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THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ

U.S. Is Accused of Playing Role in Chalabi Case

A member of the former ally’s party says Iraqi charges against him are part of a plot to weaken the government.

By Henry Chu and Paul Richter
Times Staff Writers

August 10, 2004

BAGHDAD — A top supporter of embattled former Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi accused the United States on Monday of backing bogus counterfeiting charges against the onetime American ally in order to neutralize Chalabi politically and install an “impotent” government.

Mithal Alusi, a member of Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress party, said arrest warrants issued by an Iraqi court over the weekend were part of an international plot that is “bigger than anyone could imagine” to strip Chalabi of his popularity.

The charges come a week before a conference of Iraqi civic and tribal leaders that will appoint an interim national assembly. Chalabi, who was shut out of the interim government that took power in June, was expected to play a lead role at the gathering.

“The warrants were issued by a government that is lacking in will and authority,” Alusi said. “Every Iraqi government institution and facility is being run by so-called U.S. advisors who are under the control of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. The people behind this plot want an impotent Iraqi government, not capable of doing anything.”

Chalabi and his nephew, Salem Chalabi, were named in the arrest warrants issued by Zuhair Maliky, chief investigative judge of the Central Criminal Court of Iraq.

Salem Chalabi, who has been overseeing the effort to try deposed dictator Saddam Hussein on war crimes charges, was accused of murder in connection with threats made to a Finance Ministry official who was investigating Chalabi family real estate holdings. The official was later assassinated.

Both of the Chalabis issued new denials of the charges Monday, pledging to return to Iraq to fight them. Salem Chalabi was in London and Ahmad Chalabi was in Iran when the warrants were announced.

Ahmad Chalabi is accused of counterfeiting old Iraqi dinars. But Alusi said only about 3,000 counterfeit dinars, worth approximately $2, were found in Chalabi’s office, and they were marked as forgeries with a red stamp from the Iraqi Central Bank. Chalabi, who headed the Finance Committee of the now-defunct Iraqi Governing Council, has said he was engaged in an effort to stem counterfeiting. Alusi said Chalabi held the forged dinars as part of that effort.

A Central Bank official said his agency never sought the counterfeiting charges.

“The Central Bank has not lodged a complaint against any individual regarding money counterfeiting and never requested that such charges be brought,” Sinan Shabibi, the bank’s governor, told the French news agency Agence France-Presse.

As Chalabi’s supporters in Iraq insisted that the charges were politically motivated, U.S. officials in Washington sought to distance themselves from him in an estrangement that began this spring.

Chalabi worked closely with U.S. officials in the years before the Iraq war and was the top choice of the Bush administration for assuming leadership in a new Iraqi government.

But administration officials grew wary of him this year amid reports that he had contacts with Iran that may have included passing U.S. secrets. American officials also have been concerned that Chalabi has cultivated ties to militant Iraqi cleric Muqtada Sadr and his militia, who have been battling U.S. and Iraqi forces in renewed fighting since Thursday.

On Monday, the White House took a hands-off attitude to a onetime friend.

“His future will be decided by the people of Iraq, if he wants to continue to be involved in Iraq ‘s future,” White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said. “This latest investigation, that is a matter for Iraqi authorities to handle.”

The State Department, never as close to Chalabi as the White House or Pentagon, also distanced itself. Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman, said the charges “are certainly new to us. This is a question of the Iraqi justice system at work. And we are going to play the appropriate role, which is to let that process take its course.”

At the Pentagon, civilian officials have long supported Chalabi. As recently as May, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz defended him, saying that intelligence he had provided saved American lives and helped troops. But a Wolfowitz spokesman did not return a call seeking comment.

Meanwhile, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry pressed for more information about Chalabi and his activities.

“Serious questions about Ahmad Chalabi remain, including his role in providing misleading information about Iraqi weapons and his connections to Pentagon officials,” a Kerry spokesman said Monday. “We need a full and frank accounting of the administration’s relationship with Chalabi.”

Still, the warrants for the Chalabis brought a strong defense from some of their allies in Washington, and illustrated the divisions over him among the war’s supporters.

Richard N. Perle, a former top advisor to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and a leader of the so-called neoconservatives who embraced Chalabi and the war, said in an interview that he believed the warrants were part of an effort against Chalabi undertaken by the Iraqi government with the support of the U.S. government.

“I’m sure it’s been encouraged by the U.S.,” Perle said in an interview from Europe.

He said CIA and State Department officials have long opposed Chalabi and have convinced others in the government to move against him. Now officials in the White House oppose Chalabi as well, Perle said.

“It was those reports that led to a decision to destroy him,” Perle said, adding that he believed there was no basis to the reports that Chalabi passed classified information to Iran.

Michael Rubin, a former advisor to the U.S.-led occupation authority in Iraq now at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, said the judge who issued the warrant was unqualified, and that the Bush administration and government of interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi wanted to keep Chalabi from gaining influence.

Rubin said the Allawi government had moved against Chalabi to prevent him from gaining a role in the upcoming conference. Maliky, the investigative judge, told The Times on Monday that politics had played no part in the issuance of the warrants.

LA Times staff writers T. Christian Miller and Edwin Chen in Washington and Janet Stobart in London contributed to this report.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-chalabi10aug10.story
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July 9, 2004
Defectors’ Reports on Iraq Arms Were Embellished, Exile Asserts
By JIM DWYER

Shortly after President Bush declared war on terrorism in the fall of 2001, the Iraqi National Congress, the exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, sent out a simple, urgent message to its network of intelligence agents: find evidence of outlawed weapons that would make Saddam Hussein a prime target for the United States.

Inevitably, that request reached Muhammad al-Zubaidi, himself an Iraqi exile who had been working to undermine Mr. Hussein for 24 years from posts in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and northern Iraq. Under the playful name of Al Deeb - Arabic for The Wolf - Mr. Zubaidi, now 52, served as a field leader for about 75 to 100 people who collected information on the machinations of Iraq’s police state.

Over the next three months, Mr. Zubaidi and his associates gathered statements from defectors who said they had knowledge of Mr. Hussein’s military facilities and who had fled Iraq for neighboring countries.

In short order, that same group of defectors took their stories to American intelligence agents and journalists. The defectors spoke of a nation pocketed with mobile weapons laboratories, a new secret weapons site beneath a Baghdad hospital, a meeting between a member of Mr. Hussein’s government and Osama bin Laden - accounts that ultimately became potent elements in Mr. Bush’s case for war.

Those accusations remain unproven. In fact, Mr. Zubaidi said in interviews last week in Lebanon, the ominous claims by the defectors differed significantly from the versions that they had first related to him and his associates. Mr. Zubaidi provided his handwritten diaries from 2001 and 2002, and his existing reports on the statements originally made by the defectors.

According to the documents, the defectors, while speaking with precision about aspects of Iraqi military facilities like its stock of missiles, did not initially make some of the most provocative claims about weapons production or that an Iraqi official had met with Mr. bin Laden.

The precise circumstances under which the stories apparently changed remains unclear. The defectors themselves could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Zubaidi contends that the men altered their stories after they met with senior figures in the Iraqi National Congress. Mr. Zubaidi, who acknowledged that he had a bitter split with the I.N.C. in April 2003, said officials of the group prepped the defectors before allowing them to meet with the American intelligence agents and journalists.

“They intentionally exaggerated all the information so they would drag the United States into war,” Mr. Zubaidi said. “We all know the defectors had a little information on which they built big stories.”

Yesterday, Nabil Musawi, one of Mr. Chalabi’s deputies who met with the defectors, said that Mr. Zubaidi’s assertions were “childish,” and bore no relation to reality. He said it was not the role of Mr. Zubaidi or his associates to do full debriefings of the defectors. Nor was it the responsibility of the I.N.C. to grade the reliability of each defector, he said.

“Whether the defector failed or succeeded, it meant nothing to us,” Mr. Musawi said, speaking by phone from Jordan. “There’s no question we wanted to indict the regime, but I wish we had someone clever enough to sit down and come up with stories.”
For a short time last year, Mr. Zubaidi was in the spotlight, immediately after the old government was toppled in April 2003. Acting in the power vacuum of those early days, he tried to form a civil administration in Baghdad with himself as the executive, an effort that lasted about two weeks before he was taken into custody by the United States military for 12 days and ordered to desist. He later was arrested again and held for about five months. He said he believed his former colleagues at the Iraqi National Congress were behind his jailing, an assumption Mr. Musawi says is not true.

Since February, Mr. Zubaidi has been living quietly outside Beirut. He said he had not publicly discussed details of his role in locating defectors until he was contacted by The New York Times last month. He agreed to be interviewed at length, and to make available any records that had not been confiscated by the American military forces.
Francis Brooke, an adviser to Mr. Chalabi in Washington, said yesterday that Mr. Zubaidi had been an effective agent but maintained that he had never raised concerns about the credibility of the defectors. “Sounds to me like the guy is a loony,” Mr. Brooke said. “Who knows who he is working for now? He was working closely for us. He never indicated anything to me like that. It’s completely inconsistent with any other knowledge I have of how things worked.”

Mr. Zubaidi said he decided to speak out not because of bad feelings against individuals, but to correct the record. “I’m not trying to defame those people, although they betrayed the cause,” Mr. Zubaidi said. “Now they are bearing the consequences. I’m a witness. This is something for history.”

