The number of Americans without health insurance climbed by 1.4 million last year to 41.2 million as fewer people received medical coverage from employers, according to U.S. Census estimates released Monday...The sharp increase from the year 2000, reported by the U.S. Census Bureau, serves to intensify congressional efforts to help the uninsured afford coverage. ... Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, said the increasing number of uninsured "should be a loud wake-up call for Congress and the president. "These new figures make it even more imperative for us to deal with the worsening tragedy of the uninsured,"

A recent government-sponsored study in California concludes that government-operated universal health care would cost less than the present system. Studies in Massachusetts also show big savings.

But the narrow focus of the press may have done the president a favor. The more broadly you view the new national security strategy, the clearer its contradictions become...

Nobility is a nice feature in a president, but not as nice as wisdom. Declaring yourself global sheriff would in any age be generous, since you're bearing a burden that should be shared by all who benefit from global civilization. But in an age when hatred abroad morphs easily into mass murder on your own soil, the line between generosity and martyrdom begins to blur.

And if you do insist on being chief law enforcer in such an age, you should at least try to make sure that the world believes the laws are fair and fairly enforced. Yet the Bush administration, with its limited regard for both international law and world opinion, is making America not just sheriff, but judge, jury and executioner. This strategy could lead to a number of outcomes, but national security isn't among the more likely.

The Iraqis could not have missed the testimony of three retired four-star American generals who issued a series of cautions in testimony to Congress this week.

Among them was Gen. John P. Hoar, who noted that Mr. Hussein appeared to be preparing for a defense of Baghdad. General Hoar said he feared a "nightmare scenario" of six Iraqi Republican Guard divisions and six additional tank divisions ringed by several thousand antiaircraft guns.

"The result would be high casualties on both sides, as well as in the civilian community," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "U.S. forces will certainly prevail, but at what cost? And at what cost as the rest of the world watches while we win and have military rounds exploding in densely populated Iraqi neighborhoods?" he asked.

After Saddam Hussein bounced U.N. inspectors in January 1998, then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said on Feb. 12: "I had hoped that we could get to the point where we could pass a resolution this week on Iraq. But we really developed some physical problems, if nothing else. . . . So we have decided that the most important thing is not to move so quickly but to make sure that we have had all the right questions asked and answered and that we have available to us the latest information about what is . . . happening with our allies in the world."...

Thanks for printing the picture of Bellingham's new U.S. Government TIPS sign with the 800 number that tells how we should spy on each other and report suspicious and dangerous people. I've decided to report myself as suspicious. I have an interest in atomic weapons and one July Fourth, upon tying six firecrackers together and lighting it off, I commented to those around me: "Let's get a couple packages, tie them together and make an atomic bomb." And "Dr. Strangelove" is my favorite movie!

While I was an undergraduate, I had friends in the Cosmopolitan Club from Iran, Iraq, Japan, Canada, Venezuela, Bolivia and Turkey.

Further, I have souvenirs from travel in a Muslim country. I also have a history of the Third Reich and biographies of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin and some books on China - including Mao's "Little Red Book." Such titles might not bother U:S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, of course, as those dictators didn't just urge people to spy on their neighbors, but required it. I also have a relative living in the woods of Montana who is a member of a national group that promotes firearms and dangerous weapons. He's a member of the, well, let's not disclose it here, but it has three words in the name and starts with National.

Worse, I have learned a great deal about explosives, how to blow up buildings, hate, terrorism and; indeed, war and aggression in a publication that I get daily - The Bellingham Herald.

[A Citizen of Bellingham (Wa)]
Bellingham (WA)

What's truly frightening about Mr. Ashcroft is his incompetence. Even as we learned this week that the Justice Department's prosecutors are so sloppy that they mistakenly turned over 48 classified F.B.I. reports to Zacarias Moussaoui, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that the attorney general may have blown our chance to get useful Qaeda information out of Mr. Moussaoui by mismanaging his prosecution.

It was only the latest example of how history, definitions and defense doctrines are being twisted to fit the Iraq debate. In its rush to convince Congress and the United Nations of the need to act quickly, the Bush administration has bandied about some very different concepts — pre-emption, preventive war and Ms. Rice's "anticipatory self-defense" (a phrase Webster never used) — as if they were the same thing. Experts in the field say they are not....

"There's a standard distinction here, and a very important one," said Michael Walzer, whose 1977 work "Just and Unjust Wars" has remained a staple of undergraduate courses on international conflicts. "Condoleezza Rice says we don't have to wait to be attacked; that's true," said Professor Walzer, now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. "But you do have to wait until you are about to be attacked."

At least one high-ranking Democrat, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, said he planned to offer an amendment to the administration's proposed resolution on Iraq that would support military action only in conjunction with a United Nations force. ...

"It's still a go-it-alone approach that lets the U.N. off the hook," said Mr. Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. "We want the U.N. to be credible, so we should tell the world why it is so important that we act in concert." Having done so, he said, the United States could then come back and authorize unilateral action if the United Nations still fails to act.

Mr. Levin is planning to introduce language in the Senate that would authorize military action as part of a broader United Nations force.

[snip] ...By the way, it's called the Department of Defense, not The Department of Offense. Unilateral action on the part of the United States, or in partnership with Great Britain, would for the first time set our nation on the bloodstained path of aggressive war, a sacrilege upon the memory of those who fought to defend this country. America's moral authority would be undermined throughout the world. It would signal for Russia to invade Georgia; China, Taiwan; North Korea, the South; India, Pakistan; and destabilize the entire gulf and middle east region. ...

"[snip]...The Americans are good at bombing," one Iraqi official mused. "But some day, they will have to come to the ground. And then we'll be waiting. Every Iraqi has a gun in his house, often a Kalashnikov. And every Iraqi has experience in fighting. So let's see how the Americans do when they're fighting in our streets."...

Remember in the dark days after 9/11, when the threat seemed so grave and the country was coming together and there was plenty of uplifting talk about bipartisanship?

Seems like ancient history.

Now it's potshot city, a finger-pointing frenzy, each side spending more time accusing the other of politicizing the debate over fill-in-the-blank – Iraq, Osama, homeland security – than discussing the issues themselves....

As the Bush administration drums up support to arm-twist Iraq into complying with UN Security Council resolutions, some critics are turning the tables on Washington, accusing it of "double standards" for not being as tough on its ally, Israel.

Israel has flouted 29 Council resolutions, say critics. Iraq has ignored 16. Israel's supporters call this an apples-and-oranges comparison. But even UN advocates say the two cases put the flaws of the international system into sharp relief.

"In the case of both Iraq and Israel, the Security Council has passed resolutions that are generally in line with the aspirations of the international community," says James Paul, executive director of the Global Policy Forum, a UN watchdog. "But how do you get them into compliance? That's the conundrum of the international system: You don't have a very good enforcement process. If a great power wants to do something in its national interest, it will. In a world of strong and weak nation-states, the weaker nations have this 'weak sovereignty' – they're not able to defend their sovereignty from the powerful actors in the system."

[snip] ..."The UN is the best thing that's happened at the international level, in the area of international law," [says James Paul of the Global Policy Forum in New York City.] "But it's a very weak and imperfect system, and we need it stronger. We need to have restrictions on the superpower, and erosion of sovereign power, whereby a sovereign nation-state can do whatever it wants internally."

This week's surge of partisan squabbling over national security policy in Washington is due in part to frustration among some Democratic leaders that the possibility of war with Iraq has likely become the top concern of voters as crucial midterm elections draw near.

Democrats have long thought that for them to maintain control of the Senate and win back the House, voters would have to be most worried about economic issues – particularly corporate malfeasance and the falling stock market.

