Iraq PM OKs Reconsideration of Nomination
By ROBERT H. REID
AP via The Guardian via Informed Comment, 21 April 2006
Bowing to intense pressure, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari agreed Thursday to allow Shiite lawmakers to vote again on their choice to head the new government, abandoning his claim on another term in the face of Sunni and Kurdish opposition.
Al-Jaafari's stunning reversal appeared to mark a breakthrough in the monthslong struggle to form a national unity government to try to curb the country's slide toward anarchy and enable Washington to begin bringing home its 133,000 troops.
Leaders in the seven-party Shiite alliance, the largest bloc in the 275-member parliament, were to meet Friday to begin choosing a replacement. But their field of candidates lacks stature and power, raising questions whether the new prime minister will be any more successful than al-Jaafari in confronting sectarian violence and the brutal insurgency.
It was unclear why al-Jaafari decided to relinquish the nomination that he won by a single vote with backing from radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr during a ballot among Shiite lawmakers two months ago. Al-Jaafari had insisted Wednesday that stepping aside was ``out of the question.''
``The one thing I cannot compromise is my dedication to this heroic people,'' al-Jaafari told the nation in a televised address Thursday. ``I cannot allow myself to be an obstacle, or appear to be an obstacle to that.''
Al-Jaafari said he agreed to a new vote so that his fellow Shiite lawmakers ``can think with complete freedom and see what they wish to do.''

Bitterness Intensifies Over Iraqi Deadlock
Millions of citizens braved the threat of violence to vote. More than four months later, they are still waiting for the politicians to act.
By Bruce Wallace
LA Times, 21 April 2006
...In December, he and millions of Iraqis braved the threat of violence to vote for their first permanent government in the post-Saddam Hussein era, electing 275 lawmakers to hammer out a power-sharing agreement among parties of Iraq's various ethnic and religious blocs. More than four months later, they are still waiting for the politicians to form a government.
"I don't count on them. I don't trust them. And I would never vote for them again," Izzedine said.
Iraq's parliament will convene today for just the second time since that election. The lawmakers are expected to sit for just an hour.
Parliament is expected to elect a speaker and two deputies, and avoid the much thornier matter of agreeing on a prime minister and key ministers that has bedeviled the mix of Sunni Arab, Shiite, Kurdish and secular political factions.
Many here say the inability to agree on a prime minister and other key posts has paralyzed attempts to suppress the country's spiraling sectarian violence.
The stream of assassinations and bombings continued Wednesday. Three university professors traveling to Baghdad were killed by gunmen, and five bound bodies bearing marks of torture were found in the capital.
A U.S. soldier was reported killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad, and insurgents blew up a new police station in the volatile town of Yousifiya south of the capital, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. No one was wounded in the attack.

Coup and Counter-coup: The Struggle for Iraq
By Sami Moubayed
Asia Times via Informed Comment, 21 April 2006
Amid all the political confusion in Iraq, Baghdad is swirling with rumors that former prime minister Iyad Allawi is planning a military coup to end the gridlock over the choice of Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister-designate.
Allawi's group currently has 25 seats in the 275-seat parliament - not enough to realize the former prime minister's ambitions through democratic and legal means, justifying, perhaps, a military coup to achieve them by force.
The speculation is that Allawi will use the armed forces to seize power and topple the stubborn Jaafari, who insists on staying in power (he was premier in the previous administration) although he

Psychosis In America's Public Square: The Fear of Being Labeled 'Anti-Semitic'
A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy
By TONY JUDT
NYT, 19 April 2006
...The essay [March 23rd issue the London Review of Books, a respected British journal, published an essay titled "The Israel Lobby."] and the issues it raises for American foreign policy have been prominently dissected and discussed overseas. In America, however, it's been another story: virtual silence in the mainstream media. Why? There are several plausible explanations. One is that a relatively obscure academic paper is of little concern to general-interest readers. Another is that claims about disproportionate Jewish public influence are hardly original — and debate over them inevitably attracts interest from the political extremes. And then there is the view that Washington is anyway awash in "lobbies" of this sort, pressuring policymakers and distorting their choices.
Each of these considerations might reasonably account for the mainstream press's initial indifference to the Mearsheimer-Walt essay. But they don't convincingly explain the continued silence even after the article aroused stormy debate in the academy, within the Jewish community, among the opinion magazines and Web sites, and in the rest of the world. I think there is another element in play: fear. Fear of being thought to legitimize talk of a "Jewish conspiracy"; fear of being thought anti-Israel; and thus, in the end, fear of licensing the expression of anti-Semitism.
The end result — a failure to consider a major issue in public policy — is a great pity. So what, you may ask, if Europeans debate this subject with such enthusiasm? Isn't Europe a hotbed of anti-Zionists (read anti-Semites) who will always relish the chance to attack Israel and her American friend? But it was David Aaronovitch, a Times of London columnist who, in the course of criticizing Mearsheimer and Walt, nonetheless conceded that "I sympathize with their desire for redress, since there has been a cock-eyed failure in the U.S. to understand the plight of the Palestinians."
And it was the German writer Christoph Bertram, a longstanding friend of America in a country where every public figure takes extraordinary care to tread carefully in such matters, who wrote in Die Zeit that "it is rare to find scholars with the desire and the courage to break taboos."
How are we to explain the fact that it is in Israel itself that the uncomfortable issues raised by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt have been most thoroughly aired? It was an Israeli columnist in the liberal daily Haaretz who described the American foreign policy advisers Richard Perle and Douglas Feith as "walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments ...and Israeli interests." It was Israel's impeccably conservative Jerusalem Post that described Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, as "devoutly pro-Israel." Are we to accuse Israelis, too, of "anti-Zionism"?
The damage that is done by America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel is threefold. It is bad for Jews: anti-Semitism is real enough (I know something about it, growing up Jewish in 1950's Britain), but for just that reason it should not be confused with political criticisms of Israel or its American supporters. It is bad for Israel: by guaranteeing it unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of consequences. The Israeli journalist Tom Segev described the Mearsheimer-Walt essay as "arrogant" but also acknowledged ruefully: "They are right. Had the United States saved Israel from itself, life today would be better ...the Israel Lobby in the United States harms Israel's true interests."
BUT above all, self-censorship is bad for the United States itself. Americans are denying themselves participation in a fast-moving international conversation. Daniel Levy (a former Israeli peace negotiator) wrote in Haaretz that the Mearsheimer-Walt essay should be a wake-up call, a reminder of the damage the Israel lobby is doing to both nations. But I would go further. I think this essay, by two "realist" political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind.
Looking back, we shall see the Iraq war and its catastrophic consequences as not the beginning of a new democratic age in the Middle East but rather as the end of an era that began in the wake of the 1967 war, a period during which American alignment with Israel was shaped by two imperatives: cold-war strategic calculations and a new-found domestic sensitivity to the memory of the Holocaust and the debt owed to its victims and survivors.
For the terms of strategic debate are shifting. East Asia grows daily in importance. Meanwhile our clumsy failure to re-cast the Middle East — and its enduring implications for our standing there — has come into sharp focus. American influence in that part of the world now rests almost exclusively on our power to make war: which means in the end that it is no influence at all. Above all, perhaps, the Holocaust is passing beyond living memory. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that an Israeli soldier's great-grandmother died in Treblinka will not excuse his own misbehavior.
Thus it will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state. It is already not at all self-evident to Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans or Asians. Why, they ask, has America chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue? Americans may not like the implications of this question. But it is pressing. It bears directly on our international standing and influence; and it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. We cannot ignore it.

