http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/columnists/9759659.htm?1c (original)

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2004/10/04/satullo_view.htm\
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(commentary on above)

Posted on Sun, Sep. 26, 2004

Center Square | Cries of 'media bias' hide sloppy thinking

By Chris Satullo

For journalists, it's getting Rather weird.

The ruling spin on Dan's Big Blunder seems to be: Rather exposed as a
biased hack; mainstream media exposed as arrogant, obsolete
gatekeepers; the blogosphere rules!

For any journalist who understands his real job - helping the public
life of this nation work well - the rise of citizen comment on the
Internet should be something to celebrate.

The blogosphere is a dynamic expansion of things newspapers have long
done to aid democratic dialogue, from letters to the editor to
experiments in civic journalism.

Many bloggers are citizens who care about facts and ideas. (Some are
narcissistic boors, but let's ignore them.) Good bloggers devour
information, making then a smart, skeptical audience. Any journalist
who would not welcome that is a fool. Given a choice between a world
of nonreaders zoning out with MTV or a posse of tart-tongued digital
watchdogs, I say: Up with blogs!

Blogs may display the flaws of youth (naivete, hyperbole,
self-indulgence), but I find them refreshing.

Yet, many bloggers disdain my type as clueless dinosaurs. The
blogosphere is declaring its independence, even as it relies on us
fogeys for its daily grist.

The sensation is vaguely familiar. I am, after all, the father of two teenagers.

Here's what bothers me: Rather's meltdown could be a clarifying moment
for journalism. But the event is being hijacked by propagandists of
Orwellian agenda. Their cover story: We're challenging the bloated
corporations that own the biased mainstream media. This strikes a
chord with the hype-weary youth who've made the Internet their own.
But the real goal of the propagandists - with their shouts of Bias!
Arrogance! Monopoly! - is to destroy journalism.

Why? Because journalism is the sworn enemy of propaganda.

By journalism, I don't mean getting paid $4 million a year to have
nice hair and interview Kelsey Grammer. I mean the principled,
difficult search for the most thorough, accurate, fair-minded account
of current matters that flawed human beings can attain.

Journalism, done right, buoys democracy; hence its place in the First Amendment.

Media conglomerates are not a synonym for journalism. They employ some
journalists, and many who only pretend to be. They enable the craft,
but also inhibit and cheapen it.

Don't tell my bosses I said this, but it really doesn't matter a whit
to the republic whether Knight Ridder, the corporation that owns this
newspaper, thrives or dies. As loyal as I am to newspapers, I confess
it's not even essential that the ink-on-paper medium survives.

What matters is that journalism survive, that the craft of speaking
truth to power with factual care not be snuffed out.

Because power prefers lies. Without journalism, lies flourish and liars rule.

I know, I know: What an old-media blowhard! But young bloggers, as you
shove my type aside and stride to the glorious future, take care that
the calendar doesn't one day turn to 1984. Be wary of the Orwellians.
They've pressed their attack against journalism for 30 years now,
frothing about Bias.

And shame on journalists for having given them so much ammunition. We
screw up too often. We take too many shortcuts. We lapse in vigilance
against our own preconceptions.

But, in the public forum, overuse has drained meaning from the cry of
"Bias!" Often, all it denotes is: "What you reported does not conform
to my assumptions." Or worse: "What you reported, while true, does not
advance my agenda." The Orwellians' goal isn't better journalism. It's
to bully reporters into submission, so that propaganda may flourish.

Rather's mistake was sad, but no watershed. This aging anchor is no
more the embodiment of journalism than Paris Hilton is a typical farm
girl. Mainstream media is a term so loose as to disqualify any
assertions that follow it. Let's, by all means, discuss how journalism
falls short. Let's explore how it can flourish in media new and old.
But let's see the screaming about media bias for what it is: at best
sloppy thinking, at worst Orwellian poison.

[COMMENT: I have been following the rise of the Thulfikar Army in some
detail. Refer to these Shi'a Pundit posts for more details:

http://shiapundit.blogspot.com/2004_04_25_shiapundit_archive.html#10832480062066\
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3250
http://shiapundit.blogspot.com/2004_05_02_shiapundit_archive.html#10836147784514\
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5773
http://shiapundit.blogspot.com/2004_05_02_shiapundit_archive.html#10838501800462\
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9062
]

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/8592805.htm?ERIGHTS=635780\
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766304513318mercurynews::azizhp@hotmail.com&KRD_RM=6rnuuvsspqusonursmmmmmmmmn|Az\
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|Y

An-Najaf group on quest to drive out Iraqi rivals

HOMEBRED MOVEMENT AGAINST SHIITE CLERIC GROWING

By Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson

Knight Ridder

AN-NAJAF, Iraq -- Armed with a 9mm handgun and grit, Haidar is trying
to do what the U.S. military camped nearby hasn't done: Drive the
gunmen of Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr from this holy city.

Since mid-April, Haidar and scores of other men from An-Najaf have
gathered nightly in the city's sprawling cemetery to attack members of
Sadr's Mahdi Army militia. Only a few gunmen are targeted each time to
prevent big firefights that might injure civilians, said Haidar, who
spoke with Knight Ridder on the condition that his last name not be used.

``If we capture them and they swear on the holy Koran they will leave
Najaf and never come back, we let them go,'' the 20-year-old furniture
maker said. ``If they resist, they are killed.''

The group claimed to have killed at least a half-dozen Mahdi gunmen
and chased off more than 20.

This is the first known homebred movement against Sadr, and it
illustrates the animosity toward the radical cleric within Iraq's
Shiite community, which makes up the majority of Iraq's population.
The Shiites were oppressed under Saddam Hussein's rule, and the United
States has looked to them for support in its efforts to transform Iraq.

Many Shiites in An-Najaf say only a small number of Iraqi Shiites
support Sadr. But the grand ayatollahs who guide the Shiites are
withholding support from Haidar and his band of vigilantes, fearing a
civil war among their followers.

U.S. authorities have expressed hope that the Shiite community will
take care of Sadr and have yet to condemn the vigilante attacks,
leaving the impression that they endorse them. U.S. forces have sought
to arrest the cleric and disband the Mahdi Army, but they don't want
to risk a public backlash that would follow a military incursion into
An-Najaf.

An-Najaf business leaders, some of whom Haidar and others say are
financing the resistance movement, say there's no choice but to fight
back. Sadr ``is just a child and he's running everything,'' complained
one shop owner, Mohammed Hassan, 45, who sells women's sundries in the
main bazaar. ``We haven't been able to get our goods from Baghdad
since his men took over our city. They stop the trucks at checkpoints
and steal everything.''

Like the Mahdi Army, which Sadr named after a Shiite messianic figure
to portray his fight against U.S. occupation as God-driven, the
countermilitia has adopted a religious name. The group is called Thul
Fiqar al-Battar, named after the double-edged sword carried by Grand
Imam Ali, recognized by this Muslim sect as the successor to the
Prophet Muhammad.

Haidar says the name is particularly relevant because his colleagues
are targeting a group that commandeered the holy An-Najaf shrine where
Grand Imam Ali is buried. But unlike Mahdi militiamen, who often dress
in black and carry Kalashnikovs or rocket-propelled grenade launchers,
Thul Fiqar fighters try to remain invisible.

They carry only handguns, because they can be hidden in their street
clothes. They use the common checkered keffiyeh, or Arab headdress, to
cover their faces when they go on raids. Many lack military training.

Before joining Thul Fiqar, Haidar said he had shot his 9mm handgun
only once and that was into the air to celebrate the capture of Saddam.

Yet the men have a major tactical advantage over Mahdi members, many
of whom are from nearby Al-Kufah, Baghdad and other southern towns.
Thul Fiqar fighters are hometown boys who know every inch of An-Najaf,
including the hundreds of pathways in the cemetery, which is the
largest Muslim burial ground in the world. This cemetery is where they
have concentrated their attacks against Sadr's gunmen, who go there at
night to monitor U.S. troop movements in the distance.

The immediate impact is negligible, Haidar admitted. Mahdi Army
numbers in and around An-Najaf are estimated in the thousands,
compared with the 250 claimed by the Thul Fiqar. Their quest also
comes at a high price. Four members of the new group have been killed
in firefights with the Mahdi Army, said Hashim, 27, a Thul Fiqar
leader who refused to give his last name.

``The Americans made us happy when they got rid of Saddam Hussein,''
Haidar said. ``We're happy to return the favor by getting rid of the
Mahdi Army.''

[COMMENT: This is a travelouge of a blogger friend who traveled to
Rwanda last year.]

http://www.tacitus.org/story/2004/4/7/21938/25273

Right now I'm at a public terminal in Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi,
Kenya. The airport is hot and depressing -- a pastiche of aged concrete
walls, grimy tiled surfaces, malfunctioning restrooms, and endless shops
full of the worst sort of junk. Africrap, one of my CDC acquaintances
calls it: Tusker beer t-shirts, faux Masai cloths, Kenyan coffee beans
in ridiculous foil bags, and amateurish wooden carvings. I’ve bought all
four in the past two months of travel. The coffee beans are pretty good.

My week in Rwanda was interesting and eventful, and I wish I could
report unalloyed pleasure with the country. But I can't: my untrained
eye and uninformed conscience detect something amiss in the new,
post-genocide Rwanda. It's a beautiful country, all right: Ireland in
central Africa, a land made entirely of terraced, brilliant green hills
and red earth. You are never out of the highlands in Rwanda --
everywhere there is a vista, be it a towering hill above you, or a
valley filled with clouds below. Moreso than in places like Kenya or
Zambia, Rwanda's natural beauty masks the lot of poverty and grinding
toil that is the fortune of so many Africans. If it were a silent movie
-- if it were a dream -- Rwanda would be a small paradise of verdant
highlands and gentle French murmurings.

But the land and the people tell you things you don't necessarily want
to know. You find out disturbing facts here and there: By the way, did
you know your hotel was one of the few safe havens for refugees during
the genocide? Did you know that the priest at that cathedral there
killed his own parishoners? Did you know that the admin assistant you're
working with was forced to watch as her entire family was decapitated?
Did you know that the road crew right there just dug up yet another
grave full of bones and skulls? Oh yes -- they sent the remains to Gisozi.

Gisozi is Kigali's memorial to the 1994 genocide. You could write a book
on the genocide's history and sources, and better people than I have.
The source of the strife was both pathetic and simple. Rwanda has two
major ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi. The Hutu comprise 85-90% of
the population, and the Tutsis are roughly 10-15%. We used to have exact
figures, but no longer -- I'll get to that in a moment. You can barely
tell them apart: though the Nilotic Tutsis are supposed to be tall,
slender and light and the Bantu Hutus are supposed to be squat, stout
and dark, centuries of intermarriage means that no one is quite sure
what their neighbor is simply by appearance alone.

The elusiveness of race served only to make it more precious. Tutsis
were the historical aristocrats of Rwanda, and the colonizing Germans --
and later Belgians -- used them to extort labor from the Hutu masses in
a hated corvée. But in 1959, the wheel turned, and Hutus seized power
with the complicity of guilty Belgian consciences. They celebrated by
massacring the Tutsis who had ruled for so long. And they massacred
again in '63. And in '71. And in many years, in many places, in between.
Think the lynching era of the American South, only with each lynching
routinely involving the slaughter of hundreds, with thousands more
blacks fleeing across the Mexican and Canadian borders every time it
happened. Think also that in place of the Klan there was an ideology
known as Hutu Power; a simple political belief, really, in which Hutus
were powerful, and expressed that power best by killing Tutsis. This was
the Tutsi experience in post-'59 Rwanda. Hutus killed Tutsi. Tutsi fled
to neighboring states.

And there, they waited.

One who waited was Paul Kagame, a thin man with a bookish expression
whose family fled to Uganda in his childhood. He grew up speaking
English in the exile Tutsi community there. Paul found his calling in
military rebellion: in the mid-'80s, he helped lead and mastermind
Yoweri Museveni's successful guerrilla campaign against Milton Obote.
That done, Kagame and his compatriots resolved to conquer their
ancestral homeland. They formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front, vowed to
bring peace between Hutu and Tutsi, and invaded from Uganda in 1991.
Museveni’s army suffered massive desertions as Tutsis rushed to avenge
themselves on decades of Hutu oppression. The RPF advanced and
conquered. The Hutu Power regime of President Juvénal Habyarimana in
Kigali responded by sponsoring the slaughter of still more Tutsis, and
also by calling in their insurance policy.

That policy was France. Paris was appalled at the notion of Anglophone
Tutsis overrunning Francophone Hutus; and the probability that Francois
Mitterand's son was profiting from illicit smuggling transactions with
Habyarimana's regime no doubt also spurred the Republic to action.
Morally, the choice between the inclusive, ostensibly pro-democracy RPF
and the massacre-sponsoring Hutu Power regime in Kigali would seem an
obvious one. And so it was: French soldiers arrived, joined hands with
Hutu Power, and drove the RPF back into Uganda.

Kagame's men did not give up. The next few years were rife with border
raids and rural insurrection; the pot simmered and began to boil until
the scheming men of Hutu Power decided they had had quite enough.
Eluding confrontation with the hated French by never quite provoking a
second intervention, the RPF emerged in early 1994 with much of Rwanda
in its grasp. Peace was forced upon a reluctant Habyarimana in a
power-sharing accord. Signing it was signing his death warrant. Enraged
Hutu Power ideologues shot down the presidential aircraft as it returned
to Kigali. It's something I have thought about the times I've flown into
that city. There is no ground path that can be secured, and no way to
spot an ill-intentioned missileer in the lush greenery that rolls
beneath you as you glide toward the airport. It's so easy to imagine --
the endless verdant hills of central Africa sliding under the aircraft;
the muddy red streams coursing off the hillsides; the green-on-green
terraces of centuries' cultivation; the baked-brown brick homes; the
hilltop runway rushing to meet you; and then, the thin white snaking
trail of the missile, rushing to meet you faster than the runway ever
would. I imagine it all as in a dream after that; I imagine that
Habyarimana did not die until he hit the earth, first to meet a ghastly
end in the Rwandan soil that would soon receive so many of its tormented
children.

That missile, like Princip's bullet, murdered entire nations.

In the twisted logic of Hutu Power, President Habyarimana did not die in
vain. His murderers annulled the peace accords and proclaimed the days
of vengeance. Hutu militias known as interahamwe ("those who kill
together") streamed into villages and neighborhoods, referring to
prepared lists as they methodically exterminated all Tutsis and Hutus
who opposed Hutu Power. It was all planned, all mechanical, all
bureaucratic. Passersby were asked for their identity cards and, if
Tutsi, were killed on the spot. Hutu were asked to help identify their
Tutsi neighbors, and most complied. Hutu schoolchildren were recruited
for the same purpose -- it was more efficient to kill the Tutsi children
while they were all gathered at school. One heroic school, far in the
countryside, refused: the Hutu children would not betray the identities
of their Tutsi classmates. So the interahamwe killed every child. Hutu
husbands were made to kill their Tutsi wives, but were allowed to keep
their children. Hutu wives were made to kill their children and
husbands, although sometimes the interahamwe would help out in
dispatching the latter. Killing was hard work, and this was done old
school: blunt weapons, edged weapons, and muscle power. Visitors to
Gisozi today are sometimes taken down into the ossuaries beneath the
grim structure. There, locked behind glass cases, thousands of skulls
stare accusingly at you, their attendant bones piled in neat heaps
behind them. Each tells you how it died: slashes, sometimes jagged,
sometimes clean, are machetes; a simple round crater means this person
was bashed to death with a hammer; a starlike pattern radiating across
the head means bludgeoning. The babies and small children defy untrained
analysis -- their tiny skulls are are often simply split open. Almost
never do you see the neat round hole denoting a merciful, swift bullet.
That privilege, you had to pay for.

In approximately one hundred days, just under a million Rwandans were
slaughtered. And it was almost all done by hand.

It is difficult to describe, and even callous to say, but there was
almost an element of acquiescence in the victims’ slaughter. The
genocide was no secret; the plans were no secret; the stockpiling of
machetes and weapons was no secret; the mission of the interahamwe was
no secret. The Tutsi did not live in ghettos, and they did not live in
separate villages. They were friends, neighbors, and family members of
the Hutu who invariably slaughtered or betrayed them. They knew what
Hutu Power wanted, and they listened to the state-run radio as it
exhorted their erstwhile fellow Rwandans to hate, hate, hate -- and
later to kill, kill, kill -- their Tutsi neighbors. And yet many of them
did not flee. And yet many of them complied with their murderers’
orders. Time and again you hear distressing, awful stories about the
family who marched quietly to the ravine to be machine-gunned, or the
mother who stood her children in a neat row so the interahamwe could cut
them down in turn. The thought horrifies me in ways that the ordinary
tales of massacre do not. (Alas for Rwanda that it is one of the few
places on earth where there is such a thing as an “ordinary tale of
massacre.”) I could not understand it: surely, the human spirit would
demand a final gesture of defiance, however futile, however vain.

Comprehension came from an unexpected angle. After traveling to six
African nations, I found dealing with the Rwandan bureaucracy a delight.
Certainly there were the ordinary third world annoyances in the form of
overzealous bureaucrats and maddeningly slow processes; but the
difference in Rwanda lay in the blessed fact that Rwandans were slow and
zealous not through graft or sloth, but usually because they wanted to
do things right. “It’s great,” I gushed to a co-worker, “They’re like
the Prussians of Africa.” She looked at me coolly and replied, “Now you
get it.” And in a flash, I did get it. Social conditioning, respect for
hierarchy, a yearning for efficiency for its own sake, a tradition of
state-run collective work in the corvée, deference to authority at all
costs -- these are the elements of a well-run genocide. The victimized
Tutsi did not acquiesce because they were cowards, nor because they were
weak fatalists (although surely fatalism was there). Those that
acquiesced did so out of habit. They did so because theirs was a society
that, in its moment of cruel crisis, valued process and form over content.

They did not want to die. Their moral sense was as keen as ours. But
they were not going to break the rules. They were not going to disobey
an order.

The RPF restarted its war the moment the massacres began. This time,
they battled not for power, nor for an end to simple oppression, but to
save their people from extinction. Disciplined and grimly determined,
they abandoned their piecemeal strategy of the preceding three years and
stormed across the countryside. The Hutu Power army and interahamwe
resisted fanatically -- they needed more time to kill. And indeed that
was why they resisted so fanatically. Like Hitler harming his eastern
front by diverting resources to the operation of the concentration
camps, the Hutu Power leaders knowingly crippled their own war effort by
diverting fighting men away from the front and into hamlets still
"infested" with the "roachlike," "hateful" Tutsi. Hate and madness
overcame self-preservation itself. After weeks of full-scale combat, the
results showed on the battlefield. The RPF swallowed up more and more
countryside, inheriting ruined villages and scarred survivors; and a
valiant little garrison of RPF fighters in Kigali itself, which had
entered the city to participate in the new national army under
Habyarimana's peace accords, was able to mount offensive operations and
drive the genocidaires from surrounding neighborhoods. The slaughter
continued in Hutu Power-held territory, but an end was in sight.

And then the French returned.

Outside in the wide world, nations bickered about what to do over
Rwanda. America, scarred in Somalia, stood aloof. So did most of Europe.
France did not. Having secured a UN mandate to act, the Republic's
soldiery arrived in northeastern Zaire and moved into Rwanda for a
repeat of the 1991 intervention. Hutu genocidaires lined the roads to
welcome their allies. Now, surely, the Tutsi cockroaches would receive
their comeuppance. But Kagame and the RPF had learned the lesson of
French power. Aside from a few expertly-staged mock ambushes meant only
to frighten, they offered no resistance, instead falling back when
challenged, or holding their ground and their fire. The French, too,
were behaving differently. They saw the horrors perpetrated by Hutu
Power, and they knew that the world saw as well. And so their mission in
1994 became different from that of 1991: instead of restoring Hutu Power
to its ascendancy, France would enable its escape. Inside a region of
French military control known as the Zone Turquoise, interahamwe
congregated, completed their killing, and slipped across the Zairean
border. Soon enough there were no Tutsi left to kill within the Zone;
soon enough there were no interahamwe outside of the Zone. The French
had brought a peace to Rwanda. So they left; the Zone collapsed, the
Hutu Power masterminds fled, and the RPF flooded in to claim the last
bit of their country.

One hundred days of genocide were over.

Genocide ended, but Rwanda and Rwandans remained. The task of rebuilding
was arduous in the extreme and immensely complicated by the presence of
hundreds of thousands of Hutu Power refugees just across the Zairean
border. The interahamwe would cross the lush volcanos and steamy
mountains to slaughter a village, ambush a convoy, or machine-gun a
rural market. RPF fighters would cross into Zaire to kill guerrillas and
refugees alike. In time, events sparked by this untenable situation
spiraled and coalesced into Africa's most devastating war of the past
century -- the Congolese civil war. Nations would be drawn in, millions
would die, and RPF agents would wash their feet in the Atlantic Ocean,
thousands of miles west. But that's another story.

In Rwanda, reconciliation was the theme of the day -- indeed, of the
decade. The government of national unity outlawed all further official
tabulation and information-gathering on ethnicity. The RPF, saviors of
the Tutsi, installed a decent-hearted Hutu as interim president, with
Kagame himself content for the time being to wait in the wings. The old
identity cards, facilitators of genocide, were discarded. Neighbors
still knew who was Hutu and who was Tutsi, but hopefully their children
would not. Hopefully no one would ever again try to find out. The
national task now was rebuilding; and rebuilding meant more than
physical infrastructure. It meant justice.It meant a new state with a
new constitution. Rwandans got to work.

Here we reach the point where Rwanda fades out of Western consciousness
almost entirely. Those who know about it tend to know just this much --
a long history of communal strife; a genocide; a revolution; a bright
future; the end. Indeed, that is, I find, what the ruling junta wants
the West -- and Westerners -- to think. The official narrative, when you
visit Gisozi, or even a government-run health clinic, is one of
denouement with RPF victory. “And since then, our future has been better
and brighter.” True enough -- what isn’t better and brighter in the wake
of genocide? Is it not wonderful that Hutu and Tutsi now live as
brothers? Shall we not genuflect before the peace-giving wisdom of
President Kagame, my American friend?

That’s right: President Kagame. That one phrase ought to alert that
things in the Land of a Thousand Hills -- the Mille Collines -- are
awry. The RPF came to power as a Tutsi Anglophone organization
officially committed to communal harmony: hence the comparative lack of
massacres of Hutus; hence the installation of a Hutu president; hence
the retention of French as an official language. (Oh traveler, woe upon
you if you refer to Rwanda as “Francophone” before a government
official. How I wish I had a dime for every time a bureaucrat sternly
remonstrated that Rwanda is a bilingual nation. Interestingly,
“bilingual” means French and English. That the native Kinyarwanda tongue
qualifies as a language apparently does not occur to the ruling class.)
Let us be fair -- in the regrettable pantheon of African “liberation”
movements, the RPF is among the better guerrilla armies to ever seize
power. But it is not spotless. Far from it.

Following the RPF leadership’s entry into Kigali at war’s end, a
transitional regime was established to govern until a new constitution
could be drafted. That process took almost seven full years. Seven years
with no election; seven years with new wars calling Rwanda’s youth
abroad; seven years under the rule of not one, but two presidents. For
Kagame and his clique, having agreed to serve under a Francophone Hutu,
chafed at their secondary role. Were they not Tutsi, traditional
aristocrats and rulers? Had they not won the war? Had not the million
slain by Hutu Power been replaced almost man for man by a million
returning Anglophone Tutsis from Uganda, Tanzania, and beyond? Was it
not just and right that the liberator himself rule the nation? And so it
was that these questions answered themselves in the minds of the
victorious class: bloodless bureaucratic maneuverings undercut and
overthrew the interim president, and Paul Kagame was installed as leader
of the nation.

It came to pass in 2003 that the first post-genocide national elections
under the new, long-delayed constitution were to be held. Kagame the
incumbent ran against -- well, no one of import, and no one with any
chance at victory. He raked in 95% of the official vote, and as one
might expect, declared a mandate. The tally seemed over the top to me,
particularly as the majority Hutu couldn’t possibly love the Tutsi
destroyer of their old order.

“Ninety-five percent?” I asked an Embassy acquaintance.
“Probably not,” he replied, “but maybe seventy, eighty percent. Even the
Hutu are tired of war, and they just want to get along.”
“Plus they’re going to vote for whomever is in power by virtue of the
fact that they’re in power, right?”
“Probably.”
I thought this over. “So why the need to perpetrate vote fraud?”
“It’s not like there’s polling here,” he said, “You just don’t know.”
“I suppose they must be happy.”
“No. The RPF wants to know who the five percent were. They’re unhappy
about that.”

A government perpetrates vote fraud in an election it would have handily
won in any case; and then it becomes deeply concerned over the
identities of the artificially-condoned opposition voters. Such is
Rwandaise politics and society, where the appearance of agreement is
more important than its actuality. The ruling RPF was not merely unhappy
about this loss of face; they were deeply unhappy. My friend told me of
a Rwandan journalist; he was a friend of hers, an independent-minded
fellow who rightly saw the lack of a free press as a key enabler of the
genocide. He watched the election, saw the fraud, and decided to report
on it. He disappeared shortly thereafter. “Where did they take him?” I
asked. “He wasn’t taken anywhere,” she said, and I remembered I was in a
part of the world where words like “disappeared” meant “dead.” Business
as usual, it seems, and because it was still so much better than what
had preceded it -- Hutu Power wiped out whole nations, not individual
journalists -- few complained to any effect. I think it was Stalin who
remarked that a single death was a tragedy, while a million was a
statistic. Rwanda turns Stalin’s aphorism on its head: the million
deaths are the tragedy; the single death, well, it’s a pity, but ....

But what? But they’ve been through genocide. And who are we to tell them
what must be done after that? The RPF has learned to distrust and detest
foreign advice, and the notion of the “international community” carries
no moral weight with them. The international community stopped them from
overthrowing Hutu Power before the genocide could occur; the
international community facilitated the escape of the genocidaires and
prolonged their work; the international community reprimanded them for
retaliating against interahamwe cross-border raids; and the
international community condemned their handling of returning Hutu
refugees far more vigorously than it condemned the genocide itself. The
international community has even contested Rwandan extradition requests
of genocidaires abroad; it is not unheard-of for Rwanda to ask for a
Hutu Power chief to be sent to Kigali for justice, only to have the
United Nations tribunal in Arusha claim precedence. These things are
stupefying and enraging to Rwandans, especially to Tutsis, and rightly
so. Why, then, should we expect them to take the international
community’s advice on the killing of journalists and the rigging of
elections? Another Embassy acquaintance expressed her frustration to me
over her RPF contacts’ habit of dismissing her stridently-stated
distress over their increasing habit of murdering troublesome domestic
opponents. “It’s always the genocide, the genocide, the genocide. The
genocide justifies everything. They refuse to move past it, because it’s
so convenient. It excuses everything.”

I saw her point. Yes indeed, they need to move past it. Yes, they have
to move on. Yes, they should stop viewing things through that
utilitarian lens. Even as I thought it, I sensed it was somehow wrong. A
million massacred, the bones still piling up at Gisozi barely ten years
later, and we want them to move on. Genocide isn’t like that. You don’t
just pick up and reassume normalcy. Nations under threat of extinction
are driven to extraordinary measures, and it’s arrogance to not allow
them that. I don’t expect it of Israel; I don’t expect it of Kurds; and
I ought not expect it of Rwandans.

And yet.

And yet I think of the interaction I and my colleagues had with a Hutu
health minister. I wanted to see an AIDS treatment site, and he was
unsure if he could allow it. I pressed him on the matter. No, he said,
Madame Kagame wishes you to see this other site instead. I respect the
First Lady’s patronage, I said, but I must insist that this other site
is a superior model for treatment and long-term care. He knew I was
right; and in the end, he agreed to my wishes. I thanked him. The next
day, we received a phone call: we were to be at the ministry at 7am the
next morning. My Hutu minister acquaintance was present at the meeting,
as were his assembled subordinates. They were all Tutsis, and obviously
so: not only tall and thin, their English was impeccable, as one might
expect of men raised in Anglophone Uganda. They spoke for their
superior. You must go to Madame Kagami’s site, they said. We must
insist. There is no other option. I looked to my minister, but he sat
silently; and I grasped what was happening. I did not wish to embarrass
him, and there was little to say in any case. We parted, and I made sure
to thank the minister for his cooperation and generosity. “I understand
your decision, sir.” He silently took ownership of that which he did not
control.

And yet.

And yet my American friend tells me of her Rwandan friend, a Hutu
professional, whom she was surprised to encounter in shoddy outdoor work
clothes one day outside Kigali. “What are you doing?” she joked, “Is
this the mandatory work day?” He shot her a dark look, and in his eyes
flickered hatred. He said nothing, but he did not have to. He, a Hutu,
was on corvée.

The mists never dissipate over the Mille Collines, and the green
terraced slopes and the red wounded earth forever yield their bounty of
tropical crops and grasses for the cattle. Rwanda’s silent hills swallow
up their history, till all that is left in the mud-brick homes and
winding dirt paths is the hope and fortitude of the peasants and
laborers who are not “bilingual,” but speak the Kinyarwandan tongue to
friends, loved ones, and enemies. Who is which changes too frequently,
and so they look to their beloved leaders to let them know. And therein
lies the danger of Rwanda; therein lies the slumbering volcano whose
eruption is heralded by barely-felt rumblings of electoral fraud, Hutu
political neutering, and the furtive, erratic return of the corvée. The
government functionaries may smile, and the Western consciousness may
end in July 1994. Scratch the surface, though, and you realize the awful
truth: History -- that history -- is not over yet.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040401.html

Timing is Everything
Look at Anti-Trust Law as a Digital Design and -- Guess What --
Microsoft Wins

By Robert X. Cringely

Last week, Microsoft was slapped by the European Union with sanctions
and a $600+ million fine for anti-trust violations. Readers have been
asking me what this really means. But Microsoft's troubles extend beyond
Europe. There are signs of strain in last year's DoJ v. Microsoft
anti-trust settlement. And while Redmond has settled many private and
class action anti-trust lawsuits, several more are continuing. This
would seem like not a good time to be Bill Gates. On the contrary, this
is a VERY good time to be Bill Gates, because Microsoft is winning every
case. Not only are they winning, in fact they've already won. Sure, the
verdicts aren't all in, and in some cases, the jury hasn't even been
chosen, and there is even the very real prospect that some verdicts will
appear to go against Microsoft, but that doesn't matter: Microsoft has
already won, by which I mean that Microsoft literally can't lose. It's
just that until now they are the only ones to have figured this out.

There was a time, years ago, when I actually worked for a living. I did
a little software, did a little hardware, and while I wasn't the best at
any of it, I got by primarily on, of all things, my skills in geometry.
Something of an idiot savant, I was so bad at math and so good at
geometry that, of course, I reduced everything I could to a geometry
problem. And it turns out that geometry, at least as I practiced it back
when I did practice it, was particularly useful for understanding the
timing of digital circuits and the biorhythms of software. I believe
that in today's world circuit libraries and object-oriented code such
timing is something of a lost art, but the results back then were that
my efforts, crude as they were, often got to the finish line first just
because in computers, as in comedy, timing is everything.

What this has to do with Microsoft's legal situation is simple. Forget
about looking at Microsoft's legal problems as, well, legal problems,
and start looking at them as a digital design problem. Business itself
is just a big computer program with the computer being our economy or
maybe our entire culture. There are inputs, outputs, variables,
coefficients, values, and constraints. Most of these are analog, but if
we forget for a moment the business of business and think only of the
business of law, suddenly the design becomes all-digital. That's simply
because laws are made up of yes's and no's which are effectively zeroes
and ones -- a binary system. Even the fuzzy logic of legal opinions can
be reduced to digital values since someone inevitably wins while someone
else loses, no matter how many words are involved in explaining the outcome.

Timing comes into this because doing work (even legal work) takes time,
and the time required for some work is more flexible than for others.
Think of it in hardware terms as discrete devices that can only work so
fast, plunked into designs where something can't start until something
before it ends.

Good design is like figuring out the timing of traffic lights such that
driving a steady 38 miles per hour gets you green lights all the way
through town. Bad design is like having to punch the accelerator or slam
on the brakes over and over again to achieve that same average 38 miles
per hour. REALLY bad design is not being able to go fast or slow enough
to average 38 so you miss a few lights and finish later even though your
car may actually be the fastest of all. Sometimes you go nowhere at all.

Now let's apply these admittedly poorly defined principles to anti-trust
law and to Microsoft in particular. I have no idea whether anyone at
Microsoft has done this same exercise, but I'd bet they have. Nor does
it matter whether they've done the exercise or even thought of it,
because the result will still be the same.

In anti-trust law the actors are individuals, companies, and regulators.
The clock rate of the overall system was defined no later than the 1930s
when the most recent anti-trust laws were passed. The primary data bus
is provided by the U.S. Mail. And here's the most important part of all:
coefficients were set too long ago to be effective in the case of
Microsoft or any Microsoft-like entity. Finally, there is almost no way
to optimize the system, which is filled with extraneous wait states and
timing loops that slow it to a crawl because lawyers are paid by the
hour. Justice may be blind, but she is also slow.

None of this should matter if we believe to be true the idea inherent in
law that the courts can always redress infractions even in cases where
victims are dead. Sure the system is slow, little Eolas tells itself,
but all the while Microsoft is being assessed interest on that $520
million punitive damage award, so if it isn't paid for years, that hurts
Microsoft more than Eolas. At least that's the idea which is, of course,
nonsense.

In practice, it doesn't work that way, and not just in America. Take
this example of the European Union fining Microsoft. It looks tough, but
Microsoft gets to appeal, remember, and this particular part of the EU
bureaucracy has been reversed on appeal two out of the last three times.
So whatever the fine, Microsoft has two-to-one odds of not having to pay
it, or at least of having it substantially reduced. And while the fine
looks like a lot of money, to Microsoft it isn't. That $600 million is
the amount by which Microsoft increases its cash hoard in TWO WEEKS.
Even if the EU had hit Microsoft with its maximum allowable fine of 10
percent of gross global turnover or about $3 billion, it wouldn't have
mattered. Paying a $3 billion fine to keep moving a $10 billion annual
European cash machine that yields $7 billion in annual profits is a
no-brainer. Would you pay $3 billion knowing that doing so would bring
in a net profit of $4 billion PER YEAR, especially given the likelihood
that the final judgement would be reduced or eliminated entirely? OF
COURSE you'd pay the $3 billion, anyone in that position would. And
nobody in that position, having paid the $3 billion (or $600 million)
would put much effort into real compliance, since THAT's the thing that
threatens profits, not paying artificially-capped fines.

So Microsoft will pay the European fine, which will have no impact on
their behavior. They will appeal the decision, which will freeze any
real enforcement action and effectively authorize continuation for
another two to five years of otherwise proscribed behavior while the
appeal moves forward. And if its European appeal fails, Microsoft will
still be $8-20 billion ahead of where it might be had they actually
attempted some version of compliance, which they won't. By that time,
too, enough will have changed that Microsoft will have good grounds for
arguing that it’s a different world and just maybe all parties should
start again from scratch.

Much the same thing is happening in the U.S., too. Microsoft is laboring
under a consent decree ostensibly being monitored by Harry Saal and his
team up in Redmond, but I'm hearing enough grumblings through friends of
friends to believe that Microsoft isn't paying a lick of attention to
complying with that agreement. Why should they? Compliance just slows
the company down without providing Microsoft any advantage. While it may
look like the company agreed to comply, what is really happening is the
company agreed to be bound by certain requirements, not necessarily to
comply with them. At the end of the day, they can always opt for what's
behind door number three, which is the DoJ's punishment for
noncompliance. But Microsoft knows that any such punishment won't be
enough to reverse the gains of noncompliance, and that there is a good
chance there will be no punishment at all.

Viewed as a digital system, Microsoft gains more from noncompliance than
from compliance. Microsoft risks less through noncompliance than it
would through compliance. Dynamic action gives Microsoft effective
control of the master clock because wait states can always be added by
hiring more lawyers. And if all else fails, Microsoft can always pull up
stakes and move to some other country, the very threat of which would
stimulate a frenzy of political ass-kissing that could ultimately result
in Bill Gates being named king of somewhere or other, possibly even of
the U.S.

Justice is blind, slow, and unequal. What makes this possible is a legal
system designed for the late 18th century and operated by a government
that effectively believes that while antitrust matters to individuals
and companies its effect on nations cancels out. Only it doesn't if the
companies involved are as big and powerful as Microsoft or Intel or
Wal-Mart -- companies of near-infinite resources and near-total fixation
on executing a global strategy.

There are only two ways for a society to address such taking advantage
of a legal system. One way is to drag that legal system into the 21st
century, which isn't going to happen in America. The other way is to
dramatically simplify the legal system along the lines of nomadic
justice where there are no prisons nor even capability for collecting
damages, so all correction comes down to death or maiming. That isn't
going to happen, either, so Microsoft wins.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/05/maslin.htm

The Atlantic Monthly | May 2004

The Front-Runner’s Fall

The Dean implosion up close, from the vantage point of the candidate's
pollster

by Paul Maslin

.....

