Joel Beinin: Sharon's unilateralism dims hope for a Palestinian settlement Thom Rutledge: Saddam's capture gives Bush the advantage Mark Sedra: putting Afghanistan's sputterin peace back on track Ralph A. Cossa: America's image problem in Southeast Asia

New York University

U.S. State Department's
Report on Patterns of Global Terrorism for 2002

The US State Department's Report on Patterns of Global Terrorism for 2001

Paul O'Neill and George Bush on the cover of Ron Suskind's new book

DID THE PRESIDENT LIE?
Former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill delivered the most damning criticism until now of the Bush administration's decision to go to war. In an interview with CBS News' "60 Minutes, " O'Neill charges that President Bush had decided to go after Saddam within the first days of assuming office. According to O'Neill, "the president was saying go find a way to do this." O'Neill also describes the president's conduct during cabinet meetings as being "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people." O'Neill was promoting a new book by Pulitzer-prize winner, Ron Suskind, who says that O'Neill provided access to some 19,000 documents. Somewhat incredibly, O'Neill insisted that he did not expect a retaliation from the White House. That was a serious miscalculation. While presidential spokesman Scott McClellan admonished reporters that everyone has a right to their own opinion, the Treasury Department went into action almost immediately to see whether O'Neill could be charged with leaking classified information.
• CBS News provides streaming video on-line of the essential parts of the interview and a complete transcript .
• White House spokesman Scott McClellan, aboard Air Force One en route to Mexico, side-steps reporters questions. Mclellan tells a reporter: "David, you've heard me say repeatedly that we're not in the business of doing book reviews. I don't get in the business of selling or promoting or critiquing books..."(White House press briefing).
•The Treasury Department goes after O'Neill for alleged security violations. (The BBC, January 12, 2003)
•Paul Krugman's assessement in the New York Times

THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE REPORTS THAT EXPERTS WERE AWARE THAT IRAQ POSED NO IMMEDIATE THREAT
The Carnegie report's conclusions: "Iraq’s WMD programs represented a long-term threat that could not be ignored. They did not, however, pose an immediate threat to the United States, to the region, or to global security. With respect to nuclear and chemical weapons, the extent of the threat was largely knowable at the time.
•Iraq’s nuclear program had been dismantled and there was no convincing evidence of its reconstitution.
•Regarding chemical weapons, UNSCOM discovered that Iraqi nerve agents had lost most of their lethality as early as 1991. Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, and UN inspections and sanctions effectively destroyed Iraq’large-scale chemical weapon production capabilities. For both reasons, it appears that thereafter Iraq focused on preserving a latent, dual-use capability, rather than on weapons production." (Entire report available in PDF format, or in chapters in html)

"THE TRUTH IS HE LIED"
Writing in the Spectator, Peter Osborne zeroes in on the ongoing inquiry into the death of British weapons expert David Kelly. Osborne find's Tony Blair's declarations after the event suspect at best.: "Nobody could have foreseen the tragedy of Dr Kelly’s death," Osborne admits, "But it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion, on the basis of the evidence before the inquiry, that Tony Blair personally played the primary executive role in the sequence of events that led to the naming of Dr Kelly and onwards to his death in an Oxfordshire field. Two or three days after Kelly’s suicide, the Prime Minister was asked, ‘Did you authorize anyone in Downing Street or in the Ministry of Defense to release David Kelly’s name?’ He replied: ‘Emphatically not.’ He was asked again: ‘Why did you authorize the naming of David Kelly?’ He answered: ‘That is completely untrue.’ It is said around Whitehall that these two responses form no part of Lord Hutton’s investigation, since the Prime Minister uttered them after Dr Kelly’s death. I have racked my brains over Tony Blair’s answers for ages, but have been unable to avoid the conclusion that he was lying. .."
(Peter Osborne in the Spectator, 10 January 2004)

WHO BANKROLLS THE CANDIDATES?
When it comes to dazzling political fund raising, President Bush is hard to beat. The Center for Public Integrity ranks the president at the top of the list having raked in no less than $85 million in 2003. The largest contributor was Enron, which less informed citizens had thought went bankrupt. Despite its recent financial woes and the dashed 401K plans of its employees, the company managed to collect more than $600,000 for Bush's coffers. Compare that to the the measly $25 million raised by Howard Dean. If money decides elections, Bush clearly has the advantage. The Center for Public Integrity, which has just published The Buying of the President 2004,provides a map of the candidates and a chart showing which corporate interests are backing them.
( Center for Public Integrity, January 12, 2004)

BOILING SLOWLY LIKE A FROG IN A POT
It's an old adage that if you increase the temperature slowly, a frog won't realize that he's being cooked until it's all over. WNYC's On The Media, host Bob Garfield suggests that the White House is employing a similar strategy by slipping pieces of Patriot Act II into legislation in small, unnoticed doses. Although the enhanced new version of the Patriot Act aka the the "Domestic Security Enhancement Act" was finally rejected by Congress, the parts that count are quietly being attached to other legislation. The latest example is The Intelligence Authorization Act for F.Y. 2004, which gives the FBI unprecedented powers to gather information on private individuals and radically changes the definition of what constitutes a "financial institution."
Bob Garfield's report is available in real audio and eventually as a printed transcript on the program's web site. (Bob Garfield, WNYC On The Media, January 11, 2003)
[click here]
•The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal year 2004
•The Center for Democracy and Technology analyzes the FBI's efforts to obtain "administrative subpoena" power--essentially the right to force citizens to testify or to turn over documents without benefit of judicial protection.

