THE LEFT--THE LAST FOLKS WITH FAITH IN THE CIA'S CAPABILITIES:

A Legacy of Lies: President Bush misled the nation about the threat Iraq posed. But he wasn't the first to do so. (Seth Ackerman, January/February 2004, Mother Jones)

"It turns out we were all wrong and that is most disturbing," Kay declared.

But who exactly got it wrong? Intelligence agencies obviously exaggerated Iraq's WMD potential, and it's well known that they were egged on by their political masters in the Bush administration. But that's not the whole story. In fact, Bush's manipulation of Iraq intelligence was built on a foundation established during the late 1990's, when Bill Clinton was in the White House.

Faced with the need to justify an economically devastating and internationally unpopular embargo of Iraq, the Clinton administration engaged in a pattern of stretching and distorting weapons data to bolster their claim that Saddam Hussein was still hiding an illicit arsenal. The Clinton White House never used that "intelligence" to push for an invasion of Iraq, as Bush so effectively did. But in its desperate quest to salvage a crumbling Iraq policy, the Clinton White House laid the groundwork for the deceptions of their successors.

And George Bush, Sr.? And Tony Blair? And John Major? And Margaret Thatcher? And so on and so forth?

Yet we conveniently ignored Muammar Qaddafi's more advanced nuclear program?

Isn't the more likely explanation that our intelligence just isn't very good and that we have no idea what weapons our enemies have, only that they are our enemies and need to be dealt with one way or another...

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EARLY SURRENDER:

Democrats Scale Back Ambitions for House (CARL HULSE, 2/29/04, NY Times)

Strategists, independent analysts and House members of both parties say that after a decade out of power, Democrats are unlikely to reclaim control of the House in November. [...]

One major reason Democrats are pessimistic about taking back the House can be found in Texas. In redrawing the boundaries of Congressional districts last year in favor of Republicans, the Texas Legislature built a fire wall against potential losses elsewhere in the country. The formerly Democratic-dominated House delegation from Texas is now evenly divided, with 16 members of each party, and Republicans say they hope to end up with a minimum of 20 seats. That number, they say, would better reflect the state's political bent.

The new lines have already persuaded one Texas Democrat to switch parties and created one district where Democrats are not even fielding a candidate. "We've already picked up two seats and we haven't even had an election," observed Tom DeLay of Texas, the House majority leader, who was a main architect of the redistricting.

It is not just Texas that is vexing House Democrats in their quest for the majority. The party does not appear to be putting enough House districts in play to pick up the 12 seats now separating Democrats from the speaker's chair. Some top candidates are trailing their Republican opponents in financial resources. And the House Republican campaign organization is raising more money than its Democratic counterpart.

"I don't believe you can win back the House without candidates or money," said Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, chairman of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. By his count, he said, 21 of the 40 Republicans he rates as most open to challenge do not yet have Democratic candidates running against them.

Indeed, given that the House will remain Republican for at least the rest of this decade and that the Senate will more likely approach 60-40 GOP before it will be Democrat-controlled again, anyone care to explain how John Kerry can put together an Electoral College majority?

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HATEY:

Aristide resigns, flees Haiti (IAN JAMES, February 29, 2004, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

President Jean-Bertrand Aristide resigned and fled the country Sunday, bowing to pressure from a bloody rebellion at home and governments abroad. Gunfire rang out through the capital and black smoke billowed from the city center.

Supreme Court Justice Boniface Alexandre declared three hours later he was taking charge of the country under the constitution. He urged calm after more than three weeks of violence.

Here's an apt proving ground for the French and the U.N. to show they're capable of handling a crisis without us.

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60-40 VISION:

California election foreshadows November (George Will, February 29, 2004, Townhall)

Chaos theory suggests that the beating of a butterfly's wings in Brazil can set in motion effects that include, in time, a tornado in Topeka. Imagine a possible butterfly effect from Californians' votes on Tuesday.
Reverberations might help President Bush become competitive for the state's 55 electoral votes, forcing his opponent to at least spend significant time and money here.

Disregard the Democrats' presidential primary. Begin with the Republican primary to pick an opponent for Sen. Barbara Boxer, a San Francisco liberal seeking a third term.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, succumbing to the vice of gratitude, endorsed Bill Jones, the former secretary of state who did Schwarzenegger (and himself) the favor of not running for governor during the recall of Gov. Gray
Davis. Jones, a right-to-life conservative, has decent name identification -- he has run statewide three times -- yet looks like a probable loser in this socially liberal state.

But suppose Republican voters -- a recent poll showed half of them undecided -- create the year's most mesmerizing Senate race by nominating Rosario Marin. She is the 45-year-old former U.S. Treasurer and mayor of Huntington Park, a 95 percent Latino town of 60,000 in southeast Los Angeles County, where Democrats have a 5-to-1 registration advantage.

Today, when biography serves as political philosophy, Marin's suits this nation within the nation.

Anyone seen any polling? When the Governor made his endorsement she wasn't doing to well.

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SANCTIONS=BA'ATHISM:

Hussein's Regime Skimmed Billions From Aid Program (SUSAN SACHS, 2/29/04, NY Times)

Iraq's sanctions-busting has long been an open secret. Two years ago, the General Accounting Office estimated that oil smuggling had generated nearly $900 million a year for Iraq. Oil companies had complained that Iraq was squeezing them for illegal surcharges, and Mr. Hussein's lavish spending on palaces and monuments provided more evidence of his access to unrestricted cash.

But the dimensions of the corruption have only lately become clear, from the newly available documents and from disclosures by government officials who say they were too fearful to speak out before. They show the magnitude and organization of the payoff system, the complicity of the companies involved and the way Mr. Hussein bestowed contracts and gifts on those who praised him.

Yet his policy of awarding contracts to gain political support often meant that Iraq received shoddy, even useless, goods in return.

Perhaps the best measure of the corruption comes from a review of the $8.7 billion in outstanding oil-for-food contracts by the provisional Iraqi government with United Nations help. It found that 70 percent of the suppliers had inflated their prices and agreed to pay a 10 percent kickback, in cash or by transfer to accounts in Jordanian, Lebanese and Syrian banks.

At that rate, Iraq would have collected as much as $2.3 billion of the $32.6 billion worth of contracts it signed since mid-2000, when the kickback system began. And some companies were willing to pay even more than the standard 10 percent, according to Trade and Oil Ministry employees.

Iraq's suppliers included Russian factories, Arab trade brokers, European manufacturers and state-owned companies from China and the Middle East. Iraq generally refused to buy directly from American companies, which in any case needed special licenses to trade legally with Iraq.

In one instance, the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American-led administrators in Iraq, found that Syria was prepared to kick back nearly 15 percent on its $57.5 million contract to sell wheat to Iraq. Syria has agreed to increase the amount of wheat to compensate for the inflated price, said an occupation official involved in the talks.

Iraq also created a variety of other, less lucrative, methods of extorting money from its oil customers. It raised more than $228 million from illegal surcharges it imposed on companies that shipped Iraqi crude oil by sea after September 2000, according to an accounting prepared by the Iraqi Oil Ministry late last year. An additional $540 million was collected in under-the-table surcharges on oil shipped across Iraq's land borders, the documents show. [...]

When Dr. Khidr Abbas became Iraq's interim minister of health six months ago, he discovered some of the effects of Mr. Hussein's political manipulation of the oil-for-food program.

After a review of the ministry's spending, he said, he canceled $250 million worth of contracts with companies he believes were fronts for the former government or got contracts only because they were from countries friendly to Mr. Hussein.

They were paid millions of dollars, said Dr. Abbas, for drugs they did not deliver, medical equipment that did not work and maintenance agreements that were never honored. Iraq, he added, was left with defective ultrasound machines from Algeria, overpriced dental chairs from China and a warehouse filled with hundreds of wheelchairs that the old government did not bother to distribute.

"There is an octopus of companies run by Arabs connected with the old regime or personalities like Uday," he said, referring to one of Mr. Hussein's sons who was killed by American troops last July. "Some paid up to 30 percent kickbacks."

Other Iraqi officials said the ministries were forced to order goods from companies and countries according to political expediency instead of quality.

"There would be an order that out of $2 billion for the Trade Ministry and Health Ministry, $1 million would have be given to Russian companies and $500 million to Egyptians," said Nidhal R. Mardood, a 30-year veteran employee of the Iraqi Ministry of Trade, where he is now the director-general for finance.

"It depended on what was going on in New York at the U.N. and which country was on the Security Council," he added. "They apportioned the amounts according to politics."

One result, for Iraqis, was a mishmash of equipment: fire trucks from Russia, earth-moving machines from Jordan, station wagons from India, trucks from Belarus and garbage trucks from China.

"We got the best of the worst," Mr. Mardood said.

Yasmine Gailani, a medical technician who worked at a lab specializing in blood disorders, said the political manipulation resulted in deliveries of drugs that varied in quality and dosage every six months.

At one point, she said, the lab was instructed to only buy its equipment from Russian companies, adding, "So we would have to find what we called a Russian `cover' in order to buy from the manufacturer we wanted."

Her husband, Kemal Gailani, is minister of finance in the interim Iraqi government. Last fall, he said, he confronted a United Nations official over the quality of goods that Iraqis received in their monthly rations during the sanctions.

"We were looking at the contracts already approved and the U.N. lady said, `Do you mind if we continue with these?' " he recalled. "She was talking as if it was a gift or a favor, with our money of course. I said, `Is it the same contracts to Egypt and China? Is it the same cooking oil we used to use in our drive shafts, the same matches that burned our houses down, the same soap that didn't clean?' She was shocked."

Dr. Abbas, a surgeon who left his practice in London to return home to Iraq, said he was preparing lawsuits against some of the drug and medical supply companies he said were allowed to cheat Iraqis. He would also like to stop dealing with any company that paid kickbacks, but he said he realized that might not be practical.

But he would like to give them a message.

"I would say to them, it was very cruel to aid a dictator and his regime when all of you knew what the money was and where it was going," he said. "Instead of letting his resources dry up, you let the dictatorship last longer."

So, when the Left says sanctions were working, do they really mean they were working to enrich our enemies at the expense of the Iraqi people?

