...Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2003, may go down in history as one of the most important dates in modern American politics. The bill could

[1] help the Republican Party capture the Medicare issue from the Democrats or,

[2] if the new $400 billion entitlement for senior citizens works badly, it could alienate older voters from the GOP.

Either way, the bill will likely have a significant effect on next year’s elections....

BUSH’S MOTIVATION

Given all that, why have Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist made this new entitlement for older people a top priority?

One obvious answer: According to the Census Bureau, the peak age group for voting participation is 65 to 74 years. An estimated 72 percent of people in that age group voted in the 2000 election. The bill will provide substantial new taxpayer-paid benefits to older people — the very people who are most likely to vote next year. ...

With Congress poised for final action on a major Medicare bill this week, some of the fiercest debate is focused on a section of the bill that prohibits the government from negotiating lower drug prices for the 40 million people on Medicare.That provision epitomizes much of the bill, which relies on insurance companies and private health plans to manage the new drug benefit. They could negotiate with drug companies, but the government, with much greater purchasing power, would be forbidden to do so.

Supporters of the provision say it is necessary to prevent the government from imposing price controls that could stifle innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. Critics say the restriction would force the government and Medicare beneficiaries to spend much more for drugs than they should....

... The United States Congress is poised to approve new powers that would let the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) search and seize business records without court approval in the name of the administration's "war on terror".

The legislation amounts to the first substantive expansion of the controversial USA Patriot Act since it was approved just after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

Acting at the behest of the administration of President George W Bush, a joint House-Senate conference committee has approved a provision in the 2004 Intelligence Authorization bill permitting the FBI to demand records from certain businesses without the approval of a judge or grand jury if it deems them relevant to a counter-terrorism probe. ...

"This Patriot Act expansion was the only controversial part of this legislation, and it prompted more than a third of the House, including 15 conservative Republicans, to change what is normally a cakewalk vote into something truly contested," said ACLU Legislative Counsel Timothy Edgar. "One need look no further than this vote to get an effective gauge of the Patriot Act's lack of popularity on Capitol Hill and among the American people," he said. The Patriot Act gives unprecedented powers to the FBI and the entire federal government. ...


The measure would extend the FBI's power to seize records from banks and credit unions to securities dealers, currency exchanges, travel agencies, post offices, casinos, pawnbrokers and any other business that, in the government's eyes, has a "high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax or regulatory matters"...

"My life and career are destroyed," he said matter-of-factly. "To brand someone as a terrorist after 9/11 – I don't think it will be easy to return to normal life."

The Senate Democratic leader promised a vigorous fight Sunday against the Medicare prescription drug bill, one of President Bush's top priorities, which passed the House only after an unprecedented three-hour vote.

Sen. Tom Daschle acknowledged, however, that Democrats lack the votes to sustain a filibuster threatened by Sen. Edward Kennedy and his fellow Massachusetts Democrat, presidential contender John Kerry. Republicans can stop the filibuster with 60 of the Senate's 100 votes.

"A number of our colleagues believe that we ought to focus on the flaws, and there are many, many flaws today," said Daschle, D-S.D. "But I must say we will fight this bill as hard as we possibly can. We have a number of procedural options available to us, and we're going to use them all."...

The haste is understandable: The more time legislators have to study this Trojan horse of a bill, the less likely they are to vote for it.
Consider its provisions:

• Skimpy drug benefits. The administration refused to confront the pricing power of drug companies. So the government would be billed at exorbitant prices, and the new $40 billion a year in benefits would cover only a fraction of consumers' drug expenses.

Under the formula, if you incurred $3,600 of annual drug costs, the program would cover only $1,285, leaving you to pay $2,735 out-of-pocket and in premiums. (It covers 95% after $3,600, but many would not participate at all because they couldn't afford the upfront costs.)

• Capped Benefits. The administration's real goal is to shift Medicare from a public program to a private one, with the government's contribution capped. For the right, it's a three-fer: contain government's costs, shift risks to consumers and let private industry cash in. Healthier and wealthier people could supplement the voucher with their own resources. Poorer and sicker ones would get diminished coverage.

The are some bright spots, nonetheless: The bill authorizes "experiments" in six metropolitan areas, where private insurers subsidized by the government could lure healthy seniors away from traditional Medicare. However, past experiments with Medicare HMOs demonstrate that they are far less efficient than public Medicare and leave government holding the bag for the sickest patients.

• Means-testing. The bill subjects poorer seniors to an assets test and raises Medicare premiums for middle- and upper-income seniors. It also effectively bans drug imports from Canada. And it actually reduces drug benefits for people on Medicaid and those with private retiree coverage.

As a bill for special interests, however, the legislation is sheer genius. Pharmaceutical companies get to sell more drugs at prices they set. Hospitals and doctors receive additional payments. Insurers get to run a lucrative new program, with government subsidies. And corporations that pay health benefits to retirees get new annual tax breaks worth $18 billion.

Last spring, the Senate passed a more moderate bill, in which liberals led by Sen. Ted Kennedy reluctantly traded expanded drug coverage for sponsorship by private insurers rather than via public Medicare. However, Kennedy's bottom line was: no serious tampering with the rest of Medicare.

Democrats gambled that the Republicans, in order to get a bill, would have to meet liberals halfway. But by playing interest-group politics, the White House concluded that they could peel away enough votes and ignore the liberals.

Bush's bet is that the Democrats are damned either way. Either voters don't read the fine print and Democrats get tarred for opposing a drug-benefit bill in an election season or they are made to collude in "voucherizing" Medicare.

If the Senate's liberals and moderates can withstand the pressure for a quick vote, the bill's cynically contrived deficiencies will come to light. And at least 41 senators — the number needed to filibuster — will realize that it's better election-season politics to resist wrecking a much-loved program than being complicit in its demise.

The political equation is obvious. The President will be able to say the [1] Democrats opposed prescription drugs for the elderly whether the Medicare bill passes or not (just as he campaigned in 2002 saying the Democrats blocked Homeland Security because they wanted labor-protection provisions in the bill). The same is true, to a lesser extent, of the [2] energy bill, which Senators of both parties managed to stop, perhaps temporarily, last Friday.

The President can still say, "We proposed energy 'reform'; the Dems opposed."

Not many Americans will scour the fine print. As for [3] gay marriage, my guess is that Bush will remain above the fray. The issue is too raw—and his Vice President has taken the same position as most Democrats have. But Bush will benefit nonetheless from the anguish and agitation on the religious right, which will use the ruling to invigorate turnout among Christian conservatives. ...

"We don't get to choose and shouldn't be able to choose and say, 'You get to live free, but you don't,' " ... "And I think that means that people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It's really no one else's business in terms of trying to regulate or prohibit behavior in that regard."

... As the father of a gay daughter, [cheney] was in essence speaking in defense of his family. If he now repudiates that position as a means of getting re-elected, then the family values problem in this country is even more serious than many believed.

...Gays and lesbians are banned from marriage and forbidden to enter into this powerful and ennobling institution. A gay or lesbian couple may love each other as deeply as any two people, but when you meet a member of such a couple at a party, he or she then introduces you to a "partner," a word that reeks of contingency [contingency, for me a new, but powerful concept, is defined below]....

...Today marriage is in crisis. Nearly half of all marriages end in divorce. Worse, in some circles, marriage is not even expected. Men and women shack up for a while, produce children and then float off to shack up with someone else.

Marriage is in crisis because marriage, which relies on a culture of fidelity, is now asked to survive in a culture of contingency. Today, individual choice is held up as the highest value: choice of lifestyles, choice of identities, choice of cellphone rate plans. Freedom is a wonderful thing, but the culture of contingency means that the marriagebond, which is supposed to be a sacred vow till death do us part, is now more likely to be seen as an easily canceled contract. ...

...The conservative course is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments. We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.

When liberals argue for gay marriage, they make it sound like a really good employee benefits plan. Or they frame it as a civil rights issue, like extending the right to vote.

Marriage is not voting. It's going to be up to conservatives to make the important, moral case for marriage, including gay marriage. Not making it means drifting further into the culture of contingency, which, when it comes to intimate and sacred relations, is an abomination.

Health-care companies, led by drugmakers Merck & Co. and Eli Lilly & Co., spent a record $139.1 million in six months to lobby Congress on a Medicare bill that will help the elderly buy their prescription medicines.

Pharmaceutical companies were the biggest spenders in the health-care industry in the first half of 2003, according to PoliticalMoneyLine.com, a group that tracks contributions to political campaigns. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has said the bill would increase drug sales over time by $13 billion a year as more people are able to afford medicine...

Bogus Benefits?