Mr. Brooke said the I.N.C.‘s quest to obtain information on outlawed weapons in Iraq became more pressing after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. On Sept. 20, 2001, with the Pentagon hallways still reeking of smoke and disaster, Mr. Chalabi met with the Defense Policy Board, a group of private citizens that advises the secretary of defense. The clear consensus was that Mr. Hussein had to be removed from power in Iraq, in the interests of stabilizing the region and thwarting his support for terrorists, according to Mr. Brooke, who accompanied Mr. Chalabi to the Pentagon.
For the Iraqi National Congress, which was created in 1992 with United States financial support, the attacks presented an opportunity to define their cause - overthrowing Saddam Hussein - within the newly redrawn agenda of the United States.

Mr. Brooke, an American citizen who works in Washington, said he moved quickly to seek fresh details from the group’s agents on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. “I say to everybody, and that includes everybody in my intelligence network, now is a real good time for information on those two subjects,” Mr. Brooke said. He instructed them, he said, to “highlight it, put it in red and send it to me right away.”

Mr. Zubaidi said he and his associates got that message. “My role during the process was to bring in the person, to write reports of what he said, and to give my personal information and opinion about what they were saying.”
Among the first, and most important, defectors was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a civil engineer who left Iraq in November 2001 and made his way to Syria. There, Mr. Zubaidi said, he had a chance encounter with one of Mr. Zubaidi’s associates in a travel agency, and they struck up a conversation. Mr. Saeed had run into legal problems with Iraqi officials, he said, and was eager to move his family to Australia, where his brother lives.

Over a period of weeks, Mr. Zubaidi said, Mr. Saeed disclosed that he had contracts with the government’s Military Industrial Organization that involved building and repairing concrete shelters and wells, which he believed were for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. He provided several hundred pages of documents, and had gone to school with an I.N.C. official who vouched for him.

Mr. Saeed, while financially comfortable, needed logistical help getting out of the Middle East because of problems with his travel documents, Mr. Zubaidi said. Mr. Saeed paid his family’s way to Bangkok, according to Mr. Zubaidi.

He was accompanied by Mr. Zubaidi’s associate, who was interviewed in Damascus last week but asked that he not be named. After several days in Bangkok, two I.N.C. officials arrived from London and spent about a day with Mr. Saeed. Their purpose, Mr. Brooke said, was to put the defector at ease before interviews with a reporter from The Times and a freelance television journalist who had worked occasionally for the I.N.C. but was filming Mr. Saeed for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
During his sessions with reporters, Mr. Saeed mentioned for the first time the facility underneath the hospital, according to both Mr. Zubaidi and his associate. Like other defectors, Mr. Saeed recounted his story to American intelligence agents. In Mr. Saeed’s case, the White House specifically mentioned his account in a background paper that accompanied a speech by Mr. Bush.

Inspectors from the United States government tried to find the facility in the hospital that Mr. Saeed described but could not, according to David Kay, who was appointed by Mr. Bush to lead the search for outlawed weapons.

“It wasn’t there, didn’t pan out, so people took that to mean that nothing else he said was true,” Mr. Kay said yesterday by telephone. He said that the war and uncontrolled looting created a “margin of error” about a number of suspected sites, but the hospital was not disturbed.

Mr. Musawi, one of the I.N.C. officials who prepared Mr. Saeed for his interview, said that he could not have coached Mr. Saeed because his information was far too technical. “What can you coach a chemical engineer who specializes in concrete sealing?” he asked.

Also in November 2001, Mr. Chalabi’s group arranged for press interviews with an Iraqi Army lieutenant general to whom Mr. Zubaidi had spoken. A reporter for The Times flew to Beirut to meet with the general, Jamal al-Ghurairy, who said groups of Islamic terrorists were training on an airplane fuselage to simulate hijackings.
“We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States,” Mr. Ghurairy said. During the interview, the general acknowledged his own involvement in the execution of thousands of Shiite Muslim rebels after the Persian Gulf war of 1991.

Before Mr. Ghurairy met with the reporter, Mr. Zubaidi had tried to get him to write out his account, but the general held out, according to a report provided by Mr. Zubaidi and dated Nov. 11, 2001. In that report, Mr. Zubaidi said that Mr. Ghurairy “played sick. He was being evasive so that he would get guarantees for facilitating his trip” to Europe or the United States.

Mr. Musawi, who had flown from London to Beirut to take part in the session, “assured him that we will secure their trip as soon as possible to any destination they want,” the report stated.
Mr. Zubaidi did not have a high opinion of the general’s probity. He wrote of Mr. Ghurairy, “He is an opportunist, cheap and manipulative. He has poetic interests and has a vivid imagination in making up stories.”

In February 2002, a third defector, Harith Assaf, a major in the Iraqi intelligence service, was filmed by the CBS News program “60 Minutes” speaking about mobile biological weapons laboratories that he said were put into seven refrigerated trucks. Mr. Assaf also described a meeting between a member of the Iraqi government and Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan.

When Mr. Zubaidi objected and tried to stop the interview, Mr. Musawi, who had come with the television crew from London, said he insisted that it continue. “I told him, ‘It’s not your call. I’m allowing the story to be told,’ ” Mr. Musawi said.

Mr. Zubaidi said that the major, Mr. Assaf, had not revealed the purported bin Laden meeting and the mobile laboratories during discussions that had begun three months earlier. His diary entry for Feb. 11, 2002, says: “After the interview, an argument with Nabil about their way of working, especially the connection with bin Laden.” In a follow-up story in March 2004, “60 Minutes” reported that Mr. Assaf had been deemed unreliable by American intelligence. In addition, the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks has said that while there were reports of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda, they did not appear to have “resulted in a collaborative relationship.”

Mr. Musawi said the risk to the I.N.C. of coaching defectors was considerable, because it had enemies in Washington. If a story was quickly disproved, he said, “We would look pretty stupid.”

Despite this, Mr. Kay said that during the hunt for weapons last year, a number of the defectors admitted they were lying after being put through a polygraph test. “Some of them claimed to have been coached by the I.N.C., and some of them claimed to have been coached on how to pass polygraphs,” Mr. Kay said.

Mr. Zubaidi said, “I don’t want to criticize U.S. agencies, but it’s strange that the U.S. with all its powerful agencies, the C.I.A., could not manage to know the truth from the lies in these people.”

Samar Aboul-Fotouh contributed reporting from Syria and Lebanonfor this article.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0C15FA385F0C7A8CDDAE0894DC404482
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For further journalistic inquiry, see this link :

http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3057

Miller Brouhaha  
The New York Times’ Judith Miller has been pummelled unmercifully for her reporting on the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But coverage of this murky subject has hardly been the finest hour for the news media in general.
By Charles Layton
Charles Layton is an AJR contributing writer.   

Ce qu’en dit le India Daily

Mais sans être totalement machiavelique ne pourrait-on pas supposer que les Américains ont préféré se laisser battre afin d’avoir des arguments pour obtenir plus de fric pour renouveler leur équipement ???

http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/06-18-04.asp

The real story behind Indian Air Force Superiority over US Air Force - USAF underestimated Indians as Iraqis or Iranians

Balaji Reddy, Special Correspondent
June 18, 2004
“Surprising sophistication of Indian fighter aircraft and skill of Indian pilots” stunned the US Air Force. A June 2 article in the magazine Inside the Air Force reported –“The exercise, in which US F-15Cs were said to have been defeated more than 90 per cent of the time in direct combat exercises against the IAF, is causing US Air Force officials to re-evaluate the way the service trains its fighter pilots while bolstering the case for buying the F/A-22 as a way to ensure continued air dominance for the United States.”
The magazine quoted US officials who participated in the exercise as saying it should “provide a reality check for those who had assumed unquestioned US air superiority.”

What really happened is as follows: US Air Force underestimated the India Air force Pilots and their numerical skill. They thought these are another set of Iraqi or Iranian Pilots. The numerical analysis and problem solving capability of IAF Pilots are well known and are probably the best in the world. In absence of signal intelligence, satellite guidance and automated software control, USAF faced Indians who were world class and
far superior than their US counterpart. IAF recruits the country’s best brains in Air Force. It is prestigious too. USAF can only recruit willing average or slightly above average. In addition, in absence of superior communication and jamming, Indians proved absolutely formidable.

On the face of it, the performance of the IAF, with its oft-reported air crashes in an aging, non-American fleet, might seem surprising. But US officials told the magazine that the Indians were much better than they had bargained for.

“What happened to us was it looks like our red air training might not be as good because the adversaries are better than we thought,” the article quoted Col. Mike Snodgrass, commander of the 3rd Wing at Elmendorf Air Force Base, as saying. “And in the case of the Indian Air Force both their training and some of their equipment was better than we anticipated.”

“Red air” refers to the way the US Air Force simulates enemy capability in air combat training. US officials emphasised that such simulation deliberately handicap US planes and pilots against the enemy because the service has assumed for years that its fighters are more capable than enemy aircraft.

In Cope Thunder, four F-15Cs were pitted against 10 or 12 of same model Indian fighters such as the Mirage 2000, MIG-27 and MIG-29s in offensive and defensive counter air scenarios. But the two most formidable IAF aircraft proved to be the MIG-21 Bison, an upgraded version of the Russian-made baseline MIG-21, and the Sukhoi SU-30K Flanker, US officials said.

“What we faced were superior numbers, and an IAF pilot who was very proficient in his aircraft and smart on tactics. That combination was tough for us to overcome,” the magazine quoted a US airman who took part in the exercise as saying.

While acknowledging the performance of their Indian colleagues, who they will meet again in another air combat exercise in Alaska next month, the US airmen also made a major pitch for the F/A-22 aircraft that the US government has been slow to embrace because of its cost and lack of a perceived threat.

