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Friday, January 10, 2003
washingtonpost.com
Payrolls Tumble in December
By John M. Berry
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 10, 2003; 1:43 PM
The U.S. jobless rate last month remained at its eight-year high of 6 percent while the number of workers on private industry payrolls fell to its lowest level since the recession began in early 2001, the Labor Department reported today.
Analysts said those figures, plus downward revisions in earlier estimates of payroll employment in October and November, were evidence that even though the economy is growing employers aren't hiring.
"Companies clearly remain reluctant to hire and the economy has not escaped its soft patch," said Maury Harris, chief economist at UBS Warburg in New York. "The economy is not likely quite as weak as this report suggest, however. We believe that strong productivity growth is helping to hold down hiring."
When productivity-the amount of goods and services produced for each hour worked-is rising strongly, as it has been, companies can boost production significantly without having to add workers. The result is a so-called jobless recovery similar to the one that initially followed the 1990-91 recession.
"Thus far, at least, this really has been a jobless recovery-but that is only bad news for unemployed people," said Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y. "For companies, and people with jobs-94 percent of the labor force at the moment-a surge in productivity growth is good news. It means faster profits growth and increased real wage.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters that the report is "another reason for Democrats and Republicans to work together" to pass President Bush's proposed $674 billion plan to end taxes on stock dividends and accelerate income tax cuts, which Bush said would help create 2.1 million jobs by the end of 2005.
Since the recession began in March 2001, more than 2.3 million private payroll jobs have been lost, most of them in manufacturing, which shed another 65,000 jobs last month. That decline in factory jobs was the 29th consecutive monthly drop and left the number of manufacturing workers at 16.5 million, the smallest level in 41 years. But because of strong productivity growth, manufacturing production in November was 2.9 times higher than it was in the same month in 1961.
Despite the continued factory job loss last month, there were some positive signs for manufacturing. The length of the average workweek rose by 18 minutes, to 40.9 hours, and the amount of overtime rose by 12 minutes to 4.2 hours. Even with fewer employees, the combination of a longer average workweek and a likely productivity increase probably means that factory production rose 0.4 percent last month, Harris estimated.
Employment at eating and drinking places and retail outlets fell by 104,000 on the heels of a 40,000 decline in November. The Labor report said those declines were the result of retailers hiring fewer seasonal employees than usual for the Christmas selling season.
Meanwhile, the airline industry also cut back its payrolls, which fell by 17,000 last month. The industry shed roughly 100,000 employees following the terrorist attacks in September 2001 and began another series of layoffs last September as several airlines approached bankruptcy and others sought to cut costs in the face of weak demand for air travel.
Even though the 6 percent unemployment rate did not change, the number of people actively looking for work but unable to find it-the official definition of being unemployed-rose to 8.6 million from 8.5 million. At the end of 2001, there were about 8.3 million unemployed.
Analysts said that the number of unemployed workers, and the jobless rate, would have increased considerably more except that the size of the civilian labor force rose only about 0.2 percent over the course of the year while the population 16 and over grew about 1 percent. This sort of disparity often occurs during or shortly after a recession when jobs are less plentiful and some workers drop out of the labor force.
The stability of the jobless rate masked some changes among different demographic groups. The jobless rate among whites fell by a tenth of a percentage point to 5.1 percent, but the rate for blacks rose a half point to 11.5 percent and that for persons of Hispanic origin ticked up to 7.9 percent from 7.8 percent. The volatile rates for teens fell to 16.1 percent from 16.8 percent.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 2:25 PM
POLITICS
Bush's Partisan Picks
Yesterday, the White House shuffled Otto Reich, a controversial right-wing Cold Warrior, off to a low-profile desk job instead of risking another fight over his confirmation. Immediately, some wondered: might this signal a newfound desire to play nice with Democrats rather than run roughshod over them?
Not likely. Bush may have backed off on Reich's appointment, but he renominated two equally polarizing figures for federal judgeships: Charles Pickering and Priscilla Owen. Pickering's Trent Lott-style pining for Jim Crow and Owen's vehement opposition to abortion provoked animosity last year, but, as Dale McFeatters notes in Capitol Blue, the White House has decided to push ahead, never mind the controversy.
"The bold, in-your-face gesture to Democrats, on the first day of the new Congress, shows that the president plans to play hardball even though Senate Republicans have only a one-vote majority. The Democrats, correctly, see the re-nominations as a test of how aggressive they'll be as a minority.
...
Some of Bush's advisers reportedly counseled the White House against renominating Pickering. But the president clearly felt that this fight was worth expending, in Washington's latest buzzwords, his 'political capital.'"
The editors of The Oklahoman, meanwhile, wouldn't have it any other way, lauding Bush for his leadership amid Democratic sniping.
"This President Bush, with a 63 percent job-approval mark, is flexing his political muscle -- with a bold, visionary economic stimulus plan and with the renominations of candidates who should've been confirmed for the federal bench long ago."
The Washington Post's editorial board, however, savages Bush for " prying open the fissure lines between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill":
"The president came to town promising to change the tone of debate and to reach across party lines. Now he seems to have settled on a different course. Some of his advisers apparently have concluded that polarizing political fights with Democrats benefit the administration; that ugly combat, even in a losing and not terribly worthy cause, such as the renomination of Judge Pickering, only shores up support among the Republicans' socially conservative Southern base. Tactically they may be right. But as a method of governing, all-out war from Day One leaves much to be desired."
FOREIGN
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 2:14 PM
The Fight for the Future of Music
01/06/2003 @ 4:14pm
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America stands on the cusp of a sweeping set of shifts in federal media ownership rules that could dramatically alter the nature of what we see, hear and read, warns Federal Commications Commission member Jonathan S. Adelstein. Dialogue and debate about these proposed changes must be ramped up quickly if the public interest is to be protected.
But first, how about a harmonica solo?
Before delivering his first major policy address at the annual conference of the Future of Music Coalition, Adelstein wowed a crowd of several hundred there by playing a mean harmonica during a performance by Lester Chambers of the groundbreaking 1960s group The Chambers Brothers.
Adelstein, a Democrat whose appointment to the five-member FCC was recently approved, could not have chosen a better way to introduce himself to the musicians, journalists and advocates who crowded an ancient hall on Washington's Georgetown University campus. Appearing on a stage that had been occupied during this year's Future of Music Coalition conference by rock stars like Patti Smith and Living Color's Vernon Reid, jazz players such as Alfonzo Blackwell, producers like the legendary Sandy Pearlman and media personalities such as Ira Glass, host of the This American Life radio show, Adelstein knew he had to perform. And he got high marks for his able riffs during Chambers' performance of "People Get Ready."
But he got higher marks for his eyes-wide-open report on the devastating impact of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 on radio diversity. Before an audience filled with people who worry that the Congress or the FCC just don't get it, Adelstein came across as a commissioner who understands what is at stake when regulators allow media corporations to dominate whole communications systems.
"The 1996 Act entirely eliminated a cap on the number of radio stations a single company can own nationwide. It also relaxed local ownership limits, permitting a single owner to control up to eight stations in the nations' largest markets. As one might have predicted, the relaxation of these rules led inevitably to more stations in fewer hands," Adelstein said.
"According to one FCC report, in the six years since the adoption of the 1996 Act, the number of radio station owners in the United States declined by 34 percent, even though the number of commercial radio stations increased by 5.4 percent. The FCC found that the decline is primarily due to mergers between existing owners."
To illustrate the dramatic nature of the changes that have taken place, Adelstein noted that, "In 1996, the two largest radio group owners consisted of fewer than 65 radio stations. Six years later, the largest radio group owns about 1,200 radio stations. The second largest group owns about 250 stations. Their influence is even larger than their numbers suggest, because they are concentrated in the largest markets in the country."
Adelstein hailed a Future of Music Coalition report that showed how more and more programming on local radio stations is being done at the national level by media conglomerates rather than at the local level by hometown disc jockeys. "We must consider how consolidation affects all of you as artists," Adelstein told the crowd of several hundred recording artists and music industry players who attended the conference Monday. "Years ago, as a new artist, you might have gotten your first airplay on your local station – in a town where the DJ heard you at a local club the night before and wanted everyone in town to hear you, as well. As national groups buy out more local stations, that town may no longer have a local DJ at all."
"Consolidation," Adelstein warned, "often leads to the homogenization of programming. We must ask ourselves: At what point does consolidation come at the cost of the local expression that makes radio so unique and so special in this country? At what point does allowing consolidation undermine the public interest – and the quality of what we hear on the radio?"
The answer, according to many of the artists attending the conference, is that the point of impact has already been passed. "Because of radio consolidation and the emphasis of strict formats and constant cost cutting by media companies, musicians and fans of music are losing out," says musician Jenny Toomey, who serves as executive director of the Future of Music Coalition. "Consolidation has led to less diversity."
