War

Harpers Weekly Review, 6/3/03

"Bush's Deceptions on Iraq Intelligence" -- Derrick Z. Jackson in The Boston Globe, 6/6/03:

Despite 160,000 American and British troops and the world's greatest technology, no weapons of mass destruction have been found. The commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, Lieutenant General James Conway, said whatever intelligence he was given on WMD, ''We were simply wrong.'' Conway said, ''We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there.''

Many current and former intelligence officers are now saying that the White House either ignored intelligence reports that failed to confirm weapons of mass destruction or trumped up skimpy or lame reports. A claim by Bush that Saddam was buying uranium from Africa for nuclear weapons turned out to be a forged document on the letterhead of a minister of foreign affairs in Niger who had been out of office for a decade.

Greg Thielmann, a recently retired State Department analyst who could not believe that Bush would use ''that stupid piece of garbage'' to make his case, told Newsweek, ''There is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused.''

A Central Command planner told Newsweek that the CIA's information on the sites where weapons of mass destruction were stored was ''crap.'' An intelligence official told US News and World Report that ''the policy decisions weren't matching the reports we were reading every day.'' In a 2002 document, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded, ''There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons.''

Time quoted a senior military official who helped plan the war in Iraq but quit after seeing the White House exaggerate bad intelligence. Time also quoted an Army intelligence officer who said Rumsfeld ''was deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence.''

US News and World Report detailed how Cheney's staff fed Secretary of State Colin Powell reams of ''evidence'' that could not be confirmed on the eve of Powell's testimony to the United Nations. David Albright, a former Atomic Energy Agency arms inspector, said the White House ''deliberately selected information that would increase the perception that Iraq was a serious threat'' and ''made a decision to turn a blind eye'' to the evidence that ''the large number of deployed chemical weapons the administration said that Iraq had are not there.''

Patrick Lang, a former CIA analyst on Iraq, has said intelligence was ''exploited and abused and bypassed'' by the White House. Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of CIA counter-terrorism operations, said many intelligence officials ''believe it is a scandal.'' Cannistraro said Bush had a ''moral obligation to use the best information available, not just information that fits your preconceived ideas.''

"Is Lying about the Reason for War an Impeachable Offense?" -- John Dean at cnn.com, 6/6/03:

In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush Administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed.

This administration may be due for a scandal. While Bush narrowly escaped being dragged into Enron, which was not, in any event, his doing. But the war in Iraq is all Bush's doing, and it is appropriate that he be held accountable.

To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose."

It's important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After Watergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power.

Nixon claimed that his misuses of the federal agencies for his political purposes were in the interest of national security. The same kind of thinking might lead a President to manipulate and misuse national security agencies or their intelligence to create a phony reason to lead the nation into a politically desirable war. Let us hope that is not the case.

"Secretary of State Forced to Defend Credibility of Intelligence Reports" -- Gary Younge in The Guardian, 6/5/03:

Earlier this week it emerged that Mr Powell had been so disturbed about questionable intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that he assembled a secret team to review the information he was given before he made a crucial speech to the UN security council on February 5.

The team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech because they could not be verified, according to the magazine US News and World Report.

At one point he became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing of the intelligence claims that he declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit."

According to the magazine Greg Theilmann, a recently retired state department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, says that inside the administration "there was a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused".

"Blair's Spin Doctor Apologizes for Dossier" -- Colin Brown and Francis Elliott in The Age, 6/9/03:

Tony Blair's closest adviser has written a personal letter apologising to the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service for discrediting the service with the release last January of the so-called "dodgy dossier" on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.

The disclosure that Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair's director of strategy and communications, apologised to the head of MI6 for the dossier, Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation, will fuel claims that Downing Street was involved in "doctoring" intelligence reports before the war.

Britain's Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported that Mr Campbell put his apology in writing to end a row with the intelligence service over the dossier, after it was revealed that parts were lifted via the internet from a 12-year-old thesis by an American student.

"Retired State Analyst Alleges Distortion, Misstated Conjecture in Leadup to Iraq" -- John J. Lumpkin in The Boston Globe, 6/7/03:

WASHINGTON (AP) The Bush administration distorted intelligence and presented conjecture as evidence to justify a U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a retired intelligence official who served during the months before the war.

"What disturbs me deeply is what I think are the disingenuous statements made from the very top about what the intelligence did say," said Greg Thielmann, who retired last September. "The area of distortion was greatest in the nuclear field."

Thielmann was director of the strategic, proliferation and military issues office in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. His office was privy to classified intelligence gathered by the CIA and other agencies about Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear programs.

In Thielmann's view, Iraq could have presented an immediate threat to U.S. security in two areas: Either it was about to make a nuclear weapon, or it was forming close operational ties with al-Qaida terrorists.

Evidence was lacking for both, despite claims by President Bush and others, Thielmann said in an interview this week. Suspicions were presented as fact, contrary arguments ignored, he said. . . .

Thielmann suggested mistakes may have been made at points all along the chain from when intelligence is gathered, analyzed, presented to the president and then provided to the public.

The evidence of a renewed nuclear program in Iraq was far more limited than the administration contended, he said.

"When the administration did talk about specific evidence it was basically declassified, sensitive information it did it in a way that was also not entirely honest," Thielmann said. . . .

Thielmann said he had presumed Iraq had supplies of chemical and probably biological weapons. He particularly expected U.S. forces to find caches of mustard agent or other chemical weapons left over from Saddam's old stockpiles.

"We appear to have been wrong," he said. "I've been genuinely surprised at that."

"Bush's Scorched-Earth Campaign" -- Neal Gabler in The New York Times, 6/8/03:

From the moment of his disputed election in 2000, President Bush has been dramatically reversing the traditional relationship between politics and policy. In his administration, politics seem less a means to policy than policy is a means to politics. Its goal is not to further the conservative revolution as advertised. The presidency's real goal is to disable the Democratic opposition, once and for all.

This has become a presidential mission partly by default. Bush came to the presidency with no commanding ideology, no grand crusade. He was in league with conservatives, but he was no fire-breather. For him, conservatism seemed a convenience -- the only path to the Republican nomination. One is hard-pressed to think of a single position Bush took during the 2000 campaign, save for his tax cuts, much less a full program. . . .

It has been said of Bush that he intends to finish the Reagan revolution by embedding conservatism so deeply into the governmental fabric that it will take generations to undo it. What he is really finishing, though, is not the Reagan revolution but the Clinton wars, which had far less to do with ideology than with politics. As Rove has engineered it, this is about power, pure and simple. It is about guaranteeing electoral results.

That is why, one suspects, Bush elicits such deep antagonism from the left -- deeper perhaps than any political figure since Nixon, even though he is personally genial and charming. At some level, maybe only subliminally, liberals know what the president and Rove are up to and fear that they will succeed in dismantling an effective two-party system. The left knows that Rove and company aren't keen on debating issues, negotiating, compromising and horse-trading, the usual means of getting things done politically. On the contrary: The administration is intent on foreclosing them.

As much as liberals abhor the conservative agenda, there is something far more frightening to them now -- not that Republicans have an ideological grand plan but that they don't have one. Instead, the GOP plan is policy solely in the service of politics, which should terrify democrats everywhere.

Harpers Weekly Review, 6/10/03

"Republicans Limit Probe of Iraq Intelligence" -- Vicki Allen in The Washington Post, 6/11/03:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republicans in Congress on Wednesday rebuffed calls by Democrats for a full-blown investigation into whether the Bush administration misread or inflated the threats posed by Iraq before going to war.

But they agreed to hold oversight hearings and review documents on U.S. intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. . . .

Democrats on the two Senate committees that oversee intelligence operations called for a formal joint investigation of the administration's case on Iraq's weapons and alleged links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

"We've got to make sure that the CIA does not embellish or distort in any way the intelligence information in order to advance a policy of any administration," said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the Intelligence Committee's ranking Democrat, called the Republicans' plan for oversight hearings "entirely inadequate and slow-paced."

"I'm not sure whether they really want to get to the crux of what really happened," he said, adding that he would keep pressing for a broad inquiry.

"Explain Why You Cited Forged Evidence" -- Rep. Henry Waxman's letter to George W. Bush, reprinted in Executive Intelligence Report, 6/13/03.

"U.S. Has Gained Little if Bush Lied about Reason for War" -- Mark Bowden in The Philadelphia Enquirer, 5/25/03:

Hussein represented only one of many thuggish regimes, and that the United States is not about to go to war against them all. I supported this war because I believed Bush and Blair when they said Iraq was manufacturing and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons in the hands of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations that shared Hussein's hostile designs made such a threat a defense priority - or so the argument went.

Early this month, the U.S. military announced that it had found three mobile laboratories that were most likely designed to manufacture chemical or biological weapons, the types of labs that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell referred to in making his argument for war before the U.N. Security Council. The discoveries were suggestive but hardly convincing evidence of the specific, tangible threat repeatedly outlined by the President. With the authors of Iraq's illicit-weapons program now in custody, we should expect to see soon, or to have seen already, the facilities and stockpiles we and most of the rest of the world believed Hussein possessed.

They may yet be found, but it is beginning to look as though the skeptics in this case were right. If so, I was taken in by this administration, and America and Great Britain were led to war under false pretenses.

Events have moved so swiftly, and Hussein's toppling has posed so many new pressing problems, that it would be easy to lose sight of this issue, but it is critically important. I can imagine no greater breach of public trust than to mislead a country into war. A strong case might have been made to go after Hussein just because he posed a potential threat to us and the region, because of his support for suicide bombers, and because of his ruthless oppression of his own people. But this is not the case our President chose to make. . . .

I trusted Bush, and unless something big develops on the weapons front in Iraq soon, it appears as though I was fooled by him. Perhaps he himself was taken in by his intelligence and military advisers. If so, he ought to be angry as hell, because ultimately he bears the responsibility.

"Some Analysts of Iraq Trailers Reject Germ Use" -- Judith Miller and William J. Broad in The New York Times, 6/7/03:

American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs. In interviews over the last week, they said the mobile units were more likely intended for other purposes and charged that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment. . . .

In all, at least three teams of Western experts have now examined the trailers and evidence from them. While the first two groups to see the trailers were largely convinced that the vehicles were intended for the purpose of making germ agents, the third group of more senior analysts divided sharply over the function of the trailers, with several members expressing strong skepticism, some of the dissenters said. . . .

The skeptical experts said the mobile plants lacked gear for steam sterilization, normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological production, peaceful or otherwise. Its lack of availability between production runs would threaten to let in germ contaminants, resulting in failed weapons.

Second, if this shortcoming were somehow circumvented, each unit would still produce only a relatively small amount of germ-laden liquid, which would have to undergo further processing at some other factory unit to make it concentrated and prepare it for use as a weapon.

Finally, they said, the trailers have no easy way for technicians to remove germ fluids from the processing tank.

Senior intelligence officials in Washington rebutted the skeptics, saying, for instance, that the Iraqis might have obtained the needed steam for sterilization from a separate supply truck.

The skeptics noted further that the mobile plants had a means of easily extracting gas. Iraqi scientists have said the trailers were used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons. While the white paper dismisses that as a cover story, some analysts see the Iraqi explanation as potentially credible. . . .

William C. Patrick III, a senior official in the germ warfare program that Washington renounced in 1969, said the lack of steam sterilization had caused him to question the germ-plant theory that he had once tentatively endorsed. "That's a huge minus," he said. "I don't see how you can clean those tanks chemically." . . .

Some doubters noted that the intelligence community was still scrambling to analyze the trailers, suggesting that the white paper may have been premature. They said laboratories in the Middle East and the United States were now analyzing more than 100 samples from the trailers to verify the intelligence findings. Allied forces, they noted, have so far failed to find any of the envisioned support vehicles that the trailers would need to produce biological weapons.

One skeptic questioned the practicality of some of the conjectural steps the Iraqis are envisioned as having taken to adapt the trailers to the job of making deadly germs.

"It's not built and designed as a standard fermenter," he said of the central tank. "Certainly, if you modify it enough you could use it. But that's true of any tin can."

"Blix: I Was Smeared by the Pentagon" -- Helena Smith in The Guardian, 6/11/03:

Hans Blix, the UN chief weapons inspector, lashed out last night at the "bastards" who have tried to undermine him throughout the three years he has held his high-profile post.

In an extraordinary departure from the diplomatic language with which he has come to be associated, Mr Blix assailed his critics in both Washington and Iraq.

Speaking exclusively to the Guardian from his 31st floor office at the UN in New York, Mr Blix said: "I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media. Not that I cared very much.

"It was like a mosquito bite in the evening that is there in the morning, an irritant."

In a wide-ranging interview Mr Blix, who retires in three weeks' time, accused:

-- The Bush administration of leaning on his inspectors to produce more damning language in their reports;

-- "Some elements" of the Pentagon of being behind a smear campaign against him; and

-- Washington of regarding the UN as an "alien power" which they hoped would sink into the East river.

Asked if he believed he had been the target of a deliberate smear campaign he said: "Yes, I probably was at a lower level."

Billmon's

collection of quotations from the Bush Administration and allies insisting on the imminent danger of Iraq's banned weapons.

"White House in Denial" -- Nicholas D. Kristof in The New York Times, 6/13/03:

[L]et me offer some more detail about the uranium saga. Piecing the story together from two people directly involved and three others who were briefed on it, the tale begins at the end of 2001, when third-rate forged documents turned up in West Africa purporting to show the sale by Niger to Iraq of tons of "yellowcake" uranium.

Italy's intelligence service obtained the documents and shared them with British spooks, who passed them on to Washington. Mr. Cheney's office got wind of this and asked the C.I.A. to investigate.

The agency chose a former ambassador to Africa to undertake the mission, and that person flew to Niamey, Niger, in the last week of February 2002. This envoy spent one week in Niger, staying at the Sofitel and discussing his findings with the U.S. ambassador to Niger, and then flew back to Washington via Paris.

Immediately upon his return, in early March 2002, this senior envoy briefed the C.I.A. and State Department and reported that the documents were bogus, for two main reasons. First, the documents seemed phony on their face -- for example, the Niger minister of energy and mines who had signed them had left that position years earlier. Second, an examination of Niger's uranium industry showed that an international consortium controls the yellowcake closely, so the Niger government does not have any yellowcake to sell.

Officials now claim that the C.I.A. inexplicably did not report back to the White House with this envoy's findings and reasoning, or with an assessment of its own that the information was false. I hear something different. My understanding is that while Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet may not have told Mr. Bush that the Niger documents were forged, lower C.I.A. officials did tell both the vice president's office and National Security Council staff members. Moreover, I hear from another source that the C.I.A.'s operations side and its counterterrorism center undertook their own investigations of the documents, poking around in Italy and Africa, and also concluded that they were false -- a judgment that filtered to the top of the C.I.A.

Meanwhile, the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, independently came to the exact same conclusion about those documents, according to Greg Thielmann, a former official there. Mr. Thielmann said he was "quite confident" that the conclusion had been passed up to the top of the State Department.

"It was well known throughout the intelligence community that it was a forgery," said Melvin Goodman, a former C.I.A. analyst who is now at the Center for International Policy.

Still, Mr. Tenet and the intelligence agencies were under intense pressure to come up with evidence against Iraq. Ambiguities were lost, and doubters were discouraged from speaking up.

"It was a foregone conclusion that every photo of a trailer truck would be a `mobile bioweapons lab' and every tanker truck would be `filled with weaponized anthrax,' " a former military intelligence officer said. "None of the analysts in military uniform had the option to debate the vice president, secretary of defense and the secretary of state."

Rep. Henry Waxman's

Nuclear Evidence on Iraq page

Bill Moyers's

"Presidential Address" to the Take Back America conference in Washington, DC, 6/4/03: "This is Your Story: The Progressive Story of America. Pass It On . . . "

"Iraqi Mobile Labs Nothing to Do with Germ Warfare, Report Finds" -- Peter Beaumont, Antony Barnett and Gaby Hinsliff in The Observer, 6/15/03:

An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist.

The conclusion by biological weapons experts working for the British Government is an embarrassment for the Prime Minister, who has claimed that the discovery of the labs proved that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction and justified the case for going to war against Saddam Hussein.

Instead, a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq, told The Observer last week: 'They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were - facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.'

The conclusion of the investigation ordered by the British Government - and revealed by The Observer last week - is hugely embarrassing for Blair, who had used the discovery of the alleged mobile labs as part of his efforts to silence criticism over the failure of Britain and the US to find any weapons of mass destruction since the invasion of Iraq. . . .

The revelation that the mobile labs were to produce hydrogen for artillery balloons will also cause discomfort for the British authorities because the Iraqi army's original system was sold to it by the British company, Marconi Command & Control.

"War Poll Uncovers Fact Gap" -- Frank Davies in The Philadelphia Inquirer, 6/14/03:

WASHINGTON - A third of the American public believes U.S. forces have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a recent poll. Twenty-two percent said Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons.

But such weapons have not been found in Iraq and were not used.

Before the war, half of those polled in a survey said Iraqis were among the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. But most of the Sept. 11 terrorists were Saudis; none was an Iraqi.

The results startled even the pollsters who conducted and analyzed the surveys. How could so many people be so wrong about information that has dominated news coverage for almost two years?

"It's a striking finding," said Steve Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which asked the weapons questions during a May 14-18 poll of 1,256 respondents.

He added: "Given the intensive news coverage and high levels of public attention, this level of misinformation suggests some Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance."

That is, of having their beliefs conflict with the facts. Kull noted that the mistaken belief that weapons had been found "is substantially greater among those who favored the war." . . .

Before the war, the U.S. media often reported as a fact the assertions by the Bush administration that Iraq possessed large stockpiles of illegal weapons.

During and after the war, reports of possible weapons discoveries were often trumpeted on front pages, while follow-up stories debunking the reports received less attention.

"Iraqi Military and Security Services Disbanded" -- The Guardian, 5/23/03:

Iraq's armed forces and the security organisations that supported Saddam Hussein's regime have been dissolved, it was announced today.

L Paul Bremer, the top official in the interim administration that is running the country, said the Iraqi Ministry of Defence, the Republican Guard and "other specified security institutions which constituted and supported the most repressive activities of Saddam Hussein's regime", have been disbanded. . . .

Today's order also ends conscription, turns the property of the dissolved entities over to the new administration and dismissed all employees of the armed forces, Republican Guard and the defence ministry.

It also abolishes the information ministry, which tightly controlled Iraq's media and the work of foreign journalists.

The announcement follows the administration's decree on May 16 abolishing Saddam's Ba'ath party and ordering the dismissal of party officials from the civil service. . . .

The move follows demonstrations in Baghdad on Sunday when former noncommissioned officers and officers from the three services, demanded back pay and other benefits owed to them since the collapse of Saddam's regime on April 9.

"Dividend Voodoo" -- Warren Buffett in The Washington Post, 5/20/03:

The taxes I pay to the federal government, including the payroll tax that is paid for me by my employer, Berkshire Hathaway, are roughly the same proportion of my income -- about 30 percent -- as that paid by the receptionist in our office. My case is not atypical -- my earnings, like those of many rich people, are a mix of capital gains and ordinary income -- nor is it affected by tax shelters (I've never used any). As it works out, I pay a somewhat higher rate for my combination of salary, investment and capital gain income than our receptionist does. But she pays a far higher portion of her income in payroll taxes than I do. . . .

Now the Senate says that dividends should be tax-free to recipients. Suppose this measure goes through and the directors of Berkshire Hathaway (which does not now pay a dividend) therefore decide to pay $1 billion in dividends next year. Owning 31 percent of Berkshire, I would receive $310 million in additional income, owe not another dime in federal tax, and see my tax rate plunge to 3 percent.

And our receptionist? She'd still be paying about 30 percent, which means she would be contributing about 10 times the proportion of her income that I would to such government pursuits as fighting terrorism, waging wars and supporting the elderly. Let me repeat the point: Her overall federal tax rate would be 10 times what my rate would be. . . .

Administration officials say that the $310 million suddenly added to my wallet would stimulate the economy because I would invest it and thereby create jobs. But they conveniently forget that if Berkshire kept the money, it would invest that same amount, creating jobs as well. . . .

Proponents of cutting tax rates on dividends argue that the move will stimulate the economy. A large amount of stimulus, of course, should already be on the way from the huge and growing deficit the government is now running. I have no strong views on whether more action on this front is warranted. But if it is, don't cut the taxes of people with huge portfolios of stocks held directly. (Small investors owning stock held through 401(k)s are already tax-favored.) Instead, give reductions to those who both need and will spend the money gained. Enact a Social Security tax "holiday" or give a flat-sum rebate to people with low incomes. Putting $1,000 in the pockets of 310,000 families with urgent needs is going to provide far more stimulus to the economy than putting the same $310 million in my pockets.

When you listen to tax-cut rhetoric, remember that giving one class of taxpayer a "break" requires -- now or down the line -- that an equivalent burden be imposed on other parties. In other words, if I get a break, someone else pays. Government can't deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch. And last week the Senate handed the bill to the wrong party.

"All Together Now" -- Guardian lead editorial, 5/23/03:

In pressing significant amendments to the new UN security council resolution on Iraq, France and Russia did Britain a favour. The original draft, principally authored by the US, failed to give a central role to the UN and was objectionable in several other respects, not least in its silence on resumed UN weapons inspections. The resolution passed yesterday corrects some of these imbalances.

It is now agreed that the UN's special representative will have an influential, though not decisive, say in Iraq's political rehabilitation; that the occupying powers (the US and Britain) must report regularly to the council; that there will be strengthened international monitoring of the management of Iraq's oil revenues; and that the UN oil-for-food programme - vital while Iraq's humanitarian situation remains so precarious - will continue for at least six months. The resolution is still unsatisfactorily vague about future, "confirmatory" UN inspections, promising only to "revisit" the issue. It sets no timetable for the establishment of a new Iraqi government while giving extraordinary powers to the occupiers. Conversely, they have accepted open-ended financial obligations that may yet prove exceptionally onerous for British taxpayers given the steadily falling estimates of Iraq's oil earnings in the next five years. But overall, this is a better outcome than might have been expected after all the pre-war ructions.

Despite the way it was achieved, the lifting of sanctions on Iraq, the cause of so many years of pointless suffering and fruitless argument, is a matter for celebration. So, too, is this symbolic and to a lesser degree practical reassertion of the UN's primacy in conferring both inter national legality and legitimacy. By forcing a softening of the US position, France in particular has helped Britain secure what Tony Blair calls a "solid basis" for future policy in Iraq but one which Mr Blair, despite his much-vaunted influence in Washington, could not by himself achieve. By accepting a text that they regard as less than perfect, France and its anti-war allies have served a larger cause by putting the UN "back in the game", as France's foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, puts it. After all the calumny unfairly heaped on French heads in recent months, Mr Blair and colleagues would do well to acknowledge this debt.

"CIA to Review Iraq Intelligence" -- Dana Priest and Walter Pincus in The Washington Post, 5/23/03:

The House intelligence committee, expressing concern about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, asked Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet yesterday "to reevaluate U.S. intelligence" used by the Bush administration before the war to describe Iraq's proscribed weapons programs and its links to terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda.

The administration based its argument for going to war against Iraq on the dangers posed by Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and its alleged ties to al Qaeda.

The CIA, at the suggestion of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, has an unusual study underway that will compare intelligence given to President Bush and other policymakers before the war to information now being gathered in Iraq from the ousted Iraqi government's files and interrogations of former Iraqi government personnel, according to senior intelligence officials. . . .

One official who has read a draft of the NIC and CIA prewar studies said, "There is no question there was a lot of pressure on analysts to support preconceived judgments." But, he added, "the analysts' record is not bad when you consider you have strong policymakers pushing analysts for information that supports their specific views."

Neither the agency's study nor the committee's request addresses how accurately top policymakers, in particular Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, portrayed the classified intelligence and advice they received before making their public statements.

"Blix Suspects There Are No Weapons of Mass Destruction" -- Rory McCarthy and Jeevan Vasagar in The Guardian, 5/24/03:

The chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said yesterday that he suspected that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction,

He added that "in this respect" the war might not have been justified.

"I am obviously very interested in the question of whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction - and I am beginning to suspect there possibly were none," he said in an interview with the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. . . .

He referred to Saddam Hussein's chief scientific adviser, Lieutenant General Amer al-Saadi, who surrendered last month and said in an interview: "Nothing else will come out after the end of the war."

"The fact that al-Saadi surrendered and said there were no weapons of mass destruction has led to me to ask myself whether there actually were any," Dr Blix said.

"I don't see why he would still be afraid of the regime. Other leading figures have said the same." . . .

"U.S. Sped Bremer to Iraq Post" -- Karen DeYoung in The Washington Post, 5/24/03:

The appointment of L. Paul Bremer III early this month as the new head of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq, portrayed by the Bush administration as part of a smoothly running postwar plan, was a hastily arrived-at decision by a White House increasingly worried about collapsing civil order in Iraq, according to senior administration officials. . . .

Postwar plans drawn up in January and February included the eventual installation of a senior civilian "of stature" to be in charge of non-military aspects of the occupation during an indefinite period between Garner's early efforts and the election of an Iraqi government. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had interviewed and signed off on Bremer in April, but announcements of his appointment and departure were still seen as weeks, if not months, away.

Powell was "surprised" by the decision to advance Bremer's departure for Iraq, one official said, "but it was a nice surprise" since Bremer is a former Foreign Service officer. Rumsfeld, who was traveling overseas when the news broke here on May 1, approved of Bremer but was said to be irritated that reports portrayed the sudden decision as a victory for Powell. Rumsfeld issued a terse statement praising Garner and saying no decision on any change had been announced.

Garner, who now works for Bremer, originally signed up to stay in Iraq until July 1. It is not clear how long he will remain.

"U.S. May Let Kurds Keep Arms, Angering Shiites" -- Patrick E. Tyler in The New York Times, 5/24/03:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 23 -- The American occupation authority in Iraq, apparently preserving the prewar distinction between Kurdish-controlled northern areas and the rest of the country, will allow Kurdish fighters to keep their assault rifles and heavy weapons, but require Shiite Muslim and other militias to surrender theirs, according to a draft directive.

The plan has engendered intense criticism by Shiite leaders involved in negotiations with American and British officials who have met privately with the heavily armed political groups that have moved into the power vacuum here.

"Maybe we didn't fight with the coalition, but we didn't fight against them," said Adel Abdul Mahdi, an official of the largest Shiite group, which is headed by Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim. "We want conditions where all militias are dissolved and we will not accept that other militias will be allowed to stay there with their weapons while we will not be there with ours."

Under the draft order, obtained by The New York Times, "militias that assisted coalition forces who remain under the supervision of coalition forces" will be authorized "to possess automatic or heavy weapons." . . .

Besides the armed Shiite groups, the main militia in Iraq are the Kurds and the Free Iraqi Forces of the Iraqi National Congress under Ahmad Chalabi.

General McKiernan said today that Mr. Chalabi's militia was being "demilitarized."

When Mr. Chalabi's militia first surfaced in Iraq last month, it received training from under the supervision of an American Special Forces officer.

On Thursday night, armed fighters from the Iraqi National Congress engaged in a running gun battle with unknown foes during what was described as a search by Mr. Chalabi's forces for senior Baath Party members in a Baghdad suburb.

After the firefight, American troops raided Mr. Chalabi's headquarters at Baghdad's Hunting Club, arrested 35 of his militiamen and seized their weapons. They were released, Mr. Chalabi's group said in a statement, after an American military officer assigned as a liaison to the group intervened.

Kurdish and Shiite Muslim leaders confirmed in interviews this week that senior military commanders, including Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, the deputy commander of American forces in the region, and General McKiernan had briefed them on the disarmament directive and issued some pointed warnings that they would be disarmed by force if they did not comply.

"Which Democrat Will Speak Fiscal Truth?" -- Roger Altman in The Washington Post, 5/25/03:

Officially, all three Bush tax bills, taken together, are estimated to reduce federal revenue by approximately $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years. But many of the cuts in each bill are disingenuously designed to lapse within this 10-year window. The administration knows that Congress won't likely allow taxes to go back up at those moments. Those cuts will be extended, and the ultimate reduction in federal revenue will approach an astounding $3 trillion. This means an average annual budget deficit of $420 billion over that period. We've never had a deficit that large in any single year, let alone 10 straight.

Juxtaposed against the gargantuan Social Security and Medicare actuarial deficits, this is ruinous fiscal policy and even worse social policy. But in raw political terms, it is brilliant. It paints the Democrats, and particularly their presidential candidates, into a corner. They are forced to support even larger deficits or call for a rollback of certain tax cuts or accept the utter absence of budget resources to pay for any new initiatives, from health care on down. Each of these choices is politically excruciating, just as the White House planned it.

But, perversely, there is a bright side. Problems this big lend themselves to simple approaches, such as these: (1) The Bush tax cuts are excessive and, in part, should be rolled back; and (2) future budget deficits should be smaller than the president is proposing. A Democrat with the courage to adopt these principles and communicate them effectively becomes the truth-teller and could go far. . . .

The task for the Democrats is twofold: first, to help the public understand these choices by explaining them effectively. That's not an impossible task. John F. Kennedy could have done it and so could Bill Clinton. Second, they must take the courageous step of advocating the fiscal policy we require: rolling back some of these Bush tax cuts. Only in this way can we pay for at least the few initiatives this society must have and shrink the future deficits this administration has created. Americans need to be reminded that just a few years ago, the achievement of a balanced budget for the first time in 50 years, and under a Democratic president, led to extraordinary prosperity.

Would this be politically suicidal? No. Just returning the top income tax rate to 39.6 percent (the Clinton rate), retaining the estate tax and leaving dividend taxation where it is saves nearly $1 trillion compared with the Bush plan. And the first step would affect only those with annual incomes over $400,000.

History tells us that Americans always respond to real leadership. We'll see if there is a presidential Democrat with the courage and communication skills to make this case. If there is one, next year's election may be much more competitive than you think.

"Red Cross Denied Access to PoWs" -- Ed Vulliamy in The Observer, 5/25/03:

The United States is illegally holding thousands of Iraqi prisoners of war and other captives without access to human rights officials at compounds close to Baghdad airport, The Observer has learnt.

There have also been reports of a mutiny last week by prisoners at an airport compound, in protest against conditions. The uprising was 'dealt with' by the Americans, according to a US military source.

The International Committee of the Red Cross so far has been denied access to what the organisation believes could be as many as 3,000 prisoners held in searing heat. All other requests to inspect conditions under which prisoners are being held have been met with silence or been turned down. . . .

