Hirsh: The Problem with Bush's New War Czar

Bush’s new war ‘czar’ is nominally the president’s man. But in reality, Doug Lute is fated to be powerless and can only preside over a worsening state of paralysis in Iraq.

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek

May 17, 2007 - Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute is by most accounts a formidable fellow: smart, efficient and expert in all aspects of nation-building—civilian and military. As the top operations officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he’s also intimately familiar with all aspects of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. “Lute is about as broad-gauged a senior military officer as they could find,” says Philip Zelikow, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s former senior counselor, who’s known him since Lute was a captain. “He’s perfect,” adds retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a harsh critic of George W. Bush’s “surge” plan in Iraq.

But Lute, who was named this week to be Bush’s new war “czar” for Iraq and Afghanistan, is also just a three-star general, and he’s still on active duty. What this means is that while nominally he’s the president’s man—his title puts him on par with national-security adviser Steven Hadley—militarily he’s still inferior in rank to four-star Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the multinational forces in Iraq. Neither will he be in a position to tell Defense Secretary Robert Gates or Rice what to do. “The term ‘war czar’ is terribly misguided,” says McCaffrey. “I do think he’ll be an extremely able White House operative.”

Lute, in other words, is being hired on as Bush’s messenger man—the guy who, theoretically, can deliver presidential demands to State or Defense that certain resources are to be delivered to certain places. But there’s the rub. The only way for Lute to be even marginally effective is if a president who has been consistently uninterested in the details of the Iraq conflict for the past four years—and in the nitty-gritty of Afghanistan for most of the last five years—starts obsessing over those details with just 18 months to go in his term. And that’s unlikely to happen. A leader who’s already poring over plans for his presidential library doesn’t start changing his governing habits this late in the game.

And Lute is preparing for his pseudo-czardom—he still needs to be confirmed by the Senate, which could take weeks—just as progress in Iraq is slowing to a halt on almost all fronts. While sectarian violence is down since the “surge” began, a new spate of Sunni suicide bombings has paralyzed efforts by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to reconcile his fellow Shiites with the Sunnis. A large number of those bombers—perhaps 80 to 90 percent by some intelligence estimates—are still coming over the border from Syria. Yet diplomacy with Damascus is still all but nonexistent, despite Rice’s recent meeting with the Syrian foreign minister at Sharm al-Sheikh, Egypt. And with each passing week, the price that the Syrians—or the Iranians—are demanding for cooperation in Iraq goes up, as Bush edges closer to lame-duckhood.


Even within the Bush administration, officials working on the Iraq problem despair that the president will never sign onto the kind of deal with Bashar al-Assad—one touching on all areas of U.S.-Syrian relations—that could lead the Syrian president to truly crack down on these terrorist depots within his borders. On the eve of the one-year anniversary of his administration on May 20, Maliki remains hamstrung by his own constitution, which deprives him of the power to hire and fire ministers on his own, while mortar attacks inside the once-secure Green Zone (now euphemistically called the International Zone) grow ever worse. Back in Washington, meanwhile, the debate on Capitol Hill over a withdrawal deadline has all but persuaded most Iraqis that the Americans are leaving soon, and they’d better cut a deal with whatever local bad strongman—Iran’s secret cells inside Iraq; Moqtada al-Sadr’s brutal Mahdi Army, or Sunni tribal leaders—has the most power.

Things are so stuck that come September, when Petraeus gives his official assessment to Bush about whether the surge is succeeding, there is likely to be no improvement on the ground at all. That, at least, is the view of some officials inside the Bush administration who were formerly somewhat optimistic. This in turn will reignite Democrat-led efforts to impose a withdrawal deadline, which will accelerate the Iraqi deal-cutting. “The forces that will lead the surge to succeed or fail are much larger than Doug Lute or even Bush at this point,” says Andrew Krepinevich, head of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. “In a sense what you need to get the support of one side, the American people, undermines your ability to get what you need from the other party, the Iraqis. What the American people want to hear about troop levels—that they’re coming home soon—is the opposite of what the Iraqis need to hear. That message to Iraqis is, hey, I need to prepare for the civil war that follows.”

