Roundup: Media's Take
This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
There was enough in the 9/11 hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday to make partisans on all sides unhappy. Partisans for the truth, however, have some ground for optimism.
If one were a Bill Clinton partisan, one would not be happy about the portrayal of the 42nd president and his anti-terror record. It appears that the Clinton administration had as many as four opportunities to try to kill Osama bin Laden in 1998-9, and seized upon none of them.
Sandy Berger, national security adviser during those years, testified on Wednesday that Clinton had ordered using"the full measure of the CIA's capabilities" to eliminate bin Laden...
...At the same time, if one were a George W. Bush partisan, one would not be pleased by the depiction of the 43rd president and his War on Terror record. In 2001, the Bush people inherited a holdover terrorism" czar," Richard Clarke, but they demoted him and cut his access and clout.
Did the Bush people lack confidence in his ability? Not really; after all, on the terrible day of 9/11, Condoleezza Rice, Clarke's boss, instructed Clarke to run the crisis-management operation in the White House Situation Room while she chose to hunker down in a secure bomb shelter...
...When they came into power, Bush & Co. had the idea that they needed a comprehensive review of national security policy, which called for less emphasis on terrorist networks, such as al-Qaida, and more emphasis on terrorist-sponsoring states, such as - in their minds, at least - Iraq.
That review took more than seven months; the first cabinet meeting on the administration's anti-terror policy took place on Sept. 4, 2001.
Do changes in policy, from one president to another, take time? Of course. But the Bush folks managed to reverse Clinton policies on taxes, global warming and abortion within weeks of taking office; it's obvious that unlimbering a new anti-terror policy was a second-tier priority for them...
...If an anti-terror czar is like a fireman, the Bush people left Clarke with the power to see what was happening but without the power to send out the fire engines. He had been worrying about al-Qaida for a decade, and yet even as he saw terror flames growing on the horizon, the Bush people pushed him aside.
No wonder Clarke is an angry man. In his memoir,"Against All Enemies," he recalls being in the Situation Room on 9/11 when he got a call from an FBI colleague:"We got the passenger manifests from the airlines. We recognize names, Dick. They're al-Qaida."
Clarke wondered, expletive-ly, how those killers had gotten on board."CIA forgot to tell us about them," came the FBI reply. In other words, his worst nightmare had come true: Al-Qaida operatives had slipped between the jurisdictional cracks of the federal government; the CIA had a list of al-Qaida names, but hadn't passed them on to the FBI, nor to airport security officials...
...What's striking about Clarke is not that he expressed his apologies to the 9/11 families for their loss, and for his own degree of responsibility for that loss. That was a bit of political theater that his fellow panelists must be kicking themselves for not having thought to do themselves.
No, what's striking about Clarke is that he delivered detailed testimony that bulls-eyed the incompetence of his ex-colleagues in the Bush administration. While all the other witnesses were generous in their praise for each other - leaving one hard-pressed to recall, as they spoke, that 3,000 people had died on their watch - Clarke was blunt. The Bush administration, in particular, had done a bad job, he said - and he said it under oath.
Of course the Bushies have a right to call Clarke's credibility into question. They can point to his smarmy letter of resignation, addressed to Bush, dated Jan. 20, 2003, in which Clarke praised Bush for his" courage, determination, calm, and leadership." But if the White House really wants to knock a hole in Clarke's chronicle, then top officials should joust with him on a level playing field - on which they, too, are under oath...
...The White House pleads"executive privilege," but that's a dodge. If the issue is important enough, constitutional nuance ought to give way to the people's right to know. In 1974, for example, the sitting president of the United States, Gerald Ford, testified, under oath, before the House of Representatives about his pardon of Richard Nixon. And ever since then, Ford has enjoyed a deserved reputation as a straight-talker...
...For the moment, the Clintonians and Bushites seem to be playing for narrow personal and political advantage.
By contrast, Clarke, warts and all, seems to be thinking about the truth - which means he is thinking about the national interest, as well as the long haul of history.
These hearings have the potential to embarrass all concerned. But while the truth might hurt top government officials, former as well as present, America will benefit from a full, if painful, account of mistakes that were made.
The 9/11 Commission is due to issue its final report on July 26; the 10 commissioners have an opportunity to help their country - if they can put aside their partisan differences and deal with the truth.
The grave of Senator Joe McCarthy has been pillaged. In the think tanks of the Republican right, in the broadcasts of Fox News, and in the pages of some of the most popular books in America, he lives again. From the mid-1950s until 2001, there was a consensus in America that McCarthyism was a brief period of political psychosis. The Senator's drunken belief that the democratic American left consisted mainly of closet Reds working to subvert the United States was seen as risible; a sulphuric firework that threatened American civil liberties and democracy for a moment but then deservedly died away.
No longer. The fourth best-selling book in the US last year - Ann Coulter's Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism - was an explicit apologia for McCarthy."What this country needed in the 1950s was Joe McCarthy," she says."Amid all the mandatory condemnations of Joe McCarthy, the little detail about his being right always seems to get lost. His fundamental thesis was absolutely correct... He was not terrorising people purposelessly. His targets were Soviet sympathisers and Soviet spies." She describes the Hollywood blacklisting of suspected Communists as"honourable", and concludes,"McCarthy's gravest error was in underestimating the problem of Communist subversion."
She is not a lone madwoman. The rehabilitation of McCarthy is currently a major theme on the US right. William Buckley Jr, the grande dame of American conservative intellectuals, has published a tedious but aggressive novel, The Redhunter, which glorifies the Senator. The historian Arthur Herman has published an acclaimed revisionist biography which says McCarthy's fears"weren't paranoid delusions. They were true." Campaigning group Accuracy in Academia recently staged a conference entitled"Rethinking McCarthy". Henry Kissinger has noted - echoing Coulter - that McCarthy"did not go far enough."
Is it possible that there was a vast Communist plot to subvert American democracy, and only McCarthy understood the depth of the problem? The new McCarthyites claim their reappraisal was triggered by new evidence: the declassification of a series of documents from the Soviet archives known as the Verona cables. These documents do indeed show that some of the individuals defended by the 1950s left and savaged by McCarthy were actually Soviet spies. The most prominent is the left's old cause celebre, Alger Hiss.
This is a serious blow, and it should be honestly acknowledged. A minority of people on the left are still inclined to see 1950s Stalinists as misguided idealists, decent believers in equality and liberty who somehow went astray. This is unsustainable. By the time Hiss was offering his secrets to Stalin's agents, the news about the gulags - vast concentration camps which slaughtered over 15 million innocent people - was out and beyond dispute. The US has many flaws, but it is lunatic to believe it is domestically equivalent to this; there are no mass graves in Kansas.
Too much of the left for too long implied there was moral equivalence between the two sides in the Cold War. They're wrong: the defence of a basically free society is not the same as the defence of a totalitarian state. A society where minorities can organise and fight for recognition is not the same as a society where minorities are herded up and executed. Hiss was not swapping secrets between two equally bad tribes.
But it's a wild leap to say that these cables therefore vindicate McCarthy. A handful of his allegations have turned out to have been right. A handful of Mystic Meg's predictions no doubt end up being accurate too. McCarthy made so many accusations - with virtually no evidence - that it would be extraordinary if he did not hit the target a few times.