One member of Congress, US Senator Russ Feingold, has sought to address the negative impacts of the Telecommunications Act with legislation. The Wisconsin Democrat's Competition in Radio and Concert Industries Act seeks to address concerns about media monopolies, the loss of diversity and the return of old-fashioned payola scandals. But before Feingold's legislation even gets a hearing in Congress, the FCC could take steps that will lead to greater consolidation and conglomeration within media industries. At issue in coming months are proposals to ease rules that prevent a single television network from controlling stations that reach more than 35 percent of the national audience, as well as rules regarding the number of television and radio stations that one company could own in a single region. Another proposed rule change could allow one company to own a major daily newspaper and the major television and radio station in the same community.
FCC chair Michael Powell and at least two other FCC commissioners are believed to be sympathetic to demands by media corporations for further relaxation of ownership rules. But Adelstein continues to argue for caution, and he suggested that activism by musicians and music fans could yet change the character and the direction of the debate.
"Congress's relaxation of the rules on radio consolidation has been the canary in the mine, testing whether it is safe to go in before miners dare enter," Adelstein explained. "The miners in this case are all the consumers affected by FCC rules that govern the ownership of television, radio, cable and newspapers," he said. "The FCC better carefully consider the health of that canary before we proceed further, because changes to the FCC's media ownership rules potentially could alter the media landscape as much or more than the 1996 actions by Congress changed the radio industry."
Recalling a line from "People Get Ready" the song he played harmonica on a few minutes earlier Adelstein said: "Lester Chambers got it right: There's a big train a coming." And if musicians and music fans don't want the train to roll over them, Adelstein suggested, it's time to get active. "In order to insure that there continues to be a range of voices heard over the airwaves and through all of the media, we need to continue to hear you voices loud and clear before the FCC and throughout the government," Adelstein said. "So turn it up!"
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 1:58 PM
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Long Live the Estate Tax!
by BILL GATES, SR. & CHUCK COLLINS
[from the January 27, 2003 issue]
There is a stunning disconnect between the terrible budget shortfalls facing states and localities and the priorities of federal tax-cutters. States face budget deficits of more than $60 billion for the coming year--and the ax is falling on mental health, education and children's healthcare. Libraries are being shuttered, tuitions increased and parks closed. Governors of all political persuasions talk about the need for massive federal relief to the states in the form of block grants and Medicaid subsidies.
Yet the President and Congressional tax-cutters are marching ahead with a $670 billion tax cut that could include elimination of dividend taxes and an acceleration of 2001 tax rate cuts. According to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, 42 percent of the benefits of the dividend tax cut will go to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers, whose incomes are above $330,000. These proposals have more to do with rewarding campaign contributors and lobbying patrons than with economic stimulus.
Also at the top of the domestic agenda is the push to make repeal of the federal estate tax permanent. Such a step will not have any short-term or long-term economic stimulus effect. But cutting $850 billion in revenue in the decade after the tax is phased out--money that would have been collected from the heirs of multimillionaires--will prolong the current fiscal crisis. Many states will feel the pain of revenue loss first because their inheritance and estate taxes are linked to the federal levy.
Today, the estate tax affects less than 2 percent of the richest households, those with wealth exceeding $1 million. A reformed estate tax, with wealth exemptions boosted to $3.5 million, would still generate tens of billions of dollars of revenue a year. Under such a reform, an estimated 6,000 estates a year, averaging $17 million each, would pay the tax. In Maine, Montana, Alaska and Mississippi--states where both senators have voted to completely eliminate the tax--the estimated number of estates paying the tax every year would be fewer than twenty-five.
Proposals to reform the tax have been blocked since 2000 by the "all or nothing" repeal lobby, which understands the peril of not having smaller estates as camouflage. Once exemptions rise above $3 million, it becomes impossible to find a credible and photogenic farmer or restaurant owner who will complain about what opponents call the "death tax." It's hard enough to find them now. The pro-repeal American Farm Bureau was asked to produce an example of a farmer who had lost a farm because of the estate tax. It could not identify a single one.
Lost in this debate are the benefits to our country of maintaining an estate tax. Originally passed in 1916, the estate tax was a fundamentally American response to the excesses of the Gilded Age. Populist reformers labored for the three decades before 1916 to pass federal income and estate taxes in order to shift the tax burden, mostly in the form of nineteenth-century tariff duties and excise taxes, off of Midwestern and Southern farm states and onto the wealthy Northeastern states. But underlying the movement for an estate tax was a recognition that too much concentrated wealth and power was putting our democracy at risk. We had fought a revolution to reject hereditary political and economic power--and the dizzying inequalities of the Gilded Age violated a fundamental American ideal of equality of opportunity.
We are now in a second Gilded Age. Instead of taking steps that would strengthen our democracy, we're heading backward to the wealth inequalities of a century ago. We need to preserve the estate tax in states and at the federal level for exactly the reason it is under assault. In a democracy, we should be offended when the power of concentrated wealth brazenly attempts to shape the terms of policy debate and dictate the rules of our society.
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 1:52 PM
Wednesday, January 08, 2003
Bush, Cheney would get tax-cut windfall
Reuters, 01.07.03, 6:13 PM ET
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WASHINGTON, Jan 7 (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney each stand to reap thousands of dollars in savings from Bush's proposal on Tuesday to eliminate taxes on stock dividends.
Based on income reported in his tax returns for 2001, Bush would have saved $16,511 on dividend payments of $43,805 if his new proposal had been in effect for the year.
Cheney, who had dividends of $278,103 in 2001, would have saved $104,823.
The estimated savings were derived by using a tax-savings calculator on the Internet site of the Heritage Foundation think-tank (www.heritage.org).
Bush on Tuesday proposed eliminating the tax on stock dividends as part of a $674 billion proposal he says is aimed at boosting a lukewarm economy.
Democrats have attacked the plan, which is almost all tax cuts, as a giveaway to the rich.
The White House says 92 million Americans would gain an average tax cut this year of $1,083 through Bush's proposals, which would also accelerate previously scheduled income tax cuts and boost the child tax credit.
Cheney is to take a turn at pitching the plan in a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Friday.
Bush deflected a question on Monday about how he would personally benefit from the dividend-tax cut. "My money is in a blind trust ... so I don't know if I've got any dividends," he told reporters.
Bush and Cheney also benefited handsomely from the $1.35 trillion tax cut passed by Congress in 2001. Cheney saved an estimated $43,000 on a tax bill of $1.72 million that year, and Bush saved an estimated $7,205.
Copyright 2003, Reuters News Service
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 8:35 PM
Tuesday, January 07, 2003
Most of the people don't know or care in the US.
Undercover War Begins as US Forces Enter Iraq
By John Donnelly in Washington and Tom Allard in Canberra
SMH.com Australia
Monday 6 January 2003
Armed soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division stand and watch a boxing match in Camp New York in the northern Kuwaiti desert, 24 kilometres from the Iraqi border. Photo: AFP
About 100 United States special forces personnel and more than 50 CIA officers have been inside Iraq for at least four months, looking for missile-launchers, monitoring oil fields, marking minefields and helping their pilots target air-defence systems.
The operations, which are said to have included some Australian, Jordanian and British commandos, are seen as part of the opening phase of a war, intelligence officials and military analysts say.
This is despite the Bush Administration agreeing to the schedule of United Nations weapons inspections.
A spokeswoman for the Minister for Defence, Robert Hill, rejected the suggestion that Australians - even individual soldiers attached to US or British commando units - had been involved in covert incursions. "Australians haven't been operating in Iraq," she said.
Australia is believed to have a policy of not sending special forces on covert operations into hostile countries, but the spokeswoman described this as hypothetical.
The action by US and British special forces in Iraq breaches international law because it is not sanctioned by the UN.
But it also reflects the new warfare, which targets terrorists and hidden weapons and relies heavily on commando operations and pre-emptive strikes.
On January 27 the UN inspectors will report on whether they have found evidence of a program to develop chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Soon after, the US is expected to announce whether Iraq is in "material breach" of UN resolutions and whether that is a trigger for an invasion aimed at toppling President Saddam Hussein.
War preparations have been in full swing for months. The Pentagon says 60,000 troops are in the Gulf region, and that number could double in coming weeks.
Even as President George Bush repeated at the weekend that it was not too late to avert war if Saddam complies with the inspectors, bombing by US jets over the no-fly zone, coupled with the commando operations, means that a fight is already unfolding.
"We're bombing practically every day as we patrol the no-fly zones, taking out air defence batteries, and there are all kinds of CIA and special forces operations going on," said Timur Eads, a former US special operations officer. "I would call it the beginning of a war."
Naseer Aruri, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, said the Bush Administration was being duplicitous in conducting undercover operations while agreeing to the UN inspections.
"Certainly, the Arab world and the Islamic world would see it as being inconsistent with the weapons inspections, as well as an infringement on Iraq's sovereignty."
A US intelligence official said the Iraq missions were separate from the work of the inspectors, but that the two operations might be moving in parallel.
Some special forces members were following movements around suspected weapons sites, and this information could be handed to the UN teams.
The US has so far refused to do so, out of concern that the reports might be passed to Iraqi officials
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
© : t r u t h o u t 2002
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 10:36 AM
Sunday, January 05, 2003
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January 5, 2003
The Burden
By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
I.
n a speech to graduating cadets at West Point in June, President Bush declared, ''America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish.'' When he spoke to veterans assembled at the White House in November, he said: America has ''no territorial ambitions. We don't seek an empire. Our nation is committed to freedom for ourselves and for others.''