Doug Lute must now bridge not only the interagency divide in Washington. He must straddle a widening gulf between Iraq and Washington. Perhaps that is why so many retired four-star generals—at least four of them, by most accounts—turned down the job.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18727565/site/newsweek/

Dannatt: media sank Harry's tour

Chris Tryhorn
May 17, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

The army's chief of staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, made clear today that the media had played a part in his decision to prevent Prince Harry's deployment in Iraq.
Without pointing the finger at any particular outlets, Sir Richard indicated that he believed the coverage of Harry's impending tour of duty had aggravated the security risks involved. "I have to add that a contributing factor to this increase in threats to Prince Harry has been the widespread knowledge and discussion of his deployment," Sir Richard said.

"It is a fact that this close scrutiny has exacerbated the situation and this is something that I wish to avoid in future."

When news of Prince Harry's deployment broke earlier in the year, the army circulated an operational note to news outlets calling on them to refrain from reports about his posting that could jeopardise the future safety of troops.

However, there has been no shortage of speculation about what Harry's role might be and where he might carry out reconnaissance missions with his regiment, the Blues and Royals.

The Times and the Daily Mail both suggested he might go to the border with Iran in Maysan province, where a Scimitar tank crew were killed at the end of last month.

The Observer reported that "Whitehall officials ruled out the possibility of the prince not being sent to Maysan", while the Express said he could be sent on "desert patrols in the south-east of the country".

It would have been inconceivable for Harry's deployment in a conflict zone - the first for a royal since Prince Andrew served as a helicopter pilot in the Falklands 25 years ago - not to be the subject of intense media interest.

As much as the rest of his family, Harry has always attracted huge press attention - and not always for the right reasons.

Photographs of his hijinks at parties, including the notorious shots of him in Nazi fancy dress, have been a tabloid staple.

What We Got Right in Iraq

By L. Paul Bremer
Washingtonpost, Sunday 13May, 2007

Once conventional wisdom congeals, even facts can't shake it loose. These days, everyone "knows" that the Coalition Provisional Authority made two disastrous decisions at the beginning of the U.S. occupation of Iraq: to vengefully drive members of the Baath Party from public life and to recklessly disband the Iraqi army. The most recent example is former CIA chief George J. Tenet, whose new memoir pillories me for those decisions (even though I don't recall his ever objecting to either call during our numerous conversations in my 14 months leading the CPA). Similar charges are unquestioningly repeated in books and articles. Looking for a neat, simple explanation for our current problems in Iraq, pundits argue that these two steps alienated the formerly ruling Sunnis, created a pool of angry rebels-in-waiting and sparked the insurgency that's raging today. The conventional wisdom is as firm here as it gets. It's also dead wrong.

Like most Americans, I am disappointed by the difficulties the nation has encountered after our quick 2003 victory over Saddam Hussein. But the U.S.-led coalition was absolutely right to strip away the apparatus of a particularly odious tyranny. Hussein modeled his regime after Adolf Hitler's, which controlled the German people with two main instruments: the Nazi Party and the Reich's security services. We had no choice but to rid Iraq of the country's equivalent organizations to give it any chance at a brighter future.

Here's how the decisions were made. Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the head of the military's U.S. Central Command, outlawed the Baath Party on April 16, 2003. The day before I left for Iraq in May, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith presented me with a draft law that would purge top Baathists from the Iraqi government and told me that he planned to issue it immediately. Recognizing how important this step was, I asked Feith to hold off, among other reasons, so I could discuss it with Iraqi leaders and CPA advisers. A week later, after careful consultation, I issued this "de-Baathification" decree, as drafted by the Pentagon.

Our goal was to rid the Iraqi government of the small group of true believers at the top of the party, not to harass rank-and-file Sunnis. We were following in the footsteps of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in postwar Germany. Like the Nazi Party, the Baath Party ran all aspects of Iraqi life. Every Iraqi neighborhood had a party cell. Baathists recruited children to spy on their parents, just as the Nazis had. Hussein even required members of his dreaded intelligence services to read "Mein Kampf."

Although Hussein and his cronies had been in power three times as long as Hitler had, the CPA decree was much less far-reaching than Eisenhower's de-Nazification law, which affected all but the lowest-ranking former Nazis. By contrast, our Iraqi law affected only about 1 percent of Baath Party members. We knew that many had joined out of opportunism or fear, and they weren't our targets.

