Iraq

"US Agrees to International Control of Its Troops in Iraq" -- Leonard Doyle and Stephen Castle in The Independent, 11/17/03:

The United States accepts that to avoid humiliating failure in Iraq it needs to bring its forces quickly under international control and speed the handover of power, Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, has said. Decisions along these lines will be made in the "coming days", Mr Solana told The Independent.

The comments, signalling a major policy shift by the US, precede President George Bush's state visit this week to London, during which he and Tony Blair will discuss an exit strategy for forces in Iraq.

Mr Solana underlined the change of mood in Washington, saying: "Everybody has moved, including the United States, because the United States has a real problem and when you have a real problem you need help." There is a "growing consensus" that the transfer of power has to be accelerated, he said. "How fast can it be done? I would say the faster the better."

He added: "The more the international community is incorporated under the international organisations [the better]. That is the lesson I think everyone is learning. Our American friends are learning that. We will see in the coming days decisions along these lines." . . .

As the EU's foreign policy representative, Mr Solana has been playing a significant, behind-the-scenes role. Until now, the US had resisted putting the allied forces under international auspices, although there is growing support in Washington for a Nato role.

Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, arrives in Brussels tonight for talks with EU ministers, which he will combine with a meeting with the retiring Nato secretary general, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. Diplomats say that Mr Powell is expected to "test the water" about the involvement of the transatlantic alliance in Iraq. The litany of setbacks, growing US casualties and the recent killing of 18 Italian servicemen has brought intense domestic and international pressure on the Bush administration to give the occupying force more legitimacy.

"U.S. Faces Defeat by Guerrillas" -- Michael Keane in Newsday, 11/19/03:

As recently as two weeks ago, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, called the guerrilla attacks on American forces in Iraq "strategically and operationally insignificant."

Insignificant? Actually, it is difficult to identify any military or political objectives that the guerrillas are not making real progress toward achieving. . . .

[L]ast week, after summoning to Washington the civilian administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, the Bush administration announced that it would transfer power to a provisional Iraqi government by next June.

Following on the heels of a string of guerrilla attacks and the disturbing results of the CIA study, it is a move that appears to be taken out of desperation. It took Afghan guerrillas almost 10 years to force the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The Iraqi guerrillas could plausibly achieve the same result against the United States before the end of 2004.

Sanchez's dismissive remark regarding the guerrillas reveals the contempt that conventional forces typically feel for them.

For example, when American commanders characterize the guerrillas as "cowardly," it only betrays the coalition's frustration in dealing with the raiders' hit-and-run tactics.

The belief that guerrilla warfare is unsophisticated or inferior is as wrong as it is widespread. As Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Samuel B. Griffith II noted, "This generalization is dangerously misleading and true only in the technological sense. If one considers the picture as a whole, a paradox is immediately apparent, and the primitive form is understood to be in fact more sophisticated than nuclear war or atomic war or war as it was waged by conventional armies, navies and air forces."

Gen. John Abizaid, the head of the U.S. Central Command, has stated that the number of insurgents "does not exceed 5,000." The United States has about 130,000 troops in Iraq. Yet during World War I, British officer T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) was able to tie down 200,000 Turkish troops with only 3,000 guerrillas. The Americans' numerical advantage is also exaggerated because the number of American combat-trained troops in Iraq is only 56,000; the remainder represent a support-and-logistics infrastructure. . . .

Experience strongly suggests that there is very little hope of destroying a revolutionary guerrilla movement after it has acquired the sympathetic support of a significant segment of the population, ranging from 15 percent to 25 percent. This support does not need to be actively sympathetic; it merely needs to not betray the insurgents. The intensely tribal nature of the Iraqi populace, where almost half of all marriages are between first cousins, buttresses this solidarity.

Sanchez's comment that the guerrilla attacks are "insignificant" is evocative of an exchange between an American officer and a North Vietnamese colonel just before the fall of Saigon in 1975.

"You know you never defeated us on the battlefield," the American said.

The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment.

"That may be so," he replied, "but it is also irrelevant."

"What Dick Cheney Really Believes" -- Franklin Foer & Spencer Ackerman in The New Republic, 12/1/02 (posted online 11/20/03)

"War Critics Astonished as US Hawk Admits Invasion Was Illegal" -- Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger in The Guardian, 11/20/03:

International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.

In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."

President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq - also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.

But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.

French intransigence, he added, meant there had been "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein".

Mr Perle, who was speaking at an event organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, had argued loudly for the toppling of the Iraqi dictator since the end of the 1991 Gulf war.

"Crimes against Nature" -- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Rolling Stone, 12/11/03 (as accessed 11/24/03):

George W. Bush will go down in history as America's worst environmental president. In a ferocious three-year attack, the Bush administration has initiated more than 200 major rollbacks of America's environmental laws, weakening the protection of our country's air, water, public lands and wildlife. Cloaked in meticulously crafted language designed to deceive the public, the administration intends to eliminate the nation's most important environmental laws by the end of the year. Under the guidance of Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the Bush White House has actively hidden its anti-environmental program behind deceptive rhetoric, telegenic spokespeople, secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and bureaucrats. The Bush attack was not entirely unexpected. George W. Bush had the grimmest environmental record of any governor during his tenure in Texas. Texas became number one in air and water pollution and in the release of toxic chemicals. In his six years in Austin, he championed a short-term pollution-based prosperity, which enriched his political contributors and corporate cronies by lowering the quality of life for everyone else. Now President Bush is set to do the same to America. After three years, his policies are already bearing fruit, diminishing standards of living for millions of Americans. . . .

The best way to judge the effectiveness of a democracy is to measure how it allocates the goods of the land: Does the government protect the commonwealth on behalf of all the community members, or does it allow wealth and political clout to steal the commons from the people?

Today, George W. Bush and his court are treating our country as a grab bag for the robber barons, doling out the commons to large polluters. Last year, as the calamitous rollbacks multiplied, the corporate-owned TV networks devoted less than four percent of their news minutes to environmental stories. If they knew the truth, most Americans would share my fury that this president is allowing his corporate cronies to steal America from our children.

On the "Prague Connection" and the Feith Memo:

"Case Closed" (Stephen F. Hayes in The Weekly Standard, 11/24/03) and
"Prague Revisited" (Edward Jay Epstein at slate.com, 11/19/03).

"War after the War" -- George Packer in The New Yorker, 11/24/03:

[The] view that rebuilding Iraq would require a significant, sustained effort was echoed by the State Department�s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Throughout 2002, sixteen groups of Iraqi exiles, co�rdinated by a bureau official named Thomas S. Warrick, researched potential problems in postwar Iraq, from the electricity grid to the justice system. The thousands of pages that emerged from this effort, which became known as the Future of Iraq Project, presented a sobering view of the country�s physical and human infrastructure�and suggested the need for a long-term, expensive commitment.

The Pentagon also spent time developing a postwar scenario, but, because of Rumsfeld�s battle with Powell over foreign policy, it didn�t co�rdinate its ideas with the State Department. The planning was directed, in an atmosphere of near-total secrecy, by Douglas J. Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, and William Luti, his deputy. According to a Defense Department official, Feith�s team pointedly excluded Pentagon officials with experience in postwar reconstructions. The fear, the official said, was that such people would offer pessimistic scenarios, which would challenge Rumsfeld�s aversion to using troops as peacekeepers; if leaked, these scenarios might dampen public enthusiasm for the war. �You got the impression in this exercise that we didn�t harness the best and brightest minds in a concerted effort,� Thomas E. White, the Secretary of the Army during this period, told me. �With the Department of Defense the first issue was �We�ve got to control this thing��so everyone else was suspect.� White was fired in April. Feith�s team, he said, �had the mind-set that this would be a relatively straightforward, manageable task, because this would be a war of liberation and therefore the reconstruction would be short-lived.� . . .

In the Pentagon�s scenario, the responsibility of managing Iraq would quickly be handed off to exiles, led by Chalabi�allowing the U.S. to retain control without having to commit more troops and invest a lot of money. �There was a desire by some in the Vice-President�s office and the Pentagon to cut and run from Iraq and leave it up to Chalabi to run it,� a senior Administration official told me. �The idea was to put our guy in there and he was going to be so compliant that he�d recognize Israel and all the problems in the Middle East would be solved. He would be our man in Baghdad. Everything would be hunky-dory.� The planning was so wishful that it bordered on self-deception. �It isn�t pragmatism, it isn�t Realpolitik, it isn�t conservatism, it isn�t liberalism,� the official said. �It�s theology.� . . .

"Iraq Exit Plan: New Obstacles" -- Steven R. Weisman in The New York Times, 11/28/03:

Two weeks ago, the Bush administration settled on an "exit strategy" for Iraq in which the United States committed itself to establishing self-rule there by next summer � well ahead of its previous schedule and just as the American presidential election season will be getting under way.

But the administration's initial plan for that transfer of authority has fallen apart, raising doubts about whether the June 30 deadline for ending the American occupation authority in Baghdad is still feasible.

At stake is whether the administration can reconcile President Bush's desire for a speedy transfer of sovereignty to a friendly Iraqi government next year, with the need to have some sort of electoral process to ensure that government's validity in the eyes of Iraqis and the rest of the world.

The "process," agreed upon two weeks ago, amounted to less than an election. Instead, it was an elaborate arrangement to hold caucuses throughout Iraq and give the Iraqi Governing Council considerable oversight.

The administration's quandary sharpened this week when Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's senior Shiite cleric, laid down his own definition of a legitimate government. Nothing less than an election was acceptable, he declared � a demand the United States and the Governing Council are now having to weigh.

Other Shiite leaders supported the Ayatollah's formulation, knowing that Shiites � who make up 60 percent of Iraq's population and are better organized than other groups � would be the likely beneficiaries of an early national election.

The fundamental question now is whether the administration has left itself enough time to put in place a government that can survive, be seen as legitimate, and is acceptable to the United States.

"We're boxed in," said an administration official. "We have a highly difficult set of issues to deal with here. We can't settle for just anything that gets us out of Iraq." . . .

"If we turn things over next July 1 to whatever slapdash conglomeration that is out there � let's say the Governing Council plus some others, which is what they want � you could have a civil war in Iraq come next November," an administration official said.

American policy makers also worry that, although elections are the most legitimate path to self-government, a vote held too quickly could be dangerous as well as impractical.

Some American policy makers fear that a nationwide ballot right now would bring out the most radical elements in the electorate, ready and able to exploit growing Iraqi resentments toward any candidates seen as favored by the United States.

Officials close to L. Paul Bremer III and his aides at the American-led occupation authority say his concerns about these problems led to the initial American decision to postpone the transfer of sovereignty to the end of 2004 at the earliest.

"It would be a disaster to have an election whose legitimacy was contested," said Noah Feldman, an assistant professor of law at New York University, who was a constitutional law adviser to Mr. Bremer earlier this year.

"Nobody wants Palm Beach County in Baghdad," Mr. Feldman added. "Historical experience also suggests that quick elections under postwar conditions elect people not dedicated to democratization. Simply put, if you move too fast, the wrong people could get elected."

Suddenly, earlier this month, that view shifted at the most senior levels of the administration in Washington. Mr. Bremer was summoned back for consultations, and a plan was worked out with the Iraqi Governing Council for what he called "a transparent, participatory democratic process" to choose a government.

"It was a document that looked like some treaty between the United States and the Indians in 1882," said Rami G. Khouri, executive editor of The Daily Star in Beirut. "To think they put this thing together in a couple of White House meetings with everyone in a panic mode, it's just humiliating."

"U.S. Plan May Be in Flux as Iraqis Jockey for Postwar Leverage" -- Robin Wright and Walter Pincus in The Washington Post, 11/30/03:

The latest plan to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq is barely two weeks old, but it already faces an array of problems that has led Iraqis and Iraq experts to question its prospects for creating a stable democratic government by July 1.

U.S. officials, meanwhile, are developing fallback options. But the Bush administration's decision to hand over the reins in seven months has limited U.S. leverage to solve problems during this delicate period, Iraq experts say. Despite his power on paper, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer is effectively a lame duck, and everyone who disagrees with the U.S. plan knows it.

"Iraqis are now watching the calendar," said Henri Barkey, a former State Department policy planner who chairs Lehigh University's international relations department. "There's very little incentive to cooperate with the United States, because virtually every actor thinks he can get a better deal after the Americans leave."

"All of their activities are now designed to better their bargaining position for afterwards, not to help the United States now," Barkey said. "It's not necessarily because they're mean, but because the stakes are so high."

Even more daunting than the volatile security situation, administration officials concede, are assorted political skirmishes among Iraqis that jeopardize the next two big steps: writing a set of "basic laws," and selecting a provisional government to take over from the United States.

U.S. officials have been preoccupied in recent days with a demand from Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric for direct elections to the new government, rather than an indirect system of town hall gatherings and regional caucuses to pick delegates to a national assembly. But an even larger question now looms for the administration: Will the powerful Sunni community, which dominated Iraqi politics under Saddam Hussein, opt to boycott the process?

Large numbers appear likely to balk at the current political formula for one or more reasons: loyalty to Hussein, opposition to the plan, or fear of retribution for complying with the Americans, said Amatzia Baram, an Iraq expert and senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Sunni Arabs, who account for about a quarter of the 25 million Iraqis, are also the most fearful of democracy.

"The Sunnis view democracy with terror and as the destruction of their historic role and place in society, around which they've built their self-image," said Edward N. Luttwak, a Middle East analyst and author of "Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace." "For them it's a double loss. First they lose their dominance, and then they don't believe there will be any genuine protection of their rights as equals in a country with a majority Shiite Muslim population."

Sunnis may not actively protest or confront communities that do participate, but the refusal of large numbers to engage could undermine the U.S. plan or stall the political transition at the heart of Washington's exit strategy.

At the moment, however, Bremer's more pressing problem is navigating among rival parties willing or able to consider the U.S. plan. They fall into two broad categories: the handpicked Iraqi Governing Council, dominated by former exiles and five parties backed by the United States before the war, and the traditional leaders with far wider popular support among Shiite Muslims, Kurds and several minorities.

U.S. strategy has relied on the council to play the leading role in the transition. But in recent weeks it has become increasingly unclear whether the council "is part of the problem or part of the solution," Anthony H. Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, writes in an analysis from a recent trip to Iraq.

One way or another, key council members are vying either to shape the transition or ensure the council remains intact and a powerful body, as the U.S. plan envisions. Because many of the 24 council members probably would not fare well in open elections, they pressured Bremer to establish an indirect three-step system to select a new national assembly, which in turn would pick a prime minister and cabinet, a process so complex that many Iraqis and U.S. experts doubt it will work.

A former U.S. adviser to Bremer described the plan as "an insane selection system of caucuses, like the Iowa caucus selecting those who will vote in New Hampshire."

"Some Doubt Idea of Foreign Influx" -- Stephen J. Hedges in The Chicago Tribune, 11/1/03:

BAGHDAD -- Though the Bush administration has for months claimed that foreign fighters were entering Iraq to kill Americans, U.S. military commanders who are responsible for monitoring the borders here say that they have not witnessed a large infiltration of foreign terrorists.

As recently as Tuesday, President Bush said that "the foreign terrorists are trying to create conditions of fear and retreat because they fear a free and peaceful state in the midst of a part of the world where terror has found recruits."

But officers whose areas of operations include Iraq's borders with Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran -- the primary Arab entry points into Iraq -- all said there is no evidence that a significant number of foreign terrorists have entered the country.

"We cover the border, so we would know if they came in or not," said Lt. Col. Antonio Aguto, executive officer of the U.S. Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which monitors Iraq's border with Syria and Saudi Arabia. "Most of them are locals."

The officers said that very few foreigners have been captured while crossing into Iraq illegally, arrested later inside Iraq or detained when trying to enter the country at existing border checkpoints.

One intelligence officer said emphatically that there was simply no evidence to support the claim.

"We keep hearing that, but we haven't seen anything to back it up," the officer said.

The contradiction suggests that, seven months after U.S. troops entered Baghdad, the military still is not certain who is carrying out the more than 30 attacks per day on troops, military installations, Iraqi police stations, buildings and other targets. . . .

On different days this week, officials in Washington and Baghdad blamed the attacks on foreign terrorists, Hussein, an aged Hussein confidant named Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, bin Laden, a northern Iraqi terrorist group named Ansar al-Islam and possibly another shadowy terrorist, Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, who is believed to be in Jordan, Lebanon or Iraq. . . .

Confirmation of an outside terrorist connection would bolster the case made by Bush and his top aides that the conflict is another front in the global war on terrorism.

Administration officials long have said that ties between Hussein and bin Laden are extensive and longstanding. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld argued Hussein was harboring terrorists before the war.

Terrorism experts have challenged that suggestion.

"I think there were nodes of contact," said Mangus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism at St. Andrews University in Scotland. "I don't think they were very strong."

Nor is it clear just how viable Ansar al-Islam is today. The group, which maintained training facilities in northwestern Iraq, was bombed heavily during the war, and Kurdish forces moved in afterward.

Yet, Air Force Gen. Norton Schwartz, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters nearly two weeks ago that Ansar is "our principal organized terrorist adversary in Iraq right now."

Other news reports later cited an administration official stating that the group was working with al-Douri, the Hussein aide, to coordinate attacks on U.S. forces. The official said the information came from two captured Ansar operatives.

When asked during a news briefing Thursday what percentage of foreign fighters make up the opposition in Iraq, Rumsfeld said, "I don't have as good an answer as I ought to. I keep pushing at that and trying to find out."

A few minutes later Rumsfeld said that "a large number of innocent Iraqis have been killed by Iraqis and by foreign terorists."

"Chopper Downed; 15 GIs Dead in Iraq" -- Tini Tran in Newsday, 11/2/03:

FALLUJAH, Iraq -- Insurgents shot down a U.S. Chinook helicopter in central Iraq on Sunday as it carried troops headed for R&R, killing 15 soldiers and wounding 21 in the deadliest single strike against American troops since the start of war.

The attack by a shoulder-fired missile was a significant new blow in an Iraq insurgency that escalated in recent days -- a "tough week," in the words of the U.S. occupation chief.

Other U.S. soldiers were reported killed Sunday in ground attacks here and elsewhere in central Iraq. The only day that saw more U.S. casualties came March 23, during the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.

Sunday's attacks came amid threats attributed to Saddam's party of a wave of violence against the U.S. occupation. Saturday had been planned as a "Day of Resistance" in Baghdad, though no widespread violence was reported there.

The aircraft was hit at about 9 a.m. and crashed amid cornfields near the village of Hasi, about 40 miles southwest of Baghdad and just south of Fallujah, a center of Sunni Muslim resistance to the U.S. occupation.

At the scene, villagers proudly showed off blackened pieces of wreckage to arriving reporters.

"Blueprint for a Mess" -- David Rieff in The New York Times Magazine, 11/2/03:

I have made two trips to Iraq since the end of the war and interviewed dozens of sources in Iraq and in the United States who were involved in the planning and execution of the war and its aftermath. It is becoming painfully clear that the American plan (if it can even be dignified with the name) for dealing with postwar Iraq was flawed in its conception and ineptly carried out. At the very least, the bulk of the evidence suggests that what was probably bound to be a difficult aftermath to the war was made far more difficult by blinkered vision and overoptimistic assumptions on the part of the war's greatest partisans within the Bush administration. The lack of security and order on the ground in Iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar Iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Despite administration claims, it is simply not true that no one could have predicted the chaos that ensued after the fall of Saddam Hussein. In fact, many officials in the United States, both military and civilian, as well as many Iraqi exiles, predicted quite accurately the perilous state of things that exists in Iraq today. There was ample warning, both on the basis of the specifics of Iraq and the precedent of other postwar deployments -- in Panama, Kosovo and elsewhere -- that the situation in postwar Iraq was going to be difficult and might become unmanageable. What went wrong was not that no one could know or that no one spoke out. What went wrong is that the voices of Iraq experts, of the State Department almost in its entirety and, indeed, of important segments of the uniformed military were ignored. As much as the invasion of Iraq and the rout of Saddam Hussein and his army was a triumph of planning and implementation, the mess that is postwar Iraq is a failure of planning and implementation. . . .

In Iraq today, there is a steadily increasing disconnect between what the architects of the occupation think they are accomplishing and how Iraqis on the street evaluate postwar progress. And as the security situation fails to improve, these perceptions continue to darken.

The Bush administration fiercely denies that this "alarmist" view accurately reflects Iraqi reality. It insists that the positive account it has been putting forward is the real truth and that the largely downbeat account in much of the press is both inaccurate and unduly despairing. The corner has been turned, administration officials repeat.

Whether the United States is eventually successful in Iraq (and saying the mission "has to succeed," as so many people do in Washington, is not a policy but an expression of faith), even supporters of the current approach of the Coalition Provisional Authority concede that the United States is playing catch-up in Iraq. This is largely, though obviously not entirely, because of the lack of postwar planning during the run-up to the war and the mistakes of the first 60 days after the fall of Saddam Hussein. And the more time passes, the clearer it becomes that what happened in the immediate aftermath of what the administration calls Operation Iraqi Freedom was a self-inflicted wound, a morass of our own making.

Call it liberation or occupation, a dominating American presence in Iraq was probably destined to be more difficult, and more costly in money and in blood, than administration officials claimed in the months leading up to the war. But it need not have been this difficult. Had the military been as meticulous in planning its strategy and tactics for the postwar as it was in planning its actions on the battlefield, the looting of Baghdad, with all its disastrous material and institutional and psychological consequences, might have been stopped before it got out of control. Had the collective knowledge embedded in the Future of Iraq Project been seized upon, rather than repudiated by, the Pentagon after it gained effective control of the war and postwar planning a few months before the war began, a genuine collaboration between the American authorities and Iraqis, both within the country and from the exiles, might have evolved. And had the lessons of nation-building -- its practice but also its inevitability in the wars of the 21st century -- been embraced by the Bush administration, rather than dismissed out of hand, then the opportunities that did exist in postwar Iraq would not have been squandered as, in fact, they were.

"U.S. Considering Recalling Units of Old Iraq Army" -- Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt in The New York Times, 11/2/03:

WASHINGTON, Nov. 1 ? Some American military officers in Iraq are pressing to reconstitute entire units of the former Iraqi Army, which the top United States administrator in Baghdad disbanded in May. They say the change would speed the creation of a new army and stabilize the nation. . . .

The talks are at an early stage and do not represent an actual plan. At a news conference in Baghdad on Saturday, the American administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, spoke merely of the need to welcome back former members of the Iraqi Army into the small replacement army now being formed.

But the talks tacitly acknowledge that some officers view Mr. Bremer's decision to dismantle the defeated 500,000-member Iraqi Army as a mistake, one that has contributed to the instability and increasing attacks against United States forces in Iraq.

Mr. Bremer's decision, which his advisers say was made after deliberations with senior Pentagon, White House and other administration officials, was a defining moment in the American-led occupation.

Pentagon policy makers continue to say the Iraqi military had to be dismantled before a democratic Iraq could be built, and they point out that the force had already melted away under intense attack.

But the decision reversed the approach of Mr. Bremer's predecessor, Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general who advocated paying members of the former Iraqi Army as a way to keep their units intact for possible construction tasks and to prevent them from turning against the Americans. . . .

Under one possibility described by a senior officer in Baghdad, former army transportation and engineering units might be reconstituted first. Known in the military as combat support and combat service support, such units perform important logistical missions, and the American effort in Iraq has required the mobilization of tens of thousands of reservists for those duties.

Iraqi combat units, in particular Republican Guard and tank units, would not be among those reconstituted, officers said. But armored and infantry soldiers of the former Iraqi military would be allowed to apply for retraining and membership in the new army, an effort led by Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, previously the United States Army's chief of infantry training.

The first 700-man battalion of the new Iraqi Army took the field in early October under the command of Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno of the Fourth Infantry Division, based in Tikrit.

Mr. Bremer said Saturday that about 60 percent of the enlisted soldiers and all of the sergeants in the new Iraqi Army had been members of the former army. . . .

Walter B. Slocombe, the civilian in charge of rebuilding Iraqi security institutions, defended Mr. Bremer's decision on grounds of principle and practicality. He said planting democratic roots in Iraq required disbanding an institution that was hated by the population as an instrument of Mr. Hussein's control. . . .

But Mr. Bremer's announcement contradicted the plan as described at an official Pentagon briefing on March 11, a week before General Garner's departure for Iraq.

"One of our goals is to take a good portion of the Iraqi regular army ? I'm not talking about the Republican Guards, the special Republican Guards, but I'm talking about the regular army ? and the regular army has the skill sets to match the work that needs to be done in construction," a senior Pentagon official said at the briefing.

"So our thought is to take them and they can help rebuild their own country," he said, adding that their tasks would not be combat but "things like engineering, road construction, work on bridges, remove rubble, de-mine, pick up unexploded ordnance, construction work."

Using the Iraqi army in that way, the official said, "allows us not to demobilize it immediately and put a lot of unemployed people on the street."

Mr. Bremer's decision also collided with recommendations from a group of former Iraqi military officers recruited last year by the State Department to advise the government on how to carry out the occupation.

"It was a big mistake," Muhammad al-Faour, a former major in the Iraqi Special Forces who headed the State Department project's defense working group, said in a telephone interview. "You put half a million people with their families, with their experiences, on the streets, and if just half a percent of those people turn against you, you're in trouble."

"U.S. Administrator Imposes Flat Tax System on Iraq" -- Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus in The Washington Post, 11/2/03:

The flat tax, long a dream of economic conservatives, is finally getting its day -- not in the United States, but in Iraq.

It took L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Baghdad, no more than a stroke of the pen Sept. 15 to accomplish what eluded the likes of publisher Steve Forbes, Reps. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) and Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.), and Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) over the course of a decade and two presidential campaigns.

"The highest individual and corporate income tax rates for 2004 and subsequent years shall not exceed 15 percent," Bremer wrote in Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 37, "Tax Strategy for 2003," issued last month.

Voilà! Iraq has a flat tax, and the 15 percent rate is even lower than Forbes (17 percent) and Gramm (16 percent) favored for the United States. And, unless a future Iraqi government rescinds it, the flat tax will remain long after the Americans have left.

"It's extremely good news," said Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and a Bush administration ally. Bremer's vaguely worded edict leaves open the possibility that Iraqis could face different levels of taxation below 15 percent, but "they told me it's a flat rate and it appears as though it's a flat rate," Norquist said. The tax fighter added: "It might be a hint to the rest of us."

"Corps Voters" -- Benjamin Wallace-Wells in Washington Monthly, November 2003:

The military's gripes with the administration didn't grow widespread until after we'd conquered Iraq; the problems with planning, previously a matter of policy debate for top-level officers, translated into unpleasant realities for soldiers in the field. Many officers have become disenchanted with the continuing chaos in Iraq, and with the lengthening of in-country stays and the changing rotation schedules. "What I've seen throughout the officer corps is a real pendulum swing over the last three or four months, from being pro-Bush to anti-Bush," Vandergriff said. "The officers at the middle levels, who are traditionally the most Republican, are frustrated ... that there's no exit strategy," and worry that "this conflict could just drag on and on." Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who had been friendly enough with the Bush administration that he was sent last year as the president's special emissary to the Israelis and Palestinians, last month called the administration's policy a "brain fart." Says Richard Kohn, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina and a scholar of the military: "It is my belief that the Iraq war may be what forces the officer corps to return to the old George C. Marshall model of non-partisanship." . . .

"More bad news for Bush: According to a recent New York Times poll, most Americans don't think their taxes are any lower than they were three years ago. Of course, if they are not millionaires, most of them are right."

-- Senator Tom Harkin
in The Boston Globe, 11/4/03

Discontented enlisted men and women have a separate set of provocations, which have been aired not only through the embedded media, but through weblogs updated and emails sent by soldiers in-country. Chief among these complaints is a widespread criticism that the military has fought this war with too few troops. The war in Iraq is already brutal enough day-to-day: Soldiers spend their days in hundred-plus degree heat, being shot at, peering anxiously into the distance, trying to pick out anyone likely to drive through a barricade with a car stuffed with explosives or whip a rifle out from under his robes and start shooting. They are facing an enemy who is not easily identifiable; when they are too aggressive, they are criticized by the press, and when they are not aggressive enough, they are reprimanded by their superiors, if they don't end up dead. In a chaotic situation like this, soldiers in-country live for the date on which they can return stateside. But many of them have seen that date pushed back, and then pushed back again, and then pushed back again. For a soldier, accustomed to regular, long-planned-for rotations, this makes the operation seem overwhelmingly open-ended-and is crushing to morale. "They feel overused, and under-appreciated, particularly in the enlisted ranks," Wilson said. Christopher Parker, a former Army captain and a political scientist at the University of California-Santa Barbara, put it to me more bluntly: "What we're seeing now is almost unprecedented, this widespread sense among people in the military that they're being jacked around." . . .

Reservists may be the tipping point. The reserves have been summoned nine times in the last 12 years, to meet American obligations around the world, after having previously been summoned only six times since World War II. Reservists who have been sent to Iraq recently have found themselves vastly under-equipped. Things have gone so badly for the reservists that many senior officers, like Helmly, expect a staffing crisis when the current tours are up. . . .

This country has 1.4 million active duty soldiers, and 1.2 million reserves. It also has 26.4 million veterans, nearly 13 percent of the nation's adult population. Politicians and activists involved in veterans affairs take it as a truism that a defining feature of veterans' politics is their perception of how the active military is being treated, and used. Subtle shifts in the way that massive population votes could obviously have far-reaching impacts in national politics.

A reassignment of less than two-hundredths of 1 percent in the military vote to the Democrats from the Republicans in Florida in 2000 would have moved that state to the Democratic column, and a similar shift of less than 5 percent in the veteran vote alone would have given Arkansas, Nevada, and New Hampshire's electoral votes to Gore, not Bush. And Pennsylvania and Ohio, expected to be crucial swing states in the next presidential election, each have more than a million veteran voters.

"So Few Soldiers, So Much to Do" -- Edward N. Luttwak in The New York Times, 11/4/03:

The Bush administration's reaction to the deaths of 16 American soldiers in the downing of a helicopter on Sunday morning was the same as it was to the suicide bombings at police stations and the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad a week earlier � and the same as it has been to every other setback the coalition has faced: insistence that there is no need for more American troops beyond the 133,000 now in Iraq.

It is part of any president's job to inspire confidence under pressure, but given the true number of troops in Iraq � actual armed soldiers doing a soldier's job � President Bush might just as well have said that there is no need for any American troops in Iraq. Because zero is the exact number of soldiers actually present at many sites that should be secured 24 hours a day.

Such is the arithmetic of an ultra-modern army. The support echelon is so large that out of the 133,000 American men and women in Iraq, no more than 56,000 are combat-trained troops available for security duties. As for the rest, there are many command posts where soldiers operate computers not guns, there are many specialized units charged with reconstruction and civil duties, and even in the actual combat formations there is a large noncombat element. The 101st Airborne Division has 270 helicopters, which alone require more than 1,000 technicians. The Fourth Infantry Division has the usual panoply of artillery, aviation and antiaircraft units that are needed in war but have little role in peacekeeping and security duties.

And even the finest soldiers must sleep and eat. Thus the number of troops on patrol at any one time is no more than 28,000 � to oversee frontiers terrorists are trying to cross, to patrol rural terrain including vast oil fields, to control inter-city roads, and to protect American and coalition facilities. Even if so few could do so much, it still leaves the question of how to police the squares, streets and alleys of Baghdad, with its six million inhabitants, not to mention Mosul with 1.7 million, Kirkuk with 800,000, and Sunni towns like Falluja, with its quarter-million restive residents.

In fact, the 28,000 American troops are now so thinly spread that they cannot reliably protect even themselves; the helicopter shot down on Sunday was taking off from an area that had not been secured, because doing so would have required hundreds of soldiers. For comparison, there are 39,000 police officers in New York City alone � and they at least know the languages of most of the inhabitants, few of whom are likely to be armed Baathist or Islamist fanatics.

Harpers Weekly Review, 11/4/03

"Israel Destroys US-Built Wells" -- Justin Huggler in The Independent, 11/5/03:

The US has reportedly complained after the Israeli army destroyed wells built for civilians in Gaza by an American government aid agency.

Huge areas have been demolished by the Israelis in the Gaza Strip in recent weeks, including more than 150 homes.

The wells had just been dug by the United States Agency for International Development (USAid). A few months ago the agency announced a $20m (�12m) project to rebuild infrastructure including roads, electricity supply lines and sewers in the occupied territories.

The agency was reporting good progress. But its workers were dismayed when they turned up to finish the wells and found that their work had been destroyed. A source at the American embassy said that when USAid complained, the Israelis told them that they demolished the wells because Palestinian militants had been hiding in them.

That has been a regular claim from the Israeli military to justify demolishing houses in Gaza - but in recent weeks whole streets have been knocked down. Israel has also been accused of trying to move refugee camps away from the border with Egypt.

Spokesmen at the American embassy were careful not to criticise the Israeli army. But according to reports in the Israeli press yesterday, they were less diplomatic behind the scenes. The newspaper Ma'ariv reported that the US had threatened to stop all reconstruction work unless the Israeli army promised not to demolish anything built by the Americans.

Remarks of Zbigniew Brzezinski at the New American Strategies for Security and Peace conference, Washington, DC, 10/28/03 (Center for American Progress):

Ladies and gentlemen, 40 years ago almost to the day an important Presidential emissary was sent abroad by a beleaguered President of the United States. The United States was facing the prospect of nuclear war. These were the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Several emissaries went to our principal allies. One of them was a tough-minded former Secretary of State, Dean Acheson whose mission was to brief President De Gaulle and to solicit French support in what could be a nuclear war involving not just the United States and the Soviet Union but the entire NATO Alliance and the Warsaw Pact.

The former Secretary of State briefed the French President and then said to him at the end of the briefing, I would now like to show you the evidence, the photographs that we have of Soviet missiles armed with nuclear weapons. The French President responded by saying, I do not wish to see the photographs. The word of the President of the United States is good enough for me. Please tell him that France stands with America.

Would any foreign leader today react the same way to an American emissary who would go abroad and say that country X is armed with weapons of mass destruction which threaten the United States? There's food for thought in that question. Fifty-three years ago, almost the same month following the Soviet-sponsored assault by North Korea on South Korea, the Soviet Union boycotted a proposed resolution in the U. N. Security Council for a collective response to that act.