“The major takeaway for the Air Force is that our prediction of needing to replace the F-15 with the F/A-22 is proving out as we get smarter and smarter about other [countries’] capabilities around the world and what technology is limited to in the F-15 airframe,” Col. Snodgrass said. “We’ve taken [the F-15] about as far as we can and it’s now time to move to the next generation.”

IAF flies high on Uncle Sam’s accolades
RAJAT PANDIT

TIMES NEWS NETWORK[
Effectivement, j’ai trouvé confirmation de cette étonnante défaite apéricaine à différents endroits,notamment sur le site du Times of India

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/754545.cms

SATURDAY, JUNE 26, 2004

02:21:12 AM ]

NEW DELHI: For a force constantly under heavy fire for its unusually high rate of accidents, the Indian Air Force now finally has something to cheer about: accolades for its sophisticated fighters and, of course, the tactical skills of the men behind the machines.

What adds to the “feel-good” factor is that the praise is emanating from the world’s most advanced force, the United States Air Force.

“The Americans exercised against our Sukhoi-30s… they are yet to get a taste of the our new Sukhoi-30MKI air dominance fighters acquired from Russia,” brags a young officer.

Well, IAF officers certainly have a reason to feel smug. Reports say the USAF was rudely jolted out of its complacency during the first-ever joint air combat exercise with India, “Cope India-04”, held in Gwalior in February.

The Indian pilots, flying Sukhoi-30s and other jets, simply outgunned the top-gun American pilots on their F-15Cs during the exercise, recording most of the “kills” in direct air combat.

The exercise broke new ground by pitting top-notch Russian and American fighters against each other for the first time.

“The Great Himalayan Eagles proved deadlier than American Bald Eagles. The two eagles, incidentally, were the symbols of the exercise,” said an officer. 

A part ce qu’il en est dit dans le livre de ce général indien, a-t-on bien confirmation par d’autres sources de cette défaite de l’avion US au cours d’un match amical avec les sukoi de l’aviation indienne ?

Une défaite 9-1, ça paraît quand même peu croyable, non ?

“la décision a été prise à la suite d’un ordre du général américian” ... je me demande ce qu’ils ont demandé aux polonais ? ... un bel ordre d’attaque sans doute ... les polonais ne doivent pas adhérer pleinement au fameux : “it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it”

Les forces polonaises remettent Najaf et Qadissiyah aux Américains
AFP | 09.08.04 | 18h32

Les forces polonaises en Irak ont remis aux troupes américaines le contrôle des provinces irakiennes de Najaf et de Qadissiyah, au sud de Bagdad, a annoncé lundi la division multinationale dirigée par la Pologne dans un communiqué cité par l’agence de presse polonaise PAP.La décision a été prise à la suite d’un ordre du général américain George Casey, cité par le colonel Artur Domanski, porte-parole de la division multinationale commandée par la Pologne.Des combats font rage à Najaf, une ville sainte chiite où plus de 360 miliciens chiites et quatre soldats américains ont été tués depuis cinq jours, selon l’armée américaine à Bagdad.

THE RACE TO THE WHITE HOUSE

Allies Not in Formation on Kerry’s Troops Plan

Nations have a hard time supporting his proposal to use their soldiers to fill out the force in Iraq.

By Paul Richter and Maria L. La Ganga
LA Times Staff Writers

August 9, 2004

WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry has staked much of his campaign on a proposal he hopes will convince voters that he can extricate the United States from Iraq more quickly and at less cost than President Bush.

But Kerry’s plan, which promises to effectively shift much of the Iraq war burden from America to its allies, so far is failing to receive the international support the proposal must have to succeed.

Kerry in recent appearances and interviews has been intensifying his effort to spotlight what he sees as the Bush administration’s mistakes in Iraq — especially the failure to broaden international involvement — as a fundamental difference between the two candidates. But Kerry’s proposals depend on changing the minds of foreign leaders who do not want to defy their electorates by sending forces into what many consider to be a U.S.-made mess.

“I understand why John Kerry is making proposals of this kind, but there is a lack of realism in them,” Menzies Campbell, a British lawmaker who is a spokesman on defense issues for the Liberal Democratic Party, said in a typical comment.

Many allied countries may welcome a new team in Washington after years of friction with the Bush administration. But foreign leaders are making it clear they don’t want to add enough of their own troops to allow U.S. forces to scale back to a minority share in Iraq, as Kerry has proposed.

Allies say they are ready to consider further financial aid and other help for the fragile new Iraqi government. But some officials overseas already are fretting about Kerry’s talk of burden-shifting.

“Some Europeans are rather concerned that Mr. Kerry might have expectations for relief [from abroad] that are going to be hard to meet,” said one senior European diplomat in a statement echoed in several capitals.

In an interview with The Times last week, Kerry said that by building up international support, it would be a “reasonable goal” to replace most U.S. troops in Iraq with foreign forces within his first term. There are now about 140,000 U.S. troops stationed there, or 88% of a total international force of about 160,000.

In the last several days, Kerry has begun arguing that he could substantially reduce the number of U.S. troops within the first six months of a Kerry administration. In an interview with National Public Radio on Friday, Kerry said: “I believe that within a year from now, we could significantly reduce American forces in Iraq, and that’s my plan.”

The proposal could be accomplished by increasing the number of foreign troops and boosting the size of the Iraqi security force, Kerry aides say.

Yet some key countries have already ruled out providing troops, and others are badly strained from the deployments they have already made.

The French and German governments have made clear that sending troops is out of the question. British officials have made no such categorical statement, but they have expressed concern that their troops are overstretched.

Although Japan has supplied a 550-member noncombat force as a symbol of its international commitment, analysts there see little chance the nation would agree to send more.

Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Andrei Denisov, ruled out a commitment of troops. “We are not going to send anybody there, and that’s all there is to say,” Denisov said.

“From the major European countries, there’s simply not a lot of available troops out there, for both practical and political reasons,” said Christopher Makins, president of the Atlantic Council of the United States, which supports U.S. engagement abroad.

Many allied countries have a limited number of troops suitable for the Iraq mission, and most of those are already deployed on other missions, including in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Africa, Makins said.

Dana Allin of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London said, “I think there’s no question, in general, you’ll find it easier to get cooperation from allies if there is a new [U.S.] administration.” But Allin added that if new troops were to be sent to Iraq “it’s unclear where they would come from.”

Kerry has at times said he would particularly like to bring in troops from Arab countries. But diplomats, including those from Arab nations, say they consider the scenario unlikely. The Iraqi interim government has for months excluded the possibility of any peacekeeping troops coming from immediate neighbors, in part because the Iraqi people would be suspicious of neighbors’ intentions.

The recent collapse of a Saudi proposal to bring in peacekeeping troops from other Arab and Muslim countries also indicates the long odds against the idea.

Senior Iraqi officials told U.S. officials this summer that they opposed the idea of bringing in additional troops from any foreign country.

Campbell, the British lawmaker, added that Kerry “has to overcome the very considerable barrier of the fact that he himself voted for military action in support of President Bush.”

Analysts said, moreover, that if the United States was able to reduce its military by substantial numbers in Iraq, at least one or two major nations — such as France or Britain — would have to accept a lead role.

Kerry’s proposal comes at a time when the Bush administration is struggling to convince about 30 countries to keep their troops in Iraq. Late last month, Ukraine announced that it would start negotiations to pull out some of its 1,650 troops in Iraq, the fourth-largest non-U.S. contingent.

Kerry, however, insists that he can gather international support by showing leadership and by giving other countries decision-making authority they have not had before now.

But the Massachusetts senator has repeatedly declined to say how he would find the added support, saying it is unwise to get into the details of diplomacy. “No future president should ever lay this out on the table,” he has said.

A senior foreign policy advisor to Kerry, who asked to remain unidentified, said that campaign officials knew through foreign contacts that other governments would cooperate.

“There are enough indications through enough channels that we wouldn’t be saying it if we didn’t think we could do it,” the advisor said.

A spokesman for the Bush campaign scoffed at the Democrats’ claim to have such support. Steve Schmidt recalled the highly publicized squabble early in the campaign in which Kerry claimed the support of unspecified foreign leaders.

“He won’t name the foreign leaders,” Schmidt said. “He won’t disclose the conversations.”

Kerry has proposed two other measures he has said would help draw support — convening an international conference on Iraq and naming through international consultations a “high commissioner,” with U.N. backing, to give other countries more say.

Several diplomats said allies would probably welcome signals of new interest in consultation. But they said that, with sovereignty now assumed by an interim Iraqi government, there was no longer a demand for an international authority that could give the occupation a legitimacy that was missing under U.S. military control.

“Nine months or a year ago, this could have made a difference,” said the senior European diplomat. “Now, it’s too late.”

At this point, he said, many of the allies think it would be better to concentrate on providing help directly to the new Iraqi government to improve its chances of creating a stable democracy.

Makins, of the Atlantic Council, said he thought the Kerry proposal for a conference and joint leadership would have limited value in drawing allies into a new partnership.

“I don’t think it would be a deal maker, as far as European participation,” he said. “I think major governments are looking for ways to build up the Iraqi government and constitutional process.”

Another Kerry proposal is to rebuild relationships with foreign governments by permitting them to bid for U.S. reconstruction contracts. Under Bush, companies from countries that didn’t take part in the Iraq war coalition were excluded from bidding for prime contracts.

