almost all of its energies attempting to undermine the Americans. . . .
It is precisely because the United States has been so undemanding that some varieties of anti-Americanism have become so vigorous. The legitimate application of strength generally has a sedative effect, and that is what we are about to observe. . . .
When the students and dissidents of Eastern Europe were dismantling the Soviet empire, their public readings were of Jefferson and Lincoln, and the occupants of Tienanmen Square built a replica of the Statue of Liberty. Our satirists and intellectuals and leftist journalists may prattle as they will, but there has never been anything like the rise of America . . .
I put it to you that it is preferable to continue to be envied because of our success and attachment to principle, than to fall any further into the company of those governments for which cowardice is wisdom, ingratitude is olympian serenity, and the spitefulness of the weak is moral indignation.
Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa said Thursday that if Congress were voting now on its resolution authorizing the president to take military action against Iraq, he would oppose it. . . ."In my adult life, with the exception of Vietnam, this has been the biggest failure of diplomacy we've had," said Harkin. . . .
Harkin, who at the time was in a re-election race against former Rep. Greg Ganske, was one of 29 Senate Democrats who backed the resolution. . . .
Despite efforts on both sides of the Atlantic to limit the damage, the bitter dispute over Iraq has split Europe between countries that support America and those who see it as a global menace.
The division shows Europe's inability to create a united, credible voice in world affairs and threatens the unity of the West and decades of close trans-Atlantic relations, politicians and experts say."If the Americans and the Europeans don't exercise great care in the next few weeks and months we're going to be left with an absolute shambles," said Francois Heilsbourg, an independent defense analyst based in London.
European governments also are worried about the damage the rift is causing to the institutions that have been the foundation of Western unity for decades — NATO, the European alliance with the United States, the United Nations and the European Union. So far, analysts say, nobody is saying how it can be fixed. [...]
If the United States chooses increasingly to go its own way internationally rather than seek Western consensus, trans-Atlantic cooperation, vital to political and economic stability, could be badly damaged, analysts say.
NATO, torn by wrangling over its possible role in a war with Iraq, might never fully recover, analysts say. To have real credibility, members and opponents of a defense alliance must believe it will act if faced with a threat — something that is now in doubt, they say.
Many fear the United Nations also is looking weak with the United States, Britain and other allies determined to act without its approval if necessary.
Disagreement on how to disarm Iraq has torn the EU down the middle, exposing deep divisions over whether it should be primarily a trade bloc or a global power with effective political and military muscle.
"The time has come where we need a confrontation on what are our strategic needs" in Europe, said Ulrike Guerot, an analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.
MORE:
France and Germany will soon fall out (George Trefgarne, 10/03/2003, Daily Telegraph)
Here is a surprising fact: 100 Germans are losing their jobs every hour. Imagine being Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. Like a starlet in a Hollywood disaster movie, he is trapped in a car heading over the cliff.The speedometer just keeps whizzing round as he tries the door and screams for help. He pumps the brake and turns the steering wheel, but to no avail. Last week, the counter hit 4.4 million.
Apart from his own bad driving, who or what can Mr Schroeder blame? His predecessors, the world downturn and the Americans have all come in for criticism. But he may soon find the perfect culprit: the French. For although France and Germany are having a wonderful flirtation over the Iraqi question, they are actually star-crossed lovers.
Their interests are diverging over the economy. Mr Schroeder hardly needs reminding of this. Last month, he was humiliatingly defeated in the lower Saxony and Hesse elections, just three months after winning the federal election. His pronouncements about stopping the Americans invading Iraq were simply embarrassing in the face of the question that was more immediate to many - mass unemployment.
The world economy is on a precipice, but Germany has already fallen over the edge. Germany's crisis is a once-in-a-generation event, such as Britain suffered in the 1970s, and its consequences are far-reaching.
Germany's President, Johannes Rau, gave a warning yesterday that high unemployment could prove a "danger to democracy" if political and business leaders failed to get a grip on the problem crippling the country.
His comments came days after Chancellor Gerhard Schršder allowed an initiative between politicians, unions and business leaders to collapse and vowed to implement reform alone to find work for 4.7 million jobless.Mr Rau appealed for all parties to work together for the changes needed to create more employment.
Although he has previously rejected comparisons between the present situation and that of 1930s Germany, where high unemployment was credited with helping Adolf Hitler come to power, Mr Rau's comment will be interpreted as such a warning.
Some time ago I upset the Prime Minister by suggesting in several articles that his notion of becoming a bridge between the US and the EU is a fantasy, and that Britain would some day, and soon, have to choose between America and a Europe dominated by a Franco-German axis. [...]That was before Iraq, in the balmy days when the Prime Minister and the French agreed to the Nice Treaty, which the French knew was the beginning of the end for Nato, and Blair honestly believed marked the creation of a new European supplement to that pact, one that had kept the peace in Europe for more than 50 years. A united and militarily potent Europe would march hand in hand with America into the future, Europe carrying its own weight, and Great Britain positioned as the balancing force between France and Germany, and as a bridge between a united Europe and the United States. Better still, more and more decisions would be moved to the United Nations, where Britain’s veto on the Security Council confers on it a role more commensurate with its one-time rank as a world power than with its current more humble standing in the international ranking of nations.
In short, in this joined-up view of the world, Britain did not have to choose between its special relationship with America and placing itself at the heart of Europe: it could have both its ice-cream and apple pie, and its brie and chablis.
Now we have Iraq, and Jacques Chirac’s alliance with a Germany wallowing in anti-Americanism. Chirac’s stirring up of “the European street” to derail Anglo-American efforts to strip weapons of mass destruction from one of the cruelest regimes the world has seen since Hitler and then Stalin came crashing down surprised no one.
Well, hardly anyone. The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, took France at its word when Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin promised that, if America would sign up to Resolution 1441, no further resolutions would be required to underwrite the use of force to disarm Saddam. If you want to know why doveish General Powell has grown talons, imagine the session in the White House at which he had to explain to President Bush, who had reluctantly agreed to allow his Secretary of State to enmesh America in the UN process, that the French had reneged, and that the US was now hopelessly sinking into the muck of Security Council processes.
Bush’s reported promise that he would never forget nor forgive France’s perfidy, following on his frosty reaction to Gerhard Schroeder’s anti-American blatherings, brings us back to Tony Blair. What will happen to Britain’s position vis-a-vis Europe and the United States in a post-Saddam world? It seems clear that the bridge that the Prime Minister was so painfully constructing between Europe and America has collapsed. To add to the Prime Minister’s post-Saddam woes, US Administration officials have begun to re-examine America’s historic support for European integration. The thinkers who influence the Bush Administration’s foreign policy no longer see the need to support unification of Europe so that it can be a more formidable ally against the now-gone Soviet Union.
Samizdata.net has posted a letter from The Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran on the status of woman in Iran and Islam. I don't think I have read anything as recklessly brave since the death of the USSR. Here's a taste:
Yes, during this hundred year period, only in the years of the rule of the Pahlavi kings has it been that Iranian women were able to possess unprecedented progressive rights in an Islamic country. These rights that mainly due to the backwards religious beliefs of the Iran of the times and the fear of the women from the religionists was mainly implemented from top-down at the request of a great many progressive and educated women, began with the unprecedented order of the "unveiling" by the late Reza Shah. An unprecedented order that for many of the women at the advent of the Constitutionalist era and their descendants meant the arrival of the nullification of "sexual slavery" and prejudice in our country, which led to many interpretations and radical changes and reactions in the years after it, and which continues to stir resistance in the Iran of today following this order, it was on "17th Dey 1314" (January 7, 1936) that suddenly half of the country that was condemned, till then, to covering their entire bodies, masking their faces and staying at home found the opportunity to tend to any education and career. Unprecedented opportunities for the entire region that until 50 years later and with the cancellation of these rights, simultaneous with the fall of the Kingdom of the departed late Mohammad Reza Shah, had continued and which even today do not exist in many countries in the region.
Is it just too cynical for me to suggest that some portion of the peace movement, an ally or two and a certain grey lady are perfectly happy to have the US military remove Saddam while they keep their hands clean?
Foetuses may develop consciousness long before the legal age limit for abortions, one of Britain's leading brain scientists has said.Baroness Greenfield, a professor of neurology at Oxford University and the director of the Royal Institution, said there was evidence to suggest the conscious mind could develop before 24 weeks, the upper age where terminations are permitted.
Although she fell short of calling for changes in the abortion laws, she urged doctors and society to be cautious when assuming unborn babies lacked consciousness. "Is the foetus conscious? The answer is yes, but up to a point," she said.
"Given that we can't prove consciousness or not, we should be very cautious about being too gung ho and assuming something is not conscious. We should err on the side of caution."
Last year, a Daily Telegraph straw poll found many neurologists were concerned that foetuses could feel pain in the womb before 24 weeks after conception.
Many believed foetuses should be given anaesthetics during a late abortion, after 20 weeks. Some also believe pain relief should be given for keyhole surgery in the womb.
The first President Bush has told his son that hopes of peace in the Middle East would be ruined if a war with Iraq were not backed by international unity.Drawing on his own experiences before and after the 1991 Gulf War, Mr Bush Sr said that the brief flowering of hope for Arab-Israeli relations a decade ago would never have happened if America had ignored the will of the United Nations.
He also urged the President to resist his tendency to bear grudges, advising his son to bridge the rift between the United States, France and Germany.
“You’ve got to reach out to the other person. You’ve got to convince them that long-term friendship should trump short-term adversity,” he said.
The former President’s comments reflect unease among the Bush family and its entourage at the way that George W. Bush is ignoring international opinion and overriding the institutions that his father sought to uphold. Mr Bush Sr is a former US Ambassador to the UN and comes from a family steeped in multi-lateralist traditions.
France on Saturday reinforced its call for President George W. Bush to attend next week's United Nations vote on war against Iraq, insisting leaders take personal responsibility for a "life or death" decision. [...]"When you decree life or death, it should be done at the highest level of responsibility," a source close to President Jacques Chirac said of a vote on a new resolution expected next Tuesday or soon after.
"Given the importance of the decision, it seems legitimate that it is taken by heads of state and government," the Elysee Palace source said.
Iraq said on Sunday chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix might visit Baghdad on March 17, a deadline proposed by the United States and Britain for Iraq to disarm or face military action.General Hussam Mohammed Amin, head of the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate (NMD), also said Iraq believed it had little hope that it
could avert a U.S.-led invasion no matter what Baghdad did on the disarmament issue.Asked whether Blix would visit soon, Amin told a news conference in Baghdad: ``I don't know really, but he might, he might visit us on the
17th of this month.''
The 19th-century courthouse that houses the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit sits across from a CVS and a Dress Barn on a desultory stretch of Main Street in Richmond, Va. The entrance -- peeling ''Pull'' sign, metal detector, dim lobby -- is not awe-inspiring. But upstairs in the courtrooms, beneath the pendulous chandeliers and the oil portraits of former jurists, a hush prevails. Whether or not the judges are on the bench, people whisper. It is as if they tacitly accept that the atmosphere should continue to be rarefied even as the judicial process becomes increasingly polluted by politics.This 148-year-old building, once the site of the Confederate Treasury, is where you go if you are appealing the decisions of federal judges or juries in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina or South Carolina. It's the last stop before the Supreme Court, which, given how few cases the highest court actually hears, essentially makes it the court of last resort for those seeking justice in this region. Let the plaintiff beware, though; the Fourth Circuit is considered the shrewdest, most aggressively conservative federal appeals court in the nation.
The new federalism defense comes from Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson 3d, tipped by Sontag as being on President Bush's Supreme Court short list (and thus almost certain not to be nominated).
Like the "new federalists" whose conservative thinking increasingly influences the legal mainstream, Wilkinson said he believes that the Constitution is more than just the Bill of Rights. He doesn't think that the Bill of Rights has been overemphasized, he is quick to say, but that what he calls "the structural Constitution" has been underemphasized."That body of the document that spells out the relationship between the federal government and the states was neglected for far too long," he said. "The power of Congress was seen as unlimited and that of the states as a virtual nullity." Wilkinson has found it exciting, he said, to be engaged in redressing this imbalance, which sometimes means striking down Congressional acts that seem to usurp state power unconstitutionally.
But he notes, because he is of judicious temperament, that judicial activism is "heady wine" and that restraint is still the greater virtue. Everything in moderation.
That's about it for buried treasure, though. It's hard to know whether Sontag or the editors are to blame (though I'd plump for the editors), but this story is a crazy quilt of false starts and marooned vignettes. The Times says that Judge Wilkinson is fighting with another conservative, Judge Luttig, to lead the Court. There's a brief bio of Judge Wilkinson and then, well, a tangent into a story about Judge Karen Williams, who is apparently a white trash sex traiter. Though Judge Luttig's bio was dropped, we do get the details of the sexual harassment claim Judge William's inexplicably tossed out. The plaintiff objects that when she was hired, her male coworkers didn't stop "harassing" female mannequins, a claim that Judge Luttig -- that conservative idealogue -- takes seriously (on the grounds that men who do not act like gentlemen around a lady must be up to something). All the other common tropes of liberal writing about conservative judges are present. Decisions in which a woman loses are anti-woman; the poor, pitiful murder suspect was railroaded; the plain language of a statute is a flimsy excuse for a conservative decision, etc., etc., etc. To wrap it all up, the two cases Sontag follows are still undecided. Too bad this story had to be rushed into print because, well, um, just because.
There is one little payoff for conservatives. As Sontag notes: "Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously set out to overhaul the federal judiciary ideologically. Confronting courts that were thwarting his New Deal projects, he strove to create liberal ones that would grant the government more power to regulate the economy." Ronald Reagan did the same from the right. Now, despite Bill Clinton's failure to turn back the clock -- Clinton, not really a liberal, didn't care about his nominees' judicial philosophy (I swear I'm not making this up) -- George W. Bush is again engaging in ideological overhauling. As they filibuster the Estrada nomination, the Democrats might want to consider that turn-about is fair play.
In an apparent attempt to secure an involvement in post-war plans for Iraq, Saudi Arabia has conceded to a range of US demands for facilities in the kingdom in the run up to any US attack, according to western and Gulf diplomatic sources.Western diplomatic sources said the US had secured the use of the crucial air command and control centre at the Prince Sultan airbase near Riyadh to co-ordinate the air campaign that will be mostly led out of neighbouring Qatar.
Bush focused special attention on Russian President Vladimir Putin; after speaking by phone last Thursday, the two leaders agreed to "continue to communicate." A White House official told TIME that Putin assured Bush he wouldn't cast a veto. "There were rumors that the Russians were going to veto," says the official. "The President had a conversation and got a different impression--not that Putin was with him, but that he's not going to veto."
Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Sunday the United States was "in striking distance'' of winning enough votes to back the U.N. Security Council resolution on Iraq but he would not be surprised if France blocked it with a veto.
Yesterday, OJ -- seriously misoverestimating me -- gave me the keys to the blog. Today, I awoke to this Doonesbury and this Zippy the Pinhead. I feel a little like the British soldiers in Paul's post below: it's just too early for abject surrender. Let's at least make it look good.
If Mr. de Villepin has a vision, it is to revive the greatness of France — a romantic view he articulated in his book, "The Hundred Days," the first published volume of a biography of Napoleon that tells the story of the emperor's return from exile, his triumphant march across France and his final defeat at Waterloo.Describing Napoleon's philosophy as "Victory or death, but glory whatever happens," Mr. de Villepin added, "There is not a day that goes by without me feeling the imperious need to remember so as not to yield in the face of indifference, laughter or gibes" in order to "advance further in the name of a French ambition." . . .
Indeed, members of Mr. Chirac's political circle who believe in the sanctity of the trans-Atlantic alliance complain bitterly that party operatives, the Defense Ministry and the armed forces have been pushed aside and that no one but the president and Mr. de Villepin are defining French foreign policy.
On the other hand, it is heartening that Mr. de Villepin feels himself the object of laughter and gibes. Ridicule may be America's most effective weapon.
TERRIFIED Iraqi soldiers have crossed the Kuwait border and tried to surrender to British forces - because they thought the war had already started.The motley band of a dozen troops waved the white flag as British paratroopers tested their weapons during a routine exercise.
The stunned Paras from 16 Air Assault Brigade were forced to tell the Iraqis they were not firing at them, and ordered them back to their home country telling them it was too early to surrender.
But what kind of men are so sheep-like that they obey soldiers from another country's army? Why not insist upon defecting to Kuwait?
Two months after the White House began rolling out its latest budget, the full dimensions of President Bush's new tax and spending plan are finally coming into view, and they are even more sweeping than originally thought.By linking expenditures forced on the nation by the 2001 terrorist attacks with a blizzard of other measures, Bush has produced a proposal that, if enacted, would result in a governmental about-face as far-reaching as those of Ronald Reagan or Lyndon B. Johnson.
Coupled with his already-approved 2001 cuts, the president's new tax package would make Bush the biggest tax cutter in at least two decades and possibly half a century. He would top even Reagan.
His proposed defense buildup would be bigger in real terms than Johnson's Vietnam buildup, and that's not counting the cost of a war with Iraq and its aftermath.
His plan to revamp Medicaid and other programs Washington runs jointly with the states would be, in the words of a former Nixon administration budget official, "one of the biggest pullbacks in federal responsibility we've ever seen." [...]
Part of the reason that analysts have been so slow to come to grips with the dimensions of the administration's new budget is that Bush and his key aides have chosen not to trumpet the boldness of many of their proposals, especially some of the most controversial. Officials acknowledge as much in comments about their plan.
U.S. Sen. John Kerry on Saturday accused the Bush administration of being unwilling to compromise with key allies to win their support for a potential war with Iraq.But the Democratic presidential candidate from Massachusetts stopped short of saying he had changed his position since last fall when he supported a resolution giving Bush broad authority to order an attack if diplomacy failed.
"What I do regret is that this administration has not lived up to the standards of diplomacy set forth in the resolution," Kerry told the Des Moines Sunday Register. "The president's diplomacy has been completely lacking." [...]
"The greatest position of strength is by exercising the best judgement in the pursuit of diplomacy," he said, "not in some trumped-up, so-called coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted, but in a genuine coalition."
UPDATE ON "THE BOUGHT":
As dry as their their desert camp ... Aussies bring larrikin spirit: Tom Allard in Doha reports on the calm before the storm as experienced by our latest warriors. (Sydney Morning Herald, March 10 2003)
The officer patrolling the living quarters is the "spankmaster". The social club is the Qatar Mountaineering Club. Australian humour, along with its troops, has been transported to Camp As Sayliyah, the massive US military base outside Qatar's capital Doha.The site of central command and the main media centre should war break out against Iraq, the base also acts as a transit centre for US, British and Australian forces in between exercises at various locations around the Middle East.
Thousands of troops are housed in tents inside massive climate-controlled warehouses that rise out of the relentlessly flat Qatari desert, most of them built in the last six months and indistinguishable from those that contain sensitive communications and headquarters for the top brass.
Spread over more than 100 hectares, it's a logistical marvel of sorts. Most of the facilities were constructed in the past six months as the US prepared for an Iraqi invasion. Accommodation is spartan but, in its way, homely. Australians and Americans bunk together, 200 to a tent.
About 20 per cent of the Australian contingent are women and fraternisation between the women and men, of course, is strictly prohibited. The old joke about keeping sexual frustrations "well in hand" gets a workout.
Personnel are restricted from leaving the base - the local government doesn't want troops tramping around the souqs or taking in the sea air along the Doha waterfront - and there's also an issue of force protection. Qatar may practise a more moderate brand of Islam and be a strong Western ally but terrorist attacks are an enduring concern.
The food is good and there's plenty of fresh fruit. There's a bar but, at $US3 ($5) for a can of beer, it's an occasional pleasure. Movies, a gym and pool are other diversions but down time usually involves corresponding with family, using the gym or pool, keeping up with news back in Australia or jogging around the base. There is, as Liz, an Australian Navy leading seaman, puts it: "Not much to do".
"We do bugger all, mate," was how another Australian soldier described his down time. "We've got Foxtel so we can watch the cricket and the footy. We give the Poms plenty of stick over their sporting success."
The good-natured fire is returned. The Australians, with their yellow-tinged desert uniforms with brown and purple splotches, have been dubbed the "bruised bananas".
Hundreds of Zimbabwe's notorious youth militia, nicknamed the "green bombers", are fleeing to South Africa because they say they too are being beaten and starved, and are tired of "killing for nothing".This week The Sunday Independent interviewed 14 green bombers aged from 15 to 28, giving the first insight into the terror organisation.
One youth said he fled Zimbabwe after being forced to take part in the murder of his uncle, a supporter of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
Another said he was involved in the murder of an MDC party chairperson and claimed that within hours of that death, Jonathan Moyo, the Zanu-PF minister of information, visited the area, followed by President Robert Mugabe. A large consignment of food was moved in while green bombers exhorted villagers to chant Zanu-PF slogans.Yet another said he fled to South Africa after being instructed to murder his father, an MDC supporter.
Hundreds of youths have fled to South Africa, according to human rights organisations, churches and law offices.
The stories of the youths interviewed - who come from different areas of Zimbabwe and who did not previously know each other - provide chilling details of the green bombers, their training and methods.
They come from the hundreds of youth militia training camps which have sprung up in Zimbabwe, many at secondary schools where pupils are forced to take part in activities or risk death. Most of those interviewed fled in December and January, some swimming the Limpopo and risking crocodiles to get to South Africa.
MORE:
-BUY IT: The Mission by Dana Priest
-Dana Priest | USIP Specialist (United States Institute of Peace)
-BOOK SITE: The Mission (Norton)
-Q&A with Dana Priest (Washington Post)
-THREE PART SERIES: Kosovo Land Threat May Have Won War (Dana Priest, September 19, 1999, Washington Post)
-ARTICLE: U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations; 'Stress and Duress' Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret Overseas Facilities (Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, 26 December 2002, Washington Post)
-ARTICLE: Iran's Emerging Nuclear Plant Poses Test for U.S. (Dana Priest, July 29, 2002, Washington Post)
-AUDIO INTERVIEW: with Dana Priest (Diane Rehm Show, February 24, 2003)
-DISCUSSION: A New Tape: Arab television network al-Jazeera broadcast a taped message today of what is believed to be the voice of Osama bin Laden. Gwen Ifill discusses the tape with a Washington Post reporter and the former senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council in the Clinton Administration. (Online Newshour, 2/11/03)
-REVIEW: of The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America's Military By Dana Priest (John T. Finn, SF Chrionicle)
-REVIEW: of The Mission (Max Boot, Washington Post)
-REVIEW: of The Mission (Lawrence D. Freedman, Foreign Affairs)
Here in Britain it is a pity that Stalin's most devoted admirer, Christopher Hill, the Marxist historian and former master of Balliol college, Oxford, should have died nine days earlier. For he would surely have given us a second epitaph to rival his ringing words on Stalin's death in 1953: "He was a very great and penetrating thinker. Humanity not only in Russia but in all countries will always be deeply in his debt."Only this week it has emerged that Stalin might have had some reason to return Dr Hill's gratitude. For the historian Anthony Glees of Brunel University has unearthed some interesting material about Hill's wartime service in charge of the Russian desk in the Foreign Office.
Hill, it seems, had not declared his membership of the Communist party when being recruited. Did the FO think to ask? Please, Hill was a Balliol man - and had been recommended by another former master of Balliol.
While in this key post Hill used his formidable energies to the full. He urged the government to sack all White Russian emigres working in British schools and universities and replace them with Soviet-approved staff. He set up a Committee for Russian Studies including other Communists, notably the Soviet agent Peter Smollett (alias Smolka), to make it easier for Soviet citizens to come to Britain and to exchange intelligence with the USSR. Meanwhile Smollett at the Ministry of Information was busy persuading British publishers not to print George Orwell's Animal Farm. And in face of all the evidence to the contrary, the Foreign Office remained strangely convinced that Stalin's intentions towards eastern Europe were strictly benign.
I would scarcely dignify Hill by the name of mole, that charming and resourceful mammal. After all, his activities were scarcely subterranean. Anyone who had read a line of his would know which way his political proclivities lay. Similarly, anyone who had dipped into the pre-war art criticism of Anthony Blunt would get a strong whiff of vulgar Marxism. But then, from my brief experience, vetting officers do not tend to be very literary types (I was cleared by a man named Carruthers with a walrus moustache).
Still, even if all this had been known when Hill popped off at the ripe age of 91, I doubt that it would have altered the dignified and elegiac tone of his obituaries. After all, we do know most of what Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Philby got up to. This has not inhibited the BBC from commissioning a new drama called Cambridge Spies, which a BBC apparatchik sought to puff by saying that: "This is the first time they can be seen as heroic."
On the contrary, from the moment Blunt was unmasked he was treated with the most exquisite sympathy. His former pupils at the Courtauld Institute wrote to the newspapers standing by him and pooh-poohing the notion that a little light spying might outweigh Blunt's magisterial catalogue raisonne of Poussin. And the editor of The Times had him to lunch at Printing House Square - truite aux amandes they had, I seem to remember. And why not? It had, after all, been thought quite proper that Blunt should carry on as Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures for years after they knew he was a Soviet agent.
Blunt's claim that "I did not betray my conscience" and that helping the Russians was the only way to fight fascism was treated with undeserved respect. Oddly enough, both Blunt and Hill were afflicted by Bell's palsy when threatened with exposure, suggesting that their equanimity was not quite as untroubled as they pretended.
No such indulgence would have been extended if Blunt had turned out to be a Nazi agent. Similarly, Hill would not have had a hope of being elected master of Balliol if he had recently resigned from the National Front (he only packed in his party card when Khrushchev sent the tanks into Hungary). Yet surely someone who could stomach Stalin's purges, his terror famines and his subjugation of half a continent was no more suited to guide young minds than a recently convicted paedophile.
This double standard remains troubling. The most obvious explanation for not treating Stalin's horrific crimes with anything like the same intense loathing as Hitler's is that we never fought a war against the Russians. All the same, the eagerness of the West to minimise, excuse and even forget the gulag has had pernicious effects right up to the fall of communism and beyond.
Canada's political leaders have failed to remedy the "No. 1 crisis" facing medicare -- a major shortage of doctors and nurses -- says the head of the country's medical profession.The warning has come from Dr. Dana Hanson, president of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), which challenged federal and provincial governments last fall to come up with a plan to rescue medicare within 100 days.
That deadline expired yesterday. Although the CMA said the Feb. 5 first ministers' accord and the recent federal budget provide a good start, they are limited by lack of action on the shortage of health-care providers.
"There just aren't enough hands on deck," said Hanson, adding that the problem will get worse as baby boomers who provide medical care retire.
The federal-provincial accord focuses on improving home care, expanding public coverage for a patient's "catastrophic" drug costs, reforming primary care, and buying more diagnostic equipment such as magnetic resonance imaging machines (MRIs).
But the doctors say such changes are pointless if there's no one to provide patient care.
This morning, shortly after he got up, President Bush considered how to get away from "pettiness and paltriness of mind". What did his spiritual guide advise? "Ask God to keep the eyes of your spirit open to the Risen Christ, and it will be impossible for drudgery to damp you." Thus fortified, Bush resumed hostilities against Iraq.
That the president is a devout, born-'again leader of a crusading administration is well known. An article in Newsweek goes into much more detail about his religious practices, evoking the scene "ahead of the dawn", when "even before he brings his wife, Laura, a morning cup of coffee, he goes off to a quiet place to read alone". Bush's chosen text, Newsweek discloses, is My Utmost for his Highest, a book of devotional readings by Oswald Chambers, an evangelical bible teacher who died in 1917. It provides a biblical text, along with Chambers' commentary, for every day of the year.
Assuming Newsweek is correct, we can all of us, each day, accompany Bush on his spiritual journey. Tomorrow, for example, he is due to contemplate a passage headed Undaunted Radiance, in which Chambers reminds the sinner that "the experiences of life, terrible or monotonous, are impotent to touch the love of God..."
The calendar format allows us to look back at key moments in this conflict and identify the spiritual text which might have informed the president's day. On January 20, when he announced that he was "sick and tired of games and deception", Bush would have begun with a pre-dawn reflection on Isaiah's response to God's call, "Here am I; send me". On February 20, the day Bush agreed, with Blair, on a "final ultimatum" he would have considered Cha[mbers]' exhortation to action, "always beware of giving over to mere dreaming once God has spoken". And if, as was reported then, concerted military attack is still fixed for March 14, then that morning Bush will have his mind on higher things: "There is no release in human power at all, but only in the Redemption".
Transcribed by Chambers' wife, Gertrude, after his death from appendicitis, My Utmost for His Highest is less concerned with tips on appropriate conduct, than with the forging of an intimate relationship with God: "If the crisis has come to you on any line, surrender your will to Him absolutely and irrevocably."
Social life in London has become a dangerous business. You are at an apparently relaxed dinner party, and someone suddenly launches into an anti-American diatribe-as often as not, to general
applause. You are having a friendly conversation, when out of the blue there is a crack about the utter impossibility of Dubya or the evil ways of the Washington junta-and the assumption is you'll agree.The occasion for these outbursts is usually, of course, Iraq. But when the subject comes up it is striking how little time is spent talking about Saddam Hussein and what should be done about him. There is a ritual
acknowledgment that he is not a nice man, and then the real denunciations can begin. America is a rogue state; don't let them fool you, it's all about oil (or alternatively all about Dad); George W. Bush is a cowboy, a simpleton, a recovering alcoholic, a madman, a usurper... . But readers of The New Criterion hardly need to be taken through the whole litany.According to Günter Grass, "the president of the United States embodies the danger that faces us all." Grass speaks, alas, for a large slice of European opinion. And if you have read the recent effusions of John Le
Carré ("the United States of America has gone mad") or Harold Pinter, you will know that British calumniators of America can be every bit as shrill as their Continental counterparts.No one who is exposed to current British anti-Americanism as it is exhibited on the BBC, for instance, will want to underestimate it. (The night before writing this I tuned into a BBC program about Iraq and found the narrator happily harking back to the days of American "hysteria about Commies": par for the course.) Still, there is one consolation. For the moment, at least, the disease is probably less virulent and widespread in Britain than it is in France, Germany, or most other parts of the world.
British anti-war sentiment also concentrates much of its fire on a local target-the obvious one, Tony Blair. He is scorned as a poodle and excoriated as a jackal. A tabloid switches to red ink so that it can devote its
front page to portraying him with blood on his hands. "Obscene," if it still means anything, is the only word for some of the hideous cartoons about him in The Guardian and The Independent.Above all, there is disaffection in his own party. At present, it is fairly muted. Most of his critics still cling to the hope that he can persuade Washington to hold back. But if war comes, open rebellion seems inescapable. [...]
Given the contradictions, it is tempting to draw a distinction between Blair himself and the Blair government-and there are times, indeed, when he seems strangely isolated. But no, he is prime minister, and he can't be absolved from responsibility. His office is where the buck stops and where the big initiatives begin.
Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat on Saturday described al-Makadme's assassination as a "mafia-style" operation conducted by Israeli security forces. His statement reflected Palestinian leaders' concern that the assassination could aid Hamas spokesmen in mounting a major media campaign against the PA, which is busy attempting find to pave a way back to political negotiations with Israel. "While you sit at the negotiating table with the Zionists, they are massacring us," say Hamas activists, just as the Palestinian Liberation Organization central council and the Palestinian Legislative Council are convening in Ramallah.There is no Hamas representation in either of the two Palestinian national bodies - which are discussing the appointment of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) as Palestinian prime minister - even though Hamas is the second largest Palestinian movement (and some say that it already has more followers in the Gaza Strip than Arafat's Fatah party). Indeed, the political positions of the new Palestinian prime minister directly contradict those of Hamas.