GAIL SHEARER, sheaga@consumer.org,

Shearer is senior health policy analyst for Consumers Union and author of the just-released report "Medicare Prescription Drugs: Conference Committee Agreement Asks Beneficiaries to Pay Too High a Price for Modest Benefit." Among the report's findings:

* "The funds set aside for this 'benefit' -- $400 billion over 10 years -- cover just 22 percent of the anticipated drug costs, leaving consumers to foot the rest of the bill."

* "Medicare is being moved down the road to privatization by requiring competition between private health plans and Medicare...."

* "Private Pharmacy Benefit Managers get to pick what drugs are covered under the plan, with no transparency, methodology or public accountability. This means patients who are sensitive to the choice of drug will be out of luck if their needed drug is not on the plan...."

* The deal "actually prohibits the government from negotiating deep prescription drug discounts for consumers, meaning the average Medicare beneficiary will pay more out-of-pocket for drugs in 2007 when the benefit begins, than what they currently pay now without the 'benefit.'"

Medicare's Death Spiral?

DON McCANNE, M.D., don@mccanne.org,
President of Physicians for a National Health Program , Dr. McCanne said today: "As a stand-alone component, the prescription drug benefit fails miserably on its alleged purpose: making drugs affordable for seniors. It provides a blank check for pharmaceutical firms to continue to gouge seniors, and introduces the Pharmacy Benefit Manager middlemen who profit by taking away our choices in drug access. Worse, the legislation provides financial incentives for the healthy and wealthy to exit the traditional Medicare program and enroll in private PPO plans. This concentrates high-cost, chronically ill patients in the traditional program, driving up program costs. When forced to compete with the private HMOs, which will be subsidized, the higher costs will be shifted to Medicare beneficiaries in the form of unaffordable premiums. This 'death spiral' of ever-higher Medicare premiums will force patients into the private plan marketplace. To keep premiums affordable, the plans will strip out benefits and require unaffordable cost sharing. Then Medicare will no longer ensure either health security or financial security for our seniors."

AARP Betrayal?

JOHN HESS, jkhess@peoplepc.com, http://www.fair.org/extra/writers/hess.html,

Hess, who has written extensively on issues relating to the elderly, is critical of the AARP:

"Once again, the AARP has stabbed America's elderly in the back. For more than 30 years now, it's been held up as a scarecrow -- a monster representing 35 million greedy geezers.... Briefly, the AARP is not a league of the elderly, but a marketing agency with a shady past. It peddles insurance, travel, advertising, and anything else it can get its hands on. It has a mailing list -- not a membership -- of 35 million customers. If you turn 50, they'll try to get your name on it. It calls itself an 'association' and goes through the motions in an effort to dodge taxes and commercial mailing rates, and it's been in constant trouble with the IRS and the Postal Service." Hess also claims that the AARP similarly "sold out seniors with the Social Security cuts of '78 and '83 and the catastrophic medical scam of '88." Hess, a former New York Times reporter, has written the just-published book "My Times: A Memoir of Dissent."

Howard Dean is expected soon to announce that he has won the support of Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Baltimore, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus , a nod that could help the former Vermont governor gain traction with African-American voters in his pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination. Cummings' backing might also help Dean repair any damage over his recent comments invoking the Confederate flag.With a formal endorsement likely within days, Cummings praised Dean enthusiastically in an interview this week, calling him "somebody who can energize our base" and "the kind of candidate we need to run for president of the United States."

...

The support of Cummings could help give Dean an edge in a race in which none of the nine Democratic hopefuls - not even the two African-American candidates, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun - has yet galvanized the black vote.African-American voters represent a crucial bloc once the primaries move beyond the early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the populations are largely white...

If Dean is to sustain momentum after the New Hampshire primary - where he holds a big lead in most polls - he will have to continue to pile up victories in the Southern and industrial states that follow.

African-Americans account for roughly half of the Democratic voters in the Deep South and at least that much in South Carolina, which holds the critical first Southern primary, a week after New Hampshire's.

Dean already has won the endorsement of Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. of Illinois, son of the civil rights activist and former presidential contender; as well as of Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas, vice chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus; former Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and several other black leaders.


... the support of the black caucus chairman could go a long way toward helping Dean rally African-American support and extinguish any lingering ill will from his recent remark that he wanted to be the candidate of Southern white voters who display Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.

Dean apologized for using the inflammatory symbol of the flag to make his point, and Cummings defended Dean's remark as "an honest mistake."

But even before the flag uproar, Dean had been dogged by the perception that his campaign appealed mainly to upscale, well-educated whites.

That complaint was blunted somewhat in recent days by endorsements of Dean by two major labor unions - one of them, the Service Employees International Union, the largest and most ethnically diverse union in the AFL-CIO.

Cummings, who appeared with Dean at two other events in Washington on Monday, acknowledged that the crowds were roughly 90 percent white. But he said he was impressed that Dean nonetheless spent about one-third of his time talking about race. "I have never seen a candidate do that," he said.

"The thing that impresses me is Dean talks about race to white people and black people," Cummings said. "And he's very frank, honest and sincere about it. Dean has consistently talked about revitalizing our cities, investing in our schools - issues vital to any city's ability to stay alive."

Jeremy D. Mayer, author of Running on Race: Racial Politics in Presidential Campaigns 1960 to 2000 , says the black vote has been crucial to nearly every Democratic nomination since 1960.[See review of book in wash post ]

"People like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have used the black vote and their understanding of the black community to win the nomination," says Mayer, a professor of public policy at George Mason University in Virginia.

Historically, candidates from the South - such as Clinton and Carter - have been most attractive to African-American voters because of their years of dealings with black leaders and constituencies. Indeed, Edwards has focused his campaign, perhaps more than any other, on the minority-rich Southern states, which appear to be his only possible lifeline at the moment.

But Mayer notes that Dean, a Yankee, has surprisingly come the closest to creating a stir among black voters. He believes that is the result more of Dean's combative style, including his early and outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq, than of any particular racial appeals. Dean's aggressive speaking style, Mayer says, taps into the "the anger in the black community about this administration."

... [Dick Cheney, father of a lesbian, arguing in the 2000 vice presidential debate;] "We don't get to choose and shouldn't be able to choose and say, 'You get to live free, but you don't,' " ... "And I think that means that people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It's really no one else's business in terms of trying to regulate or prohibit behavior in that regard."

... As the father of a gay daughter, [cheney] was in essence speaking in defense of his family. If he now repudiates that position as a means of getting re-elected, then the family values problem in this country is even more serious than many believed.

... The agreement reached by the U.S. Congressional Conference Committee over the weekend passes along a Medicare bill that excludes a previously proposed stipulation allowing drug importation. American drug companies have used millions to lobby so that such a provision would never allow U.S. citizens to buy cheap medicine from other countries. However, the four governors are carrying on determinedly, regardless of the current ban, which some interpret as a sign of the inevitability of opening pharmaceutical markets to foreign trade.

American drug manufacturers are not oblivious to the governors' actions. The New York Times reported Nov. 16 of a top pharmaceutical-industry leader commenting on the situation under the condition of anonymity.

"Eventually we're going to get rolled on this," the executive said.

Public demand seems clear at this point: the people want cheaper prescription drugs. But the question remains: how much are they willing to pay?

U.S. drug companies argue their prices for prescription drugs are necessarily more expensive to cover the high cost of developing new drugs. Federal regulation by the Food and Drug Administration assures both incomparable quality and inflated prices for American consumers.

This week's blockbuster leak of a secret memorandum from a senior Pentagon official to the US Senate Intelligence Committee has spurred speculation that neo- conservative hawks in the Bush administration are on the defensive and growing more desperate. ...

... First, bring back regular Iraqi Army units to bolster security. Second, be more attentive to nationalism — that means we should avoid privatization (even though it's a good idea) because Iraqis will suspect us of stealing their assets. Third, resist the temptation to anoint Ahmad Chalabi, who is resented by ordinary Iraqis as our puppet...

The bottom line, though, is that neither Republicans nor Democrats are being straight with the public: now that Mr. Bush has gotten us into this mess, there's no simple way out.

It is idealistic, bold and ambitious in its stated quest to define a transition from American-occupied Iraq to a situation of full Iraqi sovereignty in a free and democratic country.

The agreement embodies powerful principles of democratic pluralism, equality before the law, representational federalism and the consent of the governed.

In just 66 lines it offers a blueprint to wipe out three decades of Iraqi-engineered Baathist tyranny and the previous five decades of British-made post-colonial incoherence, and replace them with an American-inspired Thomas Jefferson on the Tigris.

The document drips with references to “freedom,” “equality,” “rights,” “due process,” “independence of the judiciary,” “transparency” and other such fine political values. Its democratization procedures include selection of representative individuals to regional bodies that will ultimately draft a national constitution, ratification of the constitution by the citizenry, caucuses at governorate level to select individuals who will collectively form a transitional national assembly, a constitutional convention of directly elected Iraqis, and other such ringing aspects of accountable democratic governance as it has been successfully practiced for many decades in … Iowa and Idaho.