The 2004 Democratic nomination was decided in Iowa. John Kerry's
decision to focus his efforts in the Hawkeye State, with the support of
a $6.4 million loan secured by his home, paid off handsomely: Kerry
rallied in the final two weeks to upset Howard Dean, and surged to an
easy win in New Hampshire just eight days later. The rest of the states
then fell like dominoes.

Dean and his chief strategists—Joe Trippi, the campaign manager; the
media consultants Steve McMahon and Mark Squier; and I—were not
surprised: winning Iowa had been the heart of our own victory plan. As
was the case with so many other parts of our campaign, somebody stole
our hopes along the way. This is the story of how it happened.

The Benchmark Poll

Polling in Iowa is both important and impossible. The vagaries of the
caucus process make it very difficult to predict who might actually turn
out on caucus night and to target those voters in a poll sample. The
problems are compounded because Iowa voters have become "professional,"
and they know it is to their advantage to delay making up their minds.

Our first stab-in-the-dark-attempt was in late April of 2003, nine
months before the caucuses. It confirmed some of Howard Dean's most
fervent hopes about the state: he was actually in the lead among Iowans
who had attended a caucus in the past and said they would definitely go
this time. But it exposed a serious weakness: he was virtually unknown
to many Iowans, particularly those inclined to support the 1988 Iowa
winner, Richard Gephardt, of Missouri. The data also hinted that John
Kerry could become a formidable candidate and that John Edwards was a
direct threat to Dean. The overall results were these: Gephardt, 34
percent; Kerry, 16 percent; Joseph Lieberman, 15 percent; Dean, 10
percent; Edwards, six percent; others, four percent; undecided, 15 percent.

Some revealing additional findings came out of that first poll. One
concerned the war in Iraq. Dean's support was 24 percent among those who
strongly opposed the war; 13 percent among those who somewhat opposed
it; and only six percent among those who favored it. Nearly three
quarters of our sample opposed the war. The lesson for our planning
purposes was that antiwar messages were among our least effective means
of increasing Dean's support. We already had most of the core antiwar vote.

The second finding involved the dynamics among the candidates. It was
clear even then that Kerry and Edwards posed a threat to us; support for
the three tended to overlap. As I wrote in a memo just after the April
poll, "In some ways Dean and Edwards are battling to be the 'New Face'
... just as Dean and Kerry have been battling over who is the 'True
Democrat.'" The scenario was very different when it came to Joe
Lieberman. We thought Lieberman had probably peaked in this first poll,
where he was a strong third, and that his center-right run would fail
badly among Iowa's liberal voters. Still, the votes Lieberman got would
come mainly at the expense of candidates other than Howard Dean. We
needed him to stay in the race in Iowa to sap others' support;
unfortunately, he pulled out of the state in the fall.

The third finding had to do with biography and record. More than any
other, this one showed how John Kerry might actually win. Not counting
Lieberman, there were two Washington-establishment candidates in the
race—Gephardt and Kerry. And there were two non-establishment,
non-Washington candidates—Dean and Edwards (who is serving his first
term in the Senate). Voters did not indicate a clear preference for one
kind of candidate over the other. In the April poll we found that 36
percent of voters would support a candidate "whose main experience is in
Washington, D.C., as a member of Congress," and 32 percent would support
a candidate "whose main experience is outside of Washington, D.C., as a
governor." But when voters were asked to make a choice based on job
description and without knowing the candidates' names, the winner was a
"lawyer/ congressional leader" (Gephardt) over a "medical
doctor/governor" (Dean), by 49 to 18 percent. "Vietnam vet/ senator"
also won over "medical doctor/governor," by 49 to 17 percent. In the
actual Iowa-caucus vote, nine months later, Kerry and Gephardt together
received 49 percent, and Dean 18 percent.

Fortunately from our point of view, when voters heard briefly about the
qualifications of each candidate by name, including Dean's record in
Vermont (providing health care, balancing budgets, and so on), Dean was
the only candidate to gain support; he moved ahead of Lieberman and
Kerry into a strong second against Gephardt. We knew we could probably
never win an outright battle of the bios, but a fight about the
candidates' achievements as elected officials looked promising. When we
met to discuss these results, we debated the odds of defeating Gephardt
in Iowa, and whether a second-place finish would be acceptable for us.
It was a short debate; we decided to go for the win.

Going Up Early

Since the campaign-finance reforms of the 1970s, primary campaigns have
lived with the reality of what's known as "the cap." To be eligible for
federal matching funds, candidates have to keep their spending below
per-state limits that are set by a complex formula. In practice the cap
has really mattered only in the first two states, Iowa and New
Hampshire—and in 2004 it would matter in a new way, because the
McCain-Feingold law stiffened the penalties for exceeding the cap. Late
in 2003 the Dean campaign decided to opt out of the public-financing
system, which meant it could spend as much money as it wished. But
before that decision, in the early summer of 2003, it had to calculate
when it could start running expensive TV ads without using up cap money
too soon.

We were acutely conscious that any sustained flight of television
advertising—we were considering running ads for two weeks—was going to
take a big bite out of our cap. I assumed that we would proceed
carefully and not consider airing anything until after the Fourth of
July. So imagine my surprise when Howard Dean burst into our Burlington
headquarters on the afternoon of Friday, June 6, followed not long after
by Joe Trippi, and announced that we were going to "go up" in Iowa.

"Kerry's planning to go up," Dean said. "We've got to be there first. We
can't let him get the jump on us."

"I think we're going to do the focus groups after we run the ads,"
Trippi added. This turned the usual procedure on its head; for obvious
reasons, ads are generally tested with focus groups before they air.

Two things have become clear in the many months since that moment in
June. The first is the extent to which Howard Dean based his campaign on
John Kerry's. He didn't like Kerry; he wanted to beat him; even when
things were good, he worried about him. In many ways the two men were
polar opposites—the small, feisty doctor, who talked in bursts and in
common language and often without thinking; the tall, aloof
soldier-turned-politician, who always tried to strike a lofty pose and
seemed to consider every word he uttered. Both were born to privilege.
Dean turned his back on it and fell into politics from the outside.
Kerry, too, rejected its comforts, and fought in, and later protested
against, a war that made his political career possible; but he never
seemed to shed his patrician skin. On that June day, as far as Dean was
concerned, the reason to "go up" in Iowa was to beat Kerry to the punch.

The second thing is that Howard Dean and Joe Trippi, although their work
styles were such that they rarely spoke to each other (and they would
ultimately part ways), were nevertheless on the exact same tactical page
most of the time—if not always for the same reason. And when they were,
bold action usually ensued.

By June of 2003 we understood our candidate and his message pretty well.
Our ads would be thirty-second standups, Howard Dean talking straight to
the camera and laying out what this race was all about: confronting
George Bush, opposing the war in Iraq, providing health care to all
Americans. The ads basically wrote themselves, and they clearly struck a
chord (even though they were filmed in Vermont, and in the background
featured an old Ford tractor instead of a John Deere, to which Iowans
are partial). They helped fuel a national pro-Dean momentum that crested
at the end of the month. Independent polls began to show us challenging
Gephardt for the lead in Iowa, months before we had even hoped to do so.
But they came with a price—one that far exceeded the $300,000 we spent
on them.

We learned dangerous lessons from those ads: that we could work fast,
with virtually no preparation; that it paid to be bold; and that we
could spend money at a time that no sane campaign ever would or ever
had. In late August, after Dean had completed a triumphant national
tour, Trippi decided to push more chips onto the table and persuaded us
to spend a million dollars on advertising in Arizona, New Mexico,
Oklahoma, South Carolina, Washington, and Wisconsin. Jeani Murray, our
Iowa state director, had a simple and blunt reaction: "And nothing for
Iowa?"

Wesley Clark

Howard Dean's momentum continued through the summer, despite the initial
skepticism of the Democratic establishment. The first obvious setback
came in mid-September, when General Wesley Clark entered the race.

It would be hard to overstate the initial shock to our system when
Wesley Clark entered the race. Two views prevailed about Clark. The Dean
campaign saw him as a real threat: the only other guy to share our
outsider message who could raise money and run a national effort. To
most D.C. types—the same people who had failed to understand or predict
our ascendancy—he was a rookie; he would make mistakes and bomb out
eventually. Both views proved to be right. But in mid-September Clark
was nothing but trouble for us; with his campaign diverting money, our
fundraising slowed for the first time. This is relative: we still raised
a record amount in the third quarter of 2003—nearly $15 million. But it
might have been three or four million more without Clark. Endorsements
were put on hold, and our aura of invincibility was dimmed, at least for
a time.

A few days before Clark was expected to make his announcement, the other
Democratic hopefuls gathered in Indianola, Iowa, for the Steak Fry—an
annual political get-together hosted by Iowa's Senator Tom Harkin, who
had conducted voter forums with each of the candidates over the past
several months. Former President Bill Clinton, the star attraction,
praised virtually every candidate in the field but then advised the
crowd, which consisted almost entirely of rabid supporters of one
candidate or another, that although first they'd "fall in love,"
ultimately they must "fall in line." It was hard to mistake that for
anything other than a shot across our bow—and in our minds it clearly
indicated that Clinton was, as the rumor mill suggested, secretly
pushing for General Clark. Trippi weighed in with his own concern a few
days after the Steak Fry, which he had attended. "It's not right in
Iowa," he said. "I could feel it there. It's not right."

Despite Trippi's fears, our poll numbers held in Iowa through September:
we now had a four-to-six-point lead over Dick Gephardt, with John Kerry
still a solid third but essentially motionless, and with John Edwards
mired in single digits. On September 24 and 25, when it was not clear
whether Clark would be competing in the Iowa caucuses (ultimately he did
not), we conducted a new poll that in its focus on comparing the
candidates revealed more of the emerging contours of the race. Dean held
solid advantages over his competitors when it came to who represented
change, who would stand up to Bush, and who was bringing new energy and
volunteers into politics.

Despite these strengths, the results revealed some bad signs about where
the race was going. First, although Dean led the field on who would best
stand up to Bush, a quarter of likely caucus-goers thought all the
candidates would stand up to him equally. To us, this suggested that our
message was being borrowed and diffused. Second, 13 percent thought
Kerry was the candidate best described as having "opposed the war,"
despite his vote in favor of it. His circuitous statements on that
subject may not have been helping him in New Hampshire, where Dean's
lead was increasing, or with media insiders, but plenty of Iowans still
thought he was against the war.

The third finding that raised a red flag was the so-called
"electability" question: Dean's lead was narrower here, and Kerry was
already in second place. Kerry's hope, it seemed at the time, was that
the discussion would swing back to foreign policy, where his more
"presidential" qualities could come into play.

A Full Dose Of Trippi

Joe Trippi was the principal force in pushing the campaign to
unprecedented heights of grassroots activism and small-donor
fundraising. His brilliance was obvious to all, and it wasn't limited to
his innovative use of the Internet, which defined so much of the Dean
campaign. He was also a visionary of the highest order, able to see both
the opportunities and the risks with which this campaign was constantly
presented. Yet he was a poor manager—and in fact he was never even given
a full opportunity to work as one, because Dean decided early that
Trippi should not have budgetary authority. Joe was an irascible leader
who rarely understood the need to buck up those around him when things
went wrong; instead he either lashed out at the offender, usually with
good cause, or often retreated to his corner office and behind his
computer, giving off such strong vibrations of doom and darkness that
even the most trusted and loyal members of his staff did not dare
disturb him. Trippi was the one person other than Dean—and at times the
only person, including Dean—who could be counted on to stay on message,
yet he so jealously guarded his press contacts and attention that even
his closest associates were wary of talking to the media for fear of
alienating him. He believed passionately in Howard Dean's message, yet
he allowed himself to become almost a rival messenger; he came to be
viewed, by supporters and detractors alike, as the true core of the
campaign, more so even than the candidate himself.

It should have been no surprise that normal petty jealousies and staff
rivalries, when combined with a full dose of Trippi, led to a very
dysfunctional organization. (Trippi would often joke, "If these other
campaigns only knew what this campaign is really like ...") Slights,
real and imagined, bred accusations that were hurled back and forth in
our Burlington office or in hushed phone conversations around the
country. Joe threatened to leave more than once, predicting disaster all
along; those who were not fans of his threatened on several occasions to
have Dean replace him. At one point he overturned a desk in rage in
front of his personal assistant, Kristen Morgante, who not surprisingly
walked out of the office and didn't return until two days later, after
Trippi had apologized. Another characteristic outburst occurred in a
hotel in Des Moines, when Dean balked at Trippi's idea of putting out a
pamphlet aping Thomas Paine's Common Sense because he had been given
only a couple of days to review it before the printing deadline. Trippi
blamed Kate O'Connor, Dean's closest aide, for the holdup; he left the
candidate's suite, threw his cell phone down the corridor, and screamed,
"That bitch!"

Through it all, even on the good days, Joe would look at us with that
intense and very dark glare of his and ask, "What about Iowa?" He had
campaigned in the state at least three times before: as a young staffer
for Ted Kennedy in his unsuccessful primary effort against Jimmy Carter,
in 1980; as the Iowa director for Walter Mondale, in 1984; and as Dick
Gephardt's deputy campaign manager, in 1988. He had certain ideas about
how to win the caucuses and was increasingly frustrated that the Iowa
staff seemed to be carrying out none of them. "You need a person running
each county who is in that county, no matter how small it is," he said.
"This campaign has a bunch of kids in regional headquarters that never
go out into the counties. You need a precinct captain for every one of
the nearly two thousand precincts. Jeani doesn't believe in that. I keep
asking, and they can't tell me how many we have. And you need a hard
count of ones [political parlance for strong supporters who have said
they'll back the candidate]—that's what Mondale did. That's what
Gephardt did, and he's doing it again. Our campaign doesn't know how
many ones it has, and I keep asking for it!"

The Pincushion

Life as the front-runner was never comfortable for Howard Dean. He knew
that by declaring war on the party and its establishment for their
failure to oppose Bush strongly enough, he was guaranteeing a vicious
and constant response. He complained many times about Kerry's attacks,
and occasionally about Lieberman's, but he always felt that Gephardt
would be different. "I supported Dick in 1988," he said to me one day on
the trail. "Worked for him. He may criticize me on the issues, but it'll
never get personal." I disagreed, since I had already seen Gephardt in
action against a candidate standing in his way. (I had polled for Paul
Simon, whom Gephardt narrowly defeated in Iowa in 1988.)

By October, Dean started to understand. He was becoming, as he described
it in the campaign's final weeks, a "pincushion." Kerry would attack him
for his desire to repeal all the Bush tax cuts, even those aimed at the
middle class. So would Lieberman—and Mr. Moderate would then launch into
a diatribe against Dean's views on foreign policy and national security.
In one speech Lieberman said that Howard Dean was giving the Democratic
Party a "ticket to nowhere." Al Sharpton would attack from his post as
the self-proclaimed representative of black America, looking for any and
all evidence that Dean didn't know or understand "his" people. John
Edwards would do the same from the South—which meant that when Dean
talked about wanting the support of all voters, including the guys with
Confederate-flag decals on their pickup trucks, he gave both Sharpton
and Edwards a chance to be aggrieved.

But the most serious damage was coming from Dick Gephardt and his labor
minions in Iowa, who relentlessly attacked Dean for his supposed
weakness on Medicare and Social Security and his prior support of NAFTA.
Although Dean's personal ratings remained strong, the Gephardt barrage
took its toll. When, on October 29, we completed the first night of a
new poll, Gephardt had retaken the lead in Iowa (by an impressive
margin) for the first time in more than three months.

We had decided to test two messages in that poll. One stressed the story
of the campaign and its reliance on small givers—in essence arguing that
Dean would be uniquely able to break the power of special interests. It
produced a good but hardly overwhelming response. The other likened
Bush's handling of the economy to the practices of Enron—in both cases
the rich and powerful made off with the money while ordinary people got
screwed. This message tested much better.

The day after that first night of polling, Dean reached me as I was
driving south from Washington with my wife and two daughters to visit my
son at the University of Virginia. In a typically incongruous campaign
moment, as our car hurtled through scenes of glorious fall foliage, Dean
asked me what we intended to do to turn Iowa around. I described to him
the two messages we were testing. His response was immediate: "O-kaaaay.
What about the war?" I said we could add a question or two about
Gephardt's vote to support Bush's recent request for $87 billion for
Iraq and Afghanistan. So then, as my wife explained disapprovingly to
our eleven-year-old that "this is how those horrible negative ads are
made," I dictated to my office a new question to insert into the second
night of polling.

The result was crystal clear: 56 percent of Iowans took our view on the
war, and only 35 percent agreed with Gephardt. The ad Steve McMahon and
Mark Squier produced the following week had just the right tone to be
deadly effective: as the screen showed a picture of Gephardt in the
White House Rose Garden with Bush and other congressional leaders, a
female announcer declared, "October 2002—Dick Gephardt agrees to
co-author the Iraq War resolution, giving George Bush the authority to
go to war"; the spot switched soon after to Dean's saying "I opposed the
war in Iraq and I'm against spending another $87 billion there." We
didn't need a focus group to tell us this would be a devastating ad. But
we needed to wait before running it, because the Jefferson-Jackson Day
dinner in Des Moines was slated for the upcoming weekend, with Hillary
Clinton as the emcee. We didn't want to strike the first negative blow
of the campaign before such a high-profile event.

Our ad began to air the week following that dinner, on Monday, November
17. For several days Gephardt's campaign didn't respond, and when it
did, its ad was confusing. It tried to allege that Dean had actually
supported Bush's recent funding request—and that he had promised not to
attack other candidates for backing it. This kind of debate about the
war was just what the doctor had ordered. We shot back into the lead. In
this poll nearly 60 percent of Iowans said Dean was the candidate who
could best be described as opposing the war, and 40 percent fingered
Gephardt as the candidate who could best be described as favoring it.

Once again, we thought we had learned an important lesson: the war could
bail us out of trouble. But we failed to notice a big problem with our
singling out Gephardt as the pro-war candidate: almost no Iowans were
thinking of Kerry and Edwards as candidates who had supported the war,
even though both had supported the original resolution.

Tapping The Egg

All of us involved in the Dean campaign made mistakes, for sure. But to
be fair, our candidate's erratic judgment, loose tongue, and overall
stubbornness wore our spirits down. He refused to be scripted, to be
disciplined, or to discipline himself, in his remarks about everything
from the Red Sox and the Yankees to Middle Eastern diplomacy. I later
likened it all to repeatedly tapping an egg against the edge of a
kitchen counter: eventually the egg would break. That's what happened in
Iowa.

Several times during the campaign we had attempted to change the cast of
characters accompanying Dean, so someone could help shield him from
increasingly tough or persistent media questioning or, at least,
recognize and fix problems on the spot. We desperately needed an "adult"
(preferably one the candidate knew and respected) to help provide some
stability around him, or simply to take him to the woodshed when he did
screw up, to reduce the chances of its happening again. Such a person
didn't exist in Howard Dean's personal orbit, and the campaign never
found one for the job.

But the bigger problem was Dean himself—the enemies he had made and the
process that had made him a target. The other campaigns' responses to
our success intensified in the fall. At one point Gephardt's campaign
created a Web site, Deanfacts.com, reserved for attacks on Dean's
record. John Kerry chafed at all the media attention we were getting and
once muttered in frustration, "Dean. Dean. Dean. Dean. Dean," not
realizing he was near a live mike.

What did we expect? Our candidate was the front-runner. But then we made
ourselves more vulnerable with our handling of his gubernatorial records.

Before his run for President, Dean had decided to seal some of his
records for ten years, and when he was asked about it in Vermont, in
January of 2003, he made a curious statement. Although he later claimed
that he had been speaking in jest, he basically admitted that he had
wanted to avoid potential embarrassment in some future race. This
campaign prided itself on trying to make American politics more
transparent and accessible, and Dean had railed at the secret energy
commission chaired by Dick Cheney—and yet had sealed his records,
seemingly for the sake of personal ambition.

By early December the press was ready to pounce. Dean had changed his
tactic, basically trying to go mano a mano with another former governor.
"I'll unseal mine," he said, "if he will unseal his." The problem was
that technically Bush's Texas gubernatorial records were "open," even
though in practice getting access to them would be time-consuming.
Within a day the campaign staff realized that our position was
untenable. We tried to talk a reluctant Dean into authorizing a full
release, hopeful that any damaging revelations might still be months
away. We were hoping, at any rate, that they would come out after Iowa
and New Hampshire.

At first Dean seemed receptive, and even seemed to suggest a forthcoming
full disclosure to the media, but he first wanted to discuss the issue
with us in person. On Wednesday, December 3, in the campaign's ratty
Burlington conference room, Dean met with about fifteen of his senior
campaign staffers and top consultants. I felt that failing to release
the records would be more damaging than anything the records might
contain. It would fly in the face of the campaign's whole message of
openness and change, and would reveal Dean as just another politician.
But others, who had known him longer, were more circumspect. They were
particularly concerned about the weekly memos Dean was given as
governor, on which he would write comments. Nobody could remember a
precise example, but all, including Dean himself, thought that he had
probably insulted many major political players in Vermont in those
comments, including Democrats and Democratic-leaning interest groups.

Dean was increasingly uncomfortable with the discussion, and I felt some
regret for pressing so hard when, in the end, he lowered his head and
said to us all, but mostly to himself, "I'd rather end the campaign than
have the world see everything." Seldom have I heard a candidate so open
about his feelings (one of Dean's refreshing qualities); more seldom
still have I seen someone on the brink of political success be so
conflicted about it. To this day I am convinced that no "smoking gun"
exists in those records. What is probably there is an accumulation of
cuts from a man who routinely made acidic or even profane comments to
all around him, in conversation and in writing.

I felt worse half an hour later, when—after Dean had left the
headquarters having decided not to release the records—Trippi called
McMahon, Squier, and me into his office. He shut the door and said in a
compassionate voice, rare for him, "He just lost it in here. He
basically told me that he never thought he'd be in this position. Never
thought he could ever win. Never thought it would come to all this. He
was just about in tears, and for once, I really feel for him. He said,
'I don't know why I say the things I do.' He ain't gonna release the
records, even if it costs us everything."

Saddam Hussein And Al Gore

On December 9 Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean. The next Saturday, December
13, Saddam Hussein was captured near Tikrit. The former seemed like a
huge boost for Dean's prospects: a day later Dean rose to a double-digit
lead in Iowa. But ultimately both events were setbacks.

Dean was already scheduled to give a foreign-policy address in Los
Angeles the Monday after Saddam's capture. In a rare moment when he, the
policy staff, Trippi, and the consultants agreed that playing
"front-runner" was smart, he had planned to give a reassuring speech. He
would not back down from his opposition to the war in Iraq, but he would
remind the media and the foreign-policy establishment that he had
supported the 1991 Gulf War, the war in Kosovo, and the war in
Afghanistan. The implied message was that although his view of the world
differed greatly from Bush's, he was very much in the mainstream of
foreign-policy thinking. A brief section was added to address the news
of the day. Then, as he was being driven to the speech, Dean inserted an
entirely new line: "The capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America
safer."

The best thing about Howard Dean is his willingness to say what he
thinks and stand his ground. There is no question in my mind—and, as it
turns out, most Democrats' minds—that his statement was dead on. But to
hear our opponents and the press tell it, Dean had just told the
American people that two plus two equals sixty-seven. The reaction hurt
us immediately in Iowa.

We polled previous caucus attendees just after the endorsement, and
three days after Saddam's capture we polled again. I was stunned to find
that our lead had been sliced to just three points, with Kerry now in
second place. Dean's favorability rating had also taken a hit for the
first time in the campaign.

Favorability Ratings (1-100 scale)
Candidate  Dec. 9-10  Dec. 16-18
Dean  69.4  63.7
Gephardt  64.3  66.0
Kerry  63.4  66.5
Edwards  59.2  59.8

In one week Dean's rating had dropped from No. 1 among the four major
candidates to No. 3. Nearly six points may not seem like much, but it
was the single biggest weekly drop we ever found for any candidate in
this race. And for the first time John Kerry's rating was now the
highest, by a slim margin. Perhaps most ominous, we had measured Al
Gore's favorability rating at the time of the endorsement and a week
later; it fell from 61.4 to 58.9. Was there a backlash against Gore
himself, perhaps because the media were giving full attention to his
failure to make even a heads-up call to Lieberman, his former running
mate? Probably so. But there was something else afoot—something that, it
is now clear, was a portent.

In the eyes of the media Gore's endorsement had branded Dean as the man
to beat. Indeed, from that point on a majority of likely caucus-goers
felt that Dean would probably win the caucuses and go on to capture the
nomination. But in one important subgroup of Iowans a plurality said
that Gore's endorsement made them less likely to support Dean. This
group was made up of Gore's own supporters in the 2000 caucuses. I did a
double take when I saw those results, as did everyone I told about them.
They were entirely counterintuitive, but further review revealed their
supporting logic.

# Al Gore's 2000 voters were party regulars, as much committed to Bill
Clinton as to Gore. Some probably blamed Gore for the 2000 defeat.

# Gore's 2000 voters were older and more blue-collar than the supporters
of his opponent, the former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley. That didn't
fit the Dean-voter profile in Iowa.

# Gore's 2000 voters were classic Iowa caucus-goers: proud of their role
in the process, and not about to let anyone tell them what to do—not the
media, and not even the party's former standard-bearer.

So a week after Gore's endorsement—the most stunning event in a
consistently surprising campaign, and an event that seemed to many to
lock up the nomination for Dean—we were faced with the realization that
it had little if any value.

Black Sunday

On Thursday, January 8, the Dean campaign was rocked by the news that
NBC was airing a videotape of its candidate, as a guest commentator on a
Canadian public-affairs program several years earlier, criticizing the
Iowa caucuses. The tape dominated Iowa news coverage through the
following weekend, even overshadowing Dean's endorsement by the popular
Tom Harkin. Then, that Sunday, January 11, came three negative
developments: the state's dominant newspaper, The Des Moines Register,
endorsed John Edwards; Dean shouted down a Republican heckler at a
campaign event; and, exhausted and unbriefed, Dean was forced to admit,
under fire from Al Sharpton, that he had never hired an African-American
to a cabinet post during his time as the governor of Vermont.

Our poll that Sunday night, a week before the caucuses, showed the
expected results: Dean had now fallen into a virtual three-way tie with
Kerry and Gephardt, and Edwards was riding close on our heels. Our
favorability rating had plummeted to a new low, just as those of Kerry
and Edwards had started to rise, in part because they were liberally
borrowing our message of populism and empowerment. I had seen this movie
before: after weeks of declining support, Paul Simon had received the
Register's endorsement and surged in the final week before the 1988 Iowa
caucuses, and had nearly caught Gephardt. I began to think that Edwards
might win and Dean might finish third.

Dean, Trippi, and our strategic team huddled on the telephone early the
next morning and made a quick decision: we needed to put out a negative
ad about Gephardt and Iraq again, this time with pictures of Kerry and
Edwards tacked on, in an attempt to associate them with a pro-war
position. We never tested this ad. We never even had an extensive
discussion about the pros and cons of running it. It was the biggest
mistake we could have made, and it kept me up at night for weeks
afterward. Someone—and why not I?—should have thought through the
precise implications of the ad copy and its likely impact on the entire
field.

When we ran the ad, it barely brushed the intended targets—Kerry and
Edwards—but delivered a devastating blow to Gephardt. Quite naturally,
he fought back—with a "kitchen sink" negative ad on us, which ran
midweek. That ad, which attacked Dean's views on Medicare and Social
Security, snuffed out what little chance we had left at victory—Dean and
Gephardt were both increasingly seen by Iowans as running negative
campaigns. The exchange, called off within days by both sides,
nevertheless sent us hurtling to a crushing defeat instead of a narrow
loss that we should have been able to endure. Had the vote been closer,
I believe, there would have been no "I have a scream" speech on caucus
night. All the habits we had learned so early in this race—work fast,
use Iraq, be aggressive—were coming back to haunt us.

The Perfect Storm

Once the Dean campaign opted out of public financing and was free to
spend as much as it chose in Iowa, Joe Trippi endorsed a "flood the
zone" strategy. The campaign would keep up its expensive TV-advertising
schedule. But flooding the zone also meant unleashing paid staff
members, volunteers, and every other possible organizational tool to
rouse the likely caucus-goers in Iowa. A final stage of this effort
brought in thousands of out-of-state volunteers to make phone calls,
stand on street corners, and go door-to-door across the state.

I've long felt that campaigns are akin to high-altitude climbing. You
make your plans in the fresh, oxygen-filled air of sea level. You
gradually journey up, working as a team, dealing with each challenge as
it presents itself. But in a campaign's final days, when the key
decisions must be made, you're in the equivalent of the death zone,
harried and short of time and breath. If you do the wrong thing, the
consequences are fatal. Our team was a good one, and we generally worked
well together. Howard Dean had the right temperament to make truly tough
decisions. He listened carefully, asked questions, and was decisive when
he needed to be. But the experience of the climb had worn us all down by
the time of the Iowa vote. The summit was receding into the clouds.

Thirty-five hundred mostly young out-of-state Dean supporters descended
on Iowa for what the Iowa campaign staff had billed as the "Perfect
Storm." Iowans had applauded Dean throughout the campaign for his
ability to bring new energy and volunteers to the political process—and
the Stormers, as we called them, seemed like a perfect example. People
we'd polled had told us that they'd been impressed by the letters
out-of-staters had written them about Dean. But now things seemed to be
changing.

The Stormers ventured out into the bitter cold of that last weekend,
wearing their trademark orange hats, and the Iowans politely said no,
thank you. One can certainly speculate that we went deep into overkill.
A woman in a focus group had told us that she was sick of being called
again and again by Deaniacs; multiply her by thousands. One can also
assume that Iowans, stubborn to the end, were tired of being told it
"must" be Dean—whether by the news media or Al Gore or Tom Harkin or a
bunch of kids in orange hats. Surely many voters had simply turned the
wheel beyond Dean to somebody they considered a more solid possible
President.

The entrance polls on caucus night were harsh and decisive: we would
finish a poor third to Kerry and Edwards. We met Dean at his new
campaign bus to discuss the events to follow. Dean was in no mood to
linger in Iowa. A late flight awaited to what he hoped would be a more
welcoming venue, in New Hampshire, but first he had to endure the
necessary parade of network interviewers, all wanting him to tell them
what went wrong.

We tried hard to cheer him up, and we explained the importance of
seeming confident in those interviews. He did beautifully in each of
them. But nobody had bothered to write up a concession speech or even a
few lines to use when he faced the crowd waiting in the Val Air
Ballroom, many of them Stormers. It was as if we were all in shock, and
didn't even consider the importance of his first election-night
appearance in front of a national television audience. A week later, in
New Hampshire, we and he wouldn't make that mistake. But by then it was
too late. Dean needed an immediate release that night in Iowa—a release
from the pounding, the pressure, and the poor finish.

It came in the form of that famous speech—and somehow it was fitting
that in this roller-coaster ride of a campaign, which Joe Trippi and
Howard Dean had both bragged was a fifty-state campaign, the candidate's
doom would consist simply of the shouted words "South Carolina" ...
"Arizona" ... "New Mexico" ... "Michigan," ending with The Scream.

A few weeks after Iowa, Dean went to Madison, Wisconsin, my home town,
for a last-ditch effort in the Wisconsin primary. On the day he arrived,
he was surprisingly upbeat, almost jovial—in part because his wife,
Judy, accompanied him, and in part because he had returned to Vermont
the night before to watch his son's high school hockey team win 5-0. I
felt, though, that his mood stemmed more from his coming to terms with
the extraordinary experience of his extraordinary campaign, despite its
quick and brutal demise. As he left his final event to head to the
airport, we spotted a kid with an orange hat. "Do you think it could be
...?" I wondered out loud—and sure enough, as the kid turned toward us
we saw the words THE PERFECT STORM emblazoned on his hat.

I thought Dean might have the van stop so he could greet his supporter.
But he just looked at him for a few seconds and then turned back to us
and said, "They may have fucked up Iowa, but they sure changed America."
We all laughed, particularly Dean himself, still happy from his day with
Judy. But I immediately realized, as I think he did too, that he could
just as easily have said "we" instead of "they."

http://www.brook.edu/fp/research/projects/islam/clinton20040112.pdf

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Thank you very much. Your Excellency, thank you for
your warm welcome and your fine speech.

I want to thank all of those responsible for convening the Forum:
Ambassador Martin Indyk, I'm glad to see him in a job where he gets less
criticism than he did when he worked for me, Peter Singer, Shibley
Telhami, and Steven Cohen, thank you for your work. I also want to
acknowledge His Highness, the Emir Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani,
for his support of this endeavor, the Ford Foundation, and the Saban
Center of the Brookings Institution, and my friend, Haim Saban, for
supporting this dialogue.

I have come a long way to spend a short time here because I believe that
this is an important meeting, being held in the proper place. Your
Excellency, I have just come, as you know, at your request from a visit
to your Education City, where I had a meeting in the Cornell Medical
Center Building with students from all parts of the university complex
there. And I was a little late because the students made the mistake of
opening the floor to questions. And there were still 20 or 30 people
with their hands up when I walked out, and I did my best to answer the
questions, even though they asked me some questions I did not really
want to answer.

I say that because I hope what I just saw there is the future not just
of Qatar but of the entire Middle East.

The defining feature of the modern world is not terror, nor is it trade
nor technology, although terror, trade, and technology are
manifestations of the defining feature of the modern world, which is its
interdependence--a word I far prefer to "globalization," the more common
word, because for most people globalization has a largely economic
meaning. "Interdependence" is a broader word. It simply means we cannot
escape each other. And our relationships go far beyond economics.

The main point I would like to make about the interdependent world that
applies to the relationships between the United States and the Islamic
world is that the interdependence we enjoy has been of great benefit to
some of us, but it is unequal, unstable, and unsustainable.

For example, if you take economic interdependence, in the last 20 years
global trade has lifted more people out of poverty than in any
comparable period in all of human history. But that progress has not
kept up with population growth or been manifest in countries that are
either poorly run or otherwise deficient in indigenous economic growth.
So that half the people in the world today are living on less than $2 a
day, a billion people living on less than $1 a day, a sobering thought
here in this country that will soon have the highest per capita income
in the world.

If you take the globalization of knowledge through technology, it's been
unbelievable. In America--let's take a rich country--ever since the 1990
census we have known that our young people who have at least two years
of post-high school education, university education, are likely to get a
job with a growing income. But even in America, young people with less
than two years of post-high school education are likely to have jobs,
all right, but their incomes won't keep up with the cost of living.

Around the world, the benefits of even basic education are much greater.
In a poor country, one year of schooling tends to add 10 to 15 percent a
year to the earning capacity of the children who get it, boys and girls,
in countries open to the education and employment of girls and women.
But 130 million young people in the world never go to school a single
day, and that understates the problem because there are many places
where nominally go to school, but their education is not particularly
useful.

If you take health care--and I just came from that marvelous Cornell
medical facility here--I spent a lot of money, the American people's tax
money, on biomedical research, specifically on sequencing the human
genome and on trying to merge medical research with hightechnology
research through nanotechnology, super-micro technology that will with
the sequencing of the genome and its practical applications soon give us
diagnostic mechanisms that will make virtually all cancers detectable at
submicroscopic levels and will give young women sometime in the next
several years the prospect of giving birth to babies that will have life
expectancies of 90 years or so in countries with strong health systems.

But, this year, 10 million children will die of completely preventable
childhood diseases. One in four of all the people who perish on Earth
this year from all causes will die of AIDS--100 percent
preventable--where there is medicine that turns it from a death sentence
to a chronic illness; TB, malaria--treatable with medicine; and
infections related to diarrhea, most of them are little children who
never got a single clean glass of water in their lives. They, too, are
part of interdependence.

We are more culturally interdependent than ever before. America is a lot
more interesting country than it was 30 years ago. We have people from
every race and religion and ethnic group on Earth. After the tragic
events of September 11, 2001, my wife and I went to visit a school in
Lower Manhattan in New York where the children had been forced to vacate
the school because the debris from the collapse of the World Trade
Center had destroyed their building. So we visited this school, an
elementary school. There were 600 children in this school in one
neighborhood in New York City from over 80 different countries. It was
marvelous. It was fascinating.

Islam is the fastest-growing religion in America. We have now 6
million-plus Muslims in the United States. This tapestry of ours is
growing richer, and it makes us more interesting. But it is ironic that
at a time when we have tried to accommodate more diversity, and you are
a symbol of the reconciliation of Islam with the modern world and with
people of different backgrounds around the world that you have brought
here to educate your young people with you, that the world is absolutely
beset still by conflicts rooted in hatred of those of difference,
whether by religion, race, tribe, or ethnic group.

So this is a paradoxical world we live in. We cannot understand
U.S.-Islamic relationships unless we understand the sweeping scope of
the interdependent world, its enormous benefits and its persistent
inequalities and instabilities. Because it isn't fair to say that every
single element of our relationship, good and bad, is just a function of
who happens to be in power or what the political issue of the day is.
You have to see it against the large backdrop of this moment in history.

