Venezuela Takes on Exxon Mobil in Oil Play

By NATALIE OBIKO PEARSON
The Associated Press
Thu Mar 30, 2006

Venezuela had a blunt message this week for Exxon Mobil, one of the world's most powerful oil companies: Get off my crude-rich turf.

Venezuela is tightening its squeeze on the oil industry, telling oil companies to give the state a greater share of profits — or get out.

Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez on Wednesday said Exxon Mobil Corp. was one of the companies that would "prefer to leave ... rather than adjust" to recent policy changes.

"We said we don't want them to be here then," Ramirez told the state TV broadcaster adding, if "we need them, we'll call them."

Exxon Mobil indicated Thursday it had no plans to pull out.

"ExxonMobil de Venezuela continues to have a long-term perspective of its activities in Venezuela," it said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

The flap helped push the price of oil above $67 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Thursday as the market reacted to the latest sign of tighter state-control of energy around the globe.

Venezuela is taking on Big Oil at a time when rising oil prices, political instability in the Mideast and Nigeria and new buyers in Asia have put the world's fifth-largest oil exporter in a winning position.

After snubbing Exxon Mobil, Ramirez said Venezuela has other eager partners, including state companies from Russia, Iran, China, India, as well as traditional oil companies.

The new climate has given Venezuela the flexibility to diversify "away from Western investors and incorporate state-owned companies from allied countries ... more willing to abide by new, tighter terms," said Patrick Esteruelas, analyst at the Washington-based Eurasia Group.

The government has increasingly sought projects with state-controlled oil companies in friendly countries. Last year, Venezuela granted exclusive licensing rights to certify and quantify reserves in blocks in the Orinoco tar belt to seven companies, including China's CNPC, India's ONGC and Iran's Petropars. The only western oil major included was Spanish-Argentine company Repsol YPF.

The trend is driven by President Hugo Chavez's distaste for corporate multinationals, which he accuses of looting his country's oil wealth over the years. He enjoys strong support for his efforts to take more industry profits for use in social programs for the nation's poor.

Since taking office in 1999, his government has passed legislation requiring a majority government stake in all oil production projects, hiked taxes and royalties on oil companies, and begun to collect millions of dollars in what it claims are unpaid taxes from them.

On Thursday, congress approved new guidelines to turn 32 privately run oil fields over to state-controlled joint ventures.

Among the terms faced by companies like Royal Dutch Shell PLC and France's Total SA: a minimum 60 percent stake for the state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) in each field; PDVSA controlling the boards of the new joint ventures; and a jump in income tax rates from 34 percent to 50 percent and royalties from 16.6 percent to 33.3 percent. They will also see their potential drilling acreage slashed by almost two-thirds.

Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil has often been the lone challenger to the government.

It was the only company to reject the new joint-venture agreements. Instead, in December, it sold off its stake in the 15,000 barrel-a-day Quiamare-La Ceiba field to its partner Repsol YPF.

When other companies agreed without a struggle to a royalty hike in the Orinoco tar belt in 2004, Exxon Mobil had threatened international arbitration.

Since then, PDVSA has ousted Exxon Mobil from a multibillion-dollar (euro) petrochemicals project, claiming the company did not meet timetables for starting the project.

Experts say, however, that fears that Chavez, a close ally of Cuba's Fidel Castro, is seeking to drive out private investment are exaggerated because Venezuela needs the technological expertise of Western oil majors to develop its vast deposits in the Orinoco belt.

Few state oil companies have the expertise to upgrade the extra-heavy oil and tar-like bitumen found in the Orinoco into lighter, marketable oils.

Notably, Exxon Mobil continues to hold a 41.7 percent stake in the 120,000-barrel-day Cerro Negro heavy oil upgrading project in the Orinoco along with partners British Petroleum PLC and PDVSA.

It is also partnered with PetroCanada in the La Ceiba field, each holding a 50 percent stake.

Arab League futility

Boston Globe
March 30, 2006

THIS WEEK'S ARAB LEAGUE summit in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, appeared to validate the group's reputation for idle chatter and obtuse decisions.

If the site of the summit was not callous enough -- the host government is the perpetrator of an ongoing genocide in Darfur -- the participants made things worse by rejecting a proposal to supplement 7,000 ineffectual African Union monitors in Darfur with a substantial United Nations peacekeeping force. In so doing, the league's 22 members were accepting the cynical line of Sudan's genocidal ruler, Omar al-Bashir, who characterized the plan for a UN peacekeeping force in Darfur as a violation of Sudan's sovereignty.

This gesture of solidarity with the forces behind mass murder, systematic rape, and the ethnic cleansing of non-Arab African tribal groups in Darfur cast a pall on everything else that was said, or left unsaid, by the dignitaries -- mostly autocrats -- in attendance in Khartoum.

The summit's pledge of solidarity with the Palestinians, in conjunction with a repetition of the 2002 Arab League offer of peace with Israel in return for a withdrawal from all Arab lands, belongs under the rubric of idle chatter. The vapidity of the members' stance was evident in their refusal to increase last year's commitment to contribute $55 million per month to the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinians are asking for $170 million.

But the most dramatic -- and pathetic -- failing of the summit was its effort to address the twin specters of sectarian warfare and Iranian influence in Iraq. In a barely veiled lament at the prospect of US-Iranian talks about Iraq's future, the Arab League's secretary general, Amr Moussa, said: ''Any solution for the Iraqi problem cannot be reached without Arabs and Arab participation. Any result of consultations without Arab participation will be considered insufficient and will not lead to a solution."

This was a coded way of expressing deep Arab fears that the United States and Iran are preparing to subtract Iraq from the Arab world, allowing it to be absorbed into a swelling sphere of Iranian influence. At the summit's closing session, Iraq's foreign minister told the other Arab states that they shared the blame for what is happening today in Iraq because of their indifference to decades of Saddam Hussein's ''authoritarian rule and wars." And he rightly said they had an obligation now to help Iraq in ''isolating terrorism and drying up the sources that finance its activities."

It is in the interest of the Arab states to heed this plea, because the jihadists now wreaking havoc in Iraq will likely be coming after them next.

America’s Blinders

By Howard Zinn
The Progressive
April 2006 Issue

Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled?

The question is important because it might help us understand why Americans—members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen—rushed to declare their support as the President was sending troops halfway around the world to Iraq.

A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell’s presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk. In it, Powell confidently rattled off his “evidence”: satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare. The New York Times was breathless with admiration. The Washington Post editorial was titled “Irrefutable” and declared that after Powell’s talk “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against being deceived.

One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If we don’t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don’t know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.

But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the mendacity of our high officials.

We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn’t that Mexico “shed American blood upon the American soil,” but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to “civilize” the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Woodrow Wilson—so often characterized in our history books as an “idealist”—lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to “make the world safe for democracy,” when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.

Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was “a military target.”

Everyone lied about Vietnam—Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.

And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991—hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken over Iraq’s taking of
Kuwait?), rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could anyone listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the reasons for invading Iraq? Would we not instinctively rebel against the sacrifice of lives for oil?

A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against being deceived. It would make clear that there has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the United States. This thought startles most people, because it goes against everything we have been taught.

We have been led to believe that, from the beginning, as our Founding Fathers put it in the Preamble to the Constitution, it was “we the people” who established the new government after the Revolution. When the eminent historian Charles Beard suggested, a hundred years ago, that the Constitution represented not the working people, not the slaves, but the slaveholders, the merchants, the bondholders, he became the object of an indignant editorial in The New York Times.

Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn’t talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, “Father of the Constitution,” said, thirty years before Marx was born that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and those who did not.

Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like “national interest,” “national security,” and “national defense” as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that—not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor—is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.

If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there—the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be “checks and balances”—do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth. Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars.

The deeply ingrained belief—no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general—that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are compelled to “pledge allegiance” (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with “liberty and justice for all.”

And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” announcing that we are “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” There is also the unofficial national anthem “God Bless America,” and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one nation—just 5 percent of the world’s population—for his or her blessing.

If your starting point for evaluating the world around you is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then you are not likely to question the President when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values—democracy, liberty, and let’s not forget free enterprise—to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.

It becomes necessary then, if we are going to protect ourselves and our fellow citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for other people but for Americans too, that we face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest. We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation, and racism. We must face our record of imperial conquest, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not a history of which we can be proud.

Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted that belief in the minds of many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. At the end of World War II, Henry Luce, with an arrogance appropriate to the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, pronounced this “the American century,” saying that victory in the war gave the United States the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this notion. George Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, said that spreading liberty around the world was “the calling of our time.” Years before that, in 1993, President Bill Clinton, speaking at a West Point commencement, declared: “The values you learned here . . . will be able to spread throughout this country and throughout the world and give other people the opportunity to live as you have lived, to fulfill your God-given capacities.”

