Trump Fired Up

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 23, 2006
The New York Times

Donald Trump gives me an interview, though he has his doubts.

“I would like the interview to be in the Sunday paper,” he says.

He can’t be worried about his exposure, so it must be his boundless appetite for bigger/taller/glitzier that makes him yearn for the larger readership of Sunday.
“Me, too,” I reply. “But the only way that’s going to happen is if I give Frank Rich my notes and let him write the column.”

“I like Frank Rich,” he says, his voice brimming with appreciation for a man whose circulation is bigger than mine.

“Me, too,” I say.

Kurt Andersen, who jousted with the Donald as an editor at Spy, celebrates the “Daffy Duck” of deal-making in New York magazine this week as one of the “Reasons to Love New York,” calling him “our 21st century reincarnation of P. T. Barnum and Diamond Jim Brady, John Gotti minus the criminal organization, the only white New Yorker who lives as large as the blingiest, dissiest rapper — de trop personified.”

When I call De Trop Trump at Mar-a-Lago, he’s still ranting about “that big, fat slob Rosie O’Donnell.” When he granted Tara Conner, the naughty beauty queen, a second chance this week, Rosie made a crack on “The View” about an oft-married snake-oil salesman not being the best person to pass moral judgments. He slimed back, and the Great American Food Fight was on.

This past year was rife with mistakes — global mistakes, bigoted tirades, underwear mishaps. Winding up 2006, I asked the celebrity arbiter of who-can-stay and who-must-go about redemption.

In the case of Hollywood’s overexposed and underdressed young ladies of the night, Mr. Trump judiciously notes that in some cases, carousing is good for your career. His rule is, the more talented you are, the less you should mindlessly party. But if mindlessly partying is your talent, go for it.

“Britney,” he says, “doesn’t carry it off as well as Paris.”

How about those other international party girls, the Bush twins?

“When you’re a president who has destroyed the lives of probably a million people, our soldiers and Iraqis who are maimed and killed — you see children going into school in Baghdad with no arms and legs — I don’t think Bush’s kids should be having lots of fun in Argentina,” he says.

Should viewers give Katie Couric another look?

If you can’t get the ratings, he says, you’re cooked: “I like Katie, but she’s hit bottom and she’ll stay there. She made a terrible, tragic mistake for her career. She looks extremely unhappy on the show. I watched her the other night, and she’s not the same Katie.”

Can Gwyneth rebound from her comments comparing Americans unfavorably with Brits? “Gwyneth Paltrow is a good actress with average looks,” he says. “She likes to ride the high English horse. But when she puts down this country that gave her more than she should have had, it’s disgusting.”

Michael Richards and Judith Regan made irredeemable mistakes, in his view, as did Al Gore and John Kerry, when they couldn’t win winnable elections, and W., Cheney and Rummy, when they invaded Iraq.

“No matter how long we stay in Iraq, no matter how many soldiers we send, the day we leave, the meanest, most vicious, most brilliant man in the country, a man who makes Saddam Hussein look like a baby, will take over and spit on the American flag,” he says. “Bush will go down as the worst and by far the dumbest president in history.”
Colin Powell, he considers irredeemable as well: “He’s speaking up now, but he’s no longer relevant. I call him a pathetic and sad figure.”

He thinks John McCain has lost the 2008 election by pushing to send more troops to Iraq but that Hillary should be forgiven for her “horrendous” vote to authorize the war. “Don’t forget that decision was based on lies given to her,” he says. “She’s very smart and has a major chance to be our next president.”

He deems it “not a good sign” that Barack Obama got into a sketchy real estate deal with a sleazy Chicago political figure. “But he’s got some wonderful qualities,” Mr. Trump says, and deserves another chance.

And how about Monica Lewinsky, who just graduated from the London School of Economics? “It’s good she graduated,” he says. “She’s been through a lot.”
When it comes to having an opinion on everything, Trump towers.

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Squad Leader Charged in Killings of 24 Iraqi Civilians

By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: December 21, 2006

A Marine Corps squad leader was charged today with 13 counts of murder for his role in the killings of civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha last year, and seven other marines face counts ranging from unpremeditated murder to failure to report the killings, the Marine Corps announced today.

The charges came after an inquiry into the November 2005 killings of 24 people, many of them unarmed women and children, and what military officials described as “untimely and inaccurate reporting” of what happened that day.

Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich was charged with 12 counts of murdering individuals, plus one count of murdering six people by ordering Marines under his charge to ”shoot first and ask questions later” when they entered a house, according to charging sheets released to The Associated Press by defense attorney Neal Puckett.

Puckett said his client is not guilty and acted lawfully, The A.P. reported.
Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt, 22, of Carbondale, Penn., was accused of one charge of murder involving unpremeditated killings of three males in a house, said his attorney, Gary Myers. “Our view has been and continues to be that these are combat-related deaths,” Myers told The A.P. today.

Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum, 25, of Edmund, Okla., also was charged, but his attorney, Jack Zimmerman, declined to specify the allegations before the government’s announcement.
A military investigation into the killings and the subsequent handling of the case by the Marine Corps began last March and lasted nine months. Marines from the Third Platoon of Company K, Third Battalion, First Marine Regiment, are accused of killing the villagers after a roadside explosion killed one of their comrades.

A Marine Corps official and a defense attorney representing one of the marines said earlier this month that charges were expected against Sgt. Wuterich, 26, of Meriden, Conn., the squad’s leader; Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum, 25, of Edmund, Okla.; Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt, 21, of Carbondale, Penn.; Cpl. Sanick Dela Cruz, 24, of Chicago; and Cpl. Hector Salinas, 22, of Houston.
The five marines are said to have been the ones who killed the 24 Iraqis, including five men in a taxi that approached the marines’ convoy after an explosion killed a 20-year-old lance corporal. About 10 of the dead were women and children in houses nearby who appeared to have been killed by rifle fire at close range, military officials said.

The marines have said they believed that they were coming under small-arms fire from a house on the south side of the road. Lawyers for several of the marines have said their clients were responding appropriately, and lawfully, to an attack in a dangerous region of Iraq.

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Iran President Facing Revival of Students’ Ire

By NAZILA FATHI
Published: December 21, 200
The New York Times

TEHRAN, Dec. 20 — As protests broke out last week at a prestigious university here, cutting short a speech by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Babak Zamanian could only watch from afar. He was on crutches, having been clubbed by supporters of the president and had his foot run over by a motorcycle during a less publicized student demonstration a few days earlier.

Newsha Tavakolian/Polaris, for The New York Times Babak Zamanian, a student at Amir Kabir, in Tehran, is on crutches because of a beating earlier by supporters of President Ahmadinejad. But the significance of the confrontation was easy to grasp, even from a distance, said Mr. Zamanian, a leader of a student political group.

The student movement, which planned the 1979 seizure of the American Embassy from the same university, Amir Kabir, is reawakening from its recent slumber and may even be spearheading a widespread resistance against Mr. Ahmadinejad. This time the catalysts were academic and personal freedom.

“It is not that simple to break up a president’s speech,” said Alireza Siassirad, a former student political organizer, explaining that an event of that magnitude takes meticulous planning. “I think what happened at Amir Kabir is a very important and a dangerous sign. Students are definitely becoming active again.”

The protest, punctuated by shouts of “Death to the dictator,” was the first widely publicized outcry against Mr. Ahmadinejad, one that was reflected Friday in local elections, where voters turned out in droves to vote for his opponents.

The students’ complaints largely mirrored public frustrations over the president’s crackdown on civil liberties, his blundering economic policies and his harsh oratory against the West, which they fear will isolate the country.

But the students had an additional and potent source of outrage: the president’s campaign to purge the universities of all vestiges of the reform movement of his predecessor, Mohammad Khatami.

Last summer the newly installed head of the university, Alireza Rahai, ordered the demolition of the office of the Islamic Association, which had been the core of student political activities on campus since 1963 and had matured into a moderate, pro-reform group.

Since then, students say, more than 100 liberal professors have been forced into retirement and many popular figures have been demoted. At least 70 students were suspended for political activities, and two were jailed. Some 30 students were given warnings, and a prominent Ph.D. candidate, Matin Meshkin, was barred from finishing his studies.

The students also complain about overcrowded and crumbling dormitories and proscriptions against women wearing makeup or bright colors, rules that were relaxed when Mr. Khatami came to power in 1997.

Amir Kabir University of Technology, a major polytechnic institute, has been a hotbed of student activism since before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. Drawing on networks at universities around the country through an office that links their Islamic associations, students can organize large protests on a moment’s notice. There are also student guilds, which are independent, and more than 2,000 student publications.

Mr. Zamanian, the head of public relations of the Islamic Association at Amir Kabir, said that while the situation had not been ideal in the Khatami years, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s antireformist campaign had led students to value their previous freedoms.

They were permitted to hold meetings and invite opposition figures to speak, he said, and could freely publish their journals. Now, he said, their papers are forbidden to print anything but reports from official news agencies.

