October 2004 - cypherpunks-legacy

The Revolutionary
by R.A. Hettinga 31 Oct '04

31 Oct '04

<http://www.keepmedia.com/jsp/article_detail_print.jsp> Esquire The Revolutionary Dick Cheney is the calmest man in the room. Too calm. by Walter Russell Mead | Nov 01 '04 He has many faces, all gray. He is a symphony in gray. He ranges the spectrum from vanilla to colorless to dull. Even the pink of his lip and the blue of his eyes are gray. As the Trojan horse for a contemporary American revolution, he is magnificent, as radical behavior would be the last thing suspected of someone who comports himself as he does. He is an accident of history. He is a world-historic figure. He is the greatest enigma in American public life. His name is Dick Cheney. 1. The West Wing Portraits of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson-the country's first two vice-presidents-gaze benignly past the cream-colored walls toward the blue-carpeted floor. A copy of a Remington sculpture and a nineteenth-century painting of the Grand Tetons add a hint of the West. Vice-President Cheney meets me at the door, shakes my hand, and shows me to a seat in the half of his office furnished for guests. I think and write about U. S. foreign policy for a living at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Before getting this far-my first contact with the vice-president-I'd gone through months of screening. My latest book had circulated among the vice-president's staff to determine whether my political attitudes passed muster. Call me unaligned; there are days when I can't decide whether to worry more about the Bush administration or its critics. But I had come to the White House on a mission. This man, and this administration, were wrecking my life. I wanted to know why. I hate the decision I'm being forced to make this November. I hate the choices that the war on terrorism is imposing on us. The gravest threats of an unimaginably difficult and challenging future are coming together with some of the unhappiest unresolved conflicts in our national life, creating a perfect political shit storm. I don't like the storm and I don't like the choice. But the war is real, our divisions are real, and the choice isn't going away. You can talk about Bush all you want, but for me the choice is not so much either hating Bush or voting for him (or hating him and voting for him, which quite a few people I know seem to be doing) but about the man in whose office I was now sitting, the most powerful vice-president in history. In a very real sense, the Bush administration is a Cheney administration. There are a lot of people-and a fair few are among my friends and relations-who think of Dick Cheney much the way Captain Ahab thought of Moby Dick. In poll after poll last summer, he scored the lowest approval ratings of any of the four top national candidates. One poll showed that four times as many people think he needs his teeth whitened as think John Edwards does. That's not quite my beef with Dick Cheney. Rather, for virtually his entire adult life, he's been engaged in the systematic destruction of what I was raised to believe was progressive, decent, and forward-looking in the United States of America. Now, with Cheney's determined backing, the Bush administration had invaded Iraq in the teeth of world opinion, had stumbled into an occupation for which it was clearly unprepared, and, whether you looked at the Atlantic alliance or the United Nations, seemed to be mounting an assault on what two generations of American statesmen had grown accustomed to regarding as the fundamental principles of sound American foreign policy. And they won't even tell us why they really did it. Their stated reason-Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction-was patently wrong. They had bigger and even better reasons for what they did, reasons that would calm their critics if not win them over, but we are in the last laps of an endless presidential campaign, and on this momentous subject they remain mute. Ronald Reagan was the Great Communicator. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are as silent as the Sphinx. And so, how to make coherent what is incoherent-U. S. foreign policy in the Bush years? The great question in America today is this: Are Cheney and Bush the bearers of bad news who are adjusting American foreign policy to a new and ugly reality, or are they themselves the bad news, making the world more squalid and more dangerous as they mislead the country on a ruinous course? You have to give Cheney credit: Although he sits in the eye of the tremendous shit storm encircling the world, you will never find a calmer, more rational guy. "Looking back on the last three years," I ask, "what would you say are the administration's lessons learned from fighting the war on terrorism?" Looking a bit like Jeeves bringing his hangover remedy to Bertie Wooster, Cheney deflects the question with reassuring blandness about the difficult task. Cheney projects calm no matter what it is he is saying, which makes it possible to miss the portent of things that come from his mouth, which is of course the way he likes it. He'll tell you your house is on fire as if he were complimenting you on your tie. He is also, I am told by those who love him, the funniest man in the room. And while one's first thought might be that those must certainly be some pretty bleak rooms, I have heard him crack wise. I once heard someone ask him how he felt about being the one left to kneecap Senator Kerry, to make the down-and-dirty attacks so the president can keep his hands clean. "Well," he said, "I prefer to think of them as statesmanlike appraisals." Dry chuckles all around. Or there was the line he got off at the Gridiron Club this year, when he described his role in the Bush White House as being "a dark, insidious force pushing Bush toward war and confrontation." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told me that "he doesn't tell long shaggy-dog jokes. He's got a quick sense of humor. And it's a wry sense of humor with a nifty manner about it. He brought the situation room to tears the other day. There was a terrible article in the press about something that was going on in one of the departments. And he walked in and sat down and made a comment about it and everyone just howled. And he was late. And he walked in with his stack of papers, stuck them down on the table. I can't remember what it was. I've got enough trouble doing my job here without trying to remember humorous things Cheney said, but it was just terrific." For thirty years, Cheney has traveled through Washington surrounded by fog. Moderates-like his House of Representatives mentor and leader Bob Michel-think he's a moderate. Mildly conservative but still somewhat centrist Republicans like Bush 41 confidant and national-security advisor Brent Scowcroft thought he was one of them-conservative, yes, but sensible and prudent at the end of the day. Neoconservative intellectuals committed to the global spread of democracy think he's a fellow traveler. And the rabid fire-eaters from the fever swamps think he's one of them. Not that Cheney dissembles. The Washington Post once ran a story about Congressman Cheney that gushed about what a moderate he was. Cheney instructed someone in his office to call the paper to demand a correction. Five feet away from him, I behold this Trojan horse. What hair he's got is gray; his physique is more Homer Simpson than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Bald and gray is the right look for him, by the way; in old pictures with hair, he somehow manages to look shifty. Now he seems like the old family lawyer. His body language is, well, there's not much. No chopping hands, no pointing fingers, no scowls, and, except for the occasional dry snort of amusement, no smiles or laughs. He's no war hero, either; he took five deferments during the Vietnam War because he had "other priorities than military service." So he isn't a stud, a hero, a charmer, an orator, or one of the boys. Even so, he's surrounded by his own fervent cult of fiercely loyal staff. The only public figure I've ever met with a staff this devoted and this good at insulating its principal from the world is Fidel Castro. Only when you sit down with Fidel, he talks. Cheney mostly shimmers. But here we are now, speaking about the problems we face with Iran, slowly, sagely, soporifically. Of course, Iran was now demonstrably what Cheney had once called Iraq: an aborning nuclear power with ties to terrorists. Nothing could have been more obvious or more clear as he explained why Iran's quest for nuclear weapons represents a serious threat to American interests and to our friends and allies. He spoke about his hopes that a diplomatic solution can be found and praised the widespread support of Iranians for a more democratic government and, presumably, a more peaceful foreign policy. I'd asked a senior administration official whose views reflect the vice-president's what we should do in the future if intelligence is suspect or diplomacy fails and the mullahs go for the bomb. He shrugged and smiled. "Of course I can't predict what would happen," he said. "But allowing certain types of regimes to get their hands on nuclear weapons exposes you to all kinds of unacceptable risks and dangers." Then he spoke the magic words: "At some point, you just have to do the cautious and prudent thing." Ah, cautious and prudent-who wouldn't want to do that? Allow me to translate: The vice-president believes that there are circumstances-not remote and unlikely circumstances, but possible and quite conceivable circumstances-that could lead us toward war with yet another nasty Middle Eastern regime. For many people, the "cautious and prudent" course would be to leave Iran alone, avoid war, and try to work out some way of living with its bomb. Russia has the bomb, China has the bomb; Israel, India, England, and Pakistan have the bomb; we've even learned to live in a world where France has the bomb. Why not do the "cautious and prudent" thing-and learn to live with a nuclear Iran? A few days later, I spoke to former secretary of state George Shultz about this principle, and he immediately understood and agreed. Tie goes to the runner in those cases, Shultz says. That is, when you are facing unknown, possibly grave dangers, and you really don't and perhaps can't know exactly what to do, it is safer to act than to wait. It's a positively radical idea, at the heart of George Bush's doctrine of preventative war. It is precisely this kind of thinking that got the United States into Iraq. And never before in our history, perhaps never before in the history of war and peace, have prudent and cautious added up to invade . There's the rub. And Cheney is still quietly and calmly explaining that it's the right thing to do. Worse still, I think I believe him. 2. Don't ask about that TO GET FROM CHENEY'S suite in the West Wing to his staff quarters in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, you go downstairs past a small gallery of photographs, including one of the vice-president on a couch on Air Force Two watching a bearded, captured Saddam Hussein on a flat-screen TV. Then it's out onto a walkway across the White House lawn over to what, during much of modern history, was the main building that held the departments of state, war, and navy; today, it is just an annex for White House overflow. As I followed Cheney's press secretary, Kevin Kellems, across the lawn, I found myself thinking about my last visit to the EEOB. That was during the Clinton years, and they seemed very far away. I had come because someone in Madonna's entourage was toying with the idea of a Madonna concert in Havana. The question was whether a concert like that could be staged under a "cultural loophole" in the U. S. embargo against Cuba. It might be a stretch, said the Clinton official I talked to. Madonna concerts, after all, were just entertainment. If only I had come, the official lamented, with a request for someone with a more substantive claim to cultural status-like Bruce Springsteen. Ah, the old days. Kellems led me up to I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's office in what used to be the assistant secretary of the Navy's office. This is the room from which Teddy Roosevelt ordered the U. S. fleet toward Manila in preparation for the Spanish-American War-and the room he left to take the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill; it is the room in which Franklin Roosevelt worried that his failure to serve in combat during World War I would doom his political ambitions. In the anteroom is a desk that used to be in the White House. Libby opened the drawer to show me where Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower had scratched their names. As we settled into the Roosevelts' old