Dilip Hiro, author of Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm and Secrets and Lies: Operation"Iraqi Freedom" and After, A Prelude to the Fall of U.S. Power in the Middle East?; in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, run by Tom Engelhardt (March 19, 2004):

Enough hard facts have surfaced since the war on Iraq a year ago to enable us to plot fairly accurately the path that President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair followed, culminating in the Anglo-American invasion of a country that posed no imminent threat to the United States, Britain, or any of its neighbors.

In the blame game currently being played in Washington, members of the Bush team are pointing their fingers at Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress for providing misleading or exaggerated intelligence about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But the responsibility for propping up Chalabi and his cohorts rests with the very same officials who are now feigning anger at their own henchmen.

It was the U.S. government that funded the INC's Intelligence Clearance Project. And it was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who set up his Office of Special Plans (OSP), which provided a channel outside of the established intelligence agencies, for the INC to feed its information directly to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney, who is for all practical purposes the executive prime minister to a president uninterested in and incapable of running the day-to-day administration of his government.

Out of this incestuous amplification arose the myth of Iraq's WMD stockpiles. It was an example of political judgment and decision-making preceding actual hard intelligence.

The source of what has happened in Iraq is none other than President Bush himself and his obsession with regime change in Baghdad from the day he assumed office. According to The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill , written by Ron Suskind, based on his interviews with former Treasury Secretary O'Neill and 19,000 official documents, at the first National Security Council meeting on January 30, 2001,Bush asked"Condi [Rice], what are we going to talk about today?" In her seemingly pre-scripted response, she said,"How Iraq is destabilizing the region, Mr President."

Then followed a presentation by CIA director George Tenet in which he rolled out a large, grainy aerial photograph of an Iraqi factory on a table:"A plant that produces either chemical or biological materials for weapons manufacture." The NSC members hovered over the picture, nodding. But O'Neill, a former Chief Executive Officer of Alcoa, an aluminum manufacturing company, said,"I've seen a lot of factories around the world that look a lot like this one. What makes us suspect that this one is producing chemical or biological agents for weapons?" All that Tenet could offer was circumstantial evidence.

"From the very first instance, it was [Bush's obsession] about Iraq," O'Neill told Sixty Minutes ,"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President was saying, ‘Go, find me a way to do it.'"

As soon as the Pentagon's Afghanistan war ended in January 2002, Bush turned to Iraq. According to Rowan Scarborough, the Washington Times ' Pentagon correspondent, and the author of Rumsfeld's War , Bush signed a secret National Security Council directive establishing the goals and objectives for a war on Iraq, one of the classified documents Scarborough obtained, on February 16, 2002.

Little wonder that, soon after, Bush would tell three senators having a meeting with Rice at the White House,"We are taking him [Saddam Hussein] out." And he purportedly said the same thing to Blair when the British leader visited him in early April.

It was in the course of their talks on September 6-7 at Camp David that Blair formally agreed to participate in a war against Iraq, provided Bush sought endorsement for military action from the United Nations Security Council without giving up his option to act unilaterally if that failed.

They also decided that in order to focus world attention on Iraq's WMD and pressure Iraq to allow the UN to resume inspections, Britain should publish a dossier to show that the threat of Iraq's WMD was real. The task fell to Blair because both leaders agreed that a British document would carry more credibility in the Arab and Muslim world than an American one. Such a dossier would also assist Bush in securing a Congressional vote in early October for the authority to declare war on Iraq.

Three days later a draft of the British dossier, Iraq's Programme of Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government , was sent to Tenet in Washington. On September 13, Tenet expressed reservations to the statement:"Iraq continues to work on developing nuclear weapons... Uranium to be used for the production of fissile material has been purchased from Africa." This led to a modified version, whereby"recent intelligence... indicates" that"Iraq has purchased large quantities of uranium ore, despite having no civil nuclear program that would require it."

But suddenly, on September 16, the Iraqi government said that UN inspectors could return to Iraq"without any conditions." Once that happened, the raison d'etre for the British dossier disappeared. It had achieved its aim without being released. Any rational leader would then have aborted the project. But not Tony Blair.