The ICRC has gained access to prisoners held in camps at Umm Qasr in the south. But with regard to the larger numbers reportedly held in Baghdad, said Doumani, 'we are still waiting for the green light, more than a month after the end of the conflict. This is in breach of the third Geneva Convention.' She said the laws of war should give the ICRC access 'as quickly as possible'. . . .

Witnesses to the camps are few, since no Iraqi prisoners taken to them have been released. But a cameraman for the France 3 television channel, arrested at the Palestine Hotel, did manage a glimpse. Leo Nicolian has documentation signed by a Lieutenant Brad Fisher saying he was wrongly arrested (and beaten, with a black eye to prove it) for the alleged theft of a bag from an American reporter.

He was held at the tennis court compound along with, he said, about 50 other prisoners, and told he was detained 'for investigation'. On his way out, Nicolian said he passed a bigger encampment in which he saw 'hundreds of men' hooded, with their arms tied behind their backs.

"U.S. Eyes Pressing Uprising in Iran" -- Glenn Kessler in The Washington Post, 5/25/03:

The Bush administration, alarmed by intelligence suggesting that al Qaeda operatives in Iran had a role in the May 12 suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia, has suspended once-promising contacts with Iran and appears ready to embrace an aggressive policy of trying to destabilize the Iranian government, administration officials said.

Senior Bush administration officials will meet Tuesday at the White House to discuss the evolving strategy toward the Islamic republic, with Pentagon officials pressing hard for public and private actions that they believe could lead to the toppling of the government through a popular uprising, officials said.

The State Department, which had encouraged some form of engagement with the Iranians, appears inclined to accept such a policy, especially if Iran does not take any visible steps to deal with the suspected al Qaeda operatives before Tuesday, officials said. But State Department officials are concerned that the level of popular discontent there is much lower than Pentagon officials believe, leading to the possibility that U.S. efforts could ultimately discredit reformers in Iran.

In any case, the Saudi Arabia bombings have ended the tentative signs of engagement between Iran and the United States that had emerged during the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. . . .

Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld accused Iran of harboring al Qaeda members. "There's no question but that there have been and are today senior al Qaeda leaders in Iran, and they are busy," Rumsfeld said. Iranian officials, however, have vehemently denied that they have granted al Qaeda leaders safe haven in the country.

Until the Saudi bombings, some officials said, Iran had been relatively cooperative on al Qaeda. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Iran has turned over al Qaeda officials to Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. In talks, U.S. officials had repeatedly warned Iranian officials that if any al Qaeda operatives in Iran are implicated in attacks against Americans, it would have serious consequences for relations between the two countries.

"UN Chief Warns of Anti-American Backlash in Iraq" -- Rory McCarthy in The Guardian, 5/27/03:

The UN's most senior humanitarian official in Iraq warned yesterday that US attempts to rebuild the country were overly dominated by "ideology" and risked triggering a violent backlash.

Ramiro Lopes da Silva said the sudden decision last week to demobilise 400,000 Iraqi soldiers without any re-employment programme could generate a "low-intensity conflict" in the countryside. . . .

Mr Lopes da Silva said the UN "disagreed" with some of the decisions made by the US-led authority in Baghdad.

He was surprised the decision to disband the Iraqi military had not been accompanied by an attempt to reintegrate soldiers into society.

"The way the decision was taken leaves them in a vacuum," he said. "Our concern is that if there is nothing for them out there soon this will be a potential source of additional destabilisation."

Even US generals admitted at the time they feared the decision could worsen the lawlessness and looting. Mr Lopes da Silva said the demobilisation, along with tightened security in the capital, could force looters into the less well-guarded countryside.

"What you are potentially going to create is more banditry and a low-intensity conflict in the rural areas," he said. "These edicts are seen very much just as ideological statements."

Mr Lopes da Silva also questioned the authority's de-Ba'athification programme, under which up to 30,000 Ba'ath party officials are automatically excluded from office. "Many bureaucrats who have important experience that would help the new government were only Ba'ath party members on paper," he said.

In another step against the Ba'ath party yesterday, US military officials fired the police chief for west Baghdad against the advice of several American soldiers. Abdul Razak al-Abbassi, who for the past three weeks has helped bring hundreds of officers back to work, was dismissed because he had been a senior member of the Ba'ath party under Saddam.

"Are We Safer?" Stephen F. Cohen at The Nation Online, 5/19/03:

Will the Iraq war increase America's national security, as the Bush Administration has always promised and now insists is already the case, or will it undermine and diminish our national security, as thoughtful critics believed?

In the weeks, months and years ahead, we will learn the answer to that fateful question by judging developments by seven essential criteria:

(1) Will the war discourage or encourage other regional "preemptive" military strikes, particularly by nuclear-armed states such as, but not only, India and Pakistan? India has already evoked that newly proclaimed US doctrine in its conflict with Pakistan, as has Russia in its increasingly hostile relations with the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

(2) Indeed, will the Iraq war stop the proliferation of states that possess nuclear weapons or instead incite more governments to acquire them as a deterrent against another US "regime change"? If anything, North Korea and Iran have seemed even more determined to develop such weapons.

(3) Will the war, and the long US occupation that is likely to ensue, reduce the recruitment of young Arabs by terrorist movements or will it inspire many new recruits? The subsequent suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco suggest that the latter result will be the case.

(4) With or without more recruits, will the war decrease or increase the number of terrorist plots against the United States, whether at home or abroad? Here too the recent targeting of a US firm in Saudi Arabia and continuing "terrorist" attacks on American troops even in Iraq itself are not good signs.

(5) Will the war help safeguard the vast quantities of nuclear and other materials of mass destruction that exist in the world today, and the expertise needed to operationalize them, or make them more accessible to "evil-doers"? In this exceedingly perilous respect, the war may have aleady made things worse. Not only has the Bush Administration yet to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, its original professed purpose for attacking the country, but the war led directly to the looting of at least seven Iraqi nuclear facilities and thus possibly to a new kind of proliferation.

(6) In that connection, will Russia--which has more ill-secured devices of mass destruction than any other country and which strongly opposed and still resents the US war--now be more, or less, inclined to collaborate with Washington in safeguarding and reducing those weapons and materials? Again, the initial result has been contrary to American national security interests. On May 16, President Vladimir V. Putin announced that the Kremlin, like the White House, is likely to build even more nuclear weapons.

(7) Finally, considering the rampant anti-Americanism it has provoked, will the war result in more or fewer governments willing to cooperate with--individually or in multinational organizations like the United Nations--George W. Bush's stated top priority, the war against global terrorism? During the weeks since the military campaign ended, anti-American sentiments have continued to grow, from the Middle East to Western Europe, and the United Nations remains profoundly divided by the US war and its ugly aftermath in Iraq.

"For Partisan Gain, Republicans Decide Rules Were Meant to Be Broken" -- Adam Cohen in The New York Times, 5/27/03:

Republicans, who now control all three branches of the federal government, are not just pushing through their political agenda. They are increasingly ignoring the rules of government to do it. While the Texas redistricting effort failed, Republicans succeeded in enacting an equally partisan redistricting plan in Colorado. And Republicans in the Senate -- notably those involved in the highly charged issue of judicial confirmations -- have been just as quick to throw out the rulebook.

These partisan attacks on the rules of government may be more harmful, and more destabilizing, than bad policies, like the $320 billion tax cut. Modern states, the German sociologist Max Weber wrote, derive their legitimacy from "rational authority," a system in which rules apply in equal and predictable ways, and even those who lead are reined in by limits on their power. When the rules of government are stripped away, people can begin to regard their government as illegitimate. . . .

Weber, in writing about rules, was concerned about what factors kept governments in power. That is not a concern in the United States -- there is no uprising in the offing. But when Americans see their government flouting the rules, as they did during Watergate, they respond with cynicism.

In these hard times -- with threats from abroad and a sour economy at home -- our leaders should be bringing the nation together not by demonizing foreign countries, but by instilling greater faith in our own. They should be showing greater reverence for the rules of government, and looking for other ways -- like tougher campaign finance laws -- to assure Americans that their government operates evenhandedly.

Harpers Weekly Review, 5/27/03

"We've found the weapons of mass destruction" -- George W. Bush in an interview on Polish television, 5/30/03 (as transcribed at cnn.com):

We've found the weapons of mass destruction. You know, we found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world and he said Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations' resolutions and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on.

But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them.

"Hussein Backers Regain Role in Government" -- Paul Watson in The Los Angeles Times, 5/12/03:

MOSUL, Iraq -- The U.S. Army has allowed several once-forceful supporters of Saddam Hussein's regime back into power here, including a religious leader who just weeks ago ordered Muslims to fight American troops to the death.

Convinced that sweeping out all officials associated with Hussein would result in a government too weak to hold Iraq together, U.S. forces in Mosul hope to win over their enemies by allowing them to sit on a new interim city council. . . .

A powerful member of the new council is Sheik Saleh Khalil Hamoody, who also heads the Mosul region's council of Islamic scholars. Several days after U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq began, Hamoody issued a fatwa, or edict, declaring that it was the religious duty of all Muslims to fight U.S.-led forces.

"Our valiant Iraq is facing a noble and faithful battle against imperialist and Zionist attackers who hate us," said the fatwa, which was approved by the Islamic scholars council. "They aim to destroy Islam and its existence to achieve their goals of world domination and to guarantee security for Zionism and its future."

Hamoody is widely known in northwestern Iraq for his close ties to the former Baath Party regime. He is a cousin of Hussein's former defense minister, Sultan Hashim Ahmad Jabburi Tai, who is on the U.S. military's list of most-wanted fugitives.

Hamoody was elected to the interim city council at a May 5 convention of about 150 community elders despite assurances from the commander of American forces here that U.S. intelligence would weed out candidates who were too closely associated with the toppled regime.

U.S. Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, who is in charge of northwestern Iraq as commander of the 101st Airborne Division, said he is aware of anti-American sentiment among some religious leaders in Mosul. He also acknowledged in an interview that he had not been informed about Hamoody's fatwa, and he said he might ask the imam to withdraw it in an official statement.

"Surrounded by Chaos in Iraq, Middle Class Takes Up Arms" -- Laura King in The Los Angeles Times, 5/12/03:

Alarmed by a sharp upsurge in street crime -- brazen daylight robberies, continued looting and the relatively recent phenomenon of violent carjackings -- Baghdad's professional class is rapidly arming itself, drawing on a vast pool of illicit weaponry that has flooded the capital since the fall of Saddam Hussein and his regime. . . .

The nervous well-to-do are not the only ones purchasing guns in this country where the streets, at least, were safe under Hussein. Ad hoc militias, criminal gangs, ethnic Kurds and rural tribesman also are all on a weapons-buying binge -- a development that is worrying to the U.S. forces that are trying to restore some semblance of order in both the capital and the countryside.

Thriving weapons bazaars have sprung up all over Baghdad, ranging from small, surreptitious knots of dealers operating out of their cars to sprawling, semipermanent markets where the gun merchants helpfully organize themselves by specialty, price range and degree of firepower. Just about everything is on offer, from scope-fitted sniper rifles to rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

No one has tried to publicly estimate the number of light weapons and handguns that have made their way onto the open market -- other than to say that the quantity is enormous, even for a country with an established gun culture.

Weapons stocks at abandoned Iraqi military bases, together with formidable arsenals at neighborhood and district headquarters of Hussein's Baath Party, were picked clean by looters in the days after U.S. troops moved into Baghdad. And that doesn't even include the weapons the Baath Party handed out to residents before the war for their country's defense. Many of these guns are up for grabs.

"Garner Surrenders Control of Baghdad in Bloodless Coup" -- Richard Beeston in The London Times, 5/13/03:

THE fastest regime change in Iraqi history occurred at Baghdad airport yesterday when Paul Bremer, Washington's new proconsul, took over running the country from Jay Garner, the much-criticised retired US Army general.

After less than a month in charge of the vast post- war reconstruction operation, General Garner and five top aides were eased out in a bloodless coup after failing to get government running in Iraq and to restore a semblance of normality to Baghdad. . . .

Although US officials insisted that the arrival of Mr Bremer, who will work alongside John Sawers, Tony Blair's special envoy, was not a reflection on General Garner, the facts suggested otherwise.

Baghdad today is a city without essential utilities, law and order or a functioning government. Nor does there appear to be any detailed plan to curtail the anarchy and to restore basic public services. Arguably the situation, far from improving, is deteriorating, with potentially dangerous political consequences for the coalition.

Barbara Bodine, a former US Ambassador to Yemen who was supposed to run the Baghdad region, was among those returning home. At one recent meeting with the press, she was asked about the shooting of a dozen Iraqis by US troops in Fallujah, a town outside Baghdad and within her jurisdiction. It was clear from her answer that she was unaware of the incident, which was making headline news around the world.

Margaret Tutweiler, another senior US diplomat and for-mer State Department spokeswoman, was supposed to be in charge of communications, but repeatedly she refused to meet the media in Baghdad.

The most damning assessment of General Garner's team comes from many Iraqis. Over the past three weeks, I was asked repeatedly: "Who is in charge?" Nobody had heard of their new leader.

"Terror Test" -- Beverley Lumpkin at ABCNews.com, 5/12/03:

Twenty-five federal agencies, plus dozens of state, local and Canadian government agencies, and the American Red Cross are all participating in the $16 million, five-day exercise known as TOPOFF2 -- because it's the second national exercise to test the preparation and coordination of the nation's top officials, on a regional and national level. . . .

Today at noon local time in Seattle, smoke billows from a burning car as a "bomb" explodes near a coffee shop. As local officials scramble to deal with as many as 100 casualties, they learn that radiation levels in the area have been heightened. This is no ordinary bomb, but rather a radiological dispersion device, or "dirty bomb."

In Washington, Ridge declares that the national terror threat threat level has gone to "Red," signaling that the country is under attack. A command center for the National Capital Region comprising the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia springs into action, as does the DHS command center in Ridge's offices.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, the same terrorists, known as GLODO (Group for the Liberation of Orangeland and the Destruction of Others) are supposed to release a biological agent at five different sites, and people start to exhibit flu-like symptoms such as fever, chills and aches. In the TOPOFF2 scenario, this is no flu; the germ the terrorists release is bubonic plague. When inhaled, the bacteria can cause the highly contagious and often deadly pneumonic plague.

Over the next several days, the "victims" of the biological attack will start showing up at Chicago-area hospitals (66 in all) and gradually tax their resources. The physicians and other hospital workers engaged in the exercise must first make diagnoses, then carry out tests, then have the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirm their fears. Meanwhile the initial "victims" have been "contaminating" others.

There's an international component, as well. Canadian government agencies will get involved both because of the proximity of Vancouver, British Columbia, to the Seattle attack, and because some of Chicago's plague "victims" will start arriving at Canadian airports.

The end of the exercise will come with the FBI capturing the "terrorists" late Thursday or early Friday.

Harpers Weekly Review, 5/13/03

"WMDs for the Taking?" -- Rod Nordland in Newsweek, 5/19/03 (accessed 5/13/03):

Looters outran the WMD hunters almost every time. "Once a site has been hit with a 2,000-pound bomb, then looted, there's not a lot left," says Maj. Paul Haldeman, the 101st Airborne Division's top NBC officer. In the rush to Baghdad, Coalition forces raced past most suspected WMD sites, and looters took over. After Saddam's fall, there were too few U.S. troops to secure the facilities. Roughly 900 possible WMD sites appeared on the initial target lists. So far, V Corps officers say, fewer than 150 have been searched. "There aren't enough troops in the whole Army," says Col. Tim Madere, the overseer of V Corps's sensitive-site teams. "There just aren't enough experts to do everything." . . .

Some of the lapses are frightening. The well-known Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, about 12 miles south of Baghdad, had nearly two tons of partially enriched uranium, along with significant quantities of highly radioactive medical and industrial isotopes, when International Atomic Energy Agency officials made their last visit in January. By the time U.S. troops arrived in early April, armed guards were holding off looters -- but the Americans only disarmed the guards, Al Tuwaitha department heads told NEWSWEEK. "We told them, 'This site is out of control. You have to take care of it'," says Munther Ibrahim, Al Tuwaitha's head of plasma physics. "The soldiers said, 'We are a small group. We cannot take control of this site'." As soon as the Americans left, looters broke in. The staff fled; when they returned, the containment vaults' seals had been broken, and radioactive material was everywhere.

U.S. officers say the center had already been ransacked before their troops arrived. They didn't try to stop the looting, says Colonel Madere, because "there was no directive that said do not allow anyone in and out of this place." Last week American troops finally went back to secure the site. Al Tuwaitha's scientists still can't fully assess the damage; some areas are too badly contaminated to inspect. "I saw empty uranium-oxide barrels lying around, and children playing with them," says Fadil Mohsen Abed, head of the medical-isotopes department. Stainless-steel uranium canisters had been stolen. Some were later found in local markets and in villagers' homes. "We saw people using them for milking cows and carrying drinking water," says Ibrahim. The looted materials could not make a nuclear bomb, but IAEA officials worry that terrorists could build plenty of dirty bombs with some of the isotopes that may have gone missing. Last week NEWSWEEK visited a total of eight sites on U.N. weapons-inspection lists. Two were guarded by U.S. troops. Armed looters were swarming through two others. Another was evidently destroyed many years ago. American forces had not yet searched the remaining three.

"Baghdad Anarchy Spurs Call for Help" -- Peter Slevin in The Washington Post, 5/13/03:

BAGHDAD, May 12 -- Baghdad residents and U.S. officials said today that U.S. occupation forces are insufficient to maintain order in the Iraqi capital and called for reinforcements to calm a wave of violence that has unfurled over the city, undermining relief and reconstruction efforts and inspiring anxiety about the future.

Reports of carjackings, assaults and forced evictions grew today, adding to an impression that recent improvements in security were evaporating. Fires burned anew in several Iraqi government buildings and looting resumed at one of former president Saddam Hussein's palaces. The sound of gunfire rattled during the night; many residents said they were keeping their children home from school during the day. Even traffic was affected, as drivers ignored rules in the absence of Iraqi police, only to crash and cause tie-ups. . . .

[T]he British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, expressed disappointment with efforts so far to bring democracy to Iraq. He told the British Parliament that "results in the early weeks have not been as good as we would have hoped." Straw also said the lack of security in Baghdad has been disappointing.

An office and warehouse belonging to the aid group CARE were attacked Sunday night. In two other weekend incidents, two CARE vehicles were seized by armed men, the organization reported today, asking the U.S. occupation forces to "take immediate steps to restore law and order to Baghdad."

"The violence is escalating," said Anne Morris, a senior CARE staff member. "We have restricted staff movement for their own safety. What does it say about the situation when criminals can move freely about the city and humanitarian aid workers cannot?" . . .

The Pentagon announced early this month that an additional 4,000 soldiers were being dispatched to Baghdad, bringing the total in the city to 16,000. The composition of the force will shift as combat units head home and the number of military police officers grows from 2,000 to about 4,000 by mid-June.

Mujahidin begin surrendering to US forces (Stephen Farrell, "Foreign Forces Must Go, Insists Shia Ayatollah," London Times, 5/12/03):

Ashraf Base, Iraq: Iranian rebels in Iraq have begun to surrender to US forces under a deal that effectively ends the heavily armed People's Mujahidin as a fighting force. US forces in Iraq said in a statement that the decades-old group agreed at high-level talks that within a week all of its thousands of fighters would be detained by US. The Mujahidin, labelled terrorists by Washington, also accepted that all their heavy weapons would be placed in a desert base near the Iranian border and controlled by US troops.

"Kurdish Leader Warns U.S. That Iraq Violence Risks Gains" -- Patrick E. Tyler in The New York Times, 5/12/03:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 12 -- The Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, who will play a crucial role in the formation of the interim government in Iraq, said today that the United States risked squandering its victory over Saddam Hussein by allowing chaos and anarchy to run unchecked in the country.

Mr. Barzani spoke in an interview on the day that a new civilian administrator, J. Paul Bremer III, arrived in the Iraqi capital to take over the task of rebuilding the country from Jay Garner, the retired Army lieutenant general first appointed to that mission. . . .

The sudden personnel overhaul has rattled Iraqi political leaders who have been working closely with General Garner, and none was more disappointed that Mr. Barzani, who worked with the general a decade ago when Iraq's Kurdish minority fled by the hundreds of thousands to the Turkish border region to escape the wrath of Mr. Hussein after an unsuccessful uprising.

"His departure will have a very negative effect," Mr. Barzani said. "The rapid change of officials is not very helpful because we need focus."

Elaborating, Mr. Barzani said that "major mistakes have been made" in the military and civilian management of postwar Iraq, "and if we continue in this confusion, this wonderful victory we have achieved will turn into a quagmire."

This concern now radiates far beyond the immediate region. In London today, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said that "the situation in Baghdad is not satisfactory" and he acknowledged that it was the responsibility of the United States and its coalition partners "to ensure that it becomes satisfactory very quickly."

He spoke after meeting with the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, who conveyed an even stronger sense of alarm.

"In the majority of the country, there is instability, which threatens the territorial integrity and the unity of Iraq, which is of extreme concern to the countries of the region," Prince Saud said.

He said the ongoing violence, including almost hourly eruptions of gunfire in Baghdad, would undermine the distribution of humanitarian aide "and it threatens a breakdown in order altogether."

"US: 'Saddam Had No Weapons of Mass Destruction'" -- Neil Mackay in The Sunday Herald (Scotland), 5/11/03 (?):

The Bush administration has admitted that Saddam Hussein probably had no weapons of mass destruction.

Senior officials in the Bush administration have admitted that they would be 'amazed' if weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were found in Iraq.

According to administration sources, Saddam shut down and destroyed large parts of his WMD programmes before the invasion of Iraq.

Ironically, the claims came as US President George Bush yesterday repeatedly justified the war as necessary to remove Iraq's chemical and biological arms which posed a direct threat to America.

Bush claimed: 'Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We will find them.'

The comments from within the administration will add further weight to attacks on the Blair government by Labour backbenchers that there is no 'smoking gun' and that the war against Iraq -- which centred on claims that Saddam was a risk to Britain, America and the Middle East because of unconventional weapons -- was unjustified.

The senior US official added that America never expected to find a huge arsenal, arguing that the administration was more concerned about the ability of Saddam's scientists -- which he labelled the 'nuclear mujahidin' -- to develop WMDs when the crisis passed.

This represents a clearly dramatic shift in the definition of the Bush doctrine's central tenet -- the pre-emptive strike. Previously, according to Washington, a pre-emptive war could be waged against a hostile country with WMDs in order to protect American security.

Now, however, according to the US official, pre-emptive action is justified against a nation which simply has the ability to develop unconventional weapons.

"Scaring America Half to Death" -- William Pfaff in The Daily Times (Pakistan), 5/14/03 (accessed 5/13/03):

The war against terrorism, like the war against Iraq, functions in all but total indifference to facts. An unnamed "senior Bush administration official" told the press last weekend that he would be amazed if weapons-grade plutonium or uranium were found in Iraq. It was also unlikely, he said, that biological or chemical weapons material would be found. He said that the United States never expected to find such a smoking gun.

What was the Iraq war all about then? The official said that what Washington really wanted was to seize the thousand nuclear scientists in Iraq who might in the future have developed nuclear weapons for Saddam Hussein. He described them as "nuclear mujahidin."

The preventive war, according to this redefinition, was not directed against an actual problem, but one that might have appeared in the future. One might have thought the official's statement merely an excuse for the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found, but this time it is President George W Bush who seems not to have been told. He is still assuring Americans that the illicit weapons will turn up.

On Democracy: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back" -- Josh Marshall in The Hill, 5/15/03:

Last week, [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz gave an interview to CNN-Turk, a joint venture of CNN and a Turkish media conglomerate. When asked about the future of U.S.-Turkish relations, Wolfowitz said that if Turkey wanted to get back into America's good graces, the Turks would have to admit they were wrong to deny the U.S. permission to use their territory as a staging ground for invading Iraq and, in essence, apologize.

That's a rough demand for a fellow democracy and a longtime ally. But what raised the ire of many Turks was another of Wolfowitz's statements: the Bush administration, he said, was disappointed that the Turkish military "did not play the strong leadership role on that issue [i.e., the Iraq debate] that we would have expected."

Outside the context of Turkish politics, that statement might seem obscure or insignificant. But in Turkey the meaning seemed painfully clear: The United States wished the Turkish military had either overruled the elected government or perhaps even pushed it aside in favor of one more subservient to U.S. demands. . . .

Turkey is currently struggling to accomplish something very similar to what we're trying to demonstrate in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East: that pluralism, democracy and Islam can peaceably coexist. It doesn't say much for our sincerity or seriousness if we push the generals to step in the moment we can't get the elected government to do our bidding. (It's not even shrewd politics since the Turkish military had its own reasons for resisting our plans for Iraq.)

"Straw Retreats on Finding Banned Weapons" -- Nicholas Watt in The Guardian, 5/15/03:

Britain back-tracked on the contentious issue of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction yesterday when the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, was forced to concede that hard evidence might never be uncovered.

He said it was "not crucially important" to find them, because the evidence of Iraqi wrongdoing was overwhelming.

He dismissed the significance of the failure to find banned weapons on the grounds that Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, had uncovered a "phenomenal amount of evidence" before the war. . . .

As criticism for the failure to find banned weapons has increased, ministers have struggled to offer a plausible explanation. Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, found himself the object of ridicule last month when he feigned ignorance of Downing Street's claim in last September's weapons "dossier" that an attack could be launched within 45 minutes.

He also caused some astonishment by declaring that the sudden onslaught of war, even though several days passed between the departure of inspectors and first bombings, prevented the Iraqis reassembling their hidden weapons.

He added to the confusion last night when he appeared to contradict both himself and Mr Straw by saying that allied troops would uncover evidence of banned weapons. . . .

Similar back-tracking is apparent in Washington where the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said last week that the US was pinning its hope on finding incriminating documents rather than actual weapons.

American exceptionalism in the voting booth.
"The Triumph of Hope over Self-Interest" -- David Brooks in The New York Times, 1/12/03 (reproduced at Labor21k list archives).

"David Nelson, Could You Step Aside for a Few Moments?" -- Margie Boulé in The Oregonian, 5/4/03:

If your name is David Nelson you can expect to be hassled, delayed, questioned and searched before being allowed to board aircraft anywhere in the United States for the foreseeable future.

Since the horrific attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the federal Transportation Security Administration has, without any public announcement, created a two-tiered list of names "to protect our aviation system," says Nico Melendez, the agency spokesman for the West Coast, who is based in Los Angeles.

The name David Nelson apparently is on one of those lists. . . .

One after another, local David Nelsons tell the same story: At airports their bags are put through bomb detectors; they are delayed, searched, questioned. . . .

As David Nelsons all over the country have learned, once your name is on the list, there's no way you can get it removed. Every time you go to an airport, you're assumed to be guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. . . .

Somewhere in the world there's an actual terrorist suspect named David Nelson who started all this mess. Several David Nelsons have been told by security or airline personnel that he's from Nashville.

But they're looking for him everywhere. Portland radiologist David Nelson "never could figure out why I was constantly getting flagged. Our bags would always come back with tape around them, saying they had been searched." His son and namesake, David Wesley Nelson, who's 27, thought he was always stopped "because of my age." When he flew to Los Angeles recently, "they gave me a big hassle because I didn't have a passport. I said, 'I don't normally carry a passport when traveling within the U.S.' "

"Healthcare for US Children: Controversial Budget-Cut Target" -- Alexandra Marks in The Christian Science Monitor, 5/14/03:

With a swipe of a budget-committee pen, Missouri almost dropped from one of the top states in caring for children to dead last.

Like lawmakers nationwide, Missouri legislators are struggling to close a gaping budget gap. Theirs is $323 million. So the house voted to eliminate its State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which insures children just over the poverty level - potentially making Missouri the first state to abolish the five-year-old program designed to give America's children the same medical care it affords the elderly.

From Connecticut to Montana, budget cutbacks are affecting everything from gym classes to fire stations. But one of the most emotional areas that may be pruned is children's healthcare. While every downturn brings fiscal dilemmas, the current quandary poses piercing questions about whether medical care is a right or a commodity, and where federal responsibility lies in caring for the vulnerable.

But one thing is clear: Hundreds of thousands of the more than 5 million children covered for the first time under SCHIP may find their insurance curtailed - or gone. Only a handful of states are talking about eliminating SCHIP. But dozens are trimming eligibility, benefits, and enrollment in a program that was the most dramatic expansion of low-income federal healthcare in 40 years. . . .

The battle over SCHIP in Missouri is typical of what's playing out nationwide. Opponents argue that the program is just too generous in tough fiscal times. Supporters - including parents, low-income advocates, economists, and health-policy analysts - argue that it saves money in the long term through preventive care.

Add to that the financial incentive from Washington. For every dollar Missouri spends on SCHIP, the federal government sends almost three: the state's contribution of $25 million was leveraging more than $72 million.

Then there's the healthcare spiral. If SCHIP were eliminated, another 83,000 would join Missouri's uninsured. Each time another person loses insurance, it adds to the crisis by sending costs higher. And each time costs rise, more people end up uninsured. . . .

For many healthcare advocates, this year is just round one in what they worry could be a slow erosion of SCHIP. The Bush administration has proposed combining SCHIP with Medicaid and turning the matching-grant programs into one block grant. Then, instead of federal funds increasing with state spending, each state would get a set amount of money. In exchange, the federal government would give states more flexibility in designing their own healthcare programs.

"In Reversal, Plan for Iraq Self-Rule Has Been Put Off" -- Patrick E. Tyler in The New York Times, 5/17/03:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 16 -- In an abrupt reversal, the United States and Britain have indefinitely put off their plan to allow Iraqi opposition forces to form a national assembly and an interim government by the end of the month.

Instead, top American and British diplomats leading reconstruction efforts here told exile leaders in a meeting tonight that allied officials would remain in charge of Iraq for an indefinite period, said Iraqis who attended the meeting. It was conducted by L. Paul Bremer, the new civilian administrator here. . . .

No date was set for creating an interim authority, and no details about its powers and functions were discussed in the meeting, the Iraqis said. Mr. Bremer said he would meet with the opposition leaders for further discussions in two weeks.

"They retracted what they said before," an Iraqi political figure said. The provisional government idea is gone, he said. As for the idea of convening a national assembly to select a government, he said, "there is no such thing anymore."

Today's decision was a disappointment for the former opposition forces and their supporters in the Pentagon and the Congress, where officials had been pressing for an early turnover of sovereign power to a government formed by the opposition groups.