It spells out and offers others the finest American governance traditions. If this were a commercial website, I would want to put all these democratic values in my shopping cart.

(1) It totally ignores the points of tension, even incompatibility, that will surface during the meeting of American and indigenous Iraqi-Arab-tribal-Islamic-Kurdish-etc. cultural values (these tensions will be resolved over time by Iraqis, just as they were resolved in the European and American transitions from feudalism-and-slavery to democracy from the 16th to the mid-20th centuries). Forging a new Iraqi nationalism and democracy with the crucible and moulds of American republicanism is as unrealistic as it is noble.

(2) This agreement is fundamentally imposed by the US, and includes numerous explicit American veto powers over implementation; this “democratization” process is also peculiarly undemocratic, and at second glance seems more colonial than collegiate.

(3) The Governing Council itself was appointed by the US occupation authority. Many of its members are credible national or tribal leaders, but the council collectively enjoys very mixed legitimacy and credibility among Iraqis (flashback to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands: Two decades ago, the Israeli occupation authority created Palestinian “village leagues,” tried to reach political accords with them and failed miserably and predictably. Why? Because political bodies appointed by an occupying military power and designed to achieve the occupier’s strategic goals enjoy no indigenous legitimacy or credibility, whether in Palestine, Iraq, South Vietnam, Afghanistan ­ or 18th-century Virginia.)

(4) This agreement reflects American policymaking by panic, which is dangerous for all concerned. The agreement’s content, power balance and hasty promulgation suggest that it aims more to get the US out of Iraq than to allow Iraq to define itself. Intent and credibility usually drive implementation in the adult world, and Washington’s intent and credibility here ­ just as before its war on Iraq ­ remain culturally confused, politically simplistic, motivationally suspect and diplomatically hasty. Washington has taken a good idea ­ transforming tyranny into democracy ­ and implemented it badly, because it largely acts unilaterally, militarily and through narrow American worldviews.

It mirrors a deeper history of how power and culture are exercised in the world ­ how the strong influence the weak and try to reshape them in their own image, and how colonial adventures end.

(1) The United States embarrasses itself as an incompetent and dizzy colonial power, as it changes governments and tries to reshape the entire Middle East; but also (2) the Arab governments and peoples throughout the Middle East embarrass themselves even worse, as they prove to be incompetent and docile spectators, passively watching their own post-colonial history of autocracy, passivity and powerlessness replayed over and over again.

The antidote must include a more realistic, humble and multilateral American policy, along with a more profound, activist, honest and credible policy from the Arab countries.

Iowa and Idaho became prosperous and democratic because their people demanded, and forged, good governance. America offers us ennobling lessons, along with ugly, imposed colonial treaties. We should beware of, renegotiate and improve the bad treaties, but embrace and achieve the promise of good governance.

... Retired Gen. Merrill "Tony" McPeak, the former Air Force chief of staff who endorsed George W. Bush in 2000, has left the Republican fold and is backing Democrat Howard Dean in the 2004 race for president....

McPeak, who lives in Lake Oswego, joins a small but growing list of top military veterans who have parted ways with the president at least partly because of the war in Iraq. McPeak's decision could be an important boost for Dean because critics have accused the former Vermont governor of lacking the experience and knowledge needed to be the nation's commander-in-chief.

On Monday, Dean also picked up the endorsement of U.S. Rep. David Wu, D-Ore., during an event sponsored by the Asian American Action Fund, a Democratic political action committee. ...

Dick Klass, a retired Air Force colonel from Virginia who is working with Dean's campaign to attract former military officers, said endorsements from McPeak and other veterans could play an important role in the race.

"This is basically an exercise to let people know that Dean isn't a wild, lefty, antimilitary" person, said Klass, adding that he wouldn't be surprised to face such attacks from Republicans if Dean becomes the Democratic nominee. ...

...If the bills are passed and signed into law, Republicans and some Democrats predict Bush will probably get a political boost that could resonate through the 2004 elections. Along with Bush's tax cuts, education overhaul and defense policies, Republicans also could claim they are delivering tangible results to Americans by controlling the White House and Congress.

Piece by piece, Bush and the Republican Congress are trying to take domestic issues off the table before the 2004 elections fire up early next year. Because they control the White House, Senate and House for only the second time in half a century, Republicans anticipate that the elections will be a referendum on their performance, which will be measured in large part by their ability to break through the partisan gridlock that has come to define Washington in recent years. The Medicare and energy bills had been bottled up in private negotiations for months...

... The Rev. Albert M. Pennybacker, of Lexington, Ky., chief executive officer for the [newly formed] Clergy Leadership Network and the chairman of its national committee, said: "The Christian Right has been very articulate, but they have been exclusive and very judgmental of anyone who doesn't agree with them. People may want to label us the Christian Left. But what we really are about is mainstream issues and truth, and if that makes us left then that shines even more light on the need for a shift in our society."

The organization seeks to counter groups like the Christian Coalition of America and newly influential groups like the Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition.

There are other liberal religious-based advocacy groups in Washington, like the Interfaith Alliance, a nonprofit group that lobbies Congress on policy issues. But the Clergy Leadership Council will be the first national liberal religious group, its organizers say, whose primary focus is electoral politics and partisan political organizing...

... According to Gardiner, "It was not bad intelligence" that lead to the quagmire in Iraq, "It was an orchestrated effort [that] began before the war" that was designed to mislead the public and the world.

Colonel Sam Gardiner (USAF, Ret.) has identified 50 false news stories created and leaked by a secretive White House propaganda apparatus. Bush administration officials are probably having second thoughts about their decision to play hardball with former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Joe Wilson is a contender. When you play hardball with Joe, you better be prepared to deal with some serious rebound....

The United States accepts that to avoid humiliating failure in Iraq it needs to bring its forces quickly under international control and speed the handover of power, Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, has said. Decisions along these lines will be made in the "coming days", Mr Solana told The Independent.

The comments, signalling a major policy shift by the US, precede President George Bush's state visit this week to London, during which he and Tony Blair will discuss an exit strategy for forces in Iraq.

Mr Solana underlined the change of mood in Washington, saying: "Everybody has moved, including the United States, because the United States has a real problem and when you have a real problem you need help." There is a "growing consensus" that the transfer of power has to be accelerated, he said. "How fast can it be done? I would say the faster the better."

He added: "The more the international community is incorporated under the international organisations [the better]. That is the lesson I think everyone is learning. Our American friends are learning that. We will see in the coming days decisions along these lines."

The Bush administration spelt out over the weekend its new plans for the faster transfer of power from Americans to the Iraqis, with a transitional government now scheduled to take over from the end of June. Before, US officials had said that Iraqi leaders should write a constitution first, then hold elections....

The litany of setbacks, growing US casualties and the recent killing of 18 Italian servicemen has brought intense domestic and international pressure on the Bush administration to give the occupying force more legitimacy.

Eager to counter this domestic unease, the American military sought to advertise their latest crack-down. They declared that they had fired a satellite-guided missile at what they said was an insurgents' training camp west of Kirkuk.

But there was more grim news on Saturday with the collision of two Black Hawk helicopters after one was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.

Seventeen American soldiers died, the worst single loss of life in one incident since President Bush ordered the US-led invasion....

... Note, too, that the South has the fewest independent-minded voters available for Democratic conversion. Protest candidates John McCain, Ralph Nader and Perot all bombed there. Of the 10 states where Perot fared worst in 1992, all were Southern. Of the 47 states where Nader was on the ballot in 2000, nine of his 10 worst showings came in the South. And remember how quickly the humidity of the 2000 South Carolina primary melted McCain's sugary tongue? The South is where insurgents and independents go to die....

Gerrymandering exacerbates the problem. American University professor David Lublin has chronicled the GOP's use of redistricting to pack black voters into Democratic districts to help elect Republicans elsewhere. Here's proof that Democratic voters are too condensed: Despite besting Bush in the popular vote, Gore carried only 196 congressional districts while Bush took 239, according to calculations by Democratic data guru Mark Gersh.

Gerrymandering also suppresses black turnout in presidential elections because majority-black districts are general-election cakewalks for minority candidates. In 2002, the 36 voting members of the Congressional Black Caucus won reelection with an average of more than 80 percent of the vote. In our forthcoming book on black state legislators, political scientist Tyson King-Meadows and I report a similarly astonishing fact: In 2000, 90 percent of black state legislators won with 60-plus percent of the vote, and 60 percent won with 90-plus percent of the vote. Facing a ballot full of non-contests, black voters have less incentive to turn out, and black elites have less incentive to turn them out. Low turnout may not threaten the election of black legislators, but it severely damages the chances of Democrats running for statewide offices and for president. ...