What is the idea of our moral superiority based on? Surely not on our behavior toward people in other parts of the world. Is it based on how well people in the United States live? The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked countries in terms of overall health performance, and the United States was thirty-seventh on the list, though it spends more per capita for health care than any other nation. One of five children in this, the richest country in the world, is born in poverty. There are more than forty countries that have better records on infant mortality. Cuba does better. And there is a sure sign of sickness in society when we lead the world in the number of people in prison—more than two million.

A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world. It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars and killers who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join the rest of the human race in the common cause of peace and justice.

Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.”

VIETNAM 2 PREFLIGHT CHECK

Andrew A. Beveridge
Professor of Sociology
Queens College and Grad Ctr CUNY

1. Cabal of oldsters who won't listen to outside advice? Check.
2. No understanding of ethnicities of the many locals? Check.
3. Imposing country boundaries drawn in Europe, not by the locals? Check.
4. Unshakeable faith in our superior technology? Check.
5. France secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
6. Russia secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
7. China secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
8. SecDef pushing a conflict the JCS never wanted? Check.
9. Fear we'll look bad if we back down now? Check.
10. Corrupt Texan in the WH? Check.
11. Land war in Asia? Check.
12. Right unhappy with outcome of previous war? Check.
13. Enemy easily moves in/out of neighboring countries? Check.
14. Soldiers about to be dosed with *our own* chemicals? Check.
15. Friendly fire problem ignored instead of solved? Check.
16. Anti-Americanism up sharply in Europe? Check.
17. B-52 bombers? Check.
18. Helicopters that clog up on the local dust? Check.
19. In-fighting among the branches of the military? Check.
20. Locals that cheer us by day, hate us by night? Check.
21. Local experts ignored? Check.
22. Local politicians ignored? Check.
23. Locals used to conflicts lasting longer than the USA has been a country? Check.
24. Against advice, Prez won't raise taxes to pay for war? Check.
25. Blue water navy ships operating in brown water? Check.
26. Use of nukes hinted at if things don't go our way? Check.
27. Unpopular war? Check.

VIETNAM 2 YOU ARE CLEARED TO TAXI

Pentagon To Test A Huge Conventional Bomb

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post
March 31, 2006

A huge mushroom cloud of dust is expected to rise over Nevada's desert in June when the Pentagon plans to detonate a gigantic 700-ton explosive -- the biggest open-air chemical blast ever at the Nevada Test Site -- as part of the research into developing weapons that can destroy deeply buried military targets, officials said yesterday.

The test, code-named "Divine Strake," will occur on June 2 about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas in a high desert valley bounded by mountains, according to Pentagon and Energy Department officials.

"This is the largest single explosive we could imagine doing," said James A. Tegnelia, director of the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is conducting the test.

The test is aimed at determining how well a massive conventional bomb would perform against fortified underground targets -- such as military headquarters, biological or chemical weapons stockpiles, and long-range missiles -- that the Pentagon says are proliferating among potential adversaries around the world.

Tegnelia said there is a range of technical hurdles to overcome. He suggested that big conventional bombs are unlikely to solve the overall problem of buried threats. "It's a lot easier to dig your tunnel 50 feet deeper" than to develop weapons that can destroy it, he told a meeting of defense reporters.

Such a bomb would be a conventional alternative to a nuclear weapon proposed by the Bush administration, which has run into opposition on Capitol Hill. The Pentagon for several years has sought funding for research into the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) -- also known as the "bunker buster" -- after the administration's 2001 Nuclear Posture Review stated that no weapon in the U.S. arsenal could threaten a growing number of buried targets. Congress, however, has repeatedly refused to grant funding for a study on a nuclear bunker buster, instead directing money toward conventional alternatives.

The June test will detonate 700 tons of heavy ammonium nitrate-fuel oil emulsion -- creating a blast equivalent to 593 tons of TNT -- in a 36-foot-deep hole near a tunnel in the center of the Nevada Test Site, according to official reports. It aims to allow scientists to model the type of ground shock that will be created, and to weigh the effectiveness of such a weapon against its collateral impact.

"To my knowledge, this will be the largest open-air chemical explosion that we've conducted," said Darwin Morgan, spokesman for the Energy Department's test site. Larger blasts have been carried out at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, including the nation's biggest open-air detonation, in 1985, a Pentagon spokeswoman said.

The blast is not likely to be felt or heard outside the 1,375-square-mile test site, and the cloud of dust is expected to dissipate quickly from view, Morgan said. "They don't think people will see it in the base camp on the south end of the test site," he said.

Officials took pains to differentiate between the June conventional experiment and past nuclear testing. "The U.S. has no plans to conduct a nuclear test. President Bush supports a continued moratorium on nuclear testing," said Irene Smith, a spokeswoman for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The Pentagon agency is charged with countering threats to the United States from chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons.

On a related topic, Tegnelia said the State Department and the Pentagon are developing a proposal for a $100 million effort to help Libya get rid of tons of mustard gas and some precursor chemicals being stored in the Libyan desert. "The Libyans requested some support" from the U.S. government, and a DTRA team has visited Libya to consider various options for eliminating the weapons, he said.

Iraq Cleric Will Not Read Bush Letter

An aide to Sistani said the Shiite was unhappy with what he saw as American meddling in Iraqi politics.
By Qassim Abdul-Zahra
Associated Press
March 31, 2006

BAGHDAD - A hand-delivered letter from President Bush to Iraq's supreme Shiite spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, sits unread and untranslated, a key aide to Sistani said yesterday.

The aide - who has never allowed use of his name in news reports, citing Sistani's refusal to make any public statements himself - said Sistani had laid the letter aside and did not ask for a translation because of increasing "unhappiness" over what senior Shiite leaders see as American meddling in Iraqi attempts to form their first permanent post-invasion government.

The aide said the person who delivered the Bush letter - he would not identify the messenger by name or nationality - said it carried Bush's thanks to Sistani for calling for calm among his followers and preventing the outbreak of civil war after a Shiite shrine was bombed late last month.

The messenger also was said to have explained that the letter reinforced the American position that Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite, should not be given a second term. Sistani has not publicly taken sides in the dispute, but rather has called for Shiite unity.

The United States was known to object to a second term for Jaafari but has never said so outright and in public.

But on Saturday, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad carried a similar letter from Bush to a meeting with Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of Iraq's largest Shiite political organization, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

The Sistani aide said Shiite displeasure with U.S. involvement was so deep that dignitaries in the holy city of Najaf refused to meet Khalilzad on Wednesday during ceremonies commemorating the death of Muhammad. The Afghan-born Khalilzad is a Sunni Muslim.

Elizabeth Colton, the U.S. Embassy spokeswoman, said Khalilzad had not sought any meetings and simply flew over Najaf and the nearby holy city of Karbala to witness the processions of Shiite faithful marking the day.

"The ambassador did a flyover to see people on the streets of Karbala and Najaf," Colton said. "The ambassador did not ask to see anyone and did not go into either city."

The United States is believed to oppose Jaafari because of his close ties and strong backing from radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has a thousands-strong heavily armed militia that was responsible for much of the violence that hit the country after the Feb. 22 bombing of an important Shiite shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad.

At a news conference yesterday, Jaafari said that he had met with Khalilzad a day earlier and that the U.S. ambassador denied remarks attributed to him about Jaafari's candidacy for a new term.

"I don't care much about these matters," Jaafari said. "I look at the Iraqi people and the democratic mechanisms."

At least 27 people died in violence yesterday, including a 4-year-old girl killed when a car bomb exploded near the Shiite Ali Basha mosque in Baghdad's eastern Kryaat neighborhood. Police Lt. Thaer Mahmoud said at least 10 bystanders were injured.

In Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, gunmen killed eight workers from the city power plant as they left work, Police Lt. Mahanad Khalid said.

The U.S. military yesterday reported two deaths. A soldier assigned to the Ninth Naval Construction Regiment died Tuesday from wounds sustained in fighting in Anbar province. An airman assigned to the 447th Air Expeditionary Group was killed yesterday near Baghdad. A fellow airman was injured when a roadside bomb exploded as they worked to disarm it, the Central Command reported.

The Cost Of Invading Iraq

Imponderables Meet Uncertainties
By Alan B. Krueger
New York Times
March 30, 2006

The question of whether it was worth invading Iraq is being asked with increasing frequency and fervency.

A Gallup poll this month found that 60 percent of Americans said they did not think it was worth going to war in Iraq, up from 29 percent at the start of the invasion in March 2003.

Fundamentally, deciding whether war is worth it involves weighing the benefits and costs, both tangible and intangible. The many estimates of the cost of the Iraq war that are available are uninformative absent a comparison with the likely benefits, or a comparison with the costs and benefits of the best alternative to invasion.

Unfortunately, cost-benefit comparisons of such weighty issues are more art than science. One problem is that the counterfactual situation — meaning the outcomes that would have occurred had another policy been pursued — cannot be known for sure. In addition, it is often unclear how to value the outcomes of the policy that is pursued.

