Articles

South Korea’s One-Term Trap

2008-07-16T23:46:00.000-07:00

Lessons in Love, by Way of Economics

2008-07-13T20:26:00.000-07:00

Everybody’s Business

By BEN STEIN
July 13, 2008

AS my fine professor of economics at Columbia, C. Lowell Harriss (who just celebrated his 96th birthday) used to tell us, economics is the study of the allocation of scarce goods and services. What could be scarcer or more precious than love? It is rare, hard to come by and often fragile.

My primary life study has been about love. Second comes economics, so here, in the form of a few rules, is a little amalgam of the two fields: the economics of love. (I last wrote about this subject 20 years or so ago, and it’s time to update it.)

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In general, and with rare exceptions, the returns in love situations are roughly proportional to the amount of time and devotion invested. The amount of love you get from an investment in love is correlated, if only roughly, to the amount of yourself you invest in the relationship.

If you invest caring, patience and unselfishness, you get those things back. (This assumes, of course, that you are having a relationship with someone who loves you, and not a one-sided love affair with someone who isn’t interested.)

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High-quality bonds consistently yield more return than junk, and so it is with high-quality love. As for the returns on bonds, I know that my comment will come as a surprise to people who have been brainwashed into thinking that junk bonds are free money. They aren’t. The data from the maven of bond research, W. Braddock Hickman, shows that junk debt outperforms high quality only in rare situations, because of the default risk.

In love, the data is even clearer. Stay with high-quality human beings. And once you find you that are in a junk relationship, sell immediately. Junk situations can look appealing and seductive, but junk is junk. Be wary of it unless you control the market.

(Or, as I like to tell college students, the absolutely surest way to ruin your life is to have a relationship with someone with many serious problems, and to think that you can change this person.)

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Research pays off. The most appealing and seductive (that word again) exterior can hide the most danger and chance of loss. For most of us, diversification in love, at least beyond a very small number, is impossible, so it’s necessary to do a lot of research on the choice you make. It is a rare man or woman who can resist the outward and the surface. But exteriors can hide far too much.

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In every long-term romantic situation, returns are greater when there is a monopoly. If you have to share your love with others, if you have to compete even after a brief while with others, forget the whole thing. You want to have monopoly bonds with your long-term lover. At least most situations work out better this way. ( I am too old to consider short-term romantic events. Those were my life when Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were in the White House.)

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The returns on your investment should at least equal the cost of the investment. If you are getting less back than you put in over a considerable period of time, back off.

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Long-term investment pays off. The impatient day player will fare poorly without inside information or market-controlling power. He or she will have a few good days but years of agony in the world of love.

To coin a phrase: Fall in love in haste, repent at leisure.

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Realistic expectations are everything. If you have unrealistic expectations, they will rarely be met. If you think that you can go from nowhere to having someone wonderful in love with you, you are probably wrong.

You need expectations that match reality before you can make some progress. There may be exceptions, but they are rare.

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When you have a winner, stick with your winner. Whether in love or in the stock market, winners are to be prized.

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Have a dog or many dogs or cats in your life. These are your anchors to windward and your unfailing source of love.

Ben Franklin summed it up well. In times of stress, the three best things to have are an old dog, an old wife and ready money. How right he was.

THERE is more that could be said about the economics of love, but these thoughts may divert you while you are thinking about your future.

And let me close with another thought. I am far from glib about the economy. It has a lot of pitfalls facing it. As workers and investors, we know that many dangers lurk in our paths.

But so far, these things have always worked themselves out and this one will, too. In the meantime, they say that falling in love is wonderful, and that the best is falling in love with what you have.

Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist.

Midsummer Classic

2008-07-07T02:13:00.000-07:00

Five Sets and Nearly Five Hours Later, Nadal Wins Wimbledon

By Liz Clarke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 7,

WIMBLEDON, England, July 6 -- Rafael Nadal wasn't the first Wimbledon champion to climb through the stands and bury a tearful face in his parents' embrace.

But he was the first to scamper from there to the Royal Box and shake the hand of his country's Crown Prince. Nadal broke with tradition again by marching outside the All England club's entrance with the Wimbledon trophy in his arms to sign as many autographs as he could, triggering shrieks worthy of the Beatles before stepping back inside to fulfill the media obligations that awaited.

Only glimmers of light remained by the time Nadal completed the longest final in Wimbledon history Sunday, defeating five-time champion Roger Federer, 6-4, 6-4, 6-7 (7-5), 6-7 (10-8), 9-7. And there wasn't a person Nadal didn't want to share his life's greatest moment with as darkness fell.

Federer fought off three match points before succumbing, sending a final forehand into the net to end the 4-hour 48-minute battle that was twice halted for rain. Nadal collapsed on Centre Court in relief, exhaustion and disbelief over dethroning Federer to win the game's most coveted title.

"It's impossible to describe," said Nadal, 22, who grew up on the clay courts of Mallorca. "It's a dream. When I was a kid I dreamed of playing here. But to win here? For any player -- but for the Spanish especially -- it is a dream."

Nadal had beaten Federer in 11 of their 17 previous matches. But he had never beaten him on grass, falling just short in last year's five-set Wimbledon final.

No player had beaten Federer on grass since 2002. And most predicted that his mastery would continue on Sunday, as the Swiss star sought to top Bjorn Borg's modern mark of five consecutive Wimbledon titles.

But it was Nadal who added the asterisk next to Borg's name instead, becoming the first man since Borg (in 1980) to win the French Open and Wimbledon in the same year.

It was a Wimbledon final made memorable by more than streaks and statistics.

Federer and Nadal are the best players in the world, miles above their challengers in shot-making and grit. And their rivalry, now in its fifth year, often has produced magic.

Sunday's match was their most riveting. It included every shot in the game's lexicon as the Swiss and Spaniard varied tactics and tempo, trying to coax mistakes out of each other. It proved that a clay-court master such as Nadal can adapt his game to grass. And it underscored the best qualities in athletes: resilience, courage, creativity and fair play.

If ever a Grand Slam final called for splitting the trophy, this was it.

Nadal acknowledged as much after accepting the silver gilt cup from the Duke of Kent. With the Centre Court crowd of 15,000 standing and cheering, Nadal spoke about the challenge of competing in the same era as Federer, whom he hailed as "the best player" in history.

"He's still number one," Nadal said, as the Swiss looked on. "He's still the best. He's still [a] five-time champion here. Right now, I have only one."

Nadal was on pace to win his first Wimbledon trophy in straight sets in the early going.

He broke Federer in the third game. And in 48 minutes, he accomplished what no player had done all tournament: win a set against Federer.

Nadal won the next set with similar tactics, hammering away at Federer's backhand at every opportunity. It wasn't that Federer played poorly. He was just shy of perfection, addled by the gusting wind and the wicked spin on Nadal's ball.

Federer changed tactics in the third set, coming to the net more readily to end the long rallies Nadal loves. But with neither able to break serve, a tiebreaker was needed. Federer fired four aces to force a fourth set.

A thrilling display of shot-making followed. In his four years as the world's No. 1 player, Federer has grown accustomed to wielding his racket like a magician's wand. His cross-court forehand is a wonder to behold, particularly when the ball skims the sideline just so and takes a sharp turn out of the court. Even Federer must marvel at his artistry.

But Nadal denied him that luxury so many times Sunday because he kept retrieving balls that would have been winners against lesser men and firing back winners in kind. Still, another tiebreaker was needed.

Nadal bolted to a 5-2 lead but played his worst two points of the match to give Federer a reprieve. After fending off a match point at 6-7, Federer soon found himself again in trouble when Nadal blasted a beautiful passing shot down the line.

Federer answered with a backhand passing shot even more beautiful than Nadal's and went on to win the tiebreak and pull even at two sets each.

Surely, Federer thought, Nadal would be disappointed after that. The momentum had swung his way, Federer thought to himself.

But Nadal's optimism proved as relentless as his athleticism. While Federer assumed he was brooding during the changeover that followed, Nadal was giving himself a pep talk, telling himself, as he sat on his chair, how well he was playing. Yes, he had made a few mistakes, he told himself. But Federer had hit some great shots. Why get down on himself for that? Why not play on, just as he had before, and see what happened?

The fifth set was played out against alternating chants of "Ra-fa!" and "Ro-ger!" The difference in their ability could have fit on the head of a pin. And it seemed impossible that either could manage the two-game advantage required to win the match, with fifth-set tiebreakers not allowed at Wimbledon.

Nadal got the critical break to take an 8-7 lead. And with the light fading, he blasted one last shot that Federer couldn't handle.

Anwar says he will be PM within three years

2008-04-23T20:08:00.000-07:00

KUALA LUMPUR - OPPOSITION leader Anwar Ibrahim yesterday predicted he would be prime minister within three years, sketching out the first rough timetable for his dramatic political comeback.
'I do not think we have established a definite, clear time-frame when I will take over, but it certainly would not reach three years...much earlier than that,' he said confidently in an interview with AFP. 'I am not in a rush.'

It was the strongest statement of intent so far from Datuk Seri Anwar, who has, up to now, been saying he is in no hurry to take control of the government in the wake of large gains made by the opposition in last month's polls.

Becoming premier would require the de facto leader of the opposition Pakatan Rakyat alliance to enter Parliament, which he is expected to do through a by-election for one of the seats held by his party, Parti Keadilan Rakvat (PKR). The other two alliance members are the Democratic Action Party and Parti Islam SeMalaysia.

Yesterday, Datuk Seri Anwar told AP that as prime minister, he would clean up corruption and put an end to the detention of people without trial.
He also said he would be a better premier than Datuk Seri Abdullah Badawi and his predecessor Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

'Well, I would not detain people without trial,' he said, referring to the Internal Security Act. 'I will check corruption for sure.

'With the little experience I have (in the government), I believe I can do much better. But it is for people to judge.'

He also spoke about the need to 'change the course' of the country, listing economic competitiveness, promoting a market economy, social justice and training of manpower as the main tasks.

The former deputy premier was sacked in 1998 in a power struggle, but has returned to politics to stitch together an opposition alliance that now needs just 30 defections from the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition to form a simple majority in the 222-seat Parliament.

He has said he 'has the numbers', but would rather wait for 'a comfortable majority'.

He told reporters in Kota Kinabalu yesterday that some BN Members of Parliament in Sabah had already decided to join Pakatan Rakyat, and were waiting for the right time to do so.

He claimed that if they did not join next month, it could be in the following month, or even on Aug 31, Merdeka Day.

'But I think we should not exceed beyond that,' he was quoted as saying.

ASSOCIATED PRESS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, BERNAMA

Kevin Rudd's sorry speech

2008-02-13T17:53:00.000-08:00

February 13, 2008

The text of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's speech to Parliament.

I move:

That today we honour the indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history.

We reflect on their past mistreatment.

We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were stolen generations - this blemished chapter in our nation's history.

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.

We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.

To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.

And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.

We the parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.

For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.

We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians.

A future where this parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again.

A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, indigenous and non-indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity.

A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed.

A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility.

A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.

There comes a time in the history of nations when their peoples must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to go forward with confidence to embrace their future.

Our nation, Australia, has reached such a time.

That is why the parliament is today here assembled: to deal with this unfinished business of the nation, to remove a great stain from the nations soul and, in a true spirit of reconciliation, to open a new chapter in the history of this great land, Australia.

Last year I made a commitment to the Australian people that if we formed the next government of the Commonwealth we would in parliament say sorry to the stolen generations.

Today I honour that commitment.

I said we would do so early in the life of the new parliament.

Again, today I honour that commitment by doing so at the commencement of this the 42nd parliament of the Commonwealth.

Because the time has come, well and truly come, for all peoples of our great country, for all citizens of our great commonwealth, for all Australians - those who are indigenous and those who are not - to come together to reconcile and together build a new future for our nation.

Some have asked, Why apologise?

Let me begin to answer by telling the parliament just a little of one person's story - an elegant, eloquent and wonderful woman in her 80s, full of life, full of funny stories, despite what has happened in her life's journey, a woman who has travelled a long way to be with us today, a member of the stolen generation who shared some of her story with me when I called around to see her just a few days ago.

Nanna Nungala Fejo, as she prefers to be called, was born in the late 1920s.

She remembers her earliest childhood days living with her family and her community in a bush camp just outside Tennant Creek.

She remembers the love and the warmth and the kinship of those days long ago, including traditional dancing around the camp fire at night.

She loved the dancing. She remembers once getting into strife when, as a four-year-old girl, she insisted on dancing with the male tribal elders rather than just sitting and watching the men, as the girls were supposed to do.

But then, sometime around 1932, when she was about four, she remembers the coming of the welfare men.

Her family had feared that day and had dug holes in the creek bank where the children could run and hide.

What they had not expected was that the white welfare men did not come alone. They brought a truck, two white men and an Aboriginal stockman on horseback cracking his stockwhip.

The kids were found; they ran for their mothers, screaming, but they could not get away. They were herded and piled onto the back of the truck. Tears flowing, her mum tried clinging to the sides of the truck as her children were taken away to the Bungalow in Alice, all in the name of protection.

A few years later, government policy changed. Now the children would be handed over to the missions to be cared for by the churches. But which church would care for them?

The kids were simply told to line up in three lines. Nanna Fejo and her sister stood in the middle line, her older brother and cousin on her left. Those on the left were told that they had become Catholics, those in the middle Methodists and those on the right Church of England.

That is how the complex questions of post-reformation theology were resolved in the Australian outback in the 1930s. It was as crude as that.

She and her sister were sent to a Methodist mission on Goulburn Island and then Croker Island. Her Catholic brother was sent to work at a cattle station and her cousin to a Catholic mission.

Nanna Fejo's family had been broken up for a second time. She stayed at the mission until after the war, when she was allowed to leave for a prearranged job as a domestic in Darwin. She was 16. Nanna Fejo never saw her mum again.

After she left the mission, her brother let her know that her mum had died years before, a broken woman fretting for the children that had literally been ripped away from her.

I asked Nanna Fejo what she would have me say today about her story. She thought for a few moments then said that what I should say today was that all mothers are important. And she added: Families - keeping them together is very important. It's a good thing that you are surrounded by love and that love is passed down the generations. That's what gives you happiness.

As I left, later on, Nanna Fejo took one of my staff aside, wanting to make sure that I was not too hard on the Aboriginal stockman who had hunted those kids down all those years ago.

The stockman had found her again decades later, this time himself to say, Sorry. And remarkably, extraordinarily, she had forgiven him.

Nanna Fejo's is just one story.

There are thousands, tens of thousands of them: stories of forced separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their mums and dads over the better part of a century.

Some of these stories are graphically told in Bringing them home, the report commissioned in 1995 by Prime Minister Keating and received in 1997 by Prime Minister Howard.

There is something terribly primal about these firsthand accounts. The pain is searing; it screams from the pages. The hurt, the humiliation, the degradation and the sheer brutality of the act of physically separating a mother from her children is a deep assault on our senses and on our most elemental humanity.

These stories cry out to be heard; they cry out for an apology.

Instead, from the nation's parliament there has been a stony, stubborn and deafening silence for more than a decade; a view that somehow we, the parliament, should suspend our most basic instincts of what is right and what is wrong; a view that, instead, we should look for any pretext to push this great wrong to one side, to leave it languishing with the historians, the academics and the cultural warriors, as if the stolen generations are little more than an interesting sociological phenomenon.

But the stolen generations are not intellectual curiosities. They are human beings, human beings who have been damaged deeply by the decisions of parliaments and governments. But, as of today, the time for denial, the time for delay, has at last come to an end.

The nation is demanding of its political leadership to take us forward.

Decency, human decency, universal human decency, demands that the nation now step forward to right an historical wrong. That is what we are doing in this place today.

But should there still be doubts as to why we must now act, let the parliament reflect for a moment on the following facts: that, between 1910 and 1970, between 10 and 30 per cent of indigenous children were forcibly taken from their mothers and fathers; that, as a result, up to 50,000 children were forcibly taken from their families; that this was the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state as reflected in the explicit powers given to them under statute; that this policy was taken to such extremes by some in administrative authority that the forced extractions of children of so-called mixed lineage were seen as part of a broader policy of dealing with the problem of the Aboriginal population.

One of the most notorious examples of this approach was from the Northern Territory Protector of Natives, who stated:

"Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation, all native characteristics of the Australian Aborigine are eradicated. The problem of our half-castes" - to quote the protector - "will quickly be eliminated by the complete disappearance of the black race, and the swift submergence of their progeny in the white."

The Western Australian Protector of Natives expressed not dissimilar views, expounding them at length in Canberra in 1937 at the first national conference on indigenous affairs that brought together the Commonwealth and state protectors of natives.

These are uncomfortable things to be brought out into the light. They are not pleasant. They are profoundly disturbing.

But we must acknowledge these facts if we are to deal once and for all with the argument that the policy of generic forced separation was somehow well motivated, justified by its historical context and, as a result, unworthy of any apology today.

Then we come to the argument of intergenerational responsibility, also used by some to argue against giving an apology today.

But let us remember the fact that the forced removal of Aboriginal children was happening as late as the early 1970s.

The 1970s is not exactly a point in remote antiquity. There are still serving members of this parliament who were first elected to this place in the early 1970s.

It is well within the adult memory span of many of us.

The uncomfortable truth for us all is that the parliaments of the nation, individually and collectively, enacted statutes and delegated authority under those statutes that made the forced removal of children on racial grounds fully lawful.

There is a further reason for an apology as well: it is that reconciliation is in fact an expression of a core value of our nation - and that value is a fair go for all.

There is a deep and abiding belief in the Australian community that, for the stolen generations, there was no fair go at all.

There is a pretty basic Aussie belief that says that it is time to put right this most outrageous of wrongs.

It is for these reasons, quite apart from concerns of fundamental human decency, that the governments and parliaments of this nation must make this apology - because, put simply, the laws that our parliaments enacted made the stolen generations possible.

We, the parliaments of the nation, are ultimately responsible, not those who gave effect to our laws. And the problem lay with the laws themselves.

As has been said of settler societies elsewhere, we are the bearers of many blessings from our ancestors; therefore we must also be the bearer of their burdens as well.

Therefore, for our nation, the course of action is clear: that is, to deal now with what has become one of the darkest chapters in Australia's history.

In doing so, we are doing more than contending with the facts, the evidence and the often rancorous public debate.

In doing so, we are also wrestling with our own soul.

This is not, as some would argue, a black-armband view of history; it is just the truth: the cold, confronting, uncomfortable truth - facing it, dealing with it, moving on from it.

Until we fully confront that truth, there will always be a shadow hanging over us and our future as a fully united and fully reconciled people.

It is time to reconcile. It is time to recognise the injustices of the past. It is time to say sorry. It is time to move forward together.

To the stolen generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry.

On behalf of the government of Australia, I am sorry.

On behalf of the parliament of Australia, I am sorry.

I offer you this apology without qualification.

We apologise for the hurt, the pain and suffering that we, the parliament, have caused you by the laws that previous parliaments have enacted.

We apologise for the indignity, the degradation and the humiliation these laws embodied.

We offer this apology to the mothers, the fathers, the brothers, the sisters, the families and the communities whose lives were ripped apart by the actions of successive governments under successive parliaments.

In making this apology, I would also like to speak personally to the members of the stolen generations and their families: to those here today, so many of you; to those listening across the nation - from Yuendumu, in the central west of the Northern Territory, to Yabara, in North Queensland, and to Pitjantjatjara in South Australia.

I know that, in offering this apology on behalf of the government and the parliament, there is nothing I can say today that can take away the pain you have suffered personally.

Whatever words I speak today, I cannot undo that.

Words alone are not that powerful; grief is a very personal thing.

I ask those non-indigenous Australians listening today who may not fully understand why what we are doing is so important to imagine for a moment that this had happened to you.

I say to honourable members here present: imagine if this had happened to us. Imagine the crippling effect. Imagine how hard it would be to forgive.

My proposal is this: if the apology we extend today is accepted in the spirit of reconciliation, in which it is offered, we can today resolve together that there be a new beginning for Australia.

And it is to such a new beginning that I believe the nation is now calling us.

Australians are a passionate lot. We are also a very practical lot.

For us, symbolism is important but, unless the great symbolism of reconciliation is accompanied by an even greater substance, it is little more than a clanging gong.

It is not sentiment that makes history; it is our actions that make history.

Today's apology, however inadequate, is aimed at righting past wrongs.

It is also aimed at building a bridge between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians - a bridge based on a real respect rather than a thinly veiled contempt.

Our challenge for the future is to cross that bridge and, in so doing, to embrace a new partnership between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians - to embrace, as part of that partnership, expanded Link-up and other critical services to help the stolen generations to trace their families if at all possible and to provide dignity to their lives.

But the core of this partnership for the future is to close the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians on life expectancy, educational achievement and employment opportunities.

This new partnership on closing the gap will set concrete targets for the future: within a decade to halve the widening gap in literacy, numeracy and employment outcomes and opportunities for indigenous Australians, within a decade to halve the appalling gap in infant mortality rates between indigenous and non-indigenous children and, within a generation, to close the equally appalling 17-year life gap between indigenous and non-indigenous in overall life expectancy.

The truth is: a business as usual approach towards indigenous Australians is not working.

Most old approaches are not working.

We need a new beginning, a new beginning which contains real measures of policy success or policy failure; a new beginning, a new partnership, on closing the gap with sufficient flexibility not to insist on a one-size-fits-all approach for each of the hundreds of remote and regional indigenous communities across the country but instead allowing flexible, tailored, local approaches to achieve commonly-agreed national objectives that lie at the core of our proposed new partnership; a new beginning that draws intelligently on the experiences of new policy settings across the nation.

However, unless we as a parliament set a destination for the nation, we have no clear point to guide our policy, our programs or our purpose; we have no centralised organising principle.

Let us resolve today to begin with the little children, a fitting place to start on this day of apology for the stolen generations.

Let us resolve over the next five years to have every indigenous four-year-old in a remote Aboriginal community enrolled in and attending a proper early childhood education centre or opportunity and engaged in proper preliteracy and prenumeracy programs.

Let us resolve to build new educational opportunities for these little ones, year by year, step by step, following the completion of their crucial preschool year.

Let us resolve to use this systematic approach to build future educational opportunities for indigenous children to provide proper primary and preventive health care for the same children, to begin the task of rolling back the obscenity that we find today in infant mortality rates in remote indigenous communities up to four times higher than in other communities.

None of this will be easy. Most of it will be hard, very hard. But none of it is impossible, and all of it is achievable with clear goals, clear thinking, and by placing an absolute premium on respect, cooperation and mutual responsibility as the guiding principles of this new partnership on closing the gap.

The mood of the nation is for reconciliation now, between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. The mood of the nation on Indigenous policy and politics is now very simple.

The nation is calling on us, the politicians, to move beyond our infantile bickering, our point-scoring and our mindlessly partisan politics and to elevate this one core area of national responsibility to a rare position beyond the partisan divide.

Surely this is the unfulfilled spirit of the 1967 referendum. Surely, at least from this day forward, we should give it a go.

Let me take this one step further and take what some may see as a piece of political posturing and make a practical proposal to the opposition on this day, the first full sitting day of the new parliament.

I said before the election that the nation needed a kind of war cabinet on parts of Indigenous policy, because the challenges are too great and the consequences are too great to allow it all to become a political football, as it has been so often in the past.

I therefore propose a joint policy commission, to be led by the Leader of the Opposition and me, with a mandate to develop and implement, to begin with, an effective housing strategy for remote communities over the next five years.

It will be consistent with the government's policy framework, a new partnership for closing the gap. If this commission operates well, I then propose that it work on the further task of constitutional recognition of the first Australians, consistent with the longstanding platform commitments of my party and the pre-election position of the opposition.

This would probably be desirable in any event because, unless such a proposition were absolutely bipartisan, it would fail at a referendum. As I have said before, the time has come for new approaches to enduring problems.

Working constructively together on such defined projects would, I believe, meet with the support of the nation. It is time for fresh ideas to fashion the nation's future.

Mr Speaker, today the parliament has come together to right a great wrong. We have come together to deal with the past so that we might fully embrace the future. We have had sufficient audacity of faith to advance a pathway to that future, with arms extended rather than with fists still clenched.

So let us seize the day. Let it not become a moment of mere sentimental reflection.

Let us take it with both hands and allow this day, this day of national reconciliation, to become one of those rare moments in which we might just be able to transform the way in which the nation thinks about itself, whereby the injustice administered to the stolen generations in the name of these, our parliaments, causes all of us to reappraise, at the deepest level of our beliefs, the real possibility of reconciliation writ large: reconciliation across all indigenous Australia; reconciliation across the entire history of the often bloody encounter between those who emerged from the Dreamtime a thousand generations ago and those who, like me, came across the seas only yesterday; reconciliation which opens up whole new possibilities for the future.

It is for the nation to bring the first two centuries of our settled history to a close, as we begin a new chapter. We embrace with pride, admiration and awe these great and ancient cultures we are truly blessed to have among us cultures that provide a unique, uninterrupted human thread linking our Australian continent to the most ancient prehistory of our planet.

Growing from this new respect, we see our indigenous brothers and sisters with fresh eyes, with new eyes, and we have our minds wide open as to how we might tackle, together, the great practical challenges that Indigenous Australia faces in the future.

Let us turn this page together: indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, government and opposition, Commonwealth and state, and write this new chapter in our nation's story together.

First Australians, First Fleeters, and those who first took the oath of allegiance just a few weeks ago. Let's grasp this opportunity to craft a new future for this great land: Australia. I commend the motion to the House.

Waving Goodbye to Hegemony

2008-01-27T19:21:00.000-08:00

By PARAG KHANNA
NY Times, January 27, 2008

Turn on the TV today, and you could be forgiven for thinking it’s 1999. Democrats and Republicans are bickering about where and how to intervene, whether to do it alone or with allies and what kind of world America should lead. Democrats believe they can hit a reset button, and Republicans believe muscular moralism is the way to go. It’s as if the first decade of the 21st century didn’t happen — and almost as if history itself doesn’t happen. But the distribution of power in the world has fundamentally altered over the two presidential terms of George W. Bush, both because of his policies and, more significant, despite them. Maybe the best way to understand how quickly history happens is to look just a bit ahead.

It is 2016, and the Hillary Clinton or John McCain or Barack Obama administration is nearing the end of its second term. America has pulled out of Iraq but has about 20,000 troops in the independent state of Kurdistan, as well as warships anchored at Bahrain and an Air Force presence in Qatar. Afghanistan is stable; Iran is nuclear. China has absorbed Taiwan and is steadily increasing its naval presence around the Pacific Rim and, from the Pakistani port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea. The European Union has expanded to well over 30 members and has secure oil and gas flows from North Africa, Russia and the Caspian Sea, as well as substantial nuclear energy. America’s standing in the world remains in steady decline.

Why? Weren’t we supposed to reconnect with the United Nations and reaffirm to the world that America can, and should, lead it to collective security and prosperity? Indeed, improvements to America’s image may or may not occur, but either way, they mean little. Condoleezza Rice has said America has no “permanent enemies,” but it has no permanent friends either. Many saw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the symbols of a global American imperialism; in fact, they were signs of imperial overstretch. Every expenditure has weakened America’s armed forces, and each assertion of power has awakened resistance in the form of terrorist networks, insurgent groups and “asymmetric” weapons like suicide bombers. America’s unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic and financial countermovements to block American bullying and construct an alternate world order. That new global order has arrived, and there is precious little Clinton or McCain or Obama could do to resist its growth.

The Geopolitical Marketplace

At best, America’s unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war “peace dividend” was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing — and losing — in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world’s other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules — their own rules — without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.

The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an “East-West” struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.

In Europe’s capital, Brussels, technocrats, strategists and legislators increasingly see their role as being the global balancer between America and China. Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a German member of the European Parliament, calls it “European patriotism.” The Europeans play both sides, and if they do it well, they profit handsomely. It’s a trend that will outlast both President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, the self-described “friend of America,” and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, regardless of her visiting the Crawford ranch. It may comfort American conservatives to point out that Europe still lacks a common army; the only problem is that it doesn’t really need one. Europeans use intelligence and the police to apprehend radical Islamists, social policy to try to integrate restive Muslim populations and economic strength to incorporate the former Soviet Union and gradually subdue Russia. Each year European investment in Turkey grows as well, binding it closer to the E.U. even if it never becomes a member. And each year a new pipeline route opens transporting oil and gas from Libya, Algeria or Azerbaijan to Europe. What other superpower grows by an average of one country per year, with others waiting in line and begging to join?

Robert Kagan famously said that America hails from Mars and Europe from Venus, but in reality, Europe is more like Mercury — carrying a big wallet. The E.U.’s market is the world’s largest, European technologies more and more set the global standard and European countries give the most development assistance. And if America and China fight, the world’s money will be safely invested in European banks. Many Americans scoffed at the introduction of the euro, claiming it was an overreach that would bring the collapse of the European project. Yet today, Persian Gulf oil exporters are diversifying their currency holdings into euros, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has proposed that OPEC no longer price its oil in “worthless” dollars. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela went on to suggest euros. It doesn’t help that Congress revealed its true protectionist colors by essentially blocking the Dubai ports deal in 2006. With London taking over (again) as the world’s financial capital for stock listing, it’s no surprise that China’s new state investment fund intends to locate its main Western offices there instead of New York. Meanwhile, America’s share of global exchange reserves has dropped to 65 percent. Gisele Bündchen demands to be paid in euros, while Jay-Z drowns in 500 euro notes in a recent video. American soft power seems on the wane even at home.

And Europe’s influence grows at America’s expense. While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream. Africa wants a real African Union like the E.U.; we offer no equivalent. Activists in the Middle East want parliamentary democracy like Europe’s, not American-style presidential strongman rule. Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didn’t educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past. More broadly, America controls legacy institutions few seem to want — like the International Monetary Fund — while Europe excels at building new and sophisticated ones modeled on itself. The U.S. has a hard time getting its way even when it dominates summit meetings — consider the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas — let alone when it’s not even invited, as with the new East Asian Community, the region’s answer to America’s Apec.

The East Asian Community is but one example of how China is also too busy restoring its place as the world’s “Middle Kingdom” to be distracted by the Middle Eastern disturbances that so preoccupy the United States. In America’s own hemisphere, from Canada to Cuba to Chávez’s Venezuela, China is cutting massive resource and investment deals. Across the globe, it is deploying tens of thousands of its own engineers, aid workers, dam-builders and covert military personnel. In Africa, China is not only securing energy supplies; it is also making major strategic investments in the financial sector. The whole world is abetting China’s spectacular rise as evidenced by the ballooning share of trade in its gross domestic product — and China is exporting weapons at a rate reminiscent of the Soviet Union during the cold war, pinning America down while filling whatever power vacuums it can find. Every country in the world currently considered a rogue state by the U.S. now enjoys a diplomatic, economic or strategic lifeline from China, Iran being the most prominent example.

Without firing a shot, China is doing on its southern and western peripheries what Europe is achieving to its east and south. Aided by a 35 million-strong ethnic Chinese diaspora well placed around East Asia’s rising economies, a Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere has emerged. Like Europeans, Asians are insulating themselves from America’s economic uncertainties. Under Japanese sponsorship, they plan to launch their own regional monetary fund, while China has slashed tariffs and increased loans to its Southeast Asian neighbors. Trade within the India-Japan-Australia triangle — of which China sits at the center — has surpassed trade across the Pacific.

At the same time, a set of Asian security and diplomatic institutions is being built from the inside out, resulting in America’s grip on the Pacific Rim being loosened one finger at a time. From Thailand to Indonesia to Korea, no country — friend of America’s or not — wants political tension to upset economic growth. To the Western eye, it is a bizarre phenomenon: small Asian nation-states should be balancing against the rising China, but increasingly they rally toward it out of Asian cultural pride and an understanding of the historical-cultural reality of Chinese dominance. And in the former Soviet Central Asian countries — the so-called Stans — China is the new heavyweight player, its manifest destiny pushing its Han pioneers westward while pulling defunct microstates like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as oil-rich Kazakhstan, into its orbit. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization gathers these Central Asian strongmen together with China and Russia and may eventually become the “NATO of the East.”

The Big Three are the ultimate “Frenemies.” Twenty-first-century geopolitics will resemble nothing more than Orwell’s 1984, but instead of three world powers (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia), we have three hemispheric pan-regions, longitudinal zones dominated by America, Europe and China. As the early 20th-century European scholars of geopolitics realized, because a vertically organized region contains all climatic zones year-round, each pan-region can be self-sufficient and build a power base from which to intrude in others’ terrain. But in a globalized and shrinking world, no geography is sacrosanct. So in various ways, both overtly and under the radar, China and Europe will meddle in America’s backyard, America and China will compete for African resources in Europe’s southern periphery and America and Europe will seek to profit from the rapid economic growth of countries within China’s growing sphere of influence. Globalization is the weapon of choice. The main battlefield is what I call “the second world.”

The Swing States

There are plenty of statistics that will still tell the story of America’s global dominance: our military spending, our share of the global economy and the like. But there are statistics, and there are trends. To really understand how quickly American power is in decline around the world, I’ve spent the past two years traveling in some 40 countries in the five most strategic regions of the planet — the countries of the second world. They are not in the first-world core of the global economy, nor in its third-world periphery. Lying alongside and between the Big Three, second-world countries are the swing states that will determine which of the superpowers has the upper hand for the next generation of geopolitics. From Venezuela to Vietnam and Morocco to Malaysia, the new reality of global affairs is that there is not one way to win allies and influence countries but three: America’s coalition (as in “coalition of the willing”), Europe’s consensus and China’s consultative styles. The geopolitical marketplace will decide which will lead the 21st century.

