Saturday, February 16, 2002

Democrats Challenge Justice's Redistricting Review in Miss.


By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 16, 2002; Page A06


A band of House Democrats yesterday accused the Justice Department of politicizing the Voting Rights Act, using it to undermine black voting strength in Mississippi and to boost the chances that Rep. Charles W. "Chip" Pickering Jr. (R) will defeat Rep. Ronnie Shows (D) in the November election.

"This manipulation of the Voting Rights Act to disenfranchise minority voters raises questions about your administration's commitment to civil rights in general and whether your Justice Department can carry out a fair review of minority voting rights in redistricting plans across the country," eight Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee wrote in a letter to President Bush.

Justice Department spokesman Dan Nelson denied the charges, saying, "The department's review of this matter will be conducted in a principled fashion and in a manner consistent with the department's treatment of all redistricting plans submitted for review," he said.

The Democrats contend that the Justice Department has waited until the last minute to raise questions about a pro-Democratic, pro-minority redistricting plan in order to further delay by 60 days the department's "preclearance," which is required in southern states before changes in election laws can take effect.

The consequence of the delay, the Democrats wrote, is that a separate plan backed by "a panel of three Republican-appointed federal judges" that weakens black voting strength and favors Pickering will become the law for the 2002 election. Boundaries for the state's congressional districts must be set by March 1. District lines drawn by federal judges do not require preclearance.

The state and federal court plans put two incumbents, Pickering and Shows, in the same Jackson-based district. In the state court plan, the district has a 37.5 percent black voting age population. In the federal court plan, the district has a 30 percent black voting age population and adds a number of strongly Republican precincts from white suburbs to the east of Jackson in Rankin County.

"The bottom line is that it appears the department is going out of its way to create novel and unique legal arguments which merely serve to delay the pre-clearance procedure unnecessarily and facilitate adoption of a discriminatory redistricting plan. This turns the Voting Rights Act on its head," wrote the Democrats led by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (Mich).

In southern congressional elections, the percentage of black voters can be crucial to the outcome, especially in a state like Mississippi, where whites have become strongly Republican and blacks remain a reliable Democratic constituency.

Pickering's campaign manager, Henry Barbour, said questions raised by the Justice Department are "pretty serious" and state Attorney General Mike Moore will need a substantial period of time to answer then. "The hurdle is high for anybody to handle the kind of questions Justice is asking," he said. But he also noted that the delay increases the likelihood that the pro-Pickering federal court plan will be used in the 2002 elections.

Officials in Moore's office said they will try to get answers to Justice as soon as this weekend.

Shows issued a statement charging that the Justice Department "stalls again" and saying that "preclearance should not be used as a political tool."


© 2002 The Washington Post Company
The Transatlantic Rift Is Getting Serious


By David Ignatius

Friday, February 15, 2002; Page A33


Maybe it's because this is an election year in Europe and politicians there are more likely to make inflammatory remarks. Or maybe it's because America -- at once victorious and vulnerable after its Afghan success -- is talking belligerently as it gropes toward the next phase of its war against terrorism.

But whatever the causes, the rift between the United States and its European "allies" is getting serious. You could hear the NATO alliance tearing at the seams on Tuesday as Germany's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, denounced the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policy and warned that Europeans will refuse to be treated like "satellite" states. That followed similar comments from the French prime minister, Lionel Jospin.

For President Bush, it must be a relief to be heading across the Pacific this weekend, toward Asia and away from those pesky Europeans. At least Beijing supports his anti-terrorism policy.

It's tempting to regard the recent Euro-American friction as simply a dispute over Bush's "axis-grinding" State of the Union speech. Or to believe that, in the memorable words of the prison warden in "Cool Hand Luke" to Paul Newman: "What we have here is a failure to communicate."

But I fear it's something considerably worse. What is driving a wedge between the United States and Europe isn't simply a lack of dialogue but a growing divergence of interests and capabilities. If this imbalance is not addressed quickly, both sides will soon find themselves on very unstable ground.

The imbalance begins with military power. The United States is getting stronger, relative to Europe. It's like a marriage that has gotten out of sync -- with one partner feeling left behind as the other becomes more successful.

A new generation of U.S. military technology was on display in Afghanistan, and it is years ahead of what Europe has today -- or is willing to pay for in the future. From this strategic imbalance flows everything else: America doesn't need Europe to help fight its war in Afghanistan; and Europe couldn't help much anyway, even if it wanted to. European defense planners are concentrating their limited resources on building their own modest strike force, outside NATO. Militarily, these allies may not need each other.

This growing mismatch was the unspoken theme of this month's gathering of defense experts at the annual "Werkunde" conference in Munich. The NATO secretary general, Lord Robertson, said it out loud when he warned that Europe could soon become a "military pygmy." But there's no sign the Europeans are willing to pay for the necessary growth hormone.

The fact is, the mercurial Europeans aren't even America's key diplomatic allies anymore. Since Sept. 11, that role has been played by Russia's president, Vladimir Putin.

So how to save the aging Euro-American marriage before either spouse does something really stupid? One thing that would help is if each side tried to understand what is motivating the other's anxieties.

What Europeans don't understand is how much America was changed by Sept. 11. The example I use to explain this transformation to my European friends is my parents' neighborhood in Washington. It's a comfortable, old-fashioned place with big houses and tree-lined streets. Before 9-11, you would have had trouble finding an American flag in this comfortable suburb. Today, the stars and stripes are flying above almost every door.

American patriotism is so loud and self-congratulatory in ordinary times -- think of the ending of your typical Hollywood movie -- that it's hard for Europeans to realize that this time it really is different. Americans feel that they are at war. They feel vulnerable. They want to destroy the enemy before the enemy destroys them. Europeans may find that kind of thinking naive and simplistic, but they can't wish it away.

Now turn over the coin: What Americans don't understand is that Europeans have been fighting terrorism for decades. The British coped with IRA bombs exploding in the center of London; the French lived with bombs in the Metro and assassins in the streets; the Italians lived with Red Brigades that blew up train stations; the Spaniards continue to face regular bombings by Basque terrorists. The Europeans don't need to be lectured to by Americans about how fighting terrorism is a long and bloody war; they've lived it.

Americans also fail to understand how vulnerable Europeans feel because of their own growing Muslim populations. It's easy for America, across the water, to talk about bombing Iraq and Iran. But Europeans worry they will be caught in the fallout. The biggest undiscussed issue in Europe is the millions of Muslims living in France, Britain, Germany and other countries. They are a brooding, menacing presence for many Europeans.

Paradoxically, the struggle against terrorism is one of the few issues that could unite these wayward allies. The challenge now is to identify and destroy al Qaeda's networks of sleeper agents in Europe and the United States. The Europeans won't have to spend billions on new defense hardware. All that's required is that America and Europe work together on intelligence operations and police work. It's certainly a cheaper option than divorce.



© 2002 The Washington Post Company
2/15/02 - Burton threatens Bush with contempt charge



WASHINGTON, Feb 14, 2002 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- House Government Reform Committee Chairman Dan Burton Thursday threatened to hold President Bush in contempt of Congress unless the administration releases several sets of subpoenaed Justice Department documents to his committee.
The documents relate to a series of investigations the committee has held into possible campaign finance violations by the Clinton administration and into the misuse of informants by federal law enforcement.

"Should I get about 30 Republicans and all of the House Democrats and vote to hold the president in contempt of Congress?" Burton, R-Ind., asked during Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Bybee's testimony before the committee. "That's exactly what we're going to do if you don't give us those documents."

Burton's committee has requested documents on three separate investigations. One is a long-running investigation by Burton and the committee into the improper use of informants by the FBI over a 30-year period of organized crime investigations in New England.

The committee first informally requested 13 memos related to prosecution decisions and later subpoenaed them from the Justice Department. The committee also requested two documents related to separate campaign finance investigations under the Clinton administration.

On Dec. 12, Bush announced that none of the materials would be supplied to Congress because they are deliberative in nature and, thus, fall under executive privilege.

But Burton has repeatedly argued that the documents -- most of which deal with decisions made from 1967 to 1995 in the organized crime investigations -- are harmless to the current administration. He says they could shed light on a series of failures by the FBI that led to several innocent men spending decades in prison for crimes they did not commit -- despite clear evidence the FBI was aware of their innocence.

They could also help explain the rise of two top FBI informants who leveraged their relationship with law enforcement against their competitors and expanded their criminal empire with the help of their handlers.

"Our government put an innocent man in jail for 30 years, and you don't want us to know why," Burton said. "We want to find out if there are people in jail or that have been put to death by the Justice Department for crimes they did not commit. If I have to fight my own party (to get the contempt citation), I will. But I don't want to do this, so you people must be nuts."

Thursday's hearing explored whether the FBI influenced the early 1970s murder trial of a top informant -- who at the time of the murder was in the witness protection program -- by providing testimony to the defense.

Burton alleges that the FBI and Justice Department ignored the threat to the community posed by the informant because of his previous contributions to convicting mobsters. Joe "The Animal" Barboza eventually received a prison term of 5 years to life in 1971 for his 26th known murder. He was released after just three years from a minimum-security prison.

Committee investigators are convinced that the FBI helped him avoid a longer sentence, despite having a famously violent criminal history, because of his previous value as an informant against organized crime.

Bybee denied that the administration was refusing to help with the investigation, and said that both the White House and Justice were willing to work with the committee to determine which documents needed to be shared with investigators.

"With respect to the documents, the administration will be happy to sit down with you and discuss your needs," he said. "That is our instruction from the president."

But this answer did little to appease Burton, who first responded with the threat to hold the president in contempt. He also repeatedly said that his committee and its power of subpoena should have final say in which documents it needs to see while investigating abuses of power.

