Extended Remarks

Dial Joe-4-Chávez: Former Congressman Kennedy In A Deal With Venezuelan Strongman

2008-01-04T18:35:00.000-05:00

Massachusetts Democrats love Venezuela's strongman.
The Wall Street Journal Online
Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez is an ally of the Iranian mullahs, a supporter of North Korea, a close friend of Fidel Castro and a good customer for Vladimir Putin's weapon factories. Now he's also a business partner of Joseph P. Kennedy II.

The former Democratic Congressman describes the deal he's cooked up with Mr. Chávez as charity for low-income consumers of heating oil. But it's worth asking what the price of this largesse is to Venezuelans and to U.S. security interests.

The arrangement is this: Mr. Chávez's Citgo--a Houston-based oil company owned by the Venezuelan government--is supplying home heating oil to Mr. Kennedy's Citizens Energy Corporation at a 40% discount. Citizens, a nonprofit outfit, says it passes the savings onto the poor, aiming to help 400,000 homes in 16 states that would otherwise have trouble heating their homes. In the process, Mr. Kennedy happens to get a high-profile publicity plug. If you think you qualify, says the television ad that drew our attention to this partnership, just dial 1-877-Joe-4-Oil.

Generous Joe is not the only one polishing his public image here. In the mold of the Castro strategy of sending armies of "doctors" and "teachers" among the Latin American poor, Mr. Chávez is trying to shape U.S. public opinion in the hope that more gringos will come to see the Chávez government as benevolent.

Massachusetts Democrats seem especially eager to help. In a September 29, 2005, "confidential memorandum" addressed to "President Hugo Chávez" and uncovered by a Congressional committee, William Delahunt (D., Mass.) gushed that it was a "pleasure" to have met with the strongman "to discuss your generous offer." The Democrat advised Mr. Chávez to steer his oil through Mr. Kennedy's nonprofit and declared that "from a public relations perspective" the discount oil scheme "is an extraordinary opportunity to address urgent needs of people living in poverty, while showcasing the compassion of your nation."

Compassion? If fighting poverty is the goal, Mr. Delahunt would do better to remind Mr. Chávez that charity begins at home. The U.S. is far richer than Venezuela and since Hurricane Hugo took power in 1999 Venezuelan living standards have suffered despite soaring oil prices. Annual inflation averaged more than 20% between 2001 and 2005, imposing a tax on the poorest.

Meanwhile, an insecure investment climate has taken a harsh toll on private-sector employment and shrunk the middle class.

In his eight years in power, Mr. Kennedy's business partner has also polarized Venezuela with his class warfare, rewritten the constitution, politicized the judiciary, the electoral council and military, and announced he plans to rule until 2021. Freedom House now ranks Venezuela 34th out of 35 countries in the Western Hemisphere in press freedom. Only the Cuban press is more repressed.

Transparency International puts Venezuela second to last in the Hemisphere in its 2006 "corruption perception index." And then there was that revealing rant against President Bush ("the devil") at the United Nations in September. Even Mr. Delahunt criticized his Venezuelan buddy after that one.

But Mr. Kennedy keeps on trucking. Last week in a telephone interview with the Washington Post, he defended his Chávez subsidy deal as "morally righteous," arguing that the Citgo contribution to his nonprofit is only "one-half of one percent" of Citgo oil and product sales in the U.S.

We dialed Joe-4-Oil ourselves to ask directly whether it is also "righteous" to assist an anti-American tyrant at the expense of the Venezuelan people. In between berating our reporter for daring to ask such a thing, Mr. Kennedy said that Mr. Chávez has done "so much more" for the poor than any previous government. As for democracy, he said there was "ample room for improvement in the ways that people get elected in Venezuela as well as in Florida." Mr. Chávez chose his partner well.

Google's China Problem (and China's Google Problem)

2007-11-21T07:19:00.000-05:00

ByClive Thompson
The New York Times
Published: April 23, 2006

For many young people in China, Kai-Fu Lee is a celebrity. Not quite on the level of a movie star like Edison Chen or the singers in the boy band F4, but for a 44-year-old computer scientist who invariably appears in a somber dark suit, he can really draw a crowd. When Lee, the new head of operations for Google in China, gave a lecture at one Chinese university about how young Chinese should compete with the rest of the world, scalpers sold tickets for $60 apiece. At another, an audience of 8,000 showed up; students sprawled out on the ground, fixed on every word.

It is not hard to see why Lee has become a cult figure for China's high-tech youth. He grew up in Taiwan, went to Columbia and Carnegie-Mellon and is fluent in both English and Mandarin.

Before joining Google last year, he worked for Apple in California and then for Microsoft in China; he set up Microsoft Research Asia, the company's research-and-development lab in Beijing. In person, Lee exudes the cheery optimism of a life coach; last year, he published "Be Your Personal Best," a fast-selling self-help book that urged Chinese students to adopt the risk-taking spirit of American capitalism. When he started the Microsoft lab seven years ago, he hired dozens of China's top graduates; he will now be doing the same thing for Google. "The students of China are remarkable," he told me when I met him in Beijing in February. "There is a huge desire to learn."

Lee can sound almost evangelical when he talks about the liberating power of technology. The Internet, he says, will level the playing field for China's enormous rural underclass; once the country's small villages are connected, he says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves. Lee has been with Google since only last summer, but he wears the company's earnest, utopian ethos on his sleeve: when he was hired away from Microsoft, he published a gushingly emotional open letter on his personal Web site, praising Google's mission to bring information to the masses. He concluded with an exuberant equation that translates as "youth + freedom + equality + bottom-up innovation + user focus + don't be evil = The Miracle of Google."

When I visited with Lee, that miracle was being conducted out of a collection of bland offices in downtown Beijing that looked as if they had been hastily rented and occupied. The small rooms were full of eager young Chinese men in hip sweatshirts clustered around enormous flat-panel monitors, debugging code for new Google projects. "The ideals that we uphold here are really just so important and noble," Lee told me. "How to build stuff that users like, and figure out how to make money later. And 'Don't Do Evil' " — he was referring to Google's bold motto, "Don't Be Evil" — "all of those things. I think I've always been an idealist in my heart."

Yet Google's conduct in China has in recent months seemed considerably less than idealistic. In January, a few months after Lee opened the Beijing office, the company announced it would be introducing a new version of its search engine for the Chinese market. To obey China's censorship laws, Google's representatives explained, the company had agreed to purge its search results of any Web sites disapproved of by the Chinese government, including Web sites promoting Falun Gong, a government-banned spiritual movement; sites promoting free speech in China; or any mention of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. If you search for "Tibet" or "Falun Gong" most anywhere in the world on google.com, you'll find thousands of blog entries, news items and chat rooms on Chinese repression. Do the same search inside China on google.cn, and most, if not all, of these links will be gone. Google will have erased them completely.

Google's decision did not go over well in the United States. In February, company executives were called into Congressional hearings and compared to Nazi collaborators. The company's stock fell, and protesters waved placards outside the company's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google wasn't the only American high-tech company to run aground in China in recent months, nor was it the worst offender. But Google's executives were supposed to be cut from a different cloth. When the company went public two years ago, its telegenic young founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, wrote in the company's official filing for the Securities and Exchange Commission that Google is "a company that is trustworthy and interested in the public good." How could Google square that with making nice with a repressive Chinese regime and the Communist Party behind it?

It was difficult for me to know exactly how Lee felt about the company's arrangement with China's authoritarian leadership. As a condition of our meeting, Google had demanded that I not raise the issue of government relations; only the executives in Google's California head office were allowed to discuss those matters. But as Lee and I talked about how the Internet was transforming China, he offered one opinion that seemed telling: the Chinese students he meets and employs, Lee said, do not hunger for democracy. "People are actually quite free to talk about the subject," he added, meaning democracy and human rights in China. "I don't think they care that much. I think people would say: 'Hey, U.S. democracy, that's a good form of government. Chinese government, good and stable, that's a good form of government. Whatever, as long as I get to go to my favorite Web site, see my friends, live happily.' "

Certainly, he said, the idea of personal expression, of speaking out publicly, had become vastly more popular among young Chinese as the Internet had grown and as blogging and online chat had become widespread. "But I don't think of this as a political statement at all," Lee said. "I think it's more people finding that they can express themselves and be heard, and they love to keep doing that."

It sounded to me like company spin — a curiously deflated notion of free speech. But spend some time among China's nascent class of Internet users, as I have these past months, and you begin to hear such talk somewhat differently. Youth + freedom + equality + don't be evil is an equation with few constants and many possible solutions. What is freedom, just now, to the Chinese? Are there gradations of censorship, better and worse ways to limit information? In America, that seems like an intolerable question — the end of the conversation. But in China, as Google has discovered, it is just the beginning.

Cultural Differences

Google was not, in fact, a pioneer in China. Yahoo was the first major American Internet company to enter the market, introducing a Chinese-language version of its site and opening up an office in Beijing in 1999. Yahoo executives quickly learned how difficult China was to penetrate — and how baffling the country's cultural barriers can be for Americans. Chinese businesspeople, for example, rarely rely on e-mail, because they find the idea of leaving messages to be socially awkward. They prefer live exchanges, which means they gravitate to mobile phones and short text messages instead. (They avoid voicemail for the same reason; during the weeks I traveled in China, whenever I called a Chinese executive whose phone was turned off, I would get a recording saying that the person was simply "unavailable," and the phone would not accept messages.) The most popular feature of the Internet for Chinese users — much more so than in the United States — is the online discussion board, where long, rollicking arguments and flame wars spill on for thousands of comments. Baidu, a Chinese search engine that was introduced in 2001 as an early competitor to Yahoo, capitalized on the national fervor for chat and invented a tool that allows people to create instant discussion groups based on popular search queries. When users now search on baidu.com for the name of the Chinese N.B.A. star Yao Ming, for example, they are shown not only links to news reports on his games; they are also able to join a chat room with thousands of others and argue about him. Baidu's chat rooms receive as many as five million posts a day.

As Yahoo found, these cultural nuances made the sites run by American companies feel simply foreign to Chinese users — and drove them instead to local portals designed by Chinese entrepreneurs. These sites, including Sina.com and Sohu.com, had less useful search engines, but they were full of links to chat rooms and government-approved Chinese-language news sites. Nationalist feelings might have played a role, too, in the success Chinese-run sites enjoyed at Yahoo's expense. "There's now a very strong sense of pride in supporting the local guy," I was told by Andrew Lih, a Chinese-American professor of media studies at the University of Hong Kong.

Yahoo also was slow to tap into another powerful force in Chinese life: rampant piracy. In most parts of the West, after the Napster wars, movie and music piracy is increasingly understood as an illicit activity; it thrives, certainly, but there is now a stigma against taking too much intellectual content without paying for it. (Hence the success of iTunes.) In China, downloading illegal copies of music, movies and software is as normal and accepted as checking the weather online. Baidu's executives discovered early on that many young users were using the Internet to hunt for pirated MP3's, so the company developed an easy-to-use interface specifically for this purpose. When I sat in an Internet cafe in Beijing one afternoon, a teenager with mutton-chop sideburns a few chairs over from me sipped a Coke and watched a samurai movie he'd downloaded free, while his friends used Baidu to find and pull down pirated tracks from the 50 Cent album "Get Rich or Die Tryin'." Almost one-fifth of Baidu's traffic comes from searching for unlicensed MP3's that would be illegal in the United States. Robin Li, Baidu's 37-year-old founder and C.E.O., is unrepentant. "Right now I think that the record companies may not be happy about the service we are offering," he told me recently, "but I think digital music as a trend is unstoppable."

At first, Google took a different approach to the Chinese market than Yahoo did. In early 2000, Google's engineers quietly set about creating a version of their search engine that could understand character-based Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. By the end of the year, they had put up a clunky but serviceable Chinese-language version of Google's home page. If you were in China and surfed over to google.com in 2001, Google's servers would automatically detect that you were inside the country and send you to the Chinese-language search interface, much in the same way google.com serves up a French-language interface to users in France.

While Baidu appealed to young MP3 hunters, Google became popular with a different set: white-collar urban professionals in the major Chinese cities, aspirational types who follow Western styles and sprinkle English words into conversation, a class that prides itself on being cosmopolitan rather than nationalistic. By pulling in that audience, Google by the end of 2002 achieved a level of success that had eluded Yahoo: it amassed an estimated 25 percent of all search traffic in China — and it did so working entirely from California, far outside the Chinese government's sphere of influence.

The Great Firewall

Then on Sept. 3, 2002, Google vanished. Chinese workers arrived at their desks to find that Google's site was down, with just an error page in its place. The Chinese government had begun blocking it. China has two main methods for censoring the Web. For companies inside its borders, the government uses a broad array of penalties and threats to keep content clean. For Web sites that originate anywhere else in the world, the government has another impressively effective mechanism of control: what techies call the Great Firewall of China.

When you use the Internet, it often feels placeless and virtual, but it's not. It runs on real wires that cut through real geographical boundaries. There are three main fiber-optic pipelines in China, giant underground cables that provide Internet access for the public and connect China to the rest of the Internet outside its borders. The Chinese government requires the private-sector companies that run these fiber-optic networks to specially configure "router" switches at the edge of the network, where signals cross into foreign countries. These routers — some of which are made by Cisco Systems, an American firm — serve as China's new censors.

If you log onto a computer in downtown Beijing and try to access a Web site hosted on a server in Chicago, your Internet browser sends out a request for that specific Web page. The request travels over one of the Chinese pipelines until it hits the routers at the border, where it is then examined. If the request is for a site that is on the government's blacklist — and there are lots of them — it won't get through. If the site isn't blocked wholesale, the routers then examine the words in the requested page's Internet address for blacklisted terms. If the address contains a word like "falun" or even a coded term like "198964" (which Chinese dissidents use to signify June 4, 1989, the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), the router will block the signal. Back in the Internet cafe, your browser will display an error message. The filters can be surprisingly sophisticated, allowing certain pages from a site to slip through while blocking others. While I sat at one Internet cafe in Beijing, the government's filters allowed me to surf the entertainment and sports pages of the BBC but not its news section.

Google posed a unique problem for the censors: Because the company had no office at the time inside the country, the Chinese government had no legal authority over it — no ability to demand that Google voluntarily withhold its search results from Chinese users. And the firewall only half-worked in Google's case: it could block sites that Google pointed to, but in some cases it would let slip through a list of search results that included banned sites. So if you were in Shanghai and you searched for "human rights in China" on google.com, you would get a list of search results that included Human Rights in China (hrichina.org), a New York-based organization whose Web site is banned by the Chinese government. But if you tried to follow the link to hrichina.org, you would get nothing but an error message; the firewall would block the page. You could see that the banned sites existed, in other words, but you couldn't reach them. Government officials didn't like this situation — Chinese citizens were receiving constant reminders that their leaders felt threatened by certain subjects — but Google was popular enough that they were reluctant to block it entirely.
In 2002, though, something changed, and the Chinese government decided to shut down all access to Google. Why? Theories abound. Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, whose responsibilities include government relations, told me that he suspects the block might have been at the instigation of a competitor — one of its Chinese rivals. Brin is too diplomatic to accuse anyone by name, but various American Internet executives told me they believe that Baidu has at times benefited from covert government intervention. A young Chinese-American entrepreneur in Beijing told me that she had heard that the instigator of the Google blockade was Baidu, which in 2002 had less than 3 percent of the search market compared with Google's 24 percent. "Basically, some Baidu people sat down and did hundreds of searches for banned materials on Google," she said. (Like many Internet businesspeople I spoke with in China, she asked to remain anonymous, fearing retribution from the authorities.) "Then they took all the results, printed them up and went to the government and said, 'Look at all this bad stuff you can find on Google!' That's why the government took Google offline." Baidu strongly denies the charge, and when I spoke to Guo Liang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, he dismissed the idea and argued that Baidu is simply a stronger competitor than Google, with a better grasp of Chinese desires. Still, many Beijing high-tech insiders told me that it is common for domestic Internet firms to complain to the government about the illicit content of competitors, in the hope that their rivals will suffer the consequences. In China, the censorship regime is not only a political tool; it is also a competitive one — a cudgel that private firms use to beat one another with.
Self-Discipline Awards
When I visited a dingy Internet cafe one November evening in Beijing, its 120 or so cubicles were crammed with teenagers. (Because computers and home Internet connections are so expensive, many of China's mostly young Internet users go online in these cafes, which charge mere pennies per hour and provide fast broadband — and cold soft drinks.) Everyone in the cafe looked to be settled in for a long evening of lightweight entertainment: young girls in pink and yellow Hello Kitty sweaters juggled multiple chat sessions, while upstairs a gang of young Chinese soldiers in olive-drab coats laughed as they crossed swords in the medieval fantasy game World of Warcraft. On one wall, next to a faded kung-fu movie poster, was a yellow sign that said, in Chinese characters, "Do not go to pornographic or illegal Web sites." The warning seemed almost beside the point; nobody here looked even remotely likely to be hunting for banned Tiananmen Square retrospectives. I asked the cafe manager, a man with huge aviator glasses and graying hair, how often his clients try to view illegal content. Not often, he said with a chuckle, and when they do, it's usually pornography. He said he figured it was the government's job to keep banned materials inaccessible. "If it's not supposed to be seen," he said, "it's not supposed to be seen."

One mistake Westerners frequently make about China is to assume that the government is furtive about its censorship. On the contrary, the party is quite matter of fact about it — proud, even. One American businessman who would speak only anonymously told me the story of attending an award ceremony last year held by the Internet Society of China for Internet firms, including the major Internet service providers. "I'm sitting there in the audience for this thing," he recounted, "and they say, 'And now it's time to award our annual Self-Discipline Awards!' And they gave 10 companies an award. They gave them a plaque. They shook hands. The minister was there; he took his picture with each guy. It was basically like Excellence in Self-Censorship — and everybody in the audience is, like, clapping." Internet censorship in China, this businessman explained, is presented as a benevolent police function. In January, the Shenzhen Public Security Bureau created two cuddly little anime-style cartoon "Internet Police" mascots named "Jingjing" and "Chacha"; each cybercop has a blog and a chat window where Chinese citizens can talk to them. As a Shenzhen official candidly told The Beijing Youth Daily, "The main function of Jingjing and Chacha is to intimidate." The article went on to explain that the characters are there "to publicly remind all Netizens to be conscious of safe and healthy use of the Internet, self-regulate their online behavior and maintain harmonious Internet order together."

Intimidation and "self-regulation" are, in fact, critical to how the party communicates its censorship rules to private-sector Internet companies. To be permitted to offer Internet services, a private company must sign a license agreeing not to circulate content on certain subjects, including material that "damages the honor or interests of the state" or "disturbs the public order or destroys public stability" or even "infringes upon national customs and habits." One prohibition specifically targets "evil cults or superstition," a clear reference to Falun Gong. But the language is, for the most part, intentionally vague. It leaves wide discretion for any minor official in China's dozens of regulatory agencies to demand that something he finds offensive be taken offline.
Government officials from the State Council Information Office convene weekly meetings with executives from the largest Internet service companies — particularly major portals that run news stories and host blogs and discussion boards — to discuss what new topics are likely to emerge that week that the party would prefer be censored. "It's known informally as the 'wind-blowing meeting' — in other words, which way is the wind blowing," the American businessman told me. The government officials provide warnings for the days ahead, he explained. "They say: 'There's this party conference going on this week. There are some foreign dignitaries here on this trip.' "
American Internet firms typically arrive in China expecting the government to hand them an official blacklist of sites and words they must censor. They quickly discover that no master list exists. Instead, the government simply insists the firms interpret the vague regulations themselves. The companies must do a sort of political mind reading and intuit in advance what the government won't like. Last year, a list circulated online purporting to be a blacklist of words the government gives to Chinese blogging firms, including "democracy" and "human rights." In reality, the list had been cobbled together by a young executive at a Chinese blog company. Every time he received a request to take down a posting, he noted which phrase the government had objected to, and after a while he developed his own list simply to help his company avoid future hassles.
The penalty for noncompliance with censorship regulations can be serious. An American public-relations consultant who recently worked for a major domestic Chinese portal recalled an afternoon when Chinese police officers burst into the company's offices, dragged the C.E.O. into a conference room and berated him for failing to block illicit content. "He was pale with fear afterward," she said. "You have to understand, these people are terrified, just terrified. They're seriously worried about slipping up and going to jail. They think about it every day they go into the office."

As a result, Internet executives in China most likely censor far more material than they need to. The Chinese system relies on a classic psychological truth: self-censorship is always far more comprehensive than formal censorship. By having each private company assume responsibility for its corner of the Internet, the government effectively outsources the otherwise unmanageable task of monitoring the billions of e-mail messages, news stories and chat postings that circulate every day in China. The government's preferred method seems to be to leave the companies guessing, then to call up occasionally with angry demands that a Web page be taken down in 24 hours. "It's the panopticon," says James Mulvenon, a China specialist who is the head of a Washington policy group called the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis. "There's a randomness to their enforcement, and that creates a sense that they're looking at everything."

The government's filtering, while comprehensive, is not total. One day a banned site might temporarily be visible, if the routers are overloaded — or if the government suddenly decides to tolerate it. The next day the site might disappear again. Generally, everyday Internet users react with caution. They rarely push the government's limits. There are lines that cannot be crossed, and without actually talking about it much, everyone who lives and breathes Chinese culture understands more or less where those lines are. This is precisely what makes the environment so bewildering to American Internet companies. What's allowed? What's not allowed?
In contrast to the confusion most Americans experience, Chinese businessmen would often just laugh when I asked whether the government's censorship regime was hard to navigate. "I'll tell you this, it's not more hard than dealing with Sarbanes and Oxley," said Xin Ye, a founding executive of Sohu.com, one of China's biggest Yahoo-like portals. (He was referring to the American law that requires publicly held companies to report in depth on their finances.) Another evening I had drinks in a Shanghai jazz bar with Charles Chao, the president of Sina, the country's biggest news site. When I asked him how often he needs to remove postings from the discussion boards on Sina.com, he said, "It's not often." I asked if that meant once a week, once a month or less often; he demurred. "I don't think I can talk about it," he said. Yet he seemed less annoyed than amused by my line of questioning. "I don't want to call it censorship," he said. "It's like in every country: they have a bias. There are taboos you can't talk about in the U.S., and everyone knows it."
Jack Ma put it more bluntly: "We don't want to annoy the government." Ma is the hyperkinetic C.E.O. of Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce firm. I met him in November in the lobby of the China World Hotel in Beijing, just after Ma's company had closed one of the biggest deals in Chinese Internet history. Yahoo, whose share of the Chinese search-engine market had fallen (according to one academic survey) to just 2.3 percent, had paid $1 billion to buy 40 percent of Alibaba and had given Ma complete control over all of Yahoo's services in China, hoping he could do a better job with it. From his seat on a plush sofa, Ma explained Alibaba's position on online speech. "Anything that is illegal in China — it's not going to be on our search engine. Something that is really no good, like Falun Gong?" He shook his head in disgust. "No! We are a business! Shareholders want to make money. Shareholders want us to make the customer happy. Meanwhile, we do not have any responsibilities saying we should do this or that political thing. Forget about it!"
A Bit of a Revolution
Last fall, at a Starbucks in Beijing, I met with China's most famous political blogger. Zhao Jing, a dapper, handsome 31-year-old in a gray sweater, seemed positively exuberant as he explained how radically China had changed since the Web arrived in the late 1990's. Before, he said, the party controlled every single piece of media, but then Chinese began logging onto discussion boards and setting up blogs, and it was as if a bell jar had lifted. Even if you were still too cautious to talk about politics, the mere idea that you could publicly state your opinion about anything — the weather, the local sports scene — felt like a bit of a revolution.

Zhao (who now works in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times) pushed the limits further than most. After college, he took a job as a hotel receptionist in a small city. He figured that if he was lucky, he might one day own his own business. When he went online in 1998, though, he realized that what he really wanted to do was to speak out on political questions. He began writing essays and posting them on discussion boards. Soon after he started his online writing, a newspaper editor offered him a job as a reporter.

"This is what the Internet does," Zhao said, flashing a smile. "One week after I went on the Internet, I had a reputation all over the province. I never thought I could be a writer. But I realized the problem wasn't me — it was my small town." Zhao lost his reporting job in March 2003 after his paper published an essay by a retired official advocating political reform; the government retaliated by shutting the paper down. Still eager to write, in December 2004 Zhao started his blog, hosted on a blogging service with servers in the U.K. His witty pro-free-speech essays, written under the name Michael Anti, were soon drawing thousands of readers a day. Last August, the government used the Great Firewall to block his site so that no one in China could read it; defiant, he switched over to Microsoft's blogging tool, called MSN Spaces. The government was almost certainly still monitoring his work, but remarkably, he continued writing. Zhao knew he was safe, he told me, because he knew where to draw the line.
"If you talk every day online and criticize the government, they don't care," he said. "Because it's just talk. But if you organize — even if it's just three or four people — that's what they crack down on. It's not speech; it's organizing. People say I'm brave, but I'm not." The Internet brought Zhao a certain amount of political influence, yet he seemed less excited about the way his blog might transform the government and more excited about the way it had transformed his sense of himself. Several young Chinese told me the same thing. If the Internet is bringing a revolution to China, it is experienced mostly as one of self-actualization: empowerment in a thousand tiny, everyday ways.
One afternoon I visited with Jiang Jingyi, a 29-year-old Chinese woman who makes her living selling clothes on eBay. When she opened the door to her apartment in a trendy area of Shanghai, I felt as if I'd accidentally stumbled into a chic SoHo boutique. Three long racks full of puffy winter jackets and sweaters dominated the center of the living room, and neat rows of designer running shoes and boots ringed the walls. As she served me tea in a bedroom with four computers stacked on a desk, Jiang told me, through an interpreter, that she used to work as a full-time graphic designer. But she was a shopaholic, she said, and one day decided to take some of the cheap clothes she'd found at a local factory and put them up for auction online. They sold quickly, and she made a 30 percent profit. Over the next three months, she sold more and more clothes, until one one day she realized that her eBay profits were outstripping her weekly paycheck. She quit her job and began auctioning full time, and now her monthly sales are in excess of 100,000 yuan, or about $12,000.
"My parents can't understand it," she said with a giggle, as she clicked at the computer to show me one of her latest auctions, a winter jacket selling for 300 yuan. (Her description of the jacket translated as "Very trendy! You will look cool!") At the moment, Jiang sells mostly to Chinese in other major cities, since China's rudimentary banking system and the lack of a reliable credit-card network mean there is no easy way to receive payments from outside the country. But when Paypal — eBay's online payment system — finally links the global market with the Chinese market, she says she will become a small international business, marketing cut-rate clothes directly to hipsters in London or Los Angeles.
Compromises and Disclaimers

Google never did figure out exactly why it was knocked offline in 2002 by the Chinese government. The blocking ended abruptly after two weeks, as mysteriously as it had begun. But even after being unblocked, Google still had troubles. The Great Firewall tends to slow down all traffic coming into the country from the world outside. About 15 percent of the time, Google was simply unavailable in China because of data jams. The firewall also began punishing curious minds: whenever someone inside China searched for a banned term, the firewall would often retaliate by sending back a command that tricked the user's computer into believing Google itself had gone dead. For several minutes, the user would be unable to load Google's search page — a digital slap on the wrist, as it were. For Google, these delays and shutdowns were a real problem, because search engines like to boast about delivering results in milliseconds. Baidu, Google's chief Chinese-language rival, had no such problem, because its servers were located on Chinese soil and thus inside the Great Firewall. Worse, Chinese universities had virtually no access to foreign Web sites, which meant that impressionable college students — in other countries, Google's most ardent fans — were flocking instead to Baidu.

Brin and other Google executives realized that the firewall allowed them only two choices, neither of which they relished. If Google remained aloof and continued to run its Chinese site from foreign soil, it would face slowdowns from the firewall and the threat of more arbitrary blockades — and eventually, the loss of market share to Baidu and other Chinese search engines. If it opened up a Chinese office and moved its servers onto Chinese territory, it would no longer have to fight to get past the firewall, and its service would speed up. But then Google would be subject to China's self-censorship laws.
What eventually drove Google into China was a carrot and a stick. Baidu was the stick: by 2005, it had thoroughly whomped its competition, amassing nearly half of the Chinese search market, while Google's market share remained stuck at 27 percent. The carrot was Google's halcyon concept of itself, the belief that merely by improving access to information in an authoritarian country, it would be doing good. Certainly, the company's officials figured, it could do better than the local Chinese firms, which acquiesce to the censorship regime with a shrug. Sure, Google would have to censor the most politically sensitive Web sites — religious groups, democracy groups, memorials of the Tiananmen Square massacre — along with pornography. But that was only a tiny percentage of what Chinese users search for on Google. Google could still improve Chinese citizens' ability to learn about AIDS, environmental problems, avian flu, world markets. Revenue, Brin told me, wasn't a big part of the equation. He said he thought it would be years before Google would make much if any profit in China. In fact, he argued, going into China "wasn't as much a business decision as a decision about getting people information. And we decided in the end that we should make this compromise."
He and his executives began discussing exactly which compromises they could tolerate. They decided that — unlike Yahoo and Microsoft — they would not offer e-mail or blogging services inside China, since that could put them in a position of being forced to censor blog postings or hand over dissidents' personal information to the secret police. They also decided they would not take down the existing, unfiltered Chinese-language version of the google.com engine. In essence, they would offer two search engines in Chinese. Chinese surfers could still access the old google.com; it would produce uncensored search results, though controversial links would still lead to dead ends, and the site would be slowed down and occasionally blocked entirely by the firewall. The new option would be google.cn, where the results would be censored by Google — but would arrive quickly, reliably and unhindered by the firewall.

Brin and his team decided that if they were going to be forced to censor the results for a search for "Tiananmen Square," then they would put a disclaimer at the top of the search results on google.cn explaining that information had been removed in accordance with Chinese law. When Chinese users search for forbidden terms, Brin said, "they can notice what's missing, or at least notice the local control." It is precisely the solution you'd expect from a computer scientist: the absence of information is a type of information. (Google displays similar disclaimers in France and Germany, where they strip out links to pro-Nazi Web sites.)

Brin's team had one more challenge to confront: how to determine which sites to block? The Chinese government wouldn't give them a list. So Google's engineers hit on a high-tech solution. They set up a computer inside China and programmed it to try to access Web sites outside the country, one after another. If a site was blocked by the firewall, it meant the government regarded it as illicit — so it became part of Google's blacklist.
The Google executives signed their license to become a Chinese Internet service in December 2005. They never formally sat down with government officials and received permission to put the disclaimer on censored search results. They simply decided to do it — and waited to see how the government would react.
The China Storm
Google.cn formally opened on Jan. 27 this year, and human-rights activists immediately logged onto the new engine to see how it worked. The censorship was indeed comprehensive: the first page of results for "Falun Gong," they discovered, consisted solely of anti-Falun Gong sites. Google's image-searching engine — which hunts for pictures — produced equally skewed results. A query for "Tiananmen Square" omitted many iconic photos of the protest and the crackdown. Instead, it produced tourism pictures of the square lighted up at night and happy Chinese couples posing before it.
Google's timing could not have been worse. Google.cn was introduced into a political environment that was rapidly souring for American high-tech firms in China. Last September, Reporters Without Borders revealed that in 2004, Yahoo handed over an e-mail user's personal information to the Chinese government. The user, a business journalist named Shi Tao, had used his Chinese Yahoo account to leak details of a government document on press restrictions to a pro-democracy Web site run by Chinese exiles in New York. The government sentenced him to 10 years in prison. Then in December, Microsoft obeyed a government request to delete the writings of Zhao Jing — the free-speech blogger I'd met with in the fall. What was most remarkable about this was that Microsoft's blogging service has no servers located in China; the company effectively allowed China's censors to reach across the ocean and erase data stored on American territory.
Against this backdrop, the Google executives probably expected to appear comparatively responsible and ethical. But instead, as the China storm swirled around Silicon Valley in February, Google bore the brunt of it. At the Congressional hearings where the three companies testified — along with Cisco, makers of hardware used in the Great Firewall — legislators assailed all the firms, but ripped into Google with particular fire. They asked how a company with the slogan "Don't Be Evil" could conspire with China's censors. "That makes you a functionary of the Chinese government," said Jim Leach, an Iowa Republican. "So if this Congress wanted to learn how to censor, we'd go to you."
Zhao Jing's Rankings
In February, I met with Zhao Jing again, two months after his pro-democracy blog was erased by Microsoft. We ordered drinks at a faux-Irish pub in downtown Beijing. Zhao was still as energetic as ever, though he also seemed a bit rueful over his exuberant comments in our last conversation. "I'm more cynical now," he said. His blog had been killed because of a single post. In December, a Chinese newspaper editor was fired, and Zhao called for a boycott of the paper. That apparently crossed the line. It was more than just talk; Zhao had now called for a political action. The government contacted Microsoft to demand the blog be shuttered, and the company complied — earning it a chorus of outrage from free-speech advocates in the United States, who accused Microsoft of having acted without even receiving a formal legal request from the Chinese government.

Microsoft seemed chastened by the public uproar; at the Congressional hearings, the company's director of government relations expressed regret. To try to save face, Microsoft executives pointed out that they had saved a copy of the deleted blog postings and sent them to Zhao. What they did not mention, Zhao told me, is that they refused to e-mail Zhao the postings; they offered merely to burn them onto a CD and mail them to any address in the United States Zhao requested. Microsoft appeared to be so afraid of the Chinese government, Zhao noted with a bitter laugh, that the company would not even send the banned material into China by mail. (Microsoft declined to comment for this article.)

I expected Zhao to be much angrier with the American Internet companies than he was. He was surprisingly philosophical. He ranked the companies in order of ethics, ticking them off with his fingers. Google, he said, was at the top of the pile. It was genuinely improving the quality of Chinese information and trying to do its best within a bad system. Microsoft came next; Zhao was obviously unhappy with its decision, but he said that it had produced such an easy-to-use blogging tool that, on balance, Microsoft was helping Chinese people to speak publicly. Yahoo came last, and Zhao had nothing but venom for the company.
"Google has struck a compromise," he said, and compromises are sometimes necessary. Yahoo's behavior, he added, put it in a different category: "Yahoo is a sellout. Chinese people hate Yahoo." The difference, Zhao said, was that Yahoo had put individual dissidents in serious danger and done so apparently without thinking much about the human damage. (Yahoo did not respond to requests for comment.) Google, by contrast, had avoided introducing any service that could get someone jailed. It was censoring information, but Zhao considered that a sin of omission, rather than of commission.
The Distorted Universe
Zhao's moral calculus was striking, not least because it is so foreign to American ways of thinking. For most Americans, or certainly for most of those who think and write about China, there are no half-measures in democracy or free speech. A country either fully embraces these principles, or it disappears down the slippery slope of totalitarianism. But China's bloggers and Internet users have already lived at the bottom of the slippery slope. From their perspective, the Internet — as filtered as it is — has already changed Chinese society profoundly. For the younger generation, especially, it has turned public speech into a daily act. This, ultimately, is the perspective that Google has adopted, too. And it raises an interesting question: Can an imperfect Internet help change a society for the better?
One Internet executive I spoke to summed up the conundrum of China's Internet as the "distorted universe" problem. What happens to people's worldviews when they do a Google search for Falun Gong and almost exclusively find sites opposed to it, as would happen today on google.cn? Perhaps they would trust Google's authority and assume there is nothing to be found. This is the fear of Christopher Smith, the Republican representative who convened the recent Congressional hearings. "When Google sends you to a Chinese propaganda source on a sensitive subject, it's got the imprimatur of Google," he told me recently. "And that influences the next generation — they think, Maybe we can live with this dictatorship. Without your Lech Walesas, you never get democracy." For Smith, Google's logic is the logic of appeasement. Like the companies that sought to "engage" with apartheid South Africa, Google's executives are too dedicated to profits ever to push for serious political change. (Earlier this month, Google's C.E.O., Eric Schmidt, visited Kai-Fu Lee in Beijing and told journalists that it would be "arrogant" of Google to try to change China's censorship laws.)
But perhaps the distorted universe is less of a problem in China, because — as many Chinese citizens told me — the Chinese people long ago learned to read past the distortions of Communist propaganda and media control. Guo Liang, the professor at the Chinese social sciences academy, told me about one revealing encounter. "These guys at Harvard did a study of the Chinese Internet," Guo said. "I talked to them and asked, 'What were your results?' They said, 'We think the Chinese government tries to control the Internet.' I just laughed. I said, 'We know that!' " Google's filtering of its results was not controversial for Guo because it was nothing new.

Andrew Lih, the Chinese-American professor at the University of Hong Kong, said that many in China take a long-term perspective. "Chinese people have a 5,000-year view of history," he said. "You ban a Web site, and they're like: 'Oh, give it time. It'll come back.' " Or consider the position of a group of Chinese Internet geeks trying to get access to Wikipedia, the massive free online encyclopedia where anyone can write an entry. Currently, all of wikipedia.com is blocked; the group is trying to convince Wikipedia's overseers to agree to the creation of a sanitized Chinese version with the potentially illegal entries removed. They argue that this would leave 99.9 percent of Wikipedia intact, and if that material were freely available in China, they say, it would be a great boon for China, particularly for underfinanced and isolated schools. (So far, Wikipedia has said it will not allow the creation of a censored version of the encyclopedia.)