But now, the administration has announced it will allow all comers to bid for a new tranche of contracts in September. Yet some of the European countries that were excluded from the earlier rounds have said for months that their industries never clamored for permission to seek such contracts.

Leaders from allied countries emphasized that they would be ready to reconsider financial aid and other assistance to Iraq under either a Kerry or Bush administration. Some said that they already had stepped up financial assistance to Iraq, even as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization military alliance agreed to Iraqi requests to begin training local security forces.

As they assess Kerry’s proposal, foreign leaders also are trying to decipher where he stands philosophically on Iraq. Similar questions have followed Kerry in his campaign at home.

Kerry, even when he supported the congressional resolution in October 2002 that authorized the war, has been consistent in pressing for more international backing for U.S. policies toward Iraq and reconstruction efforts there.

“The international community’s support will be critical because we will not be able to rebuild Iraq single-handedly,” Kerry said in an October 2002 Senate speech in which he outlined steps he thought Bush should take. “We will lack the credibility and the expertise and the capacity.”

In an address at UCLA in late February, 16 months later, Kerry said, “It is time to return to the United Nations and return America to the community of nations and share both authority and responsibility in Iraq.”

Addressing the Democratic National Convention on July 29, Kerry echoed the same themes. “I know what we have to do in Iraq,” he told delegates. “We need a president who has the credibility to bring our allies to our side and share the burden, reduce the cost to American taxpayers and reduce the risk to American soldiers.”

But while he has criticized the Bush administration’s competence, he has not challenged the fundamentals of its policy, nor the path it is following toward Iraq’s own upcoming elections.

Still, polls suggest that many Europeans and Asians would prefer a new administration. A recent survey found 77% of Germans prefer Kerry, to 10% for Bush; another found that 13% of Russians “like” Bush as a politician, while 60% dislike him.

There is a widespread public expectation in Europe — despite what U.S. polls show — that Bush will be ousted in November because of the troubled course of the Iraq war, analysts said.

But many European diplomats say they are coming to the conclusion that Bush and Kerry are close on key international issues and that there would be substantial continuity between the administrations.

Kerry, like Bush, insists that U.S. troops should not be tried before the International Criminal Court, the multinational tribunal that has been a contentious subject between Europe and the United States. The U.S. has not ratified creation of the court.

On another issue that divides the United States and Europe, Kerry has signaled that he would track the Bush administration on dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although he has said he would more aggressively seek a solution.

One German newspaper, the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, suggested Europeans were in for a rude awakening if Kerry becomes president. Under the headline “The Big Kerry Illusion,” the newspaper said Kerry would diverge from Bush, but any hope that he would more fully embrace the “global village” was “wishful thinking that will get a cold shower.”

By contrast, there is a widespread belief in Russia that a Kerry win would launch a new era of U.S.-European goodwill — a prospect Russian leaders view with alarm.

The Russian government is happy with tensions between Bush and Europe, which gives Moscow an opening to build its own relations with European governments and distracts world attention from its own difficulties, analysts said.

“The Kremlin feels very comfortable with the notion that Bush is playing the enfant terrible in the world arena, because of his Middle East policy, and thus he keeps distracting the world from, for example, problems in Russia,” said Stanislav Belkovsky, general director of the National Strategy Council, a think tank considered close to Russian security services. “The Kremlin is not at all interested in the Democrats’ victory in the presidential polls.”

*

————————————————————————————————————————
Times staff writers Bruce Wallace in Tokyo, Jeffrey Fleishman in Berlin, Kim Murphy in Moscow, Janet Stobart in London, Achrene Sicakyuz in Paris, Michael Finnegan in St. Louis and Maggie Farley in New York contributed to this report.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-kerryiraq9aug09.story

GEOPOLITICS - OPINION
Turkey’s Chill Further Isolates Israel

Ankara’s terrorist-state charge sets back a relationship that once was expanding. The change is laid in part to internal Turkish concerns.

By Henri J. Barkey

Henri J. Barkey, chairman of the international relations department at Lehigh University, was on the State Department’s policy planning staff (1998-2000).

August 8, 2004

BETHLEHEM, Pa. — In May, when Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan characterized Israel’s incursions into the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza as the actions of a terrorist state, there was no mistaking that something had gone terribly awry in Turkish-Israeli relations. Their correct but standoffish relationship began to blossom in 1996. So numerous were their military agreements and commercial deals that it appeared, certainly in the Arab world, that the two countries were entering a strategic relationship.

Turkey’s changed tone doesn’t signify the end of the relationship, but it augurs a time of greater differences ahead, as well as underlining Israel’s increasing isolation. The worsening situation in the Palestinian territories and the rise of the post-Sept. 11 terrorist threat have contributed to the falling-out. But the transformation in Turkish attitudes also stems from internal developments in Turkey.

The most important domestic change is the political ascent of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party. Yet despite its leaders’ desire to be moderate and centrist, the party cannot escape its roots in Turkey’s Islamist movement. To its credit, the party has charted a liberal and reformist agenda to facilitate Turkey’s entry into the European Union. At the same time, Justice and Development has had to be careful not to rile Turkey’s military establishment, which is anxious about Erdogan’s growing power. For example, the party has backed down on such divisive religious issues as relaxing the ban on women wearing headscarves in government offices, schools and universities.

Erdogan’s blast at Israel similarly gives his party some political maneuvering room. First and foremost, it signals to his bedrock supporters that though the party at times makes concessions to the military, it can hold its own when it comes to Tel Aviv. On this the Turkish public is solidly behind the Justice and Development Party, because the Palestinian issue has always been important to Turks. Furthermore, limiting contacts with Israel puts the military on the defensive. Many Turks, especially Erdogan’s rank and file, regard the Israeli-Turkish relationship as the creation of the military, which needed access to weaponry, and Israel’s staunchest friend, Washington.

There are other reasons for Turkey’s new ambivalence toward Israel. The Turkish government is more self-confident than at any time in recent history. Reflecting a palpable transformation in Europe’s attitude toward it, Turkey’s prospect for getting a date to begin accession negotiations with the EU is excellent. No longer is the country perceived as crisis-prone. Turkish views are well received, and Turkey’s leaders enjoy greater esteem. As a result, the Justice and Development Party doesn’t need to curry favor with either Israel or its powerful supporters in Washington.

Second, the party wants to cash in Turkey’s new respectability for a greater say in international institutions. It was no coincidence that Erdogan’s criticism of Israel came soon after Ankara succeeded in landing the secretary-general office in the Organization of Islamic Countries.

Finally, Turkey’s harsher attitude toward Tel Aviv coincides with an unprecedented anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic diatribe in the Turkish press. Conspiracy theories, many of them with origins in Sept. 11, abound about Israel’s abilities and intentions everywhere in the world. My favorite one was in a recent column in Turkey’s most pro-government paper. It claimed that the events in Darfur, Sudan, were the result of Israel’s desire to claim the waters of the Nile. The Israelis, the conspiracy asserts, induced its Ethiopian Christian allies to rebel against the Sudanese government. Not only did the columnist not know where Darfur is, but he also was ignorant of the fact that the genocide in Darfur is perpetrated by Arab Muslim Sudanese on African Muslims.

Exaggerated, if not unsubstantiated, reports in the U.S. media about Israeli activities in northern Iraq have fed this frenzy. Israel’s long-standing connections to Iraq’s Kurds have added to the anxiety among Turks, who believe that Israel wants another like-minded non-Arab state in the region in the hope of undermining Arab unity. Ankara fears that such a Kurdish state would inspire Turkey’s Kurds, who make up about 20% of the country’s population, to seek independence of their own. Although it’s in Israel’s interests that Iraq remain a unified — albeit federal — state devoid of fundamentalist impulses a la Iran, few in Turkey would believe this.

The developments in Turkey, as important as they are in altering its attitude toward Tel Aviv, are also another manifestation of Israel’s growing isolation. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s unilateralist policies and seeming indifference to their political costs have erased much of the goodwill his predecessors had built up in parts of the world. One only need to return to August 1999, when Israeli rescue teams, credited with saving many lives, were the first on the ground after a terrible earthquake in Turkey. Today, those efforts have disappeared from the collective Turkish memory.

The change in Turkey-Israeli atmospherics is not a welcome development for Washington, which had hailed and supported the two countries’ rapprochement. It means that Washington’s role as Israel’s lone supporter, and all the attendant consequences, will only grow.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-barkey8aug08.story

THE NATION
Private, Public Roles Overlap in Washington

Insiders are advising officials and working for businesses that profit from government contracts. It’s a growing pattern of networking.

By Walter F. Roche Jr.
Times Staff Writer

August 8, 2004

WASHINGTON — Suzanne H. Woolsey is a trustee of a little-known defense consulting group that had inside access to senior Pentagon leaders directing the Iraq war. Last January, she joined the board of California-based Fluor Corp.

Soon afterward, Fluor and a joint venture partner won about $1.6 billion in Iraq reconstruction contracts.

Her husband, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, a leading advocate for the war, is serving as a government policy advisor. He too works for a firm with war-related interests.

The Woolseys’ overlapping affiliations are part of a growing pattern in Washington in which individuals play key roles in quasi-governmental organizations advising officials on major policy issues but also are involved with private businesses in related fields.

Such activities generally are not covered by conflict of interest laws or ethics rules. But they underscore an insiders network in which contacts and relationships developed inside the government can meld with individual financial interests.

Suzanne Woolsey, 62, is a former executive with the National Academies, the institution that advises the government on science, engineering and medicine. In October 2000, she was named a trustee of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit corporation paid by the government to do research for the Pentagon.