Adding to the irritation of the committee members was the arrival on Wednesday night of thousands of pages of Justice Department documents -- which had been requested, but not subpoenaed by the committee -- for committee staff. This coincided with the administration allowing investigators to view, but not copy or release, one of the subpoenaed memos.

Such arguments over the responsibility of the White House to provide documents to Congress are nothing new to the Bush administration, which is already embroiled in several fights with the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative body, and with Burton's Democratic counterpart on the committee, California Rep. Henry Waxman.

The GAO has been demanding notes from meetings between Vice President Dick Cheney and energy industry officials during the deliberations that led to the formation of the Bush energy policy proposals last year. The White House has refused to provide them, and the GAO has threatened to sue the vice president to gain access to the notes.

Waxman has also been vocal on the same issue, but so far, has been unable to convince Burton to issue subpoenas to administration officials over the energy policy talks. But a Republican committee source expressed frustration with the White House because these latest refusals are making it more difficult for Burton to deny Waxman's requests for a subpoena.

By P. MITCHELL PROTHERO


Copyright 2002 by United Press International.


The Nation

FEATURE STORY | March 4, 2002

How Enron Did Texas
by NATE BLAKESLEE


In the spring of 1991 Texas State Representative Kevin Bailey killed an Enron bill. The freshman Democrat from Houston had been advised by his veteran campaign manager to play ball with the company, which at that point was still just a natural-gas-pipeline concern. But Bailey didn't listen, and it very nearly ended his career. In 1992 he found himself in a primary fight against an Enron-recruited candidate, who promptly used Enron cash to hire away Bailey's own campaign manager. When Bailey narrowly won that contest, Enron tried to unseat him again in 1994. Bailey survived, but he was chastened. Even then, "Ken Lay had a lot of influence," he said. "People were afraid to mess with him, because they always knew he'd try to get you." In subsequent years, Enron grew steadily more powerful in Texas. The company rose in tandem with the state Republican Party, which has been lavishly bankrolled by Enron executives and PACs. By 1999, when the Republicans, led by George W. Bush, swept every statewide Democratic official out of office and seized control of the State Senate for the first time since Reconstruction, Enron was sitting at the top of the heap, the king of the lobby.

That was the year Enron pushed its holy grail, deregulation of retail electricity, through the Texas legislature. Through its joint venture, the New Power Company, Enron stood to make a bundle when competition officially began in January of this year--if only the company were around to see it. Instead, Lay and his wife are fighting for liquidity, and the state's top Republican officials are heading into an election year with a Texas-size albatross around their necks. Governor Rick Perry has taken more than $227,075 from the company, including a $25,000 check from Ken Lay delivered the day after Perry appointed a former Enron executive, Max Yzaguirre, to head the Texas Public Utility Commission. Yzaguirre resigned under pressure on January 18, but Perry says he will not be returning the money. Neither will Republican Attorney General John Cornyn, who has received $193,000 from Enron. Cornyn recused himself from the state's investigation of the meltdown, though so far there has been little activity on that front. State Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander, the elected official who oversees the collection of taxes from companies like Enron, has received $63,000 in contributions. Enron is also the largest corporate contributor to the current membership of the Texas Supreme Court, whose justices are elected in expensive partisan races and where some portion of the coming Enron litigation may very well wind up.

Already some veteran politicos are invoking the dreaded name of Sharpstown, the Texas banking scandal of the early 1970s. In the wake of that disaster, voters replaced virtually every incumbent statewide elected official, as well as half the sitting legislators. As the current election season gets under way, each new revelation in the morning paper has campaign consultants scrambling to uncover who got what from Enron over the past decade, and what Enron got in return.

In Houston, Enron's money went to art museums, opera houses and hospitals; in Austin, it went to politicians. "Lay and the big executives were absolutely everywhere in political circles," Democratic lobbyist Patrick Woodson said. "I mean, Enron's influence was just enormous." For the better part of a decade, Enron applied that influence with single-minded purpose toward one goal: cracking open the lock that the state's investor-owned utilities, principally Texas Utilities and Houston Lighting and Power, had on retail electricity sales--and on Texas politics.

"You have to understand, what they did in Texas politics is pretty amazing," Woodson said. The real roadblock to deregulation was that the strongest lobby in Texas, the investor-owned utilities (or IOUs, in regulatory parlance), had no interest in competition. Never mind that when Enron began pushing for electricity dereg in the mid-1990s, there was little public interest in the idea, and that power in Texas was already relatively cheap, compared with New England or California. Nobody had ever taken on the big utilities and won--that was Enron's real coup. "Enron took them on and put for the first time credible financial resources up against them," Woodson said. "There's no question that if Enron had collapsed before the 1999 session," Kevin Bailey says, "we wouldn't have had dereg in Texas."

As Enron wedged its way into the inner circles of state government, the company's political largesse became legendary. "I think they viewed campaigns as an investment strategy, and it paid off for them," Woodson said. The most important investment Enron made was in George W. Bush's first gubernatorial campaign, in 1994. As Bush somewhat disingenuously sought to remind voters this past December, Lay had been a minor patron of Democratic Governor Ann Richards. But when W. entered politics, Lay switched horses in a big way. A longtime supporter of the Bush clan, Lay was considered for a Cabinet post during the first Bush presidency. He then became a close adviser to W. and a key source of funds: $146,500 from Enron PACs and executives in the 1994 campaign. After Bush eked out a narrow win over Richards, the new governor gave the company a fundamental component of its Texas strategy in one of his first appointments: Public Utility Commissioner Pat Wood, a deregulator's dream.

A Harvard law graduate from Port Arthur, Texas, Wood began his public career on the staff of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which was in the process of deregulating natural gas sales. Eyebrows were raised when Wood returned to Washington last summer, this time as Bush's choice to head the FERC, because of revelations that Ken Lay himself had vetted the list of candidates and given Wood his approval. But Wood has always been Enron's man. According to a report by Lowell Bergman in the New York Times, Lay endorsed Wood, just 32 at the time, for the PUC job in a letter to Bush in 1994. After four months on the commission, Bush made Wood the chairman, the most powerful regulatory position in the state. In an interview with the Houston Chronicle last year, Wood said that his orders from Bush were clear: "Get us to a market," Bush told him.

By all accounts, Wood did not need any convincing. From the outset, the chairman's pronouncements about the desirability of competition sounded strikingly similar to Enron's growing public relations effort. "Pat Wood was Enron's favorite PUC commissioner," Woodson said. "He started the dereg process and really put the ball in motion for them. They were the biggest player politically and financially in the dereg movement, and Pat was with them every step of the way." Wood has earned praise from some public interest lobbyists, like Public Citizen's Tom Smith, for being amenable to their concerns. But even his supporters agree that competition always came first with Wood, before any other consideration. "They've got religion" became a common refrain about the PUC under Wood.

With prospects looking up, Enron stepped up its campaign, buying statewide television and billboard ads hawking competition. The company funded front groups, like Texans for Affordable Energy, to simulate a grassroots call for deregulation. "That was a big joke, because whenever we went to community meetings we never heard a single person voice an interest other than people who worked for the companies involved," Bailey said. In fact, Texas energy prices were trending downward in the late 1990s, a fact that Wood freely admitted at the time. Because the Texas dereg formula called for freezing rates for several years, dereg initially would mean higher rates than if the legislature had simply done nothing. "But it all became this market argument that Enron put out there," Bailey said. "We had to have a free market; a free market will give people choice." Enron was simultaneously lobbying dozens of state capitals, as well as pushing its now notorious proposal for federal deregulation of online energy trading, which led to the California energy meltdown. Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1996 that Texas's average rate of 6 cents per kilowatt hour was "absurdly high." He said, "There's nothing in this market that suggests we won't see the same savings of 30 to 40 percent we've already seen elsewhere." (This was, of course, several years before price spikes and blackouts began hitting California.) The company hosted luncheons for Texas legislators at posh downtown hotels in Houston, where Lay and other executives gave elaborate presentations on the merits of competition. And always there was plenty of campaign cash--and arm-twisting--to back up the pitch.

As Enron made inroads with legislators, the IOUs began to see the writing on the wall. Bush's support for Enron was a big factor. "It was pretty obvious that the Bush/Pat Wood/Rick Perry triangle was Enron-oriented," one Democratic consultant said. "Without that, the IOUs would have run over them." Wood sweetened the deal for the IOUs by suggesting that, as with California's deregulation plan, they might be allowed to recover debts incurred from bad investments, or so-called stranded costs. In a deregulated environment, inefficient power plants, like Texas's two nuclear facilities, would be worth much less than the value their owners currently claimed for them, since they would not be able to deliver power as cheaply as more efficient competitors could. Utilities would thus be forced to write down the value of those plants, and investors would have to absorb huge losses.

In mid-1998 Wood proposed that utilities--under the guise of preparing for competition--be allowed to raise rates temporarily to recover those stranded costs from consumers, a windfall worth billions. When the 1999 session rolled around, the IOUs were finally on board. "It was free money for Texas Utilities and Houston Lighting and Power, so they figured if it was going to happen, they might as well take what they could get," said Janee Briesemeister of the Consumer's Union. (The method of measuring stranded costs was highly speculative, and, as it turned out, the projected losses have largely failed to materialize in Texas. Some lawmakers have called for a refund of much of the stranded-cost money collected by the utilities over the past two years.)

When things looked rocky, Bush was there to shepherd the deal through the legislature. "He never lobbied us directly," Kevin Bailey said, "but his legislative guys worked it hard." Sometimes a little too hard. Bailey recalled one instance in which a House committee had just approved his pro-consumer amendment to assess more of the stranded costs to big industrial customers instead of individual ratepayers. (Convinced that the bill was destined to pass, many progressives reluctantly supported deregulation in 1999, seeking to get what good they could out of the process.) When the governor's mansion got word that Bailey had added a possible deal-killing amendment to the bill, Terral Smith, Bush's legislative liaison, raced over to the committee. "He pulled all the Republicans into the back room and convinced them to vote again," Bailey said. Smith's heavy-handed tactics miffed enough members that Bailey still prevailed by one vote. The amendment didn't kill the deal, but Smith watched the bill like a hawk the rest of the session, Bailey said.