Given how flexible computer code is, there are plenty of ways to distort the universe — to make its omissions more or less visible. At one point while developing google.cn, Google considered blocking all sites that refer to controversial topics. A search for Falun Gong in China would produce no sites in favor of it, but no sites opposing it either. What sort of effect would that have had? Remember too that when Google introduced its censored google.cn engine, it also left its original google.com Chinese-language engine online. Which means that any Chinese citizen can sit in a Net cafe, plug "Tiananmen Square" into each version of the search engine and then compare the different results — a trick that makes the blacklist somewhat visible. Critics have suggested that Google should go even further and actually publish its blacklist online in the United States, making its act of censorship entirely transparent.
The Super Girl Theory
When I spoke to Kai-Fu Lee in Google's Beijing offices, there were moments that to me felt jarring. One minute he sounded like a freedom-loving Googler, arguing that the Internet inherently empowers its users. But the next minute he sounded more like Jack Ma of Alibaba — insisting that the Chinese have no interest in rocking the boat. It is a circular logic I encountered again and again while talking to China's Internet executives: we don't feel bad about filtering political results because our users aren't looking for that stuff anyway.
They may be right about their users' behavior. But you could just as easily argue that their users are incurious because they're cowed. Who would openly search for illegal content in a public Internet cafe — or even at home, since the government requires that every person with personal Internet access register his name and phone number with the government for tracking purposes? It is also possible that the government's crackdown on the Internet could become more intense if the country's huge population of poor farmers begins agitating online. The government is reasonably tolerant of well-educated professionals online. But the farmers, upset about corrupt local officials, are serious activists, and they pose a real threat to Beijing; they staged 70,000 demonstrations in 2004, many of which the government violently suppressed.
In the eyes of critics, Google is lying to itself about the desires of Chinese Internet users and collaborating with the Communist Party merely to secure a profitable market. To take Lee at his word is to take a leap of faith: that the Internet, simply through its own inherent properties, will slowly chip away at the government's ability to control speech, seeding a cultural change that strongly favors democracy. In this view, there will be no "great man" revolution in China, no Lech Walesa rallying his oppressed countrymen. Instead, the freedom fighters will be a half-billion mostly apolitical young Chinese, blogging and chatting about their dates, their favorite bands, video games — an entire generation that is growing up with public speech as a regular habit.
At one point in our conversation, Lee talked about the "Super Girl" competition televised in China last year, the country's analogue to "American Idol." Much like the American version of the show, it featured young women belting out covers of mainstream Western pop songs amid a blizzard of corporate branding. (The full title of the show was "Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Super Girl Contest," in honor of its sponsor.) In each round, viewers could vote for their favorite competitor via text message from their mobile phones. As the season ran its course, it began to resemble a presidential election campaign, with delirious fans setting up Web sites urging voters to pick their favorite singer. In the final episode, eight million young Chinese used their mobile phones to vote; the winner was Li Yuchun, a 21-year-old who dressed like a schoolgirl and sang "Zombie," by the Irish band the Cranberries.
"If you think about a practice for democracy, this is it," Lee said. "People voted for Super Girls. They loved it — they went out and campaigned." It may not be a revolution, in other words, but it might be a start.

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer. He frequently reports about technology for the magazine.

From Newt Gingrich: Don't Legislate Defeat; Work Toward Victory

2007-09-07T06:17:00.000-04:00

Dear Friend,

Next Monday, I will give a speech at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) marking six years since 9/11 and outlining the larger war we should have been waging in order to defeat our terrorist enemies on a worldwide basis.

My speech at AEI is designed to make the case for a larger and more productive dialogue about what we need to accomplish in the Real War we're engaged in -- not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but also in dealing with our enemies on a larger strategic scale, including Iran, Syria, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and the worldwide forces of terrorism that want to destroy our civilization and eliminate our freedoms.

We will webcast the speech beginning next Monday evening, September 10, and also post the text of it online at Newt.org and AmericanSolutions.com.

The reason I am speaking out is simple: We need a war-winning option, and today we do not have such an option.

What's Missing in Our National Debate About 'The War'

Next week will be the sixth anniversary of the enemy attack on the United States on 9/11. Six years ago, more than 3,000 innocent civilians were murdered by an evil barbaric force, an irreconcilable wing of Islam that seeks to repress women, eliminate religious freedom and punish personal liberty.

For six years, we have been at war on a worldwide basis with a movement funded largely by Saudi Arabian and Iranian sources.

For six years, we have failed to confront the scale of our enemy, the direct threat of nuclear and biological weapons if possessed by that enemy, and the scale and nature of the strategy needed to win the larger war with that enemy.

Next week, Gen. David Petraeus, who did a brilliant job in his two previous tours of Iraq and is the best counterinsurgency Army general America has, will issue his report on how the "surge" is working in Iraq.

And yet next week, our elites will continue to hide in the smaller argument about Iraq and avoid the larger argument about the global war.

When the analysis and debate on that report begins, there will be an important option missing.

The 'Stay the Course' Camp Versus the 'Lose Quickly' Camp

The debate over the Petraeus Report will rapidly be divided into two predictable camps.
There will be a "stay the course" camp advocating doing more of what we are already doing, hanging on and hoping for the best. This will be led by President Bush and echoed by his most loyal supporters in the Republican Party.

There will be a "let's lose quickly to end the American casualties" camp that will reject the Petraeus Report. This camp will note that we have failed to achieve a promised land of peace and stability in Iraq, and therefore, we should legislate defeat in the United States Congress rather than allow Gen. Petraeus to continue his efforts to engage Iraq to help defeat the enemy.

The Missing Option: A War-Winning Strategy

What will be missing in this debate is a third choice: "a war-winning strategy."

The great tragedy of the six years since 9/11 is that we have not had a national debate about the scale of our opponents, the depth of their hatred for our way of life and the very real threat that they will acquire nuclear and biological weapons. With the former, they may kill hundreds of thousands of Americans in our cities. With the latter, millions of Americans could die in a deliberate attack.

There is no debate about the potential for a second holocaust in which millions die if Israel is overwhelmed with nuclear weapons or if the missiles Hezbollah fires from Southern Lebanon are launched with chemical warheads or if a coalition of terrorist forces backed by Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia simply wear down the Israeli will to resist.

Iraq and Afghanistan Are Campaigns Within the Larger War

Imagine that Lincoln had tried to assess Antietam and Gettysburg without thinking about the larger war for the preservation of the Union.

Imagine that FDR had tried to assess Pearl Harbor or Guadalcanal or Kasserine Pass without looking at the larger war with Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy.

Clearly, any battle report which focused only on Iwo Jima or Guadalcanal or the Battle of the Bulge would have been so negative that many Americans would have wanted to quit the war.
Yet, in World War II, Americans understood that they were involved in a larger life-and-death struggle for the very survival of their civilization. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill knew they had to rally the American and British people to a hard, violent war with tyranny, and they brilliantly described the necessity of defending what they called "our Christian civilization" against Paganism and totalitarianism.

Because the American and British people understood what was at stake and because they believed there was a larger strategy for victory, they were prepared to endure defeats, frustrations and casualties to get to victory.

Once we accept that we are in a larger war, the assessment of Iraq and Afghanistan changes and the options available to win in both campaigns changes.

The Tragedy of Next Week's Debate

The tragedy is that next week there will be a debate between "staying the course" and "legislating defeat."

Both will be wrong.

Legislating defeat is more wrong than simply staying the course. Yet, staying the course is wholly inadequate to the long-term challenge of winning the larger war.

By focusing the country on a stay-the-course-versus-legislated-defeat choice, we have left no space for a dialogue about how to win the war.

Legislating Defeat Will Be Tragically Wrong, a Major Victory for Our Enemies and a Major Defeat for the United States

Let me be absolutely clear: I am unalterably opposed to legislating defeat.

And from talking to thousands of you across the country, including those in our armed forces, I know that the American people are opposed to defeat as well.

We know that defeat in Iraq will be a disaster for America, for the Iraqi people and for the cause of freedom and the rule of law.

If the American Congress legislates defeat, it will have taken on its shoulders the burden of politically defeating the United States at a time when it is impossible for our enemies to militarily defeat us.

If the "Reid-Pelosi Defeat America" legislation passes, every terrorist group on the planet will rejoice.

If the leftwing, pro-defeat activists celebrate a victory over Gen. Petraeus and President Bush, they will be joined in their celebration by every anti-American group around the world.

Legislating defeat should not be an acceptable option for any American who cares about our national security and who wants to defeat the enemy who attacked us on 9/11.

Staying the Course Is Inadequate

Yet as wrong as legislating defeat is, the present strategy of staying the course is simply not good enough.

As long as Northwest Pakistan (Waziristan) is a sanctuary, the Taliban can never be defeated.
As long as we have failed to create a better economy in which growing and processing drugs is no longer the best way to earn a living, Afghanistan will never be safe.

As long as Iran is allowed to ship weapons into Iraq, we will never fully bring stability to Iraq.
As long as Syria is allowed to serve as a transit point for foreign terrorists coming into Iraq, we will never fully defeat the insurgent forces.

As long as Saudi sources finance the spread of Wahhabism across the planet and the Wahhabists continue to advocate Jihad and martyrdom, the flow of new terrorist recruits willing to die will continue.

As long as the current dictatorship runs Iran and works every day to create nuclear weapons and to sustain terrorists groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the professional state-sponsored terrorists of the Iranian Guard units, our civilization will not be safe.

We Are Faced With a Large Worldwide Threat, and We Need a Large Worldwide Strategy for Victory

The greatest need in American policy today is for a strategy to win the larger war.

A strategy for a larger war requires a much more thorough statement of the scale of our enemies and their preparations.

A strategy for a larger war will involve some very difficult and, at times, frightening conversations about who is helping our enemies and what it may take to cut off that aid.
Confronting the Real War on its worldwide terms will require fundamental changes in national security, homeland security, budgets and preparations.

Setting out to win the larger war will require a new tempo and new rhythm for our bureaucracies and new determination to insist on real changes both in America and abroad.

My speech at AEI September 10 at 10:00 a.m. ET will outline the scale of changes required to win the real war.

Anticipating the Patraeus Report

We already know from a variety of sources, including interviews with Gen. Petraeus, what his report will contain.

Gen. Petraeus will report that things have improved, that we are a long way from winning but we are gaining ground, and that we need more time and more patience. The report will indicate that the military situation in Iraq is improving faster than the political situation but that both are promising.

However, we should be prepared for the probability that the enemy has spent the last several months planning and preparing to launch devastating attacks to coincide with the release of the report.

Our enemies understand how Washington works, and they understand how the media work. They increasingly plan the timing of their attacks in an effort to undermine the resolve of our politicians and our public by perfecting their influence of the war coverage in our news media.

If the enemy fails to attack during the debate over the report, it will be a modest help to Gen. Petraeus and President Bush.

If the enemy does succeed in a series of deadly attacks during the debate over the report, those attacks will be seized upon by the American news media and the pro-defeat left as proof that legislating defeat is the right solution.

Who Do You Trust? Gen. Petraeus or Gen. Pelosi?

No matter what happens that week, given a choice between the self-appointed political generals of Capitol Hill and the professional soldiers and Marines who have dedicated their lives to studying the art of war, it is a lot safer bet to believe in Gen. Petraeus' analysis than Gen. Pelosi's.

This upcoming debate is going to be the most serious effort to legislate the defeat of America in a generation.

No one should underestimate what is at stake. Please tune in to my speech September 10, and let your representatives know that we've had enough debating defeat. It's time for a serious discussion of what it takes for victory.

Your friend,
Newt Gingrich

P.S. -- Last week, in a lawsuit brought by the AFL-CIO and the ACLU, a federal district court judge in San Francisco blocked the implementation of a new rule adopted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that would have a dramatic impact in stemming the flow of illegal immigration into the United States by cracking down on illegal employment.

The new DHS rule would involve sending letters to thousands of employers across the country that have employees with invalid Social Security numbers. These "no-match" letters would give notice to employers that the Social Security numbers of at least 10 of their employees do not match existing Social Security numbers and that they have 90 days to correct the problem. If not corrected, an employer would then face civil and criminal penalties. In issuing an order for a temporary injunction, Judge Maxine Chesney stated that the court needed "breathing room" to determine if the new DHS rule went beyond what was authorized by the 1986 immigration law.

This judge's decision should serve as a moment of clarity for this Congress. Either the United States government is finally going to take action to reduce the magnet of illegal employment or it is not. The Congress should take decisive action and immediately pass legislation that makes it absolutely clear that existing immigration law permits the type of action that DHS is carrying out to enforce the law.

Is Mr. Putin Listening?

2007-08-21T23:47:00.000-04:00

By John E. Carey
For The Washington Times
August 22, 2007

Russia watchers and military analysts say some of Russia’s recent military moves speak louder than the words of Russia’s leaders.

But the words of President Vladimir Putin of Russia and others at the top of the Russian hierarchy have sent an icy chill though relations between Russia, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the U.S.

In just the last week:

--Russia reinstituted long range bomber surveillance patrols of U.S. vital areas including the military installation at Guam and our aircraft carriers at sea. These are the first routine bomber patrols since the Cold War.

--Russia announced an intention to again deploy Russian naval forces to the Mediterranean Sea. This activity also is a return to Cold War-like military deployments and operations. The head of the Russian Navy Admiral Vladimir Masorin said, "The Mediterranean is an important theater of operations for the Russian Black Sea Fleet. We must restore a permanent presence of the Russian Navy in this region."

--Russia joined with China and several oil-rich Central Asian former Soviet Republics who are members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), to conduct war game maneuvers.

For the first time ever, Russia hosted Chinese soldiers in peaceful yet provocative training exercised on Russian soil. The U.S. Embassies in Moscow and Beijing said the United States had requested participation in the events but were informed that any U.S. participation or observers would not be welcome.

--Finally, President Putin from Russia and President Hu Jintao of China participated in a multi-nation meeting of the SCO that included non-member luminaries such as Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad took the opportunity to rant against the U.S. proposed deployment of missile defenses to Poland and the Czech Republic; a deployment also criticized by China and Russia. China and Russia have blocked attempts by the U.S., U.K. and France to sanction Iran in the U.N. for its nuclear program.

“Diplomacy between Russia and the West is increasingly being overshadowed by military gestures,” says Sergei Strokan, a foreign-policy expert with the independent daily Kommersant. “It’s clear that the Kremlin is listening more and more to the generals and giving them more of what they want.”

Said President Putin at the SCO’s largest annual gathering of regional leaders ever, "Year by year, the SCO is becoming a more substantial factor in ensuring security in the region," he said. "Russia, like other SCO states, favors strengthening the multi-polar international system providing equal security and development potential for all countries. Any attempts to solve global and regional problems unilaterally have no future," he added.

Ex-Soviet members of the SCO include Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan.

For more than two years the SCO, prompted largely by Russia, has called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from two member countries, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Uzbekistan evicted American forces that were supporting American and NATO operations in Afghanistan, but Kyrgyzstan still hosts a U.S. base. Russia also maintains a military base in Kyrgyzstan.

Much of regional wrangling and politics in Central Asia relates to oil. Russia’s new hubris and military activity is funded by recent oil wealth. China has an agreement to buy Russian oil and during this last week the leaders of China and Kazakhstan agreed to finance and build a network of pipelines to supply China with oil and gas from the Caspian Sea region.

"The SCO clearly wants the US to leave Central Asia; that's a basic political demand," says Ivan Safranchuk, Moscow director of the independent World Security Institute. "That's one reason why the SCO is holding military exercises, to demonstrate its capability to take responsibility for stability in Central Asia after the US leaves."

Believing that the U.S. too greatly dominates the post-Cold War world, Russia and China agreed to for a "strategic partnership.” The creation of the SCO in 2001 is a key part of that relationship. But the outreach by Russia and China to leaders like Iran’s Ahmadinejad has caused western analysts to refer to the SCO as the "club of dictators" or “OPEC with nukes.”

Moreover, a year’s worth of bellicose rhetoric from Mr. Putin worries many western observers.

Last February at the Annual Munich Conference on Security Policy, President Putin called American foreign policy “ruinous” in a speech reporters called a “scathing attack.”Mr. Putin also said the United States was a reckless "unipolar" power. He accused United States of making the world more dangerous by pursuing policies that led to war, ruin and insecurity.

America’s new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in a follow-up to Mr. Putin’s speech, “As an old Cold Warrior, one of yesterday’s speeches almost filled me with nostalgia for a less complex time. Almost..” He added: "One Cold War was quite enough."

At the end of July, the secretary-general of NATO, Mr. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said, "Nobody wants a new Cold War, neither the Russians nor NATO, nobody.” He urged Russia to abandon its "confrontational" rhetoric and join the Western allies to combat the common threats of terrorism and failed states.

Judging by Russian activities last week, it is not clear that Mr. Putin is listening.

John E. Carey is former president of International Defense Consultants, Inc. and a frequent contributor to the Washington Times.

CIA criticises ex-chief over 9/11

2007-08-21T19:45:00.000-04:00

BBC
August 21, 2007

A CIA inquiry has accused the agency's ex-chief George Tenet and his aides of failing to prepare for al-Qaeda threats before the 9/11 attacks on the US.

"The agency and its officers did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner," the CIA inspector general wrote in a scathing report.

The document was completed in June 2005 and kept classified until now. Its release was ordered by Congress.

Ex-CIA director George Tenet said the inspector general was "flat wrong".

Mr Tenet, who enjoyed strong support from President George W Bush, resigned in 2004 citing "personal reasons."

The review team led by Inspector General John Helgerson found no "single point of failure" that would have stopped the attacks on 11 September 2001.

But he says US spy agencies lacked a comprehensive plan to counter al-Qaeda.

The report concludes that Mr Tenet "by virtue of his position, bears ultimate responsibility for the fact that no such strategic plan was ever created."

It adds that various bodies "did not always work effectively and cooperatively."

For the record

Mr Helgerson called for accountability boards to look at the performance of Mr Tenet and his aides.

Such a move was rejected after the internal report was submitted to CIA leaders.

Current CIA Director Michael Hayden said the decision to release the report was not his preference, but that he was making it available as required by Congress in a law signed by Mr Bush earlier this month.

"I thought the release of this report would distract officers serving their country on the front lines of a global conflict," he said.

The BBC's James Coomarasamy says the criticism is in keeping with previous inquiries into the 11 September attacks.

It is notable, however, for having an unusually critical tone for an internal inquiry and for its personal criticism of Mr Tenet.

In a statement, the former CIA director said he had implemented a "robust plan, marked by extraordinary effort and dedication to fighting terrorism, dating back to long before 9/11".

"Without such an effort," Mr Tenet added, "we would not have been able to give the president a plan on September 15, 2001, that led to the routing of the Taliban... and combating terrorists across 92 countries".

Our correspondent says the administration has already taken steps to address some criticisms against the intelligence community, making this latest report more of an interesting historical document than a consequential one.

Excellent Newt Gingrich Speech, National Press Club, Aug. 7, 2007

2007-08-09T19:07:00.000-04:00

The speech below is mainly a proposal to reform the way we in the United States discuss major issues and choose our president.

Peace and Freedom sincerely thanks Mr. Rick Tyler of Mr. Gingrich’s staff who worked so hard to get us this transcript. Mr. Gingrich gave this speech from notes (not text) and a transcript had to be made. Since the text of the speech is so long we added some headers so readers can scan down and find the areas that interest them the most.

The headers are:

--Introduction

--Mr. Gingrich Begins

--Lincoln-Douglas Debates

--Current System Not Working

--Strategy and Reality Not Connected

--Challenges Are Immense

--UPS and FedEx Superior to Federal Bureaucracy

--The Scale of Change

--Britain’s Phoney War

--Our Phony War: The Scale of the Challenge

--Conversations About Our Future: Better Debates

--Questions and Answers
----—Proposal Favors Good Debaters
----—How to Handle 3rd Party Candidates
----—How to Engage The Public
----—Revising Primary Debates
----—Reforming The Overall Primary Process
----—Campaign Financing
----—Fred Thompson
----—Gingrich’s Own Plan to Run
----—2008 a Democratic Year
----—Are The Candidates Up To The Task
----—Near Future of the War On Terror

We had a lot of formatting trouble with this document and we are sorry for its poor appearance. We think you’ll find that the content is excellent.

All the best to everyone,

John E. Carey
*******************

Introduction

MR. ZREMSKI: (Sounds gavel.) Good afternoon, and welcome to the National Press Club. My name is Jerry Zremski, and I’m the Washington bureau chief for the Buffalo News and president of the Press Club.

I’d like to welcome our club members and their guests who are with this today, as well as those of you who are watching on C-SPAN. We’re looking forward to today’s speech, and afterwards, I’ll ask as many questions as time permits.

Please hold your applause during the speech so that we have as much time for questions as possible.

For our broadcast audience, I’d like to explain that if you hear applause during the speech, it may be from the guests and members of the general public who attend our luncheons and not necessarily from the working press.

I’d like now to introduce our head table guests, and ask them to stand briefly when their names are called.From your right, Jackie Kucinich, a reporter for The Hill newspaper; Rhodes Cook, editor and publisher of The Rhodes Cook Letter; Charlotte Grimes, formerly of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Washington bureau and now holder of the Knight Chair in Political Reporting at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University; David Broder of The Washington Post; Eleanor Clift of Newsweek Magazine; Marvin Kalb, the Edwin R. Murrow professor of Practice, Emeritus at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, last year’s winner of the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award and the host of the Kalb Report here at the Press Club; skipping over the podium, Melissa Charbonneau of CBN News, the vice chair of the NPC Speakers Committee; skipping over the speaker for just one second, Calista Gingrich, the wife of our speaker; Ken Delecki, a freelance reporter and editor and a member of the Speakers Committee who helped arranged today’s lunch; Sylvia Smith, Washington correspondent for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette and the secretary of the National Press Club; Morgan Felchner is editor of Campaigns & Elections magazine; Clarence Page, nationally syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune; and David Hess, correspondent for the National Journal, CongressDaily and a former president of the National Press Club. (Applause.)

Before introducing our main speaker, I would like a great member and friend of the National Press Club to say a few words. Without him this event today wouldn’t be possible.

Marvin Kalb has had an extraordinary career that won him the Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award in 2006. He was an award-winning journalist for CBS and NBC before becoming an author, and now he teaches at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In addition, he hosts The Kalb Report, a periodic discussion of contemporary issues hosted here at the National Press Club in conjunction with the Shorenstein Center and George Washington University.

Ladies and gentlemen, Marvin Kalb.

MARVIN KALB (The Kalb Report): (Applause.) Thank you very much. I will try to be as brief as possible and get to Newt as quickly as possible.

I think I’m here simply to set the stage on an idea. After the 1988 campaign, Roger Ailes, who was at that time a Republican consultant, used an expression which I’ve never forgotten. He said, “If you didn’t like ‘88, you’re going to hate ‘92.” (Laughter.)

And what he had in mind at that time was the feeling of disgust that many reporters and even politicians had about the way in which the ‘88 campaign was conducted.

So, in ‘90 a number of us — journalists, scholars, politicians — got together at the Shorenstein Center to try to come up with a better idea. The idea that we came up with was something that we called Nine Sundays. It was as follows: That there are nine weeks between Labor Day and Election Day; if a network or a group of networks were to set aside each week one hour or an hour and a half for a discussion of a single major issue before the country — let us say right now it would be clearly Iraq — and that debate between the presidential candidates would take place focusing on a single issue for that 90-minute period of time, and this would be nine Sundays that this would happen.

Well, we put it out, and I must say all of the candidates — all of the candidates — were extremely pleased with the proposal. None of them, however, accepted. (Laughter.)
They patted us on the back and sent us out the door. And we tried again in ‘96, but it clearly didn’t work.

At the beginning of this year, our principal speaker and former governor from New York, Mario Cuomo, began to speak at the Cooper Union place in New York about a new way of approaching speaking, this whole idea of a presidential debate. Let’s get serious. We certainly haven’t had any and the country certainly needs it. So let’s get serious. Let’s try to come up with a better idea. And Newt had a good idea, and I hope he lays it out for us today.

Thank you. (Applause.)

MR. ZREMSKI: Our speaker today is no stranger to the National Press Club. This is his fourth National Press Club Luncheon appearance, and he has been here for many other events over the years. Newt Gingrich was elected to the House in 1978 and reelected until resigning in 1999. He is widely credited with spearheading the GOP’s rise from 40 years in the minority to the majority in 1994, thanks in part to the Contract With America, which outlined how the Republicans would govern in Congress.

Currently he is the chairman of the Gingrich Group, a communications and consulting firm, and general chairman of American Solutions for Winning the Future. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of nine books, and most importantly, he is a man of many interests and many ideas.

Recently he has given thought to this idea of improving our presidential debates. Critics of past debates contend that they’re too superficial to provide the kind of in-depth knowledge of the nominees — of the nominees the voters need to make informed choices.

Speaker Gingrich will talk today about a proposal he thinks makes more sense. It’s a plan in which he may have a very personal interest in that he could be a late entrant into the race.
Please join me in welcoming Newt Gingrich to the National Press Club. (Applause.)

Mr. Gingrich Begins

MR. GINGRICH: Thank you very, very much. And I thank all of you. Calista and I are delighted to be here.

I want to thank Marvin Kalb, who really sparked this particular event by calling me out of the blue and saying that he had seen what Mario Cuomo and I had talked about and he was glad that we had, a mere 16 years later, picked up on his idea. (Laughter.) And really it was a wonderful and a very encouraging conversation at the time that it happened.

I also want to thank Governor Cuomo, who agreed to the 90-minute discussion at Cooper Union, which you can see if you go to AmericanSolutions.com. It is still posted there. And I want to thank Tim Russert, who agreed to come up and be the moderator that night, and who really added a lot to the event and to its impact.

But Governor Cuomo was remarkably generous. And it was totally appropriate that he would be the person to join me at Cooper Union, because it was his press secretary who got me thinking about this. Some of you may know Harold Holzer, who is a remarkable figure in his own right.

He was Bella Abzug’s press secretary, then he was Mario Cuomo’s press secretary — as you can tell, somebody who obviously is somebody I’d hang out with. (Laughter.) He’s now the vice president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But he is a great Lincoln scholar. He edited, for C-SPAN, the most accurate edition of the Lincoln-Douglas debates ever published. And it is really worth your reading his introduction to understand the complexity of those debates and their importance in American history. He then wrote a book which I think is a work of genius, one of the best strategy books I’ve ever read, called simply “Lincoln at Cooper Union.”

And he makes the case in both these works, both about the Lincoln-Douglas debates and about Cooper Union, that Abraham Lincoln understood that America was at a crossroads from which it might never recover, that he had been drawn into politics by the Supreme Court’s stunningly wrong decision that slavery could be extended everywhere in the country — the Dred Scott case. And he was determined to stop the spread of slavery and to stand for freedom, even at the risk of war. And he understood that this was not a topic you discussed in a vaudeville room, that this was a topic for adults, discussed by adults in an adult setting.

Historical Context: Lincoln-Douglas Debates

He and Douglas had known each other for many, many years. They both served in the legislature. Illinois was not that big a state. Douglas was a very successful United States senator, and Lincoln decided to take him on and nagged him to debate. And everywhere — Douglas didn’t want to debate because he was the incumbent senator. Lincoln was a well-known and very successful lawyer but nonetheless, why if you’re the incumbent take the risk?And so Lincoln adopted the practice of going one day behind Douglas.

If Douglas was in Springfield, the next day, Lincoln was in Springfield. If Douglas was in Chicago, the next day, Lincoln was in Chicago. If Douglas went to Peoria, the next day, Lincoln went to Peoria. And after about three weeks of this, Douglas finally said, all right, let’s just agree to the debates; I got it; I mean, I’m tired of you following me. (Laughter.)

And they ultimately agreed to seven. The debates lasted three hours each. They had a timekeeper but no moderator — one of the points when we get to questions that Marv and I don’t totally agree on.

I represent the political leadership model that says the two guys running for power should in fact be responsible for deciding their own topics. He legitimately represents a different interest, which believes the news media might have some role in that. But in the case of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, everything in the debates was decided by Lincoln and Douglas.

And by the way if you read them, they’re much more partisan, much more narrow. But there are those brief moments of brilliance that are stunningly historic.Lincoln won the popular vote but lost the election, because the legislature picked the senator. And the way it was gerrymandered, the Democrats kept control of the legislature. However, Lincoln thought the debates were good enough. They happened to be published the following day — following year.

And they introduced Lincoln to the nation as a serious political leader based on thought.

He campaigned everywhere in 1859 that Douglas went, across Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan. And everywhere — they had a lot of off-year elections back then. Everywhere they both campaigned in November of 1859, the Republicans won. He was then invited the day after the election to come to New York to speak, originally at a church, but then they decided it would be too big a crowd. And they moved it to Cooper Union, which is a great workingman’s college that had just been founded a few years earlier.

And this is what I want to pose for you to think about. I’m walking you through this to understand what serious leaders do when they think their country’s in serious trouble. Lincoln personally spent three months at the Illinois State Library researching one speech, which he personally wrote, came east — sign of the technology of the times — he had to change trains eight times, because the track widths were different in these different states — arrives in New York City and delivers a 7,300 word, two-hour speech.

After the speech, he goes down to the major newspapers to make sure they get it edited correctly. (Laughter.) And because they’re all printing the complete text. By — he goes on to Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, gives the same speech once in each state, goes home in early March. And the next speech Lincoln gives is the farewell address at Springfield on the way to being inaugurated — does not give another speech the entire year.

And when people come to him, he says, read the speech. I’m not going to give you an answer you can take out of context. Read the speech. The estimate is that one-third of the adults in the North read the speech before the election. And it’s a very, very sober speech because it is at the crux of the survival of America as a country.

Now reading that — I’m encouraged by my good friend Barry Castleman, who is a wonderful populist idealist — I reached the following proposition.

Current System Not Working

The current political system is not working. I had not heard the Roger Ailes story, but the truth is, Roger was right. What was not all that happy in 1988 was worse in ‘92, even worse in ‘96, stunningly bad in 2000, and in 2004 was almost unendurable.For the most powerful nation on Earth to have an election in which swiftboat veterans versus National Guard papers becomes a major theme verges on insane. I mean, it’s just — and to watch those debates I found painful, for both people. They’re both smarter than the debates.

But here’s what’s happened. We have invented a system where we replace big-city machine bosses with consultant bosses. Read the newspaper coverage. Who’s your pollster? What advertising firm have you hired? Who’s your consultant? Who did you hire in Iowa? Who did you hire in South Carolina? This is the new Boston.

And what’s the job of the candidate in this world? The job of the candidate is to raise the money, to hire the consultants, to do the focus groups, to figure out the 30-second answers to be memorized by the candidate. This is stunningly dangerous.When your leaders shrink — I used a term there that was actually a quote from General de Gaulle. I talked about pygmies. I was referring to General de Gaulle describing the Fourth Republic. But the fact is — and I wasn’t referring to Republican candidates. I was referring to a process by which candidates spend more and more time raising less and less money, and that’s maniacally how we count it. Who came in first last quarter? How many consultants can they hire?

We don’t say: Who has thought — it was actually captured — Tim Russert asked Governor Cuomo at one point, “Who would be your party’s best candidate?” And instantly Mario turned and said, “Tim, shouldn’t you ask me who I think would be the best president?” Let’s think about the difference.

Then you combine this stultifying, exhausting shrinking process with the way that these auditions have occurred. These aren’t debates. This is a cross between “The Bachelor,” “American Idol,” and “Who’s Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” (sic; “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?”). (Laughter, applause.)

And on top of that, you have the challenge of the news media, which unfortunately was taught by a cross between H.L. Mencken’s cynicism and Theodore White’s wonderful writing but focused far too much on politics as a horse race, and on an unavoidable desire for “Gotcha!” And what does that do?

It turns the candidates into rigidity, because if a candidate says something in March of 2007, and in the course of the campaign they learn something fundamentally different, and they mature, and they change, and in August or September or October, they adopt a new position based on having grown during the year, they will promptly have flip-flopped.

And so you begin to trap people — as the campaigns get longer, you’re asking a person who’s going to be sworn in, in January of 2009 to tell you what they’ll do in January of 2007 when they haven’t got a clue, because they don’t know what the world will be like. And you’re suggesting they won’t learn anything through the two years of campaigning.

It was John F. Kennedy, campaigning in West Virginia, being horrified by poverty, which profoundly changed him in 1960.

And so we now have a system that is overly focused on money, overly delegated to technicians, and in which candidates are held to a rigidity standard that is very dangerous, while their answers are held to a sound bite and 30-second standard, which is just frankly absurd. What’s your answer on Iraq, in 30 seconds? What’s your answer on health care, in 30 seconds?

Now I believe this is really, really serious. First of all, when you start getting into these 30-second processes, you end up doing what Senator Obama did the other day, which is say a very insightful thing in a very dangerous way, when he pointed out, correctly, that Pakistan is enormously dangerous, that we need to have a strategy for Pakistan, but it came out that he — came out with him saying he’d use military force. Now I don’t think he would have said that in a more thoughtful setting with more preparation.

And I don’t know that it’s very good training to be president to see how quick people are on their feet when they’re tossed a question with no preparation, because I don’t frankly want to have a president who gets up and decides off the cuff what they’ll do about a major public policy problem.

Strategy and Reality Not Connected

But what’s more difficult is the answer was to attack Senator Obama, not to explore the underlying kernel of what he said, which is a very important kernel, which is we do not today have a strategy large enough to match the problems that we are facing in the war on terrorism. And Pakistan is a great case study of the mismatch between strategy and reality. And that’s an important conversation, but it’s not a 30-second answer in an audition.

Let me carry it one step further then describe what we’re trying to do, and we’re trying to lay all of this out, at American Solutions, where we’ll have nationwide workshops on September 27th until September 29th on the Internet. They’ll be available to everybody at no charge, and all of the polling we do at American Solutions is made available to all the candidates in both parties. But our goal is try to create on the Internet a solutions lab where people can participate almost like a wikipedia, and they can be — and they can focus on solutions. And I think this country is so sick of red versus blue, and the country’s so ready to go back to being red, white and blue that it is — that there’s an enormous gap between the political news media system and the average American.

Challenges Are Immense

I also think there’s something else at stake here that I think we have to put on the table. I believe we are in a Lincoln kind of period. I believe the challenges we face as a country are larger than the Cold War, larger than the Second World War, larger than the Great Depression.

I believe if you list all the different major challenges we face, they are larger than any period in American history since the 1850s. We’re going to have economic competition from China and India for which we are not prepared.

To compete in an age when we’re going to have four to seven times as much new science in the next 25 years as we had in the last 25 years while competing in the world market with China and India, we have to sow fundamentally overall our learning system, which is so carefully protected today by an entrenched unionized bureaucracy that it is staggering.

The Detroit Public Schools, according to a Gates Foundation financed report, graduate 25 percent of their entering freshmen on time. They cheat three out of every four entering students. At a time when, if you’re an African-American male and you drop out of high school, you face a 73 percent unemployment rate in your 20s and a 60 percent chance of going to jail.

We have a war here at home between organized crime, many of which comes through international gangs, drug dealing.More young Americans are killed in the United States every month than were killed in Iraq last year, and nobody’s talking about it in a serious way. The right thinks it’s not its job to talk about it, and the left doesn’t want to take on its own allies, and so we stumble forward.

And we’re going to compete with China under those circumstances?

New York, it is projected by a McKenzie Study, will be replaced by London as the center of world finance by the end of the decade. The answer of this Congress is to raise taxes in the financial sector. Our visa system is a nightmare.

People go — people now go from around the world to London to do business, even though it’s dramatically more expensive, because they’re so insulted by the American visa system, and we do nothing.The fact is that there’s a real parallel between the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis and the collapse of the levees in New Orleans — bureaucratic government does not work. It is collapsing all around you.

The federal highway system obviously didn’t inspect very well and the state highway system obviously didn’t as well. Maybe I’m being too radical, but I want to state a proposition.

None of us believe we grew up in an America where levees broke and bridges fell, and today we live in a country where it is a fiasco.

Furthermore, they’re now talking about taking till the end of next year to replace the bridge — totally bureaucratic.I’ll give you a specific example. When the Northridge earthquake shattered a bridge in California, the most heavily-traveled bridge in the world, they went to an incentivized contractor.

Sacramento, the state highway department said it would take two years and two months to fix the bridge. They offered an incentive contract, where the contractor actually could make more money by getting done quickly than he could make out of the entire contract normally — they finished the bridge in two months and two days. Now, here you have two months and two days; here you have two years and two months.And I just want to take one minute to drive this home.

There is a world that works and there’s a world that fails. And you can see this as a YouTube — three and a half minutes we did called FedEx versus Federal Bureaucracy. (Laughter)

UPS and FedEx Superior to Federal Bureaucracy

And it’s very straightforward. How many of you have gone online to check a package at UPS or FedEx? Just raise your hand. Look around the room. This is not — and I want to drive this home for the news media — this is not a theory, this is not Gingrich having interesting, unrealistic ideas.

It is an objective fact in the world that works that if you invest in technology, you reward competence — there are consequences for incompetence — you focus on the customer, you have market signals, you have the Toyota production system, Six Sigma, Lee Manufacturing, the writing of Drucker, Deming, Juran and Womack — it works, right?

Now, UPS tracks 15 million packages a day.

A UPS truck has more computing power than Apollo 13. (Laughter)

FedEx tracks 8 million packages a day. That’s the world that works. Here’s the world that failed — the federal government. The United States government today cannot find between 12 and 20 million illegal immigrants when they’re sitting still. (Light laughter.)