Ever since George Washington warned his countrymen against foreign entanglements, empire abroad has been seen as the republic's permanent temptation and its potential nemesis. Yet what word but ''empire'' describes the awesome thing that America is becoming? It is the only nation that polices the world through five global military commands; maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean; guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea; drives the wheels of global trade and commerce; and fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires.
A historian once remarked that Britain acquired its empire in ''a fit of absence of mind.'' If Americans have an empire, they have acquired it in a state of deep denial. But Sept. 11 was an awakening, a moment of reckoning with the extent of American power and the avenging hatreds it arouses. Americans may not have thought of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon as the symbolic headquarters of a world empire, but the men with the box cutters certainly did, and so do numberless millions who cheered their terrifying exercise in the propaganda of the deed.
Being an imperial power, however, is more than being the most powerful nation or just the most hated one. It means enforcing such order as there is in the world and doing so in the American interest. It means laying down the rules America wants (on everything from markets to weapons of mass destruction) while exempting itself from other rules (the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and the International Criminal Court) that go against its interest. It also means carrying out imperial functions in places America has inherited from the failed empires of the 20th century -- Ottoman, British and Soviet. In the 21st century, America rules alone, struggling to manage the insurgent zones -- Palestine and the northwest frontier of Pakistan, to name but two -- that have proved to be the nemeses of empires past.
Iraq lays bare the realities of America's new role. Iraq itself is an imperial fiction, cobbled together at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 by the French and British and held together by force and violence since independence. Now an expansionist rights violator holds it together with terror. The United Nations lay dozing like a dog before the fire, happy to ignore Saddam, until an American president seized it by the scruff of the neck and made it bark. Multilateral solutions to the world's problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless America bares its fangs.
America's empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man's burden. We are no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company, when American corporations needed the Marines to secure their investments overseas. The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known. It is the imperialism of a people who remember that their country secured its independence by revolt against an empire, and who like to think of themselves as the friend of freedom everywhere. It is an empire without consciousness of itself as such, constantly shocked that its good intentions arouse resentment abroad. But that does not make it any less of an empire, with a conviction that it alone, in Herman Melville's words, bears ''the ark of the liberties of the world.''
In this vein, the president's National Security Strategy, announced in September, commits America to lead other nations toward ''the single sustainable model for national success,'' by which he meant free markets and liberal democracy. This is strange rhetoric for a Texas politician who ran for office opposing nation-building abroad and calling for a more humble America overseas. But Sept. 11 changed everyone, including a laconic and anti-rhetorical president. His messianic note may be new to him, but it is not new to his office. It has been present in the American vocabulary at least since Woodrow Wilson went to Versailles in 1919 and told the world that he wanted to make it safe for democracy.
Ever since Wilson, presidents have sounded the same redemptive note while ''frantically avoiding recognition of the imperialism that we in fact exercise,'' as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said in 1960. Even now, as President Bush appears to be maneuvering the country toward war with Iraq, the deepest implication of what is happening has not been fully faced: that Iraq is an imperial operation that would commit a reluctant republic to become the guarantor of peace, stability, democratization and oil supplies in a combustible region of Islamic peoples stretching from Egypt to Afghanistan. A role once played by the Ottoman Empire, then by the French and the British, will now be played by a nation that has to ask whether in becoming an empire it risks losing its soul as a republic.
As the United States faces this moment of truth, John Quincy Adams's warning of 1821 remains stark and pertinent: if America were tempted to ''become the dictatress of the world, she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.'' What empires lavish abroad, they cannot spend on good republican government at home: on hospitals or roads or schools. A distended military budget only aggravates America's continuing failure to keep its egalitarian promise to itself. And these are not the only costs of empire. Detaining two American citizens without charge or access to counsel in military brigs, maintaining illegal combatants on a foreign island in a legal limbo, keeping lawful aliens under permanent surveillance while deporting others after secret hearings: these are not the actions of a republic that lives by the rule of law but of an imperial power reluctant to trust its own liberties. Such actions may still be a long way short of Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese, but that may mean only that the worst -- following, say, another large attack on United States citizens that produces mass casualties -- is yet to come.
The impending operation in Iraq is thus a defining moment in America's long debate with itself about whether its overseas role as an empire threatens or strengthens its existence as a republic. The American electorate, while still supporting the president, wonders whether his proclamation of a war without end against terrorists and tyrants may only increase its vulnerability while endangering its liberties and its economic health at home. A nation that rarely counts the cost of what it really values now must ask what the ''liberation'' of Iraq is worth. A republic that has paid a tiny burden to maintain its empire -- no more than about 4 percent of its gross domestic product -- now contemplates a bill that is altogether steeper. Even if victory is rapid, a war in Iraq and a postwar occupation may cost anywhere from $120 billion to $200 billion.
What every schoolchild also knows about empires is that they eventually face nemeses. To call America the new Rome is at once to recall Rome's glory and its eventual fate at the hands of the barbarians. A confident and carefree republic -- the city on a hill, whose people have always believed they are immune from history's harms -- now has to confront not just an unending imperial destiny but also a remote possibility that seems to haunt the history of empire: hubris followed by defeat.
II.
Even at this late date, it is still possible to ask: Why should a republic take on the risks of empire? Won't it run a chance of endangering its identity as a free people? The problem is that this implies innocent options that in the case of Iraq may no longer exist. Iraq is not just about whether the United States can retain its republican virtue in a wicked world. Virtuous disengagement is no longer a possibility. Since Sept. 11, it has been about whether the republic can survive in safety at home without imperial policing abroad. Face to face with ''evil empires'' of the past, the republic reluctantly accepted a division of the world based on mutually assured destruction. But now it faces much less stable and reliable opponents -- rogue states like Iraq and North Korea with the potential to supply weapons of mass destruction to a terrorist internationale. Iraq represents the first in a series of struggles to contain the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the first attempt to shut off the potential supply of lethal technologies to a global terrorist network.
Containment rather than war would be the better course, but the Bush administration seems to have concluded that containment has reached its limits -- and the conclusion is not unreasonable. Containment is not designed to stop production of sarin, VX nerve gas, anthrax and nuclear weapons. Threatened retaliation might deter Saddam from using these weapons, but his continued development of them increases his capacity to intimidate and deter others, including the United States. Already his weapons have sharply raised the cost of any invasion, and as time goes by this could become prohibitive. The possibility that North Korea might quickly develop weapons of mass destruction makes regime change on the Korean peninsula all but unthinkable. Weapons of mass destruction would render Saddam the master of a region that, because it has so much of the world's proven oil reserves, makes it what a military strategist would call the empire's center of gravity.
Iraq may claim to have ceased manufacturing these weapons after 1991, but these claims remain unconvincing, because inspectors found evidence of activity after that date. So what to do? Efforts to embargo and sanction the regime have hurt only the Iraqi people. What is left? An inspections program, even a permanent one, might slow the dictator's weapons programs down, but inspections are easily evaded. That leaves us, but only as a reluctant last resort, with regime change.
Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes that the empire's interest has a right to trump the sovereignty of a state. The Bush administration would ask, What moral authority rests with a sovereign who murders and ethnically cleanses his own people, has twice invaded neighboring countries and usurps his people's wealth in order to build palaces and lethal weapons? And the administration is not alone. Not even Kofi Annan, the secretary general, charged with defending the United Nations Charter, says that sovereignty confers impunity for such crimes, though he has made it clear he would prefer to leave a disarmed Saddam in power rather than risk the conflagration of war to unseat him.
Regime change also raises the difficult question for Americans of whether their own freedom entails a duty to defend the freedom of others beyond their borders. The precedents here are inconclusive. Just because Wilson and Roosevelt sent Americans to fight and die for freedom in Europe and Asia doesn't mean their successors are committed to this duty everywhere and forever. The war in Vietnam was sold to a skeptical American public as another battle for freedom, and it led the republic into defeat and disgrace.
Yet it remains a fact -- as disagreeable to those left wingers who regard American imperialism as the root of all evil as it is to the right-wing isolationists, who believe that the world beyond our shores is none of our business -- that there are many peoples who owe their freedom to an exercise of American military power. It's not just the Japanese and the Germans, who became democrats under the watchful eye of Generals MacArthur and Clay. There are the Bosnians, whose nation survived because American air power and diplomacy forced an end to a war the Europeans couldn't stop. There are the Kosovars, who would still be imprisoned in Serbia if not for Gen. Wesley Clark and the Air Force. The list of people whose freedom depends on American air and ground power also includes the Afghans and, most inconveniently of all, the Iraqis.
The moral evaluation of empire gets complicated when one of its benefits might be freedom for the oppressed. Iraqi exiles are adamant: even if the Iraqi people might be the immediate victims of an American attack, they would also be its ultimate beneficiaries. It would make the case for military intervention easier, of course, if the Iraqi exiles cut a more impressive figure. They feud and squabble and hate one another nearly as much as they hate Saddam. But what else is to be expected from a political culture pulverized by 40 years of state terror?