office, Libby asked me what I wanted to know. Libby is a slight, fit man with sandy hair and a penchant for secrecy that rivals his boss's. Indeed, the vice-president's chief of staff is known as Cheney's Cheney. He is courtly yet intense and is given to saying, "Please, call me Scooter." Well, I said, like most Americans, I know well the actions taken by this administration; I'm less clear on why. So I'm interested in the vice-president's overall view of the world-how he sees our grand strategy in the war on terrorism, how that fits in with his broader ideas about how the world and the United States are changing. This was like farting in church. The sunny day seemed suddenly overcast and the temperature in TR's old digs dropped 15 degrees. "That's a conversation stopper," he warned me. "Don't try it." In subsequent weeks and months, as I pursued the great white whale across the United States, I would get this reaction quite a bit. "Never ask him about his worldview," Kevin Kellems warned me. "He doesn't like to talk about it." Aaron Friedberg, a Princeton professor and Cheney's deputy national-security advisor, gave me the same advice. "Don't ask about his worldview," Friedberg had warned me at the coffee shop across the street from the EEOB, where Cheney staff members occasionally stop in for quasi-confidential talks with the press. "He isn't comfortable with that kind of conversation." People who've known him for years say that Cheney's not one to talk about "deep philosophy." Alan Simpson, the former senator from Wyoming, just laughed when I asked him about it. "Dick Cheney isn't interested in that kind of crap," he said. 3. What he doesn't say LIKE A LOT OF PEOPLE who work on American foreign policy, I spend a fair amount of time at home and abroad talking to foreigners about what we are doing. Some of this is organized by the State Department, which brings foreigners to the U. S. and sends Americans (of many different political points of view) to help foreigners try to understand what the crazy Americans are up to. Since September 11, I've made it my business to do as much of this as I reasonably can. This experience has made me deeply aware of just how angry many of our traditional friends are about American foreign policy in the Bush years. At home it's been more of the same. A few days after September 11, I began getting hysterical e-mails from people who saw the attacks as a plot by powerful corporations and interests to facilitate some kind of a military coup in the United States. It was the kind of sick spew of half-baked conspiracy theories, uninformed speculation, and paranoid fantasy that I remembered, hazily, from the pot smoke of the Vietnam era. As an eighteen-year-old, I had fallen for all kinds of silly theories about American energy companies having designs on the allegedly huge oil deposits off the Vietnamese coast, or the CIA's need for funds that could be obtained only through control of the rich opium routes of the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia. Oh, and Nixon was planning to cancel the elections, and the FBI was secretly building concentration camps to hold the antiwar movement. I've watched as new fantasies have crept steadily toward mainstream discourse. It's not just best-selling books in France saying that Bush was behind September 11. It's an increasingly paranoid tone in American political discourse as more and more people go off the deep end in confusion and bitterness about the Bush administration's war policy. The return of Vietnam-era politics to American foreign policy can only end in disaster from every point of view-especially at a time when the war we are fighting, however ineptly, is a war of survival. We could always come home from Vietnam; we don't have that option in the war against terrorism. The Bush administration's sometimes misleading, sometimes contradictory stories about why it invaded Iraq have accelerated the rapid Vietnamization of American politics. The war in Iraq in my judgment was both necessary and just, but you would never know this from the conflicting, incoherent, and inarticulate justifications that from time to time the administration has produced. Combine the incoherence of the war rationale with the catastrophic failures of policy in the aftermath of the military victory and it is easy to see why so many patriotic people have found themselves sinking into quagmires of conspiracy thinking and why an antiwar movement has grown up so quickly. I frankly would have hoped and expected that Cheney and Rumsfeld, who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, when Vietnam-era bitterness reached its poisonous apogee, would have understood the importance of, as far as they could, preventing or at least slowing the rise of a similar political movement today. An America divided is an America weakened, and we are deeply and painfully divided today. As I traveled into the American heartland to watch Cheney perform on the hustings, I was looking for signs that the administration was coming to grips with its failure to communicate and hoping that by leveling with the people it would begin to restore trust and consensus. At a "town hall" meeting in a convention center in Joplin, Missouri, to which only identified supporters had been invited to ask "questions," Cheney gave as close to a full and comprehensive review of administration war policy as I'd yet heard in public. He started by setting out the state of the world when he and Bush took office. On January 20, 2001, Cheney said, "the planning for the attack of 9/11 was already well under way." The terrorists had been recruited and trained. The money was raised; the attack was planned. The Taliban had turned Afghanistan into a vast safe haven for Al Qaeda and others. Twenty thousand terrorists had already been trained. In Iraq, Cheney charged, Saddam Hussein was also providing a safe haven for terrorists. He was paying $25,000 to families of suicide bombers. In the past, he'd produced and used weapons of mass destruction and had booted the UN inspectors out of his country. A nuclear bazaar was operating out of Pakistan. Muammar Qaddafi was spending "millions of dollars" to get nuclear weapons. Beyond all that, terrorists had come to the conclusion that using force against the United States got results. Going back to Ronald Reagan's withdrawal from Beirut in 1983 after 241 marines died in an attack on their barracks, Cheney ran down a list of attacks on U. S. targets that were met with mild or ineffective responses-or with changes in U. S. policy that suited the goals of the terrorists. That, he argued, was where things were when they took over. Since then, they'd overthrown the Taliban, scattered Al Qaeda, jailed Saddam Hussein, closed down the Pakistani nuclear bazaar, and put Libya out of the nuclear business. Borrowing a phrase Churchill used in World War II, Cheney said that we hadn't reached the beginning of the end, but perhaps were coming to the end of the beginning of the war. Not surprisingly, this worked for the Republican crowd in Missouri. To give him full credit, Cheney spoke without the condescension that creeps into the voices of so many politicians when they speak to a wide audience. The Cheney I saw on the platform in Joplin looked and sounded exactly the same as the one I saw in his private office in the West Wing. In an age of image consultants and hair fluffers, there's a certain discreet charm to a politician who comes across as if he were just sitting in your living room. Cheney has a solidly middle-class background and still looks and sounds like one of the neighbors. He famously drove a beat-up VW Bug while working in the Ford administration; after the defeated Ford left Washington, the story goes, Dick and Lynne Cheney drove the Bug to McDonald's for a hamburger. BUT AS THEY USED TO SAY say about Chinese food, half an hour later you're hungry again. A partisan crowd might lap it up, but there isn't much there for the skeptic or even for the open-minded swing voter. There are some basic and obvious questions that Cheney didn't even try to address: Could we have gained more allies in Iraq if we had moved more slowly and deliberately toward war? If invading Iraq was the right decision, what about the difficulties of the occupation? Should there have been more "boots on the ground" in the beginning to establish security before the insurgency got off the ground? Rather than disbanding the Iraqi army, should we have tried to turn at least some of it into the nucleus of the security forces of the new Iraqi government? And-even assuming its basic policies were right-why was the administration doing such a poor job at winning hearts and minds, not only in France, not only in the Muslim world, but virtually everywhere in the world? And what did Cheney's silence on these topics mean? Had the administration not really thought about these problems or learned anything from its experience in the terror war? In that case, would another four-year mandate mean more of the same? We then got back into the press SUVs for the motorcade out to the airport. Past a scattering of protesters-Halliburton, falling wages, war in Iraq, that sort of thing-we then clambered onto Air Force Two. In Battle Creek, Michigan, and again in Dayton, Ohio, I watched with diminishing hope as Cheney continued to utter slogans-often slogans I agree with-but without performing what I remain naive enough to believe is an essential task of a national leader in wartime: giving the public a serious and thoughtful exposition of the country's policies in a time of great danger. In Battle Creek, the motorcade took us past protesters into the back lot of a local high school, and we walked through the industrial-shop classroom into a gym with bunting and flags-not all that different from a pep rally, except that most of the crowd hadn't seen a high school classroom in twenty years. Cheney came out on the stage and greeted the partisan, cheering crowd. "This is not an enemy we can reason with, or negotiate with, or appease," he said. "This is, to put it simply, an enemy that we must destroy." Applause. "President Bush will never seek a permission slip to defend the United States." The only line that gets more applause than that trope is Cheney's courageous defense of the Pledge of Allegiance: "We believe that our nation is one nation under God, and we believe that Americans ought to be able to say 'under God' when they pledge allegiance to their flag." The next morning in Dayton, Cheney attacked Senator Kerry for proposing that the U. S. should adopt a more "sensitive" war strategy against Al Qaeda. "President Lincoln and General Grant did not wage sensitive warfare," he said. "Nor did President Roosevelt, nor Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur. . . . The men who beheaded Daniel Pearl and Paul Johnson will not be impressed by our sensitivity." The sound bite made the national news that night, and the talking heads tut-tutted over whether this was a fair attack or an unfair attack. In context, the Kerry quote was about being sensitive to our allies and neutral opinion, not going soft on Al Qaeda, but by the time Cheney's through with him, it sounds as if Kerry wants to coddle Al Qaeda the way liberal Democrats used to be accused by Lee Atwater of coddling criminals: Willie Al-Horton. Yet there's a more substantive point as well. Cheney is a military-history buff and is very well read on the U. S. Civil War. Lincoln made a lot of mistakes in that war. There were times when things looked very bleak for the United States. International public opinion was on the side of the South. Enormous scandals rocked the government, analysts and pundits blasted Lincoln's administration, and even his allies sometimes despaired. But Lincoln knew that he had to hold on, to fight the war through thick and thin, to engage the enemy and grind him down with the North's superior numbers and wealth. In Grant he found the general who could fight this kind of warfare: ugly, costly, and at times ruinously unpopular. Cheney sees this kind of persistence as the essential quality of wartime leadership. I don't think he's wrong. Churchill, too, was a leader who saw the essential logic of the fight against Hitler and was willing to follow it wherever it led-to the alliance with Bolshevik Russia, which he hated with every fiber of his being; to the destruction of the British Empire, which he had dedicated his life to preserving; to the very gates of hell. Suppose that the invasion of Iraq was a blunder, goes this quiet, unspoken argument. Yes, the news from Iraq is bad. And yes, it is the Bush administration's fault. Well, Lincoln made one blunder after another. Churchill failed in Norway, failed in France, failed in Yugoslavia, failed in Crete, failed in Singapore. And he won the war. You cannot ask a leader to be infallible or ever-victorious in a real war. You can only ask him to persevere. Lincoln, Churchill, and Grant: I don't think Cheney invokes them just to drop names. These are clues to the kind of world he believes we live in and to the war of survival he believes we must fight. These names are a measure of the stakes he sees, of the risks he will run, the price he will pay, the suffering and damage he is willing to sustain and inflict. But as much as Cheney and Bush might like to compare themselves to Churchill, the real problem isn't that they are excessively Churchillian; it's that they aren't Churchillian enough. Churchill believed that the united will of the British people to fight was the secret weapon that would win the war, and preserving and toughening that united will was the course that he took. His wartime speeches acknowledged defeats and setbacks. Unpleasant facts were frankly stated and faced. He earned the trust of a people at war by voicing their doubts even as he stoked their resolve. Dick Cheney is not going to spellbind like Winston Churchill, nor should he try. But read Grant's memoirs; there is a plainspoken American way of laying out the remorseless logic of necessary war. Scoring rhetorical points against an opponent is okay; reducing complex arguments to sound bites is also okay. But what we see in the administration's communication strategy is tactical brilliance unhinged from any strategic vision of the long-term requirements of the war-just as its conduct of the war on terrorism in the field often seems to be strategically brilliant but tactically weak. In both cases, the result is too often summed up by a phrase that Colin Powell said to me last spring to describe the result of the invasion of Iraq, one that by August had been picked up by the president: catastrophic success. 