Air Force Times Daily News Roundup for 16 January

January 15, 2007



The Daily News Roundup provides the latest top 20 military news stories posted on AirForceTimes.com.



THE LATEST 20 STORIES POSTED ON AirForceTimes.com

Opposition won’t halt troop buildup, Bush says
WASHINGTON — Digging in for confrontation, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney said they will not budge from sending thousands more U.S. troops to Iraq no matter how much Congress opposes it.

“I fully understand they could try to stop me,” Bush said of new Democratic-run Congress. “But I’ve made my decision. And we’re going forward.” [ Read More ]

Family of missing nurse offers reward
The family of an Air Force nurse missing since Nov. 19 is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to her whereabouts, the television station ABC 7 in Denver reported.

First Lt. Nonnie Dotson, 33, an intensive-care nurse at Wilford Hall Medical Center in San Antonio, disappeared while on leave at her brother’s home in Littleton, Colo. [ Read More ]

Best of Day 4: Butterflies, bigfoots and bags
ORLANDO, Fla. — Finally, some room to breathe.

By the fourth day of SHOT Show, most of the casual bystanders have had all they can stand. The booths are running out of promotional literature and even the most dedicated salesmen are a little tired of their own products. [ Read More ]

Find of the day: Get a grip
ORLANDO, Fla. — Those paw-covers you’re wearing may fit like a glove right now, but have you tried throwing them in the wash to get the funk out?

If you do, odds are, they’ll fare about as well as the three-for-10-bucks T-shirts they’re selling outside Disney World down the street. [ Read More ]

New tech school rules for civvies, driving
Airmen in tech school can now wear civilian clothes and drive a vehicle much sooner than before, Air Education and Training Command announced Saturday.

A new program, which took effect at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas, on Jan. 12, allows airmen to gain a number of privileges on a greatly expedited schedule. [ Read More ]

Casey: Quick success in Baghdad unlikely
BAGHDAD — There are no guarantees of overall success or quick results in the new U.S.-Iraqi security drive in Baghdad, Gen. George Casey, the U.S. commander in Iraq, said on Monday. [ Read More ]

Gulf moves meant to curb Iran, Gates says
BRUSSELS, Belgium — Stepped-up U.S. military activity in the Persian Gulf is to counter “very negative” behavior by Iran and undercut its belief that American forces are overcommitted in Iraq, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday. [ Read More ]

Clinton meets with U.S. general, Afghan leader
KABUL, Afghanistan — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton ate breakfast with soldiers from New York and Indiana at the main U.S. base in Afghanistan on Sunday before meeting with the top American general in Afghanistan and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, officials said. [ Read More ]

35 Willow Grove airmen deploy
WILLOW GROVE, Pa. — Almost three dozen reserve members of a tactical aircraft unit at Willow Grove Naval Air Station that is to be disbanded this fall have embarked on what officials say will probably be the unit’s final deployment. [ Read More ]

N.H. guardsmen mobilized to border
TUCSON, Ariz. — New Hampshire National Guard members have been mobilized to help with a massive patrol effort along the U.S.-Mexico border. [ Read More ]

HEADLINES

• Rhode Island Guardsmen return
• SHOT Show’s best of day 3: Losing weight
• BugBand: The SHOT Show find of the day
• UAVs to patrol Canadian border
• Legion chief: Pass VA, milcon spending bill
• Bill would make MOH 90 percent gold
• Severely injured get new rehab facility
• Illicit drug-use stats unavailable
• Rangel pushes second military draft bill
• Senior leaders offer mixed reviews on surge

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He’s in the Bunker Now

By FRANK RICH

Published: January 14, 2007
The New York Times

PRESIDENT BUSH always had one asset he could fall back on: the self-confidence of a born salesman. Like Harold Hill in “The Music Man,” he knew how to roll out a new product, however deceptive or useless, with conviction and stagecraft. What the world saw on Wednesday night was a defeated Willy Loman who looked as broken as his war. His flop sweat was palpable even if you turned down the sound to deflect despair-inducing phrases like “Prime Minister Maliki has pledged ...” and “Secretary Rice will leave for the region. ...”

Mr. Bush seemed to know his product was snake oil, and his White House handlers did too. In the past, they made a fetish of situating their star in telegenic settings, from aircraft carriers to Ellis Island. Or they placed him against Orwellian backdrops shrieking “Plan for Victory." But this time even the audio stuttered, as if in solidarity with Baghdad’s continuing electricity blackout, and the Oval Office was ditched, lest it summon up memories of all those past presidential sightings of light at the end of the Iraqi tunnel. Mr. Bush was banished to the White House library, where the backdrop was acres of books, to signify the studiousness of his rethinking of the “way forward.”

"I’m not going to be rushed," the president said a month ago when talking about his many policy consultations. He wasn’t kidding. His ostentatious deep thinking started after Election Day, once he realized that firing Donald Rumsfeld wouldn’t be enough to co-opt the Iraq Study Group. He was thinking so hard that he abandoned his initial plan to announce a strategy before Christmas .

The war, however, refused to take a timeout for the holiday festivities in Crawford. The American death toll in Iraq, which hovered around 2,840 on Election Day, was nearing 3,020 by Wednesday night.

And these additional lives were sacrificed to what end? All the reviews and thinking and postponing produced a policy that, as a former top Bush aide summed it up for The Daily News, is nothing more than "repackaged stay-the-course dressed up to make it look more palatable." The repackaging was half-hearted as well. Not for nothing did the “way forward,” a rubric the president used at least 27 times in December, end up on the cutting-room floor. The tossing of new American troops into Baghdad, a ploy that backfired in Operation Together Forward last year, is too transparently the way backward.

“Victory” also received short shrift, downsized by the president to the paltry goal of getting “closer to success.” The “benchmarks” he cited were so vague that they’d be a disgrace to No Child Left Behind. And no wonder: in November, Mr. Bush couldn’t even get our devoted ally, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, to show up for dinner at their summit in Amman, let alone induce him to root out Shiite militias. The most muscle the former Mr. Bring-’Em-On could muster in Wednesday’s speech was this: “If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people.” Since that support vanished long ago, it’s hard to imagine an emptier threat or a more naked confession of American impotence, all the more pathetic in a speech rattling sabers against Syria and Iran.

Mr. Bush’s own support from the American people is not coming back. His “new” Iraq policy is also in defiance of Iraqi public opinion , the Joint Chiefs, the Baker-Hamilton grandees, and Mr. Maliki, who six weeks ago asked for a lower American profile in Iraq. Which leaves you wondering exactly who is still in the bunker with the president besides the first lady and Barney.

It’s a very short list led by John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and neo-conservative dead-enders like William Kristol and Frederick Kagan, who congregate at The Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington think tank. The one notable new recruit is Rudy Giuliani, who likened taming Baghdad to “reducing crime in New York” without noticing that even after the escalation there will be fewer American troops patrolling Baghdad than uniformed police officers in insurgency-free New York City.

Mr. Kagan, a military historian, was sent by the White House to sell its policy to Senate Republicans. It was he, Mr. Kristol and the retired Gen. Jack Keane who have most prominently pushed for this escalation and who published studies and editorials credited with defining it. Given that these unelected hawks are some of the same great thinkers who promoted the Iraq fiasco in the first place, it is hard to imagine why this White House continues to listen to them. Or maybe not that hard. In a typical op-ed article, headlined “Stay the Course, Mr. President!,” Mr. Kagan wrote in The Los Angeles Times in 2005: "Despite what you may have read, the military situation in Iraq today is positive."

Yet Mr. Bush doesn’t even have the courage of his own disastrous convictions: he’s not properly executing the policy these guys sold him. In The Washington Post on Dec. 27, Mr. Kagan and General Keane wrote that escalation could only succeed “with a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops” — a figure that has also been cited by Mr. McCain. (Mr. Kagan put the figure at 50,000 to 80,000 in a Weekly Standard article three weeks earlier. Whatever.) By any of these neocons’ standards, the Bush escalation of some 20,000 is too little, not to mention way too late.