One of the earliest cost-benefit comparisons was done by Steven J. Davis, Kevin M. Murphy and Robert H. Topel of the University of Chicago on the eve of the invasion in 2003. They explicitly considered a continued policy of containment — enforcing the no-fly zone and other operations to hem in Saddam Hussein — as an alternative to invasion and regime change. Assuming that containment and invasion would protect the United States equally well, the question of whether invasion is worth it turns on which policy is less costly, after discounting all likely future costs.

Allowing for a 3 percent chance that the Iraqi regime would evolve into a benign government in any future year and a 2 percent real interest rate, the economists reckoned that the cost of pursuing a containment strategy was $258 billion to $380 billion. "This dwarfs any reasonable estimate of U.S. war costs," they wrote at the time. Their anticipated price tag for the war, which they considered conservative, was $125 billion.

Professors Davis, Murphy and Topel have revised their figures in a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, "War in Iraq Versus Containment." Their estimated war costs have increased to a range of $410 billion to $630 billion, reflecting reality there.

William D. Nordhaus, an economist at Yale who warned in 2002 that past war cost forecasts had turned out to be too low, said the updated work is "economics at its best and worst — quantifying the almost-unquantifiable."

In the fog of war accounting, one thing is clear: all costs and benefits can be contested as wildly inaccurate — in either direction.

Consider what the cost of containment would have been had the United States not gone to war. The University of Chicago study now says it is in "the range of $350 billion to $700 billion." This range is arguably grossly inflated because it counts virtually all of the American military forces in the Middle East as dedicated to containing Iraq.

While containing Iraq was a central focus, these troops also served many other purposes. They conducted rescue operations in Somalia; performed humanitarian missions in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Jordan; responded to terrorist bombings in Nairobi and Tanzania; and were responsible for military activities in the five Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union.

Additionally, Iran was considered a greater potential long-term threat than Iraq, according to the official command history. It is hard to believe that the United States would not have a substantial military presence in the region even if Iraq was not regarded as a threat.

Ideally, only incremental costs would be counted in deciding whether something was worth it; that is, the extra costs of resources used to achieve an objective.

Another study of Iraq war costs, by Linda J. Bilmes of Harvard and Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia, comes up with an eye-catching estimate of $2.2 trillion, assuming the United States is no longer in Iraq in 2015. This is arguably too high for several reasons. First, it counts future interest payments on the debt created by military spending as well as the direct expenditures. (This is analogous to counting both the sale price of a house and the cost of future mortgage payments as the cost of buying the house.)

Second, it counts elevated military recruitment costs that incorporate a premium for higher risk of death or injury because of the war as well as the predicted direct cost of the deaths and injuries; this is double counting if the risk premium is adequate. Finally, it ascribes a big increase in the price of oil to the war, and, as a result, a loss to the American economy of almost half a trillion dollars.

A menu of cost estimates is thus available, depending on the counterfactual situation that one chooses.

"The question of whether the war was worth it hinges not on budget costs or economic costs," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who until recently was director of the Congressional Budget Office, "but on what do we gain in the way of genuine security and international standing." The costs, he said, were manageable.

The benefits, however, are much harder to quantify than the costs. To Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, "the benefits have been, in fact, very few, beyond the obvious one: the removal of Saddam Hussein." Offsetting that, he said the war "undermined our international legitimacy," "destroyed our credibility" and "tarnished our morality with Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo."

The Chicago economists argue that anticipated improvements in Iraq's living standard, once the country stabilizes, tip the balance in favor of invasion over containment, which in their view had costs that were "in the same ballpark." They also argue that the number of Iraqi fatalities since the invasion is probably no greater than would have been the case under Mr. Hussein.

But even if one accepts all of their estimates, their results implicitly raise another question: Why intervene in Iraq and not a country like Sudan, where genocide and oppression are at least as much an affront as they were in Iraq, and where the cost of intervention and prospects for improving lives may offer a better benefit-to-cost ratio than is likely in Iraq?

Credible estimation of counterfactual outcomes of alternative policies for cost-benefit comparisons has been a hallmark of modern economics. When it comes to judging whether war is worth it, however, cost-benefit analysis is little more than educated guessing by other means. But at least it provides a framework for where to put the guesses.

This is Alan B. Krueger's last Economic Scene column. He has written columns under that heading for the last six years. Dr. Krueger is Bendheim professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton.

General Voices Doubt On Iraq Files

By Demetri Sevastopulo, Washington
London Financial Times
March 30, 2006

The top US general this week suggested that the Pentagon had not adequately vetted documents that allege Russia passed intelligence about US troop movements to Saddam Hussein early on during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

On Tuesday – the same day that Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, asked Russia to investigate the claims – General Peter Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs, suggested that the US had unresolved questions about the claims contained in Iraqi documents captured after the invasion.

“We still don’t know whether or not the translation itself is 100 per cent accurate,” Gen Pace told reporters at the Pentagon. “We don’t know if this is real information or disinformation. There’s all kinds of pieces of this that need to be looked into.”

According to the documents included in the Iraqi Perspectives Project, a US military report on how the Iraqi leadership viewed the US invasion, the Russian ambassador to Iraq gave the former Iraqi president intelligence that came from US Central Command, which oversees the war in Iraq.

Bryan Whitman, Pentagon spokesman, on Wednesday said the Joint Forces Command, which compiled the report, had taken care with the translation, which he said was accurate.

Earlier this week Centcom said it could not vouch for the documents, and was not planning an investigation. Yesterday a spokeswoman said the previous statement had not been properly vetted, adding that an investigation “has not been opened at this time”. But she pointed to comments by Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, that the whole issue “merits looking into”.

Mr Whitman declined to say whether the Pentagon was probing the claims. Asked whether Ms Rice’s raising of the issue with Moscow meant she had also asked Mr Rumsfeld to investigate, he said: “I wouldn’t make that assumption.”

The Russian foreign ministry on Wednesday said the claims were a political attempt by the US to divert attention from the violence in Iraq. One official said the US had not previously raised the issue with Moscow.

Mr Rumsfeld on Tuesday said he was briefed on the report “many months” ago, but was not informed about the Russia claims. President George W. Bush was also presented with the report last year, according to Cobra II, a recently published book by Michael Gordon, a New York Times reporter, and retired General Bernard Trainor.

Bush Blames Saddam For Strife

Says violence is his 'legacy'
By Joseph Curl, The Washington Times
Washington Times
March 30, 2006

President Bush yesterday blamed sectarian violence in Iraq on Saddam Hussein and his legacy of oppression, but said freedom and democracy will win if all the opposing political factions can put aside their differences and form a government.

In his third speech this month to reassure Americans that his war plan is working, the president took on those who charge that the U.S. occupation of Iraq has created an unprecedented insurgency. In a question-and-answer period at Freedom House, a 65-year-old organization that supports expansion of freedom, Mr. Bush faced down critics.

"Today, some Americans ask whether removing Saddam caused the divisions and instability we're now seeing. In fact, much of the animosity and violence we now see is the legacy of Saddam Hussein," Mr. Bush said.

Iraq, he added, is "a nation that is physically and emotionally scarred by three decades of Saddam's tyranny, and these wounds will take time to heal."

He opposed the idea that sectarian violence was created solely by the U.S.-led war to oust the dictator, who he said aggravated divisions among rival sects in Iraq through deliberate policies of ethnic cleansing and targeted violence. The animosity that was created during three decades remains, and insurgents are using the same techniques to sow division, such as bombing mosques.

The president did not blame all of Iraq's strife on Saddam. He pushed for sectarian leaders to move forward with creating a unity government and taking responsibility for the nation's future.

"I also want the Iraqi people to hear: It's about time you get a unity government going. In other words, Americans understand you're newcomers to the political arena, but pretty soon it's time to shut her down and get governing," Mr. Bush said.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, accused Mr. Bush of sending "mixed messages."

"The president can give all the speeches he wants, but nothing will change the fact that his Iraq policy is wrong," Mr. Reid said. "Two weeks ago, he told the American people that Iraqis would control their country by the end of the year. But last week, he told us our troops would be there until at least 2009."

Mr. Bush said the U.S. must stay the course despite recent setbacks and outbursts of violence in Iraq.

Referring to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the president said winning in Iraq is crucial to homeland security. He took aim at Democratic opponents on Capitol Hill who advocate immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops.

"While it might sound attractive to some, it would have disastrous consequences for American security," he said.

In nearly every speech on Iraq since November, Mr. Bush acknowledged that "there will be more tough fighting ahead with difficult days that test the patience and the resolve of our country."

Blackwater USA Says It Can Supply Forces For Conflicts

By Bill Sizemore
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot
March 30, 2006

Stepping into a potential political minefield, Blackwater USA is offering itself up as an army for hire to police the world's trouble spots.