That left the Soviet Union alone in opposition, stamping it as a global pariah. In the last three weeks there were two votes on the subject of the Middle East in the General Assembly of the United Nations. In one of them the vote was 133 to four. In the other one the vote was 141 to four, and the four included the United States, Israel, Marshall Islands and Micronesia.

All of our NATO allies voted with the majority including Great Britain, including the so-called new allies in Europe � in fact almost all of the EU � and Japan. I cite these events because I think they underline two very disturbing phenomena�the loss of U. S. international credibility, the growing U. S. international isolation. . . .

Since the tragedy of 9/11 which understandably shook and outraged everyone in this country, we have increasingly embraced at the highest official level what I think fairly can be called a paranoiac view of the world. Summarized in a phrase repeatedly used at the highest level, "he who is not with us is against us." I say repeatedly because actually some months ago I did a computer check to see how often it's been used at the very highest level in public statements.

The count then quite literally was 99. So it's a phrase which obviously reflects a deeply felt perception. I strongly suspect the person who uses that phrase doesn't know its historical or intellectual origins. It is a phrase popularized by Lenin when he attacked the social democrats on the grounds that they were anti-Bolshevik and therefore he who is not with us is against us and can be handled accordingly. . . .

The second condition, troubling condition, which contributes in my view to the crisis of credibility and to the state of isolation in which the United States finds itself today is due in part because that skewed view of the world is intensified by a fear that periodically verges on panic that is in itself blind. By this I mean the absence of a clearly, sharply defined perception of what is transpiring abroad regarding particularly such critically important security issues as the existence or the spread or the availability or the readiness in alien hands of weapons of mass destruction.

We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States. That failure was contributed to and was compensated for by extremist demagogy which emphasizes the worst case scenarios which stimulates fear, which induces a very simple dichotomic view of world reality. . . .

If we want to lead we have to have other countries trust us. When we speak they have to think it is the truth. This is why De Gaulle said what he did. This is what others believed us. This is why they believed us prior to the war in Iraq.

It isn't that the Norwegians or the Germans or whoever else had their own independent intelligence services. They believed us, and they no longer do. To correct that we have to have an intelligence that speaks with authority, that can be trusted, and if preemption becomes necessary can truly tell us that as a last resort preemption is necessary. Right now there's no way of knowing.

Ultimately at issue, and I end on this, is the relationship between the new requirements of security and the traditions of American idealism. We have for decades and decades played a unique role in the world because we were viewed as a society that was generally committed to certain ideals and that we were prepared to practice them at home and to defend them abroad.

Today for the first time our commitment to idealism worldwide is challenged by a sense of security vulnerability. We have to be very careful in that setting not to become self-centered, preoccupied only with ourselves and subordinate everything else in the world to an exaggerated sense of insecurity.

We are going to live in an insecure world. It cannot be avoided. We have to learn to live in it with dignity, with idealism, with steadfastness.

Escape by Voice Vote" -- Harold Meyerson in The Washington Post, 11/5/03:

If defeat is an orphan, the U.S. occupation of Iraq, for which the Senate appropriated $87 billion by a voice vote on Monday, should already go down in the loss column.

By rejecting the normal option of a recorded vote, America's senators decided that they did not want to be held individually accountable for our continuing presence in Iraq. That decision speaks far louder than their decision to actually fund our forces there and the Iraqi reconstruction.

What a difference a year makes! In the fall of 2002, the administration was positively gleeful about forcing Congress to go on record to authorize the coming war, and Democrats from swing states or districts knew they voted no at their own peril.

This week no such pressure was forthcoming. Those Republicans who live by the wedge issue understand when they could die by it, too. There was simply no percentage in compelling members to vote yes on a floundering occupation that could easily grow far worse.

It's instructive, though, that opponents of the occupation weren't exactly clamoring to be recorded against it either. Only old Robert Byrd stood on the Senate floor and shouted no when the vote was taken, but Byrd has been casting recorded votes since the waning days of the Roman Republic, and it's a hard habit to break.

What was striking Monday was that Byrd's colleagues were scuttling away from all sides of this debate, and it's not hard to understand why. The administration's handling of both the war and occupation has been so deeply flawed that it has created a situation to which not only its own policy but all the existing alternatives are clearly inadequate. Bush and his neos have given us a kind of Gothic horror version of Goldilocks, in which the policy alternatives are either too big or too small, while their own is just wrong.

"Rage Erupts over Profiteering Clause" -- Klaus Marre in The Hill, 11/5/03:

A decision by the House Republicans to strip the Iraq supplemental bill of an anti-profiteering provision has outraged the Democrats.

Some Democrats have accused the White House of pulling the strings on the effort to nix the language.

�The White House and House GOP leadership didn�t want [the provision] in there,� charged Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), an author of the language.

The provision � included during the Senate Appropriations Committee markup with unanimous support but removed in conference � would have subjected those who deliberately defrauded the United States or Iraq to jail terms of up to 20 years and costly fines.

Leahy said that, privately, some Republicans told him they though it was a good provision.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), another author of the profiteering provision, called it �shocking� that it was taken out. �Why?� Feinstein asked. �It was a good amendment.�

A Senate Democratic aide said, �Several House Republican conferees were clearly empathetic, but they had to look to a higher authority. That higher authority was the White House, which had sent the marching order to strip this from the bill.�

Another Democratic aide said that �the White House got to House Republicans.� The aide pointed to Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner�s (R-Wis.) support for the provision � the lawmaker chairs the authorizing committee but was not a member of the conference � and the unwillingness of House Republicans to compromise on the language as evidence that the top White House staff may have given the marching orders.

"Baghdad Scrambled to Offer Deal to U.S. as War Loomed" -- James Risen in The New York Times, 11/5/03:

WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 � As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal.

Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman that they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, and they offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct an independent search. The businessman said in an interview that the Iraqis also offered to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 who was being held in Baghdad. At one point, he said, the Iraqis pledged to hold elections.

The messages from Baghdad, first relayed in February to an analyst in the office of Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy and planning, were part of an attempt by Iraqi intelligence officers to open last-ditch negotiations with the Bush administration through a clandestine communications channel, according to people involved.

The efforts were portrayed by Iraqi officials as having the approval of President Saddam Hussein, according to interviews and documents.

The overtures, after a decade of evasions and deceptions by Iraq and a number of other attempts to broker last-minute meetings with American officials, were ultimately rebuffed. But the messages raised enough interest that in early March, Richard N. Perle, an influential adviser to top Pentagon officials, met in London with the Lebanese-American businessman, Imad Hage.

According to both men, Mr. Hage laid out the Iraqis' position to Mr. Perle, and he pressed the Iraqi request for a direct meeting with Mr. Perle or another representative of the United States.

"I was dubious that this would work," said Mr. Perle, widely recognized as an intellectual architect of the Bush administration's hawkish policy toward Iraq, "but I agreed to talk to people in Washington."

Mr. Perle said he sought authorization from C.I.A. officials to meet with the Iraqis, but the officials told him they did not want to pursue this channel, and they indicated they had already engaged in separate contacts with Baghdad. Mr. Perle said the response was simple: "The message was, `Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad.' "

A senior United States intelligence official said this was one of several contacts with Iraqis or with people who said they were trying to broker meetings on their behalf. "These signals came via a broad range of foreign intelligence services, other governments, third parties, charlatans and independent actors," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Every lead that was at all plausible, and some that weren't, were followed up."

There were a variety of efforts, both public and discreet, to avert a war in Iraq, but Mr. Hage's back channel appears to have been a final attempt by Mr. Hussein's government to communicate directly with United States officials.

In interviews in Beirut, Mr. Hage said the Iraqis appeared intimidated by the American military threat. "The Iraqis were finally taking it seriously," he said, "and they wanted to talk, and they offered things they never would have offered if the build-up hadn't occurred."

"Iraqis at the Wheel" -- Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, 11/6/03:

Imagine how different the U.S. position in Iraq would look to the world, to the American people and to the Arabs if President Bush could say, "Iraqis are now writing their own constitution, which will be the basis for elections, and we are in Iraq protecting that process until it's completed."

That is something Americans can understand and be proud of, and that is something that will make clear to the whole world that those people killing Iraqis and Americans today are really trying to kill the first popularly based constitution-writing process in the Arab world.

But hey, you ask, "I thought that was what we were doing?" It is what we were doing, but the process got so bogged down, and the Baathist resistance so heated up, that it now looks as if we have only a military process in Iraq and no political process.

The reason this happened is that the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, which is supposed to come up with a plan for forming the constitution-writing committee, is becoming dysfunctional. Several key G.C. members, particularly the Pentagon's favorite son, Ahmad Chalabi, have been absent from Iraq for weeks. Only seven or eight of the 24 G.C. members show up at meetings anymore.

The U.S. administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, needs to lock the 24 members of the G.C. in a room and not let them out until they produce a workable process for electing or appointing a constitution-writing committee. If they will not do that, then they should be bypassed and their powers devolved (which is happening anyway) onto the Iraqi cabinet. The one good thing the G.C. did was to appoint a 25-person Iraqi cabinet � and two-thirds of them have Ph.D.'s in their areas of expertise. Some ministers are probably corrupt and less than competent, but a majority has proved to be quite capable.

"Idealism in the Face of a Troubled Reality" -- Robin Wright in The Washington Post, 11/7/03:

In a speech that redefined the U.S. agenda in the Middle East, President Bush waxed eloquent yesterday about his dream of democracy coexisting with Islam and transforming an important geostrategic region that has defiantly held out against the global tide of political change.

But Bush failed to acknowledge the tough realities that are likely to limit significant political progress in the near future: the United States' all-consuming commitment to fighting a global war on terrorism and confronting Islamic militancy. Washington still relies heavily on alliances with autocratic governments to achieve these top priorities.

The president's vision was an attempt to wrap together major U.S. goals in the Islamic world -- new governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, an Arab-Israeli peace, as well as political and economic openings in a wide swath of countries from North Africa to South Asia -- under the wider rubric of promoting democracy. Bush pledged new momentum to foster broad change comparable to the end of communism in Eastern Europe.

"The United States has adopted a new policy: a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results," he vowed in a speech marking the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy.

The speech was clearly aimed at putting troubled Iraq into a more acceptable context for a domestic audience alarmed by the mounting attacks and the now daily troop deaths there. But for a foreign audience, the president did send an important new signal by criticizing decades of Western inaction in the Middle East.

"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty," Bush said. "As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo."

In an unusual move, the president even cited key allies, notably Egypt, that should foster greater change. . . .

In a broad assessment of the region, the president inflated the progress toward democracy made by allies such as Saudi Arabia that are harshly criticized for their abuses in the annual U.S. human rights report, while he criticized countries such as Iran that have made some inroads but do not have good relations with Washington.

"His portrayal of what's going on in Arab countries is totally unrealistic," said Marina Ottaway, co-director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"The reality that he is overlooking is that in all these countries that are supposedly making progress, hostility to the United States is at an all-time high," she said. "So the idea that these are countries where progress on democracy is going to make them better allies is certainly not supported by what is going on."

"A Solid Vote That Buttresses 'Made in USA'" -- Glenn Kessler in The Washington Post, 10/17/03:

The Bush administration, having won unanimous approval yesterday of a U.N. Security Council resolution that backs the U.S.-appointed Iraqi leaders, was muted in its celebration -- and for good reason.

"[T]he story of what we've done in the postwar period is remarkable . . . . It is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day."

US Representative George Nethercutt, 10/13/03 (quoted in The Seattle Times, 10/16/03)

President Bush greeted the vote with one sentence, thanking the Security Council, toward the end of a speech in California and an 80-word written statement. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, while calling it "a great achievement," was careful to add: "I don't see this vote as opening the door to troops."

The 15 to 0 vote, bringing in not just France, Germany and Russia but also Syria, was no small feat. But analysts and diplomats said the impact of the resolution would be limited, and perhaps not worth its cost of exposing the deep-seated resentments in the world community over the U.S. handling of the Iraq war. Few believe the Security Council's resolution will bring much in terms of pledges of troops or aid, even though the Bush administration originally sought the resolution for precisely that reason.

France's permanent representative to the United Nations, Jean-Marc de la Sabliere, underscored that point when he read a statement from France, Germany and Russia calling the resolution "a step in the right direction" but saying it "should have gone further" to broaden the U.N. role and transfer power to Iraqis. "In that context, the conditions are not created for us to envisage any military commitment and any further financial contribution beyond our present engagement."

And Pakistan, from which the administration has eagerly sought troops for Iraq, said the resolution was not good enough. "Under these circumstances, Pakistan will not be able to contribute troops for the multinational force in Iraq," Pakistan's U.N. ambassador, Munir Akram, told the Security Council.

A week ago, some U.S. officials had suggested the administration was on the verge of withdrawing the resolution. That would have been a diplomatic disaster, and might have imperiled the congressional vote on Bush's $87 billion funding request for Iraq and Afghanistan. But a range of analysts said the final vote, while far better than a withdrawal or a resolution approved with numerous abstentions, is too weak to be considered much of a victory.

Dropping the resolution "would have been a colossal slap in the face," said Kenneth M. Pollack, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. "They successfully avoided a major negative. It is not a major plus."

"The Sweet Spot" -- Paul Krugman in The New York Times, 10/17/03:

Almost every expert not on the administration's payroll now sees budget deficits equal to about a quarter of government spending for the next decade, and getting worse after that.

Yet the administration insists that there's no problem, that economic growth will solve everything painlessly. And that puts those who want to stop the looting � which should include anyone who wants this country to avoid a Latin-American-style fiscal crisis, somewhere down the road � in a difficult position. Faced with a what-me-worry president, how do you avoid sounding like a dour party pooper?

One answer is to explain that the administration's tax cuts are, in a fundamental sense, phony, because the government is simply borrowing to make up for the loss of revenue. In 2004, the typical family will pay about $700 less in taxes than it would have without the Bush tax cuts � but meanwhile, the government will run up about $1,500 in debt on that family's behalf.

George W. Bush is like a man who tells you that he's bought you a fancy new TV set for Christmas, but neglects to tell you that he charged it to your credit card, and that while he was at it he also used the card to buy some stuff for himself. Eventually, the bill will come due � and it will be your problem, not his.

Still, those who want to restore fiscal sanity probably need to frame their proposals in a way that neutralizes some of the administration's demagoguery. In particular, they probably shouldn't propose a rollback of all of the Bush tax cuts.

Here's why: while the central thrust of both the 2001 and the 2003 tax cuts was to cut taxes on the wealthy, the bills also included provisions that provided fairly large tax cuts to some � but only some � middle-income families. Chief among these were child tax credits and a "cutout" that reduced the tax rate on some income to 10 percent from 15 percent.

These middle-class tax cuts were designed to create a "sweet spot" that would allow the administration to point to "typical" families that received big tax cuts. If a middle-income family had two or more children 17 or younger, and an income just high enough to take full advantage of the provisions, it did get a significant tax cut. And such families played a big role in selling the overall package.

So if a Democratic candidate proposes a total rollback of the Bush tax cuts, he'll be offering an easy target: administration spokespeople will be able to provide reporters with carefully chosen examples of middle-income families who would lose $1,500 or $2,000 a year from tax-cut repeal. By leaving the child tax credits and the cutout in place while proposing to repeal the rest, contenders will recapture most of the revenue lost because of the tax cuts, while making the job of the administration propagandists that much harder.

Purists will raise two objections. The first is that an incomplete rollback of the Bush tax cuts won't be enough to restore long-run solvency. In fact, even a full rollback wouldn't be enough. According to my rough calculations, keeping the child credits and the cutout while rolling back the rest would close only about half the fiscal gap. But it would be a lot better than current policy.

"The Iraqi Shiites: On the History of America's Would-Be Allies" -- Juan Cole in The Boston Review, October/November 2003:

The ambitious aim of the American war in Iraq�articulated by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and other neoconservative defense intellectuals�was to effect a fundamental transformation in Middle East politics. The war was not�or not principally�about finding weapons of mass destruction, or preventing alliances with al Qaeda, or protecting the Iraqi population from Saddam�s terror. For U.S. policy makers the importance of such a transformation was brought home by the events of September 11, which challenged U.S. strategy in the region by compromising the longstanding U.S. alliance with Saudi Wahhabis. In response to this challenge, the Bush administration saw the possibility of creating a new pillar for U.S. policy in the region: a post-Baathist Iraq, dominated by Iraqi Shiites, which would spark a wave of democratization across the Middle East. . . .

In removing the Baath regime and eliminating constraints on Iraqi Islamism, the United States has unleashed a new political force in the Gulf: not the upsurge of civic organization and democratic sentiment fantasized by American neoconservatives, but the aspirations of Iraqi Shiites to build an Islamic republic. That result was an entirely predictable consequence of the past 30 years of political conflict between the Shiites and the Baathist regime, and American policy analysts have expected a different result only by ignoring that history.

To be sure, the dreams of a Shiite Islamic republic in Baghdad may be unrealistic: a plurality of the country is Sunni, and some proportion of the 14 million Shiites is secularist. In the months after the Anglo-American invasion, however, the religious Shiite parties demonstrated the clearest organizational skills and established political momentum. The Islamists are likely to be a powerful enough group in parliament that they may block the sort of close American-Iraqi cooperation that the neoconservatives had hoped for. The spectacle of Wolfowitz�s party heading out of Najaf just before the outbreak of a major demonstration of 10,000 angry Sadrists, inadvertently provoked by the Americans, may prove an apt symbol for the American adventure in Iraq. The August 29 bombing in Najaf deeply shook the confidence of Shiites in the American ability to provide them security, and provoked anger against the United States that will take some time to heal.

In addition, the Saudis cannot be pushed out of the oil picture so easily. It will be years before Iraq can produce much more than three to five million barrels a day. A good deal of that petroleum, and much of the profit from it, will be needed for internal reconstruction and debt servicing. It would take a decade and a half to two decades for Iraqi capacity to achieve parity with that of the Saudis (11 million barrels a day), and even then they will not have the Saudis� low overhead and smaller native population. The Saudis can choose to produce only seven million of the 76 million barrels of petroleum pumped in the world every day, or they can produce 11 million. That flexibility, along with their clout in the OPEC cartel, lets them exercise a profound influence on the price, and Iraq will not be able to counterbalance it soon. Neoconservative fears about Saudi complicity with al Qaeda are also overdrawn, since the Saudi elite feels as threatened by the Sunni radicals as the United States does. High Saudi officials have even expressed regret about their past support for the Muslim Brotherhood, which they now see as dangerous in a way that mainstream Wahhabism is not. (Would that Reaganite supporters of the mujahidin were similarly contrite!) So the U.S. alliance with the House of Saud, however badly shaken by September 11 and Wahhabi radicalism, will provide an essential foundation for world petroleum stability into the indefinite future.

For now, the United States is back to having two footstools in the Middle East: Israel and Saudi Arabia. Iraq has proven too rickety, too unknown, too devastated to bear the weight of the strategic shift imagined by the hawks. And far from finally defeating Khomeinism, U.S. policy has given it millions of liberated Iraqi allies. Their new Iraqi Interim Governing Council has declined to recognize Israel, citing Iraq�s membership in the Arab League and lack of genuine progress toward a Palestinian state. Al Qaeda and allied terrorist threats were not countered by the invasion of Iraq.

Whether Iraq�s Sunnis will turn to radicalism and reinforce al Qaeda is as yet unknown. But what does seem clear is that the Iraq war has proved a detour in the War on Terror, drawing away key resources from the real threat of al Qaeda and continued instability in Afghanistan. The old pillars have proven more resilient than the hawks imagined. What really needs to be changed are U.S. support for political authoritarianism and Islamic conservatism, and acquiescence in Israeli land grabs on the West Bank. Those two, together, account for most of the trouble the United States has in the Muslim world. The Iraq war did nothing to change that.

"Bush Orders Officials to Stop the Leaks" -- Joseph L. Galloway and James Kuhnhenn in The Philadelphia Inquirer, 10/16/03:

WASHINGTON - Concerned about the appearance of disarray and feuding within his administration as well as growing resistance to his policies in Iraq, President Bush -- living up to his recent declaration that he is in charge -- told his top officials to "stop the leaks" to the media, or else.

News of Bush's order leaked almost immediately.

Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.

An escalating turf war involving Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has generated an unusually bountiful crop of leaks in recent months, and one result is a criminal investigation of anonymous officials in the White House who are alleged to have leaked the name of a CIA covert officer.

The infighting, backstabbing and maneuvering on such major foreign-policy issues as North Korea, Syria, Iran and postwar Iraq have escalated to a level that veterans of government say they have not seen in years. At one point, the senior official said, Bush himself asked how bad it was.

"This isn't as bad as [George] Shultz vs. [Caspar] Weinberger, is it?" he asked, referring to a legendary Reagan administration rivalry between secretaries of state and defense. One top official reportedly nodded and said it was "way worse." . . .

"What's most revealing is the extent of frustration taking hold," said historian Robert Dallek of Boston University, a biographer of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy. "It's really reminiscent of Johnson and Vietnam. Members of the Senate . . . and the media were giving him grief. It sounds like Bush is falling into that pattern. He's blaming the media, much like Johnson did."

"Bush's 'Spirit' Cursed with Black Magic, Tossed into River" -- Sydney Morning Herald, 10/19/03:

The spirit of US President George W Bush has been trapped in a clay pot and tossed into a river in northern Thailand after being cursed by hundreds of farmers protesting US agriculture policy.

A photograph of the US leader was sealed inside a pot amid black magic mantra chants, then tossed into the Ping River on Friday by demonstrators after they rallied at the US consulate in Chiang Mai, a farm group leader said.

"This is a traditional northern Thai ceremony aimed at keeping his spirit down on the riverbed so he could not come and exploit our natural resources or suppress our (farming) brothers with his superior influence," Weerasak Wan-ubol, an executive of the Northern Farmers Alliance, said today.

The 300 protesters, claiming to represent 20,000 members from seven northern provinces, railed against imminent plans for a free-trade agreement between Thailand and the United States.

The act was also a protest against Washington's military intervention in sovereign nations, the Bangkok Post reported.

A respected elder performed the voodoo rites, inscribing ancient Khmer scripts on the pot, aimed at trapping the spirit of the US president.

"Experts Downplay Bioagent" -- Bob Drogin in The Los Angeles Times, 10/17/03:

WASHINGTON � A suspicious sample of biological material recently found by U.S. weapons hunters in Iraq probably was purchased legally from a U.S. organization in the 1980s and is a substance that has never been successfully used to produce a weapon, experts said.

The discovery of the hidden vial of C. botulinum Okra B, which was revealed in an Oct. 2 interim report by chief U.S. weapons hunter David Kay, was highlighted in speeches by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other senior administration officials as proof that President Saddam Hussein's government maintained an illicit bio-weapons program before the war. . . .

The single vial of botulinum B had been stored in an Iraqi scientist's kitchen refrigerator since 1993. It appears to have been produced by a nonprofit Virginia biological resource center, the American Type Culture Collection, which legally exported botulinum and other biological material to Iraq under a Commerce Department license in the late 1980s.

The vial of botulinum B � about 2 inches high and half an inch wide � was the only suspicious biological material Kay reported finding. It was sealed and stored in the scientist's home with 96 other apparently benign vials of single-cell proteins and biopesticides.

In his 13-page declassified report, Kay said "a biological agent" could be produced from the botulinum sample. Speaking to reporters at the White House the next day, Oct. 3, Bush said the war in Iraq was justified and cited Kay's discovery of the advanced missile programs, clandestine labs and what he called "a live strain of deadly agent botulinum" as proof that Hussein was "a danger to the world."

But Dr. David Franz, a former chief U.N. biological weapons inspector who is considered among America's foremost experts on biowarfare agents, said there was no evidence that Iraq or anyone else has ever succeeded in using botulinum B for biowarfare.

"The Soviets dropped it [as a goal] and so did we, because we couldn't get it working as a weapon," said Franz, who is the former commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick, Md., the Pentagon's lead laboratory for bioweapons defense research.

"From the weapons side, it's not something to be concerned about," agreed Dr. Raymond Zilinskas, another former U.N. inspector who is now director of the chemical and biological weapons nonproliferation program at the Monterey Institute in California.

"State Dept. Study Foresaw Trouble Now Plaguing Iraq" -- Eric Schmitt and Joel Brinkley in The New York Times, 10/19/03:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 � A yearlong State Department study predicted many of the problems that have plagued the American-led occupation of Iraq, according to internal State Department documents and interviews with administration and Congressional officials.

Beginning in April 2002, the State Department project assembled more than 200 Iraqi lawyers, engineers, business people and other experts into 17 working groups to study topics ranging from creating a new justice system to reorganizing the military to revamping the economy.

Their findings included a much more dire assessment of Iraq's dilapidated electrical and water systems than many Pentagon officials assumed. They warned of a society so brutalized by Saddam Hussein's rule that many Iraqis might react coolly to Americans' notion of quickly rebuilding civil society.

Several officials said that many of the findings in the $5 million study were ignored by Pentagon officials until recently, although the Pentagon said they took the findings into account. The work is now being relied on heavily as occupation forces struggle to impose stability in Iraq.

The working group studying transitional justice was eerily prescient in forecasting the widespread looting in the aftermath of the fall of Mr. Hussein's government, caused in part by thousands of criminals set free from prison, and it recommended force to prevent the chaos.

"The period immediately after regime change might offer these criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting," the report warned, urging American officials to "organize military patrols by coalition forces in all major cities to prevent lawlessness, especially against vital utilities and key government facilities."

Despite the scope of the project, the military office initially charged with rebuilding Iraq did not learn of it until a major government drill for the postwar mission was held in Washington in late February, less than a month before the conflict began, said Ron Adams, the office's deputy director.

The man overseeing the planning, Tom Warrick, a State Department official, so impressed aides to Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general heading the military's reconstruction office, that they recruited Mr. Warrick to join their team.

George Ward, an aide to General Garner, said the reconstruction office wanted to use Mr. Warrick's knowledge because "we had few experts on Iraq on the staff."

But top Pentagon officials blocked Mr. Warrick's appointment, and much of the project's work was shelved, State Department officials said. Mr. Warrick declined to be interviewed for this article. . . .

The broad outlines of the work, called the Future of Iraq Project, have been widely known, but new details emerged this week after the State Department sent Congress the project's 13 volumes of reports and supporting documents, which several House and Senate committees had requested weeks ago.

The documents are unclassified but labeled "official use only," and were not intended for public distribution, officials said. But Congressional officials from both parties allowed The New York Times to review the volumes, totaling more than 2,000 pages, revealing previously unknown details behind the planning.

Administration officials say there was postwar planning at several government agencies, but much of the work at any one agency was largely disconnected from that at others. . . .

A review of the work shows a wide range of quality and industriousness. For example, the transitional justice working group, made up of Iraqi judges, law professors and legal experts, has met four times and drafted more than 600 pages of proposed reforms in the Iraqi criminal code, civil code, nationality laws and military procedure. Other working groups, however, met only once and produced slim reports or none at all. . . .

The groups' ideas may not have been fully incorporated before the war, but they are getting a closer look now. Many of the Iraqi ministers are graduates of the working groups, and have brought that experience with them. Since last spring, new arrivals to Mr. Bremer's staff in Baghdad have received a CD-ROM version of the State Department's 13-volume work. "It's our bible coming out here," said one senior official in Baghdad.

"Bush Cites Philippines as Model in Rebuilding Iraq" -- David E. Sanger in The New York Times, 10/19/03:

MANILA, Oct. 18 � President Bush told the Congress of this former American colony on Saturday that Iraq, like the Philippines, could be transformed into a vibrant democracy. He also pledged his help in remaking the troubled and sometimes mutinous Philippine military into a force for fighting terrorism.

In an eight-hour visit, Mr. Bush for the first time drew explicit comparisons between the transition he is seeking in Iraq and the rough road to democracy that the Philippines traveled from the time the United States seized it from Spain in 1898 to the present day

"U.S. Set to Cede Part of Control over Aid to Iraq" -- Steven R. Weisman in The New York Times, 10/20/03:

BANGKOK, Oct. 19 � Under pressure from potential donors, the Bush administration will allow a new agency to determine how to spend billions of dollars in reconstruction assistance for Iraq, administration and international aid officials say.

The new agency, to be independent of the American occupation, will be run by the World Bank and the United Nations. They are to announce the change at a donor conference in Madrid later this week.

"Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, proudly announced the reopening of Iraq?s schools this month, while White House officials point to the opening of Iraq?s 240 hospitals. In fact, many schools were already open in May, once major combat ended, and no major hospital closed during the war. But that didn?t stop a group of Republican senators from tearing into American reporters covering Iraq earlier this month. ?I was not told by the media... that thousands and thousands of Iraqi schoolchildren went back to school,? said Larry Craig of Idaho, who recently toured Iraq. The senator neglected to mention that he slept both nights of his trip in Kuwait, not Iraq."

-- Richard Wolffe and Rod Nordland, "Bush's News War," Newsweek, 10/27/03

The change effectively establishes some of the international control over Iraq that the United States opposed in the drafting of the United Nations Security Council resolution that passed on Thursday. That resolution referred to two previously established agencies devised to ensure that all aid would be monitored and audited.

But diplomats say other countries were unwilling to make donations because they saw the United States as an occupying power controlling Iraq's reconstruction and self-rule.

The change, supported by L. Paul Bremer III, the chief occupation administrator in Baghdad, is meant to assure them as his team labors to reconstruct Iraq. . . .

American reconstruction aid, like the proposed $20 billion that President Bush is struggling to get through Congress, would go to the previously set up entity, the Development Fund for Iraq, which is run by the occupation administrators and the Iraqis. Other resources are to come from Iraqi oil revenues. This fund has given big contracts to American companies like Halliburton and Bechtel.

But the new agency could open up that process and award contracts through bidding practices open to global companies. Donors could also give directly to Iraq, specifying that their own companies do the work. . . .

At first, the Defense Department, which runs the occupation, resisted handing over financial control of Iraq's rebuilding. Instead, the Pentagon set up the Development Fund for Iraq, which is recognized by a United Nations Security Council resolution in May.

The fund was to work in tandem with another agency, the United Nations' International Advisory and Monitoring Board, which was given auditing functions and no say in spending. That setup, reiterated in the United Nations resolution of Thursday, has proved inadequate to assuage donors.

The administration changed its mind in recent weeks, in part because of the support of Mr. Bremer.

"We had to act because the international community was stonewalling us on aid," said an administration official. According to the official, Mr. Bremer said, " `I need the money so bad we have to move off our principled opposition to the international community being in charge.' "

A senior State Department official said the United States would still be consulted in the spending of aid money, for example to avoid duplication of spending.

"The donors all want to have a little bit of distance from us," the official said. "That's fine. But you can't really do much of anything without some coordination with us."

World Bank and United Nations officials said the new reconstruction agency would work closely with the Iraqi ministries set up by the Iraqi Governing Council, the 25-member body picked by the American occupation.

"Annals of National Security: The Stovepipe" -- Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker, 10/27/03 (as online 10/20/03)

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration�s prewar assessment of Iraq�s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered.

The committee is concentrating on the last ten years� worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. �The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,� he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies� reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went on, was that the intelligence reports about Iraq provided by the United Nations inspection teams and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iraq�s nuclear-weapons programs, were far more accurate than the C.I.A. estimates. �Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was,� the official said. �If you look at them side by side, C.I.A. versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board.� . . .

In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government�s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.

A retired C.I.A. officer described for me some of the questions that would normally arise in vetting: �Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the agent behave? Is he on time for meetings?� The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports�sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities�a process known as �stovepiping��without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny.

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic�and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book �The Threatening Storm� generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was �dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

�They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,� Pollack continued. �They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn�t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.�

The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. �The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet��the C.I.A. director��for not protecting them. I�ve never seen a government like this.�

Harpers Weekly Review, 10/21/03

"Public College Tuition Rose 14% in '03, Survey Finds" -- Greg Winter in The New York Times, 10/22/03:

The nation's public universities raised tuitions by 14 percent this year, the steepest increase in at least a quarter century, if not significantly longer, according to the latest annual survey by the College Board.

Tuition at community colleges across the country also rose 14 percent, the second largest increase since 1976, the earliest year for which the College Board reports data.

In both cases, the increases, which come out to 13 percent when adjusted for inflation, were largely driven by cuts in state spending on education, the College Board said.

Private universities raised tuitions by 6 percent, itself not an unusual increase in recent years. But after adjusting for inflation, 2003 was the third consecutive year that private universities raised tuitions by at least 5 percent, more than twice the rate of inflation.

The last time a series of comparable increases occurred was in the mid-1980's, when families were enjoying a much healthier economy than they are now.

As a result of the increases, tuitions reached an average of $19,710 at private colleges, $4,694 at public universities and $1,905 at community colleges, more than twice what these institutions cost 20 years ago, even after adjusting for inflation.

"Iran Will Allow U.N. Inspections of Nuclear Sites" -- Elaine Sciolino in The New York Times, 10/22/03:

TEHRAN, Oct. 21 � Iran agreed Tuesday, after months of resistance, to accept stricter international inspections of its nuclear sites and to suspend production of enriched uranium, which can be used to develop nuclear weapons.

But Tehran gave no indication when it would suspend uranium enrichment or sign, ratify and carry out an additional agreement under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968 that would allow surprise inspections of its nuclear installations.

The accord was completed in Tehran during an unusual visit by three European foreign ministers, Dominique de Villepin of France, Jack Straw of Britain and Joschka Fischer of Germany.

The ministers expressed hope that it would help defuse a diplomatic crisis that pitted Iran against the International Atomic Energy Agency and, increasingly, the world because of concerns that Iran is determined to become a nuclear power.

In a news conference with the three ministers, Hassan Rowhani, a powerful middle-level cleric who has emerged as Iran's chief negotiator during the current crisis, said the one-and-a-half-page agreement would first have to be approved by Iran's elected Parliament.

He emphasized that the suspension of uranium enrichment would be for an "interim period."

In Washington, the State Department reacted skeptically to the agreement, with officials privately voicing concerns that Tehran would not fully comply. Officials there only grudgingly praised the work of their European colleagues. . . .

Bush administration officials dismissed the notion that a less confrontational approach by the Europeans had yielded more tangible results than the administration's policy of ultimatums. They insisted that the agreement merely buttressed the American policy, and said they had kept in touch with the Europeans throughout the initiative. . . .

The European initiative grew out of a letter drafted by France and sent by the three ministers to Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, in August. It urged Iran to adopt a protocol to the nonproliferation treaty that provides for intrusive inspections on short notice, and to halt its uranium enrichment program.

