The images projected relentlessly around the world are becoming numbingly familiar, the smoke and flames over Baghdad, the terrified faces of prisoners of war, the broken and sometimes lifeless bodies of the American, British and Iraqi military, and the mounting civilian casualties, including children. What remains invisible to most of the world is the dreadful day-to-day reality behind those searing televised images, the daily lives of the Iraqi noncombatants. While a full-scale humanitarian crisis has not yet developed, conditions on the ground are extremely dangerous and reports are emerging of children in southern Iraq falling ill because of a lack of potable water, sanitation facilities and medical supplies....

ANDREW KOHUT: Well, there has been a change in public opinion. We're all doing daily tracking polls. The public is getting this 24/7. In the first few days when it looked like we might have killed Saddam Hussein, we're negotiating with the generals on cell phones and maybe there is not a battle of Baghdad, we were getting 80 percent, close to 80 percent saying this is going very well. One day later, Sunday, we had casualties, first prisoners of war, drops to 50 percent -- more casualties by the next day, more prisoners of war, it is at 40 percent. We've had about 40 percent saying it is going very well with almost as many saying fairly well.
The optimism about the war has changed. The Washington Post has people saying it is not going to take weeks; it’s going to take months. That's the new consensus view, and the public is much more inclined to see this as a long war rather than a short, easy Gulf War model of war. But throughout these daily polls each night we get 70 percent saying that we made the right decision; 70 percent saying we approve of the way the president is handling -- dealing with this war.

In August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, precipitating the first Persian Gulf war, state-run media in the Arab world suppressed the news for three days. Today, word of such an attack would be out within minutes because of a television station called Al Jazeera. Financed by the iconoclastic emir of Qatar, the gulf state where our war operations are based, Al Jazeera is the only independent broadcasting voice in the Arab world, watched by 35 million people.

That is why the decision by the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to bar the station's reporters is so repugnant.
The exchanges' complaint against Al Jazeera is that it is not "responsible." This is a cryptic allegation but it seems linked to the television station's decision last Sunday to show images of dead American and British soldiers as well as P.O.W.'s in Iraq. But Al Jazeera says that after the Pentagon asked it to remove the pictures until families had been notified it did so for eight hours, while the television stations of numerous countries continued to show them.

In truth, it seems that New York's exchanges have a broader complaint, heard in various forms elsewhere; that Al Jazeera is insufficiently supportive of America and its war in Iraq. As the only uncensored Arabic television in the world, Al Jazeera does indeed slant its debates and discussions in a way that can be hostile to the West. It is not Fox News. But if our hope for the Arab world is, as the Bush administration never ceases to remind us, for it to enjoy a free, democratic life, Al Jazeera is the kind of television station we should encourage.

It is the only Arabic television station that regularly interviews Israeli officials. It is also an important forum for American officials. Last week alone, it interviewed three senior members of the American government, including Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Al Jazeera has also been a vital source of information about Al Qaeda. Its reporters have had access to Qaeda leaders, and tapes of Osama bin Laden have found their way to the station's offices. This has been a useful window on a world that for too long has been utterly alien to us.

The ban on Al Jazeera by the princes of the free market puts them in impressive company. Libya and Tunisia have both complained that Al Jazeera gives too much airtime to opposition leaders. Jordan has thrown it out. Kuwait refused visas to its correspondents who were to be placed with American forces based there.

If a free, uncensored press ever arrives in the Arab world, many Americans will be shocked by what it says. Then, the energetic if somewhat tendentious broadcasts of Al Jazeera will seem, in comparison, like the nuanced objectivity of the BBC. For right now, Al Jazeera deserves all the help and support it can get.