Indeed, a new paragraph added to the dossier on September 19 claimed that, anticipating the arrival of UN inspectors, the Iraqi government had already started hiding its WMD. How Britain managed to collect raw information about Iraq's instantaneous concealment activities, assess it, and draw a conclusion about it within 72 hours must remain a matter of wonderment and awe in the annals of intelligence.

The dossier that was released on September 24 was titled Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction . What got many British politicians and citizens worked up was the claim in the document that Iraq's chemical and biological weapons were ready to be fired within 45 minutes of an order being issued by Saddam. Given that the Iraqi dictator allegedly possessed up to 20 medium range missiles, his warheads could have reached two British bases in Cyprus. This would have constituted an attack on Britain.

In the hullabaloo that followed soon after and erupted again at the time of Lord Hutton's Inquiry in August 2003, no witness or expert noticed that the Bush administration made no mention of this 45-minute scenario, even though the Pentagon had beefed its troop presence in neighboring Kuwait by tens of thousands in September 2002. All somebody had to say was:"How come the US, which has so many soldiers in Kuwait did not raise the fearsome scenario of them being hit by Iraq's WMD, for which Iraq's known, permissible short range missiles would have sufficed?"

The moral is that when two or more parties collude to concoct"facts," it is not always possible for them to synchronize their misinformation/disinformation/lies. That is how those who have broken the law collectively often get caught: their individual stories do not tally.

Another major Bush-Blair statement -- that they had exhausted all avenues of peaceful resolution of the crisis before declaring war on Baghdad -- has now turned out to be a lie. On November 7, 2003 the New York Times and the Guardian reported that Saddam Hussein had offered a deal in February 2003 meant to satisfy Bush and Blair on all the important aspects of the crisis: weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Middle East peace process, access of American oil companies to Iraqi petroleum, and the democratization of Iraq.

According to these reports (confirmed by all the parties involved), Saddam proposed that up to 2,000 FBI and CIA agents be dispatched to Iraq to look for its WMD anywhere in the country. He pledged that he would go along with any deal to which Israel and the mainstream Palestinian leadership agreed. He promised to give US oil corporations a share in the exploration and extraction of oil in Iraq. And he promised free and fair multiparty elections in Iraq under international supervision in two years.

Imad Hage, acting on behalf of Saddam, met Richard Perle, then chairman of the US Defense Policy Advisory Committee Board, in the lobby of the Marlborough Hotel in central London on March 7, and then they went to an office nearby and there for two hours Hage outlined the Iraqi offer to Perle. But so determined was Bush to invade Iraq that he refused point blank to consider Saddam's offer and resolve the crisis peacefully.

This was in stark contrast to the softly, softly manner in which the Bush administration had been handling – and continues to handle -- the issue of the WMD of North Korea, another member of the so-called Axis of Evil. There has been remarkable delinquency on the part of politicians and pundits in pointing out this disparity

Equally absent has been an effort to compare and contrast Haiti and Iraq. Recent developments in Haiti show that democracy has failed to become established there. It is a small republic, occupying only a third of the island of Hispaniola, which is in the backyard of the United States. Yet, Washington's efforts since 1971 -- when dictator Francois Duvalier died -- to install democracy there have proven futile.

If this is what the US has to show for its democratization mission, worldwide, in Haiti after 33 years of trying, what chance is there for democracy, planted by invading Anglo-American armies in faraway Iraq, to take root?

James Rainey, in the LAT (March 18, 2004):

In a campaign that has seen candidate Howard Dean infamously appeal to"guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks," many political scientists, historians and gender experts say that a good portion of the presidential image-making in 2004 will center on masculinity.

Driving the paternal imperative, they say, is the anxiety many Americans feel because of the war in Iraq and the threat of terrorist attacks at home.

"When you have a war going on, usually the macho factor will prevail," said Joan Hoff, a Montana State University history professor and former president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency."Bush feels it's to his advantage to keep foreign policy as a major issue. But when that comes up, I think you are going to see a lot of 'Who is tougher than whom.'"

The televised images of machismo may be as overt as Bush powering along the Maine coast in his father's cigarette boat or Kerry exchanging slap shots and forechecks on the hockey rink. But the manly theme also will be cast in more subtle and euphemistic terms, as pundits talk about the candidates'"authenticity,""decisiveness" and"toughness."

"There is no doubt that one of the things that Bush has going for him, even with some people who otherwise wouldn't like him, is that he seems decisive and a leader," said Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociologist and gender expert."For many people that links to maleness."