On April 28, the United States and Britain sponsored a political gathering of about 300 Iraqis and supported their call for a national conference to meet by the end of May to select a transitional government. Zalmay Khalilzad, who has served as President Bush's envoy to the Iraqi opposition, was a co-chairman of the April meeting, but did not return to Iraq for tonight's meeting.

On May 5, Jay Garner, the civilian administrator who preceded Mr. Bremer, said the core of a new Iraqi government would emerge this month. "Next week, or by the second weekend in May, you'll see the beginning of a nucleus of a temporary Iraqi government, a government with an Iraqi face on it that is totally dealing with the coalition," General Garner said during a visit to Basra.

"No Political Fallout for Bush on Weapons" -- Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei in The Washington Post, 5/17/03:

Disarming Saddam Hussein of his "weapons of mass destruction" was the main justification the Bush administration used both at home and abroad for attacking Iraq. But while other countries that opposed the U.S. military action claim they are vindicated by the failure so far to find those weapons, Americans -- even some of Bush's political opponents -- seem content with the low-casualty victory and believe the discoveries of mass graves and other Hussein atrocities justify the war. . . .

According to a May 1 Gallup poll for CNN and USA Today, 79 percent of Americans said the war with Iraq was justified even without conclusive evidence of the illegal weapons, while 19 percent said discoveries of the weapons were needed to justify the war. An April Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 72 percent supported the war even without a finding of chemical or biological weapons. Similarly, a CBS News poll found that 60 percent said the war was worth the blood and other costs even if weapons are never found.

It's not that Americans don't care about finding the weapons Bush said Hussein had; in an April 16 Post-ABC poll, 47 percent said it was essential. But that made it a lower priority than providing humanitarian aid to Iraq and restoring order.

"If I were a Democratic candidate, I don't think I would be pushing this issue,' said Andrew Kohut, of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. He cited a Gallup poll in the early days of the war determining that 38 percent thought the war justified even if the banned weapons were not found; toward the end of the conflict, that figure jumped to 58 percent. . . .

But the international community may not be so understanding. False accusations about Iraq's weapons could make the rest of the world even more reluctant to join the next effort to enforce Bush's policy of striking at emerging threats. "The American public is moving on, but those countries that were skeptical of this war are going to continue to press on this point," said Jonathan Tucker, a weapons expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace. "The credibility of the administration and the U.S. intelligence community are still on the line. This whole doctrine of preemptive war is predicated on our ability to determine a country's potential threat before the weapons are used."

"Loyalty Day, 2003" -- whitehouse.gov, 4/30/03:

The Congress, by Public Law 85-529, as amended, has designated May 1 of each year as "Loyalty Day," and I ask all Americans to join me in this day of celebration and in reaffirming our allegiance to our Nation.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2003, as Loyalty Day. I call upon all the people of the United States to join in support of this national observance. I also call upon government officials to display the flag of the United States on all government buildings on Loyalty Day.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this thirtieth day of April, in the year of our Lord two thousand three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and twenty-seventh.

GEORGE W. BUSH

"The Wellspring of American Empire" -- James M. Banner Jr. in The Los Angeles Times, 4/30/03:

Skillfully negotiating with their French counterparts, Jefferson's emissaries in Paris, Robert Livingston and James Monroe, shook the huge, ripe Louisiana plum off its French tree. Jefferson overcame his constitutional scruples and agreed to the deal: $15 million for much of what would become the great interior territory of the United States. "An Empire for Liberty," he called it.

Rarely has such fruit been harvested so easily and cheaply -- no war, no conquest, little debt. And rarely has such fruit brought so many alloyed legacies.

The benefits of the Purchase were recognized immediately and realized quickly. The size of the infant republic, already in 1803 the largest in the world, doubled with few pen strokes and the exchange of modest funds. If the example of its young government and its unprecedented social ways weren't already distracting the governments of other nations, its greatly augmented size was enough to make the United States a force to reckon with.

But the huge territory that fell to the United States was not just the symbol of future strength. Those acres, whose exploration Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began that same year, were to yield agricultural and mineral bounty beyond the dreams of men. The roots of American economic might, planted earlier, suddenly reached deep and far.

Yet with bounty came aspiration and responsibility, both deeply stained. The spread of European settlement set in motion the extermination of the Indian tribes. And the new lands to the west released slavery to travel beyond the Mississippi River. The Louisiana Purchase bequeathed to us the racism, inequality, bad faith and shame that are with us still.

More to the point today, the acquisition of the vast Louisiana domains embedded in Americans' imagination a dream of missionary empire. The Purchase vastly strengthened an American disposition to claim for itself what it wished and gave it the muscle to do so. . . .

Goethe once remarked that the New World had it better than the Old. On the evidence of the Louisiana Purchase, he might more accurately have said that we have always had it easier -- an inland empire for virtually nothing, and then the rest for little blood or money. Today, we reap the harvest of such comparatively easy triumphs. Jefferson's empire for liberty, like all others, has always threatened to become a different kind of empire.

Ease is always the breeding ground of prideful acts, and imperial vision has always given way to rot. The empire of ancient Rome, Napoleon's France, Britain's world-circling rule and successive 20th century efforts of the Kaiser, Hitler and Stalin to extend German and Soviet might all came to naught after causing immeasurable misery and death.

If Jefferson's Declaration of Independence gave Americans a noble and enduring way to think of themselves, the Louisiana Purchase encouraged them to realize that self-image in lesser, sometimes baser, forms. The great historian of that generation, David Ramsey, comparing the Purchase with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, wrote that "the acquisition of Louisiana is the greatest political blessing ever conferred on these states."

Already, 200 years ago, the hint of presumptuousness was in the air.

"Are We Dumb or Just Numb?" -- Robert Scheer in The Los Angeles Times, 4/29/03:

Forget truth. That is the message from our government and its apologists in the media who insist that the Iraq invasion is a great success story even though it was based on a lie.

In the statement broadcast to the Iraqi people after the invasion was launched, President Bush stated: "The goals of our coalition are clear and limited. We will end a brutal regime, whose aggression and weapons of mass destruction make it a unique threat to the world." To which Tony Blair added: "We did not want this war. But in refusing to give up his weapons of mass destruction, Saddam gave us no choice but to act."

That claim of urgency -- requiring us to short-circuit the U.N. weapons inspectors -- has proved to be a whopper of a falsehood. Late Sunday, the U.S. Army conceded that what had been reported as its only significant WMD find -- two mobile chemical labs and a dozen 55-gallon drums of chemicals -- "showed no positive hits at all" for chemical weapons. . . .

It is expected that despots can force the blind allegiance of their people to falsehoods. But it is frightening in the extreme when lying matters not at all to a free people. The only plausible explanation is that the tragedy of Sept. 11 so traumatized us that we are no longer capable of the outrage expected of a patently deceived citizenry. The case for connecting Saddam Hussein with that tragedy is increasingly revealed as false, but it seems to matter not to a populace numbed by incessant government propaganda.

The only significant link between Al Qaeda and Hussein centered on the Ansar al Islam bases in the Kurdish area outside of Hussein's control. That's the "poison factory" offered by Colin Powell in his U.N. speech to connect Hussein with international terror. But an exhaustive investigation by the Los Angeles Times of witnesses and material found in the area "produced no strong evidence of connections to Baghdad and indicated that Ansar was not a sophisticated terrorist organization." Moreover, the purpose of this camp was to foster a holy war of religious fanatics who branded Hussein as "an infidel tyrant" and refused to fight under the "infidel flag" of his hated secular regime.

The embarrassingly secular nature of the government was summarized in another Los Angeles Times story on the status of women: "For decades, Iraqi women -- at least those living in Baghdad and some other big cities -- have enjoyed a degree of personal liberty undreamed of by women in neighboring nations such as Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf emirates."

Those freedoms -- to drive, study in coeducational colleges and to advance in the professions -- are now threatened by the fundamentalist forces unleashed by the invasion. The former U.S. general now governing Iraq has stated that he will not accept a reversal of those freedoms, but our long history of cozy relationships with the oppressive Gulf regimes can't be reassuring to Iraq's women.

"The Loyal Opposition Goes AWOL" -- Joyce Appleby in The Los Angeles Times, 4/29/03:

President Bush's single-minded pursuit of regime change in Iraq during the last 15 months would not have surprised the unsentimental 18th century creators of our government. They expected the executive to pursue his foreign policy goals. What they would not have foreseen was Congress' supine acceptance of the president's usurpation of their constitutional authority to declare war and approve peace treaties. . . .

Explanations abound as to why Congress has failed to exercise its constitutional authority in the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But few would deny that a loyal opposition is needed more than ever today, as a president with a wind at his back and little ballast sails into new diplomatic waters.

What might an alternative foreign policy, championed by Congress, look like?

It could begin with the premise, shared by the administration, that the inordinate power of the U.S. gives it unique concerns that other nations do not have, both as a target of hostility and a possessor of military might. This recognition could lead to the frank admission that we will act on our own, if need be. "If need be" would be the anchor of an oppositional group that sought ways to avoid future unilateral, preemptive strikes.

Congress could insist on strengthening existing alliances, bolstering multilateral agreements and monitoring trouble spots, whether generated by famine, autocratic governments or handicaps in global commerce. It could lead world debate on health, birth control and sweat labor. It could articulate those venerable principles of American foreign policy that run counter to the radical bellicosity implicit in the Bush Doctrine.

Nothing can replace an opposition crafted within the walls of Congress, where constitutional authority over war and peace still lodges.

"
Iraqi Nuclear Site Is Found Looted; U.S. Team Unable to Determine Whether Deadly Materials Are Missing" -- Barton Gellman in The Washington Post, 5/4/03:

NEAR KUT, Iraq, May 3 -- A specially trained Defense Department team, dispatched after a month of official indecision to survey a major Iraqi radioactive waste repository, today found the site heavily looted and said it was impossible to tell whether nuclear materials were missing.

The discovery at the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility was the second since the end of the war in which a known nuclear cache was plundered extensively enough that authorities could not rule out the possibility that deadly materials had been stolen. The survey, conducted by a U.S. Special Forces detachment and eight nuclear experts from a Pentagon office called the Direct Support Team, appeared to offer fresh evidence that the war has dispersed the country's most dangerous technologies beyond anyone's knowledge or control. . . .

U.S. authorities do not know what is missing, if anything, because of an ongoing conflict between the Bush administration and the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, as well as a dispute within the administration about how much to involve the IAEA in Iraq. The unresolved struggle has kept U.S. forces out of Tuwaitha's nuclear storage areas, but a brief outdoor inspection on April 10 found the door to one of them had been breached.

The special nuclear team that surveyed the Baghdad facility this morning had been eager to make the trip for weeks.

Twenty-three days ago, a smaller U.S. survey team passed by and recommended an immediate increase in security. The following day, April 11, the IAEA listed this site and Tuwaitha as the two requiring the most urgent protection from looters. U.S. Central Command sent a detachment of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division to control the facility's gate.

"Vilified Weapons Inspectors May Have Gotten It Right" -- Marian Wilkinson in The Sydney Morning Herald, 5/1/03:

President George Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is now acknowledging that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program is less clear-cut, and probably more difficult to establish, than the White House portrayed before the war.

She has no doubt that the US-led coalition, assisted by experts from Britain and Australia, will find Iraq's WMD programs. But for the first time, Dr Rice is saying publicly that it is less likely many actual weapons will be found. Rather, she described the programs as being hidden in so-called "dual use" infrastructure. In other words, chemicals and biological agents could be in plants, factories and laboratories capable of being used for legal and prohibited purposes. . . .

She had a new explanation too for Iraq's ability to launch these weapons that were not assembled. "Just-in-time assembly" and "just-in-time" inventory, as she put it.

But in the months before the Iraq war, Mr Bush and his advisers, including the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, gave far more frightening descriptions of Iraq's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.

Addressing the UN Security Council on February 5, Mr Powell said recent intelligence showed a missile brigade outside Baghdad was "dispersing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agent to various locations". Mr Bush was equally alarmist, describing satellite evidence showing that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting Iraq's nuclear weapons programs with his top nuclear scientists, his "nuclear mujahideen". Iraq's deadliest weapons could end up in the hands of terrorists.

"We cannot wait for final proof," Mr Bush said. "The smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

When Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, suggested Iraq's WMD program could be more fragmented and degraded, he was pilloried as naive or incompetent. When his inspectors talked of a more complex search for WMD, where components or precursors could be in the form of legal, dual-use chemical or biological agents that had to be monitored, they were dismissed as flatfooted and overcautious.

Yet Dr Rice's descriptions of Iraq's weapons program is far closer to Dr Blix's analysis than she would want to concede.

"Iraqi Police, Looters Reappear in Baghdad Streets" -- Nadim Ladki, for Reuters, at Alertnet.org, 5/4/03:

BAGHDAD, May 4 (Reuters) - Hundreds of unarmed Iraqi police returned to Baghdad streets on Sunday under the supervision of U.S. forces trying to restore order in the chaotic capital.

But in a reminder of the mammoth task facing police, looters also made a comeback, making forays into a presidential palace to scavenge whatever was left from earlier bouts of looting. . . .

Baghdad's new police chief resigned on Saturday in a setback to U.S. efforts to revitalise the force.

U.S. forces spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Alan King quoted police chief Zuhir al-Naimi as saying he wanted to make way for a younger man. No other explanation was given for the resignation of a man appointed only on April 24.

A 10-nation force led by the United States, Britain and Poland plans to deploy in Iraq by the end of this month to try to stabilise a country rocked by lawlessness.

"Rare Pro-US Demo in Baghdad" -- AFP article reproduced at newindpress.com (undated; accessed 5/4/03)

BAGHDAD: Several dozen Iraqis staged a rally in Baghdad on Sunday to thank the United States for removing strongman Saddam Hussein.

"Yes, yes for democracy," they chanted in Arabic in front of the Palestine Hotel where many foreign correspondents are based.

Some of the banners in English held up at the demonstration read, "Iraqis thank the United States" and "Iraq-US cooperation equals peace."

"CEOs at Defense Contractors Earn 45% More" -- United for a Fair Economy, 4/28/03:

Median CEO pay at the 37 largest defense contractors rose 79 percent from 2001 to 2002, while overall CEO pay climbed only 6 percent, according to a new report from United for a Fair Economy, More Bucks for the Bang: CEO Pay at Top Defense Contractors, by Chris Hartman and David Martin.

Median pay was 45 percent higher in 2002 at defense contractors than at the 365 large companies surveyed by Business Week magazine. The typical U.S. CEO made $3.7 million in 2002, while the typical defense industry CEO got $5.4 million.

The jump in median defense contractor CEO pay far exceeded the increase in defense spending, which rose 14 percent from 2001 to 2002.

Compared with an army private's pay of $19,585, the average CEO at a major defense contractor made 577 times as much in 2002, or $11,297,548. This is also more than 28 times as much as the Commander in Chief's salary of $400,000.

The study also looked at the size of campaign contributions by the largest defense contractors and found a strong correlation between campaign contributions made by a company in the 2000 and 2002 election cycles and the value of defense contracts awarded to that company. Ninety percent of the difference in contract size can be accounted for by size of contributions. For example, top arms contractor Lockheed Martin was also the top campaign contributor among defense firms.

"The Corps Cored" -- Michael Grunwald at Slate.com, 5/5/03:

The Bush administration is maniacally intolerant of dissent. It doesn't give a damn what Congress thinks about anything. The good news is: That combination of enforced loyalty and executive arrogance is reining in the environmentally disastrous, economically ludicrous pork-barrel projects of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This fledgling corps reform campaign hasn't gotten much attention -- because "corps reform" sounds like something Michael Dukakis might read about on the beach, and environmentalists are too busy portraying President Bush as the second coming of the Exxon Valdez to give credit where it's due -- but corps reform could end up doing more to benefit the American environment than a dozen Arctic refuges. . . .

The Army Corps is one of the most bizarre bureaucracies in the federal government and one of the most effective at generating work to keep itself busy. From its roots as a tiny regiment in George Washington's army, it has grown into a public works behemoth with 35,000 employees -- more than the departments of Labor, Education, and Energy combined. A third of them work on military programs that are usually uncontroversial -- the recent flap over the contract to Halliburton in Iraq was an exception -- but the rest focus on civil works that reflect the agency's addictions to concrete and the control of nature. The corps has dredged and deepened America's ports and harbors, armored and manhandled America's rivers, and pumped sand onto America's beaches. It has built thousands of dams, dikes, locks, levees, seawalls, and floodgates, often justified by dubious economic benefits. And in the late 1990s, under leaders who behaved like dot-com executives seeking to increase market share -- "Seek Growth Opportunities" was actually one of three planks of the agency's "Corps Vision" -- the corps mission expanded to include construction of schools and sewage plants, cleanup of hazardous and radioactive waste, and massive restoration projects designed to revive ecosystems it damaged in the past. It is now overseeing an $8 billion effort to resuscitate the Florida Everglades, the largest environmental project in world history.

Over the years, the corps has become a true rogue agency, operating virtually independently of its supposed bosses in the executive branch, taking marching orders almost exclusively from the congressional porkers who lard its budget with their pet projects. The corps has clashed with every president since Franklin Roosevelt, and it has won almost every battle, thanks to its protection racket on Capitol Hill. In 2000, for example, after corps leaders were caught manipulating an economic study in order to justify a billion-dollar Mississippi River project and devising a secret "Program Growth Initiative" in order to boost their budget by 50 percent, the Clinton administration tried to issue a few mild guidelines reminding them to obey civilian authorities. But a few powerful senators vowed that the guidelines would not stand, so the administration withdrew them a week later. Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., then proposed legislative language designed to prevent any administration from changing anything about the corps at any time.

"Bush Shifts Focus to Nuclear Sales by North Korea" -- David E. Sanger in The New York Times, May 5, 2003:

CRAWFORD, Tex., May 4 -- Tacitly acknowledging that North Korea may not be deterred from producing plutonium for nuclear weapons, President Bush is now trying to marshal international support for preventing the country from exporting nuclear material, American and foreign officials say. . . .

For a decade, the United States' declared policy has been that North Korea would be prevented, by any means necessary, from producing plutonium or highly enriched uranium. President Bill Clinton ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans for a military strike when the North threatened to begin production in 1994, but a nuclear freeze agreement was reached later that year.

Mr. Bush's new focus on blocking the sale of nuclear material to countries or terrorist groups reflects intelligence officials' conclusion that they cannot ascertain whether North Korea was bluffing when it claimed last month that it had already reprocessed enough spent nuclear fuel to make many weapons.

"The president said that the central worry is not what they've got, but where it goes," said an official familiar with the talks between Mr. Bush and Mr. Howard. "He's very pragmatic about it, and the reality is that we probably won't know the extent of what they are producing. So the whole focus is to keep the plutonium from going further."

"Missing in Action: Truth" -- Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times, 5/6/03:

I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted -- except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.

"It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said.

Another example is the abuse of intelligence from Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq's biological weapons program until his defection in 1995. Top British and American officials kept citing information from Mr. Kamel as evidence of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Mr. Kamel had actually emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its W.M.D. program in the early 1990's. Glen Rangwala, a British Iraq expert, says the transcript of Mr. Kamel's debriefing was leaked because insiders resented the way politicians were misleading the public.

Harpers Weekly Review, 5/6/03

"President Picks a Special Envoy to Rebuild Iraq" -- James Dao and Eric Schmitt in The New York Times, 5/7/03:

WASHINGTON, May 6 -- President Bush today announced the appointment of L. Paul Bremer III, a retired diplomat and counterterrorism expert, as his special envoy to Iraq, making him the senior civilian in charge of rebuilding the country's government and infrastructure.

Mr. Bremer will take charge of a multibillion-dollar enterprise currently run by a retired lieutenant general, Jay Garner, who reports to Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander of allied forces in Iraq. Mr. Bremer will report directly to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, administration officials said.

The shift underscores the White House's intention to speed the transition from a military occupation toward civilian administration, senior administration officials said. Although he is largely being supplanted by Mr. Bremer, to whom he will report, the officials said General Garner would not resign, even as his role was still being worked out. In Iraq today, General Garner confirmed as much, saying: "I'll stay awhile. There's got to be a good handoff."

By announcing the appointment himself, and by elevating Mr. Bremer to the level of presidential envoy, Mr. Bush sought to resolve a sharp dispute over the last several days between the State Department and the Pentagon for control of the reconstruction project. The State Department has argued that a civilian with diplomatic skills and foreign policy experience should coordinate reconstruction, while Pentagon officials have insisted that the project remain under the military's control. . . .

Sean McCormack, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said Mr. Bremer, who may leave for Iraq as soon as this weekend, would guide overall reconstruction policy while General Garner would handle day-to-day reconstruction work.

"General Garner will continue doing what he's been doing, getting the lights turned on, the water flowing, the sewers working," Mr. McCormack said.

Zalmay Khalilzad, who has been the White House liaison to former Iraqi opposition groups, will also stay on to advise Mr. Bremer on Iraqi politics and assist in starting a representative government, Mr. McCormack said.

While administration officials described the appointment as a compromise, some analysts said the Pentagon had still come out on top because Mr. Bremer would still take his orders from Mr. Rumsfeld.

"My sense is that no one can claim this is a Powell victory," said Ivo Daalder, a former National Security aide in the Clinton administration who now works at the Brookings Institution. "The person you report to is the key, and while Bremer reports to the president, he does it through Rumsfeld, not Powell."

"Paul Bremer, Iraq's New Interim Governor" -- Nuh Gonultas in Byegm, 5/8/03; translated and summarized at Turkishpress.com, 5/8/03:

The appointment of an anti-terrorism expert like Bremer becomes even more telling when one realizes that US designs in Iraq have far-reaching implications for the entire Middle East region.

Bremer, 62, once chaired an anti-terrorism commission in the US, and was part of a group which fully a year-and-a half before the Sept. 11 attacks prepared a report warning of a 'grave terrorist threat.' The report predicted that in the not-too-distant future, the US could fall prey to a devastating terrorist attack rivaling the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

The US is now moving to abandon its bases in Saudi Arabia and no longer needs Turkey's military assistance. Iraq is the new staging ground for US forces in the Middle East. But what does all this mean? Bush's choice of a retired anti-terrorism expert rather than an ex-military man gives us clues to the answer to this question: The US' top priority in Iraq is not the country's reconstruction but rather gaining an extensive foothold in the region, under the guise of the war against terrorism, so as to be able to besiege all the countries of the Middle East. According to Bremer, to prevent new terrorist attacks against the US, countries such as Libya and Iran must be strictly controlled and kept under constant pressure.

"Hussein Loyalists Rise Again, Enraging Iraqis" -- Patrick E. Tyler in The New York Times, 5/8/03:

Last week, Robin Rafael, an American diplomat working under Jay Garner, the retired American lieutenant general who has been in charge of reconstruction here, decided to reinstate the Baath Party leadership of Baghdad University, the largest in the country. Mr. Hussein's personal physician, Muhammad al-Rawi, who is president of the university, was granted permission to preside over the graduation of 17,000 seniors who will return to classes on May 17.

Ms. Rafael, like most American officials here, is working behind heavy security that prevents contact with a broad cross-section of Iraqis or anyone else. She was not available for comment. But one of her colleagues suggested that her decision was a pragmatic one to get the university open under current management and then try to sort out the Baathists later.

One man with strong feelings about this decision is Professor Hilal al-Bayyati, a computer scientist who studied in the United States during the 1960's and built the National Computer Center in Iraq. During the months after his arrest in late 2000, he found himself talking to insects.

By the thousands they shared his 6-foot-by-4-foot cell at the intelligence headquarters in Baghdad. . . .

So Mr. Bayyati and some of his colleagues have sprung into action to seek reversal of Ms. Rafael's decision. First they organized a committee of faculty members that met to demand new elections for deans, department heads and administrators as a means to throw out Dr. Rawi and the other senior Baathists at the university.

Dr. Rawi locked them out of the meeting hall, but more than 250 of them they managed to convene anyway and quickly agreed to resist the administration and seek American support. They demanded that the university groundskeepers tear down a statue of Mr. Hussein. But the maintenance staff refused, saying Dr. Rawi had given no such order.

When American officials would not meet with them, Mr. Bayyati and his colleagues went to the headquarters of Ahmad Chalabi, one of the political figures who has returned to Iraq and is working with both American forces and other political groups to form an interim government. Like all of the political headquarters in Baghdad, Mr. Chalabi's is accessible to Iraqis in every way the American headquarters is not.

"There are walk-ins here," said one American official. "We can't have walk-ins over there," he added, referring to General Garner's headquarters at Mr. Hussein's Republican Palace.

Mr. Chalabi and his security staff organized a raid on the university. The Hussein statue was leveled by an armored vehicle and its head cut off and returned like a trophy to the lawn of Mr. Chalabi's headquarters.

On Monday, Mr. Bayyati went to Ms. Rafael's fortified headquarters and handed a note to an American soldier to deliver to her.

"I stood in the sun for one-and-a-half-hours," he said. "I didn't get any answer and I couldn't enter."

But as he turned to leave, Mr. Bayyati caught sight of a face he would never forget, that of Ali al-Jabouri, the warden of Abu Ghraib prison, where the professor spent 18 months in a sea of Iraqis headed for secret execution.

The warden, a senior Baath Party official, approached and kissed him on both cheeks and told him that the best thing about his job had been meeting people like the professor. Then he went past the American guards and inside the building. He did not say who he was going to see, the professor said.

"Cheney Oil Firm Widens Iraq Role" -- Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian, 5/8/03:

Halliburton, the company formerly run by the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, has been granted a far broader role in Iraq than previously disclosed and is already operating oilfields in the country, the US army admitted yesterday.

Kellogg Brown and Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, is pumping up oil despite earlier claims that its contract with the American government was for fighting oil fires, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers told the Guardian.

The bigger role, said corps spokesman Scott Saunders, was being exercised "due to the needs of the Iraqi people". About 125,000 barrels a day were produced, he said, for domestic purposes only.

The revelation came after Henry Waxman, a Democratic congressman, published correspondence in which the army said KBR's emergency contract allowed for its involvement in "operation of facilities and distribution of products". The existence of the contract, awarded with no competition before the war, was made public only in March.

"Diplomats on the Defensive" -- Sonni Efron in The Los Angeles Times, 5/8/03:

Diplomats interviewed for this story -- all of whom insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the political infighting -- said they are profoundly worried about what they describe as the administration's arrogance or indifference to world public opinion, which they fear has wiped out, in less than two years, decades of effort to build goodwill toward the United States. . . .

"The votes [against the U.S.] in the U.N. had nothing to do with Iraq. It was personal" toward America, a senior diplomat said. "I don't think this group realizes how arrogant they come off. It's a PR nightmare."

The official said he agreed with the president's decision to go to war in Iraq, and so did most officials at State, contrary to the department's reputation among neoconservatives as a bastion of wimpy multilateralism. "The issue for a lot of us is the way it's been done," he said. . . .

Many inside the Beltway regard the increasingly public rift between the agencies as just another in unending bureaucratic wars that mark life in Washington, but one that could damage U.S. interests if it encourages foreign countries to try to exploit the conflict. In South Korea, for example, many officials believe the North Korean leadership is more likely to miscalculate U.S. intentions because of the policy rift between administration hawks and doves. . . .

[W]hat is widespread within the State Department is the view that the U.S. intervention in Iraq ultimately must be judged in part by whether it generates more anti-American terrorism. Diplomats worry that the administration is insensitive to the risks its policies carry.

"When I was a kid, conservatives were the ones who did not want to take big risks" to change the world, recalled one middle-aged veteran at State, adding that "these people seem willing to take huge risks" that can truly be termed radical.

"Their willingness to roll the dice with people's lives I find troubling," he said.

"Iraq's Ragged Reconstruction" -- Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Peter Slevin in The Washington Post, 5/9/03:

A month after U.S. forces seized Baghdad, the Pentagon's occupation authority remains plagued by insufficient resources and inadequate preparations, fueling complaints from Iraqis and doubts about the Bush administration's promise to reconstruct the country swiftly and set its politics on a new, democratic course. . . .

Officials in the White House, Pentagon and State Department said before the war that speedy delivery of supplies was needed to help build Iraqi support for a difficult transformation to follow. But failure to provide salaries and restore a sense of security after a month threaten to do the opposite, alienating the population and impeding an already difficult reconstruction. In addition, some Iraqis have been angered by U.S. decisions to invite former members of the corrupt police force to return to work and to allow members of Hussein's Baath Party to reclaim senior government jobs.

In this atmosphere, anti-American sentiments appear to be growing: among people waiting in cars for a whole day to get gas, among military veterans milling about officers' clubs with the hope someone will arrive with their pensions, among college students upset that Baathist administrators are back on the job.

When several hundred people seeking jobs were turned away from a hotel recently by U.S. soldiers, they held a spontaneous protest and began chanting: "Down! Down! U.S.A." Then, comparing President Bush to the fictional thief from "A Thousand and One Nights," they yelled: "Bush! Bush! Ali Baba!"

The slow start also has prompted clerics, tribal sheiks and once-exiled opposition leaders to fill the void, particularly the Shiite Muslim clergy eager to claim political influence in a country with a 60 percent Shiite majority. Many have assumed roles as de facto mayors and neighborhood bosses, setting up militias to guard against looters, commandeering generators to provide power and distributing food seized from government warehouses.

Many clerics and sheiks have no intention of ceding those roles when a new government is formed, raising the possibility of a struggle between U.S.-sanctioned national leaders and self-proclaimed local ones. . . .

One concept common to most of the plans, U.S. officials said, was to hit the ground running. There was a recognition it would be important for the reconstruction team to develop momentum quickly if it wanted to realize its long-term ambition of transforming Iraq into a stable democracy.

But when Baghdad fell, Garner and his team remained in Kuwait because the military said it was too dangerous for them to work in Iraq. It was not until April 21, 12 days after Hussein's rule collapsed, that Garner and a small group of aides arrived in Baghdad; the bulk of his staff drove up a few days later.

"There was lots of talking about it, but just not enough doing it," said an aide to Garner who advises one of Iraq's ministries.

Problems inside Garner's headquarters -- the 258-room Republican Palace on the banks of the Tigris River -- illustrate the point. Garner's aides, assigned to run the most important ministries and the Baghdad city government, do not have working telephones in their offices. They waste time walking corridors in search of one another. If they want to communicate with the outside world, they must stand outdoors and use handheld satellite telephones, which do not work indoors.

"There was supposed to be a cell phone network set up for 5,000 phones. Where the hell are they?" one exasperated Garner aide said.

"Operation Desert Snipe": On the hunt for banned weapons in Iraq and administration hedging, back to Fall 2002, about the prospect that none would be found (The Cogent Provocateur, 4/23/02).