Whatever happens in the weeks ahead, George W. Bush has “lost” the war in Iraq. The only question now is how big a price America will pay, both in terms of battlefield casualties and political hatred swelling around the world. That is the view slowly dawning on U.S. military analysts, who privately are asking whether the cost of ousting Saddam Hussein has grown so large that “victory” will constitute a strategic defeat of historic proportions. At best, even assuming Saddam’s ouster, the Bush administration may be looking at an indefinite period of governing something akin to a California-size Gaza Strip.The chilling realization is spreading in Washington that Bush’s Iraqi debacle may be the mother of all presidential miscalculations – an extraordinary blend of Bay of Pigs-style wishful thinking with a “Black Hawk Down” reliance on special operations to wipe out enemy leaders as a short-cut to victory. But the magnitude of the Iraq disaster could be far worse than either the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba in 1961 or the bloody miscalculations in Somalia in 1993.In both those cases, the U.S. government showed the tactical flexibility to extricate itself from military misjudgments without grave strategic damage. The CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion left a small army of Cuban exiles in the lurch when the rosy predictions of popular uprisings against Fidel Castro failed to materialize. To the nation’s advantage, however, President John Kennedy applied what he learned from the Bay of Pigs – that he shouldn’t blindly trust his military advisers – to navigate the far more dangerous Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The botched “Black Hawk Down” raid in Mogadishu cost the lives of 18 U.S. soldiers, but President Bill Clinton then cut U.S. losses by recognizing the hopelessness of the leadership-decapitation strategy and withdrawing American troops from Somalia. Similarly, President Ronald Reagan pulled out U.S. forces from Lebanon in 1983 after a suicide bomber killed 241 Marines who were part of a force that had entered Beirut as peace-keepers but found itself drawn into the middle of a brutal civil war. ...Unwittingly, Bush may be applying all the wrong lessons from America’s worst military disasters of the past 40-plus years. He’s mixing risky military tactics with a heavy reliance on propaganda and a large dose of wishful thinking. Bush also has guessed wrong on the one crucial ingredient that would separate meaningful victory from the political defeat that is now looming. He completely miscalculated the reaction of the Iraqi people to an invasion.More and more, Bush appears to be heading toward that ultimate lesson of U.S. military futility. He’s committed himself – and the nation – to destroying Iraq in order to save it.

"The constraints of diplomacy ... have meant that Blair has never been ready to stand up and declare his opposition to the ideological orientation or instinct of the Bush administration," said Tom Bentley, the director of Demos, a London- based think tank close to Blair's Labor Party. "But there's no doubt that his vision of a more safe and ordered world includes elements of social justice and internationalism that are probably foreign to the way that Bush and several of his key advisors think."

During Blair's talks with Bush, which began Wednesday night at Camp David, the most apparent contrasts in emphasis may be on the postwar governance of Iraq and the urgency of advancing peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians....
"The countries and the people of the world today are more interdependent than ever," Blair said last year. "That calls for an integrated approach."

Bush, by contrast, has rejected international treaties on issues from global warming to a war crime tribunal and placed much greater priority on maximizing U.S. freedom of action.

Five days into the war, warnings are surfacing about a potential mismatch between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's strategy and the force he sent to carry it out.The optimistic assumptions of the Pentagon's civilian war planners have yet to be realized, and the risks of the campaign are becoming increasingly apparent, say some current and retired military officials.The outcome of the war isn't in doubt: Iraq's forces are no match for America and its allies.Army Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, vice chief of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon on Monday he did not think the U.S. military had invaded Iraq with too small and too light a force.But less than a week into the war, resistance is proving to be tougher than expected by some of the architects of the American strategy. As a result, the war could be longer and costlier in American and Iraqi lives.... And if weather, Iraqi resistance, chemical weapons or other factors turn things suddenly and unexpectedly sour, the backup force, the Army's 4th Infantry Division, is still at Fort Hood, Texas, as its equipment sails around the Arabian peninsula...Retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, a commander during the gulf war, said: "The stability of the liberated areas is clearly at issue.. The postwar transition has to begin immediately in the wake of the attacking forces, and they seem to be short of forces for those important missions at this time."...Knowledgeable defense and administration officials say Rumsfeld and his civilian aides at first wanted to commit no more than 60,000 American troops to the war on the assumption that the Iraqis would capitulate in two days.

The ground war that is occurring was not going to happen in Rumsfeld's plan, a Pentagon official said. Because the Pentagon didn't commit overwhelming force, "now we have three divisions strung out over 300-plus miles and the follow-on division, our reserve, is probably three weeks away from landing," the official said....Intelligence officials say Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and other Pentagon civilians[popularly known as 'chickenhawks'] ignored much of the advice of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Instead, they relied on reports from the Iraqi opposition and from Israeli sources that predicted an immediate uprising against Hussein once the Americans attacked.