But both the president and the senator from Massachusetts need to be careful that their embrace of traditional masculine roles does not become forced, Schwartz said, lest they become perceived in that most un-macho of roles — the poseur. Think Michael Dukakis in 1988, clad in an oversized helmet and perched atop a tank.

American politicians have not been above feminizing their opponents dating back to the era of powdered wigs, playing on the stereotypical notion that only the"manly" can lead.

Some critics of the day called Thomas Jefferson"womanish." In 1840, President Martin Van Buren — accused of wearing a corset and taking too many baths — lost to William Henry Harrison. The challenger purportedly took care not to be seen in the tub.

Adlai E. Stevenson found himself belittled as"Adelaide" in two unsuccessful 1950s presidential confrontations with Dwight D. Eisenhower, the retired war hero. And in 1984, onetime movie cowboy Ronald Reagan made swift work of Walter F. Mondale, who was labeled a"quiche eater" by Republican true believers....

Elisabeth Bumiller, in the NYT (March 14, 2004):

The 2004 presidential campaign has opened with a snarl.

President Bush and Senator John Kerry, two gentlemen from Yale, wasted no time attacking each other eight months before the election. Last week alone, Mr. Kerry called Republicans" crooked" and"lying" in off-the-cuff comments, then refused to apologize to what he called a"Republican attack squad." Mr. Bush accused Mr. Kerry of trying to"gut" American intelligence services, and he authorized a television ad charging that Mr. Kerry"would raise taxes by at least $900 billion" and weaken national defense. Mr. Kerry fired back with an ad asserting that he had never called for such a thing and wanted to cut taxes for the middle class.

"Doesn't America deserve more from its president than misleading negative ads?" the announcer intoned.

Probably not, at least if history is any guide. Washington's 2004 political class may be deploring the nasty tone of the fledgling campaign and wondering what awful things Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry will be saying about each other come October, but historians remain unimpressed. Negative campaigns are American.

While voters may complain that every campaign seems the most negative ever, contrarians say they serve a useful purpose. In a democracy with a free press and a robust public debate, attacks can be informative and compelling enough to make voters pay attention.

Politics have always been a spectator sport in the United States. As at football games, it is not enough to root for your own team. You have to denigrate the other.

In addition, the country has always been divided by race, region, economics and class, leading to vitriol between the two men representing each side of the divide.

That said, for all the debate about whether Mr. Bush has diminished himself by going negative so early, the Bush-Kerry matchup has not been particularly negative, at least not yet, by historical standards. More important, their attacks have been about substance that voters can learn from, like national security and taxes.

"People have not begun to sling mud," said Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations."So far it's amateur hour - no illegitimate children yet."

Mr. Mead was referring to the mother of all negative campaigns, the 1884 race between Grover Cleveland and James G. Blaine, a Republican senator from Maine. The race is perhaps best known for the attack line"Ma! Ma! Where's my Pa?" which Republicans chanted at Cleveland, who while mayor of Buffalo had an illicit relationship with a widow who bore him a child. Democrats had a response:"Gone to the White House. Ha! Ha! Ha!"

Historians say Cleveland probably would have lost had it come out closer to Election Day. As it was, Democrats had time to fight back. They painted Blaine as a corrupt businessman who ended a letter with the instructions,"burn this." But it became public, and Democrats broke into song:

"Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine!

The con-ti-nen-tal liar from the state of Maine."

One of the nastiest campaigns was one of the first. In the election of 1800, Vice President Thomas Jefferson was tarred as an agent of the French Revolution, while President John Adams was decried as a monarchist; after Jefferson won, his enemies spread the story that he had a slave mistress, Sally Hemings.

Generally, the campaigns of the 19th century were meaner than the ones today, in large part because the newspapers of the era took sides and were often subsidized by the political parties."There was almost no restraint on what could be said in the partisan press," said Bruce J. Schulman, a professor of history and American studies at Boston University."Party organizations were much stronger, and the partisan attachment of voters was much more loyal. Politics then was not about trying to convert voters based on issues. There were more or less no swing voters. It was all about getting your army of voters to the polls."