4. Cheney's Cheney THERE'S A BLUE mountain bike leaning against the desk in Scooter Libby's waiting room; GOP-friendly publications like The Weekly Standard and National Review lie scattered on the tabletops. You can also find an occasional copy of People . As we sit down at Scooter's conference table, I put the tape recorder down and edge it closer as Scooter greets me in a quiet voice, drowned out by the rumble of a nearby air conditioner. Why hasn't the administration been more forthcoming with a fuller and more convincing argument for its policies? I ask. Scooter smiles demurely. I don't know the answer to your question, he says. When nice people like you bother to come talk to small little old insignificant people like me, then we try and make the argument. With the battered air of someone who knows it won't do any good, Scooter then reminds me of all the terrible things that war critics predicted but that didn't happen in Iraq: the siege of Baghdad that was going to turn into a new Battle of Stalingrad with thousands of U. S. combat deaths, the civil war between Kurds and Arabs, the millions of refugees, the collapse of moderate governments around the Arab world, the rush of Shiite Iraqis into the arms of the Iranian mullahs. All of it predicted, none of it happened-but none of it matters now. The failure to find WMD and the president's proclamation of "Mission Accomplished" on the USS Abraham Lincoln have forever marked neocon Iraq policy as a "miscalculation." Outside Scooter's office, a loud drone resolved itself into the whup-whup-whup of a helicopter landing nearby. "I guess the president decided to drop in to see you, Walter," Kellems shouted. But what were the real reasons for going into Iraq? I'd asked a senior administration official. There were two basic reasons, the official said. "One was to be rid of the Saddam Hussein regime, whose defiance of the world community had multiple consequences-not the least of which were very bad consequences for America at the strategic level." The other was containment. Most people who opposed the war argued that containment was working, that, as the phrase went, "Saddam was in his box." "The containment of Saddam, while not as costly in the short term as war, was still a very costly endeavor. It cost money, obviously. But that was a small part of it. "It resulted in large American forces being stationed in Saudi Arabia. It resulted in a very bad message to the world, including to Islamic terrorists, that America and the world could be defied successfully. It advanced the radicalization of certain Saudis and the glorification of Saddam. Every day he succeeded in flouting us was another day in which the message to the Islamic world would be that America could be defied." And the connection between containment and Al Qaeda? I asked. Between our Iraq policy and September 11? The official pointed out fatwas from Osama that cited the effects of sanctions on Iraqi children and the presence of U. S. troops as a sacrilege that justified his jihad. In a real sense, September 11 was part of the cost of containing Saddam. No containment, no U. S. troops in Saudi Arabia. No U. S. troops there, then bin Laden might still be redecorating mosques and boring friends with stories of his mujahideen days in the Khyber Pass. As it was, the administration took what looked like the path of least resistance in making its public case for the war: WMD and intelligence links with Al Qaeda. If the public read too much into those links and thought Saddam had a hand in September 11, so much the better. This must have looked good at the time, but the failure to find WMD and the insurgency in Iraq have brutally exposed the political miscalculation in the administration's strategy. Suppose the administration had taken on the tougher job of laying out the full strategic case for the war: that Saddam's refusal to implement the cease-fire agreement was endangering the United States and its allies, and that the United States would act to enforce full compliance with the cease-fire. Saddam's persistent obstruction and ultimate expulsion of weapons inspectors would be one of the items on the charge sheet, but not the only one. Not everyone in the United States or abroad would have accepted this case or agreed with the president's decision for war if coercive diplomacy failed, but we would clearly be in better shape today if the administration had done more to put the full range of its views on the table. Again, this is the way Winston Churchill would have done it. When the French capitulated to the Germans in 1940, Churchill realized that the French government had broken its pledge to Britain that it would keep its fleet out of German hands. Add France's naval strength to Germany's and Hitler was within striking distance of the naval superiority that would have enabled him to invade Britain. Churchill determined on a preventative attack; French ships could turn themselves over to Britain, sink themselves, or be sunk by the British. Churchill did what he had to do, but he also stated his purpose and his reasoning openly and clearly. He did not hype his case-he didn't fluff up evidence to say that Hitler was an imminent threat to integrate the ships into the German navy. He confined himself to the facts, and the case he made in public was essentially the case he made in the secret deliberations of the war cabinet. As a wartime prime minister, Churchill won and kept the trust of British, allied, and, ultimately, most neutral public opinion during a long and deadly war marked (as all wars must be) by its fair share of failures, blunders, deceptions, and tough moral choices that, judged by the calmer and higher standards of peacetime, looked dubious at best. Bush and Cheney chose another path, and we are all living with the consequences. 5. Tough Town... "FUCKING CRAZIES" is what Secretary of State Colin Powell is said to have called the Cheney camp in a 2002 phone call to Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, as the administration pushed for an early war in Iraq. And while it seems objectively true that neither is likely to be high on the other's Christmas list, Powell has never lost his broad sympathy for much of what the Bush administration has accomplished. "We stopped a friggin' war!" a senior State Department official bellowed into my phone when I asked about what American foreign policy had accomplished in the Bush years-referring to American mediation of the crisis between India and Pakistan, when intelligence analysts (for what that's worth, I'm compelled to add after the Iraq WMD fiasco) thought nuclear war was less than a week away. Officials also run down a list of great powers with whom the Bush administration has enjoyed stable and businesslike relations: China, Russia, India, and Japan. France and Germany aren't on that list-which may say something about how the Bush administration defines "great powers." When Secretary Powell is asked about administration miscalculations in Iraq, he is blunt. "We did the right thing at the right place and the right time," he says about the invasion, but admits that the administration miscalculated the difficulty of achieving its goals in Iraq. The insurgency, he concedes, is not under control, and the Pentagon has been forced to increase troop deployments beyond its original plans. From a State Department point of view, the biggest miscalculation was the failure in postwar Iraq. The State Department had a cadre of experts who worked on a detailed plan for the occupation, but the White House was steadfast. Nobody who wasn't what one official called a "true believer," nobody who wouldn't drink the Kool-Aid that Ahmad Chalabi was serving up, was allowed to play a major role in the postwar planning. This meant that, among other things, the Coalition Provisional Authority had a weak plan and a thin team when it woke up one morning as the government of Iraq. I saw this myself in Amman, Jordan, last spring, when I spent the evening with a group of CPA officials-young, bright, and in jobs way too big for them. Kids fresh out of grad school who, if they were in Washington, would be interning and making copies were running major programs for a country whose history they knew nothing about and whose language they didn't speak. The CPA did not remake Iraq. The State Department official I spoke with notes with some satisfaction that Iraq policy is now back in the hands of the institutions and bureaucracies that, whatever their faults, have the resources to plan and administer large-scale efforts. Interestingly, the one question about Cheney to which I could never get a clear answer was whether he had a direct role in supporting Chalabi-the now-discredited figure whom neoconservatives had plugged for years as the answer to America's question of who could and should replace Saddam. "Since Chalabi lost some of his luster, it's amazing how many people really never met him," the State Department official says. "Well, maybe once or twice. He's been airbrushed out of a lot of pictures. I know. Tough town, my friend." OF COURSE, listening to the State Department has not always been the best way to predict what the Bush administration will do. I decide to go find out what the rest of the war Cabinet thinks about lessons learned and what they can mean for the future. There's nobody better to start with than Paul Wolfowitz, former protigi of Dick Cheney, former boss of Scooter Libby, and currently serving as deputy secretary of defense in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. Wolfowitz is probably the most hated person I've ever met. In much of the Arab world, he's so symbolic of what many see as the Jewish control of American foreign policy that I've taken to using him in my lectures there. I point out that George Soros has been identified by former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad as the leader of the worldwide Jewish plot to keep Muslims down. And Paul Wolfowitz, I tell my Arab audiences, is of course widely seen as the Jewish evil genius behind Bush-administration policy in the Middle East. And yet George Soros is so angry with Paul Wolfowitz's foreign policy that he's spending millions of dollars to drive Bush, and therefore Wolfowitz, out of office. So even if we imagine that America is run by the Jews, there are at least two Jewish conspiracies. I don't know what's more frightening: that in the year 2004 we have to use arguments like this at all; that in most of the places where I've given this talk, the idea that American Jews aren't an organized, controlling bloc with a single agenda is new; that many of the people who think American foreign policy is a Jewish plot are professional diplomats; or that I'm starting to have to make some of these points to European as well as Arab audiences. In person, Wolfowitz is a perfectly calm and friendly guy. He looks and sounds much more like a kindly professor of international relations than an evil genius heading a Jewish clique determined to plunge the world into