As Iranians expresses more and more their wishes to see the Americans take action against the present regime, the Revolutionary Guards issued warnings against those who call for normalising relations with the United States.
"The Revolutionary Guards would issues warnings and cautions for the society whenever it feel it is needed. This is one of its duties to enter the arena when it considers it as a necessity", said Mr. Ali Sa'idi, the acting Representative of the leader at the Army of the Guards of the Islamic Revolution, better known as Pasdaran, or Revolutionary Guards.
This was the Pasdaran's second stern warnings in as many days, coming after foreign media reported of wide spread and generalised deception of the Iranians with the present rule of hard line clerics.
In an article carried on its 25 April issue, the influential French daily "Le Monde" said the Iranian rulers are worried by a "fierce pro-Americanism" expressed by the Iranian population. "They are especially worried of the vox populi, that asks for a change of the regime with the help of the American marines", the daily wrote in an article dated from Tehran.
"If one admits that the Iraqis are delighted with Saddam Hoseyn's end, one must also think about the possibility that maybe, the Iranians would celebrate at the end of the Islamic Republic as well", the paper quoted Mr. Behzad Nabavi, an influential member of the reformist camp and a Majles Deputy-speaker. [...]
According to "Le Monde", most Iranians are openly calling for American intervention in Iran.
"We don't want the Islamic Republic anymore", an architect told the paper on condition of anonymity. "It took us a quarter of century to realise that the revolution is a failure", he added, calling like many other Iranians, for the American help for change the regime".
"The Afghans and the Iraqis have been freed from dictatorships, why not us?" a filmmaker said.
This probably wasn't what the doctors had in mind. Lurking in the shadows stage left, clutching her handbag close to her as ever, Lady Thatcher prepared to make her entrance.
The former prime minister is, of course, under orders from her physicians never to speak in public again.
Perhaps they forgot to add: "Oh yes, and no appearances before capacity crowds at one of London's most prestigious venues."
We were at the Royal Albert Hall to see the living legend in the flesh, to hear words of wisdom, to be awed by astonishing commitment and remarkable achievements.
And after Sir Steve Redgrave had finished, we were to be granted a few moments of Lady Thatcher's time. [...]
The interview was, we were told, her first for two years. And, said proud interviewer Andrew Main Wilson, the institute's chief operating officer, it might even be the last she ever grants. [...]
In essence, Lady Thatcher's message was that she'd duffed up the unions big style, saved Britain from the socialist plague, won a war and transformed the economy.
There was classic Thatcher too. The miners' strike - that "last gasp of militancy" - had been a victory, she said. Mr Blair and the Labour Party sound too much like us
And then she lowered her voice in the way she does when she really wants to stress her point: "You could say that by the end of it the extremists had lost. But I prefer to say that ... Britain ... had ...won."
As for Tony Blair, he won brickbats and bouquets. His handling of the war, for instance, was top notch.
He understands business too, she suggested.
But his wider philosophy took a drubbing. You can't have a "middle way" - Tony prefers to call it the third way, but we all knew what she was talking about - between capitalism and socialism, she said.
And as for those people who flounder around scratching their heads wondering "what works", well really....
"I have always known what works - free enterprise works, limited government works, encouraging initiative and responsibility works," she said.
It's all OK, though, because Tony Blair is pretty much following her creed.
Indeed, the transformation of the economy by her government had also transformed Labour, she said. On that, many Labour supporters will agree and you don't come across that sort of alliance very often.
"Indeed, that has been a bit of a problem for the Conservatives - Mr Blair and the Labour Party sound too much like us," she said.
But the danger within is still lurking, Lady Thatcher warned, citing "irresponsible" policies of tax and spend as showing Labour's true colours.
Public spending is growing too fast, taxes are being raised, Gordon Brown's forecasts are dubious.
Trade unions are finding their feet again, Europe is imposing red tape. As for the euro, joining would only make matters worse.
"This does not signal a wholesale return to the 1970s, but it does mean that Britain is now moving in the wrong direction towards the failed European model and high spending, high taxing and high regulation," she told Mr Main Wilson.
"So I am very concerned for the country's future if those trends continue."
That said, she didn't think the government would take the plunge and recommend euro membership.
Everybody wants to know where all the men have gone. The Washington Post calls their disappearance the "question that has grown too conspicuous to ignore," and USA Today notes "universities fret about how to attract males as women increasingly dominate campuses."
Females now outnumber males by a four to three ratio in American colleges, a difference of almost two million students. Men earn only 43% of all college degrees. Among blacks, two women earn bachelor's degrees for every man. Among Hispanics, only 40 percent of college graduates are male. Female high school graduates are 16% more likely to go to college than their male counterparts.
"This is new. We have thrown the gender switch," says Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men. "What does it mean in the long run that we have females who are significantly more literate, significantly more educated than their male counterparts? It is likely to create a lot of social problems. This does not bode well for anyone."
"As a nation, we simply can't afford to have half of our population not developing the skill sets that we are going to need to go into the future," says Susan L. Traiman, director of the Business Roundtable's education initiative.
Researchers from Harvard University, the University of Michigan and the United Negro College Fund have now agreed to study the issue.
"This is a powerful issue we need to stop talking about in generalities and really dig into," says Michael L. Lomax, president of Dillard University in New Orleans. "We just can't figure out how to get more male applicants, and we're not going to turn students down on the basis on gender," Lomax says. "I don't understand what is happening in the male community that is making education seem less attractive and less compelling."
The trend is unmistakable and some fear it is irreversible. Men made up the majority of college graduates when the first national survey was conducted in 1870. Except during World War II, when slightly more females enrolled than men, males were in the majority until men?s graduation rate began to decline in the late 1970s. By the early 1980s women began to represent the majority of graduates.
In total, the U.S. Department of Education estimates that 698,000 women received bachelor's degrees in 2002, compared to 529,000 men.
The term "brainstorming" has become the latest target of political correctness, according to a charity.
Trainee teachers are being told to avoid the word for fear of offending pupils with epilepsy. Instead they are being advised to use "word storm" or "thought shower".
As the 2004 presidential campaign heats up, Democratic hopefuls are competing in ... what some political operatives are calling the “McCain primary.”
While Democratic operatives cautioned that it may be too early to declare a winner in this category, they say former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean is emerging as the frontrunner to become the Democratic avatar of Sen. John McCain....
“To be frank, almost any Democrat would like to have the ex-McCain [mantle]. There’s a tremendous benefit there,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster....
Other pollsters and operatives agree that there’s a race among Democrats to be anointed as this year’s straight-talking candidate as they attempt to re-create McCain’s success in appealing to independents and swing voters....
“Dean is the most McCain-like character because he doesn’t waver in his opinions,” said Lake....
Veteran Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said: “There’s no doubt that Howard Dean has the buzz around him like McCain did”...
But this McCain-philia gives me a thought. It's possible that Dean will win the nomination: Democratic senators are largely discredited, and primary voters know that the last two Dem winners were governors. But Dean would be vulnerable in the general election because of his hard-left stands, and will need a running mate who balances the ticket. What better balance could there be than John McCain as VP on the first bipartisan ticket?
We are playing a game of expectations--some reasonable, some not. Like a New Hampshire primary in which a winner is treated as a loser because he did not win by as wide a margin as pundits expected, the war's domestic opponents keep raising the bar for success.
Predictions of enormous coalition and Iraqi civilian losses, a bloody battle for Baghdad and the ultimate quagmire melted into the Iraqi countryside along with scores of thousands of Republican Guard. With the war being easier than nearly everyone expected two weeks ago, people now are worrying about a humanitarian crisis.
A few days ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld referred to the continuing confusion and death in Iraq as "untidiness"--a euphemism for something far more serious. Yet community upheavals can be deadly--even in the absence of war, cruise missiles, and attack helicopters.
Just last year, more than 200 people died in riots in Nigeria over newspaper comments about the Miss World contest. In the three days of burning and looting in the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, 52 people died and 1,200 businesses were destroyed. Looting was also a big part of the 1990 Detroit Pistons riots, which killed 7 people. In the 1993 Chicago Bulls riots, our fellow Chicagoans killed 3, shot 20 more people, looted 197 businesses, and damaged more police cars than the chase scenes in "The Blues Brothers" movie--139 cruisers in all.
These numbers, of course, are mere shadows of what can happen when a people are freed from colonial rule and millions are forced to relocate, as happened in 1947 with the partition of India and Pakistan. In a recent issue of the scholarly journal Asian Ethnicity, professor Ishtiag Ahmed offers estimates that 2 million people were killed and 750,000 women raped in the violence accompanying the partition. [...]
The French were so angry after only four brutal years of Nazi occupation that more than 9,000 collaborators were summarily killed at the end of the war, according to standard academic accounts. And these vigilantes were the oh-so-civilized French.
May you live, as the Chinese curse has it, in interesting times. For the last 18 months, we've all been living in "interesting times"--often frightfully so. Yet for intellectuals there is always a craving that times would be ... well, just a little more interesting.
That's been especially true for the last half century because a shadow has hung over political intellectuals in the English-speaking world, and in some respects throughout the West. It is the shadow of the ideological wars (and the blood-and-iron wars) that grew out of World War I--from communism, to fascism, appeasement, vital-center liberalism, and the rest of it. Even as these struggles congeal into history, their magnitude and seriousness hardly diminish. Understanding fascism, understanding that it could be neither accommodated nor appeased, understanding that Soviet communism was really rather like fascism--these were much more than examples of getting things right or of demonstrating intellectual courage and moral seriousness. These insights, decisions, and moments of action came to define those qualities.
Since then, things have never been quite the same. Like doctors who want to treat the most challenging patients or cops who want to take down the worst criminals, it's only natural for people who think seriously about political and moral issues to seek out the most challenging and morally vexing questions to ponder and confront. Yet, since the Cold War hit its middle period in the late 1950s, nothing has really quite compared. For a time, the struggles of the 1960s came to rival those heady days from earlier in the century. But the tenor was too antic, the stakes too meager, and the legacy too mixed to ever quite match up. And while momentous, the collapse of communism in the late 1980s was bittersweet for intellectuals. In his essay "The End of History," Francis Fukuyama even posited that history had "ended" with the collapse of communism, ushering in an era in which there would be no more great debates or challenges, but rather a bourgeois millennium of endlessly growing investment funds, a brave new world of consumer appliances. Later, the Balkans provided a crisis of moral weight sufficient to rival those earlier times--especially for those writers and journalists, mostly on the center-left, who had the courage and intrepidity to go there. But Yugoslavia's collapse was essentially a local affair, with no clear connections to the world beyond the mangled and rancid history of the region.
September 11 changed all that. Al Qaeda's war on America and America's war on terrorism provided just such a vast field for thought and action. In the months after the attacks, especially on the right, writers began identifying the radical Islamist menace with fascism--Islamo-fascism, as the catch phrase had it. The idea that the war on terror should be seen as the latter-day equivalent or extension of the battles against last century's totalitarianisms has been bandied about in opinion columns and magazine articles for more than a year with varying degrees of seriousness. Paul Berman's new book Terror and Liberalism aims to give it intellectual ballast, a moral seriousness, and analytic grounding. [...]
The heart of Berman's argument is that the violence of al Qaeda is neither simply the extreme response of an oppressed group nor the alien and unknowable product of a religion and culture fundamentally different from our own. Much of the book's first half is taken up with an effort to show that Islamism is ideologically and historically tied to the extremism's that rocked Europe and most of the rest of the world through much of the 20th century. Berman's most powerful passages are those that show the deep similarities between radical, martyrdom-obsessed Islam and the nihilist, irrationalist totalitarian movements of the early and middle 20th century. (In arguing that Baathist Arab nationalism is a latter-day variant of fascism, he seems on considerably weaker ground.)
Berman forces his readers to see the irrationalism of the extremist branch of political Islam, recognizing that the movement is not just anti-American or violent or dangerous but, in fact, deeply pathological. Like every extremist movement that posits a sufficiently transcendent utopia, it is capable of rationalizing almost any degree of brutality and butchery in achieving that goal. In radical Islamism, as in the totalitarianisms of the past, one sees the same mixture of ancient, seemingly immutable, and thus reassuring beliefs coming into vexed confrontation with modernity--and producing some hideous amalgam that combines the worst of the two. One is reminded of Churchill's warning that Nazism might cast the world into "a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of a perverted science." [...]
Berman, in other words, seeks to lay the template of fascism and anti-fascist commitment onto the current reality of fanatical Islamic terrorism and Arab nationalist authoritarianism. Yet reading his book one cannot help but feel that the equation never quite works. There are similarities both meaningful and suggestive. But the analogy is not only incomplete, it is fundamentally wrong. One can recognize the grave dangers posed by radical Islamism without forcing it into a mold in which it does not fit.
One of the book's shortcomings is Berman's argument that the world of Islam and its fanaticisms are really not so exotic or distinct from the intellectual and ideological history of Europe. When one considers the long relationship between Christianity and Islam, as well as the more recent interpenetrations brought about by Western colonialism, there is much to be said for this argument. But Berman would have to be much more thoroughly grounded in Islamic theology and history to make that argument credible, and he is quite candid with readers that this is a depth of expertise he lacks. A deeper shortcoming crops up when Berman begins to chart the course we must take to do battle against the Muslim totalitarian menace. Though the battle may sometimes require bullets and bombs, it is also a battle of ideas. That battle, Berman argues, will be principally fought in London and Paris, Jersey City and Lackawanna, the Buffalo suburb where six Yemeni immigrants recently pled guilty to visiting a bin Laden training camp in Afghanistan in 2001. [...]
When comparing "Muslim totalitarianism" to fascism, communism, or other totalitarian utopianisms, the most striking thing about radical Islamism, and the Muslim world generally, is not its strength but its weakness. Indeed, the weakness of the world of Islam--an ideology and culture that sees itself not only as superior to the West and the world's other great civilizations but as properly in the vanguard of history--is the kernel of the threat it poses, the heart of violent Islamism's toxicity. At the beginning of the 21st century most of the world is, for better or worse, rushing along the current of globalization. By any measure, the world of Islam lags far behind. With the exception of a few countries with vast amounts of wealth based on natural resources, it is impoverished and trailing the rest of the world on numerous fronts. Where is the great Muslim power? There is none. Where is the world of Islam's advanced technology-driven economy? There is none. [...]
If it weren't for the fact that fanatical Islamist terrorists might get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, the sad fact is that few would even care. Of course, the fact that they could get their hands on weapons of mass destruction is a serious caveat. But it does place the issue in a certain context. It is a grave threat, but in a very specific, physical way--a threat to liberal societies but hardly the kind of ideological or political threat that great totalitarianisms posed a half a century ago. Islamist fanatics might destroy a whole city in the West, a catastrophic event. But they'll never conquer or subvert a country. And this is the heart of the difference. To paraphrase Arthur Schlesinger, Islamism is a danger to the West but hardly a danger in the West--or China, or Latin America, or anywhere else where Islam is not already the dominant religion.
For intellectuals, however, there is always a temptation to take momentous, morally serious questions and make them out to be slightly more momentous and world-historical than they really are. Call it the Orwellian temptation. George Orwell not only epitomized what an intellectual can and should be. He has also become the symbol of the role the best intellectuals played in those critical mid-century years. Along the way, however, the image he cast--or rather his ghost, or his shade--has also become part of the pornography of intellectuals. Berman has given way to this craving.
Abu Mazen is ... connected with one of the 20th century's most infamous terrorist crimes: the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes - including American citizen David Berger - at the Olympic Games in Munich, Germany in 1972.
Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, long the treasurer of the PLO, was the man who provided financing for that attack, according to information compiled by Israeli attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of the Shurat Hadin Israel Law Center.
Darshan-Leitner told Arutz-7 that PA sources themselves told her that it is ridiculous to claim that Abu Mazen was never involved in terrorism. In addition, Abu Daoud, who masterminded the Munich attack, has said that Abu Mazen provided the funds to carry it out. He made these charges in his autobiography, "Palestine: From Jerusalem to Munich" (published in French in 1999) and again in an interview last August in Sports Illustrated magazine.
Mahmoud Abbas's appointment as figurehead is not meant to actually change the Palestinian Authority, but only to give the illusion of progress. Despite the public pretense of conflict between Arafat and Abbas, Abbas is surely as much Arafat's henchman as ever.
Real progress toward peace, I suspect, will come only after the 2004 election. And it will begin with the destruction of the Palestinian terrorist leadership -- Arafat, and Abbas as well if he does not reform.
As soon as Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, I saw on television the firing squad execution of an array of political prisoners, which he ordered. He then began filling his brutal prisons with Cubans whose sole crime was a desire to breathe freedom after the Batista dictatorship -- only to find themselves in another totalitarian quicksand.
At one point, interviewing the already legendary Che Guevara -- an international Cuban revolutionary icon -- at the Cuban mission to the United Nations, I asked him if he could foresee, anytime in the future, free elections in Cuba. Crisply dressed in his military outfit, Guevara burst out laughing at my callow naivete.
Having interviewed Cubans who survived Castro's gulags, I have never understood or respected the parade of American entertainers, politicians and intellectuals who travel to Cuba to be entranced by this ruthless dictator who, for me, has all the charisma of a preening thug, akin to any killer on "The Sopranos."
These Castro-philes are among those who discredit liberalism because they're unable to recognize and be repelled by unbridled evil. Consider Steven Spielberg, who has developed impressive resources through his Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to keep alive the horrifying presence of the Holocaust. Yet, as quoted in the April 11 Wall Street Journal, Spielberg described his audience with Castro last November as "the eight most important hours of my life."
Was Spielberg's life that barren until those gloriously transcendent hours with the chief warden of Cuba's prisons?
From time to time, I still think of Elian Gonzalez, so vivid a free spirit here until condemned by Janet Reno and Bill Clinton to a land where schoolteachers must keep a record of any signs of their charges' lessening fealty to the relentless light of their lives.
The lasting, even impacting impression from the NBA playoffs so far is not of Kevin Garnett exhorting his teammates from the bench during overtime, nor Tracy McGrady swooping toward the basket, nor Allen Iverson dropping a double-nickel on the Hornets. It's the unforgettable sight of Maurice Cheeks leaving his team's bench Friday in Portland to put his arm around 13-year-old Natalie Gilbert as she stood at mid-court holding a microphone but having fumbled the words to our national anthem, all alone and visibly in despair.
For 20 years, Marvin Gaye's version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" has been, for my money, the most compelling rendition ever. But now, I've got a new favorite, the duet of Gilbert & Cheeks, impromptu, off-key, slapped together as it was. I get goose bumps every time I see the clip of Cheeks hugging Gilbert, telling her everything is going to be okay. People forget the lyrics to the national anthem every single night at a sporting event somewhere.
But when have you ever seen someone moved to the point of walking over to comfort the embarrassed singer, in this case somebody's scared little girl singing the national anthem in public for the first time? How often, in a sports setting, do we ever see such a demonstration of human kindness?
Where Rep. Richard Gephardt needs the most help to advance his presidential prospects, he isn?t getting it ? at least publicly.
Early support from two chief constituencies ? Iowans and organized labor ? that are essential to the White House hopes of the Missouri Democrat has been surprisingly tepid so far.
Documents filed with the Federal Election Commission show that Gephardt reported raising a scant $1,000 in all from only three donors in Iowa in the first quarter of 2003.
His presidential campaign amassed nearly $6 million during the same period, including $3.35 million from individuals. Candidates are required to report donations from individuals of $250 or more.
Gephardt?s campaign pooh-poohed the poor fundraising results in Iowa and said the $1,000 total does not adequately reflect the candidate?s support in the state, which he won in his first presidential outing, in 1988.
With its first-in-the-nation caucus, tentatively scheduled for Jan. 19, Iowa is a pivotal state for the Gephardt 2004 campaign. It was the only state he carried in his abortive 1988 presidential campaign, and his status as the only Midwesterner among Democratic frontrunners is presumably an asset. Additionally, Democratic politics in Iowa is dominated by organized labor, a constituency Gephardt has staunchly supported.
The US-led administration in Iraq?on Monday?ended a meeting held to discuss the country's future, setting out guiding principles and agreeing to meet within three to four weeks to form an interim government.
The gathering, of about 200 delegates in the Baghdad conference centre attracted fewer, and less powerful, Iraqis than had been expected. While Saddam Hussein supporters celebrated the former dictator's 66th birthday, Shia groups sent only low-level delegates. Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the opposition Iraqi National Congress did not attend, sending a junior delegation. The religious establishment based in the southern city of Najaf, which claims to speak on behalf of Iraq's majority Shia community, sent no representatives.
The agreed principles stressed general issues such as democracy and the rule of law, but did not contain details of how the country would be governed. However, delegates welcomed the chance to express themselves in a way they could not under Mr Hussein. Splits emerged between returned Iraqi exiles and those who had lived through the Saddam years.
First proposed in 1995 by Carl Brett of the University of Cincinnati and Gordon Baird of the State University of New York at Fredonia, coordinated stasis attempts to describe the emergence and disappearance of species across geologic time by suggesting that species living together in the same environment go through long periods of stability--some six million years—and then undergo a rapid, almost complete turnover, during which old species disappear and new ones emerge.
A recent study by a team of Syracuse University geologists has punched holes in a relatively new theory of species evolution called coordinated stasis; the theories involved are based on findings from fossil-bearing rocks that underlie Central New York. The SU study was published in "Geology," the premier journal of the Geological Society of America.
First proposed in 1995 by Carl Brett of the University of Cincinnati and Gordon Baird of the State University of New York at Fredonia, coordinated stasis attempts to describe the emergence and disappearance of species across geologic time by suggesting that species living together in the same environment go through long periods of stability—some six million years—and then undergo a rapid, almost complete turnover, during which old species disappear and new ones emerge.
Until 1995, most researchers believed that species emerged and disappeared independent of each other throughout time.
"Our study suggests that there may be more variability in species composition through time than predicted by coordinated stasis," says Linda Ivany, one of the co-authors of the SU study. "It will be the blueprint study against which other researchers will present their data sets to determine whether coordinated stasis is present or not."
Communist troops of North Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam poured into Saigon today as a century of Western influences came to an end.
Scores of North Vietnamese tanks, armored vehicles and camouflaged Chinese built trucks rolled to the presidential palace.
The President of the former non-Communist Government of South Vietnam, Gen. Duong Van Minh, who had gone on radio and television to announce his administration's surrender, was taken to a microphone later by North Vietnamese soldiers for another announcement. He appealed to all Saigon troops to lay down their arms and was taken by the North Vietnamese soldiers to an undisclosed destination.[...]
Between General Minh's surrender broadcast and the entry of the Communist forces into the city, South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians jammed aboard several coastal freighters tied up along the Saigon River, hoping to escape. They dejectedly left the ships as the Communist troops drove along the waterfront in jeeps and trucks, waving National Liberation Front flags and cheering.
Tony Blair's first public attempt to heal the diplomatic wounds of the Iraq war suffered a humiliating rebuff yesterday when Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, refused to lift UN sanctions and mocked the possibility that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq.
Mr Putin also clashed with Mr Blair by demanding UN weapons inspectors be allowed back into Iraq and challenged Mr Blair's vision of a new world strategic partnership, arguing it would be unacceptable for the US to dominate the international community.
The public dressing down for Mr Blair came during a 63-minute press conference staged by the two men at Mr Putin's private residence outside Moscow. The two men had a fabled special relationship and Mr Blair had high hopes he would be able to wean Mr Putin away from his new anti-war alliance with France and Germany.
Mr Blair started with the full diplomatic niceties but became increasingly animated until he issued a dire warning of a new world order in which two different poles of power act as rivals to one another. The world faced a choice between a partnership between the US and the main countries of the world or a continued "diplomatic stand off", he said.
[P]rospects for peaceful mutual accommodation between Jew and Arab were almost irretrievably set back by the Madrid and Oslo agreements of the early 1990s. From cynical motives on all sides -- including those of Israeli Labour politicians -- the terrorist, Yasser Arafat, was put right at the black heart of the "peace process". He had left nothing but a trail of destruction behind him in Jordan, Lebanon, indeed everywhere he'd been. From the moment he arrived, the West Bank and Gaza began to be transformed into a terror network....
Arafat lives today as the principal impediment to any workable peace agreement. Keeping him sidelined, and gradually disarming his terror brigades, will distract much creative energy from a main task, which itself cannot be easy. It will be like trying to come to some agreement with an Iraq, in which, say, Tariq Aziz were nominally in power, while Saddam Hussein continued to sit glowering beside him at the cabinet table. There is necessarily an element of farce in the spectacle.
Whatever the "roadmap" says, progress will require the imposition on the West Bank and Gaza of an international, probably American force, to replace the Israeli. For there is no conceivable Palestinian civil force that can stand up to Arafat's multiple networks of goons and suicide bombers.
An Arafat-controlled state would continue to oppress the Palestinian people, and continue terrorism until its acquisition of WMD led to the destruction of Israel, or, more likely, until Israel conquered and re-occupied Palestine. Neither outcome would count as progress.
David Warren poses another alternative to Orrin's: some outside force, either Israeli or American, attempts a coercive nation-building exercise in Palestine. Again, if Arafat remains in control of his terror networks, the schools, and other civil institutions, the occupying force will be subject to terror and, with Arafat off limits, unable to reply. This would be a recipe for a failure worse than Vietnam.
This is why the road to peace needs to begin with the destruction of Arafat, and preferably his terror network as well. To make the point that terrorism is unacceptable, the United States should seize Arafat, try him publicly with a complete airing of the evidence connecting him to murders, and then punish him appropriately -- preferably by execution. Once that is accomplished, several roads to peace may succeed -- either immediate statehood as Orrin prefers, or a continuing nation-building exercise leading to statehood.
The Palestinian parliament voted Tuesday night in Ramallah to confirm a new government, clearing the way for an American-backed peace plan after the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, denounced terrorism "by any party and in all its shapes" and appealed for a "lasting peace" with Israel.
Hours later, underlining the fragility of every step toward peace, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up outside a seaside pub here early this morning and killed at least two other people.
After Mr. Abbas's speech, the Palestinian parliament overwhelmingly approved his new government on Tuesday night, in a jubilant session that met President Bush's condition for proceeding with a new peace plan, known as the road map. After the suicide bombing, the White House confirmed that it would proceed with the peace plan, which calls for creation of a Palestinian state and a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace in three years.
The American Revolution was not a common event. Its effects and consequences have already been awful over a great part of the globe. And when and where are they to cease?
But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. While the king, and all in authority under him, were believed to govern in justice and mercy, according to the laws and constitution derived to them from the God of nature and transmitted to them by their ancestors, they thought themselves bound to pray for the king and queen and all the royal family, and all in authority under them, as ministers ordained of God for their good; but when they saw those powers renouncing all the principles of authority, and bent upon the destruction of all the securities of their lives, liberties, and properties, they thought it their duty to pray for the continental congress and all the thirteen
State congresses, &c.
The first thing one might say about the plan itself is that its pace is breathless. Comprehensive political reform, a new constitution, free elections--all within the first few months? Never mind that this seems unrealistic. (We are now 19 years past the deadline for Palestinian self-rule set in the Egypt-Israel peace agreement of 1979 and four years past the date for completing "final status" talks under the Oslo accords.) It is even undemocratic. Aren't the citizens of Palestine entitled to a little time to acquaint themselves with their new political system, not to mention to assent to it, to discover what the offices are for which they will vote, to form political parties, to debate the issues? From there, we press on frantically to sovereignty within a few more months and a complete laying to rest of the Arab-Israeli conflict by 2005. Inshallah. There is no disgrace in a rush to peace, provided one's hurry does not result in losing one's way. [...]
THE STILL DEEPER FLAW in the road map's premises is the presumption that with the terms of settlement fairly apparent, all that is needed is a guide for getting there. In the final analysis, however, the missing ingredient for peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not a blueprint of the destination, nor is it the route. The missing ingredient is a decision by the Palestinians and the other Arabs to accept the existence of a Jewish state in their midst and to live in permanent peace with it. Despite all the Palestinians have suffered these two and a half years, public opinion polls show that a clear majority of them support continuing the intifada and suicide bombing and that about half say that the goal should be the "total liberation of Palestine," in other words, the elimination of Israel. The other half of the Palestinians say they want a two-state solution. When that half grows and becomes dominant, then and only then, will real peace be possible.
Since the Six Day War, the critical divide in international approaches to the Arab-Israeli broil has been between a negotiated settlement and an imposed one. Israel has insisted on the former precisely because it wants a settlement to be more than pro forma. In an imposed settlement, the Arab representatives might make some empty prescribed gestures in return for concessions that could facilitate future efforts to destroy Israel.
"The UN should be appointed overseer of the peace not because that organisation possesses planning skills which America doesnot, but because to shut it out will cause resentment in the Arab world. However irritating are many of the do-gooders among its ranks, the UN has the advantage of being seen as an antidote to alleged Western imperialism."
After reading those words in The Spectator's leading article of 12 April, I hurled the magazine across the room and typed up my letter of resignation.
A FEW years ago, well after the time he was putting E800 worth of cocaine up his nose each week, but slightly before he had his religious awakening and gave up alcohol, Peter Howson was asked by Wolverhampton City Council to create a large painting representing the dreams of its citizens.
'All these people in Wolverhampton sent me their dreams,' he recalls. 'Most of them were very boring. They were dreams like 'My cat suddenly started talking to me.' So I ended up using a lot of my own dreams in the painting.
'The dreams I've had in my life have been apocalyptic epics where I'm escaping from Nazis, running through woods, finding lost cities, crawling through deserts, fighting battles and dying and going up to heaven or going into hell.'
You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to realise that such dreams say a lot about Howson, Scotland's best-known and most controversial painter of the last 20 years. Part showman, part shaman, he has spent two decades jabbing a brush in the public eye.
Although it was his astonishingly vibrant figurative work which first brought him to wide attention, he has remained highly visible thanks to regular confessional interviews in which he described addictions, autism, break-ups, breakdowns, and latterly his conversion to Christianity. Little wonder his dreams should feature fear, heroism, combat, death, praise, damnation and religion. There's simply no room for a talking cat in Howson's head.
And you could barely swing one in his studio. On the top floor of a former school in Glasgow's West End, Howson sits and smokes amid the clutter. Hundreds of classical music CDs are stacked round the walls, sworls of hardened oil paint crest like frozen waves on a table, a giant portrait of a bound Jesus dominates the room, and finds a profane reflection on the opposite wall in a picture of Trevor from EastEnders ripped from a magazine.
I'm here to interview Howson because he is just finishing a major commission. He has painted the 14 Stations of the Cross for a wealthy American collector to hang in his private chapel, where they will be used as devotional objects, hung alongside major works of religious art from the medieval and Renaissance periods. The paintings, which tell the story of Christ from being condemned to death to being laid in his tomb, will first be exhibited in London.
It seems right that the public should get a chance to see them, as they are among the most significant works of Howson's career.
'I don't think too many artists today are capable of coming to grips with spiritual themes,' says the collector, who wishes to remain anonymous. 'We are in an age now which is swinging from a very materialistic 20th Century to, I think, a very spiritual 21st century. I think this war we are going through now is the turning point. And if you look at Peter Howson's work, he is very timely. You can't paint the way he paints and not have a deep spiritual underpinning. He takes the soul and turns it inside out.'
Serves 4 and doubles easily
2 pounds buttery waxy potatoes (such as Yellow Finn, Red Bliss, red-skinned
San Luis Valley, or Desiree), peeled and thinly sliced
2 cups buttermilk, or more as needed
2 cups water
4 large cloves garlic, sliced
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1. Place the potatoes in a 4-quart saucepan with the buttermilk, water, garlic, a little salt, and pepper to taste. Bring to a simmer, cover, and
cook 25 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender but not falling apart. Check for scorching, adding equal parts buttermilk and water if necessary to
have the consistency of a thick stew.
2. Uncover and cook down the liquid, stirring and crushing the potatoes until creamy and thick, 5 to 10 minutes. Season to taste. (They can be set aside, covered, for an hour or more. Reheat in the saucepan over low heat, stirring constantly.)
3. Serve the hot potatoes mounded in a warmed bowl.
An Intel Corp. software engineer, whose five-week federal detention in Oregon triggered protests from outraged colleagues, was charged today with conspiring to travel to Afghanistan to fight with al Qaeda and the Taliban against American soldiers.
Maher Hawash, who worked for Intel for more than a decade, joined six other suspects based in Portland, Ore., in a plot to wage war against the United States, according to a federal arrest warrant affidavit released in Portland today. The other six -- five men and a woman -- were charged in the same conspiracy last October.
Hawash traveled in October 2001 with five members of the Portland group to China, where they tried but failed to enter Afghanistan to fight against U.S. forces, according to the affidavit. Hotel records in China show that Hawash stayed in the same hotels on the same dates as the five others, according to the affidavit.
"No independent evidence exists to corroborate any business purpose of the travel," the document said.
Federal investigators were tipped to Hawash's alleged connection to the "Portland Six" after their arrest by a neighbor who identified him, and his wife, Lisa, as "close friends" of two of the other suspected conspirators, Ahmed Bilal and Habis Al Saoub, according to the affidavit.
Hawash, 38, was born on the West Bank and became an American citizen in 1990. Known as "Mike" to his colleagues and family, he lives in suburban Portland and is married with three young children.
The FBI arrested him in an Intel parking lot on March 20. Until today, he had been detained without charge under the federal material witness statute, which the government has used since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hold some terror suspects indefinitely. Civil liberties groups have sharply criticized that practice.
The detention of Hawash, who has worked for Intel since 1992, angered many of his colleagues at Intel. They organized a media campaign, set up a Web site and demonstrated outside a federal courthouse in Portland during a closed hearing on Hawash's detention.
The announcement of the charges today seemed to do little to change their views. "These charges only show that Mike was acquainted with some members of the Portland Six, which is what you would expect in a small Muslim community like we have in Portland," said Steven McGeady, a former Intel executive and founder of a group called "Free Mike Hawash." McGeady said the allegation that Hawash traveled in China with five of the suspects showed only that friends sometimes bump into each other abroad.
President George W. Bush on Tuesday unveiled an initiative intended to pump another $15 billion in the global fight against HIV/AIDS, as he fielded criticism that legislation did not focus enough on abstinence as a solution to the pandemic.
"Fighting AIDS on a global scale is a massive and complicated undertaking, yet this cause is rooted in the simplest of moral duties. When we see this kind of preventable suffering, when we see a plague leaving graves and orphans across a continent, we must act, " Bush said.
The president appeared in the East Room of the White House with lawmakers and global AIDS activists to promote the bill providing $15 billion to the global fund established to fight the deadly disease that has infected 42 million people worldwide.
The World Health Organization reports of that number 38.6 million were adults, and 2.3 million were children under age 15. Some 3.1 million people worldwide died of AIDS in 2002.
In sub-Saharan Africa, some 28.5 million adults are infected and 2.6 million children under age 15. The pandemic has captured the attention of the international community as it figures out how best to stop the spread of AIDS on the continent.
The president warned "time is not on our side" and urged Congress to move forward "with speed and seriousness his crisis requires."
Bush said the administration's health experts believe the emergency plan for AIDS relief could prevent 7 million new HIV infections and treat 2 million people with life-extending drugs. [...]
Social conservatives and some congressional Republicans criticized the bill for not including more pro-family amendments that would promote programs that teach
abstinence and fidelity rather than only condom use. [...]
Michael Schwartz, vice president for government relations for Concerned Women for America, said the bill provides no conscious protections for faith-based groups. Schwartz told UPI that groups seeking to teach abstinence would have to also pass out condoms even if it were against their mission.
"We are quite sure that Congress must clearly outline the president's purpose within the bill. Without a clear mandate, future administrations will be able to use AIDS prevention dollars for ineffective condom based programs, rather than lifesaving ones based on abstinence and faithfulness," Schwartz said.
One of Wimbledon's most enduring traditions is finished - players will no longer have to bow or curtsy to the Royal Box at Centre Court.
But while one custom fell Tuesday, the All England Club confirmed that another will remain: Men will be paid more than women.
Players have been required to bow or curtsy to the royal family when walking onto or leaving Centre Court. From now on they will have to do so only if Queen Elizabeth II or Prince Charles, her eldest son and heir to the throne, is in the box.
The decision to scrap the tradition was made at the request of the Duke of Kent, who has been the All England Club's president since 1969. He and his wife, the Duchess of Kent, attend frequently each year and present the winners' trophies.
"It's been part of a discussion that's been going on for some time," All England chief executive Christopher Gorringe said. "It's sad, but we have to move on. We know there is very little bowing or curtsying done in royal circles now."
Players will now only have to bow or curtsy if Queen Elizabeth II or Prince Charles, her eldest son and heir to the throne, is in the box.
The queen hasn't attended Wimbledon since 1977 when she presented the women's trophy to Virginia Wade. Prince Charles made his only appearance in 1970.
British royalty has been associated with Wimbledon since 1907 when the Prince of Wales and Princess Mary watched from a temporary Royal Box.
Before leaving the ground, the prince accepted an offer to become president of the All England Club and remained so until he became King George V in 1910. Subsequent monarchs, including the current queen, have since all held the position of Patron of the Club.
The Supreme Court ruled today, in a case with significant impact on the rights of noncitizens, that the federal government can detain legal immigrants without bail during their deportation proceedings.
The court upheld, 5 to 4, the strict rules of the 1996 immigration law, which mandates detention of immigrants who have committed certain crimes even as those immigrants challenge their deportation.
"Congress regularly makes rules that would be unacceptable if applied to citizens,'' the court said in a summary attached to the opinion by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.
The case decided today, Demore v. Kim, No. 01-1491, has been closely followed by immigrants' rights groups and lawyers who follow immigration issues. Today's decision made it clear that immigrants - even those in the United States legally - may have far more to lose than American citizens if they are convicted of crimes, and not necessarily heinous ones.
"We hold that Congress, justifiably concerned that deportable criminal aliens who are not detained continue to engage in crime and fail to appear for their removal hearings in large numbers, may require that persons such as respondent be detained for the brief period necessary for their removal proceedings,'' Justice Rehnquist wrote.
The "respondent'' is Hyung Joon Kim, who came to the United States in 1984 at age 6. While still a child, he became a lawful permanent resident. In 1996, when he was a teenager, he was convicted of burglary and the next year was found guilty of petty theft.
He completed his sentence in California state prison and, the day after his release, was detained by immigration officials without bail to await deportation.
Consumer confidence, which had declined for four consecutive months,improved sharply in April, helped by a swift outcome in the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
The Consumer Confidence Index rose to 81.0 from a revised 61.4 in March, the New York-based Conference Board said Tuesday. That was far better than the reading of 70 that analysts had been expecting. [...]
This post-war surge differs from the one after the Persian Gulf War in 1991 in that both components of the index - the expectations index and the present situation index - posted gains.
The Expectations Index rose to 84.8 from 61.4. The Present Situation Index improved to 75.3 from 61.4.
"The increase in the Present Situation Index, especially in labor market conditions, may very well signal a turnaround in confidence and a more favorable outlook for consumer spending," Franco said.
Mark Vitner, an economist at Wachovia Securities in Charlotte, N.C., said he was surprised by the magnitude of the increase and that consumers believed that economic conditions had already improved.
After some criticism for not filing earlier, Al Sharpton's presidential campaign submitted the required financial reports to the Federal Election Committee yesterday. The reports show he's raised money from some interesting people.
Between January and March, Sharpton has raised $114,456 and has spent $54,456. According to the Daily News, he can thank radio host Tom Joyner, media tycoon Percy Sutton and Newark Mayor Sharpe James for $1,000 contributions. Abner Louima, who won an $8.75 million settlement when Sharpton represented him in a New York City Police torture case in 1997, also contributed $1,000. Louis Carr, president of ad sales for Black Entertainment Television, and Detroit "TV news anchor" Carolyn Clifford each donated $2,000.
A man has died after attempting to drill a hole in his head with a power tool.
The 42-year-old was found unconscious in a locked room by police who were called on Sunday to his home in Conway Street, Torquay.
The Iraqi lawyer who led U.S. forces to missing soldier?Jessica Lynch (search)?has been granted asylum by the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced Tuesday that Mohammed Odeh Al Rehaief, 33, who helped U.S. special operations teams track down Pfc. Jessica Lynch, is now living in the United States with his wife and 5-year-old child.
Al Rehaief was granted?asylum?Monday in Arlington, Virginia, which allows him to work in this country. He can stay in the U.S. indefinitely and can eventually apply for U.S. citizenship.
Prior to Tuesday, he was referred to as only as "Mohammed" in order to protect the safety of himself and his family while they were?still in Iraq.
The Al Rehaief family arrived in the United States earlier this month after the Department of Homeland Security granted them "humanitarian parole." On Monday, the family was granted asylum by the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services.
In a fiery speech Monday night, U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton accused the Bush administration of having the worst economic policies since Herbert Hoover, with no real plan to end the nation's fiscal troubles.
Dick Gephardt:
Question:
What is the one thing Jonathan Alter, Karen Tumulty and Jules Witcover can all agree on?...
Joe Lieberman:
Welcome back folks.
It's day two of Notepad LINK . Now that we've all had a chance to review what the "other guy" LINK submitted, expect to see more uniformity in today's postings as all the campaigns LINK crib best practices off of one another - namely linking LINK schedule sharing and obscure music referencing LINK
So in that spirit, let's talk shop. Lieberman was in New Jersey yesterday doing stuff.
That said, let's turn our attention to what really seems to be going on pre-debate, namely pre-debate positioning everywhere else but apparently here....
Finally, in the hopes of getting others to spill some debate aspirations, here are some Lieberland debate goals: Come Saturday, Lieberman won't pile on the make-up nor will he sigh. Much.
Howard Dean:
News Flash!!! Yesterday we were attacked by the Anointed One!
And we're not even talking about Chris Lehane.
We want to clear something up. There seems to be some confusion between the official Dean campaign blog and the unofficial blog.
Here's the official blog's response to the clubbing-from-on-high. LINK
Here's the unofficial response. LINK.
We think it's mostly a matter of tone....
John Edwards:
This genteel southern gal does not know how to react to being "truncated." How ugly.
I will be sure to keep it brief today less I raise the ire of "the editors" or Joe Trippi....
So here is a "bumper sticker anecdote" that encapsulates the strength of our Senator....
Don't misunderstimate the Breck Girl.
Dennis Kucinich:
If the 12th Commandment holds that Democrats shalt not criticize each other, than we have two candidates (I won't mention their names) who've been irreverent lately, even blasphemous in their spat over the U.S. military. Candidate Kucinich (it's my job to mention his name a lot) joined the fray by proclaiming: "They're both wrong."...
Our campaign didn't take sides in such silliness.
John Kerry:
Southern Tour, Day 2
Here is the lead from Little Rock: Painful memories of three North Vietnamese ambushes became a matter of joyous pride for Fred Short as he was reunited with the Navy patrol boat commander who he said saved the whole crew by charging into the teeth of the enemy attack....
Bob Graham:
DES MOINES — Good day!
Senator Graham arrived in Iowa today with the FL four in tow - Crowley, Adair, Bridges and Silva.... Graham talked about his life growing up on his family's dairy farm, his grandchildren, his beloved home state and his vision for a better America.
Along the way, he chatted with regular Iowans....
While waiting for his dinner companions to arrive, he saw a member of his staff dining with a staffer from another presidential campaign.
(From Jamal: Don't tell Jordan, Trippi, Nick, or Craig … shhh!)
Graham sits down. They all chat....
Only in Iowa!
Al Sharpton:
The Sharpton Campaign congratulates Congressman Dick Gephardt for presenting a bold and practical plan to insure that every American is covered with health insurance. I believe the plan is a big step in the right direction.
Go get 'em, Al!
Men are more than twice as likely as women to die during thunderstorms, mainly because they do not come in from the rain, new research suggests.
A new study of more than 1,400 thunderstorm-related deaths in the United States found 70% of the victims were male. The gender disparity was particularly pronounced among deaths caused by lightning strikes and flash floods.
Close to 80% of the lightning victims were men, said Dr. Thomas Songer of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Injury Research. [...]
Dr. Songer speculated men may be at greater risk of dying during thunderstorms because of their exposure to the elements and their behaviour. Men seem more likely to take risks during storms.
"I would say they make poor decisions," he said. "I've read several reports surrounding the deaths, and there's quite a few situations where people drive around barricades and go through flooded roads, and their car gets picked up and floated down, and they drown."
The gender trend for lightning deaths goes back at least a century in medical literature, said Dr. Mary Ann Cooper, director of the Lightning Injury Research Program at the University of Illinois, who was not involved in the new research.
"Men tend to be optimists. They all think that their team's going to win the pennant and they're never going to be hit by lightning."
By 1803 Napoleon wanted to raise money for war with Britain, and Jefferson was prepared to pay for control of France's territory around the mouth of the Mississippi in order to guarantee free use of the river.
The American minister in Paris, Robert Livingston, had already approached the French about such a limited purchase. (Livingston, who owned some 130,000 acres in upstate New York, was himself very familiar with the American real estate market.) But a critical shift occurred on April 11, 1803, when he went to meet Talleyrand in his offices in the Rue du Bac.
Writing James Madison that evening, Livingston reported that Talleyrand had suddenly asked whether "we wished to have the whole of Louisiana." Surprised and playing for time, Livingston at first denied any interest, but Talleyrand persisted, "What would you give for the whole?" Livingston came back with an opening bid of about $3.75 million, which Talleyrand dismissed as too low. But both men knew the game being played.
Talleyrand told Livingston to consider the proposition and return with a better price, and as the maneuvering continued over the days ahead, Livingston recorded Talleyrand's promise to "give me a certificate that I was the most importunate [negotiator] he had yet met with."
With the participation of James Monroe, who arrived in Paris the next day as the American "envoy extraordinary," and the French treasury minister, Francois Barbi-Marbois, agreement was reached just 18 days later for the sale of France's possessions in North America--some 565 million acres--for about $15 million, or less than 3 cents an acre. [...]
Looking at the Louisiana Purchase as a property transaction rather than a work of diplomacy helps to explain another anomaly. Many Americans feared the new land would make the nation too big to govern and, given the prevailing view that government was authority exercised from above over an unruly populace, they had good reason for their fears. But Louisiana was to witness the development of a new kind of society.
Under Spain and France, the province had been a near-feudal domain, ruled by appointees from Europe, with the land sold only to those approved by the governor. In the United States, however, land could be owned by whoever could afford it. Since 1785, all federal land west of the Appalachians had, at Jefferson's urging, been measured out in one-mile-square sections for sale as real estate, and this grid of squares now extended into the Louisiana Purchase.
For the first time in history, land, the primary source of wealth production, could be owned by anyone: speculators, settlers, even squatters. "Power," said John Adams, with ice-cold accuracy, "always follows property." In the Old World property was distributed in a hierarchical manner with the powerful few owning most; but as America spread westward, more than one billion acres of public land, including most of the Louisiana Purchase, would pass into private hands. Power still followed property, but now it was spread democratically, and the nation it created possessed innate stability, because each property-owning citizen had a vested interest in a law-abiding society.
Nearly 30 years after Gen. Augusto Pinochet deposed the democratically elected President Salvador Allende in a bloody military coup, Chile continues to live with the dictator's controversial dual legacy-a strong, vibrant economy and painful memories of horrific human rights abuses.
Gonzalo Vial Correa's recent two-volume biography of the dictator exemplifies the dilemma of many Chileans who seek to make peace with thepast. Indeed, the book's appearance in late 2002 followed four years of public debate (in Chile and abroad) over the proper fate of the dictator. In March 2000, after 16 months of house arrest in London on charges of human rights violations, Pinochet was released by the British government and allowed to return to his homeland. And following a prolonged legal, political, and public relations battle between those seeking to prosecute Pinochet and those attempting to protect him, Chileans were ready to move on. So was Ricardo Lagos, the new president-the first socialist elected since Allende-who took office just nine days after Pinochet returned to Chile. Facing human rights charges in domestic courts, the aging Pinochet was excused from trial for medical reasons but had to renounce his lifetime senate seat. Neither side felt victorious when he finally retired from public life, and many Chileans began acting as if the dictator had ceased to exist. Even Vial's Pinochet: The Biography treats the general almost as a late leader-all that can change now is history's judgment of his legacy. [...]
[T]he final chapter of the second volume includes a superb essay describing Pinochet's ambiguous legacy in unambiguous terms. Tacitly acknowledging that Pinochet's dismal human rights record inevitably taints his record of audacious neoliberal economic reforms, Vial reproaches the dictator for not curtailing the power of his notorious secret police. But the author is less forthright when speculating on whether Pinochet's advisors could have persuaded the general to take human rights more seriously. "It is also true that those who surrounded him, for a short or a long period of time-ministers, generals, close advisors-did not have the pertinacity that we should have had to press him to overcome that character trait," writes Vial,
with predictable understatement.
When the Atlas Cinema last showed "Blue Chill," people screamed: "Yes! Yes!" every time the actors began kissing, only to see the scratched reel jump to the next scene. On Monday, they sat in awed silence as naked couples writhed on screen.
"The movie is much more beautiful now, because there's sex," said a beaming Mohammed Taher, 18. Since Saturday, when the theater reopened with a freshly uncensored version of the low-budget Italian flick, he has seen "Blue Chill" three times.
Baghdad has gone through a revolution in the past three weeks, casting off decades of censorship and state control. Banned books, satellite dishes and videos are now sold on the street -- as are alcohol and women.
Horrified by the changes, some Iraqis blame America for what they call a cultural degradation. If it continues for long, they promise to rise up in a holy war against the U.S. forces occupying their country.
"Everything against Islam, everything we hate, has been imported by the Americans like a disease," said Abbas Hamid, a 60-year-old merchant. "We'll fight them. We're tired now, but we'll rest up and use our guns to drive the Americans out."
For now, Hamid appears to be in the minority as Iraqis excitedly discover worlds of vice -- and virtue too -- long forbidden by the repressive regime of Saddam Hussein:
* Teenagers gape at Christina Aguilera's navel via formerly illegal satellite dishes.
* Prostitutes walk the streets in some neighborhoods, beckoning passing motorists.
No one with an e-mail account needs to be told that unwanted commercial messages, better known as spam, are a bad problem that is getting worse. America Online reports that 70 percent of the e-mail its users receive is now junk, and that the quantity has doubled just since the beginning of this year. Much of the increase is being fueled by Internet marketing companies, which charge as little as $500 to send out a million e-mail messages. Internet service providers have taken steps to clamp down on spam, but the tools at their disposal are limited. Congress needs to help. [...]
A bill introduced by Senators Conrad Burns, a Montana Republican, and Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, would require that unsolicited marketing e-mail have valid return e-mail addresses, making it easier for recipients to remove themselves from mass e-mail lists or for Internet service providers and states to sue spammers. Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, is introducing a bill that would require the Federal Trade Commission to maintain a no-spam list, like the no-call lists for telemarketing phone calls, and impose stiff penalties on marketers who repeatedly sent spam to people who had opted out.
If these bills were put up for a popular vote, they would be passed handily. But the direct marketing industry has been lobbying hard for its right to keep sending spam. People should tell their Congressional representatives how strongly they feel about fighting spam--one e-mail note per person, please.
The four European countries most hostile to the war in Iraq meet in Brussels today to rekindle plans for a European defence force to rival Nato and show America that "old Europe" is down but not out.
France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, dubbed old Europe by Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, invited other European Union countries to attend, but found no takers.
Critics say the summit bears no relation to the realities of an expanding Europe in which several new members put far more trust in Nato, which helped free them from the Soviet Union, than a still undefined Franco-German scheme.
The key question remains - why did we go to war? It is not yet answered. In the end, it is likely that a host of responses will produce a cognitive stew, which does, at least, open the way to offering one's own notion. We went to war, I could say, because we very much needed a war. The US economy was sinking, the market was gloomy and down, and some classic bastions of the erstwhile American faith (corporate integrity, the FBI, and the Catholic Church, to cite but three) had each suffered a separate and grievous loss of face. Since our Administration was probably not ready to solve any one of the serious problems before it, it was natural to feel the impulse to move into larger ventures, thrusts into the empyrean-war!
Be it said that the Administration knew something a good many of us did not - it knew that we had a very good, perhaps even an extraordinarily good, if essentially untested, group of Armed Forces, a skilled, disciplined, well-motivated military, career-focused and run by a field-rank and general staff who were intelligent, articulate, and considerably less corrupt than any other power group in America.
In such a pass, how could the White House not use them? They could prove quintessential as morale-builders to one group in US life, perhaps the key group: the white American male. If once this aggregate came near to 50 per cent of the population, it was down to . . . was it now 30 per cent? Still, it remained key to the President's political footing. And it had taken a real beating. As a matter of collective ego, the good white American male had had very little to nourish his morale since the job market had gone bad, unless he happened to be in the Armed Forces.
NBC News correspondent Ashleigh Banfield has ripped television news networks, including her own, for their "glorious" coverage of the Iraqi war and a lack of focus on international news overall.
In a speech Thursday at Kansas State University, she also attacked NBC News for hiring right-wing radio talk-show host Michael Savage to do a show on MSNBC. Savage recently called Banfield a "slut" after her reports portraying the radical Arab point of view. [...]
Banfield, who hosted an unsuccessful talk show on MSNBC last year and is now reporting for both MSNBC and NBC News, criticized the networks for showing a bloodless war that gave a skewed picture which glossed over the horrors of battle. She did not report from Iraq during the war, but has been stationed overseas in the past.
"It was a glorious and wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news," she said at the college's annual Landon Lecture in Manhattan. "But it wasn't journalism because I'm not so sure we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war ... because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successfully terrific endeavor."
What was wrong with the coverage?
"You did not see where those bullets landed. You didn't see what happened when the mortars landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me," Banfield said.
She ripped NBC for putting Savage on the air saying, "He was so taken aback by my daring to speak to martyrs ... for being prepared to sacrifice themselves, he chose to label me a slut on the air, and that's not all, as a porn star and an accessory to the murder of Jewish children. These are the ramifications for simply bringing the message in the Arab world."
The first annual CGD/FP Commitment to Development Index (CDI), created by the Center for Global Development and FOREIGN POLICY magazine, ranks some of the world's richest nations according to how much their policies help or hinder the economic and social development of poor countries. The CDI looks beyond mere foreign aid flows to encompass trade, environmental, investment, migration, and peacekeeping policies. In this inaugural edition of the index, the CDI ranks 21 nations: Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the United States, and most of Western Europe.
In ranking these countries' commitment to development, the CDI rewards generous aid giving, hospitable immigration policies, sizable contributions to peacekeeping operations, and hefty foreign direct investment in developing countries. The index penalizes financial assistance to corrupt regime, obstruction of imports from developing countries, and policies that harm shared environmental resources. Although the governments and leaders of poor nations are themselves ultimately responsible for responding to the many challenges of development, rich countries can and should change their policies to spur economic growth and social development in poorer nations. The CDI highlights and ranks the rich countries' policies themselves, not their final impact. This approach emphasizes what each rich country-regardless of size and reach-can do to improve opportunities for development throughout the world.
The results of the first annual CDI cast traditional assumptions about the most development-friendly countries in a new, unexpected light. For example, the two countries providing the highest absolute amounts of foreign aid to the developing world-Japan and the United States-bring up the rear in the index. Japan ranks last overall, with low marks in migration and aid. The United States ranks high in trade policy but finishes second to last overall due to particularly poor performances in environmental policy and contributions to peacekeeping. By contrast, the Netherlands emerges as the top-ranked nation in the index, thanks to its strong performance in aid, trade, investment, and environmental policies. Two other small countries, Denmark and Portugal, follow in second and third place, respectively. Norway, which is usually regarded as a model global citizen and a force for peace worldwide, comes in a disappointing 10th, mainly due to its poor trade performance. And though New Zealand is not noted for its particularly generous aid giving, that country finishes fourth overall thanks to a strong showing in migration and peacekeeping policies.
Last year, John Judis and I published a book entitled The Emerging Democratic Majority, which argued that a series of economic, demographic, and ideological changes was laying the basis for a new Democratic majority that would materialize by decade's end--not certainly, we argued, but very probably as long as the Democratic Party put forth decent political leadership to challenge the dominant, but dwindling, current Republican majority.
Our book arrived in stores last September. Two months later, in the midterm elections, the Republicans surprised nearly everyone by winning control of the Senate and further solidifying their majority in the House, unifying Republican control of the federal government for only the second time in half a century. Needless to say, this wasn't my ideal outcome. In the annals of publishing, this wasn't quite so unfortunate as, say, James Glassman's prediction of a 36,000 point Dow just before the 2000 stock market crash, but it still evoked a fair amount of understandable ribbing and forced me to think hard about our thesis. So after the election, I pored over survey data, county-by-county voting returns, and a great deal of underlying demographic data and thought long and hard about what the data showed. And as a result, I've decided that ... we're still right!
Western Massachusetts, 1800: much of this territory across the state from Boston is isolated homesteads, and the daily symphony is hooting owls and barking foxes. There is music, of course, here and there; wherever you find humanity, you find music.
But in the newly minted US, music is mainly a matter of a jig or a reel from a fiddler at a dance - and, above all, of hymns in church. By 1900, those same areas of Massachusetts will be dotted with farms and villages, and not far away will reside a symphony orchestra.
The saga of American music in the 19th century is a tale of outsized personalities, showdowns and rampant can-doism. The American myth has much to do with raising yourself by your own bootstraps, and that is what American music did in the 19th century: beginning with mostly amateur fiddlers, fifers and bawling congregations, ending with some of the best orchestras and opera houses anywhere.
It was founding father John Adams who put the matter with his usual farsightedness: "My duty is to study the science of government that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and science... to give their children a right to study philosophy, painting, poetry, music, architecture, sculpture." That is, on the whole, what happened - and on Adams's timetable, too.
Last week's calls for the ouster of Republican Sen. Rick Santorum from the GOP leadership after his remarks linking homosexual acts to polygamy, bigamy and incest seem to have fallen on deaf ears. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist defended Santorum, and, on Friday, Ari Fleischer said President Bush thought Santorum was an "inclusive man." Conservatives have started alleging a political motive behind the story. Late last week, Robert Novak reported that the AP reporter who interviewed Santorum, Laura Jakes Jordan, is married to Jim Jordan, campaign manager for Sen. John Kerry's Democratic presidential campaign.
"Jordan herself is pretty suspect," said Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga. Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post reports that "Jim Jordan says he didn't know 'with any specificity' what Santorum had told his wife and (said) that Kerry was one of several Democrats who issued statements at the request of the Hotline political digest. "Even by the usual standards of the right-wing attack machine," Jim Jordan said, "this is just stupid, vicious and sexist."
Democratic candidates, meanwhile, were generally hitting home runs on the gay-rights groups scorecards. Howard Dean, who signed legislation legalizing civil unions for same sex couples in Vermont, has been working the gay and lesbian activist network heavily during the early phases of the campaign. Six of the nine Democratic presidential candidates - Gephardt, Kerry, Braun, Kucinich, Sharpton and Dean - support civil unions.
While the other three Democratic candidates - Lieberman, Edwards and Graham - "stopped short of endorsing them," none has opposed them. Lieberman and Edwards say this should be left up to individual states, and Graham said that the issue "needs more study."
All nine Democrats support benefits for domestic partners, while President Bush opposes them. Civil unions are controversial among the public, with Democrats generally supportive and Republicans opposed. Republican pollster Whit Ayres told the Boston Globe that favoring civil unions could hurt a Democratic candidate in the general election. "The dividing line between the blue states and the red states was primarily a cultural dividing line rather than an economic one. The whole issue of civil unions reinforces the differences between the parties. It seals the deal in the South" for the Republicans, Ayres said
For years now, one small branch of science has been chipping away at the foundations of religious belief by proposing that "otherworldly" experiences are nothing more than the inner workings of the human brain. Many neuroscientists claim they can locate and explain brain functions that produce everything from religious visions to sensations of bliss, timelessness or union with a higher power.
These claims have been strengthened by the work of the Canadian neuropsychologist Dr Michael Persinger. By stimulating the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, Persinger has been able to induce in hundreds of subjects a "sensed presence" only the subjects themselves are aware of. This presence, Persinger suggests, may be described as Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Muhammad or the Sky Spirit - depending on the name the subject's culture has trained him or her to use.
"Neurotheology", as this line of inquiry has been dubbed, has its critics. Some say it fails to distinguish between experiences that contain a moral or spiritual dimension (such as visions of God) from those that don't (such as ghostly perceptions). Others point out that none of this research can ever establish whether our brains have been designed to apprehend religious experiences or whether these are simply the by-product of bad wiring. [...]
The jury is still out on whether such religious experiences are mere delusions and whether God might be nothing more than a hallucination. But the argument for both has just become a lot more interesting.
Palestinian Prime Minister designate Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has told European diplomats he will use his inaugural speech to declare an end to the use of arms to achieve Palestinian national aspirations.
Abu Mazen will be inaugurated after the PLC (Palestinian Legislative Council) approves his government. He told the Europeans, after he reached agreement on the composition of his cabinet last week with Chairman Yasser Arafat, that he would say ending the armed struggle and improving the living conditions of Palestinians are an inseparable part of the road map that would form the basic guidelines of his government. Lifting checkpoints and improving the Palestinian economic situation are essential elements in this, he said.
Abu Mazen told the Europeans all future inputs of money to the PA, whether from donors, Europeans, or Arab countries would go to the PA treasury and would be overseen by Finance Minister Salam Fayyad.
That would meet long-standing European demands made to an unresponsive Arafat for financial transparency in the use of money sent to the PA. It essentially makes the process of donor money usage subject to the same transparency rules Israel laid down for handing over tax money it collects on behalf of the PA.
Joyous crowds in Baghdad celebrated Saddam Hussein's birthday in a brand new way, pasting photos of the former strongman on a donkey as they heaped scorn on his brutal 24-year reign.
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"For the first time in my life, I won't be forced to attend Saddam's birthday ceremonies. He was a dictator, he was nothing but a donkey ruling over Iraq," said Ali, 24.
The young man, speaking in the Sadr city neighborhood formerly known as Saddam city and home to about two million Shiite Muslims, said most Iraqis had been "faking joy on Saddam's birthday each year because we were plain afraid."
"We'll bring the donkey flowers and a cake this afternoon," said Hassan al-Hussein, 27, who helped organize the ceremony here Monday.
Crowds of young boys were clapping their hands in appreciation as a man planted a banner and a colorful plastic tree by the donkey.
"April 28, it's your birthday you loser!" read the sign. Saddam turned 66 on Monday although his whereabouts, if he is even still alive, are unknown.
"We may still prevail with [HUD Secretary Mel] Martinez," says a hopeful RNC staffer. "There is still some time. We'd prefer someone who can excite voters, and McCollum underwhelms. We know that. There are also some concerns about Foley's experience and ability to run a statewide campaign." Foley, though, has been raising money at a decent clip, and has been lining up support across the state.
The Republicans are pressing for a strong candidate because they expect that Bob Graham will not seek re-election, instead focusing his money and time on a presidential bid. Harris, who ran for the House after being recruited by the White House, would be an attractive candidate and, with statewide office experience, would have the name recognition and money connections to make a race of things.
"She was tabbed a star the first day she arrived in Washington in January, and she hasn't done anything to change anyone's mind," says the RNC staffer. House leadership is said to be impressed with Harris's abilities and plans to put her out to represent the party during the economic stimulus package fight to see how she handles the press attention.
Harris has not indicated she would run for the Senate, although if the White House asked, she probably wouldn't turn the offer down.
BURR CAROLINA
North Carolina Rep. Richard Burr pulled in more than $700,000 at a fundraiser last week attended by Karl Rove. According to Burr insiders, he expects to have more than $10 million in the bank for the general election in 2004, whether it is against sitting Sen. John Edwards or another Democratic challenger.
Burr has surprised Democrats down south with his fundraising momentum, and even Edwards appears to have noticed. He remains unsure about whether he should empty his Senate campaign account, which has more than $2 million in it. "He still may run for his seat. He hasn't said he won't," says an Edwards Senate staffer. "We're proceeding as though he will be elected to a second term."
Stealth drones, G.P.S.-guided smart munitions that hit precisely where aimed; antitank bombs that guide themselves; space-relayed data links that allow individual squad leaders to know exactly where American and opposition forces are during battle--the United States military rolled out all this advanced technology, and more, in its lightning conquest of Iraq. No other military is even close to the United States. The American military is now the strongest the world has ever known, both in absolute terms and relative to other nations; stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the height of Roman power. For years to come, no other nation is likely even to try to rival American might.
Which means: the global arms race is over, with the United States the undisputed heavyweight champion. Other nations are not even trying to match American armed force, because they are so far behind they have no chance of catching up. The great-powers arms race, in progress for centuries, has ended with the rest of the world conceding triumph to the United States.
Now only a nuclear state, like, perhaps, North Korea, has any military leverage against the winner.
Paradoxically, the runaway American victory in the conventional arms race might inspire a new round of proliferation of atomic weapons. With no hope of matching the United States plane for plane, more countries may seek atomic weapons to gain deterrence.
North Korea might have been moved last week to declare that it has an atomic bomb by the knowledge that it has no hope of resisting American conventional power. If it becomes generally believed that possession of even a few nuclear munitions is enough to render North Korea immune from American military force, other nations--Iran is an obvious next candidate--may place renewed emphasis on building them. [...]
The American edge does not render its forces invincible: the expensive Apache attack helicopter, for example, fared poorly against routine small-arms fire in Iraq. More important, overwhelming power hardly insures that the United States will get its way in world affairs. Force is just one aspect of international relations, while experience has shown that military power can solve only military problems, not political ones.
North Korea now stares into the barrel of the strongest military ever assembled, and yet may be able to defy the United States, owing to nuclear deterrence. As the global arms race ends with the United States so far ahead no other nation even tries to be America's rival, the result may be a world in which Washington has historically unparalleled power, but often cannot use it.
It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings. ... Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things, which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it. Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves. ... Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley says it "might not be difficult" to get the Senate to approve a $450 billion tax cut but that it will be hard to get the full $550 billion tax cut President Bush is seeking.
Mr. Grassley, Iowa Republican, who earlier pushed a $350 billion tax-cut compromise through the Senate after failing to get more than 48 votes for the president's higher proposal, said yesterday on "Fox News Sunday" that there "will be some attempt" to go above the $350 billion figure by closing corporate tax loopholes and cutting spending.
"I think [it will be] a little bit above, hopefully, quite a bit above [$350 billion], but I can't tell you what that will be right now," Mr. Grassley said.
"I can say flat out it's going to be difficult to get to $550 [billion]. It might not be difficult to get to $425 billion or $450 billion, but, remember, it's got to be dollar-for-dollar" offsets, he said, speaking of a Senate agreement that tax cuts of more than $350 billion be matched by spending reductions.
But Sen. George V. Voinovich, Ohio Republican, who voted for the budget resolution only after the president's tax cut was reduced to $350 billion, says he believes that $350 billion is the "responsible" amount.
Mr. Voinovich, interviewed on NBC's "Meet the Press," called the president's request for a $550 billion tax cut "fiscally irresponsible, with the deficits we're confronting" and uncertainty about the cost of the war in Iraq.
"We need a shot in the arm of the economy, but we don't need to shoot ourselves in the foot by increasing the deficit," he said.
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Mr. Voinovich and Sen. Olympia J. Snowe, Maine Republican, both voted to reduce the Bush tax cut to $350 billion. They initially said they would support efforts to increase the tax cut only if they were accompanied by spending offsets.
Imagine a school where 98 per cent of pupils, not one of whom has been selected by academic ability, gained five or more A to C passes at GCSE. With the average school managing to achieve these grades with only 52 per cent of pupils, you?d think the school must be doing something right and it would be worth replicating. There is such a school, in Gateshead. And there are plans to open a sister school in Middlesbrough, as well as the hope of others in Doncaster, Leeds, Newcastle, Sunderland and Hull.
Wonderful news. The people behind it--and the man who has made it possible by donating millions of pounds of his own money to help children once condemned to some of the worst schools in the country--should be lauded as heroes.
Except that to many in the liberal education establishment, they are not heroes but villains. The man who funds the school is blind, as are some of the teachers. To some in the local education authority, in neighbouring schools and in the media it?s simply beyond the pale having blind people involved in the education of children. They might, you see, somehow pass on their blindness.
It?s foul, isn?t it--and quite astonishingly stupid--that there should be such prejudice? Like most prejudice, it?s not only baseless, it?s self-defeating. The way the blind people run the school brings only positive benefits to the pupils, but that counts for nothing in the face of bigotry.
Oh, sorry. Did I say they were blind? Scrub that. I meant they are Christian. The school with a 98 per cent pass rate is Emmanuel College in Gateshead, and the man who has given millions to it, and wants to repeat his munificence elsewhere, is Sir Peter Vardy, who is--ugh, how revolting--an evangelical Christian, as are--excuse me while I hold my nose--some of the teachers.
Because they are Christians who believe in creationism, and the literal truth of the Bible, they are, it seems, unfit to teach children, lest they infect them with their foul ideas.
Tony Blair has issued a direct challenge to France's Jacques Chirac over the future of the transatlantic relationship by warning that the French president's vision of Europe as a rival to the US is dangerously destabilising.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Financial Times, the prime minister foreshadows a continuing Anglo-French struggle about Europe's relationship with Washington. Mr Blair seeks to keep alive the prospect of British entry to the euro but he disavows any personal ambition to become president of the European Union.
Though his personal relationship with Mr Chirac has improved since the bitter row over France's veto of a second United Nations resolution, Mr Blair is clear that the strategic divide that opened over Iraq has not been bridged.
Meanwhile a new MORI poll for the FT reveals that 55 per cent of Britons regard France as the UK's least reliable ally, while 73 per cent view the US as the country's most reliable.
Tony Blair has vowed to defy a groundswell of opposition from his party and the unions in order to "redraw" the welfare state with his radical programme of public service reform.
The prime minister told the Financial Times that the government had "got to opt for the radical, not the quiet life".
Insisting that he is "not going to depart from the path of reform", he says: "What we have got to do is fundamentally to redraw the way the 1945 welfare state settlement is implemented, and we have got to do it for health, for education, for the employment and labour markets, and actually in the longer term for pensions too."
Mr Blair makes clear that victory in Iraq has emboldened him to take on leftwing critics of his plans to give the best hospitals, schools and universities more money and freedom from state control.
Despite the unprecedented revolt of 139 Labour MPs opposed to military action in Iraq, Mr Blair is to risk a renewed clash with the left by ruling out any concessions on public service reform and pledging to "continue opening up" the NHS by "injecting into it the spirit of enterprise and initiative and innovation".
"I will do what is necessary to carry through the programme, yes . . . If the Labour party were to back away from public service reform, we would deal a heavy blow to public services," he said.
More than 100 Labour backbenchers could vote next month against foundation hospitals, which are to be freed from Whitehall control and allowed to borrow more money.
Mr Blair also opens a fresh front in the war of words with trade unions, dismissing threatened teachers' strikes as "NUT nonsense". Faced with a continuing pay dispute between the government and the firefighters, he insists: "We will not give in in any shape or form to any resurgent trade union militancy."
Chanting "Saddam no, Bush yes," some 200 Iraqi prisoners of war were let go Sunday at the coalition's main internment camp in the desert near the southern port of Umm Qasr.
The men, many of them barefooted, shook hands with the American soldiers guarding the camp before boarding buses and trucks to be driven to nearby Basra, southern Iraq's largest city.
Their departure brought to 700 the number of POWs released since Friday, said Maj. Stacy Garrity of the U.S. Army's 800th Military Police Brigade, which runs the camp. Around 5,800 more prisoners, including some from Jordan and Syria, await screening and possible release, she said.
"Probably half of the camp will be gone in the next week and a half," said Garrity, who is from Athens, Pa.
Wearing a towel on his head as protection from the scorching heat and blowing sand, one smiling POW, Mahdi Saleh, told The Associated Press: "My mother will die when she sees me."
It may take a while. Once in Basra, the penniless Saleh will have to find transportation home to Mosul, a city some 500 miles away in northern Iraq.
Saleh, a junior Iraqi army officer who is the father of four, said he was taken prisoner at the Qadisiya Dam at the beginning of the war that toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein.
"I gave orders to my five men not to fight and we surrendered," he said, his eyes red from the sand. "Americans were coming for our own good. ... What has Saddam done for us? I'm 30 and I haven't enjoyed life -- no justice, no piece of land, no car."
A few days before Pesach, Israel's prime minister gave the country's citizens the finest of holiday gifts: hope. Predictably, some local commentators - who tend to become excited at every new statement by every Arab despot who rearticulates his call for Israel's annihilation - were quick to dismiss what the prime minister of Israel said. Predictably, some local commentators - who are ready to adopt and embrace every deceptive formula adduced by the Palestinians - were quick to reach the conclusion that Ariel Sharon is once again being deceptive. However, the majority of Israel's citizens, in common with the majority of the world's observers, read the prime minister's remarks as they should be read: cautiously but with interest; suspiciously but with hope.
Ariel Sharon has earned the suspicious attitude people have toward him honestly. On countless occasions during the 50 years in which he has taken an active part in forging Israel's fate, he has behaved with a cleverness that borders on craftiness. His ability to equivocate has led him to the greatest of achievements and the harshest of debacles. However, even people who did not see the expression on the face of the old fighter when he said what he did about Beit El and Shiloh could discern that this was no hollow statement. Even those who did not hear the tone of voice of the master of the settlement project when he took leave of the terraced valleys of the land of the tribe of Benjamin could understand that this was not just another stratagem. Something has happened to Ariel Sharon. The guile is the same guile but the discourse is new.
No, Sharon has not moved to the left. But he has internalized a large part of the left's arguments about the futility of the occupation. No, Sharon has not become Yitzhak Rabin. But he feels the same weighty generational responsibility that Rabin felt in the early 1990s. No, Sharon does not accept the map put forward by Ehud Barak - to him, it was and remains a suicide map - but he is well aware of the historical and strategic context within which Barak acted.
"This is a silent coup," a top Palestinian Authority official in Ramallah said shortly after an agreement was reached between PA Chairman Yasser Arafat and Prime Minister-designate Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) over the composition of a new cabinet.
Efforts to replace Arafat or sideline him started shortly after Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield last spring. Abbas and a handful of PA officials seized the opportunity provided by Arafat's being under siege in his Ramallah compound and held a series of closed-door meetings to discuss the new situation resulting from the IDF's reoccupation of the West Bank.
Arafat aides described the gathering as a coup d' tat. One of the alleged conspirators, former cabinet minister Nabil Amr, was the target of a shooting attack on his home. Abbas, who understood the message, hastily left the West Bank.
Almost a year later, Abbas has made a comeback that in effect turns him into the new leader of the Palestinian people.
The consensus in Ramallah Wednesday was that the biggest loser in the cabinet crisis was Arafat, who was forced to relinquish his grip over the dozen
or so security forces that he helped establish since the Olso process began.
Last year Arafat, also under immense pressure from the US and EU, reluctantly agreed to cede control exclusive control over the PA's finances by naming Salaam Fayad as finance minister.
Fayad has since gone a long way in reorganizing the PA's finances. He has even set aside a modest budget for the president's office, depriving Arafat of control over the millions of dollars donated by the US and EU.
Last month, international pressure forced Arafat to end his 40-year autocratic rule and to accept the idea of sharing power with a prime minister.
The power struggle between Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) can be regarded as another stage in the democratization of Palestinian political life. There was no violence between the two competing for positions of power. There were elements of typical leadership struggles in which a senior leader (Arafat) doesn't want to cede power.
In neighboring Arab countries, one practically doesn't see relatively restrained, publicly reported power struggles for the leadership as took place in the Palestinian Authority in the last two weeks. Some of those states are kingdoms but even among the republics a new form of government, "a republican kingdom," has evolved, meaning a republic that is ruled by heirs, as in a monarchy.
The best known example is Syria, where Hafez Assad left the regime to his son Bashar. The same system was supposed to take place in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and the political gossip in the Arab world speculates that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is grooming his son for the presidency. Political scientists have even come up with an Arabic word for it, "Jamalochia," combining jamariya (republic) with monarchy. Quite a few Palestinians say that if Arafat had a son, he would have been the candidate to replace him.
Despite the publicity given to the power struggle between Arafat and Abu Mazen, most of the struggle actually took place in secret. Most of the reports about what has going on in the various meetings were quite limited in scope, and there was limited coverage of the events in the Arab and international press, while the Palestinian press practically ignored it and published very few and mostly partial items about it. The Palestinian political culture prefers to keep such matters modest. The rival camps also made, relatively speaking, very little use of the media.
There are major differences between the two men. There was the senior leader, Arafat, the "founding father" of Palestinian nationalism, known popularly by a host of adoring names. More than anything, he is a symbol of the struggle, embodying and personifying the national aspirations. When he arrived in Gaza in 1994 to build the PA, there were those who wrote in the Palestinian press, "The sun of Arafat is shining down on the homeland." Arafat is the man without a private life, who lives in his office, surrounded by his loyalists and without a normal family life. Everything is for the Palestinian cause.
On the other side is Abu Mazen, the complete opposite. Introverted, without a band of loyalists, rarely consults, a man of no glamour and nearly without any of the ambitions that usually turns someone into Number 1. He has private business affairs and a solid family life, though most of the family is overseas.
It's not easy to draw a portrait of a refugee, because by definition, a refugee changes according to where he is. Mahmoud Abbas, a.k.a. Abu Mazen, who is about to become the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, is first of all a refugee and then a pragmatist. Abu Mazen--whose first-born son, Mazen, an engineer, died a year ago at the age of 42 in Qatar of a heart ailment - has gone through many places in the course of his 68 years. Like every refugee, Abu Mazen also carries his birthplace, Safed, in his memory. As a pragmatist, though, he knows where to draw the line that separates nostalgia, which attracts him to the city, and reality, which prevents him from even visiting it.
The status of refugee is an important biographical detail in the life history of a Palestinian politician, but pragmatism can define him as a Palestinian leader. Like every refugee, Abu Mazen has many stations in his life: Damascus, where he fled with his family, studied at the university (law) and taught in elementary school; Moscow, where he submitted his doctoral thesis, which dealt with the Holocaust, and more specifically with the connection between Nazism and Zionism; Tunis, where he resided as one of the leaders of Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization; Qatar, where his family ran its business; and Abu Dhabi, where his daughter-in-law and his grandson live today.
Abu Mazen continues to travel between Gaza and Ramallah, in both of which he has homes, as befits the divided character of the state he is going to administer, and in addition, he has a house in Morocco, for the sake of the security that a refugee searches for all his life
In an ideal world, the former Gazan chief of the Preventive Security Service would be sitting (once again) in an Israeli prison. But Israelis hope that Muhammad Dahlan's designation as the state minister for security affairs will help stem Palestinian terrorism.
Prime Minister-designate Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) had originally sought to install Dahlan as his interior minister to take charge of the PA security forces and rein in Palestinian violence. However, Dahlan's newly crafted position is said to give him similar powers.
"After the series of bombings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in 1996, Dahlan was very effective in fighting Hamas and its infrastructure," said Uri Savir,
former Foreign Ministry director-general and current head of the Peres Center for Peace.
"I am quite sure that Abu Mazen has an interest in ending terrorism and violence and the interior minister was a key post for doing that," Savir told The Jerusalem Post. "I believe that Dahlan and Abu Mazen have a shared understanding on security."
Dahlan resigned as head of the Gaza PSS in July 2002 with the hopes of becoming interior minister a move which instead landed him a job as Arafat's national security adviser. Last October, he quit that post as well, taking the opportunity to criticize the use of arms by Palestinians during the so-called Aksa intifada.
The London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat reported Dahlan saying that, after September 11, "we should have turned it into a popular intifada and stopped the armed activity, but we didn't, because we don't have the courage, as a leadership, to do so."
Dahlan also criticized the "extremism" of the Palestinian political position, noting by contrast that prime minister David Ben-Gurion had accepted UN Resolution 181 in 1947, even though it did not include the Old City of Jerusalem within the boundaries of the Jewish state.
An East Jerusalem journalist, asked last night who won, replied: "Neither Arafat nor Abu Mazen. The Americans won."
It's very possible that answer is an accurate reflection of Palestinian public opinion, which did not seem bothered by the struggle of the titans, Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), at the top over the past few weeks.
The Palestinian street witnessed powerful international forces, led by the United States, using enormous pressure to see Abu Mazen made prime minister, with Mohammed Dahlan in charge of security. The Americans brought in the Europeans and their loyalists in the Arab world for the purpose, headed by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has a lot of influence over Arafat and his people, and they managed to dictate the composition of the government to the Palestinians.
There was a distinct feeling of deja vu from 1994 in the air this week. Back then, Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak saved the international community from embarrassment by physically forcing Yasser Arafat to sign the Gaza-Jericho agreement on live television. This week, Mubarak sent the commander of his intelligence service to repeat the performance. General Omar Sulieman came to Ramallah on Tuesday and literally forced Arafat to meet with his deputy, Dr. Mahmoud Abbas, and accept Abbas's cabinet.
As in 1994, the US and Europe heaved a collective sigh of relief at Egypt's manhandling of Arafat. The question is whether Arafat's seeming capitulation now will prove as fraudulent as his behavior then.
When last June US President George W. Bush called on the Palestinian people to reject the regime of PLO chief Arafat and to elect leaders "not compromised by terror," he underscored the necessity of a complete overhaul of the way the Palestinians perceive their national identity. No longer could the Palestinians conceive of their nationalism as something that must necessarily supplant Jewish nationalism in order to reach fruition. Rather, a new group of leaders was called on to rise up who would understand that the realization of Palestinian aspirations can come about only after the Palestinians accept Israel's right to exist as the Jewish state.
Today, responding to British pressure, the Bush administration stands poised to preside over new talks between the Israeli government and the PLO under the nascent leadership of Abbas, Arafat's deputy of four decades. The announced aim of these talks is the speedy establishment of a Palestinian state.
But before any such talks begin it is vital that all concerned parties, but especially Israel, pause a moment and consider the reason for Oslo's abject failure.
County, state and national Republican leaders this weekend sought to secure wins for the next GOP candidates for president, U.S. Senate and governor in part by reaching out to women candidates and minority voters.
Along the way, some of New York's rising Republican stars often named among contenders for statewide office in the Democrat-dominated state networked with county party leaders, a critical step for party endorsement. The closed-door Republican conference in Cooperstown Saturday and Sunday was also a strategy session on how to give New York's important 29 electoral votes usually a slam dunk for Democrats to Republican President Bush in his likely re-election campaign next year.
``I know that President Bush is going to win our state next year,'' state Republican Chairman Alexander Treadwell said Sunday. ``He'll be the first Republican presidential candidate to carry New York since Ronald Reagan did it twice.''
Treadwell introduced the Republican rising stars invited to the conference: state Sen. Michael Balboni of Long Island, state Secretary of State Randy Daniels, Erie County Executive Joel Giambra, state Sen. Raymond Meier of Oneida County, and U.S. Rep. John Sweeney. They met with county leaders during a reception at the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown.
Last week the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute found Bush's approval rating among New Yorkers rising to 58 percent from 50 percent in February before the war in Iraq. About 91 percent of Republicans polled approved of Bush, along with 38 percent of the Democrats. At the same time, however, Republican Gov. George Pataki's approval ratings sunk to the lowest in seven years, dragged down by another late state budget.
The party plans to stump for Bush in part from two substantial bully pulpits: the governor's office and the New York City mayor's office, each held for the last three terms by Republicans.
"The present circumstances in Iraq creates a historic opportunity for bilateral Iran-Iraq legal ties to be reviewed and reiterated upon," said As'ad Ardalan, an expert in international law who spoke here concerning the legal aspects of the war in Iraq.
In an exclusive interview with `Iran News' published Sunday, Ardalan said: "We should do our utmost to receive the just compensation our country is owed by Iraq as a result of the brutal aggression suffered by this nation in the hands of Saddam Hussein."
Now that the war is over, he said Iran can play an important role in Iraq's reconstruction. Iran would clearly benefit from a democratic, peaceful and secure neighbor such as Iraq, he added.
"Iraq will forever be our neighbor and should try to develop amicable relations with that country," he said.
He maintained that a long-term military administration of Iraq by the US is highly unlikely, adding that the aim of General Jay Garner's administration is to increase pressure on Iraqi forces opposed to Saddam to quickly form a new government that is in line with American interests.
Ardalan further said that the immediate objectives of any US-installed interim administration in Iraq would be the deBaathification of Iraq, the arrest of Saddam's henchmen, signing of lucrative reconstruction and oil contracts with powerful US firms without resort to international tenders and, last but not least, trying to frighten Iraq's neighbors by flexing the American military towards the neighborhood.
On the anti-American protests in Iraq over the past few days, the jurist said: "I doubt very much that these protests will result in a crisis between the Iraqi nation and the US. Moreover, the Bush administration is weary of confrontation with the people of that country since such a development would give ammunition to certain groups and organizations to take advantage of the situation. If such incidents persist, Iraq is sure to become an unstable and insecure place for the Americans."
[I]srael must face facts. Today there is a growing minority of non-Jews who live within the Israeli community. We are full members of this society and yet we are still denied some very basic human rights. My two sons, for instance, can serve in the army, they can pay taxes, but they cannot marry here, nor can they be buried alongside Jewish friends or partners. Like me, they will spend their lives listening to constant sniping remarks by politicians and officials who feel they are second class citizens, the dirty water that slipped in on a wave of immigration. They too may have to listen to jokes about goys, sarcastic comments about their parental heritage, and have doubts raised about their Israeli identity.It's been common in recent months to talk about how defeating Saddam is the easy part, building a healthy civil society in Iraq the hard part. This, as we've mentioned, seems idiotic to us: the years of Saddam's repression and the killing we've wreaked and sustained in twelve years of war in Iraq have been more difficult for all than even the messiest peace will be.
This, however, is a mistake. Today there are 50,000 Russian immigrants living in Israel who identify themselves as Christian, and another 270,000 who are not Jewish according to halakha. While some of them have given up and left Israel, in a few cases even seeking asylum in England on the grounds of religious persecution, the rest are here to stay. Israel must make a decision. Does it want yet another alienated minority, or does it want full citizens who feel a real bond to their country?
In the wake of all this, it is hard to understand why the Orthodox community is so determined to make conversion such an unpleasant process. Every year thousands apply to convert, but only a small number make it through. Assimilation today is a major problem for diaspora Jews. Experts are beginning to realize that it is also a growing problem within Israel. At a recent conference, Dr. Asher Cohen, of Bar-Ilan University's Institute for the Study of Assimilation, reported that the present rate of intermarriage in Israel stands at 10 percent, and is rising. Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, head of the Kibbutz Hadati Yeshiva, also told participants that rabbis who ease the conversion process and promote mass conversion, are actually preserving Judaism.
Instead of welcoming new converts, however, Judaism shows them its worst face. Potential converts are too often met with narrow-mindedness, corruption, and distrust. While some people undertake conversion with a full heart, many others view it as a game in which you cheat and lie to win.
Had I been met with understanding, then perhaps I would be Jewish now, and so would my two children. For Israel, it was a missed opportunity. Instead of teaching me to respect the religion, I learned instead to despise its protagonists. My children are growing up as Israelis. Their overwhelming identification is as Jews. But they also celebrate Christmas and Easter. If they ever decide they want to convert, I will support them, but there's no doubt my experiences will shape what I tell them about the Orthodox religion.
Today, I have no real idea of what it will mean to bring up two non-Jewish children in Israel. Perhaps as they get older they will be bullied by classmates, perhaps they will be accepted unquestioningly, perhaps they will feel they do not belong. Much depends on where we live and where they go to school. Much also depends on how Israel develops once the war with the Palestinians is finally concluded.
In the last few years, I have noticed a change in Israel's character, a growing maturity and tolerance within the secular population. Israelis today are more willing to accept people who are different. Certainly things for me have changed. I now have a warm relationship with my parents-in-law, whom I love dearly, and people rarely ask if I'm Jewish.
Despite that, however, I still feel like an outsider. At Christmas I bring out my tree and decorate the house, but inside I feel it's almost an act of defiance. A few years ago, a co-worker arrived in the office fuming because hotels in Jerusalem had put up Christmas trees. I told her that I put up a tree every year. "Well I hope you shut your curtains," she said bitterly. "It's not right that people in your neighborhood should have to see it. When you live here you should respect our beliefs." I was deeply distressed by her prejudice, but the awful truth is that I really have begun to feel that my religion should be hidden away behind curtains.
Just a few weeks ago I had another reminder. I was writing an article on Tekes, a new alternative Israeli organization set up to provide secular ceremonies for Jews who cannot, or do not want to, undergo an Orthodox ceremony. I suggested to the founder that I might also write up the article for a newspaper here. He hesitated for a few moments, and then said: "No offense, but I think it would be better if a Jew wrote the story."
Some of America's prickliest Arab allies, notably Saudi Arabia, gave much more support for the war in Iraq than was admitted in public, it was disclosed yesterday.
Officially Saudi rulers merely permitted the US air force to use a command and control centre at Prince Sultan air base and allowed American aircraft
to enforce the "no-fly" zone over southern Iraq. In reality, official sources told the Washington Post, at least 10,000 US troops passed through Saudi Arabia.
US special forces, ostensibly on standby for search-and-rescue operations, were allowed to cross from northern Saudi Arabia into western Iraq, where they seized airfields and prevented any Iraqi missile attacks on Israel.
Planes officially enforcing the no-fly zones carried out extensive attacks on air defence systems and Riyadh allowed overflights by fighter planes and cruise missiles from warships in the Gulf and Red Sea.
France colluded with the Iraqi secret service to undermine a Paris conference held by the prominent human rights group Indict, according to documents found in the foreign ministry in Baghdad.
Various documents state that the Iraqis believed the French were doing their utmost to prevent the meeting from going ahead.
Ann Clwyd, the Labour MP who chairs Indict, said last night that she would be demanding an apology from the French government for its behaviour, which she described as "atrocious".
The files, retrieved from the looted and burned foreign ministry by The Telegraph last week, detail the warmth and strength of Iraqi-French ties.
At a midweek news briefing, Sen. Ted Kennedy was doing what he does so well -- laying out the Democratic case on domestic policy, preparing the ground for the debates that will resume now that Congress is back from its Easter recess.
His staff had positioned a chart highlighting the economic problems that Kennedy says have piled up during President Bush's tenure: "2.5 million fewer private-sector jobs; long-term unemployment up by 184 percent; over 2 million more Americans without health insurance . . . retirement savings eroded . . . consumer confidence down . . . a projected $5.6 trillion federal surplus turned into a $4 trillion deficit."
It looked like a script for a TV ad in the 2004 campaign -- good, red-meat stuff, hitting Bush on the economy -- the same kind of attack that sank the president's father in 1992.
In the subsequent question-and-answer session, Kennedy -- who strenuously opposed the United States' taking military action against Iraq -- was asked what he thought now that Saddam Hussein's regime had been routed. "I commend the president on his leadership," he said, "and the men and women of the armed forces."
In that moment, I thought I saw the problem the Democrats face in trying to defeat this President Bush. No one, not even the most partisan of politicians, thinks it prudent to challenge Bush on his strong suit -- leadership.
The reason is obvious. A mid-April poll by Public Opinion Strategies, a respected Republican firm, gave Bush a 68 percent approval score -- 9 points higher than he enjoyed last October, on the eve of the Republicans' midterm election victory. Particularly notable, pollster Bill McInturff told me, were the reasons people gave for their support.
Only 4 percent of those approving said it was because of Bush's economic policies. Only 13 percent said it was because he had prevented additional attacks. Even though the poll was taken days after the fall of Baghdad, only 23 percent said it was because of his direction of the war. Fully 52 percent said they approved because of "his general personal strength and sense of leadership."
McInturff told me that he was not surprised. For 18 months, "when you ask people why they support him, they go right past specific policies and focus on those leadership qualities."
It is not just partisan Republicans who make this point. In an early April Gallup-CNN-USA Today poll, 80 percent of those surveyed said they agreed with the statement that Bush "is a strong and decisive leader" -- an all-time high in that survey's measure of this trait.
Nissar Hindawi, a leading figure in Iraq's biological warfare program in the 1980's, says the stories and explanations he and other scientists told the United Nations about the extent of Iraq's efforts to produce poisons and germ weapons "were all lies."
Dr. Hindawi, imprisoned during the final weeks of Saddam Hussein's rule, is now free to talk about his experiences in the program, in which he says he was forced to work from 1986 to 1989 and again sporadically until the mid-1990's. [...]
Dr. Hindawi, 61, is now in the protective custody of the Iraqi opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi. [...]
Some inspectors remain skeptical about whether Dr. Hindawi was really an unwilling participant in the program.
He returned to the program in a different capacity in 1992, when international inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission, or Unscom, were arriving to ensure that Iraqi officials were complying with their country's pledge to give up chemical, germ and nuclear weapons. He said military officials had asked him to tell inspectors that he was the head of a single-cell protein facility. The plant, in fact, had made botulinum toxin and anthrax.
He said he had had no choice but to lie, just as he had no choice but to work in the program. "It was that or else," he said.
Q. Sir, what do you think about the war in Iraq? Is it a justified war?
A. I have trusted all American presidents in my lifetime (starting with Roosevelt) not to send men into battle for cynical or meretricious reasons. Whether this war is justified or not will be, in my mind, a matter of its practical results.
First came the news that officials in Alabama may have to put President Bush on the ballot as a write-in candidate. It turns out Alabama isn't the only state scrambling to figure out what it needs to do to ensure that the president's name will appear on the state ballot next year.
The GOP's unusually late nominating convention -- it does not begin until Aug. 30 -- is the problem. Bush is not scheduled to accept his party's nomination until Sept. 2, 2004. That falls after the deadline for certifying presidential candidates not only in Alabama, but also in California, the District of Columbia and West Virginia. There are bills in the Alabama legislature to move its deadline from Aug. 31 to Sept. 5. But if, for some reason, they don't pass, the president would be forced to run there as a write-in candidate.
In other states, along with the District, the situation is a bit more murky. The D.C. City Council will need to change its Sept. 1 deadline to accommodate the convention, said Alice Miller, executive director of the Board of Elections and Ethics. She declined to speculate on what might happen if that deadline isn't changed. Cindy Smith, an elections official in West Virginia, can probably sympathize. Her state requires candidates to file by Aug. 31. Smith said she does not know of any effort to move that deadline -- and is unsure of what might happen if the president misses it.
But the biggest question may be in California, where election officials plan to begin printing about 15 million ballots almost immediately after its Aug. 26 deadline -- and begin mailing its absentee ballots Sept. 3. A spokeswoman for the secretary of state said she did not know of any effort to move the deadline or how the state might accommodate the Republicans. "It's not clear at this point," Terri Carbaugh said. "It certainly poses a dilemma."
Parents anxiously arranging play dates for their children and schools intent on building social skills might be better off leaving kids more time to play alone, according to new research.
Children develop critical thinking skills when they play on their own, says a study by a Nova Scotia researcher who specializes in what she calls "the forgotten play."
"Play in general is not valued enough, and there is a real stigma to solitary play," says Bronwen Lloyd, whose findings on the cognitive merits of solitary play have just been published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly.
"Parents are bombarded with so much information about what it takes to stimulate their children: They have a play date here, a ballet lesson there, and so on ... In today's fast-paced world, young children also need a time and a place for independent play and solitary endeavours."
Ms. Lloyd observed the play habits of 4- and 5-year-olds in organized child care programs in Halifax and found that functional play, such as climbing and running, and constructive play, such as painting and puzzle-making, were both strongly associated with cognitive thinking skills.
The findings run counter to the traditional notion that active solitary play in particular detracts from cognitive processing and contributes to anti-social behaviour.
Washington has a history of nasty rivalries, with competing camps. There were Aaron Burr people and Alexander Hamilton people; Lincoln people and McClellan people; Bobby people and Lyndon people.