So just take those two comparisons. My answer, frankly, as a policy proposal, is that we spend a couple hundred million dollars, send a package to every illegal immigrant. (Laughter) (Applause)

When they deliver it, we’ll know where they are. (Laughter)

The Scale of Change

Let me carry you just two stages further to understand the scale of change. We are going to live longer than any generation in human history. That has clear consequences for retirement, clear consequences for health care, clear consequences for quality of life. And where’s the dialogue? I mean, I helped co-chair with Bob Kerrey a quality long-term care commission. We are working on projects at the Center for Health Transformation. But this needs to be a fundamental national conversation because no society in history — and by the way, this is mostly about success.I’m now 64. I regard living longer as good. This is not a problem — you know, the crisis of aging, no. There’d be a crisis of dying. We need to think through the opportunity of aging, and we need to figure out what are we going to do realistically to make it sustainable, affordable and fair to everybody.

Britain’s Phony War

And finally, we have, I think, a real crisis — and I said something the other day that seemed to be confusing to people, so let me put it in context. There’s a terrific new book out called “Troublesome Young Men,” which is a study of the younger Torries who spent two years trying to drive Chamberlain out of office. It was very striking in reading the book, which I did shortly after the British prime minister found it impossible to be candid about the eight people they arrested in Great Britain.

It was very — six of them, by the way, were medical doctors working for the National Health Service.It was very striking to read a book in which Chamberlain was so committed to not fighting Hitler that even after war was declared in September 3rd, 1939, they fought what was called a “phony war,” and I always thought the phony war was bureaucratic passivity. It wasn’t.
It was a deliberate policy of the Chamberlain government. They asked the British media not to be offensive to the Germans. They dropped leaflets rather than bombs. They moved at half speed to prepare for war.

And during the entire time they were doing nothing, the German army was preparing for the onslaught against Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.

Our Phony War: The Scale of the Challenge

And as I read that, I thought, I can’t find a better historical parallel to what we’ve been through for six years. Compared to the scale of the challenge, we are engaged in a phony war — now not the young men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’re actually at war every morning, but the rest of the society. You pick up six people in New Jersey, two people in South Carolina yesterday, four people who wanted to blow up JFK, eight people in Great Britain; you lose Gaza to Hamas; you have Pakistan totally uncontrollable, all of Northwestern Pakistan is a sanctuary.

We’re not going to win this war until we have an honest conversation, and it’s going to be a frightening conversation, and it’s going to be a difficult conversation.

This is going to be much harder than the Cold War, and we’re not ready even to have this conversation. That cannot be captured in 30- second answers for 12 people standing in a row.

Conversations About Our Future: Better Debates

Here’s the proposal, which is exactly parallel to Marvin. I believe that every candidate should be challenged to commit that if they are their party’s nominee, they will agree to meet once a week — and Sunday night would be fine — once a week with their main opponent, and the two of them would have a dialogue.

Now, Marvin, I disagree with you slightly; I’d like to have a time keeper and require that the two candidates to pick the topics and require the two candidates to have a conversation without being interrupted except for fairness on time. He’d like to have some more role for the media.

We can talk out the details.There are two core premises.

The first is that it has to be open-ended. You should give the answer the length your answer should be. And the second is, it should be focused on a series of large questions around which people would be expected to bring solutions. And I believe two things would happen. I believe, first of all, an amazing percent of the American people would watch, and in the age of the Internet, all of the dialogue would be cached and people could go back to it.

People would analyze it, people would take it apart. I believe, second, that candidates would grow and change.And I think the American people would have a very good sense — after nine 90-minute conversations in their living room, the American people would have a remarkable sense of the two personalities and which person they thought had the right ideas, the right character, the right capacity to be a leader.Now this requires the candidates to take a risk.

But I want to close with this thought. The Founding Fathers did not invent this process for the enrichment of consultants, for the cynical maneuvering of those who seek power. The Founding Fathers invented this process to enable the America people to determine who they would lend power to.And the process should start with what is the kind of campaign the American people need in order to have the kind of country the American people deserve, in order to give our children and grandchildren the kind of future that our parents and grandparents worked and fought to give us.

I think that ought to be the challenge for every candidate in both parties, and I do think committing to nine dialogues, one a week, for 90 minutes, for nine weeks, would remarkably improve the quality of the system and remarkably improve the training of the candidates.

Thank you very, very much. (Applause.)

MR. ZREMSKI: Thank you. Thank you.

Questions and Answers

We have many, many questions, some about debates, some about other issues.

Proposal Favors Good Debater

First of all, your proposal puts a great deal of emphasis on debating skills, which would be something that you would be good at, something that Bill Clinton was good at. Under your proposal, might we miss out on good — great presidents who just aren’t good debaters?

MR. GINGRICH: Well, first of all, any system offers some advantage for some sets of skills. I think the — I used the word “dialogues” in the sense that I think if you have two people for 90 minutes in the kind of setting I’m describing, you have an adult conversation. And the first one of them that acted in less than an adult way would be punished by the country, which would say, “That’s not fair. That’s not right. That person’s cheating.”

You have two choices. You can either try to get the candidates together or not get them together. If you’re to get them together, what’s the best method to have a real opportunity to explore them? And all I want to propose is the kind of stilted — you know, there were 54 pages of legally agreed rules for the 2004 debates.

Now just think about this. You know, Lincoln and Douglas say, “Why don’t we get together?” “Okay. We’ll do three hours each, seven times. We’ll have a timekeeper. Meet you at such-and-such a state.” That was it.

Today we have this structured, protected, litigated, consulted baloney where, you know, the two podiums have to be the same height, they have to be the same color, they have to be this, they have to be that. You’re not allowed to take notes. Why aren’t you allowed to take notes? Or you can’t bring notes. Why can’t — I don’t care if somebody wants to walk in with a binder. Everybody in the country will then go, “That person needs a binder.” (Laughter.)

I mean, you know, the idea — I mean, this is really serious. The job of the president of the United States is for he or she to be in a position to lead the American people and manage the American government, in that order. Finding that growth inside themselves, to be able to talk with the American people, so the American people decide to invest their hopes in that particular leader, requires people who grow during the campaign process, not people who shrink.

And the current process shrinks our leaders in a way that makes it vastly harder for them to achieve anything once they get through the election.

How to Treat 3rd Party Candidate

MR. ZREMSKI: How would third-party candidates be treated? Would a Nader or a Perot get equal time?

MR. GINGRICH: No. (Laughter.) I think — look, let me be quite clear about this. With the singular exception of Theodore Roosevelt, no third party candidate since the 1850s has had a serious chance of winning.

And it’s a free country. People get to go play any game they want to. I’d say if you’re above 20 or 25 percent in the polls, maybe we ought to consider having you as the third person. But if you’re — and you also have to — I will also tell you flatly I think third party candidates who purchase the election violate the entire spirit of the United States. So the idea of somebody writing a personal check at a time when we say to middle-class candidates, “You get to raise $2,300 at a time, and they get to write a $500 million check,” we’re on the edge of a plutocracy, and we need to understand how dangerous the current structure is. (Applause.)

How to Engage The Public

MR. ZREMSKI: In the context of the fragmentation of the news, especially in terms of politics, how will you convince voters to actually watch and pay attention to the nine debates?MR. GINGRICH: Now, like Jefferson, I actually have faith in the American people. We have segmented news, but I think that’s basically mostly irrelevant. But the truth is, people learn things they need to learn with remarkable speed.

And if you were to find out how rapidly did the Minneapolis bridge story spread, it was breathtaking how rapidly the country knew what was going on. Or how rapidly the Katrina spread, except at FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, which didn’t seem to get it. But the country knew.

If you say to the American people, the two people who are going to vie to be your leader for the next four years are available for 90 minutes once a week, between 30 and 60 percent of the American people will watch. And they will talk to the rest. And then as people get interested, they’ll go look at it on the Internet and they’ll pull it down off of YouTube and they’ll do a lot of different things with it. And the conversation will be real.

But I have faith in the American people. I don’t think you have to think that — assume that the American people are so childish and so narrow and so venal that, you know, if we don’t put it on every channel simultaneously, then we won’t be able to coerce you. the truth is, if we put it on every channel simultaneously, you could either, A, play with your computer, B, play a DVD, or C, turn the TV off, which might be frightening, but it’s been done at times. (Laughter.)

So I’m willing to trust that a genuine — again, I’m relying on the better angels of our spirit. I believe most Americans would relish an adult conversation and are sick of the canned, consulted, commercialized process we’re trapped in. (Applause.)

Revising Primary Debates

MR. ZREMSKI: There are many so-called debates among the primary candidates these days, and the lesser-known candidates seem to be struggling to get in any time to answer questions during these events. Any suggestions on how the debates could be re-formed during the primary process?

MR. GINGRICH: Well, you know, we — I watched one of the debates, or I watched part of it. I couldn’t take all of it. I personally have tried to avoid watching these because I — since I’m not a paid news person, I don’t have a great obligation to actually have seen all the stuff, and I can’t imagine anybody else except a genuine junky — I mean, a person who — if you could go out and find the person who’s watched every presidential debate so far this year, it will be interesting to find what their social life is like. (Laughter.)

But I was struck in the — I think it was the Las Vegas Republican debate, we went back and timed it, and the average Republican candidate, in the entire debate, got seven minutes and 20 seconds. And I happened to be on Hannity & Colmes that night right after the debate, and I got 20 minutes. And it wasn’t standing in a row, it wasn’t waiting patiently for somebody to throw me a question; it was a dialogue. It was, you know, three people talking. And it was a conversation.

So I’d start with the following observation. And I tried to convince the Des Moines Register to do this. First of all, why do we have partisan debates this early? Why don’t we have Senator Clinton and Governor Romney? Why don’t we have Mayor Giuliani and Senator Edwards? Why don’t we have Senator Thompson, if he decides to run, and Senator Obama? Or Governor Huckabee and, you know — I think the country — you’d take half the poison out of the system if you made Republicans and Democrats stand on the same platform.

Second, why can’t it be a round-robin series of two people chatting for an hour? And over the course of a summer, you’d have a dramatically better conversation.

And the secondary figures would begin to emerge. First of all, you don’t know what it would be like to have some of the secondary figures in a one-on-one with the so-called first tier. The first tier is defined by being famous and having lots of money. That’s all it is. If you’re famous and have lots of money, you’re in the first tier. If you’re not famous and you don’t have lots of money, you’re not in the first tier. Jimmy Carter would have had a very hard time rising in that system.

And I think you don’t know what it would be like. You know, I think it would be very interesting, for example, to have Governor Huckabee and Senator Clinton, who both have had experience in Arkansas, on the same podium for an hour talking about their relative experience reforming education in Arkansas. And it would be totally different than what we’ve been seeing up till now.

Reforming The Overall Primary Process

MR. ZREMSKI: This is the earliest starting and going to be the most expensive primary campaign ever. What, beyond debates, should be done to reform this if it needs reform?MR.

GINGRICH: Well, we have — look, the McCain-Feingold censorship law — (scattered laughter) — is a disaster. The primary consequence of this law is that you can only raise money legally in very small units, so you have to start very early. Go look at all the analysis. Why are people starting early? Because you can’t build the organization. What are you building the organization for? So you can raise the money. So here’s Senator McCain, who followed all the correct consultant advice, raised $24 million and spent it.

And I kept telling people — people run up to you and say, “You’ve got to make a decision,” and I’ve said very clearly I’m not going to make any decision before the work stops, the American Solutions on September 27th to 29th, and I’ll look at it in October. And they say, “Oh, it will be too late.” Well, I try to remind people, three weeks before the Iowa caucus in 2004, the Democratic front-runner was Howard Dean. He had raised more money. He had gotten more magazine covers. Everybody thought he was the front- runner. He had the biggest online contributor base.

And three weeks before the caucus, normal, rational Iowans, who had rigorously avoided politics for the entire previous year, looked up. And they said, he’s weird. (Laughter.)

And Howard Dean disintegrated in three weeks.

And I keep trying to tell people, for the real — for the American people, for the average, normal, hardworking, taxpaying American, this election begins after Christmas, no matter what the news media has to cover and no matter what the consultants have to charge for. But we’ve gotten into a consultant-driven cycle where you go to your favorite consultant and say, when should I start? And they look at you for a second; they say, as soon as possible — I need a check. (Laughter.)

Campaign Financing

MR. ZREMSKI: On the topic of campaign finance, one member of the audience writes, “Your analogy of Lincoln’s campaign is hardly relevant in this technological era. Isn’t the real answer, to countering the interest of private money, public financing of presidential campaigns?”

MR. GINGRICH: No, I don’t think so.

First of all, you could design an intelligent 6-to-12-week campaign if we wanted to that would reach every American with great intensity. I mean, how — figure out whatever the longest Christmas shopping period is. I mean, Americans pay attention just before they make a decision. They don’t pay attention — I mean, the wonks and the paid professionals and — those folks all pay attention all year round. But the truth is, most Americans are not going to try to make a decision now about something they’re going to vote on.

You know, in Florida, they’re going to vote, you know, I think, January 29th. The average Floridian will begin sometime after New Year. And there’s — nothing you can do to them between now and them is going to change that. They’re just going to think you’re strange. So I’d start and say you could have a totally different model campaign.

Second, I think the answer to financing’s very simple. Allow unlimited after-tax personal contributions, reported every night on the Internet. Get all of the lawyers, all the regulations, everything else, out of it. You get to look at who give what to whom.

But when you have the senator from New Jersey vote to censor everybody else from a seat he bought and then, after voting for McCain-Feingold, buy the governorship of New Jersey, there’s a — I just think there’s a pattern here of a plutocracy emerging that is very, very dangerous.

And instead of trying to strangle the very rich — I don’t mind that Bloomberg spends $91 a vote. I just want the middle-class opponent to be able to raise the same amount of money to be able to match Bloomberg. And you could do that if you were in a position.

Gene McCarthy could not run today. Because when Gene McCarthy ran, a very small number of very liberal supporters wrote very big checks, because they were so opposed to Lyndon Johnson and the war. That would be virtually impossible today.

Fred Thompson

MR. ZREMSKI: You have had kind things to say about Fred Thompson as a possible presidential candidate. But his fundraising has lagged, and he’s already shaken up his staff and he’s been the target of much criticism for his serving as a lobbyist for a pro-abortion — or a pro-choice group.

Has all of this made you reassess Thompson’s chances? And does it encourage you to take another look at the race?

MR. GINGRICH: I rest my case. (Laughter.) I mean, that entire — I don’t mean to be offensive, but that entire question is, you know, the sort of stuff this city has to do. Because it has to fill up a — you know, fill up the newspapers; you have to fill up the gossip columns; you have to fill up the weekend talk shows.

Senator Thompson, I think, is currently running second in a number of polls, which is pretty remarkable having not yet announced. For one — for about a third of the country, he’s the only candidate on the Republican side who doesn’t have an accent, which gives him, I think, a very significant advantage across the South. And he’s an attractive guy.

I think we actually have right now four very serious Republican candidates who could be very formidable next year. Mayor Giuliani, Governor Romney, Senator Thompson and Governor Huckabee, who I think is going to emerge as the most interesting dark horse over the next few weeks because he has a level of authenticity and sincerity and candor that I think is beginning to resonate.

Those are all four serious people. Now they’re all going to have problems. They’re all going to have challenges, but that’s what this business is about. And I think Senator Thompson certainly is a formidable person. He has a very significant career. And I wouldn’t count him out, as I wouldn’t count out the other three.

Gingrich’s Own Plan to Run

MR. ZREMSKI: If you were to enter the race in October or later, how could you get organized in the early caucus and primary states? (Laughter.)

MR. GINGRICH: I think it is — to prove I’m not candidate material, I think it is tautological. If you can’t get organized in the early primary states, you can’t run. And if you can run, you can get organized in the early primary states.

So presumably if we went out and looked after we were done with our workshops at American Solutions on September 27th and 29th, if there was a large enough vacuum and there were enough people who wanted somebody capable of debating Senator Clinton next fall and there were enough people on the Internet saying, you have to run, you would by definition have had enough people say, you had to run, you should run. Now the trick is to not delude yourself and think that because all of your cousins and relatives wrote you that that was enough people. But so I think it literally is self-defining.

I would never run if there wasn’t a large enough demand that we would almost automatically be organized the opening day. But notice, my model is the opposite of the consultant-based model. My model is, you show me enough volunteers, enough people. Ross Perot, when he first announced in ‘92, in a number of states in the mountain area of the country, had over half the registered voters sign a petition to put him on the ballot with no paid staff. Because it was a genuine, spontaneous uprising of people who were fed up with Washington.

2008 a Democratic Year

MR. ZREMSKI: Some theorize that you see 2008 as a Democratic year and thus are contemplating holding back for 2012. Is this so?

MR. GINGRICH: Well, I do a newsletter every Tuesday, which I will put in a brief commercial. You can get it for free if you go to newt.org and sign up for it.

And about six weeks ago, I wrote a newsletter entitled “A French Lesson for Republicans.” Agnes, it’s really — if you’ve not paid attention, it’s really worth your looking at.

President Chirac was a center-right president for 12 years. He was in relatively deep trouble — not quite as in much trouble as President Bush, but relatively deep trouble. By any normal political science model, the socialists that nominated an attractive woman in Segolene Royal — she should have won the election. Nicolas Sarkozy is a remarkable, charismatic leader. He entered politics at 15 years of age. His father migrated to France from Hungary. His mother’s grandfather was a Jew from Salonika. He clearly is not a classic French leader. He had risen the hard way. He had been minister of Finance and minister of the Interior in the Chirac government, so this is a man running as the candidate of change while serving in the government everybody wanted to change. Not a — a nontrivial achievement.

He did two things that made him — and I think if one of the Republican candidates figures this out, that they will, frankly, win the election next year. He did two things that were really important.

The first is he established 16 channels that were like YouTube and rigorously avoided trying to communicate through the French media. Because the French media starts with The New York Times and goes to the left, and he had no possibility — (laughter) — there was no way that Sarkozy could communicate. But he said if I can communicate with you, then the news media can watch our conversation, which is very different than a conversation with the news media which you watch. He did this very disciplined and for three years.

The second thing is he — he made a very important speech where he said we must have a clean break, and his advisers all said don’t do it. Because again, he’s serving in Chirac’s government, and he’s saying we need a clean break. And I would say candidly there’s a lot of parallel there. In addition, he then narrowed it down to three things. They’re very simple things that will resonate in America.

One, you can come to France but you have to learn to be French.

Two, I will enforce the law. Remember, this is a country that had 15,000 cars burned last year.

But the third one is the most intriguing and the most like what we’re trying to do at American Solutions — the French have a 35-hour workweek, which is impossible to sustain in the world market. Before Margaret Thatcher, the French economy was 25 percent bigger than the British economy; today the British economy is 10 percent bigger than the French economy. As part of London replacing New York as the world finance center, there are now 55,000 French working in London. And Sarkozy wrote a very, very, very good book called “Testimony” — I recommend to all of you — in which he describes the situation.

And so he followed Margaret Thatcher’s rule, which is first you win the argument then you win the vote. He went to the country and said, you cannot sustain French society on 35 hours a week. You’re going to lose purchasing power. When you lose purchasing power, the government’s going to lose tax revenue. When the government loses tax revenue, we can’t sustain the pensions and the health system. And over a two-year period, he won the argument.
So Segolene Royal running as the candidate of change from Chirac became the candidate of protecting the old bureaucracies and the old unions.

Sarkozy became the candidate of real change, and here’s what he proposed, which I think is close to genius. It’s a(n) FDR-Reagan quality. He didn’t say let’s go from 35 to 40 hours, which, frankly, Republicans would be inclined to do because it’s a suicidally comfortable negatively thing to do — (laughter) — he thought — planned carefully about how do I give you an incentive? And so he said the following: If you will work more than 35 hours, all of your overtime will be tax-free. Well, what’s he doing? He’s setting up the following argument: I want to reward work, incentivize work, encourage work; they want to punish work, discourage work and demean work. Which do you think’s better for you and which do you think’s better for France? He won that argument decisively.

Unless the Republicans nominate an agent of change comparable to Sarkozy, they have a very, very hard time winning in 2008. But if they nominate, for example, an agent of change who says that destroying the lives of children in Detroit is a big enough problem; we should replace the current structure of bureaucracy which is failing — now, nobody in the Democratic ticket can say that, because they have to favor the bureaucracy over the children. And historically, no Republican has had the nerve to say it. But if you have a Sarkozy-like candidate, my guess is that the left will lose the election next year.

Are The Candidates Up To The Task

MR. ZREMSKI: You noted what a pivotal time this is and what gigantic issues the next president’s going to face. Do you see people on both sides of the aisle who are running now who you think will be capable of handling those issues?

MR. GINGRICH: Well, in all fairness, you never know. I mean, nobody would have thought, you know, in the summer of 1944 that Harry Truman would emerge as the person capable of explaining and putting together a bipartisan coalition to create the American security system for the Cold War. Nobody would have thought in the equivalent of — you know, this is the equivalent of 1859 — nobody would have thought in the summer of 1859 that Lincoln was both going to win the nomination, win the presidency and turn out to be one of the two or three greatest presidents in American history; you wouldn’t have known.

I will say this. And I think I sometimes rattle my Republican colleagues. Senator Clinton is a very formidable professional. She works very hard. She has thought a long time about this. And she is a person who, I think, has studied both sitting in the Oval Office with her husband and now sitting in the U.S. Senate for seven years, and I think the suggestion that she would not be capable of this is just wrong.

Mayor Giuliani has enormous capacity. His book “Leadership” is an extraordinary book. Mitt Romney has been extraordinarily successful at business, did a remarkable job turning around the Winter Olympics, has been a governor of a very Democratic state, so he understands having to survive in a bipartisan environment. Senator Thompson has had a long and studied career.

As I said earlier, I think governor Huckabee in some ways is really growing every day as he campaigns out there. And I wouldn’t take any of those and say they couldn’t do it. I don’t know Senator Obama or Senator Edwards as well. But of those candidates I’d say to you, you know, in the end the American people are going to pick somebody, and the job of all of us then is to try to make that person succeed. And sometimes you have to put patriotism ahead of partisanship and decide that whoever the next president is, we better help them have this conversation and help them have these decisions and, hopefully, make it work for the whole country. (Applause.)

Near Future of the War On Terror

MR. ZREMSKI: You mentioned that when it comes to the war on terror, it’s really far more difficult than we seem to have believed at this point in time. Could you just elaborate on that a little bit and tell us what we can really expect in the next few years in the war on terror and what we would really have to do to win it eventually.

MR. GINGRICH: I am really deeply worried. We have two grandchildren who are 6 and 8, and I believe they are in greater danger of dying from enemy activities than we were in the Cold War.

There are thousands of people across this planet who get up every morning actively seeking to destroy the United States. They are spreading their poison by sermons, by the Internet, by a variety of recruiting devices.

Tony Blair said it very well. The people who did the London subway bombings spoke English, were British citizens, lived in British housing and had jobs, and had decided, because of their relationships, that they were engaged in a war against the very country which had given them prosperity and freedom and safety.

When you see the Taliban kidnap 22 Christian South Korean missionaries who are there to help the people of Afghanistan, and nobody gets up and says this is despicable. Where in the Muslim world has there been any battle cry saying they should be released? Where has anybody gotten up to condemn? When you see a 12-year-old boy in Pakistan saw off a man’s head on videotape, where is the condemnation? When you know that the schools recruit suicide bombers. When you know that the Iranian government ran a cartoon last year, for children, aimed at recruiting 10-year-olds to be suicide bombers, on public television. At what point do you have to say enough?

When you’re lectured by the Saudis about being respectful, when they do not allow any Jew or any Christian to practice their religion in Saudi Arabia, and we tolerate it? When do you draw a line?

Nobody in this society has yet given a speech to outline the scale of this problem, in terms of senior leadership. And yet it’s obvious. We haven’t won in Afghanistan and we are not currently winning. If you’re not winning a guerrilla war, you’re gradually losing it. We have not won in Iraq. The Israelis, despite 30 years of work, have not won in either Gaza or the West Bank. And we’re sleepwalking. And we’ve now focused on Baghdad as though somehow we can retreat from history and find an elegant way to get out of this and it won’t have terrifying consequences.

I believe we are on the edge of a precipice. The Iranians are desperately trying to build nuclear weapons, and they will use them. This is a state — look — read what Ahmadinejad says. He writes poems about the joy of being a martyr nation. He gets to wipe out Tel Aviv; maybe the Israelis use nuclear weapons and wipe out Tehran. He would accept that in a minute because he believes everybody in Tehran goes to heaven and everybody in Tel Aviv doesn’t.

We — it’s very hard for secular elites to understand this. Religiously driven people do things that don’t calculate in nice academic faculty surroundings, and they don’t calculate at the State Department and they don’t calculate in a rational way in most of our bureaucracies.

We are in trouble, and somebody had better start talking about it in a blunt way.

I’m going to give a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on September 10th describing the first six years, and it’s driven by a simple model. I finished a novel recently called, “Pearl Harbor.” You look at the Second World War, from December 7th, 1941 to August 14th 1945 is less than four years. In less than four years, we defeated Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. Today it takes 23 years to add a fifth runway to the Atlanta airport. We are simply not prepared today to be a serious country.

And my fear is just — and I gave this speech earlier. I wrote about terrorism and nuclear weapons in a book called, “Window of Opportunity,” in 1984. I gave speeches in the `90s on this. I helped create with President Clinton the Hart-Rudman Commission. We warned in March of 2001 about terrorist attacks in American cities. I’ve been at this a long time. I am genuinely afraid that this political system will not react until we lose a city, and nobody in this country’s thought about the threat to our civil liberties the morning after we decide it’s that dangerous and how rapidly we will impose ruthlessness on ourselves in that kind of a world.

I think those of you who care about civil liberties had better be thinking through how we win this war before the casualties get so great that the American people voluntarily give up a lot of those liberties. (Applause.)

MR. ZREMSKI: We’re almost out of time, but before I ask the last question, we have our gifts: a certificate and our mug. (Laughter.) (Applause.)

And the last question is: If you were rewriting the Contract With America today, what would be the most important item on it?

MR. GINGRICH: Your question is if I were doing a new one today?

MR. ZREMSKI: Yes.

MR. GINGRICH: I don’t know. I can’t answer that way.

The Contract With America was the culmination in 1994 of 30 years of Reaganism starting with Reagan’s great speech in October of 1964, and everything in the contract stood on Ronald Reagan’s shoulders. I think in American solutions we are much closer to where Reagan was between `66 and `70 in beginning to develop a new generation of solutions. But I can tell you the three large themes.

First, we’re going to have four to seven times as much new science in the next 25 years, and we need to really rethink the — and two-thirds of that is going to be outside the U.S — and we need to really rethink everything from health to national security to education to manufacturing to take advantage of that kind of breakthrough, including energy and the environment.

Second, we currently are trapped in a world that doesn’t work, and we need to migrate government to a world that does work. And that’s the biggest domestic challenge of this country because our bureaucracies simply don’t function anymore.

And third, we have inherited — this is the 400th anniversary — a remarkable civilization which believes that your rights come from your Creator. We should be make English the official language of government. We should ensure the courts do not interfere with the right to say, “One nation under God” as part of the pledge. And we should insist both that first-generation immigrants can pass a test in American history and that high school graduates can pass a test in American history.

Thank you very, very much. (Applause.)

MR. ZREMSKI: Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you all for coming today. I’d like to thank the National Press Club staff for putting together today’s lunch. Thanks. We’re adjourned. (Sounds gavel.)

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Pakistan-Afghan Jirga Is a Farce, Says Our Man on The Ground

2007-08-09T12:44:00.000-04:00

Dear John E. Carey
Peace and Freedom

Dear Sir,

Thank you very much for the messages of goodwill and prayers for the recovery of my ailing son. Now he has been recovering. I have already told that all my miseries is due to fear and terror in our areas. Some dreaded terrorists of international fame have been hiding in the areas. They have been planning and organising terrorist attacks in the tribal areas and other parts of the world.

I shall repeat my words that some officials of the Pakistan government have been providing active support to the terrorists. You may be knowing that a grand tribal jirga is being held in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. It is ironic that Pakistan this time also ignored the genuine tribal leaders. They have sent those people to the jirga who have no influence in the areas.

Pakistan has been trying to fail the jirga. I do not know why?

Here I shall produce the editorial of a leading Pakistani newspaper which shows the mind of Pakistani officials and rulers. It stated that the three-day joint Pak-Afghan jirga, opening today, is sure to make shipwreck amid sweet nothings. President Pervez Musharraf has pulled out at the last minute and is sending the prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, instead.

The joint statement at the end of it will be meaningless. Messrs Hamid Karzai and Shaukat Aziz will be present and have discussions with their fingers crossed behind their backs.

Each side will field 350 members handpicked for backing their own official line, and a meaningless farce will be choreographed by two states suffering from a solid erosion of their writs in their territories.

On the Afghan side, the jirga as a concept is in the Constitution, and Loya Jirga is actually a parliament elected at the district level. In Pakistan, the jirga inhabits the shady tribal administrative system based on a draconian Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) run by a political agent. Since 2001, the system in Pakistan has collapsed and the political agent has been ousted by the frontal conflict between the Pakistan army and Al Qaeda.

The 350 men for the Pakistani side had to come from the Tribal Areas abutting on Afghanistan and it is not clear how many will actually make it. Of course the jirgas in Pakistan have taken a beating along with the office of the political agent. Elders thought to be favouring Islamabad have been beheaded by the Pakistani Taliban on the payroll of Al Qaeda.

The jirga is a collection of confused pale-turbaned individuals not sure if they will live to see another day after toeing the government line. The jirgas from North and South Waziristan — the two agencies most involved in terrorist infiltration into Afghanistan — have refused to go to Kabul. Why? They have refused because the Pakistan army has moved into the agencies after the two “deals” it made with them fell apart.

The latest news is that army, using helicopters and artillery, has attacked the terrorist compounds in North Waziristan and killed 10 terrorists. In the Zhob district in Balochistan, abutting on the Tribal Areas, 14 Taliban have been arrested although it is inexplicable why they were called Taliban and not Al Qaeda if 10 of them were Uzbeks and Tajiks.

The only political party with influence in Waziristan, the JUI, refused to take part in the jirga when its chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman declined to go to Kabul.

Funnily, the 350 men chosen to represent Pakistani tribes are divided into groups, each headed by people belonging to the establishment, including governors from the NWFP and Balochistan, related federal ministers and other “experts” favoured by the government. This means the jirga has been brainwashed so well that hardly any brains are left in it.

On the Afghan side, people chosen to represent those most affected by the cross-border raids by the Taliban have been handpicked by President Karzai who wants to show Pakistan that he can give as good as he takes. Kabul already fears the hand of Pakistani intelligence in the structuring and brainwashing of the Pakistani jirga.

Understandably, the Pakistani side is fearful of a biased Afghan jirga composed of ethnic representatives most hit by the Taliban strikes and therefore most virulently opposed to Pakistan. Judging by the general uninformed opinion in Pakistan, the jirga is going to tell the Afghans to start talking to the Taliban to achieve peace in the country. That will mean talking to Mullah Umar and, finally, to Ayman al Zawahiri of Al Qaeda.

But there are other characteristics of the two jirgas that must also be noted. The two jirgas of course hate each other for backing the wrong party at home. The Pakistani jirga considers President Karzai a stooge of the Americans and a renegade Pushtun; the Afghan jirga equally considers President Musharraf a stooge of the Americans and considers Pakistan a trespassing state whose hunger is not appeased by occupying a swathe of territory they think belongs to Afghanistan.

In fact Pushtun nationalism in Afghanistan is based on the repossession of these territories after undoing the Durand Line. No matter who comes to power in Kabul the first thing he rejects is an official acceptance of the Pak-Afghan boundary. There is one thing though on which the Afghan and Waziristan jirgas tacitly agree. They both despise President Musharraf.

The Afghan experience with the Pakistan army from 1996 onwards, as the power behind the cruel governance of the Taliban, has been nightmarish.

The pursuit of “strategic depth” by the Pakistan army against India inside Afghanistan has been the cruellest period in Afghan history. Contrary to thinking in Pakistan, neither the Pushtuns nor the other nationalities in Afghanistan hold a brief for Pakistan. The joint jirga is not a South Asian idea. It is the product of a typically Western mind that thinks that structured dialogue is the answer to all disputes. But talking is not what we do in our region. We isolate ourselves, stew in our own juice till positions drift continentally away from each other and war is seen as the only solvent.

Like the Indo-Pak peace talks, the “peace” jirga is an alien American idea which no one likes but to which we have to dance a slow, insincere pantomime, even as we curse the Americans under our breath all the while.

Again thank you very much.

Yours sincerely,

Muhammad Khurshid
Khar, Bajaur Agency,Tribal Areas Pakistan

Kissinger: Don't Rule Out Putin's Initiative on Missile Defense

2007-08-09T12:19:00.000-04:00

By Henry A. Kissinger
The Washington Post
August 9, 2007

The debate about missile defense, nearly 50 years old, has been reignited by the plan to deploy elements of the American missile defense in the Czech Republic and Poland. Familiar Cold War arguments have re-emerged as Russia challenges the necessity of the deployment and asserts that it is really designed to overcome Russian strategic forces rather than Iranian threats as the Bush administration claims.

But in addition to invective, the Kremlin also has a put forward a bold initiative for creating an unprecedented NATO-Russian collaboration in resisting an Iranian nuclear missile threat.
In the United States, the concept of missile defense has had a rough passage. A missile defense system proposed by President Richard Nixon in 1969 was strangled by Congress. In order to preserve its nucleus, the Nixon administration, in 1972, negotiated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which froze existing missile defenses on both sides in parallel with an agreement that achieved the first restraints on the Soviet offensive missile buildup.

In the following decades, the international environment changed dramatically and forced a reconsideration of the earlier decisions: First, the collapse of the Soviet Union eliminated for the foreseeable future the conceptual basis for the doctrine that sought deterrence through the mutual capacity for annihilation; second, technical progress made missile defense a much more realistic prospect; third, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and missile technology has generated unprecedented dangers of accidental and rogue state launches.

Involved as well was a moral issue. How could any president explain, after even the most limited nuclear attack, why, in possession of a plausible technology to mitigate its consequences or to avoid them altogether, he chose to leave the population unprotected?

These considerations convinced the Bush administration to withdraw from the ABM treaty in 2002 and to begin the construction of a global missile defense system aimed at overcoming limited attacks, especially from rogue states. Deployment has started in Alaska, and some existing radar stations elsewhere are being integrated into the system. The prospective deployment of a radar site in the Czech Republic and a small number of interceptors in Poland would be the first new installations outside the United States explicitly designed for missile defense.

Russia, which accepted the withdrawal from the ABM treaty in 2002 with little, if any, controversy, has reacted in a neuralgic manner to the Polish and Czech deployment. This should not be a surprise. Moscow has always shown great interest in missile defense.

The current American-Russian dialogue repeats a traditional pattern. But its implications go well beyond strategic considerations. Implicit in President Vladimir Putin's conduct since his critical Munich speech is a deep resentment over the advance of the NATO military establishment toward Russia's frontiers in disregard of what Moscow regards as assurances that this would not happen - especially with respect to advanced military technology.

The U.S. argument that the deployment is designed to deal with attacks from Iran is dismissed on the ground that an Iranian missile capability to reach the United States is probably 10 years or more away. Therefore the deployment, in Russian eyes, must by its very nature involve a deeper design aimed at Russian interests. Moscow's tactics reflect its rhetoric. It has launched an intense diplomatic campaign to pressure NATO and the U.S. to revoke the missile defense deployment in Central Europe. It has withdrawn assurances that none of Russia's missiles will be aimed at NATO territory.

But there are straws in the wind that imply a more constructive attitude. Putin has made an intriguing proposal of potentially profound, long-range significance: to link Russia's existing missile tracking radar installations in Azerbaijan or those planned for Southern Russia to the American and NATO defense missile system against Iran. While the proposal is unacceptable as put forward, it contains a vision of how to implement parallel strategic interests that might set a precedent for overcoming other global challenges.

Russia and the United States face an emerging world order whose threats as well as prospects transcend what any national state, no matter how powerful, can deal with by itself. Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, radical jihadism, the environment, a global economy all impose the need for cooperative approaches. At the level of the presidents and foreign ministers, this seems to be understood, and relations are friendly and characterized by serious cooperative efforts. Yet in the public dimension, something approaching Cold War attitudes is re-emerging.

This trend must not be permitted to take hold. The United States and Russia are no longer in a competition for global leadership. The military deployments of the two sides are no longer aimed at each other because each faces other, greater perils.

Many Americans understand that many global problems can best - perhaps only - be solved by American-Russian cooperation. By the same token, Russian leaders cannot fail to know that their country has nothing to gain from a global contest with the United States.

Each side, of course, also has national interests that are not necessarily congruent. America needs to show greater sensitivity to Russian complexities. Moscow must understand that its point about being taken for granted has been made and that threats are not the way to achieve a sense of common purpose.

The immediate challenge is to deal with the missile defense issue. For America, the NATO alliance has been the bedrock of its move from isolation to international engagement. It therefore should not be asked to bargain away an enterprise agreed to by the Czech Republic and Poland to underline their ties to America and that U.S. leaders consider important for American security.

But what America can and should do is to limit the proposed deployment to its stated objective of overcoming rogue state threats and find ways to define specific steps that separate the antimissile deployment in Central Europe from a strategy for a hypothetical and highly implausible war against Russia.