"Rolling Back the 20th Century" -- William Greider in The Nation, 5/12/03:

The movement's grand ambition -- one can no longer say grandiose -- is to roll back the twentieth century, quite literally. That is, defenestrate the federal government and reduce its scale and powers to a level well below what it was before the New Deal's centralization. With that accomplished, movement conservatives envision a restored society in which the prevailing values and power relationships resemble the America that existed around 1900, when William McKinley was President.


Governing authority and resources are dispersed from Washington, returned to local levels and also to individuals and private institutions, most notably corporations and religious organizations. The primacy of private property rights is re-established over the shared public priorities expressed in government regulation. Above all, private wealth -- both enterprises and individuals with higher incomes -- are permanently insulated from the progressive claims of the graduated income tax.

These broad objectives may sound reactionary and destructive (in historical terms they are), but hard-right conservatives see themselves as liberating reformers, not destroyers, who are rescuing old American virtues of self-reliance and individual autonomy from the clutches of collective action and "statist" left-wingers. They do not expect any of these far-reaching goals to be fulfilled during Bush's tenure, but they do assume that history is on their side and that the next wave will come along soon (not an unreasonable expectation, given their great gains during the past thirty years). Right-wingers--who once seemed frothy and fratricidal -- now understand that three steps forward, two steps back still adds up to forward progress. It's a long march, they say. Stick together, because we are winning.

Many opponents and critics (myself included) have found the right's historic vision so improbable that we tend to guffaw and misjudge the political potency of what it has put together. We might ask ourselves: If these ideas are so self-evidently cockeyed and reactionary, why do they keep advancing? The right's unifying idea--get the government out of our lives--has broad popular appeal, at least on a sentimental level, because it represents an authentic core value in the American experience ("Don't tread on me" was a slogan in the Revolution). But the true source of its strength is the movement's fluid architecture and durability over time, not the passing personalities of Reagan-Gingrich-Bush or even the big money from business. The movement has a substantial base that believes in its ideological vision--people alarmed by cultural change or injured in some way by government intrusions, coupled with economic interests that have very strong reasons to get government off their backs--and the right has created the political mechanics that allow these disparate elements to pull together. Cosmopolitan corporate executives hold their noses and go along with Christian activists trying to stamp out "decadent" liberal culture. Fed-up working-class conservatives support business's assaults on their common enemy, liberal government, even though they may be personally injured when business objectives triumph.

The right's power also feeds off the general decay in the political system -- the widely shared and often justifiable resentments felt toward big government, which no longer seems to address the common concerns of ordinary citizens.

I am not predicting that the right will win the governing majority that could enact the whole program, in a kind of right-wing New Deal--and I will get to some reasons why I expect their cause to fail eventually. The farther they advance, however, the less inevitable is their failure.

"Hatch Group May Go 'Nuclear' on Judges" -- Alexander Bolton and Geoff Earle in The Hill, 5/12/03:

Several senior Republican senators are seeking wider party backing for a bold plan that would break the Democrats' filibuster of President Bush's judicial nominees.

Their approach calls for employing a rarely used parliamentary tactic to overturn current Senate procedures.

Under the strategy envisioned by Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), among others, the Republicans would strip any Senate minority -- currently the Democrats -- of their ability to filibuster presidential nominees.

Approval by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.), which is being sought, would all but assure that the plan would go forward.

Under the most likely scenario now under discussion, they would secure a ruling from the chair that Senate Rule XXII does not apply to executive submissions to the Senate -- and that includes judicial nominees. Rule XXII provides for unlimited debate on all legislative issues that reach the floor unless three-fifths of the Senate calls a halt.

With such an approach, a favorable ruling from the chair on limiting the scope of Rule XXII could stand after only a simple majority approved it.

Anticipating these moves, Democrats have already asked the Senate parliamentarian to weigh in on the issue in their defense.

From the standpoint of the proponents, the appeal of this “silver-bullet��? strategy is that it would quash the Democratic blockade without requiring 60 votes, the number needed by current rules to halt such delaying tactics, or 67 votes, the number needed to change a filibustered Senate rule.

One drawback of this proposed tactic is that it might destroy whatever is left of the working relationship between Democrats and Republicans. That is why some legislative experts liken the parliamentary tool to a legislative nuclear bomb.

"An Interesting Day: President Bush's Movements and Actions on 9/11" -- Allan Wood and Paul Thompson at The Center for Cooperative Research, 5/9/03:

Bush's actions on September 11 have been the subject of lively debate, mostly on the internet. Details reported that day and in the week after the attacks - both the media reports and accounts given by Bush himself - have changed radically over the past 18 months. Culling hundreds of reports from newspapers, magazines, and the internet has only made finding the "truth" of what happened and when it happened more confusing. In the changed political climate after 9/11, few have dared raise challenging questions about Bush's actions. A journalist who said Bush was "flying around the country like a scared child, seeking refuge in his mother's bed after having a nightmare" and another who said Bush "skedaddled" were fired. . . . We should have a concise record of where President Bush was throughout the day the US was attacked, but we do not.

What follows is an attempt to give the most complete account of Bush's actions - from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska to Washington, DC.

(Emperors-clothes.com has more.)

"Bush, Blair Nominated for Nobel Prize for Iraq War" -- Alister Doyle for Reuters on Yahoo! News, 5/8/03:

A Norwegian parliamentarian nominated President Bush . . . and British Prime Minister Tony Blair . . . for the Nobel Peace Prize on Thursday, praising them for winning the war in Iraq . . .

"Sometimes it's necessary to use a small and effective war to prevent a much more dangerous war in the future," Jan Simonsen, a right-wing independent in Norway's parliament, told Reuters.

"New US Civilian Head Arrives in Iraq" -- The Guardian, 5/12/03:

The new American civilian administrator of Iraq arrived in Baghdad today amid a shake-up of key US reconstruction personnel.

Paul Bremer, a former ambassador and head of America's counter-terrorism office, takes over from the retired general Jay Garner in the latest sign of US frustration over the failure of its post-war team to restore order.

The move comes one day after the Bush administration sacked Barbara Bodine, the US coordinator for central Iraq, after only three weeks in the post. Four more key personnel from the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance are expected to be flown home in the coming days, according to a report in today's New York Times.

Mr Bremer stopped in Basra before flying on to the capital, where the civilian reconstruction agency is based. He said: "We intend to have a very effective, efficient and well-organized handover."

Asked whether he was, in effect, directing a US plan to colonise Iraq, Mr Bremer said: "The coalition did not come to colonise Iraq. We came to overthrow a despotic regime. That we have done. Now our job is to turn and help the Iraqi people regain control of their own destiny."

Attempting to stifle reports that his replacement of Mr Garner represented a policy shift, Mr Bremer said: "I also want to say how proud I am of the work my good friend Jay Garner and the people who are working for him, how proud I am of everything they have done here in the last couple of weeks under extraordinary circumstances." He said Bodine was being reassigned back to Washington by the state department "for its own reasons."

"US Sacks Its Woman in Baghdad" -- Ewen MacAskill in The Guardian, 5/12/03:

The US yesterday sacked one of its most senior envoys to Iraq after only three weeks, in an admission that the task of running the country is proving tougher than expected.

With Baghdad still in a state of chaos, there was a whiff of panic about Washington's removal of the top layer of its team responsible for reconstruction. There was also a hint that it is being forced to rethink its post-war strategy.

Barbara Bodine, the US coordinator for central Iraq, was ordered back to Washington, a casualty of the failure to restore law and order or basic public services to the capital, Baghdad. . . .

Ms Bodine, a former ambassador to Yemen, has been a victim of Iraq before: she was on assignment in Kuwait before the 1991 Gulf war and was held captive for 137 days by Saddam's invading forces.

Her relations with Gen Garner are reported to have been strained, and she was also said to have been unhappy at the dispatch of Paul Bremer, a former US diplomat, to oversee the political process. He is due in Iraq this week.

Britain has sent John Sawyer, an ex-ambassador to Cairo and former Downing Street policy adviser, to work alongside Mr Bremer. Mr Sawyer, who has been designated special envoy to the Iraq political process, said he wanted a new Iraqi government that was broad-based and credible.

"Weapons Taskforce Leaves in Failure" -- Rory McCarthy in The Guardian, 5/12/03:

The US military task force hunting for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq is to leave within a month, having found no trace of any illegal weapons, according to a report yesterday.

Troops with the 75th Exploitation Task Force, which has led the search for Saddam Hussein's banned weapons programme over the past seven weeks, say they are increasingly frustrated with their failure to find any banned weapons, the Washington Post said. . . .

Another, larger US force -- the Iraq Survey Group -- will be sent out to continue the search for weapons, but it will include fewer specialists, the paper said. Coalition officials, including George Bush himself, have said recently that the work of inspecting sites had only just begun.

Of a US central command list of 19 top weapons sites, all but two have been searched already. Another 45 sites searched so far from a list of 68 thought to contain some evidence of banned weapons have also yielded nothing.

"We came to bear country, we came loaded for bear, and we found out the bear wasn't here," an officer with the US defence intelligence agency was quoted as saying.

"Ba'athist Minister Forced Out as Doctors Rebel" -- Rory McCarthy in The Guardian, 5/12/03:

Iraq's newly appointed health minister resigned suddenly yesterday amid mounting criticism over his career as a senior Ba'ath party official.

His departure represents a significant embarrassment for the American authorities who chose him as the first minister in the post-Saddam government. It also brings another costly delay in the already slow reconstruction process.

Iraqi medical sources told the Guardian that Dr Ali Shnan al-Janabi quit yesterday morning and was not likely to be replaced. The health ministry will instead be run by a large committee on which all doctors, nurses and hospital staff are represented. . . .

As the number three at the ministry under Saddam Hussein, Dr Janabi was regarded by doctors as complicit in the appalling corruption and mis management of the decrepit health system. Yet hours before he resigned, senior US officials continued to defend him as a man of "honesty" and "great courage".

Hundreds of doctors and medical staff gathered outside the ministry last week to protest at his appointment. "Clean this corrupted ministry," reads the graffiti on the wall surrounding the building.

Dr Janabi ignored the disapproval over his appointment and on Saturday held day-long meetings with Jay Garner, the retired general appointed to lead the reconstruction of Iraq, and Stephen Browning, a US special adviser to the health ministry.

The minister, along with all the doctors and ministry staff at the meeting, was required to fill out a form renouncing his membership of the Ba'ath party and denouncing it and the Saddam regime.

At a news conference afterwards, Dr Janabi said he was no longer a party member, but he defended it. "I didn't commit a criminal act against humanity or against the children of Iraq," he said. Asked if he would denounce the party, he refused. "You will find a lot of the ideology is very, very good," he said.

"We Stopped Getting Orders from Iraq a Long Time Ago" -- Sophie Arie interviews the crews of two Iraqi navy ships stranded in La Spezia, Italy for the last seventeen years (The Guardian, 5/12/03)

"Yanks Go Home" -- Jonathan Steele in The Guardian, 5/12/03:

The speed with which the US is forfeiting the goodwill it had in Iraq is breathtaking. With the exception of the Kurds, most Iraqis opposed the invasion of their country, and once US troops had succeeded in toppling Saddam Hussein without massive casualties or tides of refugees the dominant emotion was relief. Public displays of gratitude were few, but there was widespread satisfaction that the dictator and his regime were gone.

A month later, the mood has changed. Iraqis are staggered that the efficiency of the US fighting machine was not matched by post-conflict competence worthy of a superpower. Overriding everything is the issue of governance. Who is going to run Iraq, and will it be done for the benefit of Iraqis or of outside powers? Some reports suggest that Iraqis do not care who governs them, as long as someone competent ends the chaos soon. That is a false perception. American mismanagement in the first month of occupation has led an increasing number of Iraqis to distrust the whole US enterprise.

Even America's Iraqi friends are having second thoughts. Many Iraqi exiles who were recruited months ago by Washington's Future of Iraq project, to work in Baghdad ministries alongside American "advisers" after regime change, are hesitating to take up their posts for fear of being seen as collaborators.

"Bush: Weapons May Be Gone" -- Ken Fireman in Newsday, 4/25/03:

Speaking at an Abrams tank factory, Bush acknowledged for the first time that Saddam Hussein may have destroyed his chemical and biological weapons before the invasion began. . . .

Bush said, "Iraqis with firsthand knowledge of these programs, including several top officials who have come forward recently -- some voluntarily, others not -- are beginning to cooperate, are beginning to let us know what the facts were on the ground."

His statement was based on documents and intelligence gained since the invasion began, said a White House official who spoke on condition he not be identified.

"Some things were destroyed in the '90s, some things were destroyed just before the war, some things were destroyed during the war and some things were moved," the official said. "They had a complex system for hiding things."

Newsweek reported recently that Hussein son-in-law Hussein Kamel told UN weapons inspectors in 1995 that most, if not all, biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them had been destroyed in the early to mid-1990s.

ABC News, 4/25/03: US officials downplay the significance of banned weapons as the rationale for war and
seek alternative justifications:

Officials inside government and advisers outside told ABCNEWS the administration emphasized the danger of Saddam's weapons to gain the legal justification for war from the United Nations and to stress the danger at home to Americans.

"We were not lying," said one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis."

Officials now say they may not find hundreds of tons of mustard and nerve agents and maybe not thousands of liters of anthrax and other toxins. But U.S. forces will find some, they say. On Thursday, President Bush raised the possibility for the first time that any such Iraqi weapons were destroyed before or during the war. . . .

One official said that in the end, history and the American people will judge the United States not by whether U.S. officials find canisters of poison gas or vials of some biological agent.

History will judge the United States, the official said, by whether this war marked the beginning of the end for the terrorists who hate America.

"After 'Decline,' U.S. Again Capable of Making Nuclear Arms" -- Ralph Vartabedian in The Los Angeles Times, 4/23/03:

The United States has regained the capability to make nuclear weapons for the first time in 14 years and has restarted production of plutonium parts for bombs, the Energy Department said Tuesday.

The announcement marks an important symbolic and operational milestone in rebuilding the nation's nuclear weapons complex, which began a long retrenchment in the late 1980s as the Cold War ended and the toll of environmental damage from bomb production became known. . . .

Under a Bush administration plan, the Energy Department is beginning limited production of plutonium parts for the stockpile of nuclear weapons and will begin laying plans for a new factory that could produce components for hundreds of weapons each year. . . .

"It is a sign that after a long period of decline, the weapons complex is back and growing," said Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Energy Department weapons expert. "To the average U.S. citizen, it would be accurate to say we have restarted the production of nuclear weapons."

Energy Department officials vehemently denied that they are actually producing nuclear weapons and said they need the capability of producing plutonium parts to ensure the reliability of the stockpile of U.S. weapons, which is aging and may need new components. . . .

But critics question whether the Bush administration is going overboard in its investments in the nuclear weapons complex. Thomas Cochran, a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the government is now spending about $6 billion annually on the nuclear weapons complex, 50% more than it did during the Cold War.

Reactions III (April 24-30, 2003) Read More »

Ron Reagan, Jr. on Bush and the war:
"Reagan Blasts Bush" (interview by David Talbot in Salon, posted 4/14/03):

Reagan says he doesn't have anything personal against Bush. He met him only once, at a White House event during the Reagan presidency. "At least my wife insists we did -- he left absolutely no impression on me. . . ."

But Reagan has strong feelings about Bush's policies, including the war in Iraq, which he ardently opposes. "Nine-11 gave the Bush people carte blanche to carry out their extreme agenda -- and they didn't hesitate for a moment to use it. I mean, by 9/12 Rumsfeld was saying, 'Let's hit Iraq.' They've used the war on terror to justify everything from tax cuts to Alaska oil drilling."

Of course, Reagan's father was also known for his military buildup and aggressive foreign policy. "Yes," he concedes, "there are some holdovers from my dad's years, like Elliott Abrams and, my God, Admiral Poindexter, who's now keeping watch over us all. But that observation doesn't hold up. My father gave a speech a couple years after he left the White House calling for 'an international army of conscience' to deal with failed states where atrocities are taking place. He had no thought that America should be the world's policeman. I know that for a fact from conversations I had with him. He believed there must be an international force to intervene where great human tragedy was occurring. Rwanda would have been a prime example, where a strike force capable of acting quickly could have gone in to stop the slaughter.

"Now George and Dick and Rummy and Wolfy all have a very different idea about America's role in the world. It was laid out by [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz back in '92 -- Iraq is the center of the Middle East, its axis, and it's of such geo-strategic importance that we can't leave it in the hands of Saddam. We need to forcibly change that regime and use Iraq as a forward base for American democracy, setting up a domino effect in the region, and so on. My father, on the other hand, was well aware of the messiness of the Middle East, particularly after [the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in] Lebanon."

Reagan says his opinions about the war were not changed by the rapid fall of Baghdad. "Look, whether or not Saddam was a bad guy, or whether the Iraqi people were terribly oppressed, was never the issue. I mean I'm happy for the Iraqis, but that's not what this was all about. Nor was the military conclusion ever in doubt; this was the Dallas Cowboys playing a high school team. Their army was a third the size it was in '91, and it didn't give us much trouble then.

"And the weapons of mass destruction? Whatever happened to them? I'm sure we'll find some," he laughs. "They're being flown in right now in a C-130."

"Thousands Demonstrate against US" -- The Guardian, 4/18/03:

Iraqi demonstrators poured out of Friday prayers in Baghdad mosques chanting anti-US slogans and calling for an Islamic state to replace Saddam Hussein's toppled government.

A recording was played over US army loudspeakers, warning people in Arabic to leave the area "immediately or there will be consequences".

At one mosque, Sheik Ahmed al-Kubeisy rejected the troops' "occupation" and said US soldiers should leave the country soon, before Iraqis expel them, the Arab news channel Al-Jazeera reported.

Michael McFaul on
three scenarios for Iraq's political development ("Between Restoration and Revolution," Washington Post, 4/15/03):

The Iraqi opposition today consists of exiled liberals and generals, Kurdish nationalists, Shiite and Sunni clerics, Islamic fundamentalists, a smattering of monarchists and the unknown local leaders throughout the country who have quietly provided comfort to opponents and passive resistance to Saddam Hussein's totalitarian regime. From other regime changes, we should assume that this united front against Hussein will no longer be united after Hussein. The combination of a weak state, soaring expectations in society and factional fighting in the anti-authoritarian coalition gives rise to two dangerous "solutions." One is restoration. Living in anarchy, people want order. Who can provide order most quickly? Those who previously provided order. How can order be provided most quickly? By deploying the same methods used before. For both American officials governing Iraq and the Iraqi people, the temptation to settle for a new regime led by new leaders with autocratic proclivities grafted onto old state structures from Hussein's regime will be great.

But there is another, more sinister solution that can also gain appeal: the victory of the extremists. The end of dictatorship is a euphoric but ephemeral moment. When the new, interim government does not meet popular expectations, the radicals offer up an alternative vision to construct a new political (and often social) order. It is amazing and frightening how often they win. In February 1917 the end of Russian czarism seemed to create propitious conditions for constitutional democracy. Less than a year later, the Bolsheviks had seized power. In 1979 the first provisional government in Iran contained many prominent leftist intellectuals and even some liberals. No one today, however, remembers Mehdi Bazargan or Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, while everyone knows the name of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the radical cleric who pushed these others aside to dictate his vision for Iran. The Taliban seized control in Afghanistan to end the years of anarchy after the collapse of the old order there.

In Iraq, this threat from revolutionaries -- that is, the terrorist wing of Islamic fundamentalism inspired by Osama bin Laden -- is now latent and below the radar screen, but real. For devotees of this world perspective, Iraq offers a ripe opportunity. Not only is the old state gone and expectations high, but the only authority in the country is, in their revolutionary discourse, an imperial occupying force of infidels. Vladimir Lenin and Khomeini would have drooled over such propitious conditions for revolution.

The third path between restoration and revolution is a long and bumpy one. Liberal, moderate grass-roots movements from below always take more time to emerge and consolidate than the autocratic forces of either restoration or revolution. To succeed in Iraq, they will need their U.S. allies for the long haul. Premature departure guarantees thugs in power at best and Osama bin Laden supporters at worst.

"Prove Iraqi Guilt, MPs Tell Blair" (The Guardian, 4/20/03):

Tony Blair is facing the threat of a fresh rebellion from Labour backbenchers who are growing increasingly alarmed that the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq will confirm that the war was illegal.

As a 1,000-strong Anglo-American task force of inspectors prepares to search hundreds of suspicious sites, Labour MPs are demanding an inquiry to establish whether MI6 misled ministers about Iraq's weapons programme. . . .

MPs are also starting to ask questions about the conduct of the intelligence services. They want to see the evidence that persuaded members of the Commons intelligence committee to back government efforts to win round waverers before the war began. One MP is telling committee members: "You kept saying you wished you could tell us, so now will you tell us?" . . .

The doubts about Iraq's WMD programme mean that some Labour MPs will be sceptical even if a 'smoking gun' is uncovered. Mr Hinchliffe said there was a "cynical view" among Labour MPs that the coalition inspectors will doctor the evidence.

Britain wants to reassure critics by appointing an international body on the lines of the Northern Ireland disarmament commission to verify any weapons finds.

But the former cabinet minister Gavin Strang said the coalition should go all the way by allowing UN inspectors back into Iraq. "I do not understand why we have not been able to allow Hans Blix to go back in," he said.

Josh Marshall on
Saudi Arabia's new vulnerability to US intervention (talkingpointsmemo.com, 4/20/03):

In addition to their oil, much of our security relationship with the Saudis has been based on our need to project force against and counterbalance Iraq and Iran. With the Iraqi government out of the picture, our need to counterbalance them disappears. And if you want to project force against or counterbalance Iran, Iraq is a much better place to do it from than Saudi Arabia.

What this adds up to is that most, if not all, of our geostrategic interest in Saudi Arabia evaporated over the last month. If the Saudis give us grief or won't cut off terror money to various bad-actors we have a much freer hand to squeeze them. . . .

Now, combine all this with the fact that many in the Bush administration (and out of the Bush administration, for that matter) think that Saudi Arabia is the ground zero of international terrorism, the terror purveyor state par excellence. To this point, our ability to muscle the Saudis on the terror question or even undermine the regime itself has always been limited by our need for their assistance geostrategically. But if the administration gets what it wants in Iraq, all of that changes.

"Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Four Key Bases in Iraq" (Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt in The New York Times, 4/20/03):

The United States is planning a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to military bases and project American influence into the heart of the unsettled region, senior Bush administration officials say.

American military officials, in interviews this week, spoke of maintaining perhaps four bases in Iraq that could be used in the future: one at the international airport just outside Baghdad; another at Tallil, near Nasiriya in the south; the third at an isolated airstrip called H-1 in the western desert, along the old oil pipeline that runs to Jordan; and the last at the Bashur air field in the Kurdish north. . . .

A military foothold in Iraq would be felt across the border in Syria, and, in combination with the continuing United States presence in Afghanistan, it would virtually surround Iran with a new web of American influence. . . .

These goals do not contradict the administration's official policy of rapid withdrawal from Iraq, officials say. The United States is acutely aware that the growing American presence in the Middle East and Southwest Asia invites charges of empire-building and may create new targets for terrorists.

So without fanfare, the Pentagon has also begun to shrink its military footprint in the region, trying to ease domestic strains in Turkey and Jordan.

In a particularly important development, officials said the United States was likely to reduce American forces in Saudi Arabia, as well. The main reason for that presence, after all, was to protect the Saudi government from the threat Iraq has posed since its invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

US military tries to thwart media coverage of anti-US protests in Iraq (AFP article, 4/15/03, reproduced at Yahoo! News):

Exasperated US military officials tried to hamper the media from covering new demonstrations in Baghdad on Tuesday while some 20,000 people in the Shiite Muslim bastion of Nasiriyah railed against a US-staged meeting on Iraq's future.

The protests came as the Americans delivered a first progress report in their effort to restore Iraq to normalcy and head off a chorus of criticism over continued lawlessness and a lack of basic services.

Some 200-300 Iraqis gathered Tuesday outside the Palestine Hotel, where the US marines have set up an operations base, for a third straight day of protests against the US occupation.

For the first time, visibly angered US military officials sought to distance the media from the protest, moving reporters and cameras about 30 meters (yards) from the barbed-wired entrance to the hotel.

"We want you to pull back to the back of the hotel because they (the Iraqis) are only performing because the media are here," said a marine colonel who wore the name Zarcone but would not give his first name or title.

Cross-party support grows for
a Commons investigation into prewar intelligence claims that Iraq had banned weapons (Jo Dillon in The Independent, 4/20/03):

Tony Blair has ruled out an inquiry into allegations that the public was misled about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the main justification for the war.

Putting himself at odds with a growing number of MPs, the Prime Minister said there was no need for a separate inquiry as a 1,000-strong Anglo-American inspection team prepares to search Iraq for weapons.

Meanwhile a cross-party alliance is getting behind the campaign for an inquiry to be conducted by the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee into whether MI6 misled ministers about WMDs, and into the exact nature of the intelligence information used to convince waverers in the Labour Party to back military action. The campaign is unlikely to win Downing Street's co-operation. . . .

Alice Mahon MP, a prominent member of Labour Against the War has added her support to calls for an inquiry. She joins fellow Labour MPs Lindsay Hoyle -- who voted in favour of war because he was told there was "hard evidence" of an Iraqi weapons programme -- David Hinchliffe and Doug Henderson, the former Defence minister, who warned that the war would retrospectively be deemed illegal if no weapons were found.

Ms Mahon said she would be calling for the United Nations, and not the US, to send inspectors to Iraq. "There is cynicism about the US," she said, "and a number of people have said this to me: they will find them [WMDs] because they will take their own in there with them. That was the reason we went to war, so let's get it verified."

While not opposing the idea of a Commons inquiry, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, Menzies Campbell, said he believed the Government should go further and push for the United Nations weapons inspectors, led by Dr Hans Blix, to be allowed back into Iraq.

Mr Campbell told The Independent on Sunday: "Any inquiry held in the UK or the US will inevitably be accused of bias. The only credible approach is to allow Dr Blix and Unmovic to complete the mandate the UN Security Council gave them under Resolution 1441. Only the United Nations will be trusted."

The Conservative Party, too, has backed the broad principle of an inquiry to find out whether the evidence presented to ministers and to members of the Intelligence and Security Committee was an accurate reflection of the situation on the ground in Iraq. They also called for the UN to be allowed back in.

"US under Pressure to Allow Truly Independent Regime" -- Rupert Cornwall in The Independent, 4/20/03:

The United States came under strong regional pressure yesterday to hand over power in Iraq to a post-Saddam government that was not a mere puppet regime of Washington and London.

The demand, an important theme of a meeting of Iraq's neighbours in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, emerged as Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, confirmed that he would soon travel to Syria. He said he would read the riot act to the President, Bashar al-Assad, over the alleged shelter provided for members of the former Iraqi regime and pursuit of chemical weapons. . . .

[T]he Bush administration's pressure on Syria appears, if anything, to be producing a counter-reaction in the region, fuelled by worries that hawks in Washington will manipulate the formation of a new Baghdad government to ensure that it is friendly to Israel. . . .

The eight participants included not only Washington's traditional allies -- Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia -- but Syria and Iran, both longstanding opponents of the US, which are both accused of supporting terrorism.

With the exception of Turkey, which wants to put the reconstruction of Iraq at the top of the agenda, the other countries have set aside longstanding quarrels to press for the emergence of a genuinely independent Iraqi government as soon as possible.

UN set to intensify efforts to reinstate its inspections process (Andrew Gumbel in The Independent, 4/20/03):

Hans Blix, the chief United Nations weapons inspector, returns to the Security Council this week -- not to update the member nations on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but rather to pile pressure on the United States to let the UN back into the post-war reconstruction process. . . .

[A]lthough Mr Blix probably won't be saying "I told you so" when he addresses the Security Council on Tuesday, he will at least speak with some authority when he urges the military victors in Iraq to let the UN back in and help certify that, post-Saddam, the country is indeed free of biological, chemical and nuclear arms.

"I think the world would like to have a credible report on the absence or eradication of the programme of weapons of mass destruction," he told the BBC last week. "We would be able not only to receive the reports of the Americans and the Brits of what they have found or not found, but we would be able to corroborate a good deal of this."

The United Nations has several ways it can take advantage of the growing controversy over Iraq's illegal weapons programmes -- or lack of them. One is simply to reassert the authority of the inspection team and to point out its usefulness as an independent arbiter. The clear implication of Mr Blix's interview was that the US, on its own, cannot report credibly and should not have the right to dictate its terms. As he also said last week: "We're not dogs on a leash."

Another possible strategy stems from the wording of the Security Council resolution on economic sanctions on Iraq. The sanctions can only end, Resolution 687 says, if the UN certifies the country to be free of illegal weapons. Several countries, notably Russia, have suggested this clause could be used as leverage to give the UN a more significant role in post-war Iraq.

The Bush administration is busy looking for ways to end the sanctions without this UN imprimatur. The Iraqi people "have suffered enough", the Deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, argued -- a line that is not without irony, since for years the United States insisted that sanctions were not responsible for Iraqi suffering, Saddam Hussein was.

Friday protests in Baghdad
were also a show of armed defiance to US occupation -- Peter Beaumont in The Observer, 4/20/03:

On Friday there was an invisible line of demarcation between greater Baghdad and the residents of Sadr City -- a place where US patrols are absent, as are the Iraqi capital's awkward new police. Its boundary marks the greatest failure of the US intervention in Iraq thus far: the failure to tackle what may be the most potent challenge to US plans for a Western-style democracy in Saddam's collapsed demesne.

Because, for all its poverty and danger, Sadr City may be the very model of the new Iraq that America is making. It has a population that is turning to its clerics, not to the political exiles who are flooding back and demanding that they be handed the reins of power.

And on Friday Sadr City belonged emphatically to the hundreds of armed men of the Sadr Movement's militia and to a second group loyal to the rival Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, both bearing arms in open defiance of the US troops who have flooded into the city.

They are gunmen who on Friday not only manned their impromptu checkpoints at city junctions and outside the main hospital, but lined every rooftop along the main road that led to the al-Heqma mosque, and mingled with the crowd. These hundreds of armed men exerted their presence as tens of thousands of worshippers came to listen to messages delivered across the city's mosques.