Now, the United States has enjoyed good relationships with Qatar under
Republican and Democratic administrations. In good and bad times, you
have been our friend, and I am grateful. Our relationships with the rest
of the Islamic world, both in the Middle East and elsewhere, are not all
that good. Sometimes they're good and sometimes they're not so good.
Why? Well, there are differences. There are deep historical wounds.
There are honest and perplexing misunderstandings. That's why this
meeting's a good thing. Serious good people of good will can get a long
way just by having honest conversations. So I have been asked to come
here to participate in that conversation, and I would offer four
observations:

We need to do more to understand how the two major players here
understand each other.

We need, secondly, to improve our capacity for self-criticism.

Third, we need to identify our common interests.

And, fourth, we need to build the habits of mind and heart necessary to
end the habit of demonizing those who are different from us.

Striving to understand how each other views the world requires at least
knowing that our attitudes toward one another are born of history,
faith, circumstance, national interest, and collective psychology as
well. Too many Americans know too little about the Islamic world, and
much of what they know they learned after September the 11th through the
narrow lens of terror. It is important but not sufficient, because what
people do out of anger, pain, and fear both darkens and distorts reality.

If people in the United States better understood the glorious paths that
Islam took in its early centuries, they might better understand the
frustrations of many people in the Muslim world today as well as their
dreams for a better future.

In the golden age of the Caliphate, Mamun the Great collected scholars,
sought all the great works from abroad, brought translators to put works
from Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Sanskrit into Arabic. In the year 800,
paper was being made for Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad. The Arabs brought
it to Byzantium, then to Spain, from which it spread across Europe, and
ultimately made possible inventions like the printing press.

Engineers and builders had to construct mosques that, wherever they
were, faced Mecca, requiring them to produce a diagram from which the
sacred directions could be deduced no matter where they were needed
within the reach of the empire.

This led Muslim scientists and engineers to improve on Ptolemy's figure
for longitude and latitude, and that is why the kings of Europe in turn
commissioned maps from Arab geographers.

Al-Hazzan (ph), the great student of light and vision, laid the
foundation for modern optics and, more important, for the modern
scientific method, for he--not a Western scientist--was the first to
teach that science should be based on experiment as well as
philosophical argument, laying the basis for an infusion of knowledge
that spread from the Arab world through Spain and ultimately helped to
fuel the entire European Renaissance and the scientific revolution there.

Therefore, those in the West who tend to see Islam only through the
specter of terror and to identify a faith with a history this rich only
with the darkest moments of its recent past would be well served by
knowing more of the whole history.

I thought the best thing President Bush did in the immediate aftermath
of September the 11th was to go to a mosque and meet with American
Muslim leaders and say to the world, "Our fight is not and never has
been with Islam. It is with terror."

But we have sometimes forgotten that.

I would say one other thing, however. What worked then will work now and
is working in Qatar. And that brings me to my second point.

I think it is important that the Muslim world try to understand the
United States. Sometimes I feel that our country here is judged by many
Muslims based on how they think the Middle East peace process is going
and whether they think we're doing enough to try to give the
Palestinians a state and a decent future. I myself don't mind being
judged by that standard because I worked for it for eight years.

But that is not the only standard. I said President Bush went to a
mosque and met with Muslim leaders shortly after September the 11th. I
was the first President to observe every year the feast of 'Id al-Fitr
at the end of Ramadan; to bring large numbers of Muslims into the White
House on a wide range of issues; to address the Palestinian National
Council in Gaza. And I did try until my last day in office to get a just
and lasting peace in the Middle East that would give a state to the
Palestinians, a capital in Jerusalem, protect the religious sites on the
Haram al-Sharif, and provide fair treatment of refugees.

America's support for Israel is not rooted in hostility to the
legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians. Our support for Israel is
rooted in several things. Yes, partly what happened in the Holocaust,
partly by the presence of so many Jewish Americans in our country, but
also let us not forget, as we always cite UN Resolutions 242 and 338,
Israel was also created by an act of the UN.

I never thought my support for Israel's existence and right to live in
peace with its neighbors was inconsistent with my support for a
Palestinian state and decent treatment from the Palestinians, whom I
believe have been abused by just about everybody who had a chance to
abuse them for a long time, including their own leaders and a lot of
their neighbors besides Israel. They have provided a convenient
football. I will say more about that in a moment.

The only point I want to make today is: People in the Islamic world
should not look at America solely through the prism of the current state
of the Middle East peace talks. It's okay, if you don't think we're
doing the right things, for you to criticize us. But if we're failing,
it doesn't mean that we're hostile to the legitimate aspirations of the
Palestinians. President Bush has said he wants a Palestinian state.

If we're failing, we may just have made a mistake. It may not be that
we're anti-Muslim at all. We're human. We don't always know what the
right thing to do is. And if this were an easy problem, someone would
have solved it long ago. I personally believe that we can do more, and
I'll say more about that in a moment.

Again, I remind you that Islam is in the United States. When the
terrorists killed 3,100 people in America on September the 11th, 2001, a
few hundred of those people were Muslims, American Muslims and our
guests and friends from Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan,
Malaysia, Nigeria, Turkey, and Yemen.

During my Presidency, the United States used its military power in
Bosnia and Kosovo to protect Muslims against Mr. Milosevic, who
represented an orthodox Christian culture. And what he did to the
Bosnian Muslims and the Kosovar Muslims that Mr. Holbrooke there helped
me to stop was as big a violation of Christianity as what happened on
September the 11th, 2001, was an affront to Islam.

A lot of people remember that 18 Americans died in a fire fight in
Somalia in 1993, and their deaths were memorialized in a movie called
"Black Hawk Down." It was one of the three or four worst days of my
Presidency. But I would like the Islamic world to remember why those men
died. Two hundred fifty thousand Somalis had died of starvation; a
million more were at risk because armed gangs wouldn't let relief
workers deliver food to starving people. President Bush first sent the
troops there, and I supported him and kept them there. They were on a
humanitarian mission, subsequently part of the United Nationssanctioned
mission.

But the American soldiers died because they were trying to arrest
General Aidid--for doing what? For murdering 22 Pakistani Muslim United
Nations peacekeepers.

In addition to Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, the United States has sided
with Muslims in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, in Kuwait and
Saudi Arabia against Saddam. Often we sided during the Cold War with
Pakistan in disputes with India, with Turkey in disputes with Greece.

I ask only this: America should be judged on our full record. We make
mistakes. We're human. And if you make enough big decisions, you'll make
a mistake now and then. I made my fair share, and I suppose every other
President has. But I believe that the terrorist view that America is
anti-Islam is a false view.

Just recently, President Bush and Tony Blair announced that they had
reached an accord with Muammar Qaddafi, even. I never thought I'd live
to see that.

And, in fairness to him, Mr. Qaddafi's been hawking this deal for two or
three years now, as a lot of you know. And I applaud the President and
Prime Minister Blair for doing it. They had to see the situation with
new eyes.

So the first thing we have to do is to see each other without
distortion. Once you do that, it becomes a little easier to stop blaming
someone else for every problem and to engage in constructive self-criticism.

Crown Prince Abdullah told a meeting of Gulf leaders after September the
11th, and I quote, "Catastrophes are, in fact, opportunities that make
it incumbent upon us to conduct self-scrutiny, review our attitudes, and
repair errors. The real and deadly risk is to face crises with hands
folded and to blame others instead of confronting the crises and taking
responsibility for our role."

Terrorism, indeed all political extremism in all countries, never
accepts any responsibility for any problem. They always blame the
others. It's always their fault. Blaming outsiders, as all of us who
have been in office knows, can be very good politics in the short run.
It's always nice to convince your people that you can demonize someone
else. The problem is in the long run. Blaming outsiders is a path to
powerlessness. By contrast, assuming responsibility to build a different
future is empowering. Witness our host. Look at what is being done in
Qatar to build a different future.

Look at what is being done in other Gulf states and, indeed, around the
world. I want to come back to this in a minute, but I will say again: If
one's life is dominated by blaming someone else for your own problems,
even if they are to blame, even if there really is someone to blame, in
the end you make yourself powerless; whereas, if you assume
responsibility for doing what can be done about your own problems, you
make yourself powerful.

I was profoundly moved by the highly insightful self-criticism in the
United Nations Arab Human Development Report last year where Islamic
authors said reform from within based on rigorous self-criticism is a
far more proper and sustainable alternative in contrast to efforts to
restructure the region from outside.

The report revealed that under 2 percent of the Arab population has
access to the Internet; that only one in 20 university students in the
Arab world study science; that with 5 percent of the world's population,
you publish only a little over 1 percent of the world's books. This is
good news. Why? Because all these things are something you can easily do
something about.

I just went to Education City today. I saw you doing something about it.
This is something that does not require even a great deal of thought. It
requires some money, maybe some from the region, some from without. But
you can do something about it.

We in America would like the Islamic world to ask themselves, even as we
ask ourselves, exactly what inspired their hatred of our country and
what can we do together to defuse it, to prevent more September the
11th's, not only in the West but in the Islamic world, for we have
learned in recent months that no nation is safe from the fire of terrorism.

I think what stunned us in America on September the 11th more than the
method of the attack was the depth of hatred and cold calculation behind
it. And let me say in that context, one of the things that I think has
to be examined is the kind of education offered by Education City here
as opposed to that which concentrates on a highly selective reading of
the Koran in a religion-only education, designed to blame other people
for current problems.

I respect religious education. When I was a boy, I went to a Catholic
school for a couple of years. I respect families' rights to send their
children to any religious schools they want. But I think it is important
that even schools that are religious at their base both teach science
and arts and not teach hatred and dehumanization.

Now, let me say, having said all this, I think the United States needs
to engage in a little more self-criticism. We've never been a perfect
country. We were born in slavery. When we first started having
elections, only white male property owners could vote. The author of our
Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, said when he thought of
slavery-- and he held slaves all his life. He said, "I tremble to think
God is just." In other words, he knew better and did it anyway.

So we're hardly perfect. We're still burdened with our haters and our
dividers who use religion sometimes as an excuse to get and keep
political power. We still are prone to be blinded by self-interest.
Sometimes we're heedless of the feelings and views of others. And I
think for a country as wealthy as ours to run a $500 billion government
deficit is unconscionable because we're taking the money out of the
global economy that ought to be used to invest in the poor countries of
the world. So we're not perfect.

Before September the 11th, the worst terrorist act in our history was an
American citizen blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City.

On the other hand, for more than 200 years now, America has become the
longest-lasting democracy in human history because we kept stumbling in
the right direction. When our Constitution was written, what did our
Founding Fathers say they were doing? They said: We're not creating a
perfect country. We are creating a system that will produce, and I
quote, "a more perfect union." What did that mean? We'll never be
perfect, but we can always do better by extending freedom, by extending
opportunity, by widening the circle of community. How do we do it? Well,
we had a system that built in self-criticism. One of our Founding
Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, said, and I quote, "Our critics are our
friends, for they show us our faults." I think it's fair to say that if
that's the definition, I had more friends than any President in modern
history.

But we got away from criticism a little bit after September the 11th,
but we're getting over it now. We're getting back to normal. And we need
to know that.

One problem you need to understand about America is that before
September the 11th, huge numbers of my fellow citizens didn't--they
weren't hostile toward you. They didn't think about you one way or the
other. And a lot of what they knew was wrong. And we were wrong in that.
But if you want to criticize us, know what we really did wrong. We bore
you no ill will. We had no hostility to the Palestinians. We didn't want
the Islamic world to be disrespected in any way. We had a lot of people
who never thought about it and who didn't even know what their own
government's policy was.

A couple of years ago, we had a poll where we asked the American
people--I didn't. The University of Maryland said: Well, how much do you
think your country spends on foreign aid? The biggest number, 15
percent. Well, how much should your country spend on foreign aid? Only 3
to 5 percent.

I agreed with them. The problem is America spends less than 1 percent of
our budget on foreign aid, the smallest of any wealthy country in the
world, and my fellow citizens don't know it.

So if you want to be mad at us, be mad at us for being ignorant, not
malicious, and say to America 9/11 showed you have to know more about
the rest of the world and care more about it.

We have done a lot in my country's history to ease the suffering and
pain of the world, but we have to do more. And that brings me to the
third point, and maybe the most important one. The real way for people
to overcome misunderstanding is to do things together. Just to do things
together, to identify common interests. We've already identified one in
a better dialogue and more understanding. We need more people-to-people
dialogue. I'm glad Al- Jazeera's covering this, but I've probably been
seen before in the Muslim world. What if we covered in the United States
and throughout the region a real people-to-people dialogue as the Public
Diplomacy Group recommended? What if everybody entered the dialogue with
a goal of listen and understand instead of discredit and defeat in an
argument? I think it can make a difference.

What else--what are our other common interests? Let me just mention a
couple. Whether you think America did the right thing in Iraq or not, I
think we all now share an interest in a free, independent, stable,
representative government in Iraq, strong enough to defend its borders,
not able to threaten its neighbors, prosperous enough to deny a foothold
to al Qaeda or any other terrorist group.

I thank Qatar for their contribution to the reconstruction of Iraq. That
wasn't for America. It was for the people of Iraq and the people of the
region.

The same thing is true in Afghanistan. We dare not make the mistake in
Afghanistan the United States made in the early '80s where, as soon as
the Soviet Union was gone, we were out the back door, forgetting their
sacrifice and leaving them to the tender mercies of those who took over.

The same thing is true in building a worldwide partnership to track
terrorists, intercept communications, cut off the financing, and do all
the things that we have to do, and stopping the appeal of weapons of
mass destruction. We have a common interest in all those things.

And, finally, we have a common interest in building a just and lasting
peace in the Middle East. I saw Yasser Abed Rabbo and Amnon
Lipkin-Shahak last night. I see Mohammed Dhalan, who spent many
sleepless nights with me in the negotiations. But I just want to say a
couple things about this.

Everybody knows I think that it was a mistake for the Palestinians not
to take the deal I put on the table at Taba. But they didn't and we are
where we are. I also think that it's been a mistake to have three years
without a resolution. The interesting thing about this Geneva Accord
that Belin, Rabbo, and everybody else that was involved in the accord,
is not so much the details. It is that it proves that people of good
will on both sides can make an honorable settlement that is mutually
beneficial.

I was actually surprised by some of the details. Some of them were a
little more favorable to Israel than I had been thinking about. Some of
them were a little more favorable to the Palestinians than I had been
thinking about. But they were innovative. They thought it up and they
did it.

Now, here's what I want to say about this, and this is where I think you
can hold my country accountable. We can't impose a settlement on the
parties. But we know when we're involved, fewer people die. What we have
now is ever since 2000, we've known within three or four degrees one way
or the other what the final settlement was going to be. And we can go on
the way it is for five years, ten years, or a hundred years, but the
facts are not going to change, except the Palestinians will get more
numerous, younger, poorer, and angrier. And we'll help the Israelis to
survive because we must, but it'll be more expensive, and they'll have
to have more weapons, and it'll be a more miserable life for them, too.
In this intifada, you had 1,900 dead Palestinians, average age about 18;
900 dead Israelis, average age about 24. And a handful of politicians
who won't do what has to be done, average age, a heck of a lot older
than that.

So the deal here is: How long are old guys like me going to sit around
and let young guys like them die because we're too darned proud to make
the changes that have to be made when we know what the deal is?

Now, if the United States doesn't do anything but just remind everybody
of that reality and try to keep people from killing each other and
making it worse, doing things that are provocative and making it worse,
that is time and effort worth spending.

But you have a responsibility, too. If you come from a more prosperous,
more peaceful Islamic state, I think you have to ask yourself what are
your responsibilities to help the young Palestinians get education, to
understand they have different options, to reach out to Israel and tell
them there is a secure, friendly future in the Middle East, to create
the conditions on both side that will enable older people who've been
living with the circumstances so long they can't imagine making the
compromises to do what's right to stop younger people from dying, for
God's sakes.

This is something we need your help on. Everybody. You can't ask America
to do this alone. The Arab states have to help here.

We have got to create a climate to do what we know has to be done. Look
at the Geneva agreement. It doesn't matter if it's the right details.
The fact is it can be done. And we have a common interest.

If you think we're laying down on the job and we're not pushing this,
reprimand us. By all means, tell us, get over here and go back to work
and stop so many people from dying. But you need to ask yourself what
you can do, too.

We have to find a home for these refugees. We have to find jobs for
people. We have to find education for people. There has to be an
alternative future. And it bothers me--you know, I've reached the age
now where the thing that bothers me most in life is somebody younger
than me dying. I've had a good life. I've lived my dreams. I am sick and
tired of children dying. And we've now had a three-year intifada where
young people are dying because older people won't do what needs to be
done. And it's not acceptable. But we can't do this alone. We need your
help, too. Both with the Palestinians and with the Israelis, we can do it.

Now, let me just make one other point. We have a common interest not
just in stopping bad things from happening, but in making good things
happen. You can teach--look at Qatar again. Let's just take Qatar.
There's 130 million children in this world who never go to school. A lot
of them are Muslim, and a lot of them are girls. Sixty percent of the
people who never go to school are girls. It doesn't cost much money to
put all of them in school and give them a pretty decent education. It's
something we ought to do together so no one would think we were trying
to violate Islam or the religious and cultural traditions of any
country, of any faith, on any continent. We have a common interest in that.

We have a common interest in basic health systems. We have a common
interest in teaching people to have more indigenous economic growth. The
only Muslim country I know of today working in what I think of as the
most important basic economic growth program, that of Hernando de Soto,
the great Peruvian economist, is Egypt, where they're trying to
establish basic rules for giving title to property and cutting through
government red tape so that people can have title in their homes, their
businesses, their farms, and be able to get credit for it. We need to do
more things like this.

The final point I want to make is this: We can find common interests, we
can be selfcritical, we can understand where each other are coming
from--and we will all fail unless we honestly believe that our common
humanity is more important than our interesting differences.

So I'll just close with a totally non-political, non-economic
observation. Every person in this room, whatever your religion, whatever
your country, whatever your native language-- learned from infancy to
organize reality into categories so that you could think and speak and
communicate: women and men, tall and short, time and distance, colors
and shapes, wood and stone and steel. If there were no categories, we
couldn't make sense of one another.

The problem comes, especially in matters of religion, when people
believe their categories contain the whole truth. Because if you believe
you have the whole truth, then whoever disagrees with you is not as
human as you are and not entitled to the same humanity and treatment.
And there will never be a reconciliation of the United States and the
Islamic world as long as that is the dominant way of thinking. You have
to dehumanize someone if you think you've got the whole truth.

This is not just a Muslim problem. When I was President, a very
prominent fundamentalist minister, whom I like very much personally,
came to see me to reprimand me for my sins-- not my personal sins, my
political sins.

I think he figured everybody was a personal sinner, but you didn't have
to be a political sinner. That was somehow a matter of choice.

So this fellow looked at me over--this is a true story. He looked at me
over breakfast one day, and he was a very powerful person. He said, "I
want you to answer this question yes or no. Don't give me some fancy
political answer. Yes or no. Do you believe our Bible is literally true?
Yes or no."

Now, listen to this. We're all laughing, but you listen. I'm dead
serious. I said, "I believe it is completely true. But I do not believe
you or I are smart enough to understand it completely."

Why does the Koran say, "Allah put different people on the Earth not
that they might despise one another but that they might come to know one
another and love one another"? Why does the Torah say, "He who turns
aside a stranger might as well turn aside from the most high God"? Why
does the Christian Bible say, "Love your neighbor as yourself"? This is
the crux of this whole thing.

Now, you know I'm a Christian. The most important Christian theologian
was St. Paul, who wrote an interesting commentary on paradise. And since
Muslims believe in paradise, I think I will give you the commentary, and
the conclusion of the commentary about what our values should be.

St. Paul was talking about life today and life in paradise, and this is
what he said: "For now, I see through a glass darkly, but then, face to
face. Now I know in part, but then, I shall know even as I am known, by
God," parenthesis. "And now abideth faith, hope, and love, these three,
but the greatest of these is love."

How in the world could love be greater than faith? Because I see through
a glass darkly and I know in part. Oh, I know we've got all the
television in the world. We've got instantaneous communications. We've
got science. We've sequenced the human genome.

And we've got all these smart politicians. I'm telling you, in the end
it all comes down to that. As long as you're prepared to admit you don't
have the whole truth and somebody else might know something you need to
know, we're going to do just fine. We just need to work at it.

Thank you very much.

http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/01/13/dean_media/print.html

The media vs. Howard Dean
Democrats haven't voted yet, but reporters have got the story: The
former Vermont governor is angry, gaffe-prone and unelectable. How do
they know? Republicans, and anonymous Democrats, told them so.

<p> When the Washington Post introduced readers to Howard Dean in a long
Page 1 feature July 6, part of a series of "meet the Democrats"
candidate profiles, the paper went for the jugular, literally, with a
cartoonish, unflattering description to open the article: "Howard Dean
was angry. Ropy veins popped out of his neck, blood rushed to his
cheeks, and his eyes, normally blue-gray, flashed black, all dilated
pupils." </p>

<p> Six months later, an extended version of that campaign narrative,
polished by Republican talking-points memos and echoed day after day by
the mainstream media, remains a constant of the campaign trail: Dean is
a sarcastic smart aleck with foot-in-the mouth disease, a political
ticking time bomb. The former Vermont governor remains the front-runner
among Democratic voters, but he's gotten increasingly caustic treatment
from the media, which has dwelled on three big themes -- that Dean's
angry, gaffe-prone and probably not electable -- while giving
comparatively far less ink to the doctor's policy and political
prescriptions that have catapulted him ahead of the Democratic field.
Newsweek's critical Jan. 12 cover story, "All the Rage: Dean's
Shoot-From-the-Hip Style and Shifting Views Might Doom Him in November,"
achieved a nifty trifecta that covered anger, gaffes and electability,
all three of the main media raps against Dean. </p>

<p> Certainly Dean has an unorthodox political style. Unvarnished and
blunt, his pronouncements on domestic and foreign policy are at times
controversial, occasionally sloppy and, in any event, deserve press
scrutiny. It's obvious Dean has changed his position on some policy
matters, such as NAFTA. As a governor he supported the free trade pact;
as a presidential candidate he does not. He once suggested raising the
retirement age to protect Social Security; now he does not. And Dean's
electoral formula is far from certain -- he's the former governor of a
tiny Northeastern state, and no one knows how far his Internet base will
carry him in a long, brutal national campaign against the well-funded,
disciplined Bush machine. </p>

<p> But a look at the last half-year of media coverage -- from the
contentious treatment Dean received on "Meet the Press" in late June,
through the often harsh Time and Newsweek cover stories last week --
raises the question: Has his anger been so uncontrollable, his campaign
miscues so frequent, are his political chances so unlikely as to merit
the unrelenting focus on anger, "gaffes" and so-called unelectability
that has come to dominate reporting on Dean? </p>

<p> For Dean's top backer there must be a sense of d&eacute;j&agrave; vu
in all of this. In 2000, Vice President Al Gore suffered from <a
href="/politics/feature/2000/11/08/media/index.html">chronically caustic
coverage</a> that clung to all sorts of fictional, Republican-inspired
spin about the vice president being an unlikable, untrustworthy
exaggerator. Suddenly, as with Gore in 2000, it seems Dean is battling
not only his Democratic opponents and Republican Party officials, he's
also wrestling members of the media's chattering class who view him with
growing unease and even contempt. </p>

<p> Without the Gore <a target=" new"
href="http://www.rollingstone.com/news/newsarticle.asp?nid=14976&cf=78439">press
fiasco</a> as a backdrop it might seem as if Dean were simply wading
through an inevitable rough patch with the press -- that pundits and
reporters are practicing the usual baptism-by-fire, forcing the unlikely
front-runner to earn his stripes. That's a legitimate, even expected
part of any race for the White House. But watching the striking
similarities between the way the D.C. press is covering Dean and how it
treated Gore, and contrasting it with the way it has treated President
Bush, it's becoming harder to avoid the obvious conclusion: that
Democratic presidential front-runners and nominees are held to a higher,
tougher standard by the Washington press corps. </p>

<p> Remember how Gore was dogged in the press by often phony,
Republican-crafted stories about how he couldn't be trusted? A classic
case in point was the "Gore invented the Internet" story. The facts were
simple: In March 1999 Gore gave an interview to CNN in which he
artlessly said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took
the initiative in creating the Internet." He was referring to his
landmark "information superhighway" speech, as well as his well-known
leadership in delivering key government funding to help nurture the Net
in the '80s and early '90s. For a few days Gore's CNN comments were
ignored in the 24-hour news cycle. Then the RNC issued a press release
mocking Gore's statement, and soon the urban legend about Gore having
claimed to invent the sprawling Internet took root in the political
landscape. Almost five years later, even though it's been relentlessly
debunked, it's a weed that can't be killed. Just last month it bloomed
again when Gore endorsed the Internet-savvy Dean, and Joe Klein,
Clarence Page, Jeff Greenfield, and Tim Russert all reached back and dug
it up for public consumption. Lazy media habits die hard. </p>

<p> Today, the parallels between the Dean and Gore press coverage are
impossible to miss. There's the charge Dean is constantly trying to
"reinvent" himself, which Gore was accused of in 2000. That Dean is
"angry"; Gore was tagged a <a
href="http://www.salon.com/politics2000/feature/2000/01/27/gore/">"savage
campaigner"</a> during the primaries. There's the often nit-picking
obsession with the "gaffes" that supposedly bedevil Dean; for Gore the
problem was "exaggerations." There's even a tedious debate in the press
about whether the New York City apartment Dean grew up in was luxurious,
just as pundits went back and forth, in all seriousness, over whether as
a boy Gore grew up in a fancy "suite" or just an "apartment" inside
Washington's Fairfax Hotel. </p>

<p> New York Times columnist David Brooks recently ridiculed Dean for
beginning "a sentence with, 'Us rural people ...' Dean grew up on Park
Avenue and in East Hampton. If he's a rural person, I'm the Queen of
Sheba." Somebody might want to tell Brooks (or his editor) that Dean has
spent half his life living in <i>Vermont,</i> and his wife still
practices family medicine in the tiny town of Shelburne (pop: 6,618).
Meanwhile, of course, the Andover, Yale and Harvard-educated Bush's
claim to a pure Texas pedigree is rarely questioned. </p>

<p> Dean's real media sin, aside from some clumsy misstatements, seems
to be that he's running as an outsider, which always breeds contempt
among the Washington press corps. As governor of Texas, Bush pretended
to run as an outsider in 2000, but nobody in the news business took the
claim seriously. Dean, though, seems bent on it, including taking aim at
the Beltway press. When he officially announced his candidacy with a
June 23 speech, he asked rhetorically, "Is the media reporting the
truth?" And instead of schmoozing reporters on the campaign trail and
handing out playground-type nicknames the way Bush did in 2000, Dean
treats them professionally, but pushes back when he thinks they're
wrong. </p>

<p> Perhaps not surprisingly, it's the Washington Post -- particularly
its editorial and Op-Ed pages, which double as the house organ of the
D.C. establishment -- that has taken the lead role in deriding the
surging outsider. But the rest of the press also seems eager to play
along with the established, critical Dean narratives. </p>

<p> By some measures, Dean's media troubles began with his June 22
appearance on "Meet the Press." During the hour-long sit-down, Dean
faced off against a clearly combative host, Tim Russert, who prepared
for the interview, in part, by asking the Bush Treasury Department to
produce what the Washington Post called a "highly selective" analysis of
the Democratic tax program, including rolling back scheduled tax cuts.
Later in the program came a pop-quiz question about how many men and
women currently serve in the military. When Dean said he didn't know the
exact number and complained it was like asking him "who the ambassador
to Rwanda is," Russert shot back: "As commander in chief, you should
know that." Dean estimated there were between 1 and 2 million men and
women in active duty; according to the Pentagon, there are 1.4 million. </p>

<p> What a sharp contrast to '99, when Russert had a warm, respectful
one-on-one with then-candidate Bush. When the host sprang a specific
policy question on Bush about how many missiles would still be in place
if a new START II nuclear weapons treaty were signed, Bush answered: "I
can't remember the exact number." But unlike his session with Dean,
Russert dropped the topic without lecturing Bush that "as commander in
chief, you should know that." </p>

<p> Beltway insiders clucked over Dean's June appearance on NBC's mighty
"Meet the Press," labeling him evasive and unprepared. But lots of party
faithful saw something else -- a candidate who would stand up to biased,
big-foot pundits -- and flooded the campaign with contributions that
day. Instead of marking Dean's leveling-off point, "Meet the Press"
marked the beginning of his ascent to undisputed front-runner status. </p>

<p> In the wake of "Meet the Press," the Washington Post on July 1
reported that a "new contentiousness" was creeping into Dean's press
coverage. The paper made that a self-fulfilling prophecy on July 6,
uncorking the Page 1 Dean profile that opened with the image of the
former governor's bulging veins. In fact, in just two summertime
features the Washington Post managed to use the following words to
describe Dean: "abrasive," "flinty," "cranky," "arrogant,"
"disrespectful," "yelling," "hollering," "fiery," "red-faced,"
"hothead," "testy," "short-fused," "angry," "worked up," and "fired up."
And none of those adjectives were used in a complimentary way. In fact
the Post, in an Aug. 4 Is-Dean-mean story, took pains to distinguish him
from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whom the paper termed
"brilliantly cranky." </p>

<p> Soon the rest of the press <a target=" new"
href="http://www.nypress.com/17/1/news&columns/cage.cfm">was lavishing
attention</a> on Dean's temper -- researching it, analyzing it, trying
to document it. Both Time and Newsweek's August cover stories on Dean
dutifully dwelled on the issue of anger. For Republicans the anger angle
fit perfectly with the party's plan to attack Dean personally rather
than politically. As was true with Gore in 2000, the GOP spin machine is
paying less attention to Dean's policy agenda than to his alleged
personality defects: "Arrogance" and "anger" are high on that list. </p>

<p> Picking up on the press's handiwork, RNC chairman Ed Gillespie
amplified the theme in September, accusing Democratic candidates of
using "political hate speech" in their attacks on Bush. Soon the Bush
reelection campaign Web site featured an anti-Dean video dubbed, "When
Angry Democrats Attack." More recently, a December RNC press release
insisted Dean's "Foreign Policy Attack Based on Anger Not Facts." Bush
himself sent out a fundraising letter, asking for help fending off
"angry attacks" by Democrats. And last week Rush Limbaugh declared Dean
to be "mad," "angry" and "fit to be tied." </p>

<p> Lately, it's been hard to tell where GOP spin ends and independent
analysis begins. On Dec. 28, the New York Times wrote, "President Bush's
campaign has settled on a plan to run against Howard Dean that would
portray him as reckless, angry and pessimistic." Two days later a Times
headline described Dean as "prickly." On Jan. 3, the paper ran an entire
article about Dean's temper. </p>

<p> And yet the anger issue may be fading, perhaps because reporters and
pundits haven't actually been able to uncover Dean's temper. As the
Times conceded in its obligatory Dean-is-angry article, nobody has seen
him explode during this entire campaign. (The Times did manage to
detail, secondhand, how years ago as governor, Dean once slammed his
fist on a table.) Despite being publicly attacked by his Democratic
rivals, by centrists at the Democratic Leadership Council, by
Republicans, and by pundits (last month Slate magazine compared Dean to
a "suicide bomber"), the candidate has kept his cool throughout. </p>

<p> More bad news for that beloved press story line: Seventy-six percent
of Democrats consider Dean "likable," according to the latest CNN/Time
poll. And among the larger pool of respondents, including Republicans
and Independents, by a margin of nearly 2-to-1 they consider Dean to be
an "optimist," not a "pessimist." (In addition, 40 percent opt for
either "moderate" or "conservative" to describe Dean; just 24 percent
pick "liberal.") It's the press, egged on by Republican spin and eager
to play the role of hardheaded analyst, that has latched onto this
notion that Dean is too passionate to be president. </p>

<p> But with the anger angle on the decline, the gaffe narrative is
clearly gaining momentum, with obvious echoes of the press's obsession
with Gore's exaggerations. Just as there was with Gore, there is often a
nugget of fact that gets a much larger press story going: Dean did, in
fact, wind up apologizing for his remarks about "wanting to be the
candidate for guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks," and
he's had to spend a lot of time explaining his comment about believing
that if Osama bin Laden is caught, he deserves a trial to determine his
guilt for 9/11. </p>

<p> But looking at just one staple of the gaffe stories -- Dean's
remarks to radio host Diane Rehm about the "theory" that Bush was warned
about 9/11 -- shows the way the media has sometimes colluded with the
RNC and Republican pundits to distort Dean beyond recognition. When Rehm
asked Dean in a Dec. 1 interview why he thought Bush wasn't more
forthcoming with the commission investigating the terrorist attacks,
Dean replied, "The most interesting theory that I've heard so far --
which is nothing more than a theory, it can't be proved -- is that he
was warned ahead of time by the Saudis." </p>

<p> For days Dean's 9/11 comments drew little or no press attention.
Reminiscent of Gore's Internet legend "gaffe," it wasn't until the RNC
research department stepped in, and conservative outlets hyped the
incident, that the story took root in the mainstream press. Dean gave
the interview Dec. 1, and it was ignored until Dec. 5, when Charles
Krauthammer hyped it in his Washington Post column. On Dec. 7, Chris
Wallace pressed Dean about the comment during an interview on "Fox News
Sunday." On Dec. 9, the RNC issued a press release ("Dean Sinks to New
Low"), hoping to spark more interest in the story. On Dec. 11,
Republican-friendly columnist Robert Novak weighed in, citing
Krauthammer's column approvingly and condemning Dean for having "neither
apologized nor repudiated himself for passing along this urban legend."
By Dec. 18, the 9/11 episode had been embraced by reporters, serving as
the Post's lead example in a huge Page 1 story about Dean gaffes. Today,
the episode is routinely included in media shorthand accounts of Dean
verbal miscues. </p>

<p> But if December represented a kind of zenith in Dean-gaffe reporting
throughout the media, the Washington Post still managed to stand out,
with a month-long negative focus on the Democratic front-runner in its
news and Op-Ed pages as well as in lead editorials. It began with
Krauthammer's Dec. 5 column, when the columnist, eager to prove Dean
mentally unstable, was <a target="
new"href="http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh120503.shtml">reduced</a> to
doctoring TV transcripts in hopes of transforming humorous banter into
paranoid ravings. One week later, Post columnists Richard Cohen and <a
target=" new"
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=\
A54827-2003Dec10&notFound=true">David
Broder</a> teed off on Gore on the same day for endorsing Dean. Cohen
belittled Gore for having "knifed [Sen. Joe Lieberman] in the back,"
while Broder dubbed the endorsement "one of the more eccentric
developments in modern political history." </p>

<p> The Post signaled the arrival of gaffes as a big-time theme when the
paper went Page 1 on Dec. 18 with an expos&eacute; examining Dean's
history of "making statements that are mean-spirited or misleading."
Worse, huffed the Post, "he made allegations -- some during his years as
governor -- that turned out to be untrue." But just as with the Gore
exaggeration scandal, some of the paper's proof seemed thin. The story
cited a mundane back-and-forth disagreement between Dean and Rep.
Gephardt over their competing healthcare proposals, the sort of dispute
that's a staple of every presidential campaign, as well as a 6-year-old
comment Dean once made about a Vermont farmer who may have had too many
cows in his barn. Dean dutifully apologized to the farmer. </p>

<p> That very same day, the editorial page uncorked what ABC News' the
Note dubbed "a button-popping, eye-bugging anti-Dean editorial." In it,
the Post leveled the ultimate insider insult, labeling the candidate's
views on foreign policy "beyond the mainstream," with the paper hinting
that Bush's new policy of preventive wars was the new American
mainstream. (The next day Dean told reporters voters can believe him "or
they can believe the Washington Post.") </p>

<p> Ten days later, the Post flipped the coin on the Dean-is-angry angle
and, in an argumentative article, mocked Dean's optimistic campaign call
for a return to '60s idealism. The same day, yet another unsigned
editorial appeared, informing readers, "We are troubled by aspects of
Mr. Dean's character and personality." </p>

<p> Then on Dec. 31, Post columnists rang out the year with a
double-fisted round of Dean bashing. "At long last, the revelation I've
been waiting for: the reason why -- beyond the prospect of epic,
McGovernesque defeat -- I feel so uneasy about Howard Dean," wrote
Marjorie Williams. (The answer was he's a doctor.) On the same page came
was this nearly identical, McGovern-referencing lead from Harold
Meyerson: "I've got this Howard Dean problem, and it's not that I think
he's George McGovern. Actually, I think he's John Wayne." (Apparently
Post columnist E.J. Dionne never got the memo about Dean; he continues
to defend the Democratic front-runner.) </p>

<p> One staple of news and opinion stories that cast Dean as headed for
a McGovern-style drubbing is a fair-seeming grounding in
<i>Democrats'</i> worries that Dean can't win. But it's worth noting
that such stories almost never name these Democrats -- except the other
candidates for the nomination -- who are allegedly wringing their hands
over Dean. For its 2,800-word cover story last week, Newsweek found just
one for an on-the-record quote: former Clinton aide James Carville.
Syndicated columnist Novak filled an entire Dec. 22 dispatch about the
"Dean dilemma" by referring vaguely to "thoughtful Democrats," "a sage
Democratic practitioner," "a party loyalist" and "Democratic savants,"
all anonymous, who were all sick about Dean's surge. Novak never
bothered to tell readers if any of those unnamed Democrats had ties to
Dean's campaign competitors. </p>

<p> And yet, with all the focus on electability, most stories seem short
on data that proves their thesis. Last week's Time story on Dean seemed
to bury its lead, waiting until the 23rd paragraph in a 27-graph story
to inform readers that, according to the magazine's own new polling
data, Dean trails Bush by just six percentage points in a head-to-head
matchup. That, despite a recent wave of good news for Bush on the
economic and foreign policy front. It was a key fact that undercut the
guts of the Time story (and every other Dean feature of late), which
dwelled on doomsday scenarios for the Democrats if Dean is nominated.
Others polls have shown the race to be less competitive, but the most
recent Newsweek survey conducted Jan 8-9 found Dean trailing Bush by
eight percentage points. That's hardly the making of an automatic rout,
considering exactly four years ago Gore trailed Bush by 17 points,
according to a <a target=" new"
href="http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/01/07/cnn.poll/index.html">Jan\
uary
2000 CNN poll.</a>. In the end, of course, Gore earned more votes than
Bush. </p>

<p> To be sure, part of this winter's negative press barrage stems from
the media's natural push to create a closer, more interesting horse race
as votes in Iowa and New Hampshire approach, just as the press worked
hard <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/11/10/gore/">to
prop up</a> Sen. Bill Bradley's long shot against Gore in 2000. </p>

<p> On Monday, the Wall Street Journal breathlessly uncovered "signs of
shakiness in front-runner Howard Dean's once commanding lead." The
proof? A new poll by John Zogby that showed Dean leading Rep. Dick
Gephardt by just two points in Iowa. But every pol knows Dean has
<i>never</i> held a commanding lead in Iowa, which has always been
considered a tossup state, since Gephardt hails from neighboring
Missouri. The Journal also vaguely reported that "a separate poll showed
retired Gen. Wesley Clark inching closer to Mr. Dean in New Hampshire."
Since the paper doesn't bother to say which poll it's citing, perhaps it
was the most recent American Research Group tracking survey, which does
indeed show Clark inching up ... and still trailing Dean by 16 points.
That's not to suggest Dean has the nomination wrapped up. He doesn't.
But for some reason the Journal, out to prove Dean's commanding lead is
gone, fails to reference his 16-point lead. </p>

<p> After his defeat in 2000, a bitter-sounding Gore talked to the New
York Observer about the media's rightward drift, and the way reporters
piece together negative narratives for Democrats: "Something will start
at the Republican National Committee, inside the building, and it will
explode the next day on the right-wing talk-show network. And then
they'll create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they'll start
baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they've
pushed into the zeitgeist." </p>

<p> In Dean's case, it's a little more complex: Sometimes the narrative
starts with the mainstream media and gets picked up by the RNC,
sometimes it's the other way around. What's beyond debate is that
there's a media echo chamber -- and its focus has been on Dean's flaws.
And if the trend continues, more voters may agree with Gore about the
rightward bias of the media. In a remarkable poll released Monday, the
Pew Research Center found that 29 percent of Democrats think campaign
coverage is tilted toward the GOP, up from 19 percent in 2000. If Dean
is the nominee and the media trend continues, you can expect that number
to jump again sharply by 2008. </p>

</font>

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/06/fallows.htm

The Atlantic Monthly | June 2003

Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?