Beyond this vestige of traditional arms control looms the prospect of a new approach to international order. Putin's initiative to link NATO and Russian warning systems could be - or could be made - an historic initiative in dealing jointly with issues that threaten all countries simultaneously. It is one of those schemes easy to disparage on technical grounds but, perhaps like Reagan's Star Wars vision, is a harbinger of a future posing entirely new creative opportunities. It permits one to imagine a genuinely global approach to the specter of nuclear proliferation, which has heretofore been treated largely through national policies. And such an approach could become a forerunner for other issues of comparable dimension.

Of course, it is quite possible - perhaps even likely - that the Kremlin proposal is largely a tactical maneuver: to "expose" non-existent American designs against Russian strategic forces; to split NATO by exploring Russian proposals in the NATO-Russian Council; and to make the new proposal conditional on abandoning the planned U.S. deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic.

It would be a pity. For a successful negotiation - even a serious effort at one - would put the nonproliferation talks with Iran in a radically new framework and, in time, perhaps lead to a wider approach to other global challenges. The Russian proposal therefore deserves detailed exploration. How would such a system operate? How would the proposed system respond to its own warnings? How will other nations with comparable interests be brought into it?

If these questions can be answered positively - if, in other words, the countries involved link their strategies on the nonproliferation issue - a new framework for a host of other issues will come about. A debate started over the most destructive weapons will have culminated in sketching a road toward a more peaceful world.

Henry A. Kissinger heads the consulting firm Kissinger & Associates. This article was distributed by Tribune Media Services.

Newt Gingrich on Lincoln and Bush

2007-08-09T07:52:00.000-04:00

Thursday, September 7, 2006
The Wall Street Journal
By Newt Gingrich

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. . . . As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves."
--Abraham LincolnAnnual message to CongressDec. 1, 1862

WASHINGTON--Five years have passed since the horrific attack on our American homeland, and, still, there is one serious, undeniable fact we have yet to confront: We are, today, not where we wanted to be and nowhere near where we need to be.

In April of 1861, in response to the firing on Fort Sumter, President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to serve for 90 days. Lincoln had greatly underestimated the challenge of preserving the Union. No one imagined that what would become the Civil War would last four years and take the lives of 620,000 Americans.

By the summer of 1862, with thousands of Americans already dead or wounded and the hopes of a quick resolution to the war all but abandoned, three political factions had emerged. There were those who thought the war was too hard and would have accepted defeat by negotiating the end of the United States by allowing the South to secede. Second were those who urged staying the course by muddling through with a cautious military policy and a desire to be "moderate and reasonable" about Southern property rights, including slavery.

We see these first two factions today. The Kerry-Gore-Pelosi-Lamont bloc declares the war too hard, the world too dangerous. They try to find some explainable way to avoid reality while advocating return to "normalcy," and promoting a policy of weakness and withdrawal abroad.

Most government officials constitute the second wing, which argues the system is doing the best it can and that we have to "stay the course"--no matter how unproductive. But, after being exposed in the failed response to Hurricane Katrina, it will become increasingly difficult for this wing to keep explaining the continuing failures of the system.

Just consider the following: Osama bin Laden is still at large. Afghanistan is still insecure. Iraq is still violent. North Korea and Iran are still building nuclear weapons and missiles. Terrorist recruiting is still occurring in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and across the planet.

By late summer, 1862, Lincoln agonizingly concluded that a third faction had the right strategy for victory. This group's strategy demanded reorganizing everything as needed, intensifying the war, and bringing the full might of the industrial North to bear until the war was won.

The first and greatest lesson of the last five years parallels what Lincoln came to understand. The dangers are greater, the enemy is more determined, and victory will be substantially harder than we had expected in the early days after the initial attack. Despite how painful it would prove to be, Lincoln chose the road to victory. President Bush today finds himself in precisely the same dilemma Lincoln faced 144 years ago. With American survival at stake, he also must choose. His strategies are not wrong, but they are failing. And they are failing for three reasons.

(1) They do not define the scale of the emerging World War III, between the West and the forces of militant Islam, and so they do not outline how difficult the challenge is and how big the effort will have to be.

(2) They do not define victory in this larger war as our goal, and so the energy, resources and intensity needed to win cannot be mobilized.

(3) They do not establish clear metrics of achievement and then replace leaders, bureaucrats and bureaucracies as needed to achieve those goals.

To be sure, Mr. Bush understands that we cannot ignore our enemies; they are real. He knows that an enemy who believes in religiously sanctioned suicide-bombing is an enemy who, with a nuclear or biological weapon, is a mortal threat to our survival as a free country. The analysis Mr. Bush offers the nation--before the Joint Session on Sept. 20, 2001, in his 2002 State of the Union, in his 2005 Second Inaugural--is consistently correct. On each occasion, he outlines the threat, the moral nature of the conflict and the absolute requirement for victory.

Unfortunately, the great bureaucracies Mr. Bush presides over (but does not run) have either not read his speeches or do not believe in his analysis. The result has been a national security performance gap that we must confront if we are to succeed in winning this rising World War III.

We have to be honest about how big this problem is and then design new, bolder and more profound strategies to secure American national security in a very dangerous 21st century. Unless we, like Lincoln, think anew, we cannot set the nation on a course for victory. Here are some initial steps:

First, the president should address a Joint Session of Congress to explain to the country the urgency of the threat of losing millions of people in one or more cities if our enemies find a way to deliver weapons of mass murder to American soil. He should further communicate the scale of the anti-American coalition, the clarity of their desire to destroy America, and the requirement that we defeat them. He should then make clear to the world that a determined American people whose very civilization is at stake will undertake the measures needed to prevail over our enemies. While desiring the widest possible support, we will not compromise our self-defense in order to please our critics.

Then he should announce an aggressively honest review of what has not worked in the first five years of the war. Based upon the findings he should initiate a sweeping transformation of the White House's national security apparatus. The current hopelessly slow and inefficient interagency system should be replaced by a new metrics-based and ruthlessly disciplined integrated system of accountability, with clear timetables and clear responsibilities.

The president should insist upon creating new aggressive entrepreneurial national security systems that replace (rather than reform) the current failing bureaucracies. For example, the Agency for International Development has been a disaster in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The president should issue new regulations where possible and propose new legislation where necessary. The old systems cannot be allowed to continue to fail without consequence. Those within the bureaucracies who cannot follow the president's directives should be compelled to leave.

Following this initiative, the president should propose a dramatic and deep overhaul of homeland security grounded in metrics-based performance to create a system capable of meeting the seriousness of the threat. The leaders of the new national security and homeland security organizations should be asked what they need to win this emerging World War III, and then the budget should be developed. We need a war budget, but we currently have an OMB-driven, pseudo-war budget. The goal of victory, ultimately, will lead to a dramatically larger budget, which will lead to a serious national debate. We can win this argument, but we first have to make it.

Congress should immediately pass the legislation sent by the president yesterday to meet the requirements of the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision. More broadly, it should pass an act that recognizes that we are entering World War III and serves notice that the U.S. will use all its resources to defeat our enemies--not accommodate, understand or negotiate with them, but defeat them.

Because the threat of losing millions of Americans is real, Congress should hold blunt, no-holds-barred oversight hearings on what is and is not working. Laws should be changed to shift from bureaucratic to entrepreneurial implementation throughout the national security and homeland security elements of government.

Beyond our shores, we must commit to defeating the enemies of freedom in Iraq, starting with doubling the size of the Iraqi military and police forces. We should put Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia on notice that any help going to the enemies of the Iraqi people will be considered hostile acts by the U.S. In southern Lebanon, the U.S. should insist on disarming Hezbollah, emphasizing it as the first direct defeat of Syria and Iran--thus restoring American prestige in the region while undermining the influence of the Syrian and Iranian dictatorships.

Further, we should make clear our goal of replacing the repressive dictatorships in North Korea, Iran and Syria, whose aim is to do great harm to the American people and our allies. Our first steps should be the kind of sustained aggressive strategy of replacement which Ronald Reagan directed brilliantly in Poland, and ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet empire.

The result of this effort would be borders that are controlled, ports that are secure and an enemy that understands the cost of going up against the full might of the U.S. No enemy can stand against a determined American people. But first we must commit to victory. These steps are the first on a long and difficult road to victory, but are necessary to win the future.

Mr. Gingrich, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America" (Regnery, 2005).

Stories of flight from Vietnam

2007-07-10T04:36:00.000-04:00

July 10, 2007 - Posted at 12:00 a.m.
BY Huong Le - Austin American Statesman - Inside her wooden story box, Kimberly Do put an American passport, a family picture and a lucky money envelope. She painted the box with red and yellow stripes, the colors of the former South Vietnam flag."That's the flag that my parents like more, because they didn't like the one with the star," Kimberly said. Her family came to America in 1981, six years after the communist takeover. "The South Vietnam flag was the one with these stripes. My parents wanted more freedom. They liked that flag better."

The box contains what Kimberly, 11, understands about her Vietnamese heritage and the story of how her family immigrated to America and Austin. It is part of the art exhibition, "We are from Vietnam: Family Immigration Stories from Austin, Texas," on display at the Austin's Children Museum through July 20.

The artwork was created by American Vietnamese second- and fifth-graders enrolled in the Vietnamese Culture Program at Walnut Creek Elementary School in North Austin. After interviewing their grandparents and parents, second-graders retold their family stories through drawings. Fifth-graders created story boxes and wrote about why their families immigrated and the hardships that they endured to reach America and build new lives.

Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees have found sanctuary in the United States, many in the 1970s and 1980s by perilous sea escapes in tiny, overcrowded boats. In Texas, Vietnamese immigrants generally settled in larger cities, including Houston, Dallas and Austin, and in coastal areas. Austin is home to about 20,000 Vietnamese, according to the 2000 U.S. Census.

Born in Austin, Kimberly visited Vietnam for the first time when she was 4 during a family trip to Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City.

Escaping danger

"My family wanted to immigrate because they wanted to escape the great danger of the Vietnam War," Kimberly wrote in her story for the exhibition. "They were transported here by boats, so they had to leave many valuables behind."

"If they got caught, they would get killed," she later added to her parents' story. Her mother told her there were 1,000 people and little food on the small boat that brought her family to asylum.

Chat Thiet Tran, founder of the Walnut Creek program, said the project helps American Vietnamese students find and preserve their identities.

"Some of the parents still feel the pain of having to leave your country, to live in another country without knowing when they can come back," Tran said. "Sometimes, they don't talk about it to their children."

In the program, which started in 1983, students receive additional instruction in math and reading. On Fridays, they take Vietnamese cultural classes that include studying the language and Vietnamese history and traditions. About 18 percent of Walnut Creek's 1,100 students are of Asian decent, giving the school one of the largest Asian enrollments in the Austin district.

"I think it's beautiful to grow up in two cultures," said one of the program's teachers, Thuan Tang, who left Vietnam when he was about 18 months old. "The whole idea of bilingual (education) is (for the students to) grow up learning English and retaining their native language."

In her story box, 10-year-old Thy Tran put a note worth 50,000 dong, the currency of
Vietnam, family pictures and a lucky money envelope. The envelopes are traditionally given to children during Tet, the Vietnamese new year celebration. Thy has never been to Vietnam, though she's curious about seeing her mother's country.

In her story for the exhibition, Thy wrote that her mother left Vietnam with "a small hope to be free."

"When the moment broke out of the comonist coming to claim South Vietnam, my mom was in panic," Thy wrote. "She was only 16. . . . My mom found kind Chinese people which created a plan to travel on a boat to go to a different country."

That country was America.

Leave Iraq and Brace for a Bigger Bloodbath

2007-07-08T20:23:00.000-04:00

By Natan Sharansky
The Washington Post
Sunday, July 8, 2007; Page B03

Iraqis call Ali Hassan al-Majeed "Chemical Ali," and few wept when the notorious former general received five death sentences last month for ordering the use of nerve agents against his government's Kurdish citizens in the late 1980s. His trial came as a reckoning and a reminder -- summoning up the horrors of Saddam Hussein's rule even as it underscored the way today's heated Iraq debates in Washington have left the key issue of human rights on the sidelines.

People of goodwill can certainly disagree over how to handle Iraq, but human rights should be part of any responsible calculus. Unfortunately, some leaders continue to play down the gross violations in Iraq under Hussein's republic of fear and ignore the potential for a human rights catastrophe should the United States withdraw.

As the hideous violence in Iraq continues, it has become increasingly common to hear people argue that the world was better off with Hussein in power and (even more remarkably) that Iraqis were better off under his fist. In his final interview as U.N. secretary general, Kofi Annan acknowledged that Iraq "had a dictator who was brutal" but said that Iraqis under the Baathist dictatorship "had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school."

This line of argument began soon after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. By early 2004, some prominent political and intellectual leaders were arguing that women's rights, gay rights, health care and much else had suffered in post-Hussein Iraq.
Following in the footsteps of George Bernard Shaw, Walter Duranty and other Western liberals who served as willing dupes for Joseph Stalin, some members of the human rights community are whitewashing totalitarianism. A textbook example came last year from John Pace, who recently left his post as U.N. human rights chief in Iraq. "Under Saddam," he said, according to the Associated Press, "if you agreed to forgo your basic freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less OK."
The truth is that in totalitarian regimes, there are no human rights. Period. The media do not criticize the government. Parliaments do not check executive power. Courts do not uphold due process. And human rights groups don't file reports.
For most people, life under totalitarianism is slavery with no possibility of escape. That is why despite the carnage in Iraq, Iraqis are consistently less pessimistic about the present and more optimistic about the future of their country than Americans are. In a face-to-face national poll of 5,019 people conducted this spring by Opinion Research Business, a British market-research firm, only 27 percent of Iraqis said they believed that "that their country is actually in a state of civil war," and by nearly 2 to 1 (49 percent to 26 percent), the Iraqis surveyed said they preferred life under their new government to life under the old tyranny. That is why, at a time when many Americans are abandoning the vision of a democratic Iraq, most Iraqis still cling to the hope of a better future. They know that under Hussein, there was no hope.
By consistently ignoring the fundamental moral divide that separates societies in which people are slaves from societies in which people are free, some human rights groups undermine the very cause they claim to champion. Consider one 2005 Amnesty International report on Iraq. It notes that in the lawless climate of the first months after Hussein's overthrow, reports of kidnappings, rapes and killings of women and girls by criminal gangs rose. Iraqi officers at a police station in Baghdad said in June 2003 that the number of reported rapes "was substantially higher than before the war."
The implication was that human rights may not really be improving in post-Hussein Iraq. But the organization ignored the possibility that reports of rape at police stations may have increased for the simple reason that under Hussein it was the regime -- which includes the police -- that was doing the raping. When Hussein's son Uday went on his legendary raping sprees, victims were not about to report the crime.
Of course, Hussein's removal has created a host of difficult strategic challenges, and numerous human rights atrocities have been committed since his ouster. But let us be under no illusion of what life under Hussein was like. He was a mass murderer who tortured children in front of their parents, gassed Kurds, slaughtered Shiites, started two wars with his neighbors and launched Scud missiles into downtown Riyadh and Tel Aviv. The price for the stability that Hussein supposedly brought to the region was mass graves, hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq, and terrorism and war outside it. Difficult as the challenges are today -- with Iran and Syria trying to stymie democracy in Iraq, with al-Qaeda turning Iraq into the central battleground in its holy war of terrorism against the free world, and with sectarian militias bent on murder and mayhem -- there is still hope that tomorrow may be better.
No one can know for sure whether President Bush's "surge" of U.S. troops in Iraq will succeed. But those who believe that human rights should play a central role in international affairs should be doing everything in their power to maximize the chances that it will. For one of the consequences of failure could well be catastrophe.
A precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces could lead to a bloodbath that would make the current carnage pale by comparison. Without U.S. troops in place to quell some of the violence, Iranian-backed Shiite militias would dramatically increase their attacks on Sunnis; Sunni militias, backed by the Saudis or others, would retaliate in kind, drawing more and more of Iraq into a vicious cycle of violence. If Iraq descended into full-blown civil war, the chaos could trigger similar clashes throughout the region as Sunni-Shiite tensions spill across Iraq's borders. The death toll and the displacement of civilians could climb exponentially.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the political debate over Iraq is that many of Bush's critics, who accused his administration of going blindly to war without considering what would happen once Hussein's regime was toppled, now blindly support a policy of withdrawing from Iraq without considering what might follow.

In this respect, the debate over Iraq is beginning to look a lot like the debate about the Vietnam War in the 1960s and '70s. Then, too, the argument in the United States focused primarily on whether U.S. forces should pull out. But many who supported that withdrawal in the name of human rights did not foresee the calamity that followed, which included genocide in Cambodia, tens of thousands slaughtered in Vietnam by the North Vietnamese and the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of "boat people."

In the final analysis, U.S. leaders will pursue a course in Iraq that they believe best serves U.S. interests. My hope is that as they do, they will make the human rights dimension a central part of any decision. The consequences of not doing so might prove catastrophic to Iraqis, to regional peace and, ultimately, to U.S. security.

Natan.ISS@shalem.org.il

Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident who was imprisoned for nine years in the gulag, is chairman of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem.

North Korea: Iffy cool-down

2007-07-08T20:18:00.000-04:00

Richard Halloran
The Washington Times
July 8, 2007

Hearts are fluttering once again among the disarmament folks over renewed hopes North Korea will finally take the first step toward giving up the nuclear ambitions of its leader, Kim Jong-il.

International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have visited Yongbyon, site of North Korea's primary nuclear facility. The U.S. negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, has been received in Pyongyang. China's Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi urged Kim Jong-il last week to move things along. The Six-Party Talks central to this process are to resume this month or next.

Skeptics, however, have cautioned that not everything will go well. The North Korean regime
has a long history of reneging on promises to other nations while keeping promises to the North Korean people, foremost of which is Mr. Kim's pledge to retain nuclear arms to deter what he sees as a U.S. threat.

Graham Allison, who specialized in arms control as a Clinton administration assistant defense secretary and is now at Harvard, wrote recently that even if the Yongbyon plant is disabled, much remains to execute an accord reached in February by the Six Parties — North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, Russia, and the United States. It calls for North Korea to shut down all its nuclear sites.

Mr. Allison warned: "Expect lengthy slogging through incomplete records, all in Korean script, missed deadlines, disputes about who can visit where, and all the other antics" that have frustrated those who have dealt with North Korea.

Confronted with this likelihood, the United States appears to evolved have a new strategy, which is to play for time by adopting the North Korean tactic of talk, talk, and more talk until Mr. Kim either gives up his nuclear weapons or his regime collapses. Whiffs of dissent have recently been wafting from Pyongyang, making regime change a possibility.

Said an American insider: "The U.S. will take note of North Korea's nuclear weapons but we will never accept North Korea as a nuclear nation. We will never tolerate a North Korea armed with nuclear weapons."

The game afoot has ruled out military action to destroy North Korea's nuclear sites. Bombs and cruise missiles could do enormous damage but would most likely trigger a North Korean attack on South Korea. Tens of thousands of South Koreans would die in artillery barrages before South Korean and U.S. forces could overrun North Korean positions.

Instead, in this developing strategy, American negotiators will continue talking while carrying out what might be called the five "Nots." The U.S. will not:

-- Extend diplomatic recognition to North Korea, thus depriving it of a status that Kim Jong-il is said to be eager to attain.

-- Sign a treaty replacing the truce that ended the Korean War of 1950-53 because North Korea will not give assurances it will reduce its forces along the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas.

-- Remove the threat of U.S. nuclear weapons that could strike North Korea from submarines in the Pacific or with ballistic missiles or bombers based in the United States.

-- Offer substantial economic aid to a North Korea that has been stricken with famine, limping industrial output and financial disruption for a decade.

-- Open trade and investment relations with a nation that, like China, could benefit from access to American markets, technology, and capital.

The Bush administration has already drawn fire about this strategy and can expect more, especially from China.

John Bolton, President George Bush's former ambassador to the United Nations, reflected the so-called neo-conservatives in an article last week, asserting: "The Bush administration has effectively ended where North Korea policy is concerned, replaced for the next 18 months by a caretaker government of bureaucrats, technocrats and academics."

Chinese leaders have long said they will keep North Korea afloat. David Frum, of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in June that Beijing dreads a North Korean breakup. "Chinese leaders know that such a collapse," he said, "would unify the peninsula under a democratic government based in Seoul and aligned with the U.S. and Japan — for them, a terrifying outcome."

Nor will North Korea roll over easily. Rodong Shinmun, an official newspaper in Pyongyang, said last week that North Korea's "mighty war deterrent for self-defense has become an invincible shield for curbing reckless war provocations of the bellicose forces at home and abroad."

That doesn't sound much like a nation ready for nuclear disarmament.

Richard Halloran is a free-lance writer and former New York Times correspondent based in Honolulu.

Doctors of Death: Let's Be Honest About the Terrorist Threat

2007-07-08T19:55:00.000-04:00

By Oliver North
The Washington Times
July 8, 2007

On July Fourth, President Bush told the troops and families of the 167th Airlift Wing in Martinsburg, W.Va., that, "Our first Independence Day celebration took place in the midst of a war — a bloody and difficult struggle that would not end for six more years before America finally secured her freedom." He urged "more patience, more courage, more sacrifice," to achieve victory in Iraq.

"If we were to quit Iraq before the job is done," the president explained, "the terrorists ... would follow us here," and he reminded his critics: "These people want to strike us again."

What he didn't do was describe just who "these people" are. In the aftermath of last week's botched terror attacks by eight medical professionals in Great Britain — explaining who "these people" are has became more difficult, and the potentates of the press aren't about to help him.

Mainstream media coverage of the three-part event — two "car-bombs" that failed to detonate in London and a flaming SUV driven into the front of the airport terminal in Glasgow, Scotland — was a bigger dud than the doctors' poorly designed vehicular-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs). Even before the terror suspects were identified, cable news and wire service reports were trying to link the botched attack to the war in Iraq.

MSNBC described the attempted attacks as a "chilling new threat: Iraq-style devices. The car bombs were similar to highly destructive explosives used in Iraq and could have killed hundreds of people." According to AFP, "terror threat returns to London after two Iraq-style car bombs were defused in London." The words "Iraq-style" were hyped in dozens of other print and broadcast reports.

Activists and politicians who want to begin extracting U.S. and British troops from Iraq have seized on the London-Glasgow events as "proof" the mission has already failed. Readers, listeners and viewers are drawn inescapably to the conclusion this attempted attack would likely not have happened had British troops been withdrawn from Mesopotamia. But those who know anything about terrorism realize the description of this most recent event as "new" or "Iraq-style" is at best incompetent — and at worst a scam.

First, it is interesting to note that while one of the alleged perpetrators, Dr. Bilal Abdullah is apparently a refugee from Iraq, not one of the British government, police or intelligence spokesmen who have described the London-Glasgow devices — or those detained in connection with the failed attacks — has uttered the words: "Iraq-style." The phrase is entirely the creation of the media reporting on the events.

Second, VBIEDs are hardly an Iraqi invention. Al Qaeda terrorists, Shi'ite militia-men and Ba'ath militants in Iraq may have elevated car-bomb carnage to the level of a new art form, but they are far from the originators. Bolsheviks and anarchists perfected the technique early in the last century. One of the earliest was a horse-drawn wagon detonated on Sept. 16, 1920, on Wall Street that killed 40 and wounded more than 300. The Israeli Stern Gang, the Irish Republican Army, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood all used VBIEDs for decades before U.S. troops set foot in Iraq.

Finally, those of us who have actually seen — and felt — the effects of real VBIEDs know that describing the London and Glasgow devices as "similar to highly destructive explosives used in Iraq," is grossly misleading. In Iraq — and increasingly now in Afghanistan — IEDs of all kind, including those driven by terrorists bent on suicide, are usually constructed using military explosives, prima-cord and heavy artillery rounds connected to sophisticated detonators.

Unlike "Iraq-style" car bombs, the London-Glasgow devices were apparently built with propane ("Patio gas" in the United Kingdom) tanks, gasoline and improperly wired cell-phone detonators. Though certainly capable of inflicting serious casualties, these devices would be unable to do anything like the kind of damage done by the VBIEDs our troops encounter regularly on Iraqi roads. Fortunately, the Doctors of Death in Britain were incompetent bomb builders.

Instead of trying to distract us with bogus connections between the failed London-Glasgow attacks and the war on Iraq, the media would better serve the interests of the American people by more carefully reporting on why well-educated Muslim professionals want to kill us.

Who are the imams, mullahs, sheiks or ayatollahs with the power of persuasion to convince doctors to abandon their Hippocratic oath: "I will prescribe regimens for my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone." How do they entice engineers to devote their lives to destruction? What could they say to prompt an experienced airline pilot to kill his 217 passengers by crashing his plane into the sea?

"These people," as the president said on Independence Day, "want to strike us again." Why, and where, and how, have much more to do with radical Islam than they do with Iraq.

Oliver North is the host of "War Stories" on the Fox News Channel and the founder of Freedom Alliance, an organization that provides support to the troops and scholarships to the sons and daughters of American heroes.

China Waging Capitalist Warfare

2007-07-08T19:47:00.000-04:00

By William Hawkins
The Washington Times
July 8, 2007

China's government took the first official step June 27 to inject $200 billion into a new sovereign company that will buy equity assets abroad. Beijing announced its plan in March to make more profitable use of $1.2 trillion in hard currency reserves, much of which are now kept in U.S. Treasury securities. The Finance Ministry will capitalize the fund, to be run by a former Finance official.

What will distinguish this Chinese fund is not just its size but that it will be a government entity. As its agents scout the world for lucrative investments, it will act to draw private enterprises into government control. It will enter the market to subvert the market.

Beijing's foreign direct investment has focused so far on energy and raw materials to support its expanding industries. China would prefer to import from itself, owning its overseas supplies to assure security and avoid market fluctuations. Importing at the internal cost of production, rather than a price set by rising global demand, will give China's industry another global edge.
The attempt by China National Overseas Oil Company (CNOOC) to buy the American energy producer Unocal in 2005 set off alarm bells in Washington. Unocal then accepted a rival bid from Chevron.

To avoid another such confrontation, the new Chinese fund initially may settle for minority stakes administered by front companies like the Blackstone Group, into which China's new agency poured $3 billion just before Blackstone launched its initial public offering.

In the longer run, a state-run agency with such enormous reserves will likely try to use those funds to advance broader national objectives than merely a few extra percentage points of return on capital.

On June 26, China created an initial $1 billion fund to finance trade and investment by Chinese companies in Africa to advance ties with that resource-rich continent. The fund is part of Chinese aid promised by President Hu Jintao at a Beijing summit with African leaders in November.

Chinese state oil companies have expanded aggressively on the continent, signing deals in Nigeria, Angola and Sudan. After a 2004 Latin American tour, Mr. Hu promised $100 billion in investments for that region, mostly in energy, mining and infrastructure projects (the latter to help ship resources to China). These will be paid for with Chinese manufactured goods in classic colonial style.

Chinese investments have often gone to shore up radical regimes, thus becoming part of Beijing's diplomatic offensive to build coalitions against American "hegemony." At a Darfur conference in Paris the same week the Africa fund was launched, the Chinese envoy argued against imposing sanctions on Sudan for its genocidal policies.

Washington needs to shore up its own economic defenses in case Beijing turns its attention again to buying strategic American assets. Besides resources, China wants advanced technology and has shown interest in acquiring high-tech firms. Beijing has made no secret of its desire to obtain "dual use" technology with military applications, whether through trade, acquisitions or espionage. It protested new Commerce Department security measures on U.S. high-tech exports announced June 15. The measures are much weaker than originally envisioned, due to lobbying by certain business groups that seek to profit by helping China's rise to great-power status. Beijing and its "business" partners cannot be trusted when U.S. security is at stake.

Public authorities must be vigilant and have the authority to act to guard the national interest.
On June 29, the Foreign Investment and National Security Act of 2007 (S. 1610) was passed by the Senate on a voice vote. The work of Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, it would strengthen the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). This multi-agency committee was created in 1988 to analyze foreign acquisitions of privately owned entities to determine their affect on national security. There is wide agreement — including a scathing 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office, that CFIUS has not done its duty, rubber-stamping deals without much serious investigation. Mr. Dodd's bill is a good start, but Chinese reserves are likely to reach $2 trillion by the end of the 110th Congress. Stronger action is needed to keep Beijing from using its vast store of purchasing power strategically against the American economy in an attempt to shift the global balance of power.

Beijing is well aware of how foreign investment can be used in this regard, remembering how China was divided into spheres of influence by the imperialist powers of the 19th century. Last August, its Commerce Ministry set new limits on foreign investment that could transfer control of leading enterprises or traditional Chinese brands, threaten companies with more than 2,000 employees, or pose risks to "economic security" — not just military security. Beijing uses the term "comprehensive national power" to unite economic and military concerns, and Washington must think in the same way.

William Hawkins is senior fellow for national security studies at the U.S. Business and Industry Council.

Vietnam: “Phone Home” (Explosion in cell phone users and transport needs)

2007-07-08T19:11:00.000-04:00

These articles appeared briefly on the internet of the Communist system but were then removed as it their custom.

July 7, 2007

VietNamNet Bridge (Communist Net Feed) – By the end of June 2007, Vietnam had 38.8 million phone subscribers, 74% of whom were mobile subscribers.

In June alone, Vietnam had an additional 11 million phone subscribers, equivalent to the total number of new subscribers in 2006. Vietnam has reached a ratio of 45.8 phones per 100 residents.

The country also has 4.52 million Internet subscribers, equivalent to 16.2 million Internet users, reaching a ratio of 19.5% of the population. The total number of broadband Internet subscribers is 753,000.

The postal network has more than 19,000 service points. Each point serves residents in a diameter of 2.37km or 4,400 people on average.

According to Deputy Minister of Post and Telematics Le Nam Thang, the biggest worry of state management agencies in the fields of telecom and IT in the first half of 2007 was the theft of undersea optical cable.

Mr. Thang said that the Ministry of Post and Telematics would compile an instruction on protecting international telecom systems, especially the undersea optical cable networks to submit to the Prime Minister for consideration.

+++++++++++++

Vietnam urges Japan to complete transport studies

VietNamNet Bridge (Communist Net Feed) – Vietnam has asked Japan to wrap up its study on Vietnam’s overall transportation system in order for development programmes to take place as quickly as possible.

Acting co-Chairman of the Sub-committee on three major infrastructure projects of the Vietnam-Japan Joint Co-ordination Committee, Nguyen Xuan Tien made the request at the sub-committee’s meeting in Hanoi, on July 6.

The plans are integral to the development of the country’s infrastructure and transport system, said Tien, who is also deputy head of the Ministry of Planning and Investment’s Department for External Economy.

“Vietnam hopes the Japanese side will accelerate its studies and surveys so an overall report is released as soon as possible,” Tien said.In response, Minister of the Japanese Embassy and co-Chairman of the Sub-committee, Matsunaga Daisuke, said Japan will endeavour to complete the studies as soon as possible.

Black Culture, Hip-Hop and Bling

2007-05-28T10:24:00.000-04:00

By Thomas Chatterton Williams
The Washington Post
Monday, May 28, 2007; Page A17

Over the past three decades black culture has grown so conflated with hip-hop culture that for most Americans under the age of 45, hip-hop culture is black culture. Except that it's not.

During the controversy over Don Imus's comments this spring, the radio host was pilloried for using the same sexist language that is condoned, if not celebrated, in hip-hop music and culture. As the scandal evolved, some critics, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and the NAACP, shifted their attention to the rap industry. Indeed, every couple of years, it seems, we ask ourselves: Is hip-hop poisonous? Is it misogynistic, violent and nihilistic? What kind of message is it sending?

But what critics consistently fail to emphasize in these sporadic storms of opprobrium, as most did during the Imus affair, is that the stakes transcend hip-hop: Black culture itself is in trouble.

Born in the projects of the South Bronx, tweaked to its gangsta form in the 'hoods of South Central Los Angeles and dumbed down unconscionably in the ghettos of the "Dirty South" (the original Confederate states, minus Missouri and Kentucky), there are no two ways about it -- hip-hop culture is not black culture, it's black street culture.

Despite 40 years of progress since the civil rights movement, in the hip-hop era -- from the late 1970s onward -- black America, uniquely, began receiving its values, aesthetic sensibility and self-image almost entirely from the street up.

This is a major departure for blacks, who traditionally saw cultivation as a key to equality. Think of the days when W.E.B. Du Bois "[sat] with Shakespeare" and moved "arm in arm with Balzac"; or when Ralph Ellison waxed universal and spoke of the need "to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life."

The historian Paul Fussell notes that for most Americans, it is difficult to "class sink." Try to imagine the Chinese American son of oncologists -- living in, say, a New York suburb such as Westchester, attending private school -- who feels subconsciously compelled to model his life, even if only superficially, on that of a Chinese mafioso dealing heroin on the Lower East Side.

The cultural pressure for a middle-class Chinese American to walk, talk and act like a lower-class thug from Chinatown is nil. The same can be said of Jews, or of any other ethnic group.

But in black America the folly is so commonplace it fails to attract serious attention. Like neurotics obsessed with amputating their own healthy limbs, middle-class blacks concerned with "keeping it real" are engaging in gratuitously self-destructive and violently masochistic behavior.

Sociologists have a term for this pathological facet of black life. It's called "cool-pose culture."

Whatever the nomenclature, "cool pose" or keeping it real or something else entirely, this peculiar aspect of the contemporary black experience -- the inverted-pyramid hierarchy of values stemming from the glorification of lower-class reality in the hip-hop era -- has quietly taken the place of white racism as the most formidable obstacle to success and equality in the black middle classes.

As John H. McWhorter emphasizes in his book "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America," "forty years after the Civil Rights Act, African-American students on the average are the weakest in the United States, at all ages, in all subjects, and regardless of class level."

Reading and math proficiency test results consistently show this. Clearly, this nostalgie de la boue, this longing for the mud, exacts a hefty price.

A 2005 study by Roland G. Fryer of Harvard University crystallizes the point: While there is scarce dissimilarity in popularity levels among low-achieving students, black or white, Fryer finds that "when a student achieves a 2.5 GPA, clear differences start to emerge." At 3.5 and above, black students "tend to have fewer and fewer friends," even as their high-achieving white peers "are at the top of the popularity pyramid." With such pressure to be real, to not "act white," is it any wonder that the African American high school graduation rate has stagnated at 70 percent for the past three decades?

Until black culture as a whole is effectively disentangled from the python-grip of hip-hop, and by extension the street, we are not going to see any real progress.

The writer is a graduate student in the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. He also works for n+1 magazine, a semiannual journal of literature.

Leadership Lessons of the Movies: You’ll Never guess Which One (Number Twenty-One)

2007-05-13T15:11:00.000-04:00

By John E. Carey
Peace and Freedom
May 13, 2007

It has been too long since we have commented upon a film of interest. “Pavilion of Women” (2001) is a treat of a flick I had seen some time ago and it is worth another viewing.

This film is a brave attempt to understand Chinese and Western culture at the deepest level: what puts men and women a part and what puts them together.

In 1938, Ailian is the forty years old wife of a wealthy man, Mr. Wu. Mr. Wu belongs to the traditional Wu Family in China.

To understand how big this is: The Wu’s have a “Family Compound.”In order to get rid off her sexual obligations with her husband, Ailian gives Chiuming Wu, her husband, a very young and beautiful concubine.

Now to you readers from Cleveland this sounds like a really good deal but the complexities that ensue make this a problematic situation at best.

Andre (played by Willem DeFoe) is an American priest and doctor who takes care of an orphanage and becomes the tutor of Mrs. Wu’s eighteen years old son Fengmo Wu. Wu lives like a prince in “The Wu Compound.”

Father Andre starts giving classes to Fengmo, Ailian and Chiuming. Then, two forbidden loves will rise: between the priest and the first wife, and between the son and the concubine, having the invasion of China by the Japanese in a big picture shash up at the end.

This is one of Willem DeFoe’s bold and brave moves, for which we admire him very much.

Most of all this is a "culture class" for which I am hardly equipped to comment upon: my bride is Vietnamese and I as an American understand all things and all people. (?)

"If I cannot be with you in this life then I will be with you in the next."

Father Andre observes: "All love stories end the same, don't they?"

There is leadership in abundance from many corners of this finely prduced flick.

Buy, rent, steal or borrow "Pavilion of Women." You'll be glad you did.

The French Foreign Legion: Legendary Force Updates Its Image

2007-05-13T10:30:00.000-04:00

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 13, 2007; Page A14

CASTELNAUDARY, France -- The French Foreign Legion, one of the most romanticized military units in history, is getting a 21st-century makeover.

Out with the images honed by Hollywood -- in movies such as "Beau Geste" and "March or Die" -- of bands of misfits and miscreants dispatched to kill or be killed on sandy fields of battle.

Today, the French Foreign Legion's most powerful recruiter is the Internet. Its troops are more likely to be securing the sewers of Nice against terrorists than fighting wars on camel-back in the deserts of Africa.

Most of its soldiers in this era of globalization are economic immigrants rather than Rambos or felons on the run. And modern Legionnaires are required to be as proficient with computers and high-tech gear as with their French Famas automatic assault rifles.

"The new Foreign Legion reflects the international reality," said Brig. Gen. Louis Pichot de Champfleury, 52, commandant of the 7,655-member force. "The reality has changed. The Legion has to have the capability to adapt to a new era, new recruiting, new technologies."

Laye Sylla is typical of the new Legionnaire. The lanky, ebony-skinned 26-year-old was born in Senegal and immigrated to France in search of an education. After graduating from computer training school, he said, he sent out 400 resumes.