Abu Mazen helped forge the Oslo agreements, which Hamas considered one of the most treacherous acts in the history of the Palestinian nation. He is also one of the few Palestinian senior leaders who doesn't hesitate to publicly voice his opposition to the use of violence in the intifada. In negotiations held between Palestinian organizations in Cairo over the last few weeks, Abu Mazen, representing Fatah, argued vociferously with Hamas delegation representative, Haled Mashal, regarding the Egyptian proposalt to halt terror attacks.
Hamas could interpret Abu Mazen's appointment as an open provocation. As of now, with the assassination of al-Makadme, it's almost certain that Hamas leaders will go back to hinting that PA security forces are cooperating with Israeli security forces in an effort to eliminate Hamas altogether.
Wrapping up a Saturday night of laughs on a somber note, President Bush toasted American armed forces surrounding Iraq and declared them ready for war if needed.''Because they serve, our freedom will be secure and our peace will be safe,'' he told the annual Gridiron Club dinner of journalists and their high-powered guests.
With 250,000 troops poised to disarm Saddam Hussein if ordered to action, Bush said, ''They are prepared if necessary to remove a gathering danger.''
His remarks were a contrast to an evening of songs and satirical skits by journalists who lampooned Republicans and Democrats alike.
Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), a wealthy trial lawyer who hopes to oust Bush from the White House in next year's election, poked fun at his own background in giving the Democratic ''response.''
''President Bush says frivolous lawsuits have never helped anyone,'' he said. ''Yeah, tell that to my new house in Georgetown.''
Bush's closing remarks underscored a feeling among Gridiron members that current topics do not easily lend themselves to levity.
"Holy, Holy/Are You Lord God Almighty," a Christian rock band sings, as the crowd sways, palms in the air. The music stops, and a preacher with a microphone speaks. "God, you are bigger than any addiction! You are bigger than any crack cocaine, you are bigger than any beer, than any pornography!"It is Friday night at Healing Place Church, and Tonja Myles is presiding over one of the most controversial church services in America. It is a meeting of a "Christ centered" addiction-treatment program, led by the woman who has become the face of the Bush administration's campaign to send tax dollars to faith-based social service providers. Ms. Myles was President Bush's special guest at the State of the Union address in January, when he asked Congress for $600 million over three years to finance vouchers for addiction programs, including religious ones.
Faith-based social services are the latest missile the Bush administration has fired at the wall between church and state. Earlier this year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans to allow tax dollars to be used to build churches, as long as part of the building is used for social services. I decided to head to Baton Rouge to see Ms. Myles's program firsthand. For airplane reading, I brought Thomas Jefferson's writings on religion, including his famous reply to the Danbury Baptist Association, which introduced the now-classic formulation of a "wall of separation" between church and state. [...]
Backers of faith-based initiatives say that rules against state support for religion are a recent invention of activist judges. But when the Supreme Court handed down a landmark church-state case in 1947, it was careful to ground its decision in the words of our third president.
Jefferson was hardly hostile to religion. In his first Inaugural Address, he called God "an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter." But when the Danbury Baptist Association, a Connecticut religious group, asked him to declare a national fast day, he refused, citing his conviction that "religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God," and his view of the First Amendment as "building a wall of separation between church and state."
Jefferson saw freedom of conscience as paramount. "To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful," he wrote in "A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom." He also feared that if the churches were united with government, the result would be tyranny. The power of organized religion, Jefferson once wrote, "has been severely felt by mankind, and has filled the history of ten or twelve centuries with too many atrocities not to merit a proscription from meddling with government." [...]
Supporters of faith-based initiatives accuse opponents of being anti-religion. But it is the Bush administration that denigrates religion by presenting it as simply another "option," no different from secular choices like Alcoholics Anonymous or Weight Watchers. Jefferson insisted on the need for a wall between church and state not because he failed to appreciate religion, but because he understood its power all too well.
By contrast, here's George Washington's first Inaugural Address--it too is extra-constitutional, but he at least presided over the Constitutional Convention:
[I]t would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that His benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States a Government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes, and may enable every instrument employed in its administration to execute with success the functions allotted to his charge. In tendering this homage to the Great Author of every public and private good, I assure myself that it expresses your sentiments not less than my own, nor those of my fellow-citizens at large less than either. No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency; and in the important revolution just accomplished in the system of their united government the tranquil deliberations and voluntary consent of so many distinct communities from which the event has resulted can not be compared with the means by which most governments have been established without some return of pious gratitude, along with an humble anticipation of the future blessings which the past seem to presage. These reflections, arising out of the present crisis, have forced themselves too strongly on my mind to be suppressed. You will join with me, I trust, in thinking that there are none under the influence of which the proceedings of a new and free government can more auspiciously commence.
As a Christian and as a president who was severely provoked by international crises, I became thoroughly familiar with the principles of a just war, and it is clear that a substantially unilateral attack on Iraq does not meet these standards. This is an almost universal conviction of religious leaders, with the most notable exception of a few spokesmen of the Southern Baptist Convention who are greatly influenced by their commitment to Israel based on eschatological, or final days, theology.For a war to be just, it must meet several clearly defined criteria.
The war can be waged only as a last resort, with all nonviolent options exhausted. In the case of Iraq, it is obvious that clear alternatives to war exist. [...]
The attackers must have legitimate authority sanctioned by the society they profess to represent. The unanimous vote of approval in the Security Council to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction can still be honored, but our announced goals are now to achieve regime change and to establish a Pax Americana in the region, perhaps occupying the ethnically divided country for as long as a decade. For these objectives, we do not have international authority. [...]
The peace it establishes must be a clear improvement over what exists. Although there are visions of peace and democracy in Iraq, it is quite possible that the aftermath of a military invasion will destabilize the region and prompt terrorists to further jeopardize our security at home.
George W. Bush is the President of the United States of America and has the authority of his nation to pursue the war. The United Nations, as is being proved this week, has no authority, temporal or moral.
Saddam Hussein's regime is one of the two or three worst in the world today: anything will be an improvement, including a period of instability and the breakup of the country.
That democracy is problematic is proven by the inexplicable fact that this flaming idiot is a former President of the United States. That this is a great nation is amply proven by the fact that we survived that presidency.
The case for war has been incoherent due to overlapping reasons conservatives want to get Saddam.The president wants to avenge his father, and please his base by changing the historical ellipsis on the Persian Gulf war to a period. Donald Rumsfeld wants to exorcise the post-Vietnam focus on American imperfections and limitations. Dick Cheney wants to establish America's primacy as the sole superpower. Richard Perle wants to liberate Iraq and remove a mortal threat to Israel. After Desert Storm, Paul Wolfowitz posited that containment is a relic, and that America must aggressively pre-empt nuclear threats.
And in 1997, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Fox News, and other conservatives, published a "statement of principles," signed by Jeb Bush and future Bush officials - Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby and Elliott Abrams. Rejecting 41's realpolitik and shaping what would become 43's pre-emption strategy, they exhorted a "Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity," with America extending its domain by challenging "regimes hostile to our interests and values."
Saddam would be the squealing guinea pig proving America could impose its will on the world.
With W., conservatives got a Bush who wanted to be Reagan. With 9/11, they found a new tragedy to breathe life into their old dreams.
Which of these things does she oppose:
(1) Punishing Saddam for trying to assassinate a U.S. president?(2) Ending the Gulf War?
(3) Exorcising whatever few ghosts of Vietnam remain?
(4) America as the world's sole Superpower
(5) Liberating Iraq?
(6) Removing a mortal threat to Israel?
(7) Driving a wooden stake into containment?
(8) Pre-empting nuclear threats?
(9) Moral clarity?
(10) Challenging "regimes hostile to our interests and values"?
EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE -- A new conventional bomb whose blast releases shock waves that can be felt miles away is scheduled to be tested at a range here, possibly within a week, officials said Saturday.The 21,000-pound bomb is known as a MOAB, or "massive ordnance air burst."
A bomb known as a "daisy cutter," the 15,000-pound BLU-82, is currently billed as the world's most powerful non-nuclear explosive.
A golf magazine speculates, using sources, that Sandra Day O'Connor will be Augusta National's first female member.The club will announce this, Golfweek says, the day before next month's Masters. And if true, that means the Supreme Court justice could walk through the club gates wearing her robe, directly past the Imperial Wizard wearing his.
It's the perfect ending to a Mel Brooks movie. And the perfect conclusion to this saga of the South.
Hootie Johnson and Augusta already were losing a defensible privacy-issue argument. Hootie is to blame for that, but so are the inherent images of rich white men smoking cigars on a Georgia plantation.
Then came the end game, when an ally joined Augusta National's cause last week and slipped a green straitjacket on Hootie.
And to think. No one thought the Ku Klux Klan had power anymore.
SADDAM Hussein and his family are to be given 72 hours on Tuesday to accept an offer of exile, while 50 of Iraq's top military brass will be offered an amnesty in return for full co-operation with the United Nations in a secret plan to be tabled at its New York headquarters.The highly sensitive proposal was tabled by Pakistan during a closed-door meeting of the 10 non-permanent members of the Security Council on Friday and was brokered by Saudi Arabia, the Vatican and moderate Arab states. Failure by Saddam to agree to the plan would clear the way for war.
If the proposal, understood to be in the form of a short paragraph, becomes part of a second resolution and is adopted by the Security Council, the UN would oversee the establishment of a post-Saddam government and the UN, not the US, would take stewardship of Iraq's oilfields.
The Iraqi generals and top ranking officers would have to co-operate fully with UN inspectors to oversee the total elimination of any weapons of mass destruction.
Pope John Paul II has dispatched his emissaries to meet all the key parties during the past two weeks. His special envoy and per manent observer at the UN, Archbishop Renato Rafaele Martino, has been discussing the proposal with all the Security Council members.
MORE:
Saddam's Thai gem spree hints at getaway plan (Jon Swain, March 9, 2003, The Sunday Times)
SADDAM HUSSEIN has sent his personal jeweller to Thailand on a secret mission to buy millions of dollars worth of diamonds, prompting speculation that he is preparing to flee or send his family into hiding, writes Jon Swain.Sources with knowledge of the trip revealed that the jeweller travelled from Baghdad to Bangkok via Jordan. They said he bought the gems in the Thai capital in a prearranged deal. "He purchased millions of dollars worth," said one.
This was the jeweller's second recent visit to Bangkok. Three months ago the sources said that Saddam's son Uday had sent him to buy a diamond ring from an American dealer for $750,000. [...]
In a defiant address last week Saddam said he would never desert Iraq or its people in the event of war. He has not left the country since the invasion of Kuwait more than 12 years ago. In an interview with American television last month, he said: "We will die here. We will die in this country and we will maintain our honour - the honour that is required - in front of our people."
The purchase of diamonds suggests he may now be having second thoughts, at least for his family. Saddam may have opted to convert part of his wealth into diamonds because they are easier to hide and transport than banknotes.
Tamara, who grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Adriana, who hails from Valley Stream, discovered through sheer chance just days after they turned 20 that they are twin sisters who were separated at birth. And for three years, they have been attending college on Long Island just a few miles from each other."I feel like I have known her my whole life," Tamara said Monday before a half-dozen TV cameras and reporters from local and national media who had descended on Hofstra University to hear the twins' amazing story.
It begins back in November. A friend of Adriana's ended up at Tamara's 20th-birthday celebration and talked and talked about how much Tamara looked like this friend of his. This friend told her how this girl she resembled so much was born in Mexico, as Tamara knew she had been, and also had celebrated a birthday recently.
"I was curious," Tamara said. That led to an e-mail communication between the two students, and it was then that Adriana e-mailed her picture to Tamara. "I was shocked. She has my face," Tamara said.
Henry Heimlich's name is known across the globe. Every time he travels, the 83-year-old is greeted by someone with a tale to tell about how the Heimlich Manoeuvre saved their choking mother, father or child.He has books filled with grateful letters from people who have saved their loved ones.
Since the technique was introduced in 1974 it has saved more than 100,000 US lives, including those of Cher, former President Ronald Reagan, Elizabeth Taylor, Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau, Carrie Fisher and Jack Lemmon.
But despite being the inventor of one of the most significant medical techniques, Dr Heimlich told BBC News Online that he has only been called upon once to carry it out himself - and that was just three years ago.
"I was in this club restaurant eating when I heard someone calling Dr Heimlich. I turned around and saw a man choking so I did the Heimlich Manoeuvre and got it out and then went on and had my lunch."
Glossing over the negative aspects of the latest report by the weapons inspectors, a government statement issued from a meeting presided over by Saddam Hussein and editorials in the government-controlled press all reached the same conclusion: that Iraq had been declared sufficiently free of weapons of mass destruction to warrant the cancellation of sanctions imposed after the 1991 Persian Gulf war. . . .The Iraqi demands to the United Nations included a call to strip Israel of its weapons of mass destruction and force it to abide by Security Council resolutions requiring its withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territory. The government statement also said the United States and Britain should officially be branded "liars."
The statement by the Iraqi cabinet said the United States was still trying to use the cover of the Security Council reports to attack Iraq despite the cooperation detailed by the weapons inspectors.
A prominent economist has sounded a warning about China's troubled state banks, bulging budget deficits and hidden debts, which he said could hobble its economic growth.Professor Wu Jinglian, who is a member of the country's top advisory body, said on Friday that the amount of non-performing assets (NPAs) held by the four state-owned commercial banks was far too high.
He said China's asset management companies, created to restructure bad bank loans, can only fix about 30 per cent of the 1.4 trillion yuan (S$294 billion) of NPAs transferred to them.
The rest is left to the government to deal with.
The state banks themselves still have 1.8 trillion yuan of NPAs on their books that must be written off by the government.
Prof Wu estimated that China's NPAs represent some 30 per cent of current gross domestic product.
Just as unsettling for the economist was the country's ballooning budget deficit, which hovered at around 3 per cent of GDP.
The Ethical Society of Austin ("the Ethical Society"), a congregation of individuals who meet regularly to practice a belief system known as Ethical Culture, seeks tax-exempt status as a religious organization under the tax code. The Texas Comptroller denied the application on the ground that the Ethical Society must demonstrate that it requires belief in a "God, Gods, or higher power" (hereinafter "the Supreme Being test") in order to qualify. The trial court found that the Ethical Society should not have been denied tax-exempt status because the Comptroller's test was unconstitutionally underinclusive and that the Ethical Society should have qualified for the requested tax exemptions. We must now decide whether a state government may, consistent with the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, require a group to demonstrate its belief in a "Supreme Being" in order to be considered a religion for statutory purposes. Because the Comptroller's test fails to include the whole range of belief systems that may, in our diverse and pluralistic society, merit the First Amendment's protection, we will affirm the trial court's judgment. [Citations omitted] . . .Ethical Culture has the marks of a traditional religious organization. Indeed, with a history dating back to 1876, Ethical Culture does appear to function in a way analogous to more established religious groups. It maintains a bona fide separate corporate existence. It possesses a coherent literature. Ethical Culture groups meet regularly, typically on Sundays, for services including ceremonial practices. Those services are led by a group of clergy, most of whom have been educated at theological institutes and seminaries. The same trained clergy perform life cycle rituals, including marriages and naming ceremonies. The services are supplemented with religious instruction for children. The Ethical Society of Austin has such meetings, coordinated by professional clergy, and meets regularly on Sundays. Taken together, these factors indicate to us a sincere attempt by the Ethical Society, and its sister groups, to undertake to provide the benefits of a traditional religion. In light of our understanding of the structure of Ethical Culture's principles, these external indications of religious faith mark an important factor for determining whether the Ethical Society is a religion.
He is acclaimed in north Africa as anti-Bush, anti-America and pro- Saddam. Not quite the image he wants to convey to Washington, of course, but a useful counterweight to the notion, widespread in the Muslim world, that US policy towards Iraq is part of a Christian crusade against Islam.But reality was an intrusive, if unwelcome guest, at the party. France has the largest Muslim population in Europe and it is growing fast and immigration is a hot political issue. While Chirac was in Algiers, the French town of Nimes was convulsed by violence. Gangs of youths ran riot after the police shot dead a 17-year-old man of north African descent. Shops were burnt and looted, a police car was shot at.
There are more than two million Algerians in France. Last year, almost 200,000 more got visas to enter the country. The demand is ever growing. Wherever he went, Chirac was greeted by chants of 'Vi -- sas! Vi -- sas!'
But France is shutting its doors. While Chirac spoke in Algiers of opening frontiers, his ambitious interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, was tightening down the hatches and sending refugees home. This is a country that is no longer sure of its place and role in the world. France is bewildered by the pace of change, by globalisation, the evolution of the EU and the ebbing power and significance of national institutions.
The French are disturbed by the speed of demographic change and worried that the enlargement of the EU into Central and Eastern Europe will bring them no good. They fear that it will mean the end of the rural France that has so shaped the nation's identity -- the notion of La France profonde. Without the agricultural subsidies of CAP, the depopulation of the countryside will gather pace.
In last year's elections, the far-right National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, shocked the country and its political establishment by winning almost 20% of the vote in the first round . Of course, Le Pen's followers included the fascist bully-boys that make up the far-right all over Europe, but they were a minority. Most of those who marched behind his banners came from middle-class, rural and artisan France.
After Chirac's crushing victory in the second round, he sent his ministers on a fact-finding mission to the provinces to discover why Le Pen did well. There were no surprises: insecurity, a decline in law and order and fears of a dilution of national identity.
Few who saw him accept the presidency on a snow-swept day in January 2001 ever thought that young Dubya would step up from being an insipid interloper to a world leader, about to embark on adventures that will change the shape of the world. First the Taliban and their evil ideas were sent packing from Afghanistan, the noose is tightening around the al-Qaeda terrorist network that attacked the US homeland, and now the Iraqi leader is in Bush's sights. Two momentous events saw to that: the September 11 atrocities, which demanded strategic realignment, and the mid-term elections a year later, which provided Bush's power base with unshakable foundations.Yet, for all that Bush has adopted the complexion of the chameleon, many still believe that grey is still the predominant colour. The man who will take the world into a largely unwanted war, once said: 'When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world and you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who they are, but we know they're there.' Dubya knew what he meant, or at least thought he did, but, somewhere along the route followed by the presidential thought processes, the synapses clicked at the wrong moment and the sentiment came out the wrong way round, upside down, and decidedly mangled.
In the Chevy Chase world of US politics, it is easy to smirk at Bush's solecisms and snicker at the commonly-held view that he's a few beans short of a full burrito, a dyslexic who gets it so wrong that he once went to a fancy-dress toga party dressed as a goat. It is even simpler to write him off as a numbskull or a front man who needs others to wind up the clockwork before he speaks or acts. It needs no second prompting to suggest he is driven by religious fanaticism, almost fundamentalist in its intensity, to save souls and bring them to the redemption stool. Such thoughts might be diverting for unreconstructed cynics, they might give comfort to those of a nervous disposition, but they do not tell the whole truth. [...]
But like many other bitter jests from those days when the heavens seemed to be falling, there was more than a knowing smile behind the words. The jury is still out on whether or not Bush is a blockhead -- he seems to possess a sly, animal intelligence -- but one thing cannot be denied or rewritten. It was money that got Dubya into the Oval Office. Here was a rich kid living off his father's reputation, a guy who had been handed everything because it had been bought for him, a thin-skinned semi-failure with a tendency to reinvent his own life history, an oil baron wheeler-dealer whose money came from dubious sources, yet this bluff Texas cowpoke with a penchant for homely maxims suddenly found himself occupying the world's most powerful position .
As he stands on the brink of plunging the Middle East into turmoil or, if you prefer, of leading the next stage of his crusade against terrorism, Dubya is that curious amalgam of modern times -- a man who came from nowhere going somewhere, a latter-day Peter the Hermit blessed or cursed with big bucks, who has been permitted to decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. His election was as shabby an example of power exercised without responsibility as could be found in Richard J Daley's Chicago during the heyday of boss politics. Here was Tammany Hall meeting Midland, Texas. [...]
Due to the collegiate system Bush encourages in his inner Cabinet, a vital factor in understanding him is to know the last person to whom he has spoken. If it's Cheney or Rumsfeld, hang 'em high will be the way forward. If it's Powell, the agenda will include compromise and caution. Condoleezza Rice brings her own brand of pragmatism, balanced by Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's ferocious realpolitik. Since quitting drink , Bush has become a good listener and enjoys moderating his argumentative Cabinet as they kick options back and forth. Here he is among friends who know where he is coming from. That counts in Team Bush.
And President Bush demonstrated his faith in his own leadership qualities when he surrounded himself with this cabinet, the most qualified since George Washington's. After all, there was no political constituency for Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, and much bureaucratic danger in bringing aboard two former presidential chiefs of staff. But he not only hired them, he also brought aboard Colin Powell, John Ashcroft, Tommy Thompson, etc.--men who'd run governments or, in General Powell's case the U.S. Military, and have significant support within the party in their own rights. No man who was insecure about himself would have built such a team, one where he could easily have ended being overshadowed by his putative subordinates.
One particularly hilarious example of how much smarter--at least in terms of management skills--Mr. Bush is than Mr. Royle is that last bit about doing whatever the last advisor said. That is, of course, how you handle staff, allowing a Colin Powell to believe that he's convinced you to do what you've already decided, then taking him out to the Rose Garden to announce it to the press with him by your side, thereby making him beholden to you for what you'd do anyway. This continuing refusal, or inability, of pundits to examine Mr. Bush's political career through the lens of his business background seriously diminishes the quality of their analysis, and leaves them needlessly perplexed and their readers shortchanged.
SADDAM HUSSEIN has been trying to acquire a fleet of 300 drones equipped with spraying devices capable of delivering chemical and biological weapons, it was revealed last week.Iraqi documents seen by The Sunday Times show orders for kits to make the pilotless planes and for gyroscopes and guidance systems enabling them to be flown at targets from a distance. The documents also contain requests for small spraying devices normally used in agriculture that would be specially adapted for use in the air. [...]
Details of the orders emerged as the United Nations declassified a report on Iraq’s prohibited weapons programme. Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, said there was “credible information” that Iraq never destroyed 21,000 litres of biological warfare agents, including 10,000 litres of anthrax, stored during the 1990 Gulf war. There was also “credible information” that Iraq had 7,000 litres more biological warfare agents in bombs and warheads than it had declared.
Blix mentioned that inspectors had recently discovered an undeclared Iraqi drone with a wingspan of 25ft, which he said had been test-piloted by Iraq and could carry anthrax or other biological weapons to neighbouring countries.
To the fury of British and American officials the disclosure was buried deep in his 173-page report and not mentioned in an oral presentation to foreign ministers. The plane is being studied by inspectors to determine whether it can exceed the authorised range of 92 miles.
Two young sons of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks, are being used by the CIA to force their father to talk.Yousef al-Khalid, nine, and his brother, Abed al-Khalid, seven, were taken into custody in Pakistan last September when intelligence officers raided a flat in Karachi where their father had been hiding.
He fled just hours before the raid but his two young sons, along with another senior al-Qa'eda member, were found cowering behind a wardrobe in the apartment.
The boys have been held by the Pakistani authorities but this weekend they were flown to America where they will be questioned about their father.
Last night CIA interrogators confirmed that the boys were staying at a secret address where they were being encouraged to talk about their father's activities.
"We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children," said one official, "but we need to know as much about their father's recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care."
Geopolitics has intruded into the obscure world of shoe sole sales, with the first publicly documented case of a US company scrapping a German business deal because of Berlin's opposition to an attack on Iraq.Enefco, a Maine-based buyer of leatherboard - used in shoes and belts - has cancelled a L25,000-a-month ($27,494-a-month) contract with Lederett, a small east German company, citing "the lack of support for the US by the Federal Republic of Germany".
Enefco - whose internet home-page features an animated US flag and the legend "God Bless America" - confirmed on Friday it had withdrawn from the contract but said Norman Farrar, its owner, would not comment further.
German business organisations have long warned that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's opposition to US foreign policy is damaging trade relations. But they have not cited specific cases of US companies wrapping themselves in the stars-and-stripes and turning down business with German companies. In the US, some Republican senators have called for trade sanctions against Germany and France, and a number of popular protests have gained publicity.
They're calling it the "baby summit." Host Sweden hopes a March meeting of European leaders will launch an appeal to reverse Europe's declining birth rates, rejuvenate the population and banish fears that a shrinking workforce will soon be unable to pay the continent's pensions bill."You can find no worse threat to sustainable development than to have too few children born," Environment Minister Kjell Larsson said recently. [...]
A UN report last year said Germany would need to import 487,000 immigrants a year to keep the working-age population stable up to 2050 at current birth and death rates. France would need 109,000 and the EU as a whole 1.58 million.
To keep the ratio of workers to old-age pensioners steady, the Union would need the influx of outsiders to swell to 13.5 million a year.
The Swedish government believes the population slump is the greatest social problem facing Europe. Its plan to reverse the decline is simple - create a "family friendly" society to make it easier for today's dual-breadwinner couples to have more babies without sacrificing their careers. The Swedes will be making the point when they host their first ever EU summit in Stockholm March 23-24. [...]
Sweden is already taking a lead, with the government planning to phase in a series of improvements to a support programme already among the world's most generous. New measures include increasing paid parental leave from 12 to 13 months, of which fathers must take two months; increasing monthly child benefit payments beyond the current 950 kroner ($102) per child; and introducing free pre-school for four and five-year-olds by 2003.
Swedish officials say paying to promote a baby boom has been shown to work.
When benefits were raised in the late 1980s, the birth rate soared to 14.5 per 1,000 citizens - second only to Ireland among the EU nations. When a recession forced cuts in the early 1990s the babies stopped coming and Sweden finished the decade with just 10 births per 1,000 people - almost bottom of the EU birth table.
Sweden has an advantage over other EU nations: Its people have shown they are prepared to tolerate some of the world's highest tax rates in return for cradle-to-grave welfare.
It is estimated that Swedes, numbering about nine million, pay around 60 per cent of their income on taxes. Increasingly that's the sort of price other nations may have to consider paying to keep the population going, experts say.
The Taliban supreme leader Mulla Omar and two sons of Osama bin Laden were arrested in southeastern Afghanistan while intensified search continues for the most sought after man Osama Bin Laden in a joint operation involving US forces . . . The brothers were captured in the Rabat region in the extreme southwest of Afghanistan’s Nimroz province where the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet, they added. Sources said that the joint forces were sure that they have captured an important Taliban figure Mulla Omar but his identity was yet to ascertained by the top intelligence high command in Pentagon.
Earlier this week we wondered what Old Europe could hope to gain from being humiliated when they fail to stop the war; Patrick Ruffini says It's Not About Iraq.
The President has carefully set about action in ascending order of difficulty. First the Taliban. Then Saddam. Then the next step, Iran - the world's leading financier of terror. North Korea will be left to China to deal with, with Mr Bush making clear to China that, if it does not take its responsibilities seriously, Japan will be given nuclear weapons.This is not speculation; talk, as I have, to those within the Bush circle . . . and they will take you through the plan step by step. . . .
Iran is, if you like, the Henry Ford of modern terror: it invented an assembly line, from the local mosque to the terrorist training camp . . .
Well-connected advisers tell me that if, as now seems likely, the UN refuses to back action against terror, Mr Bush will announce a "temporary" suspension of America's membership, to be accompanied by an offer: if the UN gets its act together and carries out long-overdue reforms, America (and its money) will return. But if there is no reform, the temporary withdrawal will, de facto, become permanent.
Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader, will not be permitted to shake hands with President George W Bush or visit the Oval Office during next week's St Patrick's Day celebrations at the White House.The decision was taken after the Farc, a Colombian narco-terrorist group, used its training from the Provisional IRA to launch a campaign of urban bombing and began to target Americans.
A defence contractor working for the US Army was murdered and three more taken hostage by the Farc last month after their single engine Cessna plane crashed in the jungle 200 miles south of Bogota. [...]
Last year, Mr Adams was among a group of five party leaders photographed with Mr Bush in the Oval Office along with Bertie Ahern, the Irish premier, and John Reid, then Northern Ireland Secretary. This year, there will be no photograph and no contact between Mr Adams and Mr Bush.
The politically correct position on the war against terrorism is "this is not about Islam". Two groups dissent: American fundamentalist Christians and European fundamentalist secularists. Born-again Christians of the American midwest think that the reunification of all the biblical lands of Israel will hasten the Second Coming, in which Rapture they will be forever saved. European fundamentalist secularists think that all religion is blindness and stupidity, a kind of mental affliction, of which Islam is a particularly acute example.The polite form of this attitude is to say "Islam must have its Reformation". After all, Muslims are still living in the Middle Ages aren't they? In 1424, to be precise. This, apart from being unbearably condescending ("come on you chaps, reform yourselves and maybe we'll let you into the house"), is also half-baked. The Reformation started as a revolt against the pope in the name of a true reading of the holy books. Islam doesn't have a pope, which is one reason it's so hard for it to have a Reformation. But anyway, would those who say "Islam must have its Reformation" really want Muslims to get back to a strict, literal interpretation of the Koran? No, what people who say this really mean is "Islam must have its Enlightenment". Or, better still, its post-Darwinian secularisation. Muslims must, in short, evolve .
The one form of evangelism that is still acceptable on the European left is evangelical Darwinism. Its fundamental belief is that all other forms of belief are symptoms of intellectual backwardness. Thus Martin Amis wrote on this page a couple of days ago "we are obliged to accept the fact that Bush is more religious than Saddam: of the two presidents, he is, in this respect, the more psychologically primitive". By this logic, Archbishop Rowan Williams is more psychologically primitive than Stalin and Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is more psychologically primitive than Hitler.
Europe is the place where post-Darwinian secularisation is most advanced. It's now the most secular continent on earth. And it's precisely the fact that Europeans, especially on the left, have such a secular imagination that makes it so difficult for us to understand and accept the religious Muslims who have come among us in growing numbers. You need a religious imagination to respond to the music of other religions. Jonathan Sacks expressed this well in his account of a meeting with radical Muslims, including a senior Iranian Ayatollah. "We established within minutes a common language, because we take certain things very seriously: we take faith seriously, we take texts seriously. It's a particular language that believers share." [...]
The leap of imaginative sympathy from Christianity or Judaism to Islam is much smaller than that from evangelical secularism to any of them. That's why America, which has preserved the religious imagination it imported from Europe, may actually be better placed to accept the Islamic other. That's not all. America has a rare combination of religious imagination and an inclusive, civic identity. Europe has a fateful combination of secular imagination and exclusive, ethnic identities.
A couple of months ago, taking a crash course of enculturation in the American Bible Belt, I sat in Homer's coffee house, in a suburb of Kansas City, talking to Chris Mull, a singer of rather excruciating "Christian rock". He said some interesting things about the local Muslims. Being religious themselves, he said, the local Christians were better able to understand Muslim religiosity. Since this was an area of so many competing religious sects, everyone accepted that religion had to be a matter of private choice and community life. In this sense, a place where most people are religious can come closer to the pluralist ideal in which, as Rabbi Sacks has memorably put it, "Values are tapes we play on the Walkman of the mind; any tune we choose so long as it does not disturb others." Finally, my Christian rocker said that local Muslims made more efforts to adapt to American ways because "they're living the American dream".