Now, since Newt Gingrich aimed the MOAB of screeds at an already circumscribed Mr. Powell, the capital has been convulsed by the face-off between Defense and State.
There are Rummy people: Mr. Cheney, Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Feith, Bill Kristol, William Safire, Ariel Sharon, Fox News, National Review, The Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the fedayeen of the Defense Policy Board - Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Mr. Gingrich, Ken Adelman - and the fifth column at State, John Bolton and Liz Cheney.
And there are Powell people: Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Bush 41, Ken Duberstein, Richard Armitage, Richard Haass, the Foreign Service, Joe Biden, Bob Woodward, the wet media elite, the planet.
The Bush administration encountered a backlash earlier this month when Secretary of Education Rod Paige was quoted in The Baptist Press news service as saying that he would prefer to have a child in a Christian school, partly because the value system was set. Mr. Paige said that there were too many different values in the public schools to easily arrive at a value consensus.
Mr. Paige was criticized for seeming to diminish the public schools that he is charged with improving. But the problem is that his remarks seemed to attribute moral superiority to Christian schools in a religiously diverse society that includes millions of non-Christians.
Religious chauvinism is clearly driving policies at the Department of Education, which has seemed fixated on religion under Mr. Paige's tenure and seems to believe that the schools would be fine if only students were exposed to more religion and more prayer.
Even more troubling is the Bush administration's battle to create "faith-based" initiatives, which could potentially open a direct line of funding to church-related social programs--while allowing those organizations to proselytize with federal dollars. Congress, particularly the Senate, seems worried about how all this could violate the First Amendment. But the president's indifference to the church-state barrier is especially perplexing at a time when this country faces grave peril from religious fundamentalists abroad who aspire to theocracy.
The imperial impulse arose from a complex of emotions: racial superiority, yes, but also evangelical zeal; profit, perhaps, but also a sincere belief that spreading ''commerce, Christianity and civilization'' was not just in Britain's interest but in the interests of her colonial subjects too.
The contrast with today's ''wannabe'' imperialists in the United States -- call them ''nation-builders'' if you prefer euphemism -- could scarcely be more stark. Five points stand out.
First, not only do the overwhelming majority of Americans have no desire to leave the United States; millions of non-Americans are also eager to join them here. Unlike the United Kingdom a century ago, the United States is an importer of people, with a net immigration rate of 3.5 per 1,000 and a total foreign-born population of 32.5 million (more than 1 in 10 residents of the United States).
Second, when Americans do opt to reside abroad, they tend to stick to the developed world. As of 1999, there were an estimated 3.8 million Americans living abroad. That sounds like a lot. But it is a little more than a tenth the number of the foreign-born population in the United States. And of these expat Americans, almost three-quarters were living in the two other Nafta countries (more than one million in Mexico, 687,700 in Canada) or in Europe (just over a million). Of the 294,000 living in the Middle East, nearly two-thirds were in Israel. A mere 37,500 were in Africa.
Third, whereas British imperial forces were mostly based abroad, most of the American military is normally stationed at home. Even the B-2 Stealth bombers that pounded Serbia into quitting Kosovo in 1999 were flying out of Knob Noster, Mo. And it's worth remembering that 40 percent of American overseas military personnel are located in Western Europe, no fewer than 71,000 of them in Germany. Thus, whereas the British delighted in building barracks in hostile territories precisely in order to subjugate them, Americans today locate a quarter of their overseas troops in what is arguably the world's most pacifist country.
Fourth, when Americans do live abroad they generally don't stay long and don't integrate much, preferring to inhabit Mini Me versions of America, ranging from military bases to five-star ''international'' (read: American) hotels. When I visited Lakenheath air base last year, one minute I was in the middle of rural Cambridgeshire, flat and ineffably English, the next minute, as I passed through the main gate, everything -- right down to the absurdly large soft-drink dispensers -- was unmistakably American.
The fifth and final contrast with the British experience is perhaps the most telling. It is the fact that the products of America's elite educational institutions are the people least likely to head overseas, other than on flying visits and holidays. The Americans who serve the longest tours of duty are the volunteer soldiers, a substantial proportion of whom are African-Americans (12.9 per cent of the population, 25.4 per cent of the Army Reserve). It's just possible that African-Americans will turn out to be the Celts of the American empire, driven overseas by the comparatively poor opportunities at home.
Indeed, if the occupation of Iraq is to be run by the military, then it can hardly fail to create career opportunities for the growing number of African-American officers in the Army. The military's most effective press spokesman during the war, Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, exemplifies the type.
The British, however, were always wary about giving the military too much power in their imperial administration. Their parliamentarians had read enough Roman history to want to keep generals subordinate to civilian governors. The ''brass hats'' were there to inflict the Victorian equivalent of ''shock and awe'' whenever the ''natives'' grew restive. Otherwise, colonial government was a matter for Oxbridge-educated, frock-coated mandarins.
Now, ask yourself in light of this: how many members of Harvard's or Yale's class of 2003 are seriously considering a career in the postwar administration of Iraq? The number is unlikely to be very high. In 1998/99 there were 47,689 undergraduate course registrations at Yale, of which just 335 (less than 1 percent) were for courses in Near Eastern languages and civilizations. There was just one, lone undergraduate senior majoring in the subject (compared with 17 doing film studies). If Samuel Huntington is right and we are witnessing a ''clash of civilizations,'' America's brightest students show remarkably little interest in the civilization of the other side.
Americans and Europeans have an overwhelming common interest in seeing democracy, peace and prosperity spread through the Middle East -- not least, so that Israel is one day physically connected to the West by a patchwork of Islamic or post-Islamic democracies. This means handing back Iraq as soon as possible to the Iraqis and supporting their federal or confederal democracy. Then, and urgently, it means trying to make progress toward secure, viable states of both Israel and Palestine. One unintended consequence of the war on Iraq is that this can no longer wait. The Palestinian question is now, for the Arab and Muslim world -- and for many Europeans -- the litmus test of whether the Bush administration means what it says about liberating and democratizing the Middle East rather than occupying and colonizing it. [...]
At the moment, Europeans and Americans don't even see the threat the same way. During the cold war, Berlin always felt itself to be more directly threatened than New York; now it's the other way round. I have no doubt that the collapse of the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, was the true beginning of the 21st century. The combination of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, whether by rogue states or rogue groups, is one of the greatest new dangers to all free countries. Americans have woken up -- been woken up -- to this in a way that most Europeans have not. Europe has not yet had its 9/11. There is both hypocrisy and an ostrichlike head-in-the-sand quality about much European discussion, or nondiscussion, of these issues. Tony Blair is the exception who proves the rule. Criticizing America, Europeans sometimes are, as Kipling famously put it, ''makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep.''
However, it is not simply that Europeans feel less threatened by Islamic extremism; in other ways, we feel more so. There are now at least 10 million Muslim immigrants living in the European Union, not to mention the more than 5 million who have lived elsewhere in Europe for centuries in places like Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo. European fears that this Muslim population could be radicalized by events in the Middle East are neither unfounded nor ignoble. Over the next decade, Europe will probably take in another 10 million Muslims, plus at least another 60 million if the E.U. delivers on its promise to include Turkey, which the United States has been urging us to do. As the native European population ages, we could soon find that 1 in every 10 Europeans is a Muslim. It is our elemental concern that peaceful, law-abiding Muslims should feel at home in Europe, and in the West more broadly.
Please remember that the democratic politics of Europe have been rocked over the last few years by populist parties that won a large share of the vote essentially on one issue: hostility to immigration. In Europe today that means, especially, Muslim immigration: Moroccans in Spain, Algerians in France, Turks in Germany, Pakistanis in Britain. (I have just bought my newspaper from a Muslim news agent, picked up my cleaning from a Muslim cleaner and collected my prescription from a Muslim pharmacist, all in leafy North Oxford.)
America is much better than Europe at making immigrants of all creeds and colors feel at home. Obviously, it helps that almost everyone in the U.S. is an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants. America also has a capacious, civic national identity, whereas Europe has a patchwork of exclusive, ethnic national identities. Have you ever met anyone who identified himself or herself as a ''Muslim European''? It actually seems easier for religious Muslims to integrate into a religious but pluralist society like the United States than it is for them to integrate into the very secular societies of Europe. So here we can learn from you. [...]
Europeans also tend to have a different analysis of the threat, one that pays more attention to the political causes of Islamist terror and, in particular, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestine is the great symbolic cause of the Arab-Muslim world, repeatedly embraced by Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the whole Arab League and the ''Arab street'' -- hypocritically, perhaps, but nonetheless effectively. Many Europeans feel that giving the Palestinians a viable state could be a bigger contribution to winning the war against terrorism than deposing Saddam Hussein. In this respect, Tony Blair is very much a European. He has extracted from Washington a commitment to revive the ''road map'' for the peace process between Israel and Palestine. I was deeply depressed the other day to hear from a well-placed American political insider, a Democrat, that no real progress on the issue can be expected until after the November 2004 presidential elections. The Bush administration now has to prove him wrong. Perhaps if Bush had not started the war against Iraq, Palestine might just have waited that long; but he did, and so it can't.
At this point, I should mention a charge made by some conservative commentators in the United States. This is that European support for a viable Palestinian state reflects hostility to a viable Israeli state, which in turn reflects Europe's ancestral, almost genetic anti-Semitism. Vicious attacks on synagogues and individual Jews in European cities are rolled into one poisonous European ball with reasoned criticism of both the Sharon government and the Bush administration's outspoken support for it. For a European to criticize Sharon is for him or her to be an anti-Semite. ''What we are seeing,'' wrote Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post last April, ''is pent-up anti-Semitism, the release -- with Israel as the trigger -- of a millennium-old urge that powerfully infected and shaped European history.'' He continued, ''What so offends Europeans is the armed Jew, the Jew who refuses to sustain seven suicide bombings in the seven days of Passover and strikes back.'' It's ''those people'' again, the Europeans.
I have no doubt that there is still anti-Semitism in Europe today. Broadly speaking, it's of three kinds. There's the virulent anti-Semitism of some Arabs living in Europe, a minority within that minority; there's the very nasty anti-Semitism of the old and new far right in some European countries; and there's the residual, mainly verbal anti-Semitism of parts of the wider population. Yet there are also many, many Europeans who are pro-Palestinian without being anti-Israeli, let alone anti-Semitic. Some of them take a grimly realistic view of Yasir Arafat and his weak, corrupt Palestinian Authority.
To tar such reasoned European critics of the policies of Ariel Sharon with blanket charges of anti-Semitism is offensive -- especially to those of us, Jewish or not, for whom the Holocaust remains central to our whole understanding of liberal politics. In particular, many of us understand the whole European project embodied in the European Union as being, at its deepest core, about the post-Holocaust ''never again.'' [...]
A more united Europe and a less arrogant United States should work together with all the peoples of the Middle East to do for them what we did with and for the peoples of Middle Europe during the cold war. This can be our trans-Atlantic project for the next generation. Here's how we put the West together again.
Shall we talk about it?
There is much we don't know about what happened this month at the Baghdad museum, at its National Library and archives, at the Mosul museum and the rest of that country's gutted cultural institutions. Is it merely the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years, as Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, put it? Or should we listen to Eleanor Robson, of All Souls College, Oxford, who said, "You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale"? Nor do we know who did it. Was this a final act of national rape by Saddam loyalists? Was it what Philippe de Montebello, of the Metropolitan Museum, calls the "pure Hollywood" scenario--a clever scheme commissioned in advance by shadowy international art thieves? Was it simple opportunism by an unhinged mob? Or some combination thereof?
Whatever the answers to those questions, none of them can mitigate the pieces of the damning jigsaw puzzle that have emerged with absolute certainty. The Pentagon was repeatedly warned of the possibility of this catastrophe in advance of the war, and some of its officials were on the case. But at the highest levels at the White House, the Pentagon and central command--where the real clout is--no one cared. Just how little they cared was given away by our leaders' own self-incriminating statements after disaster struck. Rather than immediately admit to error or concede the gravity of what had happened on their watch, they all tried to trivialize the significance of the looting. Once that gambit failed, they tried to shirk any responsibility for it.
"What you are seeing is a reaction to oppression," said Ari Fleischer on April 11, arguing that looting, however deplorable, is a way station to "liberty and freedom." If only the Johnson administration had thought of this moral syllogism, it could have rationalized the urban riots that swept America after the assassination of Martin Luther King. "Stuff happens!" said Donald Rumsfeld, who likened the looting to the aftermath of soccer games and joked to the press that the scale of the crime was a trompe l'oeil effect foisted by a TV loop showing "over and over and over . . . the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase." As Jane Waldbaum, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, summed up the defense secretary's response to the tragedy, he "basically shrugged and said, `Boys will be boys.' "
FORMER Iraqi prime minister Tariq Aziz has told American intelligence officials that he has not seen Saddam Hussein since the first night of the war, it was claimed last night.
Aziz, who surrendered to US forces last week, has fuelled speculation that the Iraqi dictator was killed or seriously injured when the bunker in which he was hiding with his sons has hit by cruise missiles.
According to US intelligence sources, the 67-year-old has said he does not know whether Saddam is alive or dead.
However, he has told his captors he presumes the former Iraqi leader was incapacitated as he played no role in coordinating the defence of Baghdad.
The director of the CIA, George Tenet, has reportedly been saying he believes Saddam is dead after being briefed on Aziz?s testimony.
Most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing, which is about 15 percent of the time they spend watching television. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors never get a writing assignment from their history or social studies teachers.
And in most high schools, the extended research paper, once a senior-year rite of passage, has been abandoned because teachers do not have time to grade it anymore.
Those are among the findings of a report issued yesterday by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, an 18-member panel of educators organized by the College Board.
The commission's report asserts that writing is among the most important skills students can learn, that it is the mechanism through which they learn to connect the dots in their knowledge--and that it is now woefully ignored in most American schools.
"Writing, always time-consuming for student and teacher, is today hard-pressed in the American classroom," the report said. "Of the three R's, writing is clearly the most neglected." [...]
The panel found that only about half of the nation's 12th graders report being regularly assigned papers of three or more pages in English class; about 4 in 10 say they never, or hardly ever, get such assignments. Part of the problem is that many high school teachers have 120 to 200 students, and so reading and grading even a weekly one-page paper per student would be a substantial task.
On the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam, only about one in four students in Grades 4, 8 or 12 scored at the proficient level in writing in 1998, the most recent such results available. And only one in a hundred was graded "advanced."
Further, a 2002 study of California college students found that most freshmen could not analyze arguments, synthesize information or write papers that were reasonably free of language errors.
The leader of a prominent U.S.-based animal rights group said she had drawn up a will directing that her flesh be barbecued and her skin used to make leather products in protest at man's ill-treatment of animals.
Ingrid Newkirk, 53, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), said on Thursday she had chosen to donate her body to her organization for use in a variety of startling protests.
Newkirk also suggested her feet be removed and made into umbrella stands similar to those made from elephant feet that she had seen as a child.
"I want to find ways to have my work live on when I'm gone and this has been my first idea. I will make a stir when I am long in the ground," Newkirk told Reuters.
Washington has rarely been adept, or candid, in fostering authentic democracy. Almost nowhere in half a century--from 1950s' CIA coups in Iran, Guatemala and Congo, among other places, to expeditions into the Caribbean, Africa and elsewhere in the 1980s and 1990s--has regime change left a nation freer. Not even Germany and Japan.
Love him or hate him, but at least acknowledge the fact that President Bush has a knack for bringing the most unlikely people together. Could anyone have imagined that Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims - historic foes for centuries - would unite in a Baghdad mosque to oppose US occupation of their land and vow to work hand in hand to remove the infidels from their ancestral ground? Equally impressive, President Bush's Iraq policy has helped millions of Europeans, who often find themselves at odds with each other on the most banal considerations of life, to find their common identity in opposition to the war. [...]
What we are witnessing is historic. Europeans are finding their identity. That is not to say that the millions of people who are beginning to speak as one suddenly identify with the European Union. I doubt whether a single protester sees himself or herself, first and foremost, as a citizen of the EU. While Brussels is far from most people's minds, what unites Europeans is their repudiation of the geopolitics of the 20th century and their eagerness to embrace a new "biosphere politics" in the 21st century.
The telltale signs of the nascent identity are everywhere. Europeans are concerned over global warming and other environmental issues. They support the international criminal court to ensure universal human rights. They favour generous development assistance to the poor in the third world and they back the United Nations as the appropriate forum to settle disputes among nations.
A growing of number of Europeans see the US government openly opposing these things they so ardently care about. And even on what they regard as the most basic questions of morality, such as opposition to capital punishment, they feel that a chasm is growing between their views and the views across the Atlantic. The US refusal to sign the Kyoto accords, the biodiversity treaty and the amended biological weapons convention, its withdrawal from the anti-ballistic-missile treaty and now the US decision to bypass the UN security council and act virtually unilaterally in Iraq have convinced many Europeans that the US is hopelessly locked into a Hobbesian view of the world. Europeans, on the other hand, have had their fill of wars and centuries of conflict. They are in search of Immanuel Kant's vision of universal and perpetual peace, and increasingly they see US policies and objectives as an anathema to the forging of a truly global consciousness.
It is this kind of fundamental difference in perception that has led so many Europeans to conclude that their interests, hopes and vision for the future are diverging from their old friends in America in ways that may be irreparable by diplomacy alone.
Of course, while Europeans, especially the young, are pacifists and champion dialogue over confrontation, the fact is that were it not for the US willingness to maintain and employ military power around the world to keep the peace, warfare between feuding ethnic and political groups and sovereign states might long ago have turned the whole world into the perpetual Hobbesian nightmare so many Europeans loathe.
Senior cabinet ministers at the centre of Tony Blair's war strategy were braced to quit along with the prime minister in the run-up to the Commons vote on Iraq, the Guardian can reveal.
Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, told the Guardian that he intended to resign if the vote went against the government. The home secretary, David Blunkett, also said that cabinet ministers close to Mr Blair would "go down with him". The prime minister revealed last week that he had told his family he might be forced to quit over Iraq.
In an interview with the Guardian as part of a special investigation into the build-up to war, Mr Blunkett recalled: "Everyone believed, in the run-up to that vote, that Tony had put his premiership on the line and those who are very close to him would go down with him. I thought it would be a hit on the government as a whole."
Mr Straw said: "The projected voting figures were very serious ... I knew there would be a point at which Tony would resign and I would resign as well. I told my wife I might well have to go over this. I think Tony assumed that I would go."
The revelations show how perilous the government's position became during the build-up to war. At one point, Labour whips told Mr Blair that up to 200 Labour MPs would vote against the government, and frantic last-minute efforts were made to persuade rebels back on side.
According to one cabinet source, the entire cabinet could technically have been forced to tender their resignation. "If the prime minister resigns, the whole government resigns. Everybody's portfolios and talents would be put into the hands of the new leader."
In the last desperate 24 hours before the vote, the government essentially ground to a halt as the energies of Mr Blair and other leading cabinet figures were devoted to winning over potential rebels.
Mr Straw recalled: "We used every argument, including telling them that this is no longer about what you say to your local paper, this is about whether you want to keep this government in business."
The defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, warned his US counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld, about the possible consequences of the vote. He told the Guardian: "I had a long conversation with him, warning him that if the vote went wrong we might not be able to be there. I did not want him or anyone on the US side not to understand the significance of where we were on the importance of the parliamentary vote. The US came to understand it was about us gambling just about everything in getting this right."
He added: "If we had lost that vote, that would have been it."
Pre-emption is the name of the Bush administration's game, not just abroad but at home. President Bush understands better than any president since Ronald Reagan that the chief executive's chief power is to set the agenda. Bush also understands that this power cannot be banked. Use it or lose it. So he uses it -- and how. Abroad, he launches a pre-emptive invasion. At home, he launches a pre-emptive tax cut.
With the invasion, Bush seeks to pre-empt Saddam Hussein's development of weapons of mass destruction. With the tax cut, he seeks to pre-empt -- well, there is a question. What, exactly, does the tax cut pre-empt? [...]
Congress is scaling back Bush's tax cut to perhaps half of his request. But Bush will almost certainly get a tax cut; the question is only how large. So completely has he dominated the agenda that he wins even if he loses. Maybe the agenda is what he really set out to pre-empt. If so, he has done as well in Washington as in Baghdad.
Bush's bold initiative in Iraq looks irresponsible to his critics because it takes great risks for uncertain benefits. His tax-cutting fits the same mold. There is, however, an important difference. The most destabilizing problem in the geopolitical world right now is the lack of democracy in the Arab world; liberating Iraq will almost by definition be a step in the right direction. The most destabilizing problem in the fiscal world is the high cost of paying pension and health care costs for Baby Boom retirees; cutting taxes, however, is almost by definition a step in the wrong direction. [...]
The first President Bush agreed to a tax increase that did more than any other single action to break the back of the federal deficit. But look what happened to him. His son, having learned that lesson, is a Time Bandit, encouraging rather than taming politicians' natural tendency to embezzle from the future.
This year's tax cut, assuming one passes, will be moderate in size, and considerably smaller than its 2001 predecessor. Its significance lies less in its scale than in its confirmation of Bush's determination to chart a new course for fiscal policy, one that would reduce federal taxes to pre-Clinton levels. Bush the gambler is betting that he will come out looking like President Reagan, whose deficits bought economic reforms and a stronger national defense.
"I love babies," I said, surprised at the simplicity of my statement. And then immediately, perfectly naturally, "I'm so glad I had all those abortions."
Now, I know this is an unusual statement to make. Even EastEnders, which is ceaselessly condemned by the Daily Mail as being irretrievably "PC", has an amazingly censorious attitude to abortion. Think of key scenes featuring Carol, Bianca, Natalie, not to mention Dot's life sentence of sorrow. Yet I remember, as a child in the early 1970s, hearing Diane, the waitress heroine of the decidedly reactionary soap Crossroads, saying matter-of-factly to a miserably pregnant woman, "Abortion's not a dirty word, you know!"
Where did the recent creeping foetus fetishism come from? And how do we - excuse the phrase - get rid of it? Some of it must be blamed on Tony Blair's bowing of the knee to Rome. Cherie Blair can call herself a feminist all she likes, but any feminist worth her salt would have made a point of having a termination - on the NHS, naturally - when she got knocked up the last time. Wantonly giving birth to a fourth child on a planet buckling under the strain of overpopulation certainly isn't any sort of example to set for gymslip mums, who can at least plead ignorance and rampant fertility.
Me-Ism - psychiatry, psychoanalysis, any sort of navel-gazing - has to take part of the blame for the demonisation of abortion. The idea that everything we do or have done to us stays with us for ever is a reactionary and self-defeating reading of modern life. No doubt if you're the sort of lumbering, self-obsessed poltroon who believes that seeing Mommy kissing Santa Claus 30 years ago irrevocably marked your life, you wouldn't get over an abortion, as you wouldn't get over stubbing your toe without professional help. But you choose to be that way, because you are weak and vain, and you think your pain is important. Whereas the rest of us know not only that our pain is not important, but that it probably isn't even pain - just too much time on our hands. [...]
In a recent Mori poll for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, only 7% of those asked about abortion declared themselves totally opposed to it, yet it remains the last taboo. Famous women would rather admit to having been sexually abused as children than to having had a termination - Cybill Shepherd and Barbara Windsor are the only ones I can think of who refer to theirs with good-humoured straightforwardness. "No woman takes abortion lightly," even the valiant pro-choice spokeswomen have taken to saying, not realising that they are adding to the illusion that abortion is a serious, murderous, life-changing act. It isn't - unless your life is so sadly lacking in incident and interest that you make it so.
Myself, I'd as soon weep over my taken tonsils or my absent appendix as snivel over those abortions. I had a choice, and I chose life--mine.
I'd stopped listening to the actual lecture. But there are more ways than one of listening. I shut my eyes for a moment.? The effect was curious. I seemed to see the fellow much better when I could only hear his voice.
It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on for a fortnight without stopping. It's a ghastly thing, really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by the hour. The same thing over and over again.? Hate, hate, hate.? Let's all get together and have a good hate. Over and over.? It gives you the feeling that something has got inside your skull and is hammering down on your brain. But for a moment, with my eyes shut, I managed to turn the tables on him. I got inside his skull. It was a peculiar sensation. For about a second I was inside him, you might almost say I was him. At any rate, I felt what he was feeling.
I saw the vision that he was seeing. And it wasn't at all the kind of vision that can be talked about. What he's saying is merely that Hitler's after us and we must all get together and have a good hate. Doesn't go into details. Leaves it all respectable. But what he's seeing is something quite different.? It's a picture of himself smashing people's faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of course. I know that's what he was seeing. It was what I saw myself for the second or two that I was inside him.? Smash! Right in the middle!? The bones cave in like an eggshell and what was a face a minute ago is just a great big blob of strawberry jam. Smash! There goes another! That's what's in his mind, waking and sleeping, and the more he thinks of it the more he likes it. And it's all O.K. because the smashed faces belong to Fascists. You could hear all that in the tone of his voice.
Why do we not behave like human beings? for by and large we certainly do not. Regard dispassionately the history of what we call "civilization." So far as we know, which is not far, it was not so bad in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Crete, but as history becomes clearer so does the evidence of a pretty invincible beastliness. It is a farrago of cruelty, slaughter and injustice. I have no intention of rehearsing old records. Nero and Ghengis Khan and the gangs they led may rest in their unquiet graves for all me, but come down to what are, comparatively, our own times and call to mind the barbarian invasions of Italy, of northern France and of England; the wars of religion with the slaughters of Catholics and Protestants; the Inquisition with its auto da fe; the Thirty Years' War and the Hundred Years' War; the witchcraft insanity; the beastliness of the "Peasants' War" in Germany and of the French Revolution; the horrors of the so-called "Reformation" in England and on the Continent; the African slave trade; the debauching of the Negro tribes; the Spanish record in Mexico, Central and South America, with the blasting of Maya and Inca and Aztec civilization; the piracy and brigandage of the seventeenth century; our own treatment of the Indians; the gross evils accomplished in the South Seas by traders, adventurers and evangelical missionaries; the ruthless barbarity of the new industrialism in England from 1780 on for fifty years; the record of the Turks in Macedonia and Armenia; the Russian Revolution; gas warfare; and the blind selfishness of advancing technological and capitalist civilization.
These are only a few salient headings in one category of human activity, a few amongst the many that continue without pause or break for some three thousand years. I might match and rival this record were I to dilate on the follies and miscarriages of justice and the evidences of invincible ignorance and superstition that follow man in what was once termed his "evolutionary" progress. But this is unnecessary. We have but to regard our present estate when, at the summit of our Darwinian advance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest and the development of species have resulted in a condition where, with all the resources of a century and a half of unparalleled scientific and mechanical development, we confront a situation so irrational and apparently hopeless of solution, that there is not a scientist, a politician, an industrialist, a financier, a philosopher or a parson who has the faintest idea how we got that way or how we are to get out of it.
Yes, but there is another side to the question. However repulsive and degrading the general condition of any period in the past, there never has been a time when out of the darkness did not flame into light bright figures of men and women who in character and capacity were a glory to the human race. Nor were they only those whose names we know and whose fame is immortal. We know from the evidences that there were more whose identity is not determined, men and women lost in the great mass of the underlying mob, who in purity and honour and charity were co-equal with the great figures of history. Between them and the basic mass there was a difference greater than that which separates, shall we say, the obscene mob of the November Revolution in Russia, and the anthropoid apes. They fall into two absolutely different categories, the which is precisely the point I wish to make.
We do not behave like human beings because most of us do not fall within that classification as we have determined it for ourselves, since we do not measure up to standard. And thus:
With our invincible?and most honourable but perilous?optimism we gauge humanity by the best it has to show. From the bloody riot of cruelty, greed and lust we cull the bright figures of real men and women. Pharaoh Akhenaten, King David, Pericles and Plato, Buddha and Confucius and Lao Tse, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and Virgil, Abder-Rahman of Cordoba, Charlemagne and Roland; St. Benedict, St. Francis, St. Louis; Godfrey de Bouillon, Saladin, Richard Coeur de Lion; Dante, Leonardo, St. Thomas Aquinas, Ste. Jeanne d'Arc, Sta. Teresa, Frederick II, Otto the Great, St. Ferdinand of Spain, Chaucer and Shakespeare, Strafford and Montrose and Mary of Scotland, Washington, Adams and Lee. These are but a few key names; fill out the splendid list for yourselves. By them we unconsciously establish our standard of human beings.
Now to class with them and the unrecorded multitude of their compeers, the savage and ignorant mob beneath, or its leaders and mouthpieces, is both unjust and unscientific. What kinship is there between St. Francis and John Calvin; the Earl of Strafford and Thomas Crumwell; Robert E. Lee and Trotsky; Edison and Capone? None except their human form. They of the great list behave like our ideal of the human being; they of the ignominious sub-stratum do not?because they are not. In other words, the just line of demarcation should be drawn, not between Neolithic Man and the anthropoid ape, but between the glorified and triumphant human being and the Neolithic mass which was, is now and ever shall be.
What I mean is this, and I will give you this as a simile. Some years ago I was on the Island of Hawaii and in the great crater of Kilauea on the edge of the flaming pit of Halemaumau. For once the pit was level full of molten lava that at one end of this pit, at the iron edge of old lava, rose swiftly from the lowest depths, then slid silently, a viscous field of lambent cherry colour, along the length of the great pit, to plunge and disappear as silently, only to return and rise again, when all was to happen once more. Indeterminate, homogeneous, it was an undifferentiated flood, except for one thing. As it slid silkily onward it "fountained" incessantly. That is to say, from all over its surface leaped high in the air slim jets of golden lava that caught the sun and opened into delicate fireworks of falling jewels, beautiful beyond imagination.
Such I conceive to be the pattern of human life. Millennium after millennium this endless flood of basic raw material sweeps on. It is the everlasting Neolithic Man, the same that it was five or ten thousand years B.C. It is the matrix of the human being, the stuff of which he is made. It arises from the unknown and it disappears in the unknown, to return again and again on itself. And always it "fountains" in fine personalities, eminent and of historic record, or obscure yet of equal nobility, and these are the "human beings" on whose personality, character and achievements we establish our standard.
The basic mass, the raw material out of which great and fine personalities are made, is the same today as it was before King Zoser of Egypt and the first architect, Imhotep, set the first pyramid stones that marked the beginning of our era of human culture. Neolithic it was and is, and there has been no essential change in ten thousand years, for it is no finished product, but raw material and because of its potential, of absolute value. We do not realize this, for it is not obvious to the eye since all that greatness has achieved in that period is as free for the use of contemporary Neolithic Man as it is for those who have emerged into the full stature of humanity. Free and compulsory education, democratic government and universal suffrage, and the unlimited opportunities of industrial civilization have clothed him with the deceptive garments of equality, but underneath he is forever the same. It is not until we are confronted in our own time with a thing like the original Bolshevik reign of terror, the futility of popular government, not only national but as we see it close at home in the sort of men that we choose to govern us in our cities, our state legislatures, the national Congress; in the bluntness of intellect and lack of vision in big business and finance, or when we read Mr. Mencken's "Americana" or consider the monkey-shines of popular evangelists, "comic strips", dance- and bicycle- and Bible-reading marathons, that we are awakened to a realization of the fact that there is something wrong with our categories.
Those that live in these things that they have made are not behaving like the human beings we have chosen for ourselves out of history as determinants of that entity, and this for the reason that they still are the veritable men of the Neolithic age that no camouflage of civilization can change.
Perhaps we have set our standard too high. Perhaps we should, in accordance with the alleged principles of Mr. Jefferson, count the mob-man as the standard human being; but since the gulf that separates him from the ideal we have made for ourselves is too vast to be bridged by any social, political or biological formula, this would force us back on the Nietzschean doctrine of the Superman which, personally, I reject. It seems to me much more fitting to accept our proved ideal as the true type of human being, counting all else as the potent material of creation.
I cannot blind myself to the fact that if what I have said is taken seriously it will probably seem revolting, if not grotesque and even impious. I do not mean it to be any of these things, nor does it seem so to me. Put into few words, and as inoffensively as possible, all I mean is that the process of creation is continuous. That as the "first man" was said to have been created out of the dust of the earth, so this creation goes on today as it ever has. As this same "dust of the earth" may have been Neolithic or more probably Paleolithic sub-man, so today the formative material is of identical nature and potency?but it is still, as then, the unformed, unquickened, primitive or Neolithic matter. Within its own particular sphere it is invaluable, indispensable, but we treat it unfairly when, through our vaporous theorizing we are led to pitchfork it into an alien sphere where it cannot function properly, and where it is untrue to itself, and by its sheer weight of numbers and deficiency of certain salutary inhibitions, is bound to negative the constructive power of the men of light and leading, while reducing the normal average to the point of ultimate disaster.
Call it the land of latte liberals or the "left coast." No matter what the nickname, the fact is that for more than a decade Democratic strategists have relied on a formula for winning the White House that begins and ends with California.
The Golden State has been a rich source of campaign cash for presidential hopefuls, and since 1992, as Republicans have surged in the South and the West, California's mother lode of 54 electoral votes has been essential for the Democratic nominee pursuing the magic 270 needed to capture the nation's top job.
In any strategy to unseat President Bush in 2004, winning California is imperative. But more than a year out, the political landscape is proving a bit rocky for Democrats. The state faces a staggering $35 billion budget deficit, and the blame is falling largely on Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, who captured a second term last year in a race that reflected widespread ambivalence.
Since then, Davis has faced a grass-roots recall effort and his approval ratings have plummeted to an all-time low of 27 percent, according to a recent Field Poll. The same survey showed President Bush, who lost California to Al Gore by 12 percentage points in 2000, beating a generic Democratic nominee 45 percent to 40 percent.
And none of the nine Democratic candidates fighting for the party's nod have managed to make much of an impression in the state.
The phrase "Animal Liberation" appeared in the press for the first time on the April 5, 1973, cover of The New York Review of Books. Under that heading, I discussed Animals, Men and Morals, a collection of essays on our treatment of animals, which was edited by Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris. The article began with these words:
"We are familiar with Black Liberation, Gay Liberation, and a variety of other movements. With Women's Liberation some thought we had come to the end of the road. Discrimination on the basis of sex, it has been said, is the last form of discrimination that is universally accepted and practiced without pretense, even in those liberal circles which have long prided themselves on their freedom from racial discrimination. But one should always be wary of talking of 'the last remaining form of discrimination.' "
In the text that followed, I urged that despite obvious differences between humans and nonhuman animals, we share with them a capacity to suffer, and this means that they, like us, have interests. If we ignore or discount their interests, simply on the grounds that they are not members of our species, the logic of our position is similar to that of the most blatant racists or sexists who think that those who belong to their race or sex have superior moral status, simply in virtue of their race or sex, and irrespective of other characteristics or qualities. Although most humans may be superior in reasoning or in other intellectual capacities to nonhuman animals, that is not enough to justify the line we draw between humans and animals. Some humans--infants and those with severe intellectual disabilities--have intellectual capacities inferior to some animals, but we would, rightly, be shocked by anyone who proposed that we inflict slow, painful deaths on these intellectually inferior humans in order to test the safety of household products. Nor, of course, would we tolerate confining them in small cages and then slaughtering them in order to eat them. The fact that we are prepared to do these things to nonhuman animals is therefore a sign of "speciesism"--a prejudice that survives because it is convenient for the dominant group--in this case not whites or males, but all humans.
As President George W. Bush has also warned the Islamic republic to stop meddling in Iraqi affairs, an influential French daily says Iranian officials are worried by the "obvious pro-Americanism sentiments" of " the Iranian people".
Iranian officials are worried. Worried of the American presence next to their doors, on the East as well as to the West, worried of the invasion of Iraq "with so little popular resistance", worried of the fast fall of the Baghdad regime, worried of the sidelining of the UN, worried of the total disillusion of the Iranian people that, since the beginning of the Iraqi crisis, has resulted in a fierce pro-Americanism of the population... but, especially, worried of the vox populi, that asks for "a change of the regime with the help of the American marines", the daily "Le Monde" wrote. [...]
For Behzad Nabavi, one of the "credible voices" of the reformers, the relations with Washington has become a "national security issue".
In a rare interview, Mr. Nabavi, a close adviser to President Khatami, told "Le Monde" that the American strategy for the region "doesn't stop to the doors of Baghdad". According to Mr. Nabavi, it exists in Washington, "an Iran project" that is in the process of being implemented", a project that is "not necessarily a military one." In his office situated at the old Marble Palace, in the south of Tehran, that also includes the Majles, of which he assures the vice-presidency, Mr. Nabavi speaks of his concern facing the Americans.
"Evidently, I am afraid!" he exclaims. "How would I not be afraid of an America armed to the teeth and who demonstrated in Iraq its total disdain of respect for the sovereignty of the States? Yes, I am afraid. The Americans are apparently able do whatever they like; no matter the United Nations or even the Western public opinion". "The only and somewhat acceptable argument to the eyes of the western intellectuals justifying a hostile action against a country is the instauration of democracy", Mr. Nabavi said. It is for it, according to him, "that the best defense of Iran against the Americans would be to reinforce its democracy in order to deprive them of their arguments".
Interrogated on the voices calling for "the American interference", Mr. Nabavi declares: "It is obvious that it is the result of our mistake. The fact that people prefer a foreign invasion to living in the Islamic Republic is only the sign of our failure. We have not been able to fulfill the people's democratic aspirations and it is normal that they are disappointed". If one admits that the Iraqis are delighted with Saddam Hoseyn's end, one must also think about the possibility that maybe, the Iranians would celebrate at the end of the Islamic Republic as well".
These are uncertain times for literary scholars. The era of big theory is over. The grand paradigms that swept through humanities departments in the 20th century — psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, post-colonialism — have lost favor or been abandoned. Money is tight. And the leftist politics with which literary theorists have traditionally been associated have taken a beating.
In the latest sign of mounting crisis, on April 11 the editors of Critical Inquiry, academe's most prestigious theory journal, convened the scholarly equivalent of an Afghan-style loya jirga. They invited more than two dozen of America's professorial elite, including Henry Louis Gates Jr., Homi Bhabha, Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson, to the University of Chicago for what they called "an unprecedented meeting of the minds," an unusual two-hour public symposium on the future of theory. [...]
A student in the audience spoke up. What good is criticism and theory, he asked, if "we concede in fact how much more important the actions of Noam Chomsky are in the world than all the writings of critical theorists combined?"
After all, he said, Mr. Fish had recently published an essay in Critical Inquiry arguing that philosophy didn't matter at all.
Behind a table at the front of the room, Mr. Fish shook his head. "I think I'll let someone else answer the question," he said.
So Sander L. Gilman, a professor of liberal arts and sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, replied instead. "I would make the argument that most criticism — and I would include Noam Chomsky in this — is a poison pill," he said. "I think one must be careful in assuming that intellectuals have some kind of insight. In fact, if the track record of intellectuals is any indication, not only have intellectuals been wrong almost all of the time, but they have been wrong in corrosive and destructive ways."
Personally, I don't much care if the U.S. reports about weapons of mass destruction prove to be imaginary. Toppling Hussein's regime was still right.
But no good deed goes unpunished, as the old saying goes. And it seems possible that the United States will gain little in terms of its own security from its decision to liberate Iraq. We may have created a new Iran here -- an Iraqi democracy that will be dominated by a Shiite majority among which pro-Iranian clerics seem, at this point, to be the best-organized political force.
Or Iraq may become another Lebanon -- a lawless nation ruled by car bombs and warlords. Avoiding these disasters depends on whether the United States can quickly fill the existing power vacuum with a stable Iraqi government, help it get started and then leave, pronto.
American actions over the next few weeks will determine whether Iraq loves its liberators or becomes a seething pit of anti-American anger.
The reaction to the American and British victory in Iraq, in Iraq itself, was as predictable as the victory, to anyone with genuine knowledge of the situation there. The gratitude to President Bush and the allies is, momentarily, intense and euphoric. It is a comet-like condition that lasts about two days, but has a tail six months long -- the time in which the hard stuff has to be attempted, of creating a constitutional order for Iraq, out of almost nothing.
After that, Iraq is likely to settle back into a mood fairly unlike gratitude, as Kuwait did by the end of 1991, and, in different ways, as the countries liberated from Communism in central and eastern Europe did: the blame for problems will be increasingly assigned to the people who are trying to fix them, and removed from the people who caused them, who are no longer there. This is human nature, which is essentially incurable; but it will take
various peculiarly Arabic and Islamic cultural forms -- sometimes better, sometimes worse than their Western equivalents. (So much of human nature is a freak show.)
The U.S. soldiers will gradually be re-categorized from "liberators" to "foreigners". As we know from France and Germany, as well as the Gulf States, there is no such thing as lasting gratitude, except among the saints. There will nevertheless remain an institutional memory, should new Iraqi institutions survive, that the Americans and British are allies. And this, with any luck, will last for at least a generation to come.
This much is perfectly predictable, and I think it has been taken into account in Pentagon (if not State Department) plans for the Iraqi apres-guerre. My impression is that thanks to the personal shock and awe of Donald Rumsfeld, the attitudes and work habits of the Pentagon have been transformed. But thanks to the protective instincts of Colin Powell, the State Department bureaucracy continues to work within intellectual categories that should have been declared defunct on Sept. 12th, 2001.
There will be clashes between them in the weeks and months ahead, as the Pentagon tries to do things that are new, and difficult, while State tries to sabotage with the help of the old "Arabist" hands in the CIA, the academy, and the media -- the people who still have their jobs after being proved wrong about everything. It would be politically impossible for any President of the United States to simply sack the lot of them; and from that fact a lot of diplomatic "friendly fire" can be anticipated on the road ahead.
Advantage, however, to the people who've won the war, and been proved right about everything that was at issue -- for at least the immediate future. This is no time to be glum.
What is more interesting than the predictable mood on the ground in Iraq, is the mood of the onlooking world. Something very dramatic happened this week, on live television before a vast audience. For the Arab world especially, it was an event like 9/11, but upside down and inside out.
Limited-government advocates have their eyes on Idaho. Or Montana. Or New Hampshire.
All are among 10 lightly populated states known for small-government politics that could end up being a Libertarian utopia.
A movement called the Free State Project has registered some 3,100 people who would help choose a "candidate" state and move there in hopes of canceling laws against drugs, prostitution, guns and other individual liberties, while privatizing current state functions such as schools.
"Rather than change the whole nation it makes sense for all of us to gather in one place," said Elizabeth McKinstry, 33, of Hillsdale, Mich., the project's vice president. [...]
Which state is a favorite? Project officials say a major downside for Idaho is its Mormon population, which isn't likely to support legalizing prostitution and drugs or drop taxes on booze and tobacco. [...]
Mark Snider, spokesman for Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, said he was sorry to learn that Idaho was on the list. He warned the Free Staters not to confuse Idahoans' love for small government with a desire for nearly no government.
"The majority of Idahoans want safe streets, and not to be under the threat of drunk drivers, drug addicts or criminals," Snider said.
It is becoming clear that the Arab world needs to take the initiative in making its political and economic systems more democratic. The frustrations Arabs feel today--prompted by the slow pace of democratic reform, stagnant economies and political instability: all threaten the region's future. The moment has come for the Arab world to engage in a homegrown, evolutionary and orderly process of democratization--one that will respect Arab culture while at the same time giving citizens the power to be part of the political process.
It's important to remember, though, that expecting the seeds of democracy to blossom overnight is a simplistic assumption at best, and a dangerous one at worst. Force-feeding democracy will lead not to reform but to radicalization. A wiser approach would be to respect the ability of Arab countries to take matters into their own hands.
The Arab world is ready to do this. The United Nations Arab Human Development Report, written by Arabs and released last year, is a frank assessment of some of the main challenges confronting us. It discusses the expansion of political freedoms, the role of women and the knowledge gap as key issues Arab nations need to face. This report must be taken seriously, not defensively, by the region. This is what we have done in Jordan, where both King Abdullah II and Queen Rania have endorsed it as a blueprint for development.
The Arab world also needs to assume a more active role in mediating the Arab-Israeli conflict. Arab leaders must finally take a public stand against suicide bombings. The truth needs to be clearly stated: suicide bombings have only hurt the Palestinian cause.
"See, they're back to the old blackmail game," US President George W Bush told NBC-TV anchor Tom Brokaw late Thursday. That's pretty close to, "I told you so," and reveals - if revelation were necessary - that major factions in the Bush administration never thought much of talking to North Korea about its nuclear programs in the first place. Even allegedly dovish Secretary of State Colin Powell weighed in with some quite heavy artillery, saying: "The North Koreans should not leave the meetings in Beijing, now that they have come to a conclusion ... with the slightest impression that the United States and its partners will be intimidated by bellicose statements or by threats." He added that the US was looking for ways to "eliminate" the threat posed by any North Korean nuclear weapons program and had "not taken any options off the table" - diplomatese for not ruling out military action.
Of course, the North Koreans, on their part, will not exactly have pleased their Chinese hosts, who had worked long and hard to bring about US-North Korea-China talks, by telling US chief negotiator James Kelly that they were in fact in possession of atomic bombs, were ready to test and even sell them, and had already reprocessed 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods to extract weapons-grade plutonium (enough for six to eight nukes).
Where the Korean nuclear standoff goes from here is anyone's guess. Understandably, "honest broker" China wants to put the best possible face on the outcome of the discussions at Beijing's Diaoyutai State Guest House, their early conclusion (to avoid the term "breakdown") notwithstanding. Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said the meeting "signifies a good beginning", and his ministry said in a later statement that all sides "agreed to maintain contacts through diplomatic channels regarding continuing the process of talks".
But the course the talks took between Wednesday and Friday morning was hardly encouraging. In opening remarks, the United States reiterated that it wants to see immediate and verifiable dismantling of North Korea's nuclear programs before talking about anything else; Pyongyang chief negotiator Li Gun repeated the Iraq war had proved that nations need a strong deterrent to protect their sovereignty; China urged compromise. And that, pretty much, was already the end of three-way discussions.
To build its case for war with Iraq, the Bush administration argued that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but some officials now privately acknowledge the White House had another reason for war ? a global show of American power and democracy.
Officials inside government and advisers outside told ABCNEWS the administration emphasized the danger of Saddam's weapons to gain the legal justification for war from the United Nations and to stress the danger at home to Americans.
"We were not lying," said one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis." [...]
[T]he Bush administration decided it must flex muscle to show it would fight terrorism, not just here at home and not just in Afghanistan against the Taliban, but in the Middle East, where it was thriving.
Officials deny that Bush was captured by the aggressive views of neo-conservatives. But Bush did agree with some of their thinking.
"We made it very public that we thought that one consequence the president should draw from 9/11 is that it was unacceptable to sit back and let either terrorist groups or dictators developing weapons of mass destruction strike first at us," conservative commentator Bill Kristol said on ABCNEWS' Nightline in March.
The Bush administration wanted to make a statement about its determination to fight terrorism. And officials acknowledge that Saddam had all the requirements to make him, from their standpoint, the perfect target. [...]
The Bush administration could probably have lived with the threat of Saddam and might have gone after him eventually if, for example, the Iraqi leader had become more aggressive in pursuing a nuclear program or in sponsoring terrorism.
But again, Sept. 11 changed all that.
Listen closely, officials said, to what Bush was really saying to the American people before the war.
"I hope they understand the lesson of September the 11th," Bush said on March 6. "The lesson is, is that we're vulnerable to attack, wherever it may occur, and we must take threats which gather overseas very seriously. We don't have to deal with them all militarily, but we have to deal with them."
Maureen Dowd writes, displaying either an immense insider knowledge of day-to-day Baghdad or else no knowledge at all, that the American forces assigned to protect Chalabi would have been enough on their own to prevent the desecration of the National Museum. Since Chalabi was in Nasiriyah, far to the south, when the looting occurred, and since up until now he has provided his own security detail (I'd want my own bodyguards, too, if I'd been on Saddam's assassination list for a decade), and since we don't know by whom the actual plunder of the museum was actually planned or executed (or at least I don't), Dowd might wish either to reconsider or to offer her expertise to Gen. Garner.Nobody does disdain like Hitchens.
The death rate for the worldwide outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, which has fluctuated for months, has recently begun what looks like an ominous rise. . . .You might think, though you would be wrong, that it would be worth a mention in this story from the Washington Post that, to date, no one in the United States has died of SARS, nor has it appeared particularly infectious. Canada, on the other hand, has a relatively high mortality rate and the WHO is advising against traveling to Toronto.
[T]he rising numbers are cause for concern for three reasons. First, the current -- higher -- death rate is statistically more reliable than the previous -- lower -- estimates.
Second, as hospitals learn to cope with the outbreak and doctors find ways to treat or stabilize patients, the death rate ought to head down, not up.
Finally, large numbers of cases so far, especially in places such as Hong Kong and Singapore, have involved hospital workers, who tend to be younger and healthier. As the SARS virus has spread to the general population in some places, it may strike more vulnerable elderly people and increase in lethality.
February 28th: Kwan Sui-Chu, having recently returned from Hong Kong, goes to her doctor in Scarborough complaining of fever, coughing, muscle tenderness, all the symptoms of the by now several ProMed alerts. As is traditional in Canada, the patient is prescribed an antibiotic and sent home.
March 5th: Having apparently never returned for further medical treatment and slipped into a coma at home, Kwan Sui-Chu is found dead in her bed. The coroner, Dr. Mark Shaffer, lists cause of death as "heart attack." Later that day, Kwan's son, Tse Chi Kwai, visits the doctor, complaining of fever, coughing, etc. He too is prescribed an antibiotic and sent home. Later still, the son takes his wife to the doctor. Likewise.
March 7th: Tse Chi Kwai goes to Scarborough Grace, and is left on a gurney in Emergency for 12 hours exposed to hundreds of people.
March 9th: Scarborough Grace discovers Tse's mother has recently died after returning from Hong Kong. But Dr. Sandy Finkelstein concludes, if Tse is infectious, it's TB.
And now a new and alarming class of symptoms began to appear in the distempered body politic. There had been, from the first, in the parliamentary party, some men whose minds were set on objects from which the majority of that party would have shrunk with horror. These men were, in religion, Independents. They conceived that every Christian congregation had, under Christ, supreme jurisdiction in things spiritual; that appeals to provincial and national synods were scarcely less unscriptural than appeals to the Court of Arches, or to the Vatican: and that Popery, Prelacy, and Presbyterianism were merely three forins of one great apostasy. In politics they were, to use the phrase of their time, root and branch men, or, to use the kindred phrase of our own time, radicals. Not content with limiting the power of the monarch, they were desirous to erect a commonwealth on the ruins of the old English polity. At first they had been inconsiderable, both in numbers and in weight; but, before the war had lasted two years, they became, not indeed the largest, but the most powerful faction in the country. Some of the old parliamentary leaders had been removed by death; and others had forfeited the public confidence. Pym had been borne, with princely honors, to a grave among the Plantagenets. Hampden had fallen, as became him, while vainly endeavoring, by his heroic example, to inspire his followers with courage to face the fiery cavalry of Rupert. Bedford had been untrue to the cause. Northumberland was known to be lukewarm. Essex and his lieutenants had shown little vigor and ability in the conduct of military operations. At such a conjuncture it was that the Independent party, ardent, resolute, and uncompromising, began to raise its head, both in the camp and in the parliament.
The soul of that party was Oliver Cromwell. Bred to peaceful occupations, he had, at more than forty years of age, accepted a commission in the parliamentary army. No sooner had he become a soldier, than he discerned, with the keen glance of genius, what Essex and men like Essex, with all their experience, were unable to perceive. He saw precisely where the strength of the royalists lay, and by what means alone that strength could be overpowered. He saw that it was necessary to reconstruct the army of the parliament. He saw, also, that there were abundant and excellent materials for the purpose; materials less showy, indeed, but more solid, than those of which the gallant squadrons of the king were composed. It was necessary to look for recruits who were not mere mercenaries, - for recruits of
decent station and grave character, fearing God and zealous for public liberty. With such men he filled his own regiment, and, while he subjected them to a discipline more rigid than had ever before been known in England, he administered to their intellectual and moral nature stimulants of fearful potency.
The events of the year 1644 fully proved the superiority of his abilities. In the south, where Essex held the command, the parliamentary forces underwent a succession of shameful disasters; but in the north the victory of Marston Moor fully compensated for all that had been lost elsewhere. That victory was not a more serious blow to the royalists than to the party which had hitherto been dominant at Westminster; for it was notorious that the day, disgracefully lost by the Presbyterians, had been retrieved by the energy of Cromwell, and by the steady valor of the warriors whom he had trained.
These events produced the self-denying ordinance and the new model of the army. Under decorous pretexts, and with every mark of respect, Essex and most of those who had held high posts under him were removed; and the conduct of the war was intrusted to very different hands. Fairfax, a brave soldier, but of mean understanding and irresolute temper, was the nominal lord-general of the forces; but Cromwell was their real head.
Cromwell made haste to organize the whole army on the same principles on which he had organized his own regiment. As soon as this process was complete, the event of the war was decided. The Cavaliers had now to encounter natural courage equal to their own, enthusiasm stronger than their own, and discipline such as was utterly wanting to them. It soon became a proverb that the soldiers of Fairfax and Cromwell were men of a different breed from the soldiers of Essex. At Naseby took place the first great encounter between the royalists and the remodelled army of the Houses. The victory of the Roundheads was complete and decisive. It was followed by other triumphs in rapid succession. In a few months, the authority of the parliament was fully established over the whole kingdom. Charles fled to the Scots, and was by them, in a manner which did not much exalt their national character, delivered up to his English subjects.
While the event of the war was still doubtful, the Houses had put the primate to death, had interdicted, within the sphere of their authority, the use of the liturgy, and had required all men to subscribe that renowned instrument, known by the name of the Solemn League and Covenant. When the struggle was over, the work of innovation and revenge was pushed on with still greater ardor. The ecclesiastical polity of the kingdom was remodelled. Most of the old clergy were ejected from their benefices. Fines, often of ruinous amount, were laid on the royalists, already impoverished by large aids furnished to the king. Many estates were confiscated. Many proscribed Cavaliers found it expedient to purchase, at an enormous cost, the protection of eminent members of the victorious party. Large domains belonging to the crown, to the bishops, and to the chapters, were seized, and either granted away or put up to auction. In consequence of these spoliations,a great part of the soil of England was at once offered for sale. As money was scarce, as the market was glutted, as the title was insecure, and as the awe inspired by powerful bidders prevented free competition, the prices were often merely nominal. Thus many old and honorable families disappeared and were heard of no more; and many new men rose rapidly to affluence.
But, while the Houses were employing their authority thus, it suddenly passed out of their hands. It had been obtained by calling into existence a power which could not be controlled. In the summer of 1647, about twelve months after the last fortress of the Cavaliers had submitted to the parliament, the parliament was compelled to submit to its own soldiers.
Thirteen years followed, during which England was, under various names and forms, really governed by the sword. Never, before that time, or since that time, was the civil power in our country subjected to military dictation.
The army which now became supreme in the state was an army very different from any that has since been seen among us. At present, the pay of the common soldier is not such as can seduce any but the humblest class of English laborers from their calling. A barrier almost impassable separates him from the commissioned officer. The great majority of those who rise high in the service rise by purchase. So numerous and extensive are the remote dependencies of England, that every man who enlists in the line must expect to pass many years in exile, and some years in climates unfavorable to the health and vigor of the European race. The army of the Long Parliament was raised for home service. The pay of the private soldier was much above the wages earned by the great body of the people; and, if he distinguished himself by intelligence and courage, he might hope to attain high commands. The ranks were accordingly composed of persons superior in station and education to the multitude. These persons, sober, moral, diligent, and accustomed to reflect, had been induced to take up arms, not by the pressure of want, not by the love of novelty and license, not by the arts of recruiting officers, but by religious and political zeal, mingled with the desire of distinction and promotion. The boast of the soldiers, as we find it recorded in their solemn resolutions, was, that they had not been forced into the service, nor had enlisted chiefly for the sake of lucre; that they were no janizaries, but free-born Englishmen, who had, of their own accord, put their lives in jeopardy for the liberties and religion of England, and whose right and duty it was to watch over the welfare of the nation which they had saved.
A force thus composed that, without injury to its efficiency, be indulged in some liberties which, if allowed to any other troops, would have proved subversive of alldiscipline. In general, soldiers who should form themselves into political clubs, elect delegates. and pass resolutions on high questions of state, would soon break loose from all control, would come to form an army, and would become the worst and most dangerous of mobs. Nor would it be safe, in our time, to tolerate in any regiment religious meetings, at which a corporal versed in Scripture should lead the devotions of his less gifted colonel, and admonish a backsliding major. But such was the intelligence, the gravity, and the self-command of the warriors whom Cromwell had trained, that in their camp a political organization and a religious organization could exist without destroying military organization. The same men, who, off-duty, were noted as demagogues and field-preachers, were distinguished by steadiness, by the spirit of order, and by prompt obedience on watch, on drill, and on the field of battle.
In war this strange force was irresistible. The stubborn courage characteristic of the English people was, by the system of Cromwell, at once regulated and stimulated. Other leaders have maintained order as strict. Other leaders have inspired their followers with a zeal as ardent. But in his camp alone the most rigid discipline was found in company with the fiercest enthusiasm. His troops moved to victory with the precision of machines, while burning with the wildest fanaticism of crusaders. From the time when the army was remodelled to the time when it was disbanded, it never found, either in the British Islands, or on the Continent, an enemy who could stand its onset. In England, Scotland, Ireland, Flanders, the Puritan warriors, often surrounded by difficulties, sometimes contending against threefold odds, not only never failed to conquer, but never failed to destroy and break in pieces whatever force was opposed to them. They at length came to regard the day of battle as a day of certain triumph and march against the most renowned battalions of Europe with disdainful confidence. Turenne was startled by the shout of stern exultation with which his English allies advanced to the combat, and expressed the delight of a true soldier when he learned that it was ever the fashion of Cromwell's pikemen to rejoice greatly when they beheld the enemy; and the banished Cavaliers felt an emotion of national pride, when they saw a brigade of their countrymen, outnumbered by foes and abandoned by allies, dive before it in headlong rout the finest infantry of Spain, and force a passage into a countersearp which had just been pronounced impregnable by the ablest of the marshals of France.
But that which chiefly distinguished the army of Cromwell from other armies was the austere morality and the fear of God which pervaded all ranks. It is acknowledged by the most zealous royalists that, in that singular camp, no oath was heard, no drunkenness or gambling was seen, and that, during the long dominion of the soldiery, the property of the peaceable citizen and the honor of woman were held sacred. If outrages were committed, they were outrages of a very different kind from those of which a victorious army is generally guilty. No servant girl complained of the rough gallantry of the redcoats. Not an ounce of plate was taken from the shops of the goldsmiths. But a Pelagian sermon, or a window on which the Virgin and Child were painted, produced in the Puritan ranks an excitement which it required the utmost exertions of the officers to quell. One of Cromwell's chief difficulties was to restrain he pikemen and dragoons from invading by main force the pulpits of ministers whose discourses, to use the language of that time, were not savory; and too many of our cathedrals still bear the marks of the hatred with which those stern spirits regarded every vestige of Popery.
Q. If Saddam Hussein is the Ace of Spades on the "Most Wanted'' playing cards, is his wife the Queen of Hearts?
A. No. The Queen of Hearts is Barzan al-Ghafur Sulayman Majid, commander of the Special Republican Guard.
Saddam has at least two wives. Neither is depicted on the cards.
He married Sajida Khairallah Talfah, a cousin, in 1963. She is the mother of sons Udai (Ace of Hearts) and Qusai (Ace of Clubs) and three daughters. Sajida has reportedly left Iraq and could be in Syria, the Associated Press reported, citing U.S. defense sources.
Saddam is also married to Samira Shahbandar, a former Iraqi Airlines flight attendant whom he wed in the late 1980s. She is the mother of his other son, Ali Saddam Hussein. Her whereabouts are unknown.
Reportedly, Udai was upset with his father taking a second wife. Udai is said to have clubbed to death Saddam's valet and food taster because he helped arrange liaisons for his father with Samira.
Zimbabwe's newspapers depicted this week's massive strike as a potentially decisive standoff between the government and an increasingly strident opposition. The strike, endorsed by the country's main opposition party, is seen as more than an airing of workers' grievances; it is yet another sign that the Zimbabwean people are losing patience with a government that has thrown the former jewel of Africa into economic free-fall. Britain's Guardian called the strike and a similar walkout last month "a stinging vote of no-confidence by the workers in President Robert Mugabe's economic policies." Zimbabwe, once one of Africa's most prosperous and promising nations, is in economic ruin. Food shortages have left more than half the country's 11.3 million people hungry and dependent on outside aid. Inflation stands at 228 percent; unemployment at more than 60 percent.
The three-day work stoppage, called by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, is a response to the government's recently imposed 200 percent fuel-price hike. The ZCTU is closely linked to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, which led a nationwide walkout last month. The MDC's endorsement of this week's strike fueled political tension in the country, since Mugabe accuses the MDC of manipulating the public into staging such protests.
An op-ed in the opposition Daily News compared Mugabe's rule to the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Titled, "Violent regimes leave no option but war," the commentary said the coalition invasion of Iraq was "desperately needed ... for the good of the people" in order to remove "a heinous regime." It continued, "That is certainly the case I would put for removing the present regime in Zimbabwe." Britain's Independent reported that there is a new catchphrase among Zimbabwe's unemployed youth: "Mr. Bush, when are you coming to liberate us?"
[G]ays and lesbians are more than just sons and daughters. We're moms and dads, too. My boyfriend and I adopted a son five years ago, and we plan to adopt again. As more same-sex couples start families, it's going to be harder for Republicans like Mr. Santorum to say we are somehow a threat to the American family.
As much as it may dismay Mr. Santorum and his defenders, there really is no word other than "family" to describe the three people who live in my house. When it comes to marriage rights, gays and lesbians are willing to play semantic games. We will use awkward phrases like "civil union" and "domestic partnership" so long as we can get what our families really need: the rights, responsibilities and safeguards of legal marriage. But two adults who love each other and are raising children together? What are we if not a family? What other word is there for us?
In our culture, homosexuality is discussed only when it presents a problem--for the armed forces, for closeted gay students in high school, for those who imagine gays are undermining society. Rarely is homosexuality credited with the creation of something positive and lasting. Desire brought my boyfriend and me together. And it's simple desire that brings most couples, gay or straight, together. Responsibly acted on, this desire is a good thing in and of itself, and it can often lead to other good things. Like strong, healthy families.
Having removed a historic threat to Israel's existence, deployed about a quarter million troops a few hundred miles from Jerusalem and coaxed forth an emerging Palestinian leadership, President Bush appears in a strong position to pursue peace in the Middle East, perhaps the strongest of any American president since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
European and Arab officials and analysts of many nationalities say he also has a powerful motive to try: progress in Middle East talks could ease a major source of Arab anti-Americanism, which may be inflamed by the presence of American troops in Iraq.
Mr. Bush has suggested that he sees a link, albeit a tenuous one, between Iraq and the search for a Middle East peace. As he sought support for the war in February, he said, "Success in Iraq could also begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace, and set in motion progress towards a truly democratic Palestinian state."
Palestinian and Israeli leaders have also drawn the connection, saying that the war may give them a new chance for peace. But today a suicide bomber connected to the Fatah movement of Yasir Arafat and the new prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, killed himself and a security guard outside an Israeli
train station. The bombing fanned doubts once again about the Palestinian leadership's capacity and willingness to confront terrorism.
On the Israeli side, Mr. Sharon so dominates political life that he may have the capacity to achieve a deal. But his willingness to make what he calls "painful concessions" is untested. Mr. Sharon's worldview was shaped by decades of fighting first for Israel's creation and then its survival, and he is not inclined to gamble for a peace deal with what he considers matters of security, despite the defeat of the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein.
Once, his advisers pointed to the proximity of Iraq's tanks to argue for Israel's need for "strategic depth"--the thickening of its borders achieved by West Bank settlements. Now they say that there is no telling whether Iraq may eventually revert to its old ways.
Mr. Sharon wants significant changes in a new peace plan, known as the road map, which foresees recognition of Israel throughout the region and an independent state of Palestine in 2005. His advisers predict that Mr. Bush will not put serious pressure on him to abide by its terms, including immediate removal of settlement outposts built in the last two years.
[O]ne of the most interesting figures on the ecclesiastical scene in Rome is ... a professor of political science at the University of Perugia and an editorial writer for Italy’s most respected daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera, named Ernesto Galli della Loggia....
Galli della Loggia noted that in John Paul’s United Nations speeches on peace, the pope had always placed his message in the context of human rights. Yet the pope has not used human rights language much during the Iraq crisis. Galli della Loggia suggested this may be because references to human rights would invite awkward questions about the brutal character of the Saddam Hussein government.
How does Galli della Loggia explain the Vatican tilt against the American position?
First, there are historic reservations some have always felt about the United States. Despite the fact that Pius XII was known as the “chaplain of NATO,” many Europeans in the Vatican have long harbored doubts about an Atlantic alliance dominated by the Americans. Such a system, they felt, would signal the victory of Protestant America over Catholic Europe.
Second, Galli della Loggia says that despite Bush’s sincere religious belief, and despite an alignment of interests between Washington and the Vatican on issues such as abortion and cloning, the cluster of Protestant “radicals” such as John Ashcroft in the Bush administration is troubling to some in the Holy See.
Finally, there is the desire of the Vatican, and especially John Paul II, to deliver a message of solidarity to the Islamic world, in order to avoid a long-feared “clash of civilizations” between Christianity and Islam.
On this third score, Galli della Loggia sees a subtle realpolitik calculation by the Vatican.
“They probably think that no matter what the pope says, American Catholics will be okay and the American administration will still see the Vatican as a great global institution. In that sense, there’s nothing to lose by coming out against the Americans, and everything to gain by siding with Islam,” he said.
Galli della Loggia then made the interesting observation that it was the most Catholic countries of Europe – Spain, Italy and Poland – whose governments backed the U.S. on the war, while it was France and Germany, the birthplaces of Revolution and Reformation respectively, that sided with the pope....
We also discussed the future of Europe, currently locked in debate over its “constitutional document.” Galli della Loggia doesn’t understand the Vatican’s push for an explicit reference to the religious roots of Europe.
“If the Catholic Church wants to be a global institution, it doesn’t make sense to identify itself with its European roots,” he argued.
On the current breach between the United States and Europe, Galli della Loggia believes it is destined to remain. Europe has ceased to believe in war as an instrument of politics, Galli della Loggia said, because it is incapable of judging its own military past in positive terms. The United States, on the other hand, sees itself playing a global role in the promotion of democracy and human rights, and believes its use of force in support of these ideals is just.
As for the Vatican, Galli della Loggia says that the Iraq crisis exposed a fundamental weakness in its foreign policy – hesitation to confront corrupt regimes in the developing world.
“The Vatican wants to be a global voice of conscience, supporting developing nations,” Galli della Loggia said. “Often they express this support by spouting the same economic formula they always recycle, blaming rich nations for poverty. But the principal obstacle to social and economic development is not the West, but dictatorial and corrupt regimes that strangle their own people. Catholic missionaries and even the Vatican polemicize against the West, hiding local responsibility. They’re afraid of being tossed into the ‘Western’ mix if they make problems for these governments.”
“Ironically, the only governments the Church criticizes are in the West, where it knows it won’t have to pay any price because those governments respect human rights,” Galli della Loggia said.
Pius XII, living under Axis rule, made sharper criticisms of the Nazis than Vatican bishops made of Saddam Hussein. As a Catholic, I want to be proud of my bishops. I wish they would make it easier for me.
The failure of the Iraqi military to continually throw GPS-equipped Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombs and Tomahawk cruise missiles severely off course can be attributed to several factors. Among the most important was the installation of backup inertial navigation systems (INS) that could keep the bombs and missiles on target if the GPS signal was compromised. INS systems are slightly less accurate than GPS, however, so there is a greater risk that INS-guided weapons might be a tad off course, raising the risk of collateral damage and casualties in densely populated areas. Still, the danger is likely to be short-lived: high-powered GPS jammers can easily be traced back to their origin, effectively painting themselves with a bull's-eye. "In fact, we destroyed a GPS jammer with a GPS weapon," U.S. Major General Victor Renuart told reporters at a briefing in Qatar that described the attacks against GPS jammers.
Iraqi efforts at jamming may also have been thwarted by a novel, signal-boosting technology--deployed in Iraq under a shroud of secrecy--that overwhelmed the GPS jammers. Airborne pseudo satellites, nicknamed "pseudolites," installed on Global Hawk or Predator unmanned drones would have created a miniature GPS constellation over Iraq. These pseudolites would have captured the weak GPS signals from space and then relayed them, at substantially higher power and at closer range, to airborne bombs and missiles or to forces on the ground. Like the satellites in space, four pseudolites would be required to plot a navigational solution. Tests performed in April 2000 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's research arm, convinced the military that the psuedolites were powerful enough to overcome jamming. Specially developed beam-forming antennas and signal processors allow the pseudolites to acquire the space-borne GPS signal even when it’s under attack. New receivers called Precision Lightweight GPS Receivers (PLGRS), or "pluggers," have been made for use with pseudolites.
Pseudolites and backup inertial navigation systems mean smart bombs and cruise missiles are likely to reach their intended targets as long as the U.S. military controls the air space over a battlefield. But in a conflict in which pseudolites cannot be safely deployed, ground forces could go astray or misdirect their fire if they encounter a minefield of expendable, hockey-puck-size GPS jammers, each of which could disrupt the GPS signal within a one-kilometer radius. Iraq reportedly also purchased as many as 400 small GPS jammers from Aviaconversiya prior to the outbreak of hostilities in the region, although it is not known whether any of these were used.
"It's a serious threat," says Jim Hendershot, president of Radio Design Group, Inc., a maker of GPS jamming gear used for training purposes, based in Grants Pass, Ore., "because these small jammers can screw up the guy on the ground. Soldiers' GPS receivers don't have backup navigation systems. They would be deprived of their ability to navigate."
Just how dependent ground forces can be on GPS was inadvertently revealed to Greek authorities in August 2000, when the U.S., Britain and France competed for a $1.4-billion tank contract. As each country's tank entry demonstrated its prowess, it became clear that U.S. and British tanks could not acquire a GPS signal for navigation. Sometime later and to the amusement of Greek defense officials, reports the journal Military Review, it was revealed that French agents were remotely activating small, one-foot-high GPS jammers to disrupt the GPS signal when British and U.S. tanks were in the field. Such GPS jamming tactics should not have come as a surprise considering the fact that the U.S. and Australian militaries were jointly conducting research on GPS jammer locators in remote Woomera, Australia, as far back as March 2000.
In fact, small GPS jammers can be built by any hobbyist with a spare $400 to invest in electronic components, using plans supplied by the online hacker magazine Phrack, for example. Such devices can easily disrupt a commercial GPS signal and possibly a military GPS signal, even though the latter is encrypted with a code that changes on a regular basis. The military signal is a little harder to disrupt," Hendershot says, "but it's still easy."
That's why the military is lobbying for the launch of 20 new GPS satellites starting next year. These new satellites would transmit a GPS signal eight times stronger than the current signal, which means that any potential jammers would have to increase in size and complexity. Until then, note experts like Hendershot, "GPS is very vulnerable."
Left in limbo for months while Al Gore, his 2000 ticketmate, mulled a comeback, the Connecticut senator got his own presidential quest off to a slow start, eroding his early standing. Once he did get in, Lieberman's outspoken support for military action to oust Saddam Hussein quickly put him on the wrong side of the divisive issue for many Democratic activists. At the New Hampshire Democratic Party's annual fund-raising dinner in Manchester on Feb. 27, a skeptical crowd sat on its hands as Lieberman outlined his reasons for going to war in Iraq. His first quarter fund-raising total of just over $3 million was less than half of those tallied by rivals John Kerry and John Edwards. And the latest New Hampshire poll shows him back in the pack, essentially tied with Dick Gephardt for third, behind Kerry and second-place Howard Dean. [...]
Despite the senator's slow start, his strategists claim to see opportunity in New Hampshire. Dean, they think, surfed the antiwar wave so hard he is now stranded outside the mainstream. Kerry, at 24 percent in the latest New Hampshire poll, is well shy of the 36 percent that next-door-neighbor Mike Dukakis tallied in winning the 1988 primary or the 33 percent that Tsongas garnered to win here in 1992.
Lieberman's combination of a muscular foreign policy, a progrowth, probusiness agenda, and progressive social stands is unusual among the candidates, he concedes. But not, he insists, among voters. Still, will a party driven halfway round the bend with loathing for the Republican incumbent really warm to a mild-mannered, low-key moderate, a man who thinks Bush has been a bad president, but is not a bad man, and certainly not the root of all evil?
Lieberman laughs out loud. ''Since I think you are describing me,'' he offers, '' I would say that that might be the New Hampshire way.''
My first encounter with buttermilk was a disaster. Shortly after we were married, my husband brought home a carton of buttermilk, a substance I had managed to avoid for the first twenty-five years of my life. He offered me a taste, but I wasn't interested. Have you ever seen the streaky residue left in the glass after someone has just drunk buttermilk from it? Who in her right mind would want to drink something like that?
To make matters worse, the next day my husband performed a strange ritual that I had never seen before. He took a large square of homemade corn bread, crumbled it into a big glass, filled the glass with buttermilk, and then proceeded to eat the whole yucky-looking mess with a spoon. I couldn't bear to watch.
Later I learned that this buttermilk--corn bread concoction is a favorite food in the Deep South, where some people even gussy it up with a sprinkling of sugar. And, over the years, I also developed a taste for buttermilk--although I've never been persuaded to engage in weird activities involving buttermilk and corn bread, even if they are traditional below the Mason-Dixon Line.
What is buttermilk, anyway? Originally it was simply the liquid left over after whole milk or cream had been churned into butter. The churn's motion caused the butterfat to separate from the milk or cream and solidify into butter. The liquid that remained was called buttermilk. [...]
If you turn into a true buttermilk fanatic, you can even make an entire meal based on buttermilk, with recipes from around the globe. Start with an American appetizer of raw vegetables with buttermilk dip, followed by cold blueberry-buttermilk soup from Europe. Then serve a spicy Indian vegetarian main dish of okra with buttermilk, accompanied by white rice. For dessert, offer a choice of high-calorie buttermilk pie or buttermilk pralines, or low-calorie buttermilk sherbet--all classics from the American South.
And the next time you finish drinking a glass of pure buttermilk, look closely at the patterns on the glass. Maybe then you'll understand why a songwriter once described the streaks of cirrus clouds in winter as a "buttermilk sky." [...]
Blueberry-buttermilk soup
Cold soups made from fruits and berries are eaten in many parts of Scandinavia and in central and eastern Europe. This easy-to-make soup can be served by itself for lunch on a hot summer day, or as a first course for dinner any time of the year.
4 cups fresh blueberries or two 16-ounce packages unsweetened frozen blueberries
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1/4 cup sugar (or more, to taste)
2 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice
1 1/2 cups well-chilled sparkling water
Garnish:
sour cream or cr?me fra”che
ground cinnamon
Wash and drain fresh blueberries (or thaw and drain frozen ones). Puree berries in a blender or food processor, then press puree through a sieve into a large glass bowl. Whisk in buttermilk, sugar, and lemon juice. Taste, and add more sugar if desired. Cover and chill until serving time. Just before serving, stir in chilled sparkling water. Mix very well.
Serve immediately, in chilled soup bowls. Garnish each serving with a dollop of sour cream or cr?me fra”che, and a light sprinkling of ground cinnamon. Makes 6 servings. [...]
Buttermilk pralines
A classic confection from the American South, pralines are served on many occasions--for afternoon tea, for dessert, as an accompaniment to after-dinner coffee, and as a sweet snack at any time of day.
1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp. baking soda
2 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1/8 tsp. salt
3 Tbsp. unsalted butter (plus extra butter for pans)
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 cups coarsely chopped pecans
Important note: You must use a very large pan with a lid (at least 4 quarts, preferably larger) for this recipe because the mixture foams up considerably during boiling. Do not try to double this recipe (or you'll have a big mess all over the stove). If you want more pralines, make 2 separate batches.
Lightly butter 2 large baking sheets. Set aside. Lightly butter inside of a large, heavy-bottomed cooking pot. Add buttermilk and baking soda, stirring to dissolve soda. Stir in sugar and salt. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture comes to a boil. Cover pan and cook exactly 3 minutes longer.
Uncover pan and continue to cook mixture over medium heat. Do not stir. The mixture will bubble up considerably and will gradually turn caramel-colored as it boils. Let mixture boil until it reaches the soft-ball stage (236*F on a candy thermometer), about 10 minutes from the time you uncover the pan.
Immediately remove pan from heat and stir in butter. Let mixture cool for 3--4 minutes. Stir in vanilla and pecans. Beat mixture with a large wooden spoon until it just begins to become thick and creamy. Quickly drop it by heaping tablespoonfuls onto buttered baking sheets.
Let pralines cool completely before removing them with a spatula. Wrap each praline in aluminum foil or plastic wrap and store in an airtight container. Pralines will stay fresh longer if stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator. They can also be frozen. Makes 24 soft pralines, each
approximately 2 1/2 inches in diameter.
The country is confronting an anniversary of sorts this year: the 10th anniversary of the year that killed Canadian politics.
One-party rule, or at least a facsimile of it, has been with Canadians ever since the election of 1993. Since that time, the Liberals -- no matter what they do -- have maintained an extraordinary 20- to 35-percentage-point lead in the polls. And there is no sign of a letup. The system is almost locked shut against change. One-party rule could be the rule for a generation to come.
Kim Campbell, Preston Manning and the campaign of 1993 are the culprits. It may well have been the most significant election in our history. It collapsed the political system.
The Cuban regime took another disgraceful and unacceptable step when it sentenced to prison those who only attempted to defend their fundamental rights and to practice independent journalism. It was yet another example of the demented intolerance with which Fidel Castro wields his government.
The truth is that Castro is not all that different from his predecessor. His Sierra Maestra saga to overthrow dictator Fulgencio Batista turned into a betrayal of his own revolution and of an entire nation's dreams of freedom.
Castro is cut from the same cloth as Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, two of his less-notable contemporaries, or Paraguay's Alfredo Stroessner and the Somoza clan, all of them fully deserving members of the Hall of Shame. [...]
The international community must deal at once with the Cuban situation, using the tools of diplomacy -- lest the emboldened hawks in Washington decide to include Cuba in the axis of evil.
What is very rarely recognised in the radical camp, except as the occasion for mockery, is that the major states have, since the collapse of the cold war, elaborated and put into practice some version of an 'ethical dimension to foreign policy' (the phrase was put into the public arena by Robin Cook, the former UK Foreign Secretary).
In an article in the current issue of Foreign Policy the journal of the US Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb and Justine Rosenthal write that "something quite important has happened in American foreign policy making with little notice or digestion of its meaning. Morality, values, ethics, universal principles--the whole panoply of ideas in international affairs that were once almost the exclusive domain of preachers and scholars--have taken root in the hearts, or at least the minds of the American foreign policy communiy...in the past, tyrants supported by Washington did not have to worry a lot about interference in their domestic affairs. Now, even if Washington needs their help, some price has to be exacted, if only sharp public criticism. Moral matters are now part of American politics and the politics of many other nations".
Note the many reservations. Ethics have not taken over foreign policy: it remains largely driven by national interests. The application of moral standards is often--indeed, one could say always--selective. Some tyrants are targeted, while others are cosseted – and the reasons given for targeting some are often applicable to those being cosseted. My contention, however, is that there is a significant effect which is growing. Namely that the ethical dimension is increasingly being linked with the realist concerns of the kind most famously associated, both when he was a scholar and when he was a practitioner, with Henry Kissinger.
This has not of course been confined to America. Britain has its own version of an ethical foreign policy, as has France and even Germany--the latter, under a social democratic government, confronting its own comfortable and popular pacifism in order to make some sort of effective response, even if tardy, to the horrors of former Yugoslavia.
Many on the left and most on the right have dismissed these shifts towards an ethical dimension in international policy as cosmetic, propagandist, hypocritical, over-idealist or useless. This is tragic, especially on the left, for this current of opinion has in the past--together with the United Nations, Christian churches and many international NGOs--been in the forefront of pressing for humanitarian intervention, and for an end to the possibility of using national sovereignty as a shield behind which tyrants can commit atrocities with impunity.
As a result the intellectual/creative opposition to this war has, in Europe, been quite close to a monopoly. Only a few have broken this monopoly, notably the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who wrote in La Repubblica on 16 April that "one of the few profound joys which history reserves for us is the end of a tyranny." But few of his fellow writers and artists have shared this joy. Most have felt something quite different: a profound disgust--at the US. [...]
According to a report last week in the Independent , poor Zimbabwean youths are asking when Bush will come and liberate them from Mugabe. Do we smile at their naivete and the falseness of their consciousness? Or, on the other hand, do those of us who are British--with some historical responsibility--allow an indifferent American administration to convince us that we have no dog in this fight because Mugabe is not part of any axis of evil? Or do we try to think through, as the times invite us to do, how we can better square our ideals, our humanitarian impulses and our internationalism with life as it is lived and deaths as they are meted out?
We should recognise that politics, and human rights, are becoming global. None of the answers to the often-hideous questions thrown up are easy. And those that spring from finely crafted denunciations of American wickedness are the least convincing of all.
America has discovered a new beer, one that seems right for a country facing bad times.
Pabst Blue Ribbon, a forgotten if not forsaken brand, once the solace of the beleaguered working man, and, regrettably, a beer often associated with what people in polite company call "trash," has staged a surprising comeback. The resurgence is mostly among young adults, led by colleagues such as snowboarders and indie filmmakers.
Perhaps it's a sign of the times, or a remembrance of the way it was, or a toast to blue-collar virtue. However you pour it, PBR is America's new beer for a simple reason: It is not new at all. [...]
Of course, no amount of hipster or counterculture endorsement is going to resurrect Pabst to its former glory, or even bring it to levels competitive with Coors, Miller and Anheuser-Busch.
Steinman classifies PBR as "sub-premium," a real category among beer producers but one that also reflects the attitude of many American beer drinkers, an attitude that is unlikely to change as the beer proliferates among Establishment dropouts. And nothing is so tenuous as a youth fad, particularly one embraced by the ever-vigilant American iconoclast, who is likely to bail once he suspects corporate America has found him out, not to mention the media. If PBR becomes too visible, too much of a commodity, then it will lose its newfound support. (Note the brief and swiftly exploited revival of swing music in the 1990s.)
As Steinman points out, a sprinkle of sales doesn't mean a watershed is soon at hand. "The Pabst Brewing Company as a whole is still declining at a substantial rate," he says. "Pabst Blue Ribbon is a small component at this time. It's not their biggest brand." That distinction belongs to Old Milwaukee, not exactly a contender either. And the ground Pabst has lost since its heyday near the end of the 19th century will never be recovered.
In the 1890s Pabst produced the best-selling and most widely distributed beer in the country. It was the first beer to be accepted by the moneyed elite; sales were so brisk that Pabst purchased its own forest and barrel factories just to meet the demand. Today, Pabst products constitute about 4.2 percent of the domestic beer market, while Anheuser- Busch commands about 48 percent.
For now, low-saturation marketing has paid off. Pabst projects an image of casual earnestness. Buy it or don't buy it. Whatever. It is an image shared with today's indie rock scene, indie film scene, skateboarding scene, art and literary scenes. It is the image that, ironically, sells.
While most young consumers buy clothes and cars to make themselves seem as affluent and desirable as possible, the materialism of many of today's counterculture youth is just the opposite. It is meant to reflect the economics of "reality," of working-class thriftiness, of the notion of America at its best, at its most optimistic, at its blue-collar prime. Of course, this is not America. This is Americana -- and an appetite for what was good when things are going bad.
Rednecks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer
The barmaid is mad cause some guy made a pass
The jukebox is playin' there stands a glass
The cigarette smoke kinda hangs in the air
Rednecks, white socks and Blue Ribbon beer
A cowboy is cussin' a pinball machine
The drunk at the bar is gettin orn'ry and mean
Some guy on the phone says, "I'll be home soon, dear!"
Rednecks, white socks and Blue Ribbon beer
No we don't fit in with that white collar crowd
We're a little too rowdy and a little too loud
But there' s no place that I'd rather be than right here
With our rednecks, my white socks, and Blue Ribbon beer
The semis are passing on the highway outside
The 4:30 Crowd is about to arrive
The sun's goin' down and we'll all soon be here
With our rednecks, white socks, and blue ribbon beer
No we don't fit in with that white collar crowd
We're a little too rowdy and a little too loud
But there' s no place that I'd rather be than right here
With our rednecks, my white socks, and Blue Ribbon beer
With our rednecks, my white socks, and Blue Ribbon beer
#37: Those critics who got it wrong at the start by billing the Simpsons as 'America's most dysfunctional family.' It's now clear that Homer almost always ends up doing the right thing; it is, it could be argued, one of the most moral
shows on television today. According to Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams: 'It's one of the most subtle pieces of propaganda around in the cause of sense, humility and virtue.'
The leader of one of Utah's largest polygamist sects has objected to Sen. Rick Santorum's comment lumping plural marriage with other practices the Pennsylvania Republican considers to be antifamily.
Santorum has been under fire for comparing homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery.
Owen Allred, 89, head of the United Apostolic Brethen, based in the Salt Lake City suburb of Bluffdale, agreed with Santorum in part.
"He is absolutely right. The people of the United States are doing whatever they can to do away with the sacred rights of marriage," Allred told The Salt Lake Tribune.
But Allred said Santorum's inclusion of polygamy in his list tarnishes a religious tradition whose roots are traced to biblical figures such as Abraham, Jacob and Moses - defiling them as "immoral and dirty."
The Justice Department has closed its case against Texas Tech and a biology professor after he changed his policy for giving recommendations - a policy that, the government alleged, "constituted religious discrimination."
"The new policy rightly recognizes that students don't have to give up their religious beliefs to be good doctors or good scientists," Ralph F. Boyd Jr., assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a prepared statement.
"A biology student may need to understand the theory of evolution and be able to explain it. But a state-run university has no business telling students what they should or should not believe in."
Professor Michael Dini changed the criteria and wording on his Web site to alleviate any question that he required students to affirm a personal belief in evolution. The Web site now states that students must be able to explain the scientific theory of evolution.
United States officials say they believe that one of Saddam Hussein's most prominent ministers, Tariq Aziz, is in US custody.
Tariq Aziz was deputy prime minister in the Iraqi regime and one of the best-known members of government in the West.
The BBC's Pentagon correspondent, Nick Childs, says it could be the most significant arrest by coalition forces so far.
Mr Aziz may have information on the location of Saddam Hussein and any programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction, which was the reason for the US-led coalition going to war.
He is listed among Iraq's so-called "dirty dozen" and as a member of the Revolutionary Command Council he is wanted by the US for war crimes against Kuwait, Iran and his own people.
Details are scarce and it is not known where or how he was arrested or even whether he surrendered.
Heavily Democratic New York is showing growing support for President Bush over all potential Democratic challengers, including the state's own Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a poll showed.
Bush's approval rating among New Yorkers rose to 58 percent from 50 percent in February, before the war in Iraq, according to the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute poll released Thursday. [...]
Bush was favored 50 percent to 38 percent over Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman as well as Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry in potential presidential faceoffs.
Bush was favored 49 percent to 38 percent over Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri in a presidential matchup.
A fortnight ago, the top story on CCTV9, China's international English-language channel, was "Sars is unequivocally under control".
The World Health Organisation had apparently complimented Beijing on its handling of the crisis, and archive footage of smiling, waving western tourists proved that even fickle foreign devils weren't scared.
The Communist party had successfully defended the Motherland from the ravages of Sars.
Here in Tianjin, just over an hour's train ride from the capital, Sars was little more than a big joke at that time. We mocked the Rolling Stones for pulling out of their China tour; those who donned surgical masks were ridiculed. Sars was nothing.
We didn't really believe the government's lies, but what they were claiming was by far the most comforting thing to tell ourselves.
It all changed four days ago. In the space of a few hours, the figure for cases in Beijing was revised from 30 to almost 400. And from then on, we kicked ourselves for having pretended to believe what we knew were lies.
The media's change of tack looks like a new attempt at honesty, but it has come far too late. Who knows how many have fallen ill or died needlessly?
No-one, Chinese or otherwise, can believe the offical line now.
U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin traveled to Cuba to promote sales of Iowa farm products, but ended his visit on Thursday calling on President Fidel Castro to release jailed dissidents.
The Iowa Democrat, an outspoken defender of human rights in other parts of the world, had planned his sales pitch trip to Cuba before the island's communist authorities arrested 75 pro-democratic opponents of Castro last month and handed them stiff sentences of up to 28 years in prison.
"Some said I should not come here under these circumstances, but a policy of isolation and the embargo of 42 years has not achieved any U.S. objectives nor made life better for the average Cuban citizen," Harkin said.
The senator also asked the Bush administration to make it clear that it has no plans for military action against Cuba, responding to Cuban fears that Washington might be aiming at a regime change in Cuba after Iraq. [...]
After meeting with dissidents, including the Gisela Delgado, whose husband Hector Palacios was handed a 25-year jail term, Harkin said "it is clear that the best course of action now is moderation not escalation, engagement not isolation."
At that meeting on Tuesday evening at the Hotel Nacional, the dissidents recognized the waiter serving drinks as one of the witnesses the government produced at Palacios' trial to testify that the dissident had met with U.S. legislators at the hotel.
Let's leave adultery and polygamy out of it for the moment. Let's set aside morality and stick to law. And let's grant that being attracted to a gender is more fundamental than being attracted to a family member. Santorum sees no reason why, if gay sex is too private to be banned, the same can't be said of incest. Can you give him a reason?
The easy answer--that incest causes birth defects--won't cut it. Birth defects could be prevented by extending to sibling marriage the rule that five states already apply to cousin marriage: You can do it if you furnish proof of infertility or are presumptively too old to procreate. If you're in one of those categories, why should the state prohibit you from marrying your sibling? [...]
I'm a lifestyle conservative and an orientation liberal. The way I see it, stable families are good, homosexuality isn't a choice, and therefore, gay marriage should be not just permitted but encouraged. Morally, I think incest is bad because it confuses relationships. But legally, I don't see why a sexual right to privacy, if it exists, shouldn't cover consensual incest. I think Santorum is wrong. But I can't explain why, and so far, neither can the Human Rights Campaign.
The man of conservative temperament believes that a known good is not lightly to be surrendered for an unknown better. He is not in love with what is dangerous and difficult; he is unadventurous; he has no impulse to sail uncharted seas; for him there is no magic in being lost, bewildered or shipwrecked. If he is forced to navigate the unknown, he sees virtue in heaving the lead every inch of the way.What others plausibly identify as timidity, he recognizes in himself as rational prudence; what others interpret as inactivity, he recognizes as a disposition to enjoy rather than to exploit. He is cautious, and he is disposed to indicate his assent or dissent, not in absolute, but in graduated terms. He eyes the situation in terms of its propensity to disrupt the familiarity of the features of his world.
As a man of reason and logic, I am all for reform; but as the unworthy inheritor of a great tradition, I am unalterably against it. I am forever with Falkland, the true martyr of the Civil War,--one of the very greatest among the great spirits of whom England has ever been so notoriously noteworthy,--as he stood facing Hampden and Pym. 'Mr. Speaker,' he said, 'when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.'
For us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.
Economism can build a society which is rich, prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being. It can not build one which is lovely, one which has savour and depth, and which exercises the irresistible attraction that loveliness wields. Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the society it has built may be tired of itself, bored by its own hideousness, and may despairingly consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer.
The homosexual learns to make distinctions between his sexual desire and his emotional longing--not because he is particularly prone to objectifications of the flesh, but because he needs to survive as a social and sexual being. The society separates these two entities, and for a long time the homosexual has no option but to keep them separate. He learns certain rules; and, as with a child learning grammar, they are hard, later on in life, to unlearn.
It's possible, I think, that whatever society teaches or doesn't teach about homosexuality, this fact will always be the case. No homosexual child, surrounded overwhelmingly by heterosexuals, will feel at home in his sexual and emotional world, even in the most tolerant of cultures. And every homosexual child will learn the rituals of deceit, impersonation, and appearance. Anyone who believes political, social, or even cultural revolution will change this fundamentally is denying reality. This isolation will always hold. It is definitional of homosexual development.
Homosexuality is not 'normal.' On the contrary, it is a challenge to the norm; therein rests its eternally revolutionary character. Note I do not call it a challenge to the idea of the norm. Queer theorists - that wizened crew of flimflamming free-loaders - have tried to take the poststructuralist tack of claiming that there is no norm, since everything is relative and contingent. This is the kind of silly bind that word-obsessed people get into when they are deaf, dumb, and blind to the outside world. Nature exists, whether academics like it or not. And in nature, procreation is the single, relentless rule. That is the norm. Our sexual bodies were designed for reproduction. Penis fits vagina: no fancy linguistic game - playing can change that basic fact. However, my libertarian view, here as in regard to abortion, is that we have not only the right, but the obligation to defy nature's
tyranny. The highest human identity consists precisely in such assertions of freedom against material limitation.
[Howard] Dean appeared on "Wolf Blitzer Reports." Some highlights:
Asked if Iraqis are better off without Saddam: "We don't know that yet. ... We still have a country whose city is mostly without electricity. We have tumultuous occasions in the south where there is no clear governance. We have a major city without clear governance. We don't know yet."
CNN's Blitzer: "You think it's possible ... that whatever emerges in Iraq could be worse than what they have for decades under Saddam Hussein?"
Dean: "I do. We have to think of this from an American perspective, not an Iraqi perspective. The reason the president gave for going into Iraq, which I disagree with, is Iraq was a security threat to the United States. I don't believe Saddam was. But I believe a fundamentalist Islamic regime would be. ... The other thing is, you have to remember that this president has now created a new American foreign policy -- a preemptive doctrine. And I think that's going to cause America some serious trouble down the line too."
Al Qaeda and its terrorist allies remain a potent threat, but their failure to carry out a successful strike during the U.S.-led military campaign to topple Saddam Hussein has raised questions about their ability to carry out major new attacks.
The fears of senior Bush administration officials and private terrorism analysts that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would attempt to "hijack" Muslim opposition to the Iraq war with a spectacular new attack have proved unfounded, even with American generals now occupying Saddam's Baghdad palaces.
"I think their credibility is increasingly on the line the longer we go without a successful terrorist strike," said Mark Burgess, director of the Terrorism Project at the Center for Defense Information.
"We know al Qaeda is a patient lot, but I don't know if they can afford to be too patient," he said. "Bin Laden made a lot of noise before the war about defending the Iraqi people, and so far there's nothing to show for it."
Despite a few suicide bombings that targeted U.S. forces in Iraq, speculation that Saddam's regime would resort to widespread terrorist attacks to disrupt the coalition campaign also did not pan out.
The link between the war in Iraq and the larger post-September 11 war on terrorism has been one of the most contested battlegrounds in the debate over toppling Saddam.
Scientists claim to have discovered a way of producing embryonic stem cells that could side-step the entire ethical debate surrounding such research.
Researchers from the US bio-tech company Stemron have produced embryos capable of providing stem cells, but which can never become human beings.
It is the first time scientists have used a technique called parthenogenesis on human cells.
Parthenogenesis is a form of reproduction in which the egg develops without fertilisation. The phenomenon occurs naturally in many insects, while artificial parthenogenesis has been achieved in almost all groups of animals, although it usually results in abnormal development.
Emboldened by the U.S. military victory in Iraq, neoconservatives and their allies in Congress are mounting a preemptive campaign against the U.S. plan to implement a so-called road map for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [...]
