Liberal Christians
Saturday, August 20, 2005
Friday, August 19, 2005
Thursday, August 18, 2005
What Watergate could teach the White House
By Marvin Kalb
Published: August 17 2005 19:59 | Last updated: August 17 2005 19:59
Somebody is lying. So wrote Terry Neal, a Washington Post reporter, on July 25 2005. He was writing about one of the strangest stories to engulf the White House since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001. It is the story of an official investigation into who leaked the name of a CIA operative to the media. According to a 1982 law, that kind of leak would be illegal. Two prominent names have emerged in the investigation of the leak – Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, and Lewis Libby, vice-president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.
The investigation appears now to be heading towards rapid conclusion. If the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, finds that either Mr Rove or Mr Libby or both violated the law, they would face criminal charges, and the Bush administration would find itself enmeshed in a scandal of dimensions that are already being compared to the Nixon-era Watergate scandal.
According to recent opinion polls, including an August 7 poll in Newsweek magazine, the American people are increasingly of the view that Mr Rove, whom Mr Bush described as the “architect” of his 2004 re-election, may be guilty of unethical or illegal behaviour in connection with the leak.
Much is still not known about Mr Fitzgerald’s investigation – he has insisted on absolute secrecy – but what is known suggests that the Bush administration is engaged in a two-front war: one to cover up its blunders in the lead-up to the Iraq war based on the mistaken assumption that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed “weapons of mass destruction”, and the other to protect the leaker. The two fronts are now unmistakeably linked.
It became painfully clear in the war’s aftermath that Iraq had no such weapons and that Mr Bush’s justification for war was wrong. Therefore, it was “no accident”, as the Soviets used to say, that when Joseph Wilson, a former US ambassador, wrote a comment article in the New York Times on July 6 2003 accusing the administration of “twisting” intelligence to justify the war, the White House fumed – and struck back. Within days stories began to appear in the media criticising and belittling Mr Wilson, and then, oddly, outing Valerie Plame, his CIA wife, by name. The White House later vigorously denied that Mr Rove was “involved” in any way.
In Washington the outing of a CIA operative is no trifling matter, no partisan matter either, and within a few months, the justice department appointed a public prosecutor. Mr Fitzgerald, a hard-nosed prosecutor from Chicago, plunged into a series of interviews with senior officials, including the president and vice-president. Mr Rove and Mr Libby were also interviewed. In a sequence that lawyers saw as highly unusual, Mr Rove was summoned to testify three times before the grand jury. Most unexpected, reporters suggested, for someone uninvolved. Mr Rove was also questioned twice by the FBI.
In recent weeks, speculation has grown that Mr Fitzgerald was investigating not just the identity of the leaker but also more serious charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. What had been, up to then, kept so quiet suddenly surfaced as front page news and cocktail chatter, deeply embarrassing and potentially damaging to the administration. It turned out that Mr Rove and Mr Libby were “involved” in the leaking and the outing, and opinion polls began reflecting growing doubts about the honesty of the Bush administration. An obvious link was being drawn between a security breach, which would have been a problem, and the war in Iraq, which is proving to be a disaster. Complicating the matter, In a show of legalistic machismo, Mr Fitzgerald pursued Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter, for refusing to disclose her sources for a story that she never wrote about the Wilson-Plame affair, resulting in Ms Miller’s imprisonment.
A key lesson from the Watergate scandal is that sometimes a cover-up can be worse than the crime. In this case, a usually media-savvy White House, stung by criticism of its justification for war, lashed out at one critic and then took the inexplicable step of orchestrating the outing of his CIA wife, unintentionally triggering a chain of events.
It would have been so much better if the White House had simply acknowledged its blunder – and apologised. The American people would almost surely have “understood”.
The writer, co-author of The Media and the War on Terrorism, is senior fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government
Mixed emotions for Palestinians
Mixed emotions for Palestinians
By James Bennet The New York Times
FRIDAY, AUGUST 19, 2005
BEACH CAMP, Gaza Strip The essence of the Palestinians' national story, the one told in their songs and schoolbooks, is a tale of dispossession and eviction by Jewish and Israeli forces. It is symbolized by keys to houses unseen for two generations and affirmed by maps showing Palestinian villages lost in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and boundaries blurred in the one in 1967.
This week, Palestinians watched Israeli Jews forcibly evict other Israeli Jews, who struggled and wept over their homes and what they saw as a devastating new chapter in the Jewish people's own story of dispossession, of loss.
As news reports conveyed images of agonized settlers and soldiers, some Palestinians celebrated the removal of those they saw as usurpers of their land and liberty. But mixed with the jubilation and grim satisfaction, there were flashes of sympathy, too, from some of those who know what it means to lose a home.
"I feel that as a Palestinian this is my territory, this is my land," said Mkhaimar Abu Sada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University in Gaza City. Members of his family became refugees in 1948.
"This is my life," he said, "and I really want this to be happening right now. But on the other side, it's something on the human level - it's not an easy thing to take someone from their property and make them leave."
There is a bewildering upheaval under way here, a shifting of the theoretical and actual grounds on which the conflict has been fought. Israeli Jews have been barred at army checkpoints from reaching the settlements; giant armored bulldozers are preparing to demolish Israeli, rather than Palestinian, homes. Gaza is being unsettled, and everyone is struggling to understand what it means.
Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist in Gaza City who was made a refugee as a boy in 1948, said of the evacuation, "It provokes feelings of victimization and a kind of feeling we are all victimized by the whole thing."
He recalled watching television with his wife and friends on Tuesday. "One Israeli settler lady was talking about that she planted some trees, and she wanted the people behind to look after them," he said.
He looked over at his wife, he remembered. "She was smiling," he said, "and at the same time she had tears. So it tells you about the conflicting emotions."
In this Palestinian refugee camp, where tents long ago hardened into houses of cinder blocks and memories of lost villages softened into myth, refugees said they found themselves thinking back this week on their own experiences. But some said that did not make them sympathetic.
"Let them taste the bitterness," said Amona Aksham, who has lived more years and been surrounded with more grandchildren than she has counted.
Illuminated by a bare bulb as she sat on a thin mattress on the floor, she remembered her "beautiful life" in a village near Ashkelon. There, she grew grapes instead of buying them and left bread still baking when she fled the Israelis in 1948 without any belongings. "No, I can't sympathize with them," she said. "They didn't sympathize with us."
Unlike the settlers, Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes by an enemy during war, and no one compensated them. There are more differences than parallels between their experiences, despite a shared romance with the land and with their remembered notions of their present antagonists.
Palestinian refugees like to say that life with Jews was neighborly before the Zionists came and spoiled it all; for settlers, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza were their friends until Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, came to Gaza in 1994 under the Oslo peace accord.
A few blocks from Aksham's house, Suheil Abu al-Aaraj sat with his brother, Abdel Khader Abu al-Aaraj, in the balmy evening air and recalled the family's former home in Israel, which he visited for the first time in 1972.
"Maybe I shouldn't mention this," he continued before a visitor raised the subject of Israeli settlers. "I saw a settler crying on television. But they've been settlers for what, 20 years? What about those who stayed refugees for 50 years? They are victims, and we are victims too."
His brother, 50, hotly interrupted him. "They are not victims," he said. "They are occupiers. They kicked us out of our land. They killed us."
Suheil Abu al-Aaraj, 40, replied, "When I say victims, I meant victims because their government cheated them." The Israeli government sent them to Gaza in the first place, he said. "It's their government that caused this misery for them."
Many Palestinians were irritated by what they saw as excessive news media attention to the travails of people they believe have caused untold Palestinian suffering. Diana Buttu, an adviser to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said, "I feel no sympathy for them whatsoever."
Buttu also said Israeli governments had used the settlers by encouraging them to go to the West Bank and Gaza. "But at the same time it's not as though they weren't warned they were living in occupied territory," she said.
Her own relatives became refugees in the 1948 war, leaving behind homes near Nazareth in what is now northern Israel.
"In the case of my uncles and my aunts, they didn't have a country they could go to, and they still now remain in exile," she said. "And the difference is they were actually from Palestine, rather than being imported in from around the world."
Israeli Jews argue that Israel is their historic homeland, to which they have returned after 2,000 years in exile.
In the zero-sum game that can define Israeli-Palestinian relations, something that makes one side sad might be expected to make the other proportionately happy. Yet Palestinians are wary of all this Israeli tumult.
Palestinians have for decades seen Ariel Sharon, one of Israel's most ferocious commandos and an architect of the settlement movement, as a bitter enemy. Now they are watching him, as prime minister, turn against the settlers.
Sarraj, the psychiatrist, said, "It's very strange and very comical, even, that this same man has victimized his own people twice: once luring his people into this settlement activity and then evicting them, and at the same time victimizing Palestinians."
Many suspect Sharon of trying to hold on to most of the West Bank and all of Jerusalem.
Many Palestinians are reluctant to celebrate the withdrawal because it has not resulted in any palpable change in their lives. It may be weeks or even months before the army finishes demolishing the settlements and lets Palestinians in. Palestinians do not know if Israel will release its control of Gaza's borders and airspace.
Further, Palestinian officials fear that excessive jubilation might send the message that the Palestinians consider Israel to have ended its occupation even before it releases control. "It's a huge bind," Buttu said. "The colonization is finally over, but occupation is not."
By minimizing their own relief, Palestinians may signal the rest of the world that the Israeli misery is not so important, that it does not indicate a serious concession.
"The Israelis now are correcting their historic mistake: to settle in areas, territories, that do not belong to them," said Jibril Rajoub, the national security adviser to Abbas. "They are just correcting this mistake. They are not doing a benefit for anyone."
BEACH CAMP, Gaza Strip The essence of the Palestinians' national story, the one told in their songs and schoolbooks, is a tale of dispossession and eviction by Jewish and Israeli forces. It is symbolized by keys to houses unseen for two generations and affirmed by maps showing Palestinian villages lost in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and boundaries blurred in the one in 1967.
This week, Palestinians watched Israeli Jews forcibly evict other Israeli Jews, who struggled and wept over their homes and what they saw as a devastating new chapter in the Jewish people's own story of dispossession, of loss.
As news reports conveyed images of agonized settlers and soldiers, some Palestinians celebrated the removal of those they saw as usurpers of their land and liberty. But mixed with the jubilation and grim satisfaction, there were flashes of sympathy, too, from some of those who know what it means to lose a home.
"I feel that as a Palestinian this is my territory, this is my land," said Mkhaimar Abu Sada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University in Gaza City. Members of his family became refugees in 1948.
"This is my life," he said, "and I really want this to be happening right now. But on the other side, it's something on the human level - it's not an easy thing to take someone from their property and make them leave."
There is a bewildering upheaval under way here, a shifting of the theoretical and actual grounds on which the conflict has been fought. Israeli Jews have been barred at army checkpoints from reaching the settlements; giant armored bulldozers are preparing to demolish Israeli, rather than Palestinian, homes. Gaza is being unsettled, and everyone is struggling to understand what it means.
Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist in Gaza City who was made a refugee as a boy in 1948, said of the evacuation, "It provokes feelings of victimization and a kind of feeling we are all victimized by the whole thing."
He recalled watching television with his wife and friends on Tuesday. "One Israeli settler lady was talking about that she planted some trees, and she wanted the people behind to look after them," he said.
He looked over at his wife, he remembered. "She was smiling," he said, "and at the same time she had tears. So it tells you about the conflicting emotions."
In this Palestinian refugee camp, where tents long ago hardened into houses of cinder blocks and memories of lost villages softened into myth, refugees said they found themselves thinking back this week on their own experiences. But some said that did not make them sympathetic.
"Let them taste the bitterness," said Amona Aksham, who has lived more years and been surrounded with more grandchildren than she has counted.
Illuminated by a bare bulb as she sat on a thin mattress on the floor, she remembered her "beautiful life" in a village near Ashkelon. There, she grew grapes instead of buying them and left bread still baking when she fled the Israelis in 1948 without any belongings. "No, I can't sympathize with them," she said. "They didn't sympathize with us."
Unlike the settlers, Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes by an enemy during war, and no one compensated them. There are more differences than parallels between their experiences, despite a shared romance with the land and with their remembered notions of their present antagonists.
Palestinian refugees like to say that life with Jews was neighborly before the Zionists came and spoiled it all; for settlers, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza were their friends until Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, came to Gaza in 1994 under the Oslo peace accord.
A few blocks from Aksham's house, Suheil Abu al-Aaraj sat with his brother, Abdel Khader Abu al-Aaraj, in the balmy evening air and recalled the family's former home in Israel, which he visited for the first time in 1972.
"Maybe I shouldn't mention this," he continued before a visitor raised the subject of Israeli settlers. "I saw a settler crying on television. But they've been settlers for what, 20 years? What about those who stayed refugees for 50 years? They are victims, and we are victims too."
His brother, 50, hotly interrupted him. "They are not victims," he said. "They are occupiers. They kicked us out of our land. They killed us."