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THE INCIDENTAL SECRETARY GENERAL:

It wasn't Kofi we were bugging, Clare, it was Tariq: In the run-up to last year's Iraq war, there was one conversation that everyone wanted to hear: that between Kofi Annan and the Iraqi deputy prime minister. (Con Coughlin, 29/02/2004, Sunday Telegraph)

As Mr Blair was quick to stress in the immediate aftermath of Ms Short's UN allegations, all of Britain's intelligence and security organisations are required to work within the law - both domestic and international - and while their main priority is to protect the security of the realm, no one in the intelligence community would undertake to spy on the UN secretary-general without the specific authorisation of their political masters.

In the majority of cases, targets are selected on the basis that they are considered to constitute a threat to the interests of the United Kingdom. But even though the energies of MI6, MI5 and GCHQ are primarily directed against what they call "the bad guys", there are occasions where, often inadvertently, they find themselves monitoring those who are regarded as friends and allies.

For example, in the build-up to last year's war, GCHQ would have been failing in its duty had it not monitored Tariq Aziz, Iraq's then deputy prime minister, who was Saddam's trusted confidant in international affairs and was in almost daily contact with UN officials in New York as part of his desperate attempt to avert war. If Mr Aziz were then to have had a discussion with Kofi Annan, a transcript of that conversation would have been made available to British officials, even though the main target of the espionage exercise was Mr Aziz, not Mr Annan.

The subtleties of how British intelligence works in reality are, unfortunately, lost on the likes of Ms Short who, although she had limited access to intelligence reports, was never senior - or trusted - enough in the Cabinet to have an understanding of the context in which certain operations were being conducted.

The same can be said for Katharine Gun, the junior GCHQ employee whose prosecution under the Official Secrets Act was dropped last week after she admitted leaking an email about an American request asking Britain to spy on the six countries that would decide the fate of the second UN security council resolution. As a low-grade translator of Mandarin, Mrs Gun was hardly in a position to know how the British authorities dealt with the request, or even if they acted upon it.

Ms Short was similarly out of the loop about the precise nature of Britain's espionage in the build-up to the war. Although she is correct when she says that her department had access to intelligence reports on Iraq to help her plan for humanitarian relief after the war, her access was strictly limited, and the material she was given was provided on a strict "need-to-know" basis. Even when she held Cabinet rank, she was regarded with some suspicion by the intelligence service both because of her previous outspoken support for the IRA and the obvious sympathy she displayed for the anti-war movement. For this reason, she would not have had access to the high-grade intelligence reports that were being circulated to the Prime Minister and his inner circle.

If - as is perfectly feasible - transcripts of Mr Annan's conversations had found their way to Whitehall as a result of British attempts to spy on Tariq Aziz, Ms Short would have been presented with only the bare facts of what Mr Annan had said, not how the information had been obtained.

The Left wants both to criticize the failure and the attempt to gather good intelligence.

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THE ONLY WORTHWHILE FLATLANDERS:

Fortunate Sons: For the supergroup The Flatlanders, three albums in three decades ain’t so bad (MIKAEL WOOD, Feb 26, 2004, Dallas Observer)

When the laid-back cosmic cowpokes of Lubbock's Flatlanders reunited in 1998 to cut "South Wind of Summer" for Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer soundtrack, there weren't any perks to speak of: Beyond a 1973 debut album originally released exclusively on eight-track tape (and reissued on CD by Rounder in 1990 to pre-alt-country collectors), the Flatlanders, in the words of that CD's title, had become More a Legend Than a Band, an early precursor to the cowpunk liberalism that would produce such late-'80s/early-'90s bands-not-legends as Uncle Tupelo and the Jayhawks. What's more, each of the three Flatlanders--dry Joe Ely, wry Butch Hancock and presumably high Jimmie Dale Gilmore--followed up that '73 debut with a successful solo career of his own. So slotting them alongside successors like Gillian Welch and Steve Earle on Whisperer, Redford wasn't offering the Flatlanders anything more than a historical bump (and perhaps the chance to meet Kristin Scott Thomas in the flesh). When I met up with the guys last month in a New York City hotel suite, it's clear even that's more than they needed.

"A lot of times a band becomes a business or something," Ely says in his hardscrabble music-vet drawl. "We've always tried to keep the music thing not as part of any business, but just as part of the thing that moves us, whatever that thing is that keeps us going physically and spiritually. And that's what we try to keep fresh. We made an agreement: If business or anything like that ever comes in the way of our friendship, then we'll immediately drop that."

Gilmore and Hancock agree: As far as they're concerned, just because the world didn't hear from the Flatlanders for more than a quarter of a century doesn't mean the Flatlanders didn't exist. The opportunity to get together and record a song simply meant a chance to hang out on someone else's dime. "We've been part of each other's lives throughout," Gilmore says. "Sometimes we were overtly working together, but I feel like we've always been collaborators. The whole time we weren't playing music together we still were best friends."

That approach helps explain the easy warmth and effortless charm of Wheels of Fortune, the Flatlanders' new album and the follow-up to 2002's Now Again, which attracted attention precisely because it was the first most of the world had heard from the group for 29 years. Like Again, Wheels is a set of gently off-kilter country-rock songs about old love, new loneliness and beautiful women, though this one also boasts a song about a guy named Shorty, whom lots of women would like to strangle.

Any non-Texan know why Joe Ely wears his fingernails long?

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ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER:

Imagining John Lennon's Utopia (Byron Matthews)

John Lennon, a famously prolific songwriter, today is most remembered for his 1971 utopian anthem, "Imagine". The song appeared as the title track on Lennon's second post-Beatles album, and it represents the pop icon's deepest musical foray into the realm of political and economic philosophy. Just how strongly Lennon is identified with the song is suggested by the title chosen for his 1988 film portrait, Imagine: John Lennon. Then there was the 2000 release Gimme Some Truth – The Making of John Lennon's "Imagine", which included scenes from an earlier film by Lennon and wife Yoko Ono, entitled – you guessed it – Imagine. The unpopular War in Viet Nam made the song an immediate hit, and it remains the best-loved number in the pacifist hymnal more than thirty years later. It's a good bet that more candles and Bic lighters have been waved in the air to "Imagine" than to all else combined, "Kumbaya" included. In the plaintive voice of the since tragically murdered Lennon, "Imagine" can carry an emotional punch, especially when experienced as the reverent keening of a solemn nighttime gathering of believers in the dream. In the midst of so much hopeful sincerity, even an inveterate cynic could find himself fumbling for his Bic somewhere in the second verse. But what, exactly, was Lennon asking us to imagine? The answer leaves no doubt that Lennon should have stuck to singing about yellow submarines.

A sort of musical What Is To Be Done?, "Imagine" is Lennon's prescription for dragging ourselves out of the bloody trenches of war, at long last to "live as one" in the Brotherhood of Man. The secret is to get rid of the three things that have been putting us at each other's throats: religion, countries, and possessions. (How Lennon missed using "A Modest Proposal" as a prankish subtitle remains a mystery to this day.) A website devoted to John Lennon and "Imagine" once asked readers what they thought the song was about. Not exactly a stumper, the answers were about what you'd predict, only with worse spelling. But someone posted this Socratic bucket of cold water: "Are these lyrics not the promise made by communism?" Hmm. Maybe it's time for a dry-eyed look at Lennon's program. Do history and everyday experience suggest that abolishing religion, nations, and private property is the road to a world of peace and plenty? Or did Lennon actually write a prescription for political oppression and economic failure, for a society opposite in every important respect from the enticing vision he intended to promote?

As it happens, I was in college when he was shot and at the campus pub. I turned to another conservative and we high-fived. (Yes, I know, this was terribly insensitive.) We barely made it out alive....

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SERVING THE DEVIL IN THE NAME OF TRUTH:

EUGENICS: IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE (Jacinta Lodge/ExBerliner/March, 2004) (click “In This Issue”, then “Feature”)

The green leafy suburb of Dahlem is known to most of us primarily as the home of the Freie Universität and numerous embassies. What many dońt realise is that a number of these noble facades hide a darker and more gruesome past than the elegant mortar work suggests. In particular, the frontage of Ihnestr. 22 once presented to the world the face of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics, an institute which played a central role in much of the Third Reich's racial politics.

Established under the directorship of Eugen Fischer, this institute was opened in 1927 during the 5th International Congress on Hereditary Science in Berlin. A few years prior, Fischer co-wrote Human Heredity and Race Hygiene, a book welcomed by the National Socialist Party that was soon to become the basis of the Nazi racial hygiene program. Following Hitler's assumption of power in 1933, Fischer made it clear: "The institute is completely and wholly prepared to assume the tasks of the current government."[...]

So it was in this hey day of eugenics that the KWI for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics was established and to which, in 1942, Baron Otmar von Verschuer moved, replacing Fischer as director. One of Verschueŕs primary research interests was in determining the genetic factors of disease. To this end, he worked with a large number of families, especially those of twins. His originally reputable research became more and more corrupted as he fell into the investigation of racial genetic differences, especially in terms of the "Jewish question," and it wasńt long before he was using human material gathered by one of his former research assistants and sent to him.

This former assistant was none other than Josef Mengele, the "Death Angel of Auschwitz." [...]

The KWI for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics remained throughout the war until February 1945, when most were evacuated. In April the institute building was confiscated by Russian forces, and the remaining scientists who had continued in the director's residence lost this building as well to the American troops in July. Soon the Kaiser Wilhelm Society officially ceased to exist, but a new society was built out of the ashes of the old – the Max Planck Society. By the time that this was founded in 1948, the KWI for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics was considered so politically compromised that it was not included, and the Society passed the building onto the Freie Universität. In 1988, pressure from the political science students studying there led to the erection of a memorial tablet on the front of the building. The final lines read: "Scientists have to be responsible for the content and consequences of their scientific work."

Note how the Institute closed finally because it was politically, not morally compromised.