The key second-world countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia are more than just “emerging markets.” If you include China, they hold a majority of the world’s foreign-exchange reserves and savings, and their spending power is making them the global economy’s most important new consumer markets and thus engines of global growth — not replacing the United States but not dependent on it either. I.P.O.’s from the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) alone accounted for 39 percent of the volume raised globally in 2007, just one indicator of second-world countries’ rising importance in corporate finance — even after you subtract China. When Tata of India is vying to buy Jaguar, you know the landscape of power has changed. Second-world countries are also fast becoming hubs for oil and timber, manufacturing and services, airlines and infrastructure — all this in a geopolitical marketplace that puts their loyalty up for grabs to any of the Big Three, and increasingly to all of them at the same time. Second-world states won’t be subdued: in the age of network power, they won’t settle for being mere export markets. Rather, they are the places where the Big Three must invest heavily and to which they must relocate productive assets to maintain influence.

While traveling through the second world, I learned to see countries not as unified wholes but rather as having multiple, often disconnected, parts, some of which were on a path to rise into the first world while other, often larger, parts might remain in the third. I wondered whether globalization would accelerate these nations’ becoming ever more fragmented, or if governments would step up to establish central control. Each second-world country appeared to have a fissured personality under pressures from both internal forces and neighbors. I realized that to make sense of the second world, it was necessary to assess each country from the inside out.

Second-world countries are distinguished from the third world by their potential: the likelihood that they will capitalize on a valuable commodity, a charismatic leader or a generous patron. Each and every second-world country matters in its own right, for its economic, strategic or diplomatic weight, and its decision to tilt toward the United States, the E.U. or China has a strong influence on what others in its region decide to do. Will an American nuclear deal with India push Pakistan even deeper into military dependence on China? Will the next set of Arab monarchs lean East or West? The second world will shape the world’s balance of power as much as the superpowers themselves will.

In exploring just a small sample of the second world, we should start perhaps with the hardest case: Russia. Apparently stabilized and resurgent under the Kremlin-Gazprom oligarchy, why is Russia not a superpower but rather the ultimate second-world swing state? For all its muscle flexing, Russia is also disappearing. Its population decline is a staggering half million citizens per year or more, meaning it will be not much larger than Turkey by 2025 or so — spread across a land so vast that it no longer even makes sense as a country. Travel across Russia today, and you’ll find, as during Soviet times, city after city of crumbling, heatless apartment blocks and neglected elderly citizens whose value to the state diminishes with distance from Moscow. The forced Siberian migrations of the Soviet era are being voluntarily reversed as children move west to more tolerable and modern climes. Filling the vacuum they have left behind are hundreds of thousands of Chinese, literally gobbling up, plundering, outright buying and more or less annexing Russia’s Far East for its timber and other natural resources. Already during the cold war it was joked that there were “no disturbances on the Sino-Finnish border,” a prophecy that seems ever closer to fulfillment.

Russia lost its western satellites almost two decades ago, and Europe, while appearing to be bullied by Russia’s oil-dependent diplomacy, is staging a long-term buyout of Russia, whose economy remains roughly the size of France’s. The more Europe gets its gas from North Africa and oil from Azerbaijan, the less it will rely on Russia, all the while holding the lever of being by far Russia’s largest investor. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development provides the kinds of loans that help build an alternative, less corrupt private sector from below, while London and Berlin welcome Russia’s billionaires, allowing the likes of Boris Berezovsky to openly campaign against Putin. The E.U. and U.S. also finance and train a pugnacious second-world block of Baltic and Balkan nations, whose activists agitate from Belarus to Uzbekistan. Privately, some E.U. officials say that annexing Russia is perfectly doable; it’s just a matter of time. In the coming decades, far from restoring its Soviet-era might, Russia will have to decide whether it wishes to exist peacefully as an asset to Europe or the alternative — becoming a petro-vassal of China.

Turkey, too, is a totemic second-world prize advancing through crucial moments of geopolitical truth. During the cold war, NATO was the principal vehicle for relations with Turkey, the West’s listening post on the southwestern Soviet border. But with Turkey’s bending over backward to avoid outright E.U. rejection, its refusal in 2003 to let the U.S. use Turkish territory as a staging point for invading Iraq marked a turning point — away from the U.S. “America always says it lobbies the E.U. on our behalf,” a Turkish strategic analyst in Ankara told me, “but all that does is make the E.U. more stringent. We don’t need that kind of help anymore.”

To be sure, Turkish pride contains elements of an aggressive neo-Ottomanism that is in tension with some E.U. standards, but this could ultimately serve as Europe’s weapon to project stability into Syria, Iraq and Iran — all of which Europe effectively borders through Turkey itself. Roads are the pathways to power, as I learned driving across Turkey in a beat-up Volkswagen a couple of summers ago. Turkey’s master engineers have been boring tunnels, erecting bridges and flattening roads across the country’s massive eastern realm, allowing it to assert itself over the Arab and Persian worlds both militarily and economically as Turkish merchants look as much East as West. Already joint Euro-Turkish projects have led to the opening of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, with a matching rail line and highway planned to buttress European influence all the way to Turkey’s fraternal friend Azerbaijan on the oil-rich Caspian Sea.

It takes only one glance at Istanbul’s shimmering skyline to realize that even if Turkey never becomes an actual E.U. member, it is becoming ever more Europeanized. Turkey receives more than $20 billion in foreign investment and more than 20 million tourists every year, the vast majority of both from E.U. countries. Ninety percent of the Turkish diaspora lives in Western Europe and sends home another $1 billion per year in remittances and investments. This remitted capital is spreading growth and development eastward in the form of new construction ventures, kilim factories and schools. With the accession of Romania and Bulgaria to the E.U. a year ago, Turkey now physically borders the E.U. (beyond its narrow frontier with Greece), symbolizing how Turkey is becoming a part of the European superpower.

Western diplomats have a long historical familiarity, however dramatic and tumultuous, with Russia and Turkey. But what about the Stans: landlocked but resource-rich countries run by autocrats? Ever since these nations were flung into independence by the Soviet collapse, China has steadily replaced Russia as their new patron. Trade, oil pipelines and military exercises with China under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization make it the new organizing pole for the region, with the U.S. scrambling to maintain modest military bases in the region. (Currently it is forced to rely far too much on Afghanistan after being booted, at China’s and Russia’s behest, from the Karshi Khanabad base in Uzbekistan in 2005.) The challenge of getting ahead in the strategically located and energy-rich Stans is the challenge of a bidding contest in which values seem not to matter. While China buys more Kazakh oil and America bids for defense contracts, Europe offers sustained investment and holds off from giving President Nursultan Nazarbayev the high-status recognition he craves. Kazakhstan considers itself a “strategic partner” of just about everyone, but tell that to the Big Three, who bribe government officials to cancel the others’ contracts and spy on one another through contract workers — all in the name of preventing the others from gaining mastery over the fabled heartland of Eurasian power.

Just one example of the lengths to which foreigners will go to stay on good terms with Nazarbayev is the current negotiation between a consortium of Western energy giants, including ENI and Exxon, and Kazakhstan’s state-run oil company over the development of the Caspian’s massive Kashagan oil field. At present, the consortium is coughing up at least $4 billion as well as a large hand-over of shares to compensate for delayed exploration and production — and Kazakhstan isn’t satisfied yet. The lesson from Kazakhstan, and its equally strategic but far less predictable neighbor Uzbekistan, is how fickle the second world can be, its alignments changing on a whim and causing headaches and ripple effects in all directions. To be distracted elsewhere or to lack sufficient personnel on the ground can make the difference between winning and losing a major round of the new great game.

The Big Three dynamic is not just some distant contest by which America ensures its ability to dictate affairs on the other side of the globe. Globalization has brought the geopolitical marketplace straight to America’s backyard, rapidly eroding the two-centuries-old Monroe Doctrine in the process. In truth, America called the shots in Latin America only when its southern neighbors lacked any vision of their own. Now they have at least two non-American challengers: China and Chávez. It was Simón Bolívar who fought ferociously for South America’s independence from Spanish rule, and today it is the newly renamed Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela that has inspired an entire continent to bootstrap its way into the global balance of power on its own terms. Hugo Chávez, the country’s clownish colonel, may last for decades to come or may die by the gun, but either way, he has called America’s bluff and won, changing the rules of North-South relations in the Western hemisphere. He has emboldened and bankrolled leftist leaders across the continent, helped Argentina and others pay back and boot out the I.M.F. and sponsored a continentwide bartering scheme of oil, cattle, wheat and civil servants, reminding even those who despise him that they can stand up to the great Northern power. Chávez stands not only on the ladder of high oil prices. He relies on tacit support from Europe and hardheaded intrusion from China, the former still the country’s largest investor and the latter feverishly repairing Venezuela’s dilapidated oil rigs while building its own refineries.

But Chávez’s challenge to the United States is, in inspiration, ideological, whereas the second-world shift is really structural. Even with Chávez still in power, it is Brazil that is reappearing as South America’s natural leader. Alongside India and South Africa, Brazil has led the charge in global trade negotiations, sticking it to the U.S. on its steel tariffs and to Europe on its agricultural subsidies. Geographically, Brazil is nearly as close to Europe as to America and is as keen to build cars and airplanes for Europe as it is to export soy to the U.S. Furthermore, Brazil, although a loyal American ally in the cold war, wasted little time before declaring a “strategic alliance” with China. Their economies are remarkably complementary, with Brazil shipping iron ore, timber, zinc, beef, milk and soybeans to China and China investing in Brazil’s hydroelectric dams, steel mills and shoe factories. Both China and Brazil’s ambitions may soon alter the very geography of their relations, with Brazil leading an effort to construct a Trans-Oceanic Highway from the Amazon through Peru to the Pacific Coast, facilitating access for Chinese shipping tankers. Latin America has mostly been a geopolitical afterthought over the centuries, but in the 21st century, all resources will be competed for, and none are too far away.

The Middle East — spanning from Morocco to Iran — lies between the hubs of influence of the Big Three and has the largest number of second-world swing states. No doubt the thaw with Libya, brokered by America and Britain after Muammar el-Qaddafi declared he would abandon his country’s nuclear pursuits in 2003, was partly motivated by growing demand for energy from a close Mediterranean neighbor. But Qaddafi is not selling out. He and his advisers have astutely parceled out production sharing agreements to a balanced assortment of American, European, Chinese and other Asian oil giants. Mindful of the history of Western oil companies’ exploitation of Arabia, he — like Chávez in Venezuela and Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan — has also cleverly ratcheted up the pressure on foreigners to share more revenue with the regime by tweaking contracts, rounding numbers liberally and threatening expropriation. What I find in virtually every Arab country is not such nationalism, however, but rather a new Arabism aimed at spreading oil wealth within the Arab world rather than depositing it in the United States as in past oil booms. And as Egypt, Syria and other Arab states receive greater investment from the Persian Gulf and start spending more on their own, they, too, become increasingly important second-world players who can thwart the U.S.

Saudi Arabia, for quite some years to come still the planet’s leading oil producer, is a second-world prize on par with Russia and equally up for grabs. For the past several decades, America’s share of the foreign direct investment into the kingdom decisively shaped the country’s foreign policy, but today the monarchy is far wiser, luring Europe and Asia to bring their investment shares toward a third each. Saudi Arabia has engaged Europe in an evolving Persian Gulf free-trade area, while it has invested close to $1 billion in Chinese oil refineries. Make no mistake: America was never all powerful only because of its military dominance; strategic leverage must have an economic basis. A major common denominator among key second-world countries is the need for each of the Big Three to put its money where its mouth is.

For all its historical antagonism with Saudi Arabia, Iran is playing the same swing-state game. Its diplomacy has not only managed to create discord among the U.S. and E.U. on sanctions; it has also courted China, nurturing a relationship that goes back to the Silk Road. Today Iran represents the final square in China’s hopscotch maneuvering to reach the Persian Gulf overland without relying on the narrow Straits of Malacca. Already China has signed a multibillion-dollar contract for natural gas from Iran’s immense North Pars field, another one for construction of oil terminals on the Caspian Sea and yet another to extend the Tehran metro — and it has boosted shipment of ballistic-missile technology and air-defense radars to Iran. Several years of negotiation culminated in December with Sinopec sealing a deal to develop the Yadavaran oil field, with more investments from China (and others) sure to follow. The longer International Atomic Energy Agency negotiations drag on, the more likely it becomes that Iran will indeed be able to stay afloat without Western investment because of backing from China and from its second-world friends — without giving any ground to the West.

Interestingly, it is precisely Muslim oil-producing states — Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iran, (mostly Muslim) Kazakhstan, Malaysia — that seem the best at spreading their alignments across some combination of the Big Three simultaneously: getting what they want while fending off encroachment from others. America may seek Muslim allies for its image and the “war on terror,” but these same countries seem also to be part of what Samuel Huntington called the “Confucian-Islamic connection.” What is more, China is pulling off the most difficult of superpower feats: simultaneously maintaining positive ties with the world’s crucial pairs of regional rivals: Venezuela and Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan. At this stage, Western diplomats have only mustered the wherewithal to quietly denounce Chinese aid policies and value-neutral alliances, but they are far from being able to do much of anything about them.

This applies most profoundly in China’s own backyard, Southeast Asia. Some of the most dynamic countries in the region Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam are playing the superpower suitor game with admirable savvy. Chinese migrants have long pulled the strings in the region’s economies even while governments sealed defense agreements with the U.S. Today, Malaysia and Thailand still perform joint military exercises with America but also buy weapons from, and have defense treaties with, China, including the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation by which Asian nations have pledged nonaggression against one another. (Indonesia, a crucial American ally during the cold war, has also been forming defense ties with China.) As one senior Malaysian diplomat put it to me, without a hint of jest, “Creating a community is easy among the yellow and the brown but not the white.” Tellingly, it is Vietnam, because of its violent histories with the U.S. and China, which is most eager to accept American defense contracts (and a new Intel microchip plant) to maintain its strategic balance. Vietnam, like most of the second world, doesn’t want to fall into any one superpower’s sphere of influence.

The Anti-Imperial Belt

The new multicolor map of influence — a Venn diagram of overlapping American, Chinese and European influence — is a very fuzzy read. No more “They’re with us” or “He’s our S.O.B.” Mubarak, Musharraf, Malaysia’s Mahathir and a host of other second-world leaders have set a new standard for manipulative prowess: all tell the U.S. they are its friend while busily courting all sides.

What is more, many second-world countries are confident enough to form anti-imperial belts of their own, building trade, technology and diplomatic axes across the (second) world from Brazil to Libya to Iran to Russia. Indeed, Russia has stealthily moved into position to construct Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor, putting it firmly in the Chinese camp on the Iran issue, while also offering nuclear reactors to Libya and arms to Venezuela and Indonesia. Second-world countries also increasingly use sovereign-wealth funds (often financed by oil) worth trillions of dollars to throw their weight around, even bullying first-world corporations and markets. The United Arab Emirates (particularly as represented by their capital, Abu Dhabi), Saudi Arabia and Russia are rapidly climbing the ranks of foreign-exchange holders and are hardly holding back in trying to buy up large shares of Western banks (which have suddenly become bargains) and oil companies. Singapore’s sovereign-wealth fund has taken a similar path. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia plans an international investment fund that will dwarf Abu Dhabi’s. From Switzerland to Citigroup, a reaction is forming to limit the shares such nontransparent sovereign-wealth funds can control, showing just how quickly the second world is rising in the global power game.

To understand the second world, you have to start to think like a second-world country. What I have seen in these and dozens of other countries is that globalization is not synonymous with Americanization; in fact, nothing has brought about the erosion of American primacy faster than globalization. While European nations redistribute wealth to secure or maintain first-world living standards, on the battlefield of globalization second-world countries’ state-backed firms either outhustle or snap up American companies, leaving their workers to fend for themselves. The second world’s first priority is not to become America but to succeed by any means necessary.

The Non-American World

Karl Marx and Max Weber both chastised Far Eastern cultures for being despotic, agrarian and feudal, lacking the ingredients for organizational success. Oswald Spengler saw it differently, arguing that mankind both lives and thinks in unique cultural systems, with Western ideals neither transferable nor relevant. Today the Asian landscape still features ancient civilizations but also by far the most people and, by certain measures, the most money of any region in the world. With or without America, Asia is shaping the world’s destiny — and exposing the flaws of the grand narrative of Western civilization in the process.

The rise of China in the East and of the European Union within the West has fundamentally altered a globe that recently appeared to have only an American gravity — pro or anti. As Europe’s and China’s spirits rise with every move into new domains of influence, America’s spirit is weakened. The E.U. may uphold the principles of the United Nations that America once dominated, but how much longer will it do so as its own social standards rise far above this lowest common denominator? And why should China or other Asian countries become “responsible stakeholders,” in former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick’s words, in an American-led international order when they had no seat at the table when the rules were drafted? Even as America stumbles back toward multilateralism, others are walking away from the American game and playing by their own rules.

The self-deluding universalism of the American imperium — that the world inherently needs a single leader and that American liberal ideology must be accepted as the basis of global order — has paradoxically resulted in America quickly becoming an ever-lonelier superpower. Just as there is a geopolitical marketplace, there is a marketplace of models of success for the second world to emulate, not least the Chinese model of economic growth without political liberalization (itself an affront to Western modernization theory). As the historian Arnold Toynbee observed half a century ago, Western imperialism united the globe, but it did not assure that the West would dominate forever — materially or morally. Despite the “mirage of immortality” that afflicts global empires, the only reliable rule of history is its cycles of imperial rise and decline, and as Toynbee also pithily noted, the only direction to go from the apogee of power is down.

The web of globalization now has three spiders. What makes America unique in this seemingly value-free contest is not its liberal democratic ideals — which Europe may now represent better than America does — but rather its geography. America is isolated, while Europe and China occupy two ends of the great Eurasian landmass that is the perennial center of gravity of geopolitics. When America dominated NATO and led a rigid Pacific alliance system with Japan, South Korea, Australia and Thailand, it successfully managed the Herculean task of running the world from one side of it. Now its very presence in Eurasia is tenuous; it has been shunned by the E.U. and Turkey, is unwelcome in much of the Middle East and has lost much of East Asia’s confidence. “Accidental empire” or not, America must quickly accept and adjust to this reality. Maintaining America’s empire can only get costlier in both blood and treasure. It isn’t worth it, and history promises the effort will fail. It already has.

Would the world not be more stable if America could be reaccepted as its organizing principle and leader? It’s very much too late to be asking, because the answer is unfolding before our eyes. Neither China nor the E.U. will replace the U.S. as the world’s sole leader; rather all three will constantly struggle to gain influence on their own and balance one another. Europe will promote its supranational integration model as a path to resolving Mideast disputes and organizing Africa, while China will push a Beijing consensus based on respect for sovereignty and mutual economic benefit. America must make itself irresistible to stay in the game.

I believe that a complex, multicultural landscape filled with transnational challenges from terrorism to global warming is completely unmanageable by a single authority, whether the United States or the United Nations. Globalization resists centralization of almost any kind. Instead, what we see gradually happening in climate-change negotiations (as in Bali in December) — and need to see more of in the areas of preventing nuclear proliferation and rebuilding failed states — is a far greater sense of a division of labor among the Big Three, a concrete burden-sharing among them by which they are judged not by their rhetoric but the responsibilities they fulfill. The arbitrarily composed Security Council is not the place to hash out such a division of labor. Neither are any of the other multilateral bodies bogged down with weighted voting and cacophonously irrelevant voices. The big issues are for the Big Three to sort out among themselves.

Less Can Be More

So let’s play strategy czar. You are a 21st-century Kissinger. Your task is to guide the next American president (and the one after that) from the demise of American hegemony into a world of much more diffuse governance. What do you advise, concretely, to mitigate the effects of the past decade’s policies — those that inspired defiance rather than cooperation — and to set in motion a virtuous circle of policies that lead to global equilibrium rather than a balance of power against the U.S.?

First, channel your inner J.F.K. You are president, not emperor. You are commander in chief and also diplomat in chief. Your grand strategy is a global strategy, yet you must never use the phrase “American national interest.” (It is assumed.) Instead talk about “global interests” and how closely aligned American policies are with those interests. No more “us” versus “them,” only “we.” That means no more talk of advancing “American values” either. What is worth having is universal first and American second. This applies to “democracy” as well, where timing its implementation is as important as the principle itself. Right now, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, the hero of the second world — including its democracies — is Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore.

We have learned the hard way that what others want for themselves trumps what we want for them — always. Neither America nor the world needs more competing ideologies, and moralizing exhortations are only useful if they point toward goals that are actually attainable. This new attitude must be more than an act: to obey this modest, hands-off principle is what would actually make America the exceptional empire it purports to be. It would also be something every other empire in history has failed to do.

Second, Pentagonize the State Department. Adm. William J. Fallon, head of Central Command (Centcom), not Robert Gates, is the man really in charge of the U.S. military’s primary operations. Diplomacy, too, requires the equivalent of geographic commands — with top-notch assistant secretaries of state to manage relations in each key region without worrying about getting on the daily agenda of the secretary of state for menial approvals. Then we’ll be ready to coordinate within distant areas. In some regions, our ambassadors to neighboring countries meet only once or twice a year; they need to be having weekly secure video-conferences. Regional institutions are thriving in the second world — think Mercosur (the South American common market), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), the Gulf Cooperation Council in the Persian Gulf. We need high-level ambassadors at those organizations too. Taken together, this allows us to move beyond, for example, the current Millennium Challenge Account — which amounts to one-track aid packages to individual countries already going in the right direction — toward encouraging the kind of regional cooperation that can work in curbing both terrorism and poverty. Only if you think regionally can a success story have a demonstration effect. This approach will be crucial to the future of the Pentagon’s new African command. (Until last year, African relations were managed largely by European command, or Eucom, in Germany.) Suspicions of America are running high in Africa, and a country-by-country strategy would make those suspicions worse. Finally, to achieve strategic civilian-military harmonization, we have to first get the maps straight. The State Department puts the Stans in the South and Central Asia bureau, while the Pentagon puts them within the Middle-East-focused Centcom. The Chinese divide up the world the Pentagon’s way; so, too, should our own State Department.

Third, deploy the marchmen. Europe is boosting its common diplomatic corps, while China is deploying retired civil servants, prison laborers and Chinese teachers — all are what the historian Arnold Toynbee called marchmen, the foot-soldiers of empire spreading values and winning loyalty. There are currently more musicians in U.S. military marching bands than there are Foreign Service officers, a fact not helped by Congress’s decision to effectively freeze growth in diplomatic postings. In this context, Condoleezza Rice’s “transformational diplomacy” is a myth: we don’t have enough diplomats for core assignments, let alone solo hardship missions. We need a Peace Corps 10 times its present size, plus student exchanges, English-teaching programs and hands-on job training overseas — with corporate sponsorship.

That’s right. In true American fashion, we must build a diplomatic-industrial complex. Europe and China all but personify business-government collusion, so let State raise money from Wall Street as it puts together regional aid and investment packages. American foreign policy must be substantially more than what the U.S. government directs. After all, the E.U. is already the world’s largest aid donor, and China is rising in the aid arena as well. Plus, each has a larger population than the U.S., meaning deeper benches of recruits, and are not political targets in the present political atmosphere the way Americans abroad are. The secret weapon must be the American citizenry itself. American foundations and charities, not least the Gates and Ford Foundations, dwarf European counterparts in their humanitarian giving; if such private groups independently send more and more American volunteers armed with cash, good will and local knowledge to perform “diplomacy of the deed,” then the public diplomacy will take care of itself.

Fourth, make the global economy work for us. By resurrecting European economies, the Marshall Plan was a down payment on even greater returns in terms of purchasing American goods. For now, however, as the dollar falls, our manufacturing base declines and Americans lose control of assets to wealthier foreign funds, our scientific education, broadband access, health-care, safety and a host of other standards are all slipping down the global rankings. Given our deficits and political gridlock, the only solution is to channel global, particularly Asian, liquidity into our own public infrastructure, creating jobs and technology platforms that can keep American innovation ahead of the pack. Globalization apologizes to no one; we must stay on top of it or become its victim.

Fifth, convene a G-3 of the Big Three. But don’t set the agenda; suggest it. These are the key issues among which to make compromises and trade-offs: climate change, energy security, weapons proliferation and rogue states. Offer more Western clean technology to China in exchange for fewer weapons and lifelines for the Sudanese tyrants and the Burmese junta. And make a joint effort with the Europeans to offer massive, irresistible packages to the people of Iran, Uzbekistan and Venezuela — incentives for eventual regime change rather than fruitless sanctions. A Western change of tone could make China sweat. Superpowers have to learn to behave, too.

Taken together, all these moves could renew American competitiveness in the geopolitical marketplace — and maybe even prove our exceptionalism. We need pragmatic incremental steps like the above to deliver tangible gains to people beyond our shores, repair our reputation, maintain harmony among the Big Three, keep the second world stable and neutral and protect our common planet. Let’s hope whoever is sworn in as the next American president understands this.

Parag Khanna is a senior research fellow in the American Strategy Program of the New America Foundation. This essay is adapted from his book, “The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order,” to be published by Random House in March.

As Suharto Clings to Life, Mystics See Spirits’ Power

2008-01-27T19:02:00.000-08:00

By SETH MYDANS
NY Times, January 27, 2008

SOLO, Indonesia — As former President Suharto hovers on the edge of death, some people here say it is not doctors and machines that have kept him alive, but an unseen cosmos of mystical forces.

Mr. Suharto, 86, a committed mystic himself, has rallied more than once over the past two weeks after reaching what seemed to be the end as his lungs, heart and kidneys failed him. His doctors have said they were amazed and baffled by his recoveries.

The diagnosis among believers here in Solo, the heart of Javanese culture, is that powerful occult forces in his body will not let him go, that certain rituals that would cleanse his spirit have not yet been performed or that nature has not yet signaled that it is ready to receive him.

“The power of spirits inside his body is keeping him alive,” said Darsono, 34, a spiritualist here who is said to be able to perform magic, expressing one common view. “Suharto’s life is supported by a mystical power,” added Mr. Darsono, who, like many Indonesians, goes by one name.

Indonesia is an overwhelmingly Muslim country, the most populous in the world, with 240 million people. But the version of Islam practiced by most people here is mixed with the Hinduism, Buddhism and especially animism that were present before Muslim traders brought their religion to the country in the 12th century.

Animist beliefs and superstitions color everyday life for many people, and occult explanations, including the power of curses and black magic, are sometimes given for everyday events.

“Indonesian Islam is what I call accommodative,” said Azyumardi Azra, director of the graduate school at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta. “Most Indonesian Muslims accept local tradition even though the local tradition could not be accepted by, say, Wahhabi-minded people,” he said, referring to followers of a strict Islamic sect.

When a religious war gripped the Moluccas, a group of islands in the eastern Indonesian archipelago, at the beginning of the decade, both Christians and Muslims turned to mysticism, performing animist rituals before fighting each other.

All six presidents of Indonesia — each a Muslim — paid respects to the spirit world, visiting sites said to hold mystical power, consulting with seers or collecting tokens of magic like the Indonesian dagger called a kris.

Mr. Suharto stands out among them for his devotion. He studied with a spiritual teacher as a boy and performed ritual acts throughout his presidency, continuing after he was deposed by a popular uprising in May 1998.

Over the years, according to his aides, he has made frequent visits to sacred places, including mountains, caves, tombs and ruins, and he has taken ritual baths in the ocean and in rivers at places that were believed to hold special powers. He is said to have collected hundreds of sacred artifacts to absorb their magical power.

Among them, according to local press reports, is a red stone called a mirah delima, which psychics say can protect its owner from swords and bullets and guard against illness.

Mr. Suharto’s mentor, Daryatmo, was an Islamic teacher who also practiced mysticism, and the former president pays tribute to him in his autobiography, “My Thoughts, Words and Deeds.” Mr. Daryatmo’s death in January 1998 was taken by some people as a warning of Mr. Suharto’s fall from power four months later.

Omens of his downfall are said to have included the breaking of a gavel in Parliament and Mr. Suharto’s loss of the chignon, or hairpiece, of his wife, Siti Hartinah, who died in 1996.

Many Indonesians maintain that her death was the beginning of the end for Mr. Suharto. She was a minor member of the royal family here, the Sultanate of Solo, and is said to have been the source of Mr. Suharto’s legitimacy as a ruler. In Javanese tradition, power has an essence of its own, known as wahyu, and is conferred like a mantle on certain chosen people in a way similar to the “mandate of heaven” that empowered Chinese emperors.

After the death of Mr. Suharto’s wife, spiritualists as well as political scientists saw Mr. Suharto becoming less deft as a ruler. In his desperation near the end, according to accounts at the time, he called in a West African spiritualist to help him.

“There is a tradition of Javanese kings becoming kings because of their wives,” Onghokham, a prominent social historian, said in an interview. He died last year. “When Suharto rose to power, people believed that the wife had the wahyu, the flaming womb, and whoever united with her would get the wahyu. After her death, people began to sense the wahyu was gone.”

In the past several weeks, as Mr. Suharto’s prolonged and highly publicized illness has riveted the nation, a variety of new portents are being observed by those who believe in such things, some pointing toward death, some toward survival.

Nature, for example, seems to be giving mixed signals.

Ominously, landslides have occurred near here recently, both on the slopes of Mount Lawu, where Mr. Suharto often meditated, and on the road leading up a small mountain to a mausoleum where he is to be buried beside the tomb of his wife.

And two weeks ago, when doctors said Mr. Suharto was dying, a huge tree fell near Parangtritis, the town that is home to the mystical Queen of the South Sea, where Mr. Suharto sometimes bathed in the ocean. The queen’s specter is said to visit the sultans of Poso and of nearby Yogyakarta for periodic conjugal reunions.

A contrary view holds that the weather has simply been too nice for Mr. Suharto to die. Java has been sunny most of the past two weeks. According to this belief, the earth must weep and quake when the ruler dies.

That has sometimes happened when Javanese kings died in the past, according to a recent article in the newspaper Suara Merdeka.

The newspaper added, however, that the mystical power of omens and portents like this “cannot be verified.”

The concern among many mystics is that certain lucky charms that have been spiritually implanted in Mr. Suharto’s body have become malevolent and are prolonging his suffering. Spiritually, he is ready to die and should be relieved of his pain, they say, but those charms will not release him until they have been ritually removed.

A Muslim cleric named Nasruddin Ansory suggested that the removal could be done by having 40 pure-hearted people pray by his bedside.

Another solution was proposed by a prominent spiritualist named Permadi, who is also a member of Parliament. Mr. Permadi said he had received a “spiritual whisper” telling him that the spirits would release Mr. Suharto if he apologized to Sukarno, the man he supplanted as president in 1967.

Sukarno, the founding president of Indonesia who died in 1970, is also said to have surrounded himself with magic charms and with dwarfs, albinos and others he believed to have spiritual qualities, but they seem to have been no match for Mr. Suharto.

M. T. Arifin, 50, is a widely quoted military analyst here, but he is also known locally as a mystic who can see behind the curtain of the physical world.

“Maybe he’ll last another year, maybe a little less,” Mr. Arifin declared in an interview last week. “He needs one year to cleanse himself. It’s a long process.”

Asked for his source, he pointed toward the sky and said: “From up there. The spiritual world. The one who told me was the Queen of the South Sea.”

When a visitor raised his eyebrows, Mr. Arifin said, “It’s just because you don’t understand, just the way I can’t understand you when you speak English.”

He said it was not true, as some people here say, that he could make a kris fly. But he can make it rise up and stand on end, he said.

“It’s not mysticism,” he insisted, as if trying to break through a language barrier. “It’s reality.”

Inside Apple Stores, a Certain Aura Enchants the Faithful

2007-12-29T02:18:00.000-08:00

Consumers at the new Apple store in Lower Manhattan.

By KATIE HAFNER, NY Times.
Published: December 27, 2007

It was 2 o’clock in the morning but in the subterranean retailing mecca in Midtown Manhattan, otherwise known as the Apple store, it might as well have been midafternoon.

Late one night shortly before Christmas, parents pushed strollers and tourists straight off the plane mingled with nocturnal New Yorkers, clicking through iPod playlists, cruising the Internet on MacBooks, and touch-padding their way around iPhones.

And through the night, cheerful sales staff stayed busy, ringing up customers at the main checkout counter and on hand-held devices in an uninterrupted stream of brick-and-mortar commerce.

The party inside that store and in 203 other Apple stores around the world is one reason the company’s stock is up nearly 135 percent for the year. By contrast, high-flying Google is up about 52 percent, while the tech-dominated Nasdaq index is up 12 percent.

The popularity of the iPhone and iPod and the intended halo effect those products have had on sales of Apple computers are behind Apple’s vigor. But the company’s success in retailing, as other competitors struggle to eke out sales growth, has been the bonus.

Apple now derives 20 percent of its revenue from its physical stores. And the number is growing. In the fourth quarter in 2007, which ended Sept. 30, Apple reported that the retail stores accounted for $1.25 billion of Apple’s $6.2 billion in revenues, a 42 percent increase over the fourth quarter in 2006.

Apple stores generate sales at the rate of about $4,000 per square foot a year, according to a report last year by Sanford C. Bernstein analysts.

As other electronics makers like Dell, Nokia and Sony still struggle to find the right retail formula, Apple seems to have perfected it.

Not only has the company made many of its stores feel like gathering places, but the bright lights and equally bright acoustics create a buzz that makes customers feel more like they are at an event than a retail store.

The close attention paid to detail in the stores’ designs, such as the maple veneer tables used for product displays, gives the impression that Steven P. Jobs himself, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, signed off on every square aesthetic inch of every store.