Suheil Abu al-Aaraj, 40, replied, "When I say victims, I meant victims because their government cheated them." The Israeli government sent them to Gaza in the first place, he said. "It's their government that caused this misery for them."
Many Palestinians were irritated by what they saw as excessive news media attention to the travails of people they believe have caused untold Palestinian suffering. Diana Buttu, an adviser to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said, "I feel no sympathy for them whatsoever."
Buttu also said Israeli governments had used the settlers by encouraging them to go to the West Bank and Gaza. "But at the same time it's not as though they weren't warned they were living in occupied territory," she said.
Her own relatives became refugees in the 1948 war, leaving behind homes near Nazareth in what is now northern Israel.
"In the case of my uncles and my aunts, they didn't have a country they could go to, and they still now remain in exile," she said. "And the difference is they were actually from Palestine, rather than being imported in from around the world."
Israeli Jews argue that Israel is their historic homeland, to which they have returned after 2,000 years in exile.
In the zero-sum game that can define Israeli-Palestinian relations, something that makes one side sad might be expected to make the other proportionately happy. Yet Palestinians are wary of all this Israeli tumult.
Palestinians have for decades seen Ariel Sharon, one of Israel's most ferocious commandos and an architect of the settlement movement, as a bitter enemy. Now they are watching him, as prime minister, turn against the settlers.
Sarraj, the psychiatrist, said, "It's very strange and very comical, even, that this same man has victimized his own people twice: once luring his people into this settlement activity and then evicting them, and at the same time victimizing Palestinians."
Many suspect Sharon of trying to hold on to most of the West Bank and all of Jerusalem.
Many Palestinians are reluctant to celebrate the withdrawal because it has not resulted in any palpable change in their lives. It may be weeks or even months before the army finishes demolishing the settlements and lets Palestinians in. Palestinians do not know if Israel will release its control of Gaza's borders and airspace.
Further, Palestinian officials fear that excessive jubilation might send the message that the Palestinians consider Israel to have ended its occupation even before it releases control. "It's a huge bind," Buttu said. "The colonization is finally over, but occupation is not."
By minimizing their own relief, Palestinians may signal the rest of the world that the Israeli misery is not so important, that it does not indicate a serious concession.
"The Israelis now are correcting their historic mistake: to settle in areas, territories, that do not belong to them," said Jibril Rajoub, the national security adviser to Abbas. "They are just correcting this mistake. They are not doing a benefit for anyone."
BEACH CAMP, Gaza Strip The essence of the Palestinians' national story, the one told in their songs and schoolbooks, is a tale of dispossession and eviction by Jewish and Israeli forces. It is symbolized by keys to houses unseen for two generations and affirmed by maps showing Palestinian villages lost in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and boundaries blurred in the one in 1967.
This week, Palestinians watched Israeli Jews forcibly evict other Israeli Jews, who struggled and wept over their homes and what they saw as a devastating new chapter in the Jewish people's own story of dispossession, of loss.
As news reports conveyed images of agonized settlers and soldiers, some Palestinians celebrated the removal of those they saw as usurpers of their land and liberty. But mixed with the jubilation and grim satisfaction, there were flashes of sympathy, too, from some of those who know what it means to lose a home.
"I feel that as a Palestinian this is my territory, this is my land," said Mkhaimar Abu Sada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University in Gaza City. Members of his family became refugees in 1948.
"This is my life," he said, "and I really want this to be happening right now. But on the other side, it's something on the human level - it's not an easy thing to take someone from their property and make them leave."
There is a bewildering upheaval under way here, a shifting of the theoretical and actual grounds on which the conflict has been fought. Israeli Jews have been barred at army checkpoints from reaching the settlements; giant armored bulldozers are preparing to demolish Israeli, rather than Palestinian, homes. Gaza is being unsettled, and everyone is struggling to understand what it means.
Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist in Gaza City who was made a refugee as a boy in 1948, said of the evacuation, "It provokes feelings of victimization and a kind of feeling we are all victimized by the whole thing."
He recalled watching television with his wife and friends on Tuesday. "One Israeli settler lady was talking about that she planted some trees, and she wanted the people behind to look after them," he said.
He looked over at his wife, he remembered. "She was smiling," he said, "and at the same time she had tears. So it tells you about the conflicting emotions."
In this Palestinian refugee camp, where tents long ago hardened into houses of cinder blocks and memories of lost villages softened into myth, refugees said they found themselves thinking back this week on their own experiences. But some said that did not make them sympathetic.
"Let them taste the bitterness," said Amona Aksham, who has lived more years and been surrounded with more grandchildren than she has counted.
Illuminated by a bare bulb as she sat on a thin mattress on the floor, she remembered her "beautiful life" in a village near Ashkelon. There, she grew grapes instead of buying them and left bread still baking when she fled the Israelis in 1948 without any belongings. "No, I can't sympathize with them," she said. "They didn't sympathize with us."
Unlike the settlers, Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes by an enemy during war, and no one compensated them. There are more differences than parallels between their experiences, despite a shared romance with the land and with their remembered notions of their present antagonists.
Palestinian refugees like to say that life with Jews was neighborly before the Zionists came and spoiled it all; for settlers, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza were their friends until Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, came to Gaza in 1994 under the Oslo peace accord.
A few blocks from Aksham's house, Suheil Abu al-Aaraj sat with his brother, Abdel Khader Abu al-Aaraj, in the balmy evening air and recalled the family's former home in Israel, which he visited for the first time in 1972.
"Maybe I shouldn't mention this," he continued before a visitor raised the subject of Israeli settlers. "I saw a settler crying on television. But they've been settlers for what, 20 years? What about those who stayed refugees for 50 years? They are victims, and we are victims too."
His brother, 50, hotly interrupted him. "They are not victims," he said. "They are occupiers. They kicked us out of our land. They killed us."
Suheil Abu al-Aaraj, 40, replied, "When I say victims, I meant victims because their government cheated them." The Israeli government sent them to Gaza in the first place, he said. "It's their government that caused this misery for them."
Many Palestinians were irritated by what they saw as excessive news media attention to the travails of people they believe have caused untold Palestinian suffering. Diana Buttu, an adviser to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said, "I feel no sympathy for them whatsoever."
Buttu also said Israeli governments had used the settlers by encouraging them to go to the West Bank and Gaza. "But at the same time it's not as though they weren't warned they were living in occupied territory," she said.
Her own relatives became refugees in the 1948 war, leaving behind homes near Nazareth in what is now northern Israel.
"In the case of my uncles and my aunts, they didn't have a country they could go to, and they still now remain in exile," she said. "And the difference is they were actually from Palestine, rather than being imported in from around the world."
Israeli Jews argue that Israel is their historic homeland, to which they have returned after 2,000 years in exile.
In the zero-sum game that can define Israeli-Palestinian relations, something that makes one side sad might be expected to make the other proportionately happy. Yet Palestinians are wary of all this Israeli tumult.
Palestinians have for decades seen Ariel Sharon, one of Israel's most ferocious commandos and an architect of the settlement movement, as a bitter enemy. Now they are watching him, as prime minister, turn against the settlers.
Sarraj, the psychiatrist, said, "It's very strange and very comical, even, that this same man has victimized his own people twice: once luring his people into this settlement activity and then evicting them, and at the same time victimizing Palestinians."
Many suspect Sharon of trying to hold on to most of the West Bank and all of Jerusalem.
Many Palestinians are reluctant to celebrate the withdrawal because it has not resulted in any palpable change in their lives. It may be weeks or even months before the army finishes demolishing the settlements and lets Palestinians in. Palestinians do not know if Israel will release its control of Gaza's borders and airspace.
Further, Palestinian officials fear that excessive jubilation might send the message that the Palestinians consider Israel to have ended its occupation even before it releases control. "It's a huge bind," Buttu said. "The colonization is finally over, but occupation is not."
By minimizing their own relief, Palestinians may signal the rest of the world that the Israeli misery is not so important, that it does not indicate a serious concession.
"The Israelis now are correcting their historic mistake: to settle in areas, territories, that do not belong to them," said Jibril Rajoub, the national security adviser to Abbas. "They are just correcting this mistake. They are not doing a benefit for anyone."
BEACH CAMP, Gaza Strip The essence of the Palestinians' national story, the one told in their songs and schoolbooks, is a tale of dispossession and eviction by Jewish and Israeli forces. It is symbolized by keys to houses unseen for two generations and affirmed by maps showing Palestinian villages lost in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and boundaries blurred in the one in 1967.
This week, Palestinians watched Israeli Jews forcibly evict other Israeli Jews, who struggled and wept over their homes and what they saw as a devastating new chapter in the Jewish people's own story of dispossession, of loss.
As news reports conveyed images of agonized settlers and soldiers, some Palestinians celebrated the removal of those they saw as usurpers of their land and liberty. But mixed with the jubilation and grim satisfaction, there were flashes of sympathy, too, from some of those who know what it means to lose a home.
"I feel that as a Palestinian this is my territory, this is my land," said Mkhaimar Abu Sada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University in Gaza City. Members of his family became refugees in 1948.
"This is my life," he said, "and I really want this to be happening right now. But on the other side, it's something on the human level - it's not an easy thing to take someone from their property and make them leave."
There is a bewildering upheaval under way here, a shifting of the theoretical and actual grounds on which the conflict has been fought. Israeli Jews have been barred at army checkpoints from reaching the settlements; giant armored bulldozers are preparing to demolish Israeli, rather than Palestinian, homes. Gaza is being unsettled, and everyone is struggling to understand what it means.
Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist in Gaza City who was made a refugee as a boy in 1948, said of the evacuation, "It provokes feelings of victimization and a kind of feeling we are all victimized by the whole thing."
He recalled watching television with his wife and friends on Tuesday. "One Israeli settler lady was talking about that she planted some trees, and she wanted the people behind to look after them," he said.
He looked over at his wife, he remembered. "She was smiling," he said, "and at the same time she had tears. So it tells you about the conflicting emotions."
In this Palestinian refugee camp, where tents long ago hardened into houses of cinder blocks and memories of lost villages softened into myth, refugees said they found themselves thinking back this week on their own experiences. But some said that did not make them sympathetic.
"Let them taste the bitterness," said Amona Aksham, who has lived more years and been surrounded with more grandchildren than she has counted.
Illuminated by a bare bulb as she sat on a thin mattress on the floor, she remembered her "beautiful life" in a village near Ashkelon. There, she grew grapes instead of buying them and left bread still baking when she fled the Israelis in 1948 without any belongings. "No, I can't sympathize with them," she said. "They didn't sympathize with us."
Unlike the settlers, Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes by an enemy during war, and no one compensated them. There are more differences than parallels between their experiences, despite a shared romance with the land and with their remembered notions of their present antagonists.
Palestinian refugees like to say that life with Jews was neighborly before the Zionists came and spoiled it all; for settlers, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza were their friends until Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, came to Gaza in 1994 under the Oslo peace accord.
A few blocks from Aksham's house, Suheil Abu al-Aaraj sat with his brother, Abdel Khader Abu al-Aaraj, in the balmy evening air and recalled the family's former home in Israel, which he visited for the first time in 1972.
"Maybe I shouldn't mention this," he continued before a visitor raised the subject of Israeli settlers. "I saw a settler crying on television. But they've been settlers for what, 20 years? What about those who stayed refugees for 50 years? They are victims, and we are victims too."
His brother, 50, hotly interrupted him. "They are not victims," he said. "They are occupiers. They kicked us out of our land. They killed us."
Suheil Abu al-Aaraj, 40, replied, "When I say victims, I meant victims because their government cheated them." The Israeli government sent them to Gaza in the first place, he said. "It's their government that caused this misery for them."
Many Palestinians were irritated by what they saw as excessive news media attention to the travails of people they believe have caused untold Palestinian suffering. Diana Buttu, an adviser to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said, "I feel no sympathy for them whatsoever."
Buttu also said Israeli governments had used the settlers by encouraging them to go to the West Bank and Gaza. "But at the same time it's not as though they weren't warned they were living in occupied territory," she said.
Her own relatives became refugees in the 1948 war, leaving behind homes near Nazareth in what is now northern Israel.
"In the case of my uncles and my aunts, they didn't have a country they could go to, and they still now remain in exile," she said. "And the difference is they were actually from Palestine, rather than being imported in from around the world."
Israeli Jews argue that Israel is their historic homeland, to which they have returned after 2,000 years in exile.
In the zero-sum game that can define Israeli-Palestinian relations, something that makes one side sad might be expected to make the other proportionately happy. Yet Palestinians are wary of all this Israeli tumult.
Palestinians have for decades seen Ariel Sharon, one of Israel's most ferocious commandos and an architect of the settlement movement, as a bitter enemy. Now they are watching him, as prime minister, turn against the settlers.
Sarraj, the psychiatrist, said, "It's very strange and very comical, even, that this same man has victimized his own people twice: once luring his people into this settlement activity and then evicting them, and at the same time victimizing Palestinians."
Many suspect Sharon of trying to hold on to most of the West Bank and all of Jerusalem.