But in political terms, guns now appear to have trumped butter, as the Bush administration's push for a resolution authorizing use of force against Iraq has dominated the congressional agenda at a key moment in the fall campaign.

[snip] ...Yet internal party surveys show at least one-third of Democratic lawmakers in Congress as opposed to war in Iraq, and this faction has felt it is being muzzled. Many Democratic activists – who will be key players in the 2004 presidential primary process – feel likewise.

"The Democrats are in a very awkward position because the leadership seems to want to take the issue off the table ... [and] the Democratic grass roots clearly doesn't feel that way," says Stuart Rothenberg, editor of The Rothenberg Political Report.

WASHINGTON - American research companies, with the approval of two previous presidential administrations, provided Iraq biological cultures that could be used for biological weapons, according to testimony to a U.S. Senate committee eight years ago.

West Nile Virus, E. coli, anthrax and botulism were among the potentially fatal biological cultures that a U.S. company sent under U.S. Commerce Department licenses after 1985, when Ronald Reagan was president, according to the Senate testimony.

The Commerce Department under the first Bush administration also authorized eight shipments of cultures that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention later classified as having "biological warfare significance."

Between 1985 and 1989, the Senate testimony shows, Iraq received at least 72 U.S. shipments of clones, germs and chemicals ranging from substances that could destroy wheat crops, give children and animals the bone-deforming disease rickets, to a nerve gas rated a million times more lethal than Sarin.

Disclosures about such shipments in the late 1980s not only highlight questions about old policies but pose new ones, such as how well the American military forces would be protected against such an arsenal - if one exists - should the United States invade Iraq.

Testimony on these shipments was offered in 1994 to the Senate Banking Committee headed by then-Sens. Donald Riegle Jr., D-Mich., and Alfonse M. D'Amato, R-N.Y., who were critics of the policy. The testimony, which occurred during hearings that were held about the poor health of some returning Gulf War veterans, was brought to the attention of The Buffalo News by associates of Riegle. [Maybe D'Amato wasn't as bad as I thought. He was replaced by Hillary Clinton.]

The committee oversees the work of the U.S. Export Administration of the Commerce Department, which licensed the shipments of the dangerous biological agents.

"Saddam (Hussein) took full advantage of the arrangement," Riegle said in an interview with The News late last week. "They seemed to give him anything he wanted. Even so, it's right out of a science fiction movie as to why we would send this kind of stuff to anybody."

The new Bush administration, he said, claims Hussein is adding to his bioweapons capability.

"If that's the case, then the issue needs discussion and clarity," Riegle said. "But it's not something anybody wants to talk about."

The shipments were sent to Iraq in the late 1980s, when that country was engaged in a war with Iran, and Presidents Reagan and George Bush were trying to diminish the influence of a nation that took Americans hostages a decade earlier and was still aiding anti-Israeli terrorists.

"Iraq was considered an ally of the U.S. in the 1980s," said Nancy Wysocki, vice president for public relations for one of the U.S. organizations that provided the materials to Hussein's regime.

"All these (shipments) were properly licensed by the government, otherwise they would not have been sent," said Wysocki, who works for American Type Culture Collection, Manassas, Va., a nonprofit bioinformatics firm.

The shipments not only raise serious questions about the wisdom of former administrations, Riegle said, but also questions about what steps the Defense Department is taking to protect American military personnel against Saddam's biological arsenal in the event of an invasion.

Riegle said there are 100,000 names on a national registry of gulf veterans who have reported illnesses they believe stem from their tours of duty there.

"Some of these people, who went over there as young able-bodied Americans, are now desperately ill," he said. "Some of them have died."

"One of the obvious questions for today is: How has our Defense Department adjusted to this threat to our own troops?" he said. "How might this potential war proceed differently so that we don't have the same outcome?

"How would our troops be protected? What kind of sensors do we have now? In the Gulf War, the battlefield sensors went off tens of thousands of times. The Defense Department says they were false alarms."

U.S. bioinformatics firms in the 1980s received requests from a wide variety of Iraqi agencies, all claiming the materials were intended for civilian research purposes.

The congressional testimony from 1994 cites an American Type shipment in 1985 to the Iraq Ministry of Higher Education of a substance that resembles tuberculosis and influenza and causes enlargement of the liver and spleen. It can also infect the brain, lungs, heart and spinal column. The substance is called histoplasma capsulatum.

American Type also provided clones used in the development of germs that would kill plants. The material went to the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission, which the U.S. government says is a front for Saddam's military.

An organization called the State Company for Drug Industries received a pneumonia virus, and E. coli, salmonella and staphylcoccus in August 1987 under U.S. license, according to the Senate testimony. The country's Ministry of Trade got 33 batches of deadly germs, including anthrax and botulism in 1988.

Ten months after the first President Bush was inaugurated in 1988, an unnamed U.S. firm sent eight substances, including the germ that causes strep throat, to Iraq's University of Basrah.

An unnamed office in Basrah, Iraq, got "West Nile Fever Virus" from an unnamed U.S. company in 1985, the Senate testimony shows.

While there is no proof that the recent outbreak of West Nile virus in the United States stemmed from anything Iraq did, Riegle said, "You have to ask yourself, might there be a connection?"

Researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies said American companies were not the only ones that sent anthrax cultures to Iraq. British firms sold cultures to the University of Baghdad that were transferred to the Iraqi military, the Center for Strategic and International Studies said. The Swiss also sent cultures.

The data on American shipments of deadly biological agents to Iraq was developed for the Senate Banking Committee in the winter of 1994 by the panel's chief investigator, James Tuite, and other staffers, and entered into the committee record May 25, 1994.

The committee was trying to establish that thousands of service personnel were harmed by exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons during the Gulf War, particularly following a U.S. air attack on a munitions dump - a theory that the Defense Department and much of official Washington have always downplayed.

COBB-SMITH: I really don’t want to comment on what Scott is doing now. As I said, he remains well-read. And he is an expert on the region. He knows what he is talking about.
I’m not an academic. I’m an operations man. I moved on to other wars. I left Scott to deal with his specific subject.

Explosive claims by Condoleezza Rice, the US national security adviser, that the Iraqi regime is providing refuge to al-Qaida operatives in Baghdad and has assisted attempts by the terror organisation to obtain chemical and possibly other weapons of mass destruction may be looked at in two different ways.

It is possible that Ms Rice has suddenly uncovered the closest thing yet to a smoking gun - one that places Iraq squarely in the gunsights of the global "war on terror". It is possible this will now convince a majority of Americans, and even some western allies, that Saddam Hussein is in cahoots with the September 11 murderers. It is possible that, consequent on this belief, the very personal devastation that some in the Bush administration have already been threatening to visit upon Saddam will become both certain and inevitable.

On the other hand, it is possible that Ms Rice and hardliners in the administration are growing desperate in their attempts to justify their current policy on Iraq. It is possible that having reluctantly agreed to pursue the issue via the United Nations, the US government fears it will not get the sort of full legal mandate its allies say is essential if they are ultimately to support military action. It is indeed possible that the White House has been listening to a growing number of voices in the US media and on US radio and TV chatshows that have been asking why, if the enemy is Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, is the administration so fixated on Iraq. ...

More than a dozen Democrats, who requested anonymity, have told The Post that many members who oppose the president's strategy to confront Iraq are going to nonetheless support it because they fear a backlash from voters.

The United States, with Britain's help, is drafting a United Nations resolution that would give Saddam Hussein about two months to demonstrate his willingness to cooperate fully with weapons inspectors and to make new efforts to comply with the resolutions that ended the Persian Gulf war, administration officials and United Nations diplomats said today...

But the drafting process is being slowed by the ideological divides within the Bush administration and between Washington and allied capitals over the United Nations' role in authorizing the use of force, some officials asserted today.