But the 20th century had its low moments, too, like the 1948 race between Thomas E. Dewey and the incumbent Harry S. Truman. An Oct. 26 headline in The New York Times captures the campaign's tenor:"President Likens Dewey to Hitler as Fascists' Tool."

Brendan Miniter, in the WSJ (March 17, 2004):

John Kerry is right about one thing: He's no Michael Dukakis. A look at the record shows that in his bid for the White House in 1988, Massachusetts' then-governor ran to Mr. Kerry's right on national defense. Mr. Kerry has not repudiated his opposition to the weapon systems Mr. Dukakis promised to support.

Everyone remembers the pathetic image of Mr. Dukakis riding around in a tank while wearing a goofy helmet. But few remember why he staged that photo-op in the first place. Mr. Dukakis was fighting to overcome the impression that he had what Henry Kissinger called a "visceral, negative" attitude toward the military--a fatal problem for a Cold War presidential candidate.

Being part of the Democratic Party was a hindrance. Many Democrats spent much of the 1980s fighting for the nuclear-freeze movement. Mr. Kerry joined the movement in 1982, during his successful campaign to become Mr. Dukakis's lieutenant governor, and he used many of its appendage groups in Massachusetts when he sought an open Senate seat in 1984. These were the intellectuals behind the rabble in the streets who protested things like deploying nuclear missiles to Turkey to counter the Soviets SS-23s.

But they did much more than oppose building or deploying nukes. They believed so strongly in "mutually assured destruction"--neither side would start a nuclear war if it was clear neither side could win such a war--that they also opposed just about any weapon system that would give America a tactical advantage over the Soviets. That's why President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (which opponents derided as "star wars") was so vehemently opposed. And it's why Mr. Kerry and others voted against funding Trident II submarine launchers, stealth bombers and even the M1 Abrams Tank.

Mr. Dukakis understood the political reality that he had to close his party's credibility gap on defense without alienating politicians like Mr. Kerry. So he tried to have his cake and eat it too. Mr. Dukakis promised to cut funding for SDI but not to kill the program altogether. He also offered qualified support to the Trident II and stealth bomber projects as well as to consider ways to get around his budget concerns regarding Midgetman missile launchers. But the bulk of his military program called for spending more money on "traditional" military hardware. He wanted more tanks, not more nukes.
To pull off this feat, Mr. Dukakis drew close to "Defense Democrats" like Rep. Les Aspin and Sen. Sam Nunn, then chairmen of the Armed Services Committees in their respective chambers. He wanted to show that he wasn't the equivocating "liberal," Vice President George Bush said he was, but in fact had the support of hawks within his party.

On Sept. 11, 1988, a group of Defense Democrats made a public show of meeting Mr. Dukakis to press him on, among other things, dropping the "ifs" and "buts" when voicing support for stealth bombers and Trident II missiles. After the meeting they publicly proclaimed him to be sound on defense. The next day Mr. Dukakis went into the tank for the famous photo.

Michael Kranish, in the Boston Globe (March 11, 2004):

Steven Michael Gardner served side by side with John Forbes Kerry in Vietnam, was wounded under Kerry's command, and was manning twin .50-caliber machine guns on a night that has forever haunted Kerry -- the night his crew killed a young boy in a sampan.

But unlike many of Kerry's crewmates, Gardner has not appeared at Kerry's side at campaign rallies, and his view of Kerry at war is far different from the heroic view presented by others."He absolutely did not want to engage the enemy when I was with him," Gardner said in a recent interview."He wouldn't go in there and search. That is why I have a negative viewpoint of John Kerry."

Gardner's view is dramatically at odds with that of many other crewmates whom the Globe interviewed, who praise Kerry's leadership and say he was one of the most aggressive skippers in the Navy at the time. Gardner, who said he intends to support President Bush for reelection, clashed with Kerry on one of the most memorable and haunting nights that the two sailors spent together in Vietnam. That story, which until recently has been told publicly only in fragmentary form, involved the killing of the young boy.

As Gardner recalls it, he was in the"tub" above the pilot house with the twin machine guns, and Kerry was in command, when the Navy swift boat came upon a sampan in the darkness. Gardner flashed a searchlight and ordered the craft to stop. Then, he said, he saw a figure rise up over the gunwale with a semiautomatic weapon. Spotting tracers in the sky and fearing an attack, Gardner said, he laced the sampan with bullets, and other crew members fired as well. Gardner recalls a man in the sampan falling overboard, presumably dead.