Many Palestinians are reluctant to celebrate the withdrawal because it has not resulted in any palpable change in their lives. It may be weeks or even months before the army finishes demolishing the settlements and lets Palestinians in. Palestinians do not know if Israel will release its control of Gaza's borders and airspace.
Further, Palestinian officials fear that excessive jubilation might send the message that the Palestinians consider Israel to have ended its occupation even before it releases control. "It's a huge bind," Buttu said. "The colonization is finally over, but occupation is not."
By minimizing their own relief, Palestinians may signal the rest of the world that the Israeli misery is not so important, that it does not indicate a serious concession.
"The Israelis now are correcting their historic mistake: to settle in areas, territories, that do not belong to them," said Jibril Rajoub, the national security adviser to Abbas. "They are just correcting this mistake. They are not doing a benefit for anyone."
By James Bennet The New York Times
FRIDAY, AUGUST 19, 2005
BEACH CAMP, Gaza Strip The essence of the Palestinians' national story, the one told in their songs and schoolbooks, is a tale of dispossession and eviction by Jewish and Israeli forces. It is symbolized by keys to houses unseen for two generations and affirmed by maps showing Palestinian villages lost in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and boundaries blurred in the one in 1967.
This week, Palestinians watched Israeli Jews forcibly evict other Israeli Jews, who struggled and wept over their homes and what they saw as a devastating new chapter in the Jewish people's own story of dispossession, of loss.
As news reports conveyed images of agonized settlers and soldiers, some Palestinians celebrated the removal of those they saw as usurpers of their land and liberty. But mixed with the jubilation and grim satisfaction, there were flashes of sympathy, too, from some of those who know what it means to lose a home.
"I feel that as a Palestinian this is my territory, this is my land," said Mkhaimar Abu Sada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University in Gaza City. Members of his family became refugees in 1948.
"This is my life," he said, "and I really want this to be happening right now. But on the other side, it's something on the human level - it's not an easy thing to take someone from their property and make them leave."
There is a bewildering upheaval under way here, a shifting of the theoretical and actual grounds on which the conflict has been fought. Israeli Jews have been barred at army checkpoints from reaching the settlements; giant armored bulldozers are preparing to demolish Israeli, rather than Palestinian, homes. Gaza is being unsettled, and everyone is struggling to understand what it means.
Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist in Gaza City who was made a refugee as a boy in 1948, said of the evacuation, "It provokes feelings of victimization and a kind of feeling we are all victimized by the whole thing."
He recalled watching television with his wife and friends on Tuesday. "One Israeli settler lady was talking about that she planted some trees, and she wanted the people behind to look after them," he said.
He looked over at his wife, he remembered. "She was smiling," he said, "and at the same time she had tears. So it tells you about the conflicting emotions."
In this Palestinian refugee camp, where tents long ago hardened into houses of cinder blocks and memories of lost villages softened into myth, refugees said they found themselves thinking back this week on their own experiences. But some said that did not make them sympathetic.
"Let them taste the bitterness," said Amona Aksham, who has lived more years and been surrounded with more grandchildren than she has counted.
Illuminated by a bare bulb as she sat on a thin mattress on the floor, she remembered her "beautiful life" in a village near Ashkelon. There, she grew grapes instead of buying them and left bread still baking when she fled the Israelis in 1948 without any belongings. "No, I can't sympathize with them," she said. "They didn't sympathize with us."
Unlike the settlers, Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes by an enemy during war, and no one compensated them. There are more differences than parallels between their experiences, despite a shared romance with the land and with their remembered notions of their present antagonists.
Palestinian refugees like to say that life with Jews was neighborly before the Zionists came and spoiled it all; for settlers, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza were their friends until Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, came to Gaza in 1994 under the Oslo peace accord.
A few blocks from Aksham's house, Suheil Abu al-Aaraj sat with his brother, Abdel Khader Abu al-Aaraj, in the balmy evening air and recalled the family's former home in Israel, which he visited for the first time in 1972.
"Maybe I shouldn't mention this," he continued before a visitor raised the subject of Israeli settlers. "I saw a settler crying on television. But they've been settlers for what, 20 years? What about those who stayed refugees for 50 years? They are victims, and we are victims too."
His brother, 50, hotly interrupted him. "They are not victims," he said. "They are occupiers. They kicked us out of our land. They killed us."
Suheil Abu al-Aaraj, 40, replied, "When I say victims, I meant victims because their government cheated them." The Israeli government sent them to Gaza in the first place, he said. "It's their government that caused this misery for them."
Many Palestinians were irritated by what they saw as excessive news media attention to the travails of people they believe have caused untold Palestinian suffering. Diana Buttu, an adviser to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said, "I feel no sympathy for them whatsoever."
Buttu also said Israeli governments had used the settlers by encouraging them to go to the West Bank and Gaza. "But at the same time it's not as though they weren't warned they were living in occupied territory," she said.
Her own relatives became refugees in the 1948 war, leaving behind homes near Nazareth in what is now northern Israel.
"In the case of my uncles and my aunts, they didn't have a country they could go to, and they still now remain in exile," she said. "And the difference is they were actually from Palestine, rather than being imported in from around the world."
Israeli Jews argue that Israel is their historic homeland, to which they have returned after 2,000 years in exile.
In the zero-sum game that can define Israeli-Palestinian relations, something that makes one side sad might be expected to make the other proportionately happy. Yet Palestinians are wary of all this Israeli tumult.
Palestinians have for decades seen Ariel Sharon, one of Israel's most ferocious commandos and an architect of the settlement movement, as a bitter enemy. Now they are watching him, as prime minister, turn against the settlers.
Sarraj, the psychiatrist, said, "It's very strange and very comical, even, that this same man has victimized his own people twice: once luring his people into this settlement activity and then evicting them, and at the same time victimizing Palestinians."
Many suspect Sharon of trying to hold on to most of the West Bank and all of Jerusalem.
Many Palestinians are reluctant to celebrate the withdrawal because it has not resulted in any palpable change in their lives. It may be weeks or even months before the army finishes demolishing the settlements and lets Palestinians in. Palestinians do not know if Israel will release its control of Gaza's borders and airspace.
Further, Palestinian officials fear that excessive jubilation might send the message that the Palestinians consider Israel to have ended its occupation even before it releases control. "It's a huge bind," Buttu said. "The colonization is finally over, but occupation is not."
By minimizing their own relief, Palestinians may signal the rest of the world that the Israeli misery is not so important, that it does not indicate a serious concession.
"The Israelis now are correcting their historic mistake: to settle in areas, territories, that do not belong to them," said Jibril Rajoub, the national security adviser to Abbas. "They are just correcting this mistake. They are not doing a benefit for anyone."
BEACH CAMP, Gaza Strip The essence of the Palestinians' national story, the one told in their songs and schoolbooks, is a tale of dispossession and eviction by Jewish and Israeli forces. It is symbolized by keys to houses unseen for two generations and affirmed by maps showing Palestinian villages lost in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and boundaries blurred in the one in 1967.
This week, Palestinians watched Israeli Jews forcibly evict other Israeli Jews, who struggled and wept over their homes and what they saw as a devastating new chapter in the Jewish people's own story of dispossession, of loss.
As news reports conveyed images of agonized settlers and soldiers, some Palestinians celebrated the removal of those they saw as usurpers of their land and liberty. But mixed with the jubilation and grim satisfaction, there were flashes of sympathy, too, from some of those who know what it means to lose a home.
"I feel that as a Palestinian this is my territory, this is my land," said Mkhaimar Abu Sada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University in Gaza City. Members of his family became refugees in 1948.
"This is my life," he said, "and I really want this to be happening right now. But on the other side, it's something on the human level - it's not an easy thing to take someone from their property and make them leave."
There is a bewildering upheaval under way here, a shifting of the theoretical and actual grounds on which the conflict has been fought. Israeli Jews have been barred at army checkpoints from reaching the settlements; giant armored bulldozers are preparing to demolish Israeli, rather than Palestinian, homes. Gaza is being unsettled, and everyone is struggling to understand what it means.
Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist in Gaza City who was made a refugee as a boy in 1948, said of the evacuation, "It provokes feelings of victimization and a kind of feeling we are all victimized by the whole thing."
He recalled watching television with his wife and friends on Tuesday. "One Israeli settler lady was talking about that she planted some trees, and she wanted the people behind to look after them," he said.
He looked over at his wife, he remembered. "She was smiling," he said, "and at the same time she had tears. So it tells you about the conflicting emotions."
In this Palestinian refugee camp, where tents long ago hardened into houses of cinder blocks and memories of lost villages softened into myth, refugees said they found themselves thinking back this week on their own experiences. But some said that did not make them sympathetic.
"Let them taste the bitterness," said Amona Aksham, who has lived more years and been surrounded with more grandchildren than she has counted.
Illuminated by a bare bulb as she sat on a thin mattress on the floor, she remembered her "beautiful life" in a village near Ashkelon. There, she grew grapes instead of buying them and left bread still baking when she fled the Israelis in 1948 without any belongings. "No, I can't sympathize with them," she said. "They didn't sympathize with us."
Unlike the settlers, Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes by an enemy during war, and no one compensated them. There are more differences than parallels between their experiences, despite a shared romance with the land and with their remembered notions of their present antagonists.
Palestinian refugees like to say that life with Jews was neighborly before the Zionists came and spoiled it all; for settlers, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza were their friends until Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, came to Gaza in 1994 under the Oslo peace accord.
A few blocks from Aksham's house, Suheil Abu al-Aaraj sat with his brother, Abdel Khader Abu al-Aaraj, in the balmy evening air and recalled the family's former home in Israel, which he visited for the first time in 1972.
"Maybe I shouldn't mention this," he continued before a visitor raised the subject of Israeli settlers. "I saw a settler crying on television. But they've been settlers for what, 20 years? What about those who stayed refugees for 50 years? They are victims, and we are victims too."
His brother, 50, hotly interrupted him. "They are not victims," he said. "They are occupiers. They kicked us out of our land. They killed us."
Suheil Abu al-Aaraj, 40, replied, "When I say victims, I meant victims because their government cheated them." The Israeli government sent them to Gaza in the first place, he said. "It's their government that caused this misery for them."
Many Palestinians were irritated by what they saw as excessive news media attention to the travails of people they believe have caused untold Palestinian suffering. Diana Buttu, an adviser to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said, "I feel no sympathy for them whatsoever."
Buttu also said Israeli governments had used the settlers by encouraging them to go to the West Bank and Gaza. "But at the same time it's not as though they weren't warned they were living in occupied territory," she said.
Her own relatives became refugees in the 1948 war, leaving behind homes near Nazareth in what is now northern Israel.
"In the case of my uncles and my aunts, they didn't have a country they could go to, and they still now remain in exile," she said. "And the difference is they were actually from Palestine, rather than being imported in from around the world."
Israeli Jews argue that Israel is their historic homeland, to which they have returned after 2,000 years in exile.
In the zero-sum game that can define Israeli-Palestinian relations, something that makes one side sad might be expected to make the other proportionately happy. Yet Palestinians are wary of all this Israeli tumult.
Palestinians have for decades seen Ariel Sharon, one of Israel's most ferocious commandos and an architect of the settlement movement, as a bitter enemy. Now they are watching him, as prime minister, turn against the settlers.
Sarraj, the psychiatrist, said, "It's very strange and very comical, even, that this same man has victimized his own people twice: once luring his people into this settlement activity and then evicting them, and at the same time victimizing Palestinians."
Many suspect Sharon of trying to hold on to most of the West Bank and all of Jerusalem.
Many Palestinians are reluctant to celebrate the withdrawal because it has not resulted in any palpable change in their lives. It may be weeks or even months before the army finishes demolishing the settlements and lets Palestinians in. Palestinians do not know if Israel will release its control of Gaza's borders and airspace.
Further, Palestinian officials fear that excessive jubilation might send the message that the Palestinians consider Israel to have ended its occupation even before it releases control. "It's a huge bind," Buttu said. "The colonization is finally over, but occupation is not."
By minimizing their own relief, Palestinians may signal the rest of the world that the Israeli misery is not so important, that it does not indicate a serious concession.
"The Israelis now are correcting their historic mistake: to settle in areas, territories, that do not belong to them," said Jibril Rajoub, the national security adviser to Abbas. "They are just correcting this mistake. They are not doing a benefit for anyone."
BEACH CAMP, Gaza Strip The essence of the Palestinians' national story, the one told in their songs and schoolbooks, is a tale of dispossession and eviction by Jewish and Israeli forces. It is symbolized by keys to houses unseen for two generations and affirmed by maps showing Palestinian villages lost in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and boundaries blurred in the one in 1967.
This week, Palestinians watched Israeli Jews forcibly evict other Israeli Jews, who struggled and wept over their homes and what they saw as a devastating new chapter in the Jewish people's own story of dispossession, of loss.
As news reports conveyed images of agonized settlers and soldiers, some Palestinians celebrated the removal of those they saw as usurpers of their land and liberty. But mixed with the jubilation and grim satisfaction, there were flashes of sympathy, too, from some of those who know what it means to lose a home.
