The secret buried in the Torture Bill

Legislating Violations of the Constitution

By Erwin Chemerinsky

Saturday, September 30, 2006

With little public attention or even notice, the House of Representatives has passed a bill that undermines enforcement of the First Amendment's separation of church and state. The Public Expression of Religion Act - H.R. 2679 - provides that attorneys who successfully challenge government actions as violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment shall not be entitled to recover attorneys fees. The bill has only one purpose: to prevent suits challenging unconstitutional government actions advancing religion.

A federal statute, 42 United States Code section 1988, provides that attorneys are entitled to recover compensation for their fees if they successfully represent a plaintiff asserting a violation of his or her constitutional or civil rights. For example, a lawyer who successfully sues on behalf of a victim of racial discrimination or police abuse is entitled to recover attorney's fees from the defendant who acted wrongfully. Any plaintiff who successfully sues to remedy a violation of the Constitution or a federal civil rights statute is entitled to have his or her attorney's fees paid.

Congress adopted this statute for a simple reason: to encourage attorneys to bring cases on behalf of those whose rights have been violated. Congress was concerned that such individuals often cannot afford an attorney and vindicating constitutional rights rarely generates enough in damages to pay a lawyer on a contingency fee basis.

Without this statute, there is no way to compensate attorneys who successfully sue for injunctions to stop unconstitutional government behavior. Congress rightly recognized that attorneys who bring such actions are serving society's interests by stopping the government from violating the Constitution. Indeed, the potential for such suits deters government wrong-doing and increases the likelihood that the Constitution will be followed.

The attorneys' fees statute has worked well for almost 30 years. Lawyers receive attorneys' fees under the law only if their claim is meritorious and they win in court. Unsuccessful lawyers get nothing under the law. This creates a strong disincentive to frivolous suits and encourages lawyers to bring only clearly meritorious ones.

Despite the effectiveness of this statute, conservatives in the House of Representatives have now passed an insidious bill to try and limit enforcement of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, by denying attorneys fees to lawyers who successfully challenge government actions as violating this key constitutional provision. For instance, a lawyer who successfully challenged unconstitutional prayers in schools or unconstitutional symbols on religious property or impermissible aid to religious groups would -- under the bill -- not be entitled to recover attorneys' fees. The bill, if enacted, would treat suits to enforce the Establishment Clause different from litigation to enforce all of the other provisions of the Constitution and federal civil rights statutes.

Such a bill could have only one motive: to protect unconstitutional government actions advancing religion. The religious right, which has been trying for years to use government to advance their religious views, wants to reduce the likelihood that their efforts will be declared unconstitutional. Since they cannot change the law of the Establishment Clause by statute, they have turned their attention to trying to prevent its enforcement by eliminating the possibility for recovery of attorneys' fees.

Those who successfully prove the government has violated their constitutional rights would, under the bill, be required to pay their own legal fees. Few people can afford to do so. Without the possibility of attorneys' fees, individuals who suffer unconstitutional religious persecution often will be unable to sue. The bill applies even to cases involving illegal religious coercion of public school children or blatant discrimination against particular religions.

The passage of this bill by the House is a disturbing achievement by those who seek to undermine our nation's commitment to fundamental freedoms laid out in the Constitution. Should it come up for a vote, it is imperative that the Senate reject this nefarious proposal. The religious right is looking for a way to get away with violating the Establishment Clause and is now one step closer to this goal. The Establishment Clause is no less important than any other part of the Bill of Rights and suits to enforce it should be treated no differently than any other litigation to enforce civil liberties and civil rights

Erwin Chemerinsky is the Alston & Bird Professor of Law and Political Science, at Duke University.

Protecting American Values...

Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Sunday, September 17, 2006

After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans -- restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon.

To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.

O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .

Many of those chosen by O'Beirne's office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq's government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance -- but had applied for a White House job -- was sent to reopen Baghdad's stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they didn't have a background in accounting.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration's gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.

The CPA had the power to enact laws, print currency, collect taxes, deploy police and spend Iraq's oil revenue. It had more than 1,500 employees in Baghdad at its height, working under America's viceroy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, but never released a public roster of its entire staff.

Interviews with scores of former CPA personnel over the past two years depict an organization that was dominated -- and ultimately hobbled -- by administration ideologues.

"We didn't tap -- and it should have started from the White House on down -- just didn't tap the right people to do this job," said Frederick Smith, who served as the deputy director of the CPA's Washington office. "It was a tough, tough job. Instead we got people who went out there because of their political leanings."

Endowed with $18 billion in U.S. reconstruction funds and a comparatively quiescent environment in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion, the CPA was the U.S. government's first and best hope to resuscitate Iraq -- to establish order, promote rebuilding and assemble a viable government, all of which, experts believe, would have constricted the insurgency and mitigated the chances of civil war. Many of the basic tasks Americans struggle to accomplish today in Iraq -- training the army, vetting the police, increasing electricity generation -- could have been performed far more effectively in 2003 by the CPA.

But many CPA staff members were more interested in other things: in instituting a flat tax, in selling off government assets, in ending food rations and otherwise fashioning a new nation that looked a lot like the United States. Many of them spent their days cloistered in the Green Zone, a walled-off enclave in central Baghdad with towering palms, posh villas, well-stocked bars and resort-size swimming pools.

By the time Bremer departed in June 2004, Iraq was in a precarious state. The Iraqi army, which had been dissolved and refashioned by the CPA, was one-third the size he had pledged it would be. Seventy percent of police officers had not been screened or trained. Electricity generation was far below what Bremer had promised to achieve. And Iraq's interim government had been selected not by elections but by Americans. Divisive issues were to be resolved later on, increasing the chances that tension over those matters would fuel civil strife.

To recruit the people he wanted, O'Beirne sought résumés from the offices of Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks and GOP activists. He discarded applications from those his staff deemed ideologically suspect, even if the applicants possessed Arabic language skills or postwar rebuilding experience.

Smith said O'Beirne once pointed to a young man's résumé and pronounced him "an ideal candidate." His chief qualification was that he had worked for the Republican Party in Florida during the presidential election recount in 2000.

O'Beirne, a former Army officer who is married to prominent conservative commentator Kate O'Beirne, did not respond to requests for comment.

He and his staff used an obscure provision in federal law to hire many CPA staffers as temporary political appointees, which exempted the interviewers from employment regulations that prohibit questions about personal political beliefs.

There were a few Democrats who wound up getting jobs with the CPA, but almost all of them were active-duty soldiers or State Department Foreign Service officers. Because they were career government employees, not temporary hires, O'Beirne's office could not query them directly about their political leanings.

One former CPA employee who had an office near O'Beirne's wrote an e-mail to a friend describing the recruitment process: "I watched résumés of immensely talented individuals who had sought out CPA to help the country thrown in the trash because their adherence to 'the President's vision for Iraq' (a frequently heard phrase at CPA) was 'uncertain.' I saw senior civil servants from agencies like Treasury, Energy . . . and Commerce denied advisory positions in Baghdad that were instead handed to prominent RNC (Republican National Committee) contributors."

As more and more of O'Beirne's hires arrived in the Green Zone, the CPA's headquarters in Hussein's marble-walled former Republican Palace felt like a campaign war room. Bumper stickers and mouse pads praising President Bush were standard desk decorations. In addition to military uniforms and "Operation Iraqi Freedom" garb, "Bush-Cheney 2004" T-shirts were among the most common pieces of clothing.

"I'm not here for the Iraqis," one staffer noted to a reporter over lunch. "I'm here for George Bush."

When Gordon Robison, who worked in the Strategic Communications office, opened a care package from his mother to find a book by Paul Krugman, a liberal New York Times columnist, people around him stared. "It was like I had just unwrapped a radioactive brick," he recalled.

Finance Background Not Required

Twenty-four-year-old Jay Hallen was restless. He had graduated from Yale two years earlier, and he didn't much like his job at a commercial real-estate firm. His passion was the Middle East, and although he had never been there, he was intrigued enough to take Arabic classes and read histories of the region in his spare time.

He had mixed feelings about the war in Iraq, but he viewed the American occupation as a ripe opportunity. In the summer of 2003, he sent an e-mail to Reuben Jeffrey III, whom he had met when applying for a White House job a year earlier. Hallen had a simple query for Jeffrey, who was working as an adviser to Bremer: Might there be any job openings in Baghdad?

"Be careful what you wish for," Jeffrey wrote in response. Then he forwarded Hallen's resume to O'Beirne's office.

Three weeks later, Hallen got a call from the Pentagon. The CPA wanted him in Baghdad. Pronto. Could he be ready in three to four weeks?

The day he arrived in Baghdad, he met with Thomas C. Foley, the CPA official in charge of privatizing state-owned enterprises. (Foley, a major Republican Party donor, went to Harvard Business School with President Bush.) Hallen was shocked to learn that Foley wanted him to take charge of reopening the stock exchange.

"Are you sure?" Hallen said to Foley. "I don't have a finance background."

It's fine, Foley replied. He told Hallen that he was to be the project manager. He would rely on other people to get things done. He would be "the main point of contact."

Before the war, Baghdad's stock exchange looked nothing like its counterparts elsewhere in the world. There were no computers, electronic displays or men in colorful coats scurrying around on the trading floor. Trades were scrawled on pieces of paper and noted on large blackboards. If you wanted to buy or sell, you came to the exchange yourself and shouted your order to one of the traders. There was no air-conditioning. It was loud and boisterous. But it worked. Private firms raised hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling stock, and ordinary people learned about free enterprise.

The exchange was gutted by looters after the war. The first wave of American economic reconstruction specialists from the Treasury Department ignored it. They had bigger issues to worry about: paying salaries, reopening the banks, stabilizing the currency. But the brokers wanted to get back to work and investors wanted their money, so the CPA made the reopening a priority.

Quickly absorbing the CPA's ambition during the optimistic days before the insurgency flared, Hallen decided that he didn't just want to reopen the exchange, he wanted to make it the best, most modern stock market in the Arab world. He wanted to promulgate a new securities law that would make the exchange independent of the Finance Ministry, with its own bylaws and board of directors. He wanted to set up a securities and exchange commission to oversee the market. He wanted brokers to be licensed and listed companies to provide financial disclosures. He wanted to install a computerized trading and settlement system.

Iraqis cringed at Hallen's plan. Their top priority was reopening the exchange, not setting up computers or enacting a new securities law. "People are broke and bewildered," broker Talib Tabatabai told Hallen. "Why do you want to create enemies? Let us open the way we were."

Tabatabai, who held a doctorate in political science from Florida State University, believed Hallen's plan was unrealistic. "It was something so fancy, so great, that it couldn't be accomplished," he said.

But Hallen was convinced that major changes had to be enacted. "Their laws and regulations were completely out of step with the modern world," he said. "There was just no transparency in anything. It was more of a place for Saddam and his friends to buy up private companies that they otherwise didn't have a stake in."

Opening the stock exchange without legal and structural changes, Hallen maintained, "would have been irresponsible and short-sighted."

To help rewrite the securities law, train brokers and purchase the necessary computers, Hallen recruited a team of American volunteers. In the spring of 2004, Bremer approved the new law and simultaneously appointed the nine Iraqis selected by Hallen to become the exchange's board of governors.

The exchange's board selected Tabatabai as its chairman. The new securities law that Hallen had nursed into life gave the board control over the exchange's operations, but it didn't say a thing about the role of the CPA adviser. Hallen assumed that he'd have a part in decision-making until the handover of sovereignty. Tabatabai and the board, however, saw themselves in charge.

Tabatabai and the other governors decided to open the market as soon as possible. They didn't want to wait several more months for the computerized trading system to be up and running. They ordered dozens of dry-erase boards to be installed on the trading floor. They used such boards to keep track of buying and selling prices before the war, and that's how they'd do it again.

The exchange opened two days after Hallen's tour in Iraq ended. Brokers barked orders to floor traders, who used their trusty white boards. Transactions were recorded not with computers but with small chits written in ink. CPA staffers stayed away, afraid that their presence would make the stock market a target for insurgents.

When Tabatabai was asked what would have happened if Hallen hadn't been assigned to reopen the exchange, he smiled. "We would have opened months earlier. He had grand ideas, but those ideas did not materialize," Tabatabai said of Hallen. "Those CPA people reminded me of Lawrence of Arabia."

'Loyalist' Replaces Public Health Expert

The hiring of Bremer's most senior advisers was settled upon at the highest levels of the White House and the Pentagon. Some, like Foley, were personally recruited by Bush. Others got their jobs because an influential Republican made a call on behalf of a friend or trusted colleague.

That's what happened with James K. Haveman Jr., who was selected to oversee the rehabilitation of Iraq's health care system.

Haveman, a 60-year-old social worker, was largely unknown among international health experts, but he had connections. He had been the community health director for the former Republican governor of Michigan, John Engler, who recommended him to Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense.

Haveman was well-traveled, but most of his overseas trips were in his capacity as a director of International Aid, a faith-based relief organization that provided health care while promoting Christianity in the developing world. Before his stint in government, Haveman ran a large Christian adoption agency in Michigan that urged pregnant women not to have abortions.

Haveman replaced Frederick M. Burkle Jr., a physician with a master's degree in public health and postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and the University of California at Berkeley. Burkle taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where he specialized in disaster-response issues, and he was a deputy assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which sent him to Baghdad immediately after the war.

He had worked in Kosovo and Somalia and in northern Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. A USAID colleague called him the "single most talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for the United States government."

But a week after Baghdad's liberation, Burkle was informed he was being replaced. A senior official at USAID sent Burkle an e-mail saying the White House wanted a "loyalist" in the job. Burkle had a wall of degrees, but he didn't have a picture with the president.

Haveman arrived in Iraq with his own priorities. He liked to talk about the number of hospitals that had reopened since the war and the pay raises that had been given to doctors instead of the still-decrepit conditions inside the hospitals or the fact that many physicians were leaving for safer, better paying jobs outside Iraq. He approached problems the way a health care administrator in America would: He focused on preventive measures to reduce the need for hospital treatment.

He urged the Health Ministry to mount an anti-smoking campaign, and he assigned an American from the CPA team -- who turned out to be a closet smoker himself -- to lead the public education effort. Several members of Haveman's staff noted wryly that Iraqis faced far greater dangers in their daily lives than tobacco. The CPA's limited resources, they argued, would be better used raising awareness about how to prevent childhood diarrhea and other fatal maladies.

Haveman didn't like the idea that medical care in Iraq was free. He figured Iraqis should pay a small fee every time they saw a doctor. He also decided to allocate almost all of the Health Ministry's $793 million share of U.S. reconstruction funds to renovating maternity hospitals and building new community medical clinics. His intention, he said, was "to shift the mind-set of the Iraqis that you don't get health care unless you go to a hospital."

But his decision meant there were no reconstruction funds set aside to rehabilitate the emergency rooms and operating theaters at Iraqi hospitals, even though injuries from insurgent attacks were the country's single largest public health challenge.

Haveman also wanted to apply American medicine to other parts of the Health Ministry. Instead of trying to restructure the dysfunctional state-owned firm that imported and distributed drugs and medical supplies to hospitals, he decided to try to sell it to a private company.

To prepare it for a sale, he wanted to attempt something he had done in Michigan. When he was the state's director of community health, he sought to slash the huge amount of money Michigan spent on prescription drugs for the poor by limiting the medications doctors could prescribe for Medicaid patients. Unless they received an exemption, physicians could only prescribe drugs that were on an approved list, known as a formulary.

Haveman figured the same strategy could bring down the cost of medicine in Iraq. The country had 4,500 items on its drug formulary. Haveman deemed it too large. If private firms were going to bid for the job of supplying drugs to government hospitals, they needed a smaller, more manageable list. A new formulary would also outline new requirements about where approved drugs could be manufactured, forcing Iraq to stop buying medicines from Syria, Iran and Russia, and start buying from the United States.

He asked the people who had drawn up the formulary in Michigan whether they wanted to come to Baghdad. They declined. So he beseeched the Pentagon for help. His request made its way to the Defense Department's Pharmacoeconomic Center in San Antonio.

A few weeks later, three formulary experts were on their way to Iraq.

The group was led by Theodore Briski, a balding, middle-aged pharmacist who held the rank of lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. Haveman's order, as Briski remembered it, was: "Build us a formulary in two weeks and then go home." By his second day in Iraq, Briski came to three conclusions. First, the existing formulary "really wasn't that bad." Second, his mission was really about "redesigning the entire Iraqi pharmaceutical procurement and delivery system, and that was a complete change of scope -- on a grand scale." Third, Haveman and his advisers "really didn't know what they were doing."

Haveman "viewed Iraq as Michigan after a huge attack," said George Guszcza, an Army captain who worked on the CPA's health team. "Somehow if you went into the ghettos and projects of Michigan and just extended it out for the entire state -- that's what he was coming to save."

Haveman's critics, including more than a dozen people who worked for him in Baghdad, contend that rewriting the formulary was a distraction. Instead, they said, the CPA should have focused on restructuring, but not privatizing, the drug-delivery system and on ordering more emergency shipments of medicine to address shortages of essential medicines. The first emergency procurement did not occur until early 2004, after the Americans had been in Iraq for more than eight months.

Haveman insisted that revising the formulary was a crucial first step in improving the distribution of medicines. "It was unwieldy to order 4,500 different drugs, and to test and distribute them," he said.

When Haveman left Iraq, Baghdad's hospitals were as decrepit as the day the Americans arrived. At Yarmouk Hospital, the city's largest, rooms lacked the most basic equipment to monitor a patient's blood pressure and heart rate, operating theaters were without modern surgical tools and sterile implements, and the pharmacy's shelves were bare.

Nationwide, the Health Ministry reported that 40 percent of the 900 drugs it deemed essential were out of stock in hospitals. Of the 32 medicines used in public clinics for the management of chronic diseases, 26 were unavailable.

The new health minister, Aladin Alwan, beseeched the United Nations for help, and he asked neighboring nations to share what they could. He sought to increase production at a state-run manufacturing plant in the city of Samarra. And he put the creation of a new formulary on hold. To him, it was a fool's errand.

"We didn't need a new formulary. We needed drugs," he said. "But the Americans did not understand that."

A 9/11 Hero's Public Relations Blitz

In May 2003, a team of law enforcement experts from the Justice Department concluded that more than 6,600 foreign advisers were needed to help rehabilitate Iraq's police forces.

The White House dispatched just one: Bernie Kerik.

Bernard Kerik had more star power than Bremer and everyone else in the CPA combined. Soldiers stopped him in the halls of the Republican Palace to ask for his autograph or, if they had a camera, a picture. Reporters were more interested in interviewing him than they were the viceroy.

Kerik had been New York City's police commissioner when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. His courage (he shouted evacuation orders from a block away as the south tower collapsed), his stamina (he worked around the clock and catnapped in his office for weeks), and his charisma (he was a master of the television interview) turned him into a national hero. When White House officials were casting about for a prominent individual to take charge of Iraq's Interior Ministry and assume the challenge of rebuilding the Iraqi police, Kerik's name came up. Bush pronounced it an excellent idea.

Kerik had worked in the Middle East before, as the security director for a government hospital in Saudi Arabia, but he was expelled from the country amid a government investigation into his surveillance of the medical staff. He lacked postwar policing experience, but the White House viewed that as an asset.

Veteran Middle East hands were regarded as insufficiently committed to the goal of democratizing the region. Post-conflict experts, many of whom worked for the State Department, the United Nations or nongovernmental organizations, were deemed too liberal. Men such as Kerik -- committed Republicans with an accomplished career in business or government -- were ideal. They were loyal, and they shared the Bush administration's goal of rebuilding Iraq in an American image. With Kerik, there were bonuses: The media loved him, and the American public trusted him.

Robert Gifford, a State Department expert in international law enforcement, was one of the first CPA staff members to meet Kerik when he arrived in Baghdad. Gifford was the senior adviser to the Interior Ministry, which oversaw the police. Kerik was to take over Gifford's job.

"I understand you are going to be the man, and we are here to support you," Gifford told Kerik.

"I'm here to bring more media attention to the good work on police because the situation is probably not as bad as people think it is," Kerik replied.

As they entered the Interior Ministry office in the palace, Gifford offered to brief Kerik. "It was during that period I realized he wasn't with me," Gifford recalled. "He didn't listen to anything. He hadn't read anything except his e-mails. I don't think he read a single one of our proposals."

Kerik wasn't a details guy. He was content to let Gifford figure out how to train Iraqi officers to work in a democratic society. Kerik would take care of briefing the viceroy and the media. And he'd be going out for a few missions himself.

Kerik's first order of business, less than a week after he arrived, was to give a slew of interviews saying the situation was improving. He told the Associated Press that security in Baghdad "is not as bad as I thought. Are bad things going on? Yes. But is it out of control? No. Is it getting better? Yes." He went on NBC's "Today" show to pronounce the situation "better than I expected." To Time magazine, he said that "people are starting to feel more confident. They're coming back out. Markets and shops that I saw closed one week ago have opened."

When it came to his own safety, Kerik took no chances. He hired a team of South African bodyguards, and he packed a 9mm handgun under his safari vest.

The first months after liberation were a critical period for Iraq's police. Officers needed to be called back to work and screened for Baath Party connections. They'd have to learn about due process, how to interrogate without torture, how to walk the beat. They required new weapons. New chiefs had to be selected. Tens of thousands more officers would have to be hired to put the genie of anarchy back in the bottle.

Kerik held only two staff meetings while in Iraq, one when he arrived and the other when he was being shadowed by a New York Times reporter, according to Gerald Burke, a former Massachusetts State Police commander who participated in the initial Justice Department assessment mission. Despite his White House connections, Kerik did not secure funding for the desperately needed police advisers. With no help on the way, the task of organizing and training Iraqi officers fell to U.S. military police soldiers, many of whom had no experience in civilian law enforcement.

"He was the wrong guy at the wrong time," Burke said later. "Bernie didn't have the skills. What we needed was a chief executive-level person. . . . Bernie came in with a street-cop mentality."

Kerik authorized the formation of a hundred-man Iraqi police paramilitary unit to pursue criminal syndicates that had formed since the war, and he often joined the group on nighttime raids, departing the Green Zone at midnight and returning at dawn, in time to attend Bremer's senior staff meeting, where he would crack a few jokes, describe the night's adventures and read off the latest crime statistics prepared by an aide. The unit did bust a few kidnapping gangs and car-theft rings, generating a stream of positive news stories that Kerik basked in and Bremer applauded. But the all-nighters meant Kerik wasn't around to supervise the Interior Ministry during the day. He was sleeping.

Several members of the CPA's Interior Ministry team wanted to blow the whistle on Kerik, but they concluded any complaints would be brushed off. "Bremer's staff thought he was the silver bullet," a member of the Justice Department assessment mission said. "Nobody wanted to question the [man who was] police chief during 9/11."

Kerik contended that he did his best in what was, ultimately, an untenable situation. He said he wasn't given sufficient funding to hire foreign police advisers or establish large-scale training programs.

Three months after he arrived, Kerik attended a meeting of local police chiefs in Baghdad's Convention Center. When it was his turn to address the group, he stood and bid everyone farewell. Although he had informed Bremer of his decision a few days earlier, Kerik hadn't told most of the people who worked for him. He flew out of Iraq a few hours later.

"I was in my own world," he said later. "I did my own thing."

Deafeatists and Apeasers...

George W. Bush, Confused Rhetoric, and the Failures of the "War on Terrorism"

By Arnaud de La Grange

Monday 11 September 2006

The Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review counted a surprise guest on the sidelines of one of its pages: Lawrence of Arabia, to whose strategies George W. Bush appealed to illustrate what asymmetric warfare and psychological action should be. The article notably cited the seizure of Aqaba in 1917 by a handful of Bedouins. In Washington, along with the author of "Guerrilla Warfare in the Desert," people should also reread Wingate and many other theoreticians of anti-subversive struggle. They teach us that in order to fight guerrilla or terrorist groups, those groups must be isolated, that the "fish must be taken out of the water." That one must rally the broadest possible segments of the population to one's cause in order to return activists to marginality, to the indefensible sphere of political delinquency. Then, and only then, can one fight them; repress them in all legitimacy, with all effectiveness. Meanwhile, the "Long War" - that's the new official terminology - conducted against terrorism from te banks of the Potomac seems to follow diametrically opposed pathways.

In fact, everything takes place as though al-Qaeda's would-be destroyers had been unceasingly knocking themselves out to enlarge the terrorist organization's base of support the last five years. "Al-Qaeda's only indispensable ally is American foreign policy toward the Islamic world." This provocative assertion does not come from some French voice prompt to denigrate the hyper-power's conduct, but from a very young CIA retiree, Michael Scheuer, who declared it a few weeks ago when the Central Intelligence Agency had just taken the decision to dissolve the "bin Laden cell," a team specialized in tracking down the al-Qaeda leader and his principal lieutenants. "Today bin Laden and his organization tend to be considered as one threat among others," deplored the former secret agent. He alluded to the intelligence services' refocusing of their resources on Iraq.

Today, we may add Iran. Last Tuesday, George W. Bush elevated Ahmadinejad's regime to the same level of threat as Osama bin Laden's organization, setting al-Qaeda's Sunni extremism back-to-back with Tehran's Shiite extremism. For the American president, the Iran of tomorrow risks being terrorism plus The Bomb. As we see from his definition of the new Horsemen of the Apocalypse, George W. Bush makes broad sweeps with his brush. As he knocks himself out to put all his enemies under the same standard, he contributes to unifying a front that demands nothing better.