THE LARGEST U.S. ARMY ROTATION EVER WILL PRESENT A TEMPTING TARGET OF OPPORTUNITY
David Isenberg, Asia Times notes that the most massive rotation of U.S. troops since World War II "officially kicked off on January 8, when advance teams from the 1st Calvary Division, part of the Army's III Corps, flew to Baghdad to begin taking over command of ground forces from troops currently there. The commander of the division, Lieutenant-General Thomas Metz, is due to take operational control of the new force.
"Both active and reserve forces are being deployed in a tightly scripted movement that puts your ordinary Broadway dance routine to shame," says Isenberg. "More than 240,000 soldiers and Marines are to move into and out of Iraq from now to May." During this rotation, about 110,000 fresh troops will deploy to Iraq to replace 125,000 troops there, 20,000 troops will replace forces in Kuwait, and about 11,000 in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom 5) who have been there for about a year. It amounts to the US military's largest troop rotation since World War II.
(David Isenberg, Asia Times, January 13, 2004)

THE MONTERREY SUMMIT
Mexico's President Vincente Fox is likely to get a domestic political boost from of George Bush's promise to give millions of illegal immigrants limited visas. The rest of Latin America may still see Fox as a supplicant of Washington's favor, and protesters aren't buying any of it. The BBC provides a concise summary of what to expect and links to background information. (BBC, January 12, 2004)
The Organization of American States provides background and live television transmissions over the internet of the summit meetings at its website (http://www.summit-americas.org/Special Summit/mainpage-eng.htm)

IRAN IN A COUNTDOWN TO COUNTER-REVOLUTION?
Teheran's decision to ban a number of pro-democracy candidates form upcoming elections did not go over well with students. The government may succeed in suppressing reform now, but in excluding Iran's youth from the political process, it is setting itself up for a counter-revolution. (Economist,January 12, 2004)
•Iranian Militants continue protests (Payvand News of Iran)
•A test for parliamentary democracy?
Parvez Esmaelli argues that democracy is intended to empower the people, but there are no guarantees for those who want to represent the people. (Teheran Times, January 13, 2004)

SHARON SAYS HE STILL HASN'T FORMULATED A PLAN FOR WITHDRAWING FROM THE WEST BANK
While Sharon dodged specifics, his deputy, Ehud Olmert said that a partial withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank could start in about six months. (Nathan Guttman, Gideon Alon, Yair Ettinger and Jonathan Lis, Haaretz, January 13, 2004)

GEORGIA EXPECTS PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN MARCH
The country has been in legislative limbo since last November's elections were declared invalid. The campaign schedule is expected to leave smaller parties at a disadvantage. (Eurasianet, January 12, 2004)
•Russia continues to insist that Georgia provided a rear base for Chechen rebels and is pointedly suggesting that the new government take a different approach. The latest warning comes from Felix Stanevsky, who was ambassador to Georgia from 1996 to 2000, and currently heads the CIS Institute of Caucasian Countries. The Georgians deny any past support to Chechens, but the message from Moscow seems clear enough: follow the Russian line or suffer the consequences. ( (Katevan Lomaia in Georgia Times, December 12, 2004)
•BP gets a roasting for the environmental impact of its pipeline construction ( By Natia Jincharadze, GEORGIA TIMES,January 6, 2004)

LOSING PERSPECTIVE IN THE WAR ON TERROR
Dr. Jeffrey Record normally teaches strategy and tactics at the U.S. Air Force's Air War College. He is currently a visiting professor at the prestigious U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute. In an article just published, Dr. Record delivers an extraordinarily blunt critique of where and why President Bush's "Global War on Terror" (GWOT) has gone wrong. Record's assessment: "In the wake of the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on the United States, the U.S. Government declared a global war on terrorism (GWOT). The nature and parameters of that war, however,remain frustratingly unclear. The administration has postulated a multiplicity of enemies, including rogue states; weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) proliferators; terrorist organizations of global,
regional, and national scope; and terrorism itself. It also seems to
have conflated them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing has subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in foreign policy and may have set the United States on a course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and nonstate entities that pose no serious threat to the United States.
Of particular concern has been the conflation of al-Qaeda and
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat.This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored
critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and
susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has
been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred
Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic
terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing
the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable
al-Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the Global War on Terrorism, but
rather a detour from it.
Additionally, most of the GWOT’s declared objectives, which
include the destruction of al-Qaeda and other transnational terrorist
organizations, the transformation of Iraq into a prosperous, stable
democracy, the democratization of the rest of the autocratic Middle
East, the eradication of terrorism as a means of irregular warfare,
and the (forcible, if necessary) termination of WMD proliferation to
real and potential enemies worldwide, are unrealistic and condemn the United States to a hopeless quest for absolute security. As such, the GWOT’s goals are also politically, fiscally, and militarily unsustainable.
Accordingly, the GWOT must be recalibrated to conform to
concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American power.
(Dr. Jeffrey Record, The Strategic Studies Institute, The U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks)
[To download the full study, click here].

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