When Bush called Wood to Washington last June to head the FERC, it was Governor Perry's turn to do Enron a favor. (Perry, the former lieutenant governor, came to office when Bush went to the White House; he has yet to face election as governor.) The devil in deregulation is in the details, and the contest was now being fought in the arena of the PUC's rule-making process. Perry's selection in June of Max Yzaguirre, chief of Enron's Mexico operations, to fill Wood's spot was carefully calculated. Documents released by the governor's office in late December show that Perry's staff debated long and hard about how Yzaguirre's nomination would be viewed. State law prohibits anyone who has worked for a Texas public utility or a direct competitor in the previous two years from serving on the PUC. Perry's staff rationalized that since Yzaguirre hadn't worked for any part of Enron that did business in Texas, his nomination adhered to the letter of the law. In any case, Perry figured, with the legislature recessed Yzaguirre would not face the scrutiny of a nominations committee for eighteen months. (The Texas legislature meets every other January for four months.)

Last fall, however, as interest in Enron's financial troubles increased, Yzaguirre amended his application to reveal that he had served as an executive on several North American subsidiaries of Enron, and things began to unravel. As pressure mounted on Perry in the wake of Enron's December collapse, the governor held fast to his appointment, even after the embarrassing revelation that Lay had personally donated $25,000 to Perry on June 14, 2001, the day after the Yzaguirre appointment. Perry called the timing a coincidence. (In a bizarre episode, Perry's bumbling staff also sought to hide Yzaguirre's criminal record--he shot a whooping crane in south Texas in 1989--from Democrats by redacting portions of his official application, which is a public document.) "I think we underestimated how firmly they would stand by Yzaguirre," said Democratic consultant Kelly Fero. "This was a question of a lot of money. This wasn't just a little payback--this was the guy who was going to oversee deregulation and an awful lot of people were going to get rich." Finally, on January 18, Yzaguirre stepped down.

Meanwhile, a second PUC commissioner, Brett Perlman, has come under fire for previously undisclosed Enron connections. Appointed by Bush in 1999, Perlman worked until 1998 for McKinsey & Company, the consultants who helped Enron evolve from a pipeline company to a global energy trading firm. According to documents obtained by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Perlman described his work there as "assisting the leading US natural gas and electricity trader in developing an industrywide online electricity trading system."

In just as deep with Enron is Texas Attorney General John Cornyn. Despite having accepted $193,000 from the company and its executives, Cornyn at first declined to recuse himself from the state's investigation of the Enron collapse. "This is not the time for him to recuse himself from his duty," his spokesperson told reporters shortly after Enron declared bankruptcy. One day later Cornyn changed course, announcing that he would form a task force within his office to determine the state's strategy and that he would take no part in the investigation. (Cornyn's announcement accompanied a cascade of recusals by Texas officials, including the US Attorney in Houston and several federal judges in the Houston area, all of whom cited conflicts of interest.)

Compared with the effort launched by other states, Texas's investigation of Enron has been noticeably lethargic. In Florida, for example, where public pension funds lost $334 million on Enron investments, the Attorney General began issuing subpoenas shortly after the bankruptcy was announced. Florida is now jockeying with California, New York and several other large states to become the lead plaintiff in a class-action suit to be heard in federal court in Houston. Texas, which has lost more than $60 million in public pension funds, somewhat belatedly announced it would join the suit.

"What [Cornyn] ought to be doing is taking matters before a grand jury in Houston," said former Attorney General Jim Mattox, a Democrat. The AG also has the power to seize corporate records and review them for evidence of illegal activity. Mattox said he would have gone after both Enron and Arthur Andersen's books immediately. "There's no doubt that the state should have a major role in the investigation, but I don't think that's happening," he said. "It raises the greater question of how campaign contributions affect policy," Public Citizen's Tom Smith said. "If the Attorney General is acknowledging this as an issue, then you have to question how others can say it doesn't affect their decision-making."

Among those decision-makers is Chief Justice Tom Phillips of the Texas Supreme Court. Phillips recently told reporters that he would not be returning the $12,250 he took from the company, because to do so would imply that there was something wrong about taking the money in the first place. (In fairness, Phillips is on record calling for judicial campaign reform.) Together, seven justices on the court have taken $134,058 from Enron. One of those justices, Priscilla Owen (down for $8,600), has seen Enron connections threaten her appointment to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, some of whom were already opposed to the conservative Owen, have indicated that she will have to answer some tough questions.

Enron has also funneled thousands of dollars to Texas Supreme Court justices and other GOP officials through a special-interest PAC called Texans for Lawsuit Reform, of which Ken Lay has been a major funder. A handful of deep-pocketed Republicans have made the group, one of several seeking to limit access by plaintiffs to Texas courts (under the rubric of tort reform), the largest PAC in Texas in recent years. TLR and its members have been John Cornyn's single largest career contributor, pitching in a staggering $1.98 million over the past five years. Nowhere has TLR's influence been greater than on the Supreme Court, which has gradually shifted from being generally considered pro-plaintiff to what is now considered one of the most staunchly pro-defendant courts in America. According to a report by the campaign finance watchdog Texans for Public Justice, Enron has fared unusually well before the court, which has accepted two of three petitions brought by the company (both of which Enron eventually won) and rejected all three petitions brought against Enron by adversaries.

Last spring Texas politicians and ratepayers watched nervously as California's deregulation experiment imploded and Texas's own countdown to competition wound down. A series of mysterious price spikes in a pilot program last summer sent state regulators scrambling to determine if anyone might be gaming the system. The findings were inconclusive, and it's too soon to tell how competition will play out. "I think we're going to have to come back to the legislature to make the whole process more transparent," said Public Citizen's Tom Smith.

"In the old vocabulary of politics there used to be an element of populism that was conservative," said Bill White, a Houston businessman and longtime Democratic Party funder. "Before they would make a dramatic change in the way people got electricity, people would take it slow and careful." That was not the Enron way. "Their executives, with their high-profile civic and political activities--part of what it did was, it gave them this aura, sort of 'These people are the new establishment, and these are smart people who play their cards well,'" he said. "And it turned out they were spending money they didn't have."
New York Times
February 16, 2002
Refusing to Take Nuclear Waste
By KENNY GUINN
ARSON CITY, Nev.

Yesterday, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham finally forwarded to the White House his plan for high-level nuclear waste disposal: Put it all in Yucca Mountain, a volcanic ridge 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. President Bush took just a few hours to send the plan on to Congress with his blessing. But like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the mountain only to have it crash back down, time and again, the Department of Energy can send its Yucca Mountain plan wherever it likes — and the plan will crash again. Why am I so sure? The Energy Department tends not to complete its more grandiose projects, even when they were based on sound science and common sense. This project is based on neither.

When Congress ordered the Energy Department to study Yucca Mountain, it required that the site must be geologically sound: the stability of the repository would come from the geology of the site, providing a rock- solid backup to manmade waste containers.

Today, after $7 billion and almost 20 years of study, the Energy Department's own contractor, Bechtel/ SAIC, as well as the General Accounting Office, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste, and the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board have each concluded that additional studies need to be performed. Those studies must be completed before Yucca Mountain could ever be seriously considered for permanent nuclear waste disposal.

The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which Congress created specifically to look at storage problems, said last month that the "technical basis" for the Energy Department's performance estimates "is weak to moderate." Last month the acting head of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, who has been working on the Yucca Mountain plan, seemed to agree, saying, "We think we have sufficient science for the step that we are at." That's the problem. The Energy Department has all along acted as though "the science" would always catch up with the politics, but the science is supposed to be the foundation upon which a decision to move forward is made. The Department of Energy has it backward — decision first, science later.

The secretary of energy has also tried to link his Yucca Mountain recommendation to national security. This is an absurd invention of the nuclear industry and an opportunistic use of the tragedies of Sept. 11. Spent fuel will have to be stored at reactor sites across America for 50 years or more as it waits to be safely shipped, because even if the Yucca Mountain repository is approved and built, it will not be ready to receive most of the waste for decades. And should Yucca Mountain get up and running, much of the fuel will remain above ground for perhaps 100 years if the Energy Department sticks with its current plans for very gradual insertion of fuel into subterranean caverns.

Meanwhile more nuclear waste will be produced around the country and continually sent out for hauling to Nevada, creating, in essence, a network of nuclear vulnerability throughout the nation, with one very big terrorist target 100 miles from one of the nation's fastest-growing cities. This is not a recipe for increased national security.

Today nuclear power plants are building inexpensive and safe dry storage facilities of their own, at their plant sites, for their spent fuel. They will continue to do this whether or not Yucca Mountain proceeds.

I was hopeful that President Bush would keep his promise to Nevada not to push the project forward absent a sound scientific basis. The president has let that opportunity go. Nevada will now pursue every means available to ensure that the laws of science and the nation ultimately prevail.

I have, under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1987, 60 days in which to veto the recommendation. I will do so. The House and Senate leaders will then have 90 days to decide whether to override the veto by majority votes of each chamber. If the 90 days of consecutive session pass, then the veto stands.

Nevada did not pick this fight, but we are determined to win it.


Kenny Guinn is the governor of Nevada.


Thursday February 14 10:49 PM ET

Japan Not Satisfied with Bush Climate Proposal
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's environment minister said on Friday he wasn't entirely happy about President Bush's plan to combat global warming, adding that Japan would go ahead and ratify the Kyoto treaty rejected by Washington.