"I feel that as a Palestinian this is my territory, this is my land," said Mkhaimar Abu Sada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University in Gaza City. Members of his family became refugees in 1948.
"This is my life," he said, "and I really want this to be happening right now. But on the other side, it's something on the human level - it's not an easy thing to take someone from their property and make them leave."
There is a bewildering upheaval under way here, a shifting of the theoretical and actual grounds on which the conflict has been fought. Israeli Jews have been barred at army checkpoints from reaching the settlements; giant armored bulldozers are preparing to demolish Israeli, rather than Palestinian, homes. Gaza is being unsettled, and everyone is struggling to understand what it means.
Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist in Gaza City who was made a refugee as a boy in 1948, said of the evacuation, "It provokes feelings of victimization and a kind of feeling we are all victimized by the whole thing."
He recalled watching television with his wife and friends on Tuesday. "One Israeli settler lady was talking about that she planted some trees, and she wanted the people behind to look after them," he said.
He looked over at his wife, he remembered. "She was smiling," he said, "and at the same time she had tears. So it tells you about the conflicting emotions."
In this Palestinian refugee camp, where tents long ago hardened into houses of cinder blocks and memories of lost villages softened into myth, refugees said they found themselves thinking back this week on their own experiences. But some said that did not make them sympathetic.
"Let them taste the bitterness," said Amona Aksham, who has lived more years and been surrounded with more grandchildren than she has counted.
Illuminated by a bare bulb as she sat on a thin mattress on the floor, she remembered her "beautiful life" in a village near Ashkelon. There, she grew grapes instead of buying them and left bread still baking when she fled the Israelis in 1948 without any belongings. "No, I can't sympathize with them," she said. "They didn't sympathize with us."
Unlike the settlers, Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes by an enemy during war, and no one compensated them. There are more differences than parallels between their experiences, despite a shared romance with the land and with their remembered notions of their present antagonists.
Palestinian refugees like to say that life with Jews was neighborly before the Zionists came and spoiled it all; for settlers, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza were their friends until Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, came to Gaza in 1994 under the Oslo peace accord.
A few blocks from Aksham's house, Suheil Abu al-Aaraj sat with his brother, Abdel Khader Abu al-Aaraj, in the balmy evening air and recalled the family's former home in Israel, which he visited for the first time in 1972.
"Maybe I shouldn't mention this," he continued before a visitor raised the subject of Israeli settlers. "I saw a settler crying on television. But they've been settlers for what, 20 years? What about those who stayed refugees for 50 years? They are victims, and we are victims too."
His brother, 50, hotly interrupted him. "They are not victims," he said. "They are occupiers. They kicked us out of our land. They killed us."
Suheil Abu al-Aaraj, 40, replied, "When I say victims, I meant victims because their government cheated them." The Israeli government sent them to Gaza in the first place, he said. "It's their government that caused this misery for them."
Many Palestinians were irritated by what they saw as excessive news media attention to the travails of people they believe have caused untold Palestinian suffering. Diana Buttu, an adviser to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said, "I feel no sympathy for them whatsoever."
Buttu also said Israeli governments had used the settlers by encouraging them to go to the West Bank and Gaza. "But at the same time it's not as though they weren't warned they were living in occupied territory," she said.
Her own relatives became refugees in the 1948 war, leaving behind homes near Nazareth in what is now northern Israel.
"In the case of my uncles and my aunts, they didn't have a country they could go to, and they still now remain in exile," she said. "And the difference is they were actually from Palestine, rather than being imported in from around the world."
Israeli Jews argue that Israel is their historic homeland, to which they have returned after 2,000 years in exile.
In the zero-sum game that can define Israeli-Palestinian relations, something that makes one side sad might be expected to make the other proportionately happy. Yet Palestinians are wary of all this Israeli tumult.
Palestinians have for decades seen Ariel Sharon, one of Israel's most ferocious commandos and an architect of the settlement movement, as a bitter enemy. Now they are watching him, as prime minister, turn against the settlers.
Sarraj, the psychiatrist, said, "It's very strange and very comical, even, that this same man has victimized his own people twice: once luring his people into this settlement activity and then evicting them, and at the same time victimizing Palestinians."
Many suspect Sharon of trying to hold on to most of the West Bank and all of Jerusalem.
Many Palestinians are reluctant to celebrate the withdrawal because it has not resulted in any palpable change in their lives. It may be weeks or even months before the army finishes demolishing the settlements and lets Palestinians in. Palestinians do not know if Israel will release its control of Gaza's borders and airspace.
Further, Palestinian officials fear that excessive jubilation might send the message that the Palestinians consider Israel to have ended its occupation even before it releases control. "It's a huge bind," Buttu said. "The colonization is finally over, but occupation is not."
By minimizing their own relief, Palestinians may signal the rest of the world that the Israeli misery is not so important, that it does not indicate a serious concession.
"The Israelis now are correcting their historic mistake: to settle in areas, territories, that do not belong to them," said Jibril Rajoub, the national security adviser to Abbas. "They are just correcting this mistake. They are not doing a benefit for anyone."
BEACH CAMP, Gaza Strip The essence of the Palestinians' national story, the one told in their songs and schoolbooks, is a tale of dispossession and eviction by Jewish and Israeli forces. It is symbolized by keys to houses unseen for two generations and affirmed by maps showing Palestinian villages lost in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and boundaries blurred in the one in 1967.
This week, Palestinians watched Israeli Jews forcibly evict other Israeli Jews, who struggled and wept over their homes and what they saw as a devastating new chapter in the Jewish people's own story of dispossession, of loss.
As news reports conveyed images of agonized settlers and soldiers, some Palestinians celebrated the removal of those they saw as usurpers of their land and liberty. But mixed with the jubilation and grim satisfaction, there were flashes of sympathy, too, from some of those who know what it means to lose a home.
"I feel that as a Palestinian this is my territory, this is my land," said Mkhaimar Abu Sada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University in Gaza City. Members of his family became refugees in 1948.
"This is my life," he said, "and I really want this to be happening right now. But on the other side, it's something on the human level - it's not an easy thing to take someone from their property and make them leave."
There is a bewildering upheaval under way here, a shifting of the theoretical and actual grounds on which the conflict has been fought. Israeli Jews have been barred at army checkpoints from reaching the settlements; giant armored bulldozers are preparing to demolish Israeli, rather than Palestinian, homes. Gaza is being unsettled, and everyone is struggling to understand what it means.
Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist in Gaza City who was made a refugee as a boy in 1948, said of the evacuation, "It provokes feelings of victimization and a kind of feeling we are all victimized by the whole thing."
He recalled watching television with his wife and friends on Tuesday. "One Israeli settler lady was talking about that she planted some trees, and she wanted the people behind to look after them," he said.
He looked over at his wife, he remembered. "She was smiling," he said, "and at the same time she had tears. So it tells you about the conflicting emotions."
In this Palestinian refugee camp, where tents long ago hardened into houses of cinder blocks and memories of lost villages softened into myth, refugees said they found themselves thinking back this week on their own experiences. But some said that did not make them sympathetic.
"Let them taste the bitterness," said Amona Aksham, who has lived more years and been surrounded with more grandchildren than she has counted.
Illuminated by a bare bulb as she sat on a thin mattress on the floor, she remembered her "beautiful life" in a village near Ashkelon. There, she grew grapes instead of buying them and left bread still baking when she fled the Israelis in 1948 without any belongings. "No, I can't sympathize with them," she said. "They didn't sympathize with us."
Unlike the settlers, Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes by an enemy during war, and no one compensated them. There are more differences than parallels between their experiences, despite a shared romance with the land and with their remembered notions of their present antagonists.
Palestinian refugees like to say that life with Jews was neighborly before the Zionists came and spoiled it all; for settlers, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza were their friends until Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, came to Gaza in 1994 under the Oslo peace accord.
A few blocks from Aksham's house, Suheil Abu al-Aaraj sat with his brother, Abdel Khader Abu al-Aaraj, in the balmy evening air and recalled the family's former home in Israel, which he visited for the first time in 1972.
"Maybe I shouldn't mention this," he continued before a visitor raised the subject of Israeli settlers. "I saw a settler crying on television. But they've been settlers for what, 20 years? What about those who stayed refugees for 50 years? They are victims, and we are victims too."
His brother, 50, hotly interrupted him. "They are not victims," he said. "They are occupiers. They kicked us out of our land. They killed us."
Suheil Abu al-Aaraj, 40, replied, "When I say victims, I meant victims because their government cheated them." The Israeli government sent them to Gaza in the first place, he said. "It's their government that caused this misery for them."
Many Palestinians were irritated by what they saw as excessive news media attention to the travails of people they believe have caused untold Palestinian suffering. Diana Buttu, an adviser to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said, "I feel no sympathy for them whatsoever."
Buttu also said Israeli governments had used the settlers by encouraging them to go to the West Bank and Gaza. "But at the same time it's not as though they weren't warned they were living in occupied territory," she said.
Her own relatives became refugees in the 1948 war, leaving behind homes near Nazareth in what is now northern Israel.
"In the case of my uncles and my aunts, they didn't have a country they could go to, and they still now remain in exile," she said. "And the difference is they were actually from Palestine, rather than being imported in from around the world."
Israeli Jews argue that Israel is their historic homeland, to which they have returned after 2,000 years in exile.
In the zero-sum game that can define Israeli-Palestinian relations, something that makes one side sad might be expected to make the other proportionately happy. Yet Palestinians are wary of all this Israeli tumult.
Palestinians have for decades seen Ariel Sharon, one of Israel's most ferocious commandos and an architect of the settlement movement, as a bitter enemy. Now they are watching him, as prime minister, turn against the settlers.
Sarraj, the psychiatrist, said, "It's very strange and very comical, even, that this same man has victimized his own people twice: once luring his people into this settlement activity and then evicting them, and at the same time victimizing Palestinians."
Many suspect Sharon of trying to hold on to most of the West Bank and all of Jerusalem.
Many Palestinians are reluctant to celebrate the withdrawal because it has not resulted in any palpable change in their lives. It may be weeks or even months before the army finishes demolishing the settlements and lets Palestinians in. Palestinians do not know if Israel will release its control of Gaza's borders and airspace.
Further, Palestinian officials fear that excessive jubilation might send the message that the Palestinians consider Israel to have ended its occupation even before it releases control. "It's a huge bind," Buttu said. "The colonization is finally over, but occupation is not."
By minimizing their own relief, Palestinians may signal the rest of the world that the Israeli misery is not so important, that it does not indicate a serious concession.
"The Israelis now are correcting their historic mistake: to settle in areas, territories, that do not belong to them," said Jibril Rajoub, the national security adviser to Abbas. "They are just correcting this mistake. They are not doing a benefit for anyone."
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Limbaugh Loses It, Says Iraq Mom Made Story Up...
Limbaugh baselessly compared Cindy
Sheehan to Bill Burkett: "Her story is
nothing more than forged documents"
Nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh equated the actions of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, with those of Bill Burkett, the retired Texas Air National Guard officer who provided CBS' 60 Minutes with unauthenticated documents regarding President Bush's National Guard record. Sheehan is currently staging an anti-war protest outside Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Limbaugh said that Sheehan's "story is nothing more than forged documents."
Sheehan's "story" is, in fact, that her son died while fighting in Iraq. A Humvee mechanic, Spc. Casey Sheehan was one of seven U.S. soldiers killed in Baghdad's Sadr City on April 4, 2004, by rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire.
From the August 15 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show:
LIMBAUGH: I mean, Cindy Sheehan is just Bill Burkett. Her story is nothing more than forged documents. There's nothing about it that's real, including the mainstream media's glomming onto it. It's not real. It's nothing more than an attempt. It's the latest effort made by the coordinated left.
Lovely Morning
Israeli Soldiers Clear Out Gaza Strip
By AMY TEIBEL
The Associated Press
Wednesday, August 17, 2005; 8:20 AM
NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip -- Israeli troops dragged sobbing Jewish settlers out of homes, synagogues and even a nursery school Wednesday and hauled them onto buses in a massive evacuation, fulfilling Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's promise to withdraw from the Gaza Strip after a 38-year occupation.
Soldiers carried away worshippers still wrapped in their white prayer shawls. Wailing men ripped their shirts in a Jewish mourning ritual. Women in a synagogue pressed their faces against the curtain covering the Torah scroll. A woman set herself on fire at a police roadblock in Israel.
In Gaza, settlers kicked and screamed as they were loaded onto buses. One woman in Neve Dekalim shouted, "I don't want to! I don't want to!" as she was carried away.
Irate residents in one outpost employed Nazi-era imagery _ including stars of David on their T-shirts _ to protest the military's actions.
But there were no signs of serious violence in the settlements as a growing number of residents appeared to be coming to terms with the withdrawal.
"I believed that God would not let this happen, but this is not true," a woman said in the isolated settlement of Morag while clutching her baby.
Sharon, who championed the settlements for years, said the images of settlers being removed from their homes were heartbreaking.
"It's impossible to watch this, and that includes myself, without tears in the eyes," he told a news conference.