The Pope prayed at Yad Vashem and Auschwitz and most Christian faiths have tried very hard to confront complicity in the Holocaust directly. It has changed them all. Yet to this day scientists defiantly deny any culpability by dismissing it all as either "bad" science, and therefore nothing to do with them, or a hangover from the pre-enlightenment era. Morally, scientific materialism is a cowardly, teflon-like creed that boasts endlessly about all the wonderful things it has wrought while blaming all other faiths for its murderous catastrophes.

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DUH?:

Drinking With Osama: Every day, lately, we hear stories about the increasing travails of traveling internationally: the fingerprint scanning, the no-fly lists, the "shoes off." But Peter Bellone's travel misadventures may leave all the others in the waiting room. (Peter Bellone, 1/15/04, MetroActive)

In college, I enrolled in some literature classes where we discussed the significance of this, the subtext of that. To me, most of it seemed a stretch--exercises in job justification. Standing before my baggage now, contents unpacked and laid out in neat rows, I believed my professors were on to something. Most of the items on display were things I had acquired over the past three months, and each one had an innocent explanation.

I wanted to get up early and be productive, so I bought a windup alarm clock. It was cheap; it worked. Maybe that's why the bad guys in the movies wired them to bundles of dynamite.

Why get up early if you weren't going to talk to people? And nothing endeared people like trying to learn their language, hence the Teach Yourself Pashto book.

And all the folks I met were Muslim, so I bought a Koran, another step toward understanding. That also explained why all the names in my address book were Muslim ones. Did they expect me to meet Buddhists?

The posters and the political pamphlet--the one with Arabic writing heading a picture of the burning Twin Towers--these were items to show the family back home, and I thought they looked cool.

And speaking of being away from home, I wasn't about to traverse dangerous lands without a good-luck charm--therefore I brought along a glass jar of Iwo Jima sand I got in the Marines. Unfortunately, at the end of my trip it slipped out and shattered, which explained the seven Ziplocked dime-sized baggies of black, volcanic sand.

And of course, there was the cylinder, with its 30 mm live round. But hey, what could be cooler than that?

After a pause, the embassy guy had only two things to say. "You got some weird s[tuff] in your bag. I'm leaving now. Is there anything else you would like to tell me?"

Beware of the subtext and the alternate story our actions always tell, whether we choose to listen or not. This time I listened.

"The press card is a fake," I admitted. "I couldn't get into Afghanistan without one, so my friend and I made one on his computer."

The look on the embassy guy's face stayed with me the whole night, as I lay there in the airport detention center. I couldn't have slept anyway. They never killed the lights, and the floor was packed with men using their suit coats for blankets, mainly Chinese and Russians who'd been caught trying to sneak into the country. Instead of being locked up, it seemed like I had just missed a good party. Too bad the only thing being served now was a tall glass of regret.

It was unbelievable. I had set off as a freelance journalist, and now I was in danger of being taken as another John Walker Lindh.

Which part is supposed to be unbelievable, that he was this stupid or that they assumed no one could be this stupid?

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SHUT THE CIA, OPEN INTELLIGENCE:

Open Source Intelligence (RICHARD S. FRIEDMAN, Summer 1998, Parameters)

Ninety percent of intelligence comes from open sources. The other ten percent, the clandestine work, is just the more dramatic. The real intelligence hero is Sherlock Holmes, not James Bond.
--Lieutenant General Sam Wilson, USA Ret. former Director, Defense Intelligence Agency

Former Ambassador to Algeria L. Craig Johnstone (presently State Department Director of Resources, Plans and Policy) recently told a Washington conference that during his assignment in Algeria, he bought and installed a satellite dish enabling him to watch CNN so he could have access to global news. He recalled:

The first week I had it running was the week of the Arab League summit in Algiers and, for whatever reason, the Department was interested in finding out whether Yasser Arafat would attend the summit. No one knew, and the day of the summit Washington was getting more frantic. We in the Embassy were banned from the summit site so there was no way we could find out whether or not Yasser Arafat would show. Finally, at about noon I was home for lunch and watching CNN when the office of the Secretary of State called. The staffer on the other end asked if there was anything at all he could tell the Secretary about Arafat's participation. And just then, on CNN I saw a live picture of Yasser Arafat arriving at the conference. "He is definitely at the conference," I reported. The staffer was ecstatic and went off to tell the Secretary. The next day I received a congratulatory phone call from the NEA bureau for pulling the rabbit out of the hat. How did you find out, they asked? The secret was mine. But I knew then and there that the business of diplomacy had changed, and that the role of embassies, how we do business in the world, also had to change.

Ambassador Johnstone's story provides an example of the value of information from open sources. Allen W. Dulles, when he was Director of Central Intelligence, acknowledged to a congressional committee, "more than 80 percent of intelligence is obtained from open sources." Whether the amount of intelligence coming from open sources is 90 percent, 80 percent, or some other figure, experienced intelligence professionals agree that most information processed into finished intelligence may be available from open sources. This essay explores the significance of a trend toward increased recognition of the role of open source information and discusses what this may mean for intelligence consumers at every level. [...]

Enthusiastic proponents of open source intelligence argue that the information revolution is transforming the bulk of any nation's intelligence requirements and reducing the need to rely upon traditional human and technical means and methods. But Robin W. Winks, distinguished Yale University historian who served in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and in its successor, the Central Intelligence Agency, concluded, "Research and analysis are at the core of intelligence . . . . [Most] `facts' are without meaning; someone must analyze even the most easily obtained data."

The emerging debate between investing in technology and developing competent analysts concerns itself basically with the value and role of open source intelligence. To understand some of the forces that are shaping the debate, we need to weigh the relative benefits of primary and secondary sources, two discrete subsidiary classes of open source material. Primary sources, generally taken to include print and electronic media, have always provided information of value to the intelligence community in current intelligence, indications, and warning as well as background information used by analysts in their work. What the so-called information revolution has done is to increase the ability of users to gain access and to manipulate the information, and although most intelligence managers do not believe that the number of primary sources has expanded greatly, the number of secondary sources has increased exponentially. To compound the analyst's problem, the objectivity and reliability of many secondary sources are often questionable. We will need more experience before we can accept expansion of secondary sources as a benefit to the management of national security.

The largest general open source collection in the world is the Library of Congress. To replace the original library, which was destroyed during the War of 1812, Congress in 1815 purchased the private library of former President Thomas Jefferson, greatly increasing the collection's size and scope. The Library of Congress now includes works in more than 450 languages and comprises more than 28 million books, periodicals, and pamphlets as well as manuscripts, maps, newspapers, music scores, microfilms, motion pictures, photographs, recordings, prints, and drawings. The library's services also include research and reference facilities, which coordinate with or amplify local and regional library resources.

There are also several thousand databases available from commercial organizations; LEXIS/NEXIS, Dialog, Reuters, and The New York Times come to mind. Any discussion of contemporary open sources must now include the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW). The World Wide Web (developed in 1989) is a collection of files, called Web sites or Web pages, identified by uniform resource locators (URLs). Computer programs called browsers retrieve these files.

The term "Internet" describes the interconnection of computer networks, particularly the global interconnection of government, education, and business computer networks, available to the public. In early 1996, the Internet connected more than 25 million computers in more than 180 countries. The Internet provides an immense quantity and variety of open source information and must be increasingly looked upon as a source for intelligence purposes.

The Internet and the World Wide Web exemplify technology that is not yet mature. One hallmark of immature technology is an underlying anarchy and a potential for disinformation. In October 1938, when radio broadcasting was emerging as a reliable source of information, producer-director Orson Welles, in his weekly radio show Mercury Theater, presented a dramatization of an 1898 H. G. Wells story, War of the Worlds. The broadcast, which purported to be an account of an invasion of earth from outer space, created a panic in which thousands of individuals took to the streets, convinced that Martians had really invaded Earth. Orson Welles later admitted that he had never expected the radio audience to take the story so literally, and that he had learned a lesson in the effectiveness and reach of the new medium in which content was struggling to catch up to technology.

Recent examples with the Internet and its spin-offs suggest that e-mail abuses, careless gossip reported as fact, and the repeated information anarchy of cyberspace have become progressively chaotic. This does not mean that the Internet and the Web cannot be considered seriously for intelligence work, but it does mean that intelligence officers must exercise a vigilant and disciplined approach to any data or information they acquire from on-line sources.

Part of the brilliance of Admiral Poindexter's idea for an intelligence market is that you could then take this mass of information and have a narrower group of folks place their bets on what's most likely to come of it all. It wouldn't render perfect answers, but it couldn't possibly do worse than our intelligence services historically have.

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60-40 VISION FILES:

Hull's stormy divorce records unsealed (FRANK MAIN, February 28, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)

The wife of Democratic Senate candidate M. Blair Hull accused him in 1998 of threatening to kill her, calling her vile names and punching her in the leg -- accusations Hull skirted on Friday.

"I did not respond at that time, and I am not going to respond now," Hull said.

Brenda Sexton divorced the multimillionaire securities trader, who was arrested on a battery charge for punching her in the shin. The case was later dropped.

The shin? Is he a dwarf?

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UNREASONABLE DOUBT:

U.S. Denies Iran Report of Bin Laden's Capture (Reuters, Feb 28, 2004)

The U.S. Department of Defense denied reports by Iran's official IRNA news agency on Saturday that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been captured.

IRNA quoted a story on Iran's state radio Pashtun service which reported "a very reliable source" as saying bin Laden had been captured in a tribal area of Pakistan.

A senior U.S. defense official denied the report, telling Reuters it was "another piece of stray voltage that's passing around out there."

And Pakistan's Foreign Minister Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri told a news conference he was aware of the Iranian report, but added: "We cannot confirm it at all."

Washington says bin Laden masterminded the September 11, 2001, suicide hijack attacks in the United States, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

"Washington says"? Didn't he take credit for it?

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ANGLOSPHERIC, NOT EU-NICK:

A New Deal for Europe (Michael Howard to the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Berlin, February 12, 2004, The Guardian)

Britain and Germany are two great nations with their own histories and their own perspectives.

Germany has wanted to achieve closer and in some cases irreversible integration thanks to her specific experiences in two world wars. Konrad Adenauer, whom we honour in this foundation, understood that the European process could be of great service to Germany. As a result, he made this country strong in Europe, valued as a trading partner and trusted as an ally. I understand why his European policy, which helped to establish Germany's place in the community of nations, is admired in Germany today.

