MR. BFRY BREAKS DOWN YOUR WORLD

YEAH CHAD!!!

2007-01-04T17:17:00.001-05:00

Pennington Wins AP Comeback Player Award

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: January 4, 2007

Filed at 4:59 p.m. ET

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (AP) -- Chad Pennington spent two nerve-racking weeks at home in Tennessee last fall wondering if his right shoulder would ever be the same.

''That was the lowest point, not knowing what direction I would go in, whether it was good or bad or whether it was with football or without football,'' the New York Jets quarterback said. ''I had no idea.''

Pennington overcame a second torn rotator cuff in as many years -- and incredible odds -- to win The Associated Press NFL Comeback Player of the Year award Thursday.

The seven-year veteran acknowledged that dark thoughts passed through his mind in the days following the injury in Week 3 of last season.

''Not having a goal, not having a challenge, not having a carrot out in front of you as an athlete is a bad place to be,'' Pennington said. ''It's sort of like `The Twilight Zone.' You have no drive, you have nothing to go for.''

His outlook improved after he had surgery and the Jets' medical team helped him focus on his rehabilitation.

''Then I had a challenge ahead of me,'' he said. ''I had a goal, I had something to go after and my total mind-set and attitude changed. I was starting to get back to normal.''

And he came back, maybe even better than before. The seven-year veteran has led the Jets to a surprising 10-6 record and a wild-card berth one season after they went 4-12 -- most of it with him sidelined -- and changed coaches. He started all 16 games in a season for the first time, finished second in the AFC with a 95.7 passer rating and threw for a career-high 3,352 yards, along with 17 touchdowns and 16 interceptions. Most importantly, he re-emerged as a leader.

''No situation rattles him,'' receiver Jerricho Cotchery said. ''I've never seen him rattled. Obviously, when you have your leader like that, you feel the same way he feels, that we can't get rattled out there.''

Pennington earned 27 votes in balloting by a nationwide panel of 50 sports writers and broadcasters who cover the NFL. He finished ahead of two other quarterbacks, Drew Brees of New Orleans (8 1/2) and Cincinnati's Carson Palmer (5 1/2). Pennington, the fifth quarterback to win the award in its nine years, is the first Jet to receive the honor.

Last year's recipients were New England linebacker Tedy Bruschi and Carolina receiver Steve Smith.

''It does mean a lot to me because I've put in a lot of hard work and there's been a lot of people that have supported me throughout the entire process and have put in a lot of hard work with me,'' Pennington said. ''To me, it's a group award and it involves so many people in so many different areas in so many different places that have taken time out of their schedules that have helped me get back to being the player I want to be, and to have a chance to play the game that I love to play.''

Pennington came to training camp determined to win a four-man competition at quarterback.

''When you're put in difficult situations, I think you have to fight human nature sometimes and human nature sometimes wants to feel sorry for itself and come up with excuses and look for ways to get out of a situation,'' he said. ''I just chose not to listen to my own human nature.''

Or to the naysayers, of whom there were plenty.

After all, how could an NFL quarterback who already had a reputation for not having a strong arm possibly come back from two operations on his shoulder in consecutive years? There was no precedent for it.

''In Chad's mind, there was never any doubt,'' coach Eric Mangini said. ''He was extremely committed to doing everything he could possibly do to put himself in a position to come back from those injuries.''

The latest occurred last season in Week 3 when Pennington was sacked by Jacksonville's Paul Spicer, who hit the quarterback from behind and pulled his right arm behind his back as he was about to throw. Pennington keeps a picture of the play on his desk at home as a framed reminder of how far he's come.

''I would say that at some times during the rehab and at some times during the competition, I think I had to look at it as if the slate was wiped clean,'' he said. ''What I had done in the past didn't matter anymore.''

Once he was medically cleared to practice, Pennington was ready to run the offense instituted by Mangini and new coordinator Brian Schottenheimer.

''It didn't matter what time I was passing through (the training room), if Chad was getting rehabbed, he was multitasking with his playbook,'' Mangini said. ''It was like a mobile study center where he was getting worked on and working at the same time.''

Pennington easily beat out Patrick Ramsey, Brooks Bollinger and Kellen Clemens for the starting job, and proved he was back with consecutive 300-yard games to start the season. He has also routinely bounced back from hard hits to the shoulder.

''If this situation did anything for me, it showed me how important staying in the present and staying in the now is, because that's the only part of your life that you can control at that moment,'' Pennington said. ''You can't control the past and you have no idea what the future holds.''

Saddam the Pitiable?

2007-01-04T10:11:00.000-05:00

Feared and Pitiless; Fearful and Pitiable

By JOHN F. BURNS

Published: December 31, 2006

Baghdad

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Thomas Hartwell/Time Life Pictures — Getty Images, 1987

A MARTYR IN HIS OWN MIND But for brief moments, Saddam Hussein never stepped outside his horrific caricature.

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NOBODY who experienced Iraq under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein could imagine, at the height of the terror he imposed on his countrymen, ever pitying him. Pitiless himself, he sent hundreds of thousands of his countrymen to miserable deaths, in the wars he started against Iran and Kuwait, in the torture chambers of his secret police, or on the gallows that became an industry at Abu Ghraib and other charnel houses across Iraq. Iraqis who were caught in his spider’s web of evil, and survived, tell of countless tortures, of the psychopathic pleasure the former dictator appeared to take from inflicting suffering and death.

Yet there was a moment when I pitied him, and it came back to me after the nine Iraqi appeal judges upheld the death sentence against Saddam last week, setting off the countdown to his execution. As I write this, flying hurriedly back to Baghdad from an interrupted Christmas break, Saddam makes his own trip to the gallows with an indecent haste, without the mercy of family farewells and other spare acts of compassion that lend at least a pretense of civility to executions under law in kinder jurisdictions. From all we know of the preparations, Saddam’s death was to be a miserable and lonely one, as stark and undignified as Iraq’s new rulers can devise.

Many Iraqis, perhaps most, will spare no sympathies for him. However much he may have suffered in the end, they will say, it could never be enough to atone for a long dark night he imposed on his people. Still, there was that moment, on July 1, 2004, when Saddam became, for me, if only briefly, an object of compassion.

He had been brought to a makeshift courtroom in the grounds of a former presidential palace in Baghdad that became, as Camp Victory, the American military headquarters in Iraq. It was the first time he had appeared in public since his capture six months earlier in a coffin-like subterranean bolt-hole near his hometown of Tikrit when he emerged unkempt yet proclaiming himself to American soldiers who hauled him from his hiding place to be “Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq,” and ready to negotiate with his captors.

We know, from accounts given by his Iraqi and American interrogators, that the old Saddam quickly reasserted himself, heaping contempt on the new generation of Iraqi leaders who were taken out to a detention center near Baghdad International Airport the next day to verify for themselves, and for the world, that the man the Americans had seized was indeed their former tormentor.

So when the day arrived for his first court appearance, starting the process that led over the next 30 months to his two trials for crimes against humanity, there seemed little doubt to me which Saddam would show up to face the charges — Saddam the indignant, Saddam the self-proclaimed champion of Iraqi and Pan-Arab nationalism, Saddam the self-anointed figurehead of the insurgency that was already, then, beginning to look like a nightmare for the invaders.

His American captors had flown Saddam and 11 of his top henchmen to Camp Victory by helicopter, and led them hooded and shackled at the waist and ankles to the threshold of the mosque annex that served as a courtroom. Only at the door to the court were the hoods and shackles removed, clattering to the floor a moment or two before the door opened to show Defendant No. 1, Saddam Hussein al-Majid, standing clasped at the elbow between two Iraqi guards.

From 20 feet away on an observer’s bench, seated beside the late Peter Jennings of ABC News and Christiane Amanpour of CNN, I caught my first glimpse of the man who had become in my years of visiting Iraq under his rule, a figure of mythic brutality, a man so feared that the mention of his name would set the hard, unsmiling men assigned to visiting reporters as “minders” to shaking with fear, and on one occasion, in my experience, to abject weeping.

But this was not that Saddam. The man who stepped into the court had the demeanor of a condemned man, his eyes swiveling left, then right, his gait unsteady, his curious, lisping voice raised to a tenor that resonated fear. Quickly, he fixed his gaze on the handful of foreigners in the court, and I had my own moment of anxiety when it came to my mind that he was intent on remembering the faces of the non-Iraqis that were there to witness his humiliation, perhaps to get word through to his lawyers, and then on to the insurgents, that we were to be punished for our intrusion. It was only later, after I learned what he had been told before being taken from his cell to the court, that I understood that our presence meant something else to him entirely, that with foreigners present, he was not going to be summarily hanged or shot.

THE Americans who were his jailers in the first days after his capture — aboard an American aircraft carrier and then at a converted detention center known as Camp Cropper at the edge of Baghdad’s airport — had chosen, on that summer day, to give Saddam a taste of the fear that he exhilarated in imposing on others. All he was told was that he was being taken “to face Iraqi justice.” Small wonder, as the architect of a quarter-century of repression, that he should fear that he was about to suffer the torture and grisly death that he had inflicted on so many others.

At that instant, I felt sorry for him, as a man in distress and perhaps, too, as a once almighty figure reduced to ignominy. But the expression of that pity to the Iraqis present marked the distance between those, like me, who had taken the measure of Saddam’s terror as a visitor, shielded from the worst of it by the minders and the claustrophobic world of closely guarded hotels and supervised Information Ministry trips, and Iraqis who lived through it with no shield.

That I could feel pity for him struck the Iraqis with whom I talked as evidence of a profound moral corruption. I came to understand how a Westerner used to the civilities of democracy and due process — even a reporter who thought he grasped the depths of Saddam’s depravity — fell short of the Iraqis’ sense, forged by years of brutality, of the power of his unmitigated evil.

After that initial encounter with Saddam, I saw him many times walking within 10 feet of my feet in the glass-walled press gallery in the courtroom at the former Baath Party headquarters, chosen as a venue for his trials by the Regime Crimes Liaison Office, the unit created by the United States Justice Department, to help Iraqi judges and lawyers create what became the Iraqi High Tribunal, the special court designated to try high-ranking members of the old regime. But the Saddam who dominated that courtroom was another figure — haughty, defiant, often beside himself with anger, but, above all, remorseless. If the death penalty held any fear for him, when it was handed down in November, for the killing of 148 men and teenage boys during a systematic persecution of the Shiite town of Dujail in 1982, he never showed it.

Almost the only chink in his prideful armor showed when he demanded at the Dujail trial that he be shot by firing squad, the privilege as he told it, due to him as the — still legitimate, as he claimed — commander in chief of Iraq’s armed forces. That plea was quickly denied by the chief judge. It was a point never again raised by Saddam, who took, at the end, to proclaiming his eagerness to die as a “martyr” for Iraq, and his belief that this would earn his passage to paradise. But the plea to be spared hanging suggested that fear — of humiliation, if not of death — was a close companion during the 1,000-odd days he spent in solitary confinement in Camp Cropper.

Of other strains of humanity there was little sign. During the Dujail trial, and just as much during the Anfal trial that followed, at which Saddam and six other defendants were accused of murdering as many as 180,000 Kurds in the late 1980’s, he showed no hint of remorse as survivors of the torture chambers and the desert internment camps and, in the case of the Anfal campaign, the chemical weapons attacks and the mass graves, told their pitiful stories. Head to one side, hand pressed to his head, fingers splayed, writing detailed notes on yellow legal pads, Saddam listened impassively to the accounts of women hung upside down to be beaten, of sons holding wet cloths to their faces and finding the twisted bodies of mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers heaped in an agony of death from mustard-gas attacks, and of young men who scrambled back to life from beneath the bloodied bodies of fellow villagers in remote pits scraped from the desert wadis of Iraq.

LIKE some ghastly accountant with an obsession for detail but no morsel of pity, Saddam limited his questions to peripheral issues: What were the precise geographic coordinates of the mass graves? How could a boy no more than 10 at the time recall so precisely the details of a chemical attack? Why should anyone credit the testimony of a man — brother to seven others who were executed after the alleged attack at Dujail — who admitted he belonged to Dawa, an Iran-backed religious party?

Not once did he avail himself of what seemed like the expedient response of a man who had pleaded not guilty to involvement in any of these crimes: an expression of sorrow for the victims, albeit coupled with renewed denials of his responsibility.

Like many another dictator before him, Saddam so sealed himself off from his own people, in his scores of palaces, and on his carefully staged, video-recorded walkabouts among crowds of ululating citizens, that he seemed never to grasp, even in the extremities of his last weeks, how hated he was by his people. In the courtroom, he insisted, repeatedly, that he remained Iraq’s lawful president and thus immune to prosecution, even as the judges responded by calling him “ex-president” and ordering him to sit down. He was sustained in this make-believe world by his former acolytes, who would stand in the dark as he entered, greeting him with expressions of undying fealty.

Among the most insistent of these courtiers were two men who were scheduled to die with him on the gallows after their appeals in the Dujail case were denied, his half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and Awad al-Bandar, chief judge of the revolutionary court who passed the death sentences on the men and boys from Dujail, in a court hearing that lasted only hours with the dock too crowded for many of the condemned even to enter the court, and with no legal representation. This miserable precedent appeared to make no impact on Saddam and his fellow defendants, who protested at every opportunity during their own trials at the denial of what they claimed were their proper rights and comforts. The quality of the prison food — including American military rations known as meals-ready-to-eat — was one such issue; the quality of the cigarettes given to them another.

Saddam, prideful to the last, left much of the caviling over prison conditions to his erstwhile minions. And shortly before he was sentenced to death, he demonstrated, inadvertently, that in the shrunken world of his captivity he remained the leader who dare not be defied. An American official who worked closely with the Iraqi court told of watching on a closed-circuit relay as Saddam and other defendants in the Dujail trial waited one day in a holding room off the courtroom floor. At the time, Saddam had declared a hunger strike on his own and his associates’ behalf in protest of the Dujail case continuing after the walkout of the defense lawyers, who had been replaced by counsel appointed by the court.

At one end of the room, visible on the surveillance cameras, was a table laid with food, including cellophane-wrapped oatmeal biscuits of the kind available in every American military canteen in Iraq. Thinking his fellow defendants were distracted, one of the accused, Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former vice president renowned even among Saddam’s henchman for his brutality, slipped two pockets of biscuits into his pocket, only for Saddam to march on him demanding to know who gave him permission to eat. Mr. Ramadan, the American official said, denied he had taken anything from the table. “Empty your pockets, you betrayer!” Saddam demanded. Whereupon Mr. Ramadan lamely admitted his guilt and, with the sheepish deference born of two decades in Saddam’s inner circle, returned the biscuits to his basket.

Saddam's Obituary

2007-01-04T10:09:00.000-05:00

Saddam Hussein Had Oppressed Iraq for More Than 30 Years

By NEIL MACFARQUHAR

Published: December 29, 2006

The hanging death of Saddam Hussein tonight ended the life of one of the most brutal tyrants in recent history and negated the fiction that he himself maintained even as the gallows loomed— that he remained president of Iraq despite being toppled by the American military and that his power and his palaces would be restored to him in time.

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Agence France-Presse

Saddam Hussein visiting the Shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf in 1996.

Pool photo by David Furst

Saddam Hussein in court as he received the death sentence on November 5 for his role in the killing in 1982 of nearly 150 people in the mainly Shiite village of Dujail.

The despot, known universally as Saddam, had oppressed Iraq for more than 30 years, unleashing devastating regional wars and reducing his once promising, oil-rich nation to a claustrophobic police state.

For decades, it had seemed that his unflinching hold on Iraq would endure, particularly after he held on to power through disastrous military adventures against first Iran and then Kuwait, where an American-led coalition routed his unexpectedly timid military in 1991.

His own conviction that he was destined by God to rule Iraq forever was such that he refused to accept that he would be overthrown in April 2003, even as American tanks penetrated the Iraqi capital of Baghdad in a war that has become a bitterly contentious, bloody occupation.

After eluding capture for eight months, Saddam became the American military’s High Value Detainee No.1. But he heaped scorn on the Iraqi judge who referred to him as the “former” president after asking him to identify himself on the first day of his trial for crimes against humanity, which ultimately lead to his execution.

“I didn’t say ‘former president,’ I said ‘president,’ and I have rights according to the Constitution, among them immunity from prosecution,” he growled from the docket. The outburst underscored the boundless egotism and self-delusion of a man who fostered such a fierce personality cult during the decades that he ran the Middle Eastern nation that joking or criticizing him in public could bring a death sentence.

Mr. Hussein’s own execution came after he lost the automatic appeal against his death sentence. The conviction stemmed from the ruthless revenge killing of 148 Shiite Muslim men and boys from the small town of Dujail just north of Baghdad, after a 1982 attack on his motorcade there. It was one of countless assassination attempts he survived. Mr. Hussein was due to face a series of trials over incidents of far greater magnitude, but Iraqi prosecutors started with Dujail because the evidence was clear-cut — including Mr. Hussein’s signature on at least one execution order.

“Long live the people!” Mr. Hussein shouted, looking drained but defiant, when the chief judge, Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman, read the death sentence. “Long live the nation! Down with the occupiers! Down with the spies!” The judge ordered him removed from court and he exited still yelling.

The tribunal’s proceedings were condemned by some lawyers and human rights advocates as “victor’s justice,” not least because Iraq remained under American military occupation.

If a man’s life can be boiled down to one physical mark, the wrist of Mr. Hussein’s right hand was tattooed with a line of three dark blue dots, commonly given to children in rural, tribal areas. Some urbanized Iraqis removed or at least bleached theirs, but Mr. Hussein’s former confidants told The Atlantic Monthly that he never disguised his.

Ultimately, underneath all the socialist rhetoric, underneath the Koranic references, the tailored suits and the invocations of Iraq’s glorious history, Mr. Hussein was a village peasant trying to be a tribal leader on a grand scale. His rule was paramount, and sustaining it was his main goal behind all the talk of developing Iraq by harnessing its considerable wealth and manpower.

Mosques, airports, neighborhoods and entire cities were named after him. A military arch erected in Baghdad in 1989 was modeled on his forearms and then enlarged 40 times to hold two giant crossed swords. In school, pupils learned songs with lyrics like “Saddam, oh Saddam, you carry the nation’s dawn in your eyes.”

The entertainment at public events often consisted of outpourings of praise for Saddam. At the January 2003 inauguration of a recreational lake in Baghdad, poets spouted spontaneous verse and the official translators struggled to keep up with lines like, “We will stimulate ourselves by saying your name, Saddam Hussein, when we say Saddam Hussein, we stimulate ourselves.”

While Mr. Hussein was in power, his statue guarded the entrance to every village, his portrait watched over each government office and he peered down from at least one wall in every home. His picture was so widespread that a joke quietly circulating among his detractors in 1988 put the country’s population at 34 million — 17 million people and 17 million portraits of Saddam.

Throughout his rule, he unsettled the ranks of the Baath Party with bloody purges and packed his jails with political prisoners to defuse real or imagined plots. In one of his most brutal acts, he rained poison gas on the northern Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988, killing an estimated 5,000 of his own citizens suspected of being disloyal and wounding 10,000 more.

Even at the end, he showed no remorse. When four Iraqi politicians visited him after his capture in December 2003, they asked about his more brutal acts. He called the Halabja attack Iran’s handiwork; said that Kuwait was rightfully part of Iraq and that the mass graves were filled with thieves who fled the battlefields, according to Adnan Pachachi, a former Iraqi foreign minister. Mr. Hussein declared that he had been “just but firm” because Iraqis needed a tough ruler, Mr. Pachachi said.

It was a favorite theme, one even espoused in a novel attributed to Mr. Hussein called “Zabibah and the King.”

At one point, the king asks the comely Zabibah whether the people needed strict measures from their leader. “Yes, Your Majesty,” Zabibah replies. “The people need strict measures so that they can feel protected by this strictness.”

Aside from his secret police, the main factor that preserved his power was his practice of filling the government’s upper ranks with members of his extended clan, regardless of their qualifications. Their Corleone-like feuds became the stuff of gory public soap operas. Saddam once sentenced his eldest son, Uday, to be executed after he beat Mr. Hussein’s food taster to death in front of many horrified party guests, but later rescinded the order. The husbands of his two eldest daughters, whom he had promoted to important military positions, were gunned down after they defected and then inexplicably return to Iraq.

Continual wars sapped Iraq’s wealth and decimated its people. In 1980, Mr. Hussein dragged his country into a disastrous attempt to overthrow the new Islamic government in neighboring Iran. By the time the war ended in stalemate in 1988, more than 200,000 Iraqis were dead and hundreds of thousands more wounded. Iran suffered a similar toll. Iraq’s staggering war debt, pegged around $70 billion, soon had wealthy Arab neighbors demanding repayment. Enraged, he invaded Kuwait in August 1990, only to be expelled by an American-led coalition in the Persian Gulf war seven months later.

Yet in the language of his Orwellian government, Mr. Hussein never suffered a setback. After the gulf war ended with the deaths of an estimated 150,000 Iraqis, he called “The Mother of All Battles” his biggest victory and maintained that Iraq had actually repulsed an attack by “America and its criminal gang.”

“Iraq has punched a hole in the myth of American superiority and rubbed the nose of the United States in the dust,” Mr. Hussein said.

His defeat in Kuwait, followed by more than a decade of tense confrontations with the West over his alleged weapons programs, ultimately led to his overthrow. The extended bloodbath that followed the invasion, with the monthly death toll of Iraqi civilians estimated roughly at 3,000 by the end of 2006, made some nostalgic for even the oppressive days of Mr. Hussein, when public security was not an issue. His repressive ways were credited with keeping the fractious population of 26 million — including 20 percent Sunni Muslims, who dominated; 55 percent Shiite Muslims; 20 percent Kurds plus several tiny minorities including Christians — from shattering along ethnic lines.

Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937, in a mud hut on stilts near the banks of the Tigris River near the village of Tikrit, 100 miles northwest of Baghdad. He was raised by a clan of landless peasants, his father apparently deserting his mother before his birth. (Government accounts said the father died.) “His birth was not a joyful occasion, and no roses or aromatic plants bedecked his cradle,” his official biographer, Amir Iskander, wrote in “Saddam Hussein, the Fighter, the Thinker and the Man,” published in 1981.

Mr. Hussein told his biographer that he did not miss his father growing up in an extended clan. But persistent stories suggest that Saddam’s stepfather delighted in humiliating the boy and forced him to tend sheep. Eventually he ran away to live with relatives who would let him go to school.

Mr. Hussein’s first role in the rough world of Iraqi politics came in 1959, at age 22, when the Baath Party assigned him and nine others to assassinate Abdul Karim Kassem, the despotic general ruling Iraq. Violence was a quick way for a young man who grew up fatherless in an impoverished village to get ahead; bloodshed became the major theme of his life.

During the failed assassination, Mr. Hussein suffered a bullet wound to the leg. The official version portrayed him as a hero who dug the bullet out with a penknife, while the other version suggests that the plot failed because he opened fire prematurely.

He sought asylum in Egypt, where President Gamal Abdel Nasser nurtured the region’s revolutionary movements. Mr. Hussein recalled studying law and ignoring Cairo’s attractions. Others remember differently.

“He was what we call a troublemaker,” said Hussein Abdel Meguid, the owner of the Andiana cafe that Mr. Hussein frequented, recalling years later in an interview with The New York Times that the Iraqi once turned a brawl into a knife fight.

Soon after returning to Iraq, Mr. Hussein married his first cousin and the daughter of his political mentor, Sajida Khairallah Tulfah, on May 5, 1963. The couple had five children including two sons, Uday and Qusay, and three daughters, Raghad, Rana and Hala. He had mistresses, including prominent Iraqi women, but never flaunted them.

His wife, three daughters and roughly a dozen grandchildren survive him. Uday and Qusay, along with Qusay’s teenage son, Mustapha, died in July 2003 during a gun battle with American forces in a villa in the northern city of Mosul. Denounced by an informant, they had been the two most wanted men in Iraq after their father.

The first years of Saddam Hussein’s marriage coincided with political tumult in Iraq, with at least six coups or attempted revolts erupting between the assassination of King Faisal II in 1958 and the July 1968 putsch that brought the Baath Party to power.

Mr. Hussein’s main role while still in his early 30s was organizing the party’s militia, which became the seed of the dreaded security apparatus. By November 1969, he had eliminated rivals and dissidents to the extent that President Hassan al-Bakr appointed him vice president and deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, as the cabinet was known. Saddam remained head of the intelligence and internal security agencies, in effect controlling Iraq.

The Arab Baath Socialist Party, whose name means “renaissance” in Arabic, had been formed in the 1930s to push a secular, socialist creed as the ideal path to achieving Arab unity. But that dogma proved a sinister excuse for the imprisonment, exile or execution of all potential rivals.

No other Arab despot matched the savagery of Mr. Hussein as he went about bending all state institutions to his whim. His opening act, in January 1969, was hanging around 17 so-called spies for Israel, up to 13 of them Jews, in a downtown Baghdad square. Hundreds of arrests and executions followed as the civilian wing of the Baath Party gradually eclipsed the Iraqi military and the era of coups ended.

Mr. Hussein staged perhaps his most macabre purge in 1979, when at age 42 he consolidated his hold on Iraq. Having pushed aside President Bakr, Saddam called a gathering of several hundred top Baathists.

One senior official stepped forward to confess to having been part of a widespread plot to allow a Syrian takeover. After guards dragged the man away, Mr. Hussein took to the podium, weeping at first as he began reading a list of dozens implicated. Guards dragged away each of the accused. Mr. Hussein paused from reading occasionally to light his cigar, while the room erupted in almost hysterical chanting demanding death to traitors. The entire dark spectacle, designed to leave no doubt as to who controlled Iraq, was filmed and copies distributed around the country.

Firing squads made of cabinet members and other top officials initially gunned down 21 men, including five ministers. Iraq’s state radio said the officials executed their colleagues while “cheering for the long life of the Party, the Revolution and the Leader, President, Struggler, Saddam Hussein.”