Pie in the sky, you may retort. Apple pie in the sky. But can you imagine anyone in Marseille or Hamburg or Oldham even thinking of saying of the local Muslims that "they're living the European dream"? Contemporary Europeanness is secular, but it's not an inclusive, civic identity, as Americanness is. That's Europe's double problem. The Iraq war may be America's crusade, but it's Europe which is closer to the likely Muslim backlash and worse equipped to deal with it.
None of this is to deny that there are large dangers in Islam itself, especially in radically politicised Islam. The captured al-Qaida commander Khalid Sheikh Mohammed chillingly reminds us of this when he describes the 9/11 terrorist attacks as "the holy raids on Washington and New York". But the beginning of the Islamic new year is a good moment for post-Christian Europe to look not at the mote in our Islamic neighbour's eye but at the beam in our own.
We happen to believe that Islam must be reformed and fear that, lacking a central authority, that reform will have to be generated from without. However, that reform, while it must secularize economics and politics, must not secularize the entire culture, lest Islam follow Europe into terminal decline.
Having grown weary of receiving e-mails telling us that the only thing that makes our site worthwhile is the comments, we've decided to cut to the chase and just have the nearly mythical "pj" post for himself. It can, therefore, now be revealed that he is Paul Jaminet, about whom you can find out more at his website. We are honored to have him participate.
The stirring events of the Exodus from Egypt, the splitting of the Red Sea, the revelation at Sinai, the disaster of the Golden Calf, the war with Amalek, all do not appear in the report at the end of the book. Instead we have an accounting of monies and goods and services donated by the Jewish people in order to build the Mishkan (Tabernacle).There is nothing as boring and undramatic as an accountant's report, a statement of profit and loss and of budgets raised and spent. Yet an accurate accounting of money lies at the heart of all civilized societies. Cooking the books, filing false financial statements destroys confidence and eventually leads to far-reaching negative consequences. Remember Enron and Arthur Andersen? The Torah therefore prefers to end this stirring book on the somewhat mundane note of honest and open accountability. And this is a great lesson in life.
Accountability is the name of the game in Jewish life. The Torah teaches us that "adam muad lolam" --- a person is always liable and responsible for one's actions and behavior. Corruption in monetary matters is a symptom of the corruption in one's heart and soul. [...]
Accepting the Torah at Sinai is dramatic and inspiring. Maintaining its precepts and living its values in a dangerous and inimical world is taxing and many times uninspiring. People crave excitement --- "spirituality." But oftentimes people think that such spirituality comes without the necessary price tag of inhibited human behavior and personal accountability.
It is only the message of accountability that this parsha stresses that can give us the courage and fortitude to continually rise in the face of adversity and proclaim "chazak, chazak, v'nischazek" ---" Let us be strong, let us be strong and let us strengthen others as well."
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-ESSAY: Rights, Responsibilities, and Communitarianism (Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D., friesian.com)
UPDATE:
Speaking of Communitarianism, one of its fathers has started a blog:
Miscellaneous (Amitai Etzioni, March 03, 2003, Amitai Etzioni Notes: Personal and Communitarian Reflections)
Until a few months ago I did not know a blog from a hole in the wall. Then I joined Lawrence Lessig at a Catholic University Law School symposium in which he laid out his opposition to copyright laws. He favored free access to cultural products in cyberspace for the common good, which he defined as creativity and innovation. I shared that characterization of the good, but wondered if the best way to protect the vary same good would be ensuring that innovators and creators receive some benefits for a reasonable period. I asked Lessig for examples of damages that creative people incurred because access to music, texts, films, and other cultural material in cyberspace is not unencumbered. Lessig did not have a sizeable list, but he suggested that the creators of blogs would be unable to incorporate, say, Disney images into their web logs, as many like to do. (He was quick to note that this matter could be readily handled by extending the fair use laws that exist in the rest of the world to cyberspace, still maintaining copyright laws).I had no idea what Lessig was referring to, but soon I found a whole slew of blogs. Many of them seem to be on the light side; quite a few are even hacking products, anything from digital cameras to underwear. But then the "wonder kid" of the UCLA law school, Eugene Volokh, invited me to what is known as the "Volokh Fest"; when he snows into town, he invites some of his considerable number of friends to a Dutch dinner. Turns out, he has a highly regarded blog site, the Volokh Conspiracy; and he introduced me to others, including the most popular one, Instapundit. These blogs inspired me to form one. I would love to have comments on my attempt to use this new medium to share pieces of information, sources, and ideas in which I naively believe everybody must be interested. And I promise you that in my case .com means communitarian, not commercial.
A number of police departments in the United States have created `cold-case squads' to investigate unsolved crimes that are years or even decades old. To `clear' old cases, detectives often use new methods such as DNA analysis and other modern forensic techniques to analyze data that was collected but not comprehensible when the crimes were committed. Professor Fox's intriguing book is about an historical `cold case' that took more than 50 years to clear.The crime in question was the cold-blooded murder of some 4,500 Polish officers and soldiers whose bodies were discovered in April 1943 in the Katyn Forest, located 12 miles west of the Russian city of Smolensk. The hero of Fox's book is a self-taught photo-interpreter of professional caliber named Waclaw Godziemba-Maliszewski. The data collected at the time of the crime were aerial reconnaissance photographs taken by the German Luftwaffe, which were seized, classified, and stored in the "evidence room" of the US National Archives until they were declassified in 1979. The methods used to finally solve the crime were modern photo interpretation and photogrammetry.
German occupation forces stumbled onto mass graves at Katyn in April 1943. Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels charged the Soviets with mass murder, hoping to exploit the grisly discovery to shatter the Anglo-American-Soviet wartime alliance. The Germans exhumed many of the corpses and brought in an international team of forensic experts and other observers to substantiate the Soviet atrocity. The plan backfired. All of the forensic experts were from Nazi-occupied countries, with the exception of one pathologist from neutral Switzerland. Stalin blamed the Germans for the massacres, and London and Washington accepted his version of the story as the truth. As time went on, most historians in the West concluded that the Soviets were to blame, since what little evidence there was suggested that the Poles were killed while in Soviet, not German, captivity. Nevertheless, doubts persisted for decades.
God's Eye is part history and part biography. The historical part tells the story of Katyn and other killing fields where more than 20,000 Polish officers, soldiers, border guards, police, and other officials, as well as ordinary citizens, were executed during World War II. The narrative stretches from 1940 to the present, tracking successive investigations that uncovered the truth bit by bit. The biographical part of Fox's book focuses on Maliszewski's indefatigable efforts to identify execution and burial sites, establish Soviet culpability, and pressure Warsaw and Moscow to complete a full official investigation.
A number of causes, working together, brought the crisis momentarily to a head, although I do not personally believe there can be serious trouble while the Duma is sitting.A number of baker shops were destroyed, and at others crowds seized bread from those who succeeded in buying it. A crowd last night broke the windows of a factory because its workers refused to strike.
The methods of the Cossacks, as I saw them this afternoon, are to make a cordon with their horses at opposite ends of the streets. Meanwhile, other troops ride through the crowd. The feeling of the people is not hostile to the Cossacks. For the most part the crowds are good tempered, and there is still hope that serious conflict will be avoided.
The general character of the excitement is vague. Throughout yesterday the streets were full of people, although Petrograd is heavily patrolled by Cossacks and mounted police; most of the crowd, including many women, were out to watch other people make trouble. The general atmosphere of excitement is like a bank holiday with thunder in the air.
Solzhenitsyn's appreciation of Stolypin has been largely unknown because it appears in the second edition of August 1914: The Red Wheel I (1989), which few have read. What Solzhenitsyn claims in the Stolypin chapters is that a moderate alternative to Tsarist autocracy existed in Russia in the early twentieth century-namely, a peaceful evolution toward a European-style constitutional monarchy under the enlightened statesmanship of Prime Minister Stolypin.The main features of Stolypin's plan were the preservation of the Romanov dynasty and Orthodox Church, combined with economic and political reforms-reforms that would have given land to peasants and established local self-governing councils. Tragically, Stolypin was assassinated by terrorists who feared the success of his plan (which Solzhenitsyn estimates could have created an independent peasantry in twenty years and prevented Communist revolution). Mahoney's analysis shows Solzhenitsyn to be a Burkean-style admirer of constitutional monarchy that gradually evolves toward ordered liberty while preserving his nation's distinctive traditions.
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Here's a recent treat, Richard Pipes reviewing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Alone Together: SOLZHENITSYN AND THE JEWS, REVISTED (Richard Pipes, 11.14.02, New Republic)
As Justice Holmes grew old he became a figure for legend. Eager young students of history and the law, with no possibility of an introduction to him, made pilgrimages to Washington merely that they might remember at least the sight of him on the bench of the Supreme Court. Others so fortunate as to be invited to his home were apt to consider themselves thereafter as men set apart. Their elders, far from discouraging this attitude, strengthened it.A group of leading jurists and liberals filled a volume of essays in praise of him, and on the occasion of its presentation Chief Justice Hughes said:
"The most beautiful and the rarest thing in the world is a complete human life, unmarred, unified by intelligent purpose and uninterrupted accomplishment, blessed by great talent employed in the worthiest activities, with a deserving fame never dimmed and always growing. Such a rarely beautiful life is that of Mr. Justice Holmes."
Perhaps the first to recognize this was H.L. Mencken, Mr. Justice Holmes: A Review of The Dissenting Opinions of Mr. Justice Holmes (H.L. Mencken, May 1930, The American Mercury):
My suspicion is that the hopeful Liberals of the 20s, frantically eager to find at least one judge who was not violently and implacably against them, seized upon certain of Mr. Justice Holmes's opinions without examining the rest, and read into them an attitude that was actually as foreign to his ways of thinking as it was to those of Mr. Chief Justice Hughes. Finding him, now and then, defending eloquently a new and uplifting law which his colleagues proposed to strike of the books, they concluded that he was a sworn advocate of the rights of man. But all the while, if I do not misread his plain words, he was actually no more than an advocate of the rights of lawmakers. There, indeed, is the clue to his whole jurisprudence. He believed that the law-making bodies should be free to experiment almost ad libitum, that the courts should not call a halt upon them until they clearly passed the uttermost bounds of reason, that everything should be sacrificed to their autonomy, including apparently, even the Bill of Rights. If this [sic] is liberalism, then all I can say is that Liberalism is not what it was when I was young.In those remote days, sucking wisdom from the primeval springs, I was taught that the very aim of the Constitution was to keep law-makers from running amok, and that it was the highest duty of the Supreme Court, following Marbury v. Madison, to safeguard it against their forays. It was not sufficient, so my instructors maintained, for Congress or a State Legislature to give assurance that its intentions were noble; noble or not, it had to keep squarely within the limits of the Bill of Rights, and the moment it went beyond them its most virtuous acts were null and void. But Mr. Justice Holmes apparently thought otherwise. He held, it would seem, that violating the Bill of Rights is a rare and deliberate malice, and that it is chief business of the Supreme Court to keep the Constitution loose and elastic, so that blasting holes through it may not be too onerous. Bear this doctrine in mind, and you will have an adequate explanation, on the one hand, of those forward-looking opinions which console the Liberals- for example in Lochner v. New York (the bakery case), in the child labor case, and in the Virginia case involving the compulsory sterilization for imbeciles- and on the other hand, of the reactionary opinions which they so politely overlook- for example in the Debs case, in Bartels v. Iowa (a war-time case, involving the prohibition of foreign-language teaching), in the Mann Act case (in which Dr. Holmes concurred with the majority of the court, [sic] and thereby helped pave the way for the wholesale blackmail which Mr. Justice McKenna, who dissented, warned against), and finally in the long line of Volstead Act cases.
Making the world safer for us - defusing terrorism and beginning to reform a region that is a source of toxic hostility to what we stand for - happens to make the world safer for Israel as well. But the idea that Israel's interests are driving one of the most momentous shifts in America's foreign policy is simple-minded and offensive. (There is also a simple-minded and offensive flip side, which holds that opposition to the war is heavily fueled by anti-Semitism - another sweeping slander with a grain of truth in it.)What is demonstrably true is that Israelis believe that the war in Iraq is - to use a phrase that is a staple of Jewish satire - good for the Jews. Even though Israel is a likely target of Iraqi reprisals when war breaks out, it is the only country I know of where polls show overwhelming support for an invasion to oust Saddam, preferably sooner. [...]
There are obvious reasons that Israelis would like to rid the region of a man who trains terrorists and pays blood money to suicide bombers' families. But the deeper explanation, says Stephen Cohen, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, is profound despair over the bloody dead end in which Israeli-Palestinian politics sit. A conquest of Iraq offers the prospect that the United States will take the region in hand. It is, to many Israelis, the only hope of change for the better.
In his speech last week to the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush for the first time seemed to embrace this thankless responsibility. He declared that success in Iraq could break the impasse and move Israel and the Palestinians toward the obvious two-state solution. He underscored this as "my personal commitment."
The speech may have been a sop to European opinion, but a successful war would offer Mr. Bush a precious opportunity. A lot of people wish that he had engaged the Palestinian question intensively and earlier, if only to gain some credibility with the Arabs prior to disarming Saddam. But later would still be better than never.
The question is, What will Mr. Bush make of this moment? If the U.S. manages to make a more benign Iraq - and perhaps a chastened Syria - the Israelis could decide to dig in their heels: Our friend Mr. Bush is here, he's on our side; we can now sit tight, wait for the Palestinians to read the handwriting on the walls of Baghdad and maybe offer them half a state.
Or the Americans could seize the opportunity to say to Ariel Sharon, who has shown no prior gift for strategic statesmanship: "We are here now - you know we won't let you down. It's time to roll back the settlements and close a deal."
Will Mr. Bush choose to lead on this? We know now that the man isn't afraid of a big gamble. But we also know that he likes his stories black and white, and no amount of conquest will make the Middle East a simple plot.
In the United Nations' most recent population report, the fertility rate is assumed to be 1.85, not 2.1. This will lead, later in this century, to global population decline. [...]The United Nations divides the world into two groups, less developed countries and more developed countries. The most surprising news comes from the poorer countries. In the late 1960's, these countries had an average fertility rate of 6.0 children per woman. Today it is 2.9 - and still falling. Huge and continuing declines have been seen in countries like Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Turkey and (of great importance to the United States) Mexico.
The more developed countries, in contrast, have seen their fertility rates fall from low to unsustainable. Every developed nation is now below replacement level. In the early 1960's, Europe's fertility rate was 2.6. Today the rate is 1.4, and has been sinking for half a century. In Japan the rate is 1.3. [...]
Among the more developed countries, the United States is the outlier nation, with the highest fertility rate - just under 2.1. Moreover, the United States takes in more immigrants than the rest of the world combined. Accordingly, in the next 50 years America will grow by 100 million people. Europe will lose more than 100 million people.
When populations stabilize and then actually shrink, the economic dislocations can be severe. Will there be far less demand for housing and office space? Paradoxically, a very low fertility rate can also yield labor shortages, pushing wages higher. Of course, such shortages in countries with low fertility rates could be alleviated by immigration from countries with higher fertility rates - a migration from poor countries to rich ones. But Europeans are actively trying to reduce immigration, especially since 9/11. Wisely, America has mostly resisted calls for restrictions on immigrants. [...]
Still, it is the geopolitical implications of this change that may well be the most important. There is not a one-to-one relationship between population and power. But numbers matter. Big nations, or big groups of nations acting in concert, can become major powers. China and India each have populations of more than a billion; their power and influence will almost surely increase in the decades to come. Europe will shrink and age, absolutely and relatively.
Should the world face a "clash of civilizations," America may find itself with weaker allies. It may then be forced to play a greater role in defending and promoting the liberal, pluralist beliefs and values of Western civilization. We may have to do more, not because we want to, but because we have to.
Pondering...morally complex incidents from the annals of modern combat and debating the lessons they provide for the current crop of military leaders and foot soldiers is the aim of a new scholarly publication, the Journal of Military Ethics.Determined skeptics - like Groucho Marx, who joked that "military justice is to justice what military music is to music" - can roll their eyes. But serious talk about the proper moral conduct of combat has been around almost as long as war itself. [...]
"We are consciously committed to showing the moral tradition relating to war is very old and embedded in Western culture," explained James Turner Johnson, a professor of religion and political science at Rutgers University and the journal's co-editor. Among armies operating today, he said, the United States has led the way in making ethical concerns a priority, and not just in cadet classrooms.
"It's pretty clear if you look around at the various militaries," Mr. Johnson said. "People think war is mainly about the technology, but the point is that it's not the technology that determines whether a particular war is discriminate or indiscriminate. It's the strategy and tactics behind that, and the training aimed at discriminating between combatants and noncombatants. The U.S. military has always said we do not directly target noncombatants."
Consider, for example, the protocol surrounding target selection, a topic covered at length in the journal's second issue. American military policy requires legal advisers to approve combat targets in advance. As a consequence, soldiers can find themselves within range of enemy forces but without permission to strike. This situation occurred repeatedly during the war in Afghanistan, where, according to American Air Force officials, clearance delays and denials allowed important Taliban and Qaeda members to escape unscathed.
The problem, the officials complained at the time, was that the military's Central Command was overly concerned about killing civilians. "The whole issue of collateral damage pervaded every level of the operation," The Washington Post quoted one officer saying in November 2001. "It is shocking, the degree to which collateral damage hamstrung the campaign."
But in the journal, scholars defended the policy, arguing that its ethical advantages outweighed its tactical costs. As Michael N. Schmitt, director of the Executive Program in International and Security Affairs at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, put it: "Legal advisers are crucial clogs in any mature targeting system."
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Center for the Study of Professional Military Ethics
Links to other Ethics related Websites (Center for the Study of Professional Military Ethics)
In a just world, Roman Polanski's film "The Pianist" should win the Academy award . . .For me, the horror of German abuse of Jews was never more vivid than when a group of Germans stormed into an apartment, demanded that everyone stand, and then threw a man in a wheelchair out of the window to his death because he could not obey them. . . .
Yet the film has come under criticism from some Jewish critics . . . [One] argues that it is wrong to suggest that Wladyslaw Szpilman (the pianist) survived because he was helped by Polish Catholics--even though it is true that both he and Polanski were kept alive by Polish Catholics. If the younger generation is to understand the horror of the Holocaust, they must not think that there were any good Poles. Nor must they know that Szpilman escaped because of the help of a Jewish traitor and survived at the end because of the help of a German captain. . . . In other words, one should distort historical truth about Polish Catholics to make propaganda.
There is a serious social science literature--written mostly by Jewish scholars--about the ''righteous Poles'' who protected Jews. The literature asks why some Poles risked their own lives that Jews might survive. The answer is that most of them were deeply religious men and women, though not pious in the traditional sense.
The critic to whom Greeley refers, Thane Rosenbaum ("Films Show Skewed Version of the Holocaust," 1/09/2003, Wall Street Journal, unavailable online) argues, "The impulse to honor the good in man is . . . disingenuous and misapplied when depicting an atrocity. . . . [B]oth Mr. Szpilman and Mr. Polanski . . . would not have survived without the assistance of Polish Catholics. But in their gratitude lies a distortion that favorably colors the anti-Semitic attitudes that the vast majority of Poles had toward Jews." Mr. Rosenbaum wishes the movie to depict Polish Catholics as anti-Semites, even though in real life Mr. Szpilman appealed to a Catholic friend and was helped, by her and a series of Catholic strangers. Surely Mr. Rosenbaum would not applaud the efforts of Holocaust deniers to conceal Nazi evil; why then does he wish Mr. Polanski and Mr. Szpilman to conceal the kindness of Catholics?
We recently discussed the accusations against Pius XII, and in the comments I recommended Ronald J. Rychlak's comprehensive refutation ("Goldhagen v. Pius XII," First Things, June/July 2002) of Daniel Goldhagen's deceitful screed in The New Republic (January 21, 2002, "What Would Jesus Have Done? Pope Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust," unavailable online). (If you don't have time to read all of Rychlak's piece -- and few will -- search down to the discussion of Goldhagen's accusations against Father Peter Gumpel.) When I consider the many errors, misrepresentations and mistranslations of primary sources, all skewing in the same direction and seemingly motivated by animus, from Goldhagen and similar writers such as James Carroll and John Cornwell, I wonder: how, precisely, do these critics differ from the anti-Semites they so eagerly deride?
A female shop assistant had beans and other foodstuffs poured over her feet by a man who falsely claimed he was raising money for charity.The man entered a shop in the New Town area of Edinburgh and told the woman he was performing bizarre stunts for Comic Relief.
He asked the young woman to close her eyes and guess what foods he was covering her feet with.
He then poured various tinned foods over her feet, including baked beans.
The man, believed to be in his early 30s, took a number of photographs of her feet before leaving.
It was notable that the nuclear inspector Dr Mohammed ElBaradei in particular was upbeat about his work and appeared almost ready to declare that Iraq had no nuclear weapons programme.Along the way he demolished the claim by the British Government in its dossier on Iraqi weapons last year when it said that "there is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Iraq has no legitimate reason to acquire uranium.
That claim, Dr ElBaradei declared was based on documents which were "not authentic" - that is they were forgeries.
US President George W Bush has slapped sanctions aimed at the assets of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe and 76 other government officials for undermining democracy there, the White House said today.Bush's executive order "blocks all property and economic assets of the targeted individuals. It also prohibits United States citizens or residents from engaging in any transaction or dealing with the targeted individuals," Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said in a statement.
The move affects "Mugabe and 76 Zimbabwean government officials who have formulated, implemented, or supported policies that have undermined Zimbabwe's democratic institutions," Fleischer said.
Britain and the United States could soon be at war with Iraq. But will it be legal?Experts on international law have conflicting views about the rights and wrongs of any military conflict.
Some believe that the use of force would be justified under existing UN resolutions, so another vote is not needed.
But others argue that even if the Security Council now passes a second resolution - and that is still in doubt - it may not provide the legal authority for military action.
Some have even posed a startling question. Could George W Bush and Tony Blair one day find themselves facing criminal charges for going to war against Iraq?
A British academic, Professor Nicholas Grief, says this is not as far fetched as it may seem. He cites the Nuremberg charter of 1945, which established the concept of a crime against peace.
"There is a school of thought that going to war without the express authority of the Security Council would violate the UN charter," says Professor Grief.
"That could raise serious questions about the personal responsibility of President Bush and Mr Blair, and they could have a case to answer.
"They could be held to account in years to come. It is something they ought to be concerned about."
George W. Bush kept seeming to lose interest in his own remarks last night as the president did that rarest of rare things -- for him -- and held a prime-time news conference. Televised live on all the major networks from the East Room of the White House, the occasion found Bush declaring this to be "an important moment" for America and the world, yet he spoke with little urgency and no perceptible passion.Have ever a people been led more listlessly into war? It's tempting to speculate how history would have changed if Winston Churchill or FDR had been as lethargic as Bush about rallying their nations in an hour of crisis. There were times when it appeared his train of thought had jumped the tracks.
Occasionally he would stare blankly into space during lengthy pauses between statements -- pauses that once or twice threatened to be endless. There were times when it seemed every sentence Bush spoke was of the same duration and delivered in the same dour monotone, giving his comments a numbing, soporific aura. Watching him was like counting sheep.
Network commentators by and large tippy-toed around the subject of Bush's curiously subdued performance. But at least Terry Moran of ABC News dared to say that the White House press corps had definitely seen Bush "sharper" than he was last night. Tactfully and gingerly, Moran said Bush seemed to be "trying to keep his mannerisms as cool as possible" as he fielded questions and spoke of ultimatums. The lethargy was contagious; correspondents were almost as logy as Bush was.
The contrast between the foggy Bush of last night and the gung-ho Bush who delivered a persuasive State of the Union message to Congress not so long ago was considerable. Maybe Bush thought he was, indeed, coming across as cool and temperate instead of bored and enervated, and this was simply a rhetorical miscalculation. On the other hand, it hardly seems out of order to speculate that, given the particularly heavy burden of being president in this new age of terrorism -- a time in which America has, as Bush said, become a "battlefield" -- the president may have been ever so slightly medicated.
He would hardly be the first president ever to take a pill.
Mr. FLEMING: This was n--late 1943. And this was the moment when Roosevelt lost all control of the State Department. Welles was his guy in there. And this--this--the whole issue of who controlled the State Department is very, very important in this book.LAMB: This photograph...
Mr. FLEMING: Yes.
LAMB: ...was taken when?
Mr. FLEMING: That photograph was taken in ni--in--in the fall of 1944. It's a rain-spattered face that you're looking at there. Franklin D. Roosevelt is riding through New York in a freezing-cold downpour, a Northeast storm. He's running for a fourth term, and he's trying to prove to the people that he's not a fatally ill man. He managed to do this, although it--it's a miracle that he did it.
LAMB: How sick was he?
Mr. FLEMING: His doctors thought he would die. We--we know now--excuse me? What...
LAMB: How sick was he?
Mr. FLEMING: He was extremely sick. In early 1944, he was examined by a heart specialist, and they found that he could die--the doctor, Dr. Harvey Bruenn, found that he could die at any time. And they restricted him--to keep him alive, Dr. Bruenn restricted him to a 20-hour week. Now the president of the United States, the leader of a global war, was told he could only work 20 hours a week.
LAMB: How would he do that?
Mr. FLEMING: He s--slept very late and got to the Oval Office only about 11:00 in the morning, would see a few visitors, then would have lunch, take a long nap, come back to the Oval Office for another two hours; in other words, work about four hours a day, five days a week, and that was supposed to be it.
LAMB: What kind of shape was he in in Tehran, and what was the--the meeting all about? And then, also, Yalta.
Mr. FLEMING: At Tehran, he was, as far as we know, in still fairly good shape, although he had a--an episode in Tehran at which, in the midst of a dinner, he fl--turned green and faltered and--and lost consciousness in his--in his chair and had to be rushed back to his room. And his--his...
LAMB: Who was there at the dinner?
Mr. FLEMING: Stalin, Churchill and a whole slew of aides. It was a very, very uc--upsetting episode. And after that--when he came back from Tehran, he--he was definitely a very sick man. And tha--that was when they had this physical examination, which led them to put him on a 20-hour workweek.
LAMB: That was when? What year?
Mr. FLEMING: This was 1944--early 1944, and that was when Ben Cohn, the most brilliant of the New Dealers, I think--he was a really brilliant lawyer, who wrote the Securities and Exchange Act. He was working in the East Wing of the White House during the war. And he wrote an eight-page memorandum, which I found in the files of the Roosevelt Library, in which he begged Roosevelt not to run again. H--i--he--he told him, as I've already said, the coalition had collapsed, but he was really saying, too, that he wasn't up to the job. [...]
LAMB: What about Yalta? What kind of shape was that--and I think I've got a--let me make sure I've got the right--yeah, this is a Yalta photograph.
Mr. FLEMING: Roosevelt was--he--he mustered all his dwindling energy for Yalta, and there's no really hard evidence that he was non compos mentis or anything like that. But you--you can see the impact of--of this--this tremendous effort that he made there when--on the--on the ship home, Sam Rosenman, who was his top speechwriter and in--inside Oval Office aide, he--he spent the entire voyage home trying to get Roosevelt to talk about the speech that he was going to give to Congress about Yalta. And Roosevelt just sat there like a zombie staring into space for the entire voyage.
LAMB: You have a photograph, the last one that was taken of him?
Mr. FLEMING: That's the last picture that was taken of Roosevelt, yes, down in Warm Springs. It was taken the day he died. And that is a--a--a very heart-breaking picture to look at.
In 1999, a young man named Timothy Bergreen went to work in Clinton's State Department. He had previously worked for Democrats on Capitol Hill, taken advanced degrees in law and political science, and practiced law in Palo Alto, Calif. His abiding passion, however, was for issues of national security. He was also a fiercely loyal Democrat-the kind, he says, who puts up lawn signs.Today, just on the cusp of 40, Bergreen would blend into a crowd on any of three or four continents. His height is average, his build slender, his hair and eyes generic brown, his features aquiline. A crinkly smile punctuates his conversation.
The smile, however, masks a sense of mission. He watches, dismayed, as Democrats waltz merrily toward an abyss. The public perceives Democrats as less capable and trustworthy than Republicans on national security. That's the bad news. The worse news is that the perception is grounded in reality. Not many prominent Democrats could comfortably and credibly say the things that Bill Clinton said about Iraq in 1998.
A lot of Democrats seem to regard foreign-policy and national security issues as distractions that, with luck, will soon go away. On Iraq, the party snapped back-with whiplash speed, seemingly as if Clinton had never happened-to the pacifism and confusion of the McGovern and Mondale years. That makes Democrats not only wrong but, in national races, unelectable.
"We have reached the point where this has metastasized into a crisis in the party," says Bergreen. "What I would like is to have a Democrat be comfortable reading the words that were in John F. Kennedy's inaugural. Have you read that recently? That's tough stuff. That liberty and freedom are something worth fighting for, worth bearing a burden for. Just because there's no Soviet Union doesn't make these things less relevant."
And so Bergreen is pounding the pavements of Washington, looking for money and support for a new organization, to be called Democrats for National Security. "The problem," says Doug Wilson, a former Clinton Pentagon official who counts himself among Bergreen's supporters, "is to be able to say 'Democrats for national security' and not have people think it's an oxymoron."
[I]f Iraq is attacked again, about 90 percent of bombs are expected to be smart. Use of precision munitions is increasing in part because the falling price of electronics has made this class of weapons one line-item in the Pentagon budget that's getting cheaper. As recently as the Gulf War, smart munitions cost $250,000 to $1 million apiece; the new smart bomb that debuted in Afghanistan, called JDAM, costs around $20,000. While getting cheaper, smart munitions have also gotten more effective. According to Pentagon analysis, about 80 percent of smart bombs struck within a few yards of their aim points during the Afghan conflict, dramatically better accuracy than in any prior air campaign.Equally significant but less well understood is that new precision munitions are used in different tactical ways. The JDAM bomb is designed to fall from high altitude, above the range of anti-aircraft missiles and artillery, yet strike more precisely than previous smart munitions delivered by harrowing low-altitude runs. This and similar new weapons are self-guided by signals from the very accurate Global Positioning System. Self-guidance eliminates the need for the pilot of the plane launching the smart bomb to lay eyes on the target or "paint" the aim point with lasers. Using the new self-guided smart ordnance in Afghanistan, U.S. forces conducted the first high-altitude precision strikes in military history. They will do the same again if Iraq must be attacked again, raining down extremely precise bombs from planes that defenders may never even see.
The ability to strike accurately from high altitude appears finally to fulfill decades of overstated promises about precision bombing. This new ability further means a significant percentage of ordnance can be borne to targets via heavy bombers with entire racks of bombs, rather than aboard fighter-bombers that typically bear two air-to-ground munitions per flight. Lots of smart bombs aboard heavy bombers means the bombing punch can come fast and furious, rather than at the drip-drip-drip pace of the Gulf War.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers told reporters yesterday that the U.S. planned to "shock" Iraq into a quick surrender. Military planners speak of "shocking" an opponent in the early hours of an assault, as blitzkrieg tactics shocked the French army into collapse in 1940. Air warfare has imposed much sorrow and destruction but never itself stunned a nation into quick capitulation. In 1991, bombs came gradually to Iraq and often missed; Iraqi planners may be expecting a repeat performance. If instead large numbers of bombs fall very precisely during the first nights of an attack, the Iraqi professional military may be stunned into suing for peace.
Accuracy also allows new smart bombs to work with less blast. Many targets that in previous air campaigns would have been "assigned" several 2,000-pound warheads will now be struck by a single 1,000-pound or 500-pound bomb. (An unfinished smart-munition project is even called "small diameter bomb," heralding an era in which the Pentagon actually works to make weapons less destructive.) Smaller warheads mean less unintended damage and permit aircraft to carry more weapons per mission, increasing the shock-inducing sense that bombs are raining down everywhere.