The image of a boy shot dead in his helpless father's arms during an Israeli
confrontation with Palestinians has become the Pietà of the Arab world. Now
a number of Israeli researchers are presenting persuasive evidence that the
fatal shots could not have come from the Israeli soldiers known to have been
involved in the confrontation. The evidence will not change Arab minds-but
the episode offers an object lesson in the incendiary power of an icon

by James Fallows

.....
The name Mohammed al-Dura is barely known in the United States. Yet to a
billion people in the Muslim world it is an infamous symbol of grievance
against Israel and-because of this country's support for Israel -against the
United States as well.

Al-Dura was the twelve-year-old Palestinian boy shot and killed during an
exchange of fire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian demonstrators on
September 30, 2000. The final few seconds of his life, when he crouched in
terror behind his father, Jamal, and then slumped to the ground after
bullets ripped through his torso, were captured by a television camera and
broadcast around the world. Through repetition they have become as familiar
and significant to Arab and Islamic viewers as photographs of bombed-out
Hiroshima are to the people of Japan-or as footage of the crumbling World
Trade Center is to Americans. Several Arab countries have issued postage
stamps carrying a picture of the terrified boy. One of Baghdad's main
streets was renamed The Martyr Mohammed Aldura Street. Morocco has an
al-Dura Park. In one of the messages Osama bin Laden released after the
September 11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, he
began a list of indictments against "American arrogance and Israeli
violence" by saying, "In the epitome of his arrogance and the peak of his
media campaign in which he boasts of 'enduring freedom,' Bush must not
forget the image of Mohammed al-Dura and his fellow Muslims in Palestine and
Iraq. If he has forgotten, then we will not forget, God willing."

But almost since the day of the episode evidence has been emerging in
Israel, under controversial and intriguing circumstances, to indicate that
the official version of the Mohammed al-Dura story is not true. It now
appears that the boy cannot have died in the way reported by most of the
world's media and fervently believed throughout the Islamic world. Whatever
happened to him, he was not shot by the Israeli soldiers who were known to
be involved in the day's fighting-or so I am convinced, after spending a
week in Israel talking with those examining the case. The exculpatory
evidence comes not from government or military officials in Israel, who have
an obvious interest in claiming that their soldiers weren't responsible, but
from other sources. In fact, the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, seem to
prefer to soft-pedal the findings rather than bring any more attention to
this gruesome episode. The research has been done by a variety of academics,
ex-soldiers, and Web-loggers who have become obsessed with the case, and the
evidence can be cross-checked.

No "proof" that originates in Israel is likely to change minds in the Arab
world. The longtime Palestinian spokesperson Hanan Ashrawi dismissed one
early Israeli report on the topic as a "falsified version of reality [that]
blames the victims." Late this spring Said Hamad, a spokesman at the PLO
office in Washington, told me of the new Israeli studies, "It does not
surprise me that these reports would come out from the same people who shot
Mohammed al-Dura. He was shot of course by the Israeli army, and not by
anybody else." Even if evidence that could revise the understanding of this
particular death were widely accepted (so far it has been embraced by a few
Jewish groups in Europe and North America), it would probably have no effect
on the underlying hatred and ongoing violence in the region. Nor would
evidence that clears Israeli soldiers necessarily support the overarching
Likud policy of sending soldiers to occupy territories and protect
settlements. The Israelis still looking into the al-Dura case do not all
endorse Likud occupation policies. In fact, some strongly oppose them.

The truth about Mohammed al-Dura is important in its own right, because this
episode is so raw and vivid in the Arab world and so hazy, if not invisible,
in the West. Whatever the course of the occupation of Iraq, the United
States has guaranteed an ample future supply of images of Arab suffering.
The two explosions in Baghdad markets in the first weeks of the war, killing
scores of civilians, offered an initial taste. Even as U.S. officials
cautioned that it would take more time and study to determine whether U.S.
or Iraqi ordnance had caused the blasts, the Arab media denounced the
brutality that created these new martyrs. More of this lies ahead. The saga
of Mohammed al-Dura illustrates the way the battles of wartime imagery may
play themselves out.

The harshest version of the al-Dura case from the Arab side is that it
proves the ancient "blood libel"-Jews want to kill gentile children-and
shows that Americans count Arab life so cheap that they will let the
Israelis keep on killing. The harshest version from the Israeli side is that
the case proves the Palestinians' willingness to deliberately sacrifice even
their own children in the name of the war against Zionism. In Tel Aviv I
looked through hour after hour of videotape in an attempt to understand what
can be known about what happened, and what it means.

The Day

The death of Mohammed al-Dura took place on the second day of what is now
known as the second intifada, a wave of violent protests throughout the West
Bank and Gaza. In the summer of 2000 Middle East peace negotiations had
reached another impasse. On September 28 of that year, a Thursday, Ariel
Sharon, then the leader of Israel's Likud Party but not yet Prime Minister,
made a visit to the highly contested religious site in Jerusalem that Jews
know as the Temple Mount and Muslims know as Haram al-Sharif, with its two
mosques. For Palestinians this was the trigger-or, in the view of many
Israelis, the pretext-for the expanded protests that began the next day.

On September 30 the protest sites included a crossroads in the occupied Gaza
territory near the village of Netzarim, where sixty families of Israeli
settlers live. The crossroads is a simple right-angle intersection of two
roads in a lightly developed area. Three days earlier a roadside bomb had
mortally wounded an IDF soldier there. At one corner of the intersection
were an abandoned warehouse, two six-story office buildings known as the
"twin towers," and a two-story building. (These structures and others
surrounding the crossroads have since been torn down.) A group of IDF
soldiers had made the two-story building their outpost, to guard the road
leading to the Israeli settlement.

Diagonally across the intersection was a small, ramshackle building and a
sidewalk bordered by a concrete wall. It was along this wall that Mohammed
al-Dura and his father crouched before they were shot. (The father was
injured but survived.) The other two corners of the crossroads were vacant
land. One of them contained a circular dirt berm, known as the Pita because
it was shaped like a pita loaf. A group of uniformed Palestinian policemen,
armed with automatic rifles, were on the Pita for much of the day.

Early in the morning of Saturday, September 30, a crowd of Palestinians
gathered at the Netzarim crossroads. TV crews, photographers, and reporters
from many news agencies, including Reuters, AP, and the French television
network France 2, were also at the ready. Because so many cameras were
running for so many hours, there is abundant documentary evidence of most of
the day's events-with a few strange and crucial exceptions, most of them
concerning Mohammed al-Dura.

"Rushes" (raw footage) of the day's filming collected from these and other
news organizations around the world tell a detailed yet confusing story. The
tapes overlap in some areas but leave mysterious gaps in others. No one
camera, of course, followed the day's events from beginning to end; and with
so many people engaged in a variety of activities simultaneously, no one
account could capture everything. Gabriel Weimann, the chairman of the
communications department at the University of Haifa, whose book
Communicating Unreality concerns the media's distorting effects, explained
to me on my visit that the footage in its entirety has a "Rashomon effect."
Many separate small dramas seem to be under way. Some of the shots show
groups of young men walking around, joking, sitting and smoking and
appearing to enjoy themselves. Others show isolated moments of intense
action, as protesters yell and throw rocks, and shots ring out from various
directions. Only when these vignettes are packaged together as a
conventional TV news report do they seem to have a narrative coherence.

Off and on throughout the morning some of the several hundred Palestinian
civilians at the crossroads mounted assaults on the IDF outpost. They threw
rocks and Molotov cocktails. They ran around waving the Palestinian flag and
trying to pull down an Israeli flag near the outpost. A few of the civilians
had pistols or rifles, which they occasionally fired; the second intifada
quickly escalated from throwing rocks to using other weapons. The
Palestinian policemen, mainly in the Pita area, also fired at times. The IDF
soldiers, according to Israeli spokesmen, were under orders not to fire in
response to rocks or other thrown objects. They were to fire only if fired
upon. Scenes filmed throughout the day show smoke puffing from the muzzles
of M-16s pointed through the slits of the IDF outpost.

To watch the raw footage is to wonder, repeatedly, What is going on here? In
some scenes groups of Palestinians duck for cover from gunfire while others
nonchalantly talk or smoke just five feet away. At one dramatic moment a
Palestinian man dives forward clutching his leg, as if shot in the thigh. An
ambulance somehow arrives to collect him exactly two seconds later, before
he has stopped rolling from the momentum of his fall. Another man is loaded
into an ambulance-and, in footage from a different TV camera, appears to
jump out of it again some minutes later.

At around 3:00 P.M. Mohammed al-Dura and his father make their first
appearance on film. The time can be judged by later comments from the father
and some journalists on the scene, and by the length of shadows in the
footage. Despite the number of cameras that were running that day, Mohammed
and Jamal al-Dura appear in the footage of only one cameraman-Talal
Abu-Rahma, a Palestinian working for France 2.

Jamal al-Dura later said that he had taken his son to a used-car market and
was on the way back when he passed through the crossroads and into the
crossfire. When first seen on tape, father and son are both crouched on the
sidewalk behind a large concrete cylinder, their backs against the wall. The
cylinder, about three feet high, is referred to as "the barrel" in most
discussions of the case, although it appears to be a section from a culvert
or a sewer system. On top of the cylinder is a big paving stone, which adds
another eight inches or so of protection. The al-Duras were on the corner
diagonally opposite the Israeli outpost. By hiding behind the barrel they
were doing exactly what they should have done to protect themselves from
Israeli fire.

Many news accounts later claimed that the two were under fire for forty-five
minutes, but the action captured on camera lasts a very brief time. Jamal
looks around desperately. Mohammed slides down behind him, as if to make his
body disappear behind his father's. Jamal clutches a pack of cigarettes in
his left hand, while he alternately waves and cradles his son with his
right. The sound of gunfire is heard, and four bullet holes appear in the
wall just to the left of the pair. The father starts yelling. There is
another burst. Mohammed goes limp and falls forward across his father's lap,
his shirt stained with blood. Jamal, too, is hit, and his head starts
bobbling. The camera cuts away. Although France 2 or its cameraman may have
footage that it or he has chosen not to release, no other visual record of
the shooting or its immediate aftermath is known to exist. Other Palestinian
casualties of the day are shown being evacuated, but there is no known
on-tape evidence of the boy's being picked up, tended to, loaded into an
ambulance, or handled in any other way after he was shot.

The footage of the shooting is unforgettable, and it illustrates the way in
which television transforms reality. I have seen it replayed at least a
hundred times now, and on each repetition I can't help hoping that this time
the boy will get himself down low enough, this time the shots will miss.
Through the compression involved in editing the footage for a news report,
the scene acquired a clear story line by the time European, American, and
Middle Eastern audiences saw it on television: Palestinians throw rocks.
Israeli soldiers, from the slits in their outpost, shoot back. A little boy
is murdered.

What is known about the rest of the day is fragmentary and additionally
confusing. A report from a nearby hospital says that a dead boy was admitted
on September 30, with two gun wounds to the left side of his torso. But
according to the photocopy I saw, the report also says that the boy was
admitted at 1:00 P.M.; the tape shows that Mohammed was shot later in the
afternoon. The doctor's report also notes, without further explanation, that
the dead boy had a cut down his belly about eight inches long. A boy's body,
wrapped in a Palestinian flag but with his face exposed, was later carried
through the streets to a burial site (the exact timing is in dispute). The
face looks very much like Mohammed's in the video footage. Thousands of
mourners lined the route. A BBC TV report on the funeral began, "A
Palestinian boy has been martyred." Many of the major U.S. news
organizations reported that the funeral was held on the evening of September
30, a few hours after the shooting. Oddly, on film the procession appears to
take place in full sunlight, with shadows indicative of midday.

The Aftermath

Almost immediately news media around the world be gan reporting the tragedy.
Print outlets were gener ally careful to say that Mohammed al-Dura was
killed in "the crossfire" or "an exchange of fire" between Israeli soldiers
and Palestinians. The New York Times, for instance, reported that he was
"shot in the stomach as he crouched behind his father on the sidelines of an
intensifying battle between Israeli and Palestinian security forces." But
the same account included Jamal al-Dura's comment that the fatal volley had
come from Israeli soldiers. Jacki Lyden said on NPR's Weekend All Things
Considered that the boy had been "caught in crossfire." She then interviewed
the France 2 cameraman, Talal Abu-Rahma, who said that he thought the
Israelis had done the shooting.

ABU-RAHMA: I was very sad. I was crying. And I was remembering my children.
I was afraid to lose my life. And I was sitting on my knees and hiding my
head, carrying my camera, and I was afraid from the Israeli to see this
camera, maybe they will think this is a weapon, you know, or I am trying to
shoot on them. But I was in the most difficult situation in my life. A boy,
I cannot save his life, and I want to protect myself.

LYDEN: Was there any attempt by the troops who were firing to cease fire to
listen to what the father had to say? Could they even see what they were
shooting at?

ABU-RAHMA: Okay. It's clear it was a father, it's clear it was a boy over
there for ever who [presumably meaning "whoever"] was shooting on them from
across the street, you know, in front of them. I'm sure from that area, I'm
expert in that area, I've been in that area many times. I know every
[unintelligible] in that area. Whoever was shooting, he got to see them,
because that base is not far away from the boy and the father. It's about a
hundred and fifty meters [about 500 feet].

On that night's broadcast of ABC World News Tonight, the correspondent
Gillian Findlay said unambiguously that the boy had died "under Israeli
fire." Although both NBC and CBS used the term "crossfire" in their reports,
videos of Israeli troops firing and then the boy dying left little doubt
about the causal relationship. Jamal al-Dura never wavered in his view that
the Israelis had killed his son. "Are you sure they were Israeli bullets?"
Diane Sawyer, of ABC News, asked him in an interview later that year. "I'm a
hundred percent sure," he replied, through his translator. "They were
Israelis." In another interview he told the Associated Press, "The bullets
of the Zionists are the bullets that killed my son."

By Tuesday, October 3, all doubt seemed to have been removed. After a
hurried internal investigation the IDF concluded that its troops were
probably to blame. General Yom-Tov Samia, then the head of the IDF's
Southern Command, which operated in Gaza, said, "It could very much be-this
is an estimation-that a soldier in our position, who has a very narrow field
of vision, saw somebody hiding behind a cement block in the direction from
which he was being fired at, and he shot in that direction." General Giora
Eiland, then the head of IDF operations, said on an Israeli radio broadcast
that the boy was apparently killed by "Israeli army fire at the Palestinians
who were attacking them violently with a great many petrol bombs, rocks, and
very massive fire."

The further attempt to actually justify killing the boy was, in terms of
public opinion, yet more damning for the IDF. Eiland said, "It is known that
[Mohammed al-Dura] participated in stone throwing in the past." Samia asked
what a twelve-year-old was doing in such a dangerous place to begin with.
Ariel Sharon, who admitted that the footage of the shooting was "very hard
to see," and that the death was "a real tragedy," also said, "The one that
should be blamed is only the one ... that really instigated all those
activities, and that is Yasir Arafat."

Palestinians, and the Arab-Islamic world in general, predictably did not
agree. Sweatshirts, posters, and wall murals were created showing the face
of Mohammed al-Dura just before he died. "His face, stenciled three feet
high, is a common sight on the walls of Gaza," Matthew McAllester, of
Newsday, wrote last year. "His name is known to every Arab, his death cited
as the ultimate example of Israeli military brutality." In modern warfare,
Bob Simon said on CBS's 60 Minutes, "one picture can be worth a thousand
weapons," and the picture of the doomed boy amounted to "one of the most
disastrous setbacks Israel has suffered in decades." Gabriel Weimann, of
Haifa University, said that when he first heard of the case, "it made me
sick to think this was done in my name." Amnon Lord, an Israeli columnist
who has investigated the event, told me in an e-mail message that it was
important "on the mythological level," because it was "a framework story, a
paradigmatic event," illustrating Israeli brutality. Dan Schueftan, an
Israeli strategist and military thinker, told me that the case was uniquely
damaging. He said, "[It was] the ultimate symbol of what the Arabs want to
think: the father is trying to protect his son, and the satanic Jews-there
is no other word for it-are trying to kill him. These Jews are people who
will come to kill our children, because they are not human."

Two years after Mohammed al-Dura's death his stepmother, Amal, became
pregnant with another child, the family's eighth. The parents named him
Mohammed. Amal was quoted late in her pregnancy as saying, "It will send a
message to Israel: 'Yes, you've killed one, but God has compensated for him.
You can't kill us all.'"

Second Thoughts

In the fall of last year Gabriel Weimann mentioned the Mohammed al-Dura case
in a special course that he teaches at the Israeli Military Academy,
National Security and Mass Media. Like most adults in Israel, Weimann, a
tall, athletic-looking man in his early fifties, still performs up to thirty
days of military-reserve duty a year. His reserve rank is sergeant, whereas
the students in his class are lieutenant colonels and above.

To underscore the importance of the media in international politics, Weimann
shows some of his students a montage of famous images from past wars: for
World War II the flag raising at Iwo Jima; for Vietnam the South Vietnamese
officer shooting a prisoner in the head and the little girl running naked
down a path with napalm on her back. For the current intifada, Weimann told
his students, the lasting iconic image would be the frightened face of
Mohammed al-Dura.

One day last fall, after he discussed the images, a student spoke up. "I was
there," he said. "We didn't do it."

"Prove it," Weimann said. He assigned part of the class, as its major
research project, a reconsideration of the evidence in the case. A
surprisingly large amount was available. The students began by revisiting an
investigation undertaken by the Israeli military soon after the event.

Shortly after the shooting General Samia was contacted by Nahum Shahaf, a
physicist and engineer who had worked closely with the IDF on the design of
pilotless drone aircraft. While watching the original news broadcasts of the
shooting Shahaf had been alarmed, like most viewers inside and outside
Israel. But he had also noticed an apparent anomaly. The father seemed to be
concerned mainly about a threat originating on the far side of the barrel
behind which he had taken shelter. Yet when he and his son were shot, the
barrel itself seemed to be intact. What, exactly, did this mean?

Samia commissioned Shahaf and an engineer, Yosef Duriel, to work on a second
IDF investigation of the case. "The reason from my side is to check and
clean up our values," Samia later told Bob Simon, of CBS. He said he wanted
"to see that we are still acting as the IDF." Shahaf stressed to Samia that
the IDF should do whatever it could to preserve all physical evidence. But
because so much intifada activity continued in the Netzarim area, the IDF
demolished the wall and all related structures. Shahaf took one trip to
examine the crossroads, clad in body armor and escorted by Israeli soldiers.
Then, at a location near Beersheba, Shahaf, Duriel, and others set up models
of the barrel, the wall, and the IDF shooting position, in order to re-enact
the crucial events.

Bullets had not been recovered from the boy's body at the hospital, and the
family was hardly willing to agree to an exhumation to re-examine the
wounds. Thus the most important piece of physical evidence was the concrete
barrel. In the TV footage it clearly bears a mark from the Israeli Bureau of
Standards, which enabled investigators to determine its exact dimensions and
composition. When they placed the equivalent in front of a concrete wall and
put mannequins representing father and son behind it, a conclusion emerged:
soldiers in the Israeli outpost could not have fired the shots whose impact
was shown on TV. The evidence was cumulative and reinforcing. It involved
the angle, the barrel, the indentations, and the dust.

Mohammed al-Dura and his father looked as if they were sheltering themselves
against fire from the IDF outpost. In this they were successful. The films
show that the barrel was between them and the Israeli guns. The line of
sight from the IDF position to the pair was blocked by concrete.
Conceivably, some other Israeli soldier was present and fired from some
other angle, although there is no evidence of this and no one has ever
raised it as a possibility; and there were Palestinians in all the other
places, who would presumably have noticed the presence of additional IDF
troops. From the one location where Israeli soldiers are known to have been,
the only way to hit the boy would have been to shoot through the concrete
barrel.

This brings us to the nature of the barrel. Its walls were just under two
inches thick. On the test range investigators fired M-16 bullets at a
similar barrel. Each bullet made an indentation only two fifths to four
fifths of an inch deep. Penetrating the barrel would have required multiple
hits on both sides of the barrel's wall. The videos of the shooting show
fewer than ten indentations on the side of the barrel facing the IDF,
indicating that at some point in the day's exchanges of fire the Israelis
did shoot at the barrel. But photographs taken after the shooting show no
damage of any kind on the side of the barrel facing the al-Duras-that is, no
bullets went through.

Further evidence involves the indentations in the concrete wall. The bullet
marks that appear so ominously in the wall seconds before the fatal volley
are round. Their shape is significant because of what it indicates about the
angle of the gunfire. The investigators fired volleys into a concrete wall
from a variety of angles. They found that in order to produce a round
puncture mark, they had to fire more or less straight on. The more oblique
the angle, the more elongated and skidlike the hole became.

The dust resulting from a bullet's impact followed similar rules. A head-on
shot produced the smallest, roundest cloud of dust. The more oblique the
angle, the larger and longer the cloud of dust. In the video of the shooting
the clouds of dust near the al-Duras' heads are small and round. Shots from
the IDF outpost would necessarily have been oblique.

In short, the physical evidence of the shooting was in all ways inconsistent
with shots coming from the IDF outpost-and in all ways consistent with shots
coming from someplace behind the France 2 cameraman, roughly in the location
of the Pita. Making a positive case for who might have shot the boy was not
the business of the investigators hired by the IDF. They simply wanted to
determine whether the soldiers in the outpost were responsible. Because the
investigation was overseen by the IDF and run wholly by Israelis, it stood
no chance of being taken seriously in the Arab world. But its fundamental
point-that the concrete barrel lay between the outpost and the boy, and no
bullets had gone through the barrel-could be confirmed independently from
news footage.

It was at this point that the speculation about Mohammed al-Dura's death
left the realm of geometry and ballistics and entered the world of politics,
paranoia, fantasy, and hatred. Almost as soon as the second IDF
investigation was under way, Israeli commentators started questioning its
legitimacy and Israeli government officials distanced themselves from its
findings. "It is hard to describe in mild terms the stupidity of this
bizarre investigation," the liberal newspaper Ha'aretz said in an editorial
six weeks after the shooting. The newspaper claimed that Shahaf and Duriel
were motivated not by a need for dispassionate inquiry but by the belief
that Palestinians had staged the whole shooting. (Shahaf told me that he
began his investigation out of curiosity but during the course of it became
convinced that the multiple anomalies indicated a staged event.) "The fact
that an organized body like the IDF, with its vast resources, undertook such
an amateurish investigation-almost a pirate endeavor-on such a sensitive
issue, is shocking and worrying," Ha'aretz said.

As the controversy grew, Samia abbreviated the investigation and
subsequently avoided discussing the case. Most government officials, I was
told by many sources, regard drawing any further attention to Mohammed
al-Dura as self-defeating. No new "proof" would erase images of the boy's
death, and resurrecting the discussion would only ensure that the horrible
footage was aired yet again. IDF press officials did not return any of my
calls, including those requesting to interview soldiers who were at the
outpost.

So by the time Gabriel Weimann's students at the Israeli Military Academy,
including the one who had been on the scene, began looking into the evidence
last fall, most Israelis had tried to put the case behind them. Those
against the Likud policy of encouraging settlements in occupied territory
think of the shooting as one more illustration of the policy's cost. Those
who support the policy view Mohammed al-Dura's death as an unfortunate
instance of "collateral damage," to be weighed against damage done to
Israelis by Palestinian terrorists. Active interest in the case was confined
mainly to a number of Israelis and European Jews who believe the event was
manipulated to blacken Israel's image. Nahum Shahaf has become the leading
figure in this group.

Shahaf is a type familiar to reporters: the person who has given himself
entirely to a cause or a mystery and can talk about its ramifications as
long as anyone will listen. He is a strongly built man of medium height,
with graying hair combed back from his forehead. In photos he always appears
stern, almost glowering, whereas in the time I spent with him he seemed to
be constantly smiling, joking, having fun. Shahaf is in his middle fifties,
but like many other scientists and engineers, he has the quality of seeming
not quite grown up. He used to live in California, where, among other
pursuits, he worked as a hang-gliding instructor. He moves and gesticulates
with a teenager's lack of self-consciousness about his bearing. I liked him.

Before getting involved in the al-Dura case, Shahaf was known mainly as an
inventor. He was only the tenth person to receive a medal from the Israeli
Ministry of Science, for his work on computerized means of compressing
digital video transmission. "But for two and a half years I am spending time
only on the al-Dura case," he told me. "I left everything for it, because I
believe that this is most important." When I arrived at his apartment,
outside Tel Aviv, to meet him one morning, I heard a repeated sound from one
room that I assumed was from a teenager's playing a violent video game. An
hour later, when we walked into that room-which has been converted into a
video-research laboratory, with multiple monitors, replay devices, and
computers-I saw that it was one mob scene from September 30, being played on
a continuous loop.

Shahaf's investigation for the IDF showed that the Israeli soldiers at the
outpost did not shoot the boy. But he now believes that everything that
happened at Netzarim on September 30 was a ruse. The boy on the film may or
may not have been the son of the man who held him. The boy and the man may
or may not actually have been shot. If shot, the boy may or may not actually
have died. If he died, his killer may or may not have been a member of the
Palestinian force, shooting at him directly. The entire goal of the
exercise, Shahaf says, was to manufacture a child martyr, in correct
anticipation of the damage this would do to Israel in the eyes of the
world-especially the Islamic world. "I believe that one day there will be
good things in common between us and the Palestinians," he told me. "But the
case of Mohammed al-Dura brings the big flames between Israel and the
Palestinians and Arabs. It brings a big wall of hate. They can say this is
the proof, the ultimate proof, that Israeli soldiers are boy-murderers. And
that hatred breaks any chance of having something good in the future."

The reasons to doubt that the al-Duras, the cameramen, and hundreds of
onlookers were part of a coordinated fraud are obvious. Shahaf's evidence
for this conclusion, based on his videos, is essentially an accumulation of
oddities and unanswered questions about the chaotic events of the day. Why
is there no footage of the boy after he was shot? Why does he appear to move
in his father's lap, and to clasp a hand over his eyes after he is
supposedly dead? Why is one Palestinian policeman wearing a Secret
Service-style earpiece in one ear? Why is another Palestinian man shown
waving his arms and yelling at others, as if "directing" a dramatic scene?
Why does the funeral appear-based on the length of shadows-to have occurred
before the apparent time of the shooting? Why is there no blood on the
father's shirt just after they are shot? Why did a voice that seems to be
that of the France 2 cameraman yell, in Arabic, "The boy is dead" before he
had been hit? Why do ambulances appear instantly for seemingly everyone else
and not for al-Dura?

A handful of Israeli and foreign commentators have taken up Shahaf's cause.
A Web site called masada2000.org says of the IDF's initial apology, "They
acknowledged guilt, for never in their collective minds would any one of
them have imagined a scenario whereby Mohammed al-Dura might have been
murdered by his own people ... a cruel plot staged and executed by
Palestinian sharp-shooters and a television cameraman!" Amnon Lord, writing
for the magazine Makor Rishon, referred to a German documentary directed by
Esther Schapira that was "based on Shahaf's own decisive conclusion" and
that determined "that Muhammad Al-Dura was not killed by IDF gunfire at
Netzarim junction." "Rather," Lord continued, "the Palestinians, in
cooperation with foreign journalists and the UN, arranged a well-staged
production of his death." In March of this year a French writer, Gérard
Huber, published a book called Contre expertise d'une mise en scène
(roughly, Re-evaluation of a Re-enactment). It, too, argues that the entire
event was staged. In an e-mail message to me Huber said that before knowing
of Shahaf's studies he had been aware that "the images of little Mohammed
were part of the large war of images between Palestinians and Israelis." But
until meeting Shahaf, he said, "I had not imagined that it involved a
fiction"-a view he now shares. "The question of 'Who killed little
Mohammed?'" he said, "has become a screen to disguise the real question,
which is: 'Was little Mohammed actually killed?'"

The truth about this case will probably never be determined. Or, to put it
more precisely, no version of truth that is considered believable by all
sides will ever emerge. For most of the Arab world, the rights and wrongs of
the case are beyond dispute: an innocent boy was murdered, and his blood is
on Israel's hands. Mention of contrary evidence or hypotheses only confirms
the bottomless dishonesty of the guilty parties-much as Holocaust-denial
theories do in the Western world. For the handful of people collecting
evidence of a staged event, the truth is also clear, even if the proof is
not in hand. I saw Nahum Shahaf lose his good humor only when I asked him
what he thought explained the odd timing of the boy's funeral, or the
contradictions in eyewitness reports, or the other loose ends in the case.
"I don't 'think,' I know!" he said several times. "I am a physicist. I work
from the evidence." Schapira had collaborated with him for the German
documentary and then produced a film advancing the "minimum" version of his
case, showing that the shots did not, could not have, come from the IDF
outpost. She disappointed him by not embracing the maximum version-the
all-encompassing hoax-and counseled him not to talk about a staged event
unless he could produce a living boy or a cooperative eyewitness. Shahaf
said that he still thought well of her, and that he was not discouraged. "I
am only two and a half years into this work," he told me. "It took twelve
years for the truth of the Dreyfus case to come out."

For anyone else who knows about Mohammed al-Dura but is not in either of the
decided camps-the Arabs who are sure they know what happened, the
revisionists who are equally sure-the case will remain in the uncomfortable
realm of events that cannot be fully explained or understood. "Maybe it was
an accidental shooting," Gabriel Weimann told me, after reading his
students' report, which, like the German documentary, supported the
"minimum" conclusion-the Israeli soldiers at the outpost could not have
killed the boy. (He could not show the report to me, he said, on grounds of
academic confidentiality.) "Maybe even it was staged-although I don't think
my worst enemy is so inhuman as to shoot a boy for the sake of publicity.
Beyond that, I do not know." Weimann's recent work involves the way that
television distorts reality in attempting to reconstruct it, by putting
together loosely related or even random events in what the viewer imagines
is a coherent narrative flow. The contrast between the confusing,
contradictory hours of raw footage from the Netzarim crossroads and the
clear, gripping narrative of the evening news reports assembled from that
footage is a perfect example, he says.

The significance of this case from the American perspective involves the
increasingly chaotic ecology of truth around the world. In Arab and Islamic
societies the widespread belief that Israeli soldiers shot this boy has
political consequences. So does the belief among some Israelis and Zionists
in Israel and abroad that Palestinians will go to any lengths to smear them.
Obviously, these beliefs do not create the basic tensions in the Middle
East. The Israeli policy of promoting settlements in occupied territory, and
the Palestinian policy of terror, are deeper obstacles. There would never
have been a showdown at the Netzarim crossroads, or any images of Mohammed
al-Dura's shooting to be parsed in different ways, if there were no
settlement nearby for IDF soldiers to protect. Gabriel Weimann is to the
left of Dan Schueftan on Israel's political spectrum, but both believe that
Israel should end its occupation. I would guess that Nahum Shahaf thinks the
same thing, even though he told me that to preserve his "independence" as a
researcher, he wanted to "isolate myself from any kind of political
question."

The images intensify the self-righteous determination of each side. If
anything, modern technology has aggravated the problem of mutually exclusive
realities. With the Internet and TV, each culture now has a more elaborate
apparatus for "proving," dramatizing, and disseminating its particular
truth.

In its engagement with the Arab world the United States has assumed that
what it believes are noble motives will be perceived as such around the
world. We mean the best for the people under our control; stability,
democracy, prosperity, are our goals; why else would we have risked so much
to help an oppressed people achieve them? The case of Mohammed al-Dura
suggests the need for much more modest assumptions about the way other
cultures-in particular today's embattled Islam-will perceive our truths.


The URL for this page is
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/06/fallows.htm.

Hello everyone,

The UNMEDIA list is about two years old now - and I've realized that
it has served its original purpose, which was to provide an outlet for
the dissenting opinions that were not (after 9-11) being represented
in the media. I think that in the years since, we have seen a return
towards vigorous debate, though of course media objectivity is at best
an illusory, elusive goal, which I wonder if I would like even if it
were achievable.

As a result, I've decided to change the focus of the group, and inform
all of you so that you can make decisions for yourselves whether
membership is still worth keeping. As most of you know, I have been
blogging since March 2002 at unmedia.blogspot.com on political issues,
as well as at dean2004.blogspot.com to promote the presidential
campaign of Howard Dean. I intend to use UNMEDIA as an archive of
articles related to those pursuits, and will continue to send articles
to the list as usual. The main source will be from major media outlets
more so than the alternative "un" media I was trying to highlight
earlier, because I think it's more important now to document events
using more widely reputable sources. This will be important in
fighting the misinformation of the future.

I've also decided to disallow postings from members. This is mainly
because I want to keep the list archives more tightly focused on the
political issues that I blog about. If you have an article that you
want me to share with others, you can always leave a comment about it
at my blog, but I think that few will miss the capability to post
since only 3 or four others ever bothered to do so.

The volume of email will remain very low on the list, and of course
you can always change your list preferences at groups.yahoo.com in
order to receive daily emails/digests/no emails. The list archives
remain public.

I'd like to thank everyone for supporing this social and political
experiment and I hope I don't lose too many of you with these changes.
Stay tuned. It's going to be one interesting year!

Aziz

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2004/01/08/ninja_dean/print.html

Dean: Ninja power?
For months, a rumor that Howard Dean played a minor role in a 1980s
slasher flick has captivated supporters and political junkies. Here's a
clip of the movie -- and the back story.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By John Gorenfeld

Jan. 7, 2004  |  It's 1984. Dr. Howard Dean has an internal medicine
practice in Vermont, and fifth-graders everywhere love ninjas.
Meanwhile, "Ninja III: The Domination" is in theaters. In one scene, a
hooded warrior is wreaking his trademark havoc on a golf course, plying
the ancient mystical art of making patrol cars fly into lakes in slow
motion.

And that's when, in a gruff tone some might associate with a guy taking
the Democratic Leadership Council to task, a cop in a descending
helicopter barks into his walkie-talkie. He warns all units to be on the
alert. Too late: The ninja jumps onboard from a palm tree and hurls
stunt doubles out the hatch.