The discrepancy between the policy that Mr. Bush nominally endorses and the one he actually ordered up crystallizes the cynicism of this entire war. If you really believe, as the president continues to put it, that Iraq is the central front in “the decisive ideological struggle of our time,” then you should be in favor of having many more troops than we’ve ever had in Iraq. As T. X. Hammes, an insurgency expert and a former marine, told USA Today, that doesn’t now mean a “dribble” (as he ridicules the “surge”) but a total of 300,000 armed coalition forces over a minimum of four years.

But that would mean asking Americans for sacrifice, not giving us tax cuts. Mr. Bush has never asked for sacrifice and still doesn’t. If his words sound like bargain-basement Churchill, his actions have been cheaper still. The president’s resolutely undermanned war plan indicated from Day 1 that he knew in his heart of hearts that Iraq was not the central front in the war against 9/11 jihadism he had claimed it to be, only the reckless detour that it actually was. Yet the war’s cheerleaders, neocon and otherwise, disingenuously blamed our low troop strength almost exclusively on Mr. Rumsfeld.

Now that the defense secretary is gone, what are they to do? For whatever reason, you did not hear Mr. Kagan, General Keane or Mr. McCain speak out against Mr. Bush’s plan even though it’s insufficient by their own reckoning — just a repackaged continuance of the same “Whac-A-Mole” half-measures that Mr. McCain has long deplored. Surely the senator knows that, as his loosey-goosey endorsement attests. (On Friday, he called the Bush plan “the best chance of success” while simultaneously going on record that “a small, short surge would be the worst of all worlds.”)

The question now is how to minimize the damage before countless more Americans and Iraqis are slaughtered to serve the president’s endgame of passing his defeat on to the next president. The Democrats can have all the hearings they want, but they are unlikely to take draconian action (cutting off funding) that would make them, rather than Mr. Bush, politically vulnerable to blame for losing Iraq.

I have long felt that it will be up to Mr. Bush’s own party to ring down the curtain on his failed policy, and after the 2006 midterms, that is more true than ever. The lame-duck president, having lost both houses of Congress and at least one war (Afghanistan awaits), has nothing left to lose. That is far from true of his party.

Even conservatives like Sam Brownback of Kansas and Norm Coleman of Minnesota started backing away from Iraq last week. Mr. Brownback is running for president in 2008, and Mr. Coleman faces a tough re-election fight. But Republicans not in direct electoral jeopardy (George Voinovich of Ohio, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) are also starting to waver. It’s another Vietnam-Watergate era flashback. It wasn’t Democrats or the press that forced Richard Nixon’s abdication in 1974; it was dwindling Republican support. Though he had vowed to fight his way through a Senate trial, Nixon folded once he lost the patriarchal leader of his party’s right wing.

That leader was Barry Goldwater , who had been one of Nixon’s most loyal and aggressive defenders until he finally realized he’d been lied to once too often. If John McCain won’t play the role his Arizona predecessor once did, we must hope that John Warner or some patriot like him will, for the good of the country, answer the call of conscience. A dangerous president must be saved from himself, so that the American kids he’s about to hurl into the hell of Baghdad can be saved along with him.

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The Warming of Greenland

Photo: Jeff Shea for The New York Times
A penisula long thought to be part of Greenland's mainland turned out
to be an island when a glacier retreated.

By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF

Published: January 16, 2007
The New York Times

LIVERPOOL LAND, Greenland — Flying over snow-capped peaks and into a thick fog, the helicopter set down on a barren strip of rocks between two glaciers. A dozen bags of supplies, a rifle and a can of cooking gas were tossed out onto the cold ground. Then, with engines whining, the helicopter lifted off, snow and fog swirling in the rotor wash.

When it had disappeared over the horizon, no sound remained but the howling of the Arctic wind.

“It feels a little like the days of the old explorers, doesn’t it?” Dennis Schmitt said.

Mr. Schmitt, a 60-year-old explorer from Berkeley, Calif., had just landed on a newly revealed island 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle in eastern Greenland. It was a moment of triumph: he had discovered the island on an ocean voyage in September 2005. Now, a year later, he and a small expedition team had returned to spend a week climbing peaks, crossing treacherous glaciers and documenting animal and plant life.

Despite its remote location, the island would almost certainly have been discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, charted these coastlines. Would have been discovered had it not been bound to the coast by glacial ice.

Maps of the region show a mountainous peninsula covered with glaciers. The island’s distinct shape — like a hand with three bony fingers pointing north — looks like the end of the peninsula.

Now, where the maps showed only ice, a band of fast-flowing seawater ran between a newly exposed shoreline and the aquamarine-blue walls of a retreating ice shelf. The water was littered with dozens of icebergs, some as large as half an acre; every hour or so, several more tons of ice fractured off the shelf with a thunderous crack and an earth-shaking rumble.

All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks — “lonely mountains” in Inuit — that were encased in the margins of Greenland’s ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape.

“We are already in a new era of geography,” said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. “This phenomenon — of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it — is a real common phenomenon now.”

In August, Mr. Steger discovered his own new island off the coast of the Norwegian island of Svalbard, high in the polar basin. Glaciers that had surrounded it when his ship passed through only two years earlier were gone this year, leaving only a small island alone in the open ocean.

“We saw it ourselves up there, just how fast the ice is going,” he said.

With 27,555 miles of coastline and thousands of fjords, inlets, bays and straits, Greenland has always been hard to map. Now its geography is becoming obsolete almost as soon as new maps are created.

Hans Jepsen is a cartographer at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, which produces topographical maps for mining and oil companies. (Greenland is a largely self-governing region of Denmark.) Last summer, he spotted several new islands in an area where a massive ice shelf had broken up. Mr. Jepsen was unaware of Mr. Schmitt’s discovery, and an old aerial photograph in his files showed the peninsula intact.

“Clearly, the new island was detached from the mainland when the connecting glacier-bridge retreated southward,” Mr. Jepsen said, adding that future maps would take note of the change.

The sudden appearance of the islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going into retreat, scientists say. Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of ice, enough water to raise global sea levels by 23 feet.

Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic miles of ice per year.

“That corresponds to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps,” Dr. Boggild said. “If you lose that much volume you’d definitely see new islands appear.”

He discovered an island himself a year ago while flying over northwestern Greenland. “Suddenly I saw an island with glacial ice on it,” he said. “I looked at the map and it should have been a nunatak, but the present ice margin was about 10 kilometers away. So I can say that within the last five years the ice margin had retreated at least 10 kilometers.”

The abrupt acceleration of melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists by surprise. Tidewater glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they break up in the process called calving, have doubled and tripled in speed all over Greenland. Ice shelves are breaking up, and summertime “glacial earthquakes” have been detected within the ice sheet.

“The general thinking until very recently was that ice sheets don’t react very quickly to climate,” said Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. “But that thinking is changing right now, because we’re seeing things that people have thought are impossible.”

A study in The Journal of Climate last June observed that Greenland had become the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise.

Until recently, the consensus of climate scientists was that the impact of melting polar ice sheets would be negligible over the next 100 years. Ice sheets were thought to be extremely slow in reacting to atmospheric warming. The 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, widely considered to be an authoritative scientific statement on the potential impacts of global warming, based its conclusions about sea-level rise on a computer model that predicted a slow onset of melting in Greenland.

“When you look at the ice sheet, the models didn’t work, which puts us on shaky ground,” said Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University.

There is no consensus on how much Greenland’s ice will melt in the near future, Dr. Alley said, and no computer model that can accurately predict the future of the ice sheet. Yet given the acceleration of tidewater-glacier melting, a sea-level rise of a foot or two in the coming decades is entirely possible, he said. That bodes ill for island nations and those who live near the coast.

“Even a foot rise is a pretty horrible scenario,” said Stephen P. Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University in Miami.

On low-lying and gently sloping land like coastal river deltas, a sea-level rise of just one foot would send water thousands of feet inland. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide make their homes in such deltas; virtually all of coastal Bangladesh lies in the delta of the Ganges River. Over the long term, much larger sea-level rises would render the world’s coastlines unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands.

“Here in Miami,” Dr. Leatherman said, “we’re going to have an ocean on both sides of us.”