Eisenhower had barred Nazis not just from holding government jobs but "from positions of importance in quasi-public and private enterprises." The Iraqi law merely prohibited these top party officials from holding government positions, leaving them free to find jobs elsewhere -- even outside Iraq (provided they were not facing criminal charges). Finally, the de-Baathification decree let us make exceptions, and scores of Baathists remained in their posts.

Our critics (usually people who have never visited Iraq) often allege that the de-Baathification decision left Iraqi ministries without effective leadership. Not so. Virtually all the old Baathist ministers had fled before the decree was issued. But we were generally impressed with the senior civil servants left running the ministries, who in turn were delighted to be free of the party hacks who had long overseen them. The net result: We stripped away the tyrant's ardent backers but gave responsible Sunnis a chance to join in building a new Iraq.

The decree was not only judicious but also popular. Four days after I issued it, Hamid Bayati, a leading Shiite politician, told us that the Shiites were "jubilant" because they had feared that the United States planned to leave unrepentant Baathists in senior government and security positions -- what he called "Saddamism without Saddam." Opinion polls during the occupation period repeatedly showed that an overwhelming majority of Iraqis, including many Sunnis, supported de-Baathification.

We then turned over the implementation of this carefully focused policy to Iraq's politicians. I was wrong here. The Iraqi leaders, many of them resentful of the old Sunni regime, broadened the decree's impact far beyond our original design. That led to such unintended results as the firing of several thousand teachers for being Baath Party members. We eventually fixed those excesses, but I should have made implementation the job of a judicial body, not a political one.

Still, the underlying policy of removing top Baath officials from government was right and necessary. This decision is still supported by most Iraqis; witness the difficulties that Iraq's elected government has had in making even modest revisions to the decree.

The war's critics have also comprehensively misunderstood the "disbanding" of Hussein's army, arguing that we kicked away a vital pillar that kept the country stable and created a pool of unemployed, angry men ripe for rebellion. But this fails to reckon with the true nature of Hussein's killing machine and the situation on the ground.

It's somewhat surprising at this late date to have to remind people of the old army's reign of terror. In the 1980s, it waged a genocidal war against Iraq's minority Kurds, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and more than 5,000 people in a notorious chemical-weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq's majority Shiites rose up against Hussein, whose army machine-gunned hundreds of thousands of men, women and children and threw their corpses into mass graves. It's no wonder that Shiites and Kurds, who together make up more than 80 percent of Iraq's population, hated Hussein's military.

Moreover, any thought of using the old army was undercut by conditions on the ground. Before the 2003 war, the army had consisted of about 315,000 miserable draftees, almost all Shiite, serving under a largely Sunni officer corps of about 80,000. The Shiite conscripts were regularly brutalized and abused by their Sunni officers. When the draftees saw which way the war was going, they deserted and, like their officers, went back home. But before the soldiers left, they looted the army's bases right down to the foundations.

So by the time I arrived in Iraq, there was no Iraqi army to disband. Some in the U.S. military and the CIA's Baghdad station suggested that we try to recall Hussein's army. We refused, for overwhelming practical, political and military reasons.

For starters, the draftees were hardly going to return voluntarily to the army they so loathed; we would have had to send U.S. troops into Shiite villages to force them back at gunpoint. And even if we could have assembled a few all-Sunni units, the looting would have meant they'd have no gear or bases.

Moreover, the political consequences of recalling the army would have been catastrophic. Kurdish leaders made it clear to me that recalling Hussein-era forces would make their region secede, which would have triggered a civil war and tempted Turkey and Iran to invade Iraq to prevent the establishment of an independent Kurdistan. Many Shiite leaders who were cooperating with the U.S.-led forces would have taken up arms against us if we'd called back the perpetrators of the southern killing fields of 1991.

Finally, neither the U.S.-led coalition nor the Iraqis could have relied on the allegiance of a recalled army. This lesson was driven home a year later, when the Marines unilaterally recalled a single brigade of Hussein's former army, without consulting with the Iraqi government or the CPA. This "Fallujah Brigade" quickly proved disloyal and had to be disbanded. Moreover, the Marines' action so rattled the Shiites and Kurds that it very nearly derailed the political process of returning sovereignty over the country to the Iraqi people -- further proof of the extreme danger of relying on Hussein's old army.