During the entire Gulf War, only 330 bombs and missiles hit within Baghdad. Today, heavy bombers carrying racks of very accurate JDAMs might deliver more ordnance to Baghdad in a single night than fell on the city in the whole of the 1991 conflict. Even hard-hearted Iraqi leaders may find this shocking.
For once, I came to the States and the big Vatican news of the week followed me here. I refer to the mission of Cardinal Pio Laghi, who met with President George Bush on March 5 in a last-ditch effort to avert war in Iraq. This was but the latest installment in the Vatican?s full-court diplomatic press. The day before, in fact, John Paul II quietly received Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a rare Bush ally in Europe, for an exchange of views about the international situation.In his conversation with Bush, Laghi accented the role of the United Nations, a constant theme of Vatican diplomacy. The Vatican sees the U.N. as the last, best hope for a meaningful international political organism capable of representing the common good within the economic order being constructed by globalization. Laghi also stressed that Iraq must comply with U.N. disarmament plans, the Vatican?s way of underlining that while it is anti-war, it is not pro-Saddam Hussein.
After his session with Bush, Laghi defined the meeting as "very friendly" but also "very frank," diplomatic code language for a meeting in which no one changed position.
The Vatican is under no illusion that Laghi's appeal, in itself, is likely to stay Bush's hand. Privately, sources in the Secretariat of State say that while one can always hope for a miracle, war is likely a foregone conclusion. The Vatican's diplomatic service, the oldest in the world, is anything but naive, and it is not in the habit of throwing good diplomatic capital after bad.
What, then, are they after?
Laghi, the 80-year-old former papal ambassador to the United States, was speaking, indirectly but unmistakably, to Cairo and Tehran, Khartoum and Peshwar, and Jakarta and Abouja. His presence in Washington spoke a message to the Islamic street: This is not our war.
Making that point is seen by Vatican diplomats as especially urgent in light of fears over the fate of Christian minorities in Islamic nations. In several such places, Christians are facing increasing strain.
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Vatican Peace Initiative (Religion & Ethics Newsweekly)
While each branch of the military teaches its recruits about its history and heroes, none does so as thoroughly as the Marine Corps.The emphasis on history starts with recruiting, which stresses the legacy of the corps. In boot camp, drill instructors deliver history lessons; in the final physical challenge, a 72-hour outdoor ordeal called "the crucible," recruits are ordered to discuss the heroism of Medal of Honor recipients.
Officers and senior enlisted members pick up the task once new Marines report to their first duty stations.
The result is that the Marines may outpace any institution in America -- military or civilian -- in teaching its history to its members.
Chief Warrant Officer John Johnson, 40, of Detroit occasionally has young Marines assigned to his command read the commendations detailing the bravery of Marines awarded the Medal of Honor.
"I want them to understand the organization that they've joined," he said. "There is something special about remembering those who preceded you."
Last weekend, even as Camp Pendleton was consumed with preparing Marines and their gear to deploy to Kuwait, the base held a memorial service and banquet to honor the 58th anniversary of the amphibious assault at Iwo Jima by the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine divisions.
"It's one of the differences between us and the Army," said 2nd Lt. Richard Wilkerson, 27, of Knoxville, Tenn. "Ask someone in the Army when the Army's birthday is, and you'll get a strange look. Ask any Marines about the birthday and they'll tell you: 'Nov. 10, 1775.' "
It was on that date that the Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, ordered that "two battalions of Marines be raised" to serve as landing forces with the Navy. In a phrase that would serve as an advertising slogan two centuries later, the congress declared that "a few good men" be recruited.
With fewer forces and less heavy artillery than the Army, the Marine Corps prides itself on moving and striking quickly, seizing territory and establishing a beachhead for the forces arriving later.
As they wait for the order to go north for "trigger time," Marines in Kuwait spend off-hours reading books about their history. The corps has an official reading list, with different books recommended for different ranks. At the top of the list are "the commandant's favorites."
Wilkerson is reading "With the Old Breed" by E.B. Sledge, the story of Marines at Peleliu and Okinawa.
Richard H. Kohn, military history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the Marines attract young men and women who want both a physical challenge and to "define their identity with what has become almost a legendary institution in American life."
All of the services, Kohn said, seem to "produce a special elan, attitude and belief." But the Marine Corps, he said, "because of its history and training seems to articulate and exhibit [it] more noticeably than the other services."
Which brings us to this, Threat of war spurs U.S. soul-searching: Mix of politics, religion is strong, Kaptur warns (DAVID YONKE, March 1, 2003, Toledo Blade)
Before launching a military strike against Iraq, Americans should consider their own history to remember how powerful the mix of religion and politics can be, U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D.,Toledo) said."If you think back to our founding as a country, we are a country of revolution," Miss Kaptur said in an interview this week. [...]
When America "cast off monarchical Britain" in 1776, it involved the help of many religious people who had fled repression in other countries, the 11-term Toledo congressman said. Among the nontraditional American revolutionaries were the Green Mountain Boys, a patriot militia organized in 1770 in Bennington, Vt., to confront British forces, she said.
"One could say that Osama bin Laden and these non-nation-state fighters with religious purpose are very similar to those kind of atypical revolutionaries that helped to cast off the British crown," Miss Kaptur said.
In Iraq and other Arab nations where revolutions are potentially brewing, religious fervor will play a vital role in shaping political events, she said, and the United States must be careful "not to get caught in the crossfire."
"I think that one thing that people of faith understand about the world of Islam is that the kind of insurgency we see occurring in many of these countries is an act of hope that life will be better using Islam as the only reed that they have to lean on.
"I think that people of faith understand that for many of the terrorists, their actions are acts of sacred piety to the point of losing their lives. And I think that people of faith understand that there is a heavy religious overtone to the opposition."
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Have You Forgotten? (Darryl Worley)
France was on Thursday night heading for a showdown with its European Union partners over its refusal to reduce spending and alter its tax policy despite its rapidly-deteriorating finances. [...]Francis Mer, finance minister, was due to tell the Eurogroup, which preceded Friday's Ecofin meeting of the EU's 15 finance ministers, that France will breach the stability and growth pact, the economic rules underpinning the euro.
Mr Mer was expected to take a hard line with other EU ministers despite being set to unveil a 2003 budget deficit of 3.4 per cent of GDP, above the 3 per cent ceiling set by the pact. The breach will trigger automatic action against France from the European Commission.
France is also likely to breach the pact's limit for 2002 after it emerged that Eurostat, the EU statistics office, could adjust the country's budget deficit from the current 3.04 per cent to 3.1 per cent by including a state subsidy to the railways.
Backing for Mr Mer's tough stance came from President Jacques Chirac whose electoral pledges of increased public spending and tax cuts last year have increased the budget deficit.
In Afghanistan, it is hardly surprising to find two dead bodies with signs of torture. This week, however, a shocking U.S. military coroner's report also suggested that the most likely suspect in the homicides was the U.S. government. Even more disturbing is emerging evidence that the United States may be operating something that would have seemed unimaginable only two years ago: an American torture facility.Credible reports now indicate that the government, with the approval of high-ranking officials, is engaging in systematic techniques considered by many to be torture.
U.S. officials have admitted using techniques that this nation previously denounced as violations of international law. One official involved in the "interrogation center" in Afghanistan said "if you don't violate someone's human rights, you probably aren't doing your job." [...]
The Bush administration position is also dangerously shortsighted: Its alleged use of torture puts every service member in any Iraq war at risk. Saddam Hussein can now cite the U.S. in support of his taste for torture. [...]
One official involved in these interrogations explained that "we don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them."
This week, West Virginia Sen. John D. Rockefeller actually encouraged the U.S. to hand over the recently arrested Al Qaeda suspect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to another country for torture. Whatever legal distinction Rockefeller sees in using surrogates to do our torturing, it is hardly a moral distinction. As a result, we are now driving the new market for torture-derived information. We have gone from a nation that once condemned torture to one that contracts out for torture services.
Instead of continuing our long fight against torture, we now seek to adopt more narrow definitions to satisfy our own acquired appetite for coercive interrogations. If the U.S. is responsible for the deaths of the two men in Afghanistan, it is more than homicide. It would be suicide for a nation once viewed as the very embodiment of human rights.
To torture the terrorists we capture just as a means of punishing them is probably a mistake, but to fail to extract every bit of information from them that we can, by whatever means necessary, and perhaps thereby ward off an attack, would be irresponsible.
N.B.: There's actually a really simple thought experiment that may help to illuminate the issue here: you catch the serial killer who's taken your wife and children. He's got them locked up somewhere but refuses to divulge their whereabouts. Which would you do, prove your humanity by accepting their eventual deaths or torture him to try and find out where they are?
"The new government of Israel," said the President, "will be expected to support the creation of a viable Palestinian state." That sounds more like marching orders than advice from a friendly ally.Sharon should therefore start by reaching out to Israelis, warning them of the dangers that lie ahead. He must unite the public behind him, filling us in on as much as he can without compromising his relationship with the President.
He needs to explain to the country that once the military threat from Iraq is removed, it will pave the way for an unparalleled diplomatic assault on Israel, led by none other than the U.S. State Department, which will seek to bring about the fulfillment of the failed Oslo accords through the establishment of Palestine.
Simultaneously, Sharon should reach out to American Jewry, as well as to the masses of American Christians who are among the Jewish state's most fervent supporters. Groups such as Esther Levens' National Unity Coalition for Israel, and Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein's Stand For Israel, have the ability to bring together millions of American Christians on Israel's behalf.
These people form the backbone of Bush's support in the Republican party, and they must be mobilized at once to work against the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
Sharon should therefore address American Christian supporters of Israel directly, tapping into their political savvy and Biblical commitment to help save the Jewish state from the fate that awaits it after the war in Iraq is complete.
Given that an attempt by a foreign power to destabilize our governing party is very nearly an act of war, and how little support even a Ronald Reagan or a George W. Bush gets from Jewish voters, there just isn't much pressure Israel can realistically bring to bear without it blowing up in their face. Then consider the weapons at Mr. Bush's disposal: (1) just once refuse to exercise our Security Council veto on an issue of importance to Israel and it would create mayhem; (2) announce that we're re-examining the billions in foreign aid we send and the economy there would teeter; (3) make the entirely reasonable point that the Palestinians are entitled to full political rights in Israel if they're not going to get a state of their own, and the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish State is called into question. This just isn't a fight that Israel can win nor can it afford to start it and lose.
Black Democrats are still fuming about Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman's tribute last year to former South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, an indication of the Connecticut Democrat's continuing problem with blacks that threatens to undermine his bid for the party's presidential nomination. Former Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, a longtime civil rights activist and prominent player within the Democratic Party, said Mr. Lieberman's little-noticed remarks were still troubling and that blacks have not forgotten them. "I didn't appreciate Lieberman saying that Thurmond is 'a man of iron with a heart of gold,' " Mr. Jackson told The Washington Times last week at the Democratic National Committee's winter meeting. Mr. Lieberman was among seven presidential hopefuls who addressed the group.
There is nothing in the Catholic tradition of just war that prefers multilateral to unilateral use of force, unless you subscribe to the belief that the United Nations -- that struggling collection of mostly tyrannical sovereignties -- is the only legitimate political authority. But for Catholics and many other Christians, the just war tradition, stemming from a profound reluctance to take any human life made in God's image, imposes real boundaries on the war on terrorism.What are the strict conditions that justify war? As the catechism of the Catholic Church puts it: "The damage inflicted by the aggressor ... must be lasting, grave, and certain; all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective; there must be serious prospects of success; the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition." A good Christian cannot support fighting a war for national glory, for revenge, to grab territory or out of vague fears of some future attack, aka pre-emptive war. Wars, like all use of force, can only be fought in self-defense, or in the legitimate defense of another.
How does this apply to Iraq? For one thing, as Michael Novak has pointed out, the war with Iraq is not a pre-emptive war. It is a war made necessary by the failure of a military aggressor to abide by the terms of its peace agreement, after its invasion was forcibly repelled.
For another, the anti-war strategy that poses as the moral high ground may in actuality be a selfish swamp. Think it through. The French, German and Russian position is that war is not necessary because we can contain and degrade the ability of Iraq to threaten its neighbors through economic sanctions and inspections. Sure, we may not find every weapon of mass destruction, but we can prevent full-scale re-armament of a kind that would allow Saddam to invade his neighbors.
Meanwhile, how many people Saddam kills, rapes and tortures remains his own business unless he threatens to invade another country. What he does with terrorists is also his own business unless a smoking gun can be found. What the international economic sanctions needed to degrade his military power do to ordinary Iraqi people is also none of our business.
The anti-war strategy thus amounts to substituting vast civilian suffering for direct attacks against military targets. Is this just?
N.B.--thanks to everyone who has sent links, we're compiling them here and should have a review of Michael Walzer's book up soon.
UPDATE:
STARVE 'EM OUT!:
What a Little War in Iraq Could Do (MICHAEL WALZER, March 7, 2003, NY Times)
The way to avoid a big war is to intensify the little war that the United States is already fighting. It is using force against Iraq every day — to protect the no-flight zones and to stop and search ships heading for Iraqi ports. Only the American threat to use force makes the inspections possible — and possibly effective. [...]Mr. Bush could stop the American march toward the big war if he challenged the French (and the Germans and the Russians) to join the little war. The result would not be a victory for Mr. Hussein or Mr. Chirac, and it would ensure that the Iraqi regime would get weaker over time.
So here is an exit strategy for the Bush administration. They haven't asked for it, but they need it. First, extend the northern and southern no-flight zones to include the whole country. America has already drastically restricted Iraqi sovereignty, so this would not be anything new. There are military reasons for the extension — the range of missiles, the speed of planes, the reach of radar all make it difficult for the United States and Britain to defend the northern and the southern regions of Iraq without control of central airspace. But the main reason would be punitive: Iraq has never accepted the containment regime put in place after the gulf war, and its refusal to do that should lead to tighter and tighter containment.
Second, impose the "smart sanctions" that the Bush administration talked about before 9/11 and insist that Iraq's trading partners commit themselves to enforcing them. Washington should announce sanctions of its own against countries that don't cooperate, and it should also punish any companies that try to sell military equipment to Iraq. Third, the United States should expand the United Nations' monitoring system in all the ways that have recently been proposed: adding inspectors, bringing in United Nations soldiers (to guard military installations after they have been inspected), sending surveillance planes without providing 48 hours' notice, and so on.
Finally, the United States should challenge the French to make good on their claim that force is indeed a last resort by mobilizing troops of their own and sending them to the gulf. Otherwise, what they are saying is that if things get very bad, they will unleash the American army. And Saddam Hussein knows that the French will never admit that things have gotten that bad. So, if they are serious, the French have to mount a credible threat of their own. Or better, they have to join the United States in every aspect of the little war.
Heard an interview on the BBC the other night with the head if USAID. The interviewer seemed to think it a perverse irony, maybe even a hypocrisy, that each military unit has USAID staff attached to it: "Don't you think it strange that the troops in front will be causing the destruction while you're people will come along behind to repair it?" The American tried very patiently to explain: "No, this how America fights wars. We're not going there to destroy things, but to help people." It was like they were speaking different languages, which they maybe were: American and Euro.
The opinion of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott Case was delivered by Chief Justice Taney. It was a full and elaborate statement of the views of the Court. They have decided the following important points:First - Negroes, whether slaves or free, that is, men of the African race, are not citizens of the United States by the Constitution.
Second - The Ordinance of 1787 had no independent constitutional force or legal effect subsequently to the adoption of the Constitution, and could not operate of itself to confer freedom or citizenship within the Northwest Territory on negroes not citizens by the Constitution.
Third - The provisions of the Act of 1820, commonly called the Missouri Compromise, in so far as it undertook to exclude negro slavery from, and communicate freedom and citizenship to, negroes in the northern part of the Louisiana cession, was a Legislative act exceeding the powers of Congress, and void, and of no legal effect to that end.
When it comes to R&B music and what's known as the "Memphis sound," Booker T. Jones has been delivering smooth, soulful, gospel-tinged music for over 40 years. Jones experienced success early when he and his band, the MG's, reached number one with the song "Green Onions."It was at Stax Records that he joined with other studio musicians -- guitarist Steve Cropper, bassist Lewie Steinberg and drummer Al Jackson -- to form the MGs. Jones explains the meaning of the name:
"The drummer, Al Jackson, looked and said, 'Well, why don't we call it Booker T. and the, uh...' and he looked outside and saw the MG (sports car) and said, 'MG's.' But we contacted (the company) and we wanted them to sponsor us and they wouldn't do it. So we decided that it would be Booker T. and the Memphis Group, the MG's."
When Jones was 17, Booker T. and the MG's (with Donald Dunn replacing Steinberg) released "Green Onions," which sold a million copies and climbed to number one on the R&B charts. The song was followed by six other Top 40 hits over the next decade, including "Hip Hug-Her," "Groovin" and "Hang Em' High."
By the early 1970s, the recording industry was changing, and the band split it 1971.
The American commentariat is gravely concerned. Over the past week, George W. Bush has shown a disturbing tendency not to waffle when it comes to Iraq. There has been an appalling clarity and coherence to his position. There has been a reckless tendency not to be murky, hesitant or evasive. Naturally, questions are being raised about President Bush's leadership skills.The United States is in the midst of the certainty crisis. Time magazine is disturbed by "The blinding glare of his certainty", as one headline referred to Bush's unwillingness to go wobbly on Iraq. "A questionable certainty" was the headline in the Los Angeles Times. "This kind of certainty worries Bush's critics," noted US News and World Report. "Moral certainty, for the most part, is a luxury of a closed mind," observed William Lesher, a Lutheran school of theology professor, who presumably preserves a subtle open-mindedness about the Holocaust and other such matters.
Meanwhile, among the smart set, Hamlet-like indecision has become the intellectual fashion. The liberal columnist E. J. Dionne wrote in The Washington Post that he is uncomfortable with the pro and anti-war camps. He praised the doubters and raised his colours on behalf of "heroic ambivalence". The New York Times, venturing deep into the territory of self-parody, ran a full-page editorial calling for "still more discussion" on whether or not to go to war. [...]
In certain circles, it is not only important what opinion you hold, but how you hold it. It is important to be seen dancing with complexity, sliding among shades of grey. Any poor rube can come to a simple conclusion - that President Saddam Hussein is a menace who must be disarmed - but the refined ratiocinators want to be seen luxuriating amid the difficulties, donning the jewels of nuance, even to the point of self-paralysis. And they want to see their leaders paying homage to this style. Accordingly, many Bush critics seem less disturbed by his position than by his inability to adhere to the rules of genteel intellectual manners. They want him to show a little anguish. They want baggy eyes, evidence of sleepless nights, a few photo-ops--Kennedy-style--of the President staring gloomily through the Oval Office windows into the distance.
And this prompts a question in their minds. Why does George Bush breach educated class etiquette so grievously? Why does he seem so certain, decisive and sure of himself, when everybody - tout le monde! - knows that anxiety and anguish are the proper poses to adopt in such times.
The US press is filled with psychologising. And two explanations have re-emerged. First, Bush is stupid. Intellectually incurious, he is unable to adapt to events. Secondly, he is a religious nut. He sees the world as a simple battle of good versus evil. His faith cannot admit shades of grey.
MORE:
In the Name of God: Bush's rhetoric suggests that he feels God has chosen him to lead the U.S. against "Evil." Is that why Bush is dragging us into an unprovoked war? (Jack Beatty, March 5, 2003 , The Atlantic)
In June, 1967, Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser was sitting in the darkened studios of Cairo Radio, with a barely a candle to illuminate his script. His voice cracking, he delivered his political testament: "We expected the enemy to come from the east and the north, but instead he came from the west. I must accept full responsibility for this disaster that has befallen us and must now resign as your President." No sooner spoken than the hum of Israeli Mystere's could be heard in the skies above the city and the crack of anti-aircraft batteries filled the air. [...]"All of a sudden," recounted Mahmoud Raid , an Egyptian journalist, "I found myself wading through multitudes of people clamoring for Nasser to stay." Within hours, messages of support arrived from the rest of Egypt and from the leaders of many other Middle Eastern countries - all of whom had ample reason to mock the presumed leader of the Arab world, yet all of whom urged him to remain. Many suspected that Nasser, in his usual theatrical style, had orchestrated the mass demonstration. But Eric Rouleau, the Middle East correspondent for Le Monde at the time, would have none of it: "People may have despised Nasser for leading them to disaster, but they also loved him as a father. And the Egyptians did not want to be left fatherless."
In focusing on the paternal relationship between Nasser and his people, Rouleau identified something significant about Arab political systems. Dictatorships thrive in the Arab world because strong men are admired and fill the authoritarian role in the popular imagination usually allocated to the father in traditional Arab society.
The Arab nuclear family is dominated by the father whose authority is total. Mothers and daughters play submissive roles within this structure and have little influence on the family's destiny. Sons are much desired, their role being largely to satisfy their father's sense of honor and secure his position in society. Absolute obedience is expected of them and severe punishment meted out for waywardness. From childhood then, Arabs become accustomed to a high level of absolute authority where challenge and questioning - the root of free and democratic society - is not encouraged. Instead, undivided respect and subservience is reserved for a single man.
[P]articularly with the airwaves and op-ed pages dominated by warmongers who mock and mischaracterize the burgeoning peace movement, there remains a need to continually reiterate the common-sense reasons to oppose a war. Here are a dozen:1. Iraq is no threat to the United States [...]
2. Iraq is deterrable [...]
3. Iraq's only conceivable threat to the United States is in event of war [...]
4. Other terrorist risks rise in event of war [...]
5. U.S. soldiers are vulnerable to chemical or biological attack in a war [...]
6. Inspections can work [...]
7. Common sense says err on the side of nonviolence [...]
8. The doctrine of preventive war is a threat to international law and humanity [...]
9. Reject empire [...]
10. Revenge is not a legitimate motive for war [...]
11. There are better solutions to our energy problems [...]
12. Iraqi lives are at stake: Unless a war brings immediate abdication by Saddam, military action is sure to cause massive casualties among Iraqi conscripts and especially among Iraqi civilians. Solidarity with the Iraqi people – not their brutal government, but the people – requires opposition to a war almost certain to cause them enormous suffering.
Selig Harrison was on the Diane Rehm show today, and he was his usual mind-numbing self. His argument on N. Korea is--I kid you not--that Kim Jong-il is justified in forcing a confrontation with the U.S. in order to get us back to the bargaining table, because without our help his government will fail, and that we should bargain with them to avoid that possibility. Funny, you'd think anyone who believes in democracy and/or cares about the North Korean people would want to see regime change there.
The White House announced President Bush will hold a news conference at 8 tonight, but officials said he still has made no decision about war."This is not a scheduled announcement of anything," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said this morning. "The opening statement will be about the successes in the war against terror as well as the importance of disarming Saddam Hussein."
Asked if the prime-time appearance is part of a public relations buildup to war, Fleischer said, "In the event that the president decides to use force, the president always thinks it's important to communicate but the president has not made any decisions about that matter."
The news conference will be the eighth of Bush's presidency and the second he has held in the East Room, one of the most formal settings available to a president.
The last East Room news conference was Oct 11, 2001-four days after allied cruise missiles and bombers began dismantling the Taliban. Bush's last solo news conference, held in a more casual setting, was Nov. 7, two days after the Republican triumphs in the midterm elections.
Those dogged reporters at the Boston Globe have discovered that Sen. John Kerry did too say he was Irish. Refuting Kerry’s claim that he’s been "clear as a bell" in never claiming Irish heritage, the Globe found a statement in the Congressional record from March 18, 1986 in which Kerry told his colleagues, "For those of us who are fortunate to share an Irish ancestry, we take great pride in the contribution that Irish-Americans from the time of the Revolutionary War to the present, have made to building a strong, vibrant nation."
Pope John Paul II asked all Catholics to fast and pray on Ash Wednesday for peace, especially in Iraq. The ash still dark on their foreheads, the parishioners offered a prayer before downing their caff� lattes.On the prospects of war with Iraq, almost all of them find themselves in a bind: as conservative Catholics, they follow the pope, but as conservative Americans, they support the president. They, like many other religious Americans, are more deeply indecisive and ambivalent than their religious leaders appear to be.
The pope has repeatedly appealed to world leaders to avoid a war, and today a papal envoy, Cardinal Pio Laghi, carried the message directly to President Bush. Last week, Catholic bishops in the United States issued their third antiwar declaration of the last four months. [...]
The principles of a "just war" were first developed by St. Augustine in the fifth century and expanded upon by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th. For a war to be considered just, it must meet the following criteria: have a just cause, meaning that it confronts a danger beyond question; be declared by a legitimate authority acting on behalf of the people; be driven by the right intention, not ulterior economic or other motives; be the last resort; be proportional, so that the harm inflicted does not outweigh the good achieved; and have a reasonable chance of success.
UPDATE:
So, for example, check this out, -ESSAY: Just War Theory and Self-Determination (Dr. Jan Garrett, December 1996; modified October 18, 2001)
Forms of pursuing just cause. These are offensive and defensive wars. There is a strong presumption in favor of defensive wars. (They are responses to aggression.)Just war theory was in the past used to permit "offensive wars to protect vital rights unjustly threatened or injured" (O'Brien, p. 34) Today, there is a strong tendency among theorists about wars to oppose offensive wars generally. "A war of vindictive justice wherein the [fighting country] fights against error and evil as a matter of principle is no longer condoned by just-war doctrine" (O'Brien). The reference is to military projects like crusades and holy wars. And offensive wars to enforce justice for oneself are also "now seemingly prohibited by positive international law." (One should use instead international courts, the UN, etc.)
MORE:
-ETEXT: St. Augustine, The City of God, Book XIX
-ETEXT: St. Thomas Aquinas :The Summa Theologica : OF WAR
-ESSAY: Just War Theory (Alex Moseley, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
-Principles of the Just War (Vincent Ferraro)
-INTERVIEW: Justice in War: Just-war theory: with Robert P. George (Kathryn Jean Lopez, October 15, 2001, National Review)
-ESSAY: Defining a Just War (Richard Falk, October 11, 2001, The Nation)
-ESSAY: A Just Cause, Not a Just War (Howard Zinn, November 2001, The Progressive)
-ESSAY: Questioning the Morality of Military Attacks on Civilians (Peter Steinfels, 6 April 2002, New York Times)
-Resources on Just War Theory (USD Values Institute Forum on Just War and the Balkans)
-ESSAY: Give Freedom a Chance: Rather than wring our hands, Americans should gird our loins--that is, to fight to win with the conviction that our cause is just. (William Safire, 3/06/03, NY Times)
-ESSAY : Can There Be a Decent Left? (Michael Walzer, Spring 2002, Dissent)
-ESSAY: INSPECTORS YES, WAR NO.: No Strikes (Michael Walzer, 09.23.02, New Republic)
EXCERPT: Walzer and the Legalist Paradigm
-ARCHIVES: "michael walzer" (Find Articles)
-ESSAY: Walzer’s Razor: Is a reasonable, responsible Left possible? (Steven Hayward, March 22, 2002, National Review)
-ESSAY: Searching for a Better Left: Since September 11, a handful of leftists have undertaken the project of looking for a principled American liberalism. Will they succeed? (Lee Bockhorn, 03/19/2002, Weekly Standard)
-ESSAY: Can There Be A Decent Left? Michael Walzer's Second Thoughts (David Horowitz, March 26, 2002, FrontPageMagazine.com)
-ESSAY: War and the Fickle Left (Robert Kagan, 12/23/02, Washington Post)
-ESSAY: My Fellow Lefties . . .: Stop it with the American-bashing. (Michael H. Shuman, 02/18/2002, Weekly Standard)
-ESSAY: As the Left Says No to War, a Journal's Editor Dissents (DANIEL TREIMAN, JANUARY 31, 2003, FORWARD)
-ESSAY : The War Party's Theologian : President Bush carries on the liberal tradition of Reinhold Niebuhr. (JOSEPH LOCONTE , May 31, 2002, Wall Street Journal)
Truth, it's often noted, is the first casualty of war. This time isn't any different, even though a shot has yet to be fired. Here's a reality check on some of the whoppers circulating in the lead-up to conflict.
A month after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush released a list of the world's most-wanted terrorists. There were 22 names on it. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was No. 22.And the list wasn't alphabetical.
But, sometime between then and early Saturday morning, when Mohammed was captured in Pakistan, the U.S. government identified Mohammed as the mastermind behind the al-Qaida plot.
Osama bin Laden, we're now told, is pretty much a figurehead: It's Mohammed who made things happen. Over the past 2-1/2 years, he's climbed from last place to a photo finish for No. 1 on the most-wanted list.
The cynical view on this is that Mohammed is still the relatively small fish we were first told he was, but the news of his arrest is being hyped because the Bush administration needs a victory in the war on terrorism before going to war in Iraq.
Why are some writers so harsh in their assessments? A large reason, as one of the unnamed experts mentioned above points out, is a very curious shoot-out in Karachi, Pakistan, on September 11, 2002. Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the man who wanted to join the 19 hijackers but was unable to get a US visa, was captured at the end of a four-hour battle involving thousands of police. Nine other suspected terrorists were captured, and two were killed. [Telegraph, 9/16/02] The capture of bin al-Shibh was hailed as a major victory, but it was accidental: "Pakistani intelligence and police officials now admit that the man they were actually looking for that day was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed...," reported one account. [Christian Science Monitor, 10/29/02, Guardian, 9/23/02]"Afterward, and still, Karachi was thick with rumor. Mohammed was dead, was captured, was there and got away, was there and was allowed to get away." [Los Angeles Times, 12/22/02] And tge Asia Times claimed Mohammed was killed. They reported that the FBI together with Inter-Services Intelligence, or the ISI, Pakistan's notorious intelligence agency, conducted a raid aimed at capturing Mohammed alive. "However, despite instructions to the contrary, a few Pakistan Rangers entered the flat, where they found Shaikh Mohammed and another man, allegedly with their hands up. The Rangers nevertheless opened fire on the pair. ... Later, the Pakistani press carried pictures of a message scrawled in blood on the wall of the flat, proclaiming the Muslim refrain of Kalma, in Arabic: 'There is no God except Allah, Mohammed is his messenger'). An official who was present in the flat at the time of the shooting has told Asia Times Online that the message was written by Shaikh Mohammed with his own blood as his life drained from him." His wife and two children, captured in the raid, confirmed his identity. [Asia Times, 10/30/02] An Australian newspaper repeated that the view that he was killed, and added, "Some reports went so far as to suggest his wife and son had identified his body and buried him under the watchful eye of the FBI." [Daily Telegraph, 3/4/03]
"Nearly every article I read [about Detroit] has to work in the 1967 riots," observes historian Thomas Sugrue, a Detroit native and author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, a seminal study of racism and American cities. Never mind that cities across America erupted in violence that year and the next. Never mind that the riots may have very little to do with Detroit today.
"To look at Detroit's fate as primarily a consequence of an urban riot or black politics of the late sixties and early seventies is to entirely misread the history of postwar America," Sugrue continues. "We miss out on the far deeper roots of economic disinvestment and the far deeper roots of racial division. And more than that, by focusing on the riots and Coleman Young and black power, the mainstream journalists--the white media--put the blame implicitly on blacks. It's blacks' fault that Detroit is the way it is."And if it's blacks' fault, then the whites who turned their backs on Detroit--the whites who turn their backs on Detroits all over America--can go on turning, guilt-free. And they'll always have the current state of Detroit--or rather the psychological construction of it--to justify their departure.