Environment Minister Hiroshi Oki's comments came after Bush outlined on Thursday a voluntary plan to slow the growth of global-warming gases in place of mandatory cuts demanded by the widely accepted Kyoto Protocol he rejected last year as harmful to the U.S. economy.

``It's obvious that this plan won't achieve the seven percent reduction target, which the United States had agreed to in Kyoto,'' Oki said.

Under the 1997 Kyoto deal, industrialized nations agreed to cut carbon dioxide emissions by an average 5.2 percent from 1990 levels by 2012. Greenhouse gases, which come mainly from burning fossil fuels, are thought to cause rising global temperatures.

The Kyoto treaty set a target for the United States to reduce emissions by about seven percent below 1990 levels within a decade.

Bush irritated many U.S. allies by rejecting the pact last March saying it would hurt the U.S. economy while other large polluters such as China and India were exempted.

Oki told a news conference that the timing of the announcement, just before Bush's planned arrival in Tokyo on Sunday for a three-day visit, reflected the importance the United States places in ties with Japan.

The plan also showed that the United States was making efforts to tackle global warming, he said.

``But this doesn't mean we are very satisfied with the contents. It's not as if we're extremely happy with it,'' he said.

Bush's plan, most elements of which must be approved by Congress, would set goals for gas reduction tied to U.S. economic growth and give firms incentives to meet them.

Oki reiterated Japan's position that it will ratify the Kyoto treaty even without U.S. participation.

``Japan intends to take all necessary steps to ensure the approval by parliament of the Kyoto Protocol and to enact required legislation during the current parliamentary session,'' he said in a statement released at the news conference.

New York Observer
A War Without End, And Without Victory
by Nicholas von Hoffman



Karl Rove, the White House’s man assigned to winning the fall elections for the Republicans, says that the way to do it is to brag on how well the President has handled that illusive struggle called the "war against terrorism." The Democrats seem ready to concede the point; they’re saying it’s everything else Mr. Bush and his oil-soaked administration have screwed up.

What are the outward signs of Mr. Bush’s competence as a war leader? Victory? Hardly. This is a strange war. Mr. Bush and other officials put the emphasis on the war’s duration. We hear more about how long it’s going to be than about winning it. During the Vietnam War, the nation agonized over winning or losing. In the Second World War, there was V.E. Day, which stood for "Victory in Europe" Day, and V.J. Day, which stood for the same in Japan. So what about Victory over Terrorism Day? The way they talk, V.T. Day will never come.

Mr. Bush is practically promising there will be no victory, because this is a different kind of war. The subtext is that he thinks it’s unwinnable. Certainly his war aims are vague. Sometimes he does his Osama-dead-or-alive schtick, and sometimes the robot who does the White House press briefings says that capturing Mr. bin Laden or killing him isn’t important in the war against terrorism. Over at the Pentagon, Don Rumsfeld peddles a line about our fighting invisible battles we’ll never hear about because it’s a new kind of war which will go on for a long, long time and we may never know if we’ve won it. In the meantime, dial up the volume on "God Bless America" and hand out fresh flags for everybody’s car aerials–the old ones are getting tatty.

As time passes, the "war" looks more like a gimmick to keep certain politicians in office than it does a struggle against a named and definable enemy. The White House line on the–ahem! cough-cough!–victory in Afghanistan is that we got a lot of Al Qaeda videos and dusty computer floppies of uncertain value. On certain days when they’re playing us these scratchy Osama tapes, the war resembles a raid on the Blockbuster store in Kabul.

Ah, but there are other trophies of our grand victory. There’s that guy from California who decided at age 16 to become a Muslim and wound up fighting for the Taliban. We got him, the little traitor–don’t think we won’t fry his ass. It may not be Austerlitz or Malplaquet or any of the great military victories in history, but Mr. Bush’s forces did capture those guys they put in the orange suits and sent off to Guantánamo Bay, where we can show Fidel Castro the humane way to lock people up.

It follows that the namby-pambies would attack Mr. Bush’s treatment of his prisoners. The namby-pambies can’t understand that these guys are not white men, so it’s O.K. They are off-white men, which is Arab, and the rules don’t apply to them. Maybe they’re terrorists, or maybe they’re "unlawful combatants." When we went to war against them, they didn’t apply to the U.N.’s War Certification Office, where they issue licenses to make it jake to fight us. You do not want to be fighting the U.S. of A. without permission, a stamped permit and, incidentally, a proper uniform–unless, of course, you believe orange is a flattering color.

Sooner or later the Afghan phase of the never-to-end war against terrorism will have to fade out. Either the people will be dead or reduced to blithering idiocy from the bombing or the bullshit or both. However it ends in Afghanistan, the one constant is the impression that the Americans have no idea of where they are or what they’re doing, except roaring around posing for little TV propaganda bits glorifying our might, our valor and our unconquerable dedication to the cause of Freedom. Hey, baby, it’s Operation Enduring Freedom time. If this horse opera had not begun in response to the crime of Sept. 11, one might suggest they put the whole thing to music.

The crime of Sept. 11 was never a sane basis for going to war. This is a crime that needs be handled by the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the police and intelligence agencies, not by the Army and Air Force and Navy. Everything we know about Sept. 11 and other such attacks tells us that the networks of perpetrators are limited in number to a few thousand people–far too few to spread out and too deeply hidden for military action. These few move among millions who sympathize with them but aren’t active terrorists, so the choice is between thumping around with an army or using means suitable for the task–the police and intelligence agencies.

For decades, those with eyes to see have watched the Israelis, who have all the guns, all the artillery, all the supersonic fighters, etc., pound the crap out of the Palestinians, and what do they have to show for it? There isn’t an Israeli in the world–man, woman or child–who can walk down a street anywhere without being afraid someone will jump out at him and slit his throat. The more Palestinians the Israelis kill, the more Israel lives in terror.

For all our armed force has accomplished, we have gained little protection. We’re reduced to strip-searching everybody boarding an airplane. We’re afraid to leave anything unguarded. Nothing is safe; everybody has the jitters. If this is winning the war, I’d hate to find out what losing it consists of. We’ll know that the war against terrorism is won when they put the metal detectors and the bomb sniffers in trucks and cart them away. But George Bush isn’t talking about that.

There’s a word for a non-winner, and that word is "loser."

You may reach Nicholas von Hoffman via email at: nvonhoffman@observer.com.
Chariots of ire: is US jingoism tarnishing the Olympic ideal?
Duncan Mackay in Salt Lake City
Friday February 15, 2002
The Guardian

The wave of American jingoism and intense security that has marked the first week of the Winter Olympics here has led to senior officials of the International Olympic Committee privately expressing concerns about whether the US can ever stage another Olympic event.

The games have already been dubbed the "red, white and blue Olympics" because almost every event has patriotic overtones in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11. Nationalism has always been a part of the Olympics but IOC officials here feel the event is being used simply as propaganda for the US war effort.

"This is a show designed to send a message to Osama bin Laden," said one IOC member. "President Bush is saying: 'Look at us: you bombed us but you can't stop us going about our normal lives.' But that is not what the Olympic Games are supposed to be about."

The IOC is embarrassed that the very public presence of the 15,000 police and military is projecting a tense and uncomfortable atmosphere for an event that, since its first staging in 1924, has been a sedate, friendly festival. There are more American security personnel here than in Afghanistan and three times as many as were present at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles during the cold war with the Soviet Union.

"Bush wants to show the American public that he can guarantee their security and they have nothing to worry about," said the IOC member.

The heavy-handed security operation could have serious repercussions for a proposed bid from New York for the 2012 Summer Olympics. IOC officials have been speculating openly that if it requires this much effort to protect an isolated area in the midwest, then how many troops would be needed to secure the world's most famous city. "It just can't happen," said another IOC member.

From being forced to back down in the row over using the flag recovered from the World Trade Centre ruins at the opening ceremony to the overt security operation, the lords of the rings are angry.

The tone was set during the opening ceremony when President Bush broke with protocol by opening the games from a position among a group of US athletes. He then departed from the Olympic charter when he put the words "On behalf of a proud, determined and grateful nation", in front of the official line, "I declare open the Games of Salt Lake City..."

Heavy security


The IOC fears that this could set a precedent for future heads of states to follow when they open the games in their countries. "How [might] Americans react in six years [at the 2008 Beijing games] if China's head of state decides to stand in the midst of his nation's Olympic team, declaring how the indomitable will of the Chinese nation has brought the games to the world?" said Ed Hula, the editor of Around The Rings, an American newsletter covering Olympic politics.

The host broadcaster, NBC, also linked the opening ceremony with the war effort when, during the parade of nations, it referred to the Iranian athletes as part of Mr Bush's "axis of evil". During the ceremony NBC made frequent crosses to American troops in Afghanistan, who pointed to the flag on their uniforms and chanted "USA".

Earlier this week the FBI and CIA were forced to tone down the intense security searches of competitors following complaints from many international teams that their athletes were being harassed. Athletes have everything searched repeatedly, and must often queue in sub-zero conditions for more than 30 minutes.

A Russian silver medallist was upset that she was asked to drink from her water bottle to prove it contained water as she was trying to get into the cross-country venue. "Every day we have to go through the same annoying procedures," said Larissa Lazutina. "It's a put-down for the athletes."

Matters took an even more bizarre turn yesterday when nine musicians from a California band had their bus stopped and searched 60 miles south of Salt Lake City after a convenience store clerk told officials they had asked about security checkpoints at the games."It was a surprise and it was funny," said a band member. "What wasn't so funny was that they asked us what ethnic groups were on the bus and after they searched the whole bus and found some articles about terrorism, they pulled one of our guys aside and questioned him a lot."