We in Britain came through the war with our national institutions strong. When we seek to preserve those institutions, we are defending a constitutional settlement that has survived great stresses and strains and which continues to work well and be understood by people in Britain.

Britain has always been a global trading nation. We have historic connections with our Commonwealth partners and with the United States. Look, for example, at where our international telephone calls go at Christmas and New Year: to North America, to the Caribbean, to the Indian subcontinent, to Australia and New Zealand.

This is not just a sentimental point. It is also a hard commercial truth. More of our trade is with non-EU members than is the case for any other member state. We have more overseas investments in non-European markets than any other member state. We are unique in the EU in having a global financial centre.

But Britain and Germany are not the only countries that approach European integration from a perspective shaped by their history. Every European country does. I do not always agree with your Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer. Nor, I suspect, do you. But he was recently quoted in one of our newspapers as saying: 'All the countries ... have different traditions, different political disputes at home, complicated parliaments, complicated majorities ... Language and history matter in Europe and we have to understand these different histories and difficulties'. He makes an important point.

The Eastern European accession countries have thrown off the yoke of Soviet domination. They, along with other new member states, have rediscovered their own national identities and the freedom to determine their own destiny. As a result they may well be wary of giving up too much of that hard-won independence.

Different histories, different institutions and different traditions.

To undermine these institutions and ways of life, whether they have developed uninterrupted over hundreds of years or only recently re-emerged, and which are seen as legitimate by their people, would be an act of folly. Most people in the nations of Europe do not feel the same affinity or identity with EU bodies that they do with their own national institutions. People who identify themselves as Europeans rather than as citizens of their own country still remain a very small minority in every member state of the European Union.

Most people simply do not feel European in the same sense that they might feel American or German - or British.

There is no European public opinion; no European national identity. In the absence of a European demos, we are left with unadorned kratos: the power of a system that commands respect through force of law, not public affection.

It is in in fact the perfect expression of modern Europe, an attempt to unify around a void.

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ARE YOU EKSPERYANSED?:

Rebels Nearing Haitian Capital, Deepening Panic (LYDIA POLGREEN and CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS, 2/28/04, NY Times)

Among the possibilities the Pentagon is considering, Defense Department officials and military officers said, is to send a force of 2,200 Marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., aboard Navy ships from Norfolk, Va., to take up positions off Haiti. But they said such a deployment, similar to what was done to stabilize Liberia last year, could take several days to organize.

In the gathering chaos in Port-au-Prince, no one could say for sure if that would be soon enough.

Truckloads of armed men, many in ski masks, patrolled the city on Friday, vowing to kill anyone who challenged Mr. Aristide's presidency. Looters pillaged warehouses at the port, and at least four people were killed in violence sweeping through the city. The bloodshed was set off by rumors that rebel soldiers would soon march in to remove Mr. Aristide by force.

Insurgents have already seized several large cities, and some moved Friday into Les Cayes, the nation's fourth largest town, The Associated Press reported. Rebel troops also took control of Mirebalais, an important crossroads town 25 miles northeast of the capital, The A.P. reported.

A rebel leader, Guy Philippe, told reporters that his plan was not to attack the capital immediately but rather to put it under siege. "We want to block Port-au-Prince totally," The A.P. quoted him as saying. "Port-au-Prince now, it would be very hard to take it. It would be a lot of fight, a lot of death."

With shouts of "Viv Titid!" — Titid is a Creole diminutive of Aristide — armed troops loyal to the president and his party, Lavalas, vowed to stop the rebel advance, brandishing M-16 rifles and semiautomatic handguns at barricades of flaming tires.

The port was a mad scene of looting, with thousands of people streaming into a narrow entrance that had been pried open. Just outside the gate lay the body a man killed earlier in the day, dressed in a pink shirt and black pants, a stream of blood congealing next to his head.

Like most men, or at least those in Nick Hornby novels, we believe that all of life should have a soundtrack. In this case, try Revolution, by Boukman Eksperyans. The band, which originally supported Aristide and even played his Inauguration, is now calling for him to step down.

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3.6 BILLION FILMGOERS CAN'T BE WRONG:

Hurray for Bollywood (PANKAJ MISHRA, 2/28/04, NY Times)

[I]ndia makes around 800 films each year, more than any country in the world. Bollywood produces up to 200 films in Hindi and Urdu alone.

Little of what comes out of this $1.3 billion-a-year industry is of much quality, and few films make a profit. Yet India, where approximately 12 million people go to the movies every day, remains culturally a world unto itself, immune to the films emerging from Hollywood, which have captured only 6 percent of the largest domestic movie market in the world.

Moreover, Bollywood's films reach up to 3.6 billion people around the world — a billion more than the audience for Hollywood. Egyptians, South Africans and Fijians joined Indians in electing Amitabh Bachchan — a name unknown to most people in Europe and America — as the "actor of the millennium" in a BBC online poll.

Mr. Bachchan gained his reputation by repeatedly playing the role of the poor, resentful young man who makes it in the big city — often through crime and violence. But Bollywood films do more than sell garish dreams of a better life to the poor. To people struggling for emotional and material security within their increasingly modern and fragmented societies, they offer the consolations of tradition, especially of family values. Mr. Bachchan's angry young man usually dies in the arms of his mother or father, having realized the folly of his ways.

If you're looking for a rental for tonight, Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India is an especially enjoyable introduction to Indian film.

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ANYBODY EDIT UPI?:

Democracy and Bush's riddle (Vanessa Yeo, 2/28/2004, UPI)

About the American push for global democracy, the recently imploded Soviet Union and Japan come as examples of nations accepting an alien ideology -- albeit perhaps unwillingly.

Despite the 13 years since its collapse in 1990, Russia (ex-Soviet Union) today is nowhere near the supposed glory it envisaged it would reach, when it began experimenting with glasnost and perestroika.

And the zombie nature of the country hasn't helped either. With scores of principalities pulling at opposite ends, the aftermath of its collapse to this day has been a chaotic mix of mob rule, secessionist warfare and constant talk of coup. And, what was really worse in 1994, was talk of a return to communism, as the only form of ideology suitable for the body politic of the nation.

If democracy is of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," the closest mirror image of that serene state in Russia, existed ironically during the era of Stalin and Khrushchev.

And now coming to Japan, the great wonder story of resilience whose capitulation during World War II was ordered not by invading U.S. troops, but by the emperor.

We beg you to pause for a moment and take time to appreciate what you've just witnessed--never in human history has a single human being packed so much willful ignorance into two sentences as Ms Yeo does into those last two. To reach these conclusions all she had to ignore was: the reasonably normal evolution towards liberalism and industrialization of tsarist Russia; the nature of totalitarianism in the USSR, the gulag, and the 20 million murdered by Stalin; two atomic bombs, with their accompanying death toll; and the imperfect but improving condition of Putin's Russia.

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WEDGIE DEFENSE:

Revolution by Fiat (Charles Krauthammer, February 27, 2004, Washington Post)

Wedge? Marriage has been around for, oh, 5,000 years. In every society, in every place, in every time it has been defined as an opposite-sex union. Then four robed eminences in Boston decree otherwise. With the stroke of a pen, they radically redefine the most ancient of all social institutions. And then those not quite prepared to accept this undebated, unlegislated, unvoted, unnegotiated revolution are the ones accused of creating a political wedge! [...]

I welcome the debate on the constitutional amendment because it will shift the locus of this issue from unelected judges to where it belongs: the House and the Senate and the 50 state legislatures. In the end, however, I would probably vote against the amendment because for me the sanctity of the Constitution trumps everything, even marriage. Moreover, I would be loath to see some future democratic consensus in favor of gay marriage (were that to come to pass) blocked by such an amendment.

Nonetheless, that does not render the abusive, ad hominem charges made by the marriage revolutionaries -- that it is their opponents who are divisive and partisan -- any less hypocritical. Gay activists and their judges have every right to revolution. They have every right to make their case. But they deserve to be excoriated when, having thrown their cultural Molotov cocktail and finding that the majority of Americans have the temerity to resist, they cry: Culture war!

One of the more absurd mantras of those trying to destroy marriage is that the amendment is unusual because it seeks to restrict a human right. Instead, like almost the entire Constitution, it seeks to apportion power and define the limits of government action.

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COMMON CAUSE (via Buttercup):

Feminism in The 21st Century (Phyllis Chesler and Donna M. Hughes, February 22, 2004, Washington Post)

In the past, when faced with choosing allies, feminists made compromises. To gain the support of the liberal left, feminists acquiesced in the exploitation of women in the pornography trade -- in the name of free speech. The issue of abortion has prevented most feminists from considering working with conservative or faith-based groups. Feminists are right to support reproductive rights and sexual autonomy for women, but they should stop demonizing the conservative and faith-based groups that could be better allies on some issues than the liberal left has been.

In the past feminists interpreted freedom of religion to mean freedom from religion. Too often they have viewed organized religion only as a dangerous form of patriarchy, when it can also be a system of law and ethics that benefits women. Too often feminists base their views of religious groups on outdated stereotypes. Groups that were hostile to feminism 40 years ago now take women's freedom and equality as a given. For example, faith-based groups have become international leaders in the fight against sex trafficking.

Human rights work is not the province of any one ideology. Saving lives and defending freedom are more important than loyalty to an outdated and too-limited feminist sisterhood. Surely after 40 years feminists are mature enough to form coalitions with those with whom they agree on some issues and disagree on others.

Twenty-first-century feminists need to become a force for literate, civil democracies. They must oppose dictatorships and totalitarian movements that crush the liberty and rights of people, especially women and girls. They would be wise to abandon multicultural relativism and instead uphold a universal standard of human rights. They should demand that all girls have the opportunity to reach their full potential instead of living and dying in the gulags of the sex trade.

Twenty-first-century feminists need to reassess the global threats to women and men, rethink their vision, rekindle their passion and work in solidarity with pro-democracy forces around the world to liberate humanity from all forms of tyranny and slavery.

What a delightful irony, that feminists are forced to recognize that George W. Bush is the single most important force for the rights of women on the planet.