The students also complain about the president’s failure to deliver economic growth and jobs. At last week’s protest, which coincided with a now infamous Holocaust conference held by the Foreign Ministry, students chanted, “Forget the Holocaust — do something for us.”

A student who identified himself only as Ahmad, for fear of retribution, said: “A nuclear program is our right, but we fear that it will bring more damage than good.”

Another student said: “It is so hard and costly to come to this university, but I don’t see a bright future. Even if you are lucky enough to get a job, the pay would not be enough for you to pay your rent.”

Mr. Zamanian said that the protest had not been planned ahead of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s visit, but that students were further enraged when they saw supporters of the president being bused in.

Although the auditorium was almost filled with the president’s supporters by the time any students were let in, the protesters forced their way inside, chanted, “Death to the dictator,” and held banners calling him a “fascist president.” They also held up posters of the president with his picture upside down and set fire to three of them. Many of the students are now in hiding.

At one point, the head of a moderate student guild complained to Mr. Ahmadinejad that students were being expelled for political activities and given three stars next to their names in university records, barring them from re-entering. The president responded by ridiculing him, joking that the three stars made them sergeants in the army.

The president was eventually forced to cut his speech short and leave. But angry students stormed his car, kicking it and chanting slogans. His convoy of four cars collided several times as they tried to leave in a rush. Eventually the students were dispersed.

An entry on Mr. Ahmadinejad’s Web log, posted Wednesday, played down the scale and significance of the protest, writing that the president had a “good feeling when he saw a small group amid the dominant majority insulting him without any fear.”

A few days after the protest, former Amir Kabir students affiliated with the Islamic associations’ coordinating office wrote a letter to Mr. Ahmadinejad. In it, they turned down what they said was his invitation to share their problems with him, because they believed that he wanted to use the occasion to bolster his candidates in the local elections.

The students also wrote that the president had insulted their intelligence by talking to them in the same language he uses in remote villages on his provincial trips.

“You should know that what happened at Polytechnic University was the voice of universities and the real voice of the people,” they wrote. Tehran Polytechnic was the university’s name before the revolution.

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Defense Secretary Arrives in Baghdad

By DAVID S. CLOUD
Published: December 20, 2006
The New York Times

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 20—Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates arrived in Baghdad today and said he expected to “learn a lot” in his first talks with American commanders and Iraqi officials since taking office.

“The whole purpose is to go to talk to commanders, talk to the Iraqis and see what I can learn,” Mr. Gates told reporters traveling on his airplane.

His visit to Iraq only two days after taking over from former Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld reflected the intense focus on Iraq strategy by the Bush administration, which is weighing an American troop surge and other options for restoring security in Baghdad and other areas of the country.

Mr. Gates was scheduled to have several meetings with Gen. John P. Abizaid and Gen. George W. Casey, Jr., and other top American commanders, during his first day in Baghdad. He is expected to see Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki later in his visit.

His trip, like those of all senior American officials since 2003, was not announced beforehand for security reasons.

Also today, the military announced that General Abizaid plans to go ahead with his overdue retirement next spring. Since General Casey is also likely to step down around then, Mr. Gates will have the opportunity to reshape the top ranks of commanders overseeing Iraq at the same time that a new strategy is adopted.

Capt. Gary E. Arasin Jr., a spokesman for Central Command in Tampa, Fla, said today that Mr. Rumsfeld asked General Abizaid last spring to stay on until March 2007, beyond the usual term in that position. “He does not intend to extend beyond that period,” Captain Arasin said.

As Mr. Gates left Washington for Baghdad, there were already other indications that the replacement of Mr. Rumsfeld is affecting Bush administration policy.

President Bush told the Washington Post in an interview Tuesday that he favors increasing the size of the United States military, a move that Mr. Rumsfeld had long opposed. Mr. Bush said he had told Mr. Gates to develop a plan for boosting troop levels, which follows public complaints by top generals that Iraq and other deployments have stretched American forces too thin.

Mr. Gates has given few indications about his views on the strategy options under consideration, except to say that an American failure in Iraq could lead to a wider regional conflict in the Middle East.

"Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility, and endanger Americans for decades to come," said Mr. Gates, said at the ceremony.

Mr. Bush has put off a speech on his strategy decisions until next month, in part he said to give Mr. Gates time to formulate his views.

Joining him on his trip to Iraq was Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior aides from the Pentagon, the White House staff, the State Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Mr. Gates traveled to Baghdad earlier this year as a member of the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan panel created by Congress to recommend a new Iraq strategy. But he resigned from the panel after his nomination and before it issued its recommendations last month.

Its recommendations include phasing out most American combat troops by early 2008, increasing training for Iraqis and talks with Iran and Syria in hopes of curtailing the violence.

At his swearing-in ceremony earlier this week, Mr. Gates promised to rely on advice from military commanders in comments that were widely seen as a signal to uniformed services that his style would differ from that of Mr. Rumsfeld. He was often criticized for overriding the views of senior military commanders.

General Casey is formulating a plan to dramatically boost the number of American advisers attached to Iraqi units, a move aimed at improving the Iraqis’ performance over the next year, officials have said.

Additional trainers are already being drawn from American combat units in Iraq. Still under discussion is how large to make the training teams, which now have between 4,000 and 6,000 personnel, officials said.

Senior commanders and members of the Joint Chiefs have not publicly endorsed increasing American force levels in Iraq by 20,000 or more in a short-term surge aimed at restoring security. Gen. James Conway, commandant of the Marine Corps, said recently that the chiefs would back a troop increase if it was accompanied with a plan for using the forces effectively.

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Flunking Our Future

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 20, 2006
The New York Times

The only sects that may be more savage than Shiites and Sunnis are the Democratic feminist lawmakers representing Northern and Southern California.

After Nancy Pelosi and Jane Harman had their final catfight about who would lead the House Intelligence Committee, aptly enough at the Four Seasons’ hair salon in Georgetown, the new speaker passed over the knowledgeable and camera-eager Ms. Harman and mystifyingly gave the consequential job to Silvestre Reyes of Texas.

Mr. Reyes promptly tripped over the most critical theme in the field of intelligence. Jeff Stein, interviewing the incoming chairman for Congressional Quarterly, asked him whether Al Qaeda was Sunni or Shiite.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” the lawmaker guessed.

As Mr. Stein corrected him in the article: “Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an Al Qaeda clubhouse, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.”

Mr. Stein followed up with a Hezbollah question: “What are they?” Again, Mr. Reyes was stumped.

“Hezbollah,” he stammered. “Uh, Hezbollah. Why do you ask me these questions at 5 o’clock? Can I answer in Spanish?” (O.K. ¿Que es Hezbollah?)

Sounding as naked of essentials as Britney Spears, the new intelligence oversight chief pleaded that it was hard to keep all the categories straight. Thank heavens Mr. Stein never got to Syrian Alawites.

Many Americans, including those in charge of Middle East policy, are befuddled and fed up with the intransigent tribal and religious fevers of the region. As Bill O’Reilly sagely remarked, “I don’t want to ever hear Shia and Sunni again.” But it is beyond the job description of top officials to wish the problems away, especially when the entire region is decomposing before our bleary eyes.

If Mr. Reyes had been reading the newspaper, he might have noticed Mr. Stein’s piece on The Times’s Op-Ed page two months earlier, in which, like a wonkish Ali G, he caught many intelligence and law enforcement officials, as well as members of Congress, who did not know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite.

“Too many officials in charge of the war on terrorism just don’t care to learn much, if anything, about the enemy we’re fighting,” he concluded. “And that’s enough to keep anybody up at night.”

The lack of intellectual urgency about our Middle East wars is chilling. The Iraq Study Group reported that our efforts in Iraq are handicapped by the fact that our embassy of 1,000 has only 33 Arabic speakers, just six who are fluent.

W., of course, failed a foreign affairs pop quiz and still became a close ally of the Pakistani dictator he referred to as “General ... General.”

Once they have the job, the incentive of politicians to study is somewhat dulled. Charles Z. Wick, who headed the U.S. Information Agency during the Reagan years, sent a memo to his staff saying that he and the president needed to know if France was a member of NATO. Mr. Reagan had already been the president for years, The Times’s Steve Weisman reported, when he expressed surprise at learning that the Soviets had most of their nuclear weapons on land-based missiles, while America had relatively few.

One possibility is that Mr. Stein’s questions were just too darn hard. He should have pitched a few warm-ups, like: How many sides are there in the Sunni Triangle? Or: Which religious figure, Muhammad or Jesus, has not been the subject of a Mel Gibson film?

Perhaps the questions could be phrased Jeopardy-style, as in: “The name shared by two kings in Jordan and Saudi Arabia.” (What is Abdullah?)

A multiple choice might be easier on harried policy makers. For instance, which of the following quotes can be attributed to Dick Cheney?

a) “So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people: greedy, barbarous and cruel.”

b) “Don Rumsfeld is the finest secretary of defense this nation has ever had.”

c) “Certain things are not known to those who eat with forks.”

Or this: Is the Shiite crescent a) a puffy dinner roll, b) a new Ramadan moon, or c) an arc of crisis?