More than this, it is a blatant distortion of the historical record to claim that only McCarthy was opposed to Communist spies. Most of the democratic left saw the menace of Stalinism and the crucial importance of defending America's imperfect democracy. If anything, McCarthy damaged the cause of anti-Communism by associating it with paranoid madness.
Some people will see this as an arcane historical debate. They are wrong. The Verona cables were decoded in 1995, but they have only been vigorously debated since 11 September 2001. There's a reason: at the start of a long war against Islamic fundamentalism, Americans are thinking about the launch of their last long war. How McCarthy is viewed provides us with an indication of how the"War on Terror" will proceed.
If the errors of the early stages of the Cold War are not acknowledged now, they will be repeated. The history of the 1950s is a must-read today. The first lesson is clear: within America, dissent must be defended vigorously from Coulter-style charges of treachery. The way to defend democracy is not to shut it down but to embrace it. Public debate and a frank analysis of American mistakes will make the battle against Islamic fundamentalism more efficient, not less.
In particular, it will help us to distinguish between when the US acts in a legitimate war against Islamic fundamentalism, and when it uses this as a pretext aggressively to extend its own business interests. This blurring went on throughout the Cold War: uppity democracies trying to fend off US business exploitation, like Guatemala, were crushed in the name of the war on communism. The neo-McCarthyites must not be allowed to silence opponents of aggressive US businesses with a howl of"Treachery!" It is one thing to die fighting Stalinism or Bin Laden; it is another to kill for the United Fruit Company or Halliburton.
The second lesson is that to oppose Islamic fundamentalism, Americans must repudiate their own far right. A Cold War in which America was led by McCarthy and his acolytes might not have been winnable at all. An America that jailed people for their political beliefs or that launched"limited nuclear wars" (another McCarthy obsession) might have been an America that collapsed under its own lunacies before the Soviet Union did. The US side in the Cold War was at its weakest - and its most morally indefensible - when it was fought by the President politically closest to McCarthy: Richard Nixon.
The third lesson is that the US and Britain should not back the far right abroad - foreign McCarthys - in the mistaken belief that they will help us to prevail. The Cold War led the US to overthrow many decent democratic regimes that it feared were pro-Soviet (or simply found economically inconvenient): Salvador Allende in Chile, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran. This damaged the American cause by making it - in foreign policy terms - for a time as totalitarian as the Soviet Union.
The same mistake may be repeated today. If the US continues to back fascistic dictatorships like the House of Saud, Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan and now Colonel Gaddafi, in the mistaken belief that they will help us in the"War on Terror", then the US will continue to haemorrhage its moral superiority over Islamic fundamentalists. The best way to defend democracy is to spread democracy, not supress it in the interests of fair-weather friends.
The corpse of Joe McCarthy is being paraded before us. The more extreme wing of the US right believe he offers us a model for how to fight a war against Islamic fundamentalism. They're right - and it's a model that leads straight to liquidated democracy and defeat.
Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman, in the Straits Times (March 22, 2004):
THE brutality of the 20th century has given George Santayana's observation that 'those who forget history are condemned to repeat it' the standing of an absolute truth. Less noted but equally true is that dictators study history in order to repeat it.
Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were students of political history, including the works of Machiavelli. Saddam Hussein carried a well-worn Arabic translation of Mein Kampf.
Now, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il shows he is a no less apt pupil of history, having learnt from his mentors how to use terror to gain and exercise power, crush domestic opposition and build and maintain brutal concentration camps to rival anything built by Hitler and Stalin.
MR KIM also excels at the propaganda war, especially when it comes to brainwashing the country's children. Consider how he uses The Diary Of Anne Frank, the touching chronicle of a child desperate for love and hope while hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.
Anne's moving plea for tolerance and peace in the midst of despair and brutality is presented in North Korea's schools as a manual for preparing for the next war against 'the American imperialists' who, as one student puts it, are 'worse than Hitler's fascists'. Like his totalitarian predecessors, who contorted hope into hatred, Mr Kim's regime twists the message of Anne Frank to teach hatred of 'Nazi America'.
Unfortunately, the Nazi analogy is devastatingly appropriate - not for the United States, but the brutal North Korean regime. In the past few weeks, new information has come to light bolstering charges that political prisoners are being gassed in 'experiments' worthy of Josef Mengele, Auschwitz's 'angel of death'.
Korean human rights activist Do Hee Youn revealed top secret documents from North Korea's secluded Vinalon Complex - site of a factory producing nerve gas and blister and choking agents.
The factory's former chief engineer Kang Byong Sop smuggled out papers showing political prisoners were trucked in twice a week for experiments. He also provided this personal witness: 'I saw human hands scratching a round glass window inside a chamber that was locked with a heavy metal door.'
The factory is in the remote town of Hamhung, along with Camp No. 22, Mr Kim's largest concentration camp.
Mr Kang's revelations are new confirmation of what Mr Kwon Hyuk, former security chief at Camp No. 22, told the world a few months ago. 'I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' he charged.
'The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save their children with mouth-to-mouth breathing.'
North Korea 'stonewalled' and attacked the credibility of these reports. The most prestigious Western media, and even US Secretary of State Colin Powell ('optimistic' about six-power talks with Pyongyang on nuclear weapons) downplayed or chose to ignore the horrifying claims of North Korean concentration camps and gas chambers.
The resulting virtual non-story is not only eerily similar to initial reports
of Saddam's 1988 gassing of Kurds but another haunting reminder of the Holocaust,
when so many early reports of Nazi killing squads and death camps were also
dismissed as biased or erroneous by Allied governments and media.
John D. Podesta and Judd C. Legum, in Salon (March 22, 2004):
Every time our nation faces a threat to national security there is a powerful tension between the need to keep the people informed and the need to keep the enemy in the dark....
On July 20, 1916, a group of German saboteurs blew up a large munitions dump on the New York Harbor, creating what the New York Times later described as"a colossal, ear-splitting, ground-shaking, glass-breaking explosion" that could be heard as far away as Maryland. Shrapnel pierced the Statue of Liberty. Thus, terrorism was an issue of great national concern nearly 90 years ago.
The attack on the New York Harbor and, more broadly, the beginning of the United States involvement in World War I marked the birth of the modern secrecy movement. During the first days of World War I, the Army implemented the first modern information-classification system. And just weeks after the United States entered the war, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it unlawful to disseminate information relating to the broad categories of"national defense" or"public defense."
In October 1917, Theodore Roosevelt expressed the prevalent attitude of the day:"The men who oppose the war; who fail to support the government in every measure which really tends to the efficient prosecution of the war; and above all who in any shape or way champion the cause and the actions of Germany, show themselves to be the Huns within our own gates and the allies of men whom our sons and brothers are crossing the ocean to fight."
Attorney General John Ashcroft, in an eerie echo of Roosevelt's comment, made it clear that the"Huns within" syndrome is alive and well. Testifying in support of the USA PATRIOT Act, a law which significantly expanded the ability of the government to act in secret, Ashcroft infamously said:"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil."
It has always been this combination of the fear of the enemy as well as the fear of disloyalty -- what Roosevelt referred to as the"Huns within" -- that has been the rationale for withholding government information from the American public. As apprehension of subversives rises, so does the scope of government secrecy.