Recently, reports that that the cop was portrayed by Howard Dean,
Democratic forerunner, bubbled up onto the liberal blogs Daily Kos
(http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2003/11/24/43231/528/70), Eschaton
(http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_01_04_atrios_archive.html#10733406826770193)
and Pandagon (http://www.pandagon.net/mtarchives/000430.html), where
Dems were urged to run out to the video store. Murmurs had persisted
since late 2003, when someone noticed that the Internet Movie Database
listing for "Howard Dean," which mentions the former Vermont governor's
turn on last fall's "K Street," also credits "Howard Dean"
(http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0212792/) with playing a policeman on "Ninja
III."

So Dean fans sought copies of the silver-boxed ninja epic shot in
Arizona (originally released by legendary '80 schlock outfit Cannon
Films). Arizona State University student Tony Cani threw a "Ninja III"
party to see if the cop was Dean. "Roughly 8 minutes into the movie a
police officer in a helicopter LOOKS AND SOUNDS LIKE HOWARD DEAN," he
posted
(http://fearitself.blogspot.com/2003_12_07_fearitself_archive.html#1071117638354\
08294)
on the blog Fear Itself. The use later of a much more dashing stunt
double left him undeterred: "For now though -- the 15 of us in the room
are willing to say tentatively... IT IS HOWARD DEAN."

[To view a clip of "Howard Dean," click here
(http://anon.salon.speedera.net/anon.salon/media/2004/01/dean.mov). He's
the one saying, "Proceed with caution!"]

Dean, unfortunately, says it's not him. Jay Carson, a Dean spokesman,
told Salon he asked Dean "point-blank" -- and the Democratic
front-runner said he was in no way associated with "The Domination," the
story (from producers Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan) of a beautiful
'80s aerobics practitioner possessed by the spirit of a ninja slain on a
golf course. (It's the kind of movie where the heroine, having gone to a
psychologist for help, is told that there doesn't seem to be anything
wrong with her, "aside from your exceptional extrasensory perception and
your preoccupation with Japanese culture. No harm in that.")

But as with WMDs, belief dies hard, especially when a wily ninja is such
a promising metaphor for, say, Karl Rove. The mind invents explanations:
Is it so hard to imagine that Dr. Howard Dean, admittedly stuck in
Vermont most of 1983, might have spent a weekend in Arizona with a buddy
from med school ... and then, finding the local links closed down for a
movie shoot, stumbled upon some B-movie filmmakers who were short one
helicopter cop...?

Cani, the ASU student, upon being informed by a reporter that Dean
denies being in "Ninja III," is nevertheless pleased with the movie as a
recruitment tool. "I will tell you," Cani says, "a handful of people are
[Dean] supporters now -- not so much because of the movie but because it
is a safe place for people to start talking about politics from. Cheesy
ninja movies: Everyone loves them."

http://nytimes.com/2003/12/16/opinion/16TUE1.html

Saddam Hussein has long been an obsession for the world, and
particularly the United States. Yet Iraq was so cut off from the outside
that it was impossible for anyone — including, it seems, American
intelligence officials — to get a clear picture of who he really was. We
got a series of vivid but inconsistent portraits, colored to fit various
political agendas. Now that the real man is under interrogation, we hope
a single realistic version will emerge.

George W. Bush's Saddam Hussein was both vicious and efficient — a
combination that made him a clear and imminent threat to international
security. He not only had the will to harm his neighbors and the United
States, he had the means. He was rapidly expanding an arsenal of
biological and chemical weapons while steadily moving closer to becoming
a nuclear power. He was so clever and well organized that he might
surprise the world with nuclear weapons at any time. And although his
regime was a secular one, it was so single-minded in its
anti-Americanism that it was undoubtedly working with the radical
Islamist terrorists of Al Qaeda.

Others had radically different pictures of the man running Iraq —
ranging from the high-minded defender of Muslim honor conjured up on the
Arab streets to the unappetizing but rational trading partner who many
European leaders believed could be handled through a continued
application of carrots and sticks.

After the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it seemed that everyone might
have given him too much credit. Pictures of the Hussein family's
multiple palaces showed each one looking more like a bad Las Vegas hotel
suite than the last. The country was a mess, with crumbling
infrastructure even in the critical oil fields. No weapons of mass
destruction turned up, and some Iraqi science officials claimed that
since the first gulf war in 1991, the fearsome arsenal had existed only
in the imagination of the West, and perhaps of the tyrant himself.

But as the increasingly violent weeks of occupation dragged on, people
began wondering whether Mr. Hussein was pursuing a new, clever strategy.
Had the United States been lured into Iraq to founder like Napoleon in
Russia, while the Republican Guard melted into the landscape to fight a
guerrilla war under the direction of the missing dictator?

The bedraggled man pulled out of a hole near Tikrit certainly did not
look like a military genius. When he comes to trial, perhaps the Iraqi
people will finally learn whether they were governed for so many years
by a cunning tyrant or by one who at some point turned into an
out-of-touch thug, allowing his brutal underlings to do whatever they
wanted to keep a terrorized populace subdued. Interrogators will
certainly be trying to figure out whether weapons of mass destruction
were being produced and stockpiled. They may discover that the first
Bush administration was right in believing that having been thoroughly
defeated in 1991 and kept under an international embargo, Mr. Hussein no
longer posed a major military threat.

The one thing on which everyone now agrees is that this man caused the
deaths of hundreds of thousands of his own people and kept most of the
rest in fear and misery. Ironically, that was a vision first painted
nearly 15 years ago by international human rights groups, during a
period in which American presidents, as well as most of the rest of the
world, treated him as a valuable ally and a bulwark against Iranian
extremism.

http://www.jewsweek.com/bin/en.jsp?
enPage=BlankPage&enDisplay=view&enDispWhat=object&enDispWho=Article%
5El890&enZone=Opinions&enVersion=0&

Bangladesh is a tiny country, and not one you hear about very often,
but it could teach a host of lessons on pluralism, religious
tolerance, and maybe even peacemaking in the Middle East.
by Richard L. Benkin/Jewsweek.com/November 23, 2003

Ask most Americans what they know about Bangladesh and, chances are,
you will hear something about George Harrison, maybe about poverty
and disasters, and a few might even say, "Oh, yeah, isn't that
somewhere around India?" And that's after you eliminate those who
just give you a blank stare. That's a shame, too. For I read your
major English-language dailies, and I consider myself fortunate for
having done so. For it is clear to me that you are a nation of
thoughtful individuals with whom I can find agreement, and with whom
I can disagree; individuals I can respect in either case. I have seen
debate and dialogue even the beginnings of one surrounding the Middle
East. Do you know what a rarity that is in the Moslem press?

Beyond that, you are a nation with a dynamic foreign policy,
committed to regional cooperation. You also attempt to find common
ground with old foes in your region. Bangladesh is also, to your
great credit, a democracy. The fact that you engage in self-
criticisms about your shortcomings only strengthens that democracy
and helps keep you free. While so many other nations seem to have
turned away from democracy, and seem to feel that their people cannot
handle the free flow of ideas, you have endured in your struggle, and
continue to do so.

I also believe that Bangladesh is uniquely positioned to help bring
peace to a region that has resisted peace for so long: the Middle
East.

What? Am I daft? Bangladesh is a small nation with its own problems
to solve, you might say. We might remind ourselves, however, that
when the United States negotiated a peace between Russia and Japan in
1903, it was still a relatively minor player on the world stage. More
recently, modest Norway attempted to broker a peace between Arabs and
Israelis. Other historical events are also instructive. From the end
of World War II until the 1970s, America refused to recognize the
People's Republic of China, demonizing it, and not accepting its
legitimacy. The president who finally changed that was one of the
least forgiving of those old cold warriors, Richard Nixon. A liberal
Democrat who tried to do it would have faced tremendous opposition.
Similarly, the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab country
was signed not by doves from each side, but by two men who fought
vehemently against each other's peoples: Anwar Sadat and Menachem
Begin. So, what country is better qualified to broker a truce than a
non-Arab Moslem nation and a democracy at that: Bangladesh.

Moreover, issues that have surfaced in your part of the world, as
well as the history, are strikingly similar to those that Israelis
and Arabs face. To begin with, both regions were under British
hegemony until shortly after World War II, when Europeans began to
despair of their colonial legacy and started disbanding it. As with
the Middle East, the so-called Indian subcontinent was an
amalgamation of formerly separate peoples, cropped into one body by
the outside European power. In both parts of the world, these
divisions were along religious and ethnic lines. Yet, despite the
continuing sabre rattling between India and Pakistan, as well as
periodic flare-ups of Hindu-Muslim violence, this area has
accommodated itself to its religious conundrum. Such is not the case
in the Middle East. Even forgetting about Muslim-Jewish violence, we
have seen Shiites war with Sunnis, Arabs fight Kurds. Additionally,
the post-colonial period began here with extensive population
transfers based on religion. While the numbers in the Middle East
come nowhere close to those who transferred here, both Muslim
Palestinians and Jews throughout the Middle East had to make the same
choice.

Of all the nations that were carved out of the former British colony
in South Asia, Bangladesh has become the most successful in
accommodating a diverse population. Its different groups have been
able to live side by side without inter-ethnic violence. Can either
India or Pakistan make the same claim? You provide the world with a
unique example of a nation that allows its people freedom of
religion, even while having its own state religion. Yes, Bangladeshis
do have a great deal to teach the peoples in the Middle East.

Taking the religious conflict a step further, one of the most
contentious issues in the Mideast conflict revolves around
Jerusalem's Temple Mount. That is, we Jews call it the Temple Mount
because it was the site of our holy Temples, including the one built
by King Solomon. Muslims of the region speak of the Noble Sanctuary,
and identify it as the place from which the Prophet ascended to
heaven in his Night Journey. The problem is that both Jews and
Muslims are talking about the same place and have not been able to
agree on a way to share it. Here you have a similar situation in
Ayodhya, where the Babri mosque was built on a site holy to Hindus.

There are similarities on a more practical level, as well. There has
been much concern expressed in your press of late over water rights,
and Indian projects that you believe threaten Bangladesh's water
supply. As any reader can well imagine, water is an extremely
critical issue in the arid Middle East, and is necessary not only for
agricultural production, but often for human survival as well. Over
time, both Israelis and Arabs have had cause to complain about each
other's projects and their affect on water supply. Perhaps together,
all groups can arrive at a workable solution.

Why should the world assume that only a superpower like the United
States, or a European country like Norway, should offer itself as a
broker for peace? Bangladesh is really a more logical vehicle to
bring together Israelis and Arabs. On the one hand, you share a
Muslim heritage with Arabs. On the other, you share Israel's
religious diversity. (Do you know, Israel has approximately the same
percentage of Jews as Bangladesh has Muslims?) You share the Arab
world's past subservience to western powers; but your democratic
government is much closer to Israeli democracy than Arab autocracy.
There is only one thing missing to complete the equation.

It would be very difficult for Bangladesh to play such a role in this
conflict while it does not formally recognize the sovereignty of one
of the parties. It would be difficult to broach such an issue when
there is no Bangladeshi diplomatic corps in Israel to contact its
Israeli counterparts. (Before trying to broker Middle East peace, the
U.S. allowed Palestinian Arabs to open a diplomatic office in
Washington, and recognized the Palestinian Authority.) Imagine for a
moment what would happen if Bangladesh established diplomatic
relations with Israel, then announced its intentions to hold a peace
conference for the parties in the Middle East? Although it would not
be the first Muslim nation to recognize Israel, your action still
would no doubt shock many around the world. For you would be denying
the pernicious belief, which holds that a sovereign Jewish state can
exist in the Middle East only at the expense of Muslims. Consign that
lie to the ashbin of history where it belongs. Declare to the world
that Jews and Muslims can live side by side as equals, and the world
can know peace. Your bold action would demonstrate to the world a
level of courage and maturity that too few nations possess. And it
would place Bangladesh on the center stage of world events.

Peace is possible in the Middle East, but it will take a special kind
of wisdom and courage. Most nations are too mired in self-interest,
stilted thinking, and ideologies to take that leap of faith. Let the
nation and people of Bangladesh be the one to lead us out of those
traps and into a new era of peace.

http://msnbc.com/news/991209.asp?0cv=CB20

Cheney’s Long Path to War
The Hard Sell: He sifted intel. He brooded about threats. And he wanted
Saddam gone. The inside story of how Vice President Cheney bought into
shady assumptions and helped persuade a nation to invade Iraq

Nov. 17 issue —  Every Thursday, President George W. Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney have lunch together in a small dining room off the
Oval Office. They eat alone; no aides are present. They have no fixed
agenda, but it’s a safe assumption that they often talk about
intelligence—about what the United States knows, or doesn’t know, about
the terrorist threat.

THE PRESIDENT RESPECTS Cheney’s judgment, say White House aides, and
values the veep’s long experience in the intelligence community (as
President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, as a member of the House
Intelligence Committee in the 1980s and as secretary of Defense in the
George H.W. Bush administration). As vice president, Cheney is free to
roam about the various agencies, quizzing analysts and top spooks about
terrorists and their global connections. “This is a very important area.
It’s the one the president asked me to work on ... I ask a lot of hard
questions,” Cheney told NBC’s Tim Russert last September. “That’s my job.”

   Of all the president’s advisers, Cheney has consistently taken the
most dire view of the terrorist threat. On Iraq, Bush was the decision
maker. But more than any adviser, Cheney was the one to make the case to
the president that war against Iraq was an urgent necessity. Beginning
in the late summer of 2002, he persistently warned that Saddam was
stocking up on chemical and biological weapons, and last March, on the
eve of the invasion, he declared that “we believe that he [Saddam
Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons.” (Cheney later said
that he meant “program,” not “weapons.” He also said, a bit
optimistically, “I really do believe that we will be greeted as
liberators.”) After seven months, investigators are still looking for
that arsenal of WMD.

Cheney has repeatedly suggested that Baghdad has ties to Al Qaeda. He
has pointedly refused to rule out suggestions that Iraq was somehow to
blame for the 9/11 attacks and may even have played a role in the
terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The CIA and FBI, as
well as a congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks, have
dismissed this conspiracy theory. Still, as recently as Sept. 14, Cheney
continued to leave the door open to Iraqi complicity. He brought up a
report—widely discredited by U.S. intelligence officials—that 9/11
hijacker Muhammad Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in
Prague in April 2001. And he described Iraq as “the geographic base of
the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most
especially on 9/11.” A few days later, a somewhat sheepish President
Bush publicly corrected the vice president. There was no evidence, Bush
admitted, to suggest that the Iraqis were behind 9/11.

Cheney has long been regarded as a Washington wise man. He has a dry,
deliberate manner; a penetrating, if somewhat wintry, wit, and a
historian’s long-view sensibility. He is far to the right politically,
but in no way wild-eyed; in private conversation he seems moderate,
thoughtful, cautious. Yet when it comes to terrorist plots, he seems to
have given credence to the views of some fairly flaky ideologues and
charlatans. Writing recently in The New Yorker, investigative reporter
Seymour Hersh alleged that Cheney had, in effect, become the dupe of a
cabal of neoconservative full-mooners, the Pentagon’s mysteriously named
Office of Special Plans and the patsy of an alleged bank swindler and
would-be ruler of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi.

A Cheney aide took strong exception to the notion that the vice
president was at the receiving end of some kind of private pipeline for
half-baked or fraudulent intelligence, or that he was somehow carrying
water for the neocons or anyone else’s self-serving agendas. “That’s an
urban myth,” said this aide, who declined to be identified. Cheney has
cited as his “gold standard” the National Intelligence Estimate, a
consensus report put out by the entire intelligence community. And,
indeed, an examination of the declassified version of the NIE reveals
some pretty alarming warnings. “Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear
weapons program,” the October 2002 NIE states.
          Nonetheless, it appears that Cheney has been susceptible to
“cherry-picking,” embracing those snippets of intelligence that support
his dark prognosis while discarding others that don’t. He is widely
regarded in the intelligence community as an outlier, as a man who
always goes for the worst-case —scenario and sometimes overlooks less
alarming or at least ambiguous signs. Top intelligence officials reject
the suggestion that Cheney has somehow bullied lower-level CIA or
Defense Intelligence Agency analysts into telling him what he wants to
hear. But they do describe the Office of the Vice President, with its
large and assertive staff, as a kind of free-floating power base that at
times brushes aside the normal policymaking machinery under
national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice. On the road to war, Cheney
in effect created a parallel government that became the real power center.

Cheney, say those who know him, is in no way cynically manipulative. By
all accounts, he is genuinely convinced that the threat is imminent and
menacing. Professional intelligence analysts can offer measured, nuanced
opinions, but policymakers, Cheney likes to say, have to decide. As he
put it last July in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, “How
could any responsible leader have ignored the Iraqi threat?” And yet
Cheney seems to have rung the warning bell a little too loudly and
urgently. If nothing else, his apparently exaggerated alarms over Iraq,
WMD and the terror connection may make Americans slow to respond the
next time he sees a wolf at the door.

What is it about Cheney’s character and background that makes him such a
Cassandra? And did his powerful dirge drown out more-modulated voices in
the councils of power in Washington and in effect launch America on the
path to war? Cheney declined an interview request from NEWSWEEK, but
interviews with his aides and a wide variety of sources in the
intelligence and national-security community paint the portrait of a
vice president who may be too powerful for his own good.

Cheney, say those who know him, has always had a Hobbesian view of life.
The world is a dangerous place; war is the natural state of mankind;
enemies lurk. The national-security state must be strong, vigilant and
wary. Cheney believes that America’s military and intelligence
establishments were weakened by defeat in Vietnam and the wave of
scandals that followed in Watergate in the ’70s and Iran-contra in the
’80s. He did not regard as progress the rise of congressional
investigating committees, special prosecutors and an increasingly
adversarial, aggressive press. Cheney is a strong believer in the
necessity of government secrecy as well as more broadly the need to
preserve and protect the power of the executive branch.

He never delivers these views in a rant. Rather, Cheney talks in a low,
arid voice, if at all. He usually waits until the end of a meeting to
speak up, and then speaks so softly and cryptically, out of one side of
his mouth, so that people have to lean forward to hear. (In a babble of
attention-seekers, this can be a powerful way of getting heard.) Cheney
rarely shows anger or alarm, but on occasion his exasperation emerges.

One such moment came at the end of the first gulf war in 1991. Cheney
was secretary of Defense, and arms inspectors visiting defeated Iraq had
discovered that Saddam Hussein was much closer to building a nuclear
weapon than anyone had realized. Why, Cheney wondered aloud to his
aides, had a steady stream of U.S. intelligence experts beaten a path to
his door before the war to say that the Iraqis were at least five to 10
years away from building a bomb? Years later, in meetings of the second
President Bush’s war cabinet, Cheney would return again and again to the
question of how Saddam could create an entire hidden nuclear program
without the CIA’s knowing much, if anything, about it.

Cheney’s suspicions—about both the strength of Iraq and the weakness of
U.S. intelligence agencies—were fed after he left government. Cheney
spent a considerable amount of time with the scholars and backers of the
American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank that has served
as a conservative government-in-waiting. Cheney was on the board of
directors and his wife, Lynne, a conservative activist on social issues,
still keeps an office there as a resident “fellow.” At various lunches
and dinners around Washington, sponsored by AEI and other conservative
organizations, Cheney came in contact with other foreign-policy
hard-liners or “neoconservatives” like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and
Douglas Feith. It was an article of faith in the AEI crowd that the
United States had missed a chance to knock off Saddam in 1991; that
Saddam was rebuilding his stockpile of WMD, and that sooner or later the
Iraqi strongman would have to go. When some dissidents in northern Iraq
tried to mount an insurrection with CIA backing in the mid-’90s and
failed, the conservatives blamed the Clinton administration for showing
weakness. Clinton’s national-security adviser, Tony Lake, had, it was
alleged, “pulled the plug.”

In the late ’90s, Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of one of the resistance
groups, the Iraqi National Congress, began cultivating and lobbying
intellectuals, journalists and political leaders in Washington. Chalabi
—had a shadowy past; his family, exiled from Iraq in the late ’50s, had
set up a banking empire through the Middle East that collapsed in
charges of fraud in 1989. (Chalabi, who has always denied wrongdoing,
has been convicted and sentenced, in absentia, by a Jordanian military
court to 22 years of hard labor.) But operating out of London, the
smoothly persuasive Chalabi presented himself as a democratic answer to
Saddam Hussein. With a little American backing, he promised, he could
rally the Iraqi people to overthrow the Butcher of Baghdad.

Chalabi was hailed in some circles, especially among the neocons at AEI,
as the “George Washington of Iraq.” But the professionals at the State
Department and at the CIA took a more skeptical view. In 1999, after
Congress had passed and President Bill Clinton had signed the Iraqi
Liberation Act, providing funds to support Iraqi exile groups, the U.S.
government convened a conference with the INC and other opposition
groups in London to discuss “regime change.” The American officials
proposed bringing INC activists to America for training. Chalabi’s aides
objected. Most of the likely candidates were Iraqi refugees living in
various European countries. By coming to the United States, they could
lose their refugee status. Some Pentagon officials shook their heads in
disbelief. “You had to wonder,” said one who attended the conference,
“how serious were these people. They kept telling us they wanted to risk
their lives for their country. But they were afraid to risk their
refugee status in Sweden?”

After the Republicans regained the White House in 2001, many of the
neocons took top national-security jobs. Perle, the man closest to
Chalabi, chose to stay on the outside (where he kept a lucrative
lobbying practice). But Wolfowitz and Feith became, respectively, the
No. 2 and No. 3 man at the Defense Department, and a former Wolfowitz
aide, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became the vice president’s chief of
staff. Once the newcomers took over, the word went out that any
disparaging observations about Chalabi or the INC were no longer
appreciated. “The view was, ‘If you weren’t a total INC guy, then you’re
on the wrong side’,” said a Pentagon official. “It was, ‘We’re not going
to trash the INC anymore and Ahmad Chalabi is an Iraqi patriot who
risked his life for his country’. ”

Some neocons began agitating inside the Bush administration to support
some kind of insurrection, led by Chalabi, that would overthrow Saddam.
In the summer of 2001, the neocons circulated a plan to support an
INC-backed invasion. A senior Pentagon analyst questioned whether Iraqis
would rise up to back it. “You’re thinking like the Clinton people,” a
Feith aide shot back. “They planned for failure. We plan for success.”
It is important to note that at this early stage, the neocons did not
have the enthusiastic backing of Vice President Cheney. Just because
Cheney had spent a lot of time around the Get Saddam neocons does not
mean that he had become one, says an administration aide. “It’s a
mistake to add up two and two and get 18,” he says. Cheney’s cautious
side kept him from leaping into any potential Bay of Pigs covert actions.

What changed Cheney was not Chalabi or his friends from AEI, but the
9/11 attacks. For years Cheney had feared—and warned against—a terrorist
attack on an American city. The hijacked planes that plowed into the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon confirmed his suspicions of American
vulnerability—though by no means his worst fears—that the terrorists
would use a biological or nuclear weapon. “9/11 changed everything,”
Cheney began saying to anyone who would listen. It was no longer enough
to treat terrorism as a law-enforcement matter, Cheney believed. The
United States had to find ways to act against the terrorists before they
struck.

Cheney began collecting intelligence on the threat anywhere he could
find it. Along with Libby, his chief of staff, the vice president began
showing up at the CIA and DIA for briefings. Cheney would ask probing
questions from different analysts in various agencies and then, later
with his staff, connect the dots. Such an aggressive national-security
role by a vice president was unusual. So was the sheer size of Cheney’s
staff—about 60 people, much larger than the size of Al Gore’s. The
threat from germ warfare was a particular concern of Cheney’s. After
9/11, Libby kept calling over to the Defense Department, asking what the
military was doing to guard against a bio attack from crop-dusters. In
July 2002, Cheney made a surprise, unpublicized visit to the Centers for
Disease Control in Atlanta. He wanted to question directly the
public-health experts about their efforts to combat bioterrorism. If not
for the traffic snarls caused by his motorcade, his visit might have
remained a secret.

   There was, within the administration, another office parsing through
intelligence on the Iraqi and terror threat. The Office of Special Plans
was so secretive at first that the director, William Luti, did not even
want to mention its existence. “Don’t ever talk about this,” Luti told
his staff, according to a source who attended early meetings. “If
anybody asks, just say no comment.” (Luti does not recall this, but he
does regret choosing such a spooky name for the office.) The Office of
Special Plans has sometimes been described as an intelligence cell,
along the lines of “Team B,” set up by the Ford administration in the
1970s to second-guess the CIA when conservatives believed that the
intelligence community was underestimating the Soviet threat. But OSP is
more properly described as a planning group—planning for war in Iraq.
Some of the OSP staffers were true believers. Abe Shulsky, a defense
intellectual who ran the office under Luti, was a Straussian, a student
of a philosopher named Leo Strauss, who believed that ancient texts had
hidden meanings that only an elite could divine. Strauss taught that
philosophers needed to tell —”noble lies” to the politicians and the people.

The OSP gathered up bits and pieces of intelligence that pointed to
Saddam’s WMD programs and his ties to terror groups. The OSP would
prepare briefing papers for administration officials to use. The OSP
also drew on reports of defectors who alleged that Saddam was hiding bio
and chem weapons under hospitals and schools. Some of these defectors
were provided to the intelligence community by Chalabi, who also fed
them to large news organizations, like The New York Times. Vanity Fair
published a few of the more lurid reports, deemed to be bogus by U.S.
intelligence agencies (like one alleging that Saddam was running a
terrorist-training camp, complete with a plane fuselage in which to
practice hijackings). The CIA was skeptical about the motivation and
credibility of these defectors, but their stories gained wide circulation.

Cheney’s staffers were in more than occasional contact with the OSP.
Luti, an intense and brilliant former naval aviator who flew combat
missions in the gulf war, worked in Cheney’s office before he took over
OSP, and was well liked by Cheney’s staff. Luti’s office had absorbed a
small, secretive intelligence-analysis shop in the Pentagon known as
Team B (after the original Team B) whose research linked 9/11 to both Al
Qaeda and the Iranian terror group Hizbullah. The team was particularly
fascinated by the allegation that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met in
Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent. One of Team B’s creators—David
Wurmser—now works on Cheney’s staff. Libby went to at least one briefing
with Team B staffers at which they discussed Saddam’s terror
connections. It would be a mistake, however, to overstate the influence
of OSP on Cheney or his staff. Cheney collected information from many
sources, but principally from the main intelligence agencies, the CIA
and DIA. Likewise, Cheney’s aides say that they talked to Chalabi and
his people about “opposition politics”—not about WMD or terrorism. (“The
whole idea that we were mainlining dubious INC reports into the
intelligence community is simply nonsense,” Paul Wolfowitz told NEWSWEEK.)

There has been much speculation in the press and in the intelligence
community about the impact of the conspiracy theories of Laurie Mylroie
on the Bush administration. A somewhat eccentric Harvard-trained
political scientist, Mylroie argued (from guesswork and sketchy
evidence) that the 1993 World Trade Center attack was an Iraqi
intelligence operation. When AEI published an updated version of her
book “Study of Revenge” two years ago, her acknowledgments cited the
help of, among others, Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of State John Bolton
and Libby. But Cheney aides say that the vice president has never even
discussed Mylroie’s book. (“I take satisfaction in the fact that we went
to war with Iraq and got rid of Saddam Hussein,” said Mylroie. “The rest
is details.”)

Cheney is hardly the only intelligence adviser to the president. CIA
Director George Tenet briefs the president every morning. But Tenet was
often caught up defending his agency. Cheney feels free to criticize,
and he does. “Cheney was very distrustful and remains very distrustful
of the traditional intelligence establishment,” says a former White
House official. “He thinks they are too cautious or too invested in
their own policy concerns.” Cheney is not as “passionate” in his
dissents as Wolfowitz, the leading intellectual neocon in the
administration. But he carries more clout.

Cheney often teams up with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to roll
over national-security adviser Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell.
“OVP [Cheney’s office] and OSD [Rumsfeld’s office] turned into their own
axis of evil,” grouses a former White House official, who added that
Cheney and Rumsfeld shared the same strategic vision: pessimistic and
dark. Some observers see a basic breakdown in the government. Rice has
chosen to play more of an advisory role to the president and failed to
coordinate the often warring agencies like State and Defense. “Cheney
was acting as national-security adviser because of Rice’s failure to do
so,” says Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies.

State Department staffers say that Cheney’s office pushed hard to
include dubious evidence of Iraq’s terror ties in Powell’s speech to the
United Nations last February. Libby fought for an inclusion of the
alleged meeting between Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague. Powell
resisted, but Powell’s aides were impressed with Libby’s persistence. In
the end, the reference to Atta was dropped, but Powell did include other
examples linking Baghdad to Al Qaeda. When the State Department wanted
to cut off funds to Chalabi for alleged accounting failures, Cheney
backed shifting the money from the State Department to the Defense
Department. It is significant, however, that Cheney ultimately did not
support setting up Chalabi as a government in exile, a ploy that the
State Department and CIA strongly opposed. They feared that Chalabi
would proclaim himself ruler-by-fiat after an American invasion. Though
Chalabi’s people often talked to Cheney’s staff, the vice president has
no particular brief for the INC chief over any other democratically
elected leader, says an administration official.

Accused of overstating the Iraqi threat by politicians and pundits,
Cheney is publicly and privately unrepentant. He believes that Al Qaeda
is determined to obtain weapons of mass destruction and use them against
American civilians in their cities and homes. To ignore those warnings
would be “irresponsible in the extreme,” he says in his speeches. His
staffers are not unmindful of the risk of crying wolf, however, and
acknowledge that if weapons of mass destruction are never found in Iraq,
the public will be much less likely to back pre-emptive wars in the
future. Cheney still believes the WMD will turn up somewhere in Iraq—if
they aren’t first used against us by terrorists.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/26/politics/26MEMO.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&posi\
tion=

August 26, 2003
POLITICAL MEMO
Bush 'Compassion' Agenda: A Liability in '04?
By ELISABETH BUMILLER


WASHINGTON, Aug. 25 — President Bush is running for re-election as a
"compassionate conservative" who has sought to bring a new Republican
approach to poverty and other social ills. Indeed, his campaign Web site
is lush with a "compassion photo gallery" showing him reading to
schoolchildren, helping out at a soup kitchen and visiting an AIDS
treatment center in Africa.

But supporters, some administration officials among them, acknowledge
that Mr. Bush's "compassionate conservative" agenda has fallen so far
short of its ambitious goals, in a number of cases undercut by pressure
from his conservative backers, that they fear he will be politically
vulnerable on the issue in 2004.

At the same time, some religious supporters of Mr. Bush say they feel
betrayed by promises he made as a candidate and now, they maintain, has
broken as president.

"After three years, he's failed the test," said one prominent early
supporter, the Rev. Jim Wallis, leader of Call to Renewal, a network of
churches that fights poverty.

Mr. Wallis said Mr. Bush had told him as president-elect that "I don't
understand how poor people think," and appealed to him for help by
calling himself "a white Republican guy who doesn't get it, but I'd like
to." Now, Mr. Wallis said, "his policy has not come even close to
matching his words."

Joshua B. Bolten, White House budget director and formerly Mr. Bush's
chief domestic policy adviser, responded in an interview last week by
saying that "I think that is one of the most unfair criticisms that has
been leveled against the president."

At issue is Mr. Bush's willingness to demand financing from Congress on
his signature "compassionate conservative" issues, like education reform
and AIDS, with the same energy he has spent to fight for tax cuts and
the Iraq war.

Critics say the pattern has been consistent: The president, in eloquent
speeches that make headlines, calls for millions or even billions of
dollars for new initiatives, then fails to follow through and push hard
for the programs on Capitol Hill.

On one central piece of such legislation, the so-called faith-based bill
to help religious charities, Mr. Bush, after two years of objections
from Democrats, retreated this spring and agreed to strip the bill of
provisions specifically related to religious groups. Instead, it now
largely offers tax incentives to encourage giving to charities of all kinds.

On a proposal this summer to extend a $400-a-child tax credit to
low-income families, Mr. Bush at first demanded that Congress
appropriate the money, then backed off in the face of opposition from
his conservative allies in the House, most notably the majority leader,
Representative Tom DeLay of Texas. The issue is now bottled up in a
dispute between the House and the more moderate Senate, and several
Republican senators have called on Mr. Bush to step in and break the
impasse.

Financing for another item on Mr. Bush's compassion agenda, the national
volunteer program called AmeriCorps, faltered this summer under similar
opposition from Mr. DeLay. Although Mr. Bush forcefully called for
expanding that Clinton-era program in his 2002 State of the Union
address, he was largely silent last month amid objections to a $100
million emergency infusion that it needed to maintain its current level
of operations. The House rejected that spending, leaving AmeriCorps with
an uncertain future.

"Even the president is not omnipotent," Mr. Bolten said of the House
opposition to the AmeriCorps money. "Would that he were. He often says
that life would be a lot easier if it were a dictatorship. But it's not,
and he's glad it's a democracy."

Senator Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat who called on the White House to
intercede with Republicans to help AmeriCorps, rejects that argument,
saying Mr. Bush has simply been unwilling to spend political capital by
standing up to Mr. DeLay.

White House officials say that given difficult political terrain, Mr.
Bush has done well. James Towey, director of the White House Office of
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said the president "takes every
occasion to publicly announce how important these compassion agenda
programs are to him." On some issues, Mr. Towey added, "Congress will go
a lot farther on funding what he asks for than others."

Education reform is one compassion issue that has left Democrats
particularly bitter. In January 2002, with great fanfare, Mr. Bush
signed his No Child Left Behind Act, a landmark bill that mandated
annual testing of children in Grades 3 through 8 and greatly enlarged
the federal role in public education. Democrats like Senator Edward M.
Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representative George Miller of California
were crucial to its passage, and say they went along with the president
on his assurances that the government would give states enough money to
comply with it.

But the White House has now asked for $12 billion to continue that
financing next year, $6 billion less than the legislation authorizes.

"We raised this in the Oval Office, we raised this in our meetings with
the president," Mr. Miller said. "He assured us that the funds would be
there if the reforms were there. This is calculated conservatism, and
they calculate just as much as they can get away with. You can dress it
all up, but at the end of the day he broke his promise. It's not much
more complicated than that."

Mr. Bolten, the White House budget director, responded by saying that
the president had asked for "some very substantial increases" in
education spending — in fact, such spending has risen during his
administration — and that the government's budget deficit "would be
really way out of control" if the White House asked that all bills be
financed to the limits allowed by law.

Democrats have also been angry over Mr. Bush's AIDS legislation, saying
that on this issue, too, he has delivered less than promised. Last
month, they note, the president toured Africa and heavily promoted his
recently enacted bill to fight global AIDS, a measure that authorizes
spending of $3 billion a year for five years.

"I'm here to say you will not be alone in your fight," Mr. Bush said on
July 12 in Nigeria, to applause. "In May, I signed a bill that
authorizes $15 billion for the global fight on AIDS."

"The House of Representatives and the United States Senate," the
president added, "must fully fund this initiative, for the good of the
people on this continent of Africa."

But that very week in Washington, the White House asked for only $2
billion, $1 billion less than authorized, for the first of the five years.

Representative Jim Kolbe, the Arizona Republican who is chairman of the
House Appropriations subcommittee overseeing foreign assistance, argued
that $2 billion was more than enough for the outset of the program. "I
think we're showing sensible compassion," he said.

White House officials say that in September, after Mr. Bush returns to
Washington from a monthlong working vacation at his Texas ranch, he will
move to resolve differences between House and Senate bills that would
add a drug benefit to Medicare. Mr. Bush, Republicans say, is eager for
a bipartisan piece of legislation in time for 2004 that he can cite as a
part of his compassion agenda.

The president will also promote his smaller compassion proposals, like
his call for $50 million a year for three years to provide mentors to
children of prisoners, a program for which Congress provided only $10
million in 2003. Mr. Bush will also push his new Access to Recovery drug
treatment plan, which calls for $200 million a year for three years; so
far, the House has agreed to provide $100 million for the program next
year, but a Senate committee has voted it nothing.

The president, his aide Mr. Towey said, has pioneered a new Republican
approach to social programs, "and like any pioneer, it's tough going."

http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20030813/5402556s.htm

Bush unscathed by investigations. Here's why Special counsels are now a
thing of the past, and GOP-controlled Congress has stifled partisan
inquiries
By Susan Page
USA TODAY

WASHINGTON -- The urge to investigate defined the capital during the
Clinton years. But no more.

For nearly a decade, special counsel inquiries and adversarial
congressional hearings dominated the headlines, etched bitter partisan
lines, led to the impeachment of a president and made the nation's
political debates resemble hand-to-hand combat.

Now, some things have changed. The law that provided for special
counsels has expired. President Bush's fellow Republicans control both
houses of Congress. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm
of Congress, has stepped back from challenging the White House after
losing a court case that sought to open the records of Vice President
Cheney's energy task force.

The result: The White House is better able to control information and
prevent a nagging controversy from becoming a full-blown crisis. It's
harder for Democrats to demand answers and easier for administration
officials to dismiss their charges as political posturing. Fairly or
not, Bush faces less of the daily barrage that prompted President
Clinton to set up a parallel press operation for investigative inquiries
and made Clinton's White House seem at times like an embattled enclave.

Not since the early years of Lyndon Johnson's tenure has a president had
more breathing room.

