Roundup: Media's Take
This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
Frank Rich, writing in the NYT (Jan. 25, 2004):
Since its release, "The Fog of War" has generated plenty of debate on two fronts. Should Mr. McNamara, who freely admits to making errors about Vietnam but stops well short of outright contrition, rot in hell? The verdicts on his confessions in Mr. Morris's film range from mild praise (he's conceding fallibility, however belatedly) to utter rage (Roger Rosenblatt, on "The NewsHour," likened him to the self-justifying bureaucrats of Treblinka).
The greater debate has been over the degree to which the follies of Vietnam are now being re-enacted in Iraq. Though Mr. Morris started interviewing Mr. McNamara before 9/11 and his film never mentions current events, the implicit parallels between then and now are there for the taking. In the Johnson administration's deceptive hyping of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a provocation to war, we see the Bush administration's deceptive hyping of the supposedly imminent threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction for the same purpose. In Mr. McNamara's stern warnings against waging war unilaterally and against trying to win the hearts and minds of a foreign land without understanding its culture first, we find historical lessons we didn't heed as we blundered into the escalating chaos of our "postwar" occupation of Iraq.
Such analogies can be pushed only so far, however, and Mr. McNamara refuses to draw them publicly, despite repeated badgering by interviewers like me to do so. But if it is inexact, not to mention wildly premature, to declare that Iraq is Vietnam, it is not too soon to mine a related and pressing resonance of the McNamara story. When President-elect John F. Kennedy appointed Mr. McNamara to his cabinet, he was lionized as the very model, indeed the very shiny new model, of the modern star business executive: famously, the first non-Ford to be president of the Ford Motor Company, the most brilliant of the 10 so-called Whiz Kids whom Ford had recruited en masse from the Air Force brain trust of World War II, and the first M.B.A. from Harvard Business School to ascend so high in government.
As a national role model at the dawn of Camelot, Robert McNamara was Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and, yes, Paul O'Neill before it was cool. He entered the cabinet as an exemplar of "American certitude and conviction" who could use "his rationality with facts" to intimidate bureaucratic dissenters, David Halberstam wrote in "The Best and the Brightest" in 1972, after Mr. McNamara had come to his bad end. Among Mr. McNamara's virtues, Mr. Halberstam wrote, was loyalty — but "perhaps too much loyalty, the corporate-mentality loyalty to the office instead of to himself."
"The Price of Loyalty," Ron Suskind's new best-selling exposé of the inner workings of the Bush White House, reads like an as-told-to book by its principal source, Mr. O'Neill, a C.E.O./cabinet officer fired by another Texan wartime president. It casts the former treasury secretary in the same role of protagonist that Mr. McNamara plays in "The Fog of War." When Mr. O'Neill was first appointed, he was hailed for his successful tenure at Alcoa, where, like Mr. McNamara at Ford, he was prized for his humanistic concern with safety as well as his can-do resuscitation of a sinking bottom line. The parallels end there. Whatever one thinks of Mr. O'Neill's White House tenure, he is of footnote stature in American history, if that. And unlike Mr. McNamara, a loyal courtier to presidents to the bitter end and beyond, Mr. O'Neill hardly waited a moment before trashing George W. Bush.
Patrick Tyler, writing in the NYT (Jan. 25, 2004):
Since becoming prime minister in 1997, Tony Blair has proved the most successful and popular Labor leader of the last century, yet there are whispers in his own party that he could be out of office by Easter.
"If Blair is out next week, there probably won't be any tears outside his family because it is a ruthless system and it's the way the system works," said Iain McLean, professor of politics at Oxford University.
Whatever it is about British politics and the parliamentary system that deliver abrupt and surprising reversals of political fortune seems to be at work again. Mr. Blair has proved nimble at brilliant reinventions in the past, but the question remains: Can he outrun British democracy's penchant for fatigue, which has sometimes claimed leaders at the most surprising times?
In May 1945, Winston Churchill was at the apex of power after Germany's surrender. And with Franklin Roosevelt's death the month before, Mr. Churchill was the West's icon of allied victory.
Yet before the month was out, he was forced to resign as prime minister, and the Labor Party soon swept into office under Clement Attlee.
In 1990, Margaret Thatcher suffered a similar indignity after winning three terms for her party, presiding with Ronald Reagan at the burial of Communism in Europe and privatizing much of the British economy.
In August she was telling the first President Bush, with Churchillian verve, not to go "wobbly" in the face of Saddam Hussein invasion of Kuwait. But by November she was political toast, overthrown by Tory rebels and replaced by John Major.
"I was visiting at Stanford University in 1990 and my colleagues had no idea" that Mrs. Thatcher was teetering, said Professor McLean.
"It was Thanksgiving, so there was no one around to explain,'' he added. "So I was briefly a pundit.''
Like Churchill and Lady Thatcher before him, Mr. Blair has set records for longevity and led his nation into war. He returned the Labor Party to a prominence it had not enjoyed in 101 years with two landslide victories. Large Labor majorities took control of the House of Commons, and almost every city, town and shire overturned the Tory supremacy in British life.
But his war leadership in Iraq has made him deeply unpopular with a large segment of the public, even though opinion polls still show that a plurality of Britons back his decision to go to war to remove Mr. Hussein.
Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing in the NYT (Jan. 24, 2004):
A great philosophical schism has opened within the West, and instead of mutual indifference, mutual antagonism threatens to debilitate both sides of the trans-Atlantic community. Coming at a time in history when new dangers and crises are proliferating, this schism could have serious consequences. For Europe and the United States to decouple strategically has been bad enough. But what if the schism over "world order" infects the rest of what we have known as the liberal West? Will the West still be the West?
It is the legitimacy of American power and American global leadership that has come to be doubted by a majority of Europeans. America, for the first time since World War II, is suffering a crisis of international legitimacy.
Americans will find that they cannot ignore this problem. The struggle to define and obtain international legitimacy in this new era may prove to be among the critical contests of our time, in some ways as significant in determining the future of the international system and America's place in it as any purely material measure of power and influence.
Americans for much of the past three centuries have considered themselves the vanguard of a worldwide liberal revolution. Their foreign policy from the beginning has not been only about defending and promoting their material national interests. "We fight not just for ourselves but for all mankind," Benjamin Franklin declared of the American Revolution, and whether or not that has always been true, most Americans have always wanted to believe that it is true. There can be no clear dividing line between the domestic and the foreign, therefore, and no clear distinction between what the democratic world thinks about America and what Americans think about themselves.
Every profound foreign policy debate in America's history, from the time when Jefferson squared off against Hamilton, has ultimately been a debate about the nation's identity and has posed for Americans the primal question "Who are we?" Because Americans do care, the steady denial of international legitimacy by fellow democracies will over time become debilitating and perhaps even paralyzing.
Americans therefore cannot ignore the unipolar predicament. ...
Right now many Europeans are betting that the risks from the "axis of evil," from terrorism and tyrants, will never be as great as the risk of an American Leviathan unbound. Perhaps it is in the nature of a postmodern Europe to make such a judgment. But now may be the time for the wisest heads in Europe, including those living in the birthplace of Pascal, to begin asking what will result if that wager proves wrong.