If only invasion, and not containment, can build democracy in Iraq, then the question becomes whether the Bush administration actually has any real intention of doing so. The exiles fear that a mere change of regime, a coup in which one Baathist thug replaces another, would suit American interests just as well, provided the thug complied with the interests of the Pentagon and American oil companies. Whenever it has exerted power overseas, America has never been sure whether it values stability -- which means not only political stability but also the steady, profitable flow of goods and raw materials -- more than it values its own rhetoric about democracy. Where the two values have collided, American power has come down heavily on the side of stability, for example, toppling democratically elected leaders from Mossadegh in Iran to Allende in Chile. Iraq is yet another test of this choice. Next door in Iran, from the 1950's to the 1970's, America backed stability over democracy, propping up the autocratic rule of the shah, only to reap the whirlwind of an Islamic fundamentalist revolution in 1979 that delivered neither stability nor real democracy. Does the same fate await an American operation in Iraq?
International human rights groups, like Amnesty International, are dismayed at the way both the British government of Tony Blair and the Bush administration are citing the human rights abuses of Saddam to defend the idea of regime change. Certainly the British and the American governments maintained a complicit and dishonorable silence when Saddam gassed the Kurds in 1988. Yet now that the two governments are taking decisive action, human rights groups seem more outraged by the prospect of action than they are by the abuses they once denounced. The fact that states are both late and hypocritical in their adoption of human rights does not deprive them of the right to use force to defend them.
The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions -- and Iraq may be one of them -- when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror. This does not mean the choice is morally unproblematic. The choice is one between two evils, between containing and leaving a tyrant in place and the targeted use of force, which will kill people but free a nation from the tyrant's grip.
III.
Still, the claim that a free republic may sense a duty to help other people attain their freedom does not answer the prudential question of whether the republic should run such risks. For the risks are huge, and they are imperial. Order, let alone democracy, will take a decade to consolidate in Iraq. The Iraqi opposition's blueprints for a democratic and secular federation of Iraq's component peoples -- Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans and others -- are noble documents, but they are just paper unless American and then international troops, under United Nations mandate, remain to keep the peace until Iraqis trust one another sufficiently to police themselves. Like all imperial exercises in creating order, it will work only if the puppets the Americans install cease to be puppets and build independent political legitimacy of their own.
If America takes on Iraq, it takes on the reordering of the whole region. It will have to stick at it through many successive administrations. The burden of empire is of long duration, and democracies are impatient with long-lasting burdens -- none more so than America. These burdens include opening up a dialogue with the Iranians, who appear to be in a political upsurge themselves, so that they do not feel threatened by a United States-led democracy on their border. The Turks will have to be reassured, and the Kurds will have to be instructed that the real aim of United States policy is not the creation of a Kurdish state that goes on to dismember Turkey. The Syrians will have to be coaxed into abandoning their claims against the Israelis and making peace. The Saudis, once democracy takes root next door in Iraq, will have to be coaxed into embracing democratic change themselves.
All this is possible, but there is a larger challenge still. Unseating an Arab government in Iraq while leaving the Palestinians to face Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships is a virtual guarantee of unending Islamic wrath against the United States. The chief danger in the whole Iraqi gamble lies here -- in supposing that victory over Saddam, in the absence of a Palestinian-Israeli settlement, would leave the United States with a stable hegemony over the Middle East. Absent a Middle East peace, victory in Iraq would still leave the Palestinians face to face with the Israelis in a conflict in which they would destroy not only each other but American authority in the Islamic world as well.
The Americans have played imperial guarantor in the region since Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud in 1945 and Truman recognized Ben-Gurion's Israel in 1948. But it paid little or no price for its imperial pre-eminence until the rise of an armed Palestinian resistance after 1987. Now, with every day that American power appears complicit in Israeli attacks that kill civilians in the West Bank and in Gaza, and with the Arab nations giving their tacit support to Palestinian suicide bombers, the imperial guarantor finds itself dragged into a regional conflict that is one long hemorrhage of its diplomatic and military authority.
Properly understood, then, the operation in Iraq entails a commitment, so far unstated, to enforce a peace on the Palestinians and Israelis. Such a peace must, at a minimum, give the Palestinians a viable, contiguous state capable of providing land and employment for three million people. It must include a commitment to rebuild their shattered government infrastructure, possibly through a United Nations transitional administration, with U.N.-mandated peacekeepers to provide security for Israelis and Palestinians. This is an awesomely tall order, but if America cannot find the will to enforce this minimum of justice, neither it nor Israel will have any safety from terror. This remains true even if you accept that there are terrorists in the Arab world who will never be content unless Israel is driven into the sea. A successful American political strategy against terror depends on providing enough peace for both Israelis and Palestinians that extremists on either side begin to lose the support that keeps violence alive.
Paradoxically, reducing the size of the task does not reduce the risks. If an invasion of Iraq is delinked from Middle East peace, then all America will gain for victory in Iraq is more terror cells in the Muslim world. If America goes on to help the Palestinians achieve a state, the result will not win over those, like Osama bin Laden, who hate America for what it is. But at least it would address the rage of those who hate it for what it does.
This is finally what makes an invasion of Iraq an imperial act: for it to succeed, it will have to build freedom, not just for the Iraqis but also for the Palestinians, along with a greater sense of security for Israel. Again, the paradox of the Iraq operation is that half measures are more dangerous than whole measures. Imperial powers do not have the luxury of timidity, for timidity is not prudence; it is a confession of weakness.
IV.
The question, then, is not whether America is too powerful but whether it is powerful enough. Does it have what it takes to be grandmaster of what Colin Powell has called the chessboard of the world's most inflammable region?
America has been more successful than most great powers in understanding its strengths as well as its limitations. It has become adept at using what is called soft power -- influence, example and persuasion -- in preference to hard power. Adepts of soft power understand that even the most powerful country in the world can't get its way all the time. Even client states have to be deferred to. When an ally like Saudi Arabia asks the United States to avoid flying over its country when bombing Afghanistan, America complies. When America seeks to use Turkey as a base for hostilities in Iraq, it must accept Turkish preconditions. Being an empire doesn't mean being omnipotent.
Nowhere is this clearer than in America's relations with Israel. America's ally is anything but a client state. Its prime minister has refused direct orders from the president of the United States in the past, and he can be counted on to do so again. An Iraq operation requires the United States not merely to prevent Israel from entering the fray but to make peace with a bitter enemy. Since 1948, American and Israeli security interests have been at one. But as the death struggle in Palestine continues, it exposes the United States to global hatreds that make it impossible for it to align its interests with those Israelis who are opposed to any settlement with the Palestinians that does not amount, in effect, to Palestinian capitulation. The issue is not whether the United States should continue to support the state of Israel, but which state, with which borders and which set of relations with its neighbors, it is willing to risk its imperial authority to secure. The apocalyptic violence of one side and the justified refusal to negotiate under fire on the other side leave precious little time to salvage a two-state solution for the Middle East. But this, even more than rescuing Iraq, is the supreme task -- and test -- of American leadership.
V.
What assets does American leadership have at its disposal? At a time when an imperial peace in the Middle East requires diplomats, aid workers and civilians with all the skills in rebuilding shattered societies, American power projection in the area overwhelmingly wears a military uniform. ''Every great power, whatever its ideology,'' Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once wrote, ''has its warrior caste.'' Without realizing the consequences of what they were doing, successive American presidents have turned the projection of American power to the warrior caste, according to the findings of research by Robert J. Lieber of Georgetown University. In President Kennedy's time, Lieber has found, the United States spent 1 percent of its G.D.P. on the nonmilitary aspects of promoting its influence overseas -- State Department, foreign aid, the United Nations, information programs. Under Bush's presidency, the number has declined to just 0.2 percent.
Special Forces are more in evidence in the world's developing nations than Peace Corps volunteers and USAID food experts. As Dana Priest demonstrates in ''The Mission,'' a soon-to-be-published study of the American military, the Pentagon's regional commanders exercise more overseas diplomatic and political leverage than the State Department's ambassadors. Even if you accept that generals can make good diplomats and Special Forces captains can make friends for the United States, it still remains true that the American presence overseas is increasingly armed, in uniform and behind barbed wire and high walls. With every American Embassy now hardened against terrorist attack, the empire's overseas outposts look increasingly like Fort Apache. American power is visible to the world in carrier battle groups patrolling offshore and F-16's whistling overhead. In southern Afghanistan, it is the 82nd Airborne, bulked up in body armor, helmets and weapons, that Pashtun peasants see, not American aid workers and water engineers. Each month the United States spends an estimated $1 billion on military operations in Afghanistan and only $25 million on aid.
This sort of projection of power, hunkered down against attack, can earn the United States fear and respect, but not admiration and affection. America's very strength -- in military power -- cannot conceal its weakness in the areas that really matter: the elements of power that do not subdue by force of arms but inspire by force of example.
VI.