"I never got one response," recounted Sylla, echoing a common complaint among Africans and Arabs in France. He applied to the Foreign Legion in search of a job, a paycheck ($1,418 a month), a chance to use his computer skills -- and perhaps a bit of excitement on the side.

Eighty percent of the Legion's recruits join out of economic necessity or joblessness. The other 20 percent are attracted by the glamour, the history, the yearning for adventure -- and the Internet recruiting site.

Gandolf Samual, a 21-year-old Canadian part-time tree-planter and occasional oil-rig worker, was fed up with monotonous jobs and an uneventful life when he logged on to the Internet and found his ticket to adventure and exotic travel.

"All I knew was how legendary the Foreign Legion was," Samual said after four months of training that included doing push-ups with a railroad tie balanced across his back and struggling to follow orders in a language he didn't understand. "I wanted to leave everything behind and start over."

The worldwide reach of the Internet has made today's Legion, with members from 136 countries, the most diverse in its 176-year history.

In a classroom at Bel-Air Farm -- one of four recruit training centers in this rural southern district -- the well-thumbed dictionaries scattered across the rows of scarred wooden desks reflect the cultural shifts that have occurred in the Foreign Legion: French-Chinese. French-Korean. French-Japanese. French-Spanish. French-Romanian.

"Une fourchette!" shouted the instructor, holding a fork above his head.

"Une fourchette!" repeated 49 recruits representing 21 nationalities.

Once an almost exclusively European force, the Legion now counts Asians and Latin Americans among its fastest-growing cadres of soldiers. Although French law forbids the Legion to actively recruit beyond French borders, the Internet has rendered the law almost meaningless.

Commanders say it is even more difficult now to meld dozens of cultures into a single military force. Recruits say the isolation entailed in adapting to a new life in a new language is compounded when none of your bunkmates shares a common language or culture.

"There's a lot of tension between everybody," said Samual, who said he used sign language in the first weeks to communicate with fellow recruits from Nepal, Iraq, Romania and Ukraine.
After four months, recruits are expected to have learned 400 to 600 French words -- enough to get by on the battlefield, in the barracks and at the dinner table. And in the end, said commanders, it is the French language that binds the Legionnaires together as a family of foreigners serving under the French tricolor.

Champfleury, a graduate of France's elite Saint-Cyr military academy, has headed the Foreign Legion since last July. Like 90 percent of Legion officers, he is a member of the regular military.
He is quick to smile and crack a joke. He keeps a souvenir pistol from U.S. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf in a glass case in his spacious office at the Legion's Aubagne headquarters, a 3 1/2 -hour drive east of here. Legionnaires served under Schwarzkopf during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, made him an honorary private and presented him with cases of wine from the Legion's vineyard in Provence.

Legionnaires now work side-by-side with French police and army troops patrolling train stations and airports as part of counterterrorism efforts. Before a NATO meeting in the southern coastal city of Nice in 2004, Legion divers were ordered into the city's subterranean sewers to help provide security.

Legionnaires serve in Afghanistan, Chad and Ivory Coast with regular French military forces. They were deployed with U.S. military forces in Somalia in 1992 and have been part of peacekeeping missions in Kosovo, Rwanda and Cambodia. They also took part in relief efforts in South Asia after the December 2004 tsunami.

When President Jacques Chirac volunteered to send French troops to help rebuild Lebanon last summer after the war between Israel and Hezbollah, Legion engineers were the first to reconstruct destroyed bridges.

Created in 1831 as a way of absorbing European refugees who had flooded the country after the revolutions of 1830, the Legion has long prided itself on being the first French unit into conflict zones. "Having a force with a lot of single men and a lot of foreign people makes it easier to deal with politically," Champfleury said. "You don't have the widows and orphans."

In the course of its history, 35,000 Legionnaires have been killed in battle or during service to the organization.

Though its missions and makeup have shifted over the decades, much of the Legion's mystique persists.

It advertises itself as "the school of the second chance" for the man -- it does not admit women -- who is fleeing anything from a broken heart to social upheaval. The typical profile of a recruit, according to Lt. Gregory Gavroy, a spokesman, is "unstable, fragile, someone who is changing countries, has lost his roots, is looking for a new life" -- hardly attributes most employers seek.

Recruits are required to sign up for a five-year stint and must give up their real names and choose new ones. Samual, for instance, chose Gandolf -- for Gandalf, his favorite character in "The Lord of the Rings" -- as his new first name.

The 18 percent of recruits who are French-born must surrender their passports and are given new documents listing them as residents of other French-speaking countries. It is after all, the French Foreign Legion.

However, entry into the Legion does not earn foreign members an automatic French passport unless they are injured while serving.

Like most militaries these days, the Legion offers a variety of job specialties from sniper and diver to paratrooper, cook and bricklayer. It also has a band and a team of marathon runners that tours the globe. However, all Legionnaires must be proficient with a weapon and remain combat-ready.

All of them must also learn to iron their 13-crease dress shirts, a feat that can take first-timers three to four hours to perform.

Though the Legion no longer accepts recruits with serious criminal records -- stealing a chicken is okay, anything much bigger is not -- it is fiercely protective of its members.

"The Legionnaire is seldom an angel, but never a criminal," boasts the Legion's Web site. At the same time, said 1st Lt. Renaud Bellat, who instructs recruits at Bel-Air Farm, "We have no room for Rambos here."

But the Legion is no place for wimps, either.

Just before lunch on a recent drizzly spring day, the drill sergeants ordered an "aperitif" for the newest recruits, a little something to stimulate the taste buds.

A line of eight recruits, stripped to the waist, dropped to their hands and knees in the wet, flower-spangled grass for push-ups -- with a massive railroad tie balanced atop their bare backs.

Next came sit-ups, with the tree-size piece of timber laid across their stomachs.

"Do you hurt?" shouted the drill instructors.

"No, Sergeant! I feel good!" the recruits roared in a single hoarse voice, faces contorted.

"You can never know what it's like until you're here," said Samual, who has earned the famous white hat, called the kepi blanc, that marks the promotion from recruit to Legionnaire. "There were moments when I wanted to die. But never to go back."

Researcher Corinne Gavard contributed to this report.

John Edwards, The $400 Haircut, My Two Wives and Me

2007-04-24T12:57:00.000-04:00

By John E. Carey

I was married once before and I am not proud of the fact that I was divorced.

I think my first wife struggled to be happy despite all the beautiful purses, shoes and other goodies she owned. Her kitchen looked like something out of a cuisine catalogue: Calthalon pots and pans like there was no tomorrow. She informed me stuff this good is called “cookware.”

That same year her pajamas became “sleepwear.”

I bought her a new house and a new car all in the same week. She hardly smiled. A neighbor told me I could buy her the Ringling Brothers Circus, put it right on the lawn and she wouldn’t be happy.

That’s when, in middle age, I started to discover that it is not possessions, fancy cars and other goodies that delight me. What makes me happy is an afternoon at the movies with your best girl, a funny conversation at the 7-11, doing someone a favor, and things like that.

Then I met Lien, now my bride, who solidified this thought in me forever.

Born in Vietnam, she lived though war and life as a refugee for most of her life. When she moved in with me she couldn’t even fill a closet. She has less in the way of possessions than anyone I know. And she is the happiest person I know.

Don’t worry, we are getting to John Edwards.

Lien, being Vietnamese, belongs to a genetic strain of Nail and Hair Salon Experts. In the Washington DC area, the Vietnamese have the salon business just about locked up, except for the Erwin Gomez Salon and Spa in Georgetown, which caters to the Washington DC gentry that wants to feel like they are in Hollywood.

Despite this blood relationship to the salon business, and knowing dozens of salon proprietors who could give her a facial or a new hair color, Lien doesn’t want to be pampered. She always looks great but she always does her own hair, nails and the rest.

So this week it occurred to me that John Edwards wants to be pampered. He lives in the biggest and most expensive house in the county and he gets his stylist to meet him on the road to give him his $400 hairdo.Do you really want someone that needs to be pampered living in the White House?

My barber (he would spit if I called him a stylist) is a Greek Immigrant Entrepreneur. He charges me $10 for my haircuts and he fills the time with brilliant political analyses or stories from the world.

I wish my hair grew faster so I could see more of him!

Life is not about the objects you own or the pampering you buy yourself, in my book. Life is about a moment together, a fun conversation, a lunch in a booth, and an uplifting motion picture shared together.

Fortunately, I found the perfect woman. My bride Lien.

++++
John Edwards Could Look Like Glen Campbell For A Lot Less

By Mark Rutledge
The Daily Reflector
Saturday, April 21, 2007

No matter what you think about John Edwards' politics, there's no denying the man has some nice hair.

The Associated Press reported this week that the Democratic presidential candidate's campaign-spending disclosures include some high-dollar haircuts.

At least two were $400 cuts the former N.C. senator got from Joseph Torrenueva, a celebrity hairstylist in Beverly Hills, Calif.

The AP must have decided to check Edwards' hair-care spending after noticing he never looks like he needs, or recently had, a haircut. His is the kind my father calls "a haircut that doesn't look like a haircut."

Most men order that type of trim — the kind that doesn't expose tan lines on the back of the neck or above the ears — only when they're about to get married or attend a funeral.

Had John Edwards been in the public eye in 1970, my father might have aspired to have his 9-year-old son achieve the John Edwards look. But the closest thing we had to John Edwards back then was Glen Campbell.

After admiring his hair on TV's "The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour," my dad got the idea that my bangs should be arranged in a similar fashion.

I remember sitting in the chair at Earl's Barbershop in Johnson City, Tenn., while dad borrowed a comb to demonstrate how he would like my hair to swoop right-to-left across my forehead.
"Sort of like Glen Campbell's," he said.

Earl, a tall Southern gentleman who peers over his glasses during instructions on how much hair to remove, nailed the cut.

I sported the Glen Campbell look until I was about 13, when my hair took a decidedly wavy turn.

Some people are saying it looks bad for John Edwards to buy $400 haircuts while running for president on an anti-poverty platform. I say he can spend as much as he wants to maintain his boyish good looks.

Edwards and Torrenueva are friends, according to the AP article, and Edwards likes to get his hair cut by his friend whenever possible.

I can relate to that. Earl Rice and I are friends, too. He began cutting my hair when I still needed the booster board laid across the seat. I still go back to Earl's whenever possible.

One reason Torrenueva charges Edwards so much is that he apparently goes to Edwards rather than having Edwards come into his Beverly Hills salon.

I doubt if Earl would agree to go to Edwards. But if Edwards ever finds himself campaigning in East Tennessee, and Torrenueva is too busy to leave his salon, Earl's Barbershop would make the perfect backdrop for a campaign stop and photo op.

The place has remained unchanged for nearly four decades. The walls display regional art and various mounted fish and pheasants.

On the Saturday before Easter, Earl gave me the standard tan-line budget cut, which should hold me until I visit my parents again Memorial Day weekend.

But the master barber can just as easily give Edwards a haircut that doesn't look like a haircut.
No appointment is needed, but Earl sometimes slips down to the Red Pig Bar-B-Q for a bite around lunchtime.

Not to worry, though. Earl's is a three-chair operation. Bill and Zeke, the other two barbers, are also certified in the Glen Campbell technique — still only $10 a pop.

That's a bargain on any political platform.

Mark Rutledge can be contacted at mrutledge@coxnc.com

U.S. military buildup urged to counter China

2007-04-11T20:18:00.000-04:00

By Bill Gertz
The Washington Times
April 11, 2007

The United States should build up military forces in Asia to counter China’s military expansion, according to a report on U.S.-China relations by a blue-ribbon panel.

“The United States should sustain and selectively enhance its force posture in East Asia, ensuring it has capabilities commensurate with the region’s growing importance to the U.S. economy and other vital national interests,” the report by a task force of the Council on Foreign Relations stated.

The task force, whose report was made public yesterday, was led by retired Pacific Command chief Adm. Dennis Blair and former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills.

“We believe that the United States should maintain the air, maritime and space superiority that we have in the Western Pacific that’s been the basis of a lot of Western Pacific/East Asian development ever since the end of the Second World War. And we need to maintain that position,” Adm. Blair said.

The report stated that upgrades to the U.S. military base on the Pacific island of Guam should continue and that the U.S. military should “invest broadly” in next-generation technologies that are appropriate for the Pacific, such as advanced naval and air forces.

The Pentagon also should consider “shifting the balance of its naval forces toward the Pacific from the Atlantic,” the report stated.”

The maritime interests of the United States in the future are increasingly in the Asia-Pacific region, and the stationing of its naval forces should be aligned with this trend,” it stated.The buildup and shift of forces to the Pacific is part of what the Pentagon calls its “hedge” strategy of being ready to defeat China swiftly in any military conflict.

The report also stated that the United States needs to improve its intelligence-gathering and analysis of the Chinese military, including training more intelligence specialists with Chinese language skills.

The task force disagrees with part of the Pentagon’s four-year strategy, stating that it does not think China will become a “peer competitor” of the U.S. military in the near future.

"We don’t see it becoming a peer competitor, but we think the United States needs to maintain its capability that it’s had,” Adm. Blair said.

Richard Fisher, a specialist on China’s military, said he disagrees strongly with that assessment.

"By 2010, most of China’s anti-access forces will be in place, making it very difficult to use Pacific forces to help Taiwan,” Mr. Fisher said.

“Unless we double the number of our aircraft carriers and triple our bomber fleet, China is going to be a peer competitor by 2030.”

The 30-member task force included former government officials, business specialists and academics, most of whom are known to favor conciliatory policies toward Beijing. They include former Defense Secretary Harold Brown, defense officials Ashton B. Carter and Charles Freeman, and former State Department officials Winston Lord, Wendy Sherman and Randy Schriver.

Arthur Waldron, a task force member and University of Pennsylvania professor, said the report accurately highlights the many problems and issues facing China at home and abroad but fails to recognize that they could lead to a rapid and spontaneous change that “is more risky and volatile than anything we have seen to date in China.”

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Dennis Miller provides a hip alternative to Rush Limbaugh

2007-04-11T14:23:00.000-04:00

By Joe Holleman
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
April 11, 2007

Not many people can take you on a wilder ride of cultural references than Dennis Miller.In two minutes on a recent radio broadcast, the stand-up comedian and "Saturday Night Live" alum started with rock group Metallica, zipped past Atticus Finch and O.J. Simpson lawyer Barry Scheck, dropped in the Louvre, touched on English lit giants Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, and then came to rest on Boss Tweed. That adrenalized analysis is now available on St. Louis talk radio: 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday through Friday on KRFT (1190 AM, the Talk Monster.)

Having embraced a conservative, or at least a pro-Bush position on Iraq, Miller has become a lightning rod for the left and a far more hip haven than Rush Limbaugh for right-leaners. (This interview took place before the controversy over radio host Don Imus erupted.)

And have no fear: Miller — who once referred to liberal presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich's brain as "skull jelly" — can still rant with the best of them.

Recently, Miller took part in a telephone interview. He said "this" about "that":

Q: Why has your humor taken a turn toward the conservative?

A: They bombed those two buildings, remember? I woke up the next day and had an epiphany. I want our guy to go kill terrorists. It's that simple. People think it's some big shift. I can't believe that a good portion of my country doesn't believe that as well. Not only do they fly planes into buildings, they wire up their own kids to bombs.

You could've gone into the bunker with Hitler and Goering and suggested they wire their kids to explode, and they'd have said, "Hey, let's slow down. That's a little crazy."

Q: In a sense, does your career mirror Winston Churchill's notion that if you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain?

A: That's exactly the process I've gone through. I'm 53, and I'm a pragmatist. We watched punks blow up our buildings and, what, I'm now supposed to sit around and think about how we wronged the punks? Things get cut and dried as you get older. And what about the people who never, ever change the way they think about things? Those are the people I slide away from at cocktail parties.

Q: You've taken shots at Barbra Streisand for her liberal activism. Why?

A: Barbra Streisand is an ungodly talent, but she went into the (show business) bubble at 16. And she reflects that in all the shallow, typical ways.

She has the political beliefs of a sixth-grader.

Q: When it comes to political thought, which authors do you read?

A: I read Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Friedman and Mark Steyn. Personally, I think Krauthammer is a genius.

Q: Handicap the most prominent presidential candidates for the 2008 election:

A: John McCain — I love him and (his service as a Vietnam POW) is one of the most noble, courageous acts ever. But he's 73. I want to see him ride off into the sunset and enjoy the rest of his life.

Rudy Giuliani — That's who I'm voting for. He's a tough guy. And I don't care if he's been married three times.

Barack Obama — Sweet kid. If I were 19 years old, I'd vote for him. But if Michael Corleone was right about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer, he better spot-weld a Clinton to each hip.

Hillary Clinton — She's boring, basically. I read her book last year and she said she had no idea Bill was running around on her. Really? I'm not sure you're smart enough to be my president.

Al Gore — At some point, he'll come riding over the hill like he's the cavalry. But it won't take long for everyone to figure out he's not Forrest Tucker. He's Larry Storch, and he's got his hat on sideways.

jholleman@post-dispatch.com/314-340-8254

Visit us at:
http://johnib.wordpress.com/

The Fall of Saigon: 1975 (Part I)

2007-02-24T07:10:00.000-05:00

I have been exchanging emails with some friends that had shared experiences on the last days of a Free Saigon in 1975. The story below is from john2 who was an airman in the U.S. Air Force. His service was commendable and brave and he was very moved by the plight of the Vietnamese people. All the rest below is quoted directly, unvarnished and unedited by Peace and Freedom.

John E. Carey

john2's text:

I was there til near the end. My last trip in and out was two days before the NVA assault began on the outskirts of Saigon. It was total anarchy.

I was stationed at Clark AB, and we were dedicated, including the volunteers, mostly dependent wives and children, to doing everything we could, to get as many people out of Nam as we could. The mission I was most involved in, was Operation Babylift, and we were able to get @3,000 children out of country and adopted.

I lost a very good friend on the first OB flight out, when a C5A crashed, shortly after take-off.

Of course you understand, I was only one Airman in a huge operation involving thousands.

Standing on the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut, providing security for the aircraft, crews, and passengers gave me a limited perspective of all that was happening around me. Looking at the masses of frantic people surrounding the base, and looking into the eyes of the South Vietnam people we were boarding, told me stories that words never could, or that I could ever express adequately in words.

I had friends in Intelligence, that informed us on what they were seeing, as the NVA rolled steadily to Saigon, and the occasional rocket, mortar, and sapper pot shots at us, was a constant reminder that our time there was limited, so the sense of urgency on everyone's part was constant.

The night time combat landing in a C130 was the best wild ride I have ever had, even though the giggles from the weightless moments, were stifled with the reality that the reason we had to land that way was because of the SAM sites moving closer in near the AB. I did have a friend on the very last C130 to land at Tan Son Nhut, and it was destroyed by rocket fire, and the way they got out was two ARVN Huey pilots picked them up, and flew them out to a ship, which would not let them land, due to International Law, so they cut engine, and belly-flopped into the Gulf, so they could be rescued.

He said sailing back to Subic for the next couple of days, crammed into a tiny bunk, gave him plenty of time to reflect on what had happened. Tell your wife for me, I and my brothers and sisters did everything we could to get as many people out as possible, but the task was enormous.

We risked our lives, and some gave theirs, for no other reason than we are a caring people, and despite the cold and harsh policies produced by Congress, we would have fought to the death to protect Vietnam and their citizens.

I have met a number of people that were children when their families fled Vietnam, and have heard the tales of all the years of privation and fear. I can't begin to imagine what life for her and her family must have been like, and am glad to know they survived their journey, and wish only the best for them.

"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."

--Thomas Paine

The Time the Six Stopped Working On My TV Remote

2007-02-22T11:51:00.000-05:00

By John E. Carey
February 22, 2007

A few years ago when I was angry with everyone and everything I hung out too much with a guy named Jim Beam. Some of you may know Jim as he gets around and can be a lot of fun sometimes.

Jim and I used to love to watch football on TV. I even found that without Jim I could not tolerate the Washington Redskins that year because they were so miserable. At the time ESPN was one of my favorite channels and on my satellite system it was on channel 56.

One day the six on my remote stopped working.

This was intolerable. I hade to actually STAND to change the channels. Can you imagine?

Jim was no help either.

I phoned to satellite service provider and got run around from prerecorded voice to prerecorded voice. This again, intolerable.

Finally I got a “real person” and I said: “My favorite channel is number 56 and the six on my remote no longer works and I have been talking to recorded voices at your business for four hours and now I am sitting on my roof naked and screaming my lungs out in frustration.”

She giggled and said, “Would you repeat that for my supervisor?”

I did and I added that my wife thought (though I denied it) that there was some small correlation between my misadventures with Jim Beam and the failure of the remote. She said sometimes Jim got a little sloppy and ended up on the floor and then I might drop the remote (ya think?) which might, just might, get a little of Jim into the electrons.Not good for the remote. S

he also claimed that I once threw the remote at the Washington Redskins and that may have contributed to its untimely death.

I denied this too but, well, the Redskins were pretty bad that year so who knows? They wouldn’t have caught the remote that year.

I agreed to repeat my story on the speaker phone to the delight of everyone at the satellite company. They had a big laugh. They FedExed me TWO new remotes and a nice funny note.

I got rid of my anger after divorcing my first wife. I divorced Jim too. The Redskins could be next.

Hunting Montagnards In Cambodia

2007-02-22T03:30:00.000-05:00

By The Co Van
February 22, 2007

They still hunt Montagnards here in the eastern province of Mondulkiri, Cambodia, like the Native American Indians were hunted down in the Old West in the United States. It’s hard to believe that such a thing could still be happening in the year 2006 and that the rest of the world doesn’t give a damn, but that’s the way it is here.

The irony is that hunting the forest animals for meat is now against the law in Cambodia but there is no such prohibition when it comes to hunting humans who flee oppression from the nearby police state of Vietnam.

The main crimes of the minority peoples of Southeast Asia is that they aligned themselves with the Americans during the Vietnam War and that the hardliners in the Hanoi politburo have never strayed from their obsession with collecting their blood debt after the war. The communist party of Indochina founded by Ho Chi Minh has given the world the boat people, the reeducation camps, the genocide of the Hmong people in Laos, and the killing fields of Cambodia.

The Vietnamese communist party apparatus still maintains a virtual iron curtain around the Central Highlands of Vietnam that used to be the traditional homeland for the 54 ethnic hill tribes loosely defined as Montagnards. No Montagnard can leave a village without a pass, their leaders are confined to house arrest, and many are in prison that refuse to denounce their protestant religion.

One can always tell when a group of Montagnards escape into Mondulkiri Province. Vietnamese army and police officials chase after them and cross the border as if they owned western Cambodia. The Cambodian provincial police are alerted, and the guesthouses in the capitol of Sen Monorum quickly fill with Cambodian police and army officials from neighboring provinces.

The government approved bounty hunters, who bring along their karaoke girls for the week’s fun, then hunt the fleeing Montagnards and sell them back to the Vietnamese for $20 to $100, depending upon the importance of the individual captured. Twenty dollars is a month’s pay for a policeman in this part of the world.

The UNHCR who is supposed to be there to assist the Montagnard refugees then enters the picture. After most of the Montagnards have been captured and sold back to the Vietnamese, Prime Minister Hun Sen gives permission to the UNHCR in Phnom Penh to travel to Mondulkiri to help the escaping Montagnards.

After an 8-hour drive from Phnom Penh to Mondulkiri in their shiny white Land Rovers, the UNHCR workers give the pretense of searching for the escaping refugees, and once in awhile, they happen to find a few. One has to wonder why the UNHCR has their refugee camp an impossible distance of 300 kilometers for the fleeing Montagnards to reach safely.

My experience last year with a UNHCR rep in charge of the refugee camp was that he had utter contempt for the fleeing Montagnards from Vietnam, referring to them as economic refugees rather than legitimate political refugees. With a straight face, he told me that the Montagnards sent back to Vietnam are quite well treated and receive high paying jobs. “We have a Vietnamese on staff who resides in Hanoi, “he proudly stated. “He travels to the Central Highlands to investigate human rights violations.” And surprise, there aren’t any human rights violations.

That’s the way the game is played here in Cambodia. The human rights organizations that I met with here last month in Phnom Penh have little respect for the UNHCR. UNHCR bowed to behind the scenes pressure from the Hanoi government several years ago and pulled their camps back to Phnom Penh where they now only give a wink and a nod to the fleeing Montagnards.

The US Consulate staff in Vietnam has adapted the UNHCR’s view of the Montagnards’ plight in the Central Highlands in that the Montagnards themselves are the cause for most of their difficulties and that there are no human rights abuses there.

In October of 2005 in Saigon, I met with the refugee resettlement section representing eleven Montagnard families from North Carolina. They were pleading for US officials to intervene with government officials for their relatives who were being hassled and extorted for huge sums of money for documents that they needed to successfully emigrate.

“The Montagnards are basically an uneducated bunch who don’t follow the rules,” lectured one senior US official. “When we go out to investigate, we find them to be the ones causing the problems.”

But of course, when US officials are allowed into the Central Highlands on rare occasions, a communist minder accompanies them. The Montagnards are then interviewed with police officials breathing down their necks. And surprise, they say they are treated quite well.

There is an iron curtain that surrounds the Central Highlands today. There is absolutely no independent inquiry allowed there. Even our own ambassador can’t visit there independently. There was more press freedom in Vietnam back during the Vietnam War as western reporters could travel anywhere and report their findings without censure or fear. The American media doesn’t seem to be interested in this topic today.

What a tragedy that America has abandoned our former allies in the Vietnam War a second time. Now the US has the leverage to force the Vietnamese government to treat the Montagnards better but it remains silent when Hanoi glosses over their draconian human rights record in their bid for entrance into the WTO.

The new focus in Vietnam today is market capitalism with no human rights or religious freedom for the ethnic minorities. The communist party and the politburo that are the real power in Vietnam learned long ago that they could make money off the backs of the little people. That’s why they confiscated the Montagnards’ valuable land in the Central Highlands.

According to the magazine Asia Inc, Nov-Dec 2006, the government of Vietnam today owns 1500 state enterprises worth 30 billion dollars. Yes, that’s right, a tiny minority that comprises the communist party that is the government of Vietnam is now worth 30 billion dollars.

Why have the mainstream media ignored the plight of the Montagnards and their cousins, the Hmong in Laos for over 30 years, and still continue to do so?

The modern day intelligentsia that dominate our universities where speech codes are in place and free exchange of ideas are very limited, grew up as a part of the anti-war movement of the l960’s singing the simple Marxist phrases of Ho Chi Minh and damning the evil American military capitalist machine. And most of the mainstream media stars of that time period marched lock step with them. It’s now a given that the Vietnam War was lost in the streets of American and on American television. Even the North Vietnamese generals admit it in their memoirs. (Is a similar parallel unfolding today?)

Those Vietnam Veterans who fought the war along side the South Vietnamese and the Montagnards received the scorn of the American left who sang praises for Uncle Ho and his communist cadres who were going to introduce the new socialist paradise on earth. But then, the holocaust that unraveled in Southeast Asia after the American military left, had been simply too painful for the left in America to face, for if they honestly examined it, they might find themselves guilty by their tacit support for the perpetrators of the killing fields in Cambodia, the reeducation camps in Vietnam, and the genocide of the ethnic hill tribes that continues today.

To put it into simpler words, that’s the side the left in America rooted for in the Vietnam War. How can they ever honestly face up to it? Or accurately write about it.

One has to wonder why the Vietnamese communist party is so paranoid and ruthless in their treatment of a few Montagnards escaping their clutches in the middle of the night. That’s because they know they can get away with it and that the mainstream media in the West really isn’t interested in the human rights abuses of a communist police state.

It seems the Socialist Republic of Vietnam still owns the hearts and minds of the dominant media culture in America. By their ongoing silence that has lasted for over 30 years, they continue to ignore the ongoing genocide in Southeast Asia of our former allies and swallow the communist doublespeak as to the human rights violation there.

But if one were ever to stray off the tourist path in Cambodia and Vietnam like I have, it’s easy to discover that, “The Montagnards are hunted down like animals and sold back to the Vietnamese communist government, and the rest of the world doesn’t give a damn.”

The big picture in Asia

2007-02-18T05:01:00.000-05:00

By John E. Carey
February 18, 2007

Headlines around the globe in bold type are proclaiming: "North Korea agrees to nuclear disarmament."

On the same day North Korea seemed to be making a promise, China jumped in with a piece of its own headline making news: "China says no more satellite-killer (ASAT) tests." Should we believe them?

No. The record of going through with promises and treaties by China and North Korea is abysmal. In many Asian cultures, and especially Chinese culture, the only thing that counts is achieving one's goals no matter how long it takes, by constantly moving the ball down the field.
Cultures of specific groups are formed over centuries, not just decades. They are often times difficult for outsiders to understand and they can only be changed or modified very gradually. Combine this with what many ethicists call the "Culture of Corruption." Should we believe the ethicists?

Perhaps, because understanding much of Chinese culture, which has developed over thousands of years, has been highly influenced by Confucianism -- not the rule of law.

"The dominant strain of Confucianism stresses avoidance of conflict, a social hierarchy that values seniority and patriarchy," and several other factors, wrote Asia Media contributor Professor Ying Zhu.

"These principles are directly at odds both with capitalism's faith in free markets and with modern political institutions," said Professor Zhu. "Professor Hu Xingdou, a political scientist at the Beijing Institute of Technology, advocates adherence to more tangible systems of accountability like the rule of law and Western-style democratic elections."

Given the cultural influence and the so-called "Culture of Corruption," why else would China promise to give up its ASAT capability while assisting in brokering a deal on North Korea?

Because China is riding high in the Pacific just now, even as the United States is primarily focused upon Iran and Iraq. North Korea's missile launches and nuclear testing came as something of a surprise to the preoccupied American government.

Then there is the booming Chinese economy. Speaking of China's government leaders, Yuan Gangming, an economist with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a top think tank, said "As in 2006, they want a growth rate of 10.5 percent or even higher."

China has used the profits of its phenomenal commercial success, in part, to initiate the modernization of the People's Liberation Army, China's armed forces. And the ASAT test in January was not the only apparent act of provocation by China's military.

Last October a Chinese submarine stalked a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier and surfaced within sight of the ship -- an unprecedented show of capability.

China is quietly making inroads into other parts of Asia. Last September, a bloodless military coup in Thailand deposed the democratically elected government and the generals appointed their own leadership. The U.S. condemned the action and withheld $24 million in military aid from Thailand in protest to the coup.

But then China opened a more lively discussion of military matters with Thailand. Senior officials from Thailand have visited China and China is reciprocating. China also offered Thailand $49 million worth of military aid and training.

No senior U.S. officials have visited Thailand since the September coup and requests to have senior Thai officials visit Washington have been denied.

The largest U.S.-Thailand military exercise, "Cobra Gold," will be the topic of high level diplomatic and political discussions in the near term. U.S. and Thai defense official have told us planning for Cobra Gold was seriously disrupted by the coup. Now a political decision must be made to proceed with the cooperative event or cancel it outright.

And though China has a horrible record on human rights, China's state-run media will not comment and the so-called Western media has been lenient. Chinese President Hu Jintao visited several African nations last month, including Sudan.

The U.N., the EU and the United States are all isolating if not boycotting Sudan for its barbaric behavior in Darfur. While in Sudan on Feb. 2, 2007, on a trade and business development mission, President Hu made no public remarks about Darfur.

Zhang Dong, China's ambassador to Khartoum, told Xinhua news agency on Thursday that China "never interferes in Sudan's internal affairs."

Finally, last month 16 Asian nations met in the Philippines for the second East Asian Summit.

They agreed to reduce poverty in Asia while increasing better energy security: a principle goal of China which cannot sustain its economic machine without vast imports of oil. The U.S. was not invited to participate in this conference. Host Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, said, "We are happy to have China as our big brother in this region."

So, everything in the North Korean disarmament deal over North Korea points toward a China wanting to not overplay its hand because it is mainly getting exactly what it wants economically, politically, militarily and as an influence throughout Asia and the world. One last often overlooked factor is that China desperately wants to make a splash on the world stage when it hosts the Olympics in 2008. The Chinese do not want to risk angering any nation in the Pacific in the interim.

The naive belief China can be taken its word belies history and reminds one of the Munich Agreement between Adolf Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Believing in a policy of appeasement and by not imposing checks and balances upon Hitler, Chamberlain in 1938 had to rely upon trusting an evil dictator. He had none of the "trust but verify" that Ronald Reagan believed in. Chamberlain held up the agreement he had signed with Herr Hitler and proclaimed that the accord with the Germans signaled "peace for our time."

America needs to be wary of China and ensure rigid checks on any agreement.

John E. Carey is the former president of International Defense Consultants Inc. and a frequent contributor to The Washington Times. He has lived in China.

Anne Frank's father tried to get to U.S.

2007-02-15T07:03:00.000-05:00

By Colleen Long, Associated Press

NEW YORK - Anne Frank's father tried to arrange U.S. visas for his family before they went into hiding, but his efforts were hampered when Allied and Axis countries tightened immigration policies, according to papers released Wednesday.

Otto Frank also sent desperate letters to friends and family in the U.S. pleading for help with immigration costs as the family tried to escape the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.

"I would not ask if conditions here would not force me to do all I can in time to be able to avoid worse," Otto Frank wrote to his college friend Nathan Straus in April 1941. "It is for the sake of the children mainly that we have to care for. Our own fate is of less importance."

The letters, along with documents and records from various agencies that helped people immigrate from Europe, were released by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a New York-based institution that focuses on the history and culture of Eastern European Jews. The group discovered the file among 100,000 other Holocaust-related documents about a year and a half ago.

The documents show how Frank tried to arrange for his family — wife Edith, daughters Margot and Anne and mother-in-law Rosa Hollander — to go to the U.S. or Cuba. He wrote to relatives, friends and officials between April 30, 1941, and Dec. 11, 1941, when Germany declared war on the U.S.

But immigration rules were changing under the Nazi regime and in the U.S. There were nearly 300,000 people on a waiting list for a U.S. immigration visa. Besides, since Frank had living relatives in Germany, he would have been unable to immigrate under U.S. policy at the time.
"I know that it will be impossible for us all to leave even if most of the money is refundable, but Edith urges me to leave alone or with the children," he said in another letter to Straus.

He managed to secure one visa to Cuba, but it was canceled in December 1941 after the Germans declared war on the U.S. The family went into hiding in July 1942.

Otto Frank's attempt to move his family mirrors thousands of German Jews, said Richard Breitman, an American University professor who focuses on German and American intelligence history.

"Frank's case was unusual only in that he tried hard very late — and enjoyed particularly good or fortunate American connections. Still, he failed," Breitman said.

The family was in hiding for more than two years before being arrested. Anne Frank described the family's life in hiding in a diary that has sold an estimated 75 million copies. The family's hiding place in a secret annex in an Amsterdam canal-side warehouse has been turned into a museum.

Anne Frank died of typhus at age 15 in a concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, Germany, in 1945. Her father returned to the Netherlands to collect his daughter's notes and published them in the Netherlands in 1947.
___

Making Progress On Iraqi Refugees

2007-02-15T05:56:00.000-05:00

By John E. Carey
Peace and Freedom
February 15, 2007

Yesterday the U.S. Department of State announced that up to 7,000 Iraqi refugees will be permitted to enter the United States. Only 202 Iraqis were allowed in last year. Only about 400 Iraqi and Afghani refugees entered the United States before 2006.

The United States also said it will immediately contribute $18 million for a worldwide resettlement and relief program. The United Nations has asked for $60 million from nations around the world.

This is a big step in the right direction.

America must act in behalf of these people for humanitarian reasons. But we are acting not just to provide shelter and food. We are acting to save lives and avoid torture.

Background: Vietnam

When the Vietnam War ended and Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese feared for their lives. Many had assisted the United States in many ways, great or small, and they knew there would be retribution from the Communists.

A hemorrhage of people began to flow into the South China Sea in small, un-seaworthy boats. Many were lost at sea or killed or othewise abused by pirates.

Many members of Congress were ready to turn their backs on the refugees from Vietnam.

But Senator Ted Kennedy knew many of these people had helped the United States as soldiers, diplomats, clerks, typists and drivers. It didn’t matter one’s station in life: when the Communists came if you helped the United States you were going into re-education.

I’ve spoken to many re-education survivors: the lucky ones. Some spent 5, 8, 10, 12 years detained. Some never recovered as contributing members of society. Some, like Fong, my wife’s brother, went into detention and was never seen or heard from again.

In 1975, Senator Kennedy, working with President Ford and many members of the House and Senate, crafted the legislation that allowed the United States to rescue, feed and house thousands of Vietnamese refugees. Today they are a thriving community of immigrants and the sons and daughters of immigrants contributing to the American economy, society and way of life.

Iraqi Refugee Dilemma

Although the United Nations estimates that 3.8 million Iraqis have fled their homes since the war began nearly four years ago, few have made it here to the United States. Meanwhile, Iraq’s neighboring nations are virtually awash in Iraqi refugees.

Some 2 million Iraqis have left their country, and an additional 1.8 million are thought to have relocated inside Iraq. The refugee flow has increased sharply as sectarian violence has increased over the past year.

On December 30, 2006, in a Washington Post commentary essay, Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy (D-MA) made the case for Iraqi war refugees.

“It is essential that we also reflect on another human cost of the war — the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children who have fled their homes and often their country to escape the violence of a nation increasingly at war with itself.”