More links than anyone really needs to
instances of George W. Bush asserting certainty that Iraq possessed banned weapons (uggabugga.blogspot.com, posted 4/16/03)

Michael Lind on
how the neoconservatives took over US foreign policy (mostly by accident) (sf.indymedia.org, datelined 4/11/03):

. . . So that is the bizarre story of how neoconservatives took over Washington and steered the U.S. into a Middle Eastern war unrelated to any plausible threat to the U.S. and opposed by the public of every country in the world except Israel. The frightening thing is the role of happenstance and personality. After the al-Qaida attacks, any U.S. president would likely have gone to war to topple bin Laden's Taliban protectors in Afghanistan. But everything that the U.S. has done since then would have been different had America's 18th century electoral rules not given Bush the presidency and had Cheney not used the transition period to turn the foreign policy executive into a PNAC reunion.

US planning to pipe Iraqi oil to Israel -- Edward Vuillamy in The Observer, 4/20/03:

Plans to build a pipeline to siphon oil from newly conquered Iraq to Israel are being discussed between Washington, Tel Aviv and potential future government figures in Baghdad.

The plan envisages the reconstruction of an old pipeline, inactive since the end of the British mandate in Palestine in 1948, when the flow from Iraq's northern oilfields to Palestine was re-directed to Syria.

Now, its resurrection would transform economic power in the region, bringing revenue to the new US-dominated Iraq, cutting out Syria and solving Israel's energy crisis at a stroke.

It would also create an end less and easily accessible source of cheap Iraqi oil for the US guaranteed by reliable allies other than Saudi Arabia -- a keystone of US foreign policy for decades and especially since 11 September 2001.

Until 1948, the pipeline ran from the Kurdish-controlled city of Mosul to the Israeli port of Haifa, on its northern Mediterranean coast.

The revival of the pipeline was first discussed openly by the Israeli Minister for National Infrastructures, Joseph Paritzky, according to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz .

The paper quotes Paritzky as saying that the pipeline would cut Israel's energy bill drastically -- probably by more than 25 per cent -- since the country is currently largely dependent on expensive imports from Russia.

US intelligence sources confirmed to The Observer that the project has been discussed. One former senior CIA official said: 'It has long been a dream of a powerful section of the people now driving this administration [of President George W. Bush] and the war in Iraq to safeguard Israel's energy supply as well as that of the United States.

Robert Fisk on
evidence of US indifference toward bringing the Hussein regime to justice (Znet, datelined 4/17/03):

Why, Iraqis are asking, did the United States allow the entire Iraqi cabinet to escape? And they're right. Not just the Beast of Baghdad and his two sons, Qusay and Uday, but the Vice-President, Taha Yassin Ramadan, the Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, Saddam's personal adviser, Dr A K Hashimi, the ministers of defence, health, the economy, trade, even Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Minister of Information who, long ago, in the days before journalists cosied up to him, was the official who read out the list of executed "brothers" in the purge that followed Saddam's revolution -- relatives of prisoners would dose themselves on valium before each Sahaf appearance.

Here's what Baghdadis are noticing -- and what Iraqis are noticing in all the main cities of the country. Take the vast security apparatus with which Saddam surrounded himself, the torture chambers and the huge bureaucracy that was its foundation. President Bush promised that America was campaigning for human rights in Iraq, that the guilty, the war criminals, would be brought to trial. The 60 secret police headquarters in Baghdad are empty, even the three-square-mile compound headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

I have been to many of them. But there is no evidence even that a single British or US forensic officer has visited the sites to sift the wealth of documents lying there or talk to the ex-prisoners returning to their former places of torment. Is this idleness. Or is this wilful? . . .

At the end of the Second World War, German-speaking British and US intelligence officers hoovered up every document in the thousands of Gestapo and Abwehr bureaux across western Germany. The Russians did the same in their zone. In Iraq, however, the British and Americans have simply ignored the evidence. . . .

The top security men in Saddam's regime were busy in the last hours, shredding millions of documents. I found a great pile of black plastic rubbish bags at the back of one villa, each stuffed with the shreds of thousands of papers. Shouldn't they be taken to Washington or London and reconstituted to learn their secrets? . . .

Now here's another question the Iraqis are asking -- and to which I cannot provide an answer. On 8 April, three weeks into the invasion, the Americans dropped four 2,000lb bombs on the Baghdad residential area of Mansur. They claimed they thought Saddam was hiding there. They knew they would kill civilians because it was not, as one Centcom mandarin said, a "risk free venture" (sic). So they dropped their bombs and killed 14 civilians in Mansur, most of them members of a Christian family.

The Americans said they couldn't be sure they had killed Saddam until they could carry out forensic tests at the site. But this turns out to have been a lie. I went there two days ago. Not a single US or British official had bothered to visit the bomb craters. Indeed, when I arrived, there was a putrefying smell and families pulled the remains of a baby from the rubble.

"So Where Are They, Mr. Blair?" -- editorial, The Independent, 4/20/03:

Remember Colin Powell at the Security Council two months ago (though today it seems another age on another planet): the charts, the grainy intelligence satellite pictures, the crackly tapes of the intercepted phone conversations among Iraqi officials? How plausible it all sounded, especially when propounded by the most plausible figure in the Bush administration.

And what about those other claims, wheeled out on various occasions by Messrs Bush, Blair, Cheney and Rumsfeld? The Iraqi drones that were supposed to be able to attack the US east coast, the imports of aluminium tubes allegedly intended for centrifuges to enrich uranium, the unaccounted-for lethal nerve and germ agents, in quantities specified down to the last gallon or pound, as if exact numbers alone constituted proof. All, it seems, egregious products of the imagination of the intelligence services -- one commodity whose existence need never be doubted.

Maybe the Saddam regime was diabolically cunning in the concealment of these weap-ons, but the shambolic manner of its passing suggests otherwise. Maybe, as those "US officials" continue to suggest from behind their comfortable screen of anonymity, the weapons have been shipped to Syria for "safekeeping". But that theory too is dismissed by independent experts.

Indeed, it collapses at the first serious examination. Why should Saddam part with his most effective means of defence, when the survival of his regime and himself was on the line? Nor will that hoary and disingenuous line advanced by our political masters wash any longer -- oh yes, we know a lot more, but if we told you, we would be showing our hand to Saddam and endangering precious intelligence sources. . . .

Well, Saddam is now gone. And with him has disappeared any conceivable risk to those intelligence sources (assuming they ever existed). So just what was this information on the basis of which Washington and its faithful ally launched an unprovoked invasion of a ramshackle third world country? A country with a very nasty regime to be sure, but not a great deal nastier than some other potential candidates for "liberation" in the Middle East and elsewhere.

If only for the credibility and reputation of our country, this newspaper hopes that enough weapons of mass destruction will be discovered to justify a war that has grievously weakened the UN, strained the Atlantic alliance and split the European Union.

"Officials Argue for Fast U.S. Exit from Iraq" -- Jonathan Weisman and Mike Allen in The Washington Post, 4/21/03:

Confronting cost estimates of at least $20 billion a year and fears that Iraq could become permanently dependent on a U.S. military presence, senior officials in the White House and Pentagon are questioning the Bush administration's most ambitious, long-term plans for Iraq's reconstruction. . . .

Such sentiments mark a departure from the lofty goals laid out within the administration and before the American public before the war began -- goals that a chorus of think tanks and former diplomats is imploring the administration to carry out. Still, the debate over what happens next is far from settled, with some powerful administration officials, especially in the Treasury and State departments, arguing for a longer-term commitment. . . .

Such hedging is likely to exacerbate differences between the minimalist camp and some State Department officials, who still believe the United States should set its sights on spending whatever time it takes to create a true, pluralistic democracy with a thriving, entrepreneurial economy. . . .

Treasury Department officials are also thinking big, hoping to encourage the adoption of a codified system of property rights and a rule of law for business operations, a transparent system of budgeting and taxation, the promotion of an entrepreneurial economy and, ultimately, the privatization of centrally planned state enterprises. . . .

White House aides stress that Iraq is not a destitute country, like Afghanistan. Besides its oil reserves, the second-largest in the world, it has an extensive transportation, water, electricity and telecommunications infrastructure, an educated population and a recent history of entrepreneurship and relative affluence.

Pentagon officials take a very different tack, emphasizing that Iraqis have grown accustomed to intermittent electric power, unreliable and decrepit water and sewerage systems, and a terribly inefficient state-run economy.

From those disparate assessments, however, flow the same conclusion: Not much needs to be done to improve the average Iraqi's lot.

Thumbnail biographies of
key figures bidding to lead postwar Iraq (Washington Post, 4/15/03)

"A New Boss in Baghdad" -- Rajiv Chandrasekaran in The Washington Post, 4/21/03:

Mohammed Mohsen Zubaidi, a longtime Iraqi exile . . . has proclaimed himself governor of Baghdad . . .

Zubaidi, a Shiite Muslim dissident who has spent the past 24 years in exile and is a top official of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, said he was selected last week by a 22-member council of businessmen, clerics and intellectuals to run this city of 5 million people. Although his name elicits befuddled stares on the streets of Baghdad and his appointment has not been recognized by the U.S. military, he insisted he is the city's new leader.

In the uncharted political landscape that is today's Iraq, Zubaidi has moved with alacrity to stake out turf. Over the past week, he said, he has met with doctors and judges, urging them to return to work. He has talked to police commanders and former soldiers, telling them that the corrupt old days are over. He has reached out to tribal leaders, providing them with power generators, medicine and other goodies to curry their favor. And he has met with U.S. military officers, casting himself as a key interlocutor with what remains of the Iraqi government.

His power-grab may not last if it meets with the objection of the U.S. government, which is establishing an interim civil authority led by retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner. But there are signs that Zubaidi's activities may have at least the tacit approval of some U.S. officials. The Iraqi National Congress has received substantial financial backing from the Pentagon, and his top deputy is a member of an exile militia trained by the U.S. military. . . .

In a news conference . . . Zubaidi said the country's new constitution would be derived from Islamic law and promised to prosecute anyone whose "hands are stained with the blood of the Iraqi people."

He insisted that his was not "a transitional government."

"We are an executive committee to run Baghdad," he said. He added that 22 subcommittees had been formed to administer the capital and that "professional people" had been appointed to lead them.

"The Greatest Gulf" -- Jonathan Raban in The Guardian, 4/22/03:

When the British cobbled together Iraq out of three provinces of the collapsed Ottoman empire, they were deliberately fractionalising and diluting two of the three main demographic groups. It made good colonial sense to split up the ever-troublesome Kurds (Sunni Muslims, but not Arabs) between Syria, Turkey, Persia, and Iraq. Equally, the Shias had to be prevented from dominating the new state. In her letters home, Gertrude Bell, an archaeologist and official of the British administration in Baghdad after the first world war, described the Shias as, variously, "grimly devout", "violent and intractable", "extremist", "fanatical and conservative". By contrast, the Baghdad Sunnis were seen as generally docile, forward-looking and pro-British. A representative democracy was out of the question, because the majority Shias would promptly hijack it. Bell wrote: "I don't for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority, otherwise you'll have a mujtahid-run, theocratic state, which is the very devil." . . .

From the start, the unwieldy assemblage of Iraq needed not a government but a ruler. When monarchy failed, tyranny of a peculiarly Middle Eastern kind took over. Rosen interestingly asserts that the idea of "state", in the western sense of a complex machinery of government independent of the person of the ruler, barely exists in the Arab world, because an entity as abstract and impersonal as a state cannot be credited with those "bonds of obligation" that define and constitute the Islamic self. This is borne out by fundamentalist websites that warn their followers not to vote in western elections for fear of committing the sin of shirk, or blasphemy: to show allegiance to a secular state, instead of to the Ummah and to Allah, is to worship a false god. The typical Arab ruler is likely to echo Louis XIV: the state, such as it is, is him -- a warlord-like figure on a grand scale, with an army and a secret police at his disposal, like Nasser, Hafez al-Assad, King Saud, or Saddam Hussein. For the individual strong man is compatible with strict Islamist teaching in a way that a strong state is definitely not.

In the case of Iraq, arrogant colonial mapmaking happened to conspire with Islamic tradition to create a state that would permanently tremble on the verge of anarchy, or at least of violent partition into a Kurdistan to the north, a Shi'ite theocracy to the south, and a Sunni-led secular statelet in the middle with Baghdad as its capital. That Iraq still conforms -- just -- to its 1921 borders is a tribute to the extraordinary power and brutality of Saddam. Yet Wolfowitz has singled out this state-that-never-should-have-been for his breathtakingly bold experiment in enforced American-style democracy. On April 6 he went the rounds of the Sunday-morning talk-shows to "warn" the nation that it might take "more than six months" to get Iraqi democracy up and running. He should be so lucky. What seems to be happening now is that, as American troops take full possession of Iraq, they are beginning to find out -- in Baghdad, Ur, Mosul -- that the country they invaded has effectively ceased to exist.

More on the West's flawed intelligence about Iraqi politics and the Hussein regime.
"Iraq: Misreading the Vital Signs" (David Baran in Le Monde Diplomatique, English Edition, April 2003)

Because the Iraqi regime is so impenetrable and in constant flux, its behaviour, or lack of it, causes problems of circularity. Motivated by the legitimate need to make sense of their observations, "experts" attempt to interpret seemingly straightforward noises and signals from within Iraq. Saddam's mercurial regime produces a lot of these, albeit fragmentary and contradictory. Interpreting them means overstatement, and this adds to the ambiguity of the actual signals. Foreign observers acting in good faith then play into the hands of an inscrutable, unpredictable regime. And the essentially false analyses get the media cover.

British forces encouraged looting (London Times, 4/5/03):

United Nations officials have rebuked British commanders for urging local residents to loot buildings belonging to the Iraqi Army and the ruling Baath Party.

The British view is that the sight of local youths dismantling the offices and barracks of a regime they used to fear shows they have confidence that Saddam Hussain's henchmen will not be returning to these towns in southern Iraq.

One senior British officer said: "We believe this sends a powerful message that the old guard is truly finished." . . .

But UN officials said last night that such behaviour was against the Geneva Convention and bred a dangerous mood of anarchy. Homes and vehicles in towns such as Umm Qasr and Safwan, which have nothing to do with Saddam's regime, have been robbed and vandalised in recent days; a UN official attributed that to the permitted level of lawlessness. One said: "The British and American armies have a duty to protect local law and order. It is not right that they promote the idea that it is permissible to steal or destroy anything owned by the Iraqi Government, their army and their party leaders.

From Matthew Rothschild's
interview with film critic Roger Ebert on March 30, 2003 (posted at Progressive.org):

I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class. I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out. . . .

When I write a political column for the Chicago Sun-Times, when liberals disagree with me, they send in long, logical e-mails explaining all my errors. I hardly ever get well-reasoned articles from the right. People just tell me to shut up. That's the message: "Shut up. Don't write anymore about this. Who do you think you are?"

To resist US unilateralism,
support the euro -- George Monbiot in The Guardian, 4/22/03:

Almost 70% of the world's currency reserves -- the money that nations use to finance international trade and protect themselves against financial speculators -- takes the form of US dollars. The dollar is used for this purpose because it is relatively stable, it is produced by a nation with a major share of world trade, and certain commodities, in particular oil, are denominated in it, which means that dollars are required to buy them.

The US does very well from this arrangement. In order to earn dollars, other nations must provide goods and services to the US. When commodities are valued in dollars, the US needs do no more than print pieces of green paper to obtain them: it acquires them, in effect, for free. Once earned, other nations' dollar reserves must be invested back into the American economy. This inflow of money helps the US to finance its massive deficit.

The only serious threat to the dollar's international dominance at the moment is the euro. Next year, when the European Union acquires 10 new members, its gross domestic product will be roughly the same as that of the US, and its population 60% bigger. If the euro is adopted by all the members of the union, which suffers from none of the major underlying crises afflicting the US economy, it will begin to look like a more stable and more attractive investment than the dollar. Only one further development would then be required to unseat the dollar as the pre-eminent global currency: nations would need to start trading oil in euros.

Until last week, this was already beginning to happen. In November 2000, Saddam Hussein insisted that Iraq's oil be bought in euros. When the value of the euro rose, the country's revenues increased accordingly. As the analyst William Clark has suggested, the economic threat this represented might have been one of the reasons why the US government was so anxious to evict Saddam. But it may be unable to resist the greater danger.

Last year, Javad Yarjani, a senior official at Opec, the oil producers' cartel, put forward several compelling reasons why his members might one day start selling their produce in euros. Europe is the Middle East's biggest trading partner; it imports more oil and petrol products than the US; it has a bigger share of global trade; and its external accounts are better balanced. One key tipping point, he suggested, could be the adoption of the euro by Europe's two principal oil producers: Norway and the United Kingdom, whose Brent crude is one of the "markers" for international oil prices. "This might," Yarjani said, "create a momentum to shift the oil pricing system to euros."

If this happens, oil importing nations will no longer need dollar reserves to buy oil. The demand for the dollar will fall, and its value is likely to decline. As the dollar slips, central banks will start to move their reserves into safer currencies such as the euro and possibly the yen and the yuan, precipitating further slippage. The US economy, followed rapidly by US power, could then be expected to falter or collapse.

Harpers Weekly Review, 4/22/03

Burger King and Pizza Hut are open for business in Basra (New York Daily News, 4/23/03)

"U.S. Planners Surprised by Strength of Iraqi Shiites" -- Glenn Kessler and Dana Priest in The Washington Post, 4/23/03:

As the administration plotted to overthrow Hussein's government, U.S. officials said this week, it failed to fully appreciate the force of Shiite aspirations and is now concerned that those sentiments could coalesce into a fundamentalist government. Some administration officials were dazzled by Ahmed Chalabi, the prominent Iraqi exile who is a Shiite and an advocate of a secular democracy. Others were more focused on the overriding goal of defeating Hussein and paid little attention to the dynamics of religion and politics in the region.

"It is a complex equation, and the U.S. government is ill-equipped to figure out how this is going to shake out," a State Department official said. "I don't think anyone took a step backward and asked, 'What are we looking for?' The focus was on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein."

Complicating matters is that the United States has virtually no diplomatic relationship with Iran, leaving U.S. officials in the dark about the goals and intentions of the government in Tehran. The Iranian government is the patron of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the leading Iraqi Shiite group. . . .

U.S. intelligence reports reaching top officials throughout the government this week said the Shiites appear to be much more organized than was thought. On Monday, one meeting of generals and admirals at the Pentagon evolved into a spontaneous teach-in on Iraq's Shiites and the U.S. strategy for containing Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq.

"Blair's Secret War Meetings with Clinton" -- Patrick Wintour in The Guardian, 4/25/03:

Tony Blair took repeated secret advice from the former American president Bill Clinton on how to unlock the diplomatic impasse between Europe and the US in the build-up to the war on Iraq, the Guardian can reveal.

In the crucial weekend before to the final breakdown of diplomacy in March, Mr Clinton was a guest of Mr Blair's at Chequers where the pair discussed the crisis.

Mr Blair was battling to persuade the Chilean president Ricardo Lagos -- a key figure on the security council -- to back a second UN resolution setting a new deadline for Saddam to cooperate fully with the UN or face military action.

Three days after his Chequers meeting, Mr Clinton made a rare public appeal to his successor, George Bush, to give the UN weapons inspectors more time.

Mr Blair and Mr Clinton met at least three times to discuss the war, underlining the extent to which Mr Blair rates Mr Clinton's analytical powers, despite the bond of trust he has also formed with the Republican White House.

Eli J. Lake on
the competing US plans for interim governance in Iraq and the danger posed by inaction while the conflict plays out (The New Republic, 5/5/03; posted online 4/24/03):

There is not one U.S. plan to create an interim Iraqi government but, rather, two competing ones--one backed by the Pentagon, the other by the State Department and the National Security Council (NSC)--and this bureaucratic infighting is sowing confusion, delaying reconstruction, and leaving the political field largely open for the worst kind of anti-Western, anti-democratic leaders to rise.

For his part, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is pushing a plan that would rapidly establish a new government by merging a council of Iraqi leaders elected by exiles at a March conference in the northern Iraqi city of Salahuddin with "internals," the Bush administration's term for Iraqis that have endured Saddam's tyranny (see "The Wasteland," page 18). The NSC and the State Department, on the other hand, would like to sponsor a series of town meetings with internals and exiles--like the one held outside of Nasiriya in Ur on April 15--culminating in a large conference in Baghdad, in the hope that Iraqis on the inside, rather than exiles, will emerge as viable leaders for the transitional regime. . . .

With every week that passes, the United States could be losing the battle for influence on the ground. In Najaf, Sayyid Muqtada Sadr, the heir to perhaps the most prestigious clerical line in Shiism, drove his religious rival into hiding by threat of force. In the eastern city of Baqouba, militias trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guard stormed into the city last week and executed men they accused of being Baathists. And Iranian intelligence agents have reportedly already infiltrated the Shia neighborhoods of the Iraqi capital and are organizing Islamist parties. We can only hope the Bush administration establishes an interim authority before they do.

"Spoiling the Victory" (Guardian lead editorial, 4/11/03):

High-level Washington infighting over the role in an interim authority of the Iraqi National Congress leader, Ahmad Chalabi, is one such own goal. It risks derailing attempts to assert control over a currently lawless Iraq. Dr Chalabi, recently described as a "tassel-loafered, London-based Shia aristocrat" is a man with a controversial past and no present powerbase in Iraq. But the patronage of Dick Cheney and Pentagon hawks propelled him to Nassiriya this week where he plans to help host the first post-Saddam leadership council. Never mind that the state department warns against a "coronation". Never mind that the main Shia opposition has announced a boycott and other factions jostle fatally. Dr Chalabi and his backers seem intent on a preemptive strike that may turn Iraq's political reformation into the mother of all battles even before the corpses of the Ba'athist gauleiters grow cold.

Washington's insistence on retaining ultimate control of all significant aspects of Iraq's postwar affairs, for as long as it chooses, is another preventable own goal. Its agenda includes overseeing the distribution of humanitarian aid, to the dismay of NGO's; the processing of PoWs and the conduct of future war crimes trials; a US-directed hunt for Iraq's fabled weapons of mass destruction; the awarding of reconstruction contracts; the administration of Iraq's ministries and the vetting of former officials; the rehabilitation (prior to possible privatisation) of Iraq's oil and gas industry; the remodelling of Iraq's remaining army; the parameters of Iraq's future foreign policy, including possible recognition of Israel; and, last but not least, the creation of a "consultative group" of agreeable Iraqis which will, eventually, translate into an interim authority still under US auspices. . . .

It is not too late to stop this foolishness. Britain's proposal for a postwar conference should be expanded to include all interested parties, inside Iraq and beyond, and set in train without delay. It should be chaired by the UN's Kofi Annan. And its aim should be to agree a road map for the new Iraq, under UN auspices, which all can support.

"How Bush kicked the [expletive] out of the Geneva Conventions" -- Paul Knox in The Toronto Globe and Mail, 3/26/03:

[N]othing George Bush says on the subject of Geneva Conventions and international legal standards is likely to convince anyone. He has unleashed the greatest onslaught against international law of any U.S. president in living memory. He has torn up arms-control agreements and worked to sabotage the International Criminal Court. In his campaign against terrorism, he has not only flouted the venerable Geneva accords but sought to deny suspects the benefits of the law he is sworn to uphold.

Extensive U.S. press reports -- challenged only in the most general terms by the Bush administration -- have revealed that U.S. interrogators are using borderline torture techniques against suspected terrorists. The toughest methods are used at Bagram air force base in Afghanistan and on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. There, "stress and duress" tactics include sleep deprivation, questioning under pain and subjecting the suspects to extremes of cold or heat.

More disturbingly, U.S. officials acknowledge that some terror suspects have been turned over to countries such as Pakistan and Jordan, which Washington's own annual human-rights reports accuse of practising torture. "We don't kick the [expletive] out of them," one official told The Washington Post. "We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them." This despite the fact that the U.S. is a party, along with 131 other countries, to the 1987 convention against torture.

Mr. Bush insists on calling his counterterrorism campaign a war -- yet the hundreds of prisoners rounded up since September of 2001 are not accorded the status of prisoners of war under the Conventions. Hundreds have been held, incognito and without charge, for more than a year. The U.S. government says they are "unlawful combatants," subject to no laws whatsoever because they are neither U.S. citizens nor held on U.S. soil. It says it can hold them for as long as it wants, with no access to lawyers or judicial oversight. Shamefully, U.S. courts appear to agree.

UN:
"US-UK Forces 'Breaching Geneva Convention'" (The Guardian, 4/11/03):

US and British forces in Iraq are breaching the Geneva convention by failing to protect hospitals in Baghdad from looters, the United Nations has claimed.

The UN office of the humanitarian coordinator for Iraq (UNOHCI) said one of Baghdad's biggest hospitals, al-Kindi, had been ransacked and access to medical centres was almost impossible because of the "breakdown of law and order". . . .

"The coalition forces seem to be unable to restrain the looters or impose any sort of controls on the mobs that now govern the streets," the UNOHCI said in a statement.

"This inaction by the occupying powers is in violation of the Geneva conventions, which explicitly state that medical establishments must be protected, that the wounded and sick must be the object of particular protection and respect, and that hospital personnel must be protected and must be free to carry on their duties."

Jonathan Freedland on
preempting preemption (The Guardian, 4/12/03):

[T]he past month has been like a round-the-clock, slickly produced infomercial for acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. Can't you just picture the North Korean leader, well-lit in a TV armchair, saying: "Hi, my name's Kim Jong-Il. My friend Saddam didn't have nuclear weapons, and look at the price he paid. I do have nukes -- and America backed off. If you're a rogue state, call one of our operators now -- and get nuked-up. The US won't touch you. I guarantee it."

That logic -- what one former Clinton official calls "pre-empting the pre-emption" -- might appeal to Iran and the newest member of the axis club, Syria. Both countries can now feel America's hot breath on their necks, with US forces right on their borders. Iran in particular has reason to feel jumpy: it's all but encircled, with a US presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and all along the Persian Gulf waterway.

So will Tehran take the Pyongyang remedy, seeking a nuclear buffer to protect it from US might? There are grounds for that suspicion. Iran has shown an unusually active interest in nuclear energy for a country with the second largest natural gas reserves in the world. Since gas is cheaper and more efficient than nuclear power, it is rather suspicious that Tehran is so keen on building nuclear generators. And it has hardly been open about its plans.

Patrick Nicholson in Umm Qasr:
"The Cans and Buckets Are Empty, and the People are Desperate" (The Independent, 4/5/03):

I visited Umm Qasr as part of a Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (Cafod) emergency response team, and had been led to believe it was a town under control, where the needs of the people were being met.

The town is not under control. It's like the Wild West, and even the most serious humanitarian concern, water, is not being adequately administered.

Everywhere I went in Umm Qasr, people asked me for water. Wherever you look, people are carting around buckets and drums.

While tankers are being sent into the city by the Allied forces, people in the town told me that the water was being sold by the Iraqi drivers at 250 dinars for 20 litres -- the average Iraqi earns 8,000 dinars a month. The standard humanitarian quota for water in emergency situations is a minimum of 20 litres per person each day. . . .

There is a lot of anger toward Westerners in Umm Qasr, triggered by bitter disappointment at their "liberation". They feel they have been given false expectations and are scared by the breakdown in social order in the town. I saw no obvious Allied presence and the normal structures of schools, government and police has disappeared. But the people are hopeful for a future without Saddam Hussein. However bad the situation today, they told me, it was better than under Saddam's regime.

"Viewing the War as a Lesson to the World" -- David Sanger in The New York Times, 4/5/03:

Mr. Bush's aides insist they have no intention of making Iraq the first of a series of preventive wars. Diplomacy, they argue, can persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons programs. Intensive inspections can flush out a similar nuclear program in Iran. Threats and incentives can prevent Syria from sponsoring terrorism or fueling a guerrilla movement in Iraq.

Yet this week, as images of American forces closing in on Baghdad played on television screens, some of Mr. Bush's top aides insisted they were seeing evidence that leaders in North Korea and Iran, but not Syria, might be getting their point. . . .

Some hawks inside the administration are convinced that Iraq will serve as a cautionary example of what can happen to other states that refuse to abandon their programs to build weapons of mass destruction, an argument that John R. Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, has made several times recently.

The administration's more pragmatic wing fears that the war's lesson will be just the opposite: that the best way to avoid American military action is to build a fearsome arsenal quickly and make the cost of conflict too high for Washington. . . .

Several of the hawks outside the administration who pressed for war with Iraq are already moving on to the next step, and perhaps further than the president is ready to go. R. James Woolsey, the former director of central intelligence, said on Wednesday that Iraq was the opening of a "fourth world war," after World War I, World War II and the cold war, and that America's enemies included the religious rulers in Iran, states like Syria and Islamic extremist terrorist groups.

"Watch Out for Hijackers" -- Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, 4/6/03:

Saddam Hussein's regime will soon be finished, and the moment for building the peace will be upon us. As soon as it arrives, there will be people who will try to hijack this peace and turn it to their own ends. Mr. Bush must be ready to fend off these hijackers, who will come in two varieties.

One group will emerge from the surrounding Arab states -- all the old-guard Arab intellectuals and Nasserites, who dominate the Arab media, along with many of the regimes and stale institutions, like the Arab League, that feel threatened by even a whiff of democracy coming from Iraq. These groups will be merciless in delegitimizing and denouncing any Iraqis who come to power after the war -- if it appears that they were installed by the U.S. . . .

The other hijackers are the ideologues within the Bush team who have been dealing with the Iraqi exile leaders and will try to install one of them, like Ahmad Chalabi, to run Iraq. I don't know any of these exiles, and I have nothing against them. But anyone who thinks they can simply be installed by America and take root in Iraqi soil is out of his mind.

Mr. Bush should visit the West Bank. It is a cautionary tale of an occupation gone wrong. It is a miserable landscape of settlements, bypass roads, barbed wire and cement walls. Why? Because the Israeli and Palestinian mainstreams spent the last 36 years, since Israel's victory in 1967, avoiding any clear decision over how to govern this land. So those extremists who had a clear idea, like the settlers and Hamas, hijacked the situation and drove the agenda.

Defense Department domination of military decisionmaking:
parallels between the Kennedy and G.W. Bush administrations (Jean Edward Smith, "Firefight at the Pentagon," New York Times, 4/6/03):

With John F. Kennedy, however, civilian power at the Defense Department came to its apogee. The combination of an inexperienced president and a take-charge secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, led to a total shake-up. The secretary imported a coterie of hard-driving academics -- including two Harvard law professors, John McNaughton and Adam Yarmolinsky -- to help him take effective operational control of the sprawling defense establishment.