Mr. Hussein invariably ensured that those around him were complicit in his bloody acts, which he masqueraded as patriotism, making certain that there would be no guiltless figure to rally opposition.

In an authoritative account of Mr. Hussein’s regime called “The Republic of Fear,” the self-exiled Iraqi architect Kenaan Makiya (writing under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil) estimated that at least 500 people died in the purge that consolidated Saddam’s power.

Mr. Hussein’s titles reflected his status as an absolute ruler modeled after one of his heroes, Josef Stalin of the former Soviet Union. They included President of the Republic, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, Field Marshal and Prime Minister. In addition, the state-owned news media referred to him repeatedly as the Struggler, the Standard Bearer, the Knight of the Arab Nation and the Sword of the Arabs.

Mr. Hussein saw his first opportunity for Iraq to dominate the region in the turmoil that swept neighboring Iran immediately after its 1979 Islamic revolution. In September 1980, Mr. Hussein believed that by invading Iran he could both seize a disputed waterway along the border and inspire Iranians of Arab origin to revolt against their Persian rulers. Instead, they resisted fanatically. Mr. Hussein never acknowledged making a gross miscalculation; rather, he vilified the Iranian Arabs as traitors to the Arab cause.

Iraq fared badly in the war, not least because Mr. Hussein interfered in the battle plans despite a complete lack of military training, even issuing orders based on dreams. When strategies urged by Mr. Hussein failed, he often accused the commanders of betrayal, cowardice and incompetence and had them executed.

Mr. Hussein adored the macho trappings of the armed forces, appointing himself Field Marshal and dressing his ministers in olive-green fatigues. If he was a poor military strategist, he was fortunate in his first choice of enemy. The fear that an Islamic revolution would spread to an oil producer with estimated reserves second only to Saudi Arabia tipped the United States and its allies toward Baghdad and they provided weapons, technology and, most important, secret satellite images of Iran’s military positions and intercepted communications.

The war lasted for eight years until Iran accepted a cease-fire in July 1988, with both sides terrorizing each other’s civilian populations by rocketing major cities. But the March 1988 mustard gas attack on the Iraqi village of Halabja by its own government was perhaps the most gruesome incident.

Mr. Hussein waged war while promising the Iraqi people that he would not diminish their standard of living, investing in massive development that markedly improved daily life. Rural villages were electrified and linked by modern highways. Iraq boasted some of the best universities and hospitals in the Arab world — all free. Its painters, musicians and other artists, many benefiting from generous government subsidies, were also the most accomplished in the region. Mr. Hussein had his own development methods — anyone who avoided mandatory adult literacy classes in rural areas faced three years in jail.

Official corruption was unknown in Iraq in the 1980s, and religious worship somewhat free. Mr. Hussein occasionally took populist measures to underscore the importance of the public welfare. Once, for example, he decided that his ministers were too fat and he demanded that they diet, publishing their real weights and their target weights in the news media. Mr. Hussein’s own weight could fluctuate from chubby to relatively trim, although well tailored suits hid his paunch. Around six feet tall, he was stocky and sported a trademark moustache.

In keeping with a ruler who used violence to achieve and sustain power, Mr. Hussein’s most widespread investments were in his military. He ended the Iran-Iraq war with one million men under arms.

By then Iraq had embarked on extensive projects to acquire a homegrown arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Iraq had also become a regional power, and Mr. Hussein expected to dominate the Arab world much as his hero Nasser held sway through the 1960s. In March 1990, he threatened to “burn half of Israel” if it ever acted against Iraq, even though the Israeli Air Force had humiliated the Iraqi leader by destroying his country’s nuclear research center at Osirik in June 1981.

Mr. Hussein’s next target was another neighbor, Kuwait, which Iraq had long considered part of Iraq and coveted for its deep-water port. On Aug. 2, 1990, his army swiftly occupied the tiny, immensely wealthy emirate, provoking an international crisis. Mr. Hussein declared the country Iraq’s 19th province, installing a puppet government. Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab states were shaken and outraged, while the United States and other Western countries feared for the oil fields ringing the Persian Gulf. The United Nations imposed a trade embargo and economic sanctions.

The United States and eventually 33 other nations deployed forces to the region and warned of a wider war if Mr. Hussein did not withdraw. As the crisis wore on, Mr. Hussein held onto Kuwait despite repeated threats from the United States, which dominated the military coalition by dispatching some 500,000 American soldiers.

While Uday and other senior Iraqis set about plundering Kuwait, Mr. Hussein portrayed the invasion as the start of an Islamic holy war to liberate Jerusalem. He declared that the “throne dwarfs” of the gulf must be overthrown so their wealth could fund the Arab cause. To lend himself the veneer of a religious crusader, he added the words “Allah-u akbar,” or “God is great,” to the Iraqi flag, said to be modeled from his own handwriting.

His public aims resonated among many Arabs in Jordan, Yemen and elsewhere, particularly because the brutality of Mr. Hussein’s government had never been detailed by the state-controlled media of other Arab states. In addition, Mr. Hussein’s Scud missiles crashing into Tel Aviv, however ineffective, created a stir in the Arab world.

Washington and its coalition allies hoped that the war would bring Mr. Hussein’s downfall. Even before the war ended, President George H. W. Bush encouraged the Iraqi people to overthrow him, but there was no coherent plan. The ground offensive against Iraq ended after 100 hours, partly out of concern that American troops not occupy an Arab capital, partly because Arab allies feared the disintegration of Iraq and partly because a “100-hour war” made a good sound bite. Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, warned that sending American forces to Baghdad would get them stuck in a “quagmire.”

This decision enabled much of the elite Republican Guard to escape with minimal losses. The first Bush administration did little to support Shiite and Kurdish uprisings that erupted immediately after the war, which Saddam crushed with tanks and helicopter gunships.

For the next decade, Mr. Hussein repeatedly brought Iraq to the brink of renewed warfare by refusing United Nations weapons inspectors the unfettered access required to catalogue and destroy Iraq’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, as specified in the cease-fire agreement.

The United Nations maintained strict economic sanctions against Iraq until 1996, when some oil exports were allowed to pay for food, medicine and war reparations. The sanctions, devastating to Iraqis, proved a boon to Mr. Hussein and his subordinates. The Government Accountability Office in the United States Congress estimated that the Iraqi leader siphoned at least $10 billion from the program by making oil trades off the books and demanding kickbacks.

Still, in an effort to end sanctions, Baghdad over the years offered at least five “full, final and complete” weapons disclosures, which the United Nations dismissed as incomplete. Some of the most extensive revelations emerged after the astonishing August 1995 defection of Saddam’s two sons-in-law and his two eldest daughters to Jordan. The Iraqi government was apparently worried that Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel al-Majid, the minister in charge of weapons development, would disclose all that he knew. Six months later, Gen. Kamel Majid and his brother abruptly declared they had accepted amnesty and returned. Within days, Mr. Hussein’s daughters divorced them and they died in a violent shootout.

Mr. Hussein dyed his hair black and refused to wear his reading glasses in public, according to interviews with exiles published in The Atlantic Monthly in March 2002. Since a slipped disc caused him to limp slightly, he was never filmed walking more than a few steps. Each of his 20 palaces was kept fully staffed, with meals prepared daily as if he were in residence to disguise his whereabouts. Delicacies like imported lobster were first dispatched to nuclear scientists to be tested for radiation and poison.

His wine of choice was Portuguese, Mateus Rose, but he never drank in public to maintain the conceit that he was a strict Muslim. He even had genealogists draw a family tree that linked him to Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad.

He kept an immaculate desk, with reports from all the ministries neatly stacked. He usually read only the executive summaries, but would occasionally dig deeper and always complained that he was being deceived. He often was, with even his son Qusay telling military commanders to lie if Mr. Hussein thought something had been accomplished that was not.

He was particularly phobic about germs. Even top generals summoned to meet him were often ordered to strip to their underwear and their clothes were then washed, ironed and X-rayed before they could get dressed to meet him. They had to wash their hands in disinfectant.

Mr. Hussein’s American jailers reported that he tried to maintain those precautions, using baby wipes to clean meal trays, his table and utensils before eating.

Rarely traveling abroad, and surrounded by often uneducated cousins, Mr. Hussein had a limited worldview. He once reacted with wonder when an American reporter told him that the United States had no law against insulting the president. Former officials painted him as a vain, paranoid loner who no longer believed he was a normal person and considered compromise a sign of weakness.

Saad al-Bazzaz, an Iraqi writer and editor, said that Mr. Hussein, having risen so far beyond the village and cheated death so often, believed that God anointed him.

Mr. Bazzaz told The Atlantic that even Mr. Hussein’s speeches echoed Koranic texts. “In the Koran, Allah says, ‘If you thank me, I will give you more,’ ” Mr. Bazzaz said. “In the early ’90s, Saddam was on TV, presenting awards to military officers, and he said, ‘If you thank me, I will give you more.’ ”

Iraq under Mr. Hussein had a stifled quality. Imprisonment, torture, mutilation and execution were frequent occurrences, at least for those who chose to dabble in anything vaguely political. Simple information like the weather report was classified. There was no freedom of expression — even foreign newspapers were banned — and no freedom to travel. Contact with foreigners was proscribed.

There were widespread reports that Mr. Hussein himself periodically carried out the torture or even execution of those he felt had crossed him. In the summer of 1982, for example, Riyadh Ibrahim Hussein, the health minister, suggested during a cabinet meeting that Mr. Hussein step down to ease the negotiation of a cease-fire with Iran. Mr. Hussein recommended that the two retire to another room to discuss the proposal. When they did, a shot rang out. Mr. Hussein returned to the cabinet meeting alone, although in later interviews he denied killing anyone. The minister’s widow was sent his dismembered corpse.

Right after the gulf war, Mr. Hussein had 42 merchants executed for profiteering, their bodies hung on telephone poles with signs reading “Greedy Merchant” around their necks. Leaders of the Shiite Muslim religious community were a particular target for summary executions, a 1998 United Nations human rights report noted.

On the other hand, Mr. Hussein ordered mosques constructed around Baghdad on a scale not seen since it was the medieval capital of the Muslim caliphate. Perhaps the most striking was the Mother of All Battles mosque completed in 2001, the 10th anniversary of the gulf war. The minarets resembled Scud missiles, and the mosque held a Koran written with Mr. Hussein’s own blood, the president having donated 28 liters over more than two years.

Evidence from inside Iraq after the invasion confirmed what United Nations weapons inspectors anticipated beforehand — that Mr. Hussein abandoned the attempt to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons after his 1991 defeat. Orders from Mr. Hussein to destroy vestiges of the program, interpreted before the 2003 invasion as an attempt to hide their development, turned out to be an effort to comply with the ban.

The fatal controversy over whether Iraq was still developing unconventional weapons stemmed in part from Mr. Hussein’s desire to convince different audiences of different things, a postwar study by the Defense Department concluded. He wanted the West to believe that he had abandoned the program, which he had. Yet he also wanted to instill fear in enemies like Iran and Israel, plus maintain the esteem of Arabs, by claiming that he possessed the weapons.

Some Bush administration critics argued that the accusations over unconventional weapons were a smoke screen, that government hawks were determined to topple Mr. Hussein as a way of reasserting American power. Richard Clarke, a former national security adviser to three presidents, described in his 2004 book “Against All Enemies” the scene in the White House in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the United States, with President Bush and other senior officials trying to link Mr. Hussein directly to Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden’s organization. No such link was ever established.

Just before the invasion, Mr. Hussein, cigar in hand, appeared on television almost nightly, belittling American forces to small groups of Republican Guard commanders. He also admonished that the battlefields should be throughout Iraq, wherever there were people, even while secretly planning to protect only Baghdad.

His main concern was preserving his government, which the United States military discovered in interviews with his top aides after they were captured. Some of the unclassified results were published in a 2006 article in Foreign Affairs titled “Saddam’s Delusions: The View From the Inside.”

By 2003, Iraq’s military was anemic, weakened by sanctions and constant changes in command, not to mention the fact that Mr. Hussein, suspicious of coup attempts, barred any rigorous maneuvers and repeatedly created new popular militias. Commanders also constantly lied to him about their state of preparedness. The United States report quoted Mr. Hussein’s personal interpreter as saying that the president thought that his “superior” forces would put up a “heroic resistance and inflict such enormous losses on the Americans that they would stop their advance.”

Mr. Hussein cited both Vietnam and the hasty American withdrawal from Somalia in 1994 as evidence that Americans could not stomach casualties, and he did not take the threat of regime change seriously. He so believed his own publicity about his success in fighting the first gulf war that he used it as a blueprint for the second. Hence, his main worry during the invasion was to avoid repeating the Shiite and Kurdish internal rebellion of 1991. He did not blow up the bridges over the Tigris and Euphrates to slow the American advance, for example, out of concern that he would need to rush troops south to quell any uprising. Nor did he order the oilfields ignited, as he had in Kuwait, thinking he would need the revenue in the postwar period.

“Even with U.S. tanks crossing the Iraqi border, an internal revolt remained Saddam’s biggest fear,” Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister, told the American investigators.

The war plan as described in the 2006 book “Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq” states that while Republican Guard troops were supposed to seal off the approaches to Baghdad, only the Special Republican Guard was permitted inside the capital, again as insurance against a coup. Military commanders needed permission for any large troop movements, and the collapse came so quickly that Mr. Hussein was still issuing orders to units that had ceased to exist.

One of his last sightings was on April 9, the same day that American soldiers pulled down his statue in a Baghdad square. He appeared outside a mosque in one neighborhood, addressing a crowd from the back of a truck, with the film broadcast later on Abu Dhabi television. “I am fighting alongside you in the same trenches,” he said.

He then disappeared, apparently using up to 30 hiding places and the aid of loyal tribesmen to escape capture despite a $25 million reward. He often traveled as he had during the first gulf war, in a battered orange and white Baghdad taxi. He issued periodic messages encouraging the insurgency.

In a letter dated April 28 that was faxed to Al Quds al Arabi, an Arabic newspaper published in London, Mr. Hussein blamed traitors for his ouster and urged Iraqis to rebel. “There are no priorities greater than expelling the infidel, criminal, cowardly occupier,” he wrote.

In December 2003, his location was divulged by a clan member captured in a raid on a Baghdad house. Less than 11 hours later, 600 American soldiers and Special Operations forces supported by tanks, artillery and Apache helicopter gunships surrounded two farmhouses near the banks of the Tigris in Al Dwar, a village about nine miles southeast of Tikrit, the tribal seat. The soldiers — no Iraqis were involved — found nothing on the first sweep. But on the second, more intensive search, underneath a trap door apparently made of Styrofoam, Mr. Hussein was discovered lying flat at the bottom of an eight-foot hole.

His first words when he emerged, nervous and disoriented, were, “I am Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, and I am willing to negotiate” in halting English. A special operations soldier there shot back “President Bush sends his regards,” the military said later. The main indication that the filthy, dilapidated concrete hut close by had been used by the former Iraqi president was a battered green metal suitcase holding $750,000 in neatly bundled bills.

L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the occupation authority, made the first official announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we got him.” The Iraqi journalists at the heavily guarded Baghdad news conference leapt up, applauded and cheered.

Mr. Hussein, sporting a bushy salt-and-pepper beard, was first shown on television undergoing a medical exam for head lice. The pictures electrified and shocked Iraqis and the larger Arab world, with some cheering and some appalled to see a captive Arab leader put on undignified display.

He was imprisoned at Camp Cropper, near the international airport some 10 miles from Baghdad, on the grounds of a former palace complex that the United States military turned into a prison for senior members of the government. The prison consisted of three rows of single-story buildings surrounded by a double ring of razor wire.

Mr. Hussein was kept in solitary confinement — letters and care packages including cigars sent via the Red Cross from his wife and daughters living in Qatar or Jordan were his main contact with the outside world. He lived in a relatively spartan cell consisting of a bed, a toilet, a chair, a towel, some books — including a slightly singed Koran with a bullet hole in it, which he said he found in some rubble —and a prayer rug.

Some of his former American guards, interviewed for a July 2005 story in GQ magazine, said he acted in a fatherly way, offering advice on finding a good wife — “neither too smart nor too dumb, not too old nor too young” — and invited them to hang out in one of his palaces after he was restored to power. He claimed that President Bush always had known he had no unconventional weapons. His favorite snack was Doritos corn chips, his guards said.

Mr. Hussein was combative throughout his trial, using it as a platform to encourage the insurgents. The proceedings frequently seemed to slide toward chaos, with the star defendant and the judges shouting at each other. The trial, held in one of the grandiose buildings erected not far from Mr. Hussein’s former presidential palace, proved something of a security nightmare, with three defense lawyers assassinated.

At one point, something he said prompted guffaws from a spectator in an overhead gallery. Mr. Hussein turned and pointed a finger, saying, “The lion does not care about a monkey laughing at him from a tree.”

Mr. Hussein often tried to draw parallels between himself and the famous leaders of Mesopotamia, the earliest civilization in the region, as well as Saladin, the 12th-century Kurdish Muslim military commander who expelled the crusaders from Jerusalem.

What preoccupied him, he said, was what people would be thinking about him in 500 years. To the horror of historic preservationists, he had the ancient walls of the former capital city of Babylon completely reconstructed using tens of thousands of newly fired bricks. An archaeologist had shown him bricks stamped with the name of Nebuchadnezzar II in 605 B.C.

After the reconstruction, the small Arabic script on thousands of bricks read, “In the reign of the victorious Saddam Hussein, the president of the Republic, may God keep him, the guardian of the great Iraq and the renovator of its renaissance and the builder of its great civilization, the rebuilding of the great city of Babylon was done.”

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2007-01-04T10:00:00.000-05:00

The Seven Deadly Sins of Failure in Iraq: A Retrospective Analysis of the Reconstruction

The Middle East Review of International Affairs, December 2006

Kenneth M. Pollack, Director of Research, Saban Center for Middle East Policy

Kenneth M. Pollack

It never had to be this bad. The reconstruction of Iraq was never going to be quick or easy, but it was not doomed to failure.[1] Its disastrous course to date has been almost entirely the result of a sequence of foolish and unnecessary mistakes on the part of the United States.

Perhaps at some point in the future, revisionist historians will try to claim that the effort was doomed from the start, that it never was possible to build a stable, let alone pluralistic, new Iraq in the rubble of Saddam Hussein's fall. However, that is decidedly not the view of the experts, the journalists covering the story, or the practitioners who went to Iraq to put the country back together after the 2003 invasion. Americans returning from Iraq--military and civilian alike--have proven unanimous in their view that the Iraqis desperately want reconstruction to succeed and that they have the basic tools to make it work, but that the United States has consistently failed to provide them with the opportunities and the framework to succeed.[2] Indeed, perhaps the most tragic evidence of this unrealized potential is that even three-and-a-half years after Saddam's fall, with Iraq mired in a deepening civil war and no sign of real progress on the horizon, over 40 percent of Iraqis still clung to the belief that Iraq was headed in the right direction--with only 35 percent saying it was headed in the wrong direction.[3]

If Iraq does slide into all-out civil war, the Bush Administration will have only itself to blame. It disregarded the advice of experts on Iraq, on nation-building, and on military operations. It staged both the invasion and the reconstruction on the cheap. It never learned from its mistakes and never committed adequate resources to accomplish either its original lofty aspirations or even its later, more modest goals. It refused to believe intelligence that contradicted its own views and doggedly insisted that reality conform to its wishes. In its breathtaking hubris, the Administration engineered a Greek tragedy in Iraq, the outcome of which may plague us for decades.

IGNORANCE AND ARROGANCE

The invasion of Iraq was born of a great many different ideas. As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz noted in an interview with Vanity Fair, the threat of Saddam with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was simply the one threat upon which all of the senior members of the Bush Administration agreed--and believed that it could be used to justify the war to the public.[4] Not all of these ideas were foolish. Some of their rationales for war were quite reasonable: the international consensus that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs--which turned out to be entirely mistaken but was considered "incontrovertible"[5] at the time;[6] the fact that Saddam was one of the most brutal tyrants of the previous sixty years; the fact that his ambitions ran directly counter to those of the United States--and his efforts to achieve them had destabilized the Persian Gulf for twenty-five years; and the problem that the world was losing interest in keeping him bound by sanctions, as evinced by the postwar revelations of the Volcker commission concerning the corruption and manipulation of the Oil-for-Food program by the Iraqi government to secure the political support of France, Russia, and China, among other countries.[7]

However, there were also a great deal of unreasonable ideas, and unfortunately these unreasonable ideas were not only part of the justification for the war, but also became critical elements of the Administration's prewar thinking about postwar reconstruction. Some in the Bush Administration had convinced themselves that Saddam was the source of all of the ills of the Middle East and that, therefore, any progress on any issue in the region first required Saddam's removal. This was a key piece of the neoconservative support for Laurie Mylroie's bizarre claims that Saddam was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, as well as a number of other attacks.[8] Likewise, during the 1990s, this author personally heard individuals who would later become senior Bush Administration officials insist that Saddam's opposition had doomed American efforts to make peace between the Arabs and the Israelis in the 1980s. In so doing, they simply dismissed all of the evidence that no Arab leader except Hosni Mubarak had been more supportive of the peace process than Saddam during that period. This was the basis of the neo-conservative refrain that "the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad." Likewise, this mistaken conviction was part of the reason that Washington quickly shifted its attention from Afghanistan to Iraq, in the belief that Saddam somehow stood behind both the Taliban and al-Qa'ida. It is certainly the case that Administration figures regularly played fast and loose with the paltry evidence suggesting any kind of relationship between Saddam and bin Ladin, but it is also the case that they did so because they were certain that it existed, even if there was no evidence to support it and most of the evidence available suggested the opposite.[9]

As bad as some of these rationales for war may have been, far more damaging was the way in which these rationalizations influenced the Administration's senior leadership regarding the necessity and demands of postwar reconstruction. At bottom, many in the Administration--and virtually all of those leading the march to war--simply did not believe that a major effort at reconstruction was necessary. United States Central Command (CENTCOM), the military command responsible for the war, was told to prepare for humanitarian contingencies such as refugees, but little else. Both the CENTCOM commander, General Tommy Franks, and the office of the Secretary of Defense made clear that they wanted to reduce the American military presence in Iraq as quickly as possible, and if there were any serious efforts at nation-building to be made, they were determined that someone else do it.[10] Rumsfeld and other members of the Administration, including even the President, had made it clear that they did not believe that nation-building was the sort of operation in which the U.S. military should be involved.[11] Other members of the Administration, particularly those close to Iraqi National Congress (INC) leader Ahmed Chalabi, saw no need for a major American reconstruction effort, because they hoped to turn the country over to Chalabi and have him run it for the United States.[12]

To make matters worse, officials at the Department of Defense (DoD), the Office of the Vice President (OVP), and some at the National Security Council (NSC) decided that the State Department was "against" the war and would sabotage their plans to run Iraq the way they saw fit and to install Chalabi in power. They worked assiduously to retain complete control over the meager work on postwar reconstruction that was being done and to exclude State Department personnel, offices, and input. Thus one of the many Catch-22s of U.S. prewar planning for postwar Iraq is that while neither the military nor the civilian leadership of the Pentagon was interested in nation-building, they were absolutely determined to exclude those agencies that were both more willing and more able. While State's capacity to handle postwar reconstruction and nation-building probably would also have proven inadequate without massive international cooperation, it was still orders of magnitude beyond what DoD possessed. Instead, the Defense Department put together a small team (about 200 people at the time of the invasion) led by retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner to handle postwar reconstruction--at least temporarily--until a presidential envoy could be appointed.[13] Garner was not even asked to head this postwar transition team until January 9, 2003, a little more than two months before the start of the war. He was prevented from cooperating with Central Command planners, and many of his requests for key personnel were denied. Garner and his team wanted desperately to do the right thing, and some were quite able, but they started with everything stacked against them.

Once again, this was particularly true with regard to the intellectual foundations of the Administration's approach to war, which underlay all of the planning. Most of the Administration's chief Iraq hawks shared a deeply naive view that the fall of Saddam and his top henchmen would have relatively little impact on the overall Iraqi governmental structure. They assumed that Iraq's bureaucracy would remain intact and would therefore be capable of running the country and providing Iraqis with basic services. They likewise assumed that the Iraqi armed forces would largely remain cohesive and would surrender whole to U.S. forces. While the Administration does not seem to have intended to use the Iraqi army to secure the population, they believed that because it would remain cohesive, there would be little threat from disgruntled soldiers joining organized crime or insurgent groups, as actually happened.[14]

As has been documented by many other authors, the result of all this was a fundamental lack of attention to realistic planning for the postwar environment. As it was assumed that the Iraqis would be delighted to be liberated--with no allowance either for those who opposed the invasion, those glad but wary of U.S. intentions, or those simply looking to take advantage of the dictator's fall to grab as much loot as they could--little thought was given to security requirements after Saddam's fall. This was carried over into a larger dearth of planning for the provision of security and basic services in the mistaken belief that Iraqi political institutions would remain largely intact and therefore able to handle those responsibilities--especially after America's Iraqi friends (particularly Chalabi) were installed in Baghdad in Saddam's place. Although senior military commanders decided that the State Department would be responsible for reconstruction, thereby alleviating themselves of any responsibility for it, the Department of Defense prohibited Garner's team from interacting with Franks' staff, while also working to minimize its cooperation with the State Department. Across the board, planning was disjointed, inadequate, and unrealistic.[15]

NEGLECT AND STUBBORNNESS

All of these bad ideas--the products of arrogance and ignorance--began to bear tragic fruit during and immediately after the invasion of Iraq. There were certainly problems with the operation itself. The assumption that virtually no Iraqis would fight proved inaccurate. Most did not, but enough did to create some serious headaches for commanders throughout the chain of command. There were too few Coalition troops, which meant that long supply lines were vulnerable to attack by Iraqi irregulars, and the need to mask entire cities at times took so much combat power that it brought the entire offensive to a halt. American technology at times fell victim to simple Iraqi countermeasures--such as barrages of small arms fire that effectively neutralized the fearsome Apache attack helicopters that the United States had hoped would pulverize Iraqi mechanized formations. Nevertheless, the invasion itself was, overall, a remarkably successful operation, resulting in the capture of Baghdad and the fall of the regime in a little less than four weeks.[16]

Yet the invasion was not the war. It was merely the beginning of the war. Unfortunately, the prewar planning guidance handed down from the civilian chiefs in the Department of Defense now dictated what the military forces on the ground did and did not do, and that meant that they did far too little.