It is unsurprising that force projection overseas should awaken resentment among America's enemies. More troubling is the hostility it arouses among friends, those whose security is guaranteed by American power. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Europe. At a moment when the costs of empire are mounting for America, her rich European allies matter financially. But in America's emerging global strategy, they have been demoted to reluctant junior partners. This makes them resentful and unwilling allies, less and less able to understand the nation that liberated them in 1945.
For 50 years, Europe rebuilt itself economically while passing on the costs of its defense to the United States. This was a matter of more than just reducing its armed forces and the proportion of national income spent on the military. All Western European countries reduced the martial elements in their national identities. In the process, European identity (with the possible exception of Britain) became postmilitary and postnational. This opened a widening gap with the United States. It remained a nation in which flag, sacrifice and martial honor are central to national identity. Europeans who had once invented the idea of the martial nation-state now looked at American patriotism, the last example of the form, and no longer recognized it as anything but flag-waving extremism. The world's only empire was isolated, not just because it was the biggest power but also because it was the West's last military nation-state.
Sept. 11 rubbed in the lesson that global power is still measured by military capability. The Europeans discovered that they lacked the military instruments to be taken seriously and that their erstwhile defenders, the Americans, regarded them, in a moment of crisis, with suspicious contempt.
Yet the Americans cannot afford to create a global order all on their own. European participation in peacekeeping, nation-building and humanitarian reconstruction is so important that the Americans are required, even when they are unwilling to do so, to include Europeans in the governance of their evolving imperial project. The Americans essentially dictate Europe's place in this new grand design. The United States is multilateral when it wants to be, unilateral when it must be; and it enforces a new division of labor in which America does the fighting, the French, British and Germans do the police patrols in the border zones and the Dutch, Swiss and Scandinavians provide the humanitarian aid.
This is a very different picture of the world than the one entertained by liberal international lawyers and human rights activists who had hoped to see American power integrated into a transnational legal and economic order organized around the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court and other international human rights and environmental institutions and mechanisms. Successive American administrations have signed on to those pieces of the transnational legal order that suit their purposes (the World Trade Organization, for example) while ignoring or even sabotaging those parts (the International Criminal Court or the Kyoto Protocol) that do not. A new international order is emerging, but it is designed to suit American imperial objectives. America's allies want a multilateral order that will essentially constrain American power. But the empire will not be tied down like Gulliver with a thousand legal strings.
VII.
On the new imperial frontier, in places like Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo, American military power, together with European money and humanitarian motives, is producing a form of imperial rule for a postimperial age. If this sounds contradictory, it is because the impulses that have gone into this new exercise of power are contradictory. On the one hand, the semiofficial ideology of the Western world -- human rights -- sustains the principle of self-determination, the right of each people to rule themselves free of outside interference. This was the ethical principle that inspired the decolonization of Asia and Africa after World War II. Now we are living through the collapse of many of these former colonial states. Into the resulting vacuum of chaos and massacre a new imperialism has reluctantly stepped -- reluctantly because these places are dangerous and because they seemed, at least until Sept. 11, to be marginal to the interests of the powers concerned. But, gradually, this reluctance has been replaced by an understanding of why order needs to be brought to these places.
Nowhere, after all, could have been more distant than Afghanistan, yet that remote and desperate place was where the attacks of Sept. 11 were prepared. Terror has collapsed distance, and with this collapse has come a sharpened American focus on the necessity of bringing order to the frontier zones. Bringing order is the paradigmatic imperial task, but it is essential, for reasons of both economy and principle, to do so without denying local peoples their rights to some degree of self-determination.
The old European imperialism justified itself as a mission to civilize, to prepare tribes and so-called lesser breeds in the habits of self-discipline necessary for the exercise of self-rule. Self-rule did not necessarily have to happen soon -- the imperial administrators hoped to enjoy the sunset as long as possible -- but it was held out as a distant incentive, and the incentive was crucial in co-opting local elites and preventing them from passing into open rebellion. In the new imperialism, this promise of self-rule cannot be kept so distant, for local elites are all creations of modern nationalism, and modern nationalism's primary ethical content is self-determination. If there is an invasion of Iraq, local elites must be ''empowered'' to take over as soon as the American imperial forces have restored order and the European humanitarians have rebuilt the roads, schools and houses. Nation-building seeks to reconcile imperial power and local self-determination through the medium of an exit strategy. This is imperialism in a hurry: to spend money, to get results, to turn the place back to the locals and get out. But it is similar to the old imperialism in the sense that real power in these zones -- Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan and soon, perhaps, Iraq -- will remain in Washington.
VIII.
At the beginning of the first volume of ''The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,'' published in 1776, Edward Gibbon remarked that empires endure only so long as their rulers take care not to overextend their borders. Augustus bequeathed his successors an empire ''within those limits which nature seemed to have placed as its permanent bulwarks and boundaries: on the west the Atlantic Ocean; the Rhine and Danube on the north; the Euphrates on the east; and towards the south the sandy deserts of Arabia and Africa.'' Beyond these boundaries lay the barbarians. But the ''vanity or ignorance'' of the Romans, Gibbon went on, led them to ''despise and sometimes to forget the outlying countries that had been left in the enjoyment of a barbarous independence.'' As a result, the proud Romans were lulled into making the fatal mistake of ''confounding the Roman monarchy with the globe of the earth.''
This characteristic delusion of imperial power is to confuse global power with global domination. The Americans may have the former, but they do not have the latter. They cannot rebuild each failed state or appease each anti-American hatred, and the more they try, the more they expose themselves to the overreach that eventually undermined the classical empires of old.
The secretary of defense may be right when he warns the North Koreans that America is capable of fighting on two fronts -- in Korea and Iraq -- simultaneously, but Americans at home cannot be overjoyed at such a prospect, and if two fronts are possible at once, a much larger number of fronts is not. If conflict in Iraq, North Korea or both becomes a possibility, Al Qaeda can be counted on to seek to strike a busy and overextended empire in the back. What this suggests is not just that overwhelming power never confers the security it promises but also that even the overwhelmingly powerful need friends and allies. In the cold war, the road to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, led through Moscow and Beijing. Now America needs its old cold war adversaries more than ever to control the breakaway, bankrupt Communist rogue that is threatening America and her clients from Tokyo to Seoul.
Empires survive when they understand that diplomacy, backed by force, is always to be preferred to force alone. Looking into the still more distant future, say a generation ahead, resurgent Russia and China will demand recognition both as world powers and as regional hegemons. As the North Korean case shows, America needs to share the policing of nonproliferation and other threats with these powers, and if it tries, as the current National Security Strategy suggests, to prevent the emergence of any competitor to American global dominance, it risks everything that Gibbon predicted: overextension followed by defeat.
America will also remain vulnerable, despite its overwhelming military power, because its primary enemy, Iraq and North Korea notwithstanding, is not a state, susceptible to deterrence, influence and coercion, but a shadowy cell of fanatics who have proved that they cannot be deterred and coerced and who have hijacked a global ideology -- Islam -- that gives them a bottomless supply of recruits and allies in a war, a war not just against America but against her client regimes in the Islamic world. In many countries in that part of the world, America is caught in the middle of a civil war raging between incompetent and authoritarian regimes and the Islamic revolutionaries who want to return the Arab world to the time of the prophet. It is a civil war between the politics of pure reaction and the politics of the impossible, with America unfortunately aligned on the side of reaction. On Sept. 11, the American empire discovered that in the Middle East its local pillars were literally built on sand.
Until Sept. 11, successive United States administrations treated their Middle Eastern clients like gas stations. This was part of a larger pattern. After 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet empire, American presidents thought they could have imperial domination on the cheap, ruling the world without putting in place any new imperial architecture -- new military alliances, new legal institutions, new international development organisms -- for a postcolonial, post-Soviet world.
The Greeks taught the Romans to call this failure hubris. It was also, in the 1990's, a general failure of the historical imagination, an inability of the post-cold-war West to grasp that the emerging crisis of state order in so many overlapping zones of the world -- from Egypt to Afghanistan -- would eventually become a security threat at home. Radical Islam would never have succeeded in winning adherents if the Muslim countries that won independence from the European empires had been able to convert dreams of self-determination into the reality of competent, rule-abiding states. America has inherited this crisis of self-determination from the empires of the past. Its solution -- to create democracy in Iraq, then hopefully roll out the same happy experiment throughout the Middle East -- is both noble and dangerous: noble because, if successful, it will finally give these peoples the self-determination they vainly fought for against the empires of the past; dangerous because, if it fails, there will be nobody left to blame but the Americans.
The dual nemeses of empire in the 20th century were nationalism, the desire of peoples to rule themselves free of alien domination, and narcissism, the incurable delusion of imperial rulers that the ''lesser breeds'' aspired only to be versions of themselves. Both nationalism and narcissism have threatened the American reassertion of global power since Sept. 11.
IX.