Once our leaders get a grasp of the basics, we can hit them with a truly hard question: Three and a half years after the invasion of Iraq, with nearly 3,000 American troops dead and the Iraqis not remotely interested in order or democracy, what on earth do we do now?

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The Not-So-Long Gray Line

By LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV
Op-Ed Contributor
Published: June 28, 2005

Los Angeles

JUNE is the month in which West Point celebrates the commissioning of its graduating class and prepares to accept a new group of candidates eager to embrace the arduous strictures of the world's most prestigious military academy. But it can also be a cruel month, because West Pointers five years removed from graduation have fulfilled their obligations and can resign.

My class, that of 1969, set a record with more than 50 percent resigning within a few years of completing the service commitment. (My father's class, 1945, the one that "missed" World War II, was considered to be the previous record-holder, with about 25 percent resigning before they reached the 20 years of service entitling them to full retirement benefits.)

And now, from what I've heard from friends still in the military and during the two years I spent reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan, it seems we may be on the verge of a similar exodus of officers. The annual resignation rate of Army lieutenants and captains rose to 9 percent last year, the highest since before the Sept. 11 attacks. And in May, The Los Angeles Times reported on "an undercurrent of discontent within the Army's young officer corps that the Pentagon's statistics do not yet capture."

I'm not surprised. In 1975, I received a foundation grant to write reports on why such a large percentage of my class had resigned. This money would have been better spent studying the emerging appeal of Scientology, because a single word answered the question: Vietnam.
Yet my classmates were disillusioned with more than being sent to fight an unpopular war. When we became cadets, we were taught that the academy's honor code was what separated West Point from a mere college. This was a little hard to believe at first, because the code seemed so simple; you pledged that you would not lie, cheat or steal, and that you would not tolerate those who did. We were taught that in combat, lies could kill.

But the honor code was not just a way to fight a better war. In the Army, soldiers are given few rights, grave responsibilities, and lots and lots of power. The honor code serves as the Bill of Rights of the Army, protecting soldiers from betraying one another and the rest of us from their terrifying power to destroy. It is all that stands between an army and tyranny.

However, the honor code broke down before our eyes as staff and faculty jobs at West Point began filling with officers returning from Vietnam. Some had covered their uniforms with bogus medals and made their careers with lies - inflating body counts, ignoring drug abuse, turning a blind eye to racial discrimination, and worst of all, telling everyone above them in the chain of command that we were winning a war they knew we were losing. The lies became embedded in the curriculum of the academy, and finally in its moral DNA.

By the time we were seniors, honor court verdicts could be fixed, and there was organized cheating in some units. A few years later, nearly an entire West Point class was implicated in cheating on an engineering exam; the breakdown was complete.

The mistake the Army made then is the same mistake it is making now: how can you educate a group of handpicked students at one of the best universities in the world and then treat them as if they are too stupid to know when they have been told a lie?

I've seen the results firsthand. I have met many lieutenants who have served in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, practically back to back. While everyone in a combat zone is risking his or her life, these junior officers are the ones leading foot patrols and convoys several times a day. Recruiting enough privates for the endless combat rotations is a problem the Army may gamble its way out of with enough money and a struggling economy. But nothing can compensate for losing the combat-hardened junior officers.

In the fall of 2003 I was embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in northern Iraq, and its West Point lieutenants were among the most gung-ho soldiers I have ever encountered, yet most were already talking about getting out of the Army. I talked late into one night with a muscular first lieutenant with a shaved head and a no-nonsense manner who had stacks of Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker and The Atlantic under his bunk. He had served in Bosnia and Afghanistan, and he was disgusted with what he had seen in Iraq by December 2003.

I feel like politicians have created a difficult situation for us," he told me. "I know I'm going to be coming back here about a year from now. I want to get married. I want to have a life. But I feel like if I get out when my commitment is up, who's going to be coming here in my place? I feel this obligation to see it through, but everybody over here knows we're just targets. Sooner or later, your luck's going to run out."

At the time, he was commanding three vehicle convoys a day down a treacherous road to pick up hot food for his troops from the civilian contractors who never left their company's "dining facility" about five miles away. He walked daily patrols through the old city of Mosul, a hotbed of insurgent activity that erupted in violence after the 101st left it last year. The Army will need this lieutenant 20 years from now when he could be a colonel, or 30 years from now when he could have four stars on his collar. But I doubt he will be in uniform long enough to make captain.
One cold night a week later, I sat on a stack of sandbags 50 feet from the Syrian border with another West Point lieutenant; he, too, was planning to leave the Army. "I love going out on the border and chasing down the bad guys," he told me as he dragged on a cigarette. "We've got a guy making runs across the border from Syria in a white Toyota pickup who we've been trying to catch for two months; we call him the jackrabbit.

"He gets away from us every time, and I really admire the guy. But when we catch him, there'll be somebody else right behind him. What's the use? Guys are dying, for what?"

A couple of weeks ago, I got an e-mail message from another West Point lieutenant; he was writing from a laptop in a bunker somewhere in Iraq. "I'm getting out as soon as I can," he wrote. "Everyone I know plans on getting out, with a few exceptions. What have you got to look forward to? If you come back from a tour of getting the job done in war, it's to a battalion commander who cares more about the shine on your boots and how your trucks are parked in the motor pool than about the fitness of your unit for war."

There was a time when the Army did not have a problem retaining young leaders - men like Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, George Marshall, Omar Bradley and my grandfather, Lucian K. Truscott Jr. Having endured the horrors of World War I trenches, these men did not run headlong out of the Army in the 1920's and 30's when nobody wanted to think of the military, much less pay for it. They had made a pact with each other and with their country, and all sides were going to keep it.

When members of the West Point class of 1969 and other young officers resigned nearly en masse in the mid-1970's because of Vietnam, Washington had a fix. Way too late, and with no enthusiasm, the politicians pulled out of Vietnam, ended the draft and instituted the "all volunteer" military, offering large increases in pay and benefits. Now, however, the Pentagon has run out of fixes; the only choices appear to be going back to the draft or scaling back our military ambitions.

The problem the Army created in Vietnam has never really been solved. If you keep faith with soldiers and tell them the truth even when it threatens their beliefs, you run the risk of losing them. But if you peddle cleverly manipulated talking points to people who trust you not to lie, you won't merely lose them, you'll break their hearts.

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THE REACH OF WAR; Uneasy Exiles Await Those Who Flee the Chaos in Iraq

By HASSAN M. FATTAH; SUHA MAAYEH CONTRIBUTED REPORTING FROM AMMAN, AND RASHA ELASS FROM DAMASCUS, SYRIA.
Published: December 8, 2006
The New York Times

Every day at dusk as the streets of this brooding city empty, people like Halima Reyahi scramble to become invisible again.

She sticks to side streets, her eyes scanning for the increasingly frequent police dragnets and checkpoints set up in search of illegal Iraqi immigrants like her. The loneliness of her exile is magnified by the fact that all four of her sons have been turned away repeatedly at the Jordanian border.

Ms. Reyahi is one of nearly two million Iraqis who have fled the vicious chaos of their country since the American invasion nearly four years ago, flooding neighboring states, especially Jordan and Syria, but also Lebanon and Egypt.

As they leave Iraq at a rate of nearly 3,000 a day, , the refugees are threatening the social and economic fabric of both Jordan and Syria. In Jordan, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are trying to blend into a country of only 6 million inhabitants, including about 1.5 million registered Palestinian refugees. The governments classify most of the Iraqis as visitors, not refugees.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated in a report released last month that more than 1.6 million Iraqis have left since March 2003, nearly 7 percent of the population. Jordanian security officials say more than 750,000 are in and around Amman, a city of 2.5 million. Syrian officials estimate that up to a million have gone to the suburbs of Damascus, a city of three million. An additional 150,000 have landed in Cairo. Every month, 100,000 more join them in Syria and Jordan, the report said.

In a report released this week, Refugees International, a Washington-based advocacy group, put the total at close to two million and called their flight ''the fastest-growing humanitarian crisis in the world.'' Its president, Kenneth Bacon, said, ''The United States and its allies sparked the current chaos in Iraq, but they are doing little to ease the humanitarian crisis caused by the current exodus.''

Every night, hulking orange and white GMC Suburbans and sedans pull into the taxi garage in downtown Amman stuffed with Iraqis and their belongings, adding to the growing social problems they pose while fueling growing fears that Iraq's sectarian tensions will spill over here.
As Iraq seems to disintegrate into warring factions of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, the risk that their dispute will be transferred here and increase local social problems is frightening the authorities. As a result, restrictions on Iraqis have been tightened in Egypt, Syria and Jordan, which has been increasing patrols seeking to evict those who have overstayed their visas.
Most of the émigrés bring tales of horror and sadness. Ali Ghani, a onetime champion Iraqi body builder, said that his father had been grabbed from their house in Iraq, apparently because he was a Shiite; his body was later found in the street. Several other friends have met a similar fate, he said.