The lesson of the Cold War
Secrecy became more formalized and pervasive during the Cold War. The Soviet Union heightened anxieties of external attack, domestic infiltration and espionage. Communists and"fellow travelers" became the new"Hun within."
As fears of the Communism increased, the executive branch expanded the role of the intelligence communities, continually placing more of the government's operations under a shroud of secrecy. Stunningly, by 1957, the epidemic of over-classification was acknowledged by the government. That year a presidential Commission on Government Security concluded that a"vast, intricate, confusing and costly complex of temporary, inadequate, uncoordinated programs and measures designed to protect secrets and installations vital to the defense of the National against agents of Soviet imperialism" had grown unrestrained. But the commission's advice to reduce and control that system went unheeded. That same system, although somewhat narrowed or expanded by succeeding presidents, underpins our classification system today.
The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 demonstrated the unfortunate consequences of increasing reliance on government decision making performed exclusively through secret channels. The aim of the limited invasion, planned and carried out in a narrow and covert channel, was intended to spark a popular revolt against Castro. Instead the failed mission set in motion a chain of events that led to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
The year before the invasion, Lloyd Free, a Princeton University social scientist, conducted an extensive public-opinion survey in Cuba. The study revealed that at the time Cubans were quite optimistic about the future. Free unambiguously concluded that Cubans"are unlikely to shift their present overwhelming allegiance to Fidel Castro." Even though this public information was specifically given to the U.S. government, it was ignored. This is one of the most tragic consequences of the culture of secrecy: Crucial public information becomes devalued, easily disregarded or dismissed.
Nearly 40 years later the U.S. invasion of Iraq mirrors the problems associated with the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The Bush administration concluded that Iraq currently possessed weapons of mass destruction based on information that it was provided largely in secret, even though much of this information was self-serving, secondhand or otherwise unreliable. For example, the government relied heavily on information provided to it by Ahmed Chalabi, its favorite exile who hadn't been in Iraq for decades and had a strong self-interest in precipitating a U.S. invasion.
Rev. Mark Gallagher, minister of the Michael Servetus Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Vancouver, WA, in Columbian.com (March 21, 2004):
Two men of my Vancouver congregation recently got a marriage license from Multnomah County, and I traveled to their Portland home to conduct the ceremony. Given their loving and committed relationship of over 13 years, they were perhaps the most deeply ready of any couple I have married.
I ask,"Why on Earth should these men be excluded?" Objectors answer:"You can't go tampering with an institution like marriage. It has always been this way!"
Which way would that be?
In ancient and medieval Europe, marriage was not about love but property. It was arranged by parents, often prior to the bride reaching puberty, with a dowry paid to the husband upon consummation. The overriding concern was economic.
According to the Bible, Abraham and his wife, Sarah, were children of the same father. We call that incest today. Old Testament men routinely took multiple wives. We call that polygamy today. After failing to get pregnant, Sarah offered her slave Hagar for Abraham to have children with. I'm not sure what we'd call that today.
Marriage has not always been any particular way.
[We hear:] "Change marriage and civilization will collapse!" This hysteria echoes throughout history. From the Boston Quarterly Review in 1859:"The family, in its old sense, is disappearing from our land, and not only our free institutions are threatened but the very existence of our society is endangered."
The prospect of divorce also spelled society's downfall. In 1816 Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University decried Connecticut's new divorce law:"Within a moderate period, the whole community will be thrown into general prostitution." Horace Greeley suggested that a partnership with the possibility of divorce should be called something other than marriage. ("Civil union" perhaps?)
The specter of interracial marriage was a grave threat to civilization. At one point, 41 states banned interracial marriage. It was not until 1967 that the Supreme Court ruled such laws unconstitutional. At the time of that"activist court" decision, according to one survey 72 percent of Americans disapproved of interracial marriage; 48 percent believed it should be a crime. That is significantly higher disapproval than we see today regarding same-sex relationships.
From the Rush Limbaugh Show, transcript by Limbaugh (March 22, 2004):
RUSH: Now, I'm not going to use any video of Clarke from 60 Minutes, but he was on Good Morning, America today, and here's just a couple, maybe three sound bites. Charlie Gibson says,"So, you deal with the exigencies of the day on September 11th. You come in September 12th ready to plot what response we take to Al-Qaeda. Let me talk about the response that you got from top administration officials. On that day, what did the president say to you?"
CLARKE: Well, the president wanted us to look to see if Iraq was involved. Now, the White House is trying to say he very calmly asked me to do due diligence and see who might have done it to look at all the possibilities. That wasn't it, and the White House is also saying maybe the meeting didn't take place, and there are witnesses who have said the meeting took place. The president in a very intimidating way left us, me and my staff, with the clear indication that he wanted us to come back with the word that there was an Iraqi hand behind 9-11, because they had been planning to do something about Iraq from before the time they came into office.
RUSH: You know, all this would really be powerful if the first thing we had done is go into Iraq. But my memory tells me, my friends, that the first thing we didn't do was go to Iraq, that we went to Afghanistan. You know, and plus, Mr. Clarke, this is an opinion. He’s indulging here in opinion, what he thinks of what the president wanted, what he thinks was on the president's mind. The president was faking him out, the president, look, I want you to come back here, I don't care what you find, it better say Iraq. Well, the president didn't get what he wanted, apparently, and so how can that be? If the president had his mind made up and wanted to see Iraq in this report, and it wasn't there, then what would we logically expect the president to do, fire the people who didn't do what he wanted to do and then launch a salvo on Iraq the next day?
By the way, you know, folks, I want to take you back, if you care to traverse back to September 12th, 2001, when this first happened, who did you think it might be? Who was it that you thought it might be? I tell you what, my first thought was Saddam Hussein. Here's Bush's kid, Bush 41's son in the White House, who is still steaming over the Gulf War. That was my first thought, and a lot of other people's first thoughts as well. The administration was mum. The administration didn't say anything, and we were wondering why. We didn't know what they were thinking. This idea that Richard Clarke is sitting here on the inside, he was a holdover from the Clinton years. And it's obvious there were people keeping him at arm's length even though he was on board. The next sound bite, Richard Clarke answers Charlie's question on Good Morning, America, today. Did Bush ask about any other nations other than Iraq?
CLARKE: Oh, no, no. No. Not at all. It was Iraq, Saddam, fight find out, get back to me.
GIBSON: And were his questions more about Iraq than about Al-Qaeda?
CLARKE: Absolutely. Absolutely. He didn't ask me about Al-Qaeda. I think they had an"idee fixe," a plan from day one, that they wanted to do something about Iraq, while the World Trade Center was still smoldering, while they were still digging bodies out, the people in the White House were thinking, ah, this gives us the opportunity we've been looking for to go after Iraq.