Last September, just before the holidays, Chomsky flew from Istanbul to
Diyarbakir. Diyarbakir is a dilapidated, poor, muddy, overcrowded city in southeastern Turkey, on the banks of the Tigris, about sixty miles north of Turkey's border with Iraq. It is the center of Kurdish guerrilla resistance to the Turkish government, and is thought of, in certain circles, as the capital of an independent Kurdistan. Chomsky arrived at Diyarbakir's tiny airport on a freezing night, and was greeted, as he is greeted everywhere, by a crowd of cameras and microphones. In the dining room of his spartan, Soviet-style hotel, Diyarbakir was waiting to meet him. The mayor was there, along with a famous Armenian-language novelist, a Kurdish poet, and a crowd of Kurdish-rights activists.

Chomsky had been to Turkey once before, in February of last year, to attend the trial of his publisher. Aram, an Istanbul publishing house associated with the P.K.K., the Kurdish guerrilla resistance movement, had published a collection of Chomsky material, some of it downloaded from the Internet, in which Chomsky criticized the Turkish government's human-rights record and its policies toward the Kurds. Aram's editors knew that they were likely to be prosecuted for publishing the bookin fact, they had done so precisely in order to provoke prosecution, both for publicity and as an act of civil disobedience. Chomsky's presence in the courtroom made the trial an international event, felt uncomfortable under this unexpected scrutiny, the charges were dismissed. Chomsky was treated like a rock star. Reporters, photographers, and TV cameramen camped outside his hotel in Istanbul for the three days and nights that I he was there. When he visited Diyarbakir, he was greeted by a crowd of loudly ululating women.

Chomsky had come to Diyarbakir this time to speak at a human-rights conference. He was taken to a large, low-ceilinged, windowless room, lit by fluorescent lights. On either side of the stage, local activist groups had propped seven-foot-tall cardboard signs in the shape of giant lollipops, bearing their organizational banners and covered in bright-colored tissue paper.

"I'd like to say a few words about what lies immediately ahead, and what this may bring to the Kurdish populations of the Middle East," Chomsky said. "It's clear that the government of the United States, with Britain trailing along, is desperately seeking to go to war with Iraq, although the disparity of force is so vast that the term 'war' is hardly appropriate." As he spoke, a tiny orange kitten appeared and wandered out in front of the stage. It spotted the huge audience and froze, terrified. Several of the photographers snapped pictures of it. It ran back and forth frantically and then hid behind a curtain.

"Like most states in the world," Chomsky continued, unaware of the kitten, "Iraq is an artificial creation--it was patched together by the rulers of the world eighty years ago in order to satisfy two conditions: first, that Britain, not Turkey, would gain control of the huge oil reserves of the north, and, secondly, that the British dependency of Iraq would have no access to the sea and therefore would remain a dependency. When the United States took over global management from Britain sixty years ago, it kept the same arrangements in place." Another kitten ran out onto the stage, followed by the first one. The two curled up together and fell asleep.

Carol, sitting in the front row in a purple down coat, was also asleep, her chin resting on her chest. It had been a very long week. Just before he travelled to Diyarbakir, Chomsky had spent three days engaged in non-stop activity in London. He had then, after a twenty-four-hour stop in Geneva, spent seventy-two hours in Istanbul, during which time he opened a book fair by cutting a ribbon with the mayor, lectured at a symposium on peace and democracy, dined with trade-union activists, gave a linguistics seminar at Bosporus University, and received the first Turkish Publishers Union Peace Prize. Chomsky is now seventy-four, and all his travel is taking its toll on him.

"The trip was horrible," Carol said later. "I'm never going on another one. What am I going to do? Sit there and watch him kill himself?" She had accompanied him in an effort to make him slow down, but she had failed. "About ten years ago, Noam came home from a trip to India in a state of complete nervous exhaustion," she said. "He dragged himself into the doctor's office and the doctor said, 'You'll die. You can't do this. Clear your schedule for two weeks, stay in bed.' He had a whole regimen. Big meal in the afternoon, not at night, twenty minutes' soak in the tub, and he put him on Valium or something. And he said, 'You've got to do something different. You can't be at the mercy of your hosts.'We decided that I should be the policeman because he can't say no, someone else has to say no for him. But this trip he said, 'Turkey is different, don't get in my way. There's not going to be any sticking to the schedule because things are so awful and they need so much.'"