"Everyone needs this kind of two-headed thing--on the one hand to be frightened of and on the other hand to be better than," explains Bill Harris, a Detroit playwright and professor who has long maintained that the situation of his hometown mirrors that of the black man in America. "It's a way that you can confront what you can't confront--which is what racism is." If we can't locate the bogeyman, Harris reminds, we must create him. So is Detroit America's bogeyman? "Yeah," he says without missing a beat. "Because it's black, because it's poor, because it's everything that we don't want to be."
And then comes the question that has been gnawing at me ever since I began thinking about this essay, or more accurately, ever since I arrived in the city more than ten years ago. "Shouldn't we be over Detroit by now?" I ask Sugrue. Shouldn't the city have ceased to be America's bogeyman decades ago? His answer confirms my most cynical suspicions. "Detroit," he contends, "stands as a rebuke to our optimistic views of racial progress in America." And I believe him. I believe him because I lived it, am living it. I believe him because you're living it too.
In an online poll last year asking voters to give their opinions on which would be the first European country to adopt sharia law, France seemed like a shoo-in. After all, it is within 35 years of having Muslim majority – given the respective birthrates of Muslims and the indigenous population – and has a problem with both legal and illegal immigration from Muslim countries.However, Holland galloped into first place, demonstrating an impressive prescience among the respondents. Long the ne plus ultra of hashish-induced fuzzy thinking, Holland’s drug laws, or lack of them, have assured the country’s position as the munchie attack Mecca of Europe.
Readers may recall the assassination about a year ago of gay activist Pym Fortuyn – a politician often labeled a "hard right-winger" by the fascist lefty media. Far from being a rightist, even in the most generalized sense, Fortuyn feared that Muslim immigrants were getting far too loud a voice in Dutch politics, and he campaigned, and gained widespread support, on a platform of limiting, or stopping entirely, Muslim immigration and opposing any further concessions. He gained widespread support from the public, although the ruling elites and the newspapers castigated him as illiberal. Rotterdam, one of the largest ports in the world and once the pride of Holland, now has a majority Muslim population in this tiny country.
Opponents, predictably, accused him of racism, a charge he effortlessly felled as he pointed to the ethnicities of his many former lovers, and also to the fact that the deputy head of the political party he had founded, was black. What Fortuyn feared was that the Muslims were getting an over-confident voice in Dutch politics and were gnawing at traditional Dutch freedoms in an effort to get Islamic laws incorporated into Dutch law. He feared that Holland’s freewheeling attitudes to drugs and sex - and especially, in his own case, homosexuality – would gradually be encroached upon by the immigrants in the name of "religious freedom" - their religious freedom to bend the rest of the world to the will of Allah.
Kim Jong Il, North Korea's leader, seems to have a sense of strategy, even though it may be driving his country to the brink of destruction. He will almost surely continue to take advantage of the heavy US commitment to overthrowing Saddam Hussein. If the US becomes engaged in a full-blown war in Iraq, Mr Kim is likely to escalate his nuclear challenge to dangerous levels, perhaps by detonating a nuclear test explosion.The Bush administration is right to insist on a regional solution to the crisis, but wrong to reject bilateral talks with Mr Kim. Direct talks should be aimed at setting an agenda for multilateral talks. And that agenda should be as broad as America's negotiating partners can be persuaded to accept. "More for more" should be the objective.
According to recent reports, President George W. Bush remains firmly against talks with the man he "loathes", despite mounting North Korean provocations. But if direct negotiations are off the table, and if calculated deterrence fails, what is the alternative? Are we looking at another pre-emptive war? The issue is not regarded as a crisis by the US administration, at least in public, probably because it can handle only one crisis at a time. It may be able to handle only one war at a time, too.
When the meeting rolled around, the PTC and its supporters, about 80 in all, showed up in force on a rainy day, wearing buttons that said, "Evolution: A Leap of Faith." They crowded into the lobby of the board offices, shoulder to shoulder with pro-evolutionists, engaging in mini-debates as they waited to speak."I had one man come up to me and say my button was offensive to him," Taylor said. "He was wearing a black T-shirt with the Christian fish on it, but with feet coming out the bottom and "Darwin" written inside. I told him his shirt was a desecration of a holy religious symbol. He didn't have any comment."
In his last major policy address before deciding whether he'll run for president, former Sen. Gary Hart called for every American child to receive $1,000 at birth in a fund that would be invested until he or she wanted to buy a house or go to college.
When the United States finally goes to war again in the Persian Gulf, it will not constitute a settling of old scores, or just an enforced disarmament of illegal weapons, or a distraction in the war on terror. Our next war in the Gulf will mark a historical tipping point—the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization.That is why the public debate about this war has been so important: It forces Americans to come to terms with I believe is the new security paradigm that shapes this age, namely, Disconnectedness defines danger. Saddam Hussein’s outlaw regime is dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world, from its rule sets, its norms, and all the ties that bind countries together in mutually assured dependence.
The problem with most discussion of globalization is that too many experts treat it as a binary outcome: Either it is great and sweeping the planet, or it is horrid and failing humanity everywhere. Neither view really works, because globalization as a historical process is simply too big and too complex for such summary judgments. Instead, this new world must be defined by where globalization has truly taken root and where it has not.
Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap.
Globalization’s “ozone hole” may have been out of sight and out of mind prior to September 11, 2001, but it has been hard to miss ever since. And measuring the reach of globalization is not an academic exercise to an eighteen-year-old marine sinking tent poles on its far side. So where do we schedule the U.S. military’s next round of away games? The pattern that has emerged since the end of the cold war suggests a simple answer: in the Gap.
The reason I support going to war in Iraq is not simply that Saddam is a cutthroat Stalinist willing to kill anyone to stay in power, nor because that regime has clearly supported terrorist networks over the years. The real reason I support a war like this is that the resulting long-term military commitment will finally force America to deal with the entire Gap as a strategic threat environment.
Naipaul, like the Indians Prashad writes about, is too busy being a "good immigrant" to recognize the falsity of his own "whiteness."A prodigious student but not a naturally gifted writer, Naipaul admits, in "Reading & Writing" (1999), that his ambitions, which began when he was eleven, were "for many years a kind of sham. I liked to be given a fountain pen and a bottle of Waterman ink and new ruled exercise books (with margins), but I had no wish or need to write anything; and didn't write anything, not even letters: there was no one to write them to. . . . I wished to be a writer. But together with the wish there had come the knowledge that the literature that had given me the wish came from another world, far away from our own." Naipaul could not write about the place he knew because the place he knew was not the place that fed the literature he most admired, the literature of the British Empire. He could only play the role of a writer, and, when he did so, he played the writer he planned to become—an English one.
England has been his home, more or less, for fifty-three years now, and one of his goals as a writer has been to continue the tradition of British travel writing. Along the way, he has done more than he set out to do. He has created an influential voice for colored travel writing—a way of both being and not being a part of the Third World he describes—which other black West Indian writers have emulated. But Naipaul himself had no models. His only examples were Englishmen such as George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, who could go out into the world, to Paris, to Burma, and always have their homeland as a point of reference, a standard of identity. Naipaul didn't want Trinidad as a point of reference; it carried little distinction for him. The traditionally "picturesque" way of writing about Indians in the Caribbean seemed to him to "distort and trivialise . . . because it indicates a special attitude towards yourselves: it says that you don't consider yourselves really serious people . . . that the place you inhabit is only a kind of bongo paradise." In his introduction to "East Indians in the Caribbean," a series of papers presented at the University of the West Indies in 1975, he wrote, "A book has just been published in which an Anglo-American television man 'introduces' the island and introduces articles about the island, mainly by local people. . . . It indicates how strong and ineradicable the wish is, among the bongo islanders, to act up to the tourist image. . . . England is selling itself, its history, its achievements. Trinidad sells only its 'picturesqueness,' its 'cosmopolitan' population, and such tourist concepts harden simplicities and ignorance." Between the master narrative of Englishness (Forster in India, Orwell in Spain) and the blank page of the West Indies, Naipaul chose the former. But, in doing so, he chose a page that was just as blank, because England was not really his to choose. His absorption of the country's history, with its exhausted imperialism, its entrenched class system, only hampered his work; writing in a voice that wasn't his own, Naipaul simply confirmed his difference.
Naipaul's latest collection of essays, "The Writer and the World" (Knopf; $30), some of which appeared in this magazine, is fat (five hundred and twenty-four pages) with information, details, and accounts that range across three decades of Naipaul's writing life, but its intellectual curiosity remains oddly limited. Naipaul relies too much on the reporter's tools—description, quotation, narrative—while rarely questioning why he is where he is. For most of the book, he's just there, writing it all down, his pen dipped in a kind of imperialist "I told you so," particularly when any question of the African diaspora arises. The Indian novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra, who edited the collection, refers in his introduction to the characters who populate the essays as "unsettled men with peasant or tribal backgrounds." What follows is ample evidence of Naipaul's dismissive approach toward everything "peasant" and "tribal"—which is to say, black, poor, illiterate, and backward, as far as one can get from the educated Europeans of his dreams. Consider the first paragraph of "A New King of the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa":
The Congo, which used to be a Belgian colony, is now an African kingdom and is called Zaire. It appears to be a nonsense name, a sixteenth-century Portuguese corruption, some Zairois will tell you, of a local word for "river." So it is as if Taiwan, reasserting its Chinese identity, were again to give itself the Portuguese name Formosa. The Congo River is now called the Zaire, as is the local currency, which is almost worthless.
There is plenty of disdain here, but where is the history of colonialism? How did the Belgians get to the Congo? And why is the faded identity of a people who, for centuries, have been colonized and bastardized by a European nation a subject of ridicule?
As Naipaul writes in an autobiographical essay in "Finding the Center: Two Narratives" (1984), he is not interested in facts per se. He'd rather chase his own preconceptions: "I follow a thread till I find something that I was looking for. When I find it I stop." Whether he is in Tehran or British Guyana, he is not a journalist but a fiction writer who travels. He has little inclination for historical analysis, and he makes sweeping generalizations where specificity might help. In a review of "Finding the Center," Joan Didion noted, "What interests a writer like . . . Naipaul is only rarely what interests, in the same situation, a reporter. For one thing, whether the project at hand is fiction or reportage, the novelist's interest in the situation wanes at that precise point when the reporter begins to consider himself competent: when the place is understood." [...]
Still, to make any conclusive statement about Naipaul is to risk making a fool of oneself. There is simply too much writing to encompass. Naipaul's ambivalence about identity—his own and others'—confounds, frustrates, and enlightens. His relentless focus on man making a mess of his own humanity limits his scope.
Since Max Weber, there has been an active debate on the impact of religion on people's economic attitudes. Much of the existing evidence, however, is based on cross-country studies in which this impact is confounded by differences in other institutional factors. We use the World Values Surveys to identify the relationship between intensity of religious beliefs and economic attitudes, controlling for country fixed effects. We study several economic attitudes toward cooperation, the government, working women, legal rules, thriftiness, and the market economy. We also distinguish across religious denominations, differentiating on whether a religion is dominant in a country. We find that on average, religious beliefs are associated with good' economic attitudes, where good' is defined as conducive to higher per capita income and growth. Yet religious people tend to be more racist and less favorable with respect to working women. These effects differ across religious denominations. Overall, we find that Christian religions are more positively associated with attitudes conducive to economic growth.
And, just as a way of illuminating the potential importance of such findings, consider the story below from the perspective of certain cultures being conducive to growtrh and others retarding it. Do we really want to be "understanding" if it will wreck our nations? Or might insisting on our culture be necessary to the continued health of our society?:
The Other and Ourselves: Is Multi-culturalism Inherently Relativist? (Charles Taylor, Project Syndicate)
Understanding "the other" will pose the 21st century's greatest social challenge. The days are over when "Westerners" could consider their experience and culture as the norm and other cultures merely as earlier stages in the West's development. Nowadays, most of the West senses the arrogant presumption at the heart of that old belief.Sadly, this newfound modesty, so necessary for understanding other cultures and traditions, threatens to veer into relativism and a questioning of the very idea of truth in human affairs. For it may seem impossible to combine objectivity with the recognition of fundamental conceptual differences between cultures. So cultural openness poses the risk that we debase the currency of our values.
To grapple with this dilemma, we must understand culture's place in human life. Culture, self-understanding, and language mediate whatever we identify as fundamental to a common human nature. Across human history, always and everywhere, these basic faculties have demonstrated endless extraordinary innovation.
In accounting for such variety, some people anchor our understanding of human nature at a level below that of culture. Sociobiology, for example, seeks to discover human motivation in the ways that human beings evolved. Advocates of this view claim that cultural variation is but the surface play of appearances.
But we can never discover species-wide laws, because we can never operate outside of our historically and culturally specific understanding of what it is to be a human being. Our account of the decline of the Roman Empire is not and cannot be the same as that put forward in 18th century England, and it will differ from accounts offered in 22nd century Brazil or 25th century China.
Here the charge of relativism arises. But it is wrong to believe that accepting cultural differences requires abandoning allegiance to truth. The 17th century scientific revolution's great achievement was to develop a language for nature that purged the purpose- and value-terms bequeathed by Plato and Aristotle to earlier scientific languages, which were nourished by earlier civilizations.
But the universality of the language of natural science cannot be applied to the study of human beings, where a host of theories and approaches compete. One reason for this is that the language of human science draws on our ordinary understanding of what it is to be human, to live in society, to have moral convictions, aspire to happiness, and so on. No matter how much our everyday views may be questioned by a theory, we nonetheless draw on our understanding of basic features of human life that seem so obvious as to need no formulation. It is these tacit understandings that make it difficult to understand people of another time or place.
Ethnocentrism results from the unchallenged understandings that we unwittingly carry with us, and which we cannot dispel by adopting another attitude. If our tacit sense of the human condition can block our understanding of others, and if it is so fundamental to who we are that we cannot merely wish it away, are we utterly imprisoned in our own outlooks, unable to know others?
The French, German and Russian foreign ministers said Wednesday they will not allow a U.N. resolution that justifies war against Iraq to pass, erecting a major obstacle to U.S. efforts to get backing for military action.Foreign ministers from the three countries — two of which have the power to veto Security Council resolutions — met in Paris to plot strategy for a vote on the measure that would pave the way for war, which was authored by the U.S., Britain and Spain.
A vote on the proposal could come next week, on the heels of the next report by weapons inspectors, due Friday.
"We will not allow a resolution to pass that authorizes resorting to force," French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said at a press conference. "Russia and France, as permanent members of the Security Council, will assume their full responsibilities on this point. "
De Villepin's statement strongly hinted that Russia and France would use their vetoes to block the U.S.-British-Spanish measure, which, while not explicitly approving war, would declare Iraq to have failed its disarmament requirements and reiterate the council's threat of "serious consequences."
A West Yorkshire head teacher has banned books containing stories about pigs from the classroom in case they offend Muslim children.The literature has been removed from classes for under-sevens at Park Road Junior Infant and Nursery School in Batley.
Head Barbara Harris said the books would remain in the school library for children to read.
Sixty per cent of the school's pupils are of Pakistani or Indian origin and 99% of these pupils are Muslims.
Mrs Harris said in a statement: "Recently I have been aware of an occasion where young Muslim children in class were read stories about pigs.
"We try to be sensitive to the fact that for Muslims talk of pigs is offensive."
The shrillness of the debate about French and German opposition to war on Iraq has concealed the change in fundamental American strategic thinking that lies at its heart. The Pentagon is returning the US to its traditional role as a maritime power. In that strategy, western Europe, indeed Europe as a whole, will matter less than it has done.Gerhard Schroeder and Jacques Chirac are serving as a convenient excuse for President George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, to slash the American presence in Europe. The US has always been primarily a sea power, from the days of the privateers to Theodore Roosevelt's "Great White Fleet" and Ronald Reagan's 600-ship navy. Now that it no longer needs a massive land presence in western Europe it wants to return to that strategy.
Sea powers behave in predictable ways. Strategically, they try to dominate the oceans (and now the skies). They abhor large and fixed land deployments, preferring to use local auxiliaries. They like to control or at least to neutralise the opposite shores of contiguous seas and oceans. [...]
Washington may not announce this new strategy for some time, if ever, because that might reinforce Europe's wish for its own security and foreign policy. Like all traditional naval powers, Washington prefers to keep a balance of power between various states on other continents. That is one reason Mr Rumsfeld called upon "new Europe" to balance "old Europe". But the maritime strategy will become clear over time.
This could create some problems for Tony Blair. The US wants to cut its role in Europe but does not like an independent-minded European foreign and defence policy. Mr Blair will have to resolve that contradiction and may be asked again to choose sides.
Some Europeans believe that Mr Rumsfeld is as guilty of "irrational exuberance" today as the New York stock exchange was in the bubble years at the end of the last decade. He has certainly done all he can to annoy the Europeans. But he is preparing for a new and different strategic environment and western Europeans should understand their diminished role.
Reasonable people may even ask whether current US policies will serve the new American strategic objectives. Such questions are, of course, legitimate but only if they are posed in terms of the new strategy. They should not be posed - as many now are - on the basis of what the new breed of Pentagon planners would regard as terminally obsolete sentimentalism about superannuated cold-war relations.
The Monroe Doctrine was not only not isolationist, it was anti-isolationist. It amounted to the recognition that American safety depended on the balance of power in Europe. With that doctrine's promulgation, the first era in American foreign policy came to a close. The strategic principles of the Monroe Doctrine have continued without interruption to shape American foreign policy from that day to this. American interventions in the world wars as well as the Cold War were not a series of revolutionary departures from Monroe's statecraft; they were examples of the same thinking that led Monroe to proclaim it. Just as Monroe and his talented secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, were prepared in the last analysis to help Britain prevent the French or the Spanish from reestablishing dynastic empires in the Americas in 1823, twentieth-century American presidents were prepared to step in to keep Germany and the Soviet Union from overturning the European power balance and spreading their power through the rest of the world. If another antidemocratic power should threaten to unite all Europe under its dominion tomorrow, we would step in and resist again. We would do the same thing in Asia, and for the same reason. Our policies have changed over the decades and centuries to reflect changing circumstances; our basic strategic posture has not changed since 1823.
MORE:
The Jacksonian Tradition (Walter Russell Mead, The National Interest)
The epithet that Europeans have most often flung at American war hawks over the past year is "unilateralist." Especially in French and German public opinion, it is assumed that George W. Bush's administration seeks to conquer the world.It doesn't. American hawks are pursuing a more subtle, and perhaps more durable, project. They are joining the European quest for a post-national global order, but on their own terms. Extrapolating from its own constitutional history, the US wants to supply today's inchoate order with what Montesquieu called "vigour" and Alexander Hamilton called "energy".
This may be a project that the world ends up not wanting. It may be one that is naive to the point of being silly. But it is a far cry from the "Bonapartism" that certain European observers discern in the administration's recent conduct. America does not aim to be a world dictator; it aims to be something more like a world executive. [...]
As America sees it, there are two obvious problems with the UN as a world government. First, it is incomplete. Old Europe ignores the fact that the world needs an executive, both to enforce the democratic will and balance a legislature's powers. For the time being, it is true, the US shows signs of arrogating that executive role to itself. But the US is groping towards a new constitutional order, not a global dictatorship. The Bush administration's courtship of "New Europe", whether through the Blair Eight or the Vilnius Ten, has been a bid for legitimacy.
Second, even if the world needs a legislature, the UN as presently constituted is ill-fitted to provide it. Many of its members are themselves undemocratic. In being selective about whom it listens to, the US is not being high-handed. It is striking a blow for political accountability. Noel Mamere, presidential candidate of France's Greens, may warn in his recent book of a nascent "American Bonapartism". But there is surely less risk that the US will act like a megalomaniacal Napoleon than that a mob of outlaw states gathered under the UN roof (Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Zimbabwe etc) will together pursue their common interests like Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety.
Some time before the end of the Iraq crisis, it will become clear that the US differs with Europe not over the need for post-national structures but over how those structures should be built. A nasty shock could be in store. By the time Europeans realise they do not have a monopoly on multilateral thinking, the US may already have come up with a more serviceable blueprint for a post-national order.
Just seven days earlier he had opened his morning newspaper on the headlines announcing the Russian-German alliance. News that shook the politicians and young poets of a dozen capital cities brought deep peace to one English heart. [...] He lived too close to Fascism in Italy to share the opposing enthusiasms of his countrymen. He saw it neither as a calamity nor as a rebirth; as a rough improvisation merely. He disliked the men who were edging themselves into power around him, but English denunciations sounded fatuous and dishonest and for the past three years he had given up his English newspapers. The German Nazis he knew to be mad and bad. Their participation dishonoured the cause of Spain, but the troubles of Bohemia, the year before, left him quite indifferent. When Prague fell, he knew that war was inevitable. He expected his country to go to war in a
panic, for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all, with the wrong allies, in pitiful weakness. But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.
[G]uy Crouchback, is an English Catholic from an ancient recusant family, the archetype of a noble reactionary. The war makes sense to him just so long as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are together as the enemy. In a famous phrase, Waugh makes Crouchback say to himself: 'The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.'But nothing stayed plain and undisguised. Hitler attacked Stalin; the Bolsheviks became our allies. For Guy, the war had become meaningless. As the years passed, justice and honour and moral standards went splash and then splash again into the scum. Last week, Channel 4 showed their two-part version of Sword of Honour. [...]
Terror, irony and moral compromise pursue the TV Crouchback through Crete, Egypt, London under the doodlebugs and Croatia under the partisans. There is a huge effort to achieve authenticity. And yet it is not the effort to get uniforms and weaponry and orderly-room furniture and cigarettes 'right' which is so convincing. There is something else sizzling away here - a 'wonder additive' which made so many viewers feel familiar with scenes dated decades before they were born.
And that, precisely, is what worries me. Sword of Honour is convincing - but for an ominous reason: Waugh's private myth about war's futility has become our public myth today. [...]
When Waugh wrote this trilogy, between 1951 and 1964, people loved the acerbity of his writing. But they found Crouchback and his views perverse. In those days, the thought that the Second World War might have been an error which left the world worse than it found it was almost unthinkable.
There had been frightful blunders such as Singapore, admitted the reader in the National Health spectacles. But to see it all as a mistake, you would have to be...well, either a fascist or a believer in something perfectly weird. For instance, a devout member of the old English Roman Catholic aristocracy. Down the narrow perspective of that particular telescope, through which the welfare of the Vatican mattered more than cutting Axis communications in the Balkans, things might well look different.
They did to fictional Guy Crouchback. He was in Egypt, recovering from his escape from Crete in an open boat, when he heard that atheist, Bolshevik Russia had suddenly become Britain's ally. 'He was back after less than two years' pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour.'
It's not that eccentric view of the war which turns a vast TV audience into millions of Crouchbacks. Although half a century has passed, few people seriously believe that Britain should have saved its soul by letting Hitler and Stalin slug it out alone. Neither do they want to defeat 'the Modern Age'. But, like Guy Crouchback, twenty-first century Britain finds it hard to justify a war's means by its ends.
If smashing Hitler required abandoning innocent people to destruction, betraying your friends or helping murderers to seize power, then what became of justice and honour? This TV drama says: 'Yes, and all wars are like that: mad and pointless.' And it also suggests that there are only perpetrators and victims in war: no moral shades of grey.
It sounds hard, but it's soft. It amounts to pulling the curtains across the world we live in. Out there, though, wars will go on blazing up. All will be foul, and all will make men and women do things that violate their conscience. But some will be worth winning.
On the other hand, one can take great comfort in knowing this is how things always work in the democracies. As Evelyn Waugh argued best, WWII--in leaving Communism in control of the territories that Nazism had just been driven from--was just as pointless. Far from destroying the Modern Age, we aided and abetted it. So, looking back and comparing ourselves, we may not be a serious people, but we're surely not much less serious than our grandparents. We got that goin' for us. And, of course, Islamicism and Asian Communism are no more capable of sustaining themselves than were Nazism and Soviet Communism, so they'll fall in the end. And if it will be bloodier, cost more, and sap more of the soul to merely contain them than to fight them, it will nonetheless "succeed". That too should be comforting...I guess...
My Master an elixir hath that turns
All base and worthless substances to gold.
From rubble stones He fashions palaces
Most beautiful and stately to behold.
He garners with a craftsman's skillful care
All that we break and weeping cast away.
His eyes see uncut opals in the rock
And shapely vessels in our trampled clay.
The sum of life's lost opportunities,
The broken friendships, and the wasted years,
These are His raw materials;
His hands rest on fragments, weld them with His tears.
A patient Alchemist! --He bides His time,
Broods while the south winds breathe, the
North winds blow,
And weary self, at enmity with self,
Works out its own destruction, bitter slow,
Our gallant highways petered out in mire,
Our airy castles crumbled into dust,
Leaving us stripped of all save firece desire,
He comes, with feet deliberate and slow,
Who counts a contrite heart His sacrifice.
(No other bidders rise to stake their claims,
He only on our ruins sets a price.)
And stooping very low engraves with care
His name, indelible, upon our dust;
And from the ashes of our self-despair
Kindles a flame of hope and humble trust.
He seeks no second site on which to build,
But on the old foundation, stone by stone,
Cementing sad experience with grace,
Fashions a stronger temple of His own.
The United States said on Tuesday it was gaining support in the U.N. Security Council for a resolution against Iraq and ordered 60,000 more troops to the Gulf, as Turkey gave Washington hope it could be allowed to open a northern front there for any invasion.The new developments and U.S. signals that it could push soon for a U.N. Security Council vote on a new resolution, a possible prelude to invasion, built fresh momentum toward war.
"I am increasingly optimistic that if it comes to a vote, we will be able to make a case that will persuade most of the members of the Security Council to vote for the resolution," Secretary of State Colin Powell told the French television station France 2 in an interview.
For decades, English and American conservatives have gleefully anticipated the imminent collapse of Scandinavia. After all, the Scandinavian welfare state, which largely came into existence around 1935, is an affront to theories held dear by both libertarian and traditionalist right wingers. But they have been continually frustrated.
The image itself (splayed across virtually every newspaper in the world) was uncanny, the caption more unsettling yet: Dec. 6, 1999, a
pair of 12-year-old ethnic Karen twin brothers, the Htoos, Johnny on the left (that's a boy?) and Luther (Luther!?) on the right, leaders of a beleaguered Myanmar insurgent group known as God's Army, whose members credit them with mystical godlike powers that "render them invulnerable during battle."In the photo, they look like Renaissance cherubs gone badly wrong (specifically like those two clichéd angels propped at the foot of Raphael's Dresden Sistine Madonna): toxic putti. Raphael's cherubs, that is, gone upriver, deep, way too deep into Conradland -- miniature Brandos bestriding their own demented cargo cult. Their aura is all the more unsettling in that, in this photo anyway, they actually look, if you'll pardon the expression, like Siamese twins. Johnny seems to grow right out of Luther's back, his tremulous innocence hitched helplessly to the latter's age-old, gimlet-eyed world-weariness: seen it all (toke), seen it all (toke), should never have seen any of it.
John Hodgman conducts an informal survey in which he asks the age old question: which is better? The power of flight, or the power of invisibility? He finds that how you answer tells a lot about what kind of person you are. And also, no matter which power people choose, they never use it to fight crime. (13 minutes)
[R]ather than being Churchill Redux, as his many current admirers claim, it is far more accurate to see George W. Bush as the Anti-Churchill, and someone from whom the Great Winston might well have recoiled.Churchill was...notable for rising above party and political prejudice as a national war leader. His Great Coalition of 1940-45 still ranks as arguably the greatest of all British wartime administrations.
Many of its best talents came from the opposition Labour Party which at that time was so far left it would horrify current Third Way Democrats just to think about it.
The Bush Administration, by contrast, has recruited few Democrats or even Independents to join a Cabinet notable for its lack of administrative grasp and intellectual brilliance even in the year and a half since "9/11". [...]
Finally, Churchill won World War II above all not by his direct military direction of the British war effort, which was often disastrously incompetent, but by his brilliant diplomatic and strategic sense.
He did more to maintain and hold together Britain's Grand Alliance with the United States and the Soviet Union than any other leader in all three countries.
George Bush, for his part, has already sloughed off the great "wall-to-wall" international alliance that rallied round him after "9/11"--with more than a little help from Secretary of State Colin Powell.
He appears amazingly unconcerned at shattering the venerable Atlantic Alliance--and defying Russia and China as well over Iraq and even appears to relish going into Iraq virtually alone, save for an increasingly isolated British Prime Minister Tony Blair at his side.
Churchill famously said that the only thing worse than having to wage war with allies was having to wage it without them. Mr. Bush, in sharp contrast, appears liberated and even exhilarated by the very prospect Churchill so feared.
George W. Bush, unfortunately for him as president but fortunate for we who have him for a president, lives in different times. Because Democrats were so bitter over the results of the 2000 election, all of those who were approached about serving in the cabinet, with the exception of Norm Minetta and George Tenet who were already there, refused to serve their country if it meant serving a Republican president. Meanwhile, whereas Britain in 1940 had no allies because Hitler had conquered them all, America in 2003 has few because most no longer have the stomach to fight for Western values. But we do have some, and most important among them is Britain. One suspects that, somewhere or other, Mr. Churchill is rather proud of both Tony Blair and George W. Bush, and all the prouder because, like him, they stubbornly persist despite a paucity of allies.
For slightly under two hours, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (DreamWorks/20th Century Fox) is even greater than the sum of its parts'a roller coaster in which the loop-the-loops are philosophical as well as visceral. It's one of the drollest projections of the future ever put on film. The movie is adapted from an early short story by Philip K. Dick; and while it strays from Dick's narrative, it nails the basic premise and some quintessential Dickian motifs. The year is 2054, and in and around Washington, D.C., murder has been eliminated by a private corporation with governmentlike powers of detention. The company, Precrime, has developed technology to tap into the minds of "Pre-Cogs," psychic humans who float in a sort of sacred amniotic pool, their synapses wired to video terminals. What they visualize, and what shows up on screens in the company's control room, are not "thought crimes" but crimes that definitely will be committed.Sounds invasive, no? Shrewdly, the screenplay (by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen) adds a cliffhanger aspect to engage our sympathies. With crimes of passion, the Pre-Cogs' vision can come mere minutes before a murder is destined to occur, which means a race to discern the location and stop the killing. While his hovercraft SWAT team waits to swoop down on the perpetrator-to-be, the unit chief, John Anderton (Tom Cruise), reviews the Pre-Cogs' tapes on a giant glass screen like some sort of forensic Leonard Bernstein, commanding the computer to shift the grid, try different angles, and zoom in for close-ups. Anderton also has a direct video link to a pair of judges, who by rote give their legal blessing to go forth and apprehend.
I must admit that I find elements of this future attractive?and so, according to Minority Report, does the populace of 2054. A political advertisement for Precrime is stunningly effective: It shows people who would have been murder victims expressing gratitude for their lives. As the movie begins, Precrime is on the verge of a referendum that would make its policies the law of the United States, and a smirky Justice Department honcho called Witwer (Colin Farrell) has arrived to scrutinize the company's inner workings?to ensure that the data that sends would-be culprits into suspended animation for the rest of their lives is reliable. The movie presents us with a classic totalitarian trade-off, upgraded by technology and the paranormal: Would you surrender a slew of civil liberties for a world without crime? Assuming that the right people were always jailed for the right reasons, I'd think about it long and hard.