Such ominous implications are not lost on Mr. Schmitt, who says he hopes that the island he discovered in Greenland in September will become an international symbol of the effects of climate change. Mr. Schmitt, who speaks Inuit, has provisionally named it Uunartoq Qeqertoq: the warming island.

Global warming has profoundly altered the nature of polar exploration, said Mr. Schmitt, who in 40 years has logged more than 100 Arctic expeditions. Routes once pioneered on a dogsled are routinely paddled in a kayak now; many features, like the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in Greenland’s northwest, have disappeared for good.

“There is a dark side to this,” he said about the new island. “We felt the exhilaration of discovery. We were exploring something new. But of course, there was also something scary about what we did there. We were looking in the face of these changes, and all of us were thinking of the dire consequences.”

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Out of Sight, Under Fire Over Leases

Johnnie Burton is director of Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service. On Thursday,
the Senate Energy Committee will hold a hearing on unpaid royalties by oil and gas companies.

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

Published: January 16, 2007
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Jan. 15 — Johnnie M. Burton, who runs the Interior Department’s troubled program to collect royalties on oil and gas pumped on public lands, is under attack and out of sight.

As director of the Minerals Management Service, Ms. Burton has faced widespread complaints from Congress for months that her agency is mismanaged, unaccountable and on the verge of losing billions of dollars owed by oil and gas companies that drill in the Gulf of Mexico.

On Thursday, the Interior Department’s inspector general is expected to tell the Senate Energy Committee that Ms. Burton either ignored or remained unacceptably blind to a leasing blunder that will, if left unchanged, let oil companies escape as much as $10 billion in royalties over the next five years.

The Senate hearing comes amid rising bipartisan anger about potentially huge losses to taxpayers that have prompted an investigation by the Justice Department into the agency’s multibillion dollar “royalty in kind” program.

Yet Ms. Burton — a diminutive Algerian-born former French teacher and state official from Wyoming — will not be testifying. In her place will be an assistant secretary of the Interior, C. Stephen Allred, who joined the department less than four months ago.

Ms. Burton declined requests for an interview. In response to questions, Lucy Querques Denett, associate director of Minerals Management Service, praised Ms. Burton’s record in an e-mail statement.

“Her direction to staff has always been to perform our mission in conformance with the laws and regulations,” Ms. Denett said. “She has also clearly impressed upon us that we are responsible for collecting every penny due and owed the American public.”

Senior Interior officials have kept Ms. Burton out of public view, and many colleagues assume she will soon leave the agency.

It is quite a reversal of fortune for an official who won praise from Congress in her first three years for her expertise in arcane issues about oil and gas accounting.

Ms. Burton, 67, arrived in the United States as a refugee in 1962, after fleeing from Algeria during its war for independence from France. She moved to Wyoming after meeting and marrying a geologist from the state. After working initially as a French teacher, she teamed up with her husband in a small oil exploration business and later started an oil industry news service for the Rocky Mountain region.

A staunch Republican, Ms. Burton served six years in the Wyoming state legislature. When voters elected a Republican governor, Ms. Burton became director of the state’s Department of Revenue for six years. Because Wyoming’s state revenue comes almost entirely from energy and mining, Ms. Burton became well-versed in many of the same issues posed in collecting federal royalties on oil and gas.

“She always tried to be perfect at everything she did,” said Thomas Strook, a retired oilman and Republican legislator in Wyoming who was close friends with Ms. Burton during her time there.

Ms. Burton lost her job in Wyoming in 2002, after voters ousted the Republican governor, Jim Geringer. While she knew Vice President Dick Cheney, who also comes from Wyoming, acquaintances say it was her ties to state political leaders and her experience with energy taxation that won her the job at Interior.

In recent months, Republicans and Democrats alike have castigated Ms. Burton for only belatedly acknowledging a leasing blunder created by the Clinton administration in the 1990s that is likely to cost the government about $10 billion over the next five years and then insisting that there was little the government could do to fix the problem.

In July, Republicans the House Government Reform Committee accused her agency of stonewalling their investigation. In September, they accused Ms. Burton of going too far in making concessions to oil companies. That same month, the Interior Department’s chief independent investigator declared that “short of crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior.”

Democratic lawmakers, now in control of Congressional oversight committees, have vowed to step up their own investigations and overhaul the entire program.

But Ms. Burton has hardly been acting on her own.

Under President Bush, the Interior Department’s top ranks were filled with people with close ties to industry. Most prominent were Gale A. Norton, a strong advocate of domestic drilling who recently stepped down as Interior secretary and subsequently joined Shell Oil, and G. Steven Griles, a former industry lobbyist who became deputy secretary and now faces a possible indictment on charges of lying about his dealings with the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

In November, Interior officials announced that a new task force of outside experts would evaluate the royalty program. Officials named David T. Deal, a longtime lawyer for the American Petroleum Institute, to head the panel.

“Since Bush was elected, there has been a clear agenda to promote oil and gas development wherever and however they can,” said Erich Pica, a policy analyst at Friends of the Earth, an environmental policy group. “Time and again, you have seen the administration and its political appointees side with the oil and gas companies.”

(Page 2 of 2)

In 2004, when the Interior Department offered lucrative new royalty incentives to gas producers that drill very deep wells in shallow waters, the final arrangement was negotiated above Ms. Burton’s level, in negotiations between top aides to Interior Secretary Norton and White House budget officials, according to current and former administration officials.

But if Ms. Burton has been less a decision maker than a loyal soldier, her responsibility for the leasing program has left her in the line of fire. Lawmakers express outrage over how Ms. Burton and other top officials glossed over the error that occurred when the Interior Department signed 1,100 offshore leases in 1998 and 1999 that let deepwater drillers escape royalties regardless of how high oil and gas prices might climb.

The incentives were supposed to stop if oil prices climbed above a “threshold price” of $34 a barrel, but leasing officials omitted the escape clause for two years.

Though midlevel officials spotted their mistake in 2000, Interior officials never mentioned the mistake in public and never tried to fix the leases until 2006.

Ms. Burton’s first reaction was to blame the Clinton administration, saying she did not learn about the problem until early 2006. With anger boiling over in Congress, Ms. Burton announced in June that she would try to persuade oil companies to renegotiate voluntarily.

But the Interior Department’s inspector general is expected to report this week that Ms. Burton either knew or should have known about the problem as early as 2004.

The timing is important, because energy prices were much lower in 2004 and many lawmakers contend that the government might have been able to renegotiate the leases without acrimony if it had moved earlier.

Ms. Burton told the House Government Reform Committee last September that she first learned about the problem in early 2006. But investigators say that Thomas Readinger, then associate director of the Minerals Management Service, confirmed to oil companies in 2004 that the escape clause was indeed missing.

Officials involved in the issue said that Earl E. Devaney, the Interior Department’s inspector general, found no evidence that Ms. Burton lied in her testimony. But they note that Mr. Readinger was one of Ms. Burton’s top deputies and contend that she had little excuse for not knowing about the issue.

“If she didn’t know about it, she should have known about it,” said Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican who headed several hearings on the matter.

In response to questions, the Minerals Management Service said in a statement on Friday that Mr. Readinger routinely discussed issues with oil companies without involving Ms. Burton.

“His contacts with industry were routine and in most instances did not rise to the level of the director,” the agency said. “As associate director one of his functions was to provide industry with factual information, not decisions.”

On Thursday, House Democrats hope to pass a bill that would pressure companies to change the leases. Companies that refuse to give up the loophole would either be prohibited from acquiring any additional federal leases or would have to pay a “conservation fee” of $9 for each barrel they produce.

Ms. Burton, and the Bush administration in general, have opposed the measure and said it undermined the “sanctity of contracts.” But lawmakers in both parties say the measure is all but certain to pass with strong bipartisan support.

Ms. Burton faces other problems. On Tuesday, a federal jury in Denver will hear allegations by a top former auditor at the Minerals Management Service that the Kerr-McGee Corporation cheated the government out of at least $12 million in royalties — and that senior agency officials in Washington ordered him to drop the case.