Carol shares her husband's views, and has been politically involved herself, but she dislikes the activist existence even more than he does. "My life has certainly not turned out the way I expected," she said. "To me, the interesting question is, if I were in the position of making the choice to marry now, would I choose him?" She went on, "That's a funny question. Who knows? I mean, it is very different from what I expected. Just in terms of the fame and notoriety, or whatever you call it. The intrusion of public life. The ridiculous clutching at him. The noblesse-oblige aspect sometimes he says, 'I just have to take that call.' We've actually got it now so that the phone almost never rings, except when it rings at 3 A.M. from some party where kids are having an Ecstasy rave or who knows what." Asked if she regretted any of the decisions she had made in her life, she paused for a long time. "Well, you roll with the punches," she said at last. "He leaves me alone about things, so that makes it very easy. He can do his thing, I do mine."

"It's reasonably clear that the official reasons for the war cannot be taken seriously," Chomsky went on. "The Bush Administration is carrying out a serious assault against the general population" he meant its domestic policies. "They have to prevent people from paying attention, and the only way anyone has ever figured out how to do that is to terrify them with tales of monsters who are about to destroy us."

As nearly always happens at a Chomsky talk, the unrelieved gloom of the lecture was followed by questions begging for suggestions and hope. Chomsky complied, with the few sentences he reserves for such moments. "The peace movements have expanded enormously in the past thirty or forty years," he said. "And the global-justice movements are also something completely new. It's the first time ever that there has been something that looks like a true international--the dream of the workers' movement and the left since their modern origins." Carol watched him deliver these thoughts with tired bemusement. "An early question in every Q. & A. is 'You've told us everything that's wrong but not what we can do about it,'" she said later. "And they're right. He hasn't. So he gives what to me is a fake answer: 'You've got to organize, because a lot of people think these things but they're isolated from each other.' He's doing it because people walk out too depressed. He's responding to people saying, 'Just give us something to hang on to.'" After the lecture, many people hurried up to the stage. An old woman in a head scarf asked Chomsky to help her find her sons, who had been picked up by the Army, and he told her there was nothing he could do. After a short while, Carol gestured to the organizers, Chomsky was guided through the crowd out of the hall, and the owners of the giant lollipops stepped forward to take them away.

LONDON, March 25 (Reuters) - Britain's Tony Blair insisted on Tuesday that London and Washington agreed that the UN had to play a pivotal role in post-war Iraq. Asked if he was flying for talks with President George W.Bush in order to head off plans for an American civil administration taking control of Iraq once President Saddam Hussein is toppled, Blair said "no." "It is common ground between us that the UN has got to be involved in post-conflict Iraq," Blair told a news conference in his Downing Street home. He admitted that details of post-war structures had to be thrashed out but added: "I've got no doubt at all that we will." Turkey was aware that Iraq's territorial integrity must be observed, he said.

The United States is preparing to establish immediate sole control of postwar Iraq, initially without recourse to the United Nations, with a civilian administration under the direct command of the military, according to senior administration officials.Even before American troops reach Baghdad, administration officials are assembling a team of civilian officials, largely retired American diplomats, to run Iraq as soon as the fighting is over.The administration has decided that helping the country and its people recover after the war will require a civilian corps in place working with the military as it tries to establish security throughout the country. European and Asian diplomats, while offering to help rebuild Iraq, raised questions last week about American plans to administer postwar Iraq without a central role for the United Nations.

It's Richard Perle's world. We're just fighting in it. The Prince of Darkness, a man who whips up revelatory souffles and revolutionary pre-emption doctrines with equal ease, took a victory lap at the American Enterprise Institute on Friday morning.The critical battle for Baghdad was yet to come and "Shock and Awe" was still a few hours away. (The hawks, who are trying to send a message to the world not to mess with America, might have preferred an even more intimidating bombing campaign title, like "Operation Who's Your Daddy?")

Yet Mr. Perle, an adviser to Donald Rumsfeld, could not resist a little pre-emptive crowing about pre-emption, predicting "a general recognition that high moral purpose has been achieved here. Millions of people have been liberated."