RUSH: Yeah, while the bodies were being dug out and the World Trade Center was still smoldering the administration trying to concoct and arrange a scenario to allow them to go into Iraq no matter what? Well, the only problem here, uh, Mr. Clarke is that Bush didn't go into Iraq no matter what. Once we knew it was Al-Qaeda we went to Afghanistan, not Iraq. I mean, it's one thing for you to go out and say all this and offer these opinions but history doesn't bear him out. History doesn't bear him out. Well, he's claiming he was in on the big meetings but he obviously wasn't in on the big meetings. We'll get to that in just a second. So Gibson says,"All right, you write in the book.." And, by the way, there's no challenge to anything this guy said on 60 Minutes, there's very little challenge to what he said on Good Morning, America today. Oh, you say this, okay, well what do you say about this, what do you say about that? He wasn't challenged on much of anything. Gibson says,"You write in the book no doubt the U.S. could have brought true stability to Afghanistan with a larger force, could have made the return of the Taliban and the terrorists virtually impossible. Instead, the larger force was held back for Iraq?"
CLARKE: That's right. And to this day Afghanistan is not stable. To this day we're hunting down Osama bin Laden. We should have put U.S. special forces in immediately, not many weeks later. U.S. special forces didn't get into the area where bin Laden was for two months and we tried to have the Afghans do it. You know, basically the president botched the response to 9-11. He should have done right after Afghanistan, right after bin Laden, and then he made the whole war on terrorism so much worse by invading Iraq.
RUSH: You know, this is just the amazing thing. How many times had Al-Qaeda via bin Laden acted when Richard Clarke meant something in the counterterrorism force, and we never once went after bin Laden. In fact, bin Laden was offered to us at least twice from Sudan, recall? When Richard Clarke was there. And we said no, the Clinton administration said no because there are lawyers in the justice department, i.e., Janet Reno advised against it,"we don't have enough evidence to hold him" or some other concoction. All this talk, you should have done this, you should have done that - he was in the White House for nine months when all this happened, you guys were in there eight years, Mr. Clarke, with event after event after event, terrorist attack after terrorist attack after terrorist attack, and you are the ones that strengthened bin Laden by not pursuing him, by not retaliating and in fact by caving to him in Somalia.
And then there's this line again,"made the whole war on terrorism so much worse by invading Iraq." Oh, yeah, the terrorists really got mad then, that's going to really make 'em mad. As though we did go to Afghanistan, whether our special forces got there when he wants them there or not we did go to Afghanistan, we blew up Tora Bora, we have imprisoned terrorists of al-Qaeda down at G'itmo. What do you mean, we're going to make 'em mad? He is espousing here, espousing a recipe for not pursuing these people, because"he's only going to get mad, they're only going to get mad." I mean, let me ask you a question. During the Clinton administration was there ever a war on terrorism? Did they ever mount a war on terrorism? I don't recall one! I don't recall terrorism being a big focus of the Clinton administration.
I do recall after the embassy bombings, Madeleine Albright saying,"We're declaring war on terrorism," and that's when they launched the salvo at the aspirin factory in Sudan and the missiles at the empty terrorist camp in Afghanistan and the missiles in Baghdad and that's all they did and those events happened to coincide with key grand jury testimony of people, witnesses, in the Monica Lewinsky case, which led at an impeachment case. You know, they had a terrorism summit somewhere on some island off of Egypt somewhere, a Clinton photo op. What war on terrorism did this administration fight? I've got a piece here on Richard Clarke written a year ago -- I have to double-check where it is, it's in the stack here in just a second, but this piece is written by an expert in the field who said that Clarke when he was in the Clinton administration running around warning everybody of the dangers posed by electronic warfare and terrorism, that the Internet was going to be the focal point of it. He couldn't have been more wrong. The only war that the Clinton administration fought, ladies and gentlemen, was on Ken Starr, and now they're mounting a war on George W. Bush as they seek to protect their own keisters. That would be rear ends for those of you in Rio Linda.
The Balkans risk being plunged into a new cycle of instability and bloodshed if the three main international decision-makers in the region do not act quickly and start political negotiations over the status of Kosovo, diplomats and analysts warned yesterday...
...Nato, the EU and the UN have invested much time, money and personnel in the small province that the US-led military alliance defended against Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader indicted by the Hague Tribunal for alleged war crime and genocide.
However, since the 1999 Nato bombing campaign against Serbia, all three organisations have been reluctant to address the main issue that dogs stability in the Balkans: Kosovo's future political relationship with Serbia...
...The EU started negotiations last year but they have made no progress, partly because of the rise of Serb nationalists in Belgrade and a weak, nationalist leadership in Kosovo."But there is also a lack of political will by the EU," said a European diplomat. Yet Balkan experts warned yesterday that if political negotiations did not start soon, it was likely violence would continue in the province and spill over to the rest of the region.
In Kosovo, the small ethnic Serb minority - which has never felt secure since 1999 - could call on Serbia to help them.
The ethnic Albanian majority could be tempted to use the unrest, fanned by some Serb nationalists in Belgrade, as a means to push their case for independence.
Next door in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the EU is expected to take over from the 12,000-strong Nato-led Sfor later this year, Bosnian Serbs could use the chance to break away from the federation of Croats, Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs.
The EU and Nato have been trying to sew this republic back together since the bloody civil wars of the 1990s, but Bosnian Serbs still hanker to join with Serbia.
Were that to happen, nationalist Croats, both in Croatia and Bosnia, might seize a similar chance, say analysts.
Diplomats suggest that Montenegro, now linked with Serbia, could use unrest in Kosovo to push its own claims for independence from Belgrade. There is also concern about what might happen in Macedonia....
Last week, an obscure government actuary named Richard S. Foster rocked Washington with accusations that the Bush administration had muzzled his economic forecasts for overhauling Medicare. Mr. Foster calculated that it would cost more than $500 billion to provide a prescription drug benefit over the next 10 years, but says his boss threatened to fire him if he shared the information with Congress. Lawmakers passed the bill relying on a much lower -- and politically palatable -- figure of $400 billion.
The health and human services secretary, Tommy G. Thompson, immediately ordered an internal investigation, while Mr. Foster's boss, who has since left government to become a health industry lobbyist, denied making any threats. But Democrats wasted no time in charging that the White House had tampered with the truth.
The Foster case was only the latest in a string of high-profile controversies over how the Bush White House handles information, from scientific data to health facts to intelligence in the war in Iraq.
In recent weeks, Environmental Protection Agency employees have said they were told to forgo the customary scientific and economic studies in developing a rule on mercury emissions. Nobel laureates issued a statement asserting the administration had distorted scientific fact on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry. Mr. Thompson acknowledged his agency had altered a report on racial disparities in health to sound more positive. And the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan research institution, found that administration officials"systematically misrepresented" the threat from Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs...
...But the line between spin and deception is a thin one indeed, as Mr. Clinton ("I did not have sex with that woman") amply demonstrated. And as the Medicare controversy unfolded last week, Republicans noted pointedly that President Bush won election by vowing to restore integrity to the White House, a goal they say he has more than achieved...
...So the question is not whether the Bush administration has shaded the facts, but whether in doing so, it has approached a tipping point, beyond which even its Republican allies in Congress no longer trust what it says.
"I think the White House has come under such disrepute over the years that whether we have approached what would be the tipping point is hard to say," said James MacGregor Burns, a presidential historian at the University of Richmond, who studies leadership."A lot of the cynicism among the public results from failures on the part of not only this president, but also earlier presidents, in putting out full and accurate information."