As the Iraqi operation looms, it is worth keeping Vietnam in mind. Vietnam was a titanic clash between two nation-building strategies, the Americans in support of the South Vietnamese versus the Communists in the north. Yet it proved impossible for foreigners to build stability in a divided country against resistance from a Communist elite fighting in the name of the Vietnamese nation. Vietnam is now one country, its civil war over and its long-term stability assured. An American operation in Iraq will not face a competing nationalist project, but across the Islamic world it will rouse the nationalist passions of people who want to rule themselves and worship as they please. As Vietnam shows, empire is no match, long-term, for nationalism.
America's success in the 20th century owed a great deal to the shrewd understanding that America's interest lay in aligning itself with freedom. Franklin Roosevelt, for example, told his advisers at Yalta in 1945, when he was dividing up the postwar world with Churchill and Stalin, that there were more than a billion ''brown people'' living in Asia, ''ruled by a handful of whites.'' They resent it, the president mused aloud. America's goal, he said, ''must be to help them achieve independence -- 1,100,000,000 enemies are dangerous.''
The core beliefs of our time are the creations of the anticolonial revolt against empire: the idea that all human beings are equal and that each human group has a right to rule itself free of foreign interference. It is at least ironic that American believers in these ideas have ended up supporting the creation of a new form of temporary colonial tutelage for Bosnians, Kosovars and Afghans -- and could for Iraqis. The reason is simply that, however right these principles may be, the political form in which they are realized -- the nationalist nation-building project -- so often delivers liberated colonies straight to tyranny, as in the case of Baath Party rule in Iraq, or straight to chaos, as in Bosnia or Afghanistan. For every nationalist struggle that succeeds in giving its people self-determination and dignity, there are more that deliver their people only up to slaughter or terror or both. For every Vietnam brought about by nationalist struggle, there is a Palestinian struggle trapped in a downward spiral of terror and military oppression.
The age of empire ought to have been succeeded by an age of independent, equal and self-governing nation-states. But that has not come to pass. America has inherited a world scarred not just by the failures of empires past but also by the failure of nationalist movements to create and secure free states -- and now, suddenly, by the desire of Islamists to build theocratic tyrannies on the ruins of failed nationalist dreams.
Those who want America to remain a republic rather than become an empire imagine rightly, but they have not factored in what tyranny or chaos can do to vital American interests. The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike. Even so, empires survive only by understanding their limits. Sept. 11 pitched the Islamic world into the beginning of a long and bloody struggle to determine how it will be ruled and by whom: the authoritarians, the Islamists or perhaps the democrats. America can help repress and contain the struggle, but even though its own security depends on the outcome, it cannot ultimately control it. Only a very deluded imperialist would believe otherwise.
Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, has written recently for The Times Magazine about Bosnia and Afghanistan. He is a contributing writer for the magazine.
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accesswater2030@yahoo.com 7:50 PM
January 6, 2003
G.O.P. Lobbyists in Demand as Business Sees Its Chance
By JOHN TIERNEY
ASHINGTON, Jan. 5 — Ed Gillespie, one of the best-connected Republican lobbyists, recalls returning to work right after the election. He was greeted in his office by a hard-charging young Democratic member of his lobbying firm.
"If you need me this morning," the young man said to Mr. Gillespie, "I'll be in the garage washing your car. Would you like me to do the hubcaps?"
These are good days to be a Republican on K Street, the avenue lined with offices of lobbyists and lawyers. Dick Armey, the departing House majority leader, summarized the situation in his usual succinct style when he was asked on Friday how much money he would be making in his new job starting this week at Piper Rudnick, a law firm with a large lobbying operation.
"I don't anticipate going hungry," Mr. Armey replied.
Democratic lobbyists are hardly out of work, because they are still essential to getting the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. But while most firms maintain a bipartisan array of lobbyists, their clients know very well what it takes to reach the politicians in charge of the committees and calendars on Capitol Hill.
"The biggest fundamental change is that Republicans now have the power to schedule," said Mr. Gillespie, a Capitol Hill veteran who was an adviser to the Bush campaign in 2000. "Any lobbyist or trade association can make the case that their cause is right, but the real question in policy making is, why now?"
When Democrats were in power, many corporations regarded lobbyists' fees as a form of protection money against higher taxes and more regulations. Now that Republicans control Congress as well as the White House, corporations are switching from defense to offense as they pursue goals like tax cuts, deregulation, changes in tort law and new profit opportunities from the war on terrorism.
"The old rule was that Democrats in power were good for K Street because they scared corporate America," said Frank J. Donatelli, a lobbyist who was the White House political director during the Reagan administration. "But now corporations are going to K Street because they see an opportunity to improve the business climate dramatically. They see a president who wants to accomplish something and a Congress that they're betting is going to remain Republican for the foreseeable future."
With Republican résumés in vogue, Democratic lobbyists are treasuring their Republican partners. Toby Moffett, a former Democratic congressman from Connecticut, recalls returning to his home state after the election to make a pitch to a potential client. Although he had his own connections with the board of directors, Mr. Moffett realized the key to getting the contract was bringing along his partner, Robert L. Livingston, the Louisiana Republican and former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
"I'm not sure there was a single Republican on the board of the client, but they knew what they needed," Mr. Moffett said. "If I'd gone in there alone, they would have said, `We love you, Toby, but what are we going to do about all those Republicans in Washington?' As soon as we sat down, I told them, `As a Democrat, I have no illusions why I'm here. I realize Washington is a wall-to-wall Republican town, and I wouldn't be in this room if I weren't sitting next to the past Republican chairman of the Appropriations Committee.' They all smiled."
Mr. Livingston's firm expects revenue this year to be 30 percent higher than last year, when it took in $8.6 million, according to Influence magazine, which covers the lobbying industry. Although he has been in the business less than four years, Mr. Livingston is already one of the busiest lobbyists in town and makes a good case study of the Republican era on K Street.
"I didn't think I could work any harder than I did when I was on the Hill, but I'm doing it now," Mr. Livingston, 59, said. "I start at 7 in the morning, work till 7 or 8, and then go out at night sometimes for work." He said he found the work quite similar to what he did in Congress — "I've always been an advocate for one group or another" — with one big difference.
"You go from the grovelee to the groveler," Mr. Livingston said. "It takes a psychological adjustment, but there are compensations."
Such as?
"Well, for the first time in my life, I have more money than month."
Mr. Livingston became a lobbyist after dramatically announcing his resignation from Congress in 1998 just as he was about to become speaker of the House. It was during the furor over President Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, and Mr. Livingston was accused of marital infidelity by Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine. To spare his colleagues and the public from the controversy, Mr. Livingston said, he was resigning, and he urged Mr. Clinton to follow his example.
Mr. Livingston and three of his aides started a lobbying business that has expanded to three offices (in downtown Washington, on Capitol Hill and in suburban New Orleans) and is still short of space for its growing staff. The firm now has 14 full-time professionals plus 30 consultants and lobbyists who work in alliance with the firm. One of the most recent additions is Chester Trent Lott Jr., who was hired just before the controversy that forced his father to resign as Senate majority leader. The news release announcing his hiring mentioned his ability to "provide top-level insights into the operations of the U.S. Senate."
Why do companies like ChevronTexaco , Oracle and Northrop Grumman pay Mr. Livingston fees that are typically $10,000 to $30,000 a month? For starters, he can solve their parking problems by driving them in his Mercedes to the Congressional garage under Capitol Hill, where former members retain privileges. His chief service, of course, is to get them in to see the right person. After two decades in Congress and two terms as the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee — Approps, as it is known lovingly by lobbyists eager for its largess — he can draw on longstanding friendships with the leaders and other committee chairmen like Billy Tauzin, a fellow Louisiana Republican who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
"When he calls up, people don't say, `Bob who?' " said Ken Johnson, the spokesman for the energy committee, of Mr. Livingston. "He's known and respected by a lot of people. He opens a lot of doors."
Mr. Livingston's clients include energy companies hoping for favorable treatment in an energy bill, colleges and universities and hospitals seeking appropriations and defense contractors looking for work from the Pentagon and the new Department of Homeland Security. As the federal government decides what sort of computer systems to order for the war on the terrorism, Mr. Livingston is helping the Oracle software company make its case on Capitol Hill.
"Bob has been very helpful in shepherding us around the Hill," said Robert Hoffman, director of legislative affairs for Oracle. "He has been giving us strategic advice on who we should be seeing, and how to package our message based on the expertise and background of the member. He knows the personalities and the inner workings of the process."
Aside from wanting to sell more software, Oracle is also one of the many companies eager for tax breaks, expected to be one of the first issues when Congress convenes on Tuesday. The prospect has set off jockeying among industries with different wish lists — tax credits for research, a permanent repeal of the estate tax, reductions in taxes on dividends and other income.
There is also a joint lobbying campaign called the Tax Relief Coalition, which represents more than 1,000 companies and groups like the Chamber of Commerce of the United States and the National Federation of Independent Business. The coalition's leader, Dirk Van Dongen, the president of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, met with senior White House staff members shortly after the election to discuss strategy for getting tax breaks through Congress.
"Business is optimistic with this new Congress, but it's still very hard to get over the 60-vote threshold in the Senate if the White House does not provide adult supervision," Mr. Van Dongen said. "Someone's got to herd cats when you've got the razor-thin margin we have now."