James Woolsey, 62, who headed the CIA from 1993 to 1995, is a member of the Defense Policy Board, an unpaid advisory panel serving Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials. Woolsey is also on CIA and Navy advisory boards and was a founding member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a private advocacy group set up in 2002 at the instigation of the White House to build public support for the war.

He is also a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting firm that co-sponsored a May 1, 2003, conference on business opportunities in the reconstruction of Iraq. Woolsey was one of the keynote speakers for the event.

Booz Allen is a subcontractor on a $75-million telecommunications project in Iraq. The firm does extensive work for the Defense Department as well. It was recently awarded $14 million in contracts by the Navy. The former CIA director said in an interview that he had not been involved in Booz Allen’s Iraq contracts.

Last month, Woolsey appeared at a Capitol Hill news conference to announce the creation of a group called the Committee of the Present Danger, which he said would try to focus public attention on the threat “to the U.S. and the civilized world from Islamic terrorism.”

Others with war-related overlapping interests include Richard N. Perle and Christopher A. Williams.

Perle, assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, was chairman of the Defense Advisory Board but stepped down from that post and eventually the board itself after questions were raised about possible conflicts between his advisory role and his private business interests.

Christopher A. Williams, a former aide to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), is another Defense Policy Board member. He has registered as a lobbyist for Boeing and other defense contractors.

In Suzanne Woolsey’s case, during the U.S.-led attack on Iraq, the Institute for Defense Analyses provided senior Pentagon officials with assessments of the operation.

Personnel from the institute formed part of an 18-member civilian analysis team working from the Joint Warfighting Center in Virginia.

The operation was described in a June 3, 2003, briefing by Army Brig.Gen. Robert W. Cone. “This team did business within the Centcom headquarters on a daily basis by observing meeting and planning sessions, attending command updates, watching key decisions being made, watching problems being solved and generally being provided unrestricted access to the business of the conduct of this war,” Cone said, according to a transcript of the session.

Tax records show Suzanne Woolsey was paid $11,500 in trustee fees for serving on the Institute for Defense Analyses board last year.

A spokesman for Fluor declined to discuss why she had been invited to become a director or what role if any she played in the company’s Iraq contracts. Fluor pays its outside directors $40,000 a year, plus stock options and additional fees for attending meetings, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records and the Fluor spokesman.

At the National Academies, Suzanne Woolsey served as chief operating officer from 1993 to 2000 and as chief communications officer from 2000 to 2003. She also is a former newspaper editorial writer and holds degrees in psychology.

Her appointment to Fluor’s board came in late January 2004, while Fluor and its joint venture partner, AMEC, were competing for two federal contracts to do reconstruction work in Iraq.

A little over a month after her appointment, Fluor and AMEC got both contracts, with a combined value of $1.6 billion.

Records show Fluor’s stock has risen steadily since the war began; it has a price of about $42 a share, up from about $30 a share in March of 2003.

According to reports filed with the SEC, Woolsey owns 1,500 shares of Fluor stock and could gain an additional 800 shares under a deferred compensation program.

In a Jan. 27 news release announcing Woolsey’s appointment to Fluor’s board, the company noted that she was a trustee for the Institute for Defense Analyses. Fluor’s chairman and chief executive, Alan L. Boeckmann, said, “Sue’s expertise in and passion for government policy, private industry and science will be important enhancements to our board.”

Earlier, Fluor had won two other government contracts for reconstruction work in Iraq. These contracts had a potential value of more than $1.5 billion over the next five years, according to company spokesman Jerry Holloway. They covered a range of assignments including power generation, construction of a U.S. military camp and a subcontract to renovate an Iraqi military facility.

Holloway said all the contracts — the first one dates to April of last year — were awarded on a competitive basis. He noted that many of Fluor’s contracts were awarded before Woolsey’s appointment.

Holloway said the actual amount paid to Fluor under its Iraq contracts may never reach the company’s potential $2.5-billion share; the ultimate amount will depend on the individual work orders issued to the company by federal agencies.

Still, Fluor considered the Iraq contracts an important element in its financial performance. In a recent SEC filing, the company reported that its revenue for the first quarter of the current fiscal year from work in Iraq totaled “approximately $190 million. There was no work in Iraq in the comparable period in 2003.”

The quarterly report concluded that increased profits in the first quarter were primarily due to work in Iraq along with the purchase of a new company.

According to other filings with the SEC, Suzanne Woolsey is also affiliated with other firms, including the Paladin Capital Group, a Washington venture capital firm in which her husband is a partner.

Suzanne Woolsey did not respond to messages left for her at Paladin and at Fluor.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-woolsey8aug08.story

Bravo pour le commentaire. Il est vrai que les Français ont une vue idyllique des Etats-Unis, je pense cependant que cela est due à la confusion entretenue entre l’Amérique et les Etats-Unis. On pense à l’Amérique du noble sauvage, des grands espaces, de la nature en discourant sur les Etats-Unis. D’ailleurs, dans le film ”Mon oncle d’Amérique” un des personnages a eu cette remarque très frappante (pour moi au moins): l’Amérique n’exite pas, j’y étais.

Nos amis états-uniens ont l’air décidés à tuer le logiciel libre Linux.

Le Parlement Européen semble (étonnamment ?) décidé à soutenir Linux.

Mais le Conseil des Ministres semble préférer, pour on ne sait quelle obscure raison, faire plaisir à l’Oncle Sam. Probablement parce qu’ils sont tout autant inféodés au capitalisme néo-libéral que le sont les membres de l’establishment US.

Une pétition est lancée pour sauver Linux sur le site http://petition.eurolinux.org/index_html?LANG=en

Voici ce que l’on trouve sur le site ZDnet sur la question :

http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/business/0,39020715,39163808,00.htm?feed

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Le noyau Linux sous la menace de 283 brevets de logiciels déposés aux États-Unis

Par Estelle Dumout

ZDNet France

Lundi 2 août 2004

Selon une étude réalisée pour le compte d’une société d’assurances, quelque 280 brevets, encore non validés par les tribunaux, pourraient être utilisés contre les utilisateurs de solutions Linux.

Le noyau Linux pourrait potentiellement enfreindre 283 inventions validées comme telles par l’Office américain des brevets et des marques (US PTO). Telle est la principale conclusion d’une enquête publiée le 2 août par Open Source Risk Management (OSRM), une compagnie d’assurances spécialisée dans la gestion des risques juridiques liés à l’utilisation de logiciels à “code source ouvert”, et en particulier ceux soumis à la licence GPL des “logiciels libres”.

Cette étude aux conclusions radicales a été réalisée par Dan Ravicher, un avocat américain spécialiste des questions de propriété intellectuelle. Fondateur de la Public Patent Foundation aux États-Unis, il est aussi le principal conseiller juridique de la Free Software Foundation (FSF), le groupe de militants historique des solutions GNU/Linux et de la GPL.

«J’ai une bonne et une mauvaise nouvelle», lance Dan Ravicher dans un communiqué. Côté positif, il a passé en revue tous les brevets logiciels validés en appel par les tribunaux américains: selon son analyse, les versions 2.4 et 2.6 du noyau ou “kernel” Linux ne contreviennent à aucun d’entre eux.

Toutefois, la médaille a son revers. «La mauvaise nouvelle est que nous avons identifié 283 brevets logiciels publiés, mais non encore validés par les tribunaux, qui contiennent des détails pouvant être raisonnablement utilisés contre les utilisateurs professionnels de logiciels à base de noyau Linux», souligne Dan Ravicher. «Ces derniers s’exposeraient, si ces brevets venaient à être validés, à de lourdes conséquences financières.»

Un tiers des brevets aux mains des amis de Linux

L’avocat refuse cependant de dresser un tableau alarmiste de la situation: environ un tiers de ces brevets sont détenus «par de grandes entreprises qui sont favorables à Linux, certaines d’entre elles ayant même des intérêts financiers à voir l’adoption de ces solutions se développer: Cisco Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, Sony…» Reste une ombre au tableau: Microsoft, adversaire déclaré des solutions open source en général, et des logiciels libres GPL en particulier, détient 27 de ces 283 inventions, le reste étant entre les mains de particuliers ou de sociétés «qui n’ont rien à perdre à entamer des procédures légales contre les utilisateurs professionnels de Linux, à la recherche de compromis lucratifs».

«Au final, nous avons confirmé ce que la communauté savait déjà: [l’utilisation de] Linux, comme n’importe quel autre produit à succès, comporte des risques au niveau des brevets», poursuit Dan Ravicher. La question est au cœur de toutes les polémiques depuis que la société SCO, qui détient des droits sur le système propriétaire Unix System V, prétend que le noyau Linux et les distributions complètes qui l’utilisent ont en quelque sorte “plagié” Unix. SCO s’en est pris à des poids lourds de l’informatique, dont IBM, puis a tenté d’imposer des licences aux autres utilisateurs; avec un relatif insuccès pour l’instant.

OSRM profite opportunément de la publication de cette étude pour présenter sa nouvelle police d’assurance, qui devrait être lancée d’ici le début de 2005. Pour 150.000 dollars par an, cette police couvre, dans la limite de 5 millions de dollars, tous les coûts d’une entreprise qui serait poursuivie pour son utilisation des solutions à base du noyau Linux.