“Apple’s retail offering is very compelling,” said Andrew Neff, senior managing director at Bear Stearns, “but the other key is the product. The retail concept ties in very much to the product.”

But the secret formula may be the personal attention paid to customers by sales staff. Relentlessly smiling employees roam the floor, carrying hand-held terminals for instant credit-card swiping. Technicians work behind the so-called genius bar, ministering to customers’ ailing iPods, MacBooks and iPhones. Others, designated “personal trainers,” give one-on-one instruction and lead workshops.

Personal shoppers are available by appointment, and last month the company took the concept of personalized service to a new level, with concierge teams stationed throughout each store.

“They’ve become the Nordstrom of technology,” said Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director at Jupiter Research, referring to the department store that is known for its service.

Ron Johnson, Apple’s senior vice president for retail, said he believed the high level of service played a large role in the success of the stores.

“The idea is that while people love to come to retail stores, and they do it all the time, what they really appreciate the most is that undivided personal attention,” Mr. Johnson said. The result is far fewer qualms among consumers about paying premium prices: $30 for an iPhone case, $200 for an iPod Nano or $1,200 for a computer.

This month, Apple opened its third Manhattan store, in a three-story, 10,500-square-foot renovated building in the meatpacking district on West 14th Street. With one entire floor dedicated to individualized services, along with small seminar series, Mr. Johnson’s goal is to make the 14th Street store “the most personal store ever created.”

Mr. Gartenberg said people often first go to an Apple store out of curiosity. “Apparently a lot of them like what they’re seeing in the stores, they like the experience and they go back to buy the products,” he said.

The stores’ architecture also makes consumers feel good about spending money there.

In nearly a dozen high-profile urban centers — including New York, San Francisco, London and Glasgow — the signature feature is a glass staircase. Some of the staircases go straight up and others ascend in a spiral skein that appears to be held in place by nothing more than Apple hype.

A customer entered the 14th Street store last week with his two whippets. Their reaction to the impressive stairs was more fear than awe. When the dogs refused to climb the steps, their owner scooped both of them into his arms and carried them up.

Apple stores encourage a lot of purchasing, to be sure. But they also encourage lingering, with dozens of fully functioning computers, iPods and iPhones for visitors to try — for hours on end.

The policy has given some stores, especially those in urban neighborhoods, the feel of a community center. Two years ago, Isobella Jade was down on her luck, living on a friend’s couch and struggling to make it as a fashion model when she had the idea of writing a book about her experience as a short woman trying to break into the modeling business.

Unable to afford a computer, Ms. Jade, 25, began cadging time on a laptop at the Apple store in the SoHo section of Manhattan. Ms. Jade spent hours at a stretch standing in a discreet corner of the store, typing. Within a few months, she had written nearly 300 pages.

Not only did store employees not mind, but at closing time they often made certain to shut Ms. Jade’s computer down last, to give her a little extra time. A few months later, the store invited her to give an in-store reading from her manuscript.

“Everyone is free to use the Internet and do anything they want — within reason,” said Paul Fradin, the general manager of the SoHo and 14th Street stores. Visitors spotted surfing pornographic Web sites are quietly asked to leave, and are escorted out.

Visitors can bring almost anything they like. Ms. Jade showed up nearly every day with her full set of notes, and enough food to see her through a few hours of writing.

Meanwhile, the Sony flagship store on West 56th Street, a few blocks from Apple’s Fifth Avenue store, has the hush of a mausoleum. And being inside the long and narrow blue-toned Nokia store on 57th Street feels a bit like being inside an aquarium.

The high-end Samsung Experience showroom, its nuevo tech music on full blast one recent morning, was nearly empty. And although that store professes to encourage hands-on exploration of its products, the showroom has a clinical, forbidding feel. (Nothing is actually sold there; it’s just for display.)

“Whenever we ask consumers to cite a great retail experience, the Apple store is the first store they mention,” said Jane Buckingham, president of the Intelligence Group, a market research firm in Los Angeles. “Basically, everything about it works. The people who work there are cool and knowledgeable. They have the answers you want, and can sell you what you need. Customers appreciate that. Even the fact that they’ll e-mail you a receipt makes you feel like you’re in a store just a little bit further ahead of everyone else.”

This could be part of the reason that Jack Graham, 16, visiting for the holidays from Worcester, England, spent at least an hour each day of his visit at one of the three New York Apple stores, his parents sitting by patiently, happy to watch the crowd.

“These stores are going to become iconic places that people go to see when they come to New York,” said Mr. Gartenberg, the analyst. “Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall and Apple’s great glass cube on Fifth Avenue.”

As for Ms. Jade, whose modeling career is advancing, she has yet to buy a computer from the Apple store. But she is still welcome to check her e-mail — and stay as long as she likes.

Why Apple Isn’t Japanese

2007-12-02T22:44:00.000-08:00

Once a technology leader, Japan is now struggling to find its place in the digital age.

By Christian Caryl
NEWSWEEK
Dec 1, 2007

Ever heard of DoCoMo? probably not, unless you happen to live in Japan. NTT DoCoMo is one of the world's biggest wireless phone companies. It operates in a ferociously competitive market, boasts about 50 million customers and has been known to produce cutting-edge technology. By all rights it ought to be a star performer in the increasingly global business of wireless communications. Yet DoCoMo's brand is still virtually unknown outside its home country.

This is one story that could have had a very different ending. At the turn of the century DoCoMo executives announced that they were setting out to conquer the world. Their company's star mobile Internet application, known as i-mode, was leading the pack in its home market, and DoCoMo planned to leverage that success into a bid to dictate wireless Internet standards around the world. The company went on a buying spree, trying to gain footholds by purchasing stakes in overseas companies—stakes that soon made for painful losses, and not much else, when the New Economy bubble popped soon thereafter.

The would-be worldbeater proved tone-deaf. DoCoMo managers were so enraptured with their state-of-the-art Internet service that they failed to notice that the long and intricate menus favored by Japanese consumers didn't score with foreign customers who were looking for more direct and intuitive interfaces. One reason for the failure to communicate: not a single person in the senior management of the company was non-Japanese. "With the right approach they could have become a Google," says Gerhard Fasol of the Tokyo consultancy Eurotechnology Japan. "They had the chance—but they blew it."

The fall of DoCoMo is only the most recent story in a long tale of Japanese innovation failures over the past two decades—a huge irony, given that Japan is a technological powerhouse. If you exult in brilliantly bizarre gadgetry, engineering wonkery and prodigious feats of craftsmanship, you'll feel right at home. It's also an extremely sophisticated business environment. The Japanese domestic market is big and nuanced; Japanese consumers are notoriously finicky and demanding.

On the face of things, it would all seem to add up to an entrepreneurial paradise, a playground of creativity and innovation. Japan spent $130 billion on research and development last year (more as a percentage of GDP than the United States or the EU, putting it in third place globally behind Sweden and Finland). It registers, far and away, more patents than any other country—even more than the United States, with more than twice the population.

So you'd think Japan would be confident about its technological future, but you'd be wrong. These days, big business, academia, think tanks, government and the media, as well as the average Japanese salaryman, are all brooding about the state of their economy in the digital era. The educational system is going down the tubes, it's said, generating math and science scores that increasingly lag behind other OECD countries. The government is gridlocked, stalling urgently needed economic reform. Managers are mired in old mentalities, while imaginative newcomers can't find the space or the capital to develop their ideas. It's a syndrome that's sometimes summed up in a single, angst-ridden question: how come we weren't the ones who invented the iPod?

It isn't just the iPod as a cool gadget that keeps the Japanese awake at nights. It's the iPod (and its relative the iPhone, soon to debut in Japan) as the supersuccessful symbol of a new way of doing business that causes the hand-wringing. While Japanese companies like DoCoMo, NEC, Sony and the like struggle with incremental improvement, competitors like Apple and Google are fusing innovative technology with great marketing, design and distribution to create entirely new product categories.

That's precisely what unnerves the Japanese. Bloggers and commentators routinely invoke Apple's success as a wake-up call for a country that once ruled the world's consumer-electronics market. Masamitsu Sakurai, the chairman of office-equipment maker Ricoh and head of one of Japan's leading industrial associations, shocked members of his group with a recent speech that held up the iPod as an example of an innovative Western product that Japan is finding hard to emulate because of its outmoded management.

There are many who would write off this sort of talk as heretical hyperbole. Japan, they argue, has a long track record as a country of innovation. "Lean manufacturing," low-mileage cars and Toyota's Prius hybrid must surely count for something. They also note that Japan is the land of Sony, a company that once represented, in the persons of its legendary cofounders, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita, the perfect fusion of engineering and marketing savvy.

But that was then. One reason Apple galls the Japanese so is that it has displaced Sony as the leading innovator in consumer electronics. Sony's last truly big thing was the Walkman, and many non-Japanese aren't even aware that the Walkman still exists—as a digital music player competing feebly against the iPod.

The lithe Sony of Morita's day has given way to a fat conglomerate, with interests in everything from finance to movies, that stumbles over its own feet. Because Sony has its own music division, its executives are jealous of their copyrights, so they set up a distribution system much less open than Apple's. That's one reason the Walkman holds a 23 percent market share in Japan, while iPod holds a 58 percent share, according to market researcher BCN.

The innovation crisis is in large part rooted in the country's peculiar corporate culture. Japan Inc. still remains dominated by big, vertically integrated dinosaurs with little maneuverability and a marked disinclination to creativity. Sony CEO Howard Stringer was brought in from America to shake things up in 2005 and has been struggling ever since to break down the barriers between company divisions.

The strict hierarchies of Japanese companies discourage people with radical new ideas. As James Mok of the Tokyo software consulting firm Apriso notes, "In the U.S. it's much easier to spin off the results of a particular project as a separate business." In Japan, a risk-averse culture makes it harder. Mok recently penned a study called "How the Japanese IT Industry Destroys Talent."

One notorious case in point involves Shuji Nakamura, the brilliant scientist who invented a revolutionary energy-saving blue-diode light source only to find himself mired in years of litigation as he struggled to extract royalty payments from the company that had profited from his invention. Nakamura ultimately abandoned Japan for California. Fasol recalls asking scientists at the University of Tokyo if they considered his departure a blow. " 'No, not at all,' they told me. 'It might be good to have someone more ordinary'." Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the youthful, productively offbeat cofounders of Google, wouldn't have stood a chance in Japan.

Nor would Google's remarkable culture of chaotic cross-pollination. In Japan, boundaries between groups (even inside companies) are clearly defined and hard to cross. Carl Kay, a U.S. consultant who has spent years analyzing Japanese service companies, recalls encountering several representatives of a leading Japanese computer maker at an Internet conference back in the United States in 1995. "We went to Starbucks together, and they said, 'We don't get it. Why would we want to use the Internet to talk to people outside of the company?' "

Insular Japanese companies are evidently ill poised to craft the sort of personalized, culturally specific content that is at the heart of much of technology and telecoms development today. But even straight-ahead research

is problematic. Stodgy government labs and big corporate research centers don't have great track records. Back in the 1980s the Japanese government spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a now forgotten project called the "Fifth Generation Computer." Americans, still reeling from Japan's stunning rise in cars and consumer electronics, watched with anxiety. In 1984, one U.S. computer magazine pronounced portentously: "The Japanese are planning the miracle product. It will come not from their mines, their wells, their fields, or even their seas. It comes instead from their brains."

Apparently, it's still there. Indeed, all too often Japan's technological prowess comes to a screeching halt when it comes to developing computers or the programs that run on them. "Japan was a technological powerhouse in the predigital world," says Keith Woolcock, a global tech strategist at Westhall Capital in London. "But they've never been a dominant computer maker. And the computer, linked with the Internet, is now the armature around which the whole world revolves." There are no Japanese operating systems; Toshiba, the laptop pioneer, is no longer a player in the PC market.

The reasons for this run deeper than a dysfunctional corporate culture. Among the problems: promotion based strictly on seniority (resulting in managers with little training in information technology), and a near-complete disconnect between universities and the corporate sector.

Takahiro Fujimoto, an economics professor at the University of Tokyo, poses another theory: that personal computers, software and hybrid gadgets like the iPod are "modular" products, made up of existing components that "people mix and match in an innovative way." The Japanese tend to excel at "integral" products like cars, with customized components designed from scratch. "When you need this kind of activity, it's likely that people will be working on the same floor for a long time as a team," says Fujimoto. "We are not good at dealing with genius individuals—we're good at teams." That consensus-oriented approach tends to preclude the sorts of disruptive innovation that companies like Google throw off practically at will.

One intriguing exception: Nintendo, the gaming company whose remarkable, easy-to-use Wii console has enabled it to break away from more-conventional rivals like Microsoft and Sony. But Nintendo is also the exception that proves the rule—it has cultivated an outsider image and pursued a distinctive strategy of tapping consumer groups traditionally uninterested in gaming. It's no accident that Nintendo, like several other more innovative companies, is based in Kyoto—far away from staid Tokyo.

The insularity issue, which underscores so much of the innovation problem, has reached a boiling point. One of Japan's leading business papers, The Nikkei, published a piece earlier this year describing how a senior executive at Sanyo Electric had an idea similar to the iPod back in 1997; when he tried to form an alliance with Apple to explore the technology, his company's own chairman refused. Today, the story noted, Sanyo is struggling to survive. The paper went on to point out that Japanese electronics companies depend to a large degree on sales to regulated industries and the government. The world's second biggest market, protected by the Japanese language and its own cloistered standards, offers many companies a profitable sanctuary. But, as the article concluded, Japanese companies must ultimately "face globalization."

Of course, Japan's obsessive, incremental approach to innovation is a perfectly good way to run some companies. Japanese steelmakers have a proprietary technology that makes their high-tech steel untouchable by Korean and Chinese competitors. They keep trying to close the gap, but the Japanese, given their extraordinary attention to detail, could very well manage to keep a few steps ahead—enough to maintain crucial comparative advantage.

Japan abounds with this sort of almost artisanal industrial company. Toyota's famous production philosophy of kaizen, or continuous improvement, is perhaps the ultimate example—a system where workers are constantly proposing small improvements that perpetually bring the manufacturing process closer to perfection. Over the short term, says Fujimoto, Japan shouldn't be afraid to maintain focus on those areas where it truly excels. But over the longer term, he warns, something will have to give. Growth industries, like technology, aren't about incremental improvement—they are about making big bets, and finding the next new new thing.

At this point, it is worth taking another look at the cautionary tale of DoCoMo. Today it is trapped in a domestic market with a diminishing population, watching as its nimbler rivals at home grab an ever-bigger piece of the shrinking mobile pie. Its only hope for decisive growth would have been to leapfrog into the global market. But it didn't happen, thanks mainly to the company's limited cultural horizons and unimaginative management. Just three years ago the value of DoCoMo's shares amounted to about 10 times that of Nokia's. Today Nokia (based in Finland, with a population of 5 million versus Japan's 127 million) has a market capitalization more than double that of DoCoMo's. That puts Nokia in the realm of other global giants like Apple, Google and Vodafone. And just look at who tops the list: China Mobile.

This drives home the point that the lesson for "them" (the Japanese) isn't necessarily that they should be more like "us" (the Americans). It's merely to warn that some serious adjustments might be in order. Over the next century, disruptive innovations won't be coming only from countries like the United States. They'll also be emerging from dynamic, hungry, rising economies that offer plenty of room for risk-taking, flights of fancy and cross-border synthesis. If the Japanese want to be a part of that club, they'll have to revamp not only how they think about technology, but how they think about themselves.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/73236

How to Beat Hillary (Next) November

2007-11-26T23:07:00.000-08:00

Republicans who think she'll be easy to defeat are wrong. What they should do.

By Karl Rove
NEWSWEEK
Nov 17, 2007

I've seen up close the two Clintons America knows. He's a big smile, hand locked on your arm and lots of charms. "Hey, come down and speak at my library. I'd like to talk some politics with you."

And her? She tends to be, well, hard and brittle. I inherited her West Wing office. Shortly after the 2001 Inauguration, I made a little talk saying I appreciated having the office because it had the only full-length vanity mirror in the West Wing, which gave me a chance to improve my rumpled appearance. The senator from New York confronted me shortly after and pointedly said she hadn't put the mirror there. I hadn't said she did, just that the mirror was there. So a few weeks later, in another talk, I repeated the story about the mirror. And shortly thereafter, the junior senator saw me and, again, without a hint of humor or light in her voice, icily said she'd heard I'd repeated the story of the mirror and she … did … not … put … that mirror in the office.

It is a small but telling story: she is tough, persistent and forgets nothing. Those are some of the reasons she is so formidable as a contender, and why Republicans who think she would be easy to beat are wrong. The Republican presidential nomination is the most fluid and unpredictable contest in decades, but the Democratic nominee is likely to be Hillary. Not without a fight, not without losing early contests (probably Iowa, for starters) and not without bruises and bumps.

And so the question to John McCain from a woman at a town hall in South Carolina last Monday was tasteless, but key: "How do we beat the [rhymes with witch]?" Right now, Republicans are focusing much of their fire on Senator Clinton. Criticizing her unites the party, stirs up the unsettled feelings many swing voters have toward her and allows each candidate to say why he is best able to beat her. For now, that's enough. But when a GOP nominee emerges, he needs to remember no Republican is as well known as Hillary. The Republican has room to grow in the polls as voters get a better sense of who he is and what animates him. Here's what he needs to do.

Plan now to introduce yourself again right after winning the nomination. Don't assume everyone knows you. Many will still not know what you've done in real life. Create a narrative that explains your life and commitments. Every presidential election is about change and the future, not the past. So show them who you are in a way that gives the American people hope, optimism and insight. That's the best antidote to the low approval rates of the Republican president. Those numbers will not help the GOP candidate, just as the even lower approval ratings of the Congress will not help the Democratic standard-bearer.

Say in authentic terms what you believe. The GOP nominee must highlight his core convictions to help people understand who he is and to set up a natural contrast with Clinton, both on style and substance. Don't be afraid to say something controversial. The American people want their president to be authentic. And against a Democrat who calculates almost everything, including her accent and laugh, being seen as someone who says what he believes in a direct way will help.

Tackle issues families care about and Republicans too often shy away from. Jobs, the economy, taxes and spending will be big issues this campaign, but some issues that used to be "go to" ones for Republicans, like crime and welfare, don't have as much salience. Concerns like health care, the cost of college and social mobility will be more important. The Republican nominee needs to be confident in talking about these concerns and credible in laying out how he will address them. Be bold in approach and presentation.

Go after people who aren't traditional Republicans. Aggressively campaign for the votes of America's minorities. Go to their communities, listen and learn, demonstrate your engagement and emphasize how your message can provide hope and access to the American Dream for all. The GOP candidate must ask for the vote in every part of the electorate. He needs to do better among minorities, and be seen as trying.

Be strong on Iraq. Democrats have bet on failure. That's looking to be an increasingly bad wager, given the remarkable progress seen recently in Iraq. If the question is who will get out quicker, the answer is Hillary. The Republican candidate wants to recast the question to: who will lead America to victory in a vital battleground in the War on Terror? There will be contentious fights over funding the troops and over intelligence-gathering right after the parties settle on their candidates. Both battles will help the Republican candidate demonstrate who will be stronger in winning the new struggle of the 21st century.

The conventional wisdom now is that Hillary Clinton will be the next president. In reality, she's eminently beatable. Her contentious history evokes unpleasant memories. She lacks her husband's political gifts and rejects much of the centrism he championed. The health-care fiasco showed her style and ideology. All of which helps explain why, for a front runner in an open race for the presidency, she has the highest negatives in history.

While the prospective Republican nominee is talking about her now, the time will come soon when he must spend more time telling his story. By explaining to voters why he deserves to be our next president, he will also make clear why that job should not go to another person named Clinton.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/71000

Making the First 10 Minutes of an Interview Count

2007-09-16T20:22:00.000-07:00

Seven Tips
By THE CREATIVE GROUP

from aol.com

A hiring manager can often tell if you're the right fit for his or her organization just minutes after the two of you shake hands. In a recent Robert Half survey, executives polled said it typically takes them only 10 minutes to form an opinion of a candidate during an employment interview, despite meeting with staff-level applicants for nearly an hour, on average.

With such a short amount of time to interact with a hiring manager, how can you evoke a positive response? Projecting confidence and enthusiasm is key, so keep the following advice in mind:

1. Dress to impress. For better or worse, a good part of the impression an interviewer first forms of you depends on how you're dressed. So wear a nice suit or business-appropriate dress, even if you know the office to be a casual environment.

2. Remain calm. One of the best ways to make a good first impression is to quell any pre-interview jitters. Plan to arrive at the interview destination 10-15 minutes early. This will give you time to compose yourself and relax a little.

3. Show some respect. Many hiring managers ask everyone who has interacted with a candidate -- from administrative staff to members of their department -- for feedback on the prospective employee. So be pleasant toward those you meet and avoid the urge to hold a loud cell phone discussion in the elevator or lobby.

4. Break the ice. Small talk plays an important role in the interview by helping to break the ice and put both parties at ease. If the hiring manager asks if traffic was heavy or if you had problems finding your way to the office, offer more than just a "yes" or "no" answer. Just be sure not to prattle on.

5. Focus on the little things. The fact that employers form opinions of candidates so quickly places additional importance on the more subtle points of the interview, such as giving a firm handshake, maintaining eye contact and practicing good posture. Your nonverbal cues can say a lot about your personality and interest in the position. Crossing your arms, nodding hurriedly or making tense facial expressions can all send the wrong message.

6. Demonstrate your knowledge. Hiring managers often start interviews by asking job candidates some straightforward questions about their experience, knowledge of the company and ability to excel in the position. For example, "Can you tell me a little about yourself?" "What do you know about our firm?" and "Why do you want to work here?" are three common questions. Research the business beforehand so that when answering these types of queries, you can relate your responses to the firm's needs or priorities.

7. Remain positive. The executives surveyed said interviews take an average of 55 minutes for staff-level job candidates and 86 minutes for management-level applicants. Even if you fear you've already made a negative impression in the hiring manager's mind, stay positive and focus on what you can do during the rest of the meeting to convince the employer you're right for the job. Consider whether you're making any common nervous mistakes -- such as rushing your responses or not listening to the full questions -- and adjust your communications as necessary.

No matter how well you prepare for an interview, things may not always go as smoothly as you had hoped. Whether you become tongue-tied or are thrown a curveball question, roll with the punches. Keeping a positive attitude and remaining confident in your ability to land the job is one sure way to impress any hiring manager.

The Creative Group is a specialized staffing service placing creative, advertising, marketing and web professionals on a project basis with a variety of firms. For more information, visit www.creativegroup.com.

Copyright 2007 The Creative Group

Tenor of the Times

2007-09-08T15:39:00.000-07:00

Op-Ed Contributor

By DAVID HAJDU
NY Times, 8 September 2007

ON Sept. 13, 1994, Luciano Pavarotti and Bryan Adams stood side by side before a symphony orchestra assembled on a vast outdoor stage in Modena, Italy, Mr. Pavarotti’s hometown, and they performed a duet of “O Sole Mio.” Mr. Pavarotti, beaming, sang the hoary old heart-stopper beautifully, almost as if he had not done it several jillion times before. Mr. Adams croaked and giggled and clutched the microphone in palpable terror. The performance, which was televised internationally and later released on video, survives on YouTube. Watching it now, in the wake of Mr. Pavarotti’s death from pancreatic cancer, one can only marvel at the incongruity of the scene and wonder what in the world was that rock star doing in the company of that guy Adams?

Luciano Pavarotti was, among many things — perhaps above all — a rock star, regardless of the fact that the music he sang happened to be opera or, on occasion, folk or popular music in the operatic mode. To recognize this is not to deny his profound gifts as an artist or to diminish his importance as the most beloved tenor of the postwar era. He was blessed with a stunningly gorgeous voice, pure yet unmistakable, which he employed with ardor in the service of beauty and joy. He brought countless listeners, including this one, to rapture.

In addition, as waves of encomiums in recent days have reminded us, his enormous appeal gave Mr. Pavarotti an evangelical dimension. More than anyone since Enrico Caruso, we are repeatedly told, Mr. Pavarotti brought opera to the masses. This is true, but not the whole truth: more than anything, what Mr. Pavarotti did was bring mass culture — particularly the sensibility of the rock ’n’ roll age — to the world of opera.

He came to see his work as a mission of outreach. In this, he was carrying on a tradition as old as opera itself. Performers, promoters and civic leaders have worked for centuries to connect opera with the populace. In the American Old West, every frontier town worth its tumbleweed erected an opera house between the Wells Fargo station and the saloon. In the early 20th century, every vaudeville bill had a “class” act — a soprano or a vocal duo who would sing excerpts from an aria or two between the magicians and the jugglers.

Mr. Pavarotti, following the lead of his hard-driving, open-eyed manager, Herbert Breslin, veered away from full-scale operas in traditional halls and branched into the recital business, where his buoyant personality could flourish and his indifference to acting and his reluctance to learn new roles would not be significant liabilities. Mr. Breslin pushed him into the mold of rock stardom, and he fit nicely. Mr. Pavarotti was the first opera star to be booked in Madison Square Garden, and he became an arena attraction, the aria Elvis. He played Vegas; he did “The Tonight Show”; he was the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live”; he starred in a Hollywood movie, “Yes, Giorgio.”

Although the singer and manager parted ways acrimoniously, Mr. Pavarotti stayed for the rest of his career in the mold set by Mr. Breslin. He expanded his audience through his arena tours with Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, and through a series of concerts with rock and pop singers including James Brown, Celine Dion, Meat Loaf and the Spice Girls, not to mention Bryan Adams.

What was it about Luciano Pavarotti that made him so popular among people who otherwise showed no special affection for opera? He had a peasant quality that made up for his performing an art usually associated with a cultured elite. He had a robust earthiness that signified authenticity, especially to Americans of the postwar era who prized ruralism and took vernacular artists to be truer, more legitimate, than trained urban professionals. Mr. Pavarotti, who never mastered reading music, was a largely intuitive musician, and that seemed to come across to his advantage.

He was, if not larger than life, larger in size than most humans. Indeed, he was practically the embodiment of an opera-hater’s parody conception of a male opera singer — so huge he could hardly support his own weight, robustly Italian, blustering, flamboyant and oddly child-like. With his heavy beard and long, wavy hair, his enormous eyebrows permanently cocked in seeming puzzlement, and his habitually broken English, Mr. Pavarotti seemed almost like a character from a Warner Bros. cartoon come to life, ready to sing a chorus of “Kill the Wabbit!” All this, I suspect, may well have helped him endear himself to a public inured to pop stars who look and act very much like cartoons and self-parodies.

Never much disposed to the acting side of opera, Mr. Pavarotti learned in time to play Pavarotti, regardless of the character he was supposed to be. He drew from his own personality, like a popular singer, and his sensibility was exuberant, boyish, inclined to emotional extremes, and not very reflective. The kind of opera he gave us was, on the whole, a music of voluptuous emotion, little darkness, and not much thought. There was melodrama but little drama; there were outcries of pain, but scarcely any doubt, no melancholia.

The opera of Mr. Pavarotti was always thrilling and rarely challenging. It was something less than opera in the fullness of its dramatic potential. Still, it had a beauty that was practically unnatural in its perfection. It always made me happy, and it was grand, like the man who made it.

David Hajdu, the author of “Lush Life” and “Positively Fourth Street,” is the music critic for The New Republic.

Abusing Iraqi Civilians

2007-07-10T00:27:00.000-07:00

By BOB HERBERT
NY Times, 10th July 2007

With no end yet in sight for the long dark night of the Iraq war, The Nation magazine is coming out this week with an article that goes into great and disturbing detail about the brutal treatment of Iraqi civilians by some U.S. soldiers and marines.

The article does not focus on the handful of atrocities that have gotten substantial press coverage, like the massacre in Haditha in November 2005. Instead, based on interviews conducted on the record with dozens of American combat veterans of the war, the authors address what they describe as frequent acts of violence in which U.S. forces have abused or killed Iraqi civilians — men, women and children — with impunity.

The combination of recklessness, wantonly destructive behavior born of panic and deliberate acts of cold-blooded violence by G.I.’s are believed to have cost the lives of thousands of innocent Iraqis, the article says. The soldiers interviewed said they believed that only a minority of U.S. troops engaged in objectionable behavior, but the toll of their actions has been huge.

The article describes soldiers and marines frustrated and fearful in an alien environment in which the enemy hides among civilians and uses acts of terror as the primary tactic. “The mounting frustration of fighting an elusive enemy and the devastating effects of roadside bombs, with their steady toll of American dead and wounded, led many troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis,” said the authors, Chris Hedges, a former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, and Laila al-Arian.

Jeff Englehart, a 26-year-old Army specialist from Grand Junction, Colo., said in the article: “I guess while I was there, the general attitude was a dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi. You know, so what?”

For a lot of troops, he said, that attitude tended to morph into a debilitating sense of guilt after their return home.

Kelly Dougherty of Cañon City, Colo., who served in Iraq as a sergeant with a National Guard military police unit, remembered investigating an incident in which a military convoy ran over a boy, about 10 years old, and his three donkeys. When she and others from her unit arrived at the scene, the boy was lying dead by the side of the road. The donkeys had also been killed.

“We saw him there,” she said, “and, you know, we were upset because the convoy didn’t even stop. They really, judging by the skid marks, they hardly even slowed down.”

Accidents, even those caused by recklessness, are bad enough. More disturbing are the incidents described in the article in which G.I.’s routinely abused civilians. Among the worst abuses have been the shootings of innocent civilians and the improper arrests that have occurred in the course of raids carried out by soldiers and marines looking for insurgents.

There have been thousands of such raids. An extraordinary number of them — the vast majority, according to the interviews for article — were exercises in futility, yielding nothing but grief and terror for the innocent families whose homes were invaded.

“So you have all these troops, and they’re all wound up,” said Army Sgt. John Bruhns of Philadelphia, who participated in many raids while serving in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib. “And a lot of them think once they kick down the door there’s going to be people on the inside waiting for them with weapons to start shooting at them.”

In most cases, there is nothing more than a terrified family on the other side of the door. In instances in which unarmed civilians are shot and killed in raids, which happens frequently, it’s not unusual for G.I.’s to plant weapons by their bodies and to arrest survivors on false charges of participating in the insurgency, the article says.

“Every good cop carries a throwaway,” said Joe Hatcher, who served with the Army’s Fourth Cavalry Regiment in Iraq. “If you kill someone and they’re unarmed, you just drop one on ’em.”

The article emphasizes the extreme stress that G.I.’s are operating under in Iraq. A byproduct of that stress is the tendency to stereotype and dehumanize all Iraqis. What the soldiers find out, after they get home, is that in dehumanizing the people they supposedly were fighting for, they often end up dehumanizing themselves.

There is no upside to this war. It has been a plague since the beginning. But it’s one thing to lose a war. It’s much worse for a nation to lose its soul.

BUSINESS 2.0

2007-07-03T19:50:00.000-07:00

The Man Who Owns the Internet

Kevin Ham

Scientists Link Housecats to Wildcat Subspecies

2007-06-28T15:56:00.000-07:00

By NICHOLAS WADE
NY TIMES, June 28 2007

Some 10,000 years ago, somewhere in the Near East, an audacious wild cat crept into one of the crude villages of early human settlers, the first to domesticate wheat and barley. There she felt safe from her many predators in the region, such as hyenas and larger cats, and the rodents that infested the settlers’ homes and granaries were sufficient prey for her.

Seeing she was earning her keep, the settlers tolerated her, and their children greeted her kittens with delight.

At least five females, of the wildcat subspecies known as Felis silvestris lybica, accomplished this delicate transition from forest to village, scientists have concluded, based on new DNA research. And from these five matriarchs, all the world’s 600 million housecats are descended.

Carlos A. Driscoll of the National Cancer Institute and colleagues spent more than six years collecting species of wildcat from Scotland to Israel. He then analyzed the DNA of the wildcats, of many ordinary house cats and of the fancy cats that breeders started to develop in the 19th century.

Five subspecies of wildcat spread across the Old World. They are known as the European wildcat, the Near Eastern wildcat, the Southern African wildcat, the Central Asian wildcat and the Chinese desert cat. Their patterns of DNA fall into 5 clusters. The DNA of all house cats and fancy cats falls within the Near Eastern wildcat cluster, making clear that this subspecies is their ancestor, Dr. Driscoll and his colleagues report in today’s issue of Science.

The wildcat DNA closest to that of modern house cats came from 15 individuals collected in the remote deserts of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the researchers say.

The house cats in the study fell into five lineages, based on analysis of their mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down solely through the female line. Since the oldest known archaeological site with a cat burial is about 9,500 years old, the geneticists suggest that the founders of the five lineages lived around this time and were the first cats to be domesticated.

Wheat, rye and barley had been domesticated in the Near East by 10,000 years ago, so it seems likely that the granaries of early Neolithic villages harbored mice and rats, and that the settlers would have welcomed the cats’ help in controlling them.

Unlike other domestic animals, which were tamed by people, cats probably domesticated themselves, perhaps accounting for the haughty independence of their descendants. “The cats were adapting themselves to a new environment, so the push for domestication came from the cat side, not the human side,” Dr. Driscoll said.

Cats are “indicators of human cultural adolescence,” he remarked, since they entered human experience as people were making the difficult transition from hunting and gathering, their way of life for millions of years, to settled communities.

Until recently the cat was commonly believed to have been domesticated in ancient Egypt, where it was a cult animal. But three years ago a group of French archaeologists led by Jean-Denis Vigne discovered the remains of an eight-month-old cat buried with what was presumably its human owner at a Neolithic site in Cyprus. The Mediterranean island was settled by farmers from Turkey who brought their domesticated animals with them, presumably including cats, because there is no evidence of native wildcats in Cyprus.