But he urged settlers to show restraint.
"I'm appealing to everyone. Don't attack the men and women in uniform. Don't accuse them. Don't make it harder for them, don't harm them. Attack me. I am responsible for this. Attack me. Accuse me," Sharon said.
The operation capped a bruising political battle for Sharon, who proposed the withdrawal more than 18 months ago as a way to reduce friction with the Palestinians. Opponents accuse him of caving in to Palestinian violence and abandoning the dream of full control over the biblical Land of Israel.
Throughout the day, some 14,000 troops entered six Jewish settlements: Morag, Neve Dekalim, Bedolah, Ganei Tal, Tel Katifa and Kerem Atzmona.
In several settlements, including the largest _ Neve Dekalim, army commanders were trying to persuade residents to leave voluntarily.
Security officials said the goal was to clear out the 21 Gaza settlements in just a few days, far more quickly than originally planned. But thousands of pullout opponents who infiltrated Gaza in recent weeks remained.
In Neve Dekalim, a grizzled colonel, with tears in his eyes, shook hands with a young father, cradling the man's tiny baby, as he explained it was time to go.
Another commander, identified only as Yitzhak, tearfully hugged another settler.
"It's not easy. These are very special people. This is the salt of the earth," Yitzhak said. "But we have a mission and we will carry it out, and I think these people understand that."
Some teenage activists _ many West Bank activists _ showed fierce resistance. Troops dragged dozens of protesters, some as young as 12, onto buses and took them away.
"I want to die!" screamed one youth as he was hauled off.
Several soldiers were hit by white paint bombs, and protesters smashed a bus window.
Hundreds of protesters holed up in the town's main synagogue.
A group of teenage girls sang, "I believe in the messiah," and many cried while pressing their faces to the curtain covering the Torah.
In Morag, soldiers encountered cement blocks and burning garbage containers early Wednesday, briefly clashing with residents. But as the day dragged on, protesters gradually surrendered.
Under a weeping willow tree at a children's nursery, mothers clutched their babies, soldiers carried toddlers, settlers ripped their clothes and troops loaded diapers and toys onto buses for evacuation.
A female soldier with tears in her eyes held a toddler in her arms, gave him some candy and implored, "Where is his mother?" Another soldier waved away flies from a toddler lying in a stroller.
Troops carried dozens of worshippers out of the local synagogue, in one case escorting a crying man covered by a prayer shawl. Some kept praying in front of the Torah as soldiers removed others.
Soldiers also removed families from their homes. Female residents walked out under army escort, while the men let themselves by carried. One resident, Eran Hendel, lay on the floor, read a psalm and ripped his shirt collar before being carried away.
In the hardline outpost of Kerem Atzmona, irate settlers shouted at soldiers: "Nazi!" "Refuse orders!" and "Jews don't expel Jews!" Soldiers dragged the flailing residents out of their homes and loaded them onto buses, as children sat in their homes crying.
In the Bedolah settlement, Rabbi Menachem Froman hugged and kissed a Torah scroll as he was led out of the local synagogue. A soldier held him up by the elbow. The elderly, white-bearded rabbi, who lives in a West Bank settlement, advocates coexistence with the Palestinians.
In Kfar Darom, another center of fierce resistance, 65 families and 2,000 protesters barricaded themselves behind barbed wire but said they would not resist violently, the Haaretz newspaper reported.
The Gaza pullout is to be accompanied by a withdrawal from four small West Bank settlements. Security officials have expressed fears that the West Bank pullout could be more violent, given the land's biblical significance to observant Jews.
A 54-year-old West Bank woman opposed to the Gaza pullout set herself on fire Wednesday in southern Israel, suffering life-threatening burns over 70 percent of her body, police and hospital officials said. She had the smell of gas on her, a paramedic said.
Sharon, meanwhile, reiterated Wednesday he would never give up the West Bank's largest settlement blocs. He said settlers' efforts were not in vain, but it no longer was realistic to hold on to Gaza, where 1.3 million Palestinians live in crowded, impoverished conditions.
"True they (settlers) had a dream, and I did, too, that can we hold on to all the territory, or most of the territory, but things have changed," Sharon said.
The army said it arrested 52 Israelis headed Wednesday to Homesh, one of the settlements slated for evacuation.
Once Gaza is cleared of civilians, it will take troops about a month to dismantle military installations and relinquish the coastal strip to Palestinian control.
The Palestinians have deployed thousands of troops to prevent any attacks on settlers or Israeli soldiers during the withdrawal. Palestinians have welcomed the evacuation but also fear that Israel is trying to draw borders without negotiations.
© 2005 The Associated Press
Monday, August 15, 2005
Cindy Sheehan comforts Juan Torres, of Chicago
Cindy Sheehan comforts Juan Torres, of Chicago, after starting to cry during an interfaith prayer service at Sheehan's camp near Crawford on Sunday. Both Sheehan and Torres lost their sons in the war in Iraq. (AP Photo)
Round Up Begins
Cages at the ready to remove settlers who flout deadline
Hard core of Jewish families will be prised out if softly, softly tactics fail
Chris McGreal in Neve Dekalim, Gaza settlements
Monday August 15, 2005
The Guardian
For the most diehard Jewish settlers, the last view of their doomed homes on the Gaza coast is likely to be from a cage as it swings high over the uniform red roofs, whitewashed walls and neatly tended gardens to deliver them to the security forces.
At midnight, as the deadline passed for Israelis to leave the 17 condemned settlements in the Gaza Strip and four small ones in the northern West Bank, the government was still banking on most of the 8,000 settlers going quietly.
Prime minister Ariel Sharon has tried to lure them out with generous compensation packages far above the true value of the properties left behind and with appeals to consider the national good.
But at the same time, the army has spent months planning for the unwelcome prospect of prising out those who intend to make a last stand in defence of Israel's most controversial colonies. Tens of thousands of soldiers and police have been trained to remove the settlers "with determination and sensitivity", riot control methods have been softened up from those used against Palestinians, and plans have been laid to move the last settlers by sea if all else fails.
So far, several hundred settlers have left Gaza, mostly from smaller communities, although many more are preparing to go. Starting today, soldiers and police officers will go from door to door to attempt to persuade the rest to leave.
Colonel Erez Katz, the officer overseeing the pullout on the ground, said he believes a good proportion of families have chosen to stay beyond the deadline to register their defiance, but that many will load up their cars and drive away before the removal squads arrive, particularly those parents who do not wish to be arrested in front of their children.
"They will have registered their protest by staying on after the deadline, and if they leave in [the next] 48 hours they will not lose any of the compensation," he said.
But a hard core is expected to remain beyond Wednesday. In Gush Katif, the largest settlement block, local leaders say they will lock the gates to the settlements this morning and have called for a mass turnout to block roads to prevent what the army has named Operation Brotherly Hand from getting off the ground. It may also prevent some of those who want to leave from doing so.
The Gaza settlers who plan to hold out have been joined by several thousand supporters from Jewish colonies in the West Bank, or from Israel proper, many of them young people whose fervour has been sharpened by the closure deadline coinciding with Tisha B'av, the most mournful day in the Jewish calendar, marking the destruction of the ancient temples in Jerusalem.
The army has not said which settlement will be cleared first, but the approach will be the same in all. On the morning of the forced evacuation, the targeted settlement will be surrounded by six rings of security forces. The first will ensure that roads are kept open to allow in the second wave, assigned to clear the colony house by house. The remaining rings will protect the evacuation from Palestinian attack and seal off a wide area around the Gaza strip to keep Israeli protesters at bay.
Each of the squads assigned to clear houses is made up of a combination of 17 soldiers and police officers. A policeman will knock on the door of each home, inform the residents that they are breaking the law and ask them to board a bus. They will be permitted a few minutes to gather belongings.
The approach, the army says, is to be understanding; firm but kind - a side of the Israeli military rarely seen by Palestinians in the neighbouring Khan Yunis or Rafah refugee camps, who are routinely ordered through the loudspeaker of an armoured vehicle to get out of their home minutes before it is bulldozed.
"We will show all the sensitivity that a family forced to leave its home deserves," said Col Katz.
The squads have been practising for weeks what will happen if the residents refuse to move. Adults will be pinned down, with one soldier or policeman on each limb, and lifted out. Only female soldiers and police officers will arrest women or carry children on to the bus.
The authorities believe the settlers have prepared several tactics to resist, such as retreating to one room, sitting on the floor and clinging tightly to each other. Others may barricade themselves in. If so, the squads will go through the windows or hammer their way through the walls.
Through all of this, the settlers are likely to appeal to the soldiers and police officers not to carry out their orders. "Jews don't evacuate Jews" is a common plea.
The removal squads will not be armed and several of the settlements have responded to appeals from the military to hand in their weapons. At the first sight of a gun, the process will be halted and a special negotiating team brought in.
"Even though we simulated some extreme scenarios, we believe most settlers would not resort to violence. Some of them are even waiting for the soldiers with cakes and sweets," said Col Katz.
The army has developed an alternative to rubber bullets, which sometimes kill, by developing rounds using compressed sand that are not nearly so dangerous.
Although some smaller settlements, such as Kfar Darom, are generally the most militant, the hardest to clear may prove to be Neve Dekalim, the largest in Gaza. It is normally home to about 2,600 people, but the number may have doubled or trebled with an influx of evacuation opponents.
Groups such as Land of Israel Loyalists have prepared for a long siege "against the expulsion and transfer plot", with stockpiles of food.
Some of the settlers and their supporters are expected to retreat to the roofs of their homes, or the top of the few multi-storey buildings, such as council offices and a large religious school in Neve Dekalim. The military considers it dangerous for both sides to have to drag resisters down stairs, so they will be forced into large yellow cages lowered on to the rooftops, locked in and swung into the arms of police waiting on the ground.
If the confrontation gets really difficult - with the only road out of Gush Katif blocked by mass demonstrations - the security forces have laid plans to move the settlers out by sea, using hovercraft and military landing craft.
There are other potential complications. Rocket attacks by Hamas or Islamic Jihad would probably bring the evacuation to a halt, particularly if a settler, soldier or police officer were killed. If that happens, the army has threatened to launch an offensive to seize control of Palestinian territory in Gaza, probably delaying the evacuation by days.
Once the settlers have gone, the dead will follow. Col Katz said that under religious law, the 48 people buried in the local graveyard can only be disinterred and moved after the living have left.
The contents of homes will be locked in containers and shipped to a location in the Negev desert for collection. Squads will move in to dismantle the parts of the houses that can be removed, such as water tanks and solar panels, and remove the asbestos found in many of the homes.
Diggers will cave in the roof of each home to make it uninhabitable, but the bulk of the destruction and removal of the rubble will be left to the Palestinians who are keen to use it to provide work.
Synagogues, religious schools and other sensitive buildings will be dismantled as far as possible - with roofs, door frames and windows being removed. Other public buildings, such as administration offices, will be left for the Palestinians.
When they are finally gone, along with the last of the bulldozers, the remaining soldiers will gather beneath the Israeli flag. The national anthem will be played, the Star of David lowered and the Israelis will leave Gaza after a presence that some never imagined would go on so long, and others thought would go on forever.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
A True American Patriot -Cindy Sheehan
By Ted Lang
8-14-5
How far we have fallen as a people and a society that emotionalist sycophants and apologists, blinded by dollar-driven petty motives and arrangements, and who earn zillions of dollars by merely appearing cute and knowledgeable in front of a FOXNews TV camera, or an ABC "golden microphone," are so revered by so many of the ignorant masses, while those that bravely stand and bleed on the battlefield of truth are demonized and vilified.
As always, it takes a courageous truth-teller to lead the ignorant, frightened people. It is astonishing how most of Sheehan's critics prefer President G. Bush's lies over the lives of their sons and daughters who are serving right now in Bush's war. The war is lost; yet, the Bush regime is planning another 9-11 false flag terrorist event to launch another unjust invasion of a sovereign nation currently at peace with US.
Some parents and relatives of fighting service personnel would rather believe in the lies offered by Bush when he offered that Muslims hate US for our "democracy and freedom," and that secularist Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons of mass destruction, as well as both the means and the motive to deliver them. Bush implicated Saddam falsely tying him to 9-11 and al Qaida. No connection has ever been made. All these premises of the criminal Bush regime have been proven lies.
What is wrong with these people who glorify war and thereby make possible the maiming and untimely deaths of their loved ones? How is this war protecting US or even remotely serving our interests? They are frantically pursuing the mirage of a just and righteous American government, instead of recognizing what it has really become: an immoral, world-threatening, fascist, police state with designs of conquering the entire globe!
Bush is the most vacationing chief executioner in the history of this former republic, now a dictatorship thanks to dumbos Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity and the rest of this sorry-assed bunch of "conservative" anti-American traitors. Israel first - America never! Along with the rest of the GOP [Gangsters of Politics], the GOP-supporting media hucksters, a frightened Congress loyal only to Israel, the frightened military families supporting Bush's war, have a much greater fear; perhaps, just perhaps, Sheehan is right! Perhaps there is no real comfort in Statist institutions after the loss of a loved one.