Immigration Officials Raid Companies
By Nicole Gaouette
LA Times, 20 April 2006
In a series of raids that set a single-day record for workplace enforcement arrests, immigration officials announced Thursday that they took 1,187 illegal immigrants into custody at wood products plants in 26 states and charged seven company managers with crimes that carry long prison terms.
The operation targeted 40 plants operated by IFCO Systems North America, a Dutch company based in Houston that is the largest manufacturer of wooden pallets in the country.
Although the raids were the culmination of a year-long investigation, Thursday's operation came at a sensitive time. Congress is returning to the Capitol from its spring recess next week still deeply divided on the hotly debated issue of how to overhaul the nation's immigration laws.
Reaction to the raids reflected the well-drawn lines in the debate. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., dismissed the raids as "a photo-op crackdown by (the Bush administration's) Homeland Security Agency to prove a political point won't erase its failed record." But conservative Republicans hailed news of the action. "Reform starts with the border but doesn't stop there. Secretary Chertoff's announcement ... shows his continued commitment to immigration enforcement," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, in a statement.
The latest raids contained tacit warnings for everyone involved with the current debate on immigration reform.

Bush, Hu Pledge Cooperation, Don't Get Far
By JENNIFER LOVEN
AP via LA Times, 21 April 2006
President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao pledged cooperation in reining in the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea and resolving troubling trade disputes of their own Thursday, but they made little measurable headway in a pomp-filled summit that was infiltrated by a screaming anti-China protester.
In a half-day of talks, the watchwords were candor and discussion -- not agreement and announcement.
...One gaffe during the elaborate arrival ceremony threatened the delicate balancing act. Before the playing of the two countries' national anthems, a White House announcer referred to China as the "Republic of China," the formal name of Taiwan.

Gloomy Economic Views; Bush Approval at New Low
By Dana Blanton
Fox News, 21 April 2006
More Americans disapprove than approve of how George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Congress are doing their jobs, while a majority approves of Condoleezza Rice. President Bush’s approval hits a record low of 33 percent this week, clearly damaged by sinking support among Republicans.
Opinions are sharply divided on whether Rumsfeld should resign as secretary of defense. In addition, views on the economy are glum; most Americans rate the current economy negatively, and twice as many say it feels like the economy is getting worse rather than better. These are just some of the findings of the latest FOX News national poll.
President Bush’s job approval rating slipped this week and stands at a new low of 33 percent approve, down from 36 percent two weeks ago and 39 percent in mid-March. A year ago this time, 47 percent approved and two years ago 50 percent approved (April 2004).
Approval among Republicans is below 70 percent for the first time of Bush’s presidency. Two-thirds (66 percent) approve of Bush’s job performance today, down almost 20 percentage points from this time last year when 84 percent of Republicans approved. Among Democrats, 11 percent approve today, while 14 percent approved last April.
"It seems clear that many Republicans, while they may still like and support George Bush, are growing uneasy with what may happen to their candidates — and the policies they support — in the November elections," comments Opinion Dynamics Chairman John Gorman.
"This unease about the direction of the party is now showing up as an erosion of the near unanimous support Bush has enjoyed among the Republican rank-and-file for the last six years."
In a follow-up question the poll asked respondents to explain why they approve or disapprove of the job Bush is doing. Of the 33 percent who approve, 52 percent say "he is doing a good job" in general, 21 percent cite Bush’s handling of the war on terrorism and 18 percent mention their agreement with him on the issues. The only other reason to receive double-digit mentions is the president’s honesty and character.
Overall, 57 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Bush is doing, and the most frequently mentioned reason is Iraq (48 percent). The other top reasons include generally "doing a bad job" (24 percent), disagreement on issues (22 percent) and the economy/jobs (17 percent).
Eleven percent of Americans say they disapprove because they "don’t like him" and 10 percent because he "doesn’t care about average people."

The Great Revulsion
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 21 April 2006
...the great revulsion has arrived. The latest Fox News poll puts Mr. Bush's approval at only 33 percent. According to the polling firm Survey USA, there are only four states in which significantly more people approve of Mr. Bush's performance than disapprove: Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Nebraska. If we define red states as states where the public supports Mr. Bush, Red America now has a smaller population than New York City.
The proximate causes of Mr. Bush's plunge in the polls are familiar: the heck of a job he did responding to Katrina, the prescription drug debacle and, above all, the quagmire in Iraq.
But focusing too much on these proximate causes makes Mr. Bush's political fall from grace seem like an accident, or the result of specific missteps. That gets things backward. In fact, Mr. Bush's temporarily sky-high approval ratings were the aberration; the public never supported his real policy agenda.
Remember, in 2000 Mr. Bush got within hanging-chad and felon-purge distance of the White House only by pretending to be a moderate. In 2004 he ran on fear and smear, plus the pretense that victory in Iraq was just around the corner. (I've always thought that the turning point of the 2004 campaign was the September 2004 visit of the Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, a figurehead appointed by the Bush administration who rewarded his sponsors by presenting a falsely optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq.)
The real test of the conservative agenda came after the 2004 election, when Mr. Bush tried to sell the partial privatization of Social Security.
Social Security was for economic conservatives what Iraq was for the neocons, a soft target that they thought would pave the way for bigger conquests. And there couldn't have been a more favorable moment for privatization than the winter of 2004-2005: Mr. Bush loved to assert that he had a "mandate" from the election; Republicans held solid, disciplined majorities in both houses of Congress; and many prominent political pundits were in favor of private accounts.
Yet Mr. Bush's drive on Social Security ran into a solid wall of public opposition, and collapsed within a few months. And if Social Security couldn't be partly privatized under those conditions, the conservative dream of dismantling the welfare state is nothing but a fantasy.
...Meanwhile, a combination of accident and design has left likely Democratic voters bunched together — I'm tempted to say ghettoized — in a minority of Congressional districts, while likely Republican voters are more widely spread out. As a result, Democrats would need a landslide in the popular vote — something like an advantage of 8 to 10 percentage points over Republicans — to take control of the House of Representatives. That's a real possibility, given the current polls, but by no means a certainty.
And there is also, of course, the real prospect that Mr. Bush will change the subject by bombing Iran.
Still, in the long run it may not matter that much. If the Democrats do gain control of either house of Congress, and with it the ability to issue subpoenas, a succession of scandals will be revealed in the final years of the Bush administration. But even if the Republicans hang on to their ability to stonewall, it's hard to see how they can resurrect their agenda.
In retrospect, then, the 2004 election looks like the high-water mark of a conservative tide that is now receding.