Secretary Powell is said to have won the backing of the president's more conservative advisers for an ironclad resolution through the United Nations to test Mr. Hussein's willingness to submit to inspections and the Security Council's willingness to authorize force if inspections fail.

In return, Secretary Powell has made it clear that he will back the use of military force if working through the United Nations fails.

Dozens of congressional Democrats are frustrated with their leadership for rushing to embrace President Bush's Iraqi war resolution and fostering an impression the party overwhelmingly backs a unilateral strike against Saddam Hussein....

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) [one of the House's 19 anti-war coalition] said the outspoken support of Bush by House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) belies grave concerns about the administration's Iraq policy among most rank-and-file Democrats he has spoken to.

"It's not as though there's some great rush inside the party to support war," Kucinich said. "The problem is our leadership has been so outspoken in favor of Bush . . . it causes Democrats to be characterized as favoring the war." Last night, he distributed leaflets asking those who share his concerns to convene for a strategy session. ...

The issue is exposing a rift between many rank-and-file Democratic lawmakers concerned about the consequences of war with Iraq and their party leaders -- including some presidential hopefuls -- eager to back Bush and shift the debate to domestic issues, such as the economy, before the Nov. 5 elections.

Several Democrats pointedly suggested that Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) and Gephardt are putting politics over policy by rushing to back a unilateral strike against Iraq. Both men are considering a run for president in 2004 and hope to gain Democratic congressional seats this fall. They know their party suffers when Congress, the media and voters are debating war instead of health care reform and other domestic concerns....

Leading lawmakers predict Bush will win an overwhelming, bipartisan majority for his resolution. But House and Senate Democrats, after attending private meetings to discuss the topic yesterday, said opposition is spreading quickly.

"The more time passes, the more apparent it becomes there is not a justification for war at this time," said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Tex.). He said a number of opponents are reluctant to go public with their concerns, fearing a backlash from leadership and voters back home.

Kucinich said numerous Democrats were emboldened by Gore's speech on Monday, in which he blasted Bush's Iraq policy and declared it would "severely damage" the broader war on terrorism and undermine U.S. credibility. They were also delighted with Carter's comments that Bush's policy of using preemptive military action is a "radical departure" from U.S. policy. Kucinich has phoned both men to request their help in building opposition to Bush's resolution.

[snip] ... But the contents of the report were dismissed as "nothing new" by critics and military experts.

Major Charles Heyman, editor of military bible Jane's World Armies, said: "It does not produce any convincing evidence, or any 'killer fact', that says that Saddam Hussein has to be taken out straight away."

And Thomas Withington, defence analyst with King's College, London, said a lot of the information was old material re-hashed adding: "Nothing staggering, is it?"

Labour MP and former defence minister Peter Kilfoyle said: "There are no new killer facts in this document."
"The dossier is a judgement. It's full of unsubstantiated assertions and allegations. There is nothing we don't already know."

Backbench MP George Galloway, a vocal critic of action against Iraq, demanded the return of UN weapons inspectors and called the claims in the dossier "pulp fiction"....

Then, the phenomenon of "Disappearing Democrats" in Washington. Why have Democratic leaders gone quiet on issues from Iraq to the tax cut to military spending? Is there an opposition party in Washington today? Jesse Jackson Jr., Bernie Sanders and Democratic Party spokespersons weigh in.

-----------------------------------------

Plus, in Parliament today British Prime Minister Tony Blair presented a dossier claiming to prove that Saddam Hussein is an imminent threat. It was denounced as "pulp fiction" by our guest, George Galloway, a member of Parliament, who joins Phil with a reaction from London.

"The U.S. wants a new UN Security Council resolution to pave the way for an invasion of Iraq and to ensure that the UN inspection process does not move forward. Secretary-General Kofi Annan negotiated Iraq's agreement on inspectors based on existing Council resolutions. A new resolution may upset that agreement, which is what Washington apparently wants. But the UN is moving ahead rapidly with inspections. UNMOVIC head Hans Blix is saying that his core team could be in Iraq by Oct. 15 and they can provide a preliminary report in 60 days. That would not be the definitive report, but a preliminary assessment of the situation. That could lead to a relatively speedy judgment on Iraq's weapons -- Washington's nightmare. Unfortunately, the U.S. will probably be able to get a Council resolution, in spite of broad opposition. If you read the chapter in James Baker's autobiography on the 1990 Gulf crisis you will see the precedent. He talks about how, as Secretary of State, he cut deals, bribed, cajoled and threatened countries into going along with what the U.S. government wanted. It had nothing to do with international law or enforcing Security Council resolutions. We see the same horse-trading going on now. There's a fair amount of evidence that the U.S. government is divvying up Iraq's oil between the powers on the Security Council, particularly France, Russia and China, to get them to acquiesce to a U.S. war. Of course, the lion's share will still go to U.S. and British firms. These deals, which are similar to other deals among the major powers going back to World War I, divide the spoils of war based on raw political power. In the past, such deals remained secret for many years, but now those in power seem to have no shame, and references are emerging in the press even before the final deals are struck."

BLITZER: As e-mail and letters continue to pour in, you've been letting us know your thoughts on the subject of Iraq. Now, it's time for a couple of key members of the U.S. to know how you feel. Joining me here in Washington is California Republican David Dreier -- he's the chairman of the House Rules Committee -- and from Seattle, Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott.

Congressmen, thanks for joining us. I want to go right to our e- mailers. Our viewers are very upset. They have a lot of questions. Let me throw this question out to both of you.

Ann from Tamarac, Florida -- "The people of the United States are being deluged with experts stating why we should enter Iraq with military force. To date, I have yet to hear what would happen if Saddam Hussein were to be captured."

David Dreier, what do you say?

REP. DAVID DREIER (R), CALIFORNIA: Well, let me just say that along with that e-mail, I just came back from spring this weekend. I was at the L.A. County Fair where I milked a cow and I was looking at our fires that are real problems out there, I rode in the Route 66 Parade and I find overwhelming support for the president on this in Southern California. I do believe that none of us is enthusiastic about the prospect of going to war but the case that has been made and is getting across the country to the American people is one...

BLITZER: Well, what about...

DREIER: ... which is resonating. And as far as exactly what will take place, I know that the National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others in the administration in response to this have indicated that a lot of effort is being put into the prospect of a post-Saddam Hussein government and obviously, our goal would be to move towards Democratization where the people of Iraq would have an opportunity to choose their leader, Wolf.

BLITZER: Congressman McDermott, we got a question for you from Rose Marie in San Bernardino, California. "Saddam Hussein has enough time to build underground storage to hide all his weapons of mass destruction. Don't you think it's kind of late to look for them now?"

REP. JIM MCDERMOTT (D), WASHINGTON: Absolutely not. This is not a situation where we have to hurry. There's no threat to the United States. The administration is trying very desperately to scare people into thinking we have to go immediately and the Congress has to decide. Let the U.N. work its way with inspections and then we'll decide on whether or not we have to go further.

DREIER: Wolf, we know right now that Secretary of State Colin Powell is working very closely with the United Nations Security Council to try and bumped up support. And if there is going to be a resolution, it has to have a very strict timeframe to it. And I think that we're in a position right now where we've waited 11 years. And what we've seen over the past 4 years since the inspectors left is the development of nuclear capability, which was pointed out on your show on Sunday, a hundred facilities under schools and hospitals where nuclear capability could be enhanced.

BLITZER: What about that, Congressman McDermott?

MCDERMOTT: They can always scare people with those kinds of stories. Show me the proof. If he says you can come in and look wherever you want -- this bunch of people, the Bush administration both first and second Georges have been wanting to go to war with him for 10 years to get control of the oil fields.

DREIER: That's just not true.