During the run-up to the Iraq war, President Bush announced his intention of unveiling the Middle East road map once Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority's prime minister-designate, forms his Cabinet and its members take office.
Bush made that commitment, at least in part, as a concession to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his strongest ally on the war, who was concerned that Washington's failure to aggressively pursue an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord was enraging the Arab world.
As outlined in media reports, the plan details a series of reciprocal steps that Israel and the Palestinians would take leading up to the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005.
Neoconservatives take issue with the fact that it is a collaborative effort with the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.
Calling that arrangement a State Department "invention," Gingrich described it Tuesday as "a deliberate and systematic effort to undermine the president's policies procedurally by ensuring that they will consistently be watered down and distorted by the other three members."
Underlying such antagonism is the belief among many administration hawks, especially in the Pentagon, that Russia, France and Germany stymied U.S. efforts to obtain U.N. support for forcefully disarming Iraq.
"For us to invite them into a quartet is an absolute defeat before the process even begins," Gingrich said.
As a part of the new peace initiative, the Bush administration intends to press Israel to ease its crackdown in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
During an April 14 meeting at the White House, both Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security advisor, delivered that news to Dov Weisglass, an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who had brought to the White House Sharon's many reservations about the plan.
In an effort to present a united front, Rice included other senior administration officials whom Israel considers more sympathetic, among them Elliott Abrams, a top National Security Council advisor on the Middle East; I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney; and Douglas J. Feith, who is undersecretary of Defense for policy.
But Rice reportedly told Weisglass that the administration would make no changes to the road map before it was unveiled.
Critics of baseball will tell you that Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, N.Y., invented the game in 1839 and not a thing has changed since. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, no one has yet proved that Ol' Abner actually invented the game, and second, the game of baseball changes constantly--with every game, every day, and every player bringing something unique to the sport.
The peanuts and Cracker Jack are still there, but everything else is different than it was 20, 30, even five years ago. In my opinion, no sport has changed as radically as baseball has in the past 20 years. To me, baseball is a matter of who is in control--the pitcher or the hitter. The vast majority of the changes in major-league baseball over the past 20 years have favored putting the hitter in control. Why? Because fans would rather see an 11-8 ballgame with balls getting smacked over the fence than a 2-1 pitcher's duel. And hitters today are delivering.
Last fall, as the United States rumbled toward war against Saddam Hussein, literary reviews and higher-brow magazines wrestled with an intriguing if unlikely hypothetical: What would George Orwell say if he were here today?
Christopher Hitchens, the fire-breathing British journalist who kick-started the discussion with his book Why Orwell Matters, suggested that a contemporary Eric Blair "would have seen straight through the characters who chant 'No War On Iraq'" and helped the rest of us to "develop the fiber to call Al-Qaeda what it actually is." Washington Post book reviewer George Scialabba stated confidently that "Orwell would associate himself with the unsexy democratic left, notably Dissent and the American Prospect," and that "he might, in particular, have wondered aloud why the heinous terrorist murder of 3,000 Americans was a turning point in history." Commentary tried yet again to claim Orwell as a neocon, and The Weekly Standard's David Brooks argued that the great man's mantle and relevance had actually passed onto a new contrarian's shoulders: "At this moment, oddly enough, Hitchens matters more than Orwell."
At exactly the same time, the one man in the world of the living who could justifiably claim to be Orwell's heir was expounding almost daily on Saddam Hussein and international terrorism -- even while rushing through one of the most frenetic periods of a famously accomplished life. Vaclav Havel, the 66-year-old former Czech president who was term-limited out of office on February 2, built his reputation in the 1970s by being to eyewitness fact what George Orwell was to dystopian fiction. In other words, he used common sense to deconstruct rhetorical falsehoods, pulling apart the suffocating mesh of collectivist lies one carefully observed thread at a time.
Like Orwell, Havel was a fiction writer whose engagement with the world led him to master the nonfiction political essay. Both men, in self-described sentiment, were of "the left," yet both men infuriated the left with their stinging criticism and ornery independence. Both were haunted by the Death of God, delighted by the idiosyncratic habits of their countrymen, and physically diminished as a direct result of their confrontation with totalitarians (not to mention their love of tobacco). As essentially neurotic men with weak mustaches, both have given generations of normal citizens hope that, with discipline and effort, they too can shake propaganda from everyday language and stand up to the foulest dictatorships.
Unlike Orwell, Havel lived long enough to enjoy a robust third act, and his last six months in office demonstrated the same kind of restless, iconoclastic activism that has made him an enemy of ideologues and ally of freedom lovers for nearly five decades. [...[
The first targets of Havel?s considerable wrath and sarcasm were the poor fools making "halfhearted" efforts at creating "Socialism with a humanface." One of his first essays, 1965?s "On Evasive Thinking" (collected in the English-language volume Open Letters) makes cruel sport of a newspaper essayist who -- not unlike his modern American counterparts -- attempted to assess and then dismiss the broader significance of a temporal tragedy, in this case, a building ledge falling and killing a passerby. "The public," Havel wrote, "again showed more intelligence and humanity than the writer, for it had understood that the so-called prospects of mankind are nothing but an empty platitude if they distract us from our particular worry about who might be killed by [another] window ledge, and what will happen should it fall on a group of nursery-school children out for a walk."
Here, in Havel?s earliest essay to be translated into English, you can already find the four main themes that have animated his adult nonfiction writing ever since. One is the responsibility to make the world a better place. Another is that the slightest bit of personal dishonesty warps the soul. ("The minute we begin turning a blind eye to what we don't like in each other?s writing, the minute we begin to back away from our own inner norms, to accommodate ourselves to each other, cut deals with each other over poetics, we will in fact set ourselves against each other...until one day we will disappear in a general fog of mutual admiration.")
A third theme is that ideology-driven governance is practically doomed to fail. ("It prevents whoever has it in his power to solve the problem of the Prague facades from understanding that he bears responsibility for something and that he can't lie his way out of that responsibility.") Finally, there is his belief in the revolutionary potency of individuals speaking freely and "living in truth."
The last of these phenomena became nearly extinct after the tanks of 1968 rolled in from Russia. The new rulers ushered in the "normalization" period, during which tens of thousands emigrated and most "nonconformist" writers (including Havel) were inconvenienced, banned, or sometimes just locked away. In April 1975, facing an utterly demoralized country and an understandable case of writer?s block, Havel committed an act of such sheer ballsiness that the shock waves are still being felt in repressive countries 30 years later. He simply sat down and, knowing that he'd likely be imprisoned for his efforts, wrote an open letter to his dictator, Gustav Husak, explaining in painstaking detail just why and how totalitarianism wasruining Czechoslovakia.
"So far," Havel scolded Husak, "you and your government have chosen the easy way out for yourselves, and the most dangerous road for society: the path of inner decay for the sake of outward appearances; of deadening life for the sake of increasing uniformity; of deepening the spiritual and moral crisis of our society, and ceaselessly degrading human dignity, for the puny sake of protecting your own power."
It was the Big Bang that set off the dissident movement in Central Europe. For those lucky enough to read an illegally retyped copy or hear it broadcast over Radio Free Europe, the effect was not unlike what happened to the 5,000 people who bought the Velvet Underground's first record: After the shock and initial pleasure wore off, many said, "Wait a minute, I can do this too!" By standing up to a system that had forced every citizen to make a thousand daily compromises, Havel was suggesting a novel new tactic: Have the self-respect to tell the truth, never mind the consequences, and maybe you'll put the bastards on the defensive.
Coalition troops in Iraq captured four top former officials of Saddam Hussein's regime Wednesday, including the air defense force commander and the former head of military intelligence.
The highest-ranking capture is Muzahim Sa'b Hassan al-Tikriti, who headed Iraq's air defenses under Saddam. He was No. 10 on the U.S. list of the top 55 most wanted officials from Saddam's regime and the queen of diamonds in the military's deck of playing cards listing those officials.
The French Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, is the first man for a long time to hold that post who has shown the courage and determination to confront France's growing social problems. He has put policemen back on the beat; he is testing drivers of crashed cars for the presence of cannabis in their urine. But he made a rod with which to beat his own back in creating the Union of French Islamic Organizations as an intermediary between French Muslims and the French government. He hoped that moderates would control the new group, but instead it has given extremists a platform from which to voice their demands. Last weekend, he brought down the extremists' ire by re-opening the question of the wearing of the headscarf by Muslim girls and women in a speech to the new Islamic union.
The fundamentalists booed Sarkozy, though a smattering of the women in the audience applauded when he remarked that the law required that photographs for the compulsory identity card should be taken bareheaded: that is to say, without a headscarf. He was implicitly asserting the supremacy of the law of the state over any religious custom.
The Conseil d'Etat had not long before ruled that the wearing of headscarves by Muslim girls at school was legal (it had previously been banned), provided that it gave rise to no conflict. This, of course, was asking for the circle to be squared: and conflict over headscarves duly started up again in several schools almost at once. But, in a spirit completely contrary to the Conseil d'Etat's ruling, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin announced his intention of prohibiting by law the wearing of the headscarf in the exercise of any public function. He did so in name of the difference between the public and the private sphere, and of the secularism of the state.
The wearing of the headscarf has clearly become a matter of the deepest symbolic significance in France, a matter over which it is not impossible to see hundreds or even thousands eventually being killed. What might appear to an outsider as a trivial disagreement is actually one of great philosophical importance-a fact that both parties to the disagreement instinctively understand.
By his own admission, Hitler was not a big fan of novels, though he once ranked Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Don Quixote (he had a special affection for the edition illustrated by Gustave Dore) among the world's greatest works of literature. The one novelist we know Hitler loved and read was Karl May, a German writer of cheap American-style westerns. In the spring of 1933, just months after the Nazis seized power, Oskar Achenbach, a Munich-based journalist, toured the Berghof-in the Führer's absence-and discovered a shelf of Karl May novels at Hitler's bedside. "The bedroom of the Führer is of spartan simplicity," Achenbach reported in the Sonntag Morgenpost. "Brass bed, closet, toiletries, a few chairs, those are all the furnishings. On a bookshelf are works on politics and diplomacy, a few brochures and books on the care of German shepherds, and then-pay attention you German boys! Then comes an entire row of books by-Karl May! Winnetou, Old Surehand, Bad Guy, all our dear old friends." During the war Hitler reportedly admonished his generals for their lack of imagination and recommended that they all read Karl May. Albert Speer recounted in his Spandau diaries,
"Hitler was wont to say that he had always been deeply impressed by the tactical finesse and circumspection thatKarl May conferred upon his character Winnetou ... And he would add that during his reading hours at night, when faced by seemingly hopeless situations, he would still reach for those stories, that they gave him courage like works of philosophy for others or the Bible for elderly people.
Prior to the administration of the country's present leader, Guatemala underwent significant economic and political development. Under the leadership of President Alfonso Portillo, however, the country has experienced a sharp reversal of many of the pre-1999 free-market reforms. The Portillo Administration's enactment of higher taxes and its cavalier treatment of the rule of law have stymied the nation's economic development.
These conditions have brought about a renewed interest in the free-market reforms that characterized government policy in the 1990s. The March conferences in which I participated were designed to bring together some of Guatemala's "best and brightest" to discuss the future of free market reforms and, by extension, the very future of Guatemala itself. The fundamental conviction of all the sponsoring organizations is that the future of Guatemala lies not with a centralized federal structure dictating economic policy, but with the economic and moral components of a revitalized civil society working in concert for the economic development of Guatemala.
Rodrigo Callejas, an attorney from Guatemala City and one of the conference organizers, provides critical insight into the changes necessary to unlock the economic and political potential of Guatemala. Callejas notes that, for Guatemala to have continued economic growth, "a national dialogue has to be set in order for all sectors of Guatemalan society to agree upon a long-term national vision, based upon a stable legal framework, rule of law, a democratic government, and a socially-aware free market economic system."
However, like other countries in the region, the desired free-market "culture" needed for long-term, systemic change in Guatemala has been deterred by an overbearing and unwieldy federal structure. This structure has made Guatemala, especially in the perception of most investors, a very unfriendly place for business. Significant structural reforms are needed-and needed immediately-if Guatemala is to survive and be competitive in the international marketplace. Callejas is convinced that new growth will ensue when Guatemala's assets are capitalized and when there is "a single tributary scheme that will motivate investors and provide them with the stability for their investments."
Perhaps such a possibility looms more imminently than one imagines, since federal elections are scheduled for November. The next generation of Guatemala's leaders, like Callejas, want to improve economic conditions by seeking "to take away the overwhelming power that the government actually has, and decentralize it to the civil society." A new vision for Guatemala is needed, continues Callejas, where " the government has to understand that its role is to serve . . . and respond to the needs of entrepreneurs in a just and efficient way."
His is not a lone voice. Organizations such as IPRES explore and disseminate the dynamic relationship between ethics, social responsibility, and the institutions of the free-market. A fundamental principle of The Instituto de Gobernanza is to promote the principles of limited government and respect for the autonomy of civil society.
The best chance of fixing these problems came last year with the launch of a conference to overhaul Europe's institutions in the runup to the "Big Bang", when EU membership expands from 15 to 25 countries in May 2004.
The convention, chaired by former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, is due to submit its recommendations by the end of June. Some of its thinking has been ambitiously integrationist. Some delegates have suggested changing the name of the EU to the United States of Europe, appointing a permanent EU president, rather than rotating the presidency every six months, and having an EU foreign minister.
But the outcome of the Iraqi war has clearly tipped in favour of Britain and other "Euro-realists", who want an EU where member states co-operate if they can, but keep significant competencies, such as foreign policy and defence, for themselves. The pragmatists are now in the ascendancy, and are determined to water down the convention's ambitious reforms, or reject them outright if need be.
If so, the Europe of the future will speak with several voices rather than a single voice, and there will be vocal demands for intimate ties with Washington and Nato, opposing the radicals who want to weaken the transatlantic connection and set up the EU as a potential challenger to the US. The pro-US strand will be reinforced next year by the induction of Eastern countries such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
A documentary about St Paul has infuriated Christians by suggesting that the apostle's conversion on the road to Damascus may have been caused by an epileptic fit or a freak lightning bolt.
In one of the Bible's most dramatic stories, Paul was transformed from a zealous persecutor of Christianity into one of its most powerful advocates after being struck down by a blinding light.
Trembling and on his knees, he heard the voice of God asking: "Why do you persecute me?" Soon after, he began the missionary journeys that spread Christianity across the Roman Empire.
The documentary, to be broadcast on BBC1 on May 11, is presented by Jonathan Edwards, the athlete and evangelical. It challenges the belief that Paul's conversion was caused by divine intervention by quoting scientists who link religious experience with epilepsy.
It suggests that the apostle's reference to an ailment which he described as "a thorn in the flesh, which acts as Satan's messenger to beat me, and keep me from being proud" could be the condition. [...]
An even more bizarre theory, suggested by Dr John Derr, an American earthquake expert, is that Paul could have been struck by a bolt of electro-magnetic energy, similar to ball lightning, released by an earthquake.
Two days later, the governor was back at the station for his monthly call- in with News Director Eric Scott, who asked McGreevey to reveal the nature of his relationship with Golan Cipel, the former $110,000 aide sans job description.
"Very good friends," said McGreevey. "Remains a good friend?" probed Scott. "Yes," said McGreevey.
Scott also asked the Guv if he accompanied Cipel on a house-hunting expedition when the young Israeli citizen looked at a condo he eventually purchased not far from Drumthwacket, the governor's mansion.
McGreevey said he saw the place and told Cipel it made sense. The governor said he had done as much for others.
When asked if McGreevey still seeks counsel from Cipel, the Guv said, "Sure. Definitely." Rest well tonight, New Jersey.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., tells the Boston Globe that he might consider tapping into his wife's fortune to compensate for the possibility of a $200 million fundraising juggernaut by President Bush.
Yasser Arafat and his prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, have ended a dispute over who will take key security roles in a new Palestinian cabinet.
The agreement reached hours before a midnight deadline puts Mr Abbas as interior minister as well as prime minister while Mohammed Dahlan will report to him as minister of state for security.
Natalie Lavarra is having second thoughts about her position on the Iraq war.
''I still think it was right of [French President Jacques] Chirac to say no to the war,'' says the Paris secretary. ''But when I saw how happy the Iraqis were . . . I had to ask myself whether we didn't perhaps make a mistake.'' [...]
Chirac's staunch resistance boosted his popularity to an all-time high. But despite still scoring 65 percent approval ratings in French polls, his role has changed from that of an international hero walking the moral high ground to what appears to be a sulking lone voice, fighting not to be excluded from sharing in the spoils of the war.
The result, says Alain Madelin, a Conservative politician who opposed France's war policy, is that Chirac has been presented as Saddam's best friend.
''The Iraqis feel today they had been liberated without--and even against--the will of France,'' he says.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wants to implement sweeping changes in the way civilian employees are hired, paid and promoted in the Defense Department.
Pentagon officials recently sent a 205-page bill to Capitol Hill detailing a proposed overhaul of the civil service system that would replace guaranteed annual raises for 470,000 workers with a pay-for-performance plan. It also would shift as many as 320,000 military members out of jobs that could be done by civilians, make it easier for the Defense Department to contract out work to the private sector and allow managers to hire and transfer employees without time-consuming competitions.
Moreover, the proposal would grant the defense secretary the power to implement major personnel changes over the opposition of the Office of Personnel Management and labor unions.
Pentagon officials said the changes are necessary to shape the Defense Department into a modern, responsive bureaucracy capable of efficiently carrying out the government's most important mission, protecting its citizens.
"We are trying to create a system in which people can think in one cohesive unit, and then act," said David S. Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, speaking yesterday at a human resources forum hosted by the IBM Endowment for the Business of Government.
"The current civil service system is rigid. It is not agile," Chu said. "We cannot succeed with the current system."
President Bush said today that Alan Greenspan deserved appointment to a fifth term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, in effect leaving to Mr. Greenspan the decision of whether to extend his long tenure as head of the central bank.
Responding to a question in an interview with financial journalists about whether Mr. Greenspan had done well enough to be reappointed, Mr. Bush replied: "Yes. I think Alan Greenspan should get another term." White House officials said later that Mr. Bush would renominate Mr. Greenspan next year before Mr. Greenspan's current four-year term expires in June.
President Bush called former Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar to persuade him to run for the Senate on Monday, and on Tuesday Edgar said he was "seriously'' considering the possibility. [...]
After the call from the president, Edgar dined at Mike Ditka's Restaurant in Chicago with a group of political intimates and top staffers from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, who flew to the city as part of a campaign to convince Edgar to run.
The dinner group included the committee's executive director, Jay Timmons, and its political director, Patrick Davis, as well as GOP consultant Carter Hendren and Bob Kjellendar, a member of the Republican National Committee and college friend of Bush's senior political strategist, Karl Rove. [...]
The meeting at Ditka's was described as a session where Edgar was "getting up to speed'' on new campaign finance laws and what would be involved in a federal campaign. Edgar, who served as governor for eight years and secretary of state for 10 years, has never been in a federal race.
With his considerable stature in the state, Edgar quickly emerged as the consensus pick of GOP officials. Illinois Republicans have a thin bench, and if Edgar decides not to run the attention would shift to State Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka, the state party chairman, who said last week her attention was focused on getting Edgar to say "yes."
What's not clear is if Edgar wants to give up his comfortable lifestyle, cushioned with money from teaching, lobbying and serving on corporate boards.
[T]he golden age that Arab fundamentalists refer to was achieved only because Baghdad was wide open to foreign influences, much as the United States at its birth imported ideas of the Enlightenment from Europe and made more of them than did the Old World.
One can go further. Many of the scholars who translated the manuscripts of the Greeks, Indians and Chinese, and who flocked to Baghdad in the golden age, were Christians, Jews and pagans. Although the West as we know it didn't exist in the 9th and 10th centuries, one could say that the Arab world was, for a time, part of the intellectual circle that would become the West. Many of the Greek classics reached Europe via Muslim Toledo, in Spain, where they were translated from Arabic into Latin.
In other words, there is no need for the Arab world to fear the West--or to despise it, for that matter. If Arab history is any guide, more prosperity comes from openness, receptivity and curiosity than from the closed, self-referential world of fundamentalist religions. One of the reasons the golden age happened was that the natural sciences and the so-called Islamic sciences (or religious study) were kept separate in the colleges of the day. It seems no coincidence that only when the religious authorities started to interfere with the natural sciences, starting in the 11th century, did the golden age lose its glitter.
Historically, the place we now call Iraq has always been the most secular of Arab states. That is a precious asset. Whatever government follows Saddam Hussein, it must continue to turn its face against fundamentalism. The acrimony last week between imams and secular Iraqis at meetings on the shape of the new Iraq was worrisome, if not surprising. Unless the next Arab generation, in Iraq and elsewhere, embraces the intellectual openness that so characterized the Baghdad of the 9th and 10th centuries, a second Arab miracle is unthinkable.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:
from bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to complacency;
from complacency to apathy;
from apathy to dependency;
from dependency back again to bondage.
-Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (1742-1813)
My thesis...is this: the very perfection with which the XIXth Century gave an organisation to certain orders of existence has caused the masses benefited thereby to consider it, not as an organised, but as a natural system. Thus is explained and defined the absurd state of mind revealed by these masses; they are only concerned with their own well-being, and at the same time they remain alien to the cause of that well-being. As they do not see, behind the benefits of civilisation, marvels of invention and construction which can only be maintained by great effort and foresight, they imagine that their role is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily, as if they were natural rights. In the disturbances caused by scarcity of food, the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreck the bakeries. This may serve as a symbol of the attitude adopted, on a greater and more complicated scale, by the masses of to-day towards the civilisation by which they are supported.
-Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses
I have often asked myself why human beings have any rights at all. I always come to the conclusion that human rights, human freedoms, and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world. These values are as powerful as they are because, under certain circumstances, people accept them without compulsion and are willing to die for them, and they make sense only in the perspective of the infinite and the eternal. . . . While the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God.
Britons continued spending apace last month, according to a report by the British Banker's Association which showed strong mortgage lending and weak savings rates.
The personal decisions that would accompany genetic enhancement are frightening. How would you feel about your first child when the second one comes bundled with upgrades? Could the younger sibling ever enjoy a sense of real achievement, or would the kid forever wonder if that three-minute mile had been written in before birth? "I suppose if I were the only one enhanced, I'd feel a bit of a cheat," Watson admits. Where do you draw the line between risks and rewards? Changing the germ line—those genes that will be passed onto future generations--must be done ahead of the fetus's development, and so carries tremendous potential for cascades of disaster. Somatic therapies--delivering genes to a living person--have loosed cancers in test subjects.
Even in best-case scenarios, the questions are endless. Will genetically enhanced people be held back by society, just as gifted students are now woefully underserved? Should you have to pay insurance premiums inflated by others whose parents lacked the foresight to eliminate disease genes? How much privacy protection should such people have? Pity the presidential candidate who must reveal that she's been enhanced by a lab instead of a blue-blood pedigree.
Why should the DNA-boosted have to follow our usual strictures at all? "The minimum time you must invest to do a Ph.D. these days is something like three years," says Princeton philosopher Peter Singer. "But why force someone to do it in three years when it can be done in three months?" Need a person with faster reaction times be stuck driving 55 miles per hour?
Social pressure may end up curbing wild-eyed genetic hubris, says Princeton molecular biology professor Lee Silver. "Parents want kids like themselves, except maybe a little smarter," he says. "Not beyond the curve, but on the leading edge of the curve. I think this is all going to happen very slowly, step by step. That's much more insidious, of course."
The means to achieve GM babies are spreading, and if the practice ever catches on, it'll be because parents are trying to keep up with the Joneses.
Douglas Osheroff, a Nobelist for physics, opposes genetic enhancement on principle. Instead of molecular manipulation, he favors providing a stimulating environment, which as a Stanford professor, he could provide in spades. But even he concedes, "If it appeared that [my children] would not be competitive unless they were engineered, I suppose I would seriously consider this process."
So once created, what kind of reception would those kids get? Most visions of genetic engineering--Gattaca, Brave New World--focus on the danger of having a genetic uber-class. These dystopian renderings overlook one crucial fact: Time and again, mob rule has eliminated elites, real or perceived. "This could be another way privilege is concentrated and the underclass will be angry," Watson says. "The underclass has always been angry, sometimes with good reason."
The Pentagon has produced detailed plans to bomb North Korea's nuclear plant at Yongbyon if the Stalinist state goes ahead with reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel rods, an Australian report said.
Citing "well-informed sources close to US thinking", The Australian newspaper said the plan also included a US strike against North Korean heavy artillery in the hills above the border with South Korea.
Isaac Bashevis Singer fled Nazi Europe in 1935 and came to this country. He married my grandmother, who had escaped from Hitler's Germany in 1940. He went on to become a lauded author and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978. His family--those who stayed behind--were killed in the concentration camps.
My grandfather was also a principled vegetarian. He was one of the first to equate the wholesale slaughter of humans to what we perpetrate against animals every day in slaughterhouses. He realized that the systems of oppression and murder that had been used in the Holocaust were the systems being used to confine, oppress and slaughter animals. He attributed to a character in one of his books something he believed in himself: "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis. For [them], it is an eternal Treblinka." [...]
The Holocaust happened because ordinary people chose to ignore the extraordinary oppression and abuse being inflicted on innocents by the Nazis. Millions of people went about their daily lives, knowingly turning a blind eye to the suffering of those they didn't relate to, those who were deemed "unworthy of life."
My grandfather often said that this mind-set, whether it manifested itself as the oppression of animals or of people, exemplified the most hideous and dangerous of all racist principles. As Adorno said, "Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: They're only animals." We all have the power to stop suffering and misery every time we sit down to eat.
The European left is having one of its sudden flashes of the obvious. Every time you pick up a paper these days in Europe you find out that some intellectual, journalist or union leader is coming around to the view that Fidel Castro is not such a good egg after all and that he may be depriving Cubans of their basic freedoms, when not their lives. Some socialist politicians are even insisting that, actually, they were the first to denounce Castro....
Jose Saramago, a Portuguese communist who had defended Castro for years, suddenly last week bid adios to his favorite uniformed tinpot dictator. In the briefest of notes to the Madrid daily El Pais, Mr. Saramago, a novelist, wrote words that have now become famous, because they have been quoted so often: "This is as far as I go. From now on Cuba will go its way, but I'll stay."
"To dissent is a right that is found and will be found written in invisible ink in every declaration of human rights past, present and future," the Nobel laureate wrote. "Cuba has won no heroic battle by executing those three men but it has lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, cheated my dreams."
I also like the "invisible ink" line. Clever of those authors of human rights declarations to put some rights in visible ink and others in invisible.
From Mexico, novelist Carlos Fuentes, like Mr. Saramago a supporter of Castro until yesterday, said this too was as far as he would go. But for lovers of Latin American magical realism, Mr. Fuentes put his criticism of Castro in its proper context. "I congratulate Saramago for drawing his line in the sand. Here's mine: against Bush, against Castro."
Back in the U.S., the stifling of dissent under the Bush regime continues apace:
After showing his documentary about Castro, "Comandante" at the Berlin Film Festival in February, [Oliver] Stone said of the dictator he had been privileged enough to spend three days with: "We should look to him as one of the Earth's wisest people, one of the people we should consult." Mr. Stone described Castro as "a very driven man, a very moral man. He's very concerned about his country. He's selfless in that way."
The U.S. cable network Home Box Office, which had planned to air the Stone paean to Castro next month, has now put it on ice. "In light of the recent alarming events in the country, the film seems somewhat dated or incomplete," said HBO.
A controversial, revisionist history of the Spanish civil war which claims it was sparked by a leftwing revolution and that Winston Churchill was crueller than General Francisco Franco has proved a surprise publishing success.
The Myths of the Civil War, by the former communist guerrilla turned Franco apologist Pio Moa, has outraged the Spanish left and many mainstream historians with its attacks on the icons of the period. [...]
"Franco did not think he had rebelled against a democratic republic but against an extreme danger of revolution ... Undoubtedly, he was right," Moa states.
"Franco's victory saved Spain from a traumatic revolution ... his regime saved it from involvement in the world war, modernised society and established the conditions for a stable democracy," he adds.
Moa paints those who joined the International Brigades in the late 1930s to fight Franco as a bunch of lawless, anti-Spanish communists.
He lashes out at historians who have written about Franco and the civil war, including the British author Paul Preston, and claims there is a leftwing academic plot to demonise the dictator.
Moa, who in 1976, the year after Franco died, helped found an armed communist revolutionary group, now blames modern rightwing politicians for not defending the dictator's reputation. "The right will swallow anything just so that it does not seem itself to be Francoist," he complains.
Democratic presidential hopeful Bob Graham said Tuesday that he's urging potential successors to start working on their bids to replace him in the U.S. Senate.
The Florida lawmaker has not ruled out seeking a fourth term next year if his presidential campaign falters. Still, a handful of state Democrats have expressed interest in the race, and Graham said he has heard from several.
"I've been encouraging them to get organized, start forming a campaign and be ready to go," he said during a campaign appearance.
Tony Blair joined an international push to rescue the Israeli-Palestinian peace process yesterday by urging Yasser Arafat to make every effort to help his prime minister designate, Mahmoud Abbas, form a cabinet.
If an agreed cabinet is not given to the Palestinian legislative council by tonight Mr Arafat will have to nominate another prime minister and the hope of progress to peace will be dashed, for the time being at least.
Mr Blair phoned Mr Arafat at his headquarters in Ramallah and urged him to overcome his differences with Mr Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, whom Mr Arafat appointed prime minister in March.
The main sticking point between Mr Arafat, president of the Palestinian Authority, and his nominee seems to be Mr Abbas's wish to appoint Mohammed Dahlan his head of security.
The European Union's Middle East peace envoy, Miguel Moratinos, and many national governments have also been putting pressure on Mr Arafat.
It is said that when Mr Moratinos told him that the EU would accept no one but Mr Abbas as prime minister, Mr Arafat screamed at him and slammed down the phone.
Mr Arafat has also had calls from Jordan, Egypt, Spain, Germany and the US.
Is there a copy of you reading this article? A person who is not you but who lives on a planet called Earth, with misty mountains, fertile fields and sprawling cities, in a solar system with eight other planets? The life of this person has been identical to yours in every respect. But perhaps he or she now decides to put down this article without finishing it, while you read on.
The idea of such an alter ego seems strange and implausible, but it looks as if we will just have to live with it, because it is supported by astronomical observations. The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 1028 meters from here. This distance is so large that it is beyond astronomical, but that does not make your doppelg?nger any less real. The estimate is derived from elementary probability and does not even assume speculative modern physics, merely that space is infinite (or at least sufficiently large) in size and almost uniformly filled with matter, as observations indicate. In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere. There are infinitely many other inhabited planets, including not just one but infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices.
You will probably never see your other selves. The farthest you can observe is the distance that light has been able to travel during the 14 billion years since the big bang expansion began. The most distant visible objects are now about 4 X 1026 meters away--a distance that defines our observable universe, also called our Hubble volume, our horizon volume or simply our universe. Likewise, the universes of your other selves are spheres of the same size centered on their planets. They are the most straightforward example of parallel universes. Each universe is merely a small part of a larger "multiverse."
By this very definition of "universe," one might expect the notion of a multiverse to be forever in the domain of metaphysics. Yet the borderline between physics and metaphysics is defined by whether a theory is experimentally testable, not by whether it is weird or involves unobservable entities. The frontiers of physics have gradually expanded to incorporate ever more abstract (and once metaphysical) concepts such as a round Earth, invisible electromagnetic fields, time slowdown at high speeds, quantum superpositions, curved space, and black holes. Over the past several years the concept of a multiverse has joined this list. It is grounded in well-tested theories such as relativity and quantum mechanics, and it fulfills both of the basic criteria of an empirical science: it makes predictions, and it can be falsified. Scientists have discussed as many as four distinct types of parallel universes. The key question is not whether the multiverse exists but rather how many levels it has. [...]
So should you believe in parallel universes? The principal arguments against them are that they are wasteful and that they are weird. The first argument is that multiverse theories are vulnerable to Occam's razor because they postulate the existence of other worlds that we can never observe. Why should nature be so wasteful and indulge in such opulence as an infinity of different worlds? Yet this argument can be turned around to argue for a multiverse. What precisely would nature be wasting? Certainly not space, mass or atoms--the uncontroversial Level I multiverse already contains an infinite amount of all three, so who cares if nature wastes some more? The real issue here is the apparent reduction in simplicity. A skeptic worries about all the information necessary to specify all those unseen worlds.
But an entire ensemble is often much simpler than one of its members. This principle can be stated more formally using the notion of algorithmic information content. The algorithmic information content in a number is, roughly speaking, the length of the shortest computer program that will produce that number as output. For example, consider the set of all integers. Which is simpler, the whole set or just one number? Naively, you might think that a single number is simpler, but the entire set can be generated by quite a trivial computer program, whereas a single number can be hugely long. Therefore, the whole set is actually simpler.
Similarly, the set of all solutions to Einstein's field equations is simpler than a specific solution. The former is described by a few equations, whereas the latter requires the specification of vast amounts of initial data on some hypersurface. The lesson is that complexity increases when we restrict our attention to one particular element in an ensemble, thereby losing the symmetry and simplicity that were inherent in the totality of all the elements taken together.
In this sense, the higher-level multiverses are simpler. Going from our universe to the Level I multiverse eliminates the need to specify initial conditions, upgrading to Level II eliminates the need to specify physical constants, and the Level IV multiverse eliminates the need to specify anything at all. The opulence of complexity is all in the subjective perceptions of observers--the frog perspective. From the bird perspective, the multiverse could hardly be any simpler.
The complaint about weirdness is aesthetic rather than scientific, and it really makes sense only in the Aristotelian worldview. Yet what did we expect? When we ask a profound question about the nature of reality, do we not expect an answer that sounds strange? Evolution provided us with intuition for the everyday physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, so whenever we venture beyond the everyday world, we should expect it to seem bizarre.
A common feature of all four multiverse levels is that the simplest and arguably most elegant theory involves parallel universes by default. To deny the existence of those universes, one needs to complicate the theory by adding experimentally unsupported processes and ad hoc postulates: finite space, wave function collapse and ontological asymmetry. Our judgment therefore comes down to which we find more wasteful and inelegant: many worlds or many words. Perhaps we will gradually get used to the weird ways of our cosmos and find its strangeness to be part of its charm.
Some of the more drastic incursions on civil liberties resulting from these Patriot Act provisions:
* It is a crime for anyone in this country to contribute money or other material support to the activities of a group on the State Department's terrorist watch list. [...]
* The FBI can monitor and tape conversations and meetings between an attorney and a client who is in federal custody, whether the client has been convicted, charged, or merely detained as a material witness. [...]
* Americans captured on foreign soil and thought to have been involved in terrorist activities abroad may be held indefinitely in a military prison and denied access to lawyers or family members. [...]
* The FBI can order librarians to turn over information about their patrons' reading habits and Internet use. [...]
* Foreign citizens charged with a terrorist-related act may be denied access to an attorney and their right to question witnesses and otherwise prepare for a defense may be severely curtailed if the Department of Justice says that's necessary to protect national security.
* Resident alien men from primarily Middle Eastern and Muslim countries must report for registration.
* Lawful foreign visitors may be photographed and fingerprinted when they enter the country and made to periodically report for questioning.
* The government can conduct surveillance on the Internet and e-mail use of American citizens without any notice, upon order to the Internet service provider. [...]
* The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) can search any car at any airport without a showing of any suspicion of criminal activity.
* The TSA can conduct full searches of people boarding airplanes and, if the passenger is a child, the child may be separated from the parent during the search. [...]
* The TSA is piloting a program to amass all available computerized information on all purchasers of airline tickets, categorize individuals according to their threat to national security, and embed the label on all boarding passes. [...]
* The TSA distributes a "no-fly" list to airport security personnel and airlines that require refusal of boarding and detention of persons deemed to be terrorism or air piracy risks or to pose a threat to airline or passenger safety. [...]
* American citizens and aliens can be held indefinitely in federal custody as "material witnesses," a ploy sometimes used as a punitive measure when the government does not have sufficient basis to charge the individual with a terror-related crime. [...]
* Immigration authorities may detain immigrants without any charges for a "reasonable period of time."
* American colleges and universities with foreign students must report extensive information about their students to the BCIS. [...]
* Accused terrorists labeled "unlawful combatants" can be tried in military tribunals here or abroad, under rules of procedure developed by the Pentagon and the Department of Justice. [...]
* A warrant to conduct widespread surveillance on any American thought to be associated with terrorist activities can be obtained from a secret panel of judges, upon the affidavit of a Department of Justice official. [...]
* The FBI can conduct aerial surveillance of individuals and homes without a warrant, and can install video cameras in places where lawful demonstrations and protests are held.
In real time, world Islam may be in the 21st century, but in practice, it's closer to the Dark Ages, panelists said at a forum on April 12.
"The theory and practice of jihad was not concocted in the Pentagon," said Ibn Warraq, a speaker at the conference on Islam sponsored by the Council for Secular Humanism at the Capitol Hilton in Washington, D.C. "It was taken from the Koran, the Hadith [additional sayings of Muhammad] and Islamic tradition. Western liberals, especially humanists, find it hard to believe this. The trouble with Western liberals is they are pathologically nice. They think that everyone thinks like them, including the Islamic fundamentalists.
"For humanists, terrorists are frustrated angels forever thwarted by the United States of America," he said.
Mr. Warraq was a participant at a "One Nation under God?" conference and, along with five other Muslim dissidents, spoke for three hours on "Will Islam Come into the 21st Century?" [...]
Mr. Warraq criticized listeners for their naivete, adding that humanists need to face facts.
"Islamic fundamentalists are utopian visionaries who wish to replace Western-style liberal democracies with Islamic theocracy, a fascist system of filth that aims to control every single act of every individual," he said. [...]
Bringing Islam into the current century, he said, would mean following Turkey's example in forming a secular society in which mosque and state do not mix. It would also mean subjecting the Koran to the kind of textual criticism as the Bible has undergone, rewriting school textbooks to include pre-Islamic history and comparative religion and closing the "madrassas," which are fundamentalist Islamic schools for young boys.
The old saying "There are no atheists in foxholes" turns out to be virtually correct, at least for the U.S. armed forces. About 0.1 percent of all American military personnel officially declare themselves to be atheists.
Overall, 44 percent of Americans in the volunteer military call themselves Protestants and 24 percent say they are Catholics, according to the Defense Manpower Data Center. The other major world religions are not heavily represented: Muslims and Jews make up 0.3 percent each, Buddhists 0.2 percent and Hindus 0.1 percent. The "other" category numbered 5 percent.
The religious makeup of the armed forces is similar to that of the general population. A 2000 Gallup Poll found that 56 percent of all Americans consider themselves Protestant, 27 percent Catholic, 2 percent Jewish, 1 percent Orthodox, 1 percent Mormon, and 5 percent "other." An additional 8 percent gave their religion as "none."
Gay rights groups called yesterday for Senate Republicans to repudiate remarks by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) comparing homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery.
Santorum made the remarks in an interview with the Associated Press about a Supreme Court case challenging the constitutionality of a Texas law against sodomy.
"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything," Santorum said, according to the AP. [...]
The gay rights groups likened Santorum's remarks to those last December by Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) extolling Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential campaign. Accused of racism, Lott was forced to resign as majority leader.
"For the second time in a matter of months, we see a senior Republican leader in the Senate disparaging an entire group of Americans," said HRC spokesman David Smith. "While we welcome his spokeswoman's clarification that he has no problem with gay people, it's analogous to saying, 'I have no problem with Jewish people or black people, I just don't think they should be equal under the law.' "
The loss of the theological stance leaves us truly at a loss in the world because none of the secular disciplines will help us orient our lives. The young man who peddles pornography on the Internet justifies his behaviour by saying that he just wants a nice lifestyle. This is what liberalism is, it is the pursuit of happiness sans value.
There is another downside of the loss of the theological stance and that is we lose the ability to analyse culture, both our own and others. We fail to recognise that metaphysics shapes culture because we have been told that metaphysics - how we view the world - is irrelevant.
This is where we really get nervous because we are tempted to make unfavourable comparisons between Western and other cultures and that smacks of ethnocentrism and the incitement of inter-religious hatred. We would much rather talk in the abstract about the "World's Great Religions" as if that abolishes any difference. We also are apt to say that there is, after all, only one god worshipped in many different ways.
But this high-flown language will not hide the deep rifts that exist between the religions of the world. Neither will cultural relativism smooth over the cracks or the romantic attitude that we are apt to take towards traditional cultures that makes everything seem of equal value. The argument of this essay is that we cannot afford to abandon the theological/critical stance either towards our own civilization or towards others.
At the present time the West is engaged in a war against an Islamic country. Our leaders have pressed the case that this has got nothing to do with religion and in the case of Iraq this is partly correct. However, if we fail is to understand how Islam has shaped the culture of Islamic countries then we will never see a large part of the picture. Let us take just three examples of differences between Judeo/Christianity and Islam.
1. Creation.
Islam, like Judeo/Christianity understands God as the creator of all things. The difference between them is that for Islam God cannot be contaminated by the human, God is pure, unknowable all powerful etc.
This is why Islam can accept Jesus as a prophet but cannot believe that he is the son of God. This would threaten God's purity. Such a metaphysic does not affirm the existence and importance of the world and human life that the creation stories and the incarnation do so strongly.
While both Islam and Christianity are tempted by Neoplatonism, in which the reality of the world is reduced to an emanation of the divine and the only real things are the heavenly, this is subverted in Christianity by the incarnation - God becomes a man. This is one of the reasons that the West is so ascendant in the material sciences, because its metaphysics affirms the reality of time and the world as the arena of human destiny. The world cannot be reduced in favour of heaven.
2. Law
Christian fundamentalism and Islam both agree that salvation comes by obeying the divine law. St Paul argued that our efforts to obey the law and to be justified by that are futile. He opens a new way of being that takes into account our frailty of purpose and puts revelation in its place. We see what human life is in the history of the nation of Israel - and the stories it told - and in the life and death of Jesus. We find our way via story.
So instead of slavishly obeying a text that tells us how to behave we are set free to make the journey into the human mystery. This has enormous implications for culture because it is always open to the new thing and is able to search the depths of the human heart.
3. Sin.
Both Judeo/Christianity and Islam deal with the story of Adam and Eve and the fall. However, Islam says that God forgave the human so that we did not carry the fall into the future. While Christianity affirms that there is something up with us, that there is something broken at the very basis of our lives, Islam projects the existence of evil onto Satan. The logic of this difference produces self examination and confession in the Christian tradition and the disowning of evil in the Islamic. Private admission of sin is necessary for public reformation. [...]
Metaphysics cannot be voided; it is rather the case that one displaces another. The radical Enlightenment of the 17th C with its emphasis on the objective and on freedom from all creeds, and the subsequent reorientation of life towards the pursuit of happiness, thanks to the Americans, has displaced the dreaming that was at the base of Western civilization.
For my money this is a thinner narrative of the human and produces thinner lives and thinner culture. If the West is to find itself exhausted, economically, culturally and politically, then it will be because it has grasped to its bosom an inadequate narrative of the human.
It seems that we have out-paced ourselves. We find ourselves with increasingly powerful new toys and we do not know their import for us. And so we invent things called "ethics" that purport to tell us. But ethics cannot be derived from an inadequate narrative of the human; all you get is inadequate ethics. The solution to all this? That is another story.
Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller said on Tuesday he was "astonished" at criticism by European Commission President Romano Prodi of Poland's purchase of US F-16 fighter jets, a day after Poland signed EU entry papers.
In an interview to Italian newspaper "La Repubblica" on Saturday Prodi said he was "not happy at the signature by Poland of the massive purchase contract to buy US fighter jets a day after the Athens summit". [...]
Prodi made his remarks after Poland had signed on Friday 3.5-billion-dollar (3.24-billion-euro) contract to buy 48 multi-role Lockheed Martin F-16 planes.
The US giant knocked out Swedish-British consortium BAE Systems-SAAB, which wanted to sell the Jas-39 Gripen, and France's Dassault Aviation, which wanted to sell the Mirage 2000-5.
The problem with American power is not that it's American. Most states with the resources and opportunities the US possesses would have done far worse. The problem is that one nation, effectively unchecked by any other, can, if it chooses, now determine how the rest of the world will live. Eventually, unless we stop it, it will use this power. So far, it has merely tested its new muscles.
The presidential elections next year might prevent an immediate entanglement with another nation, but there is little doubt about the scope of the US government's ambitions. Already, it has begun to execute a slow but comprehensive coup against the international order, destroying or undermining the institutions that might have sought to restrain it. On these pages two weeks ago, James Woolsey, an influential hawk and formerly the director of the CIA, argued for a war lasting for decades "to extend democracy" to the entire Arab and Muslim world.
Men who think like him - and there are plenty in Washington - are not monsters. They are simply responding to the opportunities that power presents, just as British politicians once responded to the vulnerability of non-European states and the weakness of their colonial competitors. America's threat to the peace and stability of the rest of the world is likely to persist, whether George Bush wins the next election or not. The critical question is how we stop it.
Riad al-Turk, Syria's most outspoken dissident, ticks off the roughly one-third of his life spent as a political prisoner: 13 months under the current president, Bashar al-Assad, a whopping 18 years in solitary confinement under Mr. Assad's late father and sundry years or months stretching almost back to independence in 1946.
Now, like everyone in the Middle East, he has a new political factor to consider: the United States military, setting up next door in Iraq as the latest occupying power.
Like many Syrians, he is horrified, yet he--like other government critics--also recognizes that the welcome toppling of Saddam Hussein, if handled right, may push the kind of political and economic opening that they have sought for decades.
"Iraq had a bloodier system--when we compare the number of victims here to the number in Iraq, it had many, many more," said Mr. Turk, 73. "But in substance they are the same." [...]
However, even Syrians much closer to the establishment than Mr. Turk is seem certain that this country, and the region, will adapt--even if the American action in Iraq smacks of the kind of external control from which the Arabs have been trying to free themselves for the better part of a century.
"We don't know what will happen to us after the Iraq war," said Haitham Kilani, a retired diplomat and general. "But it is certain there will be change."
Syria in some ways feels like the Iraq of old, and will probably be prominent on Washington's list of despotic states needing evolution.
Like Mr. Hussein's Iraq, Syria stands accused of developing chemical weapons and aiding groups that Washington considers terrorists--in Syria's case, Hezbollah, which dominates southern Lebanon and threatens Israel from that base. Syria also allows most Palestinian groups to maintain what it insists are information offices here, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The justices said today that they would review a decision by the federal appeals court in Denver, which ruled last September that physical evidence--a gun, in this case--discovered as a "fruit" of a Miranda violation could no longer be introduced as evidence at trial despite Supreme Court rulings to the contrary. The appeals court's reasoning was that the premise of the earlier cases was "fundamentally altered" when the Supreme Court declared three years ago in Dickerson v. United States that the warnings set out in Miranda were not simply "prophylactic" measures to insure that confessions were voluntary, but were directly required by the Fifth Amendment's protection against compelled self-incrimination.
The earlier cases, principally Michigan v. Tucker in 1974 and Oregon v. Elstad in 1985, were based on the premise that a Miranda violation was not a constitutional violation as long as the suspect's statements were voluntary, the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit noted in its opinion. That court ordered suppression of a pistol that police found in the Colorado Springs home of a suspect, Samuel F. Patane, whom they had just arrested for violating a domestic violence restraining order. The police asked Mr. Patane about the gun, and he described its location without having first received the Miranda warnings.
"Because Dickerson now concludes that an un-Mirandized statement, even if voluntary, is a Fifth Amendment violation," the evidence had to be suppressed, Judge David M. Ebel wrote for the appeals court.
But that was a misunderstanding of the Dickerson decision, Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson told the justices in the government's appeal, United States v. Patane, No. 02-1183.
Rather than rejecting the notion that physical evidence derived from a Miranda violation was admissible, Mr. Olson said, the Supreme Court in its 2000 decision incorporated that concept into its conclusion that because the Miranda decision was limited to actual statements, it had not imposed an unduly difficult burden on law enforcement.
Further, Mr. Olson said, while one purpose of the Miranda rule was to "guard against the use of unreliable statements at trial," physical evidence like the gun in this case "undoubtedly constitutes reliable, trustworthy evidence."
A US spy satellite monitored a strong explosion that rocked North Korea's test site for ballistic missiles in November last year, South Korean reports said Monday.
Washington has passed information concerning the explosion to South Korean military authorities, according to Yonhap news agency.
The blast occurred during a missile engine test and crippled operations and facilities at North Korea's missile launch site at Musudan-ri, Hwadae county, northeast of Pyongyang, Seoul's Chosun Ilbo newspaper said.
For more than a decade, Mr Galloway, MP for Glasgow Kelvin, has been the leading critic of Anglo-American policy towards Iraq, campaigning against sanctions and the war that toppled Saddam. [...]
It purported to outline talks between Mr Galloway and an Iraqi spy. During the meeting on Boxing Day 1999, Mr Galloway detailed his campaign plans for the year ahead.
The spy chief wrote that Mr Galloway told the Mukhabarat agent: "He [Galloway] needs continuous financial support from Iraq. He obtained through Mr Tariq Aziz [deputy prime minister] three million barrels of oil every six months, according to the oil for food programme. His share would be only between 10 and 15 cents per barrel."
Iraq's oil sales, administered by the United Nations, were intended to pay for only essential humanitarian supplies. If the memo was accurate, Mr Galloway's share would have amounted to about £375,000 per year.
The documents say that Mr Galloway entered into partnership with a named Iraqi oil broker to sell the oil on the international market.
The memorandum continues: "He [Galloway] also obtained a limited number of food contracts with the ministry of trade. The percentage of its profits does not go above one per cent."
International law recognises a major difference between the rules that apply in a war between armies and an occupying power, for an occupying army has special obligations to the population under its control. Thus, when military activities ended in Iraq, entirely new standards of conduct were applied to the coalition force. They are now judged by how well they protect and meet the needs of a civilian population under their occupation. That is why the US now faces international criticism for failing to prevent looting and lawlessness in Iraq and for delays in re-supplying power and drinking water, and in repairing infrastructure.
It seems not to register with many Israelis that they are occupiers and as such have inescapable responsibilities towards those in their custody and an obligation to end the occupation as speedily as possible. It is an obligation reinforced by Israel's decision after the 1967 war not to grant citizenship and equal rights in the Jewish state to the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, even in return for Israel's permanent retention of the occupied territories. The inescapable corollary of this decision is that Israel must grant Palestinians the right to their own state. The alternative is permanent disenfranchisement and subjugation of the Palestinians.
Palestinians are not the only ethnic minority denied separate statehood. The Kurds, the Albanians in Kosovo, and others have been denied a separate homeland. In the case of the Kurds and the Kosovo Albanians, the international community intervened so they would at least be granted the same rights as the majority. However, Palestinians are the only ethnic group denied by their occupiers both Israeli citizenship (which in any case Palestinians do not want) and separate statehood. Mr Sharon's notion of a Palestinian "state" in less than 50 per cent of the West Bank and in parts of Gaza would create South African style bantustans entirely under Israel's control.
The Sharon-led government opposes a viable Palestinian state, and a political process that may result in one, on the grounds that it would serve as a haven for Palestinian terrorism impossible for Israel to control. It is a disingenuous argument. The contrary is the case: it would be far easier for Israel to deal with terrorism from a neighbouring state than terrorism from 3.5m people it is deeply intertwined with and whose national aspirations it represses. This, too, is the lesson of Iraq, where the US and Britain devastated Iraqi forces using measures they could never have used against an occupied population.
But it is Israel's own experience that best demonstrates the difference between internal terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism. There is no cross-border terrorism into Israel from any of Israel's Arab neighbours. This is not because any of them have a special affection for Israel, but because they have experienced the devastating price of allowing such terrorism. And the terrorism Israel failed to subdue when it occupied southern Lebanon for two decades ended immediately when Israel withdrew and threatened a full-blown war should terrorism continue. There is no reason to doubt that a neighbouring Palestinian state would be similarly constrained.
The Europeans are worried about the productivity gap. Their studies show that America leaves them in the dust when it comes to producing goods and services efficiently. Since the only way a nation can increase the welfare of its citizens is to have each worker produce more, this productivity gap is worrisome. After all, what good European wants to contemplate a future in which the gap between U.S. and E.U. living standards progressively widens?
So in this one regard they want to become more like the otherwise despised United States. One answer the Europeans have concocted is to meet--year after year--and promise a variety of "reforms" to make it easier for new firms to set up shop, and existing firms to hire. So far, no luck. Unemployment in Germany is over 10 percent, and in France is approaching double digits--and rising. Only Britain is doing moderately well, and even there rising taxes and continental-style regulations are starting to take their toll.
The Europeans understand that without rapid economic growth, the funds for the cherished expansion of their welfare states just won't be available. So they try to talk like Americans. In the words of Europe's most savvy finance minister, Chancellor Gordon Brown of the UK, they are promising they "will learn from American competition and enterprise. . . ."
But in looking to America for guidance, Europe seems to have learned too much from Franklin Roosevelt and too little from Jack Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. FDR followed the advice of an adviser who promised "We shall tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect." The result was a prolonged depression that ended only when America entered WWII. Kennedy and Reagan took the road less traveled, cut taxes, and set in train periods of extended and rapid growth.
Not Europe's politicians. Brown has raised taxes steadily since taking office. Jacques Chirac was elected on a promise to cut taxes by 30 percent over five years, but after an initial reduction of 5 percent, gave a Gallic shrug and reversed course. Gerhard Schroeder's economic recovery plan seems to change daily.
Meanwhile, deficits in all of these countries continue to rise, and now exceed the 3 percent of GDP that the European Central Bank considers prudent. Such deficits are probably appropriate in a period of slowing growth, and the Europeans like to point out that they are merely following the lead of President Bush in spilling some red ink. But there is a difference. Europe's deficits are the result of massive overspending by the public sector America's deficit, on the other hand, will result from a tax cut that puts more money into the hands of consumers to spend in the private sector. Not for E.U. politicians the teaching of leading experts such as Princeton's William Baumol and his colleagues: "Restraining public expenditures," they conclude, "can make private investment easier and more rewarding financially."
There is worse. Europe's leaders see a productivity gap and feel called upon to develop government programs to eliminate it.
The Bush Doctrine of coercive diplomacy, preemptive action, and regime termination has passed another important test: After destroying the terrorist regime run by the Taliban and bankrolled by al Qaeda, it has dismantled the Saddam Hussein vast prison state, thus eliminating one of the centerpieces of global terrorism and preempting the use or transfer of weapons of mass murder onto the American homeland. But there?s more to come?and there?s more happening than meets the eye.
While the U.S.-led coalition swept through Iraq, the Pentagon quietly continued its ongoing operations throughout the eastern hemisphere?a fact underscored by large-scale raids in eastern Afghanistan timed to coincide with the initial assault on Saddam?s regime. In Pakistan, the Bush Doctrine?s coercive diplomacy has converted President Pervez Musharraf from the Taliban?s only friend into a dependable ally in the War on Terrorism. U.S. Special Forces now roam freely along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, conducting search and destroy missions on both sides of the border?sometimes deep inside Pakistani territory, and often with the assistance of Pakistani troops.
In the Philippines, teams of U.S. troops are conducting what the diplomats call ?counterterrorism training missions? with the Philippine army. But if it?s training, it?s on-the-job training. As in Afghanistan, the U.S.-led force has smashed and scattered the enemy. Likewise, in Georgia and other former Soviet republics, U.S. troops are training and equipping local forces to clean out al Qaeda and its kindred movements.
From their perch in Djibouti, U.S. intelligence agents and military taskforces are conducting operations in and around Yemen (recall the Predator strike on al Qaeda commanders in November 2002), monitoring terrorist activity in the lawless lands of eastern Africa, reminding the Sudanese and Libyans that there?s a new sheriff in town, and intercepting suspicious ships transiting the vital waterways around the Horn of Africa. One of those ships was a North Korean vessel loaded with SCUD missiles bound for Yemen. Although the ship was allowed to continue to its destination, the episode sent an unmistakable message to North Korea and its ilk: America is watching and can strike at will.
Yet all of this was little more than background noise as the United States waged and won two major military campaigns in the span of eighteen months. Like some twenty-first-century posse, U.S. Special Forces rode into Afghanistan on horseback, the Marines by helicopter. The warplanes came from the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, the former Soviet Union and the continental United States. The Taliban promised another Vietnam, a replay of the Soviet?s Afghan nightmare. But what the world witnessed was liberation in its fullest sense, as this improbable taskforce rewrote military history and helped Afghanis take their first steps toward freedom in a generation.
Then, before a new government was even installed in Kabul, the United States swung its sites to Iraq and began assembling an invasion force like no other. Once called into action, it moved across the sands and skies of Iraq like lightning across the heavens. Saddam promised a Stalingrad, a Mogadishu. He wanted oil fires and mass casualties to show the world that the allies were no different than his thugs. But what the world has witnessed is the power of restraint, the shock and awe of a military juggernaut limited only by the conscience of a moral people. From the airmen and sailors using their missilery like a sniper?s rifle to the Marines and soldiers sharing food with Saddam?s victims after destroying his armies, America?s finest have risked their own lives to limit the bloodshed.
Saddam?s Baathists have done the very opposite. Cribbing their battle plan from bin Laden?s al Qaeda and Arafat?s al Aqsa Martyrs, they marched noncombatants in front of tanks, used school buses and pregnant women as time bombs, and converted holy sites into missile sites. Yet none of this deterred the liberators of Iraq. Instead, they fought harder and plunged deeper. Could it be that every fake surrender, every suicide attack, every atrocity, reminded the Americans of the men who planned and executed September 11?
In all of this, one recalls what an awestruck Churchill observed in the middle of World War II: "With her left hand," he marveled, "America was leading the advance of the conquering Allied armies into the heart of Germany, and with her right, on the other side of the globe, she was irresistibly and swiftly breaking up the power of Japan." Such is the reach of a wounded America.
A year after National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen placed second in French presidential elections, the country's political establishment continues to digest the seismic results.
From a spate of analyses and editorials of the April-May 2002 voting, to the government's hardening line against fundamentalist Islam, to polls showing voters may not have changed all that much over a year, the fallout of the far-right's influence is being felt in ways large and small.
The anniversary was marked most obviously by the National Front itself, which had its annual congress last weekend in Nice. [...]
A new poll suggests Le Pen's party continues to wield influence among the French electorate. Seven out of 10 French believe a far-right candidate could again place second in the 2007 presidential race, according to the Ipsos survey, to be broadcast Monday on France 2.
Muhammad Hamza al-Zubaydi, who played a key role in the brutal suppression of the Shiite Muslim uprising of 1991, was arrested Monday in Iraq, the U.S. Central Command said.
Al-Zubaydi, a former member of the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council and central Euphrates regional commander, was No. 18 on a list of the 55 most-wanted figures from Saddam Hussein's regime. [...]
He was the queen of spades in the deck of former Iraqi officials distributed to U.S. forces.
Besides the Histadrut labor federation, the parliamentary opposition, and dozens of social organizations, a broad front of social affairs experts has come out against the government's economic austerity program. In the past, professors and lecturers from social work schools and other schools had reservations about individual issues, but it seems that the social aspects of the current plan have evoked an unprecedented level of vehement and broad criticism.
It's possible to understand when criticism is leveled at the specific social elements of a plan, but in this case, what's amazing are the generalizations some critics have employed to couch their critiques. With a tone of absolute certainty, they have reached sweeping conclusions that they would likely not allow for within their own scientific research.
Particularly bothersome is their reading of the program as a deliberate attempt by the planners to wipe out the welfare state, or at least "delegitimize its ideas," as one of them was quoted in an April 16 article by Ruth Sinai. Another thinks the plan "is clearly meant to harm the social security of the citizens of Israel," because the government believes "it's a shame to waste money on the weak sectors of the population, since they are not productive."
Such nonsense is barely worthy of a fire-breathing politician from the opposition, let alone someone who wears the cloak of academia. "The right does not regard education as productive, only as a social expense," says another, while ignoring the fact that spokesmen for the right, just like spokesmen for the left, are committed to the position that the future of the state's security is dependent on the level of education given to the next generation (which doesn't mean there is no room for efficiency measures). "The neoconservative position cynically exploits the distortions created by political bribery (to the Haredim - A.T.) to destroy the welfare state which they fundamentally do not believe in," adds a spokesman for the neo-socialists, who then analyzes the ramifications of globalization from the social perspective: global systems have no commitment to the poor in Dimona, only to maximizing profits, and in that same spirit, the state is now ridding itself of responsibility for the weakest in society.
Among the political intelligentsia a kind of public conversation concerning values is perpetually going on. Unlike the US and Britain, Australia does not have influential intellectual magazines. As a consequence, it is mainly in the pages of our quality newspapers - The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review and The Australian - that this conversation is conducted.
If one of these papers changes political direction, the ears of the intelligentsia prick. In recent months many of its members have been privately discussing the rather rapid ideological shift of The Australian towards the kind of neo-conservatism currently dominant on the right side of the "culture wars" being fought out in the US. [...]
Neo-conservatism is the ideology founded on the 1970s marriage of anti-communism with free-market liberalism. At its centre is the belief in the possibility of spreading Western economic and political values across the globe and the conviction that, to achieve this victory, the baleful influence exercised by self-hating left-wing intellectuals on the home front must be destroyed.
As David Brock shows in his defection memoir, Blinded by the Right, in the US Rupert Murdoch has been the most important financier, in both the serious and popular media, of the neo-conservative cause. Given this, it should come as no surprise that in Australia his flagship paper has finally been mobilised in the service of the crusade.
The dispute between Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat and Palestinian prime minister-designate Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) over the formation of a new government centers around the latter's plans to dismantle Fatah's Al Aqsa Brigades and his intentions to deal with the other armed factions in the territories.
Most reports have focused on Abu Mazen's plan to make Mohammed Dahlan, the Gazan strongman and former head of the Preventive Security Services in the Gaza Strip, head of the new government's security services. However, Palestinian sources said the dispute actually revolves around the premier-designate's plans for establishing a new PA security policy, and whether he must win Arafat's approval for every decision he makes.
The sources said Abu Mazen's plans to disarm the underground armed wing of Fatah, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, and how he will confront Hamas and Islamic Jihad are at the heart of the dispute.
[W]here, in the panoply of American presidents, do we situate Bush? He's not the first president to try to reconstruct the economic order. But the president who really attempted a general fix -- Franklin Roosevelt -- did so because the old order was plainly collapsing. No such situation exists today. Worse yet, what Bush is proposing is to erect a new economy by giving more power to the shakiest element -- the private-sector safety net -- of the old.
Just over a century ago, William McKinley set America on the course of acquiring a colonial empire, setting off a debate over America's proper role in the world every bit as impassioned as the one raging today. McKinley's path was a radical departure from past practice, but the United States was still a second-tier power. The shift did not destabilize the world. A half-century before that, James Polk plunged us into war with Mexico over considerable northern-state opposition (including, in the later phases of the war, that of Congressman Abraham Lincoln), but at that point, America was a third-tier power.
The three presidents who sought to build a multilateral framework for international affairs were Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Wilson's plan was killed in its crib when Congress refused to ratify our entry into the League of Nations. Roosevelt's and Truman's contributions -- setting up a structure of international law, bringing prosperity and freedom to Western Europe, cementing alliances with other democracies, containing and eventually defeating Soviet communism -- are the enduring triumphs of U.S. foreign policy. Bush seems bent on destroying Roosevelt's and Truman's handiwork, however, and substituting a far more grandiose version of Polk's and McKinley's, in what is distinctly
a postcolonial world. As with his assault on Roosevelt's New Deal order, he professes to replace an architecture that may be flawed but certainly isn't broken -- in this case, with an empire not likely to be backed up by the consent of the governed.
None of these presidents, great or awful, seems quite comparable to Bush the Younger. There is another, however, who comes to mind. He, too, had a relentlessly regional perspective, and a clear sense of estrangement from that part of America that did not support him. He was not much impressed with the claims of wage labor. His values were militaristic. He had dreams of building an empire at gunpoint. And he was willing to tear up the larger political order, which had worked reasonably well for about 60 years, to advance his factional cause. The American president -- though not of the United States -- whom George W. Bush most nearly resembles is the Confederacy's Jefferson Davis.
Yes, I know: Bush is no racist, and certainly no proponent of slavery. He is not grotesque; he is merely disgraceful. But, as with Davis, obtaining Bush's defeat is an urgent matter of national security -- and national honor.
[B]etween July and October 2002 ... Raines killed several stories by Golden and fellow reporter David Kocieniewski. For months, the two had been pursuing allegations of influence peddling by former New Jersey senator Robert Torricelli, who was running for re-election. The New York Observer reported last week that Raines felt the pieces he spiked had been "reckless."Times insiders tell another story: They say editors asked Raines to spell out his complaints about the spiked pieces, but he declined, citing only his aversion to "piling on" or to giving prosecutors too much credence. After all, the Justice Department had declined to press charges, and the Senate only gave the senator a severe reprimand....
Adding insult to injury, someone else got the scoop. On September 26, after some of the Times pieces were spiked, WNBC ran a special Torricelli report by Jonathan Dienst, featuring a jailhouse interview with Chang and an inventory of evidence. According to someone close to the Torricelli case, key sources tired of waiting for the Times to use their info, so they turned it over to WNBC. Four days after the WNBC report aired, Torricelli pulled out of the race, expressly to avoid further harm to the party.
[Richard E.] Lucas's study concludes that people have a happiness "set point" to which they return after marriage and other life events. The study is part of a broad inquiry into psychological adaptation, the notion that people "are doomed to experience stable levels of well-being because, over time, they adapt to even the most extreme positive and negative life circumstances."Studies have shown, for example, that people who win large amounts of money through the lottery get a temporary boost in happiness from winning, but the emotional high quickly subsides to pre-winning levels.
That's the bad news.
The good news is that people who face tragedy -- such as a devastating spinal cord injury -- also adapt. One study of such disabled people found that while negative emotions overwhelmed them immediately after the misfortune, patients' feelings were more positive than negative eight weeks later.
David Lykken, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, conducted a study comparing the happiness of middle-aged twins. Though siblings experienced very different life circumstances, genetically identical pairs had similar levels of happiness. Lykken's conclusion: "Happiness varies around a genetically determined set point."
Still, adaptation studies have been difficult to conduct on questions of romance and happiness, because they run into chicken-and-egg questions. By examining long-term happiness levels in a large group of people before they got married, after marriage, and if they divorced, Lucas and a team of other researchers were able to tease apart the happiness mystery.
When people are asked to rate how happy they are on a scale of zero to 10, most score between 5.5 to 8, Lucas said. People who eventually got married scored, on average, a quarter-point higher on this scale before marriage.
During the year before marriage -- presumably a period of courtship and falling in love -- these people's happiness rose by another fifth of a point. Immediately after marriage, they got a boost of yet another fifth of a point.
Given that most people rate their happiness within a 2.5-point range, a total difference of two-thirds of a point is considerable, said Lucas. But two years after marriage, he found that the married people's happiness levels had dropped back down to a quarter point higher than average -- exactly what they were before marriage. [...]
While the study examined heterosexual marriage and happiness, Lucas said his "intuition is these processes apply to lots of other relationships," including gay and cohabiting couples.
Six members of Congress live in a $1.1 million Capitol Hill town house that is subsidized by a secretive religious organization, tax records show.The lawmakers, all Christians, pay low rent to live in the stately red brick, three-story house on C Street, two blocks from the Capitol. It is maintained by a group alternately known as the ''Fellowship'' and the ''Foundation'' and brings together world leaders and elected officials through religion.
The Fellowship hosts receptions, luncheons and prayer meetings on the first two floors of the house, which is registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a church.
The six lawmakers--Reps. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) and Sens. John Ensign (R-Nev.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.)-- live in private rooms upstairs.
Rent is $600 a month, said DeMint, a Presbyterian.
''Our goal is singular--and that is to hope that we can assist them in better understandings of the teachings of Christ, and applying it to their jobs,'' said Richard Carver, a member of the Fellowship's board of directors.
We are commanded to make our holy days contemporary. As the Haggada puts it, "In every generation each person is required to view himself as if he himself were escaping from the enslavement of Egypt..."In his laws of the Seder, Maimonides instructs the father to point to contemporary examples of slaves in order to make the bitterness of our slavery in Egypt tangible. The quest for contemporaneity, however, can be easily distorted. In recent years we have witnessed a proliferation of Haggadas designed not so much to make the experience of the Exodus alive through current examples, but to completely remove the story from its particularistic Jewish context. The goal is not to relive the birth of the Jewish people as a nation, but to universalize the Jewish experience in a modern-day context. This universalizing tendency can be found in various "Freedom" Haggadas, in which the narrative is likely to devote as much time to Selma, Alabama, as Egypt, to Nelson Mandela as Moses.
Lost in the process for Jewish participants at those "Seders" is any deepened sense of connection to their people. Yet it is far from clear that anything is gained in terms of identification with other oppressed people, if recent events provide any clue. Opinion polls consistently showed American Jewish support for Operation Iraqi Freedom to be significantly lower than that of the general American public. Jews were over-represented at antiwar rallies.
While these facts at least give lie to the claim of Pat Buchanan and many others that the war in Iraq was foisted on an unwitting American public by Israel and its "Amen corner" in the United States, they do not say much for Jewish concern with enslaved people.
Notable by their absence from every antiwar rally were any Iraqis. Organizers were concerned lest hearing about the suffering of the Iraqi people under Saddam Hussein might deflate the moral superiority of the demonstrators as they held aloft their witty signs about President George W. Bush being the greatest threat to mankind since Hitler and ignored completely the more than one million dead attributable directly to Saddam.
Yet the Jews marching at the antiwar demonstrations were most likely to be those who demand that their Haggadot be au courant and who read the Torah, if they read it at all, as a brief for the Left wing of the Democratic Party.
IN TRUTH, it would be hard to find a better modern-day example to make the slavery of Egypt real for us than the affliction of the Iraqi people under Saddam.
A California superior court judge sent me the following quotation, which is well worth pondering:"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their 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."
This declaration was made by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel L. Jackson, America's senior representative at the 1945 Nuremberg war crimes trials, and the tribunal's chief prosecutor.
Those now exulting America's conquest of Iraq should ponder Judge Jackson's majestic words. Particularly now that the U.S.-British justifications for invading Iraq are being revealed as distortions.
Why did the Arab media consent to align itself with the Iraqi regime while at the same time pretending that it was with the people?It is my view that the answer was stated by the director of one of the satellite channels: "It is competition. In such circumstances, either we win the viewers or others win them." Thus he summarized the way of most of those in the Arab media. Their aim is to win the street at any price. The street is emotional and has little confidence in the Americans. It can be won by fanning the flames of its emotions and encouraging its feelings with dreams of a great Arab victory and a great American defeat.
To a large extent, the Arab media was characterized by selectivity, and it was decidedly on the side of the Iraqi regime. Our intellectuals took over the line and constantly repeated it. Our media then devoted special programs to disseminating and repeating the falsehoods of Sahaf. Their biased point of view was imposed on listeners. Our media attempted to increase the degree of hatred against the coalition by concentrating on the degree of the destruction and the number of civilian victims, without making clear that this was because the regime positioned its forces and tanks in civilian areas. The army of Saddam of which they were so proud because it was the only army which could protect civilians in fact used the civilians to protect itself.
It was the Arab media itself which claimed that the aims of the war were to destroy Iraq, put an end to its capabilities, and, in the end, to occupy it. It did not for a moment consider the role of Iraq's ruler in the destruction and ruin of the country over a period of more than thirty years. It did not consider how he had destroyed the country’s environment, education, health and legal systems. He also set oil wells on fire and destroyed bridges, and he transformed the cities, especially in the south, into wretchedness, deprived even of clean drinking water.
The Arab media attacked the Iraqi opposition and imposed a collective boycott while satellite stations played host to everyone but the Iraqis who were, after all, the ones most concerned. The Kuwaiti media was the sole exception to this rule. Not one satellite channel had the courage to transmit scenes of welcome to the coalition troops in the liberated cities. Instead, the satellite stations made a great fuss over what they called the crimes of the coalition and ignored the crimes of the regime. The correspondents continued to impose their political points of view on viewers. Not one of the satellite stations, except Kuwait, had the courage to show a tape of the chemical strike against Halabja. It was the same with the air attack of the 1991 uprising in which holy places were hit and hundreds of Shiites were killed and tortured. More than 250,000 Iraqi citizens were killed in the uprising.
Nor was their selectivity of topics confined to analysis. It extended even into the presentation of the news. One Arab channel deliberately blamed the weapons and ammunition hidden by Saddam's soldiers who were in civilian clothes in a house. This was shown in its entirety by CNN. The aim of the Arab satellite stations was to suggest that the allies were "savage" in their treatment of civilians. Furthermore, respectable newspapers were not considered to be devout if they did not cover the sorrowful and tragic accident of the journalists who were killed by the coalition forces--in order, they said, to silence Arab satellite stations. Again, the question: Is it possible for the Arab media to be objective?
In my view, it is not possible because the Arab media is controlled by the prevailing general atmosphere and by people who have been fed on the slogans of incitement and inflammatory propaganda for more than half a century.
Not long ago, I was talking to a policeman who was on the verge of retirement. He was pleased to leave the force, he said, because it had not only become unbearably bureaucratic, but morally and intellectually corrupt. Chief constables were now politicians and spin-doctors, not policemen; policing was more a matter of public relations than of enforcing the law. "In the old days", he added wistfully, "it was different. We were nice to the nice people and nasty to the nasty people."Under our brave new dispensation, a strange inversion is happening: it is the nasty people to whom the police feel increasingly obliged to be nice. Of course there must have been room for abuse in the old days: not every nasty person is a criminal, and not every policeman's judgment was sound. Still, the system worked as a whole, as evidenced by the astonishingly low crime rate. [...]
Mr Hitchens places the blame firmly where it belongs: on a supine and pusillanimous political establishment that, for four decades at least, has constantly retreated before the verbal onslaught of liberal intellectuals whose weapons have been mockery allied to sentimental guilt about their prosperous and comfortable lives, and whose aim has been to liberate themselves from personally irksome moral constraints, without regard to the consequences for those less favourably placed in society than themselves.
In his, in my view justified, rage at what has been done to British society, Mr Hitchens sometimes over-eggs the pudding or makes a mistake. For example, in trying to prove that prison is no longer any kind of punishment or humiliation for the wrongdoer, he states that prisoners who attempt to escape are not now dressed in the absurd clothes that warned prison officers of their intentions - but this is not so. E-men (as would-be escapees are called in the splendid argot of prison) are still put in "stripes": a blue and yellow outfit that looks like the costume of a Shakespearean fool in a bad school production.
But occasional inaccuracies do not detract from the burden of what he says; and it is clear to me that his outrage is of the genuine and generous variety that comes from a real understanding of the conditions which millions of people now endure - unlike the simulated and self-regarding outrage that is common among liberal reformers.
Most of the reforms that have turned so much of Britain into an urban nightmare were not enacted because of any groundswell of opinion from below.It was the intellectual elite that demanded that the police should be emasculated, that the law's teeth should be drawn, that perpetrators should be treated as the victims of their own behaviour, and so forth. Mr Hitchens traces the genesis of these reforms, and in every case finds the self-satisfaction of people such as Roy Jenkins, who introduced lenient treatment for criminals without ever having personally to face the social concequences.
Mr Hitchens doesn't ask - and a fortiori doesn't answer - the question of why the British political establishment should have proved so craven over the years. Personally I suspect it had something to do with the loss of Empire and world power - what the Chinese call the loss of the Mandate of Heaven. I also think Hitchens is too optimistic about the prospect of the nation coming to its senses: the march of "progressive" sociology through the institutions has been so thorough that there is no constituency left which could preserve the kind of traditional limited polity that he believes Britain once was and which he would like to see restored.
Covering totalitarian states forces a journalist to act in compromising ways. Anyone who has reported from such countries knows that it is one of the most challenging tasks a journalist faces, involving daily calculations over access, honesty, freedom of movement and fear of reprisal. Some governments assume a foreign journalist is a spy. The way they treat you forces you to act like one. [...]One solution is to report only from the places where the story is accessible. In the Middle East, this usually means Israel. But those who complain about CNN would certainly complain if it or other news organizations produced even more stories about Israel and still fewer about the countries around it. Coverage from the region already suffers from a terrible imbalance on this score.
I was a Middle East correspondent through much of the 1990's, and while I never faced a choice as agonizing as the possible death of an employee, I did struggle with complex dilemmas. In 1994, I wrote a short article about the marriage of President Hafez al Assad's strong-willed daughter, Bushra. She wed a politically ambitious man of whom her father disapproved, something I learned from people who knew her. Officials at the Syrian Information Ministry screamed at me over the telephone and barred me for about 18 months, saying I had shown disrespect for the president and his family. Did I make the right decision to write it? I'm not sure. I told readers something they didn't know. But at what cost to my coverage? If I had saved that interesting but not significant little story, might I not have gained more information on later visits about more important things in Syria? But would I not be betraying my readers and my mission by withholding information?
The fact is that each time I visited Syria or Iraq or Iran, I learned a lot — and I believe my readers benefited either from the articles I wrote from those places or broader ones later looking at the region as a whole. I was often able to move around without a minder (perhaps easier for a print reporter than one in television). There is simply no way to understand a place without setting foot in it. Yet by going there, you are forced to contend with a set of rules that are abhorrent. This is the dilemma faced by CNN and everyone else in a place like the old Baghdad.
It's easy to say Mr. Jordan and CNN made the wrong choice. It certainly allows for a comforting moral clarity. And it may be that they stepped over a line in pandering to Iraqi officials. But I, for one, would be very slow in condemning them. Anyone who has faced the choices forced on journalists in those circumstances knows exactly what I mean.
TV-Turnoff Week 2003 is April 21-27
Thank you, David Kendall, for a moment of comic relief amid all the war news. Last week the Clinton Follies were back in Little Rock, and the former president's lawyer was the star.The occasion was a seminar on the Clinton presidency, and Counselor Kendall could have just walked onto a television set some time in 1999. His spin hadn't changed a bit. Once again he was denouncing the case against his client as "constitutional vandalism" -- much ado about not very much.
The effect of the Clinton impeachment, he warned the students, would be to lower the standard for impeaching future presidents. After all, the charges were small potatoes: perjury and obstruction of justice.
It's one thing to argue that The Hon. William Jefferson Clinton wasn't guilty of those offenses, another to contend that they were not serious accusations -- sufficiently serious to warrant removing a president from office.
I wish to propose an immodest remedy for this sorry situation: We, the people of the Bay Area, need to leave the United States. We are held prisoner by a foreign power, colonized by an alien civilization. We require cultural and social self-determination. We demand, in short, a declaration of independence -- and our own nation. . . .First of all, the idea of the Bay area seceding is so brilliant, so obvious in hindsight, so well-calculated to lead to the betterment of the country as a whole, that it is hard not to suspect the subtle hand of Karl Rove at work here. I'm not sure there's any downside, other than the intense pressure to readmit the Bay area when the whole thing comes crashing down 10 months later.In U.S. history, preservation of "the Union" has long been presented as virtually a religious necessity. Our greatest national myth remains the inevitable rightness of the Northern victory in the Civil War. We are taught again and again about the greatness of Abraham Lincoln, who held our nation together. Yet at what price? Lincoln freed the African American slaves, but they fell victim to "Jim Crow," the peculiar institution, to paraphrase historian Kenneth Stampp, that maintained racial separation in the South (and sanctioned violence against blacks) well into the 1960s. With the South in tow following the Civil War, the United States subdued the Native Americans in the West in the most brutal fashion, seized Cuba and the Philippines from Spain in 1898, thus ushering in an era of imperialism. American hegemony in the second half of the 20th century might have been impossible without a Northern victory in the Civil War.
In the latest dust-up over political comments on-air at CBC, the hosts of Inside Media exchanged barbs on Thursday night as one flashed a peace sign and the other brandished an American flag.Antonia Zerbisias, the show co-host, has been using the peace symbol as her signoff since December. In response, her counterpart, Matthew Fraser, waved a small U.S. flag and questioned whether his colleague should be making the gesture during the war in Iraq.
Ms. Zerbisias is the Toronto Star media columnist and Mr. Fraser writes a media column for the National Post. Their television show, which debuted last fall on CBC Newsworld, has frequently focused on the media working in Iraq and issues related to covering the conflict.
"I am hired here for my opinions, just as you are. You come from the right, I come from the left. What's wrong with this?" Ms. Zerbisias asked, making the peace sign with her fingers during an informal discussion at the end of this week's show.
"I'm not advocating anything partisan, I am not saying anything about any state, I am not saying anything about any government, I am not saying anything about an administration. I just want this to be one great, big happy planet."
During the conversation, Mr. Fraser reached into his jacket and pulled out the flag, saying he wanted to show solidarity with "the great republic to the south and our American friends."
"Most Canadians, according to polls, agree with that and you are in a minority," he told Ms. Zerbisias.
Mr. Fraser smiled and waved the flag at the end of the show while Ms. Zerbisias leaned over and flashed the peace sign next to his head.
The long-exiled Iraqi National Congress said on Sunday that Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Jamal Mustafa Sultan had surrendered to them and would be handed over into U.S. custody within hours. [...]Sultan is the nine of clubs on the U.S. list of 55 most wanted Iraqis.
Charles Sennott is foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe. He was recently in northern Iraq where he traveled independently with a group of journalists. He was in Kirkuk when allied forces took the city from Baathist control. In Afghanistan, in 2001 Sennott traveled with the Northern Alliance. He is also the author of the new book The Body and The Blood: The Holy Land's Christians At the Turn of a New Millennium (PublicAffairs). Sennott was the Globe's Middle East bureau chief.
It was not meant to happen this way. The demonstration through the centre of Paris was a massive and largely spontaneous rejection of the war in Iraq. Trade unionists, students, teachers, professional people of all kinds -- a reflection of French public opposition to military action against Iraq . But amid that flood of humanity, drowned beneath the incessant chants and beat of drums, pulsed something altogether more ugly.A wave of anti-semitism is sweeping France and it's being linked to events in the Middle East. Blamed for the policies of the Israeli government, Jews now fear that they will act as scapegoats for US policy in Iraq.
France, like many European countries, has a long history of anti-semitism. Indeed, the state has only recently accepted the responsibility for the role of Vichy France in the rounding up of French Jews for Hitler's concentration camps. Yet this is something different. The new wave has its deepest roots in the burgeoning Islamic community -- at almost five million, the biggest in Europe. [...]
A recent investigation by France's National Consultative Committee on Human Rights (CNCDH) found that the number of anti-semitic attacks in 2002 increased by six times since 2001, adding that this might be the tip of the iceberg as most attacks went unreported.
The report says the figures were part of a wider trend, which has brought the highest levels of racist violence in 10 years. Last year 38 people were badly hurt in racist attacks throughout France and one man died. Racism, of course, is not peculiar to France but what is unusual is the anti-semitism. According to CNCDH, 74% of all recorded racist attacks last year were anti-semitic.
'While the increase in the number of attacks directed at the immigrant community is significant, the number of attacks directed against the Jewish community has truly exploded,' the report claimed.
Many Jews blame government policy in the Middle East, which they say, has repeatedly failed to draw a distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-semitism. When the French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin refers to the 'pro-Zionist' lobby in the US administration and claims the Washington hawks are in the hands of Israeli leader Ariel Sharon, they see proof of their suspicions. The fear is that the anti-war sentiment encouraged by President Jacques Chirac could degenerate into widespread violence against Jews. It is perhaps the reason for the recent surge in Jewish emigration from France to Israel.
At the annual meeting of psychology researchers in Boston three years ago, two scientists weighed in on a question that seemed to be as much in need of investigation as whether the sun rises in the east.The pair had asked a professor to send weekly e-mail messages to students of his who had done poorly on their first exam for the class. Each missive included a review question. In addition, one-third of the students, chosen at random, also received a message -- advice to study, for example -- suggesting that how well they did in the course was under their own control. The other third received the review question plus a "You're too smart to get a D!" pep talk aimed at raising their self-esteem, which everyone knows boosts academic performance.
Oops.
Compared with the other e-mail recipients, the D and F students who got the self-esteem injection performed notably worse on later tests. [...]
In the case of the struggling students, the likely reason the self-esteem intervention backfired speaks volumes. Students work hard partly because it helps them do better academically; 95s feel better than 65s. But "an intervention that encourages them to feel good about themselves regardless of work may remove the reason to work hard -- resulting in poorer performance," suggest psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues in a monograph to be published next month in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. (The four were tapped by the American Psychological Society to undertake the study.) If you get to feel good without learning Maxwell's equations or the causes of the Korean War, why bother?
It isn't just school performance. From the 200-plus studies they analyzed, the APS group found no evidence that boosting self-esteem (by therapeutic interventions or school programs) results in better job performance, lowered aggression or reduced delinquency. And "high self-esteem does not prevent children from smoking, drinking, taking drugs, or engaging in early sex," it concluded.
Of course, self-esteem and school or job performance are correlated. But long overdue scientific scrutiny points out the foolishness of supposing that people's opinion of themselves can be the cause of achievement. Rather, high-esteem is the result of good performance. [...]
Amid the ashes of self-esteem, the APS team finds one benefit: High self-esteem makes you happier. But that jolly outcome ensues whether your self-esteem is justified or delusional.
As we persist in praising children even for mediocre work and trivial accomplishments, I can't resist ending with a plea from the APS scientists: "Psychologists should reduce their own self-esteem a bit and humbly resolve that next time they will wait for a more thorough and solid empirical basis before making policy recommendations to the American public."
The head of the National Organization for Women's Morris County chapter is opposing a double-murder charge in the Laci Peterson case, saying it could provide ammunition to the pro-life lobby."If this is murder, well, then any time a late-term fetus is aborted, they could call it murder," Morris County NOW President Mavra Stark said on Saturday.
Prosecutors in California announced Friday their intention to charge Scott Peterson, 30, of Modesto, both with killing his wife and their unborn son. Laci Peterson was eight months pregnant when she disappeared Dec. 24. [...]
Marie Tasy, public and legislative affairs director for New Jersey Right To Life, countered that a double-murder charge against Scott Peterson is appropriate. She assailed pro-choice activists for opposing fetal homicide statutes.
"Obviously he was wanted by the mother," Tasy said.
Traditional wisdom insists that Iraq must remain in one piece. Washington subscribes to that belief. The Bush administration insists it will not permit the breakup of Iraq.But what if some Iraqis prefer to live apart from others who slaughtered their families?
Certainly, our efforts to rehabilitate the region would go more smoothly were Iraq to remain happily whole within its present borders. Our initial efforts should aim at facilitating cooperation between and the protection of Iraq's ethnic and religious groups. But we also need to think ahead and to think creatively if we are to avoid being blindsided by forces we cannot control.
What if, despite our earnest advice, the people of Iraq resist the argument that they would be better off economically and more secure were they to remain in a single unified state? What if the model for Iraq's future were Yugoslavia after the Cold War, not Japan or Germany after World War II?
The key lesson of Yugoslavia was that no amount of diplomatic pressure, bribes in aid or peacekeeping forces can vanquish the desire of the oppressed to reclaim their independence and identity. Attempts to force such groups to continue to play together like nice children simply prolong the conflict and intensify the bloodshed.
We are far too quick to follow Europe's example and resist the popular will we should be supporting. If the United States does not stand for self-determination, who shall?
This is not an argument for provoking secession by Iraq's Kurds or Shiites. Objectively viewed, Iraq's advantages as an integral state are indeed enormous, while the practical obstacles faced by any emerging mini-states would range from the problems of a landlocked Kurdistan in the north to the threat of religious tyranny in the Shiite south.
But reason does not often prevail in the affairs of states and nations. Passion rules.
I heard a neoconservative joke recently.A Frenchman, a German and an American were all facing a firing squad in Africa and each was given a final wish.
The Frenchman asked to sing the "Marseillaise"; the German asked to give a lecture on the use of force and international law. The American said: "Please, please shoot me first. I don't want to have to hear that lecture -- or that song." [...]
During the Cold War, you Americans and we Europeans had a common project -- the containment of the Soviet Union. It was a long and exhausting war, but it succeeded. And with the Soviet collapse, the U.S. became the strongest power in the world.
Inevitably, the gap between Europe and the United States grew. When the European Union and the U.S. split over how to deal with the fall of Yugoslavia and the consequent conflicts in the Balkans, the entire NATO agreement seemed in jeopardy. One EU dignitary declared that the "Hour of Europe" had come -- but it ultimately went without Europe distinguishing itself.
In the Balkans, all Europe could do was introduce United Nations peacekeepers, who did indeed save lives but could do nothing to save the situation. The conflicts were ended only when the Clinton administration finally went in and applied force.
Kosovo marked the first time the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as such had undertaken military action. The effort succeeded in driving the Serbs from Kosovo, but it exposed serious imbalances in the alliance. The U.S. flew the overwhelming majority of the conflict's missions and dropped almost all the precision-guided munitions.
In all, some 200,000 people died in the Balkans on Europe's watch. It was America that stopped that. In 2001, it was only America that could have liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban.
The results in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan are not perfect. But all those areas are better off than they were, and only the U.S. could have made those changes. Tony Blair understands that; many other European leaders do not.
Almighty and most merciful Father, I am now about to commemorate once more in Thy presence, the redemption of the world by our Lord and Savior Thy Son Jesus Christ.Grant, O most merciful God, that the benefit of His sufferings may be extended to me.
Grant me faith, grant me repentance.
Illuminate me with Thy Holy Spirit.
Enable me to form good purposes, and to bring these purposes to good effect.
Let me so dispose my time, that I may discharge the duties to which Thou shalt vouchsafe to call me, and let that degree of health, to which Thy mercy has restored me, be employed to Thy Glory.
O God, invigorate my understanding, compose my perturbations, recall my wanderings, and calm my thoughts, that having lived while Thou shalt grant me life, to do good and to praise Thee, I may when Thy call shall summon me to another state, receive mercy from Thee, for Jesus Christ's sake.
Amen.
As the capital still smolders, senior Iraqi officers are beginning to absorb the scale of their defeat--and examine what went wrong.The day that Baghdad fell, April 9, is one that Iraqi army Maj. Saleh Abdullah Mahdi Al Jaburi remembers with shame.
''A military driver took me to my house in Tikrit,'' Jaburi recalls. ''As soon as I got home, I took my uniform off, went to my bedroom and stayed there for five days. I was so shocked.''
Faced with America's firepower and technological superiority, three Iraqi officers--who fought in different parts of Iraq--say they never expected to win this war. But they voice dismay at the number of Iraqi errors--deployment of militia groups instead of army units, for example--and at the effect of U.S. psychological operations.
Despite their anger, these men could prove to be the voice of a new professional Iraqi army that may emerge, with American assistance, in the aftermath of this conflict.
And they know whom to blame: Saddam Hussein and his sons Qusai and Odai made all key military decisions.
''We are already used to his mistakes from the Iran-Iraq war and Kuwait,'' said Col. ''Asaad,'' who asked that a pseudonym be used. ''Every plan of Saddam was a disaster.''
Iraqi armed forces had also never recovered from being pulverized in the 1991 Gulf War. ''You can't fight with what was left ... and this war was not just about what you learn at the military academy--it is technological, and we recognized that,'' Asaad said. ''The army believed that from the first bullet fired by the British in the south, it would lose.''
And so it came to pass. Jaburi, a lean and weary battalion commander with the Iraqi army's 2nd Infantry Division, knew defeat was inevitable.
''But we were expecting that the war would last longer than it did,'' he said. ''We were desperate when Baghdad fell so quickly. If we were not Muslims, we would have done like the Japanese and committed suicide, [but] ... our religion forbids it.''
An old Middle Eastern maxim says Arabs cannot make war without Egypt or peace without Syria.Egypt is no longer the military colossus it once was, but Syria remains a pivotal player in Middle Eastern peace. Perhaps this explains why the Bush administration has taken a sudden interest in the nation that supports some of the most dangerous terrorist groups in the region.
President Bush is concerned about the recent accusations some of his top officials have hurled at Syria, namely that it might be harboring Iraqi war criminals and is almost certainly making chemical weapons.
But experts say Bush has more immediate and constructive plans for Damascus than setting it up for regime change with a list of charges.
He is actually trying to leverage some cooperation.
With the war in Iraq winding down, next on the Bush agenda is jump-starting the long stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks under a plan called the ''road map.'' Perhaps more than any other Arab nation, Syria is positioned either to help the talks advance by suppressing the anti-Israeli terrorists it holds sway with or allowing the peace process to again explode in violence.
The recent accusations by the Bush administration were a form of muscular diplomacy, essentially putting Syrian President Bashar Assad on notice while also providing an option for redemption.
On Tuesday, the leaders of the antiwar coalition Win Without War will gather for a two-day retreat outside New York City to discuss their group's future now that the war has ended. One of the items on the agenda: Should it change its name to Win Without Wars?The question of whether to go plural reflects how the antiwar movement is trying to move forward now that the conflict it so passionately wanted to avert - and for a time, thought it might avert - has ended.
Leaders in the movement do not like to focus on the notion that they lost. Yes, they failed to stop the war. Yes, the public has overwhelmingly supported President Bush's actions. With a swift United States victory over a brutal dictator and fewer casualties than most experts predicted, it is particularly hard for antiwar organizers to argue that their dire forecasts were right.
They focus instead on how much strength the movement gained so quickly - it was largely invisible just six months ago - and on their next moves, even if they are not quite certain what those might be.
Throughout the war, these organizers worked hard to stay in harmony - if not quite in tune - with the American public, emphasizing that this peace movement is patriotic and mainstream. After violent protests at the beginning of the war angered officials in several cities, they emphasized the civil in civil disobedience.
Now again, the challenge is to find a message that resonates.
Up to 20 high-ranking North Korean military officers and nuclear scientists have defected to the United States and its allies under a plan involving several countries including the Pacific state of Nauru,
an Australian newspaper said on Saturday.The defections began last October after 11 countries agreed to provide consular protection to smuggle North Koreans from China, The Weekend Australian said.
The man seen as the father of North Korea's nuclear program,Kyong Won-ha, was believed among the defectors, the newspaper said.
It said a U.S.-based lawyer approached Nauru's former president, Rene Harris, with an offer to foot the bill for establishing Nauruan embassies in Washington and Beijing, ostensibly to boost trade ties with those
countries.But the real reason for the Beijing embassy was "to expedite the movement of these very important people," the paper said, citing Harris.
Nauru's former finance minister, Kinza Clodumar, was quoted as saying he was briefed on what was dubbed "Operation Weasel" while with a Nauruan delegation in Washington in October. [...]
Countries believed to have been involved include the United States, Nauru, New Zealand, Vanuatu, Thailand, the Philippines and Spain, the report said.
Late in life, Francois Mitterrand let slip the news of a secret war. "France does not know it yet, but we are at war with America," reports his biographer, Georges-Marc Benamou. "A permanent war... a war without death. They are very hard, the Americans-they are voracious. They want undivided power over the world."FRANCE'S CURRENT PRESIDENT, Jacques Chirac, likens himself more to Charles de Gaulle than to Mitterrand. But never mind. The message is the same. America and France are at war-and it's no secret anymore. With the conflict winding down in Iraq, both sides are assessing the fallout from their diplomatic battles. The French-85 percent of whom opposed the war-are beginning to realize the consequences of dissent. "If Jacques Chirac persists in making the U.N. his next battlefield... he'll be dignified, glorious, solitary, and maybe even moving," opined the weekly L'Express. But the magazine also noted that he would be "without relevance."