misery and destruction. Wolfowitz has bent under these blows, but he's still unbowed. "I've still got the scars," he says of the negative press coverage he's received as the insurgency has gained strength. But he's still hopeful "that eight months from now, a year from now, you have a situation in Iraq where Iraqis have largely taken charge." When I ask him about where the administration is headed, he goes back to the late 1940s and to Democrats like George Marshall and Dean Acheson who laid the foundations of what became the bipartisan consensus for the cold war. He reminds me that Acheson decided to be "clearer than truth" in explaining the communist menace to the American people and points out that this era, which we now think of as characterized by bipartisan consensus, was actually a bitter and divisive time-featuring Joe McCarthy, for one thing. But it's clear enough that Wolfowitz, widely regarded as the scariest neocon this side of Richard Perle, is spending real time thinking about consensus building in foreign policy. That was not a prominent neoconservative theme before Iraq. When Wolfowitz looks ahead to a Bush second term, he sees a return to the Middle East peace process. "We were on the verge, I think, last May, with that Sharm al-Sheikh meeting, of really starting to make some breakthroughs . . . and you could almost feel it slipping away as the situation in Iraq got more difficult." Even as this reminds me how expensive the war has been, it's reassuring. Serious moves by the Bush administration on the Arab-Israeli front would do more than any other single step to rebuild relations in Europe and in parts of the Middle East. I take advantage of my time with Wolfowitz to learn more about Cheney. Wolfowitz had worked for Cheney in the Defense Department back under Bush 41. And unlike Cheney, "Wolfie," as he's affectionately known, is comfortable having conversations on the dreaded worldview question. So I ask him: Is Cheney a neocon? It's a question that's debated in Washington, as the war in Iraq is seen as a brainchild of the neocons. Wolfowitz thinks for a minute. "No," he says. "Cheney can't be a neocon. He isn't Jewish." There's an interesting subtext to this line. The rap about Jewish intellectuals in Wasp circles a generation or so ago was that Jews were bright but "too ideological." They allegedly valued theory over practice, consistency over efficiency. They took good ideas and carried them "too far"; they learned their statesmanship from books and professors rather than at their grandfathers' knees. There's a whiff of that old fault line in the Bush administration today; especially after Iraq, you can sense a recoil from following the full neocon logic to its furthest and hardest conclusions. Seriously, though, I say to Wolfowitz. Is Cheney a neocon? Again, Wolfowitz thinks. "Not really," he says finally, "though he has moved in that direction." I would get almost exactly the same answer from William Kristol, neocon editor of The Weekly Standard . For both Kristol and Wolfowitz, Cheney is at heart a realist. That is, Cheney is more concerned about things like the national interest than abstract ideas like democracy. Spreading democracy might be good in itself, and it might also be good for American power, but Cheney was more likely to start from the position of wanting to defend and advance American power than wanting to defend and advance democracy worldwide. Cheney is a realist, and the neocons themselves are feeling a little chastened. Rebuilding a domestic consensus and reviving the peace process stand high on Wolfowitz's agenda. This is progress. NEXT ON MY LIST comes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the man who brought Dick Cheney into government in 1969. Rumsfeld, too, seems to be singing out of the multilateral hymnbook these days. "There are an awful lot of things the United States can't do alone that we simply have to have the cooperation of other countries on," he tells me. The Defense Department is engaged in a review of post-hostility efforts, and Rumsfeld says it is clear that successful post-hostility policy "requires all elements of government cooperating." This was not DOD policy in the Chalabi era. And when it comes to questions of grand strategy in the war on terrorism, Rumsfeld again sounds very much in the American mainstream. Pet conservative causes of the 1990s, such as abolishing the United States Information Agency and substantially downgrading our efforts in public diplomacy, now look like mistakes to him. Rumsfeld wants to revive the USIA to make America's case more effectively abroad. And like Wolfowitz, like Libby, like Powell, Rumsfeld these days is looking back to the early years of the cold war for how to develop strategies and political support for a long struggle in which ideology could count as much as military strength. In the Pentagon these days, this war is looking more like the cold war than like World War II. Rumsfeld makes a point about Cheney's conservatism. "I don't know that he's that conservative," he says. "I never thought of him as being particularly conservative. He's kind of a western Republican. His views and his positions are more rooted in understanding our country and the people of our country than in any theoretical underpinning." So: the Pentagon has gone soft and the war Cabinet is retreating to the center? Not quite. On the need for preemptive war, Rumsfeld isn't giving an inch. What about the fact that our intelligence was faulty in Iraq? I ask. Does that mean we need to hold back on the use of force? Not at all, Rumsfeld says. The combination of unreliable intelligence and the danger of WMD could lower, not raise, the threshold for preemptive war. "If someone is threatening you with a snowball," Rumsfeld says, "you can afford to think he won't throw it and take the hit if you're wrong. No great loss. "But if you start thinking about the potential of biological weapons, if you take the hit, you could affect tens of thousands of people, and you could have that run down through another generation or two." As Cheney might put it, at some point you have to do the cautious and prudent thing. THERE ARE SOME who look at these facts and hope that the Cheney Revolution in American foreign policy has burned itself out-that the neocons had their tail feathers scorched in Iraq and won't be flying so high in the future. Cheneyism was tried, and it failed. W.'s second term will look more like his father's first. That's not how I read it. Cheneyism as an approach to post-cold-war American foreign policy was first articulated in a 1992 draft of a national-defense review paper that shocked many readers in the U. S. and abroad with a call for the U. S. to deter other countries, even its allies, from ever challenging American military supremacy. The outcry was so great that the paper was disavowed and a sanitized version appeared in the waning days of the first Bush administration. The famous National Security Strategy document of 2002 is a direct intellectual descendent of that earlier paper. That document contains both sides of Cheney's agenda: unchallengeable and untrammeled American strength-including preemptive war-and the kinder, gentler words about cooperating with allies and working in multilateral institutions. The confusion and tension between the traditional and radical elements in Cheneyism reflect the confusion and tension most Americans feel as we look at the war on terrorism. On the one hand, we know that we need the help of others to defeat this enemy, and that we somehow need to win over the hearts and minds of the Muslim world, especially, to stop the growth of terrorist ideology. On the other hand, we want the president to take any military steps necessary to protect us from our enemies-and we don't rule out anything against people who want to use dirty bombs or biological weapons in our cities. We want to be loved-but 64 percent of us are willing to use torture in some cases if that's what it takes. This tension in Cheney's worldview is our tension. If Cheneyism doesn't cohere, it is because we live in an incoherent time. 6. The Cheney Era BRENT SCOWCROFT, who was George Herbert Walker Bush's national-security advisor, told me a story about the vice-president that reminded me just how unlikely this Cheney era has been. We all remember that in 2000 Cheney was asked to pick the perfect running mate for Governor Bush. An elder-statesman role. And of course we all know that after his exhaustive search, Cheney said, Governor, I have found him, and he is me. Scowcroft says that when Cheney joined Halliburton in the nineties, he thought he was leaving public life for good. "I'm convinced he made a strategic decision," Scowcroft says. "He turned his back on government, and he decided he was in a new career. I saw him at a panel discussion held at the Bush Library in the late nineties. It was crystal clear that he wasn't following foreign policy closely. He had turned his sights to a different career and thrown himself into it, and I don't think he had any intention when Bush asked him to look for a vice-presidential candidate to end up with the job." Now, no American vice-president has ever had anything like Cheney's power, and no one in the government knows as much about American foreign policy and how it is made as Cheney does. For an accidental vice-president, Cheney's behavior has been radical and his impact profound. And yet, as I watch him fielding questions from the daily press in a swirl of aides, he's the calmest man in the room. The vice-president is in a back room at a convention center in Dayton, Ohio, where he's just finished delivering a slashing attack on John Kerry. The speech was vintage Cheney: defining the differences between the tough leadership and clear stands that the country needs and the indecisive waffling of his despicable opponents. Nuance is just a fancy French word for flip-flop. And as for the war in Iraq: The danger from Saddam's WMD program and his ties to Al Qaeda left us no choice. Cheney has been criticized over and over by the national press for this defense of the Iraq war-especially the links to Al Qaeda, which neither the 9/11 Commission nor anyone else thinks are as strong as Cheney insists they are. But he's got his story and he's sticking to it. And as he sits next to his wife at a small table in a room crowded with staffers and daughter Liz carrying her four-week-old baby in a basket, he looks somewhat vital. The cast-iron certainty has been that a second term would be the end for him, but as we now know, this man is capable of upending cast-iron certainties by the score. Let Bush win in November and by, say, 2006, Cheney might start to think that his stented heart is feeling better, and maybe he's ready for the big job. The urgency of the task facing America as he sees it is not likely to lessen in four years, and who better to carry on the work than the man who has been the principal author for the entire post-9/11 era? After all, he is only three years older than John Kerry. Bush might give him the dedazo , as the Mexicans call the blessing a retiring president gives the designated heir. Members of the Bush family are mindful that the country might not be dynastically inclined, thus freezing brother Jeb out in 2008. A caretaker Cheney presidency, goes this thinking, would keep the seat warm for Jeb and prevent somebody else from remaking the Republican party in the meantime. As he finished his speech, I realized that he made no reference to the dramatic military events of the day, with U. S. forces on the brink of assaulting the holiest shrine in Shiite Islam during its confrontation with the Mahdi militia. It was stunning. Clearly the campaign is moving down a scripted and predetermined path, and responding to the uncertainty and concern many Americans feel in response to historic events in the war isn't part of the script. The look crossing the vice-president's face spoke loudly: This is a campaign rally. Who in his right mind would bring bad news to these good people? And so as my time with the war Cabinet comes to an end, I'm afraid that they've missed the most important lesson of all. "Never, never, never," Winston Churchill once wrote, "believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events." Those who take a democracy to war must build the kind of support that can see them through the setbacks and disasters that must inevitably come. If it's your war, you must embrace it, good and bad. And you owe it to the people to explain yourself. This the Bush administration has not yet learned to do, and the consequences could be severe. Meanwhile, a few feet away, Vice-President Cheney speaks in the flat calm that is his authority. And we are put at ease. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: Osama's makeover
by Major Variola (ret) 31 Oct '04