20 April 2006

Iraq II or a Nuclear Iran?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT, 19 April 2006
If these are our only choices, which would you rather have: a nuclear-armed Iran or an attack on Iran's nuclear sites that is carried out and sold to the world by the Bush national security team, with Don Rumsfeld at the Pentagon's helm?
I'd rather live with a nuclear Iran.
While I know the right thing is to keep all our options open, I have zero confidence in this administration's ability to manage a complex military strike against Iran, let alone the military and diplomatic aftershocks.
As someone who believed — and still believes — in the importance of getting Iraq right, the level of incompetence that the Bush team has displayed in Iraq, and its refusal to acknowledge any mistakes or remove those who made them, make it impossible to support this administration in any offensive military action against Iran.
I look at the Bush national security officials much the way I look at drunken drivers. I just want to take away their foreign policy driver's licenses for the next three years. Sorry, boys and girls, you have to stay home now — or take a taxi. Dial 1-800-NATO-CHARGE-A-RIDE. You will not be driving alone. Not with my car.

Unforeseen Spending on Materiel Pumps Up Iraq War Bill
Senate to Take Up Measure as Military Fights to Keep Guns, Tanks Working
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post, 20 April 2006
With the expected passage this spring of the largest emergency spending bill in history, annual war expenditures in Iraq will have nearly doubled since the U.S. invasion, as the military confronts the rapidly escalating cost of repairing, rebuilding and replacing equipment chewed up by three years of combat.
The cost of the war in U.S. fatalities has declined this year, but the cost in treasure continues to rise, from $48 billion in 2003 to $59 billion in 2004 to $81 billion in 2005 to an anticipated $94 billion in 2006, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The U.S. government is now spending nearly $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from $8.2 billion a year ago, a new Congressional Research Service report found.
Annual war costs in Iraq are easily outpacing the $61 billion a year that the United States spent in Vietnam between 1964 and 1972, in today's dollars. The invasion's "shock and awe" of high-tech laser-guided bombs, cruise missiles and stealth aircraft has long faded, but the costs of even those early months are just coming into view as the military confronts equipment repair and rebuilding costs it has avoided and procurement costs it never expected.

Our Dirty War
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 20 April 2006
I said, "Some of these folks have never been heard from again, right?"
"Yup," said Curt Goering. "That's right."
Mr. Goering is the senior deputy executive director for policy and programs at Amnesty International USA. We were discussing a subject — government-sanctioned disappearances — that ordinarily would repel most Americans.
In past years, stories about torture and "the disappeared" have been associated with sinister regimes in South and Central America. The attitude in the United States was that we were above such dirty business, that it was immoral and uncivilized, and we were better than that.
But times change, and we've lowered our moral standards several notches since then. Now people are disappearing at the hands of the U.S. government.
"Below the Radar: Secret Flights to Torture and 'Disappearance' " is the title of a recent Amnesty International report on the reprehensible practice of extraordinary rendition, a highly classified American program in which individuals are seized — abducted — without any semblance of due process and sent off to be interrogated by regimes that are known to engage in torture.
Some of the individuals swept up by rendition simply vanish.
SEE ALSO:
In New Job, Spymaster Draws Bipartisan Criticism
By SCOTT SHANE
NYT, 20 April 2006
The top Republican and the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee have disagreed publicly about many things, but on one issue they have recently come together. Both are disquieted by the first-year performance of John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence.
The fear expressed by the two lawmakers, Representatives Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, and Jane Harman, Democrat of California, is that Mr. Negroponte, the nation's overseer of spy agencies, is creating just another blanket of bureaucracy, muffling rather than clarifying the dangers lurking in the world.

Things Change, and Stay the Same
NYT, 20 April 2006
President Bush wants to show the nation he's shaking things up in his administration, but it is clear that the people who messed everything up will remain in place. The press secretary goes; the political-and-domestic-policy adviser is losing half his portfolio. There's a new White House chief of staff. But the folks at the Defense Department are still on the job, doing ... what they've been doing.
Metaphors about deck chairs abound.
It's too soon to say how history will judge this administration, but it does look as if the first thing this president will be remembered for is the disastrous way the war in Iraq was conducted under Donald Rumsfeld, who, of course, isn't going anywhere. If there's a second thing we think history will shake its head over, it's the administration's cavalier disregard for the civil liberties of American citizens and the human rights of American prisoners. Needless to say, nobody's being replaced at the Justice Department.
The third great disaster of the Bush administration is a fiscal policy that has turned a federal surplus into a series of enormous budget gaps and an economy that depends on loans from China to pay its bills. The administration is changing the fiscal team, but doing everything possible to send the signal that there are no new brooms in this venture — just the same old faces with new labels. Rob Portman will morph from being the trade representative into being the director of the White House budget office. Mr. Portman, a longtime Bush loyalist, used his nomination acceptance speech to champion all the policies that wrecked things in the first place. More tax cuts will be forthcoming, he vowed, and budget cuts will make things balance out in the end.
President Bush has been slicing away at federal revenues by encouraging Congress to pass tax cuts for wealthy Americans. That usually isn't hard to do. The fact that there's been so much difficulty getting the latest round through the Republican-controlled Senate is a measure of how irresponsible the plans are. And everybody is well aware that the proposed spending cuts wouldn't go far enough to make up for lost tax dollars. Even budget cuts that are doable are anathema to an undisciplined legislature that is used to being allowed to spend whatever it wants by a feckless presidency.
The sudden exit of Scott McClellan, the press secretary, would be meaningless under normal circumstances. But in the current context, it really does send an important message. The president is like one of those people who pretend to apologize by saying they're sorry if they were misunderstood. He doesn't believe he's done anything wrong. It's our fault for not appreciating him.
Blame the victim.
SEE ALSO:
A Team in a Slump
By Richard Cohen
Washington Post, 20 April 2006
'Tis a pity George Bush did not own the New York Knicks instead of the Texas Rangers. History might have been different. His cocky approach to war in Iraq might have been tempered by the knowledge that money and power doesn't always guarantee victory. Sometimes, as Don Rumsfeld has memorably noted, things happen.
...Henry Ford, not my favorite historical figure, was an ignoramus and a bigot, but besides being something of an industrial genius, he once said something very smart. After a harebrained scheme of his to end World War I came to naught, Ford said, "We learn more from our failures than from our successes." To hope this will be the case when it comes to the Knicks trivializes hope itself. Basketball, after all, is only a game. But Iraq is a war, fought by the modest and the brave. Still, as with the sorry Knicks, the lessons of defeat are clear: It's not the bench that needs to be replaced. It's the front office.