Another priority for business lobbyists is changes in tort law. In the last session, the House passed bills limiting class-action suits and the amount of money that could be awarded for pain and suffering in medical malpractice suits, but the Democrats controlling the Senate refused to go along. Lobbyists working for trial lawyers opposed to the changes are ready for the new Republican leaders to take up the fight.
"It's going to be a difficult Congress when you have so many corporations looking for change in the law to make them less accountable," said Linda Lipsen, who is the chief lobbyist for the Association of Trial Lawyers of America. "We might add a lobbyist here and there, and maybe a Republican if we need one." But even though the Senate's leadership has flipped, the basic arithmetic of lobbying has not been greatly altered by the Republicans' gain of two seats, she said, because crucial votes are still decided by the swing voters — the 7 to 10 moderate members of each party who will determine whether the Republicans can get the 60 votes needed to stop a filibuster.
Tom Korologos, a longtime Republican lobbyist, said that he had been trying to tamp down his clients' hopes. "Just because Republicans now control three branches of government doesn't mean businesses can get everything they want," (READ, corporations control 3 branches of government.)Mr. Korologos said. "The only thing to expect, I tell my clients, is for fewer bad things to happen."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 7:17 PM
Flaws in the war machine
Peter Hartcher in Washington
04/01/2003
Until September 11, 2001, the US military's budget was about the size of the entire Australian economy. After the terrorists struck, the government quickly increased defence spending, by an amount equal to the New Zealand economy. In the budget that President George Bush is preparing to submit to Congress, he is expected to ask for another increase, this time equivalent to the national economy of Syria.
Altogether, this would put US military spending at roughly $US410 billion ($730 billion) for the fiscal year beginning in October.
So if the Pentagon were a country, it would rank as the world's 14th-biggest economy - a fraction smaller than India and South Korea, but larger than the Netherlands or Russia.
Washington's military spending, long the heftiest in the world, has burgeoned to become preponderant, stunning by any measure.
At the peak of US defence spending during the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union, Washington accounted for 31 per cent of all global military outlays.
Today, the US makes up fully half of all world defence spending.
What if you combine the defence budgets of all America's adversaries and potential adversaries - the unfriendly seven, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, plus the potential strategic rivals, the great powers China and Russia?
They barely come to the knee of the US colossus - equal to less than one-third of the Pentagon budget, according to the Center for Defense Information in Washington.
Together with its backers - NATO, Japan, South Korea, Australia - the US alliance system accounts for well over two-thirds of all military spending worldwide.
Even by US historical standards, its spending today is vast. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the US cut its defence budget by a third.
Now, although the US no longer faces a mighty opposing empire, its military outlays have been rebuilt to a level 10 per cent higher than the average during the Cold War, and only 16 per cent lower than the absolute peak of its Cold War spending in 1985, according to Steven Kosiak at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.
So why does a country with 5per cent of the world's population and a quarter of the world economy need half the world's military spending?
If it sounds seriously out of proportion to the needs of a normal country, that's because it is not a normal country.
Certainly, the US seeks to provide security for itself. But it seeks something much more.
"The Pax Americana that Bush inherited from Bill Clinton derived from one very large but indisputable fact: over the previous century, the US had achieved by force of arms a dominant position in four distinct regions of critical geopolitical and economic importance," writes Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich in his book American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy.
Those four: Europe, East Asia, the Middle East and the Western Hemisphere.
"This breadth of American mastery, greater than that of the British Empire in its heyday, marked the US after the Cold War as unique in the annals of great powers. But with that level of mastery, there could be no pulling back."
Indeed, we know the ambitiousness of US policy from the mouths of its most senior officials.
First, to retain an unchallenged mastery of the globe. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has said a key aim of US strategy is to ensure that "no hegemon can rise to threaten stability". There is room for only one hegemon at a time.
Second, not content with the status quo, to actually extend the degree of US dominance.
This is where September 11 comes in. The Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington presented "the kind of opportunities that World War II offered to refashion the world".
US military spending is not merely a means to a normal country's goal of national defence; it is a tool for a superpower's ambition to extend global domination.
"The whole mindset of military spending changed on September 11," observes Loren Thompson, a defence expert at the Lexington Institute, a Washington think tank. "The most fundamental thing about defence spending is that threats drive defence spending. It's now going to be easier to fund almost anything."
And so it has proved.
Several stark truths have emerged with particular post-September 11 clarity in the gritty reality of the American military system.
One is that it is indeed easier to fund almost anything, but it's almost impossible to stop funding something - even if it's useless.
The Bush administration wants to extend and entrench US hegemony, no question, and set out to do it as decisively and efficiently as possible.
So last year Rumsfeld announced plans to close 100 redundant military bases in the US. The US Congress refused. The Congress was happy to authorise one-third of a $US1trillion for the armed forces, but would not allow the administration to pursue efficiencies in spending it.
It emerged as the most contentious defence issue in the legislature. Rumsfeld declared himself to be very disappointed: "What that means is that the US will continue to have something like 20 to 25 per cent more bases than we need," he said.
"We will be spending money that is being wasted to manage and maintain bases we don't need. Given the war on terror, we will be doing something even more egregious - and that is, we will be providing force protection on bases we don't need."
Rumsfeld's arguments fell on deaf ears. Why? Because members of Congress are more intent on keeping the jobs and spending that go with the bases in their districts than they are on improving the efficiency or ability of the US armed forces.
Rumsfeld's only success was that the Congress agreed to review the situation in 2005.
Dwight Eisenhower famously warned of the dangers of a collusive "military-industrial complex" of armed forces and defence industrialists. This has been updated to what some in Washington call "the iron triangle" - not just the generals and the arms manufacturers, but also the crucial paymasters for the system, the US Congress.
The second stark truth is that members of Congress have pounced on the upsurge in defence spending as a cover for increasing the level of pork-barrelling in their districts.
In the defence spending bills approved by the Senate on December 7, 2001, for spending in 2002, the Congress voted $US4 billion more than the administration had requested. That's an amount equal to Singapore's total defence budget.
These extra funds were for scores of home-town projects for individual members of Congress, ranging from fisheries loans in Alaska to a small business centre in Missouri and more trustees for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC.
But the Congress actually trimmed the part of the proposed defence budget that directly supports combat forces and their needs, the operations and management budget.
The Bush administration asked for $US125.7 billion for post-September 11 military readiness. The Congress handed him $US123.3 billion, a cut of $US2.4 billion.
And the Congress denied the Pentagon funding for some combat projects while adding a raft of irrelevant "pork" for members' home districts - like a landfill project, bridge repairs and memorials.
While most of the participants in this rorting deliver speeches - fine and stirring patriotic affirmations - to deflect attention from what they are doing, one senator, John McCain, was outraged.
McCain, who ran against Bush for the Republican nomination for president in 2000, stood in the Senate and denounced his colleagues: "This kind of behaviour cannot go on. You will lose the confidence of the American people. This is called war profiteering."
But it did go on, and attracted little public scrutiny and no discernible outrage in the American media.
Indeed, the Senate went on to add yet more irrelevant pork projects to the bills.
Only one project has generated any sustained controversy. The Congress approved an extraordinary rort to favour Boeing by leasing 100 planes to use as fuel tankers for mid-air refuelling of bombers. Rather than buy the planes for $US16 billion and own them, the Congress approved a deal to lease the planes for 10 years - for $US26 billion.
"I do not think I have ever seen a proposal that makes less sense economically - and I have been here for 22 years," said Phil Gramm, another Republican senator.
And while the future of this deal is still in the balance, the tolerance for such naked collusion and rorting seems very high.
One Senate staffer adopted the nom de plume of Spartacus and wrote a detailed and scathing indictment of the whole process: "Unneeded bases stayed open, while soldiers were deployed to war with training budgets reduced to enable more pork.
"Unsought air tankers will be borrowed at extraordinary cost, while weapons used in the new conflict are shorn of maintenance resources for their use.
"Members of Congress are given brand new VIP transports for their personal travel, while combat air crew fly in fighter-bombers that are up to 20 years old and B-52 bombers that were last built in 1962."
Members of Congress did manage to muster enough indignation to find out the true identity of Spartacus - one Winslow Wheeler - and force him out of his job last July.
In the new budget proposal, Rumsfeld is resolutely pushing to renovate the US military force structure.
He wants to junk the bulk of the Cold War defence systems and weapons and invest in leaping a generation ahead to a high-tech future - the so-called revolution in military affairs.
He has been repeatedly frustrated by the US Congress: "Instead of seizing the historic moment to establish new defence priorities after September 11, the Bush administration seems to be ... funding two military strategies at once - one for the Cold War and one for the future," writes Michelle Ciarrocca of the Arms Trade Resource Center.
But the new budget proposes shifting $US90 billion over the next five years from traditional weapons programs to futuristic ones, such as laser satellite transmissions and unmanned combat aerial vehicles like the one that incinerated six suspected terrorists in a car in Yemen in November.
This will pit the Bush administration's grand strategic vision of extended world domination against the pork-barrel urges of the US Congress. Vast as the US military budget may be, it is not infinite.