Cofer Black, vice chairman of the Moyock, N.C.-based private military company, told an international conference in Amman, Jordan, this week that Blackwater stands ready to help keep or restore the peace anywhere it is needed.

Such a role would be a quantum leap for Blackwater and raises a host of policy questions.

Until now, the eight-year-old company has confined itself to training military and police personnel and providing security guards for government and private clients. Under Black's proposal, it would take on an overt combat role.

"We're low-cost and fast," Black was quoted as saying. "The issue is, who's going to let us play on their team?"

Unlike national and multinational armies, which tend to get bogged down by political and logistical limitations, Black said, Blackwater could have a small, nimble, brigade-size force ready to move into a troubled region on short notice.

Black's remarks were reported by Defense News, a military publisher that sponsored the conference where he spoke, the Special Operations Forces Exhibition.

Chris Taylor, a vice president at Blackwater's Moyock headquarters, confirmed the account.

"A year ago or so, we realized that we could have a significant positive impact with a small, professional force in stability operations and peacekeeping operations," Taylor said.

Blackwater is no stranger to volatile situations. As a security subcontractor escorting a convoy in Iraq in 2004, the company attracted worldwide attention when four of its workers were killed, mutilated and hung from a bridge in Fallujah.

Blackwater, most of whose workers are former members of elite military units such as the Navy SEALs, now provides security for the U.S. ambassador to Iraq under a contract with the State Department.

The reconstruction of Iraq has been hampered by insurgent activity, Taylor said, and Blackwater has the expertise to quell insurgent attacks if invited by the Iraqi government.

"We clearly couldn't go into the whole country of Iraq," Taylor said. "But we might be able to go into a region or a city."

Another place where Blackwater could help restore order, Taylor said, is the Darfur region of Sudan, where millions have been killed or displaced by civil strife. The company could send troops under the control of the United Nations, NATO or the African Union, he said.

Taylor and Black said the company would undertake such a mission only with the approval of the U.S. government.

Peter Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has written a book on private military companies, said the concept of private armies engaging in counter-insurgency missions raises myriad questions about staffing standards, rules of engagement and accountability.

"No matter how you slice it, it's a private entity making decisions of a political nature," he said. "It gets dicey."

True Or Not, Report Of 'Massacre' Angers Iraqis

By Scott Peterson
Christian Science Monitor
March 29, 2006

BAGHDAD -- The public perceptions swirling around a "massacre" - as some Iraqi officials have charged - are the latest incident to stall the creation of Iraq's new government.

Did US forces attack a mosque in a Shiite district of Baghdad Sunday night, killing 17 unarmed worshippers, an act that Iraq's Shiite interior minister called a "horrible violation" that has dominated Iraqi TV and sparked a political outcry?

Or, did Iraqi special forces, backed up by US advisers, take on a "terrorist cell" at an office complex, kill 16 "insurgents," and free an Iraqi hostage - only to have Iraqi provocateurs, as top US commanders allege, "set the scene up" to look like an atrocity?

The truth may be the latest war casualty as perceptions shape Iraq's political reality, and the prevailing view of a bloody US raid is undermining US-backed efforts to form a coalition government, while boosting the influence of anti-US cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

"How could [Americans] come out of this mess?" asks Ghassan Atiyyah, head of the Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy, who was reached in London. "Sadr is becoming a strong force in Iraqi politics. When he was weak, they could not deal with him, and now he is strong."

"I very much appreciate what [US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad] is doing" to form a unity government, says Mr. Atiyyah. "It should have been done two and a half years ago, to balance these things."

Mr. Sadr conducted two popular revolts against US forces in 2004, and has become kingmaker by supporting Iraq's embattled Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, against efforts by Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and secular parties - as well as, reportedly, the US - to see him go.

Sadr's Mahdi Army militia - which controls the Mustafa Husseiniya raided by US and Iraqi forces Sunday, and is accused of sectarian killings in Baghdad that mostly target Sunni Arabs - can deploy immediately in their thousands, and are often allowed to work unchecked by Iraq's Shiite-dominated security forces.

Underscoring the significance of the raid, President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, vowed to oversee an investigation. A Husseiniyeh is a Shiite place for prayer and other religious purposes. In Iraq it is considered virtually the same as a mosque.

"It is very important to clarify - an investigation could help defuse tension," says Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish MP who noted that Shiites did not turn up for talks Monday to form the government.

"Always people like Moqtada and extremists will benefit from this in the street, they will get sympathy from ordinary people," says Mr. Othman. "The last three years many things like this have happened: [Americans] hit a wedding ceremony, or hit the wrong house, or get wrong information - some anti-American people want them to make mistakes, to build on that."

The deputy US commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, early Tuesday dismissed reports that a mosque had been hit, or that the 50 Iraqi Special Operations forces, backed up by 25 US advisers, had chosen the wrong target. Besides capturing some weaponry, they released an Iraqi dental technician who had been kidnapped 12 hours earlier.

Inside the religious complex, with its minaret, are series of rooms for teaching the Koran, a large prayer room, and Imam's quarters, as well as offices of Mr. Jafaari's Dawa Party, which were also raided. Even two days later, an Iraqi employee of the Monitor could see four places where the pockmarks of bullet holes coincided with bloodstains, and other evidence of killings at the place.

Iraqi units "told us point blank that this was not a mosque," said Lt. Gen. Chiarelli, noting that, on US military maps, the Mustafa Mosque was in fact six blocks north of their target. He said that Iraqi forces "did the fighting," and there was "gunfire from every room."

"After the fact someone went in and made the scene look different than it was. There's been huge misinformation," Chiarelli said. "I think the [anti-US] backlash has been caused by the folks who set the scene up."

That explanation did not wash Tuesday in the angry Ur neighborhood of northeast Baghdad, near the poor Shiite enclave of Sadr City, where witnesses and residents said the bloodshed has boosted their support of Sadr and his Mahdi Army.

"I need the government that I voted for to protect us, but they failed," says Souad Mohammad, the deputy director of a school, whose second-floor apartment, across the street from the mosque, is riven with holes from small-caliber US armor-piercing rounds.

"They came and killed the young people, and we want the Imam Mahdi Army to protect us, because they are from us, they are Iraqi people," says Mrs. Mohammad. "When the Mahdi Army is here, it's very quiet, no one is assassinated in this area, there are no car bombs, and at night there are checkpoints to protect us."

The popular view of US wrongdoing has been fed by the images on Al-Furat television - the station run by one of the most powerful Shiite parties in Iraq - of bags of explosives with wires poking out, that they allege US forces left behind.

The result has been a firestorm among the majority Shiite, which have borne the brunt of Sunni Arab-led insurgent attacks aimed at sparking a full-scale civil war, and who grate at US insistence on giving the minority Sunni Arabs a real political role.

Haidar al-Abbadi, an adviser to Jafaari, warned of "death squads working alongside US troops that execute people without any reason while they are praying," he told Al-Arabiya television.

True or not, that view is widely held. The US-Iraqi raid "means they are targeting Shiites, to stop the political process," says Jassim Mohamad Ali, whose face was scratched by jumping over a fence in the Mustafa compound, to hide from the raiders. "The only thing I witness from the Mahdi Army, they have honor and are loyal to this country, and they try to keep the Iraqi street clean," he says.

"People always say: The Americans never do these things, but when I saw them with helicopters and their Humvees and Bradleys, I am very sure now they are terrorists," says Mr. Ali, giving a stark opinion increasingly expressed on Iraqi airwaves following the raid. "We will fight terrorism, whether it is [extreme Sunni] Wahhabi or American."

The Last Helicopter

By Amir Taheri
Wall Street Journal
March 29, 2006

Hassan Abbasi has a dream -- a helicopter doing an arabesque in cloudy skies to avoid being shot at from the ground. On board are the last of the "fleeing Americans," forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of Islam) by "the Army of Muhammad." Presented by his friends as "The Dr. Kissinger of Islam," Mr. Abbasi is "professor of strategy" at the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard Corps University and, according to Tehran sources, the principal foreign policy voice in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's new radical administration.

For the past several weeks Mr. Abbasi has been addressing crowds of Guard and Baseej Mustadafin (Mobilization of the Dispossessed) officers in Tehran with a simple theme: The U.S. does not have the stomach for a long conflict and will soon revert to its traditional policy of "running away," leaving Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed the whole of the Middle East, to be reshaped by Iran and its regional allies.

To hear Mr. Abbasi tell it the entire recent history of the U.S. could be narrated with the help of the image of "the last helicopter." It was that image in Saigon that concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian desert, leaving behind the charred corpses of eight American soldiers. Under Ronald Reagan the helicopters carried the bodies of 241 Marines murdered in their sleep in a Hezbollah suicide attack. Under the first President Bush, the helicopter flew from Safwan, in southern Iraq, with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf aboard, leaving behind Saddam Hussein's generals, who could not believe why they had been allowed live to fight their domestic foes, and America, another day. Bill Clinton's helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu and delivering 16 American soldiers into the hands of a murderous crowd.