Guy Coq, author of a book about secularism in France, writing in the NYT (Jan. 30, 2004):
With France on the verge of passing a law that would prevent Muslim girls from wearing their head scarves in class, Americans are asking why the French are so attached to secularism....
The French word that is closest to secularism, laïcité, was invented in the late 19th century to express several ideas. Laïcité includes, foremost, tolerance. Tolerance had actually been around for a while. It was first instituted in 1598 under the Edict of Nantes — which allowed Protestants to practice their faith and ended our Wars of Religion. But the state and the Roman Catholic Church were so intertwined that tolerance wasn't enough. We had to take away the church's power to oppress minorities and make law.
For that, France had to go farther than other countries in separating matters of state and matters of religion. The most emphatic expression of this desire came in our Revolution of 1789. The French people didn't just depose a monarch — they also took aim at the Catholic Church's domination of society, stripping the church of its property and demanding that the clergy acknowledge the authority of the state.
In the century after the Revolution, however, the Catholic Church found ways to regain power. A concordat between the papacy and Napoleon in 1801 gave the church a privileged position as the majority religion of France. The church took control of education and provided priests as teachers. As monarchs, emperors and republics succeeded one another during the 1800's, the church inserted itself into politics by joining with forces that were enemies of the rights of man and the republican ideas of the Revolution.
The leaders of the Third Republic, in the 1880's, saw that for the republic to establish itself, it had to wrest control of the schools from the church. Prime Minister Jules Ferry founded the public school system, which barred priests as teachers and took over the job of transmitting common values and the sense of social unity — in short, forming the citizens of the republic — without reference to religion.
The next step, the ending of Napoleon's concordat, came in 1905. By separating church and state — instituting a republic that was neutral toward all religions, and without a national religion — France finally realized the aims of the Revolution. This is laïcité, and it has worked well.
But the laïcité of schools has been eroded by the intrusion of religious symbols, prompted by an excess of individualism, that philosophy so revered by Americans. The necessity of the law that Parliament will debate on Tuesday reveals the regrettable waning of this French tradition
Peter Robinson, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, served as chief speechwriter to Vice President Bush and special assistant and speechwriter to President Reagan. He is the author of How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life (Regan, 2003). In the WSJ (Jan. 22, 2004):
The White House communications director, Dan Bartlett, reported on Tuesday that by the time the president left to deliver his State of the Union address at the Capitol, the speechwriters were "on about draft 30 of the speech." From a speechwriter who went through the ordeal a few times himself, here's a report card:
* The Fatuity Factor: By the time a State of the Union address is in its 10th or 12th draft, it's easy for the speechwriters to start composing sentences that don't actually mean anything. Perhaps because they passed through so many hands -- his speechwriting staff was the largest in recent years, perhaps in history -- President Clinton's State of the Union addresses are especially rich in examples of empty rhetoric. Consider this beauty from Mr. Clinton's 1996 address: "Now is the time for us to look to the challenges of today and tomorrow, beyond the burdens of yesterday."
President Bush? I listened closely, but in all 54 minutes I never heard him utter a single sentence that didn't mean at least a little something. This may seem an odd category in which to award a grade. But within the speechwriting brotherhood, it's important. Even at the worst moments, everyone on the Bush staff kept his head. Grade: A* Make 'Em Laugh: Humor is tricky in a State of the Union address. A few laughs would help set the audience in the House chamber at ease. But the occasion is supposed to be august. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush joked that Speaker Tom Foley and Vice President Dan Quayle, positioned on the rostrum behind him, "saw what I did in Japan [the President, ill with the flu, had vomited at a state dinner] and they're just happy they're sitting behind me." The elder Bush may have gotten a laugh, but he sounded undignified.
One of the finest moments this time took place during the president's discussion of the war on terror. Turning to the argument that the rebuilding of Iraq should be internationalized, the president deadpanned.
"This particular criticism," he said, "is hard to explain to our partners in Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines . . . " As Mr.
Bush continued -- ". .. . Thailand, Italy, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, the Netherlands . . ." -- his audience began to laugh. Then the audience interrupted him with applause. And when he finally completed the litany of nations that have committed troops to Iraq -- ". . . Norway, El Salvador, and . . . 17 other countries . . ." -- the audience gave him an ovation.The best use of humor in a State of the Union address I've witnessed. Grade: A+
* The Speech He Got Stuck With: State of the Union addresses often amount to not one but two speeches: the speech the president got stuck with, which sounds like a hodgepodge, and, somewhere inside it, the speech the president wanted to deliver, which sounds unified, authentic and complete.
How do chief executives get stuck with hodgepodges? For weeks, Cabinet secretaries, agency heads, chairmen of congressional committees, and members of the White House senior staff draw up lists of initiatives they insist the address must contain. Some of this material can be tossed out.
But a lot cannot. Speechwriters do their best to keep this portion of State of the Union addresses thematically unified. They always fail.How was this portion of President Bush's address? Just fine. The president's own interest in the speech came and went -- he appeared a lot more intent on making his tax cuts permanent than on modernizing the electricity grid. But his delivery remained well-paced, the text itself craftsmanlike. And it isn't really the rhetoric in this portion of any State of the Union address that matters in any event. It's the dollars. By contrast with the spree over which George W. Bush has so far presided -- as this newspaper has pointed out, Mr. Bush has increased discretionary domestic spending more than any chief executive since Lyndon Johnson -- the hodgepodge of proposals the president advanced on Tuesday appears restrained. Grade: A
* The Speech He Wanted to Deliver: In 1992, President George H. W. Bush delivered one of the best speeches-within-a-speech in any State of the Union address, speaking with feeling about the end of the Cold War.
"[C]ommunism died this year," the elder Bush proclaimed. "There are still threats. But the long, drawn-out dread is over."
On Tuesday, President George W. Bush delivered a speech-within-a-speech of his own, devoting it to the war on terror. These first 25 minutes of his address proved beautifully written and powerfully delivered. "The work of building a new Iraq is hard, and it is right," the president declared. "And America has always been willing to do what it takes for what is right." Yet something was missing. Although the president provided a compelling defense of his actions in the 28 months since 9/11, he told us almost nothing about what comes next."[N]early two-thirds of [al Qaeda's] known leaders have now been captured or killed," the president stated. Did he mean to suggest that the war on terror is two-thirds over? If not, why not? At times the president spoke as if the war would end as soon as we caught "the remaining killers." At other times he spoke as if the war would continue until we had transformed the entire Arab world, remaking a region that "remains a place of tyranny and despair and anger." Which does he intend?
As he proved in his defiant address on Sept. 20, 2001, nine days after the terrorist attacks, George W. Bush knows how to sound Churchillian. In the State of the Union address, he should have told us whether the war on terror has reached the beginning of the end or only the end of the beginning. Grade: Incomplete
* "Good Enough": The president's failure to lay out our next objectives in the war on terror strikes me as serious. On the other hand, you can submit President Reagan's 1984 State of the Union address to the most minute scrutiny but find only the broadest hints about what he intended to do in a second term. Yet later that year he carried 49 out of 50 states -- and by the time he left office he had won the Cold War.