In another speech last week, he qualified the enemies he is fighting - from Iraq to Afghanistan - as "successors to the fascists, the Nazis, the Communists." No less. For the Muslim street, America's globalizing discourse is perceived as a general aggression. George W. Bush plays on a mélange of genres. And by ricochet effect, so does al-Qaeda. And one of the great strengths, the great successes of the terrorist organization resides in the enveloping character of its struggle. Alongside the religious dimension, its rhetoric salvages fields left fallow since the end of the Cold War: anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, the North-South cleavage.

This broadened mobilization capacity is undoubtedly the key to al-Qaeda's worrying ability to renew itself. And a major issue. We saw it at work again recently in the Lebanese crisis. By holding out against the Israeli army and by flouting its American ally, Hezbollah quickly forced the admiration of Arab and Muslim populations and quickly donned the vestments of herald of anti-Western imperialism. To the great displeasure of al-Qaeda, jealous of its status as Public Enemy Number One for the United States and Israel. Suddenly, the terrorist organization entered the game - from a media perspective, at least. Through the voice of its Number Two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, it promised reprisals for the Israeli attacks against Lebanon and Gaza. Among radical Islamist groups, the competition was launched.

In these past few days, George W. Bush has reasserted that his soldiers in Baghdad and Kabul were conducting the great "ideological conflict of the twenty-first century." A speech from which Paris has distanced itself. Before the ambassadors' conference ten days ago, Jacques Chirac warned against the risk of a disastrous "divorce" between the West and Islam.

Apart from outrageously polarizing the war against terrorism, the American president's semantics are tactically counter-productive. Caricaturing the enemy is to know him less well, to combat him less well. When you put everything in the same subversive bag, you don't head in the direction of understanding crises. Islam scholar Olivier Roy recently wrote in le Figaro's columns: "We must recover the specificity of each conflict rather than gargling vague and inoperative terms such as "war against terrorism" or "Islamofascism."

Moreover, the caricature and dialectical outrageousness in vogue in Washington do not confine themselves to the spadassins of Islamist activism. They also have their "domestic" uses. Last week, American Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld scandalized Democrats by assimilating Iraq war detractors to those who accommodated themselves to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.

Yet, these unconscious "doves" do not reproach the American president for making war, but for doing it badly. Or not in the right place. They resent his offering other lands for jihad between the Tigris and Euphrates, by draining the real anti-terrorism front along the Afghan-Pakistani border, for example. In short, for not having - to use an expression dear to George W. Bush - "finished the job."

The True Iraq Appeasers

by Peter W. Galbraith

Published on Thursday, August 31

In his most recent justification of his Pentagon stewardship, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reached back to the 1930s, comparing the Bush administration's critics to those who, like US Ambassador to Britain Joseph P. Kennedy, favored appeasing Adolf Hitler. Rumsfeld avoided a more recent comparison: the appeasement of Saddam Hussein by the Reagan and first Bush administrations. The reasons for selectivity are obvious, since so many of Hussein's appeasers in the 1980s were principals in the 2003 Iraq war, including Rumsfeld.

In 1983, President Reagan initiated a strategic opening to Iraq, then in the third year of a war of attrition with neighboring Iran. Although Iraq had started the war with a blitzkrieg attack in 1980, the tide had turned by 1982 in favor of much larger Iran, and the Reagan administration was afraid Iraq might actually lose. Reagan chose Rumsfeld as his emissary to Hussein, whom he visited in December 1983 and March 1984. Inconveniently, Iraq had begun to use chemical weapons against Iran in November 1983, the first sustained use of poison gas since a 1925 treaty banning that.

Rumsfeld never mentioned this blatant violation of international law to Hussein, instead focusing on shared hostility toward Iran and an oil pipeline through Jordan. Rumsfeld apparently did mention it to Tariq Aziz, Iraq's foreign minister, but by not raising the issue with the paramount leader he signaled that good relations were more important to the United States than the use of poison gas.

This message was reinforced by US conduct after the Rumsfeld missions. The Reagan administration offered Hussein financial credits that eventually made Iraq the third-largest recipient of US assistance. It normalized diplomatic relations and, most significantly, began providing Iraq with battlefield intelligence. Iraq used this information to target Iranian troops with chemical weapons. And when Iraq turned its chemical weapons on the Kurds in 1988, killing 5,000 in the town of Halabja, the Reagan administration sought to obscure responsibility by falsely suggesting Iran was also responsible.

On Aug. 25, 1988 -- five days after the Iran-Iraq War ended -- Iraq attacked 48 Kurdish villages more than 100 miles from Iran. Within days, the US Senate passed legislation, sponsored by Claiborne Pell, Democrat of Rhode Island, to end US financial support for Hussein and to impose trade sanctions. To enhance the prospects that Reagan would sign his legislation, Pell sent me to Eastern Turkey to interview Kurdish survivors who had fled across the border. As it turned out, the Reagan administration agreed that Iraq had gassed the Kurds, but strongly opposed sanctions, or even cutting off financial assistance. Colin Powell, then the national security adviser, coordinated the Reagan administration's opposition.

The Pell bill died at the end of the congressional session in 1988, in spite of heroic efforts by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts to force it through by holding up a raft of administration nominations.

The next year, President George H.W. Bush's administration actually doubled US financial credits for Iraq. A week before Hussein invaded Kuwait, the administration vociferously opposed legislation that would have conditioned US assistance to Iraq on a commitment not to use chemical weapons and to stop the genocide against the Kurds. At the time, Dick Cheney, now vice president, was secretary of defense and a statutory member of the National Security Council that reviewed Iraq policy. By all accounts, he supported the administration's appeasement policy.

In 2003, Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld all cited Hussein's use of chemical weapons 15 years before as a rationale for war. But at the time Hussein was actually doing the gassing -- including of his own people -- they considered his use of chemical weapons a second-tier issue.

The Reagan and first Bush administrations believed that Hussein could be a strategic partner to the United States, a counterweight to Iran, a force for moderation in the region, and possibly help in the Arab-Israel peace process. That was, of course, an illusion. A ruthless dictator who launched an attack on his neighbor, Iran, who used chemical weapons, and who committed genocide against his own Kurds was never likely to be a reliable American ally. Hussein, having watched the United States gloss over his crimes in the Iran war and at home, concluded he could get away with invading Kuwait.

It was a costly error for him, for his country, and eventually for the United States, which now has the largest part of its military bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire. Meanwhile the architects of the earlier appeasement policy now maintain the illusion that they have a path to victory, if only their critics would shut up.

Peter W. Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia, is author of ``The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End."


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Study calls Iran 'biggest beneficiary' of US war on terror

By Arthur Bright

posted August 25, 2006 at 2:00 p.m.

Two new reports criticize the US's handling of Iran, just as the West gauges Iran's response to a proposal meant to rein in Tehran's nuclear ambitions. One report says the US war on terror has strengthened Tehran, the other slams America's poor intelligence on Iran.

The first report, released Wednesday by the non-government Royal Institute of International Affairs (also known as Chatham House) in Britain, says that Iran, despite being a part of US President Bush's "axis of evil," has been the "chief beneficiary of the war on terror in the Middle East."

The United States, with Coalition support, has eliminated two of Iran's regional rival governments — the Taliban in Afghanistan in November 2001 and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in April 2003 — but has failed to replace either with coherent and stable political structures. The outbreak of conflict on two fronts in June –July 2006 between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza, and Israel and Hizbullah in Lebanon has added to the regional dimensions of this instability.

Consequently, Iran has moved to fill the regional void with an apparent ease that has disturbed both regional players and the United States and its European allies. Iran is one of the most significant and powerful states in the region and its influence spreads well beyond its critical location at the nexus of the Middle East, Turkey, the Caucasus, Central Asia and South Asia.

Of particular note is Iran's influence in Iraq. Chatham House argues that "the great problem facing the US is that Iran has superseded it as the most influential power in Iraq," due in part to Tehran's tremendous sway with influential militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), one of the country's dominant Shia parties.

This influence has a variety of forms but all can be turned against the US presence in Iraq with relative ease, and almost certainly would heighten US casualties to the point where a continued presence might not be tenable. Sources in Iraq are already warning that the major cities (including Basra and Baghdad) have witnessed a rise in the activities of Iranian paramilitary units and the recent bout of violence and instability in Basra is now considered to be a small display of what would happen if Iran itself was targeted.

The BBC reports that one author of the report puts the blame for Iran's ascension on the United States and its execution of the war on terror.

One of the authors of the Chatham House report, Dr Ali Ansari of the University of St Andrews, told BBC Radio Five Live: "We've seen really since 9/11 that the chief beneficiary of America's global war on terror in the Middle East has been the very country that it considers to be a major part or a founding member of the axis of evil.

"And that basically tells us that there's an enormous incoherence in American approach to the Middle East. They simply haven't managed to work out a strategy and a policy that will work and will achieve results."

Another author of the report echoed those statements, reports UPI.

Nadim Shehadi, associate fellow on Chatham House's Middle East Program and one of the report's authors, said: "While the U.S. has been playing poker in the region, Iran has been playing chess. Iran is playing a longer, cleverer game and has been far more successful at winning hearts and minds."

John Rapley, a senior lecturer in the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica, writes in a Jamaica Gleaner commentary that because of Iran's newfound strength and American struggles in the Middle East, President Bush "may have no choice but to negotiate with the Iranians on terms he doesn't like."

However, members of the US House Intelligence Committee argued in their own report released Wednesday that America's weak position with Iran stems from poor intelligence from the CIA and other agencies. The Washington Post writes that the report "fully backs the White House position that the Islamic republic is moving forward with a nuclear weapons program and that it poses a significant danger to the United States. But it chides the intelligence community for not providing enough direct evidence to support that assertion."

"American intelligence agencies do not know nearly enough about Iran's nuclear weapons program" to help policymakers at a critical time, the report's authors say. Information "regarding potential Iranian chemical weapons and biological weapons programs is neither voluminous nor conclusive," and little evidence has been gathered to tie Iran to al-Qaeda and to the recent fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, they say.

The report relies exclusively on publicly available documents. Its authors did not interview intelligence officials. Still, it warns the intelligence community to avoid the mistakes made regarding weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war, noting that Iran could easily be engaged in "a denial and deception campaign to exaggerate progress on its nuclear program as Saddam Hussein apparently did concerning his WMD programs."

The Post notes that the report was authored primarily by Frederick Fleitz, a former CIA officer who had been a special assistant to former State Department official and current ambassador to the United Nations John R. Bolton, who has espoused a hard line against Iran. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has since pushed a policy of supporting Europe's direct negotiations with Iran.

In an editorial published today, The New York Times criticized the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R) of Michigan, for the report, calling it bullying of American intelligence agencies and fearmongering for GOP political gain.

It's hard to imagine that Mr. Hoekstra believes there is someone left in this country who does not already know that [Iran is a strategic threat to the US]. But the report obviously has different aims. It is partly a campaign document, a product of the Republican strategy of scaring Americans into allowing the G.O.P. to retain control of Congress this fall. It fits with the fearmongering we've heard lately — like President Bush's attempt the other day to link the Iraq war to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But even more worrisome, the report seems intended to signal the intelligence community that the Republican leadership wants scarier assessments that would justify a more confrontational approach to Tehran. It was not the work of any intelligence agency, or the full intelligence panel, or even the subcommittee that ostensibly drafted it. The Washington Post reported that it was written primarily by a former C.I.A. official known for his view that the assessments on Iran are not sufficiently dire.

While the report contains no new information, it does dish up dire-sounding innuendo, mostly to leave the impression that Iran is developing nuclear weapons a lot faster than intelligence agencies have the guts to admit. It also tosses in a few conspiracy theories, like the unsupported assertion that Iran engineered the warfare between Israel and Hezbollah. And it complains that America's spy agencies are too cautious, that they "shy away from provocative conclusions."

Dan Riehl of the conservative NewsBusters blog counters that the Times is belittling the threat Iran poses in favor of an anti-GOP critique.

[The Times states] that Iran is our enemy, has lied to the world about their on going nuclear endeavors ... and our intelligence is murky, at best. And the Times answer to that? Be Not afraid!

Interesting that to the Times a lying, terrorist-supporting enemy nation with a hidden nuclear program isn't really such a big deal. It's those dangerous democratically elected Republicans America has to fear.

However, Larry C. Johnson of The Huffington Post argues that Republicans, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, his former aide "Scooter" Libby, and White House advisor Karl Rove, were responsible for undermining CIA efforts to monitor Iran's nuclear activity by outing CIA operative Valerie Plame in an act of political retribution against her husband, Joseph C. Wilson.

So, the Republicans want to whine about inadequate intelligence on Iran's nuclear program while holding fund raisers for Scooter Libby, one of the men implicated in the leak of Valerie's classified identity? Excuse me? The leak did more than ruin Val's ability to continue working as an undercover CIA officer. The leak destroyed a U.S. intelligence program to collect information about Iran's efforts to get nuclear weapons material.

Commander in Denial...

Keith Olbermann: Terror and Politics in America

Keith Olbermann does a stunning job of laying out a five year history of Bush administration Terror Alerts that came at moments when the administration may have wanted to change the subject.

Groundhog Day

by James K. Galbraith

posted online on August 16, 2006

Let's see... It's August. Bush is in Crawford on a "working vacation." His polls are in the tank. Congress is in revolt. The economy is going soft. The next elections don't look good. Cheney is off in Wyoming, or wherever he goes. It's 2001. No, it's 2006.

In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx reports that "Hegel writes somewhere" that the great events of history tend to occur twice, first as tragedy and then as farce.

On September 11, nineteen hijackers commandeered four airplanes and succeeded in killing some 3,000 people. On August 10, we are told, British authorities upended a suicide-murder plot aimed at destroying twelve airplanes, killing everyone on board including the bombers, possibly with more fatalities than on 9/11. As a senior British police official put it, "This was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale."

From all official statements so far, we are led to believe that August 10 was a highly developed, far-advanced conspiracy, under surveillance for some time, which could have been put into action within just a few days. And perhaps 8/10 really was the biggest thing since 9/11. But then again, perhaps it wasn't. We don't know yet. And it's not too early to ask the questions on which final judgment must depend.

Well, then. Here is a checklist of some things we should shortly be hearing about. Bombs. Chemicals. Detonators. Labs. A testing ground. Airline tickets. Passports. Witnesses. Suspicious neighbors. Suspicious parents. Suspicious friends. Threats. Confessions. Let me spell this out: By definition, you cannot bomb an aircraft unless you have a bomb. In this case, we are told that there were no bombs; rather, the conspirators planned to bring on board the makings of a bomb: chemicals and a detonator. These would be mixed on board.

Exactly what the chemicals were remains unclear. Nitroglycerin has been suggested, but it's too likely to go off on the way to the airport. TATP, made of acetone and peroxide, has been suggested, but there are two problems. One is that the peroxide required is highly concentrated--it's not the 3 percent solution from the drugstore. The other is that acetone is highly volatile. As anyone who flies knows, you can't open a bottle of nail polish remover on an airplane without everyone within twenty feet knowing at once. It's possible to imagine one truly dedicated and competent bomber pulling this off. But it is impossible to imagine twenty-four untrained people between the ages of 17 and 35 all getting away with the same trick at once.

So, there must have been training. That means there must be a lab, or labs. There must have been trial bombs. There must be various bits and pieces of equipment used to mix the chemicals and set them off. There must be a manual. There must be a testing ground. And each one of the young men under arrest must have been to these places. Interestingly, it must have all happened, too, without a serious accident, injury or death among the conspirators. If so, they are a lot more competent than the Weather Underground ever was, in my day.

Arrests were made at night, catching the culprits at home. Houses have been raided, and are being searched. So far as we know at this point, no bombs have been found. No chemicals. No equipment. No labs. No testing ground. Maybe this will come out later, but it hasn't so far, even though the authorities seem anxious to tell just about everything they know.

Now, in order to get on an airplane, even the most devout suicide terrorist needs a ticket, and these generally must be purchased with money. Apparently, not one ticket had been purchased by the detainees. One little-known feature of airline security (in the United States, anyway) is that people traveling on one-way tickets bought at the last minute get special scrutiny at the gate. Those tickets are also (a lot) more expensive. If you want to pass unnoticed, you will buy your ticket round-trip, in advance, and also save money like everyone else. Actually, if you didn't know this already, you're not fit to be let out of the house.

Further, to get on an international flight from Britain to the United States, in these days of the modern nation-state, you need something else. It's a document called a passport. Apparently, some of the detainees don't have them. Someone lacking a passport can, I think, safely be excluded from the ranks of potential suicide bombers of UK-to-US flights. They could, of course, have a counterfeit or be operating in a support role--but so far we are not being told of any counterfeit documents or any support operation. And to pass security you would use a different person to carry each chemical you needed. For twelve flights, that's twenty-four people.

As for the suspicious parents, friends and neighbors--it's technically possible that the bombers' security was so excellent that none existed. It's just that, in dealing with young people swept up in a fervor of religious hatred, the odds are extremely low. Of all the Islamic groups, Hezbollah in Lebanon is the only one that maintains effective military security, which it does by isolating its fighters as completely as possible from the civilian population. But these young men were picked up at home; they were well-known and yet apparently suspected by no one at all.

As to threats: A joke going around the Manchester Airport on August 10 was that at least the IRA would remember to call. What's the point of a suicide bombing if no one knows what it's for? The downing of twelve airplanes would be horrific to those on them (including me, as it happened), but it wouldn't put a dent in Western capitalism. It would have to be part of a much larger, ongoing, unstoppable campaign. Otherwise, why bother? A once-off attack shows the weakness, not the capacity, of the plotters, and in the end it strengthens not them but the governments they attack. After 9/11, terrorists should know this.

Finally, confessions. Twenty-four suspects have been arrested, according to some reports. Nineteen have been named. Happily, the detainees were taken alive. Unlike the man arrested in Pakistan, we may presume (I trust) that they are not being tortured. Therefore, they will have a chance to make an uncoerced statement of their intentions in open court. By then the authorities will have found the labs, testing grounds, airline tickets and passports. Credible witnesses too will have emerged. By then the young zealots will have no expectation of acquittal or mercy, and nothing to lose. We may therefore confidently expect them to face the judges and declare exactly what their motives and intentions were. If they do that, I'll eat my hat.

In short: Could this case blow up? Could it turn out to have been an overreaction, a mistake--or even a hoax? Yes, it could, and it wouldn't be the first one, either. I'm not saying it will, necessarily. I'm not accusing the British authorities of bad faith. I'm not suggesting the plot was faked--at least, not by them. But dodgy informants and jumpy politicians are an explosive mixture, easily detonated under pressure. Everyone knows that.

Be skeptical... be very skeptical

By M K Bhadrakumar

Aug 18, 2006

One of the significant contributions to the "war on terror" by Britain's home secretary David Blunkett before his abrupt departure from the Tony Blair cabinet last year was his statement on terrorism in the House of Commons that specifically flagged the possibility of a "dirty bomb" being planted in Britain by terrorists.

That was in November 2002, when preparations were already in an advanced stage for the march to Baghdad. We are still waiting for the dirty bomb and its lethal radiation. The dirty bomb genre, however, provoked two years later a brilliant television series on BBC2 by acclaimed documentary producer Adam Curtis, titled, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear.

Curtis's argument was that much of the threat of international terrorism turns out to be in actuality "a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians ... In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power."

Curtis placed al-Qaeda terrorism in a long line of dramatic panics in Britain's checkered history since the Elizabethan era, which included the arrival of Spanish raiding parties, French revolutionary agitators, anarchists, Bolsheviks, and Irish republicans.

Naturally, Curtis comes readily to mind a week after British authorities arrested some two dozen Muslims on August 10 for plotting to blow up trans-Atlantic flights from United Kingdom to the United States. Not a shred of evidence has since seen the light of day in this Mother of all Dastardly Plots.

Meanwhile, wild stories of new plots in the making are in circulation. The latest was the "breaking news" regarding the emergency landing of an aircraft in Boston on Wednesday due to the tantrums of an "unruly" woman passenger. Last weekend, Michigan police locked up three hapless Palestinian-Americans for allegedly plotting an act of terrorism. The three "terrorists" were caught red-handed purchasing 80 cell phones from a Wal-Mart store.

Michigan police concluded that the cell phones could be used as detonators to blow up the Mackinac Bridge, which connected the peninsula's upper and lower parts. Subsequently it transpired that the three detained "terrorists" bought and sold cell phones to make a living.

The London plot itself is becoming curiouser and curiouser. Reports have appeared that the British security agencies were feeling increasingly uncomfortable that their American counterparts rushed to make out that the alleged plot was linked to al-Qaeda. More importantly, it appears that sources in London have begun distancing themselves from the plot by claiming that the British side was pressured from Washington to go public with the plot despite a lack of evidence and clear and convincing facts whether any conspiracy in fact existed at all.

Not surprisingly, the loudest voices of skepticism about the alleged plot are heard in Pakistan, where of course the public is habitually cynical over anything that goes to the credit of the establishment. This despite the insistent claim that the UK, US and Pakistani security agencies had actively coordinated in thwarting the plot - a scenario that cast Pakistan as a plucky, feisty partner in the "war on terror", quite contrary to the prevailing impression that Islamabad is possibly indulging in doublespeak.

The skeptics in Pakistan feel that the entire plot is a crudely executed hoax by the Bush administration. It was not only the so-called "jihadi" circles in Pakistan that ridiculed the plot but even sections of opinion, which usually put primacy on reasoning. The Pakistani newspaper Daily Times commented editorially, "There is a horrible war going on in Lebanon and it is not unfolding in favor of Israel, US and UK. Iraq has gone bad; Afghanistan is getting worse.

"The Bush-Blair duo is in trouble at home and both need something really big to happen to justify their policies and distract attention from their losses ... the past record of intelligence agencies everywhere suggests they are quite capable of blowing up or underplaying things for better media management of their respective governments' performance. So a bit of skepticism is in order."

Adam Curtis had an explanation for the dilemma facing the saner sections of opinion in times of public hysteria. As he explained two years ago, such plots, when blown up in larger-than-life terms and whipping up an atmosphere of hysteria, have a way of trapping us. In the process, we get "trapped by a fear that is completely irrational".

Indeed, in a poll after the plot story broke, 55% of Americans voiced approval of Bush's handling of terrorism and homeland security. A beaming Bush promptly promised his nervous nation that the terror fight may last for "years to come". Democrats are beginning to accuse the Republicans of using the scare to political advantage ahead of the November elections to the US Congress.

Former US president Bill Clinton said: "They [the Bush administration] seem to be anxious to tie it to al-Qaeda. If that's true, how come we've got seven times as many troops in Iraq as in Afghanistan? I think that Republicans should be very careful in playing politics with this London thing because they're going to have a hard time with the facts."

All the same, it is extraordinary that the mainstream media in the US could so willingly suspend their disbelief over the patchy official claims that the plot was a "real idea" of cosmic significance. Furthermore, they dutifully ran "expert opinions" by commentators on the alleged plotters' al-Qaeda connections. Not a single mainstream newspaper in the US challenged the plot theory as such - leave alone pointed out the patent gulf between the London plotters' ambition and their ability to pull it off.

It could be that they have succumbed to the "suspiciously circular relationship between the security services and much of the media" (to quote Curtis) in which official briefings become the stuff of dramatic press stories and prompt further briefings and further stories.

At any rate, terrorism thrives on bluff. Think of the horrific bomb blasts in Mumbai last month. Unlike the ethereal London plot, it was tangible; it was verifiable. It was of a piece, by all indications, with the cycle of violence ripping apart India's composite society for the past decade or so since the Babri Mosque was pulled down by vandals incited by Hindu fundamentalists.

Yet, in the wake of the Mumbai blasts, an attempt has been made to link the abhorrent violence to al-Qaeda. As if al-Qaeda is an organized international network. As if it has members or a leader. As if it has "sleeper cells". As if it has corporate-style affiliates and subsidiaries. As if it has a strategy towards India.

Indian media people seem to be unaware that al-Qaeda barely exists at all and that it is more an idea about cleansing the impure world of Islam corrupted by the al-Adou al-Qareeb (Muslim apostates) and al-Adou al-Baeed or the "far enemy" (Israel and the Western powers), through violence sanctioned by religion explicitly for such extraordinary times.

Indian opinion makers seem to believe that countering al-Qaeda justifies a national security objective. Some among them no doubt fancy that a closer "strategic partnership" with the Bush administration becomes possible if only India were to assertively stake claim to be a frontline state in the "war on terror". But there is no way that India can hope to gain entry into the exclusive, charmed circle that comprises the US Central Intelligence Agency, Britain's MI6 and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.

The so-called Islamic terror network is the trinity's fabrication. It has become what would be known in intelligence parlance as an "asset" or an "instrument". The "intelligence assets" do enjoy a certain measure of independence and autonomy vis-a-vis their sponsors but that is part of the art of dissimulation. Al-Qaeda has incrementally become then a situation or a chain of events in politics that can arouse a particular emotional reaction instantaneously.

M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, with postings including India's ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001).


A related article can be seen in Counterpunch Magazine:
The UK Terror Plot: What's Really Going On?

Fearful Tales...

Joe Scarborough: Is Bush an idiot?

Joe Scarborough, former Republican congressman from Florida, asks some interesting questions about the Presidents intellect on MSNBC's Scarborough Country.

Watching Lebanon

By Seymour M. Hersh

21 August 2006 Issue

In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.”

The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.

Israeli military and intelligence experts I spoke to emphasized that the country’s immediate security issues were reason enough to confront Hezbollah, regardless of what the Bush Administration wanted. Shabtai Shavit, a national-security adviser to the Knesset who headed the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service, from 1989 to 1996, told me, “We do what we think is best for us, and if it happens to meet America’s requirements, that’s just part of a relationship between two friends. Hezbollah is armed to the teeth and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla warfare. It was just a matter of time. We had to address it.”