In return, the letter acknowledged Iran's right to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and raised the possibility of cooperation on technology, without specifically pledging help with a civilian nuclear energy program.

The agreement on Tuesday came swiftly, apparently enjoying the support of conservatives as well as reformers in Iran's divided leadership.

"Ashcroft Briefed Regularly on Inquiry into C.I.A. Leak" -- Eric Lichtblau in The New York Times, 10/22/03:

ASHINGTON, Oct. 21 � Attorney General John Ashcroft's top aides have regularly briefed him on key details in the investigation into the disclosure of a C.I.A. officer's identity, including the identities of those interviewed by the F.B.I., a senior Justice Department official told members of Congress on Tuesday.

Mr. Ashcroft's regular, detailed briefings suggest that he has taken a more hands-on role in the politically charged investigation than the department had acknowledged. Senate Democrats said the arrangement threatened to compromise the independence of the investigation, a contention that Justice Department officials rejected.

Mr. Ashcroft has been given all the details needed "for him to understand meaningfully what's going on in the investigation," Christopher Wray, a political appointee who heads the Justice Department's criminal division, said at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee under sharp questioning from several Democrats who want Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself from the case.

That information, Mr. Wray said, includes the names of those interviewed since the Justice Department opened its investigation three weeks ago into whether senior Bush administration officials illegally leaked the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer to the syndicated columnist Robert Novak. The officer's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, has been a vocal critic of the administration's Iraqi policies, and Mr. Wilson has suggested that the White House publicized his wife's work at the C.I.A. in an effort to intimidate him.

Mr. Ashcroft and his aides have stressed repeatedly that the department's career attorneys are being left to run the investigation free of political hindrance.

But Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said he was troubled to learn from Mr. Wray at Tuesday's hearing that the attorney general is receiving regular reports on the status of the inquiry and has been told whom the F.B.I. is interviewing. Mr. Schumer said the attorney general's close personal and political ties to the White House pose a potential conflict if Mr. Ashcroft knows the White House officials investigators plan to interview.

"When the line prosecutors know that the attorney general knows what they are doing, it could hamper their independence," Mr. Schumer said in an interview. "It means someone is watching over them, and that's not what we want in a case like this. It has a chilling effect, and it makes the case for Ashcroft recusing himself stronger."

"Rumsfeld Questions Anti-Terror Efforts" -- Bradley Graham in The Washington Post, 10/23/03:

In a private memo sent last week to his closest Pentagon associates, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld called into question his department's efforts to win the war on terrorism, and said it might be necessary to fashion "a new institution" that could better focus the government's campaign.

He said the Pentagon had not "yet made truly bold moves" to reshape itself for the ongoing war and said "relatively little effort" had gone into developing "a long-range plan" to defeat terrorism. He also said the United States even lacks a good set of measures to determine how well it is doing in the war. . . .

Most of the memo consisted of questions rather than specific proposals. It was addressed to four people: Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary; Douglas J. Feith, the Pentagon's undersecretary for policy; Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the vice chairman.

Surprised by the release of the document, Pentagon and White House officials sought to depict it as evidence simply of Rumsfeld doing his job to compel the armed forces to adapt to new threats. . . .

The memo echoed a theme that Rumsfeld has voiced repeatedly in the past two years -- concern that the Department of Defense, originally geared to fight big militaries around the world, is too big and slow to effectively fight small groups of terrorists. But Rumsfeld signaled fresh worries that some of the measures taken so far, such as greater use of agile special operations forces, have been "too modest and incremental." . . .

"The U.S. is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan," Rumsfeld said, "but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."

In one particularly cryptic line near the end of the memo, Rumsfeld asked: "Does the CIA need a new finding?" A finding, signed by the president, provides authority to conduct whatever covert activity is stipulated. Rumsfeld did not indicate the covert activity he had in mind.

"Raw Data: Rumsfeld Memo to Inner Circle" -- foxnews.com, 10/22/03:

TO: Gen. Dick Myers, Paul Wolfowitz, Gen. Pete Pace, Doug Feith

FROM: Donald Rumsfeld

SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism

The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?

DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere -- one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.

With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be: We are having mixed results with Al Qaeda, although we have put considerable pressure on them -- nonetheless, a great many remain at large.

USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis. USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban -- Omar, Hekmatyar, etc. With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started. Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the U.S.? Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror? Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental?

My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?

Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us? Does the U.S. need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists?

The U.S. is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions. Do we need a new organization? How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools? Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?

It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog. Does CIA need a new finding? Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madrassas to a more moderate course? What else should we be considering?

Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday. Thanks.

Reporters sans frontières

ranks the United States #31 among 166 countries in respect for freedom of the press. (That's in the United States -- in Iraq, the United States ranks #135. Iraq itself ranks #124.)

"Congress Embarrassed" -- Washington Post editorial, 10/24/03:

WHERE IS the energy bill? According to spokesmen for the House and Senate energy committees -- whose staffs have been writing the bill -- the legislation is now finished, except for a few sections on taxes. Yet although this bill may become law in a few days, no Democrats, few Republicans and even fewer members of the public have seen it: The bill's language will be released, committee chairmen now say, no earlier than 48 hours before a possible vote -- an improvement over the 24 hours originally promised, but not much. There appears to be no plausible explanation for this deep veil of silence -- except possibly embarrassment. For the past several weeks, members of Congress have scrambled to stuff last-minute provisions that benefit their districts or their local industries into this piece of legislation: Perhaps they don't want anyone to find out about them before it's too late.

That, at any rate, is the only conclusion that can be drawn when we hear about measures such as the one Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) is proposing to include in the bill. Mr. Barton's amendment would, according to his staff, merely allow the Environmental Protection Agency to give urban areas more time to meet air pollution deadlines set out in the Clean Air Act. No one denies that this measure is intended to apply to that section of the Dallas-Fort Worth region contained in Mr. Barton's district -- an area known for its high number of air-polluting industries. The trouble is, the change would affect the air quality in the entire region and might affect the enforcement of the Clean Air Act across the country. Among those affected, for example, are the Dallas constituents of Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), who first learned that this measure was included in the energy bill from the Dallas Morning News editorial Web log.

This provision was not in either version of the energy bill originally passed by the House and the Senate. Few of the citizens of Dallas have been acquainted with this measure, and Mr. Barton has not gone out of his way to talk about it. As of yesterday afternoon, for example, we were unable to find information about the measure on the congressman's Web site. Mr. Barton is able to stuff this damaging legislation into this already pork-laden bill only because he is on the conference committee that, in this Congress, effectively meets in secret. Is that democracy?

"House Leaders Are Pushing to Cut Corporate Taxes" -- Edmund L. Andrews in The New York Times, 10/24/03:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 � House Republican leaders are nearing agreement on a bill to give nearly $60 billion in additional tax breaks to corporations, brushing aside Democratic complaints that the measure would deepen the federal budget deficit.

According to a draft circulated among Republican lawyers, the bill, which is expected to come up for a vote next week at the House Ways and Means Committee, would gradually reduce the corporate tax rate for most companies from 35 to 32 percent.

It would also relax or abolish a number of longstanding tax regulations on foreign profits of American multinationals, a move that Congressional tax analysts say could save companies more than $40 billion in taxes over the next decade. . . .

The proposals are in the latest draft of a bill to replace a tax break for American exporters that the World Trade Organization has declared an illegal trade subsidy. The European Union has threatened to retaliate with up to $4 billion a year in tariffs on American products if the United States fails to repeal the old break.

But the original issue has become a magnet for lobbying from competing business groups, all looking to either protect their existing tax breaks or obtain some new ones.

According to a new report by the Center for Responsive Politics, a group that scrutinizes campaign finance, companies in one or another of the coalitions lobbying over this issue contributed $753,000 to members of the Senate Finance Committee and $700,000 to members of the House Ways and Means Committee in the first half of 2003.

In an attempt to placate as many groups as possible, the House proposal would repeal the original export tax break for what is known as extraterritorial income and replace it with a broader array of corporate tax breaks worth more than twice as much.

Repealing the old tax break would bring the Treasury about $50 billion over 10 years, and the bill would raise nearly $30 billion more by blocking a variety of tax shelters and loopholes. But the new tax breaks would be worth about $142 billion over 10 years, leaving the net cost to the government at about $60 billion over the next decade. . . .

House Democrats have vowed to fight the Republican proposal, charging that it would worsen the federal deficit and provide additional tax incentives for companies to build factories and shift jobs overseas.

"9/11 Panel Threatens to Subpoena White House" -- Philip Shenon (New York Times) in The St. Paul Pioneer Press, 10/26/03:

MADISON, N.J. � The chairman of the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks said the White House was continuing to withhold several highly classified intelligence documents from the panel and that he was prepared to subpoena the documents if they were not turned over within weeks.

Thomas Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, also said in an interview that he believed the bipartisan 10-member commission would soon be forced to issue subpoenas to other executive branch agencies because of continuing delays by the Bush administration in providing documents and other evidence.

"Any document that has to do with this investigation cannot be beyond our reach," Kean said Friday.

It was Kean's first public warning to the White House that it risked a subpoena and a politically damaging courtroom showdown over access to the documents, including intelligence reports that reached President Bush in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I will not stand for it," Kean said in the interview in his offices here at Drew University, where he is president. "That means that we will use every tool at our command to get hold of every document." . . .

Kean's comments Friday came as another member of the commission, Max Cleland, a former Democratic senator from Georgia, became the first panel member to say publicly that the commission could not complete its work by its deadline and the first to accuse the White House of withholding classified information from the panel for purely political reasons.

"It's obvious that the White House wants to run out the clock here," he said. "It's Halloween, and we're still in negotiations with some assistant White House counsel about getting these documents � it's disgusting."

He said the White House and Bush's re-election campaign had reason to fear what the commission was uncovering in its investigation of intelligence and law enforcement failures before Sept. 11.

"As each day goes by," Cleland said, "we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before Sept. 11 than it has ever admitted."

Interviews with several other members of the commission show that Kean's concerns are widely shared on the panel, and that the concern is bipartisan.

Slade Gorton, a Republican member of the panel who served as a U.S. senator from Washington from 1982 to 2000, said he was startled by the "indifference" of some executive branch agencies in making material available to the commission.

"This lack of cooperation, if it extends anywhere else, is going to make it very difficult" for the commission to finish its work by next May, he said.

Timothy Roemer, president of the Center for National Policy in Washington and a former Democratic member of the House from Indiana, said "our May deadline may, in fact, be jeopardized."

"Many of us are frustrated that we're still dealing with questions about document access when we should be sinking our teeth into hearings and to making recommendations for the future," Roemer said.

Congress would need to approve an extension if the panel requested one, a potentially difficult proposition given the reluctance of the White House and many senior Republican lawmakers to see the commission created in the first place.

"If the families of the victims weighed in � and heavily, as they did before � then we'd have a chance of succeeding," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was a sponsor of the legislation creating the commission.

He said that, given the "obfuscation" of the administration in meeting document requests, he was ready to pursue an extension "if the commission feels it can't get its work done."

"Winning Badly" -- Richard Hart Sinnreich in The Washington Post, 10/27/03:

As our casualties continue to mount, America's leaders could do themselves and us a favor by calling things by their right names. What's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan today is not nation-building. It's not postwar reconstruction. It's not pacification. It's war.

It's not war just because both nations are crawling with troops. So are others. Nor is it war just because people continue to die violently. That happens every day in every city in the world. Nor is it war just because some of the victims wear uniforms. That too is not uncommon even in peacetime.

It's war because our undefeated enemies say it is and behave accordingly.

In that stubborn resistance lies a fundamental truth that seems too often to have eluded American political leaders since World War II: It's not the winner who typically decides when victory in a war has been achieved. It's the loser. . . .

Having dealt ourselves the cards in our hand, we have little choice but to play them. In Iraq, that may eventually produce something resembling victory, although at a final cost we can't yet compute. In Afghanistan, it may depend more on Pakistan than on us, unless we are willing to invest a good deal more military power than we have so far.

But the more pertinent question is what we will take away from these two exercises about the business of fighting wars. Putting aside the question of whether invading Iraq was necessary, both wars might have been fought quite differently from the way they were, in a way that took the loser's acceptance less for granted and therefore was considerably more ruthless about achieving it.

Fighting that way certainly would have exacted a stiffer price up front, from us and from those we invaded. It is at least possible, though, that the price might still have been cheaper than the one we could end up paying in the long run.

"Dozens Killed in Baghdad Attacks" -- The Guardian, 10/27/03:

Car bombers attacked the international Red Cross headquarters and four police stations across Baghdad today, killing around 40 people.

A suicide bomber drove an ambulance packed with explosives into security barriers outside the Red Cross at around 8.30am local time (0530 GMT), killing 12 people, the aid agency said.

Then in police station bombings through the morning, 27 people, mostly Iraqis and one US solider, were killed, Iraqi police said.

The capital has now seen the worst two day of violence since the war was declared over in April and the sound of sirens reverberated through the streets this morning as emergency vehicles criss-crossed the city.

The bombings came during a morning of apparently choreographed attacks by Iraqi resistance guerrillas that appears to have been timed to coincide with the first day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. . . .

Other Iraqis, meanwhile, were reported to have been killed at the hands of Americans. In Fallujah, 65km (40 miles) west of Baghdad, witnesses said US troops opened fire indiscriminately, killing at least four Iraqi civilians, after a roadside bomb exploded as a US military convoy passed. The US command did not immediately confirm the incident or any US casualties. . . .

The terror attacks came hours after clashes in the Baghdad area killed three US soldiers overnight, and a day after an audacious rocket salvo attack on the Rashid hotel in central Baghdad which narrowly missed Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, who had been staying there. A US colonel was killed and 18 people wounded in that attack.

The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) confirmed at its headquarters in Geneva that 12 people were killed, including two of its Iraqi employees. Baghdad ICRC spokeswoman Nada Doumani said she believed the employees were security guards.

"The (Finally) Emerging Republican Majority" -- Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard, 10/27/03:

Realignment is already here, and well advanced. In 1964, Barry Goldwater cracked the Democratic lock on the South. In 1968 and 1972, Republicans established a permanent advantage in presidential races. In the big bang of realignment, 1994, Republicans took the House and Senate and wiped out Democratic leads in governorships and state legislatures. Now, realignment has reached its entrenchment phase. Republicans are tightening their grip on Washington and erasing their weakness among women and Latinos. The gender gap now exposes Democratic weakness among men. Sure, an economic collapse or political shock could reverse these gains. But that's not likely. . . .

In 1992, Democrats captured 59 percent of state legislative seats (4,344 to 3,031 for Republicans). Ten years later, Republicans won their first majority (3,684 to 3,626) of state legislators since 1952. In 1992, Democrats controlled the legislatures of 25 states to 8 for Republicans, while the others had split control. Today, Republicans rule 21 legislatures to 16 for Democrats. Governors? Republicans had 18 in 1992, Democrats 30. Today, Republicans hold 27 governorships, Democrats 23.

Not to belabor dry numbers, but Republicans have also surged in party identification. Go back to 1982, the year of the first midterm election of Ronald Reagan's presidency. The Harris Poll found Democrats had a 14-point edge (40 to 26 percent) as the party with which voters identified. By 1992, the Democratic edge was 6 points (36 to 30 percent) and last year, President Bush's midterm election, it was 3 points (34 to 31 percent). . . .

All these figures represent "a general creeping mode of realignment, election by election," says Burnham. By gaining governors and state legislators, Republicans are now in the entrenchment phase. "If you control the relevant institutions, you can really do a number on the opposition," [Walter Dean] Burnham says. "You can marginalize them."

Last year, Republicans shattered the mold of midterm elections for a new president, picking up nine House seats. Most of these came from Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, states where Republicans controlled the legislature and governor's office in 2001 and exploited the new census to draw House districts for Republican advantage. In 2002, Republicans completed their takeover of Texas by winning the state house of representatives. This allowed them to gerrymander the U.S. House districts earlier this month to target incumbent white Democrats. Unless the redistricting is overturned in court, Democrats may lose five to seven seats in 2004. "Texas means there's no battle for the House" until after the 2010 census, says Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Democrats may wind up with fewer than 200 seats for the first time since 1946, says Burnham.

Democrats have theorized that the voting patterns of Hispanics, women, and urban professionals were producing what analysts John Judis and Ruy Teixeira called an "emerging Democratic majority." But in 2002 and the recall, the theory faltered. The midterm elections saw the demise of the old gender gap--women voting more Democratic than men--that had endured for over two decades. The intervening event was the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. That "really did change things permanently," says Burnham. In 2002, women, partly out of concern for the security and safety of their families, voted like men. Florida exemplified the change. In 2000, President Bush lost the vote of female professionals in the burgeoning I-4 corridor across central Florida. In 2002, his brother, Republican governor Jeb Bush, won that vote.

Harpers Weekly Review, 10/28/03

"Bush Weighing Decision on Release of Documents to Sept. 11 Panel" -- Philip Shenon in The New York Times, 10/28/03:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 � President Bush declined on Monday to commit the White House to turning over highly classified intelligence reports to the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, despite public threats of a subpoena from the bipartisan panel.

The president said in a brief meeting with reporters that the documents were "very sensitive" and that the White House was still discussing the issue with the panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey.

Mr. Bush's remarks and subsequent comments from his press secretary suggested that the White House might ultimately refuse the commission's demand for access to the documents, setting up a possible showdown between the White House and the independent investigators.

Last week, Mr. Kean said for the first time that he was prepared to issue a subpoena and risk a courtroom battle with the White House if the documents were not turned over within weeks.

Officials for the commission say the documents include copies of the so-called Presidential Daily Briefing � the summary prepared each morning by the Central Intelligence Agency for the Oval Office � that Mr. Bush received in the weeks before the attacks. The White House refused to provide the reports to House and Senate investigators last year for their investigation of the attacks, citing executive privilege.

After Mr. Kean's comments on Friday, several prominent lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, joined in urging the White House to make the documents available to the panel, known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which was created by Congress last year over initial objections by the White House.

"Bush Says Attacks Are Reflection of U.S. Gains" -- Dana Milbank and Thomas E. Ricks in The Washington Post, 10/28/03:

President Bush yesterday put the best face on a new surge of violence in Iraq as his top defense aides huddled to discuss additional ways of thwarting the anti-American rebellion there before it becomes more widespread.

The president, speaking after attacks on police stations and a Red Cross facility in Iraq killed at least 35 people, said such attacks should be seen as a sign of progress because they show the desperation of those who oppose the U.S.-led occupation.

"The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," Bush said as he sat in the Oval Office with L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq. He added: "The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become, because they can't stand the thought of a free society." . . .

Bush . . . argued that the recent attacks only demonstrated foes' desperation. It was an amplification of a theme he struck after terrorists attacked the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on Aug. 19, when he said, "Every sign of progress in Iraq adds to the desperation of the terrorists and the remnants of Saddam's brutal regime."

Democrats reacted with ridicule. Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), a presidential candidate, likened Bush's statement to the "light at the end of the tunnel" claims during the Vietnam War. "Does the president really believe that suicide bombers are willing to strap explosives to their bodies because we're restoring electricity and creating jobs for Iraqis?" Kerry asked in a statement.

Bush got a similar reprimand earlier from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has supported the president on Iraq. "This is the first time that I have seen a parallel to Vietnam, in terms of information that the administration is putting out versus the actual situation on the ground," he told Newsweek. White House press secretary Scott McClellan defended Bush's assertion, saying: "Our military leaders have said that some of these attacks have become more sophisticated, but what you're really seeing is that the more progress we make, the more desperate these killers become." . . .

Experts in public opinion said it would be difficult for Bush to convince Americans that the violence was a byproduct of success. Jeremy Rosner, a Democratic pollster, said the public is "more and more worried as the drumbeat of casualties continues and the administration constantly shifts rationale and tactics." Frank Luntz, who has advised Republicans on use of language, said Bush's upbeat argument is "better than saying nothing, but it's not enough to say it. You've got to show the evidence."

"President Holds Press Conference" -- transcript at whitehouse.gov, 10/28/03:

Q Thank you, sir. Mr. President, your policies on the Middle East seem, so far, to have produced pretty meager results as the violence between Israelis and Palestinians --

THE PRESIDENT: Major or meager?

Q Meager.

THE PRESIDENT: Oh, okay.

Q Meager.

THE PRESIDENT: Meager.

"Postwar Iraq Deaths Pass Numbers during Combat" -- Drew Brown in The San Jose Mercury-News, 10/28/03:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - More U.S. soldiers have died in combat in Iraq since May 1, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations, than died during main phase of the war, the U.S. military said on Tuesday.

The death toll is a milestone, graphically illustrating the extended character of a war that many Americans believed was nearly finished after just a few weeks of combat. With a stubborn insurgency that is becoming more sophisticated and deadly in its attacks, it's also a sobering reminder of the distance left to go in Iraq.

The 115th combat death occurred on Monday - 114 died prior to May 1 - during the wave of bombings in the Iraqi capital. . . .

President Bush declared this week's extraordinary bombing attacks in Baghdad - killing at least 35 people and wounding 230, mainly Iraqis, on Monday - as proof that terrorists and other anti-coalition forces are becoming desperate and on the wane.

Yet the facts are that combat deaths have been increasing in numbers, not declining, amid signs that guerrilla fighters are becoming better organized.

In retrospect, the U.S. approach in Iraq suffered from a number of miscalculations, unnecessarily alienating many people. Military planners correctly anticipated that they could defeat Iraq's army with a fraction of the troops it took to oust Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait in 1991, but they underestimated the number it would take to keep order across the country after the war.

Faulty intelligence fed largely by Iraqi exiles led planners to believe that most of the Iraqi army would not fight. Instead, U.S. soldiers and Marines faced some of their strongest resistance in southern Iraq. Hit and run attacks took a toll on supply lines. Tactical intelligence was poor. Most units had no interpreters, and interpreters remain in short supply today.

U.S. troops did little to stop the widespread looting that took place in Baghdad after the city fell in April. While much of the city was ransacked, the only government ministry that U.S. troops moved to secure decisively was the Oil Ministry, reinforcing the popular belief that the invaders were only after Iraqi oil.

"I think this was the biggest mistake the Americans made," said Dr. Zaid Makki, 30, an ear, nose and throat specialist who supplements his $120 a month salary by selling satellite dishes three days a week. "If they had just put one tank in front of every ministry here and stopped people from stealing, even the religious men would still be behind them."

The initial months of the occupation were characterized by inaction and chaos. Electricity was out for weeks. Security was nonexistent. Delivery of other basic services faltered. The first U.S. administrator, retired Gen. Jay Garner, was fired after only a few months.

His replacement, L. Paul Bremer, outlawed Saddam's former Baath Party and formally disbanded the 400,000-strong army, under a policy encouraged by powerful exiles, including Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi.

Amer Hussain Fayad, a political science professor at the University of Baghdad, said that decision was perhaps the coalition's biggest mistake after the war because it put thousands of unemployed and angry men on the street. . . .

U.S. troops once regarded as liberators are now seen as occupiers. While the soldiers have done plenty of good in Iraq - repairing schools and hospitals, fixing water treatment plants and thousands of other small projects - the goodwill they once enjoyed is long gone in many areas, replaced by frustration and disillusionment.

"Before, I thought America was here to liberate us, but now my feelings have changed," said Dr. Talib Abdul Jabar al Sayeed, 62, a British-trained physician whose home was raided by mistake in August. "Now I feel like we have to kick them out. I would never have thought that people who came from America, the land of freedom and democracy and civilization, would do this to me."

Senior coalition officials and U.S. military officers continue to cling to the belief, at least publicly, that the Iraqi resistance is composed primarily of former regime loyalists, foreign terrorists and common criminals. They downplay the involvement of nationalist groups, which appear to be growing especially strong in Sunni areas. And they believe that the U.S. presence still has a majority of support among the public. Polls taken in Iraq in the last few months show a majority of respondents want the United States to stay, even though many distrust U.S. intentions.

"Whose Banner Is It, Anyway? -- Jason Sherman and Chris Cavas in The Air Force Times, 10/28/03:

President George W. Bush�s staff played more of a role in the �Mission Accomplished� sign that hung on the carrier Abraham Lincoln than the president suggested yesterday in a Rose Garden press conference.

Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq from the Lincoln�s deck on May 1. Since then about 215 American troops have been killed in action and hundreds more wounded.

The president sought to distance himself from the upbeat message in the banner, explaining at Tuesday�s press conference that the idea for the sign came from the ship�s crew.

�I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff � they weren�t that ingenious, by the way,� he said.

Turns out they may have been that ingenious.

Navy officials and the White House yesterday said that while the crew of the Lincoln came up with the banner�s message, the White House printed it.

�The Navy asked for help in the production of the banner for the president�s visit. So we helped,� said White House spokesman Allen Abney.

The crew felt the banner reflected their recent operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq, according to Navy officials and the White House.

The Navy�s spokesman, Rear Adm. T McCreary, said, �The White House communications office did print it at the ship�s request.�

The White House communications office, well known for the care it takes with the backdrops at Bush speeches, created the �Mission Accomplished� banner in the same style as banners the president uses in other appearances, including one just a week before the carrier appearance in Canton, Ohio. That banner, with the same soft, brush-stroked American flag in the background and the identical typeface, read: �Jobs and Growth.�

"Clark's Jabs Pour on Bush over Iraq" -- Kevin Freking in The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 10/29/03:

DURHAM, N. H. � Presidential candidate Wesley Clark stepped up his criticism of President Bush�s handling of the war in Iraq on Tuesday, seizing on Bush�s contention of having nothing to do with the "Mission Accomplished" banner that hung overhead when the president declared last May that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

At a news conference Tuesday in Washington, Bush said the "sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln saying that their mission was accomplished."

Clark, observing that the May 1 speech was Bush�s "staged event," said, "I think it�s outrageous he would blame the sailors for that. And that was an event his advance team staged.

"I guess the next thing we�re going to hear is that the sailors told him to wear the flight suit and prance around on the aircraft carrier. "

"The Danger of Defeat" -- Fred Hiatt in The Washington Post, 10/29/03:

KIRKUK, Iraq -- When you journey abroad, news from home tends to arrive in disjointed snippets. But rarely has such a tidbit seemed as unrooted in reality as the comment of President Bush that reached here a day after a series of devastating bombings in Baghdad. The attacks, Bush said, resulted from the progress of the occupation and the desperation of the insurgents.

Bush is right that progress is occurring in some places, including this city north of Baghdad. But even here progress is fitful, and dependent on Iraqi confidence that the Americans will not bail out anytime soon. The president's implication that the latest well-coordinated attacks are a last gasp of a desperate opposition seems so much a product of wishful thinking that it can only undermine that confidence, even as it continues to mislead Americans about the difficulty of defeating a ruthless insurgency.

Here's the reality: Insurgents are waging a strategic and malevolently clever campaign that is achieving, in its terms, considerable success. The kind of progress that Bush seeks cannot be accomplished under current conditions of danger and uncertainty. What Iraqis need as they emerge from decades of stifling repression is a richness of contact with the world and a faith that change -- true, structural change -- is possible. Both of those -- the contact and the faith -- are undermined, deliberately and successfully, by terrorism aimed at any vulnerable point of intersection between cooperating Iraqis and well-wishing foreigners.

Saddam Hussein isolated his people in a prison of secret-police-enforced fear. Now fear of terrorism is isolating them in a different way. The charitable, human rights and democracy-building volunteers who should be streaming into the country are for the most part staying away. That further exposes the official occupiers, who in turn are forced to distance themselves from the people they are here to help.

Nothing symbolizes that distance more sadly than the Baghdad presidential palace-turned-occupation headquarters. Inside the vast complex, once-echoing hallways teem with soldiers and civilians dedicated to the noble job of reconstruction. But they work behind so many layers of security -- behind walls and tanks and signs threatening "DEADLY FORCE" and approach roads turned into slaloms of concrete barriers -- that the palace must seem to ordinary Iraqis, if not as frightening as in the past, certainly as remote. When senior occupation officials do venture out, it is often in convoys bristling with armed guards. . . .

There is a danger that slow progress will shift into reverse as Iraqis grow impatient and the insurgency becomes more skilled. The occupiers would have to isolate themselves further, while American clamoring for an "exit strategy" would further erode Iraqi confidence. There is a danger, in other words, of defeat -- one that would be devastating both for the vast majority of Iraqis, who do not want Saddam Hussein's henchmen to return, and for America's safety and well-being.

"Fund Scandal 'Serious as a Heart Attack' to Investors" -- John Waggoner and Christine Dugas in USA Today, 10/29/03:

Major events in the investigation of mutual funds

Sept. 3: New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer launches an investigation into hedge fund Canary Capital Partners and several mutual funds Bank of America's Nations Funds, Bank One Funds, Strong and Janus over suspected trading abuses.

Sept. 12: Research firm Morningstar says it has withdrawn indefinitely any recommendations on Janus mutual funds.

Sept. 30: Alliance Capital says it suspended two executives after finding conflicts of interest related to fund trading.

Oct. 1: A dozen stockbrokers and managers at Prudential are forced to resign after an internal investigation finds evidence of improper mutual fund trading.

Oct. 2: A former trader for Millennium Partners, a $4 billion hedge fund, pleads guilty to securities fraud in the second criminal case to stem from Spitzer's probe.

Oct. 9: The SEC says it will propose new rules to combat market timing and late trading in the mutual fund industry.

Oct. 14: Morgan Stanley, one of Wall Street's top investment banks, says the SEC may take action over its failure to disclose incentives related to mutual fund sales. The bank also says it received a subpoena in July from Spitzer requesting information about possible late trading and market timing in mutual funds.

Oct. 15: Bank One executives Mark Beeson, who ran the One Group mutual funds unit, and John AbuNassar, manager of the bank's institutional asset management group, leave amid an internal probe of improper trading.

Oct. 16: James Connelly, a former vice chairman of Fred Alger Management, pleads guilty to criminal charges of evidence tampering as part of a probe into whether the money manager permitted illegal trading of mutual fund shares.

Oct. 24: Four portfolio managers at Putnam are forced to leave the firm after they profited from market timing their own funds.

Tuesday: Putnam and two former portfolio managers are charged with civil securities fraud by Massachusetts regulators and the SEC related to market timing.

"Senator Roberts, You Have Got to Be Kidding, Right?" -- Josh Marshall in The Hill, 10/29/03:

In recent months, in this column and on my website, I�ve been chronicling the outbreak of a new epidemic running rampant at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. I call it �up-is-downism.� The condition is characterized by a persistent propensity to claim that black is white, that up is down, that hot is cold and other similarly improbable sentiments.

Now it seems the malady has spread to Capitol Hill. And Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kans) has an acute case.

Let�s review the symptoms.

We know that our intelligence about what we�d find in Iraq was woefully off the mark. And many of the errors and misjudgments were contained in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which was cobbled together about exactly one year ago.

The question is, who�s to blame?

Many people think that the president, the vice president and the civilians at the Pentagon pushed, prodded and bullied the CIA and the rest of the Intelligence Community until they produced the intel that they wanted to fit their policy.
Roberts has a different take altogether: The CIA sold the White House a bill of goods about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

�The executive was ill-served by the intelligence community,� Roberts told The Washington Post. The NIE was sloppily put together, the evidence was overstated and too many unreliable sources were credited. In other words, according to Roberts, the agency bamboozled the White House into thinking there was a lot more WMD than there really was. It led a credulous executive down the garden path. . . .

But that�s not what happened here.

We know that the Bush administration specifically resisted calling for an NIE until very late in the game because it didn�t want the results and findings getting in the way of the policy the administration had already decided on. The reason an NIE was finally pulled together is that Senate Democrats wanted some sense of what the evidence was for all the White House�s claims about Iraqi WMD and ties to international terrorism.

In other words, the NIE was only put together when the policy was being sold, not when it was being put together. So the administration could not have been misled or ill-served by it because it was never used to formulate policy. The administration only used it to sell the policy to a skeptical Congress.

The timing of the NIE points to another important conclusion. If you�re wondering why the document seemed so slanted in favor of alarmist judgments about Iraq�s WMD, it�s probably because it was produced for a White House that already had a policy in place. With the policy already decided upon, it was, shall we say, pretty clear how the White House wanted the report to turn out. And, unfortunately, the agency obliged.

The day after Roberts made his initial remarks about the CIA, he issued a statement claiming that the Post had �mischaracterized� his remarks.

Roberts hadn�t meant to characterize the totality of the agency�s work, said one of his aides, but only particular foul-ups such as the now-discredited Niger uranium story. But that�s hardly any better, since the uranium story is the one in which we know the most about what the CIA was doing to resist the White House�s push. It�s a proof against Roberts�s criticism, not in favor of it.

The simple truth is that Roberts�s spin makes no sense no matter how you slice it. It�s an open secret � heck, it�s not even a secret � that the White House and the CIA battled for 18 months over Iraq intelligence assessments, with the White House consistently pushing more alarmist interpretations and the CIA pushing more cautious ones. Given that, it�s simply impossible to believe that the push for exaggeration (and the desire for it) came from the Agency rather than the White House.

The CIA � particularly the top brass � does have a lot to answer for. But its sin isn�t the one Roberts says it is. After more than a year of bullying and harassment, the CIA largely gave way to White House�s pressure to shape the intelligence to fit the policy. Rather than a check on the White House�s excesses, the agency became an enabler.

Someone at the CIA should be called to account for that failure. But one suspects that�s not a criticism Roberts is prepared to make.

"US Invasion Killed 15,000 Iraqis, Says Study" -- Suzanne Goldenberg in Dawn, 10/29/03:

WASHINGTON, Oct 29: As many as 15,000 Iraqis were killed in the first days of America's invasion and occupation of Iraq, a study produced by an independent US thinktank said on Tuesday. Up to 4,300 of the dead were civilian non-combatants.

The report, by Project on Defence Alternatives, a research institute from Cambridge, Massachussets, offers the most comprehensive account so far of how many Iraqis died.

The toll of Iraq's war dead covered by the report is limited to the early stages of the war, from March 19 when American tanks crossed the Kuwaiti border, to April 20, when US troops had consolidated their hold on Baghdad.

Researchers drew on hospital records, official US military statistics, news reports, and survey methodology to arrive at their figures. They were also able to make use of two earlier studies on Iraq's war dead from Iraq Body Count, a website which has kept a running total of those killed, and the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, which has sought to count the dead and injured of the war in order to pursue compensation claims for their families.