The date of the burial, some 9,500 years ago, far precedes Egyptian civilization. Together with the new genetic evidence, it places the domestication of the cat in a different context, the beginnings of agriculture in the Near East, and probably in the villages of the Fertile Crescent, the belt of land that stretches up through the countries of the eastern Mediterranean and down through what is now Iraq.

Dr. Stephen O’Brien, an expert on the genetics of the cat family and a co-author of the Science report, described the domestication of the cat as “the beginning of one of the major experiments in biological history,” because the number of house cats in the world now exceeds half a billion, while most of the 36 other species of cat, and many wildcats, are now threatened with extinction.

So a valuable outcome of the new study is the discovery of genetic markers in the DNA that distinguish native wildcats from the house cats and feral domestic cats with which they often interbreed. In Britain and other countries, true wildcats may be highly protected by law but stray cats are not.

David Macdonald of Oxford University in England, a co-author of the report, has spent 10 years trying to preserve the Scottish wildcat, of which only 400 or so remain. “We can use some of the genetic markers to talk to conservation agencies like the Scottish Natural Heritage,” he said.

Pick Your Poison: Fists or Fireballs

2007-06-26T22:58:00.001-07:00

Bruce Willis reprises his character as the super-cop John McClane.

By MANOHLA DARGIS
NY Times Movie Review, June 27 2007

The gasping, grunting and oozing hard-body slab that muscles, and sometimes crawls, through "Live Free or Die Hard" sure looks like John McClane. Older if apparently no wiser, the blue-collar super-cop from the "Die Hard" franchise has lost his hair, his foul mouth and apparently his nicotine itch, but he still has the same knack for trouble, the adrenaline-pumping, cheerfully anarchic kind that causes cars to ignite, bodies to fly, eardrums to pop and hearts to race and gladden. He's also lost his sneer, but sneering is cheap, and movies are expensive, especially when your star has pushed past 50 and slid off the power lists.

A lot has happened in the 12 years since Bruce Willis yippee-kai-yay-ed in "Die Hard With a Vengeance" with a glowering Samuel L. Jackson in tow. During that time Mr. Willis's star has expanded and collapsed through hits and duds and plenty of personal off-screen noise. The world has changed too, of course, and with it the action-flick coordinates: for one, Arnold Schwarzenegger runs California, while the sober, nonwisecracking likes of Matt Damon's Bourne rules the bad-boy roost. For another: Mr. Willis has become an increasingly appealing character actor, the kind who punches up a scene or two ("Alpha Dog," "Fast Food Nation") or an entire movie ("16 Blocks"), mostly by playing it not so nice and very easy.

Life or age or something has mellowed Mr. Willis. He no longer enters a movie like God's gift, as he did almost two decades ago in the first "Die Hard," lips pursed as if he alone were in on the joke — which, given the fat salary he was earning, perhaps he was. In "Live Free or Die Hard" he enters swinging, fist smashing through hard glass and sinking into soft flesh. He's making a point and so is the movie, namely that McClane (and Mr. Willis) is ready to earn our love again by performing the same lovably violent, meathead tricks as before. And look, he's not laughing, not exactly, even if the film ends up a goof.

An unexpectedly funny goof, at that, despite everything, including the mayhem and somewhat creepy plot. The screenplay attributed to Mark Bomback, who shares the story credit with David Marconi, has the whiff of multiple writers, as action-driven productions generally do. It originated with a 1997 story (dubiously titled "A Farewell to Arms") by John Carlin in Wired magazine about the potential for a cataclysmic, nation-crippling "information war," which mutated and stalled, picking up new writers and equally doubtful names ("WW3.com," "Die Hard 4.0"). Somewhere along the development line, the real world intruded, which is why the original idea about an information war now includes a plausible-sounding or at least not entirely outlandish hook to Sept. 11 — hence, the creepiness.

In most Hollywood action movies, references to Sept. 11 as well as to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are often tacked on or displaced, used for decorative flag-waving or scenes of torture. "Live Free or Die Hard" tries to engage the real world more directly than most studio-made fantasies, with a logic-defined plot involving a disgruntled government security expert. That would be Thomas Gabriel, who seems partly inspired by the counterterrorism expert Richard A. Clarke and partly informed by Bill Gates and is wholly played by the pretty Timothy Olyphant, dressed in black and wearing Maggie Q on his arm. Mr. Olyphant has many charms, but annihilating menace is not one of them. Mr. Willis nonetheless keeps any incredulity in check along with his sneer.

Despite its jaw-jutting title, with its evocation of revolutionary America and radical individualism, "Live Free or Die Hard" keeps a tighter rein on McClane, dialing down his man-against-the-world attitude to a low hum. He's still more or less alone, at least existentially, though, as per the action playbook, he quickly picks up a sidekick and audience surrogate in the hacker impersonated by Justin Long (flicking between annoyance and amusement).

But McClane is also unequivocally playing for team America, helping the F.B.I. and its no-nonsense, supremely capable deputy director, Bowman (Cliff Curtis), who runs the sillily named cyber division with blinking monitors and scurrying minions. Heroic in deed and in acquaintance, Bowman knows to side with McClane, saving his contemptuous looks for the guy from Homeland Security.

Nothing on Len Wiseman's résumé — he previously directed the two "Underworld" flicks, wherein the Goth kids really are vampires — suggests that he could wrangle both Mr. Willis and this new film's nerve-jangling action to such satisfying effect. At least on the second count he has received terrific help from a sprawling cast of stuntmen and -women (and the stunt coordinator Brad Martin), who do a great deal to advance the film's old-school mayhem. The use of Parkour during several fight scenes is particularly tasty, proving that when cinematic push comes to shove, the French, who originated this ultra-cool rough-and-tumble, which finds performers bouncing like balls from wall to wall, rooftop to rooftop and many hair-raising points in between, are definitely in the coalition of the willing.

"Live Free or Die Hard" is rated PG-13. (Parents strongly cautioned.) Extremely brutal violence and mild obscenities.

LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD

Opens today nationwide.

Directed by Len Wiseman; written by Mark Bomback, based on a story by Mr. Bomback and David Marconi; director of photography, Simon Duggan; edited by Nicolas de Toth; music by Marco Beltrami; production designer, Patrick Tatopoulos; stunt coordinator, Brad Martin; produced by Michael Fottrell; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 130 minutes.

WITH: Bruce Willis (John McClane), Timothy Olyphant (Thomas Gabriel), Justin Long (Matt Farrell), Cliff Curtis (Bowman), Maggie Q (Mai) and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Lucy McClane).

Think of It This Way, Tony: At Least America Will Miss You

2007-06-24T22:36:00.000-07:00

By James Traub
Washingtonpost, June 24, 2007

The people of Britain will shed few tears when Tony Blair steps down as prime minister on Wednesday. But Americans will miss him deeply, the way we do the star of a beloved TV drama that the networks finally cancel. Not since Mikhail Gorbachev has the leader of a great power so utterly outlived his welcome at home while remaining the apple of the American eye.

Why the crush? Just read Blair's speech before Parliament on March 18, 2003, the day before the invasion of Iraq. A million Britons had marched in protest the month before; the leaders of Blair's own Labor Party believed that he was making a terrible mistake, and in some cases had publicly said so. And Blair stood in the well of the House of Commons and warned that our equivocation was emboldening our enemies: "That is why this indulgence has to stop. Because it is dangerous. It is dangerous if such regimes disbelieve us. Dangerous if they think they can use our weakness, our hesitation, even the natural urges of our democracy towards peace, against us. Dangerous because one day they will mistake our innate revulsion against war for permanent incapacity; when in fact, pushed to the limit, we will act."

Blair's argument was predicated on his certainty that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. His speech, in short, was wrong. The British public, which lost patience with Blair years ago, believes that he led them into war in 2003 on a lie. A more charitable, and perhaps less dispassionate, conclusion is that he acted on a conviction that he would not permit troubling evidence to undermine. The same may be true of George W. Bush. I'm guessing, though, that a great many Americans who would never give Bush the benefit of the doubt would do so for Blair. And perhaps that's because of the way they feel about Bush: Our leader was the naif, the showboat, the callow cowboy; theirs was his photographic positive -- steadfast, worldly, eloquent.

And what eloquence! No doubt Americans are too easily impressed by genuine oratory because our own political life is so gassy with the fake, bloated variety. Bush seems to veer between two radically different rhetorical modes: the swelling biblical or Lincolnesque cadences (so obviously, if often splendidly, scripted for him) and the taciturn Texas county sheriff. His language has almost always seemed too big or too small. Blair, by contrast, always found the words that fit even the most solemn moment, as when he united the British people after the death of Princess Diana -- "the people's princess," as he memorably called her. Or in the speech last month announcing his resignation: "Believe one thing if nothing else. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right." After a thousand years of great oratory, Britons may have developed an immunity to such stirring formulations; Americans sure haven't.

I could go on about the particulars of Blair's speaking style: the punchy sentences, the strategic repetition, the homey expressions ("hand on heart") that the British themselves often rolled their eyes at. But all this is technique, which any bright schoolboy could pick up were he so inclined. Blair is worth caring for because of what he stood for.

In April 1999, Blair gave a speech in Chicago framing what he called "a new doctrine of international community." NATO had been bombing Kosovo for the previous month without breaking the will of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. In Chicago, Blair said flatly, "We cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand."

Kosovo was the interventionist plank of that new doctrine. Blair called for sustained reform of the system of global finance, a new push on free trade, reform of the decision-making apparatus of the U.N. Security Council and NATO, progress on global warming and a reduction of Third World debt. And, returning to Kosovo, he insisted that the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states must give way in the face of genocide or ethnic cleansing.

Blair soon demonstrated that he took his own doctrine seriously. In May 2000, when a murderous rebel force in Sierra Leone kidnapped 500 U.N. peacekeepers and threatened renewed warfare, Britain answered a desperate call for help from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan by sending an air and naval force that intimidated the rebels and persuaded them to release the peacekeepers. Here, in miniature, was the decisive combination of military force with moral force that world publics had been hungering for since the 1990s nightmares of Rwanda and Bosnia.

At the time, Blair's doctrine of international community sounded less like a visionary scheme than a hopeful summation of an emerging consensus. In retrospect, it represents a might-have-been that's almost too painful to contemplate -- for the world, not just for Blair. Certainly the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, derailed some elements of this optimistic agenda: Humanitarian intervention came to seem like an unaffordable luxury once we had to use force in self-defense. But ultimately, it was the election of Bush, and Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq, that doomed Blair's new paradigm -- and Blair himself. But the British leader cannot put all the blame on his American counterpart, who scarcely made a secret of his bellicose worldview.

Remember how, when the two leaders first met, Bush announced that they used the same brand of toothpaste? This detail, at once lame and unnerving, made you think: Poor Tony must really be missing his old pal Bill Clinton. But no: Blair and Bush hit it off in a way that baffled and vexed people on both sides of the Atlantic who admired the one and scorned the other.

Various explanations have been offered: Both were "conviction politicians" who recognized in the other a man whose yea was yea and whose nay was nay. Blair was determined to stamp out the virus of anti-Americanism in the Labor Party. Most plausibly, the British prime minister understood that the new world he sought could not be brought into being without the Americans. (Or maybe it was the toothpaste.) Certainly Blair believed that the United States needed an interlocutor to help deal with an increasingly hostile and suspicious Western Europe, and he fashioned this role for himself. The terrible irony is that a man willing to risk his political career for the sake of his convictions came to be seen as Bush's lapdog.

The insult seemed unfair at the time and still does today. Blair pressed Bush to route Iraq policy through the Security Council, and he succeeded. Blair was willing to let U.N. weapons inspections continue, but the Bush administration was not. By that time, Blair could scarcely have withdrawn his support. He believed that Saddam Hussein had to be stopped. More than that, he believed that forcibly disarming the Iraqi dictator was wholly of a piece with the decision to confront Milosevic, another tyrant who posed a threat to his own people and to the West. The 2001 terrorist attacks may have transformed (or created) Bush's worldview, but they only fortified Blair's.

But once the prime minister threw in his lot with the Americans, he was trapped. Blair wanted to give the United Nations a central role in running postwar Iraq, as it had in Afghanistan, but Bush refused. Blair sent one of his most seasoned diplomats, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, to Baghdad to try to work out a political settlement among Iraq's squabbling leaders, but L. Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, ignored him. What is tragic (or perhaps ludicrous) about Blair's situation is that he had placed his fate in the hands of a man who did not share his views. He should have realized it. Perhaps he did.

It has been a long downward spiral for a leader who once seemed a protean figure in British political history. The transformation that Blair had to work to make Labor the overwhelming majority party in England was vastly more wrenching than the operation Clinton carried out on the Democrats. Even the harshest British obituaries -- which is to say, the ones from the left -- concede that today's England is more open, more tolerant, more self-confident and more just than the one Blair inherited. But they blame him for promising much and accomplishing little in the reform of public services, for shamelessly hobnobbing with the rich, for ruling by fiat, for surrendering to the dark arts of spin and above all for lying -- and not only about Iraq. For those of us across the ocean, this is a little bit like hearing that the boss you so admire is a monster at home. They would know, of course; but it's still hard to believe.

Tony Blair leaves office under a cloud darker even than the one that shadowed Bill Clinton. His sad trajectory brings to mind Lyndon B. Johnson, another greatly gifted and even brave leader brought low by a ruinous war from which he could not extricate himself. Blair is still young and energetic, unlike Johnson when he left office, and has many years in which to redeem himself. The news that the Bush administration may tap him to serve as a special envoy to the Middle East suggests that opportunities for redemption could come sooner than imagined. Blair himself has said that he hopes to advance the liberal internationalist credo for which he once served as standard-bearer. But he will have to face the fact that nothing has undermined that credo so much as the war he fought in its name.

Becker still holds court with mind games

2007-06-24T19:31:00.000-07:00

Andrew Longmore, The Australian.
June 25, 2007

THERE is a less happy Wimbledon anniversary for Boris Becker to celebrate this time. We have had the reprise of his astonishing victory in 1985 and his defence of the men's singles title the following year, and now we have to remember his first Wimbledon defeat, by an unknown Australian called Peter Doohan all of 20 years ago.
The match was not memorable, but the press conference was. Doohan had done his homework and sensed the young champion, still just 19, might be vulnerable in the early rounds. He took his chance. But in defeat Becker revealed something much greater in himself than the mere winning and losing of tennis matches.

"What did I say?" he asks, sitting in the executive suite of a smart London hotel, looking every inch the successful businessman.

"Oh yes, I remember now. 'It wasn't a war. Nobody died out there. I just lost a tennis match'."

Becker believes it is as true now as it was then, but the innocence of the remark brought a roomful of journalists to confront two further truths: the first was that a teenager from Munich had just educated his elders in the trivialities of sport; the second was that, if we did not know it before, we were in the presence of a real star, on and off the court.

Becker and the press were made for each other. Now he has hopped over the other side of the fence as not only a trenchant and acute critic of the game, but a television reporter, asking difficult and often inappropriate questions to sports stars who want only to seek the comforts of the dressing-room.

When Dirk Nowitzki missed a game-winning jump shot for the Dallas Mavericks in last year's NBA finals, Becker had to ask what happened.

"I spoke to David Beckham after the Ecuador game (England won 1-0) in the last World Cup," he recalls. "He had just been sick at the side of the pitch and it was all over his shirt, but he came over to talk. I didn't need to ask him about it because I knew he would talk.

"Same with Dirk. All he wanted to say was why he missed. I didn't need to ask him why. It helps, though, if there is respect for each other."

Becker was always a skilled post-match interviewee. He said just enough to discourage a follow-up question but not enough to mean much.

He always talked sense and is doing so again now, not so much about the technical aspects of the backhand and forehand or volley, but about gamesmanship and the psychology of matchplay, which he believes is a forgotten art.

"Sometimes you had to interrupt matches, put the other guy out of his rhythm," he says. Becker was the best shoelace tier in the game, and his shoelaces always came undone at critical moments.

"Maybe argue with the umpire, question a call," he says.

"Can you imagine what Ilie Nastase would have done against Roger Federer? Nobody does that to Federer, nobody tries to get inside his head and disrupt his rhythm."

At least, not on the green grass of Wimbledon's Centre Court.

"I was watching a match sitting next to (Ivan) Ljubicic the other day in Hamburg and a guy, I can't remember the name, was playing Rafael Nadal and, on one point, he came to the net and hit a winning volley. Ljubicic says, 'Ah, that's how you beat Nadal'. I was amazed. He'd only just worked it out."

Ion Tiriac, Becker's first mentor, taught him the psychological subtleties of the game. Tiriac, a gruff Romanian who made Brad Gilbert, Andy Murray's combative coach, seem like an amateur when it came to winning ugly, knew how to manipulate matches, how to win when playing below his best and how to draw an opponent into playing the way he wanted.

During his second Wimbledon, Becker was worked so hard by Tiriac that he recalls screaming "why do I have to serve another hundred balls?" at him in frustration.

"He wanted to know how far I was prepared to go to win. That fighting spirit always came through in my matches," Becker says.

"I always fought to the last point. Too many players, if they lose the first set now, the shoulders drop and the body language is not right. It's what I can bring to commentary at Wimbledon. I understand where the pressure points are in a match and what is going on inside a player's head, what they are doing and, more importantly, what they should be doing."

Even Federer doesn't play so smart sometimes against Nadal, staying back when he should go forward, trying to play him at his own game, a champion's trait recognisable to Becker.

"It's pride," he explains. "'I'm Roger Federer, I'm not going to change for anyone'. But he will never beat Nadal in the French Open if he plays as he did in that last final."

Becker finds the modern professional, with notable exceptions, one-dimensional, too swift to accept fate, whether it's losing the first set or taking a line call. Few players, he says, truly understand the mentality of the game, one of the reasons why Federer has dominated all players bar Nadal and on all surfaces except clay and why, back in Beverly Hills, Pete Sampras believes he could still be a contender for an eighth Wimbledon title.

"Pete would still have a good chance," Becker says. "OK, your feet get slower and your body is older, but Pete had some weapons out there and he would keep coming at you every point. Even if he was playing Federer, Pete would keep coming to the net, coming to the net, making him hurry.

"Wimbledon is about rallying now, everyone stays back, so he'd have a chance."

Becker will find Wimbledon changing 22 years on from his debut. The Centre Court is being fitted for a roof (a good thing) and Hawk-Eye is making its debut (also good). Federer, he believes, is more vulnerable in the first week this year than ever before. "He pulled out of Halle, changed his routine, that's very interesting," he says. "But if he reaches the second Monday, nobody will beat him."

Inca Skull Rewrites History of Conquest

2007-06-20T02:02:00.001-07:00

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post
June 20, 2007

The 500-year-old skull, found in a long-forgotten Inca cemetery outside Lima, Peru, had two round holes just across from each other. Nearby was a plug of bone, recovered intact, that carried the distinct markings of an old musket ball.

Archaeologists sensed they had unearthed an important find, but it wasn't until months later that a powerful electron microscope scan confirmed it by finding traces of lead in the skull. The victim, who was between 18 and 22 years old when he died, had been shot by a Spanish conquistador.

Given the age of the remains, as well as the age of other remains buried nearby, the archaeologists came to the conclusion that they had identified the earliest victim of a gunshot wound ever found in the Americas.

"There may have been Incas and other native people killed by Europeans before him, but this is our oldest example so far," said Peruvian archaeologist Guillermo Cock, who has excavated in the area for more than 20 years. "This happened at the beginning of a long and difficult history."

Based on carbon dating, as well as analysis of the hundreds of other bodies buried in the area, Cock believes the man was shot in the 1530s, just a few years after Francisco Pizarro and his small army of conquistadors arrived in Peru.

That arrival led to one of the most disastrous population declines in recorded history -- up to 80 percent of the 12 million people in the Inca empire died within 70 years.

The history of the Incas' rapid defeat and decline, written almost entirely by the Spanish victors, has emphasized the valor and skill of the greatly outnumbered Europeans. Cock said the relatively new field of Inca archaeology is beginning to rewrite some of that story.

For instance, Cock said, there is good reason to believe the young gunshot victim died during the siege of Lima in 1536 -- one of numerous Inca uprisings following the execution of their leader, Atahualpa, by the Spanish. He also said there is archaeological and historical evidence to suggest those insurrections were put down with the help of native peoples who opposed the Incas' rule.

"We are just now starting to really compare what was written with the material evidence being uncovered," Cock said. "There is a lot that was never told before."

The musket victim was one of 72 people who appear to have been hastily placed in a formal Inca burial ground where hundreds of others had been meticulously wrapped, honored and interred in the traditional Inca way. The 72 were barely wrapped, had no ceremonial offerings with them and were in shallow graves.

These signs of a speedy burial, along with tentative evidence that two others may have died of gunshot wounds and that several more had been crushed by swinging maces, led Cock to conclude they died during the little-known siege of Lima. He said relatives probably took them from the battlefield and buried them quickly in the traditional cemetery. The remains of women and children, who most likely traveled with the Inca forces, were also found.

Cock's research was funded by National Geographic and will be the subject of a "Nova" TV special on PBS next Tuesday. The discovery of the lead deep in the bone of the skull was made at the University of New Haven's Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science.

Cock, who is trained as a historian as well as an archaeologist, said about 30 of the 72 bodies had been killed by native weapons -- lending support to his theory that Pizarro succeeded only because he enlisted the help of other tribes who were enemies of the Incas. Pizarro's closest allies are believed to have been the Huaylas, who lived about 100 miles north of Lima, Cock said. Pizarro is known to have taken a prominent Huayla woman to be his mistress, and Huayla forces are believed to have had a decisive impact during the Lima siege.

Richard Burger, a Yale University anthropology professor, said that if the finding holds up, it will indeed represent the first example of a Native American killed by guns. He said Spanish colonists were in the Caribbean and Mexico decades before they came to Peru in 1532, and some native people were probably shot during those years. But their remains have not been unearthed.

"There hasn't been much archaeological evidence in this area, so the finding could be very important," Burger said. "There's a lot of interest now in learning more about the Inca decline from sources other than the victors."

Before the Spanish arrived, the Inca empire controlled the entire Andean region, later earning the designation "Romans of the New World." Highly accomplished builders, the Incas built the city of Machu Picchu on a mountaintop 8,000 feet above sea level.

The fast decline of the Incas has generally been attributed to the far more advanced Spanish weaponry, the spread of European diseases to which native people had no immunity, and malnutrition and illness caused by the harsh working conditions imposed by the colonists.

Cock said all those factors doubtless played a role, but the ability of the Spaniards to establish native allies was also important and has been generally ignored.

"They joined Pizarro in the hope of being rewarded with more independence and freedom," Cock said. "I believe they wanted a more equal, more horizontal relationship with the Spaniards. Clearly, that did not happen."

Secretive Kingdom

2007-06-05T03:17:00.000-07:00

North Korea is one of the world's most opaque nations. So how do we decode conflicting reports about Kim Jong Il’s health and choice of successor?

By Christian Caryl
Newsweek Web-Exclusive Commentary

June 4, 2007 - If you're confused by the reports coming out of North Korea, you're probably not alone. Take the recent slew of conflicting reports about the health of the nation's Dear Leader. "U.S. calls Kim Jong Il's health a 'concern,'" ran one headline. The body of the story, quoting a senior U.S. official who was himself referring to reports from other unnamed officials in Seoul, alluded to a "monthlong disappearance" by Kim and noted that the North Korean dictator suffers "from advanced diabetes and heart disease as well as high blood pressure." Around the same time, another analysis claimed that Kim had recovered from these "chronic diseases." The report, which based its account on the usual anonymous senior officials in Seoul and obscure North Korea wonks, also asserted confidently, that "intelligence" in the hands of the South Korean government indicates that Kim will choose his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, as his successor.

So what are we to think? Does that mean that everything we read about North Korea is garbage pretending to be authoritative truth? This sort of conundrum is par for the course for anyone who has spent time studying the goings-on at the top of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, as the North prefers to call itself. The ironic fact of the matter is that we know far more about North Korea than ever before. China and South Korea have both deepened their ties with the Hermit Kingdom in recent years, and that means that much more information is flowing out as well as in. A steady stream of defectors has provided us with often-elaborate detail about the country in general. And there's even a small—exceedingly small—population of foreigners who deal with the North on a regular basis. All of this helps us to build up our picture of what's going on in the country.

Yet when it comes to the most important part of the story—the motives and intentions of North Korea's government—it's always best to be skeptical. Andrei Lankov, a Seoul-based Russian academic who has studied the North for decades, says that he refuses to comment when asked by journalists about government reshuffles or coup rumors in Pyongyang. Such reports occasionally do end up getting confirmed by events, he concedes, but estimates that they are successful less than 20 percent of the time. (In other words, you'd usually be much better off judging the account's veracity by flipping a coin.) Lankov notes that the
Kim regime won't even publish the precise number of members in the ruling communist party, much less basic stats on the economy. He describes it as by far the world's most secretive state—far more so than even the old U.S.S.R., where it was common for intellectuals to discuss political topics when they knew they were in like-minded company. In North Korea, by contrast, "People are terrified to death to discuss anything political." And that, he says, is because everything political ultimately comes down to the Kim family, which holds the power of instant life or death over every North Korean—and isn't afraid to use it, as countless tales of the regime's brutality attest. For that reason, Lankov argues, "The most explosive topic, the one that is never discussed, is the topic of succession."

The result is a level of mystery that seems almost calculated to drive journalists into a frenzy. Confronted with such opacity, it's hard to resist the temptation to show off even the slightest scrap of seemingly revelatory information garnered from some super-secret privileged source. In November 2004, the Russian news agency Tass reported that official portraits of Kim Jong Il were being taken down in North Korean diplomatic representations and official buildings. Could it be that Kim was on the way out? Respected news outlets jumped on the story, in some cases adding details culled from Chinese or Korean newspapers suggesting that the Dear Leader's days were numbered. It hardly needs adding that he— and his portraits—remain firmly in place today.

Applying a bit more common sense might not be a bad thing. But the fact is that that's far easier said than done. In April 2004, for example, a tremendous explosion took place in the train station in the North Korean city of Ryongchon, killing hundreds of people and rendering thousands more homeless. It happened just hours after Kim's personal train had passed through the same station, spawning fervid speculation about a possible assassination attempt. According to one version the blast was triggered by a mobile phone—a detail that gained credibility a few months later, when the North Korean authorities pulled the plug on the country's 18-month-old cell phone program. Service has never been restored.

Sounds convincing. Yet consider for a moment the important questions left unanswered by this version of events. If the explosion was being triggered remotely, why did the presumed conspirators wait for hours after Kim's passage to send the signal? And why did they decide to kill hundreds of innocents in the process? In retrospect, virtually everything about this incident is still up for grabs. The fact that the North Korean government released casualty figures was actually hailed by some commentators as evidence of North Korea-style glasnost. Suffice it to say that we are still waiting for CNN to open its first Pyongyang bureau. (Skeptics note that the city's proximity to the Chinese border meant that news of the explosion was bound to get out anyway.) In the wake of the disaster one British journalist confidently asserted that North Korea was becoming "more open to international help"—not that that stopped Pyongyang from announcing that it was about to start expelling international aid organizations a year later. And so it goes.

Western intelligence agencies also have a strikingly poor record when it comes to the country. No one in Washington or London predicted the North's invasion of the South in 1950. The Clinton administration signed an agreement that would have supposedly rid the North of its plutonium-based nuclear-weapons program back in 1994—and then delayed fulfilling its own part of the deal because the CIA was assuring it of the North's imminent collapse. (The experts are still sparring over whether the resulting failure of the Agreed Framework led inexorably to the North's first nuclear test last autumn.) In 2002 the Bush administration announced that North Korea had suddenly admitted, in negotiations, its pursuit of a hitherto secret parallel nuclear weapons program based on highly enriched uranium—leading Washington to break off talks in indignation. In recent months, though, administration officials—their reputation already severely tarnished by the Iraq WMD intelligence scandal—have been forced to acknowledge that they can't tell for sure whether the North Koreans still have such a program under way.

Grounds for despair? No, just for a measure of humility. Journalists—and governments—need to do a better job of admitting to the public that any information about North Korea's leadership is to be regarded with profound skepticism. To be sure, a few privileged insiders—former Kim employees, a kidnapped film director—have come forth to tell their stories. That's how we know, for example, details of the Dear Leader's luxury-loving ways. Yet there have been almost no defectors from the upper ranks of the leadership who have been willing to reveal significant details about what makes the regime tick—presumably for fear of retribution against them or their families. Perhaps it's just hard for many of us, wallowing in an age of instant messaging and tell-all blogs, to believe that there are limits to what we can know about other human beings. Consider, for example, this revealing incident involving a North Korean worker (who thus almost certainly doubles as an employee of the North Korean security service) at a European embassy in Pyongyang. The worker was shocked when her brother showed up one day to apply for a visa, because she had no idea that her brother had the right to travel abroad. He, by contrast, had no idea that his sister worked in a foreign embassy. In that respect, perhaps, North Korea can serve as a useful cautionary tale. Is it hard to know what's going on at the top? "It's not just hard," says Andrei Lankov. "It's impossible."

Hirsh: The Problem with Bush's New War Czar

2007-05-18T09:11:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-17T07:22:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-13T02:43:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-09T07:10:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-09T06:44:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-02T01:26:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-01T19:03:00.000-07:00

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."

Who Needs Venice When Zagreb (or Bruges . . .) Beckons?

2007-04-24T16:28:00.000-07:00

By GISELA WILLIAMS
NYtimes April 22, 2007

Affordable Europe | Second-Tier Cities

EXPECT to pay $14 for the Eiffel Tower. And more than $100 for a gondola ride through the canals of Venice. No, Europe's tourist capitals don't come cheap. To save some serious money this year, opt for Europe's lesser-known, second-tier cities. You might get a blank stare from less-worldly travelers when you mention Zagreb, but you'll score points in other ways, including your wallet.

VALENCIA

Jet-setters who complain that Barcelona has become too trendy and too touristy are heading south, to the Mediterranean city of Valencia. Stealing some of Barcelona's design and culinary mojo, Spain's third-largest city has transformed itself in recent years from a neglected port city into a cool resort.

The America's Cup is in town this summer. And Santiago Calatrava, a native son, has brought architectural buzz to the city with his futuristic, helmet-shaped Opera House (www.lesarts.com), part of the City of Arts and Sciences (www.cac.es ), a dazzling complex of polished glass.

But despite its new luster, Valencia is still authentically Spanish. One of its hottest neighborhoods, Barrio del Carmen, is also one of its oldest. It's where aging Spaniards gossip over carajillos (liquor-spiked espresso), artists hobnob in tiny galleries, and hip gays order cañas (glasses of beer) at funky bars.

And you know Valencia's restaurant scene is heating up when Barcelona's epicureans are driving two hours for lunch. For an affordable taste of Valencian cuisine, head to Casa Montaña (Calle José Benlliure 69; 34-96-367-2314; www.emilianobodega.com) and order the delicious anchovies (2.40 euros, about $3.25 at $1.36 to the euro), cooked fava beans (2.40 euros) and cod fish croquettes (1.40 each). If you're in the mood for clóchinas, or mussels, the place to go is El Pilar (Calle Moro Zeit 13; 34-96-391-0497), a 90-year-old tapas bar with just seven tables.

NAPLES

Rome is being invaded — not by soldiers, but by “Da Vinci Code” tours and outrageously expensive cafes. For a far cheaper bite of the Italian dolce vita, go to seaside Naples.

Long associated with organized crime, chaotic traffic and a volcano (Vesuvius), Naples is more rough-edged than the Eternal City. But Naples has calmed down and cleaned up just enough to attract the bohemian set, thanks to a dynamic mayor who is promoting the arts, from subway installations by Sol LeWitt to the new Palazzo delle Arti Napoli (www.palazzoartinapoli.net).

Mixing things up are private art spaces like 404 Gallery (www.404gallery.com) and Not Gallery (www.notgallery.com), as well as the Hotel Correra 241 (Via Correra 241; 39-081-195-62-842; www.correra.it), a 10-room boutique hotel with rotating art exhibits. Doubles start at 75 euros.

The food in Naples isn't bad, either. After all, there are a mind-boggling 12,000 pizzerias in town. You can't go wrong with Pizzeria di Matteo (94 Via Tribunali; 39-081-455-262) and L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele dal 1870 (Via Cesare Sersale 1/3; 39-081-553-9204; www.damichele.net), which serve two types of fresh pies (marinara or margherita) with perfectly thin crusts for about 4 euros.

ZAGREB

Take Vienna's florid architecture, throw in Budapest's bubbling cafe culture, and you get Zagreb, Croatia's grand capital. A showcase of fin-de-siècle architecture capped by not one, but two hilltop medieval towns, Zagreb's unexpected beauty is drawing sophisticated weekenders.

One could spend an entire day just wandering from cafe to cafe on Trg Bana Jelacica, the main square, chatting with the friendly and fashionable locals. At night, the action moves to the city's old-style restaurants. At the rustic favorite Vallis Aurea (Tomiceva 4; 385-1-48-31-305), you can order hearty dishes like pork cutlets or rump steak for under 8 euros. Afterward, cross the street to Vinoteka Pantheon (Tomiceva 5; 385-1-48-33-907), a chic new bar that serves Croatian delicacies and wine.

The shopping is surprisingly good, too. All the global fashion labels are present, but residents are just as likely to peruse the Hrelic flea market on Sunday mornings for 1960's chandeliers and Modernist furniture. The one thing Zagreb lacks is designer hotels, which is just as well, considering that grand places like the Hotel Dubrovnik (Gajeva 1; 385-1-4863-555; www.hotel-dubrovnik.hr), on Trg Bana Jelacica, start at just 120 euros (about $165).