Last month [Ryan] Clancy was among about 50 Western anti-war activists who rode on red double-decker buses to Baghdad after an overland trip that started at London's Tower Bridge.They hoped to avert a U.S.-led war by putting a human face on the potential civilian casualties by positioning themselves in communities and at hospitals and schools.
Consistency and predictability are core strengths of George W. Bush as a politician. Be the issue domestic (taxes, education) or foreign (terrorism, Iraq), once he settles on a policy he sticks with it. There is no ambiguity, no guessing what his real position might be, no despair at interpreting contradictions. Even his detractors never complain about "Tricky George" or "Slick Bush."But there is one exception to this pattern. And - couldn't you have predicted it? - the topic is the Arab-Israeli conflict. Here, Bush not only seems unable to make up his mind, but he oscillates between two quite contrary views.
For example, at the height of the Palestinian assault against Israel last April, the president delivered a major address that contained within it a flagrant contradiction.
* He began by slamming Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA) for its terrorism against Israelis, and he fingered several groups, one of them (Al-Aqsa Brigades) under Arafat's control, attempting to destroy Israel. In this spirit, not surprisingly, Bush approved of Israeli efforts at self-protection, saying that "America recognizes Israel's right to defend itself from terror."
* Then, in concluding the speech, he drew policy conclusions at odds with this analysis. The president asked Palestinian leaders to make some nominal gestures to prove they are "truly on the side of peace," then demanded that Israel's government reciprocate with four giant steps (halt its military efforts, withdraw from areas it had recently occupied, cease civilian construction in the occupied territories and help build a viable Palestinian state).
In sum, Bush theoretically backed Israel and condemned Arafat while practically he backed Arafat and punished Israel. All this left most observers stumped.
(1) Settled borders. Just announce to the Palestinians what their borders are. Recognize them as an independent nation. Move on.
(2) Once they have a nation, some significant amount of the fury of both Palestinians in particular and Arabs in general will be reduced, at least as regards Israel. Instead, the Palestinians are likely to start making greater demands of their own leadership, to improve life in the new nation.
(3) It is not to be expected that this will end hostilities between Palestine and Israel, but attacks at that point will constitute acts of war and Israel will have both the right and the moral sanction to treat Palestine as a nation with which it is at war. Right now when they undertake "reprisals" they may be justified, but they suffer the worldwide hoistility that will always greet repression directed towards a population that is fundamentally under your control.
(4) Should the situation ever become truly apocalyptic, this separation into two states will be particulary important because the world little cares about the genocide of the American Indians, but it won't accept Jim Crow.
(5) The sooner there's a Palestinian state the better, because if the Palestinian leadership ever changed its strategy and just asked for full rights as Israeli citizens in a unified state, Israel would have to say no, and that would truly place them in the wrong.
For twenty years the fates of Marsalis and jazz music have appeared inextricably intertwined. He was a young newcomer on the New York scene at a time when jazz seemed dominated and diminished by rock-oriented "fusion," marginalized by outrŽ experimentation and electronics, and disconnected from the youth audience that has driven American popular culture since the postwar era. Extraordinarily gifted and fluent in both jazz and classical music, not to mention young, handsome, black, impassioned, and articulate, especially on the importance of jazz history and jazz masters, Marsalis was ideally equipped to lead a cultural-aesthetic movement suited to the time, a renaissance that raised public esteem for and the popular appeal of jazz through a return to the music's traditional values: jazz for the Reagan revolution. In 1990 Time magazine put him on the cover
and announced the dawn of "The New Jazz Age." Record companies rediscovered the music and revived long-dormant jazz lines, signing countless young musicians inspired by Marsalis, along with three of his five brothers (first his older brother, Branford, a celebrated tenor saxophonist; later Delfeayo, a trombonist; and eventually the youngest, Jason, a percussionist) and his father, Ellis (a respected educator and pianist in the family's native New Orleans). By the 1990s Wynton Marsalis had become an omnipresent spokesperson for his music and also one of its most prolific and highly decorated practitioners (he was the first jazz composer to win a Pulitzer Prize, for Blood on the Fields, his oratorio about slavery)—something of a counterpart to Leonard Bernstein in the 1950s. He took jazz up and over the hierarchical divide that had long isolated the music from the fine-arts establishment; the modest summer jazz program he created won a full constituency at Lincoln Center. In 1999, to mark the end of the century, Marsalis issued a total of fifteen CDs—about one new title every month.In the following two years he did not release a single CD of new music. In fact, after two decades with Columbia Records, the prestigious and high-powered label historically associated with Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis, Marsalis has no record contract with any company. Nor does his brother Branford, who just a few years ago was not only one of Columbia's recording stars but an executive consultant overseeing the artists-and-repertory direction of the label's jazz division. (Branford recently formed an independent record company.) Over the past few years Columbia has drastically reduced its roster of active jazz musicians, shifting its emphasis to reissues of old recordings. Atlantic folded its jazz catalogue into the operations of its parent company, Warner, and essentially gave up on developing new artists. Verve is a fraction of the size it was a decade ago. In addition, jazz clubs around the country have been struggling, and the attacks of September 11 hurt night life everywhere; New York's venerable Sweet Basil closed in the spring of 2001, after twenty-five years in operation, and later reopened as a youth-oriented world-music place. In the institutional arena, Carnegie Hall discontinued its in-house jazz orchestra at the end of the 2001-2002 season.
For this grim state of affairs in jazz Marsalis, the public face of the music and the evident master of its destiny, has been declared at least partly culpable. By leading jazz into the realm of unbending classicism, by applying the Great Man template to establish an iconography (Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Coltrane), and by sanctifying a canon of their own choosing (Armstrong's "Hot Fives," Ellington's Blanton-Webster period, Parker's Savoy sessions, Coltrane's A Love Supreme), Marsalis and his adherents are said to have codified the music in a stifling orthodoxy and inhibited the revolutionary impulses that have always advanced jazz.
"They've done a lot to take the essence of jazz and distort it," the composer and pianist George Russell told The New York Times in 1998. "They've put a damper on the main ingredient of jazz, which is innovation."
A former executive with Columbia Records who has worked intimately with five Marsalises says, "For many people, Wynton has come to embody some retro ideology that is not really of the moment, you know—it's more museumlike in nature, a look back. I think as each day passes, Wynton does lose relevance as a shaper of musical direction. He's not quite the leader of a musical movement any longer. That doesn't mean he's not remarkable, or without considerable clout, or that he's not the leader of a cultural movement. But within the record industry the Marsalises are no longer seen as the top guys."
1) Yesterday, I went to a master class taught by Paquito D'Rivera....something Adriana saw and surprised me with a ticket. It wasn't a normal master class (in which everyone brings their horns, and the teacher uses the students to demonstrate his points), rather just Paquito talking about elements of jazz and Latin music...with him (accompanied by a piano player) making his own points on alto and clarinet....it was a great time for someone like me...anyway, here's the tie to Wynton: at one point, Paquito was talking about what he thinks is lacking in a lot of instrumentalists, and one of the things he mentioned was articulation (which in wind instrument refers to the differentiation of individual notes by using the tongue). He said not enough guys anymore really articulate well, and even fewer do so with any personal imprint. He went on to cite Wynton as an example of a guy who is a "genius" of articulation and dynamics, which results in him having a beautiful, exciting sound. He then mimicked Marsalis's sound with his voice. Well, I admire the hell out of Paquito D'Rivera, and if Wynton is good enough for him, who am I to argue?
2) I'm not that familiar with Hadju or his views on jazz, but I have read his best-known work, his biography of Billy Strayhorn, which I liked very much. I know he must know a lot about the music, and maybe his opening in this article was exaggerated for dramatic effect, but I find it hard to believe he had to sit there for 4 songs before he was sure the trumpet player was Wynton. Separate and apart from whether someone likes his music, Marsalis does have a distinctive (and remarkably beautiful) tone on the trumpet....if I had been in the club, I would have known it was him even if I had been blindfolded...it struck me as unbelievable that the author, and the jazz man sitting next to him, couldn't tell...
3) Hadju makes a surprising number of references to Wynton and women: that he has kids with 2 girlfriends, that he has access to lots of good looking girls, that Crouch lured him to the surprise birthday party by telling him they were going to meet to girls, etc. I thought it was a bit out of place for an article that was supposed to be comparing the State of Jazz to the State of Wynton. It wasn't quite "Mandingo", but I don't know that "black man as sex machine" was really relevant to the main thesis. (Especially without any allegations that Wynton mistreats women or doesn't take care of his kids....in fact, the author made the opposite point: that Marsalis is seemingly polite and solicitous to all of his fans and acquaintances and takes the kids during vacations, etc.)....
4) Hadju shouldn't have taken his appearance at a club in late August as a shock. The summer is typically when musicians make the "Jazz Festival" circuit...Montreaux, Newport, JVC (in NY), Telluride, Italy, Japan, etc. The festivals are usually over by mid-August. So, at that point, Wynton is home, a great musician who he would respect (McPherson) is playing at the most famous jazz club in the world (the Village Vanguard), so Wynton, who lives a $5 cab ride away, stops in for a few sets. All that shows me is that Marsalis wasn't b.s.'ing the writer when he told him he loves to play. I find it remarkable and admirable (but not surprising) that a world-famous musician, who plays to sold out concert halls everywhere, loves to play so much that he'll drop in for a few tunes with a friend. At my club, I've seen guys like Joe Williams, Alan Broadbent, and even Miles freaking Davis himself, come out of the audience to sit in on a song or two.
5) I chuckle at the attempt to draw distinctions between Branford and Wynton. Yes, Branford has done some pop stuff, but his first release on his own record label features his interpretations of Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" and Sonny Rollins' "Freedom Suite"....so, unlike his brother, he obviously doesn't hold the old masters in reverence or anything.
6) He makes a good point about the difficulty posed to critics by Wynton when he acts as a critic. Tough to have a guy invade your turf who can actually do the thing at a high level and he knows as much about the history as you do.
7) Finally, Hadju says about 5 times that the jazz club business is struggling throughout the country since 9/11, and he uses the cut backs at some labels as an indicator that the music is dying. Now, I don't doubt that there has been a drop off at places like the Blue Note in NY which always catered to busloads of Japanese and German tourists. But whenever I'm in NY (3 or 4 times a year) and go by Iridium or the Vanguard, they are always packed. And, I'm happy to say, the Catalina Bar and Grill has seen a significant increase in business since 9/11...we don't' know why, but I suppose it's because people from LA may not be taking as many vacations, so they go out to do something special in town. On the record side, interesting, avant garde (for want of a better, less pejorative word) new comers like Jason Moran, and established non-traditional players like David Murray, Arthur Blythe and Wayne Shorter have all released new albums in the last few months. Mainstream guys like Hank Jones (in his 80's), Kenny Barron, Larry Coryell, Cedar Walton, etc., etc., are going strong....and Jackie McLean and Sonny Rollins (both in their 70's) can still outplay anyone on the planet, and continue to make fresh, challenging music that doesn't rest on their laurels from the 1950's and 60's..... Oh yeah, and back to where I started, with Paquito: guys like D'Rivera and Sandoval, and players from all over the world (Paquito's piano player is Israeli) are coming to this country, adopting jazz and adding touches of their home cultures.
Claims that the news media form a vast liberal conspiracy strike me as utterly unconvincing, but there's one area where accusations of institutional bias have merit: nearly all of us in the news business are completely out of touch with a group that includes 46 percent of Americans.That's the proportion who described themselves in a Gallup poll in December as evangelical or born-again Christians. Evangelicals have moved from the fringe to the mainstream, and that is particularly evident in this administration. It's impossible to understand President Bush without acknowledging the centrality of his faith. Indeed, there may be an element of messianic vision in the plan to invade Iraq and "remake" the Middle East. [...]
I tend to disagree with evangelicals on almost everything, and I see no problem with aggressively pointing out the dismal consequences of this increasing religious influence. For example, evangelicals' discomfort with condoms and sex education has led the administration to policies that are likely to lead to more people dying of AIDS at home and abroad, not to mention more pregnancies and abortions.
But liberal critiques sometimes seem not just filled with outrage at evangelical-backed policies, which is fair, but also to have a sneering tone about conservative Christianity itself. Such mockery of religious faith is inexcusable. And liberals sometimes show more intellectual curiosity about the religion of Afghanistan than that of Alabama, and more interest in reading the Upanishads than in reading the Book of Revelation.
Nor can Mr. Bush be claimed by the culture warriors of the Christian right, although he gave them John Ashcroft and occasionally throws them a steak. The president is not a bigot, or a pessimist.
The Rev. Don Wildmon, founding chairman of a mushrooming network of Christian radio stations, does not like National Public Radio."He detests the news that the public gets through NPR and believes it is slanted from a distinctly liberal and secular perspective," said Patrick Vaughn, general counsel for Mr. Wildmon's American Family Radio.
Here in Lake Charles, American Family Radio has silenced what its boss detests.
It knocked two NPR affiliate stations off the local airwaves last year, transforming this southwest Louisiana community of 95,000 people into the most populous place in the country where "All Things Considered" cannot be heard.
Every devoted radio listener has experienced it at some time or another--a favorite station changes its format. The effect is unsettling. Last year, National Public Radio listeners in Lake Charles, La., experienced something even more alarming.
Now, these may not necessarily be indicators of liberal bias at the Times; they may just demonstrate grotesque insenitivity to the religious beliefs of a plurality of Americans. But, whichever is the case, surely Mr. Kristoff's crusade against the "sneering tone"of media coverage of Christians should begin at home, shouldn't it?
Republican Sen. Rick Santorum has just announced a major change in the party's strategy in the Miguel Estrada confirmation fight. Santorum told reporters minutes ago that Republicans will file for cloture today, which will lead to a vote on Thursday.So far, Republicans can count on just four Democratic votes in favor of Estrada, which will leave them short of the 60 votes needed to stop the Democratic filibuster. "We've sort of hit a wall now," Santorum said. "We haven't had anybody come forward in a week and a half, and at some point, you're going to have to change strategies to make this happen."
Santorum said the Republican strategy now "will be to put people on the record" through a cloture vote. Anticipating that Republicans will at first fail to reach 60 votes, Santorum added, "This will be one of many cloture votes."
"My guess is we will do another cloture vote next week and wait and see what happens," Santorum said. "If we're successful and pick up a vote, we may have some other options."
Why do Republicans always have to be the ones who behave responsibly? Just make the Democrats filibuster 24/7.
UPDATE:
Okay, Senate rules are famously complex, so I may well have this wrong--if you see differently please tell us--but it appears from this that by forcing a vote, the GOP would be effectively bringing Senate business to a halt until the filibuster ends, whereas as right now other measures can be considered on the floor while the filibuster goes on.
UPDATE:
That's apparently completely wrong. Please check the comments for more informed instruction.
It only took three years, but we finally posted a review of Robert D. Putnam's Bowling Alone
Mr. Ridge said Mr. Mohammed had been trying to activate a terror plot against a target inside the United States, a plan that contributed significantly to the government's decision last month to rachet up the terrorist threat alert level from yellow to orange, a status that has since been rescinded. Mr. Ridge called it "a significant terrorist plot," but would not discuss any details."There was one plot line that we were able to connect with him that related to a potential terrorist attack during the time that this whole thing was being discussed," Mr. Ridge said. Asked if the attack was planned for the United States, Mr. Ridge replied simply, "Yes."
The plot to which Mr. Ridge appeared to be referring, officials said, involved newly received intelligence indicating that Mr. Mohammed was trying to set in motion a large-scale attack against an unspecified target in the United States, perhaps involving fuel trucks, gas stations and bridges. Mr. Mohammed had considered trying to attack such targets before Sept. 11.
And now we can reveal USA TODAY's choice for the hardest thing to do in sports: hitting a baseball, thrown 90-plus mph at your chin,
or buckling your knees. Here's why it's so hard, from a scientific perspective, from an expert athlete's and from an average joe's.In his book The Physics of Baseball, retired Yale University physics professor Robert Adair writes that the moment of contact when a bat strikes a ball lasts just 1/1,000th of a second.
But the skills required to execute that at the highest levels require years and years of training. You'll get a multimillion-dollar contract if you can pull it off successfully anywhere near three out of 10 times. [...]
Consider that a fastball thrown at 95-100 mph reaches home plate in about 0.4 seconds. Adair notes in his book that it takes 0.15 seconds for humans to voluntarily blink their eyes in response to visual signals. When a big-league fastball is on the way, you must do far more than just blink. You must swing the bat to precisely the right spot at precisely the right time.
"If a person from another planet was told what's involved ... they would say it's impossible," says Porter Johnson, a physics professor at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
It becomes even more challenging when pitchers throw curveballs and other breaking pitches. They also can throw the batter's timing off by mixing their fastest pitches with the slower changeups.
But skilled batters can be tipped off by the motions of pitchers. They can make split-second assessments of how the seams on the ball are spinning (indicating various pitches) and gauge its path toward the plate.
"It takes good eyesight, years of practice, good concentration," Johnson says. But in the final analysis, he says even good hitters are simply making well-educated guesses. "You've already committed yourself to swing at a particular point and a particular time. It's just a question of whether the ball happens to be there."
Adair says that when a fastballer such as Randy Johnson throws a pitch in the high 90s, the hitter has only about two-tenths of a second from the time the ball leaves his hand to process "the last information that does you any conceivable good whatsoever" - and then swing.
"After two-tenths of a second, they can turn out the lights in the stadium," Adair says, "and it won't affect your hitting him at all."
If the Democratic effort to kill the appointment of Miguel Estrada to the U.S. Court of Appeals succeeds, Estrada should return the favor by moving back to New York State and challenging his chief tormentor, Senator Charles Schumer, in the 2004 elections.Estrada, a Honduran immigrant who graduated from Columbia University and served in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, would be a formidable candidate against Schumer. He could at one stroke derail the ambitious Schumer’s political career and solidify the Republican hold on the Senate.
The unbridgeable gap between "socialism" and "fascism," so often remarked since World War II, was invented by the communists, who earlier had a more, shall we say, "flexible" attitude towards Nazism. ("Fascism" and "Nazism" were two different political movements. For instance, racialist pseudo-science and genocide were integral to Nazism, but played no roles in fascism. Socialists find it convenient to ignore such distinctions.) Beginning in 1935, American communists began softening their image, via the Moscow-orchestrated "Popular Front." The American Communist Party was nominally led by Earl Browder, who got his orders direct from Moscow. Based on Stalin's flipflops and shifting alliances, American communists sometimes changed their dogmatic positions over night, a practice which George Orwell would creatively work into his landmark novel, 1984.Such continuous equivocation and changing of alliances is the thread of continuity between 1930s communism, the 1960s New Left, and contemporary multiculturalism (or as I call it, racial socialism). [...]
During a March 10, 1939 radio address, Stalin spoke of the "kinship" between communism and Nazism. Initially, American communists wanted America to stay out of the "imperialist" war in Europe. That Moscow-dictated position was due entirely to the non-aggression pact that Stalin had entered into with Hitler on August 23,1939, when the dictators forged their secret plan to divvy up Poland. At that point, the communists (like American Nazis and many America Firsters) thought Hitler and his murdering band were fine fellows. Not that communists ever had any problem with murder, in the first place.
But on June 22, 1941, in Operation Barbarossa, Hitler betrayed his good friend Stalin, and invaded Russia. Overnight, American communists became the country's biggest hawks. They wanted to put America at the service of Soviet "socialism in one country." It was the "democratic" thing to do. The Soviets then formulated the insuperable dichotomy between bellicose "fascism" and peace-loving "socialism" that leftists have parroted ever since. (Never mind, that national socialism wasn't fascist; one showed one's loyalty to the cause by one's willingness to swallow lies, not truths.)
In reality, there are few rallying cries with less power to motivate men to fight to the death, than the call to serve the workers of the world. Religion, race, nationality, ethnicity, regionalism are all more effective motivators. Effective communist agitators and leaders have almost always used more concrete loyalties to rally the troops. It was the invocation of Mother Russia, not the Comintern, that Stalin used to inspire the Russian people and the Red Army to overcome what was initially one of the worst beatings in military history, and ultimately savage the Wehrmacht's Eastern Command.
MORE:
The Containment Theory Is Dead!: Long Live The Containment Theory! (Nicholas Stix, February 27, 2003,Toogood Reports)
The U.S. "Containment" Theory And The Anonymous "X" Man Article (Nicholas Stix, February 25, 2003,Toogood Reports)
The Berlin Wall And The Price Of Freedom (Nicholas Stix, February 23, 2003, Toogood Reports)
Last week, our friend Charles Murtaugh lit out after Senator Sam Brownback for an essay on banning human cloning. Mr. Murtaugh said:
[M]ost aggravating from my perspective, is Brownback's wholesale calumny on responsible scientists:"Ultimately, whether or not the Raelian claim of a live-born human clone is proven to be true or false, we all know that a live-born human clone is either already among us or soon will be. There are other more credible scientists around the world working feverishly for the notoriety that will inevitably accompany the announcement made by the scientist who can prove to the world that he has brought the first live-born human clone to birth."
Does he care to name some of these "credible scientists"? Of course not -- because there are none! The leading figures of animal cloning have long spoken out against human reproductive cloning, and over a year ago the National Academy of Sciences endorsed a ban on the practice.
If anyone can find a "credible scientist" openly working on baby cloning, let me know. I don't think they exist, if only because everyone knows that working on it would put them ethically outside the pale. Repeat after me: animal studies suggest that for every successfully-born human clone there would be twenty abortions, miscarriages or stillbirths. These are odds that no mainstream researcher would risk, especially given the public outcry that would result from failures. (Go take another look at the polls: over 80% of Americans favor a ban on reproductive cloning.) In fact, safety is still the major basis for scientists' stated opposition to baby cloning; I've always argued that the safety issue doesn't exhaust the anti-cloning arguments, but it's a start, and so far no "credible scientists" have tried to contradict it.
Fifty years to the day from the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of its co-discoverers has caused a storm by suggesting that stupidity is a genetic disease that should be cured.On 28 February 1953 biologists James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA - the chemical code for all life. The breakthrough revealed how genetic information is passed from one generation to the next and revolutionised biology and medicine.
But in a documentary series to be screened in the UK on Channel 4, Watson says that low intelligence is an inherited disorder and that molecular biologists have a duty to devise gene therapies or screening tests to tackle stupidity.
"If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease," says Watson, now president of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, New York. "The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't. So I'd like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent."
Watson, no stranger to controversy, also suggests that genes influencing beauty could also be engineered. "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."
IN RECENT DECADES, stoicism and emotional reserve, once considered virtues, have come to be viewed as hopelessly outdated and unhealthy. Many schools nowadays have programs and exercises to teach children how to express their feelings; in reading materials, students are often asked to ponder how the story they have just read made them feel. In professional psychotherapy and pop self-help literature alike, failure to express and explore one's feelings is the deadliest of all sins.Men in particular have been both castigated and pitied for their inability to ''open up'' and for not being in touch with their feelings. A few years ago, the best-selling book ''Real Boys'' by psychologist William Pollack lamented that boys' training to ''take it like a man'' does terrible damage to their mental and even physical health.
But according to some fascinating new research reported by writer Lauren Slater in The New York Times Magazine, the prevailing wisdom may be wrong. The old-fashioned advice to suck it up and move on may have been far healthier than anyone suspected -- and as far as the gender angle is concerned, Henry Higgins may have been on to something in ''My Fair Lady'' when he sang, ''Why can't a woman be more like a man?''
The research summarized by Slater, conducted by several American and Israeli psychologists working independently of each other, suggests that people who tend not to talk much about their problems and to cope with pain or grief by distracting themselves generally recover better and lead happier lives.
Islam may still be a faraway religion for millions of Americans. But for Europeans it is local politics. The 15 million Muslims of the European Union (EU)-up to three times as many as live in the United States-are becoming a more powerful political force than the fabled Arab street. Europe's Muslims hail from different countries and display diverse religious tendencies, but the common denominator that links them to the Muslim world is their sympathy for Palestine and Palestinians. And unlike most of their Arab brethren, growing numbers of Europe's Muslims can vote in elections that count.This political ascendance threatens to exacerbate existing strains within the trans-Atlantic relationship. The presence of nearly 10 million Muslims versus only 700,000 Jews in France and Germany alone helps explain why continental Europe might look at the Middle East from a different angle than does the United States. Indeed, French and German concerns about a unilateral U.S. attack on Iraq or Washington's blind support for Israel are at least partly related to nervousness about the Muslim street at home.
Whether Brussels, Berlin, Paris, or Washington like it or not, Europe's Muslim constituencies are likely to become an even more vocal foreign policy lobby. Two trends are empowering Europe's Muslim street: demographics and opportunities for full citizenship.
Neiman's account of the intellectual connections among those who sought to fit evil into an ordered explanation of reality, especially Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, is rich and detailed. Leibniz's Theodicy (a term he coined) rationalized and defended the traditional view against Bayle's attack. The experience of moral and natural evil is the just consequence of the imperfection of all created things. Evil is thus a metaphysical necessity. That the universe conforms to general natural laws, discoverable by science, indicates just how well the creation is made: it does not require special divine intervention to keep it working. Leibniz justifies God's ways to man by declaring in essence "that God could not have done any better than He did."The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 exposed Leibniz to ridicule and discredited the effort to explain natural evil as part of a rational scheme. The earthquake, Neiman says, shocked "western civilization more than any event since the fall of Rome." No one could justify the arbitrary punishment of so many thousands of victims. In consequence, Rousseau argued that natural evil should be understood as having no inherent meaning. The purpose of nature is to provide the conditions within which man exercises the freedom to become human. This is an historical and psychological process that involves conflict and suffering and which is the proper subject of philosophy and theodicy. That human nature is not fixed but subject to development means that evil might, at least on occasion, have a constructive role to play. In any case, it is clear that evil (that is, moral evil) comes not from the hand of God but is our own doing. As Neiman summarizes Rousseau, we can do no more than "worry about the evils for which we are responsible."
Consider just one issue: guns. The violence associated with guns takes a horrific toll in our society. Those whose primary focus is on averting that violence are naturally hostile to guns. Those of us who focus on freedom are willing to accept a trade off, even one this terrible, in order to protect our rights and liberties. But even as we believe in that freedom and oppose those who would limit it, we can--we must--understand what drives them. We may think them wrong, but we shouldn't just dismiss the quality of their vision. The real dispute between us is not over the world that we want to see emerge, but over the way that we get there. Both sides make a mistake when they treat the other or the other's ideas as evil in and of themselves.
MORE:
One surprising meditation on this duality is M. Night Shyamalan's vastly underrated film, Unbreakable.
In the mid-19th century, when the cold tongue of land that is the Michigan peninsula was first being sliced up for development, the surveyors began to discover problems with their measurements, particularly during the winter. The lengths of metal chain they doggedly carried and laid out like giant rulers across the forests and swamps would shrink when the temperature dropped below zero.The resulting inconsistencies would only add up to a few inches a day, but over the vast distances of midwestern America the shrinking chains threatened to cause future disputes between landowners. Until a conscientious surveyor called William Burt came up with a solution: every frosty morning, he built a fire and warmed up his chain until it expanded back to exactly its original length.
Such diligence, respect for figures, and slightly bloody-minded defiance of the elements is a very American combination. So to try to understand the country by describing how it was first surveyed and divided up, as this book does, is likely to be a fruitful enterprise.
At first, in fact, Measuring America seems almost too neat a project, full of charmingly eccentric explorers, with echoes of two recent bestsellers about map-making, Dava Sobel's Longitude and Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. It details quirky discoveries about the 19th century and about America, two of contemporary publishing's favourite subjects. The opening sentences could almost be a cosy, sepia voiceover from the History Channel: "The imposing library of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in London is strategically situated. In one direction its tall windows look over the street to Whitehall, where the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns ruled..."
Yet Andro Linklater is too restless and intelligent a writer to take a predictable route through the subject for long. He begins not with America, but with the pioneering land surveys in England and Holland during the early 16th century. [...]
The measuring of America was more or less finished by the 1930s. Parts of Alaska remain unsurveyed. Perhaps they never will be now. America, to its foreign critics at least, has become less the world's great rational civilisation and more a sort of neurotically religious semi-democracy, where creationism is taught in school instead of science and family dynasties occupy the White House. Linklater is too optimistic and pro-American to say it, but these days, someone surveying the American wilderness from a hilltop might be arrested as a terrorist.
Monstrous walls of icy Tasman Sea water thirty feet high crash across the bow of the German freighter Columbus America. Sixty knot winds scream through the shipping containers stacked three tall on deck like mutant Lego blocks. 100,000 tons of steel rolls wildly side-to-side like a drunken bucking bronco as she beats her way east towards New Zealand and the red glow of the rising sun. Foamy green seawater sloshes across the deck and stinging salt spray fills the air. Five stories up the ship's master (captain) and a crewman brace themselves against the storm, sip their pre-breakfast coffee and complete their watch in relative comfort. I on the other hand, scuttle on hands and knees through the deepest bowels of the ship, beneath the lowest hold, approximately five stories below deck. I drag a shovel and a bucket, removing rust and flaked off paint chips from this troglodictic labyrinth. The ship's massive engines roar ceaselessly, pushing us forward through wind and sea. The deafening cacophony seeps through my ear protection interrupted only by the disturbing screeches and groans of twisting metal as the ship bucks and rolls. The smell of diesel fuel permeates the dank air and the pores of my skin as my appetite for breakfast rapidly fades. I am a work-away or, as it states on the contract I signed in Melbourne, Australia, a passage-worker.It's seven am local time and I've been at this for sixty minutes. By the time I climb the steel ladders and stairs up to the main deck and my small cabin and slip out of my dirty coveralls and work boots for breakfast my head is spinning. I join the crew in their dining room, the "schwein messe", where I briefly borrow some scrambled eggs and fried potatoes and retreat to my berth, unable to stand and down for the count. The second officer, the acting medical expert aboard ship, visits my sick bed and declares me, in passable English, unfit for duty. My middle ear, he informs me, needs rest. This is only day ten of my passage, at least thirty more before I reach Philadelphia, my final destination. I think I've made a terrible mistake but what am I to do? I am lower than the most junior member of the ship's crew and I work the tasks assigned me. I have no choice.
I joined the ship in Melbourne and contracted to work for my passage for the 12,000-mile trip to the first U.S. stop, Philadelphia, located an hour from my family's home in New Jersey. It's like in the old black and white movies, hop a freighter and sail the seas, visit exotic lands, pure romance. By the third time I puked that stormy morning, bringing up only yellow bile, my stomach muscles cramping, it no longer seemed romantic.
I have received several e-mails about Dennis Miller spewing hatred on The Tonight Show a few days ago. From what I’m told, he expressed great contempt for the French and total disdain for the well-being of innocents in Iraq. I believe the letters because I have seen him express similar Jurassic views on other programs. We thought he had bottomed out when he became the sportscasting equivalent of William Shatner/lounge singer, but it now appears he won’t be happy until he gets a show on the Fox News Channel.I used to write for Miller in 1992, when he had a syndicated talk show. During the program’s one season, Miller went from endorsing Jerry Brown to becoming a big Ross Perot supporter. A political impulse-buyer, his ideological cannon was never lashed very securely to the deck. Over the years, the cannon somehow became lodged on the starboard side of the vessel. Each time Miller receives a paycheck, he seems to take it to a bank further to the right of the last one. And now, more than a decade since I wrote my last joke for the man, I can only watch in stupefaction as this once hip and inside comic completes his transformation into a lout whose act sounds as if it were ghostwritten by George Jessel. Actually, that’s not fair ... to George Jessel.