31 Oct '04

At 12:03 PM 10/31/04 -0800, Bill Stewart wrote: >At 08:23 PM 10/30/2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: >>And did you see the wire up his back and the earpiece? >> >>Or maybe its hard to get good tailors in Pakistan. > >Nah - he's allowed to use a Teleprompter, >unlike Bush and Kerry at the debate-o-mercials. > >And unlike Bush, he can actually read. C'mon Bill, that's not fair. Even Osama commented on how Bush was making good progress on that book about the goats in the school on 9/11. How W didn't even want to put it down, he enjoyed it so much. His fine reading skills even got shown in Fahrenheight 911, along with some amusing footage of his handlers, and that's a documentary, so it must be true.

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Osama's makeover
by Major Variola (ret) 31 Oct '04

31 Oct '04

At 05:23 PM 10/30/04 -0700, John Young wrote: >Which returns to the Osama make-over. His nose looks >much bigger, longer and wider, eyes closer together. The >sage-of-the-desert color combination of his face and hands, >beard, robe, hat and backdrop look as if it was shot in >New Mexico, or maybe Israel pretending Lawrence of >Arabia remake. And did you see the wire up his back and the earpiece? Or maybe its hard to get good tailors in Pakistan.

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RE: Osama's makeover
by Tyler Durden 31 Oct '04

31 Oct '04

Yeah...wasn't there an X-Files that was similar? I remember someone picking up a photo of Sadam Hussein and the TLA-dude saying, "Him? He was a truck driver in Detroit we found." Perhaps the reason Bush hasn't 'caught' bin Laden yet is because he thinks he (ie, Bush) will win the election. He does have Florida locked up... -TD >From: "Major Variola (ret)" <mv(a)cdc.gov> >To: "cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net" <cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net> >Subject: Osama's makeover >Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 21:23:19 -0700 > >At 05:23 PM 10/30/04 -0700, John Young wrote: > > >Which returns to the Osama make-over. His nose looks > >much bigger, longer and wider, eyes closer together. The > >sage-of-the-desert color combination of his face and hands, > >beard, robe, hat and backdrop look as if it was shot in > >New Mexico, or maybe Israel pretending Lawrence of > >Arabia remake. > >And did you see the wire up his back and the earpiece? > >Or maybe its hard to get good tailors in Pakistan. _________________________________________________________________ FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar get it now! http://toolbar.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200415ave/direct/01/

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Need for Draft Is Dismissed by Officials at Pentagon
by R.A. Hettinga 31 Oct '04

31 Oct '04

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/politics/31draft1.html?pagewanted=print&p…> The New York Times October 31, 2004 Need for Draft Is Dismissed by Officials at Pentagon By THOM SHANKER ASHINGTON, Oct. 30 - Rumors of a secret plan to reinstate the draft are churning across the Internet, worrying some in Congress and even coloring the presidential campaign, but senior Pentagon personnel officials and Army officers insist that there is no need for a draft - and that they do not want one, either. To counter public fears that conscription is returning, these officials produced internal studies to illustrate the economic and demographic reasons why a draft is not necessary, and why it would be a step backward for the quality of the current all-volunteer force. Army and Pentagon officials hope that efforts under way to reorganize the service to form at least 43 combat brigades from today's 33 will create additional deployable units and alleviate the stress on the Army. And as both the Air Force and Navy shrink their personnel rosters, some of those departing personnel are being courted by the Army in a program that also serves as antidote to the draft. If a decision is made that the American military should grow, then the Pentagon could ask Congress to finance a permanent expansion in personnel, including enough money to attract recruits and retain those in uniform without undercutting accounts for operations and weapons systems. Officials note that Congressional proposals for expanding the military, mostly in the range of 30,000 to 40,000 more troops, would hardly require a new draft to force conscripts from across the approximately two-million-strong cohort of current 18-year-old Americans. In fact, the demographics of America are cited by Pentagon officials as a major reason why the draft makes no sense today. The Pentagon's top personnel officer, David S. C. Chu, said the size of today's military - 1.4 million in the active component, and 1.2 million in the National Guard and Reserve - is a much smaller percentage of a much larger pool of possible recruits than the United States faced during World War II and into the 1950's. And since the military could not possibly absorb all the 18-year-olds in the population should a draft be reinstated, there is little doubt that a system of deferrals would be established that, just as in the Vietnam era, could create a caste-like system separating the privileged of America from the others. "What do you do when not all need to be called and only a few are chosen?" said Mr. Chu, who is under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness. "It becomes a question of fairness." Today's high-technology military also benefits from personnel who are committed to staying in the service for several years, allowing the armed services to reap full benefit from their costly training. During the draft, soldiers were required to stay in the service for only two years. But Pentagon studies show that current recruits need one to three years to reach full competency in combat or support skills. A study by Mr. Chu's office makes that point in arguing against reinstating a draft that was allowed to lapse on July 1, 1973. "Draftees quit early; volunteers stay - so today's midgrade and senior noncommissioned officers are well experienced," said the study, written by Bill Carr, deputy under secretary for military personnel policy. "During the most recent draft, 90 percent of conscripts quit after their initial two-year hitch, whereas retention of volunteers is five times better - about half remain after their initial (normally four-year) military service obligation," said the study, which was published in the spring 2004 edition of "World Defense Systems," a military journal. Those statistics may not be persuasive to those who believe the United States is poised for a broader array of offensive military operations against other adversaries that would require a draft, nor to those who feel that a program of required national service would benefit the nation and America's 18-year-olds. But senior officers stress that the all-volunteer military is also more competent, better educated and more disciplined than in the final years of the draft. "I served in the draftee Army," said Gen. Richard A. Cody, who is now vice chief of staff for the Army, the service most under stress from worldwide deployments. "Those soldiers were just as loyal as today," he said. "But it was like Forrest Gump. You know, 'Life is like a box of chocolates.' With conscripts, you never know what you're going to get." General Cody said the strain to meet current global commitments cannot be minimized - nor the strain to meet recruiting goals. But he said the young men and women who signed up today were of a higher quality than any he had seen in 29 years of command. "I don't have rose-colored glasses on," General Cody said. "But we don't need the draft and we don't want the draft. There are plenty of Americans who still want to be in the military." Perhaps the most often-cited reason for opposition to a draft is the motivation of the all-volunteer force. "The most important thing about a draft is that the people you draft, by definition, don't all want to be there," Mr. Chu said. "The great strength of the volunteer force is the ranks of people who all made a positive, voluntary decision that this is what they want to do." The current American military "is also smarter than the general population" from which conscripts would be drawn, according to the study by Mr. Chu's office. "Over 90 percent of new recruits have a high school diploma, while only 75 percent of the American youth do; 67 percent score in the upper half of the enlistment (math/verbal aptitude) test," it stated. "These attributes translate to lower attrition, faster training and higher performance," it concluded. Mr. Chu said that studies of the military also showed that the all-volunteer force had fewer disciplinary problems than a draftee service. "All that comes together in the performance of the force in the field, which is the ultimate test," Mr. Chu said. "How does this force fight? How well does it carry out the nation's objectives? How disciplined is it in the face of challenges? I don't think anyone can look at the events of the three-plus years since 9/11 and not see the payoff in the volunteer force." Copyrigh -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Check This Out
by R.A. Hettinga 31 Oct '04

31 Oct '04

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/opinion/01mon2.html?th=&pagewanted=print&…> The New York Times October 31, 2004 EDITORIAL Check This Out Never content to pass savings along to customers, banks - with a little help from their friends in Congress - are again poised to turn a basic service into a profit center. Last week, federal law began allowing banks greater latitude to process checks electronically, reducing to minutes or hours the time it takes for the money to be deducted from a check writer's account. But there is no change in the length of time that banks can hold deposited checks before making the funds available - up to two days for local checks, five days for nonlocal checks and 11 days for checks over $5,000. So in addition to saving an estimated $2 billion a year in paper processing costs, the banks will make loads of money on the float. And not just from that. By processing checks faster while placing holds on deposits, banks are increasing the chances of bouncing a check. As banks start using the new procedures, unsuspecting consumers will bounce an estimated seven million more checks a month and pay an additional $170 million in monthly bounced-check fees. Worse yet, to promptly correct problems that may arise from electronic processing, such as double payment of a single check or payment in the wrong amount, the new rules require a customer to present a copy of the check's electronic image, known as a "substitute check." There's nothing to prevent a bank from charging a fee for providing the copy. Groups like Consumers Union and the Consumer Federation of America have come out strongly against the law's lack of customer protection. The banks should listen. At the least, banks that use the new electronic procedures should adopt a no-hold policy for deposits by customers with problem-free accounts. If the banks do not change their policies, the Federal Reserve should force them to by changing the rules on fund availability. We would also like to see a major bank step up and pledge to re-credit accounts within 10 days of a customer's reporting an error, without the need for a substitute check. That would, in effect, extend the same protection to electronically processed checks that debit cards enjoy, as well as set a standard of customer service for other banks to match. Banks do not have to gouge their customers just because the law permits it. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Uk.gov database 'rationalisation', the ID scheme way
by R.A. Hettinga 31 Oct '04