For the first time, the office of the secretary had the requisite staff and intellectual capacity to wrest military decision-making from the services. Under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, civilian judgment supplanted battle-tested precedent, and the United States carried out the eminently logical but tactically catastrophic escalation in Vietnam.

In the decades after, presidents tended to be hands-off and the relative power of the civilians in the Pentagon ebbed. The Powell doctrine of overwhelming force came to hold sway, and in the 1991 Persian Gulf war the military called the shots. Political control was not relinquished -- Dick Cheney, then the secretary of defense, fired the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Mike Dugan, for talking out of turn -- but for the most part traditional command relations resumed.

Until now. The current administration bears an uncanny resemblance to that of John F. Kennedy: an inexperienced, somewhat detached president and a decisive, high-profile secretary of defense have teamed to once again assume operational control. Donald Rumsfeld's defense intellectuals -- an oxymoron akin to "military music" -- have done precisely what Robert McNamara's whiz kids did in 1961: substitute their theoretical concepts for traditional doctrine. The ideological slant is different -- this time it's neoconservatism -- but the effect on the decision-making process is the same.

History rarely repeats itself, and the failures of Vietnam do not necessarily mean today's transition is unwise or unworkable. What we saw last week, however, was that this time the men with the stars on their shoulders aren't going to take it sitting down.

US troops in South Korea may withdraw from positions that would be vulnerable to North Korean attack if tensions increase.
"U.S. Seeks Troop Pullback" (Lee Chul-hee in The JoongAng Daily, 4/5/03:

The United States has officially informed South Korea that it intends to pull back its troops from inter-Korean border areas during the second half this year, government sources said yesterday.

"In a video conference on March 24, Richard Lawless, the Pentagon's top policymaker on Korea, told his South Korean counterpart, Lieutenant General Cha Young-koo, about Washington's intention to move the U.S. 2d Infantry Division to the area south of the Han River during the second half of this year," a senior government official said on condition of anonymity. . . .

General Cha tried to persuade Mr. Lawless that relocating the 2d Infantry Division this year is impossible, due to the difficulty of finding an alternate site, the official said. General Cha also stressed that the relocation should be implemented after the North Korea's nuclear aspirations are resolved.

Mr. Lawless reportedly did not mention any force cut.

The U.S. 2d Infantry Division, about 15,000 strong, is the largest American unit in South Korea. Most of the division is deployed in Dongducheon, Gyeonggi province, 25 kilometers (15 miles) southeast of the inter-Korean Military Demarcation Line. The division headquarters is in Uijeongbu, 35 kilometers southeast of the border.
Stationed within range of North Korea's conventional artillery, the troops have been seen as a "tripwire," assurance of automatic U.S. involvement in the event of a North Korean attack. U.S. officials, however, recently have reacted sensitively to this description. Washington has long demanded that Pyeongyang withdraw its conventional weapons deployed along the border.

Aid groups won't cooperate with a postwar government lacking UN involvement; Jay Garner wavering, too (Ed Vulliamy and Kamal Ahmed for The Observer, 4/6/03):

A colony of potential US administrators has assembled in waiting, along a stretch of Kuwaiti seaside villas, speaking well or not-so-well of the man regarded as the real architect of the new order, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy to Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, or 'Wolfowitz of Arabia' as he's been dubbed.

But Washington itself is riven over these arrangements, with hostility again spilling over between Powell and Rumsfeld, as in the lead-off to war. The infighting has been so acrimonious that - The Observer is told - Garner has even told associates he has considered resigning before he has begun.

The debates are over the role - or not - of the United Nations, and the part that Iraqi exiles are to play. Pentagon sources tell The Observer that they are determined to sideline the UN and to impose the Rumsfeld plan. 'This war proceeds without the UN,' said one official. 'There is no need for the UN, which is not relevant, to be involved in building a democratic Iraq.'

UN official Shashi Tharoor said that the body was keen to join the humanitarian relief effort and participate in governing the country, but only if mandated by the Security Council.

However, many relief organisations - including Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontiers - have said they will refuse to operate under such arrangements. Thirteen leading non-governmental aid groups have sent a letter to George Bush urging him to 'ask the UN to serve as the humanitarian coordinator for Iraq'.

"U.S. Set to Take Government Reins In Parts of Iraq" -- Glenn Kessler and Peter Slevin in The Washington Post, 4/8/03:

U.S. officials said the dispatch of "free Iraqis" from the north to the south -- including Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi -- was designed to prevent chaos as looting was reported in southern Iraq. As U.S. forces make progress in eliminating armed resistance, they must find ways to stabilize and administer villages, towns and cities no longer under Hussein's control. Defense officials believed the moment was ripe to bring in Iraqi assistance.

But Chalabi's associates believe his arrival could also bolster his position in the scramble for leadership in the post-Hussein period, a goal long sought by his supporters in the Pentagon. "The forces advocating working with him got a huge shot in the arm over the weekend," said Randy Scheunemann, executive director of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. "It changes the complexion of the exile leader debate pretty dramatically."

The State Department has strenuously opposed a leading role for Chalabi, a London-based banker who left in Iraq in 1958, believing he lacks credibility and support. But State Department officials said yesterday they were willing to accept this new assignment for Chalabi and his compatriots because it was necessary to stabilize the country and get broader Iraqi involvement in what has been viewed overseas as a largely U.S.-led operation. . . .

Other Pentagon officials also said they were not trying to anoint Chalabi, but that the war had evolved to the point where U.S. commanders could spare the planes to fly the Iraqis in and make the effort to incorporate them into the battle plan. Also, there was a political assessment in Washington that now would be a good time to do something more that would show the Iraqis coming forward and participating in their own liberation.

Oakland police
fire dummy bullets at antiwar protesters, bystanders (San Francisco Chronicle, 4/8/03):

In one of the fiercest Bay Area demonstrations since the Iraq war began, dozens of war protesters were injured Monday at the Port of Oakland when police fired tear gas and projectiles to break up a crowd that failed to heed warnings to disperse.

The largest of several protests across the region that targeted federal and corporate institutions seen as profiting from the war, the skirmish resulted in the arrests of 31 of about 500 protesters who blocked a port gate for more than an hour -- and prompted two Oakland city councilwomen to call for an investigation into police behavior. . . .

Among the injured were nine members of the longshore workers union who were waiting to get into their work site and not participating in the demonstration, said union representative Clarence Thomas. A union official, Jack Heyman, was arrested.

Gunter Grass on the war (Los Angeles Times, 4/7/03; reproduced by Common Dreams):

Disturbed and powerless, but also filled with anger, we are witnessing the moral decline of the world's only superpower, burdened by the knowledge that only one consequence of this organized madness is certain: Motivation for more terrorism is being provided, for more violence and counter-violence. Is this really the United States of America, the country we fondly remember for any number of reasons? The generous benefactor of the Marshall Plan? The forbearing instructor in the lessons of democracy? The candid self-critic? The country that once made use of the teachings of the European Enlightenment to throw off its colonial masters and to provide itself with an exemplary constitution? Is this the country that made freedom of speech an incontrovertible human right?

It is not just foreigners who cringe as this ideal pales to the point where it is now a caricature of itself. There are many Americans who love their country too, people who are horrified by the betrayal of their founding values and by the hubris of those holding the reins of power. I stand with them. By their side, I declare myself pro-American. I protest with them against the brutalities brought about by the injustice of the mighty, against all restrictions of the freedom of expression, against information control reminiscent of the practices of totalitarian states and against the cynical equations that make the death of thousands of women and children acceptable so long as economic and political interests are protected. . . .

Many people find themselves in a state of despair these days, and with good reason. Yet we must not let our voices, our no to war and yes to peace, be silenced. What has happened? The stone that we pushed to the peak is once again at the foot of the mountain. But we must push it back up, even with the knowledge that we can expect it to roll back down again.

Neela Banerjee on
oil and the reconstruction of Iraq (New York Times, 4/6/03):

If popular opinion in the Middle East is united on anything, it is that oil -- not terrorism, not regional stability and not any intention to bring democracy to the Iraq -- is the real reason the United States decided to oust Saddam Hussein. In Jordan, a longtime ally of Washington, a recent poll showed that 83 percent of people there think that the United States wants to control Iraq's oil. . . .

Throughout the 1920's, Britain, France and the United States (which denounced the "imperialism" of the other two) jockeyed for control of Iraq's oil. It was not until after World War II that Iraq began to gain some measure of control of its own. It was a founding member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, the first meeting of which was held in Baghdad in 1960, and nationalized its oil industry in 1972. . . .

So far, the Bush administration has consistently said that Iraqi oil belongs solely to the Iraqis, but it has also said it intends to control how the country is rebuilt. On Tuesday, industry experts who had spoken to administration officials said that Philip J. Carroll, a former chief executive of Shell Oil Company, the American arm of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, had emerged as the leading candidate for the job. The administration declined comment. . . .

One move that would be welcome, at least by the Iraqis and some Arab leaders, is if the United States opened the books on how the oil revenues are used, regional experts said.

A recent report by Human Rights Watch found that oil money usually subverts democracy by making a country's leaders unaccountable to its citizens. The United States could work with Iraqis to disclose the sources of oil revenue and the awarding of contracts, the report said. The group also encouraged independent auditing of the oil company's books, and the creation of a trust fund, similar to a system Norway has for investing a portion of the profits to benefit future generations.

William Hartung on the grotesquely inappropriate Jay Garner (Tompaine.com, 4/8/03):

Nothing embodies the Bush administration's shortsightedness and moral bankruptcy more than its plan to employ former Air Force Gen. Jay Garner as the head of the Pentagon's rebuilding effort for Iraq. Not only does Garner have interests in companies like SY Technologies, which stand to profit from the war in Iraq, but he is a longtime associate of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a right-wing, pro-Likud think tank that has long supported "regime change" in Iraq while denigrating the Camp David peace process as an inappropriate way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

If the Bush administration were to consciously set out to pick a person most likely to raise questions about the legitimacy of the post-war rebuilding process, they could not have selected a better man for the job than Jay Garner. But if they truly want a stable, democratic Iraq, they should send Mr. Garner packing and start immediate bargaining to bring the United Nations -- and anti-war allies like France, Germany and Russia -- into the center of the rebuilding process.

Bush and Blair's joint statement after their April 7 meeting in Belfast (London Times, 4/8/03:

As the coalition proceeds with the reconstruction of Iraq, it will work with its allies, bilateral donors, and with the United Nations and other international institutions.

The United Nations has a vital role to play in the reconstruction of Iraq. We welcome the effort of UN agencies and non-governmental organisations in providing immediate assistance to the people of Iraq.

As we stated in the Azores, we plan to seek the adoption of new United Nations Security Council resolution that would affirm Iraq's territorial integrity, ensure rapid delivery of humanitarian relief and endorse an appropriate post-conflict administration for Iraq.

We welcome the appointment by the United Nations Secretary General of a special adviser for Iraq to work with the people of Iraq and coalition representatives.

The day when Iraqis govern themselves must come quickly. As early as possible. We support the formation of an Iraqi interim authority, a transitional administration, run by Iraqis until a permanent government is established by the people of Iraq.

The interim authority will be broad-based and fully representative, with members from all Iraqis ethnic groups, regions and Diaspora.

The interim authority will be established first and foremost by the Iraqi people, with the help of the members of the coalition, and working with the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

As coalition forces advance, civilian Iraqi leaders will emerge who can be part of such an interim authority. The interim authority will progressively assume more of the functions of government.

It will provide a means for Iraqis to participate in the economic and political reconstruction of their country from the out-set.

Coalition forces will remain in Iraq as long as necessary to help the Iraqi people to build their own political institutions and reconstruct their country, but no longer. . . .

Concise
political biography of Ahmed Chalabi by Patrick Cockburn in The Independent, 4/8/03:

Ahmed Chalabi is one of the great survivors of Iraqi opposition politics. He has a controversial past, a long list of enemies but is also politically agile, tough and persistent. . . .

Mr Chalabi's weakness is that there is no evidence the INC has any support among Iraqis. He will find it difficult not to be seen as an American pawn if he has a prominent position in any interim administration.

The coalition's moral high ground is now; so what next to preserve it? Deborah Orr in The Independent, 4/8/03:

Perhaps, as Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, says, the Iraqi mothers of children killed by cluster bombs may "one day" thank the Allies. I'd say instead that in a curious way, we are now approaching the high water mark of the invasion's moral force. In the next few weeks the US and Britain are likely to receive as much thanks from the liberated people of Iraq as they will ever get.

The "battle for hearts and minds" must end when the battle does. Above all, as the regime collapses, Iraqis will be sickened by the propaganda they have been fed, and suspicious of propaganda that may be fed to them in the future. What the people of this country need now is the space to make up their own minds, and follow their own hearts, instead of the assault on these organs moving from the physical and psychological to the purely psychological.

When the war ends, it is important that Iraqi civil society is given time and space to make its own evaluation of what has been done, and whether the Iraqi people would have chosen it had they been able to. The US-UK forces should take all the help from other countries they can get in maintaining the order necessary for this process.

It is important, too, that the international community listen to the conclusions of the Iraqi people. Much can be learned from such an action, as long as the US-UK leaders don't persist with their belief that they know all the answers already.

"UN Postwar Role Remains Blurred" (Matthew Tempest in The Guardian, 4/8/03):

Tony Blair and the US president, George Bush, have once more failed to clarify the UN's role in a post-Saddam Iraq, in their third meeting in less than three weeks.

Speaking at a joint press conference at Hillsborough castle in Northern Ireland, the two men were pressed repeatedly on what a "vital role" for the United Nations may mean.

Mr Bush defined it both as "food, medicine, aid, contributions" and "helping the interim government stand up until the real government shows up".

Mr Blair intervened to say that the "important thing is to not get into some battle over a word here or there, but for the international community to come together ... rather than endless diplomatic wrangles."

But, taking only four questions in a 25-minute press briefing, Mr Bush warned: "When we say a vital role for the UN we mean a vital role."

"Anger, Despair . . . Arab World Backs Saddam" (Donna Abu-Nasr in The Guardian, 4/8/03):

In Egypt, they queued to sign up for jihad after learning US tanks were rolling into Baghdad. In Oman, they erupted with cries of "God is great" when they heard an Iraqi official denying it. And across the Middle East, Arabs urged Saddam Hussein not to give up.

Despite the dismay many Arabs feel about the US incursion into the heart of Iraq, some are still holding out hope that President Saddam will live up to his promise to slaughter the allied troops at the gates of Baghdad. . . .

In Muscat, men watched the news with angry and resentful faces. One shouted: "Where is your army, Saddam?" Another, not believing the television pictures, grumbled: "These Americans are relying on false propaganda!"

A short while later, many felt vindicated when the Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, denied allied reports.

Scores of Egyptians lined up outside Cairo's Lawyers' Syndicate, a professional union that has been organising people to join the war, more determined to join other Arabs who have gone into Iraq to wage jihad alongside the Iraqis. "As Arabs, we cannot see this and not move," said a man who refused to give his name. "We are selling ourselves for a higher cost, for God, not for Saddam."

Ali Oqla Orsan, head of the Arab Writers' Union in Damascus, said: "If the allied forces occupy Iraq, it would signal the beginning of a liberation war against the colonialists."

Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper on Bush's "roadmap" and
prospects for progress on the Israel/Palestine conflict (interview by Kathleen and Bill Christison in Counterpunch, 3/29/03:

Halper is an Israeli anthropologist, until his retirement a year ago a professor at Ben Gurion University, a transplant 30 years ago from Minnesota, a harsh critic of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and, as founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), one of the leading peace and anti-occupation activists in Israel.

Halper tries to be upbeat. He sees the "roadmap" drawn up by the U.S. and its Quartet partners as a promising document because, among a few other straws to grasp at, it actually uses the word "occupation," which Israel itself refuses to use. He wants to mobilize and coordinate pro-Palestinian groups in Israel/Palestine and elsewhere around the world to insert themselves into the process and try to work with their governments to have some input in implementing the plan. He recently talked to a State Department official who was hopeful. But for the most part, what Halper says is gloomy and pessimistic.

Congress is the principal problem in the U.S., he believes, which makes it particularly hard for President Bush. For Bush really to move on the issue, it would "cost him a lot of political capital." He thinks it's an open question whether Bush will ever be willing to pay that cost, so he is latching onto the "roadmap." But then, right after declaring the roadmap a promising document, he says, "Either you just get rid of the occupation, period, or the two-state solution is gone. If Israel keeps the main settlement blocs, it'll control 90% of the West Bank." But the roadmap shows little promise of "just getting rid of the occupation, period."

At the end, Halper returns to the issue of Israeli fears and his blunt assessment of where Israel's actual thinking is centered. "It's not fear," he says. "We're just pissed off [at the Palestinians], the way whites were with blacks in the southern United States. They just don't know their place."

"A Road Map to Nowhere, Or Much Ado About Nothing" (Uri Avnery in Counterpunch, April 5, 2003):

The objectives are very positive. They are identical with the aims of the Israeli peace movement: an end to the occupation, the establishment of the independent State of Palestine side-by-side with the State of Israel, Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian peace, the integration of Israel in the region.

In this respect, the Road Map goes further than the Oslo agreement. In the Oslo "Declaration of Principles" there was a giant hole: it did not spell out what was to come after the long interim stages. Without a clear final aim, the interim stages had no clear purpose. Therefore the Oslo process died with Yitzhaq Rabin. . . .

[W]ho is this "Quartet" that has to decide at every point whether the two parties have fulfilled their obligations, and a new phase can be entered?

At first glance, there is a balance between the four players: the United Nations, the United States, Europe and Russia. . . . The United States are close to Israel, Europe and Russia are acceptable to the Palestinians. . . .

[However], the Quartet must take all decisions unanimously. The Americans have a veto, which means that Sharon has a veto. Without his agreement, nothing can be decided. Need more be said?

The truth is, in this whole document there is not one word that Sharon could not accept. After all, with the help of Bush he can torpedo any step at any time.

To sum up: Much Ado about Nothing. As evidenced by the fact that neither Sharon nor the settlers are upset.

Harpers Weekly Review, 4/8/03

"In Search of Horror Weapons" -- New York Times editorial, 4/9/03:

In making the case for the invasion, the administration suggested that Iraq's arsenal might be quite large: up to 500 tons of nerve and mustard agents, and 30,000 munitions capable of delivering them; materials to produce 25,000 liters of anthrax and 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin; and mobile or underground laboratories to make germ weapons. If so, it should be possible to find them with the help of Iraqi scientists and officers. But for any findings to be credible in the battle for global opinion, neutral analysts -- from the United Nations or technically proficient nations like Finland or Switzerland -- will be needed to verify the laboratory results and ensure a strict chain of custody to avoid charges of tampering with the evidence.

Seumas Milne on
the new incentives for weapons proliferation to avoid Iraq's fate (The Guardian, 4/10/03):

The wider global impact of this war was spelled out by North Korea's foreign ministry this week. "The Iraqi war shows," it declared, with unerring logic, "that to allow disarmament through inspections does not help avert a war, but rather sparks it", concluding that "only a tremendous military deterrent force" can prevent attacks on states the US dislikes.

As the administration hawks circle round Syria and Iran, a powerful boost to nuclear proliferation and anti western terror attacks seems inevitable, offset only by the likelihood of a growing international mobilisation against the new messianic imperialism. The risk must now be that we will all pay bitterly for the reckless arrogance of the US and British governments.

"Arab Fears Will Delay Recognition" (Brian Whitaker in The Guardian, 4/10/03):

Arab states, grappling to adjust to the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, are unlikely to recognise a new Iraqi government for at least several months, diplomatic sources said yesterday. . . .

There are also questions about Iraq's membership of the Arab League, which could be temporarily suspended. Iraq's permanent representative at the league's headquarters in Cairo will be expected to leave after the fall of the regime, but it is unclear what will happen then. . . .

Some Arabs suspect that a new Iraqi government could be induced by the Americans to recognise Israel, which at present has full diplomatic relations with only two of the 22 Arab League members - Egypt and Jordan.

Criticizing the president (Theodore Roosevelt in The Kansas City Star, 5/7/1918):

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.

Gideon Rose on unrealistic expectations and
the Iraqi National Congress (Slate, 4/10/03):

The administration's postwar plans for Iraq are still being fought over internally, but three distinct themes appear to feature prominently: promoting democracy, limiting American involvement, and keeping the rest of the international community at arm's length. Many observers find this troika somewhat baffling, because they see no way of achieving all three objectives simultaneously. What they fail to appreciate are the magical powers attributed by administration hawks to the Iraqi opposition, and in particular to one opposition group known as the Iraqi National Congress. Just as before, people like Pentagon adviser Richard Perle think the INC can leap easily over the obstacles others worry about and will thus be able to transform Iraq in a flash.

Unfortunately, the INC is as ill-prepared to pull off a postwar miracle as it would have been for a wartime wonder. It can boast some heroic individual members, such as the dissident intellectual Kanan Makiya, but it has negligible military power, administrative capacity, or local backing. Iraq experts joke that the group has fewer supporters on the Tigris than on the Potomac.

"Power Vacuum That Has Taken US by Surprise" (Ewen MacAskill and Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian, 4/11/03):

The Iraqi opposition parties, long-time bitter rivals, resumed their squabbling yesterday within 24 hours of statues of Saddam being toppled in Baghdad. A putative bid to establish an early interim government at a special meeting of the exile groups billed for Nassiriya, in southern Iraq, has already created chaos.

The US state department and the Pentagon were at odds yesterday concerning the Nassiriya meeting - for which a date has not been fixed - and over who should be in the new government. . . .

The row in Washington over Mr Chalabi's suitability for power is symptomatic of a lack of preparedness by the US. The meticulous planning that went into the military campaign has not been matched by post-Saddam preparations. This follows a predictable US pattern, in which its military prowess has not been matched by peacekeeping or nation-building. . . .

One of the biggest divisions is between Mr Chalabi's INC and the powerful Iranian-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), which played a big part in earlier anti-Saddam revolts and which has a big following among Shias. Sciri has thrown into doubt whether the Nassiriya meeting will go ahead.

Sciri said yesterday it had yet to decide whether to participate. A spokesman said a boycott was unlikely, contradicting a spokesman who said 24 hours earlier the group would not attend in protest at the US military presence in Iraq.

"We are discussing this because we must know who the participants are, what the aims and plans for this meeting are, then we'll decide," said Mohsen Hakim, an aide to the Sciri leader, Ayatollah Mohammad Bakir Hakim. "I doubt that Sciri will boycott the meeting."

The ayatollah has spent the past 20 years in the Iranian capital, Tehran, which makes him suspect to US officials. The ayatollah, who has a 10,000-strong militia under his sway, said he will soon return to Iraq.

"This Pyrrhic Victory on the Tigris" (David Clark in The Guardian, 4/11/03):

The repercussions of this war will not be confined within Iraq's borders. The idea of an international community based on multilateral rules and institutions lies in ruins as the prospect of a world dominated by the hegemonic preferences of a solitary power hoves into view. The real tragedy will not lie in the imposition of American authority on an unwilling world as much as in the embittered response of those who refuse to submit to it.

The Arab world has been inflamed by this war and will draw the conclusion that since American power cannot be confronted on its own terms, it must be dealt with asymmetrically. Like the young Catholics who signed up to fight for the IRA after Bloody Sunday, young men from Cairo to Amman will now beat a path to the door of anyone able to provide them with the means to hit back. As of today, that door is Osama bin Laden's. The dividing line between Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, once so clear, has become even more dangerously blurred as a result of our actions.

None of this is inevitable. But there is precious little evidence to suggest that the White House is interested in taking the sort of steps needed to prevent it. Bush may agree to the publication of the road map for a Middle East peace settlement, but he has no intention of taking the journey. He talks about a democratic Iraq, but his first priority is a compliant Iraq.

"Iraq Will Preoccupy and Pin Down the US for Years" (Martin Woollacott in The Guardian, 4/11/03):

The war has made politics more global by emphasising the centrality of American power, by offering the first test since Vietnam of what happens when an American endeavour is opposed by most of the rest of the planet, by engaging the US and the Muslim world more intimately, although not amiably, and by showing how American and European political developments can no longer even begin to be divorced from one another.

It has taken one stage further the processes which began with September 11. The world, to put it another way, is even more wired together, for good or ill. There is irony in the fact that this unilateralist war has produced a situation which will both confirm the Bush administration in its unilateralist instincts, and at the same time entangle it in inevitably more complex multilateral situations. The preparations for the war, with the juggler dropping first the plate marked United Nations and then the cup marked Turkey, are an indication of difficulties to come.

Josh Marshall (Talkingpointsmemo.com, 4/10/03):

"Shock and Awe" wasn't a misplaced phrase. We just had the date wrong. It came yesterday, with the collapse of Baghdad. And it came not in Baghdad or Kirkuk or Basra but in Cairo, Beirut, Riyadh, Amman and other capitals around the Arab world.

Iraq War Links

(Last updated May 2003)

• Tower of
  Babel Links Page (More links than here)
• Guardian Iraq links page

Organizations

• United for Peace and
  Justice
• 
  UFPJ-New York City
• NYC
  antiwar groups
• ANSWER
• Not in Our Name
• Veterans against
  the Iraq War
• Veterans for
  Common Sense
• Veterans for
  Peace
• September Eleventh
  Families for Peaceful Tomorrows
• Americans against
  Bombing
• Peace.protest.net

  (links to protest events)

• Iraq Action Coalition
• MoveOn.Org
• Greenpeace
• Patriots
  for Peace
• Votenowar.org
• Direct Action to Stop
  the War
• Nonviolence.org
• Win without
  War
• StopJayGarner.com
• National Youth and
  Student Peace Coalition
• Campus Anti-War
  Network
• American Friends Service
  Committee
• Iraq
  Pledge of Resistance
• Win without War
• Peace Action
• Campaign for Peace and
  Democracy
• Cities for
  Peace
• Marchforjustice.com
• Historians
  Against War
• PeaceProtest.Net
• Antiwar.com
• Global Nonviolence Alliance
• True Majority
• Rooting Out Evil:
  "Expanding the search for weapons of mass
  destruction" to the United States
• Indymedia.org: San Francisco
  protests
• Direct Action to Stop
  the War (San Francisco)
• Stop the War Coalition in
  Britain
• Code Pink
• Act Now! (Nation links)
• The
  antiwar movement (Guardian links)

Information and Resources

• Guardian Iraq top page
• BBC Monitoring: Middle East headlines
• WaronIraq.org News
  Links
• Al-Ahram
  Weekly Iraq coverage
• The "Shock and Awe" Photo Gallery (Marchforjustice.com)
• Truthout.org
• Rational Enquirer
• Alternet
• FAIR
• Command Post collective
  warblog
• Spokane
  Spokesman-Review War Page
• Buzzflash
• Counterpunch
• Disturbingtrends
• Independent Media
  Center
• Cost of the War in Iraq
• Fight the Octopus
  
• Anti-War News
• Education for Peace in
  Iraq Center
• America's War on Iraq (matrixmasters.com)
• The Center for
  Cooperative Research
• Mediatransparency.org
• ZNET
  Iraq Watch
• Warblogs
• Peaceblogs
• Anti-War Web
  Ring
• 
  Where is Raed?
• Killing Goliath
• Lisa Rein
• 
  BBC Reporters' Log
• Foreign Policy in
  Focus
• The War in Context
• Peacenews.info
• Justresponse.org
• ElectronicIraq.net
• Opendemocracy.net
• Iraq Action Coalition
• Red Pepper
• 
  Cost of War
• Webocracy
• Urban75.org
• Bandelier.net
• WaronIraq.org
• Why War?
• How to watch Iraqi TV
• Green Anarchist
• Jay's Leftist and Progressive Internet Resources Directory
• Democracy Now
• Schnews
• Undercurrents
• New Internationalist
• Z.mag
• Urban75
• Institute for War and Peace Reporting
• Voices in the Wilderness
• The Unseen [First] Gulf War
• Whatreallyhappened.com
• Unknownnews.net
• Iraqi National Congress
• Forum.vif2.ru
• aeronautics.ru
• Война в Ираке (Iraqwar.ru)
• Americanstate.org News Links

Iraq War Photojournalism Links

• Links to Iraq war photojournalism (USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review)
• Current photojournalism links (Headlinespot.com)
• Washington Post photo galleries links
• Guardian photo galleries
• Links to major photo press agencies (Huntfor.com)
• Iraq war coverage links, including "multimedia" links (Cyberjournalist.net)
• Seattle Times Iraq war galleries
• The Week in Pictures (msnbc.com)
• Rocky Mountain News Iraq war slideshows
• Peter Menzel
• New York Times multimedia index (images disappear after two weeks?)
• La Repubblica war photos
• Links to "photographic coverage of Iraqi freedom" (desertroad.net)
• Pulling down the statue in Firdos Square: various views (informationclearinghouse.info)
• Brian Walski's infamous Photoshopped photojournalism (Los Angeles Times)
• More Photoshopping: London Evening Standard, 4/9/03
• The "Shock and Awe" photo gallery (marchforjustice.com)
• Death and Casualty from Iraq(Scoop Photo-Essay 1)
• Death and Casualty from Iraq(Scoop Photo-Essay 2)
• Death and Casualty from Iraq(Scoop Photo-Essay 3)
• iraqdeadwounded galleries (dadapop.com)
• Inside Iraq (Jerome Delay)
• Photojournalism links (American Press Institute)
• Photojournalism links (fotophile.com)
• alt.journalism.photo (via Google Groups)
• National Press Photographers Association
• Digitaljournalist.org
• Editorialphoto.net
• Photojournalism in previous wars: This Is War (thememoryhole.org)

The American State

• Guardian Special Report: The United States of America
• White House
• Congress
• Supreme Court
• Department of
  Defense
• Army
• Navy
• Air Force
• Marines
• National Security
  Council
• Department of
  Homeland Security
• Ready.gov
• Project for the New American Century
• American
  propaganda leaflets

Other States

• United Nations
• UN News Centre
• UN Chronicle
• UN Wire
• Foreign
  Government Resources on the Web

"Democracy Delayed" -- Richard Cohen in The Washington Post, 4/1/03:

In about a week, the Bush administration has done in Iraq what the Johnson administration took more than a year to do in Vietnam: opened a credibility gap. This one is about "the plan," which the Bush administration describes as both "brilliant" and on schedule. As anyone can see -- and as some field commanders keep saying -- it is neither. . . .

So if, as Don Rumsfeld and others say, the U.S. effort remains on schedule, then the question is why was this the schedule in the first place? In other words, wouldn't it have been better to keep the diplomatic effort going -- the additional month asked for by the six swing votes on the Security Council -- so when war came, it came swiftly? An additional month would have meant that all U.S. forces would have been in the region, ready to go. As it is, the 4th Infantry Division still is not in place.