Partly as a result of such strife, refugees here claim, there is a growing sectarian dimension to the official crackdown. They say the authorities of this officially Sunni country have paid more attention to deporting Iraqi Shiites, fearing that their militias are trying to organize here.
''There is only disrespect for us now,'' said Qais Attiyeh, 36, a Shiite sculptor who says he has been granted refugee status in Amman. ''And now I increasingly find Jordanians who ask me, 'Are you a Shiite or a Muslim?' '' he said, referring to extremist Sunnis' rejection of Shiism as a branch of Islam.

''I read their facial expressions and tell them what they like to hear,'' he said.
Faris Braizat, a researcher at the Center for Strategic Studies at Jordan University, said, ''It's becoming clear that with these kinds of numbers we are creating a massive problem further down the road.'' Jordanians, once proud of their Iraqi neighbors, have become unwilling to continue sacrificing for them, he said.

The first wave of Iraqis, mostly doctors, intellectuals and teachers, came here after the Persian Gulf war in 1991, escaping Saddam Hussein's Iraq. After the American invasion of 2003, a similarly wealthy wave of former government figures, businessmen and investors came here with billions of dollars that they soon began investing in real estate and businesses. Their arrival drove up prices but was also credited with helping the economy. As their numbers grew and much poorer people started to arrive, however, the problems began.

In particular, when Iraqi suicide bombers attacked three Amman hotels in 2005, this country's attitude toward Iraqis changed abruptly. The attack was organized by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which was led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian. Jordanian officials stepped up immigration enforcement, turning away many Iraqis at the border and making it harder for Iraqis to renew their visas.

It remains the case that those able to deposit $150,000 in Amman banks are granted residency almost instantly here. A few have also been sponsored by employers or have married Jordanian women. But the vast majority, poor and with few options, enter on visitor visas and soon become illegal, opening them up to exploitation and abuse.

Human Rights Watch called on the Jordanian government last week to grant Iraqis temporary protection and legalize their status. The group also called on the Jordanians to halt the deportation of Iraqis who registered for temporary protection and to admit asylum seekers, in addition to exempting Iraqis who registered their status from having to pay stiff fines.
Iraqis are increasingly blamed for Jordan's ills. Those with cash are blamed for doubling, and even tripling, property prices, as well as for buoying prices on everything from tomatoes to cigarettes. (Less attention has been paid to the broader market forces that led to the rise.)
The average price of a three-bedroom apartment in upscale West Amman has risen to up to $150,000 from about $50,000. Apartments that once rented for $400 now rent for $1,200, pricing out the average Jordanian, who earns between $500 and $750 per month.
Khaled Saeed, who owns a DVD shop in downtown Amman, was saving for years to buy an apartment near Amman's Sports City complex. He had his eye on one building where, just a few years ago, apartments sold for the equivalent of $35,000.

Then the Iraqis came, he said.

''When I finally came to buy it after some time, I found that the price had risen to 45,000 dinars,'' he said, amounting to almost $65,000. ''So I've changed my mind about the Iraqis. Now I just wish they would leave so that life would go back to normal.''

Late this summer the government loosened restrictions on private education for Iraqis without residency here, flooding Jordanian schools with new students. Principals have found themselves in the awkward position of telling families they have to go elsewhere.

Inflation, too, has doubled to 6 percent from about 3.5 percent in 2005, fueled in part by reduced subsidies on oil and gasoline, and by growing demand from Iraqis, economists say.
Many refugees say the crackdown has focused attention on Shiites, even as the government has hunted down Al Qaeda. Even before this, Shiite prayer halls, known as Husseiniyas, were strictly banned here. Security officials have been wary of Shiites seeking to organize and preach Shiite teachings. A prominent sheik representing Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Iraq was deported late this summer.

In the Jordanian town of Muta, the site of a historic battle between Muslim and Byzantine armies,the shrine of the Shiite saint Jaffar al-Tayyar, a pilgrimage site, has come under particularly close scrutiny lately. Last week, security men crawled around the site, keeping an eye on the comings and goings of visitors.

Shiite pilgrims have been banned from sleeping overnight at the site and are now allowed to stay only briefly, a shop owner at the shrine said. Where thousands once came, the number of visitors has dropped markedly, he said, for fear of the security men, and his sales have plummeted.
Security men at the site said they were concerned about attacks against Shiites there, rather than trouble from the Shiites themselves.

Still many Shiites say they are increasingly bearing the brunt of the growing frustration with the Iraqis here.

''When you say 'deported,' people typically think 'Shia' now,'' one former Jordanian official said. ''They are afraid that they will connect with the groups in Iraq.''

Security officials say they have sought to weed out both Sunnis and Shiites who intend to cause trouble in Iraq, and do not differentiate between the sects. ''We don't have a problem with someone trying to advance his Shiite faith,'' the security official said. ''But we do have a problem with someone proselytizing and being political.''

The Iraqi exodus has sent ripples through Syria, too, where the government has maintained an open-door policy for Iraqis, attracting mainly poor Iraqis who have flocked to neighborhoods like Sayeda Zeynab, the site of a Shiite shrine, creating little ghettos.

There, too, rents have risen, more than doubling in poorer areas like Jaramana, a suburb of Damascus. Some officials have begun warning of impending electricity and water shortages in Syria because of the influx of Iraqis. The price of heating oil and gasoline is expected to rise along with the increased demand.

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Attacks in Iraq at Record High, Pentagon Says

By DAVID S. CLOUD and MICHAEL R. GORDON
Published: December 19, 2006

WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 — A Pentagon assessment of security conditions in Iraq concluded Monday that attacks against American and Iraqi targets had surged this summer and autumn to their highest level, and called violence by Shiite militants the most significant threat in Baghdad.

The report, which covers the period from early August to early November, found an average of almost 960 attacks against Americans and Iraqis every week, the highest level recorded since the Pentagon began issuing the quarterly reports in 2005, with the biggest surge in attacks against American-led forces. That was an increase of 22 percent from the level for early May to early August, the report said.

While most attacks were directed at American forces, most deaths and injuries were suffered by the Iraqi military and civilians.

The report is the most comprehensive public assessment of the American-led operation to secure Baghdad, which began in early August. About 17,000 American combat troops are currently involved in the beefed-up security operation.

According to the Pentagon assessment, the operation initially had some success in reducing killings as militants concentrated on eluding capture and hiding their weapons. But sectarian death squads soon adapted, resuming their killings in regions of the capital that were not initially targets of the overstretched American and Iraqi troops.

Shiite militias, the Pentagon report said, also received help from allies among the Iraqi police. “Shia death squads leveraged support from some elements of the Iraqi Police Service and the National Police who facilitated freedom of movement and provided advance warning of upcoming operations,” the report said.

“This is a major reason for the increased levels of murders and executions.”

The findings were issued on the day Robert M. Gates was sworn in as defense secretary, replacing Donald H. Rumsfeld.

At an afternoon ceremony at the Pentagon attended by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Gates said he planned to travel to Iraq shortly to consult with military commanders as part of a broad administration review of Iraq strategy.

“All of us want to find a way to bring America’s sons and daughters home again,” Mr. Gates said. “But as the president has made clear, we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East. Failure in Iraq would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for decades to come.”

Over all, the report portrayed a precarious security situation and criticized Shiite militias for the worsening violence more explicitly than previous versions had.

It said the Mahdi Army, a powerful Shiite militia that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal Al-Maliki has not confronted despite American pressure to do so, had had the greatest negative impact on security. It is likely that Shiite militants are now responsible for more civilian deaths and injuries than terrorist groups are, the report said.

But the report also held out hope that decisive leadership by the Iraqi government might halt the slide toward civil war.

While noting that efforts by Mr. Maliki to encourage political reconciliation among ethnic groups had shown little progress, it said that Iraqi institutions were holding and that members of the current government “have not openly abandoned the political process.”

The Pentagon assessment, titled “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq,” is mandated by Congress and issued quarterly.

The new report, completed last month, noted two parallel trends.

On the one hand, the Iraqi security forces are larger than ever, with 322,600 Iraqi soldiers, police officers and other troops, an increase of 45,000 since August. Iraqi forces also have increasingly taken the lead responsibility in many areas.

The growth in Iraqi capabilities, however, has been matched by increasing violence. That raises the question of whether the American strategy to rely on the Iraqi forces to tamp down violence is failing, at least in the short term.

The Bush administration has decided to step up substantially the effort to train and equip the Iraqi forces. A major question being pondered by Mr. Bush is whether that is sufficient, or whether more American troops are needed in Baghdad to control the violence and stabilize the city.

According to the Pentagon, the weekly average of 959 attacks was a jump of 175 from the previous three months. As a consequence, civilian deaths and injuries reached a record 93 a day.

Deaths and injuries suffered by Iraq’s security forces also climbed to a new high, 33 a day, while American and other allied deaths and injuries hovered at 25 a day, just short of the record in 2004, when the United States was involved in battles in Falluja and elsewhere.
The increase in violence coincided with the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, when there had previously been a temporary spike in attacks, but also reflected the deeper sectarian passions that have flared since an attack in February 2006 on a Shiite shrine in Samarra.