As for Washington? Chirac may claim that his threatened Security Council veto in the run-up to war was a matter of principle. But the White House took it personally. If administration hawks get their way, France will pay. Punish France, ignore Germany and forgive Russia, national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice reportedly said in Moscow last week. George Bush himself is said to deeply mistrust Chirac. U.S. officials fully expect the French to obstruct the next round of Iraq diplomacy at the United Nations. "What is their strategy?" asks one sarcastically. "Are they going to refuse to recognize the new Iraqi government? Are they going to recognize the government of Saddam Hussein?" The last thing anyone wants to see is Iraq's future bogged down in Paris.
So where does Chirac go from here?
Some economists argue that th[e] transformation from creditor to debtor is nothing to worry about. Capital flows into the United States, they say, simply because it is a great place to invest and foreigners want a piece of the action. In any case, the foreign investors seem ready to settle for markedly lower returns when they invest in the United States than the returns Americans get when they invest overseas. That is the only way to explain why the United States consistently receives higher investment income from its investments abroad than it pays out to foreigners who have put their money into American assets.This might lead to the conclusion that Mr. Rogoff of the I.M.F. has little to worry about. But while being a hyperdebtor may not matter in economics, it can matter in the realm of strategy.
When the last great English-speaking empire bestrode the globe a hundred years ago, capital export was a foundation of its power. From 1870 to 1914, net capital flows out of London averaged from 4 to 5 percent of gross domestic product. On the eve of World War I, the capital flows reached an astonishing 9 percent. This was not only an extraordinary diversion of British savings overseas. It was also a remarkable attempt to transform the global economy by investing in commercial infrastructure - docks, railways and telegraph lines - in what we now call less developed countries. [...]
SECOND, there can be no guarantee that foreign investors will be willing indefinitely to put such a large chunk of their savings in American government bonds and other low-risk securities. Right now they seem to be content with the prospect of a third year of disappointing returns on Wall Street and the lowest yields in Treasury bonds since 1962. But will they stay content?
Not so long ago, from 1984 to 1987, dollars were being dumped on the currency markets. Another crisis of confidence is not impossible to imagine, especially if all those foreign holders of bonds worry about the Bush administration's combination of increased military spending and decreased taxation.
Since the creation of the euro, investors have a whole new range of securities in which to invest. European bonds might look attractive if foreigners, and not just Americanophobic French millionaires, start to think of the euro as safer than the dollar. Al Jazeera recently ran a cartoon of Uncle Sam weeping as the euro was run up a flagpole in place of the once-mighty dollar. [...]
Balzac once said that if a debtor was big enough then he had power over his creditors; the fatal thing was to be a small debtor. It seems that Mr. Bush and his men have taken this lesson to heart.
John Milton, in the 1600s, lived in a place and time when everyone was a practicing Christian, no matter what they believed in private. Milton for 14 years labored on poetry that struggled with the most fundamental issues of good and evil; he gave all the best lines to the "Fiend," "Satan," for Milton never doubted the power, the appeal and the reality of evil's presence in the souls of some men. "Know ye not mee? . . . Not to know mee argues yourselves unknown."Some 350 years later, no matter how much this particular weekend burns with ritual, it is evident that secular society, however real its benefits, doesn't dwell much on Satan or evil. It's not a subject. Even organized religion, both Catholicism and Protestantism here and in Europe, has recently dedicated its energies to more secular goals such as material justice rather than to purely spiritual goals, such as salvation or damnation, which once defined our common understanding of good and evil. Inside or outside the churches, it's not clear who believes what anymore, which wasn't true in Milton's time. What is now clear is that they don't believe in evil as John Milton believed in it, and as does, evidently, George Bush.
If this is true--that years of declining belief have diluted evil to an abstraction--it isn't surprising that for a great many people in the Iraq debate the idea that Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi regime were evil enough to require elimination from the civilized world simply did not compute; that's been deleted from their software. Despite the beheadings of women and the severing of dissenting tongues (Amnesty International report, 2000), the now-revealed prisons for children, the torture chambers with meat hooks, nine years of meticulous U.N. archiving of programs to produce weapons of mass destruction, the homicidal gassing of Shiites and Kurds, and a son, Uday, whose life reveals the Husseins to be, more than anything, Neronic voluptuaries, despite what this so obviously adds up to, it could never be "sufficient cause."
Milton thought that should evil win, then earth's base was "built on stubble." Not yet.
BM: Do you believe in evil?AD: I don't see how anyone can have experienced even indirectly as you and I sitting here have the events of the last day and not take seriously the existence of evil. One of the things that a number of writers have said about the devil-- some people believe in him as a literal being, some people believe in him as a metaphor or an image or a representation of these dark, human capacities-- one thing that a number of writers have said is that the cleverest trick of the devil is to convince people that he does not exist. We saw evil yesterday. We have to confront it. We have to face it.
BM: Evil is defined as?
AD: Well, for me I think the best I've been able to do with that question is to try to recognize and come to terms with the reality of the fact that there are human beings who are able, by convincing themselves that there's some higher good, some higher ideal to which their lives should be dedicated, that the pain and suffering of other individuals doesn't matter, it doesn't have to do with them or that it's... That they're expendable, that it's a cost that's worth making in the pursuit of these objectives. So evil for me is the absence of the imaginative sympathy for other human beings.
BM: The absence of a moral imagination, the ability to see what the consequences of your actions are to someone else?
AD: Yes, the inability to see your victims as human beings. To think of them as instruments or cogs or elements or statistics but not as human beings.
BM: You have written about your concern that Americans have lost the sense of evil. Is what happened in the last 36 hours going to bring us back or is it too deep for that, our absence, our loss of memory.
AD: I think it simmers. It's dormant in all of us. We don't want to acknowledge it. We want to explain it away. We want to find [an explanation] for it. In a modern world we mostly live in a place where the terrible suffering of the world seems far away-abstract and unreal and we can somehow imagine that it hasn't anything to do with us. It came home yesterday. I think a lot of people in this city and in this country are searching their souls.
[T]he story I have tried to tell is the story of the advance of secular rationality in the United States, which has been relentless in the face of all resistance. It is the story of a culture that has gradually withdrawn its support from the old conception of a universe seething with divine intelligence and has left its members with only one recourse: to acknowledge that no story about the intrinsic meaning of the world has universal validity.
The moderate new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmud Abbas, stormed out of overnight talks with Yasser Arafat over the Palestinian leader's refusal to appoint Gaza security chief Mohammed Dahlan as head of internal security, officials here said. [...]Dahlan, a former colonel in the security force tasked with preventing attacks on Israel, quit his post last year after falling out with Arafat, who is accused by Israel and the United States of doing too little to fight "terrorism."
Dahlan is seen as a tough figure whose appointment would be welcomed by the United States, which is expected to put pressure on both sides to find a solution to the 30-month crisis after it has brought the situation in Baghdad under more control. [...]
Abbas helped co-found the mainstream Fatah faction with Arafat at the end of the 1950s, but has staked out his ground as a moderate, calling this year for a suspension of armed attacks on Israel to allow peace talks the chance to resume.
Germany's intelligence services tried to develop links with Saddam Hussein's secret service a few months before Berlin announced its opposition to any US-led war on Iraq.In return, Iraqi authorities offered lucrative contracts to German companies if Berlin helped to prevent a US invasion of the country, the Sunday Telegraph reported, quoting documents recovered from the bombed-out Iraqi intelligence headquarters in Baghdad.
It said a German agent, Johannes William Hoffner, met with the head of Iraq's secret service, General Taher Jalil Haboosh, on January 29, 2002.
Haboosh told the German that Baghdad was keen to have a relationship with Germany's intelligence agency "under diplomatic cover" through Hoffner, according to the documents seen by the newspaper.
It said the German replied: "My organisation wants to develop its relationship with your organisation."
Haboosh suggested that Germany would be rewarded with lucrative contracts if it offered international support to Iraq, the Sunday Telegraph said.
"When the American conspiracy is finished, we will make a calculation for each state that helps Iraq in its crisis," Haboosh said, according to the newspaper.
There is a pattern to Mr. Rumsfeld's life. He takes over organizations and shakes them up — often hard.After the Ford administration, Mr. Rumsfeld became president of a struggling pharmaceutical company, G. D. Searle. Two years later, he wrote to shareholders that there were new occupants in "roughly half of the top 65 management positions."
Mr. Rumsfeld shed 20 Searle businesses and reassigned or let go hundreds of people from administrative jobs. "I think he was totally convinced that the people who left, he was doing them a favor," said Ned Jannotta, the chairman of the William Blair investment banking firm, who advised Mr. Rumsfeld at Searle. Eventually, Searle's stock rose and the company was sold.
Gen. Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Mr. Rumsfeld's background in pharmaceuticals gave him a taste for experimentation, which led him to insist on building myriad options into the Iraq military plan. That allowed for launching ground troops before the air war, which contained an element of surprise, General Pace said.
His corporate experience, and his long friendship with Vice President Dick Cheney, also made him attractive to the Bush administration for the Pentagon job. Mr. Gingrich said Mr. Rumsfeld told President Bush, "If you want me to change the building, I'll change the building." But many experts say Mr. Rumsfeld has had less effect at the Pentagon than on the battlefield.
At a Pentagon briefing last October, Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, which monitors government procurement, said Mr. Rumsfeld "was obviously frustrated with the obstacles to his agenda."
Ms. Brian said that according to her notes from the meeting, Mr. Rumsfeld pointed out the opposition in Congress to his cancellation of the Crusader artillery system. "It was as if I shot a little old lady in the grocery store," she quoted Mr. Rumsfeld as saying.
Common wisdom says the war will strengthen Mr. Rumsfeld's hand with Congress. But Michael Vickers, the director of strategic studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said similar speculation followed the Afghan war, although there were few changes in weapons systems. "People are now saying, `Look at this great victory in Iraq, now there are going to be all those changes,' " said Mr. Vickers, a former Army special forces officer. "I'm not so sure."
Coast Guard cutters operating off South Florida's shores have picked up fewer Cuban migrants in the first three months of the year than Haitians and Dominicans combined. But the absence of large numbers of Cuban migrants headed for South Florida may be the calm before the storm.A wave of repression in Cuba in recent weeks has been so alarming that U.S. officials have begun to wonder whether Cuba may unleash a new Mariel-style exodus -- a typical Cuban response in times of crisis. American officials are so worried that they have already quietly advised Cuba not to attempt any such action.
But if a new exodus occurs, officials say they will activate a classified federal contingency plan designed to deal with migrant surges. Operation Distant Shore would trigger a dramatic escalation in the number of Coast Guard and other military vessels patrolling the Florida Straits -- a veritable floating wall designed to interdict as many migrants as possible at sea.
Talk of the plan is all the more relevant in the wake of reports last week that President Bush was preparing punitive steps against Cuba along with a possible public warning to Fidel Castro not to resort to a new exodus. No one will say when Bush would deliver the warning, but officials at the White House's National Security Council and the State Department have left no doubt that Washington is concerned. [...]
Some Cuba analysts in the United States believe that the Camarioca departures in 1965, the Mariel boatlift in 1980 and the rafter exodus in 1994 were ''engineered migrations'' -- political weapons designed to punish the United States for real or imagined actions and coerce it into softening policies toward Cuba.
Cuba expert Kelly M. Greenhill argued in a landmark study last year of Cuban mass migrations that Castro launched the rafter exodus to ''manipulate'' fears in the United States of another Mariel to compel a shift in U.S. policy toward Cuba.
The exodus ended when the United States and Cuba began to negotiate new migration accords under which Washington eventually agreed to return migrants stopped at sea to Cuba. Until then, Cuban migrants rescued at sea were brought to the United States and allowed to stay.
A new gay silhouette is emerging that isn't on the Atkins' diet. The stomach is expanding. It is both out and, shockingly, proud. Keeping trim used to be the obsession of gay clubbers. But owing to its proximity to the Tottenham Court Road branch of McDonald's, young men and their fashion-student hangers-on are often seen in the queue for Nag Nag Nag - London's most celebrated gay night - eating chicken nuggets. Somehow it all fits neatly as part of their look. Eyeliner: check. Cheap hair rinse: check. Outsized silver Nike hi-tops: check. Potbelly: check. Chip wrapper: why not?Larger boys have always been big with girls. I've choked on my pint when female friends have confessed to their deviant fantasies about Peter Kay, Ricky Gervais or even Johnny Vegas. The payoff line is always the same. Funny is sexy.
But for boys? And boys involved in same-sex sexual activity? Homosexual males are traditionally the most preening, pouting, moisturised, eye-gelled, self-critical, fitted, kitted and spun-dry gym bunnies on the block. Even the ugly ones are aware that Clinique is not French for hospital. They are the only men in the western world for whom Botox has become the stuff of birthday presents.
The rise of the potbelly is a dawn-of-destruction moment for the kind of gay man who prizes the body beautiful above all else. In certain gay cliques, the six-pack is still a Masonic handshake of both introduction and entry. For the topless gay massive that dominated the dreary night- time landscape for the best half of the last decade, it was not just a uniform - it was the only thing to get you into the club.
Thankfully, people are beginning to notice that this six-pack living is tedious. In the new issue of i-D magazine, sexually uninhibited fashion designer Jeremy Scott castigates his interviewer for his embarrassment at a potbelly. Scott, one of the few men who can claim to have done both full nude for the genius Dutch gay fashion/porn fanzine Butt and designed razzy evening wear for a Minogue, said: "I think potbellies are the sexiest. I always hated being skinny. It wasn't until I first came to New York that people were into my body, but you are what you are." [...]
The rise of the paunch should come as welcome news to everyone who likes a regular tipple and a handsome portion come dinnertime. As Jeremy Scott says, quite reasonably: "You should be happy with what you are." If you are a man coming to terms with the fact that all his trousers are too small and are destined for Oxfam, you are now not only a style icon, but a sex symbol. Tell your gay best friends of our general potbelly rule of thumb: a 36 inch waist is acceptable, 38 is just greedy.
After Empire (Theodore Dalrymple, Spring 2003, City Journal)The explanations usually given for Africa's post-colonial travails seemed to me facile. It was often said, for example, that African states were artificial, created by a stroke of a European's pen that took no notice of social realities; that boundaries were either drawn with a ruler in straight lines or at a natural feature such as a river, despite the fact that people of the same ethnic group lived on both sides.This notion overlooks two salient facts: that the countries in Africa that do actually correspond to social, historical, and ethnic realities-for example Burundi, Rwanda, and Somalia-have not fared noticeably better than those that do not. Moreover in Africa, social realities are so complex that no system of boundaries could correspond to them. For example, there are said to be up to 300 ethnic groups in Nigeria alone, often deeply intermixed geographically: only extreme balkanization followed by profound ethnic cleansing could have resulted in the kind of boundaries that would have avoided this particular criticism of the European mapmakers. On the other hand, pan-Africanism was not feasible: for the kind of integration that could not be achieved on a small national scale could hardly be achieved on a vastly bigger international one.
In fact, it was the imposition of the European model of the nation-state upon Africa, for which it was peculiarly unsuited, that caused so many disasters. With no loyalty to the nation, but only to the tribe or family, those who control the state can see it only as an object and instrument of exploitation. Gaining political power is the only way ambitious people see to achieving the immeasurably higher standard of living that the colonialists dangled in front of their faces for so long. Given the natural wickedness of human beings, the lengths to which they are prepared to go to achieve power-along with their followers, who expect to share in the spoils-are limitless. The winner-take-all aspect of
Africa's political life is what makes it more than usually vicious.But it is important to understand why another explanation commonly touted for Africa's post-colonial turmoil is mistaken-the view that the dearth of trained people in Africa at the time of independence is to blame. No history of the modern Congo catastrophe is complete without reference to the paucity of college graduates at the time of the Belgian withdrawal, as if things would have been better had there been more of them. And therefore the solution was obvious: train more people. Education in Africa
became a secular shibboleth that it was impious to question.The expansion of education in Tanzania, where I lived for three years, was indeed impressive. The literacy rate had improved dramatically, so that it was better than that of the former colonizing power, and it was inspiring to see the sacrifices villagers were willing to make to enable at least one of their children to continue his schooling. School fees took precedence over every other expenditure. If anyone doubted the capacity of the poor to make investments in their own future, the conduct of the Tanzanians should have been sufficient to persuade him otherwise. (I used to lend money to villagers to pay the fees, and-poor as they were-they never failed to repay me.)
Unfortunately, there was a less laudable, indeed positively harmful, side to this effort. The aim of education was, in almost every case, that at least one family member should escape what Marx contemptuously called the idiocy of rural life and get into government service, from which he would be in a position to extort from the only productive people in the country-namely, the peasants from whom he had sprung. The son in government service was social security, old-age pension, and secure income rolled into one. Farming, the country's indispensable economic base, was viewed as the occupation of dullards and failures, and so it was hardly surprising that the education of an ever larger number of government servants went hand in hand with an ever contracting economy. It also explains why there is no correlation between a country's number of college graduates at independence and its subsequent economic success.
The naive supposition on which the argument for education rests is that training counteracts and overpowers a cultural worldview. A trained man is but a clone of his trainer, on this theory, sharing his every attitude and worldview. But in fact what results is a curious hybrid, whose fundamental beliefs may be impervious to the education he has received.
A teenager was blinded after being struck in the face with a frog shot from a so-called "potato gun."Daniel Benjamin Berry, 17, received the injury after he looked down the barrel of the gun's PVC pipe barrel and was hit in the face by the frog.
"He is going to be blind in both eyes," Daniel's mother, Lisa Berry, said.
Potato guns are made of pipe with one end sealed. A potato is wedged into the open end and a flammable liquid put into a sealed chamber is ignited, launching the object.
Denton County Sheriff's Department spokesman Kevin Patton said the accident occurred about 1 a.m. Sunday when Daniel Berry joined a crowed of teenagers watching the gun be fired.
When it misfired, Daniel Berry looked down the barrel to see what was wrong when the gun went off, Patton said.
Faced with a vulnerable spot on U.S. tanks, Army engineers sketched an idea on a napkin. Seven days later, 20 custom pieces of armor were to be shipped to Iraq on Saturday to protect Abrams M1A2 tanks.Engineers, cutters and welders at the Lima Army Tank Plant worked around the clock to fix the weak spot - exhaust and air intake vents - that led to the loss of several tanks in the first weeks of the war, said Lt. Col. Damon Walsh, plant commander.
"It's incredible," he said. "Guys in the desert are going to be that much safer because of what they do here."
Tony Blair has staked much of his personal and political prestige on attempting to tame the young Syrian President, Bashar Assad. His hard work has been rewarded with embarrassment and humiliation. When the Prime Minister visited Damascus in October 2001, preaching a message of sweet reason and an end to violence, he was forced to listen in silence as Assad defended Palestinian suicide bombers and compared them to the French Resistance fighters against the Nazis: "Resistance to liberate land is an international right that no one can deny."Then, when Bashar visited London in December, he made Blair squirm again as he described the plethora of Palestinian terror headquarters in Damascus as "press offices". And between lunch in Downing Street and afternoon tea with the Queen, he managed to paint his host as "an ostrich that buries its head in the sand" for believing that a reformed Palestinian Authority would produce peace in the Middle East.
It is difficult to know just who persuaded Blair that he could charm Bashar and pacify Syria, but it was a massive policy miscalculation, and one that Blair seems determined to pursue.
Commentator Patt Morrison says the next leader of Iraq should be President George Bush himself. She claims Iraq and Texas have more in common that one might think. This is one of Morning Edition's occasional commentaries in a series offering a range of opinions on the war in Iraq.
The war in Iraq has put advocates for democracy in the Middle East like Saad Eddin Ibrahim in a tough position.On the one hand, the Egyptian scholar does not believe democracy can be imposed by a foreign power, and especially not by force.
But as a critic of totalitarian Arab regimes who was just released from an Egyptian prison last month, he acknowledges that the U.S. action could help shake those regimes' hold on power in the region, opening a window for democratic groups.
The United States "has no business imposing democracy by military means,'' Ibrahim said Tuesday at an address at the University of Chicago. But the war "put all dictators on notice that if they do not reform, they will be subject to similar unpleasant predicaments like Saddam Hussein.''
BRITISH troops were racing against time last night to free prisoners believed to have been buried alive by Saddam Hussein’s fleeing henchmen.Army engineers were called in after British officers heard scratching beneath a wrecked statue of Saddam in al-Faw. Local people said they had seen two coachloads of prisoners being sealed into a secret chamber under the site.
Hundreds of Iraqis kept a vigil yesterday as engineers with pneumatic drills and a bulldozer worked to break through a yard of concrete believed to have been poured into a stairwell leading to the dungeon.
Several British troops said they had heard a response after they stopped digging, called for quiet and knocked on the ground.
The sound of a series of scratching noises has been distinct at least twice since work started on Monday afternoon.
An angry crowd stoned to death an Indian man accused of practicing witchcraft in a southern Mexico town with a long tradition of religious violence.The man, Domingo Shilon Shilon, was also hacked with machetes Sunday by the crowd in San Juan Chamula, a majority Catholic township on the outskirts of the colonial city of San Cristobal, 460 miles (735 kms) southeast of Mexico City.
Within hours of Illinois Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (news, bio, voting record)'s surprise announcement that he will not seek re-election, top Illinois Republicans were courting former two-term Gov. Jim Edgar to become the party's standard bearer in 2004."He's clearly our dream candidate," said Bob Kjellander, an Illinois member of the Republican National Committee (news - web sites), who spoke with Edgar early Tuesday before Fitzgerald publicly confirmed his decision.
Edgar, a moderate who has twice rejected party appeals to run for Senate and retired as a popular incumbent in 1999, said the race was wide open and he was not ready to enter it.
"I don't want anybody to think I am doing this at this point. What I have done, at the request of party leaders, is said I would not say no and I would listen," said Edgar, who splits his time as a consultant and a fellow at the Institute for Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.
Former US President Bill Clinton blasted US foreign policy adopted in the wake of the September 11 attacks, arguing the United States cannot kill, jail or occupy all of its adversaries."Our paradigm now seems to be: something terrible happened to us on September 11, and that gives us the right to interpret all future events in a way that everyone else in the world must agree with us," said Clinton, who spoke at a seminar of governance organized by Conference Board.
"And if they don't, they can go straight to hell."
The Democratic former president, who preceded George W. Bush at the White House, said that sooner or later the United States had to find a way to cooperate with the world at large.
"We can't run," Clinton pointed out. "If you got an interdependent world, and you cannot kill, jail or occupy all your adversaries, sooner or later you have to make adeal."
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld chose General Garner for his position. The two men know each other well from the late 1990's when the general served on a missile defense commission headed by Mr. Rumsfeld. They now talk every other night by video teleconference, and sometimes Mr. Rumsfeld calls directly, the general said.By getting out of Iraq fast, the general said, the United States can avoid repeating past mistakes. "We're notorious for telling people what to do," he said. An example? "Start with Vietnam and the strategic hamlet concept."
General Garner served two tours in Vietnam, first in 1967-68 as an infantry adviser in the central highlands, and as a district senior adviser in 1971-72 in the strategic hamlet program, which involved relocating Vietnamese in remote villages into areas heavily defended by American forces, he said. Over all, he said, the war in Vietnam was a failure because the United States had the "wrong military objective."
"It took too long," he said. "We should have taken the war north instead of waiting in the south. Just like here. If President Bush had been president, we would have won."
The general retired from the military in 1997 after serving from 1994 to 1996 as commander of the Army Space and Strategic Defense Command. He joined SYColeman, a missile systems contractor that gives technical advice on a variety of systems, including the Patriot, which was deployed in Iraq. It was bought by L-3 Communications last year. He enjoyed his business career, he said, because "most of the guys are former military, and you make a lot of money."
After the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the general ran a mission that helped the Kurds and resulted in the creation of the semiautonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq. At that time, General Garner worked closely with an experienced civilian expert in delivering aid, Fred Cuny, who was later killed in Chechnya. The effort was deemed by many in Washington to be a success.
General Garner appeared unperturbed at the prospect of running all of Iraq, under much more intense scrutiny. He is prepared, he said, for bickering on Tuesday among Iraqi exile groups and local Iraqis. Mr. Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress who was flown to Nasariya almost two weeks ago by the Special Forces, will not attend, but has said he would send an adviser.
The general seemed to relish the prospect. The Tuesday meeting represents, he said, the first time in perhaps "several hundred years" that Iraq has had such an "open season" for dialogue.
"I would prefer to have a child in a school that has a strong appreciation for the values of the Christian community, where a child is taught to have a strong faith -- where a child is taught that there is a source of strength greater than themselves," he said recently in an interview that appeared in the Baptist Press.Huh?
My "huh?" comes from the ambiguity of the statement. It is not clear whether this secretary of education -- this secretary of public education -- is saying that he prefers kids to be in Christian schools, in which case he is in the wrong job, or that the public schools ought to teach Christian values, in which case he is also in the wrong job. What is clear -- about the only thing, really -- is that Paige has totally blurred the line between personal belief and education policy. [...]
He talked about his own religious beliefs and how they should be inculcated in the curriculum. So when he mentioned "strong faith" as something that should be taught, he was talking about teaching religion -- not teaching about religion, which is fine and worthwhile, but inculcating religious belief, which is forbidden by the Constitution and for good reason.
The "faith" that Paige wants to be taught is clearly the Christian one. That might be fine for the 84 percent of the population that is Christian. But Jews (2 percent) might quibble and so might the growing number of Muslims, 5 million to 7 million people, according to the latest estimates. But the strongest objection might come from the 10 percent of the population that follows no religion at all. Should they be taught "faith," as if to straighten them out? [...]
The Founding Fathers knew what they were doing. The European experience, with its state religions and concomitant homicides in the name of the True Faith, was fresh to them. We have a civic faith in this country, and that is faith in our public institutions, the confidence that, no matter what our religion, these institutions belong to all of us. This is the faith that Paige does not seem to appreciate.
Maybe Paige misspoke. Maybe his tongue wandered off while his mind was distracted. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
But if he truly believes what he told the Baptist Press, then he is not fit to be secretary of education. He ought to explain or he ought to resign and, for once, he ought to be clear about it.
A British couple have been helped to commit suicide by a Swiss euthanasia group even though they were not suffering from terminal illness. Robert Stokes, 59, and his wife, Jennifer, 53, flew to Zurich at the end of March, where they drank the poison pentobarbital sodium, say Swiss police.The couple, from Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, were assisted to commit suicide by Dignitas, the Swiss organisation that has aided the deaths of more than 100 people from around the world.
Both suffered from chronic, but not necessarily terminal, illnesses. They were among five people, including another British woman, who arrived in Zurich between March 31 and April 5 and killed themselves.
The number of so-called suicide tourists is becoming an embarrassment to the Swiss authorities, and alarming anti-euthanasia campaigners.
Edwin Loescher, a Zurich district attorney, said five assisted suicides in one week was "too many - it's nearly unbearable".
For the first time in the Netherlands, a court has awarded damages to a severely disabled girl for the fact that she was borna so called "wrongful life" judgment.
The Palestinian Authority demanded the release of veteran Palestinian guerrilla leader Abu Abbas on Wednesday, saying his detention in Iraq by U.S. forces violated an interim Middle East peace deal."We demand the United States release Abu Abbas. It has no right to imprison him," Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat told Reuters.
"The Palestinian-Israeli interim agreement signed on September 28, 1995 stated that members of the Palestine Liberation Organization must not be detained or tried for matters they committed before the Oslo peace accord of September 13, 1993," he said.
"This interim agreement was signed on the U.S. side by President Clinton and his secretary of state, Warren Christopher," Erekat added. There was no immediate Israeli comment on Abbas' arrest by U.S. special forces.
Abbas masterminded the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship in the Mediterranean.
Now that Saddam Hussein has been removed from power in Iraq, a new military issue is dividing Democrats running for president, how to deal with Syria.President Bush warned Syria on Sunday about harboring Iraqi leaders and accused Damascus of keeping chemical weapons, but he did not go as far as to threaten military action.
Presidential candidate Bob Graham, a Florida senator who voted against the resolution authorizing force against Iraq, suggested military action against Syria might be necessary.
"We threw a few cruise missiles into the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan ... that's what we may have to do in Syria," he told the Orlando Sentinel after an appearance during the weekend in his home state.
Abu Abbas, the Palestinian terrorist who masterminded the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean Sea, has been arrested by U.S. personnel in Iraq.I assume that we're now clear on the fact that international terror is a seamless web, with America's enemies all quite willing to make common cause. The second lessen here is that Abbas was apparently turned away by Syria, as he tried to escape from Iraq. Either Syria has suddenly become philosophically opposed to middle east terrorism, or something has happened to make it mind its manners. Hmm, I guess the anti-war movement was right: Tyrannical regimes will respond to the careful application of diplomacy.Abbas was arrested about 50 miles west of Baghdad after being turned away from Iraq's border with Syria, a Palestinian source told CNN.
The hijacking of the ship led to the killing of disabled passenger Leon Klinghoffer, an American Jew. Klinghoffer was shot in his wheelchair and thrown overboard by Abbas' men.
They couldn't prevent the war, but that hasn't stopped the "Non-Nyet-Nein" coalition of France, Russia and Germany from staking their individual claims to a role in shaping, and profiting from, the new Iraq.Even before the fighting stopped, the three European powers were moving to build bridges to the United States and Britain to ensure their companies get a share in rebuilding the infrastructure in Iraq.
France says it wants to be pragmatic, Germany says it is an honest broker because it has no economic interests in Iraq, and Russia says it will consider Washington's call to forgive some $8 billion in Soviet era debt.
All three have sounded conciliatory in the past week, while saying they want to see the United Nations play the lead role in post-war reconstruction -- tactics widely seen as an effort to avoid being locked out of business deals by the United States.
Years ago, watching a clip of bungee jumpers, I thought, It's just like writing a biography--the long drop into the abyss, then the sudden jerk of salvation. Later I realized that was wishful thinking. There is no jerk, except yourself, plunging into the depthless mire of research, until finally you are obliged to concede, "Hold, enough!" However many bones you unearth, you know there are more, buried a little deeper. And when the boneyard is truly bare, bones already baking in the sun will be endlessly re-excavated. Otherwise there wouldn't be hundreds of biographies of Alexander, Napoleon, and Lincoln, each presuming to varnish or grind into dust its predecessors. I have never attempted a full-dress biography of Louis Armstrong, but I have written a short life and several essays, enough to have felt some confidence in understanding him, his genius, and his times. Yet seconds after curator Michael Cogswell ushered me into the Louis Armstrong House & Archives for a recent visit, I felt I was plunging down the rabbit hole.In the short time I spent there, examining maybe .05 percent of the holdings, I found no new information. But facts and factoids have limited appeal. What you really hope for is a better purchase on the man, a jarring of the imagination that enables you to see what you already know in a clearer light. A few steps into the archive I was stopped dead by a pasteboard blowup of a photograph that had never been published, showing Armstrong and his adopted son, "Clarence Hatfield." I had never given Clarence much thought, having heard he was mentally retarded and died a long time ago, hidden away.
But here he was: beaming backstage at the Band Box, a club in Chicago, in the 1940s, nattily dressed in a double-breasted suit not unlike the pinstripe tailored for Armstrong, who also beams, with unmistakable paternal pride. Clarence and their relationship sprang to life, sending me back to Armstrong's account in Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, to appreciate for the first time its affectionate candor regarding his only venture into paternity. Clarence was born in 1915 to Louis's teenage cousin, Flora, apparently after she was molested by an old white man her father felt powerless to challenge. Louis's first sight of the baby washed "all the gloom out of me." He took it upon himself, at 14, to get a job hauling coal (immortalized in the 1925 "Coal Cart Blues") to support the baby and the ailing mother, and assumed full responsibility after Flora's death, marrying his first wife and adopting the three-year-old at 17. In that period, Clarence fell off a porch and landed on his head; doctors judged him to be mentally impaired. When Louis married Lil Hardin in Chicago, Clarence joined them, and Louis never forgave Lil--who claimed that Clarence was never legally adopted--for her impatience with him. When he left Lil for Alpha, he brought Clarence along.
Eventually, Clarence was set up in the Bronx, where he was married in an arrangement of convenience financed by Louis. Clarence's surname is something of a mystery. According to Armstrong's friend, photographer Jack Bradley, he was listed in the phone book as Clarence Hatfield--but this may have been an expediency to keep nosy fans and biographers at a distance. Before Flora died, she evidently anticipated Louis's involvement and renamed her son Clarence Armstrong. He lived a full life, dying in August 1998, and endures in Armstrong's memoir as the happy athletic boy everyone called, much to Louis's pleasure, "Little Louis Armstrong." You feel his attachment in the photograph; had I seen it 15 years ago, I would have made every attempt to find and interview "Hatfield."
Other photos are no less revealing.
I’d love to know your thoughts for a woman of 43 who is finally ready to have children but is wary of bringing new lives into such a frightening world.Elizabeth Gratch
Ypsilanti, MichiganDear Elizabeth,
Don’t do it! It could be another George W. Bush or Lucrezia Borgia.
The kid would be lucky to be born into a society where even the poor people are overweight, but unlucky to be in one without a national health plan or decent public education for most, where lethal injection and warfare are forms of entertainment, and where it costs an arm and a leg to go to college. This would not be the case if the kid were a Canuck or Swede or Limey or Frog or Kraut. So either go on practicing safe sex or emigrate.
Kurt
Rodney King, whose videotaped beating led to the deadly 1992 riots in Los Angeles, was hospitalized with a broken pelvis after he lost control of his SUV while weaving through traffic at 100 mph and crashed into a house, police said.King, 39, was spotted Sunday by a police officer who said King was speeding and weaving through traffic in his 2003 Ford Expedition when he slammed into a utility pole, a chain-link fence and then the home, police said. No one in the home was injured.
King was in fair condition Monday afternoon, hospital spokesman Jorge Valencia said. His condition was not available Tuesday as hospital officials did not answer phone calls.
Police said they suspect that King was intoxicated, and a blood sample was drawn to determine his blood-alcohol level. Test results have not yet been released.
The Iraq war should be a political triumph for Joe Lieberman. But he spent the days after the fall of Baghdad in Iowa, the so-called peace state, and too often found that his stance for war magnified his other political troubles here.Iowa will be the first caucus state in 2004, and whoever wins, or at least beats expectations, will likely be dubbed a front-runner. Lieberman's expectations are lower than Iowa cornstalks in January, yet he keeps trying to win supporters. [...]
Lieberman is still a blur of sorts in Iowa, someone whom people just can't put into focus. He's a friendly, decent man who promotes himself as a centrist in a state where Democrats are generally liberals, but his voting record leans left on most key issues.
His campaign has stymied by quirky logistical tangles - his first scheduled 2003 trip was to have begun on the day the space shuttle Columbia exploded. It was canceled.
The rescheduled visit went on two weeks later, but without his staff, stuck in Washington in a snowstorm. Last week's trip was cut short because the senator had to rush back to Washington for a rare Friday afternoon vote, so a crowd that had gathered in Ames heard son Matt Lieberman address them by speakerphone instead.
He addressed the strange degree of difficulty his father faces from his political history and personality. He's well-known, since he ran in 2000 for vice president, and generally well-liked. But many question whether he's too much a symbol of the past and too gentle to take on President Bush.
"Some people give off lightning," Matt Lieberman said. "Some give off a warm, steady glow. Right now, especially now, America needs the steadiness of his leadership." [...]
"I'm going to come up the center," he told a Fort Dodge crowd, "and unite all parts of the party behind me." And by positioning himself in the middle, he explained, he can paint Bush as a right-wing extremist out to only help his friends and the wealthy.
Good stuff, some said. "It's a very strong message. He's very presidential," said Seth Grote, a McClelland farmer.
But Lieberman's centrist style and talk, while useful in a general election, may make it more difficult for him to get that far, especially in places like Iowa.
Lieberman's forces believe that in a multi-candidate field, as little as 20 percent of the vote in Iowa would be seen as a good showing and maybe even a win.
But even getting 20 percent is hardly a safe bet, and Lieberman has a tough choice to make in the months ahead - whether to contest this state hard, or do as Arizona Sen. John McCain did in 2000, spend his time and money where the results will be more to his favor.
"The dynamics of this race change day by day," Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer said. "At the beginning, there was a push back as people questioned the war; now it's turned around. Tomorrow, who knows?"
The antiwar rally here Saturday began much the same way as a half-dozen others before it, with thousands of placard-carrying protesters marching through the streets. But this one was also noticeably different.Among the crowd of a few thousand, there were clear signs that war protesters are embarking on a new phase. Many more of the protesters' placards took aim directly at President Bush: "Bush Must Go!" "Impeach Bush!" Voter registration tables urging protesters to "Vote for change!" also dotted the city park that served as the rallying point.
Although this demonstration, like the others across the country Saturday, was set before Baghdad crumbled, antiwar organizers said they were already preparing to shift their attention beyond protesting the war to a more ambitious agenda. In broad terms, according to leaders of some of the largest national peace groups, the antiwar movement is reshaping itself to become an anti-Bush movement.
Just how the antiwar movement plans on challenging the president depends on which group you ask. Some are focusing on registering voters to challenge Bush in 2004. Others say their emphasis will be on finding congressional candidates to run against those who have supported or acquiesced to the Bush administration. Still others say they will emphasize creating permanent community-based groups that will fight the administration's policies. Some also say that while they plot their next big moves, they will continue to hold teach-ins, protests and other forums to criticize the current military policies and practices in Washington and fortify their ranks.
The man who killed Dutch anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn has been jailed for 18 years.Prosecutors had asked for a life sentence for 33-year-old Volkert van der Graaf, who shot Fortuyn as he left a radio studio last year.
But the court in Amsterdam ruled that Van der Graaf should receive the lighter 18-year sentence to give him the chance of rehabilitation. He could be freed by 2014.
Van der Graaf said he killed Fortuyn - the then leader of the Pim Fortuyn List (LPF) - to protect Muslim immigrants and other "vulnerable" members of society.
The shooting in Hilversum on 6 May, 2002, stunned the Netherlands - it was the country's first political killing since World War II.
Van der Graaf's lawyers had argued that a life sentence - usually reserved for serial killers who show no remorse - would be extraordinarily harsh in this case.
The judges told the court on Tuesday that they agreed.
"All considered, a sentence of life imprisonment would not be appropriate in this case," said presiding judge Frans Bauduin. "Therefore we are giving a fixed term of imprisonment."
The judges said they had taken into account that the murder had damaged Dutch democracy, had been premeditated and had been carried out "at close range and with deadly precision".
"The political values and the way we engage in the democratic debate were violated in an extreme manner and the crime has shocked the legal order severely," said Mr Bauduin.
But he said there was only a small possibility of Van der Graaf offending again, and he deserved a chance to be rehabilitated.
Sevententh-century New Englanders believed that people sometimes covenanted with Satan to acquire the powers of witchcraft. That this assumption was nearly universal in Massachusetts made it no different from other European societies, where witches had been prosecuted, tortured, and executed with some regularity since at least the 11th century. But there is no doubt that something strange occurred in Salem in 1692—by far the largest outbreak of witchcraft accusations, prosecutions, and executions in colonial North American history, with 19 people dying and hundreds more accused before the trials were stopped. [...]Most Americans who know anything about the Salem witchcraft crisis probably have had their impressions shaped by Arthur Miller's 1953 play (and 1996 movie) The Crucible, which saw parallels to 1950s McCarthyism in Salem's trials. For their part, historians have offered many competing accounts, most of them focused on the accusers' motivations. Probably the most influential recent approach is Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed (1974), which interprets the crisis as a boiling over of long-simmering animosities between the "haves" and "have-nots" within Salem Village, the newer, more agrarian neighbor of old Salem Town. Books and articles on the trials continue to appear at a remarkable pace. Marilynne K. Roach's The Salem Witch Trials is representative of this ongoing interest: her "day-by-day chronicle" will find a place on the shelves of researchers and history buffs for whom the fascination of Salem never palls.
Mary Beth Norton, however, is not satisfied with this vast literature, and her ambitious and complex In the Devil's Snare argues that most of the work on Salem witchcraft has failed to connect the accusation patterns to the one factor that may finally help us understand why the outbreak became such a torrent: the external wartime setting that provided the trials' context. We have heard these sorts of claims before, as many writers have claimed that they will reveal the one compelling piece of evidence that others have overlooked. But Norton's analysis of the witchcraft crisis in the context of the ongoing wars does make a significant new contribution, probably the most important since Boyer and Nissenbaum.
Historians have done a great deal in recent years to begin understanding the North American colonies in their Atlantic context, and in the case of Massachusetts one should remember that the Puritan experiment did not occur in isolation. Beginning with the Pequot War of the 1630s, New Englanders had regular military conflicts with their Native American neighbors. In the 1670s New Englanders barely beat back the resistance of Wampanoag sachem Metacom in King Philip's War, which they also called the "First Indian War." They saw the hostilities that began in 1689 with French-sponsored Wabanakis as the "Second Indian War," in which Maine settlers faced regular Wabanaki attacks, and lurid reports emerged from the front of surprise attacks, the torturing and dismemberment of English farmers and their families, raids that seemed to come from the pit of hell. (How the Indians saw the colonists is another story.)
This war with the Wabanakis provides Norton's critical backdrop to the witchcraft crisis. Though she cannot produce a "smoking gun," Norton provides much circumstantial evidence to show that many accusers and accused had connections to the Indian wars. [...]
Norton's analysis of the connections between the Second Indian War and the Salem crisis works well because context is crucial to understanding any such historical event. Arthur Miller was, in this sense, wrong to lead us to believe that the backdrop of historical context (1690s Massachusetts or 1950s Cold War America) is largely irrelevant. No one reading this book can come away doubting that the Second Indian War colored the entire Salem episode. But we are still left wondering if Norton really has explained why the crisis came when it did. Though we will likely never have a definitive explanation of Salem witchcraft, the very difficulty in providing one fuels our enduring fascination with it.
Chronicle: One organizer of the teach-in called what you said "idiotic."
de Genova: To defensively denounce what I said as "idiotic" merely contributes to the pro-war campaign of vilification. There are people with a very vested interest in exploiting this issue and manipulating it for their own ends, and attacks against me are therefore attacks against the entire antiwar movement.
Chronicle: The comment you made linking patriotism and white supremacy has also caused controversy. Can you expand a bit on that?
de Genova: It's an oversimplification ... to say that I am simply calling anyone who is a patriot of the United States a white supremacist. But I did trace a historical relationship between U.S. invasions and conquests and colonization to the history of white supremacy and racism in the U.S.
Chronicle: If you had it to do over again, would you make the same remarks?
de Genova: Had I known that there was a devious yellow journalist from a tabloid newspaper among the audience, I certainly would have selected my words somewhat more carefully. But I would not have changed the message.
A San Francisco judge has been nominated to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the second time this year that the Bush administration selected a Latino for the nation's largest and most controversial federal appeals court.The White House to day announced the nomination of Superior Court Carlos Bea, who must now be confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate. President Bush chose Bea, 68, to fill one of three vacancies on the 28-member 9th Circuit, which interprets law for California and eight other Western states.
Bea would only say today that he is "honored'' by the nomination.
The 9th Circuit's Latino representation could soon triple as a result of Bea's nomination and the president's selection in February of Sacramento state appeals court justice Consuelo Maria Callahan. If Bea and Callahan are confirmed, they would join the 9th Circuit's only current Latino judge, Richard Paez, a Clinton appointee.
At this point, Bea, a Stanford University law school graduate who played for the Cuban national basketball team in the 1952 Olympics, is not expected to encounter the type of major opposition being mounted against many of Bush's judicial picks, including 9th Circuit nominee Carolyn Kuhl of Los Angeles.
Bay Area lawyers say Bea has enlisted enough support among influential Democrats to steer clear of controversy. Perhaps the most unusual aspect to Bea's nomination is his age -- he is older than most judges who first join the federal bench, and would immediately become one of the 9th Circuit's eldest members.
Israeli defense officials and military commanders have expressed amazement over the capture of one of the largest and most powerful Arab countries by what they say amounted to fewer than three U.S. Army divisions.The officials said the U.S. strategy of avoiding enemy troop concentrations as well as exploiting combat air supremacy comprises methods far more advanced than those employed by the Israeli military.
"This has been a very strange and unprecedented war and it will take us awhile to learn what took place," Yuval Steinetz, chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said. "We will have to learn from this war and draw the conclusions."
"I am jealous of them [U.S. military]," Maj. Gen. Dan Harel, head of the Israel military's C4 directorate, said. "They have advanced in areas that we were leading in only a few years ago. They have the ability to put everything together in command and control. Our navy and air force have systems. but we have to integrate them." [...]
Steinetz, regarded as one of the most prominent Israeli strategists in government, said Israel will have to understand the significance of technology in combat. He said Israel's military must absorb the U.S. model of avoiding direct engagement with enemy troops.
Israeli officials said the military will have to learn the war strategy espoused by the late British general Basil Henry Liddell Hart. In a series of books, Liddell Hart advocated the "indirect approach" to warfare where attacking forces avoid enemy troop concentrations and focus on key targets that could result in the downfall of the regime. The approach stresses maneuver, cunning, and forces the enemy to prepare for multiple contingencies.
Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, increased the diplomatic pressure on Damascus while Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, extended his rhetoric against the Syrians, insisting that "there's no question" that some senior Iraqi leaders had fled to Syria. "We certainly are hopeful Syria will not become a haven for war criminals or terrorists," Mr Rumsfeld said.President George Bush added to the pressure, saying: "Syria just needs to co-operate with the United States and our coalition partners, not harbour any Baathists, any military officials, any people who need to be held to account." Speaking to reporters later, he appeared to threaten Syria with possible military action, by pointedly saying that Damascus held chemical weapons, and that the Iraq war showed that "we're serious about stopping weapons of mass destruction". [...]
Hawks in the Bush team have raised the prospect of action against Syria. Mr Rumsfeld warned that Syria would be "held to account" if it provided military equipment to Iraq.
General Powell, considered a moderate within the administration, joined the chorus of disapproval despite concern over deteriorating relations between Syria and the West. He said: "We think it would be very unwise ... if suddenly Syria becomes a haven for all these people who should be brought to justice who are trying to get out of Baghdad ... nor do I know why Syria would become a place of haven for people who should be subject to the justice of the Iraqi people." [...]
Lawrence Eagleburger, who was US Secretary of State under George Bush Snr, told the BBC: "If George Bush [Jnr] decided he was going to turn the troops loose on Syria and Iran after that he would last in office for about 15 minutes. In fact if President Bush were to try that now even I would think that he ought to be impeached. You can't get away with that sort of thing in this democracy."
The war is winding down, with remarkably few coalition casualties. Yet soon somebody will try to start another casualty list, that of a second Gulf War Syndrome (GWS). The only way to stop it is to finally acknowledge that, in any meaningful sense, no such thing as GWS exists.Over a decade of published scientific studies have shown that while naturally some of the 700,000 Gulf vets have died in the 12 years since the war and others have acquired various illnesses, on the whole they are at least as healthy as people their age who didn't deploy.
Consider the mother of all GWS epidemiological studies, which appeared in the January 2000 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. It matched the medical records of 650,000 Gulf vets to those of 650,000 non-deployed vets of similar age and demographic backgrounds.
Researchers looked at illness ranging from cancer to heart disease to mental disorders to skin diseases for a total of 14 diseases. They further divided these by the three hospital systems involved, for a total of 42 data "slices." Statistically significant increased problems were found in four of the 42 slices. But the researchers also found significantly decreased levels of illness in 11 slices.
Smaller epidemiological studies have repeatedly come to the same conclusion, that Gulf vets as a group are a remarkably healthy bunch. Researchers have also repeatedly found that they are no more likely to have miscarried children or children with birth defects.
Yet the scare stories abound, only to be proved groundless time and again. [...]
The true definition of GWS is nothing more than any disease that any Gulf vet has or thinks he has. The symptom lists stands at over 120, including: hair loss, graying hair, weight gain, weight loss, irritability, heartburn, rashes, sore throat, kidney stones, sore gums, constipation, sneezing, leg cramps and athlete's foot.
If you haven't suffered a dozen "GWS symptoms" over the last year, it's bad news because it means you're an android. One major new newsmagazine even reported the claim of a vet who said that GWS gave him genital herpes. How convenient!
"If you go out on the street in any city in this country, you'll find people who have exactly the same things and they've never been to the Gulf," declared Dr. Edward Young, head of the VA Medical Center in Houston until the VA sacked him for that "insensitive" observation.
Yet true insensitivity is putting our vets in permanent fear of contracting a disease that doesn't exist. It may be too late to remove the ingrained myth of GWS, but we can and must prevent the crime that would be the fabrication of GWS II.
Civil liberties and education groups called yesterday for Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige to apologize or resign after he told a Baptist publication that he believes it is important for schools to teach Christian values."All things equal, I would prefer to have a child in a school that has a strong appreciation for the values of the Christian community, where a child is taught to have a strong faith," Paige said in an interview published Monday by the Baptist Press, the news service of the Southern Baptist Convention. [...]
Paige, who serves as a deacon at Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston, said the animosity against God in public school settings is puzzling, according to the Baptist Press article.
"The reason that Christian schools and Christian universities are growing is a result of a strong value system," he said. "In a religious environment the value system is set. That's not the case in a public school where there are so many different kids with different kinds of values."
Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a union representing 1.3 million teachers, said Paige should quickly clarify or recant his comments.
"Secretary Paige is right about one thing: Our public schools are filled with, as he said, many different kinds of kids with different values. But it is insulting for the secretary -- who should be the advocate for the over 50 million children in our public schools -- to say their diversity somehow compromises those schools. Nothing could be further from the truth. That is precisely what makes our public schools great," she said.
EDITORS' NOTE: On April 7 Baptist Press published a report by Todd Starnes about an interview with the U.S. Secretary of Education, the Honorable Rod Paige, conducted on March 7. The report accurately portrayed the substance of Dr. Paige's faith in God but contained factual and contextual errors in other respects. We regret the misrepresentations by the writer. Todd Starnes has been a trusted correspondent but no longer will be employed to write for Baptist Press. To counter any confusion, we are publishing the full-text transcript of the interview below.
--Baptist Press [...]STARNES: The Bush Administration has been very open and supportive of having, you know, more religion in the schools or at least having the acceptance of religion in the schools. Tell me, what is your personal opinion of that? Do you think that we should be embracing, you know, religious values in our schools?
THE SECRETARY: Absolutely. I think that religious values are wonderful values that we should embrace in our daily lives wherever we are, and this would [unintelligible] kids are in school. But I think it's even more important that they embrace these values in homes.
STARNES: Uh-huh. The results of that, what do you think the results of that would be if people did that?
THE SECRETARY: I think we'd have a much calmer and more gentle and compassionate society if people did that. [...]
STARNES: What do you think one of the chief benefits of a religious education is?
THE SECRETARY: Because of the strong value system support. Values go right along with that. In some of our other schools, we don't have quite as strong a push for values as I think we would need. In a religious environment the value system is pretty well set and supported. In public schools there are so many different kids from different kinds of experiences that it's very hard to get consensus around some core values. [...]
STARNES: One final question, Mr. Secretary, we're hearing a lot in the Christian colleges and universities about Christian world view education. Do you have any comment on that, what you think about that?
THE SECRETARY: No, I really haven't -- I've not heard enough about that to formulate a view, so I probably need to take a pass on that one.
STARNES: Given the choice between private and Christian - or private and public universities, what do you think -- who do you think has the best deal?
THE SECRETARY: That's a judgment, too, that would vary because each of them have real strong points and some of them have some vulnerabilities. But, you know, all things being equal, I would prefer to have a child in a school where there's a strong appreciation for values, the kind of values that I think are associated with the Christian communities, and so that this child can be brought up in an environment that teaches them to have strong faith and to understand that there is a force greater than them personally.
ONE of the greatest blessings enjoyed by the United States is that God hasn't claimed any local real estate. The insistence in so much of the world that one divinity or another cherishes a specific handful of dust remains one of humankind's great curses.Viewed honestly, the competition between faiths and creeds over sacred ground remains a cancer of the human condition. Whether we speak of millennia of bloody contests for control of Jerusalem or the bloodshed over plans to build a Hindu temple on the site of a razed mosque in Ayodhya, the importance of Karbala in Iraq or the destruction of Sufi shrines by Muslim fundamentalists, competing claims over bits of earth have spawned the world's most enduring and inherently insoluble conflicts.
The amount of suffering human beings are willing to inflict on one another over a corner of dirt is impossible to reconcile with the basic tenets of any of the world's leading religions. Men will fight for their religion, but they will massacre for their religion's totems. And sacred earth is the greatest totem of all, the ultimate idol.
CERTAINLY, some religious groups in the United States value specific pieces of land, from the national shrine of the Virgin in Emmitsburg, Maryland, to the grounds of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City. But the roots do not run sufficiently deep to tap history's underground rivers of blood and, still more vitally, the sanctified ground is not contested. [...]
THERE are many respects in which the United States differs wonderfully from the old worlds we Americans left behind. But is there any more important advantage in continuing to build our unprecedented multi-ethnic, multi-faith society than the inability of zealots in our midst to convince us that God favors one bit of earth over another?
When our congregations outgrow our churches, temples or mosques, we build anew on a bigger plot, either down the street or miles away in a suburb. Communion in the "little brown church in the vale" has always been a movable feast. This flexibility grants us a tremendous strategic and moral advantage.
Of course, we Americans have strong religious traditions. The vision of a "city on a hill" is part of the fabric of our national being. But that city has never been a physical place, except in the sense of the nation as a whole. The simple fact that God - again, by any name or names - doesn't do real estate in the United States is so great a blessing that one almost suspects that we are - all of us, no matter our faith - truly a chosen people.
Cheers erupted Wednesday morning as a Brooklyn family watching television recognized their son and brother as the Marine who played a lead role in toppling a statue of Saddam Hussein in a central square in Baghdad.The image of Cpl. Edward Chin, 23, of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines Regiment, was broadcast on TV screens around the world as U.S. troops joined a crowd that was attacking the statue.
In central Baghdad's Firdos Square, Chin climbed the outstretched arm of an M88 Tank Recovery Vehicle to fasten a cable around the statue's neck, and while he was there, briefly covered its face with an American flag.
After the M88 pulled the statue down, the crowd placed a pre-Gulf War Iraqi flag on the statue's base.
Iraqis broke the statue into pieces and dragged its head through the streets, while others -- including children -- pounded it with shoes, an act considered a supreme insult in the Arab world.
"I [am] so, so proud, so very proud," said an emotional Nai Koon Chin, the Marine's mother. "He used to play like GI Joe as a little boy. He always dreamed he would be a Marine."
An immigrant from Burma, she said the family left the country seeking "American freedom" in 1980, and she gave birth to Edward a week later.
"We like our children have a good life, good schools. We want American freedom. Now Edward bring American freedom, " she said.
We have long been told our Civil War involved only us, and was irrelevant to the rest of the world. This is wrong, for our Civil War involved more than a conflict between our own people. It also defined who we are as a nation: America the liberator, a representative of the transforming idea of freedom, throughout the world.I see today the mighty battles of our Civil War transferred to the planetary scale, and the emergence of a global Civil War, to determine whether freedom or tyranny will dominate the future of humanity.
I see today an evil, terrorism, that like the evil of slavery, reflects the power of vast, entrenched interests.
I see today a commodity, oil, that like cotton then, is treated as a value above all others, determining the fates of whole nations.
I see today a captive people, the Muslims of the world, who like the African Americans of a century and a half ago, labor under the tyranny of terror and the terror of tyranny.
I see today a Europe that, like Europe in the 1860s, disrespects the moral values that inspire the leaders of our cause.
At the time of our Civil War, the European statesmen declared they would support the Union if it truly sought freedom for the slaves, but they scoffed and argued that our intentions were low and mercenary, and that we were fighting merely to maintain our colossal presence in the world, and not for any higher principle. They called our Civil War a war over cotton, impossible to win against the hardy and committed southern forces. So today they scoff and argue that our intentions are imperialistic, and that this is a war over oil, impossible to win against millions of Arabs.
At the time of our Civil War, the European statesmen revealed that although they hated slavery they feared American power more, just as today they show that while they fear terrorism they fear our power more.
At the time of our Civil War, many among those in Britain who supported the cause of our Union, nonetheless believed peace and order were superior to liberty, and shrank from the recognition that blood might have to be spilled to pay the cost of freedom, just as today many who support our struggle to rid the world of terrorism draw back when they see the sacrifices that will be demanded by it.
At the time of our Civil War, the European press portrayed our secretary of state, William Henry Seward, as a fanatic willing to turn the Civil War into a world war should the European powers obstruct our path, just as the neoconservatives within the present administration have been painted as ideological extremists. And the European press described secretary Seward’s defiance of European meddling as a gambit to divert attention from the failures of the Lincoln administration by starting a foreign war, just as the European media, and a section of our American media, describe the liberation of Iraq as an attempt to distract our people from the alleged domestic failures of the Bush administration.
At the time of our Civil War, the rotten powers of Europe proposed to halt the conflict between north and south and to impose peace upon us, without removing the cancer of slavery and liberating the oppressed millions in our southern states, just as the United Nations has sought peace in Iraq without removing the terrorist dictatorship of Saddam.
At the time of our Civil War, our president was slow to embrace direct action to free the slaves, as the present administration was slow to commit itself to the strategy of liberation in the Arab and Muslim lands, but, once having taken the decision, followed through with it. And the European powers, which had demanded that the war be fought over slavery, then described the Emancipation Proclamation, the 140th anniversary of which we mark this year, as a dangerous act that might provoke a slave uprising and a race war, just as today they predict that the liberation of the Iraqi people will produce a wholesale war of all against all in that martyred land.
Secretary of state Seward commented then, "at first, the [Union] government was considered unfaithful to humanity in not proclaiming emancipation, and when it appeared that slavery, by being thus forced into this contest, must suffer, and perhaps perish in the conflict, then the war had become an tolerable propagandism of emancipation by the sword."
So are we told today that our president has committed our nation to an intolerable program of democratization by the sword.
But our cause is that of all humanity, as it was 140 years ago. Our cause, as it was then, is that of Moses, for when God commanded him to free the House of Israel from bondage, God did not tell him to inform Pharaoh that inspectors would be sent into Egypt and the United Nations entrusted with the work of liberation. And I will tell you that traditional Muslims love the Prophet Moses, and will not oppose our cause if we act in loyalty to the great inspiration of freedom that moved him.
But today the United Nations has come to resemble our congress as it existed in the decades before the Civil War: a place wherein the evil influence of tyranny and terror hold sway, serving only to prevent the actions of brave and moral leaders from carrying out the worthy mission of defeating the oppressors.
And I recall to you, in reflecting upon the degeneracy of the United Nations, the great words of secretary of state Seward, who declared that such deliberative bodies have "no power to inhibit any duty commanded by God on Mount Sinai," or by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount of Olives.
Seward also spoke with clarity in 1858, as the Civil War drew near, of the Democratic party of that time, a party that had made itself the protector of the slave power. He said, in words I believe apply fully to the Muslim and Arab peoples, "I know, and you know, that a revolution has begun. I know, and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backward. [S]enators and...representatives proclaim boldly in Congress today sentiments and opinions and principles of freedom which hardly so many men, even in this free State [of New York], dared to utter in their own homes twenty years ago. While the government of the United States, under the conduct of the Democratic party, [have] surrender[ed] one plain and castle after another to slavery"--and if we substitute the word "terrorism" for that of "slavery" his words become truly exact in their parallel--"the people of the United States have been no less steadily and perseveringly gathering together the forces with which to recover back again all the fields and all the castles which have been lost, and to confound and overthrow, by one decisive blow, the betrayers of the constitution and freedom forever."
Today I see the Republican party reborn in its original, magnificent incarnation, as the party of liberation, the party of American power in the service of freedom, the party of Lincoln. And I will say that I am grateful to God for having allowed me to live to see this mighty outcome.
We have turned a page in our history. As our president has said, our cause is just. Freedom has come for the Iraqi people. Liberation will come to the Muslim and Arab peoples. Let America be America the liberator again!
[O]n French TV, ... scenes of Baghdad looting were accompanied by lengthy passages from the Geneva Convention, which, for France, is the Bill of Rights.
ALGERIA Multi-party state with elected parliament and president. The National Liberation Front, dominant party since independence from France 40 years ago, won 2002 parliamentary elections that were marred by violence. In 1991, the army, fearing the Muslim fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front would be elected, they aborted the final round and sparked a bloody insurgency.BAHRAIN Declared a constitutional monarchy in 2002 as part of reforms that paved the way for the first legislative elections in 30 years. Women voted and ran in elections, which secularists narrowly won. Most power resides with the king, Sheik Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.
EGYPT President Hosni Mubarak took over from assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981 and his security apparatus and National Democratic Party have almost absolute control over the elected parliament. Mubarak periodically stands as only candidate in referendums in which Egyptians are asked to vote yes or no on whether his presidency should con- tinue.These always produce a yes vote of over 90 percent.
IRAQ U.S.-led coalition expected to run country for at least six months until new Iraqi-run government replaces Saddam Hussein’s 35-year dictatorship. Washington has promised the new Iraq will be democratic, but its history of repression and deep divisions in society will make that difficult.
JORDAN King Abdullah II, who succeeded his late father, King Hussein, has virtually absolute power. Elected parliament has not met since being dissolved in 2001, but Abdullah has promised new parliamentary elections later this year.
KUWAIT Politics are controlled by an emir, or prince Sheik Jaber Alhmed Al Sabah, and his family. Kuwait was pioneer in elections in 1963, but the emir regularly dismisses national assemblies and women are barred from voting and running for office.
LEBANON Elections regular and lively, but not open because of power-sharing agreement meant to prevent resurgence of the 1975-90 sectarian civil war. Legislative seats apportioned equally to Christians and Muslims, prime minister must be Sunni Muslim, president must be Christian. Syria, a dictatorship, wields great influence of Lebanese politics.
LIBYA Moammar Gadhafi has held absolute power since 1969 military coup.
MOROCCO King Mohammed VI appoints the prime minister and members of government following legislative elections and can fire any minister, dissolve parliament, call for new elections, or rule by decree. Incumbent socialist party won September, 2002 parliamentary elections praised as clean and fair. Conservative Islamic parties did well.
OMAN Sultan Qaboos became ruler after overthrowing his father in 1970. Family has ruled for about 250 years. Has no political parties nor elected legislature.
PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat under growing pressure to share power after four decades of sole control. The post of Palestinian prime minister was recently created.
QATAR Expected to have parliamentary elections in two or three years after holding its first municipal elections in 1999, with women fully participating. Famous as home of the al-Jazeera satellite TV station; the most liberal in the Arab world.
SAUDI ARABIA Crown Prince Abdullah rules on behalf of ailing King Fahd; no elected legislature. In a sign royal family is feeling pressure to reform, government recently allowed international human rights monitors to visit for the first time and Abdullah has proposed all Arab states encourage greater political participation by the masses. He met recently with 40 Saudi reformers.
SYRIA President Bashar Assad possesses near-absolute power and has disappointed those who expected the young, Western-educated doctor to open up politics. He succeeded his father, longtime dictator Hafez Assad, who died in 2000.
SUDAN President Omar el-Bashir has led country since 1989 coup. El-Bashir recently moved to lessen influence of fundamentalist Islamic leaders, but democratic reform not on agenda.
TUNISIA Republic dominated by single party, the Constitutional Democratic Assembly, since independence from France in 1956. Opposition parties have been allowed since 1981.
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Federation of states each controlled by an emir and his family.
YEMEN President Ali Abdullah Saleh presides over largely feudal society. Despite constitution, elected parliament and lively press, power rests with military and tribes.
Pyongyang, April 8 (KCNA) -- Kim Jong Il received a floral basket from Palestinian Yasser Arafat on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his election as Chairman of the DPRK National Defence Commission. Today it was conveyed to DPRK Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun by Palestinian Ambassador to the DPRK Shaher Mohammed Abdlah."Palestinian Ambassador to the DPRK." There's a phrase to remember.
The gains from joining the eurozone are not likely to be spectacular. According to the European Commission, the savings in transaction costs could amount to 0.1-0.2 per cent of gross domestic product, worth 1bn-2bn a year. But the capitalised value of this stream of savings is not much greater than the change-over cost that would be required to produce them.Equally, eliminating exchange risk may boost trade with eurozone countries, but economic theory and empirical studies suggest the impact will be limited because the risk, in any case, can largely be diversified away in modern capital markets. And since the pound has been more stable against the dollar over the past 20 years than the euro - if we reconstruct the euro historically - any benefit will be offset by greater volatility against the dollar and those currencies in effect tied to it.
Even if we consider benefits such as price transparency or deeper European capital markets, the answer is the same - yes, worth having, but in each case not worth more than a fraction of one per cent of GDP a year.
By contrast, subjecting the UK to inappropriate macroeconomic policies may cause a loss of output amounting to several per cent of GDP a year for many years.
The damage that would be done by joining the euro at too high an exchange rate is widely recognised. Modelling by Oxford Economic Forecasting has suggested that entering at an exchange rate that was 10 per cent overvalued would cause GDP to fall about 4 per cent, and industrial production about 5 per cent, below the levels that would otherwise have been expected. These falls would be deeper and longer-lasting than those associated with a high pound at present, because the opportunity to react by cutting UK interest rates would not be available.
What is less widely appreciated is that the loss of the Bank of England's control of interest rates would be felt long after entry, in part because our industry and foreign trade is structured differently from the eurozone's. For example, we trade more with North America and Asia.
As a result, economic developments would affect the UK differently from the rest of the eurozone. Renewed recession in the US, further global falls in equity prices, or a purely domestic development such as a downturn in the housing market and consumer borrowing - any of these would hit the UK harder than the eurozone generally. But the European Central Bank, watching its Europe-wide indices, would not cut interest rates to the extent required for the UK. The resulting downturns in the UK would therefore be deeper and more prolonged than if the country had been outside the eurozone.
Who is that masked man? One of Japan's newest politicians.A professional wrestler who fought his way to victory in local assembly elections under his ring name and wearing his trademark mask has vowed the mask will not leave his face even after he enters the staid halls of Japanese politics.
"This is my face," the wrestler -- known as "The Great Sasuke" -- was quoted by the Nikkan Sports newspaper as saying of his black and white full-face mask with bright scarlet streaks and golden wings by the eye holes.
"I won support from voters with this face, and to take it off would be breaking promises," the 33-year-old wrestler, whose real name is Masanori Murakawa, said of his victory in conservative Iwate prefecture, some 460 km (290 miles) north of Tokyo.
It has become de rigueur in Europe and the Arab world to proclaim that the problem in the Middle East is that the Bush administration is not "engaged" in restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Yet the United States has been engaged in important ways, and hopeful signs are now coming from Israel and the Palestinians. To exploit this moment, the European and Arab states themselves must now also become engaged.While everyone was focused on Iraq, some promising developments have occurred. First, Yasir Arafat was forced to accept Salam Fayyad, a highly respected veteran of the International Monetary Fund, as the Palestinian Authority finance minister. Then last month, reformers in the Palestine Legislative Council, over Mr. Arafat's fierce objections, ratified the moderate Mahmoud Abbas (widely known as Abu Mazen) as the Palestinians' first prime minister.
These changes did not happen in a vacuum. First, Israel's resolve not to capitulate to violence became clear. Hopes that it would pull out of the West Bank as a result of suicide bombs were dashed when the army went house to house to round up militants last spring.
Second, last June President Bush made clear that Washington would no longer view Mr. Arafat as a legitimate interlocutor. Faced with Mr. Arafat's calls for Palestinian "martyrdom," Mr. Bush insisted on working with "leaders not compromised by terror."
Finally, because Mr. Arafat's legitimacy at home rested in part on his influence abroad, the American move to isolate him aided his domestic critics. Mr. Arafat could no longer deflect domestic complaints about corruption in his regime, authoritarian-style leadership and a general dearth of good governance. Polls of Palestinians started to show a desire to end the violence of recent years, which had not led to progress. Ironically, it was the American position, read by some as a lack of "engagement," that emboldened the authority's Legislative Council, until now largely toothless, to push reform. Breaking from past practice, even the European Union and United Nations envoys threatened to disengage, securing the promotions of Mr. Fayyad and Mr. Abbas.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, trying to build bridges between Syria and a tough-talking United States, began a Gulf Arab tour on Monday stressing the need for dialogue with Damascus.U.S. leaders, on a roll after toppling the Iraqi government and smashing its army in a stunning show of military might, have bombarded Syria with accusations of harbouring Iraqi leaders and chemical weapons.
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana urged Washington on Monday to tone down its rhetoric, saying it would be better to make "constructive statements" that would help lower tension in the region.
Israel, moving quickly to take advantage of the U.S. pressure on its hostile neighbour, weighed in with a list of demands of its own, focusing on Syria's alleged support for guerrilla groups that have long been a thorn in Israel's flesh.
Syria, which strongly opposed the U.S.-led war on Iraq, has rejected specific U.S. charges about sending military equipment to Iraq, but remained silent on others.
Straw, speaking in Bahrain at the start of a four-nation tour, said Britain and the United States had no intention of invading Syria after Iraq, but Damascus had "important questions" to answer.
"As far as 'Syria on the list', we made clear that it is not," he told reporters. "There is no next list."
"What is important...is for Syria fully to cooperate over these questions that have been raised about the fact that some fugitives from Iraq may well have fled into Syria and other matters including whether they have in fact been developing any kind of...chemical or biological programmes," he told BBC radio.
Instead of building our armed forces around plans to fight this or that country, we need to examine our vulnerabilities, asking ourselves, as Frederick the Great did in his great General Principles of War, what design would I be forming if I were the enemy, and then fashioning our forces as necessary to deter and defeat those threats.For example, we know that because the U.S. has unparalleled land, sea and air power, it makes little sense for potential adversaries to try to build up forces to compete with those strengths. They ... will likely seek to challenge us asymmetrically, by looking at our vulnerabilities and building capabilities with which they can, or at least hope, to exploit them.
They know, for example, that an open society is vulnerable to new forms of terrorism. They suspect that U.S. space assets and information networks, critical to our security and our economy, are somewhat vulnerable. And they are. They see that our ability to project force into the distant corners of the world where they live depends in some cases on vulnerable foreign bases. And they know we have no defense against ballistic missiles ...
Before the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington we had decided that to keep the peace and defend freedom in the 21st century our defense strategy and force structure must be focused on achieving six transformational goals:
- First, to protect the U.S. homeland and our bases overseas.
- Second, to project and sustain power in distant theaters.
- Third, to deny our enemies sanctuary, making sure they know that no corner of the world is remote enough, no mountain high enough, no cave or bunker deep enough, no SUV fast enough to protect them from our reach.
- Fourth, to protect our information networks from attack.
- Fifth, to use information technology to link up different kinds of U.S. forces so that they can in fact fight jointly.
- And sixth, to maintain unhindered access to space and protect our space capabilities from enemy attack.
Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
-George Orwell [Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950)
A bouncer at a Manhattan nightclub died Sunday after he was stabbed in a brawl that police said began when he tried to enforce the city's new ban on smoking in bars and restaurants.Dana Blake, 32, died about 11 hours after the late-night fight in an East Village nightclub....
Blake's older brother, Tony Blake, said Sunday he blamed the death on the smoking ban. "I'm very bitter," he said. "It's a senseless murder because of this stupid cigarette law. That's the reason this guy was killed."
[T]hose who thought it was a bad idea for America to launch what was the moral equivalent of unilateral war on Iraq have nothing to apologize for. [...]If the Iraqi people end up better off as a direct result of America's insistence on launching the war without the support of the United Nations, it won't be the first time that good outcomes have resulted from bad means. I don't doubt that there are some children who are healthier and happier than they would have been if they hadn't been stolen from their parents. Can't we wish the best for those children without condoning kidnapping?
Why can't those of us who thought the war was a bad idea (or, at any rate, a premature one) let it go now and just join in celebrating the victory wrought by our magnificent military forces?
A number of answers come to mind, perhaps the most important being: The war isn't over.
I accept that Iraq is probably over, save for a military mopping up and maybe a decade of rebuilding. But I can't dismiss two worrisome thoughts: First, that the loudly proclaimed justification for launching the war in the first place was Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, which have yet to materialize. Could it be that our leaders took us into war not believing what they swore to us was true?
And second: The neoconservative ideologues who brought us this war have spoken publicly and repeatedly about the need to go the rest of the way toward replacing all the Middle East dictatorships with democratic governments -- whether or not we are invited to do so.
Is Syria next? Iran? Egypt?
I'd love to see democracies in all those places. I just don't think my country should be using its unmatched military power to install them.
How seriously can we take this explanation for the friendliness of nature? Not very, I think. For a start, how is the existence of the other universes to be tested? To be sure, all cosmologists accept that there are some regions of the universe that lie beyond the reach of our telescopes, but somewhere on the slippery slope between that and the idea that there are an infinite number of universes, credibility reaches a limit. As one slips down that slope, more and more must be accepted on faith, and less and less is open to scientific verification.Extreme multiverse explanations are therefore reminiscent of theological discussions. Indeed, invoking an infinity of unseen universes to explain the unusual features of the one we do see is just as ad hoc as invoking an unseen Creator. The multiverse theory may be dressed up in scientific language, but in essence it requires the same leap of faith.
At the same time, the multiverse theory also explains too much. Appealing to everything in general to explain something in particular is really no explanation at all. To a scientist, it is just as unsatisfying as simply declaring, "God made it that way!"
Problems also crop up in the small print. Among the myriad universes similar to ours will be some in which technological civilizations advance to the point of being able to simulate consciousness. Eventually, entire virtual worlds will be created inside computers, their conscious inhabitants unaware that they are the simulated products of somebody else's technology. For every original world, there will be a stupendous number of available virtual worlds--some of which would even include machines simulating virtual worlds of their own, and so on ad infinitum.
Taking the multiverse theory at face value, therefore, means accepting that virtual worlds are more numerous than "real" ones. There is no reason to expect our world--the one in which you are reading this right now--to be real as opposed to a simulation. And the simulated inhabitants of a virtual world stand in the same relationship to the simulating system as human beings stand in relation to the traditional Creator.
Far from doing away with a transcendent Creator, the multiverse theory actually injects that very concept at almost every level of its logical structure. Gods and worlds, creators and creatures, lie embedded in each other, forming an infinite regress in unbounded space.
This reductio ad absurdum of the multiverse theory reveals what a very slippery slope it is indeed. Since Copernicus, our view of the universe has enlarged by a factor of a billion billion. The cosmic vista stretches one hundred billion trillion miles in all directions--that's a 1 with 23 zeros. Now we are being urged to accept that even this vast region is just a minuscule fragment of the whole.
But caution is strongly advised. The history of science rarely repeats itself. Maybe there is some restricted form of multiverse, but if the concept is pushed too far, then the rationally ordered (and apparently real) world we perceive gets gobbled up in an infinitely complex charade, with the truth lying forever beyond our ken.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in an interview published on Sunday that Israel would have to remove some settlements to get peace with Palestinians, and called the fall of Saddam Hussein a chance to end the conflict.Expanding for the first time on previous references to "painful concessions" Israel would make for peace, Sharon also voiced objections to parts of a U.S.-backed "road map" that sets out steps on the way to creating a Palestinian state by 2005.
As an Israeli team headed for Washington with 15 reservations about the peace plan, moves by Palestinian prime minister-designate Mahmoud Abbas to meet the U.S. condition for releasing the blueprint to end 30 months of violence hit a snag.
Abbas, a leading moderate also known as Abu Mazen, presented a list of cabinet members, including reformist legislators, to President Yasser Arafat, Palestinian sources said.
But sources close to Arafat said he rejected the roster in which Abbas had taken for himself the powerful interior ministry portfolio that oversees Palestinian security forces.
The United States has said release of the "road map" must await installation of an Abbas-led cabinet that Washington hopes will pursue financial transparency in the Palestinian Authority and crack down on militants behind attacks on Israel.
Sharon, long a right-wing champion of Jewish settlement on land occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, told the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz he was ready to take steps "that are painful for every Jew and for me personally."
"Our whole history is bound up with these places: Bethlehem, Shiloh, Beit El. I know that we will have to part with some of these places," the former general said in an interview. "There will be a parting from places that are connected to the whole course of our history ... As a Jew, this agonizes me. But I have decided to make every effort to reach a (peace) settlement."
The harmful effects of working more hours are being felt in many areas of society. Stress is a leading cause of heart disease and weakened immune systems. Consumption of fast foods and lack of time for exercise has led to an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Many parents complain that they do not have enough time to spend with their children, much less become involved in their community. Worker productivity declines during the latter part of long work shifts.By contrast, over the past 30 years, Europeans have made a different choice--to live simpler, more balanced lives and work fewer hours. The average Norwegian, for instance, works 29 percent less than the average American--14 weeks per year--yet his average income is only 16 percent less. Western Europeans average five to six weeks of paid vacation a year; we average two.
Work and consumption are not necessarily bad. But producing and consuming can become the focus of a person's life--at the expense of other values.
Americans should reflect on those values. Later this year, on Oct. 24, will be the first Take Back Your Time Day, the goal of which is to encourage Americans to lead more balanced lives. The date falls nine weeks before the end of the year, nine weeks being how much more, on average, Americans work each year than Western Europeans. Perhaps this day will help American workers realize that, in the end, there's no present like the time.
Meeting no resistance, advance elements of the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division entered southern Iraq late Sunday to reinforce the American war effort.Gen. McCaffrey is an experienced commander and a professer of military science. I'm a schmo with good internet access. But he was wrong, wrong, wrong and he was wrong for an interesting reason: he didn't notice that the world had changed.The advance units were scouting the way for a convoy expected to roll in early Monday and continue throughout the day, said Maj. Mike Silverman. He said no resistance had been met.
With the advance of American troops into Tikrit on Sunday and the last vestiges of Iraqi resistance crumbling, it was not clear whether the division would see any action or take more of a stabilization role.
President Bush warned Syria on Sunday not to harbor fleeing Iraqi leaders and asked for patience as the United States and its coalition allies restore order in Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said earlier Sunday that some top members of Saddam Hussein's government had taken refuge in Syria. Some have remained in Syria, while others have moved on to different countries, Rumsfeld said.On the one hand, the President is subject to malapropisms; on the other hand, he usually means what he says. Did he mean that Syria "needs to . . . not harbor any Baathists?" We can only hope."THE SYRIAN government needs to cooperate with the United States and our coalition partners and not harbor any Baathists, any military officials, any people who need to be held to account for their tenure," Bush told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House as he returned from Camp David.
"The reason I didn't support the war -- and I continue to maintain this position -- is because it opens up a new, dangerous pre-emptive doctrine.... We're going to spend a lot of money in Iraq.... It's going to be $200 billion. For $200 billion, we could insure every child under the age of 18 in this country, just like we do in the state of Vermont.... We've gotten rid of him (Saddam Hussein), I suppose that's a good thing, but there's going to be a long period where the United States is going to need to be maintained in Iraq and that's going to cost the American taxpayers a lot of money that could be spent on schools and kids."[Emphasis added.]
- Former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont"I have always supported the cause in Iraq. I think it is a just cause. I think that what we're doing there is right. I think it is a fight, among other things, for the liberation of the Iraqi people. We have to now show that we went there for the right reasons: by, as soon as we reasonably can, turning over the governing of the Iraqi people to the Iraqi people, by turning over the oil fields and the revenue from those oil fields to the Iraqi people."
- Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina"Our highest responsibility is to keep our people safe. And the reason I supported this action was that I do not want to have another 9/11. I don't want weapons of mass destruction used in this society, and I think we have to do what we have to do to defend the security of our people. We also should feel very proud tonight of the young men and woman who are in Iraq putting up their lives and their injuries for us to be safe.... We are going to have more deficits as a result of this war. We have to get rid of almost all of the Bush tax cuts -- the one last year and whatever he tries to put on the books this year."
- Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri"I voted against the resolution to authorize the president to use force against Iraq. I did so because I thought the war against Iraq would make us less secure, not more secure. Saddam Hussein is an evil person; he lives in a neighborhood with a lot of evil people. The question is where do we put our priorities for the safety of Americans? In my judgment those priorities should be to eliminate the shadowy groups of international terrorist organizations which killed almost 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11. I believe that the war in Iraq has actually reduced our ability to effectively carry out the war against terrorism."
- Sen. Bob Graham of Florida"I support disarming Saddam Hussein, but I have been very critical of the way this administration went at it because it leaves the American people carrying a greater financial burden and an enormous repair job with NATO, the United Nations, the European community and the rest of world. And now this administration is laying out enormous plans for building roads, schools, hospitals, and providing books in Iraq, and it's time for us to demand that they lay out a plan that they do the same here in the United States of America."
- Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts"We have to know the difference between defense and offense. I also think this war was about a pretext. It was not about whether they had weapons of mass destruction. Let's face it: Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction, homelessness is a weapon of mass destruction, lack of adequate education is a weapon of mass destruction, our children not having good neighborhoods is a weapon of mass destruction. We're blowing up bridges over the Tigris and Euphrates, (but) we're not building bridges in our own cities."
- Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio"I supported the war and I did because I believe one of the first responsibilities of government, as our Constitution says, is to 'provide for the common defense.' History teaches us that if you leave a brutal, immoral dictator with weapons of mass destruction, eventually he will use them and all of our liberty and everything else we strive for will be compromised. But the choice between security for our nation and a better life for our children is a false choice. ... If we pull back this outrageously unfair and irresponsible tax cut program of President Bush, we could both protect our security and provide a better life for our children."
- Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut"If we spent $80 billion to kill Saddam Hussein that's $79 billion too much. I'd rather see that money spent on providing health care for children, universal health care for our country, to build schools and provide quality education, to deal with domestic concerns of the American people. … Charity begins at home and if we're going to attend to our priorities we should take care of America first and American children first."
- Former Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois"I opposed the war and I'm still saying that I do not see the necessity for the war. I do not see where we've seen the nuclear weapons that we were told were there. I do not see the imminent danger. I do not see the necessity for the military action. I'm glad Saddam was toppled, but I also would like to see things toppled in this country, like no health insurance, like illiteracy, like childhood obesity. The real question to me is if we can come up with billions to occupy Iraq, why can't we come up with money for the budgets of the 50 states we already occupy?"
- Rev. Al Sharpton of New York
Why do they hate us?... [I]t is worth considering the possibility that the root source of anti-Americanism in the world lies in the deep-rooted anti-modern tradition of Continental Europe.[T]he broader anti-Americanism currently fashionable on all continents comes ultimately from what some have called the Industrial Counter-Revolution. This is a comprehensive category for the various reactions in Europe against ... liberalism in the classical sense -- individualism, free markets, and technological and social progress....
Continental European Jews, because they owed their very presence in the larger civilization to the values of liberalism and modernism, were one of the first and most obvious targets of the Industrial Counter-Revolution.... Those European Jews who were left alive at the end of [WW II] overwhelmingly desired to leave, and they left to two destinations: Israel, and the Anglosphere.
With this emigration, on top of the previous great Jewish emigration to London and New York in the late 19th century, much of the energy, creativity and contributions of European Jews were given to the Anglosphere rather than the Continent....
Gradually, however, Europe seemed to run out of creativity, in everything from arts, to academia, to demographic vigor, to the will to political reform.... It may be coincidence, but these new generations are the ones who grew up without the experience of studying, working and socializing with substantial numbers of Jews....
The modern world was first carried forward by two great civilizations. The Anglosphere was one. The dynamic industrializing culture of 19th century Continental Europe, to which the spark of the Judaeo-Christian encounter was so important, was the other. That culture committed suicide in the '30s. Perhaps its successor is not the revival of that culture, but rather its zombie....
And we should not be surprised if [modern Europeans] hate us.
Throughout this war, Saddamism was peddled by Al Jazeera television, Arab intellectuals and the Arab League. You cannot imagine how much distress there is among certain Arab elites that the people of Iraq preferred liberation by America to more defiance under Saddam. The morning after Baghdad was liberated, Abdul Hamid Ahmad, editor of The Gulf News, wrote, like so many of his colleagues: "This is a heartbreaking moment for any Arab, seeing marines roaming the streets of Baghdad."The wall of Saddamism, which helped bad leaders stay in power and young Arabs remain backward and angry, was as dangerous as Saddam. "The social, political, cultural and economic malaise in this part of the world had become a threat to American security — it produced 9/11," said Shafeeq Ghabra, president of the American University of Kuwait. "This war was a challenge to the entire Arab system, which is why so many Arabs opposed it. The war to liberate Kuwait from Iraq [in 1991] was outpatient surgery. This war was open-heart surgery."
But this open-heart surgery will succeed in toppling both Saddam and Saddamism only if we are successful in creating a healthy Iraq — an Arab state where people can find dignity, not just by saying no to the West, but by building a decent, tolerant, modernizing society that they can be proud of, an Arab state where people can speak the truth and that other Arabs would want to emulate. The widespread looting that has followed the fall of Saddam tells me just how hard that will be. So far, all that we have unleashed in Iraq is chaos, not freedom. There is no civil society here. We are starting from scratch.
And then we must also take down the third wall — the wall of cement, fear and barbed wire being erected between Israelis and Palestinians. We must defuse this conflict. If we let this Israeli-Palestinian wall stand, it will reinforce the wall of Saddamism. Arab dictators will hide behind this conflict as an excuse not to change, Arab intellectuals will use it to delegitimize U.S. power out here, and the enemies of the new leaders in Iraq will use it to embarrass them for working with us.
THE TUMBLING STATUE of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad last Wednesday did look like something out of the revolutions of 1989, and this resemblance ought to plunge us into thought. A thousand experts have told us that, by fighting in Afghanistan and now in Iraq, America has thrown itself into the clash of civilizations, and that reality in the Muslim world bears very little in common with reality in the West. Even so, that falling statue looked exactly like one of those colossal statues of Lenin and the other Communist leaders that used to stand guard in public plazas all over Eastern Europe.There is a reason for this. Saddam's Ba'ath Party has always claimed to be restoring the ancient national glory of the Arab people, from the glory days of the Caliphate of the seventh century, when the Arab Empire was on the march. But the Ba'ath is not, in fact, an ancient Arab institution. The party was founded in Damascus in 1943 on the basis of doctrines from the 1920s and `30s, which were subsequently updated to include a number of doctrines from later times, as well. These ideas were pretty much Mussolini's and those of the extreme right in Europe, mixed with a few ideas from the Stalin era of Soviet communism and given a distinctly Arab varnish. The iconography of Saddam's Ba'ath looks like the iconography of modern Western totalitarianism because that is, in fact, exactly what it is.
The modern age has been the age of totalitarianism, but it has also been the age of totalitarianism's demise. In one country after another, totalitarianism's overthrow has led to scenes of statue-toppling and dancing crowds-scenes of revolution. And so, it is natural to wonder if revolution is the scene before our eyes in Baghdad, too-if we are observing not just the superficial fact of a tyrant's fall or what is cynically called ''regime change,'' but the deeper reality of a growth in human freedom, the beginning of a revolution for the liberal values of individual and minority rights, the rule of law, tolerance, and justice.
This is a question for the long haul, not just for today. […]
Some people have worried about something even more dangerous-that a renewed hubris might take hold of the leaders in Washington, a further twist on the arrogance that drove away some of America's potential allies in the months before the war. In the wake of military victory, the US government could succumb to the wildest fantasies of omnipotence, a trigger-happy impulse to fight wars on a thousand fronts or an imperial disdain for the newly freed Iraqis. These worries strike me as entirely realistic.Let us fear, then. But let us also remember that, at moments like this, every possibility is still in play-the worst, but also the best: the road that leads to Yugoslavia, as well as the road to Poland. Iraq could go either way right now. So let us hope, too. Let us press for greater American involvement, a more generous budget, an all-is-forgiven attitude that welcomes and even requests support from the rest of the world-a big campaign of reconstruction and not a small one.
Building a society of greater freedom than ever before in Iraq, a safer society for its own people and its neighbors and (not least) for us in far-away America-this possibility does exist, even if not in a fairyland version. There is a two-word name for this possibility: liberal revolution. If falling statues of tyrants are a familiar symbol to us, that is because, in modern times, more-or-less successful revolutions have also become familiar. And now let us get ready for the long haul.
The rapid march that Capt. Adam J. Morrison had at first called "the cannonball run" threatened to become a crawl, if that.A single shot to the head killed Specialist Gregory P. Sanders on March 24 as he stood beside his tank in the Najaf area. He was 19 and the brigade's first soldier to die. Sgt. Roderic A. Solomon died on the 28th when the Bradley he was in crashed into a ditch. He was 32.
Four more from the same company — Pfc. Michael R. Creighton Weldon, Specialist Michael E. Curtin, Pfc. Diego F. Rincon and Sgt. Eugene Williams — died a day later when a bomb in a taxi exploded at a checkpoint. None had turned 25 yet.
That was the day, March 29, when Maj. Morris T. Goins, a tall, easygoing North Carolinian who is the First Brigade's operations officer, swore.
"You ain't going to get there," he shouted at another officer, gesturing toward Baghdad, "if all you're worrying about is what's back there."
Those were the darkest days of the division's sweep across Iraq, when fear, anger and doubt cut into soldiers in the desert like the grit in the wind. In faraway places, which to the brigade's soldiers, meant places like Kuwait and Washington, commanders and commentators questioned the Pentagon's strategy, contemplated an "operational pause," and debated the semantics of words like "bogged down."
But where the desert meets the fertile crescent of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the division's mechanized forces remained largely intact, even if bloodied on its flanks by fedayeen fighters. The division needed only the order to move again.
That order came sometime before the moonless hours after midnight on April 2, when the brigade's armored forces began to move again. The renewed advance had been preceded by days of aerial bombardments of Iraqi forces guarding the southern approaches to Baghdad.
A little of the cool swagger of Major Goins, the brigade's operations officer, returned that day. He never seemed happier than when the division was moving.
"Thirty-six hours," he told a dozen soldiers from the brigade's mobile command post as they began to break camp in the desert at last. "Then we'll be in the history books forever."
Sharon: "The Iraqi leadership was a horrific and murderous one. As early as 20 years ago they understood it was impossible to acquire an Islamic bomb, and therefore it had to be manufactured. So the removal of Iraq as a threat is definitely a relief. However, this does not mean that all of the problems we are facing have been removed. Iran is making every effort to produce weapons of mass destruction and is engaged in making ballistic missiles. Libya is making a very great effort to acquire nuclear weapons. What is developing in these countries is dangerous and serious. In Saudi Arabia, too, there is a regime that grants sanctioned aid to terrorist organizations here.Are you saying that what happened in Iraq has to happen, in one way or another, in Iran, Libya and Saudi Arabia?
"In the matter of Iraq, the United States showed leadership at the highest level. I don't think it is realistic to think that immediately after the conclusion of one campaign, another will begin. Even a superpower has limits. When you win, you are also weakened to a certain degree.
"But we face the possibility that a different period will begin here. The move carried out in Iraq generated a shock through the Middle East and it brings with it a prospect of great changes. There is an opportunity here to forge a different relationship between us and the Arab states, and between us and the Palestinians. That opportunity must not be neglected. I intend to examine these things with all seriousness." [...]
Do you consider Abu Mazen a leader with whom you will be able to reach a settlement?
"Abu Mazen understands that it is impossible to vanquish Israel by means of terrorism."
U.S. troops entered the Iraqi town of Tikrit on Sunday bringing the war to Saddam Hussein's birthplace -- the last major center yet to fall to the invading forces.During their push out of Baghdad, U.S. Marines rescued seven Americans who had gone missing during the 25-day war, although initial details of the recovery were sketchy.
As U.S. soldiers hit Saddam's hometown, key cities under U.S. control returned to a degree of normality after days of looting, but tensions between rival Muslim Shi'ite factions appeared close to boiling point in the holy city of Najaf.
U.S. Gen. Tommy Franks said Marines marching on Tikrit, which lies 110 miles north of Baghdad, had met little resistance, but he cautioned against hopes that the war was about to end.
"I wouldn't say it's over, but I will say we have American forces in Tikrit right now," Franks told CNN Television.
"Right after the sandstorm ended, we started getting indications that they were getting pounded," said a senior military officer. And when the Air Force's "bomb damage assessments" finally arrived that weekend, the results were astonishing. The Army had wanted to hold back until the Medina Division was judged to be cut to 50 percent of its original combat effectiveness. Instead, the Medina was assessed to be at just 20 percent.The result, said a senior military officer, is that the war looked very different to ground commanders than it did to Franks or to his bosses at the Pentagon. "There are real disconnects," he said. But, he added, "I don't think there has ever been a battle where there hasn't been a strategic-tactical disconnect."
The most important meeting of the war may have been the one held on the morning of Saturday, March 29 on a wooded ridge in the Maryland countryside, at the Camp David presidential retreat. Some retired generals were arguing that U.S. forces in Iraq should wait for reinforcement from the 4th Infantry Division, and some Army officers on active duty privately agreed with that view.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is close to Rumsfeld and a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, recalled that the discussion was a turning point. "You had this moment when the old Army was pounding away, saying that we were out there and facing the Republican Guard" with too small of force, said Gingrich. "That was the moment of optimum danger. A less confident administration might have paused and waited for another division to come up."
At the Saturday morning meeting, held as a video teleconference, President Bush "was not an impatient person," recalled a senior administration official. "He was prepared to let things unfold."
The meeting's conclusion, said a presidential adviser, was that the campaign should remain "Baghdad-centric," and that the forces should push on to the capital as soon as possible, rather than try to secure their supply lines and consolidate their positions in southern Iraq. The thinking, recalled this adviser, "was that if you cut off the head of the snake, the rest of the snake wouldn't be able to eat you."
The president also had another agenda, said this official. Several people close to Bush said the calculated risk of plunging ahead was driven partly by the realization that it was important for Rumsfeld's ambition of transforming the military into a lighter, more agile force. Slowing down on the battlefield threatened to suggest a reversal of the administration's key defense policy.
"The people who were bad-mouthing the plan were the anti-transformation forces, the heavy-Army guys," said this person, who participated in numerous war-planning meetings. "They wanted 600,000 troops in there. By not waiting around, it had the effect of winning that debate." The message that came down the chain of command from that meeting, said a senior military officer, was, "Stay the course."
It was the low point of the war for the two generals.On March 27, outside the city of Najaf, Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, commander of the U.S. Army's V Corps, met with Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division. As they sat on gray folding chairs in the desert wasteland, the war seemed to be in dismal shape.
The critical crossroads city of Nasiriyah had degenerated into a shooting gallery for U.S. convoys. An Army maintenance unit was ambushed on an overextended supply line. In just one day, 36 U.S. soldiers and Marines were killed, taken prisoner, or missing. That night, the first deep strike by AH-64D Apache attack helicopters was beaten back by small-arms fire that downed one chopper and riddled 33 others with bullets. Then a harsh sandstorm swept in, grounding U.S. helicopters, jamming some weapons, bringing most operations to a halt, and demoralizing the troops. And they had not yet engaged the Iraqi Republican Guard, which they expected would greet them with chemical weapons.
Wallace, wearing cotton cavalry gloves and Wiley-X sunglasses, said in an interview after the meeting with Petraeus that, in light of the damage sustained by the Apaches earlier in the week, it was not clear how they could be used in Iraq. He added, "We're dealing with a country in which everybody has a weapon, and when they fire them all into the air at the same time, it's tough."
Just 13 days later, Baghdad fell.
What ended as a military victory that toppled the Iraqi government in 21 days was filled with moments of uncertainty, miscues and unexpected successes for U.S. forces. This article is an anatomy of the war as described by dozens of military officials and commanders, including key participants in the decision making on the battlefield and in Washington. They provided an inside look at a conflict that upended a host of specific assumptions about how the war would unfold even as it delivered the final collapse of Iraqi resistance that commanders had forecast.