"Bush's Treatment of Congress Angers GOP, Too" -- James Kuhnhenn in The Philadelphia Inquirer, 4/1/03:

Consumed by waging war, the Bush administration is increasingly giving the Republican-controlled Congress the back of its hand, acting as if the legislative branch were a constitutionally mandated annoyance.

Administration officials have abruptly canceled appearances before congressional committees and refused lawmakers' requests for information. Now President Bush wants to sidestep congressional oversight of how he spends nearly $75 billion that he is seeking for the war and homeland security.

"Nice try," scoffed Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R., Ill.), during a hearing on the spending plan. "There are a lot of precedents we don't want to accept here." . . .

To many lawmakers, Bush's request for flexibility is only the latest example of administration disdain, if not contempt, for Congress. Time and again, Republicans and Democrats say, the Bush administration has stiff-armed lawmakers or scorned their committees.

In Basra,
"Everyday Life Goes on Despite Siege" (Keith B. Richburg in The Washington Post, 4/1/03):

The residents of Basra have been described by the U.S. military as "human shields," being held in the city against their will by members of the Iraqi military and militia. But the soldiers here say that most of those leaving the city appear to be going out just for the day to the markets in Zubair, a town about 10 miles southwest of here, and returning voluntarily.

"They're not coming out to stay," said a soldier guarding the bridge. "They're not leaving with their household goods. A lot of them are going out to get tomatoes. It's not a great outflow of refugees."

Some reports from U.S. and British officials said Basra residents who did leave had family members held back as hostages to ensure their return. But the soldiers, and reporters who stood with them on the bridge, saw entire families leaving together -- men, women, children and infants -- and the flow was in both directions.

"US Draws Up Secret Plan to Impose Regime on Iraq" (Brian Whitaker and Luke Harding in The Guardian, 4/1/03):

A disagreement has broken out at a senior level within the Bush administration over a new government that the US is secretly planning in Kuwait to rule Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Under the plan, the government will consist of 23 ministries, each headed by an American. Every ministry will also have four Iraqi advisers appointed by the Americans, the Guardian has learned.

The government will take over Iraq city by city. Areas declared "liberated" by General Tommy Franks will be transferred to the temporary government under the overall control of Jay Garner, the former US general appointed to head a military occupation of Iraq.

In anticipation of the Baghdad regime's fall, members of this interim government have begun arriving in Kuwait.

Decisions on the government's composition appear to be entirely in US hands, particularly those of Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. This has annoyed Gen Garner, who is officially in charge but who, according to sources close to the planning of the government has had to accept a number of controversial Iraqis in advisory roles.

Hugo Young on American idealism in The Guardian, 4/1/03:

From top to bottom, Americans do believe democracy is good for everyone, even if some may have to wait for it longer than others. But here comes the crux of the American dilemma. Even if we're prepared to grant the existence, deep in American purposes, of more idealism than is usually admitted, its fulfilment has become unattainable. America's understanding of the world has become so self-centred, and its reputation so corrupted, that its ability to export liberal democracy either by example or by force now looks to be non-existent.

"It Will End in Disaster" -- George Monbiot on prospects for postwar Iraq in The Guardian, 4/1/03.

The twenty-one countries bombed by the United States since the end of World War Two (New Internationalist):

China 1945-46, 1950-53

Korea 1950-53

Guatemala 1954, 1960, 1967-69

Indonesia 1958

Cuba 1959-61

Congo 1964

Peru 1965

Laos 1964-73

Vietnam 1961-73

Cambodia 1969-70

Lebanon 1983-84

Grenada 1983

Libya 1986

El Salvador 1980s

Nicaragua 1980s

Panama 1989

Bosnia 1995

Sudan 1998

Former Yugoslavia 1999

Iraq 1991-??

Afghanistan 1998, 2001-??

Harpers Weekly Review, 4/1/03

Iran-Contra as precursor to Al Qaeda: Bruce Sterling in Wired Magazine, 4/3/03:

Considering the audacity of . . . [Iran-Contra's] challenge to Constitutional authority, its principals have done surprisingly well in the years since. Oliver North gave up his uniform to become what he always had been at heart: a right-wing political agitator. Elliot Abrams now manages Venezuelan revolution, counterrevolution, and counter-counterrevolution for the State Department. And, of course, John Poindexter is in charge of the Department of Defense's Total Information Awareness program.

But the real success story is the Contras, or rather their modern successor: al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden's crew is a band of government-funded anticommunist counterrevolutionaries who grew up and cut the apron strings. These new-model Contras don't need state support from Washington, Moscow, or any Accessory of Evil. Like Project Democracy, they've got independent financing: oil money, charity money, arms money, and a collection plate wherever a junkie shoots up in an alley. Instead of merely ignoring and subverting governments for a higher cause, as Poindexter did, al Qaeda tries to destroy them outright. Suicide bombers blew the Chechnyan provisional puppet government sky high. Cars packed with explosives nearly leveled the Indian Parliament. We all know what happened to the Pentagon.

The next Iran-Contra is waiting, because the contradictions that created the first have never been resolved. Iran-Contra wasn't about eager American intelligence networks spreading dirty money in distant lands; it was about the gap between old, legitimate, land-based governments ruled by voters and the new, stateless, globalized predation. The next scandal will erupt when someone as molten, self-righteous, and frustrated as John Poindexter uses stateless power for domestic advantage. That's the breaking point in American politics: not when you call in the plumbers, but when you turn them loose on the opposition party. Then the Empire roils in a lather of sudden, indignant fury and strikes back against its own.

"A Spurious 'Smoking Gun'" -- Chris Smith on the forged Niger uranium letters and the media's indifference to them (Mother Jones, 3/25/03):

It was one of the White House's strongest arguments for war.

For months, administration officials had been touting a series of letters purporting to show Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from the African country of Niger. If the letters weren't exactly a smoking gun, Washington hawks contended, they were at least irrefutable proof that Iraq still had nuclear ambitions.

Then, two weeks ago, it all came crashing down. The letters, it was revealed, were hoaxes -- crude forgeries discredited by nuclear weapons experts and disowned by the Central Intelligence Agency. Further, the Agency asserted that it made its concerns known to administration officials in late 2001, shortly after telling the White House about the letters. For more than a year, Washington had used evidence repudiated by its own intelligence advisors to build a case for war.

The revelations could have delivered a damaging blow to the White House's political and diplomatic push for invasion. But the national media rapidly moved off the story, swept up in the administration's rush to war. And it all might have ended there, but for Congressman Henry Waxman. In a scathing letter sent to President Bush last week, the California Democrat demands an investigation into what Bush knew about the Niger forgeries and when he knew it. Waxman, who voted last year to give the administration authority to wage a war in Iraq, says there is reason to believe that he and other members of Congress have been misled.

"It is unfathomable how we could be in a situation where the CIA knew information was not reliable but yet it was cited by the President in the State of the Union and by other leading Administration officials," he says. "Either this is knowing deception or utter incompetence and an explanation is urgently needed."

Waxman, who says he signed on to Bush's war initiative in part because he was concerned about Iraq's nuclear aims, wonders how the forgeries could have been used as evidence of Iraqi malfeasance for so many months after they were officially debunked. At the very least, he writes, the recent revelations have created a perception that facts were withheld to bolster the President's case for war.

"Arab Hopes Rest on Toppling Saddam and Humbling the US" (Martin Woollacott in The Guardian, 4/2/03):

The chastening of America has begun and the likely outcome of the war is coming into view - one regime gone, in Baghdad, another humbled, in Washington. According to those who analyse Arab policy and follow Arab opinion from here, the hopes of Arab governments now centre on this prospect. . . .

Arab states wanted the quick war the US promised but also feared the triumphalist America which would have emerged from it. Now the least worst option for them would be the less confident US which a harder war might produce, one which would not contemplate further military adventures, would get out of Iraq quickly, and might redeem itself by a more even handed approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict. . . .

[W]hat the Arabs have almost certainly got right is that even if the war takes a sudden turn for the better, post-Saddam America will be a very different place from the country that existed only two weeks ago, perhaps weaker, certainly more cautious.

"Emperor George" -- Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, 4/2/03:

This war is un-American. That's an unlikely word to use, I know: it has an unhappy provenance, associated forever with the McCarthyite hunt for reds under the beds, purging anyone suspected of "un-American activities". Besides, for many outside the US, the problem with this war is not that it's un-American - but all too American.

But that does an injustice to the US and its history. It assumes that the Bush administration represents all America, at all times, when in fact the opposite is true. For this administration, and this war, are not typical of the US. On the contrary, on almost every measure, they are exceptions to the American rule.

Britain pushes commitment to UN administration of postwar Iraq (Michael White and Patrick Wintour in The Guardian, 4/2/03):

Tony Blair is determined to show he has not lost control of the post-war agenda to hawks in the Bush administration by promoting the concept of a UN-sponsored conference for all groups in Iraq to start reshaping their country's future after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The conference would open during the period of American military rule that is expected when the fighting ends and would follow the model set by the Afghanistan conference in Bonn which preceded the formation of a post-Taliban government.

In a clear attempt to assert self-determination over quasi-colonial rule, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, said yesterday that the goal would be "to place responsibility for decisions about Iraq's political and economic future firmly in the hands of the Iraqi people".

Amazing use of Times Square news ticker by Fox News during antiwar demonstration (Richard Cowen, "'Die-Ins' Target War and News Media," Northjersey.com, 3/28/03):

More than 200 people were arrested Thursday for blocking traffic in Manhattan during a day of civil disobedience called to protest the war in Iraq and the corporate media's reporting of the conflict. . . .

Fox News had its own response to the demonstrators. The news ticker rimming Fox's headquarters on Sixth Avenue wasn't carrying war updates as the protest began. Instead, it poked fun at the demonstrators, chiding them.

"War protester auditions here today ... thanks for coming!" read one message. "Who won your right to show up here today?" another questioned. "Protesters or soldiers?"

Said a third: "How do you keep a war protester in suspense? Ignore them."

Still another read: "Attention protesters: the Michael Moore Fan Club meets Thursday at a phone booth at Sixth Avenue and 50th Street" - a reference to the film maker who denounced the war while accepting an Oscar on Sunday night for his documentary "Bowling for Columbine."

The protesters said Fox's sentiments only proved their point: that media coverage, in particular among the television networks, is so biased as to be unbelievable.

David Broder on
Congressional pressure for a UN-led administration of a postwar Iraq ("Time to Heal the Breach," Washington Post, 4/2/03):

The messages from Capitol Hill are aimed at influencing what [Wisconsin Democratic representative Ron] Kind called "a raging debate" inside the Bush administration. The immediate question is whether postwar Iraq will be run by an American viceroy or a U.N. official. But the larger question is whether superpower America will seek to heal the breach with longtime allies that blocked U.N. action against Saddam Hussein, or walk away from the world body and seek to manage future conflicts with its own "coalition of the willing."

The Pentagon, which holds the upper hand in that debate because it is calling the shots in the war, already has designated a general to take over at least temporarily in Baghdad. [Delaware Democratic senator Joseph] Biden, who is blunt in his appraisal of the stakes, told me that he thinks Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney are "seeking a twofer. They want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and break the grip of the United Nations."

Kind is slightly more tactful in his description, but said that, judging from his sources in the State Department, "This is the issue of the day. It will affect our relations with the Arab nations and the rest of the world for decades to come. And it has a direct bearing on our security. As powerful as our military is, if we're seen as the occupying power in a Muslim country, it makes us more vulnerable to terrorism."

Jay Garner's provisional provisional government
prepares to administer occupied Iraq (Susan B. Glasser and Rajiv Chandrasekaran in The Washington Post, 4/2/03):

The actual war in Iraq has left the country's government-in-waiting still in rehearsal. The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, with a Kuwait-based staff already numbering in "the low hundreds," had expected to move quickly into Iraq after a swift war that toppled President Saddam Hussein and won over Iraqis grateful to the United States for liberating them from more than three decades of authoritarian rule.

But with military commanders warning of a longer and more difficult war, Garner's team also has been reevaluating its strategy. Plans to send a large number of U.S. civilians into Iraq are being postponed, given concerns about security even in areas of southern Iraq nominally under U.S. control. . . .

In Washington, meanwhile, disagreement over control of the program surfaced as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld vetoed the State Department's selection of eight current and former diplomats to join Garner's team. Some officials here complain that the Pentagon is seeking to dominate every aspect of Iraq's postwar reconstruction. . . .

"Some of us came out here thinking it would be a three- or four-month operation," one member of Garner's team said. "Now it's clear that we're going to be here, and eventually in Baghdad, for a lot longer than we expected." . . .

Garner's team is made up almost exclusively of Americans, many of them former or current officials. Aides come from the Pentagon, the State Department and other departments and agencies, including Treasury, Justice, the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Army Corps of Engineers. The only non-Americans are a handful of British and Australian diplomats, and a small group of Iraqi exiles. The United Nations is expected to "play some part in the equation," an official said, but U.S. officials have made clear it will be a subordinate role.

Strange symmetry between US and Iraqi strategic goals thus far (Patrick Cockburn, "The Lessons that Washington Has Still to Learn," in The Independent, 4/2/03):

Iraqis I spoke to a few days after the start of the invasion were much quicker than the outside world to notice its slow pace and inability to crack President Saddam's real levers of power. Indeed, the whole US attack plan has played straight into the Iraqi leader's hands.

There is a curious symmetry between the Pentagon's plans and those of President Saddam. The US intention was to avoid the cities and head for Baghdad. President Saddam's plan, which was more or less public knowledge, was to retreat into the cities where the US could not use airpower and wouldn't know the terrain as well as the defenders.

President Saddam and Washington were also at one on another important issue. He was always frightened of internal uprisings among the Kurds and the Shia Muslims, who together make up three-quarters of the population. The great rebellions of 1991 had almost brought him down. Over the years he has taken minute precautions to make sure it would not happen again by sending an army Baath party members and security men into every village, town and city district.

In fact Washington was against any uprising, as it had been in 1991. It was frightened that a rebellion by the Kurds in Kirkuk and Mosul provinces would provoke Turkish intervention. In the south, the US was against an uprising among the Shia because it might benefit Iran, the supporter of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is the most powerful Shia organisation in the country. The US also felt that to allow Iraqi political organisations to share in the expected easy victory would compel Washington to give them a share in power after the war. "It would have interfered with their plans to remake Iraq after their own vision," said one opposition leader.

There also seems to have been a misunderstanding about the nature of President Saddam's government. Though his ruling Baath party came to power through a military coup in 1968, it was never a classic military regime where the army holds power. President Saddam, despite his military uniforms, had no formal military training. He has always depended on his security services, the Baath party and a complex network of clan and tribal alliances to keep him in power.

These were the sinews of his rule, and by deliberately not capturing cities at the beginning of the invasion, the US and Britain ensured that he remained in control of the vast majority of the Iraqi population. The failure to take a city like Basra early in the campaign also meant, as one Kurdish commander put it, there were "no visible coalition gains to show the Iraqi people".

"America's Moslem Miscalculation" -- Fawaz A. Gerges on the Institute for War and Peace Reporting website (posted 3/28/03):

Washington's war has blurred the lines between mainstream, liberal and radical politics in the world of Islam, and with it squandered most of the empathy engendered after 9/11. A new realignment against the United States that brings together a broad spectrum of political forces is crystallising in Arab and Muslim lands. Distinguished Islamic institutions and renowned - and moderate - clerics have urged Muslims to join in jihad to resist the US-led onslaught.

Al-Azhar, the highest, oldest and most-respected institution of religious learning in the Muslim world, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, advising "all Muslims in the world to make jihad against invading American forces". Although Islam possesses no organised church, the significance of al-Azhar's call is comparable to a Papal call on Catholics to fight a just war to defend the faith. The Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Mohamed Sayyed Tantawi, a reformist who was one of the first clerics to condemn 9/11 and who dismissed bin Laden's jihadi credentials as fraudulent, ruled that attempts to resist the US attack ON IRAQ are a "binding Islamic duty."

Until now Tantawi has been attacked by conservative and reactionary clerics as a pro-Western reformer. His new stance shows the extent of the realignment of political opinion in the world of Islam.

Another widely-respected Egyptian-born cleric based in Qatar, Sheikh Youssef Al-Qaradawi, accused the Bush administration of declaring war against Islam - and behaving like "a god". Qaradawi, who also denounced al-Qaeda terrorism after 9/11, said fighting US troops is "legal jihad" and "death while defending Iraq a kind of martyrdom."

Moderates and radicals now appear to be fully united in opposition to the American war. In an editorial in al-Hayat, a leading secular-liberal writer warned of the "new American tyranny . . . an empire that cannot be questioned." Similarly, a leader in Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood, a well-organised and mainstream Islamist organisation with millions of members in several Arab countries, called on his followers everywhere to join in jihad in defence of Iraq. The Muslim Brothers have not been considered a militant group since the 1970s when they forsook violence and agreed to play by the rules of the political game.

Bin Laden must be laughing in his grave - or cave, whichever the case may be. His apocalyptic nightmare of a clash of religions and cultures is finally resonating in both camps. What was unthinkable a year and a half ago has happened: two versions of a just war theory, one Western and the other Muslim, are clashing over Iraq.

"Presidential Quarantine" -- Jeremy Mayer on American Prospect Online, 4/1/03:

What country could this president visit that wouldn't immediately erupt into massive civil unrest? A Bush visit to Western Europe would make 2001's violent anti-globalization demonstrations in Genoa look like a tea party. . . .

Bush's quarantine involves almost all of the Middle East, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, and even some Asian countries. Polls in some Eastern European nations suggest less intense opposition to America, but those countries are geographically close to Western Europe -- a presidential visit to Bucharest would likely attract hundreds of thousands of demonstrators from Germany and France. A trip to a less stable nation, such as Egypt or Pakistan, could severely weaken or even bring down the host government.

The world's citizens are so helpless in the face of America's military supremacy and unilateral foreign policy that the only way they can express their anger is through civil unrest and boycotts. Even a visit to America's neighbors, Mexico or Canada, would produce scenes of unprecedented anti-American demonstrations.

And those images would matter here at home. In 1960, Kennedy used the anti-Nixon demonstrations abroad to argue that the nation was losing stature in the world. A foreign trip by Bush now would reveal to the average American in pictures -- so vivid that even FOX News couldn't spin them away -- just how bitterly our policies are opposed around the globe.

Once the war is over and the occupation begins, reporters will start to ask why our president isn't traveling anymore. Karl Rove will have to think of a place to send him. Outside of Israel or Afghanistan, the choices will be slim. Of course, Bush could safely go to a country where the government uses brutality to stop demonstrations. Which means that it has come to this: The American president, who once symbolized the value of freedom to many people around the world, can now only visit countries where dissent is crushed.

Technology of antiwar protest: AP reporter Rachel Konrad in The San Mateo County Times, 4/3/03:

Throughout the world, technology is allowing activists to stage spontaneous rallies in reaction to the war.

Prohibitively expensive only a few years ago, gadgets ranging from the cell phone to the mini digital video camera simplify protests from Brussels to Manila.

Instead of relying on posters taped to telephone poles or slapped onto university walls, activists have crafted sophisticated Web sites with maps, weather and traffic updates and news on police crackdowns.

Before the invasion of Iraq began, the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center solicited volunteers to stage sit-ins in particular intersections. When sit-ins sparked police confrontations, the group published live video on its Web site.

Such tactics enabled the activists to shut down much of downtown San Francisco -- proof that new technologies have revolutionized civil disobedience, said Pam Fielding, co-author of The Net Effect: How Cyberadvocacy is Changing the Political Landscape.

Congress
resists Israeli concessions called for in the Bush/Blair "road map" for the Middle East (Jim VandeHei in The Washington Post, 4/4/03):

President Bush's latest bid for a Middle East peace deal is running into unexpected resistance from key allies in Congress. Republicans and Democrats are pressing the White House to adopt a more staunchly pro-Israel stance, even if it feeds the perception the United States is too closely aligned with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government. . . .

Sharon's government, and many in Congress, object to the non-negotiable nature of the document and to its demand that Israel and the Palestinian take parallel steps to move toward peace. Israel's position is that the Palestinians must prove they have stopped all terrorism, and activities that Israel believes promote terrorist activities, before it is required to take any steps, including the withdrawal of troops and stopping the expansion of settlements in occupied Palestinian territory. . . .

Several Republican and Democratic leaders plan to send Bush a letter this month signed by dozens of members, imploring him to adopt a position more clearly backing the Sharon government. "There are concerns about Bush's" recent comments, said House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), an outspoken supporter of the war in Iraq and co-author of the letter. "We think this is not the direction he ought to go."

Gregg Easterbrook on
Rumsfeld's opponents in the US Army and why they're leaking criticism of his war plans (New Republic Online, 4/1/03):

The Army dislikes Rumsfeld because the "revolution in military affairs" faction, of which he is grand vizier, wants to cut the Army's divisions and budget, while boosting funding for Air Force and Navy aviation. Making Rumsfeld, a former Navy pilot, look like he doesn't understand land warfare issues is essential to the Army counterattack. . . .

The Army wants to survive the budget wars, wants its share of advanced hardware, and wants respect; the "revolution" crowd coos over pilots and scientists while treating grunts as the hired help. Given that Rumsfeld's reputation rests on the fast, agile assaults the Army is now conducting, keep looking for leaks on multiple fronts.

"Held under House Arrest by Saddam for a Decade, Could This Cleric Be a Secret Weapon for the Allies?" Paul Valelly in The Independent, 4/4/03:

Iraq's most senior religious leader issued a fatwa yesterday urging the country's majority Shia community not to hinder the US and British armies. It could prove as significant a development for the invading forces as any of the military victories of the past few days.

The ruling, from Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani -- the foremost Shia authority in Iraq -- called on Muslims to keep calm, stay at home, not put themselves in danger and not to fight. It could add the decisive weight to the scales of war.

Certainly the fatwa provoked great optimism among the coalition's political and military leaders. Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, of Allied Central Command in Qatar, said: "We believe this is a very significant turning point and another indicator that the Iraqi regime is approaching its end."

The Ayatollah, who is 73, has been under house imprisonment at his home in the holy city of Najaf by Saddam Hussein's secret police for almost a decade. He was freed two days ago when his guards fled as US forces advanced on the city.

Roundup of
Defense Policy Board conflicts of interest (André Verlöy and Daniel Politi, with Aron Pilhofer, at The Center for Public Integrity website (posted 3/28/03):

Of the 30 members of the Defense Policy Board, the government-appointed group that advises the Pentagon, at least nine have ties to companies that have won more than $76 billion in defense contracts in 2001 and 2002. Four members are registered lobbyists, one of whom represents two of the three largest defense contractors.

The board's chairman, Richard Perle, resigned yesterday, March 27, 2003, amid allegations of conflicts of interest for his representation of companies with business before the Defense Department, although he will remain a member of the board. Eight of Perle's colleagues on the board have ties to companies with significant contracts from the Pentagon.

Members of the board disclose their business interests annually to the Pentagon, but the disclosures are not available to the public. "The forms are filed with the Standards of Conduct Office which review the filings to make sure they are in compliance with government ethics," Pentagon spokesman Maj. Ted Wadsworth told the Center for Public Integrity.

The companies with ties to Defense Policy Board members include prominent firms like Boeing, TRW, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton and smaller players like Symantec Corp., Technology Strategies and Alliance Corp., and Polycom Inc.

"Fear that 'Sleepers' Will Destabilise New Regime" (Rory McCarthy in The Guardian, 4/4/03):

Before the war few senior officers believed they would face such strong resistance from the paramilitaries ahead of the final battle for Baghdad. In fact, three groups, the Saddam Fedayeen, the Special Security Organisation and the Ba'ath party militia, emerged immediately, even in the very south of the country, as a significant fighting force. Militia groups are still holed up in the southern city of Basra, as well as other towns on the route north, including Nassiriya, Najaf and Kerbala.

The resilience of the militias has surprised commanders. Officers say they are more secular than insurgents in countries like Afghanistan and Chechnya, which are largely inspired by extreme interpretations of Islam. "They are not driven by ideology or religious fervour but recruited by the regime, armed and very highly paid," the British officer said.

The structure of the resistance appears to be much closer to an anti-western, hardline nationalist force. In the months after the war, they could emerge as a guerrilla vanguard for the growing anti-western feeling across the Arab world.

To prevent militia fighters from representing a future threat, coalition forces will have to arrange a much deeper purge of the Iraqi apparatus of power, and in particular the Ba'ath party, than was at first thought. That is likely to make the business of post-Saddam government considerably harder than imagined.

"Everyone in America--Myself Included -- Has Been Driven Insane by This War" -- Neal Pollack,
"Fighting Words", Portland Mercury, April 3-9, 2003:

Let's run down a list of incidents that I've heard about in the last month alone: A French woman in Houston, who's lived in her neighborhood for 20 years, wakes up on a Saturday morning to find graffiti on her garage door telling her to go back to France. A guy from Seattle arrives in San Diego and finds a threatening note from airport security because he's packed two "No Iraq War" signs in his bag. In Austin, the French owner of an antique shop hears on a radio call-in show that people want to blow up the miniature Eiffel Tower in front of his store. Radio stations in Kansas City and Louisiana stage Dixie Chicks bonfires and monster-truck CD stomps. At a rodeo in Houston, a guy starts a brawl because a kid and his friends don't want to stand while Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." plays over the loudspeaker. The guy tells the kid, who's half Mexican and half Italian, to "go back to Iraq."

Meanwhile, the FBI has warned that a full-blown war, now underway, will lead to an increase in "hate crimes." Arab Americans were already cowering before the war started. An 18-year-old Lebanese kid in Yorba Linda, California, had his jaw broken on February 22 by a mob of 20 teenagers who shouted "white power" as they beat him with baseball bats. A few days later, a Muslim woman in Santa Clara, California, was attacked in the laundry room of her apartment building. The FBI also reported that a Muslim father of six was assaulted February 21 in Irvington, New Jersey, by two men who accused him of being a terrorist. . . .

Welcome to insanity. The insanity of war. When President Bush referred to the Americans as a "peaceful people" in his 48-hour-showdown speech, I had to wonder: What "people" was he talking about?

"The President's Real Goal in Iraq" -- Jay Bookman in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 9/29/02:

[W]hy does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled?

Because we won't be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran.

In an interview Friday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld brushed aside that suggestion, noting that the United States does not covet other nations' territory. That may be true, but 57 years after World War II ended, we still have major bases in Germany and Japan. We will do the same in Iraq.

And why has the administration dismissed the option of containing and deterring Iraq, as we had the Soviet Union for 45 years? Because even if it worked, containment and deterrence would not allow the expansion of American power. Besides, they are beneath us as an empire. Rome did not stoop to containment; it conquered. And so should we.

"'Rolling' Victory Key to U.S. Endgame": Peter Slevin and Bradley Graham in The Washington Post, 4/4/03:

The Bush administration has devised a strategy to declare victory in Iraq even if Saddam Hussein or key lieutenants remain at large and fighting continues in parts of the country, officials said yesterday.

The concept of a "rolling" victory contemplates a time -- not yet determined -- when U.S. forces control significant territory and have eliminated a critical mass of Iraqi resistance. U.S. military commanders would establish a base of operations, perhaps outside Baghdad, and assert that a new era has begun. Even then, tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers would remain to help maintain order and provide humanitarian assistance.

"American Tragedy" -- Jonathan Schell in The Nation, 4/7/03:

The path through domestic events to this same destination arguably begins with the impeachment attempt against President Bill Clinton, in which the Republican Party abused its majority power in Congress to try to knock a President of the other party out of the executive branch. The attempt failed, but the institutional siege on the presidency continued in the resolution of the freakishly close vote in Florida in 2000. In a further abuse of government power -- in this case the judicial branch -- the President was chosen by a vote not of the people of the United States but of the Supreme Court. The message of Republicans at the time in Congress and the Florida legislature was that if judges did not produce the result they demanded, they would bring on a constitutional crisis in the House of Representatives. A new conception of democracy was born: Freedom is your right to support what we want. Otherwise, you are 'irrelevant.' You can vote, but you do not decide. 'Unilateralism' was born in Florida.

The tragedy of America in the post-cold war era is that we have proved unequal to the responsibility that our own power placed upon us. Some of us became intoxicated with it, imagining that we could rule the world. Others of us -- the Democratic Party, Congress, the judiciary, the news media -- abdicated our obligation to challenge, to check and to oppose, letting the power-hungry have their way. The government of the United States went into opposition against its own founding principles, leaving it to the rest of the world to take up our cause. The French have been better Americans than we have. Because the Constitution, though battered, is still intact, we may still have time and opportunity to recoup. But for now, we will have to pay the price of our weakness. The costs will be heavy, first of all for the people of Iraq but also for others, including ourselves. The international order on which the common welfare, including its ecological and economic welfare, depends has sustained severe damage. The fight for 'freedom' abroad is crippling freedom at home. The war to stop proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has provoked that very proliferation in North Korea and Iran. More ground has already been lost in the field of proliferation than can be gained even by the most delirious victory in Baghdad. Former friends of America have been turned into rivals or foes. The United States may be about to win Iraq. It has already lost the world.

"W.T.O. Rules Against U.S. on Steel Tariff"
(Elizabeth Becker in the New York Times, 3/26/03):

While the trade decision was called interim, with the final report expected next month, it is rare for an interim decision to be reversed. If the United States loses next month, European and other nations could impose trade sanctions of comparable value against the United States.

Last spring, Mr. Bush imposed tariffs of nearly 30 percent on most types of steel imported from Europe, Asia and South America, the biggest government action to protect an industry in several decades. While it was praised by the steel industry and trade unionists, the move was criticized by free trade advocates and companies that use steel in manufacturing.

The case against the tariffs was brought by the European Union, which accused the United States of illegally protecting the steel industry. . . . But there was no celebratory statement or any comment from the Europeans today. All spokesmen said they would not discuss an interim decision, but foreign officials also said Europe wanted to avoid creating a further division with the United States in a time of war.

"Blair, the War Criminal" -- British MP Tam Dalyell in The Guardian, 3/27/03:

The overwhelming majority of international lawyers, including several who advise the government (such as Rabinder Singh, a partner in Cherie Booth's Matrix Chambers), have concluded that military action in Iraq without proper UN security council authorisation is illegal under international law. The Foreign Office's deputy legal adviser, Elizabeth Wilmhurst, resigned on precisely this point after 30 years' service. This puts the prime minister and those who will be fighting in his and President Bush's name in a vulnerable legal position. Already lawyers are getting phone calls from anxious members of the armed forces.