Almost immediately, the mistaken assumptions and inadequate planning for postwar Iraq began to plague U.S. actions. Combat units found themselves in charge of large urban areas with no sense of what to do, whom to contact, or how else to get help. As no orders were issued to the troops to prevent looting and other criminal activity--since it was mistakenly assumed that there would not be such problems--no one did so. The result was an outbreak of lawlessness throughout the country that resulted in massive physical destruction coupled with a stunning psychological blow to Iraqi confidence in the United States, from neither of which has the country recovered.

It was at that moment, in April 2003, that the United States created the most fundamental problems in Iraq. At that point, having torn down Saddam Hussein's tyranny, there was nothing to take its place; nothing to fill the military, political, and economic void left by the regime's fall. The result was that the United States created a failed state and a power vacuum, which even as of this writing has not been properly filled. That power vacuum and that failed state allowed an insurgency to develop in the Sunni tribal community of Western Iraq, left the Shi'a communities to be slowly taken over by vicious sectarian militias, spawned organized crime rings across the country, and prevented the development of governmental institutions capable of providing Iraqis with the most basic services such as clean water, sanitation, electricity, and a minimally functioning economy capable of generating basic employment. The persistence of these problems over time led to the emergence of low-level civil war in Iraq, and it now threatens to plunge the country into a Bosnia- or Lebanon-like maelstrom.

Compounding the problem, the Administration concurrently took a number of steps that discouraged those who might have helped them to address these failings by helping to build new political, economic, and security institutions in Iraq capable of replacing Saddam's fallen regime. Such capabilities were resident in segments of the UN bureaucracy and, to an even greater extent, in scores of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have assisted in nation-building around the world in the past. However, the Bush Administration's stubborn insistence that the United Nations be denied overall authority for the reconstruction, and that the international community conform to American dictates in Iraq effectively denied the United States their assistance.

It is not true, as many seem to believe, that the Administration simply barred the United Nations and other states from participating in the reconstruction. However, Washington did impose conditions on that involvement that made it unattractive for the UN, international NGOs, and a long list of foreign governments to participate. Even countries that disagreed with the United States on the decision to invade Iraq were eager to assist with the reconstruction--indeed some, like Germany, hoped that their fulsome participation in reconstruction would help assuage the anger that their opposition to the war itself had created in the United States. Unfortunately, another pathology of the senior leadership of the Bush Administration was that most of them shared an abiding antipathy to the UN and other international organizations. This, coupled with their ignorant but adamant belief that a major reconstruction effort would be unnecessary in Iraq, hardened them in their stand-offish approach to the UN and other members of the international community. Washington insisted that the reconstruction be headed by an American and that all UN and international personnel be integrated into the American effort.

However, neither the UN, the international NGOs, nor many other governments were interested in working under these conditions. Most UN bureaucrats disliked the Bush Administration (if not the United States altogether) and the invasion of Iraq to begin with. Moreover, they and members of the Security Council were loathe to make the UN subordinate to the United States given both the greater resources and success of the UN in nation-building operations in the past.[17] The United Nations provided only a small staff of several hundred people and most of the NGOs either stayed away or sent only small numbers of personnel themselves. To its credit, the United Nations did send one priceless commodity: Sergio Vieira de Mello, an outstanding international administrator who had headed the successful effort to stabilize East Timor in the years before the invasion of Iraq. To the extent that the United Nations and the rest of the international community participated meaningfully in the reconstruction of Iraq in the days after the fall of Baghdad, it was largely because Sergio de Mello was determined to make it work. When de Mello was killed in August 2003 by a truck-bomb attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad, the Secretariat immediately reduced its presence in Iraq to little more than a skeleton crew on the grounds that the United States, which had insisted on retaining complete control of the effort, was failing in its most basic task: providing the security that was the sine qua non of any reconstruction efforts.

In retrospect, the meager participation of the international community was an important factor in the many failures of reconstruction. The United Nations, through its various agencies, can call upon a vast network of personnel and resources vital to various aspects of nation-building. One of the greatest problems the United States faced was that it simply did not have enough people who knew how to do all of the things necessary to rebuild the political and economic systems of a shattered nation. The UN, in contrast, had worked with thousands of people with such skills in Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Had the UN asked those people to help in Iraq, they probably would have come. In contrast, they proved mostly unwilling to answer the same call from the Bush Administration, especially when Washington rudely and repeatedly emphasized that reconstruction in Iraq would be done their way and no other. The ability to tap into a much larger network of people with desperately needed skills, by itself, was a crucial virtue of the UN that was lost to the United States out of sheer hubris.[18]

PANIC AND HASTE

It did not take long after the fall of Saddam's regime for reality to intrude upon the pipe dreams of the Administration. It quickly became clear that Iraq's governmental apparatus had largely collapsed. The people had all gone home and most were not reporting to work. The buildings had been ransacked by looters. The equipment had largely been stolen or destroyed. Many of the files had been destroyed, stolen, or acquired for other nefarious purposes. A comprehensive survey undertaken by the new Iraqi minister of water resources after he took office in late 2003, found that the ministry had lost 60 percent of its equipment--from pencils to massive dredgers--in the looting.[19] The Administration did look briefly to Ahmed Chalabi and his INC to fill the void, flying Chalabi and 400 of his personnel into al-Nasiriyah early in the war. However, the paltry numbers of followers that Chalabi could scrape together compared to what he claimed, and the increasing evidence that those on the inside did not know or care for him, made it impossible to simply hand the reins of power to Chalabi and expect that he could manage the state. What's more, it was equally clear that the United States lacked the personnel with the expertise to step in and fill these roles--and the international community, which did have such personnel, was not willing to provide them unless the Administration agreed to major changes in its handling of the postwar reconstruction.

The result was a sort of panic in both Washington and Baghdad, as it became apparent that postwar realities were radically different from the Administration's prewar expectations. Initially, the panic took the form of criticism of Jay Garner. In essence, the first response of those in Washington who had devised the vision for the threadbare postwar reconstruction was to blame Garner for not being up to the task. They whispered to the press that it was his execution and not their unrealistic expectations and inadequate preparations that were to blame.

Not surprisingly, Garner was soon on his way out. He was relieved of his charge in June 2003, and replaced by the more senior and more politically savvy L. Paul Bremer. Yet Bremer knew even less about Iraq when he took charge than Garner had, having never handled operations there before and not even having had the benefit of Garner's few months of pre-planning to get a sense of the country. Bremer's early remarks upon arrival in Baghdad were largely focused on the need to privatize Iraqi industry. It was as if he had inherited leadership of an Eastern Europe nation that had just shed Soviet-style Communism--and not an Arab country suddenly freed from war, comprehensive sanctions, and a near-genocidal dictatorship.[20] However, Bremer had another problem to deal with: Washington's demands.

The manifest problems in Iraq--from the looting and anarchy, to the persistent insurgent attacks, to the lack of any progress in restoring basic services--coupled with the lack of progress in finding WMDs, were putting a serious damper on the Administration's ability to claim that it had truly "liberated" Iraq and would quickly be able to leave it a stable, prosperous state. Washington began to put intense pressure on its small, but constantly growing, staff in Baghdad to produce results, and fast. The result was a series of mistaken decisions in the summer and fall of 2003 that further crippled the reconstruction effort.[21]

The best known of these decisions was the disbanding of the Iraqi military and security services. This decision actually requires a bit of explanation in order to understand the problematic facets of it. As Bremer and his senior staff have repeatedly argued, and not incorrectly, "the Iraqi Army disbanded itself." As noted above, and as should have been expected, during and after the war, most Iraqi soldiers simply went home. Thus, to some extent, the decision merely reflected the reality of the situation. Moreover, the Administration's critics are probably wrong in their contention that the Army could have been used to maintain order, and so take the place of the missing Coalition soldiers who should have been there to do so. The Iraqi Army was Saddam's Army--and his security services even more so--and it is very unclear how the population would have reacted to an American decision to use them to clamp down on civilians after the regime's fall. In this author's conversations with Iraqis both inside and outside Iraq since the end of the war, there certainly have been those who suggested that since most of the conscripts were Shi'a and merely following orders, the people would have accepted them as enforcers of law and order after Saddam's fall. However, far more have suggested the opposite. Bremer's team heard the same thing, and an important element in their decision to disband it was to try to send a signal to the people that the old regime was gone, and the Coalition would be starting again from a clean slate to create new institutions without the taint of Saddam.

While this rationale was understandable, it did not mean that the decision was faultless. In fact, there was a major problem, albeit one principally derived from the poor prewar planning rather than from mistakes made by Bremer's team in Baghdad. This was the failure to entice, cajole, or even coerce Iraqi soldiers back to their own barracks or to other facilities where they could be fed, clothed, watched, retrained, and prevented from joining the insurgency, organized crime, or the militias. During its various forays into nation-building in the 1980s and 90s, the United States learned the importance of a Disarm, Demobilize, and Retrain (DDR) program for any reconstruction effort. The purpose of such a program is to take the soldiers and officers of the old army and put them into a long-term program of transition so that they can eventually be reintegrated into the society with the skills needed to find themselves jobs as civilians.

In Iraq, there was no DDR program, nor could one have been pulled together overnight. Doing so would have required places to put those Iraqis (their barracks had been bombed in some cases; looted in every case), money to pay, feed, and otherwise care for them; personnel and supplies to train them; and additional troops to guard them (in both senses of the word). As a result, the Coalition had nothing to offer former Iraqi soldiers and (particularly) officers, who had once enjoyed privileged positions in their society. By abruptly disbanding the military and security services without a DDR program, the United States turned as many as one million Iraqi men loose on the streets with no money, no way of supporting their families, and no skills other than how to use a shovel and a gun. Not surprisingly, many of the Sunni officers were humiliated by how they were treated and went home to their tribes in al-Anbar province and joined--along with their sons, cousins, and nephews--the burgeoning Sunni insurgency. Equally unsurprisingly, many of the rank and file were quickly recruited by the insurgency, by militia leaders, or by organized crime. The result was a massive boost to the forces of instability in the country.[22]

Although the decision to disband the Army without a DDR program is the best known of the rushed decisions made during the summer and fall of 2003, it was hardly the only one, and two other important ones bear mentioning. The first of these was the decision to accelerate massively the training of the new Iraqi Army. When Major General Paul Eaton was given responsibility for setting up a training program in Iraq for the New Iraqi Army, he was told that his goal was to have nine trained battalions (about 10,000 to 12,000 men) at the end of twelve months. This was a realistic goal, and Eaton's plan was fully capable of achieving it. However, soon after the program had started running, Eaton was suddenly ordered to accelerate his training program so that he could produce twenty-seven battalions in only nine months.[23] The reason for this was that the Administration had realized that they were desperately short of troops to fill the security vacuum the United States had created when it toppled Saddam's regime. However, rather than mobilize and deploy additional American soldiers--or do what would be necessary to secure greater participation in the Coalition by other nations--Washington's response was to have Eaton start pumping out as many Iraqi troops as he could, heedless of the fact that the accelerated programs would inevitably produce Iraqi soldiers who were neither properly trained nor fully committed to the mission.

This problem became even more severe with the creation of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC) in the fall of 2003. The purpose of the ICDC was to provide local militia forces--like those used successfully in many other counterinsurgency and stability operations around the world--as adjuncts to the national military forces. Again, the basic idea was sound. However, in Washington's fever to churn out more Iraqi soldiers to hold up as proof that no more American or other foreign forces were needed, the Administration insisted on a breakneck pace that virtually eliminated any ability to vet personnel before they were brought into the ICDC. At the same time, training time was cut to just two or three weeks. Not surprisingly, the ICDC turned out to be a total debacle: It had virtually no combat capability, was thoroughly penetrated by the insurgents, militias, and organized crime, and collapsed whenever it was committed to battle.

The last key mistake made in that summer of panic was the decision to create an Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), which laid the foundation for many of Iraq's current political woes. The experience of nation-building in other states over the past twenty to thirty years left the experts convinced that the process of political reconstruction could not be rushed. In most of these situations, the problem was that there was no readily available pool of leaders who genuinely represented the people. This was especially true in Saddam's Iraq, where he had effectively "decapitated" the population by killing or co-opting any person with the charisma or stature to lead segments of the population and so pose a threat to his rule. In all of these societies, it took years to allow new leaders to emerge from the people. Such men and women had to feel safe enough to want to lead, they had to become known to large groups of people (large enough to get elected to some new position), and then they had to demonstrate their ability to lead in the new systems. What this suggested was the requirement for a period of three to six years of political transition during which sovereignty and ultimate stewardship of the decision-making process resided in an external force--ideally a UN-authorized "high commissioner" or the like, backed by international security forces and NGOs skilled in political and economic reconstruction. These experiences of nation-building had demonstrated that when the process of turning control of the government back to the indigenous population was rushed, the old elites and anyone else with guns inevitably took over the government by buying or bullying the electorate.

Thus, the experts on reconstruction generally urged the inclusion of Iraqi voices in the decision-making process, but not the turning over of decision-making authority--or the appearance of it--to any Iraqi group. Instead, the focus was on a longer timeframe of building a new political system from the ground up over a period of years, during which time an international coalition, blessed by the UN, would retain sovereignty and only delegate authority to new Iraqi political entities as they became ready.[24]

To some extent, that was the intent of some Americans in Iraq. Both State Department personnel and U.S. military officers--particularly those who had served in the Balkans and witnessed UN and NGO personnel in action there--began establishing local governing councils all across Iraq as part of such a bottom-up approach of building local governance capacity first, before moving on to provincial and then national levels. However, the unhappiness of Iraqis, Americans, and others with the course of reconstruction after the fall of Saddam, coupled with the desire of Ahmed Chalabi and his allies to see him installed in power, led Washington to insist on a change. Rather than allowing the bottom-up process the time it needed to succeed, they short-circuited the process and instead opted for a top-down approach, in which a new council of Iraqis (what became the IGC) would work with a fully-empowered American viceroy--Bremer--to run the country.[25] It was a combination of wanting to put the Iraqis out in front so that they would take the heat for the mistakes and problems of reconstruction (some of which were inevitable), and wanting Chalabi in charge even though it had become apparent that he could not get himself elected dog-catcher of Baghdad if he were forced to actually work his way up in a process of bottom-up political reconstruction.[26]

As a result, the United States created the twenty-five-member IGC and gave it an important role in guiding reconstruction. However, because Washington had not allowed enough time--let alone created the circumstances--for genuinely popular figures to emerge, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) simply appointed twenty-five Iraqi leaders well-known to them. Some, like the Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Mas'ud Barzani, truly did represent their constituency. Others, like Shi'a leader 'Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, were at least respected in their community, even if they could not necessarily be trusted to speak for it. Most could not even claim that. Most were entirely unknown--a State Department poll found that only seven of them were known well enough for 40 percent or more of the population to have any opinion of them, positive or negative. In some cases, like Chalabi, they were genuinely disliked. In other cases, the choices were equally unfortunate, because they were nothing more than militia leaders. Many of them used their positions on the IGC to engineer their own further political and military (and financial) aggrandizement, so that membership on the IGC became a ticket to political power for those who might otherwise have had none.

The seeds of a great many of Iraq's problems lay in this arrangement. The IGC set the tone for later Iraqi governments, particularly the transitional governments of Ayad Allawi and Ibrahim Jaafari that followed. Many of the IGC leaders were horribly corrupt, and they stole from the public treasury and encouraged their subordinates to do the same. They cut deals with nefarious figures, many in organized crime. They built up their militias and insinuated them into the various security services. They used the instruments of government to exclude their political rivals from gaining any economic, military, or political power--particularly Chalabi, who gained control of the de-Ba'thification program and used it to exclude large numbers of Sunnis from participating in the new Iraqi government.[27] Because they wrote the first Iraqi constitution, the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), this became a document largely suited to their own interests and not necessarily those of the country; and because the TAL became the basis of the subsequent constitution, the constitution carried over some of these problems, while leaving many key issues ambiguous, since delegates could not reach a consensus between what the TAL espoused and what was actually best for Iraq.

This last point raises another problem that resulted from the creation of the IGC: the marginalization of a number of important Iraqi communities, most notably the Sunni tribal segment of the population. The IGC itself included only one Sunni tribal leader, and he was not widely respected in his own community. As a result, the Sunnis saw the IGC as an American instrument for turning the country over to the Kurds and the Shi'a. The Sunnis became increasingly concerned as the members of the IGC and their followers set about using their new positions to steal, expand their political and economic power, and further discredit Sunnis through de-Ba'thification--all the while filling government jobs with their own cronies. All of these strategies had been previously employed by the Sunnis themselves under Saddam; thus, the Sunnis became convinced that in the new Iraq they would be oppressed just as they had once oppressed the Shi'a and the Kurds. More than anything else, this conviction fed the Sunni-based insurgency.[28]

Not everything that Bremer's CPA did was a mistake, however. In November 2003, Bremer and his team appear to have recognized the Frankenstein's monster that had been created in the IGC--something that Bremer reportedly opposed from the start. As a result, they fashioned a new approach to Iraqi participation in the reconstruction and the development of the Iraqi political sector, called the November 15 Agreement for the date that it was finally accepted. The November 15 Agreement received a lot of undeserved bad press. This accord was a very complex formula to produce a new Iraqi legislative and executive body through a bottom-up process of caucuses. The reason for the complexity was that it was designed to exclude the unpopular exiles and militia leaders who had been brought into the power structure through the creation of the IGC and allow for genuinely popular leaders to be elected to new regional and national political bodies.[29]

It is unclear just how well it might have worked, but it was a clever effort to repair the damage done by the creation of the IGC. Unfortunately, its very complexity doomed it. Those members of the IGC who knew they could not get elected in a truly representative system began lobbying heavily with their allies in Washington and in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Meanwhile, the Shi'a militia leaders convinced Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani--the Marja-e Taqlid al-Mutlaq, the most revered figure in Shi'a Islam and the spiritual leader of the Iraqi Shi'a community--to oppose the November 15 Agreement based on the spurious claim that because it did not include direct elections, it was therefore undemocratic and a plot to prevent the Shi'a from realizing their rightful place in Iraqi society. It is far more likely that Sistani just did not understand the agreement and its complex caucus system and allowed various other leaders in the Shi'a community to manipulate him into opposing it because it was a threat to their new power and wealth. Tragically, Sistani's opposition and Washington's machinations doomed the November 15 Agreement, America's best chance to derail the pernicious political system inaugurated by the creation of the IGC in the summer of 2003.

DENIAL

Unfortunately, the mistakes did not end there. As bad as the Administration's prewar assumptions were, as tragic as it was that General Franks and his command did not see the need to stabilize the country, and as badly as the mistakes of the CPA were in compounding these problems, there were still more to come, and these too became critical components in the overall problems besetting the reconstruction.

In 2004-05, the Bush Administration largely convinced itself that the problems besetting Iraq were not as great as their critics claimed. While recognizing that reconstruction had turned out to be more demanding than they had anticipated, they convinced themselves that the problems of the country were simple and straightforward, and so could be addressed by a limited number of simple steps. Of greatest importance, they convinced themselves that solving Iraq's problems did not require any difficult political, economic, or military decisions, and no matter how much the evidence diverged from their theories, they refused to accept reality and give up their theories. In particular, throughout 2004-05, Administration officials believed that the problems besetting Iraq were almost entirely the fault of the Iraqi insurgency, which they maintained was largely driven by al-Qa'ida and by a small number of former regime figures. They insisted that once Iraq held fair and free elections to constitute a new legislature, this would undermine the legitimacy of the insurgency, causing it to whither away, and thus alleviating--if not eliminating--all of the problems.

Unfortunately, none of this was true. Moreover, by insisting that all of the problems of the country were caused by the insurgency--rather than that all of the problems of the country were helping to fuel the insurgency--and that, especially in 2004 and early 2005, the insurgency was really about al-Qa'ida operatives and former regime "dead-enders," the United States concentrated its efforts in the wrong places and on the wrong problems. As a result, the United States not only failed to quash the insurgency, but allowed the rest of the country to fall effectively under the control of sectarian militias and organized crime.

A major manifestation of this fatally misguided approach lay in the realm of military operations. In both counterinsurgency and stability operations,[30] the best course of action is to blanket the entire country with a thick layer of security personnel to protect the population and make it difficult--if not impossible--for insurgents, militias, and criminals to harm the civilian population. That was the strategy that the U.S. military attempted to employ in Iraq immediately after the invasion. However, while numbers are always soft in warfare, historically it has required a rough ratio of twenty security personnel per thousand of the population to create such security in both counterinsurgency and stability operations.[31] Even if one allows that the 70,000 Peshmerga are more than adequate to secure Kurdistan, the rest of Iraq would still require roughly 450,000 troops to achieve such a ratio. It is clear that there were never going to be 450,000 troops available to adequately blanket the entire country,[32] at least not until many years into the future when much larger numbers of competent Iraqi troops would be available. The United States was never willing to commit more than about 150,000 troops, and the Coalition allies never produced more than 20,000. Even by 2006, the actual number of Iraqi troops capable of contributing meaningfully to this operation was probably around 60-80,000.

This gap, and the fact that the Administration had no intention of providing the numbers of troops they required to actually make such a strategy work, became apparent to American military commanders in late 2003. At that point, they faced a choice: They could either concentrate the troops they had available on the areas of insurgent activity to try snuff them out, or they could concentrate those forces in and around Iraqi population centers to try to protect them against insurgents and criminals. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, the American military commanders made the wrong decision: They chose the former, rather than the latter.

In conventional warfare, the goal is to go on the offensive, take the fight to the enemy, focus on killing "bad guys," and put the enemy on the defensive. In unconventional warfare--including counterinsurgency and stability operations--the only way to win is to do the exact opposite: remain mostly on the defensive, focus on protecting "good guys," and create safe spaces in which political and economic reform/reconstruction can take place--thereby undermining popular support for the "bad guys." The U.S. military, and particularly the U.S. Army, has never liked unconventional warfare. The small number of officers who understood it were typically relegated to the special forces and rarely ever rose to prominent command positions. Those who did rise to the top were those steeped in the principles of conventional warfare, which Army ideology insisted was universally applicable, including in unconventional operations, even when centuries of history made it abundantly clear that this was not the case.

Thus for nearly all of 2004 and 2005, Coalition forces were inordinately concentrated in western Iraq, romping around the Sunni triangle trying to catch and kill insurgents. The results were disastrous. First, because the insurgents were always willing to flee to fight again another day, these operations had virtually no impact on the insurgency overall, which actually grew stronger as ham-fisted American raids antagonized ever more Sunni tribesmen, convincing them to join the insurgency.[33] Second, because the insurgency grew stronger and stronger over time despite the massive exertions of the U.S. military, Iraqis increasingly began to see the United States as a paper tiger, with a variety of detrimental consequences. Last, because too many Coalition forces were off playing "whack-a-mole" with insurgents in the sparsely populated areas of western Iraq, the rest of the country was relatively denuded of troops--indeed, there were vast swathes of southern Iraq where one might not see Coalition or Iraqi Army forces for hours if not days--which allowed the militias and organized crime rings to gradually take control over neighborhoods and villages all across the rest of Iraq. Many of the current problems with the virtually unchecked insurgent attacks on the Shi'a, the explosive growth of vicious Shi'a--and Sunni, and Kurd, and other--militias, and the spiraling sectarian violence among them, can all be traced to this mistaken approach.

To make matters worse, not until 2006 did the U.S. military even acknowledge that their strategic concept--and tactics--in Iraq were not working. Despite numerous criticisms from both inside and outside the armed forces arguing that a conventional approach to the unconventional mission of securing Iraq was bound to fail--and was manifestly failing--the military refused to give up its strategy. Only at the start of 2006, when Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli arrived in Baghdad to take over the corps command there, did the U.S. military command in Baghdad devise a true counterinsurgency/stability operations approach to dealing with the security problems of the country. This effort began with what became known as "the Baghdad Security Plan," which was designed to concentrate large numbers of Iraqi and Coalition troops in Baghdad and employed the proper tactics to secure the capital and allow political and economic reconstruction efforts to begin to take hold there.

It was a brilliant plan, the first that could have actually accomplished what it set out to, but when it was finally approved in the summer of 2006, Chiarelli was given only about 70,000 mostly Iraqi troops--and then mostly Iraqi police, the worst of their security services--not the roughly 125,000 that he would have needed (and reportedly requested). Moreover, Chiarelli's plan called for a fully integrated military and civilian chain of command with adequate numbers of civilian personnel to match their American military and Iraqi civilian counterparts--two more things sorely lacking in Iraq from the very beginning--but none of this was forthcoming. As of this writing, the Baghdad security plan appeared to be enjoying some real success in those pockets of Baghdad where mixed formations of Iraqi and American units were present, but accomplishing little everywhere else. It too seems likely to fail as a result of the too little, too late approach Washington has taken toward the reconstruction of Iraq from start to finish.