So, after full coordination within the U.S. government, including the military, I issued an order to build a new, all-volunteer army. Any member of the former army up to the rank of colonel was welcome to apply. By the time I left Iraq, more than 80 percent of the enlisted men and virtually all of the noncommissioned officers and officers in the new army were from the old army, as are most of the top officers today. We also started paying pensions to officers from the old army who could not join the new one -- stipends that the Iraqi government is still paying.

I'll admit that I've grown weary of being a punching bag over these decisions -- particularly from critics who've never spent time in Iraq, don't understand its complexities and can't explain what we should have done differently. These two sensible and moral calls did not create today's insurgency. Intelligence material we discovered after the war began showed that Hussein's security forces had long planned to wage such a revolt.

No doubt some members of the Baath Party and the old army have joined the insurgency. But they are not fighting because they weren't given a chance to earn a living. They're fighting because they want to topple a democratically elected government and reestablish a Baathist dictatorship. The true responsibility for today's bloodshed rests with these people and their al-Qaeda collaborators.

Lpaulbremer@gmail.com


L. Paul Bremer was presidential envoy to Iraq and administrator

of the Coalition Provisional Authority from May 2003 to June 2004.

A White-Tie Dinner for Queen’s White House Visit

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NY Times May 8, 2007

WASHINGTON, May 7 — Presidents come and go, but for more than half a century, the queen has always been the queen.

So it was perhaps no surprise that Washington went a little gaga on Monday, as Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, began an official two-day visit to the capital.

Across the Atlantic, Helen Mirren, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Elizabeth in “The Queen,” shocked the British conscience over the weekend by turning down an invitation to dine at Buckingham Palace.

But on this side of the ocean, Her Majesty was making Americans go weak in the knees.

The White House was decorated to perfection for an exclusive white-tie dinner on Monday evening, with President Bush and the first lady, Laura Bush, playing host to the royal couple and 130 other A-list guests. But the morning was reserved for the masses — or, at least, the masses with the kind of connections that warrant an invitation to the formal arrival ceremony on the South Lawn.

Lucky ticket-holders — more than 7,000 of them — began lining up at 7 a.m. to get in: women in fine hats carrying floral bouquets, little girls in chiffon dresses, boys and men in their best suits, toting cameras and craning their necks for a glimpse of what one called “the real deal.”

Joy Green, whose daughter scored tickets by virtue of her job at the Justice Department, flew in from Selma, Ala., for the occasion. “I think we love it that they have a queen,” she said, explaining the American fascination, “and we’re glad that we don’t.”

At 10:56 a.m., six minutes past schedule, she arrived, a small woman in a black and white hat, white gloves, a white jacket and black skirt. Drums rolled and trumpets blared. There was a gasp in the crowd, and a squeal: “I see her! I see the queen!”

It was a day for pomp and circumstance — a military color guard, a fife and drum band in white wigs, red jackets and tricornered hats — punctuated by a presidential slip of the tongue that lightened the moment during Mr. Bush’s welcoming remarks. Mr. Bush reminded the 81-year-old queen that she had already dined with 10 American presidents.

“You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17 —— ” he went on, stopping to correct himself before 1776 could slip out. The crowd erupted in laughter, and the president and the queen turned to each other for a long, silent gaze. Then, Mr. Bush turned back to the crowd with an explanation. “She gave me a look,” he said, “that only a mother could give a child.”

Mr. Bush had been the recipient of such a look once before in the queen’s presence — from his own mother, back in 1991, when the first President and Mrs. Bush played host to their own state dinner for the queen. By several different accounts, including Mr. Bush’s own, Barbara Bush told the queen that she had seated her son far away from Her Majesty, for fear he might make a wisecrack.

Then, to his mother’s horror, he did, telling the queen that he was his family’s black sheep and asking, “Who’s yours?” The queen, apparently not amused, replied tartly, “None of your business.”

If the queen was not amused on Monday, she did not show it. “I’m sure she accepted it for what it was — a slip of the tongue,” said her press secretary, Penny Russell-Smith. The ceremony was laden with pleasantries and reminders of the close ties between the two nations, as well as a brief foreign policy lecture from Mr. Bush, who made clear that Iraq was not far from his mind as he thanked the queen for “your leadership during these times of danger and decision.”

The queen, in turn, thanked the president, for “this opportunity to underline the extent of our friendship — past, present and future.”