BRUGES

Bruges, a medieval city in the Flemish region of Belgium, has fairy-tale streets, gingerbread houses and winding canals that lead to old windmills. Call it the other Amsterdam, except that few American travelers seem to know it. But that might change, thanks to a new film, “In Bruges,” starring Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes.

Before the movie fans arrive, savor what this former Viking city excels at: decadent chocolate and beers made by Trappist monks. Follow your nose to the Chocolate Line (Simon Stevinplein 19; 32-50-34-10-90; www.thechocolateline.be), an old-fashioned shop in the center of town where residents get their sweet fix. You can choose from 60 varieties including Tonka — made of white ganache with coconut milk, bourbon vanilla and Venezuelan tonka beans (4 euros per 100 grams).

When it comes to beer, steer clear of the tourist traps like Brugs Beertje, and head to Cambrinus (Philipstockstraat 19; 32-50-3-23-28; www.cambrinus.eu), a historic bar that serves 400 beers and bar food like steak frites. Wait until you get to Halve Maan (Walplein, 26; 32-50-33-26-97; www.halvemaan.be) — the only active brewery in the town center — before ordering the Brugse Zot, its house brew (2.50 and 3 euros).

But be careful. Those monks like their beer strong: most contain 8 percent to 11.5 percent alcohol.

Guantanamo not that high on Cuba's wish list

2007-04-19T00:24:00.000-07:00

Even as it is rankled by the U.S. troop presence, Havana may find the base serves a better purpose as a symbol of American hegemony.

By Carol J. Williams, LA Times.
April 18, 2007

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA — Fidel Castro wages silent protest against the U.S. military "tenants" of this bay in southern Cuba from a drawer in his desk.

There lie 47 uncashed checks drawn on the U.S. Treasury, each for $4,085, the annual rent fixed in a 1903 lease agreement that has vexed the Cuban leader since a leftist revolution brought him to power nearly half a century ago.

The presence of U.S. troops on Cuban soil has long rankled Castro, who, before taking ill in July and temporarily ceding presidential authority to his brother Raul, often ranted about the "imperialist occupation" in speeches and broadcasts.

But would he take it back if Washington offered to tear up the lease today?

Julia Sweig, director of Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, pointed out the international outcry over the Pentagon's use of the base at Guantanamo to detain and prosecute prisoners held in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism, and suggested handing over the property as a possible solution.

"One way to unload the problem would be to give it back to Cuba," she said. "The question is, would the Cubans want it back?

"Because it's become such a global symbol of what has gone wrong with America — not just a symbol of our colonial impulses but of the anti-imperialist fight throughout Latin America — it's something Cuba uses to greater benefit than getting the base back."

In a report issued last month on Guantanamo's role in the troubled diplomatic relationship between Havana and Washington, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs think tank concluded that returning the territory to Cuba would be essential to ending the United States' perceived domination of Latin American neighbors.

During President Bush's trip last month through Latin America, even friendly leaders reminded him of the message conveyed to the region by U.S. military occupation of the Cuban territory, said the council's director, Larry Birns.

"Guantanamo is the symbol of 19th century gunboat diplomacy practiced by Washington," Birns said. He added that a movement was gaining ground throughout the Western Hemisphere "questioning the United States' legitimacy in occupying Guantanamo under the present arrangement."

Caleb McCarry, the Bush administration's point man on a post-communist Cuba, said that Guantanamo would be on the table — if and when the island threw off its one-party regime.

'A colonial relic'

The U.S. government gained control of Guantanamo Bay and its surrounding territory in 1903 under an agreement between the newly independent Cuban government and its U.S. liberators after the 1898 Spanish-American War.

At the time, the military wanted a base to position U.S. forces to protect the Panama Canal, then under construction. The base also played an important role during the Cold War, allowing U.S. forces to monitor Soviet movements in the region.

But since the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union and its communist empire and the 1999 return of the Panama Canal to its host nation, the U.S. base has lost its strategic significance and now serves as little more than "a colonial relic," Birns asserted.

The 103-year-old agreement limits use of the Cuban territory to "coaling and naval purposes only," neither of which appears to cover the prison or tribunal operations.

The agreement also expressly prohibits "commercial, industrial or other enterprise within said areas," but the U.S. base now sports a McDonald's, two Starbucks outlets, a Subway sandwich shop and other American concessions.

Such breaches of the treaty render it voidable, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs stated in its report urging the U.S. government to cease its use of Guantanamo against the host country's wishes.

Although U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have publicly acknowledged that many foreign allies view the detention center and war crimes tribunal as illegitimate, some U.S. officials argue that the base remains crucial to American interests in the region.

'A vital role'

"Guantanamo serves a vital role in Caribbean regional security, protection from narco-trafficking and terrorism, and safeguards against mass-migration attempts in un-seaworthy craft," said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, the latter referring to use of the base as a refugee camp for intercepted Haitian and Cuban rafters.

Analysts such as Sweig point out, however, that the idea of closing Guantanamo has repeatedly surfaced over the years during Pentagon belt-tightening efforts that have led to the closure of nearly 100 other military bases. Before the January 2002 arrival of the first terrorism suspects, Guantanamo had dwindled to about 300 military personnel. It now has more than 8,500.

In the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, also known as the Libertad Act, Washington offered to open negotiations with a democratically elected Cuban government aimed at returning Guantanamo or redefining the lease terms to Havana's satisfaction.

The State Department's acting Cuba desk chief, John Regan, said Havana had not made an issue of the base, which under the agreement is leased in perpetuity unless both sides agree to end it.

"To my knowledge, the Cubans have never officially asked for it back," Regan said.

Nor have they raised any objection to the detention mission at the monthly fence-line meeting of U.S. and Cuban military officials, the forum at which they were advised of the new role for the base at a January 2002 meeting, Regan said.

Neither officials in Havana nor Cuban diplomats in Washington responded to numerous telephone and e-mail requests to express their views on Guantanamo. But American business, political and cultural figures with regular contact with Cuban leaders say they have the impression that Castro's government wants the U.S. military off the island but that the issue isn't a priority now.

Sarah Stephens, head of the Center for Democracy in the Americas, said she'd never heard Cuban officials mention Guantanamo during any of her 30-plus trips to Havana with congressional and other delegations.

Beyond Havana's control

"I always just assumed it was something they know they can't control," she said of the lease deal, noting that the annual rent checks hadn't been cashed since the first year Castro was in power.

The revolutionary leader hadn't yet aligned his government with the Soviet Union when, in the summer of 1959, he cashed the U.S. Treasury check for that year's base rental. U.S. officials have cited that action in defending their continued use of the base, contending that it signaled his acceptance of the December 1903 agreement.

"About two years ago I asked President Fidel Castro, 'What is the policy the Cuban government takes if one of the terrorists escapes from Guantanamo onto Cuban soil?' " said Albert Fox, a Tampa businessman and head of the Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy, a pro-engagement lobby. "He responded, 'They are already on Cuban soil.' "

Koreans Fearful of Racial Backlash

2007-04-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

By Ryu Jin
The Korea Times, Staff Reporter

The South Korean government hopes that the tragic Virginia massacre will neither strain South Korea-U.S. relations nor stir up racial prejudice or retaliatory actions.

The statement was released after President Roh Moo-hyun expressed deep condolences to all Americans, especially the bereaved families of the victims in the shooting spree.

``I and the people of this country are greatly shocked and saddened by the tragedy in the United States,’’ he said in a statement televised across the country. ``We hope U.S. society will overcome this sadness and regain tranquility as early as possible.’’

Prime Minister Han Duck-soo also expressed deep sadness and gave words of comfort to the bereaved families of the victims on behalf of the South Korean people and the government.

Put on high alert, the government has been making efforts to ensure the rampage would not lead to any ethnic confrontation in the United States.

Virginia police identified the gunman who killed 32 people and wounded dozens in the rampage as Cho Seung-hui, a 23-year-old South Korean student majoring in English literature there. He later took his own life and his motives were not known immediately.

Roh, who has already expressed condolences twice the previous day, held an emergency meeting at Chong Wa Dae to discuss follow-up measures, according to officials.

A presidential aide who attended the meeting said that the participants expressed hope that the incident would not have too much negative influence on South Korea-U.S. relations.

``We hope that the tragedy would not stir up any racial prejudice or retaliatory acts against our people,’’ he said. ``We would take extra precautions to calm down the Korean-American community in confusion and shock and prevent possible damage to other Koreans.’’

Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Song Min-soon also sent a personal letter of condolences for the victims to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, calling the incident a ``tragedy that should have never taken place.’’

Song also convened an emergency meeting the previous night and decided to dispatch a task force to the U.S. as part of efforts to minimize the fallout of the incident.

Officials at the ministry were concerned over a possible backlash against South Korean residents living in the U.S. and the negative impact on the alliance, recenetly strengthened by the conclusion of a bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) on April 2.

``We are afraid that the incident could deal a serious blow to the national image and status as the world’s 11th largest economy,’’ a ministry official said. ``We are also trying to minimize the negative impacts on the general relations between the two countries.’’

South Korean politicians were quick to call for concrete government measures to prevent the tragedy from causing any damage to Koreans living in the U.S. and straining the alliance between the two countries.

``I can’t contain my shock and sorrow,’’ Uri Party Chairman Chung Sye-kyun said. ``These kinds of incidents can stoke various kinds of worries, and the disturbance should be put under control as quickly as possible.’’

``I express my deep sorrow for the victims and their family members,’’ said Chairman Kang Jae-sup of the main opposition Grand National Party. ``I also hope the incident will not cause a crack in South Korea-U.S. ties.’’

Why I Declined To Serve

2007-04-15T22:34:00.000-07:00

By John J. Sheehan
Washingtonpost, April 16, 2007

Service to the nation is both a responsibility and an honor for every citizen presented with the opportunity. This is especially true in times of war and crisis. Today, because of the war in Iraq, this nation is in a crisis of confidence and is confused about its foreign policy direction, especially in the Middle East.

When asked whether I would like to be considered for the position of White House implementation manager for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I knew that it would be a difficult assignment, but also an honor, and that this was a serious task that needed to be done. I served as the military assistant to the deputy secretary of defense in the mid-1980s and more recently as commander in chief of the Atlantic Command during the Cuban and Haitian migrant operation and the reconstruction of Haiti. Based on my experience, I knew that a White House position of this nature would require interagency acceptance. Cabinet-level agencies, organizations and their leadership must buy in to the position's roles and responsibilities. Most important, Cabinet-level personalities must develop and accept a clear definition of the strategic approach to policy.

What I found in discussions with current and former members of this administration is that there is no agreed-upon strategic view of the Iraq problem or the region. In my view, there are essentially three strategies in play simultaneously.

The first I call "the Woody Hayes basic ground attack," which is basically gaining one yard -- or one city block -- at a time. Given unconstrained time and resources, one could control the outcome in Iraq and provide the necessary security to move on to the next stage of development.

The second strategy starts with security but adds benchmarks for both the U.S. and Iraqi participants and applies time constraints that should guide them toward a desired outcome. The value of this strategy is that everyone knows the quantifiable and measurable objectives that fit within an overall strategic framework.

The third strategy takes a larger view of the region and the desired end state. Simply put, where does Iraq fit in a larger regional context? The United States has and will continue to have strategic interests in the greater Middle East well after the Iraq crisis is resolved and, as a matter of national interest, will maintain forces in the region in some form. The Iraq invasion has created a real and existential crisis for nearly all Middle Eastern countries and created divisions among our traditional European allies, making cooperation on other issues more difficult. In the case of Iran, we have allowed Tehran to develop more policy options and tools than it had a few years ago. Iran is an ideological and destabilizing threat to its neighbors and, more important, to U.S. interests.

Of the three strategies in play, the third is the most important but, unfortunately, is the least developed and articulated by this administration.

The day-to-day work of the White House implementation manager overseeing Iraq and Afghanistan would require a great deal of emotional and intellectual energy resolving critical resource issues in a bureaucracy that, to date, has not functioned well. Activities such as the current surge operations should fit into an overall strategic framework. There has to be linkage between short-term operations and strategic objectives that represent long-term U.S. and regional interests, such as assured access to energy resources and support for stable, Western-oriented countries. These interests will require a serious dialogue and partnership with countries that live in an increasingly dangerous neighborhood. We cannot "shorthand" this issue with concepts such as the "democratization of the region" or the constant refrain by a small but powerful group that we are going to "win," even as "victory" is not defined or is frequently redefined.

It would have been a great honor to serve this nation again. But after thoughtful discussions with people both in and outside of this administration, I concluded that the current Washington decision-making process lacks a linkage to a broader view of the region and how the parts fit together strategically. We got it right during the early days of Afghanistan -- and then lost focus. We have never gotten it right in Iraq. For these reasons, I asked not to be considered for this important White House position. These huge shortcomings are not going to be resolved by the assignment of an additional individual to the White House staff. They need to be addressed before an implementation manager is brought on board.

The writer is a retired Marine Corps general.

Nancy Pelosi, Respectfully Maintaining Her Own Image

2007-04-05T23:50:00.000-07:00

FASHION

By Robin Givhan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 6, 2007.

Over the past week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi toured the Middle East with a congressional entourage and a generous collection of scarves. The scarves provided her with an additional bit of sartorial modesty when the situation required it and she was also able to use them to cover her head when protocol dictated -- such as when she visited the tomb of John the Baptist inside a mosque in Damascus and tied one around her head in the manner of a Hitchcock heroine.

Other Western women have visited the Middle East and have had to cover their heads, but they often looked as though that requirement came as a surprise and in a pinch they reached for the nearest available square of fabric. Being respectful demands a certain mindfulness in order not to look like one is wearing a tablecloth.

The point is not to have some glitzy bit of silk to cover the head -- being flashy would defeat the point. It is to avoid looking unprepared and awkward. Grabbing half-heartedly for the table linens may be following the letter of the cultural rules, but not the spirit. To some degree, it is reminiscent of when a man arrives for an event that requires business attire and he is wearing black walking shoes instead of dress ones. He gets a pass, but really, he should know better.

Pelosi's scarf collection included a red print style that she wore around her neck when she was in Jerusalem. In Syria and Saudi Arabia, she wore one dominated by yellow. And then while in Beirut, she had a blue scarf tied jauntily around the strap of her shoulder bag.

In each example, the scarf was incorporated into the day's wardrobe. One hesitates to say that she accessorized her ensembles with the scarves because that makes it sound as though their significance can be equated with a pair of earrings or a strand of pearls. They were more meaningful than that. They allowed her to be respectful of the day's hosts while maintaining her own public identity. She looked like herself and she maintained control of the visual message.

There are few images more discomforting than public figures thrust into foreign cultures and required to wear the host's traditional attire. Almost without exception the visitors tend to look smaller and more vulnerable. They evoke the uneasiness of children who have been dressed by a parent, teacher, minister or other authority figure. Wearing something unfamiliar or inappropriate in a public forum has a way of deflating even the most pompous figures. Their body language communicates their uneasiness. Our eyes register the sight as jarring.

One such searing image was captured in November, when world leaders including President Bush, Russia's Vladimir Putin, Canada's Stephen Harper and Chile's Michelle Bachelet gathered for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Hanoi. During the conference, the group was photographed dressed in traditional Vietnamese costumes. They all looked, if not like they wanted to be somewhere else, at least like they wanted to be wearing something else.

Everyone has tools they rely on to help them look as dignified as they feel. Take away those aides and it can be more difficult to maintain one's bearing.

Clothing can evoke authority, but at the most basic level it is an expression of control. Prison coveralls wrest autonomy from convicts. School uniforms attempt to level the playing field so that no clique can dominate the student body. In both cases, individuals fight to reclaim a sense of self, whether by shortening the hem of a skirt or accessorizing the body with tattoos.

When the recently released British detainees were trotted in front of the media in Iran, the men were not in the uniform of their country, which would have been a reminder of their international stature, but rather in look-alike shabby suits and no ties. They were dressed in the image of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Western mufti was appropriated and served as a stand-in for an emasculating uniform, making the seamen appear small and uncertain. The lone woman looked like she had been overpowered by someone else's cultural traditions.

Pelosi, with her carefully coordinated scarves, respected her foreign surroundings without ceding any control. She assiduously avoided leaving a trail of cringe-inducing photographs in which she looked so uncomfortable she might as well have been dressed in a coat of porcupine quills. Her multipurpose, culturally adaptable scarves underscored the reality that sometimes it not only matters who you are, but also what you wear.

Who Got the British Sailors Released?

2007-04-04T12:11:00.000-07:00

By CATHERINE MAYER/LONDON AND AZADEH MOAVENI/TEHRAN
time.com Wednesday, Apr. 04, 2007

The President of Iran was clearly relishing his role as beneficent liberator of the 15 British Marines and sailors detained by Iran for nearly two weeks. At a press conference today, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the release a "gift to the British people" on the occasion of Easter as well as a commemoration of the Prophet Muhammad's birthday. The smiling President then met with the British detainees, nodding his head munificently as they lined up to offer thanks for their release. "It is for Islam," he reminded one. He joked to another: "You ended up on a compulsory visit, didn't you?"

As much as today's events appeared to be another episode of the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad show, the Iranian president's actual role in ending the crisis may have been less than meets the eye. The office of the presidency in Iran does not really have a say in matters of foreign policy. Indeed, British analysts were quick to credit another political personage for the resolution of the drama. John Williams, the former Director of News of Britain's Foreign Office, asserts that Dr. Ali Larijani, the secretary general of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, was more important in calling the shots. "It seems that around the weekend, Dr. Larijani decided to settle this and took control," says Williams. "He has proved himself a significant power broker, a man who, if he feels it is in Iran's best interests, will do business with the international community." Other observers warn against giving Larijani too much credit. Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, they say, may have decided that Iran had squeezed as much advantage out of the situation as possible and simply got Larijani to do the legwork to end the crisis.

Observers in Britain don't doubt that the release of the detainees was in Iran's best interest. "If the saga had dragged on, it would have led to an escalation of international opinion against Iran," says Chris Rundle, a former British diplomat in Iran, noting that it took Iran 13 days to coordinate its policy. Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain's former ambassador to the U.S., describes the decision as "a shrewd move. The detainees were a wasting asset." The sudden announcement also reinforced a sense that Iran, and not Britain, was dictating the pace.

Having Ahmadinejad deliver the breakthrough news may have been intended to buttress that image. He remains a symbol of Tehran's defiance of the West, and, for a politician of limited power, Ahmadinejad still knows how to play his role to maximum advantage. Nazenin Ansari, the diplomatic correspondent of the London-based Persian-language weekly Kayhan, believes he and Iran's hardliners have benefited from the showdown with Britain. "What we have seen is a shift to the right," she says. Reformists had been making progress, but "in Iran politics is all about changing the atmosphere. The current has now shifted in the same way it did during the 1979 hostage crisis."

In his press conference, Ahmadinejad said the captives would have been let go sooner but that the "British government behaved badly, and so it took a little while." When asked what prompted the sudden release, he said London had sent a letter promising that such incidents would not be repeated. While careful to point out that the British sailors were being released "as a gift, and not as a result of the letter," the president's reference to a British concession served as a face-saving device, rationalizing the sudden release after much clamor in Iran for a possible trial of the British service personnel.

The Iranian leadership — including Larijani, Ahmadinejad and certainly Khamenei — believes that Tehran's popularity among the world's Muslims, particularly for its face-off against America, gives it leverage in dealing with the West. "Iranians had bruised egos because of international pressure over their nuclear program and the detentions of their personnel by the U.S. in Iraq," says Ansari. "What we've seen is a public relations exercise to take command of the Arab street once again." Says Shahid Malik, one of the first Muslims elected to Britain�s parliament: "This was yet another example of how adept Ahmadinejad is at communications in the way he targets the Muslim and non-Muslim world." During the press conference, Ahmadinejad made the expected jabs at the West, referring to the U.N. Security Council as "an organization they've created" and its resolutions as "pieces of paper they keep passing." He then accused Britain of involvement in a series of bombings in Iran's ethnic minority provinces in the past two years, while saying he would avoid going into detail lest the session "turn bitter."

Downing Street welcomed the move with public caution and mopped brows behind closed doors. As the crisis dragged on, government sources acknowledged that Iran's intransigence was exposing Britain's comparative impotence. It had failed to secure a strong denunciation of Iran's actions from the U.N. Security Council; its European allies were balancing support for Britain against their business interests; and although Prime Minister Tony Blair warned a failure to reach a quick resolution would lead to a "new phase" in response to the detentions, nobody detected in his words the martial sounds of rattling sabers. "There's no mood here for military adventures in Iran or elsewhere," says Malik. "Iraq wasn't what we thought it would be. There's a somber mood in this country."

I cannot quit my place among the gloom-mongers. We still look like losing

2007-04-03T15:38:00.000-07:00

Whatever the tactical successes of the US surge, it is hard to believe that anything other than defeat and disaster await

Max Hastings
Tuesday April 3, 2007
The Guardian

Every now and again, grown-up people review their cherished opinions and prejudices. Does the evidence still stack up? Or are there grounds for thinking again? It seems especially important to do this at regular intervals with Iraq, because its fate is critical for the west.
Sceptics have for years been rehearsing a countdown to a day of doom. I am often among their number. But, as a compulsive consumer of the torrent of analysis and situation reports that comes out of Iraq, I sometimes shut my eyes and ask: is there a shred of hope?

Europeans are prone to think of the Americans who run the place as body-armoured oafs. If this was sometimes true in the past, it is certainly not so now. On the contrary, the US has belatedly entrusted the salvation of Iraq to its best and brightest - and I do not use that phrase pejoratively.

David Petraeus, who commands, is probably the cleverest and most imaginative general in the American army. He has assembled around himself a cluster of like-minded people, passionately committed to retrieving the country from the brink of disaster. Colonel HR McMaster, for instance, the most successful unit commander to have served in Iraq, was whisked back to Baghdad from an academic fellowship in London to join Petraeus's team.

Stephen Biddle, a civilian academic from the US Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of some outstanding papers on the country's plight, and was suddenly plucked out of Washington a fortnight ago to work 13 hours a day with Petraeus's brainstormers. Graeme Lamb, Petraeus's senior British deputy, is as able a soldier as the army has got.

Despite the latest Iraqi government figures showing civilian deaths up in March, the evidence is that Bush's "surge", entrusted to Petraeus's direction, is achieving real results. In Baghdad, there has been a dramatic fall in the rate of murders, suicide-bombings, insurgent attacks. Many Sunnis have become deeply hostile to the depredations of al-Qaida's foreign fighters. In some cases, Sunnis have taken violent action to expel or eliminate the intruders, whom they no longer want as allies.

Aided by much improved intelligence, so-called Tier One special forces - of which almost one-third are British SAS - have been carrying out intensive operations to "harvest" insurgent leaders. Hundreds have been captured or killed. The Americans have exchanged a policy of dispatching troops daily on armoured excursions from their huge bases for one of holding positions to provide visible security in the midst of Iraqi communities.

General Barry McCaffrey, a retired US officer fiercely critical of his nation's policies in Iraq, has just visited the country, seen all the top brass, and delivered a report to the US Military Academy at West Point. McCaffrey is full of praise for what Petraeus and his team are doing. He argues that there is now a slim chance of stabilising the country.

Yet everything turns not upon what Americans - much less the British - do, but upon Iraqis. "Reconciliation is the way out," writes the general. "There will be no imposed military solution with the current non-sustainable US force levels."

"Non-sustainable" applies, of course, to both the military and political constraints. Every senior officer engaged in Iraq knows that the British are easing out; the US army is stretched to its limits and beyond; the patience of Congress and the American people is ebbing fast.

It is common ground among all but irredeemable negativists that Petraeus's soldiers are doing better than anyone thought possible a year ago. Unfortunately, however, this is happening at three minutes to midnight. Pumpkin time is very close. Huge problems persist, first, with the paralysis of Iraqi rule. McCaffrey acknowledges "there is no function of government which operates across the nation".

Second, though progress is being made with training Iraqi soldiers and police, these are still a million miles from being sufficiently numerous, motivated, trained, or equipped to assume responsibility for the nation's security. McCaffrey calls for a hugely increased commitment to the forces: "We are still in the wrong ball park."

More than this, there is no chance of stabilising Iraq unless its people are provided with public services that work, and its economy is functioning in a fashion that gives most of its citizens a clear stake in peace. Almost four years after Baghdad fell, basic facilities such as electricity and sewerage, together with local security against crime and kidnapping, work less well than they did under Saddam.

This remains the catastrophic failure of the occupation, and the likeliest cause of its doom. A senior British officer to whom I spoke last week argues that Iraq needs a Marshall Plan, civil aid on a scale greater than anyone has yet attempted - or than the US Congress in its current mood is willing to endorse.

For US policy in Iraq to have a chance of working, the indispensable ingredient is time. Yet the storehouse of this precious commodity was almost emptied before Petraeus arrived. Everybody concerned with Iraq - the American and British governments, the precarious regime in Baghdad, the insurgents, the population across the country - is staring at the calendar, looking towards January 2009.

When George Bush quits the White House, it seems unlikely that any successor will be willing to maintain a big commitment in Iraq. The game will be over. Yet to put Iraq on its feet, to leave behind a viable society, a minimum of five years and hundreds of billions in cash will be needed.

Many of the right things are now being done, too late to retrieve the mistakes of 2003 and 2004. McCaffrey's report mentions the need for regional dialogue. Yet even on this it is hard to turn back the clock. In the early days Iran might, just might, have been willing to talk and act in support of its own rational interest in a stable Iraq. Today, however, the British and Americans are engaged in something close to a proxy war with the Iranians, escalated by the seizure of British sailors.

The foremost challenge is to persuade a sufficient number of Iraq's people to overcome a visceral desire to see their occupiers humiliated, and act on the basis of self-interest. However successful are Petraeus and his brightest and best in holding the ring, only the Iraqis can save themselves.

Today, as McCaffrey acknowledges: "No Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO, nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection." Surge or no surge, there are not remotely enough western troops in Iraq to alter this wretched reality. Only the people who live there can do it.

At the end of my own spasm of soul-searching, I cannot quit my place among the gloom-mongers. It is hard to believe that, whatever tactical military successes Petraeus's people are achieving - and these are real enough - Iraq's leaders, security forces and citizens can take the strain in real time. We still look like losing.

Yet this should never become cause for exultation, even among the bitterest foes of the Washington neocons. If defeat, chaos, regional war indeed come to pass, the Iraqi people and the security interests of the west will suffer a disaster for which the disgrace of George Bush and Tony Blair will represent wholly inadequate compensation.

Legislating Leadership on Iraq

2007-03-28T21:04:00.000-07:00

NY Times Editorial
29 Mar 2007

This week it was the Senate’s turn. Like the House last week and the voters last November, the Senate made clear Tuesday that Americans expect to see the disaster in Iraq brought to an early and responsible end.

President Bush’s reaction was instantaneous, familiar in its contempt for views that do not follow his in lockstep, and depressing in its lack of contact with reality. Mr. Bush threatened to veto the spending bill needed for this year’s military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan rather than accept language calling for most American combat troops to be withdrawn from Iraq sometime next year. Nor was there any hint of his own prescription for ending this war.

Mr. Bush, his advisers and his loyalists on Capitol Hill threw up a cloud of propaganda aimed at making Americans think there is a debate going on between those who want to win the war and those who want to lose. That’s nonsense, and the White House knows it. Mr. Bush’s inadequate response was a cynical attempt to portray the Democrats and moderate Republicans who voted with the majority as indifferent to the political future of Iraq and to the morale of American soldiers stationed there.

In truth, it is Mr. Bush who has been defaulting on his own responsibilities in both areas, and that is why Congress needed to add the language he now objects to so vehemently.

Instead, he has handed a blank check to a government of divisive Iraqi politicians adept at paying lip service to national reconciliation while working hard to undermine it in practice. And he continues to ratchet up an already unsustainable troop escalation that will require sending exhausted units back into combat and compromise the Army’s ability to maintain high-quality forces ready to respond to crises around the world.

Most Senate Republicans still stuck with Mr. Bush and his policies Tuesday. But their arguments are hollow. Senator John McCain of Arizona gibed that the bill should have been labeled the “Date Certain for Surrender Act.” Yet Mr. McCain himself co-sponsored a similar resolution in 1994 calling for withdrawal of American troops from Haiti “as soon as possible.” Other Republicans leading the attack on Democrats, like Senator John Warner of Virginia, also voted in favor of withdrawal from Haiti.

Victory is no longer an option in Iraq, if it ever was. The only rational objective left is to responsibly organize America’s inevitable exit. That is exactly what Mr. Bush is not doing and what the House and Senate bills try to do.

The House version imposes benchmarks for political progress on the Iraqi government and requires the Bush administration to enforce them as a condition for continued financing of most American combat operations. If those conditions are met, it gives the Pentagon 18 months to complete the transition from combat operations to training and antiterrorist missions. The Senate version contains a nonbinding 12-month withdrawal timetable.

Both dates are far enough off to allow for a responsible exit. Even more important is the effort to press Mr. Bush to use remaining American leverage to nudge the Iraqi government away from its worst instincts. Passing new laws on pooling oil revenues, easing restrictions on former Baath Party members and reducing the frightening power that Shiite militias now wield in local and national police forces is fine. But Congress must also make sure the White House insists that legal changes are translated into a qualitatively different reality on the ground. That is the only course that can possibly rescue Iraq from civil war.

That pressure will be forthcoming only if Congress insists on it. Otherwise, Mr. Bush will continue to settle for half-hearted assurances from Baghdad and try to quash any thinking about a responsible exit strategy until he leaves office in 22 months.

We Can't Win If We Don't Know the Enemy

2007-03-24T19:38:00.000-07:00

FIGHTING BLIND

By Bruce Hoffman
Washingtonpost, March 25, 2007; Page B05

From the moment that President Bush declared a "war on terrorism" and then led the country to war in Iraq, the United States has utterly failed to fulfill the timeless admonition to "know your enemy." This failure helps explain why we are so far from winning in Iraq or more broadly against al-Qaeda and its allies.

"If you know the enemy and know yourself," China's Sun Tzu famously advised in the 6th century B.C., "you need not fear the results of a hundred battles." But we have plenty to fear, because five and a half years into this struggle we lack a thorough understanding of our enemies: their motivation and mind-set, their decision-making processes and command-and-control relationships, their organizational dynamics and their ideological appeal.

Military tactics are doomed to failure when they are applied without a sophisticated knowledge of the enemy being pursued -- of how that enemy thinks, and therefore how he is likely to respond or adapt to the tactics being used against him. Without knowing our enemies we cannot successfully penetrate their cells; we cannot sow discord and dissension in their ranks to weaken them from within; we cannot think like them to anticipate how they may act in a variety of situations. This means that we cannot conduct an effective counterterrorist strategy by preventing or deterring terrorist attacks, or an effective counterinsurgency strategy by winning the support of the population and then dismantling the insurgent infrastructure.

Until we really know our enemies, America will remain on the defensive, inherently reactive rather than proactive. We will continually be surprised by our enemies' tactics and maneuvers. We will not prevail.

If we knew our enemy, we might not have been surprised by al-Qaeda's resurrection in Pakistan -- literally under the noses of our forces right across the border in Afghanistan. We might also have detected the warning signs of the Taliban resurgence long before the spring offensive now believed to be imminent. And we might have better understood why last year's killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had only an ephemeral effect on al-Qaeda in Iraq's capacity for continued violence and bloodshed.

This is not the first time the United States has faced an enigmatic, unseen enemy motivated by a powerful ideology that used terrorism and insurgency to advance its cause and rally popular support. That was also our situation in the Vietnam War. Though we lost in Vietnam, we did make a serious attempt to understand the enemy. Intelligence agencies used interviews with captured Vietcong soldiers and defectors, plus communist documents that were found or captured, first to figure out who the enemy was and how they operated, then to try to devise political, social and economic programs that would undermine the Vietcong and strengthen the South Vietnamese government that the United States supported. Studying the enemy was big business.

It wasn't enough, because then, as now, our conventional military commanders remained impatiently fixated on strategies of attrition and decapitation. They dismissed tactics that were based more on guile than firepower, hoping for quick results and avoiding tactics that would have taken time to work but in the long run might have been effective.

The United States is making no comparable effort today to study and understand either the terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda or the insurgents in Iraq. Our counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies appear weighted toward a "kill or capture" approach targeting individual bad guys. This reflects the conventional military's commitment to "enemy centric" warfare. Killing bad guys is easy compared with the "population centric" approach so important to effectively countering terrorism and insurgency. But our tactics are ineffectual, because they are based on the erroneous assumption that al-Qaeda and its allies or the insurgents in Iraq are organized, centralized armed forces that will respond to traditional definitions of victory and defeat. Our tactics presume that killing or capturing enough bad guys will end global terrorism and the Iraqi insurgency.

So the U.S. military and our intelligence community are focused on hunting down militant leaders, killing terrorists and insurgents, and protecting U.S. forces -- all laudable goals, but inadequate ones. Decapitation strategies have rarely worked against terrorist or insurgent campaigns. Occupations such as ours in Iraq that anger the local populace are similarly ineffective. Our fundamental problem is that al-Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgents appear to have little difficulty attracting new recruits to continue their fights against us.

The Pentagon has made a conceptual breakthrough by recognizing recently that we are engaged in "a long war" likely to continue for a decade or more. This acknowledgement provides a signal opportunity finally to begin to collect and analyze the information needed to truly know our enemy. We have to get serious about this right now, given the changes we see in the behavior and operations of our adversaries, who are much too elusive and complicated to be vanquished by mere decapitation.

