Unocal Deal: A Lot More Than Money Is at Issue

By LESLIE WAYNE and DAVID BARBOZA

The battle for Unocal, the large independent American oil company, is shaping into as much a test of Chinese-American strategic and economic relations as it is a boardroom showdown.

Most takeover battles can be settled by price - the highest bidder wins. But judging by the sharp reaction yesterday in Washington, that may not be the case with Unocal.

Just a day after the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, or CNOOC, one of China's largest state-controlled oil companies, made an unsolicited bid of $18.5 billion for Unocal, senators and representatives, as well as lawyers, bankers and lobbyists, are taking jabs at what may become one of the thorniest strategic business challenges facing the administration.

At issue is whether CNOOC can buy Unocal, which in April agreed to a $16.4 billion merger deal with Chevron, the American energy giant.

The unexpected foreign bid for Unocal comes at a time when oil prices are hitting $60 a barrel, energy reserves are gaining more value, and the United States is concerned about its own oil and gas resources. At the same time, the administration needs to work with China on trade and currency issues, even as concerns are increasing about the growing economic power of China.

"It does raise questions about how much of the country we are willing to sell to a Communist country that we might be fighting someday," said Michael O'Hanlon, an international military specialist at the Brookings Institution. But he added, "I'd be surprised if we really fall on our sword to prevent the sale."

CNOOC's bid is also forcing Unocal shareholders to weigh the higher price that the Chinese are willing to pay against the risks that the deal faces in Washington. On top of that, there is the possible backlash that might arise from selling a potentially strategic American asset to China.

Unocal said that it had received permission from Chevron to hold discussions with CNOOC.

The question is how - if Unocal decides to switch from Chevron to CNOOC - the politics will play out in Washington, where critics are already speaking out and where the deal would be subject to approval by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States. The panel, a federal multiagency group, can prevent any foreign investment on the grounds of national security.

For years, the government has placed restrictions on the extent of foreign ownership in a variety of industries, from airlines to the media to military contractors. In the past, these restrictions have mostly affected developed countries like Japan and Britain.

"This is a remarkable arrival of China into the world of global big business deals and international investing," said Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr., a former trade negotiator in the Reagan administration and president of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington. "And it does raise the issue of whether this gives influence or some kind of potential importance to a government that may not always be friendly to us."

In Washington, CNOOC is already laying the groundwork. It has hired Public Strategies, a public relations firm whose vice chairman, Mark McKinnon, led President Bush's media campaign in the 2004 election. The company has also lined up some of the nation's savviest financial advisers - among them Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan - as well as such well-connected legal and lobbying firms as Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and Davis Polk & Wardell.

Many in Washington said that the deal, on its merits, might gain approval from the foreign investment committee. In any case, the committee would not review the case until a formal deal is completed. In recent deals involving China, the committee's responses have been mixed.

In 2003, a negative review by the foreign investment committee caused Hutchison Whampoa, which is based in Hong Kong, to withdraw a bid for Global Crossing, the telecommunications carrier that later filed for bankruptcy. But this year, the committee permitted the $1.75 billion sale of I.B.M.'s personal computer business to Lenovo of China.

"The national security argument is a fair one," said William A. Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council and a former trade official in the Clinton administration. "When you talk about energy supplies, and the market is tight, there is a national security issue. You are going to have a lot of people pounding the table."

CNOOC is already trying to play down any concerns that the transaction could hurt the American oil and gas markets. It is stressing that 70 percent of Unocal's oil and gas reserves are in Asia and that its American reserves amount to only about 1 percent of America's oil consumption, with none of it now supplying the military.

Unocal also has a pipeline hooked up to American strategic oil reserves, as well as a rare-earth mine, the only one in the United States. CNOOC has said it will consider selling these assets, if that is necessary to close the deal.

In addition, CNOOC has promised not to take supplies from Unocal's oil and gas reserves in the United States and sell them outside the country. It also said it would retain "substantially all" of the American employees.

In Washington, two Republican congressmen, Richard W. Pombo, chairman of the House Committee on Resources, and Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, wrote to President Bush last week, saying that "such an acquisition raises many concerns about U.S. jobs, energy production and energy security."

