Behind the Times (subscription wall)

Blunt planned campaign just days before quitting

2008-01-25T21:59:00.000-05:00

By DAVID A. LIEB
Associated Press

JEFFERSON CITY | On the weekend before his State of the State address, Gov. Matt Blunt convened his campaign team for a strategic retreat at a luxury Ozarks resort just south of Branson.

Confidence filled the room. Blunt's trusted advisers discussed a fundraising goal that could have shattered the state record, developed a TV ad blitz to begin airing before spring and honed a campaign message for a competitive challenge from Democratic Attorney General Jay Nixon.

Although the Republican governor never said so directly, he left little doubt: Blunt was running for re-election, and he was running to win.

So perhaps no one was more shocked than those in Blunt's inner circle when, just 10 days later, Blunt announced his exit from the race.

"Everyone was convinced we would win this race," said John Hancock, a Republican consultant and pollster who attended the campaign retreat. Hancock, Blunt's campaign spokesman, learned the governor was not running just hours before he publicly announced his decision Tuesday.

The Associated Press confirmed Blunt's campaign retreat with multiple participants, several of whom recounted the details on condition of anonymity.

The gathering at the Big Cedar Lodge south of Branson included top-ranking staff from the governor's office, pollsters, media specialists, fundraisers and people responsible for Blunt's communications and grass-roots organizing. It had been a while since any similar such meeting. The gathering, in essence, amounted to a kickoff for the campaign year.

Participants described the governor as inquisitive, engaged, involved in all aspects of the planning.

Before their meeting, Blunt already had shot video footage for a first-round of campaign commercials. The plan developed that weekend called for Blunt's commercials to begin running before spring. The goal was to beat Nixon to the punch, to get a couple of weeks of uncontested air time in which Blunt could lay out his accomplishments directly to voters before they got bombarded with competing messages.

Blunt already had raised almost $10 million since he was elected in 2004, though his campaign had barely $4 million on hand as a result of previous expenditures and refunds required by a Supreme Court ruling. Blunt's campaign still needed to refund about $2.3 million, which would put him nearly even with what Nixon had on hand.

But Blunt had shown the ability to rake in large amounts of money before. Some people thought he could take in about $20 million — twice what he raised for the 2004 election and far more than the Missouri candidate record of almost $15.7 million set by Republican Sen. Jim Talent in his unsuccessful 2006 re-election campaign.

The campaign team discussed various factors that could influence the governor's race — even several initiative petitions being circulated, mindful of how a stem cell ballot initiative spilled over into the 2006 Senate race. Blunt also reviewed internal polling data, which meeting participants said showed him closing the gap, but still down, to Nixon.

Blunt's message, as sharpened during the meetings, would proclaim he converted a $1 billion inherited shortfall into three straight years of budget surplusses, significantly boosted education spending, presided over the creation 90,000 new jobs since he took office and transformed a broken health care system.

That same message formed the foundation for Blunt's televised State of the State address several days later, on Jan. 15.

Those who attended the campaign retreat believed it could be a successful message, even though Nixon would highlight Blunt's cuts to the Medicaid health care system, warn the economy was faltering and assert that the governor had not done enough for education.

Embattled KC parks board member Frances Semler steps down

2008-01-22T10:45:00.000-05:00

Frances Semler, the Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners appointee whose membership in the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps caused a political controversy for Mayor Mark Funkhouser, has resigned.

In a statement faxed to area media outlets, including The Kansas City Star, Semler writes “ENOUGH, I am resigning.” In the letter she cites repeated and ongoing personal attacks against her character as a reason, and blasts her most vocal opponents and levels her own criticisms at Kansas City Police Chief Jim Corwin and unnamed City Council members, saying some on the council have made “vicious, false and irresponsible claims about me.”

Also apparently, in recent days, Semler has taken issue with comments made in published reports by Mayor Mark Funkhouser and his wife, Gloria Squitiro.

“I do believe I have been a positive asset. There are many projects I eagerly wanted to pursue,” Semler writes. But after reading quotes from Funkhouser in the The Star last week, “I feel BETRAYED.”

Semler could not be reached Tuesday morning for comment.

Funkhouser in June appointed Semler, a neighborhood association president, to be the sole Northland representative on the five-member park board.

The appointment triggered sharp protests from several minority organizations, including the National Council of La Raza, In October, of La Raza voted to pull its convention from Kansas City, at a projected loss of $5 million, because of Semler’s connection to the Minutemen, a divisive group that takes a hardline stance on immigration issues.

On Jan. 15, the leader if the Southern Christian Leadership Conference said that the SCLC had decided to move it’s convention from Kansas City to New Orleans and would call for a boycott of Kansas City if Semler was not removed from the park board.

Rita Valenciano, head of the local Coalition of Hispanic Organizations, said Semler’s decision to step down was a welcome outcome. But she, added, she would have preferred if the mayor had taken action himself.

Semler had offered to resign last year when controversy first erupted over her appointment, but Funkhouser declined the notion and publicly backed her appointment.

“It’s something that should have been taken care of in the very beginning,” she said. “It was a lack of leadership … my concern is if the mayor is going to accept her resignation.”

Before launching into her criticisms of city officials, Semler writes “as a United States citizen I have always felt able to express my views freely. Out of respect for the Mayor, I have allowed my voice to be stilled. No longer.”

While referring to illegal immigration as a “well-organized invasion of illegals,” she defends the Minutemen as an unjustly attacked group dedicated to the enforcement of immigration laws.

Canada manual: U.S. prisoners face torture

2008-01-19T01:58:00.000-05:00

By ROB GILLIES
Associated Press Writer

A training manual for Canadian diplomats lists the United States as a country where prisoners risk torture and abuse, citing interrogation techniques such as stripping prisoners, blindfolding and sleep deprivation.

The Foreign Affairs Department document, released Friday, singled out the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay. It also names Israel, Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Syria as places where inmates could face torture.

The listing drew a sharp response from the U.S., a key NATO ally and trading partner, which asked to removed from the manual.

"We find it to be offensive for us to be on the same list with countries like Iran and China. Quite frankly it's absurd," U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins told The Associated Press. "For us to be on a list like that is just ridiculous."

He said the U.S. does not authorize or condone torture. "We think it should be removed and we've made that request. We have voiced our opinion very forcefully," Wilkins said.

Michael Mendel, the Israeli Embassy spokesman, said Israel's Supreme Court "is on record as expressly prohibiting any type of torture. If Israel is included in the list in question, the ambassador of Israel would expect its removal," he said.

A Canadian citizen, Omar Khadr, is in custody at Guantanamo, but Canada has long publicly said it accepts U.S. assurances that Khadr is being treated humanely.

The government inadvertently released the manual to lawyers for Amnesty International who are working on a lawsuit involving alleged abuse of Afghan detainees by local Afghan authorities, after the detainees were handed over by Canadian troops.

Canada said the manual is for training, and does not amount to official government policy.

"It is not a policy document or any kind of a statement of policy. As such it does not convey the government's views or positions," said Neil Hrab, a spokesman for Canada's Foreign Affairs Department.

"The training manual purposely raised public issues to stimulate discussion and debate in the classroom."

Human rights groups have long called on Canada to pressure the United States to return Khadr from Guantanamo. They say Canada has not done enough for Khadr, who has been in custody since he was 15. Khadr is accused of tossing a grenade that killed one U.S. soldier and wounded another in Afghanistan in 2002.

He is the son of an alleged al-Qaida financier, and his family has received little sympathy in Canada, where they've been called the "First Family of Terrorism."

Dennis Edney, one of Khadr's lawyers, said the foreign affairs document shows that Canada says one thing publicly but believes something else privately.

"Canada was well aware that Omar Khadr's allegations of being tortured had a ring of truth to it. Canada has not once raised the protection of Omar Khadr when there are such serious allegations," Edney said. "What does that say to you about Canada's commitment to the rule of law and human rights? It talks on both sides of its face."

US withdraws Mideast resolution at UN

2007-11-30T23:12:00.000-05:00

By EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press Writer

In an about face, the United States on Friday withdrew a U.N. resolution endorsing this week's agreement by Israeli and Palestinian leaders to try to reach a Mideast peace settlement by the end of 2008, apparently after Israel objected.

U.S. Deputy Ambassador Alejandro Wolff informed the Security Council that the United States was pulling the resolution from consideration less than 24 hours after U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad introduced it.

Khalilzad had said he needed to consult with the Israelis and Palestinians on the text of the resolution to ensure that it was what they wanted following the decisions by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the Mideast peace conference in Annapolis, Md.

Wolff said the U.S. had held intensive consultations in the past few days "and the upshot was that there were some unease with the idea" of a resolution.

Diplomats said Israel, a close U.S. ally, did not want a resolution, which would bring the Security Council into the fledgling negotiations with the Palestinians. The diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said Khalilzad introduced the draft resolution without getting broad support from the Israelis, Palestinians and the Bush administration.

[Keep reading...]

"It's not the proper venue," Israel's deputy ambassador Daniel Carmon said after Friday's council meeting. "We feel that the appreciation of Annapolis has other means of being expressed than in a resolution.

"We were not the only ones to object," Carmon said.

He added that the Americans had told the Israelis that the Palestinians also objected.

Abbas, speaking to reporters in the Tunisian capital, Tunis, said Friday that while he didn't know the details of the draft resolution it was a sign of the seriousness of the United States, which he also perceived at the Annapolis conference.

"This means, if what we have learned is verified, that there are serious steps that speak to the existence of an American position supporting the negotiations," Abbas said.

Wolff said the United States realized that "the focus, we all realized again, should be placed and remain on Annapolis and the understanding that was reached there."

"It's a momentous decision ... and rather than dilute from that and in respect to both parties in terms of what they thought would be most helpful, we reached a conclusion that it would be best to withdraw it," Wolff said.

Normally, the United States would have consulted Israel in advance of introducing a Security Council resolution, as well as the Palestinians, to gauge their reaction.

But on Thursday, Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman said he knew "very little" about the proposed resolution, adding "we will be discussing it, and no doubt in very good spirit."

The State Department said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had decided such a resolution was unnecessary.

"We have looked at this and, at the end of the day, the secretary believes that the positive results of Annapolis speak for themselves and there is really no reason to gild the lily," spokesman Sean McCormack said. "I am not sure that we saw the need to add anything else to the conversation. Sometimes, the results and the event speak for themselves."

Two U.S. officials, who on condition of anonymity described Rice's decision to withdraw the draft document, said there were several concerns about the resolution, including the failure to consult the Israelis and Palestinians on the language and the possibility that some on the Security Council might try to add anti-Israeli language to it.

Ambassador Nassir Al-Nasser of Qatar, the only Arab member on the Security Council, said Thursday "we are happy with the language as it is" in the U.S. draft resolution. "I am happy that the council is dealing with this issue," he said. "For me, this is the main thing."

The Annapolis conference drew 44 nations, including Israel's neighboring Arab states. A joint understanding between the Israelis and Palestinians, in doubt until the last minute, was salvaged and Abbas and Olmert reiterated their desire to reach a peace settlement by the end of 2008.

Indonesian Ambassador Marty Natalegawa, the current council president who had hoped the resolution would be adopted Friday, said he wanted to highlight the strong support in the council for the Annapolis conference. Council members were "welcoming, supporting and encouraging the parties to diligently follow up," he said.

"We are more focused at this time on the substance, that there is an absolutely clear message of council unity in supporting Annapolis conference and its achievements," he said.

Deputy Ambassador Konstantin Dolgov of Russia said it was the U.S. right as the sponsor to withdraw the resolution.

"What is important is that discussions showed that there is a lot of support for the outcome," he said. "We think that it would be important, of course, for the Security Council to express itself on this issue because the discussions showed that all Security Council members supported the outcome of Annapolis meeting."

Marines to cut armored vehicle orders

2007-11-30T01:17:00.000-05:00

A Category I mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle,
is driven on a test course during a media demonstration at
Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. in this Aug. 24, 2007 file photo.
The Marines plan to buy fewer bomb-resistant vehicles
than planned despite pressure from lawmakers who are
determined to spend billions of dollars on the vehicles

By LOLITA C. BALDOR
Associated Press Writer

The Marines plan to buy fewer bomb-resistant vehicles than planned despite pressure from lawmakers who are determined to spend billions of dollars on the vehicles.

The Marine Corps' requirement for mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles would drop from the planned 3,700 to about 2,400, The Associated Press has learned. The Marines would not comment on the decision, but defense officials confirmed the cut. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision has not been announced.

About a month ago, Marine Commandant Gen. T. James Conway signaled the possibility of a new examination of the commitment to the vehicles, saying he was concerned his force was getting too heavy. "I'm a little bit concerned about us keeping our expeditionary flavor," he said.

At the same time, an independent study by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington questioned whether the Pentagon was buying too many of the pricey vehicles, which can cost as much as $1 million each. The study found that in some cases, the heavily armored vehicles, with their bomb-deflecting V-shaped hulls, might not be the answer that many believe they are.

Military officials and other experts have said that while the vehicles, known as MRAPs, are lifesavers in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are not as useful or mobile in some terrain.

The Marine Corps was criticized this year for not responding quickly enough to urgent requests for the vehicles from troops in Iraq. In May, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the vehicles were the military's highest priority acquisition program.

In his comments last month, Conway said the Marine Corps has emerged as a "second land Army," assigned to secure Iraq, and must buy heavy equipment, including the mine-resistant vehicles, for protection against roadside bombs.

"Can I give a satisfactory answer to what we're going to be doing with those things in five or 10 years? Probably not," Conway said at an event sponsored by the Center for a New American Security. "Wrap them in shrink wrap and put them in asphalt somewhere is about the best thing that we can describe at this point. And as expensive as they are, that is probably not a good use of the taxpayers money."

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill, buoyed by the vehicle's solid record - to date no troops have died in one - have consistently said the military must buy more and must buy them faster.

Ex-Iraq commander says bring troops home

2007-11-21T23:47:00.000-05:00

By ANNE FLAHERTY
Associated Press Writer

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq shortly after the fall of Baghdad, said this week he supports Democratic legislation that calls for most troops to come home within a year.

His comments come as welcomed ammunition for the Democratic-controlled Congress in its standoff with the White House on war spending. This month, the House passed a $50 billion bill that would pay for combat operations but sets the goal that combat end by Dec. 15, 2008. The White House threatened to veto the measure, and Senate Republicans blocked it from passing.

The Pentagon on Tuesday said that as many as 200,000 civilian employees and contractors will begin receiving layoff warnings by Christmas unless Congress approves a war spending bill that President Bush will sign.

"The improvements in security produced by the courage and blood of our troops have not been matched by a willingness on the part of Iraqi leaders to make the hard choices necessary to bring peace to their country," Sanchez said in remarks to be aired Saturday for the weekly Democratic radio address.

"There is no evidence that the Iraqis will choose to do so in the near future or that we have an ability to force that result," he said.

Sanchez added that the House bill "makes the proper preparation of our deploying troops a priority and requires the type of shift in their mission that will allow their numbers to be reduced substantially."

Critical assessments on the war from former Pentagon brass are nothing new. But Sanchez's newfound alliance with Democrats is particularly noteworthy because he was directly in charge of combat operations in Iraq, from 2003 to 2004.

He also is somewhat controversial. The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal happened under his watch, and some have pointed to leadership failures as a contributing factor. While he was not charged with any misconduct, Sanchez said upon retiring from the military in November 2006 that his career was a casualty of Abu Ghraib.

In October, the three-star general told a group of reporters that the U.S. mission in Iraq was a "nightmare with no end in sight." He also called Bush's decision to deploy 30,000 extra forces to Iraq earlier this year a "desperate attempt" to make up for years of misguided policies in Iraq.

Iraq says 2 American guards detained

2007-11-20T11:14:00.000-05:00

By KIM GAMEL

Associated Press Writer

Iraqi soldiers detained two American security guards along with several other foreigners traveling in a private security convoy after they opened fire Monday in Baghdad, wounding one woman, an Iraqi military spokesman said.

U.S. military and embassy officials had no immediate information about the report, which follows a series of recent shootings in which foreign security guards have allegedly killed Iraqis. Last month, the Iraqi Cabinet sent parliament a bill to lift immunity for foreign private security companies that has been in effect since the U.S. occupation began in 2003.

Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said the convoy was driving on the wrong side of the road in the central Baghdad neighborhood of Karradah when the shooting took place about midday.

Those arrested included two American guards, along with 21 people from Sri Lanka, nine from Nepal and 10 Iraqis, the Baghdad military spokesman said.

"We have given orders to our security forces to immediately intervene in case they see any violations by security companies. The members of this security company wounded an innocent woman and they tried to escape the scene, but Iraq forces arrested them," al-Moussawi told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

The role of private security guards has become particularly controversial following a Sept. 16 shooting in which Blackwater Worldwide guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians at Baghdad's Nisoor Square.

The FBI is continuing its investigation into the shootings, although the Iraqi government has concluded that the security guards were unprovoked when the began shooting at an intersection at Nisoor Square in western Baghdad. The North Carolina-based company, the largest private security firm protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq, has said its security convoy was under attack before it opened fire.

The Iraqi Cabinet's initiative to lift immunity for private security companies would not be retroactive and therefore not affect the Blackwater employees who were involved in the Sept. 16 shooting. Parliament has yet to act on the measure.

A top U.S. commander, meanwhile, said violence in northern Iraq has declined at a slower rate than it has in other regions, as al-Qaida and other militants move there to avoid coalition operations elsewhere.

As a result, the north is now more violent than other regions. Most of the 27 U.S. deaths this month were north of Baghdad.

Army Maj. Gen. Mark P. Hertling, who commands U.S. troops in the region, said al-Qaida cells still operate in all the key cities in the north.

"What you're seeing is the enemy shifting," he told Pentagon reporters in a video conference from Tikrit. "The attacks are still much higher than I would like here in the north but they are continuing to decrease in numbers and scale of attacks."

He said 900 roadside bombs were placed in his region last month, compared with 1,830 in June.

Sporadic violence nationwide left at least 22 people were killed or found dead Monday.

The deadliest attack occurred near the southern city of Basra when a rocket slammed into a house, killing five children and their mother, police said. Police said they believe the rocket was targeting the nearby airport, which is the headquarters of the British military in the area, but fell short.

British-led forces plan to hand over security responsibilities to Iraqis in the predominantly Shiite province in mid-December, saying the levels of violence have dropped despite fears of escalating rivalries between Shiite militia fighters battling for power.

In another mostly Shiite province, Qadisiyah, U.S. and Iraqi troops detained about 70 suspected extremists and seized weapons caches, Maj. Gen. Othman al-Ghanimy said.

In other developments:

- Iraq's chief prosecutor said a trial would begin "within days" for two former Health Ministry officials accused of letting death squads use ambulances and government hospitals to carry out kidnappings and killings and siphoning millions of dollars to the Mahdi Army, a case that will test the government's commitment to crack down on Shiite militias.

- The head of Iraq's largest Shiite party, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, returned home from Iran after undergoing another round of chemotherapy there for lung cancer.

- U.S. Embassy spokesman Philip Reeker, said several Iranians who have been detained by U.S. forces in Iraq were being allowed family visits starting Monday.

Associated Press writer Sameer N. Yacoub contributed to this report.

Army to review Iraq contracts for fraud

2007-10-27T00:41:00.000-04:00

A 105mm M1 Abrams tank is shown outside the
Tank-Army Automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM)
at the Detroit Arsenal in Warren, Mich., in this Aug. 24, 2005 file photo.

By RICHARD LARDNER
Associated Press Writer
This article was posted to
The Kansas City Star Website
26 October 2007

A team of specially trained investigators will hunker down in an Army office north of Detroit on Monday to begin poring over hundreds of Iraq war contracts in search for rigged awards.

This team of 10 auditors, criminal investigators and acquisition experts are starting with a sampling of the roughly 6,000 contracts worth $2.8 billion issued by an Army office in Kuwait that service officials have identified as a hub of corruption.

The office, located at Camp Arifjan, buys gear and supplies to support U.S. troops as they move in and out of Iraq. The pace of that operation has exploded since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003.

Based on what the team finds, the probe may expand and the number of Army military and civilian employees accused of accepting bribes and kickbacks could grow, U.S. officials told The Associated Press. Nearly two dozen have been charged so far.

Signs of trouble include contracts continually awarded to vendors without the usual competition and awards that were competed but went to the bidder with the highest price rather than the lowest. A mismatch between the original product to be purchased and what was actually delivered is another red flag.

"Is there anything in there that might indicate to us that there might be some potential fraudulent activity?" Jeffrey Parsons, director of contracting at Army Materiel Command, said in an AP interview. "If there are patterns that we start to identify, then we're going to do further review."

Contracts with significant problems will be forwarded to the Army Audit Agency and the Army Criminal Investigation Command. If there's credible evidence of wrongdoing, the FBI and prosecutors from the U.S. Justice Department are called in.

In Warren, Mich., home to a large Army acquisition center, the contracting review team will examine 314 of the Kuwait contracts, each worth more than $25,000 and issued between 2003 and 2006.

In Kuwait, a separate team of 10 at Camp Arifjan is already going through 339 contracts of lesser value and awarded during the same time period, according to Army Materiel Command at Fort Belvoir, Va.

Both reviews are to be finished before the end of the year.

A probe of 2007 contracts out of Kuwait has been completed; investigators found numerous problems with the office, including inadequate staffing and oversight, high staff turnover, and poor record-keeping.

In the midst of those shortcomings came billions of dollars in war funding, creating an environment ripe for misconduct and malfeasance.

The teams in Michigan and Kuwait will go through paper records and also use data-mining tools to electronically search data stored on computers.

"Do we have contractors with different names but the same address?" Parsons said. "That would cause some suspicion."

Tips from individuals familiar with the contracts are another tool for finding flawed awards, he said.

The contract review process isn't foolproof, however.

If a contracting officer and a vendor are determined to break the rules for personal gain, it can be difficult to pinpoint corruption, according to Parsons, who also is serving as senior adviser to a contracting task force recently established by Army Secretary Pete Geren.

"You can have a contract file that is pristine - all the documentation is there," Parsons said. "Just going through the contract files doesn't necessarily give you 100 percent assurance that something else might not have been going on."

The efforts in Michigan and at Camp Arifjan are parts of a broader inquiry being conducted by the task force, which was formed by Geren following a spike in the number of criminal cases related to the acquisition of gear and supplies for U.S. troops.

Many of the cases stemmed from fraudulent or mismanaged contracts issued by the Kuwait office, prompting Geren to call for a detailed probe of the work done there.

The Army Criminal Investigation Command has 83 ongoing criminal investigations related to contract fraud in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan, according to spokesman Chris Grey.

Grey said 23 individuals have been charged with contract fraud and more than $15 million in bribes has changed hands.

One of the largest cases involves Army Maj. John Cockerham, who is accused of bribery, conspiracy, money laundering and obstruction. Prosecutors allege Cockerham, along with his wife and sister, took at least $9.6 million in bribes in 2004 and 2005 while Cockerham was a contract officer stationed in Kuwait

From the 6,000 Kuwait contracts flowed 18,000 transactions - numerous orders could be placed on a single contract - for items such as bottled water, laundry services, barracks, food, transportation, and warehouse services.

In 2005, Lt. Gens. Steven Whitcomb and John Vines, then both top Army commanders in Iraq, became so concerned over allegations of corrupt contracting that the Criminal Investigation Command established field offices in Iraq and Kuwait.

Deceiving the checks and balances in the federal procurement system takes careful planning, Frank Anderson, president of the Defense Acquisition University at Fort Belvoir, said in a separate interview.

"You had some smart bad apples," said Anderson, who leads the organization that trains the military's acquisition officials. "It had to be someone who understood the business well enough to figure out how to get around the system."

Where do we go from here?

2007-09-18T11:45:00.000-04:00

First of all, thanks to everyone who has been reading. Looking at the numbers at the end of every day was definitely validating!

Two years ago, I started reproducing columns and reports that I was going to link to in blog posts, because a lot of stuff disappears behind a subscription wall after a certain amount of time elapses. I hate clicking a link and finding the reference now hidden, so this place was born.

Then came "Times Select" which really infuriated me - but I am a print subscriber, so the "mission" morphed into one of access for all.

Now the pay-wall is coming down at midnight, and everyone who wants to read will have unfettered access to the Times columnists. "Mission" accomplished.

Now, I ask you, the thousand or so readers who visit here daily, would you like to see this site, where you can leave comments on articles and columns, and where cookies are not collected, continue?

For the mildly curious, anyone interested in reading my original stuff can find it all over Left Blogsylvania...I write the blog Blue Girl, Red State, I am a front page diarist at Show Me Progress, and I am one of the founding bloggers at both the Out of Iraq Bloggers Caucus/Caucus Central and my real pride and joy, the important, often-linked, and growing-in-prominence-every-day Watching Those We Chose.

--Blue Girl

G.O.P.’s Dirty Tricks Begin

2007-09-18T11:36:00.000-04:00

By BOB HERBERT

Published: September 18, 2007

The folks who gave us the Willie Horton ads, the Swift boat campaign, the purges of black voters in Florida and endless other dirty electoral tricks are at it again.

Like crack addicts confronting the irresistible vial, the evil geniuses of the G.O.P. can’t seem to help themselves. This time — with an eye toward seizing the White House again next year, even if they lose the popular vote — they’re trying to rewrite the rules for the distribution of electoral votes in California.

Under current law, all of California’s 55 electoral votes go to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote statewide. This “winner take all” system is the norm in the U.S. It’s in place in all but two states, Maine and Nebraska, which have just four and five electoral votes, respectively.

Now comes a move, from lawyers with close ties to the Republican Party, to scrap the current system in California and replace it with one that would divide up the electoral votes in a way that would likely give 20 or more of them to the candidate who loses the popular vote in the state.

Democrats fear, correctly, that this maneuver could checkmate even their best efforts to win back the White House next year.

California is widely expected to go Democratic in the presidential election. Its 55 electoral votes are a hefty chunk of the 270 needed to win, and thus crucial to Democratic hopes.

Under this new proposal, the 20 or more electoral votes that would be denied the winner of the statewide vote in California, could well be enough to hand the White House to a Republican candidate who loses the popular vote nationally.

“Their idea is to have California be the only big state to do this,” said Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist who is supporting Senator Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. “If the Republicans can poach 20 electoral votes from the Democrats in California, that’s the same as winning all the electoral votes in Ohio. You’re basically giving them the election.”

The effort to change the way Californians vote for president has been cloaked in the typically deceptive garb that the G.O.P. pulls out for its underhanded maneuvering. The proposal has been dubbed the “Presidential Election Reform Act.” It is being led by Thomas Hiltachk of Bell, McAndrews and Hiltachk, a law firm that has represented both the state Republican Party and G.O.P. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

According to The Associated Press, the firm was also linked to a political committee, largely funded by Bob Perry, that targeted Democratic candidates in 2006. Mr. Perry, a longtime supporter of George W. Bush, contributed millions of dollars to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose intense and deceptive campaign in 2004 was so damaging to the candidacy of John Kerry.

This crowd is no more interested in genuine electoral reform than Britney Spears is.

Mr. Hiltachk and his operatives are trying to gather enough signatures to get their proposal before the voters as a California ballot initiative next June. If they succeed, and the voters approve the initiative, the rules for apportioning the state’s electoral votes would be changed for the 2008 presidential election.

Instead of “winner take all,” 53 of the state’s 55 electoral votes would be apportioned according to the winner of the presidential popular vote in each of the state’s 53 Congressional districts. A single vote would be awarded to the winner in each district. (The other two votes would still go to the statewide winner.)

John Kerry defeated George W. Bush in California in 2004 and collected all of the state’s electoral votes. But Mr. Bush won the popular vote in 22 of the state’s Congressional districts. If this proposed system had been in effect, 22 electoral votes would have been withheld from Mr. Kerry and given to Mr. Bush.