The royal visit began last week with a trip to Jamestown, the original English settlement in Virginia, and will conclude Tuesday with a visit by the queen and Prince Philip to the Children’s National Medical Center, and another dinner, this one at the British Embassy.

For the White House, the visit is a welcome break, a chance for a beleaguered administration to catch its breath and ready itself for what Mrs. Bush promised would be “a fun and festive evening.” She spoke to reporters on Monday afternoon, to offer a sneak preview of the evening affair.

The State Dining Room was brimming with white roses, vermeil centerpieces and pearl-handled flatware. The five-course menu, featuring “spring pea soup with fern leaf lavender,” “saddle of spring lamb,” and three different wines, was set. Dessert petit-fours were on silver platters for the press corps to taste. The chief florist, Nancy Clarke, was busy checking petals and stems.

The guest list, a must-read for Washingtonians, offered a smattering of surprises: Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, who openly criticized the administration over the interrogation of terror suspects; Senator Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican who lost his leader’s job in 2002 after the White House helped orchestrate a coup; and Calvin Borel, the jockey who rode the winning horse at the Kentucky Derby. (The queen attended Saturday’s race.) Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, was the featured entertainment.

The dinner is the first, and probably the only, white-tie event of the Bush administration, and Mrs. Bush confessed Monday to what is by now an open secret: she enlisted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to talk Mr. Bush into wearing formal attire. “We thought if we were ever going to have a white-tie event,” Mrs. Bush said, “this would be the one.”

A Second Founding

Archaeologist's Feat Gives New Depth to Celebration

By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 9, 2007;


JAMESTOWN, Va. -- Once again, the three brave ships will sail the mighty James and moor by Virginia's fair shore.

But this weekend, it will be to the noise of a party -- the 400th anniversary celebration of the first permanent English settlement here in 1607. There will be feasts, music, reenactments and a visit by President Bush on Sunday.

Yet lost, perhaps, amid the celebration of the famed landings, is an achievement of another kind -- one not of adventure, but of science.

Much that is new and exciting in the story of Jamestown is the result of discoveries made in the past 13 years by a white-haired 66-year-old archeologist named William M. Kelso, who found something here no other archaeologist had been able to find in a century of looking:

The long-lost site of Jamestown's fort.

Kelso's findings, unfolding quietly over more than a decade, take Jamestown's story back to its beginning, experts say, and rank among the greatest in North American archeology in the past 50 years.

"It's a big deal," said Carter L. Hudgins, chairman of the department of history and American studies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg. "It's something you thought you'd never be able to look at. . . . We can now begin with the letter A. We don't have to begin with the letter D."

Kelso himself seems astonished. Last week he hosted the queen of England and Vice President Cheney. This week, the president. He chuckles: "This is the whole ball of wax, man."

On May 14, 1607, after a voyage of almost five months -- attended by what was probably Halley's Comet in the night sky -- a hundred or so colonists came ashore on Jamestown Island. It is now a low-lying 1,500-acre tract of loblolly pines, sweet gum trees and marsh grass on the lower James about 150 miles south of Washington.

The colonists, who had left London in December, had sailed into the Chesapeake Bay almost three weeks earlier aboard three ships: the Discovery, the Godspeed and the Susan Constant.

They had been attacked by some Indians and befriended by others and had found the land brimming with wildlife, fruit and flowers, like a paradise.

The voyagers located one likely settling spot, but the water was shallow and their ships would have to anchor out in the river. At Jamestown, the river was "six fathom" deep near the shore, one of them wrote later, and the ships could be moored close and lashed to the trees.

The colonists started on the fort the day they landed -- eventually cutting timber and setting logs vertically into the ground side-by-side, according to their later accounts. The fort was "triangle-wise," George Percy, one of the expedition leaders, wrote, "having three Bulwarkes at every corner like a halfe Moone, and foure or five pieces of Artillerie mounted in them."

By mid-June, Percy wrote, the enclosure was complete.

Over the succeeding months and years, the settlers endured disease, famine and death, as well as friction with the Indians and one another. At one point, the colonists packed up and started for home, only to return after meeting an in-bound ship filled with newcomers.