One key to a Democratic Southwest is the growing influence of Latinos, who in 2002 became the nation's largest ethnic minority. Two surveys conducted last summer, one by pollster Sergio Bendixen and another by CBS News/New York Times, indicate that the GOP is losing ground with the ethnic group that Karl Rove believes is critical to a Republican realignment. And there's more to the story than ethnicity. As electoral scholars John Judis and Ruy Teixeira show, these Southwestern states feature the progressive-centrist "ideopolis" cities of Tucson, Denver, Las Vegas and Santa Fe.

Future presidential contests get a whole lot easier if Democrats can successfully employ a Southwestern strategy. Add the solidly Democratic Northeastern and Pacific Coast states. Stir in post-industrial, Midwestern Rust Belt states such as Illinois and Michigan. If Democrats solve their solvable Ohio problem, they can win the presidency without carrying any states south of Maryland and east of the Mississippi River. Non-Southern coalitions worked for the GOP for decades: William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge all coasted to victory without the South. ...

Trippi [HD's campaign manager] likes to remind reporters that winning all the Gore states plus New Hampshire would put Dean in the White House. Because the Bush states gained seven electoral votes as a result of the 2000 Census, Trippi's math is a bit off -- in 2004, that combination only yields 264 electors, six shy of the magical 270 threshold.

But Trippi has the right idea. If the Democrats can hold the Gore states -- a big "if," but they have to start somewhere -- plus capture newly competitive Arizona's 10 electors, that's exactly 270. A non-Southern strategy isn't the only path back to the Oval Office. But it may be the shortest.

Daschle: We have not seen all the details, but it sounds like a bad deal for seniors and a good deal for big drug companies and health maintenance organizations....

House and Senate negotiators said they reached agreement Saturday on the most contentious issue in the bill, an experiment that would require direct competition between private health plans and the traditional government-run Medicare program....

American intelligence agencies have found increasing evidence that the broad outlines of the guerrilla campaign being waged against American forces in Iraq were laid down before the war by the Iraqi Intelligence Service, government officials said Friday.

That view is based on interrogations of former senior Iraqi officials who are now in American custody and on documents found in Iraq, government officials said. They acknowledged that intelligence agencies had earlier underestimated the strength of the resistance and the degree to which it now appears to have reflected central planning and organization.

The conclusion that the insurgency may have been planned ahead of the war points to yet another failure to act on prewar intelligence, a prominent critic of the war effort said Friday.

"Most of the things that happened, such as the level of violence and the difficulty of getting various factions to cooperate, were known and predicted by foreign intelligence services before the war, but this information was systematically dismissed," said Senator Bob Graham of Florida, a Democrat who was among those briefed by Central Intelligence Agency officials on Thursday and who until January was the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee....

The announcement of a firm date to create an interim Iraqi government and end the formal American occupation — though not the American military presence — promises the Iraqis the sovereignty they have clamored for, and offers President Bush the political symbol he needed: the beginnings of an exit strategy that he can explain to American voters.

But the price of a speedy transfer of power, Mr. Bush's own top aides worry, may be a rapid loss of control — control over the drafting of a constitution, and over the effort to make democracy flower in a land where it had never been cultivated. Now that Mr. Bush himself has redefined America's mission in Iraq — from disarming Saddam Hussein to creating "a free and democratic society" that will be a model for the rest of the Middle East — any plan that grants Iraq its sovereignty before it adopts full-fledged democracy risks derailing that grander mission.

"It's a gamble, a huge gamble," one of the most senior architects of Mr. Bush's campaign to oust Saddam Hussein conceded this week, after two days of meetings with L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the American-led occupation authority. "But it's easy to overestimate the degree of control we have over events now," the official said, "and to underestimate how much we will retain."

If the plan succeeds, Mr. Bush could declare an end the formal American occupation of Iraq by early summer, just as the presidential campaign heads into its final and decisive stretch.

But American officials expect that tens of thousands of allied troops will remain at the new government's "invitation," and nobody can predict whether they will still face a violent and deadly insurgency, possibly targeting Iraqi security forces as well. That would make it harder for Mr. Bush to describe the transfer of power to a new government, and the drawing down of American troops, as an unqualified success. ...

Administration officials have dismissed critics who suggest that the process might be driven by Mr. Bush's electoral needs. [Sure! Sure!] Administration officials have dismissed critics who suggest that the process might be driven by Mr. Bush's electoral needs, taking pains to portray the new approach as Iraqi-born, initiated by Iraqi leaders out of what Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, called a "clamor" for a faster turnover of power., taking pains to portray the new approach as Iraqi-born, initiated by Iraqi leaders out of what Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, called a "clamor" for a faster turnover of power.

...
In the latest NYT Weekend Magazine, and article by Matt Bai details an exciting new development related to the left in the US. In recent decades several institutions on the conservative side of the political spectrum have emerged that gives them an edge, makes the playing field uneven: Rush Limbaugh and his imitators on rightwing talk radio, TV’s Fox News, Murdoch’s financing of the Weekly Standard, and the emergence of conservative think tanks, financed by rightwing benefactors. ...

Reuters reports that the European Union and the United States appear headed for another confrontation. This time the showdown concerns the ramifications of a leaked International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEA) report about Iran's nuclear program. According to the IAEA report, no evidence of a bomb program in Iran has been found, but that Tehran had dabbled in possibly related activities, such as plutonium production and uranium enrichment, between 1988 and 1992.


In the US's first official reaction to the report, undersecretary of state for non-proliferation and arms control John Bolton called it "impossible to believe." Mr. Bolton, who is known for being taking a hardline approach towards countries like Iran, Cuba, Syria, and North Korea (in fact, he was recently accused of "exaggerating" some of his assessments of their nuclear capabilities) said the US believes the massive and covert Iranian effort to acquire sensitive nuclear capabilities "make sense only as part of a nuclear weapons program."

"This is not only the administration's view [said Bolton]. Thomas Cochran, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the New York Times that it's dumbfounding that the IAEA, after saying that Iran for 18 years had a secret effort to enrich uranium and separate plutonium, would turn around and say there was no evidence of a nuclear weapons program. If that's not evidence, I don't know what is."

Thursday the IAEA rejected Bolton's criticism of its report. IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said the organization stands by the report, "... but it's confidential and will be considered at next week's (IAEA) board meeting." He declined further comment....

On July 2, President Bush was asked to respond to the handful of attacks then taking place in Iraq each day.

"My answer is, bring them on," Bush said.

That was four months ago. At the time, 26 U.S. military personnel had been killed since the end of major combat. Now, the number will soon surpass 160. The number of attacks has escalated as well, to 30 or 35 a day, and have also grown more sophisticated.

Military officials in Iraq warn that the situation will get even worse over the next 30 to 60 days. A new CIA assessment confirms that fear, warning that an important turning point may have been reached, with more and more Iraqis now drawn into the struggle against us.

Today, there are no more complaints from the White House about all the good news that goes unreported. Managing image isn't the concern anymore; reality has intervened. Instead, we see hastily called top-level meetings and talk of sudden policy and even personnel changes. The cockiness has been stripped away, the bravado exposed as false.

Military officials have grown so frustrated that in Fallujah, we are turning to aerial bombardment in an attempt to cow the civilian population into submission, an act that concedes that winning hearts and minds is no longer possible. The long, hard slog that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned against privately, and belatedly, is upon us.

In the broad reassessment of U.S. policy that now seems under way, the most important step may be to redefine victory. The invasion of Iraq was rationalized in many ways, some more baseless than others, but the most romantic and far-fetched was the notion that we could use force to impose a democracy even upon a foreign culture that would deeply resent our presence. If we continue to define victory as the creation of such a democracy, we define the terms of our own defeat.

Victory will be the creation of an Iraqi-based government powerful enough to rule Iraq without stooping to the cruelty and terror used by Saddam Hussein. We'll be lucky to accomplish that much, but if we do, we ought to be willing to call it good.

The Bush administration will not admit to such a change in its goals, but it seems to be doing so nonetheless ....

U.S. forces are losing the intelligence battle in Iraq to an increasingly organized guerrilla force that uses stealth, spies and surprise to inflict punishing casualties.

U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement officials say that after six months of intensifying guerrilla warfare, Iraqi insurgents know more about the U.S. and allied forces -- their style of operations, convoy routes and vulnerable targets -- than the coalition forces know about them. Indeed, U.S. intelligence has had trouble si.mply identifying the enemy and figuring out how many are Iraqis and how many are foreign fighters.

With local knowledge and the element of surprise on their side, the guerrillas are exploiting their intelligence edge to overcome the coalition's overwhelming military superiority. Insurgents routinely use inexpensive explosives to destroy multimillion-dollar assets, including tanks and helicopters. Using surveillance and inside information, the guerrillas have assassinated many Iraqis helping the coalition, gunned down a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, killed the top United Nations official in Iraq and blasted the heavily guarded hotel in Baghdad where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying.