MCDERMOTT: And they are back -- they are back at it now and they simply don't want anybody to say you ought to wait and think about it. There is not proof...

BLITZER: All right.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: David Dreier, hold on. David Dreier, hold on. We've got another question from Victor in Orlando. "Iraq does not ICBM's or even a Navy. How would they accomplish an attack on America or other countries in the region?"

[Can't help but notice a little fudging here. Congressman Dreier doesn't answer the viewer's question. Instead, notice that he changes the subject.]

DREIER: Wolf, in this report, you have talked about smallpox vaccinations. I was talking to a doctor friend of mine out in L.A. the other day. He pointed to the fact that one of the greatest accomplishments of the 20th century was the elimination of the threat of smallpox. And we, right now, in the 21st century have the potential of that being used in terrorist capability against us. And I will tell you the VX capability, which has developed, mass production of one of the deadliest chemical weapons around. That poses a very serious threat.

BLITZER: All right...

DREIER: Now, he said push the nuclear mujahedeen and Iraq should push our enemy back across the Atlantic.

BLITZER: Let's let Congressman McDermott respond. Go ahead, Congressman.

MCDERMOTT: I didn't catch your question.

BLITZER: The question about the VX and the poison gas, that Saddam Hussein has proven in the past he's used these kinds of deadly weapons. Why not take him out now?

MCDERMOTT: He's very smart. He used them with the United States knowledge and complicity against the Iranians. We provided him with the basic chemicals when he was fighting Iran for us, as a proxy and he used them against the Kurds. But he did not use them in the Iraq War when he had the opportunity when we were on the ground. This man is smart and he is not going aggressively against anybody outside the country.

BLITZER: All right. We got another question for you, David Dreier. Robert from Shreveport asks this question -- "The rest of the world sees us as two-faced. Let's back the U.N. on Palestine/Israel resolutions as well as those on Iraq." Is there a double standard there?

DREIER: There is not a double standard here. If you, in fact, look at the fact that Iraq -- with the Sullivan Pact Terrorist Training Camp has in fact trained terrorists who have been used against the Palestinians. I think that we will be able to do a great deal for the stability in the region, the overall region, if we were to bring an end to Saddam Hussein's dictatory rule and threat.

BLITZER: All right, Congressman McDermott, go ahead.

MCDERMOTT: Well, it's -- there's no evidence whatsoever that taking out Saddam Hussein is going to fix the problems of Palestine. And in my view, we have had a double standard on many issues. We go with the United Nations when it suits our purpose. When it doesn't suit our purpose, we go without them. We use NATO. We are a very...

DREIER: Our national security is our number one priority, Jim, and we should not have our national security standards established by anybody other than the leadership of the United States of America.

MCDERMOTT: We are part of the world and we joined the United Nations. And we signed the charter and we said we wouldn't act unilaterally. And we cannot if we're going keep our part in the world.

BLITZER: Unfortunately, gentlemen, we have to leave it right there. David Dreier, Jim McDermott, we'll continue this debate. It's only getting started.

MCDERMOTT: Thanks, Wolf.

BLITZER: Thanks to both of you, appreciate it. Thank you very much.

There is no case for a war on Iraq. It has not threatened to attack the US or Europe. It is not connected to al-Qa'ida. There is no evidence that it has new weapons of mass destruction, or that it possesses the means of delivering them.

This pamphlet separates the evidence for what we know about Iraq from the wild suppositions used as the pretext for a war.

Opposition in the Labour Party, both at Westminster and among the grass-roots, is developing into the most serious revolt Mr Blair has faced.

Labour rebels will appeal to Michael Martin, the Speaker, to allow them a substantive vote on the prospect of war, rather than a procedural motion on whether the Commons should adjourn. Up to 60 Labour MPs may vote against the Government and others may show their misgivings by abstaining.

LABOUR MPs have ambushed Tony Blair with a hard-hitting dossier exposing Government hypocrisy and lies over Iraq.

The document, seen by the Daily Mirror, will acutely embarrass No 10.

It has been circulated in time to torpedo the Premier's own dossier against Iraq which is due out ahead of tomorrow's emergency Commons debate.

The report is designed to give Labour MPs ammunition to blow apart Mr Blair's arguments for sending British troops into a U.S.-led war on Saddam Hussein.

The No 10 document will contain graphic pictures of the victims of chemical warfare.

But the Labour Against The War dossier highlights a catalogue of myths and decades of hypocrisy over Britain and America's dealings with Iraq.

It says America has turned a blind eye in the past to Iraq's use of chemical weapons, experts insist there is no proof that Saddam is close to building nuclear weapons, and Iraq has only a small number of missiles.

The dossier, using intelligence and official reports from Europe and America going back 20 years, was written by MP Alan Simpson and Cambridge University lecturer Dr Glen Rangwala.

It says: "This pamphlet separates the evidence for what we know about Iraq from the wild suppositions used as the pretext for a war.

"You cannot launch a war on the basis of unconfirmed suspicions of both weapons and intentions to use them."

Mr Blair will today preside over one of the most turbulent Cabinet meetings since Labour came to power in 1997.

Some MPs believe International Development Secretary Clare Short and Commons Leader Robin Cook could end up resigning over the Premier's plans to back President Bush's war on Iraq.

The two Cabinet rebels risked the fury of Downing Street and spoke out over the weekend about their opposition to military strikes.

Ms Short said on GMTV: "We cannot have another Gulf war. We cannot have the people of Iraq suffering again. They have suffered too much. That would be wrong."

Several Labour MPs are convinced Mr Cook will quit the Cabinet if British troops join a U.S.-led war against Iraq without UN backing. The ex-Foreign Secretary said: "It is very important that any action taken on Iraq is one that does have international support."

Liberal Democrats will step up pressure against war at their party conference in Brighton this week. Leader Charles Kennedy said yesterday: "We want to see the moral as well as the political authority of the United Nations remain paramount in all of this."

Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith backed Mr Blair, and said military action was the only way to stop Saddam breaching UN resolutions over weapons of mass destruction. Former Foreign Secretary Lord Owen said Iraq should be invaded and Saddam Hussein put on trial at a UN court for using chemical weapons on his own people, unless he complies with UN resolutions.

Some journalists have already run into trouble with their employers over the contents of their personal sites, with one — a reporter for The Houston Chronicle — having been fired for his efforts. And news media companies may be opening themselves to questions of liability when they set up Web logs on their sites....

Mickey Kaus, who writes a Web log for the Microsoft Web magazine Slate, said reporters and editors were likely to have tensions over what material goes where. "I'm a little worried that reporters will start to put their best stuff into blogs" to bypass editors, he said.

Some journalists maintain Web logs outside work, just for fun. But, as Steve Olafson found, these side projects can cause problems. Mr. Olafson was a reporter for The Houston Chronicle for seven years before his Web log cost him his job in July.

I have no illusions about how difficult it would be to democratize a fractious Iraq. It would be a huge, long, costly task, if it is doable at all, and I am not embarrassed to say that I don't know if it is. All I know is that it's the most important task worth doing and worth debating. Because only by helping the Arabs gradually change their context, a context now dominated by anti-democratic regimes and anti-modernist religious leaders and educators, are we going to break the engine that is producing one generation after another of undeterrables.

These undeterrables are young men who are full of rage, because they are raised with a view of Islam as the most perfect form of monotheism, but they look around their home countries and see widespread poverty, ignorance and repression. And they are humiliated by it, humiliated by the contrast with the West and how it makes them feel, and it is this humiliation, this poverty of dignity, that drives them to suicidal revenge. The quest for dignity is a powerful force in human relations.