Think about it for a moment. Congressman John Conyers, a Democrat, rallied 88 other Democrats demanding an explanation from Bush as to the Downing Street Memo, conducted an investigative panel in a congressional basement, and was totally shut down by Israelites via smears of "anti-Semitism." And this followed on after Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi humbled herself to AIPAC, the powerful Jewish lobby that controls all aspects of American government. Bush blows off Congress, the real media, protest groups, German reporters while in their land, and now a grieving mom that lost her son to this smirking jerk's lies!
So of course, Cindy Sheehan is a traitor in the eyes of the Zionist, Israel-loyal, corporate, mainstream, establishment media. And that's why the Jewish MSM whores are now coming out in force to denigrate, belittle, and sling mud at her. How smug and comfortable they all are in their temperature-controlled studios behind their cameras, their microphones, and their keyboards. How convenient their far reaching animosity extends, ensconced in total unaccountability, just like Bush in his air-conditioned bullet-proof horseless carriage. The smirking stooge for Israel has been unchallenged in his disloyalty to America while sending America's youth to die for Israeli oil pipelines of the future.
All these political manipulations by America's greatest enemy, an enemy that struck the U.S.S. Liberty and killed American sailors during a botched false flag operation, as well as their successful false flag operation at the WTC on 9-11 that killed 2,600 of our defenseless citizens, and yet no one in American government will step forward and point the much-needed accusatory finger; no one that is, until Cindy Sheehan had enough and decided not to take it any more.
Although it was G. Bush' intention to send America's finest, our sacrificing military, to fight and die for Israel, Cindy Sheehan's son did not die for Israel - he died heroically for America! This is a grieving mother's greatest gift to her dead son. Because of her courage, her son's death will indeed serve to save lives of American military personnel, because Cindy exposed a tyrant and a traitor, and just shortened his lousy war by waking up a lot of the American people!
© 2005 All Rights Reserved
Ted Lang is a political analyst and freelance writer.
8-14-5
How far we have fallen as a people and a society that emotionalist sycophants and apologists, blinded by dollar-driven petty motives and arrangements, and who earn zillions of dollars by merely appearing cute and knowledgeable in front of a FOXNews TV camera, or an ABC "golden microphone," are so revered by so many of the ignorant masses, while those that bravely stand and bleed on the battlefield of truth are demonized and vilified.
As always, it takes a courageous truth-teller to lead the ignorant, frightened people. It is astonishing how most of Sheehan's critics prefer President G. Bush's lies over the lives of their sons and daughters who are serving right now in Bush's war. The war is lost; yet, the Bush regime is planning another 9-11 false flag terrorist event to launch another unjust invasion of a sovereign nation currently at peace with US.
Some parents and relatives of fighting service personnel would rather believe in the lies offered by Bush when he offered that Muslims hate US for our "democracy and freedom," and that secularist Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons of mass destruction, as well as both the means and the motive to deliver them. Bush implicated Saddam falsely tying him to 9-11 and al Qaida. No connection has ever been made. All these premises of the criminal Bush regime have been proven lies.
What is wrong with these people who glorify war and thereby make possible the maiming and untimely deaths of their loved ones? How is this war protecting US or even remotely serving our interests? They are frantically pursuing the mirage of a just and righteous American government, instead of recognizing what it has really become: an immoral, world-threatening, fascist, police state with designs of conquering the entire globe!
Bush is the most vacationing chief executioner in the history of this former republic, now a dictatorship thanks to dumbos Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity and the rest of this sorry-assed bunch of "conservative" anti-American traitors. Israel first - America never! Along with the rest of the GOP [Gangsters of Politics], the GOP-supporting media hucksters, a frightened Congress loyal only to Israel, the frightened military families supporting Bush's war, have a much greater fear; perhaps, just perhaps, Sheehan is right! Perhaps there is no real comfort in Statist institutions after the loss of a loved one.
Think about it for a moment. Congressman John Conyers, a Democrat, rallied 88 other Democrats demanding an explanation from Bush as to the Downing Street Memo, conducted an investigative panel in a congressional basement, and was totally shut down by Israelites via smears of "anti-Semitism." And this followed on after Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi humbled herself to AIPAC, the powerful Jewish lobby that controls all aspects of American government. Bush blows off Congress, the real media, protest groups, German reporters while in their land, and now a grieving mom that lost her son to this smirking jerk's lies!
So of course, Cindy Sheehan is a traitor in the eyes of the Zionist, Israel-loyal, corporate, mainstream, establishment media. And that's why the Jewish MSM whores are now coming out in force to denigrate, belittle, and sling mud at her. How smug and comfortable they all are in their temperature-controlled studios behind their cameras, their microphones, and their keyboards. How convenient their far reaching animosity extends, ensconced in total unaccountability, just like Bush in his air-conditioned bullet-proof horseless carriage. The smirking stooge for Israel has been unchallenged in his disloyalty to America while sending America's youth to die for Israeli oil pipelines of the future.
All these political manipulations by America's greatest enemy, an enemy that struck the U.S.S. Liberty and killed American sailors during a botched false flag operation, as well as their successful false flag operation at the WTC on 9-11 that killed 2,600 of our defenseless citizens, and yet no one in American government will step forward and point the much-needed accusatory finger; no one that is, until Cindy Sheehan had enough and decided not to take it any more.
Although it was G. Bush' intention to send America's finest, our sacrificing military, to fight and die for Israel, Cindy Sheehan's son did not die for Israel - he died heroically for America! This is a grieving mother's greatest gift to her dead son. Because of her courage, her son's death will indeed serve to save lives of American military personnel, because Cindy exposed a tyrant and a traitor, and just shortened his lousy war by waking up a lot of the American people!
© 2005 All Rights Reserved
Ted Lang is a political analyst and freelance writer.
Project on the origins of life launched
Harvard joining debate on evolution
Harvard University is launching a broad initiative to discover how life began, joining an ambitious scientific assault on age-old questions that are central to the debate over the theory of evolution.
The Harvard project, which is likely to start with about $1 million annually from the university, will bring together scientists from fields as disparate as astronomy and biology, to understand how life emerged from the chemical soup of early Earth, and how this might have happened on distant planets.
Known as the ''Origins of Life in the Universe Initiative," the project is still in its early stages, and fund-raising has not begun, the scientists said.
But the university has promised the researchers several years of seed money, and has asked the team to make much grander plans, including new faculty and a collection of multimillion-dollar facilities.
The initiative begins amid increasing controversy over the teaching of evolution, prompted by proponents of ''intelligent design," who argue that even the most modest cell is too complex, too finely tuned, to have come about without unseen intelligence.
President Bush recently said intelligent design should be discussed in schools, along with evolution. Like intelligent design, the Harvard project begins with awe at the nature of life, and with an admission that, almost 150 years after Charles Darwin outlined his theory of evolution in the Origin of Species, scientists cannot explain how the process began.
Now, encouraged by a confluence of scientific advances -- such as the discovery of water on Mars and an increased understanding of the chemistry of early Earth -- the Harvard scientists hope to help change that.
''We start with a mutual acknowledgment of the profound complexity of living systems," said David R. Liu, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard. But ''my expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention."
Exploring the natural order
The theory of evolution has been both fascinating and religiously charged since its very beginnings, because it speaks directly to the place of people in the natural order. In another era, the idea that humans are the close cousins of apes -- a scientific fact now supported by overwhelming evidence -- was seen as both offensive and preposterous.
Today's research of origins focuses on questions that seem as strange as the study of ''ape men" once did: How can life arise from nonlife? How easy is it for this to happen? And does the universe teem with life, or is Earth a solitary island?
At Harvard, the origins of life initiative is part of a dramatic rethinking of how to conduct scientific research at the university.
Many of science's most interesting questions are emerging in the boundaries between traditional disciplines such as physics, chemistry, and biology, yet universities are largely organized by those disciplines. Harvard's president, Lawrence H. Summers, is a proponent of the view that universities must develop new structures to encourage interdisciplinary science. And new science laboratories based on this are at the center of the plans for a sprawling new campus in Allston.
The Harvard origins initiative is on a short list of projects being considered for this campus, along with the widely discussed Harvard Stem Cell Institute, which aspires to bring together biologists, chemists, doctors, and others.
Today, scientists said, Harvard is considered something of an underdog in the field of the origins of life, compared with powerhouses such as the University of Arizona, the California Institute of Technology, and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.. But the university has tremendous resources, including leading scientists who work in related areas.
''I hope that Summers is batting for a home run," said Steven Benner, a University of Florida scientist who is considered one of the world's top chemists in origins-of-life research. ''It is quite gratifying to see Harvard is going for a solution to a problem that will be remembered 100 years from now."
A look far afield
Harvard has made its move at a time of increased interest in the possibility of life on other planets. Over the past decade, astronomers have discovered more than 150 planets orbiting distant suns, suggesting that the galaxy is littered with them. At the same time, biologists have been finding that life can survive in much more hostile environments than thought possible -- such as microbes that live deep in rock or in searingly acidic water -- meaning that planets with more extreme environments might support life.
NASA has been driving the field forward, said Jonathan Lunine, a codirector of the University of Arizona's Life and Planets Astrobiology Center, which was officially launched in June.
NASA has been funding astrobiology research and the Mars mission that found evidence that tremendous amounts of water once existed there. The agency has plans for missions to search for evidence of life on other planets.
Within the next decade, NASA plans to launch the first of two Terrestrial Planet Finders, space telescopes designed to pick out the flickering light of planets near the bright blaze of distant stars. President Bush has also laid out a manned exploration of Mars as a national goal.
Nature of life's signs
These plans have researchers grappling with the question of what might constitute a sign of life, especially because life elsewhere may not look like life on Earth. One of the central goals of the Harvard initiative is to understand the different ways that life might form, according to Dimitar Sasselov, a Harvard astronomer who is organizing the university's origins-of-life initiative.
''There is no reason to think that biology would be the same from planet to planet, but physics and chemistry should be the same," Sasselov said.
Yet even understanding the path to life on Earth is daunting. Researchers have sketched out a version of the story that begins 4 billion years ago, when Earth was a hot, young planet, with no oxygen to breathe. Evolution forms the basis of modern biology.
Still, there are many points in the story of life's origins in which there is a mystifying leap that has escaped explanation. One of the first is the appearance of complex organic molecules, such as those that form membranes around cells; these are the building blocks of life.
New look at an experiment
Every high school student learns of the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment: A flask, containing elements of the early Earth's atmosphere, was jolted with electricity, like bolts of lightening. This simple setup created a wealth of organic molecules, but since, the prevailing view of the makeup of the early atmosphere has changed, and the experiment doesn't work well with the new recipe.
Some researchers have suggested that organic molecules could have been carried to Earth in the icy core of comets, or that life began near the intense heat of deep sea vents, an environment that drives unusual reactions.
But on the third floor of Harvard's Engineering Sciences Laboratory, a chemist, Scot Martin, has pursued a different theory. He believes that ultraviolet light from the sun, shining down on tiny mineral crystals floating near the surface of the early ocean, may have generated organic compounds.
In his flask, he has shown that molecules of bicarbonate, common in the early ocean, attach themselves to a mineral called sphalerite. When the ultraviolet light hits the sphalerite, it sets off a chain of events that makes the bicarbonate more reactive, and that leads to a wide range of organic compounds in Martin's flask.
A scientist's elation
''I was elated," said Martin, a professor of environmental chemistry at Harvard who only recently became involved in origins-of-life research. ''This area as a whole is drawing more interest."
Even with Martin's and others' work, though, there remains another profound and unsolved problem in the story of life's development: how the environments with just the right chemicals might have come to be.
For example, chemists have long wondered how the early Earth environment could have produced large amounts of a sugar known as ribose, a building block of RNA, a molecule that carries genetic information and that is crucial to life on Earth.
Last year, Benner published a paper in Science finding that a common mineral, borate, could collect ribose, concentrating it in the environment. Benner has been studying how minerals may have played other roles as well, helping to create special environments where the key ingredients of life could have come together and formed larger structures.
One of the biggest puzzles is discovering a way that the natural chemistry of the early Earth could lead to the building of structures, such as cells, that can evolve.
Scientists have long known that, under the right conditions, molecules called fatty acids come together and form membranes, like the skin of a water balloon. Over the past few years, a Harvard scientist, Jack Szostak, has made important progress in understanding how a process like this may have led to the first cell. In a paper in the journal Science, he has shown that a clay common on the early Earth, called montmorillonite, speeds this process by serving as a scaffold.
The Szostak team has also built on the work of other scientists, who have shown that the same clay can help the formation of RNA, thought to be a precursor to the DNA that now serves as life's instruction book. Szostak showed that when fatty acids and RNA were mixed with the clay, these balloons formed with RNA trapped inside. A process like this, Szostak said, may have led to the first cell.