Terrorist target


Fears of terror attacks have severely affected travel to Salt Lake City. Less than 7% of tickets have been sold to foreigners, and that figure includes the sales to overseas Olympic committees as well as families and friends of competitors. Of the 1.58m tickets available only 100,000 have been sold outside the country.

But that has not stopped these Olympics being an overwhelming success here, with 90% of tickets sold, making it the most successful games ever. Television ratings are also huge: an incredible 72m people, or one in four Americans, watched the opening ceremony on TV while the first day of competition gave NBC its biggest Saturday night audience for six years.

Inspired by competing at home, the American team is set to sow its biggest harvest of medals ever in the Winter games. But even that is not enough for USA Today, the country's biggest-selling newspaper, which is printing a table based on the total number of medals won rather than golds. Using that format, the US, with 10 medals won, are second behind Germany. But in the official list distributed by the IOC, Norway are top having won five gold medals compared with the Americans' three.

A strong anti-American feeling has existed among many IOC members since 1998 when 10 of its members were forced to resign or were expelled after they were found to have accepted a total of $1m in cash, gifts, scholarships and other inducements to win votes for Salt Lake's Olympic candidacy.

The IOC has tried to repair its battered image here by cutting back on many of the regal excesses which have marked its stay in previous host cities. But there is resentment among IOC members that the Salt Lake City leaders who offered the bribes, Tom Welch and David Johnson, have escaped unpunished after 15 felony charges, including bribery, were dropped.

Mr Welch and Mr Johnson are no longer involved with the Salt Lake organising committee but attended the opening ceremony.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

Thursday, February 14, 2002

Gore "Troubled" By Bush's Environmental Proposals
The former Vice President responds to the President's global warming plan in an e-mail communique.


— Former Vice President Al Gore, after delivering a carefully worded speech that did or didn't — depending on your point of view — criticize President Bush's foreign policy a few nights ago, outright blasted the energy and conservation proposals Bush rolled out today.

Even so, in keeping with his gradual reemergence on the national political stage, Gore's attack came in the form of an e-mail to reporters, not in a public appearance or media interview (which he's still declining to do).
"Instead of accepting an accord endorsed by over 170 nations, President Bush has put forward a plan that falls far short of the needs of both America and the world. He has tried this type of approach before — in Texas — and it failed," Gore wrote in the e-mail.

Gore echoed the president's concern about the country's reliance on foreign sources of oil, but said the Bush Administration's energy plan would do little to help.

"A strong policy on climate change would lessen that dangerous dependence and move us to a clean and safe energy future," Gore said. "By contrast, this policy, like the administration plans to drill in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, keep us tied to the dangerous global oil politics that pose a grave threat to our national well-being."

Two other potential Democratic presidential candidates in 2004, Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., criticized Bush's proposals this afternoon, Kerry in a brief press conference and Lieberman through a written statement.

Gore did not respond to any specific planks of the Bush plan, preferring instead to try to tap into the business-friendly type of approach many conservatives, Bush included, tend to support.

"A strong plan of action on climate change would stimulate the develop.m.ent of new transportation, power and manufacturing technologies and enable American companies to lead the world in capturing markets for those technologies. A weak policy like the one announced today, without binding requirements for greenhouse gas pollution reductions, makes it vastly harder for American companies to compete."

Gore has spent his political career developing legislative expertise on environmental issues. He wrote a book, "Earth in the Balance," which called for a reformulation of the way humans relate to nature. During his 2000 presidential campaign, candidate Gore tried to tar then-Governor Bush with negative independent studies on the state of the Texas environment and air quality.



The chill returns
U.S. military presence in Kyrgyzstan is worrying its Cold-War foes


Marcus Warren
The Daily Telegraph

Dario Lopez-Miles, The Associated Press


Kyrgyzstan has granted the United States freedom to roam within a 4.8-kilometre radius near the Afghan border.


MANAS, Kyrgyzstan - The world's new Pax Americana has few outposts more exotic than Kyrgyzstan, a mere decade ago part of the Soviet Union but now, in one of the most astonishing strategic shifts since the Sept. 11 attacks, a Western stronghold secured and defended by U.S. military might.

Lifting gear, concertina wire and Humvee vehicles, the advance guard of the U.S. garrison, have already been deployed at the main civilian airport in this tiny country occupying an obscure corner of Central Asia.

Later this month, French Mirage ground attack planes and U.S. Marine Corps FA-18 Hornets will join them as part of a strike force for use in Afghanistan.

The activity is a source of growing unease for neighbouring Russia and China.

About 3,000 foreign troops will be resident at the Manas air base by spring, but U.S. soldiers are already making their presence felt -- in military parlance "establishing a footprint" -- in the surrounding tumbledown settlements.

The post-Soviet era can have yielded few sights odder than armed U.S. troops, in the desert camouflage ordered by the Pentagon for use in Operation Enduring Freedom, tramping through the snowbound Kyrgyz village of Polevoye.

"We are just walking through," Staff Sergeant Doug Austin, the patrol leader, told bemused villagers through a local woman interpreter speaking Russian. "We want to make friends and meet the neighbours. We don't want you to be afraid of us."

"They are big and bad," giggled Ivan Tinikov, a cheeky 13-year-old, imitating a machine-gun. "Will they be doing any shooting?"

To enhance the surreal quality of the scene in an area that for years was a closed zone to the West, the patrol included a British officer from the RAF Regiment, in khaki rather than tan fatigues. He approved of U.S. efforts to fraternize with the local people.

"Getting out and talking to people is something new for them," Squadron Leader Andrew Jones. said.

"Normally they lock a base down and draw a line around it, saying they will shoot if it is crossed."

The only threat encountered by this patrol was a volley of snowballs from children. The U.S. soldiers handed out candies to the boys and girls, one each.

The Kyrgyz authorities have granted their foreign guests freedom to roam as they please within a 4.8-kilometre radius.

Apart from the U.S. planes already dwarfing Russian-made passenger jets on the tarmac, the patrols have to safeguard a 14-hectare tent city soon to be home to troops from a dozen countries as different as South Korea, Poland and Norway. But security here is relatively relaxed.

For the 400 U.S. troops already in place, the tour of duty is beginning to drag.

A handwritten sign at the gates identified the base as "Camp Punxsutawney," a tribute to the home of the U.S. equivalent of Wiarton Willie.

How much longer they and their comrades-in-arms will stay is a matter of anxious speculation in Russia, nervous at the United States' increasingly forceful presence in an oil-rich region it regards as its backyard.

Even supporters of President Vladimir Putin's alliance with the West against Islamic terror point to the fact Russia recently closed bases in Cuba and Vietnam, while the U.S. military deploys on former Soviet territory.

China, too, has a right to feel uneasy.

Its border with this mountainous country of fewer than five million is 320 kilometres away. It is far closer to Manas airport than is Afghanistan.

"There is one great power in this region that can oppose the U.S.," said Alexander Kim, a Kyrgyz military expert. "I don't think that this base is connected to strategic planes to the south as much as to China."

The U.S. build-up is one of the most remarkable signs of the changing world order since the end of the Cold War.

Kyrgyzstan, with neighbouring Tajikistan, was a part of the Soviet Union that wanted independence least of all.

Economically impoverished, it was more than happy to be in Russia's sphere of influence -- until the events of last fall put it on the front line in the war against terrorism.

Foreign troops will soon make up at least a quarter of the military manpower on Kyrgyz soil and Kyrgyz officials are enthusiastic about the deployment.

They hope it will deter Islamic guerrillas who have clashed with security forces in recent years, and boost the debt-ridden economy.

Critics of the Kyrgyz government fear the United States has given it carte blanche to repress opposition in return for backing the war.

The choice of Manas -- agreed on after the fighting in Afghanistan passed its peak -- was a "nuts-and-bolts" decision, dictated by its excellent state of maintenance, the Americans insist.

"This is not a permanent operation but a temporary one," said Col Bill Montgomery, the U.S. air force officer in charge of setting up the base.

"But we will be here for as long as it takes. We are planning on an extended stay."

His words will be scant comfort for Moscow and Beijing.


The Nation
Bush and Lay: A Common Pattern of Stock Dumps?
02/04/2002 @ 5:04pm
I had hoped to be reporting in this space today the answers of disgraced Enron CEO Ken Lay to a host of impolite questions. As you might have heard, Lay was scheduled to make his first appearance before a Congressional committee this morning--and I had planned to join the gawkers at the press tables. But yesterday, Lay canceled, claiming that recent remarks from members of Congress had led him to conclude that an anti-Lay bias had set in on Capitol Hill. Which meant that a lawyer finally had managed to talk some sense into Lay. Since he is the potential subject of criminal investigations and civil lawsuits, it would not have been wise for Lay to subject himself to wide-ranging questions from members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. Consequently, I--and you--did not get to see him respond to such questions as:

* What did you expect in return for the hundreds of thousands of dollars you donated to George W. Bush over the years?

* Did you or anyone else at Enron ever try to exert influence over a regulatory matter of the US government? If so, could you please run us through all the details?

* Did you pull strings to replace the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last year? Did campaign contributions come in handy in such an endeavor?

* Why did you find it useful to retain as lobbyists high-level GOP operatives, such as Ralph Reed and Ed Gillespie? Did Enron place Reed on its payroll as a favor to the Bush campaign, as has been reported (but denied by Reed)?

* Did your donations to the Democratic party during the Clinton years help Enron win highly-coveted seats on trade missions led by Commerce Secretaries Ron Brown and Mickey Kantor?

* What did Enron officials and the staff of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force talk about?

I am presuming the Senators would have dared to ask such direct questions. But Lay is lying low, and these and other mysteries will remain for the time being.

As a public service, then, let me put to good use the space otherwise reserved for the Lay testimony.