His conservative audience at the Reagan shrine's "black coffee briefing" ... The chesty "you repent, we decide" Bush doctrine was cooked up pre-Bush, fashioned over the last 12 years by conservatives like Mr. Perle, Mr. Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Douglas Feith and Bill Kristol.The pre-emption doctrine prefers ad hoc coalitions, allowing an unfettered America to strike at threats and potential threats. At A.E.I., Mr. Perle boasted that far from going it alone, the Bush administration had a coalition of "more than 40 countries and . . . growing." (Including Micronesia, Mongolia and the Marshall Islands, all of them.) And he was already looking forward to giving makeovers to other rogue regimes. "I'm rather optimistic that we will see regime change in Iran without any use of military power by the United States," he said. Michael Ledeen, an A.E.I. scholar on the same panel, called Iraq "just one battle in a broader war. Iran is . . . the mother of modern terrorism." ... Perle ... finds himself subject to questions about his own standards of right and wrong.

Stephen Labaton wrote in The Times on Friday that Mr. Perle was advising the Pentagon on war even as he was retained by Global Crossing, the bankrupt telecommunications company, to help overcome Pentagon resistance to its proposed sale to a joint venture involving a Hong Kong billionaire. [Perle] serves as the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an influential Pentagon advisory panel. That's why Global Crossing agreed to pay Mr. Perle a fat fee: $725,000. The fee structure is especially smelly because $600,000 of the windfall is contingent on government approval of the sale. (In his original agreement, Mr. Perle also asked the company to shell out for "working meals," which could add up, given his status as a gourmand from the Potomac to Provence, where he keeps a vacation home among the feckless French.)

Although his position on the Defense Policy Board is not paid, Mr. Perle is still bound by government ethics rules that forbid officials from reaping financial benefit from their government positions. He and his lawyer told Mr. Labaton that his work for Global Crossing did not violate the rules because he did not lobby for the company and was serving in an advisory capacity to its lawyers.

But that distinction is silly because Global Crossing has so many other big names on its roster of influence-peddlers that it doesn't need Mr. Perle's Guccis for actual lobbying footwork or advice on the process. His name alone could be worth the $725,000 if it helps win the Pentagon's seal of approval. His convictions of right and wrong extend to the right and wrong investments. On Wednesday he participated in a Goldman Sachs conference call to advise clients on investment opportunities arising from the war, titled, "Implications of an Imminent War: Iraq Now. North Korea Next?" Maybe Mr. Perle should remove the laurel wreath from his head and replace it with a paper bag.

Democratic leaders of Congress muted their criticism of President Bush today and affirmed their support for military men and women fighting the war in Iraq. "We speak today not as members of a political party, but as Americans," said Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate Democratic leader. "Today, a quarter of a million Americans are in the Persian Gulf, risking their lives to disarm Saddam Hussein. Our nation is united in gratitude and respect for them and in support for our commander in chief." Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, said she had not supported "the resolution that brought us into this war." But she added: "I join Senator Daschle in honoring our courageous men and women in uniform, including tens of thousands from my state of California. They are an inspiration." The Democrats spoke together in a radio address. "In this battle," Mr. Daschle said, "our men and women in the Gulf carry something else as well. They carry with them the thoughts and prayers of every American. They also have our commitment that they will have everything they need to achieve their mission."

An almost audible sigh of relief could be heard from a nondescript downtown building in Washington, D.C. on Thursday morning when President Saddam Hussein appeared on Iraqi television some hours after U.S. warplanes and cruise missiles bombarded a residence in Baghdad.
Media reports quoted U.S. officials as saying that the raid was directed at a "target of opportunity," possibly Hussein and his two sons themselves, shortly after the 48-hour ultimatum delivered by President George Bush had expired. If the raid had succeeded in killing the three men, U.S. officials told reporters, the Pentagon's war plans might have shifted dramatically against an all-out war.

But fortunately for the neo-conservative hawks over at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on 19th St., three blocks from the White House, it appears that Hussein remains alive, and the invasion will now go forward as planned. "That we appear not to have gotten Saddam Hussein last night ... may be a blessing in disguise," came the email message from AEI's press center.