According to Pentagon data used in formulating the report, there were 1,028 sectarian “executions” in October. That was a slight dip from July, when there were 1,169 executions, but a major increase since January, when there were 180. During this period, “ethno-sectarian incidents” have steadily risen, the report noted.

Security difficulties varied in different parts of the country. While sectarian strife was the biggest problem in Baghdad, in Anbar Province it was attacks by Sunni militants. North of Baghdad, in Diyala and Bilad, terrorists linked to Al Qaeda have been battling the Mahdi Army, it says.

While Shiite militias are active, the group known as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is still a major threat, despite the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, its leader. “The emergence of Abu Ayub al-Masri as leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq demonstrated its flexibility and depth, as well as its reliance on non-Iraqis,” the report noted.

Indications of progress were few. The report credited the Iraqi government with taking “incremental” steps at assuming more responsibility and said its security forces “have assumed more leadership in counterinsurgency and law enforcement operations.” But it remained “urgent” for the Iraqi government “to demonstrate a resolve to contain and terminate sectarian attacks.”

In a briefing for reporters, Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, a senior aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Baghdad operation had been constrained because the Iraqi government had not allowed American and Iraqi troops to “go in and neutralize Sadr City,” the base for the Mahdi Army.

Crude oil output was 2.3 million barrels a day, 7.5 percent higher than in August but still below the government’s goal of 2.5 million barrels.

Proponents of sending more troops to Iraq cited the report to argue that only Americans could ensure security in the short term and that more were needed. Critics said it showed that the initial effort by the American military to reinforce Baghdad had failed to stop the killing.

Gen. James T. Conway, who took over this fall as commandant of the Marine Corps, told reporters in Missouri on Saturday that among other options, President Bush was considering sending five or more combat brigades to Iraq, or about 20,000 troops.

General Conway said he believed that the Joint Chiefs would support such an increase as long as “there is a solid military reason for doing so.” He said sending more troops just to be “thickening the mix” in Baghdad would be a mistake.

Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri, the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he was opposed to more troops. “Everything I’ve heard and everything I know to be true lead me to believe that this increase at best

won’t change a thing,” he said, “and at worst could exacerbate the situation even further.”

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

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4 Months Into Aid Cutoff, Gazans Barely Scrape By

By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: June 18, 2006
In the fourth month without salaries from the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, the Abu Rizek family scours greenhouses after the harvest, looking for potatoes left in the ground.

Mariam al-Wahedi no longer receives her $21 a month from social services and is living off the $200 she got last month by selling her last piece of jewelry, a bracelet given to her 30 years ago. Khalid Muhammad, a policeman, moonlights in a friend's shop, selling used cellphone batteries for $2.25, and says he now yells at his wife and sometimes hits his children. Umm Jihad, with six children, begs in the market.

Awni Shibrawi, a jeweler, admits that he is almost too bad-tempered to go to work in his shop and sit all day doing nothing. Khadida Farajabah, a vegetable seller, says she has granted nearly $2,000 in credit, digging out the list she keeps inside her blouse, and cannot afford to give any more. Majid Nofad, a butcher, says business is down 60 percent and he has stopped giving credit after the total mounted to nearly $3,000.

More middle-aged men can be seen on the piers of Gaza, fishing with boys, to try to catch some protein for dinner. Couples are postponing marriage. Muhammad Kahloot, a colonel in the Palestinian police, is trying to decide whether he can afford the $700 his son, Khaled, needs to finish his last semester at the university, or whether to use the money for food and utilities.

When Colonel Kahloot uses his cellphone, he hangs up quickly, so his number appears as a ''missed call'' and he is not charged, leaving it up to a friend to phone him back.

Mr. Muhammad, 31, the moonlighting policeman, has four children. ''When my wife goes to the grocery, the owner says, 'Where's the money?' And she says, 'Maybe today, maybe tomorrow,' and this way we pass the time.'' Mr. Muhammad said the family eats beans and local greens, which are about 20 cents a pound. ''Forget about meat,'' he said, laughing. ''We don't know the chicken anymore. We hear in the news about the fish.''

The ordinary Palestinians of Gaza are coping as best they can in a world without salaries and very little money circulating, after the Western cutoff of aid to the Palestinian Authority, which Hamas took over in March. The Authority employs almost 40 percent of those with regular jobs in Gaza.

There is not a humanitarian crisis here yet, but one is building. No one knows anyone who is starving, but nearly everyone dependent on government salaries is eating less and less well, with a sharp reduction of chicken, meat and vegetables in a diet that is now based on the cheapest ingredients -- beans, potatoes, greens and bread.

The World Food Program, with 160,000 nonrefugee beneficiaries out of Gaza's population of 1.4 million, sends its workers on house visits. They say people are cutting down on the number of meals a day, and few are eating meat, eggs or yogurt, said Kirstie Campbell, a spokesman, who estimates that half the population of Gaza is not getting enough to eat.

At the same time, Dr. Ibrahim al-Habbash, the director of Gaza's largest hospital, Al Shifa, said that the worst shortages of medicines have been alleviated with increased donations from donors and Physicians for Human Rights/Israel, an advocacy group, while the Karni crossing from Israel to Gaza has been open more regularly in the last few weeks.

According to a new report issued this week by United Nations agencies here, ''the humanitarian situation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has deteriorated rapidly in 2006, a result of the fiscal crisis facing the Palestinian Authority following the election of Hamas'' as well as continuing ''Israeli security and access restrictions.'' The number of Palestinian families dropping below the poverty level -- defined as $2.70 per person a day -- has increased by 9 percent already, the report says.

On May 31, the United Nations increased its emergency appeal to donors for the Palestinian territories for 2006 by 79 percent, from $215 million to $384 million, to deal with ''a deepening humanitarian crisis,'' said David Shearer, the director of the local United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The money would go for emergency job creation, cash assistance, food and medical supplies, he said, adding: ''That amount is not what we think is necessary but what we think we can handle.''

Ms. Campbell says the World Food Program will increase its supplies by 25 percent and distribute more canned meat and canned fish. It will also allow Palestinian Authority personnel, if they qualify as poor enough, to register for benefits.

The second major employer in Gaza, after the Palestinian Authority, is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which is responsible for registered refugees -- some 70 percent of Gaza's population. The agency employs 9,100 Gaza residents and continues to pay salaries. But while in the past it gave little aid to refugees who worked for the Palestinian Authority, it is trying to serve those now poor enough to need it.

Gina Benevento of the United Nations agency said that 14,500 Authority employees are newly registered for aid in Gaza, and another 4,500 in the richer West Bank. ''In a few days, we expect the number in Gaza to reach 17,000, and we're planning for 23,000,'' she said. Families in Gaza are large, with an average of seven members.

The agency provides aid coupons for packages of flour, rice, sugar, powdered whole milk, sunflower oil and lentils. Each package is worth about $18 per person, per month, depending on the size of the family.

Unicef says it is tripling its appeal for the Palestinian territory to $22.7 million for this year, and says one in three newborns is ''at risk of dying in the hospitals of Gaza'' because of a lack of medicines and essential drugs, according to a spokesman, Damien Personnaz.

The United States and the European Union, the major donors of some $1 billion a year in aid to the Palestinian Authority -- half its income -- say that Hamas is a terrorist organization, and unless it agrees to recognize the right of Israel to exist, forswear violence and accept previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements, aid will largely stop.

The squeeze and the inability to pay salaries for the Authority's 165,000 workers has put Hamas under significant pressure, said government spokesman Ghazi Hamad. ''This is a big challenge for us, and we're trying to solve it through the president and political flexibility,'' he said. Then he conceded: ''It risks us as a government.''

The Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is negotiating with Hamas on a unified Palestinian political document, drafted by prisoners, that would implicitly recognize Israel in its pre-1967 boundaries. Mr. Abbas told Hamas that ''if you approve the political document, we can convince the West to pay and lift the siege,'' Mr. Hamad said. ''There's some flexibility in the European Union, but in the United States, I don't know.''

On Friday in Brussels, the European Union said it had drafted a temporary aid mechanism to provide payments of $200 a month to the poorest in Gaza, ensure fuel supplies and help keep health and social services going, all without dealing with the Palestinian Authority. Washington, which had objected to paying any salaries, says it will go along.

The Europeans hope to start the aid in July, with an initial European allocation of about $125 million -- about the cost of one month's salary bill for the Palestinian Authority. The Europeans also want Israel to stop withholding some $50 million a month in taxes and duties it collects for the Palestinians.

But Palestinians say they have debts they may never be able to pay, and that the new aid will not reach most of the Authority's workers.

Mr. Muhammad, the policeman, says he and his wife fight constantly now, usually over something involving the children. ''I used to give them a half-shekel for pocket money,'' he said, which is worth about a dime. ''Now they ask for money and I hit them. How can I gave them this when we need the shekels for food?''

Asked how long he could go on like this, Mr. Muhammad paused. ''Maybe two months, then all the fuel is gone,'' he said. ''Finally, I'll put the gun'' -- he reached below the counter to get his AK-47, which he stuck under his chin -- ''and kill myself.'' He laughed again, but not very convincingly, and the mark the muzzle made on his throat took a long time to fade.