“This clearly is a power grab by the Republican Party,” said John Travis, a longtime political science professor at Humboldt State University in California. Mr. Travis believes that while there may be problems with the Electoral College system, this is not the way to fix it.

“This is simply a way for the Republicans to manipulate California’s electoral votes to their advantage,” he said.

Democrats do not have perfectly clean hands when it comes to this sort of thing. A similar effort by Democrats in North Carolina was scrapped at the insistence of national party leaders, and not a moment too soon.

What the Democrats need to do now is make sure that California voters understand that they are the latest targeted pawns in the G.O.P.’s longstanding efforts to undermine not just the Democrats but democracy itself.

Hillary Clinton, From Revolution to Evolution

2007-09-18T11:29:00.000-04:00

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: September 18, 2007

Health care reform isn’t only about covering the uninsured. It’s about reorganizing one-seventh of the U.S. economy. It’s the issue that will redefine the role of government in the 21st century. So when I spoke with Hillary Clinton yesterday, I asked what her newly unveiled plan revealed about her political philosophy.

The word she kept coming back to was “partnerships.” She described an array of different social entities — individuals, the federal government, insurance companies, doctors and hospitals — coming together and exercising shared responsibility for creating a better system.

It began to sound like a health care loya jirga — indicative of the political vision that has marked so much of her thinking over the years. When some politicians are asked to describe systems that really work, they think of the competitive marketplace. Others think of political combat — good defeating evil. But Clinton, at her most hopeful moments, is a communitarian. When she’s asked to describe a system that works, she describes diverse people coming together around a big table to reach a consensus.

That’s the sort of national community her plan is supposed to foster and that’s the sort of process she used to create it. Clinton is hard to interview because her answers are often just chunks of her stump speeches, but I thought I detected real warmth when she described the way she and her staff came up with the plan.

“It was an exhilarating process!” she enthused, describing how all sorts of different people came together to talk through issues. “There were countless meetings,” she remembered fondly, “with business leaders who were surprised to find themselves sitting next to me” and a long parade of academics, nurses, experts and friends.

As she spoke, memories of the Clinton years wafted through my head — government by seminar running into the late hours. But as she will tell you (before you even have a chance to ask), she has learned a lot since the early 1990s, and while the conversations may still be endless, they are also more restrained.

And it’s true. The plan she unveiled yesterday is much simpler than the one she came up with 14 years ago. Back then, she and her staff were like technocratic engineers, one of her advisers told me, trying to patch every last gap in their edifice. This time they were content to leave the details of the plan to Congress.

Last time, they threatened people who were satisfied with their health coverage. This time they reassure them that nothing will change. Last time, they were out of touch with the American values of choice and individual freedom. This time they emphasize those values every chance they get, never seriously considering a Canadian-style single-payer system.

This time the change is evolutionary, not revolutionary. The private insurance/employer-based system will still remain the heart and soul of the social contract — it’s just that more people will be given tax credits so they can afford to buy in.

The Clinton plan makes life politically difficult for Mitt Romney. She relies on an individual insurance mandate. So does his plan in Massachusetts. The Clinton plan also takes the brave step of taxing the wealthy for gold-plated health care benefits — a reform that almost every Republican health expert endorses. Meanwhile, the plan seems to have driven John Edwards around the bend. The statement he issued yesterday qualifies as the shrillest statement issued by a major presidential candidate this year.

But the Clinton plan does have the weaknesses of the communitarian approach. She creates a magic circle of companies, providers, government entities, all interlocked in a system to provide health security. But there will still be forces outside the magic circle that will be adapting and innovating in ways that might upset the plan.

First, there will be state governments. One of the virtues of welfare reform is that while the national government set certain goals, it was up to the states to innovate and compete to reach them. Clinton says she’s not averse to creative solutions from the states, but she doubts that they’ll be able to lead the way since they rely on money from Washington. Hers is not a decentralized, federal approach.

Then, there are the insurance companies, the designated bêtes noires of her plan. They are commanded to insure everybody, but they’ll probably be extremely creative in finding ways to not insure high-risk people who will cost them money.

Then there are patients. The Clinton plan aims to lower health care costs through a variety of measures. But if the cost of an M.R.I. comes down, people will just want more of them. Americans spend more on computers as those machines get more efficient.

Finally, there is posterity. Our children face a gigantic tidal wave of debt as a result of our current health care system. If health care reform doesn’t fundamentally adjust benefits while using available tax increases to help the uninsured, then the system will still be unaffordable in the long run.

Hillary Clinton’s health care plan is a huge step forward from 1993. It’s better than the G.O.P. candidates’ plans (which don’t exist). But there are still complexities in the health care system that no loya jirga, no matter how smart, can fully anticipate and control.

Becoming an American Citizen, the Hardest Way

2007-09-18T11:21:00.000-04:00

Maria Alcántara, center, and her daughter Fredelinda Peña, in striped sweater,
took the citizenship oath on Monday for Ms. Alcántara’s son,
Cpl. Juan Alcántara, who died in Iraq.
Photo: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: September 18, 2007

On an August day when some Iraqi’s homemade bomb tore through him, Cpl. Juan Mariel Alcántara became an American. He never got to appreciate the honor.

A little-discussed detail of this war is that some of those fighting in it as soldiers of the United States are not American citizens. Over all, about 21,000 noncitizens are serving in this country’s armed forces, the Defense Department says.

Until death claimed him on Aug. 6, one of them was Corporal Alcántara of the United States Army.

He did not live long enough to acquire a richly textured biography. He was born in the Dominican Republic, reared in Washington Heights. He was 22 when the bomb — an improvised explosive device, in military-speak — ended his life and the lives of three fellow soldiers from the Second Infantry Division while they searched a house in Baquba, north of Baghdad.

At 22, Corporal Alcántara was old enough to have talked about going to college and maybe becoming a New York police officer, old enough to have a fiancée, old enough to have fathered a baby girl he never saw, Jaylani, 6 weeks old when he was killed. He was old enough, too, to have sought American citizenship.

Every year, thousands of noncitizen soldiers do that, through an accelerated naturalization process offered to those who put themselves in harm’s way so that the rest of us can go about our lives untouched by war. And every year, some of those soldiers become citizens only after they have literally been wrapped in the flag.

No other war has produced anywhere near as many posthumous citizens as this one, according to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. Corporal Alcántara is the latest, No. 103. He is the 12th from New York, an honor roll that reflects today’s city: 10 men and 2 women born in the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Guyana, Belize, Trinidad and Tobago, Myanmar and Nigeria.

The Americanization of Juan Alcántara came at his family’s request. Representative Charles B. Rangel of Manhattan helped shepherd the application through the bureaucracy in a matter of days. Officially, the corporal was declared an American from the day he died.

There was a formal ceremony yesterday in the colonnaded Great Hall of City College of New York. Corporal Alcántara’s relatives accepted his certificate of posthumous citizenship. They sat somberly in a front row: his mother, his two sisters and his fiancée, Sayonara Lopez, who fed Jaylani from a bottle.

Like scores of others filling the rows behind them, they carried small American flags. Yesterday was Citizenship Day across the country, a celebratory day for newly minted Americans. In the vaulted majesty of the Great Hall, used on occasion for such ceremonies, 242 people from 51 countries took the oath of citizenship. They were men and women like Lance Whitely, 32, formerly of Jamaica, now of the Bronx. “It’s everybody’s dream to become an American citizen,” he said before the ceremony began.

The new citizens listened to speeches on America’s grandeur and watched a large-screen video of President Bush offering congratulations.

Mr. Rangel, a critic of the Iraq war, left politics at the door. He spoke of a country that is hardly perfect but is ever working to make itself better. Once a combat soldier himself, part of the same Second Infantry Division during the Korean War, he talked about Corporal Alcántara’s sacrifice and America’s debt to him.

Throughout, the Alcántara family sat disconsolately. They applauded with the others and recited the Pledge of Allegiance and waved their little flags. But their hearts were elsewhere.

Maria Alcántara, the soldier’s mother, is clearly a woman of stricken soul. She holds Mr. Bush responsible for her son’s death. Corporal Alcántara’s Iraq duty was supposed to have ended on June 28, a day before his daughter was born. But his tour was extended as part of the president’s troop “surge.”

“If my son had been allowed to return, he would be alive,” Ms. Alcántara said in Spanish, “and he” — meaning the president — “is guilty.”

“My happiness, my everything, is gone,” she said.

The mother, who is not an American citizen, also spoke of being grateful for her son’s naturalization. Still, gratitude does not bring peace of mind, said one of her daughters, Fredelinda Peña. “It’s not a happy moment,” Ms. Peña said.

Unlike others on this day of celebration, the family wiped away tears. When the president’s image appeared on the screen, Ms. Alcántara kept her head down. She could not bring herself to look at the man who she felt was the reason her son did not come home.

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

Mangini Risks Fury of Scorned Hoodie

2007-09-18T11:15:00.000-04:00

By SELENA ROBERTS

Published: September 18, 2007

There is Coach Hoodie, and then there is Coach Hoodwink.

Coach Hoodie is the Patriots’ Bill Belichick. He answers with growls, is hardwired to be ruthless, and would have lost a congeniality contest to the dearly departed Leona Helmsley. He comes as is: obsessive, cold, and brazen enough to have cheated with his video spy games out in the open of a sideline.

Coach Hoodwink is the Jets’ Eric Mangini (pictured). He replies to questions in his library voice, visits Sesame Street in his downtime and readily reveals his soft, fatherly side. He comes off as duplicitous: paranoid, brutal, and nakedly ambitious enough to have double-crossed the organization that nurtured his career.

Mangini didn’t just flip on Belichick, costing his former mentor a celebrated image that has been reflected in a shelf-full of Lombardi Trophies, as well as a $500,000 fine and a prime draft pick. He did more. He also humiliated the respected Patriots owner and league power player Robert K. Kraft.

That sin has left Mangini toxic to some team executives. After all, would you trust him? Is there anyone — a player, assistant, general manager, owner or mascot — that he wouldn’t betray in a pinch?

Bad karma can be a career killer. It took Ted Nolan years to land his current gig as the coach of the Islanders after he was blackballed, in part because he was labeled a traitor of management during his Sabres days.

False righteousness can boomerang. The track coach Trevor Graham once said he anonymously mailed the syringe that started the Balco circus in an effort to clean up the sport, but a grand jury witness told a different tale: He did it to implicate athletes and coaches that his runners competed against. Graham is awaiting trial on charges that he lied to federal agents about the distribution of performance-enhancing drugs.

•

Videogate isn’t a criminal issue — it’s more of a punch line by now — but it does cast shadows on the league’s integrity.

There is no doubt Belichick’s video trickery was wrong, hubristic and a below-the-belt maneuver of reckless proportion. Commissioner Roger Goodell — the N.F.L.’s overtaxed moral warden — was right in delivering a punitive blow as a scare tactic to a league full of teams that seek a competitive edge by tapping into their inner MacGyvers. Even Kraft understood Goodell’s logic, even if it took him a while.

“I must tell you I was quite upset and perturbed when I saw the penalty, because I didn’t think that the incident deserved this kind of punishment,” Kraft told NBC on Sunday night. “Over the last couple of days, I’ve been thinking about it and have cooled down. I realized he wasn’t just sending a message to the New England Patriots, he was sending it to all 32 teams.”

Belichick wasn’t alone in this race to the bottom of sports ethics. Mangini was very likely, at one point in his Patriot days, the spy who loved Hoodie.

How will we ever know? Maybe the lens will be the judge. In order to eliminate any competitive advantage Belichick might have tucked away in his film files, the Patriots said yesterday that they would comply with Goodell’s request to provide their videotape archive.

How about popcorn and a movie with Goodell? Imagine what’s on those old tapes. Is that Mangini holding the Cheat Cam in 2004? Is that Mangini wiretapping Bill Parcells’s headset in 2003?

A question to Jets officials yesterday about Mangini’s possible role in New England’s spy ring was greeted with the organization mantra: “It’s a league matter.”

The matter has revealed more about Mangini than Belichick. Already, Mangini was known for attempting to raid the Patriots’ cupboards upon his exit in January 2006. He slithered around Foxborough as if he were pilfering Whoville, trying to lift players, assistants and secretaries.

He wanted everything but the picture hooks on the walls. He also wanted to claim Belichick’s mind as his own intellectual property.

But who knew how far he would go for a gotcha of Belichick? Maybe Mangini’s betrayal was a little something he learned from Belichick’s school of calculated callousness. In a way, the two almost deserve each other. Someday, Belichick and Mangini may look up and realize teams can win — and play in Super Bowls — on the strength of a coach’s humanity, not his ability to humiliate.

•

Belichick is who he is. Mangini is the one with an identity crisis. He wants to portray himself as the anti-Bill — oozing charm when talking family values — and yet he longs to be Hoodie, to be known as wickedly smart.

Calling out his mentor lacked thought, though. It is not the wisest idea to mess with the N.F.L.’s version of Zeus. The wisdom of Mangini’s decision to flip Bill will play out all season — and maybe beyond. So far, it’s Coach Hoodie, 2-0; and Coach Hoodwink, 0-2.

E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com

The Opinionator: 17 September 2007

2007-09-18T11:10:00.000-04:00

September 17, 2007, 5:37 pm

Tough Talk on Iran (in French)

By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: france, Iran

Ah, what must we Americans do to tamp down raging French bellicosity?

“The world should ‘prepare for war’ with Iran, the French foreign minister has said, significantly escalating tensions over the country’s nuclear program,” reports The Telegraph of London,

“Bernard Kouchner said that while ‘we must negotiate right to the end’ with Iran, if Teheran possessed an atomic weapon it would represent ‘a real danger for the whole world.’ ”

The Dutch blogger Michael van der Galiën is pleased:

One gets the impression that France is finding its old imperial soul back. No, I don’t favor Europe colonizing the world once again, but I do favor a strong and active Europe. We have lived too long in our Kantian paradise, pretending that the entire world is like us. The Americans understand much better that while Europe may live in its Kantian paradise, the world still lives according to the Hobbesian law: it’s all about power. Power is not something to be feared, but to be [pursued] and used.

Blake Hounshell at Foreign Policy magazine’s Passport blog, however, thinks the top man at the Pentagon, Robert Gates, may supply a calming influence. He writes:

I think we know what side of the burgeoning “bomb Iran” discussion Bob Gates is on. Speaking with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, who asked about comments by Gen. David Petraeus about Iranian Revolutionary Guards bases thought to be supplying arms to Shiite militants in Iraq, the U.S. secretary of defense indicated that diplomacy remains the Bush administration’s preferred approach to the Islamic Republic.

That Michael Mukasey">Oh, That Michael Mukasey

By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: attorney general, Charles Schumer, Michael Mukasey

Have we had a senatorial change of heart? Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters cites a New York Sun article reporting that Senator Chuck Schumer, head of the judiciary committee, may not support attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey. “Schumer, who had openly championed Mukasey as a ‘consensus candidate’ to replace Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General,” Morissey writes, “suddenly appears unsure.” He continues:

Just two years ago, Schumer pushed Mukasey as a contender for the William Rehnquist seat on the Supreme Court. The liberal group Alliance for Justice joined him in endorsing Mukasey as an alternative to John Roberts …. Bush has managed to strip Schumer of his last pretenses of fairness and honesty, and the Alliance for Justice may be next. Uncle Chuck couldn’t give a fig for “consensus.” He used Mukasey as a club to beat Bush two years ago… Schumer just had his bluff called, and one can expect that the confirmation hearings will feature several Republican committee members read into the record over and over again Schumer’s endorsement of Mukasey for the lifetime appointment.

Jeralynn Merritt at TalkLeft is also bemused:

What’s up with Sen. Charles Schumer? First he touts Mukasey to Bush for both the Supreme Court and the Attorney General’s position, and now he’s promising a tough confirmation hearing and saying Judge Mukasey only has ‘potential’ to be a consensus nominee? … Maybe he should have ascertained the Judge’s positions on these issues before he recommended him for the job.

Merritt may be a proud liberal, but she seems satisfied by the White House choice: “[A]nyone Bush picks for A.G. is going to be a conservative,” she points out. “Mukasey has bucked the government in several cases, and I’ve found nothing to suggest he will be the administration’s water boy. Mukasey is a far better pick than Ted Olson or, for that matter, a career prosecutor who grew up under Ashcroft and Gonzales.”

Note: Jamie Heller at the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog has found some interesting excerpts from articles Mukasey wrote for the Columbia Spectator in the early 1960’s

***********************************

Judging Mukasey

By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: attorney general, Justice Department

After much speculation that conservative hero and liberal bete noir Ted Olson would be tabbed to replace Alberto Gonzales as attorney general, it seems the Bush administration has chosen a nominee with a far lower profile: Michael B. Mukasey, a former federal judge from New York who has presided over several high-profile terrorism trials.

Deven Desai, an assistant professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, notes that “Judge Mukasey has a curious background.” Writing at Concurring Opinions, Desai continues:

He was a federal prosecutor with Rudy Giuliani and has ties to his campaign, served 19 years on the federal bench, and according to some interviewed by the Washington Post, is not well-known or likely to be favored among conservatives. Perhaps his rejection of the claim that Jose Padilla could be held indefinitely as an enemy combatant, which resulted in the case being transferred to South Carolina, upset some folks. Still as the Post notes, William Kristol of the Weekly Standard has written an editorial defending the choice.

Kristol suggests that even though Judge Mukasey denied the government’s motion in Padilla’s case he will be acceptable to conservatives. …

I can’t say I know enough about the man at this point. As Kristol posited, the right may be choosing someone who will not be challenged (Sen. Schumer of New York seems to like the choice) and do little harm from the right’s view in the year and a quarter left in this administration’s term.

Sad Alan’s Lament

2007-09-17T01:03:00.000-04:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: September 17, 2007

When President Bush first took office, it seemed unlikely that he would succeed in getting his proposed tax cuts enacted. The questionable nature of his installation in the White House seemed to leave him in a weak political position, while the Senate was evenly balanced between the parties. It was hard to see how a huge, controversial tax cut, which delivered most of its benefits to a wealthy elite, could get through Congress.

Then Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, testified before the Senate Budget Committee.

Until then Mr. Greenspan had presented himself as the voice of fiscal responsibility, warning the Clinton administration not to endanger its hard-won budget surpluses. But now Republicans held the White House, and the Greenspan who appeared before the Budget Committee was a very different man.

Suddenly, his greatest concern — the “emerging key fiscal policy need,” he told Congress — was to avert the threat that the federal government might actually pay off all its debt. To avoid this awful outcome, he advocated tax cuts. And the floodgates were opened.

As it turns out, Mr. Greenspan’s fears that the federal government would quickly pay off its debt were, shall we say, exaggerated. And Mr. Greenspan has just published a book in which he castigates the Bush administration for its fiscal irresponsibility.

Well, I’m sorry, but that criticism comes six years late and a trillion dollars short.

Mr. Greenspan now says that he didn’t mean to give the Bush tax cuts a green light, and that he was surprised at the political reaction to his remarks. There were, indeed, rumors at the time — which Mr. Greenspan now says were true — that the Fed chairman was upset about the response to his initial statement.

But the fact is that if Mr. Greenspan wasn’t intending to lend crucial support to the Bush tax cuts, he had ample opportunity to set the record straight when it could have made a difference.

His first big chance to clarify himself came a few weeks after that initial testimony, when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

Here’s what I wrote following that appearance: “Mr. Greenspan’s performance yesterday, in his first official testimony since he let the genie out of the bottle, was a profile in cowardice. Again and again he was offered the opportunity to say something that would help rein in runaway tax-cutting; each time he evaded the question, often replying by reading from his own previous testimony. He declared once again that he was speaking only for himself, thus granting himself leeway to pronounce on subjects far afield of his role as Federal Reserve chairman. But when pressed on the crucial question of whether the huge tax cuts that now seem inevitable are too large, he said it was inappropriate for him to comment on particular proposals.

“In short, Mr. Greenspan defined the rules of the game in a way that allows him to intervene as he likes in the political debate, but to retreat behind the veil of his office whenever anyone tries to hold him accountable for the results of those interventions.”

I received an irate phone call from Mr. Greenspan after that article, in which he demanded to know what he had said that was wrong. In his book, he claims that Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, was stumped by that question. That’s hard to believe, because I certainly wasn’t: Mr. Greenspan’s argument for tax cuts was contorted and in places self-contradictory, not to mention based on budget projections that everyone knew, even then, were wildly overoptimistic.

If anyone had doubts about Mr. Greenspan’s determination not to inconvenience the Bush administration, those doubts were resolved two years later, when the administration proposed another round of tax cuts, even though the budget was now deep in deficit. And guess what? The former high priest of fiscal responsibility did not object.

And in 2004 he expressed support for making the Bush tax cuts permanent — remember, these are the tax cuts he now says he didn’t endorse — and argued that the budget should be balanced with cuts in entitlement spending, including Social Security benefits, instead. Of course, back in 2001 he specifically assured Congress that cutting taxes would not threaten Social Security.

In retrospect, Mr. Greenspan’s moral collapse in 2001 was a portent. It foreshadowed the way many people in the foreign policy community would put their critical faculties on hold and support the invasion of Iraq, despite ample evidence that it was a really bad idea.

And like enthusiastic war supporters who have started describing themselves as war critics now that the Iraq venture has gone wrong, Mr. Greenspan has started portraying himself as a critic of administration fiscal irresponsibility now that President Bush has become deeply unpopular and Democrats control Congress.

The Nordic Option

2007-09-17T01:00:00.001-04:00

By ROGER COHEN

Published: September 17, 2007

Stockholm

Think Sweden and what comes to mind is probably not a youthful finance minister, with his long dark hair in a ponytail and a gold ring through his left ear, explaining that his ambition is to make it “more profitable to work” than to sit around on welfare.

But Anders Borg, 39, poster boy of the “New Moderates” who have put the long-governing Social Democrats out of office, does just that, and when the question of his coiffure comes up, the retort is swift: “This is northern Europe, a modern society. Your public deficit or surplus is more important than your hairstyle.”

Right. Sweden, of course, has a surplus that the deficit-ridden United States can only envy, as well as a knack for staying out of wars that borders on the obscene. It’s that reasonable, semi-socialist, Volvo-driving, super-taxed Nordic place that gave the world Ikea’s cheap furniture and Bergman’s dissection of marriage.

Or is it? The ponytailed finance minister — a world first? — is just one sign that something funky is up in the Swedish woods. A government that includes the country’s first black, avowedly gay and bisexual ministers (that’s three distinct people) has set about a radical reform of the generous welfare state that defined the Swedish condition.

In doing so, it has adopted a few core principles. It should be more profitable to work than not to work. Welfare should mean caring for people who cannot care for themselves. Unemployment insurance should be adjustment insurance rather than an open-ended sinecure. Employers should be encouraged to hire through lower taxes.

Hardly rocket science, you might say, but all of this has proved radical enough to make “systemskifte,” or “system shift,” the buzzword in Sweden. The term might be applied to much of northern Europe, where in recent years the welfare state has been upended even as its essence has been preserved.

Europe, at peace and undivided, has not been foremost on the American mind of late. Old images of “Eurosclerosis” — the vacationing worker (or non-worker) stripped of initiative by an overbearing nanny state — have tended to endure. But in countries including Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark and to some degree Germany, welfare has ceded to what Borg calls “work-fair.”

The transformation has brought streamlined state sectors; more flexible labor markets; a focus on social fairness through improved education and health care rather than through attempts at income redistribution via high taxes; a restored work ethic (“Make Work Pay” is a Swedish government slogan); and a rediscovery of entrepreneurship and choice.

“Our principle is you should show solidarity with people who have problems for a space in their lives, but they should not be supported permanently by the welfare state,” Tobias Billstrom, the migration minister, says.

Billstrom is all of 33 and sports multicolored buttons on his shirt. He’s a backer of the reforms because Sweden doesn’t want the immigrants pouring into the country to think collecting subsidies and working on the black market are the Swedish way.

Sweden has learned that a rigid labor market is a devastating form of exclusion (France, take note). Its aging population, like others in Europe, needs immigrants to find jobs and so pay the taxes that will fund pensions into the future.

By slashing unemployment benefits, making it easier and cheaper to hire, offering tax credits to employers taking on people who have been jobless for a long time, and providing tax incentives to lure domestic jobs out the black market, Sweden has cut unemployment to 4.4 percent, or about half the French rate.

Growth in 2007 of 3.2 percent will be among the highest in Europe and handily top the U.S rate. Surpluses keep accumulating. All nine million Swedes have health insurance, while 47 million Americans, or the equivalent of five Swedens, do not. And the school system delivers high standards.

Of course, Sweden doesn’t have the world to run, and a top personal income tax rate of 56 percent would make Americans pale. Still, Sweden’s new Nordic model merits attention.

“My idea,” Borg says, “is to combine the entrepreneurial spirit of America with the welfare of Sweden. That’s my ideal world: the creative impulse and restructured welfare. The lowest quarter of our population is well educated. The United States could learn from that.”

It could indeed. Northern Europe has looked to America for some of its reforms. America, Iraq-obsessed, has not looked to a changing Europe. A stagnating middle class, losing jobs and health insurance, holds the key to victory for Democratic candidates next year if they can suggest strong programs for better education and universal health care.

A stop in funky Stockholm is in order for Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama.

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You are invited to comment at my blog: www.iht.com/passages.

Restoring American Justice

2007-09-17T00:52:00.000-04:00

Published: September 17, 2007

In 2006, acting in reckless haste before an election, 65 senators and 250 members of the House defied the Constitution, endangered the safety of American soldiers and hurt the nation’s global reputation by passing the Military Commissions Act. The law created a separate, substandard and clearly unconstitutional system of trial and punishment for foreigners. This week Congress has a chance to begin fixing that grievous mistake.

The Senate is expected to consider a measure that would reverse one of the worst aspects of the 2006 law — the suspension of the right of habeas corpus, the ancient principle that no governing power may lock people up without the chance for a hearing in a court of law.

The protection from arbitrary arrest, embedded in the Magna Carta and in the Constitution of the United States, is one of the most powerful weapons against tyranny in democracy’s arsenal. Before President Bush, only one American president suspended habeas corpus — Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War — and the Supreme Court duly struck down that arrogation of power.

In 2004, the Supreme Court again affirmed habeas corpus, declaring that Mr. Bush had no right to revoke the rules of civilized justice at his whim for hundreds of foreigners he declared “illegal enemy combatants.” But Mr. Bush was determined to avoid judicial scrutiny of the extralegal system of prisons he created after the Sept. 11 attacks. With the help of his allies on Capitol Hill, he railroaded the habeas corpus suspension through the Republican-controlled Congress.

The administration’s disinformation machine portrayed the debate as a fight between tough-minded conservatives who wanted to defeat terrorism and addled liberals who would coddle the worst kinds of criminals. It was nothing of the kind.

There is nothing conservative about expressing contempt for the Constitution by denying judicial procedure to prisoners who happen not to be Americans. A long list of conservatives, including Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman; David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union; and William Sessions, a former federal judge and F.B.I. director under the first President Bush, support the reinstatement of habeas corpus for the prisoners of the so-called war on terror.

This issue has nothing to do, either, with coddling criminals. Many, perhaps a majority, of the men subjected to indefinite summary detention at Guantánamo Bay were not guilty of any crime. Beyond that, American justice rests on the principle that the only way to protect the innocent is to treat everyone equally under the law. The argument by Mr. Bush’s supporters that Guantánamo prisoners would clog the courts with appeals is specious.

There are many other things deeply wrong with the Military Commissions Act, which established military tribunals to try any foreigner that Mr. Bush labels an illegal combatant. It also allowed the introduction of evidence tainted by coercion and endorsed “combatant status review tribunals,” kangaroo courts in Guantánamo Bay that declare prisoners enemy combatants without a real hearing or reliable evidence.