“The refugees are witnesses to the cruelty that stains our age, and they cannot be overlooked.”

“America bears heavy responsibility for their plight. We have a clear obligation to stop ignoring it and help chart a sensible course to ease the refugee crisis. Time is not on our side. We must act quickly and effectively.”

Senator Kennedy estimated the number of refugees that needed assistance.

“Today, within Iraq, 1.6 million people have already fled or been expelled from their homes. An additional 1.8 million, fleeing sectarian violence, kidnappings, extortion, death threats and carnage, have sought refuge in neighboring countries. At least 700,000 are in Jordan, 600,000 in Syria, 100,000 in Egypt, 54,000 in Iran and 20,000 in Lebanon. Typically they are not living in refugee camps but have relocated in urban areas, where they must draw on their own meager resources to pay for food and shelter, and must depend on the good graces of the host governments.”

On January 16, 2007, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Refugees, held hearings to delve into the Iraqi and Afghani refugee issue. Senator Kennedy again took a leading role.

Yesterday’s announcement is not the end of this issue but a giant step in the right direction toward resolution of the Iraqi refugee dilemma.

Valentine’s Day Part III: Chemistry Counts

2007-02-13T06:08:00.000-05:00

By John E. Carey
Peace and Freedom
February 13, 2007

After watching my Mother slowly lose her mind or at least parts of her active decision making, and having other experiences with Alzheimer’s Disease and Multiple Sclerosis, I have become an observer and student of the human brain.

In fact, I have become so fascinated by the human brain and what the medical professionals know about our onboard human computer that I now consider the “space” between our ears as the new frontier: the new “space’ if you will.

This brings us, naturally, to Valentine’s Day.

Addicts, people afflicted with mentally debilitating diseases and everyone else on the face of the earth get jolts of “ups” and “downs” from their own body chemistry. One of the key chemistries doctors know about is dopamine.

You crave it, Baby, because your brain tells you to. You have to have it.

When I found out that dopamine had a connection to brain diseases like Alzheimer’s, to addiction and to human sexual attraction I became even more fascinated by the brain.Dr. Anne Marie Helmenstine asks, “Did you know that raw lust is characterized by high levels of testosterone? The sweaty palms and pounding heart of infatuation are caused by higher than normal levels of norepinepherine.

Meanwhile, the 'high' of being in love is due to a rush of phenylethylamine and dopamine. All is not lost once the honeymoon is over. Lasting love confers chemical benefits in the form of stabilized production of serotonin and oxytocin.”Dopamine and norepinephrine are the drugs of love: and therefore Valentine’s Day.

But while men can purchase Viagra; for most of us you have to make your own dopamine and norepinephrine.

I might add another stimulant of the human body: plain old adrenaline. This hormone is one of John Madden’s favorites. In fact, almost every athlete, everyone who has faced a super-stressing danger, most lovers and even people reacting to loud noises and bright lights are responding at least in part to adrenaline.That same “sweaty palms and pounding heart” impact of testosterone is produced by adrenaline. It is just that testosterone works even lower and harder than adrenaline.

Adrenaline’s first cousin epinephrine plays a central role in the short-term human response to stress. This is your physiological response to threatening, exciting, or environmental factors. This is why race track fans stand and gasp when cars wreck, why college men (and even some older guys) like strip bars and why some women can’t wait to explain where their “G-spot” is.

Even your sense of smell impacts the production of this strange cocktail of body chemistries. So doctors pretty much know that certain smells like perfumes and for me (and a bunch of others) cooking beef causes a certain rush!

Then there are the Pheromones. Pheromones are body released chemicals meant to attract and excite. Pheromones are substances which, when inhaled, can produce a reaction: sexual attraction, relaxation, excitement, even euphoria.

Moths produce pheromones to find sexual partners. The little rascals.

Many pheromones affect women and men differently and we can’t always control them by turning them up or down or on or off.

Whether you are a man or a woman and you find yourself with a partner that isn’t very attractive, I suggest you tell your friends that you were roped in by an unbelievable cocktail of pheromones.

But in truth, another drug called alcohol probably played the largest role. This is one of the most powerful and seductive and readily available of all the dangerous substances. Ask Mickey Mantle or Larry Hagman or Trra Conner. We noticed one media outlet calling Tara the "Boozing Beauty."

Her mother must be very proud.

Pheromones enter the same human super highway of everything in the air that smog and pollen use.

And again, aromas and things flying through the air and vacuumed into your schnozzle impact us all differently. For example: my Vietnamese born wife enjoys the aroma of Thang Co or Banh Chung. For me and millions in England, Ireland and the Middle East it is roasting lamb we crave.

But food aromas are not really pheromones which are naturally secreted by the body. Food aromas just use the same freeway.

"Love is a drug," says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love." In fact, love may be a chemical or a mixture of same.

But here is the thing: candles, perfume, dim lights, good food and a warm caress is all we non-professionals should be dabbling in. You start getting beyond that and you might wake up with Barry Bonds standing next to your bed with something to cheer you up!

And dabbling in these human chemicals can cause one to wake up dead, as the late Anna Nichole Smith and her son proved.

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Victory Is Not an Option

2007-02-11T07:06:00.000-05:00

The Mission Can't Be Accomplished -- It's Time for a New Strategy

By William E. Odom
The Washington Post
Sunday, February 11, 2007; Page B01

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush's illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat.

Its gloomy implications -- hedged, as intelligence agencies prefer, in rubbery language that cannot soften its impact -- put the intelligence community and the American public on the same page. The public awakened to the reality of failure in Iraq last year and turned the Republicans out of control of Congress to wake it up. But a majority of its members are still asleep, or only half-awake to their new writ to end the war soon.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Americans do not warm to defeat or failure, and our politicians are famously reluctant to admit their own responsibility for anything resembling those un-American outcomes. So they beat around the bush, wringing hands and debating "nonbinding resolutions" that oppose the president's plan to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.

For the moment, the collision of the public's clarity of mind, the president's relentless pursuit of defeat and Congress's anxiety has paralyzed us. We may be doomed to two more years of chasing the mirage of democracy in Iraq and possibly widening the war to Iran. But this is not inevitable. A Congress, or a president, prepared to quit the game of "who gets the blame" could begin to alter American strategy in ways that will vastly improve the prospects of a more stable Middle East.

No task is more important to the well-being of the United States. We face great peril in that troubled region, and improving our prospects will be difficult. First of all, it will require, from Congress at least, public acknowledgment that the president's policy is based on illusions, not realities. There never has been any right way to invade and transform Iraq. Most Americans need no further convincing, but two truths ought to put the matter beyond question:

First, the assumption that the United States could create a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq defies just about everything known by professional students of the topic. Of the more than 40 democracies created since World War II, fewer than 10 can be considered truly "constitutional" -- meaning that their domestic order is protected by a broadly accepted rule of law, and has survived for at least a generation. None is a country with Arabic and Muslim political cultures.

None has deep sectarian and ethnic fissures like those in Iraq.

Strangely, American political scientists whose business it is to know these things have been irresponsibly quiet. In the lead-up to the March 2003 invasion, neoconservative agitators shouted insults at anyone who dared to mention the many findings of academic research on how democracies evolve. They also ignored our own struggles over two centuries to create the democracy Americans enjoy today. Somehow Iraqis are now expected to create a constitutional order in a country with no conditions favoring it.

This is not to say that Arabs cannot become liberal democrats. When they immigrate to the United States, many do so quickly. But it is to say that Arab countries, as well as a large majority of all countries, find creating a stable constitutional democracy beyond their capacities.

Second, to expect any Iraqi leader who can hold his country together to be pro-American, or to share American goals, is to abandon common sense. It took the United States more than a century to get over its hostility toward British occupation. (In 1914, a majority of the public favored supporting Germany against Britain.) Every month of the U.S. occupation, polls have recorded Iraqis' rising animosity toward the United States. Even supporters of an American military presence say that it is acceptable temporarily and only to prevent either of the warring sides in Iraq from winning. Today the Iraqi government survives only because its senior members and their families live within the heavily guarded Green Zone, which houses the U.S. Embassy and military command.

As Congress awakens to these realities -- and a few members have bravely pointed them out -- will it act on them? Not necessarily. Too many lawmakers have fallen for the myths that are invoked to try to sell the president's new war aims. Let us consider the most pernicious of them.

1) We must continue the war to prevent the terrible aftermath that will occur if our forces are withdrawn soon. Reflect on the double-think of this formulation. We are now fighting to prevent what our invasion made inevitable! Undoubtedly we will leave a mess -- the mess we created, which has become worse each year we have remained. Lawmakers gravely proclaim their opposition to the war, but in the next breath express fear that quitting it will leave a blood bath, a civil war, a terrorist haven, a "failed state," or some other horror. But this "aftermath" is already upon us; a prolonged U.S. occupation cannot prevent what already exists.

2) We must continue the war to prevent Iran's influence from growing in Iraq. This is another absurd notion. One of the president's initial war aims, the creation of a democracy in Iraq, ensured increased Iranian influence, both in Iraq and the region. Electoral democracy, predictably, would put Shiite groups in power -- groups supported by Iran since Saddam Hussein repressed them in 1991. Why are so many members of Congress swallowing the claim that prolonging the war is now supposed to prevent precisely what starting the war inexorably and predictably caused? Fear that Congress will confront this contradiction helps explain the administration and neocon drumbeat we now hear for expanding the war to Iran.

Here we see shades of the Nixon-Kissinger strategy in Vietnam: widen the war into Cambodia and Laos. Only this time, the adverse consequences would be far greater. Iran's ability to hurt U.S. forces in Iraq are not trivial. And the anti-American backlash in the region would be larger, and have more lasting consequences.

3) We must prevent the emergence of a new haven for al-Qaeda in Iraq. But it was the U.S. invasion that opened Iraq's doors to al-Qaeda. The longer U.S. forces have remained there, the stronger al-Qaeda has become. Yet its strength within the Kurdish and Shiite areas is trivial. After a U.S. withdrawal, it will probably play a continuing role in helping the Sunni groups against the Shiites and the Kurds. Whether such foreign elements could remain or thrive in Iraq after the resolution of civil war is open to question. Meanwhile, continuing the war will not push al-Qaeda outside Iraq. On the contrary, the American presence is the glue that holds al-Qaeda there now.

4) We must continue to fight in order to "support the troops." This argument effectively paralyzes almost all members of Congress. Lawmakers proclaim in grave tones a litany of problems in Iraq sufficient to justify a rapid pullout. Then they reject that logical conclusion, insisting we cannot do so because we must support the troops. Has anybody asked the troops?

During their first tours, most may well have favored "staying the course" -- whatever that meant to them -- but now in their second, third and fourth tours, many are changing their minds. We see evidence of that in the many news stories about unhappy troops being sent back to Iraq. Veterans groups are beginning to make public the case for bringing them home. Soldiers and officers in Iraq are speaking out critically to reporters on the ground.

But the strangest aspect of this rationale for continuing the war is the implication that the troops are somehow responsible for deciding to continue the president's course. That political and moral responsibility belongs to the president, not the troops. Did not President Harry S. Truman make it clear that "the buck stops" in the Oval Office? If the president keeps dodging it, where does it stop? With Congress?

Embracing the four myths gives Congress excuses not to exercise its power of the purse to end the war and open the way for a strategy that might actually bear fruit.

The first and most critical step is to recognize that fighting on now simply prolongs our losses and blocks the way to a new strategy. Getting out of Iraq is the pre-condition for creating new strategic options. Withdrawal will take away the conditions that allow our enemies in the region to enjoy our pain. It will awaken those European states reluctant to collaborate with us in Iraq and the region.

Second, we must recognize that the United States alone cannot stabilize the Middle East.
Third, we must acknowledge that most of our policies are actually destabilizing the region. Spreading democracy, using sticks to try to prevent nuclear proliferation, threatening "regime change," using the hysterical rhetoric of the "global war on terrorism" -- all undermine the stability we so desperately need in the Middle East.

Fourth, we must redefine our purpose. It must be a stable region, not primarily a democratic Iraq. We must redirect our military operations so they enhance rather than undermine stability. We can write off the war as a "tactical draw" and make "regional stability" our measure of "victory." That single step would dramatically realign the opposing forces in the region, where most states want stability. Even many in the angry mobs of young Arabs shouting profanities against the United States want predictable order, albeit on better social and economic terms than they now have.

Realigning our diplomacy and military capabilities to achieve order will hugely reduce the numbers of our enemies and gain us new and important allies. This cannot happen, however, until our forces are moving out of Iraq. Why should Iran negotiate to relieve our pain as long as we are increasing its influence in Iraq and beyond? Withdrawal will awaken most leaders in the region to their own need for U.S.-led diplomacy to stabilize their neighborhood.

If Bush truly wanted to rescue something of his historical legacy, he would seize the initiative to implement this kind of strategy. He would eventually be held up as a leader capable of reversing direction by turning an imminent, tragic defeat into strategic recovery.

If he stays on his present course, he will leave Congress the opportunity to earn the credit for such a turnaround. It is already too late to wait for some presidential candidate for 2008 to retrieve the situation. If Congress cannot act, it, too, will live in infamy.

William E. Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general, was head of Army intelligence and director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan. He served on the National Security Council staff under Jimmy Carter.

A West Point graduate with a PhD from Columbia, Odom teaches at Yaleand is a fellow of the Hudson Institute.

Understanding Islamic Militancy; Part I: Where is the Most Trouble?

2007-02-11T05:59:00.000-05:00

By John E. Carey
Peace and Freedom
February 11, 2007

The issue of Islamic militancy, violence and unrest appears more and more in the international media. We are asking why and now envision a series of researched essays to forge a better understanding of this phenomena.

In this first article, we are attempting to document the places in the world most impacted by Islamic militancy and unrest. We need your help. Please email your information, facts and references to jecarey2603@cox.net to contribute to our understanding.

Southern Thailand

The death toll in the sectarian violence in southern Thailand is now approaching 2,000 over the course of the last three years. Muslims in Yala and two other southern Thai provinces want their own Muslim state.

Beheadings and other atrocities are common.

The government of the previous Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was unable to control the violence and was deposed by a bloodless military coup last September. But the new Thai government as been equally unable to stem the violence.We frequently hear from Wantanee in Thailand who gives us insights and reports.

Philippines

Islam may be the oldest organized religions to be established in the Philippines. Muslim traders brought Islam to the Philippines as early as the 14th century.

Today Filipino Muslims only form about 5% of the country's population, while the rest of the general population are mostly Roman Catholic (84%) and Protestant (8%).

Friction between the Muslim south and Christian north has been a continual problem for centuries. Occasionally, it flares up into open conflict. The largest guerilla force is currently the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). They claim to control 26 southern "territories;" but the government only credits them with controlling only ten.

The MILF wants to form its own government and break away from the Philippines.

Western China

The government of China says its western most province of Xinjiang is alive with Islamic separatists. Xinjiang borders the Tibet Autonomous Region to the south, Mongolia to the east, Russia to the north, and Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and the Pakistan-India controlled parts of Kashmir to the west. Xinjiang is somewhat like the autonomous tribal regions of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where national police and armed forces fear for their lives.

Pakistan-Afghanistan Border

The border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan is a largely uncontrolled area. Not only is human traffic between Afghanistan and Pakistan largely unregulated but there are also camps of Muslim rebels and terrorists in this mountainous region. The government of Pakistan claims to have made inroads in regulating the area but many of these steps have been tentative.

We frequently hear from Muhammad in this region and we thank him for his regular reports.

Somalia

After the failed U.S. Army humanitarian operation in Somalia from August 1992 to March 1994, the government was practically non existent. Rebels and tribal leaders attempted to assert control. Al Qaida targeted the area as a potential region to establish Islamic terrorist training areas.Recently, a movement has been made toward all inclusive diplomatic talks to get Somalia on the road toward lawful government.

The UN and others want the talks to include prominent Somali warlords, leaders of the breakaway Somaliland region and leaders of the ousted Islamic movement.Somalia remains a very troubled land.

Afghanistan

Islamic radicals continue to engage in conflict against U.S. and NATO troops. The Muslim people of Afghanistan are mostly tribal and follow their orders from their tribal elders. We talked recently to some Afghanis who expressed revulsion at the use of suicide bombers in religious strife.

Iraq

The U.S. effort to establish a democratic government has been marred by sectarian violence.

All Around Israel

Lebanon seems to be a nation divided with Hezbollah fomenting unrest that could lead to Civil War. In the Gaza strip peace has alluded Israel and may still be a long time in coming.

Russia

In Russia's Tatarstan region more and more young people are switching from Western-style dress to Muslim attire. More than just a fashion, the trend reflects a surging interest in Islam among the youth of this largely Muslim region on the Volga River, some 450 miles east of Moscow.Violence still sometimes erupts in Chechnya.

The population of Chechnya is largely Muslim and has been striving for years for complete autonomy from Russia.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the government of the republic of Chechnya declared independence, calling itself the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Only other “nation” recognized this claim: the Afghan Taliban government, which was subsequently ousted by the U.S.

China’s Answer to Islamic Separatists: Execute the Ringleader

2007-02-10T06:41:00.000-05:00

By John E. Carey
Peace and Freedom
February 10, 2007

Radio Free Asia announced that China has executed the Muslim extremist Ismail Semed for Alleged Separatist Activities.

China’s state controlled media has not confirmed the execution.

Mr. Semed, a member of the Uighur minority group in Xinjiang, was shot to death Thursday after being convicted in 2005 of trying to “split the motherland.”

Xinjiang borders the Tibet Autonomous Region to the south, Mongolia to the east, Russia to the north, and Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and the Pakistan-India controlled parts of Kashmir to the west.Xinjiang is somewhat like the autonomous tribal regions of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where national police and armed forces fear for their lives.

Human rights groups condemned the execution of Semed because they said the prosecution's case against him lacked evidence and his confession may have been coerced.

Chinese authorities say militants among the Uighurs Turkic-speaking Muslims are leading a violent Islamic separatist movement in the region and are seeking to set up an independent state of "East Turkistan."

Critics accuse Beijing of using claims of terrorism as an excuse to crack down on peaceful pro-independence sentiment and expressions of Uighur identity.

Semed’s trial was conducted in 2005. Semed's widow, identified by Radio Free Asia as Buhejer, said that her husband told her during his trial that his confession was forced.

Rebiya Kadeer, a Chinese Muslim from Xinjiang now living in exile in the U.S., said in a separate statement that the case against Semed lacked credible evidence.

"His trial, like most Uighur political prisoners' trials, was not fair," said Kadeer, who is president of the Uyghur American Association.

Amnesty International accused the government of China of torturing Semed while he was in custody.

Are astronauts still made of 'Right Stuff'?

2007-02-09T10:55:00.000-05:00

Plain Talk by Al Neuharth, USA TODAY founder

USAToday
February 9, 2007

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. - This gateway to the universe has had 322 astronauts pass through in training or en route to space flights since the original seven in the "Mercury" program in 1959.

Accidents in space or on launch pads have taken the lives of 17. But until this week, not a single astronaut has been charged with any major law-breaking.

That remarkable record was broken when astronaut Lisa Nowak was arrested and charged with attempted murder in a love triangle involving a male astronaut and a launch-support servicewoman.

People around here are asking whether NASA has lowered its standards. I think it's a matter of the law of averages.

My perspective comes from covering the space program in its early years, getting to know the first seven famous astronauts very well and many since as a resident for the past 35 years in nearby Cocoa Beach.

My recollections are enhanced by these two favorite books about astronauts:

•The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe in 1979 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux $12.95).

•John Glenn: A Memoir in 1999 (Bantam $27).

Glenn was the most straight-laced of the original seven. He wrote: "I read the riot act (to them) … saying, 'This program meant too much to the country to see it jeopardized by anyone who couldn't keep his pants zipped.' "

Wolfe hinted at some shenanigans but suggested that the most dangerous extra-curricular activity was by Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and his free-spirited buddies when they raced their Corvettes down A1A at breakneck speeds.

To me, every astronaut is a hero. Heroes are human, too. Astronaut Nowak deserves the best legal and psychiatric assistance available.

NASA should help provide it.

Don't send us home to be murdered, Liberian refugees plead

2007-02-09T03:54:00.000-05:00

By Dan Izenberg
The Jerusalem Post
February 9, 2007

Ninety refugees from war-torn Liberia, including 20 children who were born here and adults who have lived here for up to 17 years, are due to be sent home on March 31, after the UN decreed that Liberia was no longer a danger zone.Virtually all of the refugees believe that going back to Liberia means certain death, and have asked the government to extend their status as temporary refugees beyond the deadline.

"If I return to Liberia," said Ayouba Kenneh, the "president" of the closely-knit group, "the murderers of my family will almost certainly try to kill me to get rid of a potential witness who could testify against them in court and make them pay for their atrocities."

According to Kenneh, in the middle of the night of December 31, 1990, members of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) attacked the county of Grand Gedeh, where he lived. In front of his eyes, they killed his father and uncles, raped and killed three of his sisters and shot his older brother after discovering that he was a Muslim.

The civil war, which had broken out a year earlier, was primarily a religious and ethnic struggle. Kenneh, like most of the refugees in Israel, belongs to the minority Mandingo tribe. The families' assailants were from the much larger Krhin tribe.

According to Kenneh, he was taken captive by an NPFL official called Ghawo, who had allegedly owed $800 to Kenneh's father. Ghawo locked Kenneh up in a room and told him, "You will never live to tell this story. Tomorrow, I will put your heart in my soup and eat it."

Ghawo managed to escape and marched through the bush for three weeks until reaching the Ivory Coast. Eventually, he took a boat to Egypt.

On October 16, 1997, he crossed the border into Israel.

At first, Kenneh lived in Tel Aviv as an illegal sojourner. It took him three years to learn that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) maintained an office in Jerusalem and that, as a citizen of Liberia, he fell under its protection.

After the outbreak of civil war in Liberia in 1989, the UNHCR in Geneva declared Liberia an unsafe country. Its international representatives asked their host countries to grant temporary refugee status to anyone who had arrived in the country from Liberia. Israel agreed, as it has to similar requests regarding five other African countries.

As a "temporary refugee," Kenneh was given a work permit and a letter from the UNHCR attesting to his legal status in the country. As long as the UN classified Liberia as an "unsafe country," Kenneh and all the other Liberians could live and work in Israel with impunity. Since then, he has earned a living cleaning houses and married Dalma, an immigrant laborer from the Philippines.

In 2004, however, the Liberian civil war officially ended with the overthrow of president Charles Taylor, and the UN sent a peace-keeping force of 15,000 troops to restore order in the chaotic country. Last year, a new president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, was chosen in democratic elections.

In view of these developments, UNHCR headquarters in Geneva decided to remove Liberia from its list of unsafe countries. Last June, Israeli representative Michael Bavly announced that UNHCR was withdrawing its request to the Israeli government to continue offering temporary protection to the Liberians in its midst.

The following month, the Interior Ministry informed the refugees they must leave Israel by March 31. However, it offered each one the opportunity to appeal individually, on the grounds of exceptional personal circumstances, to be recognized as a refugee.

But the members of the community are traumatized by their nightmarish experiences in Liberia and convinced that their lives would still be in danger if they returned.

Kenneh's experiences during the civil war are not unique. Another refugee, Asatu Ture, saw her father killed by rebel forces. She and her sister were raped and taken away to be sex slaves for three months before she managed to escape. Miraculously, Ture and her husband, who were separated during the fighting, found each other in Israel. Last year she gave birth to twin girls.

Amarah Sirayon, 37, fled Nigeria after neighbors tried to kill him because he had fought with Charles Taylor's forces.

"Nigeria is not safe for anyone who fought for Taylor," he said. "People who suffered during his rule want revenge. Some of my friends have already been killed."

Frightened by the prospect of being forced to leave their safe haven, the Liberians hired Tel Aviv attorney Ari Syrquin to help them.

Syrquin, whose regular clientele includes businessmen involved in international trade, told The Jerusalem Post that helping the refugees was a "once in a lifetime opportunity." Indeed, he stood out, in his stylish suit and tie, walking along the run-down streets of Tel Aviv's old central bus station, where many of the immigrant workers live.

Liberia was still in chaos, Syrquin said. There was no properly organized national police or army to maintain law and order, he said, and the UN had extended the mandate of its peacekeeping force by another six months because of the unstable situation.

Syrquin cited a recent report by Los Angeles Times reporter Robyn Dixon, who described the potentially explosive situation in Liberia.

"With thousands more refugees expected to return to Liberia in the coming months, the land problem is a potential tinderbox that could undermine this nation's fragile peace," Dixon wrote. "But in a country where 80 percent of the people live below the poverty line and the unemployment rate is 85%, it's just one of many issues that could ignite violence, dragging in the ready pool of former combatants."

Bavly, the Israeli representative to UNHCR, said there was nothing extraordinary about the situation in Liberia today.

"It's like all the countries in Africa, in fact better than some of them," he said.
Bavly also said there was nothing significant about the fact that the mandate of the UN peacekeeping force had been extended.

"They extended it to be able to check that everything is quiet and, so far, everything is quiet," he said.

Bavly said it was important for the UN to remove countries from the "temporarily unsafe" category, as soon as it concluded that the security situation had improved sufficiently, so that the countries it asked to grant temporary refugee status would trust it.

When a government is confident that the UN will only ask for that status as long as it is truly necessary, it will be more willing to grant it, he said.

Kenneh is not convinced. "The people that killed my family are murderers and there is no rule of law in Liberia," he said. "They will kill me to shut me up. It's because of this that I'm still afraid to go back."

Patriot Spy: James Armistead

2007-02-07T10:16:00.000-05:00

By Madison Gray
Time Magazine

Wars are rarely fought without the use of spies and the American Revolution was no exception. Arguably, the most important Revolutionary War spy was a slave named James Armistead.

Born around 1748 in New Kent, Va., Armistead was given permission by his master to join the revolutionary cause. Although many fought as soldiers, blacks, both free and enslaved were being used by the British and the Americans to gain intelligence against each other. Armistead, however, was used by both sides, making him a double-agent.

In 1781, he joined the army and was put in service under the Marquis de Lafayette, who was desperately trying to fight the chaos caused in Virginia by turncoat soldier Benedict Arnold. His forces diminished by British Gen. Charles Cornwallis' troops, Lafayette needed reliable information about enemy movements.

Armistead began his work posing as an escaped slave, entering Arnold's camp as an orderly and guide, then sent what he learned back to Lafayette. He later returned north with Arnold and was posted close enough to Cornwallis' camp to learn further details of British operations without being detected. By also being used as a British spy (who fed them inaccurate data), Armistead was able to travel freely between both sides. One day, he discovered that the British naval fleet was moving 10,000 troops to Yorktown, Va., making it a central post for their operation.

Using the intricate details Armistead provided, Lafayette and a stunned, but relieved George Washington lay siege to the town. Concentrating both American and French forces, a huge blockade was formed, crippling the British military and resulting in their surrender on Oct. 19, 1781.

Rex Ellis, vice president of Colonial Williamsburg's Historic Area, says Armistead's role was critical to the American victory. "If he had not given the information that he gave at the strategic time he did, they would not have had the intelligence to create the blockade that ended the war."

Despite his critical actions, Armistead had to petition the Virginia legislature for manumission. Lafayette assisted him by writing a recommendation for his freedom, which was granted in 1787. In gratitude Armistead adopted Lafayette's surname and lived as a farmer in Virignia until his death in 1830.

A Few Moments With Hoi

2007-02-04T17:21:00.000-05:00

By John E. Carey
Peace and Freedom
February 4, 2007

We were honored to spend some time yesterday with Hoi Trinh. Hoi has assisted in obtaining the freedom fof thousands of Vietnamese refugees.

Hoi Trinh was born in 1970 in Saigon. At the age of 15, he left Vietnam and came to Australia as a refugee. Hoi’s Dad was an English teacher. Hoi’s Dad spent three years in the re-education camps of Communist Vietnam after Saigon fell in 1975. Bud he quickly returned to the embrace of his family.

Hoi graduated from Melbourne University Law School with combined degrees of BA and LLB. At the age of 29, he served as an associate to Justice Susan Kenny on the Federal Court of Australia. After receiving the 1999 Young Australian Lawyer of the Year award, he was then chosen for the Chevening-Oxford Australia Scholarship that allowed him to complete his Master of Studies on International Refugee Laws and Policies at Oxford University, England, in 2002.

Hoi Trinh has written numerous publications in law journals and articles for newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register. However, it is his volunteer work with the Vietnamese boat people in Southeast Asia that he has earned him international recognition. With his law experience, he assisted boat people in Hong Kong with resettlement. Recognizing his community work the Sydney Olympic Organizing Committee chose him to carry the Olympic flame in its final stretches to the 2000 Games.

Hoi has lived and worked in Manila, the Philippines, assisting some 2,000 stateless Vietnamese refugees with resettlement.

In our short period of time with Hoi, he told me he currently has three priorities:

--Refugee Protection. There are currently only a few hundred Vietnamese refugees left in the Philippines, Cambodia and Laos. Hoi is working to bring them to freedom.

--Fighting against the trafficking of human beings in Southeast Asia. Hoi and I agreed that the trafficking in Asian women is a crisis that needs to be addressed at the international level.

--Creating an environment in Vietnam that embraces Civil Society. Today Vietnam has no Non-Government Organizations like the one Hoi has propelled into world cognizance. He wants to create an environment of caring and understanding of world issues and concerns among the youth of Vietnam.

An ending is a new beginning

On Thursday, December 28, 2006, Hoi wrote, “My paternal grandpa passed away two weeks ago in Sài Gòn at 85. He grew up poor and died just the same way, leaving pretty much nothing behind. Except perhaps his tiny one-bedroom apartment where my grandma, three of their adult children with their spouses and four of their grandchildren cram in to subsist. And a rich legacy among his 20-odd grandchildren, myself included, of how generous and caring a man he turned out to be, especially in times of crisis.”

Hoi assisted in obtaining the freedom of my own wife Hong Lien and he directly influenced the freedom of Lien’s cousin Tan, who is with us now in the United States.

We at Peace and Freedom are proud to be associated with Hoi Trinh and his colleagues.

How about a nice hot bowl of horse meat and noodle during the Super Bowl?

2007-02-03T08:40:00.000-05:00

Super Bowl Sunday is the best day for eaters everywhere. To me the "Bowl" is "Super" because "Ba" is making Thang Co....

By John E. Carey
February 3, 2007

As you get ready to feast and feed on the biggest beer drinking, chip munching and guacamole slurping day of the year Sunday, I’ll be with my Vietnamese family hoping for the best.

They have it in their minds to make a big batch of Thang Co.

Thang Co is basically noodles and horse meat and the hottest, spiciest sauce you can lay your hands on.

Thang Co has three wonderful advantages: First, it makes you feel hot. In fact, NhanDan (The Communist Part’s leading newspaper in Vietnam, translates like “Peoples News”) recommends Thang Co to warm you up during a cold evening.

Thang Co is also best consumed with beer, rice wine or your other favorite libation. Lots of your favorite libation.

For men, Thang Co also makes your, ahem, let us say “Arnold,” hard. Since this is a family web site I’ll say this about that: think of the “FIRMinator.” Forget the Viagra after the Super Bowl: I’ll be stoked on Thang Co and Jim Beam.

Actually, horse is the wrong word for the meat you need for Thang Co. You need a little Pony. A tender pony. Mister Ed is way too old for Thang Co. My “Ba” (means Grandmother) says you need “lamb-like horse” not a Clydesdale.

So while the rest of America and many of my friends in Canada and around the world (and let’s not forget our troops serving everywhere) are scarfing up the fried chicken, ribs, pizza, pretzels, potato chips and….well….you fill in the rest….

I’m eating Two Bowls of Thang Co.

As the Brits say, Thang Co makes you “RANDY.”

Watch out Honey! Arnold Need YOU!

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Let hot dishes keep you warm

on cold days

(Communist Solution to Lack of Heat!)
NhanDan (Vietnam) February 1, 2007

The cold weather often makes you hesitate to go out but never let it put off your idea of dining out at night when you are in Lao Cai and other provinces in northern Vietnam.

Going out in the chilly evening will be a nice experience if you know where to go and what to eat.
Eating local hot food specialties with friends during a holiday in northern Vietnam might be a good suggestion to take into consideration, as the dishes will somehow help keep your body warm.

One of the hot dishes that you should try is Thang Co, a popular, traditional dish of the Mong people that can be found in Sapa, Lao Cai City and markets in northern Vietnam. It is quite likely that you would find the original Thang Co unappetizing due to its unfriendly smell and flavour. Knowing this, restaurateurs make some changes to suite the taste of both local and foreign tourists.

To make a tasty Thang Co, restaurant owners travel far to markets of minority peoples to find and buy ponies and grown-enough goats and bring them home. They get up in the wee hours the next day to slaughter the animals and then cut their meat, bones and intestines into pieces, making a stew of the mixture, which is served in a big hot-pot.

You will use chopsticks to pick and then dip the meat chops and intestines into a bowl of spicy sauce before eating. Thang Co soup can be eaten with bread, instant noodles, vegetables and herbs.

Because the dish is served in a big a soup pan ethnic people do not eat Thang Co alone. They usually sit around low tables on mats in restaurants and enjoy the dish with a drink of wine made from maize or other wines.

At markets of ethnic peoples like Bac Ha, Thang Co is a favourite of men; they like to gather around a fire and the big hot-pot to slurp Thang Co, chat and drink wine from morning till afternoon when the colourful markets are open. It is not recommended that tourists try the Thang Co at these markets. However, foreign tourists can enjoy Thang Co at Muong Khuong and other restaurants when they stay in Lao Cai. Here locals also put sausages, meat, seafood and eggs on open stalls for visitors to choose for grilling over burning charcoal. The heat of burning charcoal together with the wine and friendly chat will keep you warm when dining out at night in Lao Cai. (SGT)

The Muslim Insurgency in Southern Thailand

2007-02-03T05:54:00.000-05:00

Over the past three years, an insurgency in the southern, predominantly Muslim provinces of Thailand has claimed nearly two thousand lives. The rise in violence has been largely blamed on the government of Thaksin Shinawatra: His aggressive response to the insurgency was criticized by the country's military leaders who staged a coup in September 2006. Yet Thailand faced separatist movements long before Thaksin's premiership. Now, the military junta in power seems incapable of either identifying those responsible for the attacks or mounting initiatives which might slow the bloodshed.

See an extensive report on:
http://www.cfr.org/publication/12531/
muslim_insurgency_in_southern_thailand.html?breadcrumb=%2F

Joe Biden: An Inarticulate Kickoff

2007-02-02T03:22:00.000-05:00

By Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post
Friday, February 2, 2007; Page A15

What is it, exactly, that white people mean when they call a black person "articulate"?

I'll leave it to Joe Biden to explain (or figure out) why he used "clean" as one of a logorrheic string of adjectives describing his Senate colleague Barack Obama. I'm not sure his initial revision and extension of his remarks -- that he meant "clean as a whistle" -- get him off the hook. Just a suggestion, but Biden might fall back to "clean as the Board of Health," meaning sharply dressed; the last time I saw Obama he was, indeed, wearing an impeccable navy suit.

For anyone who missed it, Biden explained Obama's appeal as a presidential candidate by calling him "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." He was talking to a reporter for the New York Observer, who recorded the interview; an audio clip was soon posted on the Internet.

There was a sharp reaction, mostly focused on Biden's incomprehensible reference to personal hygiene. The Rev. Al Sharpton, a one-time presidential candidate, said that when Biden called him to apologize, " I told him I take a bath every day."

For my part, I never made it past "articulate," a word that's like fingernails on a blackboard to my ear. As it happens, President Bush used that same word Wednesday to describe Obama. "He's an attractive guy. He's articulate," Bush told Fox News.

Will wonders never cease? Here we have a man who graduated from Columbia University, who was president of the Harvard Law Review, who serves in the U.S. Senate and is the author of two best-selling books, who's a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, and what do you know, he turns out to be articulate. Stop the presses.

It's interesting that Obama's reaction dealt solely with the A-word. "I didn't take Senator Biden's comments personally, but obviously they were historically inaccurate," he said in a statement. "African-American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate."

Maybe he heard the screech on the blackboard, too.

Yes, I'm ranting a bit. But before you accuse me of being hypersensitive, try to think of the last time you heard a white public figure described as articulate. Acclaimed white orators such as Bill Clinton and John Edwards are more often described as eloquent.

What's intriguing is that Jackson and Sharpton are praised as eloquent, too -- both men are captivating speakers who calibrate their words with great precision. But neither is often described as, quote, articulate. Apparently, something disqualifies them.

Condi Rice is another story. Regular readers know that I think this administration's foreign policy is wrongheaded and dangerous. But I leap to Rice's defense when I hear people say, in the most patronizing tone, that she's soooooo articulate. What on earth do they expect? The woman has served as provost of Stanford University, national security adviser and secretary of state.

Think maybe she ought to be able to speak in complete sentences?

I realize the word is intended as a compliment, but it's being used to connote a lot more than the ability to express one's thoughts clearly. It's being used to say more, even, than "here's a black person who speaks standard English without a trace of Ebonics."

The word articulate is being used to encompass not just speech but a whole range of cultural cues -- dress, bearing, education, golf handicap. It's being used to describe a black person around whom white people can be comfortable, a black person who not only speaks white America's language but is fluent in its body language as well.

And the word is often pronounced with an air of surprise, as if it's an improbable and wondrous thing that a black person has somehow cracked the code. I can't help but think of the famous quote from Samuel Johnson: "Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

Articulate is really a shorthand way of describing a black person who isn't too black -- or, rather, who comports with white America's notion of how a black person should come across.