Sophisticated U.S. intelligence tools such as spy satellites and electronic eavesdropping intercepts have been of little practical use, according to intelligence officials in Washington and military officers in Iraq. And despite an intense search and exhaustive intelligence efforts, deposed leader Saddam Hussein remains at large.

The key problem is that Iraqi guerrillas simply have more and better sources than the coalition. U.S. military officers worry that the Iraqis who work for them, such as translators, cooks and drivers, include moles who routinely pass inside information back to insurgents. In at least two cases, Iraqis have been fired on the suspicion that they were spies....

… the current moment in the Muslim world could be compared to the birth of freedom in Germany and Japan after World War II, and in Russia and Eastern Europe after the cold war. But a fundamental difference [exists] between Reagan calling on the Russians to "tear down this wall" in Berlin and Bush telling Muslim countries to heed the handwriting on the wall in Iraq, where the United States is not only preaching democracy but trying to build an example for others to follow.

Should the United States fail in its effort to remake Iraq, it could create a perception of American weakness that would embolden the radical elements of the region, whether in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran or elsewhere, in their opposition to the United States and to Western-style democracy generally.

In 2003, Pakistan, after Musharraf agreed to local elections, the winners in the northwest frontier were anti-American Islamic fundamentalists who are believed to be cooperating with remnants of the Taliban to provide shelter to Osama bin Laden in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Weisman gives several other recent examples, and then concludes

… unless a stable political culture is built first, elections in countries where extremist groups are accustomed to getting their way by force or intimidation pose great risks. A culture has to be built up in which all groups are willing to participate peacefully, even if their own interests are set back or compromised.

With every passing week, the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq becomes more testing for the United States as the respective guerrilla wars in those countries escalate, yet Washington has very different approaches to dealing with them....

This new alliance of two theories - Ba'athist and Islamist as voiced by the Muslim Brotherhood (the web is full of pages dedicated to it. here are three that look pretty good--- (1) (2) (3) -- evidently is becoming the most powerful stumbling block to the US occupation of Iraq, as well as its designs on the region, where the US will meet resistance from Shi'ite Iran, Salafi (Wahhabi) threats in Saudi Arabia and Ba'athist and militant threats in Syria.

These forces have the potential to grow side-by-side with US influence in the region, and challenge its designs as well as its strategic interests. It is for this reason that the decision-makers in Washington are convinced that they have to make Iraq a decisive battlefield, while in Afghanistan they can afford to simply walk away....

The right-wing coalition that powered the United States into Iraq earlier this year appears in ever greater disarray amid increasingly heated complaints by friends, as well as foes, that the US occupation is not going well at all.

The main target is Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who appears increasingly at a loss to explain US strategy beyond his now-famous admission in a "leaked" memo to his top aides last month that the situation in Iraq - not to mention the wider war against al-Qaeda terrorists - will be a "long, hard slog". That was before Iraqi insurgents shot down a Chinook transport helicopter, killing 16 US servicemen at a single blow 10 days ago, and then destroyed a Blackhawk helicopter late last week and killed six more....

Meanwhile, the daily US death count, as well as the number of attacks against US forces, has roughly doubled since mid-summer, while public confidence in President George W Bush's Iraq policy continues to erode.

A whopping 87 percent of respondents in one ABC-Washington Post poll taken before the Chinook disaster said they feared that the US is getting bogged down, while public and media discourse is increasingly studded with the dreaded "V" word, for Vietnam. ...

America's fortunes in the Gulf were in free-fall yesterday after a suicide bombing in Riyadh late on Saturday that appeared to be aimed at undermining the Saudi monarchy, the United States' key ally in the region.

No one had claimed responsibility by last night, but the shadow of the fugitive Saudi national Osama bin Laden hangs over the outrage. At least 17 people, many of them Arab expatriates, were killed and 120 others, 36 of them children, were injured in a massive car bomb attack on a residential compound in Riyadh. ...

Winston dialled 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of the Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from the Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened.

In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said U.S. forces would be welcomed by the Iraqi citizenry and that Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

Now, after both statements have been shown to be either incorrect or vastly exaggerated, Rumsfeld - with the same trademark confidence that he exuded before the war - is denying that he ever made such assertions.

In recent testy exchanges with reporters, Rumsfeld interrupted the questioners and attacked the premise of the questions if they dealt with his pre-war comments about weapons of mass destruction and Americans-as-liberators.

For example, on Feb. 20, a month before the invasion, Rumsfeld fielded a question about whether Americans would be greeted as liberators if they invaded Iraq.

"Do you expect the invasion, if it comes, to be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq?" Jim Lehrer asked the defense secretary on PBS' "The News Hour."

"There is no question but that they would be welcomed," Rumsfeld replied, referring to American forces. "Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and the al-Qaeda would not let them do."

The Americans-as-liberators theme was repeated by other senior administration officials in the weeks preceding the war, including Rumsfeld's No. 2 - Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz - and Vice President Cheney.


Donald Rumsfeld: On March 30, on alleged weapons of mass distruction in Iraq.

"I should have said, 'I believe they're in that area.' "

Moving to pull US troops from Iraq amid intensifying attacks, replacing them with a hurriedly trained Iraqi force, Washington is accused of seeking an exit strategy similar to the Vietnam war.

The move to "Iraqify" military and police forces is reminiscent of the option taken by Washington over the so-called Vietnamization that came before south Vietnam collapsed before northern forces in 1975, observers and politicians say.

Former president Richard Nixon chose to "Vietnamify" -- progressively putting heavier military responsibility on the south Vietnamese so as to disengage the United States, which lost 58,000 soldiers in the tortuous war.

Though the Iraqi conflict is quite different and US casualties nowhere near the levels een in Vietnam, the analogy is being seen increasingly, after Washington said it may cut US troops from 132,000 to 105,000 by next spring.

Parallel, the United States is aiming to take the number of Iraqi security forces -- army, police and border guards -- from 118,000 men to 170,000 by early 2004.

Concerns have been raised over the policy, with claims the US administration is more interested in improving public opinion ahead of the November 2004 elections -- in which Bush will seek a second term -- than in Iraq's stability. …

… AFSCME, with 1.5 million members, previously had targeted early December for an endorsement but moved up the timetable when the SEIU decided to act this month.

AFSCME's endorsement is considered the holy grail for Democrats because the union spends more money on elections than any other. Its president, Gerald McEntee, was key to Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign success by providing crucial, early support when other unions were backing Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa…

When it comes to insider biographies of political heavyweights, why should the Michael Isikoffs and David Maranisses have all the fun? At the Rutland (Vt.) Herald and its sister paper, The Times-Argus of Montpelier, editors and reporters have collaborated on what they call the real backgrounder on Howard Dean -- a new book titled Howard Dean: A Citizens Guide to the Man Who Would Be President, which hits bookstores Nov. 15.

And they ought to know. These papers covered the leading Democratic presidential candidate for more than 11 years as governor, and the previous five years as lieutenant governor. During that time, editors say, they saw how he really responds to problems, concerns and political footballs -- a far cry, they contend, from what many in the national press have presented.

"Dean is not especially a liberal," said Dirk Van Susteren, editor of the papers' Sunday magazine who also edited the book. "That is one of the biggest surprises." Hamilton Davis, a veteran Vermont journalist and one of nine reporters who contributed chapters to the project, agreed. "Once you read this book, you will realize that what you think you know about him is not true," he said. "My guess is the general public knows virtually nothing that is in this book."

"His critics charge that his preference for the interests of large business over environmental protection sapped the vitality from the state's regulatory apparatus," Davis wrote in one of two chapters he penned for the book. "The result, they say, was unwise large-scale development and degraded water quality."

... after signing the controversial same-sex union bill in 2000, Dean embarked on a statewide tour, asking organizers at backyard stops to invite citizens who were angry at what he had just done. After allowing them to vent their opposition, Dean explained why he had signed the bill, mentioning that part of the reason was a reaction to recent court rulings that required equal protection for gays and lesbians. "The truth be told, they very likely saved Howard Dean's political skin," the book stated in a chapter on campaigning by David Gram, a longtime Associated Press reporter based in Montpelier. "He went on to win the election of 2000 by the barest of margins."

These mid-east critics dwelt on what they saw as a gap between reality in the Middle East and the Bush administration's perceptions.

… the speech amounted to a clear admission of the failure of Washington’s traditional policy in the Middle East.

… Well, this is very interesting actually, when we look at this because the date was very interesting to me. I mean he said 60 years ago. Why 60 years ago? What happened 60 years ago? Was he perhaps referring to a meeting between President Roosevelt and the Saudi king? Is this a sign also to the Saudis perhaps?