Some of these participants said the war got off to an unexpected and confused start. But it reached a swift conclusion in Baghdad in part because of the debilitating impact of air power against Iraq's Republican Guard divisions.
In particular, they said, a Special Operations campaign to guide bombing attacks against Iraqi forces even in the midst of a howling sandstorm appears to have been far more effective than generally realized.
But another Special Operations effort, to persuade Iraqi forces to surrender at the outset of the campaign, was suddenly overtaken by the decision of Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the overall war commander, to start the ground offensive a day earlier than planned. This decision, the commanders and officials said, sparked a roiling argument within the military's elite Special Operations units about whether the start disrupted the surrender plan. Some officers say the course of the war would have been far smoother, with fewer casualties, had they been allowed to bring the surrender appeal to fruition.Despite the successful drive to Baghdad, some commanders still believe the invasion force was too small, and that their supply lines were so stretched that there was a chance that front-line units would run out of food and water.
Finally, officers and Pentagon officials said that during the critical second week of the war, when the two generals met outside Najaf, a sharply different assessment of the state of the war emerged between the field commanders and officials in Washington.
Publicly, Jacques Chirac denounces the bloodthirsty Anglo- Saxons. Privately, we are told, he rings Blair and asks for France to be included in the post-war relief and reconstruction effort. And when, in the face of the anarchy and looting in Iraqi cities, Chirac declares that only the UN can run the country, he cannot expect anyone to take him seriously. In fact, Chirac’s diplomacy seems rather like Napoleon’s attitude to his foreign minister: "I don’t employ Talleyrand when I want a thing done, but only when I want to have the appearance of wanting to do it."There are signs in any case that the French public, though hostile to the war, are wearying of their government’s relentlessly negative view. Paris Match is now praising Blair’s courage. Le Figaro welcomes "a historic victory", and Liberation says Chirac faces an uphill struggle to avoid France being marginalised.
But still the resentment is grinding on. Gallant little Belgium’s prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, has denigrated the United States as "a deeply wounded power that has now become very dangerous". Now he is holding his own mini-summit at the end of the month with France, Germany and Luxembourg to further the EU’s ambitions to set up a rival to Nato and cut out the Americans.
Nor is the resentment confined to the Continent. You can see it spill over into the anti-war arguments of the Tory Europhiles. Ken Clarke, who earlier ventured a comparison to Vietnam, now says we must move on and stop being automatic followers behind the Americans. Chris Patten said he didn’t see why the continentals should pay to clean up after a war they didn’t support, and more or less accused American religious fundamentalism of being as much to blame for conflict as Islamic fundamentalism.
My reaction to all this is to say, grow up. American power is a fact. You have to learn to work with it and try to push it in the direction you favour — as Blair has in pressuring a previously unenthusiastic Bush to commit himself to a viable and independent state of Palestine, something which all the niggling from the EU never began to accomplish.
There must be a temptation now for Blair to smooth over the hard feelings. For all his determined leadership in the face of passionate opposition, he remains someone who likes to see smiling faces about him. If he cannot deliver on the euro as yet, perhaps he might let the new European constitution slide through without too much fuss.
I have always wanted to see the EU adopt a constitution which would offer a final settlement and spell out the division of powers. What we don’t want is a blueprint for a superstate, which is exactly what the drafts from Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s constitutional convention seem to be offering us. According to articles 10-12, the EU is to have exclusive or shared competence in almost every important policy area.
Even where the competence is shared, the member states may act only within the limits defined by Brussels, just as local authorities in Britain may act only within limits laid down by the government. Article 13 says "member states shall actively and unreservedly support the Union’s common foreign and security policy in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity". It has also been suggested that no member should be allowed to withdraw from the Union unless two-thirds of the other members give their consent.
The driving idea is to transform the EU from a voluntary association of like-minded nations into a cohesive, indissoluble rival to the US. In other words, deep down it derives from the same anti-American impulse that has torn Europe apart these past weeks — and will do so again if it is not resisted. At this rate I am not sure which will take longer to rebuild, the shattered cities of Iraq or the bruised egos of Europe.
Russia will not forgive Iraq some $8 billion in Soviet-era debt, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said on Saturday, a day after President Vladimir Putin said Moscow could consider wiping clean Baghdad's slate.Speaking from Washington where he is taking part in a meeting of finance ministers from the Group of Eight leading industrialised nations, Kudrin said Moscow would not forgive loans granted to Iraq under Saddam Hussein until Russia's own Soviet debts were written off.
"No one has forgiven Russia's debt, regardless of what kind of regime it was and regardless of the country's clout," he told Russian state television.
"For this reason, international law and our membership of the Paris Club of creditor nations will allow us to press for the repayment of our loans."
Russia inherited some $100 billion in Soviet-era debt. It faces a debt repayment peak of $17 billion in 2003.
They talked birdies and bogeys, Tiger and Phil, dogwoods and azaleas. They ran long, sappy montages about caddies and past champions, the whispering Georgia pines and the mystery of the Masters.What CBS announcers didn't do Saturday was talk about the protests taking place down the street from Augusta National, a front-burner topic here for much of the last nine months.
``The focus of CBS Sports is on golf,'' network spokeswoman Leslie Anne Wade explained.
Top secret documents obtained by The Telegraph in Baghdad show that Russia provided Saddam Hussein's regime with wide-ranging assistance in the months leading up to the war, including intelligence on private conversations between Tony Blair and other Western leaders.Moscow also provided Saddam with lists of assassins available for "hits" in the West and details of arms deals to neighbouring countries. The two countries also signed agreements to share intelligence, help each other to "obtain" visas for agents to go to other countries and to exchange information on the activities of Osama bin Laden, the al-Qa'eda leader.
The documents detailing the extent of the links between Russia and Saddam were obtained from the heavily bombed headquarters of the Iraqi intelligence service in Baghdad yesterday. […]
The documents, in Arabic, are mostly intelligence reports from anonymous agents and from the Iraqi embassy in Moscow. Tony Blair is referred to in a report dated March 5, 2002 and marked: "Subject - SECRET." In the letter, an Iraqi intelligence official explains that a Russian colleague had passed him details of a private conversation between Mr Blair and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, at a meeting in Rome. The two had met for an annual summit on February 15, 2002, in Rome.
The document says that Mr Blair "referred to the negative things decided by the United States over Baghdad". It adds that Mr Blair refused to engage in any military action in Iraq at that time because British forces were still in Afghanistan and that nothing could be done until after the new Kabul government had been set up.
The United States has halted the flow of Iraqi oil to Syria. Western intelligence sources said U.S.-led coalition forces shut off the oil pump outside the northern city of Kirkuk on Tuesday. The Kirkuk facility was pumping about 250,000 barrels of oil via a pipeline to the Syrian port of Banyas, Middle East Newsline reported."It's a major move by the United States and will have a significant affect on Syria," a senior intelligence source said. "The Syrians are very upset."
Intelligence sources said Iraqi oil pumped to Syria over the last two years had been a major source of revenue for the regime of President Bashar Assad. Iraq had sold the oil to Syria for about $11 a barrel and the Assad regime exported the fuel at market prices and kept the difference.
Iranian ruling ayatollahs, seriously concerned at the perspective of being the next on the America’s list of rogue regimes to be removed from power, paved Saturday the way for normalising relations with the United States, suggesting to organise a national referendum on the subject.The proposal was made by Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in an interview with "Rahbord" (Strategy) periodical, saying the problem of Iran's thorny relations with both the US and Egypt could be resolved through a referendum or by referring it to the Assembly for Discerning the Interests of the State (ADIS, or Expediency Council).
As some political analysts interpreted the suggestion as a "turning point" in the 24 years-old life of the Islamic Republic or describing it "a great leap forward", other cautioned against "over simplification" and said it is a "new cup of poison" the clerical leaders are drinking in order to save the regime, referring to the dramatic decision taken by the leader of the Islamic Revolution in 1989, accepting a United Nations resolution proclaiming cease-fire in the war with Iraq.
"Now that the ruling ayatollahs have realised the danger that looms over their head, that this American Administration is serious in its menaces, they try to get out of the pit in which they had plunged themselves", commented Mr. Ahmad Ahrar, a seasoned political analyst.
In the wake of the U.S.'s stunning military victory in Iraq, North Korea has reportedly relaxed its demands that the Bush administration engage in one-on-one talks with Pyongyang to resolve the nuclear standoff between the two countries."If the U.S. is ready to make a bold switchover in its Korea policy for a settlement of the nuclear issue, the [Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea] will not stick to any particular dialogue format," a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said, according to the state-run KCNA news agency.
The statement was a "hint" that North Korea would accept U.S. demands for multilateral talks to end the nuclear dispute, the Associated Press said. Since North Korea announced it had resumed its nuclear weapons program last October, Pyongyang has insisted on direct talks with Washington, D.C.
Under the rule of the mullahs, "life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine would suddenly give way to showers and storms," [Azar Nafisi] writes ...She decided to continue to teach, but in secret....
"I had explained to them the purpose of the class.... I mentioned that one of the criteria for the books I had chosen was their authors' faith in the critical and almost magical power of literature, and reminded them of the nineteen-year-old Nabokov, who, during the Russian Revolution, would not allow himself to be diverted by the sound of bullets. He kept on writing his solitary poems while he heard the guns and saw the bloody fights from his window. Let us see, I said, whether seventy years later our disinterested faith will reward us by transforming the gloomy reality created of this other revolution."...
To live in the Iran of the mullahs was to be "victims of the arbitrary nature of a totalitarian regime that constantly intruded into the most private corners of our lives and imposed its relentless fictions on us." It was absurdism carried to an absurd degree: "The chief film censor in Iran, up until 1994, was blind" ... The class that Nafisi organized was therefore "an attempt to escape the gaze of the blind censor," a place where "we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom."...
[Nafisi] is grateful to the Islamic Republic, she says, because it taught her "to love Austen and James and ice cream and freedom."
It was hard to be apolitical at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1930s, especially as a graduate student of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Mr. Morrison was one of Oppenheimer's most promising protégés, and like many physicists in that circle, he belonged to the Communist Party, which fought for liberal causes such as organizing farmworkers and promoting civil rights for African-Americans....Mr. Morrison felt driven to promote peace, but he foresaw that growing tensions with the Soviet Union might hinder freedom of expression. So he declined an invitation to return to the physics department at Berkeley. "I knew that Berkeley was going to be one of the most vulnerable of places," he says. "A state university can't stand out against a majority opinion, even if it is weak and poorly supported."
Instead, in the summer of 1946, he headed for Ithaca, N.Y....
But even there, Mr. Morrison could not hide from the Federal Bureau of Investigation or from red-baiting members of Congress and the press....
The attacks from Communist hunters diminished as the '50s closed, but it would be many more years before the country would catch up with Mr. Morrison's unbridled support for peace.
CNN has moved all embedded journalists in Baghdad over to independent status, and is apparently sending in reinforcements. Nic Robertson, who was kicked out of the capital by the Iraqi authorities during the opening stages of the war, has returned to the city. The network seems very much to be marketing itself as an independent news outlet - also announcing today that it will not allow its news broadcasts to appear on the coalition "Towards Freedom" channel in Iraq.
(This is an edited extract of an article from this week's New Statesman, explaining ex-editor John Lloyd's reasons for resigning as a columnist.) [...]Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, UN leaders have spread the message that their organisation could now enter into its own - as a protector of the downtrodden who, most often, are trodden on by their own rulers. This movement culminated, less than two years ago, in a Canadian-sponsored report, A Responsibility to Protect - a brilliant summation of the arguments for stripping tyrants of sovereign inviolability. Of the major government leaders, only Blair has embraced the report, as the logical extension of the ethical dimension in foreign policy that Labour promulgated when it came to office.
Most of the left refused to follow this line. For some, it has been enough to declare all ethical dimensions phoney, since states such as Britain continued to shake hands with tyrants. For others, state sovereignty seems a necessary protection against what they see as the largest threat to the world: US imperialism.
US imperialism, in this view of a now resurgent part of the left, is composed of a mixture of things: efforts to control energy resources, principally oil; the repression of the Palestinians to ensure the security of the US "client state" Israel; a US refusal to tolerate any power that counterbalances its own; a hatred of all cultures other than its own, and a determination to destroy such cultures to make the world passively receptive to American values and merchandise.
Will the end of the war and the effort to rebuild decent government in Iraq change the view of the left? It would seem unlikely: the anti-US reflex is too ingrained, the dislike of Blair too great.
Yet the left's programme now should be to argue in favour of committing resources to those multilateral agencies that work, and to seek agreement from those forces everywhere in the world that are committed to democratic (or at least more responsive) government and to an observation of human and civil rights. The aim, as the US political scientist Michael Walzer has put it, should be a "strong international system, organised and designed to defeat aggression, to stop massacres and ethnic cleansing, to control weapons of mass destruction and to guarantee the physical security of all the world's peoples".
Wash Phillips didn't die in the nuthouse. And he probably didn't play an instrument called a dolceola. But the rest of his legend remains.The mystery begins the first time you hear the flowing gospel of Washington Phillips, whose entire recorded output consists of 18 tracks recorded in Dallas from 1927-1929. His sacred porch songs, bathed in a celestial haze of notes from a strange instrument identified as a dolceola, sing out the existence of a higher power, for how could man alone create music for the angels?
Chicago has been credited as the genre's birthplace, but a trio of Texans (Phillips, guitar evangelist Blind Willie Johnson and piano player Arizona Juanita Dranes) were laying the foundation for Christian blues--which is all gospel music is, really--at a time when "the father of gospel," Thomas A. Dorsey, was still playing juke joints as Georgia Tom. Before Dorsey first mixed the spiritual with the secular on 1928's "If You See My Savior," Phillips was putting religious lyrics to 12-bar blues, blind sanctified songleader Dranes was inventing the gospel beat by spicing spirituals with barrelhouse piano and Blind Willie was sliding a knife over his guitar neck and moaning crucifixion songs.
When gospel's glory years erupted in the '30s, Phillips, Dranes and Johnson had already been tucked back into obscurity. They remain virtually unknown except to cults of rabid musicologists, who revel in the mystique of these artists who emerged out of nowhere as fully formed visionaries, then almost as quickly disappeared.
In Phillips' case, the ending of his recording career is easily explained in the liner notes to his only American CD, I Am Born to Preach the Gospel (released by Yazoo in 1991), which reports that the singer was committed to the state sanitarium in Austin in 1930 and died there of tuberculosis eight years later. The All Music Guide, a favorite Internet reference source for critics and fans, repeats the information, taken from the death certificate of a Washington Phillips of Freestone County.
The truth, however, is that another man of the same name, from the same place, is the one who Ry Cooder briefly resurrected in the '70s with covers of "Denomination Blues" and "You Can't Stop a Tattler." After just five recording sessions, the "real" Washington Phillips returned to the farming life in the black settlement of Simsboro, content to play for neighbors and churchgoers. When he died in 1954 from head injuries suffered from a fall down the stairs at the welfare office in nearby Teague, the local newspaper got his last name and age wrong. "Wash Williams, 77, Negro, Dies After Fall" was the headline on the 2-inch story that never mentions a music career. Phillips was 74 when he passed away. The man who was previously believed to be the gospel singer died in the state hospital at age 47.
I didn't know about this case of mistaken identity a couple of months ago when I stood over a grave on the old "colored" side of the Austin State Cemetery thinking that I'd found the music pioneer's final resting place.
In the current issue of Theory and Research in Education, the University of London's Michael Hand lays out an argument for the abolition of religious schools. Here's his summary:1. Faith schools teach for belief in religious propositions.
2. No religious proposition is known to be true.
3a. Teaching for belief in not-known-to-be-true propositions is, when successful, indoctrinatory, except where teachers are perceived to be intellectual authorities on those propositions.
3b. Teachers in faith schools are not perceived to be intellectual authorities on religious propositions.
Therefore,
4. faith schools are, when successful, indoctrinatory.
. . . Whatever else may or may not be wrong with them, faith schools, insofar as they succeed in their religious mission, are indoctrinatory. And, since the religious mission of faith schools is precisely what distinguishes them from common schools, this is an argument not for the reform of faith schools, but for their abolition.
This week's Torah portion, Metzora, deals with the plague of tzoraas, the punishment, according the Talmudic sages, for transgressing the sin of slander and abusive speech.In contemporary society, where everyone demands the right to know everything about everyone at anytime, it is difficult to promote the ideas of privacy, correct speech and avoidance of gossip and unnecessary curiosity of others. Yet while the exact plague of tzoraas is no longer apparent in our lives, the damages of loose talk can be seen all around us. Tzoraas is not only a plague that affects the individual affected by it. Rather, it is a plague that damages society at large as well.
A civilization that approves gossip, condones verbal abuse, insults, obscenities and shameful statements, is itself already plagued. The level of public discourse, as well as that of private conversation, requires elevation and care.
A drive to arrest loshan hara (evil speech) has been prominent in the Jewish world over the last few decades. It is difficult, of course, to assess its true success, but the mere fact that such a drive was initiated and is maintained is in and of itself a positive thing.
In a world of free speech, which is certainly a basic right, self-discipline in exercising that right is necessary. Otherwise, free speech becomes destructive speech. And destructive speech must be avoided at all costs.
[M]ore than half of those who watch sports--college sports in this case--typically binge when drinking, according to a Harvard University study. More than two-thirds of all property damage and 64 percent of all violent behavior on American campuses occur as a result of rapid consumption. Win or lose, the big game generates wild melees and serious carnage.Professional sports offer even more explicit ties to alcohol, from the Milwaukee Brewers to Rusty Wallace's promise to reward fans with free six-packs if he won the Daytona 500. The combination of beer and sports even turns San Franciscans from gentle, latte-sipping, Whole Foods-shopping wussies to demonic terrors who could level Baghdad faster than George W. could find it on a map.
"It's not about sports," says Chris Michael of Nikita, "it's about participation in a hysteria that makes the whole thing worth doing."
Hysteria and an ice-cold drink. These mini-MOABs result, oddly enough, from excessive consumption of the weakest alcoholic product this side of wine coolers. Beer generally contains a meager amount of alcohol, 5 percent and sometimes less. Vodka, scotch, bourbon, varnish, vanilla extract and other products pack 40 percent or more. Yet, as Will Morgan, bartender at Champps in Las Colinas points out, "at any sports event, it's beer, beer, beer, beer and more beer."
Why? Given the overwhelming popularity of vodka drinks, the influx of aged tequilas and rums, the availability of good scotch, why do we continue to drink beer while watching sports? [...]
Despite inflated prices at The Ballpark and other venues, beer remains an inexpensive option, especially when buying for friends. "Most people don't want to spend the money," says Mike, settling in for happy hour at Champps, "so when they have the guys over to watch a game, they buy a case of beer." In other words, a few six-packs lends the appearance of generosity, without draining the bank account.
"Beer is cheap, and men are cheap," echoes Kim, also drinking at Champps and apparently bearing some sort of grudge.
So the points to remember are these: Beer is inexpensive, low in alcohol and convenient. Beer makes certain sports tolerable. It is, as Ron Davis, bartender at Cape Buffalo, points out, "America's other favorite pastime."
Oh, one more thing: Just to be safe, avoid women named Kim until whatever it is blows over.
There's a reason rock critics--and Nation writers--love Rosanne Cash: because she's a writer of prose and essays who also happens to play guitar, possess a wondrous voice (Metaphor No. 148: warm steam off a frozen pond at dawn; Metaphor 593: a down comforter on a winter's night; there's plenty more), conjure resonant melodies and have for a father one of music's most legendary figures she's now comfortable to talk about. At last, they even sing together on Rules of Travel: The song's called "September When it Comes," and though it could and should apply to any child making peace with an aging, ailing parent, the fact it's Johnny and Rosanne trading lines about lengthening shadows that will "fly me like an angel to a place where I can rest" makes it feel like a family heirloom."But if it was just about me and my dad, then it kind of reduces it to narcissism," she insists. "It's about that exchange that goes on with an adult child and a parent facing mortality and the changes that happen then and that adult child coming to some sort of resolution about her childhood and past, which is common to all of us, if you're the least bit awake. Then it's served its purpose; then it is of service. Just about me and my dad--ultimately, who cares?" [...]
[J]ust as war broke out, Cash posted to her Web site, www.rosannecash.com, an essay in which she condemned the Bush administration for launching a pre-emptive first strike against Iraq and those who would damn war protesters for being anti-American. "I am American by birth, by choice and by love, and the right of free speech is the tenet I hold most dear," she wrote. "Therefore I am not afraid to say, as an American and a mother, that I think this war is a grave mistake, but I do support the young men and women who have been sent to fight it, and I wish them a hasty return home." Though it's doubtful her anti-war stance will affect album sales--she's no Natalie Maines, that coward--it sure ain't gonna help her.
"But it wasn't a career move," she says, with that familiar tinge of defiance. "I mean, the way I was raised was that you have to have the courage of your convictions, even if they're unpopular. And I'm a citizen, too. I get to say what I think. Yeah, I didn't do myself any favors in one regard, but in another regard, I can tell my grandchildren that I was against the war and I said so. I get letters from people saying they're going to tell everybody not to buy my records and calling me every name in the book. I'll tell you something really funny, though.
"My daughter, who's 21, she's really good at doing fan mail and stuff, so I hired her to go through the e-mails. If they're just photo requests or something, she refers them where to send their requests, all that stuff. So, the poor thing, right after I signed the petition and did the press conference with David Byrne and Russell Simmons, I got, you know, 500 e-mails, and a lot of them were incredibly nasty--name-calling, abusive, blah blah blah. She's not supposed to write back to these people, but she said, 'Mom, I just couldn't help it.' And I was like, 'Oh, my God, what did you say?' She said, 'I told her, "If you ever talk to my mother like that again, I will hunt you down. I am not peaceful like she is."' I thought it was so great. 'I am not peaceful like she is.'"
SEPTEMBER WHEN IT COMES (Rosanne Cash and John Leventhal)There's a cross above the baby's bed
a savior in her dreams
but she was not delivered then
and the baby became me
There's a light inside the darkened room
a footstep on the stair
a door that I forever close
to leave those memories thereWhen the shadows lengthen
into a copper sun
first there's summer, then I'll let you in
September when it comesI want to crawl outside these walls
close my eyes and see
fall into your heart and arms
touch your face and breathe
I cannot move a mountain now
I can no longer run
I cannot be who I was then
in a way I never wasI watch the clouds go sailing
watch the clock and sun
I watch myself depending on
September when it comesWhen the shadows lengthen
and burn away the past
I will fly me like an angel to
a place where I can rest
When winds begin I'll let you in
September when it comes
I'm sitting in a former naval barracks in Alameda, California, watching the digital assembly of a human face. Bones, teeth, glistening eyes. Layer upon layer. Finally the hair and skin, the creases and tiny scars that make us who we are. The face blinks and breathes. Then it snarls, and my skin crawls.Agent Smith is back, and he's pissed.
You'll be seeing a lot of Agent Smith this year. Neo's man-in-black nemesis returns on May 15 in The Matrix Reloaded, the continuing story of a young hacker who learns that the apparently real world is an elaborate computer simulation. In November, a second sequel, Matrix Revolutions, will take up where Reloaded's nail-biting climax leaves off.
Things have changed since 1999. In the last shot of the original film, Neo, played by ex-slacker Keanu Reeves, flew up out of the frame, demonstrating that his mental abilities had become stronger than the enslaving delusion of the Matrix. Now he's a full-fledged superhero, soaring over the skyline at thousands of miles an hour and making a rescue as trucks collide head-on. The bad news: Agent Smith, played by Hugo Weaving, is a rogue virus in the Matrix, able to multiply himself at will. And the last free human city, Zion, in a cave near the Earth's core, is under attack.
What hasn't changed is the dark, richly nuanced aesthetic of brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, a pair of Hollywood outsiders who wrote and directed what became the most successful movie in the history of Warner Bros. The Wachowskis had always conceived of Neo's odyssey as a trilogy, but to release both sequels months apart - plus the videogame Enter the Matrix and an anime series called The Animatrix - required a year of intense collaboration, as the scripts, sets, and shot designs all evolved together.
The Matrix raised the bar for action films by introducing new levels of realism into stunt work and visual effects. For Reloaded and Revolutions, the Wachowskis dreamed up action sequences that were so over-the-top they would require their special-effects supervisor, John Gaeta, to reinvent cinematography itself.
This country began with a healthy fear of the damage to life and liberty standing armies can do when employed by cruel dictators. The pages of history are littered with the ravages of such regimes. Saddam Hussein has certainly employed new discoveries in science to oppress the people of Iraq, but nothing about his politics would have surprised the Founding Fathers. To allay the people’s fear of military dictatorship, General Washington assured the fledgling nation at the onset of Revolution, "When we assumed the Soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen." Following the noble restraint of Washington, America’s Cincinnatus, he and the other Founders later formed a government in which citizens, or civilians, would give orders to soldiers rather than the reverse. As a continuation of this principle, before being given arms today, young men and women in the armed services must swear to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."Thus the American Founders solved a political problem as old as Plato: how to control and direct the potentially dangerous energies of the "spirited" men of the political order. Plato, you will recall, urged that the guardians of his imaginary republic be like good watchdogs, able to distinguish between friends and enemies. Accordingly, they must also combine two qualities seemingly opposed in nature, fierceness and gentleness. This ability and this combination Plato called "philosophic." Over the last three weeks, Americans have been viewing from their living rooms the actions of philosophic warriors that would astonish even Plato. Young men and women fighting in the desert heat, going without sleep for days at a time, not knowing whether an artillery round from the enemy might carry deadly chemical or biological agents, knowing very well that the Iraqi civilian waving a white flag from an oncoming car might be delivering explosives, these young warfighters are sparing foreign civilian lives, sometimes at the cost of their own, as they are defeating the enemy in proportions reminiscent of the Persian Wars. These troops matter-of-factly attribute their success to their rigorous training. They have been trained how to shoot and also when not to. They have been trained how to work in large units and small. They have trained for combined-arms and special operations, as that seen in the heart-warming recovery of Pfc. Jessica Lynch.
Were we to put embedded reporters in the classrooms of our most prestigious colleges and universities, would we see a civilian education comparable to this rigorous military training, one that produces such heroic citizens? To what do the nation’s professors owe their allegiance? What rules of engagement do university presidents set for their campuses? Does what is taught and learned contribute in any way to the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of the American people for which those in the armed services are willing to risk their lives? [...]
The American Founders feared and properly controlled for the abuse of military power. They took fewer precautions against the abuse of intellectual power. Perhaps they thought higher academe would ever follow in the footsteps of Princeton’s President John Witherspoon, signer of the Declaration and teacher to a generation of responsible revolutionaries, whose course in moral and political philosophy prepared his students to act as citizens in the new republic. Up until Vietnam, certainly, Ivy League graduates were not only taught to be good civilian leaders but also were over-represented among the fallen in this nation’s wars. Today, military recruiters cannot even canvass for officers on many of this nation’s leading campuses because of student protests. Today under the protection of "academic freedom," a concept unknown to countries outside the West, a known ideologue can
attain degrees at one of the most reputable universities in the country, land a coveted job at another prestigious university, and thereby preach his own brand of anti-Americanism to students whose parents are paying a small fortune, in a city where three-thousand people were killed only a year and a half ago by dangerous young men who also hated America. The Chicago-Columbia connection, formerly the axis of great-books intellectualism, has become, at least in De Genova’s case, a research partnership in anti-Americanism. The military would never think of training young people to use weapons against fellow Americans or to undermine the Constitution. Yet higher academe trains young people to use their minds, as dangerous as weapons, against the very principles upon which this nation is founded. Certainly, De Genova should be allowed to speak his mind in some forum. But that is a far cry from saying that his intellectual idiosyncrasies should virtually guarantee him a position at an Ivy League institution. We can only wonder when liberal education might again mean not "say anything you like in the name of academic freedom," but rather "teach young men and women to be good and to love and defend the truth." When shall we see some brave academic, perhaps an Ivy League or University of Chicago president, stand up and say, "When we assumed the scholar, we did not lay aside the citizen"?
On the first day of the AIPAC convention, a man named Gary Bauer took the podium. He reminded the cheering thousands that God gave the Land of Israel to the Jewish people and, therefore, there is an absolute ban on giving it to another people. Bauer is not a member of the National Religious Party, nor of the Likud central committee. He's not even Jewish. He is a leading preacher from the Christian right in America, one of those who believe the Jews are The Chosen People and one day will even choose the right messiah. Bauer is a leading spokesman for arch-conservative policies, including a total ban on all abortions and favoring government funding for religious schools.These are the people generating the spiritual energy fueling George Bush's war on global terrorism. Evangelist Christians from South Carolina paid for the huge billboard on the Ayalon Highway declaring "There's no land for peace." TV evangelist Pat Robertson last week reprimanded Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, saying "Who do you think you are, handing Jerusalem over to Arafat?"
With Christian friends like these close to the president's ear, the right-wing government in Israel does not need Jewish friends to rebuff political initiatives like the road map. But the Jewish activists are not giving up. The religious sources of the values that drive the Christian right are not preventing some Jewish organizations from turning them into a natural ally.
America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon. Further, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are not genuine "Texas oil men" but career politicians who, in between stints in public life, would have used their connections to enrich themselves as figureheads in the wheat business, if they had been residents of Kansas, or in tech companies, had they been Californians.Equally wrong is the theory that American and European civilisation are evolving in opposite directions. The thesis of Robert Kagan, the neoconservative propagandist, that Americans are martial and Europeans pacifist, is complete nonsense. A majority of Americans voted for either Al Gore or Ralph Nader in 2000. Were it not for the over-representation of sparsely populated, right-wing states in both the presidential electoral college and the Senate, the White House and the Senate today would be controlled by Democrats, whose views and values, on everything from war to the welfare state, are very close to those of western Europeans.
Both the economic-determinist theory and the clash-of-cultures theory are reassuring: they assume that the recent revolution in US foreign policy is the result of obscure but understandable forces in an orderly world. The truth is more alarming. As a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable contingencies - such as the selection rather than election of George W Bush, and 11 September - the foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made by a small clique that is unrepresentative of either the US population or the mainstream foreign policy establishment.
The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defence intellectuals (they are called "neoconservatives" because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right). Inside the government, the chief defence intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. He is the defence mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defence secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, the number three at the Pentagon; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protege who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the US to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned from his unpaid defence department advisory post after a lobbying scandal. Most of these "experts" never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defence secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.
Most neoconservative defence intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for "democracy". They call their revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism" (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians. [...]
For a British equivalent, one would have to imagine a Tory government, with Downing Street and Whitehall controlled by followers of Reverend IanPaisley, extreme Eurosceptics, empire loyalists and Blimpish military types - all determined, for a variety of strategic or religious reasons, to invade Egypt. Their aim would be to regain the Suez Canal as the first step in a campaign to restore the British empire. Yes, it really is that weird.
After listening to Daniel Schor opine on NPR about how George W. Bush would have some explaining to do if no WMD are found, Brian Boys came up with a new definition of a word that was coined for the title of an episode of Chicago Hope:
SARINDIPITY: Going to look for weapons of mass destruction, but in the process finding you've freed 20 million people from a life of daily terror.
Defence Minister George Fernandes reiterated Indian warnings that Pakistan was a prime case for pre-emptive strikes."There are enough reasons to launch such strikes against Pakistan, but I cannot make public statements on whatever action that may be taken," Fernandes told a meeting of ex-soldiers in this northern Indian desert city on Friday.
The renewed warning came just hours after US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington would strive to cool tensions between nuclear enemies Pakistan and India, who have fought three wars since 1947.
Fernandes said he endorsed Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha's recent comments that India had "a much better case to go for pre-emptive action against Pakistan than the United States has in Iraq."
I met Hector Palacios when I went see the tiny lending library maintained by his wife in their cramped third-floor walkup. (In Cuba, lending books is also a crime.) Ninety percent of Cubans no longer believe anything Castro says, Palacios estimated, and if they were free to leave, 5 million of them would do so. Formerly an official in the Communist Party, he had soured on the government in 1980, when he saw people beaten in the streets for wanting to emigrate.If he could send a message to the American people, Palacios was asked, what would it be? "I would tell them that there are two embargoes affecting Cuba," he said. "There is the US economic embargo against Cuba. And there is Castro's embargo against the Cuban people."
For engaging in peaceful dissent, Palacios was sent to prison twice in the 1990s, each time for 1-1/2 years. The latest wave of repression has just swept him behind bars again -- this time for 25 years.
Champions of "constructive engagement" have long insisted that the surest way to bring freedom and democracy to Cuba was to flood the island with tourists and foreign trade. They have loudly blasted the US embargo, which restricts Americans' freedom to travel to Cuba or do business there. Their minds have not been changed by the fact that hundreds of thousands of tourists and hundreds of millions of dollars already surge into Cuba annually, all without appreciably increasing the liberty of ordinary Cubans. Most of the influx is Canadian and European, but a significant chunk is American: 80,000 US citizens travel to Cuba each year via a third country.
Every few years Castro unleashes a brutal crackdown, sweeping scores of innocent victims -- dissidents and democrats guilty of nothing more than thinking for themselves -- into his dungeons. It isn't something he does because he has been insufficiently exposed to commerce and tourism, or because he resents the US embargo, or because Jimmy Carter and other credulous liberals haven't lavished him with his usual quota of flattery.
He does it because he is a ruthless tyrant who craves power above all else. For 44 years, he has let nothing weaken his stranglehold on Cuba, and neither concessions nor sanctions nor international condemnation will change his behavior now. The only one way to reform a totalitarian despot like Castro is to topple his regime. Peacefully if possible, by force if necessary.
The fallout from Canada's refusal to join the war in Iraq turned to heated recriminations yesterday as the Canadian Alliance compared John Manley, the Deputy Prime Minister, to the disgraced Iraqi information minister and pointed to additional criticisms from Paul Cellucci, the U.S. ambassador, as evidence of deteriorating relations between the two countries.In a speech on Wednesday to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, Mr. Cellucci slammed the Liberal government's "incomprehensible" policy of refusing to hand over Iraqi fugitives from Saddam Hussein's regime to the U.S. forces.
Mr. Cellucci said Washington was stunned at Ottawa's order to the Canadian commander of a multinational task force in the Persian Gulf to refuse to turn over any captured Iraqi war criminals and senior members of the regime. [...]
Also in the Commons yesterday, Mr. Manley accused the Official Opposition of damaging Canada's relations with Washington by giving interviews with U.S. news outlets that publicized anti-American comments by Liberal MPs.
Mr. Manley said the Alliance appearances have had the negative effect of amplifying remarks about the United States that otherwise might have received less attention.
"Some people said some things that have been regretted and have been apologized for. Why repeat them? That is what members opposite have been doing," Mr. Manley said. "They think that there is some reason for them to go to the United States and report things to the Americans to make them angry at us. Why? ... If they would show a little discipline, we would be building a new and better relationship."
The charge prompted Stephen Harper, the leader of the Alliance, to compare Mr. Manley to Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Iraqi Information Minister who defiantly predicted a U.S. loss in Iraq until the day before the fall of Baghdad.
"The Canadian Alliance is the one party in this country that has stood by our American friends through all of this, at every moment. Frankly, what John Manley is doing is kind of like the Information Minister of the government of Iraq," Mr. Harper said.
"They slander our American friends. They refuse to apologize for it. They say it is free speech, and then they try and blame their internal opposition for the problem. I mean, this is a communications tactic worthy of Saddam Hussein."
"War is a dreadful thing," wrote C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity. "I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken. What I cannot understand is this sort of semi-pacifism you get nowadays, which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you were ashamed of it."This quote begins the recent book When God Says War Is Right (Waterbrook Press, 2002) by Dr. Darrell Cole, assistant professor of religion at Drew University.
Cole argues that war is not merely a "necessary evil." Instead, he writes, it's sometimes the right thing for a Christian to do.
[Q:] Why shouldn't we view war as a necessary evil?
[A:] There are no necessary evils in Christian morality. We sometimes have to take the lesser of two courses, but that doesn't make it evil. We should always abstain from evil, and we should follow Paul who said, explicitly, "Never do evil that good may come."
If you're entering into something with a long face or a troubled conscience, that's probably a good indication you shouldn't be doing it. We can't stoop to evil just to bring about a good consequence.
[Q:] Why do we have the impression that most early Christians were pacifists?
[A:] We've gotten that idea because a great many scholars early in the 19th century were basing their research on incomplete data. Those researchers were generally very much liberal humanists. They wanted to see Jesus, Jesus' followers, and the early church in their own way of life.
Research over the past 50 or 60 years has shown that the term pacifism, as we use it to mean that all bloodshed as inherently evil-simply did not exist in the early Christian community. Early Christians did not participate in war because the Roman soldiers distrusted them and because in order to be a Roman soldier you had to participate in pagan rites.
As soon as those two things fell apart, Christians started joining in droves. So by the time you get to Constantine, in the early 4th century, you've got whole Christian battalions.
[Q:] How did the early church view Jesus' teachings about war in the broader context of the entire Bible?
[A:] They said, "Look, we have to pay attention to the whole Bible." Their enemies were saying that you could just lop off the Old Testament. More than that, they argued that you could lop off pieces of the New Testament that didn't fit in with what you wanted.
The church fathers were very adamant. "No, we've got to pay attention to the whole Bible," they said. "We've got to pay attention to the whole New Testament, so we don't make up a religion out of one and two verses that are the gospels."
The early church said that God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Jesus is a God of love and peace, but Jesus is also a God of wrath. We find out in the last book of the Bible that Jesus is leading the Lord of Hosts back into battle to defeat the enemies of God. Jesus is also read into the Old Testament, most particularly, as the divine figure who encourages Joshua before he battles against Jericho.
To sum this up quite quickly, the Old Testament God is generally characterized as one as being wrathful and vengeful, but he's also very merciful and very loving to his children. Jesus is usually characterized as being loving and merciful, but he is also very wrathful when the time comes.
On the par-3 13th hole of her second round at last year's Sybase Big Apple Classic, LPGA pro Jamie Hullett hit her tee shot into abunker. She flubbed her next shot, barely escaping the sand. Hullett, a Christian who was wearing the smiley-face logo of her sponsor, a company called "Life is Good," needed a good finish to play on the weekend, something she wasn't able to do often in 2002. Hullett scrambled for a bogey but clearly was rattled.At the 14th tee Hullett's caddie and fellow Christian, Maria "Loopy" Lopez, leaned toward her and whispered, "The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still," verse 14 from the 14th chapter of the Bible's book of Exodus. Hullett stepped up to her ball and smacked it down the middle of the fairway.
From the "Church Pew" bunkers at Oakmont CC to Lee Trevino's famous contention that "even God can't hit a 1-iron," religion has always played a role in golf culture. For most professional golfers, the game itself has been a temple with its own spiritual covenant. But for a growing collection of tour pros, religion has become the focus of their lives, and by association, a major part of their game.
"It's not seen as so strange anymore for a player to be open about his faith," says former tour pro and current CBS television announcer Bobby Clampett. "They're no longer called 'The God Squad' or 'Jesus Freaks' like we were 20 years ago. Now it's cool."
Many religions are represented on the major tours, and there are many pros who are as casual about faith as people who don't play golf for a living. But it is the evangelical vein of Christianity that stands out in professional golf and whose presence goes beyond the athletes to touch caddie shacks, broadcast booths, sessions with sport psychologists, charity affiliations, celebrity pro-ams and merchandise vendors.
Evangelicalism is often mistaken for other Christian movements that subscribe to fire-and-brimstone preaching, speaking in tongues or slick televangelism. In truth, the brand of Christianity practiced by tour evangelicals is quiet and thoughtful. Most golf fans will only know which pros are evangelical Christians when they win a tournament and happen to thank Jesus on national television. But evangelical and nonevangelical golfers across the tours acknowledge that a certain sector of each tour has a unique bond: a devoted fellowship with one another in the name of Jesus Christ.
This is where it all broke down before. On Saturday, Nigeria, Africa's biggest electorate, will choose its legislators and a week later its president. It is only the third time in Nigeria's history that an elected administration has held elections.The first time was in 1963-64. Barely a year after general elections, the army took power. The next time was 1983 and the army returned three months later. For all the defects and violence of its struggling democracy - and the peculiarity of having two former dictators as the main presidential candidates - Nigeria will be moving into new territory if it gets safely past this election.
Tentatively, unevenly, and belatedly, democracy is gaining ground in Africa. While some countries are still bloodbaths away from it, others now have more political competition, freer media and greater civil liberties than at any time since the first flush of decolonisation.A push for transparency on oil revenues
Apart from Nigeria, 16 of Africa's 54 nations are now considered fully fledged or emerging democracies, compared with around four at the end of the 1980s, according to political analysts. The rest are a mixed bunch of aspiring democracies, pseudo-democracies, semi-authoritarian, authoritarian and collapsed states.
Could the domino effect spread African democracy in the way it once spread military coups? Kenya's change of government last December set an example, in a country that had been widely expected to implode under the weight of old political habits. Its neighbour Uganda is now contemplating a switch to open party competition.
But in Zimbabwe political repression has become worse. Ivory Coast, once envied for its stability, is teetering on the verge of breakdown. And Africa's first military coup in more than three years took place last month in the Central African Republic.
Much of the continent is still mired in the morass it fell into in the 1960s. Indeed, power struggles, ethnic conflict, mismanagement, profiteering and political corruption characterise much of Africa.
Democracy is viewed as the social, political and economic answer. On the whole, democratic countries tend to be better off financially than non- democratic ones. It is not a coincidence that Botswana, among the countries that have found new mineral wealth, should be the only one to have managed its resources effectively and also one of the most established democracies on the continent.
"It is not a question of resources," says Daniel Bach of the Black Africa Study Centre in Bordeaux. "[Nigeria, the continent's biggest oil producer,] is one country in Africa that has everything going for it. In theory."
Surveys show that satisfaction with elected government in Nigeria has fallen sharply since 2000, but that the idea of democracy still commands support of more than 70 per cent.
In the past three weeks, I've had emails from friends in different parts of the world. Almost without fail, they have expressed incredulity at our prime minister's position. "We can understand Bush, we see exactly where he's coming from, we aren't surprised by his gross limitations and gross ambitions. But what is your Blair up to? He seems a civilised, intelligent man. What does he think he's doing? And what on earth does he think he's getting out of it?" Oil? Reconstruction contracts? Hardly. As for what he thinks he's doing: it seems, I explain, to be a mixture of deluded idealism (finding a moral case for war where neither the Anglican bishops nor the Pope - moral experts he might acknowledge - can see one) and deluded pragmatism: he really does believe the military conquest of Iraq will reduce the likelihood of terrorism.This is Blair's War; and as he reminded us, history will be his judge. But since we'll all be dead by the time history comes along, three key Blair moments should be pondered. The first came long before the war was mooted. The prime minister was asked in the House of Commons about Iraq and replied with a satisfied gleam: "Saddam is in his cage." At the time I merely noted the crudeness of the diction, which is why the phrase has stuck. What few of us realised at the time was that the self-appointed zookeepers were abrogating to themselves the right to shoot the beast.
Then the question of the second UN resolution. Do you remember being told that we wouldn't go to war without a second resolution? How quickly came the slippage. On the February 15 anti-war march, one of the talking-points was how Blair seemed to have shafted himself: if he didn't get a second resolution, he would have to choose between going back on his promise to the British people or going back on his friendship with Bush. Soon, we knew his choice, which led to a third key moment. When accused once too often of being Bush's poodle, Blair responded that, on the contrary, if Bush had proved timorous over Iraq, he, Blair, would have been pressing him harder to take action. Not a typical example of our "restraining influence".
Well, peacenik, are you happy now that peace is coming? No, because I don't think this war, as conceived and justified, was worth a child's finger. At least, are you happy that Saddam's rule is effectively over? Yes, of course, like everyone else. So, do you see some incompatibility here? Yes, but less than the incompatibilities in your position.
And in return, warnik, I have two questions for you. Do you honestly believe that the staggering bombardment of Iraq, televised live throughout the Arab world, has made Britain, America, and the home town of Torie Clarke, safer from the threat of terrorism? And if so, let me remind you of another statement by your war leader, Mr Blair. He told us, in full seriousness, that once Saddam was eliminated, it would be necessary to "deal with" North Korea. Are you getting hot for the next one - the humanitarian attack on Pyongyang?
Saddam Hussein may have vanished, but United Nations economic sanctions devised to contain him remain in force, creating a diplomatic tangle that could tie up U.S. plans to fund Iraq's reconstruction with its oil revenue.The U.N. sanctions can't be changed legally without the approval of the Security Council....
"The French have been threatening to veto resolutions [on Iraqi reconstruction] before they've even been circulated," one council diplomat said....
[O]il companies ... have to wait for the new diplomatic standoff to be resolved, so someone can be authorized to sell to them....
Unlike the war itself, which the Bush administration initiated without explicit Security Council approval, U.S. diplomats acknowledge they need council assent to lift the embargo. "There is no suggestion whatsoever of going outside of the system," said one U.S. official....
"We are no longer in an era where one or two countries can control the fate of another country," French President Jacques Chirac told a press conference in Paris earlier this week. "Therefore the political, economic, humanitarian and administrative reconstruction of Iraq is a matter for the United Nations alone."
Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard--awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.
Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.
We also had to worry that our reporting might endanger Iraqis not on our payroll. I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails).
Still, I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan's monarch, and I did so the next day. King Hussein dismissed the threat as a madman's rant. A few months later Uday lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon killed. [...]
I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.
In his 1950 science-fiction novel I, Robot, Isaac Asimov presented the Three Laws of Robotics: "1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law."The irrational fears people express today about cloning parallel those surrounding robotics half a century ago. So I would like to propose Three Laws of Cloning that also clarify three misunderstandings: 1. A human clone is a human being no less unique in his or her personhood than an identical twin. 2. A human clone has all the rights and privileges that accompany this legal and moral status. 3. A human clone is to be accorded the dignity and respect due any member of our species.
Although such simplifications risk erasing the rich nuances found in ethical debates over pioneering research, they do aid in attenuating risible fears often associated with such advances. [...]
Instead of restricting or preventing the technology, I propose that we adopt the Three Laws of Cloning, the principles of which are already incorporated in the laws and language of the U.S. Constitution, and allow science to run its course. The soul of science is found in courageous thought and creative experiment, not in restrictive fear and prohibitions. For science to progress, it must be given the opportunity to succeed or fail. Let's run the cloning experiment and see what happens.
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.The findings come from a study by Wolfgang Lutz, of the Austrian Academy of Science in Vienna, and Brian O'Neill, of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, using data from the European Demographic Observatory. 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.
Whether or not rogue scientists could clone a human is hotly debated. After 6 years trying, on over 700 monkey eggs, Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh says not.The current technique, his team conclude, robs primate eggs of proteins they need to survive. The 'nuclear transfer' procedure used to create Dolly the sheep "paralyses the egg", Schatten says. Key proteins are sucked out when the egg is stripped of its DNA to be replaced with genetic material from another cell1.
Cloning has worked in mice, sheep and other animals because their eggs contain back-up supplies of these proteins, says Schatten. The conventional technique "will have to be modified" to make it work on primates, including humans, agrees Roger Pedersen, who studies cloning at the University of Cambridge, UK.
The study casts doubt on the latest report that a human clone has been created. Early this week, fertility doctor Panayiotis Zavos of the University of Kentucky in Lexington published a study revealing a cloned human embryo that grew to a size of 8-10 cells2.
It is not clear whether this embryo would survive much longer. The same concerns were raised over a 2001 report from Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) in Worcester, Massachusetts, showing cloned human embryos of a few cells.
WHAT DO an Oklahoma City investigative reporter and a Philadelphia trial lawyer have in common?It sounds like a riddle with a bad punch line, but the answer is far more somber.
In a post-9/11 version of "Six Degrees of Separation," both identified a terrorist link between Iraq and al Qaeda long before a discovery this week that supports the connection.
Education Secretary Rod Paige's attempt to clarify his views about religion in schools may not satisfy those pushing him to recant his comments and apologize.In a story run by a religious news service, Paige was quoted as showing a preference for schools that appreciate "the values of the Christian community." He told reporters his expression of personal faith has no bearing on his role as the nation's education chief. [...]
"I respect his personal faith. But he tied it to a generalized belief and a preference of Christian values in schools," said Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "If he meant to say 'character' or 'traditional values,' then that's what he should have said the first time."
Democrats in Congress showed signs they do not plan to let the issue drop. [...]
"The reason that Christian schools and Christian universities are growing is a result of a strong value system," Paige was quoted as saying. "In a religious environment the value system is set. That's not the case in a public school, where there are so many different kids with different kinds of values."
From the folks who brought us preemptive war, here comes preemptive peace.The Defense Department intellectuals who have emerged as the dominant force in U.S. foreign policy had it all mapped out. While the debate raged over whether to go to war in Iraq, they dispatched a couple of hundred thousand troops to the region, establishing a fact on the ground that ultimately made the war unstoppable. Now, while the debate is just beginning over the nature of the interim government in postwar Iraq, they have dispatched a postwar government of their choosing to the Kuwait Hilton.
With the assistance of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, George W. Bush has emerged as an apt pupil of Nathan Bedford Forrest. In war and now in peace, he gets there first with the most men. Deployment precedes -- and damn near obviates -- debate.
The American Revolution was not a common event. Its effects and consequences have already been awful over a great part of the globe. And when and where are they to cease?But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. While the king, and all in authority under him, were believed to govern in justice and mercy, according to the laws and constitution derived to them from the God of nature and transmitted to them by their ancestors, they thought themselves bound to pray for the king and queen and all the royal family, and all in authority under them, as ministers ordained of God for their good; but when they saw those powers renouncing all the principles of authority, and bent upon the destruction of all the securities of their lives, liberties, and properties, they thought it their duty to pray for the continental congress and all the thirteen State congresses, &c.
There might be, and there were others who thought less about religion and conscience, but had certain habitual sentiments of allegiance and loyalty derived from their education; but believing allegiance and protection to be reciprocal, when protection was withdrawn, they thought allegiance was dissolved.
Another alteration was common to all. The people of America had been educated in an habitual affection for England, as their mother country; and while they thought her a kind and tender parent, (erroneously enough, however, for she never was such a mother,) no affection could be more sincere. But when they found her a cruel beldam, willing like Lady Macbeth, to "dash their brains out," it is no wonder if their filial affections ceased, and were changed into indignation and horror.
This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.
By what means this great and important alteration in the religious, moral, political, and social character of the people of thirteen colonies, all distinct, unconnected, and independent of each other, was begun, pursued, and accomplished, it is surely interesting to humanity to investigate, and perpetuate to posterity.
To this end, it is greatly to be desired, that young men of letters in all the States, especially in the thirteen original States, would undertake the laborious, but certainly interesting and amusing task, of searching and collecting all the records, pamphlets, newspapers, and even handbills, which in any way contributed to change the temper and views of the people, and compose them into an independent nation.
The colonies had grown up under constitutions of government so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners, and habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare, and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them in the same principles in theory and the same system of action, was certainly a very difficult enterprise. The complete accomplishment of it, in so short a time and by such simple means, was perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind. Thirteen clocks were made to strike together -- a perfection of mechanism, which no artist had ever before effected.
In this research, the gloriole of individual gentlemen, and of separate States, is of little consequence. The means and the measures are the proper objects of investigation. These may be of use to posterity, not only in this nation, but in South America and all other countries. They may teach mankind that revolutions are no trifles; that they ought never to be undertaken rashly; nor without deliberate consideration and sober reflection; nor without a solid, immutable, eternal foundation of justice and humanity; nor without a people possessed of intelligence, fortitude, and integrity sufficient to carry them with steadiness, patience, and perseverance, through all the vicissitudes of fortune, the fiery trials and melancholy disasters they may have to encounter.
I'm a theocon, not a neocon. The neocons would appear to think democracy is itself a set of inherently stable institutions that can be planted anywhere and will flower. Theocons think democracy is a rather secondary function of healthy non-governmental institutions. The soil of the Arab world seems like infertile ground for democracy.
A record-breaking knife thrower shocked Britons on Thursday when one of his daggers sliced into the head of his assistant on live TV.Circus performer Jayde Hanson, 23, was demonstrating his skills when one of his knives hit his assistant and girlfriend, 22-year-old Yana Rodianova.
As she clutched the side of her head, horrified presenter Fern Britton shouted: "Oh my God, there is blood, quick -- get her off."
Over one million viewers had been watching as Hanson, who works for the British-based Cottle and Austen Circus, showed off how many knives he could hurl at Yana in 60 seconds.
He had been trying to emulate the pace of his world record-breaking effort of 120 knives thrown in two minutes which he achieved as part of National Circus Day on Tuesday.
"He felt confident as he has been throwing his mother's kitchen knives since the age of 10," the show said on its Web Site before the accident. [...]
"In 11 years of performing, I've only hit my assistant on five occasions," he told the Daily Mail newspaper recently.
Japanese electronics giant Sony has taken an extraordinary step to cash in on the war in Iraq by patenting the term "Shock and Awe" for a computer game.It is among a swarm of companies scrambling to commercially exploit the war in Iraq, which has killed more than 5,000 soldiers and civilians in the space of three weeks.
MediaGuardian.co.uk has learned that Sony is set to launch a computer game called "Shock and Awe", having registered the defining phrase of the coalition's military campaign as a trademark in the US.
It registered the term as a trademark with the US Patent and Trademark Office on March 2 1 - just one day after war started. It wants to use it for computer and video games, as well as a broadband game played both locally and globally via the internet among PlayStation users.
The phrase, coined by former US navy pilot Harlan Ullman, was adopted by Washington to describe the fierce bombardment of Baghdad on the second night of the war - the military tactic designed to bully the Iraqi resistance into submission.
However, the crassness of the phrase was seized upon by critics of evidence of US arrogance in a war that the UN, and notably France and Russia, refused to support.
A spokesman for Sony PlayStation in the UK admitted the company might not stock the game in Britain and Europe owing to political sensitivities.
Can we please have a moratorium on all of this "the easy part is over" nonsense? We've already lost about 100 fellow citizens and killed untold thousands of Iraqis (given the "disappearance" of the Republican Guards, it seems possible that we may have killed scores of thousands), with no guarantee that the worst is over. Now we face some significant expense for rebuilding costs and a better than even chance that the replacement regime will be rather dicey. But we have more money than we know what to do with and there are plenty of crappy governments and unstable states around (if the Iraqis don't want a decent society, we won't be able to force one on them no matter how hard we try). Lives on the other hand are precious. Suppose Iraq fragments into three distinct states and remains as politically and economically backwards as its neighbors and the American taxpayers end up being on the hook for $100 billion in rebuilding costs: does that not all seem rather trifling compared to the flag draped coffins that mourning Americans will be burying in days to come and to all the fatherless, husbandless Iraqis the war leaves in its wake? The war was (and is) just, but to minimize it and its costs, particularly by comparison to a tax bill and some administrative difficulties, is to diminish our own humanity. The hard part is almost over; the annoying part awaits.
I have this delightful fantasy of left-wingers throughout the Western world putting their hands up and saying: "Well, actually we got that a little bit wrong." And maybe even deciding that, since their analysis of the war was mistaken, their diagnosis of the peace might be open to question too.But I'm not holding my breath. Those for whom America is always wrong will not be slowed down by this momentary setback. Rather like Mr al-Sahaf, they will not even appear to notice the tanks in the streets of their ideological neighbourhood. They will look away from the welcoming crowds of Basra (yes, they really did cheer, once it was safe to do so) and just move smartly on to the next American "crime against humanity".
I am off to Washington at the end of the week, where a think tank has invited me to discuss European anti-American attitudes. What shall I say to them? That the obvious truth - America is resented because of its enormous power - is only a fragment of the picture? That the foundation of anti-Americanism lies deep in the pathology of a Europe that has never recovered from its own guilt and self-loathing over the two great wars of last century?
How to make Americans, most of whom are descended from the most despised and wretched of the populations of the Old World - poor southern Italians, landless Irish peasants, ghetto Jews of eastern Europe - understand that much apparently political resistance to them is grounded in pure snobbery? The great American virtues - self-improvement, ambition, individualism - are, in European establishment eyes, the characteristics of vulgarity.
Senior Iraqi Sh'ite leader Abdul Majid al-Khoei and his aide were assassinated in an attack in the holiest shrine in the central Iraqi city of Najaf Thursday, members of his family foundation told Reuters.Ali Jabr of the London-based Khoei Foundation said Abdul Majid, who is the son of the late leader of Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim majority, was killed at the Grand Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf Thursday afternoon.
Later, fellow Khoei foundation member Ghanem Jawad told al-Jazeera television that Khoei's aide Haidar Kelidar was also killed by what he described as a mob in the mosque attack.
Iraqi opposition sources in Kuwait said Khoei's assassination could trigger infighting among Iraqi Shi'ites, who make up 60 percent of the population, as the United States tries to bring together rival groups in a post-Saddam Iraq.
Dissidents say Abdul Majid's rapid return to Iraq -- and the United States' obvious backing for him -- had sparked intense criticism from other Iraqi Shi'ite dissidents eager to assert their authority after the fall of Saddam.
Abdul Majid's critics also allege he was not as fiercely opposed to Saddam as he wanted his followers to believe. Supporters of Khoei said the U.S. forces had given him the authority to administer Najaf -- another sore point for other Shi'ite groups.
A spokesman at U.S. Central Command war headquarters in Qatar said he had heard reports about an incident in the Najaf area involving a local leader, but could not give details.
The death of an Al Jazeera journalist was a regrettable mistake and should be acknowledged as such.
World Health Organisation officials have appealed to China for greater clarity on an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome after a senior Chinese military surgeon said the government had understated the spread of the disease in Beijing.Chinese officials have said fewer than 20 people have been infected with Sars in the Chinese capital but Jiang Yanyong, a doctor at Beijing's No. 301 army hospital, said one affiliated institution alone had dealt with 60 cases.
And while the government has reported only four Sars fatalities in Beijing, Dr Jiang said he knew of seven patients at one hospital who had died of the disease.
"If [WHO experts] doubt what I have said, they should go to the hospital themselves to check. I will take full responsibility if there is any mistake," he said on Wednesday.
The rare public contradiction of the government's line could harm Beijing, which has been kept off a WHO list of Sars affected areas because of official claims that cases in the capital have been few and all "imported" from elsewhere.
His allegations will also fuel the kind of concerns that on Wednesday prompted Malaysia to stop issuing visas for most travellers from China and the Philippines to discourage the importation of Chinese meat.
Donald Rumsfeld today proclaimed that Saddam Hussein will join others in the annals of the history books as a failed dictator, naming "Hitler, Stalin, Lenin and Ceausescu".For Donald Rumsfeld's information, Vladimir Ulyanov came to power on a message of "bread and peace", setting in motion a process which was to bring a Medieval state to the front line of development and give to an oppressed, illiterate population with a near to zero chance of social mobility every opportunity for a good education, a guaranteed job, house, retirement pension, food, vodka, health care and cultural and sports opportunities second to none.
Vladimir Ulyanov set in motion a process which sees the Russian people today as well or better prepared than their peers abroad to perform any job anywhere on earth.
Vladimir Ulyanov set in motion the mechanism to create the Soviet Union, which heroically defeated the fascist forces of Hitler, who Rumsfeld mentions in the same breath as Lenin, which lost 20,000,000 of its souls and whose armed forces, under Stalin, who Rumsfeld also mentions in the same breath, killed 90% of all German soldiers in the war.
That everything was not perfect in Vladimir Ulyanov's Russia is patently clear. However, to compare him to Hitler is wholly inappropriate and demonstrates a degree of arrogance and ignorance shocking in a person at the political level which Rumsfeld has somehow attained.
Darwin himself was an invalid from the age of 30, and any profession building had to be done by his supporters, in particular by his "bulldog," Thomas Henry Huxley. In many respects, Huxley played to Darwin the role that Saint Paul played to Jesus, promoting the master's ideas. But just as Saint Paul rather molded Jesus' legacy to his own ends, so also Huxley molded Darwin's legacy. At the time that the Origin of Species was published, Britain was a country desperately in need of reform, as revealed by the horrors of the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny. Huxley and others worked hard to bring about change, trying to move public perceptions into the 20th century. They reformed education, the civil service, the military, and much else. Huxley's own work was in higher education, and he succeeded best in the areas of physiology and morphology. He realized that to improve and professionalize these fields as areas of teaching and research, he needed clients (a must in all system building). Huxley sold physiology to the medical profession, just then desperate to change from killing to curing. Huxley's offer of a supply of students, ready for specialized medical training, with a solid background in modern physiology was gratefully received. Morphology, Huxley sold to the teaching profession, on the grounds that hands-on empirical study was much better training for modern life than the outmoded classics. Huxley himself sat on the new London School Board and started teacher training courses. His most famous student was the novelist H. G. Wells.Evolution had no immediate payoff. Learning phylogenies did not cure belly ache, and it was still all a bit too daring for regular schoolroom instruction. But Huxley could see a place for evolution. The chief ideological support of those who opposed the reformers--the landowners, the squires, the generals, and the others--came from the Anglican Church. Hence, Huxley saw the need to found his own church, and evolution was the ideal cornerstone. It offered a story of origins, one that (thanks to progress) puts humans at the center and top and that could even provide moral messages. The philosopher Herbert Spencer was a great help here. He was ever ready to urge his fellow Victorians that the way to true virtue lies
through progress, which comes from promoting a struggle in society as well as in biology--a laissez-faire socioeconomic philosophy. Thus, evolution had its commandments no less than did Christianity. And so Huxley preached evolution-as-world-view at working men's clubs, from the podia during presidential addresses, and in debates with clerics--notably Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. He even aided the founding of new cathedrals of evolution, stuffed with displays of dinosaurs newly discovered in the American West. Except, of course, these halls of worship were better known as natural history museums.As with Christianity, not everyone claimed exactly the same thing in the name of their Lord. Yet, moral norms were the game in town, and things continued this way until the third phase, which began around 1930. This was the era during which a number of mathematically trained thinkers--notably Ronald Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane in England, and Sewall Wright in America--fused Darwinian selection with Mendelian genetics, and thus provided the conceptual foundations of what became known as the synthetic theory of evolution or neo-Darwinism. Rapidly, the experimentalists and naturalists--notably Theodosius Dobzhansky in America and E. B. Ford in England--started to put empirical flesh on the mathematical skeleton, and finally Darwin's dream of a professional evolution with selection at its heart was realized. But there is more to the story than this. These new-style evolutionists--the mathematicians and empiricists--wanted to professionalize evolution because they wanted to study it full time in universities, with students and research grants, and so forth. However, like everyone else, they had been initially attracted to evolution precisely because of its quasi-religious aspects, regardless of whether these formed the basis of an agnostic/atheistic humanism or something to revitalize an old religion that had lost its spirit and vigor. Hence, they wanted to keep a value-impregnated evolutionism that delivered moral messages even as it strived for greater progressive triumphs. [...]
There is professional evolutionary biology: mathematical, experimental, not laden with value statements. But, you are not going to find the answer to the world's mysteries or to societal problems if you open the pages of Evolution or Animal Behaviour. Then, sometimes from the same person, you have evolution as secular religion, generally working from an explicitly materialist background and solving all of the world's major problems, from racism to education to conservation. Consider Edward O. Wilson, rightfully regarded as one of the most outstanding professional evolutionary biologists of our time, and the author of major works of straight science. In his On Human Nature, he calmly assures us that evolution is a myth that is now ready to take over Christianity. And, if this is so, "the final decisive edge enjoyed by scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, its chief competition, as a wholly material phenomenon. Theology is not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline". An ardent progressionist, Wilson sees moral norms emerging from our need to keep the evolutionary process moving forward. In his view, this translates as a need to promote biodiversity, for Wilson believes that humans have evolved in a symbiotic relationship with nature. A world of plastic would kill us humans, literally as well as metaphorically. For progress to continue, we must preserve the Brazilian rainforests and other areas of high organic density and diversity.
So, what does our history tell us? Three things. First, if the claim is that all contemporary evolutionism is merely an excuse to promote moral and societal norms, this is simply false. Today's professional evolutionism is no more a secular religion than is industrial chemistry. Second, there is indeed a thriving area of more popular evolutionism, where evolution is used to underpin claims about the nature of the universe, the meaning of it all for us humans, and the way we should behave. I am not saying that this area is all bad or that it should be stamped out. I am all in favor of saving the rainforests. I am saying that this popular evolutionism--often an alternative to religion--exists. Third, we who cherish science should be careful to distinguish when we are doing science and when we are extrapolating from it, particularly when we are teaching our students. If it is science that is to be taught, then teach science and nothing more. Leave the other discussions for a more appropriate time.
A regime regarded by every sane person as the worst the Arabs have seen in contemporary history has collapsed....Logically, the Arabs should be jubilant. But some of the Western media tell us that they are not. Are the Arabs masochists? The answer is: no.
The Arabs can be divided into three groups with regard to the war to liberate Iraq. The first consists of Arab regimes, most of them despotic, who secretly wished to see the end of Saddam while praying that they would escape a similar fate. The second consists of the Arab masses who, as yesterday’s scenes of jubilation showed in Baghdad, are happy to see at least one of their oppressors kicked into the dustbin of history....
Then we have the “long-distance heroes”, corrupt and confused elites who, tortured by what is left of their numbed consciences, still hope that someone else’s sacrifices will somehow redeem them. These are not Iraqis. They are people far from the scene of the conflict who urged the Iraqis to die in large numbers so that they could compose poems in their praise or pen incendiary columns inciting them to “martyrdom”. They dreamed of a second Vietnam or, failing that, at least a “Stalingrad in Baghdad”....
The Iraqis did not wish to suffer the fate of the Palestinians, that is to say to die in large numbers for decades so that other Arabs, safe in their homes, would feel good about themselves. The Iraqis know that had the Palestinians not listened to their Arab brethren, they would have had a state in 1947, as decided by the United Nations Security Council. The Iraqis know that each time the Palestinians became heroic to please other Arabs they lost even more.
These days the Arab media are full of articles about how the Arabs feel humiliated by what has happened in Iraq, how they are frustrated, how they hate America for having liberated the people of Iraq from their oppressor, and how they hope that the Europeans, presumably led by Jacques Chirac, will ride to the rescue to preserve a little bit of Saddam’s legacy with the help of the United Nations....
Are the “long-distance heroes” humiliated? If they are, so what? They should jump in a river. Today, Iraq is free and, despite its legitimate concerns about the future, cautiously happy.
The negotiations for yet another tariff-lowering agreement, begun in January and expected to wrap up by the end of the year, were to dominate a session Thursday in which Bush was welcoming the leaders of Costa Rica, El Salvador (news - web sites), Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua to the White House. [...]Bush, a staunch believer in free markets, has aggressively pursued deals to lift trade barriers as he seeks to nudge the economy into better shape.
In addition to the pending pact in Central America, the White House wants to complete negotiations with Morocco this year and with Australia and five countries in Southern Africa in 2004. Deals were recently inked with Chile and Singapore. The idea is to push ahead on these several smaller fronts and create momentum for bigger deals.
The administration is currently involved in 34-nation talks to create the world's largest free trade zone, covering the Western Hemisphere, and global trade talks involving the 144 nations that are members of the World Trade Organization.
The baseball Hall of Fame has canceled a 15th anniversary celebration of the film "Bull Durham," and the shrine's president said it was because of anti-war criticism by co-stars Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon.Hall president Dale Petroskey sent a letter to Robbins and Sarandon this week, telling them the festivities April 26-27 at Cooperstown, N.Y., had been called off.
Petroskey, a former White House assistant press secretary under Ronald Reagan, said recent comments by the actors "ultimately could put our troops in even more danger."
Reached Wednesday night, Robbins said he was "dismayed" by the decision. He responded with a letter he planned to send to Petroskey, telling him: "You belong with the cowards and ideologues in a hall of infamy and shame." [...]
In his letter, Robbins said he'd been looking forward to "a weekend away from politics and war." He said he remained "skeptical" of the war plans and told Petroskey he did not realize baseball was "a Republican sport."
"I am sorry that you have chosen to use baseball and your position at the Hall of Fame to make a political statement," Robbins wrote. "I know there are many baseball fans that disagree with you, and even more that will react with disgust to realize baseball is being politicized.
"To suggest that my criticism of the President put the troops in danger is absurd. ... I wish you had, in your letter, saved me the rhetoric and talked honestly about your ties to the Bush and Reagan administrations.
"You invoke patriotism and use words like 'freedom' in an attempt to intimidate and bully. In doing so, you dishonor the words 'patriotism' and 'freedom' and dishonor the men and women who have fought wars to keep this nation a place where one can freely express their opinions without fear of reprisal or punishment."
Robbins signed his letter with a reference to an old World Series champion.
"Long live democracy, free speech and the '69 Mets -- all improbable, glorious miracles that I have always believed in," he wrote.
A humorous, pseudo-biographical verse of four lines of uneven length, with the rhyming scheme AABB, and the first line containing the name of the subject.[After writer Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956), who originated it.]
Here is one of the first clerihews he wrote (apparently while feeling bored in a science class):
Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
From government offices, state-owned companies and U.N. buildings came computers, appliances, bookshelves, overhead fans, tables and chairs. From military bases came new Toyota pickups, without license plates, that were careering through Baghdad by afternoon. An elderly woman made her way down Saadoun Street, her back sagging from a mattress she was carrying. Others rode on top of white freezers they wheeled down the road. Throughout the day, trucks piled high with booty roamed the capital."People believe these things belong to them," said Faleh Hassan, 51, as he sat at Abu Ahmed restaurant in the Karrada neighborhood. At lunchtime, he served customers kebab and kufta grilled on a charred stove crafted from an air-conditioning duct. He spoke with an ease that seemed to delight him, saying in public what he believed in private.
"The situation has changed," he said, "so even our speech is different."
Hassan, like so many in Baghdad, had his grudges. In the war with Iran from 1980 to 1988, he was arrested for deserting the army, drawing a death sentence that was later commuted. His brother, Ahmed, was killed by thugs he said came from Hussein's home town of Tikrit. Over tea, he looked back at 30 years during which one of the world's richest countries became a nation of paupers.
"It's a long story, the history of Iraq," he said.
He said he was tired of the fear, tired of the repression, tired of the isolation that he blamed for the loss of his once-fluent English. He was thankful for Hussein's end. But he was suspicious of the Americans.
"We feel peaceful and we feel relieved, but we are still frightened by tomorrow," Hassan said, dragging on a cigarette. "We will see the American and British intentions over the next few months."
A current of such ambivalence raced across Baghdad along with jubilation and surprise. Relief was tied up with trepidation, joy with anxiety. What next, many seemed to ask. Hassan, a little weary, hoped the future would be better than the past.
"I want to feel that I'm a human being, I want to feel that I'm free and that no one can take it away," he said. "I want to work, so that my family has enough to live. I want to live like everyone else in this world who lives in peace."
Ahmed, 35, a Cairo taxi driver, shook his head in disbelief at the toppling of Saddam's statue. "There is no way ordinary Iraqi citizens would have done that. Impossible! They are probably Kurds or Shias," he said.But some people said Saddam's fall should be a warning to other Arab leaders.
Egyptian political commentator Salama Ahmed Salama told Reuters: "The gap between Arab governments and the people represents a source of anxiety for different Arab regimes. But whether they'll learn the lesson or not, I don't know."
The Iraqi example showed that the backing of a party, clique or tribe was not enough to sustain a legitimate government.
"The scene of the statue being brought down showed how Iraqis were dissatisfied with (Saddam's) regime. Maybe this is going to be a lesson and an example to other Arab leaders who consider themselves like gods," said Ali Hassan, a shopper in the West Bank town of Ramallah.
Some Arab broadcasters made a point of telling viewers Saddam's demise was the end of a unique tyranny, not a precedent for other states ruled by unelected monarchs or autocrats.
"The Iraqi situation is exceptional, we can't compare it with Iran or Egypt...or a country like Saudi Arabia. This is...a regime outside history," Saudi commentator Jamal Khashoggi said.
ARM outstretched in vainglorious defiance, the remains of the statue erected last year to mark the 65th birthday of Saddam Hussein were last night scattered across the streets of Baghdad.United States marines had approached from the east; there was no resistance. Instead, a small, almost bemused crowd of Iraqi traders swelled behind the tanks and armoured personnel carriers as they surrounded the Ferdoos Square, completing the strategic link to their forces stationed on a nearby bridge across the Tigris. The centre of Baghdad had fallen and, as the marine corps secured their positions, ordinary Iraqis climbed the 20ft statue to bring down a physical symbol of tyranny.
A rope was found, and then a ladder. Climbing on to the statue, bystanders cheered as what resembled a noose tightened round the neck of Saddam's effigy.
Their makeshift hanging could not be completed, with the rope too short to topple the dictator's statue. Undeterred, men slammed a sledgehammer into the marble plinth keeping it aloft.
Despite the best efforts of one burly Iraqi, stripped to his vest, it would not move.
As night drew closer, and amid fears that expressions of joy and exuberance could injure bystanders, US soldiers intervened, driving an M88 tank-recovery vehicle face to face with the symbol of tyranny.
Mobbed as liberators, two marines used their vehicle to lasso the head with wire rope. The black statue was briefly adorned with the Stars and Stripes, to muted applause, before a civilian clambered on to the vehicle to offer a tattered Iraqi replacement.
As US soldiers held back the throng, the vehicle choked into life, reversing slowly, its grip tightening.
The depiction of a regal Saddam, tipped and twisted to the horizontal, dislodged by popular force, cemented by coalition might. Then, with another pull, it snapped, leaving only the feet and two protruding bars to waves of chanting and cheers.
The Iraqis danced on their quarry, smashing it with their shoes, baring the soles of their feet, the ultimate humiliation for a crumbling regime and its leader.
What had started with an attempt to decapitate Saddam some three weeks ago showed signs of ending as, with nightfall, his oppressed people prised the head from his monument and danced as they dragged it through city streets.
Critics of Hezbollah argue that the group's global network of sleeper cells and its ability to destabilize the region with missile attacks against Israel make it impossible for the Bush administration to ignore. Israeli sources said that one plausible scenario would be an American green light for Israeli strikes against Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, following American diplomatic measures to ensure that such Israeli actions would not spark a Syrian reaction."Clearly, we would have to work together closely on this one," said an Israeli diplomat in Washington.
Several experts warned that any military or diplomatic action by the United States against Hezbollah could trigger a string of devastating, retaliatory terrorist strikes.
"They have dormant cells around the world, which they can easily decide to use," said Gal Luft, an expert on Hezbollah who co-directs the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a small Washington-based advocacy group dedicated to ending America's dependence on Arab oil.
Israel's position is that after stabilizing the situation in Iraq, the United States should act against Hezbollah, regardless of the organization's behavior during the war, sources said.
Israeli sources told the Forward that even if Hezbollah does not actively fight with Iraq in the war, action must be taken because the organization has both the motivation and the ability to launch future attacks. Israeli officials have warned that Hezbollah boasts a military capability exceeding that of some Arab states, and a global network of dormant cells with the ability to hit American targets around the world.
Also, Israeli officials warn, Hezbollah could at any moment destabilize the region by provoking Jerusalem with cross-border attacks.
"Hezbollah can easily flare up Israel's northern border and drag us into a war with Syria," said an Israeli diplomat in Washington. "This is potentially very dangerous." [...]
During a conference on terrorism last September, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said that "Hezbollah may be the 'A team' of terrorists," while "Al Qaeda is actually the 'B team.'"
Armitage said that Hezbollah is "on the list, their time will come, there's is no question about it." He continued: "they have a blood debt to us and... we're not going to forget it," referring to several anti-American attacks for which the group has claimed credit.
"All in good time we're going to go after these problems, just like a high school wrestler goes out for a match: we're going to take [them] down one at a time," he told the conference, hosted by the U.S. Institute of Peace.
A leading member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee plans to introduce legislation Wednesday authorizing $50 million a year to aid democratic activists inside Iran seeking a peaceful end to that country's regime.A copy of an amendment to be offered by Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, obtained by United Press International, says, "It shall be the policy of the United States to support efforts to achieve democratic reform inside Iran, including support for the thousands of protesters who have expressed a desire for the government to hold a referendum vote that could permit Iran to move toward a secular, democratic government that respects human rights and does not seek to possess weapons of mass destruction."
The senator plans to attach the legislation to a bill authorizing next year's foreign assistance budget for the State Department. [...]
Under Brownback's proposed legislation, the State Department would allocate $50 million annually to an Iran Democracy Foundation. The purpose of the foundation is to support "pro-democracy broadcasting to Iran," such as the satellite television and radio stations based in Los Angeles that many Iranians watch and listen to already; support training for the Iranian-American community to reach out to Iranian dissidents; and fund human rights and civil society groups working inside Iran.
The proposal is very similar to ideas proposed last June by Pentagon staffers in the Bush administration's Iran policy review discussions. But consensus was never reached inside the government.
The amendment does not call for regime change per se, but it does state, "Democratic change within Iran would contribute greatly to increasing the stability of the entire region and would serve as a beacon to the people of Iraq and Saudi Arabia to also seek democratic reform from within."
This language in the amendment is very similar to the Iraq Liberation Act, which Congress passed in 1998. That legislation first enshrined regime change as an open policy goal for the United States in Iraq. Sen. Brownback was an early supporter and author of the legislation.
Like the rest of the world, I've just watched (live) a historic moment: a statue of Saddam Hussein crashing to earth, pulled from its pedestal by relieved GIs and jubilant Iraqis. Grave challenges lie ahead in the war on terrorism, to be sure. But since I cover American politics, I'll focus on what I know, which is this: It's George W. Bush, in a sense, who toppled that statue. The guy doesn't play small ball; he goes for the Big Inning -- and doesn't waver. Bush is what I'd call a disciplined radical, pursuing sweeping aims with an almost blinkered determination. At least for now -- since Sept. 11, 2001 -- it's working. A month ago I wrote in this space that never had so much blood and treasure been risked on the hope that people would smile. Well, watch MSNBC. There they are. [...]Throughout this dark time, I nagged my White House sources, trying to glean what little I could about the president -- his mood, his orders, state of mind. A few outsiders not in position to know (and who loathe his war policy for various reasons) spread word that he had grown snappish and weary. I think they were wrong. My sense is that he burrowed deeper into himself (and ran extra miles on the treadmill), steadily monitoring the war but never losing faith (or sleep) about his momentous decision to take out Saddam with a U.S-U.K coalition.
Why such confidence? I've written a lot about it. As a family, Bushes think they are born to lead. This particular Bush relishes decision-making. He picks people he trusts and trusts them to make the right call. He tends not to sweat the details, thereby avoiding the ups and downs of any one hour or day. His religious faith gives him a disciplined belief in the rightness of his cause. All the spin about his dedication to diplomacy notwithstanding, this is a guy who is more than comfortable at war. He likes the role of commander in chief. He's more comfortable in it than any other presidential mode. The fall of the Twin Towers, it turns out, found a man in the White House who likes the idea of leading troops in battle. [...]
There are risks in a Big Inning Presidency. One is arrogance. [...]
And if you score big in one inning you can pursue the strategy too far -- and strike out. Europeans with whom I've spoken in recent days are worried that Baghdad is just the first stop on an even more ambitious Bush Plan to bring "regime change" to Teheran and Damascus, the latter being the last stronghold (other than, perhaps, Tikrit), of the Baathist Party. The Europeans may be right to be concerned. "If I were a mullah in Iran or Bashir Assad in Syria I'd be thinking 'I'm next,'" a leading American expert on the region told me. "But the Iranians are much smarter and craftier than Saddam. The next step would be tougher."
The biggest risk is that the Big Inning strategy -- a combination of sweeping aims (the democratization of the Arab world) and military might -- won't achieved the desired result, which is to rid the world of terrorism.
ROSIE O'Donnell was booed by like-minded liberals when she started criticizing President Bush at a fund-raising dinner for GLAAD, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.O'Donnell took the stage Monday at the Marriott Marquis to accept the Vito Russo Award. Regarding Michael Moore's widely criticized anti-Bush Oscar rant, she said, "If [Moore] wants to use the Oscar stage to express his views against a war that doesn't make sense, he should be supported and applauded."
O'Donnell then ripped into Bush and grumbled that the war was "killing Iraqi women and children."
"Rosie received some polite cheering, but there were audible boos from the crowd," our spywitness reports.
A hot dog cart vendor in Harrisburg is making sure he's prepared for the worst."I'm the first hot dog vendor in all of Pennsylvania to have terrorism insurance," vendor Daniel Krehling said. "It's a $1 million policy."
Krehling knows he may not be a huge target, but his stand is sandwiched between City Hall, the county courthouse, and lots of downtown high rises.
Krehling said the policy covers anything that happens to anyone or anything in a 50-foot radius of his hot dog cart, which includes him and his customers.
A former state worker with Democratic ties at a Joliet treatment center for the state's most dangerous sex offenders registered more than 125 of them to vote last fall.Voting patterns show the child molesters, rapists and other sexual deviants overwhelmingly supported Democrats. But a spokesman for the state agency responsible for their treatment said the worker was doing her job and nothing improper happened.
Will County records show in the months leading up to the November 2002 elections, 127 of the sex offenders being treated in Joliet were registered to vote by Fran Aden, who worked at the center.
A key Iraqi opposition leader says he has information that Saddam Hussein survived an airstrike in Baghdad and escaped from the capital with at least one of his sons.However, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he did not know whether Saddam was dead or alive.
"He's either dead, or he's incapacitated, or he's healthy and cowering in some tunnel someplace trying to avoid being caught. What else can one say?" Rumsfeld said.
Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi told CNN Wednesday the unconfirmed reports indicated that the Iraqi president had taken refuge in the city of Baqubah, northeast of the Iraqi capital.
"We have no evidence they have been killed in that attack. We know at least that Qusay, his son, has survived and he is occupying some houses in the Diyala area," Chalabi said.
The same reports indicated that Gen. Ali Hassan al-Majeed -- nicknamed "Chemical Ali" -- was wounded but alive and in the same area.
There was shock and disbelief in the West Bank and Gaza Strip Wednesday as Palestinians gathered around TV sets to watch US Marines and Iraqi residents knock down a giant statute of Saddam Hussein in Tahrir Square in central Baghdad."I'm stunned and appalled. I can't understand what is happening," said Rustum Abu Ghazalah, a 30-year-old shopkeeper in the center of Ramallah.
He and grim-faced fellow shopkeepers zapped from one Arab TV station to another with the hope of discovering that what they were hearing and watching was nothing more than a US-produced Hollywood film.
"This can't be true," grumbled Abu Ghazaleh. "Where are the suicide bombers? Where are the Fedayeen of Saddam? Where are the heroic Republican Guards?" [...]
"This is a sad day for all the Arabs and Muslims, particularly the Palestinians," said Nael al-Am, a 36-year-old grocery owner in Ramallah. He is one of the few merchants who still keep a large-size poster of the deposed Iraqi president. Friends describe him as a staunch supporter of Saddam.
"I invested a lot of money in buying a satellite dish and a new TV set because I wanted to watch the day the battle for Baghdad begins," explained the bearded shopkeeper. "I was sure that this was going to be one of the great battles of the century, where an Arab army would inflict heavy losses on theinvading crusaders. I feel as if a dagger has been stuck in my heart when I see American soldiers strolling in the heart of Baghdad." [...]
Older Palestinians said the events in Iraq are reminiscent of the Six Day War, when Arab radio stations and leaders told their audiences that Israel wason the verge of defeat. They said the TV appearances of the Iraqi information minister, who remained defiant till the last minute, insisting that everything was under control and that the enemy had been defeated.
"Sahhaf reminded me of [Egyptian radio propagandist] Ahmed Said, who during the 1967 war, told us that the Israeli warplanes were falling likeflies," said Abed al-Zamel, a 70-year-old retired schoolteacher from Silwad village near Ramallah. "Once again the Arabs have fallen victim to the lies of their leaders and media. We never learn from our mistakes. When the war erupted, I warned my sons not to watch Arab TV stations so they would not be disappointed and depressed when the truth eventually comes out."
Iraqi citizens looked on in horror today when, at the orders of President George W. Bush, American soldiers and marines began retreating from Baghdad to return to the United States."We're sorry," one local commander told panicking Baghdad residents as he mounted his Bradley fighting vehicle to catch a flight out of the newly-re-renamed Saddam International Airport, "We were winning on the streets of Baghdad, but we couldn't take Hollywood Boulevard."
The administration's sudden reversal in Iraqi policy was announced at a hastily-called press conference where an apologetic President Bush explained his change of heart to the American people.
"I just didn't want to be viewed as a 'Hitler' for the rest of my presidency," a dour-faced Bush told the American people. "And the more I thought about it, the more I decided that the people calling me a fascist were right. Sending in the military to defeat Saddam Hussein, empty his torture chambers and allow Jews to once again practice their faith in Iraq is exactly what the Nazis would have done. So I stopped."
President Bush signed the "Michael Moore Is Right" Act in a private White House ceremony, where he was joined by several Democratic presidential hopefuls including Congressman Dennis Kucinich and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. Sen. John Kerry stood in the doorway, where he repeatedly pointed out to reporters that one of his feet was still in the foyer. Also in attendance were members of numerous anti-war organizations who continued to call for an immediate end to the war in Iraq even after American soldiers had taken Saddam's presidential palace in Baghdad.
"Hey--war is just wrong," said Nirvana Hempfinder, president of "Students Halting Intolerance and Terror." "I don't care how many Iraqis throw flowers at our soldiers. If they really understood that all this 'freedom' and 'liberty' the Army is bringing is just a plan to trap Iraq in America's dominant consumer culture, the people of Iraq would give back all that food and medicine we’re giving them and go back to eating...well, um, whateverÉ."
The anti-war movement declared an immediate victory and urged the president to keep his word and remove all American forces as soon as possible.
"The invading and occupying forces of the Bush military should return the nation of Iraq to the state in which they found it," said Didi Bididi of the Coalition To Stop All Republicans From Ever Doing Anything Whatsoever. When asked if that included returning Saddam Hussein to power, Bididi declined to answer. "My job is to fight against oppression and evil. What's that got to do with Saddam Hussein?"
Born in a land of liberty, having early learned its value, having engaged in a perilous conflict to defend it, having devoted the best years of my life to secure its permanent establishment in my country, my anxious recollections, my sympathetic feelings, and my best wishes, are irresistibly attracted, whensoever in any country I see an oppressed nation unfurl the banner of freedom.
At age 13, Tony al-Shammeree was in Iraq being trained in the use of guns, grenades and other weapons as part of the failed Shia Muslim uprising against Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War.Now he's girding for a rematch — this time as a U.S. Marine.
Iraqi dissident groups in the United States consider al-Shammeree a rarity because he actually enlisted in the military rather than just helping U.S. officials as translators or as sources of intelligence.
Ala Fa'ik, a spokesman for the nonprofit group Iraqi Forum for Democracy, said the choice to enlist makes perfect sense if you consider the 24-year-old lance corporal's background.
"For somebody who is born in Iraq and has seen the oppression of Saddam Hussein, they would have a much stronger sense in seeing the need to get involved in getting rid of that regime," Fa'ik said.
Al-Shammeree's admiration for the Marines began when his family was aided by a group of the military branch's soldiers on the road to Basra, and later at a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia.
It was enough to make a Texan president's heart swell: Hassan Atiya, an Iraqi on horseback, riding off into the chaos of wartime Baghdad with a vigorous wave and an exclamation — "I love you, America."
And when it came to horse-wrangling Wednesday, he wasn't the only one.As forces from the U.S. 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing claimed Fort Rashid, a sprawling compound in southeastern Baghdad, they found among their prizes a field filled with 40 Arabian-Appaloosa horses in brown, gray and glorious chestnut.
What followed was a scramble — a weirdly good-natured permutation of the looting elsewhere in Iraq this week.
Ordinary Iraqis took to the field and the stables beyond, corralling the horses suddenly available to them. Their scramble — filled with laughter and grins — began early Wednesday and continued late in the afternoon, testimony to the elusiveness of their equine quarry. [...]
Atiya was one of those who succeeded. As he prepared to ride off, he complained of a life with "no food and no rice" for his two children, his wife, and the third baby on the way.
"I love you, America!" he shouted before drawing his finger across his throat as he said one more word: "Saddam."
Then, bareback and barefoot, he pointed his horse toward the road and was on his way.
A top U.S. State Department official said Wednesday that the war on Iraq should be a lesson for other regimes pursuing weapons of mass destruction, but insisted that the United States is seeking the peaceful elimination of those weapons programs.John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, spoke to reporters after meetings with Vatican officials on proposals for humanitarian assistance and postwar reconstruction in Iraq.
He was asked about speculation that Syria and Iran could be America's next targets after the war in Iraq.
"We are hopeful that a number of regimes will draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq that the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is not in their national interest," Bolton said.
He called the pursuit of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs a terrorist threat and said it "will remain our priority to achieve a peaceful elimination of these programs so that supporters of terrorism cannot use them against innocent people."
Most revolutions that produce stable democracies expand the number of stakeholders in the nation's economy. America's occupation of Japan succeeded not just because the United States purged Japan's warmongers and established a peace constitution but because it imposed land reform. American occupiers broke up vast estates held by the Japanese aristocracy and redistributed the land to farmers, thus linking Japan's most lucrative resource to millions of citizens. Now America should do the same with Iraq's most lucrative resource, oil.Here is where Alaska comes in. In the 1970's, during the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the state realized that the new oil leases would produce an enormous windfall. Its citizens set up the Alaska Permanent Fund to manage this income, directing that the revenue be invested, the principal remain untouched and the gains be used for state infrastructure investments. A part of the proceeds was distributed as dividends to every Alaskan. By July 2002, the fund had grown to more than $23.5 billion. Dividend payments to Alaskan families averaged about $8,000 per year.
Iraq's annual oil revenue comes to approximately $20 billion. A postwar government could invest $12 billion a year in infrastructure to rebuild the nation. The other $8 billion could anchor an Iraq Permanent Fund, to be invested in a diverse set of international equities. The resulting income would go directly to Iraq's six million households. These payments would make a huge difference to families in a country whose per capita gross domestic product rests at about $2,500.
Looking back at the US experience in Somalia 10 years ago, Saddam Hussein thought he saw the key to winning a war with the United States. Mix his paramilitary forces among civilians, fade back into urban combat, and inflict more casualties than Americans back home could stomach. Then he'd count on the US to pull out, leaving the Iraqi leader in control of his country and more powerful than ever in the eyes of fellow Arabs across the region. It would be a Mogadishu redux.What he apparently failed to realize was that the Pentagon and its political leaders had also learned important lessons from what had been a military disaster for the US in the streets of Somalia's coastal capital back in 1993.
Those lessons - about intelligence-gathering, a flexible mix of conventional and Special Operations forces, focusing on capturing or killing the enemy's leadership, and generating political will - now are focused on Mr. Hussein himself.
Those four 2,000-pound "bunker buster" bombs that rained down on the place where Hussein, his sons, and other important regime leaders were thought to be this week are the starkest evidence yet that these lessons have been effective. Yet throughout the war, this approach has been evident - particularly in the use of clandestine forces, now on the ascendancy within the military establishment.
Such units have seized airfields in southern and western Iraq, secured oil fields, landed transport aircraft on highways at night to disgorge Humvees and small bands of Special Operations troops, tapped into phones and computers, and prevented the launch of Scud missiles.
They also rescued Pfc. Jessica Lynch, tracked senior Baath Party members and Republican Guard officers for capture or killing, and secured suspected chemical and biological weapons sites. They're searching underground bunkers and tunnels, working with Iraqi informants, and recently intercepted communications leading them to believe that Hussein's son Qusay is running Iraq's security forces.
In the process, they've been working with British, Australian, and Polish Special Operations units. Together they total some 10,000 troops, the largest percentage of the overall force since the Vietnam War.
"It's probably the most effective and the widest use of Special Operations forces in recent history," says Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a Pentagon briefer who has commanded Army Ranger units.
Europe's growth forecasts for 2003 tumbled on Tuesday, with warnings that the continent could fall into recession if tensions over Iraq endure and consumers suddenly lose confidence.The gloomy spring forecast by the European Commission cut baseline eurozone growth predictions from 1.8 per cent to 1 per cent. Italy risks joining Germany, France and Portugal in breaching the EU's budget rules.
Most of the bright spots in the report arise from countries outside the 12-member eurozone.
Gordon Brown, the British finance minister who presents his 2003 budget on Wednesday, will be pleased that the Commission believes the UK has weathered the downturn "rather well", albeit with a rising budget deficit.
The 10 EU candidate countries, mainly from the former communist bloc, also continue to outstrip the performance of the eurozone countries, with growth predicted to be 3.1 per cent this year and 4 per cent or more in 2004.
Pedro Solbes, EU economy commissioner, said Europe needed to pursue tough policies to "inspire confidence" at what he described as "a crucial juncture" in the EU's history.
Much the way there are no atheists in foxholes, you'll find even fewer unbelievers in Black America. Constant danger, risible ironies, and ontological uncertainty remain spirituality's best friend. An index of our particular attachment to Judeo-Christian beliefs can be found in the music we make based on the tenets and parables provided by the Old and New Testaments. Black Americans claim and transform Judeo-Christian traditions as if they had never been used to justify American chattel slavery. We continue to rework these traditions in our own image because geopolitical history shows us key Biblical events taking place comparatively "close to home" in parts of Asia and Africa. And contrary to vintage white Anglo-Saxon Protestant propaganda, Africans didn't need to be enslaved by WASPs (or Catholics!) to have access to monotheism and the good news of Christ. Not when Christian, Muslim, and Jewish converts were wandering the Mother Continent long before European slavers got there. Not when the Apostle Mark wrote down the first of the four transcribed Gospels while establishing the Christian church in Egypt 15 years after the Crucifixion.So we skeptics needn't begrudge Black America its Judeo-Christian obsessions, especially when they yield such delights as the following five gospel albums. The first thing you'll notice is that each record incorporates a regional flavor. Chicago's status as the "golden era" gospel stronghold is the stepping-off point for the praise and worship team known as Shekinah Glory Ministry. The sophisticated swing of New York session players pervades the black Israelite choir Voices of Shalom. Aaron Neville steeps his eclectic selection of folk hymns and pop-rock spirituals in the multiethnic sensuality of New Orleans. Detroit-bred evangelist Dorinda Cole-Clark does justice to her hometown legacy of Aretha Franklin, Motown, and the Clark Conservatory of Music with soulful solo testimony. Meanwhile, Kirk Franklin survives being sued by members of the Family—his first big crossover choir—to dance and shout like a Texan tent-revival leader through an ambitious autobiographical recording so rich in stylistic diversity it should have been titled "Songs in the Key of God." All five albums exist largely to affirm the persistence of faith through adversity . . . which is actually the main characteristic they have in common.
In Yugoslavia, between 20 and 30 thousand believed to have collaborated with the German occupation forces were shot dead in what has been described as a frenzy of retribution. In Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, those who had collaborated with the Germans were also hunted.In France toward the end of the war the resistance movement assassinated Germans, collaborators and others they deemed unworthy of living, such as black marketers. According to rough estimates, the French Resistance killed 2500 people between the autumn of 1943 and June 6, 1945.
President Bush promised on Tuesday to turn his focus to settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was removed from power.Bush held out the Northern Ireland peace process, spearheaded by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as a possible model, saying he was "willing to spend the same amount of energy in the Middle East."
"The end of Saddam's regime will ... remove a source of violence and instability in the Middle East," Bush said after his third face-to-face meeting in less than a month with Blair, his main ally in invading Iraq.
At Blair's urging, Bush has promised to publish a so-called "road map" peace plan, which envisions creation of a Palestinian state by 2005, as soon as Palestinian lawmakers confirm a new cabinet under prime minister-designate Mahmoud Abbas, widely known as Abu Mazen.