A pretty good speech is often good enough. Overall Grade: B+
Tony Quinn, co-editor of the California Target Book, a nonpartisan analysis
of California legislative and congressional campaigns, writing in the LAT
(Jan. 25, 2004):
Not since the 1928 elections have the Republicans retained control of both Congress and the White House. Now that 76-year-old record may be about to fall: President Bush is looking stronger with the economy picking up, and Republicans seem likely not only to hold on to control of both houses of Congress but also to increase their numbers.
A GOP gerrymander of Democratic districts in Texas will probably add six to eight Republicans to the House. Every other big state is so heavily gerrymandered that no other major changes are likely. This means the GOP majority in the House is expected to grow by at least half a dozen seats.
The Rothenberg Political Report says that six Democratic Senate seats are in danger of falling to Republicans — five in the South — while only three GOP-held seats are similarly vulnerable. The Democratic minority will almost certainly have fewer seats in the next Congress than it has today.
How did we ever get to this: The nation's historic-majority Democratic Party reduced to a declining minority, and the second-banana Republicans suddenly running everything?
A good place to start is 1928, because U.S. politics seems to run in roughly 60-year cycles.
From the Civil War until 1928, Republicans were dominant, building a coalition from Civil War veterans, farm states and the emerging West. From the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 until 1994, Democrats held both houses of Congress for all but four years and the White House for most of that time, especially in the New Deal years. They also held the most governorships and a majority of state legislatures. The New Deal coalition of the Southern poor, ethnic and minority voters and urban liberals held together, more or less, for six decades.
The big change on the national stage occurred in 1994, when the GOP achieved dominance in the South and its border states, and not on traditional economic issues but on cultural ones. While the Democrats have held their own in the industrial North and New England, they have declined in the South and much of the West over the last 40 years to a point of near-extinction. "Angry white males" in their pickups with gun racks have brought about fundamental political change by doing nothing more than shifting their loyalties from Democrats, based on economics, to Republicans, based on culture and values.
With Democrats getting down to the serious business of choosing an opponent to Bush, they face a basic issue: Can they reverse the cultural alienation that has cost them so many of their former core supporters? Watching their candidates pander to every socially liberal interest group suggests they cannot — indeed do not — even acknowledge their predicament.
The lesson of Al Gore's defeat in 2000 is not Florida, which he would have won had he just gotten as many votes as the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate there, but places like eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, which didn't stray from their New Deal roots until 2000.
A cultural conservatism grounded in religion and traditional values is imbedded in the South and its border states and is now more important to their voters than economic issues. Among the best measures of how people voted in 2000 was church attendance. People who attended church regularly overwhelmingly supported Bush; those who didn't went for Gore.
The Democrats' problem goes beyond simply being irreligious. There's an undercurrent of hostility toward religion in the highest ranks of the party. The Democrats' dismissal of Bush's "faith-based initiative" is just one example of their hostility. Even on an issue like abortion rights, on which Democrats are with the majority of the public, intolerance of any dissent has alienated a mainstay of the New Deal coalition, Roman Catholics.
That's ironic, because the last time the Democrats were in as bad a shape as they are today, 1928, the issue that did them in was religion, specifically the nomination of the Catholic Al Smith for president. Then, the party seemed too religious; now its problem is no religion at all. The gamble Democrats made in 1928, nominating a Catholic for president, paid off handsomely in the half century after Smith, as legions of Irish, Italian and Eastern European Catholics joined Southern and Western Protestants to vote again and again for Democratic majorities. John F. Kennedy's Catholicism is now regarded as crucial to his election in 1960, and he remains the last non-Southern Democrat to win the White House.
Yet, Democrats seem to have forgotten how important religious identification was to their success. Many Catholics and conservative Protestants once regarded Republicans as country-club elitists with whom they had little or nothing in common. A Southern Baptist named Harry S. Truman won in 1948 with solid Catholic and fundamentalist Protestant support.
Today, churchgoing Catholic voters are leaving the Democratic fold with accelerating speed, as are many traditional Protestants. The crucial and growing Latino constituency is more religious — and more Catholic — than mainstream Democrats, and it could be next.
Brendan I. Koerner, writing in Slate (Jan. 28, 2004):
Despite winning both the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, John Kerry trails Howard Dean on the delegate scorecard . How can Kerry have fewer delegates than the man he's twice trounced at the polls?
The discrepancy is due to the early whims of some unpledged delegates, colloquially known as superdelegates. Of the 4,964 delegates who will attend the Democratic convention in Boston this July, the majority are obliged to support specific candidates in accordance with how their respective states voted during primary season. But there are 801 delegates who won't be bound by such customs. These superdelegates—typically congressmen, party leaders, and other political bigwigs—can support whomever they please at the convention. The delegate scorecard so far, then, takes into account that just more than a quarter of the superdelegates have already expressed a public preference for one candidate or another, and Dean has been the more popular choice than Kerry among this elite.
The Democratic National Committee created superdelegates as part of a 1982 overhaul of convention rules. In response to the furor at the 1968 convention, where street protestors railed against the rarefied nature of politics as usual, the party had opted to turn the nominating process entirely over to delegates picked in the primaries and caucuses, rather than giving party elders a backroom say. But after dark horses George McGovern and Jimmy Carter won their respective nominations, party leaders worried that the populist approach encouraged"insurgent" candidates who would tend to lose more often than not—Carter's 1976 triumph notwithstanding. The superdelegates, then, were intended to stabilize the process. As political insiders, they could generally be expected to cast their lot with mainstream candidates favored by the Democratic hierarchy.
Asaf Romirowsky and Jonathan Calt Harris, writing in frontpagemag.com (Jan. 28, 2004):
The university exists for the free exchange of ideas, right? Then why is it that representatives of one half the argument – the conservative half – need bodyguards and metal detectors when they speak on North American campuses, and their leftist counterparts almost never do?
Consider three suggestive parallels of how the Right needs security and the Left is welcomed.
Government officials. In September 2002, Benjamin Netanyahu, a former Likud (conservative) prime minister of Israel was to speak at Concordia University in Montreal, but he never made it. Nearly a thousand anti-Israel protestors rioted prior to the event, [1] smashing windows and hurling furniture at police, kicking and spitting on people going to the event. “By lunchtime,” notes the Globe & Mail daily, “the vestibule of Concordia's main downtown building was littered with paper, upturned chairs, broken furniture and the choking aftereffects of pepper spray.” [2]
In contrast, Hanan Ashrawi, a well-known Palestinian politician and activist, never faces such opposition. As she makes the rounds of American universities (such as the University of Colorado, Beloit, and Yeshiva), she speaks without interference, and what protests take place are completely non-violent. At Colorado College, students held small signs and a rebuttal was offered after the speech. [3] At the University of Pennsylvania , protesting students were so respectful, Tarek Jallad, president of the Penn Arab Student Society which sponsored her visit, commented: “I was very happy with the way the crowd showed her a lot of respect.” [4]
1960s activists. David Horowitz, a founder of the New Left movement in the 1960s and now a high-profile conservative, speaks often at campuses and often faces problems. Protestors at the University of Chicago shouted at him and disrupted his talk before he uttered a word. [5] At the University of Michigan, “the university administration assigned 12 armed guards and a German Shepherd to protect the safety” of those who came to hear him speak. [6]
By comparison, Angela Davis, a former Black Panther and still today a far-leftist, enjoys the highest of esteem when visiting campuses. As she tours American colleges, she meets no protests, requires no excessive security, and is dutifully acclaimed by campus newspapers for her “wise presence.” [7]
Middle East specialists. Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, a Harvard University Ph.D., author of twelve books, and a recent Bush appointee to U.S. Institute for Peace, needs security precautions at more than half his campus appearances. At York University in Toronto, for example, security provisions included “a 24-hour lockdown on the building beforehand, metal detectors for the audience, identification checks.” [8] Multiple bodyguards escorted Pipes through a back entrance and kept him in a holding room until just before his talk. More than a hundred police, including ten mounted on horses, stood by to ensure the speaker's safety and the event not being disrupted. [9]
In contrast, John Esposito, head of Georgetown University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, a Temple University Ph.D., the author of more than twenty books, [10] and key advisor to the Clinton State Department, [11] enjoys honor and praise at the campuses. He recently served as keynote speaker for the inauguration of Stanford University's new Islamic Studies program, [12] for example, with no hint of special security.