All of those issues must be addressed, speedily, by Congress, but restoring habeas corpus would be a good first step. Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, must ensure a vote on the habeas corpus restoration measure sponsored by Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Arlen Specter, its ranking Republican.

It is good to see the effort led by Mr. Specter, who as chairman of the committee before the 2006 election shepherded the military tribunal law through Congress at the behest of the White House. We hope similar principle will be on display by the other Republican and Democratic senators and representatives who betrayed the Constitution and the democracy they were sworn to defend by voting for that law.

On the Ground

2007-09-17T00:50:00.000-04:00

September 16, 2007, 11:59 am

How Do They Cope?

By Josh Ruxin

Josh Ruxin is a Columbia University expert on public health who has spent the last couple of years living in Rwanda. He’s an unusual mix of academic expert and mud-between-the-toes aid worker.

The Ruxins

My daughter Maya was born last Friday at 2 a.m. in San Francisco. Maybe I should blame the acute sleep deprivation I’m enduring (yes, thank you, I know I don’t have to get up for every feeding, but I’m doing it anyway), but I am finding fatherhood to be staggeringly hard work. Even with a doting family, electricity, running water, access to quality health care, lactation consultants, an array of parenting books and whatever else we need to ensure our child’s well-being, doing a halfway passable job of parenting requires enormous reservoirs of energy. (Mom, Dad: Respect.)

The past few sleepless days have heightened my appreciation of the daily achievements of the billions of parents who make do without the resources my wife and I are enjoying during our time back in San Francisco. For more than a decade now, my work has brought me into daily contact with parents who are not only among the world’s poorest, but commonly managing four, six, even nine children. Far removed from the luxury of worrying about early stage developmental learning techniques, they’re concerned with just keeping their overflowing household alive with resources too meager to support even a small family.

How do they cope? From my rocking chair here amid the abundance and safety (give or take an earthquake or two) of California, it’s hard to imagine.

In the wee hours, between feeding times, my mind has been dwelling on family planning. (Irony or consequence? You decide.) I wonder how Rwanda can get ahead – economically and educationally — without slowing its population growth. Happily, the Rwandan Government appears to be taking the issue increasingly seriously. (Check out Stephen Kinzer’s revealing piece in The New York Times and his superb analysis of Rwanda in The New York Review of Books).

Even in predominantly Catholic Rwanda, policy makers are focusing on population demographics. In 1994, roughly 15 percent of Rwanda’s population was slaughtered, and yet since then Rwanda’s high population growth has already brought its overall population to levels notably higher than before the genocide.

Today, the nation has one of the highest population densities in the world and an average per capita annual income of only $280. Only about 10 percent
of women utilize modern family planning methods. The average Rwandan woman gives birth to six children – nearly three times the United States rate – and at current rates, Rwanda’s population of 9.7 million will double by about 2032.

With more than 90 percent of the population reliant on agriculture for their livelihoods, the ramifications are staggering. There are already
approximately three people per arable acre, and even with advanced agricultural techniques there is scarcely adequate land remaining to produce subsistence levels of food. A few months ago, a 44-year-old woman came to one of the health centers that my programs support to give birth to her ninth child. In tears after the birth, she said that she had no way to feed any of her children.

Rwanda is fast becoming a perfect Malthusian storm: limitations of food productivity are resulting in stunted growth in kids and, in severe instances, starvation. As a result, Rwandan President Paul Kagame has announced that he is preparing a major initiative to reduce Rwanda’s birth rate by at least half. The model for Rwanda, in this case, comes from the Far East – Thailand in particular.

Between 1965 and 1990, Thailand’s fertility rate dropped from Rwandese levels to roughly United States levels (about two births per woman), and during the same period its per capita income – a crucial factor in improving health care – tripled. The bedrock of Thailand’s success is just what Rwanda is considering today: universal access to free birth control methods; training of health care workers in every setting to provide these options; and a national advocacy campaign in support of access to family planning services.

All of us in the rich world have a stake in ensuring that the children in the poorest countries have the same opportunity to develop and thrive as
our children do. The future families of Rwanda would best be served if their meager assets could be spent nurturing a few children, rather than being forced to watch their many children go hungry and stay poor.

As I look at Maya’s newborn face, and begin to sense the extent to which she already has me wrapped around her little one-inch pinky, I’m more deeply aware of the grief parents anywhere must feel when they can’t support their families. I’m also more acutely conscious, having felt the tug on my parental heartstrings, that every Rwandan child – every child for that matter — deserves a running start at having a quality life.

Firefighter Was Down, but Not Ready to Give Up

2007-09-17T00:44:00.000-04:00

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: September 16, 2007

NORTH HAVEN, Conn.

The first fall should have been the catastrophe.

Dino Ferraro was at a fire in a largely abandoned clock factory in 1989 when he fell from a fully extended aerial ladder 25 feet to the concrete below, landing on his left shoulder. A different angle, he could have been paralyzed or killed. As it was, small miracle, he hit the ground and bounced up like a rubber ball. He separated the shoulder and was out for two and a half months, but lived to fight fires another day.

But you get to dodge only so many bullets. He didn’t dodge any on Sept. 23, 2000, when he came to work a little early and took a call he would have missed had he showed up five minutes later. This time he was on a ladder breaking open second-floor windows at a bedroom fire in a housing project.

The firefighters inside, not seeing him through the smoke, blasted him with a hose shooting out water at 150 pounds per square inch of pressure. He fell only 12 feet, but when a firefighter at the bottom of the ladder tried to break the fall, Mr. Ferraro landed squarely on the heel of his right foot. “When they pulled off the boot, it looked like scrambled eggs,” Mr. Ferraro said. He suffered what is called a pilon fracture. It is also known as a hammer fracture, which tells you all you need to know.

“They looked at the ankle and told me it was all over,” Mr. Ferraro, 48, recalled. “They told me before the surgery, they told me after the surgery, they probably told me during the surgery, that I was all done with fighting fires. They said there was just no way.”

There were operations, a steel plate and 13 screws in his leg, casts, boots and therapy sessions, all intended to allow him to walk normally, without pain. None were very successful. And when the ankle joint ended up 20 degrees out of alignment, the right leg an inch shorter than the left, that looked like the best that could be done.

But Mr. Ferraro, who at first wanted to become a state trooper but then caught the firehouse bug, wasn’t content with limping around, and, stubbornly, he wasn’t resigned to being a former firefighter, living on disability payments at the impeccably neat split raised ranch he shares with his wife, Annette. He wanted to walk normally. And he wanted to climb ladders, walk on roofs, smash gashes in burning buildings, fight fires.

So through his wife’s contacts as a radiology technician, he began looking for more options. In October 2002 that took him to the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan and Dr. S. Robert Rozbruch, an orthopedic surgeon and director of the hospital’s limb lengthening and deformity service, who decided that Mr. Ferraro’s case might not be so hopeless, after all. He could see that in 95 percent of cases it would be a career-ending injury. But between the advances in orthopedics and Mr. Ferraro’s dogged insistence on going back to work, he figured it was worth a shot.

So, using an Ilizarov frame, a scaffold around the leg that looks a bit like a medieval torture device, his treatment consisted of two main elements — returning the ankle joint to something near its normal alignment and using the body’s ability to grow new bone to lengthen the leg to where it had been before the accident. The frame was put on in February 2003. It was removed that July.

After almost a year of therapy, Mr. Ferraro thought it was time to see how close he was to where he wanted to be. He took out his ladder and climbed to the top of his house with its steep-pitched roof. Then several times a week he clambered over its eaves and ridges, first without his gear, then in his heavy firefighter’s outfit.

On June 8, 2005, he was allowed to return to work as a firefighter, and he has been there ever since, back at the New Haven Fire Department’s East Battalion, Truck 3 at the Lombard Street station, where he began work 21 years ago.

This past week all the terrible images came flooding back, of the firefighters rushing into the burning towers, the almost unfathomable dedication, the miracles of bravery, medicine, heart and soul that got people through that week six years ago. Mr. Ferraro marvels and shudders like everyone else about what people did on 9/11. But, though he wouldn’t make any comparisons, he is a reminder of how, in far, far smaller ways, those miracles play out in daily life, too.

“It’s just something in my blood,” he said. “I climb ladders. I walk on roofs. I fight fires. I wasn’t really out to prove anything. I just figured I was 41 years old, and that was too young to quit.”

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

Stop Worrying, and Learn to Love the Yanks

2007-09-17T00:37:00.000-04:00

By SELENA ROBERTS

Published: September 16, 2007

BOSTON

In a version of the '80s alternative band The Replacements, a young trio of rockin' pitchers has arrived to push out the cranky, arrogant and gluttonous tenets of Yankee loathing.

Go ahead and despise Planet Pinstripe if you must because the franchise of excess has mistake money to absorb debacles like Carl Pavano or because A-Rod is forever precious. Go ahead and sneer at Yankee Inc., because Boss revulsion is part of your DNA or because you'd rather gnaw your arm off than watch the miracle comeback the Yankees produced against Boston on Friday night.

Otherwise, Yankee hate seems so synthetic, so manufactured. Really, you have to force it when the Boss is only venomous in caricature as he slip-slides away into the background.

Odious is so yesterday now that the Yankees' sleepless crossing guard, Brian Cashman, is directing decisions, now that his boy band of Phil Hughes, Ian Kennedy and Joba Chamberlain has arrived as cheap, blissful and innocent members of the team's Happy Meal crowd.

They are so cute at this age — before hubris or entitlement or big money kicks in. They come without baggage or attitude or mercenary labels. They come as a refreshing option to the organization's villainous past. Not long ago, the Yankees possessed a crotchety AARP club of antisocial pitchers who could stare holes — or punch holes — into cinder block walls. The oppressive Kevin Brown and Randy Johnson lorded dark clouds over everyone.

Now, there is the sound of children laughing — or at least 20-somethings having a blast.

"I'm excited about any trip; I'm like a kid in a candy store," Chamberlain said Friday after his first tour of Fenway Park. "I've walked around a little bit. You've got to step back and take it all in."

Among the youth crew, Chamberlain is the overnight sensation of mythic proportions who has managed to keep his luminary status from going Britney Spears.

"We're impressed with Joba, how he has handled everything," Cashman said. "That's part of someone's development, not just the physical side on the field, but how they're doing off the field. And we'll take great care to make sure he stays balanced."

Joba Rule No. 1: Bubble Wrap his Yankee arm from harm. Joba Rule No. 54: Bubble Wrap him from the Manhattan scene.

"A lot of times, as you've seen, the extra attention can go to someone's head and make them someone they prefer not to be," Cashman said. "You see that in pop stars. We don't want that."

They have enough leftover divas, if only in reputation. Mike Mussina, the meticulous pitcher of prickly fits, has been humbled a bit as he battles for his spot in the rotation. Roger Clemens, months removed from his Shakespearean balcony scene, doesn't generate the same antipathy for being a luxury-item bust given the way his body has been breaking down.

Jason Giambi, a confessed steroid cheat whose signing before the 2002 season triggered the new Yankee era of greed, is more of a forlorn figure than a detested one. He remains upbeat — if jagged from his Red Bull devotion — but is lost in the field and sporadic at the plate.

Pitiful lot, right? And yet, here the Yankees are, aboard Alex Rod8riguez's magic carpet ride, whisking toward the playoffs with youth to lighten the mood and brighten the outlook and threaten the Red Sox.

Boston, has its own prodigies with the no-hit wonder Clay Buchholz now in the bullpen and the hot-hitting Jacoby Ellsbury pushing center fielder Coco Crisp from Red Sox memory. And Boston, too, has plenty of petty cash to cover bad investments like J. D. Drew.

Both teams are hybrids — partly built for now, partly assembled for the future. More than with Boston, the Yankees' season has been saved by homegrown additions. It's the way it used to be, back in the '90s, before the Yankees' payroll went from $40 million to a peak of $200 million in '05. Farm figures like Derek Jeter and Andy Pettitte alighted to change the staid dynamic of the clubhouse.

Now it's child-friendly again, part of the Cashman plan. His panic signing of Clemens aside — call it a momentary relapse in overspending rehab — the team is heading in a better direction with a Yankee version of The Replacements.

"Our business is baseball," Cashman said, "and all I did was simplify it, which is you've got to get back to basics, and that's the amateur pipeline. You can't spend all the money on the top-level guys. There are way too many perils."

Perils, like collapsing in the playoffs since 2001. The Yankees are still an embarrassment of riches — the envy of every general manager under a thrift-shopping mandate — but there is less to loathe with the Boss as a phantom, with the live-for-now era over.

To conjure genuine hate for the Yanks is becoming more difficult — but, of course, not impossible.

E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com

Will the Democrats Betray Us?

2007-09-16T11:58:00.000-04:00

By FRANK RICH

Published: September 16, 2007

SIR, I don't know, actually": The fact that America's surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week's festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff.

Not that many Americans were watching. The country knew going in that the White House would win its latest campaign to stay its course of indefinitely shoveling our troops and treasure into the bottomless pit of Iraq. The only troops coming home alive or with their limbs intact in President Bush's troop "reduction" are those who were scheduled to be withdrawn by April anyway. Otherwise the president would have had to extend combat tours yet again, mobilize more reserves or bring back the draft.

On the sixth anniversary of the day that did not change everything, General Petraeus couldn't say we are safer because he knows we are not. Last Sunday, Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the C.I.A.'s Osama bin Laden unit, explained why. He wrote in The Daily News that Al Qaeda, under the de facto protection of Pervez Musharraf, is "on balance" more threatening today that it was on 9/11. And as goes Pakistan, so goes Afghanistan. On Tuesday, just as the Senate hearings began, Lisa Myers of NBC News reported on a Taliban camp near Kabul in an area nominally controlled by the Afghan government we installed. It is training bomb makers to attack America.

Little of this registered in or beyond the Beltway. New bin Laden tapes and the latest 9/11 memorial rites notwithstanding, we're back in a 9/10 mind-set. Bin Laden, said Frances Townsend, the top White House homeland security official, "is virtually impotent." Karen Hughes, the Bush crony in charge of America's P.R. in the jihadists' world, recently held a press conference anointing Cal Ripken Jr. our international "special sports envoy." We are once more sleepwalking through history, fiddling while the Qaeda not in Iraq prepares to burn.

This is why the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, including those more accurate than Mr. Bush's recent false analogies, can take us only so far. Our situation is graver than it was during Vietnam.

Certainly there were some eerie symmetries between General Petraeus's sales pitch last week and its often-noted historical antecedent: Gen. William Westmoreland's similar mission for L.B.J. before Congress on April 28, 1967. Westmoreland, too, refused to acknowledge that our troops were caught in a civil war. He spoke as well of the "repeated successes" of the American-trained South Vietnamese military and ticked off its growing number of combat-ready battalions. "The strategy we're following at this time is the proper one," the general assured America, and "is producing results."

Those fabulous results delayed our final departure from Vietnam for another eight years — just short of the nine to 10 years General Petraeus has said may be needed for a counterinsurgency in Iraq. But there's a crucial difference between the Westmoreland show of 1967 and the 2007 revival by General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Westmoreland played to a full and largely enthusiastic house. Most Americans still supported the war in Vietnam and trusted him; so did all but a few members of Congress, regardless of party. All three networks pre-empted their midday programming for Westmoreland's Congressional appearance.

Our Iraq commander, by contrast, appeared before a divided and stalemated Congress just as an ABC News-Washington Post poll found that most Americans believed he would overhype progress in Iraq. No network interrupted a soap opera for his testimony. On cable the hearings fought for coverage with Britney Spears's latest self-immolation and the fate of Madeleine McCann, our latest JonBenet Ramsey stand-in.

General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker could grab an hour of prime television time only by slinking into the safe foxhole of Fox News, where Brit Hume chaperoned them on a gloomy, bunkerlike set before an audience of merely 1.5 million true believers. Their "Briefing for America," as Fox titled it, was all too fittingly interrupted early on for a commercial promising pharmaceutical relief from erectile dysfunction.

Even if military "victory" were achievable in Iraq, America could not win a war abandoned by its own citizens. The evaporation of that support was ratified by voters last November. For that, they were rewarded with the "surge." Now their mood has turned darker. Americans have not merely abandoned the war; they don't want to hear anything that might remind them of it, or of war in general. Katie Couric's much-promoted weeklong visit to the front produced ratings matching the CBS newscast's all-time low. Angelina Jolie's movie about Daniel Pearl sank without a trace. Even Clint Eastwood's wildly acclaimed movies about World War II went begging. Over its latest season, "24" lost a third of its viewers, just as Mr. Bush did between January's prime-time address and last week's.

You can't blame the public for changing the channel. People realize that the president's real "plan for victory" is to let his successor clean up the mess. They don't want to see American troops dying for that cause, but what can be done? Americans voted the G.O.P. out of power in Congress; a clear majority consistently tell pollsters they want out of Iraq. And still every day is Groundhog Day. Our America, unlike Vietnam-era America, is more often resigned than angry. Though the latest New York Times-CBS News poll finds that only 5 percent trust the president to wrap up the war, the figure for the (barely) Democratic-controlled Congress, 21 percent, is an almost-as-resounding vote of no confidence.

Last week Democrats often earned that rating, especially those running for president. It is true that they do not have the votes to overcome a Bush veto of any war legislation. But that doesn't mean the Democrats have to go on holiday. Few used their time to cross-examine General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker on their disingenuous talking points, choosing instead to regurgitate stump sentiments or ask uncoordinated, redundant questions. It's telling that the one question that drew blood — are we safer? — was asked by a Republican, John Warner, who is retiring from the Senate.

Americans are looking for leadership, somewhere, anywhere. At least one of the Democratic presidential contenders might have shown the guts to soundly slap the "General Betray-Us" headline on the ad placed by MoveOn.org in The Times, if only to deflate a counterproductive distraction. This left-wing brand of juvenile name-calling is as witless as the "Defeatocrats" and "cut and run" McCarthyism from the right; it at once undermined the serious charges against the data in the Petraeus progress report (including those charges in the same MoveOn ad) and allowed the war's cheerleaders to hyperventilate about a sideshow. "General Betray-Us" gave Republicans a furlough to avoid ownership of an Iraq policy that now has us supporting both sides of the Shiite-vs.-Sunni blood bath while simultaneously shutting America's doors on the millions of Iraqi refugees the blood bath has so far created.

It's also past time for the Democratic presidential candidates to stop getting bogged down in bickering about who has the faster timeline for withdrawal or the more enforceable deadline. Every one of these plans is academic anyway as long as Mr. Bush has a veto pen. The security of America is more important — dare one say it? — than trying to outpander one another in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The Democratic presidential candidates in the Senate need all the unity and focus they can muster to move this story forward, and that starts with the two marquee draws, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It's essential to turn up the heat full time in Washington for any and every legislative roadblock to administration policy that they and their peers can induce principled or frightened Republicans to endorse.

They should summon the new chief of central command (and General Petraeus's boss), Adm. William Fallon, for tough questioning; he is reportedly concerned about our lapsed military readiness should trouble strike beyond Iraq. And why not grill the Joint Chiefs and those half-dozen or so generals who turned down the White House post of "war czar" last fall? The war should be front and center in Congress every day.

Mr. Bush, confident that he got away with repackaging the same bankrupt policies with a nonsensical new slogan ("Return on Success") Thursday night, is counting on the public's continued apathy as he kicks the can down the road and bides his time until Jan. 20, 2009; he, after all, has nothing more to lose. The job for real leaders is to wake up America to the urgent reality. We can't afford to punt until Inauguration Day in a war that each day drains America of resources and will. Our national security can't be held hostage indefinitely to a president's narcissistic need to compound his errors rather than admit them.

The enemy votes, too. Cataclysmic events on the ground in Iraq, including Thursday's murder of the Sunni tribal leader Mr. Bush embraced two weeks ago as a symbol of hope, have never arrived according to this administration's optimistic timetable. Nor have major Qaeda attacks in the West. It's national suicide to entertain the daydream that they will start doing so now.

Will Rudy Let Her Rudy-Up?

2007-09-16T11:54:00.000-04:00

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: September 16, 2007

WASHINGTON

It’s on.

Or, rather, it’s back on.

Rudy versus Hillary, a New York steel-cage match pitting two eye-gouging, hair-pulling, kick-em-till-they’re-dead brawlers.

For months, Hillary’s comely male rivals for the Democratic nomination have tiptoed around her, letting their wives take shots at the front-runner.

Barack Obama looks wary when he’s on stage with Hillary, but Michelle stepped up: “Some women feel it’s a woman’s turn, you know? They just feel like it’s Hillary’s turn. That, I reject, because democracy isn’t supposed to be about whose turn it is.”

That followed Elizabeth Edwards’s takedown of Hillary: “She’s just not as vocal a women’s advocate as I want to see. John is.”

Obama and Edwards probably figured the criticism would sound less Lazio coming from their wives. But it just made them seem as though they were hiding behind their wives’ skirts.

Enter Rudy. He may wear skirts, but he’s not afraid to take down a skirt.

He put up an ad Friday on his campaign Web site slamming her as a hypocrite for running an antiwar campaign after supporting the president on the authorization for war.

Obama has been trying to make this point for quite a while, but so gingerly that every time he sneaks up on it, Hillary surges ahead.

Rudy doesn’t do ginger.

Hillary has been trying to Rudy-up, corralling ground zero and playing the fear card, saying that if there were a terrorist attack before the election, only she could stop Republicans from keeping the White House. But Rudy aims to de-Rudy her. His ad is an instant cult classic, with a solemn trumpet that is reminiscent of “Taps” and a narrator who sounds like the guy who does trailers for “In a World Gone Wrong” disaster flicks.

Just when Hillary was basking in her reinvention of herself, Rudy sprang out of the Republican primary shadows and shoved her back.

He ignores her attempts to be New Hillary, a senator who loves men in uniform, who is not afraid to use military power, and who is tough enough to deal with bin Laden. He recasts her as Old Hillary, a Code Pink pinko first lady and opportunist from a White House that had a reputation for having a flower-child distaste for the military, a left-wing shrew who made a secret socialist health care plan and let gays into the military and certainly can’t be trusted to fight the jihadists.

“In 2002,” the white words flash on a black screen, “Hillary Clinton voted to authorize military action in Iraq because she believed it was the right thing to do.”

Then it goes to a clip of Hillary speaking on the Senate floor during the war authorization debate that Obama has been too refined to highlight.

“If left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons,” she said, an echo of Condi. “He has also given aid and comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members. So it is with conviction that I support this resolution as being in the best interests of our nation.”

Then the narrator intones, “But now that she’s running for president, Hillary Clinton has changed her position, even joining with the radical group MoveOn .org in attacking American General Petraeus” when she said it would require “a willing suspension of disbelief” to believe him.

“Just when our troops need all our support to finish the job, Hillary Clinton is turning her back on them,” the narrator concludes.

There are harsh images of Hillary, looking brittle in dark glasses, to go with the harsh words.

Rudy has decided that the best way to win his primary is to show he can beat the woman on the way to winning hers.

He can’t campaign on family values or the sanctity of marriage. He can’t whip up any fears on abortion or gays.

He can’t campaign on his plan to get out of Iraq because he doesn’t have one. He can’t campaign as the tough-guy heir to Bush because nobody likes Bush. He can’t campaign on attacking Iran because he’ll sound like crazy Dick Cheney.

He can’t campaign on the economy because he’s W. redux, facing a possible recession because of the mortgage crisis. He can’t campaign on Rudy’s from-the-mountaintop “12 Commitments” because no one knows what they are, and they don’t mention the word “Iraq.”

But he can be the only man in the field tough enough to slap around a woman.

The irony is that if you could loosen up Hillary with a few Jack and gingers, she would probably be closer to her reinvention than to his caricature. She probably secretly supports the surge, knowing that after it sputters, she may reap the whirlwind. And then the Republicans, who have lied, stalled and mismanaged in every way imaginable, will paint her as Ms. Cut and Run, turning her back on the military again.

Somebody Else’s Mess

2007-09-16T11:48:00.000-04:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: September 16, 2007

George W. Bush delivered his farewell address on Thursday evening — handing the baton, and probably the next election, to the Democrats.

Why do I say that? Because in his speech to the nation the president basically said that on the most important, indeed only, legacy issue left in his presidency, Iraq, there would be no change in policy — that a substantial number of U.S. troops would remain in Iraq “beyond my presidency.” Therefore, it will be up to his successor to end the war he started.

“In one fell swoop George Bush abdicated to Petraeus, Maliki and the Democrats,” said David Rothkopf, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment, referring to Gen. David Petraeus and the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki. “Bush left it to Petraeus to handle the war, Maliki to handle our timetable and therefore our checkbook, and the Democrats to ultimately figure out how to end this.”

The sad thing for the American people is that we have no commander in chief anymore, framing our real situation and options. The president’s description on Thursday of the stakes in Iraq was delusional. An Iraqi ally fighting for “freedom” against “extremists”? There are extremists in the Iraqi government, army and police. There is a civil war on top of tribal, neighborhood and jihadist wars, fueled not by a single Iraqi quest for freedom, but by differing quests for “justice,” revenge and, yes, democracy. The only possible self-sustaining outcome in the near term is some form of radical federalism.

We also do not have a commander in chief weighing the costs of staying in Iraq indefinitely against America’s other interests at home and abroad. When General Petraeus honestly averred that he could not say whether pursuing the surge in Iraq would make America safer, he underscored how much the war there has become disconnected from every conceivable worthy goal — democratization of Iraq or spreading progressive governance in the Arab-Muslim world — and is now just about itself and abstractions of “winning” or “not failing.”

That is why I thought the most relevant comments from the Petraeus hearings last week were those offered by the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Ike Skelton, when he said at the outset:

“We must begin by considering the overall security of this nation. It’s our responsibility here in Congress under the Constitution to ensure that the United States military can deter and if needed prevail anywhere our interests are threatened. Iraq is an important piece of the overall equation, but it is only a piece. There are very real trade-offs when you send 160,000 of our men and women in uniform to Iraq. Those troops in Iraq are not available for other missions.”

While Mr. Bush’s tacit resignation last week greatly increases the odds of a Democratic victory in 2008, there are several wild cards that could change things: a miraculous turnaround in Iraq (unlikely, but you can always hope), a terrorist attack in America, a coup in Pakistan that puts loose nukes in the hands of Islamist radicals, or a recession induced by the meltdown in the U.S. mortgage market, which forces a stark choice between bailing out Baghdad or Chicago.

The first three, for sure, could propel the right Republican candidate right back into the thick of things — especially if the Democrats have not positioned themselves with a credible approach to Iraq and the wider national security issues facing the country.

There is an opportunity now for Democrats, and Americans will be listening — but they need to articulate a concrete endgame policy, and it would have to include at least three components:

First, a detailed blueprint with a fixed withdrawal date tied to a negotiation with Iraqi factions on a federal solution tied to a military redeployment plan to contain the inevitable spillover from Iraq.

Second, a commitment by the next president to impose a stiff tariff on all imported crude oil, to make sure we become less dependent on what is sure to be a more unstable Middle East as we leave Iraq. And third, a plan to deal with the broader terrorist challenge. Set a date. Set a price. That will get people’s attention.

Democratic candidates have been talking about health care and other important issues, but the overriding foreign policy message that still comes across from them to many Americans, argues Mr. Rothkopf, is that Democrats are simply “anti-Bush, antiwar and antitrade.” Be careful: despite the mess Mr. Bush has made in the world, or maybe because of it, Americans will not hand the keys to a Democrat who does not convey a “gut” credibility on national security.

Death in the Chair, Step by Remorseless Step

2007-09-16T11:41:00.000-04:00

SOMBER SCENE People opposed to the death penalty outside
the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution
in Nashville before the execution of Daryl Holton.