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The Pattern May Change, if ...

AFTER a 217-year march of major presidential nominees who were, without exception, white and male, the 2008 campaign may offer voters a novel choice.

But as Barack Obama, the senator from Illinois whose father is from Kenya, spends this weekend exploring a presidential bid in New Hampshire, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first woman to represent New York in the Senate, calls potential supporters in Iowa, the question remains: are Americans prepared to elect an African-American or a woman as president?

Or, to look at it from the view of Democrats hungry for victory in 2008, is the nation more likely to vote for a woman or an African-American for president?

Without question, women and blacks have made significant progress in winning office. The new Congress will include 71 women — one of whom will be the first female speaker of the House — compared with 25 when Representative Geraldine Ferraro, a Queens Democrat, became the first woman to run as a major-party vice presidential candidate in 1984. There will be 43 blacks in the new Congress, compared with 13 when the Congressional Black Caucus was formed in 1969. A Gallup Poll in September showed a steady rise in the number of people who expect the nation to elect a woman or an African-American as president one day: Americans, it seems, are much more open to these choices than, say, someone who is an atheist or who is gay.
Times are indeed changing. But how much?

Over the past of the past eight years, in the view of analysts from both parties, the country has shifted markedly on the issue of gender, to the point where they say voters could very well be open to electing a woman in 2008. That is reflected, they say, in polling data and in the continued success of women running for office, in red and blue states alike. “The country is ready,” said Senator Elizabeth Dole, the North Carolina Republican, who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2000. “I’m not saying it’s going to happen in ’08. But the country is ready.”

By contrast, for all the excitement stirred by Mr. Obama, it is much less certain that an African-American could win a presidential election. Not as many blacks have been elected to prominent positions as women. Some high-profile black candidates — Harold Ford Jr., a Democrat running for the Senate in Tennessee, and Michael Steele, a Republican Senate candidate in Maryland — lost in November. And demographics might be an obstacle as well: black Americans are concentrated in about 25 states — typically blue ones, like New York and California. While black candidates cannot assume automatic support from black voters, they would at least provide a base. In states without big black populations, the candidate’s crossover appeal must be huge.
“All evidence is that a white female has an advantage over a black male — for reasons of our cultural heritage,” said the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, the civil rights leader who ran for president in 1984 and 1988. Still, he said, for African-American and female candidates, “It’s easier — emphatically so.”

Ms. Ferraro offered a similar sentiment. “I think it’s more realistic for a woman than it is for an African-American,” said Ms. Ferraro. “There is a certain amount of racism that exists in the United States — whether it’s conscious or not it’s true.”

“Women are 51 percent of the population,” she added.

Many analysts suggested that changing voter attitudes can best be measured in choices for governors, since they, like presidents, are judged as chief executives, rather than legislators. There will be one black governor next year — Deval L. Patrick in Massachusetts, the second in the nation since Reconstruction.

By contrast, women will be governors of nine states, including Washington, Arizona and Michigan, all potential battleground states in 2008, a fact that is no doubt viewed favorably by advisers to Mrs. Clinton.

“Voters are getting more comfortable with seeing governors as C.E.O.’s of states,” said Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Kansas Democrat. Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, a Michigan Democrat who won a second term last month, said in an interview that when she first ran, she had to work harder. “Not this time,” she said in an interview. “They are used to a woman being governor.”
Of course, governors don’t have to handle national security. And Mrs. Clinton has used her six years in the Senate to try to counter the stereotype that women would not be as strong on the issue, especially with the nation at war. Mrs. Clinton won a seat on the Armed Services Committee, and was an early supporter of the war in Iraq.

Mr. Obama is in many ways an unusual African-American politician, and that is why many Democrats, and Republicans, view him as so viable.

Mr. Obama is a member of a post-civil-rights generation of black politicians and is not identified with leaders like Mr. Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York, who are polarizing to many white voters. He has a warm and commanding campaign presence that, as he showed in Illinois, cut across color lines.

Donna Brazile, a prominent Democratic strategist who is black, said that she had been deluged with e-mail messages from people looking to volunteer for Mr. Obama — and that most of the requests were from white voters.

Moreover, there is abundant evidence that attitudes toward black candidates are changing among white voters. In Tennessee, Mr. Ford lost his bid to become the state’s first black senator since Reconstruction, but by only three percentage points.

Surveys of voters leaving the polls showed that 40 percent of white voters supported Mr. Ford, compared with 95 percent of black voters. More intriguing, the final result was the same as what the exit polls had suggested. Before this, in many races involving black candidates, the polls predicted that they would do better than they actually did — presumably because voters were reluctant to tell questioners they did not support the African-American.

That said, Mr. Ford lost his race after Republicans aired an advertisement that Democrats said was explicitly racist. Many Democrats said a lesson of the loss was that racial appeals still have force, particularly in the South.

Race and gender are big issues in American politics, but they are not the only ones, particularly in the coming race. Mr. Obama, should he run, may find his lack of experience will be far more troublesome to voters than his color. He is 45 and serving his first term as senator.
Mr. Obama said that many black voters he spoke with have serious questions about whether America is ready to elect an African-American president.

“I think there is a protectiveness and a skepticism within the African-American community that is grounded in their experiences,” Mr. Obama said in an interview. “But the skepticism doesn’t mean there’s a lack of support.”

David A. Bositis, senior political analyst with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a nonpartisan Washington group that studies black issues, said that it would certainly be hard, but not impossible for an African-American candidate to win.

“I certainly felt in the ’90s that if Colin Powell had been nominated on a major party ticket, he would have had a very good chance to win,” Mr. Bositis said. “If it’s the right black candidate, I do think there is propensity to elect a black. But it has to be the right black candidate.”

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Legislator’s Wife Is Allowed to Stay in U.S.

ATLANTA, Dec. 5 — The wife of a Georgia state legislator who was facing deportation reported to federal court on Tuesday morning expecting to be arrested. Instead, an immigration judge allowed her to return to her suburban home.

The judge stayed the deportation order against the woman, Sascha Herrera Thompson, 28, and agreed to reopen her case. Upon hearing the decision, Ms. Thompson and her husband, State Senator Curt B. Thompson, 37, “both just started to cry,” said Charles H. Kuck, their lawyer.
Ms. Thompson, who married Mr. Thompson in April and is studying for a master’s degree in professional writing, could have been charged with a felony and barred from re-entering the United States for 10 years.

Ms. Thompson, a native of Colombia, had been in hiding since Nov. 28, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents appeared at the couple’s home in Norcross, Ga.

Mr. Thompson said he and his wife were unaware of the deportation order and a request for asylum that was filed on her behalf.

In a statement last week, Mr. Thompson said his wife had been the victim of an unscrupulous “notario,” a person who typically helps immigrants file paperwork for citizenship but does not have any special legal expertise. The notario filed a request for asylum for Ms. Thompson without her knowledge, he said.

Because all correspondence about her case was sent to the notario, Mr. Thompson said, Ms. Thompson missed a crucial court hearing in February 2005.

Soon after, an immigration judge issued a deportation order and closed her case.
Mr. Thompson said he and his wife thought she was in the United States legally on a student visa.

At the hearing, Terry C. Bird, the district counsel for the immigration agency, told the judge that he would not oppose Ms. Thompson’s motion to reopen her case.

“Legally, it’s as if she never missed that amnesty hearing,” Mr. Thompson said.
The judge allowed Ms. Thompson to return home pending another hearing.

An immigrant in this country who marries a United States citizen may apply for an adjustment of status, commonly called a green card, but approval is not automatic and processing a spousal petition can take months. In the meantime, Mr. Kuck said, the deportation order against Ms. Thompson trumped everything.

Mr. Thompson, who represents the most ethnically diverse district in Georgia, said he was used to hearing about his constituents’ immigration problems but was caught flat-footed when he became involved in a similar legal battle.

“It does make it more vivid,” he said, “living it, as opposed to just having it around you.”

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Baker Commission Report

Here is the the Baker Commission Report, in case you have trouble with Adobe:

T h e I r a q
Study Group
Report
James A. Baker, III, and
Lee H. Hamilton, Co-Chairs
Lawrence S. Eagleburger,
Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Edwin Meese III,
Sandra Day O’Connor, Leon E. Panetta,
William J. Perry, Charles S. Robb,
Alan K. Simpson
vintage books
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION: DECEMBER 2006
All rights reserved.
The Authorized Edition of The Iraq Study Group Report is published in the
United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Maps © 2006 by Joyce Pendola
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ISBN: 0-307-38656-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-307-38656-4
www.vintagebooks.com

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First Edition

Letter from the Co-Chairs

There is no magic formula to solve the problems of Iraq. However,
there are actions that can be taken to improve the situation
and protect American interests.

Many Americans are dissatisfied, not just with the situation
in Iraq but with the state of our political debate regarding
Iraq. Our political leaders must build a bipartisan approach to
bring a responsible conclusion to what is now a lengthy and
costly war. Our country deserves a debate that prizes substance
over rhetoric, and a policy that is adequately funded and sustainable.
The President and Congress must work together. Our
leaders must be candid and forthright with the American people
in order to win their support.