Decades passed. Jamestown grew and became Virginia's capital. The first Africans arrived in 1619, and slavery evolved. In the 1690s, the capital moved to Williamsburg, the fort crumbled, and the island was largely abandoned. As the tide of history swept inland, Jamestown reverted to farmland, and its name entered the halls of U.S. history.

Archaeology here began in the late 1800s. The first dig, conducted from 1893 to 1903, was led by Mary Jeffrey Galt, co-founder of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. The APVA, a private nonprofit agency, had been given a crucial 22-acre section of the island by landowners in 1893.

More excavation was done in the 1930s. In the mid-1950s, with the 1957 anniversary approaching, the National Park Service, which owns the rest of the island, dug for the fort in three different areas. In one case, archaeologists dredged up the river bottom offshore.

None of these efforts found any trace of the fort, and the consensus grew that it must be elsewhere out in the river.

On April 4, 1994, with a new anniversary approaching, Kelso, now the APVA's director of archeology, jabbed a shovel into the Jamestown turf to begin a new search.

An expert on Colonial America, Kelso had pioneered the archeology of slavery at Thomas Jefferson's Virginia home, Monticello, and at a former plantation outside Williamsburg called Kingsmill.

A stocky man with a trim, white moustache, Kelso once dreamed of a career as a placekicker in football -- he still reveres the late, legendary Cleveland Browns kicker Lou Groza.

But he found archeology more interesting: Kelso retains an air of wonder at his good fortune at Jamestown. Archaeologists are seldom so lucky and seldom give tours to visiting foreign monarchs.

The story of his quest, however, is irresistible.

"A lot of people came to me and said, 'Look, Bill, you're a nice guy, but there's nothing here,' " Kelso recounted in a recent interview in his office at the site; he also lives nearby. "All the evidence was saying it wasn't there, to most people."

But not to him. He said he thought: "By God, I'm not going to go to my grave saying, 'Why didn't I take a shot at that?' "

Kelso said he has always been awed by the power of places.

"You have all these stories and myths around you, and then you go to the place, and somehow you get another understanding," he said. "It brings this sense of reality to what you can't access any other way."

Kelso said most people thought the Jamestown fort must have been erected near the spot where the colonists tied their ships. That had to be in deep water where the river channel once ran close to the island. But 25 acres of that section had long since washed away, he said.

Among other things, Kelso said, he reread the account of the deep-water landing and thought: "They didn't say they put the fort there; they said they landed there."

In addition, the approximate size of the fort -- 1.75 acres -- could be deduced from a surviving description penned about two years after the landing.

There was also an ancient Jamestown map, apparently drawn in 1608 by Spain's ambassador to Britain, which included a crude rendering of a triangular fort.

And there were remains of an old church about 50 yards from the river, which Kelso figured might be on the site of an earlier church that was said to have been in the middle of the fort.

"The whole key to digging here was the church," he said. Churches might be rebuilt over time, he reasoned, but they are seldom moved far from their original site.

He started digging between the church and the river, guessing that he might intersect with evidence of one wall of the fort.

Within weeks, he said, he had: a straight line of discolored earth that contained precise soil imprints probably made by the decayed wood of side-by-side vertical timbers set in a trench about 2 1/2 feet deep.

Painstaking excavation over the next few years gradually revealed similar evidence of the other two walls and outlines of parts of the bulwarks at the corners, he said.

Not only was the fort site not lost to the river, Kelso said, but 90 percent of it survived -- undiscovered for 400 years.

As the digging expanded, Kelso found evidence of buildings erected within the fort, tens of thousands of artifacts the settlers left behind -- last week it was two ivory chess pieces -- and the remains of about 100 settlers themselves.

Crews even found the hole where Kelso believes the fort's flag pole was.

Taken together, his findings have brought Jamestown a rich new life, deepened the portrait of its early inhabitants and rewritten the opening chapters of U.S. history.

"I just love it," he said as he stood one day recently in the middle of the site, marked with a timber stockade probably much like the original. He said he looks around the place where he has spent more than a decade of his life and thinks: "Wow, look at this."

And he knows that beneath his feet there is much more.

"Another lifetime," he said, laughing. "That's what I need."

The Race for the Tallest Skyscraper

By Brian Bremner
yahoo.com Tue May 1,

The race among the world's cities to build the ultimate record-busting, flat-out tallest skyscraper on the planet is fast and furious. And the obsession to build mega-structures in nosebleed territory is particularly acute in much of economically dynamic Asia and the oil-rich Middle East.