Saying he was "pleased" with the selection, Bush told reporters after a two-day summit meeting: "I look forward to him (Abbas) finally putting his cabinet in place so we can release the road map."
The Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Tuesday that Arafat was undermining Abbas's bid to establish a government committed to reform and the premier-designate was considering pulling out rather than presenting his cabinet on Thursday as expected.
A senior Palestinian minister close to Arafat denied the report. "There are no pressures being exerted on Abu Mazen. Any talk about this is completely unfounded," Saeb Erekat said.
In advocating freedom from Arab tyrants, America and Britain must also be champions of freedom for Palestinians. Israelis would rightly resent an imposed settlement, but despite the Right-ward move in Israeli politics, there is a deep desire to see the end of the conflict.This requires a more trustworthy Palestinian leader than Arafat. It needs a man who, like Nelson Mandela, finds the words and actions to address the fears of the more powerful foe. But it also needs an Israeli leader who can give confidence that, should violence end, then the occupation of 1967 will also end.
Having completed his father's unfinished war, Mr Bush should also complete the peace started by his father with the Madrid conference of 1991.
After falling nearly a dime in three weeks, gasoline prices are expected to keep sliding to a national average of $1.56 a gallon this summer thanks to lower oil prices and optimism about the war in Iraq, the government says.The Energy Department's statistical agency revised its price forecast sharply downward Tuesday to reflect the recent fall in crude oil prices. But it also warned of uncertainties that could cause prices of both crude oil and gasoline to rebound.
The price of crude, which hit a high of nearly $40 a barrel on Feb. 27, was around $28 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Tuesday. It has dropped by about 20 percent since the war began in Iraq.
A month ago, before the war in Iraq, the agency predicted gas prices would average more than $1.70 a gallon through the summer, hitting 1.76 this month.
Instead, gasoline prices have dropped about 10 cents a gallon over the past three weeks from a high of $1.73 a gallon in early March. The national average was $1.63 a gallon on Monday, according to the EIA.
"I believe we have seen the peak," agreed Kyle Cooper, an energy analyst for Citigroup in Houston.
From a traditional perspective -- supported in recent years by the new science of evolutionary psychology -- it makes sense for many men to risk their lives to try to free a beautiful young woman. Humans evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in small bands. Fertile females were the critical resource. Even if all the males in the band but one died, he could still face up to his tribal duty and impregnate all the women in the band.But if too many younger females were killed or stolen by an enemy group, the band's survival was in doubt. As University of Florida zoologist Laura A. Higgins wrote in 1988, "Because fewer of them are needed to produce and maintain offspring, from a population maintenance perspective, males are more expendable than females."
On the other hand, this primordial instinct can get in the way of rational war fighting. In the opening months of the 1947-1948 Israeli War of Independence, women were fully integrated into frontline ranks, but later in the war, the government began withdrawing women from combat. City College of New York sociologist Steven Goldberg pointed out, "The argument that clinched Israel's decision to not use women in combat was the experience of male soldiers taking militarily unwarranted risks to save female soldiers in trouble." Israeli women were then banned from combat roles until a 1996 Israeli Supreme Court ruling.
Lynch's rescue was extremely well planned and executed, and the risks were kept to a minimum. But risks there were. And the political bonanza it reaped shows the pressures and temptations commanders face regarding the fate of nice-looking female soldiers.
[H]ow did we arrive at a situation in which we place young women in harm's way in the first place?
Enlisted women have shown little enthusiasm on average for getting into combat. And the civilian wives of soldiers and sailors tend to dislike the military deploying their husbands in cramped quarters with servicewomen, fearing that their man will father another woman's baby. (The pregnancy rate among enlisted women is about the same as among civilian women of the same ages). Still, the desire for ambitious female officers to get as close to the front lines as possible to advance their careers has resonated forcefully with ambitious career women in other fields, and their voices have spoken loudest.
Nonetheless, the remarkable reaction all across America to the pictures of the girl-next-door from Hometown, USA, is a reminder that polling often fails to plumb the deepest human passions. And, fortunately, on this occasion, these passions include joy and relief at her deliverance.
Many developing countries are carrying debt incurred by rulers who borrowed without the people's consent and used the funds either to repress the people or for personal gain. A new approach is warranted to prevent dictators from running up debts, looting their countries, and passing on their debts to the population.Under the law in many countries, individuals do not have to repay if others fraudulently borrow in their name, and corporations are not liable for contracts that their chief executive officers or other agents enter into without the authority to bind the corporations. The legal doctrine of odious debt makes an analogous argument that sovereign debt incurred without the consent of the people and not benefiting the people is odious and should not be transferable to a successor government, especially if creditors are aware of these facts in advance.
The doctrine of odious debt originated in 1898 after the Spanish-American War. During peace negotiations, the United States argued that neither it nor Cuba should be held responsible for debt the colonial rulers had incurred without the consent of the Cuban people and not used for their benefit. Although Spain never accepted the validity of this argument, the United States implicitly prevailed, and Spain took responsibility for the Cuban debt under the Paris peace treaty. Soon after, legal scholars elaborated a similar doctrine. [...]
What can be done to eliminate odious debt? In a recent study, we argued for the creation of an independent institution that could assess whether regimes are legitimate and declare any sovereign debt subsequently incurred by illegitimate ones odious and thus not the obligation of successor governments. If structured correctly, such an institution could restrict dictators' ability to loot, limit the debt burden of poor countries, reduce risk for banks, and lower interest rates for legitimate governments that borrow. This policy can be viewed as a form of economic sanction that no one would have an incentive to evade.
As it stands now, countries repay debt even if it is odious because, if they failed to do so, their assets abroad could be seized and their reputations would be tarnished, making it more difficult for them to borrow again or attract foreign investment. However, if there were an institution that assessed, and announced, whether regimes were odious, this could create a new equilibrium (that is, market outcome) in which countries' reputations would not be hurt by refusal to repay illegitimate debts, just as individuals' credit ratings are not hurt by refusal to pay debts that others fraudulently incur in their name. For example, if the world's leading powers, international organizations, and financial institutions declared a regime odious and announced that they would consider successor governments justified in repudiating any new loans the odious regime incurred, a private bank-even an unscrupulous one-would think twice before lending to the regime. This argument draws upon a well-known result in game theory that repeated games have many possible outcomes and that simply making some information public can create a new-and, in this case, better-one.
There is no guarantee, however, that everyone would coordinate on this new equilibrium. We propose two mechanisms to ensure that lending to odious regimes is eliminated. First, laws in creditor countries could be changed todisallow seizure of a country's assets for nonrepayment of odious debt. That is, odious debt contracts could be made legally unenforceable. Second, foreign aid to successor regimes could be made contingent on nonrepayment of odious debt. In other words, donors could refuse to aid a country that, in effect, was handing the funds over to banks with illegitimate claims. If foreign aid is valuable enough, successor governments will be compelled to repudiate odious loans, and banks to refrain from originating them. (Interestingly, the same reasoning suggests a potential way to solve the moral hazard problem associated with foreign aid. [...]
In short, the international community or even a few major countries, possibly in concert with nongovernmental agencies, could create a new norm under which a country would not be responsible for odious debt. Creditors therefore would not issue odious debt in the first place. This new approach would be in line with the growing recognition in international law that some uses of power by government officials might be illegitimate or criminal, the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes being just one example of this trend.
The policy we have laid out would help legitimate creditors and debtors. Creditors would benefit from knowing the "rules of the game" in advance. Currently, there is a movement to nullify some debt on the grounds of odiousness, but it is hard for creditors to anticipate which loans will be considered odious in the future. If odiousness were declared in advance, banks would avoid lending to odious regimes in the first place and no longer face the risk of large losses if a successful campaign nullified their outstanding loans. Less uncertainty has the added benefit that interest rates for legitimate borrowers would be lower. But most important, dictators would no longer be able to borrow, use the proceeds for illegitimate purposes, and then saddle the people with their debts.
I most certainly do not see God at work in the slaughter and destruction now unfolding in Iraq or in the war plans now being developed for additional American invasions of other lands. The hand of the Devil? Perhaps. But how can I suggest that a fellow Methodist with a good Methodist wife is getting guidance from the Devil? I don't want to get too self-righteous about all of this. After all, I have passed the 80 mark, so I don't want to set the bar of acceptable behavior too high lest I fail to meet the standard for a passing grade on Judgment Day. I've already got a long list of strikes against me. So President Bush, forgive me if I've been too tough on you. But I must tell you, Mr. President, you are the greatest threat to American troops. Only you can put our young people in harm's way in a needless war. Only you can weaken America's good name and influence in world affairs.We hear much talk these days, as we did during the Vietnam War, of "supporting our troops." Like most Americans, I have always supported our troops, and I have always believed we had the best fighting forces in the world--with the possible exception of the Vietnamese, who were fortified by their hunger for national independence, whereas we placed our troops in the impossible position of opposing an independent Vietnam, albeit a Communist one. But I believed then as I do now that the best way to support our troops is to avoid sending them on mistaken military campaigns that needlessly endanger their lives and limbs. That is what went on in Vietnam for nearly thirty years--first as we financed the French in their failing effort to regain control of their colonial empire in Southeast Asia, 1946-54, and then for the next twenty years as we sought unsuccessfully to stop the Vietnamese independence struggle led by Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap--two great men whom we should have accepted as the legitimate leaders of Vietnam at the end of World War II. I should add that Ho and his men were our allies against the Japanese in World War II. Some of my fellow pilots who were shot down by Japanese gunners over Vietnam were brought safely back to American lines by Ho's guerrilla forces.
During the long years of my opposition to that war, including a presidential campaign dedicated to ending the American involvement, I said in a moment of disgust: "I'm sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars in which young men do the dying." That terrible American blunder, in which 58,000 of our bravest young men died, and many times that number were crippled physically or psychologically, also cost the lives of some 2 million Vietnamese as well as a similar number of Cambodians and Laotians, in addition to laying waste most of Indochina--its villages, fields, trees and waterways; its schools, churches, markets and hospitals.
I had thought after that horrible tragedy--sold to the American people by our policy-makers as a mission of freedom and mercy--that we never again would carry out a needless, ill-conceived invasion of another country that had done us no harm and posed no threat to our security. I was wrong in that assumption. [...]
The destruction of Baghdad has a special poignancy for many of us. In my fourth-grade geography class under a superb teacher, Miss Wagner, I was first introduced to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the palm trees and dates, the kayaks plying the rivers, camel caravans and desert oases, the Arabian Nights, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (my first movie), the ancient city of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent. This was the first class in elementary school that fired my imagination. Those wondrous images have stayed with me for more than seventy years. And it now troubles me to hear of America's bombs, missiles and military machines ravishing the cradle of civilization.
But in God's good time, perhaps this most ancient of civilizations can be redeemed. My prayer is that most of our soldiers and most of the long-suffering people of Iraq will survive this war after it has joined the historical march of folly that is man's inhumanity to man.
The growing hysteria of the administration's posture on Cambodia seems to me to reflect a determined refusal to consider what the fall of the existing government in Phnom Penh would actually mean.... We should be able to see that the kind of government which would succeed Lon Nol's forces would most likely be a government ... run by some of the best-educated, most able intellectuals in Cambodia.
I met with an American official who deplored the "capabilities gap" dividing the U.S. from its European allies: America buys two thirds of the hardware consumed by NATO and invests three quarters of the alliance's military research and development. In the essential functions of modern war, Europe drops farther and farther behind, spending more on tomato subsidies each year than we spend on an entire Stryker brigade of medium-armored vehicles. Pity the poor European troops hung out on the not-so-sharp end of this system. "Americans," a European officer told me glumly, "suppress air defenses this way: they fly into the enemy air space and zap everything — nothing works afterward, no phones, no computers, no radars, no missiles. None of us Europeans have that capability. Instead, we fly into the enemy air space, trigger his SAMs, and then try to evade them." He pondered for a moment: "We need to get closer to the American system." Indeed: Portugal spends 85 percent of its small defense budget on personnel, and 50 percent of that on pensions. Germany, unable to shed tenured employees to make room for procurement, spends just $40 million a year on new vehicles and $1 billion to repair the old ones. [...]Since the really important things in Europe are arranged behind closed doors by the national governments (not in the 626-seat EU parliament), Europeans are always grousing about their "democracy deficit." Indeed, the exact nature of Europe's parliamentary system befuddles most Europeans, who see no linkage between their votes in EU elections and the 95,000 pages (at last count) of European laws and regulations, all of which seem to issue from unelected Eurocrats in the EU Commission and Council. Despite those vast crowds surging through the streets of Europe to protest Operation Iraqi Freedom, the European parliament has little impact on EU foreign or security policy, which remains the province of foreign and defense ministries in the member states. Revealingly, the EU has no commissioner for military affairs. Environment, fisheries, social affairs, and culture merit commissioners, but not the armed forces. [...]
The EU will probably not fail, but it will not overpower the U.S. anytime soon. It will expand as a kind of nanny state, customs union, and international-relations ombudsman. It speaks now in the name of the U.N. because its most strident member has a Security Council seat and because Brussels has no working military machinery of its own to assist or obstruct the U.S. In Iraq, the EU failed to confront a tyrant and rescue a suffering people, preferring to repeat old patterns of appeasement that have their root in domestic worries and military weakness, the same factors that caused European appeasement in the 1930s. The U.S. must work with the Europeans and hear and respect their views, but it should never weaken strong policy initiatives — like Operation Iraqi Freedom — for the sake of a false or hypocritical consensus.
More than 100 children held in a prison celebrated their freedom as US marines rolled into northeast Baghdad amid chaotic scenes which saw civilians loot weapons from an army compound, a US officer said.Around 150 children spilled out of the jail after the gates were opened as a US military Humvee vehicle approached, Lieutenant Colonel Fred Padilla told an AFP correspondent travelling with the Marines 5th Regiment.
"Hundreds of kids were swarming us and kissing us," Padilla said.
"There were parents running up, so happy to have their kids back."
"The children had been imprisoned because they had not joined the youth branch of the Baath party," he alleged. "Some of these kids had been in there for five years."
The children, who were wearing threadbare clothes and looked under-nourished, walked on the streets crossing their hands as if to mimic handcuffs, before giving the thumbs up sign and shouting their thanks.
What matters over the long run isn't the blessing of the Security Council but the success and stability of a post-Saddam Iraq. The country is simply too big and too complicated to even consider a significant U.N. administrative function. "Iraq is not East Timor, Kosovo and Afghanistan," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice noted Friday.Equally important is keeping the U.N.'s hands off Iraqi oil. The oil-for-food program is now being administered by Secretary General Kofi Annan under a 45-day arrangement that expires May 12. But the French and Russians want to keep it going indefinitely. Their game is as transparent as it is cynical.
Many French and Russian companies benefit by participating in the program. More important, if Paris and Moscow can get the U.S. to concede the program's continuing legality, they will use their veto to blackmail the U.S. and a new Iraqi government into honoring the dirty oil contracts and loans they arranged with Saddam Hussein's regime.
This is a rhetorical battle the U.S. can win easily if it decides to fight. The oil, after all, belongs to the Iraqi people. As for Saddam's debts, what do Iraqis owe the creditors who helped an illegitimate regime oppress them? The continuation of oil-for-food would give France and Russia an effective veto over the purse strings and a tremendous and unjustifiable influence in post-Saddam Iraq. If France and Russia really want to help postwar Iraq, they could forgive Saddam's debts.
In 1944, millions of Americans were engaged in desperate battles across the world. Nonetheless, a normal presidential election was held, and the opposition didn't pull its punches: Thomas Dewey, the Republican candidate, campaigned on the theme that Franklin Roosevelt was a "tired old man." As far as I've been able to ascertain, the Roosevelt administration didn't accuse Dewey of hurting morale by questioning the president's competence. After all, democracy--including the right to criticize--was what we were fighting for.It's not a slur on the courage of our troops, or a belittling of the risks they face, to say that our current war is a mere skirmish by comparison. Yet self-styled patriots are trying to impose constraints on political speech never contemplated during World War II, accusing anyone who criticizes the president of undermining the war effort.
For 35 years, there has been a single permanent force of foreign troops on US soil, here on the western tip of Texas, home of the largest air defence training centre in the world and the permanent home of Germany's Air Force Command.On joint training exercises, over pilseners at the Soldatenstube pub, the two forces have coalesced as partners, a proud emblem of post-World War II alliances.
But the war against Iraq is beginning to weaken that cherished solidarity. As Germany's opposition to the war has grown increasingly strident, as the mood here plunges with word that Iraqis have killed or captured at least 15 Fort Bliss soldiers, the troops are suddenly viewing each other with a wary, distant eye. After all these years, they are - once again - strangers more than allies....
[S]ome military personnel at Fort Bliss grumble about the irony of welcoming German troops only to watch them lay their arms down when America went to war....
Ilse Irwin, 73, was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, near Frankfurt, and emigrated to the US as a Fulbright scholar in 1954. A practising Catholic, the retired university professor devotes much of her time to fighting hatred and genocide, largely by working with the area's Jewish community. Irwin volunteers at the local Holocaust museum, and lately has steeled herself every time she has to guide German airmen through an exhibit or take them on a tour of a local temple.
Repeatedly, she said, they have been hostile about her work. Some have raised questions about the US's agenda and suggested that the motivation for the war is oil and the close relationship between the US and Israel - a common charge in Western Europe.
"I've had a terrible time," she said. "They say that Israelis are just modern-day Nazis. I defend Israel, but I get very nervous because I don't want to blow my cool. I don't hear it too often. But I hear it often enough."
Is an animal's life more expendable than a human life? Is life any less precious to an animal than it is to a human? These are philosophical questions, the kind that could fuel an hourlong argument in a college dorm, but they are far from abstract thumb-suckers.America is at war, and animals have been deployed to do certain tasks, usually to take advantage of one of their especially acute senses. And that can put the animals at risk.
Already, a team of highly trained dolphins dispatched by the Navy to find mines in the waters off Iraq has brought to the surface questions about the appropriate use of animals in war.
These are big, ethical questions, difficult to answer, and resistant to consensus. Should we have the consent of an animal before it takes on a dangerous task? If so, how do we do that?
Ottawa's leading Muslim cleric issued a public apology late Monday for saying he supports a holy war in the Middle East, remarks that caused a storm on Parliament Hill and threatened a review of his citizenship status.Imam Gamal Solaiman, leader of the Ottawa Mosque, said he deeply regrets remarks he made on Global television on Sunday.
"I do not support or promote violence in any form against any country or any group of people," the imam said in a written statement sent to the Citizen shortly before 11 p.m.
"I deeply regret and sincerely apologize for my misunderstood comments and the hurt which they may have caused. I hope and pray that peace will prevail in all regions of the world."
It was hasty about-face for the cleric, who had repeated the thrust of his remarks yesterday, just as they were being soundly condemned by federal politicians.
Muslims across the Middle East should take up arms to expel American troops from Iraq, the imam of the Ottawa Mosque said yesterday."If I were there, I would fight with them," said Imam Gamal Solaiman, who endorsed the call for a jihad against the United States.
"I would fight the Americans with my nails and teeth."
But he said terrorist attacks should not be conducted against Americans on U.S. soil.
"Not every American is against Arabs. So it is not open to go and kill Americans. No. The Americans who are coming to kill you, yes, you can face them to defend your country," Mr. Solaiman said. "When any Arab goes to America and makes mischief, that is totally objectionable."
Mr. Solaiman made the comments in an interview after his appearance on the Global television current affairs show Ottawa Inside Out yesterday morning. [...]
On the air, Mr. Solaiman said he supports the call for a jihad issued by besieged Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and many Middle Eastern religious leaders.
"I do [support the jihad]," Mr. Solaiman told the television panel. "Because to my mind it, [the American-led military action] is not a war for justice. It is not a war for principle."
Last week, Mohamed Elmasry, the president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, said the heroic resistance of the Iraqi people against the coalition forces is extraordinary.''It's a fact, they're heroic. The invading power is the most powerful military machine in human history. With no air power and modern technologies, they've stood against the invading forces for two weeks,'' Mr. Elmasry said.
Yesterday, Mr. Solaiman said he believes the U.S. government's motive is not merely to overthrow Saddam but to gain power in the Middle East. He said he believes that after occupying Iraq, the U.S. armed forces will try to overthrow governments in neighbouring Arab countries. For that reason, he said, Muslims from neighbouring countries should join the fight in Iraq.
"The Muslims there, in that area, they will be fighting for survival. They will be fighting to defend their lifestyle, to defend their resources, to defend their land," he said.
A large majority of Canadians -- 72% -- believe Canada should have supported the U.S. at the start of the war against Iraq, according to an exclusive National Post/Global News poll.The COMPAS survey shows 41% of people believe Canada should have given verbal support to the United States two weeks ago while 31% said the backing should have come in the form of both words and troops.
Still, only a slim majority, 56%, agreed with the U.S. decision to launch an invasion to bring down Saddam Hussein, while 34% opposed the attack.
Jean Chretien is to give a speech in the House of Commons today endorsing the Bush administration's "mission" in Iraq and asking MPs to declare formal support for a quick victory by coalition forces.
At one of the palaces, half a dozen Syrian soldiers were found, one of them hiding in a refrigerator, military officials said. The Republican Guards responsible for the security of the palace had fled.
Early in the morning, while most of Cairo is asleep, Ahmed Kamal Aboulmagd watches the war on television and despairs over the path taken by the United States. Even in the gloom of 4 a.m., this is not a normal emotion for Mr. Aboulmagd, a sprightly man of 72 who has lived through more than his share of revolutions, wars and international crises, yet has maintained a marvelously sunny outlook. [...]Mr. Aboulmagd is one of Egypt's best-known intellectuals, a senior aide to former President Anwar el Sadat, consultant to the United Nations and ever-curious polymath whose interests range across the fields of Islamic jurisprudence, comparative religions, literature, history and commercial law. [...]
He has devoted decades of his life and his writings to the cause of modernizing Islamic life and promoting understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Now those efforts, Mr. Aboulmagd said, have been set back by President Bush's "exaggerated" response to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, a response he believes only encouraged mutual enmity and suspicion by painting Muslims and Arabs as potential enemies to be reformed or destroyed.
"I find what is happening to be a serious setback in the endeavors of noble people who have realized the commonalities among different civilizations and nations," he said.
The problem, he said, is that the war on Iraq is widely seen in the Arab world as an attack on all Arabs, meant to serve the interests of Israel with no compensating outreach to aggrieved Arabs.
If you've been having trouble finding Patrick Ruffini today, he's moved here, temporarily
What defines Mr. King's style is the interplay of his strong voice and guitar as extensions of each other. He sings and plays and sings again. His guitar and voice, as Mr. King once said, come "from different parts of my soul." He added that he wanted his guitar to "sound human.""By bending the strings, by trilling my hand - and I have big, fat hands - I could achieve something that approximated a vocal vibrato," Mr. King said in his 1996 autobiography, "Blues All Around Me," written with David Ritz. He added: "I could sustain a note. I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions."
Peter Guralnick, author of the acclaimed two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, "Last Train to Memphis" and "Careless Love," offered a particularly rounded assessment of Mr. King's enormous contribution to blues and rock:
"It was King's style of rapidly picked single notes, embellishing and extending the vocal and rarely supporting it with full-bodied chords, which prevailed to create a whole blues-tinged vocabulary for modern rock.
"He never played while he was singing. He essentially played single notes that extended the vocal line. When the vocal was over, the guitar was introduced to play single notes that extended the vocal line. He made use of the treble end of the scale for dramatics in a way quite different from John Lee Hooker or Muddy Waters or traditional blues singers."
This made him a groundbreaking contributor to the genre, and coupled with the deeper values he embodied, it created the context through which "almost single-handedly B. B. King introduced the blues to white America," Mr. Guralnick said. He added that this was achieved by Mr. King - rather than by other blues legends - because of "the urbanity of his playing, the absorption of a multiplicity of influences, not simply from the blues, along with a graciousness of manner and willingness to adapt to new audiences and give them something they were able to respond to."
Mr. King's eclectic style - nurtured for years on the "chitlin circuit" of black clubs and dance halls - was derived from various sources: jazz, gospel, country, even Frank Sinatra and other stars. By contrast, the purer, Delta-rooted style of Muddy Waters, with its piercing slide-guitar attack, while exalted by critics and musicians for its energy and authenticity, had a narrower appeal. (On the other hand, the Waters song "Rollin' Stone" inspired the names of a band and a magazine.) [...]
He was born Riley B. King on Sept. 16, 1925, in a sharecropper's cabin near Indianola, Miss. His father, Albert, often worked two consecutive double shifts, 48 hours, at 50 cents a shift. Mr. King's parents separated when he was 4, and his mother took him to her family in Kilmichael, in the hills east of the Delta. Mr. King walked six miles round trip to a segregated one-room schoolhouse. He earned 35 cents a day picking cotton.
At 7 he became fascinated with the gospel singing and guitar playing of a sanctified preacher, Archie Fair, a distant relative, at the Church of God in Christ. That preacher let the young Riley play his guitar and urged him to become a minister. But against the wishes of his deeply religious mother, who called the blues "devil music," the boy listened to Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson on the radio.
At 9 Mr. King was left alone. His mother died at 25, perhaps of diabetes, and then his grandmother died. He said that a plantation owner named Floyd Cartledge and his family allowed him to live by himself on their property and earn his keep by performing house chores and milking cows. They kept a paternal eye on him. In his autobiography Mr. King said that while other plantation owners were "coldblooded racists," Cartledge - whom he still calls "Mr. Flake" - was decent enough to advance him $15 to buy a cherry-red Stella guitar when he was 12.
A brief, unhappy reunion with his father - who had remarried - led Mr. King to strike out on his own at 13. He moved to Indianola, picked cotton and worked as a tractor driver on another large farm. He consumed himself with music, joining a group of gospel singers and listening to bluesmen like Tampa Red and Big Boy Crudup on the radio. He began playing gospel and blues on his guitar on Saturday nights on street corners in Indianola, hoping to pick up spare change. It was here he learned that the money was in the blues.
War in North Korea is now almost inevitable because of the country's diplomatic stalemate with America, a senior UN official claims.Ahead of this week's crucial talks between members of the UN Security Council, Maurice Strong, special adviser to the Secretary General Kofi Annan, was gloomy on the chances of a peaceful settlement.
'I think war is unnecessary, it's unthinkable and unfortunately it's entirely possible,' he said.
Strong, who has just returned from a private mission for Annan in North Korea and is due to report to UN officials in New York tomorrow, said he felt both North Korea and America seemed to think they had time on their side but were both
on a slide towards war.On Wednesday the UN security council will hear America's demand for sanctions against North Korea, which it accuses of planning to develop nuclear weapons.
The Communist state has already said it would regard any such move as an 'act of war' and yesterday further warned that it would ignore any UN resolutions on the issue.
Ayatollah Ali Mohammed Sistani is a happy man. For the first time since 1988 he is not only not under house arrest but free to travel wherever he wishes. What's more, 22 of his relatives, held hostage by the Iraqi government since October, have returned home. A contingent of American Marines patrols Najaf, his hometown, widely regarded as the most sacred city in Shiite Islam....The 75-year-old ayatollah is the undisputed A'alam al-ulema (the most learned of the learned) of the mullahs who minister to the religious needs of Shiites.... This follows his fatwa last week -- the first pro-U.S. fatwa in modern political Islam -- in which he ordered Iraq's Shiites not to resist U.S.-led coalition forces.
The news is potent, and potentially tectonic in its impact. And with Saddam's regime disintegrating, Ayatollah Sistani is already talking of restoring Najaf's position as "the heart of Shiism."
What does this mean? Speaking on a satellite phone to this writer, the ayatollah said he had advised "believers not to hinder the forces of liberation, and help bring this war against the tyrant to a successful end for the Iraqi people." His emissaries have also gained control of mosques and seminaries in Karbala, to the north, the second most sacred city of Shiism. On Saturday, a delegation of his followers arrived in Baghdad, to "guide believers on the right path." "There is good in what happens," he said, quoting the Prophet Muhammad. "Our people need freedom more than air [to breath]. Iraq has suffered, and it deserves better government."
Ayatollah Sistani's close entourage goes further in its support of the U.S.-led coalition. "We shall never forget what the coalition has done for our people," says Hojat al-Islam Abdel Majid al-Khoi, son of the late grand Ayatollah Khoi, who was Iraq's supreme religious leader for almost 40 years. "A free Iraq shall be a living monument to our people's friendship with its liberators."
Pfc. Diego Fernando Rincon, 19, flew a Colombian flag from the rearview mirror of the Mustang he bought with his Army signing bonus. Cpl. Kemaphoom A. Chanawongse, 22, created a Web site with photographs of himself in Marine uniform under the title, "the Thai import with a baby face." Just before Lance Cpl. Jesus A. Suarez Del Solar enlisted in the Marines, he went back to Mexico and bought a figurine of the Aztec warrior he considered himself to be.Chanawongse now is classified as missing in action in Iraq. Rincon and Suarez Del Solar have been killed. Their fates attest to the toll the Iraq conflict is taking on young men and women who are fighting a war for a country that was not originally theirs.
After the war's first 2 1/2 weeks, the Pentagon has disclosed the names of 71 U.S. service members killed, seven missing and seven captured in Iraq. Of those, eight of the dead, two of the missing and two prisoners of war had immigrated to the United States, according to interviews with relatives and friends. Just four of the immigrants were U.S. citizens when the war began.
Their presence among the war's early victims outstrips the representation of immigrants in the U.S. military overall. Yet it reflects the military's attractiveness to foreign-born residents as they come of age -- an appeal that is fostered, in part, by policies that offer a quick path to citizenship for those who enlist.
As they explained it to their families, the attraction is a blend of wanderlust, economic aspiration and adoptive patriotism. Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Rincon approached an Army recruiter, who had wandered into a Conyers, Ga., gym where the teenager worked, and announced that he wanted to help fight terrorism. On March 29, Rincon was one of four soldiers killed in a car bombing in Iraq.
This cadre of immigrants, now missing or dead, talked of an indelible pride in the armed services, in the nation's elemental values. Yet their individual identities persisted.
DEATHS:April 4:
Army Capt. Tristan N. Aitken, 31, State College, Pa., combat
Army Pfc. Wilfred D. Bellard, 20, Lake Charles, La., vehicle fell into ravine
Army Spc. Daniel Francis J. Cunningham, 33, Lewiston, Maine, vehicle fell into ravine
Marine Capt. Travis Ford, 30, Oceanside, Calif., helicopter crash
Army Pvt. Devon D. Jones, 19, San Diego, vehicle fell into ravine
Marine Capt. Benjamin Sammis, 29, Rehoboth, Mass., helicopter crash
Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, 33, of Tampa, Fla., combat
April 3:
Marine Pfc. Chad E. Bales, 20, Coahoma, Texas, non-hostile accident
Army Sgt. Wilbert Davis, 40, Hinesville, Ga., vehicle accident
Marine Cpl. Mark A. Evnin, 21, South Burlington, Vt., combat
Army Capt. Edward J. Korn, 31, Savannah, Ga., combat
Army Staff Sgt. Nino D. Livaudais, 23, Utah, combat
Army Spc. Ryan P. Long, 21, Seaford, Del., combat
Army Spc. Donald S. Oaks Jr., 20, Harborcreek, Pa., combat
Army Sgt. 1st Class Randy Rehn, 36, Longmont, Colo., combat
Army Capt. Russell B. Rippetoe, 27, Colorado, combat
Army Sgt. Todd J. Robbins, 33, Hart, Mich., combat
Marine Cpl. Erik H. Silva, 22, Chula Vista, Calif., combat
April 2:
Army Capt. James F. Adamouski, 29, Springfield, Va., helicopter crash
Marine Lance Cpl. Brian E. Anderson, 26, Durham, N.C., non-hostile accident
Army Spc. Mathew Boule, 22, Dracut, Mass., helicopter crash
Army Master Sgt. George A. Fernandez, 36, El Paso, Texas
Marine Pfc. Christian D. Gurtner, 19, Ohio City, Ohio, non-combat weapons discharge
Army Chief Warrant Officer 4th Class Erik A. Halvorsen, 40, Bennington, Vt., helicopter crash.
Army Chief Warrant Officer Scott Jamar, 32, Granbury, Texas, helicopter crash
Army Sgt. Michael Pedersen, 26, Flint, Mich., helicopter crash
Army Chief Warrant Officer Eric A. Smith, 42, Rochester, N.Y., helicopter crash
April 1:
Army Sgt. Jacob L. Butler, 24, Wellsville, Kan., combat
Marine Lance Cpl. Joseph B. Maglione, 22, Lansdale, Pa., non-combat weapon discharge
March 31:
Army Spc. Brandon Rowe, 20, Roscoe, Ill., combat
March 30:
Marine Capt. Aaron J. Contreras, 31, Sherwood, Ore., helicopter crash
Marine Sgt. Michael V. Lalush, 23, Troutville, Va., helicopter crash
Marine Sgt. Brian McGinnis, 23, St. Georges, Del., helicopter crash
March 29:
Marine Staff Sgt. James Cawley, 41, Layton, Utah, combat
Army Cpl. Michael Curtin, 23, Howell, N.J., suicide attack
Army Pfc. Diego Fernando Rincon, 19, Conyers, Ga., suicide attack
Army Pfc. Michael Russell Creighton Weldon, 20, Palm Bay, Fla., suicide attack
Marine Lance Cpl. William W. White, 24, New York, vehicle accident
Army Sgt. Eugene Williams, 24, Highland, N.Y, suicide attack
March 28:
Army Sgt. Roderic A. Solomon , 32, Fayetteville, N.C., vehicle accident
March 27:
Marine Gunnery Sgt. Joseph Menusa, 33, Tracy, Calif., combat
Marine Lance Cpl. Jesus A. Suarez Del Solar, 20, Escondido, Calif., combat
March 26:
Army Spc. William A. Jeffries, 39, Evansville, Ind., illness
Marine Maj. Kevin G. Nave, 36, White Lake Township, Mich., vehicle accident
March 25:
Navy Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Michael Vann Johnson Jr., 25, Little Rock, Ark., combat
Marine Pfc. Francisco A. Martinez Flores, 21, Los Angeles, combat
Marine Staff Sgt. Donald C. May, Jr., 31, Richmond, Va., combat
Marine Lance Cpl. Patrick T. O'Day, 20, Santa Rosa, Calif., combat
Marine Cpl. Robert M. Rodriguez, 21, New York, combat
Air Force Maj. Gregory Stone, 40, Boise, Idaho, grenade attack
March 24:
Marine Cpl. Evan James, 20, La Harpe, Ill., drowned in canal
Marine Sgt. Bradley S. Korthaus, 29, Davenport, Iowa, drowned in canal
Army Spc. Gregory P. Sanders, 19, Hobart, Ind., combat
March 23:
Army Spc. Jamaal R. Addison, 22, Roswell, Ga., combat
Marine Sgt. Michael E. Bitz, 31, Ventura, Calif., combat
Marine Lance Cpl. Brian Rory Buesing, 20, Cedar Key, Fla., combat
Marine Lance Cpl. David K. Fribley, 26, Fort Myers, Fla., combat
Marine Cpl. Jose A. Garibay, 21, Costa Mesa, Calif., combat
Marine Cpl. Jorge A. Gonzalez, 20, Los Angeles, combat
Army Pfc. Howard Johnson II, 21, Mobile, Ala., combat
Marine Staff Sgt. Phillip A. Jordan, 42, Enfield, Conn., combat
Marine Lance Cpl. Patrick R. Nixon, 21, Gallatin, Tenn., combat
Marine 2nd Lt. Frederick E. Pokorney Jr., 31, Tonopah, Nev., combat
Marine Cpl. Randal Kent Rosacker, 21, San Diego, combat
Marine Lance Cpl. Thomas J. Slocum, 22, Thornton, Colo., combat
Marine Lance Cpl. Michael J. Williams, 31, Yuma, Ariz.
March 22:
Navy Lt. Thomas Mullen Adams, 27, La Mesa, Calif., helicopter collision
Marine Lance Cpl. Eric J. Orlowski, 26, Buffalo, N.Y., machine gun accident
Army Capt. Christopher Scott Seifert, 27, Easton, Pa., grenade attack
Army Reserve Spc. Brandon S. Tobler, 19, Portland, Ore., vehicle accident
March 21:
Marine Maj. Jay Thomas Aubin, 36, Waterville, Maine, helicopter crash
Marine Capt. Ryan Anthony Beaupre, 30, St. Anne, Ill., helicopter crash
Marine 2nd Lt. Therrel S. Childers, 30, Harrison County, Miss., combat
Marine Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez, 22, Los Angeles, combat
Marine Cpl. Brian Matthew Kennedy, 25, Houston, helicopter crash
Marine Staff Sgt. Kendall Damon Waters-Bey, 29, Baltimore, helicopter crash
Date not given:
Marine Lance Cpl. Thomas A. Blair, 24, Broken Arrow, Okla., combat
Marine Sgt. Nicolas M. Hodson, 22, Smithville, Mo., vehicle accident
Army Spc. James Kiehl, 22, Comfort, Texas, combat
Army Sgt. George Edward Buggs, 31, Barnwell, S.C., combat
Army Master Sgt. Robert J. Dowdy, 38, Cleveland, combat
Army Pvt. Ruben Estrella-Soto, 18, El Paso, Texas, combat
Army Chief Warrant Officer Johnny Villareal Mata, 35, Pecos, Texas, combat
Army Pfc. Lori Piestewa, 22, Tuba City, Ariz., combat
Army Pvt. Brandon Sloan, 19, Bedford Heights, Ohio, combat
Army Sgt. Donald Walters, 33, Kansas City, Mo., combat
CAPTURED:
March 24:
Army Chief Warrant Officer 2 Ronald D. Young Jr., 26, Lithia Springs, Ga.
Army Chief Warrant Officer 2 David S. Williams, 30, Orlando, Fla.
March 23:
Army Spc. Edgar Hernandez, 21, Mission, Texas
Army Spc. Joseph Hudson, 23, Alamogordo, N.M.
Army Spc. Shoshana Johnson, 30, Fort Bliss, Texas
Army Pfc. Patrick Miller, 23, Park City, Kan.
Army Sgt. James Riley, 31, Pennsauken, N.J.
MISSING:
March 23:
Army Sgt. Edward J. Anguiano, 24, Brownsville, Texas.
Marine Pfc. Tamario D. Burkett, 21, Buffalo, N.Y.
Marine Cpl. Kemaphoom A. Chanawongse, 22, Waterford, Conn.
Marine Lance Cpl. Donald J. Cline, Jr., 21, Sparks, Nev.
Marine Pvt. Jonathan L. Gifford, 30, Decatur, Ill.
Marine Pvt. Nolen R. Hutchings, 19, Boiling Springs, S.C.
Marine Sgt. Fernando Padilla-Ramirez, 26, Yuma, Ariz.
Marine Sgt. Brendon Reiss, 23, Casper, Wyo.
Yes, that's right folks, I've been blogging for exactly one year. [...]Not to overstate the case, but the blogosphere represents something completely new, the emergence of a self-appointed, independent punditocracy, capable of instanteously disseminating news, information, and commentary to an interested and educatated audience. That is a major achievement, one carried out not according to plan, program, or fiat, but organically, from the bottom up. The true blogosphere is made up of the independent voices of individuals, heard through the medium of the internet, setting their own agendas, reacting in individual ways to news and information from around the world.
It is this individuality of the idiosyncratic voice that makes the blogosphere such a grand and glorious place.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the states can ban cross burning that is designed to intimidate others.However, in a separate part of the ruling, a Supreme Court plurality struck down Virginia's ban on cross burning, citing procedural flaws. The ruling came in a challenge to the state law.
Virginia's statute treats any cross burning as obviously meant to intimidate, and the justices said that provision is too broad for the First Amendment.
Justice Clarence Thomas, the court's only black member, dissented from the plurality. Thomas refused to grant that the First Amendment was involved in the case, but argued that even it was, juries should be permitted to assume intimidation by the mere fact of a cross burning.
Citing the savage history of cross burning, Thomas quoted a favorite aphorism of the late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: "A page of history is worth a volume of logic."
Writing for the court, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said the action has a romantic Scottish history -- "Sir Walter Scott used cross burnings for dramatic effect in The Lady of the Lake."
But that history has become lost in continuing tradition of racial hate.
"Burning a cross in the United States is inextricably intertwined with the history of the Ku Klux Klan," O'Connor said. From the Klan's inception, "cross burnings have been used to communicate both threats of violence and messages of shared ideology."
Banning cross burning, which such action is designed to intimidate rather than convey a political message, is constitutional, O'Connor said.
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
While American troops have begun their attack on Baghdad, the coalition forces still have not taken any of Iraq's major cities.They have thus far controlled desert and agricultural land, but the cities have been bypassed. There has been fear of the casualties urban fighting would inflict on all sides.
American military sources suggest that there is a plan for taking the modern city of Baghdad via its major thoroughfares, avoiding the dense and dangerous old city. But it is nonetheless a gamble to leave the other cities behind, as they remain a threat to the long line of communications from Kuwait. Doing so represents a bet that Baghdad will be taken quickly, and when that happens that the regime will collapse across the country.
Thus Basra and the other bypassed cities remain under Iraqi control. But of which Iraqis? State or municipal authorities? The military command? Party militants? [...]
This chaos is the predictable consequence of the allied attack. Create a battlefield and destroy existing structures of government, and this is what happens. The allies did not seriously prepare for this development because the absurd ideological preconceptions of American planners, and listening to the dreams and illusions of Iraqi exile politicians, had convinced them that the invading army would be welcomed by happy crowds, civic structures still intact. [...]
One of the many curious things President George W. Bush is quoted as saying, this time in Bob Woodward's book, "Bush at War," is that U.S. strategy in Afghanistan "is to create chaos, to create a vacuum." Out of the chaos and vacuum, good would come. This echoes the Trotskyist belief in the constructive effect of "permanent revolution."
It has another resonance as well, an apocalyptic religious one, of interest as the president is said by some to see his presidency within the context of the biblical narrative of the end of days. He certainly thinks of the United States as the vessel of mankind's salvation.
Woodward ends his book with another quotation from the president, uncomfortably apposite: "We will export death and violence to the four corners of the Earth in defense of our great nation."
Europe is trapped by complacency and an all too human desire for oblivious contentment, says a leading French philosopher. This helps ensure the success of the nihilistic terror and extremist ideology exemplified by al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. Nobody wants war – but genocide is worse than war....Glucksman: [W]hat do extremist ideologies like the communism or Nazism of yesteryear and the Islamism of today have in common?... [T]he common characteristic is nihilism.
The root element is the attitude that anything goes, particularly when with regard to ordinary people: I can do whatever I want, without scruples. Goehring put it like this: my consciousness is Adolf Hitler. Bolsheviks said: man is made of iron. And the Islamists whom I visited in Algeria said that you have the right to kill little Muslim children, in order to save them....
Religion is only the cloth, the excuse and the justification. What is essential is the practice....
At the opening of the University of Salamanca, one General Millán Astray shouted Viva la Morte. Miguel de Unamuno, who was in charge of the occasion, was a conservative, the protégé of Franco’s wife, a philosopher of the right. He reproved the general for this impermissible, unacceptable statement, and added: "You, my general who has lost an eye in the war, are a handicapped man not because you have lost an eye but because you have shouted ‘Long live death’".
It is precisely this slogan which you hear from Islamic suicide bombers....
Interviewer: The current threat from militant Islamism is not coming from Europe, and Europeans seem to have a problem in perceiving this threat as a threat to their own interests. Is that why it seems so difficult to summon up the necessary resistance?
Glucksman: It is not only Islamism: it is nihilism, in its practical manifestation of laying waste to the civilian population. The same approach was to be found in the case of the Russian army when it flattened Grozny, a city of 400,000, and the first capital to be razed to the ground since Hitler’s destruction of Warsaw in 1944. This destructive impulse is not in the nature of Islam; this impulse is integral to the nature of civilisation and it can destroy any civilisation.
Interviewer: But these events are not perceived as being played out in central Europe, but in far away and strange locations.
Glucksman: It has happened in central Europe too – with Milosevic and his ethnic cleansing, which is also a nihilist activity.
Interviewer: Nevertheless, for a long time now, Germany and France have shied away from taking on any responsibility in such situations.... Everything which falls outside these boundaries, like Chechnya or the Middle East, really shouldn’t bother us.
Glucksman: Yes, exactly: but this is wrong. This is exactly the complacency, the crime of complacency, which once made Hitler possible. This complacency has cost us about 50 million lives. It also worked well for Stalin. ‘Better red than dead!’ Pacifism is a kind of complacency. And this complacency continues with Milosevic, with terrorism, with Saddam Hussein; people just want to sleep.
Ali Hassan al-Majid, one of the most brutal members of President Saddam Hussein's inner circle, was apparently killed by an airstrike on his house in Basra, British officials said Monday. He had been dubbed "Chemical Ali" by opponents for ordering a 1988 poison gas attack that killed thousands of Kurds.Maj. Andrew Jackson of the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment told The Associated Press that his superiors had reported the death of the man who was Saddam's first cousin, entrusted with defending southern Iraq against invading coalition forces.
Jackson said the apparent discovery of al-Majid's body was one of the reasons the British decided to move infantry into Basra, because they hoped that resistance in the southern Iraqi city might crumble with the top leadership gone.
"The regime is finished. It is over, and liberation is here," said Group Capt. Al Lockwood, spokesman for British forces in the Gulf. "The leadership is now gone in southern Iraq."
The power-sharing assembly that is the centerpiece of the agreement was suspended in October over allegations of I.R.A. spying. But the underlying problem that has continually halted progress in putting the new government permanently in place has been the clandestine guerrilla army's refusal to dismantle its arsenal and declare its war with the British and Ulster's Protestant population at an end.Sinn Fein has demanded action first on its concerns, like gaining more control of policing and the administration of justice, the further scaling down of the British military presence and the guarantee of human rights and equality for the Catholic minority. It also seeks an offer of some form of amnesty to I.R.A. members abroad who want to return to Northern Ireland without fear of prosecution on charges they consider outdated and politically inspired. [...]
The visit tomorrow will be the first to Northern Ireland for Mr. Bush. President Clinton played a significant role in the negotiations that led to the agreement, and he made three high profile trips to the province.
Mr. Trimble said today that he did not suspect Mr. Bush of any less commitment to Northern Ireland.
"He has kept in touch with the situation here," he told the BBC on Saturday. "He does things in a different way to Bill Clinton, but that doesn't mean he takes less interest or will be less effective. President Clinton had a sentimental attachment to Irish republicanism, but that doesn't mean that he was in any way weak on the principles of democracy."
If concern is growing that ideological convictions at the Defense Department resulted in costly miscalculations regarding the war in Iraq, even greater alarm is warranted by glaring missteps in the preparation for what comes after the war.Take, for instance, the political profile of the man tapped to lead the occupation, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner.
Garner's stated opinions on Middle Eastern politics make him singularly unsuitable for the indescribably sensitive task of being the first U.S. administrator of a large Arab country. In 2000, Garner signed a statement backing Israel's hard-line tactics in enforcing the occupation of the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
This statement, which was organized by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a think tank close to the Israeli far right, praised the Israel Defense Forces' "remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of a Palestinian Authority" and advised the strongest possible American support.
Anyone with the slightest knowledge of Arab politics knows that any association between an American occupation of Iraq and Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands poses great danger. It is guaranteed to breed deep resentment and bitter opposition, especially as U.S. checkpoints in Iraq begin to look increasingly like those in the West Bank.
Persistent reports in the British and American press suggest that Garner will be in charge of 23 ministries, each headed by an American with Iraqi advisors. Not only will this look and feel like a colonial administration, the identity of some of the Iraqi advisors rings alarms.
Most disturbing is the role apparently planned for Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, a U.S.-created opposition group based in London with no visible presence or support in Iraq. He is extremely popular with the neoconservatives in and around the administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
In the Middle East, however, Chalabi is also known for swindling tens of millions of dollars from a bank he headed in Jordan. In April 1992, he was sentenced in absentia to 22 years' hard labor on 31 charges of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds and speculation with the Jordanian dinar. For many months this man has been demanding that Washington appoint him prime minister of Iraq. It is cold comfort indeed to learn that he will be Garner's "advisor" at a ministry of finance.
American forces took control of a major presidential palace on the banks of the Tigris River in Baghdad early this morning in the strongest coalition thrust yet into the city. Explosions thundered and thick smoke covered portions of Baghdad as the Americans entered the city center in the early hours.As many as 70 tanks and 60 Bradley fighting vehicles rolled down the wide streets as A-10 Thunderbolt planes, nicknamed the Warthog, and pilotless drones flew over Baghdad unchallenged.
There were reports of heavy machine fire and mortars during fighting around the presidential compound. American commanders on the ground said that three army battalions would stay in the city center, and not leave as happened in an initial lighter raid on Saturday.
Reuters reported that two American soldiers and two journalists were killed and 15 people were wounded today in an Iraqi attack on a tactical operations center established by the Third Infantry Division, Second Brigade on the outskirts of Baghdad.
"Some sort of a rocket hit near the Second Brigade's tactical operation center south of the city," Major Michael Birmingham, chief public affairs officer for the Third Infantry, told Reuters.
"Obviously, I would have been happier if Canada had not been conquered in the past by the English, if this part of North America had remained French, but you can't rewrite history."
-- Jean Chretien Le Monde, Dec. 1, 1994Well, doesn't that give us some insight into the mind and machinations of one Prime Minister Jean Chretien.
But, as we look at how Chretien has snubbed our American neighbours at a time when they need our support most, maybe Chretien is trying to rewrite history.
Perhaps he's pretending he really is a man of some consequence in the world, and part of his gameplan to show that is to stick Americans in the eyes. For, in another part of that incredible interview he gave to the prestigious Paris newspaper Le Monde, Chretien talked about how French-Canadians had been "humiliated" by the English and how today they see themselves as "martyrs."
Then he boasted about how he was getting his own back on the supposed English establishment and power base. [...]
Chretien is something of a little man but, by God, the Americans aren't going to tell him what to do. He's running this country and he's going to do exactly what he wants to do.
That's even if, by undermining our largest trading partner and they decide to retaliate, he has to take this country with him.
He's standing with his partner in perfidy, one Jacques Chirac, president of France, who just may turn out to be a bigger villain than most of us already think he is. [...]
There may be yet another aspect to Chretien's strange behaviour. National Post columnist Diane Francis, who, in another era was one of the Calgary Sun's most popular columnists, recently wrote Chretien had become a "dupe" of Jacques Chirac, and that Chirac was in the pocket of Saddam Hussein because France's largest corporation, TotalFinaElf has huge interests in Iraq's oilfields. Interests that will be blown apart if Saddam is toppled, and U.S. and British oil companies given concessions by a grateful people.
Now for more intrigue: Francis says Total's biggest single shareholder is Montreal's Paul Desmarais, whose youngest son is married to Chretien's daughter. Desmarais Sr., is also a director of Total, along with other ranking members of France's establishment. It's hard to believe the Desmarais/Chretien families haven't discussed their investments in Total, and Total's investments in Saddam's Iraq.
All above board, of course.
Yet to suspicious minds, the plot thickens -- and gets scarier by the day.
Nobel peace prize laureate Elie Wiesel said the war on Iraq is justified and blamed unnamed European countries for failing to prevent it through pressuring President Saddam Hussein."If some European countries put as much pressure on Saddam Hussein as on (US President George W.) Bush, there would have been no war," he told a press conference in Montreal.
"Saddam Hussein had to be disarmed (and) there were no other means," said the Nazi concentration camp survivor and author who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1986 for his message "of peace, atonement and human dignity."
U.S. soldiers evacuated an Iraqi military compound on Sunday after tests by a mobile laboratory confirmed evidence of sarin nerve gas. More than a dozen soldiers of the Army's 101st Airborne Division had been sent earlier for chemical weapons decontamination after they exhibited symptoms of possible exposure to nerve agents.The evacuation of dozens of soldiers Sunday night followed a day of tests for the nerve agent that came back positive, then negative. Additional tests Sunday night by an Army Fox mobile nuclear, biological and chemical detection laboratory confirmed the existence of sarin.
Sgt. Todd Ruggles, a biochemical expert attached to the 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne said, "I was right" that chemical agents Iraq has denied having were present.
In addition to the soldiers sent for decontamination, a Knight Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman and two Iraqi prisoners of war also were hosed down with water and bleach.
U.S. soldiers found the suspect chemicals at two sites: an agricultural warehouse containing 55-gallon chemical drums and a military compound, which soldiers had begun searching on Saturday. The soldiers also found hundreds of gas masks and chemical suits at the military complex, along with large numbers of mortar and artillery rounds.
This is the way Machiavelli, the cynical Florentine philosopher of politics and power, put it in "The Prince" in 1513:"Everyone sees what you seem to be, few perceive what you are; and those few don't dare oppose the general opinion, which has the majesty of the government backing it up. ... The masses are always impressed by appearances and by the outcome of an event -- and in the world there are only masses. The few have no place there when the many crowd together."
Few dare to oppose now, almost 500 years later. Even a clever descendant of Machiavelli's people, Madonna, herself a philosopher of daring, has decided the risk of opposition or the appearance of opposition is just too risky with American troops in the field. Last Tuesday, demonstrating that she is no Dixie Chick, the former Madonna Louise Ciccone announced that she was withdrawing an anti-war video to promote her song "American Life."
"It was filmed before the war started, and I do not believe it is appropriate to air it at this time," she said. "Due to the volatile state of the world and out of sensitivity and respect for our armed forces, who I support and pray for, I do not want to risk offending anyone who might misinterpret the meaning of this video."
Political correctness has turned sharply right, hasn't it? I'm sure Madonna was not at all influenced by the ongoing radio boycott of the Dixie Chicks, whose lead singer, Natalie Maines, had said she was ashamed to be from the same state as President Bush. That would be Texas. The chick quickly apologized, but it may have been too late. The new PC warriors are taking names.
The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible. But another journalist, Thomas Friedman (not part of the group), is skeptical [...]Some things are true even if George Bush believes them, [Tom] Friedman says with a smile. And after September 11, it's impossible to tell Bush to drop it, ignore it. There was a certain basic justice in the overall American feeling that told the Arab world: we left you alone for a long time, you played with matches and in the end we were burned. So we're not going to leave you alone any longer. [...]
This is not an illegitimate war, Friedman says. But it is a very presumptuous war. You need a great deal of presumption to believe that you can rebuild a country half a world from home. But if such a presumptuous war is to have a chance, it needs international support. That international legitimacy is essential so you will have enough time and space to execute your presumptuous project. But George Bush didn't have the patience to glean international support. He gambled that the war would justify itself, that we would go in fast and conquer fast and that the Iraqis would greet us with rice and the war would thus be self-justifying. That did not happen. Maybe it will happen next week, but in the meantime it did not happen.
When I think about what is going to happen, I break into a sweat, Friedman says. I see us being forced to impose a siege on Baghdad. And I know what kind of insanity a siege on Baghdad can unleash. The thought of house-to-house combat in Baghdad without international legitimacy makes me lose my appetite. I see American embassies burning. I see windows of American businesses shattered. I see how the Iraqi resistance to America connects to the general Arab resistance to America and the worldwide resistance to America. The thought of what could happen is eating me up.
What George Bush did, Friedman says, is to show us a splendid mahogany table: the new democratic Iraq. But when you turn the table over, you see that it has only one leg. This war is resting on one leg. But on the other hand, anyone who thinks he can defeat George Bush had better think again. Bush will never give in. That's not what he's made of. Believe me, you don't want to be next to this guy when he thinks he's being backed into a corner. I don't suggest that anyone who holds his life dear mess with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush.
Is the Iraq war the great neoconservative war? It's the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It's the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.
Still, it's not all that simple, Friedman retracts. It's not some fantasy the neoconservatives invented. It's not that 25 people hijacked America. You don't take such a great nation into such a great adventure with Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard and another five or six influential columnists. In the final analysis, what fomented the war is America's over-reaction to September 11. The genuine sense of anxiety that spread in America after September 11. It is not only the neoconservatives who led us to the outskirts of Baghdad. What led us to the outskirts of Baghdad is a very American combination of anxiety and hubris.
The war in Iraq is still on, but it's not too early to think about what the United States should do to win the peace that will follow. There may be difficult days ahead, but we are confident in the rightness of our cause, the skill of our soldiers and the certainty of our victory.Last December we traveled to northern Iraq and visited key allies in the Middle East. Nearly every leader we met stressed the importance of gaining international legitimacy for our efforts in Iraq. The best way to build such legitimacy is by involving our key allies and international organizations -- starting with the United Nations -- in securing and rebuilding Iraq.
Yes, our decision to use force in Iraq produced deep divisions among our Security Council allies. Nonetheless, America need not and cannot take sole responsibility for the challenges of a postwar Iraq. And we must not allow the U.N. Security Council and our Atlantic allies to become casualties of war. There are five main reasons for this. [...]
In short, we must internationalize our policies for rebuilding a postwar Iraq, even as we retain full control on the security side, ideally with the involvement of NATO, the EU and countries in the region. The best way to do that is through a new U.N. resolution authorizing the necessary security, humanitarian, reconstruction and political missions in a post-conflict Iraq.
As we were told by our allies in the region in December and in subsequent meetings, securing the United Nations' endorsement would give political cover to leaders from allied countries whose people oppose the war, allowing them to justify their participation -- including financial participation -- in building the peace. It also would open the door to NATO, the European Union and the World Bank.
Without the United Nations, it would be difficult for governments and international organizations to buck strong public opposition and join the effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq.
By refusing to disarm, a defiant Saddam Hussein made the fateful choice between war and peace. We must make sure that in winning the war, we also win the peace.
Pentagon officials said repeatedly last week that the military wants to turn the country over to the Iraqis in stages, as soon as possible. Some of them say they need only six months to build a democracy. But officials at the CIA and State believe there is no way the U.S. can even begin to create a stable democracy in six months in a country that has never had one. CIA officials believe a rush to elections might result in the kind of winner—let's say a radical Islamist party—that the U.S. might be forced to reject outright, a distinctly undemocratic precedent. The Pentagon hard-liners think this attitude underestimates the Iraqi people and note that some former Soviet-bloc countries made the transition in a matter of months.Looking for reinforcements, Powell was in Europe last week, feeling out allies to see if they might lend a hand with the postwar mess. British Prime Minister Tony Blair favors using the U.N. to help with humanitarian and reconstruction projects, partly as a way to bring the U.S. and Europe together again after the damaging breach at the Security Council last month. When Blair and Bush meet early this week in Belfast, Blair will echo Powell's line and push the President to seek international help. But the hard-liners are adamantly opposed, saying the U.N. will only make things more expensive and complicated. Besides, they say, if you weren't with us on the takeoff, you don't deserve to be there for the landing.
But the most important debate of all is one that is only being hinted at. The fight about postwar Iraq is also a fight about whether and where Bush will again deploy troops to root out terrorism and transplant democracy. Military officials report that using force against Syria or Iran once Iraq is stabilized is a "live issue" in Bushland. That idea gives the State Department and allies such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt rolling heart attacks. "The camps are dividing on the question of will we push for a vision of a new democratic Middle East, or will we listen to the lobbying of some of the countries in the region," says Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "State wants to keep as many people on our side as possible, but the Defense Department is saying, 'Look, this is about a big, bold vision, and we're willing to push it forward.'"
No one can say this Bush lacks the vision thing, which may be a pretty good indicator of where he falls in the great Powell-Rumsfeld debate. In just over two years in office, the President has displayed a preference for the bold stroke—and there may well be others in the offing.
NEAR BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The first U.S. military planes landed at Baghdad's international airport Sunday night as U.S. forces tightened their control over the Iraqi capital, U.S. military officials said.So, what, four days to bring in 4th ID, if they want to?Army officials told CNN's Walter Rodgers that two C-130s and a C-117 cargo planes were flying into the city under the cover of darkness, two days after U.S. troops captured the facility.
U.S. Marines and Army forces control all roads into and out of Baghdad, encircling the city, according to Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
A review of more than 240 scientific studies has shown that today's temperatures are neither the warmest over the past millennium, nor are they producing the most extreme weather - in stark contrast to the claims of the environmentalists.None of this changes the fact that, by rejecting Kyoto, President Bush showed his unilateral contempt for our international partners.The review, carried out by a team from Harvard University, examined the findings of studies of so-called "temperature proxies" such as tree rings, ice cores and historical accounts which allow scientists to estimate temperatures prevailing at sites around the world.
The findings prove that the world experienced a Medieval Warm Period between the ninth and 14th centuries with global temperatures significantly higher even than today.
They also confirm claims that a Little Ice Age set in around 1300, during which the world cooled dramatically. Since 1900, the world has begun to warm up again - but has still to reach the balmy temperatures of the Middle Ages.
The timing of the end of the Little Ice Age is especially significant, as it implies that the records used by climate scientists date from a time when the Earth was relatively cold, thereby exaggerating the significance of today's temperature rise.
NBC News correspondent David Bloom, who has been reporting on the war from the Iraqi desert, collapsed Sunday and died from a blood clot, the network said.The 39-year-old anchor of the weekend "Today" show was traveling with troops about 25 miles south of Baghdad when he suddenly collapsed, said Allison Gollust, a spokeswoman for NBC News.
He was airlifted to a nearby field medical unit, where he was pronounced dead from a pulmonary embolism, Gollust said. She said his death was not combat related.
Bloom lived in the New York area with his wife, Melanie, and three daughters. He had been on assignment in Iraq for several weeks, reporting from the middle of desert sand storms and while columns of military vehicles rumbled toward Baghdad.
In this major work of popular history and scholarship, acclaimed historian and biographer Roy Morris, Jr., tells the extraordinary story of how, in America's centennial year, the presidency was stolen, the Civil War was almost reignited, and black Americans were consigned to nearly ninety years of legalized segregation in the South.The bitter 1876 contest between Ohio Republican governor Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democratic governor Samuel J. Tilden is the most sensational, ethically sordid, and legally questionable presidential election in American history. The first since Lincoln's in 1860 in which the Democrats had a real chance of recapturing the White House, the election was in some ways the last battle of the Civil War, as the two parties fought to preserve or overturn what had been decided by armies just eleven years earlier.
Riding a wave of popular revulsion at the numerous scandals of the Grant administration and a sluggish economy, Tilden received some 260,000 more votes than his opponent. But contested returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina ultimately led to Hayes's being declared the winner by a specially created, Republican-dominated Electoral Commission after four tense months of political intrigue and threats of violence. President Grant took the threats seriously: he ordered armed federal troops into the streets of Washington to keep the peace.
Morris brings to life all the colorful personalities and high drama of this most remarkable -- and largely forgotten -- election. He presents vivid portraits of the bachelor lawyer Tilden, a wealthy New York sophisticate whose passion for clean government propelled him to the very brink of the presidency, and of Hayes, a family man whose midwestern simplicity masked a cunning political mind. We travel to Philadelphia, where the Centennial Exhibition celebrated America's industrial might and democratic ideals, and to the nation's heartland, where Republicans waged a cynical but effective "bloody shirt" campaign to tar the Demo-crats, once again, as the party of disunion and rebellion.
Morris dramatically recreates the suspenseful events of election night, when both candidates went to bed believing Tilden had won, and a one-legged former Union army general, "Devil Dan" Sickles, stumped into Republican headquarters and hastily improvised a devious plan to subvert the election in the three disputed southern states. We watch Hayes outmaneuver the curiously passive Tilden and his supporters in the days following the election, and witness the late-night backroom maneuvering of party leaders in the nation's capital, where democracy itself was ultimately subverted and the will of the people thwarted.
Fraud of the Century presents compelling evidence that fraud by Republican vote-counters in the three southern states, and especially in Louisiana, robbed Tilden of the presidency. It is at once a masterful example of political reporting and an absorbing read.
Today, 120 of 192 countries in the world are democracies. These 120 countries all have some popularly contested elections and some beginnings, at least, of the rule of law.That is an amazing change in the lifetime of many individuals now still living. Nothing like that has ever happened in world history. Needless to say, American had something to do with this, both in helping to win World War I, in prevailing, along with Britain, in World War II, and eventually prevailing in the Cold War.
Along the way, a lot of people said very cynically at various times that the Germans, Japanese, Russians or those with a Chinese Confucian background would never be able to run democracies. It took some help, but the Germans, Japanese and now even the Russians and Taiwanese seem to have figured it out.
In the Muslim world, outside the 22 Arab states, which have no democracies, there are some reasonably well-governed states that are moderating and changing, such as Bahrain.
Of the 24 Muslim-predominant non-Arab states, about half are democracies. They include some of the poorest countries in the world, such as Bangladesh and Mali. Nearly 200 million Muslims live in a democracy in India. Outside of one province, they are generally at peace with their Hindu neighbors.
There is a special problem in the Middle East, however. Outside of Israel and Turkey, there are essentially no democracies. Rather, there are two types of governments: pathological predators and vulnerable autocrats. This is not a good mix. [...]
Clearly, the terror war is never going to go away until we change the face of the Middle East, which is what we are beginning to do in Iraq. That is a tall order. But it's not as tall an order as what we already have accomplished in the previous world wars.
Change remains to be undertaken in that one part of the world that historically has not had democracy, which has reacted angrily against intrusions from the outside - the Arab Middle East. [...]
This war, like the world wars of the past, is not a war of us against them. It is not a war between countries. It is a war of freedom against tyranny.
America has to convince the people of the Middle East that we are on their side, just as we convinced Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov that we were on their side. This will take time. It will be difficult.
We understand we are making the terrorists, dictators and autocrats nervous. We want them to be nervous. We want them to realize that America is on the march, and we are on the side of those whom they most fear - their own people.
Street protests against American and British military action in Iraq have escalated into attacks by Muslim youths on Jewish demonstrators, sparking fears of a new wave of anti-Semitism across France.The French government was forced to appeal for calm after protesters, some of them carrying pictures of Saddam Hussein, burned the Israeli flag and turned on Jewish students, attacking one of them with an iron bar, during a series of antiwar rallies.
Officials fear that antiwar sentiment, supported by President Jacques Chirac, may be running out of control and could ignite widespread violence. Banners at recent demonstrations have shown the Star of David intertwined with a Nazi swastika, while protesters shouted: "Vive Chirac. Stop the Jews."
"LOOK, there go our planes."Nawal Ali smiles widely and raises calloused hands to the sky, pointing out the vapour trail of a B-52 bomber heading towards the Iraqi cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. "I think it must be a Kurdish God who has sent the US and the UK to save us," says Ali, a 36-year-old mother of eight children and two grandchildren. "I pray for the Americans every night and would sacrifice myself for them."
Support for the US-led war in Iraq has reached hysterical proportions in this ragged little township on the outskirts of Erbil, in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. [...]
Ali and her family now live in a one-room hut made of mud and concrete bricks.
There is a mood of hope in the camp that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein will give Kurdish families a chance to return to their former homes.
"I can't wait to return," says Fatah. "Kirkuk is my destiny. It is the Jerusalem of the Kurds."
Yet the looming battle for Kirkuk is shaping up as one of the more unpredictable of the war. The potential for inter-ethnic conflict, complicated by the wary eye of Turkey, could create long-term problems.
Plans for a triumphant homecoming by Kirkuk exiles worry human rights groups, which fear civil war once the Iraq regime has been ousted. Reprisal attacks are possible if Kurdish families find Arabs living on their land and in their homes.
With John F. Kennedy...civilian power at the Defense Department came to its apogee. The combination of an inexperienced president and a take-charge secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, led to a total shake-up. The secretary imported a coterie of hard-driving academics--including two Harvard law professors, John McNaughton and Adam Yarmolinsky--to help him take effective operational control of the sprawling defense establishment.For the first time, the office of the secretary had the requisite staff and intellectual capacity to wrest military decision-making from the services. Under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, civilian judgment supplanted battle-tested precedent, and the United States carried out the eminently logical but tactically catastrophic escalation in Vietnam.
In the decades after, presidents tended to be hands-off and the relative power of the civilians in the Pentagon ebbed. The Powell doctrine of overwhelming force came to hold sway, and in the 1991 Persian Gulf war the military called the shots. Political control was not relinquished--Dick Cheney, then the secretary of defense, fired the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Mike Dugan, for talking out of turn--but for the most part traditional command relations resumed.
Until now. The current administration bears an uncanny resemblance to that of John F. Kennedy: an inexperienced, somewhat detached president and a decisive, high-profile secretary of defense have teamed to once again assume operational control. Donald Rumsfeld's defense intellectuals--an oxymoron akin to "military music"--have done precisely what Robert McNamara's whiz kids did in 1961: substitute their theoretical concepts for traditional doctrine. The ideological slant is different--this time it's neoconservatism--but the effect on the decision-making process is the same.
History rarely repeats itself, and the failures of Vietnam do not necessarily mean today's transition is unwise or unworkable. What we saw last week, however, was that this time the men with the stars on their shoulders aren't going to take it sitting down.
Not since Michael Dukakis rode around in a tank has Massachusetts created such a stir of grass-roots bewilderment. In a radical departure from the status quo, the high school baseball teams of the Bay State are switching back to wooden bats after decades of using the more juiced-up metal bats that are almost universal in schools across the nation. In the ensuing furor, it is clear far more is at stake than a retreat from the modern to the antique, from the ping to the crack of the bat. The change, fiercely controversial, amounts to a batting revolution of sorts. Wooden bats remain a tradition these days only in the major leagues and its affiliates.
How and when, it seems worth asking, will the United States and its allies know they have won the Iraqi war? [...]If the Iraqi dictator has indeed survived so far, he might well survive a little longer. He might even slip out of the encirclement of Baghdad, making his way through the chaos of defeat to try to mount a long, costly underground campaign against first the American occupiers of the city and then the new Iraqi government there. Certainly he could find shelter in any of several Arab countries hostile to the allied forces' invasion, if not enamored of the old government.
To envision the potential, one need only look a few hundred miles west. The Israelis have "won" every war against Islamic foes, but they are still engaged, after many decades, in combat against shadowy opposition.
In that sense, it is hardly "irrelevant" whether Mr. Hussein lives to fight another day, in another way. As has already been demonstrated in the current war, many Iraqis who believe
A contemporary historian and author of 19 books (6 of which have been banned), [Emadeddin Baghi] knows that history moves slowly -- and that the path to freedom sometimes takes detours, even detours behind bars. ''We went to prison, the newspapers were all closed down -- some might judge everything we're doing a failure,'' he said. ''But from the beginning, I assumed the democratic procedure has to progress millimeter by millimeter. Those who are tired and disappointed, they expected kilometers.''Kilometer democratization is attainable in one of two ways -- through revolution or through invasion, like the one now under way in Iraq. Some in the Bush administration have suggested that Iraq is just the first of any number of Middle Eastern countries that might soon experience ''regime change'' one way or another. Policy makers have billed the war in Iraq as a grand opportunity not only to topple a murderous dictatorship and eradicate weapons of mass destruction but also to create a ''free Baghdad that becomes a magnet for Arab democrats everywhere,'' in the words of one former consultant to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. The administration has come around not only to nation-building, it would seem, but also to region-building. Iranians, who are not Arabs but are one of the region's biggest powers, know where they fit on the Bush axis of good and evil, and they are anxiously wondering whether they are the next target.
There are plenty of university students across Iran who will say in whispers that they hope Iran is next on America's democratization hit list. But delve a little deeper, and they'll admit it's a pipe dream -- that no matter how much Iranians may hate the regime oppressing them, if they saw American soldiers advancing across the Iranian border, they would take up arms to defend their soil and their history.
Iranians judge American intentions today through the lens of history, and thus with deep suspicion. Those who lived through the war with Iraq in the 1980's and watched Saddam's chemical weapons incinerating and suffocating their families remember well that it was America and the West that supplied those chemicals. Older Iranians remember how America plotted what amounted to a coup in 1953 against their most progressive political leader, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, and eventually installed the shah. [...]
To many, Khatami is Iran's Mikhail Gorbachev, a transitional figure on the way to the real future. Just as Gorbachev could not dismantle the institutions of Communism, Khatami, they say, is not the man who can unlock the chains of enforced religion imprisoning the country.
The students may wave banners and rally to the defense of older, more cautious reformers like Baghi, Ganji and Aghajari, the makers of the revolution whom some students now refer to as ''our reformed sinners.'' But the students themselves have no psychological block against stating the obvious -- that religion must be removed from government, that you can't have half a democracy. While Baghi concedes that ''there should be a separation between religion and the state,'' his statement comes with a big but: ''But in Iran, religion is part of people's way of thinking. Sometimes it occurs to me there's an inborn pattern in people's minds which is mainly formed by religious concepts.''
Baghi's millimeter evolution comes down to the will of the people. ''If the majority of people are Muslim -- and if and only if they want an Islamic state -- the president of the country should be a person who knows about Islamic codes,'' he said. ''This person could then be the president and supreme leader at the same time. But he should be elected every four years by the direct vote.'' The students know, however, that under the present conditions, the hard-liners would never allow such a vote to take place. And that's where the unfettered students may decide to pick up the mantle of change.
Taxi drivers, shopkeepers, students and professors are all quick to tell a visitor that Iran is not like the rest of the Middle East. In Arab countries, the governments are allies of the United States, and the people are anti-American. But in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the government may be anti-American, but the people have a thing for America. And it drives the hard-liners mad. In November, Abbas Abdi, famous for helping to lead the charge of radical students who scaled the American Embassy walls and so begin the 444-day hostage crisis, was arrested. The charges? Spying for foreigners. He had helped to conduct a Gallup poll commissioned by a parliamentary committee, and the ruling clerics didn't like the results. Nearly 75 percent of those polled favored dialogue with the United States, and 46 percent said they felt that American policy toward Iran was ''to some extent correct.''
As radical and impatient for democracy as the students are, however, most of them do not want to lead Iran into another bloody revolution. I asked Mehdi Aminzadeh, a 25-year-old student leader studying civil engineering, if there was anything brewing in Iran equivalent to Yugoslavia's Otpor, or ''resistance'' -- a grass-roots movement spread by Serbian youth that defeated the dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic. (One of the opposition satellite television channels that are beamed into Iran by the Iranian diaspora in California constantly replays the chronicles of Milosevic's destruction of Yugoslavia and Otpor's destruction of Milosevic, as if trying to suggest a script for the students to follow.) No, he said. For now there is no social movement or political party tough enough and well financed enough to organize such mass demonstrations.
As for American designs to democratize the Middle East, the students are intrigued but wary. They are puzzled by Bush's religious and ideological rhetoric. ''We're trying to move from ideology to modernity, and Bush is moving from modernity to ideology,'' one student leader told me. The Bush administration's Middle East adventure, they say, is for Israel's benefit, and for the economic and oil interests of the United States. Bush's speeches about defending human rights and promoting democracy around the world resound in their ears like superpower hypocrisy.
The State Department has been upset about how the Arab media have been portraying the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Personally, I don't see what the problem is. As far as I can tell from watching the Arab satellite networks there's only a one-word, actually just a one-letter, difference in how they report the war and how U.S. networks report it. CNN calls it "America's war in Iraq," and Arab television calls it "America's war on Iraq."What a difference a letter makes. As I have traveled around the Arab world watching this war, I've been thinking a lot about that one letter. It contains an important message for President Bush: Beware of hijackers.
Saddam Hussein's regime will soon be finished, and the moment for building the peace will be upon us. As soon as it arrives, there will be people who will try to hijack this peace and turn it to their own ends. Mr. Bush must be ready to fend off these hijackers...
Shortly after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld issued a stark warning to Iran and Syria last week, declaring that any "hostile acts" they committed on behalf of Iraq might prompt severe consequences, one of President Bush's closest aides stepped into the Oval Office to warn him that his unpredictable defense secretary had just raised the specter of a broader confrontation.Mr. Bush smiled a moment at the latest example of Mr. Rumsfeld's brazenness, recalled the aide. Then he said one word--"Good"--and went back to work.
Michael Kelly was a lucky guy.When he stumbled upon a column of Iraqi troops during Desert Storm, they surrendered to him, piling into his car with their white flags.
He was the only reporter to find passion in the Dukakis campaign; he met his future wife, Max Greenberg, a beguiling CBS producer, on the bus.
Michael always seemed to be in the right place at the right time to get the best quote and the best story, the best jobs and the best life.
"I've had one good break after another," he told The Boston Globe, in an interview last year about how he'd revived The Atlantic Monthly in just two years as its editor. Cruising in his 1966 baby blue Mustang convertible, he said he'd had "a long series of lucky breaks and good jobs and stories and a life I like living." [...]
He liked to say he'd had "an unusually seamless life." He was crazy about his parents, Tom and Marguerite, and wanted to become a reporter because his dad had been a reporter at The Washington Daily News. [...]
He said war reporters were people "who did not want to get in harm's way but merely close enough to record the fate of those who did."
But he put himself in harm's way because he wanted to go back to Baghdad and see America kick out Saddam. "Tyranny truly is a horror. . . . It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face."
Michael was the first American reporter to die in Iraq, when the Army Humvee he was riding in came under Iraqi fire and rolled into a canal south of Baghdad airport.
At an impromptu wake at his parents' house on Capitol Hill Friday, Marguerite Kelly, who writes a Washington Post column about raising children, put out her usual spread of food. And Tom told friends his son was lucky: He had had the best possible life for a journalist and died well, better than full of tubes in a hospital somewhere.
Michael died for two things he believed in: Journalism and ridding the world of jackboots.
U.S. officials tell NBC News they believe an overnight airstrike has killed the man known as "Chemical Ali," a cousin of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and commander of Iraq's southern front. Meanwhile, leaders of the ruling Baath Party in Iraq's second city Basra fear public reprisals and were seeking to negotiate a surrender to British military forces besieging the city, a pan-Arab newspaper reported.MILITARY SOURCES told NBC News that bomb damage assessments and other intelligence indicate that the strike killed Ali Hassan al-Majeed and others, although his death has yet to be formally confirmed on the ground.
“The strike was part of an ongoing effort to end Saddam Hussein’s regime. Ali is a member of the Iraqi president’s inner circle,” U.S. Central Command said in a statement announcing the attack on the home of Majeed.
Majeed earned his nickname for overseeing the use of poison gas against Kurdish villagers in 1988.
The statement said two aircraft had struck Majeed’s home in Basra with laser-guided munitions early on Saturday. [...]
Meanwhile, pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Aswat reported that Baath Party leaders in Basra had passed a message to a Shiite cleric, Mohammed al-Bosslimi, saying they were afraid of reprisals from the citizens of Basra and wanted to arrange a surrender if Baghdad fell.“They are afraid but they say that as soon as Baghdad falls they will surrender,” the newspaper quoted the cleric as saying. It said he had met 12 of the high-ranking leaders of the Baath two days ago.
He said the Baath Party leaders could also surrender if U.S.-led forces entered the city.
“The problem is that the hated party members want to be protected from the anger of the public if they give up their weapons,” al-Bosslimi said.
One colleague, perhaps rather tastelessly, called Saturday morning's US operation in southern Baghdad "the longest drive-by shooting in history".It is not a bad description of what the Americans appear to be calling "Operation Thunder Run".
This was essentially an attention-seeking tactic aimed at both the Iraqis and the international media.
The message, as General Gene Renuart, US Central Command Director of Operations put it, was "to put a bit of an exclamation point that coalition troops were in the vicinity of Baghdad and to demonstrate that, whatever their claims, the Iraqi authorities do not control the situation there".
It certainly grabbed our attention.
What began as a small probe into the southern outskirts of the city suddenly escalated into what some journalists thought was the final push on Baghdad.
Piercing through the fog of war, it quickly became clear that this was no such thing. [...]
The probe or raid was just that. But it did demonstrate the ability of US forces to push into the city.
"I'm afraid this could mean more casualties," one enlisted man told the L.A. Times embedded reporter, after hearing that Maj. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division had relieved and replaced his regimental commander for reportedly being too slow in his drive on Baghdad.Col. Joe W. Dowdy, who had been commander of the 1st Marine Regiment, was reassigned Friday to another position, being replaced by Col. John Toolan, the 1st Marine Division's operations officer.
Toolan hurried to the front and immediately took charge of a speeded-up drive to Baghdad, quickly ordering more troops and more air power to the front lines. By Saturday morning, the Marine forces were racing north on Highway 6 and had begun to enter the capital.
According to the Times report, enlisted men with the 1st Marines were less than happy with the timing of Dowdy’s ouster. Dowdy, a popular commander was cautious with his troops -- reportedly at the expense of speed.
A specter is haunting African studies -- the specter of Gavin Kitching. It's not that he is dead, but the Australia-based scholar left the field two decades ago. So it is more as an avenging spirit that Mr. Kitching has re-emerged with his essay "Why I Gave Up African Studies." Though initially a quiet affair when it was published in a newsletter and then on the Internet two years ago, word of Mr. Kitching's provocative tract has spread until, today, his erstwhile field is buzzing with reaction. This summer the online journal African Studies Quarterly will publish a full-blown debate about the implications of Mr. Kitching's reflections. [...]"In a word," he wrote in his contrarian text, "I gave up African studies because I found it depressing."
The British-born scholar was depressed, he explained, "both by what was happening to African people and by my inability even to explain it adequately, let alone do anything about it." Africa's struggles for independence, which infused the early years of African studies with a spirit of optimism and euphoria, with time produced widespread disillusionment, as the governing classes in the newly independent African states plundered their societies and failed to deliver on their promises of "national liberation."
This trajectory, Mr. Kitching argues, has flummoxed social scientists within African studies. The failure of its practitioners to come to grips with it, and to see Africa's own ruling elites as the principal culprits for the continent's calamitous predicament, he argues, has the field tangled in knots of confusion and moribundity. [...]
The 56-year-old Mr. Kitching is a member of that generation of Africanists whose intellectual and political commitments were forged during Africa's decolonization in the 1960s and '70s. It was a period, as he describes in his manifesto, "when the hope and optimism generated by Africa's independence from colonialism was still in the air." And "like many young intellectual radicals of that period," Mr. Kitching was eager to see the experiments in "'Third Way' African socialism at first hand."
But Mr. Kitching then "lived and worked through the period when optimism and hope in and about Africa were replaced by pessimism and cynicism." The national liberation struggles that swept across the continent resulted in states that proved to be, by and large, less than liberatory. Instead of egalitarian democracies, the colonial elites were replaced by new, African elites who mirrored the political conduct of the European oppressors they did away with.
Mr. Kitching had a "ready-made radical perspective" to make sense of this state of affairs: dependency theory. The new elites -- in Marxian parlance, national bourgeoisies -- were forced to depend, given the structure of the world capitalist system, on the imperial powers for their survival. Their hands were tied.
Still, there were holes in this theory, which was predicated, Mr. Kitching writes, "on the view that these 'dependent' or 'neocolonial' governing elites were agents of 'imperialism' or of 'transnational capital' in Africa. And as the 1970s turned into the '80s and the political fragility and economic involution of so many African states became palpable this notion itself seemed ever more questionable." He began to frame things this way: "If the ruling elites of Africa are seen as managers or agents for Western capitalism or imperialism, one can only say that the latter should get itself some new agents. For the ones it has seem remarkably inefficient."
Mr. Kitching was well aware of the external constraints that circumscribed Africa's room to maneuver -- from oil shocks and attendant economic volatility to cold-war power games that left many African countries awash in armed conflict. But there had to be something more.
This led Mr. Kitching to ask himself a question to which he never found a satisfactory answer. "Why," he writes, "are some governing elites economically progressive and others not? Why are some ruling classes exploitative, selfish, and corrupt but also genuine agents for national economic and social improvement, while others are just exploitative, selfish, and corrupt? . . . Why have African governing elites been particularly prone to behaving in ways which are both economically destructive of the welfare of the people for whom they are supposedly responsible and which have led -- at the extreme -- to forms of state fission (civil war, etc.), collapse or breakdown?"
Did this perspective make Mr. Kitching guilty of blaming Africans for all of their own problems? The accusation maddened him, for it suggested a narrow binary logic -- a polarization, he writes, "between those advocating what were called 'internalist' explanations of Africa's problems and those who continued to favor 'externalist' explanations."
"Of course the vast majority of African people are the victims," he wrote, "often the horrific victims, of Africa's plight, not its perpetrators in any sense, and I, at least, would never wish to deny that." And yet he doesn't want to let African elites off the proverbial hook, for it is their behavior, he maintains, that exacerbates Africa's plight -- and Africanists have paid too little attention to this problem.
Indeed the "prime responsibility for making a decent future for Africa's people," he writes, "lies, has lain for at least 30 years, and from now on always will lie, on the shoulders of the continent's own governing elites. Simply to say that, to keep saying it, and to keep saying why it is true to any and all African people who will listen, this must be the predominant political objective of the Africanist profession at this historical juncture."
There is no doubting the sincerity of the Prime Minister’s faith. But it is accompanied by arrogance. Unluckily for those who believe that Mr Blair will one day convert to the Church of Rome, he occasionally lays claim to the kind of direct relationship to Christ that is more readily associated with the Protestant than with the Roman Catholic Church. He once, in casual conversation, identified the Saviour with New Labour. ‘Jesus was a moderniser,’ he asserted.It may be the Prime Minister’s evangelical confidence that he enjoys a direct, unmediated connection with God which enables him to lay claim to be a Christian while neglecting Church teaching. The area where this disjunction is most apparent today is the war in Iraq. Tony Blair’s apologists, such as Matthew d’Ancona, have yet to explain fully how religious belief can be at the core of the Prime Minister’s conduct of the war at a time when pretty well every Church leader, from the Pope to the Archbishop of Canterbury, has been opposed to it all along.
The great religious figures of our age feel a repugnance for this war because they understand that at the heart of Christianity is a set of moral absolutes or rules: in the context of Iraq the most relevant of these is the biblical injunction ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Tony Blair’s readiness to propound fresh doctrines of his own has been a striking feature of his premiership in all sorts of areas. He has occasionally brooded in public about the balance between natural law and utilitarianism. On two occasions he has even claimed that he is more attracted to the stern and immutable imperatives laid down by natural law than to clumsy calculations about the greatest good of the greatest number. But natural law comes down heavily against this war in Iraq, just as it does against abortion.
Ultimately the argument for invasion is a pragmatic one. It boils down to the utilitarian criterion that coalition forces will ultimately kill fewer Iraqis than will Saddam. The Iraq imbroglio threatens to illustrate in the starkest way possible the pitfalls of utilitarianism: that it is not merely wrong to break with the rules of religion, but doing so can have all sorts of unintended and undesirable consequences.
It is characteristic of those who feel that they have an unmediated line to the Lord that they think that they can make the law themselves. Tony Blair rewrote the rulebook for the Labour party. And this is what he and George Bush are doing in Iraq: their readiness to ignore the procedures of international institutions such as the United Nations is a manifestation of the same sort of arrogance. According to the precepts of natural law, the humility and discipline of religion express a wisdom that is deeper than individual men and women can readily understand. These are boundaries which, as Mr Blair may be about to discover, are impertinent to transgress.
For someone who happily consorts with a brutal dictator who has murdered people for just smiling at the wrong time, George Galloway was curiously frightened by a demure Iraqi Kurdish woman last week."I am very suspicious of you," George Galloway hissed down the phone to Freshta Raper, a 37-year-old exile and mother of one. "I have a gut feeling about you. What do you want to ask me?"
Mrs Raper had spent much of the week trying to catch up with the Left-wing Labour MP to discuss his anti-war pro-Saddam stance. The last 48 hours had, in particular, been frustrating as the MP assiduously avoided her efforts to speak to him.
Her strong view - like those of many Iraqi Kurds - is that the war is necessary as the only way to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein, the tyrant responsible for killing 21 members of her family in 1988 when the regime sprayed chemical weapons on Halabja, the Kurdish area in northern Iraq, killing 5,000.
Mrs Raper finally escaped Iraq in 1991 but only after suffering imprisonment, torture and rape. She has been burnt by one of Saddam's chemical bombs, and she has been anxious to tell Mr Galloway about her experiences with the dictator, whom the MP has visited eight times, once telling him: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability." [...]
"I just want to ask you about Saddam Hussein's human rights record," said Mrs Raper. "As a Western politician, have you ever tried to discuss this in Iraq?"
"I don't have to answer that question," said Mr Galloway defiantly, before adding: "Don't you dare contact me again. If you go to my house again I will have you thrown out and call the police."
The line went dead as Mr Galloway hung up. Perhaps it wasn't so hard to see why Mr Galloway gets on so well with the Butcher of Baghdad.
Many ritual purity practices discussed in the Torah and Talmud can no longer be fulfilled in absence of the Holy Temple. Still, the concepts at their core remain valid for all times and are indeed still influential in Jewish life to this very day.Thus, in this week's Torah reading, we read of the purification process of a woman after giving birth.
It is interesting to note that the actions that produce new life are at once the very same ones that render the person ritually impure. In the value system of Judaism, life -- its creation and maintenance -- is paramount. At first blush, this seems paradoxical. But therein lies a great message.
Ours is an impure world, to put it mildly. Within each of us, there is an inner voice that beckons for our escape and abandonment from this darkness. Monks and the monastic existence are an old story in the human saga. "Stop the world, I want to get off!" is an idea that appeals to many. Who wouldn't love to live in a pristine and pure world, a world where we do not have to dirty our hands and sully our talents? But by design, the L-rd placed us in a world that is imperfect. If we wish to create new life, to advance the values and causes that can make this a better world, then we will perforce have to deal with the world's impurity.
And while the Torah details the spiritual impurity in giving new life to this world, it also describes how one can regain a state of purity. The process of raising one's self from impurity and washing away that impurity - physically and symbolically - this, is Judaism's message.
We are here to produce new life --- but then to purify ourselves. We must not attempt to escape from the realities of this impure world. Rather, we are enjoined to realize that we are able somehow to improve and even purify this world and our society. Life, which is the vehicle of purity, marches together with its creation that necessitates impurity. This paradox is in itself the reality of life, death and the human story. As such, it is perhaps the most relevant lesson that the Torah can teach us.
The White House portrays Karl Rove, President Bush's most influential political adviser, as playing no role in military decisions that are shaping the Bush presidency.But more than two weeks after the war began, Mr. Rove is busily working to shape perceptions of Mr. Bush as a wartime leader and to prepare for the re-election campaign that will start as soon as the war ends.
Tonight, Mr. Rove traveled here to tend to the Republican troops at the Texas Night fund-raising celebration of the Kent County Republican Committee.
"The president is leading the coalition of the willing, and is determined that Iraq will be disarmed of its weapons of mass destruction and that the cruel dictator's regime will be ended," Mr. Rove declared after taking the stage to chants of "U.S.A.!" in a cavernous hanger filled with the local party faithful wearing Texas-style cowboy boots, hats and bandanas.
Beyond courting Republicans at party events, Mr. Rove has in recent days been counseling Congressional Republicans and conservative groups on how to advance their domestic agenda even while attention is on Iraq. [...]
Mr. Rove has always mixed a deep interest in policy with hardball politics. Before flying to Michigan for the campaign-style appearance here, he attended a White House briefing with Mr. Bush on severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, the contagious illness that has spread to North America from Asia.
Last year, in remarks that were assailed by Democrats as an effort to politicize the campaign against terrorism, he urged Republicans to "go to the country" on the issue of national security because voters "trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America."
With international attention focused on Iraq, despots are seizing the opportunity to get rid of their opposition--real or imagined. In Zimbabwe, Cuba and Belarus, independent journalists, opposition leaders and human rights advocates have been thrown in prison. Absent scrutiny, the leaders of these rogue regimes have been emboldened, aware that their actions are causing little more than a ripple of protest beyond their countries.The outside world has ignored Zimbabwe, which is holding critical parliamentary elections whose outcome could help determine whether President Robert Mugabe will be able to amend the Constitution and handpick his successor. Since the start of the war in Iraq, Mr. Mugabe has intensified a campaign of intimidation, arresting more than 500 democracy advocates and opposition leaders, including Gibson Sibanda, vice president of the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change.
The campaign of state-sponsored violence is not limited to the opposition leaders in Zimbabwe. A worker on the farm of an opposition parliamentary deputy died of injuries after being beaten by Mr. Mugabe's security agents for participating in a two-day general strike. Other farm workers have also been beaten by men in army uniforms who claimed that the farms were being used as staging grounds for opposition activities. Hundreds of people accused of taking part in the strike were treated for broken bones in private clinics, fearing more reprisals if they sought care at public hospitals. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe, once a breadbasket for southern Africa, falls ever further into poverty and famine.
In Cuba, the war is giving Fidel Castro cover for an unprecedented assault. Over the past two weeks his state security agents have arrested about 80 dissidents. Prosecutors are seeking life sentences for 12 of those detained and 10- to 30-year prison terms for the rest. They include the economist Marta Beatriz Roque, the poet and journalist Raúl Rivero and the opposition labor activist Pedro Pablo Alvarez. [...]
If we let tyrants escape the international condemnation that is often the only way to protect their critics against abuses, the brutal campaigns in Zimbabwe, the clean sweep of dissidents in Cuba, and the arrests of demonstrators in Belarus may have to be added to the list of unintended consequences of the war in Iraq.
Gen. George S. Patton, my grandfather, has received a lot of mention lately in connection with the astonishing dash of the American military across more than 300 miles of Iraq in less than a week. Beginning with the breakout from Normandy in August 1944, Patton's Third Army similarly used speed and maneuverability to press the attack, stretching supply lines to the breaking point while gobbling up huge tracts of territory and taking thousands of enemy prisoners.Much of what we've seen of Gen. Tommy Franks's battle plan calls to mind Patton's favorite battlefield dictums. "A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow" would seem to apply to the accelerated commencement of the ground offensive after the missile strike on the Iraqi leadership on March 18. The apparently improvised jump-start clearly surprised Iraqi defenders expecting, per the 1991 Persian Gulf war, weeks of aerial shock and awe in advance of tanks and infantry, and it helped coalition forces to secure the southern oil fields and the Euphrates bridges at Nasariya before they could be sabotaged.
Likewise Patton's oft quoted "hold 'em by the nose and kick 'em," which in tactical terms translates to pinning the enemy in place while flanking him with the bulk of your force, is reflected in the coalition's "leapfrogging" of Iraqi towns en route to the main objective, Baghdad. "There is no purpose in capturing manure-filled, water-logged villages," the general told his men. "Straight frontal attacks are prohibited unless there is no other possible solution."
Yet in September 1944, Patton deviated from his preference for maneuvering and received what he called "my first bloody nose" as a result. The fortified city of Metz, in the Lorraine in northeastern France, blocked the Third Army's route to the Rhine. And while no one should compare that city of 83,000 with Baghdad and its 5 million inhabitants living in an area larger than New York City, the perils and pitfalls of Patton's siege are worth contemplating as General Franks readies his troops for the last phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Yesterday it was reported that a suicide bomber had attacked American soldiers at the airport, but there was no immediate word on any casualties. All of which leaves the biggest problem confronting the US military planners until last: having encircled Baghdad, what do you do with a city of five million people? The scale of the problem was underlined on Friday by the usually hawkish American Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said that although Saddam and his entourage were doomed, his forces could survive if they changed sides at the last minute.If they did capitulate, their surrender would certainly save America from a potential mess. So do the men of the 3rd Infantry Division and the US Marines blast their way through a Baghdad that it is now theirs to take, confounding the much-vaunted 'humanitarian ideals' of George W. Bush and Tony Blair?
If they wait, as the British forces have done outside Basra - and UK officers have been called in by US military planners - then they may have trouble.The Basra stalemate and humanitarian concerns for the city's residents are already close to becoming an international scandal.
So which will be the fate of Baghdad: death by attrition or all-out attack? It is a question that may well determine the future success of the allies' subsequent occupation and administration of Iraq.