A clear pattern emerges. Speakers on the left are welcomed, conservatives require strict security measures.
William S. Lind, Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism, writing on the website of the Free Congress Foundation (Dec. 2003):
Will Saddam's capture mark a turning point in the war in Iraq? Don't count on it. Few resistance fighters have been fighting for Saddam personally. Saddam's capture may lead to a fractioning of the Baath Party, which would move us further toward a Fourth Generation situation where no one can recreate the state. It may also tell the Shiites that they no longer need America to protect them from Saddam, giving them more options in their struggle for free elections.
If the U.S. Army used the capture of Saddam to announce the end of tactics that enrage ordinary Iraqis and drive them toward active resistance, it might buy us a bit of de-escalation. But I don't think we'll that be smart. When it comes to Fourth Generation war, it seems nobody in the American military gets it.
Recently, a faculty member at the National Defense University wrote to Marine Corps General Mattis, commander of I MAR DIV, to ask his views on the importance of reading military history. Mattis responded with an eloquent defense of taking time to read history, one that should go up on the wall at all of our military schools. "Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation," Mattis said. "It doesn't give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead."
Still, even such a capable and well-bread commander as General Mattis seems to miss the point about Fourth Generation warfare. He said in his missive, "Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun. For all the '4th Generation of War' intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say...'Not really"...
Well, that isn't quite what we Fourth Generation intellectuals are saying. On the contrary, we have pointed out over and over that the 4th Generation is not novel but a return, specifically a return to the way war worked before the rise of the state. Now, as then, many different entities, not just governments of states, will wage war. They will wage war for many different reasons, not just "the extension of politics by other means." And they will use many different tools to fight war, not restricting themselves to what we recognize as military forces. When I am asked to recommend a good book describing what a Fourth Generation world will be like, I usually suggest Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century.
Nor are we saying that Fourth Generation tactics are new. On the contrary, many of the tactics Fourth Generation opponents use are standard guerilla tactics. Others, including much of what we call "terrorism," are classic Arab light cavalry warfare carried out with modern technology at the operational and strategic, not just tactical, levels.
Peter Robinson, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, served as chief speechwriter to Vice President Bush and special assistant and speechwriter to President Reagan. He is the author of How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life (Regan, 2003). In the WSJ (Jan. 22, 2004):
The White House communications director, Dan Bartlett, reported on Tuesday that by the time the president left to deliver his State of the Union address at the Capitol, the speechwriters were "on about draft 30 of the speech." From a speechwriter who went through the ordeal a few times himself, here's a report card:
* The Fatuity Factor: By the time a State of the Union address is in its 10th or 12th draft, it's easy for the speechwriters to start composing sentences that don't actually mean anything. Perhaps because they passed through so many hands -- his speechwriting staff was the largest in recent years, perhaps in history -- President Clinton's State of the Union addresses are especially rich in examples of empty rhetoric. Consider this beauty from Mr. Clinton's 1996 address: "Now is the time for us to look to the challenges of today and tomorrow, beyond the burdens of yesterday."
President Bush? I listened closely, but in all 54 minutes I never heard him utter a single sentence that didn't mean at least a little something. This may seem an odd category in which to award a grade. But within the speechwriting brotherhood, it's important. Even at the worst moments, everyone on the Bush staff kept his head. Grade: A* Make 'Em Laugh: Humor is tricky in a State of the Union address. A few laughs would help set the audience in the House chamber at ease. But the occasion is supposed to be august. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush joked that Speaker Tom Foley and Vice President Dan Quayle, positioned on the rostrum behind him, "saw what I did in Japan [the President, ill with the flu, had vomited at a state dinner] and they're just happy they're sitting behind me." The elder Bush may have gotten a laugh, but he sounded undignified.
One of the finest moments this time took place during the president's discussion of the war on terror. Turning to the argument that the rebuilding of Iraq should be internationalized, the president deadpanned.
"This particular criticism," he said, "is hard to explain to our partners in Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines . . . " As Mr.
Bush continued -- ". .. . Thailand, Italy, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, the Netherlands . . ." -- his audience began to laugh. Then the audience interrupted him with applause. And when he finally completed the litany of nations that have committed troops to Iraq -- ". . . Norway, El Salvador, and . . . 17 other countries . . ." -- the audience gave him an ovation.The best use of humor in a State of the Union address I've witnessed. Grade: A+
* The Speech He Got Stuck With: State of the Union addresses often amount to not one but two speeches: the speech the president got stuck with, which sounds like a hodgepodge, and, somewhere inside it, the speech the president wanted to deliver, which sounds unified, authentic and complete.
How do chief executives get stuck with hodgepodges? For weeks, Cabinet secretaries, agency heads, chairmen of congressional committees, and members of the White House senior staff draw up lists of initiatives they insist the address must contain. Some of this material can be tossed out.
But a lot cannot. Speechwriters do their best to keep this portion of State of the Union addresses thematically unified. They always fail.How was this portion of President Bush's address? Just fine. The president's own interest in the speech came and went -- he appeared a lot more intent on making his tax cuts permanent than on modernizing the electricity grid. But his delivery remained well-paced, the text itself craftsmanlike. And it isn't really the rhetoric in this portion of any State of the Union address that matters in any event. It's the dollars. By contrast with the spree over which George W. Bush has so far presided -- as this newspaper has pointed out, Mr. Bush has increased discretionary domestic spending more than any chief executive since Lyndon Johnson -- the hodgepodge of proposals the president advanced on Tuesday appears restrained. Grade: A
* The Speech He Wanted to Deliver: In 1992, President George H. W. Bush delivered one of the best speeches-within-a-speech in any State of the Union address, speaking with feeling about the end of the Cold War.
"[C]ommunism died this year," the elder Bush proclaimed. "There are still threats. But the long, drawn-out dread is over."