The new report, which estimates Iraq's war dead at between 10,800 and 15,100, uses a far more rigorous definition of civilian than the other studies to arrive at a figure of between 3,200 and 4,300 civilian noncombatants. It breaks down the combat deaths of up to 10,800 Iraqis who fought the American invasion. The figures include regular Iraqi troops, as well as members of the Ba'ath party and other militias.

The killing was concentrated - with heavy casualties at the southern entrances of Baghdad - but as many as 80 per cent of the Iraqi army units survived the war relatively unscathed, in part because troops deserted.

As many as 5,726 Iraqis were killed in the US assault on Baghdad, when the streets of the Iraqi capital were strewn with the bodies of people trying to flee the fighting.

As many as 3,531 - more than half - of the dead in the assault on the capital were noncombatant civilians, according to the report. Overall in Iraq, the ratio of civilian to military deaths is almost twice as high as in the last Gulf war in 1991. The overall toll of the first war was far higher - with estimates of 20,000 Iraqi soldiers and 3,500 civilians killed.

However, Operation Iraqi Freedom, as the US military calls this year's war, has proved far deadlier to Iraqi civilians both in absolute numbers, and in the proportion of noncombatant to military deaths.

The findings defy the reasoning that precision-guided weapons spare civilian lives. According to the author of the study, Carol Conetta, 68 per cent of the munitions used in this war were precision-guided, compared with 6.5 per cent in 1991.

Robert Fisk on violence in Iraq:

"This Is a Resistance Movement, Whether We Like It or Not" (transcript of interview by Amy Goodman at democracynow.org, 10/29/03:

We were just listening to your reading of the news where we were hearing you quoting American statesmen as saying that-- talking about the number of foreign fighters in Iraq. Well, I can tell you there are at least 200,000 foreign fighters in Iraq and 146,000 of them are wearing American uniform. You know, Americans in Iraq did not grow up in Tikrit eating dates for breakfast. The largest number of foreign fighters in Iraq, a thousand times over anything Al Qaeda can do, are western soldiers. And we need to realize that we're maintaining an occupation there.

Are there foreign Arab fighters, which is really what your question is about. I think there are probably a few, though we don't know how many and we don't know how many of them actually entered Iraq. Not as friends of Al Qaeda, but in heeding the call of Saddam Hussein to defend Iraq before the American invasion. But, you know, at the end of the day, this is what we call a canard. It's a game. It's a lie. The resistance to the American presence, and these ferocious, brutal, cruel attacks on Iraqis themselves are being carried out largely by Iraqis. The Americans claimed, after the bombings, oh, they managed to get one of the suicide bombers who didn't kill himself and he had a Syrian passport. I noticed we've not been given his passport number or his nationality, date of birth or, indeed, his name. Well, he may be real. He may be real.

But the vast majority of the, quote, resistance, unquote, are Iraqis and my own investigations, particularly around the city of Fallujah, which is where so many Americans have been killed, American servicemen, is that these people were originally Iraqis with a growing interest in the politics of Islam, who, under Saddam Hussein, were permitted, because Saddam knew when to let the top off the kettle and let it not boil over. Were permitted to form an organization called the committee, or the organization, of the faithful. They weren't pro-Saddam; in many cases they, like the people of Fallujah, were arrested and very cruelly treated by Saddam's henchmen. But they were allowed to form individual groups who could discuss religion, providing they didn't talk about politics.

When the regime fell, when the Americans entered Baghdad on the ninth of April this year, these groups became the only focused resistance against American rule. And they did decide, individually and then in coordination, that they would become the Iraqi resistance. I wrote about this actually on April 9. But, these people did begin to believe that they could be the new nationalists, aided, of course, with the weapons of Saddam, the former henchmen of Saddam, and, to some considerable extent, by a population which felt that the American occupiers were behaving brutally.

One man, a tribal leader around Fallujah, whose village I went to and, indeed, I had lunch with him a few weeks ago said to me, you know, originally when the Americans came here, we shouted our greetings to them. But when we staged a protest against their presence, they shot 14 of us dead. There were indeed 14 Iraqis shot dead in Fallujah. After that, he said, it became a question of tribal honor. We had to take our revenge against the Americans, and as they shot back, it became a question of resistance. So, what you found is that the way in which the Americans behave, the way in which the Iraqis behaved, plus this cellular system of groups of the faithful, which were permitted to exist under Saddam, though not with much enthusiasm from the previous regime, turned a war of resistance-- or, rather, turned a war of revenge into a war of resistance. And the people who are killing Americans, at the moment, and killing fellow Iraqis, are largely Iraqis. Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Bush can go on talking till cows come home about foreign fighters. These are not, for the most part, people who were born outside Iraq, which most Americans were. They are people who are called Iraqis. This is a resistance movement, whether we like it or not.

"Dems Weighing Iraq Probe" -- Alexander Bolton in The Hill, 10/29/03:

Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are discussing whether to launch an independent investigation of how the White House handled pre-war intelligence on Iraq.

To prepare for such a possible move, they have already obtained from former CIA officials the names of intelligence operatives who would be willing to testify in such an all-Democratic forum behind closed doors.

Sen. John Rockefeller (W.Va.), the ranking Democratic member and vice chairman of the committee, met with fellow Democratic panel members Carl Levin (Mich.) and Dick Durbin (Ill.) last Thursday to review whether to mount a separate investigation in response to what they view as Republican efforts to shield President Bush and the administration from scrutiny over the pre-invasion decision-making process.

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) takes the position that extending the intelligence review into White House decision-making would be an unprecedented and unwarranted expansion of the committee�s traditional jurisdiction. He has told the Democrats on his panel of his stance in no uncertain terms.

But the Democrats insist that the committee�s 1976 organizing resolution grants it jurisdiction over all �the intelligence activities and programs of the U.S. government.�

Roberts said a separate investigation by Democrats would �set a unique and unfortunate precedent for the committee.� But he acknowledged that �our committee rules are such that the vice chairman has unique jurisdiction and authority.�

In addition to launching investigations and issuing subpoenas, the Democratic vice chairman can preside over the committee, hold meetings without the presence of a majority member of the committee and authorize witness interrogation by committee staff.

But even with his unique power as the top Democrat on the committee, Rockefeller has been hesitant to defy Roberts, whom he regards as a friend.

He is also said to be keenly aware of the obstacles to embarking on what Republicans would consider a rogue investigation.

Hill staffers who have followed the growing partisan turmoil on the panel say that Levin and Durbin are the committee members who most strongly favor scrutinizing how top Bush administration officials potentially misused prewar intelligence to justify an invasion of Iraq.

�We talked about this repeatedly because chairman Roberts has refused to let this investigation to get even close to the White House and administration,� said Durbin. �Historically this has never happened, to my knowledge. This has always been a very bipartisan committee and I think Sen. Rockefeller has bent over backwards to try to avoid this kind of partisan[ship.]�

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the panel who could not make last week�s meeting of committee Democrats, said that the White House must be scrutinized.

�If that�s true and we can�t get cooperation to look at that then, yes, I strongly feel we should exercise rule six and seven,� she said. She was referring to provisions of the committee�s authorizing resolution.

Rule Six authorizes Roberts or Rockefeller to launch an investigation if five other members of the committee concur. In addition to Rockefeller, there are seven Democrats on the committee � making it nearly certain that Rockefeller would have the necessary support to move forward should he chose to do so.

Rule Seven allows either the chairman or the vice chairman to issue subpoenas �for the attendance of witnesses or the production of memoranda, documents, records or any other material.�

Intelligence committee Democrats note that their panel is the only one in Congress that gives the minority the power to conduct an investigation and issue subpoenas.

"US May Scale Down WMD Hunt" -- AP story in The Toronto Star, 10/29/03:

As violence has spiraled in Iraq, top U.S. officials have debated pulling intelligence officers off the so-far unsuccessful hunt for weapons of mass destruction and reassigning them to counterinsurgency efforts, officials said today.

The United States already is planning to recruit more Iraqis to gather information about opposition fighters and may increase security measures to protect troops, President Bush said Tuesday, the third straight day of bombings in Iraq.

But Pentagon, CIA and other top officials have not been able to agree on whether to reassign some of the 1,400 people working on the weapons search, three officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said today.

One intelligence official said they have been struggling for more than three weeks over the question of whether shifting intelligence personnel to the battle against insurgent forces would be harmful. Other possibilities include moving the needed intelligence officers, linguists and others from somewhere else, contracting outsiders or options that the official declined to cite.

Some officials have made the case that the No. 1 priority is to stop the attacks on coalition forces, Iraqis and international organizations.

Others are arguing that it's vitally important to find out what happened to biological and chemical weapons that the Bush administration said Saddam Hussein had and which constituted the main rationale for war.

Any move to reduce those working on the weapons hunt would likely have political implications since critics charge the administration exaggerated the weapons charge to justify a war it had already decided to wage, one official said.

"Dim Bulbs, Big City" -- Ted Rall at news.yahoo.com, 10/29/03:

"Next year in New York" is already the rallying cry of more than 150 groups planning to protest Bush's coronation. United for Peace and Justice, which organized some of the biggest demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq, has applied for a 250,000-person permit to march past Madison Square Garden, where the convention is being held, on the event's first full day.

Everyone from radical anarchists to moderate environmentalists expects the NYC/GOP ideological collision to spark the biggest American protest march since the end of the Vietnam War. Families of 9/11 victims, predominantly Democratic like the oasis of ideological sanity they live in, are so incensed at reports that the convention was timed to allow Bush to lay the Freedom Tower cornerstone at the World Trade Center site that many plan to join the protest. "Keep your hands off Ground Zero," Rita Lasar, head of a 9/11 victims group, warns Republicans. "Do not make a political football out of this."

Too late. New York's Republican mayor and governor have denied the cornerstone-laying story, but they've confirmed that Bush will shuttle back and forth between the convention in midtown and speeches at Ground Zero. And Rudy Giuliani is encouraging convention organizers to use 9/11 as a prop. . . .

As much as I relish the idea of a million angry Americans turning the tawdry Necropublican National Convention into a Seattle WTO-style fiasco, the potential for mayhem is terrifying. As a Manhattanite, I hope that the Republicans will seriously consider moving their convention somewhere else. New York, wounded by the dot-com crash and 9/11 (the latter injury exacerbated when Bush welched on the money he promised to help the city rebuild), continues to suffer from widespread unemployment. The risk of convention-related terrorist attacks should be reason enough to not hold it in a city that paid the highest price on 9/11. A revival of 1968, with cops fouling their batons with the blood of young people, wouldn't do anyone--left or right--any good.

"Bush May Have to Cut and Run" -- Marian Wilkinson in The Sydney Morning Herald, 10/30/03:

After yet another bloody day in Iraq, US President George Bush dropped his enthusiastic message that the latest wave of attacks was evidence of just how much "progress" was being made in bringing freedom to the country.

Bush's Democratic opponents had been scathing when he proffered this view on Monday following the death of nearly 40 Iraqis and one American in a wave of suicide bombings that also left about 230 wounded. "If this is progress, I don't know how much progress we can take," Senator Tom Daschle retorted. . . .

"We are at war in Iraq", said Richard Holbrooke, president Bill Clinton's UN ambassador, voicing an opinion that is beginning to reverberate here. "You cannot do nation-building with a country at war." . . .

Six months after the war was said to be over, US military casualties, like civilian casualties, are mounting daily, with 217 US soldiers killed in that time bringing the total since the war began to 355. More than 1730 US soldiers have been wounded.

These numbers will become a serious political liability for Bush as he enters an election year. So, despite all the strong words about not running out of Iraq, some Democrats say they will not be surprised to see Bush declare next year that enough "progress" has been made to start pulling large numbers of US forces out, whatever the consequences.

"U.N. Pulls Staff out of Baghdad while It Reviews Security" -- Kirk Semple in The New York Times, 10/30/03:

The United Nations is pulling out its international staff from Baghdad while it re-evaluates the security situation, a spokeswoman for the organization said today.

The move comes after a series of deadly suicide bombings in Iraq earlier this week; in August, a bombing at the United Nation's headquarters in Baghdad killed 22 staff members and visitors and injured more than 150 people.

"We have asked our staff in Baghdad to come out temporarily for consultations with a team from headquarters on the future of our operations, in particular security arrangements that we would need to take to operate in Iraq," the spokeswoman, Marie Okabe, said.

She said it was not an evacuation from Iraq, and that staff would remain in the northern part of the country. . . .

The Associated Press quoted United Nations officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, as saying that about 20 staff members remained in Baghdad and some 40 others across Iraq.

"Bush Election Donors Share $8bn Bonanza" -- Suzanne Goldenberg in The Guardian, 10/31/03:

Major donors to George Bush's election campaigns were the main beneficiaries of an $8bn (�4.7bn) bonanza in government contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq, an investigation published yesterday said.

In the most comprehensive survey to date of the postwar financial dispensations for Afghanistan and Iraq, the Centre for Public Integrity tracked more than 70 US firms and contractors involved in reconstruction, exposing their connections to figures in various administrations, Congress and the Pentagon.

The report arrives a day after senators agreed to give $18.4bn for the reconstruction of Iraq in grants, rather than loans, a move seen as a victory for the Bush administration. Mr Bush was in Ohio yesterday trying to raise additional funds for an election warchest that has reached $85m.

According to the centre's report, more than half of the companies - and nearly every one of the top 10 contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq - had close ties to Washington's political establishment or to the Pentagon. Company executives had worked in previous administrations - Democratic as well as Republican - and cultivated privileged connections with their old workplaces.

The study found a clear tilt towards firms with Republican connections - especially among the top 10 list of beneficiaries from the postwar era.

Since 1990, the companies and their employees have donated $49m to national political campaigns. Republican party committees received $12.7m, the report says, compared with $7.1m for the Democrats.

President Bush alone got $500,000, more than any other candidate since 1990. The biggest postwar windfall by far - $2.3bn - went to Kellogg, Brown & Root, or KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the defence contractor under the stewardship of Dick Cheney, until he was chosen by Mr Bush as his running mate.

Connections to the Bush administration helped even with the dispensation of relatively low-profile projects, such as the $38m contract awarded to Science Applications International Corp for development of representative government and free media in Iraq.

The firm was associated until recently with David Kay, the expert leading Washington's hunt for Saddam Hussein's elusive arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Kay left his post as vice-president in October 2002, six months before the war.

"Iraq Needs More GIs" -- UPI story at military.com, 10/31/03:

WASHINGTON-- President George W. Bush's declaration that no more GIs will be needed in Iraq may go down with his premature declaration of victory on May 1 as one of the worst foot in mouth gaffs of his presidency. For the pattern of guerrilla war that has already taken root in Iraq has historically required vast numbers of occupying troops just to contain, let alone defeat it.

As we noted in UPI Analysis Wednesday, France had to send hundreds of thousands of young conscript soldiers to Algeria throughout an eight-year war to just contain the National Liberation Front there, even though France had previously ruled Algeria for more than 150 years. And while Britain successfully contained the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, at the height of The Troubles there, it required 35,000 troops to contain guerrillas operating out of a minority community of only half a million people.

The Department of Defense strategy against the rapidly escalating guerrilla campaign there is based on gung-ho Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's favorite concept of aggressive response. But this assumes that the resistance is a single, structured and unrepresentative organization, effectively run by old Baathists loyal to toppled former President Saddam Hussein.

In fact, operational military intelligence assembled by the U.S. army's own analysts and those of the British army operating in southern Iraq both point to a very different conclusion: that the resistance is popularly based, widespread, diffuse and was originally very poorly organized, although it has been learning to network, adapt and coordinate at rapid speed.

One development in particular has been left almost entirely un-remarked upon by the army of armchair strategists and pontificators in Washington newsrooms and TV studios, although U.S. soldiers in the field are all too aware of it. That is the rapid speed with which the guerrillas have turned to the use of mortars to bombard static U.S. positions and bases.

As American veterans of Vietnam and anyone who lived through or reported on the Lebanese Civil War or the conflicts in Yugoslavia are well aware, mortars are the artillery of choice for guerrilla and paramilitary forces in inflicting heavy casualties on those who occupy them.

Mortars are easily transportable and very simple to set up, fire and then dismantle. UPI Foreign Editor Claude Salhani, a veteran of covering Middle East wars, notes that a good mortar team can fire about 20 rounds into the air and be on the move before the first round hits its target, alerting the victims to their peril. That is because the muzzle velocity of the mortar is so slow.

The only way to prevent concentrations of occupying troops being decimated by regular mortar bombardments is to have so many rapid-moving, quick response mobile infantry patrols out in the surrounding areas, whether urban or countryside, that mortar teams, slowed down by the weight of their equipment, can be rapidly located and killed. The British Army's Special Air Service specialized in doing that for years against IRA units operating in the "Bandit Country" of South Armagh in Northern Ireland.

Such forces provide vital screening protection and cut down on massive casualties being suffered by the occupying power, but even when they are there, casualties from lots of skilled and determined guerrilla mortar teams can be very serious, as U.S. veterans of Vietnam will testify. It is far worse, however, not to venture out into the city slums of the countryside because not doing so, or having insufficient occupying troops to do so, gives the guerrilla mortars teams a free hand to inflict serious casualties on their targets bunched together in their own bases.

"Getting Personal: Ambassador Says White House Adviser Told Press His Wife Was 'Fair Game'" -- abcnews.com, 10/1/03:

The former ambassador who accused the White House of leaking the identity of his CIA officer wife to the press says Washington reporters told him that senior White House adviser Karl Rove said his wife was "fair game."

The ambassador, Joseph Wilson, said he plans to give the names of the reporters to the FBI, which is conducting a full-blown investigation of the possible leak.

"I will be revealing the names of everybody who called me and cited White House sources or cited people specifically," Wilson said in an interview with Nightline's Ted Koppel. . . .

On Aug. 21, at a public forum in Seattle, Wilson suggested that it was Rove, Bush's chief political strategist, who revealed his wife's identity. He later backtracked, saying he had no knowledge that it was Rove who personally leaked the information, but that he believed the White House adviser condoned the leak and did nothing to shut it down.

Wilson maintains that Washington reporters told him they spoke with Rove on the telephone after the Novak column came out.

"What I have confidence in -- based upon what respectable press people in this town have told me -- is that a week after the Novak article came out, Karl Rove was still calling around and talking to press people, saying Wilson's wife is fair game," Wilson said.

"The gist of the message, as it was reported back to me right after the phone call, was 'I just got off the phone with Karl Rove. He tells me your wife is fair game.' "

The White House has said it is "ridiculous" to suggest Rove played any role in disclosing the identity of Wilson's wife, and Bush on Tuesday said he welcomed the Justice Department investigation into the leak.

"Columnist Wasn't Pawn for Leak" -- Robert Novak in The Chicago Sun-Times, 10/1/03:

I had thought I never again would write about retired diplomat Joseph Wilson's CIA-employee wife, but feel constrained to do so now that repercussions of my July 14 column have reached the front pages of major newspapers and led off network news broadcasts. My role and the role of the Bush White House have been distorted and need explanation.

The leak now under Justice Department investigation is described by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and critics of President Bush's Iraq policy as a reprehensible effort to silence them. To protect my own integrity and credibility, I would like to stress three points. First, I did not receive a planned leak. Second, the CIA never warned me that the disclosure of Wilson's wife working at the agency would endanger her or anybody else. Third, it was not much of a secret.

The current Justice investigation stems from a routine, mandated probe of all CIA leaks, but follows weeks of agitation. Wilson, after telling me in July that he would say nothing about his wife, has made investigation of the leak his life's work -- aided by the relentless Sen. Charles Schumer of New York. These efforts cannot be separated from the massive political assault on President Bush.

This story began July 6 when Wilson went public and identified himself as the retired diplomat who had reported negatively to the CIA in 2002 on alleged Iraq efforts to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger. I was curious why a high-ranking official in President Bill Clinton's National Security Council was given this assignment. Wilson had become a vocal opponent of President Bush's policies in Iraq after contributing to Al Gore in the last election cycle and John Kerry in this one.

During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger. He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA's counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger. When I called another official for confirmation, he said: ''Oh, you know about it.'' The published report that somebody in the White House failed to plant this story with six reporters and finally found me as a willing pawn is simply untrue.

At the CIA, the official designated to talk to me denied that Wilson's wife had inspired his selection but said she was delegated to request his help. He asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause ''difficulties'' if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name. I used it in the sixth paragraph of my column because it looked like the missing explanation of an otherwise incredible choice by the CIA for its mission.

How big a secret was it? It was well-known around Washington that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Republican activist Clifford May wrote Monday, in National Review Online, that he had been told of her identity by a non-government source before my column appeared and that it was common knowledge. Her name, Valerie Plame, was no secret either, appearing in Wilson's Who's Who in America entry.

A big question is her duties at Langley. I regret that I referred to her in my column as an ''operative'' -- a word I have lavished on hack politicians for more than 40 years. While the CIA refuses to publicly define her status, the official contact says she is ''covered'' -- working under the guise of another agency. However, an unofficial source at the agency says she has been an analyst, not in covert operations.

The Justice Department investigation was not requested by CIA Director George Tenet. Any leak of classified information is routinely passed by the agency to Justice, averaging one a week. This investigative request was made in July shortly after the column was published. Reported only last weekend, the request ignited anti-Bush furor.

"Editorial: Scandal/Who Outed CIA Agent Plame?" -- Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 10/1/03:

This scandal should have unfolded in July, but the mainstream media weren't interested. The story was kept alive because of dogged work by a few online bloggers, most especially Josh Marshall of "TalkingPointsMemo" (you can find him in the blogs section of www.startribune.com/2cents ). The bloggers will never get the attention and the high praise they deserve for keeping attention focused on this. So let it be noted here at least.

It finally hit the mainstream last weekend, when NBC reported that CIA Director George Tenet had requested a Justice Department investigation of the case. . . .

The Justice Department has responded affirmatively to Tenet's request for an investigation. But get this: When Justice informed the White House of the investigation Monday evening, it said it would be all right if the staff was notified Tuesday morning to safeguard all material that related to the case. The staff had all night to get rid of anything incriminating.

That incredible tidbit supports calls by Democrats and a slew of others for Attorney General John Ashcroft to appoint a special counsel to investigate this case. They're right: Ashcroft has no credibility in this, and neither does the White House, given its habitual effort to spin information, mislead the American people and smear anyone who disagrees with it. This developing scandal ultimately goes to the even more serious question of administration manipulation of intelligence on Iraq, where American soldiers continue to die almost every day in a campaign that looks increasingly like a bad mistake.

"Outside Probe of Leaks Is Favored" -- Dana Milbank and Mike Allen in The Washington Post, 10/2/03:

Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe a special prosecutor should be named to investigate allegations that Bush administration officials illegally leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released yesterday.

The poll, taken after the Justice Department announced that it had opened a criminal probe into the matter, pointed to several troubling signs for the White House as Bush aides decide how to contain the damage. The survey found that 81 percent of Americans considered the matter serious, while 72 percent thought it likely that someone in the White House leaked the agent's name.

Confronted with little public support for the White House view that the investigation should be handled by the Justice Department, Bush aides began yesterday to adjust their response to the expanding probe. They reined in earlier, broad portrayals of innocence in favor of more technical arguments that it is possible the disclosure was made without knowledge that a covert operative was being exposed and therefore might not have been a crime.

As the White House hunkered down, it got the first taste of criticism from within Bush's own party. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) said that Bush "needs to get this behind him" by taking a more active role. "He has that main responsibility to see this through and see it through quickly, and that would include, if I was president, sitting down with my vice president and asking what he knows about it," the outspoken Hagel said last night on CNBC's "Capital Report."

"Attorney General Is Closely Linked to Inquiry Figures" -- Elisabeth Bumiller and Eric Lichtblau in The New York Times, 10/2/03:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 -- Deep political ties between top White House aides and Attorney General John Ashcroft have put him into a delicate position as the Justice Department begins a full investigation into whether administration officials illegally disclosed the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer.

Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, whose possible role in the case has raised questions, was a paid consultant to three of Mr. Ashcroft's campaigns in Missouri, twice for governor and for United States senator, in the 1980's and 1990's, an associate of Mr. Rove said on Wednesday.

Jack Oliver, the deputy finance chairman of Mr. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, was the director of Mr. Ashcroft's 1994 Senate campaign, and later worked as Mr. Ashcroft's deputy chief of staff.

Those connections led Democrats on Wednesday to assert that Mr. Rove's connections to Mr. Ashcroft amounted to a clear conflict of interest and undermined the integrity of the investigation. The disclosures have also emboldened Democrats who have called for the appointment of an outside counsel. . . .

[T]he relationships have given new grist to the Democrats. "This is not like, `Oh, yeah, they're both Republicans, they've been in the same room together,' " said Roy Temple, the former executive director of the Missouri Democratic Party and the former deputy chief of staff to Gov. Mel Carnahan of Missouri. "Karl Rove was once part of John Ashcroft's political strategic team. You have both the actual conflict, and the appearance of conflict. It doesn't matter what's in the deep, dark recesses of their hearts. It stinks."

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, said she was particularly concerned about the past campaign work that Mr. Rove did for Mr. Ashcroft. "Given allegations about the involvement of senior White House officials and the past close association between the attorney general and those officials, the investigation should be headed by a person independent of the administration," Ms. Pelosi said.

On Wednesday, Justice Department officials would not rule out the possibility of Mr. Ashcroft's appointing a special counsel, or recusing himself from the inquiry.

"We're leaving all legal options open," said Mark Corallo, a department spokesman.

And the associate of Mr. Rove said of the attorney general, "He's going to have to recuse himself, don't you think?"

Mr. Bush himself salvaged Mr. Ashcroft's political career by selecting him as attorney general after Mr. Ashcroft lost his Senate race in 2000 to Mr. Carnahan, who was killed in a plane crash just before the election.

In 2001, Mr. Ashcroft recused himself from an investigation into accusations against Senator Robert G. Torricelli of New Jersey because Mr. Torricelli had campaigned against him in Missouri. Mr. Torricelli withdrew from his re-election race. . . .

Justice Department officials said that it was too early to say which administration officials would be subjects of their investigation, but they are likely to seek information from many senior advisers at the White House, including Mr. Rove.

An associate said Mr. Rove had been hired by Mr. Ashcroft in 1984, in Mr. Ashcroft's first successful race for governor of Missouri, to handle the campaign's mail solicitations for political contributions. The associate said Mr. Rove also handled Mr. Ashcroft's direct-mail solicitations for his 1988 re-election campaign and his 1994 Senate campaign, both of them successful.

By 1998, Mr. Rove had sold his direct-mail operation, Karl Rove and Company of Austin, Tex., at the request of Mr. Bush, who was considering a run for president and wanted his political aide unencumbered. In 2000, Mr. Rove worked for Mr. Bush and played no official role in Mr. Ashcroft's losing Senate race.

Nina Totenberg on NPR's "All Things Considered," 10/1/03 (as transcribed at

atrios.blogspot.com):

They may try and recover deleted email files for certain dates . . .

The White house asked for and got permission earlier this week to wait a day before issuing a directive to preserve all documents and logs which led one seasoned federal prosecutor to wonder why they wanted to wait a day, and who at the justice department told them they could do that, and why?

"White House Looks to Manage Fallout over C.I.A. Leak Inquiry" -- Richard W. Stevenson and Eric Lichtblau in The New York Times, 10/2/03:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 -- The Bush administration pursued a two-track political strategy on Wednesday to minimize the damage from the criminal investigation into the disclosure of a C.I.A. officer's identity.

The White House encouraged Republicans to portray the former diplomat at the center of the case, Joseph C. Wilson IV, as a partisan Democrat with an agenda and the Democratic Party as scandalmongering. At the same time, the administration and the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill worked to ensure that no Republicans in Congress break ranks and call for an independent inquiry outside the direct control of the Justice Department.

"It's slime and defend," said one Republican aide on Capitol Hill, describing the White House's effort to raise questions about Mr. Wilson's motivations and its simultaneous effort to shore up support in the Republican ranks.

"So far so good," the aide said. "There's nervousness on the part of the party leadership, but no defections in the sense of calling for an independent counsel." . . .

A senior House Republican aide said he thought that House Republicans had been unified by the Democratic response to the investigation.

"The overreaching by the Democrats on the special counsel and the personal attacks on the president have had a galvanizing effect, not a demoralizing effect," he said.

Still, one Republican with close ties to the administration said the White House was monitoring five Republicans in Congress, all of whom have an independent streak on foreign policy and intelligence matters: Senators John McCain of Arizona, Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and John W. Warner of Virginia, and Representative Porter J. Goss of Florida.

"The Plame Game" -- Howard Fineman at msnbc.com, 10/2/03:

I'll stipulate that it is a felony to disclose the name of an undercover CIA operative who has been posted overseas in recent years. That's what the statute says. But the now infamous outing of Victoria Plame isn't primarily an issue of law. It's about a lot of other things, like: the ongoing war between the CIA and the vice president's office; the long, complex relationship between George Tenet and the Bush family; the tinge of arrogance among some (as yet unidentified) members of Bush's team; and, ominously for the president, a breakdown in discipline among his spin doctors, who, in the old days, always wrote the same prescription. . . .

[T]he yellowcake allegation got into the president's now infamous State of the Union address, attributed only to the Brits. When the speech came under fire for accuracy (or lack thereof), the CIA at first ducked. Then White House aides let it be known that the agency had "signed off" on the entire contents of the speech, after which the CIA came forward to say yes, after much discussion and emendation, that they'd approved it. Tenet took the heat. But it was clear that he had been forced to do so. . . .

It was a fascinating moment if you know the history. The way I hear the story, Bush Two, when he was elected, had his doubts about Tenet, but was told he was a "good guy" by the ultimate arbiter of "good guys" in the Bush Family, Bush One. Tenet had curried favor with the family years earlier when he was still an intelligence bureaucrat on the Hill, serving as chief of staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Though he was working in a Democrat-controlled environment, Tenet helped out -- or at least did not stand in the way -- when Bush One wanted to appoint his friend, Robert Gates, to head the CIA. Word was that Tenet was a "team player" -- a standup guy, not a relentless Democratic partisan by any means. An expert at the inside game from his years as a staffer on the Hill, Tenet knew how to fit into Bush Two's world. He did so with ease from the start.

Bush presumably trusted Tenet and the CIA to get the goods on Saddam and his WMD. Cheney's staff evidently did too. But why did Tenet send Wilson to Africa? Maybe he just thought he was sending the most qualified guy. But the neo-cons and their allies came to see it as a conspiracy to ignore the truth -- especially after Wilson, last July, went public with the essence of his findings, which was that the yellowcake rumors were false.

The moment that piece hit the op-ed page of the New York Times, it was all-out war between the pro- and anti-war factions, and between the CIA and its critics. I am told by what I regard as a very reliable source inside the White House that aides there did, in fact, try to peddle the identity of Joe Wilson's wife to several reporters. But the motive wasn't revenge or intimidation so much as a desire to explain why, in their view, Wilson wasn't a neutral investigator, but, a member of the CIA's leave-Saddam-in-place team.

And on Tenet's part, it was time for payback -- whatever his past relationship with the Bush's had been. First, he and his agency had been humiliated, caught by the White House trying to distance themselves from the president's speech. Then the CIA was forced to admit that it had signed off on the speech. Now one of its own investigations was coming under attack, as was one of its own undercover staffers.

Are we to believe that it was a routine matter for the CIA to forward to the Department of Justice a complaint about the leak of Victoria Plame's name and job? Are we to think that Tenet didn't know that the complaint was being forwarded? Or that Tenet couldn't have shortstopped it if he wanted to? . . .

Bush preaches humility, and believes it is a cardinal virtue. But some of the people around him honor it in the breach. If it can be proved that they did, in fact, leak Mrs. Wilson's name and job, they committed an act of arrogance -- and political stupidity. You'd think that the Bush White House would know an essential lesson of presidential survival in Washington: You don't pick a fight with the CIA. Nixon learned the consequences of doing so; Bush One, a former director of the CIA, could have explained it to his son.

"Putin Says U.S. Faces Big Risks in Effort in Iraq" -- Steven Lee Myers in The New York Times, 10/6/03:

MOSCOW, Monday, Oct. 6 -- President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia says the United States now faces in Iraq the possibility of a prolonged, violent and ultimately futile war like the one that mired the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

In an expansive interview on Saturday evening, Mr. Putin warned that Iraq could "become a new center, a new magnet for all destructive elements." He added, without naming them, that "a great number of members of different terrorist organizations" have been drawn into the country since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

To respond to this emerging threat, he said, the Bush administration must move quickly to restore sovereignty to Iraqis and to secure a new United Nations resolution that would clearly define how long international forces remain there. . . .

Mr. Hussein's government had, with reason, been called "a criminal one," Mr. Putin said, but he disputed one of the core reasons given by President Bush for attacking Iraq in March: the assertion that it had ties to international Islamic militancy and terrorism. Rather, he suggested that the invasion of Iraq had created a terrorist haven where one did not previously exist.

"It struggled against the fundamentalists," he said of Mr. Hussein's government. "He either exterminated them physically or put them in jail or just sent them into exile."

Now, he added, with Mr. Hussein ousted, "The coalition forces received two enemies at once -- both the remains of the Saddam regime, who fight with them, and those who Saddam himself had fought in the past -- the fundamentalists."

Mr. Putin did not identify the militants entering Iraq, but he said they came "from all the Muslim world." Those militants, he suggested, may now find themselves at ease in Iraq, as they once were among the Afghans, and the "danger exists" of a decade-long struggle like the one fought by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980's. Such fears, he added, "are not groundless." . . .

Although Russia seeks a rapid return of sovereignty to Iraq, it would accept a dominant role for the American military in providing security, he said, as well as a gradual rather than a rapid transfer of actual power to the Iraqi authorities. Given the money it has spent and is spending there, America has to play a leading role in Iraq, he suggested.

This position -- calling for a greater United Nations role in Iraq but apparently acknowledging American primacy -- puts Russia at odds with some countries, like France, that have been more critical of the United States. Mr. Putin described the Russian position as "very pragmatic and flexible."

"George W. Bush's Medieval Presidency" -- Neal Gabler in The Los Angeles Times, 10/5/03:

At least since the Progressive era, America has been an empire of empiricism, a nation not only of laws but of facts. As heirs of the Enlightenment, the Progressives had an abiding faith in the power of rationality and a belief in the science of governing. Elect officeholders of good intent, arm them with sufficient information and they could guide the government for the public weal. From this seed sprang hundreds of government agencies dedicated to churning out data: statistics on labor, health, education, economics, the environment, you name it. These were digested by bureaucrats and policymakers, then spun into laws and regulations. When the data changed, so presumably would policy. Government went where the facts led it.