The allegations are part of a lawsuit by Bobby L. Maxwell, a former auditing supervisor in Denver, who is now suing as a private citizen under a law that rewards whistle blowers for recovering money from companies that defraud the government.

Kerr-McGee has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing, and the Minerals Management Service has insisted that Mr. Maxwell’s case has no merit.

But a federal judge has refused to dismiss the allegations, and a jury could reach a verdict by early February. If Mr. Maxwell wins, Kerr-McGee could be required to pay more than $50 million in back royalties and penalties. Ms. Burton would face pressure to explain why her agency swept aside Mr. Maxwell’s findings.

Ms. Burton’s agency is also the target of two criminal investigations by the Justice Department. One of them concerns allegations that the director and three other employees in the agency’s “royalty in kind” program had consulting arrangements with companies seeking contracts to resell government oil.

Investigators hope to finish that inquiry by next spring. But that will hardly be the end. At least three separate House and Senate committees have investigations that are still in their infancy.

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Car Washes and Genocide

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: January 16, 2007

The New York Times

Genocide may be the worst of crimes, but historically it has also brought out the best in some people.

The Raoul Wallenbergs of 2007 speckle America and the globe. And I don’t just mean the aid workers — 13 of whom have been murdered for their efforts in Darfur since last May — but also those ordinary Americans who have united in a grass-roots campaign to try to stop genocide half a world away in Sudan.

President Bush and other world leaders have dropped the ball on Darfur. But that vacuum of moral leadership has been filled by university students, churches and temples, celebrities like George Clooney and Mia Farrow, and armies of schoolchildren.

Their arsenal — green armbands, phone calls to the White House, bake sales to raise money — all seem pallid. How can a “Save Darfur” lawn sign in Peoria intimidate government-backed raiders in Sudan or Chad who throw babies into bonfires?

Yet, finally, we see evidence that those armbands and lawn signs can make a difference. Last week, the Save Darfur Coalition — the grass-roots organization that puts out those lawn signs — sponsored a trip by Bill Richardson, the New Mexico governor, to Khartoum to negotiate with President Omar al-Bashir.

Sure, it’s a little weird when a private advocacy group undertakes freelance diplomacy. But if George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Hu Jintao twiddle their thumbs, then more power to the freelancers.

Mr. Richardson worked out a joint statement in which Sudan agreed to a 60-day cease-fire to allow peace talks to resume, provided the Darfur rebels go along as well. Mr. Bashir also agreed that Sudan would prosecute rapes and stop painting its military aircraft to look as if they belong to the U.N.

The first thing to say is that Mr. Bashir has repeatedly broken his pledges in the past. Count me deeply skeptical about whether it will be any different this time. Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a Sudanese human rights campaigner, told me he thinks that President Bashir simply made cosmetic concessions in hopes of winning the chairmanship of the African Union later this month.

That said, there may be a path forward here. While U.N. peacekeepers and a no-fly zone are needed, ultimately the only way to end the slaughter is to achieve a peace agreement in Darfur. And that seems more feasible today than it was a week ago.

Most striking, it’s clear that the cease-fire was a consequence of all those armbands and lawn signs. Mr. Richardson told me that Mr. Bashir was motivated by concern at the way the killings have been spotlighted by Darfur activists. Mr. Richardson quoted him as saying, “These guys have caused me a lot of damage.”

Ken Bacon, who heads Refugees International and accompanied Mr. Richardson, said of President Bashir: “One thing that was very clear was that the Save Darfur movement has gotten under his skin. The vilification of the Khartoum regime in columns and editorials and ads is making a difference.”

So cherish this historical moment. The long record of genocide is one overwhelmingly of acquiescence, but this time ordinary citizens are trying to write a different ending.

There are the students at Santa Clara University in California who replicated a mini refugee camp and slept in it. They limited themselves to 1,000 calories a day — because that’s what Darfuris are limited to — and donated the savings to aid groups.

Or there’s Jason Miller, a California M.D./Ph.D student who in his spare time has become the foremost expert on how investments by foreign companies underwrite the Sudanese genocide. Or Beth Reilly, a stay-at-home mom in Indiana who works on Darfur a little bit every day. Or the legions of schoolkids who organize car washes, and ask for donations in lieu of birthday presents, in hopes of saving other children halfway around the globe.

Sudan’s leaders are used to bullying everyone. Jan Pronk, who was the United Nations envoy in Sudan until Khartoum ejected him, reports in his Weblog that a U.N. official recently went to the authorities in Darfur to complain about human rights violations. A Sudanese official retorted: “You better shut up. We can always expel you, as we have proven.”

But finally President Bashir is confronting people whom he can’t bully. Let’s have no illusions about how much more pressure will be necessary to stop the slaughter, but let’s also celebrate this moment. Mr. Bashir has blinked, showing that it just may be possible to fight genocide with moral courage and lawn signs.

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Descending to New Depths

By BOB HERBERT
Published: January 15, 2007
New Orleans
The New York Times

I was surprised recently by a sudden shift in the tone of a veteran cabdriver, Stanley Taylor, who had been kind enough to take me on a nearly four-hour tour of the flood-wrecked regions of the city.

For most of the afternoon, Mr. Taylor had been wonderfully informative and polite, and his comments had been filled with sympathy for those who had lost so much to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

But as we headed back to my hotel, and darkness began to fall over the eerily still neighborhoods, his tone became unmistakably bitter. We had been talking casually about the thousands of extremely poor evacuees, most of them black, who were still stranded outside New Orleans, some of them scattered to the far reaches of the United States.

Mr. Taylor, who is black, snapped that maybe it would be better if some of them didn’t come back. “The poor people that’s gone,” he said, “they’re gonna have to stay gone. That’s where all the crime was coming from, see? Folks here want people to come back, but they want people with money to come back. The criminals? Shame on ’em. Sorry for ’em.”

During the immediate post-Katrina period, there were essentially two visions of a resurgent New Orleans. One, widely decried as racist, saw the new, improved New Orleans as smaller, whiter and more prosperous.

This was openly advocated. Just a few days after the storm, a wealthy member of the city’s power elite, James Reiss, told The Wall Street Journal: “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically.”

Mr. Reiss, who is white and served in Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s administration as chairman of the Regional Transit Authority (he has since left the government), said that he and many of his colleagues would leave town if New Orleans did not become a city with better services and fewer poor people.

An alternative (and more widely desired) model of the city coincided with the approach that President Bush seemed to be taking when he made his dramatic appearance in floodlit Jackson Square in mid-September 2005. Mr. Bush promised not just to help rebuild New Orleans, but to confront the long-simmering problems of race and poverty with “bold action.”

Supporters of this approach envisioned an effort that would bring desperately needed assistance to the hurricane victims, helping to get them housed and back on their feet, while at the same time constructively engaging the contentious issues that have kept America’s blacks and whites in a state of perpetual hostility, and much of the poor in an all-but-permanent morass of ignorance and deprivation.

What is actually happening is worse than anyone had imagined.

New Orleans is a mess. It was brought to its knees by Katrina, and is being kept there by a toxic combination of federal neglect and colossal, mind-numbing ineptitude at the local level.

The police department here is a sour joke, and crime is out of control. More than 16 months after the storm, children roam the streets with impunity during school hours. Debris still covers much of the city. Doctors, hospitals and mental-health facilities are in woefully short supply. Thousands of residents are still living in trailers, and many thousands more are stuck more or less permanently out of town.

The result is that blacks and whites, feeling unsafe physically and frightened by the long-term prospect of dwindling opportunities, are eyeing the exits.

Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, who lost the mayoral race last May to Mr. Nagin, offered a grim assessment. While the ethnic breakdown may remain roughly the same, he said, the city is on its way to becoming “smaller, poorer and worse than it was before.”

Class, at the moment, is trumping race, which is how Mr. Reiss and Mr. Taylor, the cabdriver, came unwittingly to similar stereotyped conclusions. Unless the foundations of a livable city can be put in place — and they are not being put in place now — those with the ability to leave will do so. The poor, neglected as always, will be left behind.