A "decapitation" strategy targeted on Hussein, his sons, and a few other top Ba'ath officials without a full-scale invasion and occupation represents a dangerous threat to the neocon vision for the future of the Middle East. "As in Operation Desert Storm, the measure of victory in this war against Iraq will not be how big we start but where and when we stop," said the message from resident fellow Tom Donnelly. "'Going to Baghdad' means more than physically occupying the city. It is a metaphor for tearing out Saddamism, root and branch. There will be many moments – and a quick kill on Saddam would be one – where some might be tempted to say, as the first Bush administration did when the television pictures of the famous Highway of Death hit American airwaves in 1991, that enough has been done".

Perish the thought, cry the AEI hawks led by chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (DPB), Richard Perle. The current Pentagon strategy has them deeply worried that that their hopes for a thorough-going purge of ruling Ba'ath Party officials – which they see as the first step to transforming the entire Arab Middle East – may yet be frustrated.

The disagreement over military strategy is the first sign of a disagreement within the powerful alliance that has shaped U.S. foreign policy since the 9/11 attacks. The coalition consists of three main components: hard right-wing, or nationalist Republicans like the Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and vice president Dick Cheney; neo-conservatives like Perle and most of Rumsfeld's and Cheney's immediate subordinates, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; and the Christian Right, whose concerns have been represented most forcefully within the White House itself, particularly among Bush's domestic advisers.

Over the past eighteen months, these groups have agreed that the "war on terrorism" must include the ouster of Saddam Hussein, beating the war drums against Baghdad moments after the dust settled in lower Manhattan. While they have been unanimous on key issues of tactics, such as marginalizing Secretary of State Colin Powell and other "realist" veterans of the first Bush administration, and strategy, such as ousting Hussein, they have never agreed on what happens once Hussein is removed.

"The earliest and most salient rift (in the hawks' coalition) will be the hard-right nationalists, like Rumsfeld and Cheney, and the neo-conservatives," according to Charles Kupchan, a foreign-policy analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations and National Security Council strategist under former President Bill Clinton. "For the hard right, this is really about getting Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. Once that's done, they're going to say, 'Okay, we've done our job, now let's get the hell out and go home".

But the neo-conservatives, on the other hand, want to stick around to use Iraq as a base from which to exert pressure on other presumably hostile regimes, particularly Syria, Iran, and even Saudi Arabia. The third wing of the coalition, the Christian Right, is more likely to side with Rumsfeld and Cheney than the neo-conservatives in Kupchan's view, creating a split that "will complicate George Bush's life immensely".

In many ways, these rifts were already apparent in Afghanistan, with Rumsfeld and Cheney dead-set against serious "nation-building" and the extension of peacekeeping forces beyond Kabul for fear it would interfere with U.S. military operations against al Qaeda. The result – which the neo-conservatives warned against at the time – is that the authority of the U.S.-installed central government is basically confined to the capital, while most of the countryside remains in the hands of warlords. The neocons claim that Washington cannot afford to leave Iraq in a similar state of disorder.

While Cheney and Rumsfeld have both given lip service to the idea that Washington's occupation of Iraq will be the first step toward the democratization of the entire region, they have also been the most outspoken in insisting that Hussein's self-exile would be one sure way of avoiding war.

This attitude has caused no end of anxiety among the neo-conservatives both within the administration, in the think tanks like AEI, and in such media outlets as the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard (headquartered in the AEI building), Fox News, and on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.

For them, Iraq must not only be de-Ba'athized, but Washington must also be accorded the opportunity to show the world, (especially other Muslim states) just how powerful and determined the United States is to both wage war and enforce political reform. The neoconservatives view "Saddamism without Saddam" as the worst possible outcome of the present crisis. In the past months, they have excoriated the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for encouraging coups d'etat or enlisting the participation of even former senior Ba'ath officials in any post-invasion administration.

For the same reasons, they have voiced – albeit, far more tactfully due to their interest in preserving the strategic alliance – concern about Cheney's and Rumsfeld's calls for Hussein's exile and suggestions that U.S.-backed purges of the Iraqi regime will be carefully targeted and limited. The neo-conservatives have long favored a far-reaching purge that would bring to power the core of the exiled Iraqi National Congress (INC) led by Ahmed Chalabi, an old friend of Perle and Wolfowitz. Chalabi would be ideally suited to co-operate with U.S. efforts to knock over the other "dominoes" in the region who are perceived as hostile to the U.S. or Israel.