Whatever the intention, expressing one's astonishment that such individuals exist is no compliment. Just come out and say it: Gee, he doesn't sound black at all.

eugenerobinson@washpost.com

Good News From Thailand

2007-01-31T06:38:00.000-05:00

By John E. Carey
Peace and Freedom
January 31, 2007

The most encouraging news since perhaps the military coup that took control of Thailand last September came from the Thai government.

Thailand will not forcibly deport approximately 150 Hmong indigenous people to Laos.

Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont told reporters of his new policy after a group of refugees battled police and soldiers trying to return them to their communist-run homeland.

Thai police fired tear gas into an immigration detention cell earlier this week to try to force out men and boys barricaded inside, Amnesty International said.

Surayud said Bangkok saw the Hmong, an ethnic minority who fought alongside America in the Vietnam War, as illegal immigrants and could prosecute them as such, but would not deport them back to Laos, where rights groups say they face persecution. As illegal immigrants they can be fined or jailed.

The Vietnam War ended in 1975. Ever since, tribal people that sided with the United States have been persecuted by the Communist governments of Vietnam and Laos.

"If they volunteer to return home, they can. If they want to go to a third country and that country wants to take them, we will allow them to go," Surayud told reporters.

Surayud’s comments seemed to indicate that he had already received, through diplomatic efforts, agreement from the U.S. and others that he would have support and assisting getting the Hmong to third countries.

Lao government officials arrived in Nong Khai on Tuesday with three buses to repatriate the group, all of them U.N.-recognized refugees due to their fears of persecution by the Loatian government in Vientiane.

Police managed to get around 100 women and children onto the buses before a tense stand-off arose as the remaining men refused to go and barricaded themselves inside a holding cell.

Amnesty said three rounds of tear gas were fired into the cell, even though 20 boys were among those still inside. Surayud did not confirm the use of tear gas.

"These are people who have fled persecution and abuse in their own country," Amnesty said in a statement. "The Thai authorities have a duty to protect them, not to add to their suffering."

Before the confrontation escalated, Bangkok called off the deportation attempt. Our reporter Wantanee confirmed that the Thai government had received assurances from the United States, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands that they would take the refugees.

Darfur

2007-01-30T23:26:00.000-05:00

China Ignores UN, World on Darfur

By John E. Carey
Peace and Freedom
February 3, 2007

Despite almost universal world condemnation of the government of Khartoum in Sudan over the starvation and human rights abuses in the Darfur region of that nation, China continues to very publicly send the world the middle finger.

President Hu Jintao made his first visit to the Sudan Friday. Some had hoped that President Hu and China might speak out against what the U.S. has called the “genocide” in Darfur.

“I am confident this visit will facilitate a strengthening of the traditional friendship between China and Sudan and bring cooperation between the countries to a new level,” President Hu said in a statement upon his arrival. He also mentioned strengthening economic ties.

President Hu made no public remarks about Darfur.

Zhang Dong, China’s ambassador to Khartoum, told Xinhua news agency on Thursday that China “never interferes in Sudan’s internal affairs”.

Even thought the war in Sudan ended in 2005, the conflict in Darfur is estimated to have caused the deaths of some 200,000 people (some say as many as 450,000) and made more than 2 million homeless.

Billions of dollars of Chinese investment, particularly in the oil sector, have provided crucial support to President Omar al-Bashir’s regime, enabling it to join the ranks of oil exporters and improve decaying infrastructure.

But the Associated Press said: “Chinese President Hu Jintao urged Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on Friday to work harder to bring more Darfur rebels into the peace process, according to a Sudanese official. Hu is said to have raised the issue at a closed-door meeting during his landmark visit, the first ever by a Chinese president. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said Hu told Bashir that his “government should work more earnestly to get the rebels who did not sign the Darfur peace agreement to join the peace process.”

Chinese workers living in Sudan to help build Chinese projects like the huge hydro-electric plant and oil terminal lined the streets to greet their president.

Thousands of Chinese expatriates live in Sudan, working on construction projects including a giant oil refinery.

When President Hu visited the oil refinery, around 47 miles north of Khartoum, hundreds of uniformed Chinese workers wearing yellow and blue hard hats lined the streets to greet him.
The refinery processes around 100,000 barrels of crude per day.

Sudan’s Islamic government, under U.S. sanctions, has relied on its Asian ally to expand oil production to 330,000 barrels per day and build key infrastructure like dams and roads.

Sudan’s economy, which is expected to grow at a rate of 13 percent this year, has benefited from Chinese investment.

Sudan is China’s fourth-largest source of crude oil imports, behind South Africa and Angola.
China’s “no strings attached” aid policy throughout Africa runs counter to U.S. policy and has raised concern in the West. U.S. officials told us it could undermine efforts to link good government, accountability and protection of human rights to financial aid and cooperation, which is U.S. policy.

China’s approach has raised special concerns in Sudan.

More than any other nation the United States in has pressed China to use its economic muscle to persuade Khartoum to end atrocities in the Darfur region, where four years of war have killed about 200,000 people and driven 2.5 million from their homes.

Sudan sells much of its crude to China. Chinese arms are used by all sides in the Darfur conflict, despite an arms embargo on the region.

China also provides diplomatic protection for Sudan on the U.N. Security Council, which is engaged in a standoff with Khartoum over a U.N. peacekeeping mission for Darfur.

Hu’s statement made no mention of Darfur or the violence in Sudan’s western desert region and few believe Hu will use his first visit to Sudan to press his hosts on rights abuses.

“The blunt truth is China hasn’t begun to use any of the irresistible diplomatic, economic and political leverage it has with the Khartoum regime,” said U.S. Darfur expert Eric Reeves.

“And until it does, there will be … no halt to the intolerable deterioration in security for civilians and humanitarians.”

China will host the 2008 Olympics, and human rights activists are campaigning for a boycott of the Games if China does not use its permanent seat on the Security Council to put pressure on Sudan to accept U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur.

Hu is on an eight-nation tour of Africa to strengthen ties in a period marked by huge Chinese demand for raw materials for its rapid industrial expansion.

China has been offering low interest loans, debt relief and other incentives to increase its influence on the world’s poorest continent in return for access to the natural resources it needs to feed its booming economy.

“China and Africa have developed mutually respectful and beneficial relations over the years,” Hu said at a banquet thrown by President Paul Biya of Cameroon, in a speech broadcast on state television and radio this week.

“China and Africa have never tried to impose their social and economic development models on others,” Hu added.

Hu, who also toured Africa last year, met Biya to discuss social aid programs for clean drinking water and cheap housing.

“Through you, I invite Chinese companies to come and invest in Cameroon, especially in hydrocarbons such as gas and oil, mineral exploitation and forestry, where numerous opportunities exist,” Biya said at a working session with Hu.

**********************
Background on Darfur

From the July 14, 2004 edition of the Christian Science Monitor

Racism at root of Sudan's Darfur crisis

By Makau Mutua BUFFALO, N.Y. – The visits by US Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to Sudan last week gave hope that the genocide in Darfur can be arrested before an entire people is obliterated.

But anyone - including Mr. Powell and Mr. Annan - interested in averting more tragedy there must understand that Darfur is not an accidental apocalypse of mass slaughters, enslavement, pillage, and ethnic cleansing. The Darfur pogrom is part of a historic continuum in which successive Arab governments have sought to entirely destroy black Africans in this biracial nation.

Darfur is not a mere humanitarian disaster that access by international relief agencies can reverse. The raison d'être of the atrocities committed by government-supported Arab militias is the racist, fundamentalist, and undemocratic Sudanese state. What is required for peace in Sudan is either regime change, in which a democratic, inclusive state is born, or a partition, in which the black African south and west become an independent sovereign state free of Khartoum and the Arab north.

Sudan, like most African postcolonial states, is partially a victim of imperial cartography. Thoughtlessly carved out by the British during the 19th-century scramble to claim Africa, Sudan is a forced crucible of Muslim Arabs and black Africans. The blacks in the south either hew to their ancestral traditional African religions or have converted to Christianity. The fact that black Africans in Darfur are exclusively Muslim has not stopped the Arab Janjaweed militias and the government from exterminating them.

Race - not religion - is the fundamental fault line in Sudan, though religion has certainly added fuel to the fire in the south. Indeed, since independence from the British in 1956, the demon of Sudan has been race. The Arab north, except for brief periods when token Africans were included in government, has exclusively held political and military power. To protest political exclusion, military repression, enslavement, and economic exploitation, Africans in the south rose against the state several years after independence.

Since 1983, the armed insurrection in the south has drawn a scorched earth response from Khartoum. President Omar Bashir and his fundamentalist Islamic government declared a holy war against African groups in the south - the Dinka, Nuba, and Neur peoples. More than 2 million people have been decimated, millions more have been internally displaced, and hordes have been exiled.

Khartoum's genocidal policy in Darfur and the south is also a grab for resources. The Arab north is arid and barren, but the south is arable with vast oil deposits Khartoum covets and badly needs. In the west, in Darfur, Arabs seeking to escape the spreading desert kill and displace Africans for more productive land.

But there is a reality check. Khartoum has been unable to vanquish Africans militarily in the south. That's why Khartoum now appears ready to conclude its peace agreement with the south. But just as the guns are about to fall silent in the south, Arabs in Darfur have killed at least 30,000 Africans and displaced more than a million from their homes and villages.

Both the US and UN through Powell and Annan - whose mediators and proxies, particularly Kenya, are helping broker the peace deal - must make it clear to President Bashir that the accord between Khartoum and the south won't stop the diplomatic isolation and international condemnation of Sudan unless it ends its genocidal policies in Darfur and allows aid workers to care for victims and assist their return home. Both Powell and Annan must speed up work on a UN resolution to condemn the atrocities in Darfur and the south, and to impose sanctions on the Sudanese government and its leaders.

The African Union (AU), the continental body of Arab and black African states, must end the hypocrisy in Afro-Arab relations. Sudan, the bridge between black and Arab Africa, should lead in rewriting the historical script between the two peoples. Since the slave trade era, Arabs have violated and dominated Africans. Yet the Organization of African Unity, the AU predecessor, ducked these inequities under the doctrine of noninterference in the internal affairs of sister states.

The AU has stayed that odious course. It's telling that the AU has not denounced Sudan for the Darfur atrocities. And, at its annual summit in Addis Ababa last week, the AU declared that the Darfur killings did not amount to genocide. Although the killings clearly meet that definition according to the Genocide Convention, unfortunately Powell also failed last week to declare that the Darfur killings meet the definition of genocide. The AU offer to send just 300 soldiers to Darfur to protect aid workers, monitors, and civilians from Arab militiamen - in an area the size of France - demonstrates lack of political will to confront Sudan.

Important, too, is that Arab states should condemn Sudan; otherwise their anger over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rings hollow. How can they protest the killing of Palestinians when their kin exterminate Africans in Sudan?

The tragedy of Darfur wouldn't be permitted if it were taking place in Europe. But African states must take advantage of the interest by the UN and the US to bring about maximum diplomatic and economic pressure, including sanctions, to hasten regime change in Sudan. Khartoum must be put on notice that only an open and inclusive democracy will save it from partition into two states, one black African, the other Arab.

• Makau Mutua is professor of law and director of the Human Rights Center at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Doomsday, anyone?

2007-01-30T04:18:00.000-05:00

By Ernest W. Lefever
The Washington Times
January 30, 2007

A few days ago, the editors of the Bulletin of American Scientists struck again. With pomp and circumstance, they moved the hands of their "Doomsday Clock" forward to 5 minutes before a nuclear midnight -- their metaphor for the end of world.

In London, Bulletin editor Mark Strauss said his colleagues see a growing threat of a "second Nuclear Age" spurred by "nuclear ambitions in Iran and North Korea, unsecured nuclear materials in Russia and elsewhere, the continuing 'launch-ready' status of 2,000 of the 25,000 nuclear weapons held by U.S. and Russia, escalating terrorism, and new pressure from climate change for expanded civilian nuclear power that could increase proliferation risks."

The Bulletin staff along with 18 Nobel laureates concocted the doomsday clock in 1947 and set the hands at 7 minutes to midnight. Since then they adjusted the hands many times to reflect their level of apoplectic angst. After the U.S. and Soviet hydrogen bomb tests in 1953, they moved them to 2 minutes before midnight. With the 1991 U.S.-Russian arms control agreement, the hands were moved to 17 minutes to doomsday.

Americans are rightly concerned about North Korea's nukes, Iran's nuclear ambitions and terrorism, but the doomsday crowd has a poor track record. Perhaps the most absurd prophet of doom during the Cold War was Jonathan Schell. In his "The Fate of the Earth" (1982), he said atomic bombs threatened "planetary doom," and called for a new man, a new politics, and abolition of the state itself. "The task is nothing less than to reinvent politics: to reinvent the world." He advocated a 50 percent cut in the superpowers' nuclear arsenals, ignoring Moscow's massive conventional superiority in Europe.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, who played a leading role in developing the U.S. nuclear bomb, quoted the Hindu Living Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." His sense of guilt led him to oppose the American H-bomb.

Dismissing these prophets of doom, physicist Herman Kahn, urged Americans to "think about the unthinkable" and assess present dangers in the light of new facts and past experience. With a keen sense of history, Harry Truman authorized the H-bomb.

Like Truman, Ronald Reagan confronted the growing Soviet nuclear arsenal. In 1982 at the United Nations, Mr. Reagan said: "The decade of detente witnessed the most massive Soviet buildup of military power in history. ... They increased their defense spending by 40 percent while American defense declined." He persuaded Americans to build up our nuclear and conventional forces.

Reagan matched his words with deeds. In 1987, standing before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, he challenged the Soviet leader: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Two years later the Berlin Wall fell and with it the Soviet Union. America won the Cold War without firing a shot.

Like Reagan and Truman, we can draw on man's long and precarious existence to gain further perspective on the present crises. From the dawn of history, humanity has survived catastrophes -- wars, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and plagues. But we are not living in a Dr. Strangelovian world of imminent destruction. Even the most horrific past catastrophes did not threaten the survival of the human race. But, then, man was not around 65 million years ago when a massive meteorite plunged into the Yucatan Peninsula and killed off most living things, including the dinosaurs.

We entered the nuclear age in 1945 when two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. No such weapons have been fired in anger since. The "nuclear balance of terror" and astute U.S. diplomacy ended the Cold War. And the long, bitter conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir has been eased, not exacerbated, by the recent nuclear arms balance between them. But such weapons in the hands of terrorists or rogue regimes still pose a grave danger.

Even if nuclear weapons were used again in anger, this would not end civilization, much less wipe out the human race. Homo sapiens have survived many catastrophes far more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb. The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. that destroyed Pompeii and Herculum was more powerful than a thousand Hiroshimas.

The Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington state in 1980 was equal to 27,000 Hiroshima bombs, one exploding every second for 71/2 hours. The 9.0 magnitude Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 released energy equal to 23,000 H-bombs. And in 1918-19, the so-called "Spanish flu" virus killed tens of millions of people worldwide.

Americans should always be alert to grave dangers and respond to them with calm determination. Above all, we should remember that the prophets of doom are always wrong.

Ernest W. Lefever is founding president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and editor of "The Apocalyptic Premise: Nuclear Arms Debated" (1982).

Eye on Thailand: Muslim Violence Continues

2007-01-29T08:07:00.000-05:00

By John E. Carey
January 29, 2007

Police in Thailand’s southern provinces of Yala and Pattani said on Sunday that at least five more people have been killed by sectarian violence.

Muslim extremists in southern Thailand want to break away from the kingdom and form their own government. More than 1,800 people have been killed in the violence. Most of the dead have been Buddhists that the Muslims have been trying to force out of the region.

But recently, more Muslim’s have been killed in retaliation.

AFP reported that a 33-year-old Muslim was gunned down in a drive-by shooting late Sunday as he rode a motorcycle to his home in Yala, one of three Muslim-majority provinces bordering Malaysia, police said.

In neighbouring Pattani province, a 46-year-old Buddhist man was also killed in a drive-by shooting late Sunday.

Meanwhile, two Buddhist couples were shot after insurgents opened fire on a home in Songkhla province, near Yala. Three people were killed, and the fourth was seriously injured, police said.

Despite peace-building initiatives by Thailand's government, installed after a coup four months ago, violence in the three southernmost provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat has spiralled in recent months.

Thailan’s government, which came to power after a coup last September, has been trying to end the violence and restore order. Thai Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont had been blaming the lack of progress toward peace on his processor, Prime Minister Thaksin, who was deposed in the coup. But after recent personal initiative to end the violence have failed, the government of Thailand seems in a difficult situation that it cannot seem to resolve.

Thailand's government has also periodically accused Malaysia of protecting insurgents in the northern states which border Thailand, a charge the Malaysian government has denied.

Wantanne contributed from Thailand for this report.

China is Stirring: Why Now?

2007-01-23T09:28:00.000-05:00

By John E. Carey
Peace and Freedom
January 20, 2007

In the last few weeks and months, two important new military capabilities were apparently demonstrated by China to show the U.S. new -- and some say troubling – Chinese military powers. First, in October of 2006, a Chinese Song Class diesel electric submarine crept covertly to within five nautical miles of the USS Kitty Hawk, a U.S. navy aircraft carrier.

This one act said to many naval observers two things: That China intends to patrol further than ever from its shores and that China now can effectively evade U.S. Navy anti-submarine warfare systems and place warships in a position to quickly eliminate the U.S. Navy’s capital ships.

Then on January 11, 2007, China launched a land-based rocket that intercepted and destroyed an old Chinese satellite. This one act indicated that China may have the early stages of a “space denial” weapon system for use against the U.S. in a crisis or war.

Both incidents followed a period of decreased intelligence gathering by the U.S. against China.

Military intelligence officials told us that the U.S. Pacific Commander, Admiral William “Fox” Fallon, had restricted U.S. intelligence-gathering activities against China, fearing that disclosure of the activities would upset relations with Beijing.

Last week the White House announced that Admiral Fallon is now the President’s nominee to succeed General John Abazaid as the Commander of the Central Command.

We asked ourselves, “Why would China be revealing these apparently new, and to some frightening, capabilities at this time?”

We discovered a mixture of reasons after questioning several current and former officials of the State and Defense Departments in the U.S. along with former National Security Council staff members and some well known “China watchers.” We also drew upon the excellent reporting on China by Mr. Bill Gertz of the Washington Times.

--Burgeoning Power. China is the burgeoning superpower of the world. China's economy, the world's fourth largest, is likely to enjoy a fifth straight year of double-digit growth in 2007. On January 20, 2007, Reuters reported that “Beijing's leaders, despite unveiling a slew of policies in recent months to prevent over-heating, are unwilling to countenance a major slowdown because of the need to create jobs for millions of people joining the workforce every year.”

It seems as though every product for sale at your neighborhood Wal Mart or Sears is marked “Made in China.”

Speaking of China’s government leaders, Yuan Gangming, an economist with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a top think-tank, said “As in 2006, they want a growth rate of 10.5 percent or even higher."

China is spreading its wings and its economic influence the world over.
In China, the sea routes and overland transportation system from China to the sub-Saharan region of Africa is called “The New Silk Road.” The original “Silk Road” was a key trade route comprised of an interconnected series of roads, routes and sea lanes spanning from Korea to the Mediterranean Sea.

"This new 'silk road' potentially presents to sub-Saharan Africa - home to 300 million of the globe's poorest people and the world's most formidable development challenge - a significant and rare opportunity to hasten its international integration and growth," author of the study “Africa's Silk Road: China and India's New Economic Frontier.”

The author of the book, World Bank Economic Adviser Harry G. Broadman, says that skyrocketing Asian trade and investment in Africa is part of a global trend towards rapidly growing South-South commerce among developing countries.

"Asian exports to Africa are growing at 18 per cent per year, faster than to any region in the world. China and India's foreign direct investments in Africa are more modest than trade flows, but they are growing rapidly," Broadman said.

Paul Craig Roberts wrote in August 2005, that “China already is a world power. China holds enough U.S. government debt to have the dollar and U.S. interest rates in its hand.”

Paul Craig Roberts is an economist and a nationally syndicated columnist. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Ronald Reagan Administration (1981–1989). He is a former editor and columnist for Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, and the Scripps Howard News Service.

China “owns” a large chink of U.S. debt – second only to Japan. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are funded largely on “borrowed” money from China.

This according William Schneider in The National Journal: “The U.S. budget deficit is financed by borrowing. More and more of that money comes from China, now the United States' second-largest lender, after Japan. China's investment in U.S. government debt has more than tripled in the past five years, from $71 billion in 2000 to $242 billion in 2005.”

Is that a problem? No, says the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Holtz-Eakin. "Dollars all look the same," he added. "Their ultimate source doesn't matter."

William Schneider is the CNN's senior political analyst. He is also a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times, National Journal, and The Atlantic Monthly.

--“Testing the Waters.” China is “feeing out” the international response to many of its new initiatives. The U.S. Pentagon has asked that China become more open and forthcoming about its military plans and investments for many years. Just recently, China has become more “transparent” about its military spending and its priorities.

Just after Christmas, 2006, China released a new “White Paper” on its defense intentions. "China will not engage in any arms race or pose a military threat to any other country," the 91-page white paper said. "China is determined to remain a staunch force for global peace, security and stability."

"The struggle to oppose and contain the separatist forces for Taiwan independence and their activities remains a hard one," said the report from the State Council, China's Cabinet.
It indirectly criticized the United States for promising Beijing that it will adhere to the "one-China" policy, "but it continues to sell advanced weapons to Taiwan, and has strengthened military ties with Taiwan."

As for the navy, it is "working to build itself into a modern maritime force of operation consisting of combined arms with both nuclear and conventional means of operations," the report said.
Sunanda K Datta-Ray of the Hindustan Times wrote, “China’s ambitious defence White Paper hard on the heels of its African initiatives warns of a relentless advance to what — shades of the Middle Kingdom! — Hu Jintao calls his country’s ‘historical mission.’”

In his annual threat assessment, Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Congress on Jan. 11: "Several countries continue to develop capabilities that have the potential to threaten U.S. space assets, and some have already deployed systems with inherent anti-satellite capabilities, such as satellite-tracking laser range-finding devices and nuclear-armed ballistic missiles."

On the same day, the Chinese destroyed an aging weather satellite using what's known as a kinetic-kill vehicle sent into space aboard a Chinese ballistic missile. Kinetic-kill vehicles were an integral part of President Reagan's dream of protecting the U.S. against ballistic missile attacks, a plan critics mocked and still do.

--Distractions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea. China knows that the U.S. is terribly distracted by other foreign policy imperatives. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea are “sucking the air out of our ability to breathe and concentrate on other, seemingly lesser trouble spots,” a former State Department country officer told us. “Why do you think we don’t pay much attention to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela?”

Last July, at the height of the war between Israel and Hezbollah, the U.S. Secretary of State had a scheduled trip to China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Malaysia. Naturally, in the heat of war, the American Secretary of State scrubbed the entire trip, save the Malaysian piece.Asians we know, were very offended – each nation lost face and all Asia lost face, they told us. The Chinese were particularly concerned that Israel and Hezbollah seemed more important to Ms. Rice than all of China.Making things worse, the U.S. Secretary of State went to Malaysia for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Foreign Ministers. Instead of visiting with heads of state in Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul and Hanoi, the Secretary of State went to a club meeting of Foreign Ministers and played the piano for the assembly at dinner (Brahms' Sonata in D Minor, 2nd Movement).

Worse still, for right or wrong, the Secretary of State rushed back to the Middle East, it seemed, to deal with the troubles of Israel; a small and insignificant nation in the eyes of many in the vast populations of Asia. We, in America, lost face – especially in the calculating minds of the Chinese.

--U.S. Navy is “Stretched,” Showing some “Strain.” The United States Navy has, as best we can determined, contracted form a “goal” during the Ronald Reagan years of 600 ships to about 276 ships now. Every unplanned deployment of Aircraft Carrier Battle Groups or Marine Corps Amphibious Groups exacerbates the “strain” on a service which would have a key role on the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean should any major Asian crisis come to the edge of hostilities.

When the President made the decision to send an additional Aircraft Carrier Battle Group to the vicinity of the Persian Gulf and North Arabian Sea recently, many writers questioned how the U.S. would account for the loss of that firepower near Japan and Korea or in the event of a crisis near Taiwan.

There are only 12 U.S. Navy aircraft carriers. Typically, four may be engaged in overseas operations or deployments, four are preparing and training for future action and three or four have recently returned from six-months of at sea operations and are in some form of maintenance. One or more may be in an extended overhaul and unavailable for service.

With two aircraft carriers in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf and North Arabian Sea that only leaves one in the entire Pacific Ocean and one covering the Atlantic/Mediterranean operating areas.

China sees this and asks itself: “If we ever need to take back Taiwan by force, we might best do this when the U.S. Navy Aircraft carriers are days or weeks away.”

We didn’t make this question up. It was a gift to us from a People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) Admiral.

China is no match for the U.S. Navy, certainly. But a number of advanced warships will gradually come into service in the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (P.L.A.N.) in the next few years. The bulk of these ships will belong to two new guided missile destroyer classes called 052B and 052C. The 052C will be fitted with an advanced integrated air defense system, supposedly similar to the U.S. Aegis phased-array radar display, with a high capability to engage multiple targets simultaneously.

China's surface fleet consists presently consisting of 64 large combatant units: 21 destroyers and 43 frigates. Chinese Navy planners are facing the demanding task of replacing obsolete ships with more modern and capable units.

To speed this process, P.L.A.N. continues to bring into service units of the Russian Sovremenny-class destroyers, while pursuing the construction of its own type 052B and 052C-class warships.

China also is pursuing the construction of a completely new ship, , that is expected to be very large and loaded with heavy surface armament. The first ship of this series is being built in China's Dalian shipyard.

Beijing is apparently not yet attempting to build an aircraft carrier.At the moment, the creation of an extensive ship-borne air force by building and China’s submarine fleet consists of 57 units: 51 diesel submarines (SS) and six nuclear powered attack submarines (SSN).

China currently has one new Type 094 nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) of the Xia-class but construction of the series has been slow and laborious. Regional Crisis and the Protection of Sea Lines of CommunicationThe naval construction plan as a whole indicates that the duties that P.L.A.N. will be called upon to tackle in the next few years will be the protection of sea lines of communication to keep open the "choke points" relevant to China's trade flow, and power projection in areas identified as vital for China's national interests.

All these tasks coincide with China's anxiety to acquire and protect the necessary natural resources (especially oil) to sustain the growing energy requirements of its national industrial system. Increased dependence on overseas resources will bring Beijing to require a greater effort by Chinese naval forces to protect the trade flows and show the flag in ports of countries that are considered important trading partners.Moreover, P.L.A.N. will be required to conduct long-range missions in the open sea to defend exclusive economic zones and to control areas with uncertain sovereignty, as in the case of the Spratley Islands. These isolated islands, situated in the South China Sea, are claimed by China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines, due principally to the rich oil deposits believed to be located there.

The ships commissioned in P.L.A.N. will enable China to conduct missions of this kind, with the aim of deploying a fleet overwhelmingly superior to those of all other Asiatic countries (especially Taiwan) with the exception of the Indian and Japanese navies which Beijing can try, at least, to counterbalance.The submarine fleet will have the same duties as surface vessels, but is also expected to be assigned the hard task of facing the "traditional" Taiwanese adversary and, supposedly, coping with U.S. battle groups.

In fact, it appears that Beijing discarded the possibility of deploying a limited number of aircraft carriers (which would appear excessive in relation to other regional navies) since they would have little hope of prevailing in an engagement with U.S. naval forces. This explains why China's aircraft carrier planning and construction is slowing in pace. Indeed, Beijing now prefers a well-stocked fleet of diesel submarines and nuclear powered submarines to have the difficult role of exerting some deterrence against American ships in case of a crisis. Following this path, China will rise to a respectable level of underwater power, partially repeating the Soviet strategy during the Cold War. However, unlike the past Soviet submarine fleet (essentially dedicated to attacking N.A.T.O. forces and protecting bastions full of SSBNs), Chinese submarine forces seem to be assigned the role of supporting surface forces -- in their attempts to control sea lines of communication, with the additional mission of trying to exert some form of counter-power against U.S. forces. In this context, moreover, the Taiwan issue requires careful examination. In fact, the expansion and improvement of the Chinese submarine fleet, especially in diesel submarine numbers, can give Beijing an additional card to play against Taipei under the form of a submarine blockade.

Such a blockade is potentially very hard to neutralize and cope with, even for Taiwan's respectable anti-submarine warfare forces; this strategy can exert stronger pressure than diplomatic threats, but is not comparable to a real attempt at invasion, hazardous and hard to carry out -- and also fraught with unforeseeable political and military consequence.

The Chinese fleet's evolution in the coming years suggests that P.L.A.N. will be essentially concerned with protecting sea trade with the aim of assuring an uninterrupted flow of energy resources to satisfy the needs most dependent on overseas resources and to safeguard sea lines of communication. The enlargement and modernization of the Chinese fleet will inevitably alarm the surrounding countries and other regional powers (such as India and Australia) and will oblige other states to renew their surface and submarine forces. However, it appears unlikely that P.L.A.N. can, or will, become a force with global projection (notably far behind the U.S. Navy's capabilities, or those of the Soviet Navy during the 1980s) in the next decade. The chief missions that P.L.A.N. will be called upon to perform are eminently regional, such as power projection to support claims to areas of dubious sovereignty, but with rich subsoil resources (such as the Spratley Islands), to achieve the same operative capability as the more powerful Asian fleets, and ability to engage such a demanding adversary as the Taiwanese fleet (able to perform at high levels due to continuous acquisition of American equipment). In relation to U.S. Navy battle groups, P.L.A.N. can, at most, aim for the possibility of exerting some form of deterrence (especially through the use of submarine forces), thus refuting all those who, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, have imagined American and Chinese battle groups confronting one another to decide which state will rule over the Pacific Ocean.
END REWRITE

--U.S. Seen Often As “Easy Mark.” The Associated press reported last week that State Metal Industries, a Camden, New Jersey, company convicted in June of violating export laws over a shipment of AIM-7 Sparrow missile guidance parts it bought from Pentagon surplus in 2003 and sold to an entity partly owned by the Chinese government. The company pleaded guilty to an export violation, was fined $250,000 and placed on probation for three years. Customs and Border Protection inspectors seized the parts -- nearly 200 pieces of the guidance system for the Sparrow missile system -- while inspecting cargo at a New Jersey port.

The company was only ordered to pay a fine of a few thousand dollars.

“For better or for worse, our U.S. openness and the perceived weakness of our laws encourages the Chinese to believe that America doesn’t really care about deterring or catching Chinese spies or law violators,” a Pentagon official who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity told us.

“There are Chinese spies everywhere in America: we know it and they know we know it. We just don’t really do much about it unless what they do is really quiet serious or blatantly wrong.,” the same official told me.

--Weakness of the “Lame Duck” President. The midterm elections in November 2006 were a stinging blow to President Bush and the Republican Party. Control of the House and the senate shifted to the Democratic Party. By Many accounts, the president of the United States became a “lame duck” president, with very limited power and influence until he is replaced by a new man – or woman.

This is the kind of situation that emboldens Chinese leaders.

In no nation is more duck eaten than in China.

Another piece of troubling news from China: China's military is delaying the U.S. visit of its strategic nuclear forces commander despite a promise by Chinese President Hu Jintao last year that the general would hold talks with the U.S. Strategic Command leader.

Caroline Bartholomew, chairman of the congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said Beijing's failure to respond to the U.S. office is a concern. "The commission recommended a [U.S.-China] dialogue on strategic-forces issues to ensure that both China and the United States understand the lines in the sand," she said. "There are certain acts which have traditionally been and will continue to be seen as hostile, such as blinding satellites and threatening a nuclear attack on our cities."

Miss Bartholomew said "we must hope that Gen. Jing's lack of responsiveness to the invitation to visit U.S. Strategic Command, despite the fact that he has been elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, does not reflect Chinese government disinterest in strategic warning and mutual threat-reduction measures."

Washington 'snubbed Iran offer'

2007-01-20T08:11:00.000-05:00

The BBC
January 20, 2007

Iran offered the US a package of concessions in 2003, but it was rejected, a senior former US official has told the BBC's Newsnight programme.

Tehran proposed ending support for Lebanese and Palestinian militant groups and helping to stabilise Iraq following the US-led invasion.

Offers, including making its nuclear programme more transparent, were conditional on the US ending hostility.

But Vice-President Dick Cheney's office rejected the plan, the official said.

The offers came in a letter, seen by Newsnight, which was unsigned but which the US state department apparently believed to have been approved by the highest authorities.

In return for its concessions, Tehran asked Washington to end its hostility, to end sanctions, and to disband the Iranian rebel group the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq and repatriate its members.

Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had allowed the rebel group to base itself in Iraq, putting it under US power after the invasion.

One of the then Secretary of State Colin Powell's top aides told the BBC the state department was keen on the plan - but was over-ruled.

"We thought it was a very propitious moment to do that," Lawrence Wilkerson told Newsnight.
"But as soon as it got to the White House, and as soon as it got to the Vice-President's office, the old mantra of 'We don't talk to evil'... reasserted itself."

Observers say the Iranian offer as outlined nearly four years ago corresponds pretty closely to what Washington is demanding from Tehran now.

Since that time, Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah inflicted significant military losses on the major US ally in the region, Israel, in the 2006 conflict and is now claiming increased political power in Lebanon.

Palestinian militant group Hamas won power in parliamentary elections a year ago, opening a new chapter of conflict in Gaza and the West Bank.

The UN Security Council has imposed sanctions on Iran following its refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment programme.

Iran denies US accusations that its nuclear programme is designed to produce weapons.

A Message from Muhammad in the Khar, Bajaur Agency,Tribal Areas Pakistan

2007-01-20T07:50:00.000-05:00

Dear John Carey;

I hope that you will be in the best spirit of your life.

The situation in region is still fluid and uncertain as the terrorists are in the control.

An impression has been created that Taliban are more dangerous than al-Qaeda. This impression is totally wrong as al-Qaeda has still been posing threat to the very existence of this world.

The Taliban is Pashto language word which means students.

The terrorists have been using the innocent and underage students for achieving their ulterior motives. In our areas most of the poor people who cannot afford to send their children to the schools and colleges have been admitting them in the religious seminaries (madrassas). Most of the religious seminaries are being operated in big cities of Pakistan. Teachers in these seminaries have been brain washing the innocent children and then they were sent to Afghanistan or other countries for carrying out terrorist activities. For this job they were paid some money.

As I already told you that most of them were poor so they have no other option, but to go to war.

President of Pakistan in recent statement said that Taliban are more dangeruos.This statement is totally wrong.

Pakistani President General Musharraf said the center of gravity of terrorism has shifted from Al-Qaeda to the Taliban. He warned parliament that Taliban insurgents were a more dangerous terrorist force than Al-Qaeda because of the support they have of people in Afghanistan. Musharraf told the MEPs that the West and the US trained and armed 30,000 Mujahideen in Pakistan and sent them to fight the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

"Pakistan did not create Taliban. We are against the Talibanization of Pakistan," he said. Here the question arises if Pakistan is against Talibanization then why the religious seminaries are not closed down in various cities.

If the government of Pakistan provides opportunities to the people of tribal areas to admit their children in schools then no one in the areas will send their children to the religious seminaries. All opportunities of education has been closed in the tribal areas.

I am journalist and have four children, but so far I am unable to send my children to the standard schools.

The people of Bajaur Agency will very grateful to the United States if it creates chances of education for the tribesmen. Though the officials of the United States based in Pakistan have been saying that they have been providing funds for opening schools in the tribal areas, but where the funds go no one knows.

Thank you very much.

Yours Sincerely,

Muhammad

In the Khar, Bajaur Agency,Tribal Areas Pakistan

24 Hours: The International Scene Never Stops

2007-01-20T07:07:00.000-05:00

And Neither Does Life Itself!

By John E. Carey
Peace and Freedom Group
January 20, 2007

Thursday, January 18, 2007, 0901:

I lunge for the telephone. If I don’t get it by the end of the second ring the answering machine clicks on.

“John, this is Hai-lan. Hello.”

Hai-lan, my old political and military science mentor, phoned from Asia to give me a piece of her mind. Well, maybe more than a piece. Maybe a chunk of thinking and criticism and insight.Hai-lan’s phone call and the spin-off thinking I needed to do as a result became the focus of the greater part of this morning.

If you missed our insight from Asia on U.S. foreign policy, you are invited to read more at:

http://johnib.wordpress.com/2007/01/19/
is-america%e2%80%99s-way-of-war-
%e2%80%9ci-win-you-lose%e2%80%9d/

Thursday, January 18, 2007, 1120:

Phone again: “John this is Alex ‘Verbotin’ (this is Alex’s effort at a comic pseudonym) in Moscow. Can we talk later today about the U.S. intentions with regard to Iran?”

Alex is a reporter in Russia.

I tell him I will do some reading and be ready for him at about 4 or 5 PM my time.

He thanks me and promises to call back at about 5 PM.

Thursday, January 18, 2007, 1135:

I depart for Catholic Mass at noon at Our Lady of Lourdes.

Thursday, January 18, 2007, 1300:

I stop by to see my wife and her Vietnamese friends at work. I wind up buying them Vietnamese takeout for lunch. This is what friends are for.

They all eat noodles with their chopsticks and delighted faces!