At the political level, the United States actually began to do a bit better starting in 2005. The appointment of Zalmay Khalilzad as ambassador to Baghdad to succeed Bremer as the head of the civilian side of the U.S. reconstruction effort proved to be an inspired choice. Khalilzad did not have every skill that one would have wanted for that post--perhaps no mortal could--but he was a superb negotiator, and he understood some critically important basic truths. He knew that the Sunnis had to be brought back into the government to end the insurgency. He knew that real power-sharing arrangements had to be crafted so that the major figures in Iraq would commit to supporting the governmental structure. He also knew that the Iraqi people needed to be provided with basic security and basic services or they would begin to turn to warlords and militia leaders instead. As a result, he worked tirelessly to force a new national reconciliation agreement that might accomplish the first two goals and to make it possible to have a government that could partner with a new American military approach to achieve the third.

However, this has proven to be a Herculean (perhaps even Sisyphean) labor. The problem derives from the flawed decisions to rapidly create the IGC in 2003--an Iraqi executive body, manned mostly by those best known to the United States--and in doing so adopt a top-down approach to political reconstitution rather than the bottom-up approach that past experiences in nation-building demonstrated to be essential. Having brought exiles and militia leaders into the government and given them positions of power, it became virtually impossible to get them out, and even more difficult to convince them to make compromises. The militia leaders used their positions to maintain and expand their power, at the expense both of their rivals who were not in the government and of the central government itself.

The problem is most easily understood in this way. What was most needed in Iraq by early 2004 and on through 2005 and 2006, were basic security and basic services for the Iraqi people (electricity, water, sanitation, gasoline, as well as jobs, medical care, and in some cases food). The militia leaders exerted their power by laying claim to areas of the country that the government's security forces--and the Americans--could not occupy or patrol. They then built public support by providing the security and basic services that the government could not, explicitly following the model employed so successfully by Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. The best way for the federal government to rid the country of the problem of the militias was to acquire the capacity to provide both the security and the services for the Iraqi people so that they would not have to rely on the militias. However, with the militia leaders running the central government, they had absolutely no interest in having it acquire such capacity, because doing so would mean the loss of their own power bases. Thus they had every incentive to continue to use their posts in the government to reward their cronies, steal as much from the public coffers as they could, and otherwise block their adversaries from doing so--without lifting a finger to actually address the most desperate needs of the Iraqi state. Likewise, they had no incentive to cut real deals with their adversaries, particularly the Sunni tribal leaders, because doing so would bring them into the government, giving them access to the same power and graft, and thereby creating a threat to their growing control of the country and its resources.

Khalilzad and his colleagues struggled against this conundrum unflaggingly, but the challenges were enormous. There were too few truly selfless Iraqis devoted to making their nation safe, stable, and strong again, and too many simply looking to line their own pockets as best they could while preventing their rivals from doing the same. Thus, on the political side the United States came to the right idea much sooner than was the case on the military side, but the initial mistakes of the wrong ideas created a set of circumstances that has so far made it impossible to actually achieve what they knew to be the right goals.

CONCLUSIONS

The summary above barely scratches the surface of the many tragic mistakes made in the American reconstruction of Iraq. The United States has no one to blame but itself. There was so much potential in Iraq. It took so many needless blunders to drive the country to its current state. As of this writing, in late 2006, Iraq is caught in the swift current of a river of American mistakes. They are headed quickly toward the falls, and the leaders the United States put in power in Baghdad lack not just the ability, but even the desire to prevent them from going over. As it was in the beginning, the end of this story is entirely in the hands of the United States. This Iraqi leadership will not save the country. Only a dramatic change in approach by Washington can do so.

In nearly every previous instance of state failure and civil war, observers on the scene and experts elsewhere failed to recognize that they had passed the point of no return--when disaster became inevitable--until long after they had done so. As of this writing, the situation in Iraq seems bleak, but there are still areas of progress that could lead one to be hopeful that all is not lost. In other words, it does not yet look like the point of no return has been crossed. However, it is essential that the United States recognize that it is perilously close. At the very least, we should not assume that the United States has much longer to turn things around.

Footnotes

¹ For this author's assessment of both the difficulty and criticality of the reconstruction effort, see Kenneth M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 387-410. Notably, this chapter begins with the following words: "The rebuilding of Iraq cannot be an afterthought to a policy of regime change. Instead, it must be a central element in U.S. preparations. It is likely to be the most important and difficult part of the policy, and we would be living with the results or suffering from the consequences for many decades to come. Saddam's overthrow would remove an enormous threat to the vital interests of the United States. However, because Iraq is a pivotal state in one of the most important and fragile regions of the world, what will follow Saddam is of equal importance. It would be a tragic mistake if we were to remove the threat of Saddam only to create some new, perhaps equally challenging, threat in Iraq following his demise." [Back]

² For concurring assessments that the reconstruction of Iraq could have succeeded had it not been for a series of unnecessary blunders see, Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2005); Noah Feldman, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2006); T. Christian Miller, Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq (Boston: Little, Brown, 2006); George Packer, The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); David L. Phillips, Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2005); Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006). [Back]

³ International Republican Institute, "Survey of Iraqi Public Opinion: June 14, June 24, 2006," July 19, 2006, http://www.iri.org/mena/iraq/pdfs/2006-07-18-Iraq%20poll%20June%20June.ppt, downloaded August 20, 2006, p. 4. [Back]

⁴ Wolfowitz's statement to this effect originally appeared in an article by Sam Tanenhaus in Vanity Fair in May 2003. However, the "quote" used in the Tanenhaus piece was actually a misquotation. What Wolfowitz actually said was, "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but . . . there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two. . . ." See William Kristol, "What Wolfowitz Really Said," The Weekly Standard, Vol. 8, No. 38, (June 9, 2003). [Back]

⁵ The word is, again, Wolfowitz's. See Mark Bowden, "Wolfowitz: The Exit Interviews," The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 296, No. 1 (July/August 2005), p. 114. [Back]

⁶ Contrary to the claims of many Administration critics, the government distorted, but did not wholly fabricate, the U.S. intelligence community's assessments. The U.S. intelligence community--as well as those of all of the Western European states, Israel, Iran, Russia, and China--were nearly unanimous in the belief that by 2003, Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs. Only a tiny number of analysts dissented from this position, and those that did so tended to be discredited for one reason or another. Of course, the intelligence communities were wrong in this belief, but it is simply not the case that the Bush Administration claimed that Iraq had reconstituted its WMD programs, contrary to the beliefs of the intelligence professionals. Where the Administration exaggerated the conclusions of the intelligence community was in claiming that Iraq had ties to al-Qa'ida, and that Iraq's nuclear weapons program was on the brink (usually described as "one year") of acquiring a nuclear weapon. Ninety percent of the intelligence analysts did believe that Iraq would have nuclear weapons within five to seven years (as reported in the 2002 Special National Intelligence Estimate), but very few believed that Iraq could acquire one within a year. On this set of issues, see Paul Pillar, "Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 2 (March/April 2005); Kenneth M. Pollack, "Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong?" The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 293, No. 1 (January/February 2004); United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Report on U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, (Washington, DC: GPO, 2004); United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Report on Postwar Findings about Iraq's WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How they Compare with Prewar Assessments, (Washington, DC: GPO, 2006). [Back]

⁷ These were my own reasons for believing that a war with Saddam eventually would be necessary, albeit not at the time nor in the manner conducted by the Administration. In retrospect, the WMD argument was wrong because Saddam had not reconstituted these programs and probably would have required eight to twelve years to acquire a nuclear weapon, by far the most important WMD threat. I believe the other arguments remain sound; however, at this point, whatever benefits were derived in addressing these problems will be entirely outweighed should Iraq slide into all-out civil war, thereby spreading instability throughout the Persian Gulf region. If that is the ultimate outcome of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, then it will be impossible for anyone to argue that it benefited the United States, the Iraqis, or anyone else, no matter how noble (or ignoble) the intentions upon which it was based. [Back]

⁸ Jim Woolsey wrote the forward to Mylroie's book, A Study of Revenge, (Washington, DC: AEI, 2001), in which she laid out her argument. Paul Wolfowitz provided a dust jacket quote claiming that the book, "...argues powerfully that the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was actually an agent of Iraqi intelligence." As a side note, U.S. intelligence experts reviewed Mylroie's work in detail and found it to be not only unsubstantiated, but deeply flawed. For an unclassified assessment of Mylroie's claims by a highly-regarded terrorism expert, see Peter Bergen, "Armchair Provocateur: The NeoCons' Favorite Conspiracy Theorist," Washington Monthly (December 2003). [Back]

⁹ On the evidence available before the invasion both for and against a relationship between Saddam and al-Qa'ida--and concluding that no meaningful relationship existed--see Pillar, "Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq"; and Pollack, The Threatening Storm, pp. XXI-XXIII, 153-58. [Back]

¹⁰ On this, see in particular Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, especially pp. 457-96; and Ricks, Fiasco, esp. pp. 85-213. [Back]

¹¹ For instance, in the second debate of the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush replied in answer to a question about the U.S. mission in Somalia that, "[It] started off as a humanitarian mission and it changed into a nation-building mission, and that's where the mission went wrong. The mission was changed. And as a result, our nation paid a price. And so I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war. I think our troops ought to be used to help overthrow the dictator when it's in our best interests. But in this case it was a nation-building exercise, and same with Haiti. I wouldn't have supported either." Commission on Presidential Debates, "Transcript: The Second Gore-Bush Presidential Debate," October 11, 2000, http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2000b.html, downloaded, August 22, 2006. [Back]

¹² See for instance, Ricks, Fiasco, especially pp. 104-05; PBS Frontline, "Interview: General Jay Garner," from "Truth, War and Consequences," show link, downloaded on August 23, 2006. [Back]

¹³ Jane Perlez, "U.S. Team Arrives in Iraq to Establish Postwar Base," The New York Times, April 9, 2003. [Back]

¹⁴ In the spring of 2003, shortly before the invasion, Jay Garner's military team met with me and two other experts on the Iraqi armed forces to get our advice on how to tackle their new jobs. While the members of Garner's team were themselves quite competent, they were not experts on Iraq (as they readily acknowledged), and we were stunned by the ignorance inherent in the planning guidance they had been provided by the office of the Secretary of Defense. In particular, they had been told that one of their greatest challenges would be providing for all of the Iraqi formations that were expected to be surrendering to the United States. I remember telling them, along with one of my colleagues, that they would be quite lucky if they had that problem and that instead, they were much more likely to face a situation where the vast bulk of Iraqi soldiers simply went home once the shooting started. Thus, their most likely challenge would be to convince those soldiers to come back to their barracks, where they could be kept out of trouble and eventually demobilized. [Back]

¹⁵ In addition to the accounts sited in note 2 above, see also James Fallows, "The Fifty-First State?" The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 290, No. 4 (November 2002); and James Fallows, "Blind Into Baghdad," The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 293, No. 1 (January/February 2004). [Back]

¹⁶ On the course of the war itself, see Anthony H. Cordesman, The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics and Military Lessons (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II; Williamson Murray and Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr., The Iraq War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2003); Bing West and Major General Ray L. Smith, The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the 1st Marine Division (New York: Bantam, 2003). [Back]

¹⁷ On the comparative record of the United States and the UN in nation-building operations, see James Dobbins, John G. McGinn, Keith Crane, Seth G. Jones, Rollie Lal, Andrew Rathmell, Rachel M. Swanger, and Anga Timilsina, America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq (Santa Monica: RAND, 2003); and James Dobbins, Seth G. Jones, Keith Crane, Andrew Rathmell, Brett Steele, Richard Teltschik, and Anga Timilsina, The UN's Role in Nation-Building: From the Congo to Iraq (Santa Monica: RAND, 2005). [Back]

¹⁸ In the spring of 2003, just weeks before the invasion of Iraq, I was invited to spend an afternoon with the officers and other key personnel of the 352nd and 354th Civil Affairs battalions of the U.S. Army. These were the two civil affairs battalions slated to go to Iraq and lead the reconstruction effort, but they claimed that they could not get any support from DoD in terms of expertise on Iraq and what they might expect when they got there. They called me as a private citizen in the hope that I would be willing to provide what their own chain of command would not. One of the many things that struck me about that afternoon was how many of the officers I met asked me whether we would have UN and NGO participation in the reconstruction, which they considered absolutely vital. This was especially true of those personnel who had served in the Balkans. What I heard from them over and over again was that, "We are going to have the UN with us, right? 'Cause in the Balkans, all we did was act as liaison between the UN and the NGOs and NATO forces. We don't know how to rebuild a country, but they [the UN and the NGOs] do." [Back]

¹⁹ Kenneth M. Pollack, "After Saddam: Assessing the Reconstruction of Iraq," Analysis Paper No. 1, The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, January 2004, p. 27. [Back]

²⁰ Edmund L. Andrews, "Overseer in Iraq Vows to Sell Off Government-Owned Companies," The New York Times, June 23, 2003, pg. A.13; Neil King Jr., "Selling Iraqis on Selling Iraq: U.S. Pushes to Put State Firms on the Block, Skeptics Warn of Unrest," The Wall Street Journal October 28, 2003, pg. A4. [Back]

²¹ For Bremer's version, see L. Paul Bremer with Malcolm McConnell, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006). [Back]

²² Jay Garner has publicly agreed that disbanding the army was a mistake largely because there was no DDR program and so instead it set too many young Iraqi men loose on the streets with no means of support. See for instance, Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr., "Federalism Can Avert Civil War in Iraq: An Interview with Jay Garner," National Journal, Vol. 36, No. 7 (February 14, 2004). [Back]

²³ Pollack, "After Saddam," p. 12. [Back]

²⁴ On this see, James Dobbins, John G. McGinn, Keith Crane, Seth G. Jones, Rollie Lal, Andrew Rathmell, Rachel M. Swanger, Anga Timilsina, America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq (Santa Monica: RAND, 2003), pp. 184-210; John Hamre, Frederick Barton, Bathsheba Crocker, Johanna Mendelson-Forman, and Robert Orr, "Iraq's Post-Conflict Reconstruction: A Field Review and Recommendations," Center for Strategic and International Studies, July 17, 2003, pp. 4-7; Pollack, The Threatening Storm, pp. 406-09; Pollack, "After Saddam," pp. 16-23. [Back]

²⁵ Pollack, "After Saddam," p. 23. [Back]

²⁶ On Chalabi's unpopularity, see the polling data on the popularity of various Iraqi figures in Dina Smeltz and Jodi Nachtwey, "Iraqi Public Opinion Analysis," U.S. Department of State, October 21, 2003, http://www.cpa-iraq.org/government/political_poll.pdf, p. 8. In addition, during the parliamentary elections of December 2005, Chalabi's political party failed to win a single seat. [Back]

²⁷ Pollack, "After Saddam," pp. 14-15. [Back]

²⁸ Ahmed S. Hashim, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Packer, The Assassin's Gate, pp. 308-12, 415-17; Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War, especially 219-44, 279-315. [Back]

²⁹ See Pollack, "After Saddam," pp. 20-24. [Back]

³⁰ Stability operations are those military operations employed to deal with a failed state, a state that has just undergone a massive military conflict or natural disaster, or other similar circumstances. As a result of the problems of postwar Iraq, which included a failed state, a nation traumatized by war, and an insurgency, both types of operations were critical to success in Iraq. Many commentators mistakenly tried to argue that only one or the other was relevant. In fact, what made Iraq so challenging was that we had created a situation where both afflictions were present. For a longer discussion of this issue, see Kenneth M. Pollack and the Iraq Policy Working Group of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, A Switch in Time: A New Strategy for America in Iraq, The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, February 2006, pp. 1-3, 9-21. [Back]

³¹ Bruce Hoffman, "Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq," Washington, DC, RAND Corp., June 2004; Kalev I. Sepp, "Best Practices in Counterinsurgency," Military Review (May-June 2005), p. 9; James T. Quinlivan, "The Burden of Victory: The Painful Arithmetic of Stability Operations," RAND Review, (Summer 2003). Available at link. Also, James T. Quinlivan, "Force Requirements in Stability Operations," Parameters (Winter) 1995, pp. 56–69. Quinlivan has demonstrated that stabilizing a country requires roughly twenty security personnel (troops and police) per thousand inhabitants just as COIN operations do. [Back]

³² On the problems besetting the Iraqi armed forces in 2006, see Anthony H. Cordesman, "Iraqi Force Development: Summer 2006 Update," Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 23, 2006; and Pollack, A Switch in Time, pp. 41-47. [Back]

³³ In many ways, poor tactics were just as detrimental to the U.S. counterinsurgent and stability operations as were the inappropriate strategic concept. For longer discussions of these issues, see Pollack, "After Saddam," pp. 13-16, Pollack, A Switch in Time, pp. 28-41. [Back]

Note: The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and should not be attributed to the staff, officers or trustees of The Brookings Institution

Chris is always good, even if you disagree

2007-01-04T09:43:00.000-05:00

fighting words: A wartime lexicon.

Lynching the DictatorOn Saturday morning, the United States helped to officiate at a human sacrifice.

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2007, at 1:00 PM ET

The disgusting video of Saddam Hussein's last moments on the planet is more than a reminder of the inescapable barbarity of capital punishment and of the intelligible and conventional reasons why it should always be opposed. The zoolike scenes in that dank, filthy shed (it seems that those attending were not even asked to turn off their cell phones or forbidden to use them to record souvenir film) were more like a lynching than an execution. At one point, one of the attending magistrates can be heard appealing for decency and calm, but otherwise the fact must be faced: In spite of his mad invective against "the Persians" and other traitors, the only character with a rag of dignity in the whole scene is the father of all hangmen, Saddam Hussein himself.

How could it have come to this? Did U.S. officials know that the designated "executioners" would be the unwashed goons of Muqtada Sadr's "Mahdi Army"—the same sort of thugs who killed Abdul Majid al-Khoei in Najaf just after the liberation and who indulge in extra-judicial murder of Iraqis every night and day? Did our envoys and representatives ask for any sort of assurances before turning over a prisoner who was being held under the Geneva Conventions? According to the New York Times, there do seem to have been a few insipid misgivings about the timing and the haste, but these appear to have been dissolved soon enough and replaced by a fatalistic passivity that amounts, in theory and practice, to acquiescence in a crude Shiite coup d'état. Thus, far from bringing anything like "closure," the hanging ensures that the poison of Saddamism will stay in the Iraqi bloodstream, mingling with other related infections such as confessional fanaticism and the sort of video sadism that has until now been the prerogative of al-Qaida's dehumanized ghouls. We have helped to officiate at a human sacrifice. For shame.

In Baghdad last week, I missed the best chance I shall ever have to mention rope in the house of a hanged man. The house belonged to Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's repellent half-brother and one of the two men who are now scheduled to follow him through the trapdoor. These days, it serves as the office of President Jalal Talabani, with whom I was invited to take lunch. The television was showing the trial of Saddam and his associates for the Anfal campaign, that ruthless and mechanized devastation of Iraqi Kurdistan and the systematic slaughter and clearance of its people by conventional and chemical weaponry. Every Kurd I know was eager to see this episode properly aired in court and placed on the record for all time, with its chief perpetrator on hand to be confronted with his deeds. Instead, the said chief perpetrator was snatched from the dock—in the very middle of his trial—and thrown as a morsel to one of the militias. This sort of improvised "offing" is not even a parody of the serious tribunal that history demands.

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I couldn't help but notice that President Talabani was unwilling to be drawn on the subject of the death penalty, to which he is opposed. He might have been forgiven a bit of gloating after all that his people had endured, but he denied himself the pleasure. I also couldn't help noticing that when the Iraqi "appeals court" confirmed the death sentence (after a period of time so short that it would be insulting to describe it as a judicial review), it stipulated that not even the president could commute the sentence. In other words, the need of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to ingratiate himself with Muqtada Sadr's forces has been allowed to take precedence over everything else, including the stern requirements of justice that were the supposed point of the trial to begin with. The timing—isn't anyone in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad paid to notice this kind of thing?—was explicitly designed to rub every kind of humiliation into Iraqi Sunnis. It profaned their observance of the Eid ul-Adha holiday, while gratifying the Shiite fundamentalists whose ceremonies begin one day later. To have made the butcher Saddam into a martyr, to have gratified one sect, and to have cheated millions of Iraqis and Kurds of the chance for a full accounting—what a fine day's work!

I think that there is a reason the Kurdish reaction is somewhat different from the Shiite one. Iraqi Kurdistan escaped from Saddam's rule in 1992, and its citizens have since been engaged in patiently building up their autonomy. They did not have to endure the appalling humiliation of sanctions plus Saddam, and they have not since been so much engaged in a foul civil war begun by Sunni extremists desecrating shrines and slaughtering civilians. Their attitude to their former despot and murderer is somewhat more detached and judicious. If they feel a thirst for vengeance, they do not make a tribal fiesta of it. The moral difference here is not negligible.

Reporting from defeated Germany in 1945, and noticing some brutal treatment of captured SS men, George Orwell wrote a brilliant essay called "Revenge Is Sour." I hadn't thought of it for a while but pulled it down from the shelf when I returned from Iraq. Here is the key passage:

Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.
Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing S.S. officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and disgusting. It is said that when Mussolini's corpse was exhibited in public, an old woman drew a revolver and fired five shots into it, exclaiming, "Those are for my five sons!" It is the kind of story that the newspapers make up, but it might be true. I wonder how much satisfaction she got out of those five shots, which, doubtless, she had dreamed years earlier of firing. The condition of her being able to get near enough to Mussolini to shoot at him was that he should be a corpse.

The shabby, tawdry scene of Muqtada Sadr's riffraff taunting their defenseless former tyrant evokes exactly this quality of hysterical falsity and bravado. While Saddam Hussein was alive, they cringed. Now, they find their lost courage, and meanwhile take the drill and the razor blade and the blowtorch to their fellow Iraqis. To watch this abysmal spectacle as a neutral would be bad enough. To know that the U. S. government had even a silent, shamefaced part in it is to feel something well beyond embarrassment.

GOOOO JETS

2007-01-01T02:57:00.000-05:00

Patriots won't intimidate Mangini's Jets

By Michael Smith
ESPN.com
Archive

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. -- The Jets' Week 10 win at Gillette Stadium was satisfying for New York owner Woody Johnson, but he didn't hire Eric Mangini from New England just to split a season series with the Patriots. No, Johnson hired Mangini specifically for this Sunday.

Mangini's Jets earned their 10th victory of the season and a wild-card berth with a 23-3 win over the Raiders on Sunday. Now they get to put their copy of the Patriots' championship blueprint to the ultimate test -- in Foxborough, Mass., in the first round of the playoffs, a tournament New England (10-1 in the postseason under Bill Belichick) has owned the past five years.

In Mangini, Johnson and general manager Mike Tannenbaum saw the next Belichick. And when, much to Belichick's displeasure, the Jets wooed his defensive coordinator, this is exactly what they envisioned: high-stakes showdowns between mentor and protégé. It's just that few expected those showdowns to be staged so soon. There is no love lost between the two franchises -- the only thing that figures to be colder than the temperature for their third meeting is the shoulder they will give each other.

The Jets won't be intimidated by the Patriots' playoff mystique. Not after a 17-14 win Nov. 12 that started a 6-2 second-half run.

"We all knew that if we wanted to do something special this year, we had to win that game," Jets linebacker Eric Barton said.

New York has been the little green team that could all season. It won six more games than it did in 2006, when injuries, especially at quarterback, sabotaged what some thought could be a Super Bowl season. Now that they're in the playoffs, the question becomes: Are the Jets capable of sticking around for a while?

If you are among those who were surprised by the Jets' turnaround -- remember, they were a Doug Brien field goal from facing the Patriots in the AFC title game two years ago -- try not to make the same mistake twice and underestimate this gritty edition of Gang Green.

"I think it's been overstated the lack of talent we had coming into this season because we were 4-12 last year," said guard Pete Kendall, one of the holdovers from the '04 squad. "We felt like if we got some other pieces and stayed healthy, we had a chance to be a decent team."

For starters, in Chad Pennington, the Jets have an experienced (four playoff starts), efficient quarterback who, for the most part, takes care of the ball. He isn't in Tom Brady class as he was billed to be back in 2002, but he's cerebral and gets the job done. Pennington may not have the big arm, but New York has skill players in wideouts Laveranues Coles and Jerricho Cotchery and rookie running back Leon Washington who can produce big plays.

The Jets' defense yielded the fewest points (102) in the league over the final eight games. During the regular season, New York's D allowed the fewest plays of 20 yards or longer (17).

And the Jets, as they were during Herman Edwards' tenure, are among the NFL's least penalized teams. They don't make it easier for opponents by making it difficult on themselves. The Jets wait for the opposition to make the big mistake, and they're pretty good at being patient. That's why it could be a while before they are eliminated. It would be a mistake to underestimate the Jets for a second time in one season.

The no-style, all-substance Jets are a reflection of their head coach, and thus a reflection of their familiar first-round opponent. Mangini, by the way, may be new at the top job, but he has coached in 13 playoff games with Belichick and Bill Parcells -- two guys who know a thing or two about how to win a game or two in the NFL's tournament. Mangini owns three Super Bowl rings as an assistant, so he's no stranger to playoff pressure.

"I've learned more football from that man [Mangini] in one year than I've learned in a long time," said 13-year-veteran defensive end Kimo von Oelhoffen, who won a Super Bowl with Pittsburgh last season. "He doesn't leave one stone unturned. He will rep it and rep it and rep it until we can freakin' do it. He works harder than anybody I've ever seen. You trust people like that.

"He gets his point across and makes sure that everybody in the room knows his role, his responsibility and the game plan. We go through every situation, and when those situations arise, we know how to respond. We don't make many mental mistakes. If we've got 15 [mental mistakes in a game] on one side of the ball, that's way too many. In some places, that's average."

Sound like another team we know?

"It's a similarly built team," said Jets linebacker Matt Chatham, who was a member of three Super Bowl teams in New England. "The whole no-superstars thing. We play a gritty kind of game, biting, scratching, clawing, whatever it takes to win. We win on intangibles."

All the Jets talked about after wrapping up a playoff berth was the hard work they've put into adapting to scheme changes on offense and defense, adopting Mangini's philosophy, and accepting the change in culture that came with his arrival. They're a bunch of grinders. They understand that if they are to make any noise in the coming weekends, it will correlate with what they do in the quiet of Weeb Ewbank Hall during the week.