31 Oct '04

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/29/id_scheme_eats_cip/print.html> The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT The Register ; Internet and Law ; Digital Rights/Digital Wrongs ; Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/29/id_scheme_eats_cip/ Uk.gov database 'rationalisation', the ID scheme way By John Lettice (john.lettice at theregister.co.uk) Published Friday 29th October 2004 17:01 GMT Among the Home Office "concessions" on ID cards hailed (with quite remarkable promptness) this week by Home Affairs Committee chairman John Denham MP (Lab) was "the rationalisation of current database proposals and the dropping of the Citizen Information Project." Denham appears however to have been in error in cheering the demise of the CIP on behalf of his Committee, for just 24 hours later Treasury Chief Secretary Paul Boateng issued a written statement to Parliament indicating the CIP is actually being reworked to use the national ID register. Or vice versa? According to Boateng's statement: "The CIP team has investigated the costs and benefits of a range of potential options for delivering a population register. It has recommended that proposals for a national identity register (NIR), as part of the Government's proposals for ID cards, mean that if ID cards were to become compulsory then it may be more cost effective to deliver these benefits through the NIR, rather than develop a separate register. The Government has accepted this recommendation." The CIP has been going through the works via the Office of National Statistics (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/08/05/uk_birth_certificates_to_morph/) as a sort of cuddlier cousin to the ID scheme. The modernisation of births, marriages, deaths and the like led government thoughts to turn to what kind of additional related services could be offered to the citizen, with these ideas being fairly neatly encapsulated in the concept of the "through life record". As the white paper Civil Registration: Vital Change tells us "the creation of a central database of registration records provides the opportunity to make improvements..." Which is all well and good until alongside this particular register of names addresses and sundry details about the population there arrives another register with, as the Home Affairs Committee report put it, "a very large degree of overlap". In its response on Wednesday the Home Office did not say 'dropping' - it did say: "The Government believes that the NIR has the longer term potential to fulfil some of the functions envisaged for the national population register. In the light of developments to the NIR, CIP is no longer actively exploring options to improve the quality and effectiveness of existing registers, including the possible use of personal reference numbers." So the CIP is no longer developing its own population register as the electronic implementation of births, marriages and deaths, and the National Identity Register becomes that population register, with the CIP going ahead, but now hinging on the NIR. Which you might view as more of an expansion of the ID scheme than a concession, as such. Alongside the specific CIP complaint, Home Affairs expressed its concern over the growing number of government databases in general. "We believe that the Government must tackle this proliferation of databases, examining in each case whether the number, identifier or database is needed, what its relationship to other existing or planned databases, how data will be shared or verified and other relevant issues. For this action to be effective, it must be co-ordinated at the highest levels of the Civil Service... an identity card should enable access to all Government databases, so that there would be no need for more than one government-issued card." In its response the Home Office appears to indicate that the CIP-NIR approach could present a model for other services, saying "we believe that the identity card will provide an opportunity for more joined up Government by providing a consistent and standard business key for future systems evolution." Which represents a strengthening rather than a weakening of the ID scheme. Here however the Committee was effectively arguing for a strengthening, and as David Blunkett envisages the ID card and register as becoming the key to everything, this is precisely the kind of "concession" he wants to make. It does rationalise (as Denham put it) current government database proposals in the sense that it makes them dependent on the NIR. The databases themselves will continue to proliferate though. It's possible that shoehorning CIP functionality into the ID scheme may cause some delay to the ID scheme bill itself. Spy Blog points out (http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/archives/000482.html) that if the CIP stage 2 feasibility study plans aren't to come (as Boateng said) before Ministers until June 2005, they might knock the ID bill back beyond the next election. It's possible the CIP study might be accelerated, but Gordon Brown's Treasury might on the other hand not view it as a top priority. Or worse. Spy also notes that the change will mean incorporating children under 16 in the NIR, and raises the issue of the Children's Bill. This sets up another universal database, of children this time, and will operate with a number of other databases, including the NHS one and Connexions. In its Home Affairs response the Home Office said that the "National Programme for IT (NPfIT) is putting into place an infrastructure of card readers across the NHS, which will facilitate the checking of cards" and that in the case of the Connexions card readers, which are issued free to schools and colleges, there may be "cost savings to be realised for identity cards by exploiting the existing infrastructure." So some more opportunities for rationalisation here, no doubt. . Related stories Blunkett sets out store on compulsory ID cards (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/27/blunkett_hac_response/) Everything you never wanted to know about the UK ID card (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/05/complete_idcard_guide/) Blunkett poised to open ID scheme offensive tomorrow (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/26/blunkett_prepares_hac_response/) Home Office seeks spin doctor to sell cuddly ID card brand (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/13/id_marketeer_sought/) UK ID cards to be issued with first biometric passports (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/11/new_passport_equals_new_id_card/) Biometric gear to be deployed in hospitals and GPs' surgeries (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/29/blear_confirms_nhs_biometrics/) UK gov pilots passenger tracking in fight against terror (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/29/project_semaphore/) Tag, track, watch, analyse - UK goes mad on crime and terror IT (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/20/home_office_strategic_plan/) ) Copyright 2004 -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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RFID in Passports Could Lead to Identity Theft
by R.A. Hettinga 31 Oct '04

31 Oct '04

<http://www.crmbuyer.com/story/RFID-in-Passports-Could-Lead-to-Identity-Thef…> CRM Buyer THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE FOR CRM SYSTEM PURCHASERS RFID in Passports Could Lead to Identity Theft By John Jerney The Yomiuri Shimbun 10/31/04 5:00 AM PT Privacy advocates, by and large, are not against the idea of using a chip in identity documents to store additional information. But many are asking about the wisdom of including information that can be read remotely, without the document holder being aware. Personal privacy is fast becoming a thing of the past. And helping secure its demise is a technology called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). I wrote about RFID systems a few months ago, at which time I proposed a scenario in which these diminutive devices begin to appear in all sorts of objects, ranging from currency, postal mail, and even our shoes and clothing. RFID systems typically consist of a small tag containing a microprocessor, a small amount of memory, and an antenna. An RFID device communicates with an external system using radio waves. These external systems can then, in turn, be connected to networks of computers, enabling rather sophisticated information processing of the collected data. The core application of RFID systems is to enable the tracking of objects and people. The beef industry, for example, was an early adopter of RFID technology, using it to monitor the movement of cattle from grazing to slaughter. Governments also are planning to use RFID, in this case to monitor the movement of people by embedding RFID technology into our principal systems of identification. Embedding in Passports The most recent news on this front came from the U.S. State Department, which revealed that it would begin including RFID devices into all new passports starting around the middle of next year. The State Department says the idea is to make passports more difficult to forge, and to ensure that the bearer of the document matches the identification. This means that each RFID device, in each passport, will contain at least the name, address, and birthplace of the holder, along with a digital photo. The first set of devices, equipped with 64 kilobyte, of memory, will likely be capable of storing additional information, as required. Immigration and border officials will no longer need to physically swipe the document through a reader. Instead, since the RFID device uses radio waves to communicate, the passport only needs to come within reasonable proximity of a listening device in order for the information to be read. And herein lies the chief problem, as identified by privacy advocates. Without requiring the passport to be physically handled in order to retrieve information, just about anyone will be able to read your passport contents, remotely, and without your knowledge. It all seems like a massive recipe for disaster. Abuse Opportunities Encryption could help the situation, slightly, but none of the data stored on the RFID device in the proposed new U.S. passport will be scrambled, either on the device itself or as it passes through the air. Instead, the device will communicate a special digital signature identifying it as an official government document. Imagine the possibilities for abuse. As you walk through the main door, hotels will immediately be able to determine your name, nationality, and place of birth, beginning the profiling of guests even before reaching the counter. Sophisticated thieves, or even those less clever but with a few dollars to spare on an RFID reader, will be able to comb crowds of people, searching for individuals of a specific nationality or, by extension, those of a particular religion. Identity theft will become orders of magnitude easier, and stalkers at overseas shops and boutiques will be able to quickly collect personal information on targets of interest. Remote Access Concerns Privacy advocates, by and large, are not against the idea of using a chip in identity documents to store additional information. But many are asking about the wisdom of including information that can be read remotely, without the document holder being aware. Proponents of the new technology and security-minded individuals point out that the RFID devices proposed for use in U.S. passports will be passive, meaning without a self-contained power source, thereby restricting the range through which information can be transmitted. But that hardly addresses cases where people are either forced to pass close to a reader, as when they are walking through a doorway to enter a building, or when a reader is unknowingly brought close to them, as an identity thief or stalker might do. Once collected, the information can easily be processed and correlated using any of a number of commercially available databases. The best-case scenario is that enterprises will use this unknowingly mined information to sell you additional services, based on existing marketing and behavioral profiles. More sinister scenarios could easily involve confidence schemes or other serious trickery. With the inclusion of RFID in passports, governments could turn to using the system as a means of monitoring not only entry and exit, but also movements within a country. Our Vulnerabilities Increase Today, so-called FastPass systems that enable motorists to speed through tollbooths on highways and bridges are also being used in certain metropolitan areas to monitor traffic patterns and automobile use, far from the bridge or highway. Few motorists are aware of this additional use of an otherwise helpful RFID system. Interestingly, it's not really clear to me that the inclusion of RFID devices will make passports that much harder to forge. The information on each chip will remain unencrypted, making it straightforward to reverse engineer. In fact, as is often the case, our reliance and belief in advanced technology may make us even more vulnerable to deception. Put another way, the more we believe that technology is the answer to personal and national security, the more we leave ourselves open to being fooled when those systems are inevitably compromised. Adding RFID technology to passports, and making the information available unencrypted to anyone with a simple reader seems like folly on both sides of the technology equation. It's highly unlikely that it will contribute to our safety and security in any meaningful way, and may instead open us to a new type of criminal, well versed in the simple uses of high technology and ready to pounce on unsuspecting travelers. All you can ask is, what were they thinking? -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: Winning still matters, etc...
by Major Variola (ret) 31 Oct '04

31 Oct '04

At 05:09 PM 10/30/04 -0400, R.A. Hettinga wrote: >The terrorists cannot win either a conventional or an asymmetrical war >against the United States, should it bring its full array of assets to the >struggle. The large pit of smoldering radioactive glass is probably not an option.. >The improvised explosive device is a metaphor for our time. The killers >cannot even make the artillery shells or the timers that detonate the >bombs, but like parasites they use Western or Western-designed weaponry to >harvest Westerners. The "cannot even make" is patently offensive; why do nitration when what you need is around? And how many Americans could wire a Casio or Nokia to a det cap on their own? They cannot blow up enough Abrams tanks or even Humvees >to alter the battlefield landscape. Obviously the US mil industrial machine is not the weak link. But what they can accomplish is to maim >or kill a few hundred Westerners in hopes that our own media will magnify >the trauma and savagery of their attack - and do so often enough to make >300 million of us become exhausted with the entire "mess." Say 10 years from now, the dead marine count is in the high 5 figures, (perhaps they are drafted), there's more snuff-videos than porn on the web, the US *will* give up and leave, and the Jihad LLC will have won. 10 years, 20 years, whatever. Persistance works. And the martyrs enjoy the virgins, at best the infidels play harps and fly around the clouds, yawn. I'll see your IED and raise you Brittney's belly-button.