The frenzy of high-powered construction projects promises to transform 21st century skyscraper architecture in a big way. Currently, eight of the world's tallest 10 skyscrapers are in the region. And the present reigning champ among skyscrapers globally is Taiwan's Taipei 101, a structure that climbs up 509 meters or 1,671 feet.

Of course, a super-sized building boom is now raging in parts of the Middle East such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. In fact, Samsung snagged the construction work for the monstrously high Burj Dubai, a tower complex slated to reach 800 meters (2,624 ft.) in height--which will easily blow by Taipei 101 when it's completed in late 2008. (It was designed by the U.S. architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The architect was Adrian Smith (news, bio, voting record).)

"Something More Reflective"

Even lesser-known regional cities with a burning ambition to make their mark, view big, gutsy, and distinctively designed skyscrapers as potential game-changers--and are willing to offer serious incentives to get them. That's pretty much what city leaders in the South Korean port city of Busan (formerly known as Pusan) hope to accomplish with the planned 560-m. (1,837-ft.) Millennium Tower World Business Center, expected to be completed in 2010 or 2011.

This will be no bland monolith. New York-based Asymptote Architecture, which won an international design competition for the project that will spawn the tallest building in Asia, came up with a concept that features three tapered towers emerging from a powerful base foundation of floors. It offers stunning ocean and mountain views. "They were looking for something bold," says Hani Rashid, a principal architect with Asymptote. "We actually went in and tried to do something more reflective, to reset the game in terms of this tower mania " in Asia.

Whether the Millennium Tower in Busan (a city also hoping to host the 2020 Summer
Olympic Games) results in a huge economic lift is uncertain. But plenty of cities in Asia are definitely willing to roll the dice, and that's sweet news for international architectural firms and general contractors alike. "The market outlook for ultra-high buildings in the region is pretty bright," says Kang Sun Jong, vice-president in charge of architectural design and consulting at Samsung.

Economy Drivers

These super-structures are about more than just civic pride. Well-executed skyscrapers can be a real economic-development driver. Consider the 452-m. (1,483-ft.) Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, built in 1998, which was the world's tallest until it was eclipsed by Taipei 101 just six years later.

The Petronas Towers " may no longer be the tallest building in the world, but it changed Malaysia and the perception of Kuala Lumpur" worldwide, says Goh Tuan Sui, chief executive officer of property consultancy WTW Malaysia. "A world-class building can also raise the bar for other buildings in the city, be it malls, office blocks, or hotels," he adds.

When it comes to sheer scale of tall building construction activity, it's hard to match Shanghai. Since 1990, the city has erected enough high-rises to fill a big chunk of Manhattan (see BusinessWeek.com, 2/8/07, "Shanghai Rising").

The 88-story Jin Mao Tower, with its distinctive tiered pagoda design, is the tallest building in China, rising to 421 meters, or 1,380 feet, or at least it will be until the 492-m. (1,614-ft.) Shanghai World Financial Center is completed in 2008.

Girding for Materials Shortages

So is the current wave of next-generation skyscrapers starting to bump against the limits of modern-day construction engineering and material science? Rashid, with Asymptote Architecture, doesn't think so, given new construction materials coming onstream, advances in computer-aided building design, and the increasing use of robotic technology in building. "There are new materials emerging that could replace steel," he says.

Probably the biggest challenge for general contractors at the moment is getting their hands on needed engineering and construction talent, and even some basic construction materials, in a timely fashion, given the construction boom in Asia and the Middle East. "So many projects are being undertaken at the same time that securing in-time delivery of construction materials has emerged as a challenging task," says Samsung's Kang in reference to the Burj Dubai project.

As long as city planners in Asia and the Middle East have the financial wherewithal and vision to keep pushing the limits of construction engineering, the global "edifice complex" seems sure to continue.

The mufti we love to hate

Stirring the pot … Hilaly cooks dinner at his Greenacre home. He says he is happiest in the kitchen.

The Age
May 2, 2007


Age and experience have softened the outspoken Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly, who talks to Ben Cubby.

SINCE arriving on a tourist visa in 1982, and overstaying, Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly has lurched from scandal to opprobrium in a way that would have embarrassed Anna Nicole Smith. The holder of the disputed title of Mufti of Australia has politicians falling over each other to tell people how much they dislike him.