"Everybody takes it upon themselves to do the little things," Oelhoffen said of the Jets' success.

Only in their 41-0 loss to Jacksonville in Week 5 did a game get away from the Jets. They were in every other loss. They lost by a touchdown in the first meeting with the Patriots and by a field goal to the then-unbeaten Colts. They played Chicago tough. They proved they can play with anybody, anywhere. They belong here. So don't be so quick to bet against them sticking around for a couple rounds.

"We won 10 games in a hard division in a hard conference," Tannenbaum said. "It shows we're a good football team."

Michael Smith is a senior writer for ESPN.com.

Told you Solamia was going to get bad...

2006-11-15T00:05:00.000-05:00

U.N. Says Somalis Helped Hezbollah Fighters

By ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: November 15, 2006

UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 14 — More than 700 Islamic militants from Somalia traveled to Lebanon in July to fight alongside Hezbollah in its war against Israel, a United Nations report says. The militia in Lebanon returned the favor by providing training and — through its patrons Iran and Syria — weapons to the Islamic alliance struggling for control of Somalia, it adds.

The report, which was disclosed by Reuters on Monday, appears to be the first indication that foreign fighters assisted Hezbollah during the 34-day conflict, when Israel maintained a tight blockade on Lebanon.

The report also says Iran sought to trade arms for uranium from Somalia to further its nuclear ambitions, though it does not say whether Iran succeeded.

The 86-page report was issued by four experts monitoring violations of a 1992 United Nations arms embargo on Somalia, which was put in place after the country lapsed into civil war and remains in effect. The report is to be discussed Friday at the Security Council.

The panel does not say how the information was obtained. But the members had access to information from the intelligence agencies of the Security Council’s 15 current members, including Britain, France, China, Russia and the United States, a United Nations official said.

Any involvement by Somalis would be surprising because Hezbollah’s effectiveness is widely attributed to its deep familiarity with the region.

Hezbollah officials could not be reached Tuesday night for comment.

An official at the Israeli mission to the United Nations said he had not seen the report, and was not aware of any Somali fighters having taken part in the conflict with Hezbollah. The official asked not to be identified, citing diplomatic protocol.

While the sources of the information remain unclear, the report is dense with details about arms shipments to the groups vying for power in Somalia.

It states that in mid-July, Aden Hashi Farah, a leader of the Somali Islamist alliance, personally selected about 720 combat-hardened fighters to travel to Lebanon and fight alongside Hezbollah.

At least 100 Somalis had returned by early September — with five Hezbollah members — while others stayed on in Lebanon for advanced military training, the report says. It is not clear how many may have been killed, though the report says some were wounded and later treated after their return to Somalia.

The fighters were paid a minimum of $2,000 for their service, the report says, and as much as $30,000 was to be given to the families of those killed, with money donated by “a number of supporting countries.”

In addition to training some Somali militants, Hezbollah “arranged for additional support to be given” by Iran and Syria, including weapons, the report found. On July 27, 200 Somali fighters also traveled to Syria to be trained in guerrilla warfare, the report says.

It also indicates that Iran appears to have sought help in its quest for uranium in Dusa Mareb, the hometown of Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, the leader of the Islamist alliance in Somalia, which is known as the Council of Islamic Courts.

“At the time of the writing of this report, there were two Iranians in Dusa Mareb engaged on matters linked to the exploration of uranium in exchange for arms” for the Council of Islamic Courts, says the report, which is dated Oct. 16.

Those claims, if proved, could worsen global tensions over Iran’s nuclear program. Iran ignored an Aug. 31 deadline to suspend its uranium enrichment, and the United States has been leading a United Nations effort to impose sanctions.

The United Nations report is focused mostly on the increasingly volatile situation in Somalia, where Islamists took control of the capital, Mogadishu, in June from warlords backed by the United States.

Not only has the volume of arms flowing into Somalia grown, according to the authors, but more sophisticated weapons like surface-to-air missiles are being brought in. The conflict could grow into a regional war, with Somalia’s neighbors, Ethiopia and Eritrea, backing opposing sides.

The report also accuses Djibouti, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Syria of supplying the Somali Islamists with arms, advisers and fighters. It says three nations — Ethiopia, Uganda and Yemen — are aligned with the so-called transitional government based in Baidoa, an inland city.

Asked about violations of the arms embargo, the report states, officials in those countries either denied any involvement or failed to answer.

The report recommends that the Security Council blockade Somalia. It also warns urgently against sending any peacekeepers to the country, saying such a force could become “the catalyst that sparks a serious military confrontation between the opposing sides.”

GO SHAYS!

2006-11-13T00:23:00.000-05:00

Our Towns

A Survivor Reflects on Political Casualties, and Real Ones

Thomas McDonald for The New York Times

Christopher Shays, with his daughter, Jeramy, and wife, Betsi, speaking to supporters on Tuesday night after winning re-election.

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: November 12, 2006

Bridgeport, Conn.

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U.S.: The Caucus

Sitting in the sun on the balcony of his house overlooking the Long Island Sound on Thursday, Representative Christopher Shays rubbed his eyes, rubbed his temples, jumped up to take a congratulatory call from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, and plopped back wearily into a white plastic chair.

Like the only survivor of a hotel fire, he was a little hesitant to draw too many conclusions but glad he was alive.

“I’m only two days into this,” said Mr. Shays, after narrowly beating Diane G. Farrell to keep the seat in Congress he has held since 1987. “The first day you try to get your sleep. The second day you try to think about what happened to your friends.”

Many of them were the Republicans who were washed out to sea in the Democratic tide. Mr. Shays was one of the few Republicans among perhaps two dozen seen as vulnerable back in September who managed to survive. He was the only one of the three Republican incumbents from Connecticut who won re-election. When he went to Congress, he was one of nine Republican representatives from the six New England states. In the next Congress, he will be the only one.

And he won the race the hard way. He had a highly regarded, well-funded opponent. He supported the war in Iraq, if not the way it was executed. He agreed to take part in 11 debates. He did not run negative ads. He lost most of the key newspaper endorsements. His district, the Fourth, was solidly antiwar.

Some things you can learn from a guy who bucked the tide and won. Some you can’t. Mr. Shays no doubt benefited from his reputation for being an effective congressman and for a maverick’s image going back to the State Legislature in the mid-1980s. He has burnished that image in Congress ever since he got there.

He showed up at every campaign event with a 54-page booklet of positions, votes, achievements and federal spending in the district — not sexy but informative. He was able to convince people, in a way that the state’s two other Republicans, Nancy L. Johnson and Rob Simmons, were not, that if they wanted change, he was still enough of an outsider to offer it. He ran without apology on the war, saying it was a noble effort that had been botched but could still be saved. And he rejected the notion of a consultant-driven, cookie-cutter campaign with the requisite attack ads. He ran the campaign his way, and he made it work.

“By being willing to lose the election, I won the election,” Mr. Shays said. “Because from the start I was willing to lose rather than to win the wrong way. And I think of some of my colleagues that have lost around the country, and I think, boy, I would never want to go out that way.”

Of course, one voter’s maverick may be one colleague’s grandstanding egotist. It’s likely that some of Mr. Shays’s fellow party members were more eager to keep his seat Republican than to see the guy sitting in it be re-elected. But he figures that if ever the party needs in-house critics, it’s now.

“We lost our moral authority to lead,” he said. “Power in and of itself does not justify holding power.”

He said that when the party looked the other way at its ethical failings over the years, it was ambling toward disaster that finally arrived in the House page scandal.

“As soon as Foley came up, I knew it. You could feel it. I said, ‘We’re dead.’ ”

BUT, of course, there were casualties that mattered a lot more than the election ones.

“I don’t know how you’ll react to this, but I also want to say this,” he said on Tuesday night in his victory speech, interrupting the election night ritualistic hoopla with a jolt of reality. He read four names: “Wilfredo Perez. Tyanna Avery-Felder. Jack Dempsey. Nicholas Maderas. I sent them to Iraq, and they came home draped in American flags.

“I think about them almost every day of my life. And when the press talked about how tormented I must feel,” he said, referring to the possibility of losing the election, “they just didn’t get it. They just didn’t get it. The only torment I feel is for those families. And I pray that we can make it right for these families, and that we will find a way to have our men and women come home from success not failure, but that we find a way to bring them home.”

No one who knows him doubts his sincerity. But no one knows better than Mr. Shays that good intentions can be trumped by bad results. He knows in the end he will be judged more on what happens in the war fought by Specialist Perez, Specialist Avery-Felder, Corporal Dempsey and Private Maderas than on whether he ran a perfect race and held off Ms. Farrell, withstood the raging tides and kept his seat two more years.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

Chaos O'Meter, courtesy US Military

2006-11-02T09:29:00.000-05:00

Military Charts Movement of Conflict in Iraq Toward Chaos

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

Published: November 1, 2006

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 — A classified briefing prepared two weeks ago by the United States Central Command portrays Iraq as edging toward chaos, in a chart that the military is using as a barometer of civil conflict.

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A slide titled “Iraq: Indications and Warnings of Civil Conflict” lists factors that are destabilizing Iraq.

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A one-page slide shown at the Oct. 18 briefing provides a rare glimpse into how the military command that oversees the war is trying to track its trajectory, particularly in terms of sectarian fighting.

The slide includes a color-coded bar chart that is used to illustrate an “Index of Civil Conflict.” It shows a sharp escalation in sectarian violence since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, and tracks a further worsening this month despite a concerted American push to tamp down the violence in Baghdad.

In fashioning the index, the military is weighing factors like the ineffectual Iraqi police and the dwindling influence of moderate religious and political figures, rather than more traditional military measures such as the enemy’s fighting strength and the control of territory.

The conclusions the Central Command has drawn from these trends are not encouraging, according to a copy of the slide that was obtained by The New York Times. The slide shows Iraq as moving sharply away from “peace,” an ideal on the far left side of the chart, to a point much closer to the right side of the spectrum, a red zone marked “chaos.” As depicted in the command’s chart, the needle has been moving steadily toward the far right of the chart.

An intelligence summary at the bottom of the slide reads “urban areas experiencing ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaigns to consolidate control” and “violence at all-time high, spreading geographically.” According to a Central Command official, the index on civil strife has been a staple of internal command briefings for most of this year. The analysis was prepared by the command’s intelligence directorate, which is overseen by Brig. Gen. John M. Custer.

Gen. John P. Abizaid, who heads the command, warned publicly in August about the risk of civil war in Iraq, but he said then that he thought it could be averted. In evaluating the prospects for all-out civil strife, the command concentrates on “key reads,” or several principal variables.

According to the slide from the Oct. 18 briefing, the variables include “hostile rhetoric” by political and religious leaders, which can be measured by listening to sermons at mosques and to important Shiite and Sunni leaders, and the amount of influence that moderate political and religious figures have over the population. The other main variables are assassinations and other especially provocative sectarian attacks, as well as “spontaneous mass civil conflict.”

A number of secondary indicators are also taken into account, including activity by militias, problems with ineffective police, the ability of Iraqi officials to govern effectively, the number of civilians who have been forced to move by sectarian violence, the willingness of Iraqi security forces to follow orders, and the degree to which the Iraqi Kurds are pressing for independence from the central government.

These factors are evaluated to create the index of civil strife, which has registered a steady worsening for months. “Ever since the February attack on the Shiite mosque in Samarra, it has been closer to the chaos side than the peace side,” said a Central Command official who asked not to be identified because he was talking about classified information.

In the Oct. 18 brief, the index moved still another notch toward “chaos.” That briefing was prepared three days before General Abizaid met in Washington with President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to take stock of the situation in Iraq.

A spokesman for the Central Command declined to comment on the index or other information in the slide. “We don’t comment on secret material,” the spokesman said.

One significant factor in the military’s decision to move the scale toward “chaos” was the expanding activity by militias.

Another reason was the limitations of Iraqi government security forces, which despite years of training and equipping by the United States, are either ineffective or, in some cases, infiltrated by the very militias they are supposed to be combating. The slide notes that “ineffectual” Iraqi police forces have been a significant problem, and cites as a concern sectarian conflicts between Iraqi security forces.

Other significant factors are in the political realm. The slide notes that Iraq’s political and religious leaders have lost some of their moderating influence over their constituents or adherents.

Notably, the slide also cites difficulties that the new Iraqi administration has experienced in “governance.” That appears to be shorthand for the frustration felt by American military officers about the Iraqi government’s delays in bringing about a genuine political reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis. It also appears to apply to the lack of reconstruction programs to restore essential services and the dearth of job creation efforts to give young Iraqis an alternative to joining militias, as well as the absence of firm action against militias.

The slide lists other factors that are described as important but less significant. They include efforts by Iran and Syria to enable violence by militias and insurgent groups and the interest by many Kurds in achieving independence. The slide describes violence motivated by sectarian differences as having moved into a “critical” phase.

The chart does note some positive developments. Specifically, it notes that “hostile rhetoric” by political and religious leaders has not increased. It also notes that Iraqi security forces are refusing less often than in the past to take orders from the central government and that there has been a drop-off in mass desertions.

Still, for a military culture that thrives on PowerPoint briefings, the shifting index was seen by some officials as a stark warning about the difficult course of events in Iraq, and mirrored growing concern by some military officers.

A slide titled “Iraq: Indications and Warnings of Civil Conflict” lists factors that are destabilizing Iraq.

Wow! Honest Assessment! Remarkable...

2006-10-19T15:38:00.000-04:00

U.S. to Review Baghdad Plan, General Says

By MICHAEL LUO

Published: October 19, 2006

BAGHDAD, Oct. 19 — The American military’s stepped-up campaign to staunch unrelenting bloodshed in the capital under an ambitious new security plan that was unveiled in August has failed to reduce the violence, a military spokesman said today.

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Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the senior spokesman for the American military in Iraq, speaking today in Baghdad.

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Instead, attacks have actually jumped more than 20 percent over the first three weeks of the holy month of Ramadan, compared to the previous three weeks, said Gen. William Caldwell, the military’s chief spokesman in Iraq.

In an unusually gloomy assessment, General Caldwell called the spike in attacks “disheartening” and added that the American military was “working closely with the government of Iraq to determine how to best refocus our efforts.”

It is unclear, however, what other options might be available to American military commanders if their current efforts fail. Over the past year, American forces had begun withdrawing from large areas of the capital, encouraging Iraqi Army and police forces to take the lead. That policy, however, was followed by escalating levels of sectarian attacks, particularly after the bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine in Samara in February.

In August, military commanders reversed course and returned troops in force to the neighborhoods they had once patrolled. Officials at the time made clear the urgency of the task, saying that whatever unfolded in Baghdad could very well determine the outcome of the war.

American troops, along with their Iraqi counterparts, began conducting concentrated neighborhood-by-neighborhood sweeps of troubled areas, searching homes, setting up checkpoints and systematically clearing the areas of insurgents and militants participating in sectarian death squads.

Those sweeps have made a difference in some areas, General Caldwell said, but ultimately have not met military commanders’ “overall expectations of sustaining a reduction in the levels of violence.”

In a worrisome development, General Caldwell revealed today that American troops had to return last week to Dora, a troubled southern Baghdad neighborhood that had been a showcase of the new security plan and was one of the first areas to be cleared.

A key concern from the outset of the stepped-up patrols in the capital was the difficulty of holding onto areas after they had been cleared. In other troubled areas of the country that American forces have sought to “clear and hold,” like towns along the Euphrates River corridor from west of Baghdad to the Syrian border, military officials have struggled to deal with insurgents simply melting away prior to the arrival of troops, only to return stronger than ever after focused military offensives have been completed.

In Baghdad, the military has been observing a marked increase recently in sectarian attacks in so-called cleared areas, General Caldwell said, noting that insurgents were “punching back hard.”

“They’re trying to get back into those areas,” he said. “We’re constantly going back in and doing clearing operations again.”

General Caldwell also raised the possibility that insurgents have intentionally increased their attacks in recent weeks as a way of influencing political events in the United States.

“We also realize that there is a midterm election that’s taking place in the United States and that the extremist elements understand the power of the media; that if they can in fact produce additional casualties, that in fact is recognized and discussed in the press because everybody would like not to see anybody get killed in these operations, but that does occur,” he said.

By almost any measure, the situation in the capital is in a downward spiral. Last month, General Caldwell said in a briefing that suicide attacks were at an all-time high. October is also on track to be the third-deadliest month of the conflict for the American military, with a large portion of the deaths occurring in Baghdad.

The military today announced the deaths of two more American troops—a Marine in Anbar province from “enemy action” and a soldier north of Balad from a roadside bomb — bringing the month’s total to at least 72.

American commanders had predicted a spike in violence during Ramadan, but previous Ramadans have been nowhere near as deadly for American troops as October has been so far.

Deaths in Baghdad specifically have leaped this month. Anbar province also continues to be deadly for American troops who are trying to root out Sunni insurgents there.

Today, dozens of black-clad gunmen, toting assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, paraded down a main street in Ramadi, one of the most troublesome cities in Anbar province for American troops. They waved banners identifying them as members of the Shura Mujahideen Council, an umbrella group for insurgents. The council had recently announced the creation of an Islamic state in the area, independent of the Iraqi government.

“The problem is that the government is weak,” said Sheikh Fassal al-Guood, a former governor of Anbar province, on the brazen demonstration. “This issue takes time, training and weapons. The police force in Anbar now cannot stand up to Al Qaeda fighters.”

Elsewhere, the northern city of Mosul saw an outbreak in violence today, with suicide bombers targeting a police station and an American convoy, killing at least 22 people and injuring dozens more, mostly civilians, a hospital official said.

The first attack came about 7:30 a.m. when a pair of suicide bombers detonated their vehicles near al-Thakafa police station in the neighborhood of Nargal. An hour later, another suicide bomber struck an American convoy. Just before, another police station in the al-Rifaee neighborhood was attacked by mortars and gunmen in a clash that lasted for 45 minutes, according to a witness.

In Baghdad, a pair of roadside bombs wounded two people near the National Theater in central Baghdad, Reuters said.

A car bomb exploded in New Baghdad, targeting an Iraqi police patrol, killing one person and wounding four others, an Interior Ministry official said.

KIM JONG-IL, YOU REALLy, REALLY SUCK

2006-10-09T02:15:00.000-04:00

N. Korea Reports 1st Nuclear Arms Test

Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse-Getty Images

South Koreans watched a television showing the North’s leader, Kim Jong-il, at a railway station in Seoul this morning.

By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: October 9, 2006

WASHINGTON, Monday, Oct. 9 — North Korea said Sunday night that it had set off its first nuclear test, becoming the eighth country in history, and arguably the most unstable and most dangerous, to proclaim that it has joined the club of nuclear weapons states.

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The test came just two days after the country was warned by the United Nations Security Council that the action could lead to severe consequences.

American officials cautioned that they had not yet received any confirmation that the test had occurred. The United States Geological Survey said it had detected a tremor of 4.2 magnitude on the Korean Peninsula.

China called the test a “flagrant and brazen” violation of international opinion and said it “firmly opposes” North Korea’s conduct.

Senior Bush administration officials said that they had little reason to doubt the announcement, and warned that the test would usher in a new era of confrontation with the isolated and unpredictable country run by President Kim Jong-il.

Early Monday morning, even before the test was confirmed, Bush administration officials were holding conference calls to discuss ways to further cut off a country that is already subject to sanctions, and hard-liners said the moment had arrived for neighboring countries, especially China and Russia, to cut off the trade and oil supplies that have been Mr. Kim’s lifeline.

In South Korea, the country that fought a bloody war with the North for three years and has lived with an uneasy truce and failed efforts at reconciliation for more than half a century, officials said they believed that an explosion occurred around 10:36 p.m. New York time — 11:36 a.m. Monday in Korea.

They identified the source of the explosion as North Hamgyong Province, roughly the area where American spy satellites have been focused for several years on a variety of suspected underground test sites.

That was less than an hour after North Korean officials had called their counterparts in China and warned them that a test was just minutes away. The Chinese, who have been North Korea’s main ally for 60 years but have grown increasingly frustrated by the its defiance of Beijing, sent an emergency alert to Washington through the United States Embassy in Beijing. Within minutes, President Bush was notified, shortly after 10 p.m., by his national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, that a test was imminent.

North Korea’s decision to conduct the test demonstrated what the world has suspected for years: the country has joined India, Pakistan and Israel as one of the world’s “undeclared” nuclear powers. India and Pakistan conducted tests in 1998; Israel has never acknowledged conducting a test or possessing a weapon. But by actually setting off a weapon, if that is proven, the North has chosen to end years of carefully crafted and diplomatically useful ambiguity about its abilities.

The North’s decision to set off a nuclear device could profoundly change the politics of Asia.

The test occurred only a week after Japan installed a new, more nationalistic prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and just as the country was renewing a debate about whether its ban on possessing nuclear weapons — deeply felt in a country that saw two of its cities incinerated in 1945 — still makes strategic sense.

And it shook the peninsula just as Mr. Abe was arriving in South Korea for the first time as prime minister, in an effort to repair a badly strained relationship, having just visited with Chinese leaders in Beijing. It places his untested administration in the midst of one of the region’s biggest security crises in years, and one whose outcome will be watched closely in Iran and other states suspected of attempting to follow the path that North Korea has taken.

Now, Tokyo and Washington are expected to put even more pressure on the South Korean government to terminate its “sunshine policy” of trade, tourism and openings to the North — a policy that has been the source of enormous tension between Seoul and Washington since Mr. Bush took office.

The explosion was the product of nearly four decades of work by North Korea, one of the world’s poorest and most isolated countries. The nation of 23 million people appears constantly fearful that its far richer, more powerful neighbors — and particularly the United States — will try to unseat its leadership. The country’s founder, Kim Il-sung, who died in 1994, emerged from the Korean War determined to equal the power of the United States, and acutely aware that Gen. Douglas MacArthur had requested nuclear weapons to use against his country.

But it took decades to put together the technology, and only in the past few years has the North appeared to have made a political decision to speed forward. “I think they just had their military plan to demonstrate that no one could mess with them, and they weren’t going to be deterred, not even by the Chinese,” a senior American official who deals with the North said late Sunday evening. “In the end, there was just no stopping them.”

But the explosion was also the product of more than two decades of diplomatic failure, spread over at least three presidencies. American spy satellites saw the North building a good-size nuclear reactor in the early 1980’s, and by the early 1990’s the C.I.A. estimated that the country could have one or two nuclear weapons. But a series of diplomatic efforts to “freeze” the nuclear program — including a 1994 accord signed with the Clinton administration — ultimately broke down, amid distrust and recriminations on both sides.

Three years ago, just as President Bush was sending American troops toward Iraq, the North threw out the few remaining weapons inspectors living at their nuclear complex in Yongbyon, and moved 8,000 nuclear fuel rods they had kept under lock and key. Those rods contained enough plutonium, experts said, to produce five or six nuclear weapons, though it is unclear how many the North now stockpiles.

For years, some diplomats assumed that the North was using that ambiguity to trade away its nuclear capability, for recognition, security guarantees, aid and trade with the West. But in the end, the country’s reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il, who inherited the mantle of leadership from his father, still called the “Great Leader,” appears to have concluded that the surest way of getting what he seeks is to demonstrate that he has the capability to strike back if attacked.

Assessing the nature of that ability is difficult. If the test occurred as the North claimed, it is unclear whether it was an actual bomb or a more primitive device. Some experts cautioned that it could try to fake an explosion, setting off conventional explosives; the only way to know for sure will be if American “sniffer” planes, patrolling the North Korean coast, pick up evidence of nuclear byproducts in the air.

Even then, it is not clear that the North could fabricate that bomb into a weapon that could fit atop its missiles, one of the country’s few significant exports.

But the big fear about North Korea, American officials have long said, has less to do with its ability to lash out than it does with its proclivity to proliferate. The country has sold its missiles and other weapons to Iran, Syria and Pakistan; at various moments in the six-party talks that have gone on for the past few years, North Korean representatives have threatened to sell nuclear weapons. But in a statement issued last week, announcing that it intends to set off a test, the country said it would not sell its nuclear products.

The fear of proliferation prompted President Bush to declare in 2003 that the United States would never “tolerate” a nuclear-armed North Korea. He has never defined what he means by “tolerate,” and on Sunday night Tony Snow, Mr. Bush’s press secretary, said that, assuming the report of the test is accurate, the United States would now go to the United Nations to determine “what our next steps should be in response to this very serious step.”

Nuclear testing is often considered a necessary step to proving a weapon’s reliability as well as the most forceful way for a nation to declare its status as a nuclear power.

“Once they do that, it’s serious," said Harold M. Agnew, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, which designed most of the nation’s nuclear arms. "Otherwise, the North Koreans are just jerking us around.”

Networks of seismometers that detect faint trembles in the earth and track distant rumbles are the best way to spot an underground nuclear test.

The big challenge is to distinguish the signatures of earthquakes from those of nuclear blasts. Typically, the shock waves from nuclear explosions begin with a sharp spike as earth and rock are compressed violently. The signal then tends to become fuzzier as surface rumblings and shudders and after shocks create seismologic mayhem.

With earthquakes, it is usually the opposite. A gentle jostling suddenly becomes much bigger and more violent.

Most of the world’s seismic networks that look for nuclear blasts are designed to detect explosions as small as one kiloton, or equal to 1,000 tons of high explosives. On instruments for detecting earthquakes, such a blast would measure a magnitude of about 4, like a small tremor.

Philip E. Coyle III, a former head of weapons testing at the Pentagon and former director of nuclear testing for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a weapons-design center in California, said the North Koreans could learn much from a nuclear test even if it was small by world standards or less than an unqualified success.

“It would not be totally surprising if it was a fizzle and they said it was a success because they learned something,” he said. “We did that sometimes. We had a missile defense test not so long ago that failed, but the Pentagon said it was a success because they learned something, which I agree with. Failures can teach you a lot.”