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Winning still matters, etc...
by R.A. Hettinga 30 Oct '04

30 Oct '04

At 1:36 PM -0700 10/30/04, Bill Stewart wrote: >RAH about it being a >_geodesic_ neo-{Khan, con-men} empire Okay. Enough pissing in the wind. Time for a Turd Sandwich... Cheers, RAH -------- <http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/hanson/hanson200410…> The National Review October 29, 2004, 8:25 a.m. The Power of Will Winning still matters. Victor Davis Hanson The terrorists cannot win either a conventional or an asymmetrical war against the United States, should it bring its full array of assets to the struggle. Indeed, the Middle East, for all its revenue from inflated oil prices, has a smaller economy than Spain's. It has never won a war against a Western power. Arab nations lost in 1967, 1973, 1991, and 2004. Hence the fatwas must go back to millennia-old glories about Saladin, the siege of Cyprus, the Moors, and the Caliphate - about the last examples of Islamic victories over the West. The Middle East's only successes in 1956, or during the 1980s in Afghanistan, were due to either a United States' veto of British operations or the importation of American stinger missiles. The Iranian hostage crisis, Lebanon, and Mogadishu were Western retreats, not battlefield defeats - grievous, yes, but hardly arbiters of relative military advantage. The present terrorists are a nasty sort, but they are still not the SS or millions of Tojo's crack Japanese troops; nor do they have the organization or the skill of the Vietcong or NVA. These are losing hundreds of jihadists every week in Iraq and have failed to retake Afghanistan. So why do the now-surrounded and desperate insurgents in Fallujah think they can prevail, especially after the rout of the Taliban in six weeks and the implementation of a consensual government in less than three years in Afghanistan? In a word, the jihadists and their fellow-travelers are once again convinced that this time it will be different because the West, and the United States in particular, have neither the patience nor the will to endure their primeval killing of a post-Saddam Iraq. Beheadings, suicide bombings, mass executions, and improvised explosive devices are not intended to destroy or even defeat the U.S. military. Rather, they are aimed at the taxpaying citizens back home who fuel it. In a globalized world of instant communications, a bin Laden or Zarqawi trusts that most of us would prefer to take out the garbage than watch a blood-curdling video clip of yet another Western hostage kneeling before a half-dozen psychopaths as they begin to saw off his vertebrae. They hope that we the sickened ask, "Why waste our billions and hundreds of lives on such primordial folk?" - wrongly equating 26 million who wish freedom with a few thousand criminals and terrorists. The improvised explosive device is a metaphor for our time. The killers cannot even make the artillery shells or the timers that detonate the bombs, but like parasites they use Western or Western-designed weaponry to harvest Westerners. They cannot blow up enough Abrams tanks or even Humvees to alter the battlefield landscape. But what they can accomplish is to maim or kill a few hundred Westerners in hopes that our own media will magnify the trauma and savagery of their attack - and do so often enough to make 300 million of us become exhausted with the entire "mess." The message of Arabic television is that the Iraqis are supposed to blame us, not their brethren who are killing them, for the carnage. Not our power, but our will, is the target. Al Qaeda and their appendages in Iraq do not know the requisite numbers of dead or wounded Americans necessary to break the resolve of the United States, but brag that with 1,000 fatalities they are nearing their goal - and thus a few more will give them a change of administration, schedules for withdrawal, an abandoned interim Iraqi government ripe to pluck, and a Lebanon-like paradise to reconstruct the lost sanctuary of Afghanistan. In other words, they are desperate for a reprieve from their looming destruction. Al Qaeda - "the Base" - without a base is not much of a terrorist organization since its own proud appellation has become an ironic joke. Despite the three-week victory over the Baathists, there is some reason for the Islamists' optimism that they can break our will - given a decade of nonchalance after the first World Trade Center attack, the Khobar towers, the USS Cole, and an assortment of other unanswered murders in the 1990s. The April withdrawal from Fallujah - whether due to worry about Iraqi civilian or our own casualties - was a grievous blow. The Spanish debacle was an even worse Western defeat. Killing about 200 Spaniards got a Socialist and anti-American prime minister elected and an almost-immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq - even though such appeasement was met not with thanks but with a subsequent attempt to blow up the judges of the Spanish High Court. Meanwhile, here at home, John Kerry talks about timetables for departure and cessation of the present course. His supporters on the extreme left from George Soros to Michael Moore blame George Bush, not Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, for the current televised butchery. There is a reason why candidate Kerry now painfully insists that he would not precipitously withdraw - because everyone else worldwide, from a Chirac and Schroeder to Arafat and most of the Arab world - suspect that, in fact, he will. An American flight would shame Tony Blair and John Howard, leave eastern Europe to the bullying of Paris and Berlin, destroy the Iraq interim government, take the heat off Arab autocracies, and send a message that American policy was back to Clintonian-like law enforcement, replete with jargon such as "sensitive" and "nuisance." It does not matter what Kerry would "really" wish to do, since the last two years of campaign rhetoric have earned him the worldwide reputation of the Bush antithesis, and thus his victory would, rightly or wrongly, be interpreted as a complete rejection of toppling Saddam and fostering a constitutional government in his place. His supporters and financial backers on the left would not tolerate anything less than a withdrawal. Because of our astounding weaponry and superb military, the terrorists in Fallujah count on the help of such postmodern Western guilt and internecine blame to supply constraints on the American military every bit as effective as the old Soviet nuclear deterrent. Again, a Michael Moore - or so they believe - is worth an entire jihadist cell. Our parents were terrified that, should America resort to military force abroad, they would be nuked; we are even more scared that our lethality will earn us the parlor disdain of the French and Germans. The terrorists are assured that the Western press is obsessed with Abu Ghraib, but not at all with Saddam's necropolis or their own slaughter of innocents. They suspect that those who endured Omaha and Utah or scaled Suribachi are long sleeping in their graves, and that a few thousand creeps in Fallujah scare us more than a quarter million in the Bulge did our parents. So yes, it is a strange war. Jihadists are amused that a few American soldiers, worried over their safety, can refuse orders, call 7,000 miles home in anguish, and expect that their complaints, handed over by Mom to the local TV station, will turn up on national cable news before their own commanders in the field even know what is up. A teenaged terrorist with a RPG, being filmed as he is killed, is every bit as an effective soldier through his globally broadcast death than had he lived on to hit his target Humvee with his rocket in the first place. We don't ask, "Which school-builder or power-restorer was he trying to obliterate?" but rather "Why did we have to kill him?" When the Islamists behead a tearful Englishman or American, it is more likely that his surviving dad or sibling back home will be on television all over the Middle East within minutes damning Tony Blair or George Bush, without a word of censure for the Dark-Age head-loppers. After all, we are not Nepalese who storm the local mosque and put the fear of God into Islamists when they butcher our own. We are more likely to be frightened, turn on ourselves, and condemn some American somewhere who cannot stop "this." But cannot our self-induced forbearance vanish as soon as we decide enough is enough? Should the American government ignore the EU hysteria, tell Kofi Annan to worry about his son's crooked shenanigans and not Americans' killing terrorists, and simply take Fallujah - as part of a larger effort to correct the laxity of the past and finish the war - then we would surely win. The fallout would be as salutary as our present restraint is disastrous. Like the murderous Pakistani madrassa zealots who flocked to Tora Bora only to be incinerated, Fallujah would not stand as a mecca for the jihadists, but an Armageddon better to watch on television than die in. The truth is that war remains the same the more it changes. For all the technological gadgetry, foreign landscapes, baffling global communications, and endemic pacifism of the present age, war is still a struggle of the human spirit. The morality, materiel, and technology are all on our side. But we are confused in this postmodern age that such advantages should automatically equate to near-instantaneous and costless victory as they sometimes do in Panama and Serbia - as if the heart of the medieval caliphate next to Syria and Iran, replete with terrorism and a 30-year past of mass murder, is a mere Haiti or Grenada. In the heart of even the most ardent liberal lies a dormant but still alive desire for victory, and in every strutting hawk there lingers the fear of abject defeat. Had we secured Iraq by June 2003, the sputtering Kerry candidacy would by now have been faulting Bush for not going into Iran. But blink, falter, and witness beheadings and hostage-taking on television, and Kerry can reinvent himself as the apostle of peace all along - and a bizarre group of creepy people come out of the woodwork professing Biblical wisdom about George Bush's purported catastrophes. In short, the more sophisticated, the more technological, the more hyped and televised war becomes, the more pundits and strategists warn us about "fourth-generational," "asymmetrical," "irregular," and "new dimensional" conflict, the more we simply forget the unchanging requisite of the will to win that trumps all other considerations. John Kerry has no more secret a plan than George Bush - because there is no secret way to pacify Iraq other than to kill the killers, humiliate their cause through defeat, and give the credit of the victory, along with material aid and the promise of autonomous freedom, to moderate Iraqis. Victory on the battlefield - not the mysterious diplomacy of "wise men," or German and French sanction, or Arab League support - alone will allow Iraq an opportunity for humane government. Meanwhile, we all vote. One candidate urges us to return to the mindset of pre-September 11 - law enforcement dealing with terrorists as nuisances. He claims the policies that have led to an absence of another attack at home, the end of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, idealistic efforts to extend freedom, and radical and positive changes in Pakistan, Libya, the West Bank, and the Gulf have made things worse. In contrast, the other reminds us that we are in a real war against horrific enemies and are no longer passive targets, but will fight the terrorists on their home turf, win, and leave behind humane government. No choice could be clearer. It is America's call. - Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com. ----- The New York Post A 'FAHRENHEIT 9/11' FAN BY JOHN PODHORETZ October 30, 2004 -- CONGRATULATIONS, Michael Moore - America's worst enemy and one of the world's most evil men is a big fan of yours. The most startling moment on the Osama bin Laden videotape shown yesterday was his description of the morning of 9/11, which is certainly derived - albeit in garbled form - from a viewing of Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." "It never occurred to us that he, the commander in chief of the country, would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone, because he thought listening to a child discussing her goats was more important," bin Laden said. Just think. If the reprehensible Moore wins an Oscar for his disgusting piece of propaganda, Hollywood will be seconding the favorable opinion of Osama bin Laden. I want to caution my friends on the Right about claiming that the Osama tape somehow is an endorsement of John Kerry. No doubt bin Laden would like to claim credit for changing the American president. Thankfully, the