With its agencies and research institutions churning out analyses, Washington is awash in facts and figures. Alice Rivlin, who has served Democratic presidents from Johnson to Clinton, said Americans have been"very lucky as a nation" to have career bureaucrats dedicated to producing accurate information."What has characterized our government, over all the time I've been in it, is that the numbers are honest," she said...
In 1981, David A. Stockman, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under President Reagan, nearly lost his job after he confessed to a magazine reporter that upon discovering that the White House could not simultaneously reduce taxes, increase military spending and cut the deficit, he altered his computer models to suggest that it could.
"This thing pales in comparison to what David Stockman did," said Lou Cannon, a biographer of President Reagan, referring to the Medicare controversy. Of the Bush administration, he said,"If you invented some deceptiveness scale, I don't think this administration stands out."
Others, though, say the Bush administration bends the facts more than most.
"I think the Bush administration, for various reasons, seems to have a higher ratio of statistical prevarication than most," said Kevin Phillips, the author of"American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," a book that is highly critical of the president.
One reason may be the ballooning deficit, which Mr. Phillips said is forcing the White House to put a positive spin on its economic numbers -- especially in an election year. The deficit was clearly an issue with the Medicare bill. With conservative Republicans balking at the $400 billion cost, it might have been defeated, or significantly altered, had Mr. Foster's estimates been widely known.
While Democrats on Capitol Hill are trying to evoke memories of Watergate ("What did the president know; when did he know it?" Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts asked last week about the Medicare numbers), Mr. Cannon, the Reagan biographer, says it is difficult to imagine the president paying attention to the work of a lowly actuary. Questions about Mr. Bush's credibility, he said, will ultimately be decided on the far bigger issue of how the administration handled intelligence information leading up to the Iraq war.
Mr. Burns, the presidential historian, agrees."If you make a mistake or a misstatement about domestic policy, you can retrieve it, but if you make a mistake in military policy of the sort that involves bad information, there may be no remedy," he said."That, it seems to me, is the tipping point."...
Philip Stephens
A year ago we were present at the destruction. The march of US and British troops into Iraq did more than divide old allies over how best to confront Saddam Hussein. It marked the final collapse of the geopolitical architecture that had safeguarded the peace for 50 years. Amid the rubble of the postwar order, we now have incoherence and argument. The consequent risks to the west's security far outweigh the immediate threat of another al-Qaeda atrocity.
The old system, of course, was crumbling before George W. Bush decided to go to war with Iraq. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 removed the existential threat that had bound the US and Europe into the transatlantic alliance. The terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 awakened America to both its unique power and its new vulnerability.
We have heard half a dozen other reasons during the past year or two why the old transatlantic relationship was no longer sustainable. For some, it is simply a question of relative power. America is militarily strong, Europe weak. Once attacked, the US was always bound to discard the old constraints on its freedom of action. After all, the multilateralist impulse that had seen America create the common institutions of the postwar order had been as much an act of realpolitik as of Wilsonian idealism.
The Bush administration, the argument continues, never accepted the bargain under which Europe embraced US leadership in return for a say in the way it was exercised. Primacy meant America could make its own choices and opt for the flexibility of ad hoc coalitions over the obligations of fixed alliances.
There were changes too on the European side of the Atlantic. Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall meant that Europe ceased to be the centre of Washington's geopolitical universe, so too Europe felt less dependent on the US defence guarantee. Germany's implacable opposition to the invasion of Iraq would have been unimaginable during the cold war.
These are all part of the explanation. Behind them lies a deeper divide, rooted in history, culture and geography. Europe's central historical experience has been that military victories produce only temporary peace. The European Union encapsulates a visceral conviction that shared sovereignty, multilateral organisations and the rule of law are the essential explanation for the absence of war. As Jean Monnet once put it:"Institutions govern relationships between people. They are the real pillars of civilisation."
Europeans, though, failed from the outset to understand how profound was the psychological shock delivered to the US by September 11 2001. Flanked by two great oceans, America had considered itself immune from significant attack. The demonstration of vulnerability transformed a status quo power into a revolutionary one.
What we are left with is incoherence. The best that can be said of relationships between Washington and some of its erstwhile allies is that a certain public civility has returned to the conduct of diplomacy. Gerhard Schroder has visited the White House, the president has shaken the hand of France's Jacques Chirac.
A more optimistic view would say that circumstance has also obliged the antagonists to modify their views. I was rereading the other day a speech given by Richard Cheney, the US vice-president, in late August 2002. Historians will see Mr Cheney's text, which seethes with contempt for the United Nations, as a vital moment in the transatlantic rupture.
Yet the grim experience of its forces in Iraq has taught the US something of the UN's value. Only after Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, conferred his legitimacy on the process could Washington press ahead with plans to return sovereignty to the Iraqis. Mr Bush, if not Mr Cheney, has learned something of the importance of combining military might with legitimacy.
Europe, of course, has its own confusions and divisions. Tony Blair rested his hopes of keeping the US in the international system on getting up close to the president. Mr Chirac preferred traditional balance-of-power resistance. Both failed. Now the terrorist bombing of Madrid and the outcome of the subsequent Spanish election have added to the fog.
We can dismiss the charge by Mr Bush's Republican allies that the decision of the Spanish electorate to overturn the government of Jose Maria Aznar was an act of terrorist appeasement. You can be resolute against al-Qaeda and yet believe that invading Iraq was a terrible mistake. Those in Washington who now attack Spain's exercise of democracy would presumably argue that a victory for John Kerry in November's presidential election would also mark the triumph of Islamist fundamentalism.
Europe, though, does not have a single or convincing narrative as to how the Pax Americana might work. It is one thing to laud multinational institutions, another to say how they can be remade to meet the new strategic realities and threats. To tell America that it must work through alliances is not enough.
There are, of course, plenty of specific ideas around as to how to reinvigorate the transatlantic partnership. Among those under discussion in coming months will be a new mission statement for Nato and a joint commitment to encourage liberal democracy in what is now called the Greater Middle East.
These are worthy endeavours. But to have meaning they require a change of mindset on both sides of the Atlantic to fit them into a wider framework. There is no need to pretend that the postwar order was perfect. Nor should we think that it can, or should, be rebuilt precisely as it was. But the transatlantic relationship will be fixed only when America and Europe begin to talk seriously about the shape of a new bargain that can accommodate both America's power and Europe's fears. Pace Donald Rumsfeld, the sheriff and his posse will not do it.
I have heard it said that we should be patient. The system that emerged after 1945 was not a single, neat construction. It took many years to create. There was improvisation alongside vision, pragmatism stirred in with principle. That is true, in as far as it goes. But Islamist extremism has not shown itself indulgent of delay. Al-Qaeda will exploit the west's disunity at every turn. And where are today's Trumans and Adenauers, Marshalls and Schumans?
Hans de Vreij
Security and Defence editor
The battle of Poitiers in 732, Spain 1492, Vienna 1693 and Turkey 1917. These combinations of years and places most probably mean little or nothing at all to the average Westerner in 2004. Yet the events to which they refer are all significant moments in the history of two religions: Islam and Christianity.
In 732, Christian forces engaged in battle near the French town of Poitiers with a Muslim army which had managed to advance some considerable way across the continent. The Muslim forces were defeated.
