From the NY Times:
Matters of Emphasis
By PAUL KRUGMAN

"We were not lying," a Bush administration official told ABC News. "But it was just a matter of emphasis." The official was referring to the way the administration hyped the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the United States. According to the ABC report, the real reason for the war was that the administration "wanted to make a statement." And why Iraq? "Officials acknowledge that Saddam had all the requirements to make him, from their standpoint, the perfect target."

A British newspaper, The Independent, reports that "intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave political leaders were distorted in the rush to war." One "high-level source" told the paper that "they ignored intelligence assessments which said Iraq was not a threat."

Sure enough, we have yet to find any weapons of mass destruction. It's hard to believe that we won't eventually find some poison gas or crude biological weapons. But those aren't true W.M.D.'s, the sort of weapons that can make a small, poor country a threat to the greatest power the world has ever known. Remember that President Bush made his case for war by warning of a "mushroom cloud." Clearly, Iraq didn't have anything like that — and Mr. Bush must have known that it didn't.

Does it matter that we were misled into war? Some people say that it doesn't: we won, and the Iraqi people have been freed. But we ought to ask some hard questions — not just about Iraq, but about ourselves.

First, why is our compassion so selective? In 2001 the World Health Organization — the same organization we now count on to protect us from SARS — called for a program to fight infectious diseases in poor countries, arguing that it would save the lives of millions of people every year. The U.S. share of the expenses would have been about $10 billion per year — a small fraction of what we will spend on war and occupation. Yet the Bush administration contemptuously dismissed the proposal.

Or consider one of America's first major postwar acts of diplomacy: blocking a plan to send U.N. peacekeepers to Ivory Coast (a former French colony) to enforce a truce in a vicious civil war. The U.S. complains that it will cost too much. And that must be true — we wouldn't let innocent people die just to spite the French, would we?

So it seems that our deep concern for the Iraqi people doesn't extend to suffering people elsewhere. I guess it's just a matter of emphasis. A cynic might point out, however, that saving lives peacefully doesn't offer any occasion to stage a victory parade.

Meanwhile, aren't the leaders of a democratic nation supposed to tell their citizens the truth?

One wonders whether most of the public will ever learn that the original case for war has turned out to be false. In fact, my guess is that most Americans believe that we have found W.M.D.'s. Each potential find gets blaring coverage on TV; how many people catch the later announcement — if it is ever announced — that it was a false alarm? It's a pattern of misinformation that recapitulates the way the war was sold in the first place. Each administration charge against Iraq received prominent coverage; the subsequent debunking did not.

Did the news media feel that it was unpatriotic to question the administration's credibility? Some strange things certainly happened. For example, in September Mr. Bush cited an International Atomic Energy Agency report that he said showed that Saddam was only months from having nuclear weapons. "I don't know what more evidence we need," he said. In fact, the report said no such thing — and for a few hours the lead story on MSNBC's Web site bore the headline "White House: Bush Misstated Report on Iraq." Then the story vanished — not just from the top of the page, but from the site.

Thanks to this pattern of loud assertions and muted or suppressed retractions, the American public probably believes that we went to war to avert an immediate threat — just as it believes that Saddam had something to do with Sept. 11.

Now it's true that the war removed an evil tyrant. But a democracy's decisions, right or wrong, are supposed to take place with the informed consent of its citizens. That didn't happen this time. And we are a democracy — aren't we?

Shut your mouth!

From the NY Times:
Rejecting the World
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The Bush administration did the right thing on diesel emissions this week, curbing an important source of air pollution. Yet George Bush has, in general, reneged on the environmental promises of his 2000 campaign. Most notably, he broke his campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, offering instead a purely voluntary — and therefore, one might have thought, meaningless — plan to limit global warming.

But even this, it turns out, was too much for Mr. Bush's party. The energy bill passed by House Republicans last week didn't include any plan, even a voluntary one, to limit greenhouse emissions. Why?

The answer, I believe, has to do with an aversion to all things global.

On its face, the Bush plan on global warming was a sham, relying on the kindness of corporations. The Department of Energy would have issued credits to companies that reduced carbon dioxide emissions, but since there would have been no legal limits, those credits would simply have been a symbolic recognition of good behavior.

Or would they? Right-wing think tanks engaged in a concerted, and successful, campaign to persuade Congress to reject the Bush scheme. Those think tanks argued that keeping track of emission reductions would make it easier for a future administration to introduce a real global warming policy: companies that had accumulated credits might favor measures that gave those credits some value. More broadly, they opposed any legitimization of the idea that global warming is a problem.