Hezbollah is seen by Israelis as a profound threat—a terrorist organization, operating on their border, with a military arsenal that, with help from Iran and Syria, has grown stronger since the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon ended, in 2000. Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has said he does not believe that Israel is a “legal state.” Israeli intelligence estimated at the outset of the air war that Hezbollah had roughly five hundred medium-range Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets and a few dozen long-range Zelzal rockets; the Zelzals, with a range of about two hundred kilometres, could reach Tel Aviv. (One rocket hit Haifa the day after the kidnappings.) It also has more than twelve thousand shorter-range rockets. Since the conflict began, more than three thousand of these have been fired at Israel.

According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah—and shared it with Bush Administration officials—well before the July 12th kidnappings. “It’s not that the Israelis had a trap that Hezbollah walked into,” he said, “but there was a strong feeling in the White House that sooner or later the Israelis were going to do it.”

The Middle East expert said that the Administration had several reasons for supporting the Israeli bombing campaign. Within the State Department, it was seen as a way to strengthen the Lebanese government so that it could assert its authority over the south of the country, much of which is controlled by Hezbollah. He went on, “The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah of its missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush wanted both. Bush was going after Iran, as part of the Axis of Evil, and its nuclear sites, and he was interested in going after Hezbollah as part of his interest in democratization, with Lebanon as one of the crown jewels of Middle East democracy.”

Administration officials denied that they knew of Israel’s plan for the air war. The White House did not respond to a detailed list of questions. In response to a separate request, a National Security Council spokesman said, “Prior to Hezbollah’s attack on Israel, the Israeli government gave no official in Washington any reason to believe that Israel was planning to attack. Even after the July 12th attack, we did not know what the Israeli plans were.” A Pentagon spokesman said, “The United States government remains committed to a diplomatic solution to the problem of Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program,” and denied the story, as did a State Department spokesman.

The United States and Israel have shared intelligence and enjoyed close military coöperation for decades, but early this spring, according to a former senior intelligence official, high-level planners from the U.S. Air Force—under pressure from the White House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities—began consulting with their counterparts in the Israeli Air Force.

“The big question for our Air Force was how to hit a series of hard targets in Iran successfully,” the former senior intelligence official said. “Who is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in its planning? It’s not Congo—it’s Israel. Everybody knows that Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah on tunnels and underground gun emplacements. And so the Air Force went to the Israelis with some new tactics and said to them, ‘Let’s concentrate on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and what you have on Lebanon.’ ” The discussions reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he said.

“The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran.”

A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House “has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow against Hezbollah.” He added, “It was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now we have someone else doing it.” (As this article went to press, the United Nations Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution, although it was unclear if it would change the situation on the ground.)

According to Richard Armitage, who served as Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term—and who, in 2002, said that Hezbollah “may be the A team of terrorists”—Israel’s campaign in Lebanon, which has faced unexpected difficulties and widespread criticism, may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about Iran. “If the most dominant military force in the region—the Israel Defense Forces—can’t pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million,” Armitage said. “The only thing that the bombing has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis.”

Several current and former officials involved in the Middle East told me that Israel viewed the soldiers’ kidnapping as the opportune moment to begin its planned military campaign against Hezbollah. “Hezbollah, like clockwork, was instigating something small every month or two,” the U.S. government consultant with ties to Israel said. Two weeks earlier, in late June, members of Hamas, the Palestinian group, had tunnelled under the barrier separating southern Gaza from Israel and captured an Israeli soldier. Hamas also had lobbed a series of rockets at Israeli towns near the border with Gaza. In response, Israel had initiated an extensive bombing campaign and reoccupied parts of Gaza.

The Pentagon consultant noted that there had also been cross-border incidents involving Israel and Hezbollah, in both directions, for some time. “They’ve been sniping at each other,” he said. “Either side could have pointed to some incident and said ‘We have to go to war with these guys’—because they were already at war.”

David Siegel, the spokesman at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said that the Israeli Air Force had not been seeking a reason to attack Hezbollah. “We did not plan the campaign. That decision was forced on us.” There were ongoing alerts that Hezbollah “was pressing to go on the attack,” Siegel said. “Hezbollah attacks every two or three months,” but the kidnapping of the soldiers raised the stakes.

In interviews, several Israeli academics, journalists, and retired military and intelligence officers all made one point: they believed that the Israeli leadership, and not Washington, had decided that it would go to war with Hezbollah. Opinion polls showed that a broad spectrum of Israelis supported that choice. “The neocons in Washington may be happy, but Israel did not need to be pushed, because Israel has been wanting to get rid of Hezbollah,” Yossi Melman, a journalist for the newspaper Ha’aretz, who has written several books about the Israeli intelligence community, said. “By provoking Israel, Hezbollah provided that opportunity.”

“We were facing a dilemma,” an Israeli official said. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “had to decide whether to go for a local response, which we always do, or for a comprehensive response—to really take on Hezbollah once and for all.” Olmert made his decision, the official said, only after a series of Israeli rescue efforts failed.

The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel told me, however, that, from Israel’s perspective, the decision to take strong action had become inevitable weeks earlier, after the Israeli Army’s signals intelligence group, known as Unit 8200, picked up bellicose intercepts in late spring and early summer, involving Hamas, Hezbollah, and Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader now living in Damascus.

One intercept was of a meeting in late May of the Hamas political and military leadership, with Meshal participating by telephone. “Hamas believed the call from Damascus was scrambled, but Israel had broken the code,” the consultant said. For almost a year before its victory in the Palestinian elections in January, Hamas had curtailed its terrorist activities. In the late May intercepted conversation, the consultant told me, the Hamas leadership said that “they got no benefit from it, and were losing standing among the Palestinian population.” The conclusion, he said, was “ ‘Let’s go back into the terror business and then try and wrestle concessions from the Israeli government.’ ” The consultant told me that the U.S. and Israel agreed that if the Hamas leadership did so, and if Nasrallah backed them up, there should be “a full-scale response.” In the next several weeks, when Hamas began digging the tunnel into Israel, the consultant said, Unit 8200 “picked up signals intelligence involving Hamas, Syria, and Hezbollah, saying, in essence, that they wanted Hezbollah to ‘warm up’ the north.” In one intercept, the consultant said, Nasrallah referred to Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz “as seeming to be weak,” in comparison with the former Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak, who had extensive military experience, and said “he thought Israel would respond in a small-scale, local way, as they had in the past.”

Earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S. government consultant said, several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, “to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear.” The consultant added, “Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.” After that, “persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board,” the consultant said.

The initial plan, as outlined by the Israelis, called for a major bombing campaign in response to the next Hezbollah provocation, according to the Middle East expert with knowledge of U.S. and Israeli thinking. Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon’s infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official. The airport, highways, and bridges, among other things, have been hit in the bombing campaign. The Israeli Air Force had flown almost nine thousand missions as of last week. (David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that Israel had targeted only sites connected to Hezbollah; the bombing of bridges and roads was meant to prevent the transport of weapons.)

The Israeli plan, according to the former senior intelligence official, was “the mirror image of what the United States has been planning for Iran.” (The initial U.S. Air Force proposals for an air attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, which included the option of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure targets inside Iran, have been resisted by the top leadership of the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps, according to current and former officials. They argue that the Air Force plan will not work and will inevitably lead, as in the Israeli war with Hezbollah, to the insertion of troops on the ground.)

Uzi Arad, who served for more than two decades in the Mossad, told me that to the best of his knowledge the contacts between the Israeli and U.S. governments were routine, and that, “in all my meetings and conversations with government officials, never once did I hear anyone refer to prior coördination with the United States.” He was troubled by one issue—the speed with which the Olmert government went to war. “For the life of me, I’ve never seen a decision to go to war taken so speedily,” he said. “We usually go through long analyses.”

The key military planner was Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the I.D.F. chief of staff, who, during a career in the Israeli Air Force, worked on contingency planning for an air war with Iran. Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, and Peretz, a former labor leader, could not match his experience and expertise.

In the early discussions with American officials, I was told by the Middle East expert and the government consultant, the Israelis repeatedly pointed to the war in Kosovo as an example of what Israel would try to achieve. The NATO forces commanded by U.S. Army General Wesley Clark methodically bombed and strafed not only military targets but tunnels, bridges, and roads, in Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia, for seventy-eight days before forcing Serbian forces to withdraw from Kosovo. “Israel studied the Kosovo war as its role model,” the government consultant said. “The Israelis told Condi Rice, ‘You did it in about seventy days, but we need half of that—thirty-five days.’ ”

There are, of course, vast differences between Lebanon and Kosovo. Clark, who retired from the military in 2000 and unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat for the Presidency in 2004, took issue with the analogy: “If it’s true that the Israeli campaign is based on the American approach in Kosovo, then it missed the point. Ours was to use force to obtain a diplomatic objective—it was not about killing people.” Clark noted in a 2001 book, “Waging Modern War,” that it was the threat of a possible ground invasion as well as the bombing that forced the Serbs to end the war. He told me, “In my experience, air campaigns have to be backed, ultimately, by the will and capability to finish the job on the ground.”

Kosovo has been cited publicly by Israeli officials and journalists since the war began. On August 6th, Prime Minister Olmert, responding to European condemnation of the deaths of Lebanese civilians, said, “Where do they get the right to preach to Israel? European countries attacked Kosovo and killed ten thousand civilians. Ten thousand! And none of these countries had to suffer before that from a single rocket. I’m not saying it was wrong to intervene in Kosovo. But please: don’t preach to us about the treatment of civilians.” (Human Rights Watch estimated the number of civilians killed in the NATO bombing to be five hundred; the Yugoslav government put the number between twelve hundred and five thousand.)

Cheney’s office supported the Israeli plan, as did Elliott Abrams, a deputy national-security adviser, according to several former and current officials. (A spokesman for the N.S.C. denied that Abrams had done so.) They believed that Israel should move quickly in its air war against Hezbollah. A former intelligence officer said, “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’ ”

Cheney’s point, the former senior intelligence official said, was “What if the Israelis execute their part of this first, and it’s really successful? It’d be great. We can learn what to do in Iran by watching what the Israelis do in Lebanon.”

The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “The big complaint now in the intelligence community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top—at the insistence of the White House—and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely,” he said. “It’s an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.’s strictures, and if you complain about it you’re out,” he said. “Cheney had a strong hand in this.”

The long-term Administration goal was to help set up a Sunni Arab coalition—including countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt—that would join the United States and Europe to pressure the ruling Shiite mullahs in Iran. “But the thought behind that plan was that Israel would defeat Hezbollah, not lose to it,” the consultant with close ties to Israel said. Some officials in Cheney’s office and at the N.S.C. had become convinced, on the basis of private talks, that those nations would moderate their public criticism of Israel and blame Hezbollah for creating the crisis that led to war. Although they did so at first, they shifted their position in the wake of public protests in their countries about the Israeli bombing. The White House was clearly disappointed when, late last month, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, came to Washington and, at a meeting with Bush, called for the President to intervene immediately to end the war. The Washington Post reported that Washington had hoped to enlist moderate Arab states “in an effort to pressure Syria and Iran to rein in Hezbollah, but the Saudi move . . . seemed to cloud that initiative.”

The surprising strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing, the Middle East expert told me, “is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back.”

Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence official said. “There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this,” he said. “When the smoke clears, they’ll say it was a success, and they’ll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran.”

In the White House, especially in the Vice-President’s office, many officials believe that the military campaign against Hezbollah is working and should be carried forward. At the same time, the government consultant said, some policymakers in the Administration have concluded that the cost of the bombing to Lebanese society is too high. “They are telling Israel that it’s time to wind down the attacks on infrastructure.”

Similar divisions are emerging in Israel. David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that his country’s leadership believed, as of early August, that the air war had been successful, and had destroyed more than seventy per cent of Hezbollah’s medium- and long-range-missile launching capacity. “The problem is short-range missiles, without launchers, that can be shot from civilian areas and homes,” Siegel told me. “The only way to resolve this is ground operations—which is why Israel would be forced to expand ground operations if the latest round of diplomacy doesn’t work.” Last week, however, there was evidence that the Israeli government was troubled by the progress of the war. In an unusual move, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, Halutz’s deputy, was put in charge of the operation, supplanting Major General Udi Adam. The worry in Israel is that Nasrallah might escalate the crisis by firing missiles at Tel Aviv. “There is a big debate over how much damage Israel should inflict to prevent it,” the consultant said. “If Nasrallah hits Tel Aviv, what should Israel do? Its goal is to deter more attacks by telling Nasrallah that it will destroy his country if he doesn’t stop, and to remind the Arab world that Israel can set it back twenty years. We’re no longer playing by the same rules.”

A European intelligence officer told me, “The Israelis have been caught in a psychological trap. In earlier years, they had the belief that they could solve their problems with toughness. But now, with Islamic martyrdom, things have changed, and they need different answers. How do you scare people who love martyrdom?” The problem with trying to eliminate Hezbollah, the intelligence officer said, is the group’s ties to the Shiite population in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut’s southern suburbs, where it operates schools, hospitals, a radio station, and various charities.

A high-level American military planner told me, “We have a lot of vulnerability in the region, and we’ve talked about some of the effects of an Iranian or Hezbollah attack on the Saudi regime and on the oil infrastructure.” There is special concern inside the Pentagon, he added, about the oil-producing nations north of the Strait of Hormuz. “We have to anticipate the unintended consequences,” he told me. “Will we be able to absorb a barrel of oil at one hundred dollars? There is this almost comical thinking that you can do it all from the air, even when you’re up against an irregular enemy with a dug-in capability. You’re not going to be successful unless you have a ground presence, but the political leadership never considers the worst case. These guys only want to hear the best case.”

There is evidence that the Iranians were expecting the war against Hezbollah. Vali Nasr, an expert on Shiite Muslims and Iran, who is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and also teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, said, “Every negative American move against Hezbollah was seen by Iran as part of a larger campaign against it. And Iran began to prepare for the showdown by supplying more sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah—anti-ship and anti-tank missiles—and training its fighters in their use. And now Hezbollah is testing Iran’s new weapons. Iran sees the Bush Administration as trying to marginalize its regional role, so it fomented trouble.”

Nasr, an Iranian-American who recently published a study of the Sunni-Shiite divide, entitled “The Shia Revival,” also said that the Iranian leadership believes that Washington’s ultimate political goal is to get some international force to act as a buffer—to physically separate Syria and Lebanon in an effort to isolate and disarm Hezbollah, whose main supply route is through Syria. “Military action cannot bring about the desired political result,” Nasr said. The popularity of Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a virulent critic of Israel, is greatest in his own country. If the U.S. were to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Nasr said, “you may end up turning Ahmadinejad into another Nasrallah—the rock star of the Arab street.”

Donald Rumsfeld, who is one of the Bush Administration’s most outspoken, and powerful, officials, has said very little publicly about the crisis in Lebanon. His relative quiet, compared to his aggressive visibility in the run-up to the Iraq war, has prompted a debate in Washington about where he stands on the issue.

Some current and former intelligence officials who were interviewed for this article believe that Rumsfeld disagrees with Bush and Cheney about the American role in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said that “there was a feeling that Rumsfeld was jaded in his approach to the Israeli war.” He added, “Air power and the use of a few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and he tried to do it again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn’t work. He thought that Hezbollah was too dug in and the Israeli attack plan would not work, and the last thing he wanted was another war on his shift that would put the American forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy.”

A Western diplomat said that he understood that Rumsfeld did not know all the intricacies of the war plan. “He is angry and worried about his troops” in Iraq, the diplomat said. Rumsfeld served in the White House during the last year of the war in Vietnam, from which American troops withdrew in 1975, “and he did not want to see something like this having an impact in Iraq.” Rumsfeld’s concern, the diplomat added, was that an expansion of the war into Iran could put the American troops in Iraq at greater risk of attacks by pro-Iranian Shiite militias.

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on August 3rd, Rumsfeld was less than enthusiastic about the war’s implications for the American troops in Iraq. Asked whether the Administration was mindful of the war’s impact on Iraq, he testified that, in his meetings with Bush and Condoleezza Rice, “there is a sensitivity to the desire to not have our country or our interests or our forces put at greater risk as a result of what’s taking place between Israel and Hezbollah. . . . There are a variety of risks that we face in that region, and it’s a difficult and delicate situation.”

The Pentagon consultant dismissed talk of a split at the top of the Administration, however, and said simply, “Rummy is on the team. He’d love to see Hezbollah degraded, but he also is a voice for less bombing and more innovative Israeli ground operations.” The former senior intelligence official similarly depicted Rumsfeld as being “delighted that Israel is our stalking horse.”

There are also questions about the status of Condoleezza Rice. Her initial support for the Israeli air war against Hezbollah has reportedly been tempered by dismay at the effects of the attacks on Lebanon. The Pentagon consultant said that in early August she began privately “agitating” inside the Administration for permission to begin direct diplomatic talks with Syria—so far, without much success. Last week, the Times reported that Rice had directed an Embassy official in Damascus to meet with the Syrian foreign minister, though the meeting apparently yielded no results. The Times also reported that Rice viewed herself as “trying to be not only a peacemaker abroad but also a mediator among contending parties” within the Administration. The article pointed to a divide between career diplomats in the State Department and “conservatives in the government,” including Cheney and Abrams, “who were pushing for strong American support for Israel.”

The Western diplomat told me his embassy believes that Abrams has emerged as a key policymaker on Iran, and on the current Hezbollah-Israeli crisis, and that Rice’s role has been relatively diminished. Rice did not want to make her most recent diplomatic trip to the Middle East, the diplomat said. “She only wanted to go if she thought there was a real chance to get a ceasefire.”

Bush’s strongest supporter in Europe continues to be British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but many in Blair’s own Foreign Office, as a former diplomat said, believe that he has “gone out on a particular limb on this”—especially by accepting Bush’s refusal to seek an immediate and total ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. “Blair stands alone on this,” the former diplomat said. “He knows he’s a lame duck who’s on the way out, but he buys it”—the Bush policy. “He drinks the White House Kool-Aid as much as anybody in Washington.” The crisis will really start at the end of August, the diplomat added, “when the Iranians”—under a United Nations deadline to stop uranium enrichment—“will say no.”

Even those who continue to support Israel’s war against Hezbollah agree that it is failing to achieve one of its main goals—to rally the Lebanese against Hezbollah. “Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it,” John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me. Arquilla has been campaigning for more than a decade, with growing success, to change the way America fights terrorism. “The warfare of today is not mass on mass,” he said. “You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network. Israel focussed on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.”

A Rational Discussion...

Israeli Leaders Fault Bush on War

By Robert Parry

Sunday 13 August 2006

Amid the political and diplomatic fallout from Israel's faltering invasion of Lebanon, some Israeli officials are privately blaming President George W. Bush for egging Prime Minister Ehud Olmert into the ill-conceived military adventure against the Hezbollah militia in south Lebanon.

Bush conveyed his strong personal support for the military offensive during a White House meeting with Olmert on May 23, according to sources familiar with the thinking of senior Israeli leaders.

Olmert, who like Bush lacks direct wartime experience, agreed that a dose of military force against Hezbollah might damage the guerrilla group's influence in Lebanon and intimidate its allies, Iran and Syria, countries that Bush has identified as the chief obstacles to U.S. interests in the Middle East.

As part of Bush's determination to create a "new Middle East" - one that is more amenable to U.S. policies and desires - Bush even urged Israel to attack Syria, but the Olmert government refused to go that far, according to Israeli sources.

One source said some Israeli officials thought Bush's attack-Syria idea was "nuts" since much of the world would have seen the bombing campaign as overt aggression.

In an article on July 30, the Jerusalem Post referred to Bush's interest in a wider war involving Syria. Israeli "defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria," the newspaper reported.

While balking at an expanded war into Syria, Olmert did agree on the need to show military muscle in Lebanon as a prelude to facing down Iran over its nuclear program, which Olmert has called an "existential" threat to Israel.

With U.S. forces bogged down in Iraq, Bush and his neoconservative advisers saw the inclusion of Israeli forces as crucial for advancing a strategy that would punish Syria for supporting Iraqi insurgents, advance the confrontation with Iran and isolate Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

But the month-long war has failed to achieve its goals of destroying Hezbollah forces in south Lebanon or intimidating Iran and Syria.

Instead, Hezbollah guerrillas fought Israeli troops to a virtual standstill in villages near the border and much of the world saw Israel's bombing raids across Lebanon - which killed hundreds of civilians - as "disproportionate."

Now, as the conflict winds down, some Israeli officials are ruing the Olmert-Bush pact on May 23 and fault Bush for pushing Olmert into the conflict.

Building Pressure

Soon after the May 23 meeting in Washington, Israel began to ratchet up pressure on the Hamas-led government in the Palestinian territories and on Hezbollah and other Islamic militants in Lebanon. As part of this process, Israel staged low-key attacks in both Lebanon and Gaza. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com "A 'Pretext' War in Lebanon."]

The tit-for-tat violence led to the Hamas seizure of an Israeli soldier on June 24 and then to Israeli retaliatory strikes in Gaza. That, in turn, set the stage for Hezbollah's attack on an Israeli outpost and the capture of two more Israeli soldiers on July 12.

Hezbollah's July 12 raid became the trigger that Bush and Olmert had been waiting for. With the earlier attacks unknown or forgotten, Israel and the U.S. skillfully rallied international condemnation of Hezbollah for what was called an unprovoked attack and a "kidnapping" of Israeli soldiers.

Behind the international criticism of Hezbollah, Bush and Olmert justified an intense air campaign against Lebanese targets, killing civilians and destroying much of Lebanon's commercial infrastructure. Israeli troops also crossed into southern Lebanon with the intent of delivering a devastating military blow against Hezbollah, which retaliated by firing Katyusha rockets into Israel..

However, the Israeli operation was eerily reminiscent of the disastrous U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Like the U.S. assault, Israel relied heavily on "shock and awe" air power and committed an inadequate number of soldiers to the battle.

Israeli newspapers have been filled with complaints from soldiers who say some reservists weren't issued body armor while other soldiers found their equipment either inferior or inappropriate to the battlefield conditions.

Israeli troops also encountered fierce resistance from Hezbollah guerrillas, who took a page from the Iraqi insurgents by using explosive booby traps and ambushes to inflict heavier than expected casualties on the Israelis.

Channel 2 in Israel disclosed that several top military commanders wrote a letter to Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, the chief of staff, criticizing the war planning as chaotic and out of line with the combat training of the soldiers and officers. [Washington Post, Aug. 12, 2006]

One Israeli plan to use llamas to deliver supplies in the rugged terrain of south Lebanon turned into an embarrassment when the animals simply sat down.

Reporter Nahum Barnea, who traveled with an Israeli unit in south Lebanon, compared the battle to "the famous Tom and Jerry cartoons" with the powerful Israeli military playing the role of the cat Tom and the resourceful Hezbollah guerrillas playing the mouse Jerry. "In every conflict between them, Jerry wins," Barnea wrote.

Olmert Criticized

Back in Israel, some leading newspapers have begun calling for Olmert's resignation.

"If Olmert runs away now from the war he initiated, he will not be able to remain prime minister for even one more day," the newspaper Haaretz wrote in a front-page analysis. "You cannot lead an entire nation to war promising victory, produce humiliating defeat and remain in power.

"You cannot bury 120 Israelis in cemeteries, keep a million Israelis in shelters for a month and then say, 'Oops, I made a mistake.'" [See Washington Post, Aug. 12, 2006]

For his part, Bush spent July and early August fending off international demands for an immediate cease-fire. Bush wanted to give Olmert as much time as possible to bomb targets across Lebanon and dislodge Hezbollah forces in the south.

But instead of turning the Lebanese population against Hezbollah - as Washington and Tel Aviv had hoped - the devastation rallied public support behind Hezbollah.

As the month-long conflict took on the look of a public-relations disaster for Israel, the Bush administration dropped its resistance to international cease-fire demands and joined with France in crafting a United Nations plan for stopping the fighting.

Quoting "a senior administration official" with Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, the New York Times reported that "it increasingly seemed that Israel would not be able to achieve a military victory, a reality that led the Americans to get behind a cease-fire." [NYT, Aug. 12, 2006]

But the repercussions from Israel's failed Lebanon offensive are likely to continue. Olmert must now confront the political damage at home and the chief U.S. adversaries in the Middle East may be emboldened by the outcome, more than chastened.

As in the Iraq War, Bush has revealed again how reliance on tough talk and military might can sometimes undercut - not build up - U.S. influence in the strategically important Middle East.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & "Project Truth."

Hizbullah's resilience built on years of homework

By Nicholas Blanford

Fri Aug 11, 4:00 AM ET

For a month, several small groups of Hizbullah militants on a Lebanese hillside have withstood heavy artillery shelling and airstrikes to continue firing hundreds of Katyusha rockets into Israel from positions just a few hundred yards from the border.

Even seasoned observers with the United Nations peacekeeping force in south Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, whose headquarters lies at the foot of the hillside, are baffled at how the guerrillas have managed to survive and keep up their steady rocket fire.

It's just one example of Hizbullah's surprising resilience in this war. Their ability to continue fighting against the most advanced and powerful army in the Middle East is rooted in the group's meticulous planning and thorough understanding of Israeli military doctrine and capabilities.

"They have done incredible staff work, learning the lessons of guerrilla warfare down the ages and carrying out a very deep and accurate analysis of the Israeli army," says Timur Goksel, who served with UNIFIL from 1979 to 2003 and witnessed Hizbullah's military evolution over two decades.