Closing that dignity gap is a decades-long project. We can help, but it can succeed only if people there have the will. But maybe that's what we're starting to see. Look at how Palestinian legislators just voted no confidence in Arafat; look at how some courageous Arab thinkers produced an Arab Human Development Report, which declared that the Arab-Muslim world was backward because of its deficits of freedom, modern education and women's empowerment.

If we don't find some way to help these countries reverse these deficits now, while access to smaller and smaller nuclear weapons is still limited, their young, angry undeterrables will blow us up long before Saddam ever does.

To increase the pressure on Mr Blair, left-wing Labour MP Alan Simpson has circulated a pamphlet entitled "Labour Against The War" to every Labour MP, highlighting the case against an attack on Saddam and countering the Government’s dossier.

"Russia wants to show that a military operation in Iraq, without UN backing, would lead to a new model of international behavior," says Sergei Markov, head of the Center for Political Studies in Moscow. "It's the exact message: 'If you bomb Iraq, we will be free to bomb Georgia.' Russia wants the US to know it will use the same model."

The officer who commanded the British 7th Armoured Brigade in the Gulf War has revealed that he is strongly opposed to a military invasion of Iraq.

Maj Gen Patrick Cordingley, who commanded the brigade - the renowned Desert Rats - in 1991, believes that Iraq poses no imminent threat to Britain or its interests and that "the case for war has not yet been made by the politicians".

Gen Cordingley told The Telegraph: "I'm absolutely opposed to a war. I feel very strongly that it is wrong. There is no justification for sending British troops to Iraq."

The Democrats' refusal to face up to that fundamental issue leaves them without credibility for their entire critique of Bush's economic policy.

Seen from the heartland of America, there are two incontrovertible truths about Iraq. [For Byers, Bush is claiming that]

First, Saddam Hussein is an evil man who brutally oppresses the Iraqi people and seeks to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Second, the Bush administration's frantic beating of the war drums this autumn has little to do with that threat and everything to do with domestic politics.

A decade ago, presidential challenger Bill Clinton taught then-president George Bush Sr a hard lesson: "It's the economy, stupid." Foreign policy may preoccupy Washington politicians and pundits, but ordinary Americans vote with their pocketbooks. The President, having watched his father ejected from the White House by Clinton, will not have forgotten this lesson. And yet the number of unemployed in the US has more than doubled since George Bush came to office. Economic growth has slowed to a dismal 1 per cent annually, and the Dow Jones industrial index has lost a quarter of its value. A healthy federal budget surplus of $256bn (£165bn) has been transformed into a deficit of $160bn. …

In his speech to the UN, the President even made the Iraqi government's treatment of women part of his rallying cry. … His audience was the swing voters, including the famous "soccer moms" in Florida, Ohio and upstate New York. …

In Washington, sitting Democrats are rushing to provide the President with congressional authorisation for an attack against Iraq – with or without UN support. They calculate that the expedient course of action is to affirm their patriotism quickly, so as to leave time for a refocusing of the public's attention back on to economic issues. Expect a strongly worded joint resolution of the Senate and House of Representatives to be adopted within the week. …

Whatever Tony Blair might say in Parliament on Tuesday, there is no credible evidence that Saddam has the intent to attack the US this autumn. If he had, the Iraqi leader would already be dead.

An air campaign involving British and US planes will begin in mid-October. Ground operations, which are inherently more dangerous to soldiers and politicians, will not commence until after 5 November. The President's approval ratings will climb ever higher, Jeb Bush will be re-elected in Florida, and the congressional mid-terms – well, they remain too close to call.

BAGHDAD -- When Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz described the box that Washington has meticulously constructed for Iraq, he put it this way: "Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't."

It would be difficult to argue the point with Aziz, and I didn't try. Instead, during a Sept. 14 meeting here in Baghdad, I joined with others in a small American delegation who argued that the ominous dynamics of recent weeks might be reversable if -- as a first step -- Iraq agreed to allow unrestricted inspections.

Despite Iraq's breakthrough decision that came two days later to do just that, I'll be leaving Baghdad tonight with a scarcely mitigated sense of gloom. While the news from the Iraqi capital has been positive in recent days, the profuse signs of renewed acquiescence to war among top Democrats on Capitol Hill are all the more repulsive.

Boxed in, the Iraqi government opted to accept arms inspectors as its least bad choice. Gauging the odds of averting war, Iraq chose a long shot -- appreciably better than no chance at all, but bringing its own risks. Several years ago, Washington used UNSCOM inspectors for espionage totally unrelated to the U.N. team's authorized mission. This fall, new squads of inspectors poking around the country could furnish valuable data to the United States, heightening the effectiveness of a subsequent military attack.

Aziz, a very analytical man, hardly seemed eager to grasp at weapons inspections as a way to stave off attack. Instead, he told our delegation -- which included Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) and former Sen. James Abourezk -- that a comprehensive "formula" would be needed for a long-term solution.

Presumably the formula would include a U.S. pledge of non-aggression and a lifting of sanctions. No such formula is in sight. Instead, the White House remains determined to inflict a horrendous war. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party's "leadership" in the Senate, pursuing some sort of craven political calculus, is lining up to put vast quantities of blood on its hands.

I would like to take Tom Daschle to visit a 7-year-old girl, suffering from leukemia, who I saw in a Baghdad hospital a few days ago. He might spare a few senatorial moments to look at the I.V. connected to her wrist, the uncontrolled bleeding from her lips, the anguish in the dark eyes of her mother, seated on a bare mattress. Years of sanctions, championed by moralizers in Washington, have left Iraq without adequate chemotherapy drugs.

Now we're hearing about a resolution that -- unless people across the United States mobilize in opposition -- will sail through the House and Senate to authorize a massive U.S. military attack on Iraq.

I can hear the raspy and prophetic voice of Sen. Wayne Morse, who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, roaring 38 years ago: "I don't know why we think, just because we're mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might for right."

After leaving Tariq Aziz's office, our delegation met with Sa'doun Hammadi, speaker of Iraq's National Assembly. "We are now a country facing the threat of war," he said. "We have to prepare for that."

Hammadi is an elderly man. While he's now in frail physical health, his mind and articulation remain acute. If the U.S. invaders come, Hammadi said, "the Iraqi people will fight." As those words settled in the air, the gaunt old man paused and then added: "I will fight." And for a moment I thought that I could see the dimming of light in his eyes, like embers in a dying fire.

During the current heavy dance of death, the U.S. government leads with every major step. And the sky over Baghdad seems to foreshadow new horrors; unfathomable and avoidable.

With an all-out war on Iraq shadowing the near horizon, what are Americans to do if they want to prevent such carnage from happening in their names with their tax dollars? For one thing, they -- we -- can speak up. Now. The fact that the odds are dire should spur us into creative action, not anesthetize us into further passivity. "And henceforth," Albert Camus wrote, "the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions."

THE UNITED STATES did not declare war on Iraq last week, but in Washington it was sometimes hard to tell.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld announced on Monday that American and British warplanes had begun bombing major air defense sites in Iraq, a move that could prepare the way for an invasion. Then Senator Tom Daschle, the majority leader, pledged that Congress would vote within weeks on a resolution to authorize an attack, with its passage all but assured. On Thursday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell urged Congress to give the president broad latitude to use force, saying, "The threat of war has to be there."

A senior Bush administration official has asserted that US has a right to take pre-emptive action against Iraq.

But, when it comes to India and Pakistan, the official said use of force will not resolve the conflict!

Comparing the US claim of pre-emptive strike on Iraq with similar claims that could be made by others, the senior Bush Administration official, preferred to remain anonymous, told reporters: "In the cases that have been most often cited, like India-Pakistan, we continually talk to the Indians and the Pakistanis about the available means that they have to deal with the conflict between them."

"And, indeed, we have been very intimately involved -- we, and particularly the British -- in trying to find a means for them to resolve their conflict."