Prior to 1492, southern Spain – Andalusia and Granada – had been an important Islamic stronghold inside Europe. In that year, however, the Muslims were driven from Spain completely by Catholic forces.
In 1693, a decisive battle was fought and won outside the gates of Vienna against Muslim forces which had left Turkey, crossed the Balkans, and were marching across Europe. And 1917 saw Turkey's – Islamic – Ottoman Empire crumble and then collapse following its defeat by the allied powers – chief among them Great Britain and France – during the First World War.
According to some academic researchers, these events from history play a very significant role in the thought processes of the al-Qaeda terrorist network and related radical Islamic groups.
As these specialists see it, the idea of wreaking revenge for past defeats and humiliations is a key goal for such groups, alongside more contemporary motivations such as the desire to wage war against the "Western" and "Christian" occupation of Iraq or against those who launched attacks on the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Israeli security expert Giora Shamis believes Osama bin Laden's so-called "fatwas" and the thousands of documents placed on the Internet by al-Qaeda and similar groups even provide a basis to draw up a list of likely "historical targets" for attacks in or close to Europe. Turkey heads that list, followed by Spain. The next target could be Rome – the centre of power of Roman Catholicism – followed by Vienna, where al-Qaeda might attempt to avenge the aforementioned defeat of 1693.
According to Mr Shamis "Only now is the intelligence community beginning to search the Internet thoroughly for relevant information. Much has already been said there, quite openly." He adds that: "Curiously enough, the attacks in Madrid had already been announced in advance on the Web. A researcher at Norway's FFI defence institute came across the relevant document in December last year, but did nothing with the information."
Hans Jansen, a Dutch expert on the Arab World and Islam, also stresses that,
in addition to the more immediate issues on which al-Qaeda focuses, history
is a key factor in its philosophy. Asked about the possibility of Rome being
a future target, he replies: "I can well imagine that being the case because
there are certain statements – attributed to the Prophet Mohammed, who
died in the year 632 AD – in which the speaker says that Rome will fall.
The men who assassinated Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981 also spoke
of Rome being conquered in the name of Islam".
Sunanda Kisor Datta-Ray
Visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore
Iraq could explode again as soon as American troops have gone, because American administrator Paul Bremer seems to have learned nothing from the past. He is inviting disaster by defying the logic of numbers to placate US allies among Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbours and to contain Shi'ite Iran. No wonder Shi'ite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani looks to the United Nations for redress. A UN mandate might be the only way of averting another disaster.
Current wisdom - more propaganda than fact - is wrong on two counts. First, it attributes Shi'ite and Kurdish truculence only to former dictator Saddam Hussein's having brutalised both communities. Second, the Bush administration appears to believe that never before has the Middle East, not just Iraq, seen such a liberal democratic charter as the TAL, which comes into force on July 1.
To take the second fallacy first, the British beat the Americans by 80 years when they tried to saddle Iraqis with Westminster-style parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarchy. The 1925 constitution proclaimed that Iraqis had "confided ... a trust" in their foreign king, Faisal, who had been chased out of Syria and arrived from his European exile in a British gunboat. Though Britain's pro-consul, Sir Percy Cox, claimed that 99 per cent of Iraqis wanted Faisal, he timed the installation for 6am when there was hardly anyone around to object.
An Iraqi aspirant to the throne was seized and bundled off to Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was known then. The British also crushed a Shi'ite revolt against the infant, artificially created kingdom. They were desperate to secure the route to India as well as grab the oil that Iraq's Ottoman rulers had been negotiating to sell to the Dutch, Germans and Americans since 1906.
It is anyone's guess how many of the TAL's 25 signatories, hand-picked by Mr Bremer, can claim more convincing credentials than Faisal. Mr Bremer's ingenious system, which relies on "local caucuses" instead of elections, is even more arbitrary than the British-imposed constitution. That document theoretically vested power in parliament's elected lower house, because sovereignty "resides in the people" whom the British endowed with "complete freedom of conscience" as well as a glittering array of other democratic "rights".
But though 16 parliaments sat under the 1925 constitution and 58 cabinets came and went, they were all dummies. It was the boy king's uncle and regent who exercised all authority until the end in 1958.
It suited imperial Britain to back control by the Sunni minority. Hussein benefited from Britain's precedent, which the Americans are now following. Hence, no elections. Naturally, Ayatollah al-Sistani resents this denial of the majority's political rights. Hussein also followed the west in discriminating against the Kurds. The victorious first world war powers reneged at the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne on their pledge of Kurdish self -determination. Then, both the Nixon and first Bush administrations double -crossed the Kurds, encouraging them to revolt, then withholding support.
Political manipulations to prop up minority rule while promising fancy rights on paper can never last, let alone ensure stability. Syria's constitution outlaws torture, Jordan's guarantees freedom of expression and Egypt's forbids imprisonment without charges. Even the Revolutionary Command Council diktats, through which Hussein ruled for 23 years, upheld many libertarian rights in theory.
It is a truism that men make constitutions and not the other way round. Just
as the Iraqis gave short shrift to the 1925 document, they will reject the new
dispensation if it subordinates 60 per cent of the people to fewer than 20 per
cent. Asked about the wisdom of his decisions, Mr Bremer retorted, "I'll
let the historians worry about that!" The real worry is that the new imperium
is repeating all the blunders of the old. Only the UN can rescue Iraqis from
the consequences of US folly.
Peter Kammerer, in the South China Morning Post (March 16, 2004):
United States Democratic Party presidential contender John Kerry is under increasing pressure to prove his Vietnam war bravery, which has become the centrepiece of his election campaign.
Senator Kerry, the commanding officer of a US naval boat in the Mekong river delta for four months at the height of the war, rarely fails to invoke Vietnam, its legacy or his service record during campaign speeches for November's presidential election. His entourage includes fellow servicemen, who also appear in his election advertising.
Using war service as part of a wider debate on patriotism, the Democrats have questioned why President George W. Bush failed to serve in Vietnam, instead spending the conflict in Texas with the National Guard.
Yet Senator Kerry has resisted repeated calls, particularly from interest groups affiliated with Mr Bush's Republican Party, to release his wartime medical records to prove the circumstances surrounding the honours he received. Among them were three Purple Hearts for being wounded in action and two medals for valour, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star.
Internet petitions and postings elsewhere on the Web question how so many awards could have been given for such a short length of service in Vietnam - a third of the usual tour of duty.
Acclaimed historian Douglas Brinkley, the author of the only book about the senator from Massachusetts, Tour Of Duty: John Kerry at the Vietnam War, agreed last week Vietnam veterans were divided in their opinion of the presidential hopeful.
"A lot of veterans love Kerry and a lot dislike him," Dr Brinkley, the director of the Eisenhower Centre for American Studies at the University of New Orleans, said. "People who were in Vietnam in that period have different views of everything."
Those views were widened by the fact that after returning, Senator Kerry joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War and became a prominent spokesman for the cause.
Labelled a subversive by the FBI, he used his notoriety from the period to gain public office and a Senate seat in 1985.
Although Senator Kerry gave Dr Brinkley access to his extensive collection of letters, journals and notebooks written during and after the war, he did not let him see his medical records.
"If I have not seen his medical records - I don't think anybody has," the historian said.