Israeli forces are poised to mount a full-scale invasion of south Lebanon – pending a last-ditch negotiation effort – in a bid to crush their Hizbullah foes and drive the remnants north of the Litani river, about 18 miles north of the border. Still, despite two decades of experience fighting Hizbullah in south Lebanon, the Israeli military appears to have underestimated the resilience of their Lebanese opponents.

Using advanced anti-armor missiles, snipers, and roadside bombs, and operating from an complex system of bunkers and tunnels, Hizbullah's battle-hardened fighters have survived airstrikes and artillery barrages enabling them to keep killing Israeli soldiers and firing rockets. On Wednesday, 15 Israeli soldiers were killed, the highest toll in a single day since the war began.

"They have lots of strongholds, which are very well disguised, and we need to eliminate their ability to attack Israel from these places," says a senior IDF military official. "It's a very hilly area and it's not easy. You cannot identify their bunkers until you're right there."

The militants presently on the front line are thought to number no more than 1,000, a fraction of the potential force Hizbullah could unleash. The fighters are drawn from the villages on the front lines, using their intimate knowledge of the local terrain to their advantage. Local groups of Hizbullah fighters communicate with each other by walkie-talkie using a code that draws upon their personal knowledge of each other and the geography. If Israeli forces push deeper into Lebanon, moving to new towns and villages, they will encounter new lines of fresh Hizbullah combatants.

"Even I have been surprised at the tenacity of these groups fighting in the villages. They have fought far beyond my expectations. And they haven't even committed all their fully-experienced troops yet," says Mr. Goksel.

The guerrillas are drawing on years of meticulous preparations and training, combined with access to newer weapons technology. The most effective weapons system employed by Hizbullah's front line guerrillas are antitank missiles. Small teams of specially-trained fighters have inflicted comparatively heavy casualties on Israeli troops, using advanced missiles to knock out the formidable Merkava tank and using older versions to punch through the walls of houses sheltering Israeli soldiers.

In the current war, Hizbullah has used for the first time the Russian Metis-M, which can be fitted with an anti-armor warhead for destroying tanks, or a fuel-air explosive warhead to use against troops or bunkers. The missile has a range of about one mile. Hizbullah is also reported to be employing the laser-guided Kornet-E anti-tank missile which has a range of about 3.5 miles. Individual fighters carry the shoulder-fired RPG-29, a more advanced version of the RPG-7 loved by guerrilla groups around the world since the 1960s. The RPG-29 was first used by Hizbullah last November in a failed attempt to kidnap Israeli soldiers.

The ability of the well-trained missile teams to knock out Israel's vaunted Merkava tanks has frustrated the traditional Israeli military doctrine for rapid armored thrusts deep into enemy territory. Instead, Israeli forces have inched cautiously northward and even after more than two weeks of stiff fighting have yet to capture and secure key border towns.

Was Hizbullah underestimated?There's been criticism in Israel that the military waited too long to move against Hizbullah with large forces of infantry and armored vehicles.

"I don't think Hizbullah was underestimated by a great deal, but there was an expectation that the air attacks would cut off the command and control process,'' says Gerald Steinberg, political science professor at Bar Ilan University outside Tel Aviv. "There was a hope that this could be done without large scale casualties.''

In an indication of the difficulty, Israeli Chief of Staff Dan Halutz sidelined the general charged with overseeing the ground war in Lebanon. The decision was the first time since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war that a general has had his authority curtailed in the middle of fighting.

"As a fighting army, I don't find the IDF performing worse than it has in the past,'' said Yossi Alpher, the editor of the online Arab-Israeli journal, "These are probably the best trained and most highly-motivated Arab fighters we've ever faced.''

Mr. Alpher noted that Israel's army has never succeeded in snuffing out rocket fire from Lebanon, going all the way back to the 1982 invasion.

If Israeli troops enter Lebanon in strength, Hizbullah will resort to another favorite weapon, the roadside bomb. Roadside bombs killed more Israeli soldiers in south Lebanon in the 1990s than any other weapon, and the technology used to build and detonate them has become highly sophisticated.

Early roadside bombs consisted of home-made Claymore-style explosive charges that spray hundreds of ball bearings, and were detonated by a command wire or remote radio control.

Hizbullah's bombs today include shaped-charge warheads which concentrate the blast in a single direction, similar to an anti-tank missile, to punch through the walls of armored vehicles. They are detonated by infrared beam – when the beam is broken, the bomb explodes.

Military observers believe that Hizbullah long ago planted huge mines under all the roads crossing the border. In June 2002, a shepherd inadvertently stumbled across one of these bombs and alerted the local police, much to Hizbullah's annoyance. It consisted of 180 kilograms of plastic explosive that had been buried several feet beneath a road 500 yards from the border.

In anticipation of these land mines, Israeli tanks have avoided the border roads, cutting across country instead.

Secret, intricate bunker systemFrom the summer of 2000, Hizbullah established an intricate and secret military infrastructure in south Lebanon, consisting of tunnels, expanded natural caves, and underground bunkers where weapons were stored and fighters could live. Much of this construction work was carried out in remote stretches of the border away from the public gaze and at night. Three years ago, residents of villages near a valley known to be controlled by Hizbullah were kept awake at night by the sound of explosions as the guerrillas dynamited the limestone cliffs to build new bunkers.

Highly trained Hizbullah marksmen have also contributed to Israel's troop casualties. Equipped with high-powered rifles, the snipers lie undercover for days at a time, picking off Israeli soldiers when the opportunity arises. In July 2004, a Hizbullah sniper shot dead with extreme precision two Israeli soldiers from a range of 500 yards.

Israeli commanders concede that while they claim to have destroyed many of Hizbullah's long-range rocket launchers, including the 600mm Zelzal which can reach Tel Aviv, the standard 122mm Katyushas can be fired more easily by mobile teams without the need for launchers visible to spotter drones or surveillance planes. Generally, the rockets are fired from multi-barreled launchers on the back of flat-bed trucks, but they can also be fired singly, even from a simple mounting of crossed sticks which is all but invisible to drones and aircraft when hidden inside an olive grove or orange orchard. Some rockets are fired by timers, allowing the militants to escape the area in advance.

Despite saturation air coverage with missile-firing reconnaissance drones, F-16 fighter-bombers and Apache helicopter gunships, the Israelis have been unable to stem the flow of rocket fire across the border. Last week, Israeli commandos staged a pre-dawn raid on an apartment block on the outskirts of Tyre housing a team of Hizbullah militants who had been firing long-range rockets into Israel. But hours after the raid, rockets were again being fired from the same location.

Weapons caches small, dispersedInstead of stockpiling munitions in just a handful of arsenals, Hizbullah carefully dispersed ammunition, rockets, and weapons all over south Lebanon, stashing them in private homes, garages, basements, bunkers, and caves. That has ensured that small isolated Hizbullah units have a readily available supply of weapons and ammunition.

"They have amassed huge stockpiles of rockets in the area," says Gen. Alain Pellegrini, UNIFIL's commander. "I think the Israelis were hoping they would have had a faster success against Hizbullah by now."

The most important weapon in Hizbullah's arsenal may in fact be the motivation and determination of each fighter.

"The number one element is that Hizbullah is not afraid of the Israelis," says Goksel. "After 18 years fighting Israeli troops, they see them as vulnerable human beings who make mistakes and are afraid like anyone else."

Staff writer Ilene Prusher in Jerusalem and correspondent Josh Mitnick in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.

Hangover...

Half of U.S. still believes Iraq had WMD

By Charles J. Hanley
AP Special Correspondent

August 6th, 2006

Do you believe in Iraqi "WMD"? Did Saddam Hussein's government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?

Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become "independent of reality" in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.

The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.

Despite this, a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents — up from 36 percent last year — said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD. Other polls also have found an enduring American faith in the WMD story.

"I'm flabbergasted," said Michael Massing, a media critic whose writings dissected the largely unquestioning U.S. news reporting on the Bush administration's shaky WMD claims in 2002-03.

"This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence," Massing said.

Timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, two Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania's Sen. Rick Santorum, (left) and Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra, released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

"I think the Harris Poll was measuring people's surprise at hearing this after being told for so long there were no WMD in the country," said Hoekstra spokesman Jamal Ware.

But the Pentagon and outside experts stressed that these abandoned shells, many found in ones and twos, were 15 years old or more, their chemical contents were degraded, and they were unusable as artillery ordnance. Since the 1990s, such "orphan" munitions, from among 160,000 made by Iraq and destroyed, have turned up on old battlefields and elsewhere in Iraq, ex-inspectors say. In other words, this was no surprise.

"These are not stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction," said Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine who was a U.N. inspector in the 1990s. "They weren't deliberately withheld from inspectors by the Iraqis."

Conservative commentator Deroy Murdock, who trumpeted Hoekstra's announcement in his syndicated column, complained in an interview that the press "didn't give the story the play it deserved." But in some quarters it was headlined.

"Our top story tonight, the nation abuzz today ..." was how Fox News led its report on the old, stray shells. Talk-radio hosts and their callers seized on it. Feedback to blogs grew intense. "Americans are waking up from a distorted reality," read one posting.

Other claims about supposed WMD had preceded this, especially speculation since 2003 that Iraq had secretly shipped WMD abroad. A former Iraqi general's book — at best uncorroborated hearsay — claimed "56 flights" by jetliners had borne such material to Syria.

But Kull, Massing and others see an influence on opinion that's more sustained than the odd headline.

"I think the Santorum-Hoekstra thing is the latest 'factoid,' but the basic dynamic is the insistent repetition by the Bush administration of the original argument," said John Prados, author of the 2004 book "Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War."

Administration statements still describe Saddam's Iraq as a threat. Despite the official findings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has allowed only that "perhaps" WMD weren't in Iraq. And Bush himself, since 2003, has repeatedly insisted on one plainly false point: that Saddam rebuffed the U.N. inspectors in 2002, that "he wouldn't let them in," as he said in 2003, and "he chose to deny inspectors," as he said this March.

The facts are that Iraq — after a four-year hiatus in cooperating with inspections — acceded to the U.N. Security Council's demand and allowed scores of experts to conduct more than 700 inspections of potential weapons sites from Nov. 27, 2002, to March 16, 2003. The inspectors said they could wrap up their work within months. Instead, the U.S. invasion aborted that work.

As recently as May 27, Bush told West Point graduates, "When the United Nations Security Council gave him one final chance to disclose and disarm, or face serious consequences, he refused to take that final opportunity."

"Which isn't true," observed Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a scholar of presidential rhetoric at the University of Pennsylvania. But "it doesn't surprise me when presidents reconstruct reality to make their policies defensible." This president may even have convinced himself it's true, she said.

Americans have heard it. A poll by Kull's WorldPublicOpinion.org found that seven in 10 Americans perceive the administration as still saying Iraq had a WMD program. Combine that rhetoric with simplistic headlines about WMD "finds," and people "assume the issue is still in play," Kull said.

"For some it almost becomes independent of reality and becomes very partisan." The WMD believers are heavily Republican, polls show.

Beyond partisanship, however, people may also feel a need to believe in WMD, the analysts say.

"As perception grows of worsening conditions in Iraq, it may be that Americans are just hoping for more of a solid basis for being in Iraq to begin with," said the Harris Poll's David Krane.

Charles Duelfer, (left) the lead U.S. inspector who announced the negative WMD findings two years ago, has watched uncertainly as TV sound bites, bloggers and politicians try to chip away at "the best factual account," his group's densely detailed, 1,000-page final report.

"It is easy to see what is accepted as truth rapidly morph from one representation to another," he said in an e-mail. "It would be a shame if one effect of the power of the Internet was to undermine any commonly agreed set of facts."

The creative "morphing" goes on.

As Israeli troops and Hezbollah guerrillas battled in Lebanon on July 21, a Fox News segment suggested, with no evidence, yet another destination for the supposed doomsday arms.

"ARE SADDAM HUSSEIN'S WMDS NOW IN HEZBOLLAH'S HANDS?" asked the headline, lingering for long minutes on TV screens in a million American homes.

Bush brings democracy to Cuba...

Critics Cite 'Constrained' Mideast Policy

By Glenn Kessler and Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, August 6, 2006; A16

The Bush administration's policy of refusing to engage with nations and groups linked to terrorism, including Syria, Iran and Palestinian factions, has sharply limited U.S. maneuvering room during the war between Israel and Hezbollah, according to former administration officials and outside experts.

Iran is Hezbollah's prime sponsor, and Syria is the key conduit for the flow of missiles that have rained on Israeli territory -- facts that experts say make those countries essential to achieving a lasting solution. But after nearly six years in office, the administration has had increasingly limited contacts with those countries, if such contacts exist at all. Former officials charge that the administration has missed numerous opportunities to encourage Syria and Iran to cooperate more closely with U.S. interests.

"This has constrained U.S. foreign policy in many damaging ways," said Flynt Leverett, a White House official during President Bush's first term who said he argued unsuccessfully for deeper engagement with Syria. "The United States does not have effective diplomatic channels for managing the situation, much less resolving it."

Leverett's comments are echoed by other former administration officials, including former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage, (right) who made the last senior-level official visit to Damascus in January 2005. Armitage told National Public Radio last month that the administration needs to have dialogue with Syria. "We get a little lazy, I think, when we spend all our time as diplomats talking to our friends and not to our enemies," he said.

Paul R. Pillar, former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, said that "we have greatly handicapped ourselves by our refusal to use all the diplomatic channels and avenues available to us," leaving Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "trying to accomplish the seemingly impossible essentially with one hand tied behind the back."

Senior administration officials reject the criticism, saying they have made it clear what they expect from countries such as Syria, which they say has failed to respond appropriately. "The problem is, talking is not a substitute for strategy, and at the end of the day, countries make choices, and Syria has made, in our view, bad choices -- bad for them, bad for us and bad for the Syrian people," said national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley.

The administration's approach is enshrined in the National Security Strategy released earlier this year, which asserts that "the fundamental character of regimes matters as much as the distribution of power among them."

Administration officials want countries to change their policies, but in general they have been unwilling to negotiate over the terms of a shift, or even grant legitimacy to the interests of adversaries, believing that would only reward bad behavior. In the Middle East, the administration has taken that approach with Syria, Iran, former Palestinian president Yasser Arafat (left) and Hezbollah, as well as with Hamas after it won Palestinian legislative elections. It also invaded Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein.

The one exception to this approach is Libya, which gave up its weapons of mass destruction after receiving a list of assurances, including restoration of diplomatic ties -- a process that Bush inherited from the Clinton administration. More recently, under pressure from allies, the administration has joined in offering incentives to Iran, including direct talks, if it suspends its enrichment of uranium.

Administration officials say Damascus never responded to repeated attempts to encourage a change in policies. One sore point has been the flow of foreign fighters across the Syrian border into Iraq. U.S. agencies have been divided over how much of an effort Syria has made to halt this traffic.

Hadley said a succession of U.S. envoys has made the same argument to Syria, to little effect: "Look, you're out of step with what's happening in the region -- you are supporting terror, you are oppressing your own people, and you're obstructing the Middle East process, and you need to get on the right side."

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA Middle East expert now at the American Enterprise Institute, said the administration's approach is the correct one. "It is one of those recurring dreams that you are somehow going to engage the Assad regime and they're going to become a responsible member of the Middle East," he said. "It is fairly cyclical. It never really works, and it's never really clear why you would believe the regime could be bribed and what that bribe would be."

But critics of the administration's approach say the administration has simply lectured countries such as Syria, refusing to detail concrete benefits that might flow from closer cooperation. Leverett, now at the New America Foundation, interviewed Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, (left) for a book after he left the White House and said Assad complained that all he heard from U.S. officials was a long list of demands.

Syria is "a state, not a charity," Assad told Leverett. "If it is going to give something up, it must know what it will get in return."

For instance, administration officials have always demanded that Syria prevent militant groups from operating on its territory but have never explained what Syria would get in return. Leverett said the administration should have explicitly linked Syria's removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism to its expelling groups such as Hamas and severing the links that allow arms to flow to Hezbollah.

Syria also could be induced to cooperate if it receives some acknowledgment that it has a role in an Arab-Israeli peace deal, experts said. Syria nearly reached a peace agreement with Israel during the Clinton administration, but the Bush administration has been reluctant to involve Syria in its peace efforts.

Richard N. Haass, the State Department's director of policy planning in Bush's first term and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that after intense diplomatic engagement, Syria in the 1990s joined the coalition that ousted Iraq from Kuwait and was the first country to accept the U.S. invitation to join an Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid. "This administration tends to look at diplomatic interaction as an inducement or a reward, something to bestow, rather than seeing it as a neutral tool in foreign policy," he said.

After Syria was suspected of involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri (right) last year, Rice withdrew the U.S. ambassador in Damascus. In the absence of high-level U.S. contacts, the European Union has tried to fill the breach, sending Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos to meet with Assad.

Moratinos reported that Assad was willing to help but also wanted to take part in talks on a "comprehensive and lasting peace" for the region -- suggesting he is seeking the return of the Golan Heights, seized by Israel in the 1967 war.

Syria provided intelligence about radical extremist groups after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Leverett said. The CIA praised the quality of the information, he said, but a State Department effort to build on that relationship was thwarted by the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney's office.

"As unattractive as they are, the Syrians are in a position to affect U.S. interests in Iraq and Lebanon," Haass said. "We should be having a broad-based dialogue with them -- not as a favor to them but as a favor to ourselves."

James Dobbins, former U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and now at the Rand Corp., said the administration's approach has similarly been counterproductive in countering the deteriorating situation in Iraq. He said the United States has made little effort to engage Iraq's neighbors, including Iran and Syria, in helping to stabilize the country.

"We can't possibly stabilize Iraq unless we use the same methods that we used to stabilize Bosnia and Afghanistan," Dobbins said. "In both cases, we did that by engaging our adversaries and giving them a privileged place at the bargaining table."

Terrorism seeds...

Game point: Hizbullah wins sympathy

By Daniel Schorr

August 5, 2006

History may recall a shift in the Middle East power balance in the three weeks since Hizbullah's provocative cross-border attack on an Israeli Army patrol.

One element in that shift is the discovery that Hizbullah has sophisticated weapons that can inflict significant damage, even with Israeli domination of the air. These weapons, including laser-guided antitank artillery, were supplied by the government of Iran, apparently in preparation for this test of will.

Israel, trying strenuously to eliminate hard-to-find, well-dug-in Hizbullah launching sites, was drawn into risky bombings that killed civilians, including women and children, and spread sympathy and support for the Lebanese insurgents throughout the region and indeed the world.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking for President Bush, found it necessary to exert pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for at least a partial suspension of Israeli airstrikes.

Dr. Rice found that Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora no longer welcomed her. Under pressure from his own citizens, he found it embarrassingly necessary to ask that Rice stay away from Beirut.

Since then, the negotiating scene has shifted to the United Nations Security Council, where argument has raged about what kind of cease-fire can be considered a "sustainable" cease-fire, as mandated by Mr. Bush. On Monday in Miami, Bush repeated a demand that Iran cease its weapons supplies to Hizbullah, but he is not in a very good position to enforce his demand, because the tide of public opinion has shifted in the direction of Hizbullah.

For Iran, on the other hand, its proxy war in Lebanon must appear to be going well and will undoubtedly embolden the mullahs to take a defiant position in the Security Council debate on sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program. If the July 12 attack on the Israeli patrol was meant to provoke this confrontation, it has been wildly successful.

Daniel Schorr is the senior news analyst at National Public Radio.

Borrowed Empire

By Paul Craig Roberts

July 31, 2006 Issue

In recent months a hot topic on Internet sites has been speculation that Iran will instigate a collapse of the dollar’s value by billing its oil in euros. As the argument goes, Iran’s desertion of the U.S. dollar would be followed by other oil producers, bringing to an end America’s financial hegemony and severely affecting the living standards of most Americans. This Iranian threat is often said to be a main reason for Bush administration plans to attack Iran. Saddam Hussein is said to have provoked the Bush administration’s attack on Iraq by harboring the same intention to switch oil bills to euros from dollars.

This argument assumes that the cost to the U.S. of oil being billed in euros is so great that it makes worthwhile wars of aggression that are illegal under international law, that turn most of the world against the U.S. and destroy its soft power, and that have massive financial costs running in the hundreds of billions of dollars—with no clear end in sight. Would abandonment of the dollar as oil currency impose costs greater than these on the U.S.?

The change, if it were to happen, would not be the catastrophe that some people believe. Saudi Arabia and the oil sheikdoms are too much in the American pocket to follow an Iranian move to euros, and the Europeans, faced with Asian competition, do not want a stronger euro. Moreover, the real question is not the currency in which oil is billed but whether foreigners find it desirable to continue to accumulate and to hold dollar-denominated assets—stocks, real estate, bonds, and U.S. companies. America’s oil bill is dwarfed by the size of the U.S. trade and current account deficits. If the United States continues to run budget and trade deficits, foreigners’ investment portfolios can become so loaded with dollar-based assets that they cease to acquire them. That is what would lead to a sharp fall in the dollar’s value and, perhaps, to the end of the dollar’s role as world reserve currency.

I am not saying that a move by Iran and other oil producers to euros would have no effect on the dollar. Such a development would result in a lower transaction demand for dollars as a means of payment. But the real question is: what do oil producers and the rest of the world do with the dollars associated with America’s large trade and budget deficits?

The deficit in our trade imbalance due to mineral fuels is small compared to the deficit due to our imports of manufactured goods. In 2005, the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods was $506 billion, almost twice as large as the $260 billion deficit for mineral fuels. Those speculating about the currency of oil bills could paint a darker picture by worrying about the currency used to pay bills for manufactured goods.

The fundamental point overlooked by worries about an Iranian oil bourse is that oil is billed in dollars because the dollar is the reserve currency and, thereby, is acceptable as the means of international settlements. What is likely to dethrone the dollar is not Iran but Washington. Reveling in neocon hubris, not even Republicans any longer worry about deficits.

Deficits have different causes, and not all are equally worrisome. But the U.S. trade deficit is problematic for a variety of reasons. From 1990 through the first quarter of 2006, the U.S. trade deficit has accumulated to $4.7 trillion. For just the first quarter of 2006, the deficit is $208.7 billion—about twice the cost of one year’s worth of war in Iraq. The trade deficit measures U.S. consumption that is not matched by U.S. production. In other words, Americans together are consuming $2.3 billion more per day or $1,610,000 more per minute than they are producing.

Free-trade economists, who seem to specialize in apologizing for red ink, say that our trade deficit is a very positive thing. It represents, they assert, the rest of the world’s confidence in America’s economic future. These economists say that the American trade deficit is the necessary offset to the capital surplus caused by foreign investment rushing into the U.S.

There are circumstances in which this explanation of a trade deficit would be correct. However, it is not a correct interpretation of the present case. The current crop of deficit apologists misinterpret the U.S. capital surplus as real net foreign investment that is increasing America’s ability to produce and to grow. In actual fact, the majority of this foreign investment is merely a change of ownership of existing U.S. assets from Americans to foreigners. The United States is paying for its excess consumption of $2.3 billion per day by handing over the ownership of its existing wealth to foreigners. This worsens the current account deficit as the earnings on these assets now belong to overseas interests.

Another reason that our trade deficit is serious is that it has been growing faster than the economy—further evidence that foreign investment in the U.S. is primarily a change of ownership in existing assets and not new plants and equipment. In 1996, in real terms, the U.S. trade deficit was 1.0 percent of GDP. In 2005, it was 5.7 percent of GDP. In the first quarter of 2006, it was 5.9 percent of GDP. These are unprecedented percentages. When I was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration during 1981-82, the U.S. balance of trade varied between a surplus of 0.2 percent and a deficit of 0.2 percent.

One of the reasons for the unprecedented trade deficit is the offshoring of manufacturing and jobs. When U.S. corporations move production for American markets offshore and hire people in other countries to provide engineering and other services via high-speed Internet, goods and services that were produced in the U.S. are turned into imports. Free-trade economists who tout the benefits of Wal-Mart’s low-priced Chinese goods do not tell you that the price you pay at the counter is only part of the full price. The other parts of the price are the American jobs that are transferred to China and the ownership of American assets that is transferred to the Chinese in order to cover our large trade deficit.

The important question neglected by American policymakers is: at what point does the rest of the world decide that the accumulation of additional dollars is folly? Can the U.S. run a trade deficit of 10 percent of GDP and still remain the reserve currency?

The answer to the question depends in part on whether those accumulating U.S. assets see some means by which the United States can balance its trade. American economists, such as Fred Bergston, believe the U.S. can bring its trade into balance by reducing consumption, that is, by undergoing a recession that puts people out of work and reduces their ability to consume. However, Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services points out that this strategy ceased to work in the 2001 recession when the trade deficit actually increased. Why did Americans import more during recession? Do we see here the impact of offshoring and growing dependency on foreign-made goods?

Another way of reducing the trade deficit is to export more. But how does a country that is offshoring its production of goods and services export more? (By more I don’t mean in absolute terms but relative to imports.) It is possible that offshoring has permanently affected the tax base, the incentives of young people to enter the high-productivity and formerly high-paid occupations that are now offshored or filled with foreigners on work visas, and the ability of American industry to mass produce advanced technology products.

A third way of reducing the trade deficit is through dollar devaluation or the appreciation of the currencies of countries with whom we run trade deficits. But what magnitude of dollar depreciation is required to wipe out an annual trade deficit of $800 billion, and what impact would such a large decline in real purchasing power have on our living standards? Devaluation is like inflation. It raises the prices of everything with foreign-made components, which today is almost everything. Just imagine what a significant dollar devaluation would do to U.S. gasoline prices.

These serious questions are given short shrift by free-trade economists who answer with mantras.