But why would that be such a bad thing, from their point of view?

We can safely dismiss the idea that the right has carefully weighed the scientific evidence and concluded that the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is wrong. We can also dismiss the idea that conservatives have carefully examined the economics of emission controls and concluded that they are too expensive.

So was it just politics as usual? Opposition to a global warming policy partly reflects a general aversion to government regulation. Don't forget that Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, is a former exterminator who entered politics because he was angry about controls on pesticide use.

But the ferocity with which the right opposes any policy to limit greenhouse gases, even the nearly empty Bush plan, goes beyond general anti-environmentalism. What's different about global warming, I think, is that unlike local pollution, dealing with it requires concerted action by governments around the world. And that's what the right really can't stand.

This shouldn't be surprising. There was a time when U.S. conservatives were isolationists. Nobody thinks that's a viable position nowadays, but the same impulses — an assertion of moral superiority, an unwillingness to consider alternative points of view — lie behind America's new spirit of unilateralism. We obviously can't ignore the world, but many Americans reject the idea that other countries should have any say over what we do.

But what happens when unilateralists encounter problems that clearly require the cooperation of other countries — not as junior partners, but as equals? Right now the answer is simply to deny the existence of those problems. The greenhouse effect is a quintessentially global issue — fine, we'll deny that global warming exists. Fighting stateless terrorists demands a global cooperative effort — fine, we'll fight terrorism by launching a conventional war against a regime that, nasty as it was, had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks.

Eventually, of course — and sooner rather than later — this attempt to deny reality will fail. While we've been watching the Iraq show, many past achievements of U.S. foreign policy have been disintegrating. Through neglect and arrogance, the United States has squandered the good will it built up in Latin America in the 1990's. For half a century the U.S. has regarded the drive toward free trade as a key part of its global strategy; now trade negotiations are falling apart from lack of attention.

Even in Iraq, we're starting to see that winning the war was the easy part, and U.S. officials — previously dismissive of "old Europe" — are suddenly talking about an international peacekeeping force. But to be effective, such a force, like the one in Afghanistan, would surely have to include French and German soldiers.

The truth is that we can't go it alone. But by the time that truth sinks in, there may be a lot of pieces to pick up.

"Where Everything Is Music"
By Jelaluddin Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

Don't worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn't matter.

We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.

The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world's harp
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing.

So the candle flickers and goes out.
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!

They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can't see.

Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.

From the NY Times:
The Home-Front War on Taxes

With the blitzlike speed of his generals, President Bush has come out fighting for his disastrous plan for more upper-bracket tax cuts, which will only stoke the nation's record levels of deficit spending and deepening debt well beyond his incumbency. In a Rose Garden plea for his economic "growth" package yesterday, Mr. Bush artfully adapted his war-room posture to link applause lines for the Iraqi success thus far with fresh appeals to rally behind a new battle against the dividends tax.

The president made a political couplet of the two themes of patriotism and tax cuts in trumpeting his resolve to cash in his personally high poll ratings from the war for a tax cut that most Americans are wary of. Unlike Mr. Bush, they seem to be aware that continuous tax reductions at a time of heavy wartime expenses are going to reduce the chances of creating much-desired programs like prescription drug coverage for the elderly, or financing for the education initiatives that the president once seemed to think were so important. Now Mr. Bush is asking for more, please, including "at least" the $550 billion, 10-year cut pending in Congress.

It is incredible to see a wartime president demanding a tax cut that would, in an instant, require a record $984 billion increase in the national debt, to $7.384 trillion, with annual deficits of $400 billion and more under a Republican Party that once bragged of budgetary rectitude.

The president's new full-court press for tax cuts is scheduled to include dozens of Bush surrogates, fanning out across the country while Congress is in recess to argue his case. Their main target is a few principled Senate Republicans who have joined with Democrats to demand that the tax cut be limited to $350 billion. That is hardly a bargain for taxpayers, who will still be saddled with bigger deficits, debt and program shrinkage as future bills and borrowing come due.

Still, the resistance of the G.O.P. dissenters is not acceptable in Mr. Bush's renewed detaxation mania, and those Republicans must stand fast against selling out as the White House sends a platoon of emissaries to the states to lobby for the maximum cut.

Unlike his father, President Bush is leaving no gap in turning back to the troubled economy a day after the Pentagon began pronouncing the war over. Political attention is one thing, fiscal wisdom another. The Rose Garden was filled with small-business executives, but not mainline economists like Alan Greenspan. They are warning that the Republicans' doctrine of extended deficit spending and tax cuts will crimp the economy and interest rates in a grim future in which the government must borrow more and more to stay afloat.