William J. Broad contributed reporting from New York, and Thom Shanker from Washington.

Bring on the BICTH-ASS CARDINALS!

2006-10-08T23:09:00.000-04:00

METS LOVE IT IN LA-LA LAND

AMAZIN'S SWEEP, ADVANCE TO NLCS

By MARK HALE

ON THE BUBBLE: David Wright sprays champagne during the Mets' celebration following their 9-5 triumph over the Dodgers last night that completed a three-game sweep and vaulted the Amazin's into the NLCS against the winner of the Cardinals-Padres series.

October 8, 2006 -- GAME 3 Mets 9 Dodgers 5
LOS ANGELES - Carlos Beltran sprayed Omar Minaya with champagne. Fred Wilpon then poured some on Beltran.

The Mets don't have to stick around California, unless they want to drink more bubbly today, after they swept the Dodgers last night to finish off the NLDS. They knocked off L.A., 9-5 at Dodger Stadium, winning the best-of-five series in three straight and earning their first playoff sweep since the 1969 NLCS over Atlanta.

"Who's the better team in New York?" Jose Valentin asked.

Ask the Yanks.

The Mets are in the NLCS for the seventh time, and will have home field advantage. Game 1 is Wednesday at Shea against either the Cardinals or the Padres. St. Louis leads that series, 2-1, with Game 4 today.

"[Winning last night is] huge," Billy Wagner said, "because now we get a chance to catch our breath and get ready for this next series, whoever we play."

The Yankees, meanwhile, will not be moving on. They lost to the Tigers yesterday, meaning the Mets can't face them in the World Series.

"Too bad for them," Beltran said.

Down 5-4 last night going into the sixth inning after the Dodgers' three-run fifth, the Mets scored three off reliever Jonathan Broxton to retake the lead, then added two more in the eighth.

Shawn Green (three hits, two RBIs) led off the fifth with a deep double to right, and one out later, pinch hitter Michael Tucker worked a walk. Jose Reyes singled up the middle to tie the game, and Paul Lo Duca (two RBIs) followed by dropping a single just over Rafael Furcal's head in shallow left, scoring Tucker to make it 6-5, Mets.

Beltran then popped an RBI single to left to push it to 7-5.

In the eighth, the Mets got two on Lo Duca's RBI single and a run-scoring error by third baseman Wilson Betemit.

"What I'm most proud of is that these guys never looked for reasons why they should lose," Willie Randolph said of his club. "With them, it's always about why we should win."

In the opening frame, the Mets took a 3-0 lead off Greg Maddux, getting RBI singles from David Wright, Cliff Floyd - who later strained his left Achilles' and left the game - and Green. They went up 4-0 in the third on Green's RBI double.

Steve Trachsel pitched three shutout innings to open his first career playoff start. But in the fourth, the Dodgers scored two on James Loney's two-run single. With runners on second and third, Dodgers manager Grady Little pulled Maddux, bringing up Andre Ethier to pinch hit. But stunningly, Randolph hooked Trachsel as well, bringing in Darren Oliver.

Ethier ripped a pitch back to Oliver, but the Mets were fortunate, as Oliver caught the liner for the second out. He then doubled Betemit off third for a double play.

In the fifth, though, Oliver let the Dodgers even it when Jeff Kent (four hits last night in an impressive performance) blasted a two-run game-tying homer. L.A. took the lead later in the inning on a bases-loaded walk off Pedro Feliciano.

The game ended when Shawn Green caught Ramon Martinez's fly ball in the ninth.

"I've got the ball in my pocket," Green said. "If no one else wants it, I'm going to keep it."

After the game, Valentin said that "we're going to dedicate this win to Pedro Martinez and El Duque Hernandez."

Meanwhile, he joined Reyes, Endy Chavez and others singing "Meet the Mets."

Additional reporting by Mike Vaccaro and Brian Costello

Could we please, PLEASE start paying attention to Afghanistan again!!!!?

2006-10-08T22:57:00.000-04:00

Afghans may back Taliban, general warns

By FISNIK ABRASHI, Associated Press Writers 9 minutes ago

KABUL, Afghanistan -

Gen. David Richards, a British officer who commands NATO's 32,000 troops here, told The Associated Press that he would like to have about 2,500 additional troops to form a reserve battalion to help speed up reconstruction and development efforts.

He said the south of the country, where NATO troops have fought their most intense battles this year, has been "broadly stabilized," which gives the alliance an opportunity to launch projects there. If it doesn't, he estimates about 70 percent of Afghans could switch their allegiance from NATO to the Taliban.

"They will say, 'We do not want the Taliban but then we would rather have that austere and unpleasant life that that might involve than another five years of fighting,'" Richards said in an interview.

"We have created an opportunity," following the intense fighting that left over 500 militants dead in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, he said. "If we do not take advantage of this, then you can pour an additional 10,000 troops next year and we would not succeed because we would have lost by then the consent of the people."

NATO extended its security mission last week to all of Afghanistan, taking command of 12,000 U.S. troops in the war-battered country's east. The mission is the biggest ground combat operation in NATO history and gives Richards command of the largest number of U.S. troops under a foreign leader since World War II.

Some 8,000 U.S. troops will continue to function outside NATO, tracking al-Qaida terrorists, helping train Afghan security forces and doing reconstruction work.

Afghanistan is going through its worst bout of violence since the U.S.-led invasion removed the former Taliban regime from power five years ago. The Taliban has made a comeback in the south and east of the country and is seriously threatening Western attempts to stabilize the country after almost three decades of war.

Taliban militants have acknowledged adopting the suicide attacks commonly used by insurgents in

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Iraq, launching 78 suicide bombings across Afghanistan this year which have killed close to 200 people, NATO said Sunday.

There were only two suicide attacks in 2003 and six in 2004, according to Seth Jones, an analyst for the U.S.-based RAND Corp. He said there were 21 in 2005.

Richards, who will lead the NATO forces in Afghanistan until U.S. Gen. Dan K. McNeil takes over in February, said the Taliban may lose support among Afghans if it continues the attacks.

"The very cowardly use of suicide bombers, the tragic use of suicide bombers, reveals weakness on the part of the Taliban, not strength," he said.

Richards said NATO troops have also seen an upsurge in violence along the eastern border with Pakistan since that country's government signed a deal with pro-Taliban militants last month to end fighting that broke out after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

U.S. military officials have said the number of attacks on coalition and Afghan troops has tripled in the tribal border region. Afghan and Western officials have repeatedly accused Pakistan of not doing all it can to block the flow of insurgents over the border, but Pakistan has rejected the charge.

Richards, who will travel to Pakistan for meetings with military leaders on Monday, urged "partnership and cooperation rather than confrontation" in dealings with Pakistan.

MARK FOLEY: HERO OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

2006-10-08T22:55:00.000-04:00

A Political Limbo

How low can the Republicans go?

WEB EXCLUSIVE

By Marcus Mabry

Newsweek

Updated: 10:54 p.m. ET Oct 7, 2006

Oct. 7, 2006 - Come hell or high water-ran the conventional wisdom-Republicans could rely on two issues to win elections: the war on terror and values. Then came Mark Foley. The drip-drip-drip of scandal surrounding the former Congressman from Florida, which became a deluge this week, now threatens to sink Republican hopes of keeping control of Congress, says the NEWSWEEK poll out today.

And that was the good news for the GOP. More worrisome still, the Foley fiasco is jeopardizing the party’s monopoly on faith and power. For the first time since 2001, the NEWSWEEK poll shows that more Americans trust the Democrats than the GOP on moral values and the war on terror. Fully 53 percent of Americans want the Democrats to win control of Congress next month, including 10 percent of Republicans, compared to just 35 percent who want the GOP to retain power. If the election were held today, 51 percent of likely voters would vote for the Democrat in their district versus 39 percent who would vote for the Republican. And while the race is closer among male voters (46 percent for the Democrats vs. 42 percent for the Republicans), the Democrats lead among women voters 56 to 34 percent.

The pace of the news on the Foley scandal is making it difficult for Republicans to stop their slide. On Thursday, House Speaker Dennis Hastert declared that mistakes were made in handling the Foley case and that he would remain in his post to make sure the misdeeds were thoroughly investigated. Almost immediately, ABC News reported that three more former pages had come forward to say that they had received suggestive e-mails and instant messages from Foley. And just as Republicans were attempting to form a united front to paint the timing of the Foley revelations as Democratic dirty tricks-What did Nancy Pelosi know and when did she know it?-the Republicans got a fratricidal shot out of the dark-on Iraq. Virginia Republican Sen. John Warner declared that the United States had 90 days to quell the violence in Iraq, or risk losing the war. To top it off, on Friday an aide to Karl Rove resigned over the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling and corruption scandal.

Meanwhile, the president’s approval rating has fallen to a new all-time low for the Newsweek poll: 33 percent, down from an already anemic 36 percent in August. Only 25 percent of Americans are satisfied with the direction of the country, while 67 percent say they are not. Foley’s disgrace certainly plays a role in Republican unpopularity: 27 percent of registered voters say the scandal and how the Republican leadership in the House handled it makes them less likely to vote for a Republican Congressional candidate; but 65 percent say it won’t make much difference in determining how they vote. And Americans are equally divided over whether or not Speaker Hastert should resign over mishandling the situation (43 percent say he should, but 36 percent say he shouldn’t).

The scandal’s more significant impact seems to be a widening of the yawning credibility gap developing between the President, his party and the nation. While 52 percent of Americans believe Hastert was aware of Foley’s actions and tried to cover them up, it’s part of a larger loss of faith in Republican leadership, thanks mostly to the war in Iraq. For instance, for the first time in the NEWSWEEK poll, a majority of Americans now believe the Bush administration knowingly misled the American people in building its case for war against Saddam Hussein: 58 percent vs. 36 percent who believe it didn’t. And pessimism over Iraq is at record highs on every score: nearly two in three Americans, 64 percent, believe the United States is losing ground there; 66 percent say the war has not made America safer from terrorism (just 29 percent believe it has); and 53 percent believe it was a mistake to go to war at all, again the first time the NEWSWEEK poll has registered a majority in that camp.

As a result, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s approval rating has fallen to just 30 percent, and more Americans believe he should resign than remain, 48 percent vs. 37 percent. And while a plurality of Americans approve of the job Condoleezza Rice is doing as Secretary of State, 48 percent vs. 32 percent who disapprove, on the heels of Bob Woodward’s bestselling critique of the Bush administration, “State of Denial,” a solid majority, 58 percent, believe Rice did not pay as much attention as she should have been expected to pay to the domestic terror threat posed by al Qaeda before 9/11. (Only 22 percent believe she did.)

Democrats now outdistance Republicans on every single issue that could decide voters’ choices come Nov. 7. In addition to winning—for the first time in the NEWSWEEK poll—on the question of which party is more trusted to fight the war on terror (44 to 37 percent) and moral values (42 percent to 36 percent), the Democrats now inspire more trust than the GOP on handling Iraq (47 to 34); the economy (53 to 31); health care (57 to 24); federal spending and the deficit (53 to 29); gas and oil prices (56 to 23); and immigration (43 to 34).

And even if the Republicans manage to bail out their ship before the midterms, they’ll have a hard time matching their one-time strengths to voters’ priorities. A third of registered voters, 33 percent, say the single most important issue that will decide their vote will be Iraq; compare to 20 percent who say the economy and only 12 percent who say terrorism, which ties with health care.

The good news for the GOP? The election is still four weeks away.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15167150/site/newsweek/page/2/

GO JOHN WARNER!!!

2006-10-07T02:06:00.000-04:00

G.O.P. Senator's Iraq Remarks Catch White House Off Guard

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: October 7, 2006

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 — The White House, caught off guard by a leading Republican senator who said the situation in Iraq was "drifting sideways," responded cautiously on Friday, with a spokeswoman for President Bush stopping short of saying outright that Mr. Bush disagreed with the assessment.

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"I don't believe that the president thinks that way," Dana Perino, the deputy White House press secretary, said when asked whether the president agreed with the senator, John Warner of Virginia. "I think that he believes that while it is tough going in Iraq, that slow progress is being made."

Ms. Perino's carefully worded response underscores the delicate situation that Mr. Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, has created for the White House just one month before an election in which Mr. Bush has been trying to shift the national debate from the war in Iraq to the broader war on terror.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday after returning from a trip that included a one-day stop in Baghdad, Mr. Warner said the United States should consider "a change of course" if the violence there did not diminish soon. He did not specify what shift might be necessary, but said that the American military had done what it could to stabilize Iraq and that no policy options should be taken "off the table."

With the blessing of the White House, a high-level commission led by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, is already reviewing American policy in Iraq. But the commission is not scheduled to report to Mr. Bush and Congress until after the November elections, a timeline that the White House had hoped would enable Mr. Bush to avoid public discussion of any change of course until after voters determine which party will control Congress next year.

Now, Mr. Warner's comments are pushing up that timeline, forcing Republicans to confront the issue before some are ready. In an interview on Friday, Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who has been critical of the administration's approach in the past, said there was a "growing sense of unease" among other Republicans, which she said could deepen because of Senator Warner's comments.

Ms. Collins, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, echoed Mr. Warner's calls for a shift in strategy in Iraq. "When Chairman Warner, who has been a steadfast ally of this administration, calls for a new strategy," she said, "that is clearly significant."

She said the current approach, which she attributed to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, had not led to an overall reduction in violence or any prospect that American troop levels would come down soon.

"We've heard over and over that as Iraqis stand up, our troops will stand down," Ms. Collins said. "Well, there are now hundreds of thousands of Iraqi troops and security forces, and yet we have not seen any reduction in violence."

Democrats, who have been using their fall election campaigns to tap into intense voter dissatisfaction with the way that Mr. Bush has handled Iraq, quickly seized on the Warner remarks, circulating them in e-mail messages to reporters. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, convened a conference call on Friday afternoon to hammer home the theme that even Republicans believed that the administration must change course. "Warner's statement is an important, important statement and, I hope, a turning point," Mr. Biden told reporters.

He that at least two Republican colleagues other than Mr. Warner had told him that once the election is over, they would join with Democrats in working on a bipartisan plan for bringing stability to Iraq. Echoing Mr. Warner's language, he said, "I wouldn't take any option off the table at this time. We are at the point of no return."

The White House said Friday that Mr. Bush had not spoken to Mr. Warner about his comments, and otherwise insisted that it had not glossed over the problems in Iraq. During her afternoon briefing, Ms. Perino harked back to a speech in late August in which, she said, the president said Iraq was at a "crucial moment." She said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had put forth the same message during her unannounced visit to Baghdad this week.

Later in the day, the White House circulated an e-mail message entitled, "Iraq Update: Political Progress," citing comments of other lawmakers, including Democrats, who had returned from the Middle East with more hopeful assessments than the one offered by Mr. Warner.

David S. Cloud contributed reporting from Washington.

OH MY

2006-09-29T17:47:00.000-04:00

Book Says Bush Ignored Urgent Warning on Iraq

Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

President Bush at Camp David in June during a teleconference on Iraq with Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Donald H. Rumsfeld.

By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: September 29, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter and author. The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war.

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The warning is described in “State of Denial,” scheduled for publication on Monday by Simon & Schuster. The book says President Bush’s top advisers were often at odds among themselves, and sometimes were barely on speaking terms, but shared a tendency to dismiss as too pessimistic assessments from American commanders and others about the situation in Iraq.

As late as November 2003, Mr. Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.”

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq — a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.

The book, bought by a reporter for The New York Times at retail price in advance of its official release, is the third that Mr. Woodward has written chronicling the inner debates in the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent decision to invade Iraq. Like Mr. Woodward’s previous works, the book includes lengthy verbatim quotations from conversations and describes what senior officials are thinking at various times, without identifying the sources for the information.

Mr. Woodward writes that his book is based on “interviews with President Bush’s national security team, their deputies, and other senior and key players in the administration responsible for the military, the diplomacy, and the intelligence on Iraq.” Some of those interviewed, including Mr. Rumsfeld, are identified by name, but neither Mr. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney agreed to be interviewed, the book says.

Robert D. Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council, is said to have issued his warning about the need for more troops in a lengthy memorandum sent to Ms. Rice. The book says Mr. Blackwill’s memorandum concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed.

It says that Mr. Blackwill and L. Paul Bremer III, then the top American official in Iraq, later briefed Ms. Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, about the pressing need for more troops during a secure teleconference from Iraq. It says the White House did nothing in response.

The book describes a deep fissure between Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s first secretary of state, and Mr. Rumsfeld: When Mr. Powell was eased out after the 2004 elections, he told Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, that “if I go, Don should go,” referring to Mr. Rumsfeld.

Mr. Card then made a concerted effort to oust Mr. Rumsfeld at the end of 2005, according to the book, but was overruled by President Bush, who feared that it would disrupt the coming Iraqi elections and operations at the Pentagon.

Vice President Cheney is described as a man so determined to find proof that his claim about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was accurate that, in the summer of 2003, his aides were calling the chief weapons inspector, David Kay, with specific satellite coordinates as the sites of possible caches. None resulted in any finds.

Two members of Mr. Bush’s inner circle, Mr. Powell and the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, are described as ambivalent about the decision to invade Iraq. When Mr. Powell assented, reluctantly, in January 2003, Mr. Bush told him in an Oval Office meeting that it was “time to put your war uniform on,” a reference to his many years in the Army.

Mr. Tenet, the man who once told Mr. Bush that it was a “slam-dunk” that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq, apparently did not share his qualms about invading Iraq directly with Mr. Bush, according to Mr. Woodward’s account.

Mr. Woodward’s first two books about the Bush administration, “Bush at War” and “Plan of Attack,” portrayed a president firmly in command and a loyal, well-run team responding to a surprise attack and the retaliation that followed. As its title indicates, “State of Denial” follows a very different storyline, of an administration that seemed to have only a foggy notion that early military success in Iraq had given way to resentment of the occupiers.

The 537-page book describes tensions among senior officials from the very beginning of the administration. Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda.

On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.

In the weeks before the Iraq war began, President Bush’s parents did not share his confidence that the invasion of Iraq was the right step, the book recounts. Mr. Woodward writes about a private exchange in January 2003 between Mr. Bush’s mother, Barbara Bush, the former first lady, and David L. Boren, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Bush family friend.

The book says Mrs. Bush asked Mr. Boren whether it was right to be worried about a possible invasion of Iraq, and then to have confided that the president’s father, former President George H. W. Bush, “is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it; he’s up at night worried.”

The book describes an exchange in early 2003 between Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired officer Mr. Bush appointed to administer postwar Iraq, and President Bush and others in the White House situation room. It describes senior war planners as having been thoroughly uninterested in the details of the postwar mission.

After General Garner finished his PowerPoint presentation — which included his plan to use up to 300,000 troops of the Iraqi Army to help secure postwar Iraq, the book says — there were no questions from anyone in the situation room, and the president gave him a rousing sendoff.

But it was General Garner who was soon removed, in favor of Mr. Bremer, whose actions in dismantling the Iraqi army and removing Baathists from office were eventually disparaged within the government.

The book suggests that senior intelligence officials were caught off guard in the opening days of the war when Iraqi civilian fighters engaged in suicide attacks against armored American forces, the first hint of the deadly insurgent attacks to come.

In a meeting with Mr. Tenet of the Central Intelligence Agency, several Pentagon officials talked about the attacks, the book says. It says that Mr. Tenet acknowledged that he did not know what to make of them.

Mr. Rumsfeld reached into political matters at the periphery of his responsibilities, according to the book. At one point, Mr. Bush traveled to Ohio, where the Abrams battle tank was manufactured. Mr. Rumsfeld phoned Mr. Card to complain that Mr. Bush should not have made the visit because Mr. Rumsfeld thought the heavy tank was incompatible with his vision of a light and fast military of the future. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Card believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was “out of control.”

The fruitless search for unconventional weapons caused tension between Vice President Cheney’s office, the C.I.A. and officials in Iraq. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Kay, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, e-mailed top C.I.A. officials directly in the summer of 2003 with his most important early findings.

At one point, when Mr. Kay warned that it was possible the Iraqis might have had the capability to make such weapons but did not actually produce them, waiting instead until they were needed, the book says he was told by John McLaughlin, the C.I.A.’s deputy director: “Don’t tell anyone this. This could be upsetting. Be very careful. We can’t let this out until we’re sure.”

Mr. Cheney was involved in the details of the hunt for illicit weapons, the book says. One night, Mr. Woodward wrote, Mr. Kay was awakened at 3 a.m. by an aide who told him Mr. Cheney’s office was on the phone. It says Mr. Kay was told that Mr. Cheney wanted to make sure he had read a highly classified communications intercept picked up from Syria indicating a possible location for chemical weapons.

Mr. Woodward and a colleague, Carl Bernstein, led The Post’s reporting during Watergate, and Mr. Woodward has since written a string of best sellers about Washington. More recently, the identity of Mr. Woodward’s Watergate source known as Deep Throat was disclosed as having been W. Mark Felt, a senior F.B.I. official.

In late 2005, Mr. Woodward was subpoenaed by the special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case. He also apologized to The Post’s executive editor for concealing for more than two years that he had been drawn into the scandal.

Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington, and Julie Bosman from New York.

:-(

2006-09-12T01:02:00.000-04:00

Editorial

9/11/06

Published: September 11, 2006

The feelings of sadness and loss with which we look back on Sept. 11, 2001, have shifted focus over the last five years. The attacks themselves have begun to acquire the aura of inevitability that comes with being part of history. We can argue about what one president or another might have done to head them off, but we cannot really imagine a world in which they never happened, any more than we can imagine what we would be like today if the Japanese had never attacked Pearl Harbor.

What we do revisit, over and over again, is the period that followed, when sorrow was merged with a sense of community and purpose. How, having lost so much on the day itself, did we also manage to lose that as well?

The time when we felt drawn together, changed by the shock of what had occurred, lasted long beyond the funerals, ceremonies and promises never to forget. It was a time when the nation was waiting to find out what it was supposed to do, to be called to the task that would give special lasting meaning to the tragedy that it had endured.

But the call never came. Without ever having asked to be exempt from the demands of this new post-9/11 war, we were cut out. Everything would be paid for with the blood of other people’s children, and with money earned by the next generation. Our role appeared to be confined to waiting in longer lines at the airport. President Bush, searching the other day for an example of post-9/11 sacrifice, pointed out that everybody pays taxes.

That pinched view of our responsibility as citizens got us tax cuts we didn’t need and an invasion that never would have occurred if every voter’s sons and daughters were eligible for the draft. With no call to work together on some effort greater than ourselves, we were free to relapse into a self- centeredness that became a second national tragedy. We have spent the last few years fighting each other with more avidity than we fight the enemy.

When we measure the possibilities created by 9/11 against what we have actually accomplished, it is clear that we have found one way after another to compound the tragedy. Homeland security is half-finished, the development at ground zero barely begun. The war against terror we meant to fight in Afghanistan is at best stuck in neutral, with the Taliban resurgent and the best economic news involving a bumper crop of opium. Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 when it was invaded, is now a breeding ground for a new generation of terrorists.

Listing the sins of the Bush administration may help to clarify how we got here, but it will not get us out. The country still hungers for something better, for evidence that our leaders also believe in ideas larger than their own political advancement.

Today, every elected official in the country will stop and remember 9/11. The president will remind the country that he has spent most of his administration fighting terrorism, and his opponents will point out that Osama bin Laden is still at large. It would be miraculous if the best of our leaders did something larger — expressed grief and responsibility for the bad path down which we’ve gone, and promised to work together to turn us in a better direction.

Over the last week, the White House has been vigorously warning the country what awful things would happen in Iraq if American troops left, while his critics have pointed out how impossible the current situation is. They are almost certainly both right. But unless people on both sides are willing to come up with a plan that acknowledges both truths and accepts the risk of making real-world proposals, we will be stuck in the same place forever.

If that kind of coming together happened today, we could look back on Sept. 11, 2006, as more than a day for recalling bad memories and lost chances.

Can you say Subway Series??

2006-09-10T18:19:00.000-04:00

Power Rankings: Battle of New York looks promising

Week: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24

ESPN.com

The AL Central contenders are mired in mediocrity. Most of the National League is still struggling just to stay above .500. Of the two best MLB teams last week, one is a long shot to make the playoffs, and the other is a wild-card leader ... with the majors' 11th-best record.

In other words, there have been no serious threats to the two New York juggernauts at the top of ESPN.com's Power Rankings. The Mets and the Yankees occupy the top two spots for the third straight week. Perhaps we should start booking our tickets for New York in late October.

Best of the week: The Angels and the Padres were 5-1, rising to No. 4 and No. 7 respectively. Watch out for the Halos: They're 5½ back in the AL West, but they play the No. 3 A's in seven of their last 10 games.

Worst of the week: The Diamondbacks (1-6) have effectively dropped from the NL wild-card picture and down to No. 23 in the rankings.