In Russia, Corporate Thugs Use Legal Guise
By Peter Finn
Washington Post, 20 April 2006
...The new raiders employ some of that old-style intimidation, but dress it up in legality by teaming with corrupt lawyers, accountants, judges, bureaucrats and police to exploit weaknesses in Russia's fledgling corporate legal system, Russian lawmakers and entrepreneurs say.
Typically the raiders are politically connected developers and their allies in the bureaucracy. Their activity is drawing attention at the highest levels of the government, where officials fear it undermines Russia's investment climate and adds to the sense that rule of law remains illusory in the country.

19 April 2006

Here's Donny! In His Defense, a Show Is Born
By DAVID S. CLOUD
NYT, 19 April 2006
It has become a daily ritual, the defense of the defense secretary, complete with praise from serving generals, tributes from the president and, from the man on the spot, doses of charm, combativeness and even some humility.
A session on Tuesday was the third time in five days that Donald H. Rumsfeld had sought to make a public case to remain as defense secretary.
"There are no indispensable men," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon.
But the Bush administration sought to drive home the message that Mr. Rumsfeld was not going anywhere, no matter what critics might desire.
Again, Gen. Peter Pace of the Marines, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was at Mr. Rumsfeld's side, a visual prop to counter the message from a half-dozen or so retired generals that Mr. Rumsfeld should step down.
President Bush, having defended Mr. Rumsfeld on Friday from Camp David, had appeared before the cameras hours earlier, to make the case in person.
"I'm the decider, and I decide what's best," Mr. Bush said in the Rose Garden.
SEE ALSO:
Roll Call On Rumsfeld
Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service via TomPaine.com, 18 April 2006
Despite White House efforts to put an end to the controversy, the battle over the fate of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld shows little sign of abating.
And the outcome, which is by no means certain, could well determine the trajectory of U.S. policy in key areas—including Iraq, Iran and even China—through the remaining two and a half years of George W. Bush's presidency.
While the unprecedented calls by six retired generals for his resignation have focused primarily on his competence, management style and strategy for invading and occupying Iraq, Rumsfeld's departure would almost certainly cripple the coalition of neoconservative and aggressive nationalist war hawks in and around the administration for the remainder of Bush's term.
That is why the hawks outside the administration, led by the neoconservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, appear anxious to persuade Bush himself that the current campaign against his defense secretary is really aimed at him.
SEE ALSO:
Listen to the Brass
By David S. Broder
Washington Post, 18 April 2006
...Seeing these senior officers take this public stand is unprecedented; even in Vietnam, with all the misgivings among the fighting men, we saw no such open defiance.
The president has reaffirmed his confidence in Rumsfeld, and the secretary himself has been dismissive of the complaints, saying that if the defense secretary were fired "every time two or three people disagreed . . . it would be like a merry-go-round."
But the case the generals are making is as serious as it is passionate. To take but one example, the essay in Time magazine by retired Marine Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, the former director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, lists six separate areas in which he saw failure on the part of the civilian leadership of government:
"The distortion of intelligence in the buildup to the war, McNamara-like micromanagement that kept our forces from having enough resources to do the job, the failure to retain and reconstitute the Iraqi military in time to help quell civil disorder, the initial denial that an insurgency was the heart of the opposition to occupation, alienation of allies who could have helped in a more robust way to rebuild Iraq, and the continuing failure of the other agencies of our government to commit assets to the same degree as the Defense Department."
Adding these together, he concluded with the words that have come to constitute the definitive rebuke to the administration's leaders: "My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions -- or bury the results."
Gen. Newbold makes it plain that he is not advocating immediate withdrawal from Iraq unless the Iraqi political factions fail to form a government and fall into civil war. But he insists new leadership is needed in the Pentagon.
His words echo those of another retired Marine general, Anthony Zinni, whose criticisms were quoted in an earlier column of mine. And there are other notable leaders in civilian life, outside the White House, who have been making the same points publicly for months and even years. Sen. John McCain, a Republican, and Sen. Joe Biden, a Democrat, have been in and out of Iraq more than a dozen times since the start of the war. Both of them supported the war and oppose withdrawal. But both have said repeatedly since their first visits that they have never found an officer of any rank who has not said, privately and urgently, "We need more troops to complete this mission."
Rumsfeld and President Bush insist that the manpower and strategy have been exactly what the commanders in the field thought best, but now general after general is speaking out to challenge that claim. The situation cries out for serious congressional oversight and examination; hearings are needed as soon as Congress returns. These charges have to be answered convincingly -- or Rumsfeld has to go.
SEE ALSO:
Torturing Reason...
Shallow and Tormented Defense Presented by Pro-Rumsfeld Generals
NPR's Diane Rehm Show Interview, 18 April 2006
Six retired military generals have publicly called for Secretary Rumsfeld's resignation. We'll talk about the recent challenges to his leadership.
Guests
General Jack Keane, retired Vice Chief of Staff of the Army,
Col. Douglas Macgregor, U.S. Army-Retired and author of "Transformation Under Fire"
Lt General Michael DeLong,
General John Batiste, Retired Major General

Contaminated Water
The Privatization and Poisoning of Military Support in Iraq
Kellogg-Brown and Root (KBR) and Halliburton
NPR's Living On Earth, 18 April 2006
Soldiers in Iraq may have been exposed to polluted water, a company whistleblower says, causing a number of mysterious illnesses among troops.
Listen Now
SEE ALSO:
U.S. Contractor Admits Bribery For Jobs in Iraq
Occupation Officials Got Cash and Gifts for Deals
By Griff Witte
Washington Post, 19 April 2006
An American businessman who is at the heart of one of the biggest corruption cases to emerge from the reconstruction of Iraq has pleaded guilty to conspiracy, bribery and money-laundering charges, according to documents unsealed yesterday in federal court in Washington.
As part of the plea, Philip H. Bloom admitted his part in a scheme to give more than $2 million in cash and gifts to U.S. officials in exchange for their help in getting reconstruction contracts for his companies. Bloom's firms won $8.6 million in reconstruction deals, with an average profit margin of more than 25 percent.