''It's made an enormous difference, and it's helped Bush in governing,''
says Larry Sabato, a political scientist who studied the pursuit of
Washington scandals during the Clinton years. ''When a president is seen
as besieged and entangled in controversy, he really can't get very much
done. But when a president commands the central institutions of American
politics and has few institutional checks, he can range more widely and
hover above the fray.''

That doesn't mean partisanship has evaporated or even eased. The
charge-and-countercharge on cable TV shows and interest-group ads
continue, and Democrats' frustration with the White House is palpable. A
sense among Democratic regulars that party leaders haven't done enough
to challenge Bush is boosting the presidential prospects of insurgent
Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont.

But the president's Democratic critics now face a much steeper challenge
to force the administration's hand or drive the capital's agenda than
Republicans had during the Clinton administration. As the minority party
in Congress, the Democrats can't schedule a congressional hearing, issue
a subpoena, demand a special counsel or rely on the GAO to obtain
information that the White House doesn't want to give.

Predictably, the parties disagree on whether this a good thing.

''When the Republicans ran the Congress and Clinton was in the White
House, there was no accusation too small for them to pursue,'' says
California Rep. Henry Waxman, the senior Democrat on the House
Government Reform Committee. ''Now that President Bush is in power,
there's no scandal so large that they have any interest in examining it.''

He says he'd like to have hearings on the no-bid contract awarded to
Halliburton, Cheney's former company, to rebuild oilfields in Iraq, for
example.

But White House spokesman Scott McClellan says Bush has delivered on his
campaign promise to ''change the tone'' in Washington.

''The American people want us to be forward-looking and want us to work
together to get things done, not to continue to settle political scores
from the past or score political points,'' he says. ''There is an ugly
side of Washington's recent past, and Americans will not look kindly
upon partisans or presidential candidates who seek to exploit
unsubstantiated rumors or innuendo for political gain.''

It's still possible to request a special counsel to investigate
accusations that raise potential conflicts of interest for the Justice
Department. But the question is now left to Attorney General John
Ashcroft's discretion.

So far, Ashcroft hasn't appointed any. And, with a handful of
exceptions, congressional Republicans have avoided holding hearings that
might embarrass the president -- on precisely who was responsible for
including disputed intelligence claims in the State of the Union address
in January, for instance.

In contrast, by the end of Clinton's first term, Republicans on the
Government Reform Committee had issued 40 subpoenas and held three
hearings into the firing of workers at the White House travel office and
four into the release of confidential FBI files on past officials to a
junior White House aide. Five special counsels had been appointed by
judicial panels to pursue allegations against Clinton and his Cabinet.

One was named in 1995 to investigate whether Henry Cisneros, the
secretary of Housing and Urban Development, lied to the FBI about the
size of payments he had made to his mistress. Cisneros left the
government in 1997 and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in the case in 1999.

That inquiry, after pursuing related allegations, is only now closing
down. The final report is expected to be submitted this fall. It is the
last of the Clinton era to conclude its work.

A blunt weapon

There's little nostalgia for the special counsel law, enacted after the
Watergate scandal and allowed to expire in 1999 without protest from
either party. Critics say the law became a blunt weapon that propelled
marginal accusations into lengthy investigations and maligned innocent
people. The Clinton-era special counsels cost taxpayers nearly $133 million.

During the Bush administration, several special counsels have been
requested: Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., asked for a special counsel to
investigate campaign contributions to Republicans by Westar Energy, a
Kansas utility seeking exemption from some regulations. Environmental
groups wanted an inquiry into whether the No. 2 official at the Interior
Department violated ethics laws to help his former lobbying firm. Sen.
Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., requested one to pursue possible conflicts of
interest in the administration's inquiry into Enron's collapse.

Each time, the Justice Department declined. (Ashcroft recused himself
from the Enron case because he had received Enron contributions as a
Senate candidate.)

Most Democrats are less concerned about the need for criminal
investigations than they are about congressional review of policy,
though. Only the majority party can schedule hearings and require
testimony. Most committee chairmen, Republican or Democratic, aren't
inclined to use those tools to irritate the president when he is from
their own party.

So Democrats now express outrage and demand answers through press
releases, op-ed articles and open letters, hoping for news coverage or a
public groundswell. Lobbying by relatives of people killed in the Sept.
11 terror attacks persuaded congressional Republicans and the White
House to agree to an independent commission that Democrats wanted, for
instance. Persistent media coverage has driven disclosures about those
controversial 16 words in the State of the Union.

Florida Sen. Bob Graham, a presidential hopeful and former chairman of
the Senate Intelligence Committee, says he would love to convene
hearings into the ''misleading statements'' by Bush and others about
whether there was credible evidence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium
in Niger that could be used in a nuclear weapon.

''Were they the result of intelligence agency failures? Or were the
agencies acting appropriately but the information they provided was
manipulated?'' he asks. ''I would want to hold a hearing on that.''

Democrats also want to explore:

* The administration's refusal to declassify a section of the
congressional report on the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The 28 pages
reportedly detail possible Saudi involvement.

* The help that the Federal Aviation Administration gave in May to Texas
Republicans who were trying to track down Democratic state legislators.
The Democrats had flown to Oklahoma to avoid a special session on
redistricting.

* Allegations that the administration has distorted scientific findings
to justify political decisions involving missile defense, environmental
protection and other issues. Last week, Waxman issued a 40-page report
on the subject. A White House spokesman dismissed it as partisan sniping.

''We still have our voices and our ability to speak out when we see
things we don't like,'' says Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, another
presidential contender and the senior Democrat on the Senate
Governmental Affairs Committee.

But he says ''it would be a lot different'' if Democrats could schedule
hearings and call witnesses. ''They'd be under a lot more pressure than
they are today.''

Stuart Roy, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas,
has no sympathy for the other side: ''You have Democrats feeling
irrelevant, and the only way they can make themselves feel more relevant
is to engage in the politics of personal destruction.''

To some extent, partisans in both parties have switched sides. Democrats
like Waxman who decried investigations of the Clinton administration now
express frustration about lacking the tools to get answers from the Bush
administration. Republicans like DeLay who defended the Clinton-era
inquiries now dismiss proposed investigations as political grandstanding.

An agency defanged

When the General Accounting Office sought information about Cheney's
energy task force, the White House refused. Administration officials
said they were determined to rebuff what they saw as an incursion on the
president's constitutional authority.

The GAO then filed its first-ever lawsuit against the White House
demanding the information. But in February, the agency announced it was
dropping the case after losing a round in federal court, although the
watchdog group Judicial Watch is continuing its lawsuit on the same
issue. The head of the GAO, David Walker, said he wouldn't sue the
administration again unless he had the approval of the House and Senate
oversight committees -- committees that control the agency's budget and
are now ruled by Republicans.

''Much of this is the result of unified government,'' with the White
House and Congress under one party's control, says Stephen Hess of the
Brookings Institution, who arrived in Washington as a speechwriter for
President Eisenhower and has been studying capital affairs ever since.
Bush's unchallenged position at the head of the GOP and the discipline
imposed by Republican congressional leaders have magnified the advantages.

Bush is in an even stronger position than the last two presidents who
had unified governments. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress
during the first two years of Clinton's presidency, but Senate Armed
Services Chairman Sam Nunn nonetheless held critical hearings on
administration policy toward gays in the military. Democrats controlled
Congress throughout President Carter's tenure, but his relations with
Congress, even his fellow Democrats, were famously prickly.

The first President Bush and President Reagan had to deal with
opposition control of one or both houses of Congress throughout their
terms. Both administrations faced several special counsel investigations.

The current President Bush had a Democratic-controlled Senate for less
than two years, after Sen. Jim Jeffords, I-Vt., left the GOP in May 2001
and until Republicans regained control in the 2002 elections. If Bush
wins a second term in 2004, many political analysts predict he'll be
presiding over unified government again.

Hess says that favorable landscape gives Bush an opening for the sort of
fundamental policy changes made by such consequential presidents as LBJ
and Franklin Roosevelt. Bush's grand ambitions include a new national
security policy of pre-emption against foreign threats, the creation of
individual investment accounts in Social Security and more tax cuts.

Veterans of the Clinton administration are wistful when they consider
the contrast.

''There were countless investigations, and we ended up consuming
enormous resources that otherwise would have been spent on trying to
move the president's agenda forward,'' says John Podesta, former White
House chief of staff. The Bush team has a big advantage, he says: ''I
don't think the bloodhounds will be out.'


--
Aziz H.Poonawalla

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http://www.latimes.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=la-na-postwar18jul1801\
2420&section=/printstory

WASHINGTON'S BATTLE PLAN
a d v e r t i s e m e n t


Preparing for War, Stumbling to Peace
U.S. is paying the price for missteps made on Iraq
By Mark Fineman, Robin Wright and Doyle McManus
Times Staff Writers

July 18, 2003

WASHINGTON — Secretly, they gathered in an auditorium in the nation's
snowbound capital — uniformed generals, assistant Cabinet secretaries,
war college professors with top security clearance, and senior planners
from the Pentagon, the U.S. Central Command and dozens of other federal
agencies.

The date was Feb. 21. More than 100,000 U.S. and British troops were
already poised at Iraq's doorstep. Their battle plan was rehearsed and
ready. In fewer than 30 days, the first American tanks would cross the
sand berm into Iraq from Kuwait, launching the tip of the spear of what
would be a swift and brilliant battlefield victory.

Yet this two-day gathering at the Pentagon's National Defense University
was the first time all of these planners had gathered under one roof to
address an equally vital matter: how to win the peace in Iraq once the
war was over.

"The messiah could not have organized a sufficient relief and
reconstruction or humanitarian effort in that short a time," recalled
Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst who attended the session.

"The military's war planning was light-years ahead of its planning for
everything else," added a senior defense official who was present.

Jay Garner, the retired Army lieutenant general who led the meeting and
would soon attempt to lead the peace, called it a rock drill: "It's a
military term — you know, you turn over all the rocks."

When they did, Garner acknowledged in a recent interview, the group
uncovered "tons of problems," including gaps in planning, coordination
and anticipation of such mission-threatening problems as looting and
civil unrest.

Nearly five months later, the price for those gaps is still being paid.

Since the fall of Baghdad on April 9, U.S. and British troops have
struggled to bring order from chaos. Water, electricity and security are
in short supply, fueling resentment among many Iraqis. A guerrilla-like
resistance has taken shape against the occupation; U.S. casualties mount
almost daily in an op-eration that is costing nearly $4 billion a month
and stalling the withdrawal of American forces.

The Bush administration planned well and won the war with minimal allied
casualties. Now, according to interviews with dozens of administration
officials, military leaders and independent analysts, missteps in the
planning for the subsequent peace could threaten the lives of soldiers
and drain U.S. resources indefinitely and cloud the victory itself.

Rivalry and Misreadings

The tale of what went wrong is one of agency infighting, ignored
warnings and faulty assumptions.

An ambitious, yearlong State Department planning effort predicted many
of the postwar troubles and advised how to resolve them. But the man who
oversaw that effort was kept out of Iraq by the Pentagon, and most of
his plans were shelved. Meanwhile, Douglas J. Feith, the No. 3 official
at the Pentagon, also began postwar planning, in September. But he
didn't seek out an overseer to run the country until January.

The man he picked, Garner, had run the U.S. operation to protect ethnic
Kurds in northern Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Based on that
experience, Garner acknowledged, he badly underestimated the looting and
lawlessness that would follow once Saddam Hussein's army was defeated.
By the time he got to Baghdad, Garner said, 17 of 21 Iraqi ministries
had "evaporated."

"Being a Monday morning quarterback," Garner says now, the
underestimation was a mistake. "But if I had known that then, what would
I have done about it?"

The postwar planning by the State and Defense departments, along with
that of other agencies, was done in what bureaucrats call "vertical
stovepipes." Each agency worked independently for months, with little
coordination.

Even within the Pentagon there were barriers: The Joint Chiefs of Staff
on the second floor worked closely with the State Department planners,
while Feith's Special Plans Office on the third floor went its own way,
working with a team from the Central Command under Army Gen. Tommy Franks.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's civilian aides decided that they
didn't need or want much help, officials in both departments say.

Central Command officials confirmed that their postwar planning group —
dubbed Task Force Four, for the fourth phase of the war plan — took a
back seat to the combat planners. What postwar planning did occur at the
Central Command and the Pentagon was on disasters that never occurred:
oil fires, masses of refugees, chemical and biological warfare, lethal
epidemics, starvation.

The Pentagon planners also made two key assumptions that proved faulty.
One was that American and British authorities would inherit a fully
functioning modern state, with government ministries, police forces and
public utilities in working order — a "plug and play" occupation. The
second was that the resistance would end quickly.

Some top Pentagon officials acknowledged that they have been surprised
at how difficult it has been to establish order.

"The so-called forces of law and order [in Baghdad] just kind of
collapsed," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said in an
interview. "There's not a single plan that would have dealt with that
This is a country that was ruled by a gang of terrorist criminals, and
they're still around. They're threatening Iraqis and killing Americans."

The military's sprint to Baghdad initially vindicated Rumsfeld's prime
directive to transform the U.S. armed forces into a lighter, more mobile
force. It shortened the war, probably prevented many of the disasters
the Pentagon had been planning for and saved lives during the takeover
of Iraq. One senior Central Command official said the still-classified
battle plan called for as many as 125 days of combat. Baghdad fell in
just 20.

But the quick victory also created what Franks called "catastrophic
success." It left large areas of the country and millions of Iraqis
under no more than nominal allied control, with a force considerably
smaller than some experts inside and outside the military had warned
would be needed to stabilize and occupy the country.

"I would not for a minute in hindsight go back and say, 'Gee, we should
have gone slower so we could have had more forces built up behind us to
control areas that we went past,' " Wolfowitz said.

One result, he acknowledged, is "it leaves you with some holes you fill
in behind."

But could those unfilled holes have been foreseen? Many outside the
Pentagon say yes.

The Beginnings

The seeds for planning a postwar Iraq were sown on April 9, 2002, when
Afghanistan was still on center stage and an invasion of Iraq was just
talk. That was the first meeting of the Future of Iraq project, the
brainchild of Thomas S. Warrick, a veteran civil servant in the State
Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.

Warrick, who declined to comment for this report, quietly recruited
about 240 Iraqi exiles, in Europe and the U.S., with professional
experience in such fields as criminal justice, health, economics and
oil. They drafted blueprints for everything from securing the streets to
reforming the Iraqi currency.

"We emphasized the security issue from the beginning," said Ali
Al-Attar, an Iraqi American physician from northern Virginia. "That was
one of the major concerns. We were expecting that the Baathists were
going to sabotage our work."

Reforming and restructuring Hussein's armed forces was another top
priority of the Future of Iraq project. Iraq's army and other military
commands employed nearly 500,000 people, most of them men with large
families to feed. Only a handful were closely tied to Hussein's Baath Party.

Mohammed Faour, a former major in Iraq's special forces, chaired the
project's defense working group, which produced a volume of studies
laying out a quick reformation of the army. They concluded that the
soldiers could be retrained to protect and repair government buildings,
airports, bridges, dams and other key infrastructure.

Yet instead of putting the soldiers to work, U.S. occupation authorities
abruptly disbanded the armed forces as part of a de-Baathification
campaign, sending hundreds of thousands of former soldiers into the
streets in angry protest.

"Nobody listened to us," Faour recalled sadly. "We were just put aside."

It didn't help that the State Department project was something of a
backdoor operation from the start.

"We started it just as an academic exercise, knowing that getting any
kind of pre-Iraq planning approved through the interagency process would
probably be impossible," one senior State Department official said.

"After it was up and running, we briefed and invited others to attend,"
the official said. At first no one did, but as the prospect of war grew
stronger, representatives from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, the
National Security Council and even the Pentagon attended some of the
meetings.

As early as last July, the Joint Chiefs of Staff formed a team to plug
into the State Department's planning process, working with Warrick. And
late last summer, the National Security Council staff sought to
coordinate all the postwar planning efforts in an effort that came to be
known simply as ''the interagency.''

Not that it mattered. Military officials "had their own list of people
they wanted involved and didn't want to take recommendations from us,"
the State Department official said.

In October, while Warrick's group worked on its blueprints and the
administration pushed its diplomatic efforts at the United Nations, a
new Pentagon office headed by Feith was created partly to oversee
postwar planning. It operated in secret — even its name, the Special
Plans Office, was intended to obscure its purpose, officials said.

"The Special Plans Office was called Special Plans because, at the time,
calling it Iraqi Planning Office might have undercut our diplomatic
efforts," Feith told reporters last month.

But that veil of secrecy also insulated the Defense secretary's postwar
planners from other agencies' assessments on Iraq that didn't easily
mesh with their fast-moving, light-force battle plans.

Looking back, senior officials from State and other departments charge
bitterly that Feith and other Pentagon aides based most of their
assessments on information provided by exiled Iraqi opposition leader
Ahmad Chalabi, who predicted that the regime would suddenly collapse by
"decapitation," leaving the government's institutions in place, and who
expected that postwar Iraq would be a country of U.S.-flag-waving citizens.

Feith vehemently denies that Pentagon planners fell victim to
over-optimistic Chalabi predictions. Such charges, he said, are based on
"the notion that we're a bunch of simple-minded saps and unsophisticated
jerks."

U.S. intelligence officials, long skeptical of Chalabi, say they warned
repeatedly that the postwar period would be tough.

"The U.S. intelligence community warned early and often about myriad
threats it anticipated at the outset of the war and the challenges
likely to erupt in the postwar environment," CIA spokesman Bill Harlow
said in a statement to The Times.

Intelligence officials, he added, were "utterly consistent in arguing
that reconstruction rather than war would be the most problematic
segment of overthrowing Saddam's regime. Specifically, the [intelligence
community] warned prior to the conflict that Iraqis would probably
resort to obstruction, resistance and armed opposition if they perceived
attempts to keep them dependent on the United States and the West."

As fall turned to winter and U.S. troops began arriving in the Persian
Gulf by the tens of thousands, a veritable library of warnings and
proposed remedies was piling up within the administration, focusing on
the very items that would ultimately paralyze much of the postwar
effort: a lack of security, electricity, water and other basic needs.

Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel and longtime professor at
military war colleges, prepared an elaborate document spotlighting the
fragility of Iraq's electricity and water systems after decades of
neglect. In private meetings arranged by former Pentagon spokesman
Kenneth H. Bacon, he warned such senior administration officials as
Zalmay Khalilzad, President Bush's national security point man on Iraq,
that both systems would collapse even if they weren't targeted in the war.

"This is a catastrophe waiting to happen," several senior Defense
Department officials said Gardiner told them at the time.

At the State Department, Future of Iraq participants also predicted
widespread power outages that would almost surely short-circuit
reconstruction. They recommended shipping in "mini-power stations" to
supplement Iraq's antiquated, overloaded and damaged electrical grid.

The group also foresaw the collapse of telecommunications. It proposed
rolling out cellular "networks in a box" capable of linking several
thousand users in metropolitan areas within the first weeks of occupation.

For months, the Central Command separately had sent progress reports on
the war planning to the Pentagon, and for months a list of postwar
issues showed up at the bottom of the memo as unresolved "open items,"
officials said. But Feith and his aides assured Rumsfeld that they had
the planning process under control.

Bush gave Rumsfeld overall authority for the postwar plan, to maintain
what he called "a unity of concept and a unity of leadership," Feith
said. Despite some misgivings, State Department officials said,
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell agreed.

"Since so many of the responsibilities were military security
responsibilities, the only person who could really do that was the
secretary of defense," Feith said.

A Man With Experience

If the Pentagon was to run postwar operations in Iraq, Feith needed both
a mechanism and a man.

The mechanism would be the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian
Assistance, or ORHA, which Bush would create Jan. 20 by presidential
decree. The man would be Jay Garner.

In the aftermath of the 1991 war, then-Maj. Gen. Garner had
distinguished himself pacifying northern Iraq. He had opened the way for
hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds to peacefully return home.

Garner had also caught the eye of Rumsfeld, who later picked him to
serve along with Wolfowitz on a high-profile commission that examined
the feasibility of a ballistic missile defense system.

On Jan. 9, Feith placed a call to Garner in Manhattan. Garner was in a
business suit delivering the year-end earnings report for his company,
SYColeman, a subsidiary of defense contractor L-3 Communications Corp.

"I'm calling you as a request from Secretary Rumsfeld. We have to put
together a team for postwar Iraq, if there is a war," the retired
general remembers Feith saying. "We'd like for you to come in and do the
planning, put the team together and get it organized."

Garner balked. At 64, he had been out of the Army almost six years and
was deep into a lucrative second career with L-3, which had bought out
his Santa Barbara-based SY Technology for about $48 million two years
earlier.

"Well, I don't know if I can do that," Garner said he told Feith. "I've
got a company here I'm running that's got about 2,000 people, and I've
got a wife I've been married to for over 40 years, so I've got to get
permission from both."

In the end, after securing his wife's blessing and a four-month leave
from L-3, Garner moved back to the Pentagon on Jan. 17 — just 62 days
before the military launched Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Garner recalled the "vertical stovepipe" he inherited:

"Defense had done a lot of planning. State had done a lot of planning.
USAID [the U.S. Agency for International Development] had done an awful
lot of planning. Agriculture had done planning. Treasury had done an
awful lot of planning. Justice Department had done an awful lot of planning.

"Each one of them did their own planning, and they did it — this isn't a
criticism of them, it's just the way you start things — they did it with
the perspective of their agency."

For example, the Central Command had drawn up detailed lists of targets
the military should avoid in order to facilitate reconstruction. But it
did so initially with no input from other agencies that had a more
precise understanding of the vulnerabilities of Iraq's obsolescent
infrastructure.

It wasn't until shortly before the first missiles and bombs were
launched at Iraq that Garner's group added a long list of additional
targets to be avoided, which he conceded was not entirely respected.

"What needed to happen was the horizontal integration of these plans.
And there had been no mechanism to horizontally integrate them until
Secretary Rumsfeld thought of putting ORHA together," Garner said.

By all accounts, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith closely managed ORHA from
the start, and were directly involved in choosing many of its top
civilian officials.

The Defense Department blocked Warrick, creator of the Future of Iraq
project, from joining ORHA. Senior State Department officials said he
was packing files to move to the Pentagon when he was told to stay put.
One reason, State Department officials said, was that he wanted a wide
range of Iraqis to be included in a new government. Pentagon leaders
were pushing exile leader Chalabi.

Asked whether he, Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld had blocked Warrick, Feith said:
"I never the met the guy. I wouldn't know him if he walked in the room."
He added, however, that Garner's team and its successor, the Coalition
Provisional Authority, "are mostly State Department people."

After a month spent recruiting a team that included five former generals
and eight current or retired ambassadors, Garner convened his first
interagency meeting, the so-called rock drill, in February.

In attendance were assistant secretaries from Defense, State and other
departments. U.S. and British generals from Task Force Four flew in from
Kuwait. There were so many warriors and extras in the Eisenhower Hall at
National Defense University, one attendee recalled, "it was like a cast
call for the remaking of 'Ben-Hur.' "

A diplomat who was there suggested another Hollywood analogy: the Clint
Eastwood movie about aging astronauts brought in to save the day.

"There was a feeling that these were like the Space Cowboys," he said.
"They had been brought together at speed, brought in from retirement and
running companies or their farms at the twilight of their careers. They
were all impressive and able and had great camaraderie and knew how each
other worked. But they had to take on a huge task in a very short time
with too many unknowns To do it right, that rock drill needed to have
begun 18 months earlier."

U.N. diplomacy dominated the headlines that weekend. At Garner's
meeting, the painful truth about postwar Iraq was uncoiling.

Said a senior Defense Department official: "Rebuilding local governance,
immediate replacement of the security apparatus — these things were
never adequately discussed." The attitude was, "We'll go with what we've
got and take care of the rest when we get there."

On the crucial issue of security, a senior official on Garner's team
said, "The civilians and the military never got on the same page."

When the rock drill broke up on Saturday, Feb. 22, war was just 26 days
away. But two intervening events would add greatly to the postwar burden
— a result of costly miscalculations on how long-standing U.S. allies
would respond.

On March 1, Turkey upended Washington's battle plan by denying the use
of Turkish land as a staging area for a northern front. That allowed an
escape route for Hussein sympathizers to their traditional strongholds
north of Baghdad, where the resistance since the war has been the worst.

And on March 5, France, Russia and Germany pledged to oppose a U.N.
resolution supporting the war, thwarting the administration's diplomatic
plans.

Until then, U.S. strategy was still based on winning U.N. endorsement to
act against Iraq — so the international community would play a larger
role both during and after the war.

Only days before the assault began, the United States realized it would
have only a handful of allies to help it run postwar Iraq.

Waiting to Go In

Garner would have to call audibles, as Wolfowitz described it later.

One week after the rock drill, Garner deployed an advance party of about
30 staffers to Kuwait. He followed on March 16 with about 165 people in
tow, setting up interim headquarters in seaside villas at a resort south
of the capital, Kuwait City.

Four days later, U.S. and British troops poured into Iraq. Garner's
group planned while the war raged. Baghdad fell on April 9. But for
nearly two weeks more, Garner's team remained stuck in Kuwait.

Garner said Gen. Franks would not let him in sooner because the
situation on the ground was too dangerous. Garner thought his absence
was dangerous.

"If you are absent too long, while expectations are created for our
government a vacuum occurs," Garner told a Times reporter while he was
cooling his heels at Kuwait's seaside Hilton. "And if you are not there,
the vacuum gets filled in ways you don't want."

Finally, on April 17, Garner flew to Central Command operations
headquarters in Qatar to meet with Franks.

"You got to get me into Baghdad," he recalled telling Franks. "And he
said: 'It's not secure enough yet. I can't get you in there right now.'
I've known Franks for 25 years. So we talked back and forth. That night,
he called me back and he said, 'OK, you're released to go.' "

Garner and a small staff arrived in Baghdad on the 21st, followed in the
next few days by 300 more in a convoy of Chevy Suburbans.

Garner said he was shocked by what they found.

In the days following the Army's capture of the palatial icons of
Saddam's rule, and while Garner and his team were idling in Kuwait, the
only crowds in Baghdad were the swarms of Iraqis who dissected almost
every government ministry building desk by desk, wire by wire and pipe
by pipe.

So massive was the looting that, just three days after the U.S. secured
the capital, computers were selling for as little as $35 in the thieves
market.

"Our planning process was that we needed to immediately [restore] the
ministries, because that's the only way that you get government services
back and get the country functioning again," Garner said.

"But what happens is when we get there, they're not there anymore."

One reason planners underestimated the looting, Garner said, was his own
history with the Kurds in northern Iraq. There, he said, the looting was
comparatively modest, and he expected the same in Baghdad.

The Kurds "looted, but the buildings were left intact They didn't pull
out the wiring. They didn't pull out the plumbing and they didn't put it
on fire," Garner said.

If Garner was unprepared for what he found, so were the soldiers who
captured Baghdad.

Buckets of Staplers

On April 9, Task Force 4-64 of the 2nd Brigade of the Army's 3rd
Infantry Division — the brigade that took central Baghdad — began the
day on a war footing.

That morning, its infantrymen had surrounded the Justice Ministry, a
nine-story building in the center of the capital. They had heard noises
inside during the night and feared that Iraqi snipers were holed up there.

But when they broke through the gates and cautiously entered the lobby,
weapons raised, the soldiers were greeted by two grinning boys hauling
plastic buckets filled with stolen desk blotters, staplers, pens and
paper clips.

Mirror images across Baghdad and much of Iraq formed a
klepto-kaleidoscope: Mobs of men and boys ran up and down the stairwells
of ministries, hauling off desks, chairs, copiers, fax machines,
telephones and carpets. GIs stood next to their tanks and Bradley
fighting vehicles and watched them strip the buildings clean.

Troop commanders said they had never been told by their superiors that
safeguarding the ministries was a top priority.

To the south, 2,200 troops from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit from
Camp Pendleton were posted to Nasiriyah. While looters rampaged, the
Marines fought off snipers, delivered a baby, rebuilt an orphanage and
tried to put the power and water systems back in place.

"We were trying to clear out the bad guys, provide security and restart
the government. Nobody ever taught us how to do that," said Col. Thomas
Waldhauser, the commanding officer.

Few would expect forces to fight with one hand while stopping looters
with the other. But critics say that wouldn't have been necessary if
there were more troops to begin with.

Applying the same peacekeepers-to-population ratio that was used
successfully in Kosovo, 500,000 troops would be needed in Iraq, said
James Dobbins, the Bush administration special envoy to Afghanistan and
the Clinton administration special envoy for Somalia, Haiti,
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.

There are currently about 148,000 American troops on the ground in Iraq.

"While the U.S. could take Iraq with three divisions, it couldn't hold
it with three divisions," said Dobbins, now director of international
security and defense policy at Rand Corp.

Feith said his planners did anticipate disorder and looting — but
decided that other risks, such as oil field fires, refugee flows or
famine, were more dangerous.

"When you plan you [assess] various risks and you say, 'You can't do
everything,' he said. "That's life

"There were certain risks that we decided to invest more resources in,
and there were other risks that we understood that we couldn't address
to the same extent

"Nobody expected this to be immaculate. Everybody expected that this was
going to be a war and that there was going to be an aftermath, and the
aftermath was going to be untidy."

Garner has many defenders in the administration who say his mission was
almost impossible, given the planning process that preceded him.

With restoration of Iraq's basic services seemingly stalled, and deadly
attacks on U.S. forces rising, something had to give. It turned out to
be Garner. He insists he was not pushed out; his term was fixed at four
months from the start. But the announcement of his departure was abrupt.

Though his replacement didn't come much earlier than Feith initially
told him it would, the expectation was that Garner would have the Iraqi
ministries up and running by that time.

At 8 p.m. on April 24, just three days after he got to Baghdad and with
the city sliding into chaos, Garner remembers, "I got a call from
Rumsfeld, who says, 'Jay, the president selected Jerry [L. Paul] Bremer
to be the presidential envoy [to Iraq].' And he says: 'You're going to
like him. He's a good guy.'

"And I said, 'Well, I'll bring him in here, and I'll go home.'

"And he said: 'No, I don't want you to do that. I want you to transition.'

"And I said, 'How long do you want me to stay?'

"And he said, 'You and Jerry work it out.' "

Garner left Baghdad on June 1, three weeks after Bremer arrived. On June
16, Wolfowitz formally dissolved the Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq.

Looking to the Future

As Bremer now struggles to normalize Iraq amid rising violence and the
destabilizing likelihood that Saddam Hussein is still alive, Rumsfeld
and other administration officials have taken to pointing out the chaos
that has followed similar events in other countries, including the
American Revolution.

Critics say that is all the more reason to be ready for the worst.

"It's not true there wasn't adequate planning. There was a volume of
planning. More than the Clinton administration did for any of its
interventions," said Rand's Dobbins.

"They planned on an unrealistic set of assumptions," he said. "Clearly,
in retrospect, they should have anticipated that when the old regime
collapsed, there would be a period of disorder, a vacuum of power They
should have anticipated extremist elements would seek to fill this
vacuum of power. All of these in one form or another have been
replicated in previous such experiences, and it was reasonable to plan
for them."

Looking back from the third floor of the Pentagon, Feith dismissed such
criticism as "simplistic." Despite initial problems, he said, progress
is being made, with order returning to most of the country and a new
Iraqi governing council in place.

Still, he and other Pentagon officials said, they are studying the
lessons of Iraq closely — to ensure that the next U.S. takeover of a
foreign country goes more smoothly.

"We're going to get better over time," promised Lawrence Di Rita, a
special assistant to Rumsfeld. "We've always thought of post-hostilities
as a phase" distinct from combat, he said. "The future of war is that
these things are going to be much more of a continuum

"This is the future for the world we're in at the moment," he said.
"We'll get better as we do it more often."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also contributing to this report were Times staff writers Richard T.
Cooper, Warren Vieth, Sonni Efron, Greg Miller, Alissa J. Rubin, Esther
Schrader, John Hendren, Tony Perry, David Zucchino and Laura King, and
Times researchers Christopher Chandler and Robin Cochran.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

THE PROTESTS

•  Unrest in postwar Iraq has hindered the U.S.-led reconstruction
effort. One source of anger was the Pentagon's decision to disband the
armed forces, which employed nearly 500,000 people. A State Department
working group had argued for preserving the jobs.

THE LOOTING

•  U.S. officials acknowledge that they badly underestimated the amount
of looting that would follow the war. Troop commanders say they were
never told by their superiors that safeguarding the ministries — vital
to building a new Iraqi government — was a priority.

THE DESTRUCTION OF FACILITIES

•  Telecommunications buildings and other infrastructure were ruined by
looters and others after the war. A prewar planning document had warned
the Bush administration that Iraq's neglected water and power systems
were likely to collapse.

JAY GARNER

•  The retired Army general, left, the first civilian administrator in
Iraq, said that by the time he got to Baghdad, 17 of 21 ministries had
"evaporated" because of looting.

DOUGLAS FEITH

•  His Pentagon office initially worked without input from planners at
the State Department.

TOMMY FRANKS

•  The quick victory in Iraq created a "catastrophic success," according
to the wartime commander.

PAUL WOLFOWITZ

•  No plan could have dealt with Iraq's collapse of law, the deputy
Defense secretary says.

L. PAUL BREMER

•  Garner's replacement as civilian administrator is now in charge of
normalizing the country.

AHMAD CHALABI

•  The Iraqi opposition leader, who advised the Pentagon, predicted
broad support for the U.S.

DONALD RUMSFELD

•  President Bush gave the Defense secretary overall authority for the
postwar plan to maintain "unity."


--
Aziz H.Poonawalla

Welcome to UNMEDIA !

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Please use the following format for all subject lines, so that messages are easy
to filter, browse, and search through:

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7. Moderation

Messages that don't follow the posting guidelines will probably be rejected
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that are totally off-topic are also rejection fodder (like email forwards,
jokes, virus warnings, etc).

More moderators are desperately needed, especially if this list gains some
critical mass, so please contact Aziz at aziz@... if you have time and
inclination to assist.

6. CNN-TW-AOL, MSNBC, ABC-Disney ...

and their ilk are verboten! well, given that media conglomerates are so vast,
its unrealistic to try and completely exclude them. After all, opinion articles
from Slate are sometimes quite good, though it is a tentacle of MSNBC. But a
focus on international sources of news, and out-of-mainstream and academic
papers, is preferred. See the Links section for a sampling.

Welcome to UNMEDIA !

Posting Guidelines

1. Subject line format

Please use the following format for all subject lines, so that messages are easy
to filter, browse, and search through:

Subject: [keyword] Title of Article (Author)

the keyword can be any SINGLE word that you think is appropriate to describe the
topic (examples are, "palestinians", "refugees", "drugs", "women", etc.)

2. Message - include reference, full text

Please be sure to include BOTH the:
- complete URL to the article, and the
- full text of the article

some articles have a "view for printing" feature on their website which remove
all formatting and make it easy to cut and paste.

3. Photos

Some articles may have photos or other graphics associated with them that you
want to include. You can upload the Photo to the UNMEDIA Photos section
(http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/unmedia/lst). Please store the photos in a
subdir with the same name as your keyword from the Subject line, to keep them
broadly organized. The Description should be the same as the caption.

At the bottom of the email message, just include this text to indicate that a
photo is available:

PHOTO: [ORIGINAL URL]
COPIED: UNMEDIA/Photos/keyword
Caption Text

4. Discussions

This list exists only to share articles and essays culled from online sources.
It is not a discussion list, so please reply only to the original author if you
have comments. We all get too much mail as it is, so by keeping the content on
the list focused, we can ensure high SNR.

You are encouraged, even requested, to take articles from unmedia and to share
them with other circles of friends, acquaintances, workmates, etc. Think of
unmedia as a central exchange for ideas, which you should do your best to
disseminate.

5. Links

There is a links section on the Yahoo Group which you are encouraged to use to
share your favorite alternate media sources.

7. Moderation

Messages that don't follow the posting guidelines will probably be rejected
without explanation, due to time constraints. Political views will not be
censored, but if the list starts having high volume, some messages will probably
fall through the cracks. There just aren't enough hours in the day. Messages
that are totally off-topic are also rejection fodder (like email forwards,
jokes, virus warnings, etc).

More moderators are desperately needed, especially if this list gains some
critical mass, so please contact Aziz at aziz@... if you have time and
inclination to assist.

6. CNN-TW-AOL, MSNBC, ABC-Disney ...

and their ilk are verboten! well, given that media conglomerates are so vast,
its unrealistic to try and completely exclude them. After all, opinion articles
from Slate are sometimes quite good, though it is a tentacle of MSNBC. But a
focus on international sources of news, and out-of-mainstream and academic
papers, is preferred. See the Links section for a sampling.

http://www.columbiapoliticalreview.com/article014.asp

THE CUTTING EDGE: THE GRASSROOTS POLITICS OF HEZZBOLLAH
By Adam B. Kushner

In 1400 B.C., at the south end of Lebanon's fertile Bekaa Valley, a
Phoenician tradesman carved a simple paean to the area's tranquil beauty
into a stone mile marker: "Place of the Gods." In 3,400 years, things in the
Bekaa Valley have remained remarkably the same. Although the Valley's
current tenants don't see themselves as gods, per se, they do consider
themselves proprietors of God's will. They take their name, "party of God,"
from the Koran-"Verily the party of God shall be victorious"-and they are
avowed advocates for the creation of a Lebanese Islamic republic modeled
after Iran's. They are the fundamentalist group Hezbollah.