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AND THE LIVIN' IS EASY (via Michael Herdegen):

The Greatest Century That Ever Was: 25 Miraculous Trends of the Past 100 Years (Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon, 12/15/99, Cato Institute)

There has been more material progress in the United States in the 20th century than there was in the entire world in all the previous centuries combined. Almost every indicator of health, wealth, safety, nutrition, affordability and availability of consumer goods and services, environmental quality, and social conditions indicates rapid improvement over the past century. The gains have been most pronounced for women and minorities.

Among the most heartening trends discussed in this study are the following: life expectancy has increased by 30 years; infant mortality rates have fallen 10-fold; the number of cases of (and the death rate from) the major killer diseases—such as tuberculosis, polio, typhoid, whooping cough, and pneumonia—has fallen to fewer than 50 per 100,000; air quality has improved by about 30 percent in major cities since 1977; agricultural productivity has risen 5- to 10-fold; real per capita gross domestic product has risen from $4,800 to $31,500; and real wages have nearly quadrupled from $3.45 an hour to $12.50.

During the course of this century, the affordability and availability of consumer goods have greatly increased. Even most poor Americans have a cornucopia of choices that a century ago the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts could not have purchased. Today more than 98 percent of American homes have a telephone, electricity, and a flush toilet. More than 70 percent of Americans own a car, a VCR, a microwave, air conditioning, cable TV, and a washer and dryer. At the turn of the century, almost no homes had those modern conveniences. And although Americans feel that they are more squeezed for time than ever, most adults have twice as much leisure time as their counterparts did 100 years ago.

By any conceivable measure, the 20th century has truly been the greatest century of human progress in history.

And, though you'd never know it if you listen to Democrats and the media, we are accordingly a rather happy people, though less happy than we used to be when we had less of material value and more of spiritual.

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IMPERFECT, BUT UNPRECEDENTED:

Combating AIDS: The Bush administration's global AIDS initiative has its faults, but it's a start. (Mother Jones, January/February 2004)

On Tuesday, the Bush administration announced details of its much-anticipated global strategy on HIV-AIDS, including approval for the first $350 million in grants to religious groups and humanitarian organizations to fight the disease. The money is the first installment of $15 billion worth of aid to be distributed to fifteen African and Caribbean nations over the next five years.

The plan, which Bush first announced in his 2003 State of the Union address, got a mixed reception from AIDS activists, who say it's short on specifics and has been too long in coming. But they also recognize that the $15 billion plan, whatever its imperfections, is by far the largest pledge ever proposed by any nation to combat the AIDS epidemic. [...]

Kate Carr, executive director of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, commented “The money's now available, the teams are in place and the dollars are going to flow.” Marsha Martin of AIDS Action praised Bush for "unprecedented leadership.”

The compassion in Mr. Bush's conservatism seems to confuse the heck out of the Left (and Right).

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60-40 NATION:

Gay marriage a big voter issue according to poll (WILL LESTER, February 27, 2004, AP)

Gay marriage is a more powerful social issue for voters than either abortion or gun control, a new poll suggests.

Four in 10 voters say they would not vote for a candidate who disagrees with them on gay marriage, even if they agree with the candidate on most other issues, according to a poll released Friday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. [...]

Gay marriage is a crucial issue mostly for those who are opponents - especially conservatives, evangelicals and those 65 and over.

People opposed gay marriage by more than a 2-1 margin in the poll, but when asked if they consider a constitutional amendment a top priority, they placed it 21st in a list of 22 possible choices.

Almost half, 45 percent, said they strongly oppose allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally.

Seems kind of unlikely evangelicals are going to be staying home in November.

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MOCK ON, MOCK ON, ‘TIS ALL IN VAIN:

From go-go to ga-ga (Margaret Wente, The Globe and Mail, 28/02/04)

My girlfriends and I often wonder if we're going gaga. Although our minds are razor-sharp, we've noticed that we suffer from increasingly alarming lapses. The other day I left behind the $500 I had just extracted from the cash machine. I zipped in and out of there with such efficiency that I didn't even miss my money until the day after, when I reached into my pleasantly fat wallet and found nothing but a wad of old grocery-store receipts.

It's comforting to blame these mental slips on overtasking. We lead busy, busy lives, and our brains are buzzing with big ideas and too much to do. We've got lots of weighty matters on our minds — global warming, government corruption, whether Calphalon cookware is better than All-Clad, and how soon Barbara might leave Conrad now that he might go down the tubes. No wonder we occasionally find ourselves in the middle of the Staples store and can't remember why we're there.

But secretly, I know that overtasking's not to blame for this depressing deterioration of our faculties. Turning 50 is to blame. That's when the laws of entropy kick in with a vengeance. Around the time you find that first stout hair sprouting from your chin, you begin to lose your glasses when they're sitting on your own head. After you turn 50, it is dangerous to think about more than one thing at a time. If you do, you will drive right past your own street on the way home from work, the one where you've lived for 15 years.

Permit me a short, self-regarding moment. The other day I left the courthouse so excited about my brilliant victory in a bitter motion that I forgot my boots, but not my coat beside them. I was going to retrieve them yesterday, but I forgot. Beneficent science assures me and my Boomer colleagues excitedly that there is no reason we can’t break all-time longevity records and be productive members of society well into our seniorities. I sure hope I’ll be able to find the office.

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THE AIR FORCE ONE-CHASER:

John Edwards: The Lawsuit Industry Puts Its Best Face Forward: A look at John Edwards's legal career provides a window into the flaws of the legal system that made this mill worker's son a multimillionaire. (Stuart Taylor Jr., 2/25/04, Atlantic Monthly)

Edwards's autobiography, Four Trials, shows the tort system at its best, serving the indispensable functions of compensating injured victims and deterring dangerous conduct. But that's not all the book shows. And a preliminary look at Edwards's legal career provides a window into the faux-populist pretenses and other flaws of the system that made this millworker's son into a multimillionaire.

One of the book's four trials grew out of a heartbreaking accident in which a 4-year-old boy was orphaned when a tractor-trailer killed both of his parents. The truck driver, who had jackknifed across the double yellow line into the path of the parents' car after skidding to avoid rear-ending another car, pleaded guilty to reckless driving. Edwards, hired by the orphaned boy's grandmother, sued the driver's employer, a large textile company, and won a jury award of $2.5 million in compensatory damages plus $4 million in punitive damages. Assuming that Edwards (whose book never mentions his fees) took the standard contingent fee of about 33 percent— or more than $2 million—the award would cover the cost of the boy's upbringing and leave him a millionaire three or four times over.

The compensatory award's generosity seems appropriate, in light of the boy's incalculable emotional loss and the need to deter unsafe driving. But why the $4 million in punitive damages? It was not to punish the driver, Edwards explains: The grandmother thought he "seemed like a decent man, and she believed his remorse was genuine." Rather, Edwards persuaded the jury to punish the employer for paying its drivers according to "how many miles [they] covered," and thus to send a message to the trucking industry to sin no more. Paying drivers by the mile, Edwards argued, encourages them to be reckless and stay behind the wheel too long.

But nowhere in the book's 27-page discussion of this case does Edwards claim that this driver was violating the speed limit, or working more than the 12-hour shift allowed by law, or tired. Nowhere does he suggest that paying drivers by the mile was unusual in the trucking industry. Nowhere does he cite evidence that the driver decided to drive recklessly that day —after 27 years on the job—because he was paid by the mile. Nor does the book cite evidence that drivers paid by the mile are generally more reckless than those paid by the hour—who are, after all, often in a hurry to get home.

I happened to read this chapter while riding in the back of a metered taxicab on Interstate 95. The cabbie was paid by the mile, as are most cabbies. Does this make them reckless? Not that I've heard. Like truck drivers, they know that reckless driving can get them ticketed, arrested, smashed up, or even killed. And if we, as a society, want truckers to drive more slowly—which would increase the cost to consumers of moving cargo—the way to do it is to adopt and enforce lower speed limits.

Was it even "reckless" driving if he lost control while trying to avoid another accident?

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THE OPPRESSED MR. BLIX

Blix: I was a target too (Ewan MacAskill, The Guardian, 28/02/04)

The United Nations spying row widened yesterday when its former weapons inspector, Hans Blix, told the Guardian he suspected both his UN office and his home in New York were bugged in the run-up to the Iraq war.

In an exclusive interview, Mr Blix said he expected to be bugged by the Iraqis, but to be spied upon by the US was a different matter. He described such behaviour as "disgusting", adding: "It feels like an intrusion into your integrity in a situation when you are actually on the same side."

He said he went to extraordinary lengths to protect his office and home, having a UN counter-surveillance team sweep both for bugs.

"If you had something sensitive to talk about you would go out into the restaurant or out into the streets," he said.

Mr Blix's darkest fears were reinforced when he was shown a set of photographs by a senior member of the Bush administration which he insists could only have been obtained through underhand means.

His accusations came after the former cabinet minster, Clare Short, claimed that US-British intelligence bugged the office of the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan.

Speaking from his home in Stockholm, Mr Blix said that what galled him most was the possibility of being bugged by a country, the US, that he had assumed was on the same side. He said that surveillance was only to be expected between enemies or in cases where serious criminal activity is being monitored.

"But here it is between people who cooperate and it is an unpleasant feeling," he said.

Mr Blix, a Swedish diplomat who was head of the UN arms inspectors for Iraq between 2000 and 2003, said he had no conclusive evidence that the US bugged him. But his suspicions were raised when he had repeated trouble with his phone connections at his New York home.

This may baffle Americans, but a Canadian understands perfectly. Of course we can assume you are engaged in dirty tricks, condemn you loudly to your enemies, thwart your security interests, accuse you of being warmongers, call your leader a moronic cowboy and blame you for all the world's ills. We're your friends. We're really on your side. Honest.

Note how the international order works. Bugging by the US is "disgusting", but no less than one would expect from the savage Iraqis, who, of course, stood as full equals to the US. Can anyone seriously believe the French or Russians would ever stoop so low?