By DAN BARRY

Published: September 16, 2007

NASHVILLE

The window blinds to the execution chamber are raised shortly after 1 in the morning, in accordance with the Procedures for Electrocution in the State of Tennessee. And the condemned man is revealed.

He looks almost like a young child buckled into a car seat, with his closed eyes and freshly shaved head, with the way the black restraints of the electric chair crisscross at his torso. He yawns a wide-mouthed yawn, as though just stirring from an interrupted dream, and opens his eyes.

He is moments from dying.

The cause of death will be cardiac arrest. Every step toward that end will follow those written state procedures, which strive to lend a kind of clinical dignity to the electrocution of a human being, yet read like instructions for jump-starting a car engine. Remember: “A fire extinguisher is located in the building and is near the electric chair as a precaution.”

Behold Daryl Holton. He is 45. Ten years ago he shot his four young children in his uncle’s auto-repair garage, two at a time, through the heart. He used their very innocence to kill them, telling them not to peek, Daddy has a surprise. After he was done he turned himself in, saying he wanted to report a “homicide times four.”

In seeking the execution of this Army veteran, now blinking in the cold, bright room, the state argued that Mr. Holton committed premeditated murder, times four, to punish his ex-wife for obtaining an order of protection and for moving away. He killed his children, so he must be killed.

In defending the life of this man — now pursing his lips, about all that he can move — his advocates argued that he believed his children were better off dead than to live in a profoundly troubled home; that he actually felt relief after pulling a tarpaulin over those four small bodies. He killed his children, so he must be mentally ill.

All the while, Mr. Holton adhered to a peculiar code of conduct that vexed all sides. Those fighting for his life often did so against his will. Those seeking his remorse were unrewarded.

Just days ago he said the crimes for which he was convicted warranted the death penalty, but he pointedly removed himself from that equation. Perhaps to suggest the killings were justified; perhaps to keep things theoretical. No matter. Now, at 1:09 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2007, at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, it is about to happen.

The warden, Ricky J. Bell, stands before him, supervising the first electrocution in Tennessee since 1960. Prison officials had hoped that Mr. Holton would choose to die by lethal injection, and had been gently reminding him of this option. But he maintained that since electrocution was the only form of capital punishment at the time of his crimes, then electrocution it should be.

Before the raising of those window blinds, Mr. Holton had started to hyperventilate, and Mr. Bell had sought to calm him by slightly loosening the straps. But now it is 1:10, the blinds are up, the clock is running. In accordance with procedures, the warden asks if the condemned has something to say.

The inmate’s response is so slurred by his hyperventilating that he is asked to repeat what he has been planning to say for a long time. He says again, “Two words: I do.”

This could be a joke of some kind, a cosmic conundrum, or maybe Mr. Holton’s acceptance into whatever awaits him after life. It could be the use of his marital vow as a parting shot at his ex-wife, or perhaps a twisted re-affirmation of his belief in the sanctity of marriage and family.

The warden asks, “That it?” The inmate nods.

Two corrections officers step forward to place a sponge soaked in salted water on Mr. Holton’s bald scalp to enhance conductivity. Next comes the headpiece, which the procedures describe as a “leather cranial cap lined with copper mesh inside.” Finally, a power cable, not unlike the cable to your television, is attached to the headpiece.

The copper mesh pressing wet sponge sends salty water streaming down the inmate’s ashen face, soaking his white cotton shirt to the pale skin beneath. When officers try to blot him dry with white towels, Mr. Holton says not to worry about it, “ain’t gonna matter anyway.”

After the white towels comes a black shroud to be attached to the headpiece. It is intended in part to protect the dignity of the inmate, now strapped, soaked and about to die before witnesses. His final expression, then, will be his own.

Time.

With the push of a button on a console labeled Electric Chair Control, 1,750 volts bolt through Mr. Holton’s body, jerking it up and dropping it like a sack of earth. The black shroud offers the slightest flutter, and witnesses cannot tell whether they have just heard a machine’s whoosh or a man’s sigh.

Fifteen seconds later, another bolt, and Mr. Holton’s body rises even higher, slumps even lower. His reddened hands remain gripped to the arms of the chair, whose oaken pieces are said to have once belonged to the old electric chair, and before that, to the gallows.

It is 1:17. Procedures require a five-minute pause at this point. A prison official off to the side watches a digital clock on the wall while chewing something, perhaps gum, perhaps to calm his nerves. Two minutes, three, four, the only things moving in the room are his eyes and his jaw, five. The window blinds drop, and a physician begins a private examination.

Later, in the foggy darkness outside the prison, someone will read a statement from the ex-wife, Crystal Holton, in which she says that all the anger and hatred can finally leave her, to be replaced by a child’s innocent love — “love times four.”

Later, well after sunrise, Kelly Gleason, one of the lawyers who fought to keep Mr. Holton alive, will set aside her mourning for a friend and give in to fitful sleep.

Later, in the hot afternoon some 50 miles to the south, four polished tombstones will again cast shadows toward a playground at the bottom of a cemetery’s hill. Arranged in order of age, the stones bear the names of the four Holton children: Stephen, 12, Brent, 10, Eric, 6, and Kayla, 4.

But first confirmation, in accordance with procedures. And now the disembodied voice of Tennessee: “Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the legal execution of Daryl Holton. The time of death, 1:25. Please exit.”

It’s Just a Matter of Equity

2007-09-16T11:36:00.000-04:00

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Published: September 16, 2007

The moribund private equity market stirred a bit last week as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts dredged up some buyers for loans to finance its $22 billion purchase of Alliance Boots, a British drugstore chain. But lingering investor wariness toward private equity maestros and their deals is far from the only problem facing the buyout business. There are graver threats that are, no surprise, the industry’s own making.

This is not just your humble research assistant talking. It is the view of Michael C. Jensen, professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School, leading scholar in finance and management, and the man whom many consider to be the intellectual father of private equity. In other words, a person uniquely qualified to opine on the matter.

“We are going to see bad deals that have been done that are not publicly known as bad deals yet, we will have scandals, reputations will decline and people are going to be left with a bad taste in their mouths,” Mr. Jensen said in an interview last week. “The whole sector will decline.”

Mr. Jensen was elaborating on the trenchant comments he made last month in a forum on private equity convened by the Academy of Management. There, he excoriated private equity titans who sell stock in their companies to the public — a non sequitur in both language and economics, he said — and warned that industry “innovations,” like deal fees that encourage private equity managers to overpay for companies, will destroy value at these firms, not create it.

He also said that private equity managers who sell overvalued company shares to the public, whether in their own entities or in businesses they have bought and are repeddling, are breaching their duties to those buying the stocks.

“The owners who are selling the equity are in effect giving their word to the market that the equity is really worth what it is being priced at,” he said. “But the attitude on Wall Street is that there is no responsibility to the buyers of the equity on the part of the managers who are doing the selling. And that’s a recipe for nonworkability and value destruction.”

Mr. Jensen’s interest in private equity goes back to 1989, when he wrote a seminal article titled “Eclipse of the Public Corporation.” In it he argued that new and more effective organizations were emerging that unified the interests of managers and owners, eliminating value-destroying practices so common at public companies.

These practices, examples of the so-called agency problem, are a product of corporate structures that allow managers — i.e., agents — to feather their own nests at the expense of owners — i.e., investors — whose interests they are supposed to serve.

For years, private equity firms seemed superior to the public company model, Mr. Jensen said. But recent developments, he said, have wiped out many of the advantages in private equity’s original design. Agency problems, precisely what private equity was supposed to eliminate, are cropping up as a result of the disastrous changes made by these firms, Mr. Jensen argues.

Raising permanent capital by issuing stock in a private equity firm is a prime example, because it destroys powerful incentives that kept these firms working hard for their investors, Mr. Jensen said. In traditional form, private equity firms raise capital from investors for a finite period of time, agreeing to pay them back, typically after 3 to 13 years. This not only provides a reasonable time horizon for gauging how well the firms perform, it also contains an implicit threat that if they don’t produce for their partners then they won’t be able to raise additional funds.

“This gives the capital markets a chance to say no,” Mr. Jensen said. “When you liquidate a fund if you don’t have very good returns, you’re going to have a tough time on the next fund. That’s a very, very important constraint that has played a significant role in the success of the private equity model.”

Mr. Jensen also deplores the newfangled fees that private equity firms are levying on their clients. Among the worst? Deal fees that rise in tandem with the size of the buyout, and special dividends that go only to the private equity firm, not its investors.

“Deal fees that are going to pay them to do deals whether they are good or not — now that’s nuts,” Mr. Jensen said. “And this notion of taking special dividends out only for the private equity firm — you can see the conflicts of interest that creates.”

Under the original model, private equity managers got annual management fees, but their biggest payout was supposed to be on the back end, based on the performance of the companies they had operated. But waiting for a back-end payday is not enough for today’s titans. They want their money up front.

“I can predict without a shred of doubt that these fees are going to end up reducing the productivity of the model,” Mr. Jensen said. “And it creates another wedge between the outsiders and insiders, which is very, very serious. People are doing this out of some short-run focus on increasing revenues, and not paying attention to what the strengths of the model are.”

Who cares about the model when there’s a mountain of money to be made?

Short-term thinking like that can do genuine damage, and Mr. Jensen fears such a result. “The sector is going to take a reputational hit of nontrivial proportions,” he said. “Private equity is not going to go away, but it’s going to take a hit.”

A sunny side to this dark view is that public company managers may begin applying parts of the private equity model to their own operations, according to Mr. Jensen.

“In principle, one ought to be able to duplicate virtually every aspect of the private equity model in a public company, except the actual going-private part,” he said. “It’s very difficult, but I think public corporations may begin to think about running themselves in this way.”

Now that’s something to hope for.

The Nightmare Is Here

2007-09-15T15:55:00.000-04:00

By BOB HERBERT

Published: September 15, 2007

We’ve heard from General Petraeus, from Ambassador Crocker, and on Thursday night from President Bush. What we haven’t heard this week is anything about the tragic reality on the ground for the ordinary citizens of Iraq, which is in the throes of a catastrophic humanitarian crisis.

President Bush may not be aware of this. In his televised address to the nation he warned that a pullout of U.S. forces from Iraq could cause a “humanitarian nightmare.”

A trusted aide should take the president aside and quietly inform him that this nightmare arrived a good while ago.

When the U.S. launched its “shock and awe” invasion in March 2003, the population of Iraq was about 26 million. The flaming horror unleashed by the invasion has since forced 2.2 million of those Iraqis, nearly a tenth of the population, to flee the country. Many of those who left were professionals marked for death — doctors, lawyers, academics, the very people with the skills necessary to build a viable society.

The Iraq Ministry of Health reported that 102 doctors and 164 nurses were killed from April 2003 to May 2006. It is believed that nearly half of Iraq’s doctors have fled. The exodus of health care professionals in a country hemorrhaging from the worst kinds of violence pretty much qualifies as nightmarish.

While more than two million Iraqis have fled to other countries, another two million have been displaced internally. According to the Global Policy Forum, a group that monitors international developments:

“Most of these internally displaced persons, or I.D.P.’s, have sought refuge with relatives, or in mosques, empty public buildings, or tent camps. ...I.D.P.’s live in very poor conditions. Public buildings are particularly unsanitary, often overcrowded, without access to clean water, proper sanitation and basic services, in conditions especially conducive to infectious diseases.”

Iraqis are enduring most of their suffering out of the sight of the rest of the world. International relief organizations and most of the news media are largely kept at a distance by the insane levels of violence.

Access to safe drinking water is a problem in much of the country. (The World Health Organization was asked to help with a recent outbreak of cholera in parts of Kurdistan that is believed to have been caused by polluted water.) Sanitation facilities are routinely crippled by violence and sabotage. The economy, like the country’s infrastructure, is in shambles.

The worst aspect of the nightmare, of course, is the rain of death that has descended on Iraq since the U.S. invasion. Controversy has surrounded virtually all attempts to estimate the number of civilian casualties, but no one disputes that the toll is staggering.

The U.S. government has behaved as though these dead Iraqis were not even worth counting. In December 2005, President Bush casually mentioned “30,000, more or less” as the number of Iraqis killed in the war. The White House later said there were no official estimates of Iraqi deaths.

We shouldn’t be so cavalier. Based on all available evidence, it seems unreasonable to believe that fewer than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed thus far. Many very serious scholars believe the total is much higher.

As for the number of wounded and disabled Iraqis — men, women and children who have lost limbs, or been paralyzed or otherwise maimed in air, rocket and bomb attacks — no one has a real grasp of the size of the problem.

“Just considering the number of the dead and the number of displaced, this is probably the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world,” said James Paul, the executive director of Global Policy Forum, which recently compiled an extensive report on the war and occupation. “This is the biggest displacement of people in the Middle East in a very long time.”

The effect on children of the carnage, the dislocations and the deteriorating quality of daily life has been profound. Conditions in Iraq were dire for children even before the war. One in eight died before the age of 5, many from the effects of malnutrition, polluted water and unsanitary conditions.

Now, more than four years after the invasion, huge numbers of Iraqi children are finding themselves orphaned, homeless, malnourished, and worse.

According to Unicef, the U.N.’s children’s agency: “Many children are separated from their families or on the streets, where they are extremely vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Most children have experienced trauma but few receive the care and support they need to help them cope with so much chaos, anxiety and loss.”

These are just a few of the things you won’t hear much about from the American officials in Washington who profess to care so deeply about the people of Iraq.

Gail Collins is off today.

Willingham Is Vindicated by Early Success

2007-09-15T15:48:00.000-04:00

By WILLIAM C. RHODEN

Published: September 15, 2007

About three years ago, I began to carry around an imaginary college football scoreboard. It is a colossal contraption with all sorts of facts, figures and notations that go beyond the mere statistics of a game.

Notre Dame-Charlie Weis is the “team” on one side of the scoreboard; Washington-Tyrone Willingham is on the other. I keep weekly and season-to-season updates.

Today the scoreboard reads Notre Dame-Weis, 0-2; Washington-Willingham, 2-0.

I began keeping score on the imaginary board in 2004 after Willingham was unceremoniously, and unfairly, jettisoned as the Notre Dame head football coach, three days after an embarrassing road loss to Southern California.

In the press box that evening, Notre Dame faces were understandably red with humiliation as No. 1 U.S.C. routed the Irish, 41-10. It was the fifth loss by 30 points or more in Willingham’s three seasons.

After an outstanding first year was followed by a losing season, Willingham had been under fire from rabid Notre Dame alumni. So on Nov. 30, 2004, Willingham, Notre Dame’s first African-American head coach in any sport, was fired. Weis was hired from the New England Patriots a month later amid toasts and platitudes, and I’ve been keeping score ever since.

Even though nearly three years have come and gone, Willingham’s tenure at Notre Dame is frequently mentioned. The nature of Willingham’s firing and Weis’s hiring says a lot about standards and double standards and about the enduring unlevel playing field for African Americans in sports and beyond.

Weis was named the 28th head football coach in Notre Dame history in December 2004 when he agreed to a six-year contract worth a reported $2 million a year.

Weis, unlike Willingham, has always been a news media favorite, with his one-liners and zingers. He was a Notre Dame student, loved Notre Dame and bled Notre Dame, but the Irish really wanted Urban Meyer.

In Weis’s first season, the program improved significantly — with Willingham’s players. You can argue that Weis did a better job of coaching Willingham’s players; I like to think they were older and wiser. Midway through the first season of his six-year contract, Weis signed a new contract: a 10-year deal worth a reported $30 million to $40 million.

The common wisdom is that Weis got the contract on the strength a 5-2 record and Notre Dame’s close loss to a great U.S.C. team. There was also the misguided belief that Weis might run off to the N.F.L. I imagine that the same influential forces behind Willingham’s departure felt they’d better lock up their resident genius.

Newsflash: There are no geniuses in this business, only great players. There is smoke and mirrors, and there are video cameras. No geniuses.

Notre Dame has lost four consecutive games by at least 20 points, going back to last season when they were routed by U.S.C. and Louisiana State. The 2007 Irish have not scored an offensive touchdown and could be looking at 0-3 after today’s game at Michigan.

This season Weis is playing with his own players. He recruited quarterback Jimmy Clausen, the high school all-American, and apparently is going to stick with him through thick or thin.

In Seattle this afternoon, Willingham continues to ride his high school all-American quarterback, Jake Locker. Locker, a redshirt freshman, has led Washington to its first 2-0 start since the 2001 season.

Here are a couple notes to put on the imaginary scoreboard:

¶A fourth season should be mandatory for any head football coach at the Division I level. Every coach needs four seasons, at the very least, to coach the classes he inherited and bring along the players he recruited.

¶When a university finds a gem of a coach like Willingham, keep him. The cost of losing is high. Fishing for talent these days requires “feel” and “touch.” Not looking far enough, wide enough or deep enough for talent, choosing the safe and familiar, is not good business; eventually you will pay.

¶Willingham should not be the last African-American head football coach Notre Dame seriously considers — or hires.

¶Finally, the great thing about football is that results don’t lie. From South Bend to Seattle, 0-2 is 0-2; 2-0 is 2-0.

Washington faces a tremendous challenge against Ohio State this afternoon, and Willingham knows how quickly things can change.

Notre Dame could find its rhythm today and defeat Michigan; Ohio State could easily burst Washington’s bubble. Last season Washington went into October with a 4-1 record, including an upset victory over U.C.L.A. The Huskies lost their next six games and ended up 5-7.

That’s why today is an early-season day of reckoning for Notre Dame-Charlie Weis, and Washington-Tyrone Willingham.

Make no mistake: I’ll be scoreboard watching this afternoon.

E-mail: wcr@nytimes.com

The Opinionator: 14 September 2007

2007-09-15T15:45:00.000-04:00

September 14, 2007, 3:04 pm

Call My Lawyer

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: attorney general, Justice Department

Ted Olson is no Fredo: Matt Cooper, the Washington editor of Portfolio, still thinks Ted Olson, his attorney in the C.I.A. leak case, would be a good attorney general. “I wouldn’t appoint him Attorney General because I’m not a hard-core conservative,” Cooper writes at Capital, his Portfolio blog. “But this president is.” Cooper continues:

And Ted Olson, unlike Alberto Gonzales, is incredibly well qualified, maybe the best qualified person, to take the job under a Republican president. What’s more, he’s right wing but not, I think, reflexively so. After all, he sided with former Associate Attorney General James Comey in that showdown with Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card at John Ashcroft’s hospital room. He’s got a civil libertarian streak; see his work on First Amendment issues. As an experienced litigator, he’s by nature less of an ideologue than a judge or academic.

Senate Democrats, who are threatening to reject Olson if President Bush nominates him for the post, should be careful what they wish for. “[I]f Dems reject him, that’s a bad precedent for their presidencies,” Cooper writes. “They ought to be free to appoint liberals who are as partisan and brilliant as Olson.”

(Cooper made a similar case for Olson in August.)

September 14, 2007, 10:01 am

Not Quite Damned

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: George Bush, Iraq

In a faint-praise-filled editorial titled “The Least Bad Plan,” The Washington Post editorial page gives a cautious thumbs-up to President Bush’s speech last night.

The editorial says that “the president failed to acknowledge that, according to the standards he himself established in January, the surge of U.S. troops into Iraq has been a failure — because Iraqi political leaders did not reach the political accords that the sacrifice of American lives was supposed to make possible.”

But it concludes on a supportive note:

Still, there are no easy alternatives to the present policy. In the past we have looked favorably on bipartisan proposals that would change the U.S. mission so as to focus on counterterrorism and training of the Iraqi army, while withdrawing most U.S. combat units. Mr. Bush said he would begin a transition to that reduced posture in December. But according to Gen. Petraeus, Mr. Crocker and the consensus view of U.S. intelligence agencies, if the U.S. counterinsurgency mission were abandoned in the near future, the result would be massive civilian casualties and still-greater turmoil that could spread to neighboring countries.

Mr. Bush’s plan offers, at least, the prospect of extending recent gains against al-Qaeda in Iraq, preventing full-scale sectarian war and allowing Iraqis more time to begin moving toward a new political order. For that reason, it is preferable to a more rapid withdrawal. It’s not necessary to believe the president’s promise that U.S. troops will “return on success” in order to accept the judgment of Mr. Crocker: “Our current course is hard. The alternatives are far worse.”

A Surge, and Then a Stab

2007-09-14T13:31:00.000-04:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: September 14, 2007

To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.

Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, President Bush declared that “America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.”

Near the top of his list was the promise that “to give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.”

There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty much the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq’s G.D.P. and almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.

Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.

What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.

Now here’s the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.

Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that isn’t all that surprising, given this administration’s history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member of the “axis of evil.”

No, what’s interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.

The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.

After all, if the administration had any real hope of retrieving the situation in Iraq, officials would be making an all-out effort to get the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to start delivering on some of those benchmarks, perhaps using the threat that Congress would cut off funds otherwise. Instead, the Bushies are making excuses, minimizing Iraqi failures, moving goal posts and, in general, giving the Maliki government no incentive to do anything differently.

And for that matter, if the administration had any real intention of turning public opinion around, as opposed to merely shoring up the base enough to keep Republican members of Congress on board, it would have sent Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, to as many news media outlets as possible — not granted an exclusive appearance to Fox News on Monday night.

All in all, Mr. Bush’s actions have not been those of a leader seriously trying to win a war. They have, however, been what you’d expect from a man whose plan is to keep up appearances for the next 16 months, never mind the cost in lives and money, then shift the blame for failure onto his successor.

In fact, that’s my interpretation of something that startled many people: Mr. Bush’s decision last month, after spending years denying that the Iraq war had anything in common with Vietnam, to suddenly embrace the parallel.

Here’s how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.

What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to extricate us from Iraq — and prevent the country’s breakup from turning into a regional war — will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.

The Waning of I.Q.

2007-09-14T13:28:00.001-04:00

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: September 14, 2007

A nice phenomenon of the past few years is the diminishing influence of I.Q.

For a time, I.Q. was the most reliable method we had to capture mental aptitude. People had the impression that we are born with these information-processing engines in our heads and that smart people have more horsepower than dumb people.

And in fact, there’s something to that. There is such a thing as general intelligence; people who are good at one mental skill tend to be good at others. This intelligence is partly hereditary. A meta-analysis by Bernie Devlin of the University of Pittsburgh found that genes account for about 48 percent of the differences in I.Q. scores. There’s even evidence that people with bigger brains tend to have higher intelligence.

But there has always been something opaque about I.Q. In the first place, there’s no consensus about what intelligence is. Some people think intelligence is the ability to adapt to an environment, others that capacity to think abstractly, and so on.

Then there are weird patterns. For example, over the past century, average I.Q. scores have risen at a rate of about 3 to 6 points per decade. This phenomenon, known as the Flynn effect, has been measured in many countries and across all age groups. Nobody seems to understand why this happens or why it seems to be petering out in some places, like Scandinavia.

I.Q. can also be powerfully affected by environment. As Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia and others have shown, growing up in poverty can affect your intelligence for the worse. Growing up in an emotionally strangled household also affects I.Q.

One of the classic findings of this was made by H.M. Skeels back in the 1930s. He studied mentally retarded orphans who were put in foster homes. After four years, their I.Q.’s diverged an amazing 50 points from orphans who were not moved. And the remarkable thing is the mothers who adopted the orphans were themselves mentally retarded and living in a different institution. It wasn’t tutoring that produced the I.Q. spike; it was love.

Then, finally, there are the various theories of multiple intelligences. We don’t just have one thing called intelligence. We have a lot of distinct mental capacities. These theories thrive, despite resistance from the statisticians, because they explain everyday experience. I’m decent at processing words, but when it comes to calculating the caroms on a pool table, I have the aptitude of a sea slug.

I.Q., in other words, is a black box. It measures something, but it’s not clear what it is or whether it’s good at predicting how people will do in life. Over the past few years, scientists have opened the black box to investigate the brain itself, not a statistical artifact.

Now you can read books about mental capacities in which the subject of I.Q. and intelligence barely comes up. The authors are concerned instead with, say, the parallel processes that compete for attention in the brain, and how they integrate. They’re discovering that far from being a cold engine for processing information, neural connections are shaped by emotion.

Antonio Damasio of the University of Southern California had a patient rendered emotionless by damage to his frontal lobes. When asked what day he could come back for an appointment, he stood there for nearly half an hour describing the pros and cons of different dates, but was incapable of making a decision. This is not the Spock-like brain engine suggested by the I.Q.

Today, the research that dominates public conversation is not about raw brain power but about the strengths and consequences of specific processes. Daniel Schacter of Harvard writes about the vices that flow from the way memory works. Daniel Gilbert, also of Harvard, describes the mistakes people make in perceiving the future. If people at Harvard are moving beyond general intelligence, you know something big is happening.

The cultural consequence is that judging intelligence is less like measuring horsepower in an engine and more like watching ballet. Speed and strength are part of intelligence, and these things can be measured numerically, but the essence of the activity is found in the rhythm and grace and personality — traits that are the products of an idiosyncratic blend of emotions, experiences, motivations and inheritances.

Recent brain research, rather than reducing everything to electrical impulses and quantifiable pulses, actually enhances our appreciation of human complexity and richness. While psychometrics offered the false allure of objective fact, the new science brings us back into contact with literature, history and the humanities, and, ultimately, to the uniqueness of the individual.

Waiting for the Fed, and Hoping

2007-09-14T13:24:00.000-04:00

By FLOYD NORRIS

Published: September 14, 2007

That there is a financial crisis is clear. What is not so clear is whether the medicine in Dr. Ben Bernanke’s bag can do much good.

Next week, the Federal Reserve is expected to make the first cut of the Bernanke era in the federal funds rate. The Wall Street debate is over whether that cut will be just a quarter percentage point, or whether the Fed will show its determination to act by cutting the rate by twice that amount.

That the debate has gotten this far is evidence that the economy now seems much weaker than it did when Mr. Bernanke was testifying to Congress in July, just as the credit squeeze was getting under way. Then, he seemed to think there was no need for any cut at all, despite the crumbling housing market and the growing subprime problems.

A new poll of corporate chief financial officers, taken by Duke University and CFO Magazine, shows a surge in pessimism. Nearly a third of the financial bosses say their companies have been hurt by the credit market turmoil. And few see much benefit from Fed action. Nearly half think a cut of half a percentage point would not help their companies at all, and most of the rest see only a small benefit from such a move.

For many companies, the immediate credit issue is not price, but availability. Can they borrow enough money to get by?

The next part of the crisis may come from a company that is unable to borrow enough money to pay off maturing commercial paper. The Fed can help there, with gentle urging to banks not to be overly tight in their lending standards, and there is reason to hope that the immediate problem will pass with banks taking on a lot more loans.

But even if it does pass, there is the question of where companies will borrow in the future, whether to finance expansions or acquisitions, or just to raise capital if and when their business turns down. The credit markets were wide open just three months ago. Now they are all but shut to companies with speculative-grade ratings.

In the second quarter, the total volume of new junk bonds and leveraged loans averaged $88 billion a month. In August, the figure was $6.6 billion. That is a 93 percent decline.

“For the first time in years the loan market is all but gridlocked,” Standard & Poor’s said this week in its leveraged company commentary. “Demand has withered, forcing arrangers to put the massive calendar of underwritten deals on ice.”

That has happened, it may be noted, with virtually no defaults on corporate loans. But the majority of such loans were financed through securitizations, in which the risk was sliced and diced in ways that enabled most of the money to be put up by investors who bought securities rated AAA, the highest possible rating.

Sometimes those ratings were a bit off. Three weeks ago, one such security still had AAA ratings. But since then Moody’s has cut it twice, and it is now in the nether regions of junk, rated Caa2, with Moody’s warning it could go lower. It’s sort of like going from class valedictorian to remedial reading failure.