2006 Power Rankings: September 8
	RK	LW RANK	TEAM	REC	COMMENT
	1	1	Mets	87-52	With the way he's pitched since being acquired from the Indians, Guillermo Mota has filled in perfectly for the injured Duaner Sanchez.
	2	2	Yankees	83-55	Johnny Damon has now scored more than 100 runs for nine straight seasons. He also already has a career-high 22 home runs.
	3	3	Athletics	80-59	Incognito ace. Joe Blanton (7-2 in 10 starts since the break) has 27 wins in his first two seasons in the bigs.
	4	8	Angels	75-65	Keep hope alive. The Angels (12-3 in their last 15 home games) have 13 contests remaining in Anaheim.
	5	4	Twins	80-59	The Twins are just 5-11 against the Tigers this season; they've been outscored 100-52.
	6	6	Tigers	86-55	Are the wheels coming off? The Tigers have dropped 19 of 29 games since Aug. 7.
	7	10	Padres	73-66	Kid Dynamite. Rookie Cla Meredith's scoreless innings streak stands at 29, the new franchise record for a reliever.
	8	5	White Sox	80-60	The White Sox have just 23 second-half wins, four fewer than the Tigers and 10 less than the Twins.
	9	9	Cardinals	75-64	Albert Pujols, the reigning NL MVP, has six home runs, eight runs and nine RBI in his last nine games.
	10	7	Dodgers	74-66	How the West was lost? There's growing concern now that the offense (nine runs in last five games) is running cold.
	11	11	Rangers	72-69	It's easy to understand owner Tom Hicks' frustration, but throwing the team under the bus is not the solution.
	12	12	Phillies	71-69	Though he's far from a sure thing, the return of Tom Gordon from the DL is a very good thing for the Phillies' bullpen.
	13	14	Marlins	70-70	We offer a tip of our cap to rookie Anibal Sanchez, who after only 13 big-league starts has a no-hitter to his credit.
	14	18	Indians	67-72	One more chance to watch Jeremy Sowers pitch before the Indians shut down the young left-hander.
	15	15	Giants	70-70	Turn back the clock. Mike Stanton (four saves in his last four appearances) still has some nasty stuff.
	16	19	Blue Jays	73-67	Outfielder Adam Lind should get the chance to prove himself in the next three weeks, in hopes of winning a job in 2007.
	17	13	Red Sox	75-65	Red Sox Nation just can't like what it's getting from Coco Crisp (.266 batting average along with a .319 OBP).
	18	17	Astros	68-71	When trailing after six innings, the Astros are 4-54 this season; they are 7-10 when tied after six.
	19	16	Reds	69-71	Sun-Woo Kim was the 28th different pitcher the Reds have used this season. Up next: Jason Johnson.
	20	20	Braves	66-73	While John Smoltz has just 12 wins, the Braves' bullpen has let him down to the tune of six blown save chances in his 10 no-decisions.
	21	23	Mariners	66-73	Kenji Johjima leads all AL rookies in RBI (61) and is tied with Nick Markakis for most home runs (14).
	22	22	Rockies	64-76	Close, but no cigar. The Rockies are 16-24 in one-run games -- the fourth-lowest winning percentage in the majors.
	23	21	Diamondbacks	65-75	Falling behind is not the way to get ahead. The Diamondbacks have been outscored 132-65 in the first inning.
	24	26	Pirates	57-84	Reliever Salomon Torres leads the majors with 84 appearances. He's on pace for 96.
	25	25	Brewers	64-76	The Brewers have hit 154 homers, but not one single grand slam.
	26	28	Nationals	61-79	The Nats have a NL-worst 4.99 team ERA, and their starting pitchers have the second fewest wins (39) in the league.
	27	29	Devil Rays	56-84	Ever since taking over the closer's role for the Rays on Aug. 21, Seth McClung is 5-for-5 in save opportunities.
	28	24	Orioles	61-78	The O's are trying to finish ahead of the Devil Rays for a ninth straight season, but with a challenging schedule ahead, there's no guarantee.
	29	30	Royals	52-89	With their last 10 games against the Twins and Tigers, the Royals can play the role of spoiler.
	30	27	Cubs	56-84	Juan Pierre leads the NL in hits (173) and ranks second in steals (49).

Isreal and Lebanon have more in commmon than they would admit... they both have lost a lot

2006-08-29T23:33:00.000-04:00

Israel: 'To Be or Not to Be'

For many Israelis, this was not the war they expected. But for six years, the writing has been on the wall, they say - it’s about their survival.

By Kevin Sites, Wed Aug 23, 5:16 PM ET

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Note: To wrap up his coverage of the war between

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" type="hidden"> Israel and Hezbollah, Kevin Sites has filed diary pieces from both Israel and Lebanon. His Lebanon diary can be found here.

The border
This, theoretically, is what this whole war is about: the border, the so-called blue line between Israel and Lebanon. It is, of course, not blue at all, but a double-thick chain link fence topped with concertina wire.

The fence, I learn later, is electric, but not electrified. It's an important distinction. Electrified means it will shock me if I touch it. Electric means it has electric sensors attached that will let monitors know when someone tries to climb it, cut it or blast through it.

I'm with my fixer, Haggit, a freelance Tel Aviv television producer. We both just stare at it. It is, we both seem to think, somewhat remarkable. On the side where we stand, in Metulla, Israel, there are groves of green apples and reddish nectarines.

On the Lebanese side there are some buildings and houses, including one that is now nothing more than a pile of rubble.

Hezbollah's flag flies just across the
border from Israel

Also, from several lampposts and buildings, flapping in a strong breeze, is the yellow and green flag of Hezbollah with its now-familiar logo of an outstretched Kalashnikov rifle. There is also a single Lebanese flag and several posters of Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.

Haggit has two brothers in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) — one who is active duty and fighting in Lebanon and another who is in a reserve artillery unit that was called up and is now based here in northern Israel.

"I'm really surprised," she says, "to see those flags flying right on the border."

It does seem strange to me too, that the IDF would leave them alone. But this spot, aside from the sound of Israeli artillery and Hezbollah rockets arcing overhead, seems almost completely abandoned.

We cannot stop staring as we walk along the fence line. I joke with Haggit that I'll climb over and get her one of the Hezbollah flags. But then we discover climbing won't be necessary. Here, in front of us, is a large gaping hole cut through both fences.

* * *

Ticket to Tel Aviv
I have traveled through Amman's Queen Alia International Airport dozens of times in transit to places of conflict. It was always my final stop before heading into the maelstrom of violence that was and, unfortunately, still is,

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Iraq.

Most times the procedure is routine. This time, however, at least for me, it feels very different.

I've just returned from reporting from south Lebanon and now I'm heading to cover the other side of the story: Israel.

With so many Lebanese taking refuge in Jordan from the war, anti-Israeli emotions here are particularly high.

Jordan and Israel signed a peace deal in 1994. They have diplomatic relations and until recently, Israeli tourists traveled to Jordan to visit Petra or the Sinai in Egypt. But while Royal Jordanian Airlines still flies to Tel Aviv, few Israelis are making the trip, realizing they might be less than welcome.

We knew this process to take this short journey, a 45-minute flight, was going to be uncomfortable. Passing through the first security point, the guards, I know, always ask where you are going.

"Tel Aviv," I say softly, hoping not to arouse the attention of fellow passengers behind me. The guard just looks at my passport and raises his eyebrows before handing it back to me.

Because of all the technical equipment I carry, I'm always yellow-carded by airport security screeners who also ask me where I'm going. While one of the officers goes through my bag, I await the question and what I will assume will be a lengthy interrogation and dissection of my gear once I say, "Tel Aviv."

But after a cursory shuffling of items from one compartment to another he gets distracted and waves me through. A rare, small gift from the travel gods.

I still have to pick up my prepaid ticket at the Royal Jordanian ticket counter, though, and instead of saying my destination I simply hand the woman behind the glass partition my passport and confirmation numbers. After inputting the keystrokes on the computer, she prints out the ticket and finally looks at it.

"Tel Aviv?" she asks loudly. "Tel Aviv!" I just nod as she tosses the ticket onto the counter near my open hand.

There aren't any incidents at immigration and I walk to my gate and sit with the others waiting to board — a group of Korean Christians and young adult Israelis returning from a trip to Asia. But as I board the plane, the flight attendant looks at me scornfully and will not return my greeting.

After the flight, at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, I get flagged for additional questioning at immigration. I knew this would happen, as it usually does here. My American passport is filled with entry and exit visas to Iraq. Because of the mix of civilian and military flights I've taken there, the stamps don't always match.

The Israelis are quick to spot them, but after a short Q&A session with a more senior officer, I'm cleared to go.

* * *

Proportionality, asymmetry
Two words, common in diplomacy, have now entered the mainstream lexicon: proportionality and asymmetry.

This is their application in this war, first in the form of a commonly asked question: Is Israel's all-out offensive in response to Hezbollah's cross-border raid, kidnapping two Israeli soldiers and killing others, proportional? The second application is a concept. This is an asymmetrical conflict in which a state, Israel, is fighting a conventional war against a guerilla force, Hezbollah, armed and supplied by other states,

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Syria and Iran, but which is based in a host state, Lebanon.

These words have particular significance as well, for news organizations covering this conflict. Is our coverage response proportional to this asymmetrical conflict?

Rockets batter Kiryat Shemona; Israeli firefighters battle blazes » View

Most large media companies have reporters on both sides of the border simultaneously, allowing their coverage to ping-pong back and forth from one front line to the other.

The Hot Zone has only me to cover both, so I must do them one at a time. And then the question becomes, how much time or how many stories for each side? While I was in Lebanon, many readers responded with seething e-mails about the "one-side reporting" from Lebanon. Why, they asked, weren't we showing the Israeli side? Similarly, as I begin reporting from Israel, readers ask me how I can cover a grass fire started by a Katyusha rocket in northern Israel when southern Lebanon was being turned into rubble.

Surely, there is no question that a civilian death is no more or less tragic when caused by Israeli air strikes than Hezbollah rockets. But the real dilemma for myself and other journalists is, how do we factor the numbers in?

Should Lebanon get more coverage because that is where the most deaths and injuries occurred, as well as the majority of structural damage? Or, in war, are all things equal as far coverage of opposing forces?

To me, the answer is elusive while its pursuit is dizzying.

It was extremely difficult to see the death and destruction caused on the Lebanese side by Israeli air strikes and artillery. To see children killed or maimed by the world's most high-tech weaponry is not a lasting image I would wish on anyone.

Also, Lebanon, as a nation, seemed to have turned a corner away from its history of conflict and was headed toward renewed peace and prosperity before the fighting started.

But now, here in Israel, it's just as easy to see the fear, death and injury caused by ball-bearing laden Hezbollah Katyusha rockets, fired haphazardly by the hundreds at civilian population centers, forcing people here, just like in Lebanon, to huddle in shelters or flee to safer ground.

This evening a Katyusha has struck a high school in the Israeli border city of Kiryat Shimona. It is, according to the school's principal, the third time the school has been hit, although no one has been injured there yet.

Proportional? Asymetrical? The terms mean little to the majority of Israelis, who according to most polls supported the offensive against Hezbollah, even though they didn't expect it to unfold like this.

"We are fighting for the survival of Israel," Sam Seidner, the father of a wounded Israeli soldier, tells me later at a hospital in Haifa. "When have the Jews ever felt secure?"

Indeed, it is a sentiment I hear over and over throughout Israel, whether talking to civilians, soldiers or those who, at this moment of conflict, happen to be both.

IDF reserve units must quickly switch from civilian to soldier» View

"Emergency Call Up Order 8 — this is a rare animal that is both particular and peculiar to Israeli society," says Lior Taylor, a major in the IDF reserves, referring to the summons that took him from his job and family and sent him to war in Lebanon for the second time.

"It's understood," he says, that Israel doesn't use the call up order "for superfluous reasons. If you get one, the gravity of it makes the switch (from civilian to soldier) for you."

For 38-year-old Taylor, that switch had to come fast. As an operations officer for his infantry battalion, he has had to fight Hezbollah guerrillas on the ground, not with air strikes or artillery.

His first experience in Lebanon was in 1986, just four years after Israel first invaded Lebanon to try and destroy

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Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was attacking Israel from Lebanese soil.

Taylor says the terrain is the same this time around, but Hezbollah has some of the best weaponry in the world, including American-made anti-tank TOW missiles.

He says Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has said Israel is like a cobweb — that it looks like a trap, but if you touch it, it falls apart.

Taylor says Israel can't afford to let that perception stand.

"It's not an easy moment," he says of being called up for this war. "It's a defining moment in your life. It will be the difference between the past, future and everything in between."

* * *

The common mythology of death
On a small hilltop under an elm tree at the Nachsolim Kibbutz, Ya-ar Ben Giat, a 19-year-old soldier, is being laid to rest.

He was killed in south Lebanon on August 12, along with 24 other IDF soldiers, in the worst single day of fatalities for Israel since the month-long offensive began.

Ironically, he is buried just one day before the cease-fire halting the 34-day conflict will take hold.

It is, despite the sadness of the occasion, a beautiful and serene place to be buried, only a few hundred yards from the gently breaking waves of the Mediterranean.

Mourning the fallen» View

From my fixer Haggit, I learn that there is an iconic dimension to the death of a young soldier in Israel. Countless films have been made romanticizing the sense of sacrifice and loss, as well as the concept of the young soldier now ageless for the rest of time.

I can't help but thinking how similar it is, in some ways, to the mythology I witnessed in Iran toward their own war martyrs, with their young images, frozen in time, carved into the stone slabs covering their graves.

* * *

The people suffer
In Haifa, after the cease-fire has gone into effect, I meet an Arab Israeli named Haj Assad in a park. Haj is a plumber and has brought his two daughters out to play after they've been cooped up inside for more than a month out of fear of Hezbollah's Katyusha rockets, which twice landed in their neighborhood.

I wonder if Assad has mixed feelings about the war, especially since, like many Israeli Arabs, he has family members who live Lebanon.

I ask him what the people in his neighborhood think of Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nassrallah. Considering the taut emotions resulting from this war, the wisdom and clarity of his answer take me a little by surprise.

"It's not about Sheik Nasrallah," he says. "He's a leader and like other leaders, like those in the Israeli government, make decisions away from the people, without really thinking about them. The people are only abstractions to them. But when you start a war it's really the people that suffer."

* * *

The rabbit hole
Back at the border, the hole in the fence is the rabbit hole I can't resist. It's not some kind of danger dilettante's thrill, but just the niggling concept that I had reported from the war on that side of the border only a few days earlier. Why did I have to be kept on some dividing line now?

Kevin Sites finds an area of the Israel-Lebanon border to be surprisingly desolate» View

Perhaps by crossing the border, entering this no-man's land, there might be a clue to finding that elusive sense of balance necessary to cover this conflict fairly and objectively.

As I crawl through, I begin to wonder if this is such a wise choice. Hezbollah could have easily left snipers in some of the surrounding buildings, or maybe an IDF patrol could mistake me for a guerrilla fighter carrying an rocket propelled grenade launcher rather than a digital camera.

I walk along the rubble feeling vulnerable, but also, for a moment, exactly in the middle, no longer bound by the physical constraints of being on one side or the other.

Honestly, in the short period of time in this no man's land, I didn't find much, except this:

On a wall next to the pile of rubble on the Lebanese side, a strange and fitting piece of graffiti is written in English with a missing vowel, "To Be or Not To B."

Regardless of the intent of the writer, it is, I realize later, the question that Lebanon and Israel both grapple with.

Will Lebanon's fragile, multi-faceted democracy survive the consequences of not being ready or able to disarm Hezbollah's militia?

It is also the question Israelis have had to consider while looking north toward this wall, knowing that behind it was a guerilla force aligned with Iran, a country whose president has called for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth.

So the balance might then be found at last in an equality of fear.

The question now becomes, will that mutual fear be a catalyst for more war, or for finally taking significant steps toward lasting peace?

Previous: Lebanon: Holding a Rock

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I thought I was a pessimist... now I'm nobody!!

2006-08-29T20:03:00.000-04:00

Editorial Observer

What Is the Latest Thing to Be Discouraged About? The Rise of Pessimism

By ADAM COHEN

Published: August 28, 2006

The early stages of the Iraq war may have been a watershed in American optimism. The happy talk was so extreme it is now difficult to believe it was sincere: “we will be greeted as liberators”; “mission accomplished”; the insurgency is “in the last throes.” Most wildly optimistic of all was the goal: a military action transforming the Middle East into pro-American democracies.

The gap between predictions and reality has left Americans deeply discouraged. So has much of what has happened, or not happened, at the same time. Those who believed New Orleans would rebound quickly after Hurricane Katrina have seen their hopes dashed. Those counting on solutions to health care, energy dependence or global warming have seen no progress. It is no wonder the nation is in a gloomy mood; 71 percent of respondents in a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll said the country is on the wrong track.

These are ideal times for the release of “Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit,” by Joshua Foa Dienstag, a U.C.L.A. political theorist. Mr. Dienstag aims to rescue pessimism from the philosophical sidelines, where it has been shunted by optimists of all ideologies. The book is seductive, because pessimists are generally more engaging and entertaining than optimists, and because, as the author notes, “the world keeps delivering bad news.” It is almost tempting to throw up one’s hands and sign on with Schopenhauer.

Pessimism, however, is the most un-American of philosophies. This nation was built on the values of reason and progress, not to mention the “pursuit of happiness.” Pessimism as philosophy is skeptical of the idea of progress. Pursuing happiness is a fool’s errand. Pessimism is not, as is commonly thought, about being depressed or misanthropic, and it does not hold that humanity is headed for disaster. It simply doubts the most basic liberal principle: that applying human reasoning to the world’s problems will have a positive effect.

The biggest difference between optimists and pessimists, Mr. Dienstag argues, is in how they view time. Optimists see the passing of time as a canvas on which to paint a better world. Pessimists see it as a burden. Time ticks off the physical decline of one’s body toward the inevitability of death, and it separates people from their loved ones. “All the tragedies which we can imagine,” said Simone Weil, the French philosopher who starved herself to death at age 34, “return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.”

Optimists see history as the story of civilization’s ascent. Pessimists believe, Mr. Dienstag notes, in the idea that any apparent progress has hidden costs, so that even when the world seems to be improving, “in fact it is getting worse (or, on the whole, no better).” Polio is cured, but AIDS arrives. Airplanes make travel easy, but they can drop bombs or be crashed into office towers. There is no point in seeking happiness. When joy “actually makes its appearance, it as a rule comes uninvited and unannounced,” insisted Schopenhauer, the dour German who was pessimism’s leading figure.

As politicians, pessimists do not believe in undertaking great initiatives to ameliorate unhappiness, since they are skeptical they will work. They are inclined to accept the world’s evil and misery as inevitable. Mr. Dienstag tries to argue that pessimists can be politically engaged, and in modest ways they can be. Camus joined the French Resistance. But pessimism’s overall spirit, as Camus noted, “is not to be cured, but to live with one’s ailments.”

President Clinton was often mocked for his declarations that he still believed “in a place called Hope.” But he understood that instilling hope is a critical part of leadership. Other than a few special interest programs — like cutting taxes on the wealthy and giving various incentives to business — it is hard to think of areas in which the Bush administration has raised the nation’s hopes and met them. This president has, instead, tried to focus the American people on the fear of terrorism, for which there is no cure, only bad choices or something worse.

Part of Mr. Bush’s legacy may well be that he robbed America of its optimism — a force that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other presidents, like Ronald Reagan, used to rally the country when it was deeply challenged. The next generation of leaders will have to resell discouraged Americans on the very idea of optimism, and convince them again that their goal should not be to live with their ailments, but to cure them.

Damn right this show has the buzz going!

2006-08-29T17:32:00.000-04:00

Generating Buzz in All the Right Places, 'Entourage' Fills a Gap for HBO

By BILL CARTER

Published: August 28, 2006

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 24 — On the elegant office set representing the headquarters of Ari Gold’s new palatial Hollywood talent agency, Doug Ellin sat in the glass-walled ersatz conference room, about where the fictional über-agent Ari might sit, talking about the utterly unexpected phenomenon of the series he created, HBO’s “Entourage.”

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The “Entourage” boys, from left: Adrian Grenier, who plays the movie star Vincent Chase, Kevin Connolly, Jerry Ferrara and Kevin Dillon.

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“I do not say this arrogantly, but people in this town are talking about the show,” Mr. Ellin said. “I was sitting in a restaurant this week and these three people are talking, and literally I hear this one guy say to another guy, ‘Stop talking about “Entourage” already.’ ”

Mr. Ellin, also an executive producer of the show, doesn’t want anyone to stop talking about “Entourage,” and neither does HBO. The series, about a young movie star and his three hanger-on friends, wrapped up its latest batch of episodes last night (though of course that last episode will be repeated on HBO and its various channels all week). The show has become the subject of more and more fascination among viewers, who have been lamenting in Internet chat rooms and blogs what feels like a too-short season. (There were 12 episodes this summer as opposed to last season’s 14.)

It has also become the object of greater affection at HBO, which, like Ari and his agency, needs a new hot property in the worst way.

Mr. Ellin said he had picked up that message from HBO executives: “They say: ‘We love you. Keep doing it.’ They will call and say: ‘Are you O.K.? You tired? Are you happy? Do you think you can do this many episodes?’”

“This many” means as many as Mr. Ellin and his staff and cast can churn out in the next 12 months. Even as this summer’s season was winding down, Mr. Ellin and his cast were on the set working on the eight episodes HBO had ordered in addition to the 12 to 13 tentatively scheduled for next summer. The eight episodes were intended to bring the show back as soon as January, paired with the supreme HBO attraction, “The Sopranos.”

Now, in part because of a leg injury to “The Sopranos” star James Gandolfini, that show will not be back until later, perhaps March. When it returns, Mr. Ellin was told, HBO would like to schedule “Entourage” after “The Sopranos,” which will be in its final eight-episode run, the better to expose as many viewers as possible to a show that is looking more and more like the next signature series for HBO.

Carolyn Strauss, the president of HBO Entertainment, has been making that point for months. Before the current “Entourage” season started, she called the series “the future of the network.” The truth is there is not a lot of competition for that designation at the moment. “Sex and the City,” HBO’s first great popular comedy, is long gone. So is “Six Feet Under.” Besides “The Sopranos” a batch of other HBO series are heading into their final seasons. “Deadwood” will have just a four-hour coda next season.

Even though its first season was both exciting and promising, HBO has already announced that “Rome” will have just one more season. HBO managed to talk Larry David into bringing back “Curb Your Enthusiasm” for one more go-round, but that will likely be its last.

The drama “Big Love” won wide critical acclaim in its first season, but its long-term prospects remain uncertain. Which leaves “Entourage,” a show that has clearly achieved a central goal for a series on HBO, a pay channel that depends on people feeling that they can’t afford not to pay the monthly fee: “Entourage” gets people talking.

Mr. Ellin said even his own friends had become so involved with the series that “they would rather hang out with Kevin Connolly than with me.” Mr. Connolly plays Eric Murphy, best friend and manager of the matinee idol Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier), the hot young actor in Mr. Ellin’s fictional Hollywood.

The signs of the “Entourage” phenomenon are growing. The cast members are recognized everywhere. Emmanuelle Chriqui, who plays Sloan, a supporting character, was instantly mobbed when she went to a bar in North Carolina this summer. Joe Kernan, the morning anchorman of the business cable channel CNBC, confused many in the news media when he jokingly reported that first weekend grosses for the “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequel had broken the record set by “Aquaman,” a fictional film starring Vincent Chase.

Mr. Ellin noted that references to Johnny Drama, Vince’s brother (played by Kevin Dillon), and his catchphrase, “Victory!,” had become all but standard fare on ESPN’s “SportsCenter.”

“They’re always saying: ‘Victory!’ ” Mr. Ellin said of the sports anchors. “Or when Johnny Damon hits one for the Yankees: ‘Johnny Drama: Victory!’ ”

Still, audience totals, the tangible evidence of a show’s success, are not quite there yet. This season “Entourage” has averaged about 2.6 million viewers for its Sunday premiere showing at 10 p.m., up from about 1.9 million last year. Significantly, it is a bump up from what “Deadwood” scores at 9, about 2.1 million viewers.

But placed next to HBO’s ratings monsters, like “Sex and the City,” which reached more than 10 million viewers for its finale, and “The Sopranos,” which has gone as high as 13 million, “Entourage” still seems to be playing in a lower league.

Mr. Ellin says the comparisons are not completely valid. “I think the numbers tend to be silly for this show,” he said. “I know they say ‘The Sopranos’ gets 10 million or whatever. And listen, ‘The Sopranos’ is the greatest show in the history of television. But I still think most people watch that show by themselves. I think people gather to watch our show. They watch at parties. They also steal it. They get it online.”

He added that he believed “the right people” were watching the show, meaning not only that it has a younger audience profile than most other HBO shows, but also that it has been embraced by Hollywood. Certainly “Entourage” has had little trouble landing celebrities for cameos as themselves, including Scarlett Johansson and Jimmy Kimmel, and the directors James Cameron and Paul Haggis.

Even Ari Emmanuel, who heads the Endeavor Agency and is the obvious model for Ari Gold (and who represents both Mr. Ellin and the show) has no objections to Jeremy Piven’s over-the-top, widely celebrated portrayal of Ari Gold. Maybe only the producer Robert Evans, whose credits include “The Godfather,” has taken offense. A report in The Daily News last week said he was upset by a new character, Bob Ryan, played by Martin Landau, who seems to be a washed-up producer.

Mr. Ellin disavowed basing the character on Mr. Evans. He said: “Bob Evans is still out there working successfully, lining up films. Martin’s character has not been doing that for a long time.” He acknowledged that one reason the connection is being made is that the series used Mr. Evans’s real home as the character’s home in one scene.

This is an occupational hazard of a series about Hollywood that uses so many Hollywood people. Initially, Mr. Ellin said, he thought he would be mainly telling stories about “a day in the life of these guys.” But he was stunned by how involved viewers became with Vince’s career path.

“Now people are dissecting the plots and some people are saying this episode didn’t move the plot forward,” he said. The sudden downturn in Vince’s movie prospects set off all kinds of concerns. “All my friends were calling me this season saying, ‘I feel so bad for Vince,’ ” Mr. Ellin said. “I’m like: He’s out of work for three weeks. He just made $5 million. Why do you feel bad for him? Feel bad for me. I’m working seven days a week.”

That schedule is not likely to let up, given HBO’s expectations for the series. Mr. Ellin will wrap the next eight-episode run next week. Then he said he might take three or four weeks off before he begins to write episodes for the next run.

“We’ll see how I’m doing,” he said. After that, HBO would like as many as 15 or 16 for the following summer, unless the show is moved to a higher-profile midwinter run. How long does Mr. Ellin believe he can keep telling stories about four guys from Queens living the fast life in Hollywood?