A few days ago, the inimitable Molly Ivins called me. There was a slight dire tone in her voice, which is unusual. Molly gets dire about few things. What had riled her was a quote put out by the White House. In yet one more attempt to distance Bush from his (previously) good friend Lay (once known to Bush as "Kenny Boy"), a White House aide had told reporters that Bush was outraged that Lay and other executives had sold hundreds of millions in Enron stock before the company collapsed and the stock plummeted. The aide quoted an angered Bush as saying, "I thought the captain was supposed to be the last one off the sinking ship, not the first one."

This was hypocrisy, Molly noted. See my book, she said, and you'll see why. As soon as I could, I found my copy of "Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush" (cowritten with Lou Dubose), and located the relevant passage. (For those of you playing at home, pages 27 to 33.)

This section of the book covered the years before Bush entered electoral politics, the time when he was a failing-upward oil man. When W.'s father was president of the United States, George the Younger was a major shareholder in a sinking oil venture called Spectrum 7. But before Spectrum 7 sank completely, the Harken Energy Corporation, which was run by a GOP funder, bailed out the company. Bush got about $500,000 in Harken stock for his piece of Spectrum 7, and Harken signed him up as a consultant. Harken went on to win a 35-year exploration contract with the emirate of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf--an odd deal, since the company had no previous experience in international or offshore drilling. Some observers wondered if Harken's Bush connection had been a factor. But that's not the part of the story we care about at this moment.

In June of 1990, Bush sold two-thirds of the Harken stock he had received in the Spectrum 7 deal--and collected $318,430 more than it was worth when he first obtained it. Get low, sell high? Anything wrong with that? The month before this sale, Harken appointed Bush to a committee to determine, as Ivins and Dubose put it, "how restructuring [of the firm] would affect ordinary shareholders." According to Ivins and Dubose, who note the previous reporting work of "U.S. News and World Report," when Bush served on this committee, he was privy to information indicating the company was in trouble. He then dumped his stocks before this news became public. "U.S. News" concluded that at the time of the sale there was "substantial evidence to suggest that Bush knew Harken was in dire straits."

Bush claims he had merely sold at an opportune time, when word of the Bahrain deal was bolstering the company's position. But he then neglected to notify the Securities and Exchange Commission of his stock-dump, as he was required to do. Is that the tip-off something was amiss? (He filed the appropriate paperwork eight months after the deadline.) In the meantime, two months after he sold his shares, Harken stock dropped 25 percent, and it would sink further in the months ahead. As Ivins and Dubose note, "three years later, during his 1994 race against [Texas Governor] Ann Richards, he claimed he had filed the required report and that the SEC must have misplaced it. SEC spokesman John Heine told 'Time' that no one at the agency ever found any lost document."

Did Bush, one of the captains of Harken, jump that sinking ship because he had inside information the vessel was foundering? The chronology is suspicious. Yet now he is shocked, shocked that his close friend Ken Lay engaged in the same pattern of behavior. Perhaps if Ken Lay ever does permit himself to be questioned by a Congressional committee an additional query ought to be added to the list above: Did George W. Bush ever offer you advice on how to betray the shareholders of your own company by selling stock in response to bad-news known only to insiders?

The American Prospect
Board Stiffs
The myth of the disgraced CEO.
Joshua Green


One of the more frustrating Republican talking points is the politically advantageous assertion that Enron's collapse, far from being a scandal, actually vindicates the free-market system. "That companies like Enron go bankrupt," National Review lectured recently, "is a sign that markets work." Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill hailed its collapse as "the genius of capitalism." And as Ken Lay sat glumly before Congress recently, while news spread that six Enron directors would resign, it probably sounded like a reasonable point. After all, who would let Lay or Enron's directors run their business? You wouldn't trust Wendy Gramm to balance your checkbook, would you? They're finished, done, kaput, right?

Wrong. The fallacy of the markets-punish-poor-performance argument is its implication that corporate executives are punished, too. But that's rarely the case. A look back at earlier "Enrons" -- other companies driven into disastrous bankruptcies -- reveals that even the most spectacular failures rarely claim those at the top. As corporate watchdog Nell Minow puts it, "[failing] CEOs never die, they just join boards of directors." And not surprisingly, many reprise their poor performance.

Take Edward S. Finkelstein. The notorious former chairman of Macy's and poster boy for '80s corporate excess took the company private in an ill-fated 1986 leveraged buyout. In 1992, shortly after Macy's was forced to file for Chapter 11, Finkelstein jumped ship. This hardly killed his career. He became chairman and CEO of the Cherry & Webb chain of women's clothing stores in 1997. And guess what? The company filed for bankruptcy three years later.

Nor did the Macy's bankruptcy hinder its board of directors. Robert G. Schwartz approved the leveraged buyout -- and he went on to become chairman and CEO of MetLife.

The United-Baldwin Corp. was another high-profile disaster. In January of 1985, after it declared bankruptcy, board member Philip E. Beekman resigned along with the rest of the board of directors, citing "continuing controversy about their role" in the troubled company. Today, Beekman is chairman of the audit committee for the financially troubled Sunbeam Corp., and a director of multiple public firms. Or how about Pan Am's onetime CEO, Thomas G. Plaskett? He survived the airline's bankruptcy to become chairman of the board of the Dallas-based energy company, Probex.

The issue of why this problem lingers has simmered for quite some time. Several years ago, Albert J. Dunlap, then chairman and CEO of Scott Paper Co., told The Wall Street Journal: "I don't think CEOs who fail in running their companies should be on other boards. If you can't run your own company, by what reason should you be on another company's board?"

In order to alert companies and shareholders to the track record of failed directors who may not wish to disclose their past, the Securities and Exchange Commission created a rule that "tags" directors of companies that declare bankruptcy on their watch. For five years, such directors are legally obligated to disclose their status to any new board they join. According to Peter Gleason of the National Association of Corporate Directors, that's why so many directors jump ship just before a company files for bankruptcy -- a trend Gleason says was especially pronounced during the recent spate of dot-com bankruptcies.

A good example is George Shaheen, onetime CEO of the online grocery service, Webvan. After burning through $1.2 billion in capital, Shaheen resigned shortly before Webvan declared bankruptcy last July in one of the new economy's most dramatic failures. Yet in October, Shaheen joined the board of software company Closedloop Solutions and remains a director of business software giant Siebel Systems.

Spurred by recent events, the AFL-CIO has been among the most vocal opponents of this type of board-hopping. (The "market at work" argument is particularly toothless when mismanaged companies go bankrupt and cost millions in worker pension funds.) And the sentiment is suddenly in fashion, prompted in no small part by an example from Enron's own board of directors. In addition to sitting on Enron's board, Norman P. Blake Jr. is the CEO of the technology-services company Comdisco, which declared bankruptcy last July. And if Comdisco goes under, Blake can fall back on his other job as a board member of Owens Corning. At least he can for the moment -- Owens Corning filed for bankruptcy protection two years ago.

Joshua Green
10,000 Israeli Jews & Arabs Demonstrate for Peace
by HA'ARETZ

On Saturday night, February 9, 10,000 Israeli Jews and Arabs
filled Museum Square in Tel Aviv in the largest peace demonstration since the Intifada began.

Although a similar demonstration held one year ago drew only a few hundred, the now famous letter of refusal by reserve soldiers and officers has remoralized the peace movement.

This was despite the fact that Peace Now, the largest and best-financed of the peace groups, refused to endorse the demonstration,
which was sponsored by 28 peace groups, including Gush Shalom.

The mass turnout followed the publication of several large, paid peace advertisements in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz. One such ad was placed by Yesh Gvul, an organization which supports conscientious objectors.

Another was by a group of private citizens and had the headline,
"We support the soldiers who refuse to serve the occupation," and one by Gush Shalom declaring, "Peres, you are a collaborator in war crimes."

Furthermore, on February 8, the mass-circulation daily Yediot Ahronot published a survey showing that 26% of the Israeli public sympathizes with the reserve soldiers' letter.

Axis of stupidity
Bush's black-and-white rhetoric fails to grasp the complexity of the world. It doesn't even reveal the truth about the darkness of Iraq.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By David Talbot



Feb. 14, 2002 | President Bush has enthusiastically reintroduced the word "evil" to our political language. Conservatives hail this as a return to American bedrock values, dropping all the diplomatic finesse and calling a spade a spade. And in the days after Sept. 11, as I pondered the diabolical deliberation that went into turning twin towers full of humanity into giant fireballs, I found his rhetoric bracing as well. But months later -- by the time White House speechwriter David Frum came up with his "axis of evil" formulation for the Jan. 29 State of the Union speech, which Bush happily embraced as its emotional centerpiece -- I had come to think of Bush's rhetoric as part of the problem instead of the solution.

Bush utters the world "evil" the way a child does when it first dawns on him that there is darkness and danger in the world, and only his goodness and courage stands in its way. His axis-of-evil war cry, of course, was an attempt at Rooseveltian grandeur -- but because it mangles geopolitical reality (unlike the enemies FDR faced, there is no alliance between Iraq, Iran and North Korea), it simply confuses the American public and underlines what a dismal imitation of a great president our current leader is. It reminds us that this is a man who entered the 2000 presidential race in midlife with the barest, most homespun grasp of the world beyond America's borders, and after a year of Condi Rice tutorials and on-the-job training, is just a step away from calling Greeks "Grecians."

The fact that Bush and Frum -- a conservative intellectual who should know better -- were not widely ridiculed for this addled terminology is one more depressing comment on our slack-jawed media and political opposition. One of the strangest responses to Bush's rhetoric came in Wednesday's New York Times, from the normally sound-minded columnist Thomas Friedman, who while thoroughly rejecting the intellectual merits of the axis-of-evil worldview, nonetheless embraced its wacky spirit because it's necessary to be "as crazy as some of our enemies." And Al Gore, suddenly back from the Land of Nod, typically played it both ways in a New York speech on Tuesday, praising Bush for zeroing in on the odd trio of evil, but then covering his liberal base by deploring that other dark triangle, poverty, disease and oppression. It's time to stop all this dancing around and call Bush's speech what it is: a flight of idiocy.