“The same thing is moving African-Americans as is moving whites,” Mr. Landrieu said. “Everyone is asking: ‘Is it safe? What’s the school situation? Can my kids play outside? What does the future hold for them?’ ”

Without a creative new plan and energetic new leadership, New Orleans will be unable to save itself. Right now it’s a city sinking to ever more tragic depths.

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The Texas Strategy

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: January 15, 2007
The New York Times

Hundreds of news articles and opinion pieces have described President Bush’s decision to escalate the Iraq war as a “Hail Mary pass.”

But that’s the wrong metaphor.

Mr. Bush isn’t Roger Staubach, trying to pull out a win for the Dallas Cowboys. He’s Charles Keating, using other people’s money to keep Lincoln Savings going long after it should have been shut down — and squandering the life savings of thousands of investors, not to mention billions in taxpayer dollars, along the way.

The parallel is actually quite exact. During the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, people like Mr. Keating kept failed banks going by faking financial success. Mr. Bush has kept a failed war going by faking military success.

The “surge” is just another stalling tactic, designed to buy more time.

Oh, and one of the favorite techniques used by the owners of savings and loan associations to generate phony profits — it involved making high-interest loans to crooked or flaky real estate developers — came to be known as the “Texas strategy.”

What was the point of the Texas strategy? Bank owners were certainly gambling — with other people’s money, of course — in the hope of a miraculous recovery that would bail out their negative balance sheets.

But the real point of the racket was a form of looting: as long as they could keep reporting high paper profits, S.&L. owners could keep rewarding themselves with salaries, dividends and sweetheart business deals.

Mr. Keating paid himself a million dollars just weeks before his holding company collapsed.

Which brings us to Iraq. The administration has spent the last three years pretending that its splendid little war isn’t a big disaster. There have been the bromides (we’re making “good progress”); the promises (we have a “strategy for victory”); and, as always, attacks on the media for not reporting the good news from Iraq.

Who you gonna believe, the president or your lying eyes?

Now Mr. Bush has grudgingly sort- of admitted that things aren’t going well — but he says his “new way forward” will fix everything.

So it’s still the Texas strategy: the war’s architects are trying to keep their failed venture going as long as possible.

The Hail Mary aspect — the off chance that somehow, things really will turn out all right — is the least of their motivations. The real intent is a form of looting. I’m not talking mainly about old-fashioned war profiteering, although there is no question that profiteering is taking place on an epic scale. No, I’m saying that the hawks want to keep this war going because it’s to their personal and political benefit.

True, Mr. Bush can’t win another election with phony claims of success in Iraq, the way he did in 2004. But escalation buys him another year or two to claim that we’re making progress — and it gives him another chance to prove that he’s the Decider, beyond accountability.

And as for pundits who promoted the war and are now trying to sell the surge: for a little while longer they can be Very Important People who have the president’s ear.

Meanwhile, the nation pays the price. The heaviest burden — in death, shattered bodies, broken families and ruined careers — falls on those who serve. To find the personnel for the Bush escalation, the Pentagon must lengthen deployments in Iraq and shorten training time at home.

And the back-door draft has become a life sentence: there is no limit on the cumulative amount of time citizen-soldiers can be required to serve on active duty. Mama, don’t let your children grow up to be reservists.

The rest of us will pay a financial price for the hundreds of billions squandered in Iraq and, more important, a price in reduced security.

Escalation won’t bring victory in Iraq, but it might bring defeat in Afghanistan, which the administration will continue to neglect. And it has pushed the military to the breaking point.

Mr. Bush calls his critics “irresponsible,” saying that they don’t have an alternative to his strategy. But they do: setting a timetable for withdrawal, so that we can cut our losses, and trying to save what can be saved. It isn’t a strategy for victory because that’s no longer an option. It’s a strategy for acknowledging reality.

The lesson of the savings and loan scandal was that when a bank has failed, you shouldn’t let the owner string you along with promises — you should shut the thing down. We should do the same with Mr. Bush’s failed war.

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Agency Affirms Human Influence on Climate

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: January 10, 2007
The New York Times

President Bush has said it.

A lot of government scientists have said it.

But until yesterday, it appeared that no news release on annual climate trends out of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under the Bush White House had said unequivocally that a buildup of greenhouse gases was helping warm the climate.

The statement came in a release that said 2006 was the warmest year for the 48 contiguous states since regular temperature records began in 1895. It surpassed the previous champion, 1998, a year heated up by a powerful episode of the periodic warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean by El Niño. Last year, another El Niño developed, but this time a long-term warming trend from human activities was said to be involved as well.

“A contributing factor to the unusually warm temperatures throughout 2006 also is the long-term warming trend, which has been linked to increases in greenhouse gases,” the release said, emphasizing that the relative contributions of El Niño and the human influence were not known.

A link between greenhouse gases and climate change was also made in a December news conference by Dirk Kempthorne, the secretary of the interior, as that agency proposed listing polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Still, the climate agency’s shift in language came as a surprise to several public affairs officials there. They said they had become accustomed in recent years to having any mention of a link between climate trends and human activities played down or trimmed when drafts of documents went to the Commerce Department and the White House for approval.

James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said the release reflected longstanding views within the administration.

“It’s helpful for them to describe what is a question in many people’s minds — what is the human factor, what is the El Niño factor,” Mr. Connaughton said of the NOAA release. “From our perspective, what was in the press release was a direct reflection of what the president and folks in his administration have been saying for some time.”

Mr. Bush has made two speeches on climate. He first expressly accepted that humans were contributing to global warming in a news conference in Denmark in July 2005 on the way to an economic summit in Scotland, saying, “Listen, I recognize that the surface of the Earth is warmer and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem.”

But the government’s scientific bureaucracy, where public affairs officials and scientists as recently as last year complained that findings pointing to climate dangers were being suppressed, has taken time to catch up.

“There’s been some sensitivity to the fact that some people have complained that NOAA and other parts of the government haven’t been as open as they would like them to have been on this,” said Jay Lawrimore, a climatologist at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., where the temperature trends are compiled. “Now NOAA is making an effort to be clearer on some of the influences.”

Mr. Lawrimore said there was no way to account for the trends, be they the melting of Arctic sea ice or the warming of winters, without including an influence from heat-trapping gases.

“Year after year as we continue to see warmer temperatures,” he said, “there are more and more converts convinced that it’s not just natural variability and not just something that’s going to return back to temperatures we saw 40 or 50 years ago — that in fact we are doing something to the climate.”

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Petraeus on Vietnam's Legacy

Sunday, January 14, 2007; Page B04

The Washington Post

Among Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus's qualifications for the post of senior U.S. military commander in Iraq is his work training Iraqi security forces, as well as his oversight of the Army and Marine Corps' updated counterinsurgency field manual. But another document may prove useful to Petraeus in Iraq. In 1987, he earned a PhD from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School with a 328-page thesis titled "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era." Excerpts below.

-- Rachel Dry

Historical analogies are particularly compelling during crises, when the tendency to supplement incomplete information with past experiences is especially marked. . . . The legacy of Vietnam is unlikely to soon recede as an important influence on America's senior military. The frustrations of Vietnam are too deeply etched in the minds of those who now the [sic] lead the services and combatant commands. . . .

Vietnam cost the military dearly. It left America's military leaders confounded, dismayed, and discouraged. Even worse, it devastated the armed forces, robbing them of dignity, money, and qualified people for a decade. . . . While the psychic scars of the war may be deepest among the Army and Marine Corps leadership, however, the senior leaders of all the services share a similar reaction to Vietnam. There is no desire among any of them to repeat the experience that provided the material for such descriptively titled books as: "Defeated: Inside America's Military Machine"; "Self Destruction: the Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army During the Vietnam Era"; and "Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the United States Army." The simple essence of this feeling is that, in the words of then Colonel Dave Palmer, "there must be no more Vietnams."

On war and public opinion

Vietnam was an extremely painful reminder that when it comes to intervention, time and patience are not American virtues in abundant supply. . . .

he military want to avoid what former Army Chief of Staff E.C. Meyer termed the Vietnam mistake of "putting soldiers out at the end of a string" without the full support of the American people. Since time is crucial, furthermore, sufficient force must be used at the outset to ensure that the conflict can be resolved before the American people withdraw their support for it. Nothing succeeds with the American public like success, the military realize; the sooner the mission is accomplished, the better.