That fall is unusual, but instructive. The security in question, called a variable leveraged super senior certificate, was sure to be safe unless the market value of a bunch of AA-rated securities collapsed. Those securities are still rated AA, Moody’s tells me, but their market values have plunged.

“Liquidity in asset-backed markets has dried up,” Merwyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, told Parliament this week, and banks will have to return to their historic roles as financial intermediaries. “That process,” he added, “is likely to be temporary, but it may not be smooth.”

Eventually, perhaps, a safer and more cautious securitization market will develop. In the meantime, banks, and perhaps some institutional investors, will be called upon to finance corporate loans directly. Until some part of that happens, the credit squeeze is on.

Lowering the fed funds rate — the rate at which banks lend to one another — will not hurt. It will make it cheaper for high-quality borrowers to raise money, and some of that will filter down. But it will not address the issues that have caused credit to tighten.

Nor will it get us closer to learning just where prices will settle — whether for homes or companies — in an era when risky loans are no longer easy to come by. This week’s stock market euphoria at the prospect of Fed easing is likely to be temporary.

Rutgers Has Spotlight and Glare

2007-09-14T13:18:00.000-04:00

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: September 14, 2007

Here comes another duck lined up for the shooting — and shouting — gallery known as Rutgers Stadium. Here comes another meal-on-wheels for a new college football carnivore, all the way to central New Jersey from Virginia, by bus.

Here come the Spartans of Norfolk State for what is certain to be a Big East pasting tomorrow afternoon in exchange for a $275,000 payday that will at least spare them an even more arduous journey later this season.

“The money we’ll make from this game will help us with a number of things, and one of them is to be able to fly down to Tallahassee when we play Florida A&M next month,” said Marty Miller, the Norfolk State athletic director. “We’ve always gone by bus — 14 hours.”

Whatever the chances, slim to none, of riding high from Rutgers back to Norfolk, Miller and his head coach, Pete Adrian, leapt at the chance to replace Howard — which, like Norfolk State, is out of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference — on Rutgers’s 2007 schedule.

There are tangible benefits to a Saturday in Piscataway, N.J., as well as exposure and excitement for a team from the division formerly known as Division I-AA. “I was talking with the Rutgers people, and they told me it’s a sellout,” Miller said. “It’ll be the biggest crowd our kids have ever played in front of.”

Exactly what kind of reception awaits Norfolk State is another issue, raised last Friday night by an undetermined number of Rutgers fans in the student section, said to have profanely and drunkenly serenaded Navy’s players during a 41-24 Rutgers victory. The verbal assault — Imus in the evening — was first reported this week in The Star-Ledger of Newark, along with the Rutgers administration’s apologies to the Naval Academy. Writing in Wednesday’s edition of The Daily Targum, Rutgers’s student newspaper, the university’s athletic director, Robert E. Mulcahy III, called the vulgarity “undignified, disrespectful and unacceptable,” adding it had “embarrassed the university, the alumni and Rutgers fans across the state.”

•

It was bad enough that it came nearly six months after the Rutgers women’s basketball team was the victim in the infamous case of Don Imus, the subsequently defrocked shock jock. It was worse that the targets were representatives of a military academy. But beyond the characterization of the opponent — ascribed or imagined — is the macro-question of institutional accountability. How rabid is Rutgers? How will it deal with its newfound prominence as a college football power?

Will it pursue an agenda of academic legitimacy even in cases when it risks the possibility of losing the prize recruit and slipping a rung after a long, painful climb? Will it better prepare itself for the greater visibility that comes with an enhanced level of scrutiny?

With the Navy debacle presumably behind it, will Rutgers now realize that the many night games it plays for the sake of national television brings into high definition the fact that on campuses nationwide, sundown for many means the end of sobriety?

There is a very fine line between the raucous crowds and home-field advantages the high-minded sports powers from Duke on down have forever winked at, and the unruliness that can result when students and fans are allowed to do as they please. Just as deserving of an apology from Rutgers were the families now flocking to Rutgers games, many of whom, as Mulcahy wrote in the student newspaper, “were so upset” they “left the game with their children.”

Every player in an opposing uniform happens to be somebody’s child. Every opponent deserves a sporting welcome, and especially the Norfolk State Spartans, given the sacrificial nature of their visit.

They haven’t had a winning season in the 10 years since they joined what is now called the Division I Football Championship Subdivision. They lost to a Howard team last season that was beaten by Rutgers, 56-7. A historically black university, Norfolk State has in Adrian, a former defensive coordinator in the conference at Bethune-Cookman, its first white head football coach, the only current one in the country at a historically black university.

Miller said he had to ask the university president’s permission to make the controversial hire for the 2005 season, after a turbulent period for the program that included N.C.A.A. infractions. Adrian subsequently recruited a quarterback transfer, the 6-foot-5 Casey Hansen, who is also white and is now the starter.

•

“There’s been no issues, none whatsoever,” Adrian said when asked about racial complexities or complications. “When they hired me, they told me they just wanted to win. And I always thought that Norfolk State — looking at the area, at the stadium, which seats 30,000 — should be able to. Now we look at a school like Rutgers and say: Why can’t we be that in our conference?”

But what, exactly, is Rutgers after one season of flying? It’s going to take another season or two — and the university’s community at-large — to answer that question.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

From Championship Years to Tarnish on Belichick

2007-09-14T13:14:00.000-04:00

By WILLIAM C. RHODEN

Published: September 14, 2007

I can hear it now, the chorus of Patriots haters shouting: “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. I knew them guys were cheating.”

The justified cynicism will come forth now that N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell has levied a hefty penalty — a $500,000 fine for Coach Bill Belichick, a $250,000 fine for the team and the loss of draft picks to be determined — for videotaping the Jets’ signals.

That’s right, boys and girls: Santa Claus cheats.

Goodell said that because the video was seized in the first quarter Sunday, he did not believe it affected the game. But knowing Belichick, the video was not for that game, anyway, but for an encounter later in the season.

In the wake of the commissioner’s stiff penalty against the Patriots, announced last night, claims that the Patriots’ successes were counterfeit, sadly, have to be considered.

Goodell came down hard, and he should have. In fact, he should have come down harder, given how he has leveled players like Pacman Jones, Tank Williams and Michael Vick. What New England did cuts to the integrity of the game; what those players did makes the game look seamy, but it does not impact our faith that the game is being played on a level playing field.

Given the commissioner’s harsh action against players who have transgressed off the field, I would have suspended a head coach whose actions strike at the integrity of the game. I would have liked to have seen Belichick suspended and the Patriots stripped of a first- and third-round pick. Under the current penalty, the Patriots only forfeit their first-round pick in 2008 if they make the playoffs.

Why the sudden mercy? Because Belichick’s a coach? When the league suspended the Cowboys’ quarterback coach, Wade Wilson, for five games for buying human growth hormone, Wilson said he was told by Goodell that he held authority figures in higher regard than the players. Goodell said in a statement yesterday that he considered a suspension for Belichick but thought the fines and the loss of draft choices was more effective.

Yesterday’s ruling confirms that the Patriots, held up by the news media as the model of how to run a franchise, had a little bit of help along the way. They cheated. So, is the essence of Belichick’s genius: the X’s and O’s, or the hidden cameras?

In any event, the second-guessing has already started. On Wednesday, Hines Ward, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ star receiver, told reporters that he had always been suspicious of the Patriots and that the Patriots might have cheated during the American Football Conference championship game of the 2001 season.

“Oh, they knew,” Ward said. “They were calling our stuff out. They knew, especially that first championship game here at Heinz Field. They knew a lot of our calls."

Maybe. Maybe not. On the one hand, I feel about the camera scandal the way I feel about drugs and great home run hitters: Drugs don’t help eye-hand coordination, but drugs do help.

Similarly, for all of the cameras and improperly taped hand signals, a team still must execute — and the Patriots have.

But a little extra, ill-gotten information in the hands of a coach like Belichick goes a long, long way.

The next question is, how widespread is this?

The former Steelers running backs coach Dick Hoak recently told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the Steelers once received a suspicious videotape by mistake from an opposing team during a routine tape exchange. The tape focused on a coach making hand signals from the sideline. Hoak said the Steelers did not report the tape to the N.F.L.

Now you wonder: If the Patriots, the N.F.L.’s standard bearer, stooped to cheating, is the practice widespread? I’m curious to hear what Belichick says about this. Is it widespread and the Patriots simply got caught?

Is every team cheating? Is everyone out there trying to steal signs? Does every team have a camera operator slithering around? I doubt it. At least the cheats were caught.

At one level, I’m tempted to pass this off as the pros just trying to get an edge. Hey, everybody tries to get an edge: Players continue to use H.G.H., and some still use steroids. There are tests in place to catch some of those cheats, although the league does not currently test for H.G.H. The N.F.L. more or less operates on an honor system of sorts when it came to its head coaches because head coaches know how difficult it is to get a W in their league.

On the other hand, an edge in the hands of a coach like Belichick is more than an edge. It’s an ax. My mother used to famously say, “Cheaters never prosper.”

Now, we’re left to wonder.

E-mail: wcr@nytimes.com

Domestic Disturbances: a blog at the NY Times by Judith Warner

2007-09-14T13:09:00.000-04:00

September 13, 2007, 6:40 pm

Horned and Scorned

Tags: cuckolds, the clintons, the sarkozys

“A prudent cuckold (and there are many such at Paris), pockets his horns, when he cannot gore with them; and will not add to the triumph of his maker by only butting with them ineffectually.”
– Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, “Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman, 1753-54 ”

One last, lingering thought on France:

It was fascinating to be on the other side of the Atlantic this summer while Americans were chewing over our latest rounds of slimy political sex scandals.

It wasn’t that the sinning, maneuvering and marital posturing of the Larry Craigs and David Vitters received so very much attention. It was, rather, that their stories seemed so dreary, so tawdry and so second-rate compared with the much more dignified and attractive tableau vivant of family disorder exhibited by France’s new president, Nicholas Sarkozy, and first lady, Cécilia.

In case you missed it, Sarkozy last year greatly entertained France by running a campaign in which his wife was almost entirely absent. Cécilia, a former model whom Nicholas first eyed, in his previous incarnation as mayor of the city of Neuilly, while administering the vows that consecrated her last marriage, left him in 2005, eventually showing up – and being photographed – with her lover in New York City.

The Sarkozys ultimately reunited. But life together remained rocky. Cécilia made major headlines once again last May when she pulled a no-show on the night of her husband’s final run-off race against his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal.

She was rumored not to have voted at all.

Yet by summer, in the press at least, all was forgotten. When I was there, every major magazine featured glowing profiles of the new first lady. They praised her charm, her fashion sense, her break-the-mold modernity.

Could such public forgiving and forgetting of a wanton political wife ever have happened here? And could Americans, like the French, ever elect a cuckold to the presidency?

The question is more relevant than it seems.

I’m thinking, of course — aren’t I always? — of Hillary Clinton.

I spent the end of the summer thinking how remarkable it was that Cécilia’s affair hadn’t sunk Nicholas Sarkozy’s presidential prospects. After all, throughout history, the “cuckold” has typically been viewed as a fool, lacking in wit, power and general masculine wherewithal. It’s believed that the image of a cuckold as horned fool dates back to a legend of European villagers donning horns and parading around to humiliate betrayed husbands.

Although a female version of the word cuckold exists (it’s cuckquean), it’s little used, probably because, as far as the larger sense of the word’s meaning is concerned, there has been no female equivalent of the cuckold. Wronged wives typically have been figures of sympathy, not jest. The difference has stemmed, I think, from the fact that, throughout history, a wife’s infidelity meant that male power and privilege was upended. The natural order of things was usurped.

At least, that’s the way it’s traditionally been.

Sarkozy has made a lot of bold and defiant gestures since winning the election – appointing Socialists to key government posts, vacationing in America – but perhaps one of his boldest, cleverest and most successful has been the fact that, by keeping his head high, standing by his woman and steadfastly, defiantly, professing his love and desire (she is “the only non-negotiable part” of his career, he has said), he has transcended the old role of cuckold. He has instead been something more like a political wife.

As for Hillary – contemplating the Sarkozys this summer drove home to me the gender-bending aspect of her own unfortunate personal history. A formidable woman of real power and prestige, she emerged from the Monica affair much more cuckold than cuckquean. Her husband’s perfidy did, in a sense, disturb the natural order of things; in the post-feminist age, women like Hillary are not supposed to be subject to such indignities.

Hillary has never been, as she herself once put it, “some little woman standing by my man.” Perhaps that’s what made the spectacle of her public humiliation so unique and so unsettling and, ultimately, so unforgivable for the many women who came away from it all despising her.

I think I now understand that particular aspect of the Clinton conundrum in a way I never did before. It comes down to this: nobody likes a cuckold.

The Ottoman Swede

2007-09-13T22:00:00.000-04:00

By ROGER COHEN

Published: September 13, 2007

STOCKHOLM

As members of Congress mull what to do next in Iraq, they might glance at a League of Nations report of July 16, 1925, on the new Middle Eastern state then being carved by the British from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire.

The report said that despite “the good intentions of the statesmen of Iraq, whose political experience is necessarily small, it is to be feared that serious difficulties may arise out of the differences which in some cases exist in regard to political ideas between the Shiites of the South and the Sunnites of the North, the racial differences between Arabs and Kurds, and the necessity of keeping the turbulent tribes under control.”

And it warned: “These difficulties might be fatal to the very existence of the State if it were left without support and guidance.”

So much for things changing. They don’t, or only slowly, when attempts are made to carve sustainable nation states from multiethnic empires.

This 82-year-old document was handed to me by Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, a man of dry humor and quick tongue who can claim to be the world’s authority on messes in post-Ottoman areas. “From Bihac to Basra,” he said, referring to towns in western Bosnia and Southern Iraq, “these things take time and benchmarks don’t count for much.”

Bildt recently returned from Baghdad where Sweden has much to discuss given that 20,000 Iraqi refugees are expected to arrive here this year, a number that dwarfs the trickle of fleeing Iraqis into the United States. This imbalance is shameful, but that’s another story. Iraqis have no special desire to trade desert for pine forest, but Sweden has the merit of letting them in.

In the Iraqi capital, Bildt heard divergent political visions from Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Shiite prime minister, and Tariq al-Hashemi, the Sunni vice president. The notion of give-and-take, of compromise reached rather than domination imposed, is a Middle Eastern novelty.

Give-and-take has not been a big Balkan thing either, and it was in the Balkans, as a special European Union envoy, that Bildt cut his teeth on post-Ottoman mayhem. He sees “massive parallels” between Yugoslavia’s violent dismemberment once dictatorship ended and Iraq’s turbulent deliverance from tyranny.

Both states were invented in the post-World War I years in areas long under complete or partial Ottoman dominion. Both were beautiful inventions, bridges between divergent cultures and religions and ethnic groups, mosaics beneath a national flag. Both had the drawback of tending toward their own self-destruction in the absence of a strongman to resolve contradiction through force.

Freedom is a funny thing. Life without it is misery. But a glance at the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia or now Iraq is a sufficient reminder that distinct peoples forcefully gathered into a dictatorial state will react in the first instance to liberty by trying to get free of each other rather than trying to imagine a liberal democracy.

As Miroslav Hroch, the Czech political theorist, has observed, ethnic or religious nationalism easily become the “substitutes for factors of integration in a disintegrating nation.” That’s where we are in Iraq. In plotting a social revolution, the ushering to power of a subjugated Shiite majority through the overthrow of a minority Sunni dictatorship, the Bush administration did not ponder or plan for these realities.

That’s unfortunate, indeed unforgivable, but it’s done.

Bildt, Balkan-hardened, takes the long view. “If you take the Ottoman areas, they were Muslim but tolerant with an array of different cultures and their replacement with different versions of the 19th-century nation state has proved very difficult, be it in the Balkans, in Cyprus or the Middle East.”

He cannot imagine a quick American exit. “Iraqi leaders will want some sort of exit perspective, but a long-term one,” he says. As long as Iran and Saudi Arabia see Iraq as a Shia-Sunni battlefield, peace will be elusive.

The Balkan analogy is interesting. Yugoslavia’s breakup saw four years of war, then another war in Kosovo four years later. Only regional pressure — the bait of European Union membership — and a large European and American military presence have brought calm. The question of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia remains explosive.

This fragile stability is where the 16-year arc from the eruption of the Balkan wars in 1991 has led. Given that regional realities make an Iraqi breakup unthinkable, the architecture of the Yugoslavia-in-miniature in Bosnia is probably the most helpful guide for Baghdad: a fig-leaf national government presiding over a loose federation.

If the United States meets the responsibilities its invasion engaged and the region can be coaxed to help rather than hinder, we may attain such fragile stability 16 years from Saddam’s fall: that would be 2019, just over a century after the Ottoman collapse.

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You are invited to comment at my blog: www.iht.com/passages.

Sleepwalking in September

2007-09-13T21:56:00.001-04:00

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: September 13, 2007

Fred! Fred!

He’s here. He’s tanned. He’s ready.

He looks like he needs a nap.

When it comes to overhyped underperformers, Fred Thompson’s entry into the presidential race was right up there with Britney Spears at the MTV awards.

The Republican Party’s great tall hope announced his intentions on Jay Leno’s show, and timed it to coincide with his avoidance of the candidate debate in New Hampshire. That was supposed to send the message of — what? A fear of crowds? A preference for answering questions only while seated? His performance certainly could not have been more low-key. You do not often hear somebody say “I’m running for president” in the same tone Jay’s guests use to announce that they’ve signed on for the next season of “Dancing With the Stars.”

Then Thompson climbed onto a bus for a trip through Iowa and other states that are going to be first to vote, even if they have to hold the elections tomorrow. It quickly became apparent that whatever our newest top-tier candidate had been up to during those long months of water-testing did not involve practicing a speech. In Iowa, he rambled. The Daily News reported that at one town hall meeting he seemed to be telling the audience that Americans were winning over Iraqis because of Al Qaeda’s no-smoking policy. He appeared to be developing a different position on Osama bin Laden for every state.

(Best guess now is that Thompson wants to see bin Laden “caught and killed,” then granted due process.)

On the subject of gay marriage, he told an interviewer for the Christian Broadcast Network that he had an idea for a constitutional amendment that would “prevent that one state moving from another and someone having to recognize it.”

This was supposed to be the answer to the Republican core’s primal pain. Find us somebody to nominate! Someone slightly less smarmy than Mitt and slightly less strange than Rudy. “My story is an American story ... a small-town kid of modest means and modest goals,” Thompson tells the voters on his Fred08 Web site. Viewers can feel free to recall that Mitt Romney’s dad was a business tycoon and governor. And you can be sure that Fred was not spending his teens founding a high-school opera club like some former New York City mayors we could name.

Thompson, by all accounts, was indeed an underachiever who rose to fame and fortune mainly through powerful friends and good luck. The perfect answer for a country reeling from two terms with an underachiever who rose to fame and fortune mainly through powerful friends and good genes. And so far at least, it’s working in the polls. An affable guy who doesn’t try hard — what could be more refreshing?

There was always speculation that Thompson’s supporters were trying to cast a president rather than nominate one, and that his big selling point was not a résumé or even a personal story, but simply that down-home aura — a drawl in a nice suit. What nobody really expected, though, was that the former senator/lobbyist/actor would emerge on the political stage in a state of apparent exhaustion. He’s 65, but compared to him, 71-year-old John McCain looks like a pup. Either the guy never had an edge, or he lost it somewhere between “Die Hard 2” and “Baby’s Day Out.”

Or maybe he’s a victim of trying to Have It All.

You may have heard that Thompson, who was long divorced, married a woman 25 years his junior in 2002. They now have a 3-year-old daughter and an infant son. Everybody started the campaign off together last week. Little Hayden showed a crowd how she could make like an elephant and Samuel got his diaper changed on the bus during a TV interview.

It’s not unusual for wealthy men to decide they can dive into fatherhood and Social Security at the same time. This presidential field is awash with candidates of late-middle-age whose kids can still qualify for Breakfast with Santa. But none are quite so old or have children quite so young as Thompson’s. And these days it’s hard for an overage dad to get away with absentee fatherhood, especially when mom is intimately involved in the management of his campaign, as Jeri Thompson, seems to be. Yes, his wife goes by Jeri Thompson. Maybe the combination of kids and campaigning has left him too ground down to glad hand. Too pooped to pander.

If so, a lot of women are going to find the story very comforting. Not that we’re resentful of the fact that men’s biological clocks never seem to ring. Or that they’re not the ones who have to decide if they can handle both children and a career.

If it turns out that mixing a race for the most powerful job on the planet with two preschoolers is too much for any one 65-year-old man to do, millions of women will say, welcome to the club, Fred. We know how you feel.

Woodstock’s Values, and Abraham’s, Too

2007-09-13T21:48:00.000-04:00

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: September 13, 2007

WOODSTOCK, N.Y.

In his Rosh Hashana sermon today, Rabbi Jonathan Kligler, like many rabbis, will try to put the eternal struggle to square human fallibility with human aspiration in a context particularly germane to his own congregation.

So in the prepared text of his sermon he begins by meditating on “messianic visions of modernity,” particularly the idealism and passions of the ’60s that brought so many of his peers to this Catskill town still defined by the concert that wasn’t held here. Along with mulling over the “yetzer hara,” the capacity for evil, and the “yetzer hatov,” the capacity for good and the ancient wisdom of Rabbi Huna of Tzipori, he’ll tell his congregation to keep hope alive.

“I never want to abandon my idealism,” he says, near the beginning of the sermon. “I’m the rabbi of Woodstock, for God’s sake!”

Yes, Mr. Kligler is the rebbe of a distinctive congregation, where the High Holy Days ceremonies are always held outdoors in their beloved tent, and the first Rosh Hashana service begins with the singing of the ’60s anthem “Turn! Turn! Turn!” with the rabbi playing guitar, where there’s always plenty of singing, dancing and hugging along with the davening.

But still, two decades on, there’s a tale of modern Jewish life in the success of the Woodstock Jewish Congregation — Kehillat Lev Shalem (which means “the congregation of the full heart”). Like its members, like many Jews, it has tried to balance tradition and modernity, staying true to its core values and adapting to change, and has managed mostly to do it, even though no one began with a vision of a place that has an annual golf outing at the Rip Van Winkle Country Club.

“Our goal has always been to be truly welcoming, truly tolerant, true to the Woodstock ethos,” said Rabbi Kligler, who came to the congregation in 1988 as a student rabbi and never left. “At the beginning, no one wanted to have memberships, there was no accounting system. Our challenge was to grow without losing our vision and spirit.”

There were plenty of Jews in Woodstock, but no synagogue closer than Kingston until late 1986, when two refugees from Brooklyn, Laurie Schwartz and Nathan Brenowitz, decided to start one. First, they wanted to have a place where their son could learn to be Jewish — and they could learn along with him. Second, as Mr. Brenowitz noted, most of the Jews in town seemed to be Hindus or Buddhists, and they wanted a place with a Jewish identity that evoked the spirituality all their friends were seeking.

They placed an ad in The Woodstock Times announcing their intentions to start a synagogue that attracted 70 responses. First they planned a High Holy Days ceremony in a single room at the Woodstock Children’s Center. Then as word spread, they thought they could do it in two rooms with the prayer leader straddling the doorway between them. In the end, they rented a tent and more than 250 people attended the first service.

They operated for many years out of an abandoned flea market in nearby Saugerties. They contemplated a new building but worried that a traditional capital campaign might not be their thing. “The capital campaign consultants talked about a giving pyramid, with the big donors at the top,” Rabbi Kligler said. “That wasn’t going to work. We’re more like a giving mesa.”

But they pulled it off. This is their second year in the new $3 million, 12,500-square-foot building (which actually is in Woodstock) with the 150 purple chairs in the sanctuary donated by the Catskill Mountain Christian Center in Margaretville. There will be about 1,500 people attending the High Holy Days ceremonies, the membership is now 375 families, and the new building means the rabbi no longer has to operate out of a trailer behind the old flea market.

There have been at least two times of crisis. The first came when the congregation split over the rabbi’s suggestion that it affiliate with the Reconstructionist Movement, where he was trained (they decided to remain unaffiliated), the second the result of bitter political schisms after 9/11 and the second intifada over whether the synagogue was supporting Israel enough or supporting it too much (a few members quit, but life went on).

THE congregation is still distinctive, proud to have sponsored the bat mitzvah of a transsexual member who had her bar mitzvah decades ago. But Rabbi Kligler figures that with Judaism facing a growing chasm between the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox on one side and those more comfortable with modernity on the other, its experience isn’t just its own.

And though anyone can attend the High Holy Days services, those who’ve paid their membership dues get to park at the temple, a perk that might have been blasphemous in the old days, but no more.

“We finally have a privilege for members,” the rabbi said. “It makes a big difference. People have joined, so they can park on site.”

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

The Opinionator Sept 11-13

2007-09-13T21:40:00.000-04:00

September 13, 2007, 2:21 pm

Mash a Smash?

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: debates, Elections 2008, Internet

Who cares if it’s not really a mash-up? The Yahoo!/Huffington Post/Slate forum for the Democratic presidential candidates is now live, and Todd Beeton of MyDD.com thinks it’s pretty good. Beeton writes:

Although not technically a debate, this is one of the best forums we’ve had to hear the views of the candidates if only because each candidate is allowed to delve more deeply than normal into each of only 3 topics. It’s also refreshing to see the “lower tier” candidates given as much time as the front-runners so they can actually be heard for a change. What’s missing, of course, is the opportunity for candidates to clash head-to-head but that hardly happens during the normal debates anyway.

Internet evangelist Jeff Jarvis is, shall we say, less positive. Writing at his BuzzMachine blog, Jarvis calls the forum “a pathetic insult to the voters that is years behind in Internet culture.” He adds:

So we end up with watching Charlie Rose and Bill Maher asking the candidates questions on the usual topics – do we have a shortage of this on TV debates? Where’s the interactivity? Well, we get to pick which videos to watch. Oooh, the freedom. It’s like a bad children’s museum: “Here, children, push this button. You won’t do any harm.”

We should be the ones asking the questions. We should be the ones selecting the questions. We should be the ones editing the questions.

Instead, they give us buttons to push. What an insult.

Jarvis proposes a way to make the debate a true mash-up: “For you see, it’s not just about us watching. It’s about us producing and broadcasting.” He elaborates, “Indeed, why not go one step farther and take all the video from all the debates since they are open to our unrestricted reuse and put them together so we can produce and publish the ultimate mashups from the election so far?”

September 13, 2007, 10:00 am

With Friends Like These …

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: conservatives, Fred Thompson

It is an understatement to say that two prominent conservative opinion-slingers are unhappy with Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign rollout. In his Washington Post column, George Will writes:

Fred Thompson’s plunge into the presidential pool — more belly-flop than swan dive — was the strangest product launch since that of New Coke in 1985. Then, the question was: Is this product necessary? A similar question stumped Thompson the day he plunged.

Will then dissects Thompson’s interview with conservative talk-radio host Laura Ingraham about his past support for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. Will writes of Thompson, “His rambling, incoherent explanation was just clear enough to be alarming about what he believes, misremembers and does not know.”

Robert Novak is less unkind but still critical. “Thompson’s late start in itself is not a fatal flaw,” Novak writes in his Chicago Sun-Times column. “Still, it had been conceded in party circles that when he finally became a candidate, his beginning better be memorable. It was not.”

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September 12, 2007, 4:17 pm

Political Mash-Up, Half-Baked

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: debates, Elections 2008, Internet

Tonight’s presidential “mash-up” debate, sponsored by The Huffington Post, Slate and Yahoo! is neither a debate nor a mash-up, complains National Review’s Jim Geraghty at his Campaign Spot blog.

Geraghty links to a Wired story by Sarah Lai Stirland that explains the problem:

Mashups typically involve the combination of two disparate elements — for example, metropolitan crime data and Google maps, or rapper Jay Z’s The Black Album and the Beatles’ The White Album — to make new creations such as chicagocrime.org or Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album.