Did the president miss the briefing on the history of Iraq-Iran relations, the one that pointed out that the two countries are mortal enemies, one a Shiite theocracy riven by democratic yearnings, the other a Sunni-led and thoroughly secular Stalinist dictatorship, and that they bled each other nearly dry in one of the goriest wars of the 20th century? And how did starving and benighted North Korea get in there anyway? Former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke offered the most likely explanation, telling CNN's Jeff Greenfield that Bush probably threw in Beloved Leader Kim Chong-il's bizarre dictatorship just to show the U.S. wasn't going after only Islamic countries.

Bush's speeches -- or the speeches written for Bush -- do nothing to expand America's knowledge of the world we live in. There is no nuance or complexity in the president's political language, and perhaps in his mind, and of course the world is filled with it. In fact, his own presidency is replete with it. Just days before his State of the Union speech, Bush pushed through the appointment of Otto Reich as assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, despite his ties to the Cuban terrorist behind one of the worst crimes in aviation history. As Holbrooke dryly noted to Greenfield, "One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter." Then there's China. Demonized in the early days of the Bush presidency by administration hard-liners as a bellicose foe in the Cold War mode, Beijing has now become one of our best friends in the war on terrorism.

Bush sees the world in the black-and-white terms of the born-again fundamentalist that he is. He has vowed to root out evil wherever it is in the world (why not original sin too while he's at it?), and each day the press is filled with the names of new countries that the U.S. is targeting. In addition to the triad of evil, there is Yemen, Somalia, Indonesia, Algeria, the Central Asian republics, and of course American soldiers are already on the ground in the Philippines, where the full might of the U.S. arsenal is now being turned on a motley band called Abu Sayyaf, which as the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof has reported, is not an Islamic terror group, but "simply a gang of about 60 brutal thugs" with no proven ties to al-Qaida.

In the past few weeks, Bush's axis-of-evil hard line has succeeded in strengthening the hand of the militant mullahs in Iran and turning street demonstrations in Tehran that once hailed American democracy into "Death to the U.S.A." chants; in bringing Iran closer to its hated Iraqi enemy, with Saddam Hussein extending a friendly hand to the mullahs for the first time since their epic war in the 1980s; and in driving the North Korean dictatorship deeper into its cave, further entombing the "sunshine" peace process boldly started by South Korea's president Kim Dae Jung. It has also driven an ever-deeper wedge between the U.S. and its European, Asian and Arab allies, who have lined up to denounce Bush's foreign policy. South Korean official Choi Jin Wook called Bush's new line "very scary," while Chris Patten -- the European commissioner for international relations and a close associate of Tony Blair, the best friend in the world America could ever hope for -- blasted it as "absolutist and simplistic" and "unilateralist overdrive." All this and a skyrocketing military budget that threatens, along with Bush's ill-conceived tax cuts, to return the country to economy-wrecking Reagan-era deficits. Seldom has one State of the Union speech had such a global impact.

In a matter of weeks, Bush has poisoned the deep well of international sympathy that overflowed after Sept. 11 (when even Parisians were carrying signs saying "We're all Americans") and revived an American unilateralism more virulent than even in the first days of his administration. Instead of focusing on rebuilding Afghanistan and reinvigorating the Mideast peace process -- and thereby adding to America's luster by showing the world, and particularly its Islamic populations, that we stand for the progress of humanity and not just our own aggrandizement -- Bush has declared that the world is our buffer zone and we're prepared to police it on our own.

This is not to deny that the world can indeed be dark and dangerous and that America must sometimes venture into it bristling with our unmatched weaponry. Over the past months, I have strongly supported Bush's demolition of the al-Qaida network and Taliban government in Afghanistan. (And I will applaud even louder when the job is finished and U.S. forces have either captured Osama bin laden, Mullah Omar and their top aides or verified their deaths.) In addition, I have sharply criticized antiwar leftists who advocated a therapeutic response to terrorism, with none of the human mess that war entails. By denying their own country the right to defend itself militarily, these intellectuals and activists have so compromised themselves that, for now at least, they have lost their political credibility.

Nor is it to deny that, in the case of Saddam Hussein, America faces a dictator who is not only evil, but potentially threatening to our security as well, because of Saddam's undying embrace of doomsday weapons and his record of using them, as well as his intermittent courtship of terrorists. (Iran and North Korea present problems of a different sort, but ones that -- as President Clinton and our European allies have emphasized -- are best dealt with through engagement rather than Bush-style rejectionism.) Saddam is clearly the Bush team's fattest target, the great whale they let go when they were managing the first term of the Bush dynasty. On Tuesday, the administration underscored its seriousness about eliminating Saddam by sending out their voice of moderation, Colin Powell, to tell a Senate committee the dictator was definitely in its cross hairs this time, with or without the support of our allies.

But even in Saddam's case, there is less black-and-white than Bush junior's twangy rhetoric allows for. The history of U.S. relations with Baghdad is a case study in complexity, to put it mildly. Bush should just ask his father.

The United States' less than savory involvement with Iraq began after World War II, when our government stepped into the colonial shoes of Britain and took up the same tactics of political intrigue and clandestine force to assure access to the country's vast oil reserves on the West's terms and to offset Soviet influence in the region. Ever since we insinuated ourselves into what Allen Dulles called "the most dangerous spot on earth," the U.S. has cared about one thing only, "stability" -- which Washington has invariably defined not as a just and democratic government, but as a dictatorship amenable to our interests, no matter how brutal to its own people. The U.S. never resorted to the most extreme British tactics, as in 1920 when the English used its air force and gas warfare against civilians to crush a popular uprising against the British-installed monarchy (foreshadowing Saddam's ruthlessness against his own people). But, like Britain, Washington was not above orchestrating bloody coups aimed at eliminating leaders with nationalistic or Communist leanings.

In fact, it was one such coup -- the 1963 revolt that toppled Abdel Karim Kassem -- that first brought an ambitious young Ba'ath Party enforcer named Saddam Hussein to America's attention. Saddam, who was in exile in Cairo at the time, offered his services to the CIA, since the Ba'athists and the U.S. had a mutual enemy in Kassem, with his Communist sympathies. After Kassem was overthrown and executed, Saddam and the CIA again teamed up, according to his biographer Said K. Aburish, to compile lists of Iraqi political enemies for elimination. "The primary source" for the names on the list, according to Aburish, was "William McHale, a CIA agent operating under the cover of a Time magazine correspondent and the brother of Don McHale, then a senior officer in Washington ... But McHale, though he provided the longest list, was not alone, and a senior Egyptian intelligence officer, Christian Ba'athists in Lebanon, Saddam's small group in Cairo and other individuals and groups contributed to this shameful exercise. As often happens on such occasions, some people were killed as a result of personal vendettas.

"Many were disposed of on an individual basis -- a knock on the door followed by a hail of bullets; others died under torture or in groups of up to 30 at a time. After considerable research I have compiled a list of over 800 names, but the real figure is undoubtedly considerably higher. Those killed included people who represented the backbone of Iraqi society -- lawyers, doctors, academics and students -- as well as workers, women and children."

With the Ba'athists now part of the new government, Saddam was given the job of fortifying its security, roaming the country in search of enemies and personally torturing some of them in the aptly named "Palace of the End" from which no one returned. It was during this period that Saddam began openly using the maxims of his hero, Stalin, particularly this stirring one: "If there is a person then there is a problem; if there is no person then there is no problem."

When the Ba'athists were forced out of the government the following year, Saddam again had to flee. But by 1967, he and his fellow party leaders were once more conspiring with the CIA to overthrow the government of Abdel Salam Aref, who had attracted the enmity of the U.S. and Britain by inviting the Soviets to develop the vast North Rumeillah oil field. One American plotter, former Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson, was so blatant in his efforts that Iraqi demonstrators took to the streets in Baghdad shouting, "Go back home, Anderson!" Saddam and his fellow conspirators recruited support from a group of Iraqi military officers and in 1968 they took power. By 1970 Saddam himself was in complete control of the country. Since then he has perfected the cruel science of terror and torture, with his own people the chief victims. As Aburish observes, he "adopted the ways of Joseph Stalin and merged them with his tribal instincts ... a synthesis of Bedouin guile and Communist method." But as the 1970s and '80s passed, no U.S. administration moved to restrain the beast of Baghdad. He was, and remained, a creature of Washington and its Mideast policy.

The Iraq doomsday arsenal that inflames Washington hawks today was built with U.S. and Western assistance during the Reagan-Bush years, when Saddam was viewed as a bludgeon against our enemy, the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime. A U.S. company, American Type Culture Collection, shipped Baghdad strains of toxins and bacteria while Washington looked the other way. Saddam found other companies in the U.S., Britain, Germany, France and elsewhere willing to help supply his nuclear bomb program. "In all of this, we were just taking advantage of the West's 'don't ask, just sell' attitude toward Iraq," writes Khidir Hamza, the exiled Iraqi nuclear scientist whose memoir "Saddam's Bombmaker" is a deeply disturbing account of life inside the Saddam death culture.