Dennis Miller was always decent to me. He gave me a chance, and I appreciated it, but he has become so obstinately wrong of late that I am left with no choice but to comment.
Tony Blair's restless shifting of his justification for war undermines conviction, for standard "lady doth protest too much" reasons. More important is the dangerous paradox that his opportunism must arouse in the mind of Saddam Hussein. When the stated aim was to disarm him, Saddam had only to comply and war would be averted. But if the aim is to save the poor helpless Iraqis from their wicked tyrant, everything changes. Why would anyone disarm on the eve of an inevitable attack? Mr Blair's sudden shift to the moral high ground is presumably a desperate (and it now seems unsuccessful) bid to win over his own party. But has he thought through how it will be viewed in Iraq?The timing alone indicates that the real reason for war is neither of the two offered by Tony Blair. If it had been, all this would have blown up long ago. It would not have waited until George Bush failed to catch Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and needed a new foreign adventure to divert his electorate. War would have been a big plank in both Bush's and Blair's election platforms. Gerhard Schröder is the only major leader to have mentioned such a war to his electorate – he was against it – and he consequently has the best, if not the only, claim to a popular mandate. Bush not only failed to mention it in his manifesto. He failed even to get elected.
This is George Bush's war. His motives and his timing have an internal American rationale. Bush is so unswerving in his thirst for war that Saddam has even less incentive to disarm than Blair's paradox would suggest. Cowboy Bush is saying, in effect, "Stick your hands up, drop your weapons, and I'll shoot you anyway."
Bush wants oil and he wants the 2004 election. Unlike Blair's two aims, Bush's two are far from contradictory. An important part of the post-11 September American electorate likes kicking Arab butt, and never mind if a completely different lot of Arabs (who, incidentally, detest the secular Saddam) committed the atrocity. If Bush now wins a quick war, with few American casualties and no draft, he will triumph in the 2004 election. And where will that leave us?
Bush, unelected, has repudiated Kyoto, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, international trade agreements and environment-friendly initiatives set up by the Clinton administration, and he threatens the UN and Nato. What may we expect of this swaggering lout if an election success actually gives him something to swagger about?
Victory over Iraq will play well in Peoria. It will bomb – literally as well as metaphorically – in the rest of the world. In that post-war climate of seething hostility, are we, in Britain, going to let ourselves be identified, throughout the world, with this uncouth fundamentalist redneck? And are we really going to help him finally to get elected?
Those of us opposed to the war are sometimes accused of anti-Americanism. I am vigorously pro-American, which is one reason I am anti-Bush. They didn't elect him, and they deserve better.
After a midterm election campaign that many Democrats considered fractious and muddled, party members in the House and the Senate have reached general agreement on how to address economic and social issues. They have instituted regular meetings with governors and like-minded interest groups to map out a strategy for weakening the legislative proposals of the administration, and claim credit for the president's somewhat weakened standing in opinion polls."We put a lot of thought into this last fall, after the election," said Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the minority leader and a principal architect of the strategy. "We knew we could do a better job of working with governors and outside groups to use our amplification system more effectively. Now we've got our rapid-response team going, our message of the week, and some of these things we've never really done before."
The message has not won universal acclaim from party leaders around the country, some of whom continue to find it unfocused and repetitive of class-division themes. Democrats remain scattered on Iraq, a subject on which members are free to go their own way.
Even so, the assault on the administration's domestic policies has remained consistent in its unrelenting use of three domestic themes, as laid out by Mr. Daschle and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader.
First, they say, there is a "credibility gap" between Mr. Bush's words and his actions, an idea they apply to dozens of specific issues. The president's budget, they also contend, is too concentrated on tax cuts for the wealthy and does not provide enough for domestic security or medical and social needs. And finally, they say the budget's record-setting deficits threaten the economy and job growth.
The broad outline of these themes was set out in a joint appearance by Mr. Daschle and Ms. Pelosi at the National Press Club in January, the day before Mr. Bush's State of the Union address.
Democrats look at the polls, see a President just under 60% and think it's something they've achieved. Rational beings would pause and consider that number carefully at a moment in time when we are all become, in Saul Bellow's phrase, "Dangling" Men, that is we are in a kind of suspended animation awaiting war. As a result there's much uncertainty, something that particularly impacts peoples' psychology and thereby the economy. Meanwhile, protestors, foreign governments, and the media are all attacking Mr. Bush and "his" War. Yet he's still in the high 50s in the polls and, even more remarkable, the War itself is favored by just as many people. (By comparison, take a look at popular opinion on the prospect of our entering WWII prior to December 7, 1941--when the Gallup poll showed that 88% opposed American participation in the war in Europe.) .It certainly appears that Mr. Daschle has set himself up for yet another fall. Remind me again why we're supposed to think he's a capable leader....
Five weeks after Mr. Ridge, a former Pennsylvania governor, was sworn in as the newest member of the Bush cabinet, he now begins in earnest to confront the gargantuan management challenge of merging 22 federal agencies and their 170,000 employees into a single superdepartment. At the same time, he must defend against the possibility of an imminent attack by terrorists who could enter the United States from across thousands of miles of border, if they are not here already.With most of the department's crucial jobs still unfilled, with its employees confused and worried about their future and with a budget that many of his political allies feel is insufficient to the agency's vital task, Mr. Ridge could be forgiven for feeling alarm about his predicament.
An affable career politician who is a close friend of the president and was on Mr. Bush's short list of vice-presidential candidates, Mr. Ridge is offering a brave face to the men and women who have come under his leadership.
"I'm confident we can get the job done," he said last week at a ceremony marking the transfer of the Customs Service and the Secret Service from the Treasury Department to his control. "Everybody says this is an extraordinary task, it's a difficult task, it can't be done," he said. "And I say, I believe in my own mind that we're already united." [...]
His proposed $37.7 billion budget for next year is already being described by Congressional Democrats and many private security specialists as grossly inadequate, especially when matched against the $380 billion the White House is requesting for the military and the hundreds of billions the administration is seeking in a new round of tax cuts.
Friends and political allies say they worry that Mr. Ridge has been given a career-crushing assignment, and that he will be left as the administration's fall guy if there is another wave of terrorist attacks that can be attributed to a lack of government preparation.
They say his best hope for success — and political survival — is his relationship with Mr. Bush, a friendship that dates back several years and that gives Mr. Ridge instant access to the president.
[U]nder present circumstances, a small cut in interest rates is unlikely to have any effect on demand. If monetary policy is to be effective in these uncertain times, a large cut is needed. It does not make sense to cut interest rates by 25 basis points now. Either the ECB should cut now by at least 50 basis points, or it should wait for the uncertainty in Iraq to be resolved.The increasingly apparent structural weakness of the European economy suggests the ECB should stay its hand. But if the ECB is not convinced of this, it should avoid cutting a little today, because that would not be a sensible compromise; in fact, it would just waste an option without helping the economy.
ACCUSED September 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was carrying the names and phone numbers of members of al-Qaeda sleeper cells in North America when he was arrested, intelligence officials have said.His detention in Pakistan could disrupt acts of terror in the planning stages, authorities in Washington said.
Vincent Cannistraro, a former counter-terrorism chief for the CIA, said Mohammed would likely be interrogated "with some urgency" about al-Qaeda attacks that might be imminent.
Western intelligence officials have said Mohammed actively recruited terrorists for a new wave of attacks against Americans at home and abroad.
He is also alleged to have worked to develop radioactive "dirty" bombs.
Ever vigilant to go the extra mile to keep the world free from bloody tyrants, the French last week banned a party of French school children from visiting Britain because of Tony Blair's backing of the war against Iraq. Better that the kids stay home in their French classrooms and develop their view of the world by watching Michael Moore's America-bashing "Bowling for Columbine."Moore's film became a certified part of the French national curriculum after winning the "Cannes Prix Educational National" award, voted on by hundreds of French teachers and students. The film also made French history by being the first documentary chosen in nearly 50 years to be part of the official Cannes Film Festival competition. Hands down, "Bowling for Columbine" won the festival's 55th Anniversary Special Prize. "It was the only prize awarded," explains Moore, "that received a unanimous decision from the festival jury."
What the jurors unanimously liked was the picture Moore painted of America, a wild-eyed nation of militia crazies, gun nuts, military bravado, imperialistic warmongers and dull-witted suburban fathers who shuffle off to their jobs at Lockheed Martin each morning to make weapons of mass destruction while their trigger-happy kids are over at Columbine High, first going to bowling class in the morning and then blasting their classmates to smithereens.
The United States badly needed a big victory in its war on al-Qa'ida to counter those critics who said that the violent and fanatically anti-Western network represents a far greater and more immediate threat to Americans than Iraq.And now, just as its generals and Pentagon strategists apply the finishing touches to their plans to invade Baghdad and topple Saddam Hussein, America says this is precisely what it has secured.
Pakistani agents, who have been working with the CIA and FBI, have, with immaculate timing, captured a man who is, by their account, almost as important as Osama bin Laden himself, an alleged mastermind of the 11 September atrocities that set off the current global crisis, a man of such criminal genius that – according to The Washington Post – he is known within the counter-intelligence world merely as "The Brain". Almost every big attack against the Americans and their allies by Islamist extremists over the past decade has been linked with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was arrested in Pakistan at the weekend and – amid some confusion last night over whether he was in US or Pakistani custody – spirited off to a secret location.
He has been described by the White House as the central planner of the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington and a "key al-Qa'ida planner". He has been referred to by others as al-Qa'ida's chief military operations officer, a conduit for money, people and plans throughout the Middle East, south Asia and Europe.
There have been suggestions that he was involved in the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, in which 224 people were killed.
Intelligence agents in the Philippines believe he was part of a cell that plotted to kill the Pope in 1995. His name has been linked with the attack on the US warship the USS Cole, in Yemen, in which 17 American sailors were killed in 2000.
His was the hand that allegedly drew the knife across the throat of a terrified Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped and killed in Karachi as he was investigating Islamist extremist groups. He has, it is said, 27 aliases, speaks five languages, and is – say the Americans – as smooth and unruffled in a sleazy nightclub or in a restaurant in North Carolina, where he studied engineering in Chowan College, as he is in a staunchly conservative Islamic home in Pakistan.
If all these allegations are true – and it remains a significant "if" – he is about as breathtakingly ruthless and sinister as they come, a man with the blood of thousands of people on his hands and a $25m American reward on his head.
This is neat. Check out the "Masters", where Mr. Toth has done busts of numerous political and cultural figures, including Ronald Reagan.
Mohammed has been linked to attacks against the United States as far back as 1993, but his importance in the Al Qaeda structure became clear only after Sept. 11 last year, U.S. officials say. Now, some officials say, stopping Mohammed is as important as capturing Osama bin Laden is, perhaps even more so.Mohammed, believed to be 37, has traveled the world as one of the chief managers of the Al Qaeda network, using Egyptian, Qatari, Saudi, British and Kuwaiti identities. He is said to speak Arabic with a Kuwaiti accent and to be fluent in Urdu, the principal language of Pakistan, and English, acquired in part as he studied for his mechanical engineering degree at a university in North Carolina.
Although born in Kuwait, he is a Pakistani national whose family is from Baluchistan, an area that straddles Pakistan's borders with Iran and Afghanistan. He has used more than three dozen aliases, including one -- Mukhtar al Baluchi -- that honors this tribal heritage.
Mohammed has been operating out of Karachi on and off for a decade. He communicates with Al Qaeda cells around the world by courier, e-mail, coded telephone conversations and shortwave radio; German intelligence agents say that when he has been forced to retreat to rural hide-outs he sends his messages by donkey.
Even during the U.S. bombing campaign against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan late last year, Mohammed continued to plan, staff and direct new terrorist attacks, according to intelligence documents made available to The Times. The documents detail Mohammed's orchestration of a bombing campaign in Southeast Asia.
Mohammed the Pakistani, as the Asian bombers knew him, housed a young Canadian recruit for weeks in his Karachi apartment, personally instructing him on communication protocols -- e-mail passwords, telephone codes. He then sent him off to coordinate and finance the bomb squads. With just a few days' notice, Mohammed was able to deliver $50,000 to the recruit to pay for bomb-making materials. The money was delivered in packs of $100 bills at a shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, according to the intelligence documents.
That plot was foiled, but Mohammed's intimate involvement in it underscores his leadership in building regional terrorist networks. One network linked to Al Qaeda is allegedly behind the October bombing in Bali, Indonesia, in which nearly 200 people died.
It is the same role that American investigators believe he played not just in Asia but also around the world: If Bin Laden has been the architect of Al Qaeda, Mohammed has been its engineer. Al Qaeda members in custody have told their interrogators that Mohammed had operational cells in place in the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks and that he was the principal proponent within Al Qaeda of developing radioactive "dirty bombs," according to European intelligence officers.
The FBI acknowledges that it underestimated Mohammed's significance for years, a senior agency official said. "He was under everybody's radar. We don't know how he did it. We wish we knew.... He's the guy nobody ever heard of. The others had egos. He didn't."
Mohammed's persistence has earned the grudging admiration of some investigators, who marvel at his uncanny ability to stay one step ahead of unprecedented dragnets. In Pakistan, where the FBI believes Mohammed is still hiding, those attempts have involved a small army of agents from the military, police and multiple countries and intelligence agencies.
"The way he is managing their affairs, the way he is controlling things, he is not an ordinary man," said one top Pakistani intelligence official. "He is very sharp and brave -- an unusual combination."
Since the first Harry Potter novel was published in 1997, poor Harry has been the target of conservative Christians who burned his books and accused the bespectacled wizard of opening a door to the occult in youthful minds. [...]Now, a Protestant minister and academic whose specialty is the theological aspects of contemporary literature have put the final seal of approval on Harry. Rev. John Killinger says Harry is not a devil or a witch, but a Christ-like figure.
In a learned new book, God, The Devil and Harry Potter, he says the four Harry Potter novels are not only among the best reads of all time, but also "a modern interpretation of the gospel."
Rev. Killinger says there are many similarities between the lives of Harry and Christ. Just as Herod tried to slay the infant Jesus, so the evil Lord Voldemort attempts to kill Harry at birth. And just as Jesus conquered death in his final encounter with evil at the cross, Harry triumphs in the fight over the Sorcerer's Stone and in the cemetery in the climax of the fourth novel, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Like Christ, Harry is also ready to sacrifice his life for others. He jumps on the back of a troll and thrusts a wand up its nostril to rescue his friend Hermione. He drives off a large black snake to rescue Justin, another fellow student.
Rev. Killinger says the Potter mythology grows out of the Christian understanding of life and the universe and would have been unthinkable without it. Ms. Rowling has a university degree in French and classics, and Rev. Killinger says that also shows in her writing. Hogwarts, the school for young wizards, he says, is a kind of Olympus, where the headmaster, Dumbledore, is Zeus and Professor Minerva McGonagall is Athena. Allusions to Greek and Latin phrases are also found throughout the books, and so are bits and pieces of Greek, Persian, Egyptian and Roman mythologies.
The clarity with which Rowling sees the need to choose between good and evil is admirable, but still more admirable, to my mind, is her refusal to allow a simple division of parties into the Good and the Evil. Harry Potter is unquestionably a good boy, but, as I have suggested, a key component of his virtue arises from his recognition that he is not inevitably good. When first–year students arrive at Hogwarts, they come to an assembly of the entire school, students and faculty. Each of them sits on a stool in the midst of the assembly and puts on a large, battered, old hat—the Sorting Hat, which decides which of the four houses the student will enter. After unusually long reflection, the Sorting Hat, to Harry’s great relief, puts him in Gryffindor, but not before telling him that he could achieve real greatness in Slytherin. This comment haunts Harry: he often wonders if Slytherin is where he truly belongs, among the pragmatists, the careerists, the manipulators and deceivers, the power–hungry, and the just plain nasty. Near the end of the second book, after a terrifying encounter with Voldemort—his third, since Voldemort had tried to kill Harry, and succeeded in killing his parents, when Harry was a baby, and had confronted Harry again in the first book—he confesses his doubts to Dumbledore."So I should be in Slytherin," Harry said, looking desperately into Dumbledore’s face. "The Sorting Hat could see Slytherin’s power in me, and it—"
"Put you in Gryffindor," said Dumbledore calmly. "Listen to me, Harry. You happen to have many qualities Salazar Slytherin prized in his hand–picked students. Resourcefulness . . . determination . . . a certain disregard for rules," he added, his moustache quivering again. "Yet the Sorting Hat placed you in Gryffindor. You know why that was. Think."
"It only put me in Gryffindor," said Harry in a defeated voice, "Because I asked not to go in Slytherin. . . ."
"Exactly," said Dumbledore, beaming once more. "Which makes you very different from [Voldemort]. It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." Harry sat motionless in his chair, stunned.
Harry is stunned because he realizes for the first time that his confusion has been wrongheaded from the start: he has been asking the question "Who am I at heart?" when he needed to be asking the question "What must I do in order to become what I should be?" His character is not a fixed preexistent thing, but something that he has the responsibility for making: that’s why the Greeks called it character, "that which is engraved." It’s also what the Germans mean when they speak of Bildung, and the Harry Potter books are of course a multivolume Bildungsroman—a story of "education," that is to say, of character formation.
We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed, only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic "progress" leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.
Fifty years ago, on 5 March 1953, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin died.His political life as a dictator who dominated millions has been minutely dissected over the decades.
But his last days continue to provoke speculation and argument.
Did he die of natural causes following a brain haemorrhage or was Stalin killed because he was about to plunge the Soviet Union into a war its people were in no position to fight? [...]
[Russian historian Edvard] Radzinski...asserts that Stalin was injected with poison by the guard Khrustalev, under the orders of his master, KGB chief Lavrenty Beria. And what was the reason Stalin was killed?
"All the people who surrounded Stalin understood that Stalin wanted war - the future World War III - and he decided to prepare the country for this war," Mr Radzinski says.
"He said: we have the opportunity to create a communist Europe but we have to hurry. But Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov and every normal person understood
it was terrible to begin a war against America because the country [Russia] had no economy."It wasn't a poor but a super-poor country which was destroyed by the German invasion, a country which had no resources but only nuclear weapons."
MORE THAT'S VCR WORTHY:
Building the Great Pyramid (Discovery Channel, Sunday, March 2, 2003, 9pm)
MORE:
Building the Great Pyramid (BBC)
Of all the milestones in the Bush administration's 18-month campaign against terrorism, the apprehension of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, possibly the most fearsome of Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenants, came at a critical juncture.President Bush's critics have been complaining that his focus on President Saddam Hussein had distracted the nation from the war against Al Qaeda. The steady movement toward a war in Iraq had only seemed to escalate the risk of another terrorist attack.
But Mr. Mohammed's arrest was a heavy blow to Al Qaeda and good news for the United States, when that has been a scarce commodity. [...]
"Other than bin Laden, there is practically no one we would have liked better to have in custody," a senior American intelligence official said today. "It's pretty damn significant."
Though Osama bin Laden is still elusive, and his second in command, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, is also a prized target, Mr. Mohammed was viewed both as the "mastermind" of Sept. 11 and as Al Qaeda's most skilled operational planner.
"He holds the ignition keys," said Magnus Ranstorp, deputy director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland. "He could tell what is being planned, on what scale, who is involved and where they are. This is a huge blow to Al Qaeda, because Shaikh Mohammed is the contact man for operatives all around the world." [...]
With Mr. Mohammed transferred to American custody after his capture, in an arrest carried out by Pakistani authorities and guided by C.I.A. officers with the assistance of the F.B.I., intelligence officials expressed hope that Mr. Mohammed's cooperation might yield more valuable insights into Al Qaeda than any other detainee has provided so far.
The officials said he could describe the organization, financing and planning of the Sept. 11 hijackings. Moreover, because he was Al Qaeda's chief operations officer, he could also explain the terror network's current plans for attacks. He could even provide fresh clues about the whereabouts of Mr. bin Laden himself.
In addition, he may be able to provide more details about the operational abilities of Al Qaeda. Intelligence officials have said that the terror network was badly disrupted by the war in Afghanistan, but it has never been clear how much Mr. bin Laden has been able to rebuild his ability to carry out terror operations.
When, in the Fall of 2001, two liberals--Jonathan Alter and Alan Dershowitz--raised the specter of using torture to extract information from captured terrorists, they were attacked from all sides and, because it was still only speculative, defended by few. One aspect of the criticism is actually correct, that confession extracted under torture are worthless as a matter of fact and of law. However, if we are sufficiently honest with ourselves and serious about the war on terror, it seems obvious that the point is not to get Mohammed to confess--he can never be allowed out of custody again, regardless of legal niceties--the point now is to find out what he knows about those who are still planning to kill any Westerners they can get to. And here the problem of false confession is minimal. He might try to misdirect us somewhat, but it will be possible to check the information he gives. On the other hand, the same terror of torture that forces people to confess even to things they have not done may suffice to get him to reveal genuine information that can save lives and destroy al Qaeda. we would, of course, rather not use torture, but the alternative, of allowing him to remain silent even though innocents will die as a result, is just unacceptable.
If this seems extreme to you, ask yourself a simple question: if 9-11 could have been avoided by torturing a captured terrorist, one you know to have blood on his hands, would you still rather not do so? Or, consider this: Would you be able to explain to the victims' families why you did not do so?
MORE:
-U.S. now might have to consider what once was unthinkable, Dershowitz says (Tina Hesman, November 5, 2001, St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
-Time to Think About Torture (Jonathan Alter, 11/05/01, Newsweek)
-Torture Laws (Inigo Thomas, November 28, 2001, Slate)
-In case anyone's forgotten: torture doesn't work (Christopher Hitchens, November 14, 2001, Guardian)
-Tortured Thought: Alan Dershowitz has spoken up vigorously on the subject (William F. Buckley, January 29, 2002, National Review)
-Legal Torture?: Is there a place in the U.S. justice system for torture? (CBS, Sept 20, 2002)
-Why terrorism works: Alan Dershowitz says the world community opened the door to al-Qaida by rewarding Palestinian terrorists--and makes the case for national I.D. cards and torture. (Suzy Hansen, Sept. 12, 2002, Salon)
-Dershowitz advocates making torture an option (Jeremy Reynalds, January 28, 2002, Enter Stage Right)
-The Wide World of Torture (Alexander Cockburn, November 26, 2001, The Nation)
Saudi intellectuals and political commentators contacted by Arab News last night offered a wide array of opinions on the failed Arab League summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, but on one thing they all agreed: The Arabs are hopelessly divided.They were speaking after the extraordinary public showdown between Crown Prince Abdullah and Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, during which the crown prince reacted angrily to accusations that the Kingdom was a US puppet.
Leading businessman Hussein Shobokshi in Jeddah called the meltdown "a dose of reality".
"There are too many lingering issues and priorities," he elaborated.
"The real issue is not the pending war on Iraq, but reform of the Arab condition."
Asked about his thoughts on the future of the Arab League, he said: "I don't see a future for the Arab world, let alone the Arab League."
Watching this Iraq story unfold, all I can say is this: If this were not about my own country, my own kids and my own planet, I'd pop some popcorn, pull up a chair and pay good money just to see how this drama unfolds. Because what you are about to see is the greatest shake of the dice any president has voluntarily engaged in since Harry Truman dropped the bomb on Japan. Vietnam was a huge risk, but it evolved incrementally. And threatening a nuclear war with the Soviets over the Cuban missile crisis was a huge shake of the dice by President John Kennedy, but it was a gamble that was imposed on him, not one he initiated.A U.S. invasion to disarm Iraq, oust Saddam Hussein and rebuild a decent Iraqi state would be the mother of all presidential gambles. Anyone who thinks President Bush is doing this for political reasons is nuts. You could do this only if you really believed in it, because Mr. Bush is betting his whole presidency on this war of choice. [...]
My dilemma is that while I believe in such a bold project, I fear that Mr. Bush has failed to create a context for his boldness to succeed, a context that could maximize support for his vision - support vital to seeing it through. He and his team are the only people who would ever have conceived this project, but they may be the worst people to implement it. The only place they've been bold is in their military preparations (which have at least gotten Saddam to begin disarming). [...]
So here's how I feel: I feel as if the president is presenting us with a beautiful carved mahogany table - a big, bold, gutsy vision. But if you look underneath, you discover that this table has only one leg. His bold vision on Iraq is not supported by boldness in other areas. And so I am terribly worried that Mr. Bush has told us the right thing to do, but won't be able to do it right.
While the American media are having a field day against the "old Europeans" -- France and Germany -- the Iraqi media are building a fantasy world in which a resurgent Europe, inspired by Saddam Hussein's "heroic leadership," will put an end to the U.S. "quest for global hegemony."Despite the protests of French President Jacques Chirac, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and others opposed to war in Iraq that they do not endorse Hussein's brutal regime, the Iraqi press sees it differently. Iraq's media are trying to create the impression that Hussein enjoys worldwide support that cuts across ideological barriers.
"The battle started in Iraq," wrote Hussein's eldest son, Uday, in an editorial in his daily newspaper Babel on Saturday. "But the struggle of mankind against the American-Zionist enemy has now spread to the whole world. The world is waking up and responding to the call of our Heroic Leader." [...]
Iraqi newspapers and radio and television networks, all controlled by Hussein or his family, refer to the German leader as al-munadhil al-bassel (the brave combatant) because of the stance he has taken against the U.S. and in favor of Iraq. This is an important title in the Iraqi Baathist lexicon, just one degree below the title of al-munadhil al-akbar (the great combatant), used to describe Chirac, the only Western head of state to have met Hussein and to have forged a personal relationship with him in the 1970s.
On the side of the "villains" are British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Italian and Spanish counterparts Silvio Berlusconi and Jose Maria Aznar.
Hussein's Iraq is building up other heroes. France's National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, Austria's neofascist leader Joerg Haider, American social critic Noam Chomsky, Russian Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, Columbia professor Edward Said, British Labor Party leftist Tony Benn, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Jesse Jackson are some of the Iraqi "heroes."
Is the postwar world breaking up? The U.S. drive to war in Iraq has divided the U.N. Security Council, caused one of the bitterest transatlantic rows in living memory and even split the European Union into pro- and anti-Bush wings.The hullabaloo has left four people smiling. French President Jacques Chirac is thrilled to see Paris at the center of world power politics; Russian President Vladimir V. Putin is busy calculating his country's gains if the United States and the Franco-Germans get into a bidding war for his support; Saddam Hussein is overjoyed to see the international coalition against him fragmenting; and Osama bin Laden no doubt rejoices to see disarray among a group of countries he wishes to destroy.
But how bad is it, really? Will U.S. defiance damage the Security Council if America goes to war without a second U.N. resolution? And will the transatlantic partnership splinter under the threat?
Last summer, the State Department convened a number of Iraqi exiles to advise the United States government on the problems that Iraq would face after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It was called, rather grandly, the Future of Iraq Project. Among the topics was democracy, and among the Iraqis invited to join was a dissident named Kanan Makiya. He seemed a natural choice. In 1989, under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil, Makiya published a book called ''Republic of Fear,'' which relentlessly dissected the totalitarian nature of Saddam's regime. The pseudonym wasn't a whim; in those years Iraq's overseas dissidents were frequently bumped off. Ignored upon publication, the book became a best seller the next year with the outbreak of the Persian Gulf war, and Makiya, the son of Iraq's most distinguished architect and a trained architect himself, was thrust into the turbulence of Middle Eastern politics. At the end of the war, during a forum at Harvard, the author revealed his identity for the first time and urged President George H.W. Bush to finish the job the war had left undone by getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Makiya's ideas cut deeply against the grain of Arab intellectual life and won him both powerful admirers and powerful enemies.But when the State Department's invitation came last year, Makiya balked. He assumed that the Future of Iraq Project wasn't serious. ''Some people in the government are talking democratic change,'' he told me recently, referring to the civilian hawks in the Pentagon, ''and there are other people who think that's all a pile of garbage. These others are in the State Department and the C.I.A. today. They are very powerful players.''
The history of the Iraqi opposition's relationship with the United States government is a tangled and unhappy one, leaving deep suspicions between and within them. Iraq is one of the most diverse countries in the Arab world, with a majority population of Shiite Arabs, who predominate in the south, as well as large minorities of Sunni Arabs in the center, Kurds in the north and smaller groups of Assyrians, Turkomans, Armenians and a surviving handful of Jews. This ethnic makeup explains some of the Iraqi opposition's notorious divisions, but the political differences are even more rancorous. And nothing Iraqis say about one another quite equals the vitriol of the feuding over Iraq within the American government.
The Iraq question seems to exist on the far side of a looking glass where everyone turns into his opposite. The State Department and the C.I.A., considered the moderate wing of the Bush foreign policy apparatus, favor working through Iraq's traditional politics, which would mean removing Saddam but letting power stay with his ruling Baath Party, mainly minority Sunni Arabs. The State Department wants stability above all. Meanwhile, the hard-line hawks at the Pentagon and in the vice president's office, with their professed devotion to sweeping transformation in Iraq, want the transition to democracry to be led by the Western-oriented exiles grouped since 1992 under the loose umbrella of the Iraqi National Congress, whose chairman, Ahmad Chalabi, is close to Makiya.
The battle is less between left and right than between realists and revolutionaries. It has simmered throughout the buildup to war, and it could haunt and possibly sabotage the postwar reconstruction. It makes an odd kind of sense that Makiya, 53, who was once a Trotskyist and supporter of radical Palestinian politics, has ended up as a liberal in the camp of neoconservative zealots, who see a democratic Iraq as a lever for moving the entire Arab world toward the West.
In the end, Makiya decided to call the State Department's bluff -- to ''hoist them on their own petard.'' He joined the Future of Iraq Project's Democratic Principles Working Group, and along with a few allies from the exile community in Washington and London, he took over the writing of a detailed report on democracy after Saddam. There's something in it to offend everyone. The report proposes, among other radical ideas, a representative ''transitional authority'' chosen by Iraq's opposition exiles and ready to operate inside the country as the regime crumbles; the postwar demilitarization of Iraq; the dismantling of the Baath Party along the lines of German de-Nazification; war crimes trials and a truth commission; thoroughgoing secularism; a constitution in which individual and minority-group rights would be guaranteed in advance of local and then national elections, so that democracy does not lead to tyranny of the majority; a decentralized federal government in which the regions would be drawn along geographic rather than ethnic lines; and an end to ethnic identity as a basis for the state. As long as Iraq is defined as an Arab state, other ethnic groups, like Kurds and Assyrians, will continue to be second-class citizens. In Kanan Makiya's blueprint, Iraq would officially cease to be an Arab country.
Meanwhile, when does Mr. Packer think the US State department has ever supported anything but a Middle East stability maintained by dictatorships?
President Bush has said that if it comes to war in Iraq, America will fight in a "just cause" and by "just means."This is no mere rhetorical flourish. The president's use of the language of justice links the Iraq crisis to a venerable tradition of ethical restraint and justification known as "just war."
Determining what constitutes a just war originated with such great fathers of the Christian church as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, who sought to come to grips with the responsibilities of governments in a fallen world. Stretching the boundary of moral concern beyond family, tribe and territory, they created specific injunctions about the use of force aimed at limiting both the occasions for war and the means by which it was carried out.
Since then, many of these injunctions have been encoded in international agreements and conventions stipulating what is and is not acceptable in fighting between nations.
The just-war tradition insists that a war must be openly and legally fought; it must be a response to a specific instance of unjust aggression or to the certain threat of such aggression; it must be a last resort, meaning that all other avenues have been considered; and there must be a strong probability of success.