After the shooting had stopped and Kerry had ordered a cease-fire, Gardner said, the crew found a woman in the sampan who was alive. There was also the boy, dead in the bottom of the boat. Gardner said there is no way to know which crewmate fired the shots that killed the boy, but he said Kerry was in the pilot house and did not fire. Kerry was livid when he emerged, Gardner said.

"Kerry threatened me with a court-martial, screaming at the top of his lungs: `What the hell do you think you're doing? I ought to have you court-martialed,'" Gardner recalled."Thankfully, the whole crew was there in the middle of it . . . they verified there were weapons being shot at us. That was the end of it." ...

Daniel Henninger, in the WSJ (March 12, 2004):

John Kerry entered the U.S. Senate in 1985, and for 18 years built the record that is now the basis for calling him either complex and nuanced or inconsistent and opportunistic. Most famously, Mr. Kerry voted for the Iraq war resolution, but criticizes nearly every action Mr. Bush has taken on Iraq. He voted for the Patriot Act but says John Ashcroft is"abusing" it. There is a long list of similarly nuanced positions (a word Mr. Kerry rejects).

Here is a Harry Truman story from Alan Axelrod's book on Truman's leadership style. Speaking at Columbia University in 1959, a student challenged the 33rd President, a Democrat, on dropping the second A-bomb."The reason I asked this," the student said,"was that it seemed to me the second bomb came pretty soon after the first one." After speaking testily of"Monday morning quarterbacks," Truman said simply:"I was there. I did it. I would do it again."

This isn't John Kerry. Indeed, it is unlikely that Harry Truman's blunt, almost cocky retort would be seen as admirable by current standards of public sensitivity. But the stubborn forcefulness of Truman's decision-making still stands as a symbol of presidential leadership, as does that of FDR, Lincoln and increasingly Ronald Reagan, who installed Pershing missiles in Europe against opposition similar to that faced now by Mr. Bush on Iraq. Roosevelt pressed the Lend Lease Act against an embittered domestic opposition.

This is a guess, as inevitably one has to guess about a presidential challenger, but John Kerry's temperament, as we have seen it, appears unlikely to have let him make Truman's decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He would have found the implications of that decision too difficult to bear the heavy judgments of history, then or now.

Iraq aside, one must doubt that Mr. Kerry would have attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan on the scale and with the ferociousness of Mr. Bush's successful assault. After September 11, both conservatives and liberals opposed retaliation against al Qaeda's redoubts in Afghanistan, describing many scenarios of political and geographic disaster. It is reasonable to guess that a President Kerry would have sided with those articulating arguments against.

Across the years, Mr. Kerry has been Hamlet, a political metaphor sure to rise again and again until November. This is one ghost that can't be mocked offstage. It needs to be faced. Vietnam haunted him, then and now. By his friends' accounts, he wrestles in his maturity with the decisions of life and politics.

Hamlet is very much a man for our times. Perhaps the presidency deserves one version of Everyman in the complex and inconstant world we inhabit. I doubt it. The historian James McGregor Burns said a few years back that often now politicians"don't have firm sets of ideals or values, either liberal or conservative or radical, that can underpin strong leadership." Some truths don't change. It is very hard to see John Kerry as the right fit for the office of the American presidency....

Eric Black, in the Star Tribune (March 11, 2004):

Twenty years ago this summer, Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale chose Rep. Geraldine Ferraro of New York as his running mate, which made her the first woman ever on a major party ticket.

At a reunion Wednesday morning, Mondale and Ferraro reminisced about their history-making 1984 partnership, then joined several analysts of gender politics in pondering why no women have been on a major presidential ticket since Ferraro broke the barrier.

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who got her first big break on the 1984 campaign, showed data suggesting that gender stereotypes still play a significant role in voters' choices. For example, only 46 percent of Americans described themselves as"very comfortable" with the idea of a woman president.

Although a couple of women have been mentioned as possible running mates for this year's presumptive Democratic nominee, Sen. John Kerry, the most prominently mentioned names are men. If Kerry picks a man and President Bush sticks with Vice President Dick Cheney, as he has said he will, that will make 20 males who have run for president or vice president on the major party tickets since Ferraro's breakthrough nomination.