Why didn't he refer, for example to 50 years ago, to what happened in Iran, the overthrow by the United States and by England, the CIA and MI-6 interfered to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mossadegh. That's one of the most important historical events in the region that people now refer to and talk about because they see it as an attempt by the United States, by the West in fact, to block democratic transformation and to bring governments that are not representative of the people and that are, that they want to bring governments that serve western interests and help perhaps the control over oil because oil is an important factor at that time. …

In a speech that redefined the U.S. agenda in the Middle East, President Bush waxed eloquent yesterday about his dream of democracy coexisting with Islam and transforming an important geostrategic region that has defiantly held out against the global tide of political change.

But Bush failed to acknowledge the tough realities that are likely to limit significant political progress in the foreseeable future: America's all-consuming commitment to fighting a global war on terrorism and confronting Islamic militancy. Washington still relies heavily on alliances with autocratic regimes to achieve these top priorities. ...

... A key problem: Seventy percent of seniors think the changes Congress is considering will either have no effect or make the situation worse, according to one CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll. And 76 percent say that Congress should do more (than current bills provide) to help senior citizens pay for drugs.

"Healthcare is going to be an important issue in the 2004 election, and prescription drugs are at the top of the list, especially for people over 50. If there is no prescription drug bill, look out: Seniors are going to be angry. But if there is a lousy prescription drug bill, they are going to be even angrier," says pollster John Zogby.

... Yesterday, one of those challengers — former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean — got a prized endorsement from the 1.6-million member Service Employees International Union.

A formal announcement will come next week, but SEIU President Andrew L. Stern emerged from a union board meeting declaring Mr. Dean their candidate.

"We are hopeful that there are other unions who share our members' excitement for Dr. Dean's candidacy," Mr. Stern said in a statement afterward.

The SEIU is the largest union in the AFL-CIO. Another large union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, also is considering endorsing Mr. Dean.

The SEIU endorsement caps a tumultuous few days for Mr. Dean.

... Howard Dean has shown exactly the wrong way to restore a Southern Democratic majority, with statements about "guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks" that managed to offend everybody, from millions of Americans of every race and region who view the Confederate flag as a symbol of racial oppression to southerners who resent being inaccurately and condescendingly stereotyped. The modern South is not The Dukes of Hazzard.

As dozens of DLC elected officials have shown, the right way for Democrats to win a majority in the South is build a durable biracial majority. No doubt the GOP is still willing to play the race card whenever it can get away with it. But most Southern voters are repulsed by those tactics.

... Dean scored a coup in picking up the endorsement recently of Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.). Jackson told me Wednesday that Dean called him on Saturday to brief him on the developing problem. ''I encouraged the campaign to address this [i.e., lack of white support for Dems in South] issue frontally,'' Jackson said...

Former Vermont governor Howard Dean, hoping to stomp out a growing controversy over race, today said he regretted any "pain" he caused by saying he wanted to "be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks."

One day after his Democratic presidential rivals demanded he apologize for his remarks, which they called offensive to blacks and southern whites, Dean for the first time expressed remorse. "I regret the pain that I may have caused either to African American or southern white voters," he said in New York. What he had hoped to do, Dean said, was provoke a "painful" dialogue about race among all voters, including those displaying confederate flags. But, he said, "I started this discussion in a clumsy way."...

... Richard Nixon's successful "Southern Strategy" of 1968 became the blueprint for Ronald Reagan's Southern inroads and Lee Atwater and George Bush's Willie Hortonism.

…when I sat down and began to read Miller's new book, the very first paragraph made me laugh so hard that I practically spit my morning coffee. "The liberal Washington crowd," Miller writes, are "gold medalists in the Sneering Olympics… If this is a national party, sushi is our national dish. If this is a national party, surfboarding has become our national pastime. . . . The biggest problem with the party leadership is that they know nothing about the modern South. They still see it as a land of magnolias and mint juleps, with the pointy-headed KKK lurking in the background, waiting to burn a cross or lynch blacks or Jews."

It is not… a difference rooted in policy. Instead, Miller believes that his party has become so elitist that it is no longer capable of appreciating and communicating with white Southerners. He believes the party condescends to the South, and if you know the man, you know that nothing angers him more than the thought that somebody, somewhere, might be looking down his nose at Zell Miller.

Given that reality, it might be tempting to dismiss Miller's attack as the product of one man's personality disorder. But it's more than that. Miller's anger at the Democrats is also an accurate reflection of the disaffection felt by millions of other white Southerners toward their former party.

Miller lacks the honesty to admit that fact [i.e, "race"], even though he brags shamelessly to his readers about having a conscience so tough that it's "on steroids, has a black belt and long fingernails and stomps around inside of me."…

... As a result of that change, the Democratic Party became identified by many as the party of black Southerners, which in turn allowed the Republicans to market themselves as the party of whites. Miller knows that history better than anyone, because he lived it, and it is an act of fundamental dishonesty for him to now deny its lingering impact.

Another part of the problem is style. On issues such as the economy, Social Security, health care and taxation, the Democratic Party ought to be at least competitive in attracting the votes of white Southerners. Too often, though, Democrats try to sell their populist policies by using elitist rhetoric, while Republicans sell elitist policies using populist rhetoric. Not surprisingly, the Republicans often win.

Some Democrats are finally beginning to rethink that approach. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean recently said he wants to be "the candidate for guys with Confederate flags and their pickup trucks. We can't beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross section of Democrats."

[Dean’s] right: For too long, national leaders in the Democratic Party have indeed written off much of the white South in the mistaken belief that racial issues made their votes unattainable.

For U.S. soldiers posted here [Tikrit], these dusty streets are like Dodge City. Citizens rarely smile at them. Children throw stones and make obscene gestures. Guerrillas here have proved adept at using rocket-propelled grenades to down a helicopter and to kill a GI in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle; then they steal away without getting caught. Gunfights, rocket attacks and bombs have killed 10 Americans since early June.

Tikrit, a town of 30,000, was the soul of Saddam's regime. Today it is among the most anti-American of cities within the Sunni Triangle, a volatile region north of Baghdad where U.S. forces have come under punishing attacks. The deadliest was Sunday when a helicopter was shot down near Fallujah, killing 15 soldiers....

(I am paraphrasing much here.) The results of the poll offers scope “for serious analysis of recent global political trends, and also much ammunition for simplistic, knee-jerk reactions from both Americans and Europeans.” After discussions with Europeans, Americans and Middle Easterners in Paris and London, Khouri’s concludes “that these poll results should be treated as a sobering wake-up call by all concerned.”

The results of the poll prompts an understanding of a polarizing dichotomy, where two nations, the US and Israel, “see themselves as the fountainheads of democracy, peace, and prosperity in the Middle East are perceived in Europe as the No. 1 and 2 threats to world peace.”

As Khouri notes, “This is neither a statistical sampling error, nor a reflection of primordial hatreds or entrenched anti-Semitism. The EU presidency quickly criticized the poll as ‘misleading,’” and the respected Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles has charged that anti-Semitism is ‘deeply embedded within European society’. Historical anti-Semitism and modern anti-Americanism certainly partially explain these results,” Khouri continues, “but only partially.”

The full explanation is more a reflection of the law of political physics: for every foreign policy action there is a reaction of equal intensity. The European poll is only one sign of a much wider, global phenomenon that is repeatedly confirmed in polls from many other countries.

The message is very clear because it is so frequently and clearly expressed: the world respects American values and domestic practices, but dislikes the way that the US uses its power around the world. The same applies to Israel and its behavior: The world generally admires Israel’s feats in nation-building, human ingenuity, and economic productivity and prosperity, but strongly rejects Israel’s colonial, often racist, policies towards the Palestinians. The US and Israel, like all countries, do good and bad things.

This dichotomy explicitly challenges and negates the more simplistic, one-dimensional approach to the world that American and Israeli leaders try to foist on us: that you are with us or against us, that you love or hate Jews, that you are tolerant or racist, that you accept or reject freedom, and other such black-and-white, cartoon-like worldviews … (Khouri offers several telling examples of these binary positions, but then concludes that it is “a grossly inaccurate description of how the world works and how decent people feel about the US, Israel, and any other country.”

In the epicenter of anti-American hatred, even the most generous of gestures is viewed with a suspicious eye. The day after 16 American servicemen died when their helicopter was shot out of the sky here, a group of American soldiers tossed handfuls of candy from their Humvees to the Iraqi children who lined the road. "Don't touch it, don't touch it!" the Iraqi children squealed. "It's poison from the Americans. It will kill you."

This single convoluted act and image captures America’s self-image as bringing freedom and candy to the world ­ but the world runs away, shuns the candy, or even shoots the American soldiers. The combined naive goodness and aggressive arrogance of the United States cannot even convince Iraqi children to pick up candy. The good and the bad are a package deal. No wonder Europeans fear the US.

Only one in seven Americans agrees with President Bush's assertion that the conflict in Iraq is the most important fight in the war on terrorism…Since Sept. 7, when Bush addressed the nation to build support for the war in Iraq, he described Iraq as "the central front" in the war on terrorism. "We will fight this war against terror until it is won…. Iraq is now the central front."