Avec Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com

Une dépêche de Reuters nous apprend que l’on trouve à présent du Prozac, l’antidépresseur le plus connu, dans l’eau des robinets britanniques. Serait-ce le moyen trouvé par Tony Blair pour remonter le moral de ses concitoyens déprimés par son affligeante politique ? Non, il semble plutôt que ce qui se passe dans la vie de tous les jours les déprime tant qu’ils prennent leur Prozac en telle quantité que celui-ci se retrouve dans leurs excrétions et fini par se retrouver dans l’eau retraitée. Cela en dit long sur notre merveilleuse société occidentale de libre-échange. La logique capitaliste néo-libérale ne semble pouvoir fonctionner qu’en détruisant les liens entre les êtres humains, et donc en détruisant ceux-ci, comme le montrent par exemple les films lucides de Ken Loach (Navigator et d’autres…)

On pourrait aussi voir dans cette “prozacisation” de l’eau courante une illustration singulière du virtualisme : on prend du Prozac pour mener une existence somme toute artificielle, permettant de peindre en rose tous les aspects effroyablement noirs de notre condition d’esclaves du capitalisme avancé et nous nous le refilons les uns aux autres par l’anus et la vessie. Nous permettant ainsi mutuellement de continuer à prendre, toujours davantage… des vessies pour des lanternes.

Question subsidiaire : quelle quantité de Prozac y a-t-il dans l’eau des robinets des autres pays ? En France et en Belgique ? Aux Etats-Unis ?

Amusons-nous un peu, même s’il n’y a vraiment pas de quoi rire : pourrait-on élaborer une mesure du degré de virtualisme d’un pays à partir de ce paramètre ?

Dernière réflexion qui montre à quel point on est bien en plein virtualisme dans toute cette affaire : des méta-analyses statistiques effectuées par Irving Kirsch (Université du Connecticut) montreraient que l’efficacité du Prozac est à peine supérieure à celle de l’Effet Placebo. Pour ceux que cela intéresse, son texte “Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo:
A Meta-Analysis of Antidepressant Medication” se trouve en ligne à l’adresse :

http://www.journals.apa.org/prevention/volume1/pre0010002a.html

Cette analyse est par ailleurs congruente aux réflexions de Philippe Pignarre dans son excellent livre “Comment la dépression est devenue une épidémie” (Editions La Découverte). L’auteur y met l’accent sur les effets en boucle de contagion mentale et d’imitation. Bref, sur le virtualisme…

Report: Prozac Found in Britain’s Drinking Water

8/8/2004

“LONDON (Reuters) - Traces of the anti-depressant Prozac have been found in Britain’s drinking water supply, setting off alarm bells with environmentalists concerned about potentially toxic effects.

The Observer newspaper said Sunday that a report by the government’s environment watchdog found Prozac was building up in river systems and groundwater used for drinking supplies.

The exact quantity of Prozac in the drinking water was unknown, but the Environment Agency’s report concluded Prozac could be potentially toxic in the water table.

Experts say that Prozac finds its way into rivers and water systems from treated sewage water, and some believe the drugs could affect reproductive ability.

A spokesman for Britain’s Drinking Water Inspectorate said Prozac was likely to be found in a considerably watered down form that was unlikely to pose a health risk.
“It is extremely unlikely that there is a risk, as such drugs are excreted in very low concentrations,” the spokesman said. “Advanced treatment processes installed for pesticide removal are effective in removing drug residues.”

But environmentalists called for an urgent investigation into the findings.

Norman Baker, environment spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said it looked “like a case of hidden mass medication upon the unsuspecting public.”
“It is alarming that there is no monitoring of levels of Prozac and other pharmacy residues in our drinking water,” he told the Observer.

The Environment Agency has held a series of meetings with the pharmaceutical industry to discuss any repercussions for human health or the ecosystem, the Observer said.

Prescription of anti-depressants has surged in Britain. In the decade up to 2001, overall prescriptions of antidepressants rose from 9 million to 24 million a year, the paper said. “

source: courrier international.

Un haut fonctionnaire de l’administration américaine a proposé, quelques jours après les attentats du 11 septembre 2001, de “surprendre les terroristes” en attaquant l’Amérique du Sud ou l’Asie du Sud-Est au lieu de l’Afghanistan qui, selon lui, “manquait de bonnes cibles”, rapporte l’hebdomadaire américain Newsweek.

L’idée, révélée dans le récent rapport de la commission d’enquête sur le 11 septembre 2001, dans une volumineuse note de bas de page, recommandait “une attaque envers des groupes terroristes en Amérique du Sud, par exemple à la jonction des trois frontières du Brésil, de l’Argentine et du Paraguay, où la présence d’Iraniens soutenus par le Hezbollah a été enregistrée”. L’objectif était de capturer des terroristes en dehors des zones surveillées comme l’Afghanistan, là où aucune attaque n’était redoutée, et “également de provoquer un effet boule de neige sur d’autres opérations terroristes”, relate Newsweek.

La note de bas de page reprend le contenu d’un mémo top secret et anonyme, néanmoins attribué au sous-secrétaire à la Défense Douglas Feith. Dans ce mémo figuraient “de nombreux documents du Pentagone avançant des idées peu orthodoxes sur la guerre contre la terreur”, soutient Newsweek. Certaines de ces idées suggérait d’attaquer “des cibles en dehors du Moyen-Orient comme première riposte” ou “des cibles qui ne sont pas liées à Al Qaida, comme par exemple l’Irak.”

Les suggestions concernant les attaques en Amérique du Sud, informe le journal, seraient le fruit des réflexions de Michael Maloof et David Wurmser, deux membres des services secrets du Pentagone. David Wurmser est maintenant un proche conseiller de Dick Cheney en politique extérieure.

Les démocrates haussent le ton contre George W. Bush

LEMONDE.FR | 06.08.04 | 08h44

La campagne électorale a pris un ton plus offensif jeudi 5 août aux Etats-Unis. John Kerry, mais aussi Bill Clinton, s’en sont durement pris au président George W. Bush. Le candidat démocrate lui reproche de ne pas avoir réagi immédiatement le 11 septembre après avoir eu connaissance des attentats. L’ancien président a sévèrement critiqué l’hôte de la Maison Blanche, sans le nommer, en l’accusant d’avoir affaibli la lutte contre le terrorisme en renversant Saddam Hussein, qui ne représentait qu’une “menace de cinquième ordre” pour les Etats-Unis.
Le ton monte dans la campagne présidentielle aux Etats-Unis, comme si quelques semaines après la convention démocrate et à quelques jours de celle des républicains, on s’était passé le mot pour durcir le discours et déstabiliser l’adversaire entre deux conventions, période propice pour affûter les armes.  Côté démocrate, c’est d’abord l’ancien président, Bill Clinton, qui a ouvert le feu contre son successeur sans le nommer, en l’accusant d’avoir affaibli la lutte contre le terrorisme en renversant Saddam Hussein, qui ne représentait qu’une “menace de cinquième ordre” pour les Etats-Unis.

En visite au Canada pour faire la promotion de son autobiographie, l’ancien président a déclaré dans une interview télévisée que la guerre en Irak avait drainé des ressources vitales pour la guerre contre Al-Qaida. Il a reproché M. Bush de n’avoir pas mis suffisamment d’hommes et de fonds dans la bataille engagée pour capturer Oussama Ben Laden et détruire les caches d’Al-Qaida et des talibans le long de la frontière pakistano-afghane.

“Nous ne saurons jamais si nous aurions pu attraper [Ben Laden] car nous n’en avons jamais fait une priorité”, a déclaré Bill Clinton dans cette interview à la télévision canadienne (CBC). Clinton, qui soutient l’adversaire démocrate de Bush, le sénateur John Kerry, dans la campagne électorale américaine, a estimé qu’au moment de la guerre, Saddam Hussein n’était qu’une “menace du cinquième ordre”. “Pourquoi a-t-on confié aux Pakistanais le soin de lutter contre ce qui représente la menace la plus importante pour la sécurité des Etats-Unis en se contentant d’un rôle américain d’appoint, pendant que nous placions toutes nos ressources militaires en Irak, qui ne représentait au pire qu’une menace de cinquième ordre?”, s’est demandé l’ancien président démocrate. “Comment en est-on arrivé au point d’avoir 130 000 hommes en Irak et 15 000 en Afghanistan ?” a-t-il ajouté.

Selon l’ancien président, George W. Bush aurait dû se concentrer sur d’autres menaces plus importantes pour les Etats-Unis comme le conflit au Proche-Orient, la tension pakistano-indienne et la Corée du Nord, plutôt que de s’en prendre au régime de Saddam Hussein. Il s’est interrogé sur le bien-fondé stratégique “de prendre tous ces engagements en Irak, puis de mettre la sécurité de notre pays de fait entre les mains des Pakistanais en Afghanistan et en ce qui concerne Ben Laden et Al-Qaida, car c’est incontestablement ce qui est arrivé”. Clinton a aussi estimé que, eût-il été président dans les mois précédant la guerre en Irak, il aurait cru l’ancien inspecteur des Nations unies, Hans Blix, s’il lui avait indiqué que Saddam Hussein n’avait pas d’armes de destruction massive, et ce malgré les informations américaines affirmant le contraire.

“La question n’est pas de le croire lui (Hans Blix) plutôt que les agences de renseignement américaines, mais les renseignements (fournis par les services américains) étaient véritablement ambigus sur ce point”, a-t-il estimé.

KERRY CRITIQUE VIVEMENT BUSH

Puis c’est au tour du candidat démocrate, John Kerry, de prendre le relais des critiques. Il a vivement critiqué jeudi son adversaire républicain, pour ne pas avoir réagi immédiatement le 11 septembre 2001 après avoir eu connaissance des attentats.