According to this theory, President George W. Bush is an "aberration," a leader out of sync with his nation's character and no more than a brief nightmare for those who oppose the creation of an "American Middle East." Messrs. Abbasi and Ahmadinejad have concluded that there will be no helicopter as long as George W. Bush is in the White House. But they believe that whoever succeeds him, Democrat or Republican, will revive the helicopter image to extricate the U.S. from a complex situation that few Americans appear to understand.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's defiant rhetoric is based on a strategy known in Middle Eastern capitals as "waiting Bush out." "We are sure the U.S. will return to saner policies," says Manuchehr Motakki, Iran's new Foreign Minister.

Mr. Ahmadinejad believes that the world is heading for a clash of civilizations with the Middle East as the main battlefield. In that clash Iran will lead the Muslim world against the "Crusader-Zionist camp" led by America. Mr. Bush might have led the U.S. into "a brief moment of triumph." But the U.S. is a "sunset" (ofuli) power while Iran is a sunrise (tolu'ee) one and, once Mr. Bush is gone, a future president would admit defeat and order a retreat as all of Mr. Bush's predecessors have done since Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Ahmadinejad also notes that Iran has just "reached the Mediterranean" thanks to its strong presence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. He used that message to convince Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to adopt a defiant position vis-à-vis the U.N. investigation of the murder of Rafiq Hariri, a former prime minister of Lebanon. His argument was that once Mr. Bush is gone, the U.N., too, will revert to its traditional lethargy. "They can pass resolutions until they are blue in the face," Mr. Ahmadinejad told a gathering of Hezbollah, Hamas and other radical Arab leaders in Tehran last month.

According to sources in Tehran and Damascus, Mr. Assad had pondered the option of "doing a Gadhafi" by toning down his regime's anti-American posture. Since last February, however, he has revived Syria's militant rhetoric and dismissed those who advocated a rapprochement with Washington. Iran has rewarded him with a set of cut-price oil, soft loans and grants totaling $1.2 billion. In response Syria has increased its support for terrorists going to fight in Iraq and revived its network of agents in Lebanon, in a bid to frustrate that country's democratic ambitions.

It is not only in Tehran and Damascus that the game of "waiting Bush out" is played with determination. In recent visits to several regional capitals, this writer was struck by the popularity of this new game from Islamabad to Rabat. The general assumption is that Mr. Bush's plan to help democratize the heartland of Islam is fading under an avalanche of partisan attacks inside the U.S. The effect of this assumption can be witnessed everywhere.

In Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf has shelved his plan, forged under pressure from Washington, to foster a popular front to fight terrorism by lifting restrictions against the country's major political parties and allowing their exiled leaders to return. There is every indication that next year's elections will be choreographed to prevent the emergence of an effective opposition. In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, arguably the most pro-American leader in the region, is cautiously shaping his post-Bush strategy by courting Tehran and playing the Pushtun ethnic card against his rivals.

In Turkey, the "moderate" Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is slowly but surely putting the democratization process into reverse gear. With the post-Bush era in mind, Mr. Erdogan has started a purge of the judiciary and a transfer of religious endowments to sections of the private sector controlled by his party's supporters. There are fears that next year's general election would not take place on a level playing field.

Even in Iraq the sentiment that the U.S. will not remain as committed as it has been under Mr. Bush is producing strange results. While Shiite politicians are rushing to Tehran to seek a reinsurance policy, some Sunni leaders are having second thoughts about their decision to join the democratization process. "What happens after Bush?" demands Salih al-Mutlak, a rising star of Iraqi Sunni leaders. The Iraqi Kurds have clearly decided to slow down all measures that would bind them closer to the Iraqi state. Again, they claim that they have to "take precautions in case the Americans run away."

There are more signs that the initial excitement created by Mr. Bush's democratization project may be on the wane. Saudi Arabia has put its national dialogue program on hold and has decided to focus on economic rather than political reform. In Bahrain, too, the political reform machine has been put into rear-gear, while in Qatar all talk of a new democratic constitution to set up a constitutional monarchy has subsided. In Jordan the security services are making a spectacular comeback, putting an end to a brief moment of hopes for reform. As for Egypt, Hosni Mubarak has decided to indefinitely postpone local elections, a clear sign that the Bush-inspired scenario is in trouble. Tunisia and Morocco, too, have joined the game by stopping much-advertised reform projects while Islamist radicals are regrouping and testing the waters at all levels.

But how valid is the assumption that Mr. Bush is an aberration and that his successor will "run away"? It was to find answers that this writer spent several days in the U.S., especially Washington and New York, meeting ordinary Americans and senior leaders, including potential presidential candidates from both parties. While Mr. Bush's approval ratings, now in free fall, and the increasingly bitter American debate on Iraq may lend some credence to the "helicopter" theory, I found no evidence that anyone in the American leadership elite supported a cut-and-run strategy.

The reason was that almost all realized that the 9/11 attacks have changed the way most Americans see the world and their own place in it. Running away from Saigon, the Iranian desert, Beirut, Safwan and Mogadishu was not hard to sell to the average American, because he was sure that the story would end there; the enemies left behind would not pursue their campaign within the U.S. itself. The enemies that America is now facing in the jihadist archipelago, however, are dedicated to the destruction of the U.S. as the world knows it today.

Those who have based their strategy on waiting Mr. Bush out may find to their cost that they have, once again, misread not only American politics but the realities of a world far more complex than it was even a decade ago. Mr. Bush may be a uniquely decisive, some might say reckless, leader. But a visitor to the U.S. soon finds out that he represents the American mood much more than the polls suggest.

Mr. Taheri is author of "L'Irak: Le Dessous Des Cartes" (Editions Complexe, 2002).

Rumsfeld: U.S. Failing In Battle Of Ideas

He said the government was doing a poor job of countering ideological support for terrorism.
By Associated Press
March 28, 2006

CARLISLE, Pa. - The United States is faring poorly in its effort to counter ideological support for terrorism, in part because the government does not communicate effectively, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday.

Rumsfeld made the remark in response to a question from a member of his audience at the Army War College, where he delivered a speech on the challenges facing the country in fighting a global war on terrorism.

"If I were grading, I would say we probably deserve a D or a D-plus as a country as to how well we're doing in the battle of ideas that's taking place in the world today," Rumsfeld told his questioner. "I'm not going to suggest that it's easy, but we have not found the formula as a country" for countering the extremists' message.

Rumsfeld's audience consisted of more than 300 War College students and faculty members.

He said the al-Qaeda terrorist network and affiliated Islamic extremists were the most brutal enemies the United States had ever seen.

"They currently lack only the means - not the desire - to kill, murder millions of innocent people with weapons vastly more powerful than boarding passes and box cutters," he said, referring to the terrorists who hijacked the airliners Sept. 11, 2001.

Earlier in the day he stopped in Shanksville, Pa., to see for the first time the place where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field on Sept. 11, 2001, killing all 40 passengers and crew and four hijackers shortly after planes also crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In his speech at the college, Rumsfeld described the Shanksville site as a place where "a group of ordinary airline passengers gave their lives in extraordinary defiance of foreign hijackers and in defense of our country's capital."

U.S. Is Not Probing Iraqi Leak Claims

By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post Staff Writer
Washington Post
March 28, 2006

The U.S. military's Central Command said yesterday it has not opened an investigation into whether sources inside the command leaked details of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq to Russian officials, and distanced itself from captured Iraqi documents that contain the allegations.

A U.S. military study released Friday quoted two Iraqi documents that described how Russian officials -- drawing on "their sources inside the American Central Command in Doha" -- provided intelligence on U.S. troop movements and war plans to Saddam Hussein as U.S. forces attacked in March and April 2003.

A Central Command official said the command takes "all matters of operational security seriously" but was not probing the allegations.

"Centcom has not opened an investigation at this time," said Capt. Christopher Augustine, a spokesman for the Tampa-based command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East and other areas.

In e-mailed statements in response to questions, Centcom cast doubt upon the validity of the captured Iraqi documents: "It's important to remember that the information came from an Iraqi intelligence report.

"Central command does not vouch for the document's accuracy or authenticity," the statement said.

During the buildup of U.S. forces in Kuwait before the invasion of Iraq, Centcom noted, speculation was widespread about "what might or might not be planned."

Such views contrast with those of the authors of the 210-page Iraqi Perspectives Project study released Friday by the U.S. Joint Forces Command in Norfolk. They said they believe the Iraqi documents are authentic. Retired Lt. Col. Kevin M. Woods, the project director, said he had "no reason to doubt the Iraqi documents."