On fighting insurgencies

Vietnam planted in the minds of many in the military doubts about the ability of U.S. forces to conduct successful large-scale counterinsurgencies. These misgivings do not in all cases spring from doubts about the capabilities of American troops and units per se. . . .

Rather, the doubts that are part of the Vietnam legacy spring from a number of interrelated factors: the previously noted worries about a lack of popular support for what the public might perceive as ambiguous conflicts; suspicions about the willingness of civilian policy-makers -- not just those in the executive branch -- to stay the course; and lurking fears that the respective services have yet to come to grips with the difficult tasks of developing the doctrine, equipment, and forces suitable for nasty "little" wars. . . .

Others, who believe that the U.S. could develop suitable American forces for counterinsurgency operations, have doubts about the existing capabilities of U.S. units in this area. As one U.S. officer put it, "I submit that the U.S. Army does not have the mind-set for combat operations where the key terrain is the mind, not the high ground. We do not take the time to understand the nature of the society in which we are fighting, the government we are supporting, or the enemy we are fighting."

On civilian officials

Very importantly, many in the military believe that the United States armed forces can win small wars if allowed to do so. Those who hold this view tend to believe that Vietnam was less an illustration of the limitations of American military power than an example of what happens if that power is limited and not used to best advantage. This feeling springs from conviction that the U.S. military in Vietnam were so hemmed in by restrictions that they could not accomplish their mission. The lesson for those of this persuasion, therefore, is that the military must be given a freer hand in future military operations. Even among the most fervent believers in this logic, however, there is a new recognition that the world is more intractable, and intervention with U.S. troops more problematic. . . .

The military also took from Vietnam (and the concomitant activities in the Pentagon) a heightened awareness that civilian officials are responsive to influences other than the objective conditions on the battlefield. A consequence has been an increase in the traditional military distrust of civilian political leaders. . . . While the military still accept emphatically the constitutional provision for civilian control of the armed forces, there remain from the Vietnam era nagging doubts about the abilities and motivations of politicians and those they appoint to key positions. Vietnam was a painful reminder for the military that they, not the transient occupants of high office, generally bear the heaviest burden during armed conflict.


On dealing with the President

The lessons taken from Vietnam work to that end; military support for the use of force abroad is contingent on the presence of specific pre-conditions . . . "Don't commit American troops, Mr. President," they hold, "unless:

1) You really have to (in which case, presumably, vital U.S. interests are at stake);

2) You have established clear-cut, attainable military objectives for American military forces (that is, more than just some fuzzy political goals).

3) You provide the military commander sufficient forces and the freedom necessary to accomplish his mission swiftly. (Remember, Mr. President, this may necessitate the mobilization of the reserve components -- perhaps even a declaration of war.)

4) You can ensure sufficient public support to permit carrying the commitment through to its conclusion."

For the military, in short, the debate over how and when to commit American troops abroad has become a debate over how to avoid, at all costs, another Vietnam.

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Iraqis get all-firing foretaste of Bush's final Baghdad gamble

The scene is set for a bloody showdown, report Jon Swain in Baghdad and Sarah Baxter in Washington
ABU HAMED received a grim foretaste of the increased violence that many Iraqis fear was heralded by President George W Bush’s announcement last week of a new drive to pacify Baghdad.

The fighting has seen him trapped with two blind daughters in one room in the city centre since Wednesday morning, without water or electricity and with nothing to eat but beans. Hamed, a 55-year-old retired civil servant, is now growing desperate.

“Is this the new paradise that the Americans said they would give us when they invaded our country?” he asked. “When is this nightmare going to end?” The fighting in Haifa Street, one of the oldest parts of the city, was more than just another day’s violence in Baghdad.

Involving 1,000 American and Iraqi troops backed by Apache helicopters and F-18 fighter jets, it was one of the most spectacular military operations there since the American invasion in spring 2003. Flames and clouds of smoke filled the area as the battle against Sunni insurgents raged. Helicopters raked the rooftops with rocket and machinegun fire, jets swooped down almost to rooftop level, and tanks and fighting vehicles took up supporting positions as innocent people cowered inside.

When the fighting died down, Iraqi officials said at least 50 insurgents had been killed. During the lull Hamed ventured outdoors in search of food for his daughters. He immediately came across the bodies of three men. They were curled up. “I could have sworn they were sleeping at first,” he said. “Then I saw their blood-soaked clothes and their open eyes and I knew they were dead.”

Haifa Street is less than a mile from the green zone, which houses both the American command and the government of Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister. The area had been cleared of insurgents several times. Once the troops left they always drifted back and continued their sectarian killings.

In a televised address last week, Bush admitted tersely that there had not been “enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighbourhoods”. These “mistakes”, he insisted, had now been addressed. But sceptics say his change of tactics has come far too late.

Bush is in a desperate race to stabilise Iraq and preserve his legacy before Congress and the American public give up on the venture. Ominously the latest polls show that 66% of Americans oppose a surge in forces. The Iraqis are simply bracing for further bloodshed.

Under the Bush plan for “victory”, an extra 17,500 troops will be sent to Baghdad and another 4,000 to Anbar province, a Sunni stronghold to the west, bringing the American force back up to 150,000. The 82nd Airborne Division is on its way, and troop levels will build over three to four months.

Baghdad is to be carved into nine sectors, including Sadr City, a slum of 2m people where the black-robed Mahdi army of Moqtadr al-Sadr, the radical Shi’ite cleric, holds sway. In a radical departure from previous sweeps of the city, there will be 27 mini-bases, known as joint security stations. American troops will sleep and eat there alongside Iraqi forces.

“They can’t be commuters,” said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow on defence policy at the Council on Foreign Relations who recently advised Bush on Iraq. “There is going to be a heavy emphasis on a high-density presence.”

In each sector of the city American troops will be joined by one Iraqi army brigade and the Iraqi police, giving a local face to the surge. The sectors will be “gated” — sealed off by checkpoints and roadblocks as well as existing barriers such as roads and rivers.

The aim is to force insurgents out of the secured zones, while residents will be issued with IDs and protected round the clock. The unemployed will be put to work in the hope of reducing the incentives for extremism as part of the third tier of the policy of “clear, hold and build”.

The Americans intend to start their surge in a handful of ethnically mixed Sunni-Shi’ite areas, where they hope to prove their even-handedness before moving on to subdue Sadr City, Baghdad’s most explosive neighbourhood.

The Shi’ite-led government of Maliki has other ideas. In an early sign that he might not live up to his promises to the US, he is hoping his forces will never have to confront Sadr’s.

An aide to Maliki said the push would begin in Sunni neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the capital such as Salman Pak and Abu Ghraib — the areas “sending the car bombs into Baghdad” — and, if not, the prime minister “would not be very enthusiastic”.

“He argues that the best way to deal with the Mahdi army is to bring down the level of terrorist attacks so ordinary Shi’ites don’t feel the need for the Mahdi,” the aide said.

The surge could leave Americans exposed to attacks on all sides. A sheikh from the Mahdi army and a Sunni insurgent leader have already vowed to send the new troops home in body bags. More soldiers will inevitably create more targets for insurgents, as Bush acknowledged when he addressed the troops in Fort Benning, Georgia last week.

The surge, the president said, would require “sacrifice”, but with more than 3,000 US dead, how much more bloodshed are the Americans willing to accept? For some military families it is important to have one last push. Private Ross McGinnis, a 19-year-old soldier, was killed last month when he flung himself on top of a hand grenade that landed in his Humvee. His selfless act saved the life of four friends.

His mother Romayne believes the Americans must press on. “There is good being accomplished in Iraq. If we pull out now, everything we’ve tried to accomplish will falter.”

But Tina Smarro has just learnt that her son, Mick, 25, who is stationed at Fort Benning, will be joining the surge in a matter of weeks.

“My son doesn’t want to go,” she said. “He has already been to Iraq once. He knows what’s going on there. I’m devastated. How many more mothers are going to be told their son is dead?”