Conservatives have often denounced statistics-addicted bureaucrats as social engineers, but they have been no less reliant on data than liberals, because they were no less convinced that government could be rationally conducted. They simply disagreed with liberals on where rationality would take us. President Reagan might dispute economic statistics, and he certainly reinterpreted them to demonstrate how his tax cuts would lead to growth and a balanced budget, as counterintuitive as that seemed. Still, he didn't dispense with facts. He marshaled them to his cause to illustrate that he saw reality more clearly than his antagonists.

The difference between the current administration and its conservative forebears is that facts don't seem to matter at all. They don't even matter enough to reinterpret. Bush doesn't read the papers or watch the news, and Condoleezza Rice, his national security advisor, reportedly didn't read the National Intelligence Estimate, which is apparently why she missed the remarks casting doubt on claims that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Africa. (She reportedly read the document later.) And although Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld hasn't disavowed reading or watching the news, he has publicly and proudly disavowed paying any attention to it. In this administration, everyone already knows the truth.

A more sinister aspect to this presidency's cavalier attitude toward facts is its effort to bend, twist and distort them when it apparently serves the administration's interests. Intelligence was exaggerated to justify the war in Iraq. Even if there were no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or of ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, the CIA was expected to substantiate the accusations. In a similar vein, the New Republic reported that Treasury Department economists had been demoted for providing objective analysis that would help define policy, as they had done in previous administrations. Now they provide fodder for policy already determined. Said one economist who had worked in the Clinton, Reagan and first Bush administrations, "They didn't worry about whether they agreed; we were encouraged to raise issues." Not anymore.

Even the scientific community has been waved off by the medievalists. A minority staff report issued last month by the House Government Reform Committee investigating scientific research found 21 areas in which the administration had "manipulated the scientific process and distorted or suppressed scientific findings," including the president's assurance that there were more than 60 lines for stem-cell research when there were actually only 11; it concluded that "these actions go far beyond the typical shifts in policy that occur with a change in the political party occupying the White House." When a draft report of the Environmental Protection Agency earlier this year included data on global warming, the White House ordered them expunged. Another EPA report, on air quality at ground zero in Manhattan, was altered to provide false reassurance that no danger existed, even though it did.

Every administration spins the facts to its advantage. As the old adage goes, "Figures don't lie but liars do figure." But the White House medievalists aren't just shading the facts. In actively denying or changing them, they are changing the basis on which government has traditionally been conducted: rationality. There is no respect for facts because there is no respect for empiricism. Instead, the Bush ideologues came to power smug in the security of their own worldview, part of which, frankly, seems to be the belief that it would be soft and unmanly to let facts alter their preconceptions. Like the church confronting Galileo, they aren't about to let reality destroy their cosmology, whether it is a bankrupt plan for pacifying an Iraq that was supposed to welcome us as liberators or a bankrupt fiscal plan that was supposed to jolt the economy to health.

"Why Bush Angers Liberals" -- Michael Kinsley in Time, October 13, 2003 (online at time.com, 10/6/03):

So why are liberals so angry? Here is a view from inside the beast: it's Bush as a person and his policies as well. To start, we do think he stole the election. Yes, yes, we're told to "get over it," and we've been pretty damned gracious. But we can't help it: this still rankles. What rankles especially is Bush's almost total lack of grace about the extraordinary way he took office. Theft aside, he indisputably got fewer votes than the other guy, our guy. We expected some soothing bipartisan balm. There was none, even after 9/11. (Would it have been that hard to appoint a Democrat as head of Homeland Security, in a "bring us together" spirit?)

We also thought that Bush's apparent affability, and his lack of knowledge or strong views or even great interest in policy issues, would make him temperate on the ideological thermometer. (Psst! We also thought, and still think, he's pretty dumb ? though you're not supposed to say it and we usually don't. And we thought that this too would make him easier to swallow.) It turns out, though, that Bush's, um, unreflectiveness shores up his ideological backbone. An adviser who persuades Bush to adopt Policy X does not have to be worried that our President will keep turning it over in his mind, monitoring its progress, reading and thinking about the complaints of its critics, perhaps even re-examining it on the basis of subsequent developments, and announce one day that he prefers Policy Y. This does not happen. He knows what he thinks, and he has to be told it only once.

This dynamic works on facts just as it does on policies, making Bush a remarkably successful liar. This too is unexpected. There seemed to be something guileless and nonneurotic about Bush when we first made his acquaintance. It was the flip side of his, um, dimness and seemed to promise frankness if nothing else. But guess what? Ignorance and lack of curiosity are terrific fortifications for dishonesty. Bill Clinton knew that he had had sex with that woman and had to work hard to convince himself that he hadn't. Bush neither knew nor cared whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or close connections to al-Qaeda when he started to say so, and once he started, mere lack of evidence was not going to make him stop.

Just this week, responding to the brouhaha about the alleged White House outing of an undercover CIA agent, Bush declared that he takes leaks very seriously and deplores them. Liberals across America screamed into their TV sets, "But that leak was in the papers two months ago, and you did nothing about it until the fuss started last weekend!" If Bush could hear them, he might furrow his brow in puzzlement and say, "And your point is?" Steeped as liberals are in irony, it took us a while to learn what a powerful tool an irony-free mind can be.

"White House to Overhaul Iraq and Afghan Missions" -- David E. Sanger in The New York Times, 10/6/03:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 -- The White House has ordered a major reorganization of American efforts to quell violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and to speed the reconstruction of both countries, according to senior administration officials.

The new effort includes the creation of an "Iraq Stabilization Group," which will be run by the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. The decision to create the new group, five months after Mr. Bush declared the end of active combat in Iraq, appears part of an effort to assert more direct White House control over how Washington coordinates its efforts to fight terrorism, develop political structures and encourage economic development in the two countries. . . .

The reorganization was described in a confidential memorandum that Ms. Rice sent Thursday to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet.

Asked about the memorandum on Sunday, Ms. Rice called it "a recognition by everyone that we are in a different phase now" that Congress is considering Mr. Bush's request for $20 billion for reconstruction and $67 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. She said it was devised by herself, Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Powell and Mr. Rumsfeld in response to discussions she held with Mr. Bush at his ranch in late August.

The creation of the group, according to several administration officials, grew out of Mr. Bush's frustration at the setbacks in Iraq and the absence of more visible progress in Afghanistan, at a moment when remnants of the Taliban appear to be newly active. It is the closest the White House has come to an admission that its plans for reconstruction in those countries have proved insufficient, and that it was unprepared for the guerrilla-style attacks that have become more frequent in Iraq. There have been more American deaths in Iraq since the end of active combat than during the six weeks it took to take control of the country. . . .

In the interview, Ms. Rice described the new organization as one intended to support the Pentagon, not supplant it.

"The N.S.C. staff is first and foremost the president's staff," she said, "but it is of course the staff to the National Security Council." That group will in effect be taking more direct responsibility.

The council is made up of top advisers to the president who meet three times a week in the Situation Room. They have often seemed unable to coordinate efforts on the main issues relating to the occupation of Iraq. "The Pentagon remains the lead agency, and the structure has been set up explicitly to provide assistance to the Defense Department and coalition provisional authority," Ms. Rice said.

Other officials said the effect of Ms. Rice's memorandum would be to move day-to-day issues of administering Iraq to the White House.

The counterterrorism group, for example, will be run by Frances F. Townsend, Ms. Rice's deputy for that field. Economic issues -- from oil to electricity to the distribution of a new currency -- will be coordinated by Gary Edson. He has been the liaison between the National Security Council and the National Economic Council.

Robert D. Blackwill, a former ambassador to India, will run the group overseeing the creation of political institutions in Iraq, as well as directing stabilization for Afghanistan.

Anna Perez, Ms. Rice's communications director, will focus on a coordinated media message -- a response to concerns about the daily reports of attacks on American troops and lawlessness in the streets.

"Iraq Shake-Up Skipped Rumsfeld" -- Mike Allen in The Washington Post, 10/8/03:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday that he was not told in advance about a reorganization of the Iraq reconstruction, which he heads. He said he still does not know the reason for the shake-up.

Rumsfeld said in an interview with the Financial Times and three European news organizations that he did not learn of the new Iraq Stabilization Group until he received a classified memo about it from national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Thursday.

Rumsfeld was asked several times why the changes were necessary. "I think you have to ask Condi that question," he said, according to a transcript posted on the Web site of the Financial Times.

Pressed, he said: "I said I don't know. Isn't that clear? You don't understand English? I was not there for the backgrounding."

Rumsfeld's tart remarks offer a window on the tensions among members of President Bush's war cabinet, which are vividly described by administration officials but are rarely visible to outsiders. Rumsfeld's bluntness has occasionally rankled allies and caused headaches for the White House, but Bush is said to remain supportive. . . .

Rumsfeld said Rice's new system looks like a restatement of "the job of the National Security Council, to coordinate among different departments and agencies."

"Unfortunately, it's a classified memo. It shouldn't be. There's nothing in it that's classified," he said. "I kind of wish they'd just release the memorandum."

One source said the perception among some in the administration was that the Pentagon had been "neutered" by the changes, inasmuch as the White House now will be involved in budget and other decisions that had been the sole province of L. Paul Bremer, the civilian administrator in Iraq, who reports to Rumsfeld.

"The White House: Barely Managing" -- Daniel W. Drezner in The New Republic, reproduced at cbsnews.com, 10/7/03:

A detached management style combined with smart and aggressive subordinates can produce two structural flaws in the policy process. The first is that if major foreign policy players disagree, the potential for unending bureaucratic conflict is high. Even when the president clearly articulates the desired ends for policy, furious battles will erupt over the means to achieve those ends. In a cabinet filled with accommodating or like-minded individuals, such disputes can be settled quickly. In a cabinet with the likes of Powell and Rumsfeld -- confident men with genuine differences of opinion over the best way to advance the national interest -- the battles never cease. The current scuffles between State and Defense in the Bush administration are eerily reminiscent of the legendary set-tos between George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger under Reagan.

The costs of such disputes can be significant. The more resources and energy that policy principals devote to bureaucratic infighting, the less they have available for focusing on effective policy implementation. This was certainly the case with Iraq. The different components of the executive branch were embroiled in disputes on multiple fronts over postwar management, ranging from the role of Ahmed Chalabi to the role of the United Nations. In all of those disputes, the recondite issue of Iraq's deteriorating electricity grid apparently never came up. The result was that Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department ended up administering postwar Iraq but being surprised by the electricity problem, while Colin Powell's State Department was marginalized but fully aware of it.

The other structural flaw is both more rare and more frightening. When different parts of the executive branch are locked in constant conflict, the result is a permissive environment. Officials become used to the notion that they will have to act as aggressively as possible to win an argument. Lines of communication between different parts of the executive branch become frayed or severed. Add weak oversight to the mix, and you have a situation in which bureaucratic entrepreneurs will be tempted to push their agendas to the point where ethical rules are violated -- or laws are broken.

In the Reagan administration, this management style contributed to the Iran-Contra fiasco.

In the Bush administration, the battles over Iraq's WMD program have led to open hostility between the Defense Department and the CIA. The leaks and counter-leaks over Nigerian yellowcake have escalated to the point where the Justice Department is investigating whether anyone in the White House violated federal law and jeopardized national security by outing the identity of an undercover CIA operative. What's amazing about this episode is that, if true, a felony was committed over what was truly a minor dispute. Which leads to a troubling question -- if an administration official was willing to commit an overtly illegal act in dealing with such a piddling matter, what lines have been or will be crossed on not-so-piddling matters?

Harpers Weekly Review, 10/7/03

"U.S. May Drop Quest for U.N. Vote on Iraq" -- Steven R. Weisman and Felicity Barringer in The New York Times, 10/8/03:

ASHINGTON, Oct. 7 -- The Bush administration has run into such stiff opposition at the United Nations Security Council to its plan for the future government of Iraq that it has pulled back from seeking a quick vote endorsing the proposal and may shelve it altogether, administration officials said Tuesday.

Two weeks after President Bush appealed at the United Nations for help in securing and reconstructing Iraq, administration officials said, his top aides will decide soon whether it is worth the effort to get a United Nations endorsement. . . .

The new pessimism about winning United Nations support results from the cool reception accorded to the administration's most recent draft on Iraqi self-government, which was supposedly redrawn to take into account suggestions of Security Council members.

What little momentum there was behind the American proposal was deflated after the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, disclosed his own reservations last week, much to the surprise of administration officials.

Mr. Annan, according to diplomats who have talked to him, essentially takes the view of the French that the violent attacks on Americans in Iraq would subside once an interim Iraqi government was established, perhaps in a matter of months. . . .

As things stood on Tuesday, officials said, the administration faced two unpalatable options. One was that it would not win the votes to pass a resolution to its liking; the other was that its victory margin would be so thin that approval would send a signal of a divided Security Council rather than one that wanted to help.

The principal point of contention between the United States and Britain, on the one hand, and Mr. Annan, France and other Council members on the other, is the American intention to retain full control over Iraq during what could be a long period of writing a constitution, holding elections and restoring sovereignty.

Mr. Annan's comments were especially compelling to Council members because he warned that in light of the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad in the summer, he could not in good conscience send his personnel into a dangerous environment to play a role subordinate to the American occupation.

California recall exit poll data, washingtonpost.com, accessed 10/10/03:

Twenty-seven percent of voters approved of Davis's performance as governor. Ten percent of them voted "Yes" on the recall.

Forty-five percent of voters had an unfavorable opinion of Schwarzenegger. Nineteen percent of them voted "Yes" on the recall.

Thirty-two percent of voters belonged to a union household. Forty-nine percent of them voted "Yes" on the recall.

"Russia to Price Oil in Euros in Snub to US" -- Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The London Telegraph, 10/10/03:

Russia is to start pricing its huge oil and gas exports in euros instead of dollars as part of a stragetic shift to forge closer ties with the European Union.

The Russian central bank has been amassing euros since early 2002, increasing the euro share of its $65 billion (?40 billion) foreign reserves from 10pc to more than 25pc, according to the finance ministry.

The move has set off a chain reaction in the private sector, leading to a fourfold increase in euro deposits in Russian banks this year and sending Russian citizens scrambling to change their stashes of greenbacks into euro notes.

German officials said Chancellor Gerhard Schroder secured agreement for the change-over on oil pricing from Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, while on a trip to Russia this week. . . .

A switch to euro invoicing would not affect the long-term price of oil but it could encourage Middle Eastern exporters to follow suit and have a powerful effect on market psychology at a time when the dollar is already under intense pressure. Russia boasts the world's biggest natural gas reserves and is the number two oil exporter after Saudi Arabia. . . .

Oil is seen as so central to the global power structure that the choice of currency used for pricing has acquired almost totemic significance. The switch from pounds to dollars after the Second World War has come to symbolise sterling's demise as a world reserve currency.

If the dollar were ever displaced by the euro, it would lose the enormous freedom it now enjoys in running macro-economic policy. Washington would also forfeit the privilege of exchanging dollar notes for imports, worth an estimated 0.5pc of GDP.

Maxim Shein, from BrokerKreditService in Moscow, said the switch to euros makes sense for Russia since it supplies half of Europe's energy needs. But the move is also part of a global realignment stemming from the Iraq war, which threw Russia, Germany and France together into a new Triple Entente.

"Abandoning the dollar is tantamount to a curtsey to the EU," he said. For now, IMF figures show the dollar remains king, accounting for 68pc of foreign reserves worldwide compared with 13pc for the euro.

"Iraq: More Spin, Bureaucracy" -- editorial, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 10/11/03:

When the White House announced it was reorganizing its approach to reconstructing Iraq, the obvious conclusion was that President Bush now understands things aren't going well there. At every opportunity, he says they are, but they're not. On one hand, it's encouraging that he finally seems to grasp that. On the other, his prescribed solution is a monumental disappointment.

The reorganization plan calls for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to chair an Iraq Stabilization Group, which the White House described as a coordinator "of interagency efforts, as well as providing a support group" to the Pentagon and its chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer. "Stabilization" is an interesting word for the White House to use; it implies that the situation now is unstable.

What went unsaid, but has been abundantly clear this week, is that Rice's appointment was an attempt to end the fighting between the Pentagon and the State Department over Iraq policy. As one Washington insider said, it's like when two kids are fighting over a toy and a parent comes into the room. The toy gets taken away, and things settle down.

Also clear is that this was a stinging defeat for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rice referred to prior conversations about the reorganization with Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet. But Rumsfeld angrily denied having such conversations or being involved in planning the new structure. His pique is an indication of just how much he's on the outs with the White House, the State Department, and even his neocon friends, over his approach to rebuilding Iraq.

So you have a mess in Washington and in Iraq. The answer surely isn't to add another level of bureaucracy in Washington. What's needed are wiser heads, and a lot of them, from a lot of countries, on the ground in Baghdad.

That's what the Bush administration appeared to seek a week ago when it offered a new draft resolution it hoped to get endorsed by the U.N. Security Council, which would lead the way to truly internationalizing the rebuilding effort in Iraq. The new draft gave little ground on U.S. control in Iraq, however, and brought scathing responses from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, France, Germany and Russia. Soft-spoken, usually circumspect Annan flat out said he would not risk the lives of more personnel for the marginal U.N. role outlined in the draft resolution.

With creation of the Iraq Stabilization Group just a couple of days later, the White House was thumbing its nose at the Security Council and signaling that it has given up on getting U.N. support in Iraq. The effort won't be internationalized; it will be bureaucratized.

"Tax Revenue at 44-Year Low in Proportion to U.S. Economy" -- Jonathan Weisman in The Washington Post, 10/11/03:

Federal tax receipts relative to the overall economy have reached their lowest level since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, while government spending has climbed to the highest point since Bill Clinton declared the era of big government over, according to new figures released by the Congressional Budget Office.

The CBO closed its books on the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 with a report that presents a mixed picture of the federal government's financial position. Although it documented a large fiscal imbalance that's expected to grow, the report from Congress' nonpartisan budget scorekeeper also showed how the economy's building strength helped reduce the near-term growth rate of the federal budget deficit. . . .

As a snapshot of the government's fiscal health, 2003 invited historic comparisons. The $374 billion deficit surpassed the previous record of $290 billion set in 1992, although it was shy of the 1992 level after adjustment for inflation.

A sluggish economy and three successive tax cuts pushed 2003 tax receipts to $1.78 trillion, $70 billion less than in the previous year. Expressed as percentage of the economy, the federal tax take fell to 16.6 percent, the lowest level since 1959.

Tax revenue has now fallen for three successive years, which hasn't happened since the Great Depression. Since receipts peaked in 2000, they have fallen by $242 billion, or 12 percent.

Last year, corporate tax receipts fell by 11.1 percent, just 1.2 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. That is the lowest since 1983, and the second lowest since 1936. Since they peaked in 2000, corporate tax payments have plunged nearly 29 percent.

Individual income taxes fell by 7.5 percent last year and are off 21 percent from their 2000 peak. Only Medicare and Social Security taxes have continued to climb since the boom years of the 1990s, and that money -- which politicians pledged to save -- is financing other parts of the government.

"It is revenue collection which dropped off a cliff," [White House Budget Director Joshua B.] Bolten said.

Federal spending -- driven by war and rising health care costs -- has been on the opposite trajectory. Spending rose $146 billion, or 7.3 percent, from 2002, to $2.16 trillion. In 2003, spending equaled 20.3 percent of the economy, the highest level since 1996, when Clinton hailed the end of big government in his State of the Union address.

Those numbers may understate the surge in spending since historically low interest rates have cut the cost of interest payments on the $3.9 trillion federal debt held by the public, the CBO said. Excluding the fall in interest payments, federal spending rose 8.9 percent last year.

The two big federal health insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid, grew by 8.4 percent in 2003, a cause for concern, Bolten conceded.

But the real driver on the spending side was the military, which consumed $389 billion in 2003, a 17.2 percent increase in a single year. That was the fastest growth rate in 20 years, the CBO said, and more than double the average 7 percent growth in non-defense programs.

Since Bush took office, military spending has increased 34 percent, and is up 50 percent since 1999, when military spending totaled $261 billion.

"Myths of the 2002 Election" -- Ruy Teixeira at tompaine.com, 10/9/2003:

[T]he Voter News Service (VNS) exit poll (now defunct) went into a massive meltdown during the election day of 2002 and the results of the exit poll were not used at the time in any election projections, or released in any other way. However, that meltdown was not because the data collected were faulty, but rather because the computer system designed to process the data and make the appropriate projections crashed and burned.

So -- finally -- it has been possible for a file of the original national (though not state) data to be released by the VNS consortium for public use. Public Opinion Watch has secured a copy of these data and has been conducting analyses to clarify some of the outstanding issues of the 2002 election.

One such issue is the extent (or lack thereof) of minority support for Republicans in the 2002 election. Republicans have typically claimed that Republicans did well with minority voters in '02, especially Hispanics, and that that was one of the secrets to their success in that election, while others, like Public Opinion Watch have said this is, to put it politely, complete baloney. What do the VNS data tell us about this controversy?

Well, if we were to believe Republican pollster David Winston's article in Roll Call, the VNS data show that it is a myth that "Republicans can't attract minority voters in significant numbers". Public Opinion Watch begs to differ. The VNS 2002 data are actually completely consistent with that so-called myth. Republicans are still having huge difficulties attracting minority voters and the 2002 election was not an exception. Where the GOP did do exceptionally well was among white voters, where they received 60 percent of the white vote. That's up from 57 percent in 1998, the last off-year election and the best point of comparison, and also from 2000, where they received 56 percent of the white vote.

Winton claims, however, that the GOP had a breakthrough year among Hispanics. He cites as evidence a drop in Hispanic support for Congressional Democrats and rise in support for Republicans between 2000 and 2002. While Winston's data for '02 are wrong and exaggerate this change, it is true that the Hispanic two party House vote was 65 percent Democratic/35 percent Republican in '00 and did fall modestly to 62 percent/38 percent in '02. However, Hispanic support for House Democrats traditionally falls at least several points from a Presidential to an off-year election, so this says little about a real trend toward the Republicans. The more pertinent comparison is to 1998, the last off- year election, where Hispanics supported Democrats by 63 percent to 37 percent. So, basically, we have a shift in off-year Democratic support from 63/37 to 62/38. If that's a trend, Public Opinion Watch will eat his calculator.

Well, what about the Senate races? These were the most significant races of '02 and perhaps a pro-GOP surge can be detected here. Nope, the Senate two party vote among Hispanics was 67 percent Democratic/33 percent Republican. Governors, then? Not here, either -- Democratic support among Hispanics was a healthy 65 percent to 35 percent.

What about other minorities? Not much luck here either for the GOP. In fact, blacks and Asians both appear to have increased their support for the Democrats. The two party black vote for the House went from 89 percent Democrat/11 percent Republican in both 1998 and 2000 to a 91 percent/9 percent split in 2002. And Asians increased their support dramatically for House Democrats going from 56 percent Democratic/44 percent Republican in 1998 to 60 percent/40 percent in 2000 to 66 percent/34 percent in 2002!

Much more "progress" like this among minority voters and the GOP -- aka "the white people's party" -- will have a very limited future indeed.

"Probe Focuses on Month before Leak to Reporters" -- Walter Pincus and Mike Allen in The Washington Post, 10/12/03:

FBI agents investigating the disclosure of a CIA officer's identity have begun by examining events in the month before the leak, when the CIA, the White House and Vice President Cheney's office first were asked about former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger, according to sources familiar with the probe.

The name of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, a clandestine case officer, was revealed in a July 14 column by Robert D. Novak that quoted two unidentified senior administration officials.

In their interviews, FBI agents are asking questions about events going back to at least early June, the sources said. That indicates investigators are examining not just who passed the information to Novak and other reporters but also how Plame's name may have first become linked with Wilson and his mission, who did it and how the information made its way around the government.

Administration sources said they believe that the officials who discussed Plame were not trying to expose her, but were using the information as a tool to try to persuade reporters to ignore Wilson. The officials wanted to convince the reporters that he had benefited from nepotism in being chosen for the mission.

What started as political gossip and damage control has become a major criminal investigation that has already harmed the administration and could be a problem for President Bush for months to come.

One reason investigators are looking back is that even before Novak's column appeared, government officials had been trying for more than a month to convince journalists that Wilson's mission was not as important as it was being portrayed. Wilson concluded during the 2002 mission that there was no solid evidence for the administration's assertion that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium in Niger to develop nuclear weapons, and he angered the White House when he became an outspoken critic of the war.

The FBI is trying to determine when White House officials and members of the vice president's staff first focused on Wilson and learned about his wife's employment at the agency. One group that may have known of the connection before that time is the handful of CIA officers detailed to the White House, where they work primarily on the National Security Council staff. A former NSC staff member said one or more of those officers may have been aware of the Plame-Wilson relationship. . . .

The first public mention of Wilson's mission to Niger, albeit without identifying him by name, was in the New York Times on May 6, in a column by Nicholas D. Kristof. Kristof had been on a panel with Wilson four days earlier, when the former ambassador said State Department officials should know better than to say the United States had been duped by forged documents that allegedly had proved a deal for the uranium had been in the works between Iraq and Niger.

Wilson said he told Kristof about his trip to Niger on the condition that Kristof must keep his name out of the column. When the column appeared, it created little public stir, though it set a number of reporters on the trail of the anonymous former ambassador. Kristof confirmed that account.

The column mentioned the alleged role of the vice president's office for the first time. That was when Cheney aides became aware of Wilson's mission and they began asking questions about him within the government, according to an administration official.

In the meantime, Wilson was pressing his case. He briefed two congressional committees conducting inquiries into why the president had mentioned the uranium allegation in his Jan. 28 State of the Union address. He also began making frequent television appearances.

In early June, Wilson told his story to The Washington Post on the condition that his name be withheld. On June 12, The Post published a more complete account than Kristof's of Wilson's trip. Wilson has now given permission to The Post to identify him as one source for that article.

By that time, officials in the White House, Cheney's office, the CIA and the State Department were familiar with Wilson and his mission to Niger.

Starting that week, the officials repeatedly played down the importance of Wilson's trip and its findings, saying it had been authorized within the CIA's nonproliferation section at a low level without requiring the approval of senior agency officials. No one brought up Wilson's wife, and her employment at the agency was not known at the time the article was published. . . .

On July 6, Wilson went public. In an interview published in The Post, Wilson accused the administration of "misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war." In an opinion article the same day in the New York Times, he wrote that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." . . .

That same week, two top White House officials disclosed Plame's identity to least six Washington journalists, an administration official told The Post for an article published Sept. 28. The source elaborated on the conversations last week, saying that officials brought up Plame as part of their broader case against Wilson.

"It was unsolicited," the source said. "They were pushing back. They used everything they had."

Novak has said he began interviewing Bush officials about Wilson shortly after July 6, asking why such an outspoken Bush policy critic was picked for the Niger mission. Novak reported that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA on weapons of mass destruction and that she was the person who suggested Wilson for the job.

Officials have said Wilson, a former ambassador to Gabon and National Security Council senior director for African affairs, was not chosen because of his wife.

On July 12, two days before Novak's column, a Post reporter was told by an administration official that the White House had not paid attention to the former ambassador's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction. Plame's name was never mentioned and the purpose of the disclosure did not appear to be to generate an article, but rather to undermine Wilson's report.

After Novak's column appeared, several high-profile reporters told Wilson that they had received calls from White House officials drawing attention to his wife's role. Andrea Mitchell of NBC News said she received one of those calls.

Wilson said another reporter called him on July 21 and said he had just hung up with Bush's senior adviser, Karl Rove. The reporter quoted Rove as describing Wilson's wife as "fair game," Wilson said. Newsweek has identified that reporter as MSNBC television host Chris Matthews. Spokespeople said Matthews was unavailable for comment.

McClellan, the White House spokesman, has denied that Rove was involved in leaking classified material but has refused to discuss the possibility of a campaign to call attention to the revelations in Novak's column.

"America Returns to UN for Support over Iraq as EU Rebuffs Cash Pleas" -- Stephen Castle and Andrew Buncombe in The Independent, 10/14/03:

In an effort to secure financial and military support for its occupation of Iraq, the United States has proposed a deadline of mid December for the country's Governing Council to draw up a timetable for elections and a new constitution.

A new draft resolution circulated by the US to members of the United Nations Security Council also contains language that emphasises the importance of Iraqi representatives on the Council in helping the transition. But the concessions stop short of guaranteeing a central role for the UN in the future of the country.

The new resolution, on which the US could seek a vote as early as today, is the latest effort by Washington to secure international support ? money and troops ? for the ongoing occupation and reconstruction. Earlier drafts were criticised by many European countries that want the UN to have a more central role and a timetable outlining a prompt handover of power to Iraqis.

America's difficulty in obtain-ing this support was underlined yesterday in Luxembourg, where Britain was alone in pledging an additional ?375m (?264m). With time running out before a donor conference on Iraqi reconstruction next week, the US ? and its co-sponsors, the UK and Spain ? hope the resolution will persuade more countries to contribute. But in the absence of an agreement, EU countries rebuffed British requests to put cash on the table at a foreign ministers' meeting yesterday. Several countries that are certain to provide cash, such as Italy and Spain, declined to show their hand.

"Put the Patriot Act to Good Use -- on the White House Leak" -- Dante Chinni in The Christian Science Monitor, 10/14/03:

WASHINGTON ? Pity President Bush. He may be the most powerful man on earth, running the most disciplined White House in recent memory, but when it comes to finding the source of the leak that has this town buzzing, he's as helpless as the rest of us, he says.

All he knows, he says, is what we know. Sometime in July two "senior administration officials" called a half-dozen journalists and leaked to them the identity of an undercover CIA officer. One, columnist Robert Novak, ran with the story and made that identity known to the public at large. For a public official to leak this information, it turns out, is a violation of federal law, and now the CIA is angry and the Justice Department is investigating.

The president is reportedly furious over the news. He hates leaks and wants to find out the source, he says, but his hands are tied. Without the reporters revealing who their source was, he's not sure the leaker will ever be found. "This is a large administration," he told reporters last week with a chuckle. . . .

How to find such a person? It turns out, the administration may have an ally in its hunt. The Patriot Act, the anti terrorism law this administration has fought for and defended, could be used. Viet Dinh, a former assistant attorney general and one of the act's architects, says, "The normal investigative tools contained in Title II of the act may well apply to a leak investigation, such as the voice mail subpoena authority or perhaps the electronic trap and trace authority." The question, he says, is whether the facts of the case will prompt its use.

Of course, the law has already been used in several cases that have nothing to do with terrorism - from white-collar crime to blackmail. All of which suggests that even if you don't like the Patriot Act (and many on the right and the left don't) it's hard to argue against its being used here.

This is a test for the Justice Department and this administration as a whole. Over the past decade, as the Clinton scandals swirled in this town, there has been one consistent theme: Denials aren't enough. Accusations demand investigation. If that was true in the case of an Arkansas landdeal gone bad, it is doubly true here, where the stakes are higher - the CIA officer is home, but the network of contacts she established is potentially compromised.

The president has run a tight ship for three years. His staff has been loyal and on message. If leaks really aren't to be tolerated, he has to do more than throw his hands in the air and say, "The press won't tell me." He needs to push the investigation further - no matter where it leads.

"Studies: 383,000 Missing Votes in Recall, Most in Punch Cards" -- AP story in USA Today, 10/10/03:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- More than 380,000 ballots cast in the recall election did not have a valid vote on whether to recall Gov. Gray Davis, and most of them were made on punch card systems, according to two independent studies.

Even if the 4.6% of Californians whose ballots did not answer the recall question had voted against it, Davis would have lost. The recall passed by a margin of 10.8%, and Republican actor Arnold Schwarzenegger enjoyed a comfortable victory.

But California's anomalies could resonate nationwide, as counties scramble to modernize election equipment to qualify for federal funding in the 2002 Help America Vote Act.

In Los Angeles County, nearly 9% of people who cast ballots on punch card voting machines -- more than 175,000 ballots -- did not register a vote on whether to recall Davis, researchers said.

Voters either abstained from the recall question or disqualified their selection by voting both "yes" and "no."

"It's inconceivable that one in 11 people in Los Angeles went to the polls and did not cast a vote on the recall," said Henry E. Brady, professor of political science and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who conducted one study.

By contrast, almost every response to the recall counted in Alameda County, which uses an electronic touch-screen system. The 0.7% of countywide responses without an answer to the recall question were likely cast by absentee ballot using the optical scan method, said Alameda County assistant registrar Elaine Ginnold.

Harvard University research fellow Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, who conducted the other study, concluded that many of the 383,000 ballots that didn't answer the recall question had their selections erased by malfunctioning machines.

Alfie Charles, vice president of business development at Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems, which prints the punch cards for Votomatic machines, said the suggestion the machines were broken was "so far off base it has no credibility whatsoever."

"Some people clearly want to abstain to express their opinion," Charles said. "It's dangerous territory to analyze those numbers." . . .

The number of residual votes on punch card machines totaled 297,775, or 6.3% of the votes; the total on optical scan machines was 72,190, or 2.7%; and the total for touch screen machines was 13,181, or 1.5%. . . .

"They were playing with fire in this election, and it's a good thing the margins weren't close," said Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the ACLU of Southern California. "I hope this puts to rest claims that these (punch card) machines have any place in a democracy."

"All the President's Votes?" -- Andrew Gumbel in The Independent, 10/13/03 (reproduced at commondreams.org):

Last November . . . [Georgia] became the first in the country to conduct an election entirely with touchscreen voting machines, after lavishing $54m (?33m) on a new system that promised to deliver the securest, most up-to-date, most voter-friendly election in the history of the republic. The machines, however, turned out to be anything but reliable. With academic studies showing the Georgia touchscreens to be poorly programmed, full of security holes and prone to tampering, and with thousands of similar machines from different companies being introduced at high speed across the country, computer voting may, in fact, be US democracy's own 21st-century nightmare.

More News — October 1-15, 2003 Read More »

Harpers Weekly Review, 9/2/03

"Powell and Joint Chiefs Nudged Bush Toward U.N." -- Dana Milbank and Thomas E. Ricks in The Washington Post, 9/4/03:

On Tuesday, President Bush's first day back in the West Wing after a month at his ranch, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell walked into the Oval Office to present something close to a fait accompli.