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MORE REPUBLICAN SMEAR TACTICS:

Kerry rated most liberal member of Senate (Richard E. Cohen, February 27, 2004, National Journal)

The results of the [National Journal's congressional vote ratings] show that Kerry was the most liberal senator in 2003, with a composite liberal score of 96.5. But Edwards wasn't far behind: He had a 2003 composite liberal score of 94.5, making him the fourth-most-liberal senator. [...]

Last year, Kerry, Edwards, and other congressional Democrats who were seeking the presidency, including Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, missed many votes. To qualify for a score in National Journal's vote ratings, members must participate in at least half of the votes in an issue category. Of the 62 Senate votes used to compute the 2003 ratings, Kerry was absent for 37 votes and Edwards missed 22.

As a result, in the 2003 vote ratings, Kerry received a rating only in the economic policy category, earning a perfect liberal score. Edwards received ratings in the categories of economic and social issues, also putting up perfect liberal scores.

A separate analysis showed that of the votes that Kerry cast in the two categories in which he did not receive scores in 2003 -- social policy and foreign policy -- he consistently took the liberal view within the Senate. Edwards did not receive a score in the foreign-policy category; he sided with the liberals on five votes in that area, and with the conservatives on one vote. On foreign policy, Kerry and Edwards -- both of whom supported the 2002 resolution authorizing the use of military force against Iraq -- last year joined most Senate Democrats in voting that half of the U.S. reconstruction aid to Iraq be provided as loans, a provision that ultimately was dropped.

To be sure, Kerry's ranking as the No. 1 Senate liberal in 2003 -- and his earning of similar honors three times during his first term, from 1985 to 1990 -- will probably have opposition researchers licking their chops. As shown in the accompanying chart, Kerry had a perfect liberal rating on social issues during 10 of the 18 years in which he received a score, meaning that he did not side with conservatives on a single vote in those years. That included his 1996 vote, with 13 other Senate Democrats, against the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited federal recognition of states' same-sex marriage laws.

If you want to run for president from Congress you have to place yourself at one of the extreme margins of American politics or else your opponents in the party primary will clobber you with your heretical votes. Of course, once you get the nomination and your opponent is from the other party, he'll use those same votes to destroy you.

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NOT A FACTUAL ASSESSMENT?:

An Impenetrable Lie: a review of Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars by G. Edward White (MAX FRANKEL, February 29, 2004, NYT Times Book Review)

If you are too young to care much about Alger Hiss, move on. Turn away also if you recall the case and still believe Hiss never fed secrets to Soviet agents. But if you accept Hiss's guilt, as most historians now do, you will profit from G. Edward White's supplementary speculations about why, after prison, that serene and charming man sacrificed his marriage, exploited a son's love and abused the trust of fervent supporters to wage a 42-year struggle for a vindication that could never be honestly gained.

White is a legal scholar at the University of Virginia, but in ''Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars'' he is not just parsing legal evidence. Inspired by a chance family connection to Hiss, he felt a need to ruminate on two enduring mysteries: why Hiss persisted in his lying and why he managed to fool so many Americans for so long. White's answers, in a useful supplement to the vast Hiss literature, are plausible but beyond proof.

We will need novelists to recreate the angry idealism of the Depression years that led so many Americans to feel a kinship with Communists. A decade later, in the alarming first years of the cold war, even inoffensive ''fellow travelers'' came to be viciously hunted as traitors, and so the successful prosecution of Hiss greatly fanned the hysteria. In the ensuing partisan wars, believing Hiss guilty or innocent was likely to depend more on a cultural choice than a factual assessment.

Amazing--they still can't accept that the fact is that he was guilty.

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THAT'S QUITE A RECORD OF SUCCESS:

Tomorrow the World: a review of An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror by David Frum and Richard Perle (Thomas Powers, NY Review of Books)

"Hard-line" is a word defined by thirty years of examples. At various times hard-liners, Perle often among them, pushed for more and better nuclear weapons, ridiculed the notion of "arms control," argued for victory in Vietnam, were ready to spread the war into Laos, Cambodia, and even North Vietnam itself, supported Israel's invasion of Lebanon, wanted to kick the Sandinistas out of Nicaragua, argued that an all-out arms race would spend the Soviet Union into bankruptcy, pushed for American recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, backed the scrapping of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, supported a clear commitment to defend Taiwan, and expressed contempt for the United Nations. To be hard-line involves the willingness to use force, realism about using money and power to get one's way, impatience with feel-good idealism, all-out backing for friends, and contempt for efforts to placate enemies. "Hard-liners" share an Old Testament view of the world, promise an eye for an eye, know what they want, and never forget an injury.

But perhaps most important of all, hard-liners are comfortable with the fact of overwhelming American military and economic power, and argue that it ought to be used without apology to chastise enemies, support friends, and get what America wants.

With the exception of the Lebanon invasion--and attacking N. Vietnam, which tragically wasn't even attempted--didn't every single one of those policies work ?

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FALL AND RISE:

U.S. pitches Sharon plan to Europe, Arabs (Aluf Benn, 2/27/04, Ha'aretz)

The U.S. administration is trying to persuade European and Arab states as well as the Palestinian Authority to support Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has been telling European officials in recent days that Sharon is serious about his plan and that they should encourage Arab and Palestinian officials to respond in kind.

According to American sources, Rice said small steps could lead to larger processes and just as the fall of the Berlin Wall was the result of a chain of events, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza could lead to a "Middle East parallel" of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rice is a Sovietologist, and often uses images and analogies from the Cold War era.

Not years, but months...

MORE:
Israel's Sharon Is Up to Something in Gaza. But What?: What's up with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's recent announcement that Israel intends to withdraw from its settlements in Gaza? (Jonathan Rauch, 2/25/04, The Atlantic Monthly)

No one knows what Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is up to with his recent announcement that Israel intends to withdraw from most of its settlements in Gaza, but everyone knows it is momentous. Less than a year ago, notes David Makovsky, a senior fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Sharon insisted that he considered settlements in Gaza to be as important as Tel Aviv. Now Sharon is proposing to walk away, and to abandon a few, as yet unspecified, settlements in the West Bank as well.

"It's of historic significance that the architect of the settlement movement has declared his willingness to oversee the dismantlement of that enterprise in Gaza," Makovsky says. "That creates a new baseline."

At the Brookings Institution, senior fellow and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin S. Indyk remarks that no previous prime minister was willing to abandon even a single settlement outside the context of a final agreement with the Palestinians. "It's a revolution," Indyk says.

But what kind of revolution? That depends on what Sharon is up to. [...]

By getting out of Gaza, Sharon can firm up his lines and redeploy his resources. Abandoning some vulnerable West Bank settlements serves the same purpose. So does erecting the security barrier, which makes Israeli targets harder to bomb. Moreover, the barrier sits east of the Green Line, which, from Sharon's point of view, means that Israel retains land with which to bargain in negotiations with an eventual Palestinian partner.

More-defensible boundaries cannot exclude bombers entirely. Nor can they stop mortar shells and rockets. The Israeli army would continue to strike into Palestinian territory in both retaliation and pre-emption. But the frequency and difficulty of such incursions might be reduced. Israel might be less vulnerable, less stretched—and thus better able to hunker down.
For how long? "For a long time," Shain says. "Is that a fun kind of existence? No. Can it be a durable condition? Yes. Can it minimize a lot of the terror? Yes. Does it get to the point where exhaustion [of Palestinian militants] will eventually take place? Yes."

A Palestinian state has been an inevitability since Oslo. The American tilt towards Israel an irreversible reality since 9-11. What other resolution was there then going to be?

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ALL DOWNHILL:

Kerry: He's Peaking, Already (ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, 2/22/04, CounterPunch)

By all rights John Kerry should have been at the top of his form, the night he won the Wisconsin primary. Even though the six biggest states, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida, New York and California have yet to vote, he's been hailed as the Democratic nominee, with hit teams already on the rampage, hunting down prospective Nader supporters, rounding up all known and prospective third party defectors from the Democratic standard, forcing them to kneel and kiss the Democratic Party platform under pain of death, while playing a tape of DNC chair Terry McAuliffe screaching "convert or die!"

Kerry has emerged from the bruising kiss of imputed scandal and, unless Ms Alex Polier or other women inconveniently crop up again, Teresa Heinz won't have to wield the carving knife she has threatened to deploy to her husband's private parts if his path to the White House is derailed by sexual scandal. Polier not withstanding, never has a candidate had to put up with less in the way of the baptism of sewage that is a vital part of the primary process. Dean and Clark drew all the fire. John Edwards, who could slice up Kerry in a minute, has adamantly refused to unleash his forensic artillery.

So did Kerry have the jaunty mien of triumph, that night in Madison? Not that we could see. His long face, albeit abbreviated by corrective surgery, remained lugubrious and he stumbled his way tiredly through Bob Shrum's phrases. The one thing all Democrats this year want is a winner. He doesn't feel like a winner to us.

Right now some polls show Kerry a few points ahead of Bush. Other polls show Kerry peaked on February 15 and has started to slip behind Bush. The states that voted for Gore in 2000, according to a Zogby poll, are softer on Kerry while Bush states remain strong for their man. As yet Karl Rove has yet to launch the Shock and Awe barrage that will explode over Kerry's head some time in the late summer, after the Democrats have got their boost in Boston.

Is anybody in America excited by a Kerry candidacy?

MORE:
Primary Colors (Elizabeth Drew, March 11, 2004, NY Review of Books)

Now that John Kerry seems the likely Democratic candidate, it's worth considering how the Democrats chose him, so that we can sort out the myths about the major candidates and the factors that have shaped the outcome thus far. The realities are unsettling. Not only have most of the candidates, abetted by the press and television, misrepresented themselves and their records, but much about the process of choosing the next nominee of the Democratic Party has gone seriously wrong, largely owing to mismanagement on the part of the Democratic National Committee and the treatment of the candidates by the press.

The idea behind bunching up the primaries within a few months, the brainchild of Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, was that the Democrats should select a candidate as quickly as possible, giving the nominee more time to raise the enormous amounts of money needed to respond to the heavily funded Republican advertising campaigns that have already begun. But what if the primary voters haven't had enough time to learn about the candidate they select? What if there could have been a better decision? Even with more time the Democrats have in the past made some weak and even preposterous choices of nominees, as they did with Michael Dukakis in 1988. The nominee could possibly govern us for the next four or eight years. In view of what's at stake, why should it be so important to complete the process so early—why not take two or three more months?