Blair accuses opponents of war of "appeasement" - in spite of the fact that, in many cases, their active opposition to Saddam's dictatorship well predates his. (I signed the 1987 early day motion against arms exports to Iraq. Blair and Gordon Brown didn't.) If anyone is the "appeaser" it is Blair, in his support for the US government's pre-emptive attack on Saddam. . . .

Many in the Labour party believe Blair has misunderstood the pressing danger. It comes not from Iraq, but from terrorism. If there is a link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein, it is this: Osama bin Laden hates Saddam Hussein. On at least two occasions Bin Laden's organisation has tried to assassinate Saddam. The effect of this war, however, could well be to bring the pair together. This is a war that will strengthen terrorism.

"War" replaces "Sex" as #1 Web search (Guardian, 3/27/03)

The Internet and war coverage (Ben Hammersley in The Guardian, 3/27/03):

Could this be the first internet war? As the Spanish civil war brought us the first classic photojournalism, and the first Gulf war saw the heyday of CNN, and with it 24-hour rolling news, could this war be the birth of the internet as the primary source for news?

The world's major news outlets are finding it so. The readership of their online versions, including this paper's, has increased dramatically since the start of hostilities. With multiple journalists filing frequent reports from the battlefield, the only outlet wide enough, and fast enough to keep up is the net.

"The Other Superpower" -- Jonathan Schell in The Nation, 4/14/03 (posted 3/27/03):

As the war began, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld promised a "campaign unlike any other in history." What he did not plan or expect, however, was that the peoples of earth -- what some are calling "the other superpower" -- would launch an opposing campaign destined to be even less like any other in history. Indeed, Rumsfeld's campaign, a military attack, was in all its essential elements as old as history. The other campaign -- the one opposing the war -- meanwhile, was authentically novel.

John Major on postwar Iraq (originally Wall Street Journal, 3/26/03; quoted in The Guardian, 3/27/03):

"Whatever the immediate postwar arrangements for governing Iraq may be . . . it is desirable for the UN to be involved as swiftly as possible in any interim administration. Some sounding board for local opinion . . . should also be put in place. This will be uncomfortable and rancorous since the views of the Sunnis, Shias and Kurds are unlikely to be as one; but the effort must be made -- and be seen to be made . . .

"The establishment of any longer-term government . . . is fraught with difficulty . . . The depth of bitterness between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds is such that any 'grand coalition' is impossible . . . Yet, unless military governorship or UN administration is to be lengthy, we must anticipate a legitimate government that may reflect the numerical dominance of the Shias . . .

"We would be wise to consult Arab opinion . . . We should discuss our plans with the EU, China and Russia, and seek their active political support: We may, after all, need them to open their wallets as well. As we do so, we should not neglect the views of our allies, Australia, Spain and Japan prominent among them. In victory, magnanimity may heal wounds."

"Analysts Say Threat Warnings Toned Down -- Guerrilla Tactics Were Predicted" (Washington Post, 3/27/03):

Intelligence analysts at the CIA and Pentagon warned the Bush administration that U.S. troops would face significant resistance from Iraqi irregular forces employing guerrilla tactics, but those views have not been adequately reflected in the administration's public predictions about how difficult a war might go, according to current and former intelligence officials.

"Anti-Hussein Officials Rebuke Unilateral U.S. Battle Strategy"
(Washington Post, 3/27/03):

SALAHUDDIN, Iraq, March 26 -- Iraq's U.S.-endorsed opposition has distanced itself from the Bush administration's war strategy, suggesting the plan to conquer the country without involving the Iraqi public has opened the way for military problems in the south.

Opposition organizations all desired direct Iraqi involvement in the war. Just how much popular resistance they could have mustered remains an open question. But from their offices here in the Kurdish-controlled area of northern Iraq, the groups have expressed little surprise that Iraqi civilians appear reluctant to greet allied forces, much less take up arms to expel government militias and soldiers from their midst. . . .

"There's a total lack of Iraqi involvement," said Zaab Sethna, an aide to Ahmed Chalabi, who heads the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group based in London. "We have been surprised over the months the lack of cooperation with the opposition."

The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite group based in Iran, said the Bush administration has shared none of its plans with the opposition. Its leader, Mohammed Bakir Hakim, told Iraqi Shiites on Tuesday to remain neutral in the war.

"We are not in favor of this war because it places the future of Iraq in foreign hands," he told reporters in Tehran.

"War Could Last Months, Officers Say" (Washington Post, 3/27/03):

Despite the rapid advance of Army and Marine forces across Iraq over the past week, some senior U.S. military officers are now convinced that the war is likely to last months and will require considerably more combat power than is now on hand there and in Kuwait, senior defense officials said yesterday. . . .

Overhanging all developments in the war this week is the unsettling realization that thousands of Iraqis are willing to fight vigorously. During planning for the invasion, worst-case scenarios sometimes predicated stiff resistance, but "no one took that very seriously," an officer said.

"The whole linchpin of this operation was the reaction of the Iraqi people and the Iraqi ground force," said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a specialist in war planning. "If they don't turn, and so far they haven't, we have a very different strategic problem facing us than when we went in."

Seymour Hersh on
the forged Iraq nuclear program documents ("Who Lied to Whom?", New Yorker, 3/31/03 (posted 3/24/03):

What went wrong? Did a poorly conceived propaganda effort by British intelligence, whose practices had been known for years to senior American officials, manage to move, without significant challenge, through the top layers of the American intelligence community and into the most sacrosanct of Presidential briefings? Who permitted it to go into the President's State of the Union speech? Was the message -- the threat posed by Iraq -- more important than the integrity of the intelligence-vetting process? Was the Administration lying to itself? Or did it deliberately give Congress and the public what it knew to be bad information?

"Missteps with Turkey Prove Costly" -- Glenn Kessler and Philip P. Pan analyze the diplomatic failure in The Washington Post (3/28/03)

One week into the war, the administration's inability to win Turkey's approval has emerged as an important turning point in the U.S. confrontation with Iraq that senior U.S. officials now acknowledge may ultimately prolong the length of the conflict. It is a story of clumsy diplomacy and mutual misunderstanding, U.S. and Turkish officials said. It also illustrates how the administration undercut its own efforts to broaden international support for war by allowing its war plan to dictate the pace of its diplomacy, diplomats and other experts in U.S.-Turkish relations said.

Turkey's rejection not only forced a rewrite of the war plan, but it undercut the administration's broader diplomatic efforts to win international support for an invasion. Diplomats said the image of Turkey resisting U.S. pressure emboldened smaller countries on the U.N. Security Council to reject a proposed U.S.-British resolution authorizing military action. The failure of that resolution in turn made it impossible for the United States to recruit such close allies as Canada and Mexico to join the fight against Iraq, since they had tied their support to a new resolution.

Josh Marshall on
the pressure to finish the war quickly -- before Saddam gets stronger, but also before the United States is ready (3/29/03):

On CNN last night, Wes Clark made a interesting and ominous observation, which he said he based on recent conversations with various region experts. The gist of it was that we have a four or five week window to finish this up. And if we don't do it before then, a bad chain of events kicks off. Saddam starts to look strong, like he's making a stand against America, and so forth. Then Arab or non-Arab Muslim volunteers start streaming into the country to take up the fight. Basically, instead of just being angry and marching in their own countries because they think we're clobbering Iraq, they decide that Saddam's actually making a fight of it and go to get in on the action.

I can't say whether this is an accurate prediction or not. But it has the ring of truth to it -- in my ears at least. And, regardless, it's probably one of the issues that's being considered. Unfortunately, says the Galloway article, the 4th ID won't be ready for at least three weeks.

That the math doesn't add up too nicely, does it? Maybe we do have to hit Baghdad now to prevent some broader regional deterioration.

The one thing that seems really clear is this: We should not be in this position of having to decide whether to go in under-gunned or wait longer than we can really afford to. This is what's so nice about having the world's most powerful military, several times over: you shouldn't have to wing it. We should have had all the necessary troops and hardware in position when we pulled the trigger on this war, rather than having what turns out to be a critical component on the ground in Texas.

Why was that allowed to happen?

The
political costs of prolonged war for US and British leadership (Guardian lead editorial, 3/29/03):

A vice is slowly beginning to close on US and British political leaders who ordered or justified the launching of war on Iraq. This potentially fatal squeeze is the product of two opposed dynamics. One is the dawning realisation that the war will not be over quickly, may indeed drag on for months, and will certainly not be the "cakewalk" predicted by Kenneth Adelman of the Pentagon's infamous defence policy board. The other is the prospect of an accelerating humanitarian crisis. . . .

That the Pentagon has been obliged to double its ground combat forces after only a week, and must now wait for them to deploy, is a matter for considerable political shock and awe. This military deceleration now runs directly counter to that other powerful dynamic: a quickening human tragedy. Put simply, the longer the war rages, the more acute the suffering of the Iraqi people will become. And while the regime remains undefeated, the more deeply problematic will be efforts to distribute aid and the more furious the international outcry. . . .

[E]ven with the best will in the world, aid efforts will have limited impact while the conflict continues inconclusively. This is why, with the war lengthening and slowing, Iraq's human crisis seems certain to intensify. This is the inexorably closing vice that has the power to destroy thousands of innocent lives and some very prominent political careers.

More antiwar protests: Greece, Germany, South Africa, South Korea, Malaysia (Guardian, 3/29/03)

Political damage to Blair enormous, but little chance of a leadership challenge soon (Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, 3/29/03):

So how great is the risk for Blair? He has certainly made a massive withdrawal from the electorate's goodwill bank. . . .

Still, on its own, none of this yet amounts to the tremor that might trigger his downfall. For one thing, there is no opposition to exploit the opening. The Tories are weak and they back this war as much as the government: if it is a failure, they will be discredited too.

Inside Labour, there is anger to be sure. . . . But none of this yet has the makings of a coup against Blair. The rebels have no leader: Robin Cook would be a natural focus, but he has disavowed all such plotting. Heavyweights Gordon Brown and John Prescott have remained onside, ensuring cabinet unity even in these toughest of times. And, loyalist ministers point out, the wider Labour faithful are in no mood for ditching a proven vote-winner. "People looked over the precipice a couple of weeks ago," says one, recalling the brief moment when there was talk of dumping Blair, "and they took several large steps back."

Gary Younge
interviews Hans Blix in The Guardian, 3/29/03:

Formal, self-deprecating, proper and precise, Blix has spent the last few months buffeted by the transatlantic diplomatic storms and emerged with the few hairs he has left on his head in place. Not for him an emotional response to the horrors of war that he believes, at least for now, could have been avoided. Offer him a range of adjectives to describe his mood at the breakdown of talks -- even as he argued that further inspections could still produce results - and he picks only "sadness" and "disappointment", not "anger" and "frustration".

"Sadness because now it was a matter of using force and destruction," he says. "Disappointment because I thought it was too early breaking off the attempts to achieve disarmament. I thought there should have been a little more patience." . . .

Yet despite the fact that there was little nobility displayed in the negotiations and that large numbers of the human race are perishing through military action despite his efforts, he does not regret picking up the phone to Kofi Annan four years ago while on an Antarctic cruise with his wife, and coming out of retirement to take on the job. "I was taken out of the refrigerator, literally," he said recently. "I have my career behind me."

The life ahead of him appears somewhat solitary. He lives in New York, his wife is in Sweden. At 74, he confesses to living the life of a "monk". His only indulgences are bordeaux and oriental carpets; his main hobbies, preparing Scandinavian fish dishes and making his own marmalade. . . .

Blix believes there was nothing he could have said that would have convinced the Americans not to go to war at this time. "They would have wanted a clear-cut guarantee that [the Iraqis] did not have weapons of mass destruction," he says. "I could not have given them a guarantee that if they had waited a few months more there would have been results."

So what was the point of it all, then? Of all the shuttling backwards and forwards, the weighing of words and the delivering of reports when so soon after his first report war seemed inevitable?

Blix's response is a masterpiece of the diplomatic understatement for which over a few short months he became a byword: "While we were disappointed that it didn't continue and that it came to war, I think we have shown that it was feasible to build up a professional and effective and independent inspection regime... it's just too bad it didn't work."

"Embattled U.N. Weapons Chief to Step Down" (AP story in The Guardian, 3/29/03):

His inspectors are becoming valuable commodities for the United States but Hans Blix isn't. The chief U.N. inspector, blamed by Washington for hurting its drive for international support in the run-up to the war, will be stepping down at the end of June.

U.S. officials say his departure could make it easier for the Bush administration to include some of the world's top arms experts in their hunt for Iraqi weapons.

At least three members of Blix's staff -- two experts in biological weapons and one who specializes in Iraq's missile programs -- have been approached by special U.S. military units who will oversee Iraq's disarmament.

It's a sign of recognition that the inspectors are well-trained and their expertise is essential. But the Americans have not made any overtures to their boss. . . .

Blix's last major report was devastating for U.S. efforts to convince the council that Iraq was a serious threat that needed to be disarmed by force. . . .

The Americans were outraged.

"We gave him 70 sites to visit and he only went to seven," said one angry U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Blix said he couldn't remember how many sites he was given, but noted that intelligence from all countries including the United States resulted in "a relatively meager" amount of new information.

Latest marketplace bombing "a PR disaster" for invading coalition (Brian Whitaker in The Guardian, 3/29/03):

raq suffered another civilian tragedy and the invasion forces suffered another public relations disaster when an explosion in a crowded market area of Baghdad killed more than 50 people yesterday.

It was the second incident of its kind within two days. A similar blast killed 14 people in a marketplace on Wednesday. . . .

Whatever the actual cause, the damage to the US in terms of public opinion has already been done and will not be easily undone. TV stations - particularly the Arab satellite channels - showed pictures of the victims throughout the day, reinforcing the impression that the US is a greater immediate threat than Saddam Hussein.

"There Will Be a Severe Political Price to Pay If the Human and Financial Costs of This Conflict Mount Up" (lead editorial in The Independent, 3/29/03):

The implications of a long war are serious. The case for military action was sold with the implication that it would be short and relatively bloodless. Even on that basis, George Bush and his award-winning salesman Tony Blair could not persuade world opinion that it was necessary. Now that they appear to accept that the fighting will last months rather than weeks, with all the likely consequences in blood and suffering, support for the war, although it may have increased briefly once British troops were engaged, could recede. . . .

This newspaper opposed the decision to go to war, not from pacifism but because the potential benefits of removing a dictator and neutralising a theoretical risk of his arming terrorists were outweighed by the horrendous costs of war. We were prepared to accept that, had Saddam been assassinated in the first, opportunistic bombing raid and his subordinates come out with their hands up, the costs and benefits would have been more balanced. Now, however, those costs seem heavier than ever.

This is not simply a matter of the immediate human cost in death, injury, grief and fear. That will be multiplied by an unknown factor as it is translated into anti-American sentiment throughout other Arab and Muslim countries. In Iraq, meanwhile, it is becoming clearer that the feelings of the people towards their self-appointed liberators are more ambivalent than was allowed for in the world -view of the American right. That means the post-war situation in Iraq will be less tractable, and more expensive, than expected.

The financial cost of war is growing daily. Mr Bush's request to Congress for $75bn -- seven times the GDP of Iraq -- assumed that the conflict would last 30 days. It may last longer, in which case the hole in budget arithmetic in the US and the UK will grow wider. As he rewrites next month's Budget speech, Gordon Brown must be alarmed by the war's effects on a service-based economy on the brink of recession.

Nor is there any prospect that the costs of this war will be shared with the "plenty" of allies of which the President boasted unconvincingly. In 1991, nine-tenths of the costs of the Gulf War were borne by countries other than the US. This time, the coalition of the willing is not a coalition of the willing-to-pay.

Paul Peachey's
roundup of major misinformation reported in the Western press thus far (The Independent, 3/29/03): Tariq Aziz's defection, the quick capitulation of Umm Qasr, full-scale desertions from the Iraqi military, discovery of a "chemical weapons complex," the Basra "uprising," executions of British POWs.

Britain apologizes (to Britons) for
alleging Iraqi executions of British POWs (The Independent, 3/29/03):

The Government apologised yesterday to the families of two dead British soldiers over claims by Tony Blair that the men had been "executed" by Iraqi militiamen.

Adam Ingram, the Armed Forces minister, expressed "regret" for any distress caused by the Prime Minister's condemnation of a broadcast on al-Jazeera television which showed the men's bodies.

Mr Ingram's apology is a serious embarrassment for Mr Blair, who highlighted the deaths of the soldiers during his press conference on Thursday with George Bush at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland.

"How to Know if the U.S. Is Winning" (Thomas Friedman in the International Herald Tribune, 3/29/03). Friedman suggests six criteria: Does the US occupy Baghdad without destroying it? Does it remove Saddam Hussein? Does it develop reconstruction plans that successfully address Iraqi resistance to US "liberation"? Does Iraqi territory remain intact? Can a reconstruction government claim popular legitimacy? And can it claim legitimacy among its neighbors? "If you see these things happening, you'll know that the political ends for which this war was begun are being achieved. If you don't, you'll know America is lost in a sandstorm."

Fergal Keane on
media and public opinion in the Middle East (The Independent, 3/29/03):

So much has changed in this Arab world since the last Gulf War. The arrival of satellite television stations such as Al-Jazeera has transformed the information landscape: the agenda is no longer dominated by Western news outlets or by the craven and awful state-controlled media. Hour by hour, Arab families follow the progress of this war, and it is being mediated for them by Arab reporters. The information war is being lost in the Arab world, partly because the old sources of information no longer hold sway, and at least partly because nobody here wants to give the coalition the benefit of the doubt.

"Antiwar Effort Emphasizes Civility Over Confrontation" -- on the major US antiwar organizations and their strategies since the war began (Kate Zernike and Dean E. Murphy in The New York Times, 3/29/03)

More protests: Indonesia, South Korea, Pakistan, China, Cyprus, Germany (Guardian, 3/30/03)

More protests: Indonesia, China, Italy, the United States, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Russia, Germany, France, Hungary, Poland, Ireland (BBC, 3/30/03)

"The Tragedy of This Unequal Partnership" -- Will Hutton in The Observer, 3/30/03:

[Tony Blair] is fighting a barely legitimate war that is already a military and diplomatic quagmire, where even eventual victory may not avert a political disaster. He knows his capacity to survive the diplomatic humiliations piled on him by the Bush administration is limited; you cannot long lead Britain's centre and centre-left from such a compromised position, wounding not only the country's profoundest interests but torching any linkage with the progressive project. For the first time his premiership is genuinely at risk.

It is a political tragedy, Shakespearean in the cruelty of its denouement. 9/11 accelerated trends in America that had been crystallising since the 1970s and which made the political structures in which successive British Governments have managed simultaneously to play both the American and European cards unsustainable. Blair was confronted with an invidious choice that nobody in the British establishment has wanted to make: Europe or America. Side with Europe to insist that the price of collaboration in the fight against terrorism had to be that the US observe genuinely multilateral international due process - and certainly say No to some of Washington's wilder aims. Or side with America insisting from the inside that it engaged in its wars multilaterally, and hope to bring Europe along in your wake.

Either choice was beset with risk, but it's hard to believe that siding with Europe, for all its evident difficulties, would have produced an outcome worse than the situation in which we currently find ourselves: a protracted war with no second UN Resolution, no commitment to UN governance of post-war Iraq, no commitment to a mid-East peace settlement. But Blair misread the character of American conservatism, its grip on the American body politic and its scope for rationality. He continues to do so, the miscalculation of his life.

Oliver Morgan in The Observer (3/30/03) on
weapons company president Jay Garner, picked by the Bush administration to lead postwar reconstruction in Iraq:

Jay Garner, the retired US general who will oversee humanitarian relief and reconstruction in postwar Iraq, is president of an arms company that provides crucial technical support to missile systems vital to the US invasion of the country.

Garner's business background is causing serious concerns at the United Nations and among aid agencies, who are already opposed to US administration of Iraq if it comes outside UN authority, and who say appointment of an American linked to the arms trade is the 'worst case scenario' for running the country after the war.

Garner is president of Virginia-based SY Coleman, a subsidiary of defence electronics group L-3 Communications, which provides technical services and advice on the Patriot missile system being used in Iraq. Patriot was made famous in the 1991 Gulf war when it was used to protect Israeli and Saudi targets from attack by Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles. Garner was involved in the system's deployment in Israel. . . .

Jack Tyler, an SY Coleman senior vice-president, confirmed that Garner still held his position at the company.

"Special Search Operations Yield No Banned Weapons" -- Barton Gellman in The Washington Post, 3/30/03:

Ten days into a war fought under the flag of disarmament, U.S.-led troops have found no substantial sign of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. In some ways, that is unsurprising. The war is far from won, and most of Iraq's covert arms production and storage historically have taken place within a 60-mile radius of Baghdad. That is roughly the forward line of U.S. armored columns in their thrust to the Iraqi capital.

At the same time, U.S. forces have tested 10 of their best intelligence leads, four that first day and another half-dozen since, without result. There are nearly 300 sites in the top tier of a much larger list that the Defense Intelligence Agency updated in the run-up to war, officials said. The 10 sites reached by Friday were among the most urgent. If equipped as suspected, they would have posed an immediate threat to U.S. forces. "All the searches have turned up negative," said a Joint Staff officer who is following field reports. "The munitions that have been found have all been conventional." . . .

Bush administration officials are acutely aware that their declared war aims call for an early display of evidence. John S. Wolf, assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, recently said that the seventh floor of the State Department -- where Secretary Colin L. Powell and other top political appointees work -- was keen on swift discovery of a "smoking gun," according to someone present.

"The president has made very clear that the reason why we are in Iraq is to find weapons of mass destruction," Wolf said in a telephone interview yesterday. He added, "The fact that we haven't found them in seven or eight days doesn't faze me one little bit. Very clearly, we need to find this stuff or people are going to be asking questions."

Iraqi expatriots return from Jordan to fight (Stars and Stripes, 3/30/03):

AMMAN, Jordan -- Four busloads of Iraqi men left this city Tuesday for their homeland to join the fight against American-led invaders, a sign that U.S. and British forces may face opposition from ordinary Iraqis as well as from supporters of Saddam Hussein.

Few of the men said they were interested in keeping Saddam in power. Instead they talked about fighting for their communities, their families and their pride. They said they would not join the Iraqi military but would use their personal weapons to fight Americans. . . .

Jordanian officials said 4,330 Iraqis have returned to Iraq in the last 10 days, 429 in the last day. In contrast, no Iraqis fled to Jordan as refugees since the war began.

Although the numbers may not seem large, they underscore the growing sense of pride and admiration that is being expressed in this Arab capital for the way Iraqis have so far resisted American and British troops. Some analysts suggest that the return of Iraqis to their homeland also portends difficulties for the United States as it attempts to take control of Iraq and install a new government.

More protests on March 30: India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, South Korea, China, Morocco, Spain, France, Cyprus, Poland, The Netherlands, Bulgaria, Britain (The Independent, 3/31/03)

The perils of clumsy US efforts to manipulate cleavages in the Middle East:
"On a Road to Nowhere" -- Fawzi Ibrahim in The Guardian, 3/31/03:

What is as dangerous as the daily bombardment of Baghdad is the call by Tony Blair and George Bush on the Shi'ites in Basra and Baghdad to rise up. It is one thing to call for a popular uprising, it is quite another to urge this religious sect to rise up. The implication is that the other sect, the Sunnis, who form some 40% of the population, not only support the Iraqi regime but are implicated in its crime. It seems that Mr Blair and Mr Bush are determined to ferment religious divisions and sectarian conflict. This can only play into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists who wish to turn Iraq into another Afghanistan. But then, it was the US that supported and armed Osama bin Laden in the first place. So, no change there.

The political history that has shaped Iraq created a shared political awareness among the population - especially those in the cities - that is mutually acknowledged without having to be spoken. An awareness engendered by decades of tyranny and oppression. Such political awareness makes the attempt by the US and Britain to coax Iraqis into loving the invader laughable. The manner in which the politicians and the military explain how they intend to win the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi population is reminiscent of anthropologists' attempt to make contact with a previously undiscovered community in the deepest jungles of Brazil or Chile. It is modelled on the way wild animals are trained for a circus act, with a whip in one hand and a lump of sugar in the other. It is not only deeply offensive, it is profoundly racist. . . .

The last thing the Middle East needs is another war in addition to the war the Israeli government is waging against the Palestinian people. Just how many wars can a single region sustain at any one time? In what must be the most unconvincing and clumsy attempt to pacify Arab and world opinion, Mr Bush experienced a sudden and a very convenient conversion to Mr Blair's road map. If the road map had any credibility at all, it lost it the instant Mr Bush gave it his endorsement. It should surprise no one if the road map is seen as the road to nowhere.

Hosni Mubarak expects heightened Islamic militancy as war gets longer (AP story in Ha'aretz, 3/31/03):

Egypt's president said he could not stop U.S.-led warships from crossing the Suez Canal toward Iraq, and warned a drawn out war would lead to increased Islamic militancy throughout the world.

"If there is one (Osama) bin Laden now, there will be 100 bin Ladens afterward," Hosni Mubarak said in reference to the al-Qaida terror network leader during a speech to army commanders in the city of Suez, some 130 kilometers (80 miles) east of the capital, Cairo.

Mubarak also warned that the war would have "catastrophic" effects on global economic, political and humanitarian conditions and that all Mideast states, including Israel, should be free of weapons of mass destruction.

Fundamentalists rally to defend, "Islamize" Iraq (Brian Whitaker in The Guardian, 3/31/03):

Although Saddam Hussein's regime is largely secular, religious militants throughout the region will probably make strenuous efforts over the coming months to "Islamise" the conflict - as happened during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad group yesterday issued a statement announcing "the good news" that the first of its suicide bombers had arrived in Baghdad. Because of the extremely tight security in Israel, American and British troops in Iraq are likely to become an easier and more attractive target for the foreseeable future.

Seymour Hersh,
"Offense and Defense: The Battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon" (New Yorker, 4/7/03; posted 3/31/03):

On at least six occasions . . . [a senior military] planner told me, when Rumsfeld and his deputies were presented with operational plans -- the Iraqi assault was designated Plan 1003 -- he insisted that the number of ground troops be sharply reduced. Rumsfeld's faith in precision bombing and his insistence on streamlined military operations has had profound consequences for the ability of the armed forces to fight effectively overseas. "They've got no resources," a former high-level intelligence official said. "He was so focussed on proving his point -- that the Iraqis were going to fall apart." . . .

In the planner's view, Rumsfeld had two goals: to demonstrate the efficacy of precision bombing and to "do the war on the cheap." Rumsfeld and his two main deputies for war planning, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, "were so enamored of 'shock and awe' that victory seemed assured," the planner said. "They believed that the weather would always be clear, that the enemy would expose itself, and so precision bombings would always work." . . .

In the months leading up to the war, a split developed inside the military, with the planners and their immediate superiors warning that the war plan was dangerously thin on troops and matériel, and the top generals -- including General Tommy Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command, and Air Force General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- supporting Rumsfeld. After Turkey's parliament astonished the war planners in early March by denying the United States permission to land the 4th Infantry Division in Turkey, Franks initially argued that the war ought to be delayed until the troops could be brought in by another route, a former intelligence official said. "Rummy overruled him." . . .

There were reports last week that Iraqi exiles, including fervent Shiites, were crossing into Iraq by car and bus from Jordan and Syria to get into the fight on the side of the Iraqi government. Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. Middle East operative, told me in a telephone call from Jordan, "Everybody wants to fight. The whole nation of Iraq is fighting to defend Iraq. Not Saddam. They've been given the high sign, and we are courting disaster. If we take fifty or sixty casualties a day and they die by the thousands, they're still winning. It's a jihad, and it's a good thing to die. This is no longer a secular war." There were press reports of mujahideen arriving from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Algeria for "martyrdom operations." . . .

A Middle East businessman who has long-standing ties in Jordan and Syria -- and whose information I have always found reliable -- told me that the religious government in Tehran "is now backing Iraq in the war. There isn't any Arab fighting group on the ground in Iraq who is with the United States," he said.

There is also evidence that Turkey has been playing both sides. Turkey and Syria, who traditionally have not had close relations, recently agreed to strengthen their ties, the businessman told me, and early this year Syria sent Major General Ghazi Kanaan, its longtime strongman and power broker in Lebanon, to Turkey. The two nations have begun to share intelligence and to meet, along with Iranian officials, to discuss border issues, in case an independent Kurdistan emerges from the Iraq war. A former U.S. intelligence officer put it this way: "The Syrians are coöaut;rdinating with the Turks to screw us in the north -- to cause us problems." He added, "Syria and the Iranians agreed that they could not let an American occupation of Iraq stand."

"A Plan under Attack" -- Evan Thomas and John Barry in Newsweek, 4/7/03 (as accessed 3/31/03):

Last Wednesday, CIA officials gave a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill about the rising tide of anti-Americanism sweeping the Arab world. Particular emphasis was placed on Jordan and Egypt. As agency officials discussed the depth of hatred for U.S. actions, the senators fell silent. There were delicate discussions about the uncertainty, if the war was protracted, of "regime stability." After the briefing, "there were senators who were ashen-faced," said one staff member. "They were absolutely depressed." Much of what the agency briefed would not have been news to any close watcher of the BBC or almost any foreign news broadcast. "But they [the senators] only watch American TV," said the staffer. Most of the senators had been led to believe that the war would be quick and that the Iraqi populace would be dancing in the streets. It is hard to know the true level of discontent in the Arab world, and whether it can turn into revolution. But an extended and increasingly bloody Iraqi war is a risky way to find out.

"Keeping Hope Alive" -- William Hartung in The Nation, 4/7/03 (posted 3/25/03):

The chances of preventing George W. Bush -- a true believer in the cleansing powers of military force if there ever was one -- from going to war with Iraq were always small. But look what the global antiwar movement accomplished: We forced the Bush Administration to take the issue to the UN; we turned out millions of people in the largest coordinated protests in history; we helped embolden swing states like Guinea, Cameroon, Mexico, Chile, Angola and Pakistan to resist US bullying and bribery at the UN Security Council; we put the future of entire governments at risk when they attempted to side with the United States against the will of their own people. And the start of the war has not diminished the energy and creativity of our movement; if anything, it has sparked renewed determination among antiwar forces.

This doesn't sound like a peace movement that is losing. It sounds like a peace movement that lost the first skirmish but is poised to win the larger struggle to put the doctrine of aggressive unilateralism back in the trash bin of history, where it belongs.