"And we are very clear with them that the use of military force is not going to resolve that conflict and it is going to make the situation worse. So, when there are other means, you by all means ought to try them. You ought to try to deal with threats in any way that you can," the official said.

"But", he said, "there will come times when, in order to prevent an attack against you, you have to pre-empt that threat."

The official said "I would be the first to say there have never been any hard and fast rules about when to use force - Never. And it is, in fact, not a new matter to think that you don't have to wait to be attacked until you attack. That is simply not a new concept".

But it’s also not a solution. There are many people, unfortunately, who would be happy to hijack four airplanes, fly them into crowded buildings, and kill 3,000 Americans. In terms of malign intent, they all are evil. But only one of them managed to actually do it. The concept of evil tells you nothing about why — among the many evils wished upon the United States — this one actually happened. Nor does “evil” help us to figure out how to stop evil from visiting itself upon us again.

One of the most striking elements of the new strategy document is its insistence "that the president has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago."

"Our forces will be strong enough," Mr. Bush's document states, "to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." With Russia so financially hobbled that it can no longer come close to matching American military spending, the doctrine seemed aimed at rising powers like China, which is expanding its conventional and nuclear forces.

... the story of how America helped create a Frankenstein monster it now wishes to strangle is sobering. It illustrates the power of wishful thinking, as well as the iron law of unintended consequences.

The current debate over Iraq, which has blotted out any other issue the Democrats want to discuss, has two levels. One is the substantive argument over military action. The other is whether either side is playing politics with the issue.
On that score, the Republicans are coming out ahead. In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, 26 percent say Bush is pushing for a congressional vote because a pre-election vote might hurt Democrats; 68 percent say he's trying to protect the country against terrorism.

Why are some Democrats reluctant to have a vote? Fifty-nine percent of those questioned say it's because that would hurt the party in the elections; 35 percent say the Democrats want more evidence that military action is necessary.

No wonder the Dems caved on holding a quick vote.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush's call for international resolve to face down Iraq drew praise in the U.S. Congress on Thursday, but Democrats said they would not be rushed into authorizing a possible U.S. military strike against Baghdad.

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said Bush gave a strong speech at the United Nations and that he was encouraged by Bush's "expressed desire to go to the international community in search of support and a coalition" to deal with Iraq, which Bush says is developing weapons of mass destruction that threaten the United States and its allies.

But Daschle said before Congress votes, lawmakers need answers about how a conflict in Iraq would affect the war on terrorism, what regime would replace Iraqi President Saddam Hussein if he is ousted, and whether the international community will back the action.

"I don't think anyone is committed to a course of action legislatively or militarily at this point," Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat, told reporters. ...

Top Democrats and Republicans, brushing aside Iraq's offer to readmit United Nations weapons inspectors, said yesterday that Congress will vote in a few weeks on a resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein if he does not prove to the world he no longer possesses weapons of mass destruction.

"I think there will be a vote well before the [Nov. 5] elections," said Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.). "The real question is what will the resolution say."

Daschle's comments were the clearest indication yet that Congress will confront the issue of a possible strike against Iraq before U.S. voters decide several close elections, which will determine which party controls the House, the Senate and many governorships.

Despite Daschle's comments, his party remains divided on how much freedom to grant the president to wage war. Many Democrats want to limit Bush's options by requiring that any military strike be sanctioned by the United Nations, not by the United States alone, or that it must have the assistance not only of Britain and a few other allies. This could become a sticking point in talks between Bush and the Democrats....

Friedman makes some interesting points. Makes a point about adopting
"moral clarity", a term that, as you know, I am suspicious of. "We're
good, they're evil, nothing is relative." Where's he coming from on
dismissing moral relativism? "To never let the relativists get away with
their immoral thinking." ...

Recently, I've had the chance to travel around the country and do some call-in radio shows, during which the question of Iraq has come up often. And here's what I can report from a totally unscientific sample: Don't believe the polls that a majority of Americans favor a military strike against Iraq. It's just not true.
It's also not true that the public is solidly against taking on Saddam Hussein. What is true is that most Americans are perplexed. The most oft-asked question I heard was some variation of: "How come all of a sudden we have to launch a war against Saddam? I realize that he's thumbed his nose at the U.N., and he has dangerous weapons, but he's never threatened us, and, if he does, couldn't we just vaporize him? What worries me are Osama and the terrorists still out there."...

No, what worries Americans are not the deterrables like Saddam. What worries them are the "undeterrables", the kind of young Arab-Muslim men who hit us on 9/11, and are still lurking. Americans would pay virtually any price to eliminate the threat from the undeterrables, the terrorists who hate us more than they love their own lives, and therefore cannot be deterred.

I share this view, which is why I think the Iraq debate is upside down. Most strategists insist that the reason we must go into Iraq, and the only reason, is to get rid of its weapons of mass destruction, not regime change and democracy building. I disagree.

I think the chances of Saddam being willing, or able, to use a weapon of mass destruction against us are being exaggerated. What terrifies me is the prospect of another 9/1, in my mall, in my airport or in my downtown, triggered by angry young Muslims, motivated by some pseudo-religious radicalism cooked up in a mosque in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Pakistan. And I believe that the only way to begin defusing that threat is by changing the context in which these young men grow up, namely all the Arab-Muslim states that are failing at modernity and have become an engine for producing undeterrables.

I have no illusions about how difficult it would be to democratize a fractious Iraq. It would be a huge, long, costly task, if it is doable at all, and I am not embarrassed to say that I don't know if it is. All I know is that it's the most important task worth doing and worth debating. Because only by helping the Arabs gradually change their context, a context now dominated by anti-democratic regimes and anti-modernist religious leaders and educators, are we going to break the engine that is producing one generation after another of undeterrables.

These undeterrables are young men who are full of rage, because they are raised with a view of Islam as the most perfect form of monotheism, but they look around their home countries and see widespread poverty, ignorance and repression. And they are humiliated by it, humiliated by the contrast with the West and how it makes them feel, and it is this humiliation, this poverty of dignity, that drives them to suicidal revenge. The quest for dignity is a powerful force in human relations.

Closing that dignity gap is a decades-long project. We can help, but it can succeed only if people there have the will. But maybe that's what we're starting to see. Look at how Palestinian legislators just voted no confidence in Arafat; look at how some courageous Arab thinkers produced an Arab Human Development Report, which declared that the Arab-Muslim world was backward because of its deficits of freedom, modern education and women's empowerment.

If we don't find some way to help these countries reverse these deficits now, while access to smaller and smaller nuclear weapons is still limited, their young, angry undeterrables will blow us up long before Saddam ever does.

Scott Ritter once led the UN weapons inspections team in Iraq and was a thorn in the side of President Saddam Hussein's regime. Now he is a high-profile opponent of US policy. This week he publishes his latest book: War on Iraq – What the Bush Team Doesn't Want You To Know.

* Mr Ritter was born into a military family from Gainesville, Florida, in 1961 - his father was in the Air Force and his mother was a military nurse. His early years were spent in US military bases in Germany, Hawaii and Turkey. In a recent interview he recalled painting Napoleonic toy soldiers as a child and enjoying the combat simulation games in Strategy & Tactics, a military history magazine.

* After taking a degree in history, he entered the US Marines and became a captain at the outbreak of the 1991 Gulf War. It was the high point of his army career, but his first brush with controversy. He worked in military intelligence, and contradicted claims by General Norman Schwarzkopf, the Gulf War commander, of US effectiveness in hitting Scud missiles. He left the Marines shortly after the war having received several commendations during his 12-year career.

* His knowledge of arms control – he had undertaken inspections of nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union - led him to work for the UN Special Commission on Iraq (Unscom) as a weapons inspector in late 1991. There he gained a reputation as being crafty and aggressive. "We were attack dogs," he recalled.