MUCH depends for the success of the operation on General David Petraeus, the newly appointed commander in Iraq, who is known as King David for his skill in restoring order to Mosul after the American invasion.

One of the army’s “thinking” generals with a PhD from Princeton, he is the author of the military’s new counterinsurgency doctrine for fighting 21st- century wars.

Petraeus believes American and Iraqi casualties can be kept to a minimum by a policy of “cordon and knock”. Instead of kicking down doors, soldiers will politely visit homes where possible, making inquiries and offering assistance. The hope is that in such a tightly controlled environment, the death squads will find it impossible to operate.

It may be wishful thinking. “If it is a short-term surge, the rational strategy for the Sunnis and Mahdi army is to wait it out, but if they are trigger-happy, civilians will get killed no matter how discriminating the troops are and that always alienates the local population,” said Biddle.

Petraeus has been dusting off the British colonial government’s counterinsurgency programme, which was used successfully in Malaya in the 1950s. The rural population was resettled in fortified villages away from the jungle and isolated from guerillas.

But when the Americans applied the same strategic hamlet model in South Vietnam, the insurgents were locked up with the local population and ended up recruiting them. The same may well prove to be true of Baghdad’s “gated” communities.

It took the British 12 years to defeat the communist insurgency in Malaya. In Iraq, the Americans do not have that much time. In evidence to the Senate armed services committee last week, Robert Gates, the defence secretary, suggested the extra deployment of troops would last “months, not years”.

After that, he suggested hopefully, it might be possible to draw down troops by the end of this year. Instead of reassuring his critics, he raised fears among supporters of the surge such as Senator John McCain, a 2008 presidential contender, that it would not last long enough to make a difference.

Some experts contend the new counterinsurgency doctrine has already become an irrelevance in Iraq, where the gravest threat to the security is not from rebels but from sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shi’ites.

“The main difference between an insurgency and a civil war is the extent to which you can depend on the local armed forces,” said Biddle. “We’re going to be dependent on the Iraqi forces and it’s a mistake. They are penetrated by the militias they are trying to suppress.”

All over the city Shi’ite and Sunni extremists have driven people out of mixed communities with death threats, kidnapping and worse. Last week it was the turn of Husain Ali Mahmoud, a Shi’ite civil servant.

He lived with his wife and five children in Saydia, a mixed area. On Wednesday he arrived home to find a piece of paper pinned to his door. It was a death threat sent by the Sunni “Ahel Al Hak platoon” and it gave him 48 hours to leave his home or die.

Mahmoud did not hesitate. “I grabbed my wife and children and we left the same day. Now we are living just in one room in my father-in-law’s house. I knew this warning was real and they would kill us all if I stayed.”

A few days earlier Hamid Mohammed al-Suhail, a respected elderly sheikh who has been seeking Sunni-Shi’ite reconciliation, was kidnapped and a $100,000 ransom demanded from his family. After the family said it could not pay, his body was dumped. The sheikh had been tortured with a power drill.

Some of the worst crimes have been committed by the largely Shi’ite Iraqi police or defence forces working with the Mahdi army. Rapes, beatings and killings have become commonplace and nobody is immune.

Earlier this month two sisters, aged 90 and 86, were beaten by armed men who burst into their home and raped their maid before stealing jewellery and cash.

Last Thursday Manhel Alrawei was wounded by shrapnel from a mortar that exploded near his car as he went to buy cigarettes. He said he tried to go to hospital. “I ran away when I saw I was going to be kidnapped by Shi’ite militia,” he said. “Now I am treating my wounds myself in a very primitive way.

“If these are the objectives of the new security plan, which they are applying only against Sunnis, there will never be a calm Iraq because we will not stand and wait to die,” he said.

MANY Iraqis are disillusioned with Maliki, believing the prime minister to be sectarian and weak, yet the Americans’ plan for Iraq depends heavily on the quality of his leadership.

Maliki has barely bothered to conceal his lack of enthusiasm for welcoming more US forces and he reneged on troop commitments for the Operation Forward Together in Baghdad last summer, the failed forerunner of the surge.

In Sadr City, Abu Ali, one of the leaders of the Mahdi army, said: “If Sadr orders us to give up our weapons we will do it. But at the same time the Sunnis should do the same. We do not care about the government. We have our leader and are waiting for his command. We have only one enemy — American forces.”

In these circumstances, US experts — including General John Abizaid, the outgoing Middle East commander — have questioned whether an increase in troops can succeed. Bush’s gamble has met huge scepticism.

“I’m extremely uneasy. We’re holding a bad hand of cards and it’s late in the game,” said retired General Barry McCaffrey, who has been consulted frequently on Iraq by the president.

Bush is wooing top Republican congressmen at Camp David this weekend in an effort to staunch the defections on his Iraq policy. This week Senate Democrats hope to persuade enough Republicans to back a resolution opposing the push to deliver an embarrassing defeat to the president. In contrast to her 2008 rivals, Senator Hillary Clinton stayed away from the airwaves last week but was in Iraq yesterday gathering fresh political ammunition.

If Bush cannot maintain a level of support in Congress and the country for his policy, it could quickly collapse in acrimony. Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, is the Middle East, hoping to drum up support for the surge while holding out the vague prospect of progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Iraq’s neighbours are watching anxiously as the Americans appear bent on escalating tension with Iran.

There have been a series of raids against Iranians in Iraq, including the detention of six Iranians at a government office flying the Iranian flag in the Kurdish town of Irbil. Rice warned that America would not “stand idly by” if Iran tried to disrupt efforts to stabilise Iraq.

Administration officials are already pondering alternative strategies for Iraq, should the surge fail. Dumping Maliki is an obvious first step. According to one congressman, Bush told him on the phone last week: “This has to work or you’re out.”

There is speculation that Maliki could be replaced by a new coalition led by vice-president Adel Abdel Mahdi, but he might find it just as difficult to crack down on the Shi’ite militias and conciliate the Sunnis.

Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution has been studying a variety of Plan Bs. The installation of a “strongman” was increasingly tempting for the Americans, but it was questionable whether one man or junta could unite the warring country, he said.

A second option is “soft partition” — the “tried and tested way” of solving ethnic disputes, as happened in Yugoslavia. It is O’Hanlon’s preferred choice, but in the view of most experts it will ignite more fighting.

Then there is the “80% solution”, said to be favoured by Dick Cheney, the vice-president. The Shi’ites (60% of the population), with the support of the Kurds (at 20%) would force the minority Sunnis “to accept the reality of defeat”.

Viewed from this perspective, the surge may be the least worst course of action, but it does not feel that way to the Iraqis. The city’s population is apprehensively awaiting the arrival of the new American forces.

More and more people are staying at home. There is less traffic on the streets. More are trying to leave. And Iraq’s most popular fortune-teller, Abu Ali Sheibani, who has a four-hour show beamed daily from Lebanon — and who got it right by predicting Saddam Hussein would meet a “cold death” at the end of the year — has told Iraqis the country will face another ordeal in February. He has predicted “more war, more bloodshed”.

Neocon family calls the shots

FEW neoconservatives can claim to have had as much influence on the course of the Iraq war as the trio of scholars in the Kagan family, writes Sarah Baxter.

Frederick Kagan, 36, is the author of Choosing Victory, a blueprint for the surge adopted by President George W Bush. Just as everybody had begun writing off the influence of the neocons at the White House, genial, chubby-faced Frederick gave the muscular intellectuals a lease of life.

It was at Camp David last June that Kagan, a military historian and fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, outlined his plans for pouring more troops into Iraq to Bush and his war cabinet.

Donald Rumsfeld, the then defence secretary, was unimpressed, but Kagan’s views got another hearing when Bush was searching for ways to ditch the seemingly defeatist recommendations of James Baker’s Iraq Study Group. “Wow, you mean we can still win this war?” a grateful Bush reportedly said.

Kagan’s father Donald, a classicist at Yale University and expert on the Peloponnesian war, could be described as an intellectual progenitor of the conflict. Like many early neocons, Donald, 74, was a leftwinger in his youth but veered to the right over the Vietnam war.