Kenneth S. Baer, author of Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton and a speechwriter for Al Gore; in Newsday (New York) (March 7, 2004)

Listening to Republicans crow over the past few weeks, you would have thought that the 1990s never happened.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour called the presumptive Democratic nominee a"taller, leaner version of Ted Kennedy." Pat Buchanan charged that he was a"Massachusetts liberal," and GOP strategist Greg Mueller gleefully called Sen. John Kerry a"New England Dukakis liberal."

The election and re-election of Bill Clinton, plus the near-election of Al Gore, were supposed to have put this kind of liberal-bashing to rest. Clinton was the New Democrat from Arkansas who dislodged a party mired in American politics' left bank and guided it into the mainstream. In victory, Democrats were to have learned their lesson, never again to nominate a Northeastern liberal, especially one who lived a stone's throw from the ivy-covered walls of Harvard.

Yet last week, Democrats seemed to have reverted to form, selecting Michael Dukakis' fellow Bay Stater and one-time lieutenant governor to be the party's standard-bearer this fall.

Republicans may be ecstatic, but to honestly believe that Kerry is a Dukakis throwback is to believe that Cabbage Patch Kids, acid-washed jeans and MC Hammer are on the cusp of a revival.

The Democratic Party of 2004 is not the Democratic Party of 1988 - or 1968. The party has been profoundly changed by Bill Clinton's candidacies and presidency, and this transformation is clearly reflected in the Democrats' new leader...

...By 1984, according to the National Election Studies, Americans viewed the Democratic Party as representing black militants, the women's liberation movement, civil rights leaders, welfare recipients, gays and lesbians and labor unions. On a favorability scale of zero to 100, this coalition scored an average of 45.

These are the bogeymen that Republicans like to conjure up come election time, but they are the ghosts of the Democratic Party past.

In the 1990s, Clinton and the New Democrats fashioned a post-Cold War foreign policy predicated on America's engagement with the world and the promotion of democracy abroad. As demonstrated in the Balkans, they readily used military force to further American interests and values. On the domestic front, they proved that Democrats once again could manage the economy as Clinton opened markets abroad, expanded economic opportunity and oversaw the longest period of economic growth in U.S. history.

Countering the belief that the Democrats were the party of tax-and-spend, Clinton ran a record budget surplus and cut the federal government to its smallest size since John Kennedy was in office. By ending welfare, promoting national service and putting more cops on the beat, Clinton rebalanced the party's emphasis on rights and responsibilities. On social issues, Democrats remained committed to inclusion and tolerance, and shed their aversion to faith and family.

Make no mistake: Changing a party's public philosophy is like steering an aircraft carrier. It took New Right conservatives 16 years from Barry Goldwater's defeat to Ronald Reagan's victory. And despite all Clinton did to debunk Democratic stereotypes on national security, the mishandling of the 2002 campaign and Bush's post-Sept. 11 leadership reasserted the Democratic disadvantage on this issue with a vengeance. Yet, policy and political success breeds imitation and slow but steady change.

Look at the results of this year's presidential nominating race. The candidate of the labor left (Richard Gephardt) and the candidate of the liberal left (Howard Dean) both lost decisively. The black protest candidate (Al Sharpton) barely made a dent with his own constituency, and the candidate who ran on a platform of pure early-'70s liberalism (Dennis Kucinich) won nothing outside of Maui.

Both of the two finalists in the nominating race - Kerry and John Edwards - supported the war in Iraq, backed middle-class tax cuts, offered affordable and market-oriented health-care plans, championed fiscal discipline and promoted national service on the stump. When Edwards veered left by staking out a protectionist stance on trade, he not only failed to win industrial states, but was forced to concede the nomination after being shut out on Super Tuesday.

Does that make the candidate left-standing, Kerry, a New Democrat? Not necessarily. Kerry was not at the vanguard of the New Democratic movement in the 1980s, and hailing from Massachusetts - as opposed to Georgia or Oklahoma - he didn't need to be. Like most of the pre-Clinton party, Kerry was certainly more liberal Democrat than New Democrat, yet he wasn't leading the resistance either.

Since then, like the bulk of the party, Kerry has made his peace with key New Democratic policies and is far from the McGovernik Massachusetts liberal that Republicans relish running against.