"We fear that American companies will find it increasingly difficult to compete against China's state-owned and/or controlled energy companies, given their mandates to supply China's ever-growing demand for energy, which will increasingly need to come from foreign sources," the letter said.

For China, which is scouring the world for oil, gas and minerals to help power its economy, the deal is important. That puts the administration in an awkward position as it tries to negotiate a variety of trade frictions and geopolitical debates.

"The deal has got the administration over a barrel," said Michael R. Wessel, a member of the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a group established by Congress. Not only is the administration trying to work out trade issues with China over textiles, currency and a number of other matters, it is also increasingly relying on China to play a more aggressive role in containing North Korea.

"We want the Chinese to invest part of their dollars in our economic system," Mr. Wessel said, "yet we have to worry about the impact of this transaction on our national security. Everyone is concerned about the migration of jobs and research and development to China. Now we have oil hitting $60 a barrel. China is going to be on the center of our radar screen."

For CNOOC, an offshore oil company, Unocal offers huge gas reserves in 14 countries. It has Asia's largest storehouse of liquefied natural gas. A combined company would go from a Chinese offshore oil producer with high expenses, as it searches for oil around China, to a diversified oil and gas company with global reserves.

Oil industry analysts offered mixed views about a potential deal.

"There are a lot of people in Washington who are really torn," said Robin West, chairman of PFC Energy, an oil consultant in Washington. "They believe in open markets and don't want to exacerbate matters with China. Yet, do you want a Chinese company that doesn't play by American rules to take advantage of American rules and get an American company?"

Alexei Barrionuevo contributed reporting for this article.

The Real News in the Downing Street Memos

COMMENTARY

By Michael Smith
Michael Smith writes on defense issues for the Sunday Times of London.

June 23, 2005

It is now nine months since I obtained the first of the "Downing Street memos," thrust into my hand by someone who asked me to meet him in a quiet watering hole in London for what I imagined would just be a friendly drink.

At the time, I was defense correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, and a staunch supporter of the decision to oust Saddam Hussein. The source was a friend. He'd given me a few stories before but nothing nearly as interesting as this.

The six leaked documents I took away with me that night were to change completely my opinion of the decision to go to war and the honesty of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush.

They focused on the period leading up to the Crawford, Texas, summit between Blair and Bush in early April 2002, and were most striking for the way in which British officials warned the prime minister, with remarkable prescience, what a mess post-war Iraq would become. Even by the cynical standards of realpolitik, the decision to overrule this expert advice seemed to be criminal.

The second batch of leaks arrived in the middle of this year's British general election, by which time I was writing for a different newspaper, the Sunday Times. These documents, which came from a different source, related to a crucial meeting of Blair's war Cabinet on July 23, 2002. The timing of the leak was significant, with Blair clearly in electoral difficulties because of an unpopular war.

I did not then regard the now-infamous memo — the one that includes the minutes of the July 23 meeting — as the most important. My main article focused on the separate briefing paper for those taking part, prepared beforehand by Cabinet Office experts.

It said that Blair agreed at Crawford that "the UK would support military action to bring about regime change." Because this was illegal, the officials noted, it was "necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action."

But Downing Street had a "clever" plan that it hoped would trap Hussein into giving the allies the excuse they needed to go to war. It would persuade the U.N. Security Council to give the Iraqi leader an ultimatum to let in the weapons inspectors.

Although Blair and Bush still insist the decision to go to the U.N. was about averting war, one memo states that it was, in fact, about "wrong-footing" Hussein into giving them a legal justification for war.

British officials hoped the ultimatum could be framed in words that would be so unacceptable to Hussein that he would reject it outright. But they were far from certain this would work, so there was also a Plan B.

American media coverage of the Downing Street memo has largely focused on the assertion by Sir Richard Dearlove, head of British foreign intelligence, that war was seen as inevitable in Washington, where "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

But another part of the memo is arguably more important. It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that "the U.S. had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime." This we now realize was Plan B.

Put simply, U.S. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.

British government figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that although virtually none were used in March and April, an average of 10 tons a month were dropped between May and August.

But these initial "spikes of activity" didn't have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn't retaliate. They didn't provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war.

The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.

In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.

The way in which the intelligence was "fixed" to justify war is old news.

The real news is the shady April 2002 deal to go to war, the cynical use of the U.N. to provide an excuse, and the secret, illegal air war without the backing of Congress.