"The person has to sign off on them. Kerry himself would have to allow them to be released," Dr Brinkley said.
He sees no significance in the fact that the senator received so many Purple Hearts, explaining that the awards were being given "left and right".
"People who earn medals earn medals," he said. "Some Purple Hearts were awarded for being in a more dangerous zone, but a piece of shrapnel goes into your arm and you get a Purple Heart. A few more inches and it could be an eye or a brain - that's how you get killed. The notion that it's not big enough is a little strange."
His assessment was backed by Vietnam war veteran Robert Kirkwood, who is now a commercial airline pilot.
Mr Kirkwood, in the air force during the conflict but assigned to the army's special forces as a forward air controller, said his section was "stingy with its Purple Hearts".
"Minor cuts and bruises just did not come under consideration," he said from his home in Colorado.
"However, I had an acquaintance at Phan Rang Air Base who was a pilot. He was rolling out from under his bed after a rocket attack and cut his arm on a piece of broken light bulb and went down to get a band-aid and he was given a Purple Heart.
"It really depends on the time and place and who was making those kinds of decisions."
He suggested, though, that Senator Kerry had served in the most dangerous location possible for navy service personnel.
The Mekong delta area was "as close to the front lines as you could get", said Mr Kirkwood, whose awards for the wars he served in include three Distinguished Flying Crosses and five meritorious service medals.
Senator Kerry enlisted in the navy in February 1966, a few months before graduating from Yale University.
In early 1968, he made a brief stop in Vietnam on the frigate USS Bridley during five months of service in the Pacific. Senator Kerry returned to the US for training to command a small boat deployed in Vietnam's rivers known as the Swift. He was promoted to lieutenant by June and at the end of the year was sent back to Vietnam and eventually commanded two Swifts.
Of the men who served at Senator Kerry's side, one of them - Steven Michael Gardner - has become a vocal critic.
He told the Boston Globe in a recent interview that Senator Kerry "absolutely did not want to engage the enemy when I was with him. He wouldn't go in there and search," he alleged. "That is why I have a negative viewpoint of John Kerry."
Christine Brennan, in USA Today (March 18, 2004):
The timing and the location of the upcoming Summer Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, could not be more ominous. Never has there been a modern Olympic Games situated in a worse spot at a worse time in history. There have been sadly ironic locations, such as Hitler's Berlin in 1936. There have been tragic locations, such as Munich in 1972. There have been controversial locations, such as Mexico City in 1968 and Moscow in 1980.
But thanks to al-Qaeda and friends, there has never been an Olympic location fraught with the potential for more terrible things to happen than Athens in August 2004.
It's sad but true: The upcoming Olympics are a home game for the terrorists.
Which means, of course, that these Summer Olympic Games, should they be held without incident, potentially could become the most meaningful sports event ever held on the planet.
"A journalist looking back on this 50 years from now might very correctly make such a defensible statement," said John Lucas, a noted Olympic historian and professor emeritus at Penn State. "For sporting reasons, for political reasons, (a successful Olympics in Athens) would be extraordinary."
For the leaders of the Athens Olympic effort -- the dedicated men and women who are furiously throwing brick upon mortar, figuratively if not literally, preparing for the event known as the largest peaceful gathering of the world -- the stakes have never been higher. They are racing against time just to make sure their earnest nation is ready for its grand moment on the world stage, then they get to hold their collective breath for 17 days as the best security detail nearly $ 1 billion can buy tries to prevent one nut, or a collection of nuts, from ruining the whole thing.
Ghada Karmi, a research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, and author of In Search of Fatima; in the Guardian (March 18, 2004):
It is not simply Israel's current hardline government that is to blame for the subjugation of Palestinians, but Zionism itself Israel's deputy defence minister, Ze'ev Boim, recently wondered whether there was a genetic defect that made Arabs terrorists. "What is it with Islam in general and the Palestinians in particular?" he asked on Israel army radio. "Is it some sort of cultural deficiency? Is it a genetic defect?"...
For those who have forgotten or never understood what Zionism meant in practice, the Israeli historian Benny Morris's latest revelations and comments - published in the Israeli daily Haaretz and in the Guardian - make salutary reading. They have raised a storm of controversy, perhaps because they were too honest about an ideology that some would rather keep hidden. Morris, who first exposed the dark circumstances of Israel's creation in his groundbreaking 1988 book on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, explains the Israeli project with a brutal candour few Zionists have been prepared to display.
Using Israeli state archives for his recently revised study, he reminds us that Israel was set up by expulsion, rape and massacre. The Jewish state could not have come into being without ethnic cleansing and, he asserts, more may be necessary in future to ensure its survival. This bald assertion should shock no one, for it is entirely consistent with the basic Zionist proposition of an ethnically pure state. Palestine's indigenous population was a clear impediment to this aim, which is why the concept of transfer was so central to Zionist thinking long before 1948 - advocated by Zionism's leaders and expressed through a series of specific expulsion plans from the mid-1930s onwards. These led inexorably to the 1948 Palestinian exodus and the refugee tragedy that persists today.
In an attempt to evade responsibility, Zionists have long tried to suggest that, but for the Arabs' "unprovoked" attack on Israel in 1948, there would be no refugees. This idea is both pernicious and false. Between January and the end of May 1948, a mere two weeks into the war, a third of the Palestinian population (my own family included) had left, most of them expelled. The "war" itself was more of a civil conflict and could not alone have accounted for the mass exodus. The Arab armies were notoriously ill-equipped and poorly trained and no match for the superior Zionist forces. Though ultimately ineffective, they came to defend the hapless Palestinians and to prevent their territories from being totally overrun....
Though creating Israel entailed Palestinian suffering, Morris argues, it was for a noble aim. That is why Zionism is still a dangerous idea: at its root is a conviction of moral rightness that justifies almost any act deemed necessary to preserve the Jewish state. If that means massive military - including nuclear - force, unsavoury alliances, theft of others' resources, aggression and occupation, the brutal crushing of all resistance - then so be it. No one should be under any illusion that Zionism is a spent force, regardless of current discourse about "post-Zionism". That a benign Zionism, sympathetic to Palestinians, also exists means little while these basic tenets remain.
We must thank Morris for disabusing us of such notions. But a project that is morally one-sided and can only survive through force and xenophobia has no long-term future. As he himself says: "Destruction could be the end of this process."
William Saletan, in Slate (March 19, 2004):
If you oppose George Bush's policies, or if you're supported by anybody who opposes George Bush's policies, you're anti-American.
That was the message of the 1988 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush, who suggested that his opponent from Massachusetts was against the Pledge of Allegiance. Now it's his son's campaign message, too.
Facts don't matter when you run on this theme. In June 1988, George H.W. Bush said of Michael Dukakis,"I'll never understand, when it came to his desk, why he vetoed a bill that called for the Pledge of Allegiance to be said in the schools of Massachusetts . I'll never understand it. We are one nation under God. Our kids should say the Pledge of Allegiance."
The bill Dukakis vetoed didn't" call for" the pledge to be said. It imposed criminal penalties on teachers who failed to start the day by leading students in the pledge. The Massachusetts Supreme Court told Dukakis it was unconstitutional. But never mind. According to Bush, Dukakis was against saying the pledge and being one nation under God.