Today Americans, whether or not they are aware of it, are under the control of a government determined to achieve U.S. hegemony over the world. Neocons in the Bush administration advocate military attacks on Iran, Syria, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. They threaten a pre-emptive nuclear attack on North Korea. Neocons worry that China might attain military parity with the U.S. by 2020 and advocate policies designed to wreck the Chinese advance. Writing in The Nation, Stephen F. Cohen documents the neocons’ drive to marginalize Russia and to assert U.S. hegemony in Russia’s legitimate sphere of influence. These aspirations are inordinate, as well as criminal, and they will bring America to ruin.

Neocons are ignorant and disdainful of economics. They assume that hegemony derives from military power and the will to use it ruthlessly. They do not understand that America’s supremacy derives from two rapidly diminishing resources—manufacturing supremacy and the dollar as world reserve currency.

America alone emerged from World War II with manufacturing capability. It is easy to dominate world trade when no one else can produce anything. The benefits that free-trade economists attribute to America’s postwar experience were due to the impairment of every other country’s ability to produce. Great Britain was impoverished by two world wars and overwhelmed with war debts. The Breton Woods agreement dethroned the British pound sterling and established the U.S. dollar as reserve currency. This has been the source of America’s strength.

It is a strength that is close to exhausted by chronic budget and trade deficits that have sorely abused the reserve currency role, while the neocons’ grand designs for hegemonic power completely ignore the diminished economic basis on which U.S. power rests. Today Asia, or even individual countries such as Japan or China, could easily topple American hegemony simply by dumping their holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds and abandoning the use of the dollar as reserve currency.

Tough-talking neocons who are creating conflict with our major bankers, such as China, and with energy-rich countries, such as Russia, are leading America into ruinous conflict that serves no sane purpose. Indeed, the U.S. could not even wage war in Iraq if the Chinese were not lending us the money. What Gordon Prather calls the “neocon-crazies” are likely to discover that the U.S. is about as hegemonic as Hitler was at Stalingrad—and the consequences of their will to power can be just as destructive for America.

Paul Craig Roberts was assistant secretary of the Treasury under President Reagan.

'The US is the kiss of death' in the Arab world

By Jim Lobe

Aug 5, 2006

WASHINGTON - After almost four weeks of fighting between Lebanon's Hezbollah militia and Israel, the US administration's ambitions to transform the Arab Middle East into a pro-Western, more democratic region are fading fast.

Not only is Washington's thus far staunch support for Israel losing Arab "hearts and minds" at an astonishing pace, but the "moderate" governments and non-governmental forces the administration had hoped would act as catalysts for reform are increasingly isolated across the region, according to Middle East specialists.

"I have never seen the United States being so demonized or savaged by Arab commentators, by Arab politicians," Hisham Melham, veteran Washington correspondent for Lebanon's An-Nahar newspaper, told a conference this week at the Brookings Institution, an influential think-tank.

"People are clinging to Hezbollah, clinging to Hamas, because they see them as the remaining voices or forces in the Arab world that are resisting what they see as an ongoing hegemonic American-Israeli plan to control the region," he said.

Shibley Telhami, an expert on Arab public opinion at the University of Maryland, observed at the same meeting, "Right now, the United States is the kiss of death.

"If you really are trying to empower the ruling elites and nudge them to reform and be more representative, you have to deliver policies that are going to empower," he said. "What we see in Lebanon is a policy that is not empowering them. It is widening the gap [between the moderate elites and the people], and people are moving toward the militants."

That point was echoed by none other than King Abdullah of Jordan, (left) who, in the early days of the current round of fighting, had joined the Egyptian and Saudi governments in denouncing Hezbollah for "adventurism" in attacking across the Lebanese border, thus provoking Israel's devastating military campaign.

"A fact America and Israel must understand is that as long as there is aggression and occupation, there will be resistance and popular support for the resistance," Abdullah, arguably Washington's closest Arab ally, said on Thursday. "People cannot sleep and wake up to pictures of the dead and images of destruction in Lebanon and Gaza and ... say 'we want moderation'. Moderation needs deeds.

"Unfortunately, Israeli policy ... has contributed to the rise in the wave of extremism in the Arab world, and this war has come to weaken the voices of moderation," he went on, warning that even if Israel destroyed Hezbollah in Lebanon - an increasingly unlikely prospect - "a new Hezbollah would emerge, maybe in Jordan, Syria or Egypt" unless a comprehensive peace settlement were reached.

Even before the outbreak of this latest war between Israel and Hezbollah, Washington's hopes of regional transformation appeared to be dimming fast.

Besides Lebanon, whose "Cedar Revolution" last year was repeatedly cited by the administration US President George W Bush as vindication of its domino theory of democratic change, the two other Arab polities in which it has invested most of its hopes for transformation - Iraq and the Palestinian Authority (PA) - were already in deep trouble.

In the PA, not only had Hamas, the Islamist party on the State Department's terrorism list, won last January's parliamentary elections, but a subsequent US-led aid and diplomatic embargo against its government only strengthened its popularity at home, partly at the expense of Washington's preferred interlocutor, the Fatah Party's Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PA.

Moreover, Israel's US-backed military campaign against Hamas, now in its sixth week, does not appear to have reduced its hold on public opinion.

In Iraq, where Washington is currently spending nearly US$7 billion a month, a series of US-organized elections appears only to have hastened the country's descent into a brutal sectarian civil war, a scenario conceded by two of Washington's top generals on Thursday as having become increasingly possible.

"Sectarian violence probably is as bad as I've seen it, in Baghdad in particular," General John Abizaid, the head of Central Command, told a Senate hearing in Washington. "If not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war." His remarks were echoed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace.

Meanwhile, another leaked memo, this time from Britain's outgoing ambassador to Iraq, warned Prime Minister Tony Blair that "the prospect of a low-intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy".

Now, Israel's onslaught against Hezbollah, which has included the destruction of key infrastructure throughout the country, as well as Shi'ite strongholds in southern Lebanon and south Beirut, has quite possibly dealt a lethal blow to the government of the moderate, pro-Western Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, (right) even as it has boosted the popularity of Hezbollah - contrary to the initial expectations in both Washington and Jerusalem.

Even Hezbollah's fiercest Lebanese foe, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, who during the Cedar Revolution praised Bush's transformation strategy as "the start of a new Arab world" comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall, told the Financial Times this week that he was forced to support the Shi'ite militia against "brutal Israeli aggression" that would result in the weakening of the central government and the strengthening of Hezbollah and, through it, Syria and Iran.

"All American policy in the Middle East is at stake because their failure in Palestine, then failure in Iraq and now this failure in Lebanon will lead to a new Arab world where the so-called radical Arabs will profit," he said, adding that "this is ... not the new Middle East of Ms [Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice".

Moreover, the situation in Lebanon - particularly the devastation wrought by Israel's military campaign against Hezbollah and Washington's support for it - increasingly threatens the US position in Iraq by further alienating its majority Shi'ite population and its leadership, many of whom have close ties to their Lebanese co-religionists.

While faction leader Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army, which battled US forces in 2004, has been holding big anti-American demonstrations in Baghdad since the Israeli offensive began in mid-July, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, (left) the single strongest and most influential voice for moderation in Iraq's Shi'ite community, warned last Sunday after a particularly deadly Israeli air strike in which dozens of civilians were killed in Qana that "dire consequences will befall the region ... if an immediate ceasefire in this Israeli aggression is not imposed".

According to Juan Cole, a Middle East expert at the University of Michigan and president of the US Middle East Studies Association, Sisanti's warning was aimed directly at the United States. "Sistani could call massive anti-US and anti-Israel demonstrations," noted Cole.

"Given Iraq's profound political instability, this development could be extremely dangerous," he wrote on his weblog, www.juancole.com. "The US is already not winning against a Sunni Arab insurgency ... If 16 million Shi'ites turned on the US because of its wholehearted support for Israel's actions in Lebanon, the US military mission in Iraq could quickly become completely and urgently untenable."

Meanwhile, Washington's most loyal Sunni-led allies, as noted by King Abdullah, also feel under growing threat by popular support for Hezbollah and the radicalization among their subjects provoked by the current Israeli campaign.

"Arab leaders are seen by the public as American puppets who have no standing of their own," said Hassan Barari, a senior researcher at Jordan's Center for Strategic Studies, writing for Bitterlemons-international.org.

"The Americans and Israelis are once again giving victory to extremists, thus critically emasculating moderate forces and their allies," he wrote, noting that Hezbollah "has managed to expose the weakness and docility of Arab leaders".

At the same time, however, the very weakness of these regimes, combined with the fact that the gap between the rulers and the ruled has now widened to such a dangerous extent, means that the Bush administration's pressure on Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other authoritarian states to implement political reform has come to abrupt halt.

How about a ceasefire?..

It's the Stupidity, Stupid

By Matthew Yglesias

Web Exclusive: 07.31.06

"We discussed a lot of issues. The Prime Minister has laid out a comprehensive plan. That's what leaders do. They see problems, they address problems, and they lay out a plan to solve the problems. The Prime Minister understands he's got challenges and he's identified priorities." -- President George W. Bush, joint press availability with Nouri al-Maliki, Prime Minister of Iraq, July 25, 2006

The truly shocking thing about that bizarre statement is that it wasn't even in response to a question. Those were Bush's opening remarks. He did, one assumes, actually meet with Maliki. And they must have talked about something. But Bush doesn't seem to have been listening. Instead, he sounds like a college kid bullshitting in section because he didn't do the assigned reading. "We talked about security in Baghdad," Bush observed, delving into specifics. "No question the terrorists and extremists are brutal."

No question.

This sort of display would be embarrassing were it not so frightening.

Two days later, with Tony Blair standing at the adjacent podium, things went from bad to worse. One is used to hearing Bush say things that aren't true. He appears, however, from the look on his face and from the baffling nature of the untruths he uttered, to have lapsed from dishonesty into confusion. (Sheer boredom may have sent him tumbling to new depths of ignorance.) "There's a lot of suffering in the Palestinian territory," Bush mused, "because militant Hamas is trying to stop the advance of democracy."

It is? Has Bush forgotten that Hamas came to power as a result of elections that he insisted the Palestinian Authority hold? I happen to think the White House made the right call on the question of Palestinian elections -- even in retrospect, even knowing that Hamas won -- though many observers think his policy has merely backfired. Rather than defend the policy, however, Bush seems to have forgotten all about it. He returned to the theme later in the press conference: "One reason why the Palestinians still suffer is because there are militants who refuse to accept a Palestinian state based upon democratic principles."

That's absurd. The president appears to be totally unfamiliar with what is perhaps the single most-discussed topic in international politics. Nothing gets people disagreeing quite like the subject of how to apportion blame for the Palestinian peoples' considerable suffering. But absolutely nobody blames Arab militants opposed to democratic principles. Terrorists opposed to Israel's very existence? Sure. Israeli intransigence? Why not. But only someone paying no attention whatsoever would subscribe to Bush's theory.

We have, meanwhile, policies that match the intellectual cesspool of the president's rhetoric. In its statements, the White House has consistently adhered to the view that the root cause of the troubles between Israel and Lebanon is Syrian and Iranian support for Hezbollah. Thanks to the dinner roll incident at the G-8 meeting, we know this is Bush's sincere view. "You see," Bush famously explained to Blair, "the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's all over." He further elaborated: "I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone to Assad and make something happen."

There's something of a cliché going around about Bush talking loudly while failing to brandish a stick, but in truth he's mumbling indistinctly while Israeli bombs pummel Lebanon.

If Syria is the real problem here, then, not to put too fine a point on it, someone needs to take some action of some kind related to Syria. After all, why would Syria tell Hezbollah to stop doing this shit? What combination of threats and inducements is Syria supposed to offer Hezbollah to get it to stop? And why would Syria offer them anyway? What's Kofi Annan supposed to do about this? If Bush wants to make Syria do something, he needs to do something to make it happen. Either offer Syria something, or threaten Syria somehow, or some combination of the two. The same goes for Iran. In case Bush hasn't noticed, the regimes in Damascus and Tehran aren't run by kind people looking to help the world out of the goodness of their hearts. Nor has the administration's habit of vaguely suggesting we'd like to overthrow their governments rendered either nation more likely to help us or our Israeli friends out of a jam.

There's a temptation to call this combination of inflammatory tough-guy rhetoric and feckless inaction "the worst of both worlds," but in truth the war policy being advocated by the right's more fevered voices would actually be worse than Bush's embarrassing, illogical paralysis. The real problem is that the risk of a wider regional war involving the United States remains. And if that risk becomes a reality, our country will be led into it by a president who doesn't seem to grasp what's happening.

The View From Israel

by Hillel Schenker

from the August 14, 2006 issue

Tel Aviv - The current bloody situation in Lebanon and northern Israel did not begin with the July 12 Hezbollah attack across the border; it began with Israeli indifference to the need to stabilize the situation there after the withdrawal of its troops in 2000. Today, with Israel's new and inexperienced civilian leadership having quickly acceded to the military's request for the use of overwhelming force, the only hope for an end to the bloodshed and devastation is action on the part of the international players who until now have avoided any serious commitment to regional peace and stability.

When Prime Minister Ehud Barak (above, right) fulfilled his campaign promise to withdraw all Israeli troops from Lebanese soil in May 2000, the United Nations declared that the eighteen-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon was over. In 2004 the Security Council passed Resolution 1559 calling for the disarmament of Hezbollah units in southern Lebanon, the one piece of unfinished business that threatened to destabilize the international border. Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, head of Israel's National Security Council, presented a program to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that could have resolved all outstanding issues between Israel and Lebanon, but Sharon preferred not to deal with the Lebanese time bomb.

The current conflict began with two IDF operational failures. On June 25 a Palestinian Hamas unit attacked a military outpost on the Israeli side of the Gaza border, killing two Israeli soldiers and capturing one. On July 12 a Hezbollah unit crossed the northern border and killed three Israeli soldiers while capturing two others. If the IDF had prevented those two attacks, the entire bloody sequence of events we have witnessed during the past few weeks might have been averted. Of course, if Hamas and Hezbollah hadn't carried out the attacks across the internationally recognized borders that everyone wants Israel to withdraw to, we wouldn't be facing the current, horrifying circumstances, with all the civilian victims on both sides.

Ehud Olmert (left) became prime minister with one declared goal on his political agenda: carrying out a unilateral withdrawal from most of the West Bank to preserve Israel's Jewish and democratic character and to insure that the younger generation would have a peaceful country that would be "fun to live in." The primary agenda of Defense Minister and Labor Party leader Amir Peretz was to change Israel's social and economic priorities and to reduce the gap between rich and poor. Neither wanted or planned to face this type of security crisis, and they essentially gave in to the military leadership's insistence that severe reprisals be ordered to teach Hamas and Hezbollah a lesson, and to change the regional strategic reality. One Israeli commentator called this a "quiet putsch."

The military operation has the backing of the overwhelming majority of the Israeli people, including most of the mainstream peace movement, as missiles rain down daily on the north and many in the area have been forced to live in shelters or relocate. Even the opposition left-wing Meretz Party declared that "Israel has the right to act, in a way which expresses the values of the state, against anyone who attacks its sovereignty," while voicing opposition to "disproportionate damage against civilian concentrations and infrastructures in Gaza and Lebanon." On July 23 5,000 Israeli Jews and Arabs gathered in Tel Aviv for the first major antiwar rally, organized by activist elements within the peace movement, the leadership of the three Arab parties in the Knesset and left-wing Zionists such as former Meretz leader Shulamit Aloni. As voices began to be raised within the Israeli public criticizing the massive use of firepower and the growing number of civilian casualties, the primary call at the rally was for an immediate cease-fire and a return to negotiations.

Two themes underline the current crisis. One is the tendency of the military mind to set policy, both in Israel and in militant Islamic organizations, and the other is the danger of fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism, which views the Middle East as a region for Muslims only, threatens to convert the Israeli-Arab conflict into a religious one, with no room for compromise. Jewish fundamentalism, which views the victory in 1967 as miraculous, a first step in some preordained march to salvation, is the driving force behind the post-1967 settlement project in the West Bank, a major obstacle to a peaceful resolution of the conflict. And Christian fundamentalism is one of the underpinnings of George W. Bush's political power and simplistic view of the world, which divides everything and everyone into good and evil, with no apparent room for the subtleties of nonviolent conflict resolution or compromise.

What we need today is an internationally brokered cease-fire, accompanied by political steps to stabilize the situation, which will include the deployment of a credible international force on the Israeli-Lebanese border and the mutual release of prisoners. Then we can return to dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, based upon the vision of a two-state solution.

Hillel Schenker, a Tel Aviv journalist, is a veteran commentator on Israeli-Arab affairs and co-editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal.

The Dogs of War...

The "hiding among civilians" Myth

By Mitch Prothero

Jul. 28, 2006

The bombs came just as night fell, around 7 p.m. The locals knew that the 10-story apartment building had been the office, and possibly the residence, of Sheik Tawouk, the Hezbollah commander for the south, so they had moved their families out at the start of the war. The landlord had refused to rent to Hezbollah when they requested the top floors of the building. No matter, the locals said, the Hezb guys just moved in anyway in the name of the "resistance."

Everyone knew that the building would be hit eventually. Its location in downtown Tyre, which had yet to be hit by Israeli airstrikes, was not going to protect it forever. And "everyone" apparently included Sheik Tawouk, because he wasn't anywhere near it when it was finally hit.

Two guided bombs struck it in a huge flash bang of fire and concrete dust followed by the roar of 10 stories pancaking on top of each other, local residents said. Jihad Husseini, 46, runs the driving school a block away and was sitting in his office when the bombs struck. He said his life was saved because he had drawn the heavy cloth curtains shut on the windows facing the street, preventing him from being hit by a wave of shattered glass. But even so, a chunk of smoldering steel flew through the air, broke through the window and the curtain, and shot past his head and through the wall before coming to rest in his neighbor's home.

But Jihad still refuses to leave.

"Everything is broken, but I can make it better," he says, surrounded by his sons Raed, 20, and Mohammed, 12. "I will not leave. This place is not military, it is not Hezbollah; it was an empty apartment."

Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths -- the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far -- on "terrorists" who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection.

But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters -- as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers -- avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators -- as so many Palestinian militants have been.

For their part, the Israelis seem to think that if they keep pounding civilians, they'll get some fighters, too. The almost nightly airstrikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut could be seen as making some sense, as the Israelis appear convinced there are command and control bunkers underneath the continually smoldering rubble. There were some civilian casualties the first few nights in places like Haret Hreik, but people quickly left the area to the Hezbollah fighters with their radios and motorbikes.

But other attacks seem gratuitous, fishing expeditions, or simply intended to punish anything and anyone even vaguely connected to Hezbollah. Lighthouses, grain elevators, milk factories, bridges in the north used by refugees, apartment buildings partially occupied by members of Hezbollah's political wing -- all have been reduced to rubble.

In the south, where Shiites dominate, just about everyone supports Hezbollah. Does mere support for Hezbollah, or even participation in Hezbollah activities, mean your house and family are fair game? Do you need to fire rockets from your front yard? Or is it enough to be a political activist?

The Israelis are consistent: They bomb everyone and everything remotely associated with Hezbollah, including noncombatants. In effect, that means punishing Lebanon. The nation is 40 percent Shiite, and of that 40 percent, tens of thousands are employed by Hezbollah's social services, political operations, schools, and other nonmilitary functions. The "terrorist" organization Hezbollah is Lebanon's second-biggest employer.

People throw the phrase "ghost town" around a lot, but Nabatiya, a bombed-out town about 15 miles from the Lebanon-Israel border, deserves it. One expects the spirits of the town's dead, or its refugees, to silently glide out onto its abandoned streets from the ruined buildings that make up much of the town.

Not all of the buildings show bomb damage, but those that don't have metal shutters blown out as if by a terrible wind. And there are no people at all, except for the occasional Hezbollah scout on a motorbike armed only with a two-way radio, keeping an eye on things as Israeli jets and unmanned drones circle overhead.

Overlooking the outskirts of this town, which has a peacetime population of 100,000 or so -- mostly Shiite supporters of Hezbollah and its more secular rival Amal -- is the Ragheh Hareb Hospital, a facility that makes quite clear what side the residents of Nabatiya are on in this conflict.

The hospital's carefully sculpted and trimmed front lawn contains the giant Red Crescent that denotes the Muslim version of the Red Cross. As we approach it, an Israeli missile streaks by, smashing into a school on the opposite hilltop. As we crouch and then run for the shelter of the hospital awning, that giant crescent reassures me until I look at the flagpole. The Lebanese flag and its cedar tree is there -- right next to the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It's safe to say that Ragheh Hareb Hospital has an association with Hezbollah. And the staff sports the trimmed beards and polite, if somewhat ominous, manner of the group. After young men demand press IDs and do some quick questioning, they allow us to enter.

Dr. Ahmed Tahir recognizes me from a funeral in the nearby village of Dweir. An Israeli bomb dropped on their house killed a Hezbollah cleric and 11 members of his immediate family, mostly children. People in Lebanon are calling it a war crime. Tahir looks exhausted, and our talk is even more tense than the last time.

"Maybe it would be best if the Israelis bombed your car on the road here," he said, with a sharp edge. "If you were killed, maybe the public outcry would be so bad in America that the Jews would be forced to stop these attacks."

When I volunteered that the Bush administration cared little for journalists, let alone ones who reported from Hezbollah territory, he shrugged. "Maybe if it was an American bomb used by the Israelis that killed an American journalist, they would stop this horror," he said.

The handful of people in the town include some from Hezbollah's political wing, as well as volunteers keeping an eye on things while the residents are gone. Off to the side, as we watch the Israelis pummel ridgelines on the outskirts of town, one of the political operatives explains that the fighters never come near the town, reinforcing what other Hezbollah people have told me over the years.

Although Israel targets apartments and offices because they are considered "Hezbollah" installations, the group has a clear policy of keeping its fighters away from civilians as much as possible. This is not for humanitarian reasons -- they did, after all, take over an apartment building against the protests of the landlord, knowing full well it would be bombed -- but for military ones.

"You can be a member of Hezbollah your entire life and never see a military wing fighter with a weapon," a Lebanese military intelligence official, now retired, once told me. "They do not come out with their masks off and never operate around people if they can avoid it. They're completely afraid of collaborators. They know this is what breaks the Palestinians -- no discipline and too much showing off."

Perhaps once a year, Hezbollah will hold a military parade in the south, in which its weapons and fighters appear. Media access to these parades is tightly limited and controlled. Unlike the fighters in the half dozen other countries where I have covered insurgencies, Hezbollah fighters do not like to show off for the cameras. In Iraq, with some risk taking, you can meet with and even watch the resistance guys in action. (At least you could during my last time there.) In Afghanistan, you can lunch with Taliban fighters if you're willing to walk a day or so in the mountains. In Gaza and the West Bank, the Fatah or Hamas fighter is almost ubiquitous with his mask, gun and sloganeering to convince the Western journalist of the justice of his cause.

The Hezbollah guys, on the other hand, know that letting their fighters near outsiders of any kind -- journalists or Lebanese, even Hezbollah supporters -- is stupid. In three trips over the last week to the south, where I came near enough to the fighting to hear Israeli artillery, and not just airstrikes, I saw exactly no fighters. Guys with radios with the look of Hezbollah always found me. But no fighters on corners, no invitations to watch them shoot rockets at the Zionist enemy, nothing that can be used to track them.

Even before the war, on many of my trips to the south, the Lebanese army, or the ubiquitous guy on a motorbike with a radio, would halt my trip and send me over to Tyre to get permission from a Hezbollah official before I could proceed, usually with strict limits on where I could go.

Every other journalist I know who has covered Hezbollah has had the same experience. A fellow journalist, a Lebanese who has covered them for two decades, knows only one military guy who will admit it, and he never talks or grants interviews. All he will say is, "I'll be gone for a few months for training. I'll call when I'm back." Presumably his friends and neighbors may suspect something, but no one says anything.

Hezbollah's political members say they have little or no access to the workings of the fighters. This seems to be largely true: While they obviously hear and know more than the outside world, the firewall is strong.

Israel, however, has chosen to treat the political members of Hezbollah as if they were fighters. And by targeting the civilian wing of the group, which supplies much of the humanitarian aid and social protection for the poorest people in the south, they are targeting civilians.

Earlier in the week, I stood next to a giant crater that had smashed through the highway between Tyre and Sidon -- the only route of escape for most of the people in the far south. Overhead, Israeli fighters and drones circled above the city and its outlying areas and regular blasts of bombs and naval artillery could be heard.

The crater served as a nice place to check up on the refugees, who were forced by the crater to slow down long enough to be asked questions. They barely stopped, their faces wrenched in near panic. The main wave of refugees out of the south had come the previous two days, so these were the hard-luck cases, the people who had been really close to the fighting and who needed two days just to get to Tyre, or who had had to make the tough decision whether to flee or stay put, with neither choice looking good.

The roads in the south are full of the cars of people who chose wrong -- burned-out chassis, broken glass, some cars driven straight into posts or ditches. Other seem to have broken down or run out of gas on the long dirt detours around the blown-out highway and bridge network the Israeli air force had spent days methodically destroying even as it warned people to flee.

One man, slowing his car around the crater, almost screams, "There is nothing left. This country is not for us." His brief pause immediately draws horns and impatient yells from the people in the cars behind him. They pass the crater but within two minutes a large explosion behind us, north, in the direction of Sidon, rocks us.