Thursday, January 18, 2007, 1400:

Cell phone: “John, this is Tom, I think I had a heart attack.”

I say immediately: “Call 911 and get to the hospital.”

Tom: “I can’t do that. My insurance isn’t paid up. I needed the money to buy the new Lincoln.”

Tom is 75 years old, suffers from Alzheimer’s, still drives and works. He has no family and has never been married. He lives alone. I am, it seems, one of the only people he trusts in a crisis.

Because of the Alzheimer’s, Tom doesn’t make good decisions. Calling me today is one of those.

Buying a Lincoln with the medical insurance money, apparently, is one of those bad decisions he’s hiding from me.

I agree to pick Tom up, and drive him to the hospital, but he argues against my plan. I decide to go anyway. I’ll pick up an expert on Iran on the way.

Thursday, January 18, 2007, 1445:

Tom calls again on the cell phone several times. In each call he radiates enthusiasm and says he is getting better.

I tell him he is not qualified to make a self diagnosis.

My Iranian friend has a “ read file” so I start reading everything I can get my hands on about U.S. military preparations to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. This necessitates several phone calls to top intelligence sources and people in the know.

My Iranian friend makes half of these phone calls without prompting. We have worked together before.

Thursday, January 18, 2007, 1700:

We decide we know enough and depart to pick up Tom and head for the emergency room.

After we pick up Tom, Alex calls from Russia and interviews me by cell phone for a Moscow radio program.

I never tell him we are winding our way though the tunnel underneath the U.S. Capitol building on the way to the veterans hospital. The vision of Princess Diana and Dodi in the tennel below Paris flashes across my mind for a second. I drive more carefully for a few minutes.

Tom is a disabled American Veteran of the Korean War and we know he will be seen in the emergency room of the V.A. hospital without cost.

At the V.A. hospital Tom is evaluated first by a registered nurse from Puerto Rico named Juan, then by a RN from Kenya named Rosemary. I tell Rosemary I visited Kenya while in the Navy and we have a chatty conversation as she shoves probes into Tom and reads print outs.

Rosemary is from the Meru tribe in central Kenya. She tells us that the uniting term Meru covers several smaller tribes and village people and comes from the Maasai, who called the forests of Tigania and Imenti Mieru, meaning basically "a quiet place.”

I file this nugget away. But I have no idea when it might become useful. Maybe a New York Times crossword puzzle some day!

The head nurse is from the Philippines and we have some fun with her as we spent many happy times there while in the Navy.

Finally Tom is seen by a real honest to gosh Doctor, who happens to be a Beauty Queen of a Black woman.

She asks Tom if he had any heart palpitations or chest pains today and Tom smiles ear to ear and says: “Not until you came in!”

When you are a skinny 75 year old man you can get away with anything, I’ve found.

Tom must be feeling better!

We escape the emergency room at about midnight and I drive everyone home.

Friday, January 19, 2007, 0500:

I rise to start reading about China. A Chinese submarine surfaced within 5 miles of USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier, late last year. Tim, a former National Security Council member, has sent me reams of information to sift though. We are supposed to rendezvous for a meeting at the Pentagon at 0930.

When I glance at the morning news I see that The Washington Post is reporting that China has killed an old Chinese satellite with a ground-based rocket.

Why now, I wonder?

We’ll have to go back and reads up on this later.

Somebody told me one time what I am really good at.

“John,” said an old friend. “Better than anyone in our business you can read volumes of information, organize it, fit it together and make complete sense out of a hash that nobody else can decipher. Then you can explain it all to us and show us how it all fits together and makes sense.”

I guess that is what I do.

Friday, January 19, 2007, 0800:

I start driving to the Pentagon early. Good thing too. Wantanee phones from Thailand.

“John: you won’t believe it. I have the video of the interview by CNN of Former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin. It doesn’t air until Saturday and the Thai government already has said it won’t air here in Thailand at all.”

I can tell she is breathless.

I ask her, “What should we do with it?”

She knows: “Put it on the internet, of course, and tell all the Thais where they can see it!”

Wantanee and I don’t have a dog in the fight about who should lead Thailand but we do stand up for Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Speech. If the Thai government wants to keep information from the Thai people: we’re bound to be on the other side of that discussion along with organizations such as “Human Rights Watch.”

We work out the technical details and say goodbye.

At about 0856, I slow the car to a crawl as I pass Arlington national cemetery. A funeral is forming up: the soldiers in their crisp blue dress uniforms.

I am at the Pentagon and a guard I have know for more than 20 years greets me with a smile and “Morning Mister Carey.”

Another 24 hours is about to begin.

I guess my days are not as exciting as that guy's on TV. But my days are full and well spent and I've yet to find the time to see that guy on TV go though his grueling 24 hour day!

"Osama bin Obama"

2007-01-19T06:56:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, a widely reported story said that CNN had accidently captioned a picture of Illinois Senator Mr. Barack Obama as "Osama bin Obama."

This morning, a story in "Insight Magazine," says the campaign of Senator Clinton (D-NY) says that Mr. Obama attended a Madrassa -- an extremist school of Islam. And Mr. Obama's middle name is Hussein.

See:
http://www.insightmag.com/

Muqtada al-Sadr aide arrested in Baghdad

2007-01-19T06:27:00.000-05:00

By Kim Gamel
Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested one of Muqtada al-Sadr's top aides Friday in Baghdad, his office said, as pressure increases on the radical Shiite cleric's militia ahead of a planned security sweep aimed at stemming the sectarian violence ransacking the capital.

Sheik Abdul-Hadi al-Darraji, al-Sadr's media director in Baghdad, was captured Friday and his personal guard was killed, according to another senior al-Sadr aide.

"We strongly condemn this cowardly act," Sheik Abdul-Zahra al-Suweiadi said.

The U.S. military said special Iraqi army forces operating with coalition advisers captured a high-level, illegal armed group leader in Baladiyat, but it did not identify the detainee. It said two other suspects were detained by Iraqi forces for further questioning.

The raid came as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has pledged to crack down on Shiite militias as well as Sunni insurgents in a planned security operation to quell the sectarian violence in Baghdad amid concerns that his reluctance to confront the Mahdi Army of his political backer al-Sadr led to the failure of two previous crackdowns.

Two Shiite militia commanders said Thursday that al-Maliki has stopped protecting the militia under pressure from Washington, while the fighters described themselves as under siege in their Sadr City stronghold.

The U.S. military accused the main suspect of having ties with the commanders of so-called death squads, which have been blamed for many of the killings that have left dozens of bodies, often showing signs of torture, on the streets of Baghdad.

The suspect was detained "based on credible intelligence that he is the leader of illegal armed group punishment committee activity, involving the organized kidnapping, torture and murder of Iraqi civilians," according to the military statement.

It also said he was reportedly involved in the assassination of numerous Iraqi security forces and government officials.

"The suspect allegedly leads various illegal armed group operations and is affiliated with illegal armed group cells targeting Iraqi civilians for sectarian attacks and violence," the statement read, adding he was believed to be affiliated with Baghdad death squad commanders, including Abu Diraa, a Shiite militia leader who has gained a reputation for his brutality.

Al-Suweiadi did not give more details, but another official in al-Sadr's office said al-Darraji was captured during a 2 a.m. raid on a mosque in the eastern neighborhood of Baladiyat, less than a mile from a U.S. base.

The official and an Iraqi police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns, also said one of the mosque's guards was killed in a firefight during the raid that damaged the mosque walls, while four other people who were with the sheik were arrested.

Abdul-Razzaq al-Nidawi, an al-Sadr aide in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, demanded that al-Darraji and other detainees from the cleric's movement, be released and called for demonstrations after the weekly Friday prayer services.

"America is playing with fire and our patience is beginning to fade," he said. "This savage barbarian act will not pass peacefully."

Elsewhere, a roadside bomb killed one U.S. soldier and wounded three others in an attack against a patrol in Baghdad, the military said Friday.

The Multi-National Division — Baghdad soldier was killed and three others were wounded Thursday when the blast struck as the patrol was escorting a convoy in a northwestern section of the capital, according to the statement. Their identities were not released pending notification of relatives.

The military said members of the unit have been escorting numerous convoys carrying troops and materials throughout Baghdad in the past week.

U.S. and Iraqi forces are gearing up for a major neighborhood-by-neighborhood sweep aimed at quelling the spiraling violence in the capital.

At least 3,030 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

In southern Iraq, a rocket attack struck a British military base, wounding six soldiers, a military spokeswoman said Friday.

The Thursday night attack on the Basra Palace camp in the southern port city of Basra left one soldier seriously wounded, Capt. Katie Brown said. Five others were lightly wounded and treated on the spot, she said.

Human Rights Watch World Report, January 2007, "Vietnam"

2007-01-18T09:28:00.000-05:00

Events of 2006: Human Rights in Vietnam

Vietnam’s tenth Communist Party (VCP) Congress saw a significant turnover in the Politburo, as younger members replaced key aging party veterans. New faces, however, did not bring significant improvement in human rights practices.

having one of Asia’s highest growth rates, Vietnam’s respect for fundamental human rights continues to lag behind many other countries, and the one-party state remains intolerant of criticism. Hundreds of political and religious prisoners remain behind bars in harsh conditions.

During 2006 the government released a handful of prisoners of conscience but arrested dozens more, including democracy activists, cyber-dissidents, and ethnic minority Christians.

Authorities continue to persecute members of independent churches, impose controls over the internet and the press, restrict public gatherings, and imprison people for their religious and political views. Media, political parties, religious organizations, and labor unions are not allowed to exist without official oversight, or to take actions considered contrary to Party policies.

The year saw unprecedented labor unrest, official efforts to muzzle an emerging democracy movement, and ongoing repression of Buddhists and ethnic minority Christians.

Labor

The year began with a series of wildcat strikes by thousands of workers at foreign-owned factories and those with heavy foreign investment around Ho Chi Minh City. They demanded wage increases and better working conditions. The strikes quickly spread to the central and northern provinces, but died down when the government increased the minimum wage at foreign-owned companies to US $54 a month—a 40 percent increase, and the first since 1999.

Democracy Movement

In April 2006 more than 100 people publicly signed an “Appeal for Freedom of Political Association” and a “Manifesto for Freedom and Democracy.” The initiators of the movement (called the 8406 Bloc, after the date of the Manifesto) included Father Nguyen Van Ly, dissident Hoang Minh Chinh, and writer Do Nam Hai. By August, more than 2,000 people had signed the public appeals.

In October, activists announced the creation of an independent labor union as an alternative to the party-controlled labor confederation. Dissidents also launched several unsanctioned independent publications during 2006, including Tu Do Ngon Luan (“Freedom of Expression”) and Tu Do Dan Chu (“Freedom and Democracy”).

The government responded by detaining and interrogating many of the more prominent activists and confiscating their documents, computers, and cell phones (see below).

Free Expression and the Internet

Vietnam’s Law on Publications strictly bans publications that oppose the government, divulge state secrets, or disseminate “reactionary” ideas. There are few privately-owned media outlets; most publications are published by the government, the Party, or Party-controlled organizations.

In 2006 the state media, which have usually been allowed to write about corruption, covered the embezzlement of government and donor funds by transportation ministry officials.

The government blocks websites considered objectionable or politically sensitive, monitors email and online forums, and makes internet cafe owners responsible for information accessed and transferred on the internet by their customers.

A new law, Decree No. 56, “Administrative Sanctions on Information and Culture Activities,” calls for steep fines for activities such as circulating “harmful” information, defaming the nation and national heroes, or revealing “party secrets, state secrets, military secrets and economic secrets.”

Repression of Dissent

Activists who launch unsanctioned publications or use the internet to disseminate opinions critical of the government are harassed, detained, and imprisoned. At this writing, at least two cyber-dissidents remained in prison.

Nguyen Vu Binh is serving a seven-year sentence for espionage for his internet postings, testimony submitted in writing to the US Congress on human rights, and communication with activists inside Vietnam and abroad.

Truong Quoc Huy, detained in 2005 for more than eight months after participating in internet discussions about democracy, was re-arrested in an internet cafe on August 18, 2006. He had reportedly expressed public support for the democracy movement.

In mid-April two journalists were detained at Ho Chi Minh City airport and prevented from attending a conference in Manila on free expression in Asian cyberspace.

On April 20 police arrested two Montagnard students and held them for 18 days in a district prison in Dak Lak, where they were beaten, interrogated, and accused of using the internet to send lists of political prisoners to advocacy groups abroad.

On June 30 police raided the home of dissident Nguyen Thanh Giang and confiscated books and documents. On August 12 police raided the homes of five dissidents, including Nguyen Khac Toan, Nguyen Van Dai, and Hoang Tien, as they prepared to launch an independent publication. In October Do Nam Hai and two other dissidents were called for “working sessions” with the police.

US citizen Cong Thanh Do (Tran Nam), a representative of the People’s Democracy Party, was arrested on August 14. Upon Do’s expulsion from Vietnam on September 21, the state press said he had been arrested for disseminating anti-government information. At this writing, six Vietnamese arrested in August because of alleged links to the People’s Democracy Party remained in detention.

In November, four Vietnamese and three Vietnamese-Americans arrested in 2005 were sentenced to fifteen months’ imprisonment, or time served, on terrorism charges, for allegedly smuggling radio equipment in to Vietnam. Suspected democracy movement supporters Truong Quoc Huy and three others arrested in August — Nguyen Ngoc Quang, Vu Hoang Hai, and Pham Ba Hai — were charged with conducting anti-government propaganda.

Assembly

Public demonstrations are rare, especially after government crackdowns against mass protests in the Central Highlands in 2001 and 2004. Decree 38, signed by the prime minister in 2005, banned public gatherings in front of places where government, Party, and international conferences are held, and requires organizers to obtain government permission in advance.

In advance of the Party Congress in April 2006 and President Bush’s visit in November, police in Hanoi rounded up street children and homeless people and sent them to compulsory “rehabilitation” centers on the outskirts of the city where some were badly beaten. Soldiers were dispatched to villages in the Central Highlands to prevent possible demonstrations during Bush’s visit.

Religion

Vietnam’s 2004 Ordinance on Beliefs and Religions affirms the right to freedom of religion. However, it requires that all religious groups register with the government in order to be legal, and bans any religious activity deemed to cause public disorder, harm national security, or “sow divisions.”

Followers of some religions not officially recognized by the government continue to be persecuted. Security officials disperse their religious gatherings, confiscate religious literature, and summon religious leaders to police stations for interrogation.

Buddhist monks from the banned Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV), including its Supreme Patriarch, Thich Huyen Quang, and second-ranking leader, Thich Quang Do, remain confined to their monasteries.

Despite regulations to streamline the registration process, hundreds of Christian house church organizations that tried to register in 2006 were either rejected outright, ignored, or had their applications returned unopened. These included 500 ethnic minority churches in the Northwest Highlands. In the Central Highlands, some Montagnard churches linked to the government-approved Evangelical Church of Vietnam (ECVN) were reportedly able to register. However Montagnards belonging to unregistered Christian churches came under heavy pressure to join the ECVN or recant their beliefs, despite a 2005 decree banning such practices.

In May, fifty police officers raided the home and church of Mennonite pastor Rev. Nguyen Hong Quang and demolished repair work he had done to the Mennonite church building. Quang, a former political prisoner, was one of the signatories of the Bloc 8406 manifesto.

Even registered groups face problems. More than fifty monks and nuns from the officially-recognized Vietnam Buddhist Church (VBC) demonstrated in July 2006 to protest the unfair imprisonment and torture of eight Buddhists and the beating to death in custody of a monk. The case, which was heard on appeal at Bac Giang Provincial People’s Court in June 2006, resulted in their temporary release.

Prisons and Torture

Hundreds of religious and political prisoners remain in prisons throughout Vietnam. They include more than 350 Montagnards who have been sentenced to prison terms since 2001, largely for peaceful political or religious activities, or trying to seek asylum in Cambodia. There is compelling evidence of torture and other mistreatment of detainees. Prisoners are reportedly placed in solitary confinement in cramped, dark, unsanitary cells; and beaten, kicked, and shocked with electric batons.

Police officers routinely arrest and detain suspects without written warrants. Trials of dissidents are closed to the public, media, and detainees’ families. Under Administrative Detention Decree 31/CP, individuals can be put under house arrest for alleged national security crimes for up to two years without going before a judge.

Key International Actors

Vietnam’s donors, including the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and Japan raised strong concerns when news broke in January about major embezzlement of donor funds by the transportation ministry, which resulted in the resignation and arrest of several ministry officials.

While noting political prisoner releases, the EU, Vietnam’s largest donor, placed Vietnam on its list of countries of concern in its human rights report for 2006. In May, a European Parliament delegation to Vietnam called for the release of prisoners of conscience, free access for the international press to the Central Highlands, and an end to the death penalty. In September, the United Kingdom praised Vietnam’s progress on poverty reduction but said it would link ongoing aid to progress on human rights, anti-corruption, good governance, and financial reform.

Relations with the United States reached an unprecedented high in 2006, with the resumption of its human rights dialogue, which had been suspended since 2002, and the visit of President George Bush in November. The US removed its designation of Vietnam as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) for religious freedom violations, and it was expected that by the end of the year the US would grant Vietnam “Permanent Normalized Trade Relations.”

Link to:
http://hrw.org/englishwr2k7/docs/2007/01/11/vietna14858.htm

Iraqi leader criticizes comments by Bush, Rice

2007-01-18T07:18:00.000-05:00

By Leila Fadel
McClatchy Newspapers
January 18, 2007

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki voiced frustration with both President George Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday, saying their recent criticism of the Iraqi government probably helped the "terrorists."

Al-Maliki, whose relationship with the United States is strained, was especially upset about Rice's comment last week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when she said that al-Maliki's government is working on "borrowed time."

"Such statements give moral boosts to the terrorists and push them towards making an extra effort and making them believe that they have defeated the American administration, but I can tell you that they haven't defeated the Iraqi government," he said during a meeting with a handful of reporters.

The interview was al-Maliki's first public comments since Bush announced last week that he's sending 21,500 additional American troops to Iraq. The Times of London posted audio of the interview on its Web site. McClatchy Newspapers didn't take part in the interview.

Al-Maliki also criticized Bush for saying that the chaotic execution of Saddam Hussein looked like a "revenge killing" during an interview Tuesday with PBS' Jim Lehrer.

"I would like to correct President Bush that Saddam, that person, was not subjected to any act of revenge, any physical attack," al-Maliki said. "It was a judicial process that ended with him executed or sentenced to death according to Iraqi law, which sentences such criminals to death."
Al-Maliki said he thought Bush was responding to news media pressure. "I know President Bush and I know him as a strong person who does not get affected by the media pressure, but it seems that the pressure ... led to the president giving this statement."

Al-Maliki's relationship with the United States has been deteriorating for months over various issues, including control of the military forces in Iraq, the strategy for fighting the war and U.S. killings of Iraqi civilians.

On Wednesday, in what may have been a sign of the state of relations between the U.S. and al-Maliki, Rice flew from Kuwait to Europe directly over Baghdad but didn't stop to meet with Iraqi officials.

Al-Maliki has come under increasing pressure to disarm Shiite militias allied with his government, especially the Mahdi Army, which is loyal to anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and is believed to be behind the killings of hundreds of Sunnis across the capital. Al-Sadr's supporters hold five seats in al-Maliki's Cabinet and form the largest bloc in the Iraqi parliament.

Al-Maliki's comments came one week after Bush announced that 17,500 of the additional U.S. troops would be committed to a Baghdad security plan intended to target "extremists" in the capital. The plan is supposed to be Iraqi-led, with U.S. forces acting as a support system. But some here fear that the plan will allow Shiite militias to continue their campaign to force Sunni residents out of the capital.

Al-Maliki predicted that the government's need for U.S. troops would decrease in the next three to six months.

Advisers to al-Maliki and legislators have indicated that al-Maliki gave only a tepid welcome to more forces in the capital.

"I believe that if we succeed in implementing the agreement between us to speed up the equipping and providing weapons to our military forces, I think that within three to six months our need for the American troops will dramatically go down," al-Maliki said. "That is on condition that there are real, strong efforts to support our military forces and equipping and arming them."

Al-Maliki blamed high casualties on an ill-equipped Iraqi army.

"I can strongly say that we could have been in a better situation right now regarding the equipment we have and the weapons we have," he said. "If that had happened it would have greatly decreased the level of our losses and the losses of the multinational forces as well."
---
Audio of Maliki's interview with reporters can be heard at:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/world/

Iraq resolution may expose GOP divide

2007-01-18T06:19:00.000-05:00

By Anne Flaherty
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - A Democrat-driven resolution on Iraq that has attracted the support of at least two Republicans threatens to expose fissures within the GOP over the unpopular war.

Republicans are deeply divided on the war in Iraq and how Congress should react to
President Bush's plan to send 21,500 more troops to join the estimated 130,000 already there.

Ten Republicans met behind closed doors late Wednesday with Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in a bid to generate consensus on Iraq. The senators emerged from the meeting to announce that no deal had been reached.

"This is a very fluid situation," said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.

The meeting came after Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine, both Republicans who have sparred with the administration on the war, announced that they would co-sponsor the resolution.

The resolution would put the Senate on record as opposed to sending more troops to Iraq. It also calls for the U.S. military mission to switch from major combat to training Iraqi troops, counterterrorism and keeping foreign fighters out of Iraq.

"It is not in the national interest of the United States to deepen its military involvement in Iraq, particularly by escalating the United States military force presence in Iraq," the resolution states.

Hagel called the resolution a "genuine bipartisan effort." He is a possible presidential contender in 2008 and helped draft the proposal with Sens. Joe Biden, D-Del., and Carl Levin, D-Mich.

However, some Republicans denounced the proposal as a political ploy to embarrass the president. Sen. John Cornyn, a Bush supporter, predicted the resolution would fail.

"If my Democrat colleagues are truly opposed to the mission in Iraq, then as the new majority in Congress they should schedule a serious debate and a vote on cutting off funding for our troops," said Cornyn, R-Texas.

Hagel shot back: "To somehow come up with a conclusion that it shows a lack of seriousness, I am a bit befuddled by what the Texas senator is trying to describe."

The resolution does not call for a withdrawal of troops or threaten funding of military operations, as many Democrats have suggested. Instead, it says the U.S. should transfer responsibility to the Iraqis "under an appropriately expedited timeline" that is not specified.

Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said his panel will debate the measure on Jan. 24, the day following Bush's State of the Union address. A swift committee review would pave the way for debate on the floor as early as that week, although Democrats say it is likely Republicans on the committee will want to make changes.

Biden said modest changes to the bill might be used "to attract those who share our view but may not like our specific language."

Bush sought to stave off a major showdown between the administration and Congress on Iraq by inviting GOP skeptics of the plan to the White House on Wednesday. But many of those members emerged from the meeting to say they still opposed sending more troops, although they were unsure whether they would back the resolution.

Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, one of several Republicans wary of Bush's plan, said he is concerned the resolution may go too far. Coleman spokesman Tom Steward said the senator is open to an increase in the Anbar province, for example.

"Senator Coleman has repeatedly conveyed his specific concerns to the president and is hopeful that Congress can find bipartisan common ground on this resolution going forward," Steward said.

Alternative proposals have already begun to surface. House GOP leaders backed a bill that would protect funding for U.S. troops, while Senate Republicans prepared a resolution supportive of Bush's strategy.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said that resolution would say the Senate believes the war in Iraq cannot be lost "and this strategy could bring about success if properly supported."

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., is considering an alternative proposal that could attract GOP attention. Rather than denouncing the president's strategy, it would voice support for recommendations by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. That panel did not recommend sending more troops unless specifically requested by a military commander.

Other Democrats have plans of their own. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said he wants legislation capping the number of troops in Iraq at existing levels — a plan that attracted support from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., who has his own bill threatening the funding of troops.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., on Wednesday announced legislation that would require Bush to obtain congressional approval for additional troops in Iraq if the Iraqis cannot show progress after six months.

Dodd and Clinton are among several Democrats with 2008 presidential aspirations.
___
Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.

Maliki Stresses Urgency In Arming Iraqi Forces

2007-01-18T05:56:00.000-05:00

Need for U.S. Troops Could Drop 'Dramatically'

By Joshua Partlow
The Washington Post
Thursday, January 18, 2007; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Jan. 17 -- The Iraqi government's need for American troops would "dramatically go down" in three to six months if the United States accelerated the process of equipping and arming Iraq's security forces, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Wednesday.

The head of Iraq's Shiite Muslim-led government defended his country's independence and sovereignty and called on U.S. leaders to show faith in his ability to lead.

Maliki disputed President Bush's remarks broadcast Tuesday that the execution of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein "looked like it was kind of a revenge killing" and took exception to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's Senate testimony last week that Maliki's administration was on "borrowed time."

The prime minister said statements such as Rice's "give morale boosts for the terrorists and push them toward making an extra effort and making them believe they have defeated the American administration," Maliki said. "But I can tell you that they have not defeated the Iraqi government."

Speaking through an interpreter to a group of reporters for an hour in his offices in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, Maliki found several ways to say that Iraq is beholden to no country. He defended Iraq's constitutional right to the death penalty, its commitment to dialogue with Iran and Syria despite U.S. opposition to those governments, and its determination to use Iraqi troops to lead the latest effort to pacify Baghdad.

At a time when Bush has committed an additional 21,500 troops to the fight in Iraq, Maliki went further than he has before in establishing a time frame for drawing down the U.S. presence.

"If we succeed in implementing the agreement between us to speed up the equipping and providing weapons to our military forces, I think that within three to six months our need for the American troops will dramatically go down. That's on the condition that there are real strong efforts to support our military forces and equipping them and arming them," Maliki said.

In a statement issued by Maliki's office Tuesday, he said Iraq would continue to build up its armed forces "so it will be possible to withdraw the Multinational forces from cities, or withdraw 50,000 soldiers from Iraq."

Maliki faces deep skepticism in Iraq and abroad about whether he has the political will or ability to steer his country away from civil war, or even to keep his position as prime minister. His comments amounted to a defense of the viability of his government, which he pledged to lead "until I achieve the peace and prosperity that Iraq deserves."

In an interview Dec. 24, Maliki sounded less committed to his office. "I wish I could be done with it before the end" of his four-year term, he told the Wall Street Journal. "I would like to serve my people from outside the circle of senior officials, maybe through parliament."

In the interview Wednesday, Maliki said many American and Iraqi lives would have been spared if the Iraqi forces had been better equipped. But he did not elaborate on what he wanted in terms of weapons or materiel, or whether his needs exceeded what is proposed in the $1.5 billion military sales agreement Iraq reached with the United States last month. Under that deal, the Iraqi government will receive an additional 300 armored personnel carriers, 600 more "up-armored" Humvees, helicopters and other equipment this year, according to Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, a U.S. military spokesman in Iraq. Iraq's proposed 2007 budget devotes $7 billion to building up the armed forces.

"President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki agreed in November to accelerate not only the training of the Iraqi security forces but also accelerate the transfer of equipment," National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said Wednesday.

One Maliki aide said the prime minister wants "heavier weapons" and is concerned that Iraqi security forces are outgunned by militias and insurgents.

"Basically the level of weapons in the current army is really a disgrace," said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. In many cases, gunmen are "definitely better armed" than the police and the army, the aide said.

Bush administration officials have long expressed concern in private about delivering military equipment to Iraq because of uncertainty that it would be kept out of the hands of militiamen, common criminals and insurgents.

The prime minister's critics in Iraq and Washington say he is unable to target the Shiite militias run by his political allies, but Wednesday he reiterated his commitment to defeating militants of any sect. Over the past few days, he said, his government had arrested 400 members of the Mahdi Army, the burgeoning Shiite militia led by cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a political supporter of Maliki, and staged a mission in the Shiite holy city of Karbala targeting people who attempted to assassinate a member of the provincial council. He said he has prohibited the Iraqi security forces from openly paying homage to sectarian leaders, such as Sadr, or from joining political parties.

"There will not be any house or party headquarters or any office that has impunity from security operations," he said.

A Sadr spokesman, Abdul Razak al-Nadawi, denied that 400 Mahdi Army members had been arrested and said he was unaware of an operation in Karbala.

Maliki addressed at length Bush's recent critical comments about Hussein's hanging, in which attendees shouted Sadr's name and told Hussein to "go to hell" while he stood at the gallows.
The execution, Maliki said, followed a legitimate trial and conviction -- for Hussein's role in the killing of 148 men and boys from a Shiite village in the 1980s -- and Hussein "was not subjected to any act of revenge, any physical attack, and it was a judicial process that ended with him being sentenced to death according to Iraqi law."

"I know President Bush and I know him as a strong person that does not get affected by the media pressure, but it seems the pressure has gone to a great extent that led to the president giving this statement," Maliki said.

Maliki spoke slowly and seriously for most of the conversation, but occasionally broke into a smile, such as when he was asked whether Bush needs him more than he needs Bush. "This is an evil question," he said, laughing.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, who was traveling with Rice in Europe on Wednesday, defended the secretary's comment about the Maliki administration. "It was a restatement of what others have said, including the president, underscoring the importance and urgency of the Iraqi government acting on behalf of the Iraqi people," he said.

A convoy carrying members of a U.S. democracy group was ambushed Wednesday in Baghdad, and four of the workers, including an American woman, were killed, an official with the group told the Associated Press.

Gunmen attacked the three-car convoy belonging to the National Democratic Institute, said Les Campbell, the group's Middle East director. Besides the American, a Hungarian, a Croat and an Iraqi were killed, he said.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, a truck laden with explosives blew up outside a police station, killing 10 people, including four policemen, and wounding 45 others, according to the Kirkuk police chief. The blast damaged houses and destroyed cars, collapsed a mosque and took down a cellphone tower. There is growing conflict between ethnic Kurds and Turkmens in the city, and the police station was located in a predominantly Turkmen area.

Later in the day, a second car bomb exploded in Kirkuk outside a Kurdish political office.
In Baghdad, a car bomb exploded in a suicide attack near a busy restaurant in a market in the Shiite slum of Sadr City. The blast killed 20 people and wounded 23 others, according to Brig. Gen. Abdullah Sami of the Interior Ministry.

Staff writer Karen DeYoung and staff researcher Robert E. Thomason in Washington, staff writer Glenn Kessler traveling with Rice, and special correspondent Naseer Nouri in Baghdad contributed to this report.

Senate plans vote against troop surge

2007-01-18T05:51:00.000-05:00

By Charles Hurt and Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times
January 18, 2007

Senators introduced a resolution yesterday disapproving of President Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq, setting up a confrontation with the White House, which warned that those who vote for it will face charges that they don't support the troops.

The resolution -- written by the top Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees and Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska -- has no binding effect on Mr. Bush, but the authors said they hope an overwhelming vote will prove the president lacks the support to move forward.

"This resolution will give every senator a chance to say where he or she stands on the president's plan," said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware Democrat and Foreign Relations chairman. "The single and most effective way to get him to change course is to demonstrate that his policy has waning or no support from both parties."

The White House pleaded for lawmakers to take more time, study the president's plan and ask more questions.

Mr. Bush last week proposed sending more than 17,000 additional soldiers to Baghdad to help Iraqi troops stem sectarian violence and 4,000 more Marines to Anbar province to fight al Qaeda. He said Iraqi officials have promised more troops of their own and have pledged not to interfere as the U.S. and Iraqi forces go after politically sensitive targets.

The president's spokesman, Tony Snow, said yesterday that Mr. Bush is going to forge ahead with his plan and said members of Congress should be wary of how their opposition will affect the troops.

"Think about what message resolutions would send," Mr. Snow said. He said he will not be the judge of what does or does not support the troops, but said, "It is a question that those are talking about these resolutions will have to answer to themselves and to the public."

Some House and Senate Republicans skeptical of Mr. Bush's proposal went to the White House yesterday to hear the administration's case, while Vice President Dick Cheney met with Republican senators on Capitol Hill. Now Republican leaders are trying to craft a unified position.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, emerged from the meeting with the vice president to tell reporters that Republican senators unanimously support "fair procedures" for voting on the new resolution. It was a stance far short of the nearly full support they've shown the White House on the war during the past four years.

In the House, Rep. Sam Johnson, Texas Republican, offered a bill to ensure that Congress does not cut off or restrict funding for troops in a combat zone such as Iraq, and Republican House leaders urged support. But opposition to Mr. Bush's plan is firming up.

Sen. Olympia J. Snowe, Maine Republican, announced her support for the Senate resolution opposing the troop surge, and Sen. Sam Brownback said sending more troops to the region is a bad idea.

The Kansas Republican who has long been supportive of Mr. Bush and is now considering a White House run, said he's "been committed to a free, safe and secure Iraq from the very beginning."

But after a visit to the front lines last week, he said he "found less reason for optimism."

"Sunni leaders blame everything on the Shi'a. Shi'a leaders, likewise, blame everything on the Sunnis. The Kurdish leadership pointed out that the Sunni and Shi'a only meet when the Kurds call the meeting," he said in a speech on the Senate floor.

Even more frustrating, he said: "All of this suggests that at the present time, the United States cares more about a peaceful Iraq than the Iraqis do. If that is the case, it is difficult to understand why more U.S. troops would make a difference."

Also back from a trip to Iraq was Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat.

"We saw American service men and women performing bravely and magnificently, and we also saw a strategy that is not working," said the likely presidential contender. "I, personally, did not see the kind of tangible evidence of actions that we should be expecting from the Iraqi government."

She, along with fellow Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, called for more troops to be deployed in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, Connecticut Democrat and another possible 2008 candidate, said he will offer legislation capping the number of troops in Iraq and requiring the president to get congressional approval before adding more.

But Mr. Snow said that would "bind the hands of the commander in chief."

"To tie one's hand in a time of war is a pretty extreme move," he said

The Right Bet in the Mideast

2007-01-17T08:43:00.000-05:00

By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
Wednesday, January 17, 2007; Page A19

It was axiomatic during the Cold War that presidents should not gamble with matters of national security. The stakes were too high. The Bush administration's Iraq policy has long suffered from a lack of that prudence -- and the misplaced gambler's instinct is especially evident in the administration's plan to send more troops to Baghdad.

President Bush's "surge" is a mistake because it is piling more precious chips -- more human lives -- on what so far has been a losing bet. The public sent a clear message in the November election that it wants to take some of those chips off the table. That cautionary theme -- that it's time to reduce America's bet on the long shot that Iraq's sectarian mess can be fixed quickly -- was ably distilled by the Iraq Study Group in its December report.

Bush chose to go the other way, to pursue "an experiment based on high risks," in the words of Anthony H. Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has written extensively about Iraq.

What prompted Bush's decision, by the president's own account, was his concern about the consequences for regional stability of an American failure in Iraq. To avoid the Baker-Hamilton problem of negotiating from weakness, Bush has chosen instead to signal American resolve in the region in various ways: by sending more troops to Baghdad; by seizing Iranian agents operating in Iraq; by sending additional warships into the Persian Gulf; and finally, according to the well-sourced foreign policy Web site TheSwoop.net, by working covertly with Saudi Arabia to support the Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora against the Iranian-backed Shiite militia Hezbollah.

These moves are especially risky now because they are played against the background of a Middle East riven by conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. This sectarian war is destroying Iraq, and a similar war is perilously close in Lebanon. In this larger arena, U.S. strategy is hard to understand: We are allied with the Shiite government in Iraq against Sunni insurgents; and we are allied with the Sunni government in Lebanon against Shiite insurgents.

Edward Luttwak, a contrarian strategist, argued in the Wall Street Journal last week that by riding Shiite and Sunni horses at the same time, we have accidentally hit upon the divide-and-rule strategy that "past imperial statesmen strove to achieve with much cunning and cynicism."

I fear that Luttwak is being uncharacteristically overoptimistic. The reality is that in neither Iraq nor Lebanon are we checking the rising regional power, Iran.

And it seems to me that our adversaries are doing a better job at this business of cynical alliances: Iran and Syria are the key supporters, respectively, of Shiite death squads and Sunni insurgents in Iraq. Yet although they are backing different sides in Iraq, Iran and Syria remain close and effective allies. Two years ago, a pro-Syrian Lebanese warned me in an e-mail that the United States would be caught in a "sandwich strategy" in Iraq -- squeezed by Sunni and Shiite fighters who shared a hatred of American interference. His warnings have proved chillingly accurate. He wrote me a few days ago to reiterate that, for Arabs who oppose American intervention, the operating rule is: "You kill us, we kill you."

The lesson of the Cold War was to be tough -- but also to be careful. I wish I saw more evidence of that prudence now. When U.S. officials encourage the Saudis to check Hezbollah by sending money to Sunni groups in northern Lebanon, do they understand that this region is a stronghold of al-Qaeda and that they are pushing Sunni-Shiite tensions toward the point of explosion?

When officials contemplate regime change in Syria, as the Bush administration again seems to be doing, do they understand that they may be creating a wider band of chaos that would stretch from Lebanon to the Iranian border?

When the administration decides to send more ships into the Gulf as a signal to Iran, do officials understand that there are members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who might favor a torpedo attack -- so as to provoke an American retaliation and suck us deeper into an apocalyptic battle for control of the region?

In this volatile part of the world, there's just one area where I wish President Bush would take more risks -- and that's in diplomatic efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. If you want to strike a blow at Iran, Sunni insurgents and Shiite death squads all at once, that's the way to do it. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a start this week, but this is one poker game where we should be adding more chips -- doubling down the American stake in peace.

The writer co-hosts, with Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues athttp://blog.washingtonpost.com/postglobal. His e-mail address isdavidignatius@washpost.com.