During the Clinton years, Kerry sided with the president on the two most internally divisive issues the party faced, welfare reform and trade. And during his own presidential campaign, Kerry has focused his pitch on his military experience and belief in a muscular, Kennedyesque (John, not Ted) liberal internationalism. Even in the darkest days of his candidacy, Kerry told anti-war crowds that Democrats had to be strong on defense and refused to pander to labor crowds by telling them that he could bring back lost manufacturing jobs.

Of course, Kerry has a long record in public life, and Republicans surely will pick it over to paint him as a liberal (at best) or a flip-flopper (at worst) - charges that Kerry will have to forcefully rebut. But, in the end, Kerry represents the mainstream of today's Democratic Party, and while neither he nor the party may proudly take up the New Democratic label, both have been shaped by the Clinton presidency and the New Democratic project - and are better off for it.

Jagdish Bhagwati, writing for the Guardian (London) (March 8, 2004)

A free trader's work is never done, especially in the United States. The historians of free trade in Great Britain since the repeal of the corn laws in mid-19th century have argued that politicians in strong economies embrace free trade because they expect their countries to win in the Darwinian struggle in the marketplace. But the US, despite having emerged at the end of the second world war as the top dog on the block, has repeatedly descended into paranoia on trade.

The recent furore over outsourcing fits into a pattern of fear of trade with the developing countries that goes back to the fierce fights against Nafta with Mexico, and the furore over the imports of labour-intensive goods from the Far East and then China (the"yellow peril"). Now we have the outcry over the imports of (mostly) labour-intensive services online - what economists sometimes call"long distance" services where the provider and the user do not have to get together physically - from India (the"brown peril"). As always, the fear is baseless and based on bad economics.

The earlier fear was that manufacturing jobs for the working class would disappear with imports; vice-president Fritz Mondale conjured up a nation of"hamburger flippers". Now the fear is that the new imports will take good jobs from the middle class, and the modern-day doomsayers imagine a nation of"grocery baggers" at the supermarkets as discharged computer programmers et al struggle for survival at low wages in lower occupations. The fear is not just exaggerated, it is also false; though, as the Russian proverb goes, it has big eyes, and a recent poll suggests that more than a third of the American labour force is in a state of anxiety over jobs.

The difficult job situation in skilled information technology-related occupations has been heavily overlaid by the dotcom bust and by the overvaluation of the dollar, both pheonomena which are being reversed. In fact, according to the bureau of labour statistics, jobs in the very recent years for IT-related occupations have risen, admittedly slowly, but they have not fallen.

Moreover IT, like so much other technology but even more so, displaces unskilled workers and hence low-paying jobs; but it creates demands to maintain and support the technology, which implies new, higher-paying jobs. Vast numbers of jobs to support and service hardware (say, PCs), to maintain the software and to manage the ever-growing new variants and applications, have emerged and will grow rapidly through the next 10 years, as the BLS projections also underline quantitatively.

Furthermore, many services cannot simply be provided on the wire. In particular, as the US population ages and the IT revolution gathers speed and enters senior citizens' lives, many will need not a voice from Bangalore telling them in incomprehensible technical language what to do but a technician who will come and do it for them.

These optimistic assessments are clouded in the public domain by a delusion fostered by mindless commentary in the media. That is illustrated by the astonishing Lou Dobbs show on CNN which daily lists the firms that have outsourced jobs. Mr Dobbs forgets that he should also list the jobs that come in, not just those that go out.

The clinching argument against interfering with outsourcing through protectionism or its variants such as tax deterrents or opprobrium is provided by the fact that the US is closely integrated in the world economy.

In a world that is characterised by intense competition today, small cost disadvantages can spell the demise of a firm: hence all the clamour about"unfair trade" by your rivals on the flimsiest grounds.

If US firms lose out to UK firms because the British government is not joining the protectionist chorus, then they could fold, making the job loss, and hence the worker adjustment required, manifoldly greater. An analogy, not recommended for use by politicians, is that of triage: a lifeboat with a hundred people on board will sink and drown the hundred; but if 10 are thrown overboard 90 will survive.

So the fears over the job adjustment required thanks to online imports of services are unwarranted. And if they are succumbed to they will themselves create serious adjustment problems in their wake.

Will the US ever learn?