The story of Hezbollah begins with the Lebanese Civil War. In 1975,
discontented by the governance of northern Lebanon's elite Maronite
Christians, competing ethnic and religious factions armed their own militias
and opened a bloody battle to wrest control of the country from the
Maronites. Muslims from southern Lebanon-where almost a quarter of a million
impoverished Palestinian refugees had fled over the previous decades-had
been particularly disenfranchised, and their embittered Amal militia was a
remarkably effective combat force. The bloodshed continued unabated until
late 1976 when Syria intervened with an occupying force of 40,000 to
preserve the Maronite order. Syria has retained de facto control of Lebanon
ever since.

But the group to which Syria gave dominion of southern Lebanon, the Amal
faction, was crooked and ineffective. Devout Muslims could not reconcile its
corruption with their own moral scruples. So in 1982, dispossessed Shiites,
calling themselves Hezbollah, gathered around the Iraqi cleric Mohammed
Hussayn Fadlallah, who preached that Lebanese Muslims should undertake-by
force if necessary-an Islamic Revolution like Iran's just a few years
earlier.

At first, Hezbollah was a splinter group of pious men, but it soon armed its
own militia and conjoined the struggle for Muslim self-determination with
the fight against Israel-Iran's worst enemy and the Maronites' best friend.
Hezbollah amplified its animus towards Zionism when Israel invaded Lebanon
in 1982, advancing as far as Beirut in a drive to secure a friendly
Christian government and to oust Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Liberation
Organization, a terrorist group renowned at that time for vicious
cross-border attacks.

Lebanese Muslims in the south originally welcomed the invasion, hoping the
eviction of the PLO would herald a long awaited peace. But Israel overstayed
its welcome without stabilizing the area, and Hezbollah grew from a
fundamentalist break-away to a popular, grassroots organization. It
outmaneuvered and eventually outgrew the Amal faction by winning the
allegiance of Shiites, for whom it provided protection and social services.

  Lebanon's relationship with Israel took a nosedive when, in September 1982,
Christian militiamen allied with Israel undertook a three-day killing spree
in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, massacring up to
2,000 men, women, and children. An Israeli government commission found
then-defense minister Ariel Sharon "indirectly guilty" for knowing about,
but failing to stop, the attacks. In retaliation, Syria allowed Iran to
dispatch 1,000 troops from its elite Revolutionary Guard Corps into
Hezbollah's Bekaa Valley training camps, where militants were preparing for
the coming insurgency.

Hezbollah strutted onto the international stage on a sunny Sunday morning in
October 1983. A truck packed with 2,000 pounds of TNT careened into the
barracks of a U.S. Marine station just south of Beirut, killing 241
servicemen. Seconds later, another attack killed 60 French soldiers
belonging to a multilateral force just down the road. Hezbollah had invented
the synchronized attack that al Qaeda has since perfected.

Although Israel eventually pulled out of Beirut and central Lebanon in 1985,
it kept forces in the south until Prime Minister Ehud Barak withdrew them in
2000. By that time, the invasion had cost Israel over 900 lives and billions
of dollars. Hezbollah guerillas believed that their resistance had finally
driven out the enemy. The lesson was clear: persistence pays off in spades.
After the Israeli pullout, Hezbollah's secretary-general, Sayyid Hassan
Nasrallah, gave a speech: "I tell you: this 'Israel' that owns nuclear
weapons and the strongest air force in the region is more fragile than a
spiderweb." And it's no coincidence that jihadist organizations-particularly
Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and groups in the West Bank-learned the lesson that
terror can work just before the start of the al Aqsa intifada. The lesson
for Israel was no less compelling: by showing vulnerability, Barak gave up
Israel's deterrent capacity and emboldened the enemy.

Aside from the attacks in Lebanon in the early 1980s, Hezbollah is thought
to have coordinated the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight in which a Navy diver
was executed; the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, which
left 29 dead; the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires,
which killed 85 and was the deadliest act against Jews since the Holocaust
(and in which then-Argentine President Carlos Menem, a man of Syrian
descent, has been implicated for taking a $10 million bribe to cover up Iran
's involvement); and the 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia,
which killed 19 American servicemen.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told an audience last year that
"Hezbollah may be the A-Team of terrorists and maybe al Qaeda is actually
the B-Team. They're on the list and their time will come," he said, adding
colorfully that "we're going to go after these problems just like a high
school wrestler goes after a match. We're going to take them down one at a
time." Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.) chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee
during the 107th session and favored "dealing" with Hezbollah and Syria
before Iraq. "According to our intelligence community," he told me,
"Hezbollah is a more capable terrorist organization than al Qaeda, with a
state supporter-Iran-that possesses weapons of mass destruction and a track
record of attacking Americans and American interests."

Although Hezbollah's level of involvement with the Buenos Aires and Khobar
Towers bombings is not clear, the group is known to have an international
fundraising network which may be capable of training and concealing
terrorists. The Triple Frontier between Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina, for
example, is a haven for Shiite businessmen, Arab self-exiles, and
international smugglers. Hezbollah has an elaborate charity racket
established there, where it extorts money, mafia-style, from small
businesses and black-market traders. Other cells exist in Thailand, Somalia,
and even the United States until just after September 11, when prominent
Muslim charities based in Michigan and North Carolina were shut down. The
other bulk of Hezbollah's money, about half, comes in the form of an annual
$100 million stipend from the government of Iran. That sum does not include
the regular arms shipments.

In recent years, though, the group's terror activity has ebbed
significantly, giving way to increased guerilla activity. Hezbollah has
focused its paramilitary endeavors on a puny 25-acre sprawl that Israel uses
as a buffer between it and southern Lebanon, called the Shebaa Farms. The
Farms have traditionally belonged to Syria, but Syria claims that by using
it, Israel is occupying Lebanese land. The United Nations has dismissed this
argument, though Syria maintains it gave Lebanon the Farms in 1951.

From the Farms, Hezbollah launches its occasional Katyusha attacks on
positions in northern Israel. (Katyusha rockets are small missiles that can
be loaded onto the back of a truck; they can travel between four and 12
miles.) Some military analysts have suggested that the Katyusha arsenal
could hit targets as far south as Haifa, 30 miles away, but so far they
haven't even come close.

Much more worrying are three recent developments. First, in January 2002,
the Israeli Navy intercepted the Karine A-a cargo ship that Hezbollah had
loaded with Iranian mortars, anti-tank weapons, grenade launchers, and
short-range rockets-before it could dock in Gaza City. The weapons weren't
meant for Islamic Jihad or Hamas; they were earmarked for the Palestinian
Authority, whose chairman, Yasser Arafat, has denied involvement. Second,
within the last year, transports from Damascus have delivered several
hundred Iranian-made Fajr-5 rockets, capable of soaring far into Israel and
decimating the country's main oil refinery south of Haifa, as well as any
target in between. And third, Hezbollah has stepped up its anti-American
rhetoric since the invasion of Iraq. "The people of the region will receive
[America] with rifles, blood, arms, martyrdom, and martyrdom operations,"
Nasrallah said in a speech delivered before the war began. His remarks were
covered by Hezbollah's satellite news network, Al Manar, "the lighthouse."
Hezbollah officials declined to comment for the article.

Yet Hezbollah is not the big bad jihadist group that Israel and the press
like to portray. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups in the
Middle East have orchestrated grander and more frequent attacks, killing 528
noncombatant civilians since the beginning of the al Aqsa intifada in
September 2000. In the same period, Hezbollah accounted for no more than
seven civilian casualties. In some ways, Hezbollah hardly even fits the
definition of a terrorist organization. Its targets-including the Marine
barracks in 1983-are almost exclusively military.

Fadlallah, the spiritual leader, was also among the first Shiite clerics to
condemn the September 11 attacks. And Nasrallah, Hezbollah's political
leader, told 60 Minutes last month, "We reject those methods and believe
they contradict Islam and the teachings of the Koran, which do not permit
this barbarity." Nasrallah, who oversees Hezbollah's three main branches
(political, social, and guerilla), has supported-even encouraged-the
Palestinian uprising in the West Bank. But unlike other terrorist leaders,
he has never specifically condoned attacks on civilians.

"I think we use terrorism as bludgeon, frankly," said Augustus Richard
Norton, an expert on Hezbollah at Boston University. "I would prefer to
preserve the concept of terrorism for horrendous, opprobrious acts that take
innocent lives rather than conflating it with resistance struggles against
military targets. For example, while the Israeli occupation was going on in
Lebanon, even Israeli generals did not accuse the Hezbollah of terrorism;
that was a resistance struggle."

Israeli General Reuven Benkler agreed. Benkler spent 18 years on Israel's
northern front and ended his service there last year as the highest ranking
officer. He knows more about Hezbollah's paramilitary operations than almost
anyone else. "Terrorism has no end goal of statehood," he said, "whereas
guerilla warfare has a constituency behind and has a goal at the end of the
day."

Norton authored a paper in 2000 called "Hezbollah: From Radicalism to
Pragmatism?" and argued that during the 1990s, Hezbollah changed its focus
to domestic politics, electing members to the Lebanese parliament and
consolidating political power among the Shiites of southern Lebanon.
Academics around the world are starting to take notice, even if the press
isn't.

"For the past 12 years, Hezbollah has been playing a different kind of game
inside of Lebanon," he said. "They've been in the parliament since the
beginning of the 1990s." Hezbollah was founded to overturn the ruling order
with an Islamic Revolution. Twenty years later, in an astonishing
volte-face, its members now stand for election. "This is an organization
with a popular base; I'd say that in Lebanon there is something on order of
1.1 to 1.2 million Shii Muslims. Of that, they probably attract the loyalty
of at least a third, probably more," Norton said.

Norton also told me an anecdote: "One time I asked one of the leading
figures in Hezbollah, 'You guys said you would never participate in the
political system in Lebanon. You said it was corrupt to the core.' He looked
at me with a wry smile and said, 'My friend, conditions change.' These
people are pragmatists; they're not captured by ideology that prevents them
from change.. This has become a popular organization, and it has a
constituency that is quite impressive in the Lebanese middle class."

Middle class aspirations certainly do play a major part in the local
politics, as do basic bread-and-butter issues. Since the advent of
Hezbollah, its leaders have always worked to uplift the social conditions of
Shiites in southern Lebanon, who they feel have been oppressed by other
ethnic majorities. Hezbollah has a complicated social services network not
unlike Hamas in the West Bank, designed in part to indoctrinate young
Muslims in traditional Shiism, but also to provide healthcare, build roads,
and police one of the most densely populated tracts of land in the Middle
East. "They want to have school, full stomachs, and running water," Benkler
told me, "all of which Hezbollah provides."

The whims of its constituents have also helped moderate the Hezbollah
agenda. Public opinion polls show that residents of southern Lebanon detest
any Hezbollah behavior that incurs Israeli retaliation. They crave stability
and trade, not jihad. Lebanon, along with Iraq, is a traditional hub of
Middle East trade; instances of violence and instability generally hurt
Lebanese business interests.

  "We don't want to conquer anybody," said Ziad Abdelnour, who chairs the
United States Committee for a Free Lebanon. "We are pro-Western business
people, entrepreneurs, builders. That's who we are in Lebanon; we want to be
left alone." Abdelnour, a Lebanese Christian financier living in the U.S.
for 20 years, imagines himself a sort of Ahmed Chalabi of Lebanon, an exile
king, and lobbies the American government and the exile community-Christians
and Muslims-for an end to the Syrian occupation.

Other indicators, too, suggest that Hezbollah is not a fundamentally
jihadist organization like the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine. Although Fadlallah swore allegiance to the Ayatollah Khomeini at
the height of the Israeli occupation in 1985, he is widely known to despise
the Supreme Leader's successor, Ayatollah Khameini, as an intellectual
mediocrity without the clerical credentials to run an Islamic republic. Gary
Gambill, editor of the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, posits that with
the death of Khomeini in 1989, Hezbollah abandoned its goal of an Islamic
state in Lebanon-and its spiritual, if not financial, connection with
Iran-in order to enter domestic politics.

"During the war in Iraq, Fadlallah actually called on Iraqi Shiites to
overthrow Saddam," Gambill said, to illustrate Hezbollah's growing distance
from Iran. "That was not at all the line that Hezbollah leaders that are
more plugged into the Iranian intelligence services were saying."

Of course, Hezbollah's political ambitions don't explain its need for the
recently acquired Fajr-5 rockets. But Gambill also pointed out that that
Hezbollah's operations in the Bekaa Valley, where the rockets have likely
been stored, occur in an area of overlapping jurisdiction. In the Valley,
Hezbollah's militiamen share power with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and
the Syrian army. Gambill hypothesizes that the Syrians never delivered the
Fajr-5 rockets to Hezbollah; they are probably keeping them for their own
ends.

His theory makes sense. Syria has a vested interest in keeping the border
with Israel hot, because doing so causes an Israeli escalation and justifies
Syria's "defensive" occupation of Lebanon. As a Baathist police state
without oil reserves, Syria has no real economy to speak of other than $2
billion in goods it sold to Iraq every year-goods that will not likely find
buyers elsewhere. To augment that revenue, the Syrian regime flooded Lebanon
with nearly two million migrant laborers shortly after the occupation began.
They are willing to work for a fraction of the Lebanese rate, and the $4.3
billion in remittances to their families helps prop up Syria's stagnant
economy. (Syria's per capita GNP is less than a third of Lebanon's.) With
the defeat of Saddam Hussein's regime and the loss of a captive market,
Syria will be even more wedded to the lucrative Lebanese occupation.

"The Syrians saw the Shebaa Farms situation as a way to keep the border
  hot," Norton said. "And to remind the Israelis that though they may have
withdrawn from Lebanon, there were still salient issues like [the
possibility of a long-range rocket attack]. In that way, the Shebaa Farms
thing is very useful for the Syrians."

Syria has, after all, been behind most of the anti-Israeli violence in
Lebanon since the mid 1980s. To whatever extent Hezbollah's low-grade
violence drove out the Israelis (most people think it was Ehud Barak's
desperation to make peace), it had Syria to thank. Since the early 1980s,
after it disarmed all of the competing Christian, Sunni, Druze, and Shiite
militias, Syria has allowed Hezbollah to remain the only armed force in
Lebanon, controlling the Shiite ghettos south of Beirut and most of the
Bekaa Valley. It has allowed-perhaps pressured-the group to keep the Blue
Line hot by periodically launching Katyusha rockets at Israeli positions.
And, most significantly, it has flown money and arms from Tehran to Damascus
and driven them overland (in official Syrian army transports) to Hezbollah
training in the Bekaa Valley.

Hezbollah is, in short, Syria's proxy in the low-grade war against Israel.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that Hezbollah's militia takes orders
directly from Damascus. In the five instances that Hezbollah has launched
cross-border attacks from the Shebaa Farms in the last year, each one has
followed a prominent newspaper editorial calling for the end of the Syrian
occupation by fewer than four days. Syria seems to be trying to distract
attention from the Lebanese resistance.

Israel seems to be in on the game. In a few cases, the Israeli Air Force
retaliated against Syrian positions, instead of Lebanese ones. On April 16,
2001, Israel destroyed a large Syrian radar complex in response to a
Hezbollah attack. Israel seems to draw a direct line between Assad's orders
and Hezbollah's attacks. An official spokesman for Israel's defense ministry
declined to confirm that reasoning, but Benkler, in a separate conversation,
agreed.

"Absolutely," he said when asked about the relationship between Assad and
the Hezbollah militia. As the commanding officer on the northern front, the
relationship informed his responses to the attacks. Instead of striking back
at Hezbollah's social services network or its civil infrastructure, he would
often hit Syrian positions. "How do I do my job doing using as little force
as possible, killing as few as possible? The American strategy was to create
shock and awe. Well, we could have, in a week, brought Lebanon back into the
14th century."

The disjunction between Hezbollah guerillas (servants, essentially, of
Syria) and its parliamentarians (champions of Shiite self-determination)
highlight southern Lebanon's complex relationship with Syria. Assad allows
Hezbollah to dominate the social services network, instead of the Lebanese
government that should have sovereignty over that land. He cultivates
loyalty to his proxies, rather than to the Lebanese government. That way,
Hezbollah's grateful on-the-ground constituents will overlook its military
exploits that provoke Israeli retaliation. The grassroots warmth Shiites
feel for Hezbollah allows it to continue doing Syria's bidding.

But the Shiites don't want to be proxies of Syria, a secular Baathist
regime. As their parliamentarians show, they want self-determination and
basic services. In the coming months, the U.S. may use its forces in the
region to demand a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon.

"I am absolutely sure that they are going to deal with both Hezbollah and
Syria because the status quo is unbearable," Abdelnour, the Lebanese
financier, said. "But it doesn't mean that they're going to go after them
using military force. There are a lot of ways you can put leverage over
Syria and Hezbollah and make them comply."

That's because Syria has a history of responding to overwhelming threats of
force. In the mid 1990s, for example, Abdullah Ocalan's Kurdish Workers
Party, a terrorist group, was using camps in the Bekaa Valley to train
insurgents-with the blessing of Hafez Assad, the current president's father.
After repeated requests that Syria extradite Ocalan, Turkey demanded in 1998
that Syria at least expel him and his terrorists from Lebanon. When Syria
refused, Turkey massed 10,000 troops on the Syrian border and asked again.
This time, Assad complied. It took a credible threat, which is a model the
U.S. could emulate on Syria's Iraqi border. Syria's dependence on Lebanon
may make the withdrawal a tough sell, but the U.S. commands a force on a
different order of magnitude than Turkey.

"I think everybody here now sees the kind of power that the U.S. can bring
to bear should it decide to do so, and right now the U.S. is in the region,"
said Habib Malik, a professor at the Lebanese American University in Beirut.
"If all this is played out cleverly, I think it will yield results as far as
Syria is concerned."

If Syria is ever expelled-a big if-and Hezbollah is allowed to set its own
agenda, it may well moderate considerably and invest in the future an
independent Lebanese state. Moreover, if the U.S. is successful at
integrating disenfranchised Iraqi Shiites into the nascent
government-another big if-the Iraqis could provide a model for Shiites in
multi-ethnic Lebanon. (Fadlallah himself is an Iraqi Shiite.)

"There's a pretty robust record of groups that, given the opportunity to
come inside the system, basically come inside and play within the rules of
the game," Norton said.

  The Filibuster
The Filibuster provides continuous commentary by the staff of the Columbia
Political Review

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http://lists.cu.groogroo.com/mailman/archive/peace-discuss/2002-December/001
274.html

On anti-semitism and criticism of Israel
By Emily L. Hauser. Emily L. Hauser lives in Oak Park

Published December 9, 2002

Does anti-Semitism exist? Of course. There have always been people who
object to the peculiar religion of the Jews. People who believe that we are
by nature power-hungry, evil.

Sadly, in the face of this, the fear of anti-Semitism has become one of the
Jewish people's few unifiers. We long ago stopped agreeing on how to worship
God, educate our children, or treat women. About the only positions over
which most Jews are near agreement are: 1) the Holocaust proved that Jews
are never entirely safe, and 2) Israel is Good. For those who might waver in
the latter, the former is referenced as corroborating evidence. Ethnic
anxiety (to paraphrase Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic)
has become virtually our only proof of authenticity.

Yet, does this mean, can it possibly mean, that any criticism of any Jew is,
by definition, anti-Semitic? The term assumes baseless hatred, and allows us
to summarily reject anything it touches. But if I do wrong, and someone
points it out, isn't the wrong still mine, even (and this is very important)
if that someone hates me?

We take the easy way out when we conflate criticism of Israel's government
with anti-Semitism. If all criticism of Israel comes from a place of
baseless hatred (or, in the case of Jews who express it themselves, typical
self-loathing) then we needn't consider it, hold it to the light and examine
its contents. The accusation of anti-Semitism thus consistently serves to
paralyze thought within the Jewish community, as McCarthyism once did within
American society.

Much as I can't believe that as a loyal American, I'm not allowed to
criticize the American government, I also can't believe that as a loyal
Israeli, I mustn't criticize, or brook criticism of, the Israeli government.
Being in a state of war doesn't make governments incapable of error, nor
does war itself justify every action a government takes. When we elevate
Israeli politicians and generals to the kind of infallibility that assumes
that criticism can only be made with evil intent, we remove them from
history, reality, the very normalcy to which Israeli founding father David
Ben-Gurion is said to have aspired. To say that Israel is held to a higher
standard than most is equally ahistorical. Humanity has never been anything
but inconsistent in judging friends and foes--Israel has been held to
standards higher than some, and lower than others. The question should not
be: Are we being treated fairly? Are we allowed to be as bad as the next
guy? But: How do we do good? How do we behave with fairness?

Having said that, I will agree that some of Israel's critics are flat-out,
flaming anti-Semites. But the bigger truth is that some of the people who
criticize us from a place of hatred aren't anti-Semitic--they just plain
hate us.

It's very popular, in Israel and the diaspora, to discuss anti-Semitism in
Palestinian schools. The enduring appeal of the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion is frequently cited. Following the suicide bombing at Hebrew
University, many Jews pointed out that most of the Jews killed there weren't
Israeli--the target was Jews, qua Jews, they said.

And yet. Isn't there a difference between, say, an American blaming "the
Jews" for the world's ills, and a Palestinian--told over and over that
Israel is a Jewish state, for all Jews, everywhere, eternally--who blames
"the Jews" for the ills his countrymen suffer? Is it baseless hatred--or
hatred based in 35 years of my boot on his neck? Why do we want to believe
that the Palestinians wouldn't notice how badly we've treated them if no one
were to point it out? Do we honestly believe they hate us so much for our
peculiar religion that they would rather die, than see us live?

It's true that this hatred, the kind found in every conflict ever launched
between peoples, often takes on classically anti-Semitic expression among
Arabs generally. It's further true that if any Arabs hope to achieve
reconciliation with Israel, they will have to learn to respect our
sensitivities, recognize them as legitimate (2,000 years of persecution
don't just go away) and find a new vocabulary. To draw any comparison, for
instance, between Israel and Nazi Germany is ghastly and repellent--and it
frees us to reject anything else the speaker may say.

In all honesty, though, personally, I don't care if the critics of Israeli
policies are anti-Semitic. I don't care if the Europeans, Americans, or
Palestinians like me--at this point, I'd be surprised if the Palestinians
did. As an Israeli, what must matter to me is the morality of my country's
actions, regardless of personal feelings of pique. We need to examine our
history fearlessly, and find a way to right the many wrongs we have
committed. Rather than hide behind our fears, I want to have the strength to
do the right thing.


Copyright (c) 2002,  <http://www.chicagotribune.com/> Chicago Tribune

http://dynamic.washtimes.com/twt-print.cfm?ArticleID=20030420-48494890

Troops were told to guard treasures
Paul Martin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Published April 20, 2003

      KUWAIT CITY - In a memo sent two weeks before the fall of Baghdad, the
Pentagon office charged with rebuilding Iraq urged top commanders of U.S.
ground forces to protect the Iraqi National Museum and other cultural sites
from looters.
      "Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent
looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures," says the
March 26 memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.
      The Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance
(ORHA), led by retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, sent the five-page memo to
senior commanders at the Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC).
      Two weeks later, American forces pulled down the giant statue of Saddam
Hussein in Baghdad to cheering crowds, and in the days that followed,
looters pillaged Baghdad.
      The museum was No. 2 on a list of 16 sites that ORHA deemed crucial to
protect. Financial institutions topped the list, including the Iraqi Central
Bank, which is now a burned-out shell filled with twisted metal beams from
the collapse of the roof and all nine floors under it.
      "We asked for just a few soldiers at each building, or if they feared
snipers, then just one or two tanks," said an angry ORHA official, one of
several who spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity.
      A spokesman for CFLCC, the Kuwait-based branch of Central Command that
is in charge of coalition ground forces, was not familiar with the memo. He
agreed to pass a request for comment up the chain of command.
      U.S. officials characterized the initial days of looting, in which
Iraqi government buildings were ransacked and burned, as acts of revenge
against a despised regime.
      A few days later, however, looters targeted the National Museum.
      Much of the ORHA memo, titled "Guidance for CFLCC's Priorities for
Securing Key Baghdad Institutions" is devoted to the Iraqi Ministry of
Culture.
      "Among other assets, it controls Iraq's museums and archeological
sites, which contain many priceless art treasures and antiquities of world
importance," the memo says.
      The memo expresses particular concern for the National Museum located
in central Baghdad:
      "It contains literally thousands of priceless historical objects, many
of them gold, silver, and precious stones, as well as priceless works of
art.
      "Its collections cover over 5,000 years of recorded history and
represent the fruits of 200 years of scientific investigation by both
Western and Iraqi archaeologists.
      "It will be a prime target for looters," the memo says.
      Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld last week expressed sympathy over
the plunder of the National Museum while denying that the war plan had
failed to prepare for such a threat.
      "To try to lay off the fact of that unfortunate activity on a defect in
a war plan it strikes me as a stretch," he told reporters at the Pentagon.
      "Looting is an unfortunate thing. Human beings are not perfect," Mr.
Rumsfeld said. "No one likes it. No one allows it." But he added: "To the
extent it happens in a war zone, it's difficult to stop."
      Two cultural advisers to the Bush administration resigned in protest of
the museum's looting
      Martin Sullivan, who chaired the President's Advisory Committee on
Cultural Property for eight years, and panel member Gary Vikan, director of
the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, said they quit because the U.S.
military had advance warning of the danger and failed to act.
      Antiquities experts have said they were given assurances months ago
from U.S. military planners that Iraq's historic artifacts and sites would
be protected by occupying forces.
      Leading archaeologists, who gathered in Paris last week, said
professional art thieves were behind some of the looting.
      The FBI has dispatched agents to Iraq in an attempt to recover some of
the booty, and alerts have gone out worldwide in an effort to recover works
as they show up on the black market.
      Jordanian customs officials said yesterday they had confiscated 41
photographs stolen from the museum, not of antiquities but of Saddam Hussein
and his life.
      The memo's list of 16 sites in need of protection - in apparent order
of priority - also included various ministries such as defense, foreign
affairs and interior.
      "In addition to obtaining basic access to all ministries, coalition
forces should secure the facilities and prevent the destruction or removal
of equipment and sensitive records (including paper and electronic media) in
key Iraqi institutions in Baghdad."
      Just one ministry was protected by coalition forces from the beginning
of the occupation, the Ministry of Oil, which was last on the list.
      The memo said: "Looters should be arrested/detained," yet in the days
after the fall of Baghdad, looters carted off their booty as U.S. forces
looked on.
      "It's a tragedy and a disaster for our image and for rebuilding Iraq,"
said one official from ORHA. "And it could have been so easily stopped.
      "As early as the 24th of March, we were putting together the
instructions for CFLCC for their insertion into Baghdad. And it was quite
clear to us in very early stages that, unless we were able to secure these
buildings, that they would be looted."
      The official said the documents had reached "several different people
on several different occasions" in print and by secure e-mail.
      At a meeting on April 10, the ORHA staff were aghast when told that the
document had not even been read, the official said.
      The official also criticized military commanders for blocking the ORHA
staff from moving from Kuwait to Baghdad, where they are supposed to oversee
reconstruction.
      Gen. Garner was said by one of his aides to be "just livid" at the
delay.
      "The military have done a wonderful military job, but they have refused
to listen to the civilians who were brought in to specifically tell them
what they needed to do in order to make the civilian side of this work," the
official said.
      "The excuse that we've got back time and time again was that their
first priority was to war fight, the second priority was to look after their
safety, and the third priority was to do the work that we had asked them to
do. My question is: Why ask us to come here?" the official asked.
      He said this sense of frustration was shared by all ORHA officials.
"They haven't listened to any of us. We are all equally upset."

Copyright © 2003 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

[COMMENT: This is a special post that prints the essay by George Bush )Sr.)
and Brent Scowcroft as to why they did not push to remove Saddam Hussein
from power after the end of teh first Gulf War. The essay was published in
Time Magazine on 2 March 1998. However, Time Magazine has removed the essay
from their online archives, deliberately censoring the former President in
order to curry favor with the current one.]

Original URL:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/1998/dom/980302/special_report.clintons_29
.html
Mirror URL: http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/bushsr-iraq.htm

"Why We Didn't Remove Saddam"

George Bush [Sr.] and Brent Scowcroft
Time (2 March 1998)

The end of effective Iraqi resistance came with a rapidity which surprised
us all, and we were perhaps psychologically unprepared for the sudden
transition from fighting to peacemaking. True to the guidelines we had
established, when we had achieved our strategic objectives (ejecting Iraqi
forces from Kuwait and eroding Saddam's threat to the region) we stopped the
fighting. But the necessary limitations placed on our objectives, the fog of
war, and the lack of "battleship Missouri" surrender unfortunately left
unresolved problems, and new ones arose.

We were disappointed that Saddam's defeat did not break his hold on power,
as many of our Arab allies had predicted and we had come to expect.
President Bush repeatedly declared that the fate of Saddam Hussein was up to
the Iraqi people. Occasionally, he indicated that removal of Saddam would be
welcome, but for very practical reasons there was never a promise to aid an
uprising. While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam,
neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup
of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power
at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground
war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not
changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would
have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was
probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we
knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect,
rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting
it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances,
furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for
handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq,
thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the
precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had
we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying
power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically
different--and perhaps barren--outcome.

We discussed at length forcing Saddam himself to accept the terms of Iraqi
defeat at Safwan--just north of the Kuwait-Iraq border--and thus the
responsibility and political consequences for the humiliation of such a
devastating defeat. In the end, we asked ourselves what we would do if he
refused. We concluded that we would be left with two options: continue the
conflict until he backed down, or retreat from our demands. The latter would
have sent a disastrous signal. The former would have split our Arab
colleagues from the coalition and, de facto, forced us to change our
objectives. Given those unpalatable choices, we allowed Saddam to avoid
personal surrender and permitted him to send one of his generals. Perhaps we
could have devised a system of selected punishment, such as air strikes on
different military units, which would have proved a viable third option, but
we had fulfilled our well-defined mission; Safwan was waiting.

As the conflict wound down, we felt a sense of urgency on the part of the
coalition Arabs to get it over with and return to normal. This meant quickly
withdrawing U.S. forces to an absolute minimum. Earlier there had been some
concern in Arab ranks that once they allowed U.S. forces into the Middle
East, we would be there to stay. Saddam's propaganda machine fanned these
worries. Our prompt withdrawal helped cement our position with our Arab
allies, who now trusted us far more than they ever had. We had come to their
assistance in their time of need, asked nothing for ourselves, and left
again when the job was done. Despite some criticism of our conduct of the
war, the Israelis too had their faith in us solidified. We had shown our
ability--and willingness--to intervene in the Middle East in a decisive way
when our interests were challenged. We had also crippled the military
capability of one of their most bitter enemies in the region. Our new
credibility (coupled with Yasser Arafat's need to redeem his image after
backing the wrong side in the war) had a quick and substantial payoff in the
form of a Middle East peace conference in Madrid.

The Gulf War had far greater significance to the emerging post-cold war
world than simply reversing Iraqi aggression and restoring Kuwait. Its
magnitude and significance impelled us from the outset to extend our
strategic vision beyond the crisis to the kind of precedent we should lay
down for the future. From an American foreign-policymaking perspective, we
sought to respond in a manner which would win broad domestic support and
which could be applied universally to other crises. In international terms,
we tried to establish a model for the use of force. First and foremost was
the principle that aggression cannot pay. If we dealt properly with Iraq,
that should go a long way toward dissuading future would-be aggressors. We
also believed that the U.S. should not go it alone, that a multilateral
approach was better. This was, in part, a practical matter. Mounting an
effective military counter to Iraq's invasion required the backing and bases
of Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.

[IMAGE: a full-page scan of the article from the 1998 issue is also saved to
the UNMEDIA File Archives. Link:
http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/unmedia/, click the Iraq folder]

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2081376/

readme
Unsettled
Victory in the war is not victory in the argument about the war.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 11:12 AM PT


So, we've won, or just about. There is no quagmire. Saddam is dead,
or as good as, along with his sons. It was all fairly painless—at
least for most Americans sitting at home watching it on television.
Those who opposed the war look like fools. They are thoroughly
discredited and, if they happen to be Democratic presidential
candidates (and who isn't these days?), they might as well withdraw
and nurse their shame somewhere off the public stage. The debate over
Gulf War II is as over as the war itself soon will be, and the anti's
were defeated as thoroughly as Saddam Hussein.

Right? No, not at all.

To start with an obvious point that may get buried in the confetti of
the victory parade, the debate was not about whether America would
win a war against Iraq if we chose to start one. No sane person
doubted that the mighty United States military machine could defeat
and conquer a country with a tiny fraction of its population and an
even tinier fraction of its wealth—a country suffering from over a
decade of economic strangulation by the rest of the world.

Oh, sure, there was a tepid public discussion of how long victory
might take to achieve, in which pro's and anti's were represented
across the spectrum of opinion. And the first law of journalistic
dynamics—The Story Has To Change—inevitably produced a couple of
comic days last week when the media and their rent-a-generals were
peddling the Q-word. No doubt there are some unreflective peaceniks
still mentally trapped in Vietnam, or grasping at any available
argument, who are still talking quagmire. But the serious case
against this war was never that we might actually lose it militarily.

The serious case involved questions that are still unresolved.
Factual questions: Is there a connection between Iraq and the
perpetrators of 9/11? Is that connection really bigger than that of
all the countries we're not invading? Does Iraq really have or almost
have weapons of mass destruction that threaten the United States?
Predictive questions: What will toppling Saddam ultimately cost in
dollars and in lives (American, Iraqi, others)? Will the result be a
stable Iraq and a blossoming of democracy in the Middle East or
something less attractive? How many young Muslims and others will be
turned against the United States, and what will they do about it?

Political questions: Should we be doing this despite the opposition
of most of our traditional allies? Without the approval of the United
Nations? Moral questions: Is it justified to make "pre-emptive" war
on nations that may threaten us in the future? When do internal human
rights, or the lack of them, justify a war? Is there a policy about
pre-emption and human rights that we are prepared to apply
consistently? Does consistency matter? Even etiquette questions:
Before Bush begins trying to create a civil society in Iraq, wouldn't
it be nice if he apologized to Bill Clinton and Al Gore for all the
nasty, dismissive things he said about "nation-building" in the 2000
campaign?

Some of these questions will be answered shortly, and some will be
debated forever. This doesn't mean history will never render a
judgment. History's judgment doesn't require unanimity or total
certainty. But that judgment is not in yet. Supporters of this war
who are in the mood for an ideological pogrom should chill out for a
while, and opponents need not fold into permanent cringe position.

Of course opponents have been on the defensive since the day the
fighting started, forced to repeat the mantra that we "oppose the war
but support the troops." Critics mock this formula as psychologically
implausible if not outright dishonest, but it's not even difficult or
complicated. Most of the common reasons for opposing this war get
more severe as the war grows longer. Above all is the cost in human
lives, especially the lives of American soldiers. (And most American
war opponents share with American war supporters—with most human
beings, for that matter—an instinctively greater concern for the
lives of fellow nationals, however illogical or deplorable that might
be.) Unlike Vietnam, where opposition barely existed until the war
had been going on for several years, this is a war in which calling
for a pullout short of victory would be silly. So, once the war has
started, no disingenuousness is required for opponents to hope for
victory, the quicker the better.

What is an honest opponent of a war supposed to do? Since even the
end of this war won't settle most of the important arguments about
it, dropping all opposition at the beginning of the war would surely
be more intellectually suspicious than maintaining your doubts while
sincerely hoping for victory. Inevitably, more than one supporter of
this war has taunted its opponents with Orwell's famous observation
in 1942 that pacifists—the few who opposed a military response to
Hitler—were "objectively pro-fascist." The suggestion is that
opposing this war makes you objectively pro-Saddam. In an oddly less
famous passage two years later, Orwell recanted that "objectively"
formula and called it "dishonest." Which it is.

The psychological challenge of opposing a war like this after it has
started isn't supporting the American troops, but hoping to be proven
wrong. That, though, is the burden of pessimism on all subjects. As a
skeptic, at the least, about Gulf War II, I do hope to be proven
wrong. But it hasn't happened yet.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23555-2003Apr3.html

From London to Iraq: Peacekeeping Lessons Learned the Hard Way


By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 4, 2003; Page A30


LONDON, April 3 -- It was Royal Marines versus Iraqi civilians on the
soccer field in Zubair south of Basra. The referee was a local
community leader, and the crowd of onlookers included armed British
riflemen who kept a nervous eye on the proceedings. The final score:
9 to 3 for the Iraqis.

The game, as described in today's London Evening Standard newspaper,
was the latest example of a military legend being forged in southern
Iraq with the help of the media and transmitted home: British
soldiers as civic-minded peacekeepers, struggling to win the hearts
and minds of Iraqi civilians and deliver the message that the United
States and the United Kingdom have come to Iraq not as conquerors but
as liberators.