During his war with Iran, Saddam began using his grotesque biochemical devices on his own people. According to Hamza, who calls this "one of the most grisly episodes of these awful weapons in history," Saddam began not with the Kurds, but with the Shiites -- the majority population he suspected of being fifth columnists during the war. He injected Shiites as they were released from prison with an anthrax-like toxin and then began experimenting with chemical agents on Shiite prisoners at a German-built "pesticide" factory. He then turned his infamous cousin, known as Ali Chemical, on the Kurds, whom Saddam also accused of being "back-stabbers" during the war. He began by dumping typhoid spores into Kurdish villagers' water supplies. Then, in late 1987, he targeted villages in the Balasan Valley for gas attacks. By March 1988, Ali Chemical was ready for his most dramatic massacre, a nerve-agent assault on the village of Halabjah, a name that Hamza notes "would join Guernica, My Lai and Srbrenica in the pantheon of history's infamous war crimes."

It is Halabjah that President Bush refers to when he reviles Saddam for "gassing his own people." But at the time, his father, then vice president and on his way to being elected president, made no similar expressions of outrage, nor did anyone in the Reagan administration, which cynically tried to put the blame for the gas attacks on Iran. "The world greeted the gruesome news with a deafening silence," Hamza writes. "Saddam was the West's dog in the fight against Iran."

When Bush senior moved into the White House, he continued to support Saddam, ignoring his barbaric human rights violations and repelling congressional efforts to impose sanctions on his regime. One Bush envoy to Baghad went as far as to describe the tyrant as "a force of moderation." During Bush's first year in office, writes Aburish, "the United States continued to supply Iraq with helicopter engines, vacuum pumps for a nuclear plant, sophisticated communications equipment, computers, bacteria strains and hundreds of tons of unrefined Sarin." Aburish also notes that an influential pro-Iraq business lobby group at the time employed the consulting services of Henry Kissinger's firm, including Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, who would soon join the administration.

The first Bush administration's attitude toward Saddam would drastically change, of course, when the dictator, in a monumental miscalculation, decided to invade Kuwait -- a misstep he would later blame on Bush ambassador April Glaspie, whom he was convinced had given him a green light to attack. Gassing his people was one thing, but threatening the West's oil supplies was quite another. Instead of a force for moderation, now Saddam was the new Hitler. Nonetheless, he was left in power after his military was crushed in the Gulf War. After calling on the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam, Bush left the brave Kurds and Shiites who responded to the mercies of the dictator -- a stunning betrayal dramatized in the 1999 film "Three Kings." Bush reportedly bowed to the wishes of his Saudi royal friends, who feared that a pro-Iran Shiite-led democracy might emerge from the ashes of Saddam's regime.

During the Clinton years, some old Bush hands would urge the Democratic administration to do what they had failed to, perhaps out of a nagging sense of guilt, and destroy Saddam. But by then, with the Gulf War coalition coming undone, it was no simple task. And for some Bush administration veterans, commerce was again a higher priority than anti-Saddam vigilance. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Dick Cheney told ABC News that as the head of the oil industry supply firm Halliburton, he had a strict policy against doing any business with Iraq -- "even arrangements that were supposedly legal." And yet, as the Financial Times would later uncover, Cheney's company actually did over $23 million worth of business with Saddam's government in 1998 and '99. As Salon's Damien Cave observed, Cheney, who made $36 million in salary at Halliburton before being elected vice president, ended up profiting from rebuilding what he had helped destroy as secretary of defense during the Gulf War.

All this history is by way of explaining why when the current President Bush puts on his best West Texas sheriff's voice and vows that Saddam "will see" what he has coming, as if the Iraqi dictator had just ridden into town looking for trouble instead of being escorted in by the U.S. cavalry, the rest of the world regards it as disingenuous. At this point, not one nation in the world, with the sole exception of Kuwait (for obvious reasons), supports a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Even Tony Blair has cautioned against it. Russia's Vladimir Putin, in whom Bush has invested so much foreign policy capital, has been particularly outspoken against it, as have the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Turkey, whose cooperation would be essential for such a military action.

The United States' unsavory history with Iraq, and our allies' opposition to an invasion, still should not deter us from bringing down Saddam if he can be proved to be the menace to American security and world peace that administration hawks contend he is. (Since the West established a no-fly zone in north and south Iraq, he is no longer the tormentor of his own Kurdish and Shiite people that he once was.) But so far, despite months of talk-show and Op-Ed lobbying by White House proxies like Richard Perle, James Woolsey and Laurie Mylroie, the Bush hard-liners have yet to make their case that Saddam represents a clear and present danger. Polls show that a majority of Americans, still riding on the euphoria of a relatively easy victory in Afghanistan, would back a strike against Saddam. But this support may prove feeble in the actual event of a war -- and in any case not even Pentagon hawk Paul Wolfowitz seriously believes that America can go it alone against Iraq, no matter what they're making Colin Powell say in public. So our allies still need to be persuaded.

The case might be there. I for one am still willing to be convinced. But the media needs to push the White House to lay out its argument in detail, because administration officials can't depend on Tony Blair to do it for them this time. Bush needs to be told that the evildoer rhetoric no longer suffices. The media needs to stop flapping their electronic flag logos for a moment and ask some tough questions. Let's start with these:

1) Why is Saddam more dangerous today than he was 11 years ago when President Bush's father decided to leave him in power?

2) The postwar sanctions and inspections imposed on Saddam did not completely stop him from continuing his doomsday weapons projects, but they did seriously hinder him. Most world leaders advocate escalating the pressure on Saddam to permit U.N. inspectors, who were thrown out in 1998, back into Iraq. Administration officials agree with this but have also announced that this step is doomed to fail so they are already pushing for Step 2, a military invasion. Why would Saddam comply with weapons inspections if the U.S. is already determined to attack him? Shouldn't Step 1 be given more of a chance to succeed?

3) Despite the administration's strenuous efforts, no compelling evidence has been found to tie Saddam into the Sept. 11 attacks or last fall's anthrax terrorism. Why, then, is Iraq being targeted in the war on terrorism?

4) Except for his war on Iran, which was fully supported by the West, and his invasion of Kuwait, which he initially thought was sanctioned by the U.S., Saddam's atrocities have been confined to his own people. Why should we believe that Saddam, after being soundly defeated in the Gulf War, still has expansionist aims?

5) Saddam is, if nothing else, a survivor in the cunning mode of Stalin. Why would he risk the instant destruction of his regime by attacking the U.S. or Israel with nuclear or biochemical weapons? And with the West on high alert to terrorist threats, would he risk passing on these doomsday weapons to networks like al-Qaida?

6) If Saddam is backed into a corner militarily, however, and feels he has nothing to lose, some knowledgeable observers fear that he might launch a final, desperate doomsday weapons attack on Israel. How can this be prevented?

7) Washington hawks claim that the Afghanistan strategy can be applied to Iraq, with the Iraq National Congress playing the role of the Northern Alliance. But the Iraqi opposition strikes many strategists (including some in the Pentagon) as soft from years of U.S.-subsidized exile, and woefully inexperienced on the battlefield. (The INC's one military strike against Saddam, in 1995, ended in a disastrous rout.) Until Bush's axis of evil speech, INC officials were kept at arm's length from the White House, with one senior administration official dismissing them as "half-assed people who can't get the president's ear" and "pissants" who have never "smelled cordite," according to a December article by the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh. Why should we have confidence that the INC can defeat Saddam's military? Would American ground troops have to be put more in harm's way than they were in Afghanistan?

8) The one group within the loose anti-Saddam coalition that does have plenty of battle experience -- mainly from fighting one another -- is the Kurds. But, according to a report in this week's Wall Street Journal, Iraq's Kurdish population -- after years of savage repression and deprivation -- has prospered in recent years, thanks to the U.S.-enforced no-fly zone in the country's north and the billions of dollars of Iraqi oil money that has been funneled to the Kurds under the U.N.-administered oil-for-food program. As a result, they are not eager to plunge back into war and strife. Why should the Kurds take up arms against Saddam again and why should they trust the U.S. this time, when they have been betrayed more than once by Washington?

9) Neighboring countries fear that a war on Iraq would splinter the country and destabilize the region. Turkey fears a Kurdish republic in the north and Saudi Arabia fears a breakaway Shiite state in the south. How can the U.S. assure its allies that a post-Saddam Iraq would not be even more volatile?

10) Is the U.S. prepared to accept a democratic government in Baghdad, even if it is controlled by Shiites and tilts toward anti-American Iran?

11) Given the meddlesome role that the U.S. and its principal ally Britain have historically played in Iraq -- as well as Russian concerns that we are mainly interested in usurping their oil concessions in Iraq -- how can we reassure the world that we are seeking peace and democracy and not simply the country's resources?

12) The U.S. has never demonstrated much concern for the health and human rights of the Iraqi people. Why should they believe another American-led war on their country will bring them anything more than further suffering?

The press is filled this week with Bush team tough-talk about Iraq. They're telling the Los Angeles Times, with their typical swagger, that the Iraq problem is finally going to be "solved," that "containment" of Saddam is no longer good enough, that the White House is ready to "push beyond the limitations imposed by international sentiment, Arab public opinion and even the original U.N. resolutions that opened the way for Operation Desert Storm 11 years ago." Dick Cheney is going to lay the plan on them when he visits our Middle East allies next month. And if they or the Euros don't like it, tough tamales. "At some point," one administration hard guy informed the New York Times this week, "the Europeans with butterflies in their stomach ... will see that they have a bipolar choice: they can get with the plan or get off."

The United States has been "solving" the Iraq problem pretty much on its own for the past 50 years, with less than satisfactory results. Perhaps what's needed this time is less swagger and more diplomacy -- and yes, though it's anathema in chest-thumping Washington these days, a worldly sense of the limits of American power. With its vastly superior military prowess, the U.S. could certainly go it alone in Iraq and other battle zones around the world. But do we want to be this exposed and solitary a player on the world stage? There are indeed many sleep-disturbing threats to America today -- but one of them is the triumphal hubris that has taken hold of our leadership.


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About the writer
David Talbot is Salon's founder and editor in chief.