From the NY Times:
The Iraq Money Tree

Invading, occupying and rebuilding Iraq will cost American taxpayers more than $100 billion. But for some lucky companies, Iraq is emerging as a profit center. The administration has begun farming out contracts, and politically connected firms like Halliburton are among the early winners. This looks like naked favoritism and undermines the Bush administration's portrayal of the war as a campaign for disarmament and democracy, not lucre.

Despite the limited damage of this war, the ravages of earlier conflicts and sanctions have left much of Iraq in ruins. Roads, ports and schools must be rebuilt, the oil industry revived and power grids and communications networks repaired. Some emergency contracts need to be awarded right away. But that does not mean this should be done without competition or that such contracts should be long term. Moreover, by grabbing much of the first year's money, the favored American companies may have a leg up for signing future deals as well. Reconstruction is expected to cost some $20 billion a year for the next three years.

With so much money involved it is vital that bidding be competitive, transparent and open to all. That has not happened so far. Shortly before the war began, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a no-bid contract to fight oil fires for the next two years to a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company Vice President Dick Cheney ran from 1995 to 2000. The deal could be worth as much as $7 billion.

Federal contracting regulations allow normal rules to be bypassed when time is short and national security concerns are involved. Those exceptions may apply to oil fields set aflame during the fighting, but it's hard to see how they justify a multiyear contract. Congress has rightly asked the corps to provide details on the Halliburton contract and on why no competing firms were allowed to bid.

Over at State, the Agency for International Development has limited bidding to a short list composed mainly of government contracting insiders. These include the Bechtel Group, on whose board sits George Shultz, a former secretary of state, and the Fluor Corporation, whose recently retired chief executive is being considered by the Pentagon to run Iraq's oil industry.

Companies unfairly excluded from bidding for these contracts are justifiably upset, including those based in Britain, America's most important military ally in Iraq. Under World Trade Organization rules, procurement contracts are supposed to be open to all bidders, domestic and foreign.

Even if a legal basis can be found for these closed bidding arrangements, they are unacceptable. The Iraq war was fought in the name of high principles. Victory should not turn into an undeserved financial bonanza for companies that have cultivated close ties with the Bush administration.

From the NY Times:
The Last Refuge
By PAUL KRUGMAN

In 1944, millions of Americans were engaged in desperate battles across the world. Nonetheless, a normal presidential election was held, and the opposition didn't pull its punches: Thomas Dewey, the Republican candidate, campaigned on the theme that Franklin Roosevelt was a "tired old man." As far as I've been able to ascertain, the Roosevelt administration didn't accuse Dewey of hurting morale by questioning the president's competence. After all, democracy — including the right to criticize — was what we were fighting for.

It's not a slur on the courage of our troops, or a belittling of the risks they face, to say that our current war is a mere skirmish by comparison. Yet self-styled patriots are trying to impose constraints on political speech never contemplated during World War II, accusing anyone who criticizes the president of undermining the war effort.

Last week John Kerry told an audience that "what we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States." Republicans immediately sought to portray this remark as little short of treason. "Senator Kerry crossed a grave line when he dared to suggest the replacement of America's commander in chief at a time when America is at war," declared Marc Racicot, chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Notice that Mr. Racicot wasn't criticizing Mr. Kerry's choice of words. Instead, he denounced Mr. Kerry because he "dared to suggest the replacement of America's commander in chief" — knowing full well that Mr. Kerry was simply talking about the next election. Mr. Racicot, not Mr. Kerry, is the one who crossed a grave line; never in our nation's history has it been considered unpatriotic to oppose an incumbent's re-election.

Anyway, what defines patriotism? Talk is cheap; so is putting a flag in your lapel. Citizens prove their patriotism when they make sacrifices for the sake of their country. Mr. Kerry, a decorated veteran, has met that test. Most of his critics haven't.

I'm not just talking about military service — though it's striking how few of our biggest hawks have served. Nor am I talking only about financial sacrifice — though profiting from public office seems to be the norm, not the exception, among those who wrap themselves in the flag. (Mr. Racicot himself accepted the job as R.N.C. chairman only on the condition that he remain on the payroll of Bracewell and Patterson, a law firm that specializes in lobbying.)

The biggest test of a politician's patriotism is whether he is willing to sacrifice some of his political agenda for the sake of the nation. And that's a test our current leaders have failed with flying colors.