The novelist John Fowles wrote in The Magus: "Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them."
In the vortex of the imperial US military budget and the many petty political demands that swirl around it, there is much that is deadly serious. And much to laugh at, too.
© This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorised use, copying or mirroring is prohibited.
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 6:36 PM
We are not conspirators, are we? Is this an expression of the majority or the oligarchy of the rich and their lackeys?
U.S. State Department Policy Planning Study #23, 1948:
“Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity [U.S. military-economic supremacy]... To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming... We should cease to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
— George Kennan
Director of Policy Planning
U.S. State Department
1948
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 6:31 PM
“Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that The State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.”
— Arthur Miller
playwright
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 6:20 PM
George W. Bush's Constitution
Nat Hentoff
Village Voice
Saturday 3 January 2003
'Does It Take a Lifetime to Question a Man?'
It is hard to imagine that America would look kindly on a foreign government that demanded the right to hold some of its own citizens in prison, incommunicado, denying them access to legal assistance for as long as it thought necessary, without ever charging them with a crime.
Nevertheless, that is the position that George Bush's administration has tried to defend in the courts with regard to American citizens whom it has deemed to be "enemy combatants." --The Economist, London, December 14, 2002
The imprisonment of "enemy combatant" Yaser Esam Hamdi in a naval brig in the United States is not a matter of concern to most Americans, since they do not know of Mr. Hamdi's isolation from the Bill of Rights, and might not care if they did. But the Supreme Court will ultimately decide whether George W. Bush's Constitution will replace--in significant parts--the Constitution that most Americans are also not familiar with.
When Mr. Hamdi's case--though not Mr. Hamdi personally--came before federal judge Robert Doumar in Norfolk, Virginia, that veteran jurist, appointed by Ronald Reagan, was astonished at the sweep of the government's declaration that the president had the right to personally put Hamdi in the brig and strip him of all his constitutional rights after claiming that he was an "enemy combatant." It is also the government's contention that the courts have minimal jurisdiction over the commander in chief as he locks up Americans he calls "enemy combatants" during our war against terrorism.
Nonetheless, Judge Doumar insisted that the government explain itself, and was handed a two-page sworn document, written by Michael Mobbs, a Defense Department official, justifying the president's totally depriving Hamdi of his freedom indefinitely--without his being charged with any crime.
Before getting to the judge's angry reaction to the Mobbs statement, it's necessary to note that just about every reference to Hamdi in the media has said--as printed in the November 1 New York Law Journal--that "Hamdi was seized while fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan." How do we know that to be true? Don't you trust your source--your government?
As Katherine Seelye wrote in The New York Times (August 13, 2001) of Judge Doumar's response to the official Mobbs document giving the government's evidence: "He made very clear that he found the statement lacking in nearly every respect."
A fuller account of what Judge Doumar said is in an extraordinarily valuable report by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights: A Year of Loss: Reexamining Civil Liberties Since September 11. Released last September 5, the report quotes more of what Judge Doumar indignantly said to the government prosecutor who had handed him the Mobbs document:
"I'm challenging everything in the Mobbs declaration. If you think I don't understand the utilization of words, you are sadly mistaken."
Mr. Mobbs had declared that Hamdi was "affiliated with a Taliban unit and received weapons training." Bolstering the government's case--or so it seemed--were photographs in some of the media of Hamdi carrying a weapon. So what was Judge Doumar's beef?
The Mobbs document, Judge Doumar said bluntly, "makes no effort to explain what 'affiliated' means nor under what criteria this 'affiliation' justified Hamdi's classification as an enemy combatant. The declaration is silent as to what level of 'affiliation' is necessary to warrant enemy combatant status. . . .
"It does not say where or by whom he received weapons training or the nature and content thereof. Indeed, a close inspection of the declaration reveals that [it] never claims that Hamdi was fighting for the Taliban, nor that he was a member of the Taliban. Without access to the screening criteria actually used by the government in its classification decision, this Court is unable to determine whether the government has paid adequate consideration to due process rights to which Hamdi is entitled under his present detention." (Emphasis added.)
Think about that. This American citizen was officially stripped of all his constitutional rights and this flimsy two-page document is the government's explanation before the court.
If the government had more information, why didn't it show that evidence in camera (to the judge in his private chambers)?
I doubt that the relatively few Americans--not counting constitutional lawyers--who have been following this crucial case know how thoroughly Judge Doumar discredited the government's explanation for its indefinite punishment--without charges--of Hamdi.
Another point, this one entirely ignored by the media, is in an amicus brief to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers:
"[The government claims] that Mr. Hamdi 'surrendered' not to U.S. forces, but to a group of counter-insurgent Afghanis popularly called the 'Northern Alliance.' However, [the government then proceeds] to repeatedly claim that Hamdi was 'captured'--an important distinction when evaluating his legal status vis-à-vis the United States and under international law. One who surrenders before engaging in 'combat' can hardly be classified as a 'combatant' logically, much less legally."
In addition to Mr. Mobbs's pieces of paper, the government prosecutor also told Judge Doumar that the Defense Department had to hold Hamdi for interrogation. And since the war on terrorism has no defined end in sight, he must be "detained" indefinitely.
Said Judge Doumar: "How long does it take to question a man? A year? Two years? Ten years? A lifetime? How long?"
Under this intensive fire, the prosecutor, Gregory G. Garre, an assistant to Solicitor General Theodore Olson, had only this response: "The present detention is lawful."
As Judge Doumar said after he had denounced the two-page declaration: "So the Constitution doesn't apply to Mr. Hamdi?"
I will follow this case through the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and then, I expect, to the United States Supreme Court. Those nine men and women will decide whether the essential liberties in the Framers' Constitution have been removed by George W. Bush. It's a pity the Democratic Party cares much less about civil liberties than about Bush's tax cuts.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
© : t r u t h o u t 2002
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 2:40 PM
If corporations run our government, and our most powerful corporations lie, cheat and make-up stories to get our tax money, what can we do?
January 03, 2003
Physicist blows whistle on US missile defence
From Roland Watson in Washington
THE credibility of President Bush’s multibillion-dollar missile defence plans are being questioned by leading scientists after claims that the results of key tests were falsified.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is considering an investigation into accusations that fundamental flaws in the proposed “Son of Star Wars” system have been covered up.
The criticism is led by Theodore Postol, a physicist and missile defence critic at MIT, who has said that the institute is sitting on what is potentially “the most serious fraud that we’ve seen at a great American university”.
After months of demanding an inquiry into the affair, Ed Crawley, the chairman of MIT’s aeronautics and astronautics department, has reversed previous refusals and recommended an investigation.
The issue in question goes to the heart of missile defence technology, an article of faith among right-wing Republicans and a key plank in Mr Bush’s 2000 presidential manifesto. The United States unilaterally withdrew last year from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in order to pursue the controversial proposed system, which is designed to intercept enemy warheads in flight, a feat likened to hitting a bullet with a bullet.
Dr Postol and fellow critics say the ability of an interceptor missile to distinguish between an incoming warhead and the decoys likely to accompany it is deeply suspect. Any such doubts would cripple the credibility of the system.
Such questions date back to mid-1997 when the military contractor TWR Inc was accused by one of its employees, Nira Schwartz, of faking test results on a prototype anti-missile sensor meant to tell hostile warheads from decoys.
The company and its system was given the all-clear by the Lincoln Laboratory, a federally funded research centre at MIT. But subsequently the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, accused TWR of exaggerating the sensors’ performance, saying its conclusions had been “highly misleading”.
Dr Postol has written to 20 members of Congress saying that MIT’s reluctance to investigate the role of its own research centre “may indicate an attempt to conceal evidence of criminal violations”.
Critics say that MIT’s independence is compromised by its interest in maintaining hundreds of millions of dollars in annual government contracts.
The missile defence system, the first steps of which Mr Bush announced in December with the aim of having ten missile interceptors in Alaska by 2004, is being built by Raytheon, which beat TWR to the contract. But Dr Postol said the TWR test, which offers a rare glimpse into the highly secretive world of missile testing and is based on the same infra-red technology used by Raytheon, suggests some flaws that challenge the overall feasibility of the entire project.
Dr Postol, a persistent missile defence critic who is accusing MIT of a “serious case of scientific fraud”, cannot be lightly dismissed. After the Gulf War he challenged the Pentagon’s claims for the success of its defensive Patriot missiles, saying they had intercepted few if any Iraqi Scuds. Despite initial ridicule, his assertion is now accepted.
Since 1999 three of the eight tests of “hit to kill” interceptors have failed. Critics say that wrapping a nuclear warhead in radar-absorbing rubber foam or releasing thousands of small pieces of metal would be enough to fool an interceptor.
Separately the State Department yesterday charged two US aerospace companies with illegally supplying China with satellite and rocket technology that could be used for intercontinental missiles.
Hughes Electronics Corp and its parent company, Boeing Satellite Systems, stand accused of 123 arms control violations by helping China with technical data after failed rocket launches in 1995 and 1996. Hughes said that it had done nothing wrong.
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 2:38 PM
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