It's a legend built on national pride and years of military training.
But there's a flip side to the portrait: While British troops are
seen as sensitive and concerned, their American counterparts are
often depicted as inflexible and wary warriors who mistreat,
humiliate and, even occasionally, slaughter civilians.

"A lot of this is stage-managed and done for public relations," said
Ellie Goldsworthy, a former major in British military intelligence
who now works for the Royal United Services Institute, a defense
research organization. "But a lot of it is for real. British troops
are trained to come across as very forthcoming, very friendly and
open and ready to take risks in dealing with the civilian population."

"First, we have football matches, then we have tea parties, and then
somehow our soldiers go out and meet the local ladies," said Philip
Wilkinson, a retired British army colonel who teaches at the Center
for Defense Studies at King's College. "It's amazing how quickly they
do that. You can't go into a single military base back in Britain and
not meet wives who have been brought back from the countries we've
served in."

From the beginning of the war, British soldiers in Iraq have appeared
more willing to run risks when it comes to civilians. The first
British soldier to die from enemy fire, Sgt. Steven Roberts, 33, was
shot last week after he stepped down from his armored vehicle in
Zubair to tend to an agitated group of civilians.

Still, last Tuesday, Lt. Col. Mike Riddell-Webster of the Black Watch
regiment traded his helmet for a tam-o'-shanter, ditched his
sunglasses and took his men to patrol the streets of Zubair on foot.
It was, reported the Daily Telegraph, "a quintessentially British
moment."

"You can't win hearts and minds from the back of an armored vehicle,"
Goldsworthy said. "You've got to get down, take off your helmet and
deal with people on their own level."

The British say the lessons they have learned come from hard
experience during the waning days of the British Empire and in
Northern Ireland. British forces used brutal tactics to suppress
rebellions in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s. Three decades ago,
British troops mowed down 13 unarmed demonstrators in Londonderry on
the day known as "Bloody Sunday."

British analysts contend U.S. forces have much to learn. Some British
officers disparagingly refer to Americans as "Ninja Turtles" because
they are covered in body armor, helmets and Ray-Bans. "There's a
warrior-wimp syndrome in the U.S. Army," Wilkinson said. "The
Americans treat civil affairs [relations with local civilians] as a
specialization, and you have specialized civil affairs battalions to
do the touchy-feely stuff. Your warriors stay as warriors and
perceive themselves as warriors.

"We don't have those kind of resources. Every single soldier has to
become an agent of the civil affairs program. . . . We teach our
young officers and soldiers all of this touchy-feely stuff right from
the beginning."

American troops have been carefully briefed on protecting Iraqi
civilians, U.S. officials say. But often they have been surprised by
the hostility they have encountered in southern Iraq. Last Saturday,
a suicide bomber driving a taxi filled with explosives killed four
soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division at a checkpoint near the city
of Najaf. The driver had slowed down and waved for help, according to
one officer's account. When soldiers approached the car, it exploded.

Since then, U.S. troops have adopted a much more wary posture toward
civilian vehicles. The British press gave heavy coverage to
Washington Post reporter William Branigin's account of an incident
Monday in which U.S. troops fired on a van full of Iraqi civilians at
a checkpoint outside Najaf, killing 10.

British military experts contend both incidents would be less likely
at a British checkpoint. Under their military procedure, checkpoints
are manned by only one soldier, with others covering him at a
distance, to limit the potential human toll from a car bomb. The
British also say they signpost their checkpoints in Arabic and place
physical barriers well ahead of the stopping point to slow vehicles
before they are deemed a threat.

U.S. officials tend to treat the British viewpoint skeptically. "They
like to think of themselves as Athens to our Rome," one official
said. "The idea is that they bring quality and character to a rougher-
hewn America. It's not quite a myth, more like an ideal."

But some American military leaders have acknowledged that in some
areas the British have an edge. Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a BBC program last Sunday that
British operations around Basra were "absolutely magnificent."

"I can assure you that U.S. forces have leaned heavily on our British
counterparts, who have a lot of experience in this area," he said.

Britons who have served alongside American forces say U.S. troops
tend to stay in fortified bases, surrounded by high walls of barbed
wire, holding local populations at bay. "With the United States,
force protection is all about body armor, helmets and moving at speed
in closed armored vehicles," said Garth Whitty, a retired 25-year
veteran officer who also works at the services institute. "With us,
it's more about engaging with the local population to get them on-
side and minimize hostility and casualties."

"I love Americans -- they're wonderful to work with," said
Goldsworthy, who served alongside U.S. forces in Turkey and
Bosnia. "But I'm afraid the American attitude of today is like the
British attitude of 120 years ago during the Empire. We thought
everyone wanted to be an Englishman and live an English life,
celebrate the queen and have cream tea. Americans seem to believe
that everyone is envious and wants to be part of America. It's as
though they haven't learned the lessons we've learned in a very hard
way."

Goldsworthy cites photographs showing American soldiers ordering
Iraqi civilians to lie face down in the dirt while they are checked
for weapons. "For Arabs, to be spread-eagled with your face in the
dust is a hugely shameful thing," she said.

What the Iraqis want more than anything is respect, and to feel
valued and feel treated as human beings," she said. "What our troops
show is a willingness to be humble, to lose a football match 9 to 3.
If the Americans had played, I'm afraid they would have wanted to
win."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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http://slate.msn.com/id/2080322/

the earthling
The Sum of All Fears
What you should and shouldn't worry about as we go to war.
By Robert Wright
Posted Tuesday, March 18, 2003, at 9:25 AM PT

Brace yourself for a round of I-told-you-so's from Iraq hawks. And blame it
partly on Iraq doves. In trying to head off war, some doves have warned of
nightmarish consequences that are in fact not all that likely, thus setting
the stage for a postwar public relations triumph by hawks. That's too bad
because for every dubious nightmare scenario there's a more valid and
equally harrowing worry about the effects of the coming war.

Dubious fear No. 1: The war will be long and messy. Once the inevitability
of the war's outcome becomes clear-within the first week or two-Saddam
Hussein will have trouble preserving loyalty and may have trouble preserving
his life. Sustained and widespread street fighting in Baghdad is unlikely.
Streetside crowds of Iraqis cheering American and British soldiers are
virtually guaranteed.

Valid fear No. 1: The postwar occupation will be very long and increasingly
messy. The crowds who cheer us this spring will want us out by next spring.
But we won't leave because, regardless of whether Iraqis are ready for
democracy, President Bush won't be. If there's one thing that will scare
this administration as much as Iraq being run by a ruthless dictator, it's
Iraq being run by millions of Iraqis. The reason isn't just that they're
Muslims, a group not currently known for its ardent pro-Americanism. (Iraqi
Muslims are said to be on balance more secular, less amenable to radical
Islam, than some others.) There is also pent-up anger over the years of U.N.
sanctions that Iraqis blame on America. More generally, there is the
inherent unpredictability of popular sentiment in a nascent, ethnically
fragmented democracy recovering from trauma-and encountering such culturally
disruptive influences as the Internet after decades of seclusion from the
outside world. A year from now, with American troops still in Baghdad,
conservatives will find it hard to keep laughing off charges of American
imperialism.

Dubious fear No. 2: The war will unleash a wave of terrorism in America.
There probably will be some terrorism, but if al-Qaida or anyone else were
capable of unleashing much of it on American soil at this moment, America
would probably have seen something other than unbroken tranquility since
9/11.

Valid fear No. 2: The war will unleash time-release terrorism. How many
teenage Muslims will see video of dead Iraqi civilians and decide to commit
their lives to radical Islam? I don't know, but if they're smart and
ambitious, it doesn't take many to have a big future impact. The problem is
deepened by the Bush administration's inept diplomacy, which has made the
war more unpopular in Europe than was necessary. With European elites
opposing the war, international news outlets such as the BBC will dwell
inordinately on images of "collateral damage."

Dubious fear No. 3: The "Arab street" will boil over, overthrowing friendly
regimes. It's true that Al Jazeera and the spread of such grass-roots
organizing technologies as e-mail and cell phones make Muslim opinion more
volatile and powerful than it was during the Persian Gulf War. And this war,
less clearly justified and less widely supported than both the Gulf War and
the war in Afghanistan, will naturally rile more Muslims than they did. This
is especially scary in the case of Pakistan, given its nuclear arsenal-a
fact that a more judicious president would have pondered long and hard
before starting a war. Still, authoritarian governments are remarkably good
at exerting authority. Chances are we won't see an out-and-out overthrow
during the war, especially given the war's likely brevity.

Valid fear No. 3: The aforementioned length of the Iraqi occupation will
give the "Arab street" an ongoing energy boost. The lingering presence of an
infidel army will help radical agitators throughout the Muslim world, both
in their continued recruiting of anti-American terrorists and in their
recruiting of rebels to overthrow pro-American regimes (goals aided anyway
by the spread of information technologies). The deposing of these regimes
may be ultimately good-a step toward democratization. But that step can be
long and chaotic, as Iran has been illustrating for years. So, however big
the eventual payoff of a revolution, it would be best if in the meanwhile,
anti-Americanism weren't its driving force. Neocons who hope that war
triggers a chain reaction of Arab democratization may not have reckoned with
exactly how that's most likely to happen.

Dubious fear No. 4: Saddam Hussein, with his back against the wall, will
pull out his weapons of mass destruction, possibly prompting the use of
nukes by Israel or the United States. Saddam doesn't have nukes, and many
chemical and biological weapons don't really deserve the term "weapons of
mass destruction." Even Ariel Sharon isn't reckless enough to go nuclear
after a chemical warhead kills 100 people.

Valid fear No. 4: This war will make the future use of nukes more likely. It
would be nice to entice (that is, bribe) North Korea into surrendering its
capacity to make nuclear weapons. But verifying compliance would require an
ongoing intrusive inspection regime. And why would Kim Jong-il buy into such
a deal, given the precedent we're setting in Iraq-attacking a nation that
allowed inspections, even though the inspectors hadn't yet found any weapons
of mass destruction? Perhaps the biggest long-run downside of this war is
the way President Bush cynically used the United Nations along the way,
tainting it as an instrument of arms control. (And one result of his crude
maneuvering within the United Nations-that America and Britain are fighting
the war virtually alone-makes it more likely that the terrorist blow-back
will be focused on Brits and Americans, not spread across a broad alliance.)

Of course, some of the above dubious dovish fears could turn out to be
valid. (Obviously, I'm a fool to make clear predictions about a war in a
volatile region and a time of great flux.) But even so, I contend that the
biggest dangers posed by this war are in the long run. So beware snap
postwar judgments on the success of the undertaking. The Persian Gulf War
seemed like an unqualified success until the troops remaining in Saudi
Arabia caught the eye of Osama Bin Laden, putting him on the path to 9/11.

Most of the war's long-term downside won't be clearly traceable to the war.
For example, terrorists don't typically publish treatises about their
formative influences. In contrast, the war's short-term upsides-cheering
throngs, discovered and destroyed chemical weapons-are often visible and
viscerally gratifying. This asymmetry biases democracy toward anti-terrorism
policies that feel good at the time but can be killers in the long run.

In theory, the hope for correcting this bias lies with reflective,
far-seeing leaders who will perceive the cosmic implications of the various
possible war-on-terrorism strategies and illuminate them via edifying
speeches, thus steering us away from policies that feel good but are
actually bad. Why don't I feel optimistic?

Update 3/19/03: Since posting this piece, I've become aware of a useful
summary of possible good and bad consequences of the war compiled by Michael
Barletta of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. (Click on
"document" then scroll down to find the two tables summarizing the pros and
cons.)


Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2080322/

http://www.msnbc.com/news/885222.asp?0cv=KA01&cp1=1

The Arrogant Empire
America's unprecedented power scares the world, and the Bush
administration has only made it worse. How we got here—and what we
can do about it now


March 24 issue —  PART I: The United States will soon be at war with
Iraq. It would seem, on the face of it, a justifiable use of military
force. Saddam Hussein runs one of the most tyrannical regimes in
modern history.

FOR MORE THAN 25 years he has sought to acquire chemical, biological
and nuclear weapons, and has, in several documented cases, succeeded.
He gassed 60,000 of his own people in 1986 in Halabja. He has
launched two catastrophic wars, sacrificing nearly a million Iraqis
and killing or wounding more than a million Iranians. He has flouted
16 United Nations resolutions over 12 years that have warned him to
disarm or else, including one, four months ago, giving him a "final
opportunity" to do so "fully and immediately" or face "serious
consequences." But in its campaign against Iraq, America is virtually
alone. Never will it have waged a war in such isolation. Never have
so many of its allies been so firmly opposed to its policies. Never
has it provoked so much public opposition, resentment and mistrust.
And all this before the first shot has been fired.

        Watching the tumult around the world, it's evident that what
is happening goes well beyond this particular crisis. Many people,
both abroad and in America, fear that we are at some kind of turning
point, where well-established mainstays of the global order—the
Western Alliance, European unity, the United Nations—seem to be
cracking under stress. These strains go well beyond the matter of
Iraq, which is not vital enough to wreak such damage. In fact, the
debate is not about Saddam anymore. It is about America and its role
in the new world. To understand the present crisis, we must first
grasp how the rest of the world now perceives American power.

         It is true that the United States has some allies in its
efforts to topple Saddam. It is also true that some of the
governments opposing action in Iraq do so not for love of peace and
international harmony but for more cynical reasons. France and Russia
have a long history of trying to weaken the containment of Iraq to
ensure that they can have good trading relations with it. France,
after all, helped Saddam Hussein build a nuclear reactor that was
obviously a launching pad for a weapons program. (Why would the
world's second largest oil producer need a nuclear power plant?) And
France's Gaullist tendencies are, of course, simply its own version
of unilateralism.

But how to explain that the vast majority of the world, with little
to gain from it, is in the Franco-Russian camp? The administration
claims that many countries support the United States but do so
quietly. That signals an even deeper problem. Countries are furtive
in their support for the administration not because they fear Saddam
Hussein but because they fear their own people. To support America
today in much of the world is politically dangerous. Over the past
year the United States became a campaign issue in elections in
Germany, South Korea and Pakistan. Being anti-American was a vote-
getter in all three places.

         Look at the few countries that do publicly support us. Tony
Blair bravely has forged ahead even though the vast majority of the
British people disagree with him and deride him as "America's
poodle." The leaders of Spain and Italy face equally strong public
opposition to their stands. Donald Rumsfeld has proclaimed, with his
characteristic tactlessness, that while "old Europe"—France and
Germany—might oppose U.S. policy, "new Europe" embraces them. This is
not exactly right. The governments of Central Europe support
Washington, but the people oppose it in almost the same numbers as in
old Europe. Between 70 and 80 percent of Hungarians, Czechs and Poles
are against an American war in Iraq, with or without U.N. sanction.
(The Poles are more supportive in some surveys.) The administration
has made much of the support of Vaclav Havel, the departing Czech
president. But the incoming president, Vaclav Klaus—a pro-American,
Thatcherite free-marketer—said last week that on Iraq his position is
aligned with that of his people.

Some make the argument that Europeans are now pacifists, living in
a "postmodern paradise," shielded from threats and unable to imagine
the need for military action. But then how to explain the sentiment
in Turkey, a country that sits on the Iraqi border? A longtime ally,
Turkey has fought with America in conflicts as distant as the Korean
War, and supported every American military action since then. But
opposition to the war now runs more than 90 percent there. Despite
Washington's offers of billions of dollars in new assistance, the
government cannot get parliamentary support to allow American troops
to move into Iraq from Turkish bases. Or consider Australia, another
crucial ally, and another country where a majority now opposes
American policy. Or Ireland. Or India. In fact, while the United
States has the backing of a dozen or so governments, it has the
support of a majority of the people in only one country in the world,
Israel. If that is not isolation, then the word has no meaning.

        It is also too easy to dismiss the current crisis as one more
in a series of transatlantic family squabbles that stretch back over
the decades. Some in Washington have pointed out that whenever the
United States has taken strong military action—for example, the
deployment of Pershing nuclear missiles in Europe in the early 1980s—
there was popular opposition in Europe. True, but this time it's
different. The street demonstrations and public protests of the early
1980s made for good television images. But the reality was that in
most polls, 30 to 40 percent of Europeans supported American
policies. In Germany, where pacifist feelings ran sky high, 53
percent of Germans supported the Pershing deployments, according to a
1981 poll in Der Spiegel. In France, a majority supported American
policy through much of Ronald Reagan's two terms, even prefer-ring
him to the Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale, in 1984.
Josef Joffe, one of Germany's leading commentators, observes that
during the cold war anti-Americanism was a left-wing phenomenon. "In
contrast to it, there was always a center-right that was anti-
communist and thus pro-American," he explains. "The numbers waxed and
waned, but you always had a solid base of support for the United
States." The cold war kept Europe pro-American. For example, 1968 was
a time of mass protests against American policies in Vietnam, but it
was also the year of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Europeans
(and Asians) could oppose America, but their views were balanced by
wariness of the Soviet threat and communist behavior. Again, the
polls bear this out. European opposition even to the Vietnam War
never approached the level of the current opposition to Iraq. This
was true outside Europe as well. In Australia, for example, a
majority of the public supported that country's participation in the
Vietnam War through 1971, when it withdrew its forces.

         But today no such common threat exists, and support for
America is far more fluid. Center-right parties might still support
Washington, but many do so almost out of inertia and without much
popular support for their stand. During the recent German election,
Gerhard Schroder campaigned openly against America's Iraq policy.
Less noted was that his conservative opponent, Edmund Stoiber, did so
as well, at one point (briefly) outflanking Schroder by saying he
would not even allow American bases in Germany to participate in the
war.

         In one respect, I believe that the Bush administration is
right: this war will look better when it is over. The military
campaign will probably be less difficult than many of Washington's
opponents think. Most important, it will reveal the nature of
Saddam's barbarous regime. Prisoners and political dissidents will
tell stories of atrocities. Horrific documents will come to light.
Weapons of mass destruction will be found. If done right, years from
now people will remember above all that America helped rid Iraq of a
totalitarian dictator.

         But the administration is wrong if it believes that a
successful war will make the world snap out of a deep and widening
mistrust and resentment of American foreign policy. A war with Iraq,
even if successful, might solve the Iraq problem. It doesn't solve
the America problem. What worries people around the world above all
else is living in a world shaped and dominated by one country—the
United States. And they have come to be deeply suspicious and fearful
of us.

PART II: THE AGE OF GENEROSITY

         Most Americans have never felt more vulnerable. September 11
was not only the first attack on the American mainland in 150 years,
but it was also sudden and unexpected. Three thousand civilians were
brutally killed without any warning. In the months that followed,
Americans worried about anthrax attacks, biological terror, dirty
bombs and new suicide squads. Even now, the day-to-day rhythms of
American life are frequently interrupted by terror alerts and
warnings. The average American feels a threat to his physical
security unknown since the early years of the republic.

         Yet after 9-11, the rest of the world saw something quite
different. They saw a country that was hit by terrorism, as some of
them had been, but that was able to respond on a scale that was
almost unimaginable. Suddenly terrorism was the world's chief
priority, and every country had to reorient its foreign policy
accordingly. Pakistan had actively supported the Taliban for years;
within months it became that regime's sworn enemy. Washington
announced that it would increase its defense budget by almost $50
billion, a sum greater than the total annual defense budget of
Britain or Germany. A few months later it toppled a regime 6,000
miles away—almost entirely from the air—in Afghanistan, a country
where the British and Soviet empires were bogged down at the peak of
their power. It is now clear that the current era can really have
only one name, the unipolar world—an age with only one global power.
America's position today is unprecedented. A hundred years ago,
Britain was a superpower, ruling a quarter of the globe's population.
But it was still only the second or third richest country in the
world and one among many strong military powers. The crucial measure
of military might in the early 20th century was naval power, and
Britain ruled the waves with a fleet as large as the next two navies
put together. By contrast, the United States will spend as much next
year on defense as the rest of the world put together (yes, all 191
countries). And it will do so devoting 4 percent of its GDP, a low
level by postwar standards.

American dominance is not simply military. The U.S. economy is as
large as the next three—Japan, Germany and Britain—put together. With
5 percent of the world's population, this one country accounts for 43
percent of the world's economic production, 40 percent of its high-
technology production and 50 percent of its research and development.
If you look at the indicators of future growth, all are favorable for
America. It is more dynamic economically, more youthful
demographically and more flexible culturally than any other part of
the world. It is conceivable that America's lead, especially over an
aging and sclerotic Europe, will actually increase over the next two
decades.

         Given this situation, perhaps what is most surprising is that
the world has not ganged up on America already. Since the beginnings
of the state system in the 16th century, international politics has
seen one clear pattern—the formation of balances of power against the
strong. Countries with immense military and economic might arouse
fear and suspicion, and soon others coalesce against them. It
happened to the Hapsburg Empire in the 17th century, France in the
late 18th and early 19th century, Germany twice in the early 20th
century, and the Soviet Union in the latter half of the 20th century.
At this point, most Americans will surely protest: "But we're
different!" Americans—this writer included—think of themselves as a
nation that has never sought to occupy others, and that through the
years has been a progressive and liberating force. But historians
tell us that all dominant powers thought they were special. Their
very success confirmed for them that they were blessed. But as they
became ever more powerful, the world saw them differently. The
English satirist John Dryden described this phenomenon in a poem set
during the Biblical King David's reign. "When the chosen people grew
too strong," he wrote, "The rightful cause at length became the
wrong."

         Has American power made its rightful cause turn into wrong?
Will America simply have to learn to live in splendid isolation from
the resentments of the world? This is certainly how some Americans
see things. And it's true that some of the opposition to the United
States is thinly veiled envy. "Scratch an anti-American in Europe,
and very often all he wants is a guest professorship at Harvard or to
have an article published in The New York Times," says Denis
MacShane, Britain's minister for Europe.

         But there lies a deep historical fallacy in the view
that "they hate us because we are strong." After all, U.S. supremacy
is hardly a recent phenomenon. America has been the leading world
power for almost a century now. By 1900 the United States was the
richest country in the world. By 1919 it had decisively intervened to
help win the largest war in history. By 1945 it had led the Allies to
victory in World War II. For 10 years thereafter America accounted
for 50 percent of world GDP, a much larger share than it holds today.

         Yet for five decades after World War II, there was no general
rush to gang up against the United States. Instead countries joined
with Washington to confront the Soviet Union, a much poorer country
(at best comprising 12 percent of world GDP, or a quarter the size of
the American economy). What explains this? How—until now—did America
buck the biggest trend in international history?

         To answer this question, go back to 1945. When America had
the world at its feet, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman
chose not to create an American imperium, but to build a world of
alliances and multilateral institutions. They formed the United
Nations, the Bretton Woods system of economic cooperation and dozens
of other international organizations. America helped get the rest of
the world back on its feet by pumping out vast amounts of aid and
private investment. The centerpiece of this effort, the Marshall
Plan, amounted to $120 billion in today's dollars.

         Not least of these efforts was the special attention given to
diplomacy. Consider what it must have meant for Franklin Roosevelt—at
the pinnacle of power—to go halfway across the world to Tehran and
Yalta to meet with Churchill and Stalin in 1943 and 1945. Roosevelt
was a sick man, paralyzed from the waist down, hauling 10 pounds of
steel braces on his legs. Traveling for 40 hours by sea and air took
the life out of him. He did not have to go. He had plenty of deputies—
Marshall, Eisenhower—who could have done the job. And he certainly
could have summoned the others closer to him. But FDR understood that
American power had to be coupled with a generosity of spirit. He
insisted that British commanders like Montgomery be given their fair
share of glory in the war. He brought China into the United Nations
Security Council, even though it was a poor peasant society, because
he believed that it was important to have the largest Asian country
properly represented within a world body.

         The standard set by Roosevelt and his generation endured.
When George Marshall devised the Marshall Plan, he insisted that
America should not dictate how its money be spent, but rather that
the initiatives and control should lie with Europeans. For decades
thereafter, the United States has provided aid, technical know-how
and assistance across the world. It has built dams, funded magazines
and sent scholars and students abroad so that people got to know
America and Americans. It has paid great deference to its allies who
were in no sense equals. It has conducted joint military exercises,
even when they added little to U.S. readiness. For half a century,
American presidents and secretaries of State have circled the globe
and hosted their counterparts in a never-ending cycle of diplomacy.

         Of course, all these exertions served our interests, too.
They produced a pro-American world that was rich and secure. They
laid the foundations for a booming global economy in which America
thrives. But it was an enlightened self-interest that took into
account the interests of others. Above all, it reassured countries—
through word and deed, style and substance—that America's mammoth
power need not be feared.

PART III: WHERE BUSH WENT WRONG

         George W. Bush came into office with few developed ideas
about foreign policy. He didn't seem much interested in the world.
During the years that his father was envoy to China, ambassador to
the United Nations, director of the CIA and vice president, Bush
traveled two or three times outside the country. Candidate Bush's
vision amounted mostly to carving out positions different from his
predecessor. Many conservatives thought the Clinton administration
was over-involved in the world, especially in nation-building, and
hectoring in its diplomacy. So Bush argued that America should be "a
humble nation," scale back its commitments abroad and not involve
itself in rebuilding other countries.

Yet other conservatives, a number of whom became powerful within the
administration, had a more sweeping agenda. Since the early '90s,
they had argued that the global landscape was marked by two
realities. One was American power. The post-cold-war world was
overwhelmingly unipolar. The other was the spread of new
international treaties and laws. The end of the cold war had given a
boost to efforts to create a global consensus on topics like war
crimes, land mines and biological weapons. Both observations were
accurate. From them, however, these Bush officials drew the strange
conclusion that America had little freedom to move in this new
world. "The picture it painted in its early months was of a behemoth
thrashing about against constraints that only it could see," notes
the neoconservative writer Robert Kagan. For much of the world, it
was mystifying to hear the most powerful country in the history of
the world speak as though it were a besieged nation, boxed in on all
sides.

         In its first year the administration withdrew from five
international treaties—and did so as brusquely as it could. It
reneged on virtually every diplomatic effort that the Clinton
administration had engaged in, from North Korea to the Middle East,
often overturning public statements from Colin Powell supporting
these efforts. It developed a language and diplomatic style that
seemed calculated to offend the world. (President Bush has placed a
portrait of Theodore Roosevelt in the White House. TR's most famous
words of advice are worth recalling: "Speak softly and carry a big
stick.") Key figures in the administration rarely traveled, foreign
visitors were treated to perfunctory office visits, and state dinners
were unheard of. On an annual basis, George W. Bush has visited fewer
foreign countries than any president in 40 years. Still, he does
better than Dick Cheney, who has been abroad only once since becoming
vice president.

         September 11 only added a new layer of assertiveness to
Bush's foreign policy. Understandably shocked and searching for
responses, the administration decided that it needed total freedom of
action. When NATO, for the first time in its history, invoked the
self-defense clause and offered America carte-blanche assistance, the
administration essentially ignored it. It similarly marginalized NATO
in the Afghan war. NATO has its limitations, which were powerfully
revealed during the Kosovo campaign, but the signal this sent to our
closest allies was that America didn't need them. Thus as seen by the
rest of the world, 9-11 had a distressingly paradoxical effect. It
produced a mobilization of American power and yet a narrowing of
American interests. Suddenly, Washington was more powerful and
determined to act. But it would act only for its own core security
and even pre-emptively when it needed to. Bush later announced an
expansive, vague Wilsonian vision—which has merit—but his style and
methods overshadowed its potential promise.

         The Bush administration could reasonably point out that it
doesn't get enough credit for reaching out to the rest of the world.
President Bush has, after all, worked with the United Nations on
Iraq, increased foreign aid by 50 percent, announced a $15 billion
AIDS program and formally endorsed a Palestinian state. Yet none of
these actions seems to earn him any good will. The reason for this is
plain. In almost every case, the administration comes to
multilateralism grudgingly, reluctantly, and with a transparent lack
of sincerity. For a year now, President Bush has dismissed the notion
that he should make any effort toward a Middle East peace process,
even though it would have defused some of the anti-Americanism in the
region as he sought to confront Iraq. Suddenly last week, to gain
allies on Iraq and at the insistence of Tony Blair, Bush made a
belated gesture toward the peace process. Is it surprising that
people are not hailing this last-minute conversion?

Nowhere has this appearance of diplomatic hypocrisy been more
striking than on Iraq. The president got high marks for his superb
speech at the Security Council last September, urging the United
Nations to get serious about enforcing its resolutions on Iraq and to
try inspections one last time. Unfortunately, that appeal had been
preceded by speeches by Cheney and comments by Rumsfeld calling
inspections a sham—statements that actually contradicted American
policy—and making clear that the administration had decided to go to
war. The only debate was whether to have the United Nations rubber-
stamp this policy. To make matters worse, weeks after the new U.S.-
sponsored U.N. resolution calling for fresh inspections, the
administration began large-scale deployments on Iraq's border.
Diplomatically, it had promised a good-faith effort to watch how the
inspections were going; militarily, it was gearing up for war with
troops that could not stay ready in the desert forever. Is it any
wonder that other countries, even those that would be willing to
endorse a war with Iraq, have felt that the diplomacy was a charade,
pursued simply to allow time for military preparations?

         President Bush's favorite verb is "expect." He announces
peremptorily that he "expects" the Palestinians to dump Yasir
Arafat, "expects" countries to be with him or against him, "expects"
Turkey to cooperate. It is all part of the administration's basic
approach toward foreign policy, which is best described by the phrase
used for its war plan—"shock and awe." The notion is that the United
States needs to intimidate countries with its power and
assertiveness, always threatening, always denouncing, never showing
weakness. Donald Rumsfeld often quotes a line from Al Capone: "You
will get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone."

         But should the guiding philosophy of the world's leading
democracy really be the tough talk of a Chicago mobster? In terms of
effectiveness, this strategy has been a disaster. It has alienated
friends and delighted enemies. Having traveled around the world and
met with senior government officials in dozens of countries over the
past year, I can report that with the exception of Britain and
Israel, every country the administration has dealt with feels
humiliated by it. "Most officials in Latin American countries today
are not anti-American types," says Jorge Castaneda, the reformist
foreign minister of Mexico, who resigned two months ago. "We have
studied in the United States or worked there. We like and understand
America. But we find it extremely irritating to be treated with utter
contempt." Last fall, a senior ambassador to the United Nations, in a
speech supporting America's position on Iraq, added an innocuous
phrase that could have been seen as deviating from that support. The
Bush administration called up his foreign minister and demanded that
he be formally reprimanded within an hour. The ambassador now seethes
when he talks about U.S. arrogance. Does this really help America's
cause in the world? There are dozens of stories like this from every
part of the world.

         In diplomacy, style is often substance. Consider this fact:
the Clinton administration used force on three important occasions—
Bosnia, Haiti and Kosovo. In none of them did it take the matter to
the United Nations Security Council, and there was little discussion
that it needed to do so. Indeed, Kofi Annan later made statements
that seemed to justify the action in Kosovo, explaining that state
sovereignty should not be used as a cover for humanitarian abuses.
Today Annan has (wrongly) announced that American action in Iraq
outside the United Nations will be "illegal." While the Clinton
administration—or the first Bush administration—was assertive in many
ways, people did not seek assurances about its intentions. The Bush
administration does not bear all the blame for this dramatic change
in attitudes. Because of 9-11, it has had to act forcefully on the
world stage and assert American power. But that should have been all
the more reason to adopt a posture of consultation and cooperation
while doing what needed to be done. The point is to scare our
enemies, not terrify the rest of the world.

PART IV: THE WAY TO BUCK HISTORY

         In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz, then a senior official in the first
Bush administration, authored a Pentagon document that argued that in
an era of overwhelming American dominance, U.S. foreign policy should
be geared toward maintaining our advantage and discouraging the rise
of other great powers. The premise behind this strategy is perfectly
sensible. The United States should attempt to lengthen its era of
supremacy for as long as it can. Any country would try to do the same
(though a wise one would not be foolish enough to announce it). For
that reason, the elder Bush ordered the Pentagon to water down the
document so that it was not quite so arrogant.

        In principle, American power is not simply good for America;
it is good for the world. Most of the problems the world faces today—
from terrorism to AIDS to nuclear proliferation—will be solved not
with less U.S. engagement but with more. The lesson of the 1990s—of
Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Rwanda—is surely that American action,
with all its flaws, is better than inaction. Other countries are
simply not ready or able, at this point, to take on the challenges
and burdens of leadership. Around the world, people understand this.
In a global survey taken last year, the most intriguing—and
unreported—finding was that large majorities of people in most
countries thought that the world would be a more dangerous place if
there were a rival to the American superpower. Sixty-four percent of
the French, 70 percent of Mexicans, 63 percent of Jordanians felt
this way. (Ironically, old Europe was more pro-American on this issue
than new Europe. Only 27 percent of Bulgarians agreed.)

         The real question is how America should wield its power. For
the past half century it has done so through alliances and global
institutions and in a consensual manner. Now it faces new challenges—
and not simply because of what the Bush administration has done. The
old order is changing. The alliances forged during the cold war are
weakening. Institutions built to reflect the realities of 1945—such
as the U.N. Security Council—risk becoming anachronistic. But if the
administration wishes to further weak—en and indeed destroy these
institutions and traditions—by dismissing or neglecting them—it must
ask itself: What will take their place? By what means will America
maintain its hegemony?

         For some in the administration, the answer is obvious:
America will act as it chooses, using what allies it can find in any
given situation. As a statement of fact this is sometimes the only
approach Washington will be able to employ. But it is not a durable
long-term strategy. It would require America to build new alliances
and arrangements every time it faced a crisis. More important,
operating in a conspicuously unconstrained way, in service of a
strategy to maintain primacy, will paradoxically produce the very
competition it hopes to avoid. The last two years are surely
instructive. The Bush administration's swagger has generated
international opposition and active measures to thwart its will.
Though countries like France and Russia cannot become great-power
competitors simply because they want to—they need economic and
military strength—they can use what influence they have to disrupt
American policy, as they are doing over Iraq. In fact, the less
responsibility we give them, the more freedom smaller powers have to
make American goals difficult to achieve.

         In many cases the United States simply can't "go it alone."
The current crises over North Korea, Iran's nuclear program and the
leakage of fissile materials from Russia are all good examples. And
while the United States can act largely by itself in certain special
circumstances, such as Iraq, the fewer allies, bases and air rights
it has, the higher the costs will be in American lives and treasure.
And those costs will become unbearable if the United States has to
both wage war and pay for postwar reconstruction on its own.

         The war on terror has given the United States a core security
interest in the stability of societies. Failed states can become
terrorist havens. That means we must focus attention and expenditures
on nation-building. For all its flaws, the United Nations is doing on-
the-ground work to create stable societies in Afghanistan, Kosovo,
Cambodia and Mozambique—and for the most part, it's succeeding. The
European Union and Japan pay most of these bills. Were Washington to
move to an entirely ad hoc approach, why would the rest of the world
agree to clean up its messes?

         Fighting terror also requires constant cooperation with
countries across the globe. America could not have captured Qaeda
strategist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed without the active partnership of
Pakistan. And yet if you ask Pakistanis what they have gotten for
this, they will point out that American tariffs continue to strangle
their textile industry and U.S. aid remains meager. Having asked for
help in de-Islamizing their education system—a matter of crucial
concern to America—they have received little. Meanwhile the overall
tone of Bush administration foreign policy has made General Musharraf
embarrassed to be pro-American.

         The last point is perhaps the most crucial one. Being pro-
American should not be a political liability for our allies. The
diplomatic fiasco over Turkey is an excellent example. For well over
a year now it has been obvious to anyone watching that the Turkish
people were deeply opposed to a war in Iraq. Yet the administration
assumed that it could bully or bribe Turkey into giving it basing
rights. But Turkey over the last year has become more democratic. The
military is less willing to overrule politicians. The new ruling
party, AK, is more open to internal debate than Turkey's other
parties. It allowed its members to vote freely on the motion to allow
America basing rights, only to have it defeated. Since more than 90
percent of the Turks oppose giving America basing rights, this should
not have been surprising. The administration wants democracy in the
Middle East. Well, it got it.

         As usual, diplomatic style played a role. "The way the U.S.
has been conducting the negotiations has been, in general,
humiliating," says a retired senior diplomat, Ozdem Sanberk.

         The costs of this mishap are real. If Turkey allowed America
to open a second front, we could end the war more quickly and with
fewer casualties, and the thorny issues relating to Turkish-Kurdish
relations could be more easily handled. But the larger lesson is
surely that in an increasingly democratic world American power must
be seen as legitimate not only by other governments but by their
people. Does America really want a world in which it gets its way in
the face of constant public anger only by twisting arms, offering
bribes and allying with dictators?

         There are many specific ways for the United States to rebuild
its relations with the world. It can match its military buildup with
diplomatic efforts that demonstrate its interest and engagement in
the world's problems. It can stop oversubsidizing American
steelworkers, farmers and textile-mill owners, and open its borders
to goods from poorer countries. But above all, it must make the world
comfortable with its power by leading through consensus. America's
special role in the world—its ability to buck history—is based not
simply on its great strength, but on a global faith that this power
is legitimate. If America squanders that, the loss will outweigh any
gains in domestic security. And this next American century could
prove to be lonely, brutish and short.


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With bureau reports

        © 2003 Newsweek, Inc.