“En premier lieu, si j’avais été en train de lire un livre à des enfants et que mon conseiller m’avait murmuré à l’oreille l’Amérique est attaquée, j’aurais dit très poliment et très gentiment à ces enfants que le président des Etats-Unis avait à s’occuper de quelque chose”, a-t-il dit à Washington, lors d’une conférence de l’Association des journalistes de couleur. Le 11 septembre 2001, M. Bush lisait un livre à des enfants dans une école de Floride (sud-est) quand il a été avisé que des avions avaient percuté les tours du World Trade Center à New York. Il a ensuite continué à lire pendant sept minutes.

John Kerry estime disposer, au contraire de George W. Bush, d’une crédibilité pour être chef des armées, du fait de sa participation à la guerre du Vietnam. “Je prends la fonction de commandant en chef avec une expérience rare, heureusement, mais importante, celle d’avoir combattu dans une guerre,” a-t-il dit, ajoutant qu’il n’enverrait de troupes américaines au feu que si toutes les autres options avaient été épuisées.

“Et je crois que nous avons besoin d’un commandant en chef qui comprend l’épreuve avant d’envoyer des jeunes gens à la guerre. Vous devez pouvoir regarder des parents dans les yeux s’ils perdent leur fils ou leur fille, et leur dire : J’ai tenté de faire tout ce qui était en mon pouvoir pour éviter ça, mais nous n’avions pas le choix en tant que nation, en tant que peuple”, a-t-il ajouté.

Aussitôt, les responsables de la campagne du président américain George W. Bush et de la Maison Blanche ont vivement réagi jeudi aux attaques de son adversaire démocrate John Kerry. “Je veux regarder plus attentivement ce qu’il a dit, mais cela ressemble aux genres d’attaques politiques auxquelles il se livre plutôt que d’essayer de justifier ses décisions passées et de débattre des véritables questions et de nos différences sur ces questions”, a affirmé le porte-parole de la Maison Blanche Scott McClellan en marge d’un déplacement de M. Bush à Colombus (Ohio, nord).

“John Kerry va avoir des désillusions s’il prend conseil auprès de Michael Moore. John Kerry est un candidat faisant preuve d’indécision, qui a montré cette indécision dans la guerre contre le terrorisme, qui n’a pas voté pour financer nos troupes en guerre et ne peut exposer clairement sa position sur la décision de renverser Saddam Hussein”, a affirmé pour sa part Rudy Giuliani, ancien maire de New York.

Avec AFP
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3222,36-374673,0.html

M. Bush userait de la menace terroriste comme “carte” électorale

LE MONDE | 04.08.04 | 13h32 •  MIS A JOUR LE 04.08.04 | 16h18

Depuis l’alerte décrétée dimanche, la polémique enfle sur l’usage de la peur à des fins politiques en vue du scrutin présidentiel de novembre. L’actualité des plans d’attaque de centres financiers à New York et Washington par Al-Qaida est mise en doute par la presse et des démocrates.
George Bush exploite-t-il plus que de raison le filon de la peur à des fins électorales ? La question, qui a toujours trotté dans la tête de certains démocrates sans qu’ils osent s’en inquiéter trop haut, est désormais ouvertement posée aux Etats-Unis. 

Le doute a commencé à s’installer dès la nouvelle alerte lancée dimanche 1er août par le secrétaire à la sécurité intérieure, Tom Ridge, sur de possibles attentats terroristes contre les institutions financières sur le territoire américain. Trois jours après la clôture de la convention démocrate, avec en point d’orgue un discours très ferme et très médiatisé de John Kerry sur la force de l’Amérique, la date tombait en effet à pic pour permettre à l’administration Bush de reprendre l’initiative en matière de sécurité. Certains sondages donnaient un léger avantage à M. Kerry sur M. Bush, et l’un d’entre eux, en particulier, révélait que le problème de crédibilité dont souffrait le candidat démocrate en matière de lutte contre le terrorisme était presque surmonté.

“DÉTAIL ET PRÉCISION”

Mais les renseignements “nouveaux” et “alarmants” sur lesquels Tom Ridge déclarait fonder cette nouvelle alerte dissuadaient, dans un premier temps, les mauvais esprits de s’exprimer. “Sur une échelle de 1 à 10, la qualité de ces renseignements est de 10”, avait proclamé Tom Ridge sur l’un des shows télévisés les plus regardés du dimanche matin. Habitués à franchir différents paliers d’anxiété depuis le 11 septembre 2001 au gré des couleurs des alertes - orange, rouge -, les Américains renouaient avec la peur et les mesures de sécurité accrues.

Lundi 2 août pourtant, c’est de la bouche même d’une collaboratrice de la Maison Blanche que les interrogations les plus légitimes sont sorties. Questionnée par le présentateur de l’émission d’information “The News Hour” sur la chaîne publique PBS, Frances Townsend, conseillère en sécurité intérieure auprès du président Bush, explique sereinement que les renseignements sur la base desquels cette nouvelle alerte a été lancée “ont été collectés en 2000 et 2001”. “Il semble que certains d’entre eux aient été actualisés en janvier, mais ce n’est pas clair, ajoute-t-elle. Il est impossible de dire, à partir de ces renseignements, si les individus - soupçonnés de vouloir commettre des attentats - sont encore là”. Le journaliste, Jim Lehrer, se fait plus pressant, demande des précisions, que Mme Townsend est incapable de fournir. “Alors, s’étonne-t-il, vous n’avez donc aucune information sur des noms, des visages, ou d’autres choses concrètes ?”

Conscient des risques que comportent des attaques frontales contre la politique antiterroriste de l’équipe Bush, John Kerry s’abstient d’intervenir directement dans le débat. Il laisse ce soin à Howard Dean, son concurrent malheureux à l’investiture démocrate, qui souligne, sur CNN, la troublante coïncidence de l’alerte avec le traditionnel “rebond” dont bénéficie un candidat à l’élection présidentielle à l’issue de la convention de son parti : chaque fois que le contexte politique l’exige, lance-t-il, “Bush sort sa carte maîtresse, et sa carte maîtresse, c’est le terrorisme”. Plus simplement, accuse M. Dean, l’équipe Bush “manipule la diffusion de l’information en fonction de la campagne présidentielle”.

Le lendemain, mardi 3 août, plusieurs journaux, le New York Times et le Washington Post en tête, s’inquiètent à leur tour de la faiblesse et de l’ancienneté de ces fameux renseignements venus du Pakistan, où plusieurs arrestations de responsables présumés d’Al-Qaida ont été opérées ces dernières semaines. Déjà, la semaine dernière, l’hebdomadaire indépendant The New Republic avait fait état de pressions américaines pour que l’arrestation d’un important suspect d’Al-Qaida soit annoncée pendant la grand-messe des démocrates, histoire de leur voler la vedette.

Cette fois-ci, Tom Ridge est contraint de se justifier, pendant que le président Bush, en tournée électorale au Texas, tente de rester à l’écart de la polémique : “Nous ne faisons pas de politique au département de la sécurité intérieure, répond-il, mardi, lors d’une intervention publique à New York. Le détail, la précision, le sérieux des renseignements vous frapperaient aussi bien que moi si vous y aviez accès. Il est du devoir des autorités de l’Etat de porter de telles situations à la connaissance du public.” Plusieurs experts des services de renseignement, interrogés sous couvert de l’anonymat par divers journaux américains, montent au créneau : il s’agit bien, disent-ils, de renseignements de valeur, mentionnant des cibles spécifiques ; les fichiers et documents saisis remontent bien à trois ou quatre ans, mais certains ont été mis à jour aussi récemment que janvier, prouvant que les terroristes n’ont pas abandonné leurs projets.

LES FAILLES DE LA RÉFORME

L’autre volet sur lequel M. Bush a essuyé, mardi, de sérieuses critiques porte sur sa décision de créer un poste de directeur fédéral du renseignement, suivant en cela les recommandations de la commission sur les attentats du 11 Septembre. Là aussi, l’effet d’annonce, lundi 2 août, a joué à fond. Mais, dès le lendemain, experts et commentateurs soulignent les failles du plan du président, qui renonce à adopter les suggestions les plus audacieuses et les plus contraignantes de la commission : le poste qu’envisage de créer M. Bush n’est pas doté, en effet, des pouvoirs nécessaires pour lui garantir une quelconque efficacité. Le New York Times dénonce là “la marque inimitable de Donald Rumsfeld”, le secrétaire à la défense, qui refuse d’abandonner la moindre de ses prérogatives.

A l’approche de la convention républicaine, qui s’ouvre fin août à New York - un choix déjà hautement symbolique -, la controverse ne peut que rebondir dans les semaines qui viennent. Elle fait en tout cas apparaître un fait politique nouveau aux Etats-Unis : la sécurité, intérieure et extérieure, est en passe de détrôner l’économie comme thème électoral numéro un.

Sylvie Kauffmann

• ARTICLE PARU DANS L’EDITION DU 05.08.04

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3222,36-374483,0.html
——

L’éditorial du Monde
La peur et les urnes
LE MONDE | 04.08.04 | 14h28

Il est toujours risqué de jouer avec le terrorisme et avec la crainte qu’il suscite, de l’agiter ou de l’instrumentaliser dans des buts politiques ou électoraux. Les électeurs espagnols ne s’y étaient pas laissé prendre, qui avaient sanctionné le gouvernement Aznar pour avoir tenté de manipuler à son avantage l’attentat du 11 mars à Madrid et avaient donné la victoire au socialiste Zapatero. 