As we drive south toward Tyre, we soon pass a new series of scars on the highway: shrapnel, hubcaps and broken glass. A car that had been maybe five minutes ahead of us was hit by an Israeli shell. Three of its passengers were wounded, and it was heading north to the Hammound hospital at Sidon. We turned around because of the attack and followed the car to Sidon. Those unhurt staked out the parking lot of the hospital, looking for the Western journalists they were convinced had called in the strike. Luckily my Iraqi fixer smelled trouble and we got out of there. Probably nothing would have happened -- mostly they were just freaked-out country people who didn't like the coincidence of an Israeli attack and a car full of journalists driving past.

So the analysts talking on cable news about Hezbollah "hiding within the civilian population" clearly have spent little time if any in the south Lebanon war zone and don't know what they're talking about. Hezbollah doesn't trust the civilian population and has worked very hard to evacuate as much of it as possible from the battlefield. And this is why they fight so well -- with no one to spy on them, they have lots of chances to take the Israel Defense Forces by surprise, as they have by continuing to fire rockets and punish every Israeli ground incursion.

And the civilians? They see themselves as targeted regardless of their affiliation. They are enraged at Israel and at the United States, the only two countries on earth not calling for an immediate cease-fire. Lebanese of all persuasions think the United States and Israel believe that Lebanese lives are cheaper than Israeli ones. And many are now saying that they want to fight.

The F-22 Money Pit

Jack Shanahan

July 27, 2006

Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan (USN, ret.) is the former commander of the U.S. Second Fleet and heads the military advisory committee of the Priorities Campaign.

Last month, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., led a battle in the Senate to stop multi-year production of the F-22 fighter jet. This $72 billion program, launched in the late 1980s, had been plagued with major cost overruns and technical setbacks. But like other Cold War weapons still being built by the Pentagon, and with some crafty political engineering, the F-22 escaped this modest proposal by a vote of 70 to 28.

Ironically, just prior to the Senate vote on McCain’s proposal, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress, startled Washington insiders by recommending that funding for the jet be put on hold until alternatives are considered. It's long past time for Congress and the president to act on the GAO's advice—as the purpose of the expensive weapons system collapsed with the Soviets.

The F-22 (left) was approved initially to give the Air Force a next-generation stealthy aircraft to evade ever improving enemy air defenses. But a funny thing happened: Our enemies’ air defenses stopped improving.

So, today, even a casual examination of recent air combat involving the United States (the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq) proves that the existing fleet of about 700 F-15s and upwards of 1500 F-16s remain, undeniably, unbeatable, and will remain so well into the future. At $360 million per plane (versus about $25 million for the F-16), the F-22 would be by far the most expensive fighter plane ever built.

It’s a perfect example of the staying power of Cold War weapons that are irrelevant to America's current security requirements, including our ability to fight terrorism.

Other weapons, which like the F-22 should no longer be developed, include National Missile Defense, which continues to fail tests, the Virginia Class submarine—designed to counter a Soviet sub that was never built—and three new aircraft carriers for $33 billion.

Over $60 billion could be saved by cutting these and other weapons backed by defense contractor lobbyists, according to defense analysts like Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense, Lawrence Korb.

What, you say, how could this be? We’re fighting a war in Iraq. How can we afford to cut the defense budget now? It turns out that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are funded by supplemental appropriations, not the Pentagon’s yearly defense budget. The money for Cold War weapons systems is embedded in the regular defense budget.

Political leaders in Washington are so scared of being labeled “weak on defense” that they rarely object at all to defense expenditures, even ones like the F-22 that are widely regarded as wasteful. In fact, it’s an open secret in Washington that tens of billions of dollars are going down the drain at the Pentagon.

At the same time, it’s also an open secret that millions of American kids lack health insurance, public schools around the country are falling down, and our nation continues to rely on petroleum—a national vulnerability that could set us up for a serious economic collapse.

And how much is the federal government spending on renewable energy research? About as much as we’re spending on the F-22 fighter jet. And less than a third as much as we spend on national missile defense. Especially with our nation’s record deficits and other budget woes, it’s obvious that America has much more pressing budget priorities than the expensive and unnecessary F-22. But despite the occasional move toward shaking the F-22, Congress continues to back it and will continue.

That is, unless Americans demand that our military leaders focus on our nation’s real defense needs, not the wishes of special interests, as they decide whether to build new and expensive weapons.

Right on target?..

The Neocon Resurgence

by Sidney Blumenthal

Published on Thursday, July 27, 2006
by the Guardian / UK

Once again the Bush administration is floating on a wave of euphoria. Israel's offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon has liberated the utopian strain of neoconservatism that had been traduced by Iraq's sectarian civil war. And the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, (above, right) has propelled herself forward as chief cheerleader. "What we're seeing here," she said, "are the birth pangs of a new Middle East." At every press conference she repeats the phrase "a new Middle East" as though its incantation is magical.

Her jaunt to the region is intended to lend the appearance of diplomacy in order to forestall it. As explained to me by several senior state department officials, Rice is entranced by a new "domino theory:" Israel's attacks will demolish Hezbollah; the Lebanese will blame Hezbollah and destroy its influence; and the backlash will extend to Hamas, which will collapse. From the administration's point of view, this is a proxy war with Iran (and Syria) that will inexplicably help turn around Iraq. "We will prevail," Rice says.

The administration has traditionally engaged in promiscuous threat conflation-- al-Qaida with Saddam Hussein, North Korea and Iran in "the axis of evil," and now implicitly the Shia Hezbollah with the Sunni Iraqi insurgency. By asserting "we" before "will prevail," Rice is engaging in national interest conflation.

According to the Rice doctrine, the US has deserted its historic role as ultimate guarantor of Israel's security by acting as honest broker among all parties. Rather than emphasizing the importance of Lebanese sovereignty, presumably a matter of concern to an administration that had made it exhibit A in the spread of democracy in "a new Middle East," Rice has downplayed or ignored it in favor of uncritical endorsement of Israel's offensive. Rice's trip is calculated to interpose the influence of the US to prevent a ceasefire and to give Israel at least another week of unimpeded military action.

To the Bush administration, the conflagration has appeared as deus ex machina to rescue it from the Iraqi quagmire. That this is patently absurd does not dawn on those who remain in thrall to the same pattern of thought that imagined the invasion of Iraq would be greeted with flowers in the streets of Baghdad. Denial is the basis of repetition.

This week has seen the publication of Fiasco, by Thomas Ricks, the military correspondent of the Washington Post, devastating in its factual deconstruction. The Iraqi invasion, he writes, was "based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history." The policy-making at the Pentagon was a "black hole," and resistance by the staff of the joint chiefs to disinformation linking Iraq to 9/11 was dismissed. After the absence of a plan for postwar Iraq, blunder upon blunder fostered the insurgency.

In one of its most unintentionally ironic curiosities, the Bush White House has created an Office of Lessons Learned. But the thinking that made possible the catastrophe in Iraq is not a subject of this office. The delusional mindset went underground only to surface through the crack of the current crisis. There are no lessons learned about the blowback from Iraq; about Iraq's condemnation of Israel and its sympathy for Hezbollah; or about the US unwillingness to deal with the Palestinian Authority that made inevitable the rise of Hamas; or the counter-productive repudiation of direct contact with Syria and Iran.

Indeed, Rice is ushering in "a new Middle East," one in which the US is distrusted and even hated by traditional Arab allies, and its ability to restrain Israel while negotiating on behalf of its security is relinquished and diminished.

Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of "The Clinton Wars." Email to: sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com

The plan is to terrorize them...

Civil Rights Hiring Shifted in Bush Era - Conservative Leanings Stressed

by Charlie Savage

Published on Sunday, July 23, 2006 by the Boston Globe

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is quietly remaking the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, filling the permanent ranks with lawyers who have strong conservative credentials but little experience in civil rights, according to job application materials obtained by the Globe.

The documents show that only 42 percent of the lawyers hired since 2003, after the administration changed the rules to give political appointees more influence in the hiring process, have civil rights experience. In the two years before the change, 77 percent of those who were hired had civil rights backgrounds.

In an acknowledgment of the department's special need to be politically neutral, hiring for career jobs in the Civil Rights Division under all recent administrations, Democratic and Republican, had been handled by civil servants -- not political appointees.

But in the fall of 2002, then-attorney general John Ashcroft changed the procedures. The Civil Rights Division disbanded the hiring committees made up of veteran career lawyers.

During his signing of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson shook hands
with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (United Press International/ File 1964)

For decades, such committees had screened thousands of resumes, interviewed candidates, and made recommendations that were only rarely rejected.

Now, hiring is closely overseen by Bush administration political appointees to Justice, effectively turning hundreds of career jobs into politically appointed positions.

The profile of the lawyers being hired has since changed dramatically, according to the resumes of successful applicants to the voting rights, employment litigation, and appellate sections. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Globe obtained the resumes among hundreds of pages of hiring data from 2001 to 2006.

Hires with traditional civil rights backgrounds -- either civil rights litigators or members of civil rights groups -- have plunged. Only 19 of the 45 lawyers hired since 2003 in those three sections were experienced in civil rights law, and of those, nine gained their experience either by defending employers against discrimination lawsuits or by fighting against race-conscious policies.

Meanwhile, conservative credentials have risen sharply. Since 2003 the three sections have hired 11 lawyers who said they were members of the conservative Federalist Society. Seven hires in the three sections are listed as members of the Republican National Lawyers Association, including two who volunteered for Bush-Cheney campaigns.

Several new hires worked for prominent conservatives, including former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr, former attorney general Edwin Meese, Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, and Judge Charles Pickering. And six listed Christian organizations that promote socially conservative views.

The changes in those three sections are echoed to varying degrees throughout the Civil Rights Division, according to current and former staffers.

At the same time, the kinds of cases the Civil Rights Division is bringing have undergone a shift. The division is bringing fewer voting rights and employment cases involving systematic discrimination against African-Americans, and more alleging reverse discrimination against whites and religious discrimination against Christians.

"There has been a sea change in the types of cases brought by the division, and that is not likely to change in a new administration because they are hiring people who don't have an expressed interest in traditional civil rights enforcement," said Richard Ugelow, a 29-year career veteran who left the division in 2002.

No "litmus test” claimed

The Bush administration is not the first to seek greater control over the Civil Rights Division. Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan tried to limit the division's efforts to enforce school desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. But neither Nixon nor Reagan pushed political loyalists deep in the permanent bureaucracy, longtime employees say.

The Bush administration denies that its changes to the hiring procedures have political overtones. Cynthia Magnuson , a Justice Department spokeswoman, said the division had no "litmus test" for hiring. She insisted that the department hired only "qualified attorneys."

Magnuson also objected to measuring civil rights experience by participation in organizations devoted to advancing traditional civil rights causes. She noted that many of the division's lawyers had been clerks for federal judges, where they "worked on litigation involving constitutional law, which is obviously relevant to a certain degree."

Other defenders of the Bush administration say there is nothing improper about the winner of a presidential election staffing government positions with like-minded officials. And, they say, the old career staff at the division was partisan in its own way -- an entrenched bureaucracy of liberals who did not support the president's view of civil rights policy.

Robert Driscoll , a deputy assistant attorney general over the division from 2001 to 2003, said many of the longtime career civil rights attorneys wanted to bring big cases on behalf of racial groups based on statistical disparities in hiring, even without evidence of intentional discrimination. Conservatives, he said, prefer to focus on cases that protect individuals from government abuses of power.

Hiring only lawyers from civil rights groups would "set the table for a permanent left-wing career class," Driscoll said.

But Jim Turner , who worked for the division from 1965 to 1994 and was the top-ranked professional in the division for the last 25 years of his career, said that hiring people who are interested in enforcing civil rights laws is not the same thing as trying to achieve a political result through hiring.

Most people interested in working to enforce civil rights laws happen to be liberals, Turner said, but Congress put the laws on the books so that they would be enforced. "To say that the Civil Rights Division had a special penchant for hiring liberal lawyers is twisting things," he said.

Jon Greenbaum , who was a career attorney in the voting rights section from 1997 to 2003, said that since the hiring change, candidates with conservative ties have had an advantage.

"The clear emphasis has been to hire individuals with conservative credentials," he said. "If anything, a civil rights background is considered a liability."

But Roger Clegg , who was a deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights during the Reagan administration, said that the change in career hiring is appropriate to bring some "balance" to what he described as an overly liberal agency.

"I don't think there is anything sinister about any of this. . . . You are not morally required to support racial preferences just because you are working for the Civil Rights Division," Clegg said.

Many lawyers in the division, who spoke on condition of anonymity, describe a clear shift in agenda accompanying the new hires. As The Washington Post reported last year, division supervisors overruled the recommendations of longtime career voting-rights attorneys in several high-profile cases, including whether to approve a Texas redistricting plan and whether to approve a Georgia law requiring voters to show photographic identification.

In addition, many experienced civil rights lawyers have been assigned to spend much of their time defending deportation orders rather than pursuing discrimination claims. Justice officials defend that practice, saying that attorneys throughout the department are sharing the burden of a deportation case backlog.

As a result, staffers say, morale has plunged and experienced lawyers are leaving the division. Last year, the administration offered longtime civil rights attorneys a buyout. Department figures show that 63 division attorneys left in 2005 -- nearly twice the average annual number of departures since the late 1990s.

At a recent NAACP hearing on the state of the Civil Rights Division, David Becker , who was a voting-rights section attorney for seven years before accepting the buyout offer, warned that the personnel changes threatened to permanently damage the nation's most important civil rights watchdog.

"Even during other administrations that were perceived as being hostile to civil rights enforcement, career staff did not leave in numbers approaching this level," Becker said. "In the place of these experienced litigators and investigators, this administration has, all too often, hired inexperienced ideologues, virtually none of which have any civil rights or voting rights experiences."

Dates from '57 law

Established in 1957 as part of the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Division enforces the nation's antidiscrimination laws.

The 1957 law and subsequent civil rights acts directed the division to file lawsuits against state and local governments, submit "friend-of-the-court" briefs in other discrimination cases, and review changes to election laws and redistricting to make sure they will not keep minorities from voting.

The division is managed by a president's appointees -- the assistant attorney general for civil rights and his deputies -- who are replaced when a new president takes office.

Beneath the political appointees, most of the work is carried out by a permanent staff of about 350 lawyers. They take complaints, investigate problems, propose lawsuits, litigate cases, and negotiate settlements.

Until recently, career attorneys also played an important role in deciding whom to hire when vacancies opened up in their ranks.

"We were looking for a strong academic record, for clerkships, and for evidence of an interest in civil rights enforcement," said William Yeomans , who worked for the division for 24 years, leaving in 2005.

Civil Rights Division supervisors of both parties almost always accepted the career attorneys' hiring recommendations, longtime staffers say. Charles Cooper , a former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Reagan administration, said the system of hiring through committees of career professionals worked well.

"There was obviously oversight from the front office, but I don't remember a time when an individual went through that process and was not accepted," Cooper said. "I just don't think there was any quarrel with the quality of individuals who were being hired. And we certainly weren't placing any kind of political litmus test on . . . the individuals who were ultimately determined to be best qualified."

But during the fall 2002 hiring cycle, the Bush administration changed the rules. Longtime career attorneys say there was never an official announcement. The hiring committee simply was not convened, and eventually its members learned that it had been disbanded.

Driscoll, the former Bush administration appointee, said then-Attorney General John Ashcroft (left) changed hiring rules for the entire Justice Department, not just the Civil Rights Division. But career officials say that the change had a particularly strong impact in the Civil Rights Division, where the potential for political interference is greater than in divisions that enforce less controversial laws.

Joe Rich , who joined the division in 1968 and who was chief of the voting rights section until he left last year, said that the change reduced career attorneys' input on hiring decisions to virtually nothing. Once the political appointees screened resumes and decided on a finalist for a job in his section, Rich said, they would invite him to sit in on the applicant's final interview but they wouldn't tell him who else had applied, nor did they ask his opinion about whether to hire the attorney.

The changes extended to the hiring of summer interns.

Danielle Leonard , who was one of the last lawyers to be hired into the voting rights section under the old system, said she volunteered to look through internship applications in 2002.

Leonard said she went through the resumes, putting Post-It Notes on them with comments, until her supervisor told her that career staff would no longer be allowed to review the intern resumes. Leonard removed her Post-Its from the resumes and a political aide took them away.

Leonard said she quit a few months later, having stayed in what she had thought would be her “dream job" for less than a year, because she was frustrated and demoralized by the direction the division was taking.

The academic credentials of the lawyers hired into the division also underwent a shift at this time, the documents show. Attorneys hired by the career hiring committees largely came from Eastern law schools with elite reputations, while a greater proportion of the political appointees' hires instead attended Southern and Midwestern law schools with conservative reputations.

The average US News & World Report ranking for the law school attended by successful applicants hired in 2001 and 2002 was 34, while the average law school rank dropped to 44 for those hired after 2003.

Driscoll, the former division chief-of-staff, insisted that everyone he personally had hired was well qualified. And, he said, the old hiring committees' prejudice in favor of highly ranked law schools had unfairly blocked many qualified applicants.

"They would have tossed someone who was first in their class at the University of Kentucky Law School, whereas we'd say, hey, he's number one in his class, let's interview him," Driscoll said.

Learning from others

The Bush administration's effort to assert greater control over the Civil Rights Division is the latest chapter in a long-running drama between the agency and conservative presidents.

Nixon tried unsuccessfully to delay implementation of school desegregation plans. Reagan reversed the division's position on the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools and set a policy of opposing school busing and racial quotas.

Still, neither Nixon nor Reagan changed the division's procedures for hiring career staff, meaning that career attorneys who were dedicated to enforcing traditional civil rights continued to fill the ranks.

Yeomans said he believes the current administration learned a lesson from Nixon's and Reagan's experiences: To make changes permanent, it is necessary to reshape the civil rights bureaucracy.

“Reagan had tried to bring about big changes in civil rights enforcement and to pursue a much more conservative approach, but it didn't stick," Yeomans said. “That was the goal here -- to leave behind a bureaucracy that approached civil rights the same way the political appointees did."

The Clarity of Our War Strategy...

American Petrocracy

by Kevin Phillips

July 17, 2006 Issue

Few lies have wound up injuring Americans more—in everything from automobile gas tanks and winter heating bills to diminished U.S. global standing—than a rarely revisited three-year-old fib-fest involving George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair. Since World War I, history is clear: the British and Americans have been pre-occupied with only one thing in Iraq—oil. Yet in 2003, as their troops again disembarked, the pretense was all about good and evil, democracy and freedom. The disastrous outcome of the unacknowledged Middle Eastern mission, the struggle for petroleum, has rarely been discussed.

In part, that’s because a credulous press has swallowed an extraordinary fraud. Speaking on behalf of George W. Bush, then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer insisted in February 2003, “If this had anything to do with oil, the position of the United States would be to lift the sanctions so the oil could flow. This is not about that. This is about saving lives by protecting the American people.” In November 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had likewise declared, “it has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.” On the other side of the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told Parliament in early 2003, “Let me deal with the conspiracy theory that this has something to do with oil. There is no way whatever that if oil were the issue, it wouldn’t be simpler to cut a deal with Saddam Hussein.”

Horse manure. In the run-up to war, from Alberta to Texas, oilmen gossiped about the centrality of oil. Meetings of petroleum geologists buzzed about the so-called “peak oil” forecast that a dangerous top in global production was only a decade or two away. Specialized publications guesstimated how much taking over Iraqi oil could mean for profits and Exxon and Chevron. Polls of ordinary citizens from Europe to Latin America and the Mideast produced similar findings: people thought the invasion was about oil.

The Gulf War in 1991 certainly had been. When the first President Bush went into the Persian Gulf in force that year, it was indeed about petroleum. He openly stated, “our jobs, our way of life, our own freedom and the freedom of friendly countries around the world would all suffer if control of the world’s great oil reserves fell into the hands of Saddam Hussein.” The idea that Saddam Hussein was a second Hitler was a rhetorical embellishment. Back during the Cold War, even when Washington worried about the Soviet Union rolling into Iran and reaching the Persian Gulf, American concern arose out of the geopolitics of oil, not some abstract commitment to representative government and democracy.

The British had indulged their own motivational buncombe in the aftermath of the First World War when the Marquess of Curzon, Britain’s foreign secretary, said that the influence of oil in the new boundaries drawn for Iraq was “nil.” “Oil,” he said, “had not the remotest connection with my attitude, or with that of His Majesty’s Government, over Mosul.” By 1924, as the British agreed to cut American oil companies in for a share of Iraq’s oil production, the centrality of oil was obvious. Curzon’s claim that London sought to bring freedom and self-government to the Arabs was mocked in Parliament and on Fleet Street.

But that was 80 years ago, and today’s opinion-molding elites—in the United States, at least—are far more gullible. Too many are still psychologically embedded in the hard-charging pretense that surrounded the 2003 U.S. military incursion. The revelation that Saddam’s much trumpeted weapons of mass destruction seem not to have existed has yet to lead to the next logical re-evaluation: just how much more credibility should be given to the three sweeping “it wasn’t about oil” assurances quoted earlier? After all, if oil was involved, then the U.S. disaster in Iraq, doubly bungled, represents the greatest wartime failure since James Madison let the British burn Washington in 1814.

Vice President Dick Cheney, (left) the one top official who avoided denying that oil had anything to do with the Iraq invasion, is precisely the man whose attentions must be examined to illustrate the depth of oil motivations. In 1999, when Cheney was still the head of Halliburton, the oil-services giant, he made a shrewd speech to the London Institute of Petroleum in which he gloomed over coming oil-supply problems: “By some estimates, there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a 3 percent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional 50 million barrels a day.”

Those barrels would have to come largely from the Middle East, and a few years earlier the Wall Street Journal had reported an Anglo-American oil company consensus: that Iraq, specifically, was “the biggie” in terms of potential future reserves. During 2001, the energy task force that became Cheney’s first major assignment as vice president spent much time poring over maps of the oilfields in Iraq and the rival nations—China, Russia, and France among them—to whom Saddam Hussein intended to give the concessions for development. Part of Cheney’s mandate involved “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”

This was getting down to the primal underpinnings of the 2003 invasion. According to Paul Roberts in his 2004 book The End of Oil, Cheney and his task-force colleagues pored over maps of Iraqi oilfields to estimate how much Iraqi oil might be dumped quickly on the [post-invasion] market. Before the war, Iraq had been producing 3.5 million barrels a day, and many in the industry and the administration believed that the volume could easily be increased to 7 million by 2010. If so—and if Iraq [under U.S. control] could be convinced to ignore its OPEC quota and start producing at maximum capacity—the flood of new oil would effectively end OPEC’s ability to control prices.

The Anglo-American firms, in turn, would be in the catbird’s seat.

As for the supposed weapons of mass destruction, these had already played a crucial role. The United Nations sanctions imposed in the early 1990s included provisions that Saddam could not sign over development of the big Iraqi oilfields to foreign companies. On one hand, this gave the French, Russians, and Chinese an incentive to get Iraq out from under the sanctions. But on another, the key allegations that enabled the U.S. and Britain to keep sanctions in place were—what else?—Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. Without WMD, the sanctions would have fallen away, and the rivals of the U.S. and Britain would have gotten the “biggie” oilfields.

In short, the weapons of mass destruction drumbeat was substantially tied to oil and had already done its essential job by the time the invasion took place. Accept this logic and it makes mincemeat out of the Bush-Rumsfeld-Blair pretense.

The cynic will say, yes, but why could Bush and Rumsfeld not talk a little bit about oil just as the first Bush had prior to the Gulf War? Strategically, there were major differences. In 2003, there was no Kuwait to liberate as a justification for tangling with Saddam. This time it was a flat-out invasion to topple Saddam and take control. Admitting that oil was a principal motivation would have lost the public-relations battle not just in the Middle East but around most of the world. The administration had to have some larger, more noble rationale, and the war on terror offered a broad umbrella. At every opportunity, officials of the Bush administration, not least the president himself, tried to tie Saddam Hussein to terrorism and, indirectly, even to 9/11.

Furthermore, the White House had to consider the huge religious and biblical element of the coalition that elected Bush in 2000. Newsweek polling back in 1999 found that 45 percent of American Christians believed in Armageddon and the end times, and almost as many thought that the Antichrist was already alive and on the earth. Because such beliefs concentrate among very pro-Bush evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Pentecostals, my estimate is that some 55 percent of the people who voted for Bush in 2000 would have told pollsters about believing in the end times and Armageddon.

This will strike many as an exaggeration, but the phenomenon is an important one. Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals noted in 2003 that since the break-up of the USSR, “evangelicals have substituted Islam for the Soviet Union. The Muslims have become the modern-day equivalent of the Evil Empire.” According to University of Wisconsin historian Paul Boyer, by the 1990s many prophecy believers saw Saddam as the Antichrist or his forerunner, partly because Saddam was rebuilding the ancient evil city of Babylon. The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye fictionalized the Rapture-Tribulation-Armageddon sequence so successfully that it sold a whopping 60 million copies in book and tape form. Most of the readers were Bush backers.

Politically, this confronted the White House with both a strategic dilemma and a parallel opportunity. On the plus side, the huge chunk of Bush voters would want to view the U.S. attempt to topple Saddam Hussein in terms of the war of good versus evil. Weapons of mass destruction were a prop but collateral to the larger biblical context. Invading Iraq would evoke that context because Saddam was one of the evil ones—maybe the Evil One, given his Babylon tie-in. Toppling him could aspire to biblical interpretation. Aiding Israel was also biblically vital. Bush had already carved out a related, overarching “good versus evil” posture with his heavily religious post-9/11 rhetoric.

The minuses were fewer but cautionary. It was fine for the White House to criticize the United Nations because the international body was a favorite whipping post among the high-octane preachers given to quoting the Book of Revelation. Oil, however, wasn’t part of the biblical prophecy framework. In LaHaye’s series, petroleum was a minor strategic gambit of the Antichrist, not the business of the good guys. Oil’s increasing centrality was a bad sign on the websites of omen-counters like raptureready.com.