MORE:
Ethicist Argues Bush Has Moral Case for Iraq War (Karen R. Long, February 19, 2003,
Religion News Service)
French and German opinion leaders depict George W. Bush as a Texas cowboy running roughshod on the world stage. Nelson Mandela of South Africa mocks the American president's intelligence.But Jean Bethke Elshtain, a leading political ethicist, believes Bush can make a compelling moral case for starting a war against Iraq.
"Not going to war can be a tragedy, just as going to war can be a tragedy," Elshtain said here recently, noting the dithering in Bosnia and the inaction in Rwanda. "I think the president is striking the right tone."
On March 2, 1973, thirty years ago, the US diplomats Cleo Noel and George Curtis Moore were murdered by terrorists in Khartoum, Sudan. Allegedly, Arafat was personally implicated.To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the tragedy, IsraPundit has posted today (28 Feb, 2003) an exclusive interview with James J Welsh, the US National Security Agency (NSA) analyst who covered this case. The question of Arafat's involvement is elucidated in the interview in detail.
MORE:
-America's Unsettled Score With Yasser Arafat (Scott Johnson, June 18, 2002, Real Clear Politics)
-Yasser Arafat - The Forgotten Terrorist (Thomas W. Murphy - USA In Review)
-Backgrounder: REMEMBER KHARTOUM
-Covering for Arafat the Killer (Sidney Zion, January/February 2001, THE ISRAEL REPORT)
-New evidence Arafat killed U.S. diplomats: Nixon historian finds CIA report on Fatah link to 1973 murders (Joseph Farah, March 18, 2002, WorldNetDaily.com)
-Remember Cleo A. Noel, Jr.? (Robb Hensley, 10 April 2002, Netanyahu.org)
-REVIEW: of Assassination in Khartoum by David A. Korn (Daniel Pipes, American Spectator)
It can be startling to realize just how integral the Sabbath once was to American time. When we tell our children stories about the first pilgrims landing on our shores, we talk rather vaguely about their quest for religious freedom. We leave out that this freedom was needed in large part so that the Puritans could obey the Fourth Commandment -- ''Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy'' -- with a zealotry that had deeply alienated their countrymen back home. We all have heard of the Puritan ''blue laws,'' named, supposedly, for the color of paper they were printed on. They required attendance at church but punished anyone who got there with unseemly haste or on too showy a horse. They forbade unnecessary visiting, except in emergencies, and smoking and sports. Unlike Orthodox Jews, who though strict about the Sabbath are nonetheless encouraged to drink and have marital sex on Friday night, the ascetic Puritans frowned on any kind of drinking or sex on Sunday. In at least one documented instance, the ''lewd and unseemly behavior'' of kissing your wife on your doorstep upon returning home from a journey of three years was punished by a spell in the stocks. From sunset Saturday to sunset Sunday, the most pious Sabbatarians (usually clergymen) wouldn't shave, have their rooms swept or beds made or allow food to be prepared or dishes washed. They ate only what had been cooked in advance and devoted all time not spent in church to reading Scripture.Even after Puritanism lost its hold on American culture, the American Sunday was observed with unusual strictness. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville observed with some surprise that few Americans were ''permitted to go on a hunt, to dance or even to play an instrument on Sunday.'' As recently as 125 years ago, you would have been hard pressed to find a museum or library open on Sunday. Eighty years ago, football was considered too vulgar to be played on Sunday. Oldsters remember standing in line at the bank on Fridays to get cash for the weekend; youngsters assume they can withdraw at will. Anyone older than 30 can remember living with the expectation that most stores would be closed on Sunday; the expectation now is that they will be open, and we're miffed when they aren't. [...]
The eclipse of the Sabbath is just one small part of the larger erosion of social time, with its former generally agreed-upon rhythms of labor and repose. ''After hours'' has become a strictly personal concept, since the 24-hour convenience store, gas station, pharmacy, supermarket, movie theater, diner, factory and bar all allow us to work, shop, dine and be entertained at any time of day or night. We greet each shift of an activity from weekday to evening or weekend as proof of American cultural superiority; we knock over the barriers between us and the perpetual motion machine that is the marketplace with the glee you might expect of insomniacs who had been chained for too long to their beds.
The lingering traces of Sabbatarianism seem comically vestigial, like the fetal tail: the New York blue law that won't let you buy beer till after noon on Sunday; Broadway stages that go dark on Sunday nights; work rules requiring us to show up at our offices Monday through Friday, even though many of us do our best work at night or on weekends (and, as you know if you've seen the movie ''Office Space,'' putting in face time at the office is often a cover for doing less).
Customs exist because they answer a need; when they disappear, that need must be met in some other way. There is ample evidence that our relationship to work is out of whack. Economists, psychologists and sociologists have charted our ballooning work hours; the increase in time devoted to competitive shopping; the commercialization of leisure that turns fun into work and requires military-scale budgeting and logistics and emotionally draining interactions with service personnel. Personally, I think the alarm about these matters is often overblown. Most people, with the possible exception of parents of 13-year-olds, have the wherewithal to avoid the mall if they want to, and anyone who seeks to relax in a theme park or on a packaged tour deserves what he gets. So I won't weary you with cautionary tales about what our work-addicted culture can do to you, psychologically and physiologically, because, for one thing, it's completely within your power to hold it at bay, and for another, you don't want to anyway. Ours is a society that pegs status to overachievement; we can't help admiring workaholics. Let me argue, instead, on behalf of an institution that has kept workaholism in reasonable check for thousands of years.
Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work. The inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking. You cannot downshift casually and easily, the way you might slip into bed at the end of a long day. As the Cat in the Hat says, ''It is fun to have fun but you have to know how.'' This is why the Puritan and Jewish Sabbaths were so exactingly intentional, requiring extensive advance preparation -- at the very least a scrubbed house, a full larder and a bath. The rules did not exist to torture the faithful. They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit as well as by social sanction.
When we were growing up in NJ there were blue laws, but then the malls came and you couldn't deprive them of a day of shopping. And our father's father was a sabbatarian, though there's an unconfirmed rumor that he attended a Brooklyn Dodger/ New York Yankee World Series game on a Sunday...once. And on the weekend before he died he had took the Other Brother on board the USS Forrestal for Operation Sail on Sunday--so he (a Baptist) went to Catholic Mass on Saturday night, the only Sunday I ever recall him missing church. But those were the extraordinarily rare exceptions. The rule was that he would be available to us all day--after church, of course--to play games or go to the park or whatever and dinner would be a reasonably elaborate affair. This made Sundays very much different and very much better than the rest of the week. Because he kept his time for worship and family inviolable, it somehow made the enormous amount of time he devoted to his court and to faith-based organizations (though we didn't call them that then) easier to accept. Thus did a seemingly antiquated custom serve important, indeed timeless, purposes.
Folks are fond of pooh-poohing the longing for such earlier eras and claim that we can never go back. But when we realize how much we've lost and how little gained through such forms of "progress", why not turn back the clock? Why not, at a minimum, ban liquor sales on Sunday, or maybe bring back blue laws altogether? I know, I know, there'd be all kinds of lost economic activity...blah, blah, blah. Isn't that a loss we can more easily afford as a society?
This is the kind of dilemma that true conservatism eventually finds itself faced with:
In any era the problem of conservatism is to find the way to restore the tradition of the civilization and apply it in a new situation. But this means that conservatism is by its nature two-sided. It must at one and the same time be reactionary and presentist. It cannot content itself with appealing to the past. The very circumstances that call conscious conservatism into being create an irrevocable break with the past. The many complex aspects of the past had been held together in tension by the unity of the civilization, but that particular tension, that particular suspension in unity, can never be recreated after a revolutionary break. To attempt to recreate it would be pure unthinking reaction (what Toynbee calls "archaism") and would be bound to fail; nor could any reaction truly restore the civilizational tradition to the recovery of which it was putatively directed. But while conservatism is not and cannot be naked reaction, neither can its concern with contemporary circumstances lead it, if it is to be true to itself, to be content with the status quo, with serving as the "moderating wing" within the existing situation. For that situation is the result of a revolutionary break with the tradition of the civilization, and to "conserve" it is to accept the radical break with tradition that conservatism exists to overcome.
-Frank S. Meyer, Recrudescent American Conservatism
George W. Bush has often talked wickedly about his days as the black sheep of a blue-blooded, mahogany-paneled family. But the younger rebellion pales before the adult revolt, now sparking epochal changes.The president is about to upend the internationalist order nurtured by his father and grandfather, replacing the Bush code of noblesse oblige with one of force majeure.
Bush 41, a doting dad, would never disagree with his son in public, but in a speech at Tufts last week, he defended his decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power after Desert Storm.
"If we had tried to go in there and created more instability in Iraq, I think it would have been very bad for the neighborhood," he told the crowd of 4,800. (Was he referring to Baghdad or Kennebunkport?)
He conceded that getting a coalition together is harder now, because the evidence about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction is "a little fuzzier" than was his evident invasion of Kuwait. But 41 still thinks coalitions work: "The more pressure there is, the more chance this matter will be resolved in a peaceful manner." (Maybe he should enter the Democratic primary.)
At the very same moment the father was pushing peace, the son was treating the war as a fait accompli. At the American Enterprise Institute, he finally coughed up the real reason for war: trickle-down democracy.
Aaron McGruder, the radical cartoonist, insists that the Rev. Al Sharpton’s “perm” prevents him from being taken seriously as a presidential candidate. But the Democratic National Committee (DNC) seems worried enough that they drafted a black woman, former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, to dilute Sharpton’s potential electoral power.Or at least that’s the reigning theory among many political observers. Sharpton, 48, a controversial New York-based activist, makes many mainstream Democrats uncomfortable. His advocacy for victims of police abuse or racial violence is his primary claim to fame, or, as with his involvement in the bogus Tawana Brawley rape case, infamy.
Sharpton has made occasional but serious forays into electoral politics. He ran twice for the Senate (1992 and 1994) and once for mayor of New York City (1997), polling respectable but racially polarized numbers each time. He has become a formidable political figure in New York, and his blessing is sought by nearly every Democratic candidate running for a city or statewide seat. Presidential candidates also have been known to show up at Sharpton’s Harlem headquarters.
Still, many New York Democrats blame Sharpton’s “divisive” tactics for the 2001 election of Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a city with five times as many registered Democrats as Republicans. “His strength comes mainly not in guaranteeing that people can win, but in guaranteeing they won’t win if he doesn’t support them,” Fred Siegel, a fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council’s Public Policy Institute, recently told The American Prospect.
The centrist DLC is one of Sharpton’s major targets. He blames the group for pulling the Democratic Party to the right and sees his campaign as part of an effort to halt that rightward drift. But Sharpton has received little support from any party officials. In a November poll, two-thirds of DNC members said they had a negative view of Sharpton.
Enter Moseley-Braun. “Party insiders see Moseley-Braun as their Great Black Hope to stop the rise of the Rev. Al Sharpton as a major player in the Democratic presidential sweepstakes,” wrote Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page.
An unnamed Democratic strategist told the Washington Post that “the DNC made a concerted effort to get Sharpton out, and he wouldn’t play along. This is how they do it.”
Tony Blair has told critics that his Christian conscience is clear about the terrible death toll which could follow a military strike against Iraq.In a unique dialogue with Independent on Sunday readers, the Prime Minister declared: "I would never go into war if I thought it was morally wrong." Mr Blair has responded in detail to the many concerns raised by our readers over the past weeks.
His answers were composed at 30,000 feet as he flew back from talks with the Spanish Prime Minister, José Maria Aznar [...]We might not like Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq but we have been neither threatened nor attacked by it. We have no treaty obligations with any of Iraq's neighbours (none of whom have been attacked either), nor any legal obligations to the people of Iraq. No link between Iraq and al-Qa'ida has been discovered. So why are you intent on forcing the UK to take part in and pay for an act of aggression against Iraq that has no legality, and that the majority of your fellow citizens do not want?
Ann Keith, 62, Grantchester, Cambridgeshire
The simple answer is because we are a member of the UN Security Council which voted in November by 15-0 to warn Saddam that he had a final opportunity to comply fully with his disarmament obligations or face serious consequences. If the UN is to have any authority – and I believe this is vital in the modern world – then we must act if necessary.
But I also don't think in the modern world it is any longer realistic to think you can just pretend things are happening elsewhere and it is not going to affect you. Surely this was the lesson we all learnt from 11 September. The international community, for good reasons as well as bad, turned a blind eye to Afghanistan and the links between al-Qa'ida and the Taliban. I can imagine what the reaction would have been if I had said before 11 September that the international community must act militarily against al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan. But with hindsight, we know that would have been the right thing to do.
Ann Keith is the assistant librarian at Christ's College in Cambridge. She lives with her two cats in nearby Grantchester, and has one daughter and two grandchildren.
"When I was considering my question, I thought back to my youth. If we'd launched attacks like this in those days, we'd have gone to war with Stalin. We knew he was imprisoning and torturing hundreds of thousands of people, but we didn't behave like this. For whatever reason, George Bush is trying to finish what his father started, and Tony Blair has been caught up in his coat tails. At base, there is no legality for their actions, either morally or diplomatically."
Western intelligence agencies are investigating claims that Saddam Hussein ordered the murder of a senior Iraqi missile engineer to prevent him passing vital information to United Nations weapons inspectors.Gen Muhammad Sa'id al-Darraj, who was in charge of Iraq's mobile Scud missiles until three months ago, died 24 hours after talks with Saddam's officials, according to Arab newspaper reports. The officials wanted to discuss how the general would conceal his knowledge if he were called for interview by the UN.
The London-based Al-Zaman newspaper said that Gen al-Darraj told "indignant" relatives shortly before he died that he had been slipped a poisoned drink during the meeting at one of Saddam's presidential palaces.
Iraqi opposition groups suspect that the general's loyalty to Saddam was in doubt after he was removed from his post at the end of last year.
British Government officials said yesterday that they were still trying to corroborate the report.
It was supposed to be just a routine meeting. But the Oval Office tete-a-tete with the president of Latvia on February 17 had an enduring impact on George W. Bush. "Let me talk to you about the issue of Iraq," the president told Vaira Vike-Freiberga as he began his pitch for disarming or removing Saddam Hussein. But the Latvian leader interrupted him. "There's no need for that," Vike-Freiberga said; Latvia supports the need for regime change in Baghdad. "For 50 years, the democracies slept while we lived under repression and tyranny," she explained, referring to Soviet domination of the Baltics and Eastern Europe after World War II. The same fate, she added, should never befall another country.As his policy comes under increasing attack, President Bush takes comfort in such moments. In private, he has told of his meeting with the Latvian president, contrasting it with the views of those who don't believe that ousting Saddam would also help the Iraqi people. Bush finally made that case forcefully in public last week and pressed two larger points. "Success in Iraq could also begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace and set in motion progress towards a truly democratic Palestinian state," Bush said. "The passing of Saddam Hussein's regime will deprive terrorist networks of a wealthy patron that pays for terrorist training and offers rewards to families of suicide bombers."
Bush is as committed to removing the Iraqi despot as he is to any goal of his presidency. "He is in a zone," White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer told U.S. News. "He is comfortable. He is resolute. He knows what he wants to do. It's a question of whether Iraq will completely disarm and whether or not the U.N. will act."
"Take 'em out." This kind of certainty worries some of Bush's critics. "In many ways, he's an evangelist," historian Robert Dallek says. "He is not prone to deep thinking. He thinks he has all the right answers, that the Lord is on his side, and that he's doing God's work."
All this contrasts with the way Bush's father handled the run-up to the Persian Gulf War more than a decade ago. George H. W. Bush worked tirelessly to build and maintain an international coalition and was careful to use secular language in arguing his case. The elder Bush also did his share of soul-searching about the moral issues involved. At one point, after his Episcopal bishop opposed war with Iraq, the elder Bush ordered his staff to research various theories of "just war," going back to theologians like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. In the end, he concluded his course was correct.
For George W. Bush, things seem a lot simpler. A family friend and former adviser to his father says Bush the candidate was largely ignorant about the Mideast but eager to find quick, easy answers. When he was asked in a Republican presidential debate Dec. 3, 1999, in New Hampshire what he would do if Saddam Hussein were found to be building weapons of mass destruction, he had a blunt reply: "I'll take 'em out." That's pretty much his policy today.
Building on Bush's instinct for action, the initial road map in the Mideast was provided by hawks like Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and, more recently, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. "What they believe," says the former White House adviser, "is, `We know best.' "
This culture of certitude fits perfectly with Bush's born-again Christian belief that there is good and evil in the world and that everyone must take sides. Saddam, in Bush's mind, is evil personified--made all the worse because the dictator once tried to assassinate Bush's father.
The German phenomenon of Ostalgie - nostalgia for the former East Germany - has sparked plans for a theme park celebrating all aspects of life in the communist state.With surly border guards, bland regulation restaurant food and typical East German Trabant cars trundling the streets, the 10,000 square-metre (107,000 sq ft) park promises to provide its punters with an authentic eastern experience.
"We don't want to poke fun at what it used to be like - we want to provide a truly historical experience," Susanne Reich, spokeswoman for the project, told BBC News Online.
Although the plan is just at the idea stage, the company, Massine Productions, is confident that interest is sufficient to see it realised - possibly in the east Berlin suburb of Koepenick.
Patrick Ruffini has a firsthand account of President Bush's speech at AEI the other night.
[I]t is time to proclaim loudly and without apology that there is such a thing as "patriotic liberalism." [...]It would include a strong emphasis on service to the country. Congress should pass the bill proposed by Sens. John McCain and Evan Bayh to expand service opportunities for young Americans so that 250,000 slots would be available for those who want to give a year to their country. Short-term enlistments in the military should be encouraged.
Patriotic liberals would support the call of a commission convened by CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civil Learning and Engagement, and the Carnegie Corp. to have our schools place a new emphasis on civic education. This would include a genuine rigor in the teaching of government and history and a new emphasis on extracurricular activities now endangered by budget cuts.
A patriotic liberalism would contrast itself to a radical individualism that rejects any idea of a "common good." It would emphasize both rights and responsibilities. It would tell corporations moving offshore to escape taxes that they have obligations to their country at a time of war and domestic threats. It would urge that we spend what's needed to defend ourselves at home against terrorism.
It would argue that the preservation of freedom is a common project requiring a commitment of citizens to one another across the lines of class, race and gender. It would insist that a free republic will not prosper if too many of its citizens feel deprived of opportunities.
Patriotic liberalism would declare that we are all in this together. That's old-fashioned. At the moment, it would also be a radical challenge to the status quo.
(1) a new government program
(2) more money for "extracurricular activities".
(3) higher taxes
(4) more spending
(5) Feelings....whoa...whoa...feeeeeeelingsssssssss...
And they wonder why no one takes them seriously when it comes to defending the country.
The Turkish Parliament today dealt a major setback to the Bush administration's plans for a northern front against Iraq, narrowly rejecting a measure that would have allowed thousands of American combat troops to use the country as a base for an attack.More Turkish lawmakers supported the measure than opposed it, but the resolution failed because the total number of no votes and abstentions exceeded the numbers of favorable votes. Under the Turkish Constitution, a resolution can become law only if it is supported by a majority of the lawmakers present.
The final tally was 264 to 251, with 19 abstentions.
The defeat stunned American officials, who were confident that Turkey's leaders would be able to persuade the members of their party to support the measure. American ships had already begun unloading heavy equipment at Turkish ports in anticipation of a favorable vote, and more than a dozen vessels were idling off the coast.
In the turmoil after the parliamentary session, American diplomats said they were requesting a "clarification" of the vote.
The capture of suspected Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is "extraordinarily significant" because he is critical to planning future assaults on the United States, a senior U.S. official said on Saturday."He's the senior-most al Qaeda guy to be captured yet," the official told Reuters.
"He was critical to not only the planning for the September 11, 2001, attacks but also is central to the planning for future attacks, so his capture is extraordinarily significant," he said.
Pakistan said it had arrested Mohammed on Saturday in a major breakthrough in the international crackdown against Osama bin Laden's network.
Sachin Tendulkar battled through pain to propel India into the Super Six stage of the World Cup.Tendulkar passed 12,000 runs in one dayers with a majestic 98 off only 75 balls, despite straining a thigh.
A superior knock even by his glorious standards, Tendulkar gave India's run-chase the ideal springboard after Saeed Anwar's 101 saw Pakistan set a challenging target.
Tendulkar's dismissal in the 28th over gave Pakistan hope, but Yuvraj Singh (50) and Rahul Dravid (44) expertly guided India home with 26 balls to spare.
Pakistan, who are yet to beat India in four World Cup matches, must now beat Zimbabwe convincingly and hope Australia beat England to keep their hopes of progressing alive.
Not only has ISI brought Russell Kirk's fine primer, The American Cause, back into print, but if you follow the link at the top of the review you can buy it and his masterwork, The Conservative Mind, together for under $24.
N.B.--A disclaimer: if you do buy books through Brothers Judd we get a small percentage--we make just about enough each year to pay for our host site--so if you don't care to support right-wing lunacy, but do have an interest in books that are mentioned, be sure to access Amazon directly.
Belyaev began his experiment in 1959, a time when Soviet genetics was starting to recover from the anti-Darwinian ideology of Trofim Lysenko. Belyaev's own career had suffered. In 1948, his commitment to orthodox genetics had cost him his job as head of the Department of Fur Animal Breeding at the Central Research Laboratory of Fur Breeding in Moscow. During the 1950s he continued to conduct genetic research under the guise of studying animal physiology. He moved to Novosibirsk, where he helped found the Siberian Department of the Soviet (now Russian) Academy of Sciences and became the director of the Department's Institute of Cytology and Genetics, a post he held from 1959 until his death in 1985. Under his leadership the institute became a center of basic and applied research in both classical genetics and modern molecular genetics. His own work included ground-breaking investigations of evolutionary change in animals under extreme conditions (including domestication) and of the evolutionary roles of factors such as stress, selection for behavioral traits and the environmental photoperiod, or duration of natural daylight. Animal domestication was his lifelong project, and fur bearers were his favorite subjects.Early in the process of domestication, Belyaev noted, most domestic animals had undergone the same basic morphological and physiological changes. Their bodies changed in size and proportions, leading to the appearance of dwarf and giant breeds. The normal pattern of coat color that had evolved as camouflage in the wild altered as well. Many domesticated animals are piebald, completely lacking pigmentation in specific body areas. Hair turned wavy or curly, as it has done in Astrakhan sheep, poodles, domestic donkeys, horses, pigs, goats and even laboratory mice and guinea pigs. Some animals' hair also became longer (Angora type) or shorter (rex type).
Tails changed, too. Many breeds of dogs and pigs carry their tails curled up in a circle or semicircle. Some dogs, cats and sheep have short tails resulting from a decrease in the number of tail vertebrae. Ears became floppy. As Darwin noted in chapter 1 of On the Origin of Species, "not a single domestic animal can be named which has not in some country drooping ears" - a feature not found in any wild animal except the elephant.
Another major evolutionary consequence of domestication is loss of the seasonal rhythm of reproduction. Most wild animals in middle latitudes are genetically programmed to mate once a year, during mating seasons cued by changes in daylight. Domestic animals at the same latitudes, however, now can mate and bear young more than once a year and in any season.
Belyaev believed that similarity in the patterns of these traits was the result of selection for amenability to domestication. Behavioral responses, he reasoned, are regulated by a fine balance between neurotransmitters and hormones at the level of the whole organism. The genes that control that balance occupy a high level in the hierarchical system of the genome. Even slight alterations in those regulatory genes can give rise to a wide network of changes in the developmental processes they govern. Thus, selecting animals for behavior may lead to other, far-reaching changes in the animals' development. Because mammals from widely different taxonomic groups share similar regulatory mechanisms for hormones and neurochemistry, it is reasonable to believe that selecting them for similar behavior - tameness - should alter those mechanisms, and the developmental pathways they govern, in similar ways.
For Belyaev's hypothesis to make evolutionary sense, two more things must be true. Variations in tamability must be determined at least partly by an animal's genes, and domestication must place that animal under strong selective pressure. We have looked into both questions. In the early 1960s our team studied the patterns and nature of tamability in populations of farm foxes. We cross-bred foxes of different behavior, cross-fostered newborns and even transplanted embryos between donor and host mothers known to react differently to human beings. Our studies showed that about 35 percent of the variations in the foxes' defense response to the experimenter are genetically determined. To get some idea of how powerful the selective pressures on those genes might have been, our group has domesticated other animals, including river otters (Lutra lutra) and gray rats (Rattus norvegicus) caught in the wild. Out of 50 otters caught during recent years, only eight of them (16 percent) showing weak defensive behavior made a genetic contribution to the next generation. Among the gray rats, only 14 percent of the wild-caught yielded offspring living to adulthood. If our numbers are typical, it is clear that domestication must place wild animals under extreme stress and severe selective pressure.
MORE:
Building the Great Pyramid (BBC)
With an attendant lack of publicity that borders on criminal, Cartoon Network has debuted what could be the most ambitious animated series ever put on television. "Reign: The Conqueror" is a very bizarre, highly imaginative sci-fi/fantasy retelling of the story of Alexander the Great, ruler of Macedonia and conqueror of the known world (circa 330 B.C. anyway). Mixing ancient Greek legend, Japanese anime-style art and full-blown Shakespearean tragedy, "Reign" is a complex and maddeningly original bit of postmodern mythmaking."Reign" starts with an impressive behind-the-scenes line-up. Character and concept designs come courtesy of Peter Chung (the mysterious creator behind MTV's cult hit "Aeon Flux"). The show is produced by anime master Rintaro (director of Astro Boy, Captain Harlock and Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis) and is brought to life courtesy of Madhouse Studios (the animators behind such classics as Trigun and Vampire Hunter D).
The show follows Prince Alexander's rise to the throne of Macedonia, amid the turmoil and backstabbing of a royal court filled with magic, treachery and much bloodshed. The show plays something like "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" crossed with "The Sopranos." (No, really!) Chung's distinctive designs leap immediately off of the screen. His elongated, El Greco-style figures and impossibly detailed backgrounds make for a unique world that is neither here nor there, neither then nor now. Magic exists alongside science, mechanical warriors stand side by side with porcupine-quilled assassins. As a bonus, everybody is very androgynous and wears lots of makeup. (Think Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie and you've got another element in this odd mix.) [...]
Those who become hooked are advised to keep glued to the TV sets or program their VCRs. There are only 13 episodes in the "Reign: The Conqueror" series. With Cartoon Network airing the show four nights a week during the Adult Swim block, the show will come to an end quickly...."Reign: The Conqueror" runs Monday-Thursday on Cartoon Network at 12 a.m. Eastern
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Ancient history? Not on your life: Michael Wood follows Alexander to the Hindu Kush, Penguin Classic in hand (Michael Wood, February 26, 2003, The Times of London)
THIS weekend the Vatican opens its archives on its relations with Germany from 1922 to 1939, which will perhaps help to explain the enigma of Pope Pius XII, hailed a saint by some and condemned as "Hitler's pope" by others.Pius XII was the Catholic Church's representative in Bavaria from 1917 to 1929. He then became Vatican secretary of state until his election as pope in March 1939, six months before the outbreak of World War II.
Hero to his supporters, silent compromiser to his detractors, it's estimated he helped 860,000 Jews escape Nazi liquidation. The chief rabbi of Rome became a Catholic at the end of the war as a tribute to the Pope's interventions and Israel awarded him its highest honours. But after the 1963 staging of a controversial play, Rolf Hochuth's The Representative, Pius XII's failure to protest publicly against Nazi persecution of Jews became a recurring criticism, particularly among Jewish and anti-Catholic apparatchiks. [...]
Jewish historian Jeno Levai records that the future Pius XII, while still Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, sent 60 notes to Hitler, up to the outbreak of war, to protest against the persecution of the Jews.
Speaking to 250,000 pilgrims at Loreto, Italy, in 1935, he said: "The Nazis are really only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors in new tinsel. It does not make any difference if they flock to the banners of the social revolution, whether they are guided by a false conception of the world and of life, or
whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult."The Nazis had no illusions about the pope's attitudes. Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's deputy, said of Pius in 1943: "We should not forget that in the long run the pope in Rome is a greater enemy of national socialism than Churchill or Roosevelt."
What is at stake, however, is not the question of the pope's attitude but whether his fairly consistent silence was tolerable from a leader of a worldwide institution with adherents in countries of varying political ideology.
Was his silence a result of cowardice or wisdom? Was it simply a desire to keep the church inviolate from attack, or an opportunistic delay to see which of the belligerents won in the end?
MORE:
-ESSAY: Pius XII as Scapegoat (Michael Novak, August/September 2000, First Things)
-REVIEW ESSAY: Goldhagen v. Pius XII (Ronald J. Rychlak, June/July 2002, First Things)
Fred McFeely Rogers, who created and hosted Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, America's longest-running and one of its most widely respected children's television programs, died of stomach cancer early yesterday morning at his home in Pittsburgh. He was 74.Rogers, once a student at Dartmouth College and who studied piano in Norwich, was fondly remembered by children and parents who watched his programs, and by child development specialists who thought of him as a pioneer in their field. [...]
In September 1946, he enrolled at Dartmouth, and moved into 106 Massachusetts Hall with two roommates. With dreams of becoming a globe-trotting diplomat, Rogers majored in romance languages and planned on going to Georgetown University's foreign service school. But his interest soon changed to music, and on March 14, 1948, he withdrew from Dartmouth and moved to Norwich where he studied music full time with a concert pianist.
He spent about a year in Norwich before enrolling in Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., finishing there in 1951.
Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat recently asked Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to increase his support for the Palestinians in their fight against Israel.The message was sent in a telegram offering holiday greetings for the Muslim holiday Id Al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice) earlier this month.The message was published in an Iraqi newspaper on Saturday. A translation of the article was provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute on Wednesday. Arafat and the Palestinians rallied in support of Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. Many Palestinians then, as now, saw Saddam as a hero and champion of their cause.
In January, the PA sponsored an event called Iraq Solidarity Week. Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip marched in rallies in support of Iraq and opposing any U.S. action there. Saddam has openly supported the Palestinian intifadah, paying sums of up to $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
That very large majorities of the American public, and almost all (but not all) Christians believe in God, the survival of the soul after death, miracles, heaven, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the Virgin birth will come as no great surprise. What may be more surprising is that half of all adults believe in ghosts, almost a third believe in astrology, and more than a quarter believe in reincarnation -- that they were themselves reincarnated from other people. Majorities of about two- thirds of all adults believe in hell and the devil, but hardly anybody expects that they will go to hell themselves.These are some of the findings of a Harris Poll of 2,201 U.S. adults surveyed online between January 21 and 27, 2003, using the same methods used by Harris Interactive to forecast the 2000 elections with great accuracy.
The Czech governing coalition suffered a serious setback on Friday when Vaclav Klaus, a rightwing Eurosceptic, was elected president.Mr Klaus, 61, who served as prime minister until he was ousted under a cloud in 1997 after a financial scandal, won 142 votes out of 280 in the upper and lower chambers.
A staunch nationalist and populist, Mr Klaus will prove a prickly customer for the European Union as he seeks to defend national interests ahead of entry to the 15-nation club next year.
Jiri Pehe, a political analyst and adviser to former President Vaclav Havel, said: "Mr Klaus has no friends in Brussels and no friends in Washington. He has been very sceptical about supporting the United States on Iraq. The Americans also remember his statements about bombing Yugoslavia in 1999, when he openly supported Mr Milosevic."
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-ESSAY: Society and the Crisis of Liberalism: The liberal world order has been recetnly put under a new, strong and dangerous attack-by communitarianism (Vaclav Klaus, Summer 1998, Policy)