---

Checkmate Little Bush. China's CNOOC to launch 19 billion dollar bid for Unocal.

This is hilarious. One of the reasons that the United States is in Afghanistan is so as to help Unocal build a pipeline from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. What will little Bush do now? Either he is capitalist or he is not a capitalist. China just out smarted little Bush.

China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) has agreed to launch the biggest ever takeover offer by a Chinese group with a 19 billion dollar bid for US oil major Unocal, according to a report.

The decision to trump a rival bid for Unocal by ChevronTexaco was reached by CNOOC directors in a tense six-hour board meeting held in Beijing on Wednesday, The Financial Times said in its online edition.

It quoted people close to the situation as saying CNOOC had decided to bid about 67 dollars a share for Unocal and would offer to take on 1.6 billion dollars of the US energy group's debt.

At that level, the offer would value Unocal at 19.8 billion dollars, the newspaper said.

It would be higher than Chevron's cash-and-shares offer of 16.4 billion dollars plus debt, and represent a modest premium to Unocal's share price, which closed in New York Wednesday at 64.86 dollars.

If successful, it would represent the biggest overseas acquisition by a Chinese company, dwarfing the Lenovo Group's recent 1.25 billion dollar takeover of IBM's personal computer business.

But the FT quoted New York bankers as saying that CNOOC will have a difficult task persuading investors that its offer is high enough to compensate for any risk that the deal might be blocked by US regulators.

"CNOOC will have serious difficulties closing this deal given legal, bureaucratic and political barriers," Robin West, chairman of PFC Energy, a Washington consultancy, told the newspaper.

CNOOC, China's third-largest oil group, confirmed in a statement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange earlier this month that it was considering launching a possible bid for Unocal.

It said a further announcement would be made "if and when appropriate."

If CNOOC were to go ahead with an attempt to take over Unocal, it would fit into a larger Chinese strategy of securing access to energy sources overseas for the country's power-hungry industries.

Unocal has gas and oil reserves in Thailand, Indonesia and Central Asia. It has more than 6,000 employees, with most of its activities in Asia and North America. It has no refining or marketing operations.

ChevronTexaco, the number-two US oil company, announced its takeover bid for Unocal in April. The bid received US regulatory approval on June 10.

Attack Iran Now

Frankly, I could care less about the legalities of attacking Iran. Iran is completely different from other states in Southwest Asia, they are not Arabs they are Persians. The people of Iran wish to be free, they are well educated and sophisticated. Just do it. I dislike the lies of the Bush administration. Educated sophisticated individuals knew that there were no WMD's in Iraq and that Iraq had absolutely no involvement with Al Qaeda . We invaded Iraq for O.I.L. Oil, Israel and Logistics. Frankly, I could care less about Israel, it is a pariah nation that the world should shun however oil and logistical advantage in Southwest Asia is of great value to the United States and the West. It is boring to listen to the uneducated fundamentalist Christians speak of war in Babylon as well as the Jews to continue to whine about their little Israel. Bush simply lied. If he told the truth about Iraq many would have supported him. Get over yourself little George, you do not have the intellectual capacity to be President, stop your fundamentalist babble and just attack Iran so as to free its people.

The US war with Iran has already begun

by Scott Ritter; Aljazeera.net; June 21, 2005

Sunday 19 June 2005 - Americans, along with the rest of the world, are starting to wake up to the uncomfortable fact that President George Bush not only lied to them about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (the ostensible excuse for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of that country by US forces), but also about the very process that led to war.

On 16 October 2002, President Bush told the American people that "I have not ordered the use of force. I hope that the use of force will not become necessary."

We know now that this statement was itself a lie, that the president, by late August 2002, had, in fact, signed off on the 'execute' orders authorising the US military to begin active military operations inside Iraq, and that these orders were being implemented as early as September 2002, when the US Air Force, assisted by the British Royal Air Force, began expanding its bombardment of targets inside and outside the so-called no-fly zone in Iraq.

These operations were designed to degrade Iraqi air defence and command and control capabilities. They also paved the way for the insertion of US Special Operations units, who were conducting strategic reconnaissance, and later direct action, operations against specific targets inside Iraq, prior to the 19 March 2003 commencement of hostilities.