Successfully countering terrorism and insurgency cannot be an exclusively military endeavor. It requires parallel political, social, economic and ideological activities. All of these need to be integrated in a systematic approach that is operationally dynamic -- able to quickly identify changes in our enemies' tactics, targeting and recruitment patterns and to respond effectively to them. We need to be able to exploit networks, the constellations of individual relationships that define terrorism and insurgency today, with the ease and facility that our enemies routinely do. We must master "soft" skills such as negotiations, psychology, social and cultural anthropology, foreign area studies, complexity theory and systems management. All are essential to operating effectively in the ambiguous and dynamic environment in which irregular adversaries circulate.

We cannot prevail without breaking the cycle of terrorist and insurgent recruitment and replenishment that have sustained both al-Qaeda's continued campaign and the ongoing conflict in Iraq. So psychological operations that seek to persuade insurgents and terrorists to surrender are particularly important. These proven, cost-effective measures can pay vast intelligence dividends if pursued with shrewdness and persistence. If, as the rule of thumb says, it requires 10 soldiers to successfully neutralize every terrorist or guerrilla, then one defector can reduce by 10 the number of Americans needed on a particular protracted mission. Yes, such efforts require time to succeed, but once launched they can have side benefits. In Vietnam, the suspicion and mistrust that we managed to create within the Vietcong forced our enemies to expend more time and energy watching their backs and monitoring their comrades. If we can do that now, insurgents and terrorists will have less time and energy to plan attacks against us.

The key to success will be to combine the most utilitarian aspects of our formidable military forces with smart, sophisticated political and psychological efforts to know our enemy much better than we do today. We won't succeed unless we can think and plan ahead to address the threats likely to be posed by the terrorist and insurgent generation beyond the current one. And we cannot do that until we have figured out who these enemies are, what makes them tick, and what their strengths and vulnerabilities are. When we know those things, we can build a strategy and tactics based on empirical knowledge and analysis rather than on conjecture or wishful thinking. And we can win.

Bruce Hoffman is a professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and

a senior fellow at the U.S. Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Center. He is the author of "Inside Terrorism" (Columbia University Press).

Terrorized by 'War on Terror'

2007-03-24T19:16:00.000-07:00

How a Three-Word Mantra Has Undermined America

By Zbigniew Brzezinski
Washingtonpost, March 25, 2007

The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

The damage these three words have done -- a classic self-inflicted wound -- is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare -- political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.

But the little secret here may be that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a "war on terror" did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Support for President Bush in the 2004 elections was also mobilized in part by the notion that "a nation at war" does not change its commander in chief in midstream. The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being "at war."

To justify the "war on terror," the administration has lately crafted a false historical narrative that could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By claiming that its war is similar to earlier U.S. struggles against Nazism and then Stalinism (while ignoring the fact that both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were first-rate military powers, a status al-Qaeda neither has nor can achieve), the administration could be preparing the case for war with Iran. Such war would then plunge America into a protracted conflict spanning Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and perhaps also Pakistan.

The culture of fear is like a genie that has been let out of its bottle. It acquires a life of its own -- and can become demoralizing. America today is not the self-confident and determined nation that responded to Pearl Harbor; nor is it the America that heard from its leader, at another moment of crisis, the powerful words "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; nor is it the calm America that waged the Cold War with quiet persistence despite the knowledge that a real war could be initiated abruptly within minutes and prompt the death of 100 million Americans within just a few hours. We are now divided, uncertain and potentially very susceptible to panic in the event of another terrorist act in the United States itself.

That is the result of five years of almost continuous national brainwashing on the subject of terror, quite unlike the more muted reactions of several other nations (Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, to mention just a few) that also have suffered painful terrorist acts. In his latest justification for his war in Iraq, President Bush even claims absurdly that he has to continue waging it lest al-Qaeda cross the Atlantic to launch a war of terror here in the United States.

Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum. The terror entrepreneurs, usually described as experts on terrorism, are necessarily engaged in competition to justify their existence. Hence their task is to convince the public that it faces new threats. That puts a premium on the presentation of credible scenarios of ever-more-horrifying acts of violence, sometimes even with blueprints for their implementation.

That America has become insecure and more paranoid is hardly debatable. A recent study reported that in 2003, Congress identified 160 sites as potentially important national targets for would-be terrorists. With lobbyists weighing in, by the end of that year the list had grown to 1,849; by the end of 2004, to 28,360; by 2005, to 77,769. The national database of possible targets now has some 300,000 items in it, including the Sears Tower in Chicago and an Illinois Apple and Pork Festival.

Just last week, here in Washington, on my way to visit a journalistic office, I had to pass through one of the absurd "security checks" that have proliferated in almost all the privately owned office buildings in this capital -- and in New York City. A uniformed guard required me to fill out a form, show an I.D. and in this case explain in writing the purpose of my visit. Would a visiting terrorist indicate in writing that the purpose is "to blow up the building"? Would the guard be able to arrest such a self-confessing, would-be suicide bomber? To make matters more absurd, large department stores, with their crowds of shoppers, do not have any comparable procedures. Nor do concert halls or movie theaters. Yet such "security" procedures have become routine, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and further contributing to a siege mentality.

Government at every level has stimulated the paranoia. Consider, for example, the electronic billboards over interstate highways urging motorists to "Report Suspicious Activity" (drivers in turbans?). Some mass media have made their own contribution. The cable channels and some print media have found that horror scenarios attract audiences, while terror "experts" as "consultants" provide authenticity for the apocalyptic visions fed to the American public. Hence the proliferation of programs with bearded "terrorists" as the central villains. Their general effect is to reinforce the sense of the unknown but lurking danger that is said to increasingly threaten the lives of all Americans.

The entertainment industry has also jumped into the act. Hence the TV serials and films in which the evil characters have recognizable Arab features, sometimes highlighted by religious gestures, that exploit public anxiety and stimulate Islamophobia. Arab facial stereotypes, particularly in newspaper cartoons, have at times been rendered in a manner sadly reminiscent of the Nazi anti-Semitic campaigns. Lately, even some college student organizations have become involved in such propagation, apparently oblivious to the menacing connection between the stimulation of racial and religious hatreds and the unleashing of the unprecedented crimes of the Holocaust.

The atmosphere generated by the "war on terror" has encouraged legal and political harassment of Arab Americans (generally loyal Americans) for conduct that has not been unique to them. A case in point is the reported harassment of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for its attempts to emulate, not very successfully, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Some House Republicans recently described CAIR members as "terrorist apologists" who should not be allowed to use a Capitol meeting room for a panel discussion.

Social discrimination, for example toward Muslim air travelers, has also been its unintended byproduct. Not surprisingly, animus toward the United States even among Muslims otherwise not particularly concerned with the Middle East has intensified, while America's reputation as a leader in fostering constructive interracial and interreligious relations has suffered egregiously.

The record is even more troubling in the general area of civil rights. The culture of fear has bred intolerance, suspicion of foreigners and the adoption of legal procedures that undermine fundamental notions of justice. Innocent until proven guilty has been diluted if not undone, with some -- even U.S. citizens -- incarcerated for lengthy periods of time without effective and prompt access to due process. There is no known, hard evidence that such excess has prevented significant acts of terrorism, and convictions for would-be terrorists of any kind have been few and far between. Someday Americans will be as ashamed of this record as they now have become of the earlier instances in U.S. history of panic by the many prompting intolerance against the few.

In the meantime, the "war on terror" has gravely damaged the United States internationally. For Muslims, the similarity between the rough treatment of Iraqi civilians by the U.S. military and of the Palestinians by the Israelis has prompted a widespread sense of hostility toward the United States in general. It's not the "war on terror" that angers Muslims watching the news on television, it's the victimization of Arab civilians. And the resentment is not limited to Muslims. A recent BBC poll of 28,000 people in 27 countries that sought respondents' assessments of the role of states in international affairs resulted in Israel, Iran and the United States being rated (in that order) as the states with "the most negative influence on the world." Alas, for some that is the new axis of evil!

The events of 9/11 could have resulted in a truly global solidarity against extremism and terrorism. A global alliance of moderates, including Muslim ones, engaged in a deliberate campaign both to extirpate the specific terrorist networks and to terminate the political conflicts that spawn terrorism would have been more productive than a demagogically proclaimed and largely solitary U.S. "war on terror" against "Islamo-fascism." Only a confidently determined and reasonable America can promote genuine international security which then leaves no political space for terrorism.

Where is the U.S. leader ready to say, "Enough of this hysteria, stop this paranoia"? Even in the face of future terrorist attacks, the likelihood of which cannot be denied, let us show some sense. Let us be true to our traditions.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, is the author most recently of "Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower" (Basic Books).

The Rewards of Pampering Your Nose

2007-03-22T18:49:00.000-07:00

Runny or irritated nose? Treat it well, and you'll enjoy the smells of baked cookies pain free.

By Jeanie Lerche Davis, Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD
WebMD.aol.com Feature

Love it or not, your nose can't be ignored. It is a small but mighty part of our being. And a little pampering -- when a cold or allergies strikes -- can go far.

The upside to having a nose is its faithful ability to detect wondrous aromas. Our nose serves as a sensor, helping us determine if a potential food source is toxic or edible, friend or foe. The nose knows whether it's coffee we're sniffing, spoiled leftovers -- or worse.

"In evolution, odors told us what was good for us, what was bad," says Pamela Dalton, PhD, MPH, a member of The Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. "It was part of our survival system. If something smelled bad, it was toxic. If it didn't smell good or bad, it was worth investigating. If it was the smell of cooked fat, it meant survival."

In fact, scientific evidence suggests -- though far from conclusively -- that a pleasing fragrance actually affects our physiology, helping us relax.

"When animals are exposed to certain scents, there are changes in their brain chemistry and hormone levels. There is also a reduced activity level, a measurable change in their behavior. But are they relaxed? It's hard to ask them," Dalton tells WebMD. "We're also not sure what that means in terms of people."

After all, there's another factor at work: "Our expectations affect our reactions," she says. "That's why bakery smells are enjoyable, probably because they take us back to our childhood."

Taking a Peek Inside
For the best advice on pampering your snout, WebMD contacted those who know noses.

"When you've got a runny nose, the small blood vessels lining the nose become irritated," says Pedro Cazabon, MD, an internist at the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans. "Blowing or rubbing your nose aggravates the nose skin, which is sensitive anyway."

Crazy temperature changes don't help either. In frigid outdoor air, blood vessels clamp down; warm indoor air opens them up, says Michele McDonald, MD, a professor of dermatology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville.

"Any extremity, whether it's the nose or fingers, is affected by temperature changes because blood vessels are the first to react," she tells WebMD. "When blood vessels are clamped down, there's less blood flow to the skin, so skin becomes irritated; it's more susceptible to injury."

The lower humidity indoors and outdoors wreaks its own havoc -- further irritating nasal skin inside and out. "Your nose tends to dry out, especially the skin right underneath or between your nostrils," McDonald adds.

Pampering Your Nose
Saunas and steamy showers might seem like the answer to dry indoor air - and it's true that steamed heat will open up nasal passages. But that's a temporary fix that really doesn't help much. "Once you go into the cold air, they will clamp down, which only causes more nose irritation," Cazabon explains.

Likewise, humidifiers seem like a remedy to relieve dry indoor air. But they don't really help your nose's internal membranes. "It's fine to consider a humidifier if the air is really dry in your home, to make it more comfortable. But to give your skin moisture, you have to put something on it," McDonald adds.

In fact, many doctors don't advise using a portable humidifier at home. "They are prone to developing bacteria and mold, which can be released into the air and cause respiratory problems," Cazabon tells WebMD. "Humidifiers need to be cleaned regularly because of that risk."

A vaporizer, which puts out hot steam, is another option -- although it's best for relieving congestion when you have a cold. However, they are risky because they can burn anyone who overturns or gets too close to them.

Steamy baths, humidifiers, and vaporizers all have their place, says McDonald. "But they won't help your nasal skin. You must apply something to the skin."

The experts' advice:

Use saline nasal spray. "It is the best remedy for restoring moisture to mucus membranes," says Cazabon.
Minimize exposure to cold air. Wearing a scarf that covers your nose, so that it doesn't get exposed to extremes in temperature changes, can help. "Your breath adds humidity to the air inside the scarf," he adds.
Moisturize nasal skin every morning. Use a water-based moisturizer such as Oil of Olay, Neutrogena, or Lubriderm. "Vaseline is too thick for this job, because it closes off the skin and doesn't allow glands to secrete oil. Vaseline is great for lips because lips don't have those issues," says McDonald.
Choose a moisturizer that contains sunscreen.
Carry a small tube of moisturizer with you during the day to reapply. "This will help keep your nose comfortable all day long," McDonald adds.
Petroleum-based moisturizers like Vaseline are not advised for another reason, says Cazabon. "People who apply a lot to the nose, and wear it overnight, can aspirate it into their lungs, which can lead to problems like an abscess," he tells WebMD. "I don't want to be an alarmist, but you don't want a foreign substance in your lungs. Using a little within reason is fine, but many doctors prefer patients use water-based creams."

Pampering Your Senses
To pamper your olfactory sense (which registers odors), try scented oils like bath oils, Dalton suggests. "They have a nurturing effect. When I'm trying to fall asleep in a strange hotel, having an odor that makes me think of home is very relaxing, very comforting."

To wake yourself up, try menthol, cinnamon, eucalyptus, and chili peppers, she says. These produce the sensory irritation of pungency and burning, which is tied to the trigeminal nerve, a nerve in the face that is part of the body's pain response. "Because we experience those chemicals in very low doses, they don't cause pain -- but they do arouse us," she explains.

But do certain smells act as aphrodisiacs? "There's nothing that's universal to everyone," Dalton tells WebMD. "It has to do with whatever in your environment relaxes you. People who are tense are not likely to feel amorous. If the scent of your boyfriend's cologne relaxes you, it's an aphrodisiac for you. If the smell of pumpkin pie relaxes you, then yes, it's an aphrodisiac for you. With scent, if it's a positive thing, then it works for you."

Who's watching the president?

2007-03-21T02:08:00.000-07:00

Ronald Brownstein
LA Times OP-ED, 21 Mar 2007

AT TIMES, President Bush's second term has resembled a laboratory test of what happens to a large institution when all mechanisms of accountability are disabled.

The results have not been pretty.

Hurricane Katrina, the chaotic occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, the breakdown at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the FBI's abuse of Patriot Act powers, the troubling dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys — everywhere, the administration has been plagued by an epidemic of incompetence.

Bush has stumbled so badly at managing the basic responsibilities of government that even the National Review, the flagship magazine of the conservative movement and hardly a traditional critic of the president, used its latest cover to plaintively ask: "Can't anyone here play this game?"

How did it come to this for an administration that, as the National Review noted, initially portrayed itself as buttoned-down "adults" returning to Washington after President Clinton's baby boom bacchanal?

The answer begins with Bush's management style. He combines a distaste for details with a tendency to prize loyalty over performance.

Shaped by those attitudes, Bush typically worries more about signaling resolve to his critics by denying failures inside his government than demanding excellence by punishing it. That impulse explains how Bush could present a prestigious medal to George J. Tenet — who had resigned months earlier as CIA chief — after his agency's declarations about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction crumbled like sand, and how Donald H. Rumsfeld survived so long as Defense secretary while Iraq disintegrated.

Bush's instincts were dangerously reinforced by the Republican-controlled Congress, which viewed itself less as an independent branch of government than as a junior partner to the White House in the American equivalent of a parliamentary system.

The Republican majority so completely abdicated its responsibilities to conduct oversight on the executive branch that its governing motto might have been "don't ask, don't tell."

Key House and Senate committees sometimes went months without oversight hearings on Iraq. Neither chamber managed more than a glancing review of the increased police powers the administration acquired for the war on terror. Congress barely noted the collapse in care for many veterans at Walter Reed, and it almost completely avoided issues uncomfortable for Bush, such as global warming and declining access to health insurance.

This deference reflected the widespread tendency among congressional Republicans "to think that your political welfare is tied up with the president, and you don't want to make him look bad," as Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), one of the few GOP leaders who maintained some independence from the White House, told The Times.

But the abandonment of oversight had the opposite effect. By refusing to challenge the administration's performance, the Republican majority allowed problems to fester and dysfunction to deepen. One senior House Republican said this week that nothing hurt the GOP more in 2006 than the collapse of its reputation for competent governance.

Many of the decisions now causing Bush grief could have been made only by a politician who did not believe anyone was looking over his shoulder. It's inconceivable that the administration would have been so cavalier about planning the postwar occupation of Iraq — or so dismissive of the Army warnings that it had not deployed enough troops to ensure order — if it knew that Congress would closely examine its plans.

Likewise, it's difficult to imagine that an administration accustomed to serious scrutiny would have dismissed U.S. attorneys involved in sensitive decisions on whether to prosecute political corruption and fraud cases the way Bush's Justice Department did in December.

Depending on how they apply oversight power, the Democratic congressional majority could restore badly needed accountability to the system.

If Democrats focus on settling scores, they will succeed only in igniting partisan firefights. They veered dangerously close to that mistake Friday with the hearing flogging the Valerie Plame case, which the criminal justice system had already adjudicated. But congressional oversight aimed at legitimate targets will serve the country by increasing pressure on the administration to demonstrate results — beginning in Iraq, but also at home. Already, tough congressional questioning is forcing Bush to change the way he operates.

In the four months since Democrats won control, perhaps more administration officials linked to failure or ethical missteps — Rumsfeld, officials directly responsible for Walter Reed, the Army secretary, the Justice Department chief of staff — have resigned under fire than during the six years when the GOP majority averted its eyes. Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, even after Bush's vote of confidence Tuesday, may be the next to fall to the new breeze.

Tuesday's stormy news conference suggests that Bush will push back against tough oversight. But his presidency might have turned out a lot better if he hadn't spent his first six years virtually immune from it.

Shock and Awe Worked, God Help Us

2007-03-19T20:46:00.000-07:00

By William M. Arkin
Washingtonpost, 19 Mar 2007

If there is one thing that defines American military technology, one thing that floats seductively suggesting engagement without true commitment, it is airpower.

Airpower was the boost of confidence we needed in 2003 to travel on our own highway of death. Given the current ground quagmire in Iraq, airpower will be even more our downfall in the future.

That is the far greater truth we miss in our splintered and partisan world, where Bush administration "lying" about weapons of mass destruction has become the only politically correct explanation for the mess we have made in Iraq.

Four years ago today, the United States opened a second front in the "war" against terrorism, intent on taking down Saddam Hussein. Twenty-one days later the Army and Marine Corps entered Baghdad, mission accomplished.

Self-deception was as important as deception in the White House decision to attack. The administration convinced itself and the keepers of conventional wisdom that the best way to ensure nuclear safety was through regime change. That the mission would be easy, like Afghanistan. That on the ground the people would welcome us with open arms.

That high technology and a "small footprint" would avoid a quagmire.

On the morning of March 19, 2003, Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of U.S. Central Command, and the theater commander for the Middle East, showed up at Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia to visit the Combined Air Operations Center and receive the final briefing from his air commander, Lt. Gen. Michael "Buzz" Moseley.

A-Day, A-hour was designated at 9 p.m. local time on March 21: a massive choreographed attack on leadership, command and control, air defense, and WMD targets throughout Iraq. The attack had been dubbed "shock and awe" in the news media, a label that annoyed Franks and other military leaders for suggesting not only instant victory but also that airpower would do the heavy lifting in bringing down the Iraqi regime.

Later on the morning of March 19, Franks spoke with his intelligence staff about critical imagery freshly available that suggested that Iraq might be preparing to sabotage its oil well in the southern Rumaylah fields. The ground attack would be accelerated by 24 hours to "save" Iraq and avoid another Kuwait conflagration.

Back in Qatar, Franks had his final prewar video teleconference with President Bush and the national security team in Washington. The main ground attack - G-Day - scheduled to begin at 6 a.m. March 21 was now scheduled for 9:30 p.m. on March 20. All across the Kuwaiti front, and from secret bases in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, preparations were made to initiate the final assault on Baghdad.

If March 19 weren't busy enough, the CIA also received reports from Iraqi spies that Saddam Hussein might be spending the evening at a Tigris River farm in eastern Baghdad. A frenzied process of target study and emergency preparations began before dawn. There would be no repeat of Kandahar on opening night 2001 or Tora Bora later, where Osama bin Laden was in sight or cornered, and the shot was missed. Airpower could reliably reach into the heart of Baghdad, literally into the earth, an ever so seductive tool available at a mental push of the button.

A million pieces started to fall into place, and in the south, west and north, U.S., British and Polish special operations forces and CIA paramilitaries infiltrated and attacked targets throughout Iraq. Marines attacked across the Kuwaiti border into the southern oil fields. War was on.

After nightfall on March 20, 540 aircraft strike missions and 177 cruise missiles attacked Iraqi targets. The Baghdad night sky filled with anti-aircraft fire and loud detonations were heard - and remotely "seen" off in the distance -- throughout the city.

"What will follow will not be a repeat of any other conflict," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said from the Pentagon podium. "It will be of a force and a scope and a scale that has been beyond what we have seen before."

We all know the rest of the story: Unconfirmed reports that Saddam Hussein was injured and rushed off in an ambulance; that his son Uday was killed; that the entire Iraqi 51st Mechanized Division was reported to have surrendered west of Basra; that Saddam's palaces and home were hit; that the office of telegenic Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was destroyed.

The "shock and awe" air campaign officially launched a few minutes before 9 p.m. local time on March 21, really the third night of the accelerated campaign: 1,700 aircraft flying 830 strike sorties plus 505 cruise missiles attacking 1,500 aimpoints at several hundred targets: palaces, homes, guard headquarters, government buildings, military bases.

More targets were attacked in Baghdad in the span of one hour on March 21 than were hit in the entire 43-day air campaign in 1991, and airpower followed up reliably every day with hundreds more strikes. When the sandstorm came, when the Fedayeen arrived, when ground commanders got nervous that Iraq was not the country that the U.S. had wargamed against, when the Red Line was crossed, when the public got equally nervous, airpower continued in the background, bombing, bombing, bombing.

For the three weeks that followed shock and awe - less than three weeks! - we were fed a steady diet of heroics from the 3rd Infantry Division, the 1st Marines, and special forces. But really the only time we heard about airpower was when U.S. briefers uttered some more meaningless statistics that suggested industrial production, or when some mistakes were made on the ground.

An army of embedded reporters tracked every brilliant ground troop, unit and maneuver. But the embeds, as they came to be known, reported from behind U.S. lines from the U.S. perspective. There was great destruction being meted out by Army gunners and tankers, by Marine Corps aviation. There were civilian deaths, but in most cases, there was almost always an explanation, a sympathetic observer, a comrade in arms explaining the difficulty and the bravery and chivalry of the American ground assault.

There were, however, no embeds in the cockpit, none even on most air bases secreted away in places like Saudi Arabia. By default, the dominant narrative became airpower, death and destruction from the Iraqi side, from the Iraqi perspective. Or worse, death and destruction, seeming to come only from the air, bombing, bombing, bombing and the accumulation of those heartless statistics, built an image of airpower stuck in World War II mass destruction and Vietnam carpet bombing.

It just didn't sink in that the ground forces weren't operating alone, that the Iraqi government and military was fighting for its very survival in every nook and cranny of the country because of airpower, as the tanks and armored vehicles slogged through mud, over the rivers and escarpments, through the villages.

When the statue was pulled down in Baghdad, to some, the "shock and awe" experience confirmed a modern sickness of high technology. Airpower advocates again promised too much, and the results -- Saddam and his henchmen survived, civilians died -- proved that air warfare could not deliver.

That isn't the war I saw in 2003. The war I saw was 21 days of air attacks in Baghdad that succeeded in defeating a government that was far more powerful and ready than the Taliban, with ground forces blowing through a defeated and exhausted force, a force that I submit caused far more civilian harm with each inch of territory it took.

Dozens of books have since been written about the brilliance of the Army and Marine Corps, some almost reading like the war took place before the airplane was invented.

Yet it was airpower that had the unique ability, just as it had on such short notice in Afghanistan in October 2001, to reach thousands of miles into the very bedrooms and bunkers of the enemy. Friendly losses associated with hundreds of air missions crisscrossing dozens of countries every day proved so ridiculously low that its use seemed almost cost free.

As targets were selected, missions flown, aimpoints hit, the Taliban and then the Iraqi government were swept from power: The seduction in 2003 was as much that it was made a seeming cakewalk by airpower as it was any other justification or reason.

That is airpower's continuing allure: military engagement with no commitment.

I know all of the arguments, that airpower can't plant a flag on a hill, that airpower can't occupy territory. I know, and have argued in dozens of articles over the years, that we can not figure out why it works, or what it is that precisely happens on the ground with airpower's meticulous repetition. But in Iraq, and even in Afghanistan, where ground forces struggle, airpower seems so effortless and trouble-free.

That is why it is so alluring, and so dangerous.

One Number That Will Ring All Your Phones

2007-03-15T07:37:00.000-07:00

State of the Art

By DAVID POGUE
NY Times

If you have only one telephone with one phone number, this column won’t be of any interest to you. Skip to another article, you eccentric you.

But first, count your blessings. Millions of people have more than one phone number these days — home, work, cellular, hotel room, vacation home, yacht — and with great complexity comes great hassle. You have to check multiple answering machines. You miss calls when people try to reach you on your cell when you’re at home (or the other way around). You send around e-mail messages at work that say, “On Thursday from 5 to 8:30, I’ll be on my cell; for the rest of the weekend, call me at home.”

And when you switch your job, cellphone carrier or home city, you have to notify everyone you know that you have new phone numbers.

A new service called GrandCentral, now in its final weeks of public beta testing, solves all of these problems. It’s a rather brilliant melding of cellphone and the Internet.

Its motto, “One number for life,” pretty much says it all. At GrandCentral.com, you choose a new, single, unified phone number (more on this in a moment). You hand it out to everyone you know, instructing them to delete all your old numbers from their Rolodexes.

From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uninumber, all of your phones ring simultaneously, like something out of “The Lawnmower Man.”

No longer will anyone have to track you down by dialing each of your numbers in turn. No longer does it matter if you’re home, at work or on the road. Your new GrandCentral phone number will find you.

As a bonus, all messages now land in a single voice mail box. You can listen to them in any of three ways. First, you can dial in from any phone (a text message arrives on your cellphone to let you know when you have voice mail). If you call in from your cellphone, you don’t even have to enter your password first.

You can also play your messages on the Web, at GrandCentral.com, and download them as audio files to preserve for posterity. You can even ask to be notified by e-mail; a link in the e-mail message takes you online to play the voice mail.

All of this, incredibly, is free if you have only two phone numbers to consolidate. A premium plan, at $15 a month, offers more of everything: up to six phone numbers unified, voice messages preserved forever instead of for 30 days, and so on, along with a Web site free of ads.

There are only two substantial downsides to becoming involved with GrandCentral. First, GrandCentral offers you a choice of about 20 uninumbers, but it doesn’t yet offer phone numbers in every area code, so your next-door neighbor may wind up having to dial an out-of-town number to reach you. In 14 central states, in fact, GrandCentral offers no numbers at all. (You can see what’s available at GrandCentral.com.) GrandCentral plans to offer specific vanity phone numbers for an annual fee.

Second, while you’re publicizing your new number, there will be an awkward period when some people are still dialing your old numbers. You’ll have to check all your old voice mail boxes as well as your new GrandCentral one.

Otherwise, this unification of all your phones and answering machines truly makes life less complicated.

Be warned, however: GrandCentral offers a huge list of additional features that aren’t so simple. If you’re not careful, GrandCentral can turn into a full-blown hobby. For example:

CALLER NAMING Every GrandCentral caller is announced by name when you answer the phone. (“Call from Ethel Murgatroid.”)

How does it know the name? Sometimes Caller ID supplies it. GrandCentral also knows every name in your online address book, which can import your contacts from Yahoo, Gmail or your e-mail program.

Callers not in these categories are asked to state their names the first time they call. On subsequent calls, GrandCentral recognizes them.

LISTEN IN For what may be the first time in cellphone history, you can listen to a message someone is leaving, just as you can on a home answering machine.

Your phone rings and displays the usual Caller ID information. You answer it. But before you can even say “Hello,” GrandCentral’s recording lady tells you the caller’s name, and then offers four ways to handle the call: “Press 1 to accept, 2 to send to voice mail, 3 to listen in on voice mail, or 4 to accept and record the call.” Your callers have no clue that all this is going on; they hear only the usual ringing sound.

If you press 3, the call goes directly to voice mail — but you get to listen in. If you feel that the caller deserves your immediate attention, you can press * to pick up the call.

This subtle feature can save you time, cellular minutes and, in certain cases of conflict-avoidance, emotional distress.

RECORD THE CALL Hitting 4 during a call begins recording it; GrandCentral then treats the recording as a voice mail message. Here again, you can immortalize the historic calls of your life, or just create a replayable record of driving directions. GrandCentral notes that laws in some states require both parties to know that a call is being recorded.

RINGBACK MUSIC This bizarre little feature is evidently popular with young cellphone users in Europe, but is still rare in the United States. It lets you replace the ringing sounds the caller hears while waiting for you to answer (what Lily Tomlin would describe as “one ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingys”) with music—in GrandCentral’s case, any MP3 file of your choice.

This does imbue your own personal phone with a certain corporate, Muzakish feel. But hey — who wouldn’t want to seem more European?

CUSTOMIZE GREETINGS Control freaks, rejoice. You can actually record a different voice mail greeting for each person in your address book: “Hi, sugarcheeks” for your sweetheart; “Can’t take your call right now, I’m out looking for a better job” for your mother.

You can also specify, on a per person basis, which of your phones ring, which ringback music plays and whether the call goes directly to voice mail.

Finally, you can tell GrandCentral to answer certain people’s calls with the classic three-tone “The number you have dialed is no longer in service” message. Telestalkers, bill collectors and ex-lovers come to mind. Never has technology been so deliciously evil.

SWITCH LINES Anytime during a call, you can press the * key to make all of your phones ring again, so that you can pick up on a different phone in midconversation, unbeknownst to the person on the other end. For example, if you’re heading out the door, you can switch a landline call to your cellphone — or as you arrive home, a cell call to a landline, in order to save airtime minutes.

PHONE SPAM FILTERS GrandCentral maintains a database of telemarketer numbers that is constantly updated by reports from its own subscribers. Your phones don’t even ring when a telemarketer in that database tries to reach you.

QUICK CHANGES With a quick click at GrandCentral.com, you can direct all calls to voice mail when you don’t want to be disturbed; direct all calls to a new, temporary number (like a hotel); or prevent your home line from ringing during work hours.

WEB BUTTONS You can install a “call me” button on your Web site — a great, free way to field calls from your eBay, MySpace or dating-service Web page without actually posting your phone number.

All of this works smoothly and quickly, and the Web site does a noble job of organizing that dizzying number of functions. And all of these features are free, even those that would be expensive or unavailable from your phone company.

Still, you may be forgiven for feeling that GrandCentral’s central idea — a virtual phone number that’s not associated with a particular telephone — is too much of a radical brain-slamming change. You may also feel that the last thing your life needs is more phone calls reaching you successfully.

But anyone who spends some time contemplating GrandCentral’s possibilities will soon see the bigger picture: this service removes your location as a consideration in phone calling, much the same way that the TiVo makes a TV show’s broadcast time unimportant. In other words, GrandCentral has rewritten the rules in the game of telephone.

Goodbye, Houston. Hello, Dubai

2007-03-15T01:17:00.000-07:00

A mosque stands in front of the Sheik Zayed highway towers in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Kamran Jebreili / AP

By HILARY HYLTON/AUSTIN
Time.com march 14, 2007

While you weren't looking, the center of the oil world shifted several thousand miles to the east.

The Houston Petroleum Club, now high atop the city's ExxonMobil building, had always been where oil executives and adventurers gathered to discuss "bidness." But these days, more and more energy executives are meeting at the Emirates Golf Club in Dubai, where Tiger Woods recently played, to discuss their deals. So, it shouldn't have been too surprising when Halliburton Chairman and CEO David Lesar announced that he was moving the headquarters of the enormous oil construction and logistics company to the business capital of the United Arab Emirates. The rest of the industry was migrating that way already.

But some folks were badly surprised. The move prompted cries of outrage and calls for investigations from some in Congress. Was the move by Halliburton, the bete noire of left-wing blogs, an attempt to evade congressional inquiry? A move to dodge taxes? Halliburton and many business experts say no. But oil industry analysts say U.S. consumers and political leaders should be asking questions about the move, because the answers will inform America's energy policy — or lack of one. Halliburton is not running from its past, but toward the future.

Just look at other major players in Texas oil. Many Houston companies and law firms have already boosted their Middle Eastern presence, including Halliburton's business rivals, Baker Hughes and Schlumberger. Baker Hughes is building a regional headquarters and manufacturing center in the UAE and Schlumberger has a training center. Just one day after Lesar's announcement, Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced he will attend a three- day celebration marking the opening of permanent buildings at the Texas A&M University at Qatar, set to graduate its first engineering class in 2007 — evidence that the oil and gas industry will be relying on engineers trained in the Middle East as the number of U.S. petroleum engineers continues to fall.

Many of the city's oil and gas companies have a long symbiotic relationship with the Middle East. Indeed, Emirates Airline announced last month that it would set up daily direct flights between Dubai and Houston by the end of this year. The flights will utilize several of the Emirates' 44 recently purchased Boeing 777s and will come equipped with eight private first-class cabins. But that still places top energy executives 17 hours away from what is becoming the new center of the oil industry. Lesar's move shows Halliburton is aware of business customs in much of the Eastern Hemisphere. "It is very important in this part of the world to do business face-to-face," says Amy Myers Jaffe, a Princeton Arabic Studies graduate and current director of Rice University's Energy Program. She adds, "Halliburton is not deleting jobs. They are not closing the office in Houston. They are not moving to the Caymans to escape prosecution. They are adding new elements."