American people know better than to believe bin Laden will somehow go easier on us if John Kerry wins on Tuesday. They know this monster attacked America when Bill Clinton was president and that he and his minions will continue to plot the mass murder of Americans no matter who is in the White House. But something does jump out at you when you consider the message bin Laden was delivering to the United States. It was remarkably defensive, with bin Laden offering some kind of bizarre truce to the American people: "To the U.S. people," he said, "my talk is to you about the best way to avoid another disaster." How thoughtful of him. He told us that neither Bush nor Kerry could protect America: "Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda," he said. "Your security is in your own hands." In other words, if the American people would somehow agree to consider the security needs of bin Laden and his followers (whether that means just al Qaeda or the entire Arab and Muslim world isn't clear), we'd be safe. "Do not play with our security, and spontaneously you will secure yourself," he said. This is, I think, a profound rhetorical change from the man who vowed in 2002 that "the United States will not survive, will not feel any safety or any security." Usually, bin Laden and his people tend to use the most purple and terrifying language about the damage they're going to do to the United States, as we saw earlier in the week when the American al Qaeda follower "Azzam" said on his videotape that "the streets of America will run red with blood." Now bin Laden is talking truce. What's changed, perhaps, is the ferocity of the American response to 9/11. Since then, Osama has been on the run, his Afghanistan safe haven destroyed, his movement under relentless financial and military assault. By offering America a deal, no matter how twisted and pointless the deal might be, the quality that he might be showing us isn't strength, but weakness. Maybe he's feeling the weariness suggested in the videotaped statement last month by his No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri: "Oh young men of Islam," he said, "if we are killed or captured, you should carry on the fight." Maybe they're buckling. ----- <http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/hanson/hanson.asp> The National Review Victor Davis Hanson October 15, 2004, 8:23 a.m. The Therapeutic Choice A war for our lives, or a nuisance to our lifestyle? Americans are presented with a choice in this election rare in our history. This is not 1952, when Democrats and Republicans did not differ too much on the need to stay in Korea, or even 1968 when Humphrey and Nixon alike did not wish to withdraw unilaterally from Vietnam. It is more like 1972 or 1980, when a naove McGovern/Dukakis worldview was sharply at odds with the Nixon/Reagan tragic acknowledgement of the need to confront Soviet-inspired Communism. Is it to be more aid, talk, indictments, and summits - or a tough war to kill the terrorists and change the conditions that created them? Mr. Kerry believes that we must return to the pre-9/11 days when terrorism was but a "nuisance." In his mind, that was a nostalgic sort of time when the terrorist mosquito lazily buzzed about a snoring America. And we in somnolent response merely swatted it away with a cruise missile or a few GPS bombs when embassies and barracks were blown up. Keep the tribute of dead Americans low, and the chronic problem was properly analogous to law-enforcement's perpetual policing of gambling and prostitution. Many of us had previously written off just such naoveti, but we never dreamed that our suspicions would be confirmed so explicitly by Kerry himself. In the now-lost age of unperturbed windsurfing and skiing, things were not all that bad before al Qaeda overdid it by knocking down skyscrapers and a corner of the Pentagon - followed by George Bush's commensurate overreaction in Afghanistan and Iraq that brought on all the present messy and really bothersome cargo of IEDs, beheadings, and promises of dirty bombs to come. The Taliban and Saddam were, of course, bad sports. But really, going all the way over there to topple them, implant democracy, and change the status quo of the Middle East? Tsk, tsk, tsk - well, that was a bit much, was it not? Terrorist killing, like the first World Trade Center bombing or the USS Cole, certainly was not seen as the logical precursor to 9/11 - the expected wages of a quarter century of appeasement that started with the weak Carter response to the Iranian hostages and was followed by dead soldiers, diplomats, and tourists about every other year. No, these were "incidents" like 9/11 itself - "law-enforcement" issues that called for the DA, writs, and stern prison sentences, the sort of stuff that barristers like Kerry, Edwards, Kennedy, and McAuliffe handle so well. This attitude is part of the therapeutic view of the present struggle that continually suggests that something we did - not the mass murdering out of the Dark Age - brought on our present bother that is now "the focus of our lives." We see this irritation with the inconvenience and sacrifice once more reemerging in the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, and the New York Times: We, not fascists and Islamist psychopaths, are blamed for the mess in Iraq, the mess in Afghanistan, the mess on the West Bank, and the mess here at home, but never credited with the first election in 5,000 years in Afghanistan or consensual government replacing autocracy in the heart of the ancient caliphate. Sometimes our problems arise over our past failure to chastise the Russians over Chechnya. Or was it not enough attention to Mr. Arafat's dilemmas? Or maybe we extended prior support for corrupt sheiks? All that and more - according to rogue CIA "experts," best-selling authors, and the omnipresent Richard Clarke - earned us the wrath of the Islamists. Thus surely our past transgressions can be alleviated by present contrition, dialogue, aid, and policy changes of the European kind. To all you of the therapeutic mindset, listen up. We can no more reason with the Islamic fascists than we could sympathize with the Nazis' demands over supposedly exploited Germans in Czechoslovakia or the problem of Tojo's Japan's not getting its timely scrap-metal shipments from Roosevelt's America. Their pouts and gripes are not intended to be adjudicated as much as to weaken the resolve of many in the United States who find the entire "war against terror" too big, or the wrong kind, of a nuisance. Instead, read the fatwas. You hear not just of America's injustice in Palestine or Chechnya - not to mention nothing about saving Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo or Afghanistan of the 1980s - but also of what we did in Spain in the 15th century and in Tyre, Gaza, and Jerusalem in the 12th. The mystery of September 11, 2001, is not that it happened, but that it did not quite happen when first tried in 1993 during Bill Clinton's madcap efforts to move a smiling Arafat into the Lincoln Bedroom and keep our hands off bin Laden. Only an American with a JD or PhD would cling to the idea that there was not a connection between Group A Middle Eastern terrorists who attacked the WTC in 1993 and Group B who finished the job in 2001. A Kerry presidency, we know now, will go back to the tried and true institutions so dear to the therapeutic mind that please the elite and sensitive of our society. How silly that most Americans are about through with the U.N. Indeed, we Neanderthals want it relegated to something like the Red Cross tucked away at the Hague, if not on the frontlines in Nigeria or Bolivia. Yes, we dummies have seen enough of its General Assembly resolutions aimed at the only democracy in the Middle East, its promotion of rogue states such as Syria, Cuba, Iran, and Libya to human-rights watchdogs, its corrupt Oil-for-Food program, and its present general secretary and his role in nepotism and sweet-heart contracts at the expense of the Iraqi people. No surprise that a shaken perpetual-president Hosni Mubarak is calling for a U.N. conference on terror with wonderful Arab League logic: 'You kill Jews on your own soil, good; you kill them on mine and lose me money, bad.' The artists, musicians, and entertainers have also railed against the war. In the therapeutic mindset, the refinement and talent of a Sean Penn, Michael Moore, Al Franken, Bruce Springsteen, or John Fogerty earn respect when they weigh in on matters of state policy. But in the tragic view, they can be little more than puppets of inspiration. Their natural gifts are not necessarily enriched by real education or learning. Indeed, they are just as likely to be high-school or college dropouts and near illiterates, albeit with good memories, voices, and looks. The present antics of these influential millionaire entertainers should remind us why Plato banished them - worried that we might confuse the inspired creative frenzies of the artisans with some sort of empirical knowledge. But you can no more sing, or write, or act al Qaeda away than the equally sensitive novelists and intellectuals of the 1930s or 1940s could rehabilitate Stalin. And then there are the new green billionaires who no longer worry about the struggle to make any more money, much less about state, federal, and payroll taxes that can eat up half of a person's income. A George Soros may have made his pile by trying to destroy the British financial system, but now he wishes to leave the world safe for currency traders to come by defeating George Bush. The up-from-the-bootstraps struggle to create the dough for the Heinz fortune is a century past and forgotten - thus the post-capitalist Teresa in her private jet and John Kerry on his $500,000 power boat can lecture us about Americans' shameless oil profligacy and George Bush's blood for oil gambit in Iraq. Our mainstream media also cannot quite believe we are at war with evil people who wish us dead - something like the crises that have faced all civilizations at one time or another. Instead, to ponder Rathergate or the recent ABC memo advocating bias in its reporting is to fathom the arrogance of the Enlightenment, and the learned's frustration with those of us less-gifted folk who don't quite wish to follow where they lead us. Such anointed ones have taken on the burden of saving us from George Bush and his retrograde ideas. After all, who believes that anyone would really wish to reinstate a mythical caliphate, a Muslim paradise of sharia, gender apartheid, and theocracy spreading the globe through Islamic nukes and biological and chemical bombs? How one dimensional and unsophisticated. Meanwhile most Americans have already quietly made up their minds. They think the Democratic party is run not by unionists, farmers, miners, truckers, and average folk, but by those rich enough not to have to make a living, and who wish out of either guilt or noblesse oblige to force the dumber upper middle class to be more sensitive, generous, or utopian. Americans also believe Europe has lost its way and is bogged down in a hopeless and soon-to-be scary task of legislating by fiat heaven on earth. We of the tragic persuasion wish them well with Turkey and their unassimilated Islamic populations, but we don't want our hurtful combat troops there after 60 years of subsidized peacekeeping. Americans also don't care much about the Nobel prizes anymore - not when a Jimmy Carter is praised after trying to undermine his own president on the eve of war, and not when the most recent peace-prize winner rants on that AIDS is a Western-created germ agent unleashed to hurt Africa but silent about $15 billion in American aid to stop what her own continent is spreading. John Kerry is probably going to lose this election, despite the "Vote for Change" rock tour, despite Air America, despite Kitty Kelley's fraud hyped on national media, despite Soros's moveon.org hit pieces, despite Fahrenheit 9-11, despite the Nobel Prizes and Cannes Film Awards, despite Rathergate and ABC Memogate, despite the European press, despite Kofi Annan's remonstrations, despite a barking Senator Harkin or Kennedy, despite the leaks of rogue CIA Beltway insiders, despite Jimmy Carter's sanctimonious lectures, despite Joe Wilson, Anonymous, and Richard Clarke - and more. You all have given your best shot, but I think you are going to lose. Why? Because the majority of Americans does not believe you. The majority is more likely to accept George Bush's tragic view that we really are in a war for our very survival to stop those who would kill us and to alter the landscape that produced them - a terrible war that we are winning. When all is said and done, it still is as simple as that. - Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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