* In 1997 the Iraqis labelled him a troublemaker, a liar and a spy. A year later, after a serious confrontation with the Iraqis, he resigned from Unscom. He had carried out 30 inspections, over half of them as leader.

* He left his post convinced that Iraq was still concealing nuclear weapons – despite later claiming that 95 per cent of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed by 1995. In his resignation letter he wrote: "The sad truth is that Iraq today is not disarmed anywhere near the level required by Security Council resolutions."

* At the time he also said that the US and UN were not doing enough to disarm the Iraqi weapons arsenal. He was hailed by conservatives in Congress for standing up to what he saw as lack of spine in the Clinton Administration and the Security Council. One Congressmen called him "a true American hero".

* But months after resigning he changed his views and claimed that the UN and US were being too harsh on Iraq. He called Operation Desert Fox, the bombing campaign launched in retaliation for the expulsion of the weapons inspectors, a "horrible mistake".

* He clashed with his former boss, Richard Butler, the former UN Chief Weapons Inspector, who disagreed with Mr Ritter's analysis that Iraq was disarmed. Mr Ritter also claimed that Mr Butler was passing on information to the US that was used in a subsequent bombing campaign, a claim that remains unsubstantiated to this day.

* Mr Butler responded by saying: "Scott Ritter's claim that Iraq is qualitatively disarmed is completely contrary to every piece of advice that he gave me when he worked for me. When he's been asked why he's changed his mind, he's not produced any new evidence."

* An explanation for Mr Ritter's [about] face remains a mystery to observers. He has cited the large numbers of civilian deaths in Iraq as a result of sanctions as the reason. "Our foreign policy is totally corrupt. We have a foreign policy that's indefensible. I think what we're doing with Iraq borders on the criminal, actually, and I'm very pro-American."

* Mr Ritter enraged the US Government in 1999 when he published his book Endgame, in which he accused the US Government of breaching the trust of the UN by using the inspections team as a cover for spies. He claimed that by the end of his tenure in Iraq there were up to nine CIA spies on his team.

* The FBI has accused him of being a spy, saying that he shared intelligence with the Israelis, a claim that ultimately foiled his chances of joining the CIA after leaving Unscom. He has defended himself against the FBI investigation (costing him £77,000 in legal fees), which he claims is part of a US Government smear campaign.

* Last year he released a documentary, Shifting Sands: The Truth About UNSCOM and the Disarming of Iraq, that was funded by an Iraqi-American businessman. Its audience in the US was limited and it was shown on al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite channel.

* He says he has little in common with his latest allies, the anti-war movement. "They're tree-huggers and I'm for chopping down the forests," he says. He has been described by some as brash, egotistical, outspoken and a publicity seeker. Others depict a quiet man who enjoys spending time on the golf course in upstate New York where he lives with his second wife and family and is a volunteer fireman.

* His decision to speak up for Iraq against the international community has won him few allies in the Bush Administration. Ten days ago he addressed the Iraqi parliament and gave warning that President Bush was "on the verge of making an historical mistake" by going to war with Iraq.

"...the United States cannot be a beacon of freedom and justice to the world if it conducts itself as an empire"

The left has been divided before, but rarely has it been at once so vehement and so incoherent as this....

Halfway through George W. Bush's term of office, one year since 9/11, and the ideal of moral clarity in US foreign policy couldn't be murkier. According to Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Richard Perle, every moment we postpone war with Iraq damages our credibility; according to Brent Scowcroft, General Anthony Zinni, Lawrence Eagleburger, and James Baker III, nothing would damage our credibility so much as a unilateral, preemptive war on Iraq.

The Bush administration is trying to persuade ''allies'' like Saudi Arabia to sign up for Gulf War II, but somebody keeps dropping hints to the Washington Post that when Iraq goes down, the Rand Corp. will advise the president that the kingdom should go next. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, they tell the world that they desire nothing more than the liberation of oppressed Iraqis, but on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, their cheerleaders in the press bellow that what the Islamic world needs now is a crushing, humiliating military defeat that will bring a useful chaos to the part of the world running roughly from the West Bank to Islamabad.

Such is the position of the war party. To gauge by the president's speech to the United Nations Thursday, the administration actually has a serious case to make against Saddam Hussein's violations of UN resolutions; but then again, the administration does not always hold UN resolutions in such high regard, and according to the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, has waited so long to make its case because August is a bad time for new product placement. And you would think that if the president was having a hard time making his case to the Republican policy elite, let alone the UN, it would be a simple matter for the American left to rally popular opposition to the war as well.

You might think that, but you'd be wrong. Most liberals in Congress are either mumbling under their breath or speaking up only to call for a ''debate'' they themselves are unwilling to begin; the progressive left has been noisier, but the progressive left has its own problems, mired as it is in an Afghanistan quagmire of its own making. It would be a positive service to democracy if left-wing public intellectuals would take the lead where elected liberals cannot or will not, urging their fellow Americans that the war on terrorism requires many things - peace in Israel and Palestine, an end to the United States' long-term addiction to oil - before it requires any regime change in Iraq. But the left is having some trouble providing that service, because one wing of it actually supports military intervention in Iraq, while another wing opposes all military interventions regardless of their objectives.

The left has been divided before, but rarely has it been at once so vehement and so incoherent as this. On one side are the internationalists who find themselves emboldened by laudable military interventions in Kosovo and Afghanistan, which used US air power - but not ground troops - to overthrow two of the worst regimes on the planet. Some, like Michael Walzer of Dissent magazine, have already signed on for another Mission for Good in Iraq, becoming even more hawkish than most of the first Bush administration; others, like The Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens, have tentatively suggested that the United States might do well to consider that ''you can't subject the Iraqi people to the cruelty of sanctions for so long while leaving the despot in place.'' (Hitchens notes that since the United States has intervened on Saddam Hussein's behalf in the past, ''there is at least a potential argument that an intervention to cancel such debts would be justifiable.'' Who could have imagined that Hitchens and his lifelong nemesis Henry Kissinger would wind up sitting on the same fence, each refusing to look at the other?)

On the other side are the anti-imperialists who opposed the war in Afghanistan in stark and unyielding terms. They did not cheer the collapse of the World Trade Center; that is simple slander. But they did argue, to their shame, that the US military response was even more morally odious than the hijackers' deliberate slaughter of civilians. Some antiwar protesters were 19-year-old anarchists, some were devout Quakers, and some were Trotskyite diehards; but some were America's most distinguished dissidents at home and abroad, like Howard Zinn and Gore Vidal. And the antiwar left's arguments against war were simply astonishing. As Z Magazine contributor Cynthia Peters wrote last October, the operation that wrested control of Afghanistan from Al Qaeda and the Taliban was a ''calculated crime against humanity that differs from September 11th only in scale; that is: it is many times larger.'' Obtuse arguments like these, combined with the paranoid insistence that the United States had long planned strikes against the Taliban in order to secure an Afghan oil pipeline (a claim thoroughly debunked by Ken Silverstein in The American Prospect), have damaged the anti-imperialists' cause immeasurably. The anti-imperialist left correctly believes, for instance, that the American bombing of Kakrak in early July (a massive ''intelligence failure'' that killed about 50 Afghans attending a wedding party) was an atrocity; but it cannot admit that, on balance, the routing of the Taliban might have struck a blow, however ambiguous and poorly executed, for human freedom.