Szostak, who is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, is also part of the push across traditional academic boundaries. He depends, for example, on the work of chemists, who can tell him what chemical building blocks may have been available. Andrew Knoll, another member of the Harvard initiative, built his career as a specialist on Earth's most ancient fossils, but now finds himself a part of the team deciding where the Opportunity rover travels on the Martian surface.
And Sasselov is an astrophysicist who is a specialist in finding planets around other stars, and in creating models of their makeup, yet he is organizing the Harvard effort to explore some of the most fundamental questions in biology.
Doubt over a divide
There is a deep philosophical divide between this scientific community and the advocates of intelligent design.
Szostak recalled that he had been surprised to see his own research, which he interprets as progress in understanding life's origins, on religious websites, which cite the work as evidence of how difficult it would be to create life without a designer -- because, Szostak said, ''not even Harvard scientists can do it."
Michael Behe, a biologist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and one of the leading proponents of intelligent design, said he was glad that Harvard was going to try to address the issue.
''If, as I suspect will happen," Behe said, ''they fail to find a plausible answer without invoking intelligence, then maybe science will be less hostile to folks who see intelligent direction in the history of life," he said.
U.S. Lowers Sights On What Can Be Achieved in Iraq
Administration Is Shedding 'Unreality' That Dominated Invasion, Official Says
By Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 14, 2005; A01
The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.
The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."
Administration officials still emphasize how much they have achieved despite the chaos that followed the invasion and the escalating insurgency. "Iraqis are taking control of their country, building a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself. And we're helping Iraqis succeed," President Bush said yesterday in his radio address.
Iraqi officials yesterday struggled to agree on a draft constitution by a deadline of tomorrow so the document can be submitted to a vote in October. The political transition would be completed in December by elections for a permanent government.
But the realities of daily life are a constant reminder of how the initial U.S. ambitions have not been fulfilled in ways that Americans and Iraqis once anticipated. Many of Baghdad's 6 million people go without electricity for days in 120-degree heat. Parents fearful of kidnapping are keeping children indoors.
Barbers post signs saying they do not shave men, after months of barbers being killed by religious extremists. Ethnic or religious-based militias police the northern and southern portions of Iraq. Analysts estimate that in the whole of Iraq, unemployment is 50 percent to 65 percent.
U.S. officials say no turning point forced a reassessment. "It happened rather gradually," said the senior official, triggered by everything from the insurgency to shifting budgets to U.S. personnel changes in Baghdad.
The ferocious debate over a new constitution has particularly driven home the gap between the original U.S. goals and the realities after almost 28 months. The U.S. decision to invade Iraq was justified in part by the goal of establishing a secular and modern Iraq that honors human rights and unites disparate ethnic and religious communities.
But whatever the outcome on specific disputes, the document on which Iraq's future is to be built will require laws to be compliant with Islam. Kurds and Shiites are expecting de facto long-term political privileges. And women's rights will not be as firmly entrenched as Washington has tried to insist, U.S. officials and Iraq analysts say.
"We set out to establish a democracy, but we're slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic," said another U.S. official familiar with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. "That process is being repeated all over."
U.S. officials now acknowledge that they misread the strength of the sentiment among Kurds and Shiites to create a special status. The Shiites' request this month for autonomy to be guaranteed in the constitution stunned the Bush administration, even after more than two years of intense intervention in Iraq's political process, they said.
"We didn't calculate the depths of feeling in both the Kurdish and Shiite communities for a winner-take-all attitude," said Judith S. Yaphe, a former CIA Iraq analyst at the National Defense University.
In the race to meet a sequence of fall deadlines, the process of forging national unity behind the constitution is largely being scrapped, current and former officials involved in the transition said.
"We are definitely cutting corners and lowering our ambitions in democracy building," said Larry Diamond, a Stanford University democracy expert who worked with the U.S. occupation government and wrote the book "Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq."
"Under pressure to get a constitution done, they've lowered their own ambitions in terms of getting a document that is going to be very far-reaching and democratic. We also don't have the time to go through the process we envisioned when we wrote the interim constitution -- to build a democratic culture and consensus through debate over a permanent constitution," he said.
The goal now is to ensure a constitution that can be easily amended later so Iraq can grow into a democracy, U.S. officials say.
On security, the administration originally expected the U.S.-led coalition to be welcomed with rice and rosewater, traditional Arab greetings, with only a limited reaction from loyalists of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The surprising scope of the insurgency and influx of foreign fighters has forced Washington to repeatedly lower expectations -- about the time-frame for quelling the insurgency and creating an effective and cohesive Iraqi force capable of stepping in, U.S. officials said.
Killings of members of the Iraqi security force have tripled since January. Iraq's ministry of health estimates that bombings and other attacks have killed 4,000 civilians in Baghdad since Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari's interim government took office April 28.
Last week was the fourth-worst week of the whole war for U.S. military deaths in combat, and August already is the worst month for deaths of members of the National Guard and Reserve.
Attacks on U.S. convoys by insurgents using roadside bombs have doubled over the past year, Army Brig. Gen. Yves Fontaine said Friday. Convoys ferrying food, fuel, water, arms and equipment from Kuwait, Jordan and Turkey are attacked about 30 times a week, Fontaine said.
"There has been a realistic reassessment of what it is possible to achieve in the short term and fashion a partial exit strategy," Yaphe said. "This change is dictated not just by events on the ground but by unrealistic expectations at the start."
Washington now does not expect to fully defeat the insurgency before departing, but instead to diminish it, officials and analysts said. There is also growing talk of turning over security responsibilities to the Iraqi forces even if they are not fully up to original U.S. expectations, in part because they have local legitimacy that U.S. troops often do not.
"We've said we won't leave a day before it's necessary. But necessary is the key word -- necessary for them or for us? When we finally depart, it will probably be for us," a U.S. official said.
Pressed by the cost of fighting an escalating insurgency, U.S. expectations for rebuilding Iraq -- and its $20 billion investment -- have fallen the farthest, current and former officials say.
Pentagon officials originally envisioned Iraq's oil revenue paying many post-invasion expenses. But Iraq, ranked among world leaders behind Saudi Arabia in proven oil reserves, is incapable of producing enough refined fuel amid a car-buying boom that has put an estimated 1 million more vehicles on the road after the invasion. Lines for subsidized cheap gas stretch for miles every day in Baghdad.
Oil production is estimated at 2.22 million barrels a day, short of the goal of 2.5 million. Iraq's pre-war high was 2.67 million barrels a day.
The United States had high hopes of quick, big-budget fixes for the electrical power system that would show Iraqis tangible benefits from the ouster of Hussein. But inadequate training for Iraqi staff, regional rivalries restricting the power flow to Baghdad, inadequate fuel for electrical generators and attacks on the infrastructure have contributed to the worst summer of electrical shortages in the capital.
Water is also a "tough, tough" situation in a desert country, said a U.S. official in Baghdad familiar with reconstruction issues. Pumping stations depend on electricity, and engineers now say the system has hundreds of thousands of leaks.
"The most thoroughly dashed expectation was the ability to build a robust self-sustaining economy. We're nowhere near that. State industries, electricity are all below what they were before we got there," said Wayne White, former head of the State Department's Iraq intelligence team who is now at the Middle East Institute. "The administration says Saddam ran down the country. But most damage was from looting [after the invasion], which took down state industries, large private manufacturing, the national electric" system.
Ironically, White said, the initial ambitions may have complicated the U.S. mission: "In order to get out earlier, expectations are going to have to be lower, even much lower. The higher your expectation, the longer you have to stay. Getting out is going to be a more important consideration than the original goals were. They were unrealistic."
Knickmeyer reported from Baghdad.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
By Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 14, 2005; A01
The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.
The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."
Administration officials still emphasize how much they have achieved despite the chaos that followed the invasion and the escalating insurgency. "Iraqis are taking control of their country, building a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself. And we're helping Iraqis succeed," President Bush said yesterday in his radio address.
Iraqi officials yesterday struggled to agree on a draft constitution by a deadline of tomorrow so the document can be submitted to a vote in October. The political transition would be completed in December by elections for a permanent government.
But the realities of daily life are a constant reminder of how the initial U.S. ambitions have not been fulfilled in ways that Americans and Iraqis once anticipated. Many of Baghdad's 6 million people go without electricity for days in 120-degree heat. Parents fearful of kidnapping are keeping children indoors.
Barbers post signs saying they do not shave men, after months of barbers being killed by religious extremists. Ethnic or religious-based militias police the northern and southern portions of Iraq. Analysts estimate that in the whole of Iraq, unemployment is 50 percent to 65 percent.
U.S. officials say no turning point forced a reassessment. "It happened rather gradually," said the senior official, triggered by everything from the insurgency to shifting budgets to U.S. personnel changes in Baghdad.
The ferocious debate over a new constitution has particularly driven home the gap between the original U.S. goals and the realities after almost 28 months. The U.S. decision to invade Iraq was justified in part by the goal of establishing a secular and modern Iraq that honors human rights and unites disparate ethnic and religious communities.
But whatever the outcome on specific disputes, the document on which Iraq's future is to be built will require laws to be compliant with Islam. Kurds and Shiites are expecting de facto long-term political privileges. And women's rights will not be as firmly entrenched as Washington has tried to insist, U.S. officials and Iraq analysts say.
"We set out to establish a democracy, but we're slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic," said another U.S. official familiar with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. "That process is being repeated all over."
U.S. officials now acknowledge that they misread the strength of the sentiment among Kurds and Shiites to create a special status. The Shiites' request this month for autonomy to be guaranteed in the constitution stunned the Bush administration, even after more than two years of intense intervention in Iraq's political process, they said.
"We didn't calculate the depths of feeling in both the Kurdish and Shiite communities for a winner-take-all attitude," said Judith S. Yaphe, a former CIA Iraq analyst at the National Defense University.
In the race to meet a sequence of fall deadlines, the process of forging national unity behind the constitution is largely being scrapped, current and former officials involved in the transition said.
"We are definitely cutting corners and lowering our ambitions in democracy building," said Larry Diamond, a Stanford University democracy expert who worked with the U.S. occupation government and wrote the book "Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq."
"Under pressure to get a constitution done, they've lowered their own ambitions in terms of getting a document that is going to be very far-reaching and democratic. We also don't have the time to go through the process we envisioned when we wrote the interim constitution -- to build a democratic culture and consensus through debate over a permanent constitution," he said.
The goal now is to ensure a constitution that can be easily amended later so Iraq can grow into a democracy, U.S. officials say.
On security, the administration originally expected the U.S.-led coalition to be welcomed with rice and rosewater, traditional Arab greetings, with only a limited reaction from loyalists of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The surprising scope of the insurgency and influx of foreign fighters has forced Washington to repeatedly lower expectations -- about the time-frame for quelling the insurgency and creating an effective and cohesive Iraqi force capable of stepping in, U.S. officials said.
Killings of members of the Iraqi security force have tripled since January. Iraq's ministry of health estimates that bombings and other attacks have killed 4,000 civilians in Baghdad since Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari's interim government took office April 28.
Last week was the fourth-worst week of the whole war for U.S. military deaths in combat, and August already is the worst month for deaths of members of the National Guard and Reserve.
Attacks on U.S. convoys by insurgents using roadside bombs have doubled over the past year, Army Brig. Gen. Yves Fontaine said Friday. Convoys ferrying food, fuel, water, arms and equipment from Kuwait, Jordan and Turkey are attacked about 30 times a week, Fontaine said.
"There has been a realistic reassessment of what it is possible to achieve in the short term and fashion a partial exit strategy," Yaphe said. "This change is dictated not just by events on the ground but by unrealistic expectations at the start."
Washington now does not expect to fully defeat the insurgency before departing, but instead to diminish it, officials and analysts said. There is also growing talk of turning over security responsibilities to the Iraqi forces even if they are not fully up to original U.S. expectations, in part because they have local legitimacy that U.S. troops often do not.
"We've said we won't leave a day before it's necessary. But necessary is the key word -- necessary for them or for us? When we finally depart, it will probably be for us," a U.S. official said.
Pressed by the cost of fighting an escalating insurgency, U.S. expectations for rebuilding Iraq -- and its $20 billion investment -- have fallen the farthest, current and former officials say.
Pentagon officials originally envisioned Iraq's oil revenue paying many post-invasion expenses. But Iraq, ranked among world leaders behind Saudi Arabia in proven oil reserves, is incapable of producing enough refined fuel amid a car-buying boom that has put an estimated 1 million more vehicles on the road after the invasion. Lines for subsidized cheap gas stretch for miles every day in Baghdad.
Oil production is estimated at 2.22 million barrels a day, short of the goal of 2.5 million. Iraq's pre-war high was 2.67 million barrels a day.
The United States had high hopes of quick, big-budget fixes for the electrical power system that would show Iraqis tangible benefits from the ouster of Hussein. But inadequate training for Iraqi staff, regional rivalries restricting the power flow to Baghdad, inadequate fuel for electrical generators and attacks on the infrastructure have contributed to the worst summer of electrical shortages in the capital.
Water is also a "tough, tough" situation in a desert country, said a U.S. official in Baghdad familiar with reconstruction issues. Pumping stations depend on electricity, and engineers now say the system has hundreds of thousands of leaks.