In what was billed as a routine session, Powell told Bush that they had to go to the United Nations with a resolution seeking a U.N.-sanctioned military force in Iraq -- something the administration had resisted for nearly five months. Powell, whose department had long favored such an action, informed the commander in chief that the military brass supported the State Department's position despite resistance by the Pentagon's civilian leadership. Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, whose office had been slow to embrace the U.N. resolution, quickly agreed, according to administration officials who described the episode.

Thus was a long and high-stakes bureaucratic struggle resolved, with the combined clout of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department persuading a reluctant White House that the administration's Iraq occupation policy, devised by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, simply was not working.

The effort by Powell and the military began with a tête-á-tête in Qatar on July 27 between the top U.S. commander in Iraq and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was furthered in a discussion between the Joint Chiefs chairman and Bush at the president's ranch on Aug. 8. And it was cemented in the past 10 days after Powell's deputy, Richard L. Armitage, went public with the proposal.

For an administration that prides itself on centralized, top-down control, the decision to change course in Iraq was uncharacteristically loose and decentralized. As described by officials in the White House, State Department and Pentagon, the White House was the last to sign on to the new approach devised by the soldiers and the diplomats. "The [Pentagon] civilians had been saying we didn't need any more troops, and the military brass had backed them," a senior administration official said. "Powell's a smart guy, and he knew that as soon as he had the brass behind him, that is very tough to ignore." . . .

A diplomat at the United Nations who closely followed the evolution of the U.S. position said the "spark" for this week's decision was a meeting between Powell and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan at the United Nations on Aug. 21, two days after the car-bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. The diplomat said Annan made it clear in that meeting that "the best feasible option was a multinational force under U.S. command," a notion that Powell believed he could sell in part because of the turn of events in Iraq. The idea of a U.S.-led multinational coalition with a U.N. mandate was broached publicly for the first time on Aug. 26 by Deputy Secretary of State Armitage.

The White House was taken by surprise. "The floating of this idea was not expected by the White House," a senior administration official said. "It is very rare that an idea catches the White House by surprise, then is so quickly adopted." . . .

People close to the administration said the Joint Chiefs and Powell (a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs) did not win a bureaucratic battle as much as Rumsfeld lost one. "Rumsfeld lost credibility with the White House because he screwed up the postwar planning," said William Kristol, a conservative publisher with close ties to the administration. "For five months they let Rumsfeld have his way, and for five months Rumsfeld said everything's fine. He wanted to do the postwar with fewer troops than a lot of people advised, and it turned out to be a mistake."

Pentagon spokesmen said there would be no official Defense Department comment for this report.

"EPA Duo Land Private Jobs" -- Seth Borenstein in The St. Paul Pioneer Press, 9/4/03:

WASHINGTON Two top Environmental Protection Agency officials who were involved deeply in easing an air-pollution rule for old power plants just took private-sector jobs with firms that benefit from the changes.

Days after the changes in the power-plant pollution rule were announced last week, John Pemberton, the chief of staff in the EPA's air and radiation office, told colleagues he would be joining Southern Co., an Atlanta-based utility that's the nation's No. 2 power-plant polluter and was a driving force in lobbying for the rule changes. Southern Co., which gave more than $3.4 million in political contributions over the past four years while it sought the changes, hired Pemberton as director of federal affairs.

Ed Krenik, who had been the EPA's associate administrator for congressional affairs, started work Tuesday at Bracewell & Patterson, a top Houston-based law firm that coordinated lobbying for several utilities on easing the power-plant pollution rule.

The firm's Washington office also served as home base and shares staff with the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, which was created by several utilities, including Southern Co., to be the public voice favoring the rule changes the EPA just enacted.

EPA chief spokeswoman Lisa Harrison said neither Pemberton nor Krenik played a major role in the rule changes, which allow more than 500 older power plants to upgrade without adding pollution-control devices. She said Pemberton "played a minimal role on (the rule change) in the past 2� years."

Krenik said he had nothing to do with writing the rule; his duties were confined to selling it on Capitol Hill, where he has been promoting it for months.

"If I was the person writing the rule, I would say you might have something to say about conflict," Krenik said.

But others who are knowledgeable about the rule change said both men were key. Pemberton was one of three top people involved, said Bill Becker, executive director of the State and Territorial Air Polluter Program Administrators, a Washington group that represents state and local air regulators.

"His role was significant and was huge," Becker said. "Pemberton was the guy behind the scenes that worked very closely on this rule."

One former EPA official in a Republican administration agreed, but spoke only on the condition that he not be identified. "I find it incredible" to hear that Pemberton played only a minimal role, the official said.

"Hussein Link to 9/11 Lingers in Many Minds " -- Dana Milbank and Claudia Deane in The Washington Post, 9/6/03:

Nearing the second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, seven in 10 Americans continue to believe that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had a role in the attacks, even though the Bush administration and congressional investigators say they have no evidence of this.

Sixty-nine percent of Americans said they thought it at least likely that Hussein was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to the latest Washington Post poll. That impression, which exists despite the fact that the hijackers were mostly Saudi nationals acting for al Qaeda, is broadly shared by Democrats, Republicans and independents. . . .

In follow-up interviews, poll respondents were generally unsure why they believed Hussein was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, often describing it as an instinct that came from news reports and their long-standing views of Hussein. For example, Peter Bankers, 59, a New York film publicist, figures his belief that Hussein was behind the attacks "has probably been fed to me in some PR way," but he doesn't know how. "I think that the whole group of people, those with anti-American feelings, they all kind of cooperated with each other," he said.

Similarly, Kim Morrison, 32, a teacher from Plymouth, Ind., described her belief in Hussein's guilt as a "gut feeling" shaped by television. "From what we've heard from the media, it seems like what they feel is that Saddam and the whole al Qaeda thing are connected," she said. . . .

The Post poll, conducted Aug. 7-11, found that 62 percent of Democrats, 80 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of independents suspected a link between Hussein and 9/11. In addition, eight in 10 Americans said it was likely that Hussein had provided assistance to al Qaeda, and a similar proportion suspected he had developed weapons of mass destruction.

Harpers Weekly Review, 9/9/03

"France and Germany Seek Full UN Control over Iraq" -- Patrick Wintour in The Guardian, 9/10/03:

France and Germany will back the new UN resolution on Iraq sought by President George Bush only if the proposal gives the UN full political rule over the country.

The countries have also demanded a clear programme for returning power to Iraqis.

The high price sought by the French suggests that Mr Bush is going to struggle to win UN agreement ahead of his planned speech to the security council on September 24. Foreign ministers of the five permanent members are due to meet the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, in Geneva this weekend to try to find common ground.

Paris wants the UN to run Iraq temporarily on the model of Afghanistan, but insists its proposals do not represent an attempt to settle scores over the unilateral action by the US and Britain in Iraq.

France and Germany will accept the authority of the 25-strong governing council of Iraq, even though its membership was largely handpicked by the Anglo-US provisional authority. France believes the handover needs to be quick since many Iraqis fail to distinguish between US and UN control of the country.

Mr Bush has already tabled a draft resolution to leave US in full control of the coalition military, and give the UN only limited authority.

French sources insist they will approach the talks constructively, and not attempt to humiliate the US over its inability to restore order after the invasion. . . .

[France] remains sceptical of the idea that Britain is wielding significant influence over the new conservative mood in Washington. It has been suggested that No 10 saw the draft US resolution only a couple of days before it was circulated to security council members.

France is also seeking greater UN control of Iraqi oil revenues.

"Bush Backers Fear Iraq's Political Effect" -- Dana Milbank in The Washington Post, 9/10/03:

Bush has not taken a question from reporters since Aug. 22. In those 18 days, escalating attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq led the administration to request another $87 billion and to reconsider its resistance to a United Nations force. Bush's Middle East peace plan has been tossed aside with the resignation of Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and a resumption of killings, including two suicide bombings in Israel today. Meanwhile, reports have shown the economy losing jobs and the 2004 federal deficit approaching $600 billion.

"Goodbye to All That" -- John Cassidy in The New Yorker, 9/15/03 (posted online 8/8/03):

What impact do budget deficits have on the economy? Many people assume that all deficits are bad, but that's not necessarily true. In an economic downturn, when taxpayers get laid off and social expenditures rise, deficit spending can actually be helpful. Even during a period of economic expansion, the government can sensibly decide to run a modest deficit in order to finance education, scientific research, and other areas that the private sector refuses to invest in. Deficits are dangerous when they are used to finance unproductive schemes (such as tax cuts for the rich), and when there's no end in sight. Investors tend to be wary of such deficits, and demand a higher return for lending their money to the government concerned. The result is that interest rates generally rise, which rattles the stock market and chokes off spending by consumers and firms.

The Bush deficit satisfies all the requirements for a dangerous deficit. It is big and wasteful, and isn't even an efficient way of stimulating the economy, since the wealthy tend to hoard their tax savings rather than spend them. Moreover, the deficit won?t disappear even when the economy is growing steadily. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international research group, the so-called "structural budget balance," which strips out the impact of the cycle, has gone from a surplus of 0.9 per cent of G.D.P. in 2000 to a deficit of four per cent of G.D.P. in 2003.

It's a figure that's likely to increase. Many of the Bush Administration's giveaways, such as the cut in dividend taxes and the abolition of the estate tax, are "back-loaded," which means the really big handouts won't get distributed until 2008, or later. As it happens, 2008 is also the year that the aging of the population will start to deplete the Treasury. In 2008, the first boomers will be able to pick up their Social Security checks; three years later, they will become eligible for Medicare. Unless the retirement programs are reformed (and there's little sign of that happening), the aging of the boomers will have a crushing effect on the federal government's finances.

"Repeal All Bush's Tax Cuts" -- Timothy Noah at slate.com, 9/11/03

"House Broken" -- Matthew Yglesias at The American Prospect Online, 9/10/03:

Throughout the Bush recession and the ensuing jobless recovery, the one consistent source of good economic news has been from the housing market. The value of the average home increased 6.48 percent in the 12-month period ending on March 31, and it is up a hefty 38.04 percent over the past five years. This continuing strength has given homeowners a cushion in the value of their assets during an era of declining stock portfolios. It has also provided construction jobs during a catastrophic period for employment in the manufacturing sector.

This has been good news for families who own homes. But the millions of Americans who rent their homes -- a disproportionately poor, disproportionately young group -- face an increasingly bleak situation. A new report released Monday by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) reveals that the national housing wage (the amount of money per hour a full-time worker would need to make in order to rent a two-bedroom apartment on less than 30 percent of his or her income) for 2003 stands at $15.21, a 3.75 percent increase over 2002. Overall, the housing wage has increased 37 percent since the coalition began collecting comprehensive data in 1999.

The report comes out just four days after members of the Senate Appropriations Committee joined their House colleagues in endorsing the Bush administration's request to cut funding for the housing vouchers program -- the federal government's main means of addressing the issue -- by providing $900 million less than the Congressional Budget Office estimates will be necessary to continue the program at its current level.

As a result, more than 100,000 vouchers authorized by current law will go unfunded in the coming year. This will swell the ranks of the roughly 5 million households that, according to the most recent census data, must choose between spending more than half their incomes in rent and utilities or living in seriously substandard accommodations.

"Dizzying Dive to Red Ink Poses Stark Choices for Washington" -- David Firestone in The New York Times, 9/14/03:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 -- When President Bush informed the nation last Sunday night that remaining in Iraq next year will cost another $87 billion, many of those who will actually pay that bill were unable to watch. They had already been put to bed by their parents.

Administration officials acknowledged the next day that every dollar of that cost will be borrowed, a loan that economists say will be repaid by the next generation of taxpayers and the generation after that. The $166 billion cost of the work so far in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has stunned many in Washington, will be added to what was already the largest budget deficit the nation has ever known. . . .

The budget was upended by what economists now say were three independent forces gathering in power at once: a steep economic decline, a political consensus to slash taxes and the effects of the 2001 terrorist attacks. The surplus disappeared, replaced the next year with a budget deficit that has since grown to a record size. The $5.6 trillion surplus once predicted for the 10 years ending in 2011 is now a $2.3 trillion cumulative deficit under the best-case prediction issued by the Congressional Budget Office two weeks ago.

The $8 trillion difference between those numbers has little precedent in American history. The long-term budget forecast has declined as much in the last two years as the total revenue collected by the United States government from 1789 to 1983. . . .

The current fiscal year, which ends this month, was supposed to have ended with a surplus of $353 billion, the Congressional Budget Office predicted two years ago; today, the office says the year will end in a $401 billion deficit. Next year's deficit was projected to be $480 billion, but the new Iraq spending will bring that to $540 billion or higher -- close to the 5 percent of the gross domestic product that many experts warn is a serious danger zone for the economy. . . .

This course prompted the Congressional Budget Office to issue an unusual warning in its forecast last month: If Congressional Republicans and the administration get their wish and extend all the tax cuts now scheduled to expire, and if they pass a limited prescription drug benefit for Medicare and keep spending at its current level, the deficit by 2013 will have built up to $6.2 trillion. Once the baby boomers begin retiring at the end of this decade, the office said, that course will lead either to drastically higher taxes, severe spending cuts or "unsustainable levels of debt."

The long-term effect of the budget's imbalance was the reason the deficit was the leading concern in a survey of economists last month by the National Association for Business Economics, topping even unemployment. Deficits can be useful in stimulating a lethargic economy, but if they persist for years, they could push up interest rates and impose huge costs on Social Security and Medicare at precisely the moment that the baby boom generation will begin expecting its retirement benefits. The Committee for Economic Development, a group of business executives, warned earlier this year that persistent deficits could lead, for the first time in the nation's history, to a lower living standard for future generations. . . .

Economists in and out of government have begun studying the budget's plunge as a significant phenomenon in financial history, and reject the partisan contentions in Washington that the deficit can be blamed on any single factor, like the tax cuts or the 9/11 attacks. The biggest reason for this year's deficit, they say, has been the recession, while the tax cuts and military-related spending will have a much greater effect on the long-term deficit. Tax cuts alone will grow from 26 percent to 44 percent of the decline in 2011, according to the Brookings-Urban Tax Policy Center. What has been remarkable, economists say, is that all three forces combined at once beginning in 2001 to utterly change the government's financial outlook.

"Everyman, with a Voice" -- Peter Guralnick in The New York Times, 9/14/03:

John Cash ("Johnny" was Sam Phillips's bow to the marketplace) grew up in the federal "colony" of Dyess, Ark., "a social experiment with a socialist set-up, really," as Cash described it, "that was done by President Roosevelt for farmers that had lost out during the Depression." One of his most vivid memories of Dyess was the day that Eleanor Roosevelt came to town to dedicate the library, a momentous occasion not simply for the glimpse it afforded of Mrs. Roosevelt but for the opportunity it subsequently afforded him to indulge in what would become a lifelong passion for reading. He read James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott in particular at that time, and everything he could find on the American Indian ? not so much to escape as in the spirit of discovery. And he carried this exploratory spirit with him into the world, a world in which he achieved a degree of celebrity and fame far beyond anything that he might ever have imagined, and long past the point that most people would gladly have settled for the simple definition of success.

Harpers Weekly Review, 9/16/03

"US Vetoes UN Arafat Resolution" -- BBC, 9/17/03:

The United States has vetoed a draft resolution at the UN Security Council denouncing Israel's decision to "remove" the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.

US Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte said the resolution was "flawed" because it did not include a "robust condemnation of acts of terrorism".

The draft resolution, backed by Arab states, demanded that Israel "desist from any act of deportation and cease any threat to the safety of the elected president of the Palestinian Authority".

It followed a statement by Israel's security cabinet last week denouncing Mr Arafat as an "obstacle to peace" and saying he should be removed - although the cabinet did not say how or when it would do so.

And at the weekend Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert added that his government had not ruled out killing Mr Arafat. . . .

The US was the only one of the 15 countries on the Security Council to oppose the resolution.

"Saudis Consider Nuclear Bomb" -- Ewen MacAskill and Ian Traynor in The Guardian, 9/18/03:

Saudi Arabia, in response to the current upheaval in the Middle East, has embarked on a strategic review that includes acquiring nuclear weapons, the Guardian has learned.

This new threat of proliferation in one of the most dangerous regions of the world comes on top of a crisis over Iran's alleged nuclear programme. . . .

United Nations officials and nuclear arms analysts said the Saudi review reflected profound insecurities generated by the volatility in the Middle East, Riyadh's estrangement with Washington and the weakening of its reliance on the US nuclear umbrella.

They pointed to the Saudi worries about an Iranian prog-ramme and to the absence of any international pressure on Israel, which has an estimated 200 nuclear devices.

"Our antennae are up," said a senior UN official watching worldwide nuclear proliferation efforts. "The international community can rest assured we do keep track of such events if they go beyond talk."

Saudi Arabia does not regard Iran, a past adversary with which Riyadh has restored relations, as a direct threat. But it is unnerved by the possibility of Iran and Israel having nuclear weapons.

Riyadh is also worried about a string of apparent leaks in American papers from the US administration critical of Saudi Arabia.

"Truth: Too Little of It on Iraq" -- editorial, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 9/17/03:

Dick Cheney is not a public relations man for the Bush administration, not a spinmeister nor a political operative. He's the vice president of the United States, and when he speaks in public, which he rarely does, he owes the American public the truth.

In his appearance on "Meet the Press" Sunday, Cheney fell woefully short of truth. On the subject of Iraq, the same can be said for President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. But Cheney is the latest example of administration mendacity, and therefore a good place to start in holding the administration accountable. . . .

To explore every phony statement in the vice president's "Meet the Press" interview would take far more space than is available. This merely points out some of the most egregious examples. Opponents of the war are fond of saying that "Bush lied and our soldiers died." In fact, they'd have reason to assert that "Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz lied and our soldiers died." It's past time the principals behind this mismanaged war were called to account for their deliberate misstatements.

"Cheney's Conflict with the Truth" -- Derrick Z. Jackson in The Boston Globe, 9/19/03:

ON "MEET THE PRESS" last Sunday, Vice President Dick Cheney said, "Since I left Halliburton to become George Bush's vice president, I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interests. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had now, for over three years."

That is the latest White House lie.

Within 48 hours, Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey pointed reporters toward Cheney's public financial disclosure sheets filed with the US Office of Government Ethics. The sheets show that in 2002, Cheney received $162,392 in deferred salary from Halliburton, the oil and military contracting company he ran before running for vice president. In 2001, Cheney received $205,298 in deferred salary from Halliburton.

The 2001 salary was more than Cheney's vice presidential salary of $198,600. Cheney also is still holding 433,333 stock options. . . .

Five years ago, America was in a tizzy over President Clinton's "That depends on what the meaning of is, is." That was over lying about sex. For that, Clinton was impeached. Now, we have a vice president who tells America he has severed his ties even as his umbilical cord doubles his salary. To him, it depends what the meaning of i$, i$.

We know what the meaning of i$, i$ to Halliburton. It is by far the largest beneficiary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. With no-bid, no-ceiling contracts, the company has already amassed $2 billion in work. It is doing everything from restoring oil facilities to providing toilets for troops. A year ago Halliburton was staring at nearly a half-billion dollars in losses. In the second quarter of 2003 it posted a profit of $26 million.

Clinton will be forever tarnished for "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." Dick Cheney's continuing salary from the top profiteer of an invasion fueled by his sexed-up claims of Saddam Hussein's weapons is the creation of a new, mad reality. Cheney has said in so many words, "I did not have financial relations with Halliburton." Americans must determine whether that lie is as sexy as lies about sex. With nearly 300 American soldiers dead, one would hope so.

"Mistakes of Vietnam Repeated with Iraq" -- Max Cleland in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 9/18/03:

Unfortunately, the people who drove the engine to get into the war in Iraq never served in Vietnam. Not the president. Not the vice president. Not the secretary of defense. Not the deputy secretary of defense. Too bad. . . .

Instead of learning the lessons of Vietnam, where all of the above happened, the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense and the deputy secretary of defense have gotten this country into a disaster in the desert.

They attacked a country that had not attacked us. They did so on intelligence that was faulty, misrepresented and highly questionable.

A key piece of that intelligence was an outright lie that the White House put into the president's State of the Union speech. These officials have overextended the American military, including the National Guard and the Reserve, and have expanded the U.S. Army to the breaking point.

A quarter of a million troops are committed to the Iraq war theater, most of them bogged down in Baghdad. Morale is declining and casualties continue to increase.

In addition to the human cost, the war in dollars costs $1 billion a week, adding to the additional burden of an already depressed economy.

The president has declared "major combat over" and sent a message to every terrorist, "Bring them on." As a result, he has lost more people in his war than his father did in his and there is no end in sight.

Military commanders are left with extended tours of duty for servicemen and women who were told long ago they were going home. We are keeping American forces on the ground, where they have become sitting ducks in a shooting gallery for every terrorist in the Middle East.

Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance.

"Raw Data: Text of Bush Interview" with Brit Hume -- foxnews.com, 9/22/03:

[HUME:] Let me start off talking about Iraq. A few weeks back, when these terrorists began to appear on the scene evidently from outside, you said, "Bring 'em on." What did you mean by that?

BUSH: Well, I was really talking to our troops. I was saying to our troops in the theater that some in the region felt like they could come and take you on. Some felt like -- some terrorists, that is -- felt like they could beat us. And my point was we're plenty tough and we will take them on there.

They've chosen to fight. They, being al Qaeda types, Ansar Islam types, terrorist groups have chosen to fight American and coalition forces in Iraq. And we are prepared to battle, and we will. . . .

HUME: There are people who suggest that, look, you wouldn't have to be dealing with these people at all if you hadn't gone into Iraq. That these, in some sense, are newly recruited or newly minted terrorists. What's your view of that?

BUSH: That's probably the same type of person that says that therapy would work in convincing terrorists not to kill innocent life. There is a terrorist network that attacked us on September the 11th, 2001 that is active, that is engaged, that is trying to intimidate the civilized and free world. And this country will continue to lead a coalition against them. You know, there is -- in my judgment, the only way to deal with these terrorists is to stay on the offensive, is to find them and bring them to justice before they hurt us again.

HUME: What is your theory about what Saddam Hussein did with his weapons of mass destruction?

BUSH: I think he hid them, I think he dispersed them. I think he is so adapted at deceiving the civilized world for a long period of time that it's going to take a while for the troops to unravel. But I firmly believe he had weapons of mass destruction. I know he used them at one time, and I'm confident he had programs that would enable him to have a weapon of mass destruction at his disposal. . . .

HUME: How do you get your news?

BUSH: I get briefed by Andy Card and Condi in the morning. They come in and tell me. In all due respect, you've got a beautiful face and everything.

I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves. But like Condoleezza, in her case, the national security adviser is getting her news directly from the participants on the world stage.

HUME: Has that been your practice since day one, or is that a practice that you've...

BUSH: Practice since day one.

HUME: Really?

BUSH: Yes. You know, look, I have great respect for the media. I mean, our society is a good, solid democracy because of a good, solid media. But I also understand that a lot of times there's opinions mixed in with news. And I...

HUME: I won't disagree with that, sir.

BUSH: I appreciate people's opinions, but I'm more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world.

HUME: Mr. President, thank you very much.

BUSH: Thank you, sir.

Harpers Weekly Review, 9/23/03

"Bush Administration Is Focus of Inquiry" -- Mike Allen and Dana Priest in The Washington Post, 9/28/03:

At CIA Director George J. Tenet's request, the Justice Department is looking into an allegation that administration officials leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer to a journalist, government sources said yesterday.

The operative's identity was published in July after her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly challenged President Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to buy "yellowcake" uranium ore from Africa for possible use in nuclear weapons. Bush later backed away from the claim.

The intentional disclosure of a covert operative's identity is a violation of federal law.

The officer's name was disclosed on July 14 in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak, who said his sources were two senior administration officials.

Yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. Wilson had just revealed that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson's account touched off a political fracas over Bush's use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.

"Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak.

Sources familiar with the conversations said the leakers were seeking to undercut Wilson's credibility. They alleged that Wilson, who was not a CIA employee, was selected for the Niger mission partly because his wife had recommended him. Wilson said in an interview yesterday that a reporter had told him that the leaker said, "The real issue is Wilson and his wife."

A source said reporters quoted a leaker as describing Wilson's wife as "fair game."

The official would not name the leakers for the record and would not name the journalists. The official said there was no indication that Bush knew about the calls.

It is rare for one Bush administration official to turn on another. Asked about the motive for describing the leaks, the senior official said the leaks were "wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson's credibility."

Wilson, while refusing to confirm his wife's occupation, has suggested publicly that he believes Bush's senior adviser, Karl C. Rove, broke her cover. Wilson said Aug. 21 at a public forum in suburban Seattle that it is of keen interest to him "to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs."

"Bush Aides Say They'll Cooperate with Probe into Intelligence Leak" -- Mike Allen in The Washington Post, 9/29/03

"Does a Felon Rove the White House?" -- Amy Goodman and Jeremy Scahill, 9/30/03, at commondreams.org:

Vice President Dick Cheney's only public comments on Joe Wilson have been when questioned on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sept. 14, "I don't know Joe Wilson. I've never met Joe Wilson" and "I have no idea who hired him."

Cheney's comments strain credulity.

While technically he may have never met Wilson, the investigation into Niger was done at the request of the vice president's office. Surely, Mr. Cheney learned of this, if not before the request was made, then after, when, as the Washington Post revealed, Cheney traveled repeatedly to the CIA during 2002.

"This is not unusual. This is unprecedented," retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern told Democracy Now! "The Vice President of the United States never during [my] 27 years came out to the CIA headquarters for a working visit.. this is like inviting money-changers into the temple."

While Cheney may not know Wilson, there is little doubt he knows of him. When Cheney was helping run the Persian Gulf War, as secretary of defense, Wilson was one of the key players. As the acting US ambassador on the ground in Baghdad in the weeks leading up to the war, the White House consulted Wilson daily. In those weeks, he was the only open line of communication between Washington and Saddam Hussein. Cheney was the Secretary of Defense at the time and a key player in the day-to-day operations and intelligence gathering. Furthermore, Wilson was formally commended by the Bush administration for his bravery and heroism in the weeks leading up to the war. In that time, Wilson helped evacuate thousands of foreigners from Kuwait, negotiated the release of more than 120 American hostages and sheltered nearly 800 Americans in the embassy compound.

"Your courageous leadership during this period of great danger for American interests and American citizens has my admiration and respect. I salute, too, your skillful conduct of our tense dealings with the government of Iraq," President Bush wrote Wilson in a letter. "The courage and tenacity you have exhibited throughout this ordeal prove that you are the right person for the job."

Wilson says that he heard from people who were at meetings chaired by Bush in the lead up to the Gulf War, "When people would come up with an idea, George Bush would often lean forward and ask them, 'What does Joe Wilson say about that? What does Joe Wilson think about that?' So at the highest level of our government there was keen interest in knowing what the field was saying and Dick Cheney was probably at those meetings."

What's Cheney hiding? What's the White House hiding?

There is a scandal brewing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that if treated properly by the Department of Justice and elected officials could prove to be one of the clearest cases of documentable criminal conduct and blatant lies by an administration since Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal.

"Baldwin vs. Patriot Act" -- Madison Capital Times editorial, 9/30/03:

U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, has joined 20 other members of the House - including Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-chairs Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Lee - to sponsor legislation that would repeal those components of the Patriot Act that threaten basic liberties.

"Secret surveillance, secret searches, denial of counsel, monitoring of conversations between citizens and their attorneys or searching library and medical records are not necessary to protect Americans," says Baldwin, in reference to the troublesome powers of the Patriot Act that would be addressed by the "Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act."

The legislation Baldwin and the others propose would also prevent abusive searches by the Justice Department of educational records, restore reasonable limits on the use of wiretaps, and ensure that definitions of terrorism are not written so broadly that they would allow Ashcroft and his lieutenants to restrict legitimate political expression and activism in the United States.

In addition, it would force the federal government to follow basic legal standards when jailing people, seeking deportations and limiting employment options for noncitizens.

Many legislative and legal attempts are now being made to address the worst excesses of the Patriot Act - including several developed by conservative Republicans.

The measure Baldwin and her allies are supporting is clearly the most comprehensive legislation in this area, and it deserves quick attention from the House Judiciary Committee and broad support in the House as a whole.

However, after reading through the legislation's long list of legitimate complains about the Patriot Act's excesses, we are left with a question: Why not simply eliminate the Patriot Act and start anew to draft legislation that allows government to address legitimate terrorist threats while at the same time protecting civil rights and civil liberties?

"28 Pages" -- John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman at
The New Republic Online, 8/1/03

Since the joint congressional committee investigating September 11 issued a
censored version of its report on July 24, there's been considerable speculation
about the 28 pages blanked out from the section entitled "Certain Sensitive
National Security Matters." The section cites "specific sources of foreign
support for some of the September 11 hijackers," which most commentators have
interpreted to mean Saudi contributions to Al Qaeda-linked charities. But an
official who has read the report tells The New Republic that the support
described in the report goes well beyond that: It involves connections between
the hijacking plot and the very top levels of the Saudi royal family. "There's a
lot more in the 28 pages than money. Everyone's chasing the charities," says
this official. "They should be chasing direct links to high levels of the Saudi
government. We're not talking about rogue elements. We're talking about a
coordinated network that reaches right from the hijackers to multiple places in
the Saudi government." . . .

The Bush administration has insisted, again and again, that the war on terror
is its first priority. In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz argued, "The battle to secure the
peace in Iraq is now the central battle in the global war on terror." Wolfowitz
says this presumably because he still believes that Saddam Hussein's regime had
close ties with Al Qaeda. But it's looking more and more like the principal
theater in the war on terror lies elsewhere. The official who read the 28 pages
tells The New Republic, "If the people in the administration trying to link Iraq
to Al Qaeda had one-one-thousandth of the stuff that the 28 pages has linking a
foreign government to Al Qaeda, they would have been in good shape." He adds:
"If the 28 pages were to be made public, I have no question that the entire
relationship with Saudi Arabia would change overnight."

"Report on 9/11 Suggests a Role by Saudi Spies" -- James Risen and David Johnston in The New York Times, 8/2/03:

The classified part of a Congressional report on the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, says that two Saudi citizens who had at least indirect links with two hijackers were probably Saudi intelligence agents and may have reported to Saudi government officials, according to people who have seen the report.

These findings, according to several people who have read the report, help to explain why the classified part of the report has become so politically charged, causing strains between the United States and Saudi Arabia. Senior Saudi officials have denied any links between their government and the attacks and have asked that the section be declassified, but President Bush has refused.

People familiar with the report and who spoke on condition of not being named said that the two Saudi citizens, Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan, operated in a complex web of financial relationships with officials of the Saudi government. The sections that focus on them draw connections between the two men, two hijackers, and Saudi officials. . . .

Today, 46 Democratic senators asked that the deleted material be released, saying the national security issues Mr. Bush cited as the reason the material was classified could be addressed by careful editing. Republicans, including Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, a former Intelligence Committee chairman, have also called for its release.

Several Congressional officials familiar with the report say that only a small part of the classified section dealing with the specifics of F.B.I. counterintelligence and counterterrorism activities should remain classified. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said, "Keeping this material classified only strengthens the theory that some in the U.S. government are hellbent on covering up for the Saudis."

"Why Privatize National Parks?" -- Ruth Rosen in The San Francisco Chronicle, 8/4/03:

There may be a National Park Service employee who's testy, impatient or ignorant, but after decades of hiking in our national parks, I simply haven't met one. They always seem unfailingly gracious, eager to interpret the geologic landscape, dedicated to preserving the wilderness and, to put it mildly, madly in love with the natural world in which they work.

That's why I'm so appalled by the Bush administration's plan to privatize some 1,700 positions in the park service. Determined to run government like a corporation, eager to privatize and dismantle public services, the administration believes that private business could more cheaply do the same tasks now performed by some rangers and scientists, maintenance workers and other park employees.

In typical Bush doublespeak, money saved by replacing experienced park employees with privately contracted workers (paid lower wages and provided fewer benefits), would be used to "improve the parks."

Park employees, whose morale has been crushed by this policy, counter that replacement workers are unlikely to have the expertise or professionalism of career park service staff, who are highly skilled and cross-trained to assist each other with many different kinds of tasks.

Their opinion is shared by Bruce Babbitt and Stewart Udall, two Arizona Democrats who served as former secretaries of the Interior. Last week, they issued a scathing condemnation of the administration's proposal to privatize portions of the National Park Service and called the policy "radical," "reckless" and an "attempt to dismantle the National Park Service."

"What we would have is not national parks but amusement parks," said Bruce Babbitt, who served during two Clinton terms. Stuart Udall, who served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was equally indignant: "This is the first administration in the last century that is clearly, even admittedly, anti- conservation. I never thought I would see this. The national parks are not shopping malls to be privatized."

Some Republicans also find the idea repugnant. "There are times and places where competitive outsourcing is a good thing to do," said Craig Thomas, a Wyoming Republican and chairman of the Senate National Parks Subcommittee. "But we have to recognize the uniqueness and peculiarities of the park service. "

Right now, the House has attached a rider to the Interior funding bill that would block privatizing national parks jobs. In response, the White House, has threatened to veto the bill.

"Officials Confirm Dropping Firebombs on Iraqi Civilians" -- James W. Crawley in The San Diego Union-Tribune, 8/5/03:

American jets killed Iraqi troops with firebombs � similar to the controversial napalm used in the Vietnam War � in March and April as Marines battled toward Baghdad.

Marine Corps fighter pilots and commanders who have returned from the war zone have confirmed dropping dozens of incendiary bombs near bridges over the Saddam Canal and the Tigris River. The explosions created massive fireballs.

"We napalmed both those (bridge) approaches," said Col. James Alles in a recent interview. He commanded Marine Air Group 11, based at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, during the war. "Unfortunately, there were people there because you could see them in the (cockpit) video.

"They were Iraqi soldiers there. It's no great way to die," he added. How many Iraqis died, the military couldn't say. No accurate count has been made of Iraqi war casualties.

The bombing campaign helped clear the path for the Marines' race to Baghdad.

During the war, Pentagon spokesmen disputed reports that napalm was being used, saying the Pentagon's stockpile had been destroyed two years ago.

Apparently the spokesmen were drawing a distinction between the terms "firebomb" and "napalm." If reporters had asked about firebombs, officials said yesterday they would have confirmed their use.

What the Marines dropped, the spokesmen said yesterday, were "Mark 77 firebombs." They acknowledged those are incendiary devices with a function "remarkably similar" to napalm weapons.