'Sir! No Sir!' Salutes Vietnam's Dissenters in Uniform
By MANOHLA DARGIS
NYT, 19 April 2006
In March 1964 Robert S. McNamara opened a speech about South Vietnam with the statement that "the independence of a nation and the freedom of its people are being threatened by Communist aggression and terrorism." Many words later, Mr. McNamara, the secretary of defense, concluded, in rosy terms that sound eerily similar to contemporary dispatches, that "when the day comes that we can safely withdraw, we expect to leave an independent and stable South Vietnam, rich with resources and bright with prospects for contributing to the peace and prosperity of Southeast Asia and of the world."
Much happened in the bloody decade that followed, but one of the most memorable chapters of the Vietnam War has also long been one of the least revisited: the antiwar movement inside the military. Called the G.I. Movement, this resistance manifested itself in countless ways: in organized protests, in desertions and in the coffeehouses that sprang up across the country near military bases. In the early 1970's the documentary filmmaker David Zeiger worked in one such coffeehouse, the Oleo Strut in Killeen, Tex., not far from Fort Hood. Named for a helicopter shock absorber, the Oleo Strut was where off-duty soldiers went to decompress and to check out the latest issue of one of the many underground military publications, like The Fatigue Press, that gave powerful voice to their dissent.
In his smart, timely documentary about the G.I. Movement, "Sir! No Sir!," Mr. Zeiger takes a look at how the movement changed and occasionally even rocked the military from the ground troops on up. On one level the film serves as a corrective to the rah-rah rhetoric about Vietnam in such schlock entertainments as the 1980's "Rambo" franchise, in which Sylvester Stallone's veteran turned mercenary ritualistically wipes away the spit lobbed at him by a phantom antiwar protester. The image of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran, explains Jerry Lembcke, himself a Vietnam veteran and one of the persuasive talking heads who appears in the new film, helped maintain the important fiction that opposition to the war came strictly from outside the military.

Caveat Emptor...Nuggets of Death
By NINA TEICHOLZ
NYT, 16 April 2006
IT'S never pleasant to learn that an artificial substance in your food might be ruining your health. This is what happened with trans fats when they were "discovered" in the food supply a few years ago, after a high-profile lawsuit against the makers of the Oreo cookie (laden with trans fats, who knew?) captured headlines nationwide.
The publicity pushed the Food and Drug Administration to require that trans fats be listed on package labels starting this year. Producers of cookies, cakes, crackers, frozen foods and margarines, all high in trans fats, thus had an incentive to eliminate them from their products. But Americans would be better protected if the F.D.A. would limit trans fats in all foods.
The problem with the labeling regulation is that it does not cover restaurant fare and other unpackaged food. This giant loophole was exposed by Danish researchers who collected and analyzed food from 20 countries, and whose results were published last week in The New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers found that there are far more trans fats in McDonald's meals in the United States than in the same McDonald's fare in most other parts of the world.
Trans fats, which are basically a form of hardened vegetable oil, are a staple ingredient in our foods because they're cheaper than butter and they guarantee a long shelf life. Trans fats are also easily manipulated, able to give a Goldfish cracker its crunch, for instance, or make frosting creamy.
Trans fats are worrisome, however, because more than any other macronutrient in the diet they not only raise L.D.L., the so-called bad cholesterol, but also lower H.D.L., the good. (Saturated fat, in contrast, raises both kinds.) A daily intake of five grams of trans fats increases the risk of contracting heart disease 4 percent to 28 percent, various studies have shown.
Consuming that much trans fat is far too easy. The Danish study found that a large order of McDonald's French fries in the United States contains almost six grams of trans fats, while a large portion (10 pieces) of Chicken McNuggets serves up almost four grams. Eaten together, they deliver nearly 10 grams of a substance considered so unhealthy that the National Academy of Sciences concluded, in 2002, that the only safe amount of trans fats in the diet is zero.
In Denmark, that same combination of McDonald's fries and chicken contains less than one gram of trans fats. That is because, since 2004, the Danes have limited trans fats to no more than 2 percent of a food's fat content, by weight. Now, even the famous Danish pastry is virtually free of trans fats.

18 April 2006

Selling Democracy...I'm O.K., You're Biased
By DANIEL GILBERT
NYT, 16 April 2006
VERIZON had a pretty bad year in 2005, but its chief executive did fine. Although Verizon's earnings dropped by more than 5 percent and its stock fell by more than a quarter, he received a 48 percent increase in salary and compensation. This handsome payout was based on the recommendation of an independent consulting firm that relied on Verizon (and the chief executive's good will) for much of its revenue. When asked about this conflict of interest, the consulting firm explained that it had "strict policies in place to ensure the independence and objectivity of all our consultants."
Please stop laughing.
The person who made this statement was almost certainly sincere. Consultants believe they can make objective decisions about the companies that indirectly employ them, just as legislators believe that campaign contributions don't influence their votes.
Doctors scoff at the notion that gifts from a pharmaceutical company could motivate them to prescribe that company's drugs, and Supreme Court justices are confident that their legal opinions are not influenced by their financial stake in a defendant's business, or by their child's employment at a petitioner's firm. Vice President Dick Cheney is famously contemptuous of those who suggest that his former company received special consideration for government contracts.
Voters, citizens, patients and taxpayers can barely keep a straight face. They know that consultants and judges are human beings who are pulled by loyalties and pushed by animosities, and that drug reps and lobbyists are human beings who wouldn't be generous if generosity didn't pay dividends. Most people have been around people long enough to have a pretty good idea of what drives their decisions, and when decision-makers deny what seems obvious to the rest of us, the rest of us get miffed. Sell our democracy to the highest bidder, but don't insult our intelligence.
...In short, doctors, judges, consultants and vice presidents strive for truth more often than we realize, and miss that mark more often than they realize. Because the brain cannot see itself fooling itself, the only reliable method for avoiding bias is to avoid the situations that produce it.
When doctors refuse to accept gifts from those who supply drugs to their patients, when justices refuse to hear cases involving those with whom they share familial ties and when chief executives refuse to let their compensation be determined by those beholden to them, then everyone sleeps well.
Until then, behavioral scientists have plenty to study.