On Tuesday, President George W. Bush delivered a speech-within-a-speech of his own, devoting it to the war on terror. These first 25 minutes of his address proved beautifully written and powerfully delivered. "The work of building a new Iraq is hard, and it is right," the president declared. "And America has always been willing to do what it takes for what is right." Yet something was missing. Although the president provided a compelling defense of his actions in the 28 months since 9/11, he told us almost nothing about what comes next."[N]early two-thirds of [al Qaeda's] known leaders have now been captured or killed," the president stated. Did he mean to suggest that the war on terror is two-thirds over? If not, why not? At times the president spoke as if the war would end as soon as we caught "the remaining killers." At other times he spoke as if the war would continue until we had transformed the entire Arab world, remaking a region that "remains a place of tyranny and despair and anger." Which does he intend?
As he proved in his defiant address on Sept. 20, 2001, nine days after the terrorist attacks, George W. Bush knows how to sound Churchillian. In the State of the Union address, he should have told us whether the war on terror has reached the beginning of the end or only the end of the beginning. Grade: Incomplete
* "Good Enough": The president's failure to lay out our next objectives in the war on terror strikes me as serious. On the other hand, you can submit President Reagan's 1984 State of the Union address to the most minute scrutiny but find only the broadest hints about what he intended to do in a second term. Yet later that year he carried 49 out of 50 states -- and by the time he left office he had won the Cold War.
A pretty good speech is often good enough. Overall Grade: B+
Brian Klug, writing in theNation (Jan. 15, 2004):
In 1879 the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, a former socialist and anarchist, founded an organization that was novel in two ways. It was the first political party based on a platform of hostility to Jews. And it introduced the world to a new word: "anti-Semite."
Marr was an atheist, and the Antisemiten-Liga (League of Anti-Semites) was hostile to Jews on the secular grounds that they are an alien "race." However, his account of "Semitism" was not essentially different from the demonic conception of the Jew that had existed in Christian Europe for centuries. It boiled down to this: Jews are a people apart from the rest of humanity. They are the enemy. Wherever they go, they form a state within a state. Conspiring in secret, they work together to promote their own collective advantage at the expense of the nations or societies in whose midst they dwell and on whom they prey. Cunning and manipulative, they possess uncanny powers that enable them, despite their small numbers, to achieve their ends. The term "antiSemitism" has come to refer to this discourse, or variations on the themes it contains, because the same rhetoric persists whether Jewish identity is seen as religious, racial, national or ethnic. Sometimes this discourse is explicit; at other times it is the subtext of attacks on Jews. Anti-Semitism, thus defined, is not new.
But a spate of recent articles and books assert the rise of a "new anti-Semitism." This is the thrust of "Graffiti on History's Walls" by Mortimer Zuckerman, the cover story of the November 3, 2003, issue of U.S. News & World Report. In December New York magazine ran a similarly sensationalist cover story, titled "The Return of Anti-Semitism," which spoke of "a groundswell of hate" against Jews and suggested that Jew-hatred was now "politically correct" in Europe. At least three books recently published in English make the same claim: Never Again? by Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League; The New Anti-Semitism by feminist Phyllis Chesler; and The Case for Israel by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. Most of the contributors to A New Antisemitism?, edited by Paul Iganski and Barry Kosmin, take a similar view, with varying degrees of emphasis.
As the words "threat" and "crisis" in the subtitles of the books by Foxman and Chesler indicate, the "new anti-Semitism" is generally seen, by those who proclaim its existence, as a clear and present danger. Foxman believes that a "frightening coalition of anti-Jewish sentiment is forming on a global scale." Chesler goes even further: "Let me be clear: the war against the Jews is being waged on many fronts--militarily, politically, economically, and through propaganda--and on all continents." She even perceives a wider threat to Western civilization itself: "Who or what can loosen the madness that has gripped the world and that threatens to annihilate the Jews and the West?"
There is certainly reason to be concerned about a climate of hostility to Jews, including vicious physical attacks. On one Saturday this past November, for example, two synagogues in Istanbul were truck-bombed during Sabbath services, while an Orthodox Jewish school in a Paris suburb was largely destroyed by arson. Some researchers report a 60 percent worldwide increase in the number of assaults on Jews (or persons perceived to be Jewish) in 2002, compared with the previous year. At the same time, something is rotten in the state of public discourse. Anti-Jewish slogans and graphics have appeared on marches opposing the invasion of Iraq. Jewish conspiracy theories have been revived, such as the widely circulated "urban legend" that Jews were warned in advance to stay away from the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. And recently, certain public figures on both the right and the left have made negative generalizations about Jews and "Jewish influence."
The authors under review tend to lump all these facts together, along with a wealth of evidence for what they see as an explosion of bias against Israel: in the media, in the United Nations, on college campuses and elsewhere. They conclude that there is a single unified phenomenon, a "new antiSemitism." However, while the facts give cause for serious concern, the idea that they add up to a new kind of anti-Semitism is confused. Moreover, this confusion, combined with a McCarthyite tendency to see anti-Semites under every bed, arguably contributes to the climate of hostility toward Jews. The result is to make matters worse for the very people these authors mean to defend.
The claim that I am criticizing is not that there is a new outbreak of "old" antiSemitism but that there is an outbreak of anti-Semitism of a new kind. Thus the case in support of this claim is not merely cumulative: It does not consist simply in piling up one example after another. There is an organizing principle, a central idea that holds the case together. It is only in terms of this idea that many of the examples cited in the literature count as evidence of antiSemitism. Without this central idea, the case that is made with their help falls apart. So the question is this: What puts the "new" into "new anti-Semitism"?
Joanne Mariner, writing in findlaw.com (Jan. 21, 2004):
Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court opinion whose thirty-first anniversary falls on January 22, was not yet a decade old when I became pregnant. I was seventeen, living on my own, and the pregnancy was unwanted....
Even though, as the Supreme Court said in 1992, "an entire generation has come of age free to assume Roe's concept of liberty," the right to a safe and legal abortion remains under threat. According to NARAL Pro-Choice America, 335 anti-choice measures have been enacted since 1995. President George Bush has openly endorsed the goal of banning abortion, and some of his federal judicial picks have been anti-abortion zealots, a worrying indicator for his possible future nominees to the Supreme Court.
Publicly-funded abortion is not available in most states, except in narrow cases of rape, incest, or life endangerment. Since 1977, federal law has prohibited Medicaid from paying for the abortions of low-income women in most circumstances. Because fewer than half of all states offer supplemental funding that goes beyond these federal limitations, the possibility of abortion is foreclosed to many poor women.
Mandatory parental consent or notification rules, which exist in more than thirty states, deter many teenagers from exercising their constitutional right to a legal abortion. Minors with abusive parents may risk physical or emotional harm if required to disclose their pregnancy. Judicial bypass procedures, which the Supreme Court has ruled must be included in parental consent and notice laws, may be ineffective when the reviewing judge is hostile to abortion.
Numerous procedural restrictions continue to impede women's access to abortion. Now, in twenty states, women seeking abortion face mandatory delays in obtaining the procedure, a requirement that is often paired with the obligation of receiving state-dictated informational materials designed to discourage abortion. Such rules particularly burden women who live long distances from abortion providers, or whose transportation arrangements are difficult. Other state laws target doctors who perform abortions, imposing complicated regulatory schemes.
The latest effort to hobble reproductive rights has been to redefine what constitutes an abortion, via legislation like the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Although the Supreme Court struck down the most restrictive of these laws, adopted in Nebraska, others have passed lower court scrutiny. Although they are supposed to cover only late-term abortions, the imprecise and unscientific language of such laws means that their scope threatens to extend far beyond the situations cited by their supporters.