Rather than using gasoline and benzene as the fuel, the firebombs use kerosene-based jet fuel, which has a smaller concentration of benzene.

Hundreds of partially loaded Mark 77 firebombs were stored on pre-positioned ammunition ships overseas, Marine Corps officials said. Those ships were unloaded in Kuwait during the weeks preceding the war.

"You can call it something other than napalm, but it's napalm," said John Pike, defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, a nonpartisan research group in Alexandria, Va.

Although many human rights groups consider incendiary bombs to be inhumane, international law does not prohibit their use against military forces. The United States has not agreed to a ban against possible civilian targets.

"Incendiaries create burns that are difficult to treat," said Robert Musil, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a Washington group that opposes the use of weapons of mass destruction.

Musil described the Pentagon's distinction between napalm and Mark 77 firebombs as "pretty outrageous."

"That's clearly Orwellian," he added. . . .

During a recent interview about the bombing campaign in Iraq, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Jim Amos confirmed aircraft dropped what he and other Marines continue to call napalm on Iraqi troops on several occasions. He commanded Marine jet and helicopter units involved in the Iraq war and leads the Miramar-based 3rd Marine Air Wing.

Miramar pilots familiar with the bombing missions pointed to at least two locations where firebombs were dropped.

Before the Marines crossed the Saddam Canal in central Iraq, jets dropped several firebombs on enemy positions near a bridge that would become the Marines' main crossing point on the road toward Numaniyah, a key town 40 miles from Baghdad.

Next, the bombs were used against Iraqis near a key Tigris River bridge, north of Numaniyah, in early April.

There were reports of another attack on the first day of the war.

Two embedded journalists reported what they described as napalm being dropped on an Iraqi observation post at Safwan Hill overlooking the Kuwait border.

Reporters for CNN and the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald were told by unnamed Marine officers that aircraft dropped napalm on the Iraqi position, which was adjacent to one of the Marines' main invasion routes.

Their reports were disputed by several Pentagon spokesmen who said no such bombs were used nor did the United States have any napalm weapons.

"'A Form of Looting': Das Akerlof-Interview im englischen Orginal" -- interview with George Akerlof at Spiegel online, 7/29/03:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So the government's just bad at doing the correct math?

Akerlof: There is a systematic reason. The government is not really telling the truth to the American people. Past administrations from the time of Alexander Hamilton have on the average run responsible budgetary policies. What we have here is a form of looting.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: If so, why's the President still popular?

Akerlof: For some reason the American people does not yet recognize the dire consequences of our government budgets. It's my hope that voters are going to see how irresponsible this policy is and are going to respond in 2004 and we're going to see a reversal.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What if that doesn't happen?

Akerlof: Future generations and even people in ten years are going to face massive public deficits and huge government debt. Then we have a choice. We can be like a very poor country with problems of threatening bankruptcy. Or we're going to have to cut back seriously on Medicare and Social Security. So the money that is going overwhelmingly to the wealthy is going to be paid by cutting services for the elderly. And people depend on those. It's only among the richest 40 percent that you begin to get households who have sizeable fractions of their own retirement income. . . .

SPIEGEL ONLINE: It seems that the current administration has politicised you in an unprecedented way. During the course of this year, you have, with other academics, signed two public declarations of protest. One against the tax cuts, the other against waging unilateral preventive war on Iraq.

Akerlof: I think this is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history. It has engaged in extraordinarily irresponsible policies not only in foreign and economic but also in social and environmental policy. This is not normal government policy. Now is the time for people to engage in civil disobedience.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Of what kind?

Akerlof: I don't know yet. But I think it's time to protest - as much as possible.

Harpers Weekly Review, 8/5/03

Al Gore's speech to Moveon.org members at New York University, 8/7/03 (Moveon.org):

The direction in which our nation is being led is deeply troubling to me -- not only in Iraq but also here at home on economic policy, social policy and environmental policy.

Millions of Americans now share a feeling that something pretty basic has gone wrong in our country and that some important American values are being placed at risk. And they want to set it right. . . .

It seems obvious that big and important issues like the Bush economic policy and the first Pre-emptive War in U.S. history should have been debated more thoroughly in the Congress, covered more extensively in the news media, and better presented to the American people before our nation made such fateful choices. But that didn't happen, and in both cases, reality is turning out to be very different from the impression that was given when the votes -- and the die -- were cast.

Since this curious mismatch between myth and reality has suddenly become commonplace and is causing such extreme difficulty for the nation's ability to make good choices about our future, maybe it is time to focus on how in the world we could have gotten so many false impressions in such a short period of time. . . .

Robust debate in a democracy will almost always involve occasional rhetorical excesses and leaps of faith, and we're all used to that. I've even been guilty of it myself on occasion. But there is a big difference between that and a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty.

Unfortunately, I think it is no longer possible to avoid the conclusion that what the country is dealing with in the Bush Presidency is the latter. That is really the nub of the problem -- the common source for most of the false impressions that have been frustrating the normal and healthy workings of our democracy.

Americans have always believed that we the people have a right to know the truth and that the truth will set us free. The very idea of self-government depends upon honest and open debate as the preferred method for pursuing the truth -- and a shared respect for the Rule of Reason as the best way to establish the truth.

The Bush Administration routinely shows disrespect for that whole basic process, and I think it's partly because they feel as if they already know the truth and aren't very curious to learn about any facts that might contradict it. They and the members of groups that belong to their ideological coalition are true believers in each other's agendas. . . .

Here is the pattern that I see: the President's mishandling of and selective use of the best evidence available on the threat posed by Iraq is pretty much the same as the way he intentionally distorted the best available evidence on climate change, and rejected the best available evidence on the threat posed to America's economy by his tax and budget proposals.

In each case, the President seems to have been pursuing policies chosen in advance of the facts -- policies designed to benefit friends and supporters -- and has used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny that is essential in our system of checks and balances.

The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to imbed in the public mind mythologies that grow out of the one central doctrine that all of the special interests agree on, which -- in its purest form -- is that government is very bad and should be done away with as much as possible -- except the parts of it that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle.

For the same reasons they push the impression that government is bad, they also promote the myth that there really is no such thing as the public interest. What's important to them is private interests. And what they really mean is that those who have a lot of wealth should be left alone, rather than be called upon to reinvest in society through taxes.

Perhaps the biggest false impression of all lies in the hidden social objectives of this Administration that are advertised with the phrase "compassionate conservatism" -- which they claim is a new departure with substantive meaning. But in reality, to be compassionate is meaningless, if compassion is limited to the mere awareness of the suffering of others. The test of compassion is action. What the administration offers with one hand is the rhetoric of compassion; what it takes away with the other hand are the financial resources necessary to make compassion something more than an empty and fading impression. . . .

If the 21st century is to be well started, we need a national agenda that is worked out in concert with the people, a healing agenda that is built on a true national consensus. Millions of Americans got the impression that George W. Bush wanted to be a "healer, not a divider", a president devoted first and foremost to "honor and integrity." Yet far from uniting the people, the president's ideologically narrow agenda has seriously divided America. His most partisan supporters have launched a kind of 'civil cold war' against those with whom they disagree.

And as for honor and integrity, let me say this: we know what that was all about, but hear me well, not as a candidate for any office, but as an American citizen who loves my country:

For eight years, the Clinton-Gore Administration gave this nation honest budget numbers; an economic plan with integrity that rescued the nation from debt and stagnation; honest advocacy for the environment; real compassion for the poor; a strengthening of our military -- as recently proven -- and a foreign policy whose purposes were elevated, candidly presented and courageously pursued, in the face of scorched-earth tactics by the opposition. That is also a form of honor and integrity, and not every administration in recent memory has displayed it.

So I would say to those who have found the issue of honor and integrity so useful as a political tool, that the people are also looking for these virtues in the execution of public policy on their behalf, and will judge whether they are present or absent.

"Liberals Form Fund to Defeat President" -- Thomas B. Edsall in The Washington Post, 8/8/03:

Labor, environmental and women's organizations, with strong backing from international financier George Soros, have joined forces behind a new political group that plans to spend an unprecedented $75 million to mobilize voters to defeat President Bush in 2004.

The organization, Americans Coming Together (ACT), will conduct "a massive get-out-the-vote operation that we think will defeat George W. Bush in 2004," said Ellen Malcolm, the president of EMILY's List, who will become ACT's president.

ACT already has commitments for more than $30 million, Malcolm and others said, including $10 million from Soros, $12 million from six other philanthropists, and about $8 million from unions, including the Service Employees International Union. . . .

Other groups joining the fight against Bush include the American Majority Institute, which was put together by John Podesta, a former top aide to President Bill Clinton. The institute will function as a liberal counter to conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation. A network of liberal groups has formed America Votes to coordinate the political activities of civil rights, environmental and abortion rights groups among others, and former Clinton aide Harold Ickes is trying to set up a pro-Democratic group to finance 2004 campaign television ads. . . .

Republicans sent a warning shot across ACT's bow. "We are going to be watching very closely to make sure they adhere to their claim that they will not be coordinating with the Democratic Party," said Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson. Such coordination would violate campaign finance laws.

Iverson contended that ACT's financing indicates that "the Democrats are addicted to special-interest soft money and this allows them to feed that addiction by skirting the spirit of the new campaign finance law."

The shifting focus of Soros, who is worth $5 billion and is chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC, from the international sphere to the domestic political arena is considered significant.

In a statement describing his reasons for giving $10 million, Soros said, "I believe deeply in the values of an open society. For the past 15 years I have focused my energies on fighting for these values abroad. Now I am doing it in the United States. The fate of the world depends on the United States and President Bush is leading us in the wrong direction."

Steve Rosenthal, whose mobilization of union members from 1996 through 2002 has been widely praised, will be ACT's chief executive officer. He said that ACT will hire hundreds of organizers, state political directors and others as the 2004 election approaches.

ACT plans to concentrate its activities in 17 states, all of which are likely to be presidential battlegrounds: Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, Wisconsin, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio and West Virginia.

"Salt of the Earth" -- Paul Krugman in The New York Times, 8/8/03:

Before last year's elections Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, wrote a remarkable memo about how to neutralize public perceptions that the party was anti-environmental. Here's what it said about global warming: "The scientific debate is closing [against us] but is not yet closed. There is still an opportunity to challenge the science." And it advised Republicans to play up the appearance of scientific uncertainty.

But as a recent article in Salon reminds us, this appearance of uncertainty is "manufactured." Very few independent experts now dispute that manmade global warming is happening, and represents a serious threat. Almost all the skeptics are directly or indirectly on the payroll of the oil, coal and auto industries. And before you accuse me of a conspiracy theory, listen to what the other side says. Here's Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma: "Could it be that manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it."

The point is that when it comes to evidence of danger from emissions -- as opposed to, say, Iraqi nukes -- the people now running our country won't take yes for an answer.

"Roughest Region" -- Christopher Dickey at msnbc.com, 8/7/03:

Since the troops stripped off their uniforms and walked home rather than face the American juggernaut in March and April, Iraq has no army at all of its own. This week, training began for the first 1,000 soldiers in a new Iraqi military. Two years from now, if all goes well, the United States plans for Iraq to have three motorized divisions totaling only about 40,000 troops -- and no air force to speak of.

So at a press conference this afternoon (in the merciful cool of Saddam's old convention center), I asked Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of the 150,000 or so American and other Coalition forces here, if he thought the Iraqis could really feel secure with such a small force. He saw what I was getting at. "We look to be able to disengage as rapidly as possible and have Iraq stand up and be able to take care of [its own defense] over time," he said. But how much time would that be? More than two years? "At a minimum," said Sanchez, "an absolute minimum, we'll have to be here that long."

Sanchez knows better. We're here forever. The simple fact about the New Iraq is that never in our lifetimes will it be able to defend itself from its neighbors. It will always be dependent on the United States to do that job. And because it floats on oil, and because all its neighbors -- and all of us -- have a vital stake in its future, it's going to take a lot of defending. . . .

[O]f the six countries bordering Iraq, only Kuwait will have an army smaller than the one planned for Baghdad (15,400). On the other hand, Iran has some 520,000 people under arms (and may soon have nukes); Turkey has 515,000 (and a full-blown NATO arsenal); Syria has 319,000 (and chemical and biological weapons); Saudi Arabia has 200,000 (including its National Guard), and even little Jordan has 100,000. Not to mention nearby Israel, which has 161,000 soldiers on active duty, an enormous technological edge and, oh, yes, absolutely does have nuclear weapons.

"Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence" -- Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus in The Washington Post, 8/10/03 (more debunking)

"Powell's Push toward Iraq War Questioned -- Charles J. Hanley (AP) in The Kansas City Star, 8/10/03 (a point-by-point dismantling of Powell's February 2003 case against Iraq).

Harpers Weekly Review, 8/12/03

"US Notches World's Highest Incarceration Rate" -- Gail Russell Chaddock in The Christian Science Monitor, 8/18/03:

WASHINGTON -- More than 5.6 million Americans are in prison or have served time there, according to a new report by the Justice Department released Sunday. That's 1 in 37 adults living in the United States, the highest incarceration level in the world.

It's the first time the US government has released estimates of the extent of imprisonment, and the report's statistics have broad implications for everything from state fiscal crises to how other nations view the American experience.

If current trends continue, it means that a black male in the United States would have about a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison during his lifetime. For a Hispanic male, it's 1 in 6; for a white male, 1 in 17. . . .

Justice Department analysts say that experts in criminal justice have long known of the stark disparities in prison experience, but they have never been as fully documented. By the end of year 2001, some 1,319,000 adults were confined in state or federal prisons. An estimated 4,299,000 former prisoners are still alive, the new report concludes.

"What we are seeing is a substantial involvement of the public in the criminal-justice system. It raises a lot of questions in the national dialogue on everything from voting and sentencing to priorities related to state's expenditures," says Allen Beck, chief of correction statistics at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, who directed the report.

Nor does the impact of incarceration end with the sentence. Former inmates can be excluded from receiving public assistance, living in public housing, or receiving financial aid for college. Ex-felons are prohibited from voting in many states. And with the increased use of background checks - especially since 9/11 - they may be permanently locked out of jobs in many professions, including education, child care, driving a bus, or working in a nursing home. . . .

More than 4 million prisoners or former prisoners are denied a right to vote; in 12 states, that ban is for life.

"That's why racial profiling has become such a priority issue for African-Americans, because it is the gateway to just such a statistic," says Yvonne Scruggs- Leftwich, chief operating officer of the Black Leadership Forum, in Washington. "It means that large numbers in the African-American community are disenfranchised, sometimes permanently."

Some states are already scaling back prohibitions or limits on voting affecting former inmates, including Maryland, Delaware, New Mexico, and Texas.

In addition, critics say that efforts to purge voting rolls of former felons could lead to abuses, and effectively disenfranchise many minority voters.

"On the day of the 2000 [presidential] election, there were an estimated 600,000 former felons who had completed their sentence yet because of Florida's restrictive laws were unable to vote," says Mr. Mauer of the Sentencing Project.

The new report also informs - but does not settle - one of the toughest debates in American politics: whether high rates of imprisonment are related to a drop in crime rates over the past decade.

The prison population has quadrupled since 1980. Much of that surge is the result of public policy, such as the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing. Nearly 1 in 4 of the inmates in federal and state prisons are there because of drug-related offenses, most of them nonviolent. . . .

By 2010, the number of American residents in prison or with prison experience is expected to jump to 7.7 million, or 3.4 percent of all adults, according to the new report.

Harpers Weekly Review, 8/19/03

Harpers Weekly Review, 8/26/03

"US Attacked over UN Resolution" -- Greg Barrow at bbc.co.uk, 8/26/03:

US officials are objecting to a section of the resolution which refers to attacks on humanitarian workers as a war crime under the statutes of the newly-established International Criminal Court (ICC).

Washington does not recognise the court.

It also insists on either removing reference to it from UN resolutions or having paragraphs inserted that give immunity to nations like America that have not ratified the Rome Statute establishing the ICC.

Human rights groups are angry that less than a week after the attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad, the US is objecting to the draft UN resolution.

With emotions still running high in the aftermath, they now say Washington may have gone too far.

Human Rights Watch has accused the US of waging an ill-conceived and ideologically-driven crusade against the court and in the process, compromising efforts to protect aid workers.

"After the tragic killing of aid workers in Baghdad, the US opposition to the proposed resolution is disgraceful," said Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch's international justice programme.

Other human rights groups argue that the court should be supported as it acts as a deterrent to those who might consider attacks on humanitarian workers.

"Beware the Bluewash" -- George Monbiot in The Guardian, 8/26/03:

The United Nations, almost all good liberals now argue, is a more legitimate force than the US and therefore more likely to succeed in overseeing Iraq's reconstruction and transition. If the US surrendered to the UN, this would, moreover, represent the dawning of a fairer, kinder world. These propositions are scarcely more credible than those coming out of the Pentagon.

The immediate and evident danger of a transition from US occupation to UN occupation is that the UN becomes the dustbin into which the US dumps its failed adventures. The American and British troops in Iraq do not deserve to die any more than the Indian or Turkish soldiers with whom they might be replaced. But the governments that sent them, rather than those that opposed the invasion, should be the ones that have to answer to their people for the consequences.

The vicious bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad last week suggests that the jihadis who now seem to be entering Iraq from every corner of the Muslim world will make little distinction between khaki helmets and blue ones. . . .

The UN will swiftly discover that occupation-lite is no more viable than occupation-heavy. Moreover, by replacing its troops, the despised UN could, in one of the supreme ironies of our time, provide the US government with the escape route it may require if George Bush is to win the next election. We can expect him, as soon as the soldiers have come home, to wash his hands not only of moral responsibility for the mess he has created, but also of the duty to help pay for the country's reconstruction. Most importantly, if the UN shows that it is prepared to mop up after him, it will enhance his incentive to take his perpetual war to other nations.

It should also be pretty obvious that, tough as it is for both the American troops and the Iraqis, pinned down in Iraq may be the safest place for the US army to be. The Pentagon remains reluctant to fight more than one war at a time. One of the reasons that it has tackled Iran and North Korea with diplomacy rather than missiles is that it has neither the soldiers nor the resources to launch an attack until it can disentangle itself from Iraq.

"Inside the Resistance" -- Paul McGeough in The Sidney Morning Herald, 8/15/03:

When he took up his commission in mid-July, the new US military chief in Iraq, General John Abizaid, acknowledged the rapid development of the resistance: "They're better co-ordinated now. They're less amateurish and their ability to use improvised explosive devices combined with tactical activity - say, for example, attacking [our] quick-reaction forces - is more sophisticated."

Washington has been reluctant to accept that what is happening in Iraq constitutes a guerilla war. It has repeatedly pinned the blame for instability on Saddam Hussein and Baath Party loyalists; and, particularly since last week's bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, on foreigners associated with the terrorist network al-Qaeda and its offshoots.

So it fell to Abizaid to finally acknowledge the Americans face a "classic guerilla-type campaign". But he, too, stuck to the Washington script, insisting the critical threat to the Americans was from "mid-level Baathists" and from an organisational and financial structure that was, at best, localised.

The Pentagon, the US military and American analysts are reluctant to acknowledge popular support for the Iraqi resistance. But the chaos has tribal sheiks, Baghdad businessmen and many ordinary Iraqis speaking in such harsh anti-American terms that it is hard not to conclude there is a growing body of Palestinian or Belfast-style empathy with the resistance.

If the accounts of the resistance given to the Herald in interviews in the past 10 days are accurate, US intelligence is way behind understanding that what is emerging in Iraq is a centrally controlled movement, driven as much by nationalism as the mosque, a movement that has left Saddam and the Baath Party behind and already is getting foreign funds for its bid to drive out the US army.

Iraq-Al Qaeda Propaganda, November 2001-March 2003 (silver.he.net)

Dubya's Resume (idontfeelsogood.blogspot.com)

"In Wal-Mart's America" -- Harold Meyerson in The Washington Post, 8/27/03:

[T]he employer that now sets the standards for working-class America is Wal-Mart. The nation's largest employer, with 3,200 outlets in the United States and sales revenue of $245 billion last year (which, if War-Mart were a nation, would rank it between Belgium and Sweden as the world's 19th largest economy) doesn't pay its workers -- excuse me, "associates" -- enough to buy decent cars, let alone homes. According to a study by Forbes, Wal-Mart employees earn an average hourly wage of $7.50 and, annually, a princely $18,000.

Just as Ford, GM and the UAW once drove up wages for workers who were nowhere near auto factories, so Wal-Mart drives down wages for workers who never set foot there. Controlling as it does so much of the low-end retail market, Wal-Mart has, with great success, pressured suppliers to cut their labor costs. No other American company has done as much to destroy what's left of the U.S. clothing and textile industry or been so loyal a friend to the dankest sweatshops of the developing world. And unless American unions can find the political leverage to block Wal-Mart's expansion into non-southern metropolitan areas, the company poses a huge threat to the million or so unionized clerks who work at the nation's major supermarket chains.

It may just be me, but I don't recall the moment when the American people proclaimed their preference for an economy driven by Wal-Mart to the one driven by General Motors. It is, after all, one thing to live in a nation where the largest employer wants workers to make enough to afford its cars; quite another to wake up in an America where the largest employer wants workers to make so little they'll be compelled to buy low-end goods in a discount chain. Indeed, polling has consistently showed that a clear majority of the American people have been dubious about the benefits of free trade -- but these are the only polls that the political elite, so poll-driven on other questions, has consistently ignored. By the same token, polling also shows that Americans believe workers should have the right to join unions free of intimidation, yet that has not been the case in the American workplace for at least the past three decades.

"Follow the Yellowcake Road" -- Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas in Newsweek, 7/28/03:

In an age when American policy is to strike first, before the enemy can strike the American homeland, intelligence needs to be very precise. In real life, it rarely is. Intelligence officials say they are careful to weigh and double-check tips and leads. But the behind-the-scenes story of the handling of the bogus documents about Saddam's attempts to buy uranium in Africa, pieced together by NEWSWEEK, does not present a reassuring picture.

The report from Italy's SISME -- that Iraq was trying to buy 500 tons of pure yellowcake uranium from Niger -- made it into the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. But the CIA did not bother to first examine the documents. An Italian journalist turned the papers over to the American Embassy in Rome that same month, but the CIA station chief in Rome apparently tossed them out, rather than send them to analysts at Langley. At a congressional hearing last week, the CIA's Tenet was unable to explain why. "The CIA dropped the ball," said Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois. (Incredibly, the Italian press, which doesn't let the facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory, appeared to have higher standards than the CIA. The Italian reporter, Elisabetta Burba, worked for Panorama, a weekly magazine owned by Italy's conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. She went to Niger and checked out the documents but declined to use them because she feared they were bufala -- fraudulent -- and she would lose her job.)

Tenet did have qualms about using the Niger information in a presidential speech. The DCI warned deputy national-security adviser Steve Hadley not to include a reference to Niger in a speech delivered by President Bush on Oct. 7 in Cincinnati. But according to a top CIA official, another member of the NSC staff, Bob Joseph, wanted to include a mention of Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Niger in the president's State of the Union speech. According to this CIA official, an agency analyst cautioned him not to include the Niger reference. The NSC man asked if it would be all right to cite a British intelligence report that the Iraqis were trying to buy uranium from several African countries. The CIA official acquiesced. Though the British have not backed off that claim (a British official told NEWSWEEK that it came from an East African nation, not Niger), CIA Director Tenet publicly took responsibility for allowing a thinly sourced report by another country to appear in the State of the Union. (The White House last week denied that the Niger reference had ever shown up in an SOTU draft.) What Bush said in his address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." . . .

It wasn't until February, several days after the State of the Union, that the CIA finally obtained the Italian documents (from the State Department, whose warnings that the intelligence on Niger was "highly dubious" seem to have gone unheeded by the White House and unread by Bush). At the same time, the State Department turned over the Italian documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which had been pressing the United States to back up its claims about Iraq's nuclear program. "Within two hours they figured out they were forgeries," one IAEA official told NEWSWEEK. How did they do it? "Google," said the official. The IAEA ran the name of the Niger foreign minister through the Internet search engine and discovered that he was not in office at the time the document was signed. The FBI is investigating the whole affair, NEWSWEEK has learned, trying to determine if the documents were just a con job by a diplomat looking for some extra cash or a more serious attempt by Iraqi nationals to plant a story. In any case, the FBI will be, in effect, investigating the CIA, a sure script for more acts in the long-playing production of Intelligence Follies.

"Antiwar Groups Say Public Ire Over Iraq Claims Is Increasing" -- Evelyn Nieves in The Washington Post, 7/22/03:

About 400,000 people from every state have contacted members of Congress in the past three weeks as part of a MoveOn.org petition that asks Congress to investigate the controversial claims that led to the war on Iraq, with more than 50,000 people signing on to the liberal activist Web site in the past five days alone.

"It seems more and more people who supported the war are signing on," said Eli Pariser, MoveOn.org's campaigns director. "They're angry. People who in the past couple of weeks before the war decided to support it are swinging back."

For organizations that opposed the war, these are busy days. Not since hundreds of thousands of people across the country marched in antiwar rallies in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion has the rationale for the preemptive war come under such fire. The groups hope to galvanize a broad spectrum of the American people, a majority of whom supported the war, but with reservations. The goal is to persuade public officials to support an independent, bipartisan commission modeled on the panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In the week since the administration admitted that President Bush's State of the Union speech in January should not have mentioned that the British had "learned" Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Africa for a nuclear weapons program, antiwar groups say that more and more Americans have been contacting them, looking for answers.

"You know an issue has momentum," said Andrea Buffa, co-chair of the United for Peace and Justice coalition, "when people are coming into your office to ask if there's a protest planned about it." . . .

Both United for Peace and Justice and Win Without War, the largest mainstream antiwar coalitions, with hundreds of member groups, including the National Council of Churches and the AFL-CIO, have launched campaigns that include petitions demanding an investigation into the intelligence that led to war, print and television ads that accuse Bush of misleading the nation with discredited or unproven claims about Iraq's nuclear arsenal and suggestions for organizing at the local level to reinvigorate the broad movement that developed in the weeks before the war. . . .

Win Without War and MoveOn.org are already calling a 30-second ad they co-sponsored, which aired over the past week in the Washington and New York area cable markets, an unqualified hit. The ad, which labels Bush a "misleader," brought in thousands of people to the MoveOn.org Web site to sign the petition. The coalition said it will place ads in at least 10 other cities over the next two weeks.

"Columnist Blows CIA Agent's Cover" -- Timothy M. Phelps and Knut Royce in Newsday, 7/22/03 (archived at commondreams.org):

WASHINGTON - The identity of an undercover CIA officer whose husband started the Iraq uranium intelligence controversy has been publicly revealed by a conservative Washington columnist citing "two senior administration officials."

Intelligence officials confirmed to Newsday yesterday that Valerie Plame, wife of retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, works at the agency on weapons of mass destruction issues in an undercover capacity - at least she was undercover until last week when she was named by columnist Robert Novak.

Wilson, while refusing to confirm his wife's employment, said the release to the press of her relationship to him and even her maiden name was an attempt to intimidate others like him from talking about Bush administration intelligence failures.

"It's a shot across the bow to these people, that if you talk we'll take your family and drag them through the mud as well," he said in an interview.

It was Wilson who started the controversy that has engulfed the Bush administration by writing in the New York Times two weeks ago that he had traveled to Niger last year at the request of the CIA to investigate reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium there. Though he told the CIA and the State Department there was no basis to the report, the allegation was used anyway by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union speech in January.

Wilson and a retired CIA official said yesterday that the "senior administration officials" who named Plame had, if their description of her employment was accurate, violated the law and may have endangered her career and possibly the lives of her contacts in foreign countries. Plame could not be reached for comment.

"When it gets to the point of an administration official acting to do career damage, and possibly actually endanger someone, that's mean, that's petty, it's irresponsible, and it ought to be sanctioned," said Frank Anderson, former CIA Near East Division chief.

A current intelligence official said that blowing the cover of an undercover officer could affect the officer's future assignments and put them and everyone they dealt with overseas in the past at risk.

"If what the two senior administration officials said is true," Wilson said, "they will have compromised an entire career of networks, relationships and operations." What's more, it would mean that "this White House has taken an asset out of the" weapons of mass destruction fight, "not to mention putting at risk any contacts she might have had where the services are hostile."

Deputy White House Press Secretary Claire Buchan referred questions to a National Security Council spokesman who did not return phone calls last night.

"This might be seen as a smear on me and my reputation," Wilson said, "but what it really is is an attempt to keep anybody else from coming forward" to reveal similar intelligence lapses.

Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it." . . .

A senior intelligence official confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked "alongside" the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger.

But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. "They [the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story] were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising," he said. "There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason," he said. "I can't figure out what it could be."

"We paid his [Wilson's] air fare. But to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit. Most people you'd have to pay big bucks to go there," the senior intelligence official said. Wilson said he was reimbursed only for expenses.

Harpers Weekly Review, 7/22/03

"Dead: The Sons of Hussein" -- Julian Borger and Gary Younge in The Guardian, 7/23/03:

Uday and Qusay, Saddam Hussein's sons and his most feared lieutenants, were killed yesterday in a gun battle at their hideout in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul.

The deaths of Saddam's two fugitive "princes" represent the biggest coup for coalition forces since the fall of Baghdad more than three months ago. It offers Washington and London hope of a turning point in a bloody guerrilla war. . . .

Saddam's sons, together with another man and a young boy, had barricaded themselves inside the home of a Mosul businessman, thought to be a distant relative, and put up fierce resistance. Gen Sanchez said the entire operation took six hours.

"They died in a fierce gun battle. They resisted the detention and the efforts of the coalition forces to apprehend them. They were killed in the ensuing gunfight," he said.

The US army promised conclusive proof of the deaths today, possibly by presenting photographs.

General Sanchez said the raid on the house followed a tip-off from a local informant. "We had a walk-in last night that came in and gave us the information [about where they were hiding]," he said.

Gen Sanchez added that it was likely that the $15m (�9.4m) reward on each of their heads - for information leading to their discovery - would be claimed. "We are pursuing that at this point in time. That will probably happen," he said.

The deaths of Saddam's sons will come as an immense relief to the US and British governments, which have been under sustained attack for justifying the invasion with questionable intelligence.

The elimination of Uday and Qusay will provide a temporary distraction from the intelligence scandal. Iraq analysts said their deaths could sap the morale of guerrilla groups fighting for the restoration of the Hussein dynasty.

"Bush Aides Disclose Warnings from CIA" -- Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus in The Washington Post, 7/23/03:

The CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about a claim President Bush made three months later in the State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear material in Africa, White House officials said yesterday.

The officials made the disclosure hours after they were alerted by the CIA to the existence of a memo sent to Bush's deputy national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, on Oct. 6. The White House said Bush's chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, on Friday night discovered another memo from the CIA, dated Oct. 5, also expressing doubts about the Africa claims.

The information, provided in a briefing by Hadley and Bush communications director Dan Bartlett, significantly alters the explanation previously offered by the White House. The acknowledgment of the memos, which were sent on the eve of a major presidential speech in Cincinnati about Iraq, comes four days after the White House said the CIA objected only to technical specifics of the Africa charge, not its general accuracy.

In fact, the officials acknowledged yesterday, the CIA warned the White House early on that the charge, based on an allegation that Iraq sought 500 tons of uranium in Niger, relied on weak evidence, was not particularly significant and assumed Iraq was pursuing an acquisition that was arguably not possible and of questionable value because Iraq had its own supplies.

Yesterday's disclosures indicate top White House officials knew that the CIA seriously disputed the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa long before the claim was included in Bush's January address to the nation. The claim was a major part of the case made by the Bush administration before the Iraq war that Hussein represented a serious threat because of his nuclear ambitions; other pieces of evidence have also been challenged.

Hadley, who also received a phone call from CIA Director George J. Tenet before the president's Oct. 7 speech asking that the Africa allegation be removed, took the blame for allowing the charge to be revived in the State of the Union address. "I should have recalled . . . that there was controversy associated with the uranium issue," he said. He said Bush and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice were counting on his dependability, and "it is now clear to me that I failed." Hadley said Rice was not made aware of the doubts but "feels personal responsibility as well."

"The high standards that the president set with his speeches were not met," Hadley said, acknowledging that the problem was not solely that the CIA failed to strike the reference from the January speech. "We had opportunities here to avoid this problem. We didn't take them," he said. . . .

The new information amounted to an on-the-record mea culpa for a White House that had pointed fingers at the CIA for vetting the speech, prompting an earlier acceptance of responsibility by Tenet. But that abruptly changed yesterday after the CIA furnished evidence that it had fought the inclusion of the charge.

The disclosures punctured claims made by Rice and others in the past two weeks. Rice and other officials had asserted that nobody in the White House knew of CIA objections, and that the CIA supported the Africa accusation generally, making only technical objections about location and quantity. On Friday, a White House official mischaracterized the CIA's objections, saying repeatedly that Tenet opposed the inclusion in Bush's Oct. 7 speech "because it was single source, not because it was flawed." . . .

The new information disclosed by the White House provides additional material for Democrats who have been criticizing Bush's handling of Iraq intelligence. Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), a former intelligence committee chairman and now a presidential candidate, said the admission "raises sharp new questions as to who at the White House engaged in a coverup." Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), who has been pressing the administration on the matter for months, said, "Congress needs to investigate this with immediate public hearings."

But strategists in both political parties said the lifespan of the criticism, and the possibility of congressional hearings in the fall, largely depends on whether the occupation of Iraq continues to be as violent and chaotic as it has been. Yesterday's disclosures by the White House came at a time of otherwise good news related to Iraq, as the U.S. military confirmed that it had killed Hussein's two sons, Uday and Qusay, and Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch, a rescued prisoner of war, returned to her home town in West Virginia after four months of hospitalization.

"White House Tries to Limit Iraq Damage" -- Tom Raum (AP) in The Washington Post, 7/23/03:

The Bush administration is reaching out to its Republican allies in Congress in an effort to counter criticism of President Bush's Iraq policy and his use of discredited intelligence to advance the case for toppling Saddam Hussein. . . .

On Monday, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett went to Capitol Hill to urge Republicans to emphasize positive aspects of the broader war against terrorism, administration and congressional officials said.

Bartlett met with top GOP House and Senate aides to essentially provide "talking points" for countering Democratic attacks and to share recently declassified intelligence information with them, officials said.

The administration wants its GOP allies in Congress to do more to emphasize some of the upside to deposing Saddam, including humanitarian gestures and the freeing of the Iraqi people.