It is still too early to tell whether the neocons will get the opportunity to fulfill their vision for the Middle East or whether their hopes will be rudely shattered by a carefully targeted Cruise missile.

In all the world, the loneliest people must be that handful of men and women of the Department of Education dispatched by the Bush administration to wander the country, defending the new No Child Left Behind Act. Talk about friendless.

Michael Sentance, the department's Northeast representative, sat before Vermont's joint House-Senate committee on education not long ago, and sustained two hours of hammering by Republicans and Democrats alike... How do you defend a law that is likely to result in 85 percent of public schools in America being labeled failing — based on a single test score? Audacious, indeed.

And how do you defend a law demanding that schools have 100 percent of their children reaching proficiency on state tests in the next decade, and then provides a fraction of the resources state educators say is necessary to help the poor, the foreign born, the handicapped meet those standards?

Democrats and Republicans wanted to know. Did Mr. Sentance really believe, given poverty's daunting effects, that 100 percent of children could pass state exams?

Wartime is dangerous to liberty and free expression.

When troops head into battle, the party in power is always tempted to condemn opposition and dissent as forms of treason. Suddenly, the president is no longer referred to simply as “the president.” He becomes the “commander in chief,” a phrase that implies a lot more power.

But the more a president's supporters use the term “commander in chief" to enhance his authority, the more important it is to remember his role as the political leader of a free republic who is not endowed with infallibility, unlimited power or immunity from criticism. That, after all, is the essential difference between our country and Iraq. Our foe in this war is a brutal despot who responds to opponents not with nasty sound bites or 30-second attack ads, but with torture and murder. To proclaim the right to dissent is to declare why the United States is a country worth fighting for.

The president's party took an early run this week at shutting down criticism with an all-hands-on-deck attack on Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, a Vietnam-era veteran who had the nerve to criticize the diplomatic failures leading up to this war.

“I'm saddened, saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war,” Daschle said on Monday, “saddened that we have to give up one life because this president couldn't create the kind of diplomatic effort that was so critical for our country.”

The way the Republicans reacted, you'd have thought Daschle had endorsed Saddam Hussein for re-election. “Those comments may not undermine the president as he leads us into war," said House Speaker Dennis Hastert. “And they may not give comfort to our adversaries, but they come mighty close.” ... But a different standard seemed to apply after President Clinton launched his 1999 air campaign in Kosovo to protect ethnic Albanians from another dictator.

“I don't think we should be bombing in the Balkans," said Rep. Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican. “I don't think NATO should be destroyed because we changed its mission to a humanitarian one." His colleague, Rep. Randy Cunningham, Republican of California, accused President Clinton of pursuing “the most inept foreign policy in the history of the United States.”

Party Leaders Make Opposition Difficult, Wary Democrats Say
Dems are frustrated by Presidential Aspirations of Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt

Both leaders voted against engaging in the 1991 Gulf War. Now they fear that a similar stand will hurt their aspirations for the 2004 presidential election. Both have abdicated their leadership roles. Should they resign?



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.

It matters why you fight a war. It matters a great deal.And all along, Tony Blair has tried heroically, if vainly, to assure we fight the right war in Iraq. Once the bombs stop falling and the bullets stop flying, we Americans may come to appreciate what he has tried to do for us.From the beginning, the British prime minister recognized that a new world order is now taking shape, coalescing around two realities: utter U.S. dominance and a rising Islamic fundamentalism. He also understood that the crisis over Iraq would set the precedent for how that new system operates....

... But California's isolation from Washington, both geographically and, in recent years, politically, has helped foster a sense of alienation. The state, which had such an affinity for Bill Clinton, voted decisively against President Bush in 2000... "Californians love that sense of distinctiveness," said Peter Bart, editor of Variety. "We're not going to see the 60's again, but I think we are going to see a lot of rebellion against the mandates of Washington. This is an unpredictable and bizarre place, and I think we are definitely heading into an intensely politicized time in Hollywood."