Maybe this had something to do with the Bush-Rumsfeld-Blair posture of oil not being at all involved and maybe it didn’t. However, the rhetorical fact remains: oil-related motives and objectives were insistently forsworn, even if they were prominent—especially in Dick Cheney’s petroleum-savvy mind. Many Americans think his task force has been kept wrapped in secrecy because large oil companies were closely involved, but keeping oil-related war motivations hidden may have been even more vital.

If the Americans and British did act substantially for oil—and that seems highly likely—then it is fair to judge the Iraqi failure by oil-policy yardsticks and outcomes. The quick summation, obviously, is that whereas oil was selling at roughly $30 a barrel in 2002 as the White House was plotting its invasion and occupation, by late 2004 it cost a more painful $40 per barrel. By the time the operation was marking its third anniversary this spring, petroleum was flirting with $75 a barrel.

There is no room in this article to document that prior to the U.S. invasion in 2003, everything about Iraq (and neighboring Kuwait) generally boiled down to oil. Suffice it to say that Iraq’s new boundaries were drawn around oil after World War I; Axis forces invaded from Syria in 1941 in pursuit of petroleum; important Persian Gulf surveys generally concentrated on oilfields; the maps Cheney looked at in 2001 were about oil; and on entering Baghdad in 2003, the first government building U.S. troops occupied was the Oil Ministry, with its seismic maps of the rich Iraqi oilfields.

Anglo-American politics had also become increasingly shaped by oil. The Bush administration marked the first time that both the president and the vice president hailed from the oil industry. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in turn, was so close to British Petroleum that wags called BP “Blair Petroleum.”

Besides, if oil had nothing to do with the invasion, why did top officials of the Bush administration mention it in predicting how well the invasion would work out? Cheney opined that by the end of 2003, Iraqi oil output would hit 3 million barrels a day, and Lawrence Lindsey, the White House economic adviser, talked about 3-5 million, saying in September 2002, “the key issue is oil, and a regime change in Iraq would facilitate an increase in world oil” so as to drive down prices. Paul Wolfowitz, (right) Rumsfeld’s deputy in the Pentagon, enthused that increased Iraqi oil revenues could pay for the war. And White House speechwriter David Frum wrote in his 2003 book on Bush that the war on terror was designed to “bring new stability to the most vicious and violent quadrant of the earth—and new prosperity to us all, by securing the world’s largest pool of oil.”

The best way to assess the oil-related outcomes—all bungles, no boons—is to use three different yardsticks: postwar oil supplies and prices; recrimination against the U.S. dollar; and the rising portion of U.S. defense outlays that had to be spent on protecting land and deep-water oilfields, pipelines, and sea lanes vital to oil tankers.

The administration’s hope that a quick and overwhelming victory in Iraq would unleash enough new oil production to flood the markets and undercut OPEC, however absurd in retrospect, tantalized traders during the invasion weeks. On March 21, 2003, the Financial Times noted, “futures prices suggest that when it is over, OPEC will shower the world with crude and the price will fall out of its $22-28 band late next year.”

Instead, occupied Iraq turned into a quicksand of guerrilla and sectarian rivalry. Insurgents attacked and disrupted pipelines and refineries, and truck drivers refused to transport oil from the north. During the winter of 2005-2006, Iraqi production dropped as low as 1.1 million barrels a day, and covering this production gap took almost all of OPEC’s spare capacity and forced prices higher. Dalton Garis, an economist at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi, told the Associated Press in April 2006, “Iraq could be making a tremendous difference.” Instead, its shortfall is “a significant contributing factor to the high price of oil.”

American economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, in a draft paper entitled “The Economic Costs of the Iraq War: An Appraisal Three Years After the Beginning of the Conflict,” reached a similar but much more detailed and buttressed conclusion. Publicly, Stiglitz and Bilmes attribute $5-10 of the increased per barrel cost of oil to the mess in Iraq, but their private view seems to be that a very large portion of the now $45-per-barrel oil-price increase is attributable to Iraq.

That makes sense if one considers the hostile reactions of many of the world’s oil-producing nations to the behavior the Bush administration was exhibiting in Iraq and elsewhere. For several years prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that nation had been insisting—contrary to global policies in effect since the 1970s—that it would price its oil sales in euros, not dollars. Other major OPEC producers—Venezuela and Iran—also began talking about kindred moves and so did elements of the European community. Just after the U.S. invasion, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman (left) wrote that the real clash was not over weapons of mass destruction but over the dollar versus the euro—“who gets to sell—and buy—Iraqi oil, and what form of currency will be used to denominate the value of the sales ... yet another skirmish in a growing economic conflict.” Few others had the courage to raise the issue.

Had a U.S. triumph in Iraq enabled Washington to control and open the oil spigots in Iraq, OPEC would have been obliged to desist from talking about dropping the dollar to price oil in euros or a so-called basket of currencies. But as the various dimensions of U.S. failure became clear in 2003 and 2004, other nations—Indonesia, Malaysia, and Russia (not an OPEC member)—began to show their currency claws. Six months after the U.S. invasion, as Iraqi oil output shrank in the face of relentless sabotage of pipelines and other facilities by insurgents, even Saudi Arabia displayed its disdain, not by currency actions but by giving a big gas-development contract to French Total instead of ExxonMobil.

As of 2006, the U.S. dollar has been dropping again, with the ever more conspicuous failure of Bush administration energy policy—this year the U.S. will spend $300-350 billion on imported oil—a significant backdrop. Should these trends intensify and OPEC cease to price oil in dollars, the added burden on Americans will register in everything from home heating oil in northern winters to the prohibitive cost of long-distance driving in the remote exurbs of metropolitan commuter belts. The effects of the great bungle in Iraq may only be beginning.

Still another oil cost-burden that the Iraqi failure imposes on the American people involves the huge and finally starting to be noticed portion of U.S. defense outlays that are undertaken to protect foreign oil supplies from disruption. Michael Klare, a leading U.S. scholar on resource wars and oil geopolitics, has tabulated oil-related tasks being assumed by the military from South America and West Africa to the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, and the Straits of Malacca. His conclusion: the military “is being used more and more for the protection of overseas oil fields and the supply routes that connect them. … Such endeavors, once largely confined to the Gulf area, are now being extended to unstable oil regions in other parts of the world. Slowly but surely, the U.S. military is being converted into a global oil-protection service.” How much do these tax-financed costs effectively add to the price of a gallon of gas or heating oil sold in the U.S.—25 cents, 40, 85?

In sum, the energy-related price of the administration’s dishonesty and massive miscalculation in Iraq ought to be a central discussion point in this election year and again in 2008. The citizenry has to comprehend just how much is at stake and how the nation’s future has been jeopardized.
_________________________________________

Kevin Phillips has been a political and economic commentator for more than three decades. A former Republican White House strategist for Richard Nixon, Mr. Phillips is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and NPR and writes for Harper's and Time magazine.

The Pecking Order...

Hezbollah's Transformation

By Dahr Jamail

Jul 20, 2006

LATAKIA, Syria - Hezbollah, a group often misunderstood by Westerners, is a militant but also a political group.

The Arabic name means Party of God. Led by the charismatic Hassan Nasrallah, (right) the Lebanese Islamist Shi'ite group was set up in 1982 to resist Israeli occupation of Lebanon during the brutal civil war. The group declared a political existence in 1985.

Hezbollah achieved its goal when Israeli troops withdrew from southern Lebanon on May 25, 2000. The Israeli withdrawal followed sustained Hezbollah attacks on its troops.

The political platform of Hezbollah calls for the destruction of Israel, but the group has successfully transformed itself from a radical extremist group into an effective political force that holds 18% of the seats in the Lebanese parliament.

The United States, Britain, Israel and other Western countries consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization that they say has received weapons and also financial and political support from Iran and Syria. Both these countries deny supplying arms to Hezbollah.

But both countries openly support the group politically. Iranian leaders have produced angry rhetoric in support of Hezbollah. In Syria, massive demonstrations were held in Damascus, Latakia and several other cites. Demonstrations in support of Hezbollah were also held in cities across many Arab countries.

Throughout most of the Arab and Muslim worlds, Hezbollah is highly regarded as a legitimate resistance movement. The group follows a distinctly Shi'ite Islamist ideology developed by the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In Lebanon, the group had first hoped to transform the whole country into a fundamentalist Shi'ite state. But it has now abandoned that objective for a more inclusive platform.

About 60% of the 3.8 million population of Lebanon is Muslim, most of them Shi'ite. This is where Hezbollah draws its support. The rest of the population is almost all Christian. A 15-year civil war between Muslim and Christian groups ended in 1991.

The Shi'ite movement in Iraq led by Muqtada al-Sadr (right) is following in the footsteps of Hezbollah. It has won broad support in Iraq from millions of impoverished Shi'ites there for similar reasons.

Hezbollah won the support of Shi'ite Muslims by providing social services, health care and welfare when the Lebanese government failed. Hezbollah runs hospitals, news services and educational facilities for its followers in Lebanon. It is behind a large number of economic and infrastructure projects in the country.

The Israeli strikes in Lebanon destroyed Hezbollah's Al-Manar Television station. But the group continues to broadcast messages from Nasrallah by other means.

Hezbollah has refused to integrate its forces into the Lebanese army despite political pressure. It considers itself a legitimate resistance movement in Lebanon that is also important to the entire Middle East region.

Hezbollah has long accused Israel of holding many of its members in jail, some for more than 20 years, and continues to demand their release. Hezbollah says it will continue to fight unless its prisoners are released.

Hezbollah became the most powerful military force in Lebanon after Syria withdrew its troops last year. It now has a seat in the Lebanese cabinet.

During the civil war, which brought Lebanon to its knees, Hezbollah became infamous for its suicide bombings and kidnapping of Western hostages, primarily journalists.

The biggest Hezbollah suicide attack was the bombing of the barracks of US marines in Beirut in 1983. The attack killed 241 marines and led then-president Ronald Reagan to withdraw all US troops from the country.

The group is also widely believed to have carried out an attack on the US Embassy, killing 63 people, and on the headquarters of the French multinational forces, killing 58 French troops.

Hezbollah began a substantial political rise after the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri (left) in February 2005. In May of that year Hezbollah won its biggest election victory.

Hezbollah was invited to join the government last July in the hope that the move would bring national unity to Lebanon as the country struggled for stability and peace.

The current fighting between Hezbollah forces in Lebanon and Israel has left more than 250 Lebanese dead, along with several Israelis. Both Hezbollah and the government of Israel have declared open war with one another. International intervention has been lackluster to say the least, and the crisis looks set to deepen.

As through its checkered history, Hezbollah is again winning praise and support from the Arab and Muslim world, while it is accused of terrorism by the West. Hezbollah is about the most prominent division points at present between the two worlds.

Bombs Away...

Video: Valerie Plame speaks about suit against Cheney, Rove and Libby

07/14/2006 @ 12:13 pm

Valerie Plame-Wilson has made a very rare press appearance, delivering a statement about the civil lawsuit she and husband Joseph Wilson have filed against Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and others for their purported roles in damaging the couple's careers.

Triumph of the Authoritarians

By John W. Dean

Published on Friday, July 14, 2006 by the Boston Globe

John Dean was legal counsel to U.S. president Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, and his testimony before Senate investigators convinced many Americans that Nixon was closely involved in the criminal activities that eventually led to his resignation from the presidency.

Contemporary conservatism and its influence on the Republican Party was, until recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners' bludgeoning style of politics, their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest -- none of this struck me as based on anything related to traditional conservatism. Rather, truth be told, today's so-called conservatives are quite radical.

For more than 40 years I have considered myself a ``Goldwater conservative," and am thoroughly familiar with the movement's canon. But I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon ``imperial presidency" on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.

What true conservative calls for packing the courts to politicize the federal judiciary to the degree that it is now possible to determine the outcome of cases by looking at the prior politics of judges? Where is the conservative precedent for the monocratic leadership style that conservative Republicans imposed on the US House when they took control in 1994, a style that seeks primarily to perfect fund-raising skills while outsourcing the writing of legislation to special interests and freezing Democrats out of the legislative process?

How can those who claim themselves conservatives seek to destroy the deliberative nature of the US Senate by eliminating its extended-debate tradition, which has been the institution's distinctive contribution to our democracy? Yet that is precisely what Republican Senate leaders want to do by eliminating the filibuster when dealing with executive business (namely judicial appointments).

Today's Republican policies are antithetical to bedrock conservative fundamentals. There is nothing conservative about preemptive wars or disregarding international law by condoning torture. Abandoning fiscal responsibility is now standard operating procedure. Bible-thumping, finger-pointing, tongue-lashing attacks on homosexuals are not found in Russell Krik's classic conservative canons, nor in James Burham's guides to conservative governing. Conservatives in the tradition of former senator Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan believed in ``conserving" this planet, not relaxing environmental laws to make life easier for big business. And neither man would have considered employing Christian evangelical criteria in federal programs, ranging from restricting stem cell research to fighting AIDS through abstinence.

Candid and knowledgeable Republicans on the far right concede -- usually only when not speaking for attribution -- that they are not truly conservative. They do not like to talk about why they behave as they do, or even to reflect on it. Nonetheless, their leaders admit they like being in charge, and their followers grant they find comfort in strong leaders who make them feel safe. This is what I gleaned from discussions with countless conservative leaders and followers, over a decade of questioning.

I started my inquiry in the mid-1990s, after a series of conversations with Goldwater, whom I had known for more than 40 years. Goldwater was also mystified (when not miffed) by the direction of today's professed conservatives -- their growing incivility, pugnacious attitudes, and arrogant and antagonistic style, along with a narrow outlook intolerant of those who challenge their thinking. He worried that the Republican Party had sold its soul to Christian fundamentalists, whose divisive social values would polarize the nation. From those conversations, Goldwater and I planned to study why these people behave as they do, and to author a book laying out what we found. Sadly, the senator's declining health soon precluded his continuing on the project, so I put it on the shelf. But I kept digging until I found some answers, and here are my thoughts.

For almost half a century, social scientists have been exploring authoritarianism. We do not typically associate authoritarianism with our democracy, but as I discovered while examining decades of empirical research, we ignore some findings at our risk. Unfortunately, the social scientists who have studied these issues report their findings in monographs and professional journals written for their peers, not for general readers. With the help of a leading researcher and others, I waded into this massive body of work.

What I found provided a personal epiphany. Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, ``enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral." And that's not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades.

Authoritarianism's impact on contemporary conservatism is beyond question. Because this impact is still growing and has troubling (if not actually evil) implications, I hope that social scientists will begin to write about this issue for general readers. It is long past time to bring the telling results of their empirical work into the public square and to the attention of American voters. No less than the health of our democracy may depend on this being done. We need to stop thinking we are dealing with traditional conservatives on the modern stage, and instead recognize that they've often been supplanted by authoritarians.

In the Trap...

Another secret US intelligence program?

By Tom Regan

Posted July 10, 2006 at 12:00 p.m.

The Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said the White House briefed his committee on another "significant" intelligence program only after it was brought to his attention by a government whistleblower.

The New York Times reports that Rep. Peter Hoekstra, (R) (right) of Michigan then pressed President Bush to tell him about the program.

"We can't be briefed on every little thing that they are doing," Mr. Hoekstra said in an interview on "Fox News Sunday." "But in this case, there was at least one major – what I consider significant – activity that we had not been briefed on that we have now been briefed on. And I want to set the standard there, that it is not optional for this president or any president or people in the executive community not to keep the intelligence committees fully informed of what they are doing."

The White House declined to comment on the issue Sunday but said last week that it would continue to work closely with Mr. Hoekstra and the intelligence committees.

The briefing came after Mr. Hoekstra wrote a "strongly worded letter" to President Bush about not being briefed on the program. Hoekstra would not comment on the nature of the program, or whether it involved domestic or international surveillance.

Although he has been a critic of whistleblowers in the past, and has even called for tougher legislation when whistleblowers give classified information to the media, he said "This is actually a case where the whistle-blower process was working appropriately." The Washington Post reports that while Hoekstra appeared to be "mollified" by the briefing he received, he said the government is still falling short of its legal obligations "to brief key congressional members on significant intelligence operations."

Steven Spruiell reports in National Review's MediaBlog that the whistleblower who may have tipped off Hoekstra was Russell Tice, the ex-NSA employee who also says he was a source for The New York Times story earlier this year about domestic eavesdropping by the NSA. Mr. Tice said in May he planned to tell congressional staffers about undisclosed illegal programs being run at the NSA during the time when Gen. Michael Hayden (now the head of the CIA) was in charge.

Congress Daily reported on May 12, according to Mr. Spruiell, that the programs "involved the illegal use of space-based satellites and systems to spy on US citizens." It was a few days later that Hoekstra sent his letter to President Bush.

Conservative blogger Tom Maguire, in his blog JustOneMinute, says there was a fairly significant passage in Hoekstra's letter that largely ignored by the media – that the chairman believes that there is a "a strong and well-positioned group within the Agency intentionally undermined the administration and its policies." Hoekstra's letter indicates that he is concerned about the appointment of Steve Kappes (left) as deputy director of the CIA, as Hoekstra says Mr. Kappes may have been a part of this group. He cites the enthusiastic response of Democrats to Kappes' return as further proof of this suspicion.

In a recent column, however, columnist Paul Krugman of The New York Times wrote that he believes that "the Bush administration and the movement it leads have been engaged in an authoritarian project, an effort to remove all the checks and balances that have heretofore constrained the executive branch." And Mr. Krugman wrote those who disagree with the government's use of secret intelligence programs are often portrayed as "traitors" by supporters of the administration for voicing dissent or exposing possibly illegal programs. But he said it doesn't have to be this way.

"For I think that most Americans still believe in the principle that the president isn't a king, that he isn't entitled to operate without checks and balances. And President Bush is especially unworthy of our trust, because on every front – from his refusal to protect chemical plants to his officials' exposure of Valerie Plame, from his toleration of war profiteering to his decision to place the CIA in the hands of an incompetent crony – he has consistently played politics with national security."

U.S. Armed Forces Geneva Convention ID Card

Finally, in another issue involving a controversial administration program, Newsweek reports that the White House was strongly advised by State Department laywers in January 2002 that not giving Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners even the basic protections of the Geneva Conventions was inviting an "enormous backlash" from both foreign allies and US courts.

"Even those terrorists captured in Afghanistan ... are entitled to the fundamental humane treatment standards of ... the Geneva Conventions," William Howard Taft IV, the State Department legal counselor ... wrote in a Jan. 23, 2002, memo obtained by Newsweek. In particular, Taft argued, the United States has always followed one provision of the Geneva Conventions – known as Common Article 3 – which "provides the minimal standards" of treatment that even "terrorists captured in Afghanistan" deserve.

Now that the Supreme Court has in effect backed the position of the State department lawyers in its recent Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld ruling, it could also call into question the legality of other administration programs, including the NSA's domestic surveillance program, the creation of secret prisons in other countries, and perhaps other programs such as the one mentioned above.

Newsweek reports that the administration is split into two camps over how to deal with the setback dealt by the court's decision. One group, headed by National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice "want to use the decision as the basis for a wide-ranging 'fix' that would accept a role for Congress and the courts on detainee issues." The other group, headed by hardliners such as Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, David Addington, "want to nullify the court ruling by rewriting portions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and granting the president the powers the court rejected."

Inside the anti-US resistance

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

Jul 8, 2006

Osama Bin Laden is ill and invisible, but five years after September 11, 2001, his al-Qaeda movement has become the fulcrum of a global, Islamic resistance against the United States.

Asia Times Online has learned from an operative close to the al-Qaeda leadership that bin Laden languishes on a dialysis machine, in rapidly declining health.

"Sheikh [Osama] was in a poor condition when my father last visited," said the operative, who uses the name "Abdullah". Abdullah's father, known as Sheikh Ibrahim, is number two after Tahir Yuldeshev in the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IUM), a group closely allied with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and operating in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Pakistan.

Sheikh Ibrahim's meeting with bin Laden took place "a few weeks ago", Abdullah told Asia Times Online in an interview at the end of June in a northern Pakistani city. Abdullah had traveled there from North Waziristan, a Pakistani tribal agency on the Afghanistan border, to meet this correspondent.

"He [bin Laden] asked all of us to pray for his health. For the past many months he has been on dialysis and just cannot move. My father never told me where he was when he met Osama ... but he was worried about his fast-waning health."

Nevertheless, said Abdullah, the al-Qaeda leadership remains in Afghanistan and still serves as the nucleus of the movement.

"Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri [bin Laden's number two] (left) is very active in Afghanistan and controlling affairs. Most of the Arab fighters left Afghanistan after the US invasion of Iraq and many went there to fight. But the main leadership of al-Qaeda continued to stay in Afghanistan," Abdullah said.

Abdullah is a tall, strongly built 23-year-old. He lived through some very hard times after the US invasion of Afghanistan and the Taliban's subsequent retreat. His family moved to Pakistan's southern city of Karachi, and later went abroad. In 2003, when the Taliban regrouped in South Waziristan, his family returned to Karachi.

Abdullah has been in a position to observe the rise and fall of the Taliban over the past eight years, due to his father's senior position in the IMU as well as his own involvement with the movement.

"Until the end of 2003 Karachi was the focal point of all al-Qaeda, Taliban and other people who fled from Afghanistan. But constant intelligence operations forced us to leave Karachi and by the end of 2003 we reached South Waziristan, where my father joined hands with Sheikh Essa [an Egyptian] and Tahir Yuldeshev," Abdullah said.

He confirmed Asia Times Online reports that bin Laden had been short of funds, hampering al-Qaeda operations. Still, Abdullah maintained that the al-Qaeda leadership would remain in Afghanistan despite all difficulties, because of the country's identification with Bilad-i-Khurasan - a land, Muslims believe, where Muslim armies will finally regroup and go to liberate the "land of Abraham" from the Anti-God (Dajal).

"I have heard this notion since the days when Abu Hafs [the al-Qaeda number three who was killed in a US strike on Kabul in 2001] was alive. He often repeated that," Abdullah said.

Abdullah also revealed that international players are aligning themselves with al-Qaeda and the Taliban in a global Islamic alliance to fight the US.

"The money is now with Tahir Yuldeshev, who organizes Uzbek youths in South Waziristan. Where the money comes from is a mystery, but a few years ago I personally witnessed two sources of his funding, one from Turkey and the other from Saudi Arabia. Both were private people. I was with Tahir and I personally saw him receiving money in Madina," Abdullah said.

"Many months ago, I learned about a delegation of Muslim youths from Russia who met with Mullah Omar [the Taliban leader] (right) and offered to arrange a supply of Russian-made missiles and sophisticated weapons, for cash. Mullah Omar refused the deal.

"However, recently another development happened which once again reminded us that international forces are aiming at us.

"The development occur in the wake of differences between the Uzbeks. A group of Uzbeks, to which I belong, defied Tahir Yuldeshev because of his dictatorial behavior. We left South Waziristan and went to the North Waziristan town of Mir Ali. His dictatorial behavior aside, there were many other rumors in circulation about him. All put a question mark on Tahir's integrity."

(At this time, Yuldeshev was settled in South Waziristan and allied himself with local commander Abdullah Mehsud. Yuldeshev was not active on any front.)

"There were a lot of things published in the Russian press about Tahir's connection with Americans. We were not sure about that, but the way Tahir made himself aloof from al-Qaeda and the Taliban created doubts," Abdullah said.

Yuldeshev then "circulated a message through a CD, strictly for his Uzbek circle, in which he stated that a smear campaign was being run against him by Russia. Tahir said that Russians contacted him, and after he approved they came to see him in South Waziristan and offered him a deal to finance him and provide arms and ammunition to fight against the Americans in Afghanistan, on condition that he gave up his struggle in Uzbekistan.

"Tahir said on the CD that he refused the offer outright, after which a campaign was run to malign him and portray him as having CIA [the US's Central Intelligence Agency] connections."

Nevertheless, as Asia Times Online has reported, recently a greater alliance hasbeen formed throughout North and South Waziristan. Yuldeshev has changed his reclusive behaviour and joined hands with Haji Omar, Biatullah Mehsud and other Taliban commanders in a new drive against the American-led forces in Afghanistan.

Public Perception...

The Occupation of Iraqi Hearts and Minds

By Nir Rosen

Published on Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Three years into an occupation of Iraq replete with so-called milestones, turning points and individual events hailed as “sea changes” that would “break the back” of the insurgency, a different type of incident received an intense, if ephemeral, amount of attention. A local human rights worker and aspiring journalist in the western Iraqi town of Haditha filmed the aftermath of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians. The video made its way to an Iraqi working for Time magazine, and the story was finally publicized months later. The Haditha massacre was compared to the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre, and like the well-publicized and embarrassing Abu Ghraib scandal two years earlier, the attention it received made it seem as if it were a horrible aberration perpetrated by a few bad apples who might have overreacted to the stress they endured as occupiers.

In reality both Abu Ghraib and Haditha were merely more extreme versions of the day-to-day workings of the American occupation in Iraq, and what makes them unique is not so much how bad they were, or how embarrassing, but the fact that they made their way to the media and were publicized despite attempts to cover them up. Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the occupation. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media.

Americans, led to believe that their soldiers and Marines would be welcomed as liberators by the Iraqi people, have no idea what the occupation is really like from the perspective of Iraqis who endure it. Although I am American, born and raised in New York City, I came closer to experiencing what it might feel like to be Iraqi than many of my colleagues. I often say that the secret to my success in Iraq as a journalist is my melanin advantage. I inherited my Iranian father’s Middle Eastern features, which allowed me to go unnoticed in Iraq, blend into crowds, march in demonstrations, sit in mosques, walk through Falluja’s worst neighborhoods.