Consider the case of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, who also piled on Mr. Kerry last week. As it happens, during the war in Kosovo Mr. DeLay was a defeatist, and blamed his own country for provoking Serbian atrocities; any Democrat who said similar things now would be accused of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Mr. DeLay's political agenda hasn't shifted a bit now that we're at war again. He's still pushing for huge, divisive tax cuts that go mainly to the rich: "Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes," he says. And he's still eager to slash any and all domestic spending. In the midst of war he pushed through a budget that included sharp cuts in, yes, veterans' benefits.

You can see why Mr. Kerry blasted back, "I'm not going to be questioned in my patriotism by the likes of Tom DeLay."

Some timid souls will suggest that critics of the Bush administration hold off until the war is over. But that's not the American tradition — and anyway, when will this war be over? Baghdad will fall, but during the occupation that follows American soldiers will still be in harm's way. Also, a strong faction within the administration wants to go on to Syria, to Iran and beyond. And Al Qaeda is still out there.

For years to come, then, this country may be, in some sense, at war. And all that time, if Mr. Racicot and his party are allowed to set the ground rules, nobody will be allowed to criticize the president or call for his electoral defeat. You know what? If that happens, we will have lost the war, whatever happens on the battlefield.

From the Washington Post:
Bombs Bring Only Pain and Terror
By Joanne Grady Huskey

I am horrified as I read in the newspapers about the Iraqi families who have been bombed in their homes by the United States and who are reeling from the shock. I am immediately thrust back to the moment in 1998 in Nairobi, Kenya, when I was in the basement of the U.S. Embassy with my two small children and we were bombed by al Qaeda cohorts of Osama bin Laden.

I remember the moment of impact when I was thrown to the floor in darkness, stunned by a phenomenon I had never before witnessed, just as Iraqi mothers and fathers are stunned today. I remember searching desperately for my children on the floor in that dark basement, screaming to find out if they were alive. I remember finding them and holding them, while all around me people who were wounded were calling out. I remember stumbling to find my way out of the embassy, crawling through the rubble and confusion and fire. I remember the fear and the feeling that this is what hell must be like. I remember burying my friends and mourning our loss, as Iraqi families are doing today. I remember that I, like those in Iraq now, just didn't understand.

How could such an act of inhumanity happen, I wondered in my sorrow and confusion. The Iraqi people, caught in their own homes while minding their own business, must be asking the same question.

My conclusion after being attacked in Nairobi was that we Americans had every obligation to bridge the gap of misunderstanding and to try to communicate and learn about the anger directed at us. Being the wife of a diplomat, I felt that diplomacy was needed more than ever, to open up dialogue and find resolution to our conflicts with people in Muslim nations. I felt that not only formal diplomacy but also informal diplomacy, the kind that I and other Americans living abroad pursued every day, was of utmost importance if we were ever to begin to find a way toward solutions to our misunderstandings. We had to meet and know each other and begin to talk.

After the attacks on our nation on Sept. 11, 2001, we could either have learned a lesson -- that we desperately need to work with other nations to find a way to understand each other -- or we could have taken revenge, using the same tactics that were used against us.

Our president, who himself has never lived in another country, decided that the way to stop all this terror and anger directed at our country is to bomb Iraq. Rather than expanding our diplomatic efforts, we stopped them, in favor of bombing. We resorted to bombs and military attacks in an all-out effort to stop the hatred against our people.

But I am certain that bombs only exacerbate anger and pain and confusion and terror, and it grieves me to see that we are doing to other innocent people exactly what was done to us in 1998. You are wrong, Mr. President, if you think this will heal the anger against us. You are wrong, Mr. Rumsfeld, if you think you can bomb away terror. You are wrong, Mr. Cheney, if you think this will all be over soon.

As a member of one family that survived a bomb, I can tell you from the bottom of my heart: Bombing will never be the solution. Do you think the Iraqi families you are bombing today are going to get up and thank you and want to know more about our great country? You are wrong.

The writer lives in Bethesda

"There is a tradition in the Corps that no one who falls will be left behind on the battlefield. Our country has a tradition as well: no one who falls will be forgotten by this grateful nation," said Pres. George W. Bush today. Kind of an odd thing to say considering he's proposing a budget that will cut veterans' benefits.

From the NY Times:
Mugging the Needy
By BOB HERBERT

I had wanted today's column to be about the events in Tulia, Tex., where a criminal justice atrocity is at long last beginning to be corrected.

(For those who don't know, prosecutors are moving to overturn the convictions of everyone seized in an outlandish drug sting conducted by a single wacky undercover officer.)