Under the new, compressed calendar, the nomination battle whooshes from state to state without giving the voters much time to reflect on the candidates and to take account of what has happened in the most recent contest, or contests. Larry Sabato, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, has found that Kerry's Iowa victory gave him an additional twenty to thirty percentage points virtually overnight in New Hampshire and several other states. The pollster John Zogby has said, "This year's front-loaded primary schedule appears to have worked well in favor of the front-runner—as it apparently was intended to." [...]

The foreshortened primary system isn't McAuliffe's only blunder. Placing the Democratic Convention in Boston—vulnerable to attack by the Republicans as unrepresentative of the country, the home of lefties and supporters of gay marriage—was another feckless act. (The traffic getting to the recently constructed Fleet Financial Center will be frightful.) It could well be a replay of the raucous 1984 "San Francisco Democrats" Convention, of which the Republicans made a mockery.

Still another McAuliffe blunder was to force the candidates—ten of them at the time—to engage in nearly weekly "debates" last autumn. The results were terrible for the party—ten squabbling candidates in a largely meaningless, time-and-energy-consuming blur. While debates can tell us some important things about the candidates, not least their temperaments as well as the quality of their language, they put pressure on each candidate to put on some sort of act, to show in an impossibly brief time a superior, distinctive personality and command of the issues; the debates therefore gave a strong impression of being fake. And the debates tend to be judged by the press according to showbiz standards: Who can produce the best (usually rehearsed) one-liner; who attacked whom the hardest; who is the most entertaining; who made a gaffe that can be the subject of more stories? Such abilities have little to do with governing.

In fact, according to those who know him, Rove can hardly believe his good fortune in being handed an opposition so blunder-prone.

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"MECHANICAL PLACEBOS":

For Exercise in New York Futility, Push Button (MICHAEL LUO, 2/27/04, NY Times)

For years, at thousands of New York City intersections, well-worn push buttons have offered harried walkers a rare promise of control over their pedestrian lives. The signs mounted above explained their purpose:

To Cross Street
Push Button
Wait for Walk Signal
Dept. of Transportation

Millions of dutiful city residents and tourists have pushed them over the years, thinking it would help speed them in their journeys. Many trusting souls might have believed they actually worked. Others, more cynical, might have suspected they were broken but pushed anyway, out of habit, or in the off chance they might bring a walk sign more quickly.

As it turns out, the cynics were right.

The city deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals, even as an unwitting public continued to push on, according to city Department of Transportation officials. More than 2,500 of the 3,250 walk buttons that still exist function essentially as mechanical placebos, city figures show.

Yeah, but you just might be at one of the rare 750.

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ZUMWALT'S PROBLEM:

Setting Straight Kerry’s War Record (THOMAS LIPSCOMB, 2/27/04, NY Sun)

No one denies Mr. Kerry’s four bemedaled months in “Swiftboats” or his seven-months’ service as an electrical officer on board the USS Gridley, during its cruises back and forth to California, or even his months as an admiral’s aide in Brooklyn, before he was able get out of the Navy six months early to run for office.

Taking a look at Mr. Kerry’s much-promoted Vietnam service, his military record was, indeed, remarkable in many ways. Last week, the former assistant secretary of defense and Fletcher School of Diplomacy professor,W. Scott Thompson, recalled a conversation with the late Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. that clearly had a slightly different take on Mr. Kerry’s recollection of their discussions:

“[T]he fabled and distinguished chief of naval operations,Admiral Elmo Zumwalt,told me — 30 years ago when he was still CNO —that during his own command of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam,just prior to his anointment as CNO, young Kerry had created great problems for him and the other top brass,by killing so many non-combatant civilians and going after other non-military targets.‘We had virtually to straitjacket him to keep him under control,’ the admiral said. ‘Bud’ Zumwalt got it right when he assessed Kerry as having large ambitions — but promised that his career in Vietnam would haunt him if he were ever on the national stage.” And this statement was made despite the fact Zumwalt had personally pinned a Silver Star on Mr. Kerry.

Mr. Kerry was assigned to Swiftboat 44 on December 1, 1968. Within 24 hours, he had his first Purple Heart. Mr. Kerry accumulated three Purple Hearts in four months with not even a day of duty lost from wounds, according to his training officer. It’s a pity one cannot read his Purple Heart medical treatment reports which have been withheld from the public. The only person preventing their release is Mr. Kerry.

By his own admission during those four months, Mr. Kerry continually kept ramming his Swiftboat onto an enemy-held shore on assorted occasions alone and with a few men, killing civilians and even a wounded enemy soldier. One can begin to appreciate Zumwalt’s problem with Mr. Kerry as commander of an unarmored craft dependent upon speed of maneuver to keep it and its crew from being shot to pieces.

Mr. Kerry now refers to those civilian deaths as “accidents of war.”

No wonder he doesn't want his partisans to raise Vietnam service as an issue.

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WE WANT A PERP WALK:

Microsoft to drop questionable provision: Raided Japanese unit promises to remove PC licensing deal stipulation (The Japan Times, Feb. 28, 2004)

Microsoft Corp. will remove a patent-related provision in licensing contracts with personal computer makers, the U.S. software giant's Japanese unit said Friday.

The Japan unit was raided Thursday by the Fair Trade Commission on suspicion of violating the Antimonopoly Law.

The Japanese antitrust watchdog investigated Microsoft's headquarters in Tokyo regarding the controversial provision the U.S. firm inserts into contracts with original equipment manufacturers -- mostly PC and device makers that sell their products loaded with Microsoft's Windows operating system.

"Microsoft has decided that, given its focus on improving customer satisfaction, it would delete the provision in its entirety from the next round of OEM contracts, which will take effect later this year," Microsoft said in a statement released after the raid.

It'd be interesting to see if Bill Gates could run a company without resorting to criminality.

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THE INEVITABLE TRAGEDY:

Catholic Priests Abused 10,600 Children-Study (Deborah Zabarenko, 2/27/04, Reuters)

More than 10,600 children said they were molested by priests since 1950 in an epidemic of child sexual abuse involving at least 4 percent of U.S. Roman Catholic clergy, two studies reported on Friday.

About 4% of the clergy involved after a conscious effort by the Church to recruit gay men to the priesthood, seems about right. You can't set the fox to watch the hens.

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DANGLING CHAD:

The Making of an African Petrostate (SOMINI SENGUPTA, 2/18/04, NY Times)

Oil is bringing big changes to Chad, some cultural, like the one Mr. Elie worries about, others practical, like the way the World Bank will be overseeing how Chad manages its new wealth. Chad, among the poorest countries in the world, is now Africa's newest petrostate.

Its $3.7 billion underground pipeline, stretching 670 miles, began ferrying crude oil through neighboring Cameroon to the Atlantic coast last year. The pipeline is the largest single private investment in Africa.

Because the pipeline stands to transform this landlocked country, for better or worse, Chad is under a special glare — from the oil industry, global lending institutions and development groups.

The investment has come with strings attached: the oil revenues are to be transparent, and the government is to use the wealth to better the miserable lives of its nine million citizens. A citizens' committee is to review all spending to see that it conforms to the law.

If the rules work as intended, they could set a new model for how oil business is done in Africa. But if the usual corruption sets in, if democratic reforms are postponed, it will be just one more case of the spectacular misery that has befallen Africa's oil states, like Sudan, where oil greased the engines of war, or neighboring Nigeria, where living standards plummeted since oil production began 40 years ago. [...]

This year, Chad will see its first share of oil royalties, about $100 million, an amount that will enlarge the government treasury by about 40 percent, virtually overnight. While this allotment will be closely watched, another $100 million from taxes and customs duties is entirely at the government's discretion.

Certainly, there is no dearth of need. Electricity and water are beyond the reach of a majority of people here, and the average Chadian can expect to die before his 45th birthday. The per capita income barely exceeds $220 a year. Chad ranks 165th of 173 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index.

Critics say it is foolhardy to expect a leadership dominated by one ethnic group (the president's) and with a record of repression and mismanagement to do anything but use its new wealth to crush opponents.

They point to worrisome signs: the banning of an antipipeline protest, the temporary closure of an irreverent radio station, the execution of criminals after what critics believe to be incomplete trials.

The most recent sign of trouble was a suggestion by supporters of Mr. Deby, a military ruler twice elected president, to amend the Constitution to allow him to run for a third term. "For those who lead us, the law is just a piece of paper," said Dobian Assingar, head of the Chadian League of Human Rights and a member of the oversight committee.

The government, for its part, points out that no country has ever opened its revenues to such scrutiny. "I can only say: `Wait. Wait until the revenues are spent,' " said Tom Erdimi, the state's liaison to the project.

No matter how the money is spent this year, Chad is certain to have more in its future. ExxonMobil has already found more oil, and a Canadian company, Encana, is busy exploring north of here.

Another secure oil source...

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DESPOTS ARE FAIR GAME:

This war is not yet over: The consequences of Iraq could still break Blair and Bush, and change forever the way our world is ordered (Jonathan Freedland, February 11, 2004, The Guardian)

[T]he specific cost in human lives of the Iraq war is not the sole reason why this will remain the central question of current politics. There are wider reverberations. For this war was unique, the first truly pre-emptive attack lacking even the pretence of provocation. At least earlier, hotly controversial military adventures, whether over Suez or in Vietnam, had an initial, immediate prompt to action. But in 2002 there was no nationalisation of the canal, no threat by the north to topple the south. There was merely an ongoing stand-off with the United Nations, one that had been running for years and that, admittedly under the threat of military action, was beginning to unblock. Hans Blix and his men were making progress; they were not threatened or harassed. There was no provocation.

The Bush administration makes no secret that it sees the Iraq war as the prototype for future conflicts; indeed, it has enshrined the idea in its official national security strategy document. Pre-emption remains the Bush doctrine. Witness Donald Rumsfeld's revealing remarks in Munich last week. Asked whether America is bound by any international system, legal framework or code of conduct, the US defence secretary replied: "I honestly believe that every country ought to do what it wants to do ... It either is proud of itself afterwards, or it is less proud of itself." Translation: the US can do what it likes - including making war on countries that have made no attack on it.