Malcolm A. Kline, writing for Accuracy in Academia (Dec. 2003):
The Kwanzaa controversy somehow bypassed me, until my African bride forced me to evaluate it. My wife can trace her ancestry directly to Shaka, who reigned over much of sub-Saharan Africa until defeated by the combination of the most powerful European armies at the turn of the last century and tribal leaders who had grown disenchanted with the Zulu king. One of these defecting tribal leaders was, in turn, one of my wife's more direct ancestors. Shaka, in turn, was related to many of these tribal leaders.
"As an African-American and Pan-African holiday celebrated by millions throughout the world African community," the official Kwanzaa web site tells us,"Kwanzaa brings a cultural message which speaks to the best of what it means to be African and human in the fullest sense."
You see, I took it for granted that it was an African holiday. When we were still engaged, I watched a Kwanzaa TV commercial in the living room of my fiancée's apartment while my bride-to-be attended to some errand or other elsewhere. As I watched the commercial, I panicked. My mind raced. After all, the official holiday web site gives us advice on gifts, Kwanzaa colors and decorations and the celebration of the holiday itself.
I wondered whether I needed to buy presents for all my future in-laws, whether we would all exchange gifts, whether I needed to send special Kwanzaa cards to every member of the family I was marrying into, whether we would have a special dinner. Would I have to learn some special Kwanzaa songs?
As I was lost in this reverie, my African-born fiancée came into the room, looked incredulously at the television set and said,"What in the hell is this Kwanzaa?"
Samson Mulugeta, writing in Newsday (Dec. 29, 2003):
For decades, former dictators' career paths have tended to lead to luxurious retirements, untroubled by trial or punishment. With his arrest this month, though, Iraq 's Saddam Hussein joins a small but growing group: former despots facing justice.
The trend is a new one. Uganda 's Idi Amin had an opulent life of exile in Saudi Arabia for decades until he died in August. Amin's successor, Milton Obote, reportedly lives undisturbed in Zambia .
Nigeria 's Ibrahim Babangida and Guatemala 's Efrain Rios Montt, former military strongmen, kept enough political power to avoid even the bother of exile. Both are influential and untried at home, despite allegations that they engaged in corruption and state-sponsored killing while in office.
But since the end of the Cold War, a number of retired dictators have been hauled into court or jail. The trend has been pushed by U.S.-led military interventions (they ousted Hussein, Panama's Manuel Noriega and Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic) and by the rise of United Nations-sponsored tribunals, which have tried Milosevic and former rulers of Rwanda and Sierra Leone.
Dictators also are under new threat from the willingness of courts in some countries, including the United States , Spain and Belgium , to hear charges against abusive leaders from other nations.
Independent of U.S. action, other peoples - notably in Africa - have moved more aggressively in recent years to prosecute their deposed autocrats.
In Africa, the former dictator of Chad , Hissene Habre, was comfortably exiled until Senegal agreed in 2001 to hold him for possible extradition to face trial in Belgium . Jean Kambanda, who as prime minister of Rwanda helped lead the 1994 genocide there, was sentenced to life in prison by a UN tribunal in 1998.
The most prominent previous attempt to jail a former dictator has been that against Chile 's Augusto Pinochet. His detention in Britain during 1998 and '99 came at the request of a Spanish judge and marked a growing "internationalization" of such cases. Pinochet was ultimately deemed too ill to stand trial and returned to Chile .
Also in Latin America , Argentines last year charged former military ruler Leopoldo Galtieri with human rights crimes. He died in January under house arrest.
Still, it seems that most deposed despots stay out of court. "Almost a century after the appearance of modern dictators, the world still doesn't have a template of how to handle these people," said historian Benjamin L. Apers, author of "Dictators, Democracy and American Political Culture."
Con Coughlin, writing in the Sunday Telegraph (London) (Dec. 28, 2003):
We are winning the war on terror. To some this statement might appear somewhat rash in view of how 2003 is drawing to a close. French flights to America cancelled because of a potential threat by al-Qaeda; a failed assassination attempt (the second this month) against President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan ; and yet more US troops killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq .
But just because al-Qaeda still possesses the ability to blow up the British consulate in Istanbul, or some such similar outrage, does not mean that we should draw the conclusion, as does Correlli Barnett, the eminent Second World War historian , writing in the latest edition of The Spectator, that the Islamic militants are winning.
While defeatism such as this undoubtedly lends encouragement to the disparate groups of Muslim extremists who believe they are engaged in a timeless jihad against the West, it is also based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the war on terror's stated objectives. Following the September 11 attacks, it was obvious that Washington would intensify its efforts to confront al-Qaeda. But in many respects this was merely an extension of the counter-terrorism campaign that had already been waged by the US against Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network since the mid-1990s, when bin Laden first showed his willingness to attack American targets. When President Clinton left office in 2001, plans were well advanced for the Americans to assassinate bin Laden.
The most significant policy shift to emerge in Washington and, to a lesser extent, in London following the September 11 attacks was the introduction of the policy of pre-emption - hitting your enemies hard before they have the chance to hit you. President George W Bush first outlined this new policy in his address to Congress nine days after the September 11 attacks. He declared that apart from targeting terrorist groups that possessed "global reach", the US was determined to take on any country that provided "aid or safe haven to terrorism". In his State of the Union address in January 2002, he extended this policy to include "terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological or nuclear weapons".
When assessed on the basis of these criteria, then, the war on terror does not appear to be quite the calamity that some of its critics would have us believe. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan , which for many years provided a safe haven for bin Laden and his followers, has been decisively defeated, and bin Laden's operational infrastructure uprooted.
Many of bin Laden's key aides have been killed while others are in American custody - including some of those responsible for planning the September 11 attacks - and have revealed many details about al-Qaeda's methods and infrastructure to their interrogators. This information has resulted in many terror attacks being foiled, including a planned attack on the British embassy in Yemen and a repeat run of the September 11 attacks, with a hijacked civilian airliner set to crash into Las Vegas over Christmas. Foiled terrorist attacks, of course, do not generate as much publicity as those that are successful, but even within the narrow confines of the war against al-Qaeda, the past two years have hardly been a wash-out.
Paul Farhi, writing in the Washington Post (Dec. 28, 2003):
Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean has a vision of where he'd like to take the nation. It turns out to be the 1960s.
In campaign stop after campaign stop, in overheated high school gyms and smoky union halls, Dean repeatedly offers this misty-eyed homage to that turbulent decade:
"When I was 21 years old," he says, "it was the end of the civil rights era, and America had paid an enormous price. Martin Luther King had been killed. Bobby Kennedy was dead. A lot of other people who are less well-known, including four little girls in a Birmingham church, had died so that we could have equal rights under the law for all Americans.
"But it was also a time of great hope. Medicare had passed. Head Start had passed. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the first African American justice [was appointed to] the United States Supreme Court. We felt like we were all in it together, that we all had responsibility for this country. . . . That [strong schools and communities were] everybody's responsibility. That if one person was left behind, then America wasn't as strong or as good as it could be or as it should be. That's the kind of country that I want back."