… the poll found that, although 61 percent of the respondents believe Iraq is part of the war on terrorism, just 14 percent think it is the "most important" part.

This doubt -- shared by some experts in military strategy -- poses a potential problem for Bush, because it indicates that a large majority of Americans disagrees with his main argument for justifying the continuing occupation of Iraq, which has proven costlier and bloodier than was generally predicted before the war. Experts in public opinion say it may explain why support for Bush's policies on Iraq has sagged.

Bush is also hearing similar doubts from some lawmakers in his own party. Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa) criticized the administration's thinking about Iraq as " one of the most misguided assumptions in the history of United States strategic thinking "… the occupation could increase the threats to American security…

… Wesley Clark, for all his fame, is the least known of the major candidates. He is a complex man, intense and often tightly wound. He can also be relaxed and humorous. He is a talented mimic who can mock his own performance in the debates. He is capable of apologizing for the slightest discourtesy without being prompted, a rarity among politicians and part of his considerable charm. He is known to be exceptionally intelligent—he was first in his class at West Point and a Rhodes Scholar —but he is clearly aware that he has a lot to learn in his campaign. He's shown that he can change his mind….

Several people who are well informed about military politics or who worked with Clark during the Kosovo war believe that his enemies were largely motivated by professional jealousy of a US general who rose so quickly and also got international attention for a war unpopular with many of his colleagues. Some also say that Clark was too cerebral, too much of an intellectual for some of his fellow military officers. Besides, there is an inherent tension in wartime between the commanders on the ground and their superiors in Washington. In 1943 during the fighting in North Africa, Dwight Eisenhower thought he'd be fired. …

Michael Gordon, the Times's able military reporter, who covered the Kosovo war, wrote of Clark in early October that " while NATO's military campaign was not perfect by any means...the general's judgment of... critical issues seems pretty solid when viewed in perspective; a humanitarian wrong was righted and NATO won its first and only war. "….

Clark is preparing detailed programs on several domestic issues, advised by, among others, former Clinton economic officials including Laura Tyson and Robert Rubin. In fact, sixteen-point proposals for policy are less useful to voters than their getting a sense of the character of the candidates, as well as of the general direction of their policies and how they plan to pay for them…

As an example of his idea of a New Patriotism, Clark said at Hunter, "There's nothing more American— nothing more patriotic—than speaking out, questioning authority, and holding your leaders accountable." [See the long extract that follows below that I didn’t include.]

In his first major speech after he announced his candidacy, given at the Citadel in South Carolina, he said,
The administration has done many wrong-headed things. One of the worst has been to try to define patriotism as agreement with the current administration.... No president has the right to define patriotism. No president has the right to drape himself in the flag of patriotism and then demean those who would speak out against him.

Last March, while he was still appearing on CNN as a military analyst, he was interviewed on CNN's Newsnight with Aaron Brown, just after Michael Moore had delivered one of his tirades against the Bush administration, in particular its policy in Iraq. When asked by Brown how he would respond, Clark replied, "People in the military not only respect dissent, they expect dissent.... That's democratic, let's have it out." Dissent over Iraq, he said, "should be directed at the policies of the government, not the troops fighting the war." …

Robert Fisk is used to readers' derisive letters. Usually he ignores them, like the one last month from Atlanta that said his article about dead Iraqis was as "appalling" and "subversive" as a speech by Osama bin Laden.
For the piece in question, Fisk -- a foreign correspondent with the London paper the Independent -- interviewed families of Iraqi civilians who've been killed (by thieves, robbers, revenge-seekers and unknown assailants) since American and British forces deposed Saddam Hussein. In typical Fisk fashion, the article is well reported, nicely written -- and full of polemics, aimed in this case at U.S. and British authorities for ignoring "the daily slaughter of Iraq's innocents" (his article estimates 10, 000 civilian deaths in five months) and creating an environment that's as bad for Iraqis as it was under Hussein.
"The occupation powers, the 'Provisional Coalition Authority,' love statistics when they are useful," Fisk wrote. "They can tell you the number of newly re-opened schools, newly appointed doctors and the previous day's oil production in seconds. The daily slaughter of Iraq's innocents, needless to say, is not among their figures."

Fisk doesn't believe in the concept, calling it a specious idea that, as practiced by American reporters, produces dull and predictable writing weighed down by obfuscating comments from official government sources.

In the world of Robert Fisk, there's a holy template for how to report from the Middle East, Afghanistan and other hot spots: Give readers a "human" look at unfolding events, put yourself in the story (Fisk pieces inevitably use "I" a lot, as in "I came to the conclusion . . ."), don't bog it down with background that readers should know and pepper every piece with a critical eye on the "why" of things. Why are so many Baghdad residents dying under U.S. occupation? Why are American officials underplaying the sabotage of Iraq's oil pipelines? Why are average Iraqis willing to commit suicide-bombings against American soldiers?

Fisk, a brilliant man who has a Ph.D. in political science from Trinity College in Ireland, thinks he knows all the answers and so he never hesitates to finger-point in stories. Fisk's editors at the Independent approve of this approach -- as do Fisk's legions of fans, many of whom live in the Bay Area, where his dispatches from Baghdad, Beirut and elsewhere are devoured like sacred writs for their insight, edge and rhetorical tone.

Fisk is based in Lebanon. He regularly flies to the Bay Area to gives speeches for causes he believes in (such as the Middle East Children's Alliance). In person, Fisk is a surprising mixture of funny and absolute -- as if God had cloned Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky into a single, voluminous figure….

U.S. intelligence gathering operations are being called into question after the devastating attacks on the weekend, and the rocket attacks and suicide bombings rocking Baghdad and other cities almost every day.

To many Iraqis in the know, and even among Coalition officials, the answer is clear. ...

"One of the biggest mistakes of the coalition forces was to dissolve the army and the security forces," Brig. Gen. Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani told IPS in Baghdad. Shahwani left Iraq in 1990 and became a part of Washington's covert efforts to topple Saddam Hussein....

"During the liberation of Iraq, when the U.S. army was moving from the south towards Baghdad, it was clear that the Iraqi element as a partner was removed from the war planning," he says. "Everything was handled completely by the U.S. military, and this is something that I think was a mistake."...

"The coalition forces insist on full control when it comes to making decisions on security," he says. "They have not allowed any role to the political forces in the security area. They think of the political forces as militias and they think they might use their guns, and there would civil war." In addition, says Qanbar, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has tried to recruit its own informers and "intelligence assets", but this has not worked.

bloc was conceived by Brazil and India as a way to bring together large, resource-rich and economically dynamic nations from the South — a not strictly geographical label since it includes China as well as Indonesia, Thailand, South Africa, Nigeria, Mexico and Argentina. Because together they account for more than half the world's population, and, increasingly, have substantial manufacturing centers of their own, these nations “have the clout to demand greater access to the markets of industrialized nations .”

This week in Washington and later this month in Miami, trade ministers from across the Americas are to meet again to try to adjust the rules that would govern free trade in the hemisphere, and the exchanges promise to be caustic. The prospect of a global agreement or even a hemispheric pact like Washington's pet project — the Free Trade Area of the Americas — seems to be receding, replaced by a fragmented panorama in which resentment and bitterness set the tone….

"Years ago, the North-South divide was largely ideologically based," she said, with the poorer countries looking to shield themselves, through protectionism, from the risks of free trade. Now, she said, there are "floating combinations of countries, in which essential economic interests, and not ideology, are the guidepost."

In that context, the Cancun talks were also notable for the gulf that arose between the Group of 20-plus and the rest of what is known as the developing world. The conference was brought to a halt — over the question of American and European agricultural subsidies — not by Brazil and its allies but by a larger, separate coalition of less developed countries, mostly African and Caribbean, that felt disenfranchised and ignored. "If it were just up to the Group of 20-plus, the meeting would have ended with a decision to keep negotiating," said Rubens Ricupero, a Brazilian who is the director of the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development.

Members of the new bloc also seem to be taking a patchwork approach, seeking new trade patterns among themselves that make political sense even if at the cost of economic efficiency. India, for example, has bypassed Boeing and Airbus in favor of Brazil's Embraer as it tries to modernize its fleet of government planes.

While the coalition has forced the United States, Europe and Japan to take note and rethink their plans, it does not speak with a single voice on all matters. "India and China don't have the same interests as we do in Brazil, because they are not big agricultural exporters, but rather importers," said Felipe Lampreia, a former Brazilian foreign minister. "But that doesn't mean developing countries can't come together on particular themes."