“I think you can keep doing the Hollywood stories,” he said. “But this show could be another ‘Sex and the City.’ We could do a season about their relationships. We could have Vince take a year off and they could go live in the Hamptons.”

Dare I get Excited Again? YESS!!!!

2006-08-29T12:47:00.000-04:00

Pennington is No. 1 QB; Martin to start on sidelines
Associated Press

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. -- Jets quarterback Chad Pennington won the starting job Tuesday, but he will be missing a key member of the offense when the regular season starts.

Running back Curtis Martin will start the year on the physically-unable-to-perform list with a lingering knee injury after missing all of training camp. Coach Eric Mangini made both announcements, which seemed to be foregone conclusions.

"That consistency I've been looking for has been there, his presence, his ability to move the team his leadership, all those things I've been looking for, he's done an outstanding job and it's clear to me he should be the starter and he will be."
Coach Eric Mangini on QB Chad Pennington

Pennington, coming off two major shoulder injuries, was in a four-man competition to regain the job that was his before he got hurt. The move comes over 10 months after he underwent his latest operation on his right rotator cuff, and a triumph for the hardworking Pennington, whom many thought might never start again.

He took control early in camp, outshining Patrick Ramsey, Kellen Clemens and Brooks Bollinger. Pennington started both preseason games he played in after missing one to go home to Tennessee to be with his ailing father.

Ramsey, Clemens and Bollinger are now competing for the backup job. Pennington won't play in the preseason finale against Philadelphia on Friday night, but will be under center Sept. 10 against Tennessee.

"It's become really clear to me he's distinguished himself in the way I was looking for," Mangini said. "He's made great progress in the preseason, especially over the last couple weeks.

"That consistency I've been looking for has been there, his presence, his ability to move the team his leadership, all those things I've been looking for, he's done an outstanding job and it's clear to me he should be the starter and he will be."

Martin underwent surgery in December but has been slow to recover. He was placed on the PUP list before training camp started so he could continue to rehab, but Mangini said there hasn't been enough progress for him to start practicing.

The 33-year-old Martin, No. 4 on the NFL's all-time rushing list, will be eligible to return in Week 6 at the earliest.

"He's really worked as hard as you can possibly work and we've worked as hard as we possibly can work to hopefully get him ready for opening day," Mangini said. "It's just became clear that's not an option. You have now this window for him to keep working and for us to keep working together to achieve our objective and get him back on the field as quickly as possible."

Knowing Martin wouldn't be ready, the Jets traded for San Francisco running back Kevan Barlow last week. Barlow, Derrick Blaylock and Cedric Houston are expected to shoulder the load of the running game.

Mangini also said Trey Teague was taken off the PUP list and added to the active roster. Teague hurt his ankle during offseason workouts in the spring.

Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press

Rome and the Barbarians, America and the Terrorists (UPDATED)

2006-08-26T12:07:00.000-04:00

Rome and the Barbarians, America and the Terrorists

by Brian E. Frydenborg

August 26^th, 2006

I recently finished reading this amazing book, Rome and the Barbarians, 100 B.C. – A.D. 400, by Thomas S. Burns, an academic at the University of South Carolina. I have included the publisher’s synopsis below to provide a good summary of the book:

Rome and the Barbarians, 100 B. C. - A. D. 400

SYNOPSIS

The barbarians of antiquity, so long fixed in Western imaginations as the savages who sacked and destroyed Rome, now emerge in this colorful, richly textured history as a much more complex—and far more interesting—factor in the expansion, and eventual unmaking, of the Roman Empire. Thomas S. Burns marshals an abundance of archeological and literary evidence, as well as three decades of study and experience, to bring forth a perceptive and wide-ranging account of the relations between Romans and non-Romans along the frontiers of Western Europe from the last years of the Republic into late antiquity.

Surveying a 500-year time span beginning with early encounters between barbarians and Romans around 100 B.C. and ending with the spread of barbarian settlement within the western Empire around A.D. 400, Burns removes the barbarians from their former narrow niche as invaders and conquerors and places them in the broader context of neighbors, (sometimes bitter) friends, and ultimately settlers and prospective Romans, themselves.

This nuanced history shows how Rome's relations with the barbarians—and vice versa—slowly but inexorably evolved from general ignorance, hostility, and suspicion toward tolerance, synergy, and integration. What he describes is, in fact, a drawn-out period of acculturation, characterized more by continuity than by change and conflict, leading to the creation of a new Romano-barbarian hybrid society and culture that anticipated the values and traditions of medieval civilization.

“Burns brings thirty years of extensive study of the literary and archaeological evidence to bear on the nature of the impact not only that the Romans had on the barbarians but also that the barbarians had on the Romans. Fortified with a thorough exposition of the source material, meticulous analysis, and provocative suggestions, Rome and the Barbarians will take the dialogue to another level." Ralph W. Mathisen, University of South Carolina

At first glace it may seem obscure, but until for most of the past 12 months, it was the in top three bestselling books in the ancient history category at bn.com, Barnes & Noble's website. It is still in the top ten. Its bargain price and its brilliance are just too much of a powerful combination. The book is all about the interaction and mutual influence between Rome and the “barbarian” cultures (mostly Germanic, Celtic, and the Steppe peoples, the Jews and Greeks, among others, could hardly have been considered barbarians at the time, they were too advanced). What is truly mind-blowing is how similar Rome's early expansion and then imperial dominance is to our own history, and how similar it was as a superpower to us as a superpower. I wouldn't have thought as much at first, but the author simply marshals too much evidence. And he does not usually make the connection to us: it is just obvious. But anyway, even at its height the Roman Empire often relied on familial client-patron relationships: There were hardly organized governments among the barbarians, so foreign policy often relied on Rome dealing with a warlord who was powerful enough to guarantee adherence to Rome's treaties and interests; if a candidate was not powerful enough to guarantee this adherence, then Rome propped them up so that they could, and it is terribly ironic that it was the Romans doing this that caused the different barbarian peoples to coalesce around a single leader and become the Franks, the Goths, the Alamanni... The "barbarian nations" would have stayed just simple and chaotic, disparate tribes without the patronage of Rome and the Roman desire to see a strong man in charge of a designated area, or group of people. Think about all our actions in South America during the Cold War, from Somoza to Pinochet to the killing of Ché, and before that, supporting Batista in Cuba. Think of the Saudi Royal Family (really, what kind of a "nation" is Saudi Arabia?) Think today about Musharraf: a perfect example. He is a warlord, we have no real relationship with Pakistan and its many different tribes, we operate wholly through Gen. Musharraf, and we help to keep his regime in power to ensure stability.

Despite the popular image of Rome, it was largely peaceful after its early centuries of expansion; after Augustus and his immediate successors in the first century AD, the borders of the Empire stayed pretty much the same, much like America's borders after Manifest Destiny had placated the "barbarian" native American tribes, after we had taken half of Mexico by force, stayed pretty much the same. Think of Spain and North Africa as the early expansion past the Appalachians, to the Mississippi; greater Greece, and eastern Turkey as Mexico, the rest of Turkey, Syria/Palestine/Judea, as the rest of the Great Plains up to the Rockies and the older settlements on the West Coast, and Egypt and Pannonia [the Balkans] as the far West, the rest of West Coast and the Southwest. Sure, there was some late expansion (Britain, Dacia [above the Danube], parts of the German frontier, some parts the Middle East like Mesopotamia/Iraq for Rome, and Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Cuba, Hawaii and Alaska and all the Pacific territories retained after world War II for us) but even Rome withdrew from many areas it had expanded into like Dacia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and the Black sea, at its height, just as we pulled back from Cuba, Okinawa, the Philippines, Panama, and, seemingly, Afghanistan/Iraq...

The cultural and societal similarities are what really blows your mind, though, in the book, but the point is this: that while it had its expansionist phases like we did, Rome was largely peaceful after it reached its peak, and usually only ended up fighting wars (with the exception of on-and-off Parthia/Persia, ironically West vs. East) when a new generation of barbarian leaders in one particular area no longer decided to play by the rules set up in past generations between Rome and the affected area. This was usually in the Germanic areas but also in the Balkans and in Britain. Rome often found it had to renegotiate new treaties when new leaders emerged, and war would come about if the leader was not willing to give Rome what it wanted. Going back to Musharraf, when he is gone in Pakistan, we will have to do much the same thing: renegotiate a new relationship when a new warlord emerges, and war may or may not ensue depending on the interests of both. Like our future and current wars, (think Saddam and Iraq too, actually) these were not wars of expansion for Rome, nor will they be wars of expansion for us: once a friendly, dependable government was set up, Rome almost always withdrew its troops, occasionally maintaining a few forts or outposts deep in enemy territory; think of our Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan today. There really was no Afghan nation, nor is there now, the difference is that we placed a leader in charge that we believe will be strong enough to ensure our interests are maintained, and already most of our troops are out of there. It was similar for Marcus Aurelius fighting the Germanic Marcomanni (as depicted in the opening of the movie Gladiator).

Rome gave so much power to these local rulers compared to what they had before interaction with Rome that the borders of the direct Empire were often meaningless: Rome never imposed its culture or way of life on people, it’s just that both were so attractive that people all over Rome's orbit were voluntarily drawn into it. Our border with Mexico, our relationship with Japan, are very similar cases to Rome's frontiers: American and Roman culture mixed with the local culture so that direct annexation was no longer necessary to maintain power and influence. And much like our relationships with our Allies, Roman frontier neighbors and client states received much, much more aid and stimulus coming from Rome than they paid in tribute to Rome; it was enough for Rome, like us, to reap the economic and status rewards.

To relate things to today’s era, and the Middle-East, in the Palestinian Territories, Arafat was a petty tribal chieftain in many ways, operating in the same manner that many of the petty Germanic warlords did with Rome: he, like the Germanics of Rome’s time, took the money, aid, and newfound position of status that Rome/America had elevated him/them to, and distributed the wealth and power among his/their followers and, to a lesser degree, to his/their people. The patron-client relationships between Israel/the EU/Russia/America/the UN and Arafat on one level, and the personal network that he set up which became known as Fatah, were very powerful, but only as powerful as the leader, Arafat. When he died, and even before then, the US saw a need to reassess the situation and put up a new ruler, which we may find more difficult now with Hamas in charge. So to be fair to Arafat, he was the latest in a long line of patron-client relationships. The "Palestinian people" much like the "Marcomanni" or the "Germans" didn't really exist until Rome or America propped up a leader and said "you are in charge of your people." In Rome's case it could take centuries or decades for this group of people to think of themselves as what it was called by Rome. In other words, the labels "Marcomanni" and "German" for the Romans, and the names "Palestinian" and "Saudi" and dare I say "Iraqi" for us Americans, had much more meaning for us and the Romans as a convenient way to label and organize people we deal/dealt with than for the people so being labeled.

Where Arafat can be judged, and judged harshly, is that he may have started in that old patron-client era, but now in the age of mass media, he could have risen to the task, was aware of what could have been done, and could have put his people first. But he never did: Fatah served to empower him and itself. Just like in Roman times, such leaders may have been popular (if they were too oppressive they were often deposed) but at their passing, the real problems would surface and turmoil would ensue. If Rome did not intervene directly, it had one of its clients intervene or it found a new leader who could guarantee stability. We are now doing the same thing in Palestinian Territories. Later in the Roman Empire, select allies occasionally had Roman arms and equipment, much like Israel does from us. And though the client would intervene, it was an extension of Rome's arm intervening for mutual interests. How different is Israel, intervening with M16's, F-16's, and Abrams tanks?

Now to Hamas: what inspires (in comparison to Fatah) and abhors about the group, this group that could, 50/50, be better or worse than Fatah, is interesting. The election for the Palestinians was a referendum on the status quo: continue the old, ridiculously corrupt patron-client networks of Fatah or reject that way of governance in lieu of an alternative with the people's interests at heart. Hamas has two faces: the Islamic charity started decades ago by students in Egypt to care for their Palestinian Arab brothers, which has done a better job providing for the Palestinian people than Arafat's Fatah ever did, even while Fatah was in charge, and the terror group that sends suicide bombers into Israeli discos. What is reassuring is that Hamas has dramatically reigned in its militant arm in the past two years: attacks against Israelis are way down from the beginning of the Intifada. Since it took over the Palestinian government, it has certainly avoided sending suicide bombers into Israel, and this can only be a positive development. There is too much chaos and anger and legitimate gripes in the Palestinian/Occupied Territories for all attacks to halt completely, but if Hamas can continue to prevent attacks from its own organization, which, for the most part is has, there is hope.

Rome, here, again, offers guidance. Even with a Germanic chieftain "in charge" of a region bordering Roman territory, total control over all armed men in the area was rare. Armed bands of Germans, in the late Empire or during early expansion (in the middle of the Empire's history, there was a truly remarkable level of peace) might cross the border and raid Roman territory, killing villagers, pillaging, burning crops. They had no technical ability to lay siege or the numbers to lay siege, so much like a suicide bomber, their impact was far more psychological than material. A few dozen might be killed, but not more. Rome had several options, all of which were exercised at different times by different emperors and military governors, yielding different results. Rome could blame the ruler they had set up, and depose him or set up a punitive expedition to punish the whole region. A full scale minor war could ensue, (as has happened recently with Israel and Hezbollah) or Rome could encourage one of its allies to attack. Often, Rome had living within its Empire the greatest rivals of these said leaders, so Rome could send them in with Roman support and have a Roman led coup (think the Shah of Iran or numerous examples in Latin America) if that leader did not play by the rules.

More often than not, these events were isolated, and Rome recognized that it was silly for it to ask a relatively weak ruler who had no strong central government to be able to reign in every militant band. So Rome would sometimes send in a force to punish just the band of raiders, or might destroy the village that harbored them or from which the band originated, but would keep the violence localized; Rome would make its example and then withdraw, and the existing relationship between the local ruler, empowered by Rome, the people of the whole region, and Rome, would not be changed or adversely affected. Always, the number of Germans dying in the punitive raid was far more than the Romans who died in the first incursion, just like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: far more Palestinians are dead or wounded in this Intifada than Israelis. The same can also be said of the recent Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. When Rome decided not to blame the weak government for the actions of every person living there and localized its response, the best results came about: stability and peace; even if another raid came about, a similar response would still occur. But when regional governors or Emperors seeking glory wanted to inflate the situation, they often sought a larger retribution than was required. If the entire local population was antagonized, full scale wars might erupt, and if a barbarian leader felt he was being treated unfairly, he may occasionally, though rarely, find support from neighboring peoples or rulers, especially if they had suffered similar treatment (at least part of the reason Hezbollah killed and captured a few Israeli soldiers was to show solidarity with their Arab Palestinian “brothers,” under siege in Gaza at the time). Especially in the late Empire, this caused many problems as the emperors of Late Antiquity became more despotic and removed from reality.

Sometimes, a rival group in a barbarian area might want to embarrass or destabilize the Roman-empowered local ruler: they may even hope that by raiding Roman territory Rome, rather than punish just them, would attack their whole group and area, that way these troublemakers could rally support around themselves against Rome's puppet. Such examples are abound on the Palestinians side of today's situation, and more often than not, especially under Sharon, Hamas and others have succeeded in drawing Israel into destabilizing Fatah and the PA to Hamas's gain. Al-Qaeda, a group much worse than Fatah or Hamas by far, has succeeded all too well in doing this in with us and our allies in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq, and with Pakistanis against Musharraf acting as our client; why else does he hold back from the tribal regions in the search for bin Laden?

Unfortunately, the recent fighting in Lebanon shows far too much of what I have mentioned in the preceding paragraphs. Ehud Olmert, new to power in Israel, was most probably seeking to assure Israelis that he could be just as tough, and protective, as Ariel Sharon, in addition to his legitimate reason of wanting to weaken Hezbollah and rescue captured Israeli soldiers. The disproportionate response, then, can be seen as an attempt not to go after glory, but an attempt to gain stature, a mold that would fit more than just a few emperors of Rome and their client-state leaders. By putting psychological domestic considerations over the real-world results of his actions, Olmert succeeded not in destroying Hezbollah but in destroying, or at least crippling, the nascent Lebanese democracy and in sidelining Lebanese moderates. He antagonized a population that had been willing to begin to put the past aside, so much so that now they support Hezbollah far, far more than they would have without Olmert’s blunder. The Israeli government’s actions were seen as terribly unfair to Lebanon and the Lebanese people, even after initial support. These neighbors, in a mixture of actually governmental aide and grassroots spontaneity, supported, eagerly and enthusiastically, both officially and unofficially, Hezbollah. This may have happened anyway, but the scale and enthusiasm was surely increased by the disproportionate response. Like Israel (and America in Iraq), Rome, too, could be oblivious to how its actions would make the situation worse, and what could start as a minor war could end up draining the Imperial Treasury and costing many Roman lives, though, as mentioned before, the barbarians would always suffer more, juts as Lebanon (and Iraq) is now devastated.

Conversely, just as barbarian warlords tried to provoke Rome into helping them destabilize rival barbarian leaders and to rally support around themselves, Hezbollah has humiliated Israel and increased its own stature at the expense of secular Lebanese democrats. In a worst case scenario, Hezbollah might succeed as Hamas did when it made Fatah’s people look weak enough that it was able to wrest control of the government from them. Thankfully, the Lebanese democracy is a far better organization that Fatah ever was, and is thus far more popular. Still, the extent of Hezbollah’s gain and the Lebanese government’s loss remains to be seen.

What can give us hope is that, until the late, late Empire, these groups, after destabilizing and bringing war and usually defeat to their people, if these leaders were still alive, almost always succeeded in renegotiating a new treaty and relationship with Rome, to be followed by a long period of peace and stability. Romans soldiers, just like American soldiers, wanted to be at home with their families and on their farms more than anything else, and once a level of violence was achieved that could enable both sides to achieve their goals (the new chieftain being empowered, Rome reestablishing trade and peace), everyone just wanted to go home. If Hamas can do this—and I believe there is a good chance, because unlike Fatah, their people's best interests are at the heart of what they are doing, at least compared to Fatah—peace could ensue. But Hamas must abolish its extremist actions, positions and rhetoric, and the burden of governance might help it to understand even more than it has already begun to in the past year the value of practicality. The Germanic groups, with Rome, were able to abandon their war rhetoric in favor of peace, so hopefully Hamas can too.

Another dilemma Romans faced was how powerful to make their clients: if they were too weak, like the today’s Palestinian Authority, the government of Lebanon or, in their case, many German chieftains, peace, security, and stability could hardly be expected to be enforced by the weak ruler; yet if they were too strong, they could pose a threat (Pakistan in the future, the Germanic confederacies in the late empire) to Rome/America itself. Another dimension of this problem involves allies. Israel, traditionally one of America’s strongest allies, has in recent years shown itself to be fully capable of disregarding its American patron’s concerns or advice regarding its actions, sometimes flouting them entirely. A sign of Rome’s waning power was when its allies started listening less and less to its counsel, and America needs to be careful that it does not lose too much power and influence with its allies, or it risks finding it far, far more difficult to achieve its international aspirations and policies. The UN and Europe with America is another obvious example.

Yet even with strong and loyal allies, it was only Rome's mistreatment of its clients that led to major problems in their relations. What we must be worried about is America and Israel being true to their commitments. As Chuck Hagel said on the Senate floor this July:

The United States will remain committed to defending Israel. Our relationship with Israel is a special and historic one. But, it need not and cannot be at the expense of our Arab and Muslim relationships. That is an irresponsible and dangerous false choice. Achieving a lasting resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict is as much in Israel’s interest as any other country in the world.

Especially with Mahmoud Abbas, but even before with Ahmed Qurei and Arafat, Sharon's government did little to indicate it was going to follow through with its commitments: right up until the Gaza disengagement plan, settlement activity was still expanding. When Roman rulers flouted previous agreements and neglected its patron role in its client patron relationship, disaster ensued. Ironically, it was such despotic leadership from a local Roman governor which encouraged the first Jewish rebellion against Rome in 66. A.D. In the cases of the barbarians, when a group had a legitimate gripe, it might unite with other similarly slighted groups. Such instances were rare, (Vercingetorix in Gaul, the Marcomanni, the Alemmannic confederation) but they were disastrous for Rome. (Today, we are facing a unifying of Islamic extremists that could be a disaster for us, but like Rome, this is symptomatic of a long term policy problem, in this case, supporting despots). Towards the end of the Empire, it was such neglect and abuse from Roman rulers towards barbarians and Rome's own civil wars that brought about its downfall. Rather than civil war, we are threatened by a bi-polar internal political struggle that makes our dependability in the view of our allies weak. What the Democrats may support in one agreement (Kyoto for example) may be flouted by a new administration under a new party, most likely the Republicans. Much like Rome looked at the barbarians as unreliable but in reality, its fickle emperor-system made the Romans themselves the more unreliable partner later in their history, America thinks its allies are unreliable, but the dictatorships and parliamentary democracies have often proved more stable in terms of consistency of policy than our fickle presidential political system. When America or Rome become become/became unreliable in the eyes of their allies, disaster and war followed. Yet just like the barbarians never gave up hope in Rome, our allies today will not totally quit on us even as our actions worry them. The Visigoths that sacked Rome in 410 A.D. only did so after years of seeking peaceful settlement in Rome's Empire and being forced into concentration camps and being denied food and sustenance; supplies were in short supply because of Roman civil wars. It was not the Barbarians that brought Rome down, but its own deceitful and barbarous conduct of Romans towards their patrons.

When Rome failed as patron, the clients eventually rose up, but for the centuries that Rome honored its clients and did not fight too much amongst itself, peace and prosperity were the norm. We have much to learn from this. So do groups like Hamas. Our double standard of freedom and democracy for Whites and Europeans and despotic enslavement for Arabs and Africans have empowered the Islamic fundamentalists more than any other factor, and this goes far back into the history of colonialism; before Western intervention, religious extremists were on the fringe of Muslim society, but when their criticisms of the their governments for allowing Western intervention rang true, their followings grew by leaps and bound. What started as Wahabism in colonial times is now seeing its most extreme manifestation in al-Qaeda. I want to remind everyone that when Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points were translated into Arabic, Palestinians and other Arabs in the Ottoman and European colonial worlds were dancing in the streets, feeling America would make good on its promises of freedom and democracy. What they got was colonial enslavement at hands of the West; our neglect of them in our client patron relationship has brought about our current problems in dealing with these people.

In the late Empire, when people in the frontier provinces felt that the Roman client-patron relationship no longer provided them security and peace, they looked to their own defense. The difference for us today is that Osama bin Laden, in this age of mass media, has emerged as the new patron. The Romans, even though they had mass publications, had a state monopoly on such publications; there was no barbarian press. Yet modern technology has empowered people like bin Laden in a way the Romans would not recognize. While parts of the imperial system broke down all over the Empire and in Rome’s international dealings, starting a domino effect of lawlessness, disorder, and civil war for Rome to deal with, each movement that threatened Roman control and order was its own, a product of its own conditions; there were no mass movements even though Rome, ironically, tried to portray all barbarians as part of one large movement in official imperial propaganda. So while America and Rome are seeing the same breakdown in their system, the response of the people being abandoned today is more unified, under al-Qaeda, than could ever have been in Roman times. Thus we see al-Qaeda spreading very quickly into Africa along with radical Islam. But even going back to 19th century colonialism, the Arabs and Muslims have always used mass media as a way to coalesce around particular movements. And while both Rome and America effectively used/use media to oversimplify their enemies, with the unintended consequence that few Romans or Americans understood/understand much at all about the people with whom they dealt/deal, the media/unity factor on the barbarians’ end versus al-Qaeda’s end is the largest difference between what we are facing and what Rome was facing; and yet, if the barbarian peoples had access to mass media, it is not inconceivable that they too could have had a bin Laden and a mass movement in their day. This would have been like much of the Muslim/Arab world today with America; different and disparate barbarian peoples had many similar and shared grievances with Rome and could realistically have united against Rome with such technology. Despite this major difference, there are, as stated, still many valuable lessons to be gleaned from Rome for us.

Going back to Hamas: al-Qaeda exists to bring about this type of conflict, Hamas sees conflict as a means to an end for its people (in a very basic sense the same way we see conflict), and Fatah could care less what was happening as long it got its money and power. Hamas, Israel, and America must reject their extreme tendencies in favor of practicality, something all three are capable of doing. Israel has abandoned (hopefully) its settler, Eretz-Yisrael policy, Hamas has, for the time being, moved away from terrorism and violence, and America is actually trying to redress its past failings as a patron by trying to promote democracy in the Middle-East, even though Bush’s miserable execution has actually made matters worse, at least for the time being.

Yet if Hamas resorts to terrorism again, and if Israel abandons its plan to withdraw from the West Bank or reoccupies Gaza, or empowers Netanyahu, if Hezbollah comes to power in Lebanon, if America abandons the Palestinians, or the Iraqis by withdrawing, we all stand to suffer greatly. Rome valued peace, prosperity, and honor above all else: when it lost sight of these, it lost its dignity and lost its City and Empire. We must hope to not do the same. Do we, like the late emperors and late Romans, become so detached that we no longer understand the repercussions of our actions? We are definitely in danger of doing so. While today we can look back and say that the Roman Empire fell in such-and-such a year, those living at the time had no concept of the "end" of their system. Well after we would say the Roman Empire ceased to exist, for decades if not centuries after, those people considered themselves Roman and drew their legitimacy from Rome and her traditions. Yet being Roman no longer meant what it once did. We need to ask what it means to be an American, and maintain our greatness or go the way of the Romans: existing as great in our minds only because of our failings to our networks of families at home and nations and peoples abroad

So while Bush may have the rhetoric of greatness down, he may be presiding over such a period of domestic and political decline that it may cease to matter what he or any politician says. Rome came back from several great periods of decline before eventually withering away, but it was not pretty: can we admit and confront the fact that we are in decline and do the same? Only time, and our own efforts, will tell.