Ce qui se passe aujourd’hui aux Etats-Unis appelle également à s’interroger. Depuis ce week-end, peu après la clôture de la convention démocrate qui a intronisé son candidat à la présidence, John Kerry, et les critiques émises par la commission du Congrès sur le 11-Septembre, l’administration Bush agite à nouveau le spectre de la menace terroriste. Le niveau d’alerte a été relevé à New York et à Washington. Or le gouvernement a été contraint de reconnaître que les renseignements invoqués étaient vieux de plusieurs années, dataient même d’avant le 11 septembre 2001, avant d’assurer qu’ils auraient été remis à jour récemment.

Dans ces circonstances, on ne peut que se demander s’il s’agit d’une coïncidence, ou bien si cette menace a été à nouveau mise en avant pour briser l’élan de la candidature Kerry. En effet, comme l’a remarqué le New York Times qui, avec le Washington Post, a été le premier à émettre des doutes, les sondages montrent que sa gestion du risque terroriste est l’unique avantage de George Bush dans une élection extrêmement disputée. Ce dernier sait qu’il joue sur du velours. L’opinion américaine, encore traumatisée par les attentats du 11 septembre 2001, est prête à beaucoup croire. L’opposition démocrate ne peut se permettre d’attaquer le “commandant en chef” sur un sujet aussi délicat et a dû abandonner l’initiative au président sortant, de peur d’être - si un incident devait arriver - taxée d’antipatriotisme.

Mais, quand la crédibilité d’un gouvernement est mise en doute sur un sujet aussi grave, c’est toute sa politique qui risque de l’être. Et, depuis son arrivée au pouvoir en janvier 2001, l’administration Bush n’a jamais cessé de jouer la politique de la tension, et de la peur. Au point d’intoxiquer l’opinion, comme l’a montré le débat sur les introuvables armes de destruction massive dans le dossier irakien. Le 11-Septembre et la guerre en Afghanistan avaient permis fort opportunément à un président mal élu de geler le débat politique et d’adopter une série de mesures d’exception. La guerre en Irak - envisagée bien avant les attentats d’Al-Qaida - a, dans un premier temps, forcé cet avantage.

On aimerait croire que George Bush n’a pas décidé d’utiliser Al-Qaida comme son meilleur agent électoral. Mais la mise en scène de ces derniers jours, après tant d’autres, semble dire le contraire. Certes, la menace terroriste existe et des attentats sont toujours possibles, aux Etats-Unis ou ailleurs. Mais, loin d’armer une démocratie, la manipulation de l’opinion, cette politique de la peur, la fragilise.

• ARTICLE PARU DANS L’EDITION DU 05.08.04
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3208,36-374513,0.html

A Low Profile For the Big Issue
Kerry Treads Lightly on War in Iraq

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 5, 2004; Page A06

In the early days of the general-election campaign, Democrat John F. Kerry has mounted a strong effort to erode President Bush’s advantage on national security. But on the defining issue of war in Iraq, his shots have appeared oblique at best.

The war received relatively short shrift at last week’s Democratic National Convention—Kerry devoted only six sentences to Iraq policy in his 45-minute acceptance speech—and on the stump he seldom discusses his plans for bringing the U.S. occupation to a close and stabilizing the country.

Kerry has strongly criticized the Bush administration’s competence in handling the war, principally its failure to enlist other nations to its cause in Iraq. But he has not questioned the basic tenets of the policy, nor has he outlined a course of action substantially different from the one Bush is pursuing to shore up the interim government and prepare for national elections.

While he has said he would substantially cut troop strength in Iraq by the end of his first term, he has not provided details on how.

And when Kerry does raise questions about Bush’s Iraq policies, they seem to be suggestive, not pointed. Surrounding the nominee on stage in Boston were his former Swift boat crewmates in Vietnam, the subtext being that Kerry knew all about the horrors of war—unlike Bush, who served stateside in the National Guard—and is better capable to extricate the United States from that troubled nation.

“I defended this country as a young man,” Kerry told the convention, “and I will defend it as president.”

Kerry’s careful approach on Iraq is born from something of necessity. As senator, after all, he voted to give Bush authorization to conduct the war. But Kerry campaign officials also say the candidate has chosen not to address Iraq in detail at this point because of their desire to introduce the Massachusetts senator to the American public, over a range of domestic and international themes.

Polls have suggested voters do not know Kerry well.
“The acceptance speech was clearly intended to be thematic,” said Richard C. Holbrooke, a senior foreign policy adviser to Kerry. “It was not just about Iraq.”

Holbrooke and other Kerry advisers point out that Kerry has spoken about Iraq in detail before and will do so again. In a July 4 op-ed article in The Washington Post, for instance, Kerry said he would bring in allies to share more of the burden by giving them access to reconstruction contracts and helping to repair Iraq’s oil industry, if they forgave Iraq’s debt and helped pay reconstruction costs. He also called for a conference with Iraq’s neighbors and a potential deployment of NATO forces in Iraq.

Indeed, his advisers say, it is Bush who has followed Kerry’s calls for more international support and a United Nations imprimatur for U.S. policies in Iraq. “Kerry’s been the consistent one, and Bush is the one who has changed his position,” Holbrooke said.
Bush and his surrogates are working hard to use Iraq to frame Kerry as a flip-flopper, seizing repeatedly on his opposition last year to an $87 billion spending measure to support the troops and provide reconstruction money for Iraq—a Senate vote cast in the midst of the Democratic presidential primary contests when antiwar candidate Howard Dean was riding high.

Kerry has said he voted against the measure because it was not funded—he supported the request if tax cuts for the wealthy were trimmed to pay for it—but one of his closest advisers, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), has told other Democrats that he begged Kerry not to vote against the $87 billion.

Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt said Kerry’s inability to “talk straight about that vote on Iraq” will haunt him. “He voted for the war and voted against funding for Iraq,” Holt said. “As long as you look at John Kerry through a gauzy haze of images and rhetoric, they have a chance. You have to look at his record.”

In Bush’s revamped stump speech Friday, he drew particular glee in focusing on the vote over the $87 billion. “He tried to explain his vote by saying: I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it. End quote,” Bush said to laughter. “He’s got a different explanation now. One time he said he was proud he voted against the funding, then he said that the whole thing was a complicated matter.” Bush then added: “There is nothing complicated about supporting our troops in combat!”

There is some precedent for Kerry’s approach on Iraq. In 1968, Republican challenger Richard M. Nixon took virtually the same tack as Kerry when he accepted the GOP nomination. Despite mass protests against the Vietnam War, Nixon only briefly touched on the conflict in his speech, criticizing the Democrats for incompetence in conducting the war, pledging to bring it to an “honorable end,” and calling on allies to bear more of “the burden of defending peace and freedom around this world.” Nixon, who had been Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president, also said he had experience in ending wars, pointing to the conclusion of the Korean War during the Eisenhower administration.

The Vietnam War did not end for another seven years.
Much like Nixon, Democrats plan to use Bush’s handling of war—particularly what they call poor planning, the violence and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction that followed the lightning victory by U.S. and British forces—as a broader metaphor for his competence to continue as president. While Kerry did not speak much about Iraq specifically, his speech was sprinkled with indirect references to the protracted struggle the United States faces in Iraq.

“The American people know that whatever you thought about going into the war, that there could have been a better way to go about executing it,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “Because of the lack of preparation and understanding as to what to expect, many more men and women have died and been wounded. . . . The administration will be held accountable for its policy.”

The Bush campaign brushes aside those questions and focuses instead on the threat ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein might have posed to the United States before the war, implicitly contrasting Bush’s certainty against Kerry’s more protracted decision making. “When he [Hussein] continued to deceive the weapons inspectors, I had a decision to make: to hope for the best and to trust the word of a madman and a tyrant or remember the lessons of September the 11th and defend our country,” Bush said Friday. “Given that choice, I will defend America every time.”

While Republicans strongly favor Bush’s decision to attack Iraq, Kerry also must energize a Democratic base that is deeply split over the war. Nine out of 10 delegates to the convention opposed the war, surveys indicated.

That balancing act was on display at the convention. Kerry’s running mate, John Edwards, in his acceptance speech, said a Kerry administration would work for a stable, democratic Iraq, which he called “a real chance for freedom and peace in the Middle East.” He also said Kerry would bring NATO forces into Iraq and win debt relief for Iraq from balking allies.

But unlike Edwards, Kerry did not say his goal was a stable, democratic Iraq. Instead, he spoke only of bringing allies into the coalition. “I know what we have to do in Iraq,” Kerry said. “We need a president who has the credibility to bring our allies to our side and share the burden, reduce the cost to American taxpayers, reduce the risk to American soldiers. That’s the right way to get the job done and bring our troops home.”

Some experts, such as Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, felt Kerry’s language came very close to suggesting that he would pull the 140,000 U.S. troops out of Iraq. “I was a bit surprised,” said Kagan, who strongly supported the invasion of Iraq but has been critical of the administration’s postwar policy. “Edwards was pretty straightforward and clear about the commitment to Iraq. Kerry was far more tentative. He held out hope that he would get out.”

His advisers, however, denied Kerry meant to leave that impression. “John Kerry has resisted left-wing pressure to set a date certain for withdrawal because he knows the consequences would be catastrophic,” Holbrooke said. “But he believes . . . he will do better to create international support to deal with this problem.”
Staff writer Charles Babington contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40925-2004Aug4.html