No one can guarantee that any course of action in Iraq at
this point will stop sectarian warfare, growing violence, or a
slide toward chaos. If current trends continue, the potential
consequences are severe. Because of the role and responsibility
of the United States in Iraq, and the commitments our government
has made, the United States has special obligations.
Our country must address as best it can Iraq’s many problems.

ix
The United States has long-term relationships and interests at
stake in the Middle East, and needs to stay engaged.
In this consensus report, the ten members of the Iraq
Study Group present a new approach because we believe there
is a better way forward. All options have not been exhausted.
We believe it is still possible to pursue different policies that
can give Iraq an opportunity for a better future, combat terrorism,
stabilize a critical region of the world, and protect America’s
credibility, interests, and values. Our report makes it clear
that the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people also must act to
achieve a stable and hopeful future.

What we recommend in this report demands a tremendous
amount of political will and cooperation by the executive
and legislative branches of the U.S. government. It
demands skillful implementation. It demands unity of effort by
government agencies. And its success depends on the unity of
the American people in a time of political polarization. Americans
can and must enjoy the right of robust debate within a
democracy. Yet U.S. foreign policy is doomed to failure—as is
any course of action in Iraq—if it is not supported by a broad,
sustained consensus. The aim of our report is to move our
country toward such a consensus.

We want to thank all those we have interviewed and those who
have contributed information and assisted the Study Group,
both inside and outside the U.S. government, in Iraq, and
around the world. We thank the members of the expert working
groups, and staff from the sponsoring organizations. We especially
thank our colleagues on the Study Group, who have
worked with us on these difficult issues in a spirit of generosity
and bipartisanship.

x

L e t t e r f r o m t h e C o - C h a i r s

In presenting our report to the President, Congress, and
the American people, we dedicate it to the men and women—
military and civilian—who have served and are serving in Iraq,
and to their families back home. They have demonstrated extraordinary
courage and made difficult sacrifices. Every American
is indebted to them.

We also honor the many Iraqis who have sacrificed on behalf
of their country, and the members of the Coalition Forces
who have stood with us and with the people of Iraq.
James A. Baker, III Lee H. Hamilton

xi

L e t t e r f r o m t h e C o - C h a i r s

Executive Summary

The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. There is no
path that can guarantee success, but the prospects can be improved.
In this report, we make a number of recommendations
for actions to be taken in Iraq, the United States, and the region.
Our most important recommendations call for new and
enhanced diplomatic and political efforts in Iraq and the region,
and a change in the primary mission of U.S. forces in Iraq
that will enable the United States to begin to move its combat
forces out of Iraq responsibly. We believe that these two recommendations
are equally important and reinforce one another.

If they are effectively implemented, and if the Iraqi government
moves forward with national reconciliation, Iraqis will have an
opportunity for a better future, terrorism will be dealt a blow,
stability will be enhanced in an important part of the world, and
America’s credibility, interests, and values will be protected.
The challenges in Iraq are complex. Violence is increasing
in scope and lethality. It is fed by a Sunni Arab insurgency, Shiite
militias and death squads, al Qaeda, and widespread criminality.
Sectarian conflict is the principal challenge to stability.

xiii

The Iraqi people have a democratically elected government, yet
it is not adequately advancing national reconciliation, providing
basic security, or delivering essential services. Pessimism is pervasive.
If the situation continues to deteriorate, the consequences
could be severe. A slide toward chaos could trigger the collapse
of Iraq’s government and a humanitarian catastrophe. Neighboring
countries could intervene. Sunni-Shia clashes could
spread. Al Qaeda could win a propaganda victory and expand
its base of operations. The global standing of the United States
could be diminished. Americans could become more polarized.
During the past nine months we have considered a full
range of approaches for moving forward. All have flaws. Our
recommended course has shortcomings, but we firmly believe
that it includes the best strategies and tactics to positively influence
the outcome in Iraq and the region.

External Approach

The policies and actions of Iraq’s neighbors greatly affect its
stability and prosperity. No country in the region will benefit in
the long term from a chaotic Iraq. Yet Iraq’s neighbors are not
doing enough to help Iraq achieve stability. Some are undercutting
stability.

The United States should immediately launch a new
diplomatic offensive to build an international consensus for stability
in Iraq and the region. This diplomatic effort should include
every country that has an interest in avoiding a chaotic
Iraq, including all of Iraq’s neighbors. Iraq’s neighbors and key
states in and outside the region should form a support group to
reinforce security and national reconciliation within Iraq, neither
of which Iraq can achieve on its own.

xiv

Executive Summary

Given the ability of Iran and Syria to influence events
within Iraq and their interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq, the
United States should try to engage them constructively. In
seeking to influence the behavior of both countries, the United
States has disincentives and incentives available. Iran should
stem the flow of arms and training to Iraq, respect Iraq’s sovereignty
and territorial integrity, and use its influence over Iraqi
Shia groups to encourage national reconciliation. The issue of
Iran’s nuclear programs should continue to be dealt with by the
five permanent members of the United Nations Security
Council plus Germany. Syria should control its border with
Iraq to stem the flow of funding, insurgents, and terrorists in
and out of Iraq.

The United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle
East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and
regional instability. There must be a renewed and sustained
commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-
Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria, and President Bush’s
June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and
Palestine. This commitment must include direct talks with, by,
and between Israel, Lebanon, Palestinians (those who accept
Israel’s right to exist), and Syria.

As the United States develops its approach toward Iraq
and the Middle East, the United States should provide additional
political, economic, and military support for Afghanistan,
including resources that might become available as combat
forces are moved out of Iraq.

Internal Approach

The most important questions about Iraq’s future are now the
responsibility of Iraqis. The United States must adjust its role

xv

Executive Summary

in Iraq to encourage the Iraqi people to take control of their
own destiny.
The Iraqi government should accelerate assuming responsibility
for Iraqi security by increasing the number and
quality of Iraqi Army brigades. While this process is under way,
and to facilitate it, the United States should significantly increase
the number of U.S. military personnel, including combat
troops, imbedded in and supporting Iraqi Army units. As
these actions proceed, U.S. combat forces could begin to move
out of Iraq.

The primary mission of U.S. forces in Iraq should evolve
to one of supporting the Iraqi army, which would take over primary
responsibility for combat operations. By the first quarter
of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security
situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for
force protection could be out of Iraq. At that time, U.S. combat
forces in Iraq could be deployed only in units embedded with
Iraqi forces, in rapid-reaction and special operations teams,
and in training, equipping, advising, force protection, and
search and rescue. Intelligence and support efforts would continue.
A vital mission of those rapid reaction and special operations
forces would be to undertake strikes against al Qaeda in
Iraq.

It is clear that the Iraqi government will need assistance
from the United States for some time to come, especially in
carrying out security responsibilities. Yet the United States
must make it clear to the Iraqi government that the United
States could carry out its plans, including planned redeployments,
even if the Iraqi government did not implement their
planned changes. The United States must not make an openended
commitment to keep large numbers of American troops
deployed in Iraq.

xvi

Executive Summary

As redeployment proceeds, military leaders should emphasize
training and education of forces that have returned to
the United States in order to restore the force to full combat
capability. As equipment returns to the United States, Congress
should appropriate sufficient funds to restore the equipment
over the next five years.

The United States should work closely with Iraq’s leaders
to support the achievement of specific objectives—or milestones—
on national reconciliation, security, and governance.
Miracles cannot be expected, but the people of Iraq have the
right to expect action and progress. The Iraqi government
needs to show its own citizens—and the citizens of the United
States and other countries—that it deserves continued support.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in consultation with the
United States, has put forward a set of milestones critical for
Iraq. His list is a good start, but it must be expanded to include
milestones that can strengthen the government and benefit the
Iraqi people. President Bush and his national security team
should remain in close and frequent contact with the Iraqi
leadership to convey a clear message: there must be prompt action
by the Iraqi government to make substantial progress toward
the achievement of these milestones.

If the Iraqi government demonstrates political will and
makes substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones
on national reconciliation, security, and governance, the
United States should make clear its willingness to continue
training, assistance, and support for Iraq’s security forces and to
continue political, military, and economic support. If the Iraqi
government does not make substantial progress toward the
achievement of milestones on national reconciliation, security,
and governance, the United States should reduce its political,
military, or economic support for the Iraqi government.

xvii

Executive Summary

Our report makes recommendations in several other areas.
They include improvements to the Iraqi criminal justice system,
the Iraqi oil sector, the U.S. reconstruction efforts in Iraq,
the U.S. budget process, the training of U.S. government personnel,
and U.S. intelligence capabilities.

Conclusion

It is the unanimous view of the Iraq Study Group that these
recommendations offer a new way forward for the United
States in Iraq and the region. They are comprehensive and
need to be implemented in a coordinated fashion. They should
not be separated or carried out in isolation. The dynamics of
the region are as important to Iraq as events within Iraq.
The challenges are daunting. There will be difficult days
ahead. But by pursuing this new way forward, Iraq, the region,
and the United States of America can emerge stronger.