I also benefited from being able to speak Arabic—in particular its Iraqi dialect, which I hastily learned in Baghdad upon my arrival and continued to develop throughout my time in Iraq.

My skin color and language skills allowed me to relate to the American occupier in a different way, for he looked at me as if I were just another haji, the “gook” of the war in Iraq. I first realized my advantage in April 2003, when I was sitting with a group of American soldiers and another soldier walked up and wondered what this haji (me) had done to get arrested by them. Later that summer I walked in the direction of an American tank and heard one soldier say about me, “That’s the biggest fuckin’ Iraqi (pronounced eye-raki) I ever saw.” A soldier by the gun said, “I don’t care how big he is, if he doesn’t stop movin’ I’m gonna shoot him.”

I was lucky enough to have an American passport in my pocket, which I promptly took out and waved, shouting: “Don’t shoot! I’m an American!” It was my first encounter with hostile American checkpoints but hardly my last, and I grew to fear the unpredictable American military, which could kill me for looking like an Iraqi male of fighting age. Countless Iraqis were not lucky enough to speak American English or carry a U.S. passport, and often entire families were killed in their cars when they approached American checkpoints.

In 2004 the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that by September 2004 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the American occupation and said that most of them had died violently, mostly in American airstrikes. Although this figure was challenged by many, especially partisans of the war, it seems perfectly plausible to me based on what I have seen in Iraq, having spent most of the postwar period there. What I never understood was why more journalists did not focus on this, choosing instead to look for the “good news” and go along with the official story.

My first direct encounter with American Marines was from the Iraqi side. In late April 2003, I was attending the Friday prayers in a Sunni bastion in Baghdad. Thousands of people were praying and the devout flooded out of the mosque and laid their prayer rugs on the street and the square in front of it. A Marine patrol rounded a corner and walked right into hundreds of people praying on the street and listening to the sermon, even approaching the separate section for women. Dozens of men rose and put their shoes on, forming a virtual wall to block the armed Marines, who seemed unaware of the danger. The Marines did not understand Arabic. “Irjau!” “Go back!” the demonstrators screamed, and some waved their fists, shouting “America is the enemy of God!” as they were restrained by a few cooler-headed men from within their ranks. I ran to advise the Marines that Friday prayers was not a good time to show up fully armed. The men sensed this and asked me to tell their lieutenant, who appeared oblivious to the public relations catastrophe he might be provoking. He told me: “That’s why we’ve got the guns.”

A nervous soldier asked me to go explain the situation to the bespectacled staff sergeant, who had been attempting to calm the situation by telling the demonstrators, who did not speak English, that the U.S. patrol meant no harm. He finally lost his temper when an Iraqi told him gently, “You must go.” “I have the weapons,” the sergeant said. “You back off.”

“Let’s get the fuck out!” one Marine shouted to another as the tension increased. I was certain that a shove, a tossed stone or a shot fired could have provoked a massacre and turned the city violently against the American occupation. Finally the Marines retreated cautiously around a corner as the worshipers were held back by their own comrades. It could have ended worse, and a week later it did when 17 demonstrators were killed by American soldiers in Falluja, and several more were killed in a subsequent demonstration, a massacre that contributed to the city’s support of the resistance.

I believe that any journalist who spent even a brief period embedded with American soldiers must have witnessed crimes being committed against innocent Iraqis, so I have always been baffled by how few were reported and how skeptically the Western media treated Arabic reports of such crimes. These crimes were not committed because Americans are bad or malicious; they were intrinsic to the occupation, and even if the Girl Scouts had occupied Iraq they would have resorted to these methods. In the end, it is those who dispatched decent young American men and women to commit crimes who should be held accountable.

I still feel guilt over my complicity in crimes the one time I was embedded, in the fall of 2003. (I spent two weeks with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment stationed in Husaybah, an Iraqi town near the Syrian border that is a suspected entry point for foreign insurgent fighters.) Normally, I like to think, if I witnessed an act of bullying of the weak or the elderly, or the terrorizing of children, I would interfere and try to stop it. After all, a passion for justice is what propelled me into this career. It started when I arrived in the main base in the desert. Local Iraqi laborers were sitting in the sun waiting to be acknowledged by the American soldiers. Every so often a representative would come to the soldiers to explain in Arabic that they were waiting for their American overseer. The soldier would shout back in English. Finally I translated between them. One soldier, upset with an Iraqi man for looking at him, asked him: “Do I owe you money? So why the fuck are you looking at me?”

After a week, the Army unit I was living with went on a raid targeting alleged Al Qaeda cells. Included were safe houses, financiers and fighters as well as alleged resistance leaders such as senior military officers from elite units of the former Iraqi army. All together there were 62 names on the wanted list. A minimum of 29 locations would be raided, taking out the “nervous system” of the area resistance “and the guys who actually do the shooting.”

The raids began at night. The men descended upon villages by the border with Syria in the western desert. After half an hour of bumpy navigating in the dark the convoy approached the first house and the vehicles switched their lights on, illuminating the target area as a tank broke the stone wall. “Fuck yeah!” cheered one sergeant, “Hi honey I’m home!” The teams charged over the rubble from the wall, breaking through the door with a sledgehammer and dragging several men out. The barefoot prisoners, dazed from their slumber, were forcefully marched over rocks and hard ground. One short middle-aged man, clearly injured and limping with painful difficulty, was violently pushed forward in the grip of a Brobdingnagian soldier who said, “You’ll fucking learn how to walk.” Each male was asked his name. None matched the names on the list. A prisoner was asked where the targeted military officer lived. “Down the road,” he pointed. “Show us!” he was ordered, and he was shoved ahead, stumbling over the rocky street, terrified that he would be seen as an informer in the neighborhood, terrified that he too would be taken away. He stopped at the house but the soldiers ran ahead. “No, no, it’s here,” yelled a sergeant, and they ran back, breaking through the gate and bursting into the house. It was a large villa, with grape vines covering the driveway. Women and children from within were ordered to sit in the garden. The men were pushed to the ground on the driveway and asked their names. One was indeed the first high-value target. His son begged the soldiers, “Take me for 10 years but leave my father!” Both were taken. The children screamed ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ as the men were led out and the women were given leaflets in Arabic explaining that the men had been arrested.

Home after home met the same fate. Some homes had only women; these houses too were ransacked, closets broken, mattresses overturned, clothes thrown out of drawers. Men were dragged on the ground by their legs to be handcuffed outside. One bony ancient sheik walked out with docility and was pushed forcefully to the ground, where he was wrestled by soldiers who had trouble cuffing his arms. A commando grabbed him from them, and tightly squeezed the old man’s arms together, lifting him in the air and throwing him down on the ground, nearly breaking his fragile arms.

As her husband was taken away, one woman angrily asked Allah to curse the soldiers, calling them “Dogs! Jews!” over and over. When his soldiers left a home, one officer emerged to slap them on the back like a coach congratulating his players during halftime in a winning game. In a big compound of several houses the soldiers took all the men, even the ones not on the list. A sergeant explained that the others would be held for questioning to see whether they had any useful information. The men cried out that they had children still inside. In several houses soldiers tenderly carried out babies who had been left sleeping in their cribs and handed them to the women. When the work at a house was complete, or at the Home Run stage (stages were divided into 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Home Run and Grand Slam, meaning ready to move on), the soldiers relaxed and joked, breaking their own tension and ignoring the trembling and shocked women and children crouched together on the lawns behind them.

Prisoners with duct tape on their eyes and their hands cuffed behind them with plastic “zip ties” sat in the back of the truck for hours, without water. They moved their heads toward sounds, disoriented and frightened, trying to understand what was happening around them. Any time a prisoner moved or twitched, a soldier bellowed at him angrily and cursed. Thrown among the tightly crowded men in one truck was a boy no more than 15 years old, his eyes wide in terror as the duct tape was placed on them. By daylight the whole town could see a large truck full of prisoners. Two men walking to work with their breakfast in a basket were stopped at gunpoint, ordered to the ground, cuffed and told to “Shut the fuck up” as their basket’s contents were tossed out and they were questioned about the location of a suspect.

The soldier guarding them spoke of the importance of intimidating Iraqis and instilling fear in them. “If they got something to tell us I’d rather they be scared,” he explained. An Iraqi policeman drove by in a white SUV clearly marked “Police.” He too was stopped at gunpoint and ordered not to move or talk until the last raid was complete. From the list of 34 names, the troop I was with brought in about 16 positively identified men, along with 54 men who were neighbors, relatives or just happened to be around. By 08:30 the Americans were done and started driving back to base. As the main element departed, the psychological operations vehicle blasted AC/DC rock music through neighborhood streets. “It’s good for morale after such a long mission,” a captain said. Crowds of children clustered on porches smiling, waving and giving the passing soldiers little thumbs up. A sergeant waved back. Neighbors awakened by the noise huddled outside and watched the convoy. One little girl stood before her father and guarded him from the soldiers with her arms outstretched and legs wide.

In Baghdad, coalition officials announced that 112 suspects had been arrested in a major raid near the Syrian border, including a high-ranking official in the former Republican Guard. “The general officer that they captured, Abed Hamed Mowhoush al-Mahalowi, was reported to have links with Saddam Hussein and was a financier of anti-coalition activities, according to intelligence sources,” a military spokeswoman said. “Troops from the 1st and 4th squadrons of the Third Armored Cavalry cordoned off sections of the town and searched 29 houses to find ‘subversive elements,’ including 12 of the 13 suspects they had targeted for capture,” she said.

That night the prisoners were visible on a large dirt field in a square of concertina wire. Beneath immense spotlights and near loud generators, they slept on the ground, guarded by soldiers. One sergeant was surprised by the high number of prisoners taken by the troop I was with. “Did they just arrest every man they found?” he asked, wondering if “we just made another 300 people hate us.” The following day 57 prisoners were transported to a larger base for further interrogation. Some were not the suspects, just relatives of the suspects or men suspected of being the suspects.

The next night the troop departed the base at 0200, hoping to find those alleged Al Qaeda suspects who had not been home during the previous operation. Soldiers descended upon homes in a large compound, their boots trampling over mattresses in rooms the inhabitants did not enter with shoes on. Most of the wanted men were nowhere to be found, their women and children prevaricating about their locations. Some of their relatives were arrested instead. “That woman is annoying!” one young soldier complained about a mother’s desperate ululations as her son was taken from his house. “How do you think your mother would sound if they were taking you away?” a sergeant asked him.

Three days after the operation, a dozen prisoners could be seen marching in a circle outside their detention cells, surrounded by barbed wire. They were shouting “USA, USA!” over and over. “They were talkin’ when we told ’em not to, so we made ’em talk somethin’ we liked to hear,” one of the soldiers guarding them said with a grin. Another gestured up with his hands, letting them know they had to raise their voices. A first sergeant quipped that the ones who were not guilty “will be guilty next time,” after such treatment. Even if the men were guilty, no proof would be provided to the community. There would be no process of transparent justice. The only thing evident to the Iraqi public would be the American guilt.

In November 2003 a major from the judge advocate general’s office working on establishing an Iraqi judicial process told me that there were at least 7,000 Iraqis detained by American forces. Many languished in prisons indefinitely, lost in a system that imposed the English language on Arabic speakers with Arabic names not easily transcribed. Some were termed “security detainees” and held for six months pending a review to determine whether they were still a “security risk.” Most were innocent. Many were arrested simply because a neighbor did not like them. A lieutenant colonel familiar with the process told me that there is no judicial process for the thousands of detainees. If the military were to try them, there would be a court-martial, which would imply that the U.S. was occupying Iraq, and lawyers working for the administration are still debating whether it is an occupation or liberation. Two years later, 50,000 Iraqis had been imprisoned by the Americans and only 2% had ever been found guilty of anything.

The S2 (intelligence) section in the Army unit I was with had not proved itself very reliable in the past—a fact that frustrated soldiers to no end. “You get all psyched up to do a hard mission,” said one sergeant, “and it turns out to be three little girls. The little kids get to me, especially when they cry.”

The reason for the lack of confidence in S2 was made clear by the case of a man called Ayoub. I accompanied the troop when it raided Ayoub’s home based on intelligence S2 provided: intercepted phone calls, in which Ayoub spoke of proceeding to the next level and obtaining land mines and other weapons.

On the day of the raid, tanks, Bradleys and Humvees squeezed between the neighborhood walls. A CIA operator angrily eyed the rooftops and windows of nearby houses, a silencer on his assault weapon. Soldiers broke through Ayoub’s door early in the morning and when he did not immediately respond to their orders he was shot with nonlethal ordinance, little pellets exploding like gunshot from the weapons grenade launcher. The floor of the house was covered in his blood. He was dragged into a room and interrogated forcefully as his family was pushed back against a garden fence. Ayoub’s frail mother, covered in a shawl, with traditional tribal tattoos marking her face, pleaded with an immense soldier to spare her son’s life, protesting his innocence. She took the soldier’s hand and kissed it repeatedly while on her knees. He pushed her to the grass along with Ayoub’s four girls and two boys, all small, and his wife. They squatted barefoot, screaming, their eyes wide in terror, clutching each other as soldiers emerged with bags full of documents, photo albums and two CDs with Saddam and his cronies on the cover. These CDs, called “The Crimes of Saddam,” are common on every Iraqi street, and as their title suggests, they were not made by Saddam supporters; however, the soldiers saw only the picture of Saddam and assumed they were proof of guilt.

Ayoub was brought out and pushed onto the truck. He gestured to his shrieking relatives to remain where they were. He was an avuncular man, small and round—balding and unshaven with a hooked nose and slightly pockmarked face. He could not have looked more innocent. He sat frozen, staring numbly ahead as the soldiers ignored him, occasionally glancing down at their prisoner with sneering disdain. The medic looked at Ayoub’s injured hand and chuckled to his friends, “It ain’t my hand.” The truck blasted country music on the way back to the base. Ayoub was thrown in the detainment center. After the operation there were smiles of relief among the soldiers, slaps on the back and thumbs up.

Several hours later, a call was intercepted from the Ayoub whom the Americans were seeking. “Oh shit,” said the S2 captain, “[we’ve got] the wrong Ayoub.” The innocent father of six who was in custody actually was a worker in a phosphate plant the Americans were running. But he was not let go. If he was released, there would be a risk that the other Ayoub would learn he was being sought. The night after his arrest a relieved Ayoub could be seen escorted by soldiers to call his family and report he was fine but would not be home for a few days. “It was not the wrong guy,” the troop’s captain said defensively, shifting blame elsewhere. “We raided the house we were supposed and arrested the man we were told to.”

When the soldiers who had captured Ayoub learned of the mistake, they were not surprised. “Oops,” said one. Another one wondered, “What do you tell a guy like that, sorry?” “It’s depressing,” a third said. “We trashed the wrong guy’s house and the guy that’s been shooting at us is out there with his house not trashed.” The soldier who shot the nonlethal ordinance at Ayoub said, “I’m just glad he didn’t do something that made me shoot him [with a bullet].” Then the soldiers resumed their banter.

A few days later, the Army did a further analysis of the phone calls that had originally sent them in search of a man named Ayoub. In the calls, Ayoub had indeed spoken of proceeding to the next level and obtaining land mines and other weapons. This had rightfully alarmed the Army’s intelligence officers. But at some point an analyst realized that Ayoub was not a terrorist intent on obtaining weapons; he turned out to be a kid playing video games and talking about them with his friend on the phone.

The Procrustean application of spurious information gathered by intelligence officers who cannot speak Arabic and are not familiar with Iraqi, Arab or Muslim culture is creating enemies instead of eliminating them. The S2 captain could barely hide his disdain for Iraqis. “Oh he just hates anything Iraqi,” another captain said of him, adding that the intelligence officers do not venture off the base or interact with Iraqis or develop any relations with the people they are expected to understand. A lieutenant colonel from the Army’s civil affairs command explained that these officers do not read about the soldiers engaging with Iraqis, sharing cigarettes, tea, meals and conversations. They read only the reports of “incidents” and they view Iraqis solely as security threat. The intelligence officers in Iraq do not know Iraq.

In every market in Iraq hundreds of wooden crates can be found piled one atop the other. Sold for storage, upon further examination these crates reveal themselves to be former ammunition crates. For the past 25 years Iraq has been importing weapons to feed its army’s appetite for war against Iran, the Kurds, Kuwait and America. When empty, the crates were sold for domestic use. The soldiers with the Army unit I was with assumed the crates they found in nearly every home implicated the owners in terrorist activities, rather than the much simpler truth. During the operation described here I saw one of the soldiers find such a crate overturned above a small hole in a man’s backyard. “He was trying to bury it when he saw us coming,” one soldier deduced confidently. He did not lift the crate to discover that it was protecting irrigation pipes and hoses in a pit.

Saddam bestowed his largesse upon the security services that served as his praetorian guard and executioners. Elite fighters received Jawa motorcycles. Immediately after the war, Jawa motorcycles were available in every market in Iraq that sold scooters and motorcycles. Some had been stolen from government buildings in the frenzy of looting that followed the war and was directed primarily against institutions of the former government. Soldiers of the Army unit I accompanied were always alert for Jawa motorcycles, and indeed it was true that many Iraqi paramilitaries had used them against the Americans. On a night the troop had received RPG fire, its members drove back to base through the town. When they spotted a man on a Jawa motorcycle they fired warning shots. When he did not stop they shot him to death. “He was up to no good,” the captain explained.

On Nov. 26, 2003, after two weeks of brutal daily interrogations by military intelligence officers, Special Forces soldiers and CIA personnel, Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, the former chief of Iraqi air defenses whose arrest I had witnessed, died in a U.S. detention facility. Twenty-four to 48 hours before that, he had been interrogated and beaten by CIA personnel. The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division began looking into Mowhoush’s death that same day. The next day an Army news release stated that he had died of natural causes. “Mowhoush said he didn’t feel well and subsequently lost consciousness,” according to the statement, “ … the soldier questioning him found no pulse and called for medical authorities. A surgeon responded within five minutes to continue advanced cardiac life support techniques, but they were ineffective.” On Dec. 2, 2003, an Army medical examiner’s autopsy said the general’s death was “a homicide by asphyxia,” but it was not until May 12, 2004, that the death certificate was issued, with homicide as the cause. The Pentagon autopsy report in May said he had died of “asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression” and that there was “evidence of blunt force trauma to the chest and legs.” Mowhoush was one of several Iraqis whose death certificates were not issued until May of 2004, long after their deaths.

American soldiers had no mission and viewed Iraqis as “the enemy” through a prism of “us and them.” An officer returning from a fact-finding mission complained of “a lot of damn good individuals who received no guidance, training or plan and who are operating in a vacuum.” Inside the G2, or intelligence, section of the Army’s civil affairs headquarters in Baghdad, on a bulletin board I saw an anecdote meant to be didactic. It told of American soldiers suppressing Muslim Filipino insurgents a century before. They dipped bullets in pig’s blood and shot some Muslim rebels, to send a warning to the others. A Latino civil affairs officer, fed up with Iraqis, explained that the only solution was to shut down Baghdad entirely. Military civil affairs officers are supposed to provide civil administration in the absence of local power structures, minimize friction between the military and civilians, restore normalcy and empower local institutions. One brigade commander explained to a civil affairs major that “I am not here to win hearts and minds, I am here to kill the enemy.” He failed to provide his civil affairs team with security, so it could not operate.

One morning in Albu Hishma, a village north of Baghdad cordoned off with barbed wire, the local U.S. commander decided to bulldoze any house that had pro-Saddam graffiti on it, and gave half a dozen families a few minutes to remove whatever they cared about the most before their homes were flattened. In Baquba, two 13-year-old girls were killed by a Bradley armored personnel carrier. They were digging through trash and the American rule was that anybody digging on road sides would be shot.

The 4th Infantry Division was especially notorious in Iraq. Its soldiers in Samara handcuffed two suspects and threw them off a bridge into a river. One of them died. In Basra, seven Iraqi prisoners were beaten to death by British soldiers. A high-ranking Iraqi police official in Basra identified one of the victims as his son. It is common practice for soldiers to arrest the wives and children of suspects as “material witnesses” when the suspects are not captured in raids. In some cases the soldiers leave notes for the suspects, letting them know their families will be released should they turn themselves in. Soldiers claim this is a very effective tactic. Soldiers on military vehicles routinely shoot at Iraqi cars that approach too fast or come too close, and at Iraqis wandering in fields. “They were up to no good,” they explain. Every commander is a law unto himself. He is advised by a judge advocate general who interprets the rules as he wants. A war crime to one is legitimate practice to another. After the Center for Army Lessons Learned sent a team of personnel to Israel to study that country’s counterinsurgency tactics, the Army implemented the lessons it learned, and initiated house demolitions in Samara and Tikrit, blowing up homes of suspected insurgents.

It is hard to be patient when mosques are raided, when protesters are shot, when innocent families are gunned down at checkpoints or by frightened soldiers in vehicles. It is hard to be patient in hours of izdiham, or traffic jams, that are blamed on Americans closing off main roads throughout Baghdad. The Americans close roads after “incidents” or when they are looking for planted bombs. Their vehicles block the roads and they answer no questions, refusing to let any Iraqi approach. Cars are forced to drive “wrong side,” as Iraqis call it, with near fatal results. Iraqis have become experts in walking over the concertina wire that divides so much of their cities: First one foot presses the razor wire down, then the other steps over. They are experts in driving slowly through lakes and rivers of sewage. They are experts in sifting through mountains of garbage for anything that can be reused.

It is hard to relax when the soldier in the Humvee or armored personnel carrier in front of you aims his machine gun at you; when aggressive white men race by, running you off the road as they scowl behind their wraparound sunglasses; when soldiers shoot at any car that comes too close. Iraqis in their own country are reminded at all times who has control over their lives, who can take them with impunity.

An old Iraqi woman approached the gate to Baghdad international airport. Draped in a black ebaya, she was carrying a picture of her missing son. She did not speak English, and the soldier in body armor she asked for help did not speak Arabic. He shouted at her to “get the fuck away.” She did not understand and continued beseeching him. The soldier was joined by another. Together they locked and loaded their machine guns, chambering a round, aiming the guns at the old woman and shouting at her that if she did not leave “we will kill you.”

The explosive-sniffing dog in front of the Sheraton and Palestine hotels is hated by the Iraqi security guards as well as the American soldiers who stand there because it, like the rest of us who live in the area, is subject to olfactory whims as it imagines every day that it smells a bomb, forcing them to close off the street for several hours. Two of my friends were arrested for not having a bomb last week when the dog decided their bag smelled funny. They were jailed for four days.

Imagine. The American occupation of Iraq has lasted over three years. The above stories are based on my two weeks with one unit in a small part of the country. Imagine how many Iraqi homes have been destroyed. How many families have been traumatized. How many men have disappeared into American military vehicles in the night. How many crimes have been committed against the Iraqi people every single day in the course of the normal operations of the occupation, when soldiers were merely doing their duty, when they were not angry or vengeful as in Haditha. Imagine what we have done to the Iraqi people, tortured by Saddam for years, then released from three decades of his bloody rule only to find their hope stolen from them and a new terror unleashed.

Nir Rosen is a fellow at the New America Foundation and a free-lance writer who has lived for the last three years in Iraq. His book on postwar Iraq, "In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq," was published by Free Press in May 2006. His articles from Iraq and elsewhere, as well as an accompanying photo essay, are available on www.nirrosen.com.

Shafting the Working Poor

Katrina vanden Heuvel

Posted 06/21/2006 @ 1:13pm

The GOP just shafted the working people of America. By rejecting an attempt to raise the minimum wage, the Republican-controlled Senate showed that it is far more interested in lining the pockets of its campaign contributors than--as Paul Krugman wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Monday--arriving at a "new New Deal" and working to "rebuild our middle class." The 52-46 vote was eight short of the 60 needed for approval. (The measure drew the support of eight Republicans --four of these are up for re-election in the fall.)

Sen. Edward Kennedy's amendment would have raised the wage from the current $5.15 an hour to $7.25 – the first raise in a decade. "The minimum wage," as economist Gwendolyn Mink, makes clear, is supposed to guarantee an income floor to keep full-time wage-earners out of poverty. But today, the federal minimum wage guarantees abject poverty for workers... nearly $6,000 per year below the federal poverty line for a family of three."

But the vast majority of Republican Senators, several of them millionaires several times over, don't care about poverty or the well-being of their working class constituents, What they really care about is that they're sitting pretty, having voted themselves another raise --to $168,500 --on January 1.

Even the not-exactly-populist Wall Street Journal points out, "While the minimum wage has remained frozen, lawmakers' salaries have risen with annual cost-of-living increases keyed to what is given federal employees. And last week's vote in the House Appropriations Committee followed a floor vote days before in which the House cleared the way for members to get another increase valued at thousands of dollars annually." So, while Congress will soon make close to $170,000 a year, hardworking full-time minimum wage workers make just $10,700 annually.

One group that did important work to end this inequity is the Let Justice Roll coalition--a fast-growing program of more than 70 faith and community groups. The coalition labored mightily to target senators who were critical to passing this legislation and preventing it from being weakened by Republican's bogus charges of "class warfare." (For the true definition of class warfare, check out my Dictionary of Republicanisms. "Class warfare, n.: any attempt to raise the minimum wage").

For millions of families, this callous vote means another day of choosing between rent and health care, putting food in the refrigerator or gas in the car. Meanwhile, a Big Oil CEO makes $37,000 an hour. Want to talk about class warfare?


Click here to read a related article in the Washington Post:
GOP-Run Senate Kills Minimum Wage Increase

Ethanol - It's the Future...