On Saturday, Russia's foreign intelligence service called the allegations in the documents "baseless accusations" and "fabrications," and denied that Russian officials gave Hussein information on the U.S. military operations in Iraq.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in a television interview Sunday that the Bush administration would take "a real hard look at the documents and then raise it with the Russian government."

Yesterday, Central Command indicated that it would defer to State on the matter. "According to Secretary of State Rice, the State Department will address the issue through appropriate channels," its statement said.

Augustine, the Central Command spokesman, said no one in his office knew of the existence of the Iraqi documents before the study's release on Friday, and that it was "highly possible" the military released them without prior vetting by Central Command.

Unfair, Unbalanced Channels

Despite U.S. efforts to promote journalistic standards in Iraq, sectarian divisions are bleeding over onto a dozen TV stations.
By Louise Roug, Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
March 28, 2006

BAGHDAD — The Bush administration has poured millions of dollars into creating Western-style news media in Iraq, backing at least two television channels as well as training programs for Iraqi journalists on balance and ethics.

The effort has helped launch more than a dozen Iraqi channels. But the result is hardly what the administration set out to accomplish. Most of the channels are increasingly sectarian and often appear to be inflaming the country's tensions, critics say.

The result was highly visible Sunday and Monday as the state-owned Al Iraqiya station interrupted its regular schedule to broadcast nonstop footage of bloodied corpses at what it said was a Baghdad mosque.

U.S. and Iraqi forces had killed at least 16 people Sunday evening in what Americans said was a shootout with militants. On Al Iraqiya, the raid was portrayed as the killing of unarmed worshipers in a Shiite Muslim mosque. Between interviews with Shiite politicians criticizing the Americans, the camera lingered on the dead and the grieving relatives.

The channel was created by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority as an experiment in public broadcasting. It was later turned over to the Iraqi government, but is now widely viewed as sectarian.

"It was supposed to be fair, and address all the people of Iraq, but so far it hasn't succeeded in achieving this unique goal," said Mohammad Shaboot, editor of the state-run Al Sabah daily. "No one has invested in a real, nationwide Iraqi channel for all Iraqis."

Homebound because of violence and curfews, Iraqis watch their world through the kaleidoscope of satellite TV. But channel surfing Iraqi-style often offers views of the country through a sectarian lens.

Click the remote, and on one channel, the anchor refers to the Sunni-led insurgency as the "honorable resistance" as images of wounded Iraqis and aggressive U.S. soldiers flash on screen.

Click the remote again, and the insurgents are described as terrorists and the speakers praise crackdowns by the Shiite-led government.

Click again, and the insurgency might well not exist.

Until the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the two governmentsanctioned channels offered only presidential propaganda and patriotic tunes.

The toppling of former President Saddam Hussein's regime, however, prompted a TV revolution and the launch of the more than a dozen Iraqi channels. They lure viewers with popular Iraqi-made dramas such as the Sopranos-style gangster show "Departures," the irreverent "Saturday Night Live"-like "Caricature" and a host of reality TV and makeover shows.

But while escapist entertainment flourished, news programming proved more problematic.

The coverage in the aftermath of the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, an attack that brought the country close to civil war, was particularly incendiary.

Channels with ties to Sunni Arabs such as Baghdad TV — headed by former Baath Party member Saad Bazzaz and run by the Iraqi Islamic Party, the main Sunni political group — highlighted the suffering of Sunnis in reprisal attacks.

Stations run by Shiites, such as Al Furat and the government's Al Iraqiya, focused on the damage to the shrine and the suffering of Shiites under Hussein.

"Al Furat was pouring petrol on the fire, and Baghdad TV was doing the same thing on the other side," said Shaboot, the newspaper editor.

On Baghdad TV, Sunni studio hosts took calls from the audience, with some callers encouraging the audience to form a Sunni militia to counter the so-called Shiite militia.

Al Furat, backed by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq — the main Shiite political party — meanwhile was airing slogans demanding that Shiites stand up for their rights.

Al Iraqiya initially lacked credibility because of its American origins. Now some Shiites are critical of its Shiite focus and obsequious coverage of the Shiite-led government.

"When something happens in [Shiite-dominated] Karbala or Kadhimiya, we see that there is full coverage," said Ahmed Hussein, a 33-year-old Shiite businessman. "But when something happens in [the largely Sunni city of] Fallouja, there is not that much coverage, so we hear the Sunnis ask, 'Why?' "

Other channels are even more sectarian in their coverage.

On a recent day, amid kids' cartoons, Lebanese pop music videos and reruns of old Egyptian movies, a viewer could watch Al Furat's female news anchor, dressed in black hijab and abaya, introduce a speech by the leader of the largest Shiite party about Shiite families displaced by sectarian violence.

After the news, a montage showed worshipers kissing the walls of the Shiite holy shrines in Najaf and Karbala as a singer recited religious songs.

Meanwhile, on Baghdad TV, known as "Baathist TV" among some Shiites who criticize its pro-Sunni agenda, an Indonesian singer was wooing his audience from the stage, bathed in disco lights, followed by a corpulent host wearing a suit and a sky blue tie talking with a prominent Sunni cleric by phone. The program, "Under the Shadow of Sharia," dealt with questions about how to live according to religious edicts.

Farther along the spectrum, Al Rafidain showed a series of vox pop interviews. Everyone on the Arab street held the same view:

"The occupiers came to destroy us," said one man.

"The occupation cannot last," said another. "By the will of God, we will get rid of them."

On Baghdadia, a moderate Sunni channel, the anchor was delivering the top news of the day: "President Bush confesses that occupying Iraq is a very difficult task."

News directors across the political spectrum defend their own coverage while deriding their competitors as sectarian. Ahmed Rushdi, the news director of Baghdad TV, said that unlike state-controlled Al Iraqiya, his channel had no sectarian bias — even though it's backed by a major Sunni political group.

"We are always showing the facts as they are," he said.

Baghdad TV has no correspondents in either of the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, which Rushdi chalked up to Baghdad TV's being "new in the business" and still recruiting journalists around the country.

Even sports coverage has a political bent.

"We concentrate on sport stars who were oppressed during Saddam's time," said Muhsin Fasani of Al Furat, which is aimed at religiously conservative Shiites.

On the U.S.-backed channel Al Hurra, or "the Free One," a television host in a crisp blue suit profiled a Syrian dissident. "An eye on democracy opens the eye on freedom," one guest said. The channel carries most speeches by Bush in addition to a youth-oriented mix of entertainment and news.

Despite U.S. efforts, many educated Iraqis now prefer the slick, well-funded Persian Gulf-based stations such as Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera, often criticized by the U.S. government for being anti-American and pro-insurgency, because they focus on regional economic and environmental issues instead of just daily violence.

Hussein, the Shiite businessman, said he even preferred the Arabic-language version of the Discovery Channel to the Iraqi networks. "They like to analyze problems and find solutions."

While the Bush administration has been touting the proliferation of media outlets in the country as an example of newfound freedoms, some Iraqis are tuning out, exercising democracy by remote control.

"It's a luxury now to have different channels," Shaboot said. Iraqis "are hungry for it, but I'm not sure they are happy with it."

Rice To Ask Russia About Report That It Gave Iraq Data

By Steven R. Weisman
New York Times
March 27, 2006

WASHINGTON, March 26 — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday that the United States would seek clarification from Russia of an American military report that it had helped pass information to Iraq before the 2003 invasion, but she declined to make any specific allegations about Russian involvement.

"I don't have any reason to doubt or confirm the report at this point," Ms. Rice said on "Fox News Sunday." "I do think we have to look at the documents and look very carefully."

She added that the administration would "take very seriously any suggestion that a foreign government may have passed information to the Iraqis" before the invasion and that "we will raise it with the Russian government." She said she hoped that "the Russian government would take seriously any such charges."

A military report released Friday said that captured Iraqi documents described a Russian spy operation aimed at the United States Central Command and that information on American war plans and troop movements was passed to Iraq through the Russian ambassador in Baghdad.

On Saturday, Russian foreign intelligence services denied that American military secrets had been passed to Iraq.

On "Fox News Sunday" and on the NBC program "Meet the Press" Ms. Rice said it would be too early to jump to the conclusion that if information had been passed on to Saddam Hussein's government, it was done at the direction of the leadership in Moscow.

The military study said that some information Iraq had obtained from Russian sources was false, raising the possibility that it might have been part of a deliberate American effort to fool or demoralize Iraqi leaders. Ms. Rice said she did not know if any leaked information might have been part of a "disinformation" campaign.

"I don't want to jump out ahead and start making accusations about what the Russians may or may not have known," she said.

Bush Was Set On Path To War, Memo By British Adviser Says

By Don Van Natta Jr.
New York Times
March 27, 2006

LONDON — In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush's public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war.

But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

"Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.

"The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin."

The timetable came at an important diplomatic moment. Five days after the Bush-Blair meeting, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was scheduled to appear before the United Nations to present the American evidence that Iraq posed a threat to world security by hiding unconventional weapons.