President Bush had signed a covert finding in late spring 2002, which authorised the CIA and US Special Operations forces to dispatch clandestine units into Iraq for the purpose of removing Saddam Hussein from power.

The fact is that the Iraq war had begun by the beginning of summer 2002, if not earlier.

This timeline of events has ramifications that go beyond historical trivia or political investigation into the events of the past.

It represents a record of precedent on the part of the Bush administration which must be acknowledged when considering the ongoing events regarding US-Iran relations. As was the case with Iraq pre-March 2003, the Bush administration today speaks of "diplomacy" and a desire for a "peaceful" resolution to the Iranian question.

But the facts speak of another agenda, that of war and the forceful removal of the theocratic regime, currently wielding the reigns of power in Tehran.

As with Iraq, the president has paved the way for the conditioning of the American public and an all-too-compliant media to accept at face value the merits of a regime change policy regarding Iran, linking the regime of the Mullah's to an "axis of evil" (together with the newly "liberated" Iraq and North Korea), and speaking of the absolute requirement for the spread of "democracy" to the Iranian people.

"Liberation" and the spread of "democracy" have become none-too-subtle code words within the neo-conservative cabal that formulates and executes American foreign policy today for militarism and war.

By the intensity of the "liberation/democracy" rhetoric alone, Americans should be put on notice that Iran is well-fixed in the cross-hairs as the next target for the illegal policy of regime change being implemented by the Bush administration.

But Americans, and indeed much of the rest of the world, continue to be lulled into a false sense of complacency by the fact that overt conventional military operations have not yet commenced between the United States and Iran.

As such, many hold out the false hope that an extension of the current insanity in Iraq can be postponed or prevented in the case of Iran. But this is a fool's dream.

The reality is that the US war with Iran has already begun. As we speak, American over flights of Iranian soil are taking place, using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities.

The violation of a sovereign nation's airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence-gathering phase.

President Bush has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to initiate several covert offensive operations inside Iran.

The most visible of these is the CIA-backed actions recently undertaken by the Mujahadeen el-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group, once run by Saddam Hussein's dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA's Directorate of Operations.

It is bitter irony that the CIA is using a group still labelled as a terrorist organisation, a group trained in the art of explosive assassination by the same intelligence units of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, who are slaughtering American soldiers in Iraq today, to carry out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq.

Perhaps the adage of "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist" has finally been embraced by the White House, exposing as utter hypocrisy the entire underlying notions governing the ongoing global war on terror.

But the CIA-backed campaign of MEK terror bombings in Iran are not the only action ongoing against Iran.

To the north, in neighbouring Azerbaijan, the US military is preparing a base of operations for a massive military presence that will foretell a major land-based campaign designed to capture Tehran.

Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld's interest in Azerbaijan may have escaped the blinkered Western media, but Russia and the Caucasus nations understand only too well that the die has been cast regarding Azerbaijan's role in the upcoming war with Iran.

The ethnic links between the Azeri of northern Iran and Azerbaijan were long exploited by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and this vehicle for internal manipulation has been seized upon by CIA paramilitary operatives and US Special Operations units who are training with Azerbaijan forces to form special units capable of operating inside Iran for the purpose of intelligence gathering, direct action, and mobilising indigenous opposition to the Mullahs in Tehran.

But this is only one use the US has planned for Azerbaijan. American military aircraft, operating from forward bases in Azerbaijan, will have a much shorter distance to fly when striking targets in and around Tehran.

In fact, US air power should be able to maintain a nearly 24-hour a day presence over Tehran airspace once military hostilities commence.

No longer will the United States need to consider employment of Cold War-dated plans which called for moving on Tehran from the Persian Gulf cities of Chah Bahar and Bandar Abbas. US Marine Corps units will be able to secure these towns in order to protect the vital Straits of Hormuz, but the need to advance inland has been eliminated.

A much shorter route to Tehran now exists - the coastal highway running along the Caspian Sea from Azerbaijan to Tehran.

US military planners have already begun war games calling for the deployment of multi-divisional forces into Azerbaijan.

Logistical planning is well advanced concerning the basing of US air and ground power in Azerbaijan.