Apart from knowing their clients, says Jaffe, the company has recognized how the petroleum industry is going to look in the coming decades: "Halliburton is looking to the future. [The industry is] moving away from the Seven Sisters, the major oil companies, and towards national oil companies. Between 1970 and 2000, 40% of the increase in oil in the world came from the majors like Shell. [But] in the next 30 years, 90% of the new oil will come from the Middle East and Africa and will not be produced by Exxon and Shell, but by the nationally owned oil companies."

Halliburton's move is a clear sign that American consumers will be relying more and more on oil and gas produced by nationally owned companies, some in emerging democracies like Indonesia where bureaucracies are often unwieldy, others in strife-torn African nations or corrupt former Soviet republics. The move also puts Halliburton's CEO closer to emerging markets in fast-industrializing China and India.

In the past, oil services companies like Halliburton more typically served as subcontractors to the major oil companies, but as the nationally owned oil companies have gained greater market share, the service companies have contracted directly with them. That has boosted service companies' profits and prompted them to shift their operations to the east, closer to the action. Some 38% of Halliburton's $13 billion in oil services revenue came from its Eastern Hemisphere operations last year.

The move, which was greeted as a "powerful statement" by Merrill Lynch industry analyst Alan Lewis, overshadowed a second part of Lesar's announcement: Halliburton stock will be listed on one of the Middle East's stock exchanges. Most analysts believe it will be the Dubai Financial Market. That, says Jaffe, will enable the company to gain access to the vast amount of capital in the region. It also serves a wider purpose: giving regional investors a stake in the stability of global companies. When nationally owned oil companies have been listed on various exchanges, Jaffe says, it has generally led to greater transparency within those companies and motivation to avoid volatility and disruption in geopolitical affairs.

While the Gulf of Mexico remains a vital area for exploration, the shift eastward means the old Energy Capital must diversify. "A lot of us in Houston have been saying that the energy industry in Houston needs to be a lot more innovative," Jaffe said. Energy industry and political leaders are beginning to develop wind energy offshore in the Gulf, and look to other alternatives. From now on, the "bidness" discussions at the Petroleum Club are more likely to focus on new energy technologies like carbon sequestration than wildcatting.

Toxic

2007-02-21T04:22:00.000-08:00

Music Commentary

As Britney Spears re-enters rehab, an EW senior writer reflects on the girl he met five years ago and the troubled woman we see today -- and remembers her imagining her own downfall

By Chris Nashawaty
EW.com

Five years ago, I drove to Lakeland, Fla., to meet Britney Spears. I bring this up because I've been thinking about that trip a lot lately. Specifically, what the hell happened to make the girl I met back then seem so bats--- insane now?

Lakeland wasn't much of a town then, and I suspect it's not much of one now. It was really just an endless archipelago of drive-thru fast-food joints, midway between the first-class kiddie glitz of Orlando's Disney World and the blandness of Tampa. But back then, in the late fall of 2001, Lakeland was the epicenter of a teenage youthquake. It's where boy bands like 'N Sync and the Backstreet Boys worked out the kinks of their road shows before kicking off their world tours.

That's exactly what brought me face to face with the world's most famous 19-year-old. Britney had just released her third album and was about to kick off a grueling string of concerts. It was an awkward moment in her life, onstage and off. Up until then, Britney had masterfully finessed the weird dichotomy of being a wholesome teenager claiming she was saving herself for marriage, and a grown-up pop sex kitten. In fact, she'd just released the single ''I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,'' which seemed to sum up that moment in time to a T.

And that's exactly how I found her that day in Florida — a petite clusterbomb of mixed signals. Britney was a girl in pink sweats, wearing a plastic ring on her finger that opened up to reveal a cache of lip balm. And she was also a woman whose blue thong played peekaboo above the waistband of her pants, and who just a few months earlier did a bump-and-grind on TV with an albino python wrapped around her neck.

Now, aside from getting nostalgic for a time when Britney actually bothered to wear a thong (or underwear of any kind), I look back on that day as the innocent ''before'' picture to what's become a tabloid trainwreck. I have to confess, I was as riveted as anyone this past weekend watching the video footage of Britney buzzing off her locks. (Well, maybe not as riveted as Pat O'Brien, who introduced the footage twitching with the giddiness of a kid on Christmas freakin' morning.) But then, I suspect like a lot of you, I was also a bit creeped out. With her eyes still red from crying, Britney shaving her head didn't just seem like a cry for help; it felt like a bloodcurdling scream.

The pictures from the past few weeks of the 24-year-old mother of two caught flashing her south-of-the-border junk for the paparazzi, or entering and exiting rehab as if she were going through a revolving door (for the record, she just checked into an L.A. facility again today), or coming out of clubs at 4 a.m. covered in what looked like her own vomit, were bad enough. The fact she now makes her ex K-Fed look like the less trashy one is mindboggling.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but there's something about the whole hair-cutting episode that scares me and makes me queasy. It felt like I was watching Anna Nicole Smith in the days before her death raiding a fridge full of methadone and Slimfast. How did America's sweetheart turn into such a ticking time bomb?

On that day in Florida five years ago, I sat with Britney in her dressing room. There, on top of a giant TV and surrounded by candles, was a framed photo of her then-boyfriend Justin Timberlake. It was like a puppy-love shrine. Something as innocent as Joanie Loves Chachi. The lights in the dressing room were muted by draped pink scarves. The place smelled like vanilla. That day, Britney Spears was still very much a girl and not yet a woman.

After an hour or so, I asked her to imagine how her charmed life could go wrong. At the time, she had No. 1 records, fame, millions of dollars in the bank, and Justin. What would happen if, 10 years from now, they decided to make a VH1 Behind the Music episode about her? What would the detours and missteps have been? How would she have fallen from grace?

Britney looked at me like I was insane.

''Oh... my... God!''

After thinking it over for a minute, she unspooled the Britney crash-and-burn.

''First, the worst thing that could happen is if my boyfriend would break up with me. I would be totally devastated,'' she said. ''And then, after the depression, maybe I did some dorky movies that were just bombs. Then... I don't know, maybe I did another album that didn't do very well. And then, I went back to working at my granny's deli — back to rolling quarters and boiling crawfish and smelling like fish on my dates.''

Britney exhaled, then broke into a fit of giggles. It was the only unscripted moment of the interview. And when she was done with her worst-case-scenario repsonse, she gave me a look as if to say, ''That was fun!''

Well, it's not so fun anymore. Here we are, not even 10 but five years later. And everything, except for the deli part, has come to pass. And maybe in the long run, that's what it will take for Britney to get back on track: move away from the paparazzi glare of Los Angeles and back to Louisiana, rolling quarters and boiling crawfish, getting her s--- sorted out before it's too late.

Posted Feb 20, 2007

Putin's Moment To Seize

2007-02-13T21:25:00.000-08:00

By David Ignatius
Washingtonpost.com, February 14, 2007

MOSCOW -- Vladimir Putin made headlines last weekend when he blasted the Bush administration for its "almost uncontained hyper-use of force" that has created a world where "no one feels safe." If he had been a Democratic presidential candidate, it would have been a standard stump speech. But coming from a Russian president, his remarks had pundits ruminating about a new Cold War.

I was in the audience in Munich when Putin made his speech, and the tone seemed to me more one of resentment than belligerence. He was proud, prickly, defiant -- a leader with all the Russian chips on his shoulder. You could hear his inner voice: We let you dismantle the Berlin Wall. We folded the Warsaw Pact. We dissolved the Soviet Union -- all on your promises that you wouldn't take advantage of our weakness. And what did we get? Nothing! You surrounded us with NATO weapons.

Putin's comments may be jarring to Americans, but they express a bitterness that's widespread here. His generation of Russians grew up in a country that claimed the status of "superpower," and they don't like being taken for granted. Putin, a former KGB officer with a black belt in judo, has been pugnacious in standing up for his country's interests, and Russians seem to like that. In the latest opinion polls, his popularity is well above 70 percent.

I met with one of Putin's top aides yesterday in a building that once housed the headquarters of the Soviet Communist Party. "We want to work together with you," he explained. "But please open your eyes. We will never accept that the sole power in the world will be the U.S."

Russia is back. That's the real lesson I take from Putin's blunt comments. A country that was near collapse after the fall of Soviet communism has regained enough confidence and stability to take a verbal shot at its old rival. "We are emerging from nothing," the Putin aide told me. To explain the Putin phenomenon, the Kremlin's chief ideologue, Vladislav Surkov, recently compared him to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, another president who brought his country back from economic disaster and restored its pride. Like FDR, Putin is using "presidential power to the maximum degree for the sake of overcoming the crisis," Surkov said.

Visiting here for the first time since 1990, I am struck by how everything in Russia is different, and everything is the same. Driving in from the airport, you see the familiar monument marking the farthest German advance in World War II -- a testament to the Red Army's fierce resistance to foreign invasion. And next to it is the Mega Mall with its huge Ikea showroom -- a foreign invasion that, in the end, proved unstoppable.

In Red Square, the somber stones of Lenin's tomb are a reminder of Soviet power. But across the way, in what used to be the drab GUM department store, are glittering displays of the latest fashions from Vuitton and Dior.

What hasn't changed is Russia's neurotic relationship with the West. Russian friends tell me the country feels unloved and unappreciated -- a political doormat that Western powers think they can walk on at will. That's the frustration that surfaced in Putin's speech in Munich.

By Russian standards, this is something of a golden age. Putin recently touted some of the country's achievements: Russian average incomes increased 10 percent in 2006 over the previous year; the economy grew by about 6.7 percent; inflation was in single digits for the first time in many years. Russia's currency reserves rose to $303 billion, the third-largest in the world, and its "stabilization fund" of energy profits was nearly $100 billion. All this in a nation that in 1998, on the eve of Putin's presidency, was essentially bankrupt.

The new Russia has a moment of opportunity. America, far from the "unipolar" superpower Putin describes, is weakened by the Iraq war and is badly in need of allies. If Putin is wise, he can play a pivotal role in resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis -- and thereby restore some of Russia's lost diplomatic clout. Or he can keep complaining that nobody appreciates his country -- and let his old rival struggle a while longer in the Iraq quagmire.

Was Putin's Munich manifesto an "invitation to dialogue," as one of his aides told me? Or was it a warning shot from a newly confident Russia that is rather enjoying America's troubles? If Putin wants to play a role in stabilizing the post-Iraq world, he is pushing on an open door. But does he have the vision and political will to seize the moment?

Jakarta Drifts

2007-02-12T07:45:00.000-08:00

Indonesia's president talks reform but is struggling to make good on his promises.
By Joe Cochrane
Newsweek International

Feb. 19, 2007 issue - During his military career, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was known as "the thinking general" for his intellectual approach. One can only wonder what was going through his mind last week, when monsoons caused floods that submerged three quarters of Jakarta, killing 46 people and displacing some 420,000. It was a replay of a similar disaster in the capital five years ago—leading angry citizens to wonder why a single canal hadn't been dug nor dam built since then. Yudhoyono's rivals pounced on the opportunity to take potshots at the increasingly beleaguered leader. "Local [Muslim] preachers asked their congregations to [deal with the floods by] asking for forgiveness from God," said Azyumardi Azra, rector of the State Islamic University in Jakarta. But among the political elites, he continued, the disaster was seen as a sign that even nature has turned against Yudhoyono.

So it goes for Indonesia's president as he approaches the midway point of his five-year term next month. Long gone are the heady days of 2004, when his huge popularity allowed him to win the country's first-ever direct presidential election with a whopping 62 percent. Tall and confident, he promised to provide Indonesians with a firm but gentle hand and to root out its endemic corruption and nepotism. Two-and-a-half years later, however, his reform program seems dead in the water, and last week's floods only symbolized how little he's accomplished. Local commentators now accuse SBY, as the president is known, of pandering to his vice president, Jusuf Kalla, whose ruling Golkar Party gives him political muscle in Parliament. Critics also accuse the president of ignoring his own reform mandate and kowtowing to cabinet members, smaller parties in Parliament, hard-line Islamic groups and even his political rivals. To make matters worse, Jusuf Wanandi, chairman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, says Yudhoyono has developed the flaw of indecisiveness. "He's in angst if he has to decide," Wanandi says. "He talks nice, but it's tough to get him to decide anything."

As SBY waffles, his country is drifting. Last year Yudhoyono proved unable to push through much-needed tax, labor, civil service and other reforms. Indonesia is already paying the price: foreign direct investment, the key component of the president's job-creation strategy (more than 40 million of his constituents are unemployed), plummeted by 32 percent in 2006. The country possesses vast natural resources, but multinational corporations have grown wary of trying to exploit them due to the red tape and discrimination they are likely to face. During the 32-year regime of the dictator Suharto, foreign investors flocked to the country; despite the profound corruption, the rules of business were clear—grease the right palms and anything was possible. SBY's attempts to crack down on such practices have only paralyzed the country's bureaucracy. While he sends one message, meanwhile, other top officials send another.

The president has also failed to extend his writ outside Jakarta, thanks to a de-centralization process started in 1999 by President B.J. Habibie, which has empowered local players with their own agendas. "In Suharto's day, everybody knew the rules about payoffs and kickbacks," said one Western executive in Jakarta. The current situation, he said, "makes for uncertainty, and businesses don't like uncertainty."

Underscoring the problem, next month a court in North Sulawesi is expected to rule on an environmental suit brought against the U.S.-based Newmont Mining Corporation. The company's Indonesian unit is alleged to have dumped toxic substances from a gold mine into Buyat Bay, and its American president, Richard Ness, faces three years in prison. Prosecutors have accused Newmont of pillaging Indonesia's resources and despoiling its environment. Newmont, backed by the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, calls the charges a "hoax" orchestrated by figures in Sulawesi and Jakarta, who it says doctored evidence for political and monetary gain. There's something to this: prosecutors have produced little in the way of hard facts; an independent WHO study found no contamination in Buyat Bay; and at least one key government witness has already retracted her accusations. Yet the trial continues. Now in its second year, it is being viewed by other foreign businesses as a key test of SBY's claims to be investor-friendly. "Anything less than an acquittal is going to be seen as a disincentive" for foreign investment, says one U.S. official in Jakarta.

In Suharto's day, the whole affair might have ended with a quick phone call from the Presidential Palace. But Yudhoyono doesn't want to interfere in provincial matters. Other top officials aren't so squeamish, as shown by the difference between Newmont's harsh treatment and the kid-gloves handling of an Indonesian gas company accused of similar misdeeds. In May 2006, Lapindo Bratas hit an underground volcano while doing exploratory drilling in Sidoarjo, East Java. The result was one of the country's worst environmental disasters: a mud-flow that inundated more than 4.5 square kilometers of land and displaced 25,000 people. The police have named 13 Lapindo officials as suspects, but nine months on, none have been arrested (despite the fact that two American, one Australian and three Indonesian Newmont executives were jailed).

The difference between these two cases? Lapindo is owned by the family of Aburizal Bakrie, a wealthy business tycoon who is now minister of people's welfare and a leader of the Golkar Party. He has insisted that the mudflow was a "natural disaster" triggered by an earthquake, and so far his boss, the president, has kept mum about Bakrie's involvement in the case. Critics in Indonesia speculate that this is mainly because SBY needs Bakrie and his Golkar Party's support if he is to have any hopes of pushing the country toward reform. At Yudhoyono's insistence, Lapindo did agree to pay $420 million in compensation to affected persons and businesses. But it remains to be seen whether any of its officials end up in court. Colonel Rusli Nasution, head of the East Java provincial police's investigation team, told NEWSWEEK that the investigation was concluded last year but state prosecutors returned the case file to police because it was incomplete. "The prosecutors told the police to get more information on the role of each suspect and information from experts," he said.

Back in Jakarta, SBY faces more problems. Local media have jumped on rumors of a planned coup by retired generals. The alleged plotters deny the allegations, and analysts say the idea of toppling of a man who recently won a landslide election is unthinkable. But if Western investors start fleeing the country, new jobs will not materialize, and SBY's grasp on power—and chances of re-election in 2009—could continue to slip.

What makes an astronaut crack?

2007-02-10T01:09:00.000-08:00

NASA has too many of them for just a few missions a year, resulting in fierce competition among overachievers to get on a flight.
By Homer Hickam, HOMER HICKAM is the author of "Rocket Boys/October Sky," "The Keeper's Son" and many other books.
LA Times, February 9, 2007

AS A FORMER NASA astronaut training manager responsible for crew training for shuttle missions, I was not entirely surprised by the initial reports of the sad, bizarre case of Lisa Marie Nowak.

This isn't the first case of astronauts having difficulties in their personal lives. Usually, the straying astronaut simply resigns or retires, and everything is hushed up. But being charged with assault, attempted kidnapping and attempted murder is far greater than anything I ever observed or imagined could occur. Perhaps this tragedy will bring some of the agency's long-ignored problems into the open.

First is the tremendous and unnecessary pressures brought to bear on the members of NASA's cloistered astronaut office. This is the division at the Johnson Space Center in Houston where the astronauts work. It is the office that assigns each astronaut his or her job. Since most astronauts are waiting to be put on a mission, these jobs — such as working on the shuttle hydraulic system or sitting in on meetings about a new science payload — are important, but they're usually no more difficult than the ones accomplished routinely by other NASA engineers and scientists. The difference is the astronauts come under constant scrutiny by their management to determine who will fly and who will not. Some never get assigned to a space mission, yet they are called astronauts as long as they work for NASA.

Nowak was hired as an astronaut in 1996. It was a decade before she flew into space. During that time, she was passed over again and again. Somewhere along the line during those disappointing years, I think she became brittle. She finally flew, landed and then was sent to the back of the astronaut line again. My guess is that her personal life started to become unglued from the accumulated strain, and she finally cracked.

But why did Nowak have to endure 10 years of scrutiny and constant competition with her fellow astronauts before she got to fly? The fact is, there are too many astronauts (more than 125) and not enough opportunities to fly. The NASA inspector general said the same thing in a 2003 report. Yet the astronaut office hired 11 more astronauts in 2004. Last year, the shuttle flew three times, carrying just seven astronauts per flight. Its replacement vehicle, which is under design now, will carry at most six astronauts.

Does it make sense to have this many overachievers all walking on eggs, vying for such a limited number of slots? Only in a dysfunctional bureaucracy like NASA's astronaut office, which keeps hiring more astronauts than it needs.

As a training manager, I was aware that many astronauts felt as if they were powerless, stressed-out peons within their own organization. I observed their daily competition with one another to get a seat into space. In many cases, this trial by fire changed enthusiastic young astronauts into bureaucratic combatants with warped personalities and shaken confidence.

For a long time, I also have been aware of the corrosive resentment many NASA engineers and scientists feel toward the astronauts. The astronauts have a sense of entitlement, and what they want, they get, or so it seems. For instance, I was in a meeting once in which an astronaut who only had a few years of NASA experience constantly interrupted and belittled a 20-year space engineering veteran. That's the kind of thing that fuels discontent.

My suggestion to lessen the pressure on the astronauts and also to decrease the resentment others in the agency feel toward them is to reorganize their office, first by shrinking it. There are two types of astronauts — pilots and mission specialists. The latter are more or less like flight engineers who are generalists. They operate robotics, perform experiments and go on spacewalks. They make up the bulk of the astronaut corps, and we just don't need so many. They should be offered other jobs within the agency. There would remain just a small, core group confident that they will fly.

The remaining seats on shuttle flights should then be opened up to the top tier of space scientists and engineers in the country from outside NASA. Right now, the only Americans allowed to fly aboard our spacecraft are the employees of the astronaut office, who live in a closed community with little outside influence. That is just not right, nor is it healthy.

To bring in the best of the best from outside the agency to fly would not only result in better science and engineering, it would also inject a constant stream of fresh air into a program that, as the Nowak tragedy reveals, is very much in need of it.

Under Bush’s Pillow

2007-02-03T19:03:00.000-08:00

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Op-Ed Columnist
February 4, 2007

Dick Cheney as Lord Voldemort?

A reader named Melissa S. e-mailed to say that she explains Iraq policy to her 8-year-old son in terms of Harry Potter characters: “Dick Cheney is Lord Voldemort. George W. Bush is Peter Pettigrew.” Don Rumsfeld is Lucius Malfoy, while Cornelius Fudge represents administration supporters who deny that anything is wrong. And, she concludes, “Daily Prophet reporter Rita Skeeter is Fox News.”

That was one of the 400 comments from readers offering literary or historical parallels to the Bush administration and Iraq. One of the most commonly cited was Xenophon’s ancient warning, in “Anabasis,” of how much easier it is to get into a Middle Eastern war than out.

As a reader named John H. summarized “Anabasis”: “Ten thousand Greek mercenaries march from Greece to Iran to effect regime change (unseat one emperor and establish his younger brother). They win the first few battles (cakewalk, mission accomplished) but then the younger brother is killed.”

So the invaders found themselves without an effective prime minister to hand power to, yet they were stuck deep inside enemy territory. Xenophon’s subtext is how the slog of war corrodes soldiers and allows them to do terrible things. Xenophon is particularly pained when recounting a massacre that was the Haditha of its day.

The readers who sent in comments were responding to a column I wrote last month arguing that President Bush is inadvertently a fine education president, because he breathes new life into the classics. Thucydides’ account of the failed “surge” in the Sicilian expedition 2,400 years ago is newly relevant, and “Moby Dick” is interesting reading today as a bracing warning of the dangers of an obsessive adventure that casts aside all rules. (You can submit your own favorite literary or historical parallel at nytimes.com/ontheground.)

Perhaps I’m cherry-picking from the classics to support my own opposition to a “surge” in Iraq. In writing this column, I wondered what classics Mr. Bush’s supporters would cite to argue for his strategy. Shakespeare’s “Henry V”? “Hamlet”?

Yet frankly, it’s difficult to find great literature that encourages rulers to invade foreign lands, to escalate when battles go badly, to scorn critics, to be cocksure of themselves in the face of adversity. The themes of the classics tend to be the opposite.

Literature and history invariably counsel doubt and skepticism — even when you think you see Desdemona’s infidelity with your own eyes, you don’t; even when your advisers are telling you “it’s a slam-dunk,” it’s not. The classics have an overwhelmingly cautionary bias, operating as a check on any impulsive rush to war.

Perhaps that is because, as Foreign Policy argues in its most recent issue, humans have an ingrained psychological tilt to hawkishness. In many ways, the authors note, human decision-making tends to err in ways that magnify conflict and make it difficult to climb down from confrontation.

My hunch is that the classics resonate in part because they are an antidote to that human frailty; literature has generated so many warnings about hubris in part to save us from ourselves.

Eastern classics have that same purpose of trying to tame and restrain us. The central theme of Chinese philosophy is the need for moderation, and Sun Tzu’s famous “Art of War” advises generals on how to win without fighting. (Sun Tzu and Julius Caesar alike also appreciated the diplomatic benefits of treating enemy prisoners well; they would be appalled by Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.)

So Mr. Bush should resolve that for every hour he spends with Mr. Cheney, he will spend another curled up with classical authors like Sophocles. “Antigone,” for example, tells of King Creon, a good man who wants the best for his people — and yet ignores public opinion, refuses to admit error, goes double or nothing with his bets, and is slow to adapt to changing circumstance.

Creon’s son pleads with his father to be less rigid. The trees that bend survive the seasons, he notes, while those that are inflexible are blown over and destroyed.

Americans today yearn for the same kind of wise leadership that the ancient Greeks did: someone with the wisdom to adjust course, to acknowledge error, to listen to critics, to show compassion as well as strength, to discern moral nuance as well as moral clarity. Alexander the Great used to sleep with the “Iliad” under his pillow; maybe Mr. Bush should try “Antigone.”

Oh, and for Mrs. Bush? How about Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata”?

Images of Hanging Make Hussein a Martyr to Many

2007-01-05T18:42:00.000-08:00

By HASSAN M. FATTAH
NY Times January 6, 2007

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Jan. 5 — In the week since Saddam Hussein was hanged in an execution steeped in sectarian overtones, his public image in the Arab world, formerly that of a convicted dictator, has undergone a resurgence of admiration and awe.

On the streets, in newspapers and over the Internet, Mr. Hussein has emerged as a Sunni Arab hero who stood calm and composed as his Shiite executioners tormented and abused him.

“No one will ever forget the way in which Saddam was executed,” President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt remarked in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot published Friday and distributed by the official Egyptian news agency. “They turned him into a martyr.”

In Libya, which canceled celebrations of the feast of Id al-Adha after the execution, a government statement said a statue depicting Mr. Hussein in the gallows would be erected, along with a monument to Omar al-Mukhtar, who resisted the Italian invasion of Libya and was hanged by the Italians in 1931.

In Morocco and the Palestinian territories, demonstrators held aloft photographs of Mr. Hussein and condemned the United States.

Here in Beirut, hundreds of members of the Lebanese Baath Party and Palestinian activists marched Friday in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood behind a symbolic coffin representing that of Mr. Hussein and later offered a funeral prayer. Photographs of Mr. Hussein standing up in court, against a backdrop of the Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem, were pasted on city walls near Palestinian refugee camps, praising “Saddam the martyr.”

“God damn America and its spies,” a banner across one major Beirut thoroughfare read. “Our condolences to the nation for the assassination of Saddam, and victory to the Iraqi resistance.”

By standing up to the United States and its client government in Baghdad and dying with seeming dignity, Mr. Hussein appears to have been virtually cleansed of his past.

“Suddenly we forgot that he was a dictator and that he killed thousands of people,” said Roula Haddad, 33, a Lebanese Christian. “All our hatred for him suddenly turned into sympathy, sympathy with someone who was treated unjustly by an occupation force and its collaborators.”

Just a month ago Mr. Hussein was widely dismissed as a criminal who deserved the death penalty, even if his trial was seen as flawed. Much of the Middle East reacted with a collective shrug when he was found guilty of crimes against humanity in November.

But shortly after his execution last Saturday, a video emerged that showed Shiite guards taunting Mr. Hussein, who responded calmly but firmly to them. From then on, many across the region began looking at him as a martyr.

“The Arab world has been devoid of pride for a long time,” said Ahmad Mazin al-Shugairi, who hosts a television show at the Middle East Broadcasting Center that promotes a moderate version of Islam in Saudi Arabia. “The way Saddam acted in court and just before he was executed, with dignity and no fear, struck a chord with Arabs who are desperate for their own leaders to have pride too.”

Ayman Safadi, editor in chief of the independent Jordanian daily Al Ghad, said, “The last image for many was of Saddam taken out of a hole. That has all changed now.”

At the heart of the sudden reversal of opinion was the symbolism of the hasty execution, now framed as an act of sectarian vengeance shrouded in political theater and overseen by the American occupation.

In much of the predominantly Sunni Arab world, the timing of the execution in the early hours of Id al-Adha, which is among the holiest days of the Muslim year, when violence is forbidden and when even Mr. Hussein himself sometimes released prisoners, was seen as a direct insult to the Sunni world.

The contrast between the official video aired without sound on Iraqi television of Mr. Hussein being taken to the gallows and fitted with a noose around his neck and the unauthorized grainy, chaotic recording of the same scene with sound, depicting Shiite militiamen taunting Mr. Hussein with his hands tied, damning him to hell and praising the militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, touched a sectarian nerve.

“He stood as strong as a mountain while he was being hanged,” said Ahmed el-Ghamrawi, a former Egyptian ambassador to Iraq. “He died a strong president and lived as a strong president. This is the image people are left with.”

Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian media critic and director of the online radio station Ammannet.net, said: “If Saddam had media planners, he could not have planned it better than this. Nobody could ever have imagined that Saddam would have gone down with such dignity.”

Writers and commentators have stopped short of eulogizing the dictator but have looked right past his bloody history as they compare Iraq’s present circumstances with Iraq under Mr. Hussein.

In Jordan, long a bastion of support forMr. Hussein, many are lionizing him, decrying the timing of the execution and the taunts as part of a Sunni-Shiite conflict.

“Was it a coincidence that Israel, Iran and the United States all welcomed Saddam’s execution?” wrote Hamadeh Faraneh, a columnist for the daily Al Rai. “Was it also a coincidence when Saddam said bravely in front of his tormentors, ‘Long live the nation,’ and that Palestine is Arab, then uttered the declaration of faith? His last words expressed his depth and what he died for.”

Another Jordanian journalist, Muhammad Abu Rumman, wrote in Al Ghad on Thursday: “For the vast majority Saddam is a martyr, even if he made mistakes in his first years of rule. He cleansed himself later by confronting the Americans and by rejecting to negotiate with them.”

Even the pro-Saudi news media, normally critical of Mr. Hussein, chimed in with a more sentimental tone.

In the London-based pan-Arab daily Al Hayat, Bilal Khubbaiz, commenting on Iranian and Israeli praise of the execution, wrote, “Saddam, as Iraq’s ruler, was an iron curtain that prevented the Iranian influence from reaching into the Arab world,” as well as “a formidable party in the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Zuhayr Qusaybati, also writing in Al Hayat, said the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, “gave Saddam what he most wanted: he turned him into a martyr in the eyes of many Iraqis, who can now demand revenge.”

“The height of idiocy,” Mr. Qusaybati said, “is for the man who rules Baghdad under American protection not to realize the purpose of rushing the execution, and that the guillotine carries the signature of a Shiite figure as the flames of sectarian division do not spare Shiites or Sunnis in a country grieving for its butchered citizens.”

In Saudi Arabia, poems eulogizing Mr. Hussein have been passed around on cellphones and in e-mail messages.

“Prepare the gun that will avenge Saddam,” a poem published in a Saudi newspaper warned. “The criminal who signed the execution order without valid reason cheated us on our celebration day. How beautiful it will be when the bullet goes through the heart of him who betrayed Arabism.”

Mr. Safadi, the Jordanian editor, said: “In the public’s perception Saddam was terrible, but those people were worse. That final act has really jeopardized the future of Iraq immensely. And we all know this is a blow to the moderate camp in the Arab world.”

Reporting was contributed by Mona el-Naggar from Cairo, Nada Bakri from Beirut, Rasheed Abou al-Samh from Jidda, Saudi Arabia, and Suha Maayeh from Amman.

Ruslin: I don’t have to give him any advice

2006-12-15T19:22:00.000-08:00

The Star Online
Friday December 15, 2006

KUALA Lumpur City Hall has a lot more to do to fulfil the high expectations of residents of the country’s first city, says outgoing mayor Datuk Ruslin Hasan.

Ruslin, who wished his successor Datuk Abdul Hakim Borhan all the best, said the new mayor had all the qualities to oversee Kuala Lumpur's growth.

Ruslin said Abdul Hakim's experience during his stint as Federal Territories Ministry secretary-general would come in handy when he assumed his new post next week.

Asked if he had any advice for Abdul Hakim, Ruslin said: “I don't have any advice. As a new Datuk Bandar, he will definitely have the knowledge on how to handle his work. I don't have to give him any advice,” he said.

Ruslin clocking out for the last time at City Hall on Wednesday.

Ruslin, who clocked out as mayor on Wednesday, said he had tried his best to clear as much work as possible but there were still some unfinished business.

He said as next year was Visit Malaysia Year, it would definitely keep the new mayor busy as Kuala Lumpur was the gateway to the country and many tourists would have high expectations of the nation's capital city.

“We have to work hard to improve public facilities especially in terms of alleviating traffic congestion, providing pedestrian walkways and ensuring public safety.

“We have told the world that we are a developed country and Kuala Lumpur is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. If we don't keep that promise and give tourists our best services and hospitality, they would think that we are just paying lip service,” said Ruslin.

In Malaysia, official preferences remain, and tensions rise

2006-12-14T05:50:00.000-08:00

By Thomas Fuller
International Herald Tribunes - Asia Pacific, December 13, 2006

Indonesia and Malaysia have much in common: language; a border that slices across Borneo; overlapping ethnic groups. But the two countries are moving in opposite directions on the fundamental question of what it means to be a "native."

With a new citizenship law passed this year, Indonesia has redefined "indigenous" to include its ethnic Chinese population — a radical shift from centuries of policies, both during colonial times and after independence in the 1940s, that distinguished between natives and Indonesia's Chinese, Indians and Arabs.

Malaysia, meanwhile, is sticking to its longstanding policy that Malay Muslims, the largest ethnic group in the country, are "bumiputras," or sons of the soil, who have special rights above and beyond those of the country's Chinese and Indian minorities.

Maintaining this controversial policy has led to what one commentator calls a retribalization of Malaysian politics, with rising assertiveness on the part of the country's Malay Muslims — who constitute about 65 percent of the population — and a push back by the Chinese and Indians, who make up about 26 percent and 8 percent, respectively.

The Malaysian prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, warned last week that race relations had become "brittle."

"We must eliminate all negative feelings toward each other," he was quoted in the Star newspaper as saying.

Both Indonesia and Malaysia have suffered race riots in recent decades. Indonesia's were much bloodier and more far-flung. Yet today, ethnic tensions are more likely to make headlines in Malaysia than Indonesia.

Malaysia's Chinese community was angered by the recent demolition of a Taoist temple in Penang. Both Muslims and non-Muslims are upset about a series of disputes over whether Shariah or secular law should take precedence.

And a nationally televised meeting of the Malay governing party last month shocked many Malaysians for its communalism, including comments by one delegate who said the party was willing to "risk lives and bathe in blood in defense of race and religion." He was subsequently reprimanded, but only after an outcry from Chinese and Indians.

Early in November, the chief minister of the southern state of Johor, Ghani Othman, went as far as to question whether a Malaysian nation actually existed, describing it as a "rojak," or mish- mash of races, that was diluting the Malay identity.