"The most thoroughly dashed expectation was the ability to build a robust self-sustaining economy. We're nowhere near that. State industries, electricity are all below what they were before we got there," said Wayne White, former head of the State Department's Iraq intelligence team who is now at the Middle East Institute. "The administration says Saddam ran down the country. But most damage was from looting [after the invasion], which took down state industries, large private manufacturing, the national electric" system.
Ironically, White said, the initial ambitions may have complicated the U.S. mission: "In order to get out earlier, expectations are going to have to be lower, even much lower. The higher your expectation, the longer you have to stay. Getting out is going to be a more important consideration than the original goals were. They were unrealistic."
Knickmeyer reported from Baghdad.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Someone Tell the President the War Is Over
LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. "We will stay the course," he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?
A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.
But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor; Mr. Bush has lost not only the country but also his army. Neither bonuses nor fudged standards nor the faking of high school diplomas has solved the recruitment shortfall. Now Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the armed forces are so eager for bodies they will flout "don't ask, don't tell" and hang on to gay soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press.
The president's cable cadre is in disarray as well. At Fox News Bill O'Reilly is trashing Donald Rumsfeld for his incompetence, and Ann Coulter is chiding Mr. O'Reilly for being a defeatist. In an emblematic gesture akin to waving a white flag, Robert Novak walked off a CNN set and possibly out of a job rather than answer questions about his role in smearing the man who helped expose the administration's prewar inflation of Saddam W.M.D.'s. (On this sinking ship, it's hard to know which rat to root for.)
As if the right-wing pundit crackup isn't unsettling enough, Mr. Bush's top war strategists, starting with Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, have of late tried to rebrand the war in Iraq as what the defense secretary calls "a global struggle against violent extremism." A struggle is what you have with your landlord. When the war's über-managers start using euphemisms for a conflict this lethal, it's a clear sign that the battle to keep the Iraq war afloat with the American public is lost.
That battle crashed past the tipping point this month in Ohio. There's historical symmetry in that. It was in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, that Mr. Bush gave the fateful address that sped Congressional ratification of the war just days later. The speech was a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths and hype. The president said that "we know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade," an exaggeration based on evidence that the Senate Intelligence Committee would later find far from conclusive. He said that Saddam "could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year" were he able to secure "an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball." Our own National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1 quoted State Department findings that claims of Iraqi pursuit of uranium in Africa were "highly dubious."
It was on these false premises - that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11 and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America - that honorable and brave young Americans were sent off to fight. Among them were the 19 marine reservists from a single suburban Cleveland battalion slaughtered in just three days at the start of this month. As they perished, another Ohio marine reservist who had served in Iraq came close to winning a Congressional election in southern Ohio. Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a "chicken hawk," received 48 percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative Ohio district that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush.
These are the tea leaves that all Republicans, not just Chuck Hagel, are reading now. Newt Gingrich called the Hackett near-victory "a wake-up call." The resolutely pro-war New York Post editorial page begged Mr. Bush (to no avail) to "show some leadership" by showing up in Ohio to salute the fallen and their families. A Bush loyalist, Senator George Allen of Virginia, instructed the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the mother camping out in Crawford, as "a matter of courtesy and decency." Or, to translate his Washingtonese, as a matter of politics. Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need to be told that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7.
Such political imperatives are rapidly bringing about the war's end. That's inevitable for a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived in politics from the start. Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe before there was a 9/11. Within hours of that horrible trauma, according to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies," Mr. Rumsfeld was proposing Iraq as a battlefield, not because the enemy that attacked America was there, but because it offered "better targets" than the shadowy terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan. It was easier to take out Saddam - and burnish Mr. Bush's credentials as a slam-dunk "war president," suitable for a "Top Gun" victory jig - than to shut down Al Qaeda and smoke out its leader "dead or alive."
But just as politics are a bad motive for choosing a war, so they can be a doomed engine for running a war. In an interview with Tim Russert early last year, Mr. Bush said, "The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me, as I look back, was it was a political war," adding that the "essential" lesson he learned from Vietnam was to not have "politicians making military decisions." But by then Mr. Bush had disastrously ignored that very lesson; he had let Mr. Rumsfeld publicly rebuke the Army's chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, after the general dared tell the truth: that several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq. To this day it's our failure to provide that security that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been before 9/11 - "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as if that might make us forget he's the one who recklessly created it.
The endgame for American involvement in Iraq will be of a piece with the rest of this sorry history. "It makes no sense for the commander in chief to put out a timetable" for withdrawal, Mr. Bush declared on the same day that 14 of those Ohio troops were killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha. But even as he spoke, the war's actual commander, Gen. George Casey, had already publicly set a timetable for "some fairly substantial reductions" to start next spring. Officially this calendar is tied to the next round of Iraqi elections, but it's quite another election this administration has in mind. The priority now is less to save Jessica Lynch (or Iraqi democracy) than to save Rick Santorum and every other endangered Republican facing voters in November 2006.
Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.
WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.
Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago next month.
Filthy Neo-Cons
That was my son's unit. He was killed on that day 04/04/04. Here is a letter that I wrote to NightLine about the broadcast:
Love
Cindy Sheehan
Mother of Hero: Spc Casey Austin Sheehan KIA 04/04/04
Casey's Peace Page
Co-Founder of Gold Star Families For Peace
http://www.gsfp.org/
Love
Cindy Sheehan
March 15, 2005
To Whom it May Concern:
Imagine my distress when I turned Night Line on last night and I was confronted with the gory details of my son's murder in Sadr City, Baghdad, Iraq on 04/04/04. Imagine, also, my sorrow and rage at the side of the story that you presented to the American public.
I was on the Night Line Townhall Meeting in Washington, DC on 01/27/05. After I spoke (which I think was a fluke), Ted Koppel dismissed me as being "emotional." First of all, how can I approach this discussion without emotions, MY SON WAS KILLED, AND KILLED FOR LIES? Second of all, that show was not fair and balanced and I think the conclusion "Should we stay" was foregone.
The show last night was also not fair and balanced. To see all the wives being interviewed who had not lost their husbands and to hear what "hard work" it is to be left behind when their husbands are at war. How hard to you think it is to have a child killed in an illegal and immoral war? In this "wonderful" group of families left behind, we had exactly ONE of the wives call us..she is Diane Rose who was my son's Colonel, Frank Rose's wife. The last time we heard from Diane was in October and we feel we have been left behind by anyone connected to the 2-5 Cavalry. Is support only given if your loved one stays alive? One wife was quoted as saying that Sundays were the hardest for the families left behind. My son was killed on Palm Sunday last year..how does anybody think Sundays are for my family?
A distraught father who lost his son was shown telling how much his life was so adversely affected. Why wasn't a mother (like me) who has been an outspoken critic of this war and of the President's policies interviewed for this piece? Why wasn't I given a chance to talk about 04/04/04 and the series of lies, mistakes and miscalculations that led to my precious oldest child's death??
General Chiarelli was quoted as saying that 04/04/04 was a "wake up" call to the 2-5 Cavalry. If he thinks it was a "wake up" call, let me tell you how having 3 Army officers come to my door on 04/04/04 and tell me that my darling son was KIA. I have learned so many details of that day and of my son's experience in Iraq.
The very first thing that went wrong happened in November at Ft Irwin, California...the 2-5 Cavalry went for desert training. They received open desert warfare training and my son was killed in an urban guerilla attack, which he hadn't been trained for. Also, he was wearing an inadequate helmet and a Vietnam era flak jacket. Casey was stationed in a very dangerous place, like the General said: FOB War Eagle. I have subsequently learned that the soldiers of the 2-5 Cav who were stationed outside of Baghdad had Kevlar body armor. I have also found out that Casey slept in the back of his Humvee for the last 2 weeks of his life because there wasn't any room on post for him to have a cot. How tired and overworked was he before he went into that battle on 04/04/04?
In addition, my son was killed after L. Paul Bremer inflamed the Shi'a by taking away their tv station and newspapers. The Abu Ghraib scandal was about to break in America...but it was well known by the Iraqi people that their citizens were being tortured and defiled in the prisons. My son was a sitting duck by the time 04/04/04 rolled around.
The very worst thing of all, is that my son was sent to rescue some fellow soldiers trapped in an ambush in the back of a LMTV..which is basically an open air trailer. It would be the equivalent of driving through Dallas on 11/22/63 in a Convertible. The troops stationed at FOB War Eagle were sent ahead of their tanks and Bradleys!!! They had to go into battle in the back of LMTV's and non-armored Humvees. This is just proof to me that our troops are as important to their leaders as bullets are. It is a small miracle that only 7 of them were killed in the ambush. Luckily for the rest of the moms, it was dark. After my son's murder, there was an article in Stars and Stripes that quoted one of Casey's superior officers as saying. "04 April taught us a lesson. We won't send soldiers to battle without their armor any more." How do you think that made me feel? It was like "OOOPS, your dear son was killed. Life happens. Oh well, you live and learn." The General was also quoted as saying that the insurgency "surprised" them. Why? Has there ever been an invasion/occupation of a sovereign country that hasn't been resisted? Anyone with half a brain and an even rudimentary understanding of history would know that all occupations are resisted. The Pentagon and the Army brass did not plan adequately for an occupation.
Then Gen. Chiarelli said the thing that upset me the most. He said that the loss of life was terrible, but at least Iraqis had elections on 01/30/05. With the continuuing insurgency and with Iraqis and Americans losing their lives everyday there, how can he be proud of that? I may remind you and the General, that Iraqi elections was not the reason that our President and his Neo-Con war mongers invaded Iraq with our precious human resources. I will give the two reasons given for the invaseion here: Saddam had WMD's and he was an imminent threat to America. Saddam could have WMD's on our shores within 45 minutes. Condoleeza Rice used fear as a factor when she said: Don't let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud. Rumsfeld and Colin Powell pointed out to us where the weapons were on a map.
The second reason that America was given before the invasion was that Saddam was the biggest sponsor of world terrorism and he supported Osama Bin Laden! Oh really??? The hijackers were predominantly Saudi Arabian as was Osama (who is still at large, by the way). The theory that Saddam had anything to do with 9/11 was disproven by the 9/11 commission's report. A huge factor in Americans believing all this bull is that our media..the Fourth Estate didn't do any research and expose the lies for what they were: justifications for invading a country that posed no imminent or long-term threat to America.
One reason that the President DID NOT give for the invasion and occupation of Iraq was so that Iraqis could have elections. As a matter of fact, that was Ayatollah Ali al Sistani's idea..not Bush's. If the president in his lying and betraying in the lead up and rush to this insane invasion had told the world that we were going over there to give Iraqi's elections, would we the people have gone along with the invasion? Would we as compassionate Americans have thought that it would have been worth billions and billions of dollars; hundreds of our amazing children dead; tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi women and children dead: a country lying in ruins? I don't think so. I certainly didn't raise my son to be an outstanding citizen of the world to go and die so some people could have ink-stained fingers!!! If anyone reading this has children, would you think it was worth it?? Instead of some Congress leaders showing ink-stained fingers at the SOTU address they should have held up blood soaked hands.
Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full-well that my son, my family, this nation, and this world were betrayed by a George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agenda after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy...not for the real reason, becuase the Arab-Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy. That hasn't changed since America invaded and occupied Iraq...in fact it has gotten worse.
It would be so amazing if your show would put me, or another parent who lost their child on who disagrees with the war and this administration: to have just an entire show..without presenting the false side of the debate. That would take a lot of courage and integrity. I hope your program will exhibit these qualities.
I also think that Mr. Koppel owes me an apology for the rude way I was treated on his show. After I expressed myself about the war being based on lies and that the troops should be brought home immediately because the war was based on lies, I was not thanked for my comments, or my son's sacrifice. He just said to keep the discussion away from emotions. Then, the wife of a soldier who was killed was allowed to speak and she praised the policies of this deplorable and despicable administration, and she was thanked and praised by the panel.
Also, another aspect that Mr. Koppel refused to acknowledge was when a man walked up to a microphone and asked Richard Perle to explain PNAC..he was rudely ignored.
I am so glad the First Cavalry came home from this senseless and needless war based on the imaginations of Neo-Cons and fought with ignorance and arrogance by the Commander in Chief and the Pentagon. I am thrilled for the mothers whose children didn't come home under the cover of darkness in flag-draped boxes like my son did. I am sure that some of Casey's buddies were able to walk off the plane because of his sacrifice. I am just so deeply sorry that my son's blood had to be their leaders' lesson in how to occupy a country and fight an insurgency. My son is dead forever and my joy has been robbed from me for the rest of my life.
Your show needs to show both sides of this debate and stop being a propanda tool for this administration. This is my challenge to you from a true patriot who wants the lies exposed.
Cindy Sheehan
Mother of Hero: Spc Casey Austin Sheehan KIA 04/04/04
Casey's Peace Page
Co-Founder of Gold Star Families For Peace
http://www.gsfp.org/
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