Leaving Baghdad's civilians inside a city with no electricity and rapidly diminishing supplies of fresh water and food threatens many of them with a lingering death. The Red Cross said yesterday that several hundred wounded Iraqis have already been admitted to hospitals since the American troops reached the city. 'The situation is getting increasingly difficult,' said spokesman Florian Westphal.
Yet a bitter, brutal onslaught on the capital city will trigger even more misery and fill the world's TV screens with scenes of dead women and mutilated children - inflaming more local opposition and provoking further suicide attacks.
It is this latter scenario that the US military machine is now contemplating. 'We're not going to tiptoe into the city, it will be a forceful knock-out punch every time we go in,' said US Marine Captain Matt Watt, commander of Lima Company, a unit of mechanised infantry trained in urban warfare.
'We'll make sure there's no capability for the enemy to resist us, we'll go in shooting up every time,' he told Reuters. 'And if we are to take the enemy out, it may unfortunately be at the cost of a lot of civilian lives, unintentionally. If we start taking a lot of fire, we will simply level the building area, destroying it with indirect fire and air and tanks. Then we'll go in with ground forces. That's when you get civilians who choose not to leave, and they're going to die in the process.'
It is a chilling prospect, principally for the Iraqis, but also for the soldiers storming their capital. 'Marines are trained in the urban fight but despite better training, you're still going to take a lot of casualties. There's just no way round it, it's an extremely difficult fight in the urban area,' Watt said.
The fight for Baghdad is unlikely, of course, to end up like the battle of Stalingrad, which ultimately claimed a million lives. Nevertheless, the very nature of the conflict that lies ahead looks uncomfortable and unforgiving.
The suffering of the people of Iraq, bottled up inside the cauldron that is their country's capital city, is certainly not going to be over soon.
About 30 minutes after a suicide bomber killed four soldiers from the 2-7 Mechanized Infantry Battalion, Operations Officer Maj. Rod Coffey stood before the maps lying on the table of the battalion operation tent absentmindedly but violently smashing his plastic water bottle on the table.Coffey managed the front-rear coordination of the operation to secure the checkpoint on Highway 9 that had just been attacked and to retrieve the soldiers' bodies. During each radio contact with the units concerned ambulances, logistics, company commanders Coffey would speak quietly and calmly while violently smashing the bottle on the table again and again.
This continued for 10 minutes, when, at a particularly harsh smash, the bottle flew to the sandy floor with a boom. A sergeant quietly picked it up and handed it back to Coffey. Coffey took the bottle, and, realizing what had happened, gave an embarrassed glance to the soldiers and said, firmly, "We're going to destroy these bastards." With that he took a sip of water, put the bottle aside, and went on managing the operation. [...]
Reflecting on the public scrutiny of the losses, Maj. Coffey says, "I never assumed we would come back home with everyone, although I never highlighted this in conversation. By placing such great emphasis on the suicide bombing they are playing into the enemy's hand.
"You let terror succeed when you focus on it. This is no time for anyone to lose their nerve." Coffey is an intellectual. In addition to his duties as operations officer, he fills the role of battalion military historian. The blue-eyed, sandy-haired, square-jawed Rhode Islander is always on hand with a historical analogy or precedent.
On the question of the reaction to casualties, the 41-year-old Coffey sees a generational divide between the young officers and soldiers in the field and their older generals in command positions in the rear and in Washington. "The generals remember not being supported in Vietnam. That is a generational memory. We grew up in the post-Cold War era, with a huge awareness of the terrorist threat. Starting with the Iranian takeover of the US Embassy in Teheran in 1979. "We understand terrorism, we were brought up with it, so this sort of suicide attack is not a surprise to us."
In short, he says, "Our response is, 'OK, there was a car bombing, let's drive on.' To focus on it is to let Saddam succeed. We won't let him succeed."
Battalion commander Lt. Scott Rutter echoes these sentiments and adds another layer to their thinking:
"The guys who died make it clear to the soldiers that they are fighting for each other. The soldiers now realize that death happens. This makes them even stronger in their fight for each other because our survival instinct is stronger. "S.L.A. Marshall, a journalist who covered US troops in World War II, discussed this issue in his book Men Under Fire and concluded that more than mom, apple pie, or country, soldiers fight for one another."
Speaking of the politicians back in Washington, Rutter considers, "I guess they didn't realize that we would be confronted by the combination of regular enemy forces and civilians with bombs. Obviously in this situation defining what constitutes a threat is difficult."
As for the generation gap, 40-year-old Rutter says that the older officers and politicians need to respect the soldiers' willingness to serve. "They [the generals and politicians] are very sensitive to losses. Our generation is making sacrifices for our country and our way of life. These men all volunteered to serve. If we weren't ready, we wouldn't be here."
ALPHA COMPANY Commander Capt. Rob Smith commanded five of the six soldiers who died this past week. His first man fell when the Bradley fighting vehicle he was riding in plummeted 10 meters into a ditch last Thursday night. The other four were killed by the car bomb at the checkpoint on Highway 9.
Smith, at 34, is the only company commander in the battalion who also served as an enlisted infantryman. He served as a soldier for six years before going to college and becoming an officer. Smith's colleagues speak of the stocky, apple-cheeked, brown-eyed officer with deep respect.
Alpha Company is a pure infantry company. For the war it traded a Bradley platoon for an Abrams tank platoon with another company. The four soldiers killed on Saturday were members of that platoon. Alpha Company always moved first. The rest of the battalion followed. To this degree it is not surprising that Alpha would also be the first to suffer casualties.
Smith believes that as a commander, he fills the role of parent for his soldiers. "I realize that I have the highest responsibility for the lives of 156 sons of other parents. I take care of my guys as I would take care of my daughter. It's that simple. That is how I stay focused.
"The parents are upset by the fatalities. The American people are upset. All that I can do is give these people the peace of mind that at least the Alpha Company commander is doing his best. "When I find myself tired, hungry, and scared, I think what I would do if my daughter were under attack. This focuses the mind."
For Smith, the lives of his men who were killed this week are part of a long history of selfless sacrifice for the United States. "Being a soldier means not thinking about yourself. It is being a civil servant. Our forefathers risked execution when they rose against the British. Someone has to sacrifice for our freedom.
"I think of all the late nights I've worked, missing dinner with my wife and daughter. I missed my daughter's first Christmas. Hopefully, she'll understand that America doesn't exist because of selfishness, but because of individuals who made sacrifices for the greater good."
The Detroit News recently reported on new ethnic sensitivity training courses for Michigan police departments in highly Arab American communities. As part of the training, one counselor reminds officers that most Arab stereotypes have no grounding in fact. As an example, the counselor says few people realize that most Arab Americans are not Muslim. In fact, the News reports, 75 percent of Arab Americans are Christians.Does it make sense the percentage is that high? According to Roy Oksnevad, director of the Department of Ministries to Muslims at Wheaton College, it does.
"There's always been a high percentage of Christians among Arab U.S. citizens," Oksnevad told Christianity Today. "The majority of them come here because they were minorities in their native countries. Much of the reason they leave is the hard life under Islam but recently there has been a mass exodus due to renewed nationalism and an Islamic resurgence."
Apaches, Harriers, A-10 Thunderbolts and AC-130 gunships unleashed a barrage of firepower against a rebel camp in southeastern Afghanistan today, an American military spokesman said, in one of the heaviest nights of bombing in months in Afghanistan.The target was a group of 30 to 40 Taliban believed to be behind a string of attacks on government border posts in recent weeks. Yet despite the 35,000 pounds of ordnance dropped on the area, according to an American military spokesman, and hundreds of Afghan soldiers surrounding them, the rebel leaders managed to break out and make a run for the border with Pakistan, said Gen. Abdul Razzaq, the Afghan military chief of the border region. Eleven militants were captured and one was killed, but the rest got away, he said.
The battle, the latest in a series of clashes in recent weeks in which American Special Forces soldiers have had to call in airstrikes, was a stark reminder that the fighting is not over here, a year and a half after American forces first moved against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in October 2001.
The 8,500 American troops here--and several thousand more coalition troops--are now dealing with a classic guerrilla war, in which coalitions forces have to chase elusive fighters who launch attacks and then zip away into villages or across the border into Pakistan.
The Taliban fighters have regrouped, and this spring they launched a concerted campaign of hit-and-run attacks on United States and Afghan military targets in the border areas of the south and southeast of the country, Afghan and foreign military officials say. There is increasing evidence that the fighters have joined with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a longtime mujahedeen leader who is opposed to the government of President Hamid Karzai and who has both the funds and the organization to launch a campaign to destabilize the government.
In southern Afghanistan, despite aggressive operations by the American military, there is a sense that things are starting to unravel, one United Nations official said. Besides attacks on military targets, bombs, grenades and remote-controlled mines have been set on the roads, threatening ordinary civilians.
"The people are thinking the situation will get worse," said Wali Dad, 51, the local education chief and principal of Spinbaldak's main school. "The people of Afghanistan want peace, but here, unfortunately, they are disappointed. We have leaflets being left threatening violence and, now, fighting during the day."
For foreign aid workers in Kandahar, the culmination of the increasing violence was the execution of a Red Cross water engineer, Ricardo Munguia, last Thursday by a group of former Taliban members. The attack has caused all aid agencies to suspend travel in the area and many to evacuate their expatriate staff members. Development assistance to the south is likely to be affected over the coming months.
In the new world, which is to say the world dominated by a single superpower, the United States, the big things begin at MacDill Air Base in Tampa, Florida. This is the home of the US military's Central Command. The Americans, always in a hurry, have shortened its name to an ugly contraction: CentCom. The most powerful military men who have ever walked the Earth stride in and out of its entrance beneath the slate-coloured slab of a metal wall that speaks of blunt might and refuses to be softened by a wide lawn and silver birch trees that spread beyond its doors, or by the moist sea breeze that whispers and tumbles in across Tampa Bay from the Gulf of Mexico.Within, the shape of the 21st-century world is planned on a giant screen linked in real time, through banks of computers and satellite dishes, to similar command centres across the planet. Right now, its facilities--duplicated right down to another giant plasma screen--are linked most importantly to a desert camp in Qatar on the Persian Gulf.
CentCom is one of nine unified combatant commands that control US forces across the length and breadth of the world. Each has a self-appointed Area of Responsibility, and CentCom's is, since the death of the Cold War and the birth of global terrorism, by far the most important to 21st-century America: the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and the northern Red Sea; the Horn of Africa; and South Asia and Central Asia.
It was inside CentCom that Australia began its latest march to Iraq. That march began a long time before the nation--or, indeed, even those most intimately involved--had much of a clue that it might lead to Australian troops flitting about the deserts of Saddam Hussein's country, or its fighter pilots bombing Iraqi emplacements, or its navy sailors removing mines in the far reaches of the Persian Gulf.
It began just two weeks after September 11, 2001, when hijacked jet aircraft smashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and into the walls of the Pentagon in Washington, a few blocks from a hotel where Prime Minister John Howard was holding a press conference.
That night, President George W. Bush wrote in his diary: "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today." There would be an intriguing echo of this allusion 18 months later, a day before Australia finally sent its troops across the borders of Iraq. John Howard, mounting his final arguments for the assault in his address to the National Press Club in Canberra's Parliament House on Wednesday, March 19, 2003, was asked why he did not wait for proof that Saddam was collaborating with Osama bin Laden's terrorists. "I mean," he said, "if you wait for that kind of proof, you know, it's virtually Pearl Harbor."
Howard had long been on song with Bush. The hip Democrat Bill Clinton was not Howard's style at all but the prime minister was a fan of Bush even when he was still Republican governor of Texas.
On September 11, 2001, Howard declared from Washington that Australia would be "resolute in our solidarity with the Americans" in whatever retort might be planned. "Now is the time for calm but lethal responses," he said on radio. "Now is the time for the civilised world to work out the most effective way--not talk about it, not telegraph it--but work out and implement the most effective way of responding." He was as good as his word.
Without talking about it--before or since--a small group of soldiers from Australia's secretive Special Air Service Regiment found their way to CentCom at MacDill Air Base, Tampa, in the days following September 11. There was irony in their journey. The men of this unit had been involved only weeks before in a dubious operation: the boarding of the MV Tampa in an effort to ensure that 438 asylum-seekers--most of them Afghans and Iraqis--did not reach Australian soil. The MV Tampa had been named after the Florida city of Tampa, home of CentCom and an important freight port on the Gulf of Mexico.
The Australian SAS Regiment is familiar with Tampa and its military bases. They are regular visitors at CentCom. Indeed, liaison teams from the three arms of Australia's defence force have been guests at CentCom for years, although until recently they were not part of the inner circle of the US military planning machine.
But this visit was different. The federal government, through Howard and his then defence minister Peter Reith, was straining at the bit to prove to Bush and his administration that Australia was at one with the American superpower. The appearance of the men from the SAS was an unambiguous message: Australia wanted in with anything that was being planned. It was pounding on the door.
Fishermen working in Antarctic waters have made an extremely rare catch -- a colossal squid with eyes as big as dinner plates and razor-sharp hooks on its tentacles, a marine researcher said Thursday.The 150-kilogram, five-metre-long specimen was caught in the Ross Sea, said Steve O'Shea, a research fellow with the Auckland University of Technology. He said the squid was a young female.
Going by the scientific name Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, the animal is unrelated to the smaller and more common giant squid, O'Shea said.
"This animal is formidable," he told New Zealand's National Radio.
While the giant squid eats "quite small prey," the colossal squid eats large prey like the Patagonian toothfish, which can grow more than two metres long.
Hundreds of bundles of bone in strips of military uniform have been found by British soldiers at an abandoned Iraqi military base on the outskirts of the town of al-Zubayr.Faded black-and-white photographs show corpses mutilated beyond recognition, their faces burned and swollen.
Most of the victims appear to have been executed by gunshots to the head.
Skulls, their teeth broken and missing, look out from plastic bags in unsealed hardboard coffins stacked five deep in a warehouse.
Some of the bags have split open, spilling bones and scraps of clothing onto the dirt floor.
Outside, in a courtyard, a brick wall riddled with bullets stands behind a foot-high tiled platform, with a drainage ditch running in-between.
It looks like "a purpose-built shooting gallery" says one British soldier. [...]
"It is certainly not from the recent conflict but it could be from the one before," the 40-year-old from Fraddam, near Newquay, Cornwall, added.
"We have placed it out of bounds to all personnel and will treat it as a mass grave.
"It's part of being at war - just another thing you have to deal with and get on with it.
"As the war goes on you expect to see everything."
Moments later, a younger soldier dashed over to Capt Kemp with a catalogue of photographs.
"Bloody hell," he whispered.
"These are all executions. You can see the bullets - shots to the head."
Moments later the soldiers and the five western journalists who had been allowed to visit the site were hurriedly ushered out, as senior officers began to realise the possible significance of what had been discovered.
The soldiers are already asking if they could have chanced upon a death camp.
"Isn't it important for Muslims to be properly buried?" one said. "It's like a deliberate disrespect.
"Whoever these people were, they weren't very important to the people who did this."
The logic is simple, some say simplistic: France refused to fight the war in Iraq and so should not profit from the peace. But stopping France Inc. from sharing in postwar spoils may prove harder than it sounds.Baghdad's water system and much of Iraq's now bomb-blasted phone network were built by French companies. Before the war, France was among Iraq's biggest suppliers of essential goods, according to French figures.
For each of the past five years, the French stand at Baghdad's annual trade fair won the gold medal as the best Western display. [...]
''We should have no illusions, under the savage law of international commerce, American firms will leave us with nothing--or just crumbs,'' said Gilles Munier, secretary-general of a France-Iraq friendship association.
''The political situation is in the hands of the Americans,'' said Alcatel spokesman Laurent de Segonzac, whose company supplied much of Iraq's telephone network in the 1980s.
''It could become a great market for everybody or it could become hell,'' said Ada De Filippo, a spokeswoman for Peugeot, the French automaker.
Intelligence officials suspect a Canadian man arrested here last year was involved in a plot by the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah to assassinate the prime minister of Israel, the National Post has learned.Fauzi Mohammed Mustafa Ayub, a 38-year-old father of three from Toronto who used the alias Abu Abbas, was arrested in the West Bank city of Hebron last June after allegedly trying to purchase components for a bomb.
Israeli security officials believe he is one of three Hezbollah agents sent here to influence Israeli politics by killing the Prime Minister.
A senior Israeli official told the Post that Mr. Ayub is a known member of Hezbollah's elite international operations squad, called the Islamic Jihad, headed by Imad Mugniyah, one of the world's most wanted terrorists. [...]
Hearings to justify Mr. Ayub's indefinite detention under Israel's Imprisonment of Enemy Combatants Law are being held mostly in secret. Canadian embassy officials in Tel Aviv are monitoring the case and said Mr. Ayub was in good spirits. His most recent court appearance was on Feb. 25.
Canadian officials have met with Mr. Ayub about seven times since his arrest, the last meeting being in February. Consular officials transferred some money from his family in Canada to him for the purchase of some "luxury items" for personal use during his detention, including deodorant, other toiletries and a back brace. The transfer was done at Mr. Ayub's request and with the approval of the Israeli authorities, said Reynald Doiron, a spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Mr. Ayub's family in Toronto declined to be interviewed. "They decided not to say anything about this thing. They will not take your phone number. They do not want to talk to anybody," a spokeswoman for the family said.
Hisham Abou Shehadeh, the lawyer, said a court publicity ban prevented him from discussing the case.
For more than decade, Hezbollah has used Canada as a safe haven for hiding agents before and after attacks, and as a source of money and military equipment such as night-vision goggles.
Bill Graham, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, initially resisted putting Hezbollah on Canada's list of banned terrorist groups, saying to do so would brand "teachers, doctors and farmers" as terrorists.
The federal Cabinet outlawed Hezbollah last December.
An Israeli security official said the Canadian ban was having an effect.
"That was a huge, huge thing that you have done. Hezbollah is under lots of pressure because of that," he said. "It's a problem for them. It was a great move from our perspective."
Canada has not yet charged any Hezbollah members under its new anti-terrorism law. Several Canadian-based members have been charged by U.S.
authorities, however.
U.S. Army soldiers Saturday captured the headquarters of the Republican Guard's Medina Division in this town about 35 miles southeast of Baghdad.Triumphalism is bad. Triumphalism is bad. Triumphalism is bad.Two tank companies and an infantry company of the 3rd Infantry Division rolled through the headquarters unopposed and quickly took over the entire base. It appeared that the Republican Guard defenses had completely collapsed. . . .
When U.S. troops pulled into Suwaryah, the Republican Guard artillery pieces were sandwiched between civilian homes and business. Hundreds of young men in civilian clothes stood on the side of the road waving as U.S. troops drove by.
"Look at all the Republican Guard waving at us," Staff Sgt. Bryce Ivings of Sarasota, Fla., quipped to his company commander, Capt. Chris Carter of Watkinsville, Ga.
And to think I trusted MSNBC. My bad. In the comments, HD Miller points out that these are Iraqi vehicles "foray[ing] through Baghdad." Sorry.
President Bush has authorized American military forces to use tear gas in Iraq, the Pentagon says, a development that some weapons experts say other countries might see as a breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention. [...]Under the Chemical Weapons Convention, signatories forswear possession and use of chemical weapons, and undertake not to retaliate in kind if chemically attacked. Iraq has not signed the convention, but it did sign the Geneva Protocol of 1925, in which signatories deny themselves first use of chemical weapons and some reserve the right to retaliate in kind.
If the United States used riot control agents on the battlefield, Iraq might claim it was justified under the Geneva Protocol in using chemical weapons against American forces, Ms. Harris said.
The potential conflict between the executive order and the convention was a sleeping issue that began to stir in February, when Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee that he was trying to find legal ways to use nonlethal weapons in Iraq. "Absent a presidential waiver, in many instances our forces are allowed to shoot somebody and kill them, but they're not allowed to use a nonlethal riot-control agent under the law," he said.
It is not easy being an old lefty on campus in this war.At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, awash in antiwar protests in the Vietnam era, a columnist for a student newspaper took a professor to task for canceling classes to protest the war in Iraq, saying the university should reprimand her and refund tuition for the missed periods.
Irvine Valley College in Southern California sent faculty members a memo that warned them not to discuss the war unless it was specifically related to the course material. When professors cried censorship, the administration explained that the request had come from students.
Here at Amherst College, many students were vocally annoyed this semester when 40 professors paraded into the dining hall with antiwar signs. One student confronted a protesting professor and shoved him.
Some students here accuse professors of behaving inappropriately, of not knowing their place.
"It seems the professors are more vehement than the students," Jack Morgan, a sophomore, said. "There comes a point when you wonder are you fostering a discussion or are you promoting an opinion you want students to embrace or even parrot?"
Across the country, the war is disclosing role reversals, between professors shaped by Vietnam protests and a more conservative student body traumatized by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Prowar groups have sprung up at Brandeis and Yale and on other campuses. One group at Columbia, where last week an antiwar professor rhetorically called for "a million Mogadishus," is campaigning for the return of R.O.T.C. to Morningside Heights.
Even in antiwar bastions like Cambridge, Berkeley and Madison, the protests have been more town than gown. At Berkeley, where Vietnam protesters shouted, "Shut it down!" under clouds of tear gas, Sproul Plaza these days features mostly solo operators who hand out black armbands. The shutdown was in San Francisco, and the crowd was grayer.
All this dismays many professors.
University of New Hampshire alumni yesterday remembered former classmate Michael Kelly, who was killed while covering the war in Iraq, for his "clever chutzpah" and talented reporting.Kelly, 46, editor-at-large of the Atlantic Monthly and a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, was killed in a Humvee accident while traveling with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division near Baghdad.
UNH alumni and faculty recalled Kelly as a high-energy, larger-than-life figure who often melded his intellect and antics into great news stories.
"We've been telling funny stories about him for the last couple of hours," said Dover native and USA Today reporter Dennis Cauchon, a college acquaintance who crossed paths professionally with Kelly over the years.
"Even in college, he was a little like 'the Fonz.' And not like the schtick 'Fonz,' but the real 'Fonz'--leather jackets, jeans and very popular with women. And he liked to party," Cauchon said.
"He was sort of a bon vivant. That is why it was interesting he later became an anti-Clinton moralist," he added.
A hard-hitting conservative whose syndicated columns appeared weekly in The Union Leader, Kelly was the first journalist to die among the 600 embedded with U.S. armed forces. His last column was published by the Washington Post Thursday. [...]
Don Murray, UNH professor emeritus of English, recalled Kelly's clever college application, which won him admission to the university.
"He did a story for the Washington Post on visiting different campuses and got it published and submitted it with his application. We were impressed with his being in the Post and writing a good story, so we said, 'Admit him,' " said Murray, who was also a UNH journalism professor.
Murray remembered a particularly impressive feature story Kelly wrote about a trip to Boston.
"He decided to go to Boston over the weekend with no money, and he came back with some change," he said.
In 1809, a group of Bennington veterans invited their old commander to a banquet commemorating the battle. At 81, Stark was too infirm to attend, but in a letter to his former comrades the general wrote that they had once upon a time "taught the enemies of liberty that undisciplined freemen are superior to veteran slaves..."Noting that "the lamp of life is almost spent," but that he would remember their respect "until I go to the country from whence no traveller returns. I must soon receive marching orders," Stark closed with his now famous phrase, "Live free or die. Death is not the worst of evils."
MORE:
Atlantic Monthly Editor Killed in Iraq: Michael Kelly Was a Columnist for The Washington Post (Howard Kurtz, April 4, 2003, Washington Post)
-Statement from Atlantic Media on the death of Michael Kelly (4/04/03)
-ARTICLE: UNH classmatesrecall Mike Kelly (KATHRYN MARCHOCKI, 4/04/03, Union Leader)
Michael Kelly, RIP: A journalist of brilliance and independence dies doing what he loves. (PEGGY NOONAN, April 4, 2003, Walkl Street Journal)
-TRIBUTE: Michael Kelly (Washington Post, 4/05/03)
-TRIBUTE: A Courageous Man: Michael Kelly, R.I.P. (Byron York, April 4, 2003, National Review)
'The Best Possible Life' (MAUREEN DOWD, April 6, 2003, NY Times)
-TRIBUTE: IT'S UNBEARABLE (The McGill Report, 4/04/03)
-TRIBUTE: Michael Kelly (NY Times, 4/05/03)
-ESSAY: Across the Euphrates (Michael Kelly, April 3, 2003,
Washington Post)
EAST OF THE EUPHRATES RIVER, Iraq -- Near the crest of the bridge across the Euphrates that Task Force 3-69 Armor of the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division seized yesterday afternoon was a body that lay twisted from its fall. He had been an old man -- poor, not a regular soldier -- judging from his clothes. He was lying on his back, not far from one of several burning skeletons of the small trucks that Saddam Hussein's willing and unwilling irregulars employed. The tanks and Bradleys and Humvees and bulldozers and rocket launchers, and all the rest of the massive stuff that makes up the U.S. Army on the march, rumbled past him, pushing on.On the western side of the bridge, Lt. Col. Ernest "Rock" Marcone, commander of Task Force 3-69, stood in the sand by the side of the road, smoking a cigar and drinking a cup of coffee. Marcone's soldiers say he deeply likes to win, and he seemed quietly happy. At 2 a.m. yesterday, Marcone had led his battalion into the assault with two objectives, both critical to the 3rd Infantry's drive to Baghdad. The first was to seize the Karbala Gap, a narrow piece of flat land between a lake and a river that offers a direct and unpopulated passageway to this bridge. The second was the bridge itself, the foothold across the Euphrates, last natural obstacle between the division and Baghdad.
Marcone's tanks, infantry and artillery, supported by Air Force bombers and the division's Apache and Blackhawk helicopters, had taken the Karbala Gap by 7 a.m. and the bridge by 4:20 p.m. "We now hold the critical ground through which the rest of the division can pass to engage and destroy the Republican Guard," Marcone said.
Saddam Hussein, of course, knew the Americans coming from Kuwait would have to cross the Euphrates. But he did not know where the crossing would be made. The American forces' plan, drafted and revised and revised again under intense pressure in the field, centered on keeping the regime in confusion on this one great question.
There were surprises. No one anticipated the degree to which the regime would be able, using guerrilla tactics, to harass and, for a brief while, stall the offensive in the south. But the basic structure of the plan never changed. It was to employ repeated feints to deceive the enemy as to the true direction of the assault north. This would force him to redeploy his key forces away from the Karbala Gap, while exposing his moving troops and his artillery to a devastating air campaign.
LAMB: If you were to name one part of this book that left the biggest impression -- or the experience around the part of the book that you wrote, which one would it be?KELLY: The biggest impression on me?
LAMB: Yeah.
KELLY: I suppose some of the things I saw in and around Kuwait City I had never seen before, and I don't think many people have seen what happens to a place that is occupied by an army out of control. And much of this got to what I was talking about earlier about the difference between the sort of euphemistic way in which we sometimes talk about things and the way they really are. What happened in Kuwait City was so extraordinary and to walk through it, to see the endless blocks of gutted and looted and savaged buildings and to go through the morgues and see the torture -- you know, I spent one whole afternoon just in the morgue going from torture victim to torture victim; to talk to the people and to see, to hear their terror and so on. That made a great impression on me because I thought then and I think now that there was some misunderstanding perhaps in this country about why, in a moral sense, this war might be considered necessary or just. And I had my own doubts about that before I went to Kuwait City. And after that, I never had any doubts about it again, when you see what actually happens to a people who are taken by a hostile army and by an army that is intent on a campaign of looting and murder and rape and so on, it removes, in a very clarifying way, any confusion you might have had in your mind about whether it was a good or a bad idea to stop this sort of thing.
LAMB: Was it worth all the price that this country paid for?
KELLY: In my mind, yes. I mean, in my mind, it was absolutely worth it. First of all, we paid a very small price. The coin of war is death and we paid almost nothing in that coin. In financial terms, I think the price was quite bearable. In terms of what it netted this country, the obvious things -- the stopping of the threat to the oil supply, the obvious economic reasons are enough, but it also, I think, sent an astonishing message about the United States to the world that was worth a great deal. And that message is in keeping with the message that is now being sent in Somalia: the notion that a great power -- the sole remaining great power might be willing to use massive force to stop something terrible from happening for reasons that are, at least, in part, altruistic; in other words, for reasons, at least, in part, because it is the necessary good thing to do, is a tremendous thing to do, and it won us much more, I think, than we realize in the Middle East.
When I went over for that first trip to Baghdad and Amman, the conventional wisdom in Amman -- the writing in the newspapers, the talk among the intelligentsia -- was all to the effect that the United States. It was obviously working in concert with Israel, was going to use this as an excuse to start a new program of colonization of the Middle East; that once American troops were in, they would never leave, that they would end up taking the riches for themselves. And when the United States did not do this, when it did what it said it was going to restore Kuwait to the Kuwaitis and then to -- to leave -- it went, I found when I went back to Amman a year later, a very long way to changing the perceptions of at least some people in the Arab world about the United States; to seeing the United States as not necessarily and completely evil, which has been the prevailing view for many years.
The good news about the looming humanitarian crisis in Iraq is that it is not yet a crisis. There are pockets of desperate need but no widespread suffering. If sufficient military power can be brought to bear quickly to guarantee the security of aid workers, it should be possible to supply all the food, water and medical supplies needed.Allied officials and nongovernmental organizations have been surprised and relieved that no major humanitarian shortages have yet developed. There has been no mass movement of war refugees fleeing from desperate conditions in southern Iraq, and the exodus of thousands of residents from Baghdad is driven more by fear of being caught in the midst of a battle than by deprivation.
Supplies of food and water are clearly short in some areas. The first relief trucks into towns in southern Iraq triggered near-riots as residents scrambled to grab food rations and water bottles. But over all the food supplies in Iraq are mostly adequate. The Iraqi government distributed enough food before the conflict began to last the average family to the end of April, so it will be a few weeks before the situation becomes desperate.
Strenuous efforts by the allies to avoid bombing water pumps and treatment plants, and the electrical systems they rely on, have mostly succeeded, guaranteeing most Iraqis a clean supply of drinking water. The worst potential problem — a water crisis in Basra when a pumping station was knocked out by the loss of electricity — has been largely solved through the heroic efforts of the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose engineers put the plant back on line. A water crisis in Umm Qasr has been mitigated by opening a water pipeline from Kuwait, though distribution remains chaotic. There has been no major outbreak of disease in Iraq.
Still, the situation is extremely fragile.
An armored force of 50 American tanks and other vehicles wheeled suddenly into the center of Baghdad today, taking the city's defenders by surprise and triggering a rolling firefight along boulevards lined with some people waving and others shooting.Military officials said one American tank was lost in the three-hour incursion into the capital. One tank driver was reported killed when he was shot in the head during the hail of gunfire that at times rained down on the column.
A gunner in the column said that they had difficulty sorting out the civilians from the military.
A New York Times reporter traveling with the American troops near Baghdad said the push into the capital began as a reconnaissance mission spearheaded by a column of three to four dozen tanks of the Third Infantry Second Brigade. The tanks left their position south of the city this morning and used the main boulevards to drive into the heart of the city.
After moving into the city center, the armored vehicles turned west and rolled past crowds of people on the street and on to the airport where they met up with the Third Infantry First Brigade at its checkpoint. From the airport, the tank column swung south, completing a circuit back to their initial blocking position south of the city.
Officers at the United States Central Command in Qatar said that American forces in significant numbers had entered Baghdad, but they would not specify either the number of troops or their exact location.
"We do have troops in the city of Baghdad,'' Capt. Frank Thorp told reporters, "They're in the middle of the city.''
In addressing his critics last week, Secretary Rumsfeld demonstrated the low regard in which he holds military personnel, active duty or retired. He mocked his critics as "military retirees" and "armchair generals." In fact, the secretary's leading critic has been retired U.S. Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the nation's most decorated senior officer and a hero of both Desert Storm and Vietnam - where he was painfully and graphically wounded.Gen. McCaffrey, who has nothing to gain and much to lose by speaking out, undertook to express the anger felt by serving officers toward Secretary Rumsfeld for his refusal to honor repeated requests for more ground troops.
As for the existence of a plague of "armchair generals," the secretary is correct. They occupy the highest-level civilian positions in the Pentagon, where these amateur theorists of warfare have treated career officers as if they were servants - or worse than anyone should treat a servant. Dismissed as unimaginative and insulted in front of their subordinates, the generals and colonels could not respond in kind. They could only stand there and take the abuse - or face a court-martial by replying.
As it became evident that more ground troops would have been a great help to the campaign, the secretary of defense denied any responsibility for capping troop levels. This is breathtaking: the first-ever doctrine of secretarial infallibility. It is a display of moral cowardice by an arrogant man who was dangerously wrong.
Our troops will continue to save the secretary's strategic bacon. Secretary Rumsfeld will be heaped with laurels earned by our combat soldiers. But, even now, those troops continue to face higher than necessary risks because they were deprived of the additional ground forces for which commanders and planners asked.
We shall, of course, hear continued denials that anything ever was amiss from Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and from Gen. Franks, the theater commander. They are loyal subordinates and, at least for the duration of the war, cannot and should not break ranks with the Secretary of Defense. They must present a unified front to our enemies.
But honest criticism from those outside the chain of command is another form of loyalty. It is the role of the retired officers whom Secretary Rumsfeld publicly despises to speak for those in uniform when they cannot speak for themselves. And to insist that our troops be given all the support they need.
MORE:
Rumsfeld and the Generals: In this week's mini-mutiny of the generals against Donald Rumsfeld, it was awfully tempting to side with the generals. (BILL KELLER, 4/05/03, NY Times)
[W]hen aggrieved officers and former officers suggested that Mr. Rumsfeld was mismanaging the war, it was a delicious story. But was it true?Any serious verdict on the war must await its outcome, and even then the fog of postwar self-aggrandizing will take a long time to clear. But so far I think Mr. Rumsfeld has the high ground. Any shortcomings of the war plan seem to me much exaggerated, and the blame for them largely misplaced.
The indictment gleefully compiled in the press alleged that Mr. Rumsfeld had overruled his generals and sent them into battle a division or two short of a prudent force. Various motives are deduced for this: his oblivious haste to get the war started, his stubborn optimism about how easy victory would be, his enthusiasm to prove some egghead theories of modern warfare, his determination to show we could win "on the cheap."
The officers making these claims are all, understandably, either anonymous or retired. (The only commander named as one of the complainers, Lt. Gen. William Wallace, was the victim of a media stampede. General Wallace, who commands Army forces in Iraq, told The Times's Jim Dwyer that enemy tactics had been "a bit" different from what was war-gamed against beforehand. Most accounts lost the "a bit," making an obvious and innocuous remark sound like a defeatist whine.)
With a few levelheaded exceptions, analysts piled on, relishing the chance to bring the haughty defense secretary down a peg. The war plan was unfavorably compared with the overkill of Desert Storm, and blamed for troops' being susceptible to ambush and short of supplies.
By the end of the week, the gripes were overtaken by the impending siege of Baghdad, but they deserve further comment. What we were witnessing was, in fact, blowback from a bitter animosity that dates to the very beginning of this Bush administration. And it is about bigger things than the number of soldiers in Iraq. It is about who runs the military, and how to propel it into the modern age.
Mr. Rumsfeld arrived in Washington with a mission to speed-march the military into the information age. The new gospel was "transformation," and it meant a leaner fighting force that would be quicker to deploy, more agile in battle, capable of killing with greater accuracy from greater distances and more "networked."
The reform designs fell most heavily on the Army, which has a somewhat exaggerated reputation for being provincial and ponderous. One early draft
floated the possibility of cutting two of the army's 10 divisions to help pay for modernization. Mr. Rumsfeld compounded the hurt by bypassing the generals, trampling some careers and dispensing scorn."Rumsfeld is a takedown artist," says one general who knows him well. "First meeting, he insults you. You do that to an Army general, and he doesn't know what to do. He can't smart-off to the boss. So he swallows it, and hates it."
One striking irony of the current infighting is that many of the people cluck-clucking at Mr. Rumsfeld this week would--were we not engaged in a war they oppose--applaud him for standing up to the brass, and wish he had done so more successfully.
For in practice the generals and their allies in Congress have pretty much fought Mr. Rumsfeld to a standstill on his plans to reshape the military.
A battle Friday for a crucial crossroads 12 miles southeast of Baghdad involved the heaviest combat Marines had undertaken so far in Iraq, commanders said, as members of the Republican Guard put up what one commander called "a coordinated defense."The Marines lost three of their best tanks in the two-hour battle and at least eight Marines were wounded, though they still captured their last objective before starting operations into Baghdad.
The fierceness of the fight was a glum reminder for the Marines that their next attacks will be into a city of more than 5 million people defended by the most fanatical of Saddam Hussein's followers, with their backs to the wall.
Asked when the Marines would begin operations into Baghdad itself, Col. Larry Brown, operations officer for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said, "Soon. As soon as we can."
Lt. Col. Dave Pere, senior watch officer at the Marines' combat operations center, said the battle for the crossroads was "the heaviest resistance of the war." It forced Marines to dismount their armored personnel carriers for the first time to engage the Iraqis and clear them from trenches and revetments.
The crossroads is one of the anchor points of a loose cordon that the Marines and the U.S. Army's V Corps intend to hold around Baghdad, to keep military vehicles from entering or leaving but allow civilians to pass.
The collapse of the Soviet Union had a profound effect on China. Of all the many attempts to explain the Soviet collapse, the one most widely accepted in China is that constant US rearmament forced the Soviets to respond with a corresponding arms build-up, and that this broke the back of the Soviet economy.Even though Chinese nationalism is surging high, and even though there is an urgent wish in China to become a great power and to do so quickly, the Soviet collapse taught Beijing's leaders to observe changes quietly while keeping their intentions to themselves and biding their time.
This is also the reason why the Chinese government in recent years has avoided playing the political card and has instead focused on economics. Chinese officialdom has all along maintained a low profile in bigger political disputes, such as the collision between a US Navy plane and a Chinese fighter in April 2001. On the economic front, China has promoted its favorable investment policies and the advantage of its huge markets to promote exchange with Southeast Asian and European nations. The effects of this policy seem to have been quite positive.
There are frequently political motives behind economic moves, and, in the eyes of some Chinese international-relations scholars, German and French disenchantment over the US-Iraq war seems to provide an opportunity. China is hoping for an international situation with a single superpower, ie, that the US will remain the one future superpower. That would leave Germany, France and China, all of which oppose the US, as the second strongest powers. Together, however, they would be able to constrain the US.
This war may not be about oil in the first place, but to argue that the United States is committing more than 300,000 armed men and women to the single area of the world sitting atop two-thirds of the global oil reserves without having oil on its mind is a bit of a stretch.Of course oil is crucial. We consume 40 percent of its world production and import half of the oil we need. Furthermore, we have always preserved in one way or another a hegemony over the Persian Gulf region that in the past few years has become threatened by the rise of rogue regimes like Iraq and Islamic fundamentalism in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Checking this threat is unquestionably part of the scenario.
If proof were needed, even as the war is under way the press reports that the Defense Department has already contracted the same companies that extinguished many of the fires in Kuwait's oil wells in the past Gulf War, 12 years ago, to stand by. More important, the department has signed up a subsidiary of Vice President Dick Cheney's old firm, Halliburton Co., to subcontract that work. A spokesman for Halliburton confirmed that the value of these contracts is estimated at $900 million. While the Halliburton spokesman claims the company got the job because of its 84-year-long experience, the smell of oil, business and politics wafts in the air.
The death of Michael Kelly is a sin against the order of the world. He was a young man on his way to becoming a great man. He was going to be one of the great editors of his time, and at the age of 46 he was already one of its great journalists. And one's first thought about him, after saying the obvious--that he wrote like a dream, that he was a great reporter with great eyes, that he was a keen judge of what is news and what should be news--is this. He was an independent man. He had an indignant independence that was beauty to behold. He knew what he thought and why, and he announced it in his columns and essays with wit and anger.Virtually from the beginning of his career it was clear--he made it clear--that he would not accept the enforced Official Version of Reality that various luminaries and establishments attempted to force on him and others who report the news for a living. Was the vast American media establishment inclined to think one way? Then he would think another. Not necessarily the opposite--he was not a contrarian. He'd just think what he actually thought. And write it. He wouldn't let anyone tell him how to think. One would hope that would be a given in the world of big-league reporting, but newspapers and networks are full of journalists who let others tell them what to think.
I knew him as most people did, through what he wrote. I'd met him and admired him easily, but the Michael I read I loved. And so today, without a particular right to, I feel heartbroken. When the news broke, Mencken biographer Terry Teachout expressed with concision what I felt and had not been able to articulate: "This is horrible, horrible news--[Michael] had evolved into a great force for journalistic good, not just as regards this war but in general, and his death will leave a black hole in the sky." [...]
I think that when excellence enters the world--when an individual brings his excellence into the world--it is like a deep love being born between two people for the first time. It goes into the world and adds to the sum total of good in it. It inspires, and is moving in a way that cannot always be explained or understood. It adds to.
That's what Michael Kelly's career did: It added to.
His remains will come home now soon enough, and I hope what comes home is met with an honor guard, for he has earned it, and a flag, for he loved his country, and a snapped salute, for that is one way to show respect. And maybe it would be good if this son of Washington--born there, educated there, drawn to its great industry, politics and the reporting of it--were to find his final rest nearby, among those who fought with distinction for America. Michael Kelly went at great peril to be with U.S. troops, and he fell among US troops, while trying to tell the story of U.S. troops. So perhaps his final rest should be with U.S. troops, in Arlington, where we put so many heroes.
American soldiers retreated warily from the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf yesterday after a furious crowd gathered around them to stop foreign soldiers from approaching one of the holiest shrines of Shia Islam."Everybody smile!" shouted the platoon commander as he told his baffled men to kneel down and point their weapons at the ground, in a surreal act of submission.
The mightiest army in the world is learning the hard way the awkward art of trying to "win the hearts and minds" of suspicious civilians.
In other cities civilians have largely been bystanders in the military drama, neither rising up to cheer nor uniting to resist.
But in Najaf, hundreds poured into the streets to block the way of American soldiers as they came within sight of the golden dome of the mosque. They waved the soldiers away as some explained in broken English: "In the city, OK. In the mosque, No!"
The first attempt by American forces to patrol the heart of an Iraqi city has been a disconcerting experience, underlining the need for extreme sensitivity in the region.
The mosque is the reputed burial place of Ali, the fourth Caliph of Islam and the first Imam of Shia Islam.
It was damaged by Iraqi forces during the Shi'ite uprising against Saddam Hussein at the end of the 1991 Gulf war. But despite any hatred Najaf's people may harbour for Saddam, they seem resolutely opposed to having "infidel" soldiers violating the holy ground.
Nevertheless, the city's religious authorities seem to be reaching an accommodation with the occupying forces.
Where are all Iraq's soldiers hiding? John Keegan -- defense editor of the London Daily Telegraph and probably the most important, respected analyst and historian of war over the past generation -- asked this potent question Friday in his paper. The question is a troubling one. The possible answer, even more so.Keegan begins by questioning the fundamental assumption comfortably accepted by all U.S. official briefers on the current war in Iraq, as well by all U.S. media coverage of it. Far from Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard units being shattered by overwhelming firepower, Keegan questions whether they were ever even committed in the first place. And the evidence appears very much on his side.
"Fairly regularly," Keegan writes, "television or the press brings us news of Iraqi divisions 'severely mauled' or even 'destroyed.'" Yet, he continues, "Strangely enough, there are no photographs or eye-witness testimonies. Indeed, rather the contrary. James Meek, traveling with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force up the Tigris reported (Thursday) that the enemy was a will 'o the wisp."
"The situation map of March 20 showed six Republican Guard divisions encircling Baghdad and 16 ordinary army divisions, of which six armored or mechanized, (were) distributed around the country," Keegan wrote. Yet up to now, more than two weeks later, "Of the ordinary divisions there have been no reported signs at all. The Americans do not appear to have seen them, nor have the British. It is as if they have disappeared into thin air."
"Have they gone home and hidden their uniforms?" Keegan understandably asked. "Have they drifted across the borders into Iran or Syria? Are they refugees in the northern no-fly zones?"
All good, truly prescient questions. And we will in fact attempt some cautious attempts at answers.
The answers, in fact to all three of Keegan's last questions appear to be "No."
Religious Americans are, on average, more likely to support the current war than their more secular countrymen, even though a large share of the nation's religious leaders oppose it. Scholars say the long religious tradition of seeing America as a special nation may help explain that.A Gallup Poll this month found that 60% of Americans who say religion is very important in their lives supported military action against Iraq.
By contrast, among those who said religion is not very important, only 49% supported the war.
For those who see American civilization as superior, there is "quite often more readiness to exert ourselves in the world," said William R. Hutchison, a professor of the history of religion in America at Harvard University.
Nearly half of Americans (48%) said they think the United States has had special protection from God for most of its history, according to a poll a year ago by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Four in 10 took the opposite view.
That belief is strongest among white evangelical Protestants, a group that makes up about a quarter of the nation's population and that is a core constituency for the Republican party. Among that group, 71% said in the Pew center poll that they think the United States has special divine protection. Among white non-evangelical Protestants and Catholics, only four in 10 took that position.
"Evangelicals believe there is a purpose for our nation: to be good, to give, to help the oppressed, to strive for equality," said Ted Haggard, the newly appointed president of the National Assn. of Evangelicals. That belief, he said, is "the whole idea of the powerful using their strength to serve the weak."
Professor Jeffrey Walz of Concordia University Wisconsin in Mequon, Wis., said: "One tenet that many evangelicals would subscribe to is this idea of American exceptionalism, this sense that the U.S. is a city on a hill, that we have a special role and place in history, that America is a nation chosen by God to be an example to other nations."
"The question of how evangelicalism might be impacting world events would go back to American exceptionalism," he said. "I see this as well in Bush."
"We are an impatient country, and we have been historically, at least in part because of our confident view of America's role in the world. We tend to want to dive in and involve ourselves, or have historically -- and then sort out some of the details later," Walz said.
Over the first two weeks of the war, U.S. forces attacking northward across Iraq have been greeted with violent hostility in some cities, flat indifference in others and, lately, in some places, with open arms.How the war ends is likely to depend on how they are received by the 5 million residents of Baghdad, whose mood will go a long way toward determining whether fighters loyal to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein can mount a successful resistance.
As U.S. forces closed in on the west and east of the capital yesterday, defense officials discussed following an "opportunistic" strategy of probing and testing the capital's defenses to gauge the mood of the population and the likely intensity of resistance.
Under that approach, armored reconnaissance missions, Special Operations actions and precision bombing would be used across the city as ground force commanders consider their options. Those range from pushing aggressively into the city along key roads to establishing a cordon along its perimeter and waiting for reinforcements to arrive, defense officials and analysts said.
U.S. officials seemed to think yesterday that the warm welcome they had counted on from Iraqis, especially in the heavily Shiite Muslim south, finally was emerging. In the southern city of Najaf, regarded by Shiites as the third-holiest city in Islam, U.S. commanders staged a ceremony in which a statue of Hussein was blown up, and they said a Shiite leader had issued a religious edict telling followers not to interfere with U.S. forces.
There were indications that the U.S. strategy in Baghdad would be to seek to capitalize on that trend, beginning by having Marine Corps units approaching from the southeast move into the heavily Shiite eastern part of the capital. There, said Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the residents of a Muslim sect widely seen as opposed to the Sunni-dominated government "probably will not be friendly to the regime." [...]
Even a large-scale attack would not aim to take over the entire city, but would instead try to capture or destroy certain key targets vital to the government's control over the capital, defense experts said.
"They might . . . hop in and occupy some strategic points, make these guys feel surrounded," said retired Army Lt. Gen. Terry Scott, a former commander of Army Special Operations Command. "Mostly it's occupying places that retard their ability to move around from place to place -- it may be road intersections, it may be particular buildings, it may be sets of buildings."
On the other hand, if the population broadly opposes the U.S. presence, some experts said, the probable alternative would be to loosely cordon off Baghdad until more troops arrive. "We need a lot, a lot, a lot of light infantry," a Pentagon official said.
To do that, said retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., the military would establish a perimeter that stops well short of a siege. The U.S. line, he said, would be "porous enough to allow the enemy who are willing to escape an opportunity to do that."
Then, he said, the hope would be "that the city will collapse upon itself."
Baghdad, he explained, "contains all the elements of insurrection -- rich and the poor, Sunni and Shiites, the regime and the families of those the regime has murdered. It's like a tinderbox inside the city, and what you need to do is supply the spark that would enable this internal collapse to occur."
In the meantime, said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas G. McInerney, the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, which has spearheaded the drive to Baghdad from Kuwait, could swing to the northwest around Baghdad to Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, with an eye on seizing control of the northern oil fields and the important oil hub of Kirkuk north of Tikrit.
U.S. forces have now passed Karbala Gap, which Best Laid Plans considered the biggest obstacle before Baghdad itself. Most of a country the size of California has now been seized in 13 days, with fewer than 50 dead on our side and an unknown but probably relatively low number of civilian dead. Why isn't this happening faster! As Max Boot of the Council of Foreign Relations (McCaffrey belongs to the CFR too, another thing the Pentagon disliked about him) points out in today's Financial Times, in 1940 the German attack on France cost the Werhmacht 27,000 dead, and this assault is gobbling up more ground more rapidly.Why people keep saying events are occurring too slowly--speeding up would surely mean more civilian deaths!--is incomprehensible. Can't we at least wait till the third week before we lose heart? Also, bear in mind that the Iraqi military may still collapse and the U.S. side may still take mass surrenders; there is still plenty of time for this to happen and to happen very quickly by the standards of combat.
We may yet find the nerve gases and the anthrax that President Bush promised us were there, but even if we do, I believe that it is not improbable that Saddam Hussein would have refused to give them up even if he hadn't had any. The point isn't that he wanted these weapons for their own sake, either to use or to threaten to use. He just couldn't be seen to accede to the demands, still less to the threats, of an outside power. This is because of the way an honor culture works. To see what I mean, consider Saddam's behavior in his interview with Dan Rather.There, you may remember, Saddam pointedly denied that he had the al-Samoud missiles, or that, if he had them, he would destroy them. Yet he did have them and was already on the point of destroying them! How can we make sense of this, which sounds to us in the West like reverse hypocrisy: pretending to be more bad and intransigent than you really are. But to Saddam, admitting that he (a) had the missiles and (b) was willing to destroy them, even though this was in fact the case, would have made him look weak and craven on both points. And looking strong is all that he, like most of those brought up according to Arab and Muslim ideas of honor, really cares about.
Which brings us to:
IRAN'S DECISION:
Mullahs Disagreeing (Amir Taheri, NRO, 4/4/2003)
Hassan Rouhani, a junior mullah who is secretary general of the High Council of National Defense, says that Iran should be prepared for "preemptive action" to forestall U.S. attempts at using force against the Islamic Republic."The Americans will not dare think of a full-scale military invasion of Iran," he says. "But they will certainly use soft war and low intensity tactics to topple our regime. We must, therefore, be ready to take preemptive action. The most effective way is to open new political and military fronts against Israel."
Michael Kelly, the Atlantic Monthly editor-at-large and Washington Post columnist who abandoned the safety of editorial offices to cover the war in Iraq, has been killed in a Humvee accident while traveling with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division.Kelly, the first American journalist killed in the war, had also served as editor of the New Republic and National Journal. But his decision to join up with U.S. forces marked a return to his reporting roots, since he covered the first Persian Gulf War as a magazine freelancer and turned his observations into a book, "Martyrs' Day." While one Australian and two British journalists have been killed covering the war, Kelly's death is the first among the 600 correspondents participating in the Pentagon's embedding program.
He was quoted in the New York Times just four days ago as saying that he and other reporters enlisted in the Pentagon program because "there was a real sense after the last gulf war that witness had been lost. The people in the military care about that history a great deal, because it is their history."
Kelly is credited with revitalizing the respected but sometimes dull Atlantic, which won three National Magazine Awards last year and carried many high-profile cover stories, including a three-part series on the cleanup of the World Trade Center site. He took the reins after Washington businessman David Bradley bought the Atlantic from Mort Zuckerman in 1999. Kelly stepped down as editor last fall and also planned to write a book about the history of the steel industry.
As a columnist, Kelly was a caustic conservative who was merciless in his criticism of Bill Clinton and Al Gore and was generally supportive of President Bush, especially on foreign policy. In 1997, New Republic owner Martin Peretz, a close friend of Gore, fired Kelly as the magazine's editor over his continuing attacks on the Clinton administration.
Kelly grew up on Capitol Hill, the son of Thomas Kelly, a reporter for the now-defunct Washington Daily News. His mother is Marguerite Kelly, author of a syndicated column called "Family Almanac."
MORE:
-Statement from Atlantic Media on the death of Michael Kelly (4/04/03)
UNH classmatesrecall Mike Kelly (KATHRYN MARCHOCKI, 4/04/03, Union Leader)
Michael Kelly, RIP: A journalist of brilliance and independence dies doing what he loves. (PEGGY NOONAN, April 4, 2003, Walkl Street Journal)
-TRIBUTE: IT'S UNBEARABLE (The McGill Report, 4/04/03)
Across the Euphrates (Michael Kelly, April 3, 2003,
Washington Post)
EAST OF THE EUPHRATES RIVER, Iraq -- Near the crest of the bridge across the Euphrates that Task Force 3-69 Armor of the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division seized yesterday afternoon was a body that lay twisted from its fall. He had been an old man -- poor, not a regular soldier -- judging from his clothes. He was lying on his back, not far from one of several burning skeletons of the small trucks that Saddam Hussein's willing and unwilling irregulars employed. The tanks and Bradleys and Humvees and bulldozers and rocket launchers, and all the rest of the massive stuff that makes up the U.S. Army on the march, rumbled past him, pushing on.On the western side of the bridge, Lt. Col. Ernest "Rock" Marcone, commander of Task Force 3-69, stood in the sand by the side of the road, smoking a cigar and drinking a cup of coffee. Marcone's soldiers say he deeply likes to win, and he seemed quietly happy. At 2 a.m. yesterday, Marcone had led his battalion into the assault with two objectives, both critical to the 3rd Infantry's drive to Baghdad. The first was to seize the Karbala Gap, a narrow piece of flat land between a lake and a river that offers a direct and unpopulated passageway to this bridge. The second was the bridge itself, the foothold across the Euphrates, last natural obstacle between the division and Baghdad.
Marcone's tanks, infantry and artillery, supported by Air Force bombers and the division's Apache and Blackhawk helicopters, had taken the Karbala Gap by 7 a.m. and the bridge by 4:20 p.m. "We now hold the critical ground through which the rest of the division can pass to engage and destroy the Republican Guard," Marcone said.
Saddam Hussein, of course, knew the Americans coming from Kuwait would have to cross the Euphrates. But he did not know where the crossing would be made. The American forces' plan, drafted and revised and revised again under intense pressure in the field, centered on keeping the regime in confusion on this one great question.
There were surprises. No one anticipated the degree to which the regime would be able, using guerrilla tactics, to harass and, for a brief while, stall the offensive in the south. But the basic structure of the plan never changed. It was to employ repeated feints to deceive the enemy as to the true direction of the assault north. This would force him to redeploy his key forces away from the Karbala Gap, while exposing his moving troops and his artillery to a devastating air campaign.
LAMB: If you were to name one part of this book that left the biggest impression -- or the experience around the part of the book that you wrote, which one would it be?KELLY: The biggest impression on me?
LAMB: Yeah.
KELLY: I suppose some of the things I saw in and around Kuwait City I had never seen before, and I don't think many people have seen what happens to a place that is occupied by an army out of control. And much of this got to what I was talking about earlier about the difference between the sort of euphemistic way in which we sometimes talk about things and the way they really are. What happened in Kuwait City was so extraordinary and to walk through it, to see the endless blocks of gutted and looted and savaged buildings and to go through the morgues and see the torture -- you know, I spent one whole afternoon just in the morgue going from torture victim to torture victim; to talk to the people and to see, to hear their terror and so on. That made a great impression on me because I thought then and I think now that there was some misunderstanding perhaps in this country about why, in a moral sense, this war might be considered necessary or just. And I had my own doubts about that before I went to Kuwait City. And after that, I never had any doubts about it again, when you see what actually happens to a people who are taken by a hostile army and by an army that is intent on a campaign of looting and murder and rape and so on, it removes, in a very clarifying way, any confusion you might have had in your mind about whether it was a good or a bad idea to stop this sort of thing.
LAMB: Was it worth all the price that this country paid for?
KELLY: In my mind, yes. I mean, in my mind, it was absolutely worth it. First of all, we paid a very small price. The coin of war is death and we paid almost nothing in that coin. In financial terms, I think the price was quite bearable. In terms of what it netted this country, the obvious things -- the stopping of the threat to the oil supply, the obvious economic reasons are enough, but it also, I think, sent an astonishing message about the United States to the world that was worth a great deal. And that message is in keeping with the message that is now being sent in Somalia: the notion that a great power -- the sole remaining great power might be willing to use massive force to stop something terrible from happening for reasons that are, at least, in part, altruistic; in other words, for reasons, at least, in part, because it is the necessary good thing to do, is a tremendous thing to do, and it won us much more, I think, than we realize in the Middle East.
When I went over for that first trip to Baghdad and Amman, the conventional wisdom in Amman -- the writing in the newspapers, the talk among the intelligentsia -- was all to the effect that the United States. It was obviously working in concert with Israel, was going to use this as an excuse to start a new program of colonization of the Middle East; that once American troops were in, they would never leave, that they would end up taking the riches for themselves. And when the United States did not do this, when it did what it said it was going to restore Kuwait to the Kuwaitis and then to -- to leave -- it went, I found when I went back to Amman a year later, a very long way to changing the perceptions of at least some people in the Arab world about the United States; to seeing the United States as not necessarily and completely evil, which has been the prevailing view for many years.
A car exploded at a special operations checkpoint in western Iraq, killing three coalition soldiers, a pregnant woman and the car's driver, the U.S. Central Command said Friday.Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, Central Command deputy director of operations, described the bombing as terrorist.
"These are not military actions. These are terrorist actions," he said
The apparent suicide attack occurred Thursday night about 11 miles southwest of the Haditha Dam. The site is northwest of Baghdad and about 80 miles east of the Syrian border.
Brooks said U.S. special operations forces were working in the region of the dam, but he declined to give further details on what forces were killed.
"A pregnant female stepped out of the vehicle and began screaming in fear," a Central Command statement said. "At this point the civilian vehicle exploded, killing three coalition force members who were approaching the vehicle and wounding two others." The statement said the woman and the driver also were killed.
Brooks said it was impossible to know if the woman voluntarily took part in the attack.
"As coalition forces began to approach, she and the vehicle were detonated," Brooks said. "Whether this woman was coerced or not, it's now impossible to say ... some parts of it will never be discovered."
The battle FOR Baghdad is over. The battle OF Baghdad is about to begin.The capture overnight of Saddam Hussein International airport, some 10 miles from the center of the Iraqi capital, brings to an end a stunning victory in two weeks of mobile warfare that reinforces the lessons of the first Gulf War and of Kosovo. The U.S. military machine is unstoppable--and looks set to continue the kind of global dominance that the British enjoyed in the century after their decisive defeat of France's naval power in 1805.
A technological generation ahead of any other military on earth, the U.S. armed forces have built on the lessons of the German blitzkrieg of 1940 to pioneer a new style of war. The German panzer divisions integrated tanks, artillery, mobile infantry and close air support with radio communications--and consistently defeated larger armies.
The Germans lost for three main reasons. First, they never understood sea power, and modern America does (having also learned the lesson of British naval dominance). Second, German logistics were poor. Most of their divisions in 1940 depended on horses to haul their guns, and their logistics failed miserably in the Russian campaign, when German troops froze to death in their light summer uniforms at the gates of Moscow. Third, the German military failed to nurture the national technological and industrial base on which military superiority depended. They produced magnificent weapons, but never enough of them.
None of these weaknesses applies to the current U.S. armed forces, which have long learned the importance of sea and air power. But the real genius of the modern American way of war is the way they have combined their logistics with the best of civilian technology, from communications to information technology. It is one thing to marvel at the way the Vth Corps post office in Kuwait delivers 100 tons of incoming mail a day, quite another to see the massed ranks of PCs in the giant hangars at Camp Doha, with GIs e-mailing home and surfing the Web to see what al-Jazeera or the British media has to say about their war.
The supply systems are stupendous, because the U.S. military has applied the technologies of commercial companies such as Fed-Ex and Wal-Mart to track the use of equipment, locate spare parts through bar codes, and start shipping them forward to the combat troops even before they ask for them. German troops froze for months in their Russian campaigns. American troops outside Nasariya were able to take hot showers less than 48 hours after they reached the place--despite the worst sandstorm in a decade.
As a result, the U.S. armed forces defeated the best army in the Arab world with one hand tied behind their back. The U.S. Army did not even field its first team. The 4th Division, the most technologically advanced of all, with a computer in every vehicle and TV camera on the helmet of every squad leader sending real-time images back to headquarters, never even arrived on the battlefield.
As I traveled around that empire's remains in the first half of 2002, I was constantly struck by its ubiquitous creativity. To imagine the world without the empire would be to expunge from the map the elegant boulevards of Williamsburg and old Philadelphia; to sweep into the sea the squat battlements of Port Royal, Jamaica; to return to the bush the glorious skyline of Sydney; to level the steamy seaside slum that is Freetown, Sierra Leone; to fill in the Big Hole at Kimberley; to demolish the mission at Kuruman; to send the town of Livingstone hurtling over the Victoria Falls -- which would of course revert to their original name of Mosioatunya. Without the British empire, there would be no Calcutta; no Bombay; no Madras. Indians may rename them as many times as they like, but these vast metropoles remain cities founded and built by the British.It is of course tempting to argue that it would all have happened anyway, albeit with different names. Perhaps the railways would have been invented and exported by another European power; perhaps the telegraph cables would have been laid across the sea by someone else, too. Maybe the same volumes of trade would have gone on without bellicose empires meddling in peaceful commerce. Maybe too the great movements of population that transformed the cultures and complexions of whole continents would have happened anyway.
Yet there is reason to doubt that the world would have been the same or even similar in the absence of the empire. Even if we allow for the possibility that trade, capital flows, and migration could have been "naturally occurring" in the past 300 years, there remain the flows of culture and institutions. And here the fingerprints of empire seem more readily discernible and less easy to wipe away.
When the British governed a country -- even when they only influenced its government by flexing their military and financial muscles -- there were certain distinctive features of their own society that they tended to disseminate. A list of the more important of these would run as follows:
1. The English language
2. English forms of land tenure
3. Scottish and English banking
4. The Common Law
5. Protestantism
6. Team sports
7. The limited or "night watchman" state
8. Representative assemblies
9. The idea of libertyThe last of these is perhaps the most important because it remains the most distinctive feature of the empire -- the thing that sets it apart from its continental European rivals. I do not mean to claim that all British imperialists were liberals -- far from it. But what is very striking about the history of the empire is that whenever the British were behaving despotically, there was almost always a liberal critique of that behavior from within British society. Indeed, so powerful and consistent was this tendency to judge Britain's imperial conduct by the yardstick of liberty that it gave the British empire something of a self-liquidating character. Once a colonized society had sufficiently adopted the other institutions the British brought with them, it became very hard for the British to prohibit that political liberty to which they attached so much significance for themselves. [...]
What lessons can the United States today draw from the British experience of empire?
"The State of Palestine is a sovereign, independent republic." So--perhaps wistfully, perhaps with promise--begins the new draft of the Palestinian constitution.It may seem paradoxical that a people without a state would have the institutions of a democracy--an elected legislature, an elected president, a constitution that has been in the works for four years. Yet the paradox runs deeper than that. It is because of their experience of statelessness that Palestinians have a chance to build a democracy, though the Bush administration now seems more intent on creating a model Arab government in Iraq. Lessons learned in the Palestinian diaspora, and from struggling against and living alongside Israelis, have made many Palestinians yearn, not just for a state, but for a democratic state.
Other features--protection of property rights, dependable banking, independent and precedential legal system--are more deeply institutional in nature and are therefore much harder to create and maintain (obviously a legislature is an institution, but seems a shallow one, which can be tinkered with a great deal). However, the pressures exerted by the globalized economy (an economy whose tenets are a product of Anglo-American ideas) seem to offer strong incentives to develop these structures. We basically then have a system in place where these features get disseminated without our ever having to set foot in a country.
If we consider that so much of what we have to offer can be spread in this relatively passive way and that--though the influence that Britain exercised on its colonies, chiefly by planting these features, was more beneficial than not--the colonized in most places never stopped wanting independence, we may conclude that the "new" American empire can and should be one of very limited physical intervention. In the case of a Palestine or an Iraq, rather than us or the Israelis trying to run the respective countries and build institutions ourselves, which will necessarily bear our taint, we might better leave the bulk of the work to the natives, but assist them by training lawyers, judges, bankers, newspaper editors, and the like and by lending them some of ours while they get banking and legal systems and a free press up and running. This will keep us involved with and allied to the emerging nations, without creating the foolish resentments that led to things like the American Revolution or Indian Independence.
Likewise, these states should be offered, but not required to accept, trade treaties and pledges of mutual defense. So long as Palestine and Iraq remain on a reformist path, let us share their destinies as equals and friends, at least in theory, rather than try to impose our will on them, as fathers so often do their sons, with decidedly mixed results. There should be no doubt in our minds that we can improve "colonies" by getting them to adopt the "distinctive features" that characterize the old British system, but we should have no delusions that if we set ourselves up as masters and impose the system from above we will be thanked for it. We should strive to make the American Empire as organic as possible, as if it was these peoples' own idea and we're only there to offer assistance. The more natural and self-determined it is the more likely to thrive. As the greatness of the British Imperium lay in its ideas, so the weakness lay in not knowing enough to loosen the grasp once the ideas had taken root. If we can imperialize with a delicate grip we may reap the benefits and avoid the detriments.
Last April, when he regained control of France's foreign policy after a five-year "cohabitation" with a Socialist prime minister, Jacques Chirac quickly fixed the priorities of his new five-year presidential term. According to officials involved with the plan, top of the list was the rehabilitation of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.
A documentary broadcast by FR3 television in Paris last month narrated the 30-year old Chirac-Saddam personal friendship. But it also missed the point: Mr. Chirac sought Saddam's friendship not out of personal empathy but in the framework of a political vision.That vision is part of the legacy left by the late General Charles De Gaulle who believed that France should counterbalance the German weight in Europe, and the Anglo-American axis across the Atlantic, with a Mediterranean "profondeur" which, in practice, means a special relationship with the Arab states of North Africa and the Middle East.
Mr. Chirac's tactics during the Iraq crisis at the United Nations made him something of a hero for the Ba'athist ruling elite in Baghdad. The newspaper Babel, owned by Saddam's son Uday, gave Mr. Chirac the coveted title of "Great Combatant" (Al-Munadhil al-Akbar)... Abdallah Jaballah, the Algerian fundamentalist leader, praised Mr. Chirac as "the only truly Arab leader today."
Most Arab leaders, however, express surprise at Mr. Chirac's decision ...
"We cannot understand Chirac," says a senior Egyptian official. "It is a mystery why he wanted to save Saddam when that meant wrecking relations with Washington and London."...
How did Mr. Chirac, a man who was in government when Lyndon Johnson was in the White House, work himself into such a tight corner? Some of his friends blame it all on Mr. de Villepin, an amateur poet who tends to get carried away when delivering his flowery speeches.
Mr. Chirac earned his nickname of "le bulldozer" when he was minister of agriculture in 1969 for his rough tactics when negotiating European fish quotas and farm subsidies. His friends say he is only encouraged on his confrontational course by Mr. de Villepin.
"When a bulldozer is driven by a poet the result is bound to be catastrophic," says one of Chirac's political friends. "Mr. Chirac is always excited and needs someone to calm him down. In Mr. de Villepin, however, we have someone even more excited. With these two France is going to quarrel with a lot more people in the next four years."
That individuals could have such a devastating effect on French foreign policy is a direct result of what one could describe as a deficit of democracy in France.
The curious thing is that the French public, though not entirely blind to Chirac's folly, loves it. When I left a good position in academia, the department chair dubbed the move "Jaminet's folly." "La folie de Chirac," if it continues, may be quite a bit more costly, to France, Europe, and the world.
Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, is a smooth politician who relies on nuance to do his dirty work. He did not say, in plain terms, that he disbelieves The Independent's accounts of civilian casualties sustained in Iraq. He did not say that Robert Fisk, our award-winning reporter, is a willing dupe of Saddam Hussein's regime. He simply allowed those suggestions to hang, unspoken, in the House of Commons chamber yesterday."A piece of a cruise missile was handed to the journalist," he said, to explain how we were able to publish the serial number of the missile likely to have been responsible for the second Baghdad marketplace explosion last Friday, which killed about 62 civilians.
Robert Fisk has a proud record of reporting what he sees. He has travelled to dangerous places and described unflinchingly what is happening. He prefers to speak to the people caught up in conflicts rather than report what the generals, politicians and spokesmen are saying.
Any careful reader of his reports from Iraq would know that he holds no brief for the Saddam regime.
While the liberal wing of the Democratic Party hasn't been shy about opposing the war in Iraq, others within the party have begun to question whether that stance is politically wise.Democrats all say they back the U.S.-led coalition troops, but that's not the same as backing the war. On Thursday, as the war entered week three, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., exposed how deep the rift in her party is, making an unapologetic renewal of her opposition to war.
"I said then and I say now that I was not convinced that the use of force at this time was the best way to disarm Iraq," Pelosi said.
Pelosi is not alone. Several of the presidential candidates and many in Congress oppose the war and even criticize fellow Democrats who support it.
But with polls suggesting that as much as 80 percent of the public strongly backs military action in Iraq, some Democrats are increasingly worried that the anti-war sentiment will backfire against the party.
"If a minority of our party can create doubts among the American people about our ability and our willingness to defend the country and keep it safe, we will be in trouble as a party, period," said Al From, president of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council.
The Iraqi man who tipped U.S. Marines to the location of American POW Jessica Lynch said Thursday he did so after he saw her Iraqi captor slap her twice as she lay wounded in a hospital."A person, no matter his nationality, is a human being," the tipster, a 32-year-old lawyer whose wife was a nurse at the hospital, said in an interview at Marines' headquarters, where he, his wife and daughter are being treated as heroes and guests of honor.
"He is an extremely courageous man who should serve as an inspiration to all of us to do the right thing," said Lt. Col. Rick Long, spokesman for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.
After he saw Lynch slapped, the lawyer slipped into her room at the Saddam Hospital in Nasiriyah and told her, "Don't worry." Then he walked six miles to the nearest U.S. Marines and told them where she was.
He later returned to the hospital, at the request of U.S. commanders, to map the facility and count how many Saddam Hussein loyalists were there.
The lawyer, whose first name is Mohammed and who asked that his last name not be published, smiled between every sentence as he recounted in broken but expressive English how he helped the Americans. He learned English at Basra University. [...]
Mohammed and his family are now officially "temporary refugees."
After showers, Mohammed put on an oversized green Marine pullover, his wife put on one of the gray T-shirts that MTV donated to the Leathernecks and his daughter was covered to her knees in a green T-shirt from a Marine chemical warfare unit.
But Mohammed did not appear despondent, as his wife smiled and stayed shyly in the background and daughter Abir played with a neon-green illumination stick given to her by a Marine.
"I am very happy," he said, adding that his wife wants to work in a hospital helping Americans and that he is eager to help the Marines any way he can until he can return home to Nasiriyah and resume his normal life.
"In future, when Saddam Hussein down, I will go back to Nasiriyah because my house and office are there," he said. As for the Fedayeen, he said, "when Saddam Hussein down, I sure they go away."
"Believe me, not only I, all the people of Iraq, not the people in the government, like Americans," Mohammed said. "They want to help the Americans, but they are all afraid."
Providence and the President George W. Bush's theory of history (James W. Ceaser, 03/10/2003, Weekly Standard)
WHAT DO CONSERVATIVES think today about History? As President Bush readies the nation for war, an abstract question like this one seems out of place. And yet, having raised this theme himself in recent speeches, President Bush has been faced both at home and abroad with widespread criticism for his use and abuse of History. Echoing others' arguments, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen has accused the president of claiming to speak for "destiny and providence." European critics charge the president and his conservative supporters with a dangerous triumphalism born of a conviction that huge metaphysical forces are aligned on America's side. America, Bush is said to believe, represents God, History, and God in History.It has, of course, come to be accepted in modern times that presidents will speak of History, provided only that they mean nothing by it. Whenever presidents wish to elevate the tone of an address, they invoke History. History becomes the omniscient observer, watching over the president's and the nation's shoulder. History--we all know the phrases--is "judging" or "testing" us, it will "record what we do," or, in its sterner moments, "will not forgive us." Used in this way, History has become no more than a figure of speech, the great empty suit of modern rhetoric.
The problem with President Bush, so the charge against him goes, is that he has gone beyond these merely ritual usages. When he speaks about "Providence" and "history,"as he did in his State of the Union address, he unfortunately takes his own words seriously. This criticism, if it is one, is worthy of investigation, all the more so because it is conservatives who traditionally have worried about the pretensions of History. Is President Bush really guilty of what his critics accuse him of, or have they failed to read him closely? [...]
MODERN CONSERVATISM, meaning the conservatism that took hold of the Republican party with Ronald Reagan, established itself on a different plane from that of History. It has rested on the standard of nature, and conservatives have looked first to permanent principles enshrined in documents like the Declaration of Independence. At the same time, conservative statesmen have recognized that people also expect an account of where things fit into the flow of time. Political leadership must do justice to the experience of history.
But conservatives have been perplexed by the question of History, and their thought and instincts have pulled them in different directions. During the long period of
Progressive intellectual dominance, conservative thinkers contested the Doctrine of History, but from opposite ends. Some accepted the idea of Progress, arguing with liberals over how to achieve it. Progress, these conservatives insisted, would be the order of the day if only society abandoned measures of collective planning and put its trust in the forces of the market. Something of this spirit survives in modern libertarian thought.Other conservatives found fault with the whole idea of Progress. Southern Agrarians referred contemptuously to the "Gospel of Progress," decrying the thinness and materialism of the vision. Others insisted that the Doctrine of History failed to prepare people for the inevitable trials, tribulations, and reversals that were intrinsic to man's experience. Progress was a cheap elixir that sold short-term hope at the expense of longer-term understanding. Who living in the middle of the twentieth century could even begin to square the idea of Progress with the experience of the times? A more sober way of thinking was demanded, one that took account of what many conservatives called the "tragic sense." Some pushed this sense to the point of gloominess. Since tragedy proved the falsity and fatuity of the idea of Progress, it was welcomed as an indispensable companion. Conservatism became associated in some quarters with refusing to accept success for an answer.
Conservatives also balked at any idea of an inevitable plan controlling the course of events. The Doctrine of History view removed responsibility and control from human actors, especially from actors inside the political realm. It eliminated nobility and greatness. Had it not been for Lincoln or Churchill, to pick two examples, would the course of human affairs ever have been the same? The French theorist Raymond Aron was celebrated for his classic formulation of this theme. History, Aron insisted, is ultimately an account of "events," where an event is "an act performed by one man or several men at a definite place and time . . . that can never be reduced to circumstances, unless we eliminate in thought those who have acted and decree that anyone in their place would have acted the same way." As this last condition is an absurdity, it follows that the Doctrine of History is a delusion. History, from a human point of view, must be indeterminate.
These thoughts about History were in the background when the liberal idea of Progress collapsed in the 1960s. Conservatives faced an unprecedented situation. The old shibboleth that named conservatism the party of order and liberalism the party of progress could now be no more than half true. If only by comparison, conservatives had become the more progressive force. But it was not just by default that conservatives captured this dimension in 1980. The new conservative leader, Ronald Reagan, was an inveterate optimist, as strong a believer in the American project and in the capacity for transformation as any president in American history. Following Reagan's cue, a new generation of conservatives emerged that put any hint of doom and gloom in the closet and made an unshakable confidence in the future the emblem of conservatism. Grover Norquist's claim was typical: "From Ronald Reagan, conservatives have learned optimism and discovered they are on the winning side of history."
The legacy of the Reagan years has left conservatives with the question of how to incorporate this message of optimism into conservative thought. Two different paths, not always clearly delineated, have been suggested, and while the practical differences between them may for the moment seem small, the theoretical differences are enormous. In one account, conservatives espouse a Doctrine of History of their own in the form of a conservative idea of Progress. What is supported by natural law, they argue, must necessarily manifest itself in a predictable way in the historical context. Since, for example, liberal democracy is the system natural to man, one can be sure it will spread throughout most of the world in centuries to come. Other conservatives refuse to cross what they see as the philosophical red line between nature and history. While conservative principles offer the best prospect for progress and have proven themselves in many areas, nothing in the historical realm ever happens by necessity. Conservatives must continue to keep in mind the place of accident in human affairs and the importance of political choices, which of course can also lead to reversals of fortune.
GEORGE W. BUSH is the product, far more than his father, of the modern conservative movement. Like Ronald Reagan, he is a self-described optimist who once went so far as to chastise a conservative intellectual for the sin of pessimism. What Bush has added to the mainstream of conservatism is a religious dimension, which in the case of the question of History includes the theme of Providence.
Similarly, many conservatives now kid themselves that the victory over Communism and the global turn to free trade and free markets marks a final recognition that at least economies must be structured so as to maximize freedom. They fail to comprehend how much differently people will view free market capitalism when unemployment is at 10% than they do when it's at 4% or even 6%, or when inflation is running rampant, or when the economy actually starts shrinking instead of growing slowly, etc.,...
Thus, any time the tide turns in favor of one side or the other, they come to believe that they've "won", when, in fact, the ebb tide always returns.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the cultural gulf separating American and Arab military cultures. In every significant area, American military advisors find students who enthusiastically take in their lessons and then resolutely fail to apply them. The culture they return to--the culture of their own armies in their own countries--defeats the intentions with which they took leave of their American instructors. Arab officers are not concerned about the welfare and safety of their men. The Arab military mind does not encourage initiative on the part of junior officers, or any officers for that matter. Responsibility is avoided and deflected, not sought and assumed. Political paranoia and operational hermeticism, rather than openness and team effort, are the rules of advancement (and survival) in the Arab military establishments. These are not issues of genetics, of course, but matters of historical and political culture.When they had an influence on certain Arab military establishments, the Soviets strongly reinforced their clients' own cultural traits. Like that of the Arabs, the Soviets' military culture was driven by political fears bordering on paranoia. The steps taken to control the sources (real or imagined) of these fears, such as a rigidly centralized command structure, were readily understood by Arab political and military elites. The Arabs, too, felt an affinity for the Soviet officer class's contempt for ordinary soldiers and its distrust of a well-developed, well-appreciated, well-rewarded NCO corps.
Arab political culture is based on a high degree of social stratification, very much like that of the defunct Soviet Union and very much unlike the upwardly mobile, meritocratic, democratic United States. Arab officers do not see any value in sharing information among themselves, let alone with their men. In this they follow the example of their political leaders, who not only withhold information from their own allies, but routinely deceive them. Training in Arab armies reflects this: rather than prepare as much as possible for the multitude of improvised responsibilities that are thrown up in the chaos of battle, Arab soldiers, and their officers, are bound in the narrow functions assigned them by their hierarchy. That this renders them less effective on the battlefield, let alone that it places their lives at greater risk, is scarcely of concern, whereas, of course, these two issues are dominant in the American military culture and are reflected in American military training.
Change is unlikely to come until it occurs in the larger Arab political culture, although the experience of other societies (including our own) suggests that the military can have a democratizing influence on the larger political culture, as officers bring the lessons of their training first into their professional environment, then into the larger society. It obviously makes a big difference, however, when the surrounding political culture is not only avowedly democratic (as was the Soviet Union's), but functionally so.
The striking scenes of Iraqis cheering and welcoming U.S. troops as liberators in the Shiite holy city of Najaf Wednesday came as no surprise to a handful of British and American undercover officials who have for months sought with sweet talk and hard cash to win over the country's traditional tribal sheikhs and chieftains."The most important duty of a tribal chief is knowing when to switch sides," one British official with knowledge of the undercover operation told United Press International. "In Najaf, the al-Jaburi tribe understood that Saddam Hussein's time was over."
Afghanistan was the model for the operation, where a handful of CIA agents spent $70 millions to buy - or perhaps rent - the loyalties of Afghan tribal chiefs in the campaign against the Taliban in the fall of 2001.
"The Iraqi tribes knew instinctively what was going on," the British official noted. "The week that The Washington Post reported that $70 million had been spent on the Afghans, they all knew that figure - and several said openly that Iraq was a much more important country and would cost a lot more."
There are about 150 major tribes in Iraq, and close to another 2,000 another smaller tribes or clans ...
The more we learn of how methodically and meticulously the Bush administration prepared for this war, the more impressed I am. A success like this doesn't come from luck. But thinking about all that went into it, it's hard to imagine George Bush starting another one before the 2004 election.
A copycat mentality among baseball people has brought about a fundamental change in philosophy that has resulted in a general deterioration in pitching.Arithmetic tells the story. Forty years ago, teams usually had 10-man staffs, and most of the work really was done by five pitchers. There were four- man starting rotations with one principal relief pitcher, who was used for however long was necessary; Rollie Fingers pitched 3 1/3 innings in the A's Game 1 win in the 1973 World Series and worked 4 1/3 innings in their Game 1 win in the '74 Series.
The remaining five pitchers were used for long relief in games that seemed hopelessly lost, occasionally in middle relief if a starter got knocked out in what was still a close game, and for spot starts.
The A's championship teams of the '70s were sometimes an exception, because manager Dick Williams had excellent relievers like Darold Knowles, Paul Lindblad and Bob Locker, in addition to Fingers. But in the '74 Series, Alvin Dark used only five pitchers: starters Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue and Ken Holtzman, and John "Blue Moon" Odom and Fingers in relief (Hunter also got the final out in relief in the opener).
Now, there are five-man rotations, and these starters seldom pitch as many total innings as the four-man staffs did earlier. Complete games used to be the goal. Now, managers are satisfied if a starter goes seven innings.
So, more pitchers are needed. Staffs have swollen to 11, 12, even 13 on extreme occasions.
In any baseball era, there is a sprinkling of great pitchers, a larger supply of good pitchers, an even larger supply of mediocre pitchers and some very bad ones.
In an earlier era, managers of good teams usually selected from the first two groups for the key pitchers on their staff. Less fortunate managers sometimes had to dip into the third group. The really bad teams had to use pitchers from the fourth group.
Now, because so many more pitchers are used, there are many more pitchers from the third and fourth groups. On both an absolute and relative scale, there are no more bad pitchers today than there ever were. It's just that they're being used much more frequently, and that's why you see these 13-11 scores.
A Jewish-owned restaurant in Paris was torched Thursday morning.French police reported that the restaurant was totally burned.
There were no injuries.
Police have not officially stated the motives behind the torching of the restaurant or if they have any suspects, reports Israel Radio.
General Franks' "phoney pause"After advancing some 200 miles out of Kuwait in 36 hours, Central Command slowed the coalition forces' progress north for a week. The New York Times and other knowledgeable newspapers and sources credited the Fedayeen Saddam and other Iraqi irregulars with causing the slowdown. Franks' (and Rumsfeld's) war plan came under fierce attack from talking heads on TV - mostly retired colonels of whom it should have been asked why they never made general's grade. It was no forced pause. It was a time to prepare the battlefield around Baghdad with heavy air power and to await the arrival of the US 4th Infantry - the US Army's finest - at Kuwait for backup if needed.
The offensive on Baghdad started on Tuesday. The 3rd ID resumed its push north, west of the Euphrates, to Karbala. The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF) pushed north between the Euphrates and Tigris. They would meet the Republican Guard divisions head on, said the talking heads (with French training?). They did no such thing, of course. Simultaneously, on Tuesday night, the 3rd ID turned East and crossed the Euphrates near Karbala, the I MEF turned east and crossed the Tigris after destroying the Guards' Baghdad division at al-Kut in less than 24 hours; meanwhile, Guderian-style, but with Apache helicopters rather than tanks, the 101st Airborne cut across the Euphrates at Hindiya and split Republican Guard forces to the south and north of it.
Franks, the University of Texas drop-out and "muddy boots" soldier who never made it to West Point, has carried out a coordinated wheeling east maneuver about which military historians will write for years to come. During the Gulf War in 1991, he was ADC (assistant division commander -maneuver) of the US 1st Cavalry that confronted Republican Guards north of the Kuwait desert. He appreciates their fighting strength; he wasn't impressed with their tactical maneuvering skills. He and his staff officers have put such insights to use.
The "pause" was a pause. Backup by the US 4th ID was reasonably regarded as critical by Franks, who is no cowboy, but a meticulous, careful and patient planner. It was also a ruse, preparing for the wheel east, driving through Iraqi positions from the flank. This has brought US forces to the immediate outskirts of Baghdad in 48 hours - a move that "informed" French military observers writing in Le Monde (Monday) estimated might take another month of fighting. The French, it seems, are a bit hard at learning.
CASUALTIES OF THE "PAUSE":
-Warring Tribes, Here and There (MAUREEN DOWD, 4/02/03, NY Times)
-Stuck in the Quicksand (David H. Hackworth, 04-01-2003)
-Too Little Shock, Not Enough Awe (William M. Arkin, 3/30/03, LA Times)
-The War and the Peace: The Pentagon's dubious plans. (Robert Wright, April 1, 2003, Slate)
-OFFENSE AND DEFENSE: The battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. (SEYMOUR M. HERSH, 3/31/03, The New Yorker)
-President Bush's aides (Joshua Micah Marshall, 3/30/03, Talking Points Memo)
-What Was Rumsfeld Thinking? (Mickey Kaus, 3/30/03, Slate)
-Bush reportedly shielded from dire forecast: Outlooks of quick war may have prevailed (WARREN P. STROBEL, Mar. 29, 2003, Knight Ridder)
-It will end in disaster: The US and British governments have dragged us into a mess that will last for years (George Monbiot, April 1, 2003, The Guardian)
Anyone got more?
Apparently, some Iraqi civilians are rushing to surrender to American troops under the false impression that they will be taken to the United States."We had a group like that a few days ago," says Medley. "One guy wanted to go to America, bad. He wasn't a soldier. He wanted a baseball cap. When we put him on a helicopter, he thought he was going to America--he was smiling the whole time."
An article on Tuesday about criticism voiced by American military officers in Iraq over war plans omitted two words from an earlier comment by Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, commander of V Corps. General Wallace had said (with the omission indicated by uppercasing), "The enemy we're fighting is A BIT different from the one we war-gamed against."
If the Catholic Church is smarting over incessant attempts by non-historians to tarnish the image of Pope Pius XII, it can draw comfort from the certainty that the end of the smear campaign is nigh. Real historians will soon refute the likes of Harvard's Daniel Goldhagen and John Cornwell, the author of the scandalous book, "Hitler's Pope."The Vatican is making it increasingly easier for scholars to research the church's position vis-a-vis the Nazi regime. It has newly indexed documents from the papal nuncio's offices in Munich and Berlin before and during World War II -- that is, documents that were not destroyed by Allied bombing.
One of the most fascinating nuggets of information we can expect from the coming research will doubtless show how much the Vatican and the Lutheran resistance inside Germany have worked in tandem at a time when ecumenism was far from fashionable.
Already Lutheran church historian Gerhard Besier has jumped to Pius's defense by chiding Goldhagen for not even mentioning the fact that the SS "considered the Roman Catholic Church is most dangerous ideological adversary." This was the reason, wrote Besier, why the Nazis "fought 'political Catholicism' with every means at their disposal."
It shows up the shoddy scholarly craftsmanship of the Vatican's detractors that they didn't even bother to study data concerning the interplay between Lutheran martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the pope -- material that has been accessible to the general public for decades:
-- In his celebrated Bonhoeffer biography, the late Rev. Eberhard Bethge recorded the Vatican's crucial role in maintaining a line of communication between the resistance and the British Foreign Office. Bethge was Bonhoeffer's closest friend and, later, his editor.
-- Anti-Nazi diplomat Ulrich von Hassell recorded in 1940 to "what extraordinary lengths (the pope) went to make German interests his own" -- meaning, of course, not the interests of Nazi Germany but of the new Germany that was to emerge after Hitler's overthrow.
It has long been known that Protestant resistance leaders transmitted detailed plans for this post-Nazi Germany via the Vatican to London.
Of course, the intricacy of these ecumenical relations might be too much to ponder for authors bent on demagoguery.
By the time the Iraqi crisis is over, it may already be too late for the Government to stop a political disaster in Europe. The European Union's first constitution will be a done deal, and, from what we have seen of the text so far, it will usher in a new order that overturns the governing basis of British parliamentary democracy for ever.The EU will no longer be a treaty organisation in which member states agree to lend power to Brussels for certain purposes, on the understanding that they can take it back again. The EU itself will become the fount of power, with its own legal personality, delegating functions back to Britain. Draft Article 9 puts Brussels at the top of the pyramid. "The Constitution will have primacy over the law of Member States," it says.
The new order may also be irreversible. Article 46 stipulates that the terms of secession from the EU must be agreed by two thirds of the member states. In other words, one third can impose intolerable conditions [report, 3 April].
A number of fresh articles trickled out two weeks ago, just as the Iraq conflict was erupting, to create what amounts to an EU interior and justice ministry, known as Eurojust, in charge of a proto-FBI - Europol - with the power to launch raids across the EU [report, 19 March]. An EU attorney-general will be able to prosecute "cross-border crime" in British courts, a catch-all term that gives Brussels wider jurisdiction than the US Justice Department currently enjoys after 200 years of encroachment on state power.
Under a new notion called "shared competence", Brussels takes charge of virtually all areas of national life. Unless the EU chooses to waive its primacy, Westminster will be prohibited from legislating in public health, social policy, transport, justice, agriculture, energy, economic and social cohesion, the environment, internal and external trade, and consumer protection.
The EU will have the power to "co-ordinate the economic policies of the member states" and - showing some chutzpah given what happened over Iraq - "define and implement a common foreign and security policy, including the progressive framing of a common defence policy". [...]
Tony Blair was slow to see the threat. Downing Street at first dismissed the convention as a talking shop, but woke up when the French, Spanish, German and Italian governments gave it irresistible authority by appointing to it their foreign or deputy prime ministers.
The Government then fell back to a second self-deception, imagining that France and Spain would join Britain in blocking any major assault on national prerogatives. Peter Hain, Downing Street's man on the forum, confidently told reporters that the East Europeans would not give away freedoms so recently wrested from the Soviet Union.
None of this has happened. France has abandoned Britain, and her own historical attachment to a Europe where national capitals always have the whip hand over Brussels. They seem to be accepting federalism as the price of relaunching the broken Franco-German axis. As for the Spanish, they are silent.
So are the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and others, who still have a gun pointed to their head. They know that Jacques Chirac could still try to sabotage their admission next year by calling a referendum in France. Those on the convention will soon become MEPs or Eurocrats themselves, and their salaries will jump by as much as 12 times, which concentrates the mind.
It is almost pitiful to read through the long list of amendments put up by Mr Hain. Britain is alone, supported by just a handful of lonely Euro-sceptics.
Ash-Wednesday (T S Eliot)I
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing againBecause I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoiceAnd pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon usBecause these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
While world attention is focused on the conflict in Iraq, the United States is also deeply, and quietly, involved in a battle in the jungles of Colombia. In that conflict, Washington employs a small army of private contractors who assist Colombia’s government in its fight with leftist rebels and drug lords. In the past seven weeks, four Americans and one Colombian have been killed in the conflict while under contract with the U.S. government. Three others have been taken hostage.
THE LATEST U.S. casualties in the simmering conflict came March 25 when a Cessna 208 operated by private contractors on behalf of the U.S. military crashed, killing all three U.S. crew members. It was the second disaster in Colombia involving that type of aircraft in just two months.That flight was in turn part of a search-and-rescue effort trying to track down three U.S. employees of the same company who were taken hostage after their aircraft crashed Feb. 13 in rebel-held jungle territory.
These disasters have cracked open a window on a small private army of pilots, commandos and maintenance personnel involved in a secretive military and intelligence operation in Colombia run on behalf of the U.S. government. These contractors are smack in the middle of a campaign against leftist guerrillas and drug traffickers.
"We never use the 'm' word," one veteran pilot says, meaning 'm' as in 'mercenary.' But it is a job. "Where else can a guy with a high school education earn more than $100,000 a year?" the pilot says. "If you don't mind living on a base with other smelly guys, sharing a room with six other guys."
Under a U.S. program to back Colombia's battle with narcotics producers and traffickers, Washington has allocated $2 billion worth of military equipment and training to the Colombian military, which is also at war with guerrilla groups. In March, in a little-noticed item in the emergency spending request sent to Congress for Iraq war funding, the White House asked for an extra $105 million for operations in Colombia.
The three Americans taken captive by FARC are still missing, and their names have not been released. The Colombian army launched a massive operation to encircle the guerillas and rescue the captives. The U.S. Southern Command sent about 40 SAR specialists to help in the hunt, but so far there has been no trace of the missing Americans.
U.S. troops tightened the noose around Saddam Hussein's regime as ground forces swept into Baghdad's international airport under cover of darkness, overrunning its airfields with tanks and other armored units.Reporting from the tarmac of Saddam International Airport, ABCNEWS' Bob Schmidt, who is embedded with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, said the airport was in pitch darkness as coalition tanks entered the facility. U.S. forces encountered very little Iraqi resistance, said Schmidt, although some units of the 3rd encountered scattered firing by Iraqi foot soldiers and men in pickups.
Schmidt reported seeing Iraqis waving and cheering as U.S. tanks rolled toward the airport, which is just 10 miles from central Baghdad.
Syria continues to accept Saddamite refugees, his family and staff. And his WMD and the people who make it. We must soon demand the Syrians surrender all of them, and all of the materials and papers. Syria--an active supporter of terror--cannot be allowed to have WMD any more than Iraq can.
The possibility was suggested that we are letting Iraqi officials go to help prepare a case for war against Syria. But isn't it more likely that we gave Iraqi officialdom free egress in order to hasten the end of the war? We've been in contact with most of them by telephone throughout the war, and surely we've been encouraging them to leave. With the leaders fleeing, it's no wonder that lower-level functionaries have been unwilling to throw away their lives fighting the coalition.
All in all, this war has been handled masterfully. I don't know what the future holds for Syria -- maybe we will use Syria's shelter to the Iraqis, which we are probably grateful for now, as a pretext for war later -- but the administration deserves the greatest of credit for its handling of the Iraq war.
Palestinians also worked in Israel and watched Israeli television. They saw that, for its own citizens, the Israeli system had distinct virtues. This is not easy for even ardent Palestinian democrats to acknowledge.Yet since 1996, Dr. Shikaki has been polling Palestinians about what governments they admire, and every year Israel has been the top performer, at times receiving more than 80 percent approval. The American system has been the next best, followed by the French and then, distantly trailing, the Jordanian and Egyptian.
In its early days, the Palestinian Authority held fourth place, with about 50 percent approval. Now, it is dead last, under 20 percent. Corruption, mismanagement and the stagnation of the Palestinian predicament have turned the culture of criticism against the Palestinian rulers.
The Palestinians were grievously and profoundly betrayed in 1993 when Israel, along with the Clinton administration, imported a long-time mass murderer, Yasser Arafat, and established him as dictator over them. Arafat, already a terror master and client of Saddam Hussein, proceeded to destroy Palestinian civil society, kill moderates who criticized him, and effectively kidnap Palestinian children by forcing them through an 'educational system' that was little more than a training ground for suicide bombers. The result has been poverty, war, tyranny, and suffering.