Given the fact that the bulk of the logistical support and command and control capability required to wage a war with Iran is already forward deployed in the region thanks to the massive US presence in Iraq, the build-up time for a war with Iran will be significantly reduced compared to even the accelerated time tables witnessed with Iraq in 2002-2003.

America and the Western nations continue to be fixated on the ongoing tragedy and debacle that is Iraq. Much needed debate on the reasoning behind the war with Iraq and the failed post-war occupation of Iraq is finally starting to spring up in the United States and elsewhere.

Normally, this would represent a good turn of events. But with everyone's heads rooted in the events of the past, many are missing out on the crime that is about to be repeated by the Bush administration in Iran - an illegal war of aggression, based on false premise, carried out with little regard to either the people of Iran or the United States.

Most Americans, together with the mainstream American media, are blind to the tell-tale signs of war, waiting, instead, for some formal declaration of hostility, a made-for-TV moment such as was witnessed on 19 March 2003.

We now know that the war had started much earlier. Likewise, history will show that the US-led war with Iran will not have begun once a similar formal statement is offered by the Bush administration, but, rather, had already been under way since June 2005, when the CIA began its programme of MEK-executed terror bombings in Iran.

Scott Ritter is a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, 1991-1998, and author of Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of America's Intelligence Conspiracy, to be published by I B Tauris in October 2005.

Some Politics May Be Etched in the Genes

By BENEDICT CAREY

Political scientists have long held that people's upbringing and experience determine their political views. A child raised on peace protests and Bush-loathing generally tracks left as an adult, unless derailed by some powerful life experience. One reared on tax protests and a hatred of Kennedys usually lists to the right.

But on the basis of a new study, a team of political scientists is arguing that people's gut-level reaction to issues like the death penalty, taxes and abortion is strongly influenced by genetic inheritance. The new research builds on a series of studies that indicate that people's general approach to social issues - more conservative or more progressive - is influenced by genes.

Environmental influences like upbringing, the study suggests, play a more central role in party affiliation as a Democrat or Republican, much as they do in affiliation with a sports team.

The report, which appears in the current issue of The American Political Science Review, the profession's premier journal, uses genetics to help answer several open questions in political science.

They include why some people defect from the party in which they were raised and why some political campaigns, like the 2004 presidential election, turn into verbal blood sport, though polls find little disparity in most Americans' views on specific issues like gun control and affirmative action.

The study is the first on genetics to appear in the journal. "I thought here's something new and different by respected political scholars that many political scientists never saw before in their lives," said Dr. Lee Sigelman, editor of the journal and a professor of political science at George Washington University.

Dr. Sigelman said that in many fields the findings "would create nothing more than a large yawn," but that "in ours, maybe people will storm the barricades."

Geneticists who study behavior and personality have known for 30 years that genes play a large role in people's instinctive emotional responses to certain issues, their social temperament.

It is not that opinions on specific issues are written into a person's DNA. Rather, genes prime people to respond cautiously or openly to the mores of a social group.

Only recently have researchers begun to examine how these predispositions, in combination with childhood and later life experiences, shape political behavior.

Dr. Lindon J. Eaves, a professor of human genetics and psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the new research did not add much to this. Dr. Eaves was not involved in the study but allowed the researchers to analyze data from a study of twins that he is leading.

Still, he said the findings were plausible, "and the real significance here is that this paper brings genetics to the attention to a whole new field and gives it a new way of thinking about social, cultural and political questions."

In the study, three political scientists - Dr. John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska, Dr. John R. Alford of Rice University and Dr. Carolyn L. Funk of Virginia Commonwealth - combed survey data from two large continuing studies including more than 8,000 sets of twins.

From an extensive battery of surveys on personality traits, religious beliefs and other psychological factors, the researchers selected 28 questions most relevant to political behavior. The questions asked people "to please indicate whether or not you agree with each topic," or are uncertain on issues like property taxes, capitalism, unions and X-rated movies. Most of the twins had a mixture of conservative and progressive views. But over all, they leaned slightly one way or the other.

The researchers then compared dizygotic or fraternal twins, who, like any biological siblings, share 50 percent of their genes, with monozygotic, or identical, twins, who share 100 percent of their genes.

Calculating how often identical twins agree on an issue and subtracting the rate at which fraternal twins agree on the same item provides a rough measure of genes' influence on that attitude. A shared family environment for twins reared together is assumed.