Although the United States and Britain aggressively sought a second United Nations resolution against Iraq — which they failed to obtain — the president said repeatedly that he did not believe he needed it for an invasion.

Stamped "extremely sensitive," the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair's most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book "Lawless World," which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands. In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast several excerpts from the memo.

Since then, The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president's sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.

The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

Those proposals were first reported last month in the British press, but the memo does not make clear whether they reflected Mr. Bush's extemporaneous suggestions, or were elements of the government's plan.

Consistent Remarks

Two senior British officials confirmed the authenticity of the memo, but declined to talk further about it, citing Britain's Official Secrets Act, which made it illegal to divulge classified information. But one of them said, "In all of this discussion during the run-up to the Iraq war, it is obvious that viewing a snapshot at a certain point in time gives only a partial view of the decision-making process."

On Sunday, Frederick Jones, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said the president's public comments were consistent with his private remarks made to Mr. Blair. "While the use of force was a last option, we recognized that it might be necessary and were planning accordingly," Mr. Jones said.

"The public record at the time, including numerous statements by the President, makes clear that the administration was continuing to pursue a diplomatic solution into 2003," he said. "Saddam Hussein was given every opportunity to comply, but he chose continued defiance, even after being given one final opportunity to comply or face serious consequences. Our public and private comments are fully consistent."

The January 2003 memo is the latest in a series of secret memos produced by top aides to Mr. Blair that summarize private discussions between the president and the prime minister. Another group of British memos, including the so-called Downing Street memo written in July 2002, showed that some senior British officials had been concerned that the United States was determined to invade Iraq, and that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" by the Bush administration to fit its desire to go to war.

The latest memo is striking in its characterization of frank, almost casual, conversation by Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair about the most serious subjects. At one point, the leaders swapped ideas for a postwar Iraqi government. "As for the future government of Iraq, people would find it very odd if we handed it over to another dictator," the prime minister is quoted as saying.

"Bush agreed," Mr. Manning wrote. This exchange, like most of the quotations in this article, have not been previously reported.

Mr. Bush was accompanied at the meeting by Condoleezza Rice, who was then the national security adviser; Dan Fried, a senior aide to Ms. Rice; and Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff. Along with Mr. Manning, Mr. Blair was joined by two other senior aides: Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, and Matthew Rycroft, a foreign policy aide and the author of the Downing Street memo.

By late January 2003, United Nations inspectors had spent six weeks in Iraq hunting for weapons under the auspices of Security Council Resolution 1441, which authorized "serious consequences" if Iraq voluntarily failed to disarm. Led by Hans Blix, the inspectors had reported little cooperation from Mr. Hussein, and no success finding any unconventional weapons.

At their meeting, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair candidly expressed their doubts that chemical, biological or nuclear weapons would be found in Iraq in the coming weeks, the memo said. The president spoke as if an invasion was unavoidable. The two leaders discussed a timetable for the war, details of the military campaign and plans for the aftermath of the war.

Discussing Provocation

Without much elaboration, the memo also says the president raised three possible ways of provoking a confrontation. Since they were first reported last month, neither the White House nor the British government has discussed them.

"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

It also described the president as saying, "The U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam's W.M.D," referring to weapons of mass destruction.

A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Mr. Blair responded to the idea.

Mr. Sands first reported the proposals in his book, although he did not use any direct quotations from the memo. He is a professor of international law at University College of London and the founding member of the Matrix law office in London, where the prime minister's wife, Cherie Blair, is a partner.

Mr. Jones, the National Security Council spokesman, declined to discuss the proposals, saying, "We are not going to get into discussing private discussions of the two leaders."

At several points during the meeting between Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair, there was palpable tension over finding a legitimate legal trigger for going to war that would be acceptable to other nations, the memo said. The prime minister was quoted as saying it was essential for both countries to lobby for a second United Nations resolution against Iraq, because it would serve as "an insurance policy against the unexpected."

The memo said Mr. Blair told Mr. Bush, "If anything went wrong with the military campaign, or if Saddam increased the stakes by burning the oil wells, killing children or fomenting internal divisions within Iraq, a second resolution would give us international cover, especially with the Arabs."

Running Out of Time

Mr. Bush agreed that the two countries should attempt to get a second resolution, but he added that time was running out. "The U.S. would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would twist arms and even threaten," Mr. Bush was paraphrased in the memo as saying.

The document added, "But he had to say that if we ultimately failed, military action would follow anyway."

The leaders agreed that three weeks remained to obtain a second United Nations Security Council resolution before military commanders would need to begin preparing for an invasion.

Summarizing statements by the president, the memo says: "The air campaign would probably last four days, during which some 1,500 targets would be hit. Great care would be taken to avoid hitting innocent civilians. Bush thought the impact of the air onslaught would ensure the early collapse of Saddam's regime. Given this military timetable, we needed to go for a second resolution as soon as possible. This probably meant after Blix's next report to the Security Council in mid-February."

Mr. Blair was described as responding that both countries would make clear that a second resolution amounted to "Saddam's final opportunity." The memo described Mr. Blair as saying: "We had been very patient. Now we should be saying that the crisis must be resolved in weeks, not months."

It reported: "Bush agreed. He commented that he was not itching to go to war, but we could not allow Saddam to go on playing with us. At some point, probably when we had passed the second resolutions — assuming we did — we should warn Saddam that he had a week to leave. We should notify the media too. We would then have a clear field if Saddam refused to go."

Mr. Bush devoted much of the meeting to outlining the military strategy. The president, the memo says, said the planned air campaign "would destroy Saddam's command and control quickly." It also said that he expected Iraq's army to "fold very quickly." He also is reported as telling the prime minister that the Republican Guard would be "decimated by the bombing."

Despite his optimism, Mr. Bush said he was aware that "there were uncertainties and risks," the memo says, and it goes on, "As far as destroying the oil wells were concerned, the U.S. was well equipped to repair them quickly, although this would be easier in the south of Iraq than in the north."

The two men briefly discussed plans for a post-Hussein Iraqi government. "The prime minister asked about aftermath planning," the memo says. "Condi Rice said that a great deal of work was now in hand.

Referring to the Defense Department, it said: "A planning cell in D.O.D. was looking at all aspects and would deploy to Iraq to direct operations as soon as the military action was over. Bush said that a great deal of detailed planning had been done on supplying the Iraqi people with food and medicine."

Planning for After the War

The leaders then looked beyond the war, imagining the transition from Mr. Hussein's rule to a new government. Immediately after the war, a military occupation would be put in place for an unknown period of time, the president was described as saying. He spoke of the "dilemma of managing the transition to the civil administration," the memo says.

The document concludes with Mr. Manning still holding out a last-minute hope of inspectors finding weapons in Iraq, or even Mr. Hussein voluntarily leaving Iraq. But Mr. Manning wrote that he was concerned this could not be accomplished by Mr. Bush's timeline for war.

"This makes the timing very tight," he wrote. "We therefore need to stay closely alongside Blix, do all we can to help the inspectors make a significant find, and work hard on the other members of the Security Council to accept the noncooperation case so that we can secure the minimum nine votes when we need them, probably the end of February."

At a White House news conference following the closed-door session, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair said "the crisis" had to be resolved in a timely manner. "Saddam Hussein is not disarming," the president told reporters. "He is a danger to the world. He must disarm. And that's why I have constantly said — and the prime minister has constantly said — this issue will come to a head in a matter of weeks, not months."

Despite intense lobbying by the United States and Britain, a second United Nations resolution was not obtained. The American-led military coalition invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, nine days after the target date set by the president on that late January day at the White House.

So pro-Israel that it hurts

By Daniel Levy
Haaretz
23/03/2006

The new John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt study of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" should serve as a wake-up call, on both sides of the ocean. The most obvious and eye-catching reflection is the fact that it is authored by two respected academics and carries the imprimatur of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. The tone of the report is harsh. It is jarring for a self-critical Israeli, too. It lacks finesse and nuance when it looks at the alphabet soup of the American-Jewish organizational world and how the Lobby interacts with both the Israeli establishment and the wider right-wing echo chamber.

It sometimes takes AIPAC omnipotence too much at face value and disregards key moments - such as the Bush senior/Baker loan guarantees episode and Clinton's showdown with Netanyahu over the Wye River Agreement. The study largely ignores AIPAC run-ins with more dovish Israeli administrations, most notably when it undermined Yitzhak Rabin, and how excessive hawkishness is often out of step with mainstream American Jewish opinion, turning many, especially young American Jews, away from taking any interest in Israel.

Yet their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

The bottom line might read as follows: that defending the occupation has done to the American pro-Israel community what living as an occupier has done to Israel - muddied both its moral compass and its rational self-interest compass.