But there is another issue crying out for immediate attention. With the eyes of most Americans focused on the war, the Bush administration and its allies in Congress are getting close to agreeing on a set of budget policies that will take an awful toll on the poor, the young, the elderly, the disabled and others in need of assistance and support from their government.

The budget passed by the House is particularly gruesome. It mugs the poor and the helpless while giving unstintingly to the rich. This blueprint for domestic disaster has even moderate Republicans running for cover.

The House plan offers the well-to-do $1.4 trillion in tax cuts, while demanding billions of dollars in cuts from programs that provide food stamps, school lunches, health care for the poor and the disabled, temporary assistance to needy families — even veterans' benefits and student loans.

An analysis of the House budget by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that its proposed cuts in child nutrition programs threaten to eliminate school lunches for 2.4 million low-income children.

Under the House plan, Congress would be required to cut $265 billion from entitlement programs over 10 years. About $165 billion would come from programs that assist low-income Americans.

This assault on society's weakest elements has been almost totally camouflaged by the war, which has an iron grip on the nation's attention.

The House budget does not dictate the specific cuts that Congress would be required to make. In its analysis, the center assumed (as did the House Budget Committee) that the various entitlement programs would be cut by roughly the same percentages. If one program were to be cut by a somewhat smaller percentage, another would have to be cut more.

The analysis found that in the year in which the budget sliced deepest:

"The cut in Medicaid, if achieved entirely by reducing the number of children covered, would lead to the elimination of health coverage for 13.6 million children."

"The cut in foster care and adoption programs, if achieved by reducing the number of children eligible for foster care assistance payments, would lead to the elimination of benefits for 65,000 abused and neglected children."

"The cut in the food stamp program, if achieved by lowering the maximum benefit, would lead to a reduction in the average benefit from an already lean 91 cents per meal to 84 cents."

When's the last time one of the plutocrats in Congress waded through a meal that cost 84 cents?

The Senate budget is not as egregious. It calls for a total of about $900 billion in tax cuts, and there is no demand for cuts in entitlement programs. But it is not a reasonable budget. In fact, there's something obscene about a millionaires' club like the Senate proposing close to a trillion dollars in tax cuts for the rich while the country is already cutting social programs, running up huge budget deficits and fighting a war in the Middle East.

At least in the House budget the first — if not the worst — of the cuts are in plain view. In the Senate plan the inevitable pain of the Bush budget policies remains concealed.

"There is a significant human toll in the Senate budget, but it's in the future," said Robert Greenstein, the center's executive director. "What I mean is that given the deficits we're already in, you can't keep doing tax cuts like this — you can't keep cutting your revenue base — without it inevitably leading to sharp budget cuts."

House and Senate conferees are now trying to resolve the differences in the two budget proposals. They will do all they can to minimize the public relations hit that is bound to come when you're handing trainloads of money to the rich while taking food off the tables of the poor. So you can expect some dismantling of the House proposal.

But no matter what they do, the day of reckoning is not far off. The budget cuts are coming. In voodoo economics, the transfer of wealth is from the poor and the working classes to the rich. It may not be pretty, but it's the law.

FINAL STRAW

As I raise my head to broadcast my objection
As your latest triumph draws the final straw
Who died and lifted you up to perfection?
And what silenced me is written into law.

I can't believe where circumstance has thrown me
And I turn my head away
If I look I'm not sure that I could face you.
Not again. Not today. Not today.

If hatred makes a play on me tomorrow
And forgiveness takes a back seat to revenge
There's a hurt down deep that has not been corrected
There's a voice in me that says you will not win.

And if I ignore the voice inside,
Raise a half glass to my home.
But it's there that I am most afraid,
And forgetting doesn't hold.

It doesn't hold. Now I don't believe and I never did
That two wrongs make a right.
If the world were filled with the likes of you
Then I'm putting up a fight. Putting up a fight.
Putting up a fight. Make it right. Make it right.

Now love cannot be called into question.
Forgiveness is the only hope I hold.
And love-- love will be my strongest weapon.
I do believe that I am not alone.

For this fear will not destroy me.
And the tears that have been shed
It's knowing now where I am weakest
And the voice in my head. In my head.

Then I raise my voice up higher
And I look you in the eye
And I offer love with one condition.
With conviction, tell me why.
Tell me why.
Tell me why.
Look me in the eye.
Tell me why.

(p) 2003 R.E.M./Athens L.L.C.
Buck, Mills, Stipe ©2003 Temporary Music (BMI)
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