Battle Rages in Baghdad Neighborhood
Iraqi security forces fight gunmen for nine hours, leaving at least three people dead. Some residents, apparently fearing attack, join in.
By Louise Roug
LA Times, 18 April 2006
Intense fighting broke out between Iraqi security forces and gunmen in a volatile Sunni Arab section of the capital, leaving at least three people dead and terrifying residents during a battle that began during the night and extended into the daylight hours Monday.
Authorities said about 50 Sunni gunmen had fought the country's Shiite-dominated security forces for nine hours in the northern neighborhood of Adhamiya, forcing U.S. troops supporting the Iraqi forces to close down streets and entrances to the area.
Some residents entered the clash, exchanging gunfire with Iraqi soldiers and police they believed to be members of a death squad.
The violence, with its sectarian overtones, highlighted how fractured and fearful the city has become and overshadowed a brief resumption of the trial of former President Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants on human rights abuse charges.
"No one can trust anybody now," said Ali Ubaydi, an Adhamiya resident who said the gunmen had fired heavy machine guns at the Iraqi soldiers guarding the neighborhood.
"No one knows what happened or who they were," he said of the gunmen.
Khairulla Hamdi, another resident, complained that the closure of the area by American forces had made it difficult to help the wounded. Throughout the day, civilian cars flying white flags carried the injured to nearby hospitals, he said.
At least three people were killed and 20 were injured in the Adhamiya fighting, said Mustafa Mashhadani, a spokesman for the Muslim Scholars Assn. The Sunni organization has complained of abuses by security forces that allegedly have been infiltrated by Shiite militias and are accused of acting at times as death squads. Sunni residents of Adhamiya "are determined not to allow such forces to enter their neighborhood, so they resisted this force," he said.
...Inside the heavily fortified Green Zone, meanwhile, the trial of Hussein and his co-defendants continued.
...Elsewhere on Monday, the brother of a prominent Sunni politician was found slain in the capital. Saleh Mutlak's brother, Taha, had recently been kidnapped in northern Baghdad. Mutlak is the second Sunni leader whose brother has been killed in as many weeks. On Thursday, gunmen killed the brother of Tariq Hashimi as he drove through an eastern Baghdad neighborhood with a friend.
Also on Monday, gunmen in the capital kidnapped three engineers employed at a local electricity plant on their way to work. The day before, armed men wearing police uniforms and driving police vehicles had abducted a dozen employees from Al Warkaa Investment Co. in eastern Baghdad, according to a police official.
Police recovered 17 bodies from various areas of Baghdad, including seven found inside a Jeep Cherokee near a primary school in the troubled Dora neighborhood. An additional five bodies were found in the street on the other side of the school. Three bodies found in Shula showed signs of torture. Near the Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiya, the bodies of two men who had been shot were found on the bank of the Tigris River.
Hospital officials reported that 12 municipal workers, reportedly street cleaners, had been killed in a pair of drive-by shootings in the Dora area.
A roadside bomb apparently intended for Iraqi security forces patrolling downtown killed one civilian and wounded four others, authorities said.
In Baqubah, north of Baghdad, a car bomb targeting a police patrol killed a civilian and injured his son. Drive-by gunmen attacked a minibus carrying students from Baqubah University, killing two and injuring one other.

Sunni District in Baghdad Is Sealed Off
By EDWARD WONG
NYT, 18 April 2006
American and Iraqi troops sealed off one of Baghdad's most prominent Sunni Arab neighborhoods on Monday after a night of raging gun battles that left homes and storefronts riddled with bullets and at least one civilian dead, Iraqi officials and witnesses said.
The closing of Adhamiya, in northern Baghdad, seemed to signal deteriorating security in a neighborhood where attacks on American and Iraqi forces had ebbed in recent months. The area is home to hard-line Sunni Arabs who remain hostile to the Shiite-led government and the American presence. At its center is the well-known Abu Hanifa Mosque, where Saddam Hussein made his final public appearance in April 2003 before fleeing Baghdad and the American invasion force.
A leading Sunni Arab political group, the Iraqi Islamic Party, released a statement on Monday calling for calm and saying that a "human disaster might occur." It said the clashes were between Iraqi government forces and residents of Adhamiya, implying that the uniformed forces were the aggressors.

American Deaths in Iraq Rise Sharply
Reuters via Azstarnet.com via Informed Comment, 18 April 2006
U.S. military deaths in Iraq have risen sharply in April — after five straight months of declines — amid warnings by American officials that the failure to form a new Iraqi government has helped perpetuate violence.
Last month there were 31 U.S. military fatalities, the fewest since 20 died in February 2004 in the lowest monthly toll of the three-year-old war. So far this month, which is a bit more than half over, there have been at least 48 American fatalities, according to a count of military death announcements.
Many of the deaths again occurred in Anbar prov-ince, one of the hotbeds of the insurgency led primarily by members of the Sunni Muslim Arab minority who controlled the country under deposed dictator Saddam Hussein.
There have been 2,378 U.S. military deaths in the war, the Pentagon said, with another 17,549 U.S. troops wounded in action. The average monthly U.S. military death toll in the war has been 65.

Killing, Kidnap Force Iraq Brain Drain
UPI via Informed Comment, 17 April 2006
There appears to be a serious brain drain going on in Iraq where intellectuals seem to be a growing target.
At least 182 academics have been reported killed since the 2003 invasion, in addition to kidnappings and murder attempts, the Britain's Telegraph reports.
In the past four months alone, 331 school teachers have been killed and nine medical workers were slain in a single day in the northern city of Mosul last month.
Among the imperiled intelligentsia, those who can move abroad increasingly do so before they or their families join the list of their colleagues killed or kidnapped.
Many say the targeting of professionals is part of an orchestrated campaign, a ridding of individuals capable of independent thought, making it easier for violent men to push their own agenda.

National Archives Pact Let C.I.A. Withdraw Public Documents
By SCOTT SHANE
NYT, 18 April 2006
The National Archives signed a secret agreement in 2001 with the Central Intelligence Agency permitting the spy agency to withdraw from public access records it considered to have been improperly declassified, the head of the archives, Allen Weinstein, disclosed on Monday.
Mr. Weinstein, who began work as archivist of the United States last year, said he learned of the agreement with the C.I.A. on Thursday and was putting a stop to such secret reclassification arrangements, which he described as incompatible with the mission of the archives.
Like a similar 2002 agreement with the Air Force that was made public last week, the C.I.A. arrangement required that archives employees not reveal to researchers why documents they requested were being withheld.
The disclosure of the secret agreements provides at least a partial explanation for the removal since 1999 of more than 55,000 pages of historical documents from access to researchers at the archives. The removal of documents, including many dating to the 1950's, was discovered by a group of historians this year and reported by The New York Times in February.
The reclassification program has drawn protests from many historians and several members of Congress, notably Representative Christopher Shays, the Connecticut Republican who held a hearing on the program last month.
The National Archives, with facilities in College Park, Md., at the presidential libraries and in other locations, are the repository of most official government documents and a major resource for historians.
"Classified agreements are the antithesis of our reason for being," Mr. Weinstein said in a statement. "Our focus is on the preservation of records and ensuring their availability to the American public, while at the same time fulfilling the people's expectation that we will properly safeguard the classified records entrusted to our custody."
In a brief interview, Mr. Weinstein said he was particularly disturbed that the archives had agreed not to tell researchers why documents were unavailable. The C.I.A. agreement said archives employees would "not attribute to C.I.A. any part of the review or the withholding of documents." In the agreement with the Air Force, archives officials said they would "not disclose the true reason for the presence" of Air Force personnel at the archives.

17 April 2006

US Firms Suspected of Bilking Iraq Funds
Millions missing from program for rebuilding
By Farah Stockman
Boston Globe, 16 April 2006
American contractors swindled hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi funds, but so far there is no way for Iraq's government to recoup the money, according to US investigators and civil attorneys tracking fraud claims against contractors.
SEE ALSO:
American Business Standards Firmly Planted in Iraq
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 17 April 2006
Farah Stockman reports in the Boston Globe that US companies swindled the Iraqi government out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Then Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority blithely granted them amnesty just before it was dissolved. ' ''In effect, it makes Iraq into a 'free-fraud zone,' " said Alan Grayson, a Virginia attorney who is suing . . . ' Well, I'm just glad that the Bush administration was able to teach those hopelessly corrupt Middle Easterners the high standards of the American way of doing business. CPA apparently stood for "The Crooks are the Police Around here."