It is a stirring piece of rhetoric, and one that inevitably draws cheers and sustained applause for the former Vermont governor as he campaigns through this state, which holds its first-in-the-nation Democratic caucus in three weeks. In this part of the farm belt last week, Dean used it as his closer almost every place he spoke.
His references to the '60s, Dean makes clear in an interview, are something personal. "We felt the possibilities were unlimited then," he said last week. "We were making such enormous progress. It resonates with a lot of people my age. People my age really felt that way."
As history, however, Dean's memories of the era are selective. Rather than the time of great national unity and purpose he describes, the 1960s were a period of great upheaval, and surely rank among the most divisive for America in the 20th century.
By 1969, the year Dean turned 21, the Vietnam War had split the country, fomenting sometimes violent protests on college campuses. Several long, hot summers of urban riots had turned cities into powder kegs of racial tension. Despite passage of the federal Civil Rights Act five years earlier, segregation and discrimination lingered, and poverty and educational disparity were rampant. Employment opportunities for women and minorities were still highly limited. Politically, the country was deeply divided as well, with Richard M. Nixon winning a narrow 1968 presidential election over Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey and independent George C. Wallace.
As Georgetown University history professor Michael Kazin puts it, "A lot of people would be glad not to go back to the '60s." ...Dante J. Scala, a political science professor at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire , says Dean is tacitly summoning up the political ghosts of Sens. Eugene McCarthy ( Minn. ) and George S. McGovern (S.D.), two Democratic presidential candidates who, like Dean, took on their party establishment in 1968 and 1972, respectively.
"For liberals in this state, those years were the high-water mark," he says. In those primaries, "they made McCarthy and McGovern into credible candidates, and they succeeded in creating two earthquakes in the Democratic Party. Dean is doing the same thing. He's hearkening back to those heady days of the late 1960s when liberals were ascendant."
As for more moderate voters, Scala says, "They might be more wary of it, but they're not turned off by it. The problem for them is that they haven't found a candidate who lights them up the way Dean lights up reformed-minded Democrats here."
Kazin, the Georgetown professor and co-author of "America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s," pegs Dean's message earlier in the decade, which Kazin calls "the high point of liberalism." This was a period when the optimism of President John F. Kennedy's New Frontier gave way to President Lyndon B. Johnson's anti-poverty programs, such as Head Start.
"He's evoking a sort of grass-roots version of LBJ's Great Society," says Kazin. "Liberals did have that vision. Obviously, the '60s were a time of tremendous division in the country, but liberals felt that things were going their way. It's certainly a contested period, but he's trying to claim it for liberals, which is quite appropriate."
Adds Kazin, "Every political faith has a golden age. Conservatives like the 1980s, when we won the Cold War and America stood tall again. If you're liberal, you remember the '60s the way Dean is doing now."
Peter Carlson, writing in the Washington Post (Dec. 28, 2003):
Ah, it's nice to be Neil Bush.
When you're Neil Bush, rich people from all over the world are eager to invest money in your businesses, even though your businesses have a history of crashing and burning in spectacular fashion.
When you're Neil Bush, you'll be sitting in a hotel room in Thailand or Hong Kong , minding your own business, when suddenly there's a knock at the door. You answer it and a comely woman strolls in and has sex with you.
Life sure is fun when you're Neil Bush, son of one president, brother of another.
Just how much fun was revealed in a deposition taken last March, during Bush's very nasty divorce battle. Asked by his wife's attorney whether he'd had any extramarital affairs, Bush told the story of his Asian hotel room escapades....Meanwhile, back home in Texas , Bush serves as co-chairman of a company called Crest Investment. Crest, he revealed in the deposition, pays him $60,000 a year to provide "miscellaneous consulting services."
"Such as?" Brown asked.
"Such as answering phone calls when Jamal Daniel, the other co-chairman, called and asked for advice," Bush replied....
Neil Bush is the latest manifestation of a long tradition in American life -- the president's embarrassing relative.
There was Sam Houston Johnson, who used to get drunk and start blabbing to the press until his brother, Lyndon, sicced the Secret Service on him.
And Donald Nixon, who dreamed of founding a fast-food chain called Nixonburgers and who accepted, but never repaid, a $200,000 loan from billionaire Howard Hughes. His brother, Dick, had the Secret Service tap his phone.
And Billy Carter, who drank prodigious quantities of beer, authored a book called "Redneck Power" and took $200,000 from the government of Libya .
And Roger Clinton, a party animal who spent a year in prison for cocaine dealing and who later appeared in a movie called "Pumpkinhead II" playing a pol called Mayor Bubba.
But Neil Bush has surpassed them all. Bush has done something that no other American has ever accomplished: He has become the embarrassing relative of not one but two presidents.
In the late '80s and early '90s, Bush embarrassed his father, George H.W. Bush, with his shady dealings as a board member of the infamous Silverado Savings and Loan, whose collapse cost taxpayers $1 billion.
Now Bush has embarrassed his brother George W. Bush with a made-for-the-tabloids divorce that featured paternity rumors, a defamation suit and, believe it or not, allegations of voodoo.
Stephen F. Hayes, writing in the Weekly Standard (Dec. 29, 2003-Jan. 5, 2003):
ARE AL QAEDA'S links to Saddam Hussein's Iraq just a fantasy of the Bush administration? Hardly. The Clinton administration also warned the American public about those ties and defended its response to al Qaeda terror by citing an Iraqi connection.
For nearly two years, starting in 1996, the CIA monitored the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan. The plant was known to have deep connections to Sudan's Military Industrial Corporation, and the CIA had gathered intelligence on the budding relationship between Iraqi chemical weapons experts and the plant's top officials. The intelligence included information that several top chemical weapons specialists from Iraq had attended ceremonies to celebrate the plant's opening in 1996. And, more compelling, the National Security Agency had intercepted telephone calls between Iraqi scientists and the plant's general manager.
Iraq also admitted to having a $199,000 contract with al Shifa for goods under the oil-for-food program. Those goods were never delivered. While it's hard to know what significance, if any, to ascribe to this information, it fits a pattern described in recent CIA reporting on the overlap in the mid-1990s between al Qaeda-financed groups and firms that violated U.N. sanctions on behalf of Iraq.
The clincher, however, came later in the spring of 1998, when the CIA secretly gathered a soil sample from 60 feet outside of the plant's main gate. The sample showed high levels of O-ethylmethylphosphonothioic acid, known as EMPTA, which is a key ingredient for the deadly nerve agent VX. A senior intelligence official who briefed reporters at the time was asked which countries make VX using EMPTA."Iraq is the only country we're aware of," the official said."There are a variety of ways of making VX, a variety of recipes, and EMPTA is fairly unique."
That briefing came on August 24, 1998, four days after the Clinton administration launched cruise-missile strikes against al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan (Osama bin Laden's headquarters from 1992-96), including the al Shifa plant. The missile strikes came 13 days after bombings at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 257 people--including 12 Americans--and injured nearly 5,000. Clinton administration officials said that the attacks were in part retaliatory and in part preemptive. U.S. intelligence agencies had picked up" chatter" among bin Laden's deputies indicating that more attacks against American interests were imminent.