History repeats itself. Last week, George W. Bush aired a TV ad in which the following charges appeared on the screen for nine seconds:"John Kerry's Plan: Weaken Fight Against Terrorists";"John Kerry's Plan: Delay Defending America."
What was Bush's evidence for the first charge? His campaign cited four Kerry quotes . In the first, Kerry called for"replacing the Patriot Act with a new law that protects our people and our liberties at the same time." In the second, Kerry called for"provisions to guarantee that there is not this blind spot in the American justice system that there is today under the Patriot Act." In the third, Kerry said,"I voted for the USA Patriot Act in the Senate right after 9/11 to advance our security at home, but I am concerned that Attorney General John Ashcroft's Justice Department is abusing the powers conferred on it by that act." In the fourth, Kerry said,"We are a nation of laws and liberties, not of a knock in the night."
Among those four statements, I count zero in favor of weakening the fight against terrorists and two in favor of protecting American security. But never mind. According to Bush,"Kerry's Plan" is"Weaken Fight Against Terrorists."
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?
Justice Anthony Scalia, in defense of his decision not to recuse himself from the case before the Supreme Court involving Vice President Dick Cheney (March 18, 2004):
... For five years or so, I have been going to Louisiana during the Court’s long December-January recess, to the duck-hunting camp of a friend whom I met through two hunting companions from Baton Rouge, one a dentist and the other a worker in the field of handicapped rehabilitation. The last three years, I have been accompanied on this trip by a son-in-law who lives near me. Our friend and host, Wallace Carline, has never, as far as I know, had business before this Court. He is not, as some reports have described him, an “energy industry executive” in the sense that summons up boardrooms of ExxonMobil or Con Edison. He runs his own company that provides services and equipment rental to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
During my December 2002 visit, I learned that Mr. Carline was an admirer of Vice President Cheney. Knowing that the Vice President, with whom I am well acquainted (from our years serving together in the Ford administration), is an enthusiastic duck-hunter, I asked whether Mr. Carline would like to invite him to our next year’s hunt. The answer was yes; I conveyed the invitation (with my own warm recommendation) in the spring of 2003 and received an acceptance (subject, of course, to any superseding demands on the Vice President’s time) in the summer. The Vice President said that if he did go, I would be welcome to fly down to Louisiana with him. (Because of national security requirements, of course, he must fly in a Government plane.) That invitation was later extended— if space was available—to my son-in-law and to a son who was joining the hunt for the first time; they accepted. The trip was set long before the Court granted certiorari in the present case, and indeed before the petition for certiorari had even been filed....
My recusal is required if, by reason of the actions de-scribed above, my “impartiality might reasonably be ques-tioned.” 28 U. S. C. §455(a). Why would that result follow from my being in a sizable group of persons, in a hunting camp with the Vice President, where I never hunted with him in the same blind or had other opportunity for private conversation? The only possibility is that it would suggest I am a friend of his. But while friendship is a ground for recusal of a Justice where the personal fortune or the personal freedom of the friend is at issue, it has tradition-ally not been a ground for recusal where official action is at issue, no matter how important the official action was to the ambitions or the reputation of the Government officer.
A rule that required Members of this Court to remove themselves from cases in which the official actions of friends were at issue would be utterly disabling. Many Justices have reached this Court precisely because they were friends of the incumbent President or other senior officials—and from the earliest days down to modern times Justices have had close personal relationships with the President and other officers of the Executive. John Quincy Adams hosted dinner parties featuring such luminaries as Chief Justice Marshall, Justices Johnson, Story, and Todd, Attorney General Wirt, and Daniel Webster. [Memoirs of John Quincy Adams 322–323 (C. Adams ed. 1969) (Diary Entry of Mar. 8, 1821).] Justice Harlan and his wife often “ ‘stopped in’ ” at the White House to see the Hayes family and pass a Sunday evening in a small group, visiting and singing hymns. [M. Harlan, Some Memories of a Long Life, 1854–1911, p. 99 (2001).] Justice Stone tossed around a medicine ball with members of the Hoover administration mornings outside the White House. [Memoirs of Herbert Hoover (1952).] Justice Douglas was a regular at President Franklin Roosevelt’s poker parties; Chief Justice Vinson played poker with President Truman.
[J. Simon, Independent Journey: The Life of William O. Douglas 220–221 (1980); D. McCullough, Truman 511 (1992).]A no-friends rule would have disqualified much of the Court in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, U. S. 579 (1952), the case that challenged President Truman’s seizure of the steel mills. Most of the Justices knew Truman well, and four had been appointed by him. A no-friends rule would surely have required Justice Holmes’s recusal in Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 U. S. 197 (1904), the case that challenged President Theodore Roosevelt’s trust-busting initiative. [See S. Novick, Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes 264 (1989) (“Holmes and Fanny dined at the White House every week or two . . .”).]
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....
From NPR's "All Things Considered" (March 16, 2004):
ROBERT SIEGEL: In this season of national argument over same-sex marriage, we're taking a look at two historical controversies over marriage and the law. Yesterday, we heard about polygamy and, today, racial intermarriage, or miscegenation as it was called. From the earliest Colonial times until the 1960s, the marriage of two people of different races was illegal in much of the country. Historian Peggy Pascoe, who teaches at the University of Oregon in Eugene , says laws against intermarriage were the longest-lasting form of legal racial discrimination in America .
Professor PEGGY PASCOE ( University of Oregon ): They were in effect in 30 states, every Southern state, the vast majority of Western states, some of the states on the border like Indiana . And they weren't declared unconstitutional till 1967, when the US Supreme Court finally issued its famous decision, Loving vs. Virginia .
SIEGEL: Until that time, there actually was a law in Virginia that made it illegal for a white and a black to marry.
Prof. PASCOE: There was. In all the states that had these laws, there were prohibitions on marriages between whites and blacks, but that was not the extent of the prohibitions. A dozen states prohibited whites from marrying Asian-Americans. A dozen more prohibited whites from marrying Indians. Nine states prohibited whites from marrying Filipinos. And even that wasn't the end of it. Arizona prohibited whites from marrying Hindus. My own state of Oregon prohibited whites from marrying native Hawaiians....SIEGEL: As you said, at least, I guess, 30 states has miscegenation laws that made this illegal, but that meant there always were states where it wasn't illegal.
Prof. PASCOE: Yes. And over time, what that meant was that couples who wanted to marry learned a sort of geography of evasion. And if they wanted to try to marry, they would learn which states they could go to and find licensing clerks that would issue them licenses, and then they would return to their own state. That did not always provide the protection that they wanted. It wouldn't necessarily defend them from an inheritance case or other kinds of legal challenges. But it did, in many cases at least, give them marriage licenses.
SIEGEL: This could ultimately serve as some historical precedent for what we're about to see if different states treat same-sex marriage very differently. Typically--I mean, do states set aside their own view of marriage in order to honor another state's laws, or typically not?
Prof. PASCOE: Well, in the case of miscegenation law, most state marriage codes had provisions that said that a state would ordinarily recognize as valid marriages made in other states. And a couple of states-- California was one of them--upheld that even when it came to miscegenation law. But the vast majority of states found ways to make exceptions to that policy.
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."
