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."