Other aggressive efforts are expected by the administration in the days ahead to try to regain control of the message, including a possible speech on the issue by Vice President Dick Cheney, administration and congressional GOP aides said. . . .

A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Monday that Bartlett's trip to Capitol Hill was an attempt to touch base with congressional allies on the subject and go over what the administration views as "misinformation."

"Who's Unpatriotic Now?" -- Paul Krugman in The New York Times, 7/22/03:

Issues of principle aside, the invasion of a country that hadn't attacked us and didn't pose an imminent threat has seriously weakened our military position. Of the Army's 33 combat brigades, 16 are in Iraq; this leaves us ill prepared to cope with genuine threats. Moreover, military experts say that with almost two-thirds of its brigades deployed overseas, mainly in Iraq, the Army's readiness is eroding: normal doctrine calls for only one brigade in three to be deployed abroad, while the other two retrain and refit.

And the war will have devastating effects on future recruiting by the reserves. A widely circulated photo from Iraq shows a sign in the windshield of a military truck that reads, "One weekend a month, my ass."

To top it all off, our insistence on launching a war without U.N. approval has deprived us of useful allies. George Bush claims to have a "huge coalition," but only 7 percent of the coalition soldiers in Iraq are non-American ? and administration pleas for more help are sounding increasingly plaintive.

How serious is the strain on our military? The Brookings Institution military analyst Michael O'Hanlon, who describes our volunteer military as "one of the best military institutions in human history," warns that "the Bush administration will risk destroying that accomplishment if they keep on the current path."

But instead of explaining what happened to the Al Qaeda link and the nuclear program, in the last few days a series of hawkish pundits have accused those who ask such questions of aiding the enemy. Here's Frank Gaffney Jr. in The National Post: "Somewhere, probably in Iraq, Saddam Hussein is gloating. He can only be gratified by the feeding frenzy of recriminations, second-guessing and political power plays. . . . Signs of declining popular appreciation of the legitimacy and necessity of the efforts of America's armed forces will erode their morale. Similarly, the enemy will be encouraged."

Well, if we're going to talk about aiding the enemy: By cooking intelligence to promote a war that wasn't urgent, the administration has squandered our military strength. This provides a lot of aid and comfort to Osama bin Laden -- who really did attack America -- and Kim Jong Il -- who really is building nukes.

"9/11 Report: No Iraq Link to al-Qaeda" -- Shaun Waterman at UPI.com:

The report of the joint congressional inquiry into the suicide hijackings on Sept. 11, 2001, to be published Thursday, reveals U.S. intelligence had no evidence that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks, or that it had supported al-Qaida, United Press International has learned.

"The report shows there is no link between Iraq and al-Qaida," said a government official who has seen the report.

Former Democratic Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, who was a member of the joint congressional committee that produced the report, confirmed the official's statement.

Asked whether he believed the report will reveal that there was no connection between al-Qaida and Iraq, Cleland replied: "I do ... There's no connection, and that's been confirmed by some of (al-Qaida leader Osama) bin Laden's terrorist followers."

The revelation is likely to embarrass the Bush administration, which made links between Saddam's support for bin Laden -- and the attendant possibility that Iraq might supply al-Qaida with weapons of mass destruction -- a major plank of its case for war.

"The administration sold the connection (between Iraq and al-Qaida) to scare the pants off the American people and justify the war," said Cleland. "What you've seen here is the manipulation of intelligence for political ends."

The inquiry, by members of both the House and Senate intelligence committees, was launched in February last year amid growing concerns that failures by U.S. intelligence had allowed the 19 al-Qaida terrorists to enter the United States, hijack four airliners, and kill almost 3,000 people.

Although the committee completed its work at the end of last year, publication of the report has been delayed by interminable wrangles between the committees and the administration over which parts of it could be declassified.

Cleland accused the administration of deliberately delaying the report's release to avoid having its case for war undercut.

"The reason this report was delayed for so long -- deliberately opposed at first, then slow-walked after it was created -- is that the administration wanted to get the war in Iraq in and over ... before (it) came out," he said.

"Had this report come out in January like it should have done, we would have known these things before the war in Iraq, which would not have suited the administration."

The case that administration officials made that al-Qaida was linked to Iraq was based on four planks.

Firstly, the man suspected of being the ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, was supposed to have met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, in April 2001. But Czech intelligence - the original source of the report - later recanted, and U.S. intelligence officials now believe that Atta was in the United States at the time of the supposed meeting.

The Iraqi official, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani is now in U.S. custody.

Secondly, U.S. officials said Iraq was harboring an alleged al-Qaida terrorist named Abu Mussab al-Zakawi.

But the government official who has seen the report poured scorn on the evidence behind this claim.

"Because someone makes a telephone call from a country, does not mean that the government of that country is complicit in that," he told UPI.

"When we found out there was an al-Qaida cell operating in Germany, we didn't say 'we have to invade Germany, because the German government supports al-Qaida.' ... There was no evidence to indicate that the Iraqi government knew about or was complicit in Zakawi's activities."

Newsweek magazine has also reported that German intelligence agencies - having interrogated one of Zakawi's associates - believed that Zakawi was not even an al-Qaida member, but headed a rival Islamic terror group.

Thirdly, defectors provided to U.S. intelligence by the then-exiled opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, said that Islamic terrorists had been training to hijack airliners using a disused plane fuselage at a camp in Salman Pak in Iraq.

"My understanding was that there was an alternate explanation for that," said the government official, suggesting that that they were doing counter terrorism training there. "I'm not saying that was the explanation, but there were other ways of looking at it."

Fourthly, officials have cited a series of meetings in the 1980's and 1990's between Iraqi officials and al-Qaida members, especially in Sudan.

Former CIA counter-terrorism analyst Judith Yaphe has questioned the significance of this data, "Every terrorist group and state sponsor was represented in Sudan (at that time)," she said recently, "How could they not meet in Khartoum, a small city offering many opportunities for terrorist t�te-�-t�tes."

The government official added that the significance of such meetings was unclear: "Intelligence officials, including ours, meet with bad guys all around the world every day. That's their job. Maybe to get information from them, maybe to try and recruit them.

"There are a series of alternative explanations for why two people like that might meet, and that's what we don't know."

He went on to suggest that the conclusions drawn from the information about the Sudan meetings was indicative of a wider-ranging problem with the administration's attitude to intelligence on the alleged Iraq al-Qaida link.

"They take a fact that you could draw several different conclusions from, and in every case they draw the conclusion that supports the policy, without any particular evidence that would meet the normal bar that analytic tradecraft would require for you to make that conclusion," he concluded.

"Sword-Passing" -- Richard Cohen in The Washington Post, 7/24/03:

Earlier this month CIA Director George Tenet accepted responsibility for the assertion in George Bush's State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to secure uranium in Africa. It was said at the time that Tenet had fallen on his sword. It is now clear that he fell on his credibility instead.

In a game of White House sword-passing not seen since the Nixon administration, it now turns out that yet another administration official -- Stephen Hadley of the National Security Council -- has stepped forward to take a piece of the blame himself. He follows Tenet and various White House and CIA underlings -- so many confessions, so many swords, so many people responsible yet none of them accountable.

Hadley now says he was twice warned by the CIA not to include the accusation about African uranium in a speech Bush was set to deliver last Oct. 7 in Cincinnati. One memo was sent on Oct. 5 and another on Oct 6. As a result, the mention of African uranium was deleted from Bush's speech. Later, of course, it resurfaced in the State of the Union.

Why? Bush's own response, provided to the media while he was visiting Africa, was that the CIA cleared the speech. Condoleezza Rice said the same thing while winging her way to Uganda: "The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety." In a flash, Tenet took the hint. "I am responsible for the approval process in my agency."

But Tenet had never read Bush's speech. Why? It's impossible to say for sure, but maybe -- just maybe -- he had given up fighting with a White House determined to exaggerate the urgency of dealing with Iraq's nuclear weapons program. Whatever the case, he had twice warned the White House -- and his deputies had issued similar warnings. What more could a CIA director do?

Well, he might have resigned. He might have spoken up. He might have done what in Washington is considered virtually noble Roman behavior and leaked the truth. Instead, he did as the Bush White House wished. He took the blame.

It would be one thing if Tenet had proved himself to be a whiz-bang CIA director. He has not. He was the nation's premier intelligence official on Sept. 11, which can only be called a massive intelligence failure. The United States was attacked on his watch -- not because the terrorists were so awfully clever but because our intelligence agencies were so awfully inept.

The same could be said for Rice. She had been warned by the Clinton administration's outgoing NSC head, Sandy Berger, that terrorism -- specifically Osama bin Laden -- would be her number-one priority. Upon taking office, she relegated it to something less than that -- with disastrous consequences. It was her job to keep the FBI and the CIA coordinated. She failed at that, too.

Hadley is Rice's top aide. He says he forgot about the warnings from Tenet -- two memos and one phone call -- and did not tell her. If that's the case, he's in the wrong job. If it's not the case -- and a reasonable man could have reasonable doubt -- is it possible Rice said nothing to Bush? Maybe not. But if not, why not? That's her job.

By now it is clear that the White House was so desperate to buttress its unsupportable claims of an imminent Iraqi nuclear threat that it was willing to include the most questionable of evidence. That happened not only with the uranium reference but also with another piece of supposedly significant evidence -- those aluminum tubes that turned out to play no role in any nuclear weapons program. Who was behind this? Rice? Dick Cheney? The president himself? The uranium reference kept turning up like a bad penny. It had a sponsor -- someone awfully high up.

"Why Commander in Chief Is Losing the War of the 16 Words" -- Dan Balz and Walter Pincus in The Washington Post, 7/24/03:

If President Bush's White House is known for anything, it is competence at delivering a disciplined message and deftness in dealing with bad news. That reputation has been badly damaged by the administration's clumsy efforts to explain how a statement based on disputed intelligence ended up in the president's State of the Union address.

How did the White House stumble so badly? There are a host of explanations, from White House officials, their allies outside the government and their opponents in the broader debate about whether the administration sought to manipulate evidence while building its case to go to war against Iraq.

But the dominant forces appear to have been the determination by White House officials to protect the president for using 16 questionable words about Iraq's attempts to buy uranium in Africa and a fierce effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to protect its reputation through bureaucratic infighting that has forced the president's advisers to repeatedly alter their initial version of events.

At several turns, when Bush might have taken responsibility for the language in his Jan. 28 address to the country, he and his top advisers resisted, claiming others -- particularly those in the intelligence community -- were responsible.

Asked again yesterday whether Bush should ultimately be held accountable for what he says, White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters, "Let's talk about what's most important. That's the war on terrorism, winning the war on terrorism. And the best way you do that is to go after the threats where they gather, not to let them come to our shore before it's too late."

White House finger-pointing in turn prompted the CIA's allies to fire back by offering evidence that ran counter to official White House explanations of events and by helping to reveal a chronology of events that forced the White House to change its story.

The latest turn came Tuesday, when deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and White House communications director Dan Bartlett revealed the existence of two previously unknown memos showing that Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet had repeatedly urged the administration last October to remove a similar claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa.

White House officials and their Republican allies in Congress hope the Hadley-Bartlett briefing will help the administration turn a corner on the controversy, and they plan a counteroffensive to try to put Bush's critics on the defensive. But the administration faces new risks as Congress begins its own investigations, which could bring the bureaucratic infighting into open conflict.

The White House and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence are trying to work out ground rules for the collection of information from National Security Council personnel involved in preparing the president's State of the Union address, according to administration and congressional sources.

"A list has gone to the White House and documents have been requested," according to one congressional aide. On that document list are the two memos cited by Hadley and Bartlett from the CIA, dated Oct. 5 and Oct. 6, which contained comments on specific sections of drafts of the president's Oct. 7 speech on the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

Tenet testified yesterday in closed session of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and today the CIA inspector general, John L. Helgerson, is scheduled to appear before the Senate intelligence panel to discuss the findings of his ongoing investigation of how the speech was vetted. Tenet was questioned about the State of the Union speech and about the intelligence developed around Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Beyond the memos, one area of potential risk for the administration is an October telephone call from Tenet to Hadley to make certain the offending language had been removed from Bush's Oct. 7 speech. Hadley said he cannot recall whether that issue was discussed with Tenet on Oct. 5, Oct. 6 or Oct. 7, but a senior administration official familiar with the events said it was "most likely" on Oct. 7, the day of Bush's speech. Going to Hadley directly indicated Tenet's fear that his underlings had not been successful.

Another potential problem for the White House is the sharp disagreement between testimony given the committee last Thursday by CIA senior analyst Alan Foley about his conversation with Robert Joseph, a National Security Council staff member, about what was to go into the State of the Union address and how Bartlett described it to reporters Tuesday.

For all the purported discipline and unity within the Bush administration, disputes among members of the national security team have been common, particularly in the run-up to the war with Iraq. Those disputes, however, generally pitted the State and Defense departments against one another, but once Bush made a decision, the combatants generally accepted that and moved on.

What is unusual about this episode is that the combatants are officials at the White House and the CIA -- and that the White House has tried without success to resolve the controversy. The biggest lesson learned so far, said one administration official, is that "you don't pick a bureaucratic fight with the CIA." To which a White House official replied, "That wasn't our intention, but that certainly has been the perception."

Report of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2002 (gpoaccess.gov)

"Columnist Blows CIA Agent's Cover" -- Timothy M. Phelps and Knut Royce in Newsday, 7/22/03:

Washington - The identity of an undercover CIA officer whose husband started the Iraq uranium intelligence controversy has been publicly revealed by a conservative Washington columnist citing "two senior administration officials."

Intelligence officials confirmed to Newsday yesterday that Valerie Plame, wife of retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, works at the agency on weapons of mass destruction issues in an undercover capacity - at least she was undercover until last week when she was named by columnist Robert Novak.

Wilson, while refusing to confirm his wife's employment, said the release to the press of her relationship to him and even her maiden name was an attempt to intimidate others like him from talking about Bush administration intelligence failures.

"It's a shot across the bow to these people, that if you talk we'll take your family and drag them through the mud as well," he said in an interview.

It was Wilson who started the controversy that has engulfed the Bush administration by writing in the New York Times two weeks ago that he had traveled to Niger last year at the request of the CIA to investigate reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium there. Though he told the CIA and the State Department there was no basis to the report, the allegation was used anyway by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union speech in January.

Wilson and a retired CIA official said yesterday that the "senior administration officials" who named Plame had, if their description of her employment was accurate, violated the law and may have endangered her career and possibly the lives of her contacts in foreign countries. Plame could not be reached for comment. . . .

Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."

Wilson and others said such a disclosure would be a violation of the law by the officials, not the columnist.

Novak reported that his "two senior administration officials" told him that it was Plame who suggested sending her husband, Wilson, to Niger.

"Iraq Flap Shakes Rice's Image" -- Dana Milbank and Mike Allen in The Washington Post, 7/27/03:

Just weeks ago, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, made a trip to the Middle East that was widely seen as advancing the peace process. There was speculation that she would be a likely choice for secretary of state, and hopes among Republicans that she could become governor of California and even, someday, president.

But she has since become enmeshed in the controversy over the administration's use of intelligence about Iraq's weapons in the run-up to war. She has been made to appear out of the loop by colleagues' claims that she did not read or recall vital pieces of intelligence. And she has made statements about U.S. intelligence on Iraq that have been contradicted by facts that later emerged.

The remarks by Rice and her associates raise two uncomfortable possibilities for the national security adviser. Either she missed or overlooked numerous warnings from intelligence agencies seeking to put caveats on claims about Iraq's nuclear weapons program, or she made public claims that she knew to be false.

Most prominent is her claim that the White House had not heard about CIA doubts about an allegation that Iraq sought uranium in Africa before the charge landed in Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28; in fact, her National Security Council staff received two memos doubting the claim and a phone call from CIA Director George J. Tenet months before the speech. Various other of Rice's public characterizations of intelligence documents and agencies' positions have been similarly cast into doubt.

"If Condi didn't know the exact state of intel on Saddam's nuclear programs . . . she wasn't doing her job," said Brookings Institution foreign policy specialist Michael E. O'Hanlon. "This was foreign policy priority number one for the administration last summer, so the claim that someone else should have done her homework for her is unconvincing." . . .

In the White House briefing room on July 18, a senior administration official, speaking to reporters on the condition of anonymity, said Rice did not read October's National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, the definitive prewar assessment of Iraq's weapons programs by U.S. intelligence agencies. "We have experts who work for the national security adviser who would know this information," the official said when asked if Rice had read the NIE. Referring to an annex raising doubts about Iraq's nuclear program, the official said Bush and Rice "did not read footnotes in a 90-page document. . . . The national security adviser has people that do that." The annex was boxed and in regular type.

Four days later, Rice's deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, said in a second White House briefing that he did not mention doubts raised by the CIA about an African uranium claim Bush planned to make in an October speech (the accusation, cut from that speech, reemerged in Bush's State of the Union address). Hadley said he did not mention the objections to Rice because "there was no need." Hadley said he does not recall ever discussing the matter with Rice, suggesting she was not aware that the sentence had been removed.

Hadley said he could not recall discussing the CIA's concerns about the uranium claim, which was based largely on British intelligence. He said a second memo from the CIA protesting the claim was sent to Rice, but "I can't tell you she read it. I can't tell you she received it." Rice herself used the allegation in a January op-ed article.

One person who has worked with Rice describes as "inconceivable" the claims that she was not more actively involved. Indeed, subsequent to the July 18 briefing, another senior administration official said Rice had been briefed immediately on the NIE -- including the doubts about Iraq's nuclear program -- and had "skimmed" the document. The official said that within a couple of weeks, Rice "read it all." . . .

When the controversy intensified earlier this month with a White House admission of error, Rice was the first administration official to place responsibility on CIA Director Tenet for the inclusion in Bush's State of the Union address of the Africa uranium charge. The White House now concedes that pinning responsibility on Tenet was a costly mistake. CIA officials have since made clear to the White House and to Congress that intelligence agencies had repeatedly tried to wave the White House off the allegation.

The main issue is whether Rice knew that U.S. intelligence agencies had significant doubts about a claim made by British intelligence that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa. "The intelligence community did not know at that time or at levels that got to us that this, that there was serious questions about this report," she said on ABC's "This Week" on June 8. A month later, on CBS's "Face the Nation," she stood by the claim. "What I knew at the time is that no one had told us that there were concerns about the British reporting. Apparently, there were. They were apparently communicated to the British."

As it turns out, the CIA did warn the British, but it also raised objections in the two memos sent to the White House and a phone call to Hadley. Hadley last Monday blamed himself for failing to remember these warnings and allowing the claim to be revived in the State of the Union address in January. Hadley said Rice, who was traveling, "wants it clearly understood that she feels a personal responsibility for not recognizing the potential problem presented by those 16 words."

In a broader matter, Rice claimed publicly that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, did not take issue with other intelligence agencies' view that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear program. "[W]hat INR did not take a footnote to is the consensus view that the Iraqis were actively trying to pursue a nuclear weapons program, reconstituting and so forth," she said on July 11, referring to the National Intelligence Estimate. Speaking broadly about the nuclear allegations in the NIE, she said: "Now, if there were doubts about the underlying intelligence to that NIE, those doubts were not communicated to the president, to the vice president, or to me."

In fact, the INR objected strongly. In a section referred to in the first paragraph of the NIE's key judgments, the INR said there was not "a compelling case" and said the government was "lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program." . . .

In Rice's July 11 briefing, on Air Force One between South Africa and Uganda, she said the CIA and the White House had "some discussion" on the Africa uranium sentence in Bush's State of the Union address. "Some specifics about amount and place were taken out," she said. Asked about how the language was changed, she replied: "I'm going to be very clear, all right? The president's speech -- that sentence was changed, right? And with the change in that sentence, the speech was cleared. Now, again, if the agency had wanted that sentence out, it would have gone. And the agency did not say that they wanted that speech out -- that sentence out of the speech. They cleared the speech. Now, the State of the Union is a big speech, a lot of things happen. I'm really not blaming anybody for what happened."

Three days later, then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Rice told him she was not referring to the State of the Union address, as she had indicated, but to Bush's October speech. That explanation, however, had a flaw: The sentence was removed from the October speech, not cleared.

In addition, testimony by a CIA official before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence two days after Fleischer's clarification was consistent with the first account Rice had given. The CIA official, Alan Foley, said he told a member of Rice's staff, Robert Joseph, that the CIA objected to mentioning a specific African country -- Niger -- and a specific amount of uranium in Bush's State of the Union address. Foley testified that he told Joseph of the CIA's problems with the British report and that Joseph proposed changing the claim to refer generally to uranium in Africa.

White House communications director Dan Bartlett last Monday called that a "conspiracy theory" and said Joseph did not recall being told of any concerns.

"Washington Whispers: Insiders Suggest Condoleezza Rice Could Leave" -- Paul Bedard at USNews.com, 7/27/03:

As White House officials try to control the latest fallout over President Bush's flawed suggestion in the State of the Union address that Iraq was buying nuclear bomb materials, there's growing talk by insiders that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice may take the blame and resign. For most insiders, it's inconceivable that Rice, touted as a future secretary of state, California governor, and even vice president, would go, but the latest revelations that her shop and deputy Stephen Hadley mishandled CIA warnings have put the NSC in the bull's eye of controversy.

While it's unclear how serious the talk is inside the administration about the future of Rice or Hadley with the NSC, a few top aides are already suggesting replacements for Rice. They include former Bush administration National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, NASA chief and former Navy Secretary Sean O'Keefe, and Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq.

"A Tax Strategy for the Democrats" -- David Broder in The Washington Post, 7/27/03:

[I]t seems at least counterintuitive -- and maybe highly improbable -- for Democratic pollster-political consultant Stan Greenberg to argue that taxes can be a good issue for his party.

In a memo he sent out earlier this month, Greenberg, a sometime adviser to Bill Clinton and Al Gore, argued, on the basis of a June poll of 1,000 likely voters, that the Bush tax cuts and the Republican approach to taxes command only "lukewarm support." Further, he said, "The voters are angry about taxes, not because they think their taxes are too high, but because the wealthy and corporations do not pay their fair share."

Rather than making the past three years of tax cuts permanent, as Bush proposes, voters prefer shutting "the loopholes and tax shelters used by the wealthy and corporations" and requiring high-income people to pay Social Security taxes on all of their earnings, Greenberg said.

The implication of this analysis is that a Democrat proposing major reforms of the tax system could trump Bush's record of tax-cutting and his promise of more such reductions to come.

I was skeptical of these conclusions, but examining the poll whittled away some of my doubts. . . .

One clue came with a query about "what bothers you the most about taxes." Forty-six percent said it was "the feeling that the wealthy and corporations don't pay their fair share," compared with 31 percent who said it was the complexity of the tax system and only 14 percent who said, it was "the large amount you pay in taxes" that bothers them most.

When a variety of possible tax changes were outlined, the only ones a majority said they strongly favored were closing the tax loophole that allows corporations to set up offshore tax havens in places such as Bermuda and collecting Social Security taxes on a person's entire earnings, instead of capping them at $87,000 as is done now. Canceling recent tax cuts for the top 1 percent of earners enjoyed as much support as making all the tax cuts permanent. And moving to a flat tax -- the dream of conservatives such as Steve Forbes and Grover Norquist -- finished near last.

"Privatization and Neo-Feudalism" -- Bill Willers in The San Francisco Bay View, 7/23/03:

As the deficit balloons, the rightist program to privatize public lands is also moving right along. Free marketeer Terry Anderson, whose published plan to give each citizen "shares" of the public domain, said shares being sellable on the open market to those with the wealth to scoop them up, has been made President Bush's adviser on public lands issues.

Late last year, fellow free marketeer and Interior secretary, Gale Norton, a product of the anti-environmental "Wise Use Movement," revealed plans to "outsource" to the private sector 3,500 jobs in the U.S. Park Service. This raised no eyebrows, and by January 2003 the estimate had risen to more than 11,000 positions -- an eyebrow-raising 72 percent. Soon thereafter, President Bush revealed that as many as 850,000 positions, now federal, could become privatized. It was a declaration of war on public ownership and government by the people, framed as an argument for fiscal efficiency.

"Deployment Comments under Investigation" -- Lisa Burgess in Stars and Stripes, European edition, 7/25/03:

On Monday, the 3rd ID commander, Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, decided to stop
allowing reporters to spend time with his troops, other than to gather
information for pre-approved "news features," according to an e-mail response
from Lt. Col. Birmingham, 3rd ID spokesman in Baghdad.

The 3rd ID is "no longer embedding media for short stays, effective the
beginning of this week," Birmingham said.

The only exceptions to the policy will be made for three journalists who were
embedded with the unit during the war and have subsequently returned, Birmingham
said.

Blount "instituted the new ground rules with the intent to give soldiers some
opportunity to unwind among themselves," Birmingham said.

Harpers Weekly Review, 7/29/03

"Poindexter's Follies" -- New York Times editorial, 7/30/03:

The time has obviously come to send John Poindexter packing and to shut down the wacky espionage operation he runs at the Pentagon. The latest idea hatched by Mr. Poindexter's shop -- an online futures trading market where speculators could bet on the probabilities of terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups -- was canceled yesterday by embarrassed Pentagon officials. The next logical step is to fire Mr. Poindexter.

In testimony before Congress yesterday, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, disowned the futures project. The insensitivity of the idea boggles the mind. Quite apart from the tone-deafness of equating terrorist attacks with, say, corn futures, the plan would allow speculators -- even terrorists -- to profit from anonymous bets on future attacks. The project's theoretical underpinnings are equally absurd. Markets do not always operate perfectly in the larger world of stocks and bonds. The idea that they can reliably forecast the behavior of isolated terrorists is ridiculous.

The "Policy Analysis Market" would actually have opened for business on Oct. 1 had Senators Ron Wyden and Byron Dorgan not blown the whistle. Despite Mr. Wolfowitz's pledge to kill it, however, the problem of Mr. Poindexter remains. He is a man of dubious background and dubious ideas. A retired rear admiral, he served as Ronald Reagan's national security adviser and helped devise the plan to sell arms to Iran and illegally divert the proceeds to the rebels in Nicaragua. He was sentenced to six months in jail for lying to Congress, a conviction overturned on appeal. He resurfaced under the Bush administration at the Pentagon. His first big brainstorm post-9/11 was a program known as Total Information Awareness, designed to identify potential terrorists by compiling a detailed electronic dossier on millions of Americans.

Congress agreed earlier this year to subject that program to strict oversight and prohibit it from being used against Americans. In light of the revelations about the latest Poindexter scheme, Congress obviously did not go far enough. It should close his operation for good. The Senate recently agreed to do just that, adding an amendment to a Defense Department appropriations bill that would terminate funds for the program. The House must now follow suit.

"Defying Labels Left or Right, Dean's '04 Run Makes Gains" -- Jodi Wilgoren, with David Rosenbaum, in The New York Times, 7/30/03:

[Howard Dean] first dipped his toes in political water in a 1978 campaign to build a bike trail around Lake Champlain. He spent four years in the Vermont Legislature and five as lieutenant governor, both part-time jobs, before being elevated to the top job in in 1991, when Gov. Richard Snelling, a Republican, died of a heart attack.

He inherited a state budget deficit of about 11 percent, the highest income taxes in the country and the lowest bond rating in New England.

To the dismay of liberals in the Legislature who wanted to expand social and environmental programs, Dr. Dean and his chief economic adviser, Harlan Sylvester, a conservative stockbroker and investment banker, stuck with the Snelling budget-cutting plan. Helped by a booming economy, the state's finances improved sharply. Dr. Dean lowered income tax rates by 30 percent and put away millions in a rainy day fund. Vermont's bond rating became the highest in the Northeast.

In his last term, Dr. Dean won a change in law so that Vermont taxes were not automatically lowered by Mr. Bush's cut in federal income taxes, and Vermont had a comfortable surplus this spring when most other states faced crippling budget shortfalls. . . .

When he entered office, Dr. Dean was determined to provide health insurance to everyone in the state in one fell swoop. Despite support from liberal lawmakers, his plan failed, along with a similar initiative by the Clinton administration.

So Dr. Dean changed tactics and managed to accomplish much of his goal incrementally. Vermont now offers the nation's most generous health benefits to children, low-income adults and elderly residents of modest means. Almost all children in the state have full medical insurance, and more than a third of Vermont residents on Medicare get state help in paying for prescription drugs.

Under the program, teenage girls can often get counseling about sex and contraception without their parents' knowledge.

Dr. Dean promised that as president he would spend half of the money he would save by repealing Mr. Bush's recent tax cuts to provide free insurance to people under 25 and those who earn less than 185 percent of the poverty rate, and to let everybody else buy into a national plan for 7.5 percent of their gross income.

"My plan is not reform -- if you want to totally change the health-care system, I'm not your guy," Dr. Dean told supporters in Lebanon, N.H. "I'm not interested in having a big argument about what the best system is. I'm interested in getting everybody covered."

Dr. Dean earned the National Rifle Association's highest rating in its ranking of governors by signing two bills that protected gun ranges from commercial development and shifted responsibility for background checks to the federal government from county sheriffs. He says he would enforce federal laws banning assault weapons and requiring background checks, but would leave the rest to the states.

But the two most controversial bills Dr. Dean signed were forced on him by State Supreme Court decisions declaring the state's school financing system unconstitutional and demanding the same legal benefits for gay couples as for married heterosexuals.

In both instances, Dr. Dean mostly stayed in the background and left the heavy lifting to the Legislature. He insisted only that income taxes not be raised; the Legislature then turned to property taxes in wealthier communities to subsidize schools in poorer areas. And he pressed the state not to sanction gay marriages, although he allowed civil unions.

Although Dr. Dean flirted briefly with the idea of running for president in 2000, he says it was the civil union battle that finally convinced him to do so. "I realized you could win by standing up for what you believe in," he said.

"Read between the Lines of Those 28 Missing Pages" -- Robert Scheer in The Los Angeles Times, 7/29/03:

In the last week we've moved from the 16 deceitful words in George W. Bush's State of the Union speech to the 28 White House-censored pages in the congressional report that dealt with Saudi Arabia's role in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the United States.

Yet even in its sanitized version, the bipartisan report, long delayed by an embarrassed White House, makes clear that the U.S. should have focused on Saudi Arabia, and not Iraq, in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

As we know, but our government tends to ignore, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia; none came from Iraq. Leaks from the censored portions of the report indicate that at least some of those Saudi terrorists were in close contact with -- and financed by -- members of the Saudi elite, extending into the ranks of the royal family.

The report finds no such connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorists. It is now quite clear that the president -- unwilling to deal with the ties between Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden -- pursued Hussein as a politically convenient scapegoat. By drawing attention away from the Muslim fanatic networks centered in Saudi Arabia, Bush diverted the war against terror. That seems to be the implication of the 28 pages, which the White House demanded be kept from the American people when the full report was released.

Even many in Bush's own party are irritated that the president doesn't think we can be trusted with the truth.

"I went back and read every one of those pages thoroughly," Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), former vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Sunday on "Meet the Press." "My judgment is 95% of that information could be declassified, become uncensored so the American people would know."

Asked why he thought the pages were excised, Shelby, a leading pro-administration conservative, said, "I think it might be embarrassing to international relations."

Quite an embarrassment if the censored pages reveal that the Bush administration covered up the Saudi connection to the terrorist attacks.

Obviously alluding to Saudi Arabia, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), the former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, said Sunday, "High officials in this government, who I assume were not just rogue officials acting on their own, made substantial contributions to the support and well-being of two of these terrorists and facilitated their ability to plan, practice and then execute the tragedy of Sept. 11."

On Monday, Graham, responding to reports that Saudi Arabia would welcome making public some of the pages, called on Bush to fully declassify "the currently censored pages."

Newsweek, relying on anonymous government sources, reported Monday that the "connections between high-level Saudi princes and associates of the hijackers" included helping Al Qaeda operatives enter the U.S. and financing their residence in San Diego, where they plotted their infamous attacks.

Remember too that it was well known that Saudi charities with ties to the royal House of Saud were bankrolling the Al Qaeda operation in Afghanistan -- even as George H.W. Bush visited the kingdom shortly after his son was elected, eager to secure contracts for his then-employer, the Carlyle Group.

The fact is, Riyadh, unlike Baghdad, has long been a key hotbed of extremist Muslim organizing. By shielding and nurturing our relationship with the Saudi sheiks, Bush & Son have provided cover for those who support terror.

After all, is it really likely that career-conscious FBI and CIA officers would be willing to criticize possible Al Qaeda-House of Saud links when the president's father is out hustling business ties with the same family?

Even after Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration immediately protected Saudis in the United States, including allowing members of the large Bin Laden family who were in this country to be spirited home on their government's aircraft before they could be questioned. This at a time when many immigrants from all over the world were being detained arbitrarily.

"Remembering When the Truth Mattered" --
Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial, 7/30/03:

One can never be sure when to believe ex-cons, but let's say Jeb Magruder is
telling the truth. Let's imagine the former campaign aide to President Richard
Nixon is right that Nixon personally ordered the notorious Watergate burglary of

Democratic Party headquarters in 1972. That revelation not only answers one of
the world's most-asked questions -- "What did the president know and when did he

know it?" -- but also illustrates how public sentiment about presidential
conduct has changed in the decades since. . . .

Perhaps, to today's citizenry, the development will be no big deal. Those who
recall the Watergate era remember Nixon as a deceitful man. Time has painted for

them a portrait of a craven president who considered himself above the law. That

he may have gone so far as to order a burglary may shock them no longer.

Indeed, such a blas� attitude toward presidential miscreancy fits well with
popular sentiment toward other, more recent, presidential missteps. When
President Ronald Reagan's administration was accused of violating the
congressional ban on aiding Nicaragua's contra rebels, onlookers seemed less
interested in discovering the truth than dividing into political camps. The same

occurred when Bill Clinton walked into a swamp of prevarication during the
Monica Lewinsky drama. And now that President Bush is leading America into
ill-considered wars, few of Bush's supporters appear alarmed.

Could it be that Americans have come to expect their presidents to lie, cheat,
burgle, conspire and cover up? That they're no longer surprised when the leader
of the free world turns out to be less than a model citizen? If so, they may
have people like Jeb Magruder -- folks who prize simpering loyalty and
self-interest over true patriotism -- to thank. There was a time when a
less-than-honest president sparked scorn from both sides of the political aisle
and from within the White House itself. These days? Not such a big deal.