Yet even so, Palestinians continue to admire Israel and to aid Israel. Israel's program of targeted killings of terrorists works because so many Palestinians help Israel find them. The vast majority of Palestinians will coexist happily with Israel if they can live in a free society.
The Palestinians, just like the Iraqis, are suffering under a government that is little more than a gang of terrorists. To declare the existing Palestinian government a state would change nothing except to remove the Oslo limit on its possession of the most dangerous military weapons. It would make the Palestinian plight worse and increase the destruction caused by Palestinian terrorism, while leaving Israel no recourse but long-distance military attacks that would kill innocent Palestinians.
Just as we betrayed the Iraqi people in 1991 and made up for it in 2003, so it is time for Israel to make up for its 1993 betrayal. Go in, kill or imprison the terrorists, liberate the rest, help them recreate their civil society, and then leave them with a functioning democracy.
"What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States," Kerry said in a speech at the Peterborough Town Library....[T]he Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential contender seemed to be reaching out to a newly invigorated constituency as rival Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont and a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, closes in on Kerry in opinion polls....
"I believe we can have a golden age of American diplomacy," he said, outlining his own foreign policy credentials in the speech. "But it will take a new president who is prepared to lead, and who has, frankly, a little more experience than visiting the sum total of two countries" before taking office.
The criticism appeared to contradict statements Kerry made on March 18, just a day before Bush authorized military action to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
Kerry, who previously had been critical of Bush's efforts to reach out to the international community, was reluctant that day to answer when a television crew asked him whether the administration had handled its diplomatic efforts poorly.
"You know, we're beyond that now," the senator said after addressing the International Association of Fire Fighters. "We have to come together as a country to get this done and heal the wounds."
Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army's 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday.Lynch, a 19-year-old supply clerk, continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting March 23, one official said. The ambush took place after a 507th convoy, supporting the advancing 3rd Infantry Division, took a wrong turn near the southern city of Nasiriyah.
"She was fighting to the death," the official said. "She did not want to be taken alive."
Lynch was also stabbed when Iraqi forces closed in on her position, the official said, noting that initial intelligence reports indicated that she had been stabbed to death. No official gave any indication yesterday, however, that Lynch's wounds had been life-threatening.
Several officials cautioned that the precise sequence of events is still being determined, and that further information will emerge as Lynch is debriefed. Reports thus far are based on battlefield intelligence, they said, which comes from monitored communications and from Iraqi sources in Nasiriyah whose reliability has yet to be assessed. Pentagon officials said they had heard "rumors" of Lynch's heroics but had no confirmation.
The Rev. Al Sharpton met with the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations on Thursday to make what he called a moral appeal to the Iraqi government that no harm come to American prisoners of war.
Commuters across France faced massive headaches, with metro and train traffic severely disrupted because of a one-day strike over pension reforms, and hundreds of domestic and European flights cancelled as well.The broad-based strike by public sector workers was also due to affect schools and postal services. [...]
Public sector workers, who make up 25 percent of the work force, are keen to defend their privileges, which include a shorter contribution period in order to receive a full pension in comparison to their colleagues in the private domain.
Great Britain and the United States didn't count on Saddam Hussein being able to rally his country (or even to survive the first day's missile attacks). They didn't count on the Iraqi people resisting the allied incursion; or on the difficulty in maintaining supply lines in the desert; or on obstacles on the way to Baghdad; or on the likelihood of the use of suicide bombers, until now mostly a terrorist tactic, as a tool of war in conflict between states.Nor did the two countries fully comprehend the most terrifying prospect of this new Gulf War -- the notion that weapons of mass destruction might be converted from frightful, forbidden implements of conflict into symbols of nationalism that could be used, to the applause of the masses, to keep invading forces at bay. Such a development would provide unprecedented peril to allied combatants and would upend the moral calculus of the West.
That is the danger stalking in the words of Iraq's Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, who, after last weekend's taxi suicide bombing, said, "Any method that stops or kills the enemy will be used."
The Bush administration is arguing that it never promised a brisk war, but Vice President Dick Cheney expressed the prevailing attitude last month when he said on CBS's "Face the Nation" that the war in Iraq would be a matter of "weeks rather than months."
He could still be right, of course. But the public isn't so sure. A week ago, a majority of Americans expected the war to last two months; now, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll, a majority believes it will last three months.
In 1940, the French government accepted defeat and signed a separate peace with the Third Reich. The French colonies in Syria and Lebanon remained under Vichy control, and were therefore open to the Nazis to do what they wished. They became major bases for Nazi propaganda and activity in the Middle East. The Nazis extended their operations from Syria and Lebanon, with some success, to Iraq and other places. That was the time when the Baath Party was founded, as a kind of clone of the Nazi and Fascist parties, using very similar methods and adapting a very similar ideology, and operating in the same way ...When the Third Reich collapsed, and after an interval was replaced by the Soviet Union as the patron of all anti-Western forces, the adjustment from the Nazi model to the Communist model was not very difficult and was carried throughout without problems. That is where the present Iraqi type of government comes from. As I said before, it has no roots in the authentic Arabic or Islamic past. It is, instead, part of the most successful and most harmful process of Westernization to have occurred in the Middle East....
[P]eoples of the Muslim Middle East have a tradition of limited, responsible government. While not democratic, this tradition shares many features of democratic Western governments. It provides, I believe, a good basis for the development of democratic institutions -- as has happened elsewhere in the world. I remain cautiously optimistic for their future.
Europe has been the most war-riven continent because of these contending ideas. It now appears that the rest of the world must follow in Europe's path until, at last, freedom wins. But I suspect the final battles will be fought, once again, in Europe.
Sure, at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) convention they applauded Colin Powell when he said that settlement activity should be stopped. It is natural that among the 3,000 delegates there were a few hundred who oppose the settlements - particularly at present, when things have to made easier for the American government, which is already caught up in the conflict with the Arab world and with Europe.But there were many there - and these are the vast majority of the organization's activists, as anyone who has attended a few AIPAC conventions knows - who really and truly support the settlements. And even among them there were some who applauded. That is how cultured people behave, even when they hear things they don't like.
Powell is therefore advised not to be too impressed by that applause. When AIPAC decides to fight the road map, even those who applauded in Washington will enlist. And AIPAC should start now. After all, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is certainly not one of Israel's enemies, and did not arbitrarily release a semi-ultimatum - not to a lobby that can (almost) influence the outcome of the elections - that the "demands [of the road map] are not open to negotiation." And when such a resolute statement is made when the early cherry blossoms of the primaries are already blooming in Washington, it is a sign that the lobby fell asleep on its watch. The open rejoicing of a few left-wingers at the "news" that the road map is about to be forced down our throats, perhaps even before the end of the battles in Iraq, seems, therefore, to have some foundation. [...]
Unlike its predecessor, which was hostile to Israel, the current administration, which is considered friendly to Israel is for some reason in a hurry to get moving and has unsheathed its claws at the height of the war. Now Israel must respond resolutely: The milestones that are marked on this "follow the rules without question" road map are liable to lead the Jewish state into a trap that will endanger its existence. From Israel's perspective, and not that of the U.S., Rice is correct: This road map cannot be open to negotiation.
Of course, there are manifold drawbacks to this solution. To begin with, Palestine is a state in all but name, ethnically dominated by Palestinians, self-governed to some degree, and a recognizable political entity. Meanwhile, holding on to Palestine has not enhanced Israeli security in fact, though that's the theory. Terrorism is more common in Israel than it was thirty or even twenty years ago and the Israeli military has to stay continuously deployed in the territories. Also, the Israeli economy, which was doing fairly well even a few years ago, is flat or declining. It's hard to see why anyone would invest in a business in such an inherently unstable climate. And so on and so forth.
What are the alternatives then? The first, and it should not be dismissed out of hand, is genocide. The brutal truth is that while you often hear talk of slave reparations, you don't hear much about repaying the Native Americans. The reality is that if you dispose of an unwelcome people you suffer from the judgment of others for so long as you're engaged in the process but once gone they're largely forgotten. Moreover, if you just fashion some military pretext, conduct the extermination as a form of warfare, rather than as a Hitler-esque liquidation policy, you may not even face much judgment. Provoke some kind of conflict with Syria/Hamas, suffer a few appalling losses, then drop a couple nukes n Palestine and South Lebanon and the Palestinian question is permanently settled. If the overwhelming purpose here is to prevent statehood and to stop attacks, this will achieve the goals with not many more negatives--except for the Palestinians themselves--than the current policy.
Or, Israel could simply declare that all of the land that it has control of now is and for all time shall be the state of Israel and all of the peoples on the land are Israelis. If it is the land that is at issue and biblical injunctions about which state shall have those lands, this solution takes care of that and settles the question of a Palestinian state. It seems implausible though that this will enhance internal security or create better economic conditions or help with any of the other secondary problems. And, unfortunately, in just a few short years the Arabs of this greater Israel will outnumber the Jews, so Israel, assuming it were to remain a democracy, would become an Arab state. Thus does an Israel that fulfills the dreams of both Jewish nationalists and liberal democrats end up being the very worst option.
Which brings us to the fourth alternative: imposed statehood. Israel could today recognize a state of Palestine, with boundaries determined by the government of Israel, withdraw from the rest, and tell the new Palestine that it stands ready to help in any way it can, but will vigorously defend its borders. This course of action has numerous advantages: first, the element of surprise, that will shake up a region and a world already on edge, and in need of a good shake; second, the rights of Palestinians, or lack of such, will no longer be an Israeli responsibility; third, Israel will regain the moral high ground, so that when folks complain, as they will, about the boundaries extending a quarter mile here or there, Israel can just say: "We made them a nation and you want to quibble about a few random acres?"; fourth, it will, hopefully, turn Palestinian violence inwards, as the main struggle
becomes not whether there'll be a state but who will run it; and, fifth, if the genocide option does end up being inevitable, it turns the coming conflict into one between coequal nations, rather than one of a powerful political ruling class against a minority, a silly distinction to be sure, but one that matters in international law and social psychology.
This scenario, of course, has its own drawbacks. Chief among them is that in order to create a credible state of Palestine, Israel will have to either pull back some settlers or leave them to what are unlikely to be the tender mercies of the newly empowered Palestinian people. The former will cause significant domestic unrest immediately, the latter when the settlers are slaughtered. Statehood also won't satisfy the most radical elements in Palestinian society and therefore does not guarantee greater security from terrorism. But it does enable Israel to hold another government, Palestine's, responsible for helping stop the violence and it entitles Israel to take commensurate actions to protect the national security if the Palestinians refuse to help. It also offers at least the possibility that terrorism will lessen as Palestinians turn their fury on one another, instead of directing it predominantly
outward. Finally, it concedes, for now anyway, the end of the dream of a greater Israel, occupying all of Biblical lands of historic Israel. This will come as a blow to some Zionists, but given the demographic trends of the Jewish people is merely an acceptance of reality. In fact, the long term future of any Jewish state, indeed of Judaism itself, is in some doubt. But these futures depend on the Israelis themselves, and Jews generally, and have rather little to do with the Palestinians, except in so far as Palestine may one day subsume a dying Israel (if it fails to get its population crisis under control).
Of all of these, statehood certainly seems to be the best option, though we welcome different opinions and alternatives.
MORE:
-The danger, Israel, is to the West (Stan Goodenough, March 28, 2003, Israeli Insider)
The noble goal of liberating Iraq has long been linked in the British mind with the ignoble one of creating "Palestine" on Jewish lands.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center demanded Sunday the recall of the Palestinian observer to the UN Human Rights Commission for callingfor the "elimination" of Israel.Shimon Samuels, the Wiesenthal Center's representative at the 59th Human Rights Commission session currently taking place in Geneva, wrote to UN Human Rights High Commissioner Sergio Vieira de Mello calling on him to "immediately condemn the Palestinian observer and take the necessary measures for his recall, due to his violation of the UN Charter in calling for the 'elimination' of the state of Israel."
After bitter bickering over the adequacy of the invasion force and a delay caused by blinding sandstorms and attacks on the supply lines, the allied campaign in Iraq has finally begun moving again.
We're increasingly of the opinion that when the memoirs are all written, it will turn out that Howell Raines was a parodist of some fair degree of genius, who quite intentionally turned the Times into a running joke and laughed up his sleeve as folks failed to catch on. No serious person could use the word "finally" to describe a "delay" in a war that has lasted two weeks.
About sixty cars headed west out of Mosul today, carrying what's left of Saddam's extended family, and their fortunes, to Syria. Which is where intelligence sources say most of the WMD bad guys are headed with as much of their papers and handiwork as they can carry. That is, unless they're headed to one of the Baghdad embassies that will give them sanctuary from American troops on the hunt. The warning shot fired at the Russian embassy today may or may not have been an accident. If other warning shots are to occur, I suggest they be accidentally aimed at the Palestinian Authority's embassy as well as those of the other usual suspects. France and Syria, as well as China, are all helping the Iraqis hide people and papers. If our guys find proofs of WMD programs, it won't be because those countries -- and the PA -- spared any effort to hide it.Syria's ruling party is the same Ba'ath Party that rules Iraq under Saddam. Syria's complicity in terror is too clear to debate. President Bashar Assad -- who is neither as smart nor as tough as his father -- feels the need to support the Saddamites, so in they come. Tony Blair is going wobbly at the thought of American invoking the idea of hot pursuit. Syria is not half the danger Iraq has been, but it aspires to be. That is why it is the destination of choice for Saddam's thugs. In another day or two, there will be more of them in Syria than in Baghdad.
A US official told The Times that Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, was resisting State Department appointments to the administration-in-waiting, at least one of whom is already in Kuwait.He said that the Pentagon had ruled that Mr Rumsfeld should personally approve appointments to the temporary US-British administration, “and there are many people who question his authority to take that decision, including, I assume, the Secretary of State”....
He said that it was unclear how the row would end as the decision-making process was in flux. “The White House has to step in. One of the variables is Mr Tony Blair. Once again, he will be a critical voice in all of this,” he said....
The row boils down to control over policy-making on Iraq in the postwar phase, with the State Department anxious to create an environment that is more acceptable to foreign countries while the Pentagon is anxious to stay in control.
Critics of the Bush Administration’s neo-conservative wing, which dominates the Pentagon, say that its ranks are anxious to build a new Iraq in the image of the United States, using Westernised Iraqi exiles such as Ahmed Chalabi, a favourite of the Pentagon who is disliked by the State Department. The differences over how to involve Mr Chalabi, the Iraqi opposition leader, have raged for months.
Meanwhile, General Powell and Mr Blair are trying to secure a prominent role for the United Nations in an attempt to avoid further alienating US allies in Europe. State Department moderates are hoping that Mr Blair can [help them] ...
It seems to me that the one weakness in the war plan has been the failure to incorporate Mr. Chalabi and other Iraqi opposition elements into it. I would have had Iraqi-Americans embedded with the units just like the reporters, to translate and talk to the populace and get help identifying the enemy. As territory was seized, I would have put up TV and radio stations broadcasting the opposition's "TV Liberty," and given Iraqis war news and instructions on how to stay out of danger and on how to help the coalition. In reconstruction, I would name Mr. Chalabi an Iraqi chief administrator, reporting to a U.S. authority with a title like "Chief Steward," to manage war-crimes tribunals, humanitarian aid from a U.S.-administered oil revenues trust fund, and the development of a federal system of governance in which most authority resides below the national level.
The inability to reach agreement on a post-war plan has apparently led the President to put off decisions so as not to alienate anyone and damage the war effort. But it will soon be time for the debating to end and decisions to be made. Let's hope President Bush and Prime Minister Blair choose wisely.
"You have the jewel of Africa in your hands," said President Samora Machel of Mozambique and President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania to Robert Mugabe, at the moment of independence, in 1980. "Now look after it."Twenty-three years later, the "jewel" is ruined, dishonored, disgraced.
Southern Rhodesia had fine and functioning railways, good roads; its towns were policed and clean. It could grow anything, tropical fruit like pineapples, mangoes, bananas, plantains, pawpaws, passion fruit, temperate fruits like apples, peaches, plums. The staple food, maize, grew like a weed and fed surrounding countries as well. Peanuts, sunflowers, cotton, the millets and small grains that used to be staple foods before maize, flourished. Minerals: gold, chromium, asbestos, platinum, and rich coalfields. The dammed Zambezi River created the Kariba Lake, which fed electricity north and south. A paradise, and not only for the whites. The blacks did well, too, at least physically. Not politically: it was a police state and a harsh one. When the blacks rebelled and won their war in 1979 they looked forward to a plenty and competence that existed nowhere else in Africa, not even in South Africa, which was bedeviled by its many mutually hostile tribes and its vast shantytowns. But paradise has to have a superstructure, an infrastructure, and by now it is going, going— almost gone.
One man is associated with the calamity, Robert Mugabe. For a while I wondered if the word "tragedy" could be applied here, greatness brought low, but Mugabe, despite his early reputation, was never great; he was always a frightened little man. There is a tragedy, all right, but it is Zimbabwe's.
Mugabe is now widely execrated, and rightly, but blame for him began late. Nothing is more astonishing than the silence about him for so many years among liberals and well-wishers—the politically correct. What crimes have been committed in the name of political correctness. A man may get away with murder, if he is black. Mugabe did, for many years.
Early in his regime, we might have seen what he was when the infamous Fifth Brigade, thugs from North Korea, hated by blacks and whites alike, became Mugabe's bodyguards, and did his dirty work, notably when he attempted what was virtually genocide of thousands of the Ndebele people (the second-largest tribe) in Matabeleland. Hindsight gives us a clear picture of his depredations: at the time mendacity ruled, all was confusion. But the fact was, we knew the Fifth Brigade: it had already murdered and raped.
It was confusion, too, because Mugabe seemed to begin well. He was a Marxist, true, but...
Lanchester's Law can be paraphrased as follows: "The strength of a military unit — planes, artillery, tanks, or just soldiers with rifles — is proportional not to the size of the unit, but to the square of its size."...If the units under discussion have planes, cruise missiles and the like, there is no comparison and Lanchester's Law is not relevant. With tanks and artillery, Lanchester's Law does come into play, and American qualitative superiority again easily wins the day.
It's only when we get down to the level of individual soldiers with rifles in house-to-house fighting that the balance becomes unclear.
It's here that Lanchester's Law suggests that American soldiers' smaller degree of superiority may not always make up for a potential Iraqi numerical advantage ...
The Bush administration has intensified a campaign--using radio broadcasts and other communications with Iraqi military leaders--to sow doubts about whether President Saddam Hussein is still alive and in control of the country, senior administration and military officials said.American officials say they have still reached no firm conclusions about whether Mr. Hussein survived an attack two weeks ago. But they are trying to turn that uncertainty to battlefield advantage, attempting to raise questions in the minds of Iraqi military commanders about whether they should fight for a leader who may be dead or incapacitated.
"From what our intelligence is picking up, some of the Iraqi commanders themselves have not heard from him," said one senior official. "And we don't know ourselves. So you could call this psychological warfare, or you could call it exploitation of the biggest mystery out there."
The administration's effort to raise doubts about Mr. Hussein comes after American military officials have reported to the Pentagon that most Iraqis encountered by American forces believe that Mr. Hussein is still alive. [...]
"If we underestimated anything, it was Saddam's ability to project the perception that he is still in charge," one intelligence official said. "We haven't seen a massive uprising, and we think that is because most of the people are still convinced he is alive."
American intelligence officials said today that they have not yet heard Mr. Hussein or either of his two sons issuing orders since the initial raid on his bunker that started the war on the evening of March 19, Washington time. American intelligence is convinced that he was in the bunker at the time of the raid, but do not know whether he survived.
Intelligence officials say that the United States has not been able to identify any members of Mr. Hussein's inner circle who are trying to coordinate Iraqi forces in the field, or who is in overall command.
The questions about Mr. Hussein resumed today when he did not appear on television, but the Iraqi government issued another statement in his name. None of the broadcasts of Mr. Hussein shown since the war started have yielded clear evidence of where and when the tapes were made.
American analysts remain convinced that several people were killed and wounded in the March 19 raid, but they have not assembled what they would consider an authoritative list of casualties.
During the 1991 wulf war, Mr. Hussein, who has long been preoccupied with personal security, dropped from sight.
As anyone who lives in the Detroit Metropolitan area knows, the divisions between city and suburbs along race and class lines are deep and seemingly intractable. These divisions are what make a Catholic high school in Detroit—at one of which I am a teacher—so different from a Catholic high school in the suburbs. Like Rabbit, the protagonist in the recently debuted movie 8 Mile, my students hail from the south—commonly considered the “wrong”—side of 8 Mile Road. With an incessant barrage of profane language and bleak images, 8 Mile mercilessly depicts the living conditions of those who come from the south side of 8 Mile Road. The film’s depiction penetrates so pointedly that even the most callous person cannot help but gain a feel for the apparent hopelessness festering through these circumstances. This hopeless feel includes tasting the lower class existence in a trailer park in Detroit as seasoned by a missing father, a dysfunctional mother, a little sister traumatized by exposure to domestic violence, a low-wage job in a plant for drop-outs and ex-cons, and a neighborhood blighted by the abandoned houses that shelter rapists and drug dealers.Although virtually all of Rabbit’s life and work throughout the film provide counter-examples of virtuous, or even laudable, activity, 8 Mile can offer something constructive to kids who find themselves in similar circumstances, to kids for whom poverty and a dysfunctional family are all too familiar, to kids who need to be reminded that they have “got to formulate a plot fore they end up in jail or shot” (lyrics rapped by Rabbit in the movie). If we accept the task of helping these kids make the distinction between Rabbit’s genuine virtues and vices, we can make constructive use of 8 Mile’s wild popularity1 as a story that can help others caught in Rabbit’s kind of world to “formulate a plot,” a plot where they envision themselves as the successful, justly rewarded stewards of their own talents rather than the powerless victims of a manifestly unequal initial distribution of gifts or resources.
Inner-city kids—surrounded day in and day out by the urban blight that is as relentlessly dreary in real life as it was on the screen—need to see that they can achieve their dreams through hard work. For myriad reasons, some of these kids will be more drawn to Rabbit than to the more wholesome role models we would prefer them to choose. It is obvious to me, as a teacher in Detroit, that such hard core, but hardworking role models can answer a real need so long as such role models’ virtues are clearly discerned and separated from their vices. My students’ lives often do not resemble that of the characters in nice, G-rated family flicks. The city vista alone presents a harsh reality—much harsher than in the suburbs—with its overabundance of abandoned buildings and of liquor stores, its dearth of more wholesome enterprises, its higher crime rates, and its lower functioning schools. Where every day life is harsher, the properly discerned hardcore hero simply makes more sense. However, the hardworking quality is just as crucial as the hardcore. Rabbit refuses to accept failure as an option. Without hard work, failure becomes an option for these inner-city kids, along with ending up in jail or shot. As problematic as generalizations like these may be, it seems safe to say that generally the student work ethic in our city schools lags seriously behind the standard in the suburban schools.
While causes of the phenomenon of these differing work ethic standards may be debated, the phenomenon itself powerfully illustrates the crucial link between virtue and liberty. Every day I am confounded by the incredible gap between my own high school experience (I attended a school in Grosse Pointe, one of the prosperous suburbs of Detroit) and my students’ classroom behavior and expectations. Every day spent in the classroom with students who are used to such a different ratio of work-to-play than the one that prevailed in my high school is an object lesson in the necessary relationship between self-discipline, delayed gratification, and the freedom for a person to develop his or her potential and master his or her environment through something other than brute force or unrestrained emotion. Students who lack virtue—who lack the fortitude, courage, and industriousness that would allow them to resist the temptation to opt for whatever is simply easier, more comfortable, and more fun—lack personal freedom in the most painfully obvious sense.
Because it neglects to emphasize the relationship between virtue and the blessings of prosperity, the standard way in which the Christian faith and ethics are taught in schools like mine fails my students. The propensity to integrate Christianity with economics in no other way but through the prism of personal charity or social justice leaves an entire lesson untaught. Charity and justice are essential, but Detroit (or any other city for that matter) needs citizens who understand that their faith should motivate them to be productive: “‘Lord, you gave me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five more.’ ‘Well done, you good and faithful servant! You have been faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things.’” (Matt. 25:20). Many of my students write journal reflections about how they want to be wealthy and successful someday so they can help the people in their own communities—the poor, the homeless, and other kids without hope—whom they encounter every day. They have a spirit of charity and justice. What they lack is a good work ethic, a spirit of entrepreneurship toward academic competition and personal responsibility for developing their talents.
Imagine it's six months from now. The Iraq war is over. After an initial burst of joy and gratitude at being liberated from Saddam's rule, the people of Iraq are watching, and waiting, and beginning to chafe under American occupation. Across the border, in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, our conquering presence has brought street protests and escalating violence. The United Nations and NATO are in disarray, so America is pretty much on its own. Hemmed in by budget deficits at home and limited financial assistance from allies, the Bush administration is talking again about tapping Iraq's oil reserves to offset some of the costs of the American presence--talk that is further inflaming the region. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence has discovered fresh evidence that, prior to the war, Saddam moved quantities of biological and chemical weapons to Syria. When Syria denies having such weapons, the administration starts massing troops on the Syrian border. But as they begin to move, there is an explosion: Hezbollah terrorists from southern Lebanon blow themselves up in a Baghdad restaurant, killing dozens of Western aid workers and journalists. Knowing that Hezbollah has cells in America, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge puts the nation back on Orange Alert. FBI agents start sweeping through mosques, with a new round of arrests of Saudis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, and Yemenis.To most Americans, this would sound like a frightening state of affairs, the kind that would lead them to wonder how and why we had got ourselves into this mess in the first place. But to the Bush administration hawks who are guiding American foreign policy, this isn't the nightmare scenario. It's everything going as anticipated.
In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints. In February, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq, the United States would "deal with" Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Meanwhile, neoconservative journalists have been channeling the administration's thinking. Late last month, The Weekly Standard's Jeffrey Bell reported that the administration has in mind a "world war between the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism ... a war of such reach and magnitude [that] 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."
In short, the administration is trying to roll the table--to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism. So events that may seem negative--Hezbollah for the first time targeting American civilians; U.S. soldiers preparing for war with Syria--while unfortunate in themselves, are actually part of the hawks' broader agenda. Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments--or, failing that, U.S. troops--rule the entire Middle East.
The problem for Mr. Marshall and other doves is that if this is true, if the immutable destiny of Islam is anti-Western totalitarianism, then we're going to have to fight them anyway. Instead of a series of wars of liberation it will be a genuine clash of civilizations and it will be wider and bloodier--no need to spare civilians if they're all hopeless fanatics at heart, is there?--but there's no realistic alternative. The American people simply will not tolerate repeated terrorist attacks. They'll demand a nuclear holocaust before they'll accept the kind of existence that Idraelis live, constantly in fear of the next car bomb. Just look at the polling last week, when the war was in its two day quagmire phase--support for the war didn't budge; instead there was increased support for harsher methods. It is a bitter truth for the liberal minded to face, but a truth nonetheless, that no one is as lethal in the pursuit of war as a democracy.
So, which is it? Are the hawks right, and the Middle East can be transformed, can join the rest of mankind in moving towards liberal democratic-capitalist-protestantism (small "p")? Or are the doves right, and Muslims somehow unsuited to liberty and an inherent threat to world peace? Is this to be a smaller series of wars or a massive world war?
ALTHOUGH...:
Voices of Islam: Five leading Muslim thinkers speak out about war in Iraq--from its murky morality to the threat that it will radicalize Asia's Muslims (SIMON ELEGANT, 3/24/03, TIME ASIA)
What does conflict with Iraq mean to Muslims? In Kuala Lumpur last week, TIME's Southeast Asia correspondent Simon Elegant gathered five of Asia's most prominent Muslim thinkers and opinionmakers to debate the vexing issues an Iraq war raises—including the danger that it might radicalize moderate Muslims and trigger a violent anti-U.S. backlash. The panel comprised lawyer and writer Karim Raslan; parliamentarian Mustafa Ali of Malaysia's Islamic Party (PAS); scholar and human-rights activist Chandra Muzaffar; lawyer and activist Latheefa Koya, and journalist M.J. Akbar, editor of Asian Age in New Delhi. Highlights of the discussion: [...]TIME: What is it that turns a middle-class kid from Kuala Lumpur into a jihadi? He's not despairing. He has a comfortable life. Now he's suspected of trying to bomb a mall in Indonesia? A Catholic from Italy would never go on a mission for the I.R.A.
CHANDRA: The feeling of despair is much greater and more widespread for Muslims; it cuts across class lines.
MUSTAFA: Muslims believe in life hereafter, in heaven and hell as described in the Koran. So if a Muslim sacrifices his life he believes he will be rewarded. They are preparing for the next life. They want to die as martyrs.
AKBAR: The poor socioeconomic conditions of so many Muslims make heavenly afterlife a very attractive proposition. For Muslims, jihad is not just cleansing the inner spirit; it is also a call for a holy war which has been heard since the beginning of Islam. There's a saying by the Prophet: "Paradise comes under the shade of swords." This is not an invitation to kill. It is an invitation to die. Only martyrs are guaranteed paradise. Jihad is a signature tune of Islamic history. [...]
TIME: All this puts moderate Muslims in a difficult position.
AKBAR: Take the case of a country like Turkey. It has an Islamist party in power which has come through a proper exercise of democracy. Its parliament has voted against supporting America's war despite huge bribes being offered. If the credibility of this government, which is moderate and modern in its approach, is destroyed by American pressure, who will occupy the space vacated? Not Ataturkists, but those more radical. Do you want a Hamas to rule Turkey?
As it is, there is hardly any democracy in the Muslim world, which is one of the terrible problems afflicting it. And most dictatorships have the protection of the West because of the cozy relationship between power and oil. Muslims treat these dictators or local elites as quislings, who sell the national interest to line their pockets. I see the Muslim world caught in what I call the push-and-pull trap. The push comes from interests hostile to Muslims, and the pull comes from increasingly Islamist parties that lure Muslims with the dream of revival through a return to pure Islam. The levels vary, but this has happened even in a liberal state like Turkey. The future is not going to be smooth. I feel that the Muslim world is a decade away from its own French Revolution, except that this upsurge is going to be led by various shades of Islamists, thanks to the policies of leaders like Bush. France and Germany understand this, which is why they have taken the stand they have taken. What Bush does not understand is that you cannot exercise power without understanding the limits of power.
CHANDRA: After the coming invasion of Iraq there is going to be tremendous outrage in the Muslim world. Every sort of argument will be used to increase the outrage against America. The moderates are going to be pushed away.
KARIM: This saddens people like me, who support what America has always stood for, and which we believe it continues to stand for in its core values. America has stood for freedom, creativity, human endeavor. Under Bush, America has lost its prestige and credibility.
Eight centuries after his death, Francis of Assisi remains one of Christianity's most popular saints.Antiwar protesters hold up St. Francis as an example for peacemakers. During the Crusades, he traveled behind enemy lines, where he made friends with Muslim leaders.
Spiritually inclined environmentalists say prayers to Francis, patron saint of ecology.
And to those who believe drugs, sex and money have corrupted society and weakened the faithful, Francis' story offers a radical but appealing path to God. The son of a wealthy merchant, he gave up his worldly possessions, including the clothes on his back, to humble himself and develop a more intimate relationship with Jesus.
By the end of his life at about 45 years of age, Francis, who was never a priest, had 20,000 followers -- a group that has lived on as the Franciscans.
Kenneth Baxter Wolf, a history professor at Pomona College, is less of an admirer. "There was something about Francis that bugged me for a long time," said Wolf, author of a new book, "The Poverty of Riches: St. Francis of Assisi Reconsidered," which is being released this month.
In his book, Wolf criticizes St. Francis for imitating the poor, an act that brought him adulation, rather than using his resources to alleviate poverty.
For instance, Francis "hung out with lepers to make a statement to his former social class," said Wolf. "This did nothing for the lepers, but everything for Francis."
Wolf contends that Francis' self-imposed poverty concentrated too much on his own relationship with God, not on helping those around him.
The book points up a basic and continuing divide within Christian thinking: Should religiously motivated people focus their efforts on improving their society or on their personal relationships with God?
"The book is not simply an iconoclastic poke in the eye," Wolf said. "The kind of spirituality that Francis represents may be doing more harm than good, and it's time Christians and other admirers of Francis ruminated about that for awhile."
MORE:
-EXCERPT: Le Jongleur de Dieu from St. Francis of Assisi by G. K. Chesterton
"Where do they get young men like this?" (LT Smash)
The killing of Iraqis did not begin with this invasion, or with George W. Bush.Let's remember: It's been underway for years. Quietly. Persistently. With U.N. backing; with bipartisan political support at home.
If you believe UNICEF, sanctions as the result of Saddam Hussein's conquest of Kuwait resulted in the needless deaths of as many as 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of 5 between 1991 and 1999. That's 55,555 a year, 4,629 a month, 1,068 a week, 152 a day.
That's about as many dead youngsters each year as there were American servicemen killed in all the Vietnam War. That's nearly one baby of every five born in Iraq during this era. Who knows the toll of older youth and adults?
Been down the road of this argument before? Let's go again. During these years, teachers and professionals and civil servants in that once-modernizing nation were reduced to primitive squalor. As foreign arms merchants jockeyed for advantage in the palaces of power, rivers ran raw with sewage for lack of spare parts for water treatment facilities. Jobs, family savings, dignity, hope, all became scarce. And resentment of the U.S. and the Western world continued to inflame Arab and Middle Eastern societies.
The miseries of sanctions have been raised by critics of the Bush administration to explain just one of the root causes of Islamic anger toward the U.S. My point is different. With tanks aiming at Baghdad, I'm reflecting instead on the tunnel-vision outburst of morality that grips people in the television age.
"We're bombing women and children! And that's not right." An antiwar protester in San Francisco fought back tears to express her rage. My e-mails now virtually howl with accusations of U.S. crimes against humanity. The European and Arab press runs even hotter with compassion for innocents.
And why not? Who is more deserving of compassion?
But in the heat of battle, can we spare a sober moment for self-doubt? Many of those who have taken to the streets in angry demonstrations argue that the U.S. was immoral in choosing invasion over "containment" and weapons inspections. Implicit in this contention is that things were working, so why choose to kill? Forgotten in the argument is that the world was killing Iraqis all along, just without the bang of cordite. [...]
There will be time to look back and try to piece together how sanctions shaped the attitudes and memories of everyday Iraqis. For now, our pulses racing, we might stand aside for a moment. We cannot fix the mistakes that got us here -- most important, the mistake of pulling up short in the Gulf War. But we can acknowledge that the subsequent killing didn't just start, and we were party to it all along.
Those protesters who argue that containment was a moral alternative to war are not setting the example of enlightened policy that they say they want. Either they don't know better or they're playing to the TV cameras.
Soul singer Edwin Starr, who topped the charts in 1970 with his fiery, iconic, anti-war song "War," died yesterday at his home in Nottingham, England; he was sixty-one. The cause of death is believed to be a heart attack.Starr was born Charles Hatcher on January 21, 1942 in Nashville, and he started his first band, the Future Tones, as a teenager. He did a two-year stint in the army between 1960 and 1962 before moving to Detroit. A music manager there heard his voice and told Hatcher he would be a star. He added an "R" to that description, took on his middle name Edwin, and his stage name was born.
Starr began recording in the mid-Sixties for the Detroit label Ric-Tic Records, and scored his first pop hit, "Agent Double-O Soul," in 1965, which reached as high as Number Twenty-one. "Twenty-five Miles," released five years later would reach as high as Number Six.
But it was "War," delivered in Starr's rough, staccato bursts of singing for which he was best known.
War (Edwin Starr)Oh no-there's got to be a better way
Say it again
There's got to be a better way-yeah
What is it good for?
*War has caused unrest
Among the younger generation
Induction then destruction
Who wants to die?
War-huh
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it again
War-huh
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Yeah
War-I despise
'Cos it means destruction
Of innocent lives
War means tears
To thousands of mothers how
When their sons go off to fight
And lose their lives
I said
War-huh
It's an enemy of all mankind
No point of war
'Cos you're a man
*(Repeat)
Give it to me one time-now
Give it to me one time-now
War has shattered
Many young men's dreams
We've got no place for it today
They say we must fight to keep our freedom
But Lord, there's just got to be a better way
It ain't nothing but a heartbreaker
War
Friend only to the undertaker
War
War
War-Good God, now
Now
Give it to me one time now
Now now
What is it good for?
So far, the liberators have succeeded only in freeing the souls of the Iraqis from their bodies. Saddam Hussein's troops have proved less inclined to surrender than they had anticipated, and the civilians less prepared to revolt. But while no one can now ignore the immediate problems this illegal war has met, we are beginning, too, to understand what should have been obvious all along: that, however this conflict is resolved, the outcome will be a disaster.It seems to me that there are three possible results of the war with Iraq. The first, which is now beginning to look unlikely, is that Saddam Hussein is swiftly dispatched, his generals and ministers abandon their posts and the people who had been cowed by his militias and his secret police rise up and greet the invaders with their long-awaited blessing of flowers and rice. The troops are welcomed into Baghdad, and start preparing for what the US administration claims will be a transfer of power to a democratic government.
For a few weeks, this will look like victory. Then several things are likely to happen. The first is that, elated by its reception in Baghdad, the American government decides, as Donald Rumsfeld hinted again last week, to visit its perpetual war upon another nation: Syria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, North Korea or anywhere else whose conquest may be calculated to enhance the stature of the president and the scope of his empire. It is almost as if Bush and his advisers are determined to meet the nemesis which their hubris invites. [...]
The second possible outcome of this war is that the US kills Saddam and destroys the bulk of his army, but has to govern Iraq as a hostile occupying force. Saddam Hussein, whose psychological warfare appears to be rather more advanced than that of the Americans, may have ensured that this is now the most likely result.
The coalition forces cannot win without taking Baghdad, and Saddam is seeking to ensure that they cannot take Baghdad without killing thousands of civilians. His soldiers will shelter in homes, schools and hospitals. In trying to destroy them, the American and British troops may blow away the last possibility of winning the hearts and minds of the residents. Saddam's deployment of suicide bombers has already obliged the coalition forces to deal brutally with innocent civilians.
The comparisons with Palestine will not be lost on the Iraqis, or on anyone in the Middle East. The United States, like Israel, will discover that occupation is bloody and, ultimately, unsustainable. Its troops will be harassed by snipers and suicide bombers, and its response to them will alienate even the people who were grateful for the overthrow of Saddam. We can expect the US, in these circumstances, hurriedly to proclaim victory, install a feeble and doomed Iraqi government, and pull out before the whole place crashes down around it. What happens after that, to Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, is anyone's guess, but I think we can anticipate that it won't be pleasant.
The third possibility is that the coalition forces fail swiftly to kill or capture Saddam Hussein or to win a decisive victory in Iraq. While still unlikely, this is now an outcome which cannot be entirely dismissed. Saddam may be too smart to wait in his bunker for a bomb big enough to reach him, but might, like King Alfred, slip into the civilian population, occasionally throwing off his disguise and appearing among his troops, to keep the flame of liberation burning.
If this happens, then the US will have transformed him from the hated oppressor into the romantic, almost mythological hero of Arab and Muslim resistance, the Salah al-Din of his dreams. He will be seen as the man who could do to the United States what the mujahideen of Afghanistan did to the Soviet Union: drawing it so far into an unwinnable war that its economy and its popular support collapse. The longer he survives, the more the population - not just of Iraq, but of all Muslim countries - will turn towards him, and the less likely a western victory becomes.
GET HIM REWRITE!:
Saddam's army retreats to Mosul with heavy losses (Patrick Cockburn, 03 April 2003, The Independent)
The Iraqi army's northern front began to collapse yesterday as troops pulled back in confusion to the city of Mosul after suffering heavy losses from US air strikes and fighting with Kurdish militia.Sarbast Babiri, a Kurdish commander, smiled triumphantly as his men, many wearing captured Iraqi helmets, milled around him. "The Iraqi army has withdrawn to positions nine kilometres north of Mosul. They left behind heavy machine-guns, rocket launchers, food and many dead bodies," he said.
The crumbling of the northern front, quiescent since the start of the war, is a serious blow to Saddam Hussein, because he will face attacks from the north as well as the south.
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said Wednesday he hoped Saddam Hussein's government would collapse quickly, marking a stark turnaround from Germany's previous opposition to regime change as a goal of the U.S.-led war."We hope the regime will collapse as soon as possible and we'll have no further loss of life--civilians or soldiers," Fischer said before a meeting with his British counterpart, Jack Straw, at a hotel in Berlin's Grunewald suburb.
Both foreign ministers stressed common ground in Europe on Iraq--a position that would seem hard to stake out after the diplomatic rift over whether war should be waged to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.
Germany firmly opposed the war, joining France and Russia in opposing a U.N. resolution that would have authorized force, on the grounds that peaceful means to disarm Iraq had not been exhausted. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has condemned regime change as a war aim.
Britain, Italy, Spain and several eastern European countries have stood firmly behind the United States' conviction that Iraq would never disarm voluntarily.
However, Straw said the divide over how to disarm Iraq "disguised a great deal of agreement."
Fischer grounded his wish for regime change in Iraq in the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Iraq--a similar argument to the one he laid out when he supported NATO--led campaigns to end the Bosnian war and the Kosovo conflict.
"The humanitarian situation is very alarming," Fischer told reporters.
MEANWHILE, IN VICHY:
French PM wades into a tide of anti-Americanism (John Lichfield, 03 April 2003, The Independent)
The Prime Minister of France, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, is expected to make a statement today denouncing anti-Americanism and making it clear that France is "on the side of democracy" in the Iraq war.Although the French government remains convinced that the war is unjustified and probably illegal, M. Raffarin has been alarmed by signs of growing anti-American and anti-Semitic feeling at anti-war demonstrations in Paris and other French cities.
He has also been disturbed by an opinion poll earlier this week that suggested one in four French people was on the side of the Iraqi government and one in three would prefer to see a victory for Saddam Hussein. Other commentators suggested that the poll – showing a majority of French people (53 per cent) wanted to see an American victory, despite 78 per cent opposition to the war – was nothing to worry about.
They pointed out that the far left and the far right in France – both habitually anti-American and blindly pro-Iraqi for many years – added up to about 30 per cent of the electorate. Seen in this light, the 33 per cent "on the whole supporting Iraq" was not such a surprising total, they said.
With the exception of pressing regional issues and breathless soccer analyses, global media reportage these days is all war, all the time.Although such saturation coverage of the war in Iraq wouldn't surprise most Americans, the tone of these reports might. Channel-surf from Britain's BBC to Germany's ZDF, or flip through newspapers from Spain to Bangkok, and one finds stories that tilt noticeably against the war and in favor of besieged Iraqi civilians. Often these are emotional first-person accounts of visiting hospitals or bombed-out apartments, accompanied by graphic photos of the dead and dying that would never appear in U.S. outlets.
''Most Europeans do not support this war, and so the coverage is simply a reflection of that,'' says Giuseppe Zaffuto, project director at the European Journalism Center in Maastricht, the Netherlands.
''Besides, during the first Gulf War, journalists here were left to stand around and watch (CNN's) Peter Arnett in Baghdad,'' he says. ''This time, they're there. They feel compelled to not only explain what's going on in terms of the war, but also in terms of the victims of war.''
Zaffuto adds that in addition to being compelling drama, European dispatches could be a bellwether as the war grinds on: How the rest of the world perceives the U.S.-led effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power could affect everything from tourism to commerce.
For now, it seems much of the world's media still need to be convinced of Washington's position. That's no surprise in the Middle East, home of Qatari-based cable channel Al-Jazeera. It has infuriated U.S. officials, who consider it little more than an Iraqi public relations machine. But even in countries whose governments support the United States, skepticism rules.
HALABJA, Iraq -- US special forces, in an unusual press briefing yesterday in northern Iraq, said they had found preliminary evidence that Islamic militants in this area were intending to develop chemical and biological weapons before a two-day military offensive disrupted the group's operations.A battalion commander for the traditionally secretive special forces, who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity, said the air and ground offensive coordinated with Kurdish troops in recent days against Ansar al-Islam in northeastern Iraq was a ''model'' operation in the war on terrorism that revealed signs the group was trying to develop weapons of mass destruction.
''We have found documents and evidence that would indicate the presence of chemical and/or biological weapons,'' the commander said, without specifying what they found.
He said the materials would be analyzed and that the results would be made public. Those results would be a key test of the US State Department's allegation that Ansar al-Islam was experimenting with the use of chemical and biological weapons at its headquarters in the village of Sargat, which was reduced to rubble by intensive airstrikes.
A senior Kurdish official said that a team of CIA specialists in chemical weapons had been flown in to northern Iraq to process the evidence and presumably return to the United States to analyze it.
On Saturday in the Ansar stronghold of Biyara, evidence of a crude chemical lab and documents outlining the parameters of what appeared to be an attempt to isolate botulism and perhaps develop ricin were found in a municipal building held by Ansar. There also were explosive belts used by suicide bombers and stacks of TNT.
Yesterday in the village of Sargat, three small buildings which were not damaged by the US airstrikes contained approximately 300 small bottles of acetone and several plastic, 25-liter containers of potassium cyanide as well as C-4 explosives.
A foul odor around the buildings discouraged most reporters from entering, but a German television crew videotaped the labels of the chemicals.
MORE:
UNDER FIRE, MANY GIVE UP TO KURDS (David Filipov and Charles M. Sennott, April 1, 2003, Boston Globe)
US warplanes launched their fiercest bombardment yet against Saddam Hussein's front-line troop positions in northern Iraq yesterday, and several hundred Iraqi soldiers surrendered to Kurdish guerrilla forces, preferring to risk execution squads rather than face another day of the coalition's awesome aerial bombardment.
Here's the line of the day, from NPR's Talk of the Nation. A caller asked if we shouldn't be able to tell if it was actually our own missiles that hit the two bazaars in Baghdad or whether it was Iraqi anti-aircraft fire gone astray. Unfortunately, I missed the guest's name, but here was his dead-pan response: "There seems to be a prevalent assumption in the Third World that when you shoot something up in the air it keeps going...it doesn't."
In a twist right out of a Hollywood movie, U.S. intelligence may have pinpointed her exact whereabouts thanks to an Iraqi citizen - who passed a note, apparently written in English by a woman, to a Marine in the area yesterday, NBC reported."She's still alive. She's in room [deleted]," the note said, according to the network.
An NBC reporter also said he was approached the same day by an Iraqi who told him in English: "There's a woman in the Saddam Hospital who's an American soldier. Please make sure the people in charge know."
The CIA spearheaded efforts to track her down precisely, guided by crucial electronic intercepts and Iraqi POW informants, officials said.
The U.S. Marines did their part by launching an attack on other parts of the city to create a diversion just before the raid.
"The operation was timed so that U.S. forces rolled over the highway . . . bridge 15 minutes before the raid," a military source said.
Lynch's rescuers - Special Forces units made up of Army Rangers and Navy SEALs - typically work by flying into enemy territory in helicopters at night, then dropping themselves by rope to the ground.
Battles at the site raged for more than four hours. There were conflicting reports over whether there being more American POWs inside, some of them possibly dead.
Military brass vowed to find out.
"America doesn't leave its heroes behind," military spokesman Jim Wilkinson said. "It never has. It never will."
Spared the necessity of providing $300 million in loan guarantees to Air Canada, the federal government may yet provide some aid for Canada's financially strapped flagship carrier in the form of cuts to airline fees and taxes.Transport Minister David Collenette said yesterday that cabinet is "reviewing" the fees and taxes imposed on the airline industry.
He made the revelation just hours after Air Canada was granted bankruptcy protection from its creditors. [...]
Mr. Collenette confirmed that the federal government had offered the airline a loan guarantee, but Air Canada turned down the offer after securing private financing from GE Capital, one of the world's biggest industrial lenders and a major creditor.
He would not reveal details other than to say the loan guarantee, reportedly worth $300 million, would have been 100 per cent secured with no risk to taxpayers.
"They knew that we would be there to provide bridge financing so that they got their debtor-in-position financing in place. So, we would not have allowed them to go under in the sense that we would have been there to backstop them."
Mr. Collenette said Air Canada is now free to restructure itself, including cutting service to remote communities, as it sees fit.
"It's not for us to interfere in this restructuring. This is a private company. They've arranged their own financing. They will make the best decisions that they can for the employees, for the creditors, for all concerned." [...]
In documents filed yesterday, Air Canada blamed the federal government -- along with world events and its employees -- for its gloomy financial picture.
The airline said it has been "hampered in its fight for survival" by existing collective agreements with some of its nearly 40,000 employees.
Air Canada chief executive Robert Milton said he made "one final attempt" this week to convince union leaders at the airline about the need to reduce labour costs by $650 million or 22 per cent immediately, without having to file for bankruptcy protection.
The Sept. 11 attacks, the war in Iraq and the recent outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome were all described as having a negative impact on Air Canada's revenues.
Air Canada said its domestic market share has fallen to 72 per cent from 90 per cent since its takeover of Canadian Airlines in 2000.
"Air travel has become a commodity where travelers will choose the lowest cost airline. Business travelers, who used to represent a significant portion of Air Canada's profit margin, are now increasingly booking with low-cost carriers," the airline said in the court documents.
Arab commentators and officials warned the United States on Wednesday that its war on Iraq was widening its circle of enemies in the Middle East and urged Washington to refrain from picking new fights.The comments came in the wake of recent threats by senior members of President Bush's administration against Syria and Iran, and later Israeli warnings to Damascus, that they would be held to account if they gave support to Iraq.
Samir Ragab, editor of mainstream Egyptian daily al-Gomhuria, said threats issued by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell were hurting Washington's standing in the area at a time when it was making few gains on the ground in Iraq.
"It will not be in U.S. interests to hurl threats at certain countries and create the impression that they are next on the list of U.S. targets," Ragab wrote in a comment column.
"It is expected that the U.S. would keep silent, otherwise it will widen the circle of its enemies," Ragab said.
Hundreds of American troops marched into town at midday today and were greeted by its residents.The infantry was backed by attack helicopters and bombers, and immediately destroyed several arms caches and took over a military training facility to serve as their headquarters.
The occupying forces, from the First and Second brigades of the 101st Airborne Division, entered from the south and north. They had seized the perimeter of town on Tuesday.
People rushed to greet them today, crying out repeatedly, "Thank you, this is beautiful!"
Two questions dominated a crowd that gathered outside a former ammunition center for the Baath Party. "Will you stay?" asked Kase, a civil engineer who would not give his last name. Another man, Heider, said, "Can you tell me what time Saddam is finished?"
Check out the totally neutral image that Canada.com uses to guide you to their discussion of the question: "How do you think civilian casualties will affect support for the war in Iraq?"
Europe is ageing. Our birth rate is falling below the levels needed to balance deaths. Fewer working-age adults will be left to pay for the growing costs of pensions and long-term care. One solution is immigration. Another is to increase the proportion of adults who work.We need fundamental reform of the welfare state to achieve that goal. We need to help parents, mothers in particular, to combine work and family. We need to invest much more in small children. We need to require everyone who can work to consider doing so. [...]
The new welfare state must...aim to make women truly equal at work. In the 1970s, countries such as Denmark and Sweden decided to meet the problem of an ageing population by helping more women to work. By reducing child poverty, offering generous paid parental leave and attacking discrimination, they raised the proportion of women in work from 58 per cent then to 72 per cent now. The government has introduced longer and better-paid leave for parents but we need to do more to match up to the success of Scandinavian countries. [...]
The New Deals should be rationalised into a single programme - a Single Deal, open to all claimants under the poverty line. Job advisers should be able to design programmes around the needs of the individual. We should investigate the experience of Wisconsin, which guarantees a wage-paying transitional job as an alternative to benefits. In return, job advisers could then be given the power, in exceptional circumstances, to apply a benefits sanction to any claimant who could work but persistently refused to do so.
Different benefit conditions could still apply to different workers. A young man would be treated differently from, say, a single mother with children under school age. But with 1m of those on incapacity benefit saying they want to work, and most single mothers saying the same, there is real potential for reducing poverty and increasing the working population.
Combined with universal childcare and equality at work, Europe might even be able to age gracefully without relying just on immigration.
When you read something like this, which implicitly accepts as an impossibility the idea of increasing birthrates, you almost have to conclude that Europe has reached the point predicted by Albert Jay Nock:
Burke touches [the] matter of patriotism with a searching phrase. 'For us to love our country,' he said, 'our country ought to be lovely.' I have sometimes thought that here may be the rock on which Western civilization will finally shatter itself. Economism can build a society which is rich, prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being. It can not build one which is lovely, one which has savour and depth, and which exercises the irresistible attraction that loveliness wields. Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the society it has built may be tired of itself, bored by its own hideousness, and may despairingly consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer.
When it comes to credentials in Iran's Islamic Republic, Zahra Eshraghi's are cast in gold.Her grandfather was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the cleric who overthrew a king and led a revolution in the name of Islam. Her husband's brother is the reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. And her husband, Mohammad Reza Khatami, is the head of the reformist wing of Parliament.
In a society where women can derive enormous power from the men in their lives, those three pillars give Ms. Eshraghi enormous standing. Yet the 39-year-old government official and mother of two has a confession to make. She feels trapped by her family history. And she hates wearing the black veil known as the chador.
"I'm sorry to say that the chador was forced on women," she said over tea and cakes in her upscale apartment decorated in ornate furniture in northern Tehran. "Forced — in government buildings, in the school my daughter attends. This garment that was traditional Iranian dress was turned into a symbol of revolution. People have lost their respect for it. I only wear it because of my family status."
Those are the words of a rebel. Ayatollah Khomeini called the chador the "the flag of the revolution," and early in the revolution of 1979 encouraged all women to wear it. Eventually, all women were forced to wear garments that cover their heads and hide the shape of their bodies.
Ms. Eshraghi's frankness is emblematic of the changes today in Iran, where the values and promises of the revolution have given way to an intense, even dangerous debate about whether religion has a place in politics and society.
As a member of the ayatollah's family, Ms. Eshraghi is expected to embrace the trappings of the revolution and the Islamic Republic that followed. Nothing symbolizes the revolution more than the ankle-length black chador that covers all but a woman's face.
But the attitude toward the chador in Iran today has become so negative that some merchants — particularly in northern Tehran, which is more secular, Westernized and wealthy than the rest of the city — refuse to serve "chadori," as chador-wearing women are called. Chadori who do not want to expose themselves to insults avoid the new food court in Tehran that serves tacos and pizza but no traditional Persian food.
"I was in a shop, and I wanted to buy a pair of pants, and the owner wouldn't sell them to me because I was in a chador," Ms. Eshraghi said. "We have only ourselves to blame. People are not happy with the establishment, and the chador has become its symbol."
The fedayeen can harass lines of communication, forcing the coalition to deploy more troops to guard supply convoys, but this is merely a nuisance. The "dead-enders" are dying. They cannot keep up these ineffectual attacks indefinitely. Annoying as this resistance may be, other dangers have not materialised. No massive destruction of Iraqi oilfields, dams or bridges. No attacks on the US or Israel. No chemical or biological weapons used. Some of these scenarios may still occur; but others have been foreclosed by military action. The US advance of 250 miles in four days is impressive and it is not over yet. Much of western Iraq has fallen. Kurds led by US special forces are on the march in the north. Air strikes are taking a growing toll on the Republican Guard dug in around Baghdad.The media present a distorted picture because "embedded" reporters cover every scratch suffered by US and UK soldiers. But there are no reporters embedded in Iraqi forces to chronicle their devastating losses from precision air and artillery strikes.
Any loss of life is a tragedy but by historical standards the US has not suffered unduly. Fewer than 50 US personnel have been killed - a fraction of the 382 killed in the 1991 Gulf war (147 from hostile fire). Two of the most successful armoured attacks in history were the German blitzkrieg through the Low Countries and France in 1940 and the Israeli offensive against its Arab neighbours in 1967. The Germans lost more than 27,000 men, the Israelis more than 700. It will take many Nasiriya-style ambushes before US forces approach those figures.
And after a mere 14 days, the offensive is hardly bogged down. The German blitzkrieg in 1940 took 44 days before France surrendered. Nor have recent US campaigns been overnight affairs. The first Gulf war lasted 43 days, Kosovo 79 days, Afghanistan 63 days. There is no reason, other than sheer hubris, to expect this campaign to go any faster.
The endgame - the liberation of Baghdad - will not be easy or bloodless but it is doable. Mr Hussein may think he can repeat "Black Hawk Down" on a larger scale but he is almost certainly mistaken. US forces had no trouble securing Mogadishu in 1992. The problems occurred in 1993 after the bulk of US troops had gone home and a small contingent of commandos was sent to chase a warlord. US forces achieved their objective but at a cost of 18 lives, because they lacked armour and air support. In the battle of Baghdad there will be no such lack.
The coalition will be successful in Iraq. With each day that goes by, Mr Hussein's forces grow weaker and ours grow stronger. That the enemy is fighting hard now does not mean he will not soon be defeated. The French fought hard in May 1940 - at first. But eventually the speed and ferocity of the German advance led to a total collapse. The same thing will happen in Iraq.
MORE:
Baghdad Division of Republican Guard destroyed, U.S. says (AP, April 02, 2003)
American forces, which crossed the Tigris River in the drive toward the Iraqi capital, destroyed the Baghdad Division of Iraq's Republican Guard, the U.S. Central Command said Wednesday.The U.S. forces seized the strategic town of Kut and routed the Republican Guard division force that had been guarding the highway leading to Baghdad.
"The Baghdad Division has been destroyed,'' said Brig.-Gen. Vincent Brooks.
[P]resident Bush would restrict the equal opportunity currently available to young Americans of color seeking a college education, including those who would attend the service academies -- the U.S. Military Academy, the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Air Force Academy. The president has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule against the modest affirmative action policies used by the University of Michigan. If the Michigan policies are outlawed, it is likely that the aggressive affirmative action programs in place at West Point, Annapolis and Colorado Springs would also be prohibited.So while Bush flies about the nation rallying the troops, in effect he seeks to whiten the nation's elite officer corps. (Even with aggressive affirmative action policies, the service academies admit only a small number of blacks and Hispanics.)
Bush apparently doesn't care if the enlisted ranks, heavily reliant on Americans of color, don't see themselves reflected in their officers. [...]
At West Point, while the average black cadet has an SAT score of 1191 and the average Hispanic cadet an SAT score of 1225, the average white cadet has an SAT score 60 to 100 points higher. But Michael Jones, dean of admissions at West Point, notes that "academic testing is not a science."
He argues that many cadets with lower test scores show superior leadership skills and will go on to become outstanding officers. Indeed, the service academies are generally regarded as more academically prestigious than they were 30 years ago, before they adopted affirmative action policies.
When Bush stood to attack affirmative action policies at the University of Michigan several months ago, he didn't mention that similar policies exist at West Point, Annapolis and Colorado Springs. But he has nevertheless opposed their affirmative action policies, too -- and, by extension, cast aspersions on the young black and brown officers they recruited and admitted through those policies, and who are now fighting for our country.
He owes them an apology.
"What's your favorite book?" This may seem an innocuous query, but it's actually one of the more treacherous a candidate can answer. In January, for instance, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Sen. John Edwards to name his favorite book. Edwards replied that it was I.F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates.... Conservative commentator Bob Novak fumed on CNN's "Capital Gang": "That's incredible! Did Senator Edwards know that Izzy Stone was a lifelong Soviet apologist? Did he know of evidence that Stone received secret payments from the Kremlin?"...Remember Michael Dukakis? His phlegmatic 1988 campaign was perfectly symbolized by his choice of vacation reading: a book entitled Swedish Land-Use Planning....
Because the book question is so fraught with peril, ... reporters say, Democratic candidates are toting the perfect "safe" book: volume three of Robert Caro's award-winning biographical series on Lyndon Johnson, Master of the Senate.... Says USA Today political columnist Walter Shapiro (who first unearthed Dukakis's book choice), "The number whom I've seen carrying the Caro book is greater than the people who've actually read it or finished it."...
[Dan] Quayle rattled off three books, Richard Nixon's 1999: Victory Without War, Sen. Richard Lugar's Letters to the Next President, and Bob Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra, about the fall of the Russian empire. Fine books all. But ... [Quayle's] choices, which seemed several grade levels beyond his intellect, telegraphed his very desperation to be taken seriously....
Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey took the opposite approach.... Kerrey readily offered that his favorite book was Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a novel that depicted the aimless existence of a soldier-turned-stockbroker named Binx Bolling.... The New York Times' Maureen Dowd pounced, claiming Kerrey's confession would worry voters, given that Percy's work was an "anthem of alienation" about a war veteran "out of touch with the rest of America." As The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert later put it, with 20/20 hindsight, "Here was a man proposing himself as the next leader of the free world while apparently identifying with a character who, to all outward appearances, seems to have completely lost his sense of direction."...
In 2000, Bill Bradley staunchly refused to answer the book question, insisting it was irrelevant to his fitness for office. But even this non-answer proved revealing. It showed that Bradley considered himself above having to play the game.... In the end, even Bradley himself seemed to recognize this. When he withdrew from the race, he began his announcement speech by joking, "I want to begin this morning with a discussion of my favorite books."...
A legendary campaigner, Clinton famously had something to please everyone--including a different book for every constituency.... If you asked him straight, he'd tell you his favorite was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. For ivory-tower types, the answer switched to Lord Blake's Disraeli, a biography of the colorful 19th-century British prime minister. For the Oprah crowd? Clinton was a big fan of bestselling page-turners like Tony Hillerman and Sara Paretsky--Sue Grafton, too.
[Gore] announced his book selection on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," Stendhal's The Red and the Black.... Unfortunately for Gore, The Red and the Black provided a convenient plotline for his detractors. Stendhal's protagonist Julien Sorel may be one of the great characters of 19th-century literature, but he was also an opportunist whose actions were calculated to advance his career.
UPDATE (from OJ):
Stone's book is actually a fascinating psychodrama--in coming down in favor of the conviction of Socrates, he seems to be implicitly acknowledging that he too should have been tried and convicted for subverting democracy.
Syria is an inviting target for the U.S. Taking down the Assad government would rid the Middle East of an aggressive, anti-American fascist regime and also end Syria's occupation of Lebanon. That, in turn, would enable American forces to go after Hezbollah camps in the Bekaa Valley, just as they went after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Not only would that weaken international terrorism, but the U.S. hasn't forgotten that it was Hezbollah that murdered 241 American Marines in Beirut in 1983.On Monday, Secretary of State Powell took a step toward the Battle of Syria by warning that the Damascus government "bears the responsibility for its choices and for the consequences." The word "consequences" wasn't accidental. It also appears in UN Resolution 1441 as a euphemism for military action.
Still, Assad could get a temporary reprieve. If he does, it will be thanks to Iran. This week, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice publicly called attention to the advanced state of Tehran's nuclear weapons program. Undersecretary of State John Bolton underscored the point, categorizing the Iranian effort as "of equal import" to the North Korean armament push.
If Iran is really as far along as North Korea, there could be nukes in the hands of the ayatollahs within a matter of months - with hundreds of thousands of American and allied troops next door in Iraq. The U.S. has been waiting for the Tehran theocracy to fall of its own internal unpopularity, but American planners can't exercise such patience with a soon-to-be-atomic Iran.
Anyone hoping for an April V-Iraq extravaganza will be disappointed. Beyond Baghdad, the Battle of Iran lies ahead - and the Battle of Syria and Lebanon. Fortunately, these axis dictatorships aren't (currently) more militarily formidable than Iraq. They will fall as Saddam is falling. Only when they are gone will Fifth Ave. be ready for a victory parade.
"Who would be free themselves must strike the blow."
Magazines, movies, television and music videos bombard teenagers with messages about sex.But many youths are responding to a different message - abstinence until marriage - from parents, churches, educators, health-care providers and even President Bush.
What started as a movement among cultural conservatives and evangelical Christians has now swelled into a mainstream push to get kids to remain chaste until marriage.
The message appears to be getting across.
Over the last decade, the percentage of high school students who say they are virgins has risen significantly, according to a recent report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The report, based on self-reported data from more than 10,000 high school students, found that in 2001, high school virgins outnumbered those who had engaged in sexual intercourse, 54 percent to 46 percent. A decade earlier, the percentages were reversed. [...]
Natural Family Planning Center director Mary Pat Van Epps favors the word "chastity" over "abstinence."
"Chastity is a positive word that says my sexuality is so good and so important that I need to cherish it and appreciate it and I will always take care of it. Abstinence just means I can't do it," Epps said.
An official at the Jordanian Foreign Ministry said four Iraqis had been arrested.It is understood the group planted a crude device which failed to ignite fully in the hotel where hundreds of Westerners, particularly journalists, are staying. Western officials say they believe the group may have chosen the hotel because it was a relatively easy target.
1. Rate these actors on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being very favorable and 10 being very unfavorable:
- The UN: 65.9% chose 1-5, 34.1% chose 6-10.
- The EU: 63% chose 1-5, 37% chose 6-10.
- Iraq: 40.3% chose 1-5, 59.7% chose 6-10.
- The United States: 26.5% chose 1-5, 73.5% chose 6-10 (55.9% chose 10!).
2. Do you think an attack on Iraq is justified?
- Yes, definitely: 2.4%
- Yes, but I am somewhat uncomfortable: 4.6%
- No, it is not necessary now: 35.4%
- No, definitely not: 57.6%
4. Do you think the U.S. will attack Iraq regardless of UN decisions and international law?
- Yes, 95%
7. Do you think the reason for the Iraq conflict is:
- A struggle for control over oil: very important 79%, important 15%
- The Israel-Palestinian conflict: very important 14.1%, important 37.6%
- The US desire to dominate the world: very important 58.7%, important 27.2%
- An action to remove WMD from Iraq: very important 8.7%, important 24.1%
- Regime change to remove Saddam from power: very important 31.1%, important 36%
- A clash between Christianity and Islam: very important 4.9%, important 15.3%
MORE: Greek EU Presidency launches e-vote on immigration (EUObserver, 1/4/2003)
Ill-feeling between Britain and France over the invasion of Iraq has plumbed new depths with the desecration of that most sacred of memorials, a war cemetery.Yes, these two countries are going to join forces and march hand-in-hand into the future.The defilement of Commonwealth war graves in northern France coincided with a poll for The Times which found that 54 per cent of Britons no longer regarded France as a close ally because of its opposition to the war.
Since October, amid ever-louder discussions of bombing plans and interrogation techniques, a different sort of conversation began trickling out of the Bush administration. A plan - or something slightly less concrete than a plan, perhaps a will - to see the upper tier of Saddam Hussein's court tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity was starting to take shape. In the intervening months, the debate has been joined by members of international bodies, legal scholars and interested political entities.Recently, the Bush administration has indicated who the top targets of prosecution would be: at a minimum, six of the so-called dirty dozen, 12 senior Iraqi officials who, along with other officials, are said to have particularly gruesome records of torture, chemical attacks, mass disappearances and indiscriminate civilian killings. By the first night of the war, of course, it became clear that the United States' first priority was "taking out" the highest-ranking Iraqis, starting with Saddam himself. And as of this writing, it is unclear how many in this group remain alive.
Should some or all of these men survive, however, the question remains as to just how their trials might proceed. On what system of justice, let alone what continent, might they take place? The debate has been active, among both interested observers and the government officials who will eventually set the policy. And given the potential of such trials to determine, or even distort, the historical record, for nationals and for the rest of the world, the debate's resolution has a lot riding on it. "If you ask the average person why we got involved in World War II, they'd say Pearl Harbor, but also because the Germans were killing people in concentration camps," says Charles Forrest, chief executive officer of Indict, a human rights group that has been compiling evidence of Iraqi war crimes since 1997. "In fact, when we got involved in the war, the existence of the concentration camps weren't common knowledge. It was Nuremberg that brought all of that out into the open." Forrest and others say they believe that a few well-structured prosecutions of Iraq's leadership circle could do much to detail, for Iraq and the world, the history of Saddam's rule. They could also bolster the case for the American invasion in the first place.
There is no one obvious pattern that war-crimes prosecution of Iraqis would necessarily follow. The best-known recent war-crimes prosecutions - those that have dealt with atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia - were conducted under international oversight. This was a matter of principle, a belief that only international bodies could confer the kind of moral legitimacy that such trials - which are, after all, significantly about public display - require. But obviously this is not a view that the Bush administration, which has rejected the International Criminal Court and extricated itself from international agreements, shares. Washington is no more likely to leave the trials of Iraqi war criminals to the United Nations than it was to leave the war itself to it. Beyond the question of international justice, however, there are several practical considerations, in this as in all such prosecutions. How much money might this form of justice be worth to whoever's financing it? Is there still too much fighting going on to
hold the trial in Iraq itself? How many educated lawyers could be rounded up among the citizenry? What form of justice would most persuade the victims to let the law, rather than civilian violence, punish the accused? Finally, for an administration that has made no secret of its belief in the justice and efficacy of the death penalty, there is one additional consideration: in which kind of court would the prosecutors most likely win not only convictions but also executions? [...]A plan for an Iraqi-run court has certain practical drawbacks, chiefly the time it would take to get it up and running. David Scheffer, former United States ambassador at large for war crimes issues, points out that trying the former regime on its own turf "means you have these very destructive individuals still in Iraqi territory," possibly maintaining a hold over the popular imagination. "There is value to showing justice at home - I don't want to underplay that," he adds. "But there is considerable doubt that you could have a credible domestic court process quickly in a country trying to drag itself out of more than 30 years of lawlessness." Complicated legal questions arise as well when time goes on: according to the Geneva Convention, P.O.W.'s can be held until "the cessation of hostilities." After that they must be charged with a specific crime or be released.
But the Iraqi exiles have another urgent interest in keeping the trials under Iraqi (or Iraqi-American) control, one that would put them at odds with the United Nations: they want to make sure that those found guilty can suffer the death penalty. Chalabi, whose uncle Ahmed Chalabi is a leading American candidate to lead postwar Iraq, couches it in terms of cultural sensitivity: "As Westerners and so on, we'd like not to have the death penalty," he says. "But it's part of Iraqi criminal code, and you can't eradicate it easily. It's deeply ingrained in Iraqi culture."
Of course, the death penalty is deeply ingrained in American culture as well. And that might be among the more compelling reasons that the current administration would endorse an Iraqi court. It also assures that they will insist on retaining control, or at least primary oversight, for whatever trials ensue. "There's the sense," says Kenneth Anderson, "that it would be the grossest act of colonialism for the U.N. to come in and rob the Iraqis of the death penalty at the time when it's most appropriate."
Or, as David Rivkin, a Washington attorney who is a veteran of both the Reagan administration and that of George Bush Sr., says, in response to concerns about the quality of the Iraqi judiciary, "Try them for a week, give them a chance to say what they have to say and then execute the senior ones. Is there any doubt they're guilty?"
With the goal of preparing Iraqi judges to handle the coming prosecutions, the State Department is playing host to a group of expat Iraqi jurists in a Washington hotel. There, representatives of the Department of Justice will lead a crash course in international law. The schedule reads as follows: Day 1: International law. Day 2: International human rights law. Day 3: Due process, investigations. Day 4: Due process, the trial. Day 6: Military justice. Day 7: Ethics. Day 8: Judicial administration. Day 9: Train the trainers. on. Day 9: Train the trainers.
As Professor Bassiouni points out, that's a far cry from the way America rebuilt the judicial system of other vanquished enemies. By 1942, he says, three years ahead of D-Day, the United States was already planning the denazification of Germany. The Transitional Justice Working Group, by contrast, was formed only eight months ago. And the jurists in question may not be quick studies. "Somebody who came out of an Iraqi legal education in the Saddam regime did not come out with an education that was, shall we say, intellectually open," Bassiouni says pointedly.
Bassiouni favors a tribunal that employs Iraqi judges along with experienced jurors from other Arab nations, with plenty of guidance from international experts. Even that model, he concedes, would have certain drawbacks in a country that's been through as much as Iraq. But he offers a powerful reminder of just how important it is to try to find the right approach. "If we assume 500,000 people were tortured," he says, "another 100,000 people killed, under the Baathist regime, all of those victims' families are going to expect some type of justice. Where is that going to happen? If it doesn't happen, will we see revenge killings breaking out across Iraq? If occupation forces prevent them, won't the people say, 'Didn't you come to bring us justice, and now you're preventing us from having it'?"
An American prisoner of war has been rescued in Iraq, as US forces engaged in major fighting with Iraq's Republican Guard near Karbala, the last big city before Baghdad .A 19-year-old American woman soldier held prisoner by the Iraqis has been rescued in a military operation, military officials and US media said.
US central Command's Brigadier General Vincent Brooks refused to provide any further details or identify the rescued POW.
However US television networks reported the captured soldier was 19-year-old Army private Jessica Lynch, 19, from Palestine in West Virginia.
Reports said Lynch, a supply clerk, was rescued by US Army Rangers and Navy Seals and her family had been told. [...]
A CNN reporter in Nasiriyah said the rescue was in Nasiriyah and is part of a US attack in the city. The prisoner was in a hospital there, CNN said.
The first file contains four words: 'Academic who plans crimes.' Seventy-two files and four years down the road, the last one is a 220-page final draft script for three hours of television ranged over two Monday nights in March and April.In between times, the academic became a lawyer, married a politician, married a lawyer, didn't marry anyone, married the politician again, became gripped in a midlife crisis, made enemies, friends, laughed, cried, got funded by ITV and -- most importantly -- attracted Robbie Coltrane to commit to starring in his first major piece of television drama since Cracker. So no pressure there, then. [...]
With Robbie on board, time has telescoped: we realise that Coltrane has a window of opportunity in October and November of 2002. Can I write three hours of drama by June?
Is George W Bush a Republican war- monger?
Mervyn tells ITV they can have Robbie Coltrane, they can have the series, but they have to commit now. They do and for the first time in my writing life, I am doing a new script that I know will be produced. (At least as long as Robbie likes it too. If he doesn't, that 'window of opportunity' will close quicker than, well, something that closes really quickly).
MORE:
-BBC America: Cracker
-Magic monsters set loose (LOUIS B. HOBSON, November 5, 2001, Calgary Sun)
Coalition forces were engaged in a "major battle" with Iraq's elite Republican Guard in the town of Karbala, about 60 miles southwest of Baghdad, a U.S. military official at Central Command headquarters said Wednesday. The comments came after intense overnight bombing in the area, where the Medina Division of the Republican Guard -- possibly augmented by other, repositioned units of Saddam's best trained and best equipped troops -- was defending the approach to the capital against U.S. infantry. Some military officials hinted that this was the beginning of a major ground offensive against Baghdad.As Harry has noted here, infantry is the Queen of battles. In the end, good men will have to march to Baghdad to deliver the coup de grace to the Baathist regime. If this is the beginning of that battle, then God speed.
Yesterday President George Bush made his first public appearance since the start of the war, speaking to service personnel at the MacDill airforce base in Tampa in an obvious bid to reassure Americans and boost the morale of the armed forces. But how do we know this is the real George Bush?Later in the day a man who looked and sounded like Mr Bush appeared alongside Tony Blair at Camp David, leaving intelligence experts to ponder
whether a lookalike had been used, and whether the same lookalike had been deployed on both occasions.It has long been suspected that Mr Bush employs a string of lookalikes for difficult or dangerous speaking engagements, some of whom may have had their ears specially enlarged for the task.
Most of those who regularly monitor Mr Bush's speech patterns believe that it was the genuine article who spoke at Central Command HQ in Florida
yesterday, pointing to a characteristic tendency toward quasi-biblical phrasing - "There will be a day of reckoning for the Iraqi regime, and that
day is drawing in near" - and an almost total absence of words of more than three syllables.Other experts disagree, pointing out that these consistencies originate with speech writers rather then the president himself, and that Bush's main vocal technique - the bewildered pause - is only too easy to imitate. [...]
For now, Bush-watchers are refusing to say publicly whether or not this is the real president of the United States or a clever, surgically-altered lookalike.
Privately, however, they have carefully observed this confused-looking man, with his stiff, empty gestures and false gravitas.
They have noted his peculiar phrasing, which gives little indication that he understands the content of what he is saying.
They have examined his every doomsday platitude, scrutinised his baffled expression and noted that he seems uncomfortable and completely lost whenever the teleprompter is switched off.
And they have concluded that it must really be him.
Despite American warnings, in the last few days Damascus has expedited the passage of volunteers wishing to join the Iraqis in their war against the Americans. Thousands of volunteers, most of them Syrians, are thronging to the Mosul and Kirkuk regions in north Iraq.It started with a few dozen volunteers, mostly from the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Damascus allowed them to cross the border to Iraq at the official border passes in its control. This went on until one of the volunteers' buses was hit in Iraq by a missile from an American plane, killing five passengers. [...]
The dozens of volunteers who first passed from Syria to Iraq came mostly from Lebanon and from the Palestinian refugee camps in it. Damascus let them cross into Iraq through the official border passes, and became the first state bordering with Iraq to permit the passage of volunteers. One of the buses driving the volunteers in Iraq was hit by an American missile and five of its passengers were killed.
Recently, the Syrians invited journalists to two border passes on the Iraqi border, claiming they are closed. Now it appears this was a deception. The volunteers are brought to the border far away from the official crossings and allowed to pass over on foot. Nearby, on the Iraqi side of the border, trucks await them.
The trucks do not go east toward Baghdad but northeast, to the Mosul and Kirkuk regions, on routes still free of American military activity. It is not known who receives these people when they arrive, where they stay or how they are organized.
The soldier covered his face and wept.It was a deep, sudden sobbing he couldn't control. His shoulders heaved. Tears wet the frayed cuffs of his green Iraqi army sweater.
He cried because he was alive. He cried because his family may think he's dead. He cried for his country. He cried because - for him - the war was over.
"I'm so sorry. Excuse me. I just can't stop," wept the soldier who fled Saddam Hussein's army and was taken Monday into the hands of U.S.-allied Iraqi Kurdish fighters. "Could this terrible time be over soon? Please, tell me."
The soldier - part of a front-line unit - was among at least 18 Iraqi deserters who staggered into the Kurdish town of Kalak as U.S. warplanes stepped up airstrikes on Iraqi positions near the Kurds' autonomous region. He agreed to share his story, but with conditions: no details about him or his military service could be revealed. Call him Ali.
He feared Saddam loyalists could retaliate against his family. They may have already, he said.
"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.
His unit - about 30 men - slept in muddy burrows on a hillside, he said. Breakfast was tea and crusty bread. At midday: rice and a single cucumber to share between two soldiers. There was no dinner.
His commanders described the war as an American grab for Iraqi oil. He couldn't contradict them - there were no radios or chances to call home. Occasionally they would receive copies of the Iraqi military newspaper. One issue featured a poem with the lines: "The enemy will tire, and Saddam will remain."
"We knew nothing. We were told only that America was trying to take over Iraq," Ali said. "But we are not so stupid. We know how Saddam rules the country. We know in our hearts we'd be better off without him." [...]
"I can say now what I always felt: Saddam led to this war," Ali said. "We don't want to fight America. We don't want to fight for Saddam. We just want an end to all this." [...]
"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. Moments later came the thud of a U.S. bomb hitting the ridge just across the river.
As the United States fights a war with few allies alongside it, one version of how President Bush alienated the world has jelled into a kind of
orthodoxy. Even before beginning his Iraq diplomacy last fall, according to this story line, Bush had doomed his chances by arrogantly thumbing his nose at the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. If he had maintained Clinton administration commitments to these and similar multilateral ventures, other nations would have accepted U.S. leadership on Iraq.It would be wonderful if that were the whole truth, because it would mean that ending America's isolation wouldn't be all that hard. Get a president who travels to Paris a little more, quotes scripture a little less and returns the nation to a mainstream acceptance of international law, and the problem would go away.
Unfortunately, the problem is deeper-seated. And nothing makes that clearer than to remember that -- the orthodox story line notwithstanding -- President Clinton in his way also thumbed his nose at the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol and the ABM Treaty. He just didn't do it as arrogantly -- or, Bush partisans would say, as honestly. [...]
When it came to the International Criminal Court, Clinton was as worried as Bush about exposing American soldiers to international jurisprudence. He was dissatisfied with concessions his negotiators extracted in the final treaty; he complained about its "significant flaws." But again he signed it anyway -- to "reaffirm our strong support for international accountability," he said. Then he said he wouldn't submit the treaty for Senate ratification and would recommend that Bush not do so either.
Clinton was committed to the ABM Treaty with Russia, the primary purpose of which was to outlaw national missile defense. But Clinton also spent much of
the last two years of his presidency unsuccessfully trying to persuade the Russians to redefine the treaty precisely to permit national missile defense. "One way or another," Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, told his Russian counterpart, according to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, "NMD was almost certain to proceed."The Bush people entered office full of righteous indignation at these hedges. Signing treaties that you didn't believe in, salvaging treaties that you intended to undermine -- these struck the Republicans as classic Clintonian attempts to keep everyone happy, to offend no one, to kick problems into the future for someone else to deal with. They vowed to bring straight talk to foreign policy, and they did. Bush not only disavowed the ICC, he pressured other countries to follow suit. He junked Kyoto without bothering to offer anything in its place. He walked away from the ABM Treaty. And he made a lot of people angry.
One conclusion is that straight talk isn't always the wisest course in diplomacy. There may be times when fudging to avoid conflict and working toward consensus is better than forcing confrontation. Bush seemed at times to offend gratuitously, beyond what honesty demanded. He could, for example, have said that while he agreed with Clinton about the impracticality of the Kyoto Protocol, he also agreed that global warming was a concern. He hardly bothered.
[A]s the war drags on, any stifled sympathy for the American invasion will tend to evaporate. As more civilians die and more Iraqis see their "resistance" hailed across the Arab world as a watershed in the struggle against Western imperialism, the traditionally despised Saddam could gain appreciable support among his people. So, the Pentagon's failure to send enough troops to take Baghdad fairly quickly could complicate the postwar occupation, to say nothing of the war itself. The Bush administration's prewar expectation of broad Iraqi support for the invasion may turn out to be a self-defeating prophecy.Robert Wright has written a lot of junk for Slate -- all of it, by some strange coincidence, belittling the Bush administration -- but this is easily one of the most disingenous pieces I have ever read. In a portion I haven't quoted, he rips a Don Rumsfeld quote supporting Tommy Franks out of context and uses it to suggest that Rumsfeld is hanging Gen. Franks out to dry. As near as I can tell, Wright's only point in this piece is how much smarter he is than anyone currently working for the government, which is a recurring theme in his writing.
There's a deeper sense in which the early difficulty of the war bodes ill for the ensuing peace—by casting massive doubt on the credibility of some architects of that peace. It seems clearer and clearer that a key driving force behind this war is a neoconservative plan to transform the entire Middle East—a reverse domino theory in which regime change in Iraq triggers regime change, and ultimately democratization, across the region. As Joshua Marshall recently noted in the Washington Monthly, this plan is mega-ambitious and very risky. Its success depends on lots of variables falling the right way. We can only hope that the people who hatched this idea and sold it to President Bush have due respect for contingency and aren't prone to wishful thinking. . . .
In retrospect, there were good reasons to doubt that this war would go as smoothly as other American wars of the past 13 years. For example: Unlike them, this is a war in which we both a) are fighting people in their homeland, not just kicking them out of someone else's; and b) have no major, organized indigenous ground force to help us do the dirty work. But, once the geopolitics of the situation had convinced me that any essentially unilateral war would be a mistake, I didn't reflect long and hard on exactly how messy (and thus exactly how bad an idea) such a war would be.
Also, I made the mistake of putting some trust in talking heads—all those can-do TV military analysts, and even people like Wolfowitz and Perle. I had always assumed that the administration's hawks do understand war, even if they don't understand geopolitics. Turns out I was only half right.
More: Democrat Calls for End to War in Speech (AP, April 1, 2003)
Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich took his anti-war campaign to the House floor Tuesday . . . . "This war has been advanced on lie upon lie," he said. "Iraq was not responsible for 9/11. Iraq was not responsible for any role al-Qaida may have had in 9/11. Iraq was not responsible for the anthrax attacks on this country."Passing swiftly over the fact that the President has never made any of those claims, how exactly does Kucinich know that these are "lies." Did his good friend Saddam tell him?
I've been meeting with students and activists in Durham, Manchester, Hanover, Boston, Amherst, and New Haven and I have been hearing some common themes.... Heidi Brooks, a business school student, asked me "how will we know when the war is won?" We'll know the war is won when we withdraw the last of the American forces from the region.Another young person asked me "why are you a Democrat?" And I said the Democratic Party at its best is the party of hope. But, it cannot be the party of hope as long as its leaders think only about raising money. Students are coming up to me after I talk, asking me how they can get involved I tell them that the best national campaigns are those that empower young people and citizens of all ages to determine their political future.
THE US Navy's mine-clearing dolphins have been the surprise media stars of the Iraq war, but they have not exactly won over Australian divers working alongside them...."Flipper's f...ed, mate," was how one diver saw things yesterday.
"The dolphins have had all this amazing publicity, but as soon as they put one in the water it shot through. There's a war going on and Flipper goes AWOL."
Hailing India as a "rising global power," the US has said it is expanding security cooperation with New Delhi through military exchanges and helping to upgrade Indian export-control system to meet international non-proliferation standards."Shared interests and values link the United States and India, the world's two largest democracies" and "we will continue to transform our relationship with India, a rising global power," Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Christina Rocca said testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
She said, "We are deepening our partnership and are providing assistance on issues ranging from regional stability, non-proliferation and combating terror, to science and technology, economic reform, human rights and global issues.""We are expanding our security cooperation through a bilateral Defence Planning Group, joint exercises and military exchanges. US security assistance aims at promoting cooperation and interoperability, and we are helping to upgrade India's export-control system to meet international non-proliferation standards."
As the US continues an expanded economic dialogue with India, Rocca said, its economic and development programmes aimed at assisting the completion of fiscal, trade and other reforms that will promote economic stability and by extension reduce poverty.
Israel and the United States locked horns on Tuesday over the implementation of an US-backed peace plan, with Washington reportedly saying it will publish the "roadmap" despite Israeli demands that further changes be made.Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom stressed after a meeting with US President George W. Bush that the Palestinians had to fight "terrorism" before any implementation of the peace plan.
But Bush, facing a tougher than expected campaign in Iraq and with mounting tension in the Arab world, insisted he was "serious" about pushing ahead with the step-by-step plan to forge a Palestinian state, Israeli public radio said.
"I said clearly there cannot be two parallel paths: the war against terrorism in the day and negotiations at night," Shalom told the radio in Washington.
"The end of terrorism constitutes the central question for a return to negotiations with the Palestinians," he said.
At issue is not just the admissions policies at Michigan's college and law school, but the question of whether race can be taken into account by universities, employers and the government to promote diversity. The briefs provide the court--and particularly Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the likely swing vote--with compelling reasons to uphold affirmative action.The briefs supporting Michigan--filed by major corporations, elected officials and academics, among others--testify to how central affirmative action is to preserving diversity in American life, and to how much damage would be done if it were eliminated. In Vietnam, the military brief notes, many African-Americans served among the enlisted but few were officers, and the forces were racially polarized. It became so bad, the brief says, the leadership feared that the military was "on the verge of self-destruction." But race-based recruitment programs increased the percentage of minority officers and greatly improved race relations.
Fortune 500 companies tell the court about the importance they, too, place on affirmative action. A brief on behalf of 65 corporations, including Microsoft, Coca-Cola and General Electric, asserts that racial and ethnic diversity in colleges and universities is vital to the companies' ability to maintain a diverse work force, and ultimately to their "continued success in the global marketplace."
LAMB: So, what about conservatives? Have they misjudged anything in your lifetime and if they have what is it?CHAREN: Race. In the early days of the civil rights movement, conservatives were nowhere to be found. They tended to joke about it. They didn`t see the moral certitudes that were involved and they tended to give way too much weight to tradition as opposed to justice in the beginning.
I think over time when it comes to racial issues the conservatives have come around completely and are now really the principled ones in this discussion and that it`s more often liberals who are attempting to see things, you know, take color into account way too much and conservatives who are willing to look at people as individuals now, now.
LAMB: If you were going to pinpoint the time back then when conservatives misjudged and didn`t sign on at the right time, when would that have been?
CHAREN: In the `60s.
LAMB: Around what in particular, the civil rights bill?
CHAREN: The civil rights movement, the civil rights bills. Let`s see. I`m having trouble thinking of particular moments or things that people said but I can remember sort of reading conservative publications, not at the time, I was too young, but later and thinking oh, that grates. You know the tone is wrong. It wasn`t so much what they said as the way they said it. You know it was kind of grudging and the sort of this isn`t our cause, that feeling that you got in those days.
Glasser: In 1961, you said you were "not ready to abandon the ideal of local government in order to kill Jim Crow."Buckley: That's true.
Glasser: You ought to be ashamed of that now. Are you?
Buckley: No In order to advance them [blacks], certain cultural changes, including education, had to be done Whether it should have been turned over to the federal government, in my judgment, it ought not to have been.
But we are, as Ms Charen notes, arrived at a time when the roles have reversed and conservatives are on the right side of civil rights, the side that vindicates human dignity and here, in one of those delightful ironies, that make life worth living, we find the Times reverting to that earlier tragically mistaken argument of the conservative opponents of racial justice and basing their case on, "how central affirmative action is to preserving diversity in American life, and...how much damage would be done if it were eliminated." It is not, of course, any more possible to make a moral argument for this new form of racial spoils than it was for the old, so it's necessary to fall back on "tradition" and preserving the good and avoiding the damage that change will bring, etc., etc., etc.... Diversity may or may not be a worthwhile thing, but this is surely just a preferential, not a moral question--it's not, for instance, readily apparent that it is superior to homogeneity, either in theory or in practice. So what we end up with is the Times arguing in favor of an immoral system in order to vindicate a merely political impulse, and doing so on the basis of a line of thought that most of us accept as having been discredited no later than four decades ago. We've gone from conservatives arguing that racism is an appropriate and traditional means of maintaining homogeneity to liberals arguing that racism is an appropriate and traditional means of maintaining diversity. But it all comes down to the same thing: the advocacy of racism, the defense of injustice.
The petrol queue was long and Mahmood was keen to explain the fears that Iraqis feel over the arrival of Americans and British troops.Mahmood's brother owns the petrol station, an important position in a town where there has been no fuel delivery since the war began, and he led the way into the office in Umm Qasr. The concern of Mahmood and the other men gathered there was straightforward. They had been in this position before and it had cost them dearly. After the 1991 Gulf War, with Saddam Hussein's forces beaten, George Bush Snr, father of the current President, urged the largely Shia population of south-eastern Iraq to rise up and seek their freedom. When they did, America and Britain failed to support them and the Iraq regime ruthlessly suppressed the rebels. In this region the bitter memory of that betrayal still burns.
"People are very frightened," said Mahmood. "They think the Americans and British will go and then the Iraqi regime will come back. People are frightened to say anything.'' This is a serious obstacle for British and American forces as they pursue their "hearts and minds" operation to persuade civilians that the US-led war may bring them some good. [...]
Mahmood knows the reach of the Baath Party. "[Under Saddam] there were too many police and too many Baathists. In Iraq everybody is Baathist. You know why? Because if you want to get a job at the port you have to be Baathist, if you want to be a student you have to be Baathist, you want any job – it is the same."
Mahmood, 43, knows the empty promises Westerners can make. He learnt English more than 20 years ago when he was employed by an Italian geological firm in Umm Qasr. Afterwards he joined the army – fighting against Iran during the eight years of conflict that killed hundreds of thousands of young men on both sides. He suffered four shrapnel wounds. He also knows the promises of the Iraqi regime.
He said he and his friends wanted to shed the yoke of the Iraqi regime but not to have Washington or London as their new masters. "We don't want Saddam Hussein. We want freedom," said one. "We want government from the Iraqi people."
Vietnam is the most obvious, a war where we fought well and successfully for a worthwhile cause, but have accepted the very worst spin that opponents put on our involvement. The legacy of Mogadishu too is apparent, just in the way the Ba'athists are conducting their futile but cagy defense and their obvious belief they can make us cut and run...again.
But it is the high price we're paying for the past triumphs that eludes us. Our tragic intervention in WWI saved the British and French dreams of empire and led to their being allowed to carve up the Middle East and stifle the very aspirations to self-determination in the region that Woodrow Wilson had done so much to stoke. At the end of WWII we made the disastrous mistake of leaving the Soviet Union in place, to spread its message of Marxism/Stalinism in the region (as elsewhere). This led to the Cold War, where the Soviets founded, funded, and trained terrorist organizations and where both America and the Soviets supported fundamentalist when they thought it served their purposes. And, finally, and again obviously, leaving Saddam Hussein in place at the end of the First Iraq War was a mistake, since here we are fighting him again. But it's only becoming apparent to us now how deep is the sense of betrayal on the part of those we convinced to rise up against him in 1991. The war we think of as a win, they see, correctly, as a great betrayal and are justifiably wary of trusting us again.
Now, it may be the case that democracies are just incapable of waging war in any serious and thorough fashion, that they are too skittish about its cost in lives and dollars, and therefore all too ready to bolt as soon as the stated enemy's capital falls. If this is true and we are fast headed for the moment when the Ba'athists are removed from power in Iraq but are allowed to remain in Syria and terror regimes are permitted to continue also in Iran, Palestine, Libya, and the rest, then this war is foolish and we should have saved ourselves the aggravation. If we're going to walk away and leave Mahmoods by the millions in the surrounding states then what will we have really achieved? But if, for once, we're ready to honestly face our past failures, even the failings of our victories, and follow through until our broader objectives have been won--which means here the pacification and liberalization of the Islamic Middle East, whether through reform or force--then, by all means, on to Damascus.
Weaponizing animals has been one of the military's most controversial efforts. Russian soldiers in World War II reportedly strapped bombs to dogs and taught them to crawl under enemy tanks -- although the effort failed because the dogs went after Russian tanks instead. Perhaps the most bizarre attempt by the US military in World War II was to equip bats with incendiary devices and fly them into Japanese cities.In Vietnam, the Viet Cong used to bore holes in the tails of poisonous snakes and nail them to tunnel ceilings. ''It would hang there and bite you in the face,'' said Jim Knight, a herpetologist at the South Carolina State Museum who is also a Vietnam War veteran. Today, US soldiers in Iraq are warned not to venture too close to camels, lest they be booby-trapped with explosives.
Nature has long given the military technological ideas. In recent years, Air Force researchers have been racing to understand the amazing heat-seeking ability of pit vipers and beetles, so as to create machines to do the same thing. Pit vipers, which include snakes such as copperheads and cottonmouths, can sense a mouse several feet away in the dark. The beetles, meanwhile, have sensors on their chest that can tell them when a forest fire is burning as far as 30 miles away. The military already has heat-seeking devices to find missiles and other weapons, but the equipment is fragile, expensive and must often be cooled to frigid temperatures to work.
Still, since technology is so far behind nature, the military needs to harness the animal itself. Bees at Sandia National Laboratories are being trained to find explosives and transmit the findings back to humans. The bees may also one day be used to find land mines or to sniff out car bombs at border stops. Meanwhile, researchers at Iowa State have trained tiny parasitic wasps to detect similar odors. The military is now funding research into tiny transmitters that bees or wasps can carry.
Technological advances aside, sometimes animals just work well in war because they are able to scare the enemy so well. Hannibal's elephants demonstrated a crushing strength. And the snakes in Vietnam were the stuff of nightmares for many soldiers.
''You can even do this with non-dangerous animals: To most people, a snake is a snake; just ask Indiana Jones,'' said Knight, the herpetologist. He said such intimidation works well, but much of it is considered inhumane and against the Geneva Convention's rules of war. ''The funny thing is, you can kill people in war, but you can't mess with their minds.''