In 1997 he was a signatory with Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, now president of the World Bank, of the founding declaration of the neocon Project for a New American Century, which called for “a Reaganite policy of military strength and foreign clarity”.

A year before the September 11 attacks, Donald co-authored a book with Frederick called While America Sleeps about the delusion that the US was invulnerable.

“The peace does not keep itself and though it may be unfashionable to say so, the world needs a policeman,” Donald said.

But it was his elder son Robert, 48, a fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who nailed Iraq under Saddam Hussein as the problem, writing an article called A Way to Oust Saddam during the Clinton years.

Robert, who is married to the American ambassador to Nato, went on to write an essay, Americans are from Mars, after September 11, sparking a heated debate on the growing transatlantic split on the merits of war.

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Britain could cut its troops in Iraq by end of the year

Michael Evans, Defence Editor
The Times of London

• Timing depends on security position
• Talks to continue with Syria and Iran

A cutback in British troops in Iraq could still go ahead this year, despite the new US strategy of sending an additional 20,000 soldiers to reinforce efforts to defeat the insurgents, Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, told MPs yesterday.

However, addressing a joint session of the Commons Defence and Foreign Affairs committees, he gave no promises of substantial reductions and said that decisions on any reduction of troops would have to wait until security conditions in southern Iraq, where the British are based, had stabilised.

He told the MPs he was “aware of the possibility” that any future American strike on militia in Sadr City, the Shia slum in Baghdad, might have repercussions in the Shia community in Basra. He said that contingency plans existed for that eventuality.

However, he and Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, jointly questioned by the MPs, both emphasised that southern Iraq was different from Baghdad in terms of the level of violence, and there was still hope that a reduction in forces could happen this year.

Defence sources said that under present military planning, the next rotation of troops in Basra — with 1 Mechanised Brigade taking over from 19 Light Brigade in the early summer — was due to go ahead without any cut in numbers, maintaining the strength of the British presence at about 7,000.

“If the security conditions are looking better by then it might be possible to remove the odd unit from the brigade, but not a substantial amount,” one defence source said.

Mr Browne told the MPs that the situation had not changed since November when he had said that he had every expectation that he would be able to announce a withdrawal of troops in 2007 and that he hoped it would be “in the thousands”. He said that Tony Blair had made it clear he would make a statement to the Commons next month or in March about the security situation in Basra once Operation Sinbad, the drive to clear extremists from Basra city, was over.

Mr Browne told the MPs that as an indication of the success of British efforts in the south, the number of murders being committed in Basra had gone down from 139 in June last year to 29 in December.

Both Mr Browne and Mrs Beckett emphasised that the present strategy in Basra and elsewhere in southern Iraq would continue as before.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the Chief of the Defence Staff, sitting alongside the two ministers, reassured the MPs that the US had made no request for British troops to serve elsewhere in Iraq.

He also said that plans to put all British troops in Basra into one base, at the airport site, were going ahead and should be completed soon. There are also troops at Shaibah, a logistics base, south of Basra.

Mrs Beckett told the MPs that the Government intended to carry on talking to Iran and Syria and that it supported the Iraq Study Group recommendation that America should include Iran and Syria in discussions about Iraq’s future. Mr Bush made it clear in his speech that he has rejected this proposal.

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FDA investigates Texas business that lets prospective parents choose embryos

By Elizabeth White, Associated Press
Last update: January 12, 2007 – 6:29 PM
The Minneapolis Star Tribune

SAN ANTONIO — Federal officials are investigating a business that produces batches of ready-made embryos and lets prospective parents select one based on the donors' looks, ethnicity, education and other factors.

A consumer safety officer from the Food and Drug Administration was at Jennalee Ryan's house Friday during an Associated Press interview with the woman who runs the Abraham Center of Life. The officer would not comment.

An FDA spokeswoman in Dallas confirmed that the agency is investigating but would not elaborate. It was unclear what laws or regulations were the focus of the investigation.

Ryan's service involves a New York physician who uses donated eggs and sperm to create embryos that can be bought for $5,000 a pair. Ryan said she allows customers to choose embryos after reviewing the donors' characteristics, including their ethnic and educational background and, in some cases, their photos.

"Who wants an ugly, stupid kid?" she said.

At Ryan's business, sperm donors must have doctorates; egg donors must be young, intelligent and attractive. Egg donors are paid $3,500 by the recipient family but may be paid extra if they have "earned a postgraduate degree; have a unique skill, characteristic or trait," her Web site said. The sperm, which she said cost about $400 per vial, comes from sperm banks. Only one or two women so far have contributed eggs to Ryan's project.

Ryan, who runs the business out of her home in a well-to-do section San Antonio, offers already-made embryos, meaning clients cannot customize their choices by eye or hair color. Parents-to-be must choose from what Ryan has put together.

"Anybody off the street can walk into a clinic and do exactly what I'm doing. They can hire an egg donor, they can hire a sperm donor, and they can create embryos," she said. "The problem is because I took the egg and the sperm and put them together. Now all of a sudden it's Pandora's box."

Ryan said she started the center last summer but does not hope to profit from it and said she hasn't so far.

"People say, 'Well, is this ethical to do what you do? Is it moral to do what you do?"' Ryan said. "Is it ethical or moral not to do it when I have the means and ability to do it? Knowing that I can, should I continue listening to women lament that can't have children?"

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Tensions rise as Washington accuses Iran over militias

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
Published: 14 January 2007
The Independent/UK

Tensions between the US and Iran were set to escalate last night after it was revealed that President George Bush had signed an executive order several months ago, authorising American troops to undertake wide-ranging military action against Iranian operatives active inside Iraq.

That discreetly issued directive was the basis for at least two raids against Iranian targets last week - including one in the Kurdish city of Irbil.

The President's decision - revealed by Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, who yesterday arrived in the Middle East for talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders - was taken amid growing concern that Iran has been providing weapons and training to Shia forces in Iraq. Without irony, the US has long accused Iran of meddling in the affairs of its neighbour.

"There has been a decision to go after these networks," Ms Rice told The New York Times before leaving Washington. "[The President acted] after a period of time in which we saw increasing activity among Iranians in Iraq and increasing lethality in what they were producing." Her comments echoed those made by Mr Bush during his address to the nation on Wednesday evening, when he outlined his plan to send an additional 20,000 troops to Iraq. In his address, without citing any evidence, he accused Iran of supplying support for attacks being carried out on US troops and vowed to respond.

"[Iran and Syria] are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops," Mr Bush said. "We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

Privately, US officials claim Iran has provided explosives and infrared triggering devices for roadside bombs that can penetrate armour. Some of the attacks have been on British forces in southern Iraq. Officials have also reportedly claimed that thousands of Shia militia fighters have been trained in Iran by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Again, no evidence to support these claims has been made public.

US officials deny that the Bush administration is seeking to provoke Iran. The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, said that there was "an urban legend that's going around that Mr Bush was trying to prepare the way for war" with Iran or Syria.

But in recent days the US has deployed an additional aircraft carrier off the Iranian coast. USS John Stennis will join the battle group led by USS Dwight D Eisenhower. In addition, a 600-strong Patriot anti-missile defence system unit from Fort Bliss, Texas, has been deployed to the Middle East, though it is unclear where precisely it will be located.

Against this backdrop, Ms Rice, perhaps not surprisingly, has played down expectations from her trip to the Middle East - her eighth since becoming Secretary of State. Speaking to reporters on the way to Israel, she said: "I'm not coming with a proposal. I'm not coming with a plan." She added: "I expect this trip to really be one in which we have intensive consultations. If you don't lay the groundwork very well, then it's not going to succeed. And I think no plan can be made in America."

Her mission was given some headway last night by news that significant progress had been made in secret coalition talks in Damascus between the supreme Hamas leader and envoys of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. As another round of talks was held yesterday in the Syrian capital, officials from both sides signalled a sudden shift in atmosphere after several weeks of tough internal fighting.

Ms Rice was last night due to meet Israel's defence and foreign ministers. Today she heads for the West Bank city of Ramallah to meet Mr Abbas, and tomorrow talks are scheduled with the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert. Her trip also includes stops in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Germany and Britain.

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