To that end, Yahoo said as recently as Friday that it would upload the raw footage from the online debate to its own web-based video editing service Jumpcut, to make it easy for the footage to be spliced and diced as citizen editors saw fit. “Users will be able to create their own mashups and post the footage onto their websites afterwards — that’s for the hardcore fans who want to engage with this video,” spokesman Brian Nelson told Wired News.

But on Monday, Nelson called back to say the company had changed its mind. Instead the “mashup page” will only [let] citizens pick and choose which candidates they want to hear from on particular issues, by pointing and clicking on a web interface.

Geraghty concludes, “So in the end, users can… watch 15-minute interviews with the Democratic presidential candidates conducted by PBS host Charlie Rose. Thrilling!”

(Click the following link to read six articles published on the Times op-ed page last month as responses to the question, “What would a real new-media debate look like?”)

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September 12, 2007, 9:50 am

MoveOn’s General Disagreement

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: Gen. David Petraeus, Iraq, netroots

Time magazine political columnist Joe Klein thinks the full-page MoveOn.org advertisement, which referred to “General Betray Us,” in Monday’s New York Times was “morally and politically outrageous.”

“MoveOn has handed the Bush Administration a major victory — at a moment when all attention should be focused on whether we should continue to commit U.S. troops to this disaster,” Klein writes at Swampland, the Time political blog. “Just nauseating.” (Gen. Petraeus hadn’t yet told Senator John Warner, Republican of Virginia, that he wasn’t sure whether the Iraq war was making America safer when Klein wrote his blog post.)

Klein thinks the flap over the advertisement will be more than a one-day story. He writes:

Usually the Republicans are the ones who’ve tried to change topics at a crucial Iraq moment…but MoveOn usurped that gambit this time. This is going to put the Democrats on the defensive. They’re going to have to answer questions like the one posed by the odious Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida: Will you disassociate yourselves from this? The Presidential candidates will be asked…and they will have to either disassociate themselves from MoveOn (which the party’s base won’t like) or associate themselves with calling General Petraeus a traitor. And make no mistake: One who betrays us is a traitor.

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September 11, 2007, 3:43 pm

Thompson’s Legal Work for the Libyans

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: Fred Thompson

Christopher Orr, a senior editor for The New Republic, is outraged that “more is not being made of the news that, back in 1992 when he was a lawyer/lobbyist, Fred Thompson billed a few hours of work on behalf of two Libyan intelligence agents charged with (and one of them later convicted of) the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.” Orr writes:

Several prominent lobbyists, including Tommy Boggs, turned down overtures to work for Libya on the case, despite offers of a reported $1.5 million retainer. Vicki Reggie Kennedy, wife of Ted, actually resigned a partnership in her law firm over its decision to represent Libya, even though–as far as I can tell–she was never asked to do any work on the case.

But not good ol’ Fred. Not go along to get along, take a dollar where you find it Fred. A couple dozen hours lobbying for abortion rights? Why not? A few more spent helping defend two men accused of a heinous act of terrorism? Heck, if it wasn’t Fred, it’d just be someone else, right?

In a political era in which the cost of a man’s haircut can be treated as though it were a window into his soul, you’d think people would be a little more curious what it says about Fred Thompson that he’d do work–even just 3.3 hours of it–for indicted terrorists.

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September 11, 2007, 9:46 am

A Failure by Any Other Name…

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: Iraq

You don’t need to listen to Gen. David Petraeus to know that “the surge has failed, as measured by the president’s and Petraeus’s standards of success,” writes George Will in his Washington Post column. He continues:

Those who today stridently insist that the surge has succeeded also say they are especially supportive of the president, Petraeus and the military generally. But at the beginning of the surge, both Petraeus and the president defined success in a way that took the achievement of success out of America’s hands.

The purpose of the surge, they said, is to buy time — “breathing space,” the president says — for Iraqi political reconciliation. Because progress toward that has been negligible, there is no satisfactory answer to this question: What is the U.S. military mission in Iraq?

Americans are, and will always be, uncomfortable with “wars of choice” like Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, Will suggests. “What ‘forced’ America to go to war in 2003 — the ‘gathering danger’ of weapons of mass destruction — was fictitious,” he writes. “That is one reason this war will not be fought, at least not by Americans, to the bitter end.” He continues:

The end of the war will, however, be bitter for Americans, partly because the president’s decision to visit Iraq without visiting its capital confirmed the flimsiness of the fallback rationale for the war — the creation of a unified, pluralist Iraq.

After more than four years of war, two questions persist: Is there an Iraq? Are there Iraqis?

Model Franchise Sprouts an Unsightly Blemish

2007-09-13T21:34:00.000-04:00

By DAVE ANDERSON

Published: September 13, 2007

The biography of the Patriots’ owner, Robert K. Kraft, in the team’s 2006 media guide, brags that the three-time Super Bowl champions “are often referred to as a model franchise.” But no longer.

It now appears to be a model fraud, a model cheat.

Coach Bill Belichick apologized yesterday for the video camera, seized by the National Football League, that taped the Jets’ sideline signals Sunday at Giants Stadium. At least, that was presumably what he was apologizing for, although he never said it in so many words. But that’s Belichick at his vaguest best, or worst.

Whatever the semantics, Belichick was simply copping a guilty plea.

Let’s hope Commissioner Roger Goodell doesn’t shed a tear. Let’s hope that Goodell remembers that the Patriots not only were the subject of similar videotape incidents in recent years, but that the issue was discussed at length at league meetings earlier this year. It is also the issue that the Patriots apparently ignored until the Jets’ security director, Steve Yarnell, alerted league officials to a Patriots employee suspected of taping signals Jets coaches were sending to their players.

Such defiance might justify Goodell penalizing the Patriots with the loss of multiple draft choices, possibly even a first-round draft choice. Maybe that would impress upon the rest of the N.F.L. how brazen the Patriots were in videotaping the sideline signals, especially during a game against the Jets, whose coach, Eric Mangini, was once one of Belichick’s trusted assistant coaches.

Mangini hasn’t commented to reporters on the incident or even on Belichick’s apparent apology. Mangini surely doesn’t want to answer the obvious question: Were the signals of opposing teams being videotaped for decoding when Mangini was Belichick’s defensive coordinator in 2005, or earlier when he was the Patriots’ defensive backfield coach for five seasons?

If the commissioner were to ask Mangini that question, the Jets coach can’t (and shouldn’t) say “no comment” or take the Fifth Amendment.

In ruling on Michael Vick and Pacman Jones recently, Goodell cited the importance of the league’s integrity. But Vick and Jones were involved in criminal cases outside the pro football realm. The Patriots case is strictly a pro football crime subject to the commissioner’s jurisprudence.

Goodell doesn’t have to wait for an indictment or a trial. He knows the evidence. He also knows that Belichick, often referred to as pro football’s latest genius coach, has copped a guilty plea.

Not that spying is new to pro football. But the Patriots’ method was not only too high-tech, it had been discussed and denounced as blatant cheating.

In baseball, stealing signs from a third-base coach is considered an art, but the 1951 New York Giants’ use of a telescope and a buzzer system to alert batters to the next pitch would have deserved a commissioner’s punishment had it been discovered and proved.

•

Over the years in pro football, spying was usually confined to suspicion. Going back more than four decades, whenever a helicopter appeared anywhere above a Jets outdoor practice before a game with the Oakland Raiders, Coach Weeb Ewbank would blow his whistle.

“Al Davis has somebody up there watching us,” Ewbank would say, referring to the Raiders’ general managing genius. “Don’t do anything until that copter leaves.”

Harland Svare, the San Diego Chargers’ coach who had been a Giants linebacker, once looked up at a light fixture in the visiting team’s locker room at the Oakland Coliseum.

“I know you’re up there, Al Davis,” Svare yelled. “I know you’re up there.”

Told later of Svare’s accusations, Davis was willing to perpetuate his sinister reputation.

“The thing wasn’t in the light fixture,” Davis said slyly. “I’ll tell you that much.”

Ever since the Giants moved to the Meadowlands, their coaches have wondered if their practices at the outdoor field next to the stadium were being watched by spies peering through binoculars from a room in a nearby high-rise hotel. According to a Giants official, Coach Dan Reeves wanted to erect a wall to block that view.

•

In 1998, when the Atlanta Falcons, with Reeves as their coach, were about to play the Giants, the Falcons were suspected of planting a spy in that hotel. Just in case, the Giants assigned a club employee with high-powered binoculars to survey the windows of the hotel and a nearby office building. No spies were spotted.

Jim Fassel, the Giants’ coach at the time, solved the issue that week by taking the Giants inside the team’s practice bubble. The Falcons won, 34-20.

Until now, all that spying was mostly mischief that usually was more smoke than fire. But what Belichick and the Patriots did (and got caught at) was a bonfire not normally associated with a model franchise.

The War as We Saw It

2007-09-12T23:58:00.000-04:00

[This will stay at the top of the page for the entire day today. I encourage discussion of this op-ed in light of the deaths of SSG Gray and SGT Mora yesterday in Baghdad.]

By BUDDHIKA JAYAMAHA, WESLEY D. SMITH, JEREMY ROEBUCK, OMAR MORA*, EDWARD SANDMEIER, YANCE T. GRAY* AND JEREMY A. MURPHY**

Published: August 19, 2007

Baghdad

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the ''battle space'' remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers' expense.

A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.

As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.

Similarly, Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda.

However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a ''time-sensitive target acquisition mission'' on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse -- namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in constant flux.

The Iraqi government is run by the main coalition partners of the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, with Kurds as minority members. The Shiite clerical establishment formed the alliance to make sure its people did not succumb to the same mistake as in 1920: rebelling against the occupying Western force (then the British) and losing what they believed was their inherent right to rule Iraq as the majority. The qualified and reluctant welcome we received from the Shiites since the invasion has to be seen in that historical context. They saw in us something useful for the moment.

Now that moment is passing, as the Shiites have achieved what they believe is rightfully theirs. Their next task is to figure out how best to consolidate the gains, because reconciliation without consolidation risks losing it all. Washington's insistence that the Iraqis correct the three gravest mistakes we made -- de-Baathification, the dismantling of the Iraqi Army and the creation of a loose federalist system of government -- places us at cross purposes with the government we have committed to support.

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict -- as we do now -- will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. ''Lucky'' Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.

In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, ''We need security, not free food.''

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are -- an army of occupation -- and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

Buddhika Jayamaha is an Army specialist. Wesley D. Smith is a sergeant. Jeremy Roebuck is a sergeant. Omar Mora is a sergeant. Edward Sandmeier is a sergeant. Yance T. Gray is a staff sergeant. Jeremy A. Murphy is a staff sergeant.

*SGTs Mora and Gray were killed in Baghdad on 11 September 2007.

**SSG Murphy was wounded while this op-ed was being written. He was shot in the head and is expected to recover.

Iraq Through China’s Lens

2007-09-12T01:01:00.001-04:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: September 12, 2007

Dalian, China

It’s nice to be in a country where Iraq is never mentioned. It’s just a little unnerving when that country is America’s biggest geopolitical and economic rival these days: China.

I heard China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, address an international conference here in Dalian, and what impressed me most was how boring it was — a straightforward recitation of the staggering economic progress China has made in the last two decades and the towering economic, political and environmental challenges it still faces.

How nice it must be, I thought, to be a great power and be almost entirely focused on addressing your own domestic problems?

No, I have not gone isolationist. America has real enemies that China does not, and therefore we have to balance a global security role in places like the Middle East with domestic demands.

But something is out of balance with America today. Looking at the world from here, it is hard not to feel that China has spent the last six years training for the Olympics while we’ve spent ourselves into debt on iPods and Al Qaeda.

After 9/11, we tried to effect change in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world by trying to build a progressive government in Baghdad. There was, I believed, a strategic and moral logic for that. But the strategy failed, for a million different reasons, and now it is time to recognize that and focus on how we insulate ourselves from the instability of that world — by having a real energy policy, for starters — how we protect our security interests there in more sustainable ways and how we get back to developing our own house.

By now it should be clear that Iraq is going to be what it is going to be. We’ve never had sufficient troops there to shape Iraq in our own image. We simply can’t go on betting so many American soldiers and resources that Iraqis will one day learn to live together on their own — without either having to be bludgeoned by Saddam or baby-sat by us.

So either we get help or get out. That is, if President Bush believes staying in Iraq can still make a difference, then he needs to muster some allies because the American people are not going to sustain alone — nor should they — a long-shot bet that something decent can still be built in Baghdad.

If the president can’t get help, then he has to initiate a phased withdrawal: now. Because the opportunity cost this war is exacting on our country and its ability to focus on anything else is out of all proportion to what might still be achieved in Iraq by our staying, with too few troops and too few friends.

Iraqis can add. The surge has brought more calm to Iraq largely because the mainstream Iraqi Sunnis finally calculated that they have lost and that both the pro-Al Qaeda Iraqi Sunnis and the radical Shiites are more of a threat to them than the Americans they had been shooting at.

The minute we start withdrawing, all Iraqis will carefully calculate their interests. They may decide that they want more blood baths, but there is just as much likelihood that they will eventually find equilibrium.

I have not been to Dalian in three years. It is not just a nice city for China. It is a beautiful city of wide avenues, skyscrapers, green spaces, software parks and universities.

The president of Dalian University of Technology, Jinping Ou, told me his new focus now is on energy research and that he has 100 doctoral students dealing with different energy problems — where five years ago he barely had any — and that the Chinese government has just decided to open its national energy innovation research center here.

Listening to him, my mind drifted back to Iraq, where I was two weeks ago and where I heard a U.S. officer in Baghdad tell this story:

His unit was on a patrol in a Sunni neighborhood when it got hit by an I.E.D. Fortunately, the bomb exploded too soon and no one was hurt. His men jumped out and followed the detonation wire, which led 1,500 feet into the neighborhood. A U.S. Black Hawk helicopter was in the area and alerted the U.S. soldiers that a man was fleeing the scene on a bicycle. The soldiers asked the Black Hawk for help, and it swooped down and used its rotor blades to blow the insurgent off his bicycle, with a giant “whoosh,” and the U.S. soldiers captured him.

That image of a $6 million high-tech U.S. helicopter with a highly trained pilot blowing an insurgent off his bicycle captures the absurdity of our situation in Iraq. The great Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi said it best: “Great powers should never get involved in the politics of small tribes.”

That is where we are in Iraq. We’re wasting our brains. We’re wasting our people. We’re wasting our future. China is not.

Peaches Tightens the Girdle

2007-09-12T00:56:00.000-04:00

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: September 12, 2007

WASHINGTON

Joe Biden didn’t talk that much yesterday for Joe Biden.

And he told Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker that they shouldn’t talk too much, either, so that members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would have time to get in their questions. Even though the senators often didn’t ask questions but simply gave little partisan lectures or told stories about themselves, or in the case of Barbara Boxer, had an aide hold up a blow-up picture of herself with General Petraeus in Iraq.

Nevertheless, Mr. Biden, the committee’s chairman, took time at the end of yesterday’s first hearing with the Surge Twins to make the points, a bit repetitively, that there is no plan to get out of Iraq and that the Bush administration is not leveling with Americans.

John McCain was standing behind Mr. Biden, waiting to sit down for the next hearing — the Armed Services Committee — with the witnesses.

First, the Republican presidential candidate smiled archly at having to cool his heels as the Democratic presidential candidate yakked — sniffing at the Surge that Mr. McCain supports. Then Mr. McCain turned to his G.O.P. colleague Susan Collins and flapped his fingers in the universal hand sign for yakking.

It pretty much said it all.

For months, everyone here has been waiting with great expectations to hear whether the Surge is working from the top commander and top diplomat in Iraq.

But the whole thing was sort of a fizzle. It’s obvious that the Surge is like those girdles the secretaries wear on the vintage advertising show, “Mad Men.” It just pushes the fat around, giving a momentary illusion of flatness. But once Peaches Petraeus, as he was known growing up in Cornwall-on-Hudson, takes the girdle off, the center will not hold.

And it was clear from their marathon testimony that the Iraqi politicians are useless, that we’re going to have a huge number of troops in Iraq for a long time, that there’s no post-Surge strategy, that they’re just playing for time, hoping that somehow, some way, things will look up in the desert maze of demons that General Petraeus referred to as “home.”

The strategy is no more than a soap bubble of hope, just as W.’s invasion of Iraq was based on a fantasy about W.M.D.’s and an illusory view of Iraq.

Even though it was 9/11, Osama was barely mentioned all day.

Republican Senator John Warner, freer than ever now that he’s announced his retirement, turned the screw on the two witnesses.

Do you feel, he asked the general, that the Surge “is making America safer?”

“Sir, I don’t know actually,” Peaches replied. “I have not sat down and sorted out in my own mind.”

The Surge Twins seemed competent and more realistic than some of their misbegotten predecessors, but just too late to do any good. They’re like two veteran pilots trying to crash land the plane.

Ambassador Crocker has expressed a darker, more rueful vision in background briefings with reporters, and he emanated a bit of Graham Greene yesterday.

He noted that the Iraqis know that “they’re going to be there forever,” while we will not.

Pulling troops out too soon, he fears, could “push the Iraqis in the wrong direction. It would make them, I would fear, more focused on, you know, building the walls, stocking the ammunition and getting ready for a big, nasty street fight without us around.”

Asked by Senator McCain if he was confident that the Maliki government will get the job done, the ambassador said dryly: “My level of confidence is under control.”

The star witnesses gave shell game answers, trying to make the best of a hideous hand.

“It’s a hand that’s unlikely to improve in my view,” Hillary Clinton — one of five senators running for president on the two panels — told the Surge Twins. “I think that the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief.”

Hillary’s plan is to posture and criticize W.’s war all the way to the White House. But then President Clinton will be stuck with figuring out how to pull out the more than 100,000 troops still there policing a lot of crazy sectarian street fighting.

The Republicans seemed happy that the witnesses’ calm presentation bolstered the president’s case for continued war funding. In his speech on Thursday night, W. will be able to accept the recommendations of the Surge Twins, who are only recommending what he wants to hear.

Republicans seemed oblivious to the fact that they may have scored points short term while laying the groundwork for disaster long term. W. won’t care because he’s not running, but it will be political suicide for Republicans entering the campaign with 130,000 troops still in Iraq.

As Lindsey Graham joked to the witnesses about Congress, referring to the talk of the dysfunctional Iraqi government, “You could say we’re dysfunctional and you wouldn’t be wrong.”

90th Floor Frozen, Even as Ground Zero Changes

2007-09-12T00:52:00.000-04:00

By JIM DWYER

Published: September 12, 2007

Anne Foodim, Manhattan apartment dweller, lighted three candles on her dining table yesterday morning, then switched on the television to hear the name of a slight man in a sport jacket. With a few soft words, some gentle squeezes to shoulders, that man, a colleague, helped save Ms. Foodim and others on the 90th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center in 2001.

His name — Ed Emery — would be somewhere around the 700th on the list of 2,750 read at the Sept. 11 memorial service. So Ms. Foodim absorbed the stately pace of the event, taking note of its scale six years after the attack.

On the first anniversary, she had been chosen to read names as a representative of those who had escaped. The city stood still. Thousands crowded the site, and others who could not get in stood on sidewalks, listening to the ceremony on the radios of parked cars.

Yesterday, on a showery morning, no more than a few hundred relatives and friends of the dead gathered on Liberty Street. Ahead of them, a grove of construction cranes rose from the pit of ground zero. Behind them, traffic heaved along Broadway, the soaring notes of a flutist’s “Amazing Grace” dueling with the diesel wheeze of buses.

The families hiked down a ramp to drop flowers into a pool. No one will make precisely that memory walk again; the ground will be built over next year.

Sept. 11, as a public occasion, has shrunk to life size: potent as ever for people holding photographs of fathers on their wedding days and mothers in their backyards, but unlikely to start wars again.

Babies are in first grade, children have graduated from high school, teenagers have finished college. Ms. Foodim, now 63, has effectively retired. She had been fighting cancer, and could barely get down the stairs that morning.

“In some ways, strange as this is to say, Sept. 11 was good for me,” Ms. Foodim said. “I didn’t know what I had in me. In certain ways, you could say Ed saved my life.”

The personal narratives of that day in 2001 were almost immediately overtaken by the cosmic. The initials N.Y.P.D. and F.D.N.Y. were stenciled onto T-shirts and hats, then onto the sides of munitions that were launched first into Afghanistan, where the Taliban had sheltered Al Qaeda, and later into Iraq, which had no connection to the attacks.

“I don’t know how the country could buy into it to begin with,” Ms. Foodim said. “Whatever happened to Osama bin Laden?”

Two presidential candidates, both New Yorkers, attended the memorial yesterday. One of them, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, was scarcely seen; the other, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, briefly spoke, quoting the writer Eli Wiesel on the need for a moral response to evil.

Other members of Mr. Giuliani’s administration were present, including his business partner and protégé, who was then the police commissioner: Bernard B. Kerik, who pleaded guilty last year to accepting $165,000 in home renovations while in office from a company suspected of ties to organized crime. In his path to the stage yesterday, Mr. Giuliani, whether by design or chance, kept well clear of Mr. Kerik, who was standing in a section reserved for dignitaries.

Ms. Foodim recalled the day six years earlier. She had gone to work, at the end of a long siege of chemotherapy for breast cancer; she was just starting the ordeal of radiation.

That morning, she said, “I struggled up the steps out of the subway at Fulton Street, and said, ‘I am so glad I’m alive because look at that blue sky.’ ”

She worked for Fiduciary Trust, which had offices in the south tower. When the first plane struck the north tower, she felt the heat through the windows.

Mr. Emery arrived with a sense of calm and command, she said. “Ed came running out of his office, and he said, ‘Come on, let’s go,’ ” Ms. Foodim said.

He ushered a group from the 90th floor to the staircase, and led them down to the 78th floor, where they could take an express elevator to the lobby.

AS she walked down the stairs, Ms. Foodim felt the weight of the moment, and the cancer treatments, wearing on her.

She paused on landings, exhausted. Through her illness, Mr. Emery had coaxed her along, encouraging her to get rest when she needed it, but welcoming her company at work. He had given her a book on tranquillity for her birthday a few weeks earlier.

Now, she said, Mr. Emery was talking her down the stairs. “Ed said, ‘If you can finish chemo, you can get down those steps,’ ” she recalled.

At the 78th floor, one of their group, Elsie Castellanos, who had also been working at the trade center when it was bombed in 1993, became upset. Mr. Emery patted her shoulder, and urged her onto the elevator with the others.

As they approached the elevators, they heard an announcement. “Exact words: ‘The building is secure, please return to your desks,’ ” Ms. Foodim said.

“I had been out the day before. I was always a good little girl. How could you go home, if the building is secure? Ed said, ‘You know what, it’s O.K., go ahead.’ ”

The Fiduciary group boarded the express car. “He promised to be down directly, but had to go back up for something or someone,” Ms. Foodim said.

Ms. Foodim and her group got clear of the building. Somewhere between 14,000 and 17,000 people escaped from the two towers, investigations later found.

Not Mr. Emery. He climbed to the 97th floor with another Fiduciary employee, Alayne Gentul, to evacuate a group of people who were working on the computer systems. They were trapped by the second plane.

For months after, Ms. Foodim worked as the Fiduciary representative at a family center set up by the city on Pier 94, helping with benefits and death certificates for the survivors of nearly 100 people. After two years, she had had enough; she attributes her own psychic survival to a therapist she continues to see.

She lives with two dogs and has a network of friends, women she has met over the last six years. Most of them are from her neighborhood on the Upper East Side. “I don’t keep in touch with anyone from Fiduciary,” she said.

She gathered with some of her friends at her home yesterday morning. She wept a little when the Brooklyn Youth Chorus sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water” at the memorial. And she lighted the candles, one for her lost Fiduciary colleagues, one for Ms. Gentul and one for Ed Emery.

Respect Remains A World Away For U.S. Women

2007-09-12T00:47:00.000-04:00

By GEORGE VECSEY

Published: September 12, 2007

The current members of the American women’s soccer team seem preoccupied with receiving the same attention their hallowed ancestors did eight years ago.

A good way to start would be learning to survive while short a player. That is how the great teams respond. To date, there is no evidence the new breed has the same resourcefulness displayed by the Fawcetts and Foudys and, oh yes, the Chastains of yesteryear.

The current Yanks did fight back yesterday for a 2-2 draw with a worthy North Korean team in the first match of the Women’s World Cup in Chengdu, China — an event sure to make insomniacs out of soccer die-hards, what with the host nation being 12 hours ahead of New York and 15 ahead of California.

Just to disorient sports fans’ internal time clocks even more, the United States plays Tonga today in the Rugby World Cup in France while all over the continent most nations are playing qualifying matches for the Euro 2008 soccer tournament. And to further complicate things, the great cycling dynasty, now known as the Discovery Channel, is making its last stand before disbanding, racing around that historic and scenic cycling hub of Missouri.

Meanwhile, somebody told me the American football season has begun, but I haven’t had time to investigate, what with the big event in China, available thanks to good old ESPN. It was raining as hard in Chengdu as it was in New York yesterday, as I woke up at the ridiculous hour of 5 a.m. to watch the Americans in their bid for respect.

Recognition seems to be a preoccupation this year. While Kristine Lilly, the last of the great grannies, is as serene as ever, some of the younger players seem caught up in craving the publicity that Mia Hamm got — and, by the way, deserved. The soccer federation doesn’t help by pushing a needy team slogan of “The Greatest Team You’ve Never Heard Of.”

It’s hard to know whether this is a case of puffery imitating life or life imitating puffery, but the ESPN broadcast included a totally inappropriate commercial from Nike showing a creepy publicist wearing a Chastain-style sports bra, advising the players to focus on glitz. A few of the younger guns shoot him a hard look, and one of them boots a shot directly to some unspecified but vulnerable sector of the publicist’s anatomy. It should only be that easy.

•

In the actual game, which the ubiquitous sponsor could not control, the results were somewhat the opposite. Abby Wambach, the warrior striker, went off the field for treatment of a scalp wound, and the 10 remaining players failed to regroup, yielding two quick goals.

I once saw my favorite defender, Franco Baresi, wobble around with a head wound during an A.C. Milan match while a teammate, the smooth Paolo Maldini, seamlessly played both defensive sectors until Franco could see and walk again. That poise is not necessarily a guy thing. Carla Overbeck and Michelle Akers knew how to run the clock, but this team, coached by Greg Ryan, has not yet mastered those fine points.

It better rev up the learning curve because the United States plays Sweden at the same hideous time Friday. Ryan may even think about using Briana Scurry instead of Hope Solo, who allowed one shot to squish off her fingers for the first goal.

Halfway between Chengdu and New York, the United States is emphatically not a favorite in the Rugby World Cup. The Eagles, who have won only two matches, both against Japan, in World Cup competition, lost to the defending champion, England, 28-10, in the opener. Paul Emerick, one of the few American professionals, is suspended for three matches for flipping an English opponent into the air. That match will be available at the somewhat more civil hour of 8 a.m. via the dish and satellite version of Setanta Sports, perhaps in the occasional pub or restaurant that caters to international fans.

Then there are the Euro qualifiers featuring the habitual perils of Italy and England, two grand old soccer nations that do not know how to do anything easily. Italy plays Ukraine in Kiev today; England is host to Russia at Wembley. I’m going to watch the England match with an Arsenal fan and a Chelsea fan who will unite temporarily for the common cause.

•

Finally, there is the six-day jaunt around Missouri, with the Discovery Channel heading for oblivion after Sunday’s final stage. Having won the Tour de France seven times with Lance Armstrong and once this year with Alberto Contador, and with no Discovery rider ever suspended for testing positive during a race, the team is going out of business because potential sponsors were put off by the reek of scandal from the Tour.