The context in which the report is published makes of it more than passing academic interest. Similar themes keep recurring in influential books, including recently, "The Assassin's Gate," "God's Politics," and "Against All Enemies." In popular culture, "Paradise Now" and "Munich" attracted notable critical acclaim. In Congress, the AIPAC-supported Lantos/Ros-Lehtinen bill, which places unprecedented restrictions on aid to and contacts with the Palestinians, is stalled. Moderate American organizations such as the Israel Policy Forum, Americans for Peace Now and Brit Tzedek v'Shalom - each with their own policy nuances - have led opposition to the bill and Quartet envoy Wolfensohn has seemed to caution against it. In court, two former senior AIPAC officials face criminal charges.

Not yet a tipping point, but certainly time for a debate. Sadly, if predictably, response to the Harvard study has been characterized by a combination of the shrill and the smug. Avoidance of candid discussion might make good sense to the Lobby, but it is unlikely to either advance Israeli interests or the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Some talking points for this coming debate can already be suggested:

First, efforts to collapse the Israeli and neoconservative agendas into one have been a terrible mistake - and it is far from obvious which is the tail and which is the dog in this act of wagging. Iraqi turmoil and an Al-Qaida foothold there, growing Iranian regional leverage and the strengthening of Hamas in the PA are just a partial scorecard of the recent policy successes of AIPAC/neocon collaboration.

Second, Israel would do well to distance itself from our so-called "friends" on the Christian evangelical right. When one considers their support for Israel's own extremists, the celebration of our Prime Minister's physical demise as a "punishment from God" and their belief in our eventual conversion - or slaughter - then this is exposed as an alliance of sickening irresponsibility.

Third, Israel must not be party to the bullying tactics used to silence policy debate in the U.S. and the McCarthyite policing of academia by set-ups like Daniel Pipes' Campus Watch. If nothing else, it is deeply un-Jewish. It would in fact serve Israel if the open and critical debate that takes place over here were exported over there.

Fourth, the Lobby even denies Israel a luxury that so many other countries benefit from: of having the excuse of external encouragement to do things that are domestically tricky but nationally necessary (remember Central Eastern European economic and democratic reform to gain EU entry in contrast with Israel's self-destructive settlement policy for continued U.S. aid).

Visible signs of Israel and the Lobby not being on the same page are mounting. For Israel, the Gaza withdrawal and future West Bank evacuations are acts of strategic national importance, for the Lobby an occasion for confusion and shuffling of feet. For Israel, the Hamas PLC election victory throws up complex and difficult challenges; for the Lobby it's a public relations homerun and occasion for simplistic legislative muscle-flexing.

In the words of the Harvard study authors, "the Lobby's influence has been bad for Israel ... has discouraged Israel from seizing opportunities ... that would have saved Israeli lives and shrunk the ranks of Palestinian extremists ... using American power to achieve a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians would help advance the broader goals of fighting extremism and promoting democracy in the Middle East." And please, this is not about appeasement, it's about smart, if difficult, policy choices that also address Israeli needs and security.

In short, if Israel is indeed entering a new era of national sanity and de-occupation, then the role of the Lobby in U.S.-Israel relations will have to be rethought, and either reformed from within or challenged from without.

Daniel Levy was an advisor in the Prime Minister's Office, a member of the official Israeli negotiating team at the Oslo B and Taba talks and the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Initiative.

Saddam Planned To Deploy 'Camels Of Mass Destruction'

By James Langton
London Sunday Telegraph
March 26, 2006

Saddam Hussein planned to use "camels of mass destruction" as weapons to defend Iraq, loading them with bombs and directing them towards invading forces.

The animals were part of a plan to arm and equip foreign insurgents drawn up by the dictator shortly before the American-led invasion three years ago, reveals a 37-page report, captured after the fall of Baghdad and just released by the Pentagon. It is part of a cache of thousands of documents that the United States Department of Defence says it does not have the resources to translate.

Earlier this month, the Pentagon released copies in the original Arabic onto the internet in the hope that others would interpret them into English.

Handwritten on official paper, one of the reports appears to be a road map for the insurgency, with detailed instructions for training what it calls suicide bombers.

In the memo, they are described as "estishehadeyeen", Arabic for suicide martyrs, and would almost certainly have been foreign volunteers.

The memo details a training commission to be headed by senior officers, including a colonel from the "Directory of Political Orientation". Their job, says the report, was to "prepare a very intensive training course", "to raise the physical fitness and train in the use of Kalashnikovs and hand grenades".

It continues: "The largest section of the course will be specialised to focus on using the explosive material in the body, in motorcycle, in cars, and in camels". Camels will be "provided by the Directory of General Military Intelligence".

The memo also reveals the incredible bureaucracy that underpinned Saddam's Iraq. Rifles and hand grenades were to be provided by a Department of Armament and Equipping, explosives by the Directory of Military Engineering and "religious sermons that emphasise jihad'' by the Directory of Political Orientation and the Religious Scholars.

The papers have been translated by Arabic-speaking members of Free Republic, a conservative internet discussion forum that believes the documents will justify British and American claims that Saddam had made Iraq a haven for terrorists.

If the translation is correct, it suggests that many of the foreign fighters now attacking coalition forces and bombing Iraqi civilians were directly trained by the Saddam regime, although there are no known reports of camels being used in suicide attacks.

America, The Global Target

By Jim Hoagland
Washington Post
March 26, 2006

Hoping to lower tensions between the Muslim world and the West, British Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained the other day that the world confronts "a clash about civilization," not "a clash between civilizations." But the overriding lesson of events since Sept. 11, 2001, may be that you can't have one without the other.

In radical Islamic propaganda, the United States has graduated from being a mere Great Satan out to undermine Iran's ayatollahs to being depicted as a global monster responsible for virtually every crime and failing since the dawn of modern history. Meet the new Jews: the Americans.

Don't misunderstand. Americans have not replaced Jews at the top of the hate parade in Islamic countries. But the history of anti-Semitism, a word coined in Germany to provide a bogus scientific basis for prejudice against Jews, and its spread in recent years across the Middle East as an all-purpose explanation of whatever is wrong, should give Americans no cause for complacency.

The centrality of American power to global change -- good and bad, economic and political, topsy and turvy -- inevitably carries with it a heavy burden abroad of resentment and opposition. In the wake of Sept. 11 and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a widespread stereotyping and a visceral hatred that imputes racial characteristics to national policies and actions have also taken hold.

The distemper of these global times can be read in a wide variety of settings, where this new virulent anti-Americanism competes with historical anti-Semitism as a single explanation for the failures and delusions of entire nations.

The change can be seen in Turkish and Egyptian movie houses, where overflow crowds watch depictions of Americans routinely raping, killing, firebombing mosques and torturing innocents as a function of national character. It flows through the fanatical statements of Osama bin Laden and others that conflate "Jews" and "Crusaders." It peeks out of an overjoyed online announcement I came across last week that Hitler's favorite book, "The Riddle of the Jew's Success," is back in print.

Nothing new in this, it can be said. Besides, American movies, comics, journalists and politicians among others have never hesitated to stereotype Arabs, Turks or any other foreigners for their purposes, and often in extremely crude terms. Finally, the terrible polarizing effect of the conflict in Iraq and the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere do invite harsh criticism of Americans rooted not in animus but in a sense of justice.

But the central and intrusive role of the United States in unleashing the traumatic changes of globalization on families, workplaces and nations everywhere brings unintended consequences. The forces that created anti-Semitism are not confined to one group of people or one moment in history.

" The Jew is in every respect the center of the language of the Third Reich, indeed of its whole view of the epoch," literary scholar Viktor Klemperer wrote in his Nazi-era diary. A forthcoming book quotes that passage to explain how long-standing prejudice was mobilized as engine and rationale for mass murder and state terrorism in Germany.

"Anti-Semitism was not only a set of prejudices and hatreds but also an explanatory framework for historical events," Jeffrey Herf writes in "The Jewish Enemy." He demonstrates that while Hitler was convincing Germans that the Jews were about to annihilate them, the numbers and influence of Jews in Germany were sharply declining. Facts did not get in Hitler's way.

A vehement counter-ideology is developing across the Arab world today to President Bush's drive to put America even more at the center of democratic change and material progress in that region. Some of the reaction is reasoned and pragmatic; much of it veers into hate propaganda that confounds nationality with race.

That suggests two initial propositions for an ongoing discussion of this vast subject:

The Bush administration must avoid throwing gasoline on this raging fire by making assertive declarations about preemptive warfare, or God's gifts of democracy being distributed to Arabs by Americans or the like. It must show that misbehavior or crimes in Iraq or elsewhere will be punished up to the highest level of responsibility.

Second, Americans need to recognize that the problems we face in the Middle East are bigger than the failings or mistakes of Bush & Co. Those problems would not fade quickly if U.S. troops left Iraq tomorrow. Repairing America's image at home and abroad is also a complex, generational task that begins now.