On school prayer, for example, the identical twins' opinions correlated at a rate of 0.66, a measure of how often they agreed. The correlation rate for fraternal twins was 0.46. This translated into a 41 percent contribution from inheritance.

As found in previous studies, attitudes about issues like school prayer, property taxes and the draft were among the most influenced by inheritance, the researchers found. Others like modern art and divorce were less so. And in the twins' overall score, derived from 28 questions, genes accounted for 53 percent of the differences.

But after correcting for the tendency of politically like-minded men and women to marry each other, the researchers also found that the twins' self-identification as Republican or Democrat was far more dependent on environmental factors like upbringing and life experience than was their social orientation, which the researchers call ideology. Inheritance accounted for 14 percent of the difference in party, the researchers found.

"We are measuring two separate things here, ideology and party affiliation," Dr. Hibbing, the senior author, said.

He added that his research team found the large difference in heritability between the two "very hard to believe," but that it held up.

The implications of this difference may be far-reaching, the authors argue. For years, political scientists tried in vain to learn how family dynamics like closeness between parents and children or the importance of politics in a household influenced political ideology. But the study suggests that an inherited social orientation may overwhelm the more subtle effects of family dynamics.

A mismatch between an inherited social orientation and a given party may also explain why some people defect from a party. Many people who are genetically conservative may be brought up as Democrats, and some who are genetically more progressive may be raised as Republicans, the researchers say.

In tracking attitudes over the years, geneticists have found that social attitudes tend to stabilize in the late teens and early 20's, when young people begin to fend for themselves.

Some "mismatched" people remain loyal to their family's political party. But circumstances can override inherited bent. The draft may look like a good idea until your number is up. The death penalty may seem barbaric until a loved one is murdered.

Other people whose social orientations are out of line with their given parties may feel a discomfort that can turn them into opponents of their former party, Dr. Alford said.

"Zell Miller would be a good example of this," Dr. Alford said, referring to the former Democratic governor and senator from Georgia who gave an impassioned speech at the Republican National Convention last year against the Democrats' nominee, John Kerry.

Support for Democrats among white men has been eroding for years in the South, Dr. Alford said, and Mr. Miller is remarkable for remaining nominally a Democrat despite his divergence from the party line on many issues.

Reached by telephone, Mr. Miller said he did not see it quite that way. He said that his views had not changed much since his days as a marine, but that the Democratic Party had moved.

"And I'm not talking about inch by inch, like a glacier," said Mr. Miller, who makes the case in a new book, "A Deficit of Decency." "I'm saying the thing got up and flew away."

The idea that certain social issues produce immediate unthinking reactions comes through in other political research as well. In several recent studies, Dr. Milton Lodge of the State University of New York at Stony Brook has shown that certain names and political concepts - "taxes" or "Clinton," for example - produce almost instantaneous positive or negative reactions.

These intensely charged political reflexes are shaped partly by inheritance, Dr. Lodge said.

It may be the clash of visceral, genetically primed social orientations that gives political debate its current malice and fire, the study suggests.

Although the two broad genetic types, more conservative and more progressive, may find some common ground on specific issues, they represent fundamental differences that go deeper than many people assume, the new research suggests.

"When people talk about the political debate becoming increasingly ugly, they often blame talk radio or the people doing the debating, but they've got it backward," Dr. Alford said. "These genetically predisposed ideologies are polarized, and that's what makes the debate so nasty.

"You see it in people's eyes when they talk politics. You can hear it their voices. After about the third response, we all start sounding like talk radio on some issues."

The researchers are not optimistic about the future of bipartisan cooperation or national unity. Because men and women tend to seek mates with a similar ideology, they say, the two gene pools are becoming, if anything, more concentrated, not less.

Terry Dougherty said... What Jesus actually taught, and what right-wing Christers believe are not only dissimilar but probably mutually exclusive.

Christian dogma was established in 325 A.D., at the First Nicean Council as a result of a formal debate between Arius--who believed that Jesus was similar, but not identical, in substance to God the Father and God the Holy Ghost--and Athanatius, a Greek scholar and adventurer--who believed Jesus was of the same substance. That Christianity was defined nearly three centuries after Jesus was executed is problematic--mostly because Jesus' message had undergone many revisions in that space of time.