The American soccer players do not have to worry that their team will go out of business, the way Discovery is doing. The women still have time to measure up against their predecessors. The first step would be to lose that disrespectful Nike commercial.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

Fantasies, Well Meant

2007-09-10T23:40:00.001-04:00

By BOB HERBERT

Published: September 11, 2007

I must have hit a nerve. While in Las Vegas last week, I interviewed the mayor, Oscar Goodman, who enthusiastically explained how legalizing prostitution and creating a series of “magnificent brothels” could be a boon to his city’s development.

Vegas is already a paradise for pimps, johns and perverts, and I accused the mayor in a column of setting the tone “for the systematic, institutionalized degradation” of women.

Mr. Goodman was not pleased. He snarled to the local press that he had no use for me, and added, “I’ll take a baseball bat and break his head if he ever comes here.”

The mayor, who made a name for himself as a defense lawyer for mobsters, loves to slip into a clownish, tough-guy persona. (He never lets anyone forget that he had a walk-on as himself in the movie “Casino.”) But behind his bluster is a serious issue that should be addressed.

A lot of people more thoughtful than Oscar Goodman believe that prostitution should be legalized as a way of protecting and empowering the women who go into the sex trade. I’ve lost patience with those arguments, however well meaning. Real-world prostitution, in whatever guise, bears no resemblance at all to the empowerment fantasies of prostitution proponents. I have never seen such vulnerable, powerless women as those in the sex trade, legal or illegal.

At Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel about an hour’s ride outside of Vegas, the women have to respond like Pavlov’s dog to a bell that might ring at any hour of the day or night. It could be 4 a.m., and the woman might be sleeping. Or she might not be feeling well. Too bad.

When that electronic bell rings, she has five minutes to get to the assembly area, a large room where she will line up with the other women, virtually naked, and submit to a humiliating inspection by any prospective customer who happens to drop by.

“It’s not fun,” one of the women whispered to me during a tour of the brothel.

The first thing to understand about prostitution, including legal prostitution, is that the element of coercion is almost always present. Despite the fiction that they are “independent contractors,” most so-called legal prostitutes have pimps — the state-sanctioned pimps who run the brothels and, in many cases, a second pimp who controls all other aspects of their lives (and takes the bulk of their legal earnings).

They are hardly empowered. Years of studies have shown that most prostitutes are pushed into the trade in their early teens by grown men. A large percentage are victims of incest or other forms of childhood sexual abuse. Most are dirt poor. Many are drug-addicted. And most are plagued by devastatingly low levels of self esteem.

And then there are the armies of women and girls who are trafficked into the sex trade by organized criminals, both inside and outside of the U.S.

That a city, a state or any other governmental entity in the U.S. could legally sanction the sexual degradation of women and girls under any circumstances, much less those who are so extremely vulnerable, is an atrocity. And if you don’t think legalized prostitution is about degradation, consider the “date room” at Sheri’s. That’s a small room where a quiet dinner for two can be served. Beneath the tiny table is a couple of towels and a cushion for the woman to kneel on.

The only one empowered in that situation is the john.

Mayor Goodman’s concept of magnificence notwithstanding, Nevada’s legal brothels are not nice places. “The only place I’ve ever had a gun pulled on me was in a legal brothel,” said Melissa Farley, a psychologist and researcher who has studied the sex trade in Nevada for the past two and a half years.

Ms. Farley, who is in her 60s and has the demeanor of a college professor, was threatened at gunpoint by a legal pimp who didn’t like her attitude. “I tried to change the look on my face in a hurry,” she said.

Any honest investigation of the facts, as opposed to abstract theories, of prostitution — in any form — would reveal a horror show. That’s why the authorities in so many other countries that have given an official green light to prostitution, including Germany and the Netherlands, have been revisiting their policies.

Legal prostitution tends to increase, not decrease, illegal prostitution, in part by creating a friendlier climate for demand. It tends to increase, not decrease, sex trafficking. And the recent explosion of prostitution in all its forms promotes the sexualization of girls at ever younger ages.

Oscar Goodman should be viewed as a wake-up call. As a society, we should be offering help to the many thousands of women who would like to escape prostitution, and providing alternatives to those in danger of being pulled into it.

The Road to Partition

2007-09-10T23:35:00.000-04:00

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: September 11, 2007

Zealots don’t laugh when elevators break. Shatha al-Musawi did laugh. She smiled at the camera crew that was following her to her Baghdad office, and she sighed, “We’ll have to take the stairs.”

Thoughts of Musawi ran through my head as I watched David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker testify yesterday. Musawi was the subject of a profile by Damien Cave that ran on the front page of The Times a few weeks ago, and a Web cast on The Times’s Web site by Damien Cave and Diana Oliva Cave.

Musawi is a moderate Shiite member of the Iraqi Parliament who earned a university degree after her children grew up. She speaks thoughtfully and gently, but there is a wall in her mind separating Sunnis from Shiites, a wall that was erected during Saddam’s persecution and that has been fortified by the violence since. For her, the conflict with the Sunnis is not over oil; it’s a matter of honor. She wants them to accept historical guilt and grant Shiites moral supremacy.

As she said in the Web cast: “If they come and apologize to victims, if they admitted their faults and asked for forgiveness, maybe we can forget about it. But now with this continuous killing and continuous crimes against us, how could we? How could we?”

This is how many Palestinians and Israelis talk. When conflicts become struggles for moral capitulation, they take forever to end.

Musawi’s words are just one more piece of evidence that Iraq will not be put together the way it was. It’s one more piece of evidence that America’s best course is not to reunify Iraq, but simply to inhibit the violence as Iraqis feel their own way to partition.

What we’re really trying to build, in other words, is a road to partition. We’re trying to build a pathway to separation that involves the sort of low-intensity civil war that Iraq is enduring right now. We’re trying to prevent a pathway that is even worse — a high-intensity genocide.

As I was watching yesterday’s hearings, I was thinking of the sensible yet sectarian Musawi. How many American lives is it worth to save those like her? Is it realistic to think U.S. troops can help Iraqis move on that less barbaric path?

If you look around, you see this is the wrong time to give up hope, for circumstances in Iraq are better than they were in the spring.

First, there’s clearer evidence than ever that U.S. forces can inhibit violence. Despite all the debates over the data, violence over all is on the decline. In neighborhoods where 30 and 40 bodies used to show up a night, now only one or two do. After rising in 2006, violent civilian deaths of all kinds are down 45 percent since December.

Second, the worst of the ethnic cleansing may be over. For years, Shiites and Sunnis have been purging each other from towns and neighborhoods. That ugly process may be nearing its completion, and stabilization may be possible. As Damien Cave and Stephen Farrell wrote in The Times last Sunday, “Iraq’s mixed neighborhoods are sliding toward extinction.”

Third, the tribal revolt against extremism is real and growing. Few anticipated it. Few predicted that it would spread from Anbar to Diyala to Salahaddin and beyond. But it has, and U.S. troops are essential to its success.

Fourth, U.S. commanders finally have a realistic definition of their mission. We’re not trying to determine the future shape of Iraq, Petraeus said yesterday. We’re just trying to ensure that Iraqi sects compete for power in less violent ways.

Fifth, American diplomats are no longer waiting for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Yesterday Crocker made some dubious assertions about Iraqi elites discovering the virtues of power-sharing. But the concrete parts of Crocker’s efforts do not require those virtues. They involve bulking up municipal governments and disbursing money from Baghdad.

What we have then, is a confluence of events, a series of processes that weren’t happening four months ago. Obviously, these processes are tenuous. But, given the consequences, it would be foolish to give up now. It would be foolish to weaken U.S. support for the sane sectarians just when they are striving to create a segregated yet inhabitable Iraq.

Shatha al-Musawi is one of those Iraqis unwilling to reconcile. In that way, she’s part of the problem. But she doesn’t want to die in some cataclysmic civil war. There may come a time when the U.S. can do nothing for her. But with all that is happening, that time is not now.

A Day of Respect, Except for the Ballot

2007-09-10T23:32:00.000-04:00

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: September 11, 2007

On this, the sixth anniversary of the city’s longest day, most of New York will carry on as usual. Stores will be open. So will government offices. Broadway will put on its shows. The Mets, weather permitting, will play ball. Traders at the New York Stock Exchange will buy and sell.

In short, New Yorkers will go about their normal activities — with one exception. They won’t vote. That most basic element of American democracy, the ballot, is the one normal thing forbidden them on the Sept. 11 anniversary.

And our political leaders will reassure us that the terrorists haven’t won.

Customarily, Primary Day in New York State is the second Tuesday in September. That would be today. But in May, barely noticed by most New Yorkers, the Legislature and the governor delayed the primaries until next Tuesday, Sept. 18.

So we can shop, and go to a ballgame, and make money. But allow our democracy to function normally? Nope. That is somehow incompatible with Sept. 11.

Lawmakers reached this conclusion in virtual lock step, some no doubt fearing the potential wrath of 9/11 families. The State Senate voted for the delay unanimously. In the Assembly, the vote was 136 to 9, the tiny minority consisting of 6 Democrats and 3 Republicans.

Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader, called it “critically important that we reserve Sept. 11 as a day when the world looks back and remembers the many heroes who lost their lives.”

But couldn’t we remember and vote at the same time? Some might even say that democracy’s normal processes would honor those heroes while telling the terrorists in a powerful way where they can go.

“Yes, you can make the case for that,” said John E. McArdle, a spokesman for Mr. Bruno. “But I think there was a consensus all the way around that it was preferable to go this route.”

Much the same was said by Dan Weiler, a spokesman for Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker. He was asked for Mr. Silver’s reasons for seeking the postponement. As relayed by Mr. Weiler, the speaker’s response was, “We felt it was the appropriate thing to do.”

Well, that explains it.

Granted, this will not be much of a Primary Day, especially in New York City, which has nothing more exciting than a judicial race or two. Granted, some people still have bad memories of the aborted Primary Day that was Sept. 11, 2001.

Even so, did Albany bow to a new form of political correctness at the expense of respect for democratic tradition? Linda B. Rosenthal, a Manhattan Democrat who was one of the nine dissenters in the Assembly, seems to think so. She called the postponement “misguided.”

“The best way to recognize the significance of this attack on America and on its values,” Ms. Rosenthal said, “is not by postponing the opportunity to participate in the most fundamental democratic process we have.”

John A. Ravitz, executive director of the city’s Board of Elections, said that he and other election officials around the state had made a similar point to the Legislature. “We said, ‘What better way to prove that we had recovered and we’re not intimidated by what happened on 9/11 than to hold an election?’ ” Mr. Ravitz said. “But we were told that this” — the change in dates — “was a done deal.”

By now, it has become axiomatic among those in the political class that they alone among New Yorkers must be untrue to themselves on Sept. 11.

“I’ve given up,” said Jerry Skurnik, a political consultant. “We should vote on Sept. 11, but the problem is that people are going to attack candidates for campaigning.” Fernando Ferrer’s experience in the 2005 mayoral race is proof of that. You’d have thought that he had spit on the Constitution the way he was fiercely attacked for accepting the Rev. Al Sharpton’s endorsement on Sept. 11, two days before the Democratic primary.

What New York requires now is “a healthy public discussion about the need to move on and get back to the business of democracy,” said Dick Dadey, executive director of the government watchdog group Citizens Union. “There are many ways in which to show respect and honor that day,” he said, “but not at the continued expense of delaying the exercise of our democracy.”

It may be worth noting that Sept. 11 will fall next on a Tuesday in 2012, a year when major offices will be at stake. Perhaps by then New York’s political leaders will get their democratic groove back.

If it would help, we could all dye our index fingers purple that day.

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

A Spectacle the Knicks Don’t Need

2007-09-10T23:29:00.000-04:00

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: September 11, 2007

As jury selection began yesterday in the sexual-harassment case against a longtime basketball superstar and his employer, often referred to as the world’s most famous arena, perhaps the essential question was who might be blinded or biased by the presence of Isiah Lord Thomas III and the power of his standing as president and coach of the Knicks.

Lucky for the judge, the Knicks have been lousy, their television ratings could be mistaken for Court TV’s and there are people all over New York who wouldn’t know David Lee from David Lee Roth.

“I’m not a sports fan at all,” said Gretchen Haury from Chappaqua, N.Y., a mother of three. That sounded good enough for the judge, plaintiff and defense.

“I’m a Yankee fan, don’t follow basketball,” said the 67-year-old Phillip Lief, a doctor from White Plains who was accepted without challenge from either side.

“I’m not a crazy sports fan, but I like to watch tennis, or golf,” said Michelle Zelekowitz, 50, of Pleasantville, N.Y.

Have a seat in the jury box, Ms. Zelekowitz, and prepare for some no-holds-barred Madison Square Garden mud-slinging, James Dolan style.

One after another, potential jurors were called to a single seat inside a small selection room through a door from room 23A yesterday in United States District Court in lower Manhattan. The judge, Gerard E. Lynch, sat across from them at a four-sided table with a space in the middle. On the left side, the plaintiff, a former Knicks senior vice president, Anucha Browne Sanders, was mostly expressionless as she watched the proceedings, flanked by lawyers.

Thomas, a defendant, sat with his all-female legal team (wink, wink), opposite Sanders, in a gray suit with a blue hankie folded above the breast pocket of his jacket. He held a blue pen over a yellow notepad, occasionally flashing the megawatt smile that could illuminate the Garden in the middle of a Midtown blackout.

Except here in the legal arena, where the Garden strongman Dolan is Thomas’s co-defendant and not his career enabler, it is a tossup whether the jury of civilians will be as willing as Dolan has been to smile upon the I-Lord.

This is the trial Thomas insisted on, or so he claimed, to defend his honor against Sanders, who charged she was fired for complaining about Thomas’s advances and mistreatment. This is the case that Dolan could have avoided but — true to character — is spending the millions he should have devoted to a quiet settlement by trying to nuke Anucha.

What if Thomas and Dolan lose a case likely to turn on interpretation? Will Dolan jettison Thomas for having to make up to a $10 million payoff? Will N.B.A. Commissioner David Stern, known to punish players for failing to hem their shorts, suspend Thomas and even Dolan for staging a public spectacle the league needs at this point like another crooked ref?

“No comment on pending litigation!” Stern wrote in an e-mail message yesterday. Who could blame him for wanting to drive that exclamation point through Dolan’s thick skull?

•

Not surprisingly, Dolan didn’t show up yesterday, and for one day at least set up Thomas, among others, for the collateral damage in what promises to be a two- to three-week trial of juicy headlines.

The judge also remarked that he grew up reading the New York City tabloids from the back, another way of calling himself a fan and apparently one familiar with the biggest, boldest print. But his mission yesterday was more subtle: the formation of a jury impervious to the premeditated persuasions of the celebrity civil trial.

“I don’t follow sports,” said Irene Ray, 58, a receptionist from the Bronx, though she noted on her printed questionnaire that she had heard of one of the players scheduled to testify.

“I know Stephon Marbury got those $15 sneakers out,” she said. “I think that’s great.”

What about when Thomas was great? Where were all the hoop-heads who remembered him in those tight little blue Detroit Pistons shorts, weaving through traffic, all the way to the Hall of Fame?

Edward Watts, 43, a court officer from the Bronx, called himself a “New York fan” who watches games on TV, but only to a point.

“I don’t rush home at 7 o’clock,” he said, turning to Thomas. “Sorry, Isiah.”

•

Watching Thomas in the jury selection room, one had to wonder if he wasn’t sorry it had come to this, media day one month too soon, his reputation and possibly his professional fate being placed in the hands of people promising to treat him and Sanders as full-fledged equals, everything in the open, on the table.

“I can speak freely?” Tommy Vasquez, 37, a Bronx maintenance man, said when asked about Thomas. “He’s a pretty good talent evaluator, but he’s not so good a G.M.”

He got a laugh from everyone but Thomas, whose lawyers objected to Vasquez as a juror. The judge overruled. Score the goal for the plaintiff.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

Some Clues to the Future Emerge From Week 1

2007-09-10T23:24:00.001-04:00

Jets Coach Eric Mangini, right, had little to say
about Chad Pennington’s ankle sprain Sunday.
Photo: Barton Silverman/The New York Times

By WILLIAM C. RHODEN

Published: September 11, 2007

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y.

In New York City, where the news media specializes in making mountains out of mole hills, the area’s two professional football teams — the Jets and Giants — have quarterback issues right out of the box.

The Giants’ Eli Manning, playing perhaps the best game of his career against Dallas on Sunday, sustained a right shoulder injury that may force him to miss a start.

The Jets face a more delicate problem: Chad Pennington, the 31-year-old quarterback who has battled back from an assortment of shoulder and arm injuries, was temporarily knocked out of Sunday’s 38-14 loss to the New England Patriots with a high ankle sprain. Pennington returned to the game, but judging from the nasty reaction of many fans, there seems to be a sense — maybe a consensus — that Pennington is not the one to lead the Jets to the Super Bowl. But who is — Kellen Clemens?

Welcome to Jets/Giants 2007.

The opening of an N.F.L. season is like the first day of school: fresh, new back-to-school-clothes, new classmates, new teachers, the promise of a clean slate. Unlike baseball, basketball and hockey and their marathon seasons, the N.F.L.’s 16-game regular season gives every contest, every quarter and every play great weight.

So while a result in Week 1 is not necessarily a death sentence or a ticket to the Super Bowl, you can draw some general conclusions from the first day of school.

If you’re an Oakland Raiders fan, you can look at the season-opening loss to Detroit and safely predict another disappointing season. Perhaps Raiders fans should petition the image-conscious commissioner, Roger Goodell, to take the reins from Al Davis, the Raiders’ managing general partner, and have the N.F.L. operate Oakland as a trust until the league finds a suitable owner.

Similarly, I could fully understand Atlanta Falcons fans who watched a 24-7 loss to Minnesota petitioning United States District Judge Henry E. Hudson to sentence Michael Vick as harshly as he pleases — if he will just let him play for the Falcons on Sundays.

What Jets fans should take away from Week 1 is that the Jets and Patriots are still oceans apart. When the Patriots lost receiver Deion Branch, Tom Brady complained. The franchise then gave him Randy Moss.

Pete Kendall, the Jets’ former valuable veteran guard, wanted a million dollars more. The franchise traded him, and if Sunday is any indication, there is no replacement in view.

A rejuvenated Moss treated the Jets’ secondary like a collection of schoolboys. The Patriots treated the Jets the way the Patriots usually treat the Jets: like little brothers who needed to be reminded who was still the boss.

Moss gives the Patriots personality and reminds Jets fans that their team really doesn’t have one. Organizations like New England, Indianapolis, Baltimore, Pittsburgh and, recently, San Diego, have mastered the art of getting players who fit into their respective identities.

The Jets are a franchise in search — for the last 38 years — of an identity.

Without a Curtis Martin, there is no offensive player who terrifies the opposition; no one who keeps coordinators awake trying to figure out “how do we stop this guy?”

Coach Eric Mangini’s message after Sunday’s dismal loss was to change the team’s focus as rapidly as possible. “It’s never about what happened,” he said. “It’s about how you respond to what happened. It’s about the adversity; it’s how you respond to the adversity.”

Jets fans don’t respond so well. Never have.

When Pennington was injured in the third quarter, a large number of moronic Jets fans actually cheered, validating arguments in some quarters that football fans — witnesses to an absolutely brutal sport — are only a few steps removed from devotees of animal fights.

Who would cheer a player’s injury?

Pennington’s replacement, Kellen Clemens, said yesterday that he was flabbergasted by what he heard.

“For anybody who knows Chad, there should be nothing but concern for him at that moment,” he said.

Clemens said his wife did not notice that he was going into the game but cried for Pennington. “She was crying because he was hurt,” he said.

Someone quipped, “Are you sure she wasn’t crying because you were going in?”

Clemens laughed.

You can laugh in early September with 15 games to go because the end of an N.F.L. season rarely looks like the beginning.

But if the Giats lose Eli Manning and the Jets lose Chad Pennington for any significant time, pro football season in New York will be a catastrophe.

And that’s no hype.

E-mail: wcr@nytimes.com

The Opinionator: Sept. 10, 2007

2007-09-10T23:22:00.000-04:00

September 10, 2007, 5:10 pm

Really Feel">Tell Us How You Really Feel

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: Fred Thompson

Better red than Fred? “Now that Fred Thompson is officially in the race, it is appropriate to say that he is, on the face of it, by far the weakest potential president of the top tier Republicans,” National Review’s Richard Brookhiser writes at The Corner, the magazine’s staff blog. Brookhiser adds:

Fred Thompson came to the offices of National Review some years when he was still in the Senate. I liked him fine. He has done nothing, anywhere, ever. The Hubble Telescope could not find what he has done, because he has not done it.

It would be unwise to put such a man in the White House at this moment in history.

***********************************

September 10, 2007, 2:30 pm

Is ‘Equal Time’ Obsolete?

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: Fred Thompson, Television

The Wall Street Journal editorial page hopes that Fred Thompson’s presidential bid won’t mean an increase in the size of the royalty checks written to Steven Hill and Dianne Wiest, Thompson’s predecessors on “Law & Order” in the role of the district attorney. “Citing federal requirements that force television broadcasters to give all political candidates equal exposure, NBC has stopped airing reruns of “Law & Order” that feature Fred Thompson,” the Journal editorial notes. “But we were glad to learn that the cable channel TNT, which airs more than 20 “Law & Order” episodes each week, has no plans to follow suit.”

Equal-time regulations should be junked entirely [$], the editorial suggests. “The ostensible justification for equal time provisions is that, in a world of media scarcity, broadcasters need to provide a political platform for everyone on an equal basis, lest one candidate gain an unfair advantage through more exposure.” It continues:

This might have made sense when these rules were written by Congress in the 1930s, but it’s a hard policy to defend in today’s media-saturated world. The sheer volume of media outlets today not only renders these regulations obsolete but also makes fair enforcement all but impossible. Should the FCC ban Netflix and video stores from renting Mr. Thompson’s old films? Or how about monitoring YouTube to make sure the number of Barack Obama video downloads matches Hillary Clinton’s?

As long as the equal time rules live, so will the temptation to expand their scope to cable, satellite television, the Internet and who knows where else. Congress should give them a proper burial.

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September 10, 2007, 10:00 am

Dowd’s Two Cents on Iraq

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: George Bush, Iraq

The chief strategist for President Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004 writes in The Huffington Post that the American public wants the United States to withdraw from Iraq and that “the best leaders are those who trust the will of the public, even if that means changing direction or admitting a mistake.” Matthew Dowd, who previously revealed his dissatisfaction with President Bush in an April interview with The New York Times, writes:

I share these thoughts as neither a Republican nor a Democrat. While I did serve as Chief Strategist for President Bush in the 2004 campaign, I now consider myself an independent and feel it is a good time to offer what I hope you will find is a measured, reflective and objective analysis of where Democrats and Independents and a large portion of Republican voters stand on the Iraq war today.

Dowd lists four statements that he believes sum up public opinion on the war in Iraq: 1) “In the public’s mind, the Iraq War was a mistake, and continuing the status quo is simply continuing on with a mistake”; 2) “The public does not see withdrawal from Iraq as a signal America doesn’t support the troops”; 3) “The public is waiting for leaders from both political parties to stand up to the president and say enough is enough. They would like this situation resolved — and soon — and there is no other solution acceptable to them other than bringing the troops home”; 4) “The war in Iraq is now seen exclusively as a foreign policy concern, and the American public no longer supports the initiative as part of national security. This is in stark contrast to the war’s beginning — at inception, the public perceived it as directly related to fighting terrorism, and thus it was seen as a domestic policy issue connected to homeland security.”

Dowd adds, “I hope this analysis helps bolster the leaders who are ready to stand up for the troops and for the vast majority of Americans in this country. Not only is truth on those leaders’ side, but politics is as well.”

Court Cloaked in Secrecy Shows a Hint of Openness

2007-09-10T01:47:00.000-04:00

By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: September 10, 2007

The secret court that considers warrants for National Security Agency surveillance has for years met in a curious place — inside the Justice Department.

Consistent with that bit of symbolism, the court has approved almost all of the thousands of applications the department has presented to it over the years.

And the court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, has deferred to the department in other settings, too. In January, when the Senate Judiciary Committee asked the court’s presiding judge for copies of orders it had issued concerning a surveillance program, she responded that she had no objection. Nonetheless, she wrote, “I would ask you to discuss the matter with the attorney general.”

In recent weeks, however, there have been signs of a new independence, perhaps prompted by the administration’s selective disclosures of aspects of the court’s orders.

Last month, for instance, the court issued a rare public order. It told the government to respond to a motion from the American Civil Liberties Union, which had asked the court to disclose parts of its decisions approving and limiting N.S.A. surveillance programs.

“This is an unprecedented request that warrants further briefing,” the presiding judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote of the A.C.L.U.’s motion.

And Judge Kollar-Kotelly suspended the usual presumption of secrecy surrounding the court’s work, ordering the Justice Department to file its brief in public and to seek permission if it wanted to file anything under seal.

Lawyers for the A.C.L.U. said their request was a modest one. Large parts of the decisions may well be properly classified, they said. All they asked was that the court make an independent assessment of what may be disclosed.

The Justice Department, judging from the tone of the brief it filed Aug. 31, was taken aback by that suggestion. The A.C.L.U., the government said, “requests that this court second-guess the executive branch’s classification decision.” And the executive branch had decided, the brief continued, that “no part of any documents can be released without harming national security.”

A little sheepishly, the brief conceded that there had been exceptions. In January, for instance, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales described aspects of orders the court had issued that month.

But those disclosures, the brief said, were “in the interest of informing the public debate.” Perhaps coincidentally, they were also made just before a federal appeals court in Cincinnati was to hear arguments on the legality of the surveillance program.

The brief did not mention another set of even more detailed disclosures last month from Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence. In an interview with The El Paso Times, Mr. McConnell seemed to do precisely what the Justice Department said the secret court may not. He disclosed in general terms the substance of the court’s decisions.

“So the second judge looked at the same data and said, ‘Well, wait a minute — I interpret the law, which is the FISA law, differently,’ ” Mr. McConnell said, according to a transcript of an interview on the newspaper’s Web site. He was referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that established the secret court.

“And it came down to,” Mr. McConnell said of the second decision, “if it’s on a wire and in a foreign country, you have to have a warrant.”

It is one thing to argue that a judge’s mechanical application of a straightforward statute may be kept secret. It is another, lawyers for the A.C.L.U. say, for whole lines of sometimes conflicting precedent to be established in the dark.

“Having secret bodies of law is antithetical to our constitutional democracy,” said Melissa Goodman, a lawyer with the civil liberties group.

If the secret court is having doubts about the state of national security litigation, it is not alone.

Last week, judges on two ordinary federal courts expressed frustration and anxiety about the Bush administration’s approach.

On Wednesday, Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. of Federal District Court in Washington pressed the government for actual justifications in opposing a freedom of information suit seeking executive branch documents concerning the spying program. “Essentially saying ‘because we say so’ is an inadequate method,” Judge Kennedy wrote.

The next day, Judge Victor Marrero of Federal District Court in Manhattan struck down recent revisions to the USA Patriot Act, saying the deference the law required courts to give to the executive branch could amount to “the hijacking of constitutional values.”

In the case before the secret court, the A.C.L.U. will submit its response to the government’s brief on Friday, sending it to Room 6725 in the Justice Department. There is no word on whether the court will hear arguments or where that might happen.

But a spokesman for the Federal District Court in Washington said Friday that the secret court was in the midst of a relocation, out of the Justice Department. The secret court, with interesting timing that may signify a fresh approach, is moving to the courthouse.

Online: Documents and an archive of Adam Liptak’s articles and columns: nytimes.com
/adamliptak.