Such pre-emptive wars are only possible with intelligence.

The provocation was Saddam Hussein himself. At a minimal cost in men and material he was removed and a pair of substantially more liberal states will soon be recognized in place of of his brutal totalitarian regime. Does anything about that make you less proud of America? Would you be more proud if he were still oppressing his people?

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THE ENDLESS DEBT TO THE POLES:

SNP’s Swinney accuses Blair of xenophobia (Alan Crawford, 2/22/04, Sunday Herald)

In Edinburgh tomorrow evening author and journalist Neal Ascherson will tell an audience of influential guests at the Royal Society of Edinburgh that Polish immigrants are the solution to Scotland’s woes.

He told the Sunday Herald: “By God, what Scotland really wants is Poles. Poland is a highly educated place, and what we really need is Polish entrepreneurs. All these brilliant, hungry kids who know how to use money. As soon as they’ve got a few dollars together they settle down and start a small business. It’s that extraordinary kind of energy I think we might just get from a fine inflow of Poles.”

Ascherson echoed Swinney’s sentiments, criticising “stupid gesture politics because of the Daily Mail”, adding that “the idea of Poles coming in as sort of hairy, cheap labour and taking jobs away from honest working men is a complete misconception”.

Tory former whip Michael Brown, in The Independent, also argued last week that he would “have no hesitation, as a Tory, in espousing the most liberal attitude towards immigration from Poland”.

He wrote that, on his experiences in the 1980s representing Scunthorpe, which has many Polish emigrés, “it was the Poles who provided dynamism and enterprise”, being “natural workers, entrepreneurs and businessmen”.

“Indeed, the fewer Poles there are in Poland and the more of them in Britain, the better for our economy,” he added.

The world can never have enough Poles.

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NO TEA AND SYMPATHY?:

The Anxiety of His Influence: Naomi Wolf recalls a night from 20 years ago. She once wrote about it differently. (MEGHAN COX GURDON, February 27, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

In 1997, Ms. Wolf recounted the incident in her book "Promiscuities," albeit veiling the identity of the amorous professor. In the book she makes clear that students knew that "Dr. Johnson" occasionally would "elect" girls with the right aura. One Saturday night, by pre-arrangement, the professor came over to her apartment with her manuscript and a bottle. In thrilled expectation, she had put out flowers, lit candles and taken particular care to dress attractively. And over the course of the evening she got room-spinningly drunk--a detail that does not appear in the New York magazine piece.

It's not surprising that in "Promiscuities" she confesses to feelings of complicity in the brief hanky-panky that ensued. Yet in the New York magazine exposé, there is no acknowledgment of her inner excitement or her romantic preparations--there's just the frightened panting of a tender fawn chased by a big bad predator.

There's so much ugliness in this story, and in the publicizing of it, that it's difficult to know where to start. For one thing, Ms. Wolf's tale illustrates two impossibly contradictory strains in the feminist culture that she herself promotes. Women must be sexually shameless--meaning shame-free--and society should encourage female erotic exploration. Men, however, must observe a phenomenal degree of purity--in language, eye-movement, intentions and most definitely in the placing of heavy, boneless hands on women's thighs.

This reverse-Talibanism may make sense in the steamy atmosphere of a women's studies class, but it withers into absurdity in the fresh air of real life.

One doubts he'll resort to it, but this does offer Mr. Bloom the Marion Barry defense: "The [young lady in question] set me up."

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HAITIAN IF YOU DO, HAITIAN IF YOU DON'T

If we go, let's stay until job is done(Joseph L. Galloway, Miami Herald, 2/25/04)

Three times in the last century, the United States has gone into Haiti with arms and money to calm the political situation, pacify the population, get rid of one homicidal dictator or another, and build some schools, clinics, roads and bridges.

The question now is whether we will have to do it again as we read about another uprising against another autocratic leader, born of the despair of the most grinding poverty in the Western Hemisphere.

• The first and longest U.S. occupation of Haiti began in 1915, when President Woodrow Wilson ordered in a brigade of U.S. Marines, 2,000 good men and true, and they took and pacified the entire country with a loss of only three Marines killed and 18 wounded. They stayed and ran Haiti until 1934. They built more than a thousand miles of highway with 210 bridges.

• In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in the Marines again, this time to rebuild a shattered economy so communists couldn't get a toehold in the hemisphere. This the communists did the next year in nearby Cuba. This American incursion also helped prop up the dictatorship of the quite bloody-minded Francois ''Papa Doc'' Duvalier.

• In 1994, President Clinton sent the Marines in yet again, this time with the U.S. Army and U.N. peacekeepers from half a dozen armies. It was to oust the latest military cabal, that of Gen. Raoul Cedras and his cronies, and to reinstall the overthrown elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former priest who turned out to have a dictatorial streak of his own.

The American soldiers who came briefly on this last incursion found themselves marching across the only things that still worked in modern Haiti: bridges carrying little brass plates that said: "Built in 1927 (or 1930, or 1931, or 1933) by the U.S. Marine Corps."

Now the Haitians are rising up in rebellion again, seizing a clutch of towns and cities. They're killing and burning and looting in hopes of overthrowing Aristide, in part because they believe that he stole an election but mostly because he has failed to give his people a shred of hope for a better future.

Foundations on Sand An Analysis of the First United States Occupation of Haiti 1915 - 1934 (Peter L. Bunce, USMC Command and Staff College, June 5, 1995)

Thesis: The first United States Occupation of Haiti, after a slow start, made a great variety of capital improvements for Haiti, made changes in the Haitian political system, and refinanced the Haitian economy, none of which had much lasting impact on the Haiti people once the occupation was terminated.

Background: The United States occupied Haiti originally to restore public order in 1915. It's self-imposed mandate quickly expanded to reestablishing Haitian credit in the international credit system, establishing good government and public order, and promoting investment in Haitian agriculture and industry. After a slow start, marred by a brutal revolt in 1918-20, the United States Occupation of Haiti was reorganized and began to address many of the perceived shortcomings of Haitian society. Its international and internal debt was refinanced, substantial public works projects completed, a comprehensive hospital system established, a national constabulary (the Gendarmerie [later Garde] d'Haiti) officered and trained by Marines, and several peaceful transitions of national authority were accomplished under American tutelage. After new civil unrest in 1929, the United States came to an agreement to end the Occupation before its Treaty-mandated termination in 1936. Once the Americans departed in 1934, Haiti reverted to its former state of various groups competing for national power to enrich themselves. Almost all changes the American Occupation attempted to accomplish failed in Haiti because they did not take into consideration the Haitian political and social culture.

Recommendation: Before the United States intervenes in foreign countries, particularly in those where nation-building improvements are to be attempted, the political and social cultures of those countries must be taken into consideration.

Our Foreign Policy: A Democratic View. (Franklyn D. Roosevelt, Foreign Affairs, Vol. VI, 1928)

In Haiti a worse situation faced us. That Republic was in chronic trouble, and it as it is close to Cuba the bad influence was felt across the water. Presidents were murdered, governments fled, several time a year. We landed our marines and sailors only when the unfortunate Chief Magistrate of the moment was dragged out of the French Legation, cut into six pieces and thrown to the mob. Here again we cleaned house, restored order, built public works and put governmental operation on a sound and honest basis. We are still there. It is true, however, that in Santo Domingo and especially in Haiti we seem to have paid too little attention to making the citizens of these states more capable of reassuming the control of their own governments. But we have done a fine piece of material work, and the world ought to thank us.

Clinton and Coercive Diplomacy: A Study of Haiti (Sarah Bermeo, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, 1/18/01, rev'd 4/24/01)

Clinton's actions in Haiti show both how coercive diplomacy can fail when there is not a credible commitment to use force to achieve outcomes, as well as how it can succeed when the commitment to back up diplomacy with force is present. Up until September 1994 Clinton was not prepared to use force if sanctions did not work. Because of this, Cedras and his followers lived with the sanctions, prospering off black market trade and bribes, without fear of retribution. During that time poverty in Haiti, already an impoverished country, increased significantly and resentment festered in the population as corruption, looting, killing and raping terrorized the people. The task of ruling the people of Haiti was no doubt more difficult when Aristide returned in 1994 than it would have been had he returned earlier. The implication for the United States of allowing the conflict to drag on was evident in the increased number of forces needed once the intervention finally occurred. The rapid success of coercive diplomacy in 1994, once it was backed up by the credible use of force, signifies that the United States could likely have ended the conflict sooner if it had been ready to act decisively. For the same cost, or less, Clinton could have had a sizable foreign policy victory instead of a blundering outcome.

The Haiti case also provides insight into the importance of leadership in international diplomacy. Clinton focused his energy during the Haitian crisis on Haiti and on the international community while neglecting to cultivate support among the American people and Congress. This ultimately showed in the low level of support for an armed intervention in September 1994. This lack of support, in turn, could have been read by Cedras as evidence that an invasion was not imminent. Kohut and Toth note that in the Persian Gulf Crisis, in which Americans ultimately favored intervention, the initial response of the American public to the use of force was overwhelmingly negative.42 However, as they note, President Bush invested considerable effort in explaining to Congress and the American people from the beginning what the national interest was in the conflict and that force might be necessary to achieve American objectives. When an intervention was ultimately necessary, Bush could count on Congress and the American people to rally behind him. However, this situation didn't just exist; Bush helped to create it. The contrasting lack of support for Clinton's initiative in Haiti is a strong argument in favor of spending time cultivating public opinion.

U.S. Marines arrive in Haiti Opposition gets more time to consider peace plan (CNN.com, 2/24/04)

A team of 50 Marines arrived in the Haitian capital Monday to help protect the U.S. Embassy and its staff against possible rebel attack. . . .

Monday's political wrangling came a day after heavily armed rebels seeking to oust Aristide entered the key port of Cap Haitien, Haiti's second-largest city, where they seized the international airport, torched the police station, released prisoners, broke into an arms depot and looted warehouses.

An undetermined number of people were killed, witnesses said. The Associated Press reported that v