... The Iraqis now say that it's eerily like under Saddam's regime, even calling one of the commanders 'little Saddam.' The commanders are threatening to take the Iraqis' equipment or funding away if they don't do what they say, but they advertise this 'new, free Iraq.' The military is not a democracy and this doesn't really seem like the way to help build democratic institutions there. My husband tells me that everything is so orchestrated; like when politicians go to Iraq, they meet with soldiers who just got there, so they don't get a real assessment of how demoralized many soldiers are. The dignitaries virtually never meet with reservists, like my husband. He's been in and out of the military for 29 years and just wanted to get another year in as a reservist for his pension. It's incredible how badly the reservists are treated. He just got a new flak jacket about a week ago, but it doesn't have the ceramic plate, so I don't know how much good it does. ...

Saddam Hussein refused to order a counterattack against U.S. troops when war erupted in March because he misjudged the initial ground thrust as a ruse and had been convinced earlier by Russian and French contacts that he could avoid or survive a land invasion…

“Hussein sure of his own survival,” minister Tariq Aziz has told interrogators, says confusion reigned on eve of war with U.S…

... It is also imperative that dying for the State be viewed as rewarding and profitable. It is nice that the House just passed an increase in the soldier’s death benefit from $6,000 to $12,000...)

[Buehring] arrived at the air force base in Dover, Del., in the middle of the night, in an aluminum shipping case draped in an American flag… he became one of an estimated 60,000 American casualties of war that have been processed there over almost five decades…

But America never saw Lt.-Col. Buehring's arrival, days after a rocket from a homemade launcher ended his life at age 40 in Baghdad's heavily fortified Rasheed Hotel last Monday.

Americans have never seen any of the other 359 bodies returning from Iraq. Nor do they see the wounded cramming the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington or soldiers who say they are being treated inhumanely awaiting medical treatment at Fort Stewart, Ga.

President George W. Bush's administration sweeps the messy parts of war. — the grieving families, the flag-draped coffins, the soldiers who have lost limbs — into a far corner of the nation's attic. .No television cameras are allowed at Dover. .

If stories of wounded soldiers are told, they are told by hometown papers, but there is no national attention given to the recuperating veterans here in the nation's capital.

More than 1,700 Americans have been wounded in Iraq since the March invasion.

"You can call it news control or information control or flat-out propaganda," says Christopher Simpson, a communications professor at Washington's American University.

"Whatever you call it, this is the most extensive effort at spinning a war that the department of defence has ever undertaken in this country."

Simpson notes that photos of the dead returning to American soil have historically been part of the ceremony, part of the picture of conflict and part of the public closure for families — until now.

"This White House is the greatest user of propaganda in American history and if they had a shred of honesty, they would admit it. But they can't." .. .

Though the Bush administration has for months claimed that foreign fighters were entering Iraq to kill Americans, U.S. military commanders who are responsible for monitoring the borders here say that they have not witnessed a large infiltration of foreign terrorists.

As recently as Tuesday, President Bush told reporters "the foreign terrorists are trying to create conditions of fear and retreat because they fear a free and peaceful state in the midst of a part of the world where terror has found recruits."

But in interviews with officers whose areas of operations include Iraq's borders with Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran _ the primary Arab entry points into Iraq - all said there is no evidence that a significant number of foreign terrorists have entered the country.

"We cover the border, so we would know if they came in or not," said Lt. Col. Antonio Aguto, the executive officer of the U.S. Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which monitors the Iraqi border with Syria and Saudi Arabia. "Most of them are locals."

The officers said that very few foreigners have been captured while crossing into Iraq illegally, arrested later inside Iraq or detained when trying to enter the country at existing border checkpoints.

One intelligence officer said emphatically that there was simply no evidence to support the mass infiltration claim. ...

…The import of prescription drugs from Canada, where government price controls, provincial health-plan buying power and a weaker currency mean that many medicines are available at prices far below those in the U.S. free-market system.

A trend that started with a trickle of bus tours of seniors from northern states has blossomed into a billion-dollar business as Americans have developed a deep appetite for imported drugs ordered on-line, by mail or in person. Because the United States is the only developed nation that does not regulate drug prices and therefore charges the highest prices in the world for many popular prescription drugs, the cost savings to consumers and governments can be vast. According to a U.S. congressional study, drug prices in Canada are on average 38 per cent lower than in the United States, and some drugs sell in Canada for less than half the U.S. price …

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend” Traditional Muslim Proverb

The general rule of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" governs the game of balance of power. Ideology takes a back seat in international balance-of-power geopolitics.
The Abduction of Modernity, Part 6a: “Imperialism as modernity,” by Henry C K Liu

… the idea of an Islamic alliance between Sunni and Shiite extremists has been a nightmare scenario for Western intelligence agencies, their allies in the Muslim world and Israel. Beginning in the 1980s, evidence that hard-liners from both these Islamic sects have been setting aside the theological differences that have kept them apart from 14 centuries and possibly even cooperating now and then on particular operations in which the interests of all concerned are advanced… [Follow the link above and read the next few paragraphs on the historical genealogy of tensions and links between Sunnis and Shiites.]

…[While] no formalized hard-and-fast alliance between Shiite and Sunni hard-liners, dedicated to attacking the West and its Arab friends, ever seemed to emerge.. [evidence suggests] that may be changing, largely as a consequence of Sept. 11, 2001, and the US response to that unprecedented terrorist attack on its soil.

… there seems little doubt that US President George W. Bush’s “war against terrorism” is increasingly perceived in the Muslim world as a new Judeo-Christian crusade against Islam and its people. The conquest and occupation of Iraq has radicalized the Muslim world to an unprecedented degree.

These days, Iran and its Shiite Lebanese ally, Hizbullah, are actively aiding the Palestinian Sunni fundamentalists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and latterly secular Sunni-dominated forces loyal to Yasser Arafat as well…

Recent history has demonstrated that there are few religious-ideological barriers in the world of international terrorism… It would be a mistake to assume that Islamist international terror groups are driven primarily by the religious associations with radical Sunni or radical Shiite Islam. These groups [i.e., shi'ites and sunnis] have their own geopolitical interests in bridging this great Islamic divide particularly their antipathy for the US and it’s allies.

recently quoted US intelligence sources as saying that Osama bin Laden’s 24-year-old son, Saad, and other high-ranking Al-Qaeda figures were being given sanctuary in Iran, from where they are masterminding operations against the West. This all sounds remarkably like the Bush administration’s efforts to link Al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein as a justification for invading Iraq….

It is ironic that the US invasion of Iraq may be the instrument that pushes Sunni and Shiite together. An emerging alliance of Shiites and Sunnis in postwar Iraq may be the path to stability and the answer to the Americans’ inept efforts to end the chaos they engendered when they deposed Saddam’s brutal regime. Despite the escalating guerrilla war against the Americans, so far, at least, there has been no manifestation of the bloodbath between the long-repressed Shiites, who comprise some 60 percent of Iraq’s 24 million population, and the minority Sunnis who dominated Saddam’s regime that many had feared would happen once the war ended.

two key leaders of the rival sects, the firebrand Shiite preacher Muqtada al-Sadr and the charismatic Ahmed Kubeisi of the Sunnis, have come together to oppose the US occupation and both command considerable grassroots support from their coreligionists. Both have preached unity among Sunnis and Shiites and both have run afoul of the Americans, who view the alliance between the two clerics with considerable concern and dismay and have blocked both from sitting on the US-appointed 25-member Governing Council of Iraq.

Given Saddam’s brutal crackdown on the Shiites, who dominate southern Iraq and pockets west of Baghdad, over the years it came as little surprise that the US occupation found the most support among Iraq’s largest religious group. But radicals like Sadr, the son of a revered Shiite cleric, Mohammed Sadiq Sadr, who was murdered in 1999 along with two other sons by Saddam’s regime, have been taking an increasingly hostile position against the occupation that could extend the violence, so far largely confined to the so-called “Sunni triangle” north and west of Baghdad, to the volatile south as well.

An indication of the alliance between Sadr and Kobeisi has been slogans that have recently appeared in mosques linked to them that read: “No Sunni. No Shiite. Only Islam.”
…

Many Muslims are convinced that pro-Western Arab regimes, particularly the rulers of Saudi Arabia, have also done much to maintain the religious schism for political purposes, largely by financing militant Sunni factions in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere over the years.

It is this unholy alliance of secular Arab nationalism of Saddam’s Iraq, the Wahhabi Islamic fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia and Western imperialism with its massive media resources that has created the present perception of a vast Shiite-Sunni divide, according to Islamic analyst Sultan Shahin.

The fact that the widely predicted Shiite backlash against the decades-long Sunni domination of Iraq has not materialized may mean that the imperialist project of divide and rule has not succeed in that country, at least so far. Now it is for the Shiites and Sunnis in other parts of world to build on the Iraqi example and seek to bridge the gulf separating the two sects promote harmony and peace undeterred by the bigotry of extremists and the machinations of imperialist powers.