Iraq Unity Talks Set Back; 4 Marines Die
AP via NYT, 17 April 2006
Efforts to form a unity government suffered a new setback Sunday when Iraqi leaders postponed a parliament session after failing to agree on a prime minister. Bombs targeted Shiites near a mosque and on a bus as attacks nationwide killed at least 35 people.
Four more Marines were reported killed in fighting west of Baghdad, bringing the U.S. death toll for this month to 47 -- compared with 31 for all of March.

Bush 'Going Easy' on Musharraf/Khan Yields Uncertainty and Danger
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
NYT, 17 April 2006
...Robert Joseph, the Bush administration's under secretary of state for arms control and international security, who is known as one of the administration's hawks, said in an interview on Saturday that President Ahmadinejad's claim constituted "the first time I've ever heard the Iranians admit" to have a significant effort on the advanced technology. Iran, Mr. Joseph added, "has never come clean on this program, and now its president is talking about it."
The new claim focuses renewed attention on Iran's rocky relationship with Mr. Khan, who provided it with much of the enrichment technology it is exploiting today. If Mr. Ahmadinejad's claim is correct, it probably indicates that relationship went on longer and far deeper than previously acknowledged. Mr. Khan and his nuclear black market supplied Iran with blueprints for both the more elementary machine, known as P-1, and the more advanced P-2.
There are other indications that Mr. Khan may have been dealing with Iran as recently as six years ago. President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan disclosed recently that he fired Dr. Khan, a national hero credited with developing Pakistan's bomb, in 2001 after discovering that he was trying to arrange a secret flight to the Iranian city of Zahedan, known as a center of smuggling.
Dr. Khan refused to discuss the flight, saying it was important and very secret. "I said, 'What the hell do you mean? You want to keep a secret from me?' " Mr. Musharraf recalled in an interview with The New York Times for a Discovery Times television documentary, "Nuclear Jihad."
"So these are the things which led me to very concrete suspicions," Mr. Musharraf said, "and we removed him."
Last year, Pakistan said its investigation into the Khan network was closed. But the Iranian crisis has led to renewed questioning of Dr. Khan, American intelligence officials and European diplomats say.
So far his answers have been vague, investigators say. Iran, for its part, has said virtually nothing about its P-2 program. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an arms analysis group in London, said in a report last year that Iran's failure to provide more information about its P-2 program led many analysts to suspect that the advanced centrifuges formed "the nucleus of a secret enrichment program."
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private research group in Washington that monitors the Iranian program, said Mr. Ahmadinejad's declaration, whether political rhetoric or technical reality, now gave the world "something to further investigate and worry about."

Bombs That Would Backfire
By RICHARD CLARKE and STEVEN SIMON
NYT, 16 April 2006
...Now, as in the mid-90's, any United States bombing campaign would simply begin a multi-move, escalatory process. Iran could respond three ways. First, it could attack Persian Gulf oil facilities and tankers — as it did in the mid-1980's — which could cause oil prices to spike above $80 dollars a barrel.
Second and more likely, Iran could use its terrorist network to strike American targets around the world, including inside the United States. Iran has forces at its command that are far superior to anything Al Qaeda was ever able to field. The Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah has a global reach, and has served in the past as an instrument of Iran. We might hope that Hezbollah, now a political party, would decide that it has too much to lose by joining a war against the United States. But this would be a dangerous bet.
Third, Iran is in a position to make our situation in Iraq far more difficult than it already is. The Badr Brigade and other Shiite militias in Iraq could launch a more deadly campaign against British and American troops. There is every reason to believe that Iran has such a retaliatory shock wave planned and ready.
No matter how Iran responded, the question that would face American planners would be, "What's our next move?" How do we achieve so-called escalation dominance, the condition in which the other side fears responding because they know that the next round of American attacks would be too lethal for the regime to survive?
Bloodied by Iranian retaliation, President Bush would most likely authorize wider and more intensive bombing. Non-military Iranian government targets would probably be struck in a vain hope that the Iranian people would seize the opportunity to overthrow the government. More likely, the American war against Iran would guarantee the regime decades more of control.
So how would bombing Iran serve American interests? In over a decade of looking at the question, no one has ever been able to provide a persuasive answer. The president assures us he will seek a diplomatic solution to the Iranian crisis. And there is a role for threats of force to back up diplomacy and help concentrate the minds of our allies. But the current level of activity in the Pentagon suggests more than just standard contingency planning or tactical saber-rattling.
The parallels to the run-up to to war with Iraq are all too striking: remember that in May 2002 President Bush declared that there was "no war plan on my desk" despite having actually spent months working on detailed plans for the Iraq invasion. Congress did not ask the hard questions then. It must not permit the administration to launch another war whose outcome cannot be known, or worse, known all too well.

A Bad Leak
NYT, 16 April 2006
President Bush says he declassified portions of the prewar intelligence assessment on Iraq because he "wanted people to see the truth" about Iraq's weapons programs and to understand why he kept accusing Saddam Hussein of stockpiling weapons that turned out not to exist. This would be a noble sentiment if it actually bore any relationship to Mr. Bush's actions in this case, or his overall record.
Mr. Bush did not declassify the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq — in any accepted sense of that word — when he authorized I. Lewis Libby Jr., through Vice President Dick Cheney, to talk about it with reporters. He permitted a leak of cherry-picked portions of the report. The declassification came later.
And this president has never shown the slightest interest in disclosure, except when it suits his political purposes. He has run one of the most secretive administrations in American history, consistently withholding information and vital documents not just from the public, but also from Congress. Just the other day, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the House Judiciary Committee that the names of the lawyers who reviewed Mr. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program were a state secret.
Obviously, we do not object to government officials talking to reporters about important matters that their bosses do not want discussed. It would be impossible to cover any administration, especially one so secretive as this, unless that happened. (Judith Miller, who then worked for The Times, was one of the reporters Mr. Libby chose for this leak, although she never wrote about it.) But the version of the facts that Mr. Libby was authorized to divulge was so distorted that it seems more like disinformation than any sincere attempt to inform the public.
This fits the pattern of Mr. Bush's original sales pitch on the Iraq war — hyping the intelligence that bolstered his case and suppressing the intelligence that undercut it. In this case, Mr. Libby was authorized to talk about claims that Iraq had tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons in Africa and not more reliable evidence to the contrary.
About a month before, Mr. Bush rushed to announce that American forces had found evidence of a biological weapons program in Iraq — trailers that could have been used to make doomsday devices. We now know, from a report in The Washington Post, that a Pentagon team actually on the ground in Iraq inspecting the trailers had concluded two days earlier that they were nothing of the kind.
The White House says Mr. Bush was not aware of that report, and was relying on an assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency. This is hardly the first time we've been told that intelligence reports contradicting administration doctrine somehow did not make it to Mr. Bush's desk. But it does not explain why he and Mr. Cheney went on talking about the trailers for weeks, during which the State Department's intelligence division — about the only agency that got it right about Iraq — debunked the mobile-labs theory.
Of course, the inaccurate report saying that the trailers were bioweapons labs was made public, immediately, while the accurate one was kept secret until a reporter found out about it.
Since Mr. Bush regularly denounces leakers, the White House has made much of the notion that he did not leak classified information, he declassified it. This explanation strains credulity. Even a president cannot wave a wand and announce that an intelligence report is declassified.
To declassify an intelligence document, officials have to decide whether disclosing the information would jeopardize the sources that provided it or the methods used to gather it. To answer that question, they closely study the origins of the intelligence to be disclosed. Had Mr. Bush done that, he should have seen that the most credible information made it clear that the Niger story was wrong. (In any case, Iraq's supposed attempt to buy uranium from Niger happened four years before the invasion, and failed. The idea that this amounted to a current, aggressive and continuing campaign to build nuclear weapons in 2002 — as Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney called it — is laughable.)
This messy episode leaves more questions than answers, so it is imperative that two things happen soon. First, the federal prosecutor in the Libby case should release the transcripts of what Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney said when he questioned them. And the Senate Intelligence Committee must report publicly on how Mr. Bush and his team used the flawed intelligence on Iraq. Senator Pat Roberts, the committee chairman, says the panel will meet this month to discuss three of the report's five sections. That's a step. And it has taken only two years to get this far.