The government's apparently indefinite extension of an affirmative action program for the Malays, a policy that has been in place since 1971, has stirred impatience among the country's Chinese and Indians. The policy, backed by a special clause in the Constitution guaranteeing preferential treatment for Malays, imposes a 30-percent bumiputra equity quota for publicly listed companies and gives bumiputras discounts on such things as houses and cars.

Terence Gomez, a Malaysian academic who has written widely about Malaysian politics and the ethnic Chinese, and who is now a research coordinator at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development in Geneva, says the notion that one race should have supremacy is an anachronism in a country where ethnic identities are becoming less important in everyday life.

"The idea of being Malay or being Chinese or Indian is not something that is part of their daily thinking or discourse," Gomez said. The political elite, he said, "seems to be caught in a time warp."

Paradoxically, some in Malaysia, which has long been wealthier and more politically stable, are looking admiringly at developments in Indonesia.

Azly Rahman, a Malay commentator on the widely read Web site Malaysiakini, said poor Indians and Chinese are neglected under the current system.

"A new bumiputra should be created," he said. "Being a Malaysian means forgetting about the status of our fathers. We need affirmative action for all races."

The government says the affirmative action program, which was promulgated after race riots in 1969, is still needed to narrow the overall income gap between the Chinese and Malays, the original justification for the policy. But determining which race has the highest ownership levels in the country is also now a point of contention, involving disputes over how assets should be calculated.

Has He Started Talking to the Walls?

2006-12-02T21:04:00.000-08:00

Op-Ed Columnist NY Times
By FRANK RICH
Published: December 3, 2006

IT turns out we’ve been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand what’s going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting instead is “The Final Days,” the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard Nixon talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate demolished his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan in recent weeks, we’ve witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who isn’t merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality. It’s not that he can’t handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn’t know what the truth is.

The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily responsible for the country’s spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr. Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda “extremely disorganized” in Iraq, adding that “I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the state level.” Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only 2 percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in chief who can’t even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in a war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.

But that’s not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to Iraq’s “unity government” though it is not unified and can only nominally govern. (In Henry Kissinger’s accurate recent formulation, Iraq is not even a nation “in the historic sense.”) After that pseudo-government’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, brushed him off in Amman, the president nonetheless declared him “the right guy for Iraq” the morning after. This came only a day after The Times’s revelation of a secret memo by Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki either “ignorant of what is going on” in his own country or disingenuous or insufficiently capable of running a government. Not that it matters what Mr. Hadley writes when his boss is impervious to facts.

In truth the president is so out of it he wasn’t even meeting with the right guy. No one doubts that the most powerful political leader in Iraq is the anti-American, pro-Hezbollah cleric Moktada al-Sadr, without whom Mr. Maliki would be on the scrap heap next to his short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi and Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Sadr’s militia is far more powerful than the official Iraqi army that we’ve been helping to “stand up” at hideous cost all these years. If we’re not going to take him out, as John McCain proposed this month, we might as well deal with him directly rather than with Mr. Maliki, his puppet. But our president shows few signs of recognizing Mr. Sadr’s existence.

In his classic study, “The Great War and Modern Memory,” Paul Fussell wrote of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for only a new language of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under the auspices of Mr. Bush, the Iraq war is having a comparable, if different, linguistic impact: the more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is severed from its meaning altogether.

When the president persists in talking about staying until “the mission is complete” even though there is no definable military mission, let alone one that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes for his talk of “victory,” another concept robbed of any definition when the prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man who wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is “phase,” as if the increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly teenager. “Phase” is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about two words the president doesn’t want to hear, “civil war.”

When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own civil war about the proper usage of that designation last week, it was highly instructive — but about America, not Iraq. The intensity of the squabble showed the corrosive effect the president’s subversion of language has had on our larger culture. Iraq arguably passed beyond civil war months ago into what might more accurately be termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That we were fighting over “civil war” at this late date was a reminder that wittingly or not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bush’s lead in retreating from English as we once knew it.

It’s been a familiar pattern for the news media, politicians and the public alike in the Bush era. It took us far too long to acknowledge that the “abuses” at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere might be more accurately called torture. And that the “manipulation” of prewar intelligence might be more accurately called lying. Next up is “pullback,” the Iraq Study Group’s reported euphemism to stave off the word “retreat” (if not retreat itself).

In the case of “civil war,” it fell to a morning television anchor, Matt Lauer, to officially bless the term before the “Today” show moved on to such regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins. That juxtaposition of Iraq and post-pubescent eroticism was only too accurate a gauge of how much the word “war” itself has been drained of its meaning in America after years of waging a war that required no shared sacrifice. Whatever you want to label what’s happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the Olsen twins.

I have not been one to buy into the arguments that Mr. Bush is stupid or is the sum of his “Bushisms” or is, as feverish Internet speculation periodically has it, secretly drinking again. I still don’t. But I have believed he is a cynic — that he could always distinguish between truth and fiction even as he and Karl Rove sold us their fictions. That’s why, when the president said that “absolutely, we’re winning” in Iraq before the midterms, I just figured it was more of the same: another expedient lie to further his partisan political ends.

But that election has come and gone, and Mr. Bush is more isolated from the real world than ever. That’s scary. Neither he nor his party has anything to gain politically by pretending that Iraq is not in crisis. Yet Mr. Bush clings to his delusions with a near-rage — watch him seethe in his press conference with Mr. Maliki — that can’t be explained away by sheer stubbornness or misguided principles or a pat psychological theory. Whatever the reason, he is slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald Reagan did when checking out during Iran-Contra. You can understand why Jim Webb, the Virginia senator-elect with a son in Iraq, was tempted to slug the president at a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress. Mr. Bush asked “How’s your boy?” But when Mr. Webb replied, “I’d like to get them out of Iraq,” the president refused to so much as acknowledge the subject. Maybe a timely slug would have woken him up.

Or at least sounded an alarm. Some two years ago, I wrote that Iraq was Vietnam on speed, a quagmire for the MTV generation. Those jump cuts are accelerating now. The illusion that America can control events on the ground is just that: an illusion. As the list of theoretical silver bullets for Iraq grows longer (and more theoretical) by the day — special envoy, embedded military advisers, partition, outreach to Iran and Syria, Holbrooke, international conference, NATO — urgent decisions have to be made by a chief executive who is in touch with reality (or such is the minimal job description). Otherwise the events in Iraq will make the Decider’s decisions for him, as indeed they are doing already.

The joke, history may note, is that even as Mr. Bush deludes himself that he is bringing “democracy” to Iraq, he is flouting democracy at home. American voters could not have delivered a clearer mandate on the war than they did on Nov. 7, but apparently elections don’t register at the White House unless the voters dip their fingers in purple ink. Mr. Bush seems to think that the only decision he had to make was replacing Donald Rumsfeld and the mission of changing course would be accomplished.

Tell that to the Americans in Anbar Province. Back in August the chief of intelligence for the Marines filed a secret report — uncovered by Thomas Ricks of The Washington Post — concluding that American troops “are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar.” That finding was confirmed in an intelligence update last month. Yet American troops are still being tossed into that maw, and at least 90 have been killed there since Labor Day, including five marines, ages 19 to 24, around Thanksgiving.

Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much is certain: The dead in Iraq don’t give a damn what we call it.

In Certain Circles, Two Is a Crowd

2006-11-29T18:30:00.000-08:00

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
NY Times Published : Nov 16, 2006

CHANCES are that in the last week someone has irritated you by standing too close, talking too loud or making eye contact for too long. They have offended you with the high-pitched shrill emanating from the earphones of their iPod or by spreading their legs unnecessarily wide on a packed subway car.

But what makes you feel hostile toward ''close talkers,'' as the show ''Seinfeld'' dubbed people who get within necking distance of you when they speak? Or toward strangers who stand very near to you on line? Or toward people who take the bathroom stall next to yours when every other one is available?

Communications scholars began studying personal space and people's perception of it decades ago, in a field known as proxemics. But with the population in the United States climbing above 300 million, urban corridors becoming denser and people with wealth searching for new ways to separate themselves from the masses, interest in the issue of personal space -- that invisible force field around your body -- is intensifying.

Scientists who say Americans share patterns of movement and behaviors to protect their personal space have recently found new evidence in a cyber game.

Researchers who observed the avatars (digital representations of the humans that control them) of participants in Second Life, a virtual reality universe, found that some of the avatars' physical behavior was in keeping with studies about how humans protect their personal space.

In other words, the digital beings adhered to some unspoken behavioral rules of humans even though they were but pixels on a screen.

Humans tend to avert eye gaze if they feel someone is standing too close. They retreat to corners, put distance between themselves and strangers, and sit or stand equidistant from one another like birds on a wire.

The study, which was accepted for publication in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, found that virtual environments may be another platform to study physical social interaction. It specifically found that the unwritten rules of personal space are so powerful, people even impose them on their cyber selves.

''The fact that they show up in the virtual world shows how deeply ingrained they are,'' said Nick Yee, a graduate student in the department of communication at Stanford University and a lead author of the study along with Jeremy N. Bailenson, his adviser. ''We don't think about them. They're very unconscious.''

According to scientists, personal space involves not only the invisible bubble around the body, but all the senses. People may feel their space is being violated when they experience an unwelcome sound, scent or stare: the woman on the bus squawking into her cellphone, the co-worker in the adjacent cubicle dabbing on cologne, or the man in the sandwich shop leering at you over his panini.

But whether people have become more protective of their personal space is difficult to say. Studies show people tend to adapt, even in cities, which are likely to grow ever more crowded based on population projections.

Yet studies involving airlines show the desire to have some space to oneself is among the top passenger requests. In a survey in April from TripAdvisor, a travel Web site, travelers said that if they had to pay for certain amenities, they would rather have larger seats and more legroom than massages and premium food. And a current advertisement for Eos Airlines, which flies between New York and London, is promoting the fact that it offers passengers ''21 square feet of personal space.''

While people may crave space, they rarely realize how entrenched proxemics are. Scholars can predict which areas of an elevator are likely to fill up first and which urinal a man will choose. They know people will stare at the lighted floor numbers in elevators, not one another.

''In order to overcome the intimacy, you have to make sure you don't make eye contact,'' said Dane Archer, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies proxemics.

They know commuters will hold newspapers in front of them to read, yes, but also to shield themselves from strangers. And they know college students will unconsciously choose to sit in the same row, if not the same seat, each class.

''If you videotape people at a library table, it's very clear what seat somebody will take,'' Dr. Archer said, adding that one of the corner seats will go first, followed by the chair diagonally opposite because that is farthest away. ''If you break those rules, it's fascinating,'' he said. ''People will pile up books as if to make a wall -- glare.''

Edward T. Hall, an anthropologist and the father of proxemics, even put numbers to the unspoken rules. He defined the invisible zones around us and attributed a range of distance to each one: intimate distance (6 to 18 inches); personal distance (18 inches to 4 feet); social distance (4 to 12 feet); and public distance (about 12 feet or more).

But personal space is not merely a numbers game. Preferences differ from culture to culture. Scholars have found that Americans, conquerors of the wild frontier, generally prefer more personal space than people in Mediterranean and Latin American cultures, and more than men in Arab countries.

''In the U.S., it's very closely linked to ideals of individuals,'' said Kathryn Sorrells, an associate professor of communication studies at California State University, Northridge, is writing a book, ''Globalizing Intercultural Communications.'' ''There's an idea that you have the right to this space,'' she said, noting that it was born of a culture that prizes independence, privacy and capitalism.

Dr. Archer tells of a Brazilian man he interviewed who, when speaking to the American waiters with whom he worked, used to casually touch them for emphasis. The man's overtures of friendship toward his co-workers were always rejected and he wanted to know why. So when business was slow he observed how the Americans interacted. And eventually he arrived at this conclusion: Americans hate to be touched.

''He's absolutely right,'' Dr. Archer said. ''He figured it out by himself and no one ever told him. The sad thing about these nonverbal rules across cultures is you're on your own.''

The Brazilian man's experience also shows how people are quick to judge those who break the unwritten rules, unless we are attuned to the cultural differences.

John Bringardner, 26, a staff reporter at IP Law & Business, said that when he was studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, he lived next door to an Algerian man who had a habit of standing mere inches from his face. ''His spittle would get in my face,'' said Mr. Bringardner. But he did not back away. ''If it were an American guy that close,'' he said, ''it would have been a different situation.''

Yet it is rare for people to have confrontations about personal space. ''No one will ever turn to the nice person from Italy or Greece and say 'I like you but you're standing too close to me,' '' said Dr. Archer, who has videotaped strangers' responses to personal-space violations.

Rather, they will likely angle and inch their bodies away from anyone they feel breached their buffer zone. Blood pressure may rise, the heart rate may go up and the palms may sweat, said David B. Givens, the director of the Center for Nonverbal Studies in Spokane, Wash. ''All animals tend to have an aversion to being touched by a strange critter,'' he said.

Proxemics, however, is not merely about interactions between individuals. On a larger scale, it helps developers, urban planners and executives in various industries understand how people move through public spaces, how they shop, even what type of restaurants they find most comfortable.

Paco Underhill, the author of ''Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping'' and the chief executive of Envirosell, a research and consulting company whose client list includes Bloomingdale's, Saks Fifth Avenue, Starbucks and McDonald's, discovered that most consumers will walk away from whatever they are looking at in a store if a customer inadvertently brushes against their backside, disturbing his or her personal space.

And so, what may seem like a minor behavioral tic can help department stores determine how far apart to place racks of clothes, bistro owners figure out how to configure the bar area and college campuses to design residence halls.

Yet there are paradoxes to personal space, and one is that people do not always want it.

''If you've gone to see a funny movie in an empty theater, you can appreciate the facilitative effects of the presence of others,'' said Robert M. Krauss, a professor of psychology at Columbia. ''We went to see 'Borat' and every seat in the theater was full, and I have no doubt that it enhanced our enjoyment of it.''

Being crowded in a dance club or running the New York City Marathon is far different from being packed into a train car during rush hour or stuck on a freeway (yes, proxemics has been linked to road rage).

''In these spaces, when you're not commuting, you feel fine,'' Dr. Givens said. But in both positive moments of closeness and those that make the blood boil, one tenet of proxemics is the same: the near presence of people is arousing. ''It will enhance the amount that you enjoy things that are enjoyable,'' Dr. Krauss said. ''It will make more aversive the things that are not enjoyable.''

And when people want to avoid someone who is less than enjoyable, they employ a variety of tactics. Some scholars say this goes a long way toward explaining the iPod craze, which turns city streets and commuter trains into islands of individuality.

The same principle makes it easier to get close to strangers in low-lit places. ''Visually, you're not getting as much information,'' Dr. Givens said, adding that if the lights were suddenly flipped on in a dim bar, ''everybody would spring back.''

In general most people understand the rules of personal space and heed the cues. Then again, the world is littered with clods. As Dr. Archer put it, people generally view personal-space rules in one of two ways: ''the wrong way and my way.''
Home

Weapon Of Mass Destruction

2006-11-25T19:24:00.000-08:00

By Larry Kahaner, Washingtonpost
Sunday, November 26, 2006; B01

In the grand narrative of World War II, the Battle of Bryansk is a minor conflict, barely deserving of a footnote. But Bryansk has another place in history. It was there that a then-unknown tank commander named Mikhail Kalashnikov decided that his Russian comrades would never again be defeated. In the years following the Great Patriotic War, as Soviet propagandists dubbed it, he was to conceive and fabricate a weapon so simple, and yet so revolutionary, that it would change the way wars were fought and won. It was the AK-47 assault rifle.

The AK-47 has become the world's most prolific and effective combat weapon, a device so cheap and simple that it can be bought in many countries for less than the cost of a live chicken. Depicted on the flag and currency of several countries, waved by guerrillas and rebels everywhere, the AK is responsible for about a quarter-million deaths every year. It is the firearm of choice for at least 50 legitimate standing armies and countless fighting forces from Africa and the Middle East to Central America and Los Angeles. It has become a cultural icon, its signature form -- that banana-shaped magazine -- defining in our consciousness the contours of a deadly weapon.

This week, the U.S. military's presence in Iraq will surpass the length of time that American forces were engaged in World War II. And the AK-47 will forever link the two conflicts. The story of the gun itself, from inspiration in Bryansk to bloody insurgency in Iraq, is also the story of the transformation of modern warfare. The AK blew away old battlefield calculations of military superiority, of tactics and strategy, of who could be a soldier, of whose technology would triumph.

Ironically, the weapon that helped end World War II, the atomic bomb, paved the way for the rise of the lower-tech but deadlier AK-47. The A-bomb's guarantee of mass destruction compelled the two Cold War superpowers to wage proxy wars in poor countries, with ill-trained combatants exchanging fire -- usually with cheap, lightweight and durable AKs.

When one war ended, arms brokers gathered up the AKs and sold them to fighters in the next hot spot. The weapon's spread helps explain why, since World War II, so many "small wars" have lingered far beyond the months and years one might expect. Indeed, for all of the billions of dollars Washington has spent on space-age weapons and military technology, the AK still remains the most devastating weapon on the planet, transforming conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq. With these assault rifles, well-armed fighters can dominate a country, terrorize citizens, grab the spoils -- and even keep superpowers at bay.

When German forces employed the lightning war, or blitzkrieg, in World War II, it was a marked change from how wars had been fought. Instead of static fighting -- hunkering down in trenches for weeks or months at a time as in World War I -- the blitzkrieg concentrated forces at one point in an enemy's defensive line, broke a hole and then thrust deep into enemy territory, catching opponents off guard and subjecting them to waves of brutally efficient invaders.

In late September 1941, the German juggernaut reached the outskirts of Bryansk, hard against the Desna River southwest of Moscow. In the battle, the Nazis destroyed about 80 percent of the town and killed more than 80,000 people. Kalashnikov, who was 21, was wounded in his left shoulder when his tank came under artillery fire. He eventually made it to a hospital on foot after a harrowing two-day trip. He suffered nightmares about the Germans slaughtering his comrades.

Kalashnikov became obsessed with creating a submachine gun that would drive the Germans from his homeland. In his hospital bed, he sketched out the simplest automatic weapon possible. His obsession would later lead him to a metal shop, where he developed a prototype submachine gun; later to a technical school, where he invented a carbine; and finally, to the creation of the Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947 (AK-47) , approved for production that year. It combined the best characteristics of a submachine gun (light weight and durability) and a machine gun (killing power). By the end of 1949, arms plants had turned out about 80,000 AKs.

Although the AK came too late to see action in World War II, the Soviets knew their assault rifle could become the most important weapon of the modern era, and they worked hard to keep it hidden from the West. Soviet soldiers carried their AKs in special pouches that disguised their shape; they picked up spent cartridges to keep the newly sized ammunition a secret.

The 1956 uprising in Hungary compelled Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to dispatch the Red Army to Budapest. The episode required the first large-scale public use of the AK, and it performed well in an urban environment where tanks became bogged down in narrow streets against crowds wielding Molotov cocktails. The protests were squelched, and as many as 50,000 Hungarians were killed compared with about 7,000 Soviet soldiers.

By the late 1950s, the Soviet Union had begun using the AK to spread communism. In the early years of the Cold War, both Moscow and Washington tried to curry favor with uncommitted countries through sales and gifts of arms. Compared with the United States's offering of the M-1 and later the M-14, the AK proved vastly superior; its ruggedness was well suited to severe environmental conditions and the lack of gun repair facilities in poorer countries. The Soviets also distributed free licenses to produce the AK-47 to "fraternal countries," including Bulgaria, China, East Germany, Hungary, North Korea, Poland and Yugoslavia.

U.S. weapons experts did not embrace the superiority of the AK, clinging instead to old notions of warfare embodied in the M-1. The rifle had performed flawlessly during World War II, prompting Gen. George S. Patton to call it "the greatest battle implement ever devised." But it was heavy, clunky and held only eight rounds in its magazine, and was not an automatic weapon. Warfare was changing, and the M-1 was falling behind.

It was not until the Vietnam War -- the first major proxy battle against the Soviets -- that U.S. troops faced the AK-47 in action. They would pay dearly for their government's failure to recognize the power of Kalashnikov's simple weapon.

One key problem the United States faced in Vietnam involved basic weaponry: For all their military might, U.S. forces did not have an infantry weapon that could stand up to the AK in the pattern of warfare that was emerging. Confrontations often consisted of jungle patrols from both sides finding themselves unexpectedly face to face, and the side that could pump out the most rounds the fastest won.

After many years of bureaucratic wrangling, the U.S. military had finally introduced its own assault rifle, the sleek and sophisticated M-16. More than 100,000 of them were ordered by the summer of 1966 and shipped to the Asian war zone. By October, however, some unexpected reports were coming in.

M-16s were jamming in combat.

U.S. troops were found dead with their rifles in mid-breakdown, trying to undo the cause of the misfire while under attack. Morale plunged as they thought they could not trust their weapon. And as the Viet Cong learned of these problems, they became emboldened: The sight of the "black rifle," as they called it, was now less threatening. Although the Army tried to minimize the public relations fallout, reports reached Congress through the parents of servicemen as well as from soldiers who felt betrayed. A congressional subcommittee investigating the issue heard testimony about American troops routinely removing AKs from enemy dead and using them instead of their own M-16s.

The culprit, it turns out, wasn't the gun, but the ammunition. M-16s jammed because authorities had insisted on changing the cartridge propellant, and residue clogged the mechanism after repeated firing. But even after problems were addressed, it was too late. The AK came to be perceived widely as the world's top infantry weapon, and one that could beat the West's best offering. It was low-tech Soviet style vs. high-tech American style, and the communists won the war of perception.

If the Vietnam War gave the AK its credibility, it was the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the subsequent demise of the Soviet empire that accelerated the weapon's dissemination, placing it in the hands of insurgents and terrorists who embraced it as an icon of anti-imperialism.

Strategically, the initial Soviet invasion of Afghanistan seemed successful: Fewer than 70 Soviet troops died, most of them from non-combat-related accidents. Soviet planners anticipated a stay of no more than three years -- a timetable that seemed realistic considering that the Afghan fighters were short of modern weapons.

But that changed when the CIA began funneling extensive aid to the guerrilla fighters via Pakistan, including hundreds of thousands of AKs (mainly from China, where production of the Soviet weapon was booming). The CIA favored AKs because of their reliability, low cost and availability. In addition, Soviet weapons in the hands of the mujaheddin would not be easily traced to the United States, thus offering Washington official deniability. Years later in congressional testimony, CIA officials estimated that by 1984, $200 million had been sent to the Afghan mujaheddin, and that by 1988 the sum had reached $2 billion through CIA channels alone.

Graft and corruption notwithstanding, the CIA-led arms pipeline helped keep the rebels well stocked. By the mid-1980s, the war was stalemating, despite at least 100,000 Soviet troops on the ground, and the public back home was increasingly unhappy with what seemed like a no-win conflict.

When the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan on Feb. 15, 1989, the vast arms infrastructure did not disappear. Operating for a decade, it had become ingrained in the economy and culture of Afghanistan and neighboring countries. Even before the Soviet withdrawal, Western newspapers took note of the huge supply of AKs in the region, and the notion of a "Kalashnikov culture" entered the lexicon. In Pakistan, for example, a substantial part of the country's economy -- including gangs who robbed and kidnapped, drug kingpins who followed established arms routes, and the small village arms makers who bought, sold, repaired and produced their homemade versions -- depended on the ubiquitous AK.

The AK's international reach expanded further as the USSR collapsed and former Soviet bloc countries auctioned off their arms stockpiles. AKs began selling for bargain-basement prices throughout Africa, where countries were fragmented into tribal groups with long-standing ethnic resentments. In Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia and elsewhere, AKs prolonged small conflicts that previously would have petered out. The weapon became so much a part of daily life in some areas that it was dubbed the "African credit card" -- you could not leave home without it.

In Latin America, AKs ended up in the hands of drug cartels and anti-government rebels. Just as the CIA shipped AKs to Afghanistan, it did the same in Nicaragua in the early 1980s, sending arms to the contras in their fight against the Soviet-backed Sandinistas. AKs fueled civil war in El Salvador as well as political and drug-related violence in Colombia. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez recently announced the purchase of 100,000 AKs from Russian stockpiles. He also announced plans to produce AKs in his own factory -- the first time the weapon will be made in the Western Hemisphere.

Before the Soviet invasion, Afghanistan had been considered a moderate Islamic country, but the war emboldened a more virulent strain of Islam, one fueled by accessible weapons and a devastated economy. In the mountainous border area near Pakistan, Saudi-born millionaire Osama bin Laden grew more radical in his views on a holy war -- first against the Soviet invaders, and later against the United States and the West.

Just before the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, bin Laden distributed the first of several videotapes warning the West about reprisals. In these tapes, the al-Qaeda leader is seen with an AK either next to him or propped up in the background. The typical stock footage shows a white-robed bin Laden firing an AK, a symbol to the world that he is a true anti-imperialist fighter.

In their battles against U.S. forces, many al-Qaeda fighters and tribal groups still carry the same AKs that the CIA had purchased more than a decade earlier. The first U.S. soldier to die by hostile fire in Afghanistan -- Sgt. 1st Class Nathan Ross Chapman of San Antonio -- was killed by a teenager shooting an AK.

The AK is also the weapon of choice in the latest "small war" that a superpower believed would be brief and painless: Iraq.

Although coalition bombing in 1991 destroyed much of Iraq's air force, Scud missiles and tanks, Saddam Hussein's regime retained its small weapons, including AKs. By March 2003, when Operation Iraqi Freedom began, Iraqi arsenals included seven to eight million small arms. These weapons -- which U.S. planners did not consider a major threat when the invasion began -- would prove deadly for American troops once major hostilities ended. During the chaos that followed the swift victory, millions of small weapons (mainly AKs) were looted from Hussein's armories. They landed in the hands of nervous law-abiding citizens, but also in the hands of Baathist loyalists and other opponents of the U.S. occupation who used them to start a protracted urban war.

In Iraq, the AK had taken on symbolic power, too. Hussein had been so enamored with the weapon that he had built a Baghdad mosque sporting minarets in the unique shape of AK barrels. His son Uday commissioned gold-plated AKs. And when Hussein was captured, two AKs were found in his underground hideout.

Even the newly forming Iraqi army -- trained by the U.S. military and civilian contractors -- refused American-made M-16s and M-4s. When the Coalition Provisional Authority was planning to outfit Iraqi forces, they were surprised to find that the Iraqis insisted on AKs.

"For better or worse, the AK-47 is the weapon of choice in that part of the world," said Walter Slocombe, senior adviser to the CPA. "It turns out that every Iraqi male above the age of 12 can take them apart and put them together blindfolded and is a pretty good shot."

Now 85, tiny, feeble, nearly deaf, his right hand losing control because of tremors, Kalashnikov is often haunted by the killing machine he has bestowed upon the world. "I wish I had invented a lawnmower," he told the Guardian in 2002.

In Iraq, Sierra Leone, Sudan and elsewhere, today's wars are hot conflicts in urban areas, with guerrillas holding their own against better trained troops. Sophisticated, expensive arms seem no match for AK-wielding rebels who need little training and know the local terrain better. Some call this the new reality of small conflicts.

This sentiment was expressed by Maj. Gen. William J. Livsey Jr. the commandant of Fort Benning, Ga., in the early 1980s, when the military was first integrating computer chips into smart weapons. "Despite all the sophisticated weapons we or the Soviets come up with," he warned, "you still have to get that one lone infantryman, with his rifle, off his piece of land. It's the damn hardest thing in the world to do."

The AK has pierced through popular culture, too. In 2004, Playboy magazine dubbed it one of the "50 Products That Changed the World," ranking it behind the Apple Macintosh desktop, the birth-control pill and the Sony Betamax video machine. Rappers Ice Cube and Eminem mention AKs in their lyrics. And in the movie "Jackie Brown," actor Samuel L. Jackson captures the weapon's global cachet: "AK-47. The very best there is. When you absolutely, positively got to kill every [expletive] in the room."

Yet, for all of his weapon's influence, Kalashnikov receives no royalties for his invention. Recently, he began selling his own name brand of vodka, which has been a hit in Europe and the Middle East and is slated to reach the United States next year.

At times, he remains defiant and aloof, blaming others for the AK's misuse.

"I invented it for protection of the motherland," Kalashnikov told an interviewer. "I have no regrets and bear no responsibility for how politicians have used it."

Larry Kahaner is the author of "AK-47: The Weapon That Changed the Face of War" (Wiley).

Gun M1

2006-11-25T19:07:00.000-08:00

Source world.guns.ru

gun, M1,

What the U.S. Has Failed to Learn in Lebanon

2006-11-24T16:14:00.000-08:00

Viewpoint: Throughout the Middle East, Washington has repeated its tragic mistakes of the early '80s in Beirut
By SCOTT MACLEOD/CAIRO, Times Magazine
Posted Thursday, Nov. 23, 2006

The gangland-style slaying of Lebanese cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel this week is an echo of Lebanon's tragic past. It may also be a glimpse into a future Middle East that looks increasingly troubled.

In Beirut in the early '80s, I watched as the Reagan administration threw its weight behind two other Gemayels, Pierre's uncle, Bashir, and father, Amin, in a radical project to re-make Lebanon as a bastion of pro-Western liberalism, aligned with Israel and free from Syrian domination and Iranian influence. That effort failed: Bashir wound up dead; Amin went into temporary exile; U.S. credibility evaporated and Americans remaining in Beirut became kidnap targets; and Israel got mired in an 18-year military occupation. By contrast, Syrian and Iranian influence in Lebanon swelled.

History appears to be repeating itself, and not only in Lebanon. Syria and Iran have been fighting U.S. plans to re-make Iraq and the wider Arab world, and as America struggles, they are emerging as the winners. And once again, the casualties include pro-U.S. Arabs like the Gemayels.

Yes, the regimes in Syria and Iran are bent on undermining U.S. policies, including support for Lebanese Prime Minister Fuoad Siniora, who came to office in last year's pro-democracy Cedar Revolution. But a key reason for the U.S.'s setbacks in the Middle East is it's chronic refusal to wholeheartedly address the root causes of conflict, such as the lack of a negotiated end to Israel's occupation of Arab lands, the failure to establish a Palestinian state and Western support for repressive Arab regimes. Instead, Washington labors under the fantasy that its political and military strength alone can win the day. With that approach fanning an unprecedented number of crises in the region, amid the largest long-term deployment of U.S. military forces in Middle East history, it is past time for Washington to learn from its mistakes.

Early-'80s Lebanon ought to have served as a cautionary tale heading off the U.S.'s more recent adventure in Iraq. In 1982, the U.S. backed an Israeli plan to invade Lebanon and destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization, kick out Syrian troops and install a pro-Western, Israel-friendly government led by Lebanese Maronite Christian leader Bashir Gemayel. Israel drove out the PLO, only to start negotiating with Yasser Arafat after a Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza trip a few years later. Suspected Syrian agents assassinated Bashir Gemayel days before his presidential inauguration. His supporters retaliated by slaughtering hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut. The U.S. dispatched troops to quell the unrest, while Reagan's envoys negotiated a peace accord between Israel and Amin Gemayel who had taken his brother's place.

But, after militants with suspected ties to Iran and Syria bombed the U.S. embassy and the Marine base in Beirut, Reagan abruptly withdrew the soldiers and abandoned Gemayel. Syria forced Gemayel to abrogate his deal with Israel, and Hizballah, the Lebanese Shiite Muslim group founded by Iran, began a guerrilla war that eventually forced out the Israelis in 2000. That triumph that made Hizballah the most powerful faction in Lebanese politics, enabling it to trigger this summer's war with a cross-border raid into Israel and more recently threaten to topple Siniora's government.

So, what could the U.S. do differently? There's no simple answer to the challenge of political Islam, terrorism and authoritarianism. But by using its considerable capacity to decisively address the root causes of conflict, the U.S. would bolster moderate forces like Siniora and isolate governments and groups that exploit unresolved grievances to justify violence. Otherwise, existing trends will continue and the region will see further polarization, extremism and war-and perhaps the deployment of U.S. troops to additional trouble spots.

Lip-service aside, the Bush Administration has largely ignored the 58-year-old Arab-Israeli conflict, which provides pretexts for wars, feeds political extremism and bolsters authoritarian regimes. Syria's price for good behavior in Lebanon and Iraq is the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel for nearly 40 years. Labor governments negotiated towards that end with Syria, but the current Israeli government insists that the Golan is part of the Jewish State.

The Palestinian problem is the most important issue to revolve. The Hamas-led Palestinian government elected this year, which like Hizballah is also backed by Syria and Iran, refuses to recognize Israel, but that is hardly the only impediment: for decades, Israel has blanketed the West Bank with Israeli settlements that make it nearly impossible to create a viable Palestinian state. One of the factors in the continuing intifadeh and Hamas's political rise is Arafat's failure to win Palestinian statehood despite years of peace negotiations after he recognized Israel's right to exist.

This summer, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described Israel's pummeling of Lebanon as "the birth pangs of a new Middle East." A return to the old Middle East, more like it. Israel withdrew its forces from Lebanon, despite achieving few of its objectives. But U.S. support for Israel's bombardments gravely undercut the pro-American Siniora government to which Pierre Gemayel belonged and that now may not survive Hizballah's bid for greater power. As I watch dramatic events in Lebanon yet again, the U.S. looks no more able to direct events than it was two decades ago when Pierre Gemayel's uncle lost his life and his father was deserted by Washington.

Is this Altantuya?

2006-11-11T03:23:00.001-08:00

Altantuya Shaariibuu, Altantuya, Mongolian model, Razak Baginda