The al Shifa plant in Sudan was largely destroyed after being hit by six Tomahawk missiles. John McWethy, national security correspondent for ABC News, reported the story on August 25, 1998:
Before the pharmaceutical plant was reduced to rubble by American cruise missiles, the CIA was secretly gathering evidence that ended up putting the facility on America's target list. Intelligence sources say their agents clandestinely gathered soil samples outside the plant and found, quote,"strong evidence" of a chemical compound called EMPTA, a compound that has only one known purpose, to make VX nerve gas.
Then, the connection:
The U.S. had been suspicious for months, partly because of Osama bin Laden's financial ties, but also because of strong connections to Iraq. Sources say the U.S. had intercepted phone calls from the plant to a man in Iraq who runs that country's chemical weapons program.
The senior intelligence officials who briefed reporters laid out the collaboration."We knew there were fuzzy ties between [bin Laden] and the plant but strong ties between him and Sudan and strong ties between the plant and Sudan and strong ties between the plant and Iraq." Although this official was careful not to oversell bin Laden's ties to the plant, other Clinton officials told reporters that the plant's general manager lived in a villa owned by bin Laden.
Several Clinton administration national security officials told THE WEEKLY STANDARD last week that they stand by the intelligence."The bottom line for me is that the targeting was justified and appropriate," said Daniel Benjamin, director of counterterrorism on Clinton's National Security Council, in an emailed response to questions."I would be surprised if any president--with the evidence of al Qaeda's intentions evident in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and the intelligence on [chemical weapons] that was at hand from Sudan--would have made a different decision about bombing the plant."
The current president certainly agrees."I think you give the commander in chief the benefit of the doubt," said George W. Bush, governor of Texas, on August 20, 1998, the same day as the U.S. counterstrikes."This is a foreign policy matter. I'm confident he's working on the best intelligence available, and I hope it's successful."
Wouldn't the bombing of a plant with well-documented connections to Iraq's chemical weapons program, undertaken in an effort to strike back at Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, seem to suggest the
Clinton administration national security officials believed Iraq was working with al Qaeda? Benjamin, who has been one of the leading skeptics of claims that Iraq was working with al Qaeda, doesn't want to connect those dots.
Borzou Daragahi, writing in Newsday (Dec. 30, 2003):
Painstakingly restored and maintained by successive Iranian governments since 1958, the citadel at Bam was one of the most important archaeological sites in Iran and a popular tourist attraction.
Its collapse in a powerful earthquake Friday dismayed archaeologists and conservation specialists, in particular.
"It's a cultural catastrophe," said Iraj Afshar Sistani, a Tehran historian and author. "This historical city constituted one of the wonders of Iran 's heritage."
Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi, a Tehran cultural expert, likened the loss of the citadel to the 2001 demolition of the giant Buddha statues in central Afghanistan by the hard-line Taliban regime.
The impressive reddish-gray castle compound, made of sun-dried mud bricks, palm-tree trunks and straw, was the greatest mud-brick structure in the world, dominating the Kavir Desert in southeast Iran , an arid and mountainous area near the Afghan and Pakistan borders. Tens of thousands of people visited each year, including one American who reportedly died in the quake.
At least 2,000 years old, the citadel of Bam has been subject to countless invasions during its history and was completely sacked on several occasions.
Part of a major trade route, Bam became one of the first places in Iran to adopt Islam. Its Zoroastrian inhabitants built the first mosques found in Iran , said Bernard Hourcade, a geographer and Iran specialist at Paris ' National Research Center .
The citadel was abandoned by its inhabitants in 1722 following an Afghan invasion of Iran . It was thus spared the burdens of modernization and preserved as an archaeological treasure.
"It's like a city frozen in time that gives the perfect picture of ancient cities of the old Iranian plateau," said Remy Boucharlat, an archaeologist at the University of Lyon, France, specializing in Iran.
Spread out over four square miles, the old city of Bam was perched on a 200-foot-high rock and dominated by 38 towers, some rising as high as 120 feet. Four walls protected the city from potential invaders.
Bam was a perfectly preserved specimen of an ancient fortress city, Boucharlat said. It included high walls, residential quarters and administrative buildings on a natural hill, streets, several mosques, bathhouses and windtowers.
"In short," Boucharlat said, "it's a true lesson in architecture."
Over the past two decades, the oasis town that developed around the ancient citadel has struggled to house and employ a new generation of young Iranians, and its identity as an archaeological city has been partly eclipsed by a growth in manufacturing jobs and a plan to turn the area into a tax-free trade zone to lure foreign investment. Daewoo, a Korean car manufacturer, has set up a car-seat factory there.
Migrant workers from the countryside and from Afghanistan flocked to the city, boosting the population of the sleepy village - which had no more than 13,000 inhabitants during its medieval peak - to nearly 80,000 in the city and 100,000 in the outlying areas.
With the ancient citadel leveled, global cultural experts have already begun planning for its possible restoration.
Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow, writing in the Toronto Star (Dec. 26, 2003):
A recent editorial in one of Canada's leading papers condemned the French decision to ban religious symbols from public schools as an attempt at "social engineering." It's a strange argument, given that most of France's history is one vast experiment in social engineering - and looking at modern France today, one could hardly say it's been a failure.
As fellows of the Institute of Current World Affairs, of Hanover, N.H., we spent two years studying the French and trying to explain what makes the French tick.
One of our main conclusions was that the French system functions according to values and assumptions alien to Canadians, who pride themselves on their multicultural, British-style democracy. Democracy à la française involves a huge central state whose purpose it is to determine the common good, and this calls for a lot of social engineering.
French social engineering began five centuries ago.
To understand what France was back then, it is more useful to compare it to today's Balkans - it was a patchwork of lesser and bigger duchies, each with their own language, culture and religion. In order to create a single French identity, French kings set out to erase these differences.
This process was brutal and slow, but successful. At the time of the French revolution, half of the French still didn't speak French.
By 1900, most understood it and left their local language - Occitan, Breton, Alsacian, Corsican, or Basque - at home.During this period, the French closed parishes, and forbade many religious orders. To this day, the French never appoint high civil servants to work in their home region, for the purpose of breaking down social ties and avoiding local power cliques. Now that's social engineering.
Part of the reason France waged total war on its own cultural differences was to overcome an essential trait of the French political
culture: extremism. Just to give a sense of this: From 1789 to 1958, the French went through four democratic regimes, three monarchies, two empires and one fascist dictatorship, each ending in a coup, a war or a revolution.The reason France didn't dissolve into a banana republic throughout this was that their very strong central state acted as an arbitrator of the common good in spite (some say, because) of the political instability. Whether they were Protestants, Breton or Corsicans, French citizens had to fall into line, and they did.
For most of the 19th century and the better part of the 20th, France was the theatre of a struggle between Republicans and other groups who claimed they knew better what the common good was.
First it was the Royalists, who morphed into ultra-Catholics. The Republicans won, most of the time, but lost one big time in 1940 when the Catholics, using the political crisis resulting from the defeat to the Germans, seized power, scuttled the Republic, imposed a dictatorship and applied their anti-Semitic program. It was horrible, but the French came out of it even more militantly secular.
As a result of five centuries of social engineering, "assimilation" became a positive political concept in French politics.