A U.S. General’s Disquiet

2007-09-10T01:37:00.000-04:00

By ROGER COHEN

Published: September 10, 2007

I first met Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli in Baghdad in early 2005. He was about to go home after a year’s assignment as the head of the First Cavalry Division, and he was dreading his return.

The dread related to the loss of 160 men and women from his division. A sign outside his headquarters read: “Complacency kills — don’t become a statistic.” Chiarelli knew he’d carry the cruel statistics back to Fort Hood, Tex., and face the bereaved.

“The hardest thing is going home and facing those parents and wives and loved ones,” he said, looking me in the eye with tears in his. Chiarelli, now the senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, is a thoughtful, decent officer who has absorbed his share of the military’s post-9/11 hurt.

The first two decades of his career were spent training to defeat the Soviet Ninth Combined Arms Army in Europe. This was symmetrical war, tough but clear. It had nothing of the elusive asymmetry of borderless modern warfare, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism.

Like the U.S. armed forces as a whole, Chiarelli has learned and adapted through two Iraq tours. Now he has gathered his thoughts in a forthcoming article for Military Review that makes devastating reading. The picture he paints is of a military and nation still at some remove from reality.

“Much of our government and interagency seem to be in a state of denial about the requirements needed to adapt to modern warfare,” Chiarelli says, adding that even today some believe “that all we have to do to win our modern wars is kill and capture enough of the enemy.”

Nonsense, Chiarelli argues in a piece written with Maj. Stephen Smith. Shadowy modern wars are less about overwhelming force than mastering instantaneous communication to win hearts and minds, adapting rapidly, flattening ponderous military hierarchies, understanding nation-building, and bringing to bear U.S. abilities in fields as diverse as engineering and agronomy.

“If we are unable to do a better job than our enemies of influencing the world’s perception, then even the most brilliant campaign plan will be unlikely to succeed,” he writes. Unreadiness for the real-time reactions of an interconnected globe has often allowed a video-camera-wielding enemy “to run circles around us, especially in the information environment.”

Further damage has been caused by some military leaders and service members who “have not internalized the moral and ethical codes that define who we are as an armed force and nation.”

Failure to meet this moral “imperative” hurts “our credibility as a fighting force, our mission and indeed our standing in the world.” Chiarelli adds that, “Too often, we are reluctant to admit mistakes.”

At a deeper level, beyond the damage of an Abu Ghraib, this general says the United States must address what is needed to conduct long campaigns for its security in places like Afghanistan.

“The U.S. as a nation — and indeed most of the U.S. government — has not gone to war since 9/11,” he observes. While the military is fighting, “the American people and most of the other institutions of national power have largely gone about their business.”

Rarely, if ever, has daily death in combat been accompanied on such a scale by the maxing out of credit cards at the mall. President Bush likes to call himself a “war president.” More accurately he has been the war-and-shop, conflict-and-home-equity-credit president.

Now those two worlds, eerily remote from each other, have come together in simultaneous Iraq and credit crises. While Bush considers lowering troop levels, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke considers lowering interest rates. The overseas and home fronts, the dropping and the shopping, are not unrelated after all.

Chiarelli has long suffered the disconnect. He saw his soldiers killed in flimsy Humvees because American industry was not geared up in World War II fashion to produce replacements. He has seen the military pushed to provide agricultural, governance and legal experts when they might come from the Departments of Agriculture, State and Justice.

“Our current problems raise the legitimate question of whether the U.S., or any democracy, can successfully prosecute an extended war without a true national commitment,” he writes.

Unless you believe the United States can simply withdraw from the world, a popular but naïve view, that essential strategic question needs addressing beyond the Iraq tactics before Congress this week. An answer is the minimum the now overstretched shopping nation owes the long overstretched fighting nation it seldom notices.

Foreclosure is grim. But what the war bereaved want and cannot find is closure.

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You are invited to comment at my blog: www.iht.com/passages.

Where’s My Trickle?

2007-09-10T01:22:00.000-04:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: September 10, 2007

Four years ago the Bush administration, exploiting the political bounce it got from the illusion of success in Iraq, pushed a cut in capital-gains and dividend taxes through Congress. It was an extremely elitist tax cut even by Bush-era standards: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says that more than half of the tax breaks went to Americans with incomes of more than $1 million a year.

Needless to say, administration economists produced various misleading statistics designed to convey the opposite impression, that the tax cut mainly went to ordinary, middle-class Americans. But they also insisted that the benefits of the tax cut would trickle down — that lower tax rates on the rich would do great things for the economy, helping everyone.

Well, Friday’s dismal jobs report showed that the Bush boom, such as it was, has run its course. And working Americans have a right to ask, “Where’s my trickle?”

It’s true, as the Bushies never tire of reminding us, that the U.S. economy has added eight million jobs since that 2003 tax cut. That sounds impressive, unless you happen to know that a good part of that gain was simply a recovery from large job losses earlier in the administration’s tenure — and that the United States added no fewer than 21 million jobs after Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich, a move that had conservative pundits predicting economic disaster.

What’s really remarkable, however, is that four years of economic growth have produced essentially no gains for ordinary American workers.

Wages, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated: the real hourly earnings of nonsupervisory workers, the most widely used measure of how typical workers are faring, were no higher in July 2007 than they were in July 2003.

Meanwhile, benefits have deteriorated: the percentage of Americans receiving health insurance through employers, which plunged along with employment during the early years of the Bush administration, continued to decline even as the economy finally began creating some jobs.

And one of the few seeming bright spots of the Bush-era economy, rising homeownership, is now revealed as the result of a bubble inflated in part by financial flim-flam, which deceived both borrowers and investors.

Now you know why 66 percent of Americans rate economic conditions in this country as only fair or poor, and why Americans disapprove of President Bush’s handling of the economy almost as strongly as they disapprove of the job he is doing in general.

Yet the overall economy has grown at a reasonable pace over the past four years. Where did the economic growth go? The answer is that it went to the same economic elite that received the lion’s share of those tax cuts. Corporate profits rose 72 percent from the second quarter of 2003 to the second quarter of 2007. The real income of the richest 0.1 percent of Americans surged by 51 percent between 2003 and 2005, and although we don’t yet have the data for 2006, everything we know suggests that the income of the rich took another upward leap.

The absence of any gains for workers in the years since the 2003 tax cut is a pretty convincing refutation of trickle-down theory. So is the fact that the economy had a much more convincing boom after Bill Clinton raised taxes on top brackets. It turns out that when you cut taxes on the rich, the rich pay less taxes; when you raise taxes on the rich, they pay more taxes — end of story.

But it’s not just trickle-down that has been refuted: the whole idea that a rising tide raises all boats, that growth in the economy necessarily translates into gains for the great majority of Americans, is belied by the Bush-era experience.

As far as I can tell, America has never before experienced a disconnect between overall economic performance and the fortunes of workers as complete as that of the last four years.

America was a highly unequal society during the Gilded Age, but workers’ living standards nonetheless improved as the economy grew. Inequality rose rapidly during the Reagan years, but “Morning in America” was nonetheless bright enough to make most people cheerful, at least temporarily. Inequality continued to increase during the Clinton years, but wages rose, as did the availability of health insurance — and the great majority of Americans felt prosperous.

What we’ve had since 2003, however, is an economic expansion that looks good if not great by the usual measures, but which has passed most Americans by.

Guaranteed health insurance, which all of the leading Democratic contenders (but none of the Republicans) are promising, would eliminate one of the reasons for this disconnect. But it should be only the start of a broader range of policies — a new New Deal — designed to turn economic growth into something more than a spectator sport.

After Off-Season of Grandeur, Hint of Delusions in a Defeat

2007-09-10T01:15:00.000-04:00

By SELENA ROBERTS

Published: September 10, 2007

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J.

Celebrity is heady stuff for a former ball boy. For the past few months, Eric Mangini (left) has indulged in his overnight sensational-ness by trying to top his own Rubik’s Cube mind.

He unveiled Mozart to stimulate the brains of his Jets players at practice. He whisked out surprise guest speakers to motivate and inspire his team. He played into his own instant fame with his cameo as Mangenius on “The Sopranos.”

So outside the box, so Mensa, so Bill Belichick. That was Mangini’s rep for the past year. And yet as the Jets’ season-opening misery unfolded against his former employer yesterday at the Meadowlands, Mangini and his sidekick personnel wiz, Mike Tannenbaum, revealed how far removed they are from the brilliance of Bill.

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For one thing, they are dimwits at math. The Jets made a $1 million mistake when they refused to pay guard Pete Kendall — the mentor and anchor of their offensive line — that negligible extra amount to make him happy.

Even Belichick, the prize winner in the socially awkward sweepstakes, understands the value of joy. He used the off-season to make up with Tom Brady by fetching a reinvigorated Randy Moss to please his quarterback, who had felt lost since the departure of Deion Branch before last season.

Meanwhile, Mangini left Chad Pennington unloved, unprotected and vulnerable to calamity.

The inevitable occurred in the third quarter. There was Pennington on the field, left at the mercy of the Patriots’ second-string right end, Jarvis Green. In an instant, Green wrapped up and spun down Pennington, whose knee buckled and ankle rolled in unnatural ways.

“Honestly, I don’t know what happened,” said Jets left guard Adrien Clarke, Kendall’s replacement, who along with left tackle D’Brickashaw Ferguson couldn’t stop Green or anyone else as the Patriots racked up five sacks. “I’m not sure what went on. I just happened to turn around and I saw Chad on the ground.

“That’s our job, to get out there, hands down, and protect him. We didn’t do a great job of that.”

Pennington wasn’t let down by his line. He was let down by his coach.

Is he Mangenius or Mandevious? The way Mangini left Pennington exposed to enter this season is close to cruel. Is his system so exceptional that Pennington is simply a widget in his machinery? Is his strategy to push Pennington out so he can bring in his own master QB? Is his idea to copy his idol, Belichick, who once cast away Drew Bledsoe for Brady?

Whatever Mangini is up to, he stood there, hands on his hips, as Pennington, who is keenly aware of the expanding Kellen Clemens fan club, limped back onto the field with the Jets down, 28-7, with seven minutes left in the third quarter.

Yes, Pennington gamely led the Jets on a touchdown drive, but it included a warped play call from Mangini: a quarterback sneak. Pennington pushed off on his bad leg, struggled to leap into a pile, all on a quick count that drew the Patriots offside.

“At that time, Coach is going to call the plays to help us win,” Pennington said. “And if I’m out there, I’m saying I can run our plays.”

Fair enough. But even Pennington — with a pain threshold fit for a sword eater — had to end the absurdity of Mangini’s wicked decision making. It was Pennington who took himself out in the fourth quarter, not Mangini.

“He left it in my hands,” Pennington said. “With six minutes left, down 31-14, I had to, for the first time, be brutally honest with myself as far as injuries are concerned, and say that without the threat of the run, I’m kind of a sitting duck.”

Everyone saw the obvious but Mangini. In the last throes of a rout, the Patriots were playing the pass, with an immobilized Pennington as an easy target.

•

In reality, the bull’s-eye existed before the game. The risk to Pennington was high from the moment the Jets decided to cut coupons to assemble their offensive line, to cut corners in preserving the health of Pennington.

Pennington deserved better. Certainly, Kendall was not the god of left guards. Who knows if Pennington would have been hurt anyway? But Kendall was a solid ounce of protection in the prevention of a pound of injury to Pennington. Perhaps a prevention plan didn’t enter Mangini’s beautiful mind.

Does that make his Mangenius more Mandubious? There is no doubting his creativity and ingenuity as a coach. And he rightly earned praise for his rookie season with the Jets last year.

Mangini may indeed rise again. But celebrity can lead to delusions of grandeur. And fame can cloud even the most gifted thinkers. All the props and ploys and playacting didn’t translate into preparation for the Patriots.

Mangini wasn’t outsmarted by Belichick. He and Tannenbaum outsmarted themselves.

E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com

From Ballpark to Courts, an Odd Coupling

2007-09-10T00:52:00.000-04:00

By GEORGE VECSEY

Published: September 10, 2007

On one end of the boardwalk, Pedro Martínez took a curtain call like Pavarotti after hitting a high C. On the other end of the boardwalk, a few hours later, Roger Federer fell to his knees like Baryshnikov in a moment of joy.

There was passion in Queens yesterday, with Federer celebrating his latest United States Open championship after Martínez staged an unusual midgame celebration of his comeback from shoulder surgery.

The two sports overlap in these parts only a few days every year, putting the upscale tennis fans in the same traffic jam as the blue-and-orange-clad Mets fans (pictured) in their shirts honoring Piazza, Alfonzo, Seaver and many of the current worthies.

On this particular Sunday, Flushing Meadows had its own odd couple: Federer in his man-in-black garb in one arena and Martínez making his first appearance of the season in the Mets’ tacky old dive.

They both knew how to carpe the olddiem. Federer, 26, hit the floor after the final point of a 7-6 (4), 7-6 (2), 6-4 victory over Novak Djokovic, the 20-year-old who captivated tennis fans these past two weeks. (Federer is decidedly not amused by his imitations.) Martínez, soon to turn 36, gave the home fans a bonus when he emerged from the dugout to wave and do an odd little dance step after pitching five scoreless innings in what would become a 4-1 victory over Houston.

These tennis-baseball doubleheaders do not always work out for the Metsies. On a damp, ominous final Friday in 1987, Lori McNeil duffed an approach shot that would have put Steffi Graf in big trouble in their semifinal, and McNeil never recovered. A few hours later, Terry Pendleton of the Cardinals silenced Shea with a home run into the mist against Roger McDowell, effectively destroying the Mets’ hopes of repeating as champions.

The two sports coexist despite the lack of parking spaces, now exacerbated by the construction of the new Mets ballpark (Why do I keep wanting to call it the New Shea?). But everybody gets along, mostly in hope of witnessing something glorious north of the tracks or south of the tracks, connected by a wooden boardwalk with pedicabs shuttling fans back and forth.

The Mets went on first, with Martínez the main attraction. He came to New York three seasons ago to try to help win a World Series, but he was in tears last September when his body broke down. After surgery and hard training, he made it back for five innings in Cincinnati last week. Yesterday he came home, surviving his wildness on the mound and a couple of romps on the basepaths.

Normally charismatic, Martínez squirmed through 92 pitches, then openly celebrated after the Astros were retired in the fifth. Surprisingly, Martínez emerged from the dugout, a jacket on his arm, taking a wave, which no doubt thrilled the Astros. In the old days, a celebration after five innings would have earned a fastball in the ribs, and Roy Oswalt did indeed drill the Mets’ Lastings Milledge one inning later.

“I wanted to do something back for my fans and in front of my fans,” Martínez said later.

“I’m going to savor every little bit that I can get from the game from now on,” he continued. “I’m just coming back from a surgery that, if I have to do it again: ‘See you guys. No more.’ I’m going to enjoy every little moment that I have. Sign as many autographs as I can because it’s not going to last too long.”

He was entitled.

Petey went out before Federer and Djokovic took the court, with the usual assortment of celebs in attendance — Dustin Hoffman, Robin Williams, Charlie Rose, David Stern and, oh, lookie here, Maria Sharapova, who, for the record, was sitting in the Djokovic box. Djokovic says they are friends.

In a quickie television interview before the match, Federer said he was curious how Djokovic would handle his first slam final. Djokovic later said that he was affected by the stress, flubbing seven set points. (“My next book is going to be called ‘Seven Set Points,’ ” he joked afterward, as charming as ever.)

Nevertheless, Djokovic played three competitive sets, and Federer said he was sure Djokovic would be back in many more Grand Slam finals. Roger did not exactly predict that Djokovic would win those finals. That, for the foreseeable future, seems to be Federer’s job, since he has won 12 of his 14 finals so far. His presence is as emphatic as the one-handed backhand winner he struck down the line to win the second set.

Federer doesn’t waste energy on gestures, but he pumped his fist at that one. Later, he hit the deck after winning another slam title. No doubt Martínez can also fall to his knees in ecstasy and would be delighted to unveil this move in a month or so, on the north end of the boardwalk.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

As the Iraqis Stand Down, We’ll Stand Up

2007-09-09T00:56:00.000-04:00

By FRANK RICH

Published: September 9, 2007

IT will be all 9/11 all the time this week, as the White House yet again synchronizes its drumbeating for the Iraq war with the anniversary of an attack that had nothing to do with Iraq. Ignore that fog and focus instead on another date whose anniversary passed yesterday without notice: Sept. 8, 2002. What happened on that Sunday five years ago is the Rosetta Stone for the administration's latest scam.

That was the morning when the Bush White House officially rolled out its fraudulent case for the war. The four horsemen of the apocalypse — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice — were dispatched en masse to the Washington talk shows, where they eagerly pointed to a front-page New York Times article amplifying subsequently debunked administration claims that Saddam had sought to buy aluminum tubes meant for nuclear weapons. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," said Condoleezza Rice on CNN, introducing a sales pitch concocted by a White House speechwriter.

What followed was an epic propaganda onslaught of distorted intelligence, fake news, credulous and erroneous reporting by bona fide journalists, presidential playacting and Congressional fecklessness. Much of it had been plotted that summer of 2002 by the then-secret White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a small task force of administration brass charged with the Iraq con job.

Today the spirit of WHIG lives. In the stay-the-surge propaganda offensive that crests with this week's Congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, history is repeating itself in almost every particular. Even the specter of imminent "nuclear holocaust" has been rebooted in President Bush's arsenal of rhetorical scare tactics.

The new WHIG is a 24/7 Pentagon information "war room" conceived in the last throes of the Rumsfeld regime and run by a former ABC News producer. White House "facts" about the surge's triumph are turning up unsubstantiated in newspapers and on TV. Instead of being bombarded with dire cherry-picked intelligence about W.M.D., this time we're being serenaded with feel-good cherry-picked statistics offering hope. Once again the fix is in. Mr. Bush's pretense that he has been waiting for the Petraeus-Crocker report before setting his policy is as bogus as his U.N. charade before the war. And once again a narrowly Democratic Senate lacks the votes to stop him.

As always with this White House, telegenic artificial realities are paramount. Exhibit A, of course, was last weekend's precisely timed "surprise" presidential junket: Mr. Bush took the measure of success "on the ground here in Anbar" (as he put it) without ever leaving a heavily fortified American base.

A more elaborate example of administration Disneyland can be found in those bubbly Baghdad markets visited by John McCain and other dignitaries whenever the cameras roll. Last week The Washington Post discovered that at least one of them, the Dora market, is a Potemkin village, open only a few hours a day and produced by $2,500 grants (a k a bribes) bestowed on the shopkeepers. "This is General Petraeus's baby," Staff Sgt. Josh Campbell told The Post. "Personally, I think it's a false impression." Another U.S. officer said that even shops that "sell dust" or merely "intend to sell goods" are included in the Pentagon's count of the market's reopened businesses.

One Baghdad visitor left unimpressed was Representative Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Chicago, who dined with her delegation in Mr. Crocker's Green Zone residence last month while General Petraeus delivered his spiel. "He's spending an awful lot of time wining and dining members of Congress," she told me last week. Though the menu included that native specialty lobster tortellini, the real bill of fare, Ms. Schakowsky said, was a rigid set of talking points: "Anbar," "bottom up," "decrease in violence" and "success."

In this new White House narrative, victory has been downsized to a successful antiterrorist alliance between Sunni tribal leaders and the American military in Anbar, a single province containing less than 5 percent of Iraq's population. In truth, the surge had little to do with this development, which was already being trumpeted by Mr. Bush in his January prime-time speech announcing the surge.

Even if you believe that it's a good idea to bond with former Saddamists who may have American blood on their hands, the chances of this "bottom up" model replicating itself are slim. Anbar's population is almost exclusively Sunni. Much of the rest of Iraq is consumed by the Sunni-Shiite and Shiite-Shiite civil wars that are M.I.A. in White House talking points.

The "decrease in violence" fable is even more insidious. Though both General Petraeus and a White House fact sheet have recently boasted of a 75 percent decline in sectarian attacks, this number turns out to be as cooked as those tallies of Saddam's weapons sites once peddled by WHIG. As The Washington Post reported on Thursday, it excludes Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence. The Government Accountability Office, which rejected that fuzzy math, found overall violence unchanged using the methodology practiced by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

No doubt General Petraeus, like Dick Cheney before him, will say that his own data is "pretty well confirmed" by classified intelligence that can't be divulged without endangering national security. Meanwhile, the White House will ruthlessly undermine any reality-based information that contradicts its propaganda, much as it dismissed the accurate W.M.D. findings of the United Nations weapon experts Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei before the war. General Petraeus intervened to soften last month's harsh National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Last week the administration and its ideological surrogates were tireless in trashing the nonpartisan G.A.O. report card that found the Iraqi government flunking most of its benchmarks.

Those benchmarks, the war's dead- enders now say, are obsolete anyway. But what about the president's own benchmarks? Remember "as the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down"? General Petraeus was once in charge of the Iraqi Army's training and proclaimed it "on track and increasing in capacity" three years ago. On Thursday, an independent commission convened by the Republican John Warner and populated by retired military officers and police chiefs reported that Iraqi forces can take charge no sooner than 12 to 18 months from now, and that the corrupt Iraqi police force has to be rebuilt from scratch. Let us not forget, either, Mr. Bush's former top-down benchmarks for measuring success: "an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself." On that scorecard, he's batting 0 for 3.

What's surprising is not that this White House makes stuff up, but that even after all the journalistic embarrassments in the run-up to the war its fictions can still infiltrate the real news. After Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, two Brookings Institution scholars, wrote a New York Times Op-Ed article in July spreading glad tidings of falling civilian fatality rates, they were widely damned for trying to pass themselves off as tough war critics (both had supported the war and the surge) and for not mentioning that their fact-finding visit to Iraq was largely dictated by a Department of Defense itinerary.

But this has not impeded them from posing as quasi-journalistic independent observers elsewhere ever since, whether on CNN, CBS, Fox or in these pages, identifying themselves as experts rather than Pentagon junketeers. Unlike Armstrong Williams, the talking head and columnist who clandestinely received big government bucks to "regularly comment" on No Child Left Behind, they received no cash. But why pay for what you can get free? Two weeks ago Mr. O'Hanlon popped up on The Washington Post op-ed page, again pushing rosy Iraq scenarios, including an upbeat prognosis for economic reconstruction, even though the G.A.O. found that little of the $10 billion earmarked for reconstruction is likely to be spent.

Anchoring the "CBS Evening News" from Iraq last week, Katie Couric seemed to be drinking the same Kool-Aid (or eating the same lobster tortellini) as Mr. O'Hanlon. As "a snapshot of what's going right," she cited Falluja, a bombed-out city with 80 percent unemployment, and she repeatedly spoke of American victories against "Al Qaeda." Channeling the president's bait-and-switch, she never differentiated between that local group he calls "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and the Qaeda that attacked America on 9/11. Al Qaeda in Iraq, which didn't even exist on 9/11, may represent as little as 2 to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency, according to a new investigation in The Washington Monthly by Andrew Tilghman, a former Iraq correspondent for Stars and Stripes.

Next to such "real" news from CBS, the "fake" news at the network's corporate sibling Comedy Central was, not for the first time, more trustworthy. Rob Riggle, a "Daily Show" correspondent who also serves in the Marine Reserve, invited American troops in Iraq to speak candidly about the Iraqi Parliament's vacation.

When the line separating spin from reality is so effectively blurred, the White House's propaganda mission has once more been accomplished. No wonder President Bush is cocky again. Stopping in Sydney for the economic summit after last weekend's photo op in Iraq, he reportedly told Australia's deputy prime minister that "we're kicking ass." This war has now gone on so long that perhaps he has forgotten the price our troops paid the last time he taunted our adversaries to bring it on, some four years and 3,500 American military fatalities ago.

Old School Inanity

2007-09-09T00:51:00.000-04:00

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: September 9, 2007

WASHINGTON

Dying for a daddy, the Republicans turn their hungry eyes to Fred.

Fred Thompson acts tough on screen. And like Ronald Reagan, he has a distinctively masculine timbre and an extremely involved wife.

In his announcement video, Mr. Thompson stood in front of a desk in what looked like, duh, a law office, rumbling reassuringly that in this “dangerous time” he would deal with “the safety and security of the American people.”

As Michelle Cottle wrote in The New Republic, far more than puffy-coiffed Mitt and even more than tough guys Rudy and McCain, the burly, 6-foot-5, 65-year-old Mr. Thompson exudes “old-school masculinity.”

“In Thompson’s presence (live or on-screen),” she wrote, “one is viscerally, intimately reassured that he can handle any crisis that arises, be it a renegade Russian sub or a botched rape case.” But she wondered, was he really “enough of a man for this fight,” or just someone who meandered through life, creating the illusion of a masculine mystique?

Newsweek reported that some close to the Tennessean “question whether moving into the White House is truly Thompson’s life ambition — or more the dream of his second wife, Jeri, a former G.O.P. operative who is his unofficial campaign manager and top adviser.”

It took only two days of campaigning to answer the masculine mystique question. Fred gave an interview to CNN’s John King as his bus rolled through Iowa.

“To what degree should the American people hold the president of the United States responsible for the fact that bin Laden is still at large six years later?” Mr. King asked.

“I think bin Laden is more of a symbolism than he is anything else,” Mr. Thompson drawled. “Bin Laden being in the mountains of Afghanistan or — or Pakistan is not as important as the fact that there’s probably Al Qaeda operatives inside the United States of America.”

Usually, you can only get that kind of exquisitely inane logic from the president. Who does Fred think is sending operatives or inspiring them to come?

Fred is not Ronnie; he’s warmed-over W. President Reagan always knew who the foe was.

Fred followed W.’s nutty lead of marginalizing Osama on a day when TV showed another creepy, fruitcake manifesto by the terrorist, who was wearing what seemed to be a fake beard left over from Woody Allen’s “Bananas” and bloviating on everything from the subprime mortgage crisis to the “woes” of global warming to a Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory to the wisdom of Noam Chomsky to the unwisdom of Richard Perle to the heartwarming news that Muslims have lived with Jews and not “incinerated them” to the need to “continue to escalate the killing and fighting” against American kids in Iraq.

Can we please get someone in charge who will stop whining that Osama is hiding in “harsh terrain,” hunt him down and blast him forward to the Stone Age?

Fred must have missed the news of the administration’s intelligence estimate in July deeming Al Qaeda rejuvenated and “a persistent and evolving terrorist threat” to Americans.

Pressed by Mr. King on the fact that the Bush hawks went after Saddam instead of Osama, Fred continued to sputter: “You — you’re — you’re not served up these issues one at a time. They — they come when they come, and you have to — you have to deal with them.”

Democrats pounced. John Edwards issued a statement saying, “That bin Laden is still at large is Bush’s starkest failure.” John McCain and Rudy Giuliani also stressed the need to take out Osama.

Fred quickly caved on the matter of men in caves. At a rally later in the day he manned up. “Apparently Osama bin Laden has crawled out of his cave long enough to send another video and he is getting a lot of attention,” he said, “and ought to be caught and killed.”

He continued to insist that killing bin Laden would not end the terrorist threat, without realizing that this is true now because, by not catching bin Laden, W. allowed him to explode into an inspirational force for jihadists.

Republicans are especially eager for a papa after their disappointing experiences with Junior. After going through so many shattering disasters, W. seems more the inexperienced kid than ever.

In Australia, the president called Australian soldiers in Iraq “Austrian troops,” and got into a weird to-and-fro on TV with the South Korean president.

W. cooperated with Ropert Draper, the author of a new biography of him, yet the portrait was not flattering. Like a frat president sitting around with the brothers trying to figure out whether to party with Tri-Delts or Thetas, W. asked his advisers for a show of hands last year to see if Rummy should stay on. And W. is obsessed with getting the Secret Service to arrange his biking trails.

“What kind of male,” one of his advisers wondered aloud, “obsesses over his bike riding time, other than Lance Armstrong or a 12-year-old boy?”