Enemy of the Planet
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 17 April 2006
...A leaked memo from a 1998 meeting at the American Petroleum Institute, in which Exxon (which hadn't yet merged with Mobil) was a participant, describes a strategy of providing "logistical and moral support" to climate change dissenters, "thereby raising questions about and undercutting the 'prevailing scientific wisdom.' " And that's just what Exxon Mobil has done: lavish grants have supported a sort of alternative intellectual universe of global warming skeptics.
The people and institutions Exxon Mobil supports aren't actually engaged in climate research. They're the real-world equivalents of the Academy of Tobacco Studies in the movie "Thank You for Smoking," whose purpose is to fail to find evidence of harmful effects.
But the fake research works for its sponsors, partly because it gets picked up by right-wing pundits, but mainly because it plays perfectly into the he-said-she-said conventions of "balanced" journalism. A 2003 study, by Maxwell Boykoff and Jules Boykoff, of reporting on global warming in major newspapers found that a majority of reports gave the skeptics — a few dozen people, many if not most receiving direct or indirect financial support from Exxon Mobil — roughly the same amount of attention as the scientific consensus, supported by thousands of independent researchers.
Has Exxon Mobil's war on climate science actually changed policy for the worse? Maybe not. Although most governments have done little to curb greenhouse gases, and the Bush administration has done nothing, it's not clear that policies would have been any better even if Exxon Mobil had acted more responsibly.
But the fact is that whatever small chance there was of action to limit global warming became even smaller because Exxon Mobil chose to protect its profits by trashing good science. And that, not the paycheck, is the real scandal of Mr. Raymond's reign as Exxon Mobil's chief executive.

Tax Gimmickry
Paying for tax cuts for the wealthy with . . . more tax cuts for the wealthy!
LA Times, 17 April 2006
MUCH TO THE chagrin of the White House and the GOP leadership, lawmakers didn't get a new round of tax cuts done in time for tax day today. But when Congress comes back from its recess, it's expected to take up a deal to extend President Bush's capital gains and dividend tax cuts. To make their budget-busting tax policy appear less costly than it is, the lawmakers are resorting to a gimmick that is even more egregious than their usual tactics.
This one would, as usual, hide the cost of tax cuts that primarily benefit upper-income Americans. But it would accomplish that budgetary smoke and mirrors with a new tax provision, involving retirement savings accounts, that also benefits the well-to-do. And, to top things off, this new tax provision, while masking the cost of the tax cuts by bringing in more revenue in the short term, would in the long run worsen the fiscal situation by piling on more debt. No one who's serious about controlling the deficit -- whatever one's position on extending the tax cuts -- could support this dishonest approach.

Way Upstairs, Downstairs
By WALTER KIRN
NYT Magazine, 16 April 2006
There are studies that prove it, but I don't need to read them. I've seen the prices on the menus. I've also seen the pay stubs of the cooks. I've stood in the mansions, let in by the maids, and listened to the string quartets, whose players I've met in the coat aisle at Goodwill. I know what's going on. As predicted, but much faster than anticipated, the rich in America are getting richer (at rates that favor the very rich and the superrich). And at the same time, as wasn't quite predicted but still seems faster than anticipated, the nonrich are getting almost nowhere.
What I didn't know was that my knowledge shouldn't bother me.
Not according to John Snow, still, at this writing, secretary of the U.S. Treasury, who nonchalantly told a journalist recently, "What's been happening in the United States for about 20 years is" a "long-term trend to differentiate compensation." "Long-term," when used this way by this sort of official, tends to mean "fundamentally unstoppable." And, in this case, inexplicable, like a sort of financial global-warming process that may be man-made or (who knows?) a natural cycle that we would welcome if only we knew its function. Snow, a trained economist and former corporate C.E.O., doesn't pretend to be able to explain what's causing this whole compensation differential. Nor does he seem tortured by his ignorance. "We've moved into a star system for some reason," he said, "which is not fully understood."
As a nonrich noneconomist, I don't know why what's happening is happening either. But I can remember when it wasn't happening, at least not so rapidly and spectacularly. Time: The 1970's. Place: The countryside north of Minneapolis. I'm attending public grade school and junior high, watching what little TV there was to watch then and bumping into rich folks on occasion. At school, in my social-studies classes, I'm learning about a condition known as "poverty," which mainly exists, my textbooks indicate, in two obscure locations: "Appalachia" and "the ghetto." (It's a terrible situation, but it's improving some.) From television, on "Gilligan's Island," I'm learning about tycoons. (They wear blazers and speak in nasal voices.) And from actual rich people, whom I know are rich because I've heard my parents whisper about them, I'm learning that having lots of money means driving renamed Fords and Chevys called Lincolns and Cadillacs. They possess more leg room than Fords and Chevys, but mechanically they're the same, my father says.
Such innocence. Such miniature wisdom. Poverty: Bad, related to geography and something we're rightly trying to end. Tycoons: A ridiculous species of the rich. The rich: What Lincolns are to Fords. Conclusion: We're all Americans, mechanically.
But then came the dawning of the long-term star system, a phenomenon so extensive and mysterious (even to educated Treasury secretaries) that I sense it may soon become immune to human cognition in the manner of the vastest things. Gravity. Time. The national debt...