A stream of contentious public comments - comparing scantily clad women to uncovered meat, questioning the Holocaust, attacking the sentence given to the gang rapist Bilal Skaf and cracking jokes about Australia's convict heritage - has given even potential supporters cause to edge away from the sheik.

More recently, he has faced claims that donated Australian money which he passed on in Lebanon might have ended up with terrorist groups.

Yet in parts of the Muslim community, especially among elements of Lebanese Australian society, support for Hilaly remains strong.

Away from the spotlight, Hilaly lives a relatively unglamorous life in the south-western suburbs of Sydney. The former sharia court judge is happiest in the kitchen, cooking. He adores his adopted country, he says.

"I have fallen in love, after the age of 40, with a beautiful lady named Australia," Hilaly told the Herald. "What many of those who do not know me, who are angered by some of my comments, are ignorant of, is that I am a person who loves literature, in particular satirical poetry."

His outspoken comments, whether in a public sermon at his Lakemba mosque, on television or in interviews with journalists, are twisted out of recognition by politicians and the media, he says.

"They scrutinise parts of my comments without looking at the overall meaning or the heart of the topic. This is second nature to the section of the media that seeks to market its products through controversial or sensational headlines.

"As for the politicians, they are like addicted gamblers looking for the card that will give them a win."

He believes Australia's close alliance with the United States is one of the greatest failings of the Federal Government. "I acknowledge that Mr Howard is very successful as a leader internally and economically, thereby achieving affluence and happiness for Australians living inside Australia. However, I oppose his foreign policy, which had hurt our reputation and position externally and which had also hurt our national interest," he says.

"We know that America is only concerned with its own interests. The American people have come to realise that [George] Bush's foreign policy is a failure, so why do we not learn from that?"

Wry, charismatic and otherworldly, Hilaly has managed to mould himself into a symbol of resistance to the more materialistic elements in Australian culture, a stand that apparently appeals to many who follow Islam here.

Hilaly says this doesn't mean he has become a kind of politician himself. "My last post before coming to Australia was Lebanon. I confess that my approach to the policies of Arabic countries is that of outspoken, harsh criticism. This approach has created many problems for me with the security services whose role has been to protect these regimes."

As a 10-year-old in Egypt, Hilaly memorised the Koran - the beginning of 22 years of Islamic study that included a degree at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He became a university lecturer in Egypt and Libya before travelling to teach in Lebanon.

"There is no doubt that I came to Australia filled with outspoken revolutionary thought and that I have taken some positions and expressed opinions that had upset some people," he says. "Some of these opinions I no longer accept or agree with now that I am older and have learnt much more from my life experience, in particular, about other cultures."

Generally reviled in Jewish circles for his comments on Israel and the Holocaust, Hilaly says he is now prepared to take a more conciliatory line. "What our Jewish brothers and sisters in Australia and the world over need to know is that I respect Judaism as a faith and I would not be a Muslim unless I believed in and respected the prophet Moses, peace be upon him. As an Arab, I am a Semite one hundred per cent."

But he still treads a fine line that many may continue to see as racist. "I condemn and deplore the Holocaust and all the massacres that the Jews faced at the hands of the Nazis," Hilaly says. "However, I, like many researchers in the world, shy off the number of innocent victims that had been estimated at 6 million. I, along with many rational Jews, reject the Zionist ideology that is based on racism and looking down on those who are not Zionist."

He says he has written to various rabbis in Australia proposing the need to open dialogue about the future of Palestine.

Hilaly's dabblings in international politics may seem grandiose. In Sydney's Muslim community, he is probably more respected for his grassroots work. "I find the work of a man of God to be like an ambulance or a fire truck, 24 hours a day, seven days a week," the sheik says. "I am an emotional person, I am shaken by the cries of a little baby or if I were to see a person undergoing difficulties."

Devotees tell an anecdote they believe shows the mufti's character: Hilaly took a troubled young man into his home to offer him guidance, only to have his wallet stolen by the youth. "When I saw him and saw the wallet with him and the police came and placed him on the ground, I began to feel sorry for him and wept in sadness," Hilaly says.

"I decided to divide my money with him and gave him $400. I asked the police to let him go and I agreed to forgo my rights against him."