There was no biology to speak of in the Fourth Century (in fact, little science that we would recognize today as 'science'). There was no understanding, for example, of how cells from one organism were assimilated upon its death into other organisms. Though they knew about putrefaction (how could they miss it?), they did not appreciate what was happening when cadavers rot. Consequently, those in attendance at the debates at Nice (or Nicae) actually believed that there was going to be something recognizable as human remains in those graves that were going to open up on the Day of Judgment. Grave robbing became a serious crime because on that Day the body (that was supposed to resurrect) would be missing. Consider the profoundly discouraging effect this had on those who, in the interest of a fledgling science, endeavored to find out how the human body works. When Miguel Cervetes robbed graves to discover and map out the pulmonary circulatory system (a hundred-fifty years before Harvey), he became the target of the Inquisition. He escaped to Geneva where John Calvin was busy 'reforming' the church. Calvin recognized him and had him slowly burned at the stake. Contrast this behavior with Jesus who beseeched us to 'love our neighbor as ourself'.

Where in the gospels does Jesus tell us that his mother was a virgin, that he was the only begotten Son of God ('OUR Father, which art in heaven....'), that he was going to die for our sins, and that his body was going to walk around afterwards (though the gospels do detail his physical resurrection and have Him making a rather ambiguous statement 'I can destroy the temple and raise it up again in three days')? When Jesus describes the Day of Judgment, it is clear that he expected that to occur in His own time. Was Jesus simply mistaken? Probably. His comments (only found in Matthew) about bringing a sword and having unbelievers brought to him and killed in His presence are in stark contrast to his comments in the other gospels. Was Jesus simply inconsistent, or did the gospel writers err? We will probably never know.

Whatever the case, it is doubtful that the Jesus who wined and dined with publicans and prostitutes, who healed the blind, halt and lame, and even (supposedly) raised people from the dead, would have endorsed the horsecrap about the War on the Plains of Armaggedon as told in the Book of Revelation (which is how the right-wing loonies interpret the establishment of the State of Israel and our criminal war of aggression in Iraq).

U.S. lacked plan for post-Saddam Iraq

FROM THE MEMOS

Long before the Iraq war began, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers concluded that the Bush administration and the U.S. military weren’t adequately prepared for rebuilding Iraq once Saddam Hussein was driven from power.

Today, as U.S. forces fight a deadly insurgency in Iraq, the concerns expressed about a postwar Iraq in three of the leaked secret Downing Street memos seem prescient.

A July 21, 2002, paper written for top government officials preparing to meet with Blair said: “The U.S. government’s military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace. But, as yet, it lacks a political framework. In particular, little thought has been given to creating the political conditions for military action, or the aftermath and how to shape it.”

In a March 14, 2002, memo, Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser, David Manning, told the prime minister that President Bush “had yet to find the answers to the big questions” about an Iraq war, including: “what happens on the morning after.”

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw questioned the stability of a post-Saddam Iraq. “Most of the assessments from the U.S. have assumed regime change as a means of eliminating Iraq’s WMD threat,” he said in a March 25, 2002, memo to Blair.

“But none has satisfactorily answered how that regime change is to be secured, and how there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be better. Iraq has had NO history of democracy, so no one has this habit or experience.”

• ‘Military action was now seen as inevitable’

Bush’s government has been accused of exaggerating the risks of Saddam’s weapons and Iraq’s ties to al Qaeda before the war to justify the invasion.

That’s one reason the most quoted section of the eight secret Downing Street memos are the minutes of a meeting that Blair held with his top officials on July 23, 2002.

During it, Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, discussed his recent visit to Washington.

“There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable,” said Dearlove, identified as “C” in the secret minutes of the meeting.

“Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

• WMD dossier left out vital information

Blair’s government has been sharply criticized for publishing an intelligence dossier before the Iraq war claiming that Saddam had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and could deploy some within 45 minutes.

No WMD were found after the war, and the official inquiry said the intelligence used was drawn in part from “seriously flawed” or “unreliable” sources.

It also said the dossier, which helped Blair win the support of Parliament to join the U.S. in the conflict, had pushed the government’s case to the limits of available intelligence and left out vital caveats.

The Associated Press