Accordingly, The Nation, the most mainstream of journals on the progressive left, has become remarkably ambivalent about what it means to be a progressive leftist. On one page of its Sept. 2 issue, an unsigned editorial titled ''Iraq: The Doubters Grow'' asks whether we will leave Iraq in chaos ''as we have done in Afghanistan.'' On the very next page, an editorial by Anthony Borden and John West of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting details the chaos of Kabul yet acknowledges that ''conditions are vastly improved from the circumstances of only a few months ago - when the country was plagued by severe persecution and increasing food shortages with seemingly no hope.'' Perhaps we have not brought disaster to Afghanistan after all; it's hard to tell here. Still further left, the Counterpunch and Z Magazine stalwarts have kept their self-assurance but have lost their credibility - not with the Bush administration, of course, which had no plans to read Noam Chomsky's complete works before settling on an Iraq policy, but with much of the rest of the progressive left, among whose ranks I include myself.

For leftists like me who had long considered Chomsky as our own beacon of moral clarity, it is hard to say which development is more catastrophic: the fact that Chomsky-bashing has become a major political pastime, or the fact that Chomsky has become so very difficult to defend. Chomsky's response to the war in Afghanistan offered a repellent mix of hysteria and hauteur, as in this early interview: ''The U.S. has already demanded that Pakistan terminate the food and other supplies that are keeping at least some of the starving and suffering people of Afghanistan alive. If that demand is implemented, unknown numbers of people who have not the remotest connection to terrorism will die, possibly millions. Let me repeat: the U.S. has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people who are themselves victims of the Taliban. This has nothing to do even with revenge. It is at a far lower moral level even than that. The significance is heightened by the fact that this is mentioned in passing, with no comment, and probably will hardly be noticed. We can learn a great deal about the moral level of the reigning intellectual culture of the West by observing the reaction to this demand.'' By the same token, we can learn a great deal about the moral level of the antiwar left by observing its willingness to debate claims like these; over the past year, unfortunately, Chomsky and his followers have demonstrated rather little capacity for self-criticism. It is not permissible, apparently, to argue that Chomsky was right about Vietnam, Nicaragua, and East Timor but wrong about Afghanistan; those who fail to acknowledge Chomsky's infallibility about Afghanistan are guilty of thought-crime or conservatism, whichever is worse.

Most likely the hard left's myopia and intransigence will not matter to most Americans - that is, those who never trusted the judgment of Chomsky or Z Magazine in the first place and don't see why it matters now that anti-imperialists have lost a ''credibility'' they never had in some quarters. But the reason it should matter, even in parts of America where there are no campuses, no anti-Sharon rallies, and no subscribers to Counterpunch, is that the United States cannot be a beacon of freedom and justice to the world if it conducts itself as an empire. Nor can we fight Al Qaeda networks in 60 countries if we alienate our allies in Europe, who so far seem to be much more capable of finding and arresting members of Al Qaeda than is our own Justice Department.

The antiwar left once knew well that its anti-imperialism was in fact a form of patriotism - until it lost its bearings in Kosovo and Kabul, insisting beyond all reason that those military campaigns were imperialist wars for oil or regional power. And why does that matter? Because in the agora of public opinion, the antiwar left never claimed to speak to pragmatic concerns or political contingencies: for the antiwar left, the moral ground was the only ground there was. So when the antiwar left finds itself on shaky moral ground, it simply collapses.

In foreign affairs both left and right claim to speak for the conscience of America, but on Iraq the right has no moral clarity and the left has lost its moral compass. This is not a problem for the masters of realpolitik, who have long since inured themselves to the task of doing terrible things to human beings in the course of pursuing the national interest; but it is utterly devastating to those few souls who still dream that the course of human events should be judged - and guided - by principles common to many nations rather than by policies concocted by one. The emergence of the antiwar right, however, may yet hold a lesson for the left, insofar as it relies on Brent Scowcroft's internationalism rather than Pat Buchanan's isolationism: The challenge, clearly, is to learn how to be strenuously anti-imperialist without being indiscriminately antiwar. It is a lesson the American left has never had to learn - until now.

I was in the car when I heard the radio announcer say the fifth person to call in would win two tickets to a gospel concert of a singer named Tillery in Carrboro, N.C. My ears perked up when I heard "Tillery" because that's my family name, and because I don't often hear of people who have it. Since Carrboro is just five minutes from where I live, I decided to go to the concert and maybe meet a distant relative.

The next day I went to the box office to buy tickets. Taped to the ticket window was a poster of the singer and her choir. I realized that the woman who shared my name was black.

I wasn't completely surprised, given my family's history. According to the 1850 Census, my ancestors kept 150 slaves on their farm in Halifax County. I figured there was a good chance this woman was a descendant of one of them. I thought about leaving her a note asking if she wanted to get together after the show, but I couldn't do it. I had no idea how she'd feel about meeting me.

I called my cousin Sherry and asked if she wanted to go to the concert with me. I knew she would be curious about someone named Tillery who could sing-especially since nobody we knew of in our family can sing "Happy Birthday" in tune.

A few nights later we drove to the arts center for the performance. The five women in the gospel choir played a guitar, a tambourine, some big sticks and large cylindrical drums, but their voices were the predominant source of the music. The audience clapped enthusiastically, calling for one encore, then another. The singer announced that the Negro National Anthem would be our "marching-out music," but nobody in the audience wanted to leave. We continued to shout, dance and wave our arms.

When the show ended, the lead singer disappeared behind the curtain at the back of the stage. The members of the choir stayed to meet audience members. Sherry walked up to tell them how much she had enjoyed the performance. From where I stood two rows back I heard her say, "I am Sherry Tillery." With that, the singer-a powerful six-foot-tall woman with blue eyes-leapt out from behind the curtain shouting: "Did I hear somebody say Tillery?" She was thrilled. When Sherry pointed to me and told her I was also a Tillery, she burst out, "You're a Tillery, too?" We squealed and hugged each other.

When we calmed down, the singer invited us back to her dressing room so we could talk. She explained that when she realized she'd be touring our state, she had tried to pinpoint exactly where her great-great-grandparents had lived. She had traced them to a plantation called Glen Burnie. I explained that my first cousin owned Glen Burnie, though I choked on the word "plantation." My family calls it "the farm."

It was only a few months before our meeting that I had begun to face how horrible slavery was. In the past I had told myself that slaves were treated more cruelly in the Deep South than in my home state. Then I read "Letters From a Slave Girl," a fictionalized account of a slave named Harriet Jacobs, and the scales fell from my eyes. Harriet lived in Edenton, which lies in the same northeastern quadrant of tidewater North Carolina as Glen Burnie. For me, it was most painful to read about the hope slaves nurtured that they would be given their freedom each time someone in the family they belonged to died. When Harriet's mistress died, Harriet was bequeathed to her mistress's great-niece. She became the property of a 3-year-old child.

My new friend asked if her great-great-grandparents' names were in my ancestors' wills. I told her I'd look through the family papers when I got home. I didn't find their names, but I did find these words in a will dated 1750: "Fifthly, I give, bequeath and devise to well beloved son Benjamin... my Negro woman named Bell and her future increase and my Negro named Harry and my Negro girl named Jemina, to be delivered to him immediately after my decease, to him and his heirs forever."

To him and his heirs forever. The words conferred the same hopeless servitude I'd read about in "Letters From a Slave Girl." But this wasn't a book; this was slavery perpetuated by my forebears.

When the singer came by my house the next afternoon, I invited her to look through boxes of artifacts from Glen Burnie. We pored over genealogical charts, faded photographs and accounts of household finances. While we weren't able to find evidence that linked her family to mine, I consider our time together invaluable. Two strangers, one of us the descendant of plantation owners, the other the descendant of slaves, met and embraced and told each other the stories of our lives. We didn't become lasting friends (although we stayed in touch by e-mail for several months), but I'm not sure that matters. There are a million wrongs that can never be made right, but for a few days we came together as equals and talked about the past without bitterness.