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ON THE WAR IN IRAQ by Kelly Feigenbaum

My oldest son turned 17 on Oct. 5.
A week later, as we sat down to dinner, the phone rang. I glanced at the caller ID and queried out loud, “U.S. government?”

The male caller asked to speak to my oldest son. Not in the habit of allowing my children to speak to perfect strangers, I asked who was calling.

“Staff Sergeant …” and my brain blurred, “… of the U.S. Army.”

The blur became a spin, and all I could think was, “They’re after him.”

I managed a faint but firm “No thank you,” and the sergeant offered in reply, “Well ma’am, you have a nice evening.” Click. Gone.

But the call was lingering and very disturbing.

We don’t need a draft. But we’ll call 17-year-olds at home like the cheesiest of phone solicitors.
The next morning, The Star reported the death of Pfc. Shane R. Austin, 19, in Ramadi, Iraq. His mother remembered him as “a very proud soldier” and a “hero in Edgerton today.”

I don’t doubt that either is true, but I don’t want to “remember” my son. I want my son to remember me.

Too many American men, women and children are remembering proud soldiers, heroes for a day — the day they die.

Many of us continue to numb ourselves to this monumental and irreplaceable loss, hiding behind party rhetoric and the comfort of the knowledge that the war will not come knocking at our doors.

We take the deep respect and patriotism embodied in our nation’s flag, wrap our war dead in the mystique of it and hand it to grieving families, who clutch it against broken hearts. We have nothing else to give them.

President Bush, whose own children have not enlisted and served, refuses to “cut and run” while never addressing the lies and shaded truths he spoon-fed a grieving, vengeful post-Sept. 11 American public to justify the launch of an assault on a country that is now plagued by our invasion and the resulting civil war.

Brave Americans will continue to pay the ultimate price in duty to their country.
But that duty is tainted by the administration that called upon them, leaving only their service and death honorable.

President Bush, you will not pay for your lies, deceit, miscalculation, lack of understanding or planning with the blood of my children.

Your rhetoric will not be their epitaph.

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Time for Rumsfeld to go

From Air Force Times Monday, 06 November 2006

"So long as our government requires the backing of an aroused and informed public opinion ... it is necessary to tell the hard bruising truth."

That statement was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Marguerite Higgins more than a half-century ago during the Korean War.

But until recently, the "hard bruising" truth about the Iraq war has been difficult to come by from leaders in Washington. One rosy reassurance after another has been handed down by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "mission accomplished," the insurgency is "in its last throes," and "back off," we know what we're doing, are a few choice examples.

Military leaders generally toed the line, although a few retired generals eventually spoke out from the safety of the sidelines, inciting criticism equally from anti-war types, who thought they should have spoken out while still in uniform, and pro-war foes, who thought the generals should have kept their critiques behind closed doors.

Now, however, a new chorus of criticism is beginning to resonate. Active-duty military leaders are starting to voice misgivings about the war's planning, execution and dimming prospects for success.

Army Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, told a Senate Armed Services Committee in September: "I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it ... and that if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war."

Last week, someone leaked to The New York Times a Central Command briefing slide showing an assessment that the civil conflict in Iraq now borders on "critical" and has been sliding toward "chaos" for most of the past year. The strategy in Iraq has been to train an Iraqi army and police force that could gradually take over for U.S. troops in providing for the security of their new government and their nation.

But despite the best efforts of American trainers, the problem of molding a viciously sectarian population into anything resembling a force for national unity has become a losing proposition.


For two years, American sergeants, captains and majors training the Iraqis have told their bosses that Iraqi troops have no sense of national identity, are only in it for the money, don't show up for duty and cannot sustain themselves.

Meanwhile, colonels and generals have asked their bosses for more troops. Service chiefs have asked for more money.

And all along, Rumsfeld has assured us that things are well in hand.

Now, the president says he'll stick with Rumsfeld for the balance of his term in the White House.

This is a mistake.

It is one thing for the majority of Americans to think Rumsfeld has failed. But when the nation's current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads.

These officers have been loyal public promoters of a war policy many privately feared would fail. They have kept their counsel private, adhering to more than two centuries of American tradition of subordination of the military to civilian authority.

And although that tradition, and the officers' deep sense of honor, prevent them from saying this publicly, more and more of them believe it.

Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt.

This is not about the midterm elections. Regardless of which party wins Nov. 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard bruising truth:

Donald Rumsfeld must go.

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U.S. Central Command Charts Sharp Movement of the Civil Conflict in Iraq Toward Chaos

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
Published: November 1, 2006

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 — A classified briefing prepared two weeks ago by the United States Central Command portrays Iraq as edging toward chaos, in a chart that the military is using as a barometer of civil conflict.

A one-page slide shown at the Oct. 18 briefing provides a rare glimpse into how the military command that oversees the war is trying to track its trajectory, particularly in terms of sectarian fighting.

The slide includes a color-coded bar chart that is used to illustrate an “Index of Civil Conflict.” It shows a sharp escalation in sectarian violence since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, and tracks a further worsening this month despite a concerted American push to tamp down the violence in Baghdad.

In fashioning the index, the military is weighing factors like the ineffectual Iraqi police and the dwindling influence of moderate religious and political figures, rather than more traditional military measures such as the enemy’s fighting strength and the control of territory.

The conclusions the Central Command has drawn from these trends are not encouraging, according to a copy of the slide that was obtained by The New York Times. The slide shows Iraq as moving sharply away from “peace,” an ideal on the far left side of the chart, to a point much closer to the right side of the spectrum, a red zone marked “chaos.” As depicted in the command’s chart, the needle has been moving steadily toward the far right of the chart.

An intelligence summary at the bottom of the slide reads “urban areas experiencing ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaigns to consolidate control” and “violence at all-time high, spreading geographically.” According to a Central Command official, the index on civil strife has been a staple of internal command briefings for most of this year. The analysis was prepared by the command’s intelligence directorate, which is overseen by Brig. Gen. John M. Custer.

Gen. John P. Abizaid, who heads the command, warned publicly in August about the risk of civil war in Iraq, but he said then that he thought it could be averted. In evaluating the prospects for all-out civil strife, the command concentrates on “key reads,” or several principal variables.

According to the slide from the Oct. 18 briefing, the variables include “hostile rhetoric” by political and religious leaders, which can be measured by listening to sermons at mosques and to important Shiite and Sunni leaders, and the amount of influence that moderate political and religious figures have over the population. The other main variables are assassinations and other especially provocative sectarian attacks, as well as “spontaneous mass civil conflict.”

A number of secondary indicators are also taken into account, including activity by militias, problems with ineffective police, the ability of Iraqi officials to govern effectively, the number of civilians who have been forced to move by sectarian violence, the willingness of Iraqi security forces to follow orders, and the degree to which the Iraqi Kurds are pressing for independence from the central government.

These factors are evaluated to create the index of civil strife, which has registered a steady worsening for months. “Ever since the February attack on the Shiite mosque in Samarra, it has been closer to the chaos side than the peace side,” said a Central Command official who asked not to be identified because he was talking about classified information.

In the Oct. 18 brief, the index moved still another notch toward “chaos.” That briefing was prepared three days before General Abizaid met in Washington with President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to take stock of the situation in Iraq.

A spokesman for the Central Command declined to comment on the index or other information in the slide. “We don’t comment on secret material,” the spokesman said.

One significant factor in the military’s decision to move the scale toward “chaos” was the expanding activity by militias.

Another reason was the limitations of Iraqi government security forces, which despite years of training and equipping by the United States, are either ineffective or, in some cases, infiltrated by the very militias they are supposed to be combating. The slide notes that “ineffectual” Iraqi police forces have been a significant problem, and cites as a concern sectarian conflicts between Iraqi security forces.

Other significant factors are in the political realm. The slide notes that Iraq’s political and religious leaders have lost some of their moderating influence over their constituents or adherents.

Notably, the slide also cites difficulties that the new Iraqi administration has experienced in “governance.” That appears to be shorthand for the frustration felt by American military officers about the Iraqi government’s delays in bringing about a genuine political reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis. It also appears to apply to the lack of reconstruction programs to restore essential services and the dearth of job creation efforts to give young Iraqis an alternative to joining militias, as well as the absence of firm action against militias.

The slide lists other factors that are described as important but less significant. They include efforts by Iran and Syria to enable violence by militias and insurgent groups and the interest by many Kurds in achieving independence. The slide describes violence motivated by sectarian differences as having moved into a “critical” phase.

The chart does note some positive developments. Specifically, it notes that “hostile rhetoric” by political and religious leaders has not increased. It also notes that Iraqi security forces are refusing less often than in the past to take orders from the central government and that there has been a drop-off in mass desertions.

Still, for a military culture that thrives on PowerPoint briefings, the shifting index was seen by some officials as a stark warning about the difficult